by CD Reiss
Maybe we can blend the two.
Once this is over, maybe. Once everyone who tried to take her is dead, and I’ve won her safety, we can try some version of happiness.
Maybe I can meet her between her normal and mine.
When I’m sure Violetta is asleep, I slip out from under her, dress, and go to the office down the hall.
Damiano and his alliance with what’s left of the Tabonas needs to be dealt with. There’s a list of people who are going to die with or without a war. They hurt my violet’s body, which is bad enough, but the torment in her heart is intolerable. They’re all going to pay for it.
My rage isn’t wild or reckless. I am in control. The procedure is clear. I am a surgeon, cutting away flesh to get to the people who hurt Violetta, then to the man who ordered her hurt. When they’re dead, I’ll drop the scalpel, pull away my mask and scrubs, and leave the body for the rats.
We’ll go to her doctor over the river, then to the crown. Just the two of us. Three men will scout ahead to make sure it’s safe, but otherwise, I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want to announce our intentions by making a show of moving men around to secure the area again.
Once I have the pieces of the crown, I’ll solidify the loyalties of everyone in Secondo Vasto. There will be nowhere for Damiano or his allies to hide.
My wife wants a normal life, but this is my normal. I’ve had it easy up until now. I’ve been lazy and complacent, letting so many of the Tabonas live as long as they left Secondo Vasto, believing Damiano would be satisfied with friendship. Too many years in America made me soft.
That’s over. They say taking a wife makes a man weak, but Violetta’s forced me to get stronger.
It’s the dark time of day that’s both late and early. We’ve been in my office for hours, trying to come up with a way to destroy Damiano and his crew. Carmine’s fallen asleep in his chair with his head back and his mouth open. Gennaro’s fidgeting like a kid catching a third wind just as the pastries are coming around.
“Marco knows,” I tell Gennaro. “He knows where his daughter is. We find him, we find Gia, we find Damiano.”
“We gonna get it out of her the hard way?” Behind his words is a cringe of discomfort.
“We’ll do what we have to.” I sound more confident about beating information out of a woman—my young cousin especially—than I am. I don’t like it. “We’ll make sure Tavie’s far away.”
Gia’s brother came to Torre Cavallo yesterday and swore allegiance, but when push comes to shove, he’s unlikely to act against his family.
There’s a knock at the office door before it opens a crack. It’s Tavie himself, who looks more awake than anyone else in the room.
“Speak of the fucking devil,” Gennaro says.
“Who?” he asks. “Me?”
“Are you the devil?” I ask, then wave off the answer. “What is it?”
“Yeah, uh…” Tavie runs his fingers through his dark hair. “You told me to tell you if anyone came to the gate?
“I did.”
“There’s this guy, Dario Lucari?”
That is not a name I expected to hear.
“Send him up.”
He runs off, and Gennaro shakes his head at the boy.
“He’s so disgusted with his old man, makes me feel sorry.” Gennaro tries to act flippant about it, but he does feel sorry, and that’s disappointing. Bad enough I have to deal with Marco—the man who rescued and raised me because he loved my aunt. “All he cares about is Gia.”
I should have listened to Violetta while it was possible to stop the ‘mbasciata, then taken out Damiano. He was the poison in the well.
“Tavie can stay on small tasks for now,” I say. “Like Remo. Running messages between the gate and the house. Getting coffee.”
I remember Tavie running around in diapers while I played hide-and-seek with Gia. I fought off school bullies on their behalf. Now everyone I grew up calling family is motivated to betray me.
Tavie isn’t guarded enough to lie with his mouth and his face at the same time, and both tell the same story. He has no idea where his sister is. But a boy who cannot hide his emotions is a boy who could break when we drag his father up the mountain and beat his sister’s whereabouts out of him. That’s going to have to be dealt with, because I need Marco—right now—before everything gets rearranged.
Maybe Dario Lucari can help with that.
