23. Maria
Maria
It’s been a busy afternoon at Shane’s accounting company, and we only get around to wrapping up about half past six.
I spend a few minutes scratching Mr. Trumpington—Shane’s daughter Claire’s ancient dog—behind the ears, and chatting to Mrs. Horsell about nothing in particular.
Then I say my goodbyes and head for home, stopping en route for fuel at Martha’s One Stop Gas ‘n’ Diner.
Here, I chat to Martha—I have learned she indeed is the person called Martha from the sign outside—about the weather as she fills my tank, and I promise to come by for pancakes with Sandro again sometime very soon.
In all, I really feel like I am settling down here.
Like anywhere, everything had seemed strange at first—foreign, even—but gradually things had become familiar and comfortable.
Martha at the gas station, Sam at the supermarket, and his young assistant Daisy, Theo and his son Randy at Theo’s bar, and of course Mr. and Mrs. Horsell who I work for three times a week, and who pretty much treat me like their second daughter.
Better, really, since they pay me as well.
Slowly, gradually, without really thinking about it, I’d built routines and developed relationships.
Slowly, gradually, life in Coyote Creek Falls has become…
normal. But unlike our previous normality in Brooklyn, Papa’s not drinking himself to an early death, and best of all, we’re not in debt to the Morettis—Sandro had sent the title deeds of the old apartment in Bushwick to them via his bank, offering it as repayment for the loan, just as his old friend Salvatore Moretti had proposed, all that long time ago…
except it wasn’t a long time ago at all.
Just a few weeks. Amazing, it feels like months…
years… a whole lifetime ago, since that stressful nighttime escape from Brooklyn, and the long old car journey out west and up into the mountains.
How had we ended up here, of all places? Oh yes. I smile as I remember. An old John Denver song and come on the radio. A song that I’ve always liked, that had reached out to me that night, like a light in the darkness. A song that means much more to me now than it ever did back then.
“Take me home, country roads,” I sing, as I wind down my window. “To the place, where I belong…” I breathe in the warm, fresh, mountain air, take in the glorious view of the mountain peaks ahead and to my left, the lush, green trees to my right and behind me.
Yes, with the debt out from under us, and with Papa growing stronger every day, with my steady work at the accounting firm, and…
well… with my warm relationship with Grant, Regan and Abe that promises so much for the future…
I can’t help feeling that life couldn’t be much better.
Seems we’ve cracked it, at last. Papa and me.
Do we deserve this sort of luck? I muse, as I drive. Then I smile.
Yeah… of course we do!
I pull up in my usual spot in the yard, underneath a sycamore that provides some shade from the sun on the hot days, and head for the main house, noticing as I walk the few paces to the front door that there’s no noises coming from the workshop, and I don’t see Papa in the vegetable garden, either.
Mind you, it’s already after half past seven.
They’ll probably all be in the kitchen, waiting for me to get back so we can have dinner.
If it’s not one of my work days then I do it, but on my work days, the four men divide it between them on a rota.
I can’t remember whose day it is to cook.
If it’s Papa’s then inevitably we’ll be eating pasta.
If it’s Grant then it will almost certainly be a murky, brown, beef stew of some kind.
Abe has a few different recipes, and Regan is actually quite a good cook…
when he can be bothered. If it’s Regan’s turn then we really could be sitting down to anything, from Greek mezze to Polish borscht with dumplings, and everything in between.
My stomach rumbles as I open the door to the kitchen and step inside, a smile of pleasant anticipation on my face.
My smile freezes. Three men look up at me from the table, the expressions on their faces serious. Deadly serious. Something’s wrong.
“What is it?” I ask. “And where’s Papa? Is he changing his clothes?” He sometimes took a shower and put fresh clothes on for dinner if he’d gotten particularly dirty in the garden.
Regan looks down at the table. Abe just sits there, frozen, seemingly immobile. I look across at Grant, my eyebrows raised.
“Well… what is it?”
“It’s Sandro,” Grant says, his voice flat, raw. “Your mafia friends… they came and took him.”
My legs feel suddenly weak. There’s no air. I can’t stand…
Strong hands reach out, lifting me up, holding me. Guiding me to a chair, sitting me down. Regan goes to a cupboard and reaches out a bottle. Brandy. He pours a small amount into a tumbler. Hands it to me. “Drink this.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I know, Maria. I know. But drink it anyway.”
