Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Giovanni
“The inflammation in the joint is — The nerve damage from the original injury creates a compounding effect —”
The doctor is explaining why he has failed again.
I listen. I stand at the window with my hands in my pockets, and I listen to a man building an argument for his own inadequacy, and I watch the reflection of the room in the glass.
Lucia, my sister, is in the bed, propped against three pillows, her face the color of old candle wax, her hand gripping the sheet through another wave of it as I listen to the doctor talk.
“Is it better?” I ask.
“The treatment protocol requires time —”
“Is it better?”
“The pain management —”
“The pain management,” I repeat, turning from the window, “is not managing the pain. I can see that from here. So what I’m asking you, and I’d like you to understand that I’m asking only once, is whether the treatment you are providing is making my sister better?”
The doctor’s hands tighten around his bag. He is a small man, competent on paper, with six years at Milan’s top surgical program and two fellowships. The confidence is mostly gone now. It has been for several weeks.
“There are limitations,” he begins, “to what medicine can —”
“I pay you forty thousand euros a month,” I say pleasantly. “I’m not paying you to explain limitations to me.”
Lucia coughs.
The sound of it feels like a blade. Every time she coughs and I see the way her whole thin body braces for it, something in my chest drops.
The doctor is talking again. Something about nerve blockers, about surgical options previously discussed, about how the original injury at the growth plate created a cascade that —
“I think,” I say, “that you might be a fraud.”
He stops. I reach under my jacket.
“The medication you prescribed last month,” I say, turning the gun over in my hand, “she said it wasn’t working.
I told you that three weeks ago. You prescribed the same medication at a higher dose.
She told me last week it still wasn’t working.
” I look at him. “Are you hoping the problem goes away before you admit that you can’t solve it? ”
“Don Mondi, I assure you —”
“Giovanni,” Lucia calls.
I fix my face, and I put the gun away. I turn and look at her.
She is looking at me from the bed with eyes that are too old for her face. Twenty-six years old, my sister, and she looks at me sometimes like she is watching something from a very far distance.
“Angel,” I say.
I whistle once, and Fabiano appears in the doorway with the soundlessness that is one of the few things I genuinely respect about him.
“Escort the doctor out,” I say. “Show him something about what happens if he doesn’t bring better news next time.”
“Please —” The doctor takes a step forward. “Don Mondi, I have a family —”
Fabiano takes him by the arm and moves him toward the door, and the doctor is now pleading. Outside the door, there is a crack, a thud, the acoustics of a body meeting a wall, and the doctor screams before he is quiet.
I sit on the edge of the bed carefully, on her good side, and I take her hand in both of mine. Her fingers are cold. They are always cold now; she runs cold like a candle that is almost out of wax.
“How are you?”
She looks at me.
“Don’t do that,” she says. Her voice is thin, but her eyes are completely present. “Don’t do the voice.”
“What voice?”
“Killing that man is not going to cure me, Giovanni.”
“I wasn’t going to kill him.”
“You had a gun out.”
“I was holding a gun. That’s different.”
“Giovanni.”
I look at her hand in mine. The knuckles are fine-boned; the skin papery in a way it shouldn’t be at twenty-six.
I think about what these hands looked like when she was seven, when she was ten, the small, dimpled knuckles of a child who used to bring me things — drawings, interesting rocks, once a dead bird she wanted to bury properly — as offerings or apologies or both.
“Five operations,” she says. “Six years of this. Every time they say maybe, every time they say we’ll try, and I wake up, and it’s the same, and it’s —” She stops. Breathes. “It hurts.”
“I know. I’m going to fix it. There’s a specialist in Zurich, Fabiano has been —”
“Let me go.”
The words arrive in the room and sit there. My hands tighten around hers.
“Angel —”
“Let me go,” she says again. Her voice breaks on the second word. “I’m so tired of hurting. I’m tired of watching you tear the world apart trying to fix something that —”
She stops, and suddenly, her eyes change. She pulls herself back and looks at me like I am a stranger. “Where is he? Where is my brother?”
What is happening?
“Lucia —”
“Where is he?!”
“Where is my brother? He is this —” she pulls her hand from mine and holds it at the height of a child “— he is this big. Please, please, sir, where is he?”
“Lucia. It’s me. It’s Giovanni. Look at me.”
My voice is shaking.
She grabs my collar with both hands, and the strength in her grip. “Sir, please, please — my brother, he was right here, he was right here, and they —” Her voice is rising, climbing toward the place it goes. “Give me my brother. Give him back. Giovanni!” she screams.
Tears fall from my eyes. I am here; I am right here.
“It’s me. Lucia. I’m here; I’m right —”
Her nails find my jaw, my cheek, dragging, and I don’t move away from it, hold completely still, and I say her name as she is screaming. “Give him back to me! Giovanni! Giovanni!”
My head is spinning as I look at her wild eyes.
Her hands are at my throat, the grip stronger than her wrists should allow, and the door crashes open. Fabiano comes in.
“Stand down.” My voice comes out from somewhere outside the rest of me, aimed at Fabiano and the two men behind him. “Do not touch her. Stand down!”
Fabiano stops, and he looks at her hands on my throat and at me, and they stay where they are.
The hands at my throat go slack suddenly, and she looks at me.