A moment later, the man himself comes through the door wearing a pressed shirt and smelling as fresh as a virgin’s underpants. He opens his arms so I can see inside his jacket.
“I got nothing on me,” he says. “I come in peace.”
“We frisked him,” Tavie says.
I stand and shake the man’s hand. “If Dario Lucari wanted to get in here with a loaded gun, you wouldn’t even know it.” I indicate a chair across my desk. “Sit.”
He sits, crossing an ankle over his knee. Gennaro shakes Carmine awake.
“Nice place,” Dario says. “New?”
“It came with the job.” I wave. “Andate via. All of you.”
Gennaro, Tavie, and Carmine leave.
“They seem like good kids.” Dario jerks his thumb toward the door behind him after it clicks shut. When he turns, I can see the tops of his ear ends in a straight line.
I rub my eyes, suddenly as tired as I should be. “They’re so good”—I stand and go to the side bar—“they should all be priests.”
Dario laughs. “The men on this side don’t have hair on their stomachs.”
He should know. He runs a huge chunk of the Cavallo operation in New York, and the city is big enough for three families to wet their beaks without stepping on toes. Unless they want to. And someone always wants to. No one man can be king, and no man can rest.
“Drink?” I ask, opening a bottle of Strega. He nods, and I pour us both a short glass. “They’re good with people. Everyone likes them.” I hand him his cup. “They’re the men you want in peacetime.” We tap our glasses and I bring the bottle back to my seat. “So, you came all the way from New York to sit in my office and shoot the shit?”
“Well, I didn’t come for the Strega.” Dario pours the rest down his throat and puts down his glass. I pick up the bottle, and he nods. As I fill his cup, he leans forward with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms together. Blue eyes. Part Northern.
He and I are equals. I am the sole capo of a small territory, and he has a piece of a much larger pie that’s harder to defend.
“I heard you were dead,” he says.
“I was.”
“How was Hell?”
“Hot.” I offer nothing else. I’m not going to ask him what he’s doing here again.
Smiling, he pushes his weight back. “I’m lying low. Trying to draw some people out.”
“Did you die too?”
“Not yet. But it’s getting tense. Very tense…” He takes a barely perceptible pause. “With the Colonia.”
I practically spit my Strega.
“You want to draw out the Colonia?” I put my elbows on my desk. If I’m six inches closer, maybe I’ll hear him right next time. No one wants to draw out the Colonia. The world is in balance as long as they stay underground.
“It’s safer than going in to get them,” he says as if it’s obvious. “So since you were dead, I figured I’d come around and see if you had guys looking for a change of pace. Guys too loyal to work for whoever put you under. Guys who wouldn’t mind paying four grand a month to live in a broom closet.”
“But I’m not dead, and you’re still here.”
“Paying my respects.”
“Sure.” I polish off half my drink. It burns going down. “You come halfway across the country to pick over my carcass and decide to have a drink instead? Going home empty-handed is no problem? Come on. What do I look like?”
“That a rhetorical question?”
Fucking Northerners and their fancy ideas. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.
“You still need guys,” I say. “You need faces no one over there recognizes.”
“Could be.”
“And you’re supposed to be someplace else. Prison?” When he smirks, I know it’s not that. No one would believe Dario Lucari went to prison. “You still have that thing in St….” I snap my fingers, trying to jog the name loose.
“St. Eustatius.” He says the name of a Caribbean island so obscure I can’t even remember it a second after it’s told to me.
“Grazie,” I say. “They think you’re there. But no. You’re here to pick meat off my bones. Then you come home early…with an army.”
He shrugs as if I’m a genius who somehow got him, but it was all too easy. I may be partly right, but if I guessed every nuance of his plan against the Colonia, he’d try to kill me in my seat.
“You want a piece?” he asks. “I could use you.”
Ten years ago—maybe even five—I would have restored order here and flown to New York City to take him up on it. Now, though, that would mean leaving Violetta. I cannot leave her behind any more than I can dash her hopes that I’ll give her the normal life she dreams of. Once this is past us, I might see it her way.
