20. Nico
NICO
Morning
Anastasio sets the folder on my desk the next morning.
"Case just opened this morning," he says. "No hiding the church shootout now. Organized Crime Control Bureau is running the whole show, and I’m sure you’ll be interested to see who the lead investigator is."
I don't reach for it. I don’t have to. "Frank Carpenter?"
"Bingo." He drops into the chair across from me. "He didn't sign the order to open, but every name attached to it answers to him. And the requisition came up through his office."
The man’s good, I’ll give him that. Not every day that you meet a captain who knows how to dress a personal hunt in procedure’s clothes.
Anastasio continues to look at the folder, and I finally reach over, wincing slightly before I open it.
The photographs come first. The altar steps where Father Valdoni went down.
Sal in his good suit. The font of holy water with a dark spray up the marble that nobody bothered to wipe before the camera came. Fucking cops documented all of it.
"What does this touch?" I ask.
"Everything they can reach that ever ties back to you. The shooting gives them the door. Once they're through it, they subpoena the businesses, the books, the men.” Anastasio pauses for a moment. “Terminal 7.”
Fuck.
Of all places that I can’t have the cops touch, it’s Terminal 7. It’s the one piece of clean business that I own. The single place where I can still say I built while I was still Nico, and not Don Leo’s son.
Anastasio spreads his hands and continues talking. "It's a goddamn fishing license, Nico. And the man holding the rod hates you personally."
I turn another page. A diagram of the cathedral floor with little markers where each body fell.
Somebody spent an afternoon on it. The dead have been sorted into evidence.
There's a marker near the confession booth, and I look at that for a second longer than the others, at the little printed shape of the place I had her mouth on me an hour before men came through the doors shooting.
"How long do we have?" I ask.
"Before they start kicking doors? Weeks. Before they have something a grand jury will look at? Months, if we starve it. Frank wants it faster than that. Which means he'll cut corners, and make mistakes." Anastasio shrugs. "He's hungry to put you away.”
“He’s hungry for more than that,” I correct him.
“Either way. Hungry's sloppy. We can frontrun that. Clean up as much as we can before the OCCB swings the hammer in our faces.”
"Then we give him nothing but air to swing at," I say.
"Move the Terminal 7 paper through the Cayman shell before any subpoena can name it.
Anything in Red Hook that can't survive a flashlight goes dark by Friday.
The men who were inside that day stop being in this country.
Send Benito to the ones who can't fly, and tell them the bureau is offering deals to whoever talks first, so the first one who talks is the only one who hangs.
" I close the folder. "And nobody, nobody, says one word into a phone they didn't buy yesterday. "
Anastasio nods slowly. He's watching me the way he does when he's waiting to see if I'm going to do the thing he thinks I should do, which is panic, which I'm not going to do.
"You're oddly calm for a man with a noose around his neck," he says.
"I have a bullet hole in my shoulder, a case with my name on it, and a Greek who wants my wife skinned for boots." I stand, slow, and the wire of fire goes down my arm again. "Isn’t that what Dons are supposed to deal with on a day to day basis?"
He almost smiles. Then he doesn't, and there's the rest of it sitting on his face, the thing he came in carrying under the folder.
"There's one more," he says.
He hands me the phone himself instead of telling me, which is how I know that this is something much worse than Frank fucking Carpenter.
When I turn the phone on, I see a name that I haven't seen attached to anything in thirteen years sitting atop a message. For a second the whole war goes quiet in my head and there's just that.
Martina.
Mom.
I read it twice. The Italian is formal, which is the way she always wrote.
She doesn’t ask me how I am. She doesn’t even mention that it has been thirteen years since we last saw each other. She just tells me that she wants me to come.
I read her summons three times before I look down at the other parts of the message.
I want to meet her.
She wants to see Lydia.
No names, no titles, not even an acknowledgement of existence other than a single word: her. I sigh, turn the phone screen off, and push it back towards Anastasio.
"How did she know I was married?" I ask, even though I know what the answer already is. I guess there’s a part of me that wants to hear Anastasio confirm it.
Or maybe there’s a part of me that wants to believe that Mom still cares enough about her only remaining child to keep tabs on me.
"Nico, the Greeks sent killers to a church." Anastasio chews his words carefully. "Do you really think your own mother wouldn’t know? Don’t you think she at least wants to hear from your own mouth just how you tore up an ironclad contract for all of this?"
"No."
It comes out faster than I mean it to, and he hears the hurt in the voice. Thirteen long years of silence. She didn’t say a damn word when Gia died. And she didn’t shed a tear for Vinny either. But somehow, I’m supposed to believe that the thing that finally moves her hand is not me but Lydia?
I should be relieved. There's a clean reason to go, and it's sitting right in front of me, and I reach for it the way you reach for a life preserver when you’re lost on the ocean.
The ocean.
For what it’s worth, Italy offers a good enough solution for what’s facing us.
A fucking ocean between Lydia and Frank, between Lydia and the OCCB that would love nothing more than to put her in a small room and ask her about the cop who died in her mother's house.
