Episode 4: Venice - Part 3: Caesar's Cock

Episode Four: Venice

Part 3: Caesar's Cock

Pirates.

I obviously can't know that the 30 or so men, cramped and stinking in this tavern are pirates. Men of the sea they are obviously. And from the rough and unfriendly look to them, pirates is the natural assumption one leaps to.

The tavern isn't especially large, but the men are comfortable, drinking and playing their games of dice, et cetera, the din of their conversations nearly deafening. Tables scatter the open room, straw molders on the floor, and a well-dressed, tall, and pole-thin man manages the bar which makes up the room's rear perimeter.

Every eye looks my way when I enter.

I am not exactly dressed like them, nor do I wear a costume which would be instantly seen as threatening. These aren't the sort of men who would see my obviously foreign dress as anything but what it is. Pirates are nothing if not accepting of other cultures' customs. Nor do I meet any of their stares. Perhaps this is why some two-third of them go back to what they are doing. Curiosity can account for the other one-third. Even pirates are curious – if only of how long it will take for violence to break out. Which is what I'm sure they're wondering. I doubt it much has to do with why a stranger would wander into their drinking hole.

I ignore them in favor of the bartender – who is pointedly, even exaggeratedly, ignoring me.

By the time I've moved through the room to the bar – careful not to bump or nudge anyone, regardless of whether they have a drink to spill or not – there are only a few still watching me. Conversation is a whisper, now. I climb onto one of the stools at the bar and place down one of my coins so that its clink is audible. I don't look at the bartender. He'll come when he's ready.

“You couldn't find somewhere else to drink?”

I look up and find the him– an immaculate man with the cleanest face, hands, and apron I think I've ever seen – the bartender, standing before me, idly polishing a wooden cup with a rag. I slide the coin forward a few inches and take my hand away – not relinquishing it; displaying it.

“I heard this is the best place in Venice to find what I need.”

“Your Genoese is good,” the bartender sniffs. “You don't speak Venetian?”

“Not as well. I'm only visiting.”

“You're from Genoa?”

“No. I've lived there two years.”

He makes the noise again. Basically the Italian sound reserved for anyone or anything not Italian enough.

“What do you need from me and my place?”

“I could start with a drink.” I push the coin to him.

He doesn't even seem to notice it, then it's gone.

The difference in a bartender and a tavermaster or innkeeper is that, where tavernmasters and innkeepers live off them, bartenders care nothing for you or your bullshit. A bartender does not make his living parlaying rumor. He makes his living tending bar. Simply put, taverns and inns are places where your talk is sold, and bars are where you pay to talk - the psychoanalyst's couch of history . Drunks talk – and everybody likes a little extra weight in their purse. Especially if it's gold. Especially back then – gold hadn't been minted for coin in the west for hundreds of years.

“The Good Stuff it is,” the bartender says, his voice a barely-audible mutter. I can only hope his beverage isn't as bitter as his attitude.

“Vinnie, right?” I ask when he returns with a cup filled with red wine.

He nods. “One and the same.”

“I'm looking for someone,” I put another coin on the table.

“Why don't you drink your wine first? Then you can ask your questions.” His grin has a wicked edginess to it.

Putting a second coin atop the first, I pick up the cup. The first sip is... putrid. Worse than I had feared. Not only is it bitter— Skunky is not the right word. It's the damn skunk's fucking stink gland fermented. I keep my face neutral, but my body must stiffen or something as I choke the so-called wine down in a gulp or two, because I hear chuckles from the otherwise-quiet behind me.

When I put the cup back down, Vinnie takes it and the coins and heads off to refill it. With something else, I hope, at that cost. Not that I care about the coin. He returns a moment later.

“Who are you looking for?”

“His name is Pepin.”

“That is a common name. Where is he from?”

“I don't know.” I choke down the second cup, putting three coins on the bar. The buzzing in my head is nice. At least the Good Stuff got that part right.

“Then I do not know him.” Vinnie's eyes are filled with a lazily malevolent compliance. “I think it is time for you to leave.”

“People call him Pepin the Great.”

Vinnie pauses, then his gaze darts to something behind me.

I turn and look over my shoulder to find a hulking beast of a man, seven feet tall by my initial observation, and as muscular and hairy as a gorilla, standing and looking at me. From the scars crisscrossing his naked torso and the mangled mess that was once his nose, I do not have to wonder whether this is a person accustomed to violence.