First, this has to be over.
“Thank you for the offer,” I reply. “I cannot. My wife is delicate. She might worry.”
This is an act. She’ll worry, and then everyone in her sights will find out what a lie her delicacy is.
“I heard you married.” He lifts his glass. “Tanti auguri.”
“Grazie. But, to business. You still need men. Good men. That’s why you’re here. Right?”
“Yes.”
“I have them to give. But not until my business with the Orolios is finished.”
“Ti ringrazio. How long do you think this business is going to take?” he asks.
“Depends. You pay for the men with a certain favor, and it could be done before a single leaf turns red.”
Dario puts his elbows on the desk, ready to hear my proposal. “I need to be in New York by the eleventh.”
“The sooner I find Damiano Orolio, the sooner you get the men you need and get home.”
He lifts his glass and I lift mine. We drink on it, and I tell him where to find Marco Polito, the closest thing to a father I ever had.
The sun is hiding just behind the horizon when she groans in her sleep. Her brows knot and she curls into a tight fetal position.
“I’m here,” I whisper too low to wake her, but she groans again and curls into herself. I can’t see her like this, chasing demons in her mind when I’m right here to slaughter them for her. “It’s just a dream.”
I stroke her cheek. Her eyes open, then go wide. Wakefulness hasn’t chased away the bad dream.
“I’m here,” I repeat.
“No.”
“You were having a nightmare.”
“No,” she repeats, throwing the covers off her.
There’s blood everywhere.
Violetta turns on the light. The black shape under her becomes a violent red.
I’ve seen a lot of blood in my life—and I’ve seen more than this come from a person’s body. She must be shot or stabbed, but I haven’t slept. No one came in. And she’s not acting wounded. So this shape soaked into the sheets—I’m shocked by it, and I’m not sure I should be. Women bleed. But how much blood? And shouldn’t they stop when they’re pregnant?
“Is this—” I’m going to say normal, but a bark of pain comes from my wife.
She buckles at the waist. She’s in pain and I have nothing, nothing to say or do about it.
“What?” Loretta once said I only knew a woman’s body to the length of my dick. I knew she was right and didn’t think there was anything I needed to do about it. Now I wish I’d learned something, anything that would help Violetta now. I’m afraid to touch her and afraid not to. I’m like a runner on the first day of work for a new boss. “What do I do?”
She takes one hand from her belly and points toward the bathroom. “Help me.”
Given sudden purpose, I leap off the bed and pick her up in my arms, rushing to the bathroom in seven steps. Once there, though, my purpose is gone. I don’t know what to do. Still in my arms, she reaches over my shoulder, turns on the light, and motions to put her feet on the floor. She looks down at herself. Her panties and the bottom of her T-shirt are soaked with red.
“Oh, God.” She’s distressed and overwhelmed, and all I’m doing is standing here like an idiot.
I get on my knees in front of her and put my hands on her hips. “We get these off, okay?”
She nods. I lower her blood-soaked underwear over thighs dripping with it. She steps out, flips up the toilet lid, and crouches on the seat, bent at the waist with her elbows on her knees.
“You don’t have to stay,” she says, eyes closed. The bruised one looks swollen all over again. She’s been through so much, and I can’t do anything.
“I want to.”
“It’s bad. It’s going to be bad. You can…” Her face crunches like dough being kneaded, and she lets out a long mmmnnnn through clenched teeth. Beneath her, water splashes on and on. I put my hand on her knee, and she grabs it, tightens, and her deep groans turn to a series of squeaks. She’s in pain, and I can’t kill someone or cut it out of her.
“This is the baby?”
“Yes.”
“It’s coming out?”
She nods, sniffing as if she’s going to cry. Selfishly, I hope she doesn’t, because I won’t know what to do with my anger.
“Is there something I can do?”
She shakes her head. “Just stay.”
