9. Nico
NICO
“You fucking bitch.”
I roll onto my back, switch my phone to speaker, and throw an arm over my face. “Good morning, Alessia.”
“Are you hungover? You sound shitty.”
“I just woke up.”
She scoffs. “Nico, it’s eight in the morning over there. I’ve already cleared my inbox, finished my kickboxing class, and got a blowout.”
“Sounds like you’re running late to the awards ceremony.”
“You don’t get awards for doing the bare minimum.”
“We have very different ideas about the concept of bare minimum.”
“Tell me about it. I always assumed the bare minimum meant telling your big sister when you picked out a wife.”
A smear of red lipstick flashes in my mind.
I manage to sit up, which my brain rewards with a heavy roll of nausea. A shit ton of mimosas and a few shots of whiskey right before bed will do that to you. “I picked out a wife.”
“The worst one possible, apparently. Papà was pissed.”
I smile.
“Stop,” Alessia says, sounding disgusted. “I can hear you smirking over the phone. This is serious, Nico.”
I laugh and heave myself out of bed, wincing at my throbbing temples. I need coffee and bread and an excuse to sweat out some of this alcohol. I drag on a black hoodie and sweatpants while Alessia chatters.
“Are you bringing her to New York? Ugh, Papà’s going to make me hang out with her. Is she cool? Nico, I swear to god.”
I find a thick coat and boots by the front door and slip them on. “She’s cool. You’ll like her.”
Alessia makes a doubtful sound. “Mamma and I want to fly down soon. Like, this month.”
I lock the apartment door behind me, picturing the bagel shop down the block. “How is she?”
“The same. She got a new tennis instructor.”
I shiver. “Do you think this one will try to give us life lessons like the last one?”
“God, I hope not.”
Alessia tells me how her next art exhibit is going—one of her artists had taken the theme of decay and ran with it. Flies had swarmed the art gallery for days until Alessia tracked down the source. The artist had hidden chunks of raw meat inside their piece.
“So I got him blacklisted from every art gallery in New York. The next time someone buys his art, it’ll be under a bridge.” Alessia laughs. It’s not a nice sound.
I groan as I turn the corner. My bagel cravings spin to nausea.
“What?” she says. “The guy fucking sucked anyway—”
“No, it’s not that.” Giovanni’s huge form takes up most of the bagel shop window.
I consider turning tail and scrounging up something at my place, but a deeper, stronger need to piss off Giovanni at every opportunity takes the helm instead.
Maybe I’ll throw up on him. “I have to go. Your boyfriend’s here. ”
“He’s not my boyfriend, and I want details on your wife next time I call you! Hobbies, interests, favorite wine!”
I hang up as I enter the bagel shop, the smell of warm bread and coffee wrapping around me. A few retirees are sitting around the café tables, nursing their lattes at a leisurely pace.
In the corner of the restaurant, Giovanni’s reading an honest-to-god newspaper and sipping from a tiny mug. He pretends not to notice me shooting him a dirty look as I stand in line to order.
After I grab my bagel and a massive coffee, I sit down at the table next to him.
“Are they bringing steam engines to the big city, Grandpa?”
Giovanni folds the paper with a beleaguered sigh. “You have a job tonight.”
“Round two with the Irish? Or gambling with the Russians?”
“Neither. You will take the contents from one of your warehouses to a shipping truck and send it off to the Russians. As a show of friendship.”
“Kind of seems the opposite of a job. Money’s supposed to flow in, not out.”
“Most of this business is maintaining relationships. Something you need to learn. Stefano will join you.”
I take a long drink of my coffee. “Pass. Tell him he can find the nearest dog shit and eat it. And send me pictures.”
Giovanni waits until an old man passes our table to continue, “You picked your wife, which means you picked her family. If they are not going to be of any use to you, then I will remove them.”
Valeria probably wouldn’t like that. Her family’s shit, but she seems determined to protect them.
Between that and her pie-in-the-sky ideals about her work, I have the sneaking suspicion that she might be more virtuous than her scowls and all-black wardrobe would suggest. And if she is?
