JACKIE ‘You think she will pull through?’ A man's voice asked. This was years before, five to be precise. Jackie was at the top of the stairs. She was seated on the floor just outside her mother's room, slouched against the steel handrail, close enough to hear her mother call for her if she needed her. The nurse was there, but Jackie had gotten into the habit of staying close by, never straying too far. She had been listening to a Valerie June song on her walkman, with headphones, and the thrum of the guitar and the drum beats had swallowed up all the sound in the world. When Big Jack and Raymond Bianchi walked into the house, she saw them come from above, but in the place of footsteps and the click of the door opening and closing, there was thin silence and heavy music. She slid the headphones down and all the sounds of reality came rushing back. Raymond was the one speaking, asking if 'she' would survive. Jackie knew who he was referring to: the woman in the room that she sat faci

down. DANTEBy downstairs Natasha did not mean the ground floor of Ambience. As all other buildings of Ambience' calibre—enormous, designed for business purposes—there was a connecting door to a backroom*. It was this backroom* that had become the mafia's temporary storehouse. New consignment was always arriving at Ambience. New wine, new glasses, new people. Hiding the fact that a truckload of narcotics entered the building every now and then was not to hard a task to achieve.Natasha led the way there, and pushed the steel door open. It banged closed behind Dante after he had walked through it. A few men were gathered in the back. Imani was there too, but she towered above them and so was not easily mistaken for one. They were gathered around two people who had been blindfolded and bound. A Black man and a Latino woman. The woman was hysterically; the man was telling her to be quiet through gritted teeth, and if not for the upheaval* the club was making, Dante was fairly certain tha

ANDRE Nick Noah wanted to meet at a strip club. He no longer wanted to do business at the summit of a skyscraper, he told Dante over the phone. Andre was amused. That was the thing with people who had wielded power. They tried to pull weight everywhere they went, tried to always stay in control.This club was called Pose, and it was at the upper eastside of the city. He drove to the address he had been given, and when he came within sight of the building, he saw that it was made of hard, red and square bricks that seem to pop out of the wall. A neon light sign made of cursive letters spelt the strip clubs name. It glowed with seductive red light. There were very few people in sight, as it was broad daylight. Afternoon reddeding into twilight. Before the establishment stood a small man and a woman in skimpy underwear. She was so curvy that she spilled out of the scraps of fabrics that attempted to hold her together, her areolas a pinkish red, gleaming with body oil. They looked like a

ANDREThe New Testament was right: the violent did take it by force.Except in this very instance, Andre was the one who had given and the same one who had taken away. As he sat in the front seat of the Jeep Wrangler right next to Dante Bianchi's beast of a bodyguard, he ruminated. Today, instead of his usual parka and military boots, he wore a suit, tailored to fit to his body snugly like a second layer of skin. Ankle high boots swallowed his feet up to the ridges of his ankles, and he was tempted to put them up in the dashboard just to see how they would look, if they would catch the kight. His dress shirt lay unbuttoned from the valley of his clavicle, almost down to the beginning of his stomach. A fragile gold circle gleamed around his throat.They navigated the city to the quieter parts, the part reserved for churches such as the one that now rose up before them, springing into view all of a sudden. It was tall and white, and a cross grew out of its peak like a plant's stem. It wa

DANTEIf Dante Bianchi knew one thing well, it was how to throw one hell of a party. Pam had been correct the day she said he had the look of a party boy. He knew that look: pretty, unconventionally pretty, well tended hair, gaudy jewelry, especially cuban bracelets and stringy necklaces, and most importantly, a tendency to clutch bottles by their necks.*He had learnt the art of it in college, living in a frat house with a bunch of wayward kids, all of whom came from money like him, but most of whom were spoilt brats, and most of whose parents were people made clean, legitimate money. Money that they did not have to hide. It was a difficult thing to be a thoroughly spoilt brat when one came from illegal money and had a father like Raymond Bianchi. However, even though he tried to stay focused in school because he was very aware that his mother would have wanted him to—the woman had been the first to go to college in her family, and had her degree laminated and plaqued, put up on the