She held her breath as the clinker nosed onto the island. It was barely more than the size of two houses, covered in tall grass and reeds, but she hadn’t set sights on it for its size. It was hard to tell, so far from the coast, but it did not appear to have the sloping beach of a sandbar island, and even seemed to drift gently with the wind, as would their ship if the oars were docked. If she was right, this was one of the wandering islands.
Her grandmother had told stories to all the children of the village, of her own time on fishing voyages aboard the longboats, and of finding a wandering island herself. Assembled through the will of a powerful spirit, wandering islands were as much life as land, imparting some of the lost vigor of the first generation unto the soil and allowing it to again wander the lakes.
To weather the night here may not seem practical, small as the wandering islands typically are. But the spirits of these islands are kindly if offered due respect, and always protect those who sleep on their backs. And to return to the village with such a story… when she too became an elder, she could regale the next generation with her own story, not just the one she carried from her grandmother.
She teased the land with one foot, and finding it solid hauled herself over the strake and onto the land. It bobbed slightly as it took her weight, and she felt her heart soar as the remaining crew disembarked behind her. As some of their number began fetching the poles and reed mats that would make their lean-tos for the coming night, she watched one of the oarsmen reverently offer a prayer to the ship-shrine, before taking a pinch of sacred ash from the urn within. He took slow, measured steps to the center of the island, before beginning his observances to the spirit who would watch over them that night.
She almost wished she could help, but this was his role, and a spirit prefers to commune with only one regardless. He scattered the ash into the grass of the island as he shook a small chime, two strings of small shells tied on both ends to a T-shaped stick, and filled the quiet air with a gentle percussion. She could not hear his prayers; they were silent after all. But she could witness his devotion in his bearing, and imagine the honor he felt at getting this chance.
It felt strange to see the wild shrine rituals without a shrine, or even an urn, but in truth it would be impossible to erect a shrine here. The proper observances could not be carried out should the island drift and never again be found. To build a shrine, a promise to a spirit that could not be kept, would be a cruelty that the village would not be forgiven for. Perhaps they would instead leave some of the reeds they carried, shredding their mats the same way old thatch is returned to rot in the marshes, for even a spirit powerful enough to set an island adrift must respect the cycle of death and rebirth, and could make use of their gift.
But for this night, they and the spirit would share a kinship, and they would depart on the morrow with a story and a blessing.

The Zonowōdjon

Claim Map
The Zonowōdjon (families of the lake, originally from family.lake-ɢᴇɴ), also known to call themselves simply the Wōdjon, live in the coastal forests and shallow hills along the shores of the southern Titonean lakes. They comprise a collection of small villages, most constructed within reach of waterways with access to the lakes, if not on their very shore. More than anything, the Zonowōdjon are united by their animistic practices and sense of shared identity through language, as well as their predisposition to fishing and wetlands forage over the paddy agriculture predominant elsewhere in Tritonea.

Subsistence, Industry, and Lifestyle

Agriculture practiced by Zonowōdjon is more akin to horticulture. Long domesticated crops of the region such as zizania have made their way into Zonowōdjon hands, but large dedicated irrigation systems are largely not in use. Opportunistic replanting of common forage goods is frequent, typically in gardens just outside the circle of houses. While a fair amount of village labor is tied up in the planting and tending of these gardens, they do not provide a majority of Zonowōdjon caloric intake. Rather, the quantities of vegetable matter their relatively small population sizes demand are served well by a mixture of forage and horticulture, the former seeing many villages built within reach of the freshwater marshes where their most harvested good, cattail, is found.
Cattail is employed for a variety of purposes, both culinary and industrial. Young shoots and narrow leaves are consumed as vegetables, while the root is harvested seasonally, dried, and processed into flour. Tubers found in the root system are also consumed as a vegetable, as are the immature flower spikes. The bast fiber of the stem is processed for use in textiles, as are the leaf fibers, though the former are more productive and make up a greater share of Zonowōdjon textile goods. Lastly, the stems are harvested whole for the production of wicker, thatch roofing, and reed boats.
Beyond cattail, Lotus is commonly foraged for use as a vegetable, particularly its root. Nuts, fruits, and herbs also comprise a major element of Zonowōdjon food culture, though many are sourced exclusively from forage. Wild alliums are the most prevalent aromatic the Zonowōdjon harvest, while cranberries are one or the more prevalent fruits, used both fresh and dried in cooking. Hemp, both foraged and gardened, serves as a secondary source of textile fiber, and its seeds are heavily employed in cooking. Oil is pressed from seeds and nuts, with pecan being the most common source, but is not produced in great quantities by the Zonowōdjon themselves, and some oil comes by trade with their more agriculturally developed neighbors. Lastly, mushrooming is a major tradition among Zonowōdjon, comprising a significant portion of their diet during seasons when mushroom forage is plentiful.

Fishing

The true backbone of Zonowōdjon subsistence is fishing. Fish, shellfish, and crustaceans are caught through a mixture of open-water net fishing, sunken basket traps, river and stream weirs, and manual forage for shellfish in shallower waters. Crayfish are one of the most common catches in the basket traps and are prized more as a delicacy than a staple food, while larger fish from open-water fishing comprise the bulk of seafood by weight, and enable villages closer to the lake shore to grow larger, and their descendants to found new villages more frequently. Both canoes and wading fishers deploy seine nets and cast nets.
The development of more sophisticated nets, the need for more hands to operate them, and the weight of increased hauls have all driven the development of Zonowōdjon shipbuilding significantly. While traditional reed boats and birchbark canoes are still frequently employed, particularly in rivers and streams and for more coastal operations, open water fishing trips make use of larger and far more sophisticated sewn-plank longboats with proper oar locks. Even large villages may only have one or several such boats, and their construction and maintenance is a significant expenditure of labor and point of clan pride. Crews on these boats often leave their village for days at a time, camping on small islands or distant shores. The reed-mats used to construct their temporary lean-tos are carried on the ship itself, chosen for their low weight. These larger longboats typically manage drop nets, though they may also be used to deploy seine nets with the aid of smaller outriding canoes, as the longboats are better able to transport a large catch.

Cuisine

Zonowōdjon cuisine centers zizania, cattail flour, and fish as staples. A common preparation of fish involves slicing the fish crosswise and stewing in an aromatic and seasoned stock. Both the flavorful broth and the flesh of the fish are fully consumed, with the aid of a lumpy flatbread produced from cattail flour. A flat stone atop a stone tripod, constructed above a fire, is the main method for production of flatbreads. Fish may also be dry roasted whole or sliced, with seeds and herbs pressed into the flesh if it has been sliced first. When catches are in excess of what can be consumed, which is common for coastal villages with longboats, fish will be smoke-cured for preservation and hung in a store hut. Smoke cured fish may still be cooked in a broth as above, or eaten as is. Regardless, at family meals it is common for older family members to pick the flesh of the fish from the bone after cooking is done, and distribute it to those younger than them. Another common dish is zizania pilaf, cooked in a thinner stock than fish. This dish often includes dried fruits, nuts, root and vegetables, and sometimes smaller seafood like shellfish and crayfish, with what is included owing more to seasonality and availability of forage than strict recipe. One more dish of note is a vegetable fritter, formed with shredded leaf and vegetable matter, mixed thoroughly with cattail flour, water, and seasonings before being fried. As oil production is marginal in many Zonowōdjon villages, this forms a less frequent component of the diet, but as a result holds a certain prestige. Ceremonies such as weddings, feasts when hosting representatives of other villages, and spiritual observances and festivals are more likely to see production of fritters. Notably, a vegetable fritter is a common burnt offering at shrines due to its status as a festival food.

Architecture

Villages are typically constructed of permanent dwellings. All buildings are single-storey, and roofed with cattail thatch. Most buildings are single room, and constructed of wattle-and-daub between upright wooden posts, though additional standing posts may support the roof in a longhouse. The clan patriarch lives in a longhouse, which may also be used as a storehouse and hold clan shrines. Cookstoves and fires are typically built outside during fair seasons, shielded by low reed mat walls and thatch lean-tos, though they are often moved to interior firepits during cold weather. Flooring is predominantly woven reed mats, which are easily pulled back to expose bare soil should a fire be constructed inside. Some homes feature bunk beds constructed flush with the wall.
A village never contains more than three clans, and most frequently consist of only one. Houses are generally communal sleeping spaces, so many villages contain few buildings, and some may be devoted entirely to stores. Houses are generally arrayed so that all doors face the center, which is a beaten earth area free of plants and used for celebrations and ceremonies, as well as being used daily for the practice of industry such as processing cattail and weaving. Doing daily labor indoors is frowned upon during fair weather.

