Chapter 19
RAFFAELE
She moves through my apartment like a guest in a hotel.
Not the way a woman moves through a room she’s been brought to be kept.
The way someone moves when they’re not sure if it would be rude to sit down.
She sets her bag down and then picks it up again and looks for a better place.
After a bit, she ends up perched on the edge of the cushion with her hands in her lap and her shoulders up around her ears.
I should say something to her.
I have nothing.
The rage is too close to the surface. If I open my mouth right now, what would come out would not be for her. So, I stand at the kitchen island with my hand on the marble, watching her settle and thinking of everything else I could be doing. That I should be doing.
It doesn’t take long before she feels me watching. She looks up, and I make my decision.
“Where are you going?” she asks after me as I head for the elevator.
“Out.”
“Raffaele.”
“I’ll be back.”
“Please—”
Her words get cut off by the elevator doors shutting. Then, I’m alone, and a heaviness pangs in my chest. Guilt. Rage.
Fear.
By the time the doors open in the garage, the fear has melted, and the rage is in my hands. I’m steady. I’m calm. I’m walking at exactly my usual pace. Inside, I’m moving furiously fast.
Lorenzo is at the curb in his own car, engine running. He’s eating sunflower seeds out of a paper sleeve with the window cracked. He sees me, and the bag goes onto the dashboard. The window goes up, and he leans across the cabin to push the passenger door open from the inside.
I get in.
“Antonio’s.”
He pulls into traffic without a word.
“Front door,” he says, “or you want me to get creative?”
“Front door.”
“Front door’s good. Cleaner. We need a reason.”
“Yes.”
“Already thinking about it. Give me a second.”
He drives one-handed and dials with the other. He puts it on the dashboard speaker.
I notice the phone in his hand. Not his, a burner. Antonio won’t recognize the number.
The line picks up on the second ring.
“Who is this?” Antonio’s voice is annoyed. It sounds like he’s eating.
“Lorenzo Castellano. Calling on behalf of Mr. D’Amico.”
“What does he want?”
“Good news, actually.” Lorenzo says. “The Martinez files. Boss says they’re getting closed. Thought you’d want to hear it from us directly.”
“About fucking time. That’s what I’ve been saying. That’s what I told him today, in his own goddamn office, before he—”
“Yeah, about that.”
“What?”
“Boss wants to come by. Smooth things over after this morning. He feels bad about the misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding?” Antonio laughs. “He punched me in the fucking face.”
“That’s because he likes you, Antonio. You know how he is. He only loses it on guys he actually gives a shit about.”
I keep my eyes on the road.
“Which is why he’s bringing the good wine,” Lorenzo continues. “The stuff he doesn’t open for anyone else. A peace offering. The Barolo. The man does not pull that bottle out for anyone, Antonio. Anyone.“
I can hear Antonio working it out on the other end. The math isn’t complicated, and Antonio doesn’t have the patience for complicated math. He hears Barolo and peace offering and Martinez files closing, and his ego does the rest.
“Yeah, all right. Fine. I’ll have the guys at the gate let you through.”
“Twenty minutes.”
He hangs up before Lorenzo finishes saying goodbye.
Lorenzo glances at me.
“Easy. Guy swallowed it like a trout.”
“Tell me you have the bottle.”
“Tell me you have the bottle,” he mimics. “Boss. Boss. You wound me. Every time. You think I’m winging this.”
“You usually are.”
“It’s in the trunk. Wrapped in a cloth. Like a baby.” He mutters to himself, shaking his head, “The man works with me for five years. Five years. Still treats me like the new kid.”
We don’t speak again until the gate.
Antonio’s estate is twenty minutes north. Tall hedges, gravel drive, two men at the gatehouse who have known Lorenzo for years and don’t bother with the tablet when his face shows in the passenger window. Lorenzo holds up the bottle. The closer guard nods. The gate slides open.
The drive curves around a fountain that’s been turned off for the season.
“You want me on the door or in the room with you?”
“In the room.”
“Good. I haven’t been in his study for a while. I want to see if he replaced the carpet.”
The front door opens before we’ve reached the bottom of the steps.
Antonio is in shirtsleeves, no jacket, a glass already in his hand.
The split at his lip from this morning has scabbed over and started to look like a smirk that won’t come off.
He has a phone pressed to his ear with his free hand.
He doesn’t move it away when he greets us.
That’s the move. He wants me to see he’s still on a call.
He wants me to see I’m the second most important thing in the room.
“D’Amico. Castellano. Come in. Glasses are in the study.”
He turns and waves us down the hall, phone still at his ear.
“Yeah, no, I’m still here. Got visitors. Business…No, no, it’s fine. D’Amico’s here. Apparently, we’re making peace tonight.”
A laugh on his end. A laugh on the other end. The voice on the line is muffled, but I’m close enough to him in the hallway to catch it.
Nico.
