Haversham trails behind, wheeling an oxygen tank. In an Italian family he’d be considered a consigliere, but this isn’t an Italian family – and Haversham’s about the furthest thing from Italian you’ll get: pinched accountant face, white blond hair as thin and airy as a cottonball.

The wheels on the oxygen tank squeak.

The Boss steps up. Takes a hit off of the tank’s mask, then hands it to Haversham.

The old man speaks.

“I’ve got–”

Voice like dry leaves in a closing fist. He coughs into his armpit. Something wet rumbles in his lungs and he pulls his arm away and tries again.

3

The criminal organization found in other cities is barely that – “organization” is a joke, a lie, an easy bit of short-code spoken by people who don’t understand. It’s gang against gang. No quarter. No peace. No treaty. No cleanly-drawn territorial lines. A constant push-and-pull of drug corners and gun-runs and stables of foreign girls made into sex slaves. The battle lines redrawn in new blood day after day. That’s not New York. Here the Great Below altered the landscape both literally and figuratively. The monsters that came crawling up out of the broken mantle forced the game to change. Here the gangs found a tense, but effective, peace. They operate under a central authority: the Organization.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

The Boss stares out over a room with eyes so brown they’re almost black. Coals in cotton. The Lieutenants shift uncomfortably. Mookie feels gut-shot. The Boss being off the radar for so long – that was a mystery on its own but they figured, well, they figured a lot of things. Maybe he was running things on the down-low; he was old, approaching eighty, and the Organization was a creaky-but-effective machine. Maybe he was off somewhere talking to other criminal organizations – Philly, Boston, DC. Maybe he was taking an extended vacation. But this? Cancer?

Behind the Boss, Haversham steeples his fingers – each hand a spider on a mirror. He looks ever the accountant, the company man.

“I’m dying,” the Boss says again. He’s a small man, but the lights behind him lend him a long shadow. “The cancer’s all up in me. It’s, ahh–” Here he looks to Haversham. “What’s the word?” Haversham whispers and the Boss returns his gaze to the crowd. “Metastasized. Like bedbugs in city hotels. By the time they saw it, well.” He gives a shrug, takes another hit off the oxygen, throws the mask down like it’s a dirty rag. “I hate that thing. The oxygen tastes funny. Like minerals. Or pool chemicals.”

Everybody’s quiet. After a few moments, Zoladski resumes speaking:

“I built this thing we do from the ground-up fifty fucking years ago. I came up out of Philly, me and just a couple other guys. Alfie Luscas – Little Jimmy’s pop. Cyril Bartosiewicz. Max Dombrowski and his little brother, Joshy. I stole business from the Italians–” He pronounces it Eye-talians. “–and then me and my boys pushed back the Irish all the way to the Bowery and then we took the Bowery a few years later. Little gangs popped up, the Puerto Ricans, the Jamaicans, the Lantern Jacks, the Black Sleeves, the Railroad Boys…” He takes a moment, starts to cough. Haversham hands him the mask, but he swipes it away. “And instead of beating them back we brought them in. Made them a part of it. A real coalition. A fucking Organization, all official-like. You’re either in it and alive or outside it and dead. And the time came that we learned what lurked underneath our feet, we stood tall and kept what was ours.”