Secret Surrogate to the Mafia King novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Back Room

Orazio Ruvolo tells her whose embryo it is, never asks her to end it, and agrees to her terms. At her door two men are already inside.

The bald man held the car door, and I stood there in the sleet for a long moment.

"I'm not getting in," I said.

"No, miss."

"If I walk away, will you stop me?"

"No, miss." He held out the bag of mints.

"But he'll sit in that back room until you come, and he hasn't eaten since the clinic called."

I took a mint.

I told myself it was because my stomach was rolling, and not because I was curious about a man who couldn't eat.

The restaurant on Taylor Street had its blinds down and its chairs up on the tables.

The bald man, whose name was Nunzio, walked me past the kitchen without a word.

At the end of a hall he opened a door onto a small room with one round table and one lamp.

A man sat alone at the table with his hands flat on the cloth.

He was tall even sitting down, with black hair combed straight back and a charcoal vest.

A white scar ran out from under his left cuff.

His eyes were the palest grey I had ever seen.

He stood.

"Ms. Fitzgerald."

"Mr. Ruvolo."

"Orazio."

"Mr. Ruvolo," I said again. "Your clinic put your baby in me."

"Yes."

He did not say it was an accident or that he was sorry.

He said "yes", and then he waited, as though he had no right to speak until I did.

"Did they call you first?" I asked.

"Forty minutes before they called you in. The director's partner said you had agreed to the procedure."

"I tore up the form."

"I know. Nunzio watched from across the street."

For a second, something crossed his face, and it was not quite a smile.

"They told me it was your choice, and that I should stay away," he said.

"Whose embryo is it?"

He looked down at the table.

"Mine," he said. "And my wife's."

I felt it before I understood it, a drop in my chest.

"Your wife."

"Chiara. We made five embryos five years ago, when we were still sure we had time."

"Four didn't survive. She died three years ago, in a car outside a church."

I knew that story.

Everyone in Chicago knew that story, a bomb on a Sunday morning, a woman in a white coat.

I had never connected the man in the headlines with a room this small.

"I never signed the paper to destroy it," he said. "I paid the storage every year. I could not make my hand do it."

"And now it's inside a hairdresser from Bridgeport."

"Yes."

I laughed, a short, ugly sound, and then I had to sit down.

He did not move to help me.

He took one step back.

"What do you want from me?" I said.

"Nothing."

"Don't lie."

"I'm not." He waited until I looked at him.

"I want it to live, and I want you to be the one who decides."

"I am not going to ask you to carry it, and I am not going to ask you to end it."

"Here's what I want," I said. "My own embryo. It went somewhere. Find it."

"Done."

"Nobody follows me. I work Tuesdays and Thursdays at the salon, and nobody sits in a car outside it."

I watched him decide.

"No one will follow you," he said. "But nobody can promise you that no one else will."

"Who else?"

"Men who learn that the King of this city has a child coming will make it a weakness."

He said it flatly.

"You should know it now, before you decide."

"The King?"

"It's what the papers call me. I don't."

"What's the third thing?" I asked.

"There isn't a third thing. That's the door."

He gestured behind me.

"It isn't locked. It won't be, tonight or any night."

"If you want to go home and never hear my name again, I will not send anyone."

I stood up and my knees held.

"I'm going home."

"I'll drive you."

"No."

"Then I'll follow in my own car, so that if anyone is waiting for you, it's me they meet."

"That's following me."

"Yes," he said. "It is. It's the only time I'll do it without your permission."

I should have said no.

Instead I said "Fine," and his shoulders dropped half an inch, as though I had handed him something heavy.

He drove a plain grey sedan with no driver and no one in the back seat.

He did not speak the whole way to Bridgeport, and he did not turn on the radio.

He parked across from my walk-up and cut the engine.

"Third floor," I said, and opened my own door.

The stairwell light was out.

On the third-floor landing, my apartment door stood open six inches, and a yellow line of lamplight fell across the carpet.

I always lock it.

I heard a chair scrape.

Orazio's hand closed over my wrist, not hard, and drew me behind him.

"Stay on the stairs," he said, so softly I almost didn't hear.

He pushed the door with two fingers.

Two men sat at my kitchen table, eating my father's leftover lasagna.

One of them wiped his mouth with my dish towel and smiled at us both.

"Mr. Ruvolo," he said. "Congratulations. Mr. Sarto sends his love."

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