Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the vertical blinds in Ham Snower’s office. His window faced west, and now that daylight savings time was back, he usually closed the blinds to keep out the glare. Despite that, stray bands of light seeped through, splashing strips of butterscotch across his desk.
He was finishing an article on mining operations in the Congo when his phone buzzed. Joanie, the receptionist.
“You have a visitor,” she announced in a voice that managed to be both sultry and articulate, and was the reason she’d been hired. When he asked who it was, her voice held a note of amusement. “She says her name is Luisa DeLuca.”
Ham tried to place the name. He’d been clubbing down on Rush Street with a buddy two nights ago, and they’d had more than a few. He recalled meeting two women, both of whom slipped cards into his pocket.
That happened a lot. Ham was a hottie, or so he’d been told. Women admired his athletic build, sandy hair, and frank blue eyes. He also had a dimple in the cleft of his chin that convinced more than one girl he was related to the swoon-worthy Viggo Mortensen. When he told his mother about that before she died, she’d joked and said the only cleft chin that mattered was Kirk Douglas’s.
Joanie brought him back. “What should I tell her?”
He still couldn’t place the name but it didn’t matter. It was the end of the day; he would meet her, see what she wanted, and if necessary, tell her he was on his way to an appointment. “Tell her I’ll be right out.”
“I certainly will.” Joanie said in a tone that made him think he shouldn’t waste any time.
He realized she was right when he pushed through to the lobby of Nicholas Financial, and a young woman rose from the couch. She couldn’t have been much taller than five three, but in tight jeans, a heavy sweater, and knee high black leather boots, every inch was perfectly accounted for. Lots of dark hair was gathered up on her head, but a few curls had slipped out and framed her face. She was slender but curvy in all the right places, and her face was part cherub, part siren: round cheeks and small nose, but a pointed chin and dark eyes he could dive into if he wasn’t careful. Those eyes were appraising him now.
She extended her hand. It was cool and soft. “Thank you for seeing me. I’m sorry to be so late.”
For a fleeting, uncharacteristically awkward moment, Ham was at a loss for words. The receptionist cleared her throat.
Ham took the hint. “Um, Ms. DeLuca, isn’t it?”
She nodded, seeming pleased he remembered her name. “My grandmother said you’d be expecting me.”
Ham was about to ask what the hell she was talking about when it came to him. His grandfather’s friend. The morning meeting. The Mafia Queen. He blinked in surprise. “Of course,” he said, trying to recover. “I didn’t expect you this soon. You’re fast.”
She smiled. Her lips were soft and full, her teeth blazing white. Ham realized he had lost control of the conversation. It was a new experience.
“When Gran makes a decision, she doesn’t waste any time. She wanted me to come down earlier, but I had classes.”
Classes? Where? In what? Suddenly he wanted to know all about this woman. “Well, in that case, come on back to my office.” He held the door open and ushered her to the hallway where the staff offices were located. Joanie tried hard not to smile, failing miserably. Was it that obvious?
The exchange of the map took about five seconds, but Luisa was in no hurry to leave. Ham—what a peculiar name for a man, she thought—didn’t seem to be either, so they chatted. Shafts of light marched across the room, eventually hitting her in the face. When she shaded her eyes, Ham jumped up to shutter the blinds.
“No, don’t,” she said. “You have a western exposure. Let’s watch.”
“You sure?”
She nodded and watched him pull back the blinds, moving her chair so the sun wasn’t in her eyes. It had turned fiery orange, spitting out beams of light that bounced off skyscrapers, glinted on windows, and suffused the Chicago air with a rosy glow.
“Sunset is the best time of the day, don’t you think?”
Ham cocked his head in a way that made her think he’d never thought about it. She went on. “I mean, mornings are nice too, especially here in Chicago when the sun rises over the lake. But there’s something special about sunset. It’s almost as if the sun is burning off all the dust and dirt accumulated during the day. You know, preparing the city for a soft, gentle night.”
She regretted the words as soon as she’d spoken them. He probably thought she was pretentious. An aspiring literary snob.
But Ham’s smile widened, and his Adam’s apple bobbed, making her wonder if he was as nervous as she. She ran a hand down the sleeve of her sweater. He was just another guy. Doing work for the family. She had Jed anyway, and she was happy with her cowboy. Wasn’t she?
They continued to talk. He’d gone to Penn, he told her, like his mother and grandfather before him. And like his grandfather, he’d majored in finance. He played football, joined a fraternity, became part of the Ivy League old boys’ network. He asked about her.
Most times she didn’t divulge much about herself. People either knew who she was, or kept their distance when they learned. It had taken Jed months to crack through her shell. But Ham was the grandson of Gran’s friend. And he was so damn easy to talk to. Dusk had descended by the time she stopped.
She leaned back, surprised that she’d talked so much. He was probably bored out of his mind. Couldn’t wait to get out.
Instead he leaned forward. “Would you like to have dinner?”
The next morning Ham arrived at the office early. As he passed Joanie, he smiled.
She eyed him. “Now that’s a shit-eating grin if I ever saw one.”
Ham didn’t reply.
