All envelopes come to rest at the same desk.
It was a big desk, older than the neighborhood's troubles, and the man behind it had his feet up on it like a farmer on a porch. Don Aurelio did not rise when Sal came in out of the rain. In forty years he had learned that a man who stands for money will stand for anything, and so he sat, and the cigar sat with him, and the smoke went up straight in the still room, the way smoke does in a place where nobody is afraid.
Sal laid the envelopes down in a row, twelve of them, each with the rain's mark on its corner. The Don looked at the row the way a priest looks at a congregation, counting without counting, knowing every face and exactly which chair was empty.
"Morrelli?" he said.
"Paid before the bell stopped ringing," Sal said. "Fat. Sealed. Respectful."
The Don nodded once, the smallest coin he spent. Under his hand the ledger lay open, and the pen beside it, and a glass with one finger of whiskey that he would not drink until the row was complete. It was never about the drinking. It was about the waiting, and who in this city was still made to do it.
Then his eyes stopped, the way a song stops, at the end of the row where a thirteenth envelope should have been.
"And Gentile?" he said.
The room answered for Sal. The rain at the window. The safe ticking as it cooled. Somewhere up the avenue there was a shop with its lights on and its register shut, and a man inside teaching himself that an envelope was a suggestion.
The Don took his feet down, slow, and set the cigar in the tray, and for the first time that night the Old Man leaned forward over the desk where all envelopes come to rest.
"Then we will go and ask after his store," he said.
Mafia Honor is an original 1930s fiction series by Merci Web Design Studio. All names are invented.
