Red Right Hand

8.

IN A DUSTY corner of a sprawling English Tudor home in Clinton, New York-a quiet college town not far from the decaying industrial city of Utica-a phone began to ring.

Sal Lombino frowned. His daughter, Isabella, stopped plunking at the piano and looked at him. “Can I get it, Daddy?”

“Not this time, honey. What’d Ms. Malpica tell you?”

She rolled her eyes and said, “That I had to practice at least half an hour every day.”

“And how long’s it been?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. Twenty minutes?” The sheepish smile on her face made it clear she knew damn well it hadn’t been but was hoping her old man was too big a softie to call her on it.

“Try again,” he said, smiling himself. Sal hoped that Izzie never got any better at lying than she was today, midway through her seventh year. But he knew better. Lying was in her DNA. Her hateful bitch of a mother did it for sport. Sal did it for a living.

“It’s been five minutes,” she singsonged low and melancholy, her face an exaggerated pout.

“That’s more like it. Seems to me you should keep playing, then, and leave the phone to me.”

“Okay,” she said reluctantly and resumed clanking out her tune-a meandering version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with more wrong notes than right.

Truthfully, Sal didn’t much care if she practiced-the lessons were his ex-wife’s idea, no doubt intended to waste Sal’s money and drive him batty when it was his weekend to take Izzie-but the phone ringing was not the house’s primary line. It was his business line, the one that rarely rang, the one he never let his daughter answer.

Sal worked for the Council. He was, in fact, its only full-time employee. Council business was typically carried out by freelancers or members of its constituent organizations, but because those organizations were often rivals, the Council required someone unaffiliated with any of them to act as go-between.

That man was Sal. He was solely responsible for executing Council orders and looking after Council interests worldwide. It was a position that commanded fear and respect. He had no formal title, because he had no need of one-but thanks to his predecessor, who’d originated the role, those who whispered about him in dark corners of the underworld referred to him as the Devil’s Red Right Hand.

Personally, Sal had never much cared for the sobriquet. For one, he’d been an altar boy growing up and didn’t like the implication he was playing for the wrong team. For two, it was a little arch. And for three, it made him wonder if there was a counterpart on God’s side who’d one day punish Sal for everything he’d done.

Sal’s office was a cliché of a gentleman’s study. Mahogany paneling. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books he’d never read. A hinged, hand-painted globe that doubled as a bar cart. Burnished-leather armchairs. Banker’s lamps. An antique Wooton desk on which sat a phone, a leather blotter, and a computer.

Sal walked by it without a glance. His office was for show. A rodeo clown, intended to distract. He never conducted any business of real import in it.

The ringing phone was in his second guest room, which was tucked behind the kitchen. The third floor of Sal’s house comprised a guest suite-bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room-and that was where visitors typically stayed. Consequently, this bedroom was rarely used, and everything about it appeared to be an afterthought: The simple, metal-framed twin bed. The cheap floral comforter. The empty dresser. The prefab particleboard nightstand, upon which sat a lamp, a box of tissues, and an old rotary phone.

The phone wasn’t registered in Sal’s name. In fact, the line used to be connected to his neighbor’s teenage daughter’s room. When their house was foreclosed on years ago during the recession, he had surreptitiously had it rerouted and set the bill to auto-deduct from an online checking account opened for just that purpose. The former was a simple matter of redirecting a single wire; the latter, snatching a bill from his neighbor’s mailbox and calling the phone company to update the payment method. Committing fraud to get money out of major corporations is a tricky business, but committing fraud to give them money is easy, because they never think to question getting paid.

Sal stepped into the bedroom and shut the door, muffling Izzie’s halting notes but not silencing them entirely. The phone continued to ring, as he knew it would until he picked it up. He fished around inside the tissue box on the nightstand and pulled out a small electronic device the size of two stacked decks of cards: an audio jammer. Its textured black plastic surface was perforated at one end to accommodate an internal speaker, and its controls consisted of a single on/off/volume knob on the side. It was powered by a nine-volt battery and had cost him a little over a hundred bucks-from Amazon, if you can believe it.

