Indebted to the Mafia King
A Huge Mess to Clean Up

Eleni

I stare out of the wide window in the bedroom I used to share with Mama over the Narrows. The setting sun glints off the water, and my heartbeat pounds slowly in my ears. I don't remember coming back to Staten Island. I don't know if someone drove me, or I drove myself, or if I walked.

I changed at some point into a soft dress. Dante's blood remains on my hands. Other than that, all I know is this view, my heartbeat in my ears, and the uncertain sense that everything has changed.

Dante is in a hospital somewhere. I think. Or he's dead in the back of an ambulance or the doctor's car. That knowledge washes over me numbly. An hour ago a day ago, it would have rocked me to my core. Torn me apart. There's a real chance I'll never look into Dante's dark eyes and see love looking back at me again. I am alone in America. But in the wake of what he said, I can't shake the feeling I was alone in America already. Christos is dead. That does ache. As much as I thought Luca killed him, part of me still hoped he was just hidden away in some basement, toiling until he got the chance to return to us. I didn't even get the chance to ask where Dante abandoned his body before the doctor rushed him away. Without conscious thought, I turn and leave the room, walk down the hallway until I reach Dante's door. It's closed. Dimly, I remember the threats not to enter without him, the intensity in his eyes. Was he hiding the manacles on his bed? The pictures? Or something worse?

I open the door and drift over to the wall of pictures. He didn't move the one of him and Christos. Did he trust me? Or was he just laughing at me behind my back? I pluck the picture off the wall and stare at it. How could I not have known Christos had fallen into this mafia mess? In the last year, after he dropped out of college, he was a little withdrawn, a little more snappish. Mama said that was because he was having a hard time figuring out what to do with his life. She said to give him space.

In the hollow of my chest, a small flame of frustration lights. That space may very well have been the thing that killed him. None of us knew. And I'd think getting involved with the mafia would be a difficult, obvious process. Unless the mafia smiled at you and asked your favorite memory of gyros.

I shake my head. That's...different. Right?

Somehow, I replace myself wanting to know more about what happened between them. How they went from brothers in arms to enemies on opposite sides of a war. I leave Dante's room. My footsteps echo on the wood floor, another reminder that I'm alone. I could call Mama, tell her it's safe to come home. But she'd ask, and I can't explain it all now. Not through the numbness blanketing my limbs, my tongue.

Do I owe Dante the same vengeance I meted out against Luca?

I open the door to Dante's office. If there are answers to be found in this house, they're in here. If they're not here, I'll bang on the doors to Piacere until they have to let me in and show me the basement I vaguely remember through a haze of alcohol. I'll shake them out of Seb, of Tony. They're somewhere. I just have to look.

Dante's desk beckons. I sit in his leather chair and inhale. His smell filters into my lungs, and something cracks within me. I clutch the picture of Christos so hard the paper crumples.

What am I doing? I'm a twenty-three-year-old waitress with two semesters of night school under my belt. I don't belong here. I only made sense in this world with Dante at my side, and now he's-

Tears sheet down my face. A whirlwind of emotions catches me in its hold, and I slump to the top of the desk, just shaking.

An engine roars up the drive outside, then a second one. Maybe I should just stay here, let whatever loose Lombardi or Coppola soldier replace me to end the confusion.

No. Mama and Baba raised me better than that. Calimerises don't give up. I scrub the tears off my face and sit up just as the front door slams open.

"All right, let's whip this place into some kind of fucking shape," Uncle John says, his voice muted by the distance between Dante's office and the front foyer. "Where does Dino keep his papers?" Someone replies. Maybe several someones. I can't make out the words.

"Because I'm the fucking boss now," Uncle John snaps.

"Dante and I have talked about this," Tony says so tightly I imagine him gritting his teeth. "If something happens to him-"

"Look, I love the kid, but you and I both know he's been off his game recently," Uncle John replies with vitriol. "Why don't we just-" He drops his voice lower, and I lose the ability to hear the conversation.

I strain to hear, but I can only make out the tone. Everybody sounds frustrated. Dante keeps a gun in his desk somewhere, I know. I open a drawer and rustle through. Nothing but stationery. The next drawer is all files. Footsteps approach me. This is taking too long. Dante would want his gun fast if he needed it. I run my hands along the underside of the desk and replace a leather holster with a pistol.

The door bursts open. Uncle John stands there, with Tony and a few other men behind him.

"What the fuck are you doing behind Dino's desk?" he demands.

"I was "

"Shut up." His face turns red as he whips around to Tony. "What the fuck is the Greek slut still doing in my nephew's chair? In his fucking house?"

The numbness creeps over me again. Dante's dead. He must be dead.

"Because she was captured earlier today," Tony replies. "And she's a Saint."

"She's a " Uncle John's eyes bulge, and a vein leaps out on his neck. "No. No she's not. She's a fucking mistake you'd be dragging out by her hair if you had the sense God gave a brick." He advances toward me, wild with anger. "She ruined everything. She made Dino ruin everything. I told him, fucking warned him, that he was losing it. Shit, for all we know, she's a Lombardi plant. Wasn't her brother_"

His yelling turns to a roar in my ears that melds with my own heartbeat.

I don't think. I don't feel myself stand and raise the gun. I simply take aim, and fire.

Uncle John falls to the floor, blood splattering out of a hole in the center of his chest. Tony looks from the smoking gun to me, his eyes wide with mingled grief and shock.

I set the pistol down on the desk. The grip bears a bloody handprint as I slowly sit down and clear my throat. "Is everyone ready to get to business now? Because we have a huge mess to clean up."