Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Alejandro
“What the hell was that, Alejandro? You’ve never been into strippers, and you’ve certainly never hired a hooker before.”
“You might not have paid attention, but she’s gorgeous.”
“I may not have eyes for anyone but Liliana, but I’m not blind. Of course, I could see she was attractive.”
“We were on that boat for three hours of pure temptation, so I indulged a little. Yeah, I toyed with her at the end. But I’m telling you, there’s still something off, Julián. I don’t know what it is about her. You saw her reaction when that carechimba insulted her.” Face of a vagina.
“I noticed she barely reacted the first time. She definitely had plenty to say when he tried to stiff her.”
“Did you see her reaction when I told her I don’t pay for my pleasure?”
“Yeah. You’d expect her to look insulted, not hurt.”
“Exactly. I don’t know if she’s Chicago PD or a fed, but it’s like she was trying to get me to proposition her.”
“But you weren’t the one who announced he’d pay for sex.”
“It’s not like she was wearing a wire anywhere.”
At least I don’t think she was, since she was naked. Short of having it up her cunt or ass, there was nowhere else for her to put it.
“Alejandro, if she’d been there to bust us for prostitution, it should’ve been when that pedazo de mierda ran his mouth. But she didn’t.” Piece of shit.
“I know, and I’m positive the women with her had no idea she had some ulterior motive. So maybe she isn’t law enforcement, but she’s something besides an exotic dancer.”
“Do you think she’ll give up?”
I look over at Julián, who’s staring at me as we ride in the back of the town car together. As is a requirement in my family, the privacy glass is up by default.
“We’ll see. If she’s a fed and not local PD, then she was there for me, not any of you guys.”
“What? We’re too low on the food chain? She wanted to bag a shark and not a minnow?”
Julián laughs, and I chuckle along with him because he’s not wrong. Sure, feds might scoop up low to mid-level guys, hoping they’ll flip on senior leaders in an organized crime family. But if they can nab someone as high up as I am, then they would.
“Do you think she’ll go all single white female on you and stalk you? I saw her try to slip you that card. Did you look at it long enough to memorize the number?”
“Yeah.”
I’ve always had a thing for numbers and patterns. It’s not that I’m a mathematical savant, but something about numbers just makes sense to me.
“So, what next, parce?”
Parce or parcero because Colombians can’t just say a simple amigo for our friends.
“I don’t think I’ve deterred her. It won’t be tonight, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the next day or two if she showed up somewhere. She might work for someone.”
“Do you think it’s the Rizzos? Did they find out you’re here?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. What do you think? Could they have made you because they saw us together this week?”
If I blew his cover—which we know is a possibility, but I came anyway—then we need to extract him now. He’ll be dead otherwise.
“I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve earned Edoardo’s trust over the last five years.
I don’t think he questions me. I know he hasn’t had me followed in ages.
Not since I became his son’s personal bodyguard.
He trusts me to be the only one guarding Elio.
Especially after all the shit that went down with Lorenzo and Marco a few years ago, he takes his kids’ protection pretty fucking seriously.
If he’s confident I can be alone with his heir, then I feel as safe as I can in this life. ”
Marco and Lorenzo Mancinelli. Don Salvatore’s nephews.
Lorenzo’s an accountant, so he’s equivalent to my cousin Jorge.
Marco, his next older brother, is third in command.
The capo dei capi. The captain of captains.
He’s one step below the underboss, who’s Salvatore’s heir.
That’s Luca—Marco and Lorenzo’s older brother.
A few years ago, when Marco and Lorenzo—the youngest Mancinelli brother—were dating their wives who’re also sisters, they waged an attack to remind Chicago that their glory days ended with Al Capone’s death.
It made Edoardo especially cautious about his children’s protection details.
It was perfect timing for Julián to step up.
“Do you think it could be the Oskolkis?” Julián knows they’re why I’m here.
“It’s certainly possible. Maybe they got wind I arrived.
Perhaps they sent her as a honey trap to lure me away before they can face the repercussions for their fucked-up attempt to do that deal with los Iglesias.
If they want to do deals with the Mexicans in Boston, they can.
But they know who they pay for that privilege. Both families do, and neither did.”
The Oskolkis way overreached, and now there’s a lesson to teach them. The Russian bratva here in Chicago isn’t anywhere near as strong as the Ivankov branch in New York. They’ve fucked up royally, and now they’re going to pay the price for it.
