Chapter 8 - The Price of the Concession
Salvatore Greco did not touch the book.
His eyes remained fixed on Gio’s throat, on the black cross inked over the pulse point that was beating at sixty-two beats a minute—slow, cold, and rhythmic as an executioner’s pendulum.
“Your grandfather has been dead thirty years, Little Giovanni,” Greco murmured, his thick Pugliese accent thickening with contempt. “And his paper died with him. You think forty councilors in this province are going to jump into the sea because an old man wrote their names in an olive-oil book?”
“Not forty, Salvatore,” Isadora’s voice cut through the room.
She stepped past Gio, her black flats silent on the parquet. She didn't look like a waitress anymore; she looked like an auditor from the central bank who had arrived with the bailiffs. She reached out, her fingers blackened with cordite from the tunnel, and flipped the heavy sheepskin cover back with a sharp, dry snap.
“Only twelve,” she said, her finger tracing the three columns of spidery script on page forty-eight. “The twelve who sit on the executive licensing committee. Like Councilor Barone here.”
She looked down at a thin, balding man in a gray suit who sat three chairs to Greco’s right.
Barone’s face turned the color of an unwashed turnip. He tried to pull his hands beneath the table, but they were trembling so hard they rattled his silver pen against the mahogany rim.
“The shipment from Bar in November of ninety-eight, Councilor?” Isadora asked, her voice clear, conversational, and carrying into every corner of the high-ceilinged chamber. “Four hundred crates of unfiltered tobacco and six hundred kilograms of raw morphine base. You signed the customs clearance from your private office in the Via Roma at eleven-fifteen at night. And thirty minutes later, your brother’s company received twenty-eight thousand Swiss francs from an account in Chiasso called La Sirena.”
She looked up at the ceiling, then turned the page.
“And Councilor Moretti,” she continued, pointing her thumb toward a fat man with a gold watch chain who was currently mopping his jowls with a silk handkerchief. “The dredging contract for the container berths in 2004. You took two percent on every cubic meter of silt pulled out of the basin. Twelve hundred thousand euros, split between three accounts in Liechtenstein. My mother washed the ink from your receipts out of Don Salvatore’s linen every Friday morning for six years.”
Moretti made a small, choked sound in the back of his throat and looked at Greco with eyes that were wide with blind, animal panic.
“It’s ancient history,” Greco spat, but his hand on the water pitcher had gone white at the knuckles. “The statute on customs fraud is ten years in this country, girl. Any magistrate in Salerno will throw these pages into the harbor before the ink gets wet.”
“A customs fraud has a statute, yes,” Gio said, stepping forward until his hip pressed against the edge of the presidential desk.
He reached into his Barbour jacket, pulled out three folded sheets of modern, blue-lined carbon paper—the sheets Isadora had kept inside the prayer book’s binding—and laid them over the sheepskin pages.
“The statute on international arms trafficking during the UN embargo on Yugoslavia,” Gio murmured, “doesn't expire until 2035, Salvatore. And this carbon isn't my father’s handwriting. This carbon is signed by your brother, Nicola Greco. Before he had his little accident on the ferry to Durrës.”
Greco’s mouth closed.
The color drained from his nose and his ears, leaving his dark, dyed hair looking like an oil slick over a dead face. He knew that signature. He had spent twenty years hoping that the third copy of the Durrës manifest had gone down with the tugboat in forty fathoms of water off the Albanian coast.
“Nicola,” Greco whispered, the name leaving his lips like a bubble of gas from an old swamp.
“Your brother wasn't an idiot either, Salvatore,” Gio said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, quiet intimacy that made the lawyers from Naples slowly begin to slide their briefcases off the baize and onto the floor between their knees. “He knew that once the war ended, you wouldn't need a partner who knew the names of the Serbian colonels. He left his copies with my father because he knew Salvatore Rossi was the only man on the coast who had a vault that the Bari people couldn't reach with a crowbar.”
Gio leaned in, his knuckles resting on the open ledger, his face six inches from Greco’s forehead.
“Now,” Gio said. “Here is the new concession.”
He reached out his left hand without looking back.
Luca, who had been standing by the double doors with his submachine gun hidden beneath his long leather coat, stepped forward and laid a single, typed sheet of heavy legal bond on the desk.
It was not a lease. It was a complete, irrevocable renunciation of all commercial claims by the Greco syndicate to the maritime terminals of Salerno, Amalfi, and Castellammare di Stabia, transferring all existing operational infrastructure to a newly chartered municipal trust: La Società Marittima di Cetara.
At the bottom of the page were two lines for the trustees.
The first line was marked: Giovanni Rossi, Direttore Operativo.
The second line was marked: Isadora Marino, Amministratore Delegato.
Greco looked at the names. Then he looked at the open ledger, then at the bruised, weeping form of De Luca who was sitting on the floor by the radiator, and finally at the twelve councilors who were staring at their blotting paper as if their lives depended on not meeting his eyes.
“You’re giving the ports to a cook’s daughter?” Greco rasped, his voice shaking with eighty years of southern pride that had just run out of road.
“I’m giving the ports to the woman who holds the papers, Salvatore,” Gio said.
He drew his customized Beretta from his shoulder holster with a single, smooth, unhurried motion, racked the slide with his thumb, and set the pistol down on the baize, six inches from Greco’s right hand, with the muzzle pointed directly between the councilor’s ribs.
“Sign the renunciation,” Gio whispered. “Or pick up the gun. You have five seconds to decide whether you want to leave this room as a retired businessman from Bari, or as a bucket of scrap meat that we carry down to the fish market in an apron.”
Greco didn't look at the gun.
He didn't have to. He was an old wolf who had seen three generations of his family die in stone cellars and ditch water; he knew when the pack had turned, and he knew that the man standing across the mahogany didn't care about the cameras, the councilors, or the prefect sitting in the office down the hall.
Greco reached for his gold fountain pen.
His hand shook once—just once—as the nib touched the heavy bond paper, then he signed his name with the large, florid flourish he had used on shipping charters since 1982.
Salvatore Greco.
He dropped the pen. It rolled across the contract, leaving a tiny, black trail of ink across the seal of the Republic, before falling onto the parquet floor with a soft tink.
Gio didn't pick up the gun immediately.
May you like
He turned his head, his dark eyes finding Isadora where she stood by the center aisle, her hands deep in the pockets of De Luca’s cashmere coat, her chin held high, the blood on her jawline dry and black in the morning sun that had finally broken through the high windows.
“Come here, Amministratore,” Gio said softly. “Sign your father’s name.”
