Chapter 5
The cost did not arrive all at once. It came the way costs do — in pieces, over three days, each one small enough to be absorbed and none of them small enough to be ignored.
The first was the Councilman.
Thomas Wright left his briefcase at the Velvet Lounge and came back for it two days later, and he did not come for the briefcase.
He came to say the thing he had come to say, which was that a federal narcotics detective had been found unconscious on the steps of the Dirksen Courthouse with both hands broken and a two-million-dollar wire in his account, and that the Bureau had opened a file with a case number on it, and that the Bureau, in the course of its inquiries, was going to find out that the detective’s personal bank account had been wired from a structure that led, in four hops, to a company that paid rent to a building that Lorenzo Marchesi owned.
“Do you understand what a case number means?” Wright said, sweating, in Lorenzo’s study. “It means it doesn’t go away. It means some kid with a badge in a basement office is going to pull threads. And every thread leads to you, Lorenzo. Every single one. Because everything leads to you. That’s what it means to be what you are.”
“The detective was a criminal,” Lorenzo said. “He was selling case files to Sinaloa. I gave the Bureau its case.”
“Yes. And you framed him so cleanly that the only person in the city who could have done it is a man with two hundred forensic accountants and a grudge.” Wright wiped his forehead. “There’s a rumor, Lorenzo. It’s all over the south side. It’s on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, in the men’s room, on a napkin. The rumor is that Lorenzo Marchesi declared war on a police officer over a woman.”
Lorenzo looked at him for a long moment.
“Is that all.”
“That is not all. Two of the men who questioned your judgment are already asking who she is.”
“They can ask.”
“They won’t have to ask for long.”
Wright left. Lorenzo stood at the window for a while afterward, and did not look at his own hands.
The second was smaller, and it happened at the docks.
There was a man named Volkov who ran three loading bays on the Calumet and who had spent four years being quietly unhappy about the arrangement, and who had spent those four years not saying so. In the week after Miller’s arrest, Volkov said so — at a dinner, in front of six people — and said something else, which was that Don Marchesi had gone soft in the head and everyone knew why.
Lorenzo heard about it on a Friday. He went down to the docks on Saturday himself, alone, because he needed the use of his hands and there was no other way for him to get it.
He came home at three in the morning with his knuckles split to the bone and his shirt ruined.
Maria met him at the elevator with a bowl of warm water and a cloth and did not say a word. He sat on the edge of the sofa in the dark and let her clean him, and she had done this before, and she would do it again.
“Do I need to ask,” she said.
“No.”
“Then I won’t.” She pressed the cloth down. “There is a young woman upstairs who has eaten a full bowl of soup three days running, and who asked me this morning whether it would be appropriate for her to help with anything, and who has not asked to leave.”
Lorenzo looked up.
“She hasn’t asked to leave?”
“Not once.”
He sat with that for a while, in the dark, with his hands stinging.
The third cost was the one he had known was coming and had refused to price.
Mateo brought it into the penthouse on a Tuesday, in the middle of the afternoon, and did not check the hallway first, which was the only mistake he made.
“She’s a liability, Lorenzo.”
They were in the study. The door was not quite closed. It had not been not-quite-closed before, and Lorenzo would think about that a great deal afterward.
“Say it in a way that doesn’t waste my time.”
“Fine. Here it is.” Mateo ticked it on his fingers. “One: the Bureau has a file, and her name is in it, because she’s the woman from the club and a twenty-two-year-old coat-check girl watched her walk through the service door. Two: the rumor about her is already at the Hall of Justice. Three: Volkov talked, and word has gone out that the way to hurt you now is not a docks dispute, it’s a person.” He held up four. “And four — Lorenzo, you know this one — a man who has one thing he can’t afford to lose is a man who can be steered. You’ve run that play a dozen times against other men. You know what it does to them.”
“I know what it does to them.”
“Then you know what you have to do.” Mateo’s voice dropped. “Move her. Somewhere nobody connects. Give her a new name and a bus ticket and a bank account and a job. She’s a nice girl. She’ll survive. Kobe, she’ll survive better than she would have two weeks ago.”
May you like
Lorenzo was quiet.
And in the hallway outside the study, Khloe Bennett — who had come down with a coffee cup and a question about whether the kitchen needed anything and who had stopped, because she had spent two years learning to read through a door — heard the entire thing, and understood every word of it, and went back up the stairs with the coffee going cold in her hands.
