Chapter 2 #3
Pending request: administrator access. Requesting party: Gianni’s lawyers, a firm name I’d seen on the contract’s letterhead, the same letterhead that couldn’t draft a notary block.
Scope: full administrative control of the trucking dispatch system and the warehousing management platform.
Routing schedules, manifests, customer records, everything.
Effective date: contingent upon completion of the anticipated share transfer.
The anticipated share transfer. Me. I was the anticipated share transfer.
I read it twice, cold all the way through. My mother’s companies. Three hundred people. My husband-to-be wanted them.
I took the lipstick tube out of my pocket.
But of course, it wasn’t really lipsteick.
It was a dummy item, built around an encrypted drive the size of a fingernail.
I plugged it in and I took everything — the access request, the revised proxy with its irrevocable clause, the current fleet schedule with every route and every plate—and while the progress bar filled I sat very still and listened to the house.
The floors talked. Footsteps in the eastern corridor. Heavy, unhurried, entitled—one of my father’s lieutenants, the broad one with the bald patch, who knocked on doors heavy and insistent.
The drive finished. I pulled it, capped the lipstick, slid it up my sleeve, and had the screen switched by the time the door opened—to a spreadsheet of florist invoices, peonies against ranunculus, which I had prepared weeks ago for exactly this purpose and kept fresh, like a fire extinguisher.
“Working late,” the bald man said, filling the doorway, looking around the shrine with the particular discomfort men like him have in rooms that belonged to women.
“Flowers.” I sighed at the screen, dropped my chin into my hand, the picture of a girl drowning in beauty. “Papa wants white, Gianni’s people want white and gold, and peonies are out of season, but why would anyone ask me? I’m only the bride.”
He looked at the spreadsheet. He looked at me. Something in his face relaxed into the mild contempt that has been my best disguise since I was fourteen. “Good you keep busy,” he said. “Your father wants everyone downstairs at eight. Don’t be late over flowers.”
“I would never,” I said sweetly.
He left. I listened to him all the way down the corridor, past the camera that was guarding my father’s grief and missing everything else, and I sat in my mother’s chair with three hundred jobs and a marriage contract and the anatomy of a laundering operation resting inside a lipstick tube against my wrist.
“Well, Mama,” I said to the reading glasses. “You always said I’d wear your shade eventually.”
Gianni Scordato arrived at seven-forty, unannounced.
I heard him before I saw him. That was always true of Gianni.
He came through the front hall trailing cologne and Italian and two of his own men, talking with his hands about traffic on the Belt Parkway as though traffic were something that happened to him personally, an insult arranged by lesser men.
My father received him in the dining room with the handshake he reserved for people he was still deciding whether to respect, which Gianni, in his months of courtship, had never once picked up on.
Then he saw me, and his whole face did the thing I’d learned to brace for, the proprietary brightening, a man spotting his coat on the rack.
“There she is.” He crossed the room. He was holding a flat velvet box. “I brought you something. No—don’t thank me yet. Stand still.”
I had not moved, and I had certainly not thanked him, but Gianni conducted both sides of every conversation.
He opened the box. Inside, on white satin, sat a firebird in diamonds—wings spread, tail streaming, a brooch the size of my palm, genuinely beautiful, which somehow made it worse.
Then he took it out and pinned it to my dress himself, without asking, his knuckles pressing against my collarbone while he worked the clasp, taking twice as long as the clasp required.
“There,” he said, stepping back to admire his handiwork, by which I mean me. “The zhar-ptitsa. For my ptichka.”
The firebird, for his little bird. The mythical creature whose feathers burn the hands of every man who grabs at it—pinned dead in diamonds to my chest by a man who had never read past the title of anything. I could have laughed.
“It’s exquisite,” I said. “You have wonderful taste, Gianni.”
“You’re so right.” He turned to my father, gesturing at me like a man presenting a solved problem.
“You see how she is? Some women, you give them diamonds, still they sulk about the wedding, the arrangements, this and that. Not her. You know why, Lev?” He didn’t wait.
“Because little birds are happiest when someone else decides where the cage should stand. It takes the worry out of their heads.”
My father said nothing, which Gianni took for agreement.
