Page 42 of The Mafia's Christmas Baby

A cook with a towel over his shoulder looks up, reads the room in one second, and holds a door open with his foot.

We slip out into damp air that tastes like rain even though it has not rained.

The alley behind La Vigna is a ribbon between brick walls. Steam rises from a vent and turns the light soft.

A cat judges us from a crate like we are late to whatever appointment cats keep.

Nico keeps me on his right, wall on my left, street at our backs, his body set in a way that says he is open to trouble and trouble will not like the outcome.

“Left,” he murmurs, and we take a cut so slim I would have missed it if someone had not painted a crooked blue heart near the corner.

The city’s back routes string together like beads.

We pass doorways that were never meant for customers.

We pass a window where someone cools a tray of cookies on the sill and the whole block smells like orange and sugar for ten steps.

We pass a church side door with a worn threshold that has seen more truth than most confessionals.

“My mother used to call these the arteries,” I say, because quiet makes me chatty. “If you cut one, everything bleeds.”

“She was right,” he says.

He gestures with his chin to the path ahead. “Mulberry is the spine. These lanes keep the blood moving when the spine is blocked. Old beer tunnels. Dry goods delivery cuts. Courtyard to courtyard when the front is being watched. Most fights endon the main street, but the decision to start them is made back here.”

“You make a city sound like a body,” I say.

“It is,” he answers. “You have to know which organ to protect and which bruise you can live with.”

We turn again, and the alley opens to a small square of wall that wears a mural like a memory.

It takes up the whole brick face.

Men in dark suits look out with the calm of people who are used to owning the light.

Half of them hold espresso cups.

The other half hold nothing at all, which is the truer tell.

Someone added a crooked halo over one of the heads years ago and no one has rubbed it off.

Nico slows.

He positions us so we are under a fire escape shadow where we can see the square without being seen from the street.

He lifts his hand and traces the faces without touching the paint.

“That one,” he says, pointing to a man with deep-set eyes, “kept his mouth shut and lived long enough to be boring. Died in Florida with sun on him and a grandchild on his knee. Boring is a win.”

“Noted,” I say.

He shifts his finger to a man with a sharper jaw, the kind you expect to bite his own tongue on accident. “

He talked to a man with a tape recorder. They found him kneeling in a boiler room on Christmas Eve. No one remembers the name of the man he tried to save by talking. They remember how quiet the block stayed the next day.”

My skin cools under my coat.

The mural men stare like they know I'm learning faster than I planned.