Page 78 of Masked Don

And I finally stopped trying.

CHAPTER 28

ENZO

Eight days since the suitcase.

She gave me her terms the next morning, standing at my desk before I’d finished my first coffee. She had written them on a legal pad in her neat little hand, and she read them to me like a contract. I understood that if I argued with a single line, she would be gone by lunch.

A lock on her bedroom door and on her side of the bathroom door, and the only keys in her pocket. The locksmith came at noon. I handed her both keys myself. Every night since, I have stood in the hall and listened for that bolt, and every night it has turned, and every night I have gone back to my own room and not slept.

The folder. She wanted it gone, and she wanted to watch it go. We burned it in the study fireplace one photograph at a time. I held on to the last one too long, Matthew in the laundromat window with his palms against the glass. She held out her hand. I gave it to her. She dropped it in the fire.

On Sunday, she took Matthew to Bushwick to see Candy. No car. No guards. She switched her phone off on the platform at 242nd Street, and the blue dot I have been living on went gray and stayed gray for five hours and eleven minutes. Anthony came to my door twice to ask if I wanted a man on the train. I told him no twice. I sat at my desk and watched a gray dot and did not send anyone, and it was worse than the basement, worse than anything I have ever done in this house.

At six-forty, the dot came back. She texted one word. Home. I sat there with the phone in my hand until it stopped shaking.

The last line on her list was Matthew. He gets breakfast with his father. Breakfast, with her at the table, and nothing she doesn’t see. So I get forty minutes a day across a plate of eggs. He tells me about dinosaurs. I have never in my life worked so hard for anything.

She hasn’t touched me. She hasn’t said my name except at work. I haven’t asked her to.

Tonight was supposed to be the night the elders blessed my succession. A month ago, it was a formality. Now the restaurant is closed to the public, and nobody at this table is in the mood to bless anything.

The place is one of mine, an old shop on the back streets of the Upper East Side, with white tablecloths, no sign out front, and the kind of private back room where real business in this city has been done for nearly a century.

Stevie sits at my right, folio open, the way she did at the meeting in Luca’s tower. Part of me didn’t want to bring her, but the truth is, I’ve stopped being able to navigate these sorts of things without her. And I want the elders to see her at work, to witness with their own two eyes just how formidable she is.

“Enzo,” Vittorio Manfredi says in greeting. He sits at the center of the table, the others arranging themselves around him, the way iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet. “It’s your night, Enzo, so talk. We’re old and we don’t stay up late like we used to.”

I sit up straight, my hands folded on the table in front of me. “Thank you for coming, all of you. I’ll be direct out of respect for the hour. As I’m sure you all have heard, ten days ago, armed men came into one of my properties during a private event and opened fire.”

“Carmine and I put two of the shooters down. Two others ran.” I let that sit. “This wasn’t a robbery. It was professional, financed, and planned. It was an attempt on my life in a roomful of witnesses, and I’m certain every man here knows whose hand was behind it.” I don’t tell them about the green dress. A man who tells this table his enemy came for his woman is telling them where he bleeds.

“We know what you’re going to say,” says Tommaso Greco, sitting to Manfredi’s left, thin, sharp, the money man. “Say it anyway.”

“Luca Santini.”

The name settles over the table. Nobody looks surprised. Nobody looks convinced either.

“He was a guest that night,” I say. “He left an hour before the shooting and was at a precinct giving a statement before the bodies were cold.”

“You’re implying an alibi,” Vittorio says.

I nod. “An alibi built so cleanly, it’s almost insulting.”

I turn to Stevie, and she slides a folder, the one we put together over the last few days, across the table.

“And that’s only the beginning,” I say. “Santini operations have moved into three areas of my territory over the last few months: Sutphin, the waterfront, and a distribution line through Ozone Park that goes right past his casino, the Gilded Crown. He’s not hiding it, by design. He wants to see whether or not anyone will stop him.”

“A lot of maybes,” Greco says finally. “He was there, but so were two hundred other people. He left early. So did others. His people are moving into your streets.” He gives a small shrug. “Streets move. That’s the business. You want us to go to war with the Santini organization over circumstantial paper and a gut feeling?”

“Not so many,” Stevie says. Every head at the table turns. She doesn’t look up from the folio. “Mr. Santini’s people moved onto Sutphin on the ninth. The shooting was on the fourteenth. His men were already standing on those corners when the guns came through the service door, Mr. Greco. Page four. Streets don’t move that fast on their own.”

Greco turns to page four. Then he looks at her for a long moment, the way a man looks at a chess piece that has just moved on its own.

“I want you to acknowledge what’s in front of you,” I say.

“What’s in front of me,” says a third voice, belonging to old Dellucci, sitting at the far end, “is a man whose house is not in order, asking us to take his side in a fight that, for all we know, he may have started himself.”