by Nele Neuhaus
Sergio was absolved from answering her by the appearance of the head chef. Throughout the dinner, Sergio tried hard to be as entertaining as ever. Alex realized that his charm was bouncing off her, and she had to force herself not to look at the clock. She wanted to tell him what she had to say and get out of there as quickly as possible.
“What’s wrong with you, cara?” Sergio asked after dessert was served. “Why are you being so standoffish? You could be a little friendlier after such an exquisite meal.”
She looked at him pensively.
“I wanted to wait until we finished dinner,” she said, “to tell you that I’ve made a decision.”
“Aha.” He smiled, unruffled, but an attentive expression appeared in his eyes. “What decision is that?”
“Since the incident last year,” Alex said, “I have come to realize that our relationship is lacking something very important. You don’t love me. You think of me as your property that you can use as you please. You don’t respect me.”
Sergio said nothing but just observed her carefully with his incredibly blue eyes.
“That evening,” she continued, “when you raped me, I realized what kind of a person you really are.”
“And what kind of person is that?” He managed to smile.
“You’re an egoist. The only person who matters to you is Sergio Vitali, and no one else.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Cara,” he said as he leaned toward her and put his hand on hers, “in all my life I have never desired a woman as much as I desire you.”
“And?”
“And?” He looked at her with an irritated expression. “What do you mean?”
“You desire my body,” she answered, “but I expect more from a relationship than just sex. I’m almost thirty-seven years old, and I don’t want to be just the sex kitten of a man who doesn’t give a damn about my feelings.”
“What do you expect from me?” The look in his eyes was hard to read. Was it insecurity? Or was it simply anger that he couldn’t escape this conversation?
“Nothing,” Alex said, shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t expect anything from you. There will never be anything more than sex between us. You’ll never accept me as an equal partner or a person you can trust. For a while I assumed it was because of me, but that’s not the case. You simply don’t want more from a woman than what you’re getting from me. That’s not enough for me in the long term.”
Sergio was silent for a moment. His face was expressionless.
“I won’t allow you to leave me,” he said and then let go of her hand.
“What are you going to do? Force me to sleep with you with a gun to my head?”
He didn’t react to this remark.
“Tell me what I can do to change your mind.”
“Nothing. It’s too late.”
“I can’t accept this.”
“You shouldn’t have lied to me,” Alex said. “You keep lying to me. Why aren’t we going out alone tonight? Why the limousine and the bodyguards eyeing anyone who walks into the restaurant?”
She exhaled with a deep sigh and shook her head.
“I was ready to love you, Sergio. If you’d been honest with me, I would have accepted the truth, no matter how bad it might be.”
She realized from the expression in his eyes that she’d hit a sore spot.
“My wife has never asked me to tell her about my business in all our thirty years together,” he said stiffly. “Why can’t we just leave it as it is?”
“I told you why.” She finished her drink. “I want to go home now.”
Sergio swallowed. Under no circumstances did he want to lose Alex. She meant more to him than any other woman had in the past. Maybe he should cast Nelson’s warnings aside and tell her the truth about himself. He would be invincible with her by his side, because Alex had all the traits that his son Massimo lacked. She was an excellent and cold-blooded tactician, and she was prudent despite her willingness to take risks. But how would she react to the truth? What if she suddenly had scruples? Then she would be a risk, and he would have no choice but to eliminate her. Women were difficult to gauge, especially Alex. Sergio needed time to think. The soundest approach seemed to be putting their relationship on hold, but the moment that he thought this, he felt an unbearably painful longing. Just the thought of another man touching her drove him crazy.
“Let’s talk about this another time,” he finally said, using all of his strength to force himself to smile. “I need to think about all this.”
“Agreed.”
It was a quarter past midnight when they left Le Bernardin. Luca and another man had been waiting in the lobby all night and moved outside as they saw Alex approaching. Sergio fell back for a quick conversation with the restaurant’s owner. The weather was cool for June, and it was drizzling lightly. Sergio turned up his trench coat collar as he stepped outside.
