by CD Reiss
“And if you can’t give the people here their traditions, they’ll take your power?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you won’t stop these debt marriages?”
“Let me ask you.” He turns in his seat to face me as much as is possible. “If I do that, what do you think will happen when a man like, say Angelo, gets in over his head?”
“Don’t try to convince me you’re a man of the people.”
“If I do not allow fathers to pay debts with daughters, someone will see a weakness. They’ll come here and take this territory by force. That man? It’s Damiano’s father. Cosimo Orolio. I do not have enough men…” He throws up his hand. “There are not enough men in all of Secondo Vasto to fight him.”
I cross my arms and face forward. “I don’t want to hear about blood in the streets. These are excuses to do nothing.”
“This town is between the mountains and a river. Cut off that bridge, and in a day, there will be no one left here but women and children.”
“This is America.”
My protest is whispered to no one, because that’s who cares about the United States and its laws around here. If they did, I wouldn’t have been forced to marry Santino. Gia would be going on a harmless date. Rosetta wouldn’t have been sent to Italy to marry the man she was promised to because she was pregnant with her rapist’s baby. If Santino says this Cosimo guy can cut us off and take over, then he’s probably right.
“Damiano wants his father to respect him,” Santino says. “He thinks if he can get close to me, he’ll be able to take something from me.”
“What is that?”
“And if I don’t allow the marriage,” Santino continues without answering me, “Damiano will tell everyone in the four corners of the earth who has this thing. Then a war with Cosimo Orolio will look like a game of cards.”
“What do you have?” I demand.
“I have nothing.” He holds out his empty palms. “You have it.”
14
SANTINO
There’s no going back now. Once I tell her that she’s the target, the value, and the center of the universe, I can’t leave her in ignorance.
“What do I have?” she asks. “And it better not be a dumb metaphor for your love or a sweet pussy or something.”
I laugh, because that was my one way out before I spilled everything I’ve been trying to keep in my control. “We should go inside.”
“No.” She crosses her arms. “It’s been a terrible night, and now things are happening with Gia—like, I want to go back right now and make sure she’s not getting sold—and you’re saying this is happening to her in the first place because of something with me. And inside the house is one step farther from her. So I’m staying in this car. If you tell me something that means I need to get to her, either you’re driving me or I’m going to murder you and push your dead body onto the driveway.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m not serious, but I expect you to take me seriously.”
I nod and settle in. Over the front door, the motion sensor lights flick off, and when we’re in complete darkness, I tell her everything about how Emilio promised her sister to me in the hospital. Then I tell her about the first and only time I was in the presence of her inheritance.
I was born decades after the partisanos hanged the fascist Il Duce upside down in Milano, but Italy had still not been restored. Churches and museums had been looted and burned. World War Two shredded Italy of its history and culture. Artifacts were stolen, missing, never to be recovered, and smaller, regional wars went on and on.
There were few prospects on the other side. A boy could be a merchant, a scholar, or a soldier. If he chose soldier, he chose to fight for Italy or the camorra.
Like the father I never met, I was born a soldier. He fought for Italy, so when I was fourteen, I vowed to fight with the Cavallos. But like my father, I took up arms in the middle of a war I didn’t understand. All I knew was that it started soon after Altieri Cavallo gave his daughter, Camilla, to Emilio Moretti. Half of Naples seemed to be at the wedding. Damiano and I were sneaking amaretto behind the Venetian table, and the world was woozy.
Soon after that, maybe a week, I was woken by gunshots. A scream. Sirens. A symphony that played a few times a week and seemed a universe away until Dami and I started running packages for Emilio. I had to stand and wait as a man was beaten into chopped meat. I was threatened with a serrated knife. I saw a man’s throat cut under the chin so Damiano’s dad, Cosimo, could pull his tongue from the slash. I heard the man choke to death. I felt the floor bump when he writhed. Cosimo looked at his watch and asked me what the fuck I was looking at.
Then Altieri Cavallo was tortured and killed, and our boss became the boss.
“Did you hear what Nazario said?” Damiano whispered, dropping a bag of plastic bottles into the trash.
“I’m not here to listen.”
We were barely old enough to have hair under our arms, but we’d been trucked out to the warehouse in Vicaria the same as everyone else who worked for the Cavallos. Forty hours later, I was tired from running food and water to the guys pulling crates off the shelves and tearing them open. I didn’t know who owned the warehouse or what they were looking for. All I knew was that it was buried pretty deep in tons and tons of boxed-up shit, and I wasn’t there to listen to gossip.
Emilio should have been out fighting Cosimo to be capo, but instead he’d brought us all to the warehouse of the devil.
“He said it’s the Iron Crown of Lombardy,” Damiano said.
“Bullshit.”
The crown Napoleon had put on his head to make himself emperor was behind alarmed glass in a cathedral in the north. Everyone knew that. La Corona Ferrea was made of nails taken from the One True Cross and was the size of an armband. Sections had gone missing and the circle reset to be smaller soon after the death of Constantine.
