Chapter 13
Marco
My god.
The espresso machine was still fucking broken. I got word from Santo five minutes before I was due to arrive at Caruso’s. The implication was clear: it was still my job to get the coffees in.
Reluctantly, I did so. I came through the back door with a cardboard tray of four from the bodega, plastic lids still warm, the sugar packets rattling loose in the corner where I‘d shoved them.
Rosa was on her line. She gave me a quick smile and took an espresso.
Well, that was mine gone.
“Enjoy, Rosa,” I said.
“Grazie, tesoro,” she replied with a smile.
The door to the private dining room was propped open an inch. I pushed through.
Three heads turned.
Dante at the head, newspaper folded in quarters, reading glasses halfway down his nose.
My brother had been wearing reading glasses for eight months and still treated them like a concession he hadn’t fully approved.
Santo across from him, arms crossed so tight the fabric of his Henley was pulling at the shoulders, the specific crossed-arm configuration that meant you‘re late and you haven’t answered your phone in four days and I have been running the math on what that means.
And at the foot of the table, my sister, in a cream silk blouse that cost more than most people’s rent, with a half-empty glass of Sangiovese she had absolutely not ordered off the lunch menu, red lipstick on the rim in a perfect crescent, our mother’s antique ring turning slow on her middle finger.
The ring turning meant Donatella was already annoyed. The glass meant she had decided to be annoyed in style.
“Afternoon,” I said.
I set the tray on the table. Slid an espresso down to Dante.
Slid one to Santo, who did not uncross his arms to receive it.
Set Donatella’s in front of her beside the wine.
Elected not to think about how much I wanted a coffee.
I pulled out the chair between Dante’s gravity and Santo’s heat—my chair, the mediator’s chair.
“Ciao, stronzo,” Donatella said. “Four days.”
Ohh she had an attitude today. With good reason, I supposed.
“I need to tell you all something,” I said in English. “Several somethings. In order.”
Santo’s arms uncrossed.
Dante closed the newspaper. Laid it flat on the table, creased edge squared to the edge of the wood. Took his reading glasses off. Folded them. Set them on the paper.
Donatella took a deliberate sip of her Sangiovese. Set the glass down a quarter-inch from where it had been.
The room settled the way a room settles when four people who have been in a hundred rooms together agree, without speaking, to pay attention.
I had seen it happen at funerals and at the signing of contracts.
I had never been the one who caused it. Usually I was the one who smoothed the settling out, who broke it open with a joke, who gave everyone permission to exhale. I did not do that now. I let it hold.
“Business first,” I said.
“Always,” Dante said.
“Serafina Scordato is recommending her father ally with us.”
Santo’s eyebrows moved a degree. Dante’s didn’t.
“The preliminary report went to Palermo last night,” I said.
“Her name on it. Her voice, her analysis, her conclusions. Don Arturo will have read it with his morning coffee. Gianni will be drafting his counter-cover by now, probably, for whatever good that’s going to do him.
We should have an answer from the Don by Friday.
My read—and Sera’s—is that the answer is yes. ”
“Sera?” Santo said. Flat.
I ignored it.
“The terms she’s recommending are clean,” I said.
“Territorial non-interference on the Atlantic. Shared intelligence on the European side of the shipping. Access to her family’s Palermo distribution for our legitimate wine imports, which—between us—is the thing I’m going to make pay for itself inside a year.
She’s framed it as a strategic counterweight to Valenti without naming Valenti in the document.
She’s a cleaner writer than I am. She’s a cleaner thinker than I am. The report is good.”
Dante picked up his espresso. Drank half of it in one pull. Set it down.
“Don Arturo is going to go for it?” he said.
“He’s going to go for it. She’s been writing his strategic recommendations for eight years under her brother’s name.
He trusts what’s in that document even if he can’t admit yet that he knows who wrote it.
The Scordato operation is essentially run by her.
The alliance will be run by her too, on their end.
Which means whatever we build with them, we build with someone who will actually answer her phone at three in the morning and know what the question is before we finish asking it. ”
“That’s a strong read,” Dante said.
“It’s the right read.”
Santo, finally, reached for his espresso. He pried the lid off with his thumbnail and drank it in two swallows and set the cup down on the coaster. “That‘s a hell of a piece of work, Marc.”