“Where’s the limousine?” he snarled indignantly at Luca.
“He had to drive around the block first,” he replied. Alex felt chilly as she stood next to Sergio, and she raised her head when she heard screeching tires. An old brown Ford switched lanes at high speed and raced directly toward them. She noticed that the windows were down despite the rain. She remembered Kostidis’s warning words, and instantly her brain starting churning through fragments of information. She instinctively felt danger emanating from that brown car.
“Sergio!” she screamed. “Watch out.”
Warned by her scream, Sergio quickly turned around. Flashes from a submachine gun came from the car’s interior. Alex heard the dry barking of the gunfire and felt a hard blow to her back as Luca pushed her to the ground. She heard the bullets pierce the car’s sheet metal, and the restaurant’s glass door burst into thousands of glass splinters; ricocheting bullets ripped through the air. This scene only lasted for a few seconds, but as it unfolded in front of her eyes, it seemed as if in slow motion. Then the nightmare was over. After a rev of the engine, the car raced away toward Rockefeller Center. The passersby who were still out on the streets at this late hour were screaming in panic. Cars stopped and honked their horns. Alex freed herself from Luca’s grip and jumped up. Sergio and the other man were crouched behind a parked car that was now riddled with bullet holes.
“Cara,” he said, extending his arm toward her, “did anything happen to you?”
“N…n…no.” She was in shock and could hardly speak. “You?”
“I’m okay,” he assured her. As he lifted himself up his face looked pale, but he remained as calm and composed as ever. A curious crowd gathered but kept a respectful distance. The restaurant’s owner came out—white as a sheet from the shock—with some of the guests who had also heard the shots.
“Mr. Vitali!” the owner of the restaurant yelled. “Should I call the police? Or an ambulance?”
“No, no, never mind, Jean.” Sergio patted the dirt off his coat with his right hand. “Everything’s all right.”
“Someone was shooting at you!” Alex’s voice trembled hysterically. Only now did she feel the panic rising inside of her. The car had long since vanished in Midtown Manhattan’s busy nighttime traffic.
“Everything’s all right,” Sergio repeated. He walked over to the limousine that had stopped at the roadside. Alex slowly realized how close she had come to death. This wasn’t a movie, but real life! The owners of the damaged vehicles argued angrily, and someone called the police.
“You’ve got to call the police, Sergio!” Alex’s voice sounded shrill. She was trembling in fear. “Someone tried to kill you!”
“No, I don’t,” Sergio replied without looking at her. “Like I said, nothing happened. Come on, get in.”
Alex opened her mouth to object, but Luca—who had just saved her life—pushed her into the limousine. The door was hardly closed when the driver hit the pedal. Alex felt her heartbeat racing. She felt by turns hot and cold. She still couldn’t co
mpletely grasp what had just happened. In the dim light inside the limousine, she stared numbly at her hand. She touched Sergio’s shoulder. It was covered in blood. Sergio took off his coat and jacket with his face contorted in pain. Alex was horrified when she saw the rapidly expanding red patch of blood on his shirt.
“My God, you’re injured!” she whispered. “You’ve been hit!”
“Armando, make her a drink,” Sergio ordered and unbuttoned his shirt. “How about you guys? Are you okay?”
“Yep,” Luca and Armando answered. Wide-eyed and silent with fear and horror, Alex stared at the men until her gaze stopped at Sergio. He had a bulletproof vest underneath his shirt.
“Why are you wearing that thing?” she whispered, but slowly her mind started to make sense of it. Everything Kostidis had told her on the telephone was true.
“Sergio!” she said again, but he didn’t react at all.
“Have a drink, cara,” he replied. Armando pressed a glass filled with whiskey into her hand. “That’ll make you feel better.”
Alex obediently downed the whiskey, and her trembling subsided.