I swallow it down. Tastes like medicine. I’ve never liked brandy.
This will not do. Papa needs me. I shake my head and gather my thoughts.
“You mean Tony? Tony Moretti? He has my papa?”
“Yes. We’re sorry, Maria. We weren’t here. We’d gone up to Silverlode Pass…” He pauses, looking thoughtfully at me. “We think they were actually after you, not Sandro. But you were at work, so they took him instead.
“An old man. A vulnerable target,” Regan spits out from his seat. “Such brave warriors. Three of them, for one girl. Pah,” he throws up his arms. “And they couldn’t even do that right.”
“Alright, alright Regan. Give it a rest, eh?”
“Sorry, Boss. Sorry, Maria.”
“How do you know what happened?”
“We kinda saw it,” Regan explains. “But afterwards. Like a recording. From a trail camera that Abe had set up to watch the place.”
“Why?”
“Why watch the place?”
I nod.
“Well, because it turns out that someone’s been going around asking questions about a brunette with a Brooklyn accent, and somehow they’d linked her to my name. It’s Abe, he heard it from Randy, down at Theo’s. We don’t know who told them about you, but we ain’t too happy about it.”
“No,” says Regan, darkly. “Neither will they be when we find out who it was.”
I wave my hand impatiently at this. Bravado. Nice, sure, and he means well. But it won’t get Papa back, and that’s all that counts.
“Did they say what they want?” I ask. “I presume they want something… Tony never does anything without an ulterior motive—usually money.”
“Honestly?” Grant raises his eyes to me. He looks tired. Older. “We don’t know.”
“Didn’t they leave some sort of a note?”
“Yeah. They left a note. But it just has a telephone number on it. We assume it’s this Tony Moretti’s number.”
“Well?” I ask, slightly bemused. “Didn’t you call it?”
“Not yet,” Grant responds. “We wanted to wait until you came back. You see, you’re the only one who knows the guy. If you were here, listening in… well, you might—just might—pick up something that Regan, Abe and I would miss.”
I nod. It made sense.
“So… shall I call the number? It might not…” he swallows, uneasily. “It might not be pleasant.”
Oh God, oh poor Papa! I nod. “Yes, I’m okay… no really. Call it.”
He dials the number. It rings. Once, twice, three times. On the fourth ring someone at the other end picks up.
“Mr. Grant Naylor, I presume?” A well-spoken voice. Clipped, efficient. Authoritative—used to giving orders. A young, Italian-American voice with a Brooklyn accent. A hard voice. A voice I remember only too well.
“That’s him,” I whisper. “That’s Tony Moretti.”
Grant nods at me.
“Yeah,” he says. “This is Grant Naylor. And you’re Tony Moretti.”
“Very well done, Mr. Naylor. You’ve done your homework. I’m beginning to like you.” Tony Moretti’s voice sounds amused, measured, infinitely in control.
“So, what do you want, Moretti?”
“Straight to business, is it? Well, well, well, you are quite the businessman aren’t you, Grant? Can I call you Grant?”
“Call me what you like. Where’s Sandro?”
“Now, now, Grant old friend. Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves here. Time for that later. For now… well let’s be frank with each other. You’ve got something I want. You know what.”
“Maria. If you think?—”
“Mr. Naylor, I am not a fool,” Tony cuts in.
“Of course I am not suggesting just a straight swap. I know the power that young lady can have over men. Felt it myself, to be perfectly honest with you. In fact, I’ll tell you a little secret, Grant, seeing as we’re such good friends now.
I used to have a crush on Maria. When I was fourteen and she was seventeen…
just between ourselves there wasn’t a single thing I wouldn’t have done for her.
And when I got to be eighteen, well… I summoned up my courage like a man should, and I asked her out. ”
“Yeah? What did she say?”
“She said ‘No’ Grant. Much to my dismay. Can you believe it? A woman saying no… to me—a Moretti? Unheard of! And of course, it just made me want her all the more. I see that now.”
“Can we get to the point, Moretti? I ain’t got all day.”
“We’ll take as much time as I say we’ll take.” Tony’s furious temper flashes down the phone. Grant almost holds the phone a little further away, just for a moment. Then the voice on the other end of the line is all calmness and smiles again.
“But you’re right. It’s time to turn to business. Here’s the deal. I don’t want to marry Maria… not now. Not after all… this. But I still want a son. And I want a son from her bloodline.”
