“Money,” she replied.
He smirked. “Soon, that’ll be all you think of.”
Curious, how he made that sound like a good thing.
“Did your cousin get settled in all right?” Moritz went on as she fell into step beside him.
“Yes.” Raquel had arrived early that afternoon, brimming with excitement. As they’d led her from the dock, Mia had been amused at the way her head swiveled this way and that as she soaked in all the sights of New York. So vastly different from Catania. “She had a big afternoon, sightseeing, lunch. I took her to some fine shops to get some new clothes. And now she’s resting.” She’d moved out of the suite she and Gloria had shared to her own room on the other side of them. It was adjoined, so she still felt close by. Emilia had wanted to be close to her “zia,” and the arrangement suited Mia’s need for privacy.
“That’s fine,” Moritz said with a nod and smile. “I hope she enjoys life here. Will she be at your debut tomorrow night?”
He was being suspiciously friendly. “Yes, and she couldn’t be more excited. We want to take her out for a real night on the town.”
“I’m sure she’ll find it thrilling.”
At the door, Mia peeked out into the alley. Charlie shouted directions to the drivers and unloaders. “Who’re these men?”
“From the still outside Atlantic City,” Moritz replied. “With the cut batches.”
She glanced at Moritz. “Do I need to be concerned?”
He sighed. “Look, Mia, I think we got off on the wrong foot ever since you came home. For my part in that, I apologize. I know how important this operation is to you, and it’s more than just money. I’ve never lacked in ambition, and it became easier and easier to cut corners. The tension between us lately has been unpleasant, and I do hope we can start over. What do you say?”
His boyishly handsome face, round with youth, was open, and his large brown eyes were sincere behind his eyeglasses. He offered a small smile as well as his hand.
Moritz Schapiro did not offer apologies easily, so Mia reached for his hand. “Let’s bury the hatchet, then, Morrie.”
His smile grew. “That’s swell. And just to prove it to you, I want you to pick any crate at random, and select any bottle inside. You’ll see I’m a man of my word.”
Mia lifted her eyebrows, but pointed at a young man carrying a crate into the shop. “You.”
He stopped and looked at Moritz, who nodded. “Go ahead. Open it for Miss Scalisi.”
Shrugging, the young man lowered the crate and flicked open a pocket knife. He jimmied the lid open, then looked up at Mia. “What’s your fancy?”
She selected a random bottle from a lower corner of the crate, and the young man pulled it out, sliced open the seal, pulled the cork out, then offered it to her.
Mia took the bottle and sniffed it. The sharp, familiar aroma of the rye whiskey she remembered wafted up her nose. Then she took a sip, carefully swishing the liquor around her mouth to examine the taste.
It could kick a person’s teeth in, but the flavor was distinctive and…good.
She looked at Moritz and smiled.
He looked pleased with himself as he directed the young man to continue his task. “I wanted to thank you also for the timely delivery of my cut from the Madden deal this morning. I take it everything went smoothly?”
Mia set the bottle on a nearby table. “Owney’s a seasoned businessman, so that certainly helps.”
“Certainly.” Moritz adjusted his eyeglasses. “I understand Mr. Morelli received his money as well.”
Instantly, her hackles rose. She put her hands on her hips and fixed him with a steady stare.
Moritz lifted his hands. “I mean no offense, Mia. But you’re new to running deals yourself.”
“So you feel the need to father me and breathe down my neck?”
He smiled politely, but she felt their old tension simmer and bubble beneath the surface. “I’m still a partner and an investor in this operation, and all related business deals and transactions,” he said stiffly. “As such, I believe I’m entitled to ask questions.”
“I believe Hyman told you to mind your potatoes,” Mia replied. “And let me handle this. Besides, you got your money, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Goldberg has a fatherly fondness for you I believe affects his critical thinking at times,” Moritz said. “You’re not ready to lead a deal on your own—as evidenced simply by the fact that you interfered in another man’s deal and stole it for your own.”
