Page 20 of Burn this City

When Enzo joined him in the dark, it struck Sal how long he hadn’t slept fully naked in the same bed as another person he trusted, or even gave a shit about. Enzo was the blessed one—he could fall into that vulnerability so easily, and he knew that Sal would always be there to catch him. But Sal didn’t have the strength to do the same. Maybe once he’d had his revenge. Maybe he could crack himself open and release the pain.

11

Falling asleep on a chair wasn’t easy. Jack’s shoulders were crying out, but all he could manage was to roll them and pull them up against the base of his skull, hold and release, hoping to relax them somewhat. His hands were cold, but not numb. Rausa hadn’t tightened the ties unnecessarily or cruelly. The only sounds he could hear were the normal creaks of any house with inbuilt wood.

He had nothing to lean his head against, and even the attempt to topple the chair so he could maybe rest his head on the ground and find some sleep that way hadn’t worked—they’d stabilized or fastened the chair somehow. All he could do now was wait, and think, and drift off a few minutes at a time—it was never enough. He had already been mentally and emotionally exhausted from meeting Beth and offering his sad little proposal. And then Rausa … Rausa had felt like wrestling a tiger, or getting run over by a truck. The side of his face throbbed and the pain from the bruise had turned into a stinging one-sided headache.

Here I am, a man who can have men murdered with a nod or an indirect hint during a phone call. The damned consigliere of the Lo Cascio clan, Andrea Lo Cascio’s right-hand man, tied to a chair and locked away in a closet in my own house to be tortured and executed tomorrow by a man who had, until now, been a non-entity.

He ran through that thought the same way a Buddhist repeated his mantras, and the disbelief turned to exasperation, anger, and finally into a bleak kind of humor. Rausa had promised him a hard death, and Jack knew what those looked like. He’d seen bodies riddled with bullets, had seen corpses without fingernails, corpses who’d had a cut-off dick shoved into their mouth, had seen what men looked like who’d been beaten to a pulp with baseball bats. Whatever the bodies looked like, you could never really forget they’d been human once.

Jack had found killing difficult, especially the premeditated type, and he’d been lucky that the man he’d killed to be made had been a despicable coward and traitor. He would kill if necessary, if he had no alternatives, but it didn’t thrill him like it did some others. It had felt like a bone-shaking inner restlessness and nausea before, and took a long time to wear off afterward. Threats had gotten him far with the unions, and he could actually solve problems without murder. Most normal people simply fell in line when he applied pressure the correct way, such as when a construction union put him on the payroll, or he strolled into a supplier’s office and strongly suggested that some things needed to be renegotiated or the project would “die”. Not to mention, once he’d been promoted to consigliere, others were all too happy to do the wet work.

Most people picked up on words quickly if they were said well, in the right context. Most people were eager to “help” once they realized who they were dealing with, and that Jack could muster backup from all directions. Ironically, while the Dommarco family had been union busters, the Lo Cascio had always syphoned money from the unions, and, in turn, provided a ruthless element that the unions were ill-equipped to legally send into the field.

If that meant they put Jack or any other Lo Cascio man on the payroll as a “consultant” and paid a nice monthly “fee” whether there were issues to handle or not, so be it. Even better when both sides paid to have their conflicts managed. Played well, that game could last forever and be highly lucrative—no different from legal business. If skilled, a man could judge easily how much he could bleed a client, and how often, before the client became too restless or weak. The rules were not to get too greedy and always give the boss his cut.

Rausa. Now he was a different animal.

A man spoiling for a fight.

For a war, even.

Despite the fact that he’d seen the last one play out and the Rausa clan had suffered terribly and never recovered. And he hadn’t sold out to the Feds—even if somebody in a potential task force was bending the rules, whatever Jack would eventually spill would be inadmissible in court. And weren’t rats forbidden from committing further crimes? Kidnapping and torture surely counted. So far, it was little more than threats, but Jack expected Rausa to follow through on them. Fuck, at this point, Rausa wearing a wire and some Feds sauntering in and telling Jack to cooperateor elsewas his best-case scenario.

Hell, there were consiglieri who were in prison, and full members of their families who’d shopped their friends and business partners, and even written books about it. The Cosa Nostra wasn’t what it had once been, and not all the myths still worked. But this was different, this was family against family, boss against boss, and all gloves were off. If Andrea got the opportunity to strike back, he’d no doubt choose the nuclear option.

Would Jack give Rausa what he wanted? He’d seen too much to believe he could resist forever. Anything else was a stupid man’s bravado. And yet, his only value as a man had been in his usefulness and his ability to know when to talk and when to not talk. Keeper of secrets, and motor mouth when necessary. No, he wasn’t always fond of Andrea, but he respected the man’s role and his power. He respected the rules. Sometimes he thought he mostly respectedhimselfbecause others did. They didn’t see his flaws and weaknesses, and that made them easier to deal with, in secret. Men looked at him with respect, so he could pull himself back out of whatever darkness he’d lost himself in and at least be useful.

