Chapter 2 #3
I set my suitcase on the bed—a single hard-shell carry-on, black, scuffed at the corners from the one trip I’d taken to Rome three years ago for a meeting Gianni was supposed to attend and didn’t.
I packed the way I did everything: efficiently.
Dark colours. Clean lines. Three blouses, two trousers, one dress for the possibility of a formal meeting.
Underwear that was practical. Shoes that could walk.
A blazer structured enough to signal authority and plain enough to suggest I didn’t need to signal anything, that authority came standard.
No jewellery except the thin gold chain my grandmother had given me, which I wore every day and which no one had ever noticed, which suited both me and the necklace perfectly.
I opened my laptop on the desk and started searching.
Dante Caruso came first. The eldest. The don.
The internet gave me what the internet gives anyone about a man who controls a significant criminal enterprise in a major American city: a curated surface.
Charity galas. A photograph with the mayor at a children’s hospital fundraiser, both men smiling in the way that powerful men smile when cameras are present—with the teeth but not the eyes.
His wife beside him in several photos — small, dark-haired, pretty in a quiet way that suggested she didn’t enjoy being photographed.
The press called him a “prominent Italian-American businessman” and “philanthropist,” which was the polite American English for we know what you are and we’ve decided not to say it out loud because your lawyers are expensive.
He was tall. Composed. His suits fit like they’d been born on his body.
In every photograph his face was the same—controlled, unreadable, a man who had decided what the public would see and enforced that decision with the same precision he presumably brought to everything else.
I recognized it. The performance of authority.
I’d been watching it from behind a desk my entire life.
I made a note: dangerous, competent, primary decision-maker. Approach with the assumption that he has already anticipated whatever you plan to say.
Santo Caruso. The middle brother. The enforcer—had to be.
Fewer photos. The ones that existed showed a man built like an armored vehicle—broad, scarred, inked from wrist to somewhere beneath his collar.
His face in every image held the particular expression of a person who had been asked to attend an event where no one needed hitting and was profoundly unclear on what else he was supposed to do with his hands.
Recently shot during what the Chicago Tribune diplomatically termed a “domestic disturbance” and the Sun-Times more helpfully described as a “targeted rescue operation at a Near West Side residence.” There was a woman involved—a detail I filed but didn’t pursue yet.
Almost no photos of him smiling. One, at what appeared to be a family dinner, where the smile was reluctant, half-formed, clearly prompted by someone off-camera. It made his whole face different. Younger. Nearly soft.
I made a note: volatile, loyal, physically dangerous. Not the one making decisions, but the one ensuring decisions stick.
Then Marco Caruso.
I scrolled through his results expecting substance. What I found was surface.
And so much of it.
His social media was a masterpiece of managed visibility: cocktail close-ups at a nightclub called Nero, each one composed with the careful artlessness of someone who understood that good lighting sold a lifestyle better than any caption.
Charity events where he stood mid-laugh beside a rotating cast of women who all shared the same architectural cheekbones and vaguely hungry expressions.
A society-page profile in Chicago magazine that called him “Chicago’s most eligible Italian”—which was the kind of title that told you nothing about a person except that they wanted you to think it was all there was to know.
I scrolled. And scrolled.
No arrests. No known associates beyond the social circuit.
No operational footprint of any kind. No mention in any court filing, FBI report, or investigative piece that I could find—and I looked, because absence of evidence in my world is not evidence of absence; it’s usually evidence of a very good lawyer or a very careful man.
But Marco Caruso didn’t read as careful. He read as irrelevant.
Even so, Marco was the one who’d contacted us. Who’d arranged the meeting. Maybe he was the smoothest talker? The most presentable.
I stopped on a photograph. He was behind a bar—Nero, presumably—sleeves of a dark shirt rolled to the elbow, forearms bare, leaning against the counter with the loose posture of a man who had nowhere else to be and wanted you to know it.
He was grinning at someone off-camera with a smile that was warm and open and, I noted with the clinical detachment of a woman who had been performing for her entire life, practiced.
Nobody’s smile was that good by accident.
The lighting caught the angle of his jaw, the line of his collar, the easy way his hands rested on the bar top—composed, casual, a photograph that said I’m not trying so loudly that you could hear the effort underneath.
Or you couldn’t. Most people couldn’t. Most people would see a handsome nightclub owner with a famous last name and an expensive watch and a different woman on his arm every week, and they would file him under lightweight and move on.
I filed him under lightweight and moved on.
The least important brother. The family ornament, the one they put in front of cameras so no one looked too closely at what happened behind them.
Every family had one—the charming face, the social shield, the member whose function was to be visible so that the real operators could be invisible.
I understood the strategy. I respected it, even.
It was the same principle that made Gianni useful—a front man didn’t need to be competent, just presentable.
Marco Caruso was very presentable. Annoyingly so.
With a sigh, I closed the laptop. The screen went dark, and my own face appeared in it for a moment—distorted, unflattering, the face of a woman who had been awake since three in the morning.
I finished packing. Zipped the suitcase. Checked the document file on my laptop—my own copy of the Valenti analysis, the one with my name on it, kept in a folder labelled “Reference” that no one would ever open.
Five minutes. That’s how long I’d spent on Marco Caruso.
Five minutes of scrolling, a few photos, a society-page headline, and the confident conclusion that he was decoration. Pretty. Functional. Ignorable.
