Page 68 of Masked Don

“And who pays Nicky?”

“I don’t know. I swear to Christ, I don’t. He just said the man. The man wants this, the man wants that.” He’s shaking so hard the chair rattles. “But there was… there was a girl. That was the real job. The shooting was just noise. Make noise, get everybody running, find the girl in the green dress and bring her out the service door. Alive. He said alive. He said it like three times.”

The room goes very still.

“Go on.”

“Nicky said nobody touches her face. Said the man wanted her in one piece, because he had plans for her, and he didn’t want her messed up before he got to…”

He stops, because he has seen my face.

I have spent my life training my face not to do things. I don’t know what it’s doing now. Whatever it is, it makes a man who walked into my party with a rifle try to push his chair backward across the concrete with his heels.

Luca didn’t come to my party to kill me.

Killing me was the excuse. The noise. He came for her.

Five years he’s been nursing it, the night she laughed at him in front of everyone who mattered and walked out of his life on my arm. He didn’t want her dead. Dead would have been over too fast. He wanted her back in a room with him, with the door locked, so he could take as long as he liked teaching her what happens to women who laugh at Luca Santini.

I think of the green dress. I think of her hands pressed to a stranger’s wound, steady as a surgeon’s, while the man who wanted her dragged out through the service door sat in a precinct with a cup of coffee, playing the victim.

“Did you see her?” My voice sounds very far away. “That night. Did you get close to her?”

“No. No, I swear to God, we never made it upstairs. We heard the shooting on the back stairs, and the two who went up never came down, and we ran…”

“Good.”

I mean it. It’s the only thing he has said tonight that bought him anything.

I stand. My knees crack. I’m forty years old, I’ve been doing this since I was nineteen, and somewhere in the past month I have started to feel the floor in my joints.

“What happens now?” Dario’s voice cracks down the middle. “Please. Please, I got a mother, I got a little sister, I…”

“Everyone has a mother.”

I roll my sleeves back down. I button the cuffs. Anthony holds out my jacket and I shrug into it, and the boy watches every motion like it’s a clock counting down, which it is.

“There was a kid at that party,” I tell him. “Marcus. Twenty years old. Waiting tables to pay for school. You put a bullet in his leg, and he’ll carry that scar for the rest of his life, and he’ll never even know your name.” I look down at him. “That isn’t why I’m angry. Bystanders bleed. It’s an ugly business, and I made my peace with that a long time ago.”

I lean down until he can’t look anywhere but at me.

“I’m angry because you came into my house to put your hands on what’s mine.”

Then I straighten, turn to Anthony, and say the two words my father used to say in this same basement when I was a boy listening at the top of the stairs.

“The river.”

Dario starts screaming before I reach the stairs. I turn off the light on my way out, and the screaming goes on in the dark behind me, and I put my foot on the bottom step and look up.

Stevie is standing at the top of the basement stairs.

She’s barefoot, in the thin sleep shirt, one hand on the rail. The light from the kitchen hall is behind her, so I can’t see her face. I can only see that she isn’t moving.

I don’t know how long she’s been there. I know from the way she’s holding that rail that it’s been long enough.

Anthony goes still behind me. Nobody has ever come down those stairs uninvited. My sister never has. My mother never did.

I climb them one at a time. She doesn’t back up. When I reach the top, I can see her face, and it’s white, and her eyes go to my hands and stay there.