I promised I’d get her out of the house, after all, days ago. Plus something about that interrogation has unnerved me. I feel like I’ve just walked out of a horror movie. For whatever reason, I don’t want to spend tonight alone. I want Hazel. Maybe it’s because I always feel dirty questioning Benjamin. He’s clearly a monster, and in Hazel’s gaze, I can almost believe that I am, in the end, a good man.
Hazel walks up and down in front of the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooks Sole Nero’s dance floor. She’s wearing torn faded jeans and a tank top that shows the strap of her bra. It drives me wild, thinking about peeling away that strap, pulling down the top and finding those peaked nipples again. I could spend a goddamn year just playing with her breasts.
“So these dancers are here voluntarily?” she asks, nodding at the girls on the podium.
“Of course,” I say.
“And there isn’t any funny business, like, y’know, how strippers have to pay rent for their spot or whatever?”
“They’re employees of Prosperità, Inc.”
“What’s that?”
I laugh. “That’s my company. The parent company I use for all my businesses.”
“Oh.” She smiles. “And what about drugs? Do you let people sell drugs in this place?”
“No, Hazel, I don’t. It’s a legitimate business.”
She nods seriously. I can tell how much the criminal aspect of my work concerns her. But it’s strange, because the dancers getting paid seems more significant to her than my admission of killing countless men. Maybe she has a blind spot with me. The same one I have with her, perhaps.
“Hazel, would you like a drink?”
She’s still pacing. “So this is your life,” she says, ignoring me. She looks around the office: the huge chrome desk, the fifty-inch screen on one wall, the sleek gray couches surrounding a chrome coffee table. “This place is really, really depressing. I hope you know that.”
I pour myself a whiskey and gesture at her. “Whiskey? Wine? Something?”
“I’ve been in the same place for weeks. Let me pace!” She shakes her head with a twist of her lips. “What do you do in here?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, what’s your day-to-day?”
I laugh. “It’s not interesting. Mostly it’s just administrative work. Making sure my men are paid on time. Arranging deliveries.”
“You do that sort of stuff?”
I shrug. “Sometimes. Father taught me to handle business myself. Of course, Nario and Maury and Durante help.”
I shouldn’t be telling her any of this. She shouldn’t even know any of my men’s names beyond Ubert’s. But it all comes so naturally, as though my prisoner being in my office is the most ordinary thing in the world.
“What about you?” I ask, tired of talking about myself. “What do you want from life?”
She walks over to my desk, picking up my golden letter opener. I should feel a thrill of suspicion. Prisoner plus letter opener normally isn’t a good equation. But she just idly spins it with her forefinger. “That’s a broad question.”
“Do you have any idea how sexy you look right now?” I ask, changing tact.
“What, because of this?” She hefts the opener. “You like a deadly woman, do you, Carlo?”
My member twinges longingly. “I believe I asked you a question,” I say. “But my memory is suddenly fuzzy.”
She smirks, dropping the opener and sitting down, stretching her legs out. The denim hugs her thighs. I want to tear those jeans away with my teeth.
“I do have a … I don’t know, I guess you’d call it a dream.”
“Is it that we should all be judged by the content of our character?”
“Ha-fucking-ha.” She smirks. “If you’re going to be a jerk about it—”
I reach across the table, touching her hand. “Tell me.”
“Okay, but don’t laugh. Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Okay.” She takes a breath. “I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant where the cuisine changes every month. So, like one month it’s Greek, the other it’s Italian … you get the point. And the decoration will change, too. I’ll have paintings—some my own, some other artists’—hanging on the walls that match the type of cuisine that month. So, like, during Italian month, it’ll be a totally Surrealist painting of the Coliseum or something. Because I’ve always cooked all different kinds of food. I could even still do my teaching on the side, as a volunteer. I guess the only problem would be people might not like going to a place that’s constantly changing. But that’s life, isn’t it? We’re never the same as we were yesterday.”