Chapter 11 Elio
Iwas so angry I could kill someone.
How could my father pull the rug out from under me like that?
I stormed across the room to where he sat, completely ignoring Uncle Lucas’s warnings about not going in the room.
My father sat there behind his desk, smug, smoking a cigar, looking at me with amusement in his eyes.
“You did this,” I said, slamming my fist on the table. “You put Jimmy on my path.”
“I did no such thing,” he said. “Before this whole thing began, I made you a promise. I told you I was not going to help you with your mess. Those were my security guards. Not yours. I told them to stand down. What’s the matter? I thought you were the hot shit. Or was it hotshot? I forget.”
“You had no right to do that, Father,” I said, glaring.
“When your mother died, I made her a promise,” he said.
“Don’t you bring her into this!”
“You will stand there, and you will listen to me. I will not simply sit and watch you waste your life in these foolish endeavors of yours!”
“Foolish!?” I shouted at him, even though some part of me really felt bad that I was shouting at my own father. “She could have been in danger!”
“And that was your responsibility!” he shouted back. “You cannot be a don if you cannot take responsibility for your people. Do you not understand that!?”
“I don’t even want to be a don,” I said, throwing my pistol on his desk. “That’s your thing. You can have it. Find someone else to be your next in line. I’m done.”
“Just like that? At the slightest friction you quit?”
“What you think of as slight friction…” I began, closing my fist, and then stopping in my tracks. He didn’t deserve a speech. I was done. I threw my credit cards, the ones he had given me, the ones he loved to freeze every time I sneezed wrong, and then I left.
“If you leave, Elio, there is no coming back,” he said, still sitting in his chair.
“I know that,” I said before closing the door behind me.
“Are you seriously thinking about doing this!?” Uncle Lucas pleaded as I packed my clothes.
“Thinking? No. Doing? Yes,” I said bitterly, packing up my perfumes, my underwear, and my belts.
All my suits, clothes, and shoes fit in three suitcases. That was all I was going to need. I dragged them out of the house, Uncle Lucas and Robert following me, both of them trying to convince me to stay.
Robert grabbed me by my cuff and wheeled me around. I didn’t stop him from doing that. The man was practically a brother to me.
“You crazy?! There’s so much heat on you, and you think that’s the best time to call it quits?”
“I can deal with it on my own,” I said.
“And what happens if you can’t?” Uncle Lucas asked.
“I have not even considered that possibility. And it shall not happen,” I said.
“At least take your car,” Uncle Lucas said, pointing at the Rolls.
“That’s my father’s car,” I said, putting my suitcase in the Uber that had pulled up at the door.
“All of that is my father’s. Well, good.
He can have it all. He undermines me at every turn, creates hurdles, thinks it's tough love… It’s about time he learns what happens when you don’t give a guy some breathing room. ”
“But you don’t have anywhere to go!” Robert shouted at me as I got in the car.
“You can tell my father that as of an hour ago, my yacht sales went through. That I’ve made that money entirely on my own. And I shall be using it to start my own life. A life free from crime.”
I didn’t know it then, but I’d come to bite my tongue and eat crow very soon.
“Where to, boss?”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped at the Uber driver. My first Uber ride and I was sure he was going to give me a two-star rating because of that. “Take me to Brooklyn.”
“Anywhere in particular?”
I gave him Maria’s address. And then I sank in the seat and opened my phone, watching the numbers on my own bank account. It was funny: when there were billions in my account, I never actually looked at the numbers. Those billions never felt like mine.
But these millions, 4.17 million dollars to be precise, felt every bit mine. Earned. They were not a lot, but they were enough for me to settle down, think, clear my mind, and then start afresh.
It was forty minutes later that we came to Maria’s place.
“Sorry for snapping at you, man,” I said, paying the Uber in cash with a generous tip. I didn’t have a car just yet, and wasn’t used to driving without a chauffeur. I might be using Uber for a few more days. I didn’t want to have a bad rating.
Look at me, thinking like a commoner. I wondered what Maria would say about that.
“Hey, brother, it’s New York. It would be weird if you didn’t snap at me,” he said, taking the cash. “Don’t worry, you’re good.”
I watched him drive off, leaving my three suitcases on the curb. I then took my suitcases and climbed up the stairs. It was an impossible feat, lugging all three of them at the same time, but I was doing it. The thought of seeing Maria again was giving me strength, quite literally.
