Page 32 of Mafia King
9
SANTINO
I cannot take my eyes away from my wife long enough to sleep, because when she’s awake, I see her father in her features, but when she sleeps and the moonlight casts a triangle-shaped shadow across her cheek, I see her mother.
Rosetta looked more like Camilla Moretti, soft and rounded at the edges, with a heaviness to her form that was beautifully solid. Emilio was known to grab his wife’s bottom behind the grocer’s register, and she’d smile and slap his hand away. Camilla ran that store, and as far as we knew, that was all she did, besides raise two children and keep the house.
With my blood violet breathing softly on my chest, I remember her mother in the back room, punching an adding machine with a pencil and yanking the crank. It made a racket of clicks and creaks. But what had my attention was the piles of cash on the desk.
“Che c'è, Santi?” she greeted me without looking up.
I didn’t know how to react. She was a woman—my boss’s woman—and so was afforded a certain kind of respect from a sixteen-year-old boy.
Yet the way she asked meWhat, Santi?, along with the contents of the desk, confused me into a fit of nerves. I’d only met her twice, and she disarmed me on the third time.
“I have to drop this for the capo.” I held up the paper bag of cash Dami and I had extracted from a parking garage, a shoe repair, and two bars on Via Torino. The paper ribbon dropped down the other side of the desk while the clicking and creaking continued. “I’ll come back.”
“Leave it here.”
“I’m supposed to give it to him.”
The sound of the adding machine stopped. She looked at me with big brown eyes, round as Rosetta’s and as piercing as Violetta’s. “Leave it here, Santi.”
No man in this part of Naples ever took orders from a woman.
But Camilla Moretti wasn’t going to say it a third time, and if Emilio had put her behind that desk with that much cash to count, she did more than run a grocery store.
I put the bag on the desk.
“Grazie,” she said, running the paper tape through her fingers to check the numbers. “That everyone on Via Torino?”
“Everyone who owes, yes.”
“Good job.”
I stand there as if I can’t leave without something, but I couldn’t have named it if you put a gun to my head.
“You can go,” she said, penciling a number into a ledger.
Once she dismissed me, some cord was cut and I could leave.
In bed with Violetta, I smile at those few minutes with Camilla I’d forgotten. I remember her as hostess for all the big dinners for the men who worked for Emilio, and at packed weddings in crowded courtyards, dancing with her husband. I remember her with customers at the store, and gossiping with the women. But my one glimpse into a life that wasn’t so obvious had been stuffed in a box and put on the topmost shelf. Out of mind, out of sight.
Camilla knew what was in my bag down to the street I was working that day. Those piles of cash were not from the grocery register. She knew her husband’s business. Maybe not every nuance or relationship, but enough to keep a ledger.
The moon dips below the roofline of the garage, and the shadow across Violetta’s cheek folds into her jaw, disappearing like the hand of a sundial. I wonder if her mother’s knowledge protected her, or if it made her a target the night they were both killed. I wonder if she had to fight for it too, or if Emilio brought her into the business right away. He’d never had a chance to train me for his job. When they were shot, Cosimo Orolio took over, filling a power vacuum in a quickly contracting territory.
Damiano, who claims to work for no one. Who set up the‘mbasciatawith Gia after I refused to bring him onto my team. Who came toMille Luciafter my wedding and asked for friendship. Whose sister dropped bombs of information on my wife.
If he marries Gia, he will find a way into my life through the women.
If he doesn’t, he will threaten to expose Violetta again, and once he does, the incident on Flora will look like a child’s game.
If he marries Gia, I have time to correct him.
If I refuse the match, I have until Violetta’s birthday.
It’s both very late and very early when I slip out of bed.