He turned it on and cranked the volume up. The sound of static filled the room, not so loud as to be intolerable but loud enough to render useless any listening devices within a hundred and fifty feet. Then, finally, he picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”

“Sal, it’s Bobby V. We gotta talk.” Bobby V. was the Council rep for the Ventura crime family.

“This better be fucking good, Bobby,” Sal replied. “It’s my weekend with Izzie.”

“Ah. I take it you haven’t seen, then.”

“Seen what?”

“If you’d seen, you wouldn’t have to ask-you’d know. Turn on your TV.”

“What station?”

“Doesn’t matter. Any of ’em.”

“Hang on.”

He grabbed the remote from the nightstand drawer and turned on the tiny flat-screen atop the dresser. The cable box defaulted to the local NBC affiliate. Under a BREAKING NEWS banner was an aerial shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, thick smoke billowing from beneath it. The portion of the bridge directly above the smoke was hard to see, but it appeared to be canting, and several of the vertical support cables swung free, their ends frayed. The span on either side was littered with overturned cars.

“Jesus Christ,” Sal muttered.

“Yeah, it don’t look good.”

Sal cleared his throat. “Do they have any idea what happened yet?”

“If they do, they sure ain’t saying, but it looks to me like a big-ass bomb went off.”

“Bobby, I hope you’re not calling to ask if we had anything to do with it.”

Bobby scoffed. “Course not! I’m sure it was ISIS or some shit.”

“Then why’d you call? I assume you have a reason beyond torpedoing my fucking weekend.”

“They playing the video yet?”

“What video?”

“They got cell-phone video of the blast. Smiling family. Big boom.”

“No.”

“Keep watching. They will. And when they do, pay attention to the ugly mug that kicks the whole thing off.”

Sal sighed with frustration. “Listen, why don’t you just cut the bullshit and tell me what this is all about?”

“Because some things gotta be seen to be believed.”

Sal kept watching. As promised, the aerial footage cut to a shaky cell-phone video, first of a footpath, then of an old man’s blurry face. Sal tilted his head and squinted. “Holy shit. That’s Frank Segreti.”

“Oh, thank God-you see it too. When he popped up on my TV, I thought I was losing my goddamn mind.”

“He looks like hell.”

“You think? I’d say he looks pretty fucking good for a dead man.”

“This doesn’t make any sense. We blew up Segreti’s ass seven years ago.”

“Did we?”

“C’mon, Bobby. The safe house the Feds stashed him in was leveled by the blast-no one coulda made it outta there alive. And besides, they found his DNA when they processed the wreckage, it said so in their report.”

“Yeah, well, that video tells a different story,” Bobby said. “We need to convene the Council and hold a vote to authorize the funds to send a hitter after Segreti.”

Sal’s brow furrowed as he weighed his options. It’d take a couple days at least to organize a meeting, and even then, there was no guarantee they’d vote in favor of offing Segreti; they’d been reluctant to take action ever since the Engelmann job had gone sideways last year. “No. There isn’t time. Every second we wait, Segreti gets a little farther away.”

“I hate to break it to you, Sal, but you don’t have the clout to authorize an op without Council approval.”

“Of course I don’t,” Sal snapped. “And neither do you. There’s only one man who does.”

“You saying you’re gonna take this to the chairman?”

“I don’t see any other choice.”

“Do me a favor, then, and leave my name out of it.”

“Why, Bobby, you sound scared.”

“Scared? Hell, no. It’s just-you know how he’s been since the Feds announced Engelmann’s death. Communicating by dead drop. Voting by proxy. A different burner twice a week whether he used the last one or not. He’s goddamn paranoid, and for good reason. If Council business were ever linked to him, he-and everything we’ve been working toward-would be ruined. The last thing I need is to wind up on his bad side just because I put a bug in your ear.”

“How the fuck do you think I feel? I’m the one who hired Engelmann. The chairman blames me for his failure.”

“Aw, c’mon. You’re his handpicked guy. He can’t stay pissed at you forever. Hell, maybe putting Segreti in the ground will get you back into the chairman’s good graces.”

“Maybe. But first, I gotta be the guy to tell him the shitheel’s still alive. One thing’s for sure, though.”

“What’s that?”

“This time, I’m not leaving anything to chance. I wanna see him die with my own eyes. It’s the only way we’ll know that this time, the motherfucker stays dead.”