Page 77 of Mafia Queen
“I know it’s upsetting that Armando’s dead. I know it pisses you off to get our king’s finger detached from the rest of him. I want to go down there and burn it all down too. But you know why we can’t do that.”
The men look to me for a plan—but only so they can dismiss it. In the end, at least part of it has to be their idea.
“We don’t know where they are. Descending on the city not knowing where to look leaves this compound exposed. It leaves us spread out all over to get picked off.” Looking from man to man, I take the temperature of the room. Lukewarm.
“Yeah,” Vito says with a nod. “She’s right.”
His approval warms the room a few degrees.
“They know where we are,” I say. “Obviously. And they expect us to come for them. They’re waiting for it.”
“There’s no one at the bottom of the mountain,” a man says, stepping into the room. “If you don’t mind me saying.” He’s so cartoonishly deferential, I barely recognize him. It’s Fat Lip. The guy I punched the first day of my marriage. “We got cameras on some of the trees, and there’s nobody hanging around waiting. At least not there. Could be anywhere else, I guess.”
“Good,” I say. “Are there cameras all the way up?”
“No. Just where the road goes private. That’s how we knew Mando was coming, but we couldn’t tell it was him.”
“Thank you. Anything else I need to know?”
The negative answer comes in murmurs and gestures. They’re not convinced I should be followed, and the benefit of their doubts won’t last long. Everyone in this room has been trained from birth to dismiss women, including me. I have to come at this obliquely. Don’t tell them whatI want. Tell them whatwe need.
“They don’t want to come up here. If you’re uncertain about that, just look at how hard they’re trying to draw us out. We’re near the top of a mountain. There’s one narrow road up to a fortress. Blind turns. A dozen places we can shoot them from. So first, someone’s gotta be in the cupola twenty-four hours a day, watching. Yes?” I take their temperature again. No one’s abandoned ship yet, but once someone does, they all could follow. “Second, all guns out, loaded, and lining the ridge overlooking the road up.” The last thing to do after flexing my muscle is to let them know I’m not trying to be a man. “Celia, Loretta, and I will keep the home fires burning until they come or we figure out where he is.”
Laying hard on the last possibility—that we have tofind out where Santino is—seems to go unnoticed. Doubts creep in like spiders under the door. I’ve left too much to their discretion. I don’t have the knowledge I need to give them more detailed instructions. And yet—they haven’t come up with enough of it themselves.
I am not Santino. I can’t lay out the whole thing. They need to feel as though they’re not taking orders from a woman.
“Yeah, but…” The man who breaks the tension is tall and gangly—middle-aged and set in his ways. “I don’t like waiting. It doesn’t feel right.”
Vito turns in his chair. “I don’t remember her asking you to havefeelings, Benny.” He saysfeelingsas if it’s a rotten lemon on his tongue.
Benny whips his hand in a gesture that means both “fuck off” and “never mind.”
“Do we have a problem?” I ask. “Please. Write it down so I can share it with Re Santino when he gets back.”
“He could be getting chopped into pieces right now, is all,” Benny protests. “And we’re sitting up here like pussies.”
He’s driven by loyalty. I appreciate that, but we can’t fall into disarray over it.
“You’re right,” I say. “But how can we do something without risking our position?”
He makes a constellation of gestures—a shrug, another wrist flip, a glance around the room, and a bigger shrug.
“I tell you what,” Benny says. “Someone goes down. Maybe me and one other guy… We go before dawn, down into the city. Talk to people. Find out where he is. If we know that, the wait is over. We go get him.”
They all look at me.
“I like it,” I say as if it wasn’t the last part of the plan to begin with. “Good idea.”
* * *
I can’t sleep thinkingabout Santino.
What is he going through?
Am I actually lying here in our bed while it’s happening?
Am I taking a shift in the cupola for four hours, scanning the city, wondering if I’m looking right at him?
