Chapter Text
It's nearing two months of her and Nino's courtship when a man appears outside of Vesuvio's.
Florence locks up that night- Carlo had unexpected family matters to attend to and she's been trusted with the keys a couple times before, so it's not a new occurrence for her.
What is new is the large man leaning up against the brick of the restaurant. For a moment, she thinks he's just waiting on someone, idling about for a taxi. She sees lingering tourists on her way home on the regular. But he angles his body towards her just so as she steps back from the door and it makes her stiffen.
"Sorry sir, we're closed."
He grins and shrugs her statement away as if it's a fly on his shoulder. One large hand removes itself from his pocket and he pulls a lit cigarette from between his teeth.
"Not looking for a meal, ma'am. Actually, I was looking to chat with you for a moment. Florence Baker, yes?"
He speaks like a journalist, but moves like an officer.
The man stops before her, a look of smug confidence stretched across his face. It’s frustrating, that look, and a little unsettling.
Florence has never considered herself small. At 5'8", she's taller than most women she knows, and carrying around heavy plates and glasses all day has given her enough muscle that she wouldn't consider herself lanky anymore.
This man, however, seems to tower over her and the expression on his face makes her feel tiny.
"Yes. Miss Baker. How can I help you, Mr.-?" She gestures to him quickly, not bothering to hide her annoyance at his blunt way of addressing her.
"Benito."
He doesn't offer his first name, waves the question off as if it has already been responded to. When she doesn’t say anything, he straightens, growing by half of an inch, then nods his head at the restaurant.
“I’d like to offer you a deal.”
It’s uncomfortable, the vague, slow amble his words take on, and she shifts. She can’t ever remember being offered a deal when she wasn’t browsing some shop. Here on the street, it sounds far less appealing.
Florence shrugs this time, wondering if he’ll leave if she plays the part of the silly little waitress closing up for the night. Nothing more.
It’s unlikely, if he already knows her name, but worth a shot.
“I don’t own this place. That would be Mr. Vit-
“-torio Puzo, yes, we’re aware.” For the first time Benito looks annoyed, an expression that looks far more natural on the man’s face than the false courtesy from before.
“Please don’t think me dumb, Miss Baker. If it was that kind of transaction, we wouldn’t be speaking to you.” His tone holds just enough venom that Florence decides that frank honesty might be her best bet at leaving quickly.
“I’m afraid I don’t involve myself in deals with strangers, Mr. Benito. So you’ll have to forgive me, but I don’t know you-”
Florence gestures behind her and she purposely fidgets with her bag as if to leave, but Benito steps in close before she can turn.
“You know my boss.” A business card emerges from his hand like magic, as if there’s a slot in his palm and he’s just been waiting for her to say the magic words.
She looks down at his hand, frowning, and purses her lips, straightening her own shoulders as she takes the card.
The type is far more elegant than Nino’s was, the letters sitting somewhere between a scrawl and a looping script. It feels like a farce, that the font for someone who made “deals” on the street at night could look so delicate. Her thumb drags across the name as if she might erase it from the paper, but it gleams back at her even in the low lamplight of the street.
Francesco Juliano.
Something thick curls into her belly at the name and her lips twist left. She doesn’t know the man, per se, has never had the misfortune of meeting him, but New York is a city of gossip and even a fine place like Vesuvio’s receives its whispers. The man owns a number of dive bars nearby, disguised as fancy diners, a slew of brothels and speakeasies and who knows what else, tucked neatly into the most commonplace spots in the city. She doesn’t need to have met the man, doesn’t need to have caught the snarl on Nino’s lips at his name to know that she wants nothing to do with him.
“You’re mistaken. I don’t recognize the name-”
“Miss Baker, we both know that’s not true.” Benito remains where he is even as her face strains with annoyance and he circles her carefully, leaning forward so that she has to press her back against the wall of the building to avoid their hips touching.
“We admire your tenacity, not any woman can catch Nino Ricci’s attention. Even fewer can keep it.”
Florence goes still, feeling a cold chill wash up her spine at the man’s words. Benito pauses, his eyes roving over her face, and she knows this game, has asked Nino to walk her through each step of assessing a person, assessing a situation all in a moment.
A sympathetic smile plasters itself onto Benito’s lips and Florence flinches as his grubby fingers wrap around her left elbow. She watches as the man climbs into the costume of a friend, sighing with false pity, and nervous laughter threatens to bubble up into her throat.
Liar.