It’s a good enough excuse to get her out of their reach. Let the bureau subpoena an empty mansion. I can handle my own mother.
"Get the plane ready," I tell him. “We leave tonight.”
Several hours later, I find Lydia on the floor of the bedroom with the contents of my closet around her, and for a moment I just stand in the doorway and let myself watch her work.
Giorgia informed her a few minutes after Anastasio took his leave, and I wanted to give Lydia some time to absorb the information before I interrupted her.
"You own forty black shirts," she says without looking up. "Four-zero. And one that's, I want to say, charcoal, that you've clearly never worn. I'm beginning to think you keep it as a personality."
"Packing for me already?"
"Somebody has to. You'd show up to Italy with the same outfit times eleven and call it efficient."
She holds up the charcoal shirt, considers it, and then tosses it on the keep pile. Then she sits back on her heels and looks at me, and her face falls a little.
"Okay. What’s on your mind?"
"We're going to Italy."
"I’m aware of that.” She gestures at the clothes being packed.
"To see my mother."
She goes still. She’s not afraid, not yet, but she’s working on getting there. She knows that the woman exists from the silver frame on her nightstand. By all means, she’s looked at the photo enough that she might even know my mother’s face better than I do.
But knowing the face and knowing the woman wearing it are two very different things.
"I thought you said she never wanted to see you again," she says carefully. “What changed?”
I can’t help but smile at her. “You did, piccola. She wants to meet you.”
She sucks in a slow breath and looks away. “But do you want her to meet me?”
Somehow, she manages to ask the only question that actually matters. I crouch down across from her slowly, my shoulder pulling as I do. The moment she sees it, she reaches towards me to stop me from hurting myself.
I take her hand in mine.
“There’s a part of me that wants to keep you from her,” I admit. “But I started a war with you, and she’ll want to know if you’re worth it.”
“You mean if I’m worth you.”
I close my eyes and shake my head slightly. “She’s stopped asking if I’m worth anyone a long time ago.”
“Why would she do that, Nico?” she asks softly.
“You’ll see soon enough, piccola,” I reply. “But there’s one more thing you should know.”
“What is it?”
"Frank is opening an official investigation on me through the OCCB, as predicted," I tell her. "Going to Italy helps put an ocean between you and him while my people make the case starve."
Her jaw moves. "You realize that once you do this, there won’t be turning back."
“There’s been no turning back from the moment I took you from your mother’s home,” I remind her. “What’s one more thing?”
She doesn't laugh. I know she wants to, but she doesn't, and that's worse. She picks up the next shirt and folds it slowly.
“What is she like?” she finally asks. “Your mother.”
“I wish I could tell you, but thirteen years is a long time.”
She looks at me for a long moment, and then she nods. “Okay.”
She reaches back to the charcoal shirts and resumes folding them without looking, and sets them on the pile.
The jet rumbles in the air as we fly.
The cabin is dark and the water under us is darker, and Lydia has been asleep against my good side for three hours.
She went down somewhere over the Atlantic, her head on my shoulder and her breathing slow and long and even. She’s been there for hours, and my shoulder is starting to go numb. But even then, I refuse to move. My jacket is draped over her, and I wish I could sleep.
But I can’t.
Thirteen years. There's no hiding the fact that as far as I know, my Mom is a stranger to me now. Nothing more than an old woman on a rock who shares my blood.
But the eleven-year old who once held her hand and begged her not to go still lives in my heart, and that boy clings to the hope that she’s exactly who she used to be.
I know who’s waiting for us at the end of this journey, I know who’ll meet Lydia, and I know who I’d want it to be.
Even if I also know that it’ll never be anything more than a dream.
Because I also know exactly what will go through her mind the moment she sees Lydia.
Are you your father, Nicolas?
I don't dare look for an answer to that question. I just feel it sitting there in the dark with me, silently and patiently, like it has for half my life.
Somewhere across the endless ocean, there’s a person who would say yes to my face and mean it.
Lydia moves in her sleep, murmuring, and her hand finds the front of my shirt. It closes there, loose, and she clings to me like she needs to grab a fistful of something solid to keep herself steady.
I look down at her face and see the scrunched line of worry creasing her forehead, wondering what she might be dreaming about. Her mouth opens a little, and I spy the pink dart of her tongue behind her teeth.
A strand of hair falls in front of her face, and I reach over to tuck it behind her ear.
But the moment my hand moves, my heart skips a beat as she whispers something I can’t hear. An ache begins to bloom in my chest. It sweeps me up in its surge and suddenly I never want to wake her up.
I want to stay here in the plane like this, in this exact moment where the world doesn’t exist except for the two of us.
Never about love, piccola.
But somehow, in my heart of hearts, I know that lie hasn’t been true for some time. Maybe it was a lie from the moment I dragged her out of her mom’s house.
She snuggles a little closer, and I feel my heart racing faster and faster at the warm weight of her against my side.
How ironic that the most peace I've had in months is arriving as my life is literally falling apart in pieces on both ends of this metal tube hurtling over the Atlantic.
And it’s all because of her.
Far ahead, past the black curve of the earth, the sky starts turning brighter.