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bedlamsbardYou know, this is probably a good time to mention my plan for the future. I'm going to try and finish both Omerta and Black Monday before Season Two starts, which would be around mid-September, right? Habeus Corpus and Bloody Friday (the other two stories in the Mac trilogy) take place in October and November, respectably, so I'll be incorporating new canon as I go. If it totally goes against something I've already written, it will probably be ignored. Harry Potter writers have been doing this for years. Both Omerta and Black Monday take place in the summer, so...why I'm trying to finish them before they get Jossed.
Mordecai Giovinazzo had a house in Queens, a small house slotted between two others with a few flowerpots worth of dirt and grass for a yard. He lived with his brother, but Nick hadn’t met Michael yet; the other mobster had come home at something around four in the morning and still hadn’t ventured out of his room. Awkward at being in a house for the first time in thirty years, Nick had slept on the couch, waking at every little noise tensing for a fight, only to come to the slow, surprising realization that no one was going to come for him. Not here. It was terrifying, and the quiet – the feel of something moving around him, but not the predator-prey of prison – had scratched at him uneasily, until finally he found himself in the kitchen with his hands wrapped around a mug of strong Ecuadoran coffee. Mordecai was watching reruns of The Sopranos with his feet propped up on the worn kitchen table, chair tipped back on its back legs against the wall, pointing out references to real mobsters. He’d come in an after or so after Nick had woken and hadn’t seemed surprised to find his guest there, just poured coffee for both of them and dug day-old donuts out of his fridge.
“What’s it like?” Mordecai said suddenly, flicking the television to mute as it switched to commercials.
Nick blinked, glancing up from his coffee. “What?”
“Being out.” He licked frosting off his fingers.
“Weird.” Nick stared out Mordecai’s dirty window at the schoolbus pulling away at the other end of the block. He coughed suddenly. “Really weird.”
“Nice?”
“Yeah, I guess. Kinda freaky.” He jumped at the sudden purr of a car pulling up to the curb.
Mordecai turned to follow his gaze. “Cops,” he said, curling his upper lip back. “Plainclothes – detectives, probably.” He paused, frowning as his brow furrowed in startlement. “That’s Val’s nephew. What the hell is he doing here?” The front legs of his chair tapped back down onto the linoleum as he stood up, even before the doorbell buzzed.
Nick sipped warily at his coffee, then stood up, unsure whether to stay in the kitchen or follow Mordecai down the narrow hallway to the front door. He finally stepped up to the empty doorframe, leaning awkwardly against the wall so he could see down the length of the hall.
“Mordecai Giovinazzo?” a black-haired man was saying. He stood with easy confidence, coat pushed back from his hips so that both his gold badge and holstered gun were visible, and behind him on the step were two more detectives, a small man with glasses that gleamed like diamonds in the narrow slant of sunlight through the door and a brunette woman with her head tossed back in something not quite disdain.
“Yeah,” Mordecai said. “Detective Don Flack, huh?”
The man blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “Have I arrested you before, or somethin’?”
Mordecai glanced over his shoulder. “Danny,” he said, nodding to the other man. The detective looked away, hands knotting in the fabric of his coat. “And it’s Detective Aiden Burn, right?”
“I’d ask how you knew, but I’m not sure I really wanna know,” the woman said.
“Lemme guess,” Danny said. “Val’s got files and files full of shit on my partners, huh?”
“Wouldn’t know,” Mordecai said. “Security’s been up since the Lark and Johnnie Boy tried to take out Carmine and Joey, though – and you.”
Danny’s lips thinned, and Flack scowled dangerously, rumbling like a steam train.
“Oh, but you didn’t come here to talk about you, did ya’?” Mordecai continued. “What do you need, Detectives?”
Flack flipped a Polaroid out of his pocket. “You know this woman, Mr. Giovinazzo?”
Mordecai gave it a long look, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “Never seen her before in my life. Why? She dead or somethin’?”
“Gee, how’d ya’ guess?”
The look Mordecai gave him was murder. “You’re a homicide detective,” he said. “And I’m not stupid.”
“You been to the Empire State Building any time lately, Mordecai?” the lady cop, Aiden, asked.
“The Empire State? Nah. Place is for tourists and businessmen, not guys like me.”
“Yeah, criminals don’t really tend to hang out in a place like that,” Danny snapped. “We found your prints there, Mordecai. If you ain’t been there, you wanna explain how they got there?”
“I’d tell you, but I don’t know myself,” Mordecai said serenely. “Maybe they were planted.”
