Page 3 of The Mad Don
“You disappeared,” she says. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She looks at me for a moment. She has the soft look she wears when she does not believe me, but does not want to push. Then she loops her arm through mine.
“Come back inside. It’s freezing.”
I let her lead me. Max is in the doorway, and he grins as we pass him.
“What a worry head,” he says to Annika. “You can’t take her anywhere.”
Annika laughs. I look back once at the spot where the car had been, and then I let the gallery door close behind me.
* * *
I am in the kitchen with a glass of water when one of Kirill’s men finds me. He nods toward the study. I set the glass down and go.
The house is quiet, Dimitri is in bed, and Annika is asleep upstairs. The corridors are dim, so I climb the stairs without rushing.
Kirill’s study door is open. He is at the window in a blue nightrobe, holding a glass with two fingers of something brown in it. He does not turn when I come in.
“Close the door,” he says.
I close it.
He turns then and walks to the desk and sits down on the edge of it. He gestures with the glass for me to sit. I take the chair across from him.
“Three of the new shipping routes through the southern corridor have been hit in the last six weeks. Cargo intercepted. Two of my drivers were shot. They say that it’s a territorial dispute. A few new mouths who think the lines on the map were drawn for someone else, not them.” He sips the drink. “I have suspected for some time that the attacks of the first few months were from them. The fires. The breach at the house. All of it.”
He sets the glass down on the desk. “Do you remember the cruise last year?”
“I remember.”
It was a vacation. He had taken Annika out for a long weekend on the water. Dimitri had stayed behind with his friends Luca and Nathalie. Max had come along because he had been working with Annika on a private commission, and the timing had worked out that way. I had been on board too, in the back of every photograph and at the side of every doorway, because Kirill does not let Annika travel without me, even when he is there.
The attack came on the second night. Six men with rifles. Kirill ordered that no one be spared.
“One of them was not dead,” he says.
I look at him.
He picks the glass up again and turns it in his hand. “He was breathing. I had him kept alive in a long coma. A doctor who owed me a favor. He never woke fully, but he talked sometimes. There was a bank account he had been told to memorize.”
“I traced it. The account was at a small bank in Naples. It’s a bank that exists only because four families need a place to move money that does not show up in the regular columns.” He sets the glass down again. “The man died eight months ago.”
“The four families. One is the Di Meglio. That is Luca, which makes it not him.”
Luca was his age-long friend and ally.
I nod.
“Two are middle houses with old money, narrow ambition: the Esposito and the Vitale. Neither have the men nor the appetite to come at me on open water. Their fights are smaller. Closer to home.”
“And the fourth?”
