Chapter 5 - Ghosts of Albany
The door to the office opened, and Nora Bennett walked out into the diner.
She had refused Dolores’s help. Her knees were shaking, her left hand was braced against the wood trim of the hallway, and her left eye was swollen completely shut, surrounded by a ring of dark, mottled purple that ran down into the curve of her jaw. The white bandage across her brow was already spotted with fresh pink.
She wore her stained apron over her uniform. She looked small, bruised, and exhausted.
Leo Rossetti’s eyes shifted to her, then quickly flicked back to Salvatore, an uncomfortable grimace touching his lips. Mob bosses of Leo’s generation were many things—thieves, murderers, extortionists—but they lived by a rigid, hypocritical code of domestic respectability. Hitting a woman in broad daylight, in a public establishment under the eyes of regulars, was not "work." It was low-class. It was the kind of thing done by street junkies and Irish thugs, not men of honor.
"Miss Bennett," Salvatore said, his tone courteous, gesturing toward the center of the diner. "Come here, please."
Nora took three slow, measured steps. The linoleum felt cold through her thin sneakers. Every step jarred her jaw, sending little needles of fire into her skull, but she kept her chin lifted.
She looked at Trent.
Trent was slumped in the booth, clutching his bleeding mouth, looking smaller than he had twenty minutes ago. His expensive leather jacket looked foolish now, crumpled and wet. When his eyes met hers, he didn't sneer. He looked away, his gaze dropping to the floor.
"Nora," Salvatore said, standing beside her. "This is Leo Rossetti. He is the head of the family this boy claims to represent. Mr. Rossetti has offered twenty thousand dollars to forgive the injury to this house and to you."
Leo cleared his throat, adjusting his fedora. "Thirty," Leo said, his eyes on Nora’s bruised face. "Thirty thousand, cash. Tomorrow morning. You go to a private doctor, you take three months off, you take a vacation to Puerto Rico."
Nora looked at the man in the camel-hair coat. Thirty thousand dollars was more money than she had ever seen at one time in her life. It was three years of rent on her little studio in Flatbush. It was a paid-off dental bill, new shoes, a winter coat that didn't let the wind through the zipper.
For three years, Nora had lived like a ghost. In Albany, Gordon had taught her that her body, her dignity, and her safety were commodities that belonged to whoever was strong enough to take them. Gordon had taken her youth. He had taken her savings. He had taken the smooth, unblemished skin over her left eye.
And when she had run, she had thought the only way to survive was to become invisible. To smile, to pour the coffee, to say *yes sir* and *no sir* and pretend that if she made herself small enough, the wolves would walk past her.
She looked down at the floor, where her blood was still wet against the white tile.
"Mr. Rossetti," Nora said. Her voice was thick, muffled by her swollen lip, but it didn't tremble.
Leo tilted his head. "Yes, young lady?"
"Three years ago," she said, "a man named Gordon hit me with a cast-iron skillet because I forgot to buy heavy cream for his coffee. He told me that if I called the police, he’d find my sister in Syracuse and put her through a window. He gave me two hundred dollars the next morning and told me to buy myself something pretty."
The diner was so quiet you could hear the rain tapping on the canvas blinds.
"I took the two hundred dollars," Nora whispered. "I bought a bus ticket to New York. And every single night since I got here, I wake up at three in the morning smelling Gordon’s grease, thinking that the only reason I’m alive is because I was cheap enough to buy off."
She lifted her head, looking straight into Leo Rossetti’s sunken, tired eyes.
"I don't want your thirty thousand dollars," she said. "I work for my money. I earned seven dollars an hour tonight. You can pay me for the coffee your nephew broke, and you can pay Mr. Marchetti for the floor."
Leo stared at her, his mouth slightly open. In his world, everyone took the envelope. Mayors took envelopes. Judges took envelopes. Cops took envelopes. The idea of a twenty-nine-year-old girl in a stained apron turning down thirty thousand dollars was as foreign to him as Sanskrit.
Salvatore looked at Leo. The smile had vanished from Salvatore’s face, replaced by an iron finality.
"You hear that, Leo?" Salvatore said softly. "The lady does not wish to be bought."
Leo’s jaw set. He turned toward his nephew, his camel-hair coat swinging.
"Trent," Leo said.
"Uncle Leo—"
"Get up."
Trent stood, his knees knocking against the edge of the Formica table. He was trembling now, genuinely trembling, the realization of what was happening finally penetrating the thick layer of his arrogance.
"You embarrassed me," Leo whispered, stepping close to Trent, his voice dropping into a deadly, intimate hiss. "You brought me to Salvatore Marchetti’s house in the middle of the night. You made me offer money to a working girl who has more balls in her little finger than you have in your entire miserable carcass."
"Uncle Leo, please—"
"Frankie," Leo said, without looking back at the consigliere. "The keys to the Cadillac he drives."
Frankie stepped forward, his leather shoes clicking on the tile. Trent frantically pulled a set of keys from his pocket and dropped them into Frankie’s outstretched hand.
"The jacket," Leo said.
Trent froze. "What?"
"Take off the jacket. You don't wear leather like you’re somebody. You’re a bum."
With shaking hands, Trent stripped off his expensive leather jacket, leaving him in a thin, grey t-shirt that showed the goosebumps rising on his pale arms. He handed it to Tommy, the bodyguard, who dropped it onto the floor like a greasy rag.
"Salvatore," Leo said, turning back to the old man. "What is the satisfaction?"
Salvatore did not look at Trent. He looked at Nora.
"The satisfaction," Salvatore said, "is that Trent Kowalski cleans my floor. On his hands and his knees. With a bucket and a scrub brush. Until Miss Bennett says it is clean."
Trent’s face went white. "Uncle Leo! You can't let him—I’m a Rossetti man! I’m your nephew!"
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"You're a disgrace," Leo barked. "Get on your knees, or Tommy will take you to the marsh in Maspeth right now and leave you there for the gulls. Choose."
***
