Chapter 5 - The Social Club on 138th
The Paradiso Social Club was an old storefront with frosted windows that had been painted over with dark green enamel to keep the light from the street out. Inside, the air was a thick cloud of cigar smoke, stale espresso, and the distinct, oily scent of the heating oil that burned in a small space heater in the corner. Three men in track jackets were sitting at a card table near the back, drinking anisette from small paper cups while an old television mounted on the wall showed a muted horse race from Florida.
Behind the counter sat Victor Vance. He was fifty, fat, with a thick gold chain tucked into the collar of his velour shirt and a gold tooth that glinted when he spoke into a rotary telephone on the wall.
The front door didn't open. It exploded.
The brass frame sheared away from the wood as Frank kicked it inward, the frosted glass shattering into a thousand white diamonds across the linoleum floor. The three men at the card table jumped up, their hands reaching into their jackets out of old, survivalist instinct, but they froze when they saw the two submachine guns that appeared through the broken frame.
Dante Romano stepped into the smoke.
He didn't take off his cashmere coat. He walked through the glass shards slowly, his eyes fixed on Victor Vance, who had dropped the telephone receiver onto the counter, his mouth open, his gold tooth looking small and yellow in the gray light from the street.
“Who... who the hell are you?” Vance stammered, his hand sliding slowly toward the drawer beneath the register where he kept a short-barreled .38.
“Don't touch the drawer, Victor,” Frank said from the doorway, his weapon raised with a professional stability that meant he had shot twenty men before breakfast in his younger years. “You don't have the time.”
Dante reached the counter. He didn't say a word. He reached out, his hand closing around Victor Vance’s gold chain, and dragged the fat man across the laminate counter, his weight smashing the vintage cash register into the floor with a heavy, metallic bang.
Vance gasped, his chest pressed against the counter, his face turning a dark, mottled purple as the gold links cut into his throat. “I don't owe nothing! The Moretti crew gets their cut every Tuesday! Check with Silas! I’m square!”
“You’re not square with me, Victor,” Dante said. His voice was very quiet, very polite, the voice of an executioner who was explaining the mechanics of the gallows to a client. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the small candy tin he had taken from Apartment 4B. He set it on Vance’s cheek, pressing it down until the rusted edge bit into the fat man’s skin. “Do you recognize this?”
Vance blinked through his tears, his eyes bulging. “No! I don't know what that is! Some junkie left it! I got a hundred tenants, I don't know their garbage!”
“This belonged to Sarah Harper,” Dante said. “The woman in 4B. The woman who lived under the 4 train with a five-year-old child. The woman you sent your nephew to harass with a hammer when she was twelve dollars short on her envelope.”
Vance’s face went from purple to a sick, greasy gray. He knew the name Harper. He had seen her three days ago, coughing blood into her apron as she handed him the eight hundred dollars in small, wrinkled singles she’d collected from the office trash cans. “She... she said she didn't have no family! She said she was alone! I didn't do nothing to her! I let her stay! Half the landlords in this ward would have thrown her out in October!”
“You charged her eight hundred dollars for an unheated box with a broken window,” Dante said, his fingers tightening on the chain until a small line of blood appeared along Vance’s collarbone. “You let my daughter sleep on milk crates while the winter wind blew through a garbage bag. You took her medicine money, Victor. You took the money that was supposed to keep her lungs from filling with fluid.”
The three men at the card table were backed against the wall now, their hands held high above their heads, their faces white with the specific horror of men who realized they were witnessing a Romano hit.
“I didn't know!” Vance shrieked, his legs kicking uselessly against the stools behind the counter. “I swear to God, Don Romano! If I knew she was yours, I would have given her the penthouse on Grand Concourse! I would have paid for the doctor myself! Please! I got a mother! I got kids!”
“You don't have buildings anymore, Victor,” Dante said. He let go of the chain, letting Vance’s head crack against the counter before he stood back, smoothing the lapels of his dark coat. “Frank has already filed the deeds of transfer. As of eleven o'clock this morning, every shell company you own belongs to the Romano Development Group. Your tenants are being notified that their rent is zero for the next twelve months, and your nephew is currently being held at the twentieth precinct on three separate outstanding warrants for extortion.”
Vance crawled backward along the floor, his hand pressing against his bleeding neck, his gold tooth shaking. “You... you can’t just take my property! The courts won't clear it! I got contracts!”
“I am the court in this county, Victor,” Dante said, turning his back on him to walk toward the shattered doorway. “And if I see your face within five blocks of 144th Street again, I won't send Frank with a deed. I’ll send the boys with the cement mixers. Let’s see how many contracts you can sign from the bottom of the East River.”
He stepped out into the November drizzle, the smoke from the storefront rising behind him like the ash of a small, necessary war. He looked down at his watch—it was twelve thirty. He had spent twelve hours being a father, and he had already burned down a landlord's life to prove it.
But as he walked back to the limousine, his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Dr. Aris Thorne.
May you like
“Dante,” the doctor said, his voice tense against the noise of the ICU ventilators. “You need to get back to Presbyterian. Sarah’s temperature is spiking. The infection is moving into the blood-brain barrier. She’s waking up, but she’s delirious, and she’s calling for you.”
Dante’s hand closed tight around the phone. “I’m on my way.”
