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Dante
“What now? Good question,” I responded.
I wished the hell I knew. “For now, the goal is to keep you safe.”
“And you too,” Charlie said.
“Yes. Me too. And find out what my brother is up to.”
“How can I trust you?” Charlie asked, obviously still leery of me. She forced the words out, consciously forming syllables as if English wasn’t her first language.
I couldn’t blame her. If I was in her position, I’d feel the same way.
“If I was going to kill you, I would have done it already.”
“Thanks for the frankness,” she said, her gaze stubbornly making me feel like an ass.
“I won’t hurt you Charlie. You have my word on that. That’s not how I operate.”
“So how exactly do you operate? You’re so successful, or you seem so successful. It’s kind of a waste of time and talent in my book. So exactly how did you get to be part of the mob? Why would you want to be?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” she replied.
“This is no two-minute tale.”
“Well just call me lucky, because you literally seem to have a captive – pun fully intended – audience.”
She had a sense of humor. This young woman was full of surprises.
“I guess I do,” I chuckled, pulling off my jacket and sitting beside her on the sofa. Even though she was on the other end, her scent wrapped itself around me: some kind of vanillowy, musky spice – the scent of a woman; this woman. She hugged one of the over-sized, decorative pillows to her, her long, slim fingers clasped around it as she waited for me to start.
“Stefan and I ... our mother died when I was fourteen; he was ten.”
Charlie sucked in a breath. “I’m sorry. How horrible for you both. You all were so young. How did she die?”
“Car accident. It took three days to find her. Her car had run off the road and landed along an embankment. Not easy to see. Since then, it’s just been Stefan and me.”
“Who took care of you after your mother passed? Where was your father?”
“He died when I was nine.”
“Oh my goodness. What happened to him?”
“The official cause of death was a heart attack, but what actually killed him was being poor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because when you work your fingers to the bone for a company, and are denied a wage that allows you to take care of your family, and you have to work a second job and/or pick up any side work you can find, you work yourself to the bone. You worry. You stress. Stress kills. And that’s what happened to our father.”
“And you were determined that it was never going to happen to you?”
“Brighter all the time, Charlie,” I said.
“So what happened to you and your brother after your mother died?”
“Stefan and I went into foster care. They separated us.”
“Oh god no,” she said.
I continued. “It’s hard enough to place older children. Especially boys. Especially troubled boys, as Stefan and I were labeled. Rightly so; we kept running away and were constantly in trouble when they managed to cage us.”
“Such a severe description,” Charlie winced.
“Such a severe existence.”
“But look at what you all had been through. Any child would be troubled,” she noted.
“I wish you had been our case worker. ... At any rate, they could never cage us for long.”
“You haven’t been blessed with many breaks in life, have you?”
“You make your breaks in this life, which is what my mother’s death taught me more than anything. ... I got tired of me and Stefan being dragged back, only to be separated again and again. I was also ever mindful of the fact that they could parcel us off to different families in different parts of the country, and we’d lose each other altogether. So when I was 16, I took Stefan and moved from Palmdale to here. It was a much larger city; much easier for two so-called trouble-making kids to disappear into.”
“But how did you survive? You were just a kid yourself, yet you were responsible for your brother. You must have been terrified.”
“No. Not really. No time. I was big for my age, so I found work as a bar back at a strip joint. The pay was good, and the owner let me and Stefan live in a room off the back of the club. It was perfect.”
“Perfect? How can you say that? What about school? A strip joint is no place for children,” Charlie said. “I’m sorry Dante. I’m not judging; truly I’m not. I just ... my heart just breaks for the both of you.”
“Actually, it was the best thing that could have happened to us.”
“Why do you say that?”
“We were two kids, alone in the world. The guy who owned the club was decent. He taught me a lot. And trust me, seeing the seedy side of life up close and personal, you grow up fast.”
“True,” Charlie agreed. “And why do I think this decent guy taught you some things you had no business knowing at sixteen?”
“You’re very astute. ... Like I said, I was big for my age. I moved up the ranks, so to speak, from bar back to bouncer, to enforcer, I guess you could call it.”
“Enforcer, as in breaks people’s legs – or worse – to pay debts,” she reasoned.
“Something like that.”
Charlie squeezed her hands together. Her face revealed every emotion, which ran the gamut from anger to sorrow – but mostly sorrow. “To lose so much so young ... did you enjoy it, or did you want something different?”
“I learned enough to want my own; to be beholden to nobody. I learned that the world doesn’t give a fuck; that you can never fully trust anybody or anything – but your own instincts. So that’s what I did. I formed my own organization. At first it was just providing security at different clubs. Then it was doing enforcement for different outfits. Then it grew into sports betting.”
