Brutal Prince (Brutal Birthright)

Right now, neither the flawless set-up nor the excellent turnout of guests is giving me any pleasure. I march over to the bar and ask for a double shot of whiskey, neat. Aida watches me down it in one gulp.

“What?” I snap, slamming the empty glass back down on the bar.

“Nothing,” she says, shrugging her bare shoulders and turning away from me to order her own drink.

Trying to get the thought of Oliver and Aida out of my mind, I scan the crowd, looking for my first target. I’ve got to talk to Calibrese and Montez. I spot my mother over by the food, talking to the state treasurer. She’s been here for hours, overseeing the set-up and greeting the first guests as they arrived.

Then I see somebody who definitely wasn’t invited: Tymon Zajac, better known as the Butcher. Head of the Polish mafia, and a major fucking pain in my ass.

The Braterstwo control most of the Lower West Side, right up to Chinatown, Little Italy, and the wealthier neighborhoods to the northeast that are controlled by the Irish—aka me.

If there’s a hierarchy to gangsters, it goes something like this: at the top you’ve got your white-collar, gentrified gangsters who use the levers of business and politics to maintain their control. That’s the Irish in Chicago. We run this city. We’ve got more gold than a fucking leprechaun. And we make as much money legally as illegally—or at least, in that nice gray area of loopholes and backdoor deals.

Which doesn’t mean I’m afraid to get my hands dirty. I’ve made more than one person in this city disappear forever. But I do it quietly and only when necessary.

On the next rung down the ladder, you’ve got gangsters with a foot in both worlds—like the Italians. They still run plenty of strip clubs, nightclubs, illegal gambling, and protection rackets. But they’re also involved in construction projects that form the bulk of their income. They have heavy sway in the unions for the carpenters, the electrical workers, the

glaziers, heavy equipment operators, ironworkers, masons, plumbers, sheet metal workers, and more. If you want to get anything built in Chicago, and you don’t want it to burn down halfway through, or get “delayed,” or your materials stolen, then you have to hire the Italians as your foremen, or else pay them off.

Then, lower down still, you’ve got the Polish mafia. They’re still participating in violent crime, in loud and obvious and attention-grabbing shit that causes problems for those of us who want to keep up the perception of a safe city.

The Braterstwo are still actively running drugs and guns, boosting cars, robbing banks and armored cars, extorting, even kidnapping. They get their dirty deeds published in the news, and they’re constantly pushing the boundaries of their territory. They don’t want to stay in Garfield, Lawndale, and the Ukrainian Village. They want to push into the areas where the money is. The areas I own.

In fact, Tymon Zajac showing up here at my fundraiser is a problem in and of itself. I don’t want him here as an enemy or a friend. I don’t want to be associated with him.

He’s not exactly the kind of guy who blends in. He’s nearly as broad as he is tall, with wheat-colored hair just starting to gray, and a craggy face that might be scarred from acne or something worse. He has hatchet-like cheekbones with a Roman nose. He’s carefully dressed in a pinstripe suit, with a white bloom in the lapel. Somehow those natty details only serve to emphasize the roughness of his face and hands.

Zajac has a mythos around him. Though his family has been in Chicago for a century, he himself came up on the streets of Poland, operating a sophisticated car-theft ring from the time he was a teenager. He singlehandedly tripled the number of exotic car thefts in the country, until the wealthy Polish hardly dared buy an imported car, because they knew it would disappear off the streets or even out of their own garages within the week.

He rose through the ranks of the Wolomin in Warsaw, until that gang became enmeshed in a bloody turf war with the Polish Police. Around the same time, his half-brother Kasper was murdered by the Colombian drug lords helping to smuggle cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines into Chicago. The Colombians thought they could start dealing directly in the city. Instead, Zajac flew into Chicago for his brother’s funeral, then organized a two-part retaliation that left eight Colombians dead in Chicago, and twelve more slaughtered in Bogota.

Zajac did the killings himself, holding a cleaver in one hand and a machete in the other. That earned him the nickname “The Butcher of Bogota.”

The Butcher took his brother’s place as the head of the Chicago Braterstwo. And since then, not a month has gone by without his chipping away at the edges of my empire. He’s old school. He’s hungry. And I know he’s here for a reason tonight.

That’s why I’ve got to go speak to him, though I’d rather not be seen with him in public. I wait until he moves to a less obtrusive part of the room, and then I join him.

“Taking an interest in politics now, Zajac?” I ask him.

“It’s the true syndicate in Chicago, isn’t it,” he says in his low, gravelly voice. He sounds like he’s been smoking a hundred years, though I don’t smell it on his clothing.

“Are you here to donate, or do you have a comment card for the suggestion box?” I say.

“You know as well as I do that wealthy men never give their money away for nothing,” he says.

He takes a cigar out of his pocket and inhales the toasted scent.

“Care to smoke one with me?” he says.

“I wish I could. But there’s no smoking in the building.”

“Americans love to make rules for other people that they never keep themselves. If you were here alone, you would smoke this with me.”

“Sure,” I say, wondering what he’s driving at.

Aida has appeared at my side, quiet as a shadow.

“Hello, Tymon,” she says.