by CD Reiss
“You didn’t let on you felt that way.”
“I was being a bitch, and I knew it. He was never mine.” She sits on the bench, closer now. “You learned about the gods and goddesses in school here, yes?”
“Zeus and shit? Yeah.”
“Like Athena, goddess of war?” After I nod, she continues. “The Greeks carved Athena’s face to look like a man. They put breasts on a man’s body. But our war goddess, Minerva…she was a woman. She was fierce, and feminine, and mad as vinegar. That was you that day, and when he took you back, I realized that. I said, ‘One day, she will be queen.’ And here you are.”
She’s saying I’m a queen, but queens don’t feel small and incapable without their king.
“I didn’t think I’d let myself love him this much,” I admit, and she nods.
For a second time, light flashes on her face. The sound that follows is not thunder, but a scream.
25
VIOLETTA
I burst into the kitchen, Loretta following close behind. The door out of the kitchen is open, letting in the wind and windswept raindrops.
Nazario Corragio and his driver are in the same position I left them in. Celia’s holding a coffee pot, but not moving to pour it or put it down. Gennaro is stock still and Carmine is the same, but shaking his head slowly. They’re all looking down, and I follow their gaze.
The crown is on the floor.
“What the hell happened?” I ask.
The consigliere shrugs and turns to Celia, making a tsk to the espresso pot. She shakes the bees from her head and pours.
“Dario,” Gennaro says, coming back to himself. “He tried to get the crown. Steal it.”
I pick up the crown, careful not to touch the nail. The driver watches me, wide-eyed, and makes the sign of the cross.
“What?” I ask, putting it back in the box.
“It’s not hot?” he asks.
“Of course not, you testa di cavolo.” He calls him a dickhead, scoffing and sipping from his coffee cup. “It’s hers.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I close the box and latch it. “It’s the same temperature for everyone. It’s a piece of dumb metal. You all need to stop treating it like it’s got magic.”
“Tell that to Dario,” Gennaro says.
“Where is he?” I ask, suddenly panicked that he’s gathering enough men to put me in the basement.
“Ran off,” Gennaro says.
“Like a kitten when the vacuum’s turned on,” Celia adds.
“The rest of the guys chased him but—”
“Why?” I interrupt Gennaro. “Why did he run out like that?”
“When he touched it”—he waves at the box—“he was struck by lightning.”
God save us all from stories about God.
“It’s fucking thunder and lightning out,” I growl. “And if—by some miracle—a lightning bolt came through the roof without breaking it, then through the second story of this house without making a hole in the ceiling, the floor right here would be black. So stop it. Everybody, cut it out. This crown is magic, but not the way you’re saying. We have the thing Damiano’s coming for, and we can trade it for Santino.”
The consigliere laughs into his espresso, clicking down his cup. “More of this, please.”
“What’s funny?” I ask.
“Do we have a place to talk privately? Or is it all”—he waves at the room with distaste—“gossiping?”
He means women’s space, but I let it slide because he’s old and he brought me the crown.
“If you can get up a flight of stairs.” Maybe I’m not letting it slide as much as I think.
The driver cuts in. “He can.”
The consigliere holds his cane against his chest and between his knees as his driver—whose name is Sam—carries him up the stairs and places him in a chair facing Santino’s desk. Sam and Gennaro take opposite corners of the room.
I place the box on a side table and sit where my husband usually sits. The chair is still too big for me, but I don’t feel as small. On the desk to my right, an ivory-faced teak clock with Roman numerals and brass feet ticks away my luxury.
With his cane planted in the carpet between his feet and both hands resting on the brass head, Nazario looks at the old box on the side table and sighs. “I am done.”
“I accept your resignation. Anything else? Because I have to find Damiano Orolio and give him that crown.”
“No,” he says, facing me. “You will not do that.”
“If it gets me my husband back, I will.”
“It will reject Damiano.”
“I don’t care,” I say with dead seriousness, letting him anthropomorphize the crown just for the sake of argument.
He sighs again. “You’re the first one who can truly use it to rule without being subject to a man, and of course…you want to trade it for your husband. Che ironia.”
My Italian isn’t great, but I know irony when I hear it. Outside, lightning flashes and—three seconds later—thunder rolls. Santino is under the same rain, suffering in ways I can’t imagine. I don’t have time to pick apart the paradox between my desires and his superstitions.
“You wanted a place to talk,” I say. “Not gossip. We’re doing neither.”
“Capo.” He smiles at me like a proud father, calling me a boss in the traditional, non-mob sense. At least, this is what I believe.
“You brought the crown to me. I’m grateful. But I can’t sit here all night waiting for you to tell me what you want out of me.” I flip the clock around to face him. “You have ten minutes.”
Instead of blurting out his intentions to fit it all into ten minutes, he pauses. There’s a light knock on the door, and Celia comes in with a tray of coffee. He wastes two full minutes waiting for it to be poured.
“Signora,” he asks her, “do you want Damiano to have the crown?”
She hesitates. “It’s not my place.”
“You can tell him,” I say.
