Chapter 3
Marco
Marchetti’s was old school . I kind of liked it.
Dark booths. White tablecloths starched stiff enough to cut yourself on.
Black-and-white photographs of dead men lining the walls in identical frames—mayors, judges, union bosses, family heads, all of them posed with the same stiff pride, all of them underground now.
The carpet was claret and older than me.
The wood paneling was the color of dried blood, which was probably not intentional but felt appropriate for a place where more deals had been brokered than in the average courtroom and considerably fewer of them involved paperwork.
I arrived at ten-thirty. An hour and a half early. This was not nervous energy. This was strategy.
The back dining room was the reason I’d chosen Marchetti’s.
Eight seats, one door, no windows. The door had a lock—a real one, deadbolt, installed decades ago by a previous owner who understood that the most important conversations in Chicago happened in rooms no one could accidentally walk into.
The walls were thick enough to swallow sound.
The single overhead light fixture was on a dimmer that actually worked, which put it ahead of ninety percent of the restaurants in the city.
This place was neutral ground—not Caruso territory, not Valenti, not anyone’s.
Marchetti’s belonged to everyone and no one, a Switzerland of red sauce and cannoli, and that was precisely the point.
Whoever controls the details controls the room. Neutral ground just means nobody owns the walls. The lighting, the seating, the wine, the angle of approach—those are up for grabs, and I intended to grab all of them.
I started with the chairs.
Dante at the head. Obviously. The head of the table was a statement, and Dante’s presence was the statement.
Santo to Dante’s left, positioned so his sightline covered the door without him having to turn his head.
Santo in a meeting was a loaded weapon on a table—you wanted him visible, accessible, and pointed in the right direction.
Me to Dante’s right. The translator‘s seat. The mediator’s position.
The place where the person who actually did the talking sat, close enough to Dante’s authority to borrow it and far enough from Santo’s volatility to not get singed.
Three chairs opposite for the Scordato delegation.
I adjusted the center chair—the one their lead would take—pulling it back half an inch from the table.
Subtle. A person sitting slightly farther from the table leans forward to compensate, and leaning forward is a posture of engagement, of interest, of wanting.
It was a bartender’s trick, applied to diplomacy.
You’d be amazed how many negotiations are won by furniture.
The lighting next. I found the dimmer behind a framed photograph of someone’s dead uncle and turned it down one notch.
Not enough to notice consciously—just enough to soften the room, to round the edges, to create the kind of atmosphere where people relaxed a half-degree more than they intended to.
Bright light is interrogation. Soft light is conversation. I wanted conversation.
Then the wine.
I’d called ahead and spoken to the manager—a man whose name I’d made a point of remembering three years ago, along with his daughter’s college plans and his wife’s preference for Barolo.
The wine list at Marchetti’s was respectable but not exceptional, which was fine.
I wasn’t looking for exceptional. I was looking for specific.
A Nero d’Avola. From the Scordatos’ home region. Not a grand bottle—nothing that screamed we’re trying to impress you, because trying to impress is a form of submission.
I knew the grape better than I had any reason to admit. Not the polished restaurant version of it, not the tasting-note nonsense people said over white tablecloths. I knew the stubbornness of it. The heat it wanted. The soil it remembered.
Which was inconvenient, because Chicago was not Sicily and Wisconsin was even less Sicily, and some things refused to grow where you asked them to.
Some things had to be grafted. Coaxed. Lied to a little.
I chose the bottle and said nothing about any of that.
A good bottle. Solid. The kind of wine a Sicilian family would drink at their own table on a Sunday. The gesture said we know where you’re from. We respect it. We bothered to learn.
It was a small thing. Small things are the only things that matter in the first five minutes of a negotiation, because the big things—money, territory, alliances—those are the things people came prepared to argue about.
The small things bypass the preparation and speak directly to instinct.
A correctly chosen wine. A room at the right temperature.
A chair that makes you lean forward without knowing why.
I checked my work. Walked the room once more. Adjusted a water glass that was already straight.