“Vinnie told you to leave,” he says. His voice booms in the now utterly quiet room. Every pirate is gleefully looking on. Which of them expected to get to witness a murder today, I wonder. Probably all of them, on second thought. Not a generous projection, but they are pirates, after all.

I look back to Vinnie. “Jacopo told me you would have answers.”

A light goes on in Vinnie's eyes, and a hand falls on my shoulder. My gaze climbs it up its forearm and massive biceps to the face of a giant. This must have been what David felt like with Goliath glaring down at him.

“Vinnie told you to leave,” he says again. His voice is softer, now, as though he means this for my ears only.

Then his hand is bunching in my jacket and he pulls me from the stool.

“Now, just wait—“ I try to protest.

His other hand silences me, grabbing as it does at my belt. And now I'm hoisted in the air. And a moment later I'm hurtling like the world's worst shotput toward the door. As I fly backward through the room, I wonder whether al'Shamshir ever gave me a lesson on this particular situation. Thirty-to-one is not the kinds of odds I would have liked.

And then I crash into a table.

I land flat on my back. Dice and cups and men are scattered from it. It tips over. I try to twist and turn and roll my feet over my head, but all I succeed in doing is hitting the floor and sprawling across it on my belly. By the time I've scrabbled to my knees, Goliath is upon me again, lifting me from the ground by my jacket. It occurs to me that I could fight him. I could try, anyway. I might be able to get out of his grasp, to land a few blows – before those arms crush me like a clay jar.

Any advantages I might have in pugilism are negated by the tightness of the space, the closeness of the tables, the easy reach of grabbing arms. I could try to dance around him, looking for a knockout blow. I might even land it. Even if I did, would his friends replace him? Would I fight them all one at a time until I'd dispatched all thirty of them like some kind of pirate gladiatorial contest? Was Pepin worth that to me? It didn't even make any sense. More likely, if I managed to down Goliath, the others would just swarm me. Which would likely be very much worse for yours truly – I can't imagine them being the only group of men to down a single combatant and not kick him to or nearly enough to count as to-death.

Or I could do something else. Something I had prepared myself to try – but which I had only ever succeeded in doing to myself.

al'Shamshir would be proud – no one could ever prepare for this.

Goliath is holding me by the front of my jacket, his arms extended all the way out from him like I'm some kind of especially putrid piece of trash – or maybe a small animal that can bite or scratch if he lets it get too close. I reach into my jacket. In one of the pockets, I have stashed a glove I've had made with the same process with which towels, terry cloth, will come to be made. An exceedingly absorbent material.

Maybe he thinks I'm accepting my fate or something. Maybe he's too stupid to wonder what I'm doing. I don't know, but as I get this on my hand, he doesn't try to stop me. In another of the interior pockets lining my jacket – like I'm planning on starting a Medieval subway battery business – I have a small leather case containing ten delicate glass phials. Goliath is carrying me – almost gently – to the door, navigating his compatriots with evident ease. He ignores me as I open the case, gently taking out one of the phials. What could I pull from my jacket that might worry him or rectify for me the situation?

By the time we're only a handful of steps away from my expulsion, I have the phial in my gloved hand and the case replaced. I crush the glass and feel the cool liquid fill my palm, instantly absorbed by the glove. Then I act.

I throw up my left hand and drive my elbow into the inside of his right elbow. Goliath is not prepared to defend the attack. Never underestimate your opponent, folks. Never. Not even a little.

His arm buckles. I grab the back of his sweaty, densely muscled neck with my left and pull myself in close to him. My right, gloved, hand shoots out for his face. I clamp the glove over his mouth and nose. I can feel shards of glass stab into his skin, grinding and breaking against he bones, his teeth. Goliath's eyes fly wide and he gasps. His face contorts with pain and surprise and rage. He wrestles to contain me in his hands, but I have caught my feet against his thighs, locking myself on him like some kind of human face-sucker. And already his grip is weakening. He stumbles forward. I drop my feet to the floor. My legs slam into a table, but I find my balance, even as I'm supporting Goliath's weight by his face. Then his eyes are rolling in his head and I release him. He staggers around, out of my reach, like a tranquilized horse, bumping into tables and his compatriots.

Eventually he falls, and the entire room is stunned silent.

