by C. D. Reiss
“Scars are the proof we’ve lived.”
She looked up at me. “You’re going to have a really nice bit of proof here.”
I took my cigarettes out. I needed one. Not for the gash in my leg. I didn’t care about that. But the bomb made a good impression as a message. The bomb was a flexed muscle, a chambered bullet, teeth that were bared and ready to rip a throat. But only if necessary. Next time I wouldn’t be so lucky, in theory. That was what I told the police.
I leaned my head against the side of the truck and let the pretty EMT clean my leg. I wondered what the hell I was doing, and why. Money? Power? My vengeance was complete. I had nothing. My family was an ocean away. I had no partner. My business was burned down. I wasn’t the lawyer I’d wanted to be. I had no future outside of a beautiful woman who would tire of my secrecy soon enough. I wished I’d been inches from that car, because I was exhausted from running, from hunting, and from keeping secrets.
Otto pulled up across the street, and my Contessa got out before the Lincoln had even come to a full stop. She was my hope, that woman, standing so straight as she crossed the street. She could rule the world. She already ruled me.
thirty-six.
theresa
e didn’t say anything to each other when I saw him in that ambulance. We didn’t need to. I sat next to him and held his hand. He waved Otto away. The EMT put bandages on him without a word, other than instructions on dressing his wound the next day. Then she left to take care of someone else.
“Those were nice pants,” I said.
“I have more.”
“Who did this? Paulie?”
He shook his head, leaning it on the side of the truck. “No. The Sicilians are watching him. This was the Bortolusis. I’m the last camorrista prince. If I’m gone, there’s no merger.”
“And you’re going to the wedding? I think I should forbid it.”
“It’ll be the safest place in the world on that day. Paulie’s been too quiet, and it’s you he wants.”
“That’s our last day on earth.”
He squeezed my hand. “Si.”
“When you leave, there’s going to be a power vacuum. Paulie’s going to try and fill it. I’m thinking I have a couple of days to plant a seed in Daniel’s head about him. Just put him on a trail. That’ll get my ex off of thinking about where our bodies went, and Paulie will be preoccupied with sworn statements and such.”
He huffed a short laugh. “My God. You have the heart of a capo, do you know that? You could have brought Sicily to its knees. No don would stand against you.”
“I’ll call Dan tomorrow.”
“No.” He squeezed my hand when he said it. “Make an appointment for the day after the wedding. Say you have something on Paulie. Say you’re checking it out.”
He seemed so melancholy, so much a swirling black pool of sadness, that I was drawn in with him.
“Can I take you home to the loft and feed you soup?”
“Ah, Contessa, I have to—”
I stood. “You have to nothing. Get the hell up, Capo.” I held my hand out, and he clasped my wrist.
“No don could stand against you.” He smiled as I hoisted him then grimaced when he leaned on the leg.
“You need to lean on me?”
“No. I’m all right.”
“Antonio.”
“Yes?” he said.
“Next time you do something like this, you need to tell me first. I was worried. I don’t want to panic like that again.”
He stopped and faced me, a smile playing on his lips. “Are you saying I blew up a Maserati? My favorite car? To what, set a pattern? To get the next one to look just as real? Come on, that car cost a hundred thousand dollars.”
I crossed my arms. “All of Zo’s guys are gone. He always leaves one to sit with the tools. He eats lunch out the back of the truck, but not today”
“Contessa, even if I had done such a crazy thing, I wouldn’t have told you. You’d try and stop me and get yourself hurt.”
“One day, you’ll see me as a partner, not a responsibility.”
He put his arm around my shoulder, and we walked back to my car, his bloody pant leg flapping against his calf as he tried to hide the fact that he was limping.
thirty-seven.
theresa
laid him out on my couch and fed him minestrone I’d poured from a can and heated in the microwave. He complained about the saltiness, demanding I try Zia Giovanna’s the next time I was there. “When she makes it, you can taste everything. This, I don’t even know what’s in it.” He took the bowl from me and put it on the side table then pulled me on top of him.
“What are you going to do about Zia Giovanna?”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Daniel’s taking those books, and I don’t know if I caught everything. He’s going to have your accountant. He won’t prosecute an old woman. That would be political suicide. But the restaurant?”
He pressed his lips together into a fine line. “Without me, she’ll go back to Napoli with her sister.”
“Come on, Antonio—”
“Not everything needs to be controlled. There are no formal charges against her. She can go any time. It’s like you. No charges in the thing with the Armenian. If I were gone, he’d drop it.”
He was dead wrong, about Zia Giovanna at least, and I didn’t know if he was lying to himself or just to me.
“I had a thought,” I said.
“Another one?” He stroked my hair.
“Greece,” I said.
“I don’t speak Greek.” He pulled my shirt up and slid his fingers under my bra, the tips bending my nipples.
“Weather’s nice. Government’s totally corrupt.” I groaned at the trilling sensation between my legs. I pushed myself down on his erection. “After we bounce around. When we’ve erased everything. We can settle there. Fuck on the beach every day.”
