Page 5 of Merciless Daddy

“Are you.” It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. She let the silence sit exactly long enough to make its point, then moved on, brisk again. “The Sokolovs hold court at their restaurant. The Zhar-Ptitsa, Brighton Beach. Lev receives serious men there when there’s serious business—and you, Salvatore, are a serious man with a shipping operation that brushes his routes. You’ve been near-neighbors for a decade. It is entirely natural for the new circumstances in Chicago to make you curious about terms. I’ll have the approach made through the Greek. You’ll have your dinner within the week.”

She picked up her coat.

“Bring back the money trail. Bring back the marriage terms. Bring me the rope that fits my brother’s neck and nothing that fits ours.” At the top of the stairs she paused, and looked back at me, and there was something in her face that was not entirely command — something older, something almost kind, which frightened me more than the command did.

“Facts, Salvatore,” she said. “Not chivalry.”

Then she was gone, and Tonio waited a full three seconds before he leaned toward Pietro and whispered, loudly enough to be heard in Brighton Beach:

“I dunno,” Tonio said. “Be easier just to take her.”

The garage held six cars and the acoustics of a confessional. I was three steps from mine when I stopped walking.

“What,” Tonio said. He was already at the driver’s door, keys out, because Tonio drives when we’re in a hurry and I let him believe it’s a privilege rather than a way to keep his hands busy.

“The car’s been cleaned.”

“You had it detailed Tuesday. I was there. I ate a sandwich in the waiting room. It was a bad sandwich, I remember it vividly—”

“Tuesday.” I crouched at the rear bumper. “Which means the undercarriage should be uniformly dusty by now. It isn’t.”

There was a streak of fresh grease below the rear bumper, a smear the length of my finger, the kind you leave when your sleeve drags the underside of a chassis because you’re working fast, in the dark, with your arm in an unfamiliar place. I have loaded and unloaded ships for a living since I was a boy. I know what hurried hands leave behind.

“Tonio. Step away from the door.”

He stepped away from the door. That’s the thing about my brothers—they will argue with me about breakfast, about arson, about the moral character of Milanese people, but when I use that voice they move first and complain after. Pietro was already circling the car the other way, silent, checking the wheel wells.

I lay down on the concrete in a suit that cost more than the car it was under and ran my hand along the frame rail. My fingers found it behind the rear axle: a box the size of a cigarette pack, smooth, cold, held by a magnet strong enough to survive potholes. No wires into the chassis. No second package. I checked twice, the slow way, before I pulled it free and rolled back out into the light.

“Tracker,” I said. “Commercial. Battery unit.”

“Thank God,” Tonio said, hand on his chest. “For a moment I thought it was serious. It’s only someone following us everywhere we go.”

Pietro didn’t answer. Pietro was looking at the service door at the far end of the garage, where a shadow that had been carrying an empty recycling bin had just set the bin down very quietly and reached for the handle.

He crossed the garage the way he does, which is to say that one moment he was beside the car and the next his hand was flat on the service door, holding it shut, and a boy in a valet’s vest was pressed against the wall trying to become paint.

Luis. Nineteen, maybe twenty. He parked cars for the restaurant on weekends, and he called me sir in two languages, and right now he was shaking so hard I could see it from thirty feet away.

By the time I got there, he had his hands up in front of his face. Not raised like surrender. Raised like a man who already knows where the first one lands, because somewhere in his life somebody taught him.

“Pietro,” I said. “Back up.”

“Sal—”

“Several paces. Now.”

Pietro withdrew—three steps, then two more when I looked at him—and folded his arms and became a wall again, but a distant one. I stopped an arm’s length from the boy, and then, because an arm’s length from me is not a comfort to anyone, I leaned back against the concrete pillar and put my hands in my pockets.

“Luis. Look at me.”

It took him a moment. When his eyes finally came up they were wet and hopeless, and the hopelessness told me everything I needed to know.

“No one is going to touch you,” I said. “But you are going to tell me about the man who gave you the box I just took off my car, and you’re going to tell me all of it, and you’re going to tell me now, while I’m still the person you’re explaining it to.”

The story came out in pieces. His mother. Dialysis, three sessions a week, and a billing office that had stopped sending letters and started sending final notices. Then a man—not from the neighborhood, spoke to him in the alley behind the restaurant like they were old friends. The bill got paid. All of it. Fourteen thousand dollars, gone like weather. And then the same man came back a week later and explained, still friendly, that payments could be reversed. That the hospital could be told it was fraud. That his mother could lose her spot in the program entirely. Unless.

“Unless you put a magnet under a car,” I said.