I look around me, breathing hard, examining the faces of each of the men still conscious in the room - wondering whether I've driven shards of glass into my hand - and more than a little impressed with my ingenuity - who would have thought that would work exactly as I'd planned it to? Nonlethality, I know, somehow, deep, in the furthest recesses of my soul or my heart or whatever that part of us that knows the future we're headed toward but refuses to tell us in anything but foreboding knowing of things unknowable, will not always be an option moving foreward.

I didn't bring the bagh nakh and the other case of vials for no reason, did I?

Who is going to attack me next? None of the remaining pirates wants to meet the challenge. I have, evidently, defeated their Champion. When I meet Vinnie's eyes once more, he, of all the men in the room, is impressed. Maybe that will make him more amenable to answering my questions? There's only one way to find out.

I make my way back to him. Murmurs of the sort you might expect accompany the walk: How'd he do that? Sorcery, magic, witchcraft.

When I sit down at the bar again, however, another voice, lilting, lyrical, and gay shouts behind me. “What the fucking fuck is going on in my bar?”

I look up at Vinnie, and he's very obviously trying to hide a smile – perhaps even laughter. What new bullshit has come to interrupt my search for Pepin? I put my head in my hands.

From the corner of my eye, I see a weaselly little man shoot to his feet. I turn and watch him.

“Boss! He— Vinnie told him to leave. And he— He killed Crixus!”

I didn't kill—

I hear boots scuffle, a body toed with an expensive shoe. “He's not dead, you fool. He's just knocked out.”

“It was magic, Boss!”

I flick my eyebrows at this and twist my lips in self-satisfaction. Then I hear those expensive shoes approaching me.

“Ahhhhh. Look what got washed up on my bar! If it isn't you – Robert the Longshore.”

Finally I turn – to find the most flamboyant person I had ever seen making his way to me. The pirate boss, if the weaselly man could be believed - and why shouldn't he - is tall. Taller by a few inches than I. And his dress is almost too much for me to look at for long.

He's wearing a pair of, yes, expensive leather boots that climb to just below his knees. Into these are tucked a pair of the tightest imaginable leather breeches. Above this, he is wearing a flowing blouse of a white silk shirt, complete with flowing tufts of fabric at the collar and cuffs of the sleeves. This is open nearly to his navel so that a thicket of dense black curls obscure the landscape of his thickly muscled chest and narrow waist. The shirt is tucked in the front into his breeches, the only thing prevented the loose-nay-undone laces there from revealing his manhood – the bulge of which, traces a generous line across his pelvis and down his leg, proving just how Italian he really is. His face is handsome – and surprisingly young-looking, for someone apparently responsible for the thugs surrounding us. And clean shaven.

If I thought that the wideness of the brim of one's hat said something about them, specifically about their masculinity, then the brim of his hat makes mine look like it has none at all. His hat would put no few of the most bombastic noble ladies' hats of history, even those worn at the Kentucky Derby! to shame. Its brim is wider than his shoulders and flopped as he walked, with a huge, unidentifiable bird's feather trailing the air behind him. And beneath it, a shock of thick black curls that hang below his shoulders down his back.

I am not happy to hear him say my name – to learn that he knows it at all. Nor am I thrilled that this person I have never seen before knows my face well enough to not be surprised to find itin his establishment.

 Maybe Jacopo told him I was coming? 

That seems unlikely. This doesn't seem the kind of person to spend much time in Jac's place. 

Or away from the sea. 

That is an almost insane thing to say. Look at how immaculate and decidedly salt-free his clothing is.

Anyone can change into new clothes on shore.

He sits down beside me, grinning like he were meeting up with a long-lost cousin, not joining a complete stranger.

“That's not—" I abandon denying my identity. "How do you know my name?”

“Don't worry about it. I have my sources. I know everything worth knowing. Making you worth knowing.” The pirate boss speaks and uses his face, flicking his brows and working his lips, in an actor's exaggeration of flirtation. Flipping between and combining almost on a whim archetypes of feminine and masculine expressions of desire. He puts his finger to my chest in what might have been a poke, but turns his hand upside down and caresses it up to my throat before pulling it away just before he might have chosen instead to flick it off my chin. Maybe he didn't want to touch my beard. Can't blame him there.

“Of,” I correct him. I'm refusing to react to any of this at this point. I don't know what his game is, but if it's to make me uncomfortable so that I might be put me at some sort of disadvantage, I'm not going to let him. “You don't know me.”

