Page 45 of Memento Mori
Neither Grasso nor McGuire made a move to remove the handcuffs.
“If you gentlemen need me to call the Director of the FBI, I can do that. But I don’t think John would be too happy to hear from me at this hour. I’m giving you one last chance to take these cuffs off my client now, or you’ll be looking for another job before morning.”
Standing up, Agent McGuire leaned over the table and unlocked the handcuffs. I gently massaged the barely visible bruises on my wrists.
“Let’s go Antonio, Martha is waiting for me.”
I ignored Agent McGuire. He was clueless in whatever Grasso had planned. As I left the interrogation room, I gave Grasso a wink. He thought he had me. But he underestimated the power of the Rizzo’s.
***
Everyone had gathered into the study. For the last two hours we’d been trying to come up with a plan of attack, which was hard when you didn’t know who orchestrated everything. What we did know was somehow Agent Grasso was involved but didn’t know why he was targeting me. We had the cryptic note sent to Aaliyah along with the contracts that had been placed on the wives of all the major players in the criminal world.
“We haven’t been able to confirm my mother was involved in my father’s death, but with everything going on it makes the most since.”
“Sins of the father?” Abasi questioned. “This has to do with your father, Antonio. When Aaliyah’s father was alive, he never stepped foot in the U.S. Do you know if your father was involved in anything that he would have kept from you?”
“The Commission,” Aaliyah said, her voice muffled against my chest.
As soon as I stepped through the door, she’d done like she had always done at the beginning of our relationship, jumped straight into my arms. Now she insisted on sitting on my lap, clinging to me like I would vanish. Not that I minded. The closer I could get to her the better.
“What’s the Commission?” Chantal asked.
She arrived about two hours after Abasi. To say she was pissed at me being arrested based on little to no evidence was an understatement. Razor was the only one who could calm her down when she got in that kind of mood.
“I’ll let Aaliyah explain,” I said. “I don’t know because the Feds came in just when she was about to explain it to me.”
“The Commission was sort of like a board who oversaw all the other criminal organizations that your father started with the heads of all the criminal organizations.”
“When you say all,” Chantal said, “what do you mean by all?”
“Everyone. The Bratva, Irish Mob, Yakuza, and Camorra.”
“Shit,” she mumbled.
Alessandro whistled. “What the fuck was he thinking?”
“Same thing, I thought,” I chimed in.
“Anyway,” Aaliyah continued, “I haven’t been able to find anything they were actually involved in. The only thing I could uncover was all the heads were in Stavanger, Norway, thirty years ago at the same time, except the head of the Camorra.”
“The safe house?” Alessandro questioned.
“That’s the only place we have in Norway that I’m aware of. And why wasn’t the Camorra there?” I asked, my voice filled with curiosity and confusion.
“I don’t know, but I did find out about a week later one of the heads of the Camorra clans was found dead,” Aaliyah said.
It was like a fucking lightbulb went off in my head.
“They sanctioned his death,” I mumbled in disbelief. “They sanctioned the death of one of the bosses of the Camorra Clans.”
“Why?” Chantal asked. “Why sanctioned the death of someone with the other heads of organizations? Papa had power, why wouldn’t he just take him out if he needed to? Why get permission from anyone?”
“Because Grasso was a boss,” I responded.
What the hell where they involved in?
“As the head, we can’t take out the leader of any other organization without the blessing of the other heads,” Icontinued. “That’s the way of most criminal organizations. Each boss gives a yes or no on a death motion, so a war isn’t started between the groups.”
