Marco leaned back, puffing out his cheeks.
"I wasn't lying when I said not all mobsters are Medicis – I mean, their family likes to think otherwise, but a few years back they weren't the only outfit running New Meridian. The Riario, the Pazzi, Salviati, Albizzi – there were a whole lot of Old Families."
"So what changed?" Nadia wondered.
"I'm getting to that, but first you gotta understand the times back then – not like now - we didn't used to be all rotten up on the inside. There were rules, traditions, lines we knew not to cross: We never used to deal in drugs, or human traffic. There were people you never went after—journalists, politicians, lawyers, cops. Even if they came after us, we knew we could bribe our way around it, or come to an agreement. If we had to kill, we'd make it clean. Never kill a man in front of his family, never use bombs—any bystanders got hit, and we made sure the men responsible got the boot. If you were in with our crowd, you were expected to show respect for those who gave it to you. We never laid a finger on anyone who didn't cause trouble first, and we had trouble with someone then we'd have it brought out in front of the other families, to prove and settle it as men do. We had standards; we had the Omertà."
"O-mew-what?" She repeated.
"The mob's code of non-compliance." Irvin's voice echoed across the empty restaurant, he was halfway through looking over Yu-Wan's menu, "In essence it means 'don't talk to cops'."
Marco rolled his eyes. He jutted a finger over his shoulder as he continued.
"See, that view comes from Irvin's time with the police - and not surprisingly, that view is wrong. Say all you want about my business, but you won't find a worse crook - there ain't the possibility of a fatter, less honest rat in this city - than amongst the crooks in the New Meridian Police Department."
Nadia didn't reply outright, but she leaned back and raised an eyebrow at him.
"Something to say?" Marco sighed.
"Just curious." she chuckled, "The coppers are all hiss and no claw – I get that - but you might be stretching it just a bit."
"Egh, Irvin acted up the same way." Marco said, "Okay, so imagine your everyday man of the law. Why do we have cops? I mean, why does any city need them? Deep down, under the doughnuts and the badge and the fat, what is it they're here to do?"
"To make people miserable?" Nadia scoffed, "To be useless when they're around, and never around when they're needed?"
Marco gave a crooked smile.
"I knew we'd be on the same page." He said, "See, most people would say that the job of 'New Meridian's Finest' is to uphold the law and protect the innocent."
"Pssht, as if," the cat-thief scoffed, "before you go ahead, I've never heard of cops killing people who get in their way."
"Oh, you're absolutely right – the truncheons and the standard-issue pistols are all just for show. No practical applications whatsoever."
"You know what I'm talking about."
"I might. You remember the Birdland Job?"
"Birdland?"
"Yeah, it was, umm..." the mafia contractor made a vague gesture, "Irvin could tell you more about it. Years ago, this detective - name of Ben Birdland - got this stupid idea in his head that having a badge included enforcing the law. Bunch of Birdland's fellow officers decided to straighten him out by mashing him into a bloody pulp. Last I heard he's still taking his meals through a plastic tube. These weren't just some guys with truncheons - these were his own squad, people who had earned his trust and become his best friends – made him believe he could trust them with his life right before they proved the exact opposite to him."
Nadia's brow sprang up under her bangs. Her expression froze.
"I haven't gotten to the best part yet." the mobster said with a grin, "The best part is that it wasn't even Lorenzo's idea to have Birdland whacked. His own coworkers were on Lorenzo's payroll of course, but acted without consulting him. Apparently when Lorenzo realized what had happened he was so furious, he had the ringleader whacked. If that isn't proof that they're more rotten up than we are, I don't know what is."
Irvin's voice called from where he was standing at the counter.
"It's why I gave up on professional police work." the private investigator said, "As a freelancer, I've accomplished more in a month than during my whole career under a state-sanction."
Marco continued, "It's like that all through the so-called 'justice system' – juries, witnesses, judges, lawyers, politicians. They ain't got no pride, no integrity, no sense of common interest or even trust. Now if you take this and you compare it to my business? Sure, we're a bit rough around the edges, but at least we enforce punishments for breaking our own rules. People who turned against us always got their dues. That's what set true men apart from the rats – it's what allowed the Old Families to build this city and keep it running, despite the Renoirs trying to tell everyone otherwise - is that the families had self-sufficiency; we refused to rely on feeble, corrupt systems built by feeble, corrupt people -and we realized that men like us should be able to rely on each other instead, first and foremost. Omertà doesn't just mean you keep your mouth shut—it means that if you ever find yourself in a problem you can't fix on your own, you never go to anyone other than your family first and last. Because unlike the cops, your family protects you to the death, your family has honor."