If someone that good exists in a world like ours?
It’s a little too philosophical for a mind still mostly soaked in alcohol and not nearly enough caffeine.
“Why?” I ask, sipping from my coffee and dragging myself back to the present. “Salvatore already punished them. They can be just as useless as they were before, but from a distance.”
“The Russians want them gone. They are a reminder of mistakes made. You will need to prove to Salvatore they are better off alive than not.”
I tear off a hunk of bagel. Why would the Russians give a fuck? They already had me kill their traitor. They wouldn’t care if we had a few defective Italians in our midst.
But maybe this is for the best. Alessia brought up a good point—I need to learn more about Valeria, and what better source than her own family?
If Stefano doesn’t have any useful information, I can invent a reason to beat the piss out of him.
And if he does? It wouldn’t hurt to keep Valeria on her toes.
Maybe I’ll surprise her with her favorite wine, and she’ll pull me into the nearest bathroom for another round of let’s-just-get-this-out-of-our-system sex.
“By the way,” Giovanni adds as he stands, the chair scraping underneath him. “I like this place. Good coffee.”
“Of course you do. I have great taste.”
By the time I get to the warehouse, it’s pitch black and freezing cold outside.
I park and watch the men move boxes from a nondescript warehouse to a nondescript shipping truck, great white clouds billowing from their mouths like steam from hot engines.
It reminds me of all the shit I used to do before I went to jail. For all the power and luxury the Family gives you, there’s a lot of scraping and clawing in the dark to hold on to those gifts.
After I left prison, I was finally able to see it all for what it was—the slow, dreary machinations of evil. Any man in the Family would scoff at a 9-to-5 job, at grinding themselves down for a corporation, but this work is the exact same, sans health insurance.
I step out of the car and slam the door shut behind me. Stefano’s head snaps up, and he moves a little faster once he sees it’s me.
“Hey boss, we got half the boxes packed up already. We should be done in a couple hours,” he says once I approach.
I glance at the other men—Italian faces, probably the soldiers from Aceto’s old crew.
They nod to me with quiet respect as I catch their eyes.
I imagine they’re not thrilled about the change in power, but they’re smart enough to understand they can’t do anything about it, and that I’m not the sort of man they should disappoint.
As much as I hate my father, the family name comes in handy once in a while.
“What’s in the boxes?”
Stefano’s eyes go wide—for a moment, I spot the resemblance to his sister. “Uh, we haven’t checked yet, boss. We were waiting for you to arrive.”
Of course they haven’t—it’s easy to do bad shit when you can turn a blind eye.
“Well, there’s no time like the present,” I say. I pull out my pocket knife and flip it open.
Stefano and the rest of the men stop to watch as I walk to the nearest box and slice open the clear tape seal.
Boxes of tightly packed cell phones face me.
“Would you look at that?” I say “A brand new phone.”
I shimmy out a box and wave it at the guys. “Anyone need a new phone?”
None of them take the bait. I wiggle it like a worm on a hook. “Come on, nobody needs a present for their wife? Their kid? What’s the point of doing all this if we can’t skim a little off the top once in a while?”
That, they seem to understand, though they’re still skittish. The nearest guy steps forward, and I pass him the phone. I reached for the next box and hold it out. “Anyone else? Fortune favors the bold.”
One by one, they all take a phone, even Stefano. Once I’m through the top layer, I keep digging into the box.
Jackpot. A tightly wrapped brown package, about the size of a loaf of bread.
With the tip of my knife, I carve a small incision into the homemade wrapping until I’ve broken through.
White powder on the inside. I scoop a microscopic amount onto my knife, sniff it, and taste it, making sure to rub a bit under my lip.
A bitter, metallic taste numbs my gums.
Cocaine. Probably millions of dollars of cocaine in all of these boxes underneath the stolen phones.
I flick my knife closed and face the men. “I think I’m feeling generous tonight—how about all of you go home for an early night and share your presents with your loved ones. Stefano and I will handle the rest of this.”
Stefano’s face goes pale, but the rest of the guys stand up a little straighter.
