My Don Chose My Best Friend-So I Took His Empire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Scan

Gemma answers the wives' chat with one question, makes eleven laundromat managers hold the drop for her, pays three hundred men from her father's hidden safe, and Santino arrives with her suitcases.

By nine o'clock the chat had two hundred messages.

"What a blessing for the family!"

"Poor Lidia, so brave to say it."

"Gemma should be gracious. A Don needs an heir."

Not one of the forty-one women wrote my name without a sigh attached.

I read every message standing in my father's kitchen with my arms crossed.

Then I typed one line and sent it to the whole group.

"Congratulations, Lidia. Which year did it start?"

The chat went silent.

Lidia's name showed that she was typing, and then it showed nothing.

I put the phone face down on the counter.

"That felt good," Nino said from the table.

"It felt like nothing," I said. "Where is my father's ledger?"

He reached under his coat and set a thick green book in front of me.

It was the route book for the Sartori laundromats, fourteen locations across Staten Island and Brooklyn.

I had kept it for three years as a wedding gift to Dario's family.

Every manager in it knew my voice.

I started at the top and dialed the first number.

"Hylan Wash and Fold," a man answered.

"It's Gemma Sartori."

I heard him sit down.

"Signorina Gemma. God. Are you all right? They're saying things."

"I'm fine. Is tonight's drop in the safe?"

"Yes. Same as always. Dario's man comes at six."

"He doesn't come tonight," I said. "You hold the drop until I send somebody I trust. Can you do that?"

He was quiet for one moment.

"Your father taught me this job when I was nineteen. I can do that."

I dialed the second number, and the third.

Some managers hung up on me.

Some cried.

By noon, eleven of fourteen had told me the same thing, in nearly the same words.

They would hold the drop for Alberto's daughter.

"That's the cash for one night," Nino said. "It won't pay three hundred men."

"No," I said. "Where does my father keep what Dario never knew about?"

Nino looked at me for a long moment, and then he laughed, for the first time in three years.

He walked me down to the cellar and moved a rack of my father's wine.

Behind it was a steel door the size of a refrigerator.

The combination was my mother's birthday.

Inside there were stacks of banded cash, a revolver in a cloth bag, and a gold watch with a cracked crystal.

"Eighty thousand and change," Nino said. "He kept it for the day a Balestra tried to shut him out."

My father had not trusted anyone, not even his underboss.

I understood, then, that he had told me about this door when I was sixteen and I had forgotten.

I picked up the watch.

It had stopped at ten past four.

I put it in my pocket anyway.

"Pay the first week to the crews," I said. "Every man gets his envelope from me, in my name, by tonight."

"And after that?"

"After that, I take the rest."

The captains came back at two to carry the cash out in grocery bags.

Each man who took an envelope from my hands looked at me for a moment before he put it in his coat.

Nobody said Dario's name.

By evening, three hundred and twelve men had been paid, and not one of them had been paid by a Balestra.

I stood on my father's porch and watched the last car pull away.

My hands were shaking, and I let them.

Somewhere on the island, Dario was learning that his men were being paid out of my pocket.

I had been right about him for three years, and it had cost me my friend.

Headlights turned onto the street.

It was not a car I knew. It was an old grey pickup with a Port Newark yard sticker on the windshield.

It stopped at the curb, and a man got out.

He was tall, in a canvas work jacket, with a scar through his left eyebrow.

Santino Balestra, Dario's half-brother, who had not said a word at dinner.

He opened the truck's tailgate and lifted out two suitcases I recognized.

They were mine. They had been in my bedroom closet that morning.

Nino's hand went to his coat.

Santino set the bags down on the walk and held both hands out, empty.

"Your things," he said to me. "He was going to burn them."

"Did he send you to bring me home?"

"No," Santino said. "I'm not here for Dario."

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