Chapter 18 #2
The club did not open until ten on Sundays and the cleaners had finished at four, and the only sound on the floor was the low hum of the cooler behind the bar and the faint thrum of the building’s HVAC.
The black marble had been buffed. The chairs were upended on the tables.
The custom amber-and-leather diffuser was off because the staff had not arrived yet to turn it on.
I sat in my office on the third floor with the door closed and three monitors lit.
The middle one had the Reuters wire scrolling. The right one had an Italian business feed, La Repubblica’s economic page on auto-refresh. The left one had the encrypted line open to nothing, the cursor blinking in the empty input field, waiting for L.C. to come on.
This was the thing I did when I could not do anything.
I watched the news. I watched the wire. I watched the world produce information.
The phone face-up on the desk.
A bottle of San Pellegrino. No glass. I drank from the bottle.
The wire scrolled.
A train derailment in Belarus. A football transfer.
A cabinet shuffle in Argentina. A cargo ship cleared from a sandbar in the Suez.
The world was doing the small unimportant things the world did on a Sunday evening, and somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic my contact was waiting for the lights in a yellow stucco house above Palermo to go out, and my phone was face-up on the desk, and I drank water, and I watched the wire.
At six-forty-seven, the Italian feed jumped.
I almost missed it. The auto-refresh chimed and a new headline pushed up to the top of the page in the small grey font La Repubblica used for breaking economic news, and my eyes went to it the way a fish goes to a hook.
SCORDATO–VALENTI: ANNUNCIATO ACCORDO COMMERCIALE.
I sat very still.
I clicked.
The article was three paragraphs long. It had the cold, scrubbed prose of a press release dressed as journalism, the kind of thing that arrived in the inboxes of every economic desk in Italy at the same minute and was filed by a junior reporter who did not understand what they were filing.
A new mercantile cooperation between the Scordato and Valenti family interests.
Effective immediately. Joint statement issued from Palermo this evening at six-thirty local time.
A spokesperson called it a strategic alignment serving the long-term interests of both parties.
I read the three paragraphs.
I read them again.
I scrolled to the photograph attached.
A long shot of a polished walnut table in a room I recognized.
My father’s old contact had once described the room to me—the Scordato library, the one with the green shutters, the one with the hand-painted ceiling.
Arturo Scordato on the right. Enzo Valenti on the left.
Hands clasped above the table for the camera.
Both men in dark suits, both with the small thin smiles of men who had been photographed shaking hands in rooms like this their entire adult lives.
At Arturo’s left shoulder.
Gianni. I remembered him from my research. He looked so much like Sera, but nothing like her, too.
I leaned closer to the screen.
I scanned the edges of the photograph. The corners. The space behind the chair, the doorway in the back, the suggestion of a window on the right where a sliver of green shutter showed at the edge of the frame.
No Serafina.
Not at the table. Not in the doorway. Not in the corner of the frame the way she had been in every photograph I had ever seen of a Scordato gathering for the past ten years, the slim silent figure at the edge with a folder, the one in the second row who was actually running the meeting and was not allowed to sit at the table.
She was not in the room.
I sat back.
The encrypted window blinked. Empty.
I picked up the phone. I dialed Dante. He picked up on one ring.
“It just hit the wire,” I said.
“I’m watching it.”
“She’s not in the photograph.”
“I see that.”
“Dante—“
“I see it, Marco. Stay where you are. Do not call him. Do not call her. Stay on the screens. I am calling Santo.”
He hung up.
I went back to the wire.
Twenty minutes later it came.
A second alert, this one from a domestic feed I had set up in 2017 to watch for any commercial real estate movement in the Caruso footprint. It was a small targeted feed. It pinged maybe twice a month. It pinged now.
ACQUISITION ANNOUNCED: 4400 SOUTH HALSTED STREET. BUYER: VALCORP HOLDINGS LLC.
I knew the address before I read the address.
The South Halsted parcel. Eight acres. The old freight yard.
The one I had been negotiating for through three layers of shell companies for eighteen months because Dante had wanted it for the new restaurant project and had told me to take my time and get the price right.
The owner had been a widow in Boca who would not return calls.
I had finally gotten her on the phone in October. We had been three weeks from close.
ValCCorp Holdings.
The second C in ValCCorp was not a coincidence. Enzo had named it himself, probably, the way he named all his shells—small visible signatures that he could deny in court and you would still know, because the point was that you would know.
He had taken the parcel out from under me.
While the Scordato–Valenti announcement was rolling across the wires of three continents, his lawyers had already filed the paperwork on a property he could only have known I wanted because someone inside the Scordato negotiation had told him I wanted it.
Someone who had read every line of Sera’s report.
Someone who knew the Caruso footprint better than Enzo did, because she had built the file on it.
Gianni.
I stood up.
We know what you wanted. We took it. We are inside your house now.
I turned.
The wall to the right of my desk was matte black plaster over drywall, the design choice I had argued for with the contractor because I had wanted a single unbroken dark surface behind the credenza. There was nothing on it. No frame. No fixture.
