Chapter 3 — It's Not About the Money
Norman Stansfield.
The primary villain of Léon: The Professional. Neurotic, erratic, sadistic, and completely off the reservation — a DEA narcotics officer who was also, quietly, one of the biggest drug dealers operating in New York. He used his badge to confiscate product, then turned around and sold it back into the street through back channels. He had a small army of dirty cops running with him, all of them equally compromised, equally untouchable.
He had also, in the film, massacred an entire family in their apartment. Including a four-year-old.
This was Luca's first time seeing him in person.
He'd only had his memories back for a little over a year, and he was still working out the full picture of this world — which stories had bled into it, which characters were walking around somewhere in the five boroughs living their lives. At first, he'd assumed this was primarily a John Wick universe. The Continental was here. The High Table was real. The whole architecture fit.
But it clearly wasn't just that.
The three Goodfellas, for starters.
There was also a guy who ran a Korean grocery in Koreatown — went by the name David Cho, built like a safe, and rumored to have hands that could end conversations permanently. His nephew was supposedly out in Los Angeles doing something impressive, but nobody in the Bronx had details.
On Wall Street, there was a fast-talking broker named Jordan Belfort who threw parties that reportedly required medical staff on standby. The FBI had been circling him for months.
Somewhere in the NYPD, there was a detective with a reputation for solving impossible cases through methods that left Internal Affairs perpetually baffled. Word was he'd once detonated a building in Los Angeles and taken out a passenger jet at Dulles. Nobody could confirm this. Nobody wanted to look too hard.
And now Stansfield was here, walking through a hotel lobby in the Bronx, which meant—
If Stan's in New York, then Léon is in New York. And Mathilda.
Luca turned it over quickly. In the film, Stansfield had killed Mathilda's family, which was what drove Léon to open his door for the first time. The cold, solitary hitman with the potted plant and the milk habit, cracking open his door for a twelve-year-old girl with nowhere else to go.
But Stan was still alive. Which meant that scene hadn't happened yet.
Which meant Léon and Mathilda were both out there, somewhere in this city, going about their lives.
S-rank for Léon, easy. Mathilda's probably A-rank minimum. And Stan himself—
He'd already clocked the S-rank on Stan's card. Which was insane, considering the man was a DEA agent with a pill habit and a Beethoven fixation. But those two skills — Beethoven's Fury and Bloodhound's Nose — were genuinely frightening in the right hands.
Luca filed all of it away and kept moving.
He slipped out through the fire escape, took the stairs to the ground floor, and exited through the alley entrance without breaking stride. There was no reason to panic — this wasn't a raid directed at him, and getting spooked would only draw attention he didn't need.
He already knew exactly why Stansfield was here.
Upstairs, the elevator doors opened onto a hallway that smelled like gunpowder and copper.
Stansfield stepped out slowly, unhurried, taking in the scene with the careful appreciation of a man visiting a gallery. He walked the length of the hallway with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, head tilted, studying each body in turn.
He removed his earpiece.
"Headshots. Throat cuts." He crouched next to one of the bodies and examined the entry wound with genuine interest. "Clean, controlled, no wasted movement. Every single one." He stood and looked at Kahn, who was sitting on the floor outside the suite door, smoking with the hollow expression of a man who'd just watched his net worth disappear. "These aren't just kills. These are statements."
The four DEA agents flanking Stansfield said nothing. They had learned, over time, that the best response to their boss's monologues was disciplined silence.
Stansfield draped an arm over Kahn's shoulders in a way that was aggressively friendly and vaguely threatening at the same time.
"Tell me about the artist," he said.
Kahn subtly shifted away from him. "Lucchese Family. They sent somebody to push me out of the New York market." He glanced around the carnage. "Mission accomplished, I guess."
The warmth drained out of Stansfield's expression instantly. Something colder moved in behind it.
"The Lucchese Family," he repeated quietly.
Some of the product in that closet had been his — pre-arranged with Kahn, scheduled for collection today. Clean transaction. Now it was gone, and the loss was significant.
He straightened up. Rolled his neck once, slowly.
"How do you want to handle the product situation, boss?" one of his men asked.
"You know how we handle it," Stansfield said, already walking toward the stairs.
Twenty minutes earlier, on the highway heading back toward the Bronx.
Luca ended his call and glanced at the case in the back seat. He leaned forward and dropped it into Jimmy's lap.
"That's somewhere north of five million street value," he said. "You and Henry move it however you want. Get me five million back when you're done. Anything above that — keep it."
There was a beat of stunned silence.
Then Henry made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a prayer. "Luca. Man. God bless you, I mean that sincerely, you are the most generous human being I have ever encountered in my entire life—"
"Don't thank me yet," Luca said mildly. "Just get me my five million."
Jimmy held the case with the focused reverence of someone holding something sacred. His voice was remarkably calm for a man who was clearly vibrating internally. "You go home, you relax. We'll take care of this. You're gonna need a bigger safe when we're done."
Luca smiled and said nothing.
Goodfellas, he thought. I'm literally paying tuition for your skills.
A portion of that five million was going straight to Maurizio anyway — that was the structure, that was the earn, that was how the Family worked. Luca wasn't losing as much as it looked like.
He opened his panel while the city scrolled past outside the window.
He blinked.
[Henry Hill — Bond: Friend]
That fast?