Armando pulled out dressing materials from a first-aid kit, and Luca set about bandaging Sergio’s intensely bleeding shoulder. They spoke quietly in Italian, and then Luca opened the glass partition and ordered the driver to head to a certain address in Brooklyn. Alex was in a state of shock. She hadn’t noticed that the limousine was rolling over the brightly lit Brooklyn Bridge.
Luca made two quick calls on his cell phone. Sergio’s eyes were closed, and he pressed his hand on the bandage, which was turning red beneath his fingers. The sight of blood usually didn’t bother her, but this was something entirely different.
“Sergio.” Alex leaned forward, trying to subdue the trembling in her voice. “Who were they? Who was shooting at you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He opened his eyes and gave her a flat smile. “This is just a little scratch.”
“You could be dead now!”
“Yes. But you warned me in time.”
Alex said nothing. The car turned onto a deserted street. Alex could see elongated warehouses and the light of Manhattan on the other side of the river.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Someone will take you home now.” Sergio avoided answering her directly as usual and grabbed her hand. “You saved my life, cara. Thank you.”
The car stopped.
“What are you doing here? Why don’t you go to a hospital?” Alex was too confused to grasp what was happening. Armando opened the door, and Sergio clumsily got out. Although it was raining harder now and the air was cool, he had beads of sweat on his forehead.
Some cars approached through the rain with their headlights turned off; a few men got out. The rain moved sideways through the light of the lamp above the entrance. No one paid any attention to Alex, and so she followed them into the warehouse. Pressing herself to the wall of the small office, she recognized Sergio’s son Massimo and Nelson van Mieren.
More cars arrived outside. Alex heard the sound of car doors slamming. Serious-looking men with determined, grim faces entered the warehouse and talked quietly amongst themselves in Italian. She could feel their tentative looks and saw that all the men were armed to the teeth. Up to now, the Mafia was no more than an abstract term with a negative connotation for Alex—and now she was right in the middle of it. She winced when Massimo suddenly addressed her.
“Dario will take you to the city now,” he said.
“Can I see him for a moment?”
Massimo gave her a searching stare, and then he nodded. She followed him through a room in which files were stacked up to the ceiling on shaky shelves. Why did they bring Sergio here and not to his apartment or a hospital? Massimo knocked on the door. When it opened, he whispered something in Italian to Nelson van Mieren. Nelson shot Alex a repulsed look.
Sergio lay on a narrow bed. His upper body was exposed, and an older man was examining his shoulder.
“The bullet is still inside,” he said, wiping his bloody fingers on a towel. “I’m afraid that an artery has been ruptured.”
“We’re taking you to Dr. Sutton, Sergio,” Nelson said. “I’ve already called him. You’re safe at his clinic.”
Safe? From what? From another attempt on his life? Alex’s knees started trembling. Kostidis had warned her. Now there could be no excuses, no sugarcoating, no doubts about Sergio’s involvement with the criminal underworld. Just a half hour ago, she’d witnessed an assassination attempt that only barely failed. Nearly fifty heavily armed men were standing outside. The thought that she was at the Mafia’s New York headquarters seemed almost grotesque.
“Okay,” Sergio said, his face contorted in pain, “where’s Natale? He should—”
Van Mieren made a gesture with his hand, and Sergio fell silent.
His eyes landed on Alex, who stood at the wall next to a filing shelf as if paralyzed, looking at him fearfully.
“Cara.” Sergio extended his right hand, smiling with difficulty. “Come over here.”
She walked toward him hesitantly and took his hand, which was unusually cold. His eyes had a feverish gleam. He was sweating even though it wasn’t particularly warm. He was obviously weak, but he still had full control of the situation.
“I’m very sorry that you had to witness this,” he said with a grimace, “but you wanted to know why I had bodyguards escorting us tonight.”
Alex was speechless for a moment, and then her fear turned into furious anger. She pulled her hand away.
