Chapter 5 #2
Three vehicles. Two SUVs and an armored sedan, all three registered against the Northbridge account, all three currently sitting in a garage off Coney Island Avenue with their beacons warm.
Attached to the folder was a movement order, typed by somebody who had learned logistics from a manual and formality from television.
Angela read it out.
“Eighteen-forty hours, collect principal from Zhar-Ptitsa, Brighton Beach Avenue. Principal will be dressed and prepared on site. Nineteen-hundred hours, depart. Route as attached, no stops. Nineteen-forty hours, arrive residence, Mill Basin. Twenty-hundred hours, ceremony. Twenty-twenty hours, execution of instruments.”
Principal. She had a wedding dress with her name sewn inside it and to my cousin’s dispatcher she was a principal, a payload, a dot with a green pulse.
“There’s a second attachment,” Angela said.
“Read it.”
She scrolled. And then she stopped reading, and her hand came off the trackpad, and Pietro put his hand on her shoulder without a word because he knew that particular stillness better than anybody alive.
“Angela.”
“Standing medical authorization,” she said.
“It’s countersigned. A physician travels in vehicle two.
” She swallowed. “In the event the principal becomes distressed or uncooperative prior to execution of instruments, the attending physician is authorized at his discretion to administer intramuscular sedation sufficient to ensure the principal’s cooperation through the ceremony and signing.
Dosage at physician’s judgment. Notarial capacity is not affected. ”
Nobody moved.
Something went through me that I have no honest word for.
Not heat. The opposite of heat. It came up out of the floor and through the soles of my shoes and settled behind my sternum, cold and very still, and it had the shape of a woman in a service corridor telling me she’d been managing men like Gianni since before I learned to knot my tie.
Notarial capacity is not affected.
They had asked a lawyer whether a drugged woman’s signature would still hold. And the lawyer had said yes.
“Read it again,” I said.
“Sal—”
“Read it again.”
She read it again. My hands were flat on the desk and they did not shake, and I noted that, filed it, and understood that it was not calm.
I took out my phone and called Serafina.
She picked up on the second ring, in a room with an echo. “Twenty more minutes.”
“Angela’s inside Northbridge’s fleet account. I’m going to read you something and I need you to hear all of it.”
I read it to her. Every word, in my flattest voice, the manifest voice, the voice for demurrage and weather. Distressed or uncooperative. Discretion. Sufficient to ensure cooperation. Notarial capacity is not affected.
The line was silent for a long time.
“Madonna,” Serafina said, and her voice had gone thin. “Madonna.”
“Yes.”
“That’s—Sal, that’s a sworn instrument. That’s a woman signing away three hundred jobs with a needle in her arm and a priest in the room.”
“Yes.”
“And Gianni, my brother—” She stopped. I heard her breathe. Then I heard the exact moment the grief turned back into command, because I have known my cousin her whole life. “No.”
“Sera.”
“No. You are not touching a Sokolov convoy. Listen to me. If we hit that motorcade, Lev doesn’t hear we saved your daughter.
He hears Italians ambushed my blood on my own road.
He will not investigate it, he will not thank us, he will pick up a phone and he will put eleven hundred men behind Gianni Scordato openly, and then this stops being a case and becomes a body count, and it will be Sicilian boys in it. ”
“And if we do nothing,” I said, “he has the fleet, the warehouses, the paper, and the bratva anyway, by Thursday, without spending a bullet. You’re not choosing between war and peace, cugina. You’re choosing whether we’re in the war or just losing it politely.”
“That is not your decision.”
“No,” I said. “It’s yours.”
“Then hear it. Stand down.” Her voice was absolutely level. “Salvatore. Stand down. Say it back to me.”
I looked at the screen. Sixty grey dots and one green pulse in a garage off Coney Island Avenue.
“Understood,” I said.
And I hung up.
The office was very quiet. Angela was watching me with her hands in her lap.
Pietro had straightened up off the back of her chair and gone still in the way he goes still, which is the way a man goes still when he has already decided and is waiting to be asked.
Tonio had put down the coffee pot at some point in the last ten minutes and I hadn’t heard it happen.
“We take her,” I said.
“That’s not what she said,” Angela said quietly.
“No.”
I put my phone in my pocket and looked at my brothers.
“We take her before she reaches the house,” I said.
