Mafia King

by CD Reiss

  I didn’t set the Jamba Juice on fire with Vittorio Saponara in the toilet so my uncle Marco could fly all this way to arrange my cousin’s marriage without my blessing.

  I didn’t apologize to Cosimo for taking over Saponara’s business before he was even cold in the ground, then manage to not get killed by the seven guys Cosimo sent over that first year, so that his son—who he’s not even speaking to—could set up this deal right under my nose, a few weeks after I refused the first one.

  Over dinner, when I take my attention away from Damiano’s flirting with Gia, I think about how this deal was set up without me knowing. Where’s the hole, and how will I plug it?

  “Vino?” A carafe appears in my sight right after Violetta’s voice asks if I want wine.

  I follow the arm up to my wife, who’s leaning over me with a sour puss.

  The rules are simple.

  Wives do the job of being wives. Her frown is what happens when they’re busy doing things that will get them into trouble.

  “No.” I cover my glass and catch Damiano watching us.

  He was telling a joke about a construction worker and a thirteen-cent prostitute a minute ago. Now he’s staring at my wife as though she’s the punchline. He should act like a guy caught ogling his sister and move his eyes somewhere else, hoping I didn’t notice, but he tips his glass at me.

  You know who wouldn’t have let any of it get this far? The secret deals and unblessed matches?

  Emilio Moretti. He could see through bricks in a church wall. Some said he had ancient magic powers, and he didn’t say otherwise, because if they knew it was as simple as not letting your guard down, they would have shot him sooner.

  I had had plenty of reasons to decline to bless Damiano’s union with Gia. His refusal to tell her. The offer he made on Loretta’s patio and the consequences when I refused. But that threat to expose the truth about my wife to people who would destroy me to get to her had hung over the meeting.

  She’d be used and killed, and I’d be too dead to protect her.

  I had no choice but to approve the wedding.

  “Violetta,” I murmur to her before she pours for Lorenzo.

  She looks back at me. I take her carafe and put it in the center of the table, then I bring her outside, to the front of the house. On the front steps, I tap out a cigarette. I don’t crave one as much as I want to keep my hands from doing something more impulsive.

  “What?” She stays at the top step as I go through the motions of putting the pack away and lighting up.

  “You stayed after I told you to go.”

  “I thought you were swatting a fly. Was I not supposed to hear you sell Gia?”

  “I sold nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. Mi dispiace. Pope Santino the First had to bless the sale.”

  I laugh. She’s going to put me in my grave, but I will die with a smile on my lips.

  “It’s not funny.” She crosses her arms. “It’s wrong. Deeply fucking wrong.”

  “This is how it’s always been.”

  “You can take your traditions,” she says with one disrespectful finger raised at me, “and you can shove them right up your ass.”

  “You trying to get me in the mood?” I grab her hand and move it away from my face. “You don’t have to work this hard, Forzetta.”

  “Why?” She wrestles herself free because I let her. “Why are you letting this happen to Gia?”

  “Why do I let it rain?”

  “Because the clouds kiss your fucking ring?”

  “No. It’s going to rain whether I allow it or not. I keep everyone from getting wet.”

  Her arms are crossed. Her ring is turned around with the stone against her arm. She taps it. “You’re full of shit.”

  “Am I?” I flick the cigarette into the street. It lands in a spray of orange sparks and rolls away. “Maybe. Let’s see how wet I let you get.”

  She’s not amused or aroused. Yet.

  “But let’s say you knew Damiano wanted to steal something from you?” she says. “Would you let him marry Gia then?”

  My mind flips like a coin. In a heartbeat, a conversation with my wife where I try to teach her the ways she never learned turns into a matter of life or death.

  “What?” I say, climbing a step to get closer to her.

  “I overheard…” She stops. Breathes. “Damiano talking about my rings to someone else, because everyone in the fucking world knows I’m not your first choice.”

