Page 153 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby
He looks at my face, which I try to keep boring and honest.
He sees more than I want him to.
“You think the future belongs to quiet men,” he says.
“I think the future belongs to people who can walk down Court Street without checking every parked car,” I say. “The money will still move. It always has. But I don’t want a child to inherit a room that demands a ledger before a name.”
The Don leans back and steeples his fingers like a statue that made a choice.
“You give me two months,” he says. “You finish what you started. You help pick the person who sits where you sit. Then you go. You will still answer when I call if I call like a father. Not like a Don.”
“You’ll call like both,” I say.
“Maybe,” he says.
He nods once.
It could be a blessing.
It could be a warning.
With him it’s usually both.
The dinner tries to return to being dinner.
Someone brings out veal.
Someone else pours wine.
Conversation limps into sports and cousins.
People get good at pretending.
I count the seconds until I can stand without breaking the room.
Then I do.
Outside, the air smells like bread from the corner bakery and rain that hasn’t decided.
The street is wet along the curb the way it gets when the city thinks it cried and then didn’t.
Elisa is waiting half a block away, not in the open, not hiding either.
She knows how to take up exactly as much space as she wants the world to think she’s using.
I walk to her.
She reads me before I speak.
“Well?” she asks.
“He’s finished,” I say. “The Don cut him loose. Security put him in a car he won’t own again.”
She breathes out.
It’s not relief.
It’s something that makes room for relief later.