“He killed Armando. A good man. My friend. He shouldn’t get rewarded for that.” She glances at me. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
She nods, turns on her heel, and leaves.
“She has a sense of justice you lack,” Nazario says.
I remind myself that he doesn’t know me or what I’ve become since I was stolen from my home and forced to live a life I didn’t ask for. I’m different in ways I haven’t had time to name.
“The summer I was ten.” I lay my hands flat on the desk. “My uncle took my sister and me to the Signorile Oxbow Lake, where San Vitus Boulevard ends. There’s a dock you can dive off. He set up a picnic, and Rosetta and I went out on a blow-up raft with a horse’s head. He packed Zia’s granita al limone—my favorite. All I wanted was to spend a few minutes in the lake, then go back and eat it before it got mushy. But there were boys on the opposite bank, and Rosetta was fifteen, so she found this more interesting than her little sister. Her and one blond kid were—I don’t know what you’d call shouting across an entire lake.”
“I think it’s called flirting.”
I smile at him and continue. “She paddled us into the center to meet him. I was smaller, so I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t do anything but scream louder and louder that she had to stop. I was making a racket. And she turns to me, with all these raging teenage hormones, and says, ‘Swim back if you don’t like it.’ I thought…yes. I could do that. I was an okay swimmer. It wasn’t that far away. I was going to get off this thing and swim to the dock. And so I stood, grabbed the horse’s head, and froze because I realized I wasn’t leaving the safety of the blow-up raft thing. I’d rather be miserable watching my sister flirt with this stupid boy than go to the effort of swimming back.”
“So you ate mushy granita.”
“It was worse… liquid.” I wrinkle my nose. “I was mad, but I never questioned my decision. I always did the easy thing, even if I was miserable. Until Santino took away all the easy choices. Being in his house
was hard. Accepting his kindness was hard. Obeying him was impossible. Loving him… It changed everything. So before you say I don’t have a sense of justice, you need to know that Santino DiLustro is my only justice. Before him, I was nothing. I dreamed, and I worked, but I wasn’t alive. I was asleep. The walking dead. I stayed on the raft, and if he hadn’t pulled me off, I’d still be floating around, protected from my own life. So fuck the crown. It’s a raft in a lake. I’ll jump off and swim to him. I’ll give the crown to whoever returns my king to me.”
The old man blinks slowly, and with a groan, he turns the desk clock around to face me. The ten minutes are almost up. He drops onto a seat with the sigh of easily-emptied lungs.
“You are worthy,” he says. “But you know that.”
“I don’t want to be worthy of anything but him.”
Leaning on his cane, Nazario Corragio gets up with cracking, grinding bones. Sam holds him straight. I stand with him.
“Santino DiLustro,” Nazario says when he’s upright, “is in the sub basement of a nightclub. Under a laundry room.”
Hope is a fuse that—once lit—can set a soul on fire and consume every last breath of reason.
“How do you know?” My voice cracks.
“It’s my job to know.”
“Is he all right? Who’s guarding him? How many?”
“No, Violetta Cavallo, my job begins and ends with the heads who share the crown. You are the last of a line of women sold to men for it and the first able to wear it without a man to tell you not to. Use its power to get the DiLustro boy.”
“It doesn’t have power. There’s no such thing.”
“Power is belief.”
Power doesn’t come from one’s own confidence or certainty. This, I know now. It comes from the belief of others. That’s what Santino always said, and he’s always right.
“I am done here.” Nazario turns his back to me.
Sam helps him to the door without my dismissal. His last statement is more than an excuse from the room. Nazario’s done with the meeting, and he’s done with life.
The door opens and Remo stops just short of knocking over Nazario, stammering. “I’m sorry… sir. Ma’am, but…they’re coming.”
“Good,” I say, opening the crown’s box. “Good.”
26
SANTINO
I am not strong enough. At first, I blame myself for having a suicidal survival instinct since this escape plan is as likely to kill me as to free me. Then blame goes to the missing finger. Then the pain with a home base in my shoulder. It’s hunger. Thirst. Desperation.
It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The gas pipe was built not to break. Not from the weight of one man. Not from all his strength, his will, or his fear. Not even his love can bend it enough.
“What are you doing?” Gia says from the other side of the wall.
She fell asleep when she was done sobbing, and I decided I didn’t have time to wait for her to get the hell out of here. If she stuck around looking for salvation from me, she deserved to die in a gas explosion.
Now she’s up.
“Get out of here,” I say, straining to bend pipes a plumber would be able to just cut.
“I can’t see!” She’s standing on the chair again, but she’s no taller. Her fingertips reach the hole as if she’s trying to pull herself up.
“Gia!” I shout, releasing my hold on the gas line. “If you want to live, walk out now. I’m not responsible if you don’t.”
I hear her drop back to the floor. I wait, hoping for footsteps on the stairs and a slammed door. But she doesn’t leave.
“Gia! Go!”
“You care,” she says. “I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but you still care about me.”
“Don’t think I won’t kill you where you stand,” I say to a woman behind a freshly-built brick wall.
