Chapter 25 #2
I came out of the office and back onto the floor. Dario Marchetti was on his knees by the forklift with two of my men's pistols on the back of his head. He was crying. He had been driving the car on the road in early autumn. He had not pulled a trigger. He had also not stopped the car.
I walked up to him. The men stepped back. Dario lifted his face with his mouth working around words he had not found yet.
"One chance," I said. "Say something true."
His mouth worked. His eyes went around the warehouse for an answer.
"My uncle made me," he said.
I put a round in his forehead and he went over sideways into the oil stain by the forklift.
Headlights swept across the open door. The Mercedes came in at speed, brakes squealing on the wet concrete, and then Cesare Marchetti saw what was in his warehouse and slammed the car into reverse.
My men had already pulled the second truck across the door behind him.
He hit the truck with the back bumper and the Mercedes shuddered to a stop with a soft crunch.
He climbed out with his hands up. Gray at the temples. Old camel coat. The kind of smile he had worn in the photos was gone off his face and the face under it was the face of any man who has just learned a thing he had thirty years to learn.
"Daniil," he said. His voice was steady for the first sentence. Then it was not. "Daniil. We can talk. There is money. There is territory. I have a son in Italy I have not seen in eight years. Please. Please."
I heard him out. I did not interrupt. He talked for the length of time it takes a man to understand that talking is not going to save him. When he ran out, I raised the pistol and ended him in the same clean way I had ended the other two.
I lowered the gun. My ears were ringing only a little.
The earpiece came back to life.
"Manhattan Beach is empty," Alek said. His voice was flat. "Lucia was not there. She slipped out at some point in the early evening. The dinner was for show. The woman is smarter than we gave her credit for."
"Note it," I said. "She is for later."
"Copy."
"Operation status?"
"Closed on the targets we had. Cleaners moving in. Russo and DeLuca will get their new instructions before the sun is up."
"Copy."
I turned to my men on the floor. They had the surviving Marchetti soldiers and lieutenants on their knees in a row along the wall. Eight of them. Some bloody, some not. All of them with their hands behind their heads.
"Downstairs," I said.
We moved them down into the chamber in the basement under the warehouse. Concrete walls. One drain in the center of the floor. A bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The kind of room a man does not walk into without already knowing what it is.
They knew.
They started naming names before we had the last of them through the door.
Cesare's accountant. The shipping schedule.
A safe house in Yonkers we had not known about.
The cop who fed them the wire taps. Their own mothers.
They offered numbers, accounts, addresses, the names of the men in the next family over who had wronged us first. The noise of it filled the concrete the way water fills a basin.
I stood at the top of the stairs and watched. My face went still. The stillness arrived in my jaw first, then in my shoulders, then in my hands.
Mikhail came up the stairs behind me. He did not joke.
"You want it," he said low, "or you want the men to do it?"
I looked down at the eight Marchetti men begging on the concrete floor.
I thought of Chloe in a hospital bed because someone had cut the brake line on a car.
I thought of three months of being Pete in a town I did not remember, of waking in an apartment that was not mine and going to work at a job that was not mine.
I thought of Rhea's grandparents in their kitchen, the people I had almost made into widows and a widower.
I walked down the stairs.
I did the work. The way I had done it upstairs.
One at a time. Clean. I did not speak to them.
I did not give them speeches. The first one was loud.
The second was quiet. By the fifth, the rest had stopped begging because begging was no longer doing them any good.
The last man closed his eyes before I did it. I let him have that.
I lowered the pistol when it was done. My ears were ringing properly now. The bulb in the wire cage hummed. The drain at the center of the floor did its work.
I went back up the stairs.
Mikhail was waiting at the top. He did not say anything. He set a hand on my shoulder and squeezed once, hard, and let go. We walked out of the warehouse together. The cold air on the loading dock hit me in the chest and I took it in like a man taking in water after a long road.
Salt. Metal. The first faint hint of frost.
"Cars," Mikhail said.
We went to the cars.
I changed shirts in the back seat on the way home.
My driver passed a clean white one over the seat without turning around and took the bloody one off my hands without comment.
He passed me a towel too. I wiped my hands until the towel was dark.
They still smelled like cordite. They would smell like it under the soap in the morning.
I pulled out my phone.
I sat with it in my lap a long minute. The trees along the parkway went past dark and quick. The driver kept his eyes on the road.
I opened the video call.
Chloe picked up on the second ring.
She was at her grandma's kitchen table. Hair up. The same little overhead light. A cup of tea by her elbow with the steam coming off it. She looked at my face in the small lit square and her own face changed.
"How are you?" she said.
"I am all right."
"You don't look all right."
I did not put on a face for her. I did not have it in me. I looked at her in the small bright square on my lap and let her see whatever she was seeing.
"Am I bad for killing them?" I said.
She did not flinch. Her eyes stayed on mine. She thought about it.
"You did it tonight?" she said.
"It is done." I took a breath. "I thought it would feel right. It does not. Like I am not me."
She did not say what I had been afraid she would say. She did not tell me it was okay. She did not tell me they deserved it. She did not call me a monster, either.
She set her tea down. Her eyes stayed on the camera.
"You're still you," she said. Soft. "The you who's loud about feeling bad about it right now is the proof of that. The man you'd be afraid of being wouldn't call me at this hour asking if he was bad. He'd be drinking alone and asking nobody anything."
I closed my eyes for a second. The dark inside my eyelids was the only dark I trusted.
"I'm not going to tell you what you did was nothing," she said quieter. "I'm not going to call it beautiful. But you didn't do it because you liked it. You did it because you loved people. Including me. I see the difference. I'll keep seeing the difference. You're allowed to feel hollow tonight."
I opened my eyes. She was still there. Same kitchen. Same light. Same tea.
"I miss you, Chloe," I said.
"I'll be home soon."
"Come home tomorrow."
"Two more days," she said. Gentle. Firm. "My grandma. Then I'm yours."
I nodded. I let it sit. She let it sit with me.
"Eat something tonight," she said after a moment. "Sleep next to a window so the air can find you. Don't drink alone."
"Yes, ma'am," I said. The corner of my mouth almost did a thing.
She did not say goodbye. She just stayed on the screen. She sipped her tea. She watched me breathe. I breathed for her. The trees rolled past the window of the car, dark on dark, and the cold air slipping in the cracked window smelled of frost.
I had spent the night being a man other men were right to fear. I was about to spend the rest of the night being a man one woman was loving from a kitchen in Queens. Both of those were me. I could carry both.