“Men are fickle.” He looks left, glancing up at Vesuvio’s sign, and shakes his head, grits his teeth as if facing an ill truth, then turns back to her. “This place is built on pretty words and convenience- but it could come down just about as easily.”
She remains silent, wants to see just how much steam the man has.
“Meetings. Plans. They’re all easy enough to damage if you have the right information. If you have an address, a time-” Benito snaps his fingers and leans forward again, his hands drifting from her arms to her hands to her face. Her stomach jerks with discomfort.
“Miss Baker. When Nino grows tired of his little act and you want to cause a little damage, you give us a call.”
Benito pats her hand and Florence resists the urge to make a face. Instead, she brushes her fingers over the spots he touched as if she’s dusting off flecks of dirt. She steels herself, steps in close to the man, and tugs at the chest pocket of his jacket. Pleased surprise crosses the man’s face for the span of a second.
"I do believe you chose the wrong occupation, Benito. You’d have made an excellent actor.”
She slips the card inside of Benito’s pocket and smiles politely as the man doubles back to look at her. Shaking her head, Florence clenches her fists at her side, forcing them away from the foolhardy goon in front of her. She wants to rake her nails down the side of his face, shout that he’s a banal cad and storm off. What control is left in her keeps her head atop her shoulders; she clears her throat and straightens her uniform carefully.
“You can tell Mr. Juliano I'm not interested. He'll have to find another way in, I'm afraid."
Benito's expression sours and his hand twitches around his dying cigarette, an easy giveaway of his irritation. Without waiting to bear the consequence, Florence ducks away from the man’s pressing body and turns to walk swiftly down the street.
She continues past where she normally slips down to her apartment, feeling the weight of Benito’s eyes on her back. Instead, she turns down the second street, a blissfully well-lit road that has her head spinning with relief. No footsteps follow her, no shouts or out-of-place sounds, and by the time she circles the block back to Vesuvio’s, Benito is gone.
*
Still, she asks for morning shifts for the rest of that week.
It’s somewhat embarrassing that she was surprised by the man's interference, really. She knew what she was getting into when it came to dating Nino. She’s not dumb. There are enough holes in the man’s stories to know when he’s keeping things from her and as curious as she is to her boyfriend’s “dealings”, she can appreciate that he skimps on the darker details.
Like Benito.
But it still comes as a surprise that he’d found her, that anyone had bothered to find her. She’s a waitress, not the Puzo famiglia’s caretaker. She takes meal orders and customer complaints, not names and numbers and locations. Benito must be an idiot to think that Nino’s would be so stupid to share such private details with her.
It seems like a fluke almost, a test set to measure her loyalties. Nonetheless, Florence is shaken enough that she considers telling someone.
But Nino is away on business with the promise he’d see her that Saturday. She’d have to wait to mention the exchange to him. And it seems a bit ridiculous, a bit panicky, to call the number Mr. Puzo had given her a few weeks before. She’d assumed he’d given it to her exclusively, in the case of emergencies. It seemed like someone nosing around in his business was probably an everyday occurrence for the man and she feared to annoy him with her paranoia.
It would be useless talking to the police. They won’t do a thing- she’s a single woman and she’d heard their excuses before when it came down to protecting lone females when they’d “better things to do”. She’d be laughed out of the station, shamed for walking home alone.
Better to keep them out of Nino’s affairs anyway.
So she keeps it to herself and by the time Saturday rolls around, she’s convinced herself that her concerns were more severe than they needed to be. There’s no need to worry Nino when it could be nothing, no need to give him reasons to think she’s incapable of handling the man’s profession by herself.
An entire month passes with barely a whisper.
She could swear there were moments when she felt eyes on her back after bidding Nino goodnight. On occasion, she left her shift to discover a man in a bowler hat glancing quickly down at his newspaper or ducking into a shop. But she chalks each occurrence up to a long day and an overactive imagination. Beyond that, there’s nothing to report and the month passes smoothly.
Later, she’ll recognize it as naivety. Later, she’ll understand that paranoia is a safety tactic, not a foolish overreaction, and it kept made men alive.
Before that, upon arriving home on the last Tuesday in September, Florence answers her door without question.
*
“Miss Baker. Good to see you again.”
Florence freezes, her hand still on the doorknob as she stares her visitor down.
She’d expected a neighbor, asking for something from her pantry- it’s the most interaction she gets with the folks living in her area and she’s come to expect them even so late as nine in the evening.
