Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Valentino
The senator’s man is lying to me, and we both know it.
I sit across from him in the back room of a restaurant off Via Montenapoleone. His name is Renzo Albani, mid-fifties, and he works for Senator Greco, who works, in turn, for whoever pays best that week.
I am here to remind him which week this is.
"The shipping permits will go through," Albani says. He dabs his mouth with his napkin. "Senator Greco values his relationship with the family. Truly."
"Good," I say.
I don’t move. I have found that stillness does more work than words. Men fill silence with things they didn’t mean to say.
"Then the relationship continues."
He nods too fast.
I let him sweat through the espresso, then I rise, button my jacket, and leave him there.
Outside, Milan is gray and damp.
My phone buzzes.
I answer before the second ring.
"Bruno."
"Valentino." Bruno Sartori is forty-two, the eldest of the brothers, the Don who gives the orders from Chicago. "How’s the senator?"
"Bought," I say. "For now. Greco will hold his end through the spring shipments."
"For now." It’s a dry sound, almost a laugh.
"What is it?" I ask, because Bruno does not call me himself for routine updates. Lorenzo handles the conversations that need smoothing over. Nico handles the ones that need force. When Bruno calls me directly, the matter is usually worse than both.
There’s a pause.
"I need you to look at something," he says. "Quietly. Off the books."
"Tell me."
"There’s chatter coming out of the freight corridors near Monza. Girls. Eastern European, some North African. Moving through warehouses we don’t own, but close enough to our routes that it stinks."
His voice flattens.
"Trafficking, Valentino. Not labor. Flesh."
My free hand goes to my pocket, and my fingers close around the rosary before I know I've reached for it. The beads are warm from my body.
"You're certain," I say. Not a question. With Bruno it is never gossip.
"No. That's the problem. It's smoke. Nothing solid. But you know how the family feels."
I know exactly how the family feels. The Sartoris will run guns, run drugs, run half the politicians in two countries, and they will do all of it without losing a night's sleep.
But flesh? Children? On that line, Riccardo drew blood years ago, and Bruno keeps the line darker than his brother ever did.
It is the one place where business and the thing I have built my life around point the same direction.
"Whose warehouses?" I ask.
"Shell companies. Three of them, layered. One name keeps surfacing underneath, though." Another clink of ice. "Basile."
"Basile," I repeat. The beads roll under my thumb. "You're sure of that name."
"As sure as I am of anything that's still smoke," Bruno says.
The Basile family is one of the oldest names in Cosa Nostra. Older than ours. Older than most. Don Enzo Basile shook hands with men who are statues now. There are streets in Palermo that would not exist without his blessing.
"You think it's the old man?" Bruno asks.
I consider it.
"No," I say at last. "Enzo Basile is old-world.
Brutal, yes. But he operates inside a frame.
There are things he would not touch, not because he's soft, but because the men he answers to in his own head would never forgive it.
The wet trade is one of them. If Basile money is moving girls through Monza, it isn't coming from the top.
It's coming from underneath. Someone who has the name and none of the spine that's supposed to come with it. "
Bruno is quiet for a moment. I can hear him shift, the small careful sounds of a man who learned to move all over again after two years in a chair.
"That's why I called you," he says. "Lorenzo would want to negotiate before we know what we're negotiating. Nico would want six weeks of data before he let me breathe. You'll just go look."
"I'll go look," I agree.
"You understand what this is." His voice drops, loses the dry edge. "We're not at war with the Basiles. We don't want to be."
"I know what it is."
"So you go quiet. You look. You confirm or you walk away. You don't act."
"Who knows about this?" I ask. "On our side."
"Right now? Three people. Me. Lorenzo. Dante." A pause. "And you."
Four, then. I turn the number over. Small is good. Small is how you keep something from becoming a fire.
"Keep it there," I say. "If it's real, the second it gets bigger than four men, it gets out, and then either the Basiles know we're looking or Interpol does, and I don't know which is worse for what you want."
"Agreed."
I stop at the corner. Across the street, a woman is arguing into her phone in rapid Italian, gesturing at nothing, and a couple walks past her wrapped together against the cold.