Of course it’s Nico.
Lorenzo glances at me. Tips his chin a fraction toward Antonio’s phone. The question is clear: Is this a problem?
I shake my head.
It’s not a problem. It’s a gift.
The study is exactly the way I remember it—leather, dark wood, the decanters on the sideboard, a single lamp lit. Antonio walks straight to the sideboard and sets down his glass. He turns, still on the phone.
“Yeah, hold on a second, Nico, I gotta—”
He cups the receiver. He grins at me.
“So. About this morning. No hard feelings, right? I got heated. You got heated. Happens.” He shrugs.
This man, who four hours ago sent two strangers to my woman’s apartment with instructions to break her open and use what spilled, just shrugs. This man, who’s grinning at me with the certainty that nobody in this city is allowed to lay a finger on him because of what his earnings buy.
No hard feelings, he says.
“Water under the bridge,” I agree.
“Exactly. See? We’re professionals. We can move past—”
I’m across the room before he finishes the sentence.
My hand closes around his throat. His back hits the wall hard enough to rattle a framed certificate off the next panel and onto the floor. The phone leaves his hand, skidding across the rug until it stops face up just under the writing desk.
His glass shatters. His other hand comes up to claw at my forearm and gets nothing.
“What the fuck—”
I squeeze.
From the floor: “Antonio? Antonio. What was that? Hello? Hey!”
Antonio’s face is going the color of a brick. His eyes are bulging. He’s trying to speak around my hand, but there’s not enough room in his throat to do it.
I lean in.
“You sent men to her apartment.”
His head jerks. A no.
“Don’t.”
His hand stops clawing at my arm and finds the front of my shirt instead. It fists there. As if the gesture, the clutching, will count for anything. As if we’re still in a negotiation.
This not a fucking negotiation.
“You touched what’s mine.”
The fist on my shirt goes weaker. The eyes are glazing.
I keep going.
I’ve killed men with my hands twice in my life before tonight.
The first was when I was nineteen. It was an accident.
Vincenzo cleaned it up before I’d stopped puking.
The second was for the famiglia. It felt like nothing.
This is neither. This is a long, sustained pressure, an arm that does not give, a man’s pulse going from a hammer to a flutter to a stop under my palm.
I let go.
He drops.
He lands sideways on the rug with his cheek against the wood floor, one arm under him, his mouth half-open. His chest doesn’t move.
The phone is still on. Nico’s yelling out of it.
I crouch, pick it up. Stare at the screen for a long, even beat—the photo Nico has set for himself in Antonio’s contacts is from years ago, before the drinking got worse, when his hair was darker. He’s laughing at something off-camera.
I end the call.
Behind me, Lorenzo whistles low through his teeth.
“Antonio Martinez. The Butcher of Brooklyn.” He looks down at the body. “Died like a pig.”
He scratches his jaw.
“Although. Hold on. Was he the Butcher, or was that someone else? You got like four guys with a meat-related name so far. I’m not great with the New York guys yet.”
I straighten up.
I look around the study. The framed certificate is on the floor.
The glass is in pieces near the leg of the chair.
Antonio’s body is on the rug in roughly the position of a man who has fallen asleep in front of a television.
Nothing in the room screams a struggle—it suggests, instead, a man who collapsed.
That’s good. That’s usable.
“What about Nico?” Lorenzo is still by the door. “He heard most of that.”
“I’ll handle Nico.”
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow.”
I step over the body and walk down the hall.
Antonio’s bodyguards straighten when they see us. The closer one starts to ask about Mr. Martinez.
“He’s lying down,” I say. “He had a long day.”
The guard nods.
We walk out the front door together. The fountain is still off. The driveway is silent. The gate, far down the curve, is closed.
In the car, Lorenzo doesn’t put his hands on the wheel right away. He sits for a second with both hands flat on his thighs, looking through the windshield at the dark hedges.
“For what it’s worth, boss.” He starts the engine. “I’d have done the same thing.”
He pulls down the drive. The gate slides open as we approach. The closer guard at the gatehouse lifts two fingers in a small wave, the way you wave to someone you’ll see at the same place tomorrow.
Lorenzo waves back.
I stare at the road.
Two days ago I sat across from Bea in my office, and I told her—I remember it exactly—that the easy way to handle Antonio would be to put a bullet in him and be done with it.
Solve the whole thing in one evening. One phone call, one shallow grave, half the city breathes easier.
I’d said it as a joke, as a thing a sane lawyer says to a clean assistant on a Tuesday afternoon to make her uncomfortable, to remind her where she’d landed.
Two days.
The man who said that line would have called the man who killed Antonio Martinez tonight insane.
But the man who said that line isn’t in this car.
I know why I did it. I knew before I stepped into that elevator.
I did it for her.
The insanity of it has stopped feeling like insanity. It has settled into the shape of a fact.
I drive home to Bea.