Page 108 of Effortless

He considered that a win all the way across the board.

Sometimes, he had come to learn, a Capo had to take what they could get. Simple things made the greatest difference when it came right down to it.

“Good week,” Tom said to Lou when another guy headed out of the office.

Lou nodded as he flipped through the stacks of cash. “One of the better ones over the last few months, that’s for sure.”

“As long as they’re making money, then I don’t give a damn how we do it.”

His friend laughed. “Yeah, I know.”

“You would be good at this, you know?”

Lou glanced over at Tom. “Good at what?”

Tom waved at the room. “This, Lou. Doing this.”

“Being a Capo, you mean?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

His friend scoffed. “Yeah, right. We both know I’m not going anywhere but right where I am, Tommaso.”

“That’s a shitty outlook.”

“Not really. I like where I am, so I don’t see it as a bad thing. I mean, being a made man used to be something I wanted. Then the deeper I got into this business, the more I figured out it wasn’t likely to happen.”

“You shouldn’t assume things. Everybody gets their say on nominations when the time comes. Capos get a voice on who they would like to give their in to the family, so to speak. Would you still want to be a made man, if the opportunity came up?”

Lou shrugged, and took a seat on the edge of the desk. “Back when I was a teenager, I used to glamorize the mafia in my head. All the Capos drove black cars, wore suits, and controlled the city.”

Tom chuckled. “That’s a pretty accurate description. You just didn’t think to consider the rest of the people who make up the organization, too.”

“Sure, but my idea was based on some crazy notion where I could be one of those guys, Tommaso. A wise guy, you know what I mean? I started running the streets because we were dirt fucking poor, and our water got shut off in February. A month later, they turned the power off, too. I had two little sisters, and a baby brother. My father had fucked off somewhere with his latest piece of ass, and my mother barely held shit together. So I went out, and I hustled. I did deliveries, or ran errands. I did some drug drops when I thought it was safe enough that I wouldn’t get caught.”

“You never told me about that stuff,” Tom said.

Sure, he had known that Lou’s life had been stricken with poverty and rough times, but he hadn’t quite realized just how much. He hadn’t known how much his friend had sacrificed and suffered to be where he was—still quite low on a totem pole that they called the Outfit.

So was the fucking way of this business.

Tom was lucky—privileged as fuck. He knew it; he never denied it. Sure, he’d worked hard all his life to be a made man, but he didn’t doubt for a second that Lou worked twice as hard just to survive and be sitting where he was.

Lou shrugged, and cleared his throat. “Before I went on the streets to work, I wanted to be a lawyer, or a doctor. Maybe a cop.”

“That’s a bad job to have in this city.”

His friend barked out a laugh. “Right? One of the most dangerous cities for the blue line.”

“A new cop is always coming up dirty on the news every other week, too.”

“Yeah, I know, but that was one of my dreams. I ended up here instead, and I just substituted one dream for another. One dream that I likely wouldn’t even achieve. How could I?” Lou asked, a bitterness coloring his words. “I was just some poor kid from the Heights with no dad, and a mother entertaining Johns on the weekend at the pay-by-the-hour motel down the block to make extra money that her two jobs didn’t provide.

“That’s what made me easy pickings to the guys on the crew that needed a young kid to deliver their drugs, or pick something up. Twenty bucks thrown at me went a long fucking way. It didn’t take much at all for them to convince me into this business, despite the fact I could see some of them were three times my age and still going nowhere. Maybe that’s why when I started doing this shit, I glamorized the idea of the mafia and made men in my head, and the dream changed to make it worth my while. Funny how that worked.”

Tom swallowed hard, and glanced down at his clenched hands. “Sorry, man.”

Lou waved a hand. “Nah, don’t do that. Don’t be sorry, or have pity. I fucking hate that shit, Tom.”