Vincent Caruso
A crime boss with no powers at all, who beats Fenris once and gets away.
What he runs
Half the illegal trade in the city, by the account of a man living under an underpass: "Drugs, guns, protection rackets" (ch. 83). The warehouse complex east of the industrial district is chain-link, razor wire, searchlights and security towers, with a second warehouse underground beneath it.
Twenty years of building it, which he says twice and clearly says often. His first kill was twenty-three years ago. He keeps a .45 in the bottom drawer of his desk and calls the metal "a comfort".
Ted is his lieutenant, eight years in, "ever since that business with the Torrino family went south". Twelve men are stationed through the complex on the night Fenris arrives, and none of them answer the radio.
Ch. 83 is his
The chapter starts in third person on Fenris hunting for him and then switches, with no break, into Caruso's own first person: "I adjusted my silk tie". So the back half of the hunt is narrated from inside the target.
It is the most effective thing in the arc. Fenris is not described again once the switch happens. He becomes a silence where twelve armed men were, one word on a dead radio, and laughter in the dark.
VNC: That, Ted, is our problem coming to collect.
Why he wants Poppy
Not money and not drugs. He says so himself, and it is the only motive in the arc:
VNC: She stole information. Names, dates, locations. The kind of information that could put me and half my organization in federal prison for the rest of our natural lives.
See poppy.md.
What he thinks monsters are
One line, delivered while Fenris is being choked unconscious by his bear, and it is the arc's only statement of the world's species politics three centuries after the war ended:
VNC: I like to run things a bit traditional here. You monsters are human subjects and no more.
Nothing in the chapter argues with it. The man who says it is winning at the time.
He gets away
Ch. 87. He runs with Ted and Poppy in a black sedan, intending to be "three states away with new identities" by morning, and takes the operation's loss calmly: "Can be rebuilt elsewhere."
Fenris lands on the roof of the car from a three-storey warehouse and it goes through the guard rail into the river.
Ted drowns. "Ted never made it out."
Caruso appears to. He kicks for the surface through the shattered windscreen and the chapter leaves him mid-swim, which reads as an escape.
It is not. Ch. 89 has a news bulletin close it three days later: "Vincent Caruso and his lieutenant Theodore Martinez were found dead in a submerged vehicle". So Ted has a full name, and neither of them got out of the car.
Fenris pulls Poppy from the wreck and nobody else. The chapter does not say whether that was a choice.
A note on the tag
The speaker tag VNC is used for him in ch. 83, ch. 84 and ch. 87, and for
Petra Vance in Acts 12 to 14, who is an Alchemy instructor at
Solmere and has nothing to do with him. Same three letters, two people, two
hundred chapters apart.
The saga does this with names too. See the three Elenas in matta.md.
How long he had been at it
The chapter and the neighbourhood disagree, and the archive records both.
Caruso says twenty years three times across ch. 83 and ch. 84, and dates his first kill to twenty-three years ago. Marco Rosetti in ch. 89 says "Thirty years that bastard was poisoning our neighborhood."
Nothing reconciles them. A man counting his own career and a shopkeeper counting how long the street has suffered are not obliged to agree, and the saga does not step in.
Open questions
- Where the bear came from, and what he paid for it. See the-bear.md.
- Whether he knew what the bear was. He treats it as equipment.