Mia stared at him in disbelief. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“I’ve never been accused of having much of a sense of humor.”
Her temper shot to the top of her head, fiery hot, as though a switch had flipped. For the first time, she understood why her brother had always had a rep for being a hothead. She’d prided herself on being the cooler of them, but matters of business could be so very aggravating.
Mia forced herself to draw in a deep breath before she opened her mouth again. “I’d like to invite you down off your high horse. You act as though this sort of business has any rules of polite engagement, Morrie. We aren’t some blue-collar, working stiffs. This is a cutthroat business and anyone—any man—would have done what I did in an instant, and they likely wouldn’t have tried to negotiate peace by cutting in the man they stole from. You’ve got a lot of nerve acting this self-righteous when I know you’ve done the same or worse.”
“You’re missing the point,” he said impatiently. “I don’t make a habit of crossing men like Morelli. He’s half-crazy, and that’s the good half. You have no idea what you did, Mia. You can’t do something like that to a man like him and expect there to be no repercussions.”
Mia folded her arms. “Aren’t you supposed to be on my side?”
He shook his head in frustration. “This isn’t about sides, Mia!” His raised voice drew the curious stares of the men still toting in crates. Moritz lowered his voice. “This is about common business sense, which you’re still developing. You should have consulted with me and Charlie first.”
“And why’s that?”
“So we could prevent you from making irresponsible, impetuous decisions and potentially putting us all at risk.”
“How do you know Jake got his money?”
The question seemed to catch Moritz off guard. He regarded her uncertainly. “Beg pardon?”
“How,” she said, knowing full well he’d heard her the first time, “did you know Jake got his money from me?”
Moritz straightened his bowtie. “He…informed me. When he stopped by my poker room this afternoon.”
“Oh?”
“He likes cards, Mia. Like most men in this city.”
“A frequent patron of yours, is he?”
“Just what are you driving at?”
“I had no idea you and he were so very close.”
He frowned. “I don’t like your tone.”
At that moment, a young crewmember stuck his head in the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Schapiro, Miss Scalisi, but the trucks with the load for Mr. Yale are here. If it’s all the same to you, can we just stack the crates in the alley? It seems an awful lot of work to tote them in here then back out again. Mr. Yale’s due any moment, and we gotta move their trucks to make room for his.”
“Yes,” Mia said before Moritz could. “That’s fine, but don’t let the crates get too wet.”
“Oh, they won’t get wet at all,” he replied confidently. “We got tarps to cover ’em with.”
“Swell,” she said. “What was your name again?”
The young man, hardly more than a boy, flushed pink, his freckles standing out alarmingly on his skin. “Paul, ma’am. Paulie. Whatever you like.”
“Paulie it is. You get Mr. Yale loaded up and on the road inside thirty minutes, you can come see me about a bonus. All of you.”
Paulie grinned. “Yes, ma’am!” He ducked back out into the alley, and Mia could hear his shouting voice echoin
g off the brick walls.
“Wasting money again, Mia?” Moritz sighed. “Those boys could get Frankie Yale loaded inside twenty minutes without breaking a sweat.”
Mia recorked the bottle of rye. Perhaps Fred, patrolling out front, would like to take it home. “Yeah, thanks, I figured that.”
“Then why do you insist on throwing your money around so carelessly?”
She was getting awfully tired of his constant criticizing. It wasn’t that she couldn’t take advice—she found advice, solicited or otherwise, tremendously helpful. But Moritz delivered his with a nasty air, a lilt in his voice that suggested everything she did was of the utmost stupidity.
“Because I want those boys to look at me and see something to be loyal to.” The sharp edge in her tone was plain. “Because I want them to know I serve a job well done properly. Because I want them to work harder for me. You call it buying loyalty. I call it buying insurance.”
“Everything all right in here?” a voice from the doorway asked.
Mia and Moritz turned to see Charlie lingering in the doorway, drops of water from the rain sliding off the tilted brim of his hat. His dark eyes flicked between them.