Donatella lifted her Sangiovese in my direction. “Marco. That’s fucking huge.”
“It is,” Dante said. “If it holds.”
“It will hold.”
They let the good news breathe. Dante refolded the newspaper a quarter-turn for no reason other than the comfort of the motion.
Santo asked a question about the wine imports—specifics, percentages, the Palermo warehouse Sera had named in her third paragraph—and I answered it in the voice I used when I was running a briefing, the briefing voice, the voice that lived six inches above my actual chest. Donatella asked whether we’d vetted Serafina’s analyst fluency against the Cicero disclosures and I said yes and she said good and took another sip.
I watched them have their minute of relief. I knew what was coming next and I was letting them have this first because they were my family and they deserved a clean win before I loaded the second barrel.
Eventually, Donatella tilted her head.
It was a small motion. A degree of chin, maybe two. Her eyes narrowed. Our mother’s ring started turning on her finger again.
“Marco,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“What else.”
I did not answer immediately. That was the tell.
I should have answered immediately. I should have laughed and said nothing, pass the sugar, deflected the way I had been deflecting her since we were eleven and nine.
I did not. I picked up my espresso cup and drained the last bad half-inch and set it down on the saucer and lined the saucer up with the edge of the placemat.
Santo, who had been watching Donatella watch me, said flatly, “Oh, fuck. Marco.”
Dante said nothing.
The nothing was worse. Dante’s silences had weight.
They compressed the air in a room. I had seen grown men break in the face of one of them, capos twice my age rush to fill a silence my brother had laid down and end up saying things they had come into the room intending to carry out.
Dante was using the silence on me. I understood that I had earned it.
I put both my hands on the table. Flat. Palms down. The way I put my hands on the desk in my office when I did not trust myself to do anything else with them.
“I’ve been seeing her,” I said.
Donatella’s eyebrows went up one considered inch.
“Not a work thing. Or — not only a work thing. I’m going to get to that part. I’m telling you in order.”
Santo’s jaw started to do the thing. The slow grind at the hinge, the muscle there flexing and releasing, a mannerism he had inherited from our father and had never learned to suppress.
“How long,” Dante said.
“Eleven days.”
“Since when.”
“Since the night the suite flooded.”
Santo did the math in his head. I watched him do it. His eyes went slightly to the side, the way a man’s eyes do when he’s running a count, and then they came back to me and the expression on his face was the one I had been preparing myself for since I’d gotten out of the car in the alley.
“The suite flooded eleven days ago,” Santo said.
“Yes.”
“She’s been staying at the apartment.”
“Yes.”
“Your apartment.”
“My apartment, Santo. Not the guest suite two floors down that I could have put her in and did not. Mine.”
Donatella set the Sangiovese down.
“Eleven days,” she said. Musing. Not accusatory. Just laying out the facts the way she laid out accounts.
“Eleven.”
“Which means,” Santo said, “you’ve been fucking the Scordato envoy for eleven days and running a preliminary recommendation report through her father’s office simultaneously, and not one of the three people at this table knew a single thing about any of it until you walked in five minutes ago.”
The sentence was clean. I gave him that. Santo could be clean when he wanted to, and when he was being clean it was because he had decided the situation did not deserve the energy of his usual register.
“I haven’t been fucking her,” I said.
Santo’s eyes did not move.
“Not for eleven days.”
“Marco.”
“Not until last night.”
Santo went very still. Dante’s hands folded themselves on top of the newspaper — slow, deliberate, the motion of a man who was choosing to keep his hands visible so that everyone in the room could see he had made that choice.
Donatella let out a breath through her nose that was not a laugh but was in the same family as one.
“Last night,” Santo said.
“Last night.”
“After she sent her father a report recommending he ally with us.”
“Yes.”
“Just wanting to make sure we have the timeline right.”
“The timeline is right.”
Santo stood up.
He did it without scraping the chair back. He walked to the sideboard at the back of the room where Sal kept a pitcher of water and four cut-glass tumblers, and he poured himself a glass of water he was not going to drink.
His hands needing something to do that wasn’t hitting.
He turned. Glass in his hand. Water he had no intention of bringing to his mouth.