The rain took the envelope the rest of the way.
Sal carried it the way he had been taught, flat inside his coat for the first block, where the street was empty, and then out in his open hand for the last one, where it was not. That was the rule, and like every rule in the neighborhood it had a reason: the Old Man wanted the envelope seen. Paper did not frighten anybody. What paper could buy, and what its absence could cost, that was another matter.
At the curb the black Ford waited with its lights burning two holes in the rain, and the driver did not get out, and did not wave, and did not hurry him. In this work nobody hurried. Hurrying was for men whose business could not stand to be looked at.
Sal stood a moment in the wet light off the hotel sign and let the rain touch the envelope's corner, not enough to damage, just enough to mark it. Every envelope that came up the avenue carried the same mark by the time it arrived. It was how the Old Man knew the street had seen it pass.
Behind him, a door closed somewhere, soft, and a curtain moved in a window lit like an eye, and Sal smiled the smallest smile there is. They were all watching. That was the whole of it. The pizzo was never really the money. The pizzo was the watching, and the knowing, and the paying anyway, month after month, in envelopes carried openly through the rain.
He got in, and the Ford pulled out slow over the wet stones, carrying Morrelli's envelope, and the envelopes of eleven other shops, toward the one desk in the neighborhood where all envelopes come to rest.
Mafia Honor is an original 1930s fiction series by Merci Web Design Studio. All names are invented.