She looks at me for a long moment, and she starts crying. She leans forward, her forehead comes down against my shoulder, and she cries with the whole small weight of herself. I put my arms around her, and I do not make any sound at all.
I am back to seven years old. The apartment on Via Carmelo, the third floor, the way the radiator knocked in winter. The smell of cigarettes and something sour, later learned to be my own fear, baked into the walls over the years, absorbed into everything I owned.
My father is a large man in this memory.
He is always large in this memory, which is the particular distortion of a child’s eye, the way the threat magnifies, the way the body of the person hurting you seems to expand to fill everything available.
He is shouting about something, which is to say nothing specific, which is to say he has been drinking since noon and has found something wrong with the way I breathe.
Lucia is in the corner. She is always trying to make herself small. She learned this before I did, or maybe she was always better at it. She has her knees pulled up, her arms around them, watching him the way you watch something about to explode, calculating the direction of the blast.
He hits me twice. The second one puts me down.
Lucia screams. “Stop it.”
She forgot for one moment to be invisible. She jumps and covers me with her body, and he begins to hit us both.
* * *
Lucia is asleep, and her hand is in mine. Her breathing has steadied into something slow and fragile, and her face in sleep looks younger.
A new doctor is in the room.
“The episodes are psychological,” he says. He has the careful voice of a man choosing every word like he’s crossing ice. “She isn’t losing her mind, Don Mondi. She is reliving. The chronic pain, the disrupted sleep — her brain is returning to the original trauma. The nightmares bleed into waking.”
I look at my sister’s face.
“Can you fix it?”
“We can manage —”
“I didn’t ask if you could manage it.”
“The nerve damage from the original injury is extensive. The surgical options have been —”
“Can you fix it?”
He is quiet for long enough that I have my answer.
“You can diagnose her,” I say. “You can name what is happening to her. But you cannot cure it?”
“Don Mondi, medicine has —”
“Limitations.” I finish it for him.
I wave my hand, and he stops talking. He leaves the room.
I sit with her for a moment longer. I look at the way her chest rises and falls, at the lines around her mouth that pain put there years before they had any business being on a twenty-six-year-old face.
There is a man in Palermo. Old enough that most people in this world have forgotten he exists, which is why he is still useful.
The oldest practicing traditional physician in Italy, the kind who trained before medicine became an industry of liability waivers and managed expectations.
He does not advertise. He does not accept new patients through any channel.
Three people in the world know how to reach him, and I am not yet one of them.
The port corridor generates twelve million annually.
What it generates in access to the routes that run through it, in the contacts who operate along it, and in the infrastructure that cannot be replicated from scratch is worth considerably more.
With these ports, I could raise the money needed to secure a meeting.
That is what the deal with Pavlovich is for. Not the route itself. The route is a means. The route buys me the man in Palermo, and the man in Palermo is the one shot I have left at giving my sister back her leg, her sleep, and the face she had before our father got to it.
If Pavlovich holds his end.
I think about this. I think about the version of events in which Kirill decides the arrangement is not worth honoring, which he might because he is not a stupid man. He will eventually calculate that I am more dangerous with the route than without it. I think about what happens then.
I would take it. Everything I’ve spent two years building toward, the men I placed, the information I have, the particular map of Kirill’s operation that I know better than most of his own people.
I use all of it at once, and I take the port.
I would take whatever else needs taking, and I do not particularly care what the landscape looks like after.
If he hands over the girl, I am patient. I wait. I learn what I can from having her close, which I suspect is a considerable amount. I could wait a month while I raised more money from other sources.
If he doesn’t.
It’s been four days since we met at the warehouse.
Deep in the part of me that runs underneath strategy, deep where the wanting lives, I hope he doesn’t.
I hope he calls my bluff and sends men and gives me the excuse to burn the whole arrangement to the ground and take everything at once.
Lucia gets her doctor, and I get what I came for.
No one knows she exists, and she will be somewhere safe and well cared for.
I will deal with the rest from whatever rubble is left.
She is not in any file, any database, any record that connects to my name. She is the one thing in this world that I have kept completely clean of what I am.
Which means she is the one thing no one can use against me. Which means I can afford to burn it all if I have to.
I tuck the blanket up around her shoulders. I smooth it at the edge. She doesn’t stir.
I lean forward and press my mouth to her forehead. Her skin is cold.
“Dormi,” I say quietly. Sleep.
I stay another moment. Then I stand, I button my jacket, and I walk to the door.
Fabiano is in the corridor. “Kirill’s girl is here, Don Mondi.”
I am still for a moment.
“She came.”
“An hour ago. She’s in the entrance hall. One bag.”
I have met her twice before now. And twice she captivated me: first at Annika’s art gallery, then on the dock. I heard about her, about her strength and stone-cold look. I wasn’t disappointed. She is sharp and smart. Kirill trains them well.
I smooth my jacket. I roll one sleeve down and fasten the cuff. I take the stairs down slowly without hurrying.
She is standing with one bag at her feet, her coat still on. She looks at me when I reach the bottom of the stairs, and her face does exactly nothing.
I take her in because I can. She looks like someone who has slept badly.
She came. Well then, I can have fun with her while Kirill tidies up. Not a bad deal. She intrigues me after all.
“Miss Yana,” I say.
I let the silence sit. Then I smile.
“Welcome.”