CHAPTER 4
Bethany
I watched Benito leave, and as I stared at his broad, muscular back, my hands shook with rage. How did he have the nerve to come and do what he had just did? How did anyone have that kind of nerve?! I was in a state of sheer shock, confusion and disbelief – and anger. A lot of anger. Most of it was directed not at Benito, but at my late step-father, Sal. I had never liked him, even though my late mother had been crazy about him. I think they had had some sort of weird intense love-hate thing going on; they would have the biggest fights, which were really traumatizing to watch actually, but then after the initial screaming bouts, which not only involved hurling of insults but also hurling of plates and mugs and other heavy objects, they wouldn't speak to each other for a few days – and then they'd make up, and my mother would just forgive Sal for whatever transgression it was that he had done, and they'd be a couple of love birds again.
Sal had been a great manipulator; he may not have been very good at many other things, but in terms of playing people, of subtly twisting their arms to get what he needed from them, he was a master artist. His tricks hadn't worked on me though; even as a teenager I'd been able to see right through his fake facade, as if it had been made of glass. But I'd always had that ability – the ability to see people's true characters, and judge them for who they really were rather than who they pretended to be. And that was something that I had found confusing about Benito; like I said, I'd always been able to tell a person's true character pretty accurately, despite whatever airs and pretensions they put on. And Benito, well, despite the fact that he was a mobster, and had come here with this utterly outrageous proposal – my sixth sense or whatever it was that allowed me to see through people's facades was telling me that underneath it all, beneath this tough, serious gangster persona, there was a good person in there, as weird as that seemed.
But anyway, back to Sal – now there was a real piece of work. Like I said, he was a master manipulator, and when he had met my mother he had seen a walking wallet. It sounds mean and judgmental, I know, but it was the reality of the situation. He had met her six months after my real father had passed away. He had been a heavy smoker and had contracted lung cancer, and had died a long, protracted and agonizing death, one which had been as painful for us to bear witness to and live through as it had been for him. Needless to say, she and I were both devastated, and she was stuck in a funk for a very long time afterward. I was too, but I at least had my friends at high school to comfort me and give me the mental and social and emotional support I needed to get through that terrible time. My mother had me – and nobody else. She was an only child, and both of her parents had died before I was born, and because of her busy schedule running the diner for so long, she hadn't really had much chance to make any real friends for years. My father had been her rock, her everything, and when he had passed, her world crumbled around her.
She had thrown herself into her work, and had made the diner more profitable than ever – but it hadn't been enough. She had also started eating almost obsessively, and had put on a lot of weight.
Part of me blamed myself for what happened. Not with my father, I mean. He had been a lovely, kind man, and I missed him terribly, but he had been a slave to those cigarettes. Two packs most days; that's how much of a hold they had had on him. No, I blamed myself for Sal. If I hadn't spent so much time with my friends at that time, maybe my mother wouldn't have been so depressed and lonely. And if she hadn't been so depressed and lonely, she wouldn't have fallen so easily and so hard for Sal's fake charm.
He had come into our restaurant just before closing time, asking if we had any stale donuts or sandwiches that we were gonna throw out that he could have at half price or for free. At the time, he'd been a traveling insurance salesman – the latest in a long line of short-lived failures in terms of jobs – but the shoddy, cut-rate insurance he was trying to peddle was so worthless that not even he, with all his abilities to charm and manipulate people, could convince any suckers to buy it. He had laid on the charm thick from the outset with my mother – he had just wanted to try scam some free food off us with his sob story, but as he talked to my mother he soon figured out that he could get a lot more than just a free meal out of her. They ended up talking until well after closing time, and cleaning up and counting the day's profits had been left to me, despite the fact that I had a big test the next day at school. Sal had been a good-looking guy, and he knew how to use his looks on vulnerable women, and my mom, with the weight she had put on, the streaks of gray she had developed in her hair from stress, and the permanent lines of sadness etched onto her face after my father's death, had not had any attention from a man for a long time.
Sal ended up persuading her to let him stay on our sofa for one night, just while he “had a relative back in Baltimore”, where he said he was from, “wire him some money to pay for a hotel”. Apparently, he had been mugged earlier that day, and all his cash and cards had been taken. I say “apparently” because I didn't believe a word of that story.
That one night on our sofa turned into two weeks, and after two weeks he and my mother were holding hands and giggling like a pair of teenagers, and soon after that they were sharing her bed. They got married a mere six months after he had first walked into our diner, and with more of his skillful manipulating, he soon legally owned half of it.
