“Can we get outta here?”

  He looks into her eyes. “It’s over. All of it. You and me. It’s over.”

  She sees something in his eyes she doesn’t like. “What are you saying?”

  A long pause here. “I’m trying to tell you something here, something I never—”

  He stops. He can’t say it. He can’t tell her. He can’t do it.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Gerbil’s eyes are shiny in the sodium light.

  “Nothing’s the matter with me. I’m trying to tell you something here.”

  “Spit it out, Tonto.”

  “It’s over. You’re out. You’re done. Pink-slip time is what I’m saying.”

  Oswald watches her fight the tears. His guts clench. A fiery pain blooms in his side. His scalp crawls at the sight of her quivering lip.

  “You know what? Fuck you. Okay?” She quickly wipes her eyes.

  Oswald looks at the ground. A taxi roars past them, the sky hissing with the white noise of dirty jets on their glide paths.

  Gerbil starts to walk away, grumbling over her shoulder at him. “Just fuck you and your fat ass and your woo-woo Indian bullshit.”

  “Where the hell are you going?” Oswald calls after her, feeling empty all of a sudden.

  She flips him the bird over her shoulder without even looking.

  Oswald assumes this means she’ll be taking a taxi home.

  29.

  That night, around a quarter to 8, they start with an antipasti course.

  The waitstaff—three buxom matrons hand-picked by Bocci’s executive chef, Armando Rutti—come through the swinging doors and into the private room like synchronized swimmers in starched white uniforms, carrying silver trays laden with tender nuggets of mortadella, rows of capacola sliced so thin they’re transparent, proscuitto-wrapped fingers of honeydew melon, escarole leaves beaded with twenty-year-old balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil hand-pressed in a monastery on the Amalfi Coast.

  Under the flickering, festive light of antique signal lanterns from the old Galena and Chicago Railroad, the trays are laid out on the long, teak deacon’s table. Jovial dancing shadows play across the walls, which are lined with sepia stills of old Mob Chicago—images of bootleggers cracking kegs and Weegee portraits of Capone, Dillinger, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, and Papa Daley—all of it sharing space with model train paraphernalia. The old man loves toy trains. He has since his childhood. Around the uppermost edge of the ceiling, mounted on brackets along the ornate crown molding, is an actual working O-scale track. Throughout the night, the a softly clacking toy train circles the room, a dozen boxcars as long as a kite’s tail ticking under the murmur of conversation.

  At last, around 8 p.m., a rare 1947 Rossi di Montalcino is uncorked and poured, and the old man at the head of the table levers himself up onto his ivory cane.

  “To the Morelli brothers,” he croaks in his feeble alto, raising a glass with a palsied hand. “Come all the way down here from Newark to help brainstorm on this thing.”

  The other five gentlemen seated around the table lift their crystal and mutter confirmations like supplicants at a mass. Three of the guests (the ones just in from New Jersey) sit on the old man’s left. Two of them—the Morelli brothers—are dressed in sport coats and open-collar shirts. The third—Freddy “.45” Felson—is in a V-neck sweater with a gold St. Christopher medallion around his neck.

  On the other side of the table, to the old man’s immediate right, is Jimmy “the Cucumber” Dalessandro, the don’s closest confidant and capo. “Salud, boss, Salud,” he says with a gracious nod, sipping the vintage wine. “Here’s to getting this thing done.”

  Next to Dalessandro sits a jittery young man in a flannel shirt and spiky hair named Mark Ferri (better known on the street as Marky-Mark). Slumped in his chair, picking at his nose more than his food, Mark is the old man’s youngest grandson and biggest embarrassment. The boy is here tonight to somehow redeem himself in the eyes of his elder. Secretly, though, the underlings in the Ferri crew are giving heavy odds in favor of the kid screwing this Indian thing up big time.

  After the toast, the Morelli brothers—who run an assassination bureau known chiefly among Outfit insiders as “The Body Shop”—share a loaded glance. “I gotta tell ya, Mr. Ferri,” the older one, Jack, finally says. A ruddy-complected bull of a man, he looks skeptical. “I’m still a little fuzzy on why all the heavy machinery for this one guy. Who is he—the Amazing Fucking Hulk?”

