Forzetta.
She’s a trick of the mind. An innocent in need of protection with the soul of a warrior tucked into the smallest chamber of her heart.
I saw that warrior climb out of the car with a mask of fierce defiance on her face. She’s safe with Loretta, but only from other men.
She’s not safe from herself.
Café Mille Luci is quiet in the front, as always. It’s uninviting by design and may have the occasional curiosity-seeker, but it remains a setting for people whose families have been in town for two or three generations. It’s my place, and by extension it’s a Cavallo business.
So after someone tries to take Violetta from right under my nose, I go there.
By someone, I mean the Tabonas, but the question of who among them did it is open. Attacking her can ignite a war that would set Secondo Vasto ablaze, and they know it.
They wouldn’t.
Yet, it was done, and that requires a response.
When I enter, Gia approaches.
“Santino! Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Lock the door.”
She nods and obeys.
“Stay away from the windows,” I say before going to the back hallway. “And tell me if anyone comes.”
My men are on the other side of the door. The best, most stable of them are guarding my house and my wife. I wait, listening to the ones who can’t stand still from the other side of the door to the back room as they imitate the gangsters they’ve seen on TV, instead of the actual made men who raised them.
“We could hit them hard at their compound.” Carmine’s voice comes through the door, feigning the accent of a borough he’s never seen. “Go in at night and pop pop pop.”
“They can’t come for us and not expect some shit to happen.” Gennaro snorts. I hear his heavy footfall as he paces the room. “What they did was fucking disrespectful. That’s a death sentence right there. So you gotta ask why.”
Gennaro’s the most sensible. He’s leading them to the right way of thinking, but I doubt they’ll follow.
“They’ll know it’s coming,” Vito adds in his deep basso. “Hitting the compound is a suicide mission. We gotta hit them when they least expect it.”
“How many guns we got?” Carmine asks. “Got enough to storm the laundry? Just take them all out?”
When I’m not there, nothing they say surprises me. They’re trustworthy, but too eager to prove themselves.
“Now you’re talking,” Vito growls. “Blow their heads off. Let them know who they are dealing with.”
As much as I want to send the men who hurt my wife to burn in hell for eternity, they’re too reckless and impulsive to plan a response. I’m going to have to be the reasonable one. A wrong move could expose Violetta to danger where I can’t protect her.
“Who they’re dealing with?” Gennaro asks. “We don’t even know who we’re dealing with.”
God bless Gennaro for seeing through the noise. On that note of sense, I enter the room, and they all go silent. Vito’s limbs are wound in a knot on the leather couch. Gennaro’s mid-pace, and Carmine’s arm is bent as he’s about to throw a dart at the target.
“What do you think, boss?” Gennaro says.
Carmine throws his dart.
I sit on the edge of the pool table and pull out my gun to give it a nice polish. I fantasize about blowing holes in every motherfucker in a 50-mile radius, but know I won’t.
“What do I think?” I ask, but it’s more of a quiz than a question. I know what I think. “Where the fuck is Roman?”
“Got a whore in Green Springs,” Carmine offers. “Won’t say who.”
Green Springs is a good place to do a job. Two towns over, it’s a clean, white-bread American town, except for one family.
“So, we were thinking…” Vito pops up off the couch as if he’s spring loaded.
“No,” I say. “You weren’t.” I push him back down. “I think someone tried to hit my wife to get to me, and I want to know how they knew where she was.”
“Wasn’t Gia with you?” Vito asks. “Maybe she—”
I cut him off with a glare.
“Tavie knew where to pick her up,” Gennaro offers up Gia’s brother’s life.
“Look at you all,” I say. “Fucking detectives. Any one of you coulda told them but none of you’s wondering who was told, eh? You think Arturo and Benny drove up and grabbed her on their own? To what? Get one over on Franco? Huh?”
“Maybe?” Carmine said.
“No!” I bark in Carmine’s face. “They’re too fucking stupid.” I jab my finger to his temple, and he cringes but doesn’t move. “You think this is Franco Tabona, Carmine?”
“Yeah, who else?”