And then, as soon as all the papers were signed and half of that diner was in his name, that's when he started to reveal his true nature. He would start staying out late and coming home blind drunk in the early hours of the morning – or not even coming back at all, and simply showing up hungover and disheveled sometime the following day. On one occasion, he disappeared without a trace for a whole two weeks, and then just sauntered in at the end of it as if nothing had happened – after my mother had worried herself to the point of filing a missing person’s report with the cops and almost having a stroke.
I would notice money missing from the cash register – increasingly substantial amounts. He would deny it of course, and my mother, more often than not, would simply believe him, and blame me for being “dishonest” and “trying to drive a rift between them”. It had been painful for me to watch, and to experience, watching him sink his manipulative claws so deeply into her, and to not be able to do anything about it.
I knew that he was gambling, too. One more than one occasion, when I had to wash his clothes – yes, I had to do that too – I would find casino chips in his pockets. There weren't any casinos nearby, so I had no idea where he was going to do this gambling, but I suspected that it may well be some sort of illegal underground operation. I had always suspected that Sal was connected with some pretty shady characters. Once, maybe two years ago, I found a briefcase full of cash hidden in his closet – yeah, I snooped around in his closet sometimes, but only to try to protect my mother – and there was about forty thousand dollars in it. I never said anything about it to anyone though, as I was too scared, because I knew, I just knew that it had to have come from someone shady and very possibly someone dangerous.
And now I knew – that briefcase full of cash I had discovered had to have been the money loaned to him by the Sciotti family. And what would I have done at the time had I realized that I had been the collateral with the loan had been secured from them!
I still couldn't believe it. As I had said to Benito, this was the twenty-first century! People were no longer objects who could be bought and traded! Who the hell did he think he was? And for that matter, who the hell had Sal thought he was, that he could use me as a bargaining chip to get cash from these gangsters?! It was beyond outrageous. Sal had done a lot of awful things to my mother and me from that first moment he had strolled into our diner with that fake sad-sack look on his face, but this, selling me like a damn slave, this was by far the worst.
It was so crazy, so evil and so selfish, that I was still having trouble coming to terms with it. A knock on the door brought me out of this trance of contemplation though. A quick glance at the clock on the wall showed that it was five past eight; I should have opened the doors five minutes ago!
Oh no. There were customers outside, and my cook Manny wasn't here, and nobody had brewed the coffee yet! This day was just disaster after disaster. Well, all I could do was open the door and try do everything myself. I ran over to the door and unlocked it, putting on the biggest and most apologetic smile I could to the handful of people who were waiting outside.
“Hi everyone, and welcome to Canfield Grille. I'm so sorry that we're opening a few minutes late today. There was an, uh, electrical fault in the kitchen and we're working on fixing it,” I lied, “but you can come in and have a seat if you'd like. We'll be up and running shortly.”
As I opened the door for them, I noticed the big bag of garbage, into which Benito and I had put all the broken glass, sitting on the floor in the middle of the diner. It wouldn't make a great impression on the customers for them to see that sitting there, so I dashed over and grabbed it before they started walked in, and ran out to the back door to take it out to the alley.
I opened the door and walked out to the trash cans – and then almost jumped out of my shoes with fright as I saw Manny between two trash cans. He had been tied up, and a rag had been stuffed into his mouth. His eyes were wide with fright, although when he saw me a look of relief passed over his face.
I quickly knelt and took the rag out of his mouth and then cut off the cable ties that were around his ankles and wrists. After I pulled the rag out of his mouth he coughed for a long while, but after that he looked up, his dark eyes full of compassion and sadness, and smiled.
“Thank you, Miss Verde,” he said in his deep, sonorous voice. “I'm very happy to see that them thugs didn't hurt you. The bastards ambushed me here, just jumped me and whacked me over the head, almost knocked me out cold they did! It was mighty sore, it was.”
“I thought that you were skipping work today,” I replied. “I wish that that had been the case now, after seeing what those bastards did to you.”
“Me, skip work?” he said, grinning broadly. “Miss Verde, when have you ever known me to do such a thing? Ol' Manny skippin' out on work? Never!”
I hugged him.
“I'm sorry that they did this to you Manny.”
He squeezed me back. He was about the only family I had left now. Not official family obviously, but Manny had worked at our diner ever since I had been a little girl, and I had grown up with him watching over me like a kindly old uncle.
“No Miss Verde, don't be sorry about no old man like me. Be sorry that them thugs laid they hands on you. I'm sorry 'bout that, real sorry. It's a terrible thing t' have happen t' ya. Them damn young thugs, why if I was a few years younger, I would have given 'em an ass-whoopin' t' remember, teach them young fools some damn manners and respect!”
“I just wish I could have gotten to my dad's gun in time,” I said.
“What did them thugs want anyway?” asked Manny. “Was they here to rob the joint? Funny thing, I think I seen 'em before, hanging around in the street, watchin' the diner. I didn't think nothin' of it before, just thought they was hangin' out on the street coz they ain't got nothin' better t' do. Now I know, they was casin' the joint t' rob us.”