"Are you serious?" Ms. Fortune blurted out, "You made me listen to that whole, rambling speech just to tell me that? Mafia? Honor? Im-paw-sible."
"These days, that may be true." Marco nodded sadly, "A lot of bad things have happened to us: Two Skullgirls, the boss got changed out, and this new guy Vitale—ugh, Marone—you'd think Lorenzo never bothered teaching him how to actually run the business from how stupid his decisions are. He has no regard for tradition, no respect for the people who work for him. He just keeps pampering the enforcers and legbreakers while the Capi and breadwinners like us, the people who keep the lights on in Medici tower, just get pissed on from a great height. Worst thing is, he's abolished Omertà. You don't need respect to become a member these days. You don't need to be from an Old Family, hell—you don't even to be human to get mobbed up these days anymore. It's anarchy. A fish rots from the head down – The only reason we've had a downward slide now is that our rules stopped being enforced. Lorenzo - and now this idiot Vitale - have been dragging our traditions through the dirt – just like the cops and courts did to their justice system. I'm simply doing what men in this thing of mine have been doing for years: I'm fighting for my fair share. "
"So the problem is with everyone and everything except you." Nadia said snidely, "Oh, I'm very convinced. I guess I'm not fit to understand this 'honourable business' that includes extortion, kidnapping, and murder."
The metal bearings on the table jingled as she thumped her palms on it and stood up. The mobster hadn't taken the trouble to pay attention to her scars. He put the pieces together, and stared at her livid expression, his eyes wide like a deer caught in the headlights. Marco was acutely aware that he had no counter if Nadia decided he was responsible for those wounds in her arms, legs and neck.
"Easy, Ms. Fortune. He didn't know any better," Irvin had finally picked up his order. Marco reminded himself that this was the second time the private detective had saved his life in one day, "give him a chance to cooperate first, we'll see what happens later."
He was carrying a modest stack of Dim Sum bamboo baskets. The smell of steamed food was hypnotizing.
The hostilities were all but forgotten as the detective set the cylindrical baskets out on the table, and they were pried open to reveal their precious cargo of assorted shrimp, pork and beef dumplings, stuffed crab claws and cha-siu-bao pork buns.
"Look, you two don't have to agree on every little thing," the detective said, seizing the moment before the two could pick up where they left off, "you can go back to debating theory and philosophy later, but right now I just need you two to listen."
They nodded in unison.
"So, what's the word, boss?" the mobster offered, "You've brought me down here to tag some rats, right?"
"Right." Irvin turned to the thief, "Fill him in?"
Marco leaned back, silent and attentive as Nadia described the thin, cream-shirted Medici and his fat red-shirted associate. Marco slouched back with a grumble, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Just when you think there's good news… that'd be Lawrence and Riccardo you're talking about." He said, "The most worthless goons in the whole outfit."
"You don't seem too happy about it." Irvin noted.
"That's because the timing couldn't be worse." Marco sighed, "If you want to see if you can get anything other than crap out of those idiots, it'd better be by tomorrow, because they're scheduled to get 'fired' this weekend."
A silence followed. Nadia furrowed her brow, completely oblivious to the informant's implicit meaning. Irvin was the first to speak up.
"How can you be sure it's tomorrow?" the detective asked.
"Vitale's orders. He does things differently than his Papa. With Lorenzo, it's simple: he just says that someone's gotta go, and we get to it. Heck, just two guys like that? It'd be easy, y'know, wouldn't need an enforcer, wouldn't need a chop squad, just ask a wiseguy to fit it in with his daily routine, y'know: Whack Lawrence, pick up groceries, whack Riccardo, then drive the kids home from soccer practice. It would be that easy. With Vitale though, there's so many limits he puts on us: context, location, method, timing. We don't need a whole marching band and a TV crew just to put some guys in the icebox." he shrugged, scooping some stuffed crab claws out of a bamboo container.
"Wait," Nadia said, "you mean 'fired' as in unemployed or 'fired' as in..."
"I'll put it this way," Marco said, "this thing of ours is a lifelong commitment. Sure, if you get old enough and rich enough you can retire and we'll stop bothering you, but it's never something you really 'retire' from fully. For people who've been sworn into this thing of ours, the only way you ever stop being mafiosi is when you get carted off in the hearse. When I say we're 'firing' Lawrence and Riccardo, that means..."
