Chapter 3 - The 47th Street Invoice
The Italian-American Athletic Club on 24th Street had no gymnasium.
It was a narrow, three-story building of soot-blackened limestone with green canvas awnings that had not been cleaned since the Daley administration. The front windows were covered in heavy velvet drapes that smelled of cigar smoke and stale beer, their edges pinned back just two inches to allow the men inside to see who was parallel parking along the curb.
Inside, the light was the color of weak tea.
A long mahogany bar ran down the left wall, behind which an old man named Silvio wiped glasses with a bar towel that had turned the color of ditch water. At the back, beneath a framed photograph of the 1985 Chicago Bears and an autographed portrait of Antonin Scalia, a large round booth was surrounded by four men in tracksuits and padded nylon vests.
Leo "The Lip" Vitucci was thirty-one, wore a camel-hair polo coat indoors, and had a gold chain thick enough to pull an engine block nestled into the dark hair of his throat. He was eating rigatoni with sausage, his fork moving with rapid, aggressive stabs as he talked to a fat man with city credentials pinned to his lapel.
"I’m telling you, Gary," Leo said, spraying a tiny fleck of tomato sauce onto the Formica tabletop. "The permits are already cleared through the ward office. We knock down the old cold storage on 48th, we pave it, we put in seventy slots for container chassis. Vale Harbor doesn't have enough yard space on the river. They’ll have to lease from us. Dominic Vale can sit in his glass tower all he wants—when his trucks can't drop their boxes, he pays my rate or his freight rots."
The fat man chuckled nervously, glancing toward the front door. "Vale’s got the whole city council in his pocket, Leo. You don't squeeze that guy. My brother-in-law worked his terminal in Gary. He said Vale had three guys from the teamsters union thrown into the gravel crusher back in ninety-four."
"That was thirty years ago," Leo sneered, waving his fork dismissively. "The old man is soft. He wears English suits and talks to German bankers. He hasn't broken an arm himself since the millennium. The whole town knows it."
The front door clicked open.
The cold air from 24th Street rolled across the linoleum, smelling of wet asphalt and lake sulfur.
Silvio stopped wiping his glass.
The two men in nylon vests near the cigarette machine stood up, their hands drifting instinctively toward the right pockets of their jackets.
Dominic Vale walked in alone.
He was not wearing his overcoat. He wore only his three-piece charcoal suit, the jacket buttoned, his tie straight, his hands hanging loose at his sides. He did not look at the bar. He did not look at the old photographs on the wall. His boots made a dry, rhythmic clack-clack-clack against the green-and-white tiles.
"The place is private, pal," one of the kids by the cigarette machine said, stepping into the center aisle. He was twenty-two, had a fade that was too sharp for his round face, and smelled of cheap cologne. "Members only."
Dominic didn't stop.
He didn't even turn his head.
When he was two feet from the boy, his right hand came up—not a punch, but an open-palm strike that caught the kid directly under the chin with the force of an iron door swinging in a gale.
The boy’s head snapped back with a wet, wooden crack. His knees simply ceased to exist. He dropped straight down, his forehead hitting the corner of the cigarette machine before he sprawled motionless across the floor, his nine-millimeter sliding three yards under the pool table.
The second guard reached for his zipper.
Dominic took one step, caught the man by the throat with his left hand, and drove him backward across the top of the nearest booth. The wood groaned; two plates of half-eaten antipasto flipped into the air, showering the green vinyl with pickled peppers and salami.
Dominic leaned down, his face six inches from the gasping man.
"Stay down," Dominic whispered.
The man didn't move. He couldn't. His heels drummed twice against the carpet, then went still.
The entire back room had frozen.
The city inspector had already dropped his fork, his hands raised in front of his face like a schoolboy waiting for the ruler.
Leo Vitucci sat with his fork suspended three inches above his plate, his mouth half-open, a single strand of pasta hanging from his lower lip. The color had left his ears entirely, leaving them the grayish-yellow of lard.
"Dominic," Leo said. The voice was an octave higher than it had been thirty seconds ago. "Hey. Dom. What... what is this? We’re eating lunch."
Dominic walked to the round booth.
He pulled an empty wooden chair from the adjacent table, turned it around, and sat down backward, his arms resting on the curved backrest, his hazel eyes fixed on Leo’s gold chain.
"The rigatoni," Dominic said. "Is it good?"
"It’s... yeah. It’s okay. Silvio’s wife makes the gravy."
"Finish it."
"What?"
"Finish the plate, Leo."
Leo’s throat bobbed. He tried to set the fork down, but Dominic’s right hand moved—a blurred, casual gesture that caught Leo’s wrist and slammed it flat against the table with enough force to crack the plate beneath it.
"I said finish it," Dominic murmured.
Leo began to eat.
His hand shook so violently that the fork clicked against his teeth with every bite. He didn't chew; he swallowed the pasta whole, his eyes bulging as the sauce burned his throat, his breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps.
"You were on Lituanica Avenue this morning," Dominic said, his voice as conversational as a man discussing the weather in Dubuque.
Leo stopped, a mouthful of sausage half-swallowed.
"I... I had a collection, Dom. Business. Street paper. The uncle—"
"The uncle owes you twenty-two thousand," Dominic said.
"Yeah. Twenty-two. That’s all. I was just—"
"You took forty dollars from her purse," Dominic continued. "You took eight silver half-dollars from a tin under her mattress. You tore her cardigan. You kicked her twice while she was on her knees."
"She didn't have the money!" Leo squeaked, tears finally breaking through his mascara-rimmed lashes. "She gave me five hundred bucks! Five hundred on a twenty-two-thousand-dollar note! She was getting smart with me, Dom! She told me her boss wouldn't like it! She was using your name to back me off!"
Dominic leaned forward, his chest pressing against the back of the wooden chair.
"She didn't use my name," Dominic said softly. "Hannah Miller doesn't use anyone's name. She sits in a basement with two hundred boxes of tax audits, and she drinks black coffee, and she doesn't ask for a damn thing from this world."
He reached into his breast pocket.
He pulled out the carbon receipt from 47th Street—the one with the grease-pencil note.
He laid it on the table, right in the pool of red sauce that had leaked from Leo’s plate.
"Read it," Dominic said.
Leo looked down, his eyes darting across his own handwriting.
"'Paid to L.V.,'" Leo whispered, his voice trembling. "'Balance zero.'"
"The balance isn't zero, Leo," Dominic said.
Dominic reached out, took the heavy gold chain around Leo’s neck with his left hand, and twisted it twice until the links bit deep into the soft, pale flesh of the younger man’s throat.
He pulled Leo’s face down until his forehead touched the edge of the Formica table.
"You’re going to give me the deed to the chassis yard on 48th Street," Dominic said into Leo’s ear. "You’re going to give me the title to your mother’s house in Elmwood Park. And then you’re going to go to the terminal in Gary."
Leo made a choking, gurgling sound. "Gary?"
"The scrap facility," Dominic said. "The late shift. You're going to learn how to operate the metal baler. You’re going to work twelve hours a night, six days a week, for eight dollars and fifty cents an hour. And every Friday, the paymaster will take seven dollars out of your envelope and put it in a postal order addressed to Miss Hannah Miller at 3144 Lituanica Avenue."
Dominic let go of the chain.
Leo collapsed back against the vinyl cushions, coughing violently, his hands clawing at his bruised throat.
"And Leo?" Dominic said, standing up and smoothing the lapels of his suit jacket.
May you like
The younger man looked up through eyes that were swollen with terror.
"If her coffee is late tomorrow," Dominic said, "I won't come back with a chair."
