“How Can I Get Muscles Like Yours?” — The Mafia Boss Froze When the Maid’s Little Girl Walked Into His Private Gym

We did not get fired that afternoon, which my mother seemed to regard as a miracle comparable to the parting of the Red Sea.

Our quarters were on the third floor of the carriage house, connected to the main house by an enclosed stone bridge that ran over the courtyard like an arched rib. The room smelled of my mother’s dried chamomile and the lemon oil she couldn't wash out of her skin no matter how hard she scrubbed with the rough brown soap from the corner pharmacy.

She didn't spank me. She didn't yell. That was not her way. Instead, she sat on the edge of our iron bedstead, her apron over her face, and wept until her shoulders hitched.

"Mami," I said, leaning against her knee. "Benny’s not scared."

She pulled the apron down. Her eyes were red-rimmed and small. "You don't know who that man is, Lucy. You don't know what he can do. You think he is a king from your storybooks. He is not a king. He is... he is the fire that burns the house down while everyone is sleeping."

"He has two big lines on his back," I said. "Like this." I drew my finger diagonally across her apron.

She caught my wrist. Her fingers were cold. "You didn't look at him."

"I did."

"You don't look at men like him. You look at your shoes. You say *yes, sir*, and you go the other way. If he is in the hall, you go into a room. If he is in a room, you go out into the garden. Do you hear me? If he speaks to you, you don't answer until I am there."

"He told me to get blue string."

"I don't care what he said about string!" she hissed, though she immediately glanced toward the heavy oak door as if the wood itself might carry her voice down the bridge to the master bedroom. She lowered her tone until it was just a breath against my temple. "His father died in that driveway, Lucy. They found him with three coins in his mouth. That is the family we clean for. That is the man whose floor you walked on."

I did not understand coins in mouths. I understood that Dominic Moretti had shoulders that looked like two bags of potatoes, and that he did not drop his towel when he was startled.

The next morning was Tuesday.

Tuesday was linen day. The giant wicker baskets came up from the basement laundry on the dumbwaiter, smelling of boiling bleach and iron starch. My mother’s job was to take the sheets for the master suite—four hundred thread-count Egyptian cotton, smooth as cold milk—and stretch them across Dominic’s four-poster mahogany bed until you could drop a nickel on them and hear it chime.

I was supposed to stay on the bench in the corridor with my picture book about the little engine that could.

I stayed for six pages.

The hall was long, carpeted in runner rugs that had been woven somewhere where people had names with too many consonants. The walls were covered in oil paintings of dead people who all looked like they were smelling something slightly rotten: women with high, pale foreheads and pearls; men with black cravats and long, thin fingers resting on the hilts of small swords.

At the end of the hall, the door to the study was open.

A man was speaking. It wasn't Dominic. It was an older voice, high and thin, like dry paper rubbing together.

"...the Marcone brothers are still moving through the docks on 47th. They think because the alderman took the vacation in Naples, the permits are dead. I told them we have the receipts from the hotel. Every night. The wine, the girls, the whole spread."

I crept closer. The carpet was thick; my socks made no sound.

Through the crack, I saw Dominic. He was not in his gym clothes now. He wore a gray suit that looked as if it had been carved out of slate. His tie was the color of dried liver. He sat behind a desk that had no papers on it—only a black telephone with four buttons and an amber glass tumbler containing an inch of water.

Opposite him sat an old man with white hair cut very short, like a brush, and a camel-hair coat still draped over his shoulders.

"Let them move the crates," Dominic said.

"They'll establish possession, Dom," the old man said, leaning forward. "You let them sit on the dock for forty-eight hours, and according to the union, it’s their shift."

"Let them move them," Dominic repeated. His voice was lower than the other man’s, but it filled the room the way water fills a hole in the sand. "The crates aren't olives, Frank. They're salt cod from Portugal."

The old man frowned. "Salt cod?"

"The refrigeration on Pier Six failed last night at three in the morning," Dominic said mildly. He reached out and turned the glass of water three inches to the left. "By four this afternoon, the whole pier will smell like a dead whale. Let the Marcones pay the dockworkers for eight hours of unloading spoiled fish. Then tell the health inspector to meet them at the gate."

The old man stared at Dominic for a long second, then let out a wet, wheezing bark of laughter. "Jesus. You're an evil bastard, Dominic. Your old man would have just shot the foreman."

"My father bought five hundred pounds of salt cod once because he thought the price was going up," Dominic said. "He had them stored in our basement on Racine. The house smelled like an open grave for two years. He had no imagination."

"He had six crews."

"And now he’s in Mount Carmel," Dominic said. "Go tell the inspector."

The old man rose. I shrank back against the wall, pressing Benny against the baseboard.

The old man came out, smelling of peppermint and expensive wool. He didn't see me; his eyes were on his leather gloves as he pulled them on, finger by finger. He turned toward the stairs and disappeared, his shoes clicking down the marble steps.

I stayed still.

"You're behind the credenza," Dominic's voice came from the room.

I didn't know what a credenza was.

"Lucy," he said.

I poked my head around the doorframe. He hadn't turned his chair. He was looking at the reflection in the polished glass of the bookcase opposite him.

"Come here," he said.

I walked in. The room was twice the size of our apartment in Cicero. The ceiling had gold leaves painted in the plaster, and there was a fireplace large enough for me to stand up inside without my head touching the flue.

I walked until I was three feet from his desk. Benny’s ear was trailing on the Persian rug.

Dominic looked at me. His face had that same stillness. "Your mother told you to stay on the bench."

"I was reading," I said.

"Did the engine get over the mountain?"

"Yes."

"Then the book is over."

"I have another one," I said. "About the duck."

"The duck that lost its mother?"

"No. The duck that lived in the shoe."

Dominic opened the center drawer of his desk. It slid out on ball bearings with a sound like a silk dress slipping over silk stockings. He took something out and laid it on the dark wood.

It was a small spool of heavy, waxed nylon thread.

It was dark blue. The color of a bruise that was three days old.

Next to it, he placed a small, curved needle—the kind sailmakers use, thick and three-sided, with an eye wide enough to take a shoe lace.

"Your mother won't have this," he said. "Take it."

"Why is it bent?" I asked, looking at the needle.

"Because flesh isn't flat," he said. Then he paused, his eyes narrowing slightly as if he had said something he shouldn't have to someone whose knees were purple. "Canvas isn't flat either. When you pull the skin of the ear together, you need an arc. Otherwise it pulls out when you pull the knot."

"Did you sew a rabbit?"

"I sewed a dog," he said.

"Buster?"

"A dog in Sicily," he said. "A long time ago. Now take the thread and go back to the bench before your mother comes out and has a seizure on my parquet."

I picked up the spool. It was heavy for its size. The thread smelled of beeswax and paraffin.

"Thank you, Mr. Moretti," I said, remembering the manners Alina had drilled into me with a wooden cooking spoon.

"Go," he said.

I turned to leave, but stopped at the door. I looked back at him. He had already picked up a pen—a heavy, black fountain pen with a gold nib—and was unscrewing the cap.

"Mr. Moretti?"

"What?"

"Can you do fifty push-ups?"

He didn't look up from his paper. "I can do two hundred."

"Can I see?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because," Dominic Moretti said, his pen touching the white paper with a tiny, scratchy hiss, "I am the boss, and the boss doesn't perform for people whose socks have strawberries on them."

"They're on the wrong side," I told him. "The strawberries are supposed to be underneath."