Zo looked stricken. “Business.”
“I’m glad you didn’t marry that bitch,” Otto said, as if trying to pull solidarity from the jaws of anarchy. “I don’t want to work with the Sicilians. I never liked it. You ever been to Palermo? It’s backward, like they got their own pope. I don’t want to answer to a man I never met. Never shook his hand. Nothing.”
Otto was talking for the sake of talking, because no one was hearing him. It was Lorenzo and me in the room.
“I’m sorry to speak ill,” Otto continued. “But Paulie, he was dangerous. I’m sorry you had to do what you done with him, but I’m glad I don’t gotta worry no more.”
“Lorenzo,” I said, “you didn’t tell me this was your plan.”
He faced me full-on. He wasn’t afraid of me, and that concerned me.
“So?” he said. “This way we didn’t have to avenge you. Because I didn’t want to avenge a guy who wasn’t dead.”
He was right. He could have used my death to start a fight that might have brought him millions if he won. But he’d opted for the path of right and found a way to navigate it. Not bad for a baby don. Not bad at all. Except he hadn’t maintained the loyalty of the crew. Because they were gone, with a bigger love for peace than their own lives.
“They already tried to kill us,” I said. “And the crew, they don’t realize it’s me today, and it’s them tomorrow.” I had a finger up, talking to Zo but seeing Enzo and Simone. “If we were in Napoli, that would be a given. You cannot trust Americans. Cannot. They turn on you the minute there’s a risk. Nothing gets done alone.” I pushed my wine three inches left. Two right. “Americans. All lone guns. Let me tell you something. That fails.”
“I’m with you,” Zo said. “You was dead, but now you’re not and they put a price on your head. It’s changed. But some guys don’t change so fast.”
The wine became offensive to me. Liquid celebration turned bitter by betrayal. I threw it across the room. It hung in the air in a streak of red then splatted everywhere.
Theresa walked in from the kitchen just as the glass landed, and I felt a deep shame at my tantrum. She deserved better. She deserved a man who could solve problems. But my thoughts were like pigeons in the piazza, a sea of cohesive grey scattered to the wind by a running child.
“You got this,” Otto said, seemingly unaffected by my tantrum. “I don’t know how. But as long as we can get close, we can attack. And that gets the price off your head because if you kill her, you run her business.”
That was the last thing I needed. But he’d given me an idea if I could just get my head around the execution.
“No,” I said. “There are too many ways to die.”
Theresa came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder. I slid mine over hers and stayed that way for a second. I was surrounded by treachery, but she was behind me, like a balm.
“You guys eat,” I said. “I have business to attend to.”
twenty-eight.
theresa
hen he took my hand and stood, making eye contact, I melted a little. He cut through the business, the violence, the calculation, and took me to the kitchen. My cognizance of the space his body occupied sharpened like a razor. I was nowhere near his dick, but I was aware of it. My body was aware of it. My nipples hardened as if that could get me that much closer to it.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I am being betrayed.”
“By who?”
“Possibly all of them.”
“What do we do?”