Tools

The Zonowōdjon make use of knapped stone and jade tools, reed wicker baskets, hemp or cattail-fiber sacks and ropes, and primarily burn wood for fire. Western obsidian infrequently permeates Tritonia through trade, so many villages are able to make use of obsidian knives, and some use obsidian in jewelry as well. Shells and bone feature prominently in jewelry and ornamentation, and shells are also the primary material used for shrine chimes. Wood carvings are frequently used for ornamentation, particularly on shrines, and those chimes which are not shell are often carved wood. Wooden chimes that can create clear ringing tones are particularly prized, and make auspicious gifts to other villages. Stone-tipped spears are the most common weapons wielded by Zonowōdjon villagers, though clubs with a flat wooden handle and a setting of a fist-sized smooth stone are also common. Obsidian is rarely used in weaponry.

Spirituality and Mythology

The Father Moon is seen as the shepherd of souls and the patron of reincarnation. He is also the father of men and fish, and fish scales are said to shimmer like moonlight on the surface of water because of his blessing within them. Moonbeams contain souls of the deceased returning to the world both as spirits and to enter new flesh, and the Father Moon travels to the edge of the world every night to collect those souls that have traveled the dark rivers beneath the earth to reach him.
The Mother Sun is seen as the patron of flowers and plants, particularly the cattail. Filled with both warmth and rage, she begat the first life in the world, but cares little for the cycle of souls overseen by the Father Moon after the two generations she directly birthed died or otherwise left the lakes.
T’sawayda is a psychopomp and the mythological ancestor of the Zonowōdjon. They are depicted both as a giant man and an enormous fish, or with elements of both such as the head of a pike on the torso of a man. They are a member of the Zonowōdjon third gender, leaning to masculine expression, and are a member of the second generation of life. They are seen as the first of the second generation to climb from land to shore, and thus their descendents are all the Zonowōdjon. T’sawayda urged all their descendents to reap the Mother Sun’s bounty on land, but stay close to the shore to partake of the Father Moon’s bounty. T’sawayda is said to now make their home in the depths of the lake, with one door of their longhouse opening to the waters of the lake, and another to the bank of the dark rivers beneath the world. They find and guide lost souls, such as Zonowōdjon who die on the water and risk becoming demons, freeing them from their flesh and offering them hospitality before sending them on their voyage to reunite with the Father Moon.
Zonowōdjon believe the world is full of spirits, souls without constraining flesh who embody much of the natural world or protect those within it. There are believed to be local spirits both of locations, such as hills, marshes, and groves, as well as spirits to things within, such as the spirit of fish in a given marsh, or the spirit of a particularly ancient tree. Further, all villages and even most permanent buildings have venerated tutelary spirits.

Shrines

The core of Zonowōdjon spiritual practice is composed of maintaining shrines and holding public festivals. Shrines are dedicated to a local or tutelary spirit, with the latter also often seen as an ancestral spirit from a member of the clan in that village. For those spirits within buildings, a shrine is a simple as a clay urn which bears a pictorial representation of the spirit, into which offerings are placed. For spirits of larger areas, a shrine is constructed, usually from wood, either sewn or assembled through joinery. These shrines contain the urn which venerates the spirit proper. Most shrine urns feature a lid, often a wicker lid which is replaced annually during the vernal festival observances. Shell chimes are often hung from the roof of freestanding shrines, should there be enough clearance, or from poles erected around the shrine or the boughs of nearby trees. Similar chimes are held and shaken by shrine tenders during their observances, whether or not a shrine itself bears standing chimes.
Spirit urns often contain permanent offerings, with obsidian, bone, shell, and jade beads being common. Beads may initially be on a string, but the burning of offerings often leaves the beads free within the ash. During festivals and days of spiritual observance, offerings of food are placed within the urn. Offerings in distant shrines may be permitted to rot, but typically the offering is burned before being placed within the urn. Should an urn break, the shrine tender is expected to go into a period of grief and observance, and produce a replacement urn before interring the shards at the base of the shrine. Beads and other permanent offerings are transferred.
With the small population of most villages, a single man may be expected to tend multiple shrines, but the most important shrines may have a single tender. The clan patriarch is seen as symbolically responsible for the shrine to their clan’s guardian spirit, and the patriarch leading an entire village for the village spirit’s shrine as well.
Clinkers, the prized sewn-plank boats used for open-water fishing trips, hold a similar importance to homes, and thus contain a shrine. Typically the shrine is a small cavity constructed in the prow of the ship, containing a spirit urn. It is commonly believed that new ships are guarded by the returning spirit of an ancestor, so placing family ash or even bone shards within the shrine urn is often part of dedicating a new clinker.
Souls are believed to descend to the world starting on the full moon, so dedications of new homes and boats are usually practiced on the night of the full moon, that the soul of an ancestor might find the shrine and become a guardian for the new structure.

Creation

All the world was one lake, stretching to the ends of the world, and no souls lived within it. Thus, the Mother Sun and the Father Moon came together to cast the first life to the earth. The first life was enormous, and as it died, the massive corpses divided the world into smaller lakes. The Mother Sun was grieved, but tried again. The next generation was composed of smaller beings, but the world was still unable to bear their weight. Most voluntarily climbed to the sky, becoming stars, though some today choose to return to a world that is too small for them, creating disasters that terrorize the third generation. The third generation was the last attempt, and still lives upon the world, birthed by the giants of the second generation before their exodus, but blessed with life by the sky. After so many generations, the seed of the Father Moon was spent, and he went dark for the first time. It is only when many of the third generation died their first death and returned to the edge of the world that the Father Moon gathered them back to himself, and once again began to shine. Thus, the Father Moon became a shepherd of souls, gaining and losing his light as the cycles of death and rebirth flow.

The Afterlife & Funerary Practice

The Zonowōdjon do not believe in an afterlife as such, but rather in the eventual return of souls, though some may claim the dark rivers of the underworld amount to some form of hell or purgatory. The Zonowōdjon believe that the soul resides in the bones, and is constrained by the flesh. The soul must sink into the Earth to travel the great rivers under the Earth to its edge, where it will be gently collected by the Moon after a long, dark voyage. Souls embraced by the moon are returned to the lakes in the form of gentle moonbeams, souls ready to find new life. Souls of animals likewise find themselves returned to the lakes by the Moon. A soul may become the new guardian spirit of a home or village, or find itself embodied in a new human life. Those souls who return as tutelary spirits are particularly venerated, and it is believed that important ancestors return to protect the homes, boats, and villages of their descendants. Conversely, a soul lost in the dark rivers who never returns to the moon may find itself twisted by the dark, and eventually claw its way up through the lakebeds as a demon. Demons may also spawn from a soul trapped in the darkness of its own dead flesh, a fate seen as especially common for those lost to the waters of the lake. Thus, prayers for the deliverance of the missing to the Father Moon are common.
By far the most common funeral practice is cremation, as it is believed the soul cannot be liberated while flesh still encases bone. After a cremation, bones often remain. Many villages maintain ossuaries composed of shallow earthen mounds beyond the circle of homes in which bones are interred, sometimes alongside carvings, clothing, or even jewelry. Smaller villages without ossuary mounds have simpler burial grounds further outside of the village, with skulls alone being instead interred at the foundation of family dwellings. In both cases, carvings may be made on the forehead of an intact skull before burial, and a shrine urn decorated to match, in hopes that the soul of the deceased will return to grace the village as a tutelary spirit. Some ash from every burial is placed in the spirit urn of a family home, some in the village longhouse, and often distributed to important shrines of the region surrounding the village, with the latter being obligatory for those who served a particular spirit. Remaining ash is stored in a communal family urn, and on the construction of new homes, some ash from this urn is ritually placed in a small pot or basket which is buried at the foundation to consecrate the ground, and allow the descending spirits of ancestors to find and protect the site.

