Chương 12
“That you need me alive.”
Vittorio’s eyes shifted.
“If I die,” Damiano continued, “every man who still fears me becomes unpredictable. Some blame you. Some blame her. Some go after your brother, your wife, anyone they can reach. You know how this works.”
“Don’t bring my family into it.”
“I ordered no one to touch them. But I’m the only one who gave that order.”
Vittorio’s grip tightened.
Damiano took one step forward.
Keene said, “Stop.”
He did not.
“You want the organization,” Damiano told Vittorio. “You want the accounts, the crews, the names. You don’t get them if you kill me in front of police.”
“I can walk out with her.”
“No. You can walk three steps and die tired.”
Maeve’s eyes moved toward the pistol.
Damiano saw her thumb press against Vittorio’s bandaged hand.
The bite.
“Elena did that,” Maeve said quietly.
Vittorio looked down.
Maeve drove her thumb into the wound.
He flinched. The gun shifted.
Damiano crossed the remaining distance and caught Vittorio’s wrist with both hands. The pistol discharged into the ceiling. Maeve dropped. Officers surged forward.
For one second, Damiano had the gun.
Vittorio was on his knees in front of him.
No one between them.
Damiano could have fired. Everyone in the room understood it. Vittorio understood most of all.
Damiano turned the weapon and placed it on the concrete.
Keene kicked it away.
Officers forced Vittorio facedown and cuffed him. He shouted that Damiano had ordered everything, that Maeve was a liar, that Enzo had killed for the Rossettis, that the records belonged to all of them.
Some of it was true.
That was the trouble with men like Vittorio. They saved truth for moments when it might serve as poison.
Damiano knelt beside Maeve.
She recoiled.
He stopped before touching her.
Her wrists were raw. A medic came forward with shears and cut the remaining tie.
“Where’s Elena?” Maeve asked.
“With Sofia.”
“Did she see you armed?”
“No.”
“Did she see the police?”
“No.”
“Did she eat?”
“Chicken.”
Maeve closed her eyes. “That child thinks chicken is a complete diet.”
“So does the dog.”
She laughed once, then pressed a hand to her ribs.
The medic told her not to move.
Maeve looked at Damiano again. “Did you give Keene the phone?”
“Yes.”
“The ledger?”
“Yes.”
“The drive?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
He hesitated.
Her expression hardened.
“All I could identify,” he said. “There may be more.”
“There’s always more with you.”
“Yes.”
Officers approached him.
Larkin appeared behind them, coat unbuttoned, hair disturbed by the wind. “My client has cooperated and will surrender voluntarily.”
Keene nodded toward Damiano. “Turn around.”
Maeve watched as he placed his hands behind his back.
The cuffs closed around his wrists.
He expected humiliation. Instead, he felt the physical weight of something that had always existed finally becoming visible.
Maeve was taken to the hospital. Damiano was taken to an interview room.
For fourteen hours, with Larkin beside him, he explained businesses, accounts, payments, threats, favors, names, and rooms. He corrected himself when memory failed. He refused to guess when agents pushed for certainty. He admitted what he had ordered and what he had deliberately avoided learning.
At one point, an agent asked whether he considered himself responsible for Vittorio’s unauthorized extortion.
“No,” Damiano said.
Larkin shifted in his chair.
Damiano looked at the table.
“Not for ordering it,” he added. “For building a place where he knew people would believe I had.”
The agent wrote that down.
Near midnight, Larkin handed him a vending-machine coffee.
Damiano tasted it. “Boiled furniture.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Larkin drank his own. “This is going to get worse before it gets better.”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“This time I have evidence.”
He lifted his cuffed hands slightly.
Larkin looked at him over the rim of the paper cup. “Your daughter asked about you.”
Damiano set the coffee down.
“Maeve is awake,” Larkin continued. “Concussion, cracked rib, dehydration. No internal bleeding. Elena is with her.”
“Did Maeve say I could come?”
“No.”
The hope had risen before he could stop it. He let it fall without argument.
“Can I speak to Elena?”
“Family services is controlling contact. Keene passed along a request. Maeve declined tonight.”
Damiano nodded.
Larkin opened his briefcase. “There is also the matter of paternity.”
“Do the test.”
“Maeve has consented. Results will take time.”
“She knew.”
“Biology is not a legal arrangement.”
“I know.”
“There it is again.”
Three days later, Damiano appeared before a federal magistrate. The hearing lasted twenty-two minutes. Reporters waited outside the courthouse because rumors had already spread that Damiano Rossetti had surrendered records connected to a major racketeering investigation.
His detention was ordered while attorneys argued about cooperation, danger, and flight risk.
Café Nate closed.
Nate’s photograph appeared online beside headlines calling him an alleged mob banker. Customers posted comments claiming they had always suspected the back room. Other people wrote that Nate had given them free coffee when they were short on money. One former employee said the café’s cannoli had been overrated. Public scandal made room for culinary criticism.
Anthony Mercer was arrested. Rocco Venn and the hooded man were charged in connection with Maeve’s abduction. Investigators suspended two officials, including someone who had accessed Maeve’s confidential intake information. Vittorio’s wife took their children to relatives and released a statement through a lawyer saying she had known nothing about his business.
Enzo began cooperating from custody.
Paolo disappeared for forty-eight hours, then surrendered after his mother told him she would not let federal agents ruin her new carpet.
Life became untidy in ways no organization chart had predicted.
The DNA result arrived on the ninth day.
Probability of paternity exceeded 99.9 percent.
Larkin slid the paper through the slot beneath the interview-room glass.
Damiano read it twice.
May you like
He expected certainty to feel larger. Instead, the page seemed absurdly ordinary. Black type. Laboratory numbers. Elena’s entire existence reduced to a result beneath a corporate logo.
“Does Maeve have this?” he asked.
