Page 84 of Masked Don

Someone was in her apartment when she got home from her shift. The door wasn’t forced. Nothing was taken except every photograph she had of me and Matthew, the ones stuck to her fridge, the strip from the photo booth at Coney Island, the drawing he made her of a dinosaur in a tutu. On her bathroom mirror, in her own red lipstick, someone wrote TELL BUNNY I SAID HI.

And when she went back down to the street to wait for the cops she didn’t want to call, a man in a Yankees jacket was leaning on her stoop. He asked her, very politely, what day Matthew’s birthday was. When she told him to go to hell, he put her shoulder into the doorframe hard enough to tear her jacket.

“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m fine, I swear, it’s just a bruise, I just thought you should…”

I’m already walking. Down the hall, down the stairs, to the study, where the light is on under the door.

Enzo looks up from his desk the second I come in, and whatever is on my face makes him stand.

I put the phone on speaker and set it on the desk between us, and Candy tells it again. He doesn’t interrupt. He doesn’t ask a single question until she’s finished, and then he asks just one.

“Did he touch you?”

“He shoved me,” Candy says. “Into the door. Who is this?”

“Someone who’s sending a car for you,” Enzo says. “It will be outside your building in twenty minutes. The driver’s name is Anthony. Pack for a week. Don’t open the door to anyone else.”

When the call ends, he picks up his own phone, and I watch him become the other man. The one from the basement. He gives three orders in a voice so quiet I have to strain to hear it, and one of them is a description of a man in a Yankees jacket.

“Enzo.”

He lowers the phone.

“Don’t send me to bed,” I say. “Not tonight.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then he pulls out the chair beside his desk, and I sit, and we wait together until Anthony texts that Candy is in the car.

The next morning, there’s a small white box on my desk. I know what kind of box it is before I open it. I open it anyway.

Inside, on a square of black velvet, is a gold pinky ring with a crest I’ve seen on a lobby floor in Midtown. The Santini crest. There’s a card under it in Enzo’s slashing black hand.

The man who put his hands on your friend. He won’t again.

I sit with the box in my lap for a long time. I wait to be horrified.

I close the lid and put it in my drawer, and I go and make sure Candy has eaten breakfast.

CHAPTER 31

STEVIE

Enzo and Carmine are in the living room having coffee, papers spread across the low table between them. They’re trying to build a picture of Luca’s support, who’s with him, who’s watching, and who’s waiting to see which way the wind is blowing before they commit.

My job is technically supposed to be sorting the week’s correspondence in the chair by the window while I watch Matthew and Marta play in the garden. I last about ten minutes.

“Donati’s a maybe,” Carmine’s saying, tapping a name. “He’s old Santini money, but he’s careful. He won’t move on nothing.”

“He was at the party,” I say, before I’ve decided to.

They both look up.

“The party at the tower,” I say, setting down the letter in my hands. “The night of the shooting. Gray hair, wife in a silver dress, who wanted to be anywhere but there. He spent the whole evening near the doors on the east side.”

The men watch me, not quite sure what to make of my comments.

“If you ask me, he wanted to be close to an exit. You don’t stand that close to a way out unless you think you’re going to need it.”

“You remember where a man stood?” Carmine says slowly after a moment of awed silence. “At a party two weeks ago, when a shooting occurred soon after.”