Footsteps

by Susan Fanetti

  When he’d left the pub, he’d looked around but hadn’t seen her. So he’d gone back to his father’s house and spent the evening with Trey, trying not to obsess. Trying, but failing.

  Only Rosa still lived with their father, and only in the summer, but only he lived out of town. Carmen, Luca, John, and Joey all had places of their own in Quiet Cove or at least nearby. So the house was quiet on Sunday. They’d had a dinner of pasta and grilled chicken, prepared by Rosa in the kitchen and their father at the grill, and they’d finished the evening together in the living room, watching The Iron Giant with Trey, who’d watched from the snug perch of Pop-Pop’s lap.

  After Trey’s bath and bedtime, once he was tucked in and sleeping, Carlo, feeling restless and scattered, grabbed the leash off the hook in the kitchen. Rosa was cleaning up, emptying the dishwasher, and she looked up when Elsa began her joyful going-for-a-walk dance.

  “Kinda late, isn’t it?” She was young, his baby sister, but she wasn’t stupid, and the look she gave him now was suspicious. Sabina had been the subject of a lot of family talk since last night, and especially since he’d gone off to meet with her.

  It wasn’t that late, not even nine o’clock. But she wasn’t talking about time. “Just need to burn off some energy before bed, Peanut.”

  “Down to the beach?” She crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Don’t know. Just walking. Don’t be a brat.” He hooked the leash on Elsa’s collar and headed toward the front door. He had no intention of walking the dog almost a mile to the beach and then two miles down shore, and then all the way back. He’d have to carry the beast before a walk that long on sandy terrain was over. But he was drawn to the shore nevertheless—and yes, with the idea that he would be closer to Bina, even if he would not see her.

  As he wrapped his hand around the heavy brass doorknob, his father called, quietly, “Junior.” Carlo turned and saw him sitting in the dark living room, in his big, leather chair. In the shadows, only his legs, and the glint of his glass of scotch, were clearly visible.

  “Hey, Pop. Taking the dog out for a late walk.” He turned the knob.

  “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Walking the dog, Pop.”

  “Don’t treat me like you think I’m slow, boy. You know I’m not. You’re not, either. You know what you’re doing could take us all down.”

  Carlo walked into the room, Elsa following him on her leash. He sat on the edge of the table in front of the sofa, facing his father, and the dog sat at his heel, waiting patiently for the promised walk.

  He was done evading. Tomorrow, he would meet with Uncle Ben, and there would be no place for evasions. “He hurts her, Pop. He hurts her a lot.”

  Carlo Sr. set his glass on the small table at the side of his chair and leaned forward. “Answer me straight, Junior. Are you fucking this man’s wife?”

  He could answer this question both correctly and truthfully. “No, sir. I’m not. I want to help her.”

  “And you want to fuck her.”

  He was relieved that his father believed that he hadn’t yet slept with her, and that he hadn’t even paused to consider his veracity. “It’s complicated.”

  His father laughed. “Always is. He’s a powerful man. He could do us real damage. The kind we don’t recover from. He doesn’t walk away from an insult.”

  “I want to talk to Uncle Ben. He can’t do us damage if they’re involved. He can’t take them. Not even Auberon has that kind of juice.”

  There was an electric moment of stunned silence, and then Carlo Sr. sat forward. “Christ, boy. You understand what that means, I know you do. I love my brothers. They are good to us. They are family. But their way is a hard way. I’m losing Joey to that. I can’t lose you, too.”

  Joey was starting with the Uncles as a runner. Carlo Sr. had had an explosive argument with him about it after Mass, and had even called Uncle Ben to try to intercede, but it was a done deal, and it was what Joey wanted. Their father had worked all their lives to keep them away from that family business. Carlo saw that with his intention to go to the Uncles he was piling onto his father’s worry, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  “I’ll be okay, Pop. I’m not going over to that side. Just asking for help.”

  “You’re smarter than that, Junior. You know damn well that favors your Uncles do must be repaid with interest. Are you sure you want to give Ben a marker like that?”

  “I am.” He knew the dangerous waters he was entering. But he couldn’t turn his back on Bina, and the Uncles were the only way. Even if Auberon’s reputation didn’t have ‘the soft focus,’ he was known to be a vindictive, ruthless adversary. If Bina was right, and he was worse than people knew, well—then only someone who operated like he did could succeed against him.

  Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie. Who won. Always. In half a century of power, they had not lost.

  “And you say you just met this girl.”

  “Yes. Pop, it’s about more than what I want. Even without that, I can’t turn my back and let him hurt her. He’s an evil piece of filth. Maybe fighting him for her weakens him somehow. Maybe it makes things better for us, too. If the Uncles fight with us, it weakens him.”