“Or maybe you killed Anna Dove, huh? And you’re lyin’ right now. Wouldn’t be the first time you’d done either, huh?” Danny was bouncing forward on the balls of his feet, anger flashing behind his glasses, and Nick saw in him a man about to snap, someone hovering on an edge that shouldn’t be crossed.
“Danny,” Flack rumbled warningly, one large hand resting lightly on his partner’s hip and splayed a little across his back. Huh, Nick thought, because he knew that, knew the casualty with which they moved with each other was neither feigned nor forced. He’d seen it before; been a part of it once. Missed it, a slow, sour ache like a thorn in his side. Not just partners; more than that, and not just friends. Not just lovers, either, friends, lovers, partners both. There were guys in the business like that, both in prison and out of it. He’d seen guys take five year falls for robbery to keep their partners out of prison, and seen the way they looked after returning from visitation. Watched through the chain link fence as they got out, the way their eyes would be fixed on each other, totally ignorant of the world moving on and flowing around them. Partners, and lovers, and friends, and more than that; Nick didn’t think there was a word for it. It hurt, seeing Danny and Flack, even though he didn’t know them, didn’t know their relationship beyond what was seen and not seen and intuited, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off them and couldn’t help wondering, a little, if Kevin hadn’t killed that security guard, hadn’t gone a little crazy – but there was Odelia. There was always Odelia, and Stella and Astra too. He turned his attention back to the conversation at the door.
“You know,” Aiden was saying, “that this looks a little suspicious, what with your prints being in the place where Anna Dove’s body was found.”
Mordecai shrugged. “I don’t know the woman,” he said. “I’ve never heard the name before, and I haven’t been to the Empire State Building since I was a kid.”
“Suuu-ure,” Danny said, exaggerating the syllables. “I really believe that, Mordecai. No, really I do. Why’d ya’ kill her?”
“I didn’t.” Mordecai glanced over his shoulder at Nick. “Look, if you don’t mind, I got company, so –”
Danny was already bulling past him, stopping in front of Nick. “Hi,” he said. “You work for my uncle too? I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
“This is Danny Messer – Detective Danny Messer,” Mordecai said, scowling. “Val’s nephew. I’m sure you can see the family resemblance,” he added sarcastically.
Nick still hadn’t met Valentine Constantine – Mordecai had mentioned something about a meeting with one of his capos, or the don of a family, or something else Mafia-related that Nick didn’t understand at all – but he could see what Danny had gotten from his grandfather. The kid had Lucky’s nose, and his goddamned blue eyes too, and his hands, quick-moving, never stopping, were Lucky’s too. There was something vaguely reminiscent of Carmine d’Alessandro there too, but Nick couldn’t place it, and wondered a little if he was just hallucinating, trying to find resemblances and relationships that didn’t really exist. “Hi,” he said uncertainly.
“Nick Bonasera,” said Mordecai. “He knew your granddad in prison, just got out yesterday.”
Danny’s lips tightened immediately. “Oh,” he said. “Lucky Luciano, huh?” He seemed suddenly nervous, off-balance, as if everything up till now had been on his grounds and the playing field had abruptly changed drastically.
“Yeah,” Nick said.
“Bonasera,” Flack rumbled suddenly.
Nick blinked. “Yeah,” he said again.
The detective was frowning, gazing at him like he was something under a microscope, and there was something open and bewildered on his face. “That – what, that’s Greek or somethin’?”
“Italian,” Nick said, and found himself adding, “My wife was the Greek one.”
Danny had turned and was staring at his partner. So was Aiden, venturing slowly and warily up the hall with her hand hovering near her waist, not quite at her gun, but not far from it either. “Flack –” he said.
“Your wife,” Flack repeated. “She got a name?”
“Ex-wife,” Nick corrected himself. “Odelia Tangalakis. She sent me divorce papers six months into my term –” He swallowed; it still hurt. “Then she left my kids at an orphanage in Queens and took a Greyhound to fucking Omaha the second she was fancy-free. Christ.”
“Kids.”
“Daughters. Two of them.” It was hard to talk about. Nick turned his head up and stared at Mordecai’s stained ceiling. “I haven’t – I haven’t seen them in more than thirty years,” he admitted, not sure why he was bothering. “Not sure what I’d say if I did.”
Flack was shaking his head slowly, Danny and Aiden staring at him in bewilderment. “Flack –” Danny said again, and his partner cut him off with a swift downward chop of his hand in midair.
“Odelia never brought them in,” Nick said quietly. “And after – they wouldn’t remember, I don’t think. They were too young.”
