Chapter 29
DAMIANO
The Clemenza picks up his bowl again and takes another mouthful, as though rewarding me for giving way. I hope he realizes I could force all that food into him if I wanted to.
The problem is, I know how stubborn this little snake can be. And I don’t have time to waste. Seb wants a result, and it’ll be hard to keep my investigations quiet once I start poking around.
“So?” I ask. “What were you doing there?”
He pokes around in the bowl while he chews. “Maybe I was visiting my home out of some sense of nostalgia.” He gives a bitter smile and looks up before I can snarl again. “Louie texted me to meet him there. Said he’d figured out who was picking us off, but he wanted to talk in person.”
“Why didn’t you join up with your cousin before then? Safety in numbers and all that shit.”
“Louie had no interest in teaming up. He ignored my calls and texts. But then, he always saw me as a weak link.”
His mistake. Caligula Clemenza is just as wily as his grandfather was. “Did you kill your cousin?” I ask, because I’m still not a hundred percent sure he didn’t.
“I keep telling you,” he says wearily. “He was dead when I got there. I would have checked his phone to confirm that he was really the one who texted me, except right after I saw his body, that guy jumped out and tried to kill me, too. I ran.” He gives me a defiant glare.
“And then I ran into you. Now it’s your turn to spill, Dami.
Why are you asking me these questions in the first place? ”
“I got orders to look into these Clemenza killings.”
He stares at me. “Orders from whom?”
“You don’t need to know that.”
“Not your Boss,” he says speculatively. “Big Gee never struck me as someone with much political savvy. Besides, he was happy when the Clemenzas went down. Luca D’Amato let him take over part of our territory.”
“Doesn’t matter who gave the order. You just tell me what I want to know.”
But Caligula is still thinking, and there’s a spark in his eyes when he inevitably figures it out. “His half-brother, the Underboss. Sebastiano Conti. He had a reputation as a reasonable man, last time I heard.”
“Fine. It was him. Now, whose idea was it for you to go talk to Jesse Foster?”
He snorts. “My own. Not my finest moment, but I was out of choices. I even went to our Family lawyer right before then, hoping he could get me out of the country. But Tony Stuccio had no interest in helping, to put it mildly.” He tilts his head to one side.
“How long have you been following me, Dami?”
That’s a question I don’t want to answer. But the longer I pause, the more he’ll read into it. “Since your father’s funeral.”
It hits. It hurts. I see the wince, though he tries to hide it.
“Who wants the Clemenzas dead?” I ask him, moving on.
He shrugs. “Throw a dart and you’ll hit someone. There were personal as well as professional grudges. Just look at the feeding frenzy that happened after Nonno Lou was whacked. At one point, I assumed the Morellis were involved.”
“Well, it ain’t them. Not to hear Seb tell it.”
There must be a note in my voice, because he immediately asks, “You disagree with him?”
Do I? I’m not sure. “Luca D’Amato’s priority is stability,” I say slowly.
“Has been since he took over. He made a lot of money after your grandpa went down, and the rest of us got ours, too. Everyone was happy.” Caligula is looking pretty pale.
I guess it’s not much fun hearing how much his kin were hated.
“But a while ago, D’Amato put out an order that the rest of you weren’t to be touched. ”
I meant it as a small comfort. It lands as anything but. The Clemenza gets that red blotchy stain spreading up his neck and his cheeks as he spits, “He murdered my grandfather. Now he’s trying to take credit for protecting us?”
I’m not used to seeing him so angry. Most of the time he’s cold as ice. I watch his color ebb and flow with interest before I say, “You’re missing the point, golden boy.”
“What point?”
“Whoever’s doing this is going against the king of the jungle.
They either don’t know or don’t care that D’Amato put a protection order out.
Ain’t no way they don’t know about it, if they’ve got beef with the Clemenzas.
And if they don’t care about D’Amato, well, that means they’re either powerful enough or hidden enough to get away with it. ”
It might be the longest thing I’ve ever said to him.
But Caligula takes it all in and then takes a deep breath.
“Yes,” he says on the breathe-out. “You’re right.
” He’s kickstarted his brain, that thinking machine that’s always running in the background except when he gets mad, or… when he has an orgasm.
He asked why I jacked him off in the bathroom. It was mostly to dumb him down a little. I was hoping to get the intel I needed without sharing any of my own.
I’m almost impressed how fast he regained his focus.
