Chapter 17 Emilio #2
The same people who need the chaos between the families to continue because cooperating organizations are harder to exploit than warring ones.
"I'll be there at noon," I say.
"Bring backup. Not a team. One man. Someone who can keep his mouth shut."
"Carmelo."
"Fine. Just get here before this window closes."
I hang up and go find Savannah first because that's who I am now, the man who tells his woman things before he tells his boss.
She's behind the bar in the morning doing inventory because Savannah Cole cannot exist in a space without organizing it, and the sight of her in one of my t-shirts with a clipboard and a pencil behind her ear makes me want to skip the meeting entirely and spend the day watching her count bottles.
Just so I can stare at that fine as fuck ass.
"I have to go out," I say, fighting my impulse.
She looks up from the clipboard. Reads my face in about two seconds. "How dangerous?"
"Probably not very. Meeting with Ferrara, off the books."
"Probably not very is not the same as not at all."
"I'm taking Carmelo."
"Carmelo doesn't have his knife anymore."
"Carmelo has a gun under the seat of the SUV, and probably has a hundred other knives, so I think he's fine."
She sets down the clipboard, and walks around the bar, then stands in front of me and puts both hands on my chest and looks up at me with those brown eyes that I will never, for the rest of my fucking life, get tired of looking into.
"Come back in one piece."
"I always come back."
"You came back with stitches last time."
"Stitches are one piece. Just with thread holding it together."
"That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
She grabs the front of my shirt, pulls me down, and kisses me hard enough that I forget about Ferrara and the Castillos and Matteo Billone and the entire concept of leaving this bar.
Her mouth is warm and her hand is fisted in my shirt and for about four seconds the world is nothing but her lips and the taste of the coffee she's already had and the pressure of her body against mine.
She pulls back. "One piece, Emilio. I'm not joking."
"One piece. I promise."
I go to Leone next. That conversation goes about as well as I expected.
"No," he says.
We go back and forth. I make my case. He makes his. The standoff lasts for a minute, which is long for Leone and an eternity for me. I win, barely, with conditions: take Carmelo, confirm Ferrara is alone before I leave the vehicle, any sign of a setup and I'm gone. No heroics.
"Aurelio told me to keep you safe," Leone says. "Don't make me fail on the first week."
"I'll be back by two."
"You'll be back by one, or I'm sending Claudio after you, and then nobody's going to have a good day."
Fair point. Claudio showing up anywhere uninvited tends to shorten lifespans, especially when it involves me, his ‘little brother’ by mere minutes.
I take Carmelo. We drive in the SUV and the silence in the car is the Carmelo brand of silence, the kind that doesn't need filling because the man beside you communicates through presence and violence and the occasional single-word sentence that carries more weight than most people's speeches.
"You need a new knife," I say, because I can't help myself.
He looks at me. Those dead-gray eyes that have seen things I don't want to know about and done things I definitely don't want to know about. "I know."
"I'll get you one."
"No. I'll find my own." He goes back to the window.
That's the most words Carmelo has said to me in a week, and it's the clearest I've ever heard him on anything.
The knife he gave Aurelio was his. The next one has to be his too.
I respect that, even though the image of him reaching under the car seat for a Glock instead of pulling his knife from his belt is going to bother me until he finds a replacement.
We drive in silence for the rest of the way.
The parking structure off Eighth is concrete and dingy lighting. I pull into the lower level and kill the engine. Two cars. One sedan I recognize from Ferrara's security detail. One empty Honda that could belong to anyone.
"Stay in the car," I tell Carmelo. "Watch the exits. If this goes sideways, come get me."
Carmelo nods. He reaches under the seat, pulls out the nine-millimeter, checks the magazine with the efficiency of a man who's handled weapons since before he could spell his own name, and racks the slide.
The man buried his knife with a dead Don and replaced it with a handgun within forty-eight hours.
That's Carmelo's version of grief counseling.
I get out and walk toward the sedan. My gun is in my waistband, snug against the small of my back, and my hands are visible because Ferrara asked for a conversation, not a confrontation, and showing up with my hand on a weapon would set the wrong tone.
