He Replaced His Wife and Lost His Mafia Empire novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Not Your Brother's Table

Paolo meets Cara at a Manhattan hotel and asks her to write the ledger cipher down; in the lobby bar Domenico Santangelo lays a page of her own handwriting in front of her, the line that paid for his brother's death.

I did not go back for my bag, and I did not wait at the gate.

A cab took me to the city, and I gave the driver the name of a hotel Daniele had never used.

At eleven that night the lobby was almost empty.

I sat in a leather chair by the front desk with my coat buttoned to my chin and my left hand turning the empty place on my belt where the keys had been.

Paolo came through the revolving door at ten past midnight.

He was in the pale linen jacket he wore in every season, and he was smiling.

"Cari."

He crossed the lobby and picked me up off the chair in a hug that smelled of the airport.

I had not been held by anyone in a year.

"You said you'd be in California," I said into his collar.

"I was coming for the dinner. I wanted to surprise you." He set me down and kept hold of my shoulders. "I've been at a hotel in Midtown since Thursday. Look at you. You did it."

"I did it."

"Five years, and you did it with your head up." He kissed my forehead. "I'm proud of you."

I had waited a long time to hear that, and it felt just as good as I had hoped.

He got us a table in the corner of the lobby bar and ordered tea for me and whiskey for himself.

He asked about the dinner, and I told him all of it.

He listened with his chin on his fist.

When I got to the keys on the white cloth he closed his eyes briefly and smiled.

"Daniele has them now," he said. "All twelve."

"And both ledgers."

"Both." He opened his eyes. "Cari, can he read them?"

"No."

"Can anyone?"

"Only me."

"Then you're in danger, and you know it." He took a small leather notebook from his jacket and set it on the table with a pen. "Write the cipher down for me, just the key to it. I'll keep it in a safe in California. If anything happens to you, the books aren't lost."

I looked at the notebook.

I had made that shorthand over five years of nights at a kitchen table, and I had never written its key down anywhere.

"It's late," I said. "I'll do it in the morning."

"Cari."

"I'm so tired, Paolo. I'll do it after I've slept."

He held my eyes a moment and then he laughed softly and put the notebook away.

"Of course. Sleep. I'll arrange the room, and then I have two calls to make before it's morning in Europe."

He squeezed my hand and went to the front desk.

I sat alone with the tea and told myself that he was worried for me, and that was all.

"You are Cara Greco," a man said beside my chair.

I looked up.

He was standing a respectful distance off, hands loose at his sides.

He was about thirty-five, in a black coat with the collar turned up, with dark hair cut short and a pale scar through his right eyebrow.

I did not know his face, but I knew his name from a hundred pages of my own ledger.

Domenico Santangelo had been the Grecos' enemy longer than I had been a Greco.

"I'd get up if I were you," I said. "My brother is at the desk."

"Your brother is on the phone in the lobby doorway, with his back to us. I won't be long."

He sat down in Paolo's chair.

Nobody had followed him in, but two men I had not noticed now stood near the front doors, looking at nothing.

"You didn't come to hurt me," I said.

"If I'd come to hurt you, we wouldn't be talking."

He put a folded sheet of paper on the table between the teacup and the sugar.

He didn't push it toward me.

I unfolded it myself.

It was a payment slip, the kind that leaves our counting houses every week, written in plain block letters so that anyone could read it.

I knew the handwriting.

It was mine.

Warehouse Nine, Newark. Closing fee, sixty thousand dollars, cash. Paid to the foreman. And the date, three years ago in March.

"I wrote a hundred slips like this a month," I said. "I don't remember it."

"That foreman locked the loading door at midnight and left. My brother was inside, counting stock."

His voice did not rise.

"He was twenty-six."

The tea had gone cold in front of me.

I remembered the funeral notice in the paper that spring, and I remembered Daniele saying the Santangelo boy had died in an accident.

"I didn't know," I said.

"Maybe," Domenico said. "I'll ask again when you've thought about whose handwriting it is."

He stood and buttoned his coat.

He left the slip beside my cup.

"Keep that one, Mrs. Greco," he said. "I have the others."

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