Spin Ruin: (A Mafia Romance Two-Book Bundle) (48 page)

I didn’t say anything, because I hadn’t heard that exact idiom before. But Theresa burst out laughing.

“I think it was a raw flank steak,” she blurted out.

“Wait, what?”

“She covered my eyes. So sure, if she knows the cut of meat, I believe her.”

“
Mio Dio
.” I didn’t even believe what I was hearing. I had to hold in an attack of laughter, because Theresa was taking over the story.

“The guy… he hears something, and he stops. We run. Leanne pulls us in some crazy direction—”

“She has no sense of direction. She gets lost putting her contacts in,” said Jonathan.

“And we end up in the bedroom diving for a closet. We make it, but we hear the guy stomping down the hall, yelling in Russian.”

“Czech,” corrected Jonathan. “And I tell them, I whisper, ‘You’re my sisters, and I won’t let him spank you with meat.’”

Though he’d kept his face straight until then, none of us could hold it in any longer. I laughed so hard I thought my guts would drop out of me. Theresa had tears streaming down her face, and Jonathan tried to finish the story between bouts of laughter. “Leanne, I mean she was horrified. She said, ‘No one’s spanking anyone with meat, Jon.’ And then this one”—he pointed to Theresa—“says, ‘he was just tenderizing it for the grill.’”

“I was protecting your eight-year-old mind!” Theresa said.

“Wait,” I said. “You were talking? In the closet? Did he hear you?”

“We were in the tunnel by that time.” Theresa wiped a tear away, then seeing what must have been a quizzical expression, she said, “There are moveable panels in the closet. All the kids knew about them. The carriage house used to be a speakeasy. There are tunnels under it that go across the street. From prohibition.”

“Ah.” I said. “So you got away?”

“Yeah,” Theresa said. “There’s one spot where it bent to a grate under the parking space outside, and if you stood one kid on top of the other, you could open it. I have no idea if those panels are still there. I’m sure they’ve been sealed during a renovation or something.”

“They closed the connection between the carriage house and the grate,” Jonathan said. “I was trying to lose my virginity a few years later and ran into a wall.”

“It has to still be there,” I said.

“It’s all still there. Trust me. But the grate’s not connected to the house any more. And that was the best escape route, too. Landed across Gate Avenue. Remember?”

“All right!” Sheila called out from the kitchen. “We’re not waiting for Mom. So if you all want to eat, the caterer is here, and we’re ready to go!”

theresa

e ate like kings and queens, princes and princesses. I didn’t taste any of it. I was memorizing Leanne’s slovenly ponytail, Sheila’s lilting singsong, Margie’s clipped wit, Deirdre’s errant curl and sober scowl. Jonathan said nothing of importance, deftly avoiding any meaningful, personal subject matter as if he were in some sort of pain he didn’t want discussed over dinner. I wanted to corner him and ask what was happening. But then he told some joke and got a witty rejoinder from Margie. He laughed. I smiled at my brother and wondered how I would make it through the rest of my life without hearing his laugh.

Antonio put his hand on my knee and squeezed it. I put mine on top of his, and we looked at each other. I felt a third hand on my knee. It was smaller, softer, and slick with grease.

“I wanna hold, too!” I peeked under the tablecloth. It was Kalle. She had a turkey leg in her hand and poultry bits all over the front of her sequined dress. She had a lump of Play-Doh in the other hand. It smelled of dry bread dough.

“Can you wash your hands first?”

“No! I don’t like to wash my hands!” She left a big stinker of a three-year-old’s handprint on Antonio’s pant leg.

For some reason, when she giggled at the shape of the grease stain, a lump rose in my throat. I smiled through it and excused myself. I got myself together in the bathroom. I had to choose between my family and Antonio, and I loved this family, at least my siblings, but I didn’t want to be without my Capo. Not for a month or a year. Too much of my life had ticked away while I’d been doing things that made me unhappy. I’d settled for the wrong choices, followed the wrong people, and betrayed myself for too long. I was doing what I wanted, no matter how much it hurt.

Sheila was waiting for me on the way out.

“Theresa? Are you all right?” Her lilt, as if she spoke to a hurt child, would have driven anyone else crazy. It might have had that effect on me, but at that moment, I needed it.

“This guy? He’s not hurting your feelings is he? Because I’ll be happy to rip his spine out.” Even when making death threats, her voice was gentle as a lullaby.

“Him? No. He makes me very happy. I think I’m just tired, and I had too much wine.”

I hugged her tightly. I couldn’t let it go too long. I couldn’t cry on her shoulder. If I did, she’d know something was wrong. But in my mind, I said goodbye to her and to all of them.

