Chapter 5
Adriano looked at the man kneeling beside his desk for a long time. The rain had begun to slow outside, the way it always did in the hour before dawn, and the first faint gray was beginning to touch the edges of the French windows. He did not speak. He was a man who had built his life on the certainty of his own eyes, and his eyes had told him, nine hours ago, that the man on the floor had wept while he placed a bomb. A man who wept while he set a bomb was not a man without a heart. He was a man who had been crushed between two impossible things.
“Tell me everything,” Adriano said. “From the beginning. And do not leave out a single word.”
Luca’s head was bowed. When he spoke, his voice came out rough and low, the voice of a man who had been carrying a weight so long that his throat had forgot how to carry words. “Three weeks ago, I came home to Brooklyn and found a photograph on my kitchen table. It was Matteo. My boy. He was out on the street with his school bag, crossing the intersection where he always crosses. The photo was taken from a car. I knew it was taken from a car because of the angle, low, through the window, the way they do it.” He paused. “I have been in this life long enough to know what a photograph on a kitchen table means. So I waited. I did not call anyone. I did not tell you. I spent two nights in the dark, waiting for the phone to ring.”
“And it rang.”
“It rang. A voice I did not know. A man who said he was speaking for the Cordano family. He told me that they had been waiting for the right moment for fifteen years, and that the right moment was coming. He told me that on the night of the spring meeting, they would burn the Marchetti name out of the earth — the don, the Two of the inner circle, the old men from the Bronx and the harbor. He told me that they had already tried to reach you eight times, and that you had survived all eight because you were not a man who could be killed from the outside.” Luca’s voice cracked. “So they decided to kill you from the inside.”
Adriano’s face did not change. “And you were the inside.”
“I was the inside.” Luca said it without looking up. “They have Matteo. They will not tell me where. They send me a photograph every day, a new one, so I know he is still alive. They told me that if I refused to plant the device, they would send me a photograph of something else. And they told me that if I told you — if I told anyone — they would send me that photograph anyway, and they would do to him what they would have done to you, and they would do it slowly, and they would make sure I found out.”
The water was falling down his face now, and he did not wipe it away. He had not wiped it away in nine hours. “I have stood in front of bullets for you. I have walked into rooms I did not expect to walk out of. I did not think there was anything left in the world that could make me put my hands on a bomb beneath your desk. But there is one thing, Adriano. There is one thing. And I am sorry. I am sorry that it came to this. I am sorry that I chose my son. But I chose my son. And I would choose my son again. That is the whole truth of it.”
Adriano sat with his hands flat on the walnut. The words sat in the room between them like a third man. He thought about the eight attempts. He thought about the years of war with the Cordano family, the old feud that had begun before his father died, the name that had been carved into the underside of the Marchetti history for a generation. He thought about the photograph he had seen on the screen — the shoulders shaking, the forehead pressed to the floor, the four seconds of a man weeping over a bomb.
“Where is the exchange?” he asked.
Luca’s head lifted. There was something in his eyes — not hope, not yet, but the first flicker of a man who had been looking at a wall and had just seen a door. “Tomorrow night. Midnight. The old Cordano warehouse on the water, the one they have used for every exchange for thirty years. They will bring Matteo. They will bring a car. They will tell me to get in the car with my son and drive away, and they will never touch us again. It is not true, of course. They will kill us both the moment we are in the car. But I told them I would come. I told them I would climb in the car and let them do whatever they wanted, as long as Matteo was in my arms when it happened.”
“Did you tell them about the meeting?”
“No. I told them the meeting was postponed. I told them I had gotten a message from the estate saying there was technical trouble. They do not know you found the device. They do not know anything has gone wrong. As far as they know, the bomb is still under your desk, blinking, and the Marchetti family is still waiting for the spring meeting that will never come.”
Adriano leaned back in the chair. He looked at the painted eyes of his father on the wall. The old man had built an eye into this room because he had known that the day would come when the man Adriano trusted most would be the man he had to look at through it. He had not known — he could not have known — that the same eye would be the thing that showed Adriano the truth beneath the betrayal: that the man who had set the bomb had been crying, and that a man who cries while he sets a bomb is not a traitor. He is a hostage.
“Stand up,” Adriano said.
Luca did not move. “I have not asked for forgiveness—”
“Stand up.” Adriano’s voice was quiet, but it was not the quiet of the boss. It was the quiet of a man who had made a decision. “You are going to tell me everything about the warehouse. Every door, every window, every man they usually bring, every habit they have. And then you are going to call the Cordano family and tell them the meeting is rescheduled for tomorrow night after all — the don could not postpone it, the old men insisted, it will happen at the estate at ten o’clock. You are going to tell them that the device is still in place, and that you have been told to stand watch outside the study, and that the moment the meeting begins, the moment all the men are in the room, you will press the detonator yourself.”
Luca stared at him. “You want me to tell them the meeting is on.”
“I want them to believe the meeting is on.” Adriano leaned forward, and for the first time in nine hours, something that was almost a smile touched the corner of his mouth. “They have spent fifteen years trying to erase the Marchetti name from the inside. They have put their hand into my house and tried to take my family. They have taken yours. Tomorrow night, they will gather in the one place they believe is safe, to watch what they think is the end of me. And I am going to tear them out of the earth, Luca. Every one of them. And I am going to bring your son home.”
It was not a promise. It was not a threat. It was a statement of fact, the way a man states the weather when he has already seen the sky turn.
Luca rose slowly. For the first time, he looked at Adriano the way he had looked at him fifteen years ago, when the old man had lifted the silver chain from his own neck and placed it around a boy’s neck. “You are not going to kill me?”
“I am not going to kill you,” Adriano said. “I am going to give you your son back. And then I am going to decide what to do with the man who planted a bomb under my desk. But I am not going to decide it tonight. Tonight, we have work to do.”
He walked to the sideboard, picked up the glass of scotch he had poured two hours ago, and carried it back to the visitor’s side of the desk. He set it down in front of the leather chair, the one Luca had refused to sit in. “Sit,” he said. “Drink. Tell me about the warehouse.”
May you like
Luca sat down. He did not drink. He looked at the glass for a long moment, and then he looked at Adriano, and the water in his eyes finally spilled over, and he let it fall. He did not wipe it away. He sat in the chair that he had refused to sit in, and he told the man who had almost killed him everything there was to know about the warehouse on the water, the men who guarded it, the habits of the family that had taken his son, and the single narrow window of opportunity that would be open tomorrow night at midnight.
Outside, the rain stopped. The last rain of March had finished its work, and the first gray light of the new day lay across the wet gravel of the drive, and in the small guest apartment on Sixty-Eighth Street, a six-year-old girl in a red shirt was asleep in a strange bed, dreaming of shadows and red lights, unaware that the man in the black jacket had just made her warning the hinge on which the whole war would turn.