“Fine,” Moritz said, beating her to the punch this time. “Just swell. I was trying to find out why Mia pulled the move with Morelli that she did. And trying to impress upon her how stupid it was.”
Her temper burst through its carefully lashed restraints. She slammed the bottle back onto the table. “You got something to say to me or what, Morrie?”
He smiled. “I think I’ve just said it.”
“No.” Mia shook her head as she stepped closer to him. “You’ve been talking around it. Ever since this whole thing started, ever since Nick died. So spill it. I’m letting you have your say, free and open, right here, right now. Go ahead.” She lifted her chin, meeting his piercing gaze head on.
He tilted his head, eyes tightening at their corners. “Fine. You asked for it, sweetheart. I think you’re in well over your head. I think you have no idea what you’re doing. I think you should just worry about your business arrangement with Hyman, and tend to the shop, and relinquish all control of the bootlegging to those of us who actually know what we’re doing. Do you have any idea how much money we made while you were away? Have you checked your bank account lately? I personally made sure to hand-deliver your cut of the profit to Hyman every single week to deposit into your account. You can still get paid for doing none of this work. And as far as your stance on heroin—I find it unimaginably foolish.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you do,” she shot back. “That’s because you got no sense of loyalty to the community. You grew up in the Lower East Side, too, Morrie. You grew up poor like we all did. Don’t you care about the people you left behind?”
“That’s what leaving something behind means. You don’t look back.”
“I feel sorry for you,” she said.
He grunted. “Please don’t. You’d rather stand on a hypocritical pedestal and preach about how terrible the big, bad drug is, all the while peddling another version of it to anyone with money to buy it—you’ve seen the drunks around this city, haven’t you? Do you think any of them benefit from yet another sip? But when it comes to a product that has unfathomable earning potential, you’d rather let your emotions do the deciding instead of your rational brain. Then, you go and do a thing like what you did with Morelli. You have no idea what sort of man he really is, or what can happen to us now. You made a very poor choice where he’s concerned. And that is why you’re ill-equipped to be a real part of this, let alone lead anything.”
His words hovered in the air for a long, timeless moment. A queer numbness befell her as she heard them, over and over, in her mind. Was she hurt, or enraged? She had no idea, so she felt nothing at all.
And besides, a voice in her head whispered, is he wrong?
Deeper than the surface cuts his words made was the sinister realization that accompanied them. She no longer had Moritz’s support. He’d made that clear. He was a partner in Nick’s business, but he did not support her or believe in her.
He might as well have been an enemy.
Charlie was the first to speak. “Morrie, that ain’t fair.”
Moritz flashed him a scathing look. “Says the man who’s in love with her. Listen, Charlie, I’ve been meaning to ask you where your common sense has gone lately, too.”
“I’d be real careful, I was you.”
“Would you?” Moritz shook his head and reached for his hat. Then he looked at Mia. “I’ve had my say, Miss Scalisi, as you invited me to do. I’m going to go see if the boys need a hand.” He put on his hat and brushed past Charlie into the alley.
“He’s right, you know,” she said in the silence that followed his departure.
Charlie frowned and walked toward her. “You off your nut? He’s just being a jerk.”
She gave him an exasperated look. “Come on, Charlie.”
He released a long breath. “Look. I think you’re a lot like Nick in that you know good business when you hear it, and you act fast. Sometimes that ain’t the best way to go about things. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work out.”
She flung her arms out to the side. “What am I doing here, Charlie? I’m a showgirl, for Christ’s sake. I’m not a gangster or a bootlegger or even a decent businesswoman. I’m just Nick Scalisi’s sister.”
“Bullshit. You’re just as smart as Nick ever was—smarter. What you did with Owney Madden would have made him proud.”
“But the fallout,” Mia said. “He would’ve thought about that first. I didn’t think about it until Hyman pointed it out.”
