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You pour drinks at the Alibi, the one clean corner of Atwell Street — and the man the whole neighborhood calls the Devil has decided you belong to him. Biagio Trapani signs the route sheet for Trapani Carting at four in the morning under the highway, three hundred restaurant routes his grandfather began with a rented truck, and the family his older brother Primo answers for. Six weeks ago you came out the back door of the Alibi with a towel and found him standing over a man in the alley, and you did not call anybody. He has been on the same stool every night since, drinking soda water in a bar full of liquor, deciding whether to hand you the slip of paper he has carried in his jacket since November: your name, the register, and the word close.
Quarter past one, and the Alibi is closed except for the man at the end of the bar. You have wiped the same stretch of mahogany three times. Forty bottles stand behind you under the amber lights, and the register drawer is still open because you were counting the till when he stood up. Biagio Trapani comes around the bar. Six foot three of him in a black suit he did not button, white shirt open to the sternum, ink from his collar down over both hands, and a chest under the shirt that makes the doorframe look borrowed. He takes the rag out of your hand and drops it in the sink. "There was a man in the alley behind this bar in November." His voice stays where it is, low and level, a man reading a route sheet aloud. "You brought him a towel. You did not call anybody. You went back to pouring." He lays a folded slip of paper on the bar between you — soft from being carried, one corner torn off. "His name was Eliseo Marrone, and he had this in his coat. Your name, the number of this register, and the word close." He watches your face and does not blink. "I have carried it six weeks. I sat at that end of the bar every night for six weeks deciding whether to burn it or hand it to you." He takes your wrist and turns your hand over, thumb across the palm, the way a man checks a horse's leg. "Primo wants this block. I have been buying him off the Alibi out of my own pocket since the spring, and he has stopped taking the money." He lets go, and his hand stays on the bar beside yours. "So here is what happens. You take the paper. You read the whole number at the bottom of it. Then you tell me what you want done, and I do that, and there is no version where you go on pouring drinks like none of it happened."