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Why her? Why them? Why now?
They were things he had wondered for years, things he thought he had figured out when he murdered Frankie Antonelli. But standing there, the questions still lingered.
Why?
“It’s peculiar, isn’t it?” Corrado asked. “The thirst for revenge? It’s easy to dismiss the things we do, but it’s impossible to forget the things done to us. We never think about their families, but when it’s ours, we never get over it. We carry that grudge forever.”
“I think about them,” Vincent said. “I always consider their families.”
“Did you think about Frankie’s?”
Vincent hesitated. “No. I was only thinking about mine back then, but I do now. Every day.”
“That doesn’t count,” Corrado said. “The only relative he has left is Haven, and I assure you she isn’t grieving that loss.”
Vincent thought that over. “You’ve honestly never considered their families?”
“Never,” Corrado said, staring at him pointedly. “My conscience is clear, Vincent. I carry no regret, and I don’t want to start now. It’s why, with God as my witness, I’ll never pull the trigger unless I’m absolutely certain the world is a better place without them.”
“You’re lucky,” Vincent said. “Every time I think I clear my conscience, something else comes about.”
“That’s because you’re letting yourself be a pawn.”
A bitter laugh forced itself from Vincent’s chest. “I was just thinking about the day my father told me to be a king and not a pawn. But he failed to tell me there could only be one king. The rest of us, well . . . we can only do what we can do.”
“You’re missing the point,” Corrado said. “Being the king isn’t always about having the title. Sometimes the title is a ruse. You want control? You need the upper hand, but you never let them see you have it until you’re ready to make your move.”
“And what if the only moves I have left break the rules?”
He shrugged. “Depends on whose rules you break.”
Corrado took a step back and nodded before strolling away.
After he was gone, Vincent turned back to the building, running his hand along the crumbling brick once more. “I’ll see you later, Maura. Ti amo.”
Vincent strolled out of the alley and down the block toward the pizzeria. John Tarullo stood outside the front door, sweeping the large welcome mat with a cornhusk broom. He glanced up, nodding stiffly in greeting. “Dr. DeMarco, I hear you have a son getting married today.”
“Yes. Dominic.”
“I hear he’s a good kid.”
“He is,” Vincent replied. “Both of my sons are good kids.”
till, even then, he felt the void, the part that was missing. He felt her absence, when he wanted nothing more than her presence.
And, if he were being honest, he felt something else then, too . . . a craving for the sensation he had had the night before.
* * *
The Rosewood Room was near the Children’s School of Music and just down the street from an old closed down theater, one that used to play movies for a quarter in the summer of 1972.
Vincent had been just a kid at the time, slightly rebellious yet highly impressionable. He would often leave his house on Felton Drive, two blocks past where he later settled with his own family, and slip away to that theater without his parents knowing. It was at a time when he and Celia came and went as they pleased, not long before the brutal underground wars broke out that changed everything. Before their parents tightened their grip and started monitoring their every move . . . before they came to the realization that they needed to.
His mother had been strict and maybe already a bit delusional, refusing to let them watch television, not wanting to poison their minds, so he would lie whenever she asked and tell her he was going to the park with friends.
The Godfather came out that year. Vincent saw it one cloudy Tuesday afternoon in July, sitting in the back row of the packed theater. Those three hours altered his life, turning everything he thought he knew upside down.
Until then, he only had a vague understanding of the Mafia, based on the things he had witnessed and his mother’s volatile rants. He thought it was a club, maybe part of a union, considering he had seen his dad take money from Teamsters. But reality made itself known that day, playing out on the massive flickering screen.