“Not at the restaurant, too many civilians, too many exits. On the road. There’s a stretch past Floyd Bennett where the service lane necks down to one lane and there’s water on both sides and nothing to hide behind.
Tonio, we need a truck out there in six hours.
Something big enough to fill the road and slow enough to look like an accident.
Pietro, plates, spares, and something with a hood you don’t mind bending.
” I checked my watch. “Wheels up in forty minutes. It’s a two-hour flight and I want three hours of daylight on that road before I put anyone on it. ”
Neither of them asked me a single question.
Tonio was already dialing. Pietro reached past Angela, closed the laptop, and picked up his coat.
“Guns?” he said.
“All of them.”
The service road past Floyd Bennett Airfield ran between black water and black water, one lane each way, and the wind came off Jamaica Bay hard enough to make your eyes run.
We’d landed at Teterboro at three. By six-forty Tonio had a refrigerated lorry with New Jersey plates parked in the weeds a quarter mile up with its lights off and its diesel ticking, and Pietro had a grey SUV nosed into a maintenance turnout with brush pulled across the hood, and I was standing in the dark with my coat open and my breath going up in front of me like smoke.
I had picked the ground because there was nowhere to go. Water left, water right, one lane, no shoulder, and a bend at the far end that meant a driver wouldn’t see the road was gone until he was already committed to it.
I had picked it because it was the safest place in the five boroughs to take a car apart with a woman in the back seat.
“Fourteen minutes,” Pietro said in my ear. He had Angela on a line to Chicago and Angela had three green dots crawling across a map on a laptop in a kitchen above a restaurant. “They left the restaurant at seven-oh-two. Two minutes late.”
Two minutes late. Somebody had been slow getting into the car.
Good girl, I thought.
“Nine minutes.”
Somewhere behind us a jet came off Kennedy and the whole sky shook.
“Four.”
“Tonio.”
“Pronto.” His voice was very calm. Tonio’s voice is always calm at moments like this. “You say when.”
Headlights came round the bend, three sets, close, running fast the way men run when they’ve been told no stops.
“Now.”
The lorry came out of the weeds and across the lane and Tonio put it into a jackknife with the handbrake, and forty feet of trailer swung across that road and stopped dead like a wall God had dropped.
Brakes screamed. The lead SUV went sideways, clipped the trailer’s bumper, came to rest at an angle with its headlights pointed at the water.
The armored sedan stopped hard behind it.
The third vehicle reversed—and met Pietro coming out of the turnout at thirty miles an hour, hood to trunk, and stopped being a vehicle and started being a problem for an insurer.
Then it was quiet except for the wind and one engine and somebody shouting in Russian.
I stepped out into the middle of the road with my hands up and empty and walked toward the sedan.
“Salvatore Scordato,” I said. Loudly. In English, then in the Russian I learned on docks.
“Scordato. Do you hear me? Nobody in this convoy has to be hurt tonight. Put your hands on your windows and stay in your seats. My people have you from three sides and every one of them is a better shot than you are.”
Doors opened anyway. Of course they did.
Two out of the lead car, one out of the sedan’s front passenger door—young, big, coat flapping, and his hand went inside it as he turned.
He turned wrong.
He came around fast and the muzzle came up and swung, and it swung back, toward the sedan, toward the rear glass, because he had a bad angle on me and a clear one through his own car, and I understood in the half second I had that he was about to put rounds through a window with her behind it.
I shot him through the shoulder.
One round, left shoulder, high, the joint. He went down on the asphalt and the pistol went skidding under the trailer and he screamed.
“Down,” I said to the other two. “Down. On the ground, now, or I stop being careful.”
They went down. Pietro was behind them by then with a shotgun and a very quiet manner, and Tonio was out of the cab and moving along the far side, and it was over in nine seconds.
Except the rear door of the sedan was still shut, and the glass was dark, and I couldn’t see her.
That was the worst ten seconds of my life. Ten seconds of a black window and no way to know what was happening on the other side of it, and my own hand shaking on the door handle for the first time in thirteen years.
Then the car rocked.
It rocked hard, on its springs, and something hit the inside of the glass, and I heard a man make a sound that was not a word.
She’d got her heel into the top of his foot.
I found that out afterward, from the state of his shoe.
Four inches of Italian dress heel driven straight down through the bones on top of a man’s foot, and while he was folding forward around it she’d put the back of her head through his mouth and taken out three teeth.