When he spoke his voice had not changed.
“What do you ask,nipote.”
“The family. The Mediterranean. Malta is two hundred kilometers from Sicily and the water between them is yours. IneedScordatomen on the island by tomorrow morning. I need eyes on every private airfield from Luqa to Gozo. I need a hand on the correspondent bank in Valletta and a hand on the lawyer in Sliema and I need the villa outside Mellieha watched from the moment we put this phone down. I have a man in Chicago who can give you the addresses inside the hour. I am asking you,zio,to put the family in the water for me.”
Another silence.
I let it sit. I had said what I had to say. I had said it without softening it and I had said it without theater and I had said it the way my father, who had been Don Arturo’s youngest brother and had died at thirty-four with a knife in him in a doorway in Palermo, would have wanted me to say it.
“Pietro.”
“Zio.”
“You have never asked me for anything.”
“No,zio.”
“Your father did not ask either. It was a fault he had. I have wondered, sometimes, whether I gave him enough without his asking. I have decided I did not.”
He did not say anything else for a moment.
Then he said: “The family is in the water.”
I closed my eyes.
“I will have men at Luqa by dawn local time. I will have a second team out of Catania on the boats. The lawyer is already known to me — his name has crossed my desk for other reasons. The villa I do not know but if your cousin Marco can give me the coordinates by the end of the hour I will have a man with eyes on it before the sun rises in Malta tomorrow. Anything that moves in or out of that house from this moment forward will be photographed and timed. You will have the file when you land.”
“Grazie, zio.”
“Do not thank me yet.”
He paused.
“Bring her home,nipote.”
“Yes,zio.”
“And bring me Valenti’s head. The man has been a thorn in the side of two families for too long, and he has put his hand on a woman who is about to be a Scordato, and we are not going to ask twice. Bring me his head and we are even for everything. Your father included.”
The line went quiet.
He had not raised his voice once in the whole call.
“Sì, zio,” I said. “I will bring you his head.”
Chapter 18
Angela
Iwasonmybackon a tough mattress. The bag was off my head. My wrists were free. My ankles were free. The drug was a sour film at the back of my tongue and a small steady ache behind my eyes, like the start of a hangover.
I did not open my eyes.
I just listened.
I heard the absence of a city. No traffic. No el. No furnace cycling. The silence had a shape — a high open silence, the kind that meant air moving over a long distance before it found a wall. Somewhere very far off, the suggestion of water. Not a river. A bigger noise, slower, the long low pull of a tide against rock.
There was a fly, buzzing somewhere near the ceiling, working a corner.
