Downstairs the band began its first set. Upstairs, behind a locked door she alone controlled, Maya Sullivan closed the piano lid gently, like a book she intended to go on reading, and went to bed in clean sheets, in the first place in a year that asked nothing of her for letting her sleep in it.
Chapter 8: House Rules
Vincent asked her to come to the office before the club opened, four days after she moved in, and Maya went with her terms folded in her pocket like a talisman. Two coffees were on the desk, one black, one with the milk she took, and no folder, no papers, no audience — not even Tony. Whatever this was, it was not business he wanted witnessed.
"Your terms are signed," he said. "These are mine. Not conditions on yours — mine, for my house, so you hear them from me and not as rumours from the staff."
Maya sat, and wrapped her hands around the coffee, and listened the way she had learned to listen in the last year: for the sentence underneath the sentences.
"One," Vincent said. "No one enters your rooms uninvited. Not the cleaners, not Sal, not Lucia, not me. If there's a flood or a fire, we knock the house down getting to you — otherwise, we knock and we wait. Your key is the only key. I had the spare destroyed in front of Tony so there would be a witness to it, not just my word."
She had not known about the spare. Something in her shoulders, braced since Tuesday, lowered by an inch.
"Two. You may leave at any time. That is already in your terms, but I want it in my rules too, because my people need to hear me say it. If you walk out of this building and tell Sal to drive you to the station, he drives you to the station. He does not call me first. He does not stall. He may offer you your wages owed and a coat if it's raining. That is all."
"And protection is not a debt," she said. It came out less steady than she wanted.
"Three," he agreed, as calmly as if she had been reading his own list back to him. "Protection is not a debt. It never becomes one — not if you stay a week, not if you stay a year, not if you leave in the middle of the night without a word to anyone. You will not be followed to be persuaded. You will not be sent a bill in any currency we deal in, and we deal in several." The faintest dryness entered his voice at that, and was gone. "If anyone who works for me suggests otherwise to you, in any words at all, you tell me, and that person will stop working for me the same day."
Maya looked down at her coffee. All her life, rules had been the thing other people made to hem her in: her father's loving curfews, the bank's clauses, Ryan's tempers dressed up as agreements. These rules ran the other way. They hemmed him in — him, and everyone under him. She distrusted how much she wanted to believe them, and he seemed to know it, because he did not ask her to believe them now.
"Don't take my word for any of it," he said. "Words are the cheapest thing in this building, and that includes mine. Test it. You're entitled. Everyone tests the locks in a new house."
"Is that all?" she asked.
"Four. The club's rules, which apply to me as much as to you. No business of the family's kind is discussed in your hearing that you have not asked to hear. You are staff, and staff go home clean. If something ever frightened you in this building, you may say so to Lucia or to me, and it will be answered honestly or not at all — never with a story."
He turned his cup once in its saucer, a small, human fidget she had not seen from him before. "You sat on my lap in front of forty people to get away from a man who frightens you," he said. "Half this city will draw its own conclusions whatever we say. Inside these walls, I can at least make sure the truth is boring: you play piano, you live upstairs, you are left alone. Let them be bored."
Maya thought of the booth, of his hand steady at the small of nothing, touching nothing, of his voice low and exact: Stay close. No one touches you while you're with me. He had kept the letter of that sentence like a contract too.
"All right," she said. "I'll hold you to them."
"I would be disappointed if you didn't."
She tested the boundary on the following Tuesday, at dawn, without planning to — or so she told herself, though she had lain awake since five rehearsing it, which suggested the plan had made itself. The piano, Lucia's green-blanketed flat, the whole careful arrangement wanted one thing it did not have: something living in it that Maya had chosen on a whim, for beauty only. Flowers. There was a florist two streets over that opened at six for the restaurant trade, and Maya wanted white freesias for the piano top, bought with her own wages, carried home in her own arms.
She dressed quietly, took her key and her purse, and let herself out into a Chicago morning rinsed pale gold, the streets nearly empty, the club's sign dark. Every step away from the building tightened something in her chest. This was how it would happen, she thought — not at the door, but a street along, a car slowing, a man falling into step with respectful concern. Miss Sullivan, Mr. Corso thought it best. Mr. Corso was worried. Mr. Corso would prefer.
No car slowed. No one fell into step. A street sweeper nodded to her. The florist, yawning, wrapped freesias in paper and took her money and wished her a good day as if she were anyone, and Maya stood outside the shop with the flowers in her arms and cried, briefly and furiously, from sheer relief — then laughed at herself, wiped her face with her sleeve, and walked home at her own pace, by a longer route, past the river end of the street, simply because she could.
At the club's side door Sal was washing the step, though it was not his job that she knew of. He looked up, saw the flowers, and said, "Morning, Miss Sullivan," exactly as he would have if she had come down the inside stairs, and went back to his bucket. No report was being composed behind his eyes. Or if it was, she thought, letting herself in, it was a report that would say she had bought flowers, and nothing in her chest believed Vincent would count that against her.