Kylie sat in the passenger seat of Micah’s BMW, her hands clutching a thick white envelope.
Outside the car, a plastic shopping bag careened over the cold sidewalk like an urban tumbleweed, bouncing off the brown weed stalks dying from last week’s autumn cold snap.
Micah gripped the steering wheel, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
Kylie shook her head. “This is literally what you’re paying me to do.”
Micah glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. “Not entirely.”
“Oh, don’t make this dirty. I’ve never tried to scam Salvatore Grande before. I was concentrating too hard on staying alive.”
“This is just a reconnaissance mission. All you need to do is look at the art on the walls, the computer on his desk, and whatever security systems you see. Everything you notice is valuable information. You don’t have to convince him of anything. You don’t have to do anything other than be alert and get out alive.”
“Yeah, I’ll look around. And I can take a picture with my phone if I see anything suspicious.”
“Don’t take pictures. Assume you’re being watched whether anyone is in the room with you or not.”
Kylie nodded. “My appointment is in five minutes, and his office is on the fourth floor. It’ll take me a few minutes to climb the stairs.”
Micah frowned. “Building codes require disability access.”
She snorted. “Grande owns the building, and the Philly city council wouldn’t dare say a damned word to him. He probably has it designated as historical or something.”
“If anything happens, text me or call,” he said, leaning over the steering wheel and twisting his neck to peer up at the grungy seven-story building they were parked in front of. “I’ll come right up. I’ll be there in seconds.”
That would not work. “Right-o.”
“And be careful.”
“Jeez, Micah. You’d think I was important to you or somethin’.”
He sat back and glanced over at her. “I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt on my account, especially a woman. I’m not a liability. I’m the guy you call when you need a rescue. I’m the one who comes screaming in with a helicopter to pluck people out of a potential kidnapping when a meeting with a Russian bratva goes wrong.”
Kylie scrutinized him. “That was oddly specific.”
Micah resumed staring out the front window of his car. “Or something like that.”
Right.
“I’d better go. Salvatore Grande doesn’t like it if you’re late.”
Kylie stepped out of Micah’s car, placing her high-heeled pumps precisely on the sidewalk so she wouldn’t bobble and pulling her light jacket more tightly around her body. The late October breeze funneled between the decrepit office buildings. A paper jack-o’-lantern taped to the glass front door was already tattered by the wind, even though Halloween wasn’t for another week.
Hundreds and twenties filled the crisp envelope clutched in her hand. Rita had dropped off the girls’ contributions at the hotel desk early that morning, and Kylie had added all the money she had left to make up for not working that week.
Inside, mildew fumed in the air even though the summer heat and humidity had ended a month before. The chipped paint on a radiator Kylie passed as she climbed the stairs revealed layers of the different colors it had been painted, like the colored stripes of the earth after a rock slide.
The door leading to Salvatore’s office was the only one in the building that didn’t have a window. It was nothing but solid steel, and the sign beside it read Grant’s Nursery Business Office.
Grant, instead of Grande.
Salvatore shouldn’t Anglicize his name like that to hide his Italian heritage, but Kylie was sneaking around with the last name of Miller on her fake driver’s license, too.
And a supposed first name of Kylie. Some days, she almost got used to it.
Kylie looked up into the lens of the small black camera pointing at the spot in front of the door, and she waved.
The door in front of her clicked and buzzed. Kylie pushed it open.
Inside, a middle-aged woman, Kylie’s third cousin Maria Pia, sat behind a nice desk that wasn’t too fancy. Maria Pia’s glasses reflected her computer screen, which showed the empty hallway of the feed from the closed-circuit TV camera outside the door. A spiral notebook and pen lay beside the black landline phone, and the edges of a rectangular piece of glass stuck out from under the top sheet of paper.
Kylie slapped a smile on her face. “Hi, M.P. How’s your day going?”
