Page 296 of Niccolo

I snorted. “If I had a bottle of whiskey, I’d drink to kill the pain.”

Back at the Widow’spalazzo,Roberto introduced Mei-ling to everyone.

After Dario had made her acquaintance, I took him aside. “Roberto informed me he already returned the $200 million.”

Dario sighed. “Easy come, easy go. What’s our next move?”

“We should approach the Council as soon as possible. Fausto’s down. If we’re lucky,they’lldeliver the killing blow for us.”

He nodded. “Do it.”

124

Sofia

It took three days, but Fausto was able to get Aurelio’s body smuggled out of the morgue.

The Widow’s reach extended throughout the city’s law enforcement, so the morgue attendant who agreed to the arrangement wanted enough money to leave Venice forever and disappear.

Otherwise, he was afraid the cops would make sure he ‘disappeared’ in an entirely different fashion.

The agreed-upon price was half a million euros, to be paid upon delivery.

The attendant packed Aurelio’s corpse in a body bag, filled it with dry ice, and hid it in a load of laundry.

Since it was Venice, everything had to be transported by canals. The attendant paid the boat driver two grand – no questions asked – to take a detour to the mainland, where the attendant retrieved the body bag and put it in a rented van.

Fausto didn’t want to reveal our presence in Modena toanyone,so we met the attendant in Verona, an hour and a half away. There was a funeral home there that Fausto owned for money laundering purposes.

That, and quietly disposing of the occasional dead body.

Dante and several foot soldiers had accompanied us. With their help, the attendant loaded the body bag onto a gurney and brought it into a private room.

Corpses aren’t typically embalmed in Italy, so the room was used for cleaning and preparing bodies for burial.

The tiled walls were cold and bare. There were grates in the floor and a rubber hose leading to the sink, presumably for washing away blood or bodily fluids. The air stank of putrefaction and death.

There was a marble slab table in the center of the room. Dante and another foot soldier moved the body bag onto that.

Fausto stared at the black plastic shroud, his shoulders slumped, a look of anguish on his face.

Then he gestured with one hand.Go ahead.

The attendant stood there uncertainly.

“Open it,” Dante ordered the attendant.

“Are you sure?” he asked nervously. “He fell from a pretty tall height – he’s – ”

“Openit,” Dante snapped.

The attendant unzipped the bag a quarter way down and pulled it apart.

In the summer heat, the dry ice had long since evaporated. There was only Aurelio’s face, the skin pale and colorless.

All the blood had been washed away, but the left side of his head was crushed. The skin was ripped open, exposing raw muscle and bone.

He looked horrifying.

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