July 1988
Federal Correctional Institute, Danbury, Connecticut
The man on the other side of the Plexiglas window was shrunken and seemed frail. When he smiled, eighteen-year-old Sofia realized he was missing a tooth off to one side.
His smile left her cold.
She could tell he felt the chill—through the plastic between them and through the years—because his smile faded as he reached for the beige phone on the wall beside him.
Sofia sat still. Not moving. Not blinking.
This was the man she’d been afraid of the past eight years. This short, stooped man with gray hair and bad teeth. She was emboldened by the realization that he was nothing more than an old man who would spend the rest of his life behind bars. He couldn’t hurt her anymore.
That’s when she smiled back.
It wasn’t a warm smile.
She carefully wiped off the phone and then put it to her ear. She didn’t speak.
“Sofia, my principessa. You came to see your papa before you go off somewhere to college? Rosie, God bless her soul, told me you were accepted to about a dozen schools. You’re a smart kid, aren’t you?” He raised a bushy eyebrow and cocked his head. Something in his voice sent a tremor of fear through her. “You feel guilty for sending your old man up the river? You betray your own flesh and blood? The code of silence? Omerta? You broke it in a way I’ve never seen in all my years. And look at me now. Tell me you feel guilty?”
She didn’t answer, but very slowly, nearly imperceptibly, shook her head, one eyebrow slightly raised.
“You betray, like a traitor, and you feel nothing?” He almost looked amused.
“Not a god damn thing.” Her words were slow and measured.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You are not a little girl anymore are you?”
She shook her head again, eyes cold.
“Alas, that also means I may no longer be able to protect you.”
“You never could. You never did.”
“Ah. That is where you are wrong. Dead wrong. They wanted to teach you a lesson. Teach everyone a lesson about what happens to traditori.” Traitors. His lip curled as he said the word. “The worst traditori are the ones who turn on their own famiglia. But I made sure you would not be hurt. It cost me a lot to stop them, Sofia. And I’m not talking about money only. The reason you are walking around today is only because of the respect The Family has for me.”
Sofia stared past his shoulder. His words meant nothing to her. She had nothing to say.
“Because of me …” He repeated, beating his chest.
She smiled. She was no longer afraid. Maybe that’s why she had to come here today before she moved cross-country and left the Castellucci name behind forever. One last glimpse of her father. She needed to come and see him locked up. To see him where he belonged.
She stared at him. Her face a mask of indifference. She could tell it unnerved him and that made her feel powerful. He looked away and then cleared his throat.
“How is your mother?” As he asked, he gave Sofia a look she’d never seen before, a calculating, measured glance.
For a second, she was confused. He didn’t know? Her mother hadn’t told him about disappearing, abandoning her? Did that mean her mother had never come here to visit him? Then she realized none of it mattered.
She didn’t care. Not anymore.
“I asked you a question.” The same voice he used to command her around when she was little. Well, she wasn’t little anymore.
She lifted her chin and met his eyes with her own steely gaze. “I have no mother. I have no father, capisci? I hope you both rot in hell.”
“Dio mio!” His face grew red and he slapped a beefy fist onto the counter before him. The guard started his way but then he lowered his voice, leaning forward and glowering at Sofia through the glass. “What kind of monster have I fathered?”
That’s when Sofia began to laugh. She laughed until she cried, tears streaming down her face, hanging up the phone, but still sitting there, unable to speak or stand, barely able to breathe through her laughter.
Her father watched her in horror, looking from side to side, as if worried other people were watching.
Finally, her tears and laughter finished, she stood and walked away without another glance at the withered old man on the other side of the glass.