He'd known Henry for less than two weeks. One shared job and a cut of confiscated drug money, and the man's bond level had jumped straight to Friend.
He supposed it tracked. Henry's entire worldview was built around who was useful to him and who was generous to him, and Luca had just checked both boxes in a single afternoon.
He pulled up Jimmy's card.
[Jimmy Conway — Bond: Familiar]
Still Familiar. Even after the same windfall.
Luca considered that for a moment. Jimmy was a planner. Cautious underneath all the bravado. A man who smiled at you and calculated your usefulness at the same time. The kind of guy who'd killed his own crew rather than split the money — not out of rage, but out of cold arithmetic.
That kind of person didn't warm up fast.
Fair enough. Luca could be patient.
He switched over to Henry's Character Card.
[Spend 20 Skill Fragments to unlock: Rat's Instinct?]
[Yes / No]
Yes.
[Skill Unlocked: Rat's Instinct] When interacting with law enforcement, credibility with police +10%. When providing formal testimony against associates, credibility with police an additional +40%.
Luca leaned back against the seat and let out a slow breath.
There it was. The single most useful skill in this city for a man in his particular line of work, wrapped up in the most dishonorable package imaginable. He'd take it.
He had the driver drop him three blocks from the bar and walked the rest of the way, stopping first at a small pasta shop tucked between a dry cleaner and a closed-up hardware store on a side street in Belmont.
The owner was a compact, watchful man in his late fifties who kept his hands busy wiping down the counter even when there was nothing to wipe. He was three things simultaneously: a legitimate restaurateur, a neighborhood fence, and — most relevantly — a middleman. The go-between for clients who needed a professional and professionals who needed clients.
Léon's contact.
Luca set his credentials on the table — not literally, but in the way that mattered in this neighborhood: a name, a Family affiliation, and a manner that made negotiation feel redundant. Within ten minutes, he had Léon's address on a folded piece of paper in his jacket pocket.
Getting the address was the easy part.
He stood outside on the sidewalk afterward, thinking.
Approaching Léon was a different problem entirely. The man was a ghost — solitary, routinized, functionally illiterate, with no apparent social life beyond a standing arrangement with his plant collection and a nightly glass of milk. He didn't make friends. He didn't want friends. He had spent his entire adult life specifically engineering a world in which nobody got close to him.
And Mathilda — twelve years old, sharp enough to cut glass, damaged in ways that made her simultaneously guarded and reckless. She'd grown up fast out of necessity and trusted people approximately as far as she could throw them.
Two difficult targets for something as delicate as genuine human connection.
Luca tucked the address away and decided not to move on it yet. Rushing in blind would only spook them. He needed to think about the angle first.
He headed back to the bar.
He heard Maurizio before he saw him.
The man's voice — normally the careful, measured baritone of someone who'd learned to keep his volume down in rooms with ears — was currently filling the entire bar at a pitch that suggested he'd skipped careful and measured about forty-five minutes ago. Luca caught "son of a bitch" and "disrespectful" and what sounded like a full glass hitting the floor before he even got through the door.
He stepped over a broken beer bottle near the entrance.
"Luca." Maurizio spotted him and waved him over with the urgency of a man who'd been waiting. "Perfect timing. Sit down."
Luca sat.
Maurizio planted both hands on the table and leaned in. "Stansfield — DEA, narcotics division, you know him?"
"I've heard the name."
"He just hit one of our stash houses. Brought a whole team, killed a dozen of our guys, walked out with ten million in product." Maurizio's jaw was tight. "Ten million, Luca. And he left the bodies there like he was sending us a message. This isn't a bust. This is a shakedown. This is that lunatic telling us he can do whatever he wants and nobody can touch him because he's got a federal badge." He straightened up. "I want him gone. Tonight if possible."
Luca was quiet for a moment.
This was absolutely something Stansfield would do. The man operated on the assumption that his badge was armor, and so far in his career, he'd been right.
"He's DEA," Luca said carefully. "Federal. If he disappears, there are going to be people asking questions we don't want to answer."
"You think I don't know that?" Maurizio reached into his jacket. "You handled Kahn. You're getting made — I already submitted your name, you'll have confirmation in a few days. This is the job I need from you before that paperwork clears." He slid an envelope across the table. "Five hundred thousand. And you get the product back too."
"It's not about the money," Luca said.
Maurizio looked at him.
"Seven-fifty," Maurizio said.
"I'm telling you, it's not—"
"One million. Final offer. And you keep whatever product you recover."
Luca was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the table. Then he looked up at Maurizio with the expression of a man who had made a decision for principled reasons.
"You know what kind of man I am," he said. "I believe in peace. I believe in order. I believe that this city functions because people respect certain boundaries." His voice took on weight. "Stansfield doesn't respect those boundaries.
He walked into our house, killed our people, and took what was ours. That's not a police action — that's a violation. An attack on the stability of this entire neighborhood." He sat forward. "To defend the peace of New York — to defend the honor of this Family and the safety of everyone on these streets — I will take this job."
Maurizio stared at him for a long moment.
"Luca."
"Yes, boss."
"You just talked yourself into a hit for a million dollars using the words peace and honor."
"I meant every word."
"You're the strangest man I've ever sponsored," Maurizio said. "Get out of my bar. Go find that maniac and make him disappear."
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