Page 89 of Mafia Queen
“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’sgranita 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’tthatfar 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.