Culture and Gender

Zonowōdjon clan names are matrilineal, but the ruling structure of clans and villages is more patriarchal, with each clan having a patriarch who serves as both the face of the clan, and the arbiter of important decisions. However, there is a strong cultural importance put on the opinions of elderly women, who hold a similar social importance to clan patriarchs as the retainers of oral history. They wield de facto authority in villages, especially those containing multiple clans. Most villages contain 1-3 clans, with one clan’s patriarch holding primary authority, extending from their role as the face of the village when meeting with outsiders or people from other villages.
Gender roles are not particularly strict among younger individuals, especially the unmarried, with only clan patriarchs and village elders taking on especially gendered roles. Both men and women participate in fishing and forage, as well as cooking and food processing and preservation. Older women tend to perform most weaving, as it is a position of some prestige that does not require them to leave the village. A major exception is during mushrooming seasons, when elderly women are trusted to identify safe forage, and often leave the village alongside the typical younger foragers. The main gender differences observed are that it is seen as a more womanly role to plant and tend a garden, while it is seen as a more manly role to perform observances and burn offerings at a shrine (though at major ceremonies, it is still elderly woman who recount myths and tales for those in attendance, while a man performs the actual shrine observances).
Zonowōdjon culture also observes a third gender, though it is mutable and can express as leaning to either male or female gendered expression based on the individual. The Zonowōdjon believe the third gender to be an expression of the returned soul of another life in a differently sexed body. Visibly intersex children are always identified as belonging to this gender, but individuals who are not visibly intersex may also find themselves identified through other means. Commonly, showing early aptitude with reading the stars is seen as a sign that a child is of the third gender, as is a child showing both interest and aptitude in the weaving usually practiced by elderly woman. Regardless of birth sex, members of the third gender identified in this way tend to lean to some feminine aspects and gain some of the prestige granted elderly women, while those identified by their intersex characteristics tend to lean masculine. Members of this third gender are respected, but not particularly venerated. A member of the third gender can be a shrine tender, just as a man might, and participate in any labor, but are usually seen as beyond the institution of marriage and thus live their lives unmarried.

Festivals

There are several seasonal festivals observed by the Zonowōdjon, though precise timing varies heavily from village to village, with each usually choosing a phase of the moon, timed from the start of a season, to begin and end observances. Most festivals are multi-day affairs, With each day being dedicated to the observance of one particular god or heroic ancestor. Typically only one day features a full feast, and while spiritual observance happen on every day, the last day of a festival week usually sees a large communal observance. For multiple festivals, the decoration of the village is an important observance. Slender cloth drapes hung from the roofs of buildings and the boughs of trees mark the largest vernal festival, while wreaths of zizania stalks and cattail reeds hung on walls and poles mark the autumnal zizania festival. Some festivals call for decorations to be placed on poles erected in the common areas. While for some villages these poles are a temporary fixture, in other towns they remain year-round, but only feature their festival decorations during the week of observance and otherwise remain bare.
A major feature of several festivals, including the zizania festival in autumn, is circumambulation around a temporary shrine or ritual fetish constructed in a village center. Though circumambulation is practiced elsewhere in Zonowōdjon spirituality, here it persists for as long as two hours, described as beginning as the sun sets and ending when the moon is fully ascended to the sky.In addition to festivals, many clans have other non-festival observances. It is a common practice for most families to forgo the eating of fish on the new moon, and to fast during the daylight hours of both half-moons.

Techs

Key:

• Celestial Navigation

Main:

• Drop Net
• Sewn Plank Boat

Minor:

• Fishing Trap: Sunken Basket
• Hand Fishing Net: Cast Net
• Hand Fishing Net: Seine Net
• Oar Locks
• Smoke Curing

