Page 11 of Blood Orange Christmas
“Who are you?” I finally ask.
“Friends,” the tall one says.
“Of whom?”
“Old names,” he says and smiles, and it’s not an answer. “Don’t worry. He’ll come.”
“Who?”
He doesn’t bother. He knows I know.
We stop in an underground garage that smells like oil and dust. The short one puts a blindfold on me with a hand that’s careful enough to make me angrier than if he’d been rough. He steers me across smooth floor and up a shallow stair. My wrists burn. My mouth tastes like metal.
We pass through a space that sounds big and empty, then into a room that sounds small. The air is different. Old paper, coffee, a trace of chlorine. The blindfold comes off. I’m in what used to be an office. There’s a desk with nothing on it and a strip light that is too bright. The windows are painted over. The tall mancuts the tie from my wrists and flexes his hands like all of this is tedious.
“Behave, signorina,” he says. “You won’t be here long.”
“How long?”
“Depends on him.”
“Who are you working for?”
“You ask many questions,” he says, but he isn’t offended. “Eat, if you want.” He nods at a paper bag on the desk. “You might be here long enough to be hungry.”
They leave me with the door shut but not locked, because locked would be too honest. Outside the room are footsteps and voices and the hiss of a kettle. A television murmurs somewhere, low. The paper bag holds two bottles of water and a sandwich, like this is a train station and I missed my train. I don’t touch it. I sit on the chair instead and look at the blank wall and try to keep my brain from showing me pictures of what he will do when he finds out.
The world around Dante has rules that don’t look like rules from the outside. People talk a lot about omertà like it’s a romantic idea, but in practice it’s accounting and leverage. You pay who has to be paid. You remove who can’t be paid. You keep books. You clean books. You don’t make noise when quiet will do. The reason they fear him is that he understands when quiet won’t do and he doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t make examples. He makes disappearances. He keeps his word, and everyone knows exactly what it costs when you make a liar of him. I know this because I have been listening even when I pretended not to be. I know it because I have heard the names people don’t say loudly. I knowit because I’ve seen Harrison’s eyes when someone he doesn’t like gets near me.
Time stretches. I can hear the tall man and the short man outside the door, talking about football and a cousin’s wedding and how the old families used to do things better, even when better meant more dead. They call someoneZio, though I doubt he is anyone’s uncle. A phone rings. It is answered. A voice I don’t know says, “He knows,” and the air in the room tightens like it’s been pulled on wires.
The door opens, and the tall man looks different now. The quiet has drained out of his face. He studies me like I might explode.
“Change of plan,” he says. “We go now.”
“Where?” My mouth feels numb.
“Drop,” he says. “We pass you for proof of life and then you go back. Schoolyard rules.”
He is lying to me or to himself. He gestures, and I stand because there is no other thing to do. We go down a narrow hall that smells like wet concrete and I feel the building around me—old, reworked, the bones of a laundry or a public bath or an archive. I count doors. I count steps. We pass a corkboard with two flyers on it, both in Italian, both for classes that won’t happen here. The tall man holds my arm above the elbow, a grip that says he’s trying to be nice as long as I make it easy.
We come into a bigger room with high ceilings and a wide roll-up door chained half-open. The garage light on the other side is different, greener. There’s a second van. There’s a man in a suit too expensive for this place leaning against it, bored and careful at the same time. He’s young, amber cufflinks, hair too neat. He taps a message into his phone without looking up.
“Ehi,” the tall man calls. “We’re ready.”
The young man looks up, takes me in, puts his phone away with slow precision, and smiles like we’re all at a birthday party. “Rinaldi says five minutes, then we move.”
Rinaldi. A name I’ve heard in hallways, in cautious tones. Old family. New money. Not friends.
A low sound rolls through the garage, the kind of sound big engines make when they aren’t trying to hide. It swells and then cuts. Footsteps follow. Not many. Even steps, hard rubber on concrete, the stride of somebody who owns the floor. Harrison rounds the chained door first, expression empty, hands bare. Behind him there are two men I’ve never seen before with coats too light for the season and faces that look like they’ve been sanded smooth of tells. Dante comes last, unhurried.
He wears a coat I don’t recognize. It hangs right. There’s no tie. His hair is neat. His eyes are not. He takes in the room the way a chef takes in a pantry. What’s in reach. What’s missing. What needs to be used fast. He doesn’t look at me first. He looks at the tall man’s hands. He looks at the chain on the roll-up door. He looks at the too-neat boy by the van with the amber cufflinks. Then he looks at me.
“Serena,” he says.
The young man claps slowly, as if he’s the host of a show and the star has arrived. “Dante Accardi in a public garage. You honor us.”
Dante doesn’t answer him. He tilts his head slightly. “Two vans,” he says, not a question. Harrison has stopped three steps off Dante’s right shoulder, hands still empty. The two light-coat men have moved without anyone watching them move. Onestands by the service elevator. The other is near the stair, casual and in the way.
