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

December was the month of the Feast.

Saint Jude was the patron saint of lost causes, which my mother said made him the only saint worth praying to if you lived in Cook County.

The Moretti estate did not celebrate Christmas with trees and tinsel. Dominic’s father had been murdered on Christmas Eve in 1974, so the house observed the holiday season with the enthusiasm of a hospital ward.

Instead, they held the Saint Jude dinner on the twenty-eighth.

It was the only night of the year when the gates were left open.

Four hundred people came through the stone pillars: judges with red faces and silk scarves; aldermen who smelled of sour mash; police captains who wore their service medals on the lapels of their civilian tuxedos; and forty or fifty men who looked like Dominic, only smaller, with thicker necks and cheaper rings.

My mother had spent three days roasting hams and basting capons. Her hands were yellow from saffron and her forearms were crosshatched with tiny red lines from the oven grates.

I was not supposed to exist that night.

"Stay in the carriage house," she told me for the tenth time as she pinned my hair back with a metal clip shaped like a ladybug. "The doors are locked from the outside. If you hear music, you do not look out the window. If you hear cars, you do not go to the glass. There are men here from Cleveland, Lucy. They don't know the rules."

"Dominic knows the rules," I said.

"Dominic is one man," she said, her voice shaking as she pulled her black uniform down over her hips. "And tonight, he has to be the devil for four hundred people. The devil doesn't have time to look after little girls."

She left. The heavy deadbolt clicked into place.

I sat on the rag rug in our kitchen.

Benny sat on the bread box.

The music came across the stone bridge around eight o'clock. It was an accordion and three violins, playing that kind of Neapolitan music that sounds like someone crying while they dance with a fat woman.

At nine, the smell of the pork reached us.

At ten, the shouting started.

It wasn't angry shouting; it was the shouting of men who had drunk seven glasses of Chianti from the wicker jugs and were now arguing about whether the 1963 Packers could have beaten the 1968 Colts.

I stood on the kitchen stool and looked out the small window that faced the courtyard.

The black sedans were packed bumper to bumper like beetles in a tin. Two guards stood by the fountain, their hands tucked into their armpits to stay warm, their breath rising in gray puffs.

Then I saw the door to the wine cellar open.

The wine cellar was beneath the terrace. The stairs were stone, green with moss that had frozen into black slime.

A man came up the steps.

He wasn't wearing a tuxedo. He was wearing an oilskin jacket, the kind the deckhands wore on the salt barges, and a watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He had a gray canvas bag slung over his shoulder.

He didn't walk toward the house. He walked toward the garage.

The garage was where Dominic kept the black Imperial—the car with the four-inch glass and the floorboards lined with lead sheets.

I knew that car. I had sat on the front fender while Dominic changed the oil three weeks ago, holding the wrench until he asked for it.

The man in the watch cap didn't use a key. He pulled a thin piece of steel from his pocket—a "slim jim," I knew the name because Jimmy Varga had used one to get into his own locker when he lost his keys—and slid it down the driver’s side window.

*Click.*

The door opened.

He didn't get in. He leaned under the front tire, reaching up into the wheel well where the brake lines ran like black snakes through the chassis.

I didn't think about Cleveland.

I didn't think about the four hundred people or the devil who was busy being the host.

I thought about the black Imperial. I thought about how the car smelled of peppermint and the leather of Dominic’s shoulder holster.

I climbed down from the stool.

The deadbolt was high, but my mother had left the wooden cooking spoon on the counter. I jammed the handle of the spoon through the little turn-latch, leaned all my weight on the wood, and pulled down.

The brass turned with a dry, screeching *snick*.

The bridge was cold. The wind came off the lake through the stone arches, cutting through my flannel nightgown like a razor through paper. My feet were bare; the flagstones felt like blocks of river ice.

I ran.

I didn't take the main stairs. I took the scullery route—the narrow wooden steps where the grease from sixty years of roasts had soaked into the oak.

I came out into the kitchen.

The kitchen was empty. The cooks had all gone up to the ballroom with the dessert carts—the giant towers of cannoli and the spun-sugar baskets filled with marzipan oranges.

The back door was propped open with an empty olive-oil tin to let the heat out.

I slipped through the gap into the snow.

The cold was so sharp it took the breath out of my throat before I could make a sound. The snow was up to my shins; every step was like walking through cold porridge that wanted to pull my toes off.

The garage was fifty feet away.

The man in the watch cap was still there. He was kneeling in the slush by the front wheel, his canvas bag open on the floorboards. He was holding something small and square, about the size of a pound of butter, wrapped in dark green plastic with two red wires coming out of the side.

"That’s Dominic’s car," I said.

My voice didn't carry. It was small, shredded by the lake wind.

The man didn't jump. He turned his head slowly, like an owl.

He had a scar across his upper lip that had pulled his mouth into a permanent, sideways sneer. His eyes were small and dark, like two raisins pushed into an unbaked loaf of bread.

He looked at me.

He looked at my bare feet, blue-white in the gray snow.

He looked at my flannel nightgown with the yellow ducks on it.

"Go inside, kid," he said. His voice was flat, with that hard, nasal twang from the South Side docks.

"You're touching the lines," I said. "He told Jimmy not to touch the lines. He said the lines are five hundred dollars."

The man stood up. He wasn't big like Dominic. He was thin, wiry, with arms that were too long for his jacket. He reached into his coat and didn't pull out a gun—he pulled out a roll of gray duct tape.

"Come here," he said.

"No," I said.

"Come here, or I'll cut your mother’s ears off."

It was a mistake.

If he had said he would kill me, I might have stood there. A four-year-old doesn't understand death; death is just the duck that doesn't come back on the last page.

But I knew about ears.

Benny had one ear.

I knew how hard Alina had cried while she sewed the blue thread into the gray felt.

The man took two steps toward me, his boots crunching in the salt and ice.

I didn't run.

I remembered the gallery. I remembered the malachite pedestal and Marcus Aurelius rocking in his lead collar.

I dropped my head.

I didn't use the heel. I used the toe.

I stepped through the slush with my left foot, dug my bare toes into the gravel for purchase, and drove my right foot forward with everything forty-two pounds could summon.

My bare foot hit his shin—not the muscle, but the bone, right where the leather of his boot ended and his wool trousers began.

It hurt me more than it hurt him. The bone of his leg felt like a concrete curb; my little toe gave a sickening, hot *pop* that sent a white flash through my ears.

The man cursed—a short, ugly word that started with an *F*—and reached down with both hands to grab my shoulders.

I opened my mouth and did what my mother had told me never to do in the house of Dominic Moretti.

I screamed.

I didn't scream like a girl who had dropped her ice cream. I screamed like an animal that had been caught in a mowing machine. It was high, raw, and full of the cold wind from the lake.

The back door of the mansion didn't open.