Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Luca
The bedroom door clicks shut.
The phone keeps buzzing.
I pull it out. Valentino. I knew before I looked.
I step away from the counter, toward the window. I pull the curtain back an inch and let it fall.
"Yeah."
"Voss."
"Go."
"Dominik Voss. Born Krakow. Came over at nineteen on a student visa, didn't leave when it ran out, married up before anyone could put a hand on him. Furniture import. The furniture is real. The shipping containers it comes in aren't always furniture."
"For who."
"That's the part. He ran with Andrzej Kalinowski out of Avondale. Small. Two trucks. They were moving for the Albanians out of Cicero — the Beka people. Not made guys. Bag handlers. Voss was the face. Andrzej was the muscle."
I let that sit.
"Voss got shot two years ago in an alley off Western. Cops called it a robbery. Wasn't. He was skimming. Beka people decided he was skimming."
"They get the money back."
"No. That's the thing. They didn't find it. Wallet on him. Watch on him. Wedding ring on him. Robbery." He makes a sound. "Sloppy."
"How much."
"Nobody knows. Numbers I'm hearing are between two and four hundred thousand. Could be more. Could be cleaner than that. Could be houses, could be jewelry, could be a hole in the ground in Indiana. Two years and nobody's found it."
I pull the curtain again. The street is quiet.
"So they're still looking."
"They're still looking."
"Okay."
"Luca. Now you."
I walk to the couch and sit on the arm of it. My shoulder pulls. I let it.
"A woman stole my car."
"A what?"
"A woman with a kid. Yesterday. Walgreens on Ashland. I was inside getting the bandages. She was in the lot trying door handles. She got to mine. It was unlocked. The keys were in it."
There is a silence.
"Luca."
"I know."
"In Chicago we do not leave the keys in the fucking car. For God's sake."
"I know."
He breathes out.
"Go on."
"There's a tracker in the car. Got a cab. Followed the tracker to a motel in Brighton Park. Place on Archer."
"Alone. With one fucking arm."
"I had the other arm too."
"Go on."
"I went up to the room. She was in there with the kid.
She thought I was the one chasing her. Threw a shoe at me.
I was talking to her. The kid was crying.
A guy comes in behind me. Puts a gun on the back of my neck.
Says she's his wife. She doesn't say anything.
She looks at me and tells him to back off.
He tells her to give me my keys. She does. "
"And then."
"I went out the door. Turned around. Put my forehead in his face. Took the gun off him. Knocked him out."
"With?"
"Forehead. Then twice with the hand. He said something to me before I put him down. Wasn't English. Wasn't Italian. Could've been Albanian. Could've been one of the others over there. I’m not good at Eastern Europe languages."
"Beka people."
"Probably."
He breathes out again. Longer this time.
"Where are they now? The woman and the kid."
"My place."
"Luca. You took them home?"
"I took them to the apartment under Bruschetti. Not the other one."
"That is still your place."
"Yes."
"And the woman."
"Her name is Gemma. The kid is Nina. She's four."
"And?"
"She's Dominik Voss's widow."
Silence. He does not say anything for a long time.
"How the fuck?"
I do not answer.
"How the fuck does this — Luca. How does this kind of shit walk into your life right now?"
I do not answer.
He says something in Italian under his breath. Then he says it again, louder. He keeps cursing.
I wait.
The bedroom door is still shut. I can hear Nina's voice on the other side of it, a small bright sound, asking something. Gemma answers. I cannot hear the words.
"How are you?"
I know why he is asking. He is not asking about the shoulder.
"I'm managing it. For now."
"Okay."
He waits.
"She asked me to take her to her parents'. They're in Wheaton."
"Good."
I do not say anything.
"That's good, Luca. That's the right move. You drop her at the curb. You drive away. You go home, you sit on your couch and you finish whatever fucking book you're reading. Your shoulder heals and we forget about Dominik Voss, his widow, his kid and the money the Beka people are looking for."
I do not say anything.
"Luca."
"Yeah."
"Something is telling me you are not going to take her to Wheaton."
I look at the bedroom door.
"I'm not taking her to Wheaton."
"Fuck."
"I can't drop her at the curb."
"You drive her there. You open the door. She gets out. She walks. You drive."
"She asked me to take her there because she doesn't think the way we think."
"What does that even mean?"
"It means she's scared. It means in her head Wheaton is far away and that's where you go when you're in trouble. She doesn't think they know where her family lives. She doesn't think there's a guy who might already drove past it once just to look."
I stop.
"She doesn't know what they know about her. She thinks if she gets far enough west the problem stays east."
"Then you tell her."
"And then what? She knocks on her mother's door anyway because she has nowhere else. She's not going to sit in a stranger's apartment forever waiting for me to handle it. She walks her four-year-old up the driveway and someone is sitting in a car at the end of the block."
The line is quiet.
"Luca. This is not your fucking problem."
He is not shouting yet.
I do not answer.
"This is not your fucking problem. You hear me? The Beka people are not your problem. Dominik Voss is not your problem. Some woman who married the wrong boy is not your problem."
I look at the bedroom door.
"This is not your fucking problem."
Now he is shouting.
