The Don's Mistake

The Fiorelli family buries its underboss on an October morning, and Dom Falcone counts the crowd instead of praying. Two hundred people, give or take: capos, soldiers, associates, a few politicians smart enough to wear black. One man is not in black. He is at the back in a brown leather jacket, and he is not looking at the casket at all. He is looking at the tree line. Dom follows him to the mausoleums. The man spins, drops a cigar box with a brass latch, and three small brass urns spill out across the grass. *They're not for the funeral. They're for my brother.* He gives a first name and nothing else. Dom finds him anyway, because the shop is listed in the Yellow Pages. Leo Castellano restores furniture on Eighteenth Avenue, works in an apron in a room full of shavings, and wants nothing at all from a made man. *I know who you are. I know whose funeral you were at. And I know that you're not here because of a table.* Dom does have a table. Rosewood, a wedding gift his grandparents supposedly carried from Sicily. Leo can tell at a glance that it came from somewhere else. What is hidden inside it is worse: a note naming a date, a terminal and an hour, with an instruction to come alone. At home, Dom's father is arranging things. A daughter of a man he has known forty years, finished college, works at a hospital in Manhattan, pretty, smart, from a good family. Nobody is ordering anything. Nobody has to. Sal owes three hundred thousand to people the family has no business owing, and he has been flipping the money through a restaurant. When that starts to slip, someone firebombs a furniture restoration shop on Eighteenth Avenue and calls it a message. And underneath all of it is the thing Dom knows and Leo does not yet: whose order it was that killed Leo's brother. *Son of the man who ordered my brother's death.* What follows is a rosewood table with a false compartment, a photograph inscribed to a boy by his mother, a sister who has already done three months in witness protection, a recorder taped inside a belt, and a courtroom where a man with a family name finds out what it costs to stop being useful to it. An MM mafia romance out of Bensonhurst, told in Dom's third person and Leo's first, about a capo groomed to inherit and a woodworker with nothing left to lose. Closed-door.