Chapter 5 - The Glass Wall
The diner was dead silent for a full minute after the South Side men left. The two city workers in the front booth left five dollars on their table and slipped out without their coats, terrified of being caught in the crossfire of a gang war.
Nora stood behind the counter, her arms wrapped around Lily so tightly the little girl was starting to complain. “Mommy, you’re squishing my ladybug,” Lily muttered.
Nora let her go slowly, her hands trembling as she set Lily down on a stool. She looked at Adrian, who was wiping a speck of Leo Marcone’s cheap cologne off his charcoal sleeve with a napkin.
“Why?” Nora asked, her voice cracking with a mix of anger and exhaustion that she couldn't suppress anymore. “Why are you doing this, Mr. Russo? I’m a waitress from Cicero. I don't know anything about your business. I don't want to be a pawn in your war with the Marcones.”
Adrian didn't look at her. He walked to table seven—his booth—and sat down, his movements slow and methodical. “Sit down, Nora,” he said.
“I have tables to clear,” she said.
“Frank will clear them,” Adrian said.
Frank, without a word, picked up a bus tub and began stacking thick ceramic plates with an efficiency that suggested he had done significantly harder things in his life.
Nora hesitated, then walked over to table seven. She didn't sit in the booth; she stood at the edge, her arms crossed over her apron like a shield. “I don't need a protector, Mr. Russo. I need a job where people don't point guns at my daughter.”
“You don't have that job anymore,” Adrian said, his gray eyes rising to meet hers. “The moment Javier Torres took forty thousand dollars from Donald Marcone, your daughter became an asset on their books. They don't care about orders of protection, Nora. They care about leverage. If they take Lily, they get Javier. If they take you, they get the docks. That’s how they think.”
Nora felt the room spin slightly. She sat down across from him, her legs finally giving out. “Then what am I supposed to do? Run? I have eighty-four dollars in my savings account. We can’t even afford a bus ticket to Milwaukee.”
“You stay here,” Adrian said. “You work your shifts. You let Frank drive you home.”
“And what do you get out of it?” Nora hissed, leaning across the table, her green eyes flashing with bitter suspicion. “Men like you don't buy whole city blocks to protect a waitress out of the goodness of their hearts. What’s the price, Adrian? When do you come to my apartment to collect the interest?”
Adrian looked down at his hands—large, scarred hands that had broken bones and signed contracts that moved millions of dollars across international borders.
“Forty-five years ago,” Adrian said, his voice dropping into that quiet, heavy register that made the rest of the world disappear. “My father was a docker on the South Side. He took a loan from the Marcone crew to pay for my sister’s insulin. He couldn't pay it back. They came to our flat on a Tuesday night. They didn't take the furniture. They took my mother into the back room while my father was tied to a chair.”
Nora’s breath caught in her throat. She looked at his face, which was perfectly still, like a mask carved out of gray stone, but she could see the raw, bleeding wound behind his eyes—a wound forty years old that had never healed.
“My mother worked three jobs after that to keep us out of the system,” Adrian continued, his fingers tracing a knot in the wood of the table. “She died when I was twelve, face down on a laundry floor because her heart gave out from the steam. When your girl came into my booth last week and said her mother worked so she could eat... I heard my mother’s voice. That’s the only ledger I’m balancing here, Nora. I’m paying back a debt I owe to a woman who died forty years ago.”
Nora sat back against the vinyl seat, the anger draining out of her, replaced by a sudden, deep ache of empathy that she hadn't expected to feel for a man who controlled the city’s darkness. She looked across the diner at Lily, who was currently trying to teach Frank how to draw a ladybug's antenna with a broken red crayon. Frank was holding the crayon with two fingers like it was a fragile detonator, his huge face wrinkled in intense concentration.
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“I’m sorry,” Nora whispered.
“Don't be sorry,” Adrian said, standing up and pulling his overcoat around him. “Be careful. The Marcones are greedy, but they’re stupid. They’ll try the courts before they try the guns again. They think they can use the law to take what they can’t reach on the street.”