Previous Part: https://www.reddit.com/redditserials/comments/13sxdo9/i_accidentally_joined_the_mafia_in_south_brooklyn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
These last few parts have taken a lot longer for me to write than I thought. A lot of shit has gone down in the last two months, and a lot of it, frankly, is kind of a blur. But I figure, if you've stuck with me this long, then you deserve to know how it all ended up so I'm going to try my best to remember every detail of what happened.
Me? I've spent every free hour I've had, just lying in bed. I've got a lot of healed wounds that still hurt me pretty damned badly.
Blood loss from multiple gunshot wounds and then drowning in the East River, dying and then being brought back while still human, incidentally, takes a lot out of a guy.
But… I'm getting way ahead of myself.
Where were we, again?
Oh yeah, that's right. The funeral without caskets, inside of a Ukrainian restaurant just off the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. That's where I left off at.
()()()
Antoni's corpse and I had spoken together for a while longer, about Beccs and their baby, actually, sitting there in the floor in front of the three empty bathroom stalls. The next moment, as usual, he was… just gone.
It took a while to slow the bleeding, and it took even longer to try and clean myself up with just hand soap and paper towels and the water from the sink. Nobody came into the bathroom again, and as I left, I saw why. There was a sign on the door that read 'Out of Order' with something printed below it in Cyrillic that I imagined probably said the same thing as the English.
My new winter coat had been left on the floor in front of the door and the Emergency Exit at the end of the hall had its alarm disabled and had been left propped open with a brick.
I took that as a clear message that they didn't want me rejoining the party, so I exited into the alley and sat on a milk crate chain-smoking until 2 PM when the funeral ended.
The weather app on my phone said it was 10 degrees outside, but oddly enough the cold air felt soothing on my bruised face. My eyes were nearly swollen shut, and every now and again I had to pull some of the toilet paper out that I'd stuffed in my pocket to wipe another trickle of blood from my nose when I sniffed a little too hard and moved the clots loose.
At 1:57, I started to hear people exiting the restaurant, so I moved onto the sidewalk to wait for Becca. The people leaving the funeral only glanced at me for a second and then looked away with a bored expression, like I wasn't even there. Finally, only Becca and Toni's immediate family were still inside.
Tatiana gave Becca a hug, Igor, a gentle handshake, and Antoni Sr. bent down, cupped his hands around Becca's face and pressed a chaste kiss to her forehead. I could see that his right hand was bandaged and he was holding it straighter than his left. Good. I hoped the fucker had broken it when he'd punched me in the jaw.
As Becca exited, I could tell she was angry even before she stomped over to me and shoved me three times in quick succession. Like Jimmy, Becca was a lot stronger than she looked, but now I knew why. I couldn't do much but ball up and take the hits.
"Where the fuck did you go? You just took off and left me there by myself. 'He wouldn't have left without saying goodbye if he had a choice.' You knew, you cocksucker, you knew, you knew he was dead!"
"Yeah, I knew! Antoni was in the news. But we gotta get the fuck out of here, Beccs, you're making a scene, another one, and I gotta get outta this neighborhood before something worse happens to me."
The high color of anger in her cheeks dropped away immediately into a pallid white. She'd been so pissed she'd never once registered the state of my face.
"Jesus Christ, Tony, what the fuck happened to you?"
"Your little Polish sausage's Daddy Dearest just beat the fuck out of me in the men's bathroom, that's what the fuck happened."
"Why would he do that?" Becca asked, but I didn't answer. She looked back to Skovorodka, following my gaze. Antoni Sr. was still standing there, just inside the front door, watching me with narrowed eyes, his hands folded neatly behind his back like a soldier at ease. It reminded me a lot of how Antoni used to stand while we were waiting for the train together.
"Fuck," she muttered, then "Shit," and grabbed me by the arm. "Come on."
"Why would he do that?" She asked me again as we climbed the stairs to the train platform.
"Antoni was Mob, Becca, Bratva. His whole goddamned family is. Him and his brothers and his father and his fucking Russian uncle, and I'd say your Mama Tatiana probably isn't in the dark about what her brother and her hubby and his sons do to make a living, either. I don't know why the Zabrowskas were on the Avenue, but suffice to say it was probably for nefarious reasons, and Jimmy found out about it and took care of business.
"Only I don't think he realized exactly who he was taking out at the time he did it, or else he never would have put the body in the River for somebody to find. And then the other three showed up to avenge their brother, only two of 'em never made it past Bianchi any farther than Antoni did."
"The fuck are you trying to say?" Her tone says she already understands just fine and doesn't want to.
"I'm saying your dear sweet Mamma killed your boyfriend, Becca. She removed all the identifying marks from his body, ate what she wanted, then pulled all his teeth out and chewed off his hands and his feet. They dumped the body in the East River and they found him about 5 days ago, floating off of Battery Park."
"Oh God. That's why. I asked Tatiana where Antoni was going to be buried and she told me in the public cemetery on Hart Island. They're not claiming the body because they don't wanna go to the cops. For the last week I been cussing him for everything he was worth, and he's been laying in the fucking morgue." She pressed her hand to her mouth, and I saw her bloodshot eyes filling with tears again.
"Please don't cry, Becca, cause I'm gonna start crying again and I've cried enough for today."
She sniffed back her tears and swallowed hard.
"But I don't understand, Tony, what the fuck does that have to do with you?"
"They knew, Beccs, they knew how the Zabrowskas died, who killed them, and they knew I helped Moretti get rid of the bodies afterwards. That's why Antoni's father went after me. The uh… the fucking Pakhan thought Jimmy sent me there to rub it in their faces that they weren't going to be able to bury any of their boys."
"How the fuck would they know that?" She barked at me.
"Somebody's feeding them information and not some asshole on the street, somebody from inside the Camorra."
"Who would do that?"
I saw her eyes darting about wildly as she tried to think of the answer to her own question.
"I don't know, uh, the driver that brought Moretti, he didn't look like he was too fond of Bianchi, maybe he's a fucking option."
"Frankie? I mean, him and Ma have never gotten along. He's never liked her and the feeling's mutual but… that doesn't make any sense, Frankie's always been loyal to the Camorra. Rossi always said he practically muttered the Omerta in his fucking sleep, that he was a soldato down to the bones."
"I have no idea, Becca, but it gets worse," I said quietly. If it didn't hurt so goddamned bad, I would've squeezed my eyes shut.
"How the fuck could it possibly get worse, Tony?"
"First you gotta promise you're not gonna hit me again."
Her hand balled into a fist, and I couldn't help but flinch.
"I'm gonna knock you the fuck out right now if you don't stop wasting my time, Cipriani."
"I sold her out, Becca. Bianchi. I told them where she lives and how to find her tonight."
"You what!?"
"I had to! He was gonna cut my fucking fingers off, and I don't know if he was going to take all four or just three but I wasn't about to fucking find out. I kind of need those fingers seeing as I'm a fucking southpaw!"
I held my left hand out to her, curled my fingers inward, but the third finger just… stayed straight. "Ah, fuck, I didn't even notice that."
"Jesus Christ, the tendon's been cut," she whispered, and when she pressed her hand to her mouth again she looked less like she was swallowing back tears and more like she was trying to swallow back vomit. I couldn't really blame her. I felt pretty nauseous myself.
"You know, I'm, I'm not worried about Ma," she said, finally. "It wouldn't be the first time somebody's tried to take her out. She's harder to kill than they think."
"Would, uh, would cutting her head off work? Cause if so I think they're already pretty aware of how to get the job done. They… they know Bianchi's not human, Becca."
Her face got paler, if that was even possible, and her eyes were the size of saucers.
"This is a goddamn nuclear disaster. Jesus fuck."
We stood the last few minutes waiting for the train in silence. As the doors slid shut and we sat down, Becca began laughing wildly.
"So you're in hysterics for real, huh?" I asked.
"You're gonna have to forgive me, I'm a little slow on the uptake today, but I just got it, Polish sausage… only, he wasn't little, you know, he was hung like a fucking horse, and it's a goddamn tragedy for women everywhere that the man isn't on this earth anymore. And he knew how to use it, too. Best sex I ever had in my life… only sex I ever had in my life, but that's not the fucking point." A short, barking sob tore out of her.
I groaned. "You know, that is way, way more information than I ever wanted to know about you and Antoni's sex life. You couldn't, uh, you couldn't let that one pass by, huh?"
"I never pass up the opportunity to make a good dick joke. And he had Good Dick."
I laughed and regretted it as it tightened muscles in my stomach that were still a little angry about being used as Antoni Sr's personal punching bag.
"Touché, Miss Rebecca, touché."
"The two-faced bastard, I gotta give the motherfucker that much, you know, it's a uniquely personal way to say Fuck You to the Underboss, getting his teenaged daughter pregnant. I am so, so goddamned tired of being a pawn in other people's games. He's lucky he's already dead or I'd kill the bitch myself," she whispered.
"It wasn't a game, Becca, what happened between you and Antoni," I whispered back. I knew because Antoni's corpse had told me as much. "Don't ask me how I know, cause I don't wanna talk about it, but it wasn't a game. You didn't know about him and he didn't know about you and it was a big, fucked up coincidence. You loved him, and he really, truly loved you... he worshiped the ground you walked on." Actually, he had said he worshiped the boots she walked in, but I figured it was a translation issue. "It was a regular old Romeo and Juliet: Brooklyn Edition."
She squeezed her eyes shut, snorted and at the same time choked on another sob.
"Yeah, but Romeo and Juliet ended in a double suicide, not a murder and a single mother." Her tiny hand went to her mouth again, and she wasn't able to hold back the tears this time. "I miss him, Tony, I miss him so fucking much."
"You know, Beccs, I miss him, too." I miss him when he was alive, not looking like a walking nightmare, and talking my goddamned ear off half the time, but I wasn't about to tell her that. "He was the first friend I made down here."
"It's fucking stupid. I still remember every single thing he said to me those first few times I met him."
"Odd as it is, I do too, Beccs. He was that kind of guy, I guess, he didn't have to work hard to make an impression on people. It was, uh, three days after I moved in, I think. I was in the basement, getting ready to do my laundry that morning, fighting with the stuck knob on that machine down at the end? And he walks in with his clothes basket balanced on his hip and reaches past me and just… turned the fucking thing, like it wasn't even stuck to begin with. 'It has an attitude, but it likes me,' he says, and I say, 'I can see that.'
"And he, he told me his name. 'Zabrowska,' he says, 'Antoni.' And I laughed and said, 'Nice to meet you, Toni, I'm Tony.' 'Really?' he says, and I say 'Yeah. Really. Antonio Alessio Gioele Cipriani, the third, if you please.'"