“I can’t believe Maks has stayed silent on this. I guess he doesn’t give a shit what you do on behalf of el jefe.”
The New York bratva’s pakhan—Maksim Kutsenko—hasn’t done shit even though he said he would.
The Kutsenkos are the Russians—the bratva. The Mancinellis are the Italians—the Mafia, the O’Rourkes are the Irish—the mob. And my family, los Diaz are the Colombians—the Cartel.
“He’s fuming silently. We made sure of that. The Oskolkis not only overstepped by doing a secret deal with a cartel, they also overstepped doing any deal without Maks’s consent.”
Lots of people believe that since Pablo Escobar no longer runs the Colombian drug trade, our country is no longer the narco capital of Latin America. Of course, people in the States can’t look farther south than Mexico, so they assume the cartels there dominate now.
Let them.
It just means my family operates low profile outside of New York.
We don’t need that many people knowing our business.
Tío Enrique doesn’t live in the lap of luxury like Escobar did, but he’s more than just comfortable.
He’s just discreet. I’ve never been to a house larger than Tío Enrique’s.
Granted, that’s only because I’ve never been invited inside Salvatore’s.
Tío does a lot for charities to remain in plenty of people’s good graces. And he, along with the rest of us, have plenty of legal business endeavors to keep us looking legit. We pay our taxes since we’re not going down for something as stupid as evasion.
“You know if I hear anything among the Rizzos, you’ll be the first to know. How’d Ireland go? You never did get a chance to tell me how things went over there.”
The O’Rourkes fucked around and found out—again—not to get too close to my family.
Jorge’s fiancée, Anneliese, got trapped in the middle of a proxy war that’s been going on for a few months between the O’Rourkes and the Kutsenkos.
All of that played out in Frankfurt where Anneliese is from, but the obvious combatants were four syndicate families in Italy.
“Pretty well. When you have a hundred-forty proof whiskey spilled all over the place, it’s easy to light a distillery on fire and watch it go boom.”
We struck back hard against the O’Rourkes for what they did. The Kutsenkos didn’t get off mildly either.
“I bet Maks isn’t just fuming about the Oskolkis. What did you do to them?”
“We robbed them blind. We cleared out their construction site on Long Island. When I say we took everything, I mean we took everything. All the equipment and all the machinery. We also blew up two of their holdings in Frankfurt.”
“I’m sure that shit went somewhere overseas, so they can’t just steal it back. That’s got to piss them off. Maybe that’s why Maks hasn’t done shit to stop the Oskolkis.”
I gaze out the window before focusing back on Julián. “They could be retaliating for our retaliation. We shipped everything to Germany to give to Anneliese’s brother-in-law. His family’s putting it all to good use.”
“Do you ever just get tired of the tit-for-tat? I mean, I know it’s the only way for us to survive, but the machismo—it’s exhausting at times. Don’t you wish someone could just get to the top and then it could all be done with? That we could do it? That your tío could?”
That’s a question I’ve asked myself plenty of times, but it surprises me when Julián does.
“Do you want to retire? Do you and Liliana want to come back to New York, start a family there near yours? Would you prefer to go somewhere else?”
“Where could we go, Alejandro? Liliana does a great impersonation of a Chicago accent, and I do a great Texan one, so we don’t mind it.
It’s become second nature to us, but anywhere else we move, we’d have to do the same thing all over again.
Where could we go if we used our natural accents?
It’ll give away that we’re New Yorkers. The tinge of Spanish in it will scream Latin American even if no one in the U.S.
knows we’re Colombian instead of Mexican.
So, where does that leave us? We can’t go anywhere in Latin America.
Spain? You want us to learn that colonizer Spanish? ”
He grins at me, and we both roll our eyes.
We went all the way through twelfth grade together.
Our parents insisted we take Spanish in middle school because it was Castilian, not Latin American.
Even though we were fluent readers, writers, and speakers, they wanted to ensure we learned Castilian too.
Just in case we should ever need to disguise our Spanish.
It was smart of our parents to do that. When cartel life is the only life you’ve known, you come into parenthood with certain wisdom most people don’t.
“Do you want somewhere quiet here in the U.S.?”
He practically snorts. “Have you met Liliana? She is not a small-town girl. I think she’ll do the burbs here, but she’s not moving to the middle-of-nowhere America.”
“Fair enough.”