Did any of this matter in the face of death? No. He wouldn’t be around to feel the humiliation. Dead bodies had no dignity left. No longer people. They were nothing but meat. They were added to the lists of those that were never talked about again, became anecdotes, often stripped of their identities, “you know who”, and “you know when”. Anybody who was stupid enough to ask about them painted a target on their own back; it was important to know at all times who was in good standing and who wasn’t. Who’d been a loyal friend this morning and who had vanished twelve hours later.

Jack hadn’t questioned those rules, and still didn’t, but it was a sobering thought. If he gave Rausa what he wanted and anybody heard of it, judgment wouldn’t be kind. He doubted it would be kinder even if his body showed signs of that hard death Rausa promised. All they’d know and care about was that he’d betrayed them. His death would be regarded as an insult, and the response would be in kind and worse.

Rausa had kicked off the war the moment he had kidnapped and beaten Jack. His body would be the opening shot.

That was, if there was a body to find.

The morbid part of his mind noted that, as far as last evenings went, this hadn’t been the worst one he could have imagined; a good meal with a good friend. There had been days, but mostly nights, in prison when he’d contemplated all the possible ways he could end things himself. Any of those last meals would have been far worse.

Ultimately, he hadn’t wanted to die in prison and let people on the outside assume it was prison that had broken him, when the truth was that he’d been born with a huge crack right down the middle of his soul. And nothing—not the “life”, the “business”, or the advancement from being the son of a mere associate to made man and soldier to capo and finally consigliere had healed the crack. Part of him would never be respectable, would never be part of the “family”, and he’d known that from the start.

Whether he’d risen through the ranks because of luck, or because that inner brittleness had driven him, or whether he’d simply managed to fool the men around him, were questions he’d entertained often.

Those same questions had filled his mind that one dark night. He’d been drunk enough to probe the jagged edges of his soul, and suddenly felt that gnawing inside, much like a man close to starvation whose body suddenly remembered hunger in a final, desperate bid to survive.

In the club with Andrea and a number of capos, he’d slowly worked on getting drunk, fully aware that alcohol made him quiet and withdrawn, but he’d been in a mood all day. Seeing the dancers gyrating to the beat, colored flashing lights sparking off their sweat-glowing skin, among them a couple of shirtless young men, and how they’d sized each other up from under heavy eyelids, teeth playfully bared, every dancer lost in themselves as much as lost in the glory of the others, calculating yet carefree.

Something about the view in combination with the alcohol had set off a depth charge somewhere inside him, and he couldn’t hold himself together—he’d become aware that he was, right here, beginning to lose his mind, and for an exhilarating moment he hadn’t known what he’d do next—whether he’d join the dancers or attack the next warm, lithe-muscled body with teeth and claws as if he were some primordial horror. The lights had hurt his eyes, the thumping bass underneath the melody and the crowd of bodies moving with the rhythm were crushing him, so he’d cracked a joke about feeling his age and all but staggered out of the club.

In hindsight, he wondered whether that had been some kind of mental breakdown, a misfiring of all his nerves, a psychotic episode, or maybe some kind of slow-burn panic attack.

In that moment, he’d realized that he couldn’t trust himself to hold it together. Control was slipping through his fingers. That all the sacrifices he’d made both voluntarily and otherwise were no longer enough to keep his demons at bay.

So, like any man pursued by evil spirits, he’d gotten into his car and driven off out of the city, toward the forest. He vaguely remembered hatching a plan to go walk into the wilderness and somehow die there, though his mind skipped how exactly. He did remember both laughing and crying at the thought that they wouldn’t find him until hunting season, months and months later. He would simply stop existing, and it was the relief of it that made him laugh, though he sounded more than a little mad in his own ears.

How he’d ended up on Memorial Bridge was anybody’s guess. Maybe because he knew from his childhood what a desolate place it was with its flaking paint, decaying iron underneath, dark forest on both sides and the treacherous black waters of Oak River rushing below. Originally Herman Nordmeyer Memorial Bridge, only part of the name had stuck around. Everybody in Port Francis knew this was where people went to “jump”. If this had been a different sort of city, Memorial Bridge would have been the place where priests conducted exorcisms for the lost souls that surely haunted the area. Jack assumed every community had places like this—both grim and not quite real, as if, through squinted eyes, the laws of physics didn’t always completely apply. In his disjointed state, he’d wondered whether those who “jumped” were actually attempting to fly because they felt on the deepest level that those laws could be haggled over here.

Jack was done. He abandoned the car, left the door wide open and walked straight to the railing, feeling both a creeping horror and a sense of relief grow with every single step. Horror won, and he stopped, leaned on the rusty railing and stared into the fathomless water gurgling below. The river had been swollen from weeks of heavy rain, and an almost full moon cast silver shadows through the gaps in the heavy clouds that promised more rain. He gazed into the darkness below, regarded the churning surface the same way, he assumed, as saints the face of God.

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