She did not expect a gangster at her doorstep.
“Mr. Benito. You always seem to come see me late. Perhaps we should do brunch next time?”
She’s proud of herself for the jibe, though it’s really only to cover the shake in her voice. It is disturbingly apparent to her that despite her initial assumptions and attempts at covering her tracks, hiding her address was an utter failure.
Her lips thin to a small line and she frowns back at Benito, swallowing hard. She shakes her head, fluttering her hand at him as if he’s some stray cat prowling around her garbage. It’s not an entirely bad metaphor, she thinks.
“Come back another time. When the sun’s up perhaps.” Florence takes a step backwards to pull the door shut behind her, but Benito moves fast, faster than a man of his stature should be able to move, and squeezes into the hallway behind her.
Panic seizes her lungs and without wasting a second, Florence throws the front door back open. She’s one step off the porch when a strong arm wraps itself around her middle and a large, rough hand claps over her mouth.
Benito yanks her inside and the door slams behind them. As he shoves her forward into the living room, Florence hears the door latch. She spins to face him, her heart jumping into her throat. With a sigh, Benito secures the door chain as well.
When he turns back to her, the man is tugging his gloves off, finger by finger. He drags a hand across his forehead and pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Great. You’re taking me seriously now.”
Florence’s fingers twitch. She needs something in her hand. Something to hit him with. Something to get him out of her house.
“I already told you, I’m not-”
Before she can finish, Benito whirls and slaps her hard across the left cheek. She stumbles, caught off guard with her face aflame, and he moves quickly again, clapping one hand around each of her shoulders and pinning her to the wall.
“Florence. Doll. I know you’re new to this, but you can’t have expected I came for tea.”
Florence pales, digging her heels into the floor to keep herself from screaming, and she shakes her head. He nods, still impatient. One of her hands drifts up to rub at her cheek, but Benito captures it in his own hand, tightens his fingers around her wrist, and glares. She stills and he continues.
“Let me tell you how this goes then. Mr. Juliano is not a patient man. Neither am I. You can talk to me now, tell us what we want, and I’ll leave you be. No harm, no foul. Or you can be difficult and I can force it out of you.”
His hand tightens around her wrist, a silent promise to show her what he can do, and for a moment, she considers it. For a bleak, unforgivable moment, Florence imagines blurting out whatever she can think of- the men she’s seen at Vesuvio’s, the times and dates they’ve come, whispers she’s caught, how many glimpses of cold silver she’s caught on their ankles, in the slips of their cuffs. Her cheek burns and a drum slams hard and fast up against her throat.
She thinks Benito can see it. His expression smooths out into something disturbingly pragmatic and the hand on her shoulder loosens just a touch.
Maybe that’s what does it. Maybe it’s that look on his face, that he’d done it before and expects no less now. Maybe it’s the heartbreaking thought of the look of betrayal on Nino’s face- or the idea of him rolling back into the gutter with blood on his face as Francesco Juliano and his cronies laugh and turn home.
Whatever it is, it’s not hard to remember how the dance goes. It wasn’t that long ago that she was clamouring against three other girls in the school cafeteria with a full audience. No one’s watching now, no one to pull her away, no one to turn her in, and she likes to think she’s still sharp enough to break skin.
Florence kicks out, missing Benito’s knee, but driving her heel into his thigh. He yells and yanks his hands back, dropping her to the carpet. She scrambles underneath one of his flailing arms, running for the kitchen, but there’s a roar behind her and a hand yanks her back by the hair.
The world blurs in that moment. The room’s edges dim to a soft stroke, like one of her paintings- she remembers this too. The blood pounding against her eardrums, the burning in her hands and feet, the adrenaline that convinces her for just a moment that she’s invincible and sharpens Benito into the only clear object in the room.
He throws a punch again, lands it again. Florence moves with grace, not speed.
Even so, it’s a sharp blow that dies quickly to a dull buzz. One of his hands comes back bloody as the other twists sharply in her hair. The red staining his knuckles sends a shiver of fire through Florence’s veins and she grabs for the small, porcelain vase beside the window. She smashes it across Benito’s face and the first bellow of pain rolls out of his throat. He lets go of her.
“I do know your boss. Bit of a scumbag, even before this…” She gestures towards Benito, but he’s rubbing at his face, picking shards of the vase from his skin. “-mess.” He swipes at her blindly, but she sidesteps him easily. Her eyes dart towards the door, but she’s lived in this little apartment long enough to know that the lock sticks. It’ll take her too long to try leaving and she’s not willing to turn her back on Benito now.
