The Mafia's Sweetheart

The hospital smells like bleach and dying flowers.

It always does. Three months in this same room and the smell has worked its way into my coat, my hair, the inside of my nose. I push the door open with my hip, balancing the takeout container of soup I bought on the way over with the last twelve dollars in my checking account.

"Hi, Dad."

He doesn't look at me.

He is propped up in the bed with the television on a game show he doesn't watch, the remote in one hand, the cup of pills the nurse left on his tray sitting untouched at his elbow. His skin is the color of old paper. His hair has gone almost completely gray since August.

I set the soup down. I cross to the window. I pull the blinds open because the doctor said sunlight, every day, even when he says no.

"Close them."

"Dad."

"Close them, Isabella."

I leave them open.

I sit in the plastic chair that has molded itself to my spine over the last twelve weeks. I pick up the pill cup.

"You haven't taken these."

"I'll take them when I want to take them."

"They're at eleven and at five. Dr. Patel said."

"Dr. Patel can." He stops himself. He closes his eyes. "I will take them. Stop fussing."

"It is not fussing, Dad. It is not optional. It is a pacemaker drug, you cannot just."

"Isabella."

I close my mouth.

I set the cup back down. I stand up. I cross to the window I just opened and I stand there with my arms crossed because if I sit back down I will cry, and if I cry he will say something I cannot un-hear.

The parking lot below is gray. The sky is gray. Somewhere out there are the bills I cannot pay. The supplemental insurance the hospital said they would not cover. The nine-thousand-dollar deductible that arrived in the mail on Tuesday. The rent on the apartment I have not been to in two days.

"How is your mother."

He has not asked me that in a year.

I do not turn around.

"I don't know, Dad. I haven't spoken to her since June."

"Mm."

"You know I haven't."

"Mm."

He goes quiet. The game show plays a jingle. Somebody on the screen wins a refrigerator. He does not move.

"She still in Connecticut."

"Greenwich. With Howard."

"Howard." A small, ugly sound. "Howard. What does Howard do, Isabella."

"Hedge fund."

"Hedge fund." He says it the way another man would say cockroach. "He has the hair for it. The teeth. Twenty-six years and what does she leave for. Hedge fund."

"Dad."

"Take the pills off the tray, bambina. I will take them when you go."

I leave the pills.

I leave the soup.

I kiss his forehead, which is dry and hot. I say I love him. He grunts.

In the elevator, I count what is in my wallet. Twelve dollars is gone. There is a gas station receipt. There is the business card a girl I went to high school with pressed into my palm at the diner last Tuesday, after I told her I was about to lose the apartment.

The Hive, it says in cursive. An address in the meatpacking district. A phone number. Ask for Chloe at the door. They tip in cash. Just come.

I slide the card back into my pocket.

I push out into the November cold.

The line at the door is forty people deep.

It is eleven on a Wednesday, and there is a line forty people deep, and the bouncers at the velvet rope are turning men away with one hand and waving women through with the other. I walk past the line in the only nice coat I own, and my heart is in my throat, and I hand the card with Chloe's name on it to the bouncer without speaking.

He looks at the card.

He looks at me.

He lifts the rope.

The doors swing open and the bass hits me like a wave.

The first thing is the smell.

Liquor, mostly. The expensive kind, which I did not know had a smell distinct from the cheap kind, but it does . leather and oak and something sweet, layered over sweat and perfume and something animal underneath that I cannot name and do not want to. The second thing is the light . gold ceiling, low warm spots over the tables, blacklights flickering pink and purple over the dance floor at the far end. The third thing is the people. Hundreds of them. Pressed shoulder to shoulder, hands lifted, mouths open, drinks held high.

I have never been anywhere like this.

I push through.

A man in a loose unbuttoned shirt grabs my hip.

I do not realize at first that it is me he has grabbed. The grip is so casual, so confident, that I think for half a second that it is an accident . that he has confused me with someone he knows, and any moment now he will recoil and apologize. He doesn't. His fingers tighten. He leans his face down to mine, and his breath is whiskey and onion and something acid underneath.

