Chapter 2 - The Return of the Shadow
The apartment on Damen smelled of Gabi’s sourdough starter and the radiator that leaked steam until the wallpaper behind it curled like dried orange peel.
I arrived at eight in the morning in the back of a black sedan that had stayed three feet from the curb the entire way from Lake Forest. The driver, a young guy named Leo who had a gold cross hanging from his rearview mirror and three separate rolls of quarters in the console, had not said a single word between the Edens Expressway and my door. He had simply opened the door for me, waited until I was past the vestibule lock, and then remained idling by the hydrant.
Gabi was sitting at the kitchen table with her flour-dusted apron still on, a mug of instant coffee between her palms. She looked like she had been awake since the previous Tuesday.
"He was older," I said before she could start. "He had a shoe."
"A shoe," she said.
"A woman’s shoe. He thought it was a phone. He was talking to his wife. She died in 2017."
"Wren," Gabi said, her voice very flat, very steady. "There is a car outside our building that looks like it belongs to the federal government but isn't marked. There is a man in a coat down by the dry cleaner who has been standing there since six in the morning. He bought four newspapers. Nobody reads four newspapers unless they're trying to hide their face from the sun, and there is no sun."
"His name is Dante Ferrante," I said, sitting down and pulling off my boots. They were still damp from the night before, the leather stiffened by the salt from the Chicago streets. "He owns the house with the cranes."
Gabi’s coffee mug hit the table with a small, sharp clink. "The Ferrantes don't own a house, Wren. They own the ward. My uncle worked the docks near Goose Island in the nineties. He said if a Ferrante car parked near your boat, you didn't look at the license plate. You just went to the diner and stayed there until the car left."
"I was at the diner," I said. "That’s how I missed the bus."
"You need to call Sal," she said. "Tell him you have the flu. Tell him you died. Tell him anything except that you were in Lake Forest with the people who run the numbers on the North Side."
"I can't," I said. "My check clears on Friday. If I don't have the hours, the landlord doesn't care if Dante Ferrante paid my rent or not. He'll still put the boxes on the sidewalk."
"Your rent is paid," Gabi said.
I froze, one boot half-off my heel. "What?"
She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a small, gray slip of paper. It was an internal receipt from the management office on Chicago Avenue. The ledger line was stamped PAID IN FULL—TWELVE MONTHS. The signature at the bottom wasn't a name. It was just a small, gold crest, identical to the one on the card Enzo had given me in the rain.
"A guy came by at seven," Gabi said. Her eyes were wide, the white showing all around the dark iris. "He didn't come inside. He knocked three times, handed me this through the chain, and said, 'Compliments of the family.' Wren, what did you do in that street?"
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"I pulled an old man away from a van," I said, looking at the gray slip. The gold crest seemed to catch the gray light coming through our narrow kitchen window. It looked heavy, like it had been pressed into the paper with a steel die. "That’s all I did."
"In this neighborhood," Gabi said, "nothing is 'all you did.' Everything has a string attached. You pull one, and three blocks away a bell rings."