All that strength drained from my arms, my luggage falling on the floor, when I saw that her door was kicked open. There was no one inside her apartment. In the living room, there were signs of a struggle.
This could not have been Jimmy Donaldson. I had scared him good.
The question remained: who was this?
I instinctively took my phone out to call Robert, but Robert, along with the rest of my father’s forces and resources, was off-limits.
But someone was calling my phone. An unknown number. I picked up the call.
“My man in the street tells me you’ve made it to her apartment,” the voice said.
“That’s good. That’s what I like to hear.
I imagine there’s some kind of panic setting in your heart at the thought of what I might be doing to her right now.
I imagine it makes for a lovely combination with the confusion that you’re experiencing as to who I am. ”
“Listen, motherfucker,” I said, my voice low. “If you touch a hair on her head….”
“I’ll die? Come on. Be more creative than that, Elio.
Hell, if you’re not going to be creative, let me be creative.
I’ll give you my exact location. I just heard from a bird that your father has basically fucked you over, and you’re on your own.
A mafia prince on his own. I wanna see that.
I wanna see that with my own eyes. So here, I’ve just sent you a message, and I want you to come and meet this lovely girl that I’ve got tied up.
I’m going to kill her. And then I’m going to kill you.
Now here’s the creative part, the funny part, the part that makes me all giddy. You can’t do a thing to stop me.”
I cut the call and looked at the message he had sent me.
North Creek. Jimmy’s warehouse.
So Jimmy was behind this somehow.
I put my luggage inside her apartment, closed the door, and checked to see if it was shut. I didn’t have the keys to her apartment, so I left it unlocked. I went down to the landlord’s office.
Lucky for me, he was there.
I told him what happened, how someone barged into her apartment and kidnapped her. I asked him to go up and lock the door to her apartment. In the meantime, I used his computer and ran the footage from the cameras, hoping to see who this guy was.
And there he was.
Appearing in the hallway outside her apartment, I could see his face; I could make it out clearly.
Dresden Harrow, the East Coast kingpin.
“Do you want to file a police report?” the landlord asked, coming into the room, throwing me the spare key to her apartment.
“That’s only going to make things worse,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”
I sat in her apartment, dialing number after number on my phone. It was one thing that my father was undermining me. It was another thing that someone like Dresden Harrow was undermining me. He didn’t know who I was or what I was capable of.
And that’s why I was not going to visit the warehouse alone. I had a nasty surprise lying in wait for Dresden.
I could have hurried over to his warehouse in a move of desperation. But then I’d be going without backup.
An hour later, backup arrived. They arrived in their splendid cars, all of them parked by the curb. No less than a dozen.
I went down to meet them.
“Let’s roll, Elio,” James Harrow said, getting out of his Maybach. Behind him were eleven more cars, each of them my friends, the same friends with whom I’d thrown the yacht party in Miami. It was no coincidence that they were all in New York.
We were, after all, the sons of the dons and kingpins of the East Coast.
We called ourselves The Rejects.
Pretty much every single one of us had gone to an Ivy League college, gotten disillusioned by what our fathers were doing, and then tried to make it on our own.
Including James Harrow, Dresden Harrow’s son. The bitter irony of it all was that James had been excommunicated from the family by his father three years ago. He’d been rolling with me since then. Him and the rest.
There was Ronny Oslow, Don Oslow’s son. Then there was Bernard Mercetti, Don Mercetti’s son. Don Mercetti was the head of the Mercetti family in New Jersey. There were two twin brothers, Ethan and Nathan, both of them Don Lazlo’s sons. Don Lazlo operated out of Maine.
Just twelve disenfranchised, disillusioned sons who had made a pact with each other. That we’d break the old patterns and make new ones.
Ethan and Nathan had made a deal with the yacht manufacturers.
Ronny Oslow had been the one with the biggest reputation.
He’d invited the guests. Bernard Mercetti had organized the entire party.
He knew the right party people. One would think that him being from New Jersey would make him boring, but that was hardly the case.
Bernard lived in Los Angeles most of the time.
The rest of the time, he lived in New York.
If you wanted a lavish party thrown, Berny was your guy.
I was the one who had made the sales pitch to the prospective customers.
And of course, James Harrow had facilitated them in their purchase by giving them the option of paying in untraceable cryptocurrency.