  “Now you’re telling yourself fairy tales. It’s not just a matter of Ben and Lorrie taking up for you, and you know it. I know you’ve had a tough year. What Jenny did—I know that rocked you. Rocked us all. You’ve lost your balance, son. You need to think. Walk the dog in the other direction tonight. Then sleep on it.” He stood and ruffled Elsa’s ears. “If you do this, know what you’re laying down for a woman you don’t know.”

  With that, Carlo Sr. left the room and went up the stairs. Carlo knew he’d be awake for hours in his room, watching random reruns on cable television until he fell asleep. He’d been an insomniac since their mother had died, but he always holed himself up in his room, alone, before ten o’clock.

  Elsa fidgeted and whined quietly, getting impatient, and Carlo took her out the front door and down Caravel Road. Toward the beach.

  ~oOo~

  The other family business was conducted in a warehouse at the Quiet Cove Harbor. The sign painted in large, dark green script on both the road side and the water side of the long, low building read Pagano Brothers Shipping, and legitimate business was conducted during regular business hours every week of the year. Over-the-road trucking and some limited coastal water transport. It was a perfect front for the other part of the business, and Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie ran both sides expertly.

  The shipping company had been started by their father, Gavino Pagano, with one truck he’d bought secondhand and had driven himself, staying within New England, so that he could spend most of his nights at home with his young family. Working twelve and fourteen hour days, six days a week—seven, counting the paperwork and accounting he and his wife, Cella, did on Sundays—he’d built the company up to a modestly successful legitimate business. During the heyday of the Mafia, he’d held off the pressure to bring the company into that fold with humility and dogged determination, by offering up the respect those more powerful than he demanded and not being swayed by the shiny things those powerful men dangled before him.

  He and Cella had three sons, Beniamino, Lorenzo, and Carlo, and a daughter, Anita, who died of measles before she was school age. As the boys grew old enough to be of use, they worked at the company. As they became old enough to learn the business, they were brought into the office and shown. The boys took different lessons away from those insights behind their father’s office door. Carlo had seen their father hold to his principles and find fulfillment in that integrity more than in material gain. He had seen a strength in his father, a humble man who was nonetheless able to turn away men who exuded power and menace with every exhale.

  Ben and Lorrie had, instead, seen their beloved father as a man who allowed himself to be humbled, who dropped his eyes and bowed his head when lesser men came in demanding their envelope. They grew angry.
When their father dropped dead on the warehouse floor at the age of fifty-two, having worked himself literally to death, Ben and Lorrie let their grief fuel that anger. They took over the business, they took the shiny things dangled before them, and then, when the time was right, they strangled the lesser men with their own baubles.

  Carlo, the youngest, still in high school when Gavino died, watched all that happen and mourned harder for his father and what had been lost with him. When he was old enough to join the family business his brothers had started, he refused. Instead, always handy, he’d hired on as a carpenter’s apprentice. And Pagano & Sons Construction, now a regionally renowned company, had arisen from those humble beginnings.

  Like his father before him, Carlo held off the advances of more dangerous men—in his case, his own brothers—and had achieved with them an understanding. The construction business was on the up and up. Over the years, that line had softened slightly—there had been a few minor favors done, a few wheels greased, some contacts made—but nothing that besmirched Pagano & Sons Construction. And Carlo had repaid those few favors by providing a cover of respectability over the family name. His family role: the good brother.

  Carlo Jr. knew all that history intimately, because a lot of it was family lore. The parts that weren’t, the details about the Uncles’ most lucrative business concerns, Carlo had learned as a warning, when his father had begun grooming him to take over his company. Carlo was proud of his father, proud of the business he’d literally built from the ground up. But he did not want it. He’d tried hard to want it. But he did not. He’d broken his father’s heart when he’d chosen a different path.

  And he knew he was breaking it again as he approached the door to the administrative side of the Pagano Brothers building, and one of the Uncles’ grunts unlocked and opened the door. It was just before ten a.m. on Memorial Day, and though the warehouse was running a skeleton crew, this side of the building was closed. The grunt went to the receptionist’s desk, pushed a couple of keys on the phone, and announced him, and, a few seconds later, the wide, burled walnut door to the inner sanctum opened, and his Uncle Lorrie stepped out.

  Carlo’s father shared little in the way of physical resemblance with his older brothers. He was eight years younger than Lorrie, eleven years younger than Ben. But it was more than that. Carlo Sr. was a big, bullish man. Six feet and broad like a lumberjack, with hands like mallets. He had not yet gone far grey, but he had a typical receding hairline and kept his dark hair cropped close. He was clean-shaven and always had been.

  Ben and Lorrie could almost be twins. They were shorter, slimmer, and appeared softer and weaker—at least physically. Both had thick, white hair and matching mustaches. What all three shared—and what Carlo Jr. shared with them—were weary, light brown eyes, and faces that crinkled around them when they smiled. In fact, overall, Carlo Jr. looked more like his uncles than his father. Just a younger, substantially larger version.