  Freddy Felson covers his grin, and a couple of the others stifle chuckles.

  “Excellent question,” the old man says after taking a luxurious gulp of Rossi di Montalcino and swishing it around his mouth like a regular sommelier. “He isn’t that amazing... but he sure is a fucking hulk. I want a level of certainty on this one, Jackie, basically. And we need to expedite this particular thing, fellas. The nigger tells me it’s gotta be tomorrow, next day at the latest.”

  “Why all the muscle though?” Freddy Felson speaks up, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing curiously. “Way I understand it, the guy’s half gone anyway, brain fucked up. Soused all the time. Be like picking off a duck in a barrel.”

  The old man dabs his pristine little silver mustache with a cloth napkin. “I want to do this as quickly and cleanly and neatly as possible, Freddy—the shenanigans he’s been pulling—I don’t want any doubt. I don’t want to send any messages here. I just want to insure this individual is removed from the planet earth.”

  The other Morelli brother, a huge man with very little neck, name of Jilly, grins at the others. “Don’t mess with Mother Nature,” he quips.

  Big laughs on this one. Laughs all around the table. The ice is broken, and everybody gets it now: the agenda is set. The goal is clear, and there is consensus among all parties. And thus the men commence with dinner and fellowship, greeting the next course as it comes through the swinging doors with a chorus of lusty whoops and hollers.

  Oswald stumbles out of Binny’s Beveridge Depot at North and Milwaukee Avenue with a ringing in his ears and a pint bottle in his coat pocket and a black poison sickness in his brain and in his heart.

  Staggering down the deserted walkway, his hooded sweatshirt pulled tight around his huge head as though keeping his brains from spilling out, he unscrews the cheap bottle of sour mash, pops another OxyContin, and takes a big pull. He has tears in his eyes. A distant siren shatters the distance—the keen of a hook and ladder or an EMT wagon on its way to a fire or a heart attack or a drive-by—and there’s no way Oswald can save anybody from their terrible, terrible fate.

  He keeps walking and doesn’t look up at the moon. He doesn’t have to. He knows it’s almost full, and Gerbil is gone now, and Oswald Means is just about to lose everything, everything, and he’s drinking himself into oblivion again, because he sees the baleful rawhide-lined face of the Ho-Chunk elder in every dark doorway now, staring at him, judging him, doubting him, and he has nowhere to go, nowhere to flop, nothing but a truck full of guns and canned goods. And he can’t find anybody to save.

  The streets are dark and slimy with day-old rain, the sidewalks sparsely populated with stew-bums and screwballs and forgotten souls halfway to the grave, and Oswald hasn’t heard a thing from the Candy Man. He takes another pull off the bottle, and he starts wondering if he should try and give a brochure on conquering the cycle of addiction to one of the poor homeless bastards outside the Damon Street soup kitchen, when he trips on the curb.

  He falls down hard, hitting his shoulder blade on a hydrant and breaking the bottle. He starts to laugh a maniacal laugh, and his hyena howls come out of him and rise up into the sky as scratchy and dry as cornhusks.

  The desolate noise of his laughter echoes off boarded storefronts and down empty alleys, and the sound of it boomeranging back at him reaches his ears and makes him swallow his mirthless chortle until he’s half crying and half raging at the moon.

  The fucking relentless cruel pitiless moon.

  30.

  Long after closing time—after the chairs out in the dining room have been turned upside down on the tabletops, and most of the kitchen staff have punched out and gone home—Chef Rutti continues ministering to his special private party in the back room. It’s nearly midnight when the maestro personally rolls the dessert cart into the Lionel train room.

  “Holy Jesus, look at that,” one of the Morelli brothers marvels as he surveys the stainless steel caddy laden with tiramisu, cannoli, lemon ice, lady fingers dipped in Belgian chocolate, double-fudge lava cake topped with fresh berries, and dessert crepes stuffed with sweet ricotta and pine nuts. “What are you bringing the other guys?”

  Drunken laughter.

  “Just leave it, Armando, thank you, you’ve created another masterpiece.” Old Man Ferri gives a genteel little nod from across the room. He stands near a whiteboard, which is scrawled with blue erasable marker: ideas, concepts, interesting places to rub out the Indian. The old man is tipsy from too much wine, and has his smoking jacket off, his woolen vest unbuttoned at the top. A thin strand of white hangs down in his yellow eyes.