“Let me help you,” she says. “Please.”
“Like you helped Armando?”
“I didn’t know they were going to do it!”
“Now you do, so you should go away.”
“Give me a chance to do better than I did.”
“Why are women so stubborn?” I mutter.
“Please. I read about what it feels like to die without water. It can take a week or even more. Your brain shrinks and you go blind because your eyes get sucked into your skull.”
I hear her get back on the chair. I expect a bottle of water to appear in the little hole, but of course, something that welcome and simple would never occur to a woman with no hope for me. Instead, a gun is laid there.
She says, “I know where to stand so you can’t shoot me through that hole, so—”
“Shooting you wouldn’t help me.” I take it down. It’s loaded.
“But you can end it if it’s bad.”
“That’s sweet, Gia. I’m sure St. Peter will look favorably.”
“If I could let you out, I would, you know.”
I close my eyes and sigh. There’s nothing she can do. This room has no windows to open and no door with a key she can steal for me. All I have are silent water pipes and gas lines I cannot break. The room on the other side of the wall has a couch, and chairs, and bloodstained hedge clippers.
With my left hand, I clench through pain to make eighty percent of a fist. The plan I’m trying to execute will probably get me killed unless I can cut a pipe on the other side of this wall.
“You want to help me get out?” I ask.
“If I could—”
“What if you could?”
There’s a pause. I’m sure she’s rethinking this, and I’ll be stuck in here with a gun and nothing to shoot besides myself.
“Tell me what you need,” she says after a deep breath.
“When this is done, I still have to kill you. I’ve never killed a woman, but I’ve never met one who earned her death with such enthusiasm.”
“I know.”
She knows. Nice to embrace natural laws men are sworn to uphold. It’s almost enough to make me trust her, which I don’t…but that leaves me in a windowless, doorless room, slowly starving while my wife is hunted like a dog. Inaction is not a choice.
“Look around the tool bench behind the couch. Tell me what you find.”
27
VIOLETTA
My spurts of competence are replaced by a single hum of panic. I have to get out of here. I have to find him. I’m not going to stay trapped behind a gate, waiting for messages or threats, when I know where he is.
This is the third time since Santino left that I’ve been warned someone is coming up the mountain, and it’s the first time I’m prepared to do something about it. My skin tingles, and my muscles throb. I’m enflamed with the possibility of finding him, touching him, hearing his voice. I have never wanted anything as much as I want him back.
I walk out of the office with the box under my arm. All the men—young and old, experienced and green, the tough guys and the softer soldiers—all of them watch me go down the stairs and past the kitchen, waiting for me to tell them what to do, but not getting close enough to ask. How did Santino manage so many of them?
They hang back as if they’re too afraid to approach me.
Celia has no such apprehension, following me onto the lawn where the crickets have taken over the night’s song.
“Violetta,” she says, catching up. “Where are you going?”
“I know where Santino is.”
“Thank God.” She makes the sign of the cross. Habit demands I do the same, but the box is under my right arm, and prayers are for the powerless. “Are they going to get him?”
“I am. No one’s doing for me what I have the authority to do myself.”
“Take me,” she says. It takes me a moment to understand that Santino’s cook wants to join me on what could be a suicide mission. “Santino took me in when no one else would. He kept me when my father demanded me back to marry me off.”
My gaze falls to her exposed forearms and the ciga
rette burns her father gave her when she disappointed him.
“I owe him my life, and I’m tired of sitting back and waiting for the right things to happen,” she adds.
“They’re coming for us,” Loretta calls when she’s halfway between us and the house.
Celia’s eyes go wide. Obviously, word hadn’t gotten to the kitchen yet.
“They want to trade Santino for the crown,” I say.
“You guys”—Vito gets the courage to approach—“they’ll be at the gate in a few minutes. You can’t stay out here.”
“I know,” I say. “How many are there?”
“Looks like seven cars.”
“Is Santino with them?”
“No way to tell. It’s night, and the windows are dark, so there could be six guys to a car or one. So you all need to just stay inside until we know. Come on.” He tries to wave me to the house, where he’ll lock us up safe.
That’s what Santino would want. I’m sure he’d rather die than find out I put myself in danger to save him. Too bad. He’s not here to tell me not to come for him.
“Does Lasertopia have a sub basement?” I ask Loretta.
“There’s a boiler room. The bouncers turned it into a hangout.”
I ignore Vito and pace to the gate. “Remo!” I call over my shoulder. “Get out the Alfa.”
Loretta and Celia follow me.
Vito runs past them to walk next to me. “Please, Mrs. DiLustro. You can’t just drive away. They won’t let you by.”
“I’m not going to pass them, Vito. I’m going through them.”
We leave him behind. Celia is to my right, and Loretta is to my left. In front of me, a line of soldiers stand between us and the gate.
“I’ll show you the sub basement,” Loretta says. “You won’t find it otherwise.”
To my right, the garage doors open, and the Alfa Romeo’s headlights flash when the engine starts. I stop a few feet from the gate and drop the box between my feet to address the men strapped here with me.
