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 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
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
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
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
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
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
JACKIEAnyone who had been a student at a college, any college at all, understood the first rule of parties: Do not, for the life of you, be obvious. Obtrusiveness could make any one, any one at all, seem like an imposter at the party. Even its host.This party, however, was better than any she had ever been to. Not the energy, no. There was money here that she had only seen around her father. There was lustre to the money too, not like the kind she had grown accustomed to in San Diego. Frat boys with obscenely wealthy parents driving obscenely expensive cars around campus; boys who shone like oiled wood, only on the outside. Their interiors were often drab and dull. Hollowed out. Jackie detested that sort of wealth, the sort that made people lose their personalities, the type that people built the entirety of who they were around. Even when she was little, Jackie had never wanted to be a mannequin like those boys were. A fixture who achieved nothing more than making bad