Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Luca
Icrossed a line. I know I did.
I don't give a fuck right now.
She opens her mouth.
"Tomorrow," I say.
She closes it.
"We move." I tilt my head toward the door, toward the rest of the building she hasn't seen. "Same building. Second floor. Bigger. Two bedrooms. A kitchen with more than a fucking counter."
She blinks at me, still off-balance from a minute ago.
"I don't —"
"You don't have to do anything. Listen."
She listens. The ponytail's slipped half loose. Pale brown ends against her collarbone. I keep my eyes on her eyes because if I look at her mouth right now I'll do something stupider than what I just did.
"A woman comes tomorrow morning. Hairdresser.
She cuts your hair. Shorter. Different color, if she thinks it'll read.
That's her call." I keep my voice flat because if I dress it up, it lands like a request. "Sunglasses come with her.
Big ones. From tomorrow until this is done, you don't step outside this building without them on. You understand me?"
"Luca —"
"You understand me?"
A pause. Her throat works. "Yes."
"Good." I exhale through my nose. "One more thing. Nina."
Her chin lifts at the name. Quick. She doesn't even know she does it.
"You talk to her tonight. Tomorrow her hair goes short too. Make it a game. New apartment, new haircut, whatever story she'll swallow."
"Her hair?" Gemma's voice goes thin at the edges. "She's four."
"And the man at the motel saw her face and her hair. Both of you. They'll have a photo by now if they didn't already. I want the photo wrong."
She breathes in. Holds it. Lets it go. I see her do the work behind her eyes weighing me. Whatever she finds, she nods once. Small.
"Okay," she says.
Her mouth opens again. Whatever she means to say, I'll never know, because my phone goes off in my back pocket and the bedroom fills with the buzz of it against denim.
I pull it out. Look at the screen.
Bruno.
Of course. I've been waiting on this call since the second I hung up on Valentino yesterday. Valentino runs his mouth to Bruno the way water runs downhill, and Bruno doesn't like to be the last to know what his enforcer's been doing with his evenings. I'd be more surprised if it hadn't come.
I keep my face the way I keep my face. Gemma's watching it anyway.
"Out," I say.
She glances at the phone, then at me. "Is everything —"
"Out, Gemma." I jerk my chin at the door. "Now. Please."
The please is involuntary. I just hear it leave my mouth.
She moves.
"Don."
"You want to tell me," he says, "why the fuck I'm hearing from Valentino about an asshole bleeding in a motel in Brighton Park."
"It's handled."
"That's not what I asked you."
"There was a woman," I say. "A kid. He had a gun on the back of my fucking head."
"And?"
"And I dealt with it."
Bruno breathes out through his teeth. I've heard him do that exactly twice in six years. Both times someone ended up in a trunk.
"Luca. Listen to me very carefully now. You're in Chicago.
You're not in Naples. You're not on assignment for Valentino in some godforsaken corner of Calabria where I can pretend I didn't see what you did.
You are in my fucking city. You touch a man from a family we don't have paper with, you come to me first. Not after. First."
I press the heel of my hand against the window frame. The wood is cold. My thigh's gone stiff from standing too long and I shift my weight off it and the limp tells on me, even with no one watching.
"I didn't plan to bring the family into it."
"Luca." His voice climbs a notch. Not a shout. But the floor under it shifts. "Who the fuck do you work for?"
I close my eyes for a beat.
"The Sartoris."
"Say it again."
"I work for the Sartoris, Bruno."
"The second you put your hands on a man from a house we have no business with, that becomes our problem. Not yours. Ours. You understand the difference?"
"I understand it."
"Do you? Because from where I'm sitting it sounds like you went freelance in a Walgreens parking lot."
He's right. I know he's right.
I knew it from the very beginning and I did it anyway. So that part of the conversation is finished before it starts.
"Bruno." I keep my voice even. "I couldn't leave a woman and a kid with the guy who had a goddamn gun to my head."
A pause. Long enough that I count two of the clock's ticks down the line.
"I didn't ask you to," he says.
That lands differently than the rest.
"But you did it," he says. "So now we talk about what happens next. You report to me. Not Valentino. Not Fabio. Me. Every step. Every name. Every fucking phone call. You make a move on these people, I hear it before they do. You sit on your hands, I hear that too. Are we clear?"