“Yet.” He winks at me, then turns to the bartender. “Vinnie, baby, can you fix us up two of my usual?” Then back to me. “Robert – can I call you Rob? Rob— Ugh. That name really is terrible. Anyway.”

Two wooden cups appear between us.

“Vinnie! Baby! Marvelous. I'm Caesar, by the way,” he says to me with a lascivious grin. “Say thank you, Robert.”

My eyes find Vinnie's. I raise the cup. He nods and looks away. Whatever it is, I hope it's better than what he'd been giving me. Turns out it's a sweet red wine. Pleasant.

“I thought I said say thank you. Didn't I?” He smiles, but his eyes say not to disobey him again. “Good, eh? You look like you expected something else. Oh, no. Vinnie wasn't giving you the Good Stuff, was he?” He laughs, slapping the bar. “The Good Stuff is his worst shit!” He laughs some more. “How did you even hear about this place? Rich prick like you could drink at any watering hole in the city. Why mine?”

I might have frowned at this; might have paused to wonder how Caesar knew so much – let alone anything – about me, but did not. After Peitho and Metus showing up at my door apparently knowing everything there is to know about me, I'm no longer as impressed with my secrecy as I once was. I try to ignore him knowing what he shouldn't, try no to think about how it could be and with whom his interests align. He's involved, somehow. He knows where Pepin is – or at least he did for a time. I need to get what I can get and then get the Hell out of here. Before I actually do have a Scholeio assassin after me.

Assuming Peitho really isn't.

“I was told to come here by an innkeeper named Jacopo and that Vinnie knew more than he did.”

“Oh, Vinnie knows more than he likes to admit. Except you didn't mean Vinnie. You meant Vinnie knows more than Jac. But, sure. Jac's a fat asshole - who doesn't know more than him?” He pauses a moment, looking at me, then reaches into my jacket and pulls out the mostly-dry towel-glove.

I react like you might expect. Mouth falling open, protest caught in my throat. I am trying not to be overwhelmed by this man. His body language is... queer. The pirate captain takes no notice, putting the glove to his face and sniffing gently.

“Sweet Oil of Vitriol,” he says at length. His voice is impressed. Then he looks at me and offers the glove back. “How were you able to store it and keep it from exploding?”

“Practice,” I laugh, putting the glove back in its pocket.

He gives me a long look. His eyes, large and as blue as the sea right before a storm, are so deep I could swim in them.

Diethyl Ether, or Sweet Oil of Vitriol as it will come to be known in Christendom in a few centuries, is a substance I should not have been able to make – and which only the most up-to-date alchemist would even know about. Jabir ibn Hayyan – if he existed at all as only one person – discovered it less than a century previous. I'm speaking with a pirate-alchemist, then? That seemed... unlikely. But everything that has been happening to me is unlikely, lately.

“Not only do you know how to distill it—“ 

Distillation is a process of boiling and cooling a liquid until you have “purified” it. This usually means you've subtracted it from it other chemicals as gasses. When you do this with wine – that is, when you boil it down to its ethanol – then mix sulfuric acid – which we alchemists knew as Oil of Vitriol – you are left with diethyl ether. Diethyl ether is an extremely volatile gas; and you've likely heard how it was used in the 19^th century and beyond as an anesthetic and street drug. 

“But you know how to store it so that you can use it later. This – what did you do? You poured some ether into this glove and held it to his face? He breathed it in, then he passed out? Is that why they think you killed him?”

I nod. That about summed it up.

“Not magick, then. But sufficiently mysterious to be magical." He nods, smiles, stuffs the glove back into its pocket perhaps too gingerly. He stays leaning closer to me, on the bar with his elbow, his cheek in his palm - the universal bar-language for fascination. "I approve. As I see it, you are indeed the Protégé. Whom did you study with?”

Somehow I know that he does not mean the Master – but could.

“Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi!” I say, more than a little proud to say the name, but leaning subtly back from him. I am unable to look away from those blue opals.

“al-Razi!” Caesar exclaims, impressed. “Only the best for the Protégé. It was in his laboratory that you learned to distill Ether?”

I nod. “Yes. I— He gave me free reign of the place when I was younger.”

“How old were you?”

I hesitate for just a second – less.

Why are you talking to him like this? You don't know him.

He's Scholeio.

He has to be!

“Seventeen,” I say, slowly. Not guarded or cautiously, more like my mouth is wading through ankle-deep water. What was in that wine?

“Seventeen,” Caesar muses.