"That means the Medicis want them dead. Black Dahlia and her goons might be after them too, in that case." Nadia realized, "What'd they do that was bad enough to kill them for?"
Marco puffed out his cheeks, "Pick a reason. Riccardo's into girls—young ones. We got a few fathers working for the famiglia. You think a dad with two daughters is gonna tolerate a monster like Riccardo wandering the streets? That's the sort of monster no dad wants to see under his precious little girl's bed, let me say that much. Lawrence wasn't so bad, but he started hanging out with Riccardo and let's just say they're both equally rotten now. They're useless to us, and they make us look bad: we've killed better men for less."
"No," Marco said, "and I'll tell you why: If I knew where they were, I'd have whacked 'em already. Dunno where the hell they are right now."
"Can you look for them, at least?"
"No. It'd be like bending over to pick up pennies on the sidewalk: No wiseguy swallows his pride in front of the family by stooping to do something like that. It would look suspicious if I did, people would start asking questions."
"What makes tomorrow their deadline, then?" she asked. She picked up a whole basket of siu-mai and upended it onto her plate.
"Well, it's part of Vitale's plans – he's asked them to show up at the River King Casino, and that's where he wants 'em whacked." Marco explained, "Haven't got much more of an explanation beyond that."
The Dagonian cook behind the grille spat out a mouthful of tea as the informant's voice carried across the empty distance. Nadia's ears swivelled in agreement.
"The River King - you mean the guy who just had his daughters taken by the mafia?" The thief asked sarcastically. She licked her fingers clean after devouring a whole pork bun in three bites, "You're telling me that they'd just wander in there after all they've done?"
Marco sighed, casting his eyes upward as if beseeching some higher power to give him patience, "Okay, I'm gonna try to explain this as best I can, but I'll warn you now: it's convoluted and confusing, so bear with me. Now, far as I know, the River King Casino is currently property of Lorenzo and the Medici family—don't ask me why it's called the 'River King casino' if the eponymous River King in Little Innsmouth doesn't actually own it and doesn't like the Medici family, but them's the breaks."
"That really doesn't make sense." Nadia said.
"Understatement of the year." Marco agreed, "Like I said, this is the sort of stuff that's too stupid to be made up. My best bet—and keep in mind this is strictly speculation—is that the River King must have built the casino some ten, twenty years ago, maybe. Considering the only way to get shareholders in this town is to go through the Medicis, I'm betting Lorenzo waited for the River King to set the casino up, then launched a hostile takeover. I assume Lorenzo isn't the majority shareholder yet, or else he'd definitely have renamed the casino to something less confusing. But, as far as word on the street goes, that casino is de facto Medici property."
"Perhaps that's the motive for the kidnappings." Irvin mused, tapping his pen against his chin, "While there's no hard evidence to substantiate it, kidnapping the River King's daughters would give Vitale the sort of leverage he'd need to force the River King's compliance in a business dispute."
"And come to think of it, smearing the place with Lawrence and Riccardo's blood would be a good way to spook the River King's shareholders into selling to the Medicis, if they haven't taken sides already. At the very least, it'd put a serious dent in the place's stock value—that would hurt the Medicis a little bit, but it would hurt the River King a hell of a lot more."
Ms. Fortune cut in, "Uhh, look, I'm glad you two are making so much headway, but could you uh, break it down into little words? I'm kinda getting left behind here."
The private detective and the racketeer shared a wary look. Marco spoke first, "Look Nadia, I ain't sayin' this to you out of malice, but you're asking us to explain stock trading to you. It's really not edge-of-your-seat stuff. You sure you got enough time for this?"
"You don't need to give her an economics-101, we just need to paint the broad strokes." Irvin pulled his chair in closer, "In so many words, ownership of a business is determined by the company's shareholders—shareholders influence a company similar to how voters influence a republic government: except unlike a republic where each voter is given a single vote, a single shareholder in a company can have multiple votes based on how many shares they've purchased by investing in the company."
"Wait, wait, so…" Nadia said, furrowing her brow, "a republic is like a political thing, isn't it?"
Marco let out a howl of laughter, and Irvin shot a disappointed look at him.
"Good try, Vinnie." The mobster cackled, thumping the private detective on the back, "You keep paintin' those broad strokes of yours, she'll get it eventually."
