Chapter 8 - The Compact of Seventy-Eight
The meeting was not held at the headquarters on Wacker Drive.
It was held at five in the afternoon in the basement of an abandoned cold-storage warehouse near the stockyards, where four tracks of the old Chicago Junction Railway ended in a mound of frozen gravel and crushed brick.
The temperature inside the warehouse was nine degrees above zero.
Six men sat around an iron cable spool that had been tipped on its side to serve as a table. They wore heavy shearling coats, insulated hunting boots, and woolen caps pulled down to their ears. Between them sat a single Coleman lantern that hissed with a sharp, green-white glare, throwing long, distorted shadows against the flaking whitewash of the brick walls.
Dominic Vale sat on a wooden crate marked Armour & Co., his black cashmere coat buttoned to his chin, his bare hands resting flat on the splintered wood of the spool.
To his right sat Marcus Reed, his hands tucked into his armpits, his breath rising in thick, white plumes that drifted toward the high timber ceiling.
Across from them sat Alberto "The Bishop" Lucchesi.
Lucchesi was seventy-four, had spent forty-two months in Terre Haute during the Nixon administration for interstate gambling, and now ran the Western Avenue trucking association from a small bakery that sold only dry almond cookies and anisette toast. His eyes were small, watery, and yellowed by thirty years of liver trouble.
"We have an issue, Dominic," Lucchesi said, his voice whistling through a nose that had been reconstructed after an iron pipe incident in Cicero forty years ago. "The boy Leo."
"Leo is working," Dominic said.
"Leo is Anthony Vitucci’s grandson," Lucchesi said, tapping a dry, age-spotted finger against the cable spool. "His grandmother was my mother’s second cousin. The family... they don't like to see an Italian boy carrying scrap in the sleet for eight dollars an hour while the teamsters from the north side drive the new Volvos."
Dominic did not shift his weight.
"The boy broke an agreement, Alberto."
"What agreement?" Lucchesi wheezed. "A street debt? Some drunk from 47th Street who couldn't keep his hands off the dice?"
"He went into Bridgeport," Dominic said.
The other four men around the spool—older men who had buried their own brothers during the wars of the late eighties—went very still. One of them, a man named Morino who owned four dry-cleaning plants in Berwyn, quietly pulled his hands back from the table.
"Bridgeport is open territory," Lucchesi muttered, though the conviction had leaked from his voice.
"Bridgeport was open territory until eight-oh-three on Tuesday morning," Dominic said, leaning forward until his chest was four inches from the lantern’s heat. "Now it is Vale Harbor ground. Every street. Every alley. Every flat from the canal to the expressway."
Lucchesi let out a short, wet laugh that turned into a coughing fit that shook his old frame.
"You’re claiming an entire ward for an accountant, Dominic? For a girl who lives in a garden flat behind a bail bondsman?"
"I am claiming it because she works for me," Dominic said.
His voice was so low, so flat, that the hissing of the Coleman lantern seemed to double in volume.
"You have six freight companies on Western Avenue, Alberto," Dominic continued, his eyes locking onto Lucchesi’s yellow pupils. "Four of them rely on my permits to enter the intermodal yard at 51st Street. If one of your trucks has a loose mudflap, if one of your drivers has twenty minutes of overtime on his log, I will have the state police put a red tag on the steering wheel before he hits the ramp."
Lucchesi’s jaw set. The old pride, the pride of sixty years of being feared on the southwest side, rose into his face like a flush of bad blood.
"You’re pushing the old men, Dominic. The old men have friends in Springfield."
"The old men have mortgages in Fort Lauderdale," Dominic replied coldly. "And their grandchildren go to Notre Dame on money that passes through my clearinghouses. If you want to talk about seventy-eight, Alberto, we can talk about it. But we talk about it with the books open."
He reached into his pocket and dropped a single sheet of paper onto the cable spool.
It was not a legal document.
It was a printout from Terminal B-17, stamped with Hannah Miller’s red pencil.
Across the top were three account numbers from a private bank in Luxembourg, followed by four dates from the summer of 1996—the summer Lucchesi’s brother had disappeared between the airport and the lake.
Lucchesi looked down at the numbers.
The yellow in his eyes seemed to fade into gray. His fingers, which had been tapping the wood, curled into a loose, trembling fist that he slowly lowered into the pocket of his shearling coat.
"Where did you get this?" Lucchesi whispered.
"From the basement," Dominic said. "Where things are kept when people think they’ve been forgotten."
He stood up.
Marcus rose with him, his hand already on the heavy iron latch of the warehouse door.
"The boy stays in Gary," Dominic said, looking down at the circle of old men. "He works until the twenty-two thousand is paid. In full. To Miss Miller’s account."
Lucchesi did not look up. He stared at the red pencil marks on the paper, his mouth working soundlessly, like an old carp in an ornamental pond.
"And Alberto?" Dominic added as the iron door creaked open, letting in the freezing scream of the south-side wind.
May you like
"What?" the old man rasped.
"If anyone else from Western Avenue misses their turn on 31st Street," Dominic said, "I won't send them to the scrap yard. I’ll send them to the Duluth manifests."
