Chapter 23
DAMIANO
I let Caligula sleep right through to noon the next day, and when I hear Rosa in the hallway again, I take the lunch tray from her.
She still hasn’t forgiven me, giving me another cold look.
I wait until she’s back on the stairs before I head to my bedroom, pause, and knock awkwardly on the door, balancing the tray on one arm.
I’m knocking on my own fucking bedroom door.
No answer. I walk in.
Caligula is sitting up in bed, looking pale. His eyes travel over to me before his face turns, and it’s unnerving.
He doesn’t speak.
I put the tray across his lap and look down at him. He’s wearing one of the t-shirts I bought for him—one of the ones he left here when he left me.
“Eat,” I say, gesturing at the tray.
After a moment, he picks up the spoon and starts pushing stew around the bowl. Good enough. “We need to figure out what happens next.”
“What happens next is that you kill me.” His voice is calm. I almost wish he’d keep up the silent treatment.
“I haven’t decided what I’m doing with you,” I tell him. “But someone’s been trying to take you out since before I bought you, and he ain’t gonna stop. As long as he’s still out there, and you’re still in here, my people are at risk.”
There’s a pause before he asks, “Are you going to let me go? Turn me over to the Morellis?”
“Is that what you’re hoping?” I scoff. So that’s his play—turn himself over to the Morellis. But that doesn’t make sense, because— “You could have told Fontana everything,” I say suspiciously. “Why didn’t you?”
He looks at me for a long time. Then he says, “The Morellis will kill you if they think you disobeyed a protection order from the Capo dei Capi. Rosa and Vito and Sammy don’t deserve to lose their home over what happens between you and me.”
“Oh, so now you give a fuck about them?” I growl.
He doesn’t fire back. The old Caligula would’ve had a response loaded and aimed before I finished the sentence. This one just takes the hit, and then asks, “Why am I still alive?”
I don’t answer.
“You know I lied,” he says in a mechanical tone, poking and poking at the stew and not eating it. “You know I used Rosa and Sammy and Vito as a bluff. You had every reason to kill me down there. Why didn’t you?”
My brain can’t find the words I need. “It’s like you said, you’re still under a protection order from the Morellis,” I say at last. “Luca D’Amato’s got some soft spot for the great Clemenza legacy.
Don’t ask me why. But one day he’s gonna figure out you’re not some sad-eyed wannabe, you’re a threat, and he’ll pull that protection. ”
“And then?” He’s watching me closely. “You’ll do it then?”
Why can’t he just shut up? Why does he always have to push and push and push until—
My phone buzzes, and I’ve never been so grateful for a call in my life. It’s my real estate guy, who’s been dragging his feet on the Clemenza townhouse settlement, and normally I’d be pissed, but right now I’d take a call from the fucking IRS if it meant not answering the Clemenza’s question.
But the news is strange.
“Got a situation at your new property,” the guy says. “Looks like someone’s been in there. Front door was forced.”
I can’t imagine anyone who knows who previously owned that property, or who owns it now, would have the balls to break in. So that means whoever did it is probably unaware of the connections.
Still, it pisses me off. “You told me you had security on the place,” I snap.
“I said I’d get it set up after settlement. Settlement hasn’t passed yet, which means—”
Now he’s pissing me off. “Goddamn it, hire someone today. And in the meantime, I’ll go round and have a look myself.” I hang up on him before I start threatening him.
Caligula is staring straight ahead, expressionless.
“Someone broke into my new townhouse,” I tell him.
I wait. He knows which townhouse I’m talking about. The one on Park Avenue where he grew up, the one I bought for twenty million dollars while his mouth was on me. The one he was supposed to earn back.
The one that always raises his hackles when I call it my townhouse.
He picks up the spoon again and stirs the stew.
Something crawls up the back of my neck. I don’t like it. “Get dressed,” I tell him. “You’re coming with me.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t ask why. Just puts down the spoon and gets out of bed, reaches for his clothes.
