Chapter 27: Keep What You Kill

Thrak

Two nights before the doorway opened, Lord Bellafonte told me to give it all back.

By then, I had already decided to kill him.

I had declined the next Sunday dinner. Then the next. His wife sent food to the club anyway, wrapped in a cloth she apparently trusted me to return.

I had the kitchen send it back untouched.

When Lord Bellafonte asked whether something had happened at the house, I told him I had work.

He accepted the answer. That offended me too.

Now he had called me upstairs to discuss the district.

“The dead come off the streets,” he said. “The checkpoints close. You stop collecting from businesses that never agreed to pay us.”

“They agreed after I visited.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

I sat in the chair he had made for me.

My feet touched the floor.

I kept them planted there. I would not use the footrest. Not right now.

There were crumbs in the carving along one arm. I had eaten his wife’s biscuits here before I knew better.

“The district is orderly,” I said. “The warehouses lose nothing. The men obey. Revenue has increased.”

“The police can’t pretend they don’t see walking corpses forever.”

“Then they should stop pretending and accept what they see.”

Lou stood near the window.

Two of Lord Bellafonte’s men now waited inside the door. They had been outside when I entered.

Lord Bellafonte followed my glance to the guards.

“Nobody is going to hurt you.”

One guard took his hand away from his coat.

So they had discussed hurting me before I arrived.

* * *

He had received complaints.

From people whose deliveries I controlled. From a widow whose husband’s body had been useful at a loading dock. From men who objected to the requirement that a member of each household remain within the district while the others traveled.

They called them hostages.

I called them assurances.

The difference had failed to comfort anyone.

“You don’t take a man’s family to make him do his job,” Lord Bellafonte said.

“Then how do you ensure he returns?”

“Sometimes you trust him.”

“And when he betrays you?”

“Sometimes he does.”

He said it as though this were a tolerable condition of being alive.

I looked at Lou.

He would not look back.

“You taught me to make consequences clear,” I said.

“Yes.”

“To keep what I took.”

“Within limits.”

“Your limits.”

Lord Bellafonte’s face changed.

“This is my organization.”

I had expected those words and practiced my answer.

Yet I kept seeing him with Lucy asleep against his shoulder. No guards inside the house. No weapon in reach. He had handed his granddaughter to her mother with both hands supporting her, as though carrying her properly required his entire attention.

He had ruled this organization for years.

And that was how easily he could be distracted.

* * *

He offered me a smaller territory.

A club. A warehouse. Men who would help. Money already earned would remain mine. The chair would remain mine. If I wanted to leave Chicago, he would arrange it.

He named the club. A good one. I knew its receipts.

The warehouse stood outside the district he wanted back.

Lou finally spoke.

“Take a week. Get away from all this.”

Lord Bellafonte leaned forward.

“Lucy keeps asking about that tunnel. You left her brother drawing plans all over my newspaper.”

He smiled a little.

My fingers tightened around the keys as I remembered Paul on the carpet, explaining where the road should go. I had wanted to hear the rest.

Lord Bellafonte saw something in my face and mistook it for encouragement.

“Come Sunday. We can settle the work here.”

Behind him, the map showed everything he intended to take from me.

I would lose the keys, the streets, and the people who stood when I entered. Men would begin laughing at my name again.

At the club he offered, I would have to ask his men for protection.

They would come if he sent them.

I put my hand over the keys.

“You still got a place at my table,” Lord Bellafonte said.

I searched his face for the condition.

There had to be one. Hand over the keys. Behave. Become amusing again. Lie on the carpet while his grandchildren laughed.

He waited, apparently believing he had offered me something worth having.

I hated him for knowing that he had.

“No,” I said.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes.

“You don’t gotta make everything so hard, kid.”

I could hear the projector. For an instant I could even remember the weight of the little girl’s head against my sleeve.

He had seen me like that.

“The keys, Thrak.”

He held out his hand.

I drew the pistol he had given me.

* * *

Lou shouted.

One of the guards reached inside his coat.

I fired first.

Lord Bellafonte struck the desk behind him and slid to the floor.

For an instant, the room was impossibly loud.

I held a shield against the guards’ bullets and called the dead from the landing. The man by the door was reaching for the alarm; I had to stop him too.

Lord Bellafonte’s hand moved against the carpet. I must not look at it.

Too many things.

A bullet passed the edge of my protection and cut my ear. The pain broke my concentration. The first dead guard stumbled against the doorframe and blocked the others.

Lou moved toward Lord Bellafonte.

“Vincent.”

I had never heard Lou say it that way.

I told him to stand back.

He ignored me.

Lord Bellafonte looked up at him, then toward me.

He tried to speak. I never learned what he meant to say.

* * *

One of the living guards surrendered.

The other fired again.

My dead men killed him before I could decide which result I preferred.

Lou knelt beside Lord Bellafonte until there was no longer a reason to kneel.

Then he closed the man’s eyes.

I allowed it. The gesture did not affect the body.