I've turned away from him. I look back and regard him. The world seems to swim before my eyes, all the color blurring with the motion and lingering in my vision for just-too long enough for me to notice it. I blink. Caesar's eyes are... so big. They are the dominant feature of his face. He has a strong nose and jaw, his features more Greek in appearance than Italian, with full lips and dimpled chin. There seems to be, for just a moment between us, a vacuum. It's like we are heavenly bodies. Our gravities grapple. I feel it, the empty space, the forces that I can hardly describe, let alone comprehend, working on him. And then it's as though something in him shifts or breaks or surrenders under tremendous strain, and is pulled out of him and toward me.

“That must not have been long before Constantinople, then.” His eyes are wet with brimming tears. Sympathy tears? “You were just a boy.”

“Yeah.” I'm smiling, barely hearing him and losing myself to a memory. “I nearly killed myself down there. Hah. I had been reading Jabir – they always wanted me follow their lessons or go at their pace, but I couldn't wait. You know, he once said to me about Jabir that they called his work Jabirish because it's mostly nonsense gobbledeegook word soup. He said they call it that because it's like its own language – you have to know what he's talking about already to know what he's talking about.” I laugh, and Caesar smiles, almost indulgently. “So I was reading it and trying to make sense of it. I was following along a commentary of al-Razi's, working through the Oil of Vitriol experiment. I did it. I was super excited. They said you knew you'd gotten the Ether if it smelled sweet. But I guess I missed the warning about actually smelling it.”

Caesar's eyes widen.

“I took a deep sniff. They found me in the floor, much later. I guess it was lucky that I had fallen. The way I landed, when the Ether met the flame....”

“Boom.” Caesar makes the universal hand gesture for a tremendous explosion, his face cartoonishly contorting with it.

“Yeah. I burned the lab down. I'm not sure what I'm more thankful for, actually – that I was unhurt, or that the books were.”

Caesar laughs and slaps me on the back. “You are something, Mister Robert Longshore, Fulcrum of Human Fate. It has been an absolute pleasure to meet you. Now-- What did you come to my bar for? How may I be of service to you?”

“I'm looking for someone,” I start.

“Who, dammit? Tell me and be done with it already!” He's laughing. But the brewing storm of his impatience is very real in his eyes.

Don't interrupt me and this won't be a problem.

“...Someone called Pepin the Great.”

“Jac, you old son of a bitch,” Caesar curses, looking away from me at the bar. “Why....” He turns to look to the ceiling and rubs his forehead with his middle two fingers. Then, looking at me with just his eyes from this pose, he asks from the corner of his mouth in an almost-exasperated almost-sigh, his voice climbing to a sing-songy register: “What do you want to know?”

I blink. “Then you do know who he is?”

He rolls his hand in the air, as though searching for or dismissing the answer. “I wouldn't say that. I know of him.” He winks at me, purses his lips in an almost-kissy face. “Carried him on my ship – doesn't mean I know him. We didn't have dinner or anything. I didn't get to know him or anything. He's not my type. You, on the other hand....”

He'd put his hand on top of mine. I pull it away.

“No thanks. What can you tell me about him?”

“What's in it for me?” Caesar gives me a smile that's more bite than bright, walking his fingers across the bar as though he means to take my hand again.

“It depends on what you want.” I narrow my eyes at him. I have to force my hand to stay where it is.

“Oh, I'm just fucking with you.” He gives me a feather-light slap to my shoulder, throwing his other hand in the air and his mouth open, his eyes widening. Then he rests his arm on the bar and puts his lips behind his first two fingers, as if taking a good look at me for the first time. “Not that you're not a good looking specimen in your own right. But I imagine you have better things to do than what I want.”

He imagines correctly, if he wants what he's implying.

“Then you brought him to Venice?”

“Sure did,” Caesar says into his hand. This his eyes go a million miles away. “I think I made a mistake, helping him – Pepin – the Great, as they say. You know, my men started calling him that. On account of how arrogant he was when first he came aboard. Oh, he wasn't a bother at first. A little weird. But most people on a boat are a little weird. I almost wonder how you came to hear it at all. Maybe it's followed him into the city, but you haven't been in the city but a day, have you? No, this wouldn't be the first we're meeting if you had spent any significant time in Venice before today.” His gaze flicks back from wherever it has been vacationing to me for just a moment, the hint of a smile hidden behind his hand.

