Chapter Three Carmelo
The body shop is on a side street off Passyunk, wedged between a check-cashing place and a laundromat that hasn't been open in God knows how long.
The roll-up door is halfway down, there's a Cadillac on the lift, a Honda on blocks and the smell of motor oil and cigarettes coming through the gap.
I duck under the door and the two men inside look up at the same time.
The one under the Cadillac is holding a wrench. Mid-forties, thick forearms, grease to his elbows. Not the one I'm here for.
The one sitting on the tool chest with a sandwich in his hand is.
Tommy Delvecchio. Fifty-one. Runs a book out of this shop and two others in South Philly and owes the Bonaccorso family sixty-two thousand dollars for product that was fronted to him nine months ago and has been ducking Leone's calls since January.
Leone mentioned it the day I left for Philadelphia. "Since you're there."
Delvecchio sees me and the sandwich stops halfway to his mouth. He doesn't know my name. He knows what I look like because men in his position make it their business to know what every enforcer on the eastern seaboard looks like, and I'm not a difficult man to remember.
"I called Leo," he says. "Last week. I told him I needed more time."
"You did not."
"I called the number."
"You called the number and hung up before anyone answered. Three times." I know this because I’m the one he hung up on.
Delvecchio puts the sandwich down. The man under the Cadillac is watching us. He's still holding the wrench. I look at him and he puts the wrench on the floor and slides out from under the car and walks to the back of the shop, through a door and closes it behind him.
Smart.
"I have forty," Delvecchio says.
"You have sixty-two."
"I don't have sixty-two. I have forty. I can get the rest but I need until the end of the month."
I pull the knife from my belt. Not fast. There's no reason to be fast. Delvecchio isn't going to run because there's nowhere to run to, and he isn't going to fight because he's fifty-one years old and sitting on a tool chest eating a ham sandwich.
I'm six-four and holding a blade and that is simple enough that even a man who can't pay his debts can do the math.
I walk to him. He doesn't move. I take his left hand, and I put it flat on the tool chest. I put the tip of the knife against the webbing between his index and middle finger and I press until the skin dimples and a bead of blood comes up around the point.
"The end of the month," I say.
"Yes."
"Forty now. Twenty-two by the thirtieth."
"Yes. Yeah. By the thirtieth."
"If it's the first and I haven't heard from Leone that the balance is clear, I'm going to come back here, and this conversation is going to be different."
"I understand."
I hold the blade there for another three seconds because the three seconds matter more than anything I've said. Words are a negotiation. Silence with a knife in your skin is a fact. Then I pull the blade back and wipe the point on his shirt and fold it and put it back on my belt.
"The forty," I say.
He gets off the tool chest and goes to the back office and comes out with a bag. I don't bother to count it because if it's short I'll know and he knows I'll know and the knife just told him what happens next. I take the bag and walk out.
The sunlight on Passyunk is too bright after the shop.
I squint and turn east and walk twelve blocks to the apartment, and the bag goes under the bed.
I'll deal with it later. I wash my hands in the bathroom sink.
Delvecchio's blood circles the drain, thin and pink, and then it's gone.
I dry my hands and grab my knife and go to the window.
Grace is working the lunch shift. I can see her through the restaurant's front window, moving between tables, plates on her arm.
I've mapped her world. All of it. It took a day and a half because there isn't much to see.
The restaurant, open six days a week, Tuesday through Sunday.
Her apartment, third floor, two windows facing the street, one facing the alley.
The bodega on the corner where she stops almost every morning—the woman behind the counter talks to her and Grace listens and smiles and pays too much for her coffee on purpose.
The laundromat four doors down from the bodega where she does her clothes on Monday, her day off, at nine in the morning.
She carries the bag on her left shoulder, and her right hand is free and the tapping happens against her thigh while she walks.
Her entire life is a circle. A very, very small circle.
Yesterday I drove to Chestnut Hill and sat in a rental car across the street from the Marinos' house for four hours.
Paul and Linda Marino. The planted family.
The house is a two-story colonial on a quiet street with a lawn that's maintained by a service.
A driveway with a Buick and a Toyota and a motion-sensor light above the garage.
The kind of house that looks like every other house on the block, which is the point.
Normal. Unremarkable. A place you'd drive past a thousand times and never look at twice.
Paul Marino came out at ten to get the mail.
He's fifty-four, thick in the middle, gray at the temples.
He sorted the envelopes on the porch and went back inside.
Linda Marino left at noon in the Toyota and drove to a grocery store and came back with four bags.
I watched them through windows for two hours after that.
They ate lunch. They watched television.
Paul made a phone call that lasted nine minutes.
I couldn't hear it from the car, but I clocked the duration and the fact that he walked to the back of the house, away from the windows, to make it. That's a call you don't want overheard.
That's a check-in.
They're not a family. They're an installation.
Two people placed in a house with a script and a salary and a bottle of pills.
Every month they call a number and confirm that the asset is still in Philadelphia, still medicated and still doesn't remember the first eight years of her life.
They've been doing this for eleven years.
Like clockwork.
I'm going to kill them. Not today. Not this week.
But I'm going to walk into that house and I'm going to use this knife and when I'm done, Grace will run out of pills and start to remember, and the people who installed the Marinos will notice when the check-ins stop, and everything that happens after that will be my responsibility.
I know this. I've known it since I found her in the records five months ago. I've had time to consider the cost and the timeline and the operational risk and I've considered all of it and none of it has slowed me down.
As every night before, I stand at the window for three hours and watch Grace work.
