His smile widens as a full-throated chuckle escapes him. “And so you open the negotiations. My name is Matteo Giordano.”
I nod and raise my glass an inch off the armrest. “Bourbon.”
He tilts his head sideways an inch or two in. “This is an American whiskey, no?”
I nod again. This guy really isn’t from around these parts. Too urbane. Too gentlemanly. Doesn’t know his whiskey. Then there’s the ascot. Yeah, I can see him at home in an Italian villa on the shores of the Mediterranean.
“Would you be so kind as to offer me a glass?” he asks. “I should like to try it. I have heard it is a sweet variation on Scotch whisky. Which sounds just about exactly how I would set about making Scotch potable,” he adds with a smile.
Potable whisky? I laugh and hoist myself out of my seat. “Where the hell did you go to school?” I ask him as I make my way to the side table where we keep the booze. Am I really joshing with an Italian mobster? I am. Christ, I must be tired.
“I assume you are really asking where I learned to speak English?”
I nod while unscrewing the top from a bottle of Maker’s Mark. Didn’t I just open this last night? I wonder as I upend it and realize it’s already three-quarters empty. “I guess I am asking that. Somewhere in the UK?”
“University of Rome and Cambridge,” he replies, then adds with a chuckle, “which is where I learned terms such as potable.”
I hand him his bourbon and take mine—which I topped off, of course—back to my seat. I settle back and study my guest as he samples my whiskey, swishing it around his mouth with a thoughtful look on his face. Perhaps I was overly hasty in concluding that Matteo Giordano is a gangster. He looks across at me as he swallows, then delivers his verdict on the booze.
“Quite nice.” He rests his glass on the armrest with his long, elegant fingers wrapped around it and says, “So.”
“You came to me,” I remind him. “What’s this about?”
“Your FBI is making certain inquiries in my country concerning matters we prefer not to have attention drawn to.”
I stare back at him without comment. He’ll have to get a touch more specific if he hopes to enlighten me.
“I am a businessman, Mr. Valenti. A portion of my business is done somewhat outside the law, if you will.”
A spark of anger flares to life deep within me. So, he’s a fucking gangster, after all, one who fancies himself a businessman. The guy has apparently gotten his hands on a legitimate business venture or two and thinks he’s civilized. Bullshit. He’s just a sanitized version of fucking Joe. I ease forward in my chair and growl, “Have you come here to threaten my family?”
He actually looks a little pained at the harshness of my outburst. “Perhaps you will allow me a few minutes to explain myself?”
I decide to accommodate him. After all, the guy forced his way into my house with a gun, which he still has. I managed to lose sight of that while we were talking whiskey a minute ago.
“If it will make sense out of your visit, what the hell?” I mutter.
“Thank you,” he says courteously, then sips at his whisky again.
With this demeanor, the guy can’t be much of a gangster. He proves me wrong within seconds.
“My brother is a senior leader of Ndrangheta in Italy, Mr. Valenti. I have come to see you at his request. Have you heard of us?”
I nod. After learning last year of Papa’s run-in with a local offshoot of Ndrangheta when he was a young man in Italy, I did a little research. “You’re the even more murderous group of thugs that oversees the Cosche bastards who kidnapped and raped my aunt in Calabria, right?”
“That unfortunate incident is the basis for your father’s recent difficulties,” Giordano says without responding to my insult. “Rest assured that the rape of your aunt is unacceptable to us.”
“But kidnapping her and holding her for ransom was just business?”
I catch my first glance of the gangster lurking beneath the urbane veneer. “We will make no progress if you insist on being argumentative, Mr. Valenti.”
I stare back at him, wondering about the difference between business and criminality in his world. Kidnapping a young teenage girl for ransom is merely “business,” but brutally raping her for the gratification of some horny bastard is criminal. Granted, the second is more reprehensible than the first, but how am I supposed to deal with someone whose moral code is this twisted? But deal with him I must, or so it appears. “So, your people wish to kill my father?”
He shakes his head. “Not at all, Mr. Valenti. The truth is that a small circle of us knows that Francesco is staying with his sister in Penne. We do not wish him harm and will not share his whereabouts with his hunters at this time.”
I feel the blood drain from my face as my heart rate skyrockets. These people know where Papa is? And what does “at this time” mean?
“I tell you this to demonstrate that I am not your enemy, Mr. Valenti,” Giordano says in a reassuring tone while I revisit the bourbon bottle. He waves off my offer of a refill. “We would like the attention of American law enforcement diverted away from our affairs. Things have been somewhat difficult for us of late. Too much police scrutiny, if you will. Some of our associates have become, shall we say, too greedy. Too bold. Perhaps not unlike your former colleague at Sphinx Financial, Mr. Hank Fraser.”
I can’t even begin to imagine where this is leading, although the suggestion that the practices of my old employer are in any way akin to how the Mafia goes about business hits a little too close
