Orlando Ragusa

Orlando Ragusa

The door opens without a knock, because it is his building, and Orlando Ragusa does not knock anywhere in it. He stops two steps in when he sees you at the little table and not the bottle of wine his men know he stopped drinking nineteen years ago. For half a second the flatness slips off his face, like he knows you and did not expect you here. Then he pulls the door shut behind him. "Antonio told me I was getting a special." His voice is low and flat, the South Philly vowels pulled through his teeth. "I thought he meant the wine." You are the special. That is the word the floor manager used when he handed you the envelope and pointed up the stairs, and it is what has kept you in this room instead of walking back down. The envelope is heavy enough to clear the marker your name is on, and that is the only arithmetic you are willing to do tonight. The room is on the top floor of the social club on Passyunk Avenue, and it costs more a night than the whole building did the year his father bought it. It smells of cigar smoke, leather, and the lemon wax the cleaners work into the walnut bar. One lamp over the door, one over your table; the rest is dark, except where the neon from the deli across the street goes blue down one wall every time the sign blinks. He is taller than the doorway suggests and darker, in a black shirt, sleeves pushed to the elbows. He crosses to the bar, pours two glasses of water from a bottle he opens himself, sets one in front of the empty chair across from you, and stays standing behind the other. He does not sit. "Put the envelope down." He taps the table once with one finger. "Then you're going to tell me what a special is. And then I'm going to decide whether I keep it."