I burst into the kitchen, Loretta following close behind. The door out of the kitchen is open, letting in the wind and windswept raindrops.
Nazario Corragio and his driver are in the same position I left them in. Celia’s holding a coffee pot, but not moving to pour it or put it down. Gennaro is stock still and Carmine is the same, but shaking his head slowly. They’re all looking down, and I follow their gaze.
The crown is on the floor.
“What the hell happened?” I ask.
The consigliere shrugs and turns to Celia, making a tsk to the espresso pot. She shakes the bees from her head and pours.
“Dario,” Gennaro says, coming back to himself. “He tried to get the crown. Steal it.”
I pick up the crown, careful not to touch the nail. The driver watches me, wide-eyed, and makes the sign of the cross.
“What?” I ask, putting it back in the box.
“It’s not hot?” he asks.
“Of course not, you testa di cavolo.” He calls him a dickhead, scoffing and sipping from his coffee cup. “It’s hers.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I close the box and latch it. “It’s the same temperature for everyone. It’s a piece of dumb metal. You all need to stop treating it like it’s got magic.”
“Tell that to Dario,” Gennaro says.
“Where is he?” I ask, suddenly panicked that he’s gathering enough men to put me in the basement.
“Ran off,” Gennaro says.
“Like a kitten when the vacuum’s turned on,” Celia adds.
“The rest of the guys chased him but—”
“Why?” I interrupt Gennaro. “Why did he run out like that?”
“When he touched it”—he waves at the box—“he was struck by lightning.”
God save us all from stories about God.
“It’s fucking thunder and lightning out,” I growl. “And if—by some miracle—a lightning bolt came through the roof without breaking it, then through the second story of this house without making a hole in the ceiling, the floor right here would be black. So stop it. Everybody, cut it out. This crown is magic, but not the way you’re saying. We have the thing Damiano’s coming for, and we can trade it for Santino.”
The consigliere laughs into his espresso, clicking down his cup. “More of this, please.”
“What’s funny?” I ask.
“Do we have a place to talk privately? Or is it all”—he waves at the room with distaste—“gossiping?”
He means women’s space, but I let it slide because he’s old and he brought me the crown.
“If you can get up a flight of stairs.” Maybe I’m not letting it slide as much as I think.
The driver cuts in. “He can.”
The consigliere holds his cane against his chest and between his knees as his driver—whose name is Sam—carries him up the stairs and places him in a chair facing Santino’s desk. Sam and Gennaro take opposite corners of the room.
I place the box on a side table and sit where my husband usually sits. The chair is still too big for me, but I don’t feel as small. On the desk to my right, an ivory-faced teak clock with Roman numerals and brass feet ticks away my luxury.
With his cane planted in the carpet between his feet and both hands resting on the brass head, Nazario looks at the old box on the side table and sighs. “I am done.”
“I accept your resignation. Anything else? Because I have to find Damiano Orolio and give him that crown.”
“No,” he says, facing me. “You will not do that.”
“If it gets me my husband back, I will.”
“It will reject Damiano.”
“I don’t care,” I say with dead seriousness, letting him anthropomorphize the crown just for the sake of argument.
He sighs again. “You’re the first one who can truly use it to rule without being subject to a man, and of course…you want to trade it for your husband. Che ironia.”
My Italian isn’t great, but I know irony when I hear it. Outside, lightning flashes and—three seconds later—thunder rolls. Santino is under the same rain, suffering in ways I can’t imagine. I don’t have time to pick apart the paradox between my desires and his superstitions.
“You wanted a place to talk,” I say. “Not gossip. We’re doing neither.”
“Capo.” He smiles at me like a proud father, calling me a boss in the traditional, non-mob sense. At least, this is what I believe.
“You brought the crown to me. I’m grateful. But I can’t sit here all night waiting for you to tell me what you want out of me.” I flip the clock around to face him. “You have ten minutes.”
Instead of blurting out his intentions to fit it all into ten minutes, he pauses. There’s a light knock on the door, and Celia comes in with a tray of coffee. He wastes two full minutes waiting for it to be poured.
