Corrado stared at Nunzio for a minute. He shook his head. “Nunzio is not a part of my family, not officially.”
“He’s not...one of you?” Adriana sounded almost hopeful.
Corrado shook his head. “He’s from Sicily,” was all he said.
I narrowed my eyes at Corrado. There was something he was not saying. Nunzio was not a part of his family, but he still did whatever Corrado told him to. Then again…I wondered if Corrado was doing this for him because he had agreed to protect me here. A favor for a favor.
A life for a life,judging by the look on Adriana’s face.
“No!” She shook her head. Then she went after Nunzio again with a knife she pulled from the pocket of her jacket. The man who stood at the door wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her back just as she went to slash him again. She was stabbing the air, kicking her legs, screaming, “NO! My baby! You won’t take her from me! You won’t kill her spirit like he killed mine!”
Then she started to wail as if someone had died when she realized she couldn’t get to him. What was done was done.
“Let her go,” Corrado said to his man holding her.
The man did not hesitate. He let her go, but he took the knife from her hand. She did not even notice. She crumpled to the floor, on her knees, crying at the top of her lungs. Begging. Pleading. Bleeding out on the floor of a house that did not care for her tears or her loss.
I pulled the rosary from my pocket, worrying the beads between my fingers.
Maybe Corrado called my name when I rushed out of the kitchen, heading toward the garden. Maybe he did not. I could not hear over the sound of the wailing. I could not hear over the sound of another mother’s pain.
It seemed like Adriana had made one mistake in this life. She cared at one time.
Once out in the garden, I took Eleonora from Anna, holding her so close that I hoped to absorb her into my skin and keep her there forever.
34
Corrado
Ididn’t come to my grandfather’s social club, Primo, often. When he was alive, I frequented, but after he died, it lost its appeal.
Most things he left behind had.
Except for one thing that had nothing to do with him directly, though it all stemmed from the life.
Macchiavello.
My wife tried to tell me I was channeling all of the things I couldn’t control into my hate for him. The more out of control things felt—the dullness behind my wife’s eyes, the smile I couldn’t get from my daughter—the more I wanted to kill him.
Maybe I was fixated on destroying him.
The thought of him was destroying me. Everything he stood for and had stolen from me was like acid to my mind.
It was why they called me Scorpio. I had poison inside of me, and once I received an order, or my mind was made up about something, I refused to let go until it was over. Just like I refused to let the enemy go.
It had been two months since I met the kid in the park. Two months since Adriana’s dramatic performance in the kitchen. Two months since the light in my wife’s eyes seemed to dim even darker, mostly when she was thinking, not noticing that I watched her. Two months of my daughter growing and rejecting me.
“Self-imposed misery,” I said to the man in the picture, repeating something he had said to me once.
It hung across from what had been his desk. The men hung it up after he was murdered: Emilio Capitani when he had first arrived in New York. His profile was mine, but other than that, it was hard to find the family resemblance. My eyes and features belonged to Corrado Palermo.
I’d seen a picture of him walking out of the courthouse, after the Scarpones had gotten him off some charge he was probably guilty of.
Self-imposed misery was what Emilio had once told me made men did to themselves. There was nothing to be miserable about in this life of ours. The world was at our feet. Men like us were untouchable, unless we did something stupid and broke the rules. At the time, I thought he had meant physically. But the words came at me differently this time, because I was at a different time in my life.
We were untouchable when it came to feelings, not just flesh and bones.
We did what we did, and that was that. We felt what we felt, and then we moved on. That ideology carried over to home life.
