"Operation status?"
"Closed on the targets we had. Cleaners moving in. Russo and DeLuca will get their new instructions before the sun is up."
"Copy."
I turned to my men on the floor. They had the surviving Marchetti soldiers and lieutenants on their knees in a row along the wall. Eight of them. Some bloody, some not. All of them with their hands behind their heads.
"Downstairs," I said.
We moved them down into the chamber in the basement under the warehouse. Concrete walls. One drain in the center of the floor. A bulb in a wire cage on the ceiling. The kind of room a man does not walk into without already knowing what it is.
They knew.
They started naming names before we had the last of them through the door. Cesare's accountant. The shipping schedule. A safe house in Yonkers we had not known about. The cop who fed them the wire taps. Their own mothers. They offered numbers, accounts, addresses, the names of the men in the next family over who had wronged us first. The noise of it filled the concrete the way water fills a basin.
I stood at the top of the stairs and watched. My face went still. The stillness arrived in my jaw first, then in my shoulders, then in my hands.
Mikhail came up the stairs behind me. He did not joke.
"You want it," he said low, "or you want the men to do it?"
I looked down at the eight Marchetti men begging on the concrete floor. I thought of Chloe in a hospital bed because someone had cut the brake line on a car. I thought of three months of being Pete in a town I did not remember, of waking in an apartment that was not mine and going to work at a job that was not mine. I thought of Rhea's grandparents in their kitchen, the people I had almost made into widows and a widower.
I walked down the stairs.
I did the work. The way I had done it upstairs. One at a time. Clean. I did not speak to them. I did not give them speeches. The first one was loud. The second was quiet. By the fifth, the rest had stopped begging because begging was no longer doing them any good. The last man closed his eyes before I did it. I let him have that.
I lowered the pistol when it was done. My ears were ringing properly now. The bulb in the wire cage hummed. The drain at the center of the floor did its work.
I went back up the stairs.
Mikhail was waiting at the top. He did not say anything. He set a hand on my shoulder and squeezed once, hard, and let go. We walked out of the warehouse together. The cold air on the loading dock hit me in the chest and I took it in like a man taking in water after a long road.
Salt. Metal. The first faint hint of frost.
"Cars," Mikhail said.
We went to the cars.
I changed shirts in the back seat on the way home. My driver passed a clean white one over the seat without turning aroundand took the bloody one off my hands without comment. He passed me a towel too. I wiped my hands until the towel was dark. They still smelled like cordite. They would smell like it under the soap in the morning.
I pulled out my phone.
I sat with it in my lap a long minute. The trees along the parkway went past dark and quick. The driver kept his eyes on the road.
I opened the video call.
Chloe picked up on the second ring.
She was at her grandma's kitchen table. Hair up. The same little overhead light. A cup of tea by her elbow with the steam coming off it. She looked at my face in the small lit square and her own face changed.
"How are you?" she said.
"I am all right."
"You don't look all right."
I did not put on a face for her. I did not have it in me. I looked at her in the small bright square on my lap and let her see whatever she was seeing.
