Mafia's Good Girl novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Marchetti Table

Brusco was waiting in the front hall with an unlit cigar in his teeth.

I came down the stairs behind Luciano in a borrowed robe, with my wet hair dripping down my back.

The underboss was fifty-five, thick through the chest, with a gray crew cut and a gold ring on his little finger.

He looked at the robe and smiled.

"So this is the good girl," he said.

The girl in the white dress stood beside him with her hands folded.

She was maybe twenty-two, with a pale pretty face and eyes that kept sliding to the floor.

"Carmine," Luciano said. "It's ten at night."

"Old Marchetti wants his daughter at your table. Saturday. He wants to see his future son-in-law eat."

"Saturday I'm at Rosso's with Miss Hostetter."

"The driver's daughter." Brusco took the cigar out of his mouth. "You brought her to the Marchetti table, Luciano? In front of the old man?"

"I did."

"Then she sits where I tell her," Brusco said.

Luciano took one step.

It was a small step, and Brusco's smile went stiff.

"She sits beside me," Luciano said. "Take the girl home."

They left.

The girl looked back once at me from the gate, and I couldn't read her face.

Saturday night Rosso's was closed to everybody but us.

Two long tables had been pushed together under the string lights.

There were thirty people at them, and every one of them was watching me.

Old Marchetti sat at the center, seventy years old, bald and brown-spotted, with hands like rolled-up newspapers.

His daughter sat across from Luciano.

Brusco sat beside her.

I wore a black dress Rosa had thrown at me an hour before, with a neckline I'd have been fired for at the diner.

Luciano held my chair himself.

Then he sat down, and his hand came to rest on the back of mine.

Nobody missed it.

The first course came, then the second.

The Marchetti girl barely ate.

Brusco ate, and he talked, and every thing he talked about had a little hook in it.

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