  I barely hear a word after “my rings.” The rings are irrelevant to anyone but my wife and me, unless they want what I have. Then they’re everything.

  “What did he say?”

  “He mentioned them to someone else. A man. I don’t know who. It was through a door.”

  “What words?” My neck is getting hot as the fire consuming the rest of my body rises through my collar.

  Her brows knit. She’s trying to remember. I want to shake her, but any memory loosened that way will be lost.

  “I don’t…” She stops, tilts her head. Listens to a sound on the street or in her mind. “They said you paraded someone in like a race horse, and I guess that had to be me?”

  “But the rings?”

  Her hand rests on the railing, and she looks at the diamond resting on the fourth finger. “And they confirmed between them… one asked like, ‘Those the rings?’ and the other guy confirmed. So I guess, yeah. That’s it. Why are you looking at me like a bear is eating me?”

  A bear is not eating her.

  A bear is standing over her, licking his chops, dreaming of the feast before him, and the only thing standing between him and my wife is what’s inscribed inside that ring.

  You know who would have seen this danger coming? Emilio.

  “What happened?” she says. “You’re white as a sheet.”

  “Listen to me,” I say, trying to sound serious, but calm and in control. I am neither. “If anything happens to me, you take this ring off my finger.” I hold up my left fist, pushing out the fourth finger with my thumb. “You understand? If I’m dead, you get it off my body with your own hands.”

  “Can you stop? It’s just jewelry.”

  “You must promise me this, Violetta. Swear it.” Hands on her shoulders, I squeeze, bending to eye level even though I’m on a lower stair.

  “What is it with the rings?”

  I’m a fool to think she’ll stop asking, but I can’t tell her here. She’s not ready, and her knowing will put her in danger.

  “If anything happens—”

  “The rings. I know.” She nods slowly, looking me in the eye. “I swear it. You can trust me.”

  I take her face in my hands and kiss her, because I do trust her.

  8

  VIOLETTA

  In the car home, silence gnaws at the edges of the tension between us. I don’t know what’s on Santino’s mind, but I’ve settled into a gritty despair. He never promised to free Gia after what I heard, but it affected him. I’m pretty confident the wedding’s going to get unblessed or whatever. Then I have to work on making sure every other girl in this town is safe.

  Without a groom ready to steal from him, I don’t know how I’ll do it. I’m not a superhero or a saint. It’s all too big, too old, too ingrained to fix. I’m just a woman. A mouthy fishwife. A thorn in the side of His Highness.

  “You didn’t eat,” Santino says as we turn down the road to his house. The headlights bounce off the fog, creating ghosts that whoosh away as we pass.

  “There was a lot of wine to pour.”

  He pulls up to the gate, and it opens for us. “Stay away from Damiano when I’m not there.”

  “Why? Because of the rings?”

  “He’s a man without a master.” He stops and puts the car into park.

  “Italians shouldn’t write fortune cookies.” I open my door. The dome light goes on and I should leave before I say another word, but I have no strength to maintain filters.

  I get out and step u
p the gravel walk to the house, hopeful that greed for a diamond has saved Gia, and fearful that even after the cut lip and the infighting, the spark of friendship burns brightly enough to allow Santino to believe Damiano’s eventual denials.

  “What happened after my father died?” I ask when Santino catches up to me at the front door. “With you and Damiano?”

  “A king doesn’t rule more than his kingdom.”

  “For the love of God. Skip the fortune cookie bullshit.”

  He smiles and unlocks the door. “We’re Neapolitan. We are camorra. We beat the fascists because we had strength without a center. Is it fortune cookie bullshit to say I’m not the only capo in the Cavallo family? Your father was a true king.” His sigh is heavy, loaded even, as he swings open the door and steps out of the way for me. “It’s truth. Damiano can serve any of us, or he can fight me for territory. He can seek power without denying my authority.”

  We stand in a house of windows, lit from the outside. Neither one of us turns on a light.

  “I thought you worked for the same master,” I say.

