Chapter 15 #3
“I will run the team,” Sal said.
He said it without lifting his head. He said it to the folder in front of her, the way he had said the apology in Sicilian. The bruise at his jaw was already darkening.
“I will run the data,” Marco said. “I have what you need or I can get it inside three hours.”
“I will run the perimeter,” Tonio said. “The Carriage House is mine to keep clean. Nobody in or out for forty-eight hours that I have not personally cleared. Olimpo agrees.” Olimpo, on cue, thumped his tail once against the floorboards.
Santo, against the brick wall, uncrossed his arms.
“I will handle the Marseilles crew,” he said. “If they move on her before we move on Enzo, they will not get within a block. That is mine.”
Angela looked at him. She looked at him for a beat longer than at any of the others. Santo held the look, and did not soften it, and did not need to.
“Thank you,” she said.
Santo nodded, once, and crossed his arms again.
Dante had been watching the assignments go around the table without speaking. Now he spoke.
“And the Marseilles crew.”
He said it to Angela.
“Let them wait,” she said.
The room did not react. They were past reacting.
“Let them sit in the motel,” she said. “Let them watch the apartment. Let them follow the patterns they are looking for and let those patterns get boring, because Pietro and I will not be at the apartment, and there will be nothing to read. Marseilles crews are paid by the day for surveillance and they have an upper limit on how long the contract is worth running. If we move on Enzo through the money before they move on me through the routine, then the contract goes dark. Enzo will be in a position where he cannot pay them. He may already be in a position where he cannot give them new instructions. They will eventually pack up and go home. Some of them are likely already bored. They will not stay forever, especially in Chicago in January, without payment confirmation and without target movement. We do not need to engage them at all.”
She paused.
“You can if you want,” she said. “After. For information. But you do not need them to get to Enzo. They are the foot soldiers of a contract that you can starve by going after the man who funded it.”
The room sat with it.
I watched it sit. I watched Marco’s face do the small private thing it did when a plan landed in the shape he liked.
I watched Sal’s hand, still on the folder, finally relax.
I watched Dante consider her, and consider the plan, and consider the table, and not say anything for a count of ten that felt much longer.
“It’s elegant,” Marco said.
“It is elegant,” Dante agreed.
“It is also slower,” Sal said. Not as an objection. As an observation. “We could be looking at ten days from start to finish instead of two.”
“Yes,” Angela said
“Good,” Dante said.
Sal looked up.
“Good,” Dante said again. “I would rather have ten days than two. If we don’t need to rush, let’s not rush”
Sal did not argue. He nodded.
Then he turned in his chair and looked across the table at me.
The bruise at his jaw was already a clean line where my knuckle had been.
He did not touch it. He looked at me the way he had not looked at me in the eight months we had been in Chicago, which was to say he looked at me the way he had looked at me when we were boys and one of us had done something that needed to be either fought out or laid down, and we had grown up enough to know the laying down.
“Fratello,” he said. Low. The dialect. “Mi dispiace.”
I’m sorry.
I let it sit. I made myself let it sit, because Sal had let mine sit, and that was the trade.
Then I said: “Lo so.”
I know.
He nodded.
Across the table, Angela had not sat back down. She stood at the head of the table beside Dante’s chair with her hand still on top of the folder, and her chin was still up, and she looked, for the first time since we had walked through the door, like a person who had been heard.
She looked at me.
She let herself, finally, look at me.
I looked back.
The meeting did not so much end as disperse.
Dante walked it through the last logistics with the brisk economy he used for the parts of an operation that did not need argument.
Angela would start at the workstation at eight in the morning.
Marco would have the banking access provisioned by midnight.
I would stay with her at the Carriage House for the duration.
The family would reconvene every twelve hours—once before dawn, once at dusk—for status.
Tonio would coordinate the perimeter with Santo, and Santo would coordinate the Marseilles watch from his own teams. Sal would build the operational follow-up package off whatever Angela surfaced.
Marco would handle the data architecture. I would handle Angela.
He used that phrase. I would handle Angela. He said it the way he said everything—neutrally, declaratively—but he met my eye when he said it, and I understood him.
When the assignments were finished, Dante stood.
He pushed his chair back and stood up at the head of the table and the rest of them stood with him without being told.
Tonio at the stove turned the heat off under the moka.
Marco slid his phone into his pocket. Sal closed the folder one final time and set it under his arm.
Santo, already in his jacket, drew himself up off the wall.
Dante walked the length of the table.
He stopped in front of Angela.
Dante put out his hand and she took it.
He held it for a beat longer than a handshake. Not aggressively, not strangely, just for a beat that the room registered as deliberate. His other hand came up and rested briefly on top of hers, closing it between both of his palms, the way he might have closed a small bird he meant to release.
“Welcome to the family, Angela,” he said.
It was very quiet.
She did not speak. She had not been ready for it. I saw the second pass through her face—the moment where the words landed and her own mouth tried to find a shape for the response and could not. Her eyes went bright.
“Thank you,” she said.
He released her hand.
He stepped back. He looked at me, and at her, and at me again, and then he turned and walked back to the head of the table for his coat.
Marco was the first to leave.
He stopped at Angela on his way out and bowed his head a fraction, the small old-world gesture that came out of him in moments he did not want to make speeches in.
He said, “Tomorrow morning. I’ll have everything you asked for.
” She nodded. He looked at me, said, “Pietro,” with a great deal in it that he did not unpack, and went out into the courtyard.
The cold draft of his exit pushed the curtain at the kitchen window.
Tonio came next, but slower, because Tonio was constitutionally incapable of leaving a kitchen quickly.
He kissed Angela on both cheeks like she was his cousin and had always been his cousin, and he ruffled the top of my head on his way past as though I were eleven and had skinned my knee, and he said something to me in Sicilian that I did not entirely catch and did not need to.
He took Olimpo with him. The big dog padded out behind him, looking back once at the room as though to ensure it was now closed.
Santo did not say anything. Santo gave Angela the briefest of nods, an inch of head movement, and was gone.
Sal stayed last among the brothers and cousins.
He came around the table. He stopped in front of me and he put his hand flat on my shoulder, the weight of a man who was older than me by two years and had been older than me by a hundred years since we were children, and he squeezed once.
He did not say anything. He looked at Angela, and at me, and he nodded to her—the small courtly nod he had inherited from our father—and he went out after the others, the folder still under his arm.
Dante was the last.
He paused at the door, his coat already on, gloves halfway up his hands. He looked back into the kitchen at us. His face did the small thing it did when he was moved — a softening at the corners of the mouth that was not quite a smile, a shift in the eyes that lasted not even a full second.
He raised his hand, an inch off his hip.
Then he was gone.
The door closed behind him. The latch clicked. The carriage house, full all afternoon of bodies and voices and bruises and folders, went still.
Angela stood for a moment at the head of the table.
Then her shoulders dropped. I pulled the chair next to hers and I sat down. She came around and sat down too, in Dante’s chair, the chair at the head, because nobody was using it now and it was the closest one to me.
She put her head on my shoulder. The fire popped in the grate.
After a moment, very quietly, she said, “Pietro.”
“Mm.”
“Did you mean what you said. About marrying me.”
I turned my head. I kissed the crown of her hair.
“Every word,” I said.
She was quiet a moment.
“Good,” she said.