Page 60 of My Dark Fairy Tale
The Riva family was headed by the matriarch Pamina, who was as bloodthirsty as they came and known byla mafiaas Vampira because of it. They were located to the west and focused mostly on drug trafficking through the port of Rimini to and from eastern Europe. We had a good relationship, but her voraciousness made her fairly unpredictable. An argument could be made that she was setting her sights on the eastern ports as well so she could dominate the entirety of central Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, and much of Marche.
The next were the Grecos in Liguria, who made no bones about lusting after total control of the north, but who I had always thought to be too stupid to make a go of it. Still, idiocy wasn’t really the deterrent it should have been, and they were ridiculous enough to think they could take over now that Aldo Romano was dead.
The question was, Why hadn’t they tried before now?
I’d been in power for four years, and while I’d faced assassination and coup attempts in the beginning, they had ceased after four or five prudent and public messages had been sent to our enemies, written on corpses.
It seemed so ... random that they should come for me now.
Imelda was bright enough to see my mind working and suggested, “The Clan Romano of today is not what it was under your father. It’s taken you time, but you have changed the outfit fundamentally, Raffa. You must see others could be threatened by that.”
“Success is success. People will be threatened by it no matter how it happens or who it happens to.” It was disgusting, but a truth I’d faced countless times. Even friends I’d had at Oxford had begrudged me my sudden inheritance, though it meant the death of my own father. It was easy for outsiders to get caught up in the glamour of success, to be ignorant of the way it corroded over time.
“Maybe. But you have brought so much modernity to a staunchly traditionalist society. Even atla fattoria, we are scoffed at by old winemakers who say the use of technology on our scale is basicallysacrilegious. My husband manages the grapes, but I manage the money. A woman. And I am not the only one you have empowered, Raffa.”
“It is the twenty-first century, and I was raised by a strong mother and three older sisters. We have a female prime minister, for fuck’s sake.”
“And even she doesn’t declare herself a feminist,” Imelda pointed out. “We are not talking about national politics, anyway, but Mafia politics, which are so far stuck in the past, I am surprised the men don’t insist on wearing togas and being fed grapes by hand. All this to say, you might not have police eyes on you, but you have the eyes of the underworld watching and scrutinizing your every move.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and sank back into my chair. “I knew it would seem to weaken my position when we stopped focusing so much on drug smuggling, but money laundering, agromafia operations, and counterfeiting make us more money than we made under my father, with half the risk.”
Imelda held her hands in the air, her wrists bony and covered in bangles that chimed as she gestured. “I know, Raffuccio, but this is the world you live in.”
“She is right,” Renzo added, moving from the window to stand over my shoulder, where he usually resided, like a permanent symbol of support and a giant deterrent to my enemies. “The capos have quieted, but many of them were unhappy when you made Pamina capo after she killed her husband.”
“He nearly killedher,” I said, but I was exhausted by this subject and had been for years. “The women in this organization are some of the best minds we have.”
“You made it clear Martina will be consigliere when Tonio dies, and he only occupies the position still out of respect for your father,” Carmine pointed out. “Martina already does most of the legal legwork.”
“Enough. I know my faults, but bringing the Camorra into the twenty-first century is not one of them. New York’scapo dei capiDante Salvatore would agree with me, as would Damiano in Napoli. The issue here is that someone is coming for us, and I will not have peace until Iknow the face of our enemy.” I stared each of my men in the eye. “Find me names, and do not show your faces to me until you do.”
Renzo clasped me on the shoulder on his way out, taking my words as the dismissal they were. Carmine kissed Imelda on the cheeks before following Ludo and Renzo out of my study, closing the door behind them.
“I am sorry,” I told my mother’s best friend, “that Mario was hurt because of this.”
“It is not because of you directly. All the top wineries contend with such things.”
“I will increase security,” I promised.
She shrugged and waved the words away with one hand, but her eyes were shrewd on me. “You look half-elated and half-exhausted. Does either have anything to do with the lovely Guinevere?”
I hesitated, rubbing my overgrown stubble as I considered telling her anything about my conflict around Vera. How much I already ached to see her. How these new risks made me afraid for the first time in a long time because I did not want my dangers to become hers.
My family was insulated at Villa Romano with staff and soldiers to tend to their every need and protection. Guinevere was just a foreigner trying to have an adventure on her own in a new place, and unwittingly, she’d run into the arms of the worst monster in Tuscany.
“Once you said you would never enter into a deal with the family,” I reminded her, then asked the question I had always wanted answered. “Why did you, in the end?”
“You have made me a very wealthy woman. I think, in this country, we have a strange relationship with the Mafia. We hate them and revere them in equal turn. You are terrifying and horrible so often, and yet you can change generations of lives in an instant. The investment you made in Alfonso took it from a local pizzeria to an international chain. My nephew is at school in London and told me he had a slice of home from their first location there.” She sighed, toying with a marble wolf figurine from my desk as she searched for the words. “What is the saying?A femmena bona, si tentata e resta onesta, nun e stata bona tentata.”
A good woman, if tempted, remains honest, but that means she was not well tempted.
“You are a complicated man, but not a bad one by any means. Your father delighted in his cruelty when it was necessary, and I believe you see the Mafia as a game, one of life and death, but with calculation and an eye to the stakes. If you can manipulate a situation to suit your needs without death, you will do anything in your power to make it happen. I suppose I wanted to indulge my greediness and avoid my fear of death.”
She ended with a joke, but I was not in a laughing mood hearing those words.
I had always struggled with my definitions ofgoodandbad,righteousandevil, and how these words could be applied to me. I had killed, stolen, and lied and would continue to do so for the rest of my life with little compunction.
But there was a soft spot in my heart I couldn’t seem to harden no matter how much I tried. I was not empathetic, exactly, but I could be moved by beauty in all its forms and sought valiantly to preserve it.