“Signora,” he asks her, “do you want Damiano to have the crown?”
She hesitates. “It’s not my place.”
“You can tell him,” I say.
“He killed Armando. A good man. My friend. He shouldn’t get rewarded for that.” She glances at me. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
She nods, turns on her heel, and leaves.
“She has a sense of justice you lack,” Nazario says.
I remind myself that he doesn’t know me or what I’ve become since I was stolen from my home and forced to live a life I didn’t ask for. I’m different in ways I haven’t had time to name.
“The summer I was ten.” I lay my hands flat on the desk. “My uncle took my sister and me to the Signorile Oxbow Lake, where San Vitus Boulevard ends. There’s a dock you can dive off. He set up a picnic, and Rosetta and I went out on a blow-up raft with a horse’s head. He packed Zia’s granita al limone—my favorite. All I wanted was to spend a few minutes in the lake, then go back and eat it before it got mushy. But there were boys on the opposite bank, and Rosetta was fifteen, so she found this more interesting than her little sister. Her and one blond kid were—I don’t know what you’d call shouting across an entire lake.”
“I think it’s called flirting.”
I smile at him and continue. “She paddled us into the center to meet him. I was smaller, so I couldn’t fight it. I couldn’t do anything but scream louder and louder that she had to stop. I was making a racket. And she turns to me, with all these raging teenage hormones, and says, ‘Swim back if you don’t like it.’ I thought…yes. I could do that. I was an okay swimmer. It wasn’t that far away. I was going to get off this thing and swim to the dock. And so I stood, grabbed the horse’s head, and froze because I realized I wasn’t leaving the safety of the blow-up raft thing. I’d rather be miserable watching my sister flirt with this stupid boy than go to the effort of swimming back.”
“So you ate mushy granita.”
“It was worse… liquid.” I wrinkle my nose. “I was mad, but I never questioned my decision. I always did the easy thing, even if I was miserable. Until Santino took away all the easy choices. Being in his house was hard. Accepting his kindness was hard. Obeying him was impossible. Loving him… It changed everything. So before you say I don’t have a sense of justice, you need to know that Santino DiLustro is my only justice. Before him, I was nothing. I dreamed, and I worked, but I wasn’t alive. I was asleep. The walking dead. I stayed on the raft, and if he hadn’t pulled me off, I’d still be floating around, protected from my own life. So fuck the crown. It’s a raft in a lake. I’ll jump off and swim to him. I’ll give the crown to whoever returns my king to me.”
The old man blinks slowly, and with a groan, he turns the desk clock around to face me. The ten minutes are almost up. He drops onto a seat with the sigh of easily-emptied lungs.
“You are worthy,” he says. “But you know that.”
“I don’t want to be worthy of anything but him.”
Leaning on his cane, Nazario Corragio gets up with cracking, grinding bones. Sam holds him straight. I stand with him.
“Santino DiLustro,” Nazario says when he’s upright, “is in the sub basement of a nightclub. Under a laundry room.”
Hope is a fuse that—once lit—can set a soul on fire and consume every last breath of reason.
“How do you know?” My voice cracks.
“It’s my job to know.”
“Is he all right? Who’s guarding him? How many?”
“No, Violetta Cavallo, my job begins and ends with the heads who share the crown. You are the last of a line of women sold to men for it and the first able to wear it without a man to tell you not to. Use its power to get the DiLustro boy.”
“It doesn’t have power. There’s no such thing.”
“Power is belief.”
Power doesn’t come from one’s own confidence or certainty. This, I know now. It comes from the belief of others. That’s what Santino always said, and he’s always right.
“I am done here.” Nazario turns his back to me.
Sam helps him to the door without my dismissal. His last statement is more than an excuse from the room. Nazario’s done with the meeting, and he’s done with life.
The door opens and Remo stops just short of knocking over Nazario, stammering. “I’m sorry… sir. Ma’am, but…they’re coming.”
“Good,” I say, opening the crown’s box. “Good.”