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

The doctor was eighty years old and lived in a brick house behind the church of the Holy Name.

His name was Dr. Castiglione, but Dominic called him "Pills." He arrived with a black leather bag that looked as if it had been through the Great Chicago Fire, smelling of carbolic acid and cherry pipe tobacco.

He set my toe on the kitchen table while my mother held my hands and recited the Hail Mary in Spanish so fast it sounded like the clicking of bicycle spokes.

"It’s a clean fracture," Dr. Castiglione said, his yellow fingers wrapping the little bone in stiff white tape that smelled of zinc. "She’ll walk with a hitch for three weeks, then she’ll forget she has feet. What did she hit?"

"A dockworker," Dominic said.

He was sitting in the corner by the stove, drinking cold coffee from an enamel mug. He had washed his hands, but there was still a dark half-moon beneath the thumbnail of his left hand that hadn't come out with the scrub brush.

"A dockworker," the doctor repeated, not looking up. "They're making them out of granite these days?"

"Out of lard," Dominic said. "She hit the bone."

"Well," the old man said, packing his tape back into the bag. "Next time, tell her to use a pipe. It saves on the cotton."

He left. Alina took me up the bridge to the carriage house, carrying me as if I were made of blown glass.

She didn't sleep that night. She sat by my bed, her fingers tangled in her rosary beads, watching the door as if she expected the entire police department of Illinois to come through the frame with their axes.

They didn't come.

At dawn, the cars left.

The four hundred guests had vanished like mist over the river. The snow in the driveway had been plowed, the red stains by the Imperial covered with three bags of industrial rock salt that crackled like grease in a skillet when the trucks drove over them.

At eight o'clock, the door to our kitchen opened.

It was Dominic.

He was wearing his gray suit again, but he had no tie. His white shirt was open at the throat, revealing the top of the scar that ran down his sternum.

He carried a cardboard box from the bakery on Western Avenue. It was tied with red-and-white string.

He set it on our small oilcloth table.

"Alina," he said.

My mother stood up from the stove. She had her hand on the handle of the kettle, her knuckles white.

"Mr. Moretti," she said.

"Sit down," he said.

"I have to clean the gallery—the glass from the—"

"Delgado," he said. The gravel was back in his voice, but it was low, quiet, the way a man speaks when he is in a room where someone has a fever. "Sit down."

She sat. Her knees hit the pine chair with a small, hollow sound.

Dominic cut the string with his pocketknife—a little silver knife with a mother-of-pearl handle that he used for apples. He opened the box.

Inside were four pastries: giant, glossy snails covered in almonds and apricot glaze, still warm enough to make the cardboard soft.

"Eat," he said.

"I am not hungry, Mr. Moretti," she said.

"I didn't ask if you were hungry," he said. "I bought them. Eat one."

She took a small piece of the crust, her fingers trembling, and put it in her mouth. She chewed it as if it were dry sand.

Dominic pulled out the second chair—the one with the wobbly rung—and sat down. His knees were three inches from mine under the table.

He looked at my foot, which was propped up on an overturned wooden crate, wrapped in Dr. Castiglione’s white zinc tape.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," he said.

"Why is that good?" I demanded, my lower lip sticking out.

"Because if it didn't hurt, it would be dead," he said. "Pain is how your body tells you you're still part of the conversation."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out Benny.

The rabbit had been washed. He didn't smell like potato peelings anymore; he smelled of the cedar chips Dominic kept in his closet to keep the moths away from his wool suits.

The blue thread on his ear was clean.

"I had Jimmy take the Imperial to the crusher," Dominic said to the window.

Alina looked up from her pastry. "The car?"

"The car is dirty," Dominic said. "When someone puts their hands on a machine, the machine remembers. I don't like machines with memories."

He turned back to Alina. His gray eyes were steady, heavy as two stones in a well.

"The Russo family has six cousins in Kenosha," he said. "They have three in Cicero. By noon, they'll know about Silvio."

My mother’s face went that dead, lard-color again. "Mr. Moretti... please. We can go. My sister has a room in El Paso. We can take the Greyhound—"

"You're not going to El Paso," Dominic said.

"They will come here," she whispered.

"They are already here," Dominic said. "Frankie is at the gate. Jimmy has four boys from the West Side in the carriage house basement. Nobody comes through the gate unless I tell them to come."

"You can't stop all of them," Alina said. Her voice broke; the tears she had held back since yesterday finally cut two clean tracks through the flour dust on her cheeks. "You're just one man, Dominic! You have the house, you have the money, but they have... they have the whole city!"

Dominic reached out.

His hand didn't touch her face. He was not a man who touched women who worked for him; he had rules about that, old-country rules that were stiffer than the starch in his collars.

He laid his hand flat on the oilcloth between her pastry and my bandaged foot.

His palm was twice the size of hers. The gray scars on his knuckles looked like seams in old lead pipe.

"They don't have the city," Dominic said.

The words were very quiet. They didn't have the anger of the night before; they had the cold, terrifying weight of a legal decree.

"I have the city," he said. "The aldermen have the titles. The Marcones have the piers. But the city belongs to the man who can stand in the kitchen while the house is burning and tell the cook to finish the bread."

He looked at me.

"Are you finished with the bread, Lucy?"

"It’s not bread," I told him, pointing at the box. "It’s a bear claw."

"Then finish the bear claw," Dominic Moretti said. "We have to do push-ups at ten."

"My toe!"

"You don't do push-ups with your toe," he said, rising from the table. "You do them with your arms. Your arms are fine. Your arms are forty-two pounds of lazy."

He walked to the door of our little kitchen, paused with his hand on the brass knob, and looked back at my mother.

"Buy some blue wool," he said.

"Blue wool?" she asked, wiping her cheeks with her apron.

"For her coat," he said. "The red one is small. Her wrists are sticking out. A girl who fights dockworkers shouldn't look like she’s wearing her little sister’s rags."