“This is ridiculous, what the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking, Mr. Naylor,” continues Tony, speaking softly, slowly, with steel in his words.
“About a simple business arrangement. Here’s how it works.
Maria comes to live with me, and that old fool Alessandro Contarini is handed back to you.
Maria does…ah… what she needs to do to get pregnant.
She stays with me for nine months, gives birth, and leaves.
Unharmed. All debts cleared. In fact, with shall we say…
oh… five hundred thousand tax-free dollars in her bank account for her troubles, and for her silence, and of course for agreeing not to ever contest ownership of the child with me.
“Then the boy stays with me. I bring him up well. He goes to the best schools, he rubs shoulders with the wealthy and famous of this world, he has everything he could possibly wish for—much more than anything dear Maria could ever provide for him—and then, when my time has come and gone… well, then he will take over from me, just as I have taken over from my father, and my father from his father before that. Then he will walk on this Earth like a king, and everyone shall fear him and obey him.”
Grant turns to look at us. Mimes “This guy is crazy” to us.
Regan shrugs, his eyes wide. I don’t know what to say.
Seems like taking over the Moretti family reins has somehow gotten straight to his head in some way.
At least his father had some level of normality about him.
But Tony… he sounds like he’s plain nuts.
Delusions of grandeur well beyond his small-stakes mob background.
A case of schizophrenia, or something. It sounds like he needs to be medicated rather than running a mafia gang.
“And if we say ‘No’?” Grant asks.
“Oh… but you won’t do that, will you Grant, my old friend?
Because you know that if you say ‘No’… well then, we’ll have to have a little conversation with old Mr. Contarini.
And I have a feeling that a conversation of that type will end up with him feeding the fish in the bottom of the Hudson.
What do you think, Grant? And then, when we’re done with that old idiot.
Then we’ll come after you and your two friends. ”
“What friends?”
“Oh come now, Grant. Give me more credit than that. I know all about you and your two little army buddies. We have special ways of dealing with people like you, Grant. And after that… well… after that, poor little Maria will be all on her own. By then she’ll be begging me to have her back.
No, no, Grant, far better to do it my way. Far better all round.”
“How do we know you’ve got Sandro?”
“What?” Tony laughs. Incredulous. “Who else do you think came and took him? The postman? The tooth fairy?”
“Yeah, but you might already have killed him. How do we know he’s even still alive?”
There’s a deep sigh at the other end. “Very well, Mr. Naylor.” Then in a muffled voice as he turns away from the phone to speak to someone else in the room with him.
“Go and get the old fool, Contarini. Bring him here.” Footsteps, then a door opens and closes.
Then a moment or two later, the door opens again and there’s more footsteps.
The phone sounds like it’s being handed across to someone else.
“Sandro?” Grant asks.
“Grant? It’s me, Sandro.”
“Sandro! Are you okay have they?—”
“Don’t believe them, Grant.” Papa’s voice cuts in, urgently. “They’re liars. Don’t trust them. I’m old I don’t matter anymore. Just protect my daughter, Grant. Promise me, you’ll not let them get my aaaarrrgghh!”
His voice is cut short by a heavy thump and a loud scream, then… silence. We stare at each other, wild-eyed. I stand up, not knowing what I can do, but wanting to something, anything.
“Sandro? Sandro… are you there?” Grant is speaking urgently into the phone. But it’s Tony’s voice that comes back online.
“So now you know he’s still alive… for the moment. And you have my word he’ll stay that way… so long as we get Maria. Delivered to an address in Brooklyn that I will provide. Capiche, Mr. Grant Naylor?”
“I need to think about it.”
“You have twenty-four hours.”
“I need a week.” Grant plays for time.
“A week?” Tony’s voice is amused, almost derisive. “I don’t think so. Two days.”
“Five.”
Very well, three days, Mr. Naylor, and that is my last word. If you ask again, it goes back to twenty-four hours.”
Grant sighs. “Okay. Give me the address. It’s about eight here in West Virginia right now. Expect a call from me at eight p.m. in three days’ time to confirm our plans.”
“You see… I knew you’d see sense. It’s good to do business with you Mr. Naylor. Here’s the address.” Grant scribbles an address down on a piece of paper.
“Remember, Mr. Naylor… eight p.m. in three days’ time. Do not be late.”
The phone goes dead.