“Jesus,” Flack said under his breath. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Mordecai gave him a sharp look. “My brother’s sleeping,” he said for no clear reason. “If you guys don’t have anything more to ask –”
“Your daughters,” Flack said to Nick, steamrollering over Mordecai as if he didn’t exist. “What were their names?”
Nick blinked uncertainly at him. “Stella,” he said. “Stella and Astra. Stella Katerina and Astra Giovanna Bonasera.”
Flack had gone a whiter shade of pale. “We gotta go,” he said abruptly.
“What?” Danny said, blinking. “What for? We ain’t –”
“Gotta go, gotta go,” Flack said, herding Danny and Aiden in front of him down the hall like a mother hen and her chicks. “Hey, Giovinazzo, we get anything – anythin’ at all that puts you within ten miles of the Empire State – and we’ll be back. Trust me. We’ll be back, and you’ll be goin’ in.” The door slammed shut on Aiden’s protests.
Mordecai’s eyebrows went up. “If I could bottle that and sell it, I’d make a fortune,” he said.
“What?”
“Getting rid of cops that fast. You know how much that would sell for? Forget the loan-sharking and the chop-shops – with something like that –”
Nick shook his head. “That was Valentine Constantine’s nephew?” he said.
“Danny, yeah. Val tries not to bring him up too much, but ever since Patriso put a hit out on him –” He shrugged. “Danny’s the closest thing Val’s got to a son; he lived with Val for a while when he was a kid. They’re not that close, but Christ, Val loves that kid. Danny has a couple brothers, I think, but they all take after Ned Messer, not Angela Constantine. Danny’s the black sheep of the family.”
“What about the other two?”
Mordecai dropped down into a chair. “Flack and Burn? Flack’s part of the Patriso hit too, because of Vinnie Patriso and Phil DiCarlo. He shot DiCarlo, worked Vinnie Patriso’s homicide – got himself kidnapped and tortured by DiCarlo and another guy, Curly Sassone. I don’t know exactly what went down there, but it was bad. Burn works with Danny and Flack in the Crime Scene Unit of the NYPD – that’s all I know about her. She’s a Patriso target by association.”
“The Crime Scene Unit,” Nick said slowly.
Mordecai blinked at him. “Yeah. Forensic science and all that? There are a couple other detectives too. Mac Taylor, Danny’s boss, and another lady cop –” He paused. “Oh,” he said softly. “Christ. I’m an idiot.”
“Stella Bonasera,” Nick said. He put his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ. My kid – my daughter –”
“Is a crime scene dick. She’s a cop, Nick.”
Mordecai Giovinazzo had a house in Queens, a small house slotted between two others with a few flowerpots worth of dirt and grass for a yard. He lived with his brother, but Nick hadn’t met Michael yet; the other mobster had come home at something around four in the morning and still hadn’t ventured out of his room. Awkward at being in a house for the first time in thirty years, Nick had slept on the couch, waking at every little noise tensing for a fight, only to come to the slow, surprising realization that no one was going to come for him. Not here. It was terrifying, and the quiet – the feel of something moving around him, but not the predator-prey of prison – had scratched at him uneasily, until finally he found himself in the kitchen with his hands wrapped around a mug of strong Ecuadoran coffee. Mordecai was watching reruns of The Sopranos with his feet propped up on the worn kitchen table, chair tipped back on its back legs against the wall, pointing out references to real mobsters. He’d come in an after or so after Nick had woken and hadn’t seemed surprised to find his guest there, just poured coffee for both of them and dug day-old donuts out of his fridge.
“What’s it like?” Mordecai said suddenly, flicking the television to mute as it switched to commercials.
Nick blinked, glancing up from his coffee. “What?”
“Being out.” He licked frosting off his fingers.
“Weird.” Nick stared out Mordecai’s dirty window at the schoolbus pulling away at the other end of the block. He coughed suddenly. “Really weird.”
“Nice?”
“Yeah, I guess. Kinda freaky.” He jumped at the sudden purr of a car pulling up to the curb.
Mordecai turned to follow his gaze. “Cops,” he said, curling his upper lip back. “Plainclothes – detectives, probably.” He paused, frowning as his brow furrowed in startlement. “That’s Val’s nephew. What the hell is he doing here?” The front legs of his chair tapped back down onto the linoleum as he stood up, even before the doorbell buzzed.
Nick sipped warily at his coffee, then stood up, unsure whether to stay in the kitchen or follow Mordecai down the narrow hallway to the front door. He finally stepped up to the empty doorframe, leaning awkwardly against the wall so he could see down the length of the hall.