He drops it to the bar, turning to fidget with his cup – staring into it, obviously pondering something.

“I didn't think anything out of the ordinary about his destination, either. Lesvos. Not exactly a busy little island. Out in the Aegean – you know. But not unheard of for people to want to visit. Lots of history there. Not that he was the tourist or pilgrim type. He had good coin. Paid lots of it for a cabin and to be left alone. The coin was right. But he wasn't. There was something wrong with him before Lesvos. Spending all his time talking about how he is the 'rightful King of Italy', and how when he gets the army they promised him, he's going to come back to Venice and do what his great grandfather couldn't.”

I'll show them. I'll show them all.

Caesar shrugs. I'm frowning.

What could any of this mean?

“But after, it was—“ Caesar shudders. “It was worse. You could see it in his eyes, by then. Whatever it was, whatever was septic about his soul had made it to his eyes. I didn't spend much time around him after that. Rather, he didn't spend much time with me. He spent all his time in his cabin, far as I knew. Some of my boys heard him talkin to himself, yeah? Chanting-like. Repeating the same things over and over.” Suddenly he spins one-hundred eighty degrees around in his chair and is pointing at one of his men. I don't even know how he picked the guy out from the crowd, let alone that quickly.

“Hey, Jason—“ he shouts, “What did you say he was sayin?”

One of the pirates, the one Caesar had just pointed to, stands up and says, “He, sir?”

There's an audible groan in the room, a muttered chorus of “Pepin, you idiot.”

“I swear to God, Jason. If you don't fucking tell me right now what you heard him saying—“

“'I'll show them,' Sir. He said, 'I'll show them all. Then they'll see,' Cap'n.” Jason says, only just not stuttering.

“Aye,” Caesar nods to Jason. Then turning to me: “That.”

That was Pepin. Hard to doubt it, impossible as it should be. I'm watching Caesar, wondering why he's so willing to help me with this. He's made no indication that he wants paid for his work. I hated to think it, but was I talking with yet another member – former or current – of the Scholeio?

Obvioustly

Don't be stupid.

Thought we already crossed that bridge.

Was I listening to another conspirator regret his part in whatever was going on – and now he was going to try to make it right – by helping me find Pepin? My head was starting to hurt from all the thoughts I wouldn't let myself think.

Yes.

Obviously.

Don't be stupid.

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Nope! Can't be said I was anything but glad to see him go, if I'm honest with you. He gave me the creeps.”

“That's really all you know?”

Caesar nods toward the room. I turn in my chair to face it with him. The goliath is picking himself up from the floor, shaking his head.

“Crixus— You said you heard him muttering about some battle?”

The pirate stands and nods. “Yessir.”

“You going to tell our fine young friend here what it was, or are you going to make me beat you to death?” Caesar is not smiling.

“Aye. Sorry, Cap'n. Right.” He puts his hand to the top of his head and inclines it so that he's looking at the ceiling, apparently deep in thought. There is blood all over the lower part of his face. He seems to neither notice nor care.

“This isn't easy for him. All brawn, if you catch my meaning,” Caesar stage whispers to me, conspiratorially covering his mouth to conceal the words from his men. “But maybe it's fortunate for you – it would take someone as stupid as Crixus to try to have a conversation with that Pepin creature.”

“He said... 'I have to get to Turin – to the mountains west of Turin!'” Goliath shouted this last, his face lit up with pleasure like a dog who's just learned that the command Sit comes with treats.

Turin. Does that mean that Pepin left last night? Or does it mean that's his ultimate destination?

“Good boy, Crixus. Now, go sit down. And don't go bothering our guests again.” Caesar says.

“But Vinnie told him—“ Crixus tries to argue.

“Vinnie tells everybody to get out. If Vinnie wants you to make them leave, he'll tell you, all right?” Caesar's patronizing tone almost makes me laugh. Then it makes me wonder what might have happened had Vinnie asked for help.

I am simultaneously amazed by how Caesar seems to be both father and captain to these men and bored by it.

“Is that all you needed?”

Caesar is looking at me, I realize. How long had I drifted into my thoughts? This third cup of wine was much better than the first two.

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Well, all right, then. If you don't need anything else from us, why don't you go ahead and get ye gone from here? I'm sure you have more important things to do than drinking the day away.”

He grins at me, but I almost feel like this is an invitation to stay. I stand, my head feeling like it weighs a hundred pounds, and make for the door.