"We're clear."
Gemma
The kitchen tile is cold under my socked feet and I keep my steps small so the boards don't talk.
The apartment is dark except for the lamp by the couch.
He's there. Bottle on the coffee table, glass in his hand, one boot off and one still on, like he sat down meaning to take the other off and forgot.
He turns his head when I come into the light. His eyes move over me once. The hallway, the bedroom door behind me, then me.
"What happened?" he says.
"I need water."
He nods at the cupboard. "Glasses are on the left."
I already know where the glasses are. I've been here for almost five days. But I don't say that. I open the cupboard and take one down. The tap squeaks when I turn it. I let the water run a second so it goes cold, then fill the glass and turn it off.
I drink half the glass standing at the counter with my back to him.
I turn around, lean my hip on the counter and look at him over the rim of the glass. He's looking at the dark window. The bottle is more than half gone. I don't know if it was full when he started.
"You're not sleeping either," I say.
"No."
"Is that going to help?"
He glances at the glass in his hand and then at me. His face doesn't change. "No."
"Okay."
I should leave it. I drink the rest of the water. The glass goes loud against the counter when I set it down and I wince. Nina sleeps through anything but I still wince.
I push off the counter and walk toward the couch. Five steps. Six. He doesn't watch me come. He's still looking at the dark window like there's something out there worth seeing, but his shoulders shift when I get close, and I know he's tracking me without his eyes.
There's a pull off him I can't explain. Heat or weight or whatever it is that makes a person in a room feel like the centre of it. I should sit at the other end. There's a whole couch.
I stop at the arm of it. The lamp puts a yellow circle on the floor that doesn't quite reach me.
"Can I sit?" I say.
He turns his head. His eyes find mine and stay there. The green looks grey under the lamp. He doesn't blink for a second too long.
"Yes," he says.
I sit having a cushion between us.
He doesn't fill the silence and I don't think he believes in filling silence.
"Can I ask you something," I say.
"Yes."
"How does a person end up working for the mafia?"
He looks at me. Then his mouth does a small thing at one corner. He smiles for a second.
"You don't ask small questions," he says.
"Sorry. I can ask about the weather first if you want."
"No." He turns the glass in his hand. The ice has melted to two thin shapes. "Born into it."
"You were born into it."
"Yes."
"Where."
"Calabria. Then I lived in Naples."
I sit with that. It rearranges things in my head. Not in a big way. In the way of finally being able to see the edges of a picture I've been squinting at.
"You're Italian," I say.
"Yes."
"Oh."
He drinks half of what's left in his glass and sets it down on the table without looking at the table, like his hand already knows where the wood is.
"I knew you weren't American," I say. "I couldn't tell from what, though. You don't have much of an accent."
"I worked at it."
"On purpose?"
"It's easier."
"Easier how?"
"People hear an accent, they remember a face."
I think about that. About how many things he does to be less easy to remember. The dark clothes. The way he stands at the kitchen counter with his back to a wall. The blinds always half-down.
"Now that you said it, it makes sense," I say. "The way you look. I've been to Italy. Once. With my parents, when I was nineteen. Rome and Florence and a couple of days in a town outside Siena I can't remember the name of."
"Montalcino. Maybe. Or Pienza."
"Pienza. Yes."
He nods.
"The men there look like you," I say. I hear myself and the back of my neck gets hot. "I mean — they have. The same — bone structure, I guess. Tall and — never mind."
"Never mind what?"
"Never mind never mind."
He looks at me a beat longer and lets me off. I don't think he lets many people off.
"What were you doing in Pienza," he says.
"My dad wanted to see where the cheese came from. The pecorino. We stayed at a place with chickens in the yard and a woman who didn't speak any English, fed us four times a day whether we were hungry or not."
"That's Italy."
"It was the best week of my life until I'd had it."
I don't know why I say that. I don't usually say things like that out loud. I look at my hands and at the rim of his glass on the table, not at him.
"Was it?" he says. Quieter than before.
"Yeah."
He doesn't ask me anything else and I'm grateful. I can feel my pulse in my throat for no reason I can name. The lamp light keeps making the line of tattoo on the side of his neck darker and then less dark as he breathes. I look at it. Then I look at the floor.