  “You mean, of course, your father.”

  “Yes, I mean my father.” I set my jaw. “My father the grocer. And the only really-for-real king, apparently.”

  His silence is heavy. I can’t view my father as someone like Santino, someone who plays violence like an instrument.

  “Sometimes I forget you lost him so young and didn’t get to know him like we did.”

  Why am I standing here in the dark, listening to him tell me who my own father was? And why doesn’t he just take out a fucking knife and stab me while he’s at it?

  He was my papa, a memory relegated to a ghost of a man on all fours, roaring like a bear and laughing with his tiny daughter. A thick gold cross necklace dangled from his neck. His hair was dark and slicked back, and he had so many bright teeth in his smile.

  “I’m going to bed,” I say, heading up the steps. “I don’t want to fight about which one right now, please.”

  “I am the man I am because of your father, Violetta.” Santino grips the banister, but doesn’t come up. He is no longer cool and collected, but fervent and emotional.

  My newly-minted sadness shatters against the surface of his sincere passion. “Who are you then? Who are you that I should look at you and say, ‘Good job, Dad! Because no matter what you stole or who you killed, you made Santino DiLustro into the man he is today, and…’” My armor is customized to keep me from crying over my husband, not my father, and the sobs burst through at high speed. “‘And I’m so proud to be your little girl.’ Is that what I’m supposed to look at you and say? Because, honestly…?”

  The rest of the sentence is built like a weapon of war and aimed straight for my husband’s heart, but my sobs are too thick to aim through and my breath is too thin to pull the trigger. My knees cannot hold the weight of my heart’s ammunition.

  What if I hadn’t overheard the conversation about my ring? What if I’d puked instead of putting my ear to the bathroom door? Or if the men had been more careful? Or knew I understand Italian?

  I wouldn’t have been able to tell Santino what Damiano has planned, and then what?

  I collapse, sitting on the stairs, holding the railing as if it’s the only thing that can save me.

  But it can’t.

  Neither can the strong arms around me, tightening into a shell of bone and flesh. On the stairs, I cry into Santino’s shirt, saying meaningful words in meaningless sentences. Gia, Gia. Don’t. Wrong. Please. Can’t. Gia, no. I started crying over my father, but now I’m bawling because Gia was sold right in front of me and I don’t know if she’s saved, while Santino weaves meaningful sentences out of meaningless sounds. Shh. Si, si. Va bene. Va tutto bene.

  He lays me back and I’m on a bed, racked in delusional sobs that keep me from remembering how I got up the steps or even seeing which room I’m in. All I know is that he’s here, wiping my face, kissing the salty streaks from my cheeks, whispering soothing lies I need to believe. My fists clutch his shirt and skin, and my crying turns to pleading.

  I kiss his lips, the source of my comfort, and the lies are silenced, because everything isn’t going to be okay. It’s not fine and good, and I’m not going to hush. I’m going to grope at his clothes, push his hand under my skirt, and beg him to hurt me.

  “Please,” I whisper into his mouth.

  He is forceful but tender, pulling away the layers of fabric between us only as much as necessary, leaving his shirt and my dress over the shoulders, until his fingers can comfortably reach between my legs.

  “Violetta,” he says, mouth open against my cheek in a groan.

  “Please,” I repeat, wrapping my legs around him. He needs to do this before I cry again.

  The head of his cock is smooth along my seam, sliding inside me without much effort. His thrusts are as gentle as his kisses, and when he’s finally deep inside, I shudder with relief and move against him.

  I want to feel as if I’m breaking in body as well as soul, but he refuses to hurt me.

  Instead, I punch his chest, slap his face, and claw at his back so hard I feel wetness under my fingers.

  He doesn’t stop me until I grip his throat. Still rocking gently, he takes my hands away and pins them over my head.

  That’s all I need. In a rush of pleasure, I stiffen and arch in an orgasm made of my tears and his tenderness, blinded with a poisonous mixture of elation and anguish. But when he falls on me, breathing heavily, it’s all gone.