“You’re too clever for me,” I said, with the small, defeated smile I keep for exactly this purpose, and watched him inflate. It worked every time. The trick with Gianni was that flattery didn’t even need to be plausible. Only audible.
We sat. The long table, the white cloth, the silver my mother had chosen—including the coffee service on the sideboard behind Gianni’s chair, a tall polished pot with a belly like a funhouse mirror.
Gianni’s phone buzzed against the tablecloth before the soup.
He checked it at the table, because of course he did, holding it low against the cloth in the manner of a man being discreet.
In the belly of my mother’s coffee pot, his screen floated, small and warped and reversed—and his thumb moved across the keypad in six unhurried taps.
I watched the reflection the way I’d watched it three dinners running, confirming.
Right column, top. Left column, middle. The pattern mirrored, flipped it in my head, matched it to the grid.
Six digits. His own birthday, day and month and year, because Gianni Scordato was the only date in Gianni Scordato’s calendar.
Genuinely, it was almost disappointing. You want your captors to make you work a little.
“So.” He put the phone away and pointed his spoon at me.
“The proxy. Your father tells me there’s some delay.
Some—what. Some clause you didn’t like?” His voice went up at the end, and his men by the wall got very interested in the wallpaper, because Gianni getting louder was a barometric event everyone in his orbit had learned to read.
“Not a clause,” I said. “A defect.”
“A defect.” He smiled around the table, inviting everyone to enjoy this with him. “She’s a lawyer now. My bride the avvocato.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare.” I lowered my eyes to exactly the depth that reads as modesty.
“It’s only—the notarization block was drafted for the wrong state, and I thought—well.
If I signed it as written, and the proxy were ever challenged, a court could void it.
Your control of the shares could be undone by any clerk with a grudge.
” I lifted my eyes and delivered it straight to his vanity, which was the largest target in the room and possibly the state.
“And I could not sit there and watch your lawyers make you look careless. In front of my father. In front of everyone. Not you, Gianni. I won’t allow anyone to make you look small—especially not your own counsel. ”
I watched the sentence go into him and find nothing in its path. His face traveled from irritation, through confusion, and arrived at pleasure, and he sat back and pointed his spoon at my father this time.
“You see? She protects me already.” He shook his head at the miracle of his own good fortune.
“I’ll have those idiots redraft it tonight.
Careless—she’s right, it’s careless. You pay a firm like that and they can’t get the state right.
” He was reconducting the whole thing now, arranging history so the objection had been his.
I passed him the bread and let him keep it.
The soup came. Gianni, warmed by wine and his own narration, leaned toward my father and lowered his voice to the volume he believed was confidential, which carried to the kitchen.
“Once it’s signed—Lev, I tell you, everything changes.
The fleet under my authority, the warehouses, the licenses.
Real American companies. Clean since before we were born.
” He tapped the tablecloth. “No more squeezing everything through Northbridge and those rotting Valenti shells with half of Washington sniffing at them. We move it through the daughter’s trucks, and nobody looks twice, because there’s nothing to look at. Thirty years of nothing to look at.”
The daughter’s trucks. I sat six feet away, wearing his diamonds, being discussed in the third person, while he confessed a federal indictment over the soup course.
My father made a low sound and offered one of his proverbs—measure seven times, cut once—which Gianni took as applause.
I memorized every word with my eyes on my spoon.
My whole life, men have said things in front of me that they would kill each other for writing down.
Then the door opened, and Kiryl came in—summoned for dinner, hair combed flat with water, wearing the careful blankness he wore downstairs—and Gianni’s face lit with a new idea, and everything in me went to glass.
“Ah! The scholar.” Gianni spread his arms. “Kiryl. Sit, sit. I’ve been thinking about you.
” He waited until my brother had sat, until the boy’s hands were folded in his lap, until the whole table was watching.
“After the wedding, you’ll come to Sicily.
A few months. Maybe longer.” He smiled with all his teeth.
“A young man needs proper instruction, and your father agrees—the books are fine, but a Sokolov should learn how the world actually works. I’ll teach you myself.
The family business. My personal guest. We’ll take very good care of you. ”