"Where you going, sweetheart."

"Off your hand."

"Aw, don't be like that."

"Off."

"Slow down, baby, you don't have to be such a."

"I will scream so loud the bouncer breaks your wrist."

He blinks.

He laughs, like I am being charming. His grip stays.

I lean in. I drop my voice an octave.

"I am not joking. Three. Two. One."

He lets go.

He raises both hands, palms out, and walks backward into the crowd with his face full of the kind of insulted surprise only a certain kind of man can produce after being told no by a woman half his size. He is muttering something about bitches before he is fully out of earshot.

My pulse is hammering. My hands are shaking inside my pockets. I keep walking.

The bar is along the far wall.

It is the longest bar I have ever seen . black marble, gold-veined, lit from below with the same warm gold light as the ceiling. There are six bartenders working it, all of them men in white shirts with sleeves rolled to the elbow. The mirror behind them is full of bottles I cannot afford to look at.

I scan the line of stools.

Halfway down, on a tall chair, in a red-sequined leotard that catches the light like a cut wound, is Chloe.

She turns her head as if she has felt me.

"Bella!"

She is on me before I take another step. Skinny arms thrown around my neck. The smell of jasmine and hairspray and a perfume she has been wearing since we were sixteen. I hug her back hard enough that my throat hurts.

"You came." She holds me at arm's length. "Isabella Rossi. You actually came. Look at you. Look at you."

"You are wearing very little fabric, Chloe."

"I am wearing exactly enough fabric." She grins. "Come to the bar. Come, come."

She tows me by the wrist.

A space at the bar opens like the sea. People are not watching her, exactly . they are aware of her, in the way you are aware of a fire alarm you have not yet decided whether to evacuate for. She slides onto a stool, pats the one beside her.

"Sit. Sit. Leo, amore, a Diet Coke for my best friend, no liquor, she is on a mission."

The bartender at our end of the bar looks up.

He is, I will say honestly, beautiful.

Twenty-five, maybe. Light brown skin, dark hair pushed back, dimple in his left cheek when he smiles, which he does at me the moment our eyes meet. He sets down a shaker. He plants both palms on the bar. He leans across.

"You must be Isabella."

"I must be."

"Chloe has been talking about you for two weeks straight."

"Chloe does not know how to be quiet."

"I have noticed." His grin widens. "Diet Coke?"

"Please."

He pours it in a heavy crystal glass that costs more than my coat. He slides it to me. He has not stopped smiling.

"On the house," he says. "Welcome to the Hive."

"Thank you."

"And a little advice."

"Yes."

He leans closer. I get the smell of his cologne . clean, simple, expensive.

"If anyone gives you trouble out there." He flicks his eyes at the floor behind me. ".you come straight to this bar. You come to me at this bar. Understood?"

I nod. I take a sip of the Coke to hide my face.

Chloe slaps the marble.

"Stop flirting, Leo, she has an interview."

"Am I flirting." Leo's eyes have not left my face. "I had no idea."

"Leo."

He laughs. He goes to make someone a martini.

Chloe spins her stool to face me. She catches my hands. Her face goes serious for the first time since I walked in.

"Okay. Listen. Mark is the manager. Mark is . stronza, Mark is a creep, but he hires fast and he pays in cash and he won't ask too many questions about the gap on your résumé." She squeezes my fingers. "Just don't take any of his shit. Don't smile too much, he reads it as flirting. Don't argue, he reads it as defiance. Just answer the questions and walk out. Five minutes, you'll be a waitress, you'll make more in one weekend than a month at the diner. Yes?"

"Yes."

"And Bella."

"Yes."

"The owner is never here. Never. He is in Moscow or somewhere half the year. You will never see him. So you don't have to worry about . anything else. Right? It's just Mark. Just answer Mark."

"Just Mark."

"You can do this."

"I can do this."

She hugs me hard enough that her sequins press into my collarbone.

She points at a hallway behind the bar.

