The Capo's Obsession

The brush hovers an inch from the fresco and then comes away. No good. The cerulean she mixed ten minutes ago has dried a shade too cold against the Renaissance sky she is matching, so she scrapes the failed patch off with a palette knife and watches the plaster flake onto the drop cloth in pale blue curls. Late October light slants through the studio's one grimy window, catching dust motes that have nowhere better to be. Neither does she. Her phone buzzes among the tubes of burnt umber and raw sienna. Rosa calling. Gianna lets it go to voicemail, because she will ring her aunt back tonight, once she can say *I got the job* instead of *I'm still working on it*. The panel she is on is a minor thing, decorative, in a brownstone owned by a hedge fund manager who wants a touch of old world authenticity in his dining room. Three weeks of work for three thousand dollars, three hundred of which went on pigment. Then the letter arrives, and the terms in it are too good, in the way that makes her stomach tighten the same as footsteps behind her on a dark street. She dials the number at the bottom. *This is Gianna Caruso. I received your letter.* *Then you understand the terms.* *I understand the terms. I don't understand who you are.* The building is called the Aldridge, built in 1928, and the resident whose name stops her scrolling belongs to a family that shows up in whispers, in racketeering charges that never stick, in a territory war that has been running longer than she has been alive. What follows: a man in a dark suit, something underneath the paint that was never meant to be uncovered, an intrusion nobody welcomes, a bargain with a man they call the Bull, a slip of the tongue that costs a life, a sister's plea, and a curiosity that gets a great many people hurt. Twenty-three years of being told one story about herself. A father serving life. An aunt who let her believe she was an orphan. *Because I'm not going anywhere. And neither are you.* She stops calling it a job somewhere around the third week. She stops being able to walk away from him considerably earlier than that, and she is never going to be able to again. Not once.