  The chef gives them all a curt little bow and retreats out the door.

  “Boss, tell me again why the location is so important,” Freddy Felson is saying, maneuvering his lanky body around the dessert cart as the others crowd in, descending on the sweets. “I mean, it doesn’t seem that complicated.”

  The little old man at the whiteboard purses his lips, holding his temper in check. “For the third time, I don’t want to just set him up on the street or in a public place, as per usual. This Injun is foxy. Slippery. This project needs to be shooter-friendly, and it needs to be discreet, and it needs to be fast.”

  “How’s about we just drop him here?” This suggestion from Jilly Morelli, who speaks with his mouth full of cannoli, a dusting of powdered sugar on his nose. “We can store him in the walk-in. Take him apart with one of the band saws the chef’s got back there for his rib roasts.”

  Across the room, Jimmy Dalessandro, smart and cool in his Dino coif, shark skin, and thin lapels, looks away and tries not to smile.

  Anthony Ferri blows an exasperated sigh out through his liver lips. “I need you gentlemen to pay attention now,” he says, turning to the whiteboard. “I don’t want to go through this again. There’s basically three aspects of this hit I want to insure.”

  He writes on the board:

  Privacy

  Containment

  Speed

  The room gets quiet. The sound of drunken men inhaling desserts and thinking. There’s another sound—barely audible but present nonetheless—coming from the corner. Young Mark Ferri, the don’s misfit grandson, has passed out after one too many grappas. Slumped over his dinner plate, the side of his face in his marinara, he softly snores.

  After a while, it becomes painfully clear—mostly by the way he is frowning at the whiteboard—that Freddy Felson is confused. “Boss, if I may,” Freddy speaks up, trying to sound as erudite as possible. “If I may inquire, um, what you mean, exactly, vis-à-vis ‘containment’?”

  The old man blows out another exasperated sigh. “Vis-à-vis?”

  Freddy licks his lips. “As per. Regarding. You know. In relation to... the concept of containment.”

  “It’s one of the three prongs, Freddy. What’s your question?”

  Freddy swallows hard. “I understand it’s one of the prongs, boss, I mean, I’m following the prongs concept. I get the prongs. I just don’t—”

  “You don’t know what the word means, do ya?” The old man stands at the with his stringy arms crossed against his chest, an impatient headmaster about to slap a ruler across a boy’s knuckles. “Do ya?”

  The room is so quiet now all you can hear is the sound of the building settling and the soft snoring of the Ferri kid and the clacking of the O-scale model train as it wends its way around the ceiling-mounted track, rattling through little plaster-of-Paris tunnels, over balsa wood-covered bridges, past little plastic billboards for Burma Shave and Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum.

  “Boss, I know what the word containment means, I’m just having a little bit of an issue with the whole—”

  “What’s it mean, Freddy?”

  “Boss, come on.”

  The old man glares. “You have no freakin’ idea what the word containment means, do ya?”

  “Of course I know what it means.” Freddy Felson looks as though he wants to sink into his chair. “I know what the word containment means.”

  “Okay, then tell me.”

  Freddy seems to be trying to swallow his entire Adam’s apple. The ball of dough and fat in his stomach is starting to burn. “It means, well, actually, the word containment has more than one meaning, if you want to get technical—”

  “Freddy, I swear to Christ, I swear on my mother’s grave.” From inside his silk vest the old man pulls a little Remington two-shot pistol with a mother-of-pearl grip. The room gets even quieter.

  The little train keeps clacking softly around them like a taunting sprite.

  “If you don’t give me the definition of the word containment in about three seconds flat, I will put your minimal amount of brains on that dessert cart.” The old man says this as he waddles over to Felson with the little double-barreled handgun raised.

  Freddy Felson—trembling all over, armpits damp—fingers his St. Christopher medal. “Boss, c’mon, it’s a multi-definitional kind of word—”

  The old man puts the barrel against Freddy Felson’s temple and presses it hard against his skull. The others stiffen. Jimmy Dalessandro, eyes wide and alert now, takes a step across the room, his big hand reaching behind his belt. Old Man Ferri thumbs the hammer and snarls: “You have exactly three seconds to tell me the definition of containment.”