This would turn out to be the most significant miscalculation of my life.
The drive to Falcone-Borsellino took forty minutes, and I spent every one of them memorizing a landscape I wasn’t sure I’d recognize when I came back.
The family’s black Alfa Romeo wound through the hills above Monreale. I sat in the back with my suitcase beside me and my window down—all the way down. The air tasted like freedom.
Sicily unspooled outside like a sentence I’d been reading my whole life and was only now realizing the meaning of.
Crumbling stone walls that divided nothing from nothing, built by someone’s great-great-grandfather for reasons that had been forgotten before the cement dried.
Olive groves burnt silver by the July sun, the trees twisted into shapes that looked like suffering but were actually just age—decades of growing toward light through difficult soil.
A roadside shrine to the Madonna, tucked into a niche in the rock face: blue paint peeling from her robe, a ceramic vase at her feet holding flowers that were fresh.
White lilies. Someone replaced them every week.
Nobody knew who. I’d been noticing those flowers since I was a child, riding this same road to school and back, and I’d never once seen the person who brought them.
There was something about that—the anonymous devotion, the faithfulness to a task no one witnessed or rewarded that I understood better than I wanted to.
The hills softened as we descended. The rosemary and dry earth gave way to the denser smell of the coast—salt, diesel, chamomile, the layered perfume of a city that had been alive for three thousand years and still hadn’t decided what it wanted to be when it grew up.
We rounded the final curve and Palermo appeared below.
The harbor first—boats rocking in the heat haze, the water that particular shade of Mediterranean blue that photographs never capture because it isn’t a color so much as a feeling.
The cathedral dome, pale and enormous, anchoring the skyline the way it had anchored it since the twelfth century, serene and unbothered by the chaos at its feet.
And the old city itself—sprawling, crumbling, gorgeous, the buildings pressed together like commuters on a train, balconies draped in laundry and bougainvillea, the narrow streets below alive with people and noise and the absolute certainty that whatever was happening right now was more important than whatever had been planned.
I loved this city the way I loved my father—fiercely, with clear eyes, with the full understanding that it would never love me back in the way I needed.
My phone rang.
The screen said Gianni. My brother had a preternatural instinct for calling at the exact moment when I was most vulnerable to his particular brand of damage. I suspected he didn’t do it consciously. That would have required a level of intelligence he did not possess.
I answered.
“Little sister.” His voice was warm. Cynical, too. “I hear Papa is sending you to Chicago.”
“That’s right.”
“Big responsibility. These are serious people, Sera. The Carusos aren’t—they’re not like dealing with the Catanese or the Trapani families. They’re American. Different rules.”
He paused. The pause was designed to give weight to what came next. I could feel it coming the way you feel weather—a pressure change, a darkening.
“Try not to embarrass us over there.”
There it was.
Not good luck. Not you’ll do well. Not I know you wrote that entire analysis and I know Papa sent you instead of me and I know what that means and I’m man enough to acknowledge it.
“I’ll do my best, Gianni,” I said.
Flat. Neutral. The voice I used for him, which was not the voice I used for anyone else. It was a voice scrubbed of color and warmth and the dry humor that surfaced when my guard dropped.
I hung up.
The airport appeared ahead—Falcone-Borsellino, named after two judges who were murdered for trying to dismantle the very ecosystem that paid for my education and my suitcase and the Alfa Romeo I was sitting in.
Sicily didn’t do irony on purpose. It just generated it naturally, the way the hills generated rosemary—abundantly, without effort, and with no regard for whether anyone appreciated it.
I looked out the window as the car slowed for the terminal entrance, and I thought about my name.
Scordato.
In Italian, scordato means forgotten. It was a foundling name—given centuries ago by church clerks and municipal bureaucrats to the children no one claimed.
The babies left on steps, at hospital doors, in the revolving wooden cradles built into convent walls.
No family, no lineage, no one who wanted them enough to write a name on a piece of paper and say this one is ours.
So the state named them instead. Scordato. Forgotten. A label for the discarded.
My family had turned it into something else.
Three generations of men who took a name meant to erase them and made it synonymous with power—with territory, with three hundred soldiers, with a narcotics network that stretched from the coast of Tunisia to the streets of Milan.
The Scordatos were not forgotten. The Scordatos were the ones you prayed wouldn’t remember you.
But the word itself never changed. Underneath the empire, underneath the compound in the hills and the stone walls and the mahogany desk where my father conducted his business, the name still meant what it had always meant.
Forgotten.
I had been essential and invisible my entire life.
I had been the mind behind the name on the page, the voice behind the man at the desk, the daughter who produced and the brother who presented.
I had been Gianni’s ghost, my father’s secret weapon, the most capable person in every room I entered and the last one anyone thought to acknowledge.
The car stopped. The driver came around to open my door, but I was already out—one hand on the suitcase, both feet on the concrete, the Sicilian sun hot on my face and the terminal rising in front of me, all glass and steel and planes pointed toward places that weren’t here.
I didn‘t look back.
Not at the hills. Not at the harbor. Not at the city I loved with its peeling Madonnas and its anonymous devotions and its three thousand years of beautiful, frustrating refusal to change.
I walked into the terminal with my suitcase and my name and the forty pages of strategic analysis that lived in my head whether my brother claimed them or not. I walked like a woman who had been given permission to exist in public for the first time and intended to make it count.
Scordato. Forgotten.
Not this time.