I put my fist through it.
The plaster gave first. The drywall gave second.
My knuckles found the stud behind the drywall and the stud did not give, and the small bones in the back of my hand made a sound I felt before I heard it.
The pain came up my arm a half-second later, slow, the way pain came up a limb when the limb had not believed yet that the thing had happened.
I pulled my hand back.
The hole in the wall was about the size of a fist. Powder around the edge. A streak of red on the inside of the drywall where my knuckles had opened.
I stood there.
I looked at my hand. I looked at the hole.
My phone buzzed. I grabbed it, wincing at the pain from my hand.
“Pronto.”
“Marco.”
It was L.C. His voice was low and I could hear that he was outside. The small flat acoustics of a Palermo street at dawn. A bird somewhere. A scooter passing.
“I had to wait until the house was asleep,” he said. “Listen carefully. I am going to say this once and I am going to hang up.”
“Go.”
“She is in her childhood bedroom. The door has been locked from the outside since yesterday morning. From the corridor side. The key was turned and it has not been turned back.”
I did not speak.
“Her phone was taken. From her, in the study, before she went up. Her laptop was taken from the bag she brought with her from America. They are both in Gianni’s office now.”
“L.C.—“
“That is all. That is all I can say on this line. Marco. I cannot say more. Do not call me again on this number. I will reach you when I can.”
The line went.
The screen went dark.
I set the phone face-down.
Her door was locked from the outside. She was a prisoner.
I stood up.
I would not let the women I loved be a prisoner in her own house.
Icalled Dante from my apartment. He picked up on the second ring. The voice of a man who had not been sleeping and had been waiting for this call.
“Marco.”
“I’m going to Palermo. I need the jet.”
There was one beat of silence.
“You’re sure?”
“100%.”
“I trust you. The jet’s fueled by morning.”
“Thank you.”
“Marco.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have Santo at the hangar with you.”
“No.”
“Marco.” Insistent. Worried.
“No, Dante. Not Santo. I need this one. I need this one to be me.”
He did not argue.
He had argued with me about a thousand things over the course of my adult life, and he did not argue with me about this. I heard him breathe once on the other end of the line, the small considered breath of a man choosing not to say the thing he was thinking, and then he said:
“Call me from the air. Call me when you land. Call me every six hours.”
“I will.”
“D’accordo.”
He hung up.
I set the phone down.
I walked across the apartment in my socks. Down the long hall past the office where her cardigan was on the chair, past the door to the toy room with the small brass key still in the dish on the hall table. I stopped at the bedroom door. My hand on the handle. The bandage white in the dim.
I opened it.
The bed was the way we had left it Saturday morning.
She had pulled the duvet up but not made it the way the housekeeper would have made it, the way she made beds in hotel rooms—corners not square, the pillows fluffed but not lined, a small dent in the left pillow where her head had been.
Her perfume bottle on the dresser. Her dark green silk robe over the bench at the foot of the bed. The grey lamb—
She had it.
I sat down on the edge of the bed.
I put my hands on my knees. The bandaged one and the other one. I looked at the dark window across the room and the city lights out past the glass.
I had never been to Sicily for the family business.
I had been to Sicily four times in my life.
Twice as a child, with my mother. Once at twenty-three to go and sit with the old men in Monreale and buy the cuttings I had grown up knowing I would buy one day.
Once at twenty-seven for a wedding in Catania.
None of those four visits had involved a man who needed to be hurt.
I had never hurt a man.
That was the thing I sat with on the edge of the bed at three in the morning.
That was the thing I had spent ten years building into a feature of my life and the thing I had been quietly proud of without admitting I was proud of it.
I was the brother who handled rooms. I was the brother who knew everyone.
I was the one who got information out of women in dark booths and from journalists in restaurant bathrooms and from politicians on golf courses.
I had broken arms once, when I was nineteen, behind a club in River North, and I had thrown up in the alley afterward, and I had told Vito the next morning that I would not do that again, and Vito had laughed at me and patted my cheek and said okay, Marc, okay, we’ll find a job for the pretty one, and the job he had found was the job I had done ever since.
I was going to a house in Palermo with men in it who had taken her phone and locked her bedroom from the outside, and I was going to have to walk in there and get her out.
The thought landed.
It landed in my chest like a cold weight.
Not metaphorical. I felt it physically at the breastbone.
The fear came up under it, fast, and the fear was not for her—the fear for her had been in me since six o’clock yesterday morning at the farmhouse and was a different thing now, a baseline, the temperature of the room.
The fear that came up at three a.m. on the edge of my own bed was for me.
I was not built for this.
I sat there.
I looked at the green silk robe.
I thought about Sera in a room in Palermo with the door locked from the outside and no phone and no laptop and the grey lamb in her hand or in a drawer somewhere and I thought about her sitting on the edge of a bed in that room the way I was sitting on the edge of mine, and I thought, very simply:
I am going to do this my way. The right way.
First, though, I need to speak to Donatella.