A NIGHT WITH THE MAFIA DON

Emily Marlowe noticed this the way she noticed most things that night, from a slight distance, as if she were watching herself through the wrong end of a telescope. A woman in a black dress she had bought three years ago for a cousin's wedding, sitting very straight on a leather stool at the far end of the bar at the Gilded Room, with her third glass of something amber leaving a wet ring on the marble. She had not meant to come here. She had meant to go home, change into the old gray sweatshirt, and be sad in the privacy of her own kitchen like a sensible person. But the apartment had been so quiet, and the quiet had a shape, and the shape was her father's chair. So she had walked. Past her own building, past the bus stop, down Michigan Avenue in shoes that were never meant for walking, until the lobby of the Hotel Lorraine opened its brass doors in front of her like an answer to a question she had not asked. She had followed the soft music to the elevator and the elevator up to the top floor, and a man in a black suit had looked her over once, taken in the dress, her hair, the fact that she was alone, and let her through without a word. It was that kind of place. Dark wood, low amber light, a glass wall along one side that showed the whole glittering skyline laid out like jewelry on velvet. Everyone in it seemed to be very beautiful or very rich. Emily was neither tonight, and she had stopped caring around the second glass. "Another?" the bartender asked. "Please." He poured. She watched the whiskey climb the glass. A year ago tonight her father had walked out of the house to meet a supplier, kissed her on the forehead on his way through the kitchen, and said something about picking up Thai food on the way home. He had not made it to the supplier. A heart, the doctor said afterward, in the careful voice of a man who said it often. A heart that had simply decided to stop, in a parking lot in Cicero, between one ordinary breath and the next. Thomas Marlowe had been a general contractor for thirty-four years. He built porches and kitchens and, once, a whole church basement. Everyone who ever hired him loved him, and he left his only daughter a house with a leaking roof, a pickup truck with two hundred thousand miles on it, and a shoebox. The shoebox had been in the bottom drawer of his desk. Emily found it eleven days after the funeral, looking for the title to the truck. Inside were loan agreements. Eleven of them. Private lenders, mostly, men with first names for last names and addresses that turned out to be mailboxes, and the earliest was dated six years back. Her father had been borrowing to pay what he had borrowed before, carefully, patiently, in a handwriting so neat it made her want to scream. By the time she finished adding the columns at the kitchen table, with the calculator he had kept in the junk drawer since 1998, the number came to four hundred and sixty thousand dollars. It was higher now. It rose every week, the way a tide rises, without malice, simply doing what tides do. She had sold the truck. She had sold his tools. She had listed the house and learned what a house with a leaking roof and a lien on it was worth, which was less than the debt. She worked every day at the bench of a small jeweler's workshop on Wells Street, soldering other people's engagement rings for a wage that covered rent and not much more, and every night she came home and found that someone had slipped something under her door. At first the notes were polite. Reminders. Then they were not. Your father was a man of his word, the latest said, in block capitals on yellow paper. We hope you are the same. And under it, in a smaller, neater hand, as if it were an afterthought: It would be a shame to bury a second Marlowe this year. She took another swallow. It burned. She was grateful for that. The thing she kept coming back to, in the amber light, was that she was good. That was the absurd part. She had a degree in jewelry design and metalsmithing and had graduated near the top of a class of forty. Her thesis piece, a ring set with a gray moonstone that looked as though it had caught a piece of fog and held it, sold the week of the exhibit to a woman who cried. Emily had drawn a hundred designs since. They lived in notebooks under her bed. Not one of them would ever be made, because she could not afford the gold, or the stones, or a studio, or the months it would take. Every dollar she earned went to a man who had never met her and wanted her afraid. "You've been looking at that ice for ten minutes," someone said, a few stools down. A woman in sequins, kindly, a little glazed. "Honey, if you need to cry, the bathroom is lovely." "I'm not crying." "Okay." "I'm having a drink." "That too," the woman agreed, and turned back to her friends. It was around then that Emily felt it, the specific prickling sense of being looked at. It began between her shoulder blades and traveled up the back of her neck. She had spent a year learning that feeling, in parking lots and stairwells, and she turned her head slowly and saw nothing. People talking. People laughing. A man at the end of the bar, texting. But the feeling stayed. It had weight. It seemed to come from above, though she could not have said why. She turned back to the bar and ignored it. She was an expert at ignoring things now. Five minutes later a shadow fell across the marble beside her, and a man stopped at the next stool without sitting on it. He stayed standing, one hand resting on the leather. He was big, forty or so, in a dark suit that fit him as though he had been poured into it, with a quiet face and the kind of eyes that stayed polite while they counted exits. He did not look dangerous. That was what made her sit up. "Good evening, miss," he said. "I'm sorry to interrupt. A gentleman would like you to join him upstairs." Emily looked at him. Then she looked at her glass. Then she looked at him again, slowly, from his polished shoes to his patient face. "Which gentleman?" "He asked me not to give his name." "He sent you to fetch me and he didn't give you his name." She tilted her head. "That's very smooth. Is it a short walk, or are we taking the elevator?" "Miss, it's a quiet table. Very private. You would be perfectly safe." "I'm sure I would." She picked up her glass. "Tell your gentleman I said thank you, and no." The man did not move. His face did not change. "He isn't accustomed to being refused." "Then it will be educational for him." For a moment she thought he might argue. Something shifted behind the quiet eyes, a flicker that in a less careful man might have been amusement. Then he inclined his head, said, "As you like," and walked away through the crowd as if it had parted for him out of habit. Emily exhaled. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking. She set the glass down. Idiot, she thought. He was probably a banker. Possibly someone who would have bought you dinner. But she knew what that prickle along her spine was, and it was not dinner. She had spent a year learning the difference between being wanted and being hunted, and she was no longer certain which one this was. She looked up then, finally, past the bar and the bottles and the glittering glass, to the mezzanine that ran along the back wall above the room. A man stood at the rail. He was too far away for her to see his face. A tall figure in a dark suit, one hand resting lightly on the brass, the other holding a glass he was not drinking from. He stood without moving, as if he had been standing there a long time and meant to stand there longer. All the light in the room seemed to arrive at him and stop. Below him the whole club turned and glittered and laughed, and he was the only still thing in it. Something cold moved down her arm. Emily held his gaze for exactly as long as she could stand to, which was longer than she would have guessed. Then she lifted her glass an inch off the bar, a small, mocking, perfectly insolent salute, turned her back on him, and drank. He was looking directly at her.