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She inhales.
“I want to go. Please don’t follow me. Don’t contact me. And don’t ever try to find me again.”
I let Marco hold the door for me. I step outside, into what’s become a freezing coastal storm. I look back at Marco.
“Take me to fucking Switzerland.”
15
MARCO
Elio’ssafe house in Lugano is the type of place that doesn’t feel real. Positioned as it is in the mountains, overlooking a stunning lake, every building looks like something out of a damn postcard.
I can’t help the fact that my eyes get pretty damn big every time we go around a curve in the winding road to get up to it.
For two people with no passports and no money, it was shockingly easy to get here.
It helps that I’ve spent the past decade and a half developing a network of favors that, at this point, I’m cashing in at a rapid pace.
From Ireland, we hopped a boat with a French gang out of Marseille. Jean-Luc is one shifty fucker, but he knows how to dodge customs like it’s no one’s business. His boss, an even more dirty and sketchy Frenchman, practically built the smuggling routes between Marseille and Africa. If there’s someone who can get you anywhere, it’s them, and when I threatened to unearth the information I had on Jean-Luc’sfavorite aunt’s lavender farm in Provence, including how many pesticides go into the supposedly pesticide-free flowers, they begrudgingly offered us passage.
From there, the car was an easy solution. I pay a group of Algerian teenagers a living wage, which they mostly take to their families, to bring back information on the comings and goings of Marseille. They located a car that Jean-Luc had recently lifted, and we did the original owners the favor of stealing it right back. When we abandoned it in Annemasse, I made sure to call the Interpol tip line, so that whoever the owner of a beautiful black Ferrari is, they can have it back now.
It does me no favors with the French, but they rely on Elio and the Rossi’s to bring them luxury goods to smuggle, so they’ll get over it. I made a note to tell Elio to raise their bonus, just slightly, and when he asked why, I told him about the Ferrari.
He had been pissed, of course, but Elio is very rarely happy.
From Annemasse, it was easy to get the train to Geneva. Then to Bern. Then to Lugano.
And now, we’re in a car that I rented, with passports Elio had sent to a locker in the train station. The money was here already, hidden in a bank account that I inherited when my father died, and while I’m sure Elio’s curious about the cash I’m using, this particular account wasn’t part of our merge.
I’m also sure he’s asking my siblings what the hell is going on.
But, they don’t know either.
After my parents’ death, finding my mother’s journals had been debilitating. I know my mom, and my dad, in a way that none of my siblings do.
In a way that no child should probably understand about their parents, to be honest.
My parents loved each other, but it was recent. Their relationship began as a business arrangement; it was broken up by the time my mother left, and was more or less involuntarily held at the family home of Iannis Drakos.
It was voluntary, I think, until Iannis turned out to be a dick.
Either way, she escaped and came back pregnant with my half-brother Dino.
But my father was not an easy man to get along with.
To some extent, I understand that this is because he was a product of his times. Living as they did, scraping a living after the legacy of leaving Italy, the experience of coming to America in the early 1900s… all of that gets written not just into a person, but into a family. A bloodline.
And pain that has a way of echoing through generations.
My father’s way of running the De Luca family was exactly what he had always known. Hard. Lots of people were shot if they didn’t do things my dad’s way. My grandfather and uncle were probably better suited to run the organization than he was. Until stupid Jacob Capano lost the case that indicted both of them, and the RICOH charges finally stuck.
It wasn’t his fault. Capano is a good lawyer. He never really recovered from that case, but it would have been nearly impossible to beat.
When my uncle and grandfather went to jail, my dad wasn’t ready to run the De Lucas.
Which meant that between him and my mom, things were rough.