He got my shirt and bra off in one movement. “That would be nice.”
“Nice?” I unzipped him.
“Simpatico.”
“That’s better, Capo.”
I stood up and wiggled out of my pants, naked before him in seconds. He held his hand out, and I took it, putting a knee beside him.
“Tu sei preziosa per me.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Io ti farò del male per proteggerti.”
I straddled him, putting his dick against my wetness. “Nothing. You get nothing until you translate.”
“You think this stupid wound will keep me from taking you?”
“Fammi tua,” I said into his ear.
“Your accent is terrible.”
I slid myself against him. “Fammi tua.”
“To save the world from your Italian, I’ll tell you what I said. It was, ‘I’m going to fuck you easy and slow, until your bones turn into jelly, and you forget how to beg me.’”
“When? I want you to fuck me. Please.”
He moved my hips and shifted until a sharp upward stroke was all that he needed to impale me. I gasped. He grabbed my ass cheeks and pushed deep into me until I felt the pressure inside.
“Is this what you want?”
“Yes.”
He rocked against me, his body rubbing my clit, and I threw my head back.
“Like this?” he asked.
“Faster.”
“Faster what?”
“Please.”
“Per favore,” he said.
“Oh, no. I can’t.”
He stopped moving and smiled an evil grin, brown eyes glittering. “Say it so I can hear it.”
“Per favore. I want it.”
“Lo voglio.”
“Lo voglio, Capo.”
I leaned forward, and he gathered me in his arms, holding me close and controlling my movement. “Sei così preziosa per me.” He whispered it over and over as the heat between us built to a red throb, slowly, in a rhythm that went from pleasant to tortuous without c
hanging.
“Wait for me,” he sighed.
“Per favore,” I cried. “Faster, please.”
“Wait for me.”
I nodded but had no words until he said, “Si.”
He held me to the rhythm, and I felt every step of my orgasm: the foothills, the climb to the mountain, and then the volcano dripping lava as I cried for him. My face pressed to his, my mouth opened wordlessly, and he put his lips to my tears and came into me, clutching me as if he’d never let me go.
thirty-eight.
theresa
lived in an unreality where my life was marked in days. And having made that absurd, stupid choice to end my life, I lost my mind.
Antonio was shrewder than I was. He wanted to leave everything alone and let it sort itself out. I wanted to leave a neat little world behind me, where everyone could be happy. Anything less seemed cruel. I kept twisting contingencies around in my mind, trying to find the best and worst outcomes and to fix all I could without raising flags. What damage could be prevented? Was there a single favor I could call in and never repay?
There was.
I didn’t tell Antonio. We’d be long gone and he could be pissed at me as we fucked on a beach on a Greek island. The thought of a rabid hatefuck on a beach made me smile, in public, on an elevator to the Century City penthouse, where ODRSN Enterprises had its offices.
“Daddy,” I said when he turned the corner and entered the bright, sparkling reception area. My father was in his sixties. He still stood straight at six foot four, wearing a four-thousand-dollar suit and a face still handsome enough to turn heads.
“Theresa.” He handed a folder to a tall, blonde receptionist. She slipped behind the glass desk and answered the phone, smiling like a robot. My father had impoverished the family trust. Then Jonathan had rebuilt it and sold it back to J. Declan Drazen. Since then, my father had been a businessman worthy of the original Irish-born Jonathan O’Drassen and just as bad a parent as the Irishman.
“What brings you out here?” he asked.
“Looking for a job.”
“Really?”
“No.”
He laughed and led me into the corner office. The windows were on a slant, as if it were a greenhouse where all the plants had been removed and replaced by an expansive desk and maps of Los Angeles everywhere.
“I’m glad you came by.” He indicated a leather chair and sat in the seat next to it. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you since Thanksgiving.”
“It’s my turn to say, ‘really?’”
“Tell me first, how are you doing since you left WDE?”
“Fine. I’ve been working a little on my friend’s film.”
He leaned back. The leather of the sofa squeaked. “It’s not like my daughter Theresa to not have any plans. Fiona, yes. Leanne, sometimes, but you? You always were very sensible.”
“It’s not like I need money to live.”
“You never wanted to live on your trust.”
“I’m just in between things.”
He shook his head slowly.
“You don’t approve?” I said.
“You’re all past my approval. Which is too bad. But no, since you asked, I don’t. I heard about this man you took to Sheila’s?”
“And?”
“Is he the reason you quit your job with nowhere to land?”
The visit had been a mistake. He did what he always did: he took control of the conversation and made me uncomfortable before I’d even gotten to the reason for my visit. And he’d do it until I either blurted out what I wanted or left without mentioning it. He had that way of interacting. He just wanted to make us squirm. He wanted to take the rug out from under us. It was his way, and even when he’d been called out on it, he’d laughed. Only Margie could manage him, God bless her and God fuck her.
“I quit my job because I was miserable. I have nowhere to land because I hadn’t set anything up. I hadn’t even thought about it. I’ve spent my whole life inside a sensible little box. I got tired of it.”