"Goddamn, that name is painfully Italian. No wonder you tell everybody 'Just call me Tony,'" Becca snorted.
"Thank you, Miss Rebecca, I can assure you I didn't pick it myself. But, 'Ah,' Toni says and kind of taps his hand in the center of his chest, 'Junior.' And I laughed again and said 'Our parents were goddamned creative when it came to the baby naming, right?' And he laughed, too, and shook my hand.
"And uh, a few days after that he showed up outside of my apartment and asked me if I wanted to go watch a game with him and his brothers at the sports bar down the street. It was Poland vs Korea. I still don't know shit about soccer, I've always been more of an American football kind of guy, but I did learn quite a few Polish swear words that day. Apparently they'd all bet money on the home team winning that game."
"I bet you did. Poland kept catching red cards that whole game. I bet on Korea, of course, and altogether I won 8 grand from four extremely pissed off Polish dudes when we stomped their ass all over the pitch. I had no idea how seriously the four of them took soccer. Antoni wouldn't even talk to me for three days. Probably didn't help I made an ass of myself laughing at all of them. Course, I woulda bet more if I'd known they were good for it. Dry cleaners, my ass," Becca spat.
"Well, in Antoni's defense, he probably did work at a dry cleaners like he told us, just like you work at a bodega, and Jimmy and me work at a restaurant, and Pops works at a hardware store. We all got day jobs. You know, I hate to bust your balls, Becca, but did it… never occur to you to ask Antoni if the tattoos meant something?"
"No," she said weakly. "I mean, I knew they were prison tats but Jesus Christ, half the people I know have been to prison. You've been to prison, half of my cousins have been to prison, hell, Pops has been to prison. You weren't here then, but all of 2016 to 2020 I was wearing a 'Free Rossi' t-shirt everyday, a lot of people in this neighborhood did. Ma got him off on the Murder 1 charges but numbers are numbers, and she couldn't get him out of the Tax Evasion. But I figured, if Antoni didn't wanna talk about it, then it was none of my business what had happened before we met each other."
She'd minded her own business a little too hard this time.
"What did you and Antoni talk about, Becca?"
"Everything! And anything, and nothing, all at the same time. He'd complain about living with his brothers, about Misiu always leaving hair all over the bathroom, and how Ciech always left sugar all over the kitchen counter after he made his coffee. And I'd complain about having to pick up all the empty bottles of makgeolli after my Dad in the morning. I'd help him wash all the dishes his dirty ass brothers would leave piled in the sink, and fold everybody's clothes.
"We got along well, me and Antoni, we were actually very compatible, we were both neat freaks when it came to our housekeeping. We even folded our towels the same way. And he'd bitch about how Igor could never balance the register correctly at the end of the day, and I'd bitch about how my Dad never checked our invoices correctly, and I was always having to cuss out the distribution reps for shorting us on our deliveries myself.
"And we'd watch TV together. He always made fun of me for the lame ass old Chuck Lorre sitcoms I loved to watch, and I'd make fun of him for all the stupid cop dramas he watched, every Law and Order known to man, and Blue Bloods and shit. We just… talked to each other, like we were two regular people, just living our lives. It was simple and it was easy, and it was enough, it was goddamned enough for me. Our relationship was the one normal thing I had going in my fucked up life."
She cracked at the end, sobbing brokenly. She turned her head to the side, pressed her face into my bicep as she wrapped both arms around mine. Tears filled my eyes, as well, and now I was wiping snot out of my nose as well as blood. I felt goddamned sorry for the kid, and I felt like she had a right to cry, but I had to distract her, for my own sake.
"So tell me, when was the first time you talked to Antoni? Was that the same day he asked you out?"
"No, there was some time between the two. He'd been there about a week, I guess, after they moved in. They got there back in like April. I'd fucked with him the first day, you know, asked him where the hell the accent came from, and he said Poland, and I told him welcome to America cause I felt like being a dick. And he said that he'd already been in country five years and I laughed at him and told him, goddamn, I couldn't tell cause he still sounded like he was fresh off the boat. And he got this look on his face, like he was trying to decide if he needed to be offended or not, so I told him I was just fucking with him, that he was doing better than my Mom, God rest her, cause it was seven years after she got here from Seoul before she even learned a word of English and my Dad was the one that had to teach her."
"Makes sense. I moved in in June, Toni mentioned he'd only been in the building about two months hisself."
She nodded, I could feel the movement in the sleeve of my coat where her cheek was pressed to my arm.
"Him and his brothers started coming in every day after that and you know, I kind of had my eye on him from the first time I talked to him. He was goddamn gorgeous, quite literally the walking definition of 'tall, dark, and handsome.' He had those incredibly blue eyes, and that fucking accent, man, shit put me in knots everytime he came in. I learned them all pretty quick, and Antoni was easy. He got the same thing everyday, box of Newport 100s and a pack of Russian Cream Backwoods with a large slushy. You know I gotta keep the cups behind the counter because motherfuckers'll fill it up and walk out when I get busy. I saw him when he came in, and went over to the ATM, so I had his shit sitting on the counter waiting for him."
Becca had a talent for memorizing all of the regular's orders, it wasn't unusual to see a long line of cigarettes, blunts, medicine, sometimes even crack pipes and Chore Boys, and anything else she kept behind the counter, set up neatly next to the register. She also had a talent for running both registers at the same time when the line got overly long and she was there alone. Sometimes I had no idea how she kept up with it all, but that was just Becca.
"And this drunk asshole came in, right after, he didn't even belong in the neighborhood, he stayed in Bed-Stuy, but he was with his cousin, and his cousin I knew and he was shooting me apologetic looks so I was already on guard. I was in a bad goddamn mood that day, anyway. And the drunk bitch, he walked over to the bathroom and tried to open it."
"Key's behind the counter," I said, and she nodded.
"And the key costs five dollars cause people make a fucking mess in the bathroom and I ain't cleaning that shit everyday for free. Well, drunk fuck got pissed and started talking a bunch of shit and threw his five dollars down on the counter, and you know, I can't stand that. You don't throw money at me, I ain't a goddamned stripper, you can put that shit in my hand or you can get the fuck out my store. And, I said 'Naw, son, for you it's gonna cost ten, five dollar Drunk Dick surcharge for being an asshole and cutting my line.' And the motherfucker… he called me a fucking stupid little bitch, and he told me people like me needed to be sent back to my own country."
I made a sound of disapproval, already seeing where this was headed.
"I hate that stupid shit. Where the fuck am I getting sent back to? The fucking hospital in Manhattan where I was born? Everybody in the store just kind of stopped and stood there, and dude's cousin? He just shook his head at me and walked right out the store and left him there."
"He wasn't gonna get involved, huh?" I asked.
"Fuck no. He wasn't stupid. I… uh, I was seeing red by that point so I balled up his money and I threw it across the store and told him to get the fuck out. I don't even remember half the shit I said to him, but I was yelling and he was yelling back and all of a sudden Antoni was… just there. I never even noticed him walking up. He was a big motherfucker, but goddamn he was quick and quiet when he wanted to be."
Becca laced her fingers through the fingers of my right hand and I gave them a squeeze as she readjusted her head against my shoulder. I turned mine to press a kiss to her hair. She was short enough that I didn't have to worry about bumping my nose. As I turned back, I noticed that there was a puddle of water on the seat across from us, and a pit formed in my stomach immediately. My face felt cold as the blood drained from it. The puddle of water made me more than just a little nervous to see it.
I had new enemies stacking up quick, and the last thing I needed was a pissed off, jealous ghost because his grieving fiancée was getting a little handsy with me. But… Antoni never showed himself, so I could only assume he approved of my offering her comfort in her time of need. Either that or he was waiting till I was alone to express his displeasure.
"'Is there a problem here?' was all he asked and the drunk bitch turned around and he got even more pissed. He goes 'Man, fuck you, white boy. Mind your own goddamned business.' And Antoni kind of got in his face, and goes, 'I have made it my business. She told you to leave. Either remove yourself or I will remove you.'
"And the liquor must've given him a bigger set of balls than he actually had, cause he took a swing at him. And Antoni, he just kind of… leaned back a little to avoid the swing and then leaned back in and… he knocked that bitch out cold with one punch. And then he picked him up, literally picked him up, and threw his ass out on the sidewalk, and kind of dusted his hands off afterwards."
"Well, if he's anything like his father then he could throw a hell of a right cross."
Becca laughed weakly.
"Yeah, his Dad boxes, they all did, you know, from when they were young. Antoni told me he got in his Dad's face once when he was about 16, and Old Papa Zabrowska coldcocked him in the kitchen, and when he woke up on the couch, his Dad dragged him out back in the alley and beat him bloody. Told him if his little grown ass thought he was a man, then he was grown enough to get his ass stomped like a man."
That made me feel a little better, to be honest. At least I wasn't the only one I knew who had caught an ass kicking from Antoni Sr.
"I bet he didn't talk shit to his Pops again after that, huh?"
"I asked him that exact question, he said 'Oh no, no, never again. I learned my lesson.' Toni and his brothers, though, were always getting in fights, even when I knew them. He told me it was hard on their Mama, back in Kraków, having four hormonal, teenaged boys with just shy of a year between each of them, you know cause… us fucking Roman Catholics ain't too fond of any method of contraception."
"I didn't know you was Catholic, too, B."
"Of course. Rossi is a devout Catholic, and that's how he raised me, and Nia, she's an Angel, you know, a Fallen One, that's what they call themselves, but she's even got real wings. A little more leathery and less feathery, but… same thing. She goes to Mass daily, turns out demons are actually very religious. Both of my parents were atheists, and that's how they raised me, but after some of the shit I've seen, you know, it ain't too unbelievable that there's a Big Guy upstairs."
She sniffed again, wiped at her nose and I offered her a bit of toilet paper from my pocket.
"That's how it all got started, the War in Heaven. God created Adam, the first living human body, and he told all the spirits in Heaven to kneel to him. And at least half of them weren't too fond of that idea, and the Morning Star stepped up as representative and said they wouldn't kneel to anyone but God. And they, uh, they lost the War, and He banished them all to Earth, to wander without bodies of their own while the other side got to come to Earth one at a time, to live their lives.