“Altieri passed it to Emilio through Camilla—”
“It’s up by Milano,” I cut off my friend. “Unless the Northerners are lying, which is possible.”
“No, stupido.” He takes a handful of plastic bottles out of the ice bin and puts them in a sack slung over his shoulder. “The missing pieces of it. The ones with the Holy Nail.”
That got my attention, because it was both plausible and sacrilegious.
“Get the flies out of your mouth!” I said.
“Nazario said it. Corona Ferrea. He said it was so close he could smell it. And he had his hands out like this.” Dami put his palms up and out. “He said it was warm, and when he walked away, I did this too and the air was warmer.”
“Your hands are just cold from the water.”
“Go.” He bends his entire body to get the shoulder bag off then drops it over me. I almost fall under the weight of it. “Aisle 445. They’re all there. Come on! You’ll see.”
I wanted to see, because it couldn’t be true. Anyone who possessed a single piece of that crown would have more power than anyone could ever imagine. And Altieri had died. If he’d had the Iron Crown, he would have been protected.
But I had to see for myself.
So with the sack of water bottles banging on my hip, I followed Dami to Aisle 445, leaping over pallets, under forklifts, pushing past the bodies that had gravitated to that corner of the building and were standing still for the first time in two days. My friend was too big to quickly get through the tightly packed men, but I barely had to slow down on my way to the front, where a circle had formed around a wooden box. Emilio and Camilla were murmuring to each other. The lawyer, Nazario, held a crowbar.
The guy above me, an old-timer who kept making the sign of the cross like a fucking nonna, said to the young guy next to him, “They need to bring in a priest.”
Younger muttered agreement.
I put out my hands.
The air was not warmer from that direction. It was more active. More alive. Hot like water running out of an electrical soc
ket.
Emilio snatched the crowbar from Nazario. Next to me, the old-timer gasped. Camilla issued a few words I couldn’t make out, but together with her sharp stare, they sounded like a warning.
Nodding to her, Emilio pried open the top of the box with a crack and flipped it off. The sides of the box collapsed as if held together by the lid, revealing a metal box covered in an ancient green-and-brown patina. When Emilio opened it, the creak was so loud, I thought the windows would shatter. The hinges stopped moving halfway.
Nazario stepped back while Emilio put his shoulder into it, and though I realized I was holding my breath, I didn’t exhale. Not when the top flipped open. Not when Emilio smiled and clapped his hands before clenching them into fists. Not when he reached inside.
Only when he held up his hands, cradling just a glint of metal, did I breathe, because my legs bent under me as if knocked out by an unseen force. I kneeled, bowing my head like every other man in the vast warehouse.
When I dared to glance up, even Emilio was on his knees with his hands raised and fingers obscuring the artifact. Only Camilla was already standing.
“That’s it?” Violetta asks, many years later and many miles away.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’? That’s everything. Tutto. It’s the lost pieces of the Iron Crown of Lombardy.”
“And you all kneeling proves what?”
How can she not understand? I’ve painted a perfect picture.
“I felt it. I had to kneel in its presence. I had no choice. None of us did.” My voice gets thin with a sort of desperation I don’t recognize. I have to make her understand. “Nails from the One True Cross are melted in it. The Holy Blood.”
“You were exhausted and dehydrated. You were open to suggestion. That’s Psych 101.”
I’m the older of us. The more experienced. I am a man of the world, willing to teach her the things she needs to know to survive, but she’s looking at me as if I’m some kind of cretino who has never opened a book in his life.
I’ve opened a few. Very few, and not since I was thirteen and my literature teacher took me aside to give me extra assignments in epic poems that I resented, but did anyway. Nothing I can quote from The Iliad will prove my point to Violetta though. The Inferno had something about powerful things inspiring fear, but I’m flailing in a soup of quotes I can’t put together, feeling stupider and more confused with every second I don’t respond.
“These men?” I finally say in frustration. “Dozens of us in that one room? Saints. Soldiers. Men and boys. We do not drop to our knees like whores like that—all at once—unless compelled by God.”
“Have you ever heard of mass hysteria?” She’s trying to be kind with her tone, but that makes it worse.
That night in the warehouse wasn’t isteria collettiva. There was no madness. No violence. We knelt in peace before the glory of heaven.
Unless I don’t know what the term really means, which I can’t say or she’ll know I’m an idiot. She’ll never believe what I know is true.
“It was the crown,” I insist. “I was there.”
She taps her thumbs together, gazing at my hand. The crown ring. My own inheritance from her father.
“That’s why you protected Rosetta?” she asks. “And why you married me?”
“It’s why your father put you and your sister under my protection. Someone strong needs to handle the crown.”
“Fuck.” She faces front and looks out the window. “I can’t believe this crap.”
“Believe in it.”
“All this trouble, for a thing in an old box that you didn’t really see?”