Maria Pia shrugged. “Same old, same old. I’ll tell Mr. Grande you’re here.” She clicked a button on her mouse. A dark box appeared in the reflection in her glasses, and she typed something. “You can have a seat, Chiarina. Mr. Grande is currently on the phone.”
Kylie’s high heels sank into the thick carpeting as she walked over to the other side of the room and sat in one of the well-cushioned chairs against the wall. She took her phone out of her purse to check her messages.
“Um.” Maria Pia held out a basket. “No phones in the office with Mr. Grande.”
“Oops, I haven’t been to the office in so long, I forgot. I’ve been making it to St. Augustine’s for Mass every week.”
Maria Pia nodded sagely. “That’s good.”
And so, Kylie was reduced to staring at the walls and the paintings hung on them.
Each one of them seemed imbued with new meaning. The paintings in the receptionist room weren’t Old Masters or even Italian as far as Kylie knew.
But they were probably something.
Over a dozen historically significant pieces had been stolen in Uzbekistan.
Over three hundred stolen from Turkey’s Museum.
And where else had Micah said? Spain. More art had been stolen from Spanish museums.
And Russia. There had been widespread looting of Russian museums since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin’s Russian organized-crime kleptocracy.
On the wall in Salvatore Grande’s waiting room, a painting of a bowl of fruit lit with glowing amber sunlight might have been worth millions of dollars and missing from the world for years.
Or it might have been painted a few years ago by Salvatore’s great-niece Maria Francesca, who’d gone to art school in New York City.
A tiny bronze statue, not even two inches tall, standing in a glass bell jar on an end table beside her looked like rough melted rods topped with the head of an Easter Island moai. Was that a cultural treasure that had been stolen from its rightful place in a museum exhibit?
A closed-circuit TV camera in the back corner watched this room, too. Its wires must have led to some other monitor with some other person watching.
Salvatore Grande must have a lot of people watching all the time, and then more people watching them.
Maria Pia glanced up at Kylie. “Mr. Grande is done with this phone call. You can go in now.”
Kylie walked into his office, pushing the heavy door open and letting it swing shut behind her with a soft thud. She held the envelope that was becoming damp in her hands. “Good morning, Mr. Grande.”
Salvatore Grande’s spidery fingers rested on the fine leather blotter on his magnificently carved desk. Sunlight passing through the chicken wire-fused window glass shone on his scalp, visible through his thinning hair.
Salvatore Grande had been the Mafia Don of Philadelphia for eight years, a made man for thirty, and an enforcer for twenty years before that, performing his first assassination when he was fifteen. At seventy-three, every murder he ordered made him harder, more wizened, and sharpened the evil glint in his dark eyes.
Salvatore Grande said, “Good morning, Chiarina. I’ve been hoping you’d come to see me.”
Uh-oh.
Kylie placed the envelope stuffed with money on his desk and stepped backward, her hands folded in front of her. “Yes, Mr. Grande?”
“That little incident the weekend before last caused a commotion.”
The Borgata. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Grande.”
Behind his desk, two square paintings hung on the wall, neither larger than two feet across.
One was a chaotic ball of warring humanity, the people on the bottom being trampled and dying by those murdering each other above them.
The other was a rainbow-winged angel speaking to a woman, the Annunciation by Lorenzo di Credi, the stolen painting he’d taken in payment for another crime.
Salvatore Grande said, “Some of my associates were upset that the hotel lost a week’s revenue for a very expensive suite and quite a bit of money in the theft of poker chips and diamond earrings. Do you know how much they lost?”
“Eighty thousand dollars, Mr. Grande,” Kylie said.
“Yes, Chiarina, eighty thousand dollars. You can see why they’re upset.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What should I tell them?”
“That I—I’ll pay it back?”
Salvatore Grande sat back in his chair and wove his fingers together over his trim stomach. “But it would take you so long to pay them back, Chiarina. With what little you make as a waitress and your other pursuits, it would take years, if not decades, to pay off your debt. And it wasn’t just the eighty large that I gave them on your behalf. It embarrassed me that someone under my protection did that to my fellow men of honor.” He touched his black necktie over his chest. “It hurt me.”