  Lorrie smiled now. He was wearing a crisp yellow golf shirt tucked neatly into navy Dockers, sharply creased. His uncles were old school, and this was as casually as they dressed. Usually, they were fully suited in Italian wool. Uncle Ben even wore a fedora when he went outside. The grunt who’d opened the door, a guy in his mid-twenties or so, had been wearing a red, white, and blue track suit, a thick gold chain around his neck. From one end of the cliché spectrum to the other. “Hey, Junior. Don’t see you ‘round here much, buddy.”

  “Uncle Lorrie.” They shook hands.

  “Well, get in here. Let’s see what’s up.” Lorrie held the door and ushered Carlo into Uncle Ben’s office.

  The room was about as typical a shipping company executive’s office as one could imagine. Because it was on the harbor, and because it was a shipping company, most of the décor was boat and truck oriented. Prints of ships at sea hung on the walls, which were paneled in walnut. A scale model of a Pagano Brothers semi had pride of place on a shelf. The carpet was thick and dark blue. The furniture was walnut and red leather. There was a massive ship’s wheel on the wall behind Uncle Ben’s desk.

  There was no computer on his desk, neither desktop nor laptop versions. Uncle Ben was past seventy and had no interest in learning ‘new’ technology. Other people took care of that kind of work for him. As Carlo came into the room, he stood up from his massive, red leather chair and came around his desk to clasp his nephew in a hard, sincere hug. He was wearing khakis and a white Oxford-cloth shirt. A navy blazer was draped over the back of his chair. “Junior. Good to see you. Come, sit. Tell me what it is I can do for you.”

  Carlo stepped to one of the two red leather armchairs arrayed in front of the desk; Uncle Lorrie took the other. As he sat, he saw that Fred Naldi was seated on the red leather couch on the far wall, khakis and a golf shirt stretched over his rotund body. Fred was the Uncles’ consigliere—their advisor and legal counsel. Surprised, Carlo paused on his way into his seat. “Fred.”

  “Hey, Carlo.”

  Finishing his trip to the chair, Carlo turned to his eldest uncle, who had returned to his throne.

  Uncle Ben smiled. “You don’t make appointments with me, Junior. I figure there’s trouble. If there’s trouble, we’ll need Fred.” He put his arms on the smooth wood of his desk and clasped his hands together. “This is about the girl after Mass, yeah? I know who she is. And you know you’d better not be here to tell me you’re having your way with another man’s wife. So I assume you are not. What’s the trouble?”

  He wasn’t surprised that Uncle Ben was as far ahead of the story as that. The man had gotten where he was because he was keenly observant and astute. Because he asked questions and expected clear answers. And because he was ruthless. So Carlo set aside the long explanation he’d practiced and got to the meat. “I’m not—having my way. I’m not. I won’t. But Auberon hurts her. Badly. He’s too powerful for her to get free on her own. She’s sure he’s planning to kill her. I want to help her get away from him, but I can’t do it on my own, either. I’m here to ask for your help.”

  “You covet her.”

  “When she’s free, yes.” No point evading the truth his uncle already knew.

  “When I offered to bring your wife back to you—bring a mother back to her son—you turned me down. Flat. Your wife who absconded in the night with another man. But you come to me now for help taking another woman from her husband.”

  That had been the most tense conversation Carlo had ever had with him. Uncle Ben had been insulted and bitterly frustrated. That Carlo had let Jenny go, let her leave Trey and hadn’t fought for her—Uncle Ben had seen that as emasculating weakness. Now, bringing it up, he’d phrased a statement, an observation instead of a question, so Carlo didn’t respond. He held his uncle’s eyes and waited. Sometimes, the best way to show strength was to wait.

  “How long have you not been having your way with her?”

  Carlo resisted the nervous urge to swallow. “I met her Friday.”

  From the side of the room, Fred Naldi laughed—one surprised syllable. Carlo ignored him. Uncle Ben had not reacted visibly to his admission.

  “What is it you want, Junior?”

  “I want her safe.”

  Uncle Ben sighed. “Terms, boy.”

  Ah. When he’d been told to meet here, at his warehouse office, and not in Uncle Ben’s home, in his study, Carlo had known that he’d be making a business arrangement, not asking for a family favor. Family favors—as when Uncle Ben had offered to bring Jenny ‘home where she belonged’—had leeway that business arrangements did not. What Carlo was doing here was making a bargain, and there was not much difference between bargaining with Don Pagano and dealing with the Devil. Clear terms, as detailed as possible, or you’d find yourself soulless and up to your ass in flames for eternity.

  “I want her free of him and safe to live a life of her choosing.”

  “You want her for yourself?”

  “I want her free to make that choice. What I want is for her marriage
to Auberon to be invalidated, and I want her safe to live a life without fear of reprisals. Whether I have her then or not is her choice. That’s what I want.”