Chapter Twenty Eight
Roberto
I’m at the stove with a pan heating when Caterina calls. I hit speaker and set the phone on the counter.
“Zio? You got a minute?” Her voice is brisk.
“Go,” I say, shifting the pan so the skin stays flat. “What’s on fire?”
“Not fire. A routing screwup.” Papers shuffle on her end. “Owner-level comps I approved over the weekend hit Olivia’s Ops queue by mistake. Three of them. She saw them. She came to me about it.”
I lower the flame. “What do you mean she saw them?”
“System error,” she says. “When we cloned the comp rules for opening weekend, the exception table defaulted incorrectly. Anything I approve at the owner level got routed to ‘Ops review.’ Olivia owns Ops review. Three of mine hit her queue.”
I curse. “Which comps?”
“Rinaldi. DeLuca. Yang,”she says.
“What were they for, exactly?” I ask.
“Rinaldi’s suite comp was to see how easily we could move money through the property. Like, a test run,” Caterina says. “The suite, the extras, the ‘welcome’ charges—those are the cover so the money ends up recorded as normal casino business instead of outside cash.”
I keep my voice even. “DeLuca.”
“Same purpose,” she says. “His ‘promotions’ weekend is just the excuse to turn his cash into activity we can book so the totals read as house revenue, not unexplained deposits.”
“And Yang.”
“Placement and balance,” she says. “We needed him here so the totals we report line up. His comp is a pretext. He’s part of the flow that makes the numbers look ordinary from the outside.”
“Olivia saw the offers,” I say. “But not that.”
“Right. She saw comp records, not the reason behind them,” Caterina says. “But she flagged them as suspicious and brought them to me.”
“What, exactly, did she suspect?” I ask.
“Not sure,” she says. “My initials were on them, so she knew it came from me, and she knew they weren’t the type of comp rules we discussed.”
“Do you think she can figure it out? That we’re laundering?” I ask, turning the heat up under the skillet again.
Caterina sighs on the other end. “I don’t know, Zio. She’s not stupid. She clued in on them right away.”
“What did you tell her?” I salt the sea bass and set it on a plate.
“That they were my calls, within my discretion, and that she doesn’t review my band,” Cat says. “I told her the problem was routing, not her. I said I’d fix it so she doesn’t see my approvals going forward.”
“Did you give her reasons?”
“No specifics. I said there are lanes and mine includes decisions she doesn’t have to document,” she says. “I added internal reason tags to the three—private, restricted—so if an internal audit ever summarizes counts, hosts can’t treat them as precedent.”
“You think she’s figured us out?”
“I don’t think so. She hasn’t said anything,” Caterina says.
“She wouldn’t,” I say dryly.
“No, but she hasn’t been any different with me. How about you?” she asks.