They figured out that if anyone’s getting punished tonight, it’ll be Stefano.
“Thanks, boss,” a few tell me before they all scuttle away into the darkness like cockroaches.
Stefano’s jaw is tight, but he doesn’t say a word.
“You got a knife?” I ask.
He looks a little nervous as he answers, “I saw box cutters in the warehouse.”
“Why don’t you go grab one?”
The night air is almost completely silent except for the distant sounds of the city and chunks of ice in the lake cracking against the shoreline. It’d be almost peaceful if it weren’t for all the work stretching out long before me.
I wonder what Valeria’s doing tonight. Is she watching one of the movies she likes, trying to push thoughts of me out of her head?
She doesn’t seem the type to curl in her bed and moon over a man, but it still gives me the warm fuzzies to think about.
Stefano jogs back to me.
“I have a very special task for you,” I say, enjoying the sight of him squirm—nothing like his stoic sister. “But first, a question: How’s your relationship with your sister?”
Stefano meets my eye deliberately. “We’re thick as thieves. We’ve got our differences, but we know family always comes first.”
A canned response if I’ve ever heard one.
I nod, fiddling with the tip of my knife. “That’s good to hear, Stefano. Tell me, what are her hobbies?”
“Her hobbies, boss?”
“Yeah. Her hobbies, interests, favorite wine?”
For a moment, I can almost spot the panic behind his eyes.
“She works a lot, boss. I think she doesn’t have much time for hobbies. She mostly comes home and goes straight to sleep.”
“Thick as thieves, huh?”
Stefano laughs awkwardly. “What can I say? She’s an easy-going woman.”
I almost laugh with him. Valeria is anything but easy-going.
“What about her favorite food?” I point my knife at his skull. “I’m starting to think there’s just dust bunnies up there.”
His face goes a shade paler with each passing second. A vein sticks out in his forehead. “BLTs,” he finally blurts. “Nonna would make them for us when we were kids. She loved them.”
I make a noncommittal sound. He’s clearly a dead end. So desperate to be a part of the Family, but can’t even pay the slightest attention to his own blood relatives.
“Alright. Let’s do something a little different with the boxes.” I point to a spot in front of the truck. “Leave them there.”
Stefano does as he’s told, though he does a shitty job at hiding his curiosity. He brings a box from the warehouse and sets it on the ground in front of me.
I squat in front of the box, cut it open with my knife, and dig through the phones until I get to the drugs. I set the packet to the side and gesture to Stefano. “Keep them coming.”
Understanding dawns on his face. We’re doing something that’s going to get him into trouble. I wait on my heels, looking to see if he’ll grow a spine. He pinches his lips together and obediently heads toward the warehouse.
We fall into a steady rhythm—Stefano brings me the boxes, I slice them open, pull out the drugs, loosely fold the top back over, and set the boxes in the shipping truck.
We work for hours until early morning sunlight pours over us, grey and weak.
I wonder if Valeria’s awake already, getting ready for work.
I wonder if she’s sore from yesterday. If she’s wearing our ring.
“That’s the last of them,” Stefano announces.
“Good,” I say. “Now you’re going to help me with this part.”
I stab into the packet with my knife and saw an ‘X’ on the top and bottom sides until pure cocaine spills out onto the concrete.
Ignoring Stefano’s strangled sound, I take the package, walk to the shoreline, and hurl it as far as I can into the black waters of Lake Michigan.
When I face Stefano, he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Uh, boss, I don’t think…”
“That’s right. You don’t. Hurry up, we need to be done soon.”
Together, we work to slice into all the packages and throw them into the lake, where they sink beneath the waters.
When we’re done, Stefano is sweating, and I don’t think it’s just from the honest work.
“You got the keys to the truck?”
“Yeah.” He pulls them out, probably dying to hand them off to me.
“Great. Take the truck where it needs to go.”
“Me?” he squeaks.
I tilt my head slightly, giving him the unnerving look Father sometimes gives people to make them talk. “Still have no idea where Valeria got that bruise?”
He looks like he might cry. “No.”
“Then you better hurry up. You’re running late.”