“You mean gambling.”
“Yes, gambling. It’s big business, and it ought to be legal in every state, especially as some of our esteemed senators and other righteous citizens are some of the biggest participants. They read like a who’s who of the business world.”
“Is that how you make peace with it?”
“I don’t have to make peace with it Charlie. I don’t trade in regret. I’ve done what I had to do to survive. And I’ve done no better or worse than some of the most respected people in this country. And you know how I know that? Because I see them. I’m in the gutter they wouldn’t dare admit they stepped in. I have no such shame. I own what I do. You’d be surprised who doesn’t.”
“You mean that, don’t you?”
“I never say anything I don’t mean.”
“But gambling and drug running and prostitution—”
“I’ve never dealt in drugs or prostitution. Not my thing.”
“Oh. A mob boss with a heart.”
“Not exactly. It just wasn’t my cup of tea. I did quite well with gambling and my security services. I was able to provide a good life for me and Stefan. At 18, I was making more money in a week than my mother or father ever made in a year. It allowed me to become Stefan’s legal guardian and send him to private school. I wanted so much more for him.”
“I heard him say that you all started ‘the organization.’ What did he mean by that?”
“I pushed Stefan to go to college. He went for one semester and dropped out. He’s always been a handful; his natural restlessness turned to anger, especially when we moved here to San Diego. Since he was starting to get into a lot more trouble, I put him to work – as a bouncer. If he was gonna fight, he might as well get paid for it, was my thinking. He was a natural. Took to the profession it like a duck to water, even though he was a scrawny little thing.”
“He didn’t look scrawny to me!” Charlie said, her hands going to her bruised neck.
“Oh, that changed. Soon after he started bouncing, he got into bodybuilding. Even entered some competitions. He could have made a name for himself if he’d stuck with it. Anyway, the one good thing to come out of it was he brought on a couple of the key guys in our outfit that he got to know from the bodybuilding world.”
“But you started everything?”
“Yes. But who started what is not important. Stefan was a key part. I started our outfit with the idea of going clean. I knew I didn’t want to operate on the other side of the law forever. I had seen first-hand how that worked out. Unless you’re smart enough to recognize this life for what it is, no good comes of it.”
“And that’s why you and Stefan are in a power struggle; he had different ideas about which way to take your organization? Company? Business? What do you call it?”
“Never thought about it. But yes, that’s it in a nutshell. Unfortunately, my baby brother has a knack for the underbelly of life. I used to think he would outgrow it.”
“Some people are made for the streets. It’s like a drug. They get a high from all the shenanigans. And face it, flouting the rules is kinda fun.”
“And how do you know so much about the street life and flouting rules?”
“Ugh ugh mister. No changing the subject. Tell me ... how did you plan to get out of the life; to go clean as you put it?”
I had to laugh at her tenacity. I’d bared more to this slip of a woman in the last hour than I had to anyone in my entire life. Maybe she was an incognito prosecutor because she had a talent for making one spill their guts. Even thinking about the possibility of this, I answered her. I wanted her to know.
“I started investing in real estate when I was twenty-one. That allowed me to turn dirty money into clean relatively easily.”
“It’s actually ingenious,” Charlie said.
“Ok, now I have to know. How do you know so much about the inner workings of the criminal world?” I asked, more intrigued by the second. “It’s almost like you’ve been part of this life before.”
“I haven’t, not by my hand anyway. I’ve dated a character or two who were connected. Low-level thugs; not shot callers and bosses like you,” she smiled grimly. “I’ve seen some stuff I shouldn’t, picked up tidbits of info I wished I hadn’t, and heard about schemes that made my insides turn. I always thought that if guys like you – obviously smart criminals – put their minds to it, they could rule the world. And look at you: Exhibit A.”
“Thank you. I think,” I chuckled.
“You’re welcome,” she said, her strained humor disappearing. “How ironic that working for you has landed me right back to where I swore I’d never be again.”
“Meaning?”
“I told myself after the last no-good fool I got rid of that I’d avoid men and situations that put me in danger. It had become a nasty habit; one I was determined to break. And silly me, I thought having a regular job like regular people would keep me away from those kinds of people. Eventually, I thought I’d see the back of the little squalid apartment I live in that’s in a, shall we say, not so nice part of town. I didn’t realize it’d drag me right back to where I was running from; and dig me in deeper to boot,” she finished, resting her head in her hands.
“I’m sorry Charlie,” I said, my gaze begging her for some semblance of understanding.
“So am I,” she responded. “You will never know how sorry.”