"I gave you six weeks. I gave you the time. I told you, stay home, read your fucking books, do your fucking pushups with the left hand, do not pick anything up. Do not. Pick. Anything. Up. And the first day I let you out of my sight to go to Walgreens you come back with two people."
I do not answer.
"Luca. Are you listening?"
I do not raise my voice. I never have. When I have a thing to say to a man, I have other ways. The gun is one. The hand is one. The voice stays the voice.
"You called it a vacation."
"What."
"You called it a vacation. Six weeks ago. In the car. You said, take a vacation, Luca."
"I did not mean—"
"I'm on vacation. I'll do what I want with it."
"Luca."
"I'm going to do whatever I need to do to keep this woman and this kid away from men like us."
The line goes still.
He is breathing.
"Luca. Don't let your past run her."
I do not say anything.
"You hear me? She is not —. She is not a thing you owe. You don't owe her. You don't owe the kid. That's not what this is."
I do not say anything.
I hang up.
I set the phone face down on the arm of the couch.
I get up, walk to the window. I put both hands flat against the frame, one on each side of the glass, and lean my weight forward onto them. The right one shakes a little when it takes the weight. I let it shake. I let the shoulder pull. I breathe out through my nose, long.
I close my eyes.
Memories do not ask before they come in. They just come in.
Gemma
I sit on the bed with my hands flat on my knees and look at the shoes lined up on the floor.
White sneakers. A pair of small grey boots with a fleece lining. A pink pair with a strap. Three sizes, because he didn't know which would fit. The tags are still on. I lift one and turn it over and the number on the sole makes me put it down again like it burned.
There's no way. Not the shoes. Not the coats. Not the bear that's somewhere in the second bag, because Nina's screaming about it now, that high happy sound she used to make in the kitchen in Madison when she was two and the dishwasher rinse cycle caused her laughing.
I pull the bag closer and find the bear at the bottom. Soft brown, a little ribbon round its neck. I hold it on my lap.
"Mommy, Mommy." Nina is at the bedroom door before I've worked out what to say. "Did you see? Did you see the bear? Is it for me?"
"I don't know, baby."
"Can I ask him?"
"Nina—"
She's already gone.
I'm up before I mean to be, the bear still in my hand, padding down the hallway. The wood floor pops under my heel. I round the corner and there she is in the middle of the living room, her chin tipped up to look at him.
Luca's by the counter. Coat off. Sleeve pushed up to the elbow on his left side, tattoos running down to the back of his hand. He's holding a coffee mug.
He goes still when he sees her.
"Is the bear for me, Mr Luca?" Nina says.
He looks down at her. He doesn't say anything. After a beat he nods, one nod, like she's asked him to confirm a delivery.
"Thank you, Mr Luca." She runs the two steps between them and wraps both arms around his leg. "Thank you thank you thank you."
His hand lifts halfway off the counter and stops there. Just hangs in the air over her head. I can see his fingers, the way they don't quite know where to go.
He looks at me.
Whatever I have on my face must be bad, because his eyes change.
I'm afraid. My hands are getting cold around the bear. My chest is tight.
Luca clears his throat. It's a small sound, careful, like he's testing if it still works.
"Nina." His voice is low. He doesn't crouch. He stays where he is at the counter. "Go to the bedroom for a minute. Your mom and I need to talk."
"Okay, Mr Luca." She lets go of his leg. She turns and runs at me. I catch her on instinct. She lifts both arms for the bear and I hand it down. She presses her face into its fur and walks past me down the hallway like she's done this her whole life.
The bedroom door clicks shut.
Luca sets the mug down on the counter. He does it slowly, the way you put down something that might tip. He still hasn't moved his feet.
"Sit down," he says.
"I'd rather stand."
"Gemma."
It's the first time he's said my name. The vowels are wrong in his mouth, foreign, the m softer than an American m. I don't know why I notice that.
"I'm sorry." The word leaves before I have it lined up with the next one.
"About Nina. She doesn't usually—she's never done that, she doesn't hug people, she barely lets the lady at the post office wave at her, and I don't know why she did that, she just—she saw the bear and she got excited and I should've stopped her, I'm sorry if she made you uncomfortable, I didn't mean for her to grab you like that, she's four, she doesn't—"
"Gemma."
"—understand about personal space, I'm working on it, I am, and I'll talk to her, I'll tell her she can't do that, she can't just go up to people and—"
"Gemma."
"—and I know you didn't sign up for any of this, the shoes, the bear, none of it, you didn't have to do any of that and now she's hanging off your leg—I'm sorry, I'll pay you back, all of it, the clothes, the food, the—"
"Stop fucking apologising."
I close my mouth.
He's still by the counter. He hasn't moved at all. His left hand is on the wood, fingers spread, and the black ink runs down from under his sleeve to the knuckles, letters I can't read from here, a thin line down the side of his throat that I want to follow with my eyes and won't let myself.
It isn't fair. It really isn't. A man shouldn't be allowed to stand in a kitchen at ten in the morning looking like that. Not when I've spent months convinced the part of me that noticed men had dried up and gone wherever the dead parts go.
It hasn't. I can tell by the way my mouth has gone dry.
Great. This is great. I'm in a stranger's apartment and I'm standing here cataloguing the line of a jaw.