I shook my head.
“No Manny, they weren't here to rob us. Well, not in the traditional sense of the word, at least.”
Manny was, as I said, like family. I could be completely honest and open with him, and there was no point in trying to hide the real reason those CM guys had come in here earlier.
“They wasn't?” he asked, looking confused. “But then, why was they here?”
“They came to collect money owed to them – money owed to them by Sal.”
Now his expression changed to one of anger and disgust.
“That low-down, dirty two-bit hustler,” he growled. “I'm sorry Miss Verde, but that hustler sure did pull a number over your dear mammy, and now even in death he's screwin' ya family over. The extent a' that bastard's lies an' cheatin', I can't hardly believe it! What he owe them damn thugs money fo' anyway?”
“I know Manny, I know. He's still stealing from us, from beyond the grave.”
Manny, like me, was a good judge of people's characters, and like me he had taken an almost instant dislike to Sal, right from the outset. He had warned my mother about getting involved with him, but all of his warnings had, unfortunately, fallen on deaf ears.
I sighed and shook my head before I continued.
“These guys, they said they're from a gang called Coup Militants.”
He nodded.
“Ah yeah, I done heard a' them. Real nasty bunch, at least that's what the word on the street is about 'em.”
“And Sal was apparently paying them 'protection money' every month. Since he's been gone for over a month now, they hadn't been paid. So, they showed up here and tied you up and roughed me up to demand the money.”
“I heard the sounds a' things breakin' and people hollerin' inside, Miss Verde. What did they do in there? They didn't hurt you, I hope.”
“I'm not really hurt. But they managed to smash up the place good with a baseball bat. Smashed a whole bunch of cups and some glass tables, and the glass of the donut display.”
He shook his head, and there was both sadness and anger in his eyes.
“Those low-life, scumbag bastards,” he muttered. “Bastards! How much bread did they want anyway?”
“A thousand a month. That's what they told me.”
“A thousand a month! Who do they think they is?!”
“I know Manny, I know. But there's more. After they left, another guy came in – another guy who Sal owed money to.”
Now, while I loved and trusted Manny, I wasn't about to go into the details of the crazy and twisted agreement Sal had made with the Sciotti family. I wasn't ready to talk to anyone about that particular bit of craziness just yet.
“Oh Lord!” he groaned. “There's more, there's more!”
I nodded.
“There's more alright. This guy was a representative of the Sciotti family. You heard of them, Manny?”'
He nodded.
“Oh yeah, I heard a' 'em. Italian mobsters. They big in this town, have been for generations. Nobody messes wid' those guys. So, old Sal, he owed 'em bread, huh? How much, if you don't mind me askin'?”
“A lot, Manny, a lot. Probably . . . probably more than this diner is worth.”
Manny's jaw dropped with shock.
“Miss Verde . . .” he managed to ask. “What . . . what are we gon' do?! What we gon' do?!”
“Manny, there's no 'we' here. It's not your problem, it's mine, and I have to figure a way to sort it out.”
He was resolute in his response though.
“No, Miss Verde, I can't let you deal wid' something like that all on your lonesome. I done lived and breathed this diner fo' almost twenty-five years now. Anything I can do to help, I will. And you Miss Verde, you like my own daughter, if you don't mind me sayin' so. This ain't only your problem – it's our problem. We'll figure it out.”
I appreciated Manny's sentiments, but really, there was nothing he could do to help. And after reading the contract, it had become clear to me that what Benito Sciotti really wanted was not money. No – it was me, and me alone, and nobody could help with a demand like that. This problem was solely mine, mine to bear and mine to solve, if there was even a solution.
“Maybe . . . maybe I should sell the diner,” I said softly. “Maybe that's the only way out of this. Maybe it's time to just throw in the towel. I mean, today alone I've been dealt two powerful blows. I just don't see a way out of this.”
Manny gripped me by the shoulders, and shot a fierce gaze into my eyes.
“No Miss Verde. No. You can't do that. This diner is all in this world that's left a' yo' mammy. And while that asshole Sal did his best to destroy it, it's still here. An' it's in yo' blood, Miss Verde. You gots t' keep the diner. You gots t'. We'll find a way to solve this.”
I realized that he was right. This place was in my blood, this diner was everything to me, and it was all I really had left in this world. And I wasn't going to let either violent thugs or handsome mobsters take it away from me. I breathed in deeply, possessed now of a new sense of determination and strength.
“You're right Manny,” I said. “You're absolutely right. I'm going to keep the diner, and I'm going to find a way to repair all the damage Sal has done, gangsters or no gangsters. I'll find a way . . . find a way.”