“You all are that scared of a little competition?”
She should know better than to get overconfident. It’s sunk her before, landed her with a bloody nose and detention with Jenny Snyder for a month. But she forgets, as the triumph at pissing the man off soars through her lungs. She’s distracted and Benito lunges. He slams her up against the wall, drives his bare fists into her ribs until a sharp crack yanks a shout free of her throat.
Florence twists one hand into her side, breathing hard, but Benito’s still moving and he flings her hard into the coffee table. The lamp atop it crashes down with a loud smash, and a picture frame launches itself to the floor. Florence hears glass crack and shatter and a shudder goes through her. She peeks around the table to the one photo she keeps, curled halfway out of its frame, the edges stuck between shards of glass.
Something feral tears out of her. Something angry and alive and screaming just like before, and she dives for Benito. Her fingers splay outward and she slashes at the man, digging her nails into his neck. They flail for a moment, nothing but angry limbs and claws, before Benito grabs her by the throat and punches her hard in the mouth.
She stumbles backward, the momentum of his hand sending her crashing into the wall. Florence’s head bangs hard up against it and she feels the top of her head split open. The room tilts, blurs to something unrecognizable, and she sags, trying to find some kind of purchase against the wall to stay standing.
An elbow presses into the square of her back in response, turning her face first into the wall, a silent order for her to stay still. Rough fingers circle two of her own and she stiffens.
"Heard you're an artist. Good one even.” He’s breathless. Some part of her rejoices at that.
“I imagine it would be quite unfortunate if you managed to break any of these pretty little fingers.”
Understanding dawns on Florence and with it, panic turns her insides to ice. Florence wiggles the fingers of her hand, reminding herself they’re still in working order. Benito’s own twists her middle finger with just enough force to make the bones protest, and then he waits. Florence’s vision bounces, a shutter of tears and shock.
“This is my last warning, Florence. Information, now.”
She’s never allowed herself to be threatened before, never bowed to a large man threatening violence because he lacked the intellect to argue otherwise.
Florence’s head throbs, a momentary reminder that she didn’t exactly have the time to pace her answer when there was a heavy man pressing up against her with his hand wrapped around her own like a vice. But he’s hurt her and he intends to hurt her friends and she’ll be damned if that gets him answers.
Florence’s heartbeat slams hard against her throat. She presses her lips tightly together, shutting her eyes.
“Go to hell. You and your boss.”
Benito sighs behind her, the sound a mixture of frustration and resignation, and then he twists hard on her finger. She feels it, the bone of the digit fracturing apart into a splinter, and she screams, bucks against Benito.
The man is a solid wall of muscle- it’s no surprise he works in intimidation- and he hardly budges at her struggling. Wrapping his hands around her wrists, Benito tuts into her ear.
"I'm sure Ricci really appreciates this attitude. Seems a bit overdramatic to me."
Florence reels back, pressing her heels into the wall and attempting to push Benito off of her. Another sigh flits into her eardrum and with one swift jerk, she feels a hand thrust her head forward into the wall again. Before she can do more than flinch, the man yanks her pinkie and ring finger back sharply. It feels like a hot spike, driving outward from the inside, and something between a scream and a sob tumbles out of her throat. Pain tears through Florence’s left hand, so sharp that she’s not sure where it truly starts, and she twists against Benito’s grip, trying to curl her body around her hand. A noise that sounds more like a dog than herself keens through her teeth.
The room around her bounces nauseatingly and Florence squeezes her eyes shut, sucking a breath in through her teeth. A low order in Benito’s voice flutters across her eardrums, but she can’t make sense of the words and settles for staying still. The hand around her right wrist disappears and after a moment, a brief pause and the sound of cloth against cloth, something smooth and flat nudges its way into her left hand. The man behind her squeezes her fingers around it, brokering another cry from her throat as torn muscle twists over broken bone. He pats the top of her knuckles and leans forward, his mouth brushing close to her ear. She shivers and bares her teeth, and for a single moment, the angry buzzing in her ears dies down.
“I won’t play this game with you again. Mr. Juliano looks forward to your call.”
It’s strange, a moment later as she eases herself down onto the floor. She can’t remember him letting go or leaving the room. She can’t recall the door shutting behind him or the click of his heels as he ascends the steps outside.
But Benito is gone.