Antonio didn’t ask me anything until the car ride back.

“Do you need to back out?” he asked. “I won’t mind. I’ll understand.”

I ignored him. I knew I could back out. “Are you supposed to propose to this girl or something?”

He pressed his lips together as if he didn’t want to answer. I waited.

“After the Bortolusi-Lei wedding.”

“How soon after?”

“Very soon. There’s all kinds of formalities. I have to ask Donna Maria first, then have chaperoned visits… and on and on. But they won’t suffer the power imbalance too long.”

“I think we should die at the wedding,” I said. “I think everyone should see it. I mean there are easier ways, for sure, but they’ll be questioned.”

“What did you have in mind?” he asked.

“We don’t need to just die,” I said. “We need to be obliterated. Let me finish working it out, but I think the wedding is the place to do it.”

He nodded, as if understanding the gravity of what I was saying. As if he saw me shaking, he said nothing more on the drive to the little Spanish house.

I had given no thought to death, unless I wanted to be paralyzed with fear. I was afraid of neither pain nor hell, but death? Death crippled me.

It was the thought of nonexistence that took my breath away. The idea—and it was only an idea—that we ceased completely was no comfort. I felt only terror, because I wondered what my life had been in the first place if my consciousness could be so utterly snuffed. And in those moments that I allowed myself to feel, and thus fear, my nonexistence, the shattering vulnerability of my corporeal self overtook me until my skin crawled at the thought.

Was my consciousness made of carbon and electrical impulses? And was I more than that consciousness, or less? Contemplating death made me question life. Consciousness was all that I valued, and if I ceased to think when I fell into that infinite sleep, what exactly was the living me?

I would go with him into death, into that deepest of vacuums. But our death would be special, a birth into a new life together. Everyone else had to go into blackness alone, to hold up the earth or to fuel a fire.

We just hadn’t worked out how exactly we would die. And then, in the middle of the night, it came to me.

“Antonio,” I whispered, turning and finding his eyes already open.

“Yes?”

I caressed his cheek with the backs of my fingers, and he kissed them.

“Fire and tunnels.”

The answer was fire; that had never been in question. But there was always the matter of an escape route, and it came to me on the drive home on Thanksgiving.

The tunnels under the carriage house were part of a ten-acre system under downtown, built inside basements for deliveries, initially, then for drunken escapes from the underground speakeasies in the 1920s. Each block had it’s own network of basements and tunnels, and, in the case of the Gate Club, there were only two ways to get off the city block. The first was down the grate and across Gate Avenue to an unused trapdoor in a driveway; the second was the speakeasy way, through the carriage house, across Ludwig Street and into a residential basement.

The grate was in a small parking lot. We couldn’t use it without being seen going down it, so that option was out. The carriage house had no cameras to protect the privacy of important people, and the walls were thick for the same reason. It was perfect.

“You drew this?” Antonio said when I handed him the map. He was freshly showered. His lashes looked darker and thicker, like black-widow legs.

“I wanted to get it right.”

“You really do need a life.”

I swatted him.
“Basta.”

He cocked an eyebrow at me, and I pointed to the map. “Okay, this is the layout. As I remember it, the tunnels went from the carriage house, across Ludwig, into the gingerbread house. It’s really long, but if we run...”

“And you want to blow up the house?” He said it as if it were a possibility, but it sounded absurd to my ears.

“Yes,” I said, embracing the absurdity. I picked up a red marker and drew on the map.

“Here to here. Done. The service tunnel is straight because they used it for deliveries.”

“But there’s another way?” he asked.

“Yes, but it’s not connected to the house. There’s a grate here. I don’t know how we’d get to it without being seen.”

He took the map from me, and the red pen, and drew his own lines, at one point plucking his own black pen from his pocket for an accompaniment. I loved watching him work, the concentration. I wanted to work with him, to see that part of him all the time.

“This is how it’s going to go,” he said. “According to you and your brother, there’s a tunnel across Gate, not connected, and a grate we can’t get to. But we can.”

“How?” I asked. “The grate’s right there. You can even see if from the ballroom if you just look through the trees.”

He winked at me. “You check out the way across Ludwig, and I’ll see what I can do about the short way.”

theresa

 could go look at the carriage house, under the pretense of planning a stay there at some point after the Bortolusi wedding. I could even put a deposit on the place, as if I were expecting to be alive to throw an actual party on the grounds. But that would be a paper trail. It would be known that I went to look at the carriage house weeks before the wedding that was the scene of my death. And Daniel was blindly ambitious and emotionally void, but he was not stupid.