I stay with her, making a mental list of who deserves to die for this. “I’m sorry, Violetta. I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“I shouldn’t have made love to you. It was—”
Her laugh dissolves into more groans, more splashing. She bends so deep her forehead touches the top of my hand as it rests on her knee. Her shoulders shake.
She’s still laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“You,” she says into her thighs. “You backward paisà. They don’t teach you anything.” She looks up. I can’t tell if the white part of her black eye is more bloodshot than yesterday. “It was the drugs they gave me. Or the stress. Or it just wasn’t a good egg. But it wasn’t your dick. That’s not how it works.”
I can’t pretend to know how any of it works. All I know about a woman’s body is where to put my dick, my fingers, and my mouth. I know I’m stupid enough about the rest to ask if I’m hurting her. I’ve never had to deal with pain I didn’t cause and couldn’t stop.
“I’m sorry anyway. Mi dispiace.”
Her face crunches, and she nods, bending again. “It just hurts.”
“Is there something I can get for you?” I squeeze her hands. It’s all I have. I’m out of my depth. “Anything? I’ll kill an animal for you to eat. I’ll bring a river if you’re thirsty. If you’re cold, I’ll set the world on fire to keep you warm.”
“You’re sweet.” She sobs into her knees, and I want to put the world into a shredder to make her stop.
“You want normal? I’ll give it to you. Barbecues and a house. Like they show on television. We’ll get in the car and drive anyplace you want. The ends of the earth. The middle of nowhere. The moon. California.”
“Calif—?” She cuts herself off, and I think it’s to cry until she lifts her head. “Don’t try to be funny.”
“I’m not trying to be funny. I don’t like winter.”
Her face twists like dough. “Ow. Sorry. Me neither.” She bends again, putting her lips on our clasped hands. “Ow.”
“Whatever you want,” I whisper, repeating the promise over and over, wishing for some way to fix this disaster.
“I want my mother,” she says into our hands. “And two Advil.”
She doesn’t let me get up for the pills for a few minutes.
As far as
her mother goes, even the king can’t raise Camilla Cavallo from the dead. But I can bring her the comfort of women.
Celia brought Advil when I texted for it. She stood in the doorway, saw my wife on the toilet with blood everywhere, and knew what to do. She stripped the bed, brought us a stack of clean towels, and readied a hot water bottle.
Women must be taught these things while men are killing animals and moving rivers, and since Violetta isn’t hungry or thirsty, I’m useless once I carry her to a fresh bed.
“I’m fine,” she says. Her eyelids droop, then she cringes and groans again.
“Is the Advil not working?” I ask Celia, realizing my cook is not enough. She has a job. This is not going to work.
“Go,” Violetta says. “Move a mountain or whatever. I’m fine.”
I let Celia hustle me out, but once I’m in the hallway, all of the threads of the coming war tighten around me into a trap. If I don’t do something for her, I’ll go crazy.
This insanity isn’t new. When Rosetta died, I couldn’t figure out why it happened or who to blame. Outside my territory, I couldn’t threaten my way to an answer. I couldn’t break the doctor or midwife without exposing myself and thus Violetta, who was a sitting duck on the other side. I didn’t know the right questions to ask, and I didn’t believe the answers anyway. Rosetta was a good girl. I didn’t want her, but she’d been given to me, and when it turned out I had another, more noble reason to marry her, I saw it as a gift. I would raise the ill-conceived child as my own and make the best from the worst.
Then she died. A hole opened in the earth, and I fell into the gaps in my knowledge. An ectopic pregnancy is still a baby… Or is it not? And does it matter? Was it preventable? On purpose? Who did it? I was a wild man, trying to close the gap with assumptions and old wives’ tales.
Here I am again. I recognize this helplessness. This ignorance.
Out the window, I see Secondo Vasto, but also the houses built into the mountain below, and I know what to do.
I hustle downstairs. This time, I will do something. I will not leave Violetta with no one to talk to.