"You want me to bring anyone in?" I ask. "On the ground here?"
"Use your own judgment. You know the European side better than any of us." Bruno exhales. "Dante would come if you needed hands. He's in Chicago, but he'd be on a plane in an hour. You know that."
I do know that. Dante Castellani would cross an ocean for any of them without being asked twice. He is the closest thing the Sartoris have to a weapon that walks and talks and pours the wine while it watches the door.
"I'll start tomorrow," I say.
"Good." A beat. "Valentino. Quiet. Promise me, quiet."
"I'll be quiet," I say.
The man across from me drinks his espresso like he has all the time in the world.
His name is Renzo, and he's been feeding the Sartoris information out of Milan for nine years.
Small things, mostly. Which clubs are dirty.
Which judges take money. The kind of intelligence that keeps a family from walking into a room it shouldn't.
I've met him twice before. Both times he talked too much.
"You wanted to know about the agency," he says. He keeps his voice low, even though the café is half empty and the espresso machine hisses loud enough to bury us. "Agenzia Luce. You picked a strange one."
"I picked the one that didn't add up." I leave my own coffee untouched on the marble table. "Tell me why it doesn't add up."
He leans in. "Girls come in from the east. Romania, Ukraine, Moldova. All legal. Real contracts, real visas, real shoots. Luce books them for the big labels. Runways, campaigns, the whole circus." He turns his little cup in slow circles. "But the numbers are wrong."
"Wrong how."
"Forty, fifty girls a season come through that door." He stops turning the cup. His eyes flick to the window, then back. "Maybe thirty leave the country again. The rest just—" He spreads his fingers. "Gone. No flights home. No new bookings. Nothing."
"And nobody asks," I say.
"Who asks?" Renzo shrugs, but there's no ease in it.
His jaw is tight. "These girls have no people here.
They sign with the agency, the agency owns their paperwork, their housing, their phones half the time.
A girl disappears, the agency says she went home.
Who's checking? Her mother in some village outside Cluj? "
The machine hisses again. A barista laughs at something behind the counter, bright and ordinary, and the sound feels obscene against what I'm hearing.
"Who owns it?" I ask.
This is where he hesitates.
He glances at the door. Then he says it, barely above the hiss of steam. "Shell companies. Layers of them. But you peel them back far enough, and you get to a name. Basile."
I keep my face flat.
"Which Basile," I say.
"The young one. Aldo. Don Enzo's youngest." Renzo finally drinks his espresso, all of it, like he needs it now. "His father's name opens every door in this country. Aldo just opened the wrong ones."
They have a code, the Basiles. The kind of brutal, ugly honor the old families dress up and call tradition. Don Enzo would put a bullet in a man for an insult and call it justice. But this? Girls vanishing into the dark for money?
This is the kind of thing the old men say they're above. The kind of thing that brings shame down on a name they'd kill to protect.
Which means either Don Enzo doesn't know, or he knows and he's looking the other way. Neither answer is good.
"That's everything I have. Don't call me again for a month."
He's gone before I finish nodding, swallowed by the bright street and the noise.
I sit with an untouched coffee in front of me. The marble is cold under my forearms. I run it through, the way I always do, looking for the angle. Two families. One vanishing operation. The Sartoris brushed against the edge of it without knowing.
I need to know how deep it goes. How the names connect. Whether this touches the family I'm built to protect.
My phone buzzes on the marble. The screen reads Mamma.
I answer because I always answer. "Pronto."
"Valentino." Her voice is warm and worn, all the years in it. I can hear her kitchen behind her. "You're alive, then. I was beginning to wonder."
"I'm alive yes."
"When are you coming home?" she asks, the way she always does, like the answer might change. "You've been gone too long. The grove needs you. I need you, an old woman, alone with the olives."
My throat tightens. I look at the door Renzo walked out of, at the bright dangerous street beyond it, at the city that just put a name to the rot underneath it.
"Soon, Mamma," I say.
It might even be the first lie I've told her in years.