by Kyanna Skye
She held up a hand to silence him before he could say anything. “Mr. Rizzuto, please, I know that you used what amounts to a magic trick to steal that money. You gave it away when you told me about how much you enjoyed magic… that’s one of the magician’s basic tricks, isn’t it? Sleight of hand? Look over here,” she said, holding up one hand above her head and wiggling her fingers to draw his attention. “But secretly, I’m doing something over here,” she said, using her other hand and wiggling those fingers, but lower and near her pelvis.
Mr. Rizzuto only stared at her.
She couldn’t determine if he was angry, sad, or terrified. His expression sank back into a kind of neutrality that she found worse than anger, sadness, or terror. At least if he’d reacted with those she would have known what he felt. But with his face an unreadable blank, all she felt was her own sorrow building within her.
“It didn’t occur to me until I thought about what you’d said,” she pressed on, taking his silence as an invitation to keep talking about what she already knew. “You said, ‘sometimes you just have to keep things where people don’t look for it’. That’s also a magician’s trick, isn’t it? Misdirection? Whether it’s hiding pigeons up your sleeve… a rabbit in your hat… whatever the case may be, that’s what you did with the money, isn’t it? You didn’t actually steal it, it’s still there, and it’s paying for your time here in prison, isn’t it?”
She watched and waited. She could have said more, but the words wouldn’t form in her mind or mouth. She knew that there was more to this whole thing than what she was seeing and hearing from her client. A blind man should have been able to see as much. This whole thing had been a mystery from the beginning and it felt like it was one mystery built on another, built upon another under that.
Finally, it felt like she had reached the center of those problems and found only another mystery. And she had found that she’d grown tired of trying to solve those mysteries. Her career was in the balance, not to mention the future of a firm that was depending on her. She wished that her father was here, he would know what to do. The temptation to call him had been a powerful one, but she knew that she couldn’t drag her own father into this. Even that would be bad, branding her as the girl that ran to her daddy whenever things got rough.
Mr. Rizzuto sighed and put his hands on his waist. She could see something behind his eyes, at first, it had looked much like a storm before it settled into something that surprised her: a smile. Somehow, that was more worrisome than anything else he could have done.
“Well, I appreciate your directness in this matter, Jamie. And I can see no reason why I shouldn’t answer your questions, now that you’ve dropped the pretense and chosen to confer with me directly.” He folded his hands at his waist, very gentlemanly like, and his smile continued. “I’ll answer all of your questions – whatever they may be – if you meet my price.”
“Name it,” she said before she could stop herself, feeling as though she had already committed to this path and that there was no turning back now.
“Have dinner with me tonight. Not dinner like we’ve had at the lounge here before now… I mean a real dinner.”
She wondered briefly at that before realizing that the direct approach was all she had left. Her own theories in being able to whittle information out of someone with tact and subtlety had already proven true; last night had been proof enough of that. But she didn’t have time for that any longer. She needed to be direct or nothing.
“Alright,” she said with a nod. “Dinner.”
She had imagined perhaps a small dinner set upon a table in the receiving room. Possibly even something akin to a picnic on a blanket out in the yard where they had already shared so much time. Mr. Rizzuto had said that he didn’t care to visit the lounge, as was their usual fare when wanting something to eat. But he had said he’d wanted a real dinner with her.
She hadn’t expected this.
The rooftop of the prison proper was as flat as a helicopter pad and roofed with stones, on which a metal pathway had been laid for people to walk here and there. At the center of one large area, looking like some kind of a maintenance area she thought it was had been cleared away, just for them. A table had been set there, with all of the elegances of a romantic dinner. It had been that notion that surprised her more than anything.
She looked around, noting the absentness of any guards.
“We’re alone here,” he assured her as they walked, her arm in his. “We’re several stories above the ground and the guards made sure that there wasn’t climbing gear or any such thing here that I might try and use to escape. We’re still well within the wire and any fall from this high up would most certainly be fatal. They’ll not bother us here.”
He guided her to the table that sat waiting for them, like a romantic evening set for two. The table was round and covered in a silken tablecloth. Centered upon it were candles and flowers. There were two place settings where richly made silverware wrapped within silk napkins sat waiting for them. And waiting for her – for the both of them – were dishes holding steaming lobster tail dinners, complimented by what she knew was unmistakably a real bottle of wine.
Only one question came to mind as they ascended the metal work platform where the table sat. “How…?” she asked, witnessing the setting, and utterly bewildered.
Mr. Rizzuto shrugged as he guided her to the table and offered her a seat. Still being in her most casual clothes she felt terribly underdressed for an occasion like this. “Well, I have some connections and when you can afford such things, the warden, the guards, and the rest of the staff are quite agreeable.”
She looked at the bottle. “Real wine? Why didn’t you get this before?”
He chuckled. “I’ll be leaving here soon. As I understand it, most prisoners are gifted with a bottle like this when they leave. The warden was kind enough to give me mine in advance.” He rolled his eyes. “Well, he was kind enough to do so after I made a generous donation to the prison,” he added with a wink.
