So I excuse myself before either of them does and step out of the restaurant.
Leone is already waiting by the Maserati.
He opens the rear door for me without comment, but the comment comes soon enough once we are moving. It always does. Leone has many virtues. Silence, when he is curious, is not one of them.
We follow the Uber at a careful distance.
Its taillights glow red against the wet shine of the streets. New York at this hour has a strange in-between quality. Not dead, never dead, but softened around the edges. The daytime lies have gone to bed. The nighttime ones have not fully put on their makeup yet.
Leone glances at me in the mirror.
“You know,” he says, “most men who are this interested in a woman simply talk to her.”
I look out the window. “Most men are not me.”
He huffs a quiet laugh. “That may be true, but they do still occasionally ask a woman if she’d like a ride home instead of tailing her Uber like a private investigator with a morality problem.”
“I do not have a morality problem.”
Leone’s eyes meet mine in the mirror for half a second. “Right. My mistake. You are not saddled with that.”
I say nothing.
He takes that as encouragement, which is his worst habit.
“You follow her home every night,” he says. “At this point, I think even I deserve an explanation. Professionally. For fuel expenses, if nothing else.”
“I am not in the habit of explaining myself.”
“No, of course not. But if you wanted to share, your second would be a good choice. I can be discreet.”
I almost tell him to shut up.
The only reason I do not is that he is right.
Leone can be an asshat, but he is also the epitome of loyalty. I have entrusted him with matters other men would sell their souls to learn. He has never betrayed that trust. He talks too much, jokes too easily, and tests my patience as if it were a sport, but he is mine, and more importantly, he is solid.
That means discretion.
So I keep my eyes on the Uber ahead of us and say, after a while, “The world is split in two.”
Leone does not interrupt. To his credit, he knows when he has finally gotten what he asked for.
“There is the light side,” I continue. “That is where good people live. Honest people. They work, they struggle, they worry about bills and deadlines and bad bosses and rent. They are chained down by all the ordinary material things that make up a life, but for all that, they are free. They can stand under the sun and be exactly what they are. They can love openly. Build openly. Want openly. Their lives may be small from our point of view, but they belong to them.”
The city lights slide across the window as we pass them.
“And then there is the dark side,” I say. “That is where we live. You and I. The other bosses. The other seconds. Every man under our command. Men who kill and steal and threaten and conquer. Men who run empires, but only in the dark. Never in the sun. Never honestly. Never cleanly. Everything we touch comes with blood under the nails.”
Leone’s hands stay steady on the wheel.
“And the people from those two sides,” I say, “can never truly meet. They can brush past each other. They can look. They can want. They can even lie to themselves for a while. But anything more than that and the two sides collide. When they do, one of them is destroyed.”
Leone is quiet for a moment, then says softly, “And ours is the side that wins.”
“Yes.”
He exhales through his nose, thoughtful now rather than teasing.
