Chapter 17 #3
I did not know I was going to do it. The hand went down before I knew I was going to put it there.
My palm covered the page of her notebook, the page with her handwriting on it, the spiky underlined Krol — still signing.
Same hand, the hand that had also written Today, I was not afraid on the first page a lifetime ago and meant it.
I closed the notebook. I picked it up. I slid it inside my coat, into the inside pocket against my chest where she would have been in a different life.
I stood up.
“Cugino,” Marco said. He was looking up at me.
“I’m not standing still this time.”
Dante was at the table with his phone in his hand.
Sal was at the door with his coat on. Tonio was at the stove and the stove was off and he had been watching me, all this time he had been watching me, and his face was the face it had been in the alley this morning, white and unreadable, except now there was a thing in it that had not been in it before, which was the thing my own face was doing, which was waiting for an instruction.
I gave it.
“Get me Don Arturo.”
Sal lifted his head.
Dante lowered the phone.
The kitchen sat with it. The clock on the microwave moved one digit.
“Now, Sal.”
He nodded. He picked up his own phone. He walked into the courtyard and the door closed behind him.
I am coming for you, I thought. Hold on. I am coming for you. This time I am coming.
Sal came back through the door with his phone held out.
I took it.
I had spoken to Don Arturo just once in the eight weeks I had been in Chicago to update him on Serafina. The call had lasted under four minutes.
I held the phone to my ear.
“Zio.”
The silence on the other end of the line was the silence of an old man taking the measure of a younger man’s voice.
“Pietro.”
His voice was the voice it had always been—low, careful, weighted, the dialect of the village where my father had been a boy. He did not ask why I was calling. Sal had told him already, in the courtyard, the bones of it. He was waiting for me to put the meat on.
I put the meat on.
“Zio. They have taken a woman.”
He waited.
“Her name is Angela Baggio. She has been with me for two weeks. She is a federal witness who testified against the Valenti accounting structures eighteen months ago and went into the program and came out of it when the program failed her. Enzo Valenti put a contract on her life. We were running an operation to use the contract to reach Valenti. The operation broke. The crew took her this morning from a private workshop on the south side of Chicago and put her on a Gulfstream out of Lansing airfield at 11:24 our time. The flight plan is falsified. We have reason to believe the destination is Malta. We have reason to believe Enzo Valenti has been in Malta since November.”
I drew a breath.
“She is mine, zio. I am going to marry her. I told my cousins yesterday and I am telling you now. I do not have my brothers’ permission to make this call and I do not have Dante Caruso’s permission to ask you what I am about to ask you. I am asking anyway.”
The silence on the other end was longer.
When he spoke his voice had not changed.
“What do you ask, nipote.”
“The family. The Mediterranean. Malta is two hundred kilometers from Sicily and the water between them is yours. I need Scordato men on the island by tomorrow morning. I need eyes on every private airfield from Luqa to Gozo. I need a hand on the correspondent bank in Valletta and a hand on the lawyer in Sliema and I need the villa outside Mellieha watched from the moment we put this phone down. I have a man in Chicago who can give you the addresses inside the hour. I am asking you, zio, to put the family in the water for me.”
Another silence.
I let it sit. I had said what I had to say. I had said it without softening it and I had said it without theater and I had said it the way my father, who had been Don Arturo’s youngest brother and had died at thirty-four with a knife in him in a doorway in Palermo, would have wanted me to say it.
“Pietro.”
“Zio.”
“You have never asked me for anything.”
“No, zio.”
“Your father did not ask either. It was a fault he had. I have wondered, sometimes, whether I gave him enough without his asking. I have decided I did not.”
He did not say anything else for a moment.
Then he said: “The family is in the water.”
I closed my eyes.
“I will have men at Luqa by dawn local time. I will have a second team out of Catania on the boats. The lawyer is already known to me — his name has crossed my desk for other reasons. The villa I do not know but if your cousin Marco can give me the coordinates by the end of the hour I will have a man with eyes on it before the sun rises in Malta tomorrow. Anything that moves in or out of that house from this moment forward will be photographed and timed. You will have the file when you land.”
“Grazie, zio.”
“Do not thank me yet.”
He paused.
“Bring her home, nipote.”
“Yes, zio.”
“And bring me Valenti’s head. The man has been a thorn in the side of two families for too long, and he has put his hand on a woman who is about to be a Scordato, and we are not going to ask twice. Bring me his head and we are even for everything. Your father included.”
The line went quiet.
He had not raised his voice once in the whole call.
“Sì, zio,” I said. “I will bring you his head.”