Chapter 80: A Call from Mr. Corleone
He was back at his apartment by early evening, still turning over the lunch with Carol and Susan, when he noticed the voicemail light blinking on his phone.
He hit play.
"Mr. Sanchez." Corleone's voice — steady, unhurried, the voice of a man who had never needed to raise it to be heard. "We've made some progress on the matter we discussed. When you have a moment, please call me back. It would be better to speak in person. Tomorrow morning, if you're available."
Andrew stood in the kitchen and listened to it twice.
He'd been waiting for this. After the tail at McLaren's, after Rose moving into 208, after Daisy's explanation about Morris Black — Corleone had said he was looking into it, and Andrew had been patient about the timeline because being impatient with Corleone produced nothing useful. But it had been sitting in the back of his mind for two weeks, a low-level awareness that the situation had moving parts he couldn't see clearly.
He called back.
"Mr. Sanchez." Corleone picked up on the second ring. "Thank you for returning my call."
"Of course. You said you'd found something."
"I've found several things." A pause that carried information without releasing it. "Some of it is straightforward. Some of it is — more complicated. I'd prefer to explain in person rather than on the phone. Can you come by tomorrow morning? Nine o'clock."
"I'll be there."
Another pause. Slightly different in quality from the first one.
"When you come tomorrow," Corleone said, "I may also need to ask a favor of you. I want to be transparent about that before you arrive."
Andrew absorbed this.
A favor from Corleone was not a small thing. It was also not necessarily a dangerous thing — Corleone operated according to his own specific logic, and that logic had never, in Andrew's experience, required him to do anything that crossed a line he wasn't willing to cross. But it was worth knowing in advance.
"I appreciate you telling me," Andrew said.
"See you at nine," Corleone said, and hung up.
Andrew set the phone down and stood in the kitchen for a moment.
His gun permit was still processing — the range permit, specifically, which would let him practice at a facility. The home permit had cleared in February and the .38 was in his nightstand drawer, legally his to have there and nowhere else. He'd been waiting for the range permit with the patience of someone who understood that New York City's licensing timeline was not a negotiation.
He'd also, in the meantime, been working on the things that didn't require a permit.
The throwing practice had been going on since January — coins initially, small objects, the kind of thing you could practice in an apartment without drawing attention. The mechanics were transferable: the same principles of weight, release point, and trajectory that made a jab land correctly made a thrown object land correctly. He'd moved from coins to something slightly more substantial, then back to coins when he'd realized that coins, thrown correctly, were already more than sufficient for most practical purposes.
It wasn't a replacement for a firearm. It was a supplement, for a city where carrying a licensed handgun was one thing and carrying it everywhere was another, and where the legal consequences of getting that wrong started at ten years minimum and went up from there.
He wasn't going to be careless about it.
He also wasn't going to spend the evening thinking about what Corleone's favor might be. That path led nowhere productive. He'd find out tomorrow morning.
The food truck ran its evening prep on schedule. He got the truck back to the lot by nine-thirty, took the subway home, changed clothes, and decided he was too wound up to sleep before midnight.
He walked to McLaren's.
The bar had become his third place — after the apartment and the truck, the space he occupied when he needed to be somewhere that wasn't either of those things. It helped that McLaren's didn't smell like cigarettes, which most bars in Manhattan in 1993 did, and that the owner — a heavyset man named Frank McLaren who'd been running the place since 1978 — kept the place at a volume that allowed actual conversation.
Frank's nephew Carl was working the bar when Andrew came in. Carl was nineteen, six-two, covered in tattoos that he'd started acquiring at sixteen in what had apparently been a committed phase, and had ended up at McLaren's after dropping out of community college through a sequence of events that Carl described differently every time he told it. He was good at his job in the specific way that physically imposing people were good at bar jobs — his presence resolved most situations before they became situations.
"The usual?" Carl said, without looking up from the glass he was polishing.
"Please."