"You're the only one laughing right now, Marco." Irvin said, shaking the man's hand off his shoulder. He turned back to Nadia, "As the prevailing theory currently stands, we're speculating that the kidnappings may be related to pre-existing tensions between the River King and the mafia." The detective sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, only now realizing how painfully, overwhelmingly, blatantly self-apparent that statement was, "I'd have hoped to have a statement from the River King or one of his representatives on the matter, but frankly his agents have been… taciturn when I've asked them about their relation towards the mob directly."
"You figure a caring father would be more interested in keeping his kids alive than keeping his skeletons in the closet." Marco shrugged, "Maybe it's just a Dagonian cultural thing, I dunno."
There was a loud thump under the table and the mobster doubled over with a pained wheeze. It didn't take a genius to deduce that Nadia had just kicked him under the table.
The private detective pursed his lips, letting a moment pass to make sure the situation wasn't going to escalate, "…I should be more disappointed with her, but you had that one coming, Marco."
There was no reply Marco could give without sounding petulant, but he made his opinion clear by holding up his fist and slapping the crook of his elbow in a rude gesture. He glanced at the feral with a sullen expression, then craned his head back towards Irvin, rubbing the funnybone of his knee where she had kicked him, "You think she knows something about the River King we don't?"
The cat feral shook her head, "Minette didn't talk much about her dad. I figured her business was her business, but the most I got was that she wasn't really allowed to talk about him."
"Well that doesn't sound sketchy and suspicious at all." Marco decided with gusto, leaning back and folding his arms.
"Do you want me to bruise your other shin, Medici?"
"Okay. Knock it off, you two." Irvin referred to his notes again, "So as far as solid facts, we know that these two men have a connection to the abductions, and that they're going to be at the River King casino fairly soon. Marco, what would the consequences be if, for instance, someone prevented them from getting executed?"
The gangster leaned back, seeming to think on it. A slow grin crept across his face, "It'd make Vitale look bad, that's for sure. Heck, he'd be humiliated. There's not a lot of respect for him with the Mustache Petes and the lieutenants as it is—he could blame us for not pulling our weight, it's more likely we'd see him as the problem."
"Does that mean you'll help?"
"Well, I can make some calls and arrange an escape plan, but I can't go in there with you." The mobster decided, "Unless you want me to show up with my entire crew on the scene. Could be interesting, but I'm not planning on going to the mattresses with Vitale just yet."
"Wait, what?" Nadia blurted out, "What does sleeping have anything to do with this?"
"Oh, jeez..." Marco covered his face for a moment, "Okay, so whenever factions in the mob get ready to do something violent, we get all of our crew boys to kiss their sweethearts goodbye, they leave their homes or apartments or flophouses or wherever, and we set up a forward barracks – usually a big, fortified room at a motel or in extreme cases we lump some cash together to buy some private property to use as a hideout. Usually since you can have up to twenty wiseguys suddenly living under the same roof, you have to find sleeping accommodations for 'em, therefore..."
"...therefore you go buy mattresses." Nadia finished, "Okay, I get it. Wait, why would you showing up with your buddies suddenly mean going all-out with Vitale?"
"If me and my boys showed up, we'd have to make a focused effort to help kill these guys you're trying to save. Needless to say it'll look very suspicious if my men showed up kitted out and then we expressed no interest in carrying out Vitale's work – it's much easier for me to deny any involvement afterwards if I pretend like I was never there. Look, if you sabotage the Medicis' business on my intel', you have to time it right – close enough that they chalk it up to an unhappy coincidence and they don't realize they have a leak."
"Okay. So, me and Irvin get in there, stop Black Dahlia and whoever else from killing a pair of clueless goons, and get them out alive. Good, I like it when things are simple." Nadia had mild sarcasm as she said this.
"Oh, don't be such a downer - it could be fun." Marco assured with a smug grin, "I mean, what are you, a-"
"'Scaredy cat'?" the feline felon pre-empted. She wasn't one to miss out on a cat pun if she could help it, "No, it's not me that I'm worried about."
"Relax." Irvin assured her, "You told me you're an experienced thief, right? Well, we're going to steal a few perpetrators right out from under Dahlia's nose."
Wiseguy: A euphemism for a fully-fledged member of the mafia.
Marone: Phonetic slang that can have dramatically different meanings depending on what dialect the speaker is using. In the context of this fiction, it's an exclamation derived from 'Madonna', or 'Virgin Mother.'
25/08/18 Edit: Straightened out some logical contradictions. In case I haven't made this clear, I am always eager to receive feedback and especially proofreading. If you find any grammatical errors I urge you to please contact me as soon as possible by PM, and I will be grateful for it.