“Mordecai Giovinazzo?” a black-haired man was saying. He stood with easy confidence, coat pushed back from his hips so that both his gold badge and holstered gun were visible, and behind him on the step were two more detectives, a small man with glasses that gleamed like diamonds in the narrow slant of sunlight through the door and a brunette woman with her head tossed back in something not quite disdain.
“Yeah,” Mordecai said. “Detective Don Flack, huh?”
The man blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “Have I arrested you before, or somethin’?”
Mordecai glanced over his shoulder. “Danny,” he said, nodding to the other man. The detective looked away, hands knotting in the fabric of his coat. “And it’s Detective Aiden Burn, right?”
“I’d ask how you knew, but I’m not sure I really wanna know,” the woman said.
“Lemme guess,” Danny said. “Val’s got files and files full of shit on my partners, huh?”
“Wouldn’t know,” Mordecai said. “Security’s been up since the Lark and Johnnie Boy tried to take out Carmine and Joey, though – and you.”
Danny’s lips thinned, and Flack scowled dangerously, rumbling like a steam train.
“Oh, but you didn’t come here to talk about you, did ya’?” Mordecai continued. “What do you need, Detectives?”
Flack flipped a Polaroid out of his pocket. “You know this woman, Mr. Giovinazzo?”
Mordecai gave it a long look, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “Never seen her before in my life. Why? She dead or somethin’?”
“Gee, how’d ya’ guess?”
The look Mordecai gave him was murder. “You’re a homicide detective,” he said. “And I’m not stupid.”
“You been to the Empire State Building any time lately, Mordecai?” the lady cop, Aiden, asked.
“The Empire State? Nah. Place is for tourists and businessmen, not guys like me.”
“Yeah, criminals don’t really tend to hang out in a place like that,” Danny snapped. “We found your prints there, Mordecai. If you ain’t been there, you wanna explain how they got there?”
“I’d tell you, but I don’t know myself,” Mordecai said serenely. “Maybe they were planted.”
“Or maybe you killed Anna Dove, huh? And you’re lyin’ right now. Wouldn’t be the first time you’d done either, huh?” Danny was bouncing forward on the balls of his feet, anger flashing behind his glasses, and Nick saw in him a man about to snap, someone hovering on an edge that shouldn’t be crossed.
“Danny,” Flack rumbled warningly, one large hand resting lightly on his partner’s hip and splayed a little across his back. Huh, Nick thought, because he knew that, knew the casualty with which they moved with each other was neither feigned nor forced. He’d seen it before; been a part of it once. Missed it, a slow, sour ache like a thorn in his side. Not just partners; more than that, and not just friends. Not just lovers, either, friends, lovers, partners both. There were guys in the business like that, both in prison and out of it. He’d seen guys take five year falls for robbery to keep their partners out of prison, and seen the way they looked after returning from visitation. Watched through the chain link fence as they got out, the way their eyes would be fixed on each other, totally ignorant of the world moving on and flowing around them. Partners, and lovers, and friends, and more than that; Nick didn’t think there was a word for it. It hurt, seeing Danny and Flack, even though he didn’t know them, didn’t know their relationship beyond what was seen and not seen and intuited, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off them and couldn’t help wondering, a little, if Kevin hadn’t killed that security guard, hadn’t gone a little crazy – but there was Odelia. There was always Odelia, and Stella and Astra too. He turned his attention back to the conversation at the door.
“You know,” Aiden was saying, “that this looks a little suspicious, what with your prints being in the place where Anna Dove’s body was found.”
Mordecai shrugged. “I don’t know the woman,” he said. “I’ve never heard the name before, and I haven’t been to the Empire State Building since I was a kid.”
“Suuu-ure,” Danny said, exaggerating the syllables. “I really believe that, Mordecai. No, really I do. Why’d ya’ kill her?”
“I didn’t.” Mordecai glanced over his shoulder at Nick. “Look, if you don’t mind, I got company, so –”
Danny was already bulling past him, stopping in front of Nick. “Hi,” he said. “You work for my uncle too? I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
“This is Danny Messer – Detective Danny Messer,” Mordecai said, scowling. “Val’s nephew. I’m sure you can see the family resemblance,” he added sarcastically.
Nick still hadn’t met Valentine Constantine – Mordecai had mentioned something about a meeting with one of his capos, or the don of a family, or something else Mafia-related that Nick didn’t understand at all – but he could see what Danny had gotten from his grandfather. The kid had Lucky’s nose, and his goddamned blue eyes too, and his hands, quick-moving, never stopping, were Lucky’s too. There was something vaguely reminiscent of Carmine d’Alessandro there too, but Nick couldn’t place it, and wondered a little if he was just hallucinating, trying to find resemblances and relationships that didn’t really exist. “Hi,” he said uncertainly.
