Page 1 of Burn this City

1

The newly minted husband and wife smiled at each other with a devoted warmth that could easily mellow and deepen over the next five or six decades. Only a jaded man would feel differently, and Jack Barsanti wasn’t nearly jaded enough to not suffer a little at how tenderly they held the knife together as they cut the huge white cake. It wasn’t every day that a beautiful heiress married a rich, good-looking man out of love.

It could have been easy to merely calculate how much the bride’s family was worth and whether the value of her family’s construction company exceeded the value of the real estate empire that he already controlled. In terms of synergies, this was Port Francis’ marriage of the year.

Jack reached for another glass of the very drinkable prosecco and watched the crowd mingle in the ballroom around the buffet and a generously staffed bar. Both families had flown in every single relative in good standing, and perhaps some in bad. There were even a few he thought had been coerced into coming through some more or less gentle arm-twisting.

More interesting were those guests who were not related by blood to the bride and groom. First and foremost, the Lo Cascio, the bridal family’s long-time business partners. Jack knew very well just how deep those arrangements went, considering he’d sealed a lot of them with a handshake in the name of the Lo Cascio, as had his predecessor before him. Some might argue whether the family would have been financially better off without that partnership and the fees that came with it. What could not be argued was that this was how things got done here, and the Lo Cascio had always upheld their end of the deal. Jack moved through the crowd, catching fragments of conversation or individual words, but lingering nowhere.

While the bride’s family was tied to the Lo Cascio, the Dommarco had lent their weight to that of the groom. Jack didn’t know the particulars of the relationship, but assumed it looked very similar on paper and in practice. He spotted Guy Dommarco and his wife Sarah chatting with the groom’s parents—four prominent, upstanding members of the community not out of place in the local Rotary Club.

Of course, the happy couple had been forced to invite everyone who mattered in Port Francis—this was a Sleeping Beauty kind of situation: even their wealthy and powerful families didn’t want to piss off one of the fairy godfathers.

Just six years ago, if both crime families had attended the same event, it would have played out very differently; people would have been checking the magazines in their submachine guns instead of texts on their phones. Jack smiled wryly into his drink and checked his own phone, balancing it somewhat awkwardly in one hand. He missed the days when those damn things hadn’t been the size of paperbacks.

“Jack! So good to see you!”

Hearing the familiar voice, Jack smiled and slipped his phone into his pocket. Don Cassaro shook his hand and patted his shoulder with affection, and Jack made sure his nod was almost a little bow, because Cassaro was easily the most well-connected man in the room. After the “War”, he’d kept promising he’d “retire” to the golf course, but maybe Cassaro found it hard to give up his role as the Dommarco consigliere in favor of a younger man. Cassaro knew everybody who was anybody in the city, in the state, and further afield. That well-filled Rolodex made him a force to be reckoned with on his own without having to draw on the authority of his boss.

“Mr. Cassaro.” Jack reached out and plucked a glass of prosecco from a passing silver tray to offer it. “I saw you in the winter garden earlier but didn’t want to disturb you.”

“You can disturb an old man anytime.” Cassaro accepted the glass as the humble offering it was meant to be. “How have you been doing?”

Jack laughed softly, if only for the benefit of anybody watching him talk to Cassaro. He took a few steps to the side, away from the buffet. “I’ve been good. Keeping busy. You know how it is.”

Cassaro smiled, but whether the man genuinely liked him or merely indulged him was up for debate. His gut told him it was the former, but his mind always second-guessed that gut instinct. He had to—it was his job to anticipate the tantrums and violent impulses of other men, and move the china out of the way before they could smash it.

“I do. I’m not hearing much in the way of bad news,” Cassaro said.

“Business is on track. Things are just as calm and peaceful, just the way I like them.”

“There’s that thing about swans,” the old man mused. “They glide along serenely, while paddling their feathery asses off under the water.”

Jack let out a full-throated laugh. “That’s me. Paddling my feathery ass off.” He took a mouthful of the prosecco, noting again that the stuff went down so easily he could get completed wasted from it without feeling it creep up on him. A few people had glanced over when he’d laughed, but this was a wedding reception, and he wasn’t the only guest who was being a little more demonstrative, a little louder, a little brighter. “But it’s all working out,toccando ferro.”

“Walk with me.” Cassaro made a show of taking him by the elbow, serving up a large helping of “kindly uncle”, despite the fact that everybody in the room knew what the old guy was capable of and could even now arrange with a phone call or a nod. Those who didn’t know didn’t count. Jack had found that over the lifetime of a made man, power waxed and waned, but more importantly, it evolved and shifted. Cassaro had been in the life for going on five decades and had likely killed more men than Jack knew.

He walked by Cassaro’s side like a favored nephew, away from the crowd attending to the happy couple, through another huge room where people danced, past buff, hard-eyed waiters, some of them with facial scarring you didn’t acquire during a normal career in hospitality, and out into the carefully landscaped garden and bright early afternoon. Jack found himself drawing a deep breath of the cooler air that no longer carried that cloying mix of perfumes and food odors.

Cassaro led him toward the pond near the eastern wing of the manor. Light filtered golden and reddish through the tall trees, while flawless white and pink lilies sat stark and inviolate between the rich dark greens of their leaves.

“I keep hearing that Andrea is still a loose gun.” Cassaro could have let Jack’s elbow go, but he didn’t, and Jack realized it was meant to fool any onlooker that this was still a chat of no consequence. Yet, with those words, Cassaro had set Jack on edge as if he’d suddenly reached for a gun. He must have jerked, because the old man’s grip tightened. “Can’t be easy. The boy’s got a temper.”

So that was the reason for the friendly chat. Somebody on the Dommarco side was worrying that Andrea might cause trouble. The longer the peace lasted, the more nervous those who remembered the War became.

“I’m not going to dispute it, Mr. Cassaro,” Jack said so low his voice didn’t carry. “But what’s said in private doesn’t have to make it out the door. We’re different people in private, all of us.”

A rumble in the man’s chest could have been a chuckle. Very hard to read his face as they stood side by side, looking at the lilies which, in their purity, seemed incongruous rising from a muddy miniature lake. “I’m also hearing that you are doing a good job keeping your young, impetuous boss on the right track.”

“Oh, I can’t take credit for that.”

“You could, but you don’t, which makes you a good consigliere. Certainly with a boss like that.”

Jack pressed his lips together, thinking for a few moments, trying to pinpoint what exactly had triggered these concerns. They had to be small enough. A friendly chat between consiglieri was a far cry from a formal sit-down. “To my mind, keeping the peace is simply best for business. There’s no reason why the good times shouldn’t last, and if business is good, everybody’s happy.”

A simplification that was nearly criminal in itself, considering how many factors went into maintaining the equilibrium in Port Francis, as well as the constant careful management of those same factors. Andrea Lo Cascio often didn’t take the time to understand such details. He was too preoccupied with his family and his toys—his customized cars, his mistresses, his yachts—and impressing anybody around him who might be useful.

“An old friend of mine used to say ‘peace is a damned sight harder than war’. War is easy. You stick a gun in a guy’s face and—boom. Do that a few dozen times and you got war. Peace now, that’s a game you play in a hundred different ways.” Cassaro tapped his lips with the first and index fingers of his free hand. “You’ve always struck me as a man of peace, but how equipped are you to face another war?”

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