Clemente turns from the window.
And looks at me.
Those dark eyes move over me with the unhurried assessment of a man who has been reading people for decades and trusts his own judgment above everything else. Salt and pepper hair. Olive skin. A linen shirt worn with the casualness of a man who buysthings like that without checking the price. He is well built and controlled.
Holding his gaze, I smile the smile of Marco Reyes, easy, certain, the smile of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it, and Diego makes the introduction.
“Clemente, Marco Reyes, the man who can solve your New York problem.”
Clemente crosses the room toward us. He is shorter than I expected. Men like this are always this way, their presence so large in everything around them that the physical reality comes as a slight surprise. He extends his hand, I take it, we shake, and I look him in the eyes and think about Tate holding my head in his lap and begging me not to go.
“Marco.” His English is accented and precise. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Likewise.”
The word tastes like ash.
Keeping that off my face, I take the seat he gestures toward.
He talks.
That is the first thing I understand about Clemente in person that no briefing document has fully conveyed. He talks with the expansive, unstoppable energy of a man who has been the most important person in every room he’s ever entered and has simply stopped considering any other possibility.
He talks about New York with the fluency of someone who has studied it from a distance for years, the market, the appetite, the infrastructure of a city that consumes product at a rate most operations struggle to keep up with. He talks about the El Pasos with the cold frustration of a businessman whose logistics contractor has failed to deliver, not grief, not anger, just the practical irritation of a supply chain disruption.
Sitting, listening, and keeping my expression attentive and neutral, I think about Lexi Ambers being sold to Lawrence like a line item on an invoice.
Keep going, I tell myself.
Stay in the chair.
Stay in the room.
Be Marco.
“The El Pasos understood the New York market,” Clemente says. “They had relationships. History. Twenty years of working those streets.” A pause. “It will take time to rebuild that.”
“Not as much time as you think. The El Pasos had history, but they also had enemies. Bridges they’d burned. People who wouldn’t work with them regardless of the product.” A pause. “I don’t carry their history. I carry connections they never had access to.”
Clemente looks at me.
“Tell me.”
So I tell him.
Streets, neighborhoods, distribution corridors, the geography of a city lived in from every angle, above ground and below it, legal and otherwise. Every piece of knowledge is real. Every contact exists. The legend is airtight because it has been built from the inside out.
Clemente listens. Doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t push back. Just listens with those still eyes and that quality of attention that tells me every word is being weighed and filed.
“You know the Bronx?”
“Which part?”
A slight narrowing of his eyes. “Hunts Point.”
“Distribution hub. The market moves through the produce center, the cover of legitimate freight. You want product moving through there, you need at least three separate handlers, and you’re paying a fifteen percent cut to the man who runs theloading dock on the east side. His name changes every eighteen months, but the cut stays the same.” A beat. “Last I knew, his name was Victor. Before that, Anthony.”
“East Harlem,” he says.
