Chapter 19 – Luigi
Chapter Nineteen
Luigi
M y ears ring and my head hurts so badly that I can’t move it.
I might have hurt my neck or hit my head on something on the way down.
Fuck. I’m out of the smoke but still feel it in my lungs and the more I cough, the deeper the heavy particles seem to get.
Each breath grows heavy and more challenging. My mind slips…
There’s fire. More fire. More smoke. This is fucked up. What the hell happened? I reach out for a hand, but there’s none waiting for me. She’s not here.
I hear sirens. That’s a bad sign. We have a guy with the fire department – we have connections to Italians all over the city – and we have a couple cops that work this part of downtown, but a bomb going off in a downtown Buffalo nightclub can’t stay “under wraps”.
It won’t be long before dad gets down here…
My ears are ringing as my head snaps around and I struggle to see or feel anything. I’m in a waking nightmare, barely capable of holding on to anything at all, much less consciousness.
I fall out of reality again and wake up to Peter and Mikey dragging me to my feet. Mikey pours cold beer from the can he always keeps in his back pocket for emergencies when we go out over me to wake me up. I groan as the beer slides into my mouth and then makes sticky, icy rivers all over my skin.
I shake the liquid out of my hair as I force myself into consciousness. I sense Peter about to slap me and give him a “don’t you dare” glare that holds him in place. Delphine. A sharp stabbing sensation wrenches my gut deeply.
“Where is she?” I growl. “What the hell happened?”
Dad’s coming down here. He’ll be here soon and I have no idea where the hell Delphine could be.
“She’s gone,” Peter says, clearly unhappy to be the bearer of bad news. “Angela chased after her, but Mikey brought her back. Your father’s orders…”
My father’s orders wouldn’t have included protecting Delphine, especially because he has no idea she exists. Fuck.
“I need to get her back.”
“You need to get your shit together,” Mikey says forcefully. “This should have never happened on our watch.”
“It’s not my fault,” I growl at my cousin.
The Pittsburgh mobsters are responsible for this. Turns out their trip to Buffalo involved a lot more than surveillance. But how would Carmine’s death give them permission to bomb a nightclub in our city? How could they possibly benefit from pissing my father off?
Maybe it’s the old man’s death out in Pittsburgh. They assume because he was old and weak, it would be the same with my father. There’s no one like my father. No one.
I take charge with the EMTs, the firefighters and the cops. We say as little as possible and they tread carefully around questioning us because of the family name. Our reputation goes a long way in a small city like this one.
Long after most everyone clears away from the crime scene, my father arrives in a black car with Pino Corsini and Nick, one of his best gunmen.
He seethes with cold anger, most likely because our job ought to have been simple and while my father might not be any weaker at his current age, he doesn’t enjoy having to leave his bed in the middle of the night for a firebomb.
“What the fuck happened here?” he asks me in a calm, low voice. His anger is precarious.
“It wasn’t anything we could predict.”
“Our city is going to be a shithole like Pittsburgh if we don’t stop this shit before it starts.”
Given the scent and charred appearance of the building in front of us, it’s hard not to think that we’re behind, and that whoever blew up this club – most likely someone from Pittsburgh – already has a head start.
“Carmine died,” my father says slowly. “This has people on edge. But I didn’t think Maury Gravina would be such a fucking moron that he allowed his people to break that truce.”
“You think Aunt Nicola knows anything about this?”
My father’s sister, Nicola, married Maury Gravina against our grandfather Don’s wishes. He might not have been perfect, but Don understood family history and the complicated ways intertwining families can influence each other.
Maury’s marriage to Nicola has kept us deadlocked in this truce for years when truthfully, I suspect my father could have won any war against the Sicilians out in Pennsylvania.
He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. Pino wouldn’t allow me to act against his brother and I saw the wisdom in it. My sister should have listened to my father when he told her who to marry.”
“Understood.”
I make some slight movement that makes my father think I’m planning to leave because his arm darts out faster than I realized his reflexes would allow.
“I’m not done with you.”
Of course he isn’t. Angela wasn’t in the crowd of bystanders and revelers gathered outside to watch the firefighters work and answer the police officer’s questions.
Her instincts are strong enough that I wouldn’t expect her to linger around talking to cops but…
I sincerely hope she didn’t add even more to my plate by making an escape attempt.
It’s bad enough that Delphine is gone. And I can’t ask my father for the resources to get her back without making that problem even worse.
“Anything, dad,” I answer calmly.
“I’m sending Mikey and Peter out to Pittsburgh to talk to Marco.”