"But… then there was the first murder, Abel. Cain beat him to death with a rock, and the blood on the ground, the first human blood ever shed in violence, it called to God, but He wasn't the only one it called to. The blood, it gave him a way inside of a body. Lucifer. He was the First One. He's still here, you know, I've met him. He has a particular fondness for Nia, he calls her Young One, cause according to him 1607 wasn't all that long ago."
"I guess it isn't when you're that old."
"But, back to what I was saying about Toni, all of them were packed into one place together like fucking sardines, the four boys sharing one bedroom in a two bedroom apartment, and all having vastly different personalities. Tatiana is little, like me, and I don't imagine she could do much to break them up when they got to fighting about everything from who ate all the leftovers to who got the top bunks on the beds."
"Probably not," I answered.
"I mean, I could practically smell the testosterone in their fucking apartment whenever I walked in, and it was probably even worse back then. And apparently, that had been their Dad's method of keeping them from tearing up his wife's house all the time. Whenever a problem inevitably developed, he'd just take them down to the gym and throw them in the ring without any gloves and tell them to fucking handle it, and whoever was still standing at the end was the one that won the argument.
"Uh, but, uh, when Toni hit the guy, all, all I could do was stand there with my mouth hanging open like a fucking fish. I mean, I was in love, right that fucking second, standing there. The hormones were running on overdrive, my head was practically spinning with how fast all the blood rushed south, you know? Everybody was still standing there and Antoni tried to get back in line and I said, 'Uh-uh. Take your shit and go on.' And he goes," Beccs began laughing again, laughed so hard there were tears in her eyes once more.
"He goes, 'Am I in trouble?'''
I had to wrap my left arm tight around my stomach because I couldn't stop myself from laughing either. The makeshift bandage on my left hand that I'd wound out of paper towel had soaked through, I was going to have to change it soon.
"He didn't say that, Becca."
"Yes the fuck, he did. And I went, 'No, you dumbass, it's on the house, and in case I gotta translate, that means it's free. Small price to pay for a security detail.' And he just kind of blinked at me for a second, before he nodded his head and grabbed his things off the counter, went and filled his slushy up."
"You probably scared the piss out of him for that second, he probably thought he'd been found out. That's what they call it, what he was, Obshchak, Security Group."
"He stopped before he left, and told me thank you. And I said 'No, dziękuję', thank you. And then I winked at him and said 'Miłej nocy, piękna.'" She straightened up as the train began to slow for our stop.
"And what did that mean?"
"Have a good night, gorgeous." She said with a watery grin.
"Smooth, B, real smooth. Nothing quite like hitting on a man in his native language. "
"I mean, you know us, Tony, we got Southern Hospitality down here. As long as you're not an asshole, I do everything I can to make sure everyone feels welcome when they come inside. That's why there's a sign on the door that says 'DMZ.' They might have beef on the streets but don't nobody take that shit inside my store. And that means asking the Mexicans down the street if they need a bolsa, and making sure I ordered Farid's miswaks so he didn't have to walk all the way down to the Pakistani store, and sometimes it means learning a little bit of Polish so I could flirt with the new guy downstairs the next time he came in."
We exited the train, made the switch, and stood on the platform waiting for the next to take us back to Avenue U. As I glanced to the side, I could see a puddle forming on the platform next to me, drip by drip. It was already freezing around the edges. As it turned out, I wasn't the only nosy fuck around here.
"And apparently the flirting was well received by our dearly departed half-Russian friend."
"Apparently, cause about a week later I was having a busy fucking Friday night and my Dad had already gone home, and I was trying to shut her down but motherfuckers kept coming inside right up until 11. I made DeAndre from downstairs stand at the door and tell people we were closed and that he was the last customer for the night and after I rung him up I told him to flip the sign on the door and I'd lock it when I finished my cigarette count… only, I forgot to ever lock it, and DeDe's traitorous ass, he fucking set me up. He knew I had a thing for Antoni, and when he saw him coming down off the platform and rushing down the sidewalk, he let him in and told him he was the last customer for the night and to flip the sign on the door."
She closed her eyes for a moment.
"It took me… exactly 16 minutes to notice he was there. I know, cause after I was done pissing myself when I figured out I wasn't alone, the Polish smart-ass showed me his watch. He'd set a timer when he realized I wasn't paying any attention to him, and then just stood there, waiting to see how long it would take. I had my earphones in, and it took four songs," she held up her hand and ticked them off with her fingers. "'Savage Like', 'Money, Sex, Drugs', 'Proud' and 'Only.'
"I turned around and screamed like a little bitch when I saw him. And then I got pissed, cause I was embarrassed, I'd been singing along to all the songs cause I thought I was alone in the store. I started screaming at him. 'What the fuck, you can't read? The sign says Closed.' And he goes 'No, it didn't. It still said Open. I turned it myself.' I hadn't counted down my register yet, so I just went ahead and grabbed his shit and rung him up, cussing DeDe the whole time and I asked him how long he'd been standing there, and he showed me his watch. And he says, 'You shouldn't wear those, it's dangerous,' talking about my headphones, and I said, 'What are you, my fucking father?' And he got kind of a funny look on his face."
I released a weak snicker, holding my stomach tight again. I couldn't resist fucking with them both a little bit.
"He kinda had a point, Becca. Although, I can tell you he was probably less concerned about being your father and more concerned about becoming your Daddy."
"Oh, so now you got the dirty jokes," Becca said flatly.
"What can I say, B, you're a bad influence on me."
"Eh," she said after a moment, "You wouldn't be the first. You know, months later he told me that he'd stood there that long because he didn't think he'd have the nerve to ask what he wanted to ask the next time if he left, which, you know, what the fuck? What am I, scary?"
I couldn't help but laugh again.
"Yes, Becca, you are, you're fucking terrifying half the time. You might be a short fuck but dynamite comes in small packages, you know? He was probably afraid you'd tell him to suck your dick and ban him from the store for a month like every other poor motherfucker I've seen ask you out, and he probably didn't want to go through your particular brand of ridicule in front of an audience, on top of that, with all the other customers laughing him out of the store."
"It ain't my fault I'm this size," she said after a moment, shooting me a perturbed look.
"No shit, Sherlock. It's genetics."
"It ain't even that. It's the blood. I mean, my parents were both tall, you know, for Koreans, anyway, my Mom was 5'6. I probably would've been too if I'd had the chance, but, you know, the blood it… stops things. Why do you think Jimmy looks the way he does? I mean, Pops believes in 'aging gracefully,' as he says, but old Giacomino is a vain fuck, and he's got more of a taste for 'the Stuff' than Rocco ever had. He turned 65 this year, he's only two years younger than Pops, he was already 34 years old when he met Nia for the first time. He tells people he's got a good plastic surgeon, when they ask. And the same thing happened to me. My body wanted to stay 8 years old, forever.
"Rossi had to get hormones, fucking estrogen and progesterone and HGH, off the black market to force my body to start puberty and to fucking grow. It's not like we could go to a doctor and explain why I needed the prescription. I mean, these tits aren't even mine. Ma bought 'em for my sixteenth birthday so I wouldn't feel so goddamned self-conscious. Nia's not exactly flat-chested, as you know, neither was my Mom, and it kind of gave me a fucking complex when I was growing up."
"I mean, is she? I haven't really noticed," I replied, evasively.
"Yes, you have, you lying fuck. There isn't a straight or bisexual man, or a lesbian or bisexual woman for that matter, that comes within fifty feet of Appolonia Bianchi that doesn't notice all of her unnatural charms. It made for some interesting 'family' trips during the summer when we'd leave the city, lemme tell you. I asked Pops once, you know, if he ever got jealous when she'd show up with some random dick she'd run across, cause I used to think it was pretty shitty of her.
"I said she could've at least kept things on the downlow and not throw it in Rocco's face every few days. But he told me no, he loved her, he understood her nature very well and he'd accepted what she was years before I was even born, and that she loved him too, and more importantly, respected him. She always introduced the men to him because that was what he'd asked of her. That it was the one aspect of control he had in the situation, giving his 'permission' for her little liaisons. That it made him feel better to let them know they might be getting a piece, but she'd be ending every night lying in his bed, regardless of what they did."
I nodded. "I guess I can kind of see his point."
"But, the blood, that's how I ended up pregnant. I mean, I'm not a dumbass, I know how babies are made, but I wasn't worried about using condoms with Antoni, neither of us wanted to. I told him if he gave me anything I'd cut his dick off, and he knew I was serious, too, and he considered it a proportional response. I didn't even think I could get pregnant.
"I stopped the birth control when I was 16 because it was making me gain weight and my cheer coach bitched me out in front of fucking everybody, and Rossi's guy said I needed to keep taking it to keep my hormone levels even. So I told Antoni I didnt want to get into my medical history, but suffice to say I was probably fucking sterile anyway, so he didn't have to worry about it, and he told me he wasn't worried about it at all. But apparently my fucking parts work better than I thought."
"Or maybe he had some damned determined swimmers, who knows."
"I don't know why I was even concerned about not using condoms anyway. Technically we were all excommunicated as of 2014. Pope said the mafiosi lifestyle isn't compatible with the Catholic one. You know, I wonder how Antoni would feel about all this, I wonder if he'd be pissed, think I lied to him about not being able to get pregnant."
"You're just gonna have to take my word for it, B, but he's not angry in the least, he's pretty fucking proud of hisself." I'd say his chest was stuck out but he didn't have much of a chest left these days, so I just kept that part to myself. "Pretty sure he said he wasn't worried about it because he was hoping you were wrong about being sterile."
Beccs gave me a strange look but the train arrived at just that moment. The people exiting did quite a bit of staring, unlike the people leaving the funeral, but I just tucked my arm around Becca and shouldered my way past them and found us a seat. The drops of water followed us into the train.
"What's with the present tense, Tony? Is that some kind of cliche 'he's lookin' down on you' bullshit?"
I snorted and wiped the bubble of blood from my nose, staring at the puddle of water that was starting to form in the seat next to us. I could feel the cold emanating from Antoni all along my left side. Oddly enough, it was easing the intense ache in my nearly severed ring finger.
"He ain't looking down on us, B, I can tell you that much."
"So it's a Hell joke?"
"No, not really. But then again, I'm pretty sure we're all in Hell right this second, Miss Rebecca, so yes, yes it is."