She serves lunch and handles a difficult table, a man who sends back his food twice, and her face stays pleasant as she nods and listens to him.
The man behind the bar, the friend, watches her handle it and I can see from here that he's ready to step in, his weight on his front foot, his hands on the bar edge.
He doesn't have to. Grace manages it herself, and the man who sent his food back twice ends up tipping her well because she never let him feel difficult.
She just kept bringing plates until one was right.
I think about that. The patience of it. The competence.
This is a woman who was trafficked for five years and drugged for eleven and she handles a rude customer with the kind of practiced calm that most people never develop.
She doesn't know where that calm comes from.
She thinks she's just good at her job. She doesn't know that the thing that makes her good at her job—the ability to stay present and functional while someone is making her uncomfortable—is a survival skill she learned in a room she can't remember.
The knife is in my hand. I clean my thumbnail. The edge catches and I work it free and the thin curl drops to the windowsill next to the one from last night.
I'm collecting them. I don't know why.
Leone picks up on the second ring.
"Delvecchio," I say.
"Handled?"
"Forty now. Rest by the thirtieth."
"Good."
That's the end of the Delvecchio conversation.
Leone doesn't ask how I got the forty or what condition Delvecchio is in or whether the mechanic in the shop is going to be a problem.
Leone asks if it's handled and I tell him it's handled, and we move on because that's how we've always worked.
He trusts the result. I deliver the result. The details between are mine.
"The girl," Leone asks because he wants to make sure I’m okay and not getting too caught up like I do sometimes.
"Confirmed. Same schedule every day. Apartment is above the restaurant, third floor. She walks to work, works the shift, walks home. The friend behind the bar walks her back after closing."
"The family?"
"Chestnut Hill. Routine check-ins by phone. They're not surveilling her directly. The pills do the work and they file reports. I don't have the reporting cadence yet."
Leone is quiet for a moment. I can hear the compound behind him…
someone talking in the next room, a door closing.
He's in his office. I can see it without trying, the desk where Aurelio used to sit, the chair Leone inherited along with everything else his father left behind.
That room. I don't miss it. I don't miss much, but I know the sound of it. I'll always know the sound of it.
"What do you need?" Leone asks.
"Time."
"You said that last week."
"I need more of it."
Another pause. Leone is not a man who fills silence with words, which is one of the reasons we understand each other.
He's thinking. He's deciding whether to ask the question he wants to ask, which is the same question Danila asked two nights ago and the same question I don't have an answer for: why I'm here.
Why I spent five months tracking a missing girl through sealed records and coded databases.
Why I left the compound and came to a city where I have nothing except a shit apartment and a knife and a bag of his money under the bed.
He doesn't ask. He asks something else.
"What's Danila telling you about his people?"
The Bratva. Leone's been wanting to ask this since I told him Danila was helping me in Philadelphia.
Danila is Bratva and I'm Cosa Nostra and our friendship has always existed in the space between those two worlds, and Leone is smart enough to know that the space between is where useful information lives.
"Restructuring," I say. "Their contracts with the Silent's supply chain are under pressure. Funding's drying up. Danila says there's movement at the top. New people positioning."
"Names?"
"Not yet. He's careful with names."
"He should be." Leone pauses. "Keep listening. Anything he gives you, I want to hear."
"Yes." Though, the truth is, I don’t know if I will tell Leone. I’m not a traitor, but I’m no snitch either. Especially against a brother.
"And Carmelo."
I wait.
"Whatever you're doing with this girl," he says. "Whatever this is… you know the family is behind you."
He doesn't say it softly. He doesn't say it with warmth or sentimentality or any of the things other families might attach to a sentence that means I love you and I'm worried about you and I don't understand what you're doing but I'm not going to stop you.
He doesn't know how to perform care so the words are rough around the edges, but true, nonetheless.
He just does it, without the performance, and you either recognize it or you don't.
"I know," I say.
The call ends.
I put the phone down and stand at the window. The dinner shift is starting. Grace is back on the floor after what I assume was a staff meal or a break, and she's retying her apron and checking the reservation book.
Tomorrow I'm going to walk through that door.
I've decided this three times now, and each time I've found a reason to wait another day.
Another day of data. Another day of watching her patterns, her schedule, the people around her.
Another day of pretending that what I'm doing is anything except stalking, and that the right moment hasn't arrived yet.
The right moment isn't going to arrive. There's no version of this where a man my size walks into a restaurant and sits down at a table and orders food and the woman who brings it to him doesn't feel what he is.
I've killed people. I've killed people this week.
I have forty thousand dollars in cash under my bed, a knife on my belt and hands that washed a man's blood off four hours ago.
Tomorrow those hands are going to be resting on a table while a woman named Grace sets a plate in front of me.
I don't know what kind of man I am when that happens.
I've been the enforcer. The soldier. The butcher.
I've been Aurelio's son, unofficial and unchosen until he chose me, and I've been the man who buried a knife in the dirt and replaced it with a tool that doesn't carry any memories.
I've been the man in the room who says five words or fewer and means every single one of them.
I don't know what kind of man sits across from Grace.
So, I take to cleaning my nails. The knife does its work. Through the window, Grace picks up four plates without checking her grip and carries them and sets each one down with care, and her finger taps the edge of the last plate before she turns, one tap, just one.
Tap number fourteen today.
Right index finger. Surface: ceramic, plate edge. Duration: less than a second. Context: neutral, post-task, no visible stressor.
I've been keeping a count since I arrived.
Tomorrow, I’ll count again, and only then will I decide what kind of man I’ll be.