  My grief. My fear. My despair. Gone.

  I’m left with blood under my fingernails and three Furies in their place.

  Righteousness. Ambition. Justice.

  9

  SANTINO

  I cannot take my eyes away from my wife long enough to sleep, because when she’s awake, I see her father in her features, but when she sleeps and the moonlight casts a triangle-shaped shadow across her cheek, I see her mother.

  Rosetta looked more like Camilla Moretti, soft and rounded at the edges, with a heaviness to her form that was beautifully solid. Emilio was known to grab his wife’s bottom behind the grocer’s register, and she’d smile and slap his hand away. Camilla ran that store, and as far as we knew, that was all she did, besides raise two children and keep the house.

  With my blood violet breathing softly on my chest, I remember her mother in the back room, punching an adding machine with a pencil and yanking the crank. It made a racket of clicks and creaks. But what had my attention was the piles of cash on the desk.

  “Che c'è, Santi?” she greeted me without looking up.

  I didn’t know how to react. She was a woman—my boss’s woman—and so was afforded a certain kind of respect from a sixteen-year-old boy.

  Yet the way she asked me What, Santi?, along with the contents of the desk, confused me into a fit of nerves. I’d only met her twice, and she disarmed me on the third time.

  “I have to drop this for the capo.” I held up the paper bag of cash Dami and I had extracted from a parking garage, a shoe repair, and two bars on Via Torino. The paper ribbon dropped down the other side of the desk while the clicking and creaking continued. “I’ll come back.”

  “Leave it here.”

  “I’m supposed to give it to him.”

  The sound of the adding machine stopped. She looked at me with big brown eyes, round as Rosetta’s and as piercing as Violetta’s. “Leave it here, Santi.”

  No man in this part of Naples ever took orders from a woman.

  But Camilla Moretti wasn’t going to say it a third time, and if Emilio had put her behind that desk with that much cash to count, she did more than run a grocery store.

  I put the bag on the desk.

  “Grazie,” she said, running the paper tape through her fingers to check the numbers. “That everyone on Via Torino?”

  “Everyone who owes, yes.”

  “Good job.”

  I stand there as if I can’t leave without something, bu
t I couldn’t have named it if you put a gun to my head.

  “You can go,” she said, penciling a number into a ledger.

  Once she dismissed me, some cord was cut and I could leave.

  In bed with Violetta, I smile at those few minutes with Camilla I’d forgotten. I remember her as hostess for all the big dinners for the men who worked for Emilio, and at packed weddings in crowded courtyards, dancing with her husband. I remember her with customers at the store, and gossiping with the women. But my one glimpse into a life that wasn’t so obvious had been stuffed in a box and put on the topmost shelf. Out of mind, out of sight.

  Camilla knew what was in my bag down to the street I was working that day. Those piles of cash were not from the grocery register. She knew her husband’s business. Maybe not every nuance or relationship, but enough to keep a ledger.

  The moon dips below the roofline of the garage, and the shadow across Violetta’s cheek folds into her jaw, disappearing like the hand of a sundial. I wonder if her mother’s knowledge protected her, or if it made her a target the night they were both killed. I wonder if she had to fight for it too, or if Emilio brought her into the business right away. He’d never had a chance to train me for his job. When they were shot, Cosimo Orolio took over, filling a power vacuum in a quickly contracting territory.

  Damiano, who claims to work for no one. Who set up the ‘mbasciata with Gia after I refused to bring him onto my team. Who came to Mille Luci after my wedding and asked for friendship. Whose sister dropped bombs of information on my wife.

  If he marries Gia, he will find a way into my life through the women.

  If he doesn’t, he will threaten to expose Violetta again, and once he does, the incident on Flora will look like a child’s game.

  If he marries Gia, I have time to correct him.

  If I refuse the match, I have until Violetta’s birthday.