“I am.” He knew the dangerous waters he was entering. But he couldn’t turn his back on Bina, and the Uncles were the only way. Even if Auberon’s reputation didn’t have ‘the soft focus,’ he was known to be a vindictive, ruthless adversary. If Bina was right, and he was worse than people knew, well—then only someone who operated like he did could succeed against him.
Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie. Who won. Always. In half a century of power, they had not lost.
“And you say you just met this girl.”
“Yes. Pop, it’s about more than what I want. Even without that, I can’t turn my back and let him hurt her. He’s an evil piece of filth. Maybe fighting him for her weakens him somehow. Maybe it makes things better for us, too. If the Uncles fight with us, it weakens him.”
“Now you’re telling yourself fairy tales. It’s not just a matter of Ben and Lorrie taking up for you, and you know it. I know you’ve had a tough year. What Jenny did—I know that rocked you. Rocked us all. You’ve lost your balance, son. You need to think. Walk the dog in the other direction tonight. Then sleep on it.” He stood and ruffled Elsa’s ears. “If you do this, know what you’re laying down for a woman you don’t know.”
With that, Carlo Sr. left the room and went up the stairs. Carlo knew he’d be awake for hours in his room, watching random reruns on cable television until he fell asleep. He’d been an insomniac since their mother had died, but he always holed himself up in his room, alone, before ten o’clock.
Elsa fidgeted and whined quietly, getting impatient, and Carlo took her out the front door and down Caravel Road. Toward the beach.
~oOo~
The other family business was conducted in a warehouse at the Quiet Cove Harbor. The sign painted in large, dark green script on both the road side and the water side of the long, low building read Pagano Brothers Shipping, and legitimate business was conducted during regular business hours every week of the year. Over-the-road trucking and some limited coastal water transport. It was a perfect front for the other part of the business, and Uncle Ben and Uncle Lorrie ran both sides expertly.
The shipping company had been started by their father, Gavino Pagano, with one truck he’d bought secondhand and had driven himself, staying within New England, so that he could spend most of his nights at home with his young family. Working twelve and fourteen hour days, six days a week—seven, counting the paperwork and accounting he and his wife, Cella, did on Sundays—he’d built the company up to a modestly successful legitimate business. During the heyday of the Mafia, he’d held off the pressure to bring the company into that fold with humility and dogged determination, by offering up the respect those more powerful than he demanded and not being swayed by the shiny things those powerful men dangled before him.
He and Cella had three sons, Beniamino, Lorenzo, and Carlo, and a daughter, Anita, who died of measles before she was school age. As the boys grew old enough to be of use, they worked at the company. As they became old enough to learn the business, they were brought into the office and shown. The boys took different lessons away from those insights behind their father’s office door. Carlo had seen their father hold to his principles and find fulfillment in that integrity more than in material gain. He had seen a strength in his father, a humble man who was nonetheless able to turn away men who exuded power and menace with every exhale.
Ben and Lorrie had, instead, seen their beloved father as a man who allowed himself to be humbled, who dropped his eyes and bowed his head when lesser men came in demanding their envelope. They grew angry. When their father dropped dead on the warehouse floor at the age of fifty-two, having worked himself literally to death, Ben and Lorrie let their grief fuel that anger. They took over the business, they took the shiny things dangled before them, and then, when the time was right, they strangled the lesser men with their own baubles.
Carlo, the youngest, still in high school when Gavino died, watched all that happen and mourned harder for his father and what had been lost with him. When he was old enough to join the family business his brothers had started, he refused. Instead, always handy, he’d hired on as a carpenter’s apprentice. And Pagano & Sons Construction, now a regionally renowned company, had arisen from those humble beginnings.
Like his father before him, Carlo held off the advances of more dangerous men—in his case, his own brothers—and had achieved with them an understanding. The construction business was on the up and up. Over the years, that line had softened slightly—there had been a few minor favors done, a few wheels greased, some contacts made—but nothing that besmirched Pagano & Sons Construction. And Carlo had repaid those few favors by providing a cover of respectability over the family name. His family role: the good brother.