Not a bribe, she thought, but an honest donation. Dominic didn’t seem the sort to set bribes for anything. And if he did, it wouldn’t be something as simple as a bottle of real wine. It would have been for something far more important.
Settling into her chair she looked on at the lavish dinner that had been set out for them. She couldn’t escape the feeling that this was a date, not a business meeting as she had originally thought it would be. The idea sent an excited shiver down her back that she couldn’t deny that she enjoyed.
Mr. Rizzuto settled into his chair across from her and in true gentlemanly fashion, he offered to pour her a glass of the red wine that sat waiting for them. Eager for something – anything – to steady her nerves, she accepted. He poured her a generous measure of the scarlet liquid and did likewise for himself, then offered his glass in a toast.
“To full disclosure,” he offered simply.
She saluted him with her own glass, gently clinking it with his and hearing the ring of authentic crystal in the air. God, he didn’t pull any punches, did he? She sipped from the wine and felt an explosion of taste wrap itself around her taste buds and she looked at the wine with awe. “This is the stuff they give you when you leave?”
“Good, isn’t it?” Mr. Rizzuto said, setting his glass down and gesturing to her lobster tail. “Please, dig in.”
She set her napkin on her lap and as she had been taught, she began eating the offered meal with slow, small, and deliberate movements, though she felt a little ridiculous doing so. Lobster, she knew, was a gentleman’s dish and she had the distinct impression that she should eat it as a lady in gentleman’s company would. Being underdressed again added a keen embarrassment to her. And even though she knew she had pierced the veil of Dominic Rizzuto, she still felt that there was so much about him that she didn’t know.
“So, you have questions?” Mr. Rizzuto said, taking in a mouthful of lobster. “I asked for a price and you’ve met it, Jamie. Now com
es my end of the bargain, I think.” He looked at her with the kind eyes that she had only ever known him to have. “Please.”
She had been chewing on these thoughts all day and had yet to decide on which question she wanted to ask first. She had only just put the first bit of lobster into her mouth when the first question rolled into her mind. She spared a moment to chew her food and swallow before she formed the words to speak. “Who are you? I mean, really?” She gestured to the table before them. “How can you set this up? Somehow I doubt that even in a place like this you could get away with it if you have the money.”
He smiled at her and sipped his wine. “Well, it’s not so much a ‘who’ as a ‘what’ that’s interesting.” He took a short breath. “To be honest, Jamie… ‘Rizzuto’ isn’t my real name. I changed it because I have an,” he rolled his eyes thoughtfully, “unfortunate tie to, shall we say, certain families,” he said pointedly.
The simplicity of the answer hit her as though she had been struck with a sledgehammer. There was no need for explanations either. Her eyes widened and she froze before taking her next bite. She looked at him, amazed, as he calmly sat eating his lobster. “Families… as in the Mafia?”
He nodded simply as though confirming the color of his prison shoes. “My father used to work for one of the original five families. That was how he wound up in prison.”
She sat aghast. “You’re a mobster?”
He laughed aloud at that and took another sip of wine. “A mobster? No, or at least, not in any such grotesque terms. When people hear the word ‘mobster’ they flesh out some thug with a fedora and a long coat carrying a Tommy gun in his pocket and a baseball bat up his sleeve who happily breaks people’s bones in broad daylight.” He gave her a reassuring wink. “I’ve done no such thing.”
She didn’t know what else to say. He had just let out – and willingly – a detail that could have landed him in a federal prison where inmates were ground up and fed to each other in pieces just because she had asked. Normally this wasn’t the kind of thing that one discussed over dinner.
Well, what the hell did I expect? It was a redundant question, being as how she didn’t have a damn clue.
“So, you’re not tied to the mob?”
“Well, no, I didn’t say that… I most certainly am now,” he said, though she noted a small kind of regret in his voice.
She measured the sound of his voice. “You’re not happy about that?”
He half-shrugged, “Sometimes you have to make deals in order to get what you want.” He picked up his wine and gently let the fluid roll around inside the glass before he took a drink. “But considering what I stood to lose, I guess I feel good about the deal that I made.”
There was something cryptic in that, but Jamie could not sense the need to delve deeper into it. She pressed on with her original line of questioning. “So… the money… your stay here?” she asked, two questions fighting for dominance at once in her mind.
He cut a piece of his lobster tail off and forked it into his mouth. “You’re a clever girl, Jamie. I’m sure that by now that you’ve figured out that the money that I allegedly stole isn’t really gone?” He gave her an approving look. “As you’ve already correctly surmised, misdirection was the key to my success, wasn’t it?”
“How did you do it?” she asked, her mind boggled with the question.
“Think of it as the rabbit in a hat trick, basically,” he said jovially. “It was a program that I learned about in school. A Squirrel Algorithm, it was called. It gathers information, bit by bit, like a squirrel hunting for nuts.”
“Information? You mean money?”
