The Don's Deadliest Obsession novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: Forty Guns
Forty guns pointed at a room full of people who had come to eat veal.
The Quintero captains had come with almost nothing.
Their hands were open on the walnut table, and not one of them moved.
"Sit down, Tadeo," my father said, in the voice he used for dessert.
Tadeo didn't sit.
He stood with his arm around me and Ramiro groaning on the carpet at his feet, and he looked at my father.
"You've made a mistake, Gaspare," he said.
"I've made no mistake. You walked into my house with a tape and a lie." My father smiled round the table. "Gentlemen, a dead woman's voice is not proof. Anyone can put words on a tape."
A Brancato captain on the left shifted his feet.
It was the one whose chair had fallen over.
He was an old man with a white mustache, and he had taught me to ride a bike in this street.
I let go of Tadeo.
"Serafina," Tadeo said under his breath.
"I know."
I walked to the middle of the room, where both sides could see me, and I put my hands out from my sides.
"Zio," I said to the old captain. "You carried my mother's casket."
"I did, child."
"Did my father cry at the funeral?"
The old man's eyes went to Gaspare, and back.
"He cried," he said slowly. "He cried so hard he couldn't stand. I held him up."
"He cried at her tape tonight, too. He's very good at it."
Nobody laughed.
"I'm not asking any of you to take my word," I said. "Take hers. Ask yourselves why a woman writes to her enemy for help, when her husband is the Don of the Brancatos and her family is the strongest in the Bronx."
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