Charlie shook his head. “That’s because he’s been at this game for a long time. He’d know what to anticipate because he had years and years of experience with this. You’ve had, what? A few months altogether, considering you were in Sicily for a long time. Yeah, Morelli’s fucking crazy and unpredictable, but he’s not a strategist. He wants money more than anything. The deal you worked out with him at the store the other night? That was good business. Nick would never have been so fair.”
“You said I should’ve let him have storage space, too.”
“I think it would have been a show of good faith, and he would’ve seen he was getting more than he was giving up,” Charlie conceded, “but I doubt he cares too much about that since he’s seen that you’ll deliver his money in a timely manner. Again—he wants money, Mia, not a war.”
“Would Nick have sold him warehouse space?”
Charlie sighed impatiently. “Listen, do you know how many times Nick ever fucked up in business? Plenty. You never heard about those times, but there were plenty of meetings we left where he regretted something he did or didn’t say, did or didn’t offer. Sometimes, those things came back to bite him in the ass, sometimes they didn’t. He learned from them all.”
Before she could respond, Fred called to her from the front of the store.
“Miss Scalisi, some fella out here’s asking for ya. It’s all right, Mr. Scarpa and I’ll be right there.”
“I’m coming,” she called back, then looked at Charlie. “I did hear about one of those times.” She watched understanding and realization dawn in his eyes. “And he didn’t learn from all of them. ’Cause he’s dead now.”
She turned away and walked to the front of the store. Now her words hovered in the air, dreadful and heavy.
Fred was outside on the sidewalk and Paolo waited for her near the door he held open. A deep crease formed between his eyebrows as he looked at her, and he gave her a slight shake of his head.
He was not pleased.
He followed her outside, close on her heels, his head and eyes swerving side to side. At the curb, a black car idled, the driver chatting with Fred. She couldn’t make him out.
Fred turned to her. “He, er, wants to buy a bottle of the good stuff.”
Mia directed her stare and her reply to the driver, concealed in the shadows of his car. �
��I don’t sell perfume to people I don’t know. That’s the only good stuff we sell here.”
“Aw, come on, toots,” came the deep voice from the car. “I know what’s really going on here. Hell, I see them trucks in the alley.”
“I sell a lot of perfume.” Mia folded her arms. “You want some, you’ll have to come back another time. Shop’s closed, mac.”
“Even for a hundred clams?” A hand snaked out of the window. A folded C-note was pinched between his index and middle finger. “Come on. I know you got the real good stuff in here. Best in the city. The pure stuff.”
She snorted. “You think I’m a rube or something? Even prohis aren’t as bad as this. Or are you a rookie on the Bureau? Either way, get lost.”
A low peal of laughter drifted over the curb to her. “Nah. I ain’t no prohi. Fine. If a hundred bucks ain’t good enough, maybe this will be.”
Her body sensed it before her mind could understand, and she was already throwing herself to the side even as Paolo’s arms snaked around her waist to jerk her backward into the store.
“Fred!” she screamed. “Move! Move, Fred!”
But it was too late.
Bullets ripped through the air. Air whooshed out of her as she hit the floor hard, Paolo atop her. He was surprisingly strong, and even as she tried and failed to pull air into her shocked lungs, he was already dragging her backward, farther into the store and under cover. At the same time, he drew his pistol with the speed of lightning and emptied it into the car. But he hadn’t quite been fast enough, as the car pulled off with a scream of tires.
An odd, muted grunt came from his throat as he dropped his pistol and held her head in his hands, looking her over with alarm in his eyes.
Finally, her lungs unlocked and she sucked in a whistling, gasping breath. “I’m fine,” she choked, sitting up. “Fred?”
Paolo looked over his shoulder. He wouldn’t meet her eyes as he shook his head.
Charlie and a handful of men burst through the door that separated the front of the store from the back. “What the fuck was that?” he bellowed, his gun drawn. All of them had guns, Mia realized.
His dark eyes pinned on her where she remained on the floor. “Mia—Jesus Christ—”
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