“You’re not talking? Uh-oh. Did our young analyst get hit by the thunderbolt?”
He left her with what he thought was an enigmatic smile and went toward his office. Strange what twenty-four hours could do. Yesterday he would have told Joanie she was a romance junkie. Things like that only happened in movies. Today, he wasn’t so sure.
When they’d realized they both lived in Evanston, north of Chicago, dinner turned into dessert, then after-dinner drinks, and then coffee, each at a different place. Empty-nester Boomers had “discovered” Evanston, and a new restaurant seemed to open every week, each one more European and pretentious than the next. Neither Ham nor Luisa was interested in ambiance, though, and it was after midnight when she dropped him at his condo.
He wanted to invite her up, hell, he wanted to take her to bed and never let her leave, but it was way too soon. Plus, her bodyguard had been following them in a second car. The guard was a woman, ex-military Ham thought by her behavior. She kept a low profile, but her presence was enough to intimidate him.
So they sat in Luisa’s Prius and talked. At one point he tentatively slipped his arm around her. She inched closer to him and tilted her head up. She hitched the strap of her expensive-looking handbag on her shoulder, leaned across, and kissed him on the lips.
“Time for me to get home.”
He nodded and scooted toward the passenger door. “Tomorrow?”
She nodded.
“Would you…” his voice cracked. “… consider coming to my place? I’ll cook .”
“And what can you cook?”
“Um, er, I can broil a mean steak.”
Now Ham sat down, leaned over, and opened the drawer in which he’d locked the map. He was anxious to get started. Other projects would wait. If he was lucky, maybe he’d have something to tell her tonight.
As a research analyst, Ham was in an entry-level position, but he didn’t mind. He understood that his grandfather would leave the firm to him and wanted him to know it from the ground up. In fact, Ham enjoyed research. The acquisition of knowledge for its own sake was a noble pursuit. And his area, natural resources, was relevant and made for great stories.
He’d about exhausted the links to articles on the web about mining in Angola when his boss, George Trevor, minced into his office. Trevor was unmarried, and on more than one occasion, Ham wondered if he was gay. Not that it mattered. Trevor was tall and slim, with thinning brown hair and glasses that gave him the look of a dead fish. But he was impeccably dressed, and while he’d taken off his jacket, his tie was knotted tight, and the creases in his shirt were crisply ironed. Those creases would stay crisp all day. Ham figured he must sit at his desk without moving like—well, a dead fish.
“What’s up, George?” Ham asked.
“Just wanted to touch base on the project Nick assigned you.” Trevor sat down. “You need any help?”
Ham held up the map. “I got the map from Grandfather’s—er—friend.” Ham tiptoed around the word. He didn’t know the history between his grandfather and Francesca DeLuca, but he wondered if they had once been more than friends. He realized he’d never know.
Trevor snorted. “You know who she is, right?”
“Mrs. DeLuca?” When Trevor nodded, Ham said, “Grampa said she was Mafia, right?”
“The Pacelli Family,” Trevor went on. “Francesca DeLuca is one of the few Chicago families who can trace their lineage from Rothstein straight to Capone.”
“Really.” Ham rocked back.
Trevor’s lips thinned to a smirk. “Her father was Tony Pacelli. Silver-tongued Tony, they called him. In the Fifties he could have gone to Vegas with Bugsy or Cuba with Lansky. He chose Lansky and ended up running a big resort in Havana. He and his family barely got out in ’59. Over the years Pacelli rebuilt the family business in gambling, narcotics, hooking. Legitimate businesses, too. The daughter is head of the Family now.”
Ham’s eyebrows rose sky-high. “You’re telling me a woman heads up an Outfit family?”
“Why not? They’re in every other industry.”
“But—but…” Ham sputtered. “The Mob?”
“Her husband was a jerk. They say she offed him when her father made her the don. Or donna, I guess we should say. ”
“No shit.”
“No shit,” Trevor said. “No Mafioso, man or woman, can afford to look weak. So in case you were wondering, that’s who you’re working for. I’d advise you not to forget it.”
“You’re working for her too.”
“Nick asked you to be the liaison.”
Ham expected Trevor to add “thankfully,” but he didn’t. Trevor was white bread, a WASP from Connecticut. Ham came from Italian stock on his mother’s side, and while his family wasn’t connected, he saw things differently. Part of it was the Mob’s history. Dirt-poor Sicilian peasants, oppressed by the rich, came to the New World and within a generation, prospered. How could you not respect them, at least a little? Despite their tactics, which ranged from brutal to foolhardy, theirs was an ethnic Horatio Alger story.
Part of it, too, he knew, was his youth. Gen X and Y’ers were both casual and cynical. They took it for granted that corruption was rife, and they didn’t have the same idealism their parents did. Practical and flexible, they didn’t want to cleanse the system. They wanted to profit from it.
Ham leaned forward. “Well, I guess she couldn’t be any worse than a governor or two, could she? And, unlike the politicians who hired us in the past, she’ll probably pay her bills.”
“We can hope. In the meantime, I know a guy who can tell you more about African mining operations.”