Chapter 17 #2
It just settled there, heavy and warm, the big scarred hand, and he didn’t say a thing.
He didn’t tell me Olimpo would make it, because he didn’t know.
He didn’t tell me Katerina would be all right, because none of us knew that either.
He didn’t say it’s not your fault, because we both knew some of it was.
He just held his hand on my shoulder while I came apart.
The hours after were the worst of my life.
It wasn’t the pain. The ribs, the burn, the arm I couldn’t lift—that was nothing, that was background, that was a Tuesday. It wasn’t even the fear, though the fear sat on my chest the whole time like a second man.
It was that nothing happened.
I had braced for the worst. I’d braced for a video, for a finger in a box, for the kind of message a man like Gianni sends to make you understand the weight of what he’s holding.
I’d have taken any of it. A horror I could see is a horror I can act on.
But there was nothing. No ransom. No call.
No thread to pull. The phone didn’t ring.
The hours just came and went in that too-clean room with the monitor turned down, and the not-knowing got into me like water into a hull, slow, everywhere, sinking the whole thing an inch at a time.
I lay there and made a list of everything I couldn’t do.
I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t go to the block and stand on the scorched concrete and read what was left of it. I couldn’t walk into the bars and the back rooms and the places where men talk too much.
Angela came in around two in the morning.
It took me a second to place her, and then it caved my chest in all over again, because she was still half in white—someone had got her out of the gown but the slip under it was bridal, ivory, and over it she had a man’s grey sweatshirt that swallowed her, Pietro’s, his clothes on his wife on her wedding night.
She’d been crying and stopped. Her face had gone into a hard flat focus I recognized, the look of someone who has been hunted and learned to work anyway, and she had a borrowed laptop under her arm.
“I’ve been on the money,” she said. No preamble.
The new wife of my cousin, the woman who’d brought him back from the dead, spending her wedding night doing the one thing she does better than anyone alive—reading a financial structure the way a translator reads a poem, finding the meaning in the margins.
“There’s nothing that helps tonight.” Her voice was gentle and it was that gentleness that scared me. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to lie to you. The trail’s cold. It doesn’t lead anywhere.”
Donatella was worse, because Donatella never comes up empty.
I could hear her in the next room, on and off, all night.
She runs the world from a phone. Four languages, a network of the younger generation she’s spent years building, informants and favors stacked like a fortune in a bank only she can draw on.
I heard her go through it. I heard the brass at first, the certainty, the working-it tone she’d had at the bakery running the deliveries—calling in markers, calling people who owed her, calling people who owed people who owed her.
I heard the languages shift as the night wore down, Italian to Sicilian to something I think was Greek to the flat hard English she uses when she’s stopped being charming.
And I heard the calls get shorter. And shorter.
And then I heard the silence between them get longer, and I knew what that was.
She’d hit the dregs. She’d spent every favor she was owed and a few she wasn’t, and what came back, from all of it, from the whole bottomless bank of Donatella Caruso’s connections, was nothing.
Silence. The street had gone quiet, the way a street goes quiet only when the thing was done by people the street is more afraid of than it is of her.
She came in once, near dawn, to check on me, and I saw it on her.
It was all over her face. The whole brass armor gone, the red lipstick chewed off, and underneath it the same naked thing I’d seen flash in the doorway on Damen—fear, and now under the fear something heavier, the look of a woman replaying a moment she’d let slide, a promise she hadn’t pushed for, a door she hadn’t bolted because she thought there was time.
“We’ll find her,” she said, to me, and it came out without one ounce of conviction, and we both heard it, and she left before either of us had to do anything about that.
Somewhere out in the dark she was somewhere I couldn’t reach. I didn’t know which dark. I didn’t know which direction. I didn’t even know, for certain, that she was breathing.
The phone went at twenty past six in the morning.
It was Sal’s, face-up on the little table by the bed, and it lit and buzzed against the wood.
The sound of it went through the room like a shot.
An unknown number. Everything stopped. Angela appeared in the door with the laptop forgotten in her hand.
Donatella came in behind her. Pietro turned from the window.
And Sal looked at the screen, and then at me, and then he picked it up and answered it and put it on speaker and laid it back down on the table where we could all hear, and nobody breathed.
“Scordato.” A voice. Not Gianni—I’d have known Gianni, the loud-when-cornered, the borrowed business words.
This one was flat and cool and professional, a man reading from a card, a man who has done this before and finds it dull.
“Good. You’re awake. I’ll keep this brief.
I’m going to let you hear something, and then I’m going to tell you how it goes, and you’re not going to talk over me, because every word you waste is a word she doesn’t get back. Understand?”
Sal said nothing.
“Good,” the voice said. And then, away from the phone, muffled, to someone in the room with him: “Tell them your name.”
And then her voice.
I have heard Katerina’s voice every way there is.
Barking orders across the flour. Going soft and small and young over my lap.
Saying s’agapó, agápi mou into my neck. I knew every register she had.
And this one I’d never heard, and I never want to hear again as long as I live—thin, scraped, pulled tight over a terror she was fighting with everything she had, the boss in her trying to hold and the Little in her right under it shaking, and she said:
“Tonio. I’m—” A breath. The breath cost her. “I’m fine.”
I’m fine.
My chest caved in. The whole of me folding around the sound of her saying I’m fine when she so plainly wasn’t, and then—right behind it, in the same breath—the other thing came up, and it came up white.
The fury came up so total and so cold that the room went very far away.
“There she is,” the voice said, pleased, and the phone moved, her gone again, and I’d have given my working arm to hear one more word out of her. “Alive and well. As you can hear. She’ll stay that way exactly as long as you’re sensible. Now. The terms.”
“Say them,” Sal said. The only two words he’d given the man.
“One. The bakery.” The voice ticked it off, bored, a man doing inventory.
“Signed over, clean, the whole title. The block gets made whole. It’ll be good for the community.
That’s the small one.” A pause, and I heard the pleasure in it, the man savoring the size of the next part.
“Two. And this is the one your families are going to need to sit down for.”
The room waited.
“Don Arturo steps down.”
Nobody moved. I heard Donatella’s breath go in.
“In front of everyone,” the voice went on, unhurried now, enjoying it.
“A full abdication. He names Gianni Scordato as head of the family, publicly, with the other houses to witness, and he hands it over. The whole thing. Sicily, the eastern office, the American footprint, all of it, to his son, where it belongs, where it always should have belonged. Don Arturo gives Gianni the family.” A beat.
“And the woman is what he pays to get the girl back. That’s the price of her.
An old man’s throne for a baker. I’d say it’s a generous rate, but Gianni is sentimental about family. ”
The phone went quiet.
The room went quiet with it, that flat dead quiet I’d been drowning in all night, except now it had a shape. Now I understood the shape.