I don’t plan it. There’s no decision. My body launches itself out of the chair, and I’m across the room before he’s finished the sentence, and I hit him once, clean, the way I was taught when I was sixteen and angry and had nothing else. Center of the jaw. A short punch, no windup, all shoulder.
He goes down sideways over the coffee table. The table holds. His weight doesn’t. He ends up on the floor among the glass, on his back, looking up at me with the dazed, offended expression of a man who didn’t think he was allowed to be hit.
Both of his men are halfway to their jackets.
I don’t move. I don’t have to. Their hands stop where they are. They remember whose office they’re in and whose name is on the building.
“Get out of the jacket,” I say to the one on the left. “Slowly.”
His hand comes away empty and goes to his side.
I look down at Antonio. The split is already coming up on his lip. He spits once onto my floor, and I let him, because the floor can be cleaned and he can’t.
“You fucking?—”
“When you’re in my office, you respect the people working in it.”
I crouch. I put my forearm across my knee and lean in.
“When you speak to me, you speak with deference. And when you spill a drink on a woman standing in my office, you apologize to her before you apologize to me.”
“You’re done, D’Amico. You’re fucking done. When Vincenzo hears?—”
“Vincenzo will hear what I tell him.”
His eyes move. He’s calculating. He’s not stupid, which is the only reason he’s been useful.
“The lawyers. The dates. The money. All the rest of that bullshit we’ve been talking about for an hour.” I wave a hand. “It happens on my timeline. That hasn’t changed because you’re bleeding on my floor.”
“What has changed,” I say, “is that if you ever raise your voice around someone working in this office again, I’ll find a way to get every one of your motions denied on procedural grounds. Airtight. Appealed to death. Your own grandkids will be reading about it in law school, wondering how a guy with this many lawyers still managed to die in a cell.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Nod if you understand, Antonio.”
He nods.
I stand. I step back. I don’t rush it.
“Get him up,” I tell his men. “Take him home. I’ll call when I want him back in this office.”
They move fast. They know how to move fast around a body. One under the shoulders, one under the legs, and then Antonio is upright and leaning into the smaller one’s side, spitting again, into a handkerchief this time. They don’t look at me on the way out. The door clicks shut behind them, and the latch settling into the frame sounds deafening in the quiet that replaces them.
I turn.
Bea is still by the window.
She hasn’t moved. Glass fans out around her shoes in a rough half-circle, and the hem of her skirt is darker in a patch at the thigh where the whiskey hit her. Her hands are at her sides. Her chest is moving too fast.
She’s looking at me.
I start toward her.
Slowly. One step. Then another. There’s glass between us, and I watch where my shoes land because I don’t want to track it toward her. I don’t reach for her. I keep my hands visible. I lower my shoulders a fraction because I know what I look like when I haven’t, and I don’t want to look that way right now.
13
BEA
