Page 3 of Merciless Daddy

“You vote for whoever fed you last.”

“It’s true, you can’t cook without a flame. Fire is versatile.”

I let them run. They needed it, the way an engine needs to idle, and I needed the minute to look at the wall and let the new piece talk to the old ones.

“Northbridge Freight,” I said, and the room settled. It does that when I speak. I have never decided whether to be proud of it. “It was one of Enzo Valenti’s companies—trucking on paper, laundering in practice. When Enzo fell,as we know, Gianni swooped in.” I tapped the manifest cluster on the left of the wall, the ones with my handwriting in the margins going back years. “Look at the routing.”

I walked them through it, document by document, the way my father taught me.

“Gianni inherited Enzo’s laundering routes,” I said. “The machine was offered to him, or he took it, but either way it’s his money moving through those trucks now.”

“He couldn’t run a bath,” Pietro said.

“He doesn’t have to. The machine runs itself. He only has to feed it.” I moved to the right side of the wall, to the newer papers, the ones Angela had been pulling apart for us for a month. “Which brings us to Halberd Capital. Angela’s old company.”

Pietro’s wife, Angela, had exposed corruption at the company she used to work at. It hadn’t shut the company down entirely, though.

“The real estate people,” Tonio said. “The ones buying up half of nothing.”

“They’re not buying nothing. They’re buying distressed properties—and only on streets we control. The laundromat on Damen after the fire inspection. The two buildings on Archer after the code violations nobody ordered. Distress, then purchase, at forty cents on the dollar. It’s Katerina’s block all over again.” I put my finger on the map, on the pins, and drew the line the pins made, and the line ran along the edge of Caruso territory like a knife testing a seam. “This morning’s tow crew was Halberd-funded. They manufacture the distress. Then they buy the ruins. It’s a siege, but polite. With paperwork.”

Pietro was quiet for a moment. Then: “So we burn Halberd.”

“You cannot burn a limited liability company, Pietro.”

“You can burn its directors.”

“Write that down,” Tonio said. “For the memoir.”

I picked up the folder Pietro had brought in the night before—Angela’s work, printed on the cheap paper she insisted on, as if expensive paper could be traced. She had gone into structures I couldn’t reach and come back with eleven pages of a draft contract, and I had read them twice at two in the morning and then sat looking at the wall for a long time.

“Angela pulled part of a marriage agreement,” I said. “Being negotiated now. Gianni Scordato and the Sokolov bratva. Lev Sokolov’s daughter.”

Tonio whistled, low. “The Russians in Brighton Beach. Why would the old lion touch Gianni? No Italian house will shake his hand. He killed his own father.”

“Which is exactly why. Gianni needs legitimacy and Lev doesn’t care where money slept last night. But it’s the terms that matter. Read clause nine.”

I handed the pages to Pietro because Pietro reads contracts the way I read manifests. His eyes moved. Stopped. Moved again, slower.

“The daughter holds fifty-one percent of two companies,” he said. “Cold storage and trucking. Inherited from her mother.”

“Refrigerated warehousing on the Eastern Seaboard and a licensed interstate trucking fleet.” I said it evenly, but the shape of it had been sitting in my chest since two in the morning. “Clean companies. Real ones. Decades old, spotless, exactly the kind of infrastructure a laundering machine dreams about. Northbridge is dirty and everyone with a subpoena knows it. Her companies are pristine.”

“And clause nine?“ Tonio asked.

Pietro read it aloud, flat. “Upon solemnization of the marriage, the husband is granted full and irrevocable power of attorney over all shares and voting rights held by the bride.”

The office was quiet. Even Tonio put the cannolo down.

There was a photograph in the folder. Angela had included it without comment—surveillance quality, long lens, a woman crossing a Brooklyn sidewalk in a grey coat with her chin up like the street owed her money. Yelena Sokolova. Pale eyes, beautiful, even in a bad photograph.

Tonio leaned over my shoulder to look. “So she’s the bridge. Gianni’s money on one side, the Sokolov machine on the other, and she’s what they build the crossing on. Marry the bridge, own the road.”

Our cousin, Serafina Scordato did not knock.

No. The boss of the entire Scordato crime family did not knock. She was new to the position—her father, Don Arturo had passed on his power to her just before his death at Gianni’s hands.

She came up the back stairs in a dark coat with her hair pulled severe, and the three of us straightened without meaning to.