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Jimmy cooked me breakfast this morning, down in his apartment, and we ate together at the bar while I tried to fathom what the day ahead of me was going to entail. At about 6 AM, a red light started flashing above our heads and an alarm, one I recognized buzzed throughout the restaurant every time there was a delivery at the back door, began blaring.
"They're here early," Jimmy said, and wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin, tossing it into his plate and standing. He left into the bedroom and returned wearing a quilted dressing gown. Nia emerged in the matching shirt to Jimmy's pajama pants, and together we climbed the stairs back up to the restaurant.
Nia slid onto a table and sat with her legs crisscross applesauce in front of her. The silk button down was so big on her it reached past her knees, and the sleeves swallowed up her hands. She looked like a particularly lethal five year old playing dress up with her father's clothes. She'd balled her hair into a messy chignon at the back of her head, and she smiled sweetly to me as I followed Jimmy into the receiving area to the side of the kitchen. Joey was still laying there at the back door to the alley, but he'd been covered with a white sheet, and the blood had plastered the fabric against what was left of his face.
Jimmy hit a red button on the wall, and the receiving bay door started clumping upwards, panel by panel, until it was rolled up near the ceiling. A white van, no windows of course, backed up the rest of the way into the bay and the back doors opened as Jimmy hit the button again, and clump by clump the bay door closed once more.
A bear of a man crawled out of the back, and Jimmy stepped forward as they wrapped their arms around each other and laughed. Another man crawled from the driver's side, and began pulling equipment from the back of the van. A reciprocating saw, black construction bags, bottles of bleach. There were two 50 gallon drums back there, labeled with the symbols of some kind of corrosive chemical.
"You enjoy the trip to Maine, Teddy?" Jimmy asked.
"Of course. It's always nice to visit new places."
The man's name was Theodore Moretti, he'd introduced himself to me one morning at the bodega. I'd been standing there waiting to buy a pack of cigarettes, and he'd been in deep conversation with Becca about a 'runner'. He'd been asking about someone by name, I didn't know the guy myself, but Becca had been telling Moretti exactly where to find this guy, that he was hiding out at a girlfriend's in Bushwick. Afterwards, he had passed her a thick fold of money and she'd slipped it into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, not in the register. Then he'd turned around and told me his name and shook my hand, like I hadn't just seen and heard what had happened right in front of me.
"We got new people in here?" Teddy asked, looking in my direction. I gave him an awkward wave, feeling like a moron.
"Eh, Joey had an early, involuntary retirement." Jimmy replies.
Moretti mumbled something beneath his breath and crossed himself.
"God rest him. He was a good kid. I'm gonna have to drop by and check on his Ma. She's probably taking it pretty hard."
"Not right now, anyway, ain't nobody told her yet. I'm gonna need you to take him down to the funeral parlor when we're done. Tell Goldberg I'll pay for it all, but right now we got bigger issues inside."
The nameless driver passed me the two bottles of bleach, rolled the trash bags up into a neat ball, and set the Sawzall under his arm. We followed Jimmy and Teddy inside.
"What a fucking mess," Teddy said, cheerfully, as we breached the back dining room. The driver set down his burdens on an empty table and I set the bleach bottles beside them.
"Teddy!" Nia squealed, hopping down from the table. She leaped into the man's arms, and he picked her up off the ground and kissed her full on the mouth, and not the kind of kiss your overly friendly Aunt gives you at family reunions. Jimmy barely seemed to notice.
The driver was looking at Nia with a disgusted expression. As I watched, he crossed himself and muttered a prayer underneath his breath. He pulled on a pair of black protective gloves and shook out a garbage bag, crossing the room to pick up the two heads lying there, and tossed them inside with all the gravity of a chain gang member picking up litter. He exited back into the kitchen, and I imagined the heads were going to end up in the steel drums in the back of the van.
"Bentornato, amore mio." Nia says, when Moretti let her up for air and set her back on the ground again.
"Grazie, tesoro."
Moretti made short work of the bodies after that, rigor mortis having mostly let go by that point, breaking them down at the joints and cutting the torsos down into two even, easy to carry pieces. I tried not to gag as I took pieces of bone and flesh, fat and organ with my gloved hands, placed them into the garbage bag, and carried them back into the receiving bay. The driver took them from me and dropped them with a splash into one or the other of the drums. He was wearing a respirator and a pair of safety glasses, and my eyes watered from the acrid smell exiting the van.
After the butchering stopped, the two men carefully picked up Joey's body between them and placed him on the floor in the back of the van. Moretti crossed Joey's arms over his chest, made the sign of the cross on what was left of his forehead with his thumb as he mumbled a prayer, and then covered the body with the sheet again.
They left soon after that, Nia kissing Moretti goodbye, and I was left with the bottles of bleach and a bucket and scrub brush, with the instruction to clean the congealed blood off of the dining room and kitchen floors, and to sterilize the booth and the table so we'd be ready to open tomorrow morning for regular business hours. Jimmy and Nia headed back downstairs. Jimmy left me with his cell phone number in case I needed anything. I was given a sign to hang on the front door, 'Closed For Cleaning,' and I set to work doing just that.
It was a hell of a lot harder cleaning up dried blood than I had ever imagined, and I worked myself into a sweat within minutes, and though the water in the bucket turned a darker and darker red, I seemed to be making no headway on the pool on the floor.
"Jesus fucking Christ, what happened here?"
Fuck, I forgot to lock the front door back.
I looked up and found a police officer standing in front of me, Sargeant Nuzzo from the 61st Precinct. I dropped the brush on the floor and raised my hands in the air reflexively.
Nuzzo released a sound of disgust and waved his hand in front of him.
"You know what, I don't even wanna know. Where's Jimmy?"
I gave the Boss a call, told him he had a visitor, and when the man came upstairs in his dressing gown again, he didn't seem in the least bit surprised to see a cop standing in his restaurant.
"What's the news?" Jimmy asked.
"They got jack shit up in the 1st Precinct. No calls in on the tip lines yet, I mean, it's kind of still early to tell, but it's been a month since the first one and as long as you guys keep it quiet from now on, this is gonna become another unremarkable footnote in the City's history. Trust me, we got a whole fucking warehouse space filled with nothing but cold cases. Give it another few weeks, and nobody will even remember these floaters."
Jimmy handed Nuzzo a wad of cash and sent him on his way with a fresh cup of coffee. I made sure to lock the door after he left, and went back to scrubbing the floor.
About twenty minutes later, I finally started to see the white of the tile through the first blood pool, and I heard a fist banging on the front door. I slipped off the black rubber gloves and headed to the front door.
"We're closed," I said loudly.
"The fuck you are," Becca Rhee barked at me. "I'm fucking freezing to death over there and if Jimmy wants his money laundered properly, you'd damned well better let me inside. I keep double pressing keys cause I'm shakin' so goddamned hard."
She and her father lived in the apartment next door to mine, I'd been too concerned about my own shit to think about the rest of the poor people in the freezing apartment building.
I should have known the bodega was just another spoke in Jimmy's business wheel.
I didn't have the energy to argue and unlocked the door, stepping aside to let Becca through. She had a Brooklyn Nets beanie pulled down over her ears, and she looked like she was wearing at least three layers of clothes under her jacket. She headed back into the second dining room, and tossed a black duffel bag on one of the clean tables. It made sense as she opened the bag, revealing stacks on top of stacks of money, a calculator, and a handwritten account book. There were no windows back here for passerby on the street to see the suspicious circumstances occurring within. She removed her coat and tossed it haphazardly onto another table.
I locked the door back behind me, and returned to the dining room, slipping my black gloves back on and returned to scrubbing the floor.
Becca was nineteen years old. In the bodega, there were old pictures from when she was in high school. She'd been a cheerleader, back then, had even gone to a few national competitions, and that made sense too. She was only about 4'6 and she'd probably made it easy on her teammates when they tossed her into the air with as tiny as she was.
"Go in the back and grab me a bottle of vodka." She reached into her pocket, withdrew a 50 dollar bill, and slammed it down onto the end of the table. I stared at it for a moment before I spoke.
