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Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty One: Jackie
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
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Two: Dante
DANTEThe sign above his club was neon-lit in the night and its name Ambience glowed blue in the dark, true to its meaning. Ambience was packed to bursting. Folks had begun to return from their Christmas breaks and after a long stretch of chumminess, most people—people who had been locked up with their gregarious kids and aging parents, people who had spent the ‘holiday’ catering to the whims and wishes of others—wanted out desperately. The average New Yorker with an existing social life went to the nightclub to unwind, and without even trying to brag, Dante could comfortably say that Ambience was one of the top clubs in the borough.The music was lusty, ear-splitting like the crowd liked it. People danced, which mostly involved grinding against each others thighs and crotches and jumping, hair billowing away from humid skin, sticking to face and nape, and the party lights danced with them, throwing an array of blues and violets on the walls and the lustrous floor. A bevy of ladies hu
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Three: Dante
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
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Four: Dante
DANTE The world outside the tinted glass windows of the jeep was blue, deep blue, just like the glass. It had been raining snow for days on end. Drizzling, to be precise. The snowflakes floated down daintily sometimes; some other times it was a steady descent of white, almost like showers in spring. Imani drove quickly, but meticulously. She weaved carefully through the streets of Brooklyn, waiting for the red lights to turn amber and the amber lifts to go green. She could almost have been mistaken for an upstanding citizen of society, if you did not bother to look closely enough. And most people did not, too busy were they, amove, rushing to school, to jobs or appointments, to their parents or their children. But if they did look, they would have seen the yellow, black-sripped bandana slung across her neck, and, immediately, they would have averted their eyes. RWD's black and gold colours were legend in the boroughs of New York, especially Brooklyn. They did not need to fly the col
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Five: Andre
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
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Six: Andre
ANDRE Andre thought how ironical it was at first, when Dante chose him to mediate with the Black Disciples on their behalf. It was not until Natasha thumped him on the back, smiling, that he understood.'Try not to get killed out there, soldier.' She said. It was then he knew that there was foul play. Why not? He was not in the least bit surprised. In fact, he was surprised that they had not tried to take him out already after his seeming complacence lead to Raymond's death. That was why he went everywhere strapped, even to amswer the door. He laughed with Natasha. If only they knew that it was him who had squeezed the trigger, they would have taken him more seriously. They would not have thought to eliminate him by crooked means. The idea, Andre knew, was that most times mediators do not return. Yet, this time, unfortunately for them, it was him who had orchestrated their troubles. It was him who was in league with the man. It was his intel that had caused their network so much harm
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Seven: Andre
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
Dante's Fire Chapter Fifty Eight: Jackie
JACKIEFirst, Jackie heard about it on the news, the violence that had spread suddenly and ferociously in the city. At first, there were rumours that there was a mutiny within the ranks of one of the city's biggest mob. From experience, Jackie knew that it was least likely. As a teenager, she had seen her father handle mutiny in the ranks. He was Raymond's right hand man and naturally, the task of meting out punishment and dispensing justice lay with him. Jackie could remember with vivid memory the day she woke up to the sound of flailing feet and arms. She peeked out of her room to see her father leading two men to the other part of the house, a bound man in their custody. He wore RWD colours —she knew their black and golds intimately by then—and he was trying very hard to scream, the sounds of his muddied voice barely making an echo in the vast house. The man disappeared and so did her father, until the next morning when she saw him washing red off his hands at the sink. She was ce
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