Carl built the non-alcoholic cocktail with the practiced efficiency of someone who had made it enough times that the recipe was muscle memory. He slid it across the bar with a tip jar positioned meaningfully nearby.
Andrew paid, added the tip, and took his drink to his usual table — the small round one near the bar, good sightlines, not a booth.
He'd been there about forty minutes, working through the implications of Corleone's call and not making much progress, when someone sat down across from him.
He looked up.
"Lola." He straightened slightly. "I didn't know you came here."
Lola — from the family services office, the placement coordinator he'd spoken to in January about Christie's situation — looked equally surprised, though she recovered faster. "I live two blocks over. I come in occasionally." She looked at his glass. "Non-alcoholic?"
"Just a preference."
She ordered a glass of wine from Carl, who materialized with the timing of someone who had been watching the table.
"I didn't expect to see you again," she said, when Carl had gone. "Not in a bar, anyway."
"I don't come in very often," Andrew said. "The last month has been busy."
"The food truck?"
"Partly." He turned his glass once. "Christie's settled into school. That helped free up some bandwidth."
Lola's expression did the thing it did when she was accessing professional context — the slight shift of someone switching registers. "She's at Hartwell?"
"Since April."
"That's a good placement." She said it with the specific warmth of someone for whom good outcomes were worth acknowledging. Then she caught herself slightly. "Sorry — occupational habit. You probably don't need me to evaluate it."
"I don't mind," Andrew said. He meant it. Lola had been straight with him in January — direct about the obstacles, specific about the requirements, genuinely helpful in a role where helpful wasn't always available. He had no reason to be guarded with her.
"How is she doing?" Lola said.
"Well. Better than I expected, which means she's probably doing exactly as well as she expected, and my expectations were just wrong." He paused. "She's been studying with another student she met on the first day. A girl named Lily. They seem to have figured each other out."
Lola smiled. "That's usually the variable. If they find one person in the first week, the rest follows."
"That's been my observation too."
Carl came back with Lola's wine. She wrapped both hands around the glass and looked at Andrew with the direct, assessing quality she'd had in her office in January — not uncomfortable, just present.
"You came to the office with a very specific question," she said. "You wanted to know the exact requirements. Not whether it was possible — you already knew it was difficult. You wanted the precise numbers."
"I did."
"That's unusual." She tilted her head slightly. "Most people who come in about adoption are either devastated or optimistic. You were just — gathering information."
"I needed to know what I was working toward," Andrew said. "The timeline, the requirements, what would disqualify me and what wouldn't." He looked at his glass. "Christie made her own decision to come to my place. I wanted to make sure that decision had a real future attached to it."
Lola was quiet for a moment.
"You turn twenty-five in—?"
"November."
She nodded slowly. "The income threshold you'd need to demonstrate — your food truck operation would likely satisfy that, depending on what your accountant can document." She said it carefully, the way she said things that were professional rather than personal. "The residential stability requirement is twelve months at a single address. You're at—"
"Fourteen months at 90 Bedford," Andrew said.
"Then you're already there on that one." She picked up her wine. "I'm not making you any promises. I'm just telling you what the numbers look like from where I sit."
"I appreciate that," Andrew said.
They talked for another hour — about Christie, about the Hartwell scholarship structure, about the family services system's specific challenges in New York, which Lola described with the candid frustration of someone who had been working inside an imperfect structure long enough to know exactly where it failed and why. Andrew listened and asked the right questions and found her genuinely interesting to talk to.
She left at eleven-fifteen, pulling her coat on at the door. She paused.
"Lola Perez," she said. "In case you need to reach me about anything. Not office channels — just me."
She left a card on the table and walked out.
Andrew looked at the card for a moment. Then he put it in his wallet, finished his drink, and went home.
He didn't sleep for a while. He lay in the dark thinking about Corleone's call, the favor he hadn't defined, the surveillance situation that was apparently about to have an explanation.
Thursday was Red Hook.
Tomorrow was Corleone.
He went to sleep eventually, and it wasn't as bad as he'd expected.
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