"I can't do that."
"Why not?" She yelled back.
"You're too young."
"Are you fucking kidding me? What are you gonna do, call the cops on me for underage drinking, you fucking mook?"
Well, she kind of had a point, when I thought about it, so I grabbed the money and went and retrieved an unopened bottle of Skyy from the back, and stopped by the fountain machine to grab two glasses.
"You want a chaser?" I asked, turning back to look at her.
The glass fell out of my hand and shattered on the floor. Becca was in the side of the booth facing me, and there, standing just behind her, was a corpse… It was Antoni.
"The fuck is wrong with you?" She screamed at me, and I hurriedly left the room to grab a broom and a dustpan, returning to sweep up the pieces but… Antoni was still there. He raised the stump of his right wrist and jabbed it in my direction, then down at Becca. If he had hands, he'd have been pointing.
She'd grabbed the bottle and a new pair of glasses and had seated herself back at the booth. She took a large gulp of vodka that made my eyes water in sympathy as she hissed in a breath and chased it with a gulp of cola.
I disposed of the broken glass in a nearby trashcan, and within a few minutes she'd counted out several thousand dollars and wrapped them in bank bands. The adding machine whirred and the paper coming from it got longer and longer.
I returned to my place on the floor, put my gloves back on, and started scrubbing at the blood again. I looked up in her direction every few minutes, but Antoni was still standing there, staring at me with no eyes, and dripping a puddle of water on the tiled floor, 'pointing' at me.
"I need another drink. " Becca said to me, and I could hear tears in her voice. I removed the gloves again, and grabbed the glass off her table and went to refill it with cola. As I carried it back to her, I saw that she'd pulled her cell phone out and dialed a number from her contacts. Antoni jabbed his wrist at her again. I felt like a creep for spying on a teenaged girl's personal business, but I looked at her phone screen despite myself.
The contact was simply listed as T, and there was a picture attached to it. Becca was in the picture, wearing a pair of sunglasses. It had been taken at the top of Deno's Wonder Wheel and she'd been kissing the man beside her with her hands cupped around his face. The man had been the one to hold the phone up and take the picture.
The man… was Antoni Zabrowska.
The phone rang and rang, of course the owner wasn't capable of answering his phone anymore, and she eventually jabbed the End button on the phone screen and banged her fist into the table.
"Stupid motherfucker," she hissed and snatched the cola out of my hand as she downed another double shot of vodka.
There was another fierce movement from Antoni's corpse and I cleared my throat.
"You wanna talk about it?" I asked.
"Fuck you," Becca hissed in return, and then turned her phone face down on the table.
"Hey, I'm a good listener, and whatever you say doesn't matter, right? I barely exist."
She scoffed at me, took a sip of her cola and then wiped the tears off of her face like she was embarrassed they were even there. She sat for a moment longer in silence.
"It's stupid… I shouldn't even be worried about it. It's not like I'm the first dumb bitch to believe a line from some asshole that wanted to get his dick wet. He even took me to meet his fucking mother, who does that when they're just gonna turn around and ghost you? He told me he wanted to get married. And now the motherfucker doesn't even have the decency to ignore my calls. He just lets his phone ring, and I know he's home. His bedroom is right underneath mine and I can hear his fucking phone ringing, but he won't even answer the door." Her voice cracks.
The corpse behind her bent, wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pressed his torn lips to her cheek. She gave a massive shudder.
"Jesus Christ, why is it so fucking cold in here?"
I swallow and seat myself in the booth across from her.
"Did you tell Pops, you know, about you and Toni Z?"
She stared at me for a moment, then looked back down at her phone.
"You nosy fuck," she muttered, then, "And fuck no. Pops thinks I met a guy at college. He'd have a fucking calf if he knew I was dating a thirty year old, which I think is pretty fucking hypocritical considering he's dating somebody 348 years older than him."
"Bianchi?" I asked, and she nodded, her eyes narrowed at me.
"Say, how the hell did you get wrapped up in all this?"
"It was uh… kind of an accident."
She laughed and took another sip of her soda.
"Do you know the first time I met Nia Bianchi?" She asked. "I was four years old. My mom was alive back then, and she and my Dad had just opened up Rhee's. We've got fourteen different locations, now, but back then it was the first one. My Mom, she… had some shady contacts up in Koreatown, and they were expecting the store to be a new way to run cash through to clean it, but… my dad didn't do such a good job picking the neighborhood we opened our first store in. Jimmy Chiellini showed up one day, with a fruit basket to go along with his intimidation tactics, and demanded the same tribute he gets off of every business in this neighborhood.
"My Dad told him to fuck off, and for a little while it seemed like things were going to be quiet. Then one day I went outside when the ice cream truck came by, and… I never made it back inside. Somebody snatched me off the street. I took a chunk out of his hand when he grabbed me and stuffed me in the car, and put a bag over my head. They tied my hands and feet, and then they drove a short distance and took me inside somewhere."
She poured another shot and offered me the glass and I took it with muttered thanks. She held the bottle up, and I clicked my glass against it, and she took her next shot from the bottle itself.
"I was sitting there. I couldn't see anything, so I was listening. I was listening hard. I could hear Jimmy speaking off to the side, and a woman's voice. She says, 'I don't like children, Giacomo, they have no taste.'"
Becca let out a bark of laughter.
"And Jimmy goes, 'Jesus Christ, Nia, I didn't bring her here for you to kill her, I just need a place to keep her for a few hours. They're gonna crack fast, nobody needs to hurt the kid. You don't like kids, then just think of her as a tiny adult. Christ, really, just talk to her, play a game, tell her a story. Keep her occupied for a few hours, it's all you gotta do, Princess.'"
She sniffed back tears and turned her phone face up again, flipping to her gallery and opening another picture of Antoni. He looked remarkably… soft in the picture, dressed in a pair of flannel pajama pants and reading a book. He'd looked up and smiled for the camera. Becca ran the pad of her thumb over the image of his face, and took another gulp off the vodka.
"She called Rossi. Demons got no experience when it comes to children. Children are innocent, they got no use for 'em. And that was how I met Rossi, too. He brought me a Happy Meal and we played Monopoly for three hours while we waited for Jimmy to come back and get me."
"Demon?" I asked.
"Diavolessa che ha rapporti sessuali con maschi addormentati. La succuba." She said, in perfectly accented Italian which I have to admit impressed me, because I'd also heard her speaking fluent Korean with her father, Sam.
'A female demon that is thought to have sexual intercourse with sleeping men, a succubus.'
"Rossi knew what she was. Jimmy had met Nia on a trip to Napoli to visit family, and made a deal with her, back in '83, for a steady supply of food in exchange for her services to the Brooklyn Camorra. She's an attorney, you know, a damned good one. She can get anyone out of anything, and she can make anyone dissappear off the face of this earth if she really wants to. And all Jimmy has to do is make sure she gets laid on the regular. Don't be surprised if you end up on the rotation. She can't stay too long with any one man because she'll suck the life out of them, literally."
I held my glass out and she poured me another shot of vodka.
"My parents had to break down, they had to give into Jimmy to get me back, and my Mom… she paid the price for it. There was a drive by one day, and she died in front of me, laying right there in the middle of Avenue U. But before she died, my Mom took Rossi to a lawyer. She forced him into adopting me, and Nia, too. I think Mom knew what was coming, even then, and I think she knew my Appa was going to go off the deep end when she died. And he did. He's been working on suicide by liver failure for the last fifteen years. It's a slow fucking process."
I swallowed the shot and grimaced, looking over Becca's shoulder where Antoni's corpse was still standing. There were two lines of blood leaking out of his empty eye sockets, almost like tears.
"Look, Becca, I know you're mad at Antoni, and I ain't saying you ain't got a right to be but… I knew Toni pretty well. He loved you, he wouldn't have left without saying goodbye if he had a choice… just… keep that in mind, B. He might have some things going on you didn't know about."
I offered her glass back to her. She just stared at me, not saying anything. Antoni bent again, pressed another kiss to her hair, and suddenly he wasn't there anymore. The puddle of water on the floor, however, was.
Becca released a shuddering breath and gave another shiver.
"You gotta turn the heat up in here, this is fucking ridiculous," she said.