When he stood, his pistol remained in its holster.

“Are you going to make this difficult?” I asked.

He looked from the surviving guard to the dead in the doorway, then down at the blood beneath the desk.

“No.”

A sensible answer.

“You will tell the lieutenants to come here at dawn.”

“And his family?”

“They remain in their house.”

“Leave them there.”

I studied him.

“As long as there is no further trouble.”

His jaw moved once before he nodded.

Lou had survived our first disagreement by recognizing when an attempt had failed. Fourteen armed men had not been enough to remove me then. He had even less to work with now.

“Keep the office running,” I told him. “You know the drivers. The accounts. Who expects to be paid.”

“I know.”

“Then we shall manage very well.”

He picked up the telephone.

I turned my attention to the bodies. There was a great deal to arrange before morning.

* * *

Before dawn, I raised Vincent Bellafonte.

His body remembered the route from the desk to the door. It remembered how to sit, how to hold a pen, how to turn a ring with his thumb while listening.

It did not remember listening.

I positioned him beside me when the lieutenants came.

Some began to draw weapons.

Then they saw the dead guards behind them.

“Lord Bellafonte has retired,” I said.

No one laughed.

I explained the new arrangements. Revenue would continue. Disobedience would cease. Families would remain protected so long as nobody forced me to revise the definition of protection.

The men agreed.

Some meant it.

The rest would become simpler if necessary.

When they left, I looked at Vincent’s body.

“You may sit.”

He sat.

He did not tell me I was making a mistake.

I waited for him to add something.

Then I remembered he would not.

The telephone rang.

I answered it.

“Papa?”

His daughter’s voice.

I stood with the receiver against my ear. Behind her, a child was explaining something urgently. Lucy, perhaps. I could not distinguish the words.

“Lou said there was trouble. Is he there?”

Vincent sat where I had put him. His eyes remained on the door.

I replaced the receiver.

When it rang again, I disconnected it.

I had work.

* * *

By the following evening, the river warehouses answered to my tokens.

Dead men guarded bridges and loading docks. Living clerks kept accounts under rules they understood perfectly. Rival crews sent negotiators. Policemen came in groups, discovered that shooting a man in the chest did not guarantee that he stopped approaching, and withdrew to discuss the problem with people farther from it.

Beyond my streets, Chicago remained immense and disorderly.

That was temporary.

I had learned how a city worked. Food entered through roads. Money passed through businesses. People returned to homes because other people waited there.

Control the places where those things passed, and the rest followed.

Lord Bellafonte had taught me much of it.

I regretted that he had refused to understand the implications.

In his desk, I found a photograph of him with Frankie Moretti.

The human stood beside him in a fine suit, wearing the expression of a man who expected the world to present difficulties and had already budgeted time to correct them.

I studied the man whose place I had taken.

Somewhere, perhaps, he occupied mine.

I hoped Shiiruk was making that educational.

Then the old scar in my palm began to burn.

* * *

The exchange had marked me when it tore me out of Azrath’s chamber.

I had examined the mark often. It resembled part of a binding with the other half missing. A direction without a destination I could reach.

Now it had one.

Something enormous had broken far away.

The pressure moved through the mark, through the room, through every little token I had connected to my will.

The air above the warehouse floor split open.

Stone appeared beyond it.

I knew that stone.

For one heartbeat, I was small again.

Then I saw the broken heartglass and the ruined chamber. I searched the corners and the steps before the throne.

No Azrath anywhere.

A human knelt beside a body on the floor. A woman held him. A knight lay nearby. Behind them, others moved among the wreckage.

The human looked up.

I recognized the suit before the face.

Frankie Moretti had apparently found employment difficult too.

The broken heartglass frightened me more than the wreckage. Whatever these people had done, Lord Azrath would not return from it.

I could let the opening close. Leave Moretti on the other side and hope it never opened again.

Then I remembered the drivers who still asked what Frankie would have done. The men who obeyed me while looking at Lou. Moretti could call on every loyalty I had inherited, if he reached Chicago and had time to speak.

Here, I could choose his welcome. Armed dead at the crossing. More in reserve. Vincent where his old servant would see him. Moretti was wounded and grieving; the woman beside him had to hold him upright. I would give him a reason to hurry.

He had defeated Azrath in Azrath’s chamber. I knew better than to meet him in it.

* * *

The opening began to narrow.

I pressed my marked hand against the edge and fed it strength from the nearest bindings.

It held.

On the other side, an enormous man turned toward it with the expression of a craftsman discovering an interesting disaster.

I took Vincent’s ring from his hand.

I sent it through. It struck the stone floor with a little sound.

Frankie picked it up.

I watched understanding enter his face.

“Come home,” I said.

Behind me, Vincent stood when ordered.

His head turned toward me.

For an instant I saw the man standing in his doorway with a sleeping child against his shoulder.

I ordered him to face the opening.

He obeyed.

There would be no more invitations.

Keep what you kill.

And now Chicago was mine.