"Third door on the left. Tell him I sent you."

I drain the Coke. I straighten my coat. I walk.

The hallway is too quiet.

The bass is muffled here. The carpet is plush. The lights are the same warm gold but lower, lit from sconces, throwing soft pools onto walls hung with art I cannot afford to identify. The third door on the left is heavy oak, partially open. I knock anyway.

"What."

I push it.

The office behind it is a disaster.

That is the only word. Stacks of receipts on the desk. Two empty bottles on a side table. A laptop with the cooling fan whining. An ashtray. A half-eaten sandwich on a paper napkin. A printer on the floor with no obvious reason for being there. The man behind the desk is mid-fifties, balding at the crown, his shirt collar open and his tie loose around his neck like a scarf he has forgotten about.

He does not look up.

"Sit."

I sit.

"Name."

"Isabella Rossi. Chloe sent."

"Mm-hmm." He is typing. "Age."

"Twenty-three."

"Server experience."

"Three years at Mariano's on."

"Sure."

He has not looked at me. He has not looked at the résumé I am holding out across the desk in a manila folder.

"Cash okay."

"Yes."

"Tips off the books."

"Yes."

"Saturday and Sunday nights mandatory, Wednesday and Thursday rotating, you start at eleven, you finish at four, you don't go home with the customers, you don't take drugs in the bathrooms, you don't fuck the bartenders, you don't fuck the bouncers, you don't fuck me, you don't fuck the boss, you don't talk to the boss, you don't even look at the boss. Yes?"

"…Yes?"

"Great."

He stops typing.

He looks up at me for the first time.

His eyes drag, slow, from my collarbone to my face to my hairline, and back down. They linger somewhere in the middle. He sniffs. He picks up a pen and clicks it. He sets it down. He does not pick up the résumé.

"Stand up."

"I."

"Up. Come around. I gotta walk you to someone."

I stand. I clutch the folder.

"To who."

"Don't worry about it."

"To Chloe?"

"Madonna." He sighs. "Just walk."

He stands. He smells like sweat and something Italian and unwashed under the cologne. He does not bother to button his collar. He walks around the desk and grabs my elbow . not hard, but in the way you grab a child who is about to cross a street . and he steers me out of the office and back down the hall, past the third door, past the second door, all the way to the end.

The door at the end is not oak.

It is steel. Painted black. Heavy. There is a small pinhole camera lens above it, a brushed silver panel beside it, and a kind of pressure in the air at this end of the hall I cannot account for. The bass from the club is gone entirely.

Mark stops three feet from it.

He does not knock right away.

He pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket. He wipes the back of his neck. He smooths his shirt down. He clears his throat.

He is, I realize, afraid.

He knocks.

The door does not open. A long beat passes.

Mark knocks again. Harder.

"One fucking minute," a woman's voice snarls inside, in an accent that is not American, and there are footsteps, and the door is yanked inward, and a blonde steps out.

She is wearing red lingerie.

Just red lingerie. A bra and a thong and high black heels, and nothing else, no robe, no shirt, nothing. Her lipstick is smeared at one corner. Her hair is wrecked. Her eyes are dark and furious, and they go straight past Mark to me.

She looks me up and down.

She makes a sound I cannot translate but understand perfectly.

She shoulders past us in her heels and her thong, fury in every line of her body, and she does not stop walking until she has disappeared down the hall.

Mark does not look at her. Mark does not look at me. Mark looks at the floor.

From inside the open doorway, a man's voice.

It is . I do not have a word for what it is, in this first second.

It is low. It is in English with the texture of somewhere else underneath. It is the kind of voice that has not been raised in a very long time, because it has not had to be.

"Who told you," it says, very calm, very cold, "to interrupt me, Mark."

Mark's throat works.

I cannot see the man inside.

I can only see the slice of the room behind him . black and gold, a chandelier, a rug . and Mark's hand at my elbow tightening enough to hurt, and the back of my own neck going cold, all at once, like someone has opened a window in November.