  Freddy closes his eyes. “Boss, please—”

  “Three…”

  Freddy flinches. “Boss, c’mon, please—”

  “Two…”

  Eyes slammed shut. “Can you please—okay can you—can you use the word in a sentence?!”

  “One!”

  Before the old man has a chance to pull the trigger, a baritone voice rings out across the room with enough volume to turn all the heads: “ACTION TAKEN TO RESTRICT THE SPREAD OF SOMETHING HOSTILE SUCH AS AN ENEMY OR SOMETHING UNDESIREABLE SUCH AS A DISEASE!”

  Standing next to the dessert cart, Jack Morelli, the human bull, his booming voice waking everybody up, has his iPhone in his huge, calloused hands. He’s got a website called Definitions-Are-Us on his phone’s little screen.

  Old Man Ferri nods wearily, letting up on the pressure of the little muzzle against Freddy Felson’s cranium. “That’s correct,” Ferri mutters. He turns and trundles back across the room to his whiteboard. “‘Action taken to restrict a disease.’”

  Freddy Felson lets out a hoarse, pained, tortured sigh of relief and falls into the nearest chair.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” the old man says as he grabs the marker and underlines the word containment. “This mook is a disease that has to be eradicated. Jack, look up the word eradicated for the morons.”

  Across the room Jack Morelli frantically thumbs the word into his smart phone. “‘To destroy or get rid of something completely, so that it can never recur or return.’”

  “That’s right.” The old man taps the felt tip marker on the whiteboard. “That’s what we’re gonna do, we’re gonna destroy and get rid of this son of a bitch so he can never recur.”

  An awful silence descends on the room as the definition sinks in.

  The little train continues clicking cheerfully around the rim of the ceiling.

  Ferri scans the group. “That’s why we need a place to do this thing that has the proper—”

  The old man stops.

  Across the room, Jimmy Dalessandro watches the don with keen interest.

  The old man seems to be staring now at something in the middle distance, something beyond the group, something up high in the room.

  “Boss?” Dalessandro watches.

  “Containment…” Ferri’s sallow, sunken eyes are fixed on the little train as it circles the space on its little O-gauge track.

  “Boss, you okay?” Jimmy Dalessandro takes a step toward the don. “What is it?”

  The old man watches the train, his gray head rotating on its axis like a dog watching a squirrel. The little scale model of the Galena and Chicago freight, circa 1920s, continues on its merry clacking way around the little plastic guardrails and silhouettes of railroad crossings. At last the old man nods, and mutters softly to himself, “Jesus Christ, why didn’t I think of that right off the bat?”

  “Think of what, boss?”

  Old Man Ferri turns and looks at the big capo in the sharkskin suit like he’s just awakened from a dream. “Jimmy, we got a guy down at the Transit Authority in our pocket, don’t we?”

  Dalessandro thinks for a second. “Yeah, boss. We got a couple of guys down there. Why?”

  The old man just licks his wormy lips with relish and grins.

  His smile—aside from its rotten array of ill-fitting dentures—is the kind of smile that Anthony “the Mink” Ferri most likely displayed as a child, coming down the steps of his parents’ Garfield Park two-flat on Christmas morning, discovering a shiny new train set under the tree: the perfect Christmas present.

  31.

  Everything Gerbil Goldstein knows about following somebody, she learned from TV. The empty calories of crap shows like Magnum PI, and Cagney and Lacey, and Hawaii 5-0, and Charlie’s Angels, and Remington Steele, and Miami Vice, and Diagnosis Murder, and all the other insipid detective shows that have rotted her brain over the years, have given her a false sense of mastery over an incredibly difficult task. She learns this on those final three days, trying to keep up with Oswald Means without being seen by him.

  It starts at the airport, right after the big man gives her the kiss-off. She gets in a cab and has the cabbie make one revolution around the terminal, and when they get back to the Departures Lane, she tells the driver to pull up three car lengths behind Oswald’s S-10 and sit tight for a second. Then she tells the driver to follow that truck. She always wanted to say that to a cabbie. Like she’s in an episode of Mannix—“Follow that truck, buster, and step on it!”