Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Luca
"—the third truck came in two hours behind schedule," Renzo says, turning a page on the clipboard he carries with the focused efficiency of someone who genuinely enjoys logistics.
"Castellano says the delay was at the border, a documentation issue, nothing that can't be smoothed but it'll cost us another—"
"Have Costa handle the documentation," I reply. "And tell Castellano if it happens again he pays the delay out of his own cut."
"Done." Renzo makes a note. "The warehouse on Fremont needs a new rotation, two of the night crew have been flagged—"
Renzo has been with me for eleven years.
I trust very few people and the ones I do trust have earned it slowly and at considerable cost. Renzo Lotti earned it by being the only man in a room of twelve who told me the truth when the truth was not what I wanted to hear, and he has been at my right hand ever since.
He is thirty years old and looks younger and thinks older and has instincts that can't be taught.
He is also, at this particular moment, talking and I am not fully listening. I draw on my cigarette and look at the far wall of the lobby but I see the cell floor. She was sitting on it and the hem of my trousers caught between two fingers, those blue eyes coming up to find mine.
Her lips were dry.
"Pull them both," I cut in. "If they've been flagged they're already compromised."
Renzo looks up from the clipboard briefly. He has known me long enough to know when I am present in a conversation and when I am not, and he is too professional to comment on it. He makes another note.
"The men are talking," he says. "Word got around that you have a woman in the cells. They're saying she's—" a brief pause, "—memorable."
My fingers tighten around the cigarette.
"It's Keller's daughter," I answer.
Renzo is quiet for a moment. "Keller."
He has never liked politicians. His position on them is consistent and unambiguous; they are, in his view, the most dangerous category of dishonest men because they have perfected the performance of honesty and they have institutional cover when the performance fails.
I have always privately agreed with him.
Keller in particular.
Most men who come to me want something crude. Money, protection, a problem removed. Keller wanted all three dressed up in the language of mutual benefit and strategic partnership, and he delivered his requests with conviction.
I worked with him because he could give me something nobody else in New York could, access and legitimacy at a level that would have taken me a decade to build any other way. I held up my end. I removed his troubles quietly. And then Phillip Keller decided that the debt didn't exist.
That was the thing about politicians. They believed their own fiction eventually.
"What's your plan?" Renzo asks.
"I want Keller to come in himself," I confirm.
Renzo nods slowly. "The thing is," he says, in the tone he uses when he is about to say something I won't enjoy, "most men notice their children are missing within twenty-four hours. She's been down there for two days."
I stub the cigarette out on the edge of the ashtray on the lobby table.
Her voice comes back without invitation.
How else do I get him to look at me?
"Keller is self-absorbed," I reply. "But he's not going to abandon his daughter indefinitely."
"You should move her," he says finally. "Out of the cells. She's got every guard on that level distracted and that's before accounting for the fact that she put one of them in the hospital with a broken neck."
I say nothing because I am thinking about how she weighs less than a hundred and thirty pounds and is perhaps five and a half feet tall and managed, before three trained men could contain her, to incapacitate one of them permanently with a decorative hotel statue.
They had only taken her because a third man had come through the door behind her while she was focused.
A sneak attack. The only way they could do it.
She had almost walked out of that room armed and free.
"She's strong," I say, and I mean it as a statement of fact rather than a compliment, but it lands somewhere between the two.
Then I see her again as she was an hour ago. The pallor of her face under the cell lights. The way she was sitting, conserving herself. Dry lips. Two days without adequate food or water.
She is strong. But she is not going to last indefinitely in that cell and I am under no illusions about that.
Why should I care? She walked into my building uninvited. Her naivety is not my responsibility. She made her choices.
I am about to say something to Renzo about the Fremont rotation when the man comes in.
He moves fast, one of the lower-level guards, and he straightens when he sees us and directs himself to me.
"Sir." His eyes cut briefly to Renzo and back. "The lady. She just fainted."
Renzo looks at me. "Your call, boss," he says.
* * *
I am leaning in the doorway with a fresh cigarette when the doctor finishes.
Renzo stands beside me, arms folded, saying nothing.
The doctor is a small, precise man named Vitelli who has been on my private retainer for four years and who has learned, in that time, to arrive quickly and ask nothing beyond what is medically relevant. He clips the IV line to the stand with practiced efficiency, checks her pulse once more.
"Moderate head trauma," he says, addressing me directly. "It isn't serious but she needs rest and she needs to stay still for the next several hours." He glances back at her briefly.
"She's also close to malnourishment. Two days without a proper meal combined with the head injury is what brought her down. Once the IV has done its work she needs a decent meal." He closes his bag.
"After that, rest."
"Understood," Renzo answers, stepping forward to see him out. "Thank you, Vitelli."
The doctor nods in my direction and leaves. I draw on the cigarette and look at her.
She is on the bed that belongs to one of the guest rooms on the upper floor, the first room we reached when I came through the door carrying her, and she looks smaller in it than she did on the cell floor, which I wouldn't have thought possible.
The IV line runs from the stand to the inside of her left elbow.
Her color is better than it was twenty minutes ago.
Twenty minutes ago she was on the cell floor in a heap and I had stood in the doorway for a second before crossing the room and dropping to my knees beside her and putting two fingers to her throat for a pulse and then picking her up and shouting for Renzo.
I replay that sequence now with some detachment and I find I don't entirely recognize myself in it.
I panicked, internally the response was immediate and disproportionate and I acted faster than the situation strictly required. She was breathing. The pulse was there. There was no reason to panic.
I tell myself what I told myself in the corridor while I was carrying her, which is that she is my collateral and collateral has no value if it stops breathing, and my interest in her continued health is entirely transactional, and that is the beginning and the end of it.
It is a reasonable explanation.
I am almost satisfied with it.
Renzo returns. "I'll speak to the cook," he says. "Have her meals handled properly going forward."
I nod and tap ash from the cigarette.
Renzo makes a sound that isn't quite a response. I glance at him. I noticed the guards when I carried her through the corridor. I notice most things as a matter of practice but I noticed this with instant attention that tightened something in my chest.
My men are not undisciplined. But they are also not saints and she is, as Renzo had put it with understatement, memorable.
"Get her clothes," I tell him. "Whatever she needs. Toiletries, appropriate things." I pause. "She'll be moved to my quarters. The room adjoining mine."
Renzo looks at me. He doesn't ask.
"I'll handle it," he answers, and he is gone.
I finish the cigarette and remain where I am in the doorway.
She breathes against the pillow, dark hair loose around her face, the two small moles beneath her eye catching the low light of the room. The blazer she had arrived in is draped over the chair in the corner, still clean across the shoulders, slightly ruined at the hem.
I push off the doorframe and cross to the chair beside the bed and sit, resting my elbows on my knees, and I look at her.
"You're stuck with me for now, princess," I say quietly.
She doesn't stir.
The IV drips at its steady pace and the room stays quiet and I remain where I am longer than I need to and eventually I stand and straighten my jacket and walk out.