In my head, I had a profile of who would walk through that door.
Male. Late fifties, early sixties. Old-guard Sicilian—the kind who wore linen like a second skin and treated English as a necessary inconvenience.
He’d be formal. Testing. He’d shake hands with a grip calibrated to communicate exactly how many generations of power stood behind him.
He’d want espresso before wine, because no serious Sicilian discussed business before caffeine, and he’d drink it in two sips and set the cup down.
I could see him. I’d been preparing for him for weeks—studying the Scordato hierarchy, mapping the likely candidates, building a profile from the fragments L.C.
had fed me over eighteen months of careful cultivation.
The consigliere, probably. Or a senior underboss with diplomatic credentials and enough authority to assess without committing.
I’d rehearsed my opening. My pitch. The specific tone—respectful but not deferential, warm but not familiar, the precise register that said we are equals meeting as equals, and I am the one who made this happen.
I was ready.
I left the back room and walked to the front bar.
Marchetti’s bar was a relic—mahogany, brass rail, mirror behind the bottles that was clouded with age and made everyone look slightly better than they actually were.
The bartender was a quiet man in his sixties who’d been pouring drinks here since before I was born and who greeted me with the economy of someone who had seen everything twice and been impressed by none of it.
“Espresso,” I said. “Make it slow. The machine rushes if you don’t watch it.”
He gave me a look that said he’d been operating this machine since I was in diapers, but he slowed the pull. The espresso came out dark, thick, with a crema the color of hazelnuts. Acceptable.
I sat at the bar. Checked my phone. A text from Dante: Leaving in ten. Nothing from Santo, because Santo didn‘t text, he simply arrived.
I sipped the espresso. Let the bitterness settle on my tongue. The bar was mostly empty at this hour—a couple of old men in a booth nursing glasses of red, a woman two stools down reading her phone.
I looked at her. Looked again.
Dark hair pulled back in a way that was about control, not style.
No jewelry except a thin gold chain that sat against her collarbone like it had been there forever.
A black dress that cost serious money but announced none of it—clean lines, no logos, the kind of garment that required taste as well as a budget.
She focused on her phone with the particular attention of a person who was working, not scrolling.
Her posture was upright but not rigid—the spine of someone who’d been taught to sit correctly and had internalized it so completely it no longer registered as effort.
European. The way she occupied the bar stool told me that before anything else did. Americans sprawl. Europeans compose.
I filed her under: interesting but irrelevant. Moved my attention back to my espresso, my phone, the mental rehearsal of the meeting that was now forty minutes away.
Then I looked at her again.
I didn’t decide to. That’s the strange part, the part I didn’t fully understand until later. My eyes went back to her the way your tongue goes back to a cut on the inside of your mouth—involuntary, compulsive, drawn by something you can’t name but can’t leave alone.
The line of her neck. The tendon that stood out when she tilted her head to read, a clean vertical that ran from behind her ear to the hollow above her collarbone where the gold chain caught the light.
She held her espresso cup with her fingertips—not her palm, not wrapped around it the way people hold coffee when they want warmth.
With her fingertips, delicate, precise, like the ceramic was something living she didn’t want to startle.
Her fingers were long. No rings. No polish.
Clean hands that looked like they did things that mattered.
This was not how I noticed women at Nero.
At Nero, I noticed strategically—who was attractive, who was available, who would enhance the evening‘s performance and require nothing of me by morning. Those women were interchangeable by design. Not because they lacked individuality, but because I lacked the interest in finding it. That was the economy. That was the arrangement I’d made with myself years ago: charm in abundance, depth by appointment only, and the appointment book was permanently closed.
She glanced up.
It wasn’t a startle. Wasn’t the reflexive look-and-look-away of someone who felt eyes on them and wanted to identify the source before retreating.
She looked up the way you open a door you already know someone’s standing behind—deliberately, without surprise, with the calm readiness of a person who had been aware of my attention for longer than I’d been aware of giving it.