Dante's Fire

Dante: Chapter Seventy Five

DANTE

If he was being honest to himself, Dante thought, the contract killer was more likely to be a server at an Italian restaurant than he was to be a man who killed other men. But Dante did not say that.

He had seen the man's work. It was clean and efficient work. Had none of that gangster, reckless brutality going on for him, and that, in Dante's books, was next to perfect.

So instead when Dante shook the man's hand, he said, 'Dante Bianchi. It is a pleasure.'

'The man's grip was stronger than he had expected for a man who gave off an air of such fragility.

'The pleasure is mine.'

They were in what had become his office. Dante had taken up his father's former work station, a room at the top floor of Bianchi Enterprise, so wide that it could fit the entire bulk of most of the houses Dante had seen in downtown New York. He had done some renovating, which mostly involved him taking out majority of his father's things. None of it was useful to him. They were mostly memorabilia from wha