“You were expecting something like this to happen,” she whispered, “but you didn’t consider it necessary to tell me. I’m so unimportant to you that you carelessly put my life at risk!”
“I’m sorry.”
Alex clenched her hands into a fist. She felt like punching his expressionless face.
“Go to hell, Sergio,” she hissed.
She turned away before he could respond. The faster she could leave this dark warehouse, these sinister characters, this entire nightmare behind, the better.
Marvin Finnegan was playing cards with a few colleagues when an emergency call came in to the Forty-First Precinct in Morrisania in the South Bronx. It was around one in the morning, a relatively quiet night, and the officers who weren’t on patrol killed time by playing cards. The area around the Forty-First Precinct was one of New York’s most run-down neighborhoods, far removed from Manhattan’s sparkling skyscrapers, the luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue, and the Upper East Side’s posh apartment buildings. The city’s administrators rarely ventured to the South Bronx. Too few disillusioned and corrupt police officers barely maintained order here. Drugs were nothing unusual in the South Bronx. People living in the projects were embittered or had given up a long time ago. Most families had at least someone who was hooked on the needle. Many men boozed away the few dollars that they received from welfare. Violent family disputes were common in these tiny apartments, which sometimes housed more than ten people. The misery and neglect were depressing. The hideous apartment buildings were decaying because no one cared about maintaining them. Sometimes they burned down. Mountains of rubble were everywhere, and so were the prostitutes and hustlers at Hunts Point, the drug dealers, and the juvenile delinquents.
Most of the police officers were just as frustrated as the neighborhood’s inhabitants. If they couldn’t get out on sick leave or transfer to another precinct, then they took bribes from drug dealers and squeezed store owners for protection money.
Marvin Finnegan had been a police officer in one of New York’s most miserable neighborhoods for sixteen years. He was born and raised here, and had only left the South Bronx to serve in the army and later attend the police academy. He was a tough but fair cop, and his name had long ago become a legend because he was incorruptible, determined to protect honest people from criminals.
“Hey, Marvin!” Patrick Peters, the lieutenant on duty, stuck his head inside the recreation room. “A wo
man from an apartment at the corner of Flatbush and Sound View Avenue just called. That gang showed up again. I sent over Hank and Freddie.”
Finnegan put down his hand with a hint of regret. He had a full house, but that was tough luck.
Tom Ganelli, who had been Finnegan’s partner for three years, grinned in excitement.
“Pat,” Finnegan said, slipping into his jacket, “try to reach Valentine and Burns. I want them to come, but without the siren. We’ll end the game these bastards are playing.”
The patrol car stopped on a side street close to the apartment building just ten minutes later. The building was on one of those half-empty, dilapidated blocks, where working-class families lived alongside junkie squatters. Finnegan and Ganelli could hear screams and the sound of shattering glass from a distance as they approached. They scurried to the rear of the building in the shadow of the crumbling walls, while taking care not to stumble over rubble and garbage. They passed a burned-out car. Finnegan pulled out his gun. The past few weeks had seen an unusual accumulation of these nightly raids on dilapidated apartment buildings. Two buildings had been set on fire and burned to the ground because the fire hydrants in the vicinity had been intentionally blocked.
It was quite obvious to the men of the Forty-First Precinct that there was a coordinated effort underway to empty these buildings. After the tenants gave up and moved out due to the constant terror and fear, heavy machinery with wrecking balls moved in and razed the building to the ground. Property was scarce in New York City. New developments with expensive condos or offices would be built here eventually. This neighborhood would be cleaned up someday, and unscrupulous real-estate speculators, who bought these properties cheap, would make a killing. The poor people would be pushed to more run-down areas. The police officers coordinated their actions by radio and surrounded the building in a circle.
“How many, and where are they?” Finnegan wanted to know.
“They’re inside the building,” his colleague replied from the other side. “I think five or six.”