Page 49 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

ELISA

The cold hits us as soon as the door clicks shut behind the host.

Nico doesn’t speak.

He angles his body so I’m on the building side of the sidewalk and sets a steady pace that feels like a metronome.

Every twenty steps, his gaze hooks a window, a car mirror, the glossed dark of a shop door.

He’s counting reflections the way I count heartbeats when a trauma bay goes quiet too fast.

I match him.

It isn’t hard.

I grew up learning how to walk through Little Italy like the street belonged to us and also might swallow us if we forgot our manners.

A delivery truck grumbles at the corner.

Someone laughs too loudly outside a bar.

Somewhere, a radio cracks open an old Sinatra song and then slams it shut.

The night smells like wet brick and oranges, because down the block, a bakery still zesting for tomorrow hasn’t learned that midnight is for sleeping.

“What was the message?” I ask, because pretending I didn’t watch the color leave his face would be cute and I'm not cute tonight.

He doesn’t answer at first.

He guides me around a pair of men arguing in front of a news stand, one hand light at my elbow, then releases like he never touched me.

We cross Bayard with the light and he doesn’t break stride.

When he finally speaks, it’s in the measured tone he uses when he’s deciding what to hand me and what to hold.

“Marco Santangelo,” he says.

The name sits heavy, as if it arrived wearing a coat it doesn’t plan to take off. “Don Vincent’s nephew, and brother to the man I killed. The one the old ladies used to call handsome before they learned better. He and I grew up in the same rooms. Shared first suits. Broke our first bones in the same alleys. He’s been talking to the Bureau.”

I let the words settle.

They don’t shock me the way they should.

The city has been whispering to itself for as long as I’ve been alive.

The whisper just got a name.

“Talking how?” I ask. “Talking like a sinner in a booth or talking like a man who wants something for himself?”

“Both,” Nico says. “They always overlap. He’s been feeding agents street maps with different labels. Money routes. Personnel. He thinks he can trade his way out of consequences.” Nico’s hand slides into his coat pocket and I can feel more than see the gun rest there like a second spine. “If he gave them your name, you’re in a folder. The kind that gets carried into interviews and slid across tables while a man smiles politely.”

“And if I’m in a folder,” I say, keeping my tone flat, “I’m a what? A witness? A liability? A pressure point?”

“Exactly,” he says. “They will try to make you talk because they believe you don’t owe us anything. They will say they’re protecting you. They will ask for your phone, your laptop, your locker. They will arrive when you are tired and reasonable.”

We pass a bodega with half its gate down, the owner sweeping the day into a neat pile.

The broom pauses as we go by.