Her cheeks turned hot at the thought of how little she would be able to contribute because she was barely surviving. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
Salvatore Grande looked Kylie directly in the eyes, and then his gaze traveled down to her cheap high-heeled shoes and back up to her face. “What else could you offer them, or me, to pay off this debt?”
The burning on her face turned to ice, and her stomach clenched. “I don’t know, sir.”
“Think harder.”
“I—I’d have to think about that, Mr. Grande.”
“I’d want you for a year, Chiarina, in my bed and serving me on your knees. It’s a fitting position for Joseph Merlino’s daughter, to suck my dick and grovel at my feet. You’ll also be a mule and import certain commodities for me. I’ll enjoy watching the videos of you having condoms of heroin crammed up your ass.”
Kylie stared at the black toes of her shoes, shiny on the thick black carpeting underfoot.
Black carpeting wouldn’t show stains.
He continued, “If you don’t like that position, the other four gentlemen involved said that they would take you for a week, but I can’t guarantee what state you’d be in at the end of it. They said they would clear their schedules. They also said you’d be a great incentive for some of their enforcers.”
A thousand pinpricks stung Kylie’s skin, and a bead of cold sweat welled from every one.
“And don’t think of running, Chiarina. You might not know where Rachele is, but I do. You wouldn’t want her to pay your debt. She’s only fourteen.”
Sickness surged in Kylie’s throat. “Where are they? Is she still with my mother?”
“You’ll start with me on Wednesday. That will give you two days to get rid of your apartment and any pets you might have. Be here at my office at four o’clock. You’ll go home with me.”
Kylie whispered, “But what about your wife?”
Salvatore Grande shrugged, and one side of his nose rose in disgust. “What about her?”
“But if I got the money from somewhere else, couldn’t I just pay back the eighty thousand dollars?”
He shrugged. “You mean after my cut and with interest? Maybe. But we’d have to negotiate the final payment amount. I think I’d rather have you for a year, more as a warning to my other associates about what will happen to their families if they break the oath of omertà.”
“I’ll get the money. I promise.”
As Kylie walked out of Salvatore Grande’s inner office, she checked the walls and ceilings of his lair but didn’t see any other closed-circuit TV cameras inside.
After the thick steel door squeaked and clamped shut behind her and she’d made it down the hallway, Kylie stood in the stairwell and shook, her breath coming in panicked gasps as she clutched the handrail with both hands, lest her whole body fall apart.
Several minutes later, her knees steadied enough that she could walk down the three flights of stairs to the car where Micah Shine was waiting for her.
She climbed into the car and told Micah, “Closed-circuit surveillance TV cameras outside the office door in the hallway and in the waiting room. Solid steel front door. Electronic security system where you have to be buzzed through that main door. Bullet and blast-proof glass in the windows in his inner office. The walls looked different inside, like the drywall had been replaced or modified. Communication on a computer between the receptionist’s desk and Grande’s office. When his office door closed behind me, it thunked like it was also steel and had a security locking system, like it’s a panic room. I didn’t see any surveillance cameras or other equipment inside his inner office.”
Micah nodded as he pulled the car away from the curb and into traffic. “Excellent. Did you see di Credi’s Annunciation?”
Kylie nodded and swallowed the sick in the back of her throat. “It’s right behind his desk in his inner office. Look, I need to know when you’ll give me that first installment of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“What, you don’t trust me?”
Kylie turned and was about ready to launch into a tirade about confidence and confidence men when she saw the humor glinting in his opalescent eyes.
Instead, she said, “Oh, I see how it is. But I want to know a date.”
“The first installment should have been delivered while we were out. It’s probably waiting for us at the hotel desk.”
Kylie held onto the armrest of the car door and stared at the grimy streets of Philadelphia rushing by as they drove. “It’d better be.”