He’s playing me. This whole broken-doll routine is a performance, the same way covering for me with Fontana was a performance. He’s resetting the board, making me feel like a monster so I’ll give him an inch, and then he’ll take the whole goddamn mile.
That’s what’s happening here.
“Move,” I say, when he’s dressed.
He moves.
The Clemenza townhouse sits on a stretch of Park Avenue where the real old money lives.
It’s got a limestone facade, tall windows, black iron railings with that Art Deco scrollwork.
But the front door has been splintered open.
I push it wide with the flat of my hand, gun raised, and pull Caligula in with me.
If someone’s watching the street, I don’t want him standing on the front step like a target.
The foyer is dark and big and empty. Marble floor, high ceiling, a staircase curving up on the right. There’s a large dark stain on the marble in the middle of the foyer near a large wooden display table.
“That where you found your cousin?” I ask him.
He looks at it. “Yes,” he says.
That’s all. Just “yes.” No color draining from his face, no sharp inhale, not even a flinch.
“Why don’t you show me around my new property?” I ask. “Since you know it so well.”
I want him to react. Want him to snap at me, tell me this is his house, tell me to go fuck myself for making him play tour guide in his dead grandfather’s home. I want the viper back so I can be angry at the right person, instead of this hollow thing wearing his face.
“The living area is through here,” he says, and walks ahead of me into the dark.
I grab him back and go first. He falls in behind me.
This place is big, and set out weird. The magazine article I read about it said it was two townhouses renovated into one.
That meant some occasional compromises about layout.
But the Clemenza moves through doorways and around corners without hesitation, naming each room as we pass.
“Dining room. Morning room. Library.” His voice is the same for each one. He could be reading a bus schedule.
It’s just empty room after empty room, and no signs of an intruder, which makes me even more wary.
“Upstairs,” I say, when we’ve come back around to the foyer. “Behind me,” I snap, when he takes the stairs without waiting.
Second floor. He leads me to a closed door at the front of the house. For the first time, he hesitates before naming it. Then: “My grandfather’s study.”
I push open the door.
The whole room’s been torn apart. The wood paneling has been stripped from the walls in long, methodical sheets. Floorboards pried up and stacked. And the wall safe, a heavy steel box that must weigh eighty pounds, has been wrenched from its setting, the door swinging open.
Caligula stands in the doorway while I check the safe. Empty.
“The Feds drilled that open,” I tell him. “There was nothing inside.”
“Did the Feds also rip it out of the wall?”
It’s the first time he’s shown even a remote interest, so I open the photos my real estate guy sent after the sale. The safe’s in its housing in every shot, though the door is drilled open, just as it is now. And the floor is intact, along with the walls. “No.”
“So the intruder did this. They thought my grandfather still had secrets.” He looks up at the ragged hole where the safe used to sit. “They pulled it out completely in case there was another compartment behind it. Something hidden.”
I’m conscious that we’ve both started talking at a normal level, and I make a shushing motion with my hand. “Keep it down, and keep behind me. We need to keep looking.”
But the townhouse is empty, although every room on this floor tells the same story: floorboards pulled up, walls caved in, built-ins ravaged. Whoever did this was thorough. Looking for something specific.
I watch Caligula’s face as we move through the gutted rooms. His bedroom. The room that must have been his father’s. A bathroom with the tile smashed out. He walks through all of it with that same flat expression.
By the time we go back down to the first floor, I’m convinced.
He’s faking it. He has to be faking it.
He’s just real fucking good at it. Had a lot of practice, hasn’t he?
I holster my gun before we head toward the door. I’m pulling out my phone to call the realtor about security when Caligula steps out onto the stoop ahead of me. That half-second of distraction with my phone is what costs me. If I’d been paying attention, I wouldn’t have let him go out first.
He freezes on the top step, and it’s only because I’m a head taller than him that I see why.
A man is moving up the steps from the street below. Gun up. Arm straight. Muzzle aimed directly at Caligula Clemenza’s head.
Caligula doesn’t move. Doesn’t duck, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t dive back through the door.
He just stands there, looking down the barrel.