Marco Corsini is Carmine’s eldest. It stands to reason that he would have been the one to plan this bombing, since we know Pittsburgh sent guys our way and he’s the one who would have been next in line to lead the mob. It couldn’t have been Maury Gravina. That’s not how their family works.
“He agreed to a conversation?”
“Pino’s his godfather. He convinced him,” my father explains, growing reasonably agitated because this entire situation is the last thing we expected to be dealing with in the midst of innumerable family dramas.
I have the good sense not to bring up Delphine, but at some point either tonight or very soon, I’ll have to choose.
“Great. What’s the point of talking to Marco?”
“It’s a warning. They call off their men. They leave us alone. Or I kill Maurizio Gravina.”
“What about Aunt Nora?”
“What about her?” my father says. “I negotiated this truce on her behalf years ago, going against my own fucking father because she promised she could keep him in line. I smell a rat Luigi… and I’m going to wring its fucking neck.”
I strongly doubt killing our aunt’s husband would bring peace between our cities, but I can’t say what I would do in my father’s position. He has to make choices that I don’t envy in the slightest.
“Understood.”
It’s best to agree with my father when his voice tightens and he seethes with barely concealed anger.
The only person who has ever had the power to control my father’s bitter anger is my mother, bless her soul, and I don’t have a clue how she does it.
Considering my father’s prolific career in the family business, I suspect it’s a dossier of blackmail.
“This is horse shit,” dad complains, switching his attention to an important detail that I couldn’t have expected to escape him. “And where the fuck is Angela? Tell me she had nothing to do with this?”
I sigh, ready to accept the verbal beatdown of a lifetime over my missing sister, when I hear her irritating voice behind us.
“I was staying out of the way,” she says innocently. “I’m right here dad, calm down. Luigi taught me well.”
“Perfect. Come here, princess.”
Apparently, they’re friends now. Angela throws her arms around my father and says dramatically, “We could have all died. The entire family could have been blown up like bacon bits.”
“I’ll go get Peter and Mikey. When do you want us on the road?” I say to interrupt Angela.
“Before they know what fucking hit them.”
Angela gives me long, slow eye contact as if to ask me what the hell I plan to do about the big secret we both have. I press one finger to my lips, hoping she doesn’t say anything stupid in front of our father.
“I have to have a word with Peter,” Angela says (not suspiciously at all, mind you). “I’ll walk with Luigi.”
“You two are getting along?” Dad asks, as if he isn’t the cause of most of the fights between us.
“We’re fine,” I tell him.
“He’s my big brother and I love him to death,” Angela says, laying it on thick. Nick approaches dad, distracting him long enough that I can make good on my promise to talk to my cousins while getting some valuable alone time with Angela.
“Delphine,” I growl at her. It’s been about two hours since the bomb and the longer I spend away from her, the higher Delphine’s chances of ending up in the damn harbor. I need her now.
“They’re holding her at the Marriott downtown. That bartender Rachel from Belladonna’s works the closing shift Friday nights and she recognized Delphine, texted me immediately.”
In a small city like this, you can’t keep secrets from Italians. We’re all related, all connected and tangled up in a fucked up web of frustrating social connections that once in a while pay off like this.
“How the hell am I going to get her and then go to Pittsburgh?”
“Using your fucking brain,” Angela says.
“Oh, you care about her all of a sudden?”
“She’s my best friend, Luigi.”
“You didn’t know her a week ago.”
“The heart wants what it wants.”
“You are insufferable.”
“Fuck Pittsburgh and every Italian in that city,” Angela says, her anger barely describing the pain beneath it.
Angela’s husband was a Gravina. He was too old for her and far too brutal and controlling for a woman like Angela. I supported the union because of the strength it would add to the truce, but nobody could have predicted the violence this man would have inflicted upon my sister.
There is a part of me that feels like I owe it to her not to hold back my brutality now that the truce between our families lies in shambles. Carmine’s death has had intense ripple effects already. Who knows how far this could go… how much bloodshed there could be before it stops.
Still, it’s better to be the killer than the dead.
“Fine. Tell Peter and Mikey to get a head start. Go with them. I’ll head to the Marriott and get Delphine back.”
“Alone?”
“Who has her?” I ask Angela, slowing down as we approach Peter and Mikey, both hunched over and occupied by their own private conversation.
“The kid only looked about nineteen, but Rachel suspects he was armed.”
“Is Rachel still there?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. I could use her help.”
“Don’t get her killed,” Angela warns me.
I grunt. “I’ll do my best.”