The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 09

The Don Called Me Nobody Chapter 09: The Bridge

I could have changed it back.

I stood at that terminal with my hand on the keyboard for four full minutes. One message and the whole thing moved to St. Agnes, and Camilla Ferro would have gotten nothing but a wasted evening.

I didn’t.

Because somewhere between the fourth minute and the fifth, I heard my father’s voice – not the business voice, the kitchen voice, the one that used to say Fina, you can be scared and still be the calmest person in the room

So at 4:11 a.m. I walked onto the Marlow Street Bridge.

The rail was the same. The lamp with the dead bulb was the same. There was a stain on the span nobody had ever gotten out, and I knew exactly whose it was.

I put my hands on the cold rail and my whole body said no, and I said yes, and my feet kept walking because they’re

braver than I am.

The team was fourteen. Dominic’s men on both approaches. The Commission’s observer on the water tower this time, since midnight. Two of Bianca’s cousins in a van with a heater, because I’d insisted.

Dominic in a car at the near end with the engine running. Not on the span. I’d made him swear on his mother

–

mine.

And in the gallery of parked cars behind him: half the family. Sal. And in a black coat, arms folded, Camilla Ferro

“Time,” I said into the radio.

“Four–thirty,”

“Call it.”

Here is what two hours feels like.

It doesn’t feel like two hours. It feels like one long held breath with weather in it.

The Volkov cars came at 4:34. Three of them. One more than agreed.

“Extra vehicle,” the tower said. “Two men.”

“Let them sit. Nobody moves. Arkady, you brought a friend.”

His voice in my ear, bored. “Insurance.”

“Then I’ll add ten minutes and you’ll like it.”

At 4 52, a girl in a gray hoodie stepped out of the middle car.

At 4:53, a door opened on the third car, and the field went red – every rifle on the bridge came up, and my radio filled with fourteen men breathing wrong.

“Nobody fires. Pressure, not panic. Count with me. One. Two. Three.”

The man got out, lit a cigarette, and leaned on the hood.

At 4:53 and 40 seconds, the bridge was quiet again.

“Gianna,” I said, so only she could hear. “Walk.”

She walked. She didn’t run. She didn’t look back.

I could feel him the whole time.

That was the thing I’d spent three years running from, and it turned out to be the thing that got me through my father,

standing at my left shoulder, dead and absolutely present.

Watch the third car, Fina.

I see it.

Don’t relax yet.

I’m not.

At 5:06 she reached the near end, and Dominic’s door opened, and she got in, and the door shut

Silence. That awful, endless silence while a girl decides what she’s going to say.

“Biscotti,” Gianna Vitale said over the radio, and started laughing and crying at the same time.

“First half,” I said. “Move it.”

The bag crossed. Then the second.

At 6:03, the last Volkov car turned off the bridge and its taillights went down the river road, and the whole span

exhaled like a stadium.

“Nobody celebrate,” I said. “We don’t leave for twenty minutes. Nobody ever leaves early.” And then I had to stop

talking for a second, because my face was wet.

I came off the bridge at 6:41 with my radio in my hand and my coat soaked through and my legs full of sand

Dominic Vitale was standing at the end of the span.

He’d been on his feet for two hours. There was a coffee in his hand that had gone cold long ago.

“She’s in the car,” I said. “Dehydrated. Bruised. Furious about the hoodie. She’ll want a shower and a cheeseburger and

she’ll want to yell at you, in that order.”

He didn’t say anything.

He set the coffee down on the asphalt – actually set it on the ground like a man who had run out of other ideas –

walked the length of that span, and put his arms around me.

“Thank you,” he said into my hair.

And I stood on the Marlow Street Bridge, on the spot where I lost everything, and let a stranger hold me up.

Over his shoulder, at the far end, Camilla Ferro was on her phone.

Watching us.

Talking fast.