Chapter 12 Maria #3
“Work’s the only thing that’s going to drive you insane if you keep at it while also carrying all that burden on your shoulders. Fourteen days, you’re suspended with pay. Okay? I’m not hearing anything else.”
“Why suspend me, though?”
“So your sick days and leaves aren’t affected, genius,” he said calmly.
“It’s a medical suspension. If that’s not a thing, I’ve made it a thing.
When you come back, your office will still be there for you, and so will your work.
You gotta take some time off. Visit a therapist. Talk it out. Do what you gotta do.”
“Thanks, Mr. Raymond,” I said, giving him a half-hug, seeing as how we were both sitting on the same side of the desk. “You….”
“Don’t mention it, kid. Personally, I don’t believe in therapy because I find that it’s just talk, talk, talk, but this modern generation, your generation, I’ve heard they can really heal with that sort of thing.”
“I’ll go do that, then.”
“This guy, Elio,” Mr. Raymond said. “He really did that? Drove with a cavalcade to come to your rescue?”
“Yeah. He did,” I said.
“Then there are two things that you need to know about him. One, he’s more powerful than he lets on. Two, he’s sincere about you. Now go do with that information what you will.”
“What do you mean more powerful than he lets on?”
“A guy can’t summon twelve powerful young men within an hour’s notice unless he’s the most powerful of them all.
Everything you’ve told me, including his troubles with his father and his excommunication, point toward his power, not his unruly behavior.
Hell, every young man is unruly these days.
His father, it appears, wants to rein him in.
However, the choice of his friends and his sudden ability to make insane amounts of money suggest that he’s not someone to be taken lightly. ”
“Why would I ever take him lightly?” I asked, confused.
“Not you. The world. The mob bosses, his father, Dresden Harrow, all those guys. They think that because he’s a young man, he’s foolish.
It appears that Elio Romano is the opposite of what they all think.
It’s because he’s a young man that he’s wise.
Just like you. I never say it to your face, but I always mention it behind your back to other reporters.
You’re the best of us. The way you write, the way you research, it’s not like you have a knack for this thing.
God no. When you came here, you weren’t able to write a thousand words in one hour.
But now, look at you. If you keep at it, there might be a Pulitzer in your future.
That’s grit. That’s resolve. You went and did the hard thing.
You learned, you applied, and then you became our best. I don’t know Elio well enough to make the same assumption about him, but from what you’ve told me, he knows one thing well.
Whether it’s a mafia family or a business, the biggest thing you have at your disposal is networking.
PR. Knowing the right people. He’s done that.
You should ask him about that sometime. Maybe he’ll tell you something. ”
“Well, there is one thing I know,” I said, showing him my screen, showing him all the articles that I’d researched before I got kidnapped. I’d basically done a reverse image search and looked up different keywords.
I hadn’t had the chance to mention that to Elio just yet, and if I was being honest, in the wake of my kidnapping, I had forgotten. But now, when Mr. Raymond was telling me everything, it all came back to me.
Elio Romano had been unsuccessfully trying to conduct business all over the West Coast, trying to sell yachts, private planes, and custom vehicles.
He’d been trying to do that for several years now.
He’d left a trail. Even though in that trail he had changed his name to Sam Freeman, and there had not been a single sale, he’d been trying for three to four years.
This sale that he was talking about, the yacht party in Miami, was his first success after years of failure.
Maybe that’s why he was angry with his father.
That if he could turn his life around, do the hard thing, make money legally (and I had double-checked to see if it was legal or not; it was completely legal), then why did his father have to stick with his mafia lifestyle, his old-world ways, his morally gray dealings?
For I had also looked up Don Romano, and I had found out that despite whatever he said, the man still did illegal business.
It was just very well hidden. I had created a report on all the things that he was doing that were still illegal, and I didn’t have the heart to share that with anyone.
It was a pretty dead-to-rights document, detailing the tax evasion, the money laundering.
And that’s why Elio had gotten himself excommunicated from the family.
But that created more problems than it solved.
For even if there was no one coming after Elio anymore, especially after he displayed power in front of Dresden Harrow, there was still his father to contend with. And now that Elio was not a part of the family anymore, maybe his father would do something rash.
Now there remained the matter of telling all of this to Elio, and warning him before things got worse.
“That’s payload. That’s a lot of dirt there, Maria. I would suggest you forget all of this. Delete it. That way it doesn’t track to you. Don Romano is a dangerous man, and every game he plays is a dangerous game. Leave it. Forget you ever even researched all this.”
That much was clear to me. Don Romano played dangerous games, and not just in his business. Whatever his intentions with the fake bachelor auction were, he must have planned something brutal and binding for Elio. It was a good thing I was there.
He’d saved my life twice.
Now it fell to my shoulders to save his life.