“Nick Bonasera,” said Mordecai. “He knew your granddad in prison, just got out yesterday.”
Danny’s lips tightened immediately. “Oh,” he said. “Lucky Luciano, huh?” He seemed suddenly nervous, off-balance, as if everything up till now had been on his grounds and the playing field had abruptly changed drastically.
“Yeah,” Nick said.
“Bonasera,” Flack rumbled suddenly.
Nick blinked. “Yeah,” he said again.
The detective was frowning, gazing at him like he was something under a microscope, and there was something open and bewildered on his face. “That – what, that’s Greek or somethin’?”
“Italian,” Nick said, and found himself adding, “My wife was the Greek one.”
Danny had turned and was staring at his partner. So was Aiden, venturing slowly and warily up the hall with her hand hovering near her waist, not quite at her gun, but not far from it either. “Flack –” he said.
“Your wife,” Flack repeated. “She got a name?”
“Ex-wife,” Nick corrected himself. “Odelia Tangalakis. She sent me divorce papers six months into my term –” He swallowed; it still hurt. “Then she left my kids at an orphanage in Queens and took a Greyhound to fucking Omaha the second she was fancy-free. Christ.”
“Kids.”
“Daughters. Two of them.” It was hard to talk about. Nick turned his head up and stared at Mordecai’s stained ceiling. “I haven’t – I haven’t seen them in more than thirty years,” he admitted, not sure why he was bothering. “Not sure what I’d say if I did.”
Flack was shaking his head slowly, Danny and Aiden staring at him in bewilderment. “Flack –” Danny said again, and his partner cut him off with a swift downward chop of his hand in midair.
“Odelia never brought them in,” Nick said quietly. “And after – they wouldn’t remember, I don’t think. They were too young.”
“Jesus,” Flack said under his breath. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Mordecai gave him a sharp look. “My brother’s sleeping,” he said for no clear reason. “If you guys don’t have anything more to ask –”
“Your daughters,” Flack said to Nick, steamrollering over Mordecai as if he didn’t exist. “What were their names?”
Nick blinked uncertainly at him. “Stella,” he said. “Stella and Astra. Stella Katerina and Astra Giovanna Bonasera.”
Flack had gone a whiter shade of pale. “We gotta go,” he said abruptly.
“What?” Danny said, blinking. “What for? We ain’t –”
“Gotta go, gotta go,” Flack said, herding Danny and Aiden in front of him down the hall like a mother hen and her chicks. “Hey, Giovinazzo, we get anything – anythin’ at all that puts you within ten miles of the Empire State – and we’ll be back. Trust me. We’ll be back, and you’ll be goin’ in.” The door slammed shut on Aiden’s protests.
Mordecai’s eyebrows went up. “If I could bottle that and sell it, I’d make a fortune,” he said.
“What?”
“Getting rid of cops that fast. You know how much that would sell for? Forget the loan-sharking and the chop-shops – with something like that –”
Nick shook his head. “That was Valentine Constantine’s nephew?” he said.
“Danny, yeah. Val tries not to bring him up too much, but ever since Patriso put a hit out on him –” He shrugged. “Danny’s the closest thing Val’s got to a son; he lived with Val for a while when he was a kid. They’re not that close, but Christ, Val loves that kid. Danny has a couple brothers, I think, but they all take after Ned Messer, not Angela Constantine. Danny’s the black sheep of the family.”
“What about the other two?”
Mordecai dropped down into a chair. “Flack and Burn? Flack’s part of the Patriso hit too, because of Vinnie Patriso and Phil DiCarlo. He shot DiCarlo, worked Vinnie Patriso’s homicide – got himself kidnapped and tortured by DiCarlo and another guy, Curly Sassone. I don’t know exactly what went down there, but it was bad. Burn works with Danny and Flack in the Crime Scene Unit of the NYPD – that’s all I know about her. She’s a Patriso target by association.”
“The Crime Scene Unit,” Nick said slowly.
Mordecai blinked at him. “Yeah. Forensic science and all that? There are a couple other detectives too. Mac Taylor, Danny’s boss, and another lady cop –” He paused. “Oh,” he said softly. “Christ. I’m an idiot.”
“Stella Bonasera,” Nick said. He put his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ. My kid – my daughter –”
“Is a crime scene dick. She’s a cop, Nick.”