“The man at the opera who attacked—” he begins, but I shake my head to save him the breath.
“No one knew him. So either he’s a ghost—an operative, maybe imported from overseas to do the job—or more likely he was some street guy looking to make a few bucks. Because you’d have to be out of your mind or out of the loop to try something like that in a roomful of the big cats.”
Caligula is staring at me.
“What?” I ask, feeling defensive for some reason.
“You’re reasonably intelligent when you try to be,” he sniffs. “The Bratva,” he goes on. “Would they go against D’Amato?”
I think it over. “Maybe. If they thought they could keep it quiet.”
“I told King I wanted to be anonymous,” he says thoughtfully. “But he didn’t honor that. Did they announce I was going to be…you know?”
“Selling your ass? Not that I heard. Those auctions happen on the regular.”
“Then how did you know I was going to be at the Obelisk? Did you follow me there, too? You turned up right on cue.”
I weigh up whether to tell him, since it’ll change his mind pretty fast about me being reasonably intelligent, as he put it.
But I don’t give a fuck what the Clemenza thinks about me, and I have a suspicion we both fell for the same play.
“I got a text. Told me to show up fast, said it would be advantageous in relation to my, uh. Well, it mentioned the Clemenzas.”
The light in his eyes sharpens. “That was the word they used? ‘Advantageous’?” I nod. “Louie’s text to me used that word, too. I was impressed at the time that he even knew what it meant. But afterward, I realized it must have been whoever was trying to lure me there.”
“To kill you, too?” I guess.
“Seems like.” He pauses. “Or maybe to frame me. You thought I could be the one behind it all.”
Not really. He has the smarts to do it, maybe even the stomach. But getting the jump on all his cousins and uncles, that would’ve been a big ask. Besides, what did he gain from all those deaths? Nothing. He still had to sell himself at the Obelisk.
And then there was the way he was running that night, running for his life from someone looking to do him harm.
No. Caligula Clemenza isn’t behind all this. It’s someone else.
He’s already moved on. “But why did they contact you?” he murmurs aloud, though he’s really talking to himself.
“I knew it was a trap,” I say. “That text to show up at the Obelisk. But I was willing to take a risk if it meant…” I shrug.
But he’s not going to let me shrug it off. “Exactly what did my father do to yours, Dami? Tell me. If I’m going to suffer for it, I’d like to know it was at least earned.”
Part of me wants to hold it back. Why give the Clemenza what amounts to ammunition? And I don’t like to think about that day more than I have to.
But what he’s asked for is fair. If he’s going to suffer—which I’ll make sure he does, once he’s healthy again, and I’ve taken out whoever’s trying to steal my vendetta from me—then the Clemenza should understand why.
“I was thirteen. At home. Heard a crash. Ran into the kitchen, and your dad was standing there over mine. He’d cut my father’s throat…” I have to pause, squeeze my hands into fists so I don’t grab the son of that man and shake him until his teeth rattle.
Caligula looks way too much like his dad. He’s regarding me with those amber eyes, somber and quiet. “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he says at last.
“But not sorry for what he did?” I snarl.
“If my father really did kill yours—”
“What the hell do you mean, if he really did?”
“—then he must have had a reason for it.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what reason he had. He was invited in, came in all smiling and happy—”
“What do you mean?”
I spread my hands. “Your dad and mine. They were friends. Good friends. Right up until…”
His brows, a darker color than his hair, are pulling together. “They were friends? Then how come I never heard the Orsinis mentioned?”
“Because your father was a conniving snake who planned to turn on my dad as soon as he got the order, that’s why!” The need for vengeance is bubbling just below the surface, that always-present anger at the injustice of the whole world.
“Okay,” Caligula sighs in a way that just pisses me off more.
But I can’t get hold of him and shake the hell out of him like I want to, because he’s fucking sick. So I stand instead and start pacing.
“What happened to your mother?” he asks after I’ve marched back and forth a few times.
“She’s dead. Years before my father. Yours?”
“She went back to Italy after I was born. Honestly, most of my life I assumed it was some kind of bloodline arrangement, you know? I can’t remember the last time I spoke to her.”
I don’t really care about his mother. So I ask the question that’s been on my mind. “How come you’re still a virgin?”
He’s lost the red blotchiness of anger that he had before, but my question makes him pink up a little. “I’m not sure how to answer that.”