“He’s a hundred fucking years old. One foot in the grave, too sadistic to hand down succession. He lets them kill each other for position. Now say it, Carmine. Who? Enzo? Lucio? Maybe Nicolino?”
“All of them?” He winces as he says it, and I’m about to slap some sense into him when Gennaro’s voice comes from behind me.
“A free agent.”
“Ah,” I tap Carmine’s cheek and turn. “Right.”
“None of the Tabona guys are gonna risk a war while Franco’s alive,” Gennaro continues. “But they’re so weak at the top, a free agent could hire a few hard-up guys for one job, so long as they don’t really know who the job hits.”
“Because no one’s gonna hit Santino’s wife,” Vito adds as if he’s finally seeing the light. “And no one’s really seen her but a few of us so…” He indicates me as if I’m the one who hired guys to pull my wife into a car and he’s just throwing ideas out there.
I lean on the desk and cross my arms, knowing damn well why Franco hadn’t set a line of succession. Men raised in America were too stupid to do the job. They were raised to be butchers, not surgeons.
“So?” I say. “So I did it?”
“Nah, nah.” Gennaro waves the idea away.
“I’m just saying she coulda been bait?” Vito’s looking from Gennaro to Carmine, getting less confident with each glance.
Choosing speed over power, I don’t wind up to punch Vito’s face. A quick jab puts him on his knees, hands covering a bloody nose.
“Ah, I’m sorry!” I push him over and step on his throat, leaning enough to hurt him. I don’t want to kill him.
No, I do want to kill him, but the man controls the emotions, the emotions do not control the man.
“I’m saying this one time,” I say to him for the sake of everyone in the room. “She is my wife. I protect her. You protect her. If anything happens to her, I will kill everybody between me and the devil himself. Capito?”
Vito tries to nod, but my foot’s in the way. He’s turning red because thinking about her getting hurt while he’s under my shoe has unleashed my white-hot rage—the insatiable demon who never leaves my side. The need to bring revenge to whoever tried to take her is one of the purest things I’ve ever felt, and I know from experience that I cannot act on what I cannot control.
“You are here to listen from now on,” I say to Vito. “You will be silent. You will not speak a word in my presence until I release you. Do you understand?”
His chin’s pointing up, and the blood’s dripping into his ear as he gurgles, trying to nod against the toe of my shoe.
“Not a word, Vito. I will gut you and bury you so deep you won’t need to walk to the road to hell.”
He gurgles. I haven’t broken his nose, but the blood’s going back into his throat. I will destroy whoever set Violetta up, but it wasn’t Vito.
I take my foot away and wipe the blood from my sole on his shirt, indicating to Gennaro that he can help Vito up. He and Carmine do the job.
“I’m sor—” Vito starts, but Gennaro slaps him.
“Stai zitto, already,” Carmine says, tossing Vito a hankie. “No words, eh?”
Good, they got it.
“So?” I say, walking around my desk. “You stronzi would have hit the laundry.”
“We was just talking,” Carmine says.
“About bringing this town to chaos and war? Splitting it in two so…what? We make everyone take sides. The shop owners, the schoolkids, the fucking hipsters moving in from the college? And then in the chaos? What? We’re spread thin.”
And they take her. Pluck her up like a hawk. Whoever “they” were, there would be more of them, and she’d be easier to seize in the chaos, but I can’t tell them that she’s more than my wife. They can’t know she’s the priority of not just my house, but my heart. Once I show them that truth, I’m vulnerable.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Si!” I call out. Gia pokes her head in. “Rom—” Roman bursts in with a little paper bag in his hand and a shit-eating grin on his face. I nod to Gia and she closes the door behind her.
“Where the fuck have you been?” I ask, keeping my voice level and calm, but something about his whore in Green Springs is bugging me.
“I got the rings, boss. Had to go to all different engravers, just like you asked, and…” He stops when he notices Vito’s bloody face, then turns back to me with the grin wiped off. “…that ain’t easy finding guys who won’t talk. They’re industrial engravers instead of jewelers so no one’s gonna think to ask. The guy in Wallings took 24 hours because he’s a dumbfuck but the guy in Green Springs only took an hour this afternoon.”
