I needed an open-ended question that went away from Antonio and back to what Valentina knew.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“First Daniel. Did they kill Daniel?”
Who? Daniel? That had been years ago. I had to shake myself from thoughts of Antonio to remind myself of the last time she’d seen Daniel. He had been hanging upside down from a beam in his ceiling. Then I pictured on the floor, face red, grey strips of duct tape glue on his cheek.
“He’s all right. We got to him.”
She broke down in fresh tears that didn’t have sorrow or desperation in them, only relief. She put her head in her hands, and I stroked her back. I didn’t have a second to let her release, but I didn’t have a choice but to let her feel it.
“He’s fine,” I said softly. “He has a headache.”
“They took me away. And my heart gave out. It does when I have stress. They didn’t know whether to bother letting me live. They had me in the room.” Her arm went straight, pointing at the place she was describing, which may or may not have been in that direction. “They didn’t know I have some English. So I just listened. I tried not to give away my face. And they were saying…”
She was going to break down again.
“Stay with me,” I said.
“They had him go to the wrong room. They were going to take him away and…” She tilted her head and pivoted her hand around her wrist as if trying to think of a word. “Sbudellarlo.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
She made her fingers into a plane and pointed the edge of it toward herself, moving her hand up and down. “Cut him open. My sweet husband.”
She broke apart again, and no amount of breathing was going to get her back. She fell into my arms even though I was in no condition to comfort or soothe her. I just stared at the side of the vending machine, eyes wide and blank. The personality I’d cultivated for thirty years poured out of me, and I was empty. Nothing but a vessel for that other self I’d just discovered. The animal. The huntress. The savage. Though I thought that primitive woman would rend everything in her sight to achieve her ends, she surprised me. A cold calm took the place where panic and uncertainty would have been.
I was a stone. In part, I had to be or I’d break, thinking of Antonio dying. But also, if I was to avenge him, I had no time to turn into Valentina.
I took Valentina by the chin and forced her to look at me. “I’m putting you in a cab to Zia’s. You stay with her.”
Her head shook as much as my fingers allowed.
I let go of her chin. “You can go somewhere else beside Zia’s, but—”
“Where are you going?” she interrupted.
“To find him.”
“Where?”
If I said “Wilshire and Western” or “under Santa Monica pier,” she wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I could have made up anything and at least answered the question to her satisfaction, but she was illuminating a point. I didn’t know where I was looking.
And she knew it. The bitch. She looked at me with a smug little face I wanted to crack open.
“You know,” I said.
“I want to tell the men. This is not the place for us. You’re going to get him killed.”
“The men?” I set my voice to a sotto growl. “They abandoned him. They sold him. Every one of them.”
Except Otto. Maybe. He was I-didn’t-even-know-where at that point.
“They said it though?” I asked. “They said where they were taking him? They said the whole plan?”
“All of them?” she asked by way of an answer. “There isn’t one of his men to talk to?”
“No. Did they say it in front of you? Just tell me what they said without the particulars.”
“We should call his father then.”
Was she serious? She wanted to call a man across the world who may or may not have approved his son’s assassination? She needed to go back to the fabric factory.