The Old Man went himself. That was the part the neighborhood would repeat for a year.
Sal drove, and the Ford's wipers beat their slow time, and Don Aurelio sat in the back with his cigar unlit, because a man does not smoke on his way to a sorrow. Gentile's store was lit past closing, the way it had been lit all month, bright and stubborn, a little flag of a shop that had decided the envelope was a suggestion.
Emilio Gentile was waiting behind his counter with his apron still on and his chin up, and give the devil his due, he was not a coward. He said the times were hard. He said the banks had taken more than any envelope ever would. He said a man had a right to the fruit of his own shelves. The Don listened to all of it the way he listened to everything, clear to the end, because honor hears a man out before it answers him.
"You are right about the banks," the Don said at last. "And you were right to say it to my face. Now I will tell you what the envelope buys, since nobody ever has. It buys the lights on in this street. It buys the word that goes ahead of my name, so that men with bats ask after stores instead of burning them. It buys you forty years of mornings, Emilio. But it only buys them for a man who pays it."
He set a fresh envelope on the counter, empty, and he waited, and the rain waited with him.
Gentile's hand went under the counter. Aldo Morrelli's hand, that morning, had not. There is the whole of the law in the difference, and it took less time than the bell over the door took to stop ringing.
In the morning the store was shuttered, and there was no sign, and there did not need to be. Up and down the avenue the envelopes went a little fatter that month, and no one called it fear. They called it the tuition of the lesson.
At the desk, the Don drank the one finger of whiskey at last, and opened the morning paper, and under the fold the arrests had begun in another neighborhood. He read it twice. Then he turned the page.
Mafia Honor is an original 1930s fiction series by Merci Web Design Studio. All names are invented.