“It’s the lost pieces of Corona Ferrea. The Iron Crown of Lombardy. Napoleon put it on his head to declare himself emperor, but even then, the pieces were missing.”
“He was an asshole. And short.”
“And he ruled all of Europe!”
“He died young!”
“It is made with nails from Christ’s Cross.” I repeat the facts as if using different words will get the seriousness through to her. “How can it not be powerful enough to bend our knees?”
“This is ridiculous.” She shakes her head and stares into the darkness, unable or unwilling to define what part of this is ridiculous. Then she gives up and looks at me. “You’re saying my father stole it.”
“Found what Altieri lost, then he ruled with it.”
“It didn’t keep him from getting assassinated.”
“Killing him took a few tries, but no, it does not cure death.”
“Maybe it caused him to die. Ever think of that? Maybe it gives you power, then kills you?”
Does she believe?
“If that were the case, he wouldn’t have passed it to you and your sister.”
“No,” she scoffs. “He passed it to you. Rosetta and I were just a delivery method. And it doesn’t matter. The talisman of power and death is an idea in books. Fantasy books I stopped reading when I was thirteen.”
She pulls the door handle. It’s locked.
“Let me go.” Her voice is drained of emotion. She’s making a statement, not a command or request.
I unlock it, and she’s out.
15
VIOLETTA
The story exhausts me. Hearing it and believing the parts of it grounded in reality, newly aware that it’s affected every part of my life. Not because of its supernatural powers, but because so many people made choices about my life because they believed.
Now the pain of having my choices stripped from me is that much sharper. That much more exquisite for knowing the forces behind it. The anesthesia’s worn off. Now I get to feel it all, and unless I get my period in the next couple of days, I’ll be bringing a baby into it, and she’ll inherit more than a culture of servitude.
Out of the car, I make my way to the front door, but Santino grabs me and presses me against the rough stucco of the house, between two trellises tangled with rose vines.
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says.
“Jesus Christ on the One True fucking Cross. How can you miss the entire point?” I push him away, lose my footing, and grab onto a trellis of thorns. “Fuck!”
I’m bleeding, but as much as I’ve wanted to see blood in the last few days, it’s just my hand. Not deep enough. I want to bleed myself clean from the inside.
Santino takes my palm and puts his handkerchief in it before closing my fingers into a fist. I hiss from the pain and his tenderness. They’re both unwelcome.
“Calm down,” he says.
“No.”
“Yes.”
I don’t have to dare him. His mouth presses firmly against mine, prying it open. I want to bite him, but he’s too strong and I’m too weak.
The world goes quiet for just a second. Eventually, I’ll hate myself for yielding, but not yet. The mental voice screaming for me to stop and grab Gia, run for the border grows silent the more Santino reins in his kisses from firm to soft, from commanding to offering.
My knees are weak and I’m so close to being a boat adrift. He can’t just kiss me and make this disappear. It won’t fix things. It won’t undo this obscenity of a life.
And yet, like a guy looking at a stolen artifact, I want to believe.
“This is how I make you calm down.” He leans past me and punches a code into the door’s keypad, then he pushes it open with his foot. He’s calmed me with a kiss, and now he’s going to bring a sweet, docile wife into his house.
“Fuck you.”
“That mouth.” His voice rumbles and breaks like a wave. “Why can’t you just be quiet sometimes?”
“You can’t make this go away by kissing me.”
He smirks, then steps just outside the door, holding his hand toward the entrance to our home.
I am suddenly hyper aware of every sound in the front yard. The night birds singing in the trees. Fountain water trickling into the pond. The whisper of the breeze in the leaves. It all adds up to a song of outside. Not j
ust outdoors, but my existence outside the boundaries that have been set for me without me even knowing. My potential won’t fit inside his house. Inside, I’ll be a step closer to the captivity of his kisses, and one step further from freedom.
He waits as if he understands the importance of what I’m considering.
My thorn-bitten palm throbs when I tighten it around his handkerchief.
This story about my father is cute. The crown, the promise, the danger. It’s all a tidy dressing on a gaping wound. The missing pieces of an ancient crown are an excuse to take away what’s rightfully mine—my self-determination—not a reason.
I’m still committed to rescuing Gia and every girl like her, but once I walk through that door, I have to find a way to do it with him, or not at all.
“I know you’re still mad,” he says. “You can fight me inside, or maybe you’d like another round with the rosebushes?” He glances at my bleeding hand, then the tangle of flowers and thorns. “You’ll never change their mind though. They will always have thorns.”
He’s thinking of changing his mind? About what exactly? And is this a tease? Will he promise to help Gia, but never guarantee it?
Or does it simply mean there’s a chance?
A wave of confidence surges through my bloodstream, and I go through the doorway, into our house.
It’s us together or not at all.
In the half bath around the corner from the kitchen, Santino won’t let the nursing student with first aid training take charge of her own lacerations, and only by pulling rank and using medical terms am I able to talk him out of using of an entire roll of gauze.