“So you went ‘outside the box’? That’s very cliché, Theresa. I’d say you’re better than that, but you’re not a creative soul. I thought you were at peace with that.”
His tone was so gentle and sincere that his words didn’t sound insulting. I knew they were, but he wasn’t trying to offend me, so I took no offense. He had a way of cutting deep without letting a person put up a defense.
“I am, but I’ve been thinking about what to do, anyway. There’s a trust I need released to my discretion. There’s only one left that you still have control over.”
“I know the one. What were your plans?”
His interest was piqued. He knew I didn’t want to pack it up my nose or blow it on the ponies.
“Antonio’s aunt has a restaurant in San Pedro. It’s being investigated for fraud, and I’ve looked at the books. It’s clean, but broke. He can’t help or he’ll be accused of laundering money through it. He’s pulled out completely. She’s a nice old woman. The restaurant is all she has. I want to help her.”
“How nice of you.” He didn’t believe a word of it, or at the very least, he didn’t care.
“And because I know nothing is free with you,” I said, letting the first part of the sentence sink in. He nodded. He didn’t care what any of us thought of him. “I can donate half to the Wilshire Golfer’s Club. I can finance a renovation. I think the carriage house could use a touch-up?”
He waved my suggestion away. “They haven’t done anything in eighteen years. They won’t fix that thing until an earthquake flattens it, and it’s already survived two.”
“You name it, then.”
“For this man? This mobster?”
“For me,” I said.
He looked out the wall of windows. “Have you ever wondered how I have so many children and so few grandchildren?”
“There’s Sheila.”
“She can’t make up for the lot of you. Margie’s a spinster. Carrie is off somewhere. Fiona, thank God…” He rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, as if truly troubled. “It’s the men you girls choose. I don’t know where you find them.”
I could have made a crack about the example he set, but to what end? He was too old to change, and I was too old to take what he said personally.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, taking his fingers from his eyes. “Make a good choice, one good choice, and I’ll release the funds.”
“Define a good choice.”
“Whatever this phase is, finish it. Go back to who you are. Start making sense again. Then go back to Daniel. I’m sure he’s apologized. Am I right?”
“Dad, really? What will this solve?”
I shook my head. This was a waste of time. Dad had done his share of philandering, enough to put him and Mom on opposite sides of the house. I should have expected that kind of old-world nonsense.
“Is this business?” I asked. “Are you looking to have the mayor in the family?”
“I know what makes sense when I see it. That’s all.”
He did, and Daniel and I had always made sense, always been perfect on paper, and that was how Dad saw everything. He never understood actual human emotion, which was how we ended up having a conversation with him thinking the ridiculous was possible.
“Just think about it,” he said. “My insistence might be a favor in the end.”
“I will.”
When I stood, I saw a picture on a shelf, a big one of the ten of us at the Santa Barbara campground, each in our own world. Margie looked more a sister to Mom than a daughter. Jonathan, at twelve, was already bursting with puberty. Fiona’s hair was tangled. And there I was in a button down shirt and lace collar, chin up, skin without pimple or blemish from sheer force of will.
“This was the year after,” I said, stopping in my tracks.
“After what?”
“The boy.”
“Which one?”
“The one at the bottom of a ditch,” I sa
id.
“Yes?”
“I went through middle and high school convinced you did it.”
He held up his palms, one finger still wrapped in a ring that didn’t mean what it had decades before. “These hands are clean,” he said and denied it no further.
thirty-nine.
theresa
need your phone,” Antonio said standing over me in a jacket and trousers. I’d grabbed his pillow and pressed it to my face, breathing in his burned-pine smell.
“Why?” I grumbled into the pillow. Why was I so relaxed in that happy limbo between living and dying?
“Because I need to put a detonator in it.”
It was a normal, weekday-morning conversation. It wasn’t even exciting or titillating, but right and real in a way nothing in my life had been before. I shuffled around in my bag and handed him the phone. He took it and pulled me to him, pressing my nakedness against his clothes.
“You have a call from your sister,” he said, holding the glass to face me.
“Of course I do. She must be scolding me about something.”
The text came up first.
—Jon is at Sequoia. Heart attack. Looking at a bypass where the fuck are you?—
My hand covered my mouth. I’d ignored my phone because nothing seemed as important as what we were doing, but Jon at the hospital? I hadn’t expected this.
Antonio held his hand out for the phone. “What is it?”
“He’s thirty-two.”
“Who?” He looked at the text.
“I have to go see my brother.” I stepped away and headed for my pile of clothes. I had no intention of bathing or delaying another second. Antonio just stood in the middle of the room, my phone in his palm.
“We should call this off,” he said.
“Let me see what it is first.”
“You love your family.”
“Antonio!” I shouted. I hadn’t meant to shout. “Just let me go see him, okay? Then we can decide.”
***
Sequoia took up a few city blocks on the west side, the hub of a medical community with research centers for spokes and uniform and equipment suppliers at the outer rings.
