“Everything’s all right,” Sergio repeated. He walked over to the limousine that had stopped at the roadside. Alex slowly realized how close she had come to death. This wasn’t a movie, but real life! The owners of the damaged vehicles argued angrily, and someone called the police.
“You’ve got to call the police, Sergio!” Alex’s voice sounded shrill. She was trembling in fear. “Someone tried to kill you!”
“No, I don’t,” Sergio replied without looking at her. “Like I said, nothing happened. Come on, get in.”
Alex opened her mouth to object, but Luca—who had just saved her life—pushed her into the limousine. The door was hardly closed when the driver hit the pedal. Alex felt her heartbeat racing. She felt by turns hot and cold. She still couldn’t completely grasp what had just happened. In the dim light inside the limousine, she stared numbly at her hand. She touched Sergio’s shoulder. It was covered in blood. Sergio took off his coat and jacket with his face contorted in pain. Alex was horrified when she saw the rapidly expanding red patch of blood on his shirt.
“My God, you’re injured!” she whispered. “You’ve been hit!”
“Armando, make her a drink,” Sergio ordered and unbuttoned his shirt. “How about you guys? Are you okay?”
“Yep,” Luca and Armando answered. Wide-eyed and silent with fear and horror, Alex stared at the men until her gaze stopped at Sergio. He had a bulletproof vest underneath his shirt.
“Why are you wearing that thing?” she whispered, but slowly her mind started to make sense of it. Everything Kostidis had told her on the telephone was true.
“Sergio!” she said again, but he didn’t react at all.
“Have a drink, cara,” he replied. Armando pressed a glass filled with whiskey into her hand. “That’ll make you feel better.”
Alex obediently downed the whiskey, and her trembling subsided.
Armando pulled out dressing materials from a first-aid kit, and Luca set about bandaging Sergio’s intensely bleeding shoulder. They spoke quietly in Italian, and then Luca opened the glass partition and ordered the driver to head to a certain address in Brooklyn. Alex was in a state of shock. She hadn’t noticed that the limousine was rolling over the brightly lit Brooklyn Bridge.
Luca made two quick calls on his cell phone. Sergio’s eyes were closed, and he pressed his hand on the bandage, which was turning red beneath his fingers. The sight of blood usually didn’t bother her, but this was something entirely different.
“Sergio.” Alex leaned forward, trying to subdue the trembling in her voice. “Who were they? Who was shooting at you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He opened his eyes and gave her a flat smile. “This is just a little scratch.”
“You could be dead now!”
“Yes. But you warned me in time.”
Alex said nothing. The car turned onto a deserted street. Alex could see elongated warehouses and the light of Manhattan on the other side of the river.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Someone will take you home now.” Sergio avoided answering her directly as usual and grabbed her hand. “You saved my life, cara. Thank you.”
The car stopped.
“What are you doing here? Why don’t you go to a hospital?” Alex was too confused to grasp what was happening. Armando opened the door, and Sergio clumsily got out. Although it was raining harder now and the air was cool, he had beads of sweat on his forehead.
Some cars approached through the rain with their headlights turned off; a few men got out. The rain moved sideways through the light of the lamp above the entrance. No one paid any attention to Alex, and so she followed them into the warehouse. Pressing herself to the wall of the small office, she recognized Sergio’s son Massimo and Nelson van Mieren.
More cars arrived outside. Alex heard the sound of car doors slamming. Serious-looking men with determined, grim faces entered the warehouse and talked quietly amongst themselves in Italian. She could feel their tentative looks and saw that all the men were armed to the teeth. Up to now, the Mafia was no more than an abstract term with a negative connotation for Alex—and now she was right in the middle of it. She winced when Massimo suddenly addressed her.
“Dario will take you to the city now,” he said.
“Can I see him for a moment?”
Massimo gave her a searching stare, and then he nodded. She followed him through a room in which files were stacked up to the ceiling on shaky shelves. Why did they bring Sergio here and not to his apartment or a hospital? Massimo knocked on the door. When it opened, he whispered something in Italian to Nelson van Mieren. Nelson shot Alex a repulsed look.
Sergio lay on a narrow bed. His upper body was exposed, and an older man was examining his shoulder.
“The bullet is still inside,” he said, wiping his bloody fingers on a towel. “I’m afraid that an artery has been ruptured.”
“We’re taking you to Dr. Sutton, Sergio,” Nelson said. “I’ve already called him. You’re safe at his clinic.”
Safe? From what? From another attempt on his life? Alex’s knees started trembling. Kostidis had warned her. Now there could be no excuses, no sugarcoating, no doubts about Sergio’s involvement with the criminal underworld. Just a half hour ago, she’d witnessed an assassination attempt that only barely failed. Nearly fifty heavily armed men were standing outside. The thought that she was at the Mafia’s New York headquarters seemed almost grotesque.
“Okay,” Sergio said, his face contorted in pain, “where’s Natale? He should—”
Van Mieren made a gesture with his hand, and Sergio fell silent.
His eyes landed on Alex, who stood at the wall next to a filing shelf as if paralyzed, looking at him fearfully.
“Cara.” Sergio extended his right hand, smiling with difficulty. “Come over here.”
She walked toward him hesitantly and took his hand, which was unusually cold. His eyes had a feverish gleam. He was sweating even though it wasn’t particularly warm. He was obviously weak, but he still had full control of the situation.
“I’m very sorry that you had to witness this,” he said with a grimace, “but you wanted to know why I had bodyguards escorting us tonight.”
Alex was speechless for a moment, and then her fear turned into furious anger. She pulled her hand away.
“You were expecting something like this to happen,” she whispered, “but you didn’t consider it necessary to tell me. I’m so unimportant to you that you carelessly put my life at risk!”
“I’m sorry.”
Alex clenched her hands into a fist. She felt like punching his expressionless face.
“Go to hell, Sergio,” she hissed.
She turned away before he could respond. The faster she could leave this dark warehouse, these sinister characters, this entire nightmare behind, the better.
Marvin Finnegan was playing cards with a few colleagues when an emergency call came in to the Forty-First Precinct in Morrisania in the South Bronx. It was around one in the morning, a relatively quiet night, and the officers who weren’t on patrol killed time by playing cards. The area around the Forty-First Precinct was one of New York’s most run-down neighborhoods, far removed from Manhattan’s sparkling skyscrapers, the luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue, and the Upper East Side’s posh apartment buildings. The city’s administrators rarely ventured to the South Bronx. Too few disillusioned and corrupt police officers barely maintained order here. Drugs were nothing unusual in the South Bronx. People living in the projects were embittered or had given up a long time ago. Most families had at least someone who was hooked on the needle. Many men boozed away the few dollars that they received from welfare. Violent family disputes were common in these tiny apartments, which sometimes housed more than ten people. The misery and neglect were depressing. The hideous apartment buildings were decaying because no one cared about maintaining them. Sometimes they burned down. Mountains of rubble were everywhere, and so were the prostitutes and hustlers at Hunts Point, the drug dealers, and the juvenile delinquents.