He gave her a salute with his fork to confirm her deduction. “All those bits of information that it collects, it takes and keeps it hidden, like a squirrel gathering nuts for winter. It did it cent by cent, slowly gathering money until it reached the ten million dollar mark. Then it took that money and vanished with it, like a pulling a net filled with fish from the ocean in one go. It didn’t remove the money from Lester & Desoto’s accounts, it just moved it. The money was still there, it just wasn’t where it had originally been stored. And I designed the program to move that money around at unpredictable intervals and to completely random locations. It’ll stay in one place, but not long enough for anyone to find it. It might sit in one account for as long as an hour or as little as a few seconds.”
She nodded at that. There was a strange kind of brilliance in what he’d done, but again she wondered what he could accomplish if he put his mind to it. “That’s why you said that even you didn’t know where it had gone.”
“I left a spile program embedded in the software,” Mr. Rizzuto went on. “The money that I “stole” is what pays for me to be here. It siphons off to pay whatever I need for my stay… bed and board, food, clothes, even this lovely dinner. I wrote the program so that it couldn’t do anything but that.”
“Yeah, I figured that much out,” she said, her mind absorbed in her own thoughts. “But what I can’t figure out is why.” She set her fork down and folded her hands over her plate, looking across the table at this strange man. “Why did you choose Lester & Desoto? What’s so special about them?”
“Because of my father,” he said simply.
“Your father?”
“He worked for Lester & Desoto… the bad news man for people who couldn’t afford to pay their bills. He worked with the banks and took their cars, their houses, their yachts… whatever they had as compensation when the rich and guilty couldn’t pay their bills. And he was good at what he did. He worked for the Bonnano Family doing that sort of thing and he did it for me, Jamie… so that I wouldn’t have to grow up doing the things that were expected of kids like me. I didn’t want to break knee caps or burn down people’s houses. My father didn’t want that for me either. So he opted to do the dirty – but legit – work for the firm. In exchange, my father and weren’t considered to be formal members of the organization. They left us alone.”
His eyes fell and he half-heartedly cut at the remainder of his dinner. “But then that year he was gone, the one I told you about, was when things broke badly for him.”
“What happened?”
He sighed. “I never got the full of the details myself. All I know for certain is that Lester & Desoto had a client that had some rather large legal troubles, one that the Bonnano family was entitled to. They couldn’t pay their bills and they needed a way out. So, somehow, someone made it look like my dad had stolen from them to recuse them of the debt.”
She saw all of the pieces fall into place without the need for further explanations. “He was sent to prison for it… and he died there.” She resisted the urge to drink more of the wine, wanting to keep a clear head. “So you went to school to learn banking and such and changed your name so that no one would recognize you when you went to work for Lester & Desoto. And you wanted to “annoy” your bosses by stealing their money.”
“Ten million is what they accused my father of stealing and it’s what they put him away for. But during the trial, the prosecution pointed out my father’s connection to the old families. There was no defense against that: a man with a hardcore connection to a violent crime syndicate and even his real work was presented as a cover for that. The prosecution got its way and he was sent to prison as a violent offender. In prison, he wasn’t afforded any protection because everyone thought he had stolen from a mafia family. And inmates think that they can score a lot of points by killing someone that wronged one of the old families.”
And he didn’t survive long without help from the inside, she realized. “So when you turned yourself in?”
“I did it fast so the prosecution wouldn’t have time to build a case against me. What I told you about seeing people being laid off and losing their pensions because of what I did was true, Jamie. Up until I saw that, I had no plans to go to jail. I was content to steal the money from the people that my father served faithfully and who also sent him away because he was
a convenient scapegoat at the time.
“But after I saw that, I thought about everything that my father did. He sacrificed for me so that I could have a normal life. He wanted me to do good things with my life, and I had just stolen millions because I wanted to get even.” He looked mournful for a moment. “It was that more than anything that made me realize that I’d spat on him. So I turned myself in to atone for what I’d done. And since I had a new name, a new identity, there wasn’t any dirt that they could dig up in time to get me sent somewhere else.”
She registered that as a point against her. If she spoke up about it now, things would change for Mr. Rizzuto and not for the better. It was a terrible weight to hold on one’s shoulders and she didn’t relish the feeling.
“So when you pleaded no contest in your trial, it happened so fast that the prosecution or someone wouldn’t have the time to buy the judge or anything. And they didn’t have time to research you and find out who you really were. And if they did,” she said, closing her eyes and realizing the true depth of her being sent here, “they couldn’t formally acknowledge it because then they’d be humiliated for letting something like this slip right past them.”
That’s why they sent me here knowing as little as I did, she realized. It wasn’t because of my theories; they just wanted me to get this information out of him! “Bastards,” she muttered under her breath.
“And that’s why they sent you, I’d wager. And now you know the truth,” Mr. Rizzuto said as if he were reading her thoughts. He paused and set his fork aside. “I do appreciate you being honest with me, Jamie. But now, as they say, the time has come to conclude affairs.” He put folded his hands together. “What do you plan to do?”
“Do?” she asked, caught off guard by the question.
“About me.” He had a look on his face that bordered on fear. “This third party that you’ve mentioned before, I gather that it’s Lester & Desoto and all of your interest in how I grew up and all was your attempt to discover if I truly was who they feared and how best to slip the information of their missing money from out of me.”
