Chapter 7: What Caruso Wanted
They came at eleven-fifteen.
Not to the apartment — we were already gone by then, Elena and Gia in a car heading to a quiet building in Brooklyn that had no connection to my name.
But they came to the address.
Two of Caruso's men and Marco, standing in the hallway outside Elena's empty apartment, looking at a door that nobody answered.
I know because my man was watching from the stairwell.
I was in a hotel conference room on the forty-second floor of a building in Midtown when my phone rang.
Not my regular phone.
The secondary one, the number I gave to almost nobody.
Marco's name appeared on the screen.
I answered.
"You moved her," he said.
"Yes."
"That was unnecessary."
"You called Caruso from the car, Marco.
Before you even came upstairs." I kept my voice even.
"What exactly did you think was going to happen?"
A pause.
When he spoke again, the careful neutrality was gone.
"You're going to bring her into your life," he said.
"A sick woman and a child.
Into everything we've built.
Do you understand what that does?
What it exposes?
The people who want leverage over you are going to find that child within six months and use her to take everything apart."
"That's my risk to take."
"It's everyone's risk.
Every man who works for you.
Every arrangement we've maintained for eleven years." His voice tightened.
"I built half of what you have, Luca.
I have a right to protect it."
"You have no rights here," I said.
"Not anymore.
You made a decision seven years ago that was not yours to make.
You took my daughter from me.
You put Elena in that apartment.
You watched her get sick and you said nothing." I stood up from the table.
"And tonight you called Caruso.
Which means you were prepared to do it again."
Silence.
"What did you tell him to do?" I asked.
Nothing.
"Marco.
What did you tell Caruso to do?"
"To remind her," he said finally, "that disappearing was still an option.
That it would be better for everyone if she took the child and went somewhere quiet and let this go."
"And if she didn't?"
The silence this time was its own answer.
My hand tightened around the phone.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"That's not information I'm going to give you right now."
"Then I'll find you another way." I walked to the window.
Forty-two floors down, the city moved in its ordinary nighttime rhythm — taxis, pedestrians, the red and white lines of traffic.
"You have until morning to come in.
Bring Caruso.
Sit down and answer for what you did.
That's the only version of this that ends without consequences you don't want."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I stop looking for you and I let the people you've made enemies of over eleven years of working for me know that you're no longer under my protection." I let that land.
"You know exactly how long that conversation takes."
Another pause.
Longer this time.
"You'd do that," he said.
Not a question.
"I'd do that."
The call ended.
I stood at the window for a moment.
Then I called the Brooklyn address.
Elena answered on the second ring.
"Are you both settled?" I asked.
"Yes.
The doctor was here.
She was very kind." A brief pause.
"She said the treatment is possible.
She said with the right protocol, the prognosis is—" Her voice caught.
"She said it's good, Luca.
She said it's actually good."
I pressed two fingers against the bridge of my nose.
"Okay," I said.
"Gia is asleep.
She fell asleep in about four minutes.
She said the bed was very soft and she asked me to tell you thank you."
Something in my chest moved in a way I didn't have a word for yet.
"Tell her she's welcome," I said.
"What's happening with Marco?"
"I'm handling it."
"Luca." Her voice was quiet.
"He's not going to come in, is he."
It wasn't a question either.
"No," I said.
"Probably not."
"Then be careful."
I looked at the city below.
"I will be," I said.
Marco came in at seven the next morning.
Not because of my ultimatum.
He came in because Caruso had made his own calculation overnight and decided that Marco was a liability he was no longer willing to carry.
He called my office at six-forty-five and told my assistant he had information to offer.
He arrived with two lawyers and a folder of documents.
Marco arrived twenty minutes later with nothing.
He sat across from me at the same conference table where I'd taken his phone the night before.
He looked like a man who had spent the night understanding that the ground had shifted and there was no shifting it back.
"Caruso gave you everything," I said.
"I assumed he would."
"The original message to Elena.
The follow-up contact two years later when she moved to the Bronx.
The arrangement to monitor her location." I set the folder on the table between us.
"Eleven years, Marco.
I trusted you for eleven years."
He looked at the folder.
He didn't touch it.
"I did what I believed was right," he said.
"I know you did." I leaned back.
"That's the part that's hardest to forgive."
He finally looked up.
"What happens now?" he asked.
I told him.
He listened without interrupting.
When I finished, he nodded once — a small, precise movement.
The gesture of a man who had spent a long career knowing when a negotiation was over.
"And Caruso?" he asked.
"Caruso gave me everything I needed.
He walks away with his firm intact and a very clear understanding of what happens if he ever takes work connected to my name again." I stood.
"You don't walk away the same way."
"No," Marco said quietly.
"I didn't think I would."
He stood.
He straightened his jacket.
He picked up nothing from the table because he had brought nothing.
At the door, he stopped.
"She's lucky," he said.
Not to me exactly.
More to the room.
"The girl.
To have someone come for her."
He walked out.
The door closed.
I sat back down at the table and looked at the folder Caruso had brought.
Inside, behind the documents and the contact logs and the records of every address Elena had ever fled to, there was a single photograph.
Gia.
Taken from a distance.
Outside her school.
May you like
Someone had been watching her.
And the date stamped in the corner was three weeks ago.