Green Springs. Of course.
“Sorry I couldn’t check the work.” He hands me the bag. “If they’re wrong I’ll take ‘em back. Rough ‘em up, too.”
I take the box from the paper bag and flip it open. Three rings shine at me. On the right, a thick one sized for my finger. On the left, Violetta’s diamond set.
When I married Violetta, these rings were already heavy with meaning, but now they carry a weight I’ll never describe to these sorry excuses for men.
“Did you tell anyone what you were doing?” I ask, plucking out my ring and checking the new engraving before putting it on my finger.
“Not a soul.” Roman swears. Is that sweat on his brow? It certainly is.
“No one? Not a soul?”
“Not one, Re.”
“Tell me, Roman.” I take extra care to examine Violetta’s rings. “Where did you go while you were waiting an hour in Green Springs?”
Roman shrugs and looks away.
The room’s gone very quiet. The other men won’t look at Roman. Maybe they weren’t supposed to tell me about his tricky whore, or maybe they just know how much I don’t like lies.
“You know who lives in Green Springs?” I ask, and answer before they have a chance to. “Theresa Rubino.”
“So?” Roman still won’t look at me. I can smell his guilt like a dog smells a bitch in heat.
“Theresa Rubino is Damiano Irolio’s niece.” I approach Roman, who looks at his feet. Damiano was a Cavallo in the old country, but now? There was no way to know. “Acting like a big shot get you laid, Romey?”
“I ain’t a big shot.”
“Is that what you told Theresa?” I put my hand on the back of the young man’s neck and squeeze my thumb and middle finger into him. I know it hurts, but to his credit, he barely flinches. “Told her all about how much I trusted you, how you were running a top secret mission.”
“It’s not like that, I swear.”
Still gripping his neck, I whisper in his ear. “I bet your dick smells like Theresa Rubino.” He’s white as the Pope’s cassock. “What if I get Vito here to take a whiff? Bet he can smell her cunt through a busted nose.”
I shake him a little. His eyes flick back and forth, looking for an exit or help from his buddies. He will find neither.
“Did you tell her what you were up to?”
“I didn’t tell her nothing.”
“Except.” I say it as if I know exactly what he said and I’m giving him an opportunity to come clean. It’s the same technique the police use, and I learned it from them in Italy.
“Don’t everybody get their wedding rings engraved?” he says.
I press my forehead to his as if I feel a tender affection for him, which I do, and don’t.
“I can smell her cunt on your breath,” I say. “Did you mention you had a little extra time because your boss was out shopping with his wife?”
He says nothing. I grip him with my right hand, and pull out the gun at my waist with my left, clicking the safety.
“Do you know what you did?” I ask evenly even as the rage fills me entirely. I am a ball of fire, burning my control from the inside out, but I am still and calm inside it, because once I give up trying to control it, the anger is my friend.
“Nothing,” he squeaks, tears forming. “Just got a little action.”
“Open your mouth, Roman. Let’s get the pussy stink out of it.”
I feel the other guys in the room stiffen. They know I can shoot him, and I might, but I also might not. Roman knows the same. He knows that if he does as he’s told, he may live, but if he doesn’t, he’s finished.
So he crushes his eyes shut and opens his mouth.
“You killed my wife.” I slide the gun along his tongue. “Maybe not today, but the day they finally murder her is the day you pulled the trigger. Should I save you the guilt?”
Roman ahhs as if he’s at the dentist.
“Padre nostro,” I start the Lord’s prayer. “che sei nei cieli.”
He whimpers the rhythm, and when I’m sure he’s deep in prayer, with a chance to defend his life before God, I pull the trigger.
His body collapses and suddenly, the room is populated again. Carmine’s practically holding Vito up, and Gennaro’s looking down at Roman’s body, calculating how much dirt he’s going to have to move to bury him.
“Damiano Irolio will die for this,” I say. “Trust me. He will die when I say, and how I say. I don’t want to hear any of you make plans without me again.”
Stepping over Roman’s body, I leave the cleanup to my men.