Chapter 5 - The House on Clark Street
The apartment above the laundry smelled of hot starch, scorched cotton, and thirty years of fried onions from the Greek place next door.
The front door was not kicked in; it was unlocked.
That was the first thing Nico noticed when they reached the third-floor landing. The brass latch was lifted, the door resting half an inch out of its frame, disclosing a thin slice of dark interior.
Nico pushed it open with the tip of his boot.
The apartment was tiny—twenty feet from the tiny kitchenette to the single window that looked out over the elevated train tracks. A narrow iron bed sat against the south wall, covered in a blue wool blanket that had been neatly folded back at the corner.
A man was sitting on the edge of the bed.
He was wearing a grey linen suit that looked too light for a Chicago November, and he was holding a blue paper notebook with a leather spine—the kind of ledger accountants used before everything was moved to servers in Oregon.
Matteo Casaro was forty, handsome in the heavy, soft way of men who had spent their lives managing other people's money from comfortable offices in Florida. His hair was slicked back with bergamot oil, and he smelled of silver polish and mint.
He didn't look up when the door opened. He turned a page of the ledger with a dry, papery snip.
"It's all here," Matteo said. His voice was pleasant, almost conversational, like an uncle discussing the family tax returns at Christmas. "Every lire. Every dollar. The old man was very thorough, Nico. He even kept the receipts for the train tickets from Bari to Naples in ninety-nine."
Nico didn't move from the doorway. Marco stood behind him, his gun drawn and pointed at the floor, his face completely expressionless.
Ana stepped into the room from behind Marco's shoulder.
Matteo finally looked up. His eyes passed over Nico, passed over Marco, and settled on Ana's face.
"You look like your mother," Matteo said softly. "She had those same sad, dark eyes that made everyone think she was about to cry, right up until she hit my father with an iron skillet because he asked her to wash his boots."
"Where is the rest of it?" Nico asked.
Matteo closed the ledger with a soft thump. "There is no rest of it, cousin. This is all there ever was. Eleven million dollars, adjusted for thirty years of inflation, sitting in four accounts at the Credit Suisse in Geneva. All it needs is the signature of a living Casaro-Gallo and a blood sample to confirm the line."
He held up a small silver case—a medical lancet and two glass vials nestled in grey velvet.
"Julian wouldn't give it to me," Matteo said, shaking his head with a look of mild disappointment. "He was always so theatrical. He let me break his knee because he thought he was protecting a princess. But the princess was living above a dry cleaner in Chicago, serving coffee to truckers for seven dollars an hour."
He stood up from the bed. He was not carrying a weapon, but two men stepped out from the tiny bathroom behind him—men with the thick necks and short haircuts of private security contractors from Serbia.
"We don't have to do this like peasants, Nico," Matteo said, spreading his hands wide. "We split it three ways. You take the Chicago territory, I take the Florida accounts, and the girl gets a million dollars and a nice house in Arizona where she can raise her little mistake in peace."
Nico didn't look at the Serbians. He didn't look at the ledger.
He walked past Matteo, picked up the blue plastic stick that was sitting on the nightstand beside a half-empty glass of tap water, and placed it carefully inside his breast pocket, right next to his heart.
"You broke my brother's leg," Nico said.
"He was being unreasonable—"
"You made him sit in his own grease for three weeks in a cellar on 47th Street," Nico continued, his voice dropping so low it seemed to come from under the floorboards, from the place where the steam pipes hummed in the dark.
"Nico, listen to reason—"
"There is no reason," Nico said.
He turned his back on Matteo and looked at Ana.
"Go down to the car," he told her.
May you like
"Nico—"
"Go down to the car, Elena," he repeated. His hand came up and touched the back of her head, his long fingers tangling for a second in her dark, damp hair, pulling her face against his chest for one brief, strange second that smelled of rainwater and wool. "The smell in this room is about to become very bad, and it's not good for the baby."
