I stared at him.
“He left instructions,” Eddie said, with the expression of a man who had received instructions from Santo Caruso and understood that compliance was not optional.
Santo was outside. I could hear the car. I pulled the coat tighter and walked out.
Anothersecurityguy—Sal—followedata distance in a grey sedan—visible in the driver’s side mirror, four car lengths back, consistent. Professional.
I’d never been on a date with security before. If this even was a date.
We crossed into the city and I watched it come. The skyline assembling itself on the horizon the way it always did—brick first, then glass, the familiar vertical geometry of a place I knew from the inside. We went south and then west and then south again, through the grid of neighborhoods I could identify by block. I‘d spent years moving through this city on foot and bybus and occasionally by borrowed bicycle, reading it the way you read a language you were born into. I knew the syntax of it. The way the air changed crossing certain streets. The particular light that came off the lake even when you couldn’t see the lake.
Pilsensmelled like a bakery and someone’s grandmother. Murals on every flat surface, the neighborhood wearing its identity the way only certain neighborhoods did—loudly, completely, without apology. He parked on a side street. A narrow one. The kind of street with a single restaurant on it that had no sign you could read from a moving car, that you had to already know was there.
“You’ve been here before,” I said.
“Once or twice.” He got out. Came around to my side and opened the door. The gesture landed without ceremony—he wasn’t performing it, just doing it, the reflexive care of a man who opened doors because he’d decided he was the one who opened doors.
Inside, it was warm and close and smelled like garlic and wine. Six tables. Ours was in the corner—of course it was, because Santo Caruso did not sit with his back to a room. A candle on the table, white wax pooled at the base of the holder, suggesting it burned most days regardless of the hour. A card menu, handwritten, laminated.
He settled into the booth across from me with the particular ease of a large man in a small space who had decided the small space belonged to him. His shoulders took up more than their share. His hands rested on the table—the scarred knuckles, the thick fingers—and he looked at me across the candle and said nothing.
A glass of red wine appeared in front of me. Then one in front of him. No order placed. The woman who brought them—small, silver-haired, the face of someone who’d been cooking for fifty years and had opinions about it—looked at Santo with therecognition of someone who knew exactly who she was serving and had made her peace with it.
Nobody called him by name.
I wrapped my hand around the wine glass and looked at the man across from me and thought: thisisa date. I’m on a date with Santo Caruso in a restaurant that doesn‘t have a sign, with a tail car parked on the street outside and my dog forty miles away looking at Eddie like he’d failed some fundamental test.
The thought was completely absurd.
“Order the rigatoni,” he said, not looking at his menu.
“What if I want something else?”
He looked up. The corner of his mouth moved.
“Order the rigatoni.”
I looked at my menu. Looked at him. The candle between us lit the angles of his face in amber—the crooked nose, the jaw, the eyes that watched me the way they always watched me. Dark. Steady. Warm.
I ordered the rigatoni.
Itwas,ofcourse,extraordinary.
I ate the first bite and my face did the thing before my brain could intervene. The specific, involuntary expression of someone whose expectations have been exceeded against their will. My eyes closed for half a second. That was all it took.
“Good?” He wasn’t looking at his own plate. He was watching me.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“Your eyes closed.”
“I was blinking.”
The corner of his mouth lifted again. Small. Devastating. He turned to his own food.
I ate the rigatoni. It was, objectively, the best pasta I’d ever had.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