Ferrara is in the driver's seat, window down.
He looks worse than he sounded on the phone.
The silver hair is uncombed, which is a first because this is a man who showed up to a midnight negotiation at Marcello's looking like he'd stepped out of a magazine.
The scar on his jaw is more visible against skin that's gone pale, and his hands are on the steering wheel even though the engine is off, gripping it with ferocity.
"You came," he says.
"I said I would."
"Get in."
I walk around to the passenger side and open the door.
The car smells like cigarettes and the particular stinky-ass body funk of a man who's been stressed for days without sleep.
Ferrara doesn't smoke. The ashtray has three butts in it.
He started sometime in the last forty-eight hours, which tells me everything about how rattled he is.
"The order to break the alliance came through a channel I've never seen before," he says without looking at me. "Not from Marco directly. From someone who contacted Marco through a hidden back channel."
"The people above both families."
"You know about them."
"We decoded Kreiss's files. We found the connections. We know the war was engineered."
He nods slowly, and something in his shoulders releases half an inch. "Then you know what I'm about to tell you. These people need us fighting so we don’t see what they’re building."
"What are they building?"
"I don't know the specifics." He pulls a cigarette from a pack on the dash and lights it.
His hands are steady enough to hold the lighter, which means he's not as far gone as he looks.
"I know money is moving into construction projects on the eastern seaboard.
Contracts being signed with private security firms, medical suppliers, educational consultants.
That combination doesn't make sense for any legitimate business I've ever seen. "
Educational consultants. Construction projects. Medical suppliers. A new school being built with security infrastructure and medical facilities attached. The Replication Initiative isn't just a concept. It's already being built.
"There's more," Ferrara says. He takes a drag on the cigarette and blows smoke out the cracked window.
"Whoever gave Marco the order to pull the alliance also gave him a name.
A man who's supposed to mediate the new territorial arrangement.
Someone from outside both families, positioned as a neutral party. "
"What name?"
"Billone. Matteo Billone."
I don't react the way I want to react, which would involve punching the dashboard and saying several words that would make Savannah proud. Instead I sit very still and let the name settle into the space next to everything else I've learned about Aurelio's bastard son in the last twenty-four hours.
Yesterday he was a photograph on Alexandra's screen. A jawline I recognized and a trust fund that smelled wrong. Today he's being inserted between both families as a mediator, which is a word that means peacemaker in normal life and means positioning asset in the world I actually live in.
"You know the name," Ferrara says, reading my face the way men in our world read faces, by the things that don't move when they should.
"I've heard it."
"Then you know more than I do. Marco's treating him as legitimate.
Connected, credentialed, the kind of man who brokers deals between organizations without getting dirty.
But legitimate men don't appear in mafia territory disputes backed by people who financed trafficking pipelines.
That's not diplomacy. That's placement."
Matteo isn't mediating. He's being inserted. Placed between the families by the same people who engineered the war, because a mediator has access to both sides and access is what intelligence networks run on.
"I need to tell Leone," I say.
"Tell him everything. And tell him that Renzo Ferrara is not Marco Castillo's man anymore.
" He looks at me, and the man I'm seeing isn't the underboss who sat across from me at Marcello's with a neutral face and a calculated silence.
This man is scared in the way that competent men get scared, not of violence but of irrelevance.
Of discovering that his entire career was spent serving a system that was itself serving something bigger.
"I don't know what's coming, Emilio. But I know it's bigger than both families, and I know the people behind it don't care which of us survives. "
"Renzo."
"What?"
"Thank you. For reaching out. For trusting me with this."
"Don't thank me. I'm not being noble. I'm being practical.
Whatever these people are building, it's bad for business.
My business. Your business. Everyone's business.
" He finishes the cigarette and drops it in the ashtray with the others.
"One last thing, since you are going down this road.
I had a daughter once. She disappeared when she was eight and we never found her.
If… if you ever see or hear anything in your travels… please phone me."