Mick Sinatra: For Once In My Life

by Mallory Monroe

“You have your legitimate empire, Michello,” Teddy Stefani finally spoke. Of the three Dons, he was the calmest. And the one Mick respected the most. “You have Sinatra Industries and your beautiful hotels around the world. You’re even partnering up with Reno Gabrini out in Vegas. You have taken the legit world by storm. But we’re just gangsters. We don’t have empires to protect us. We don’t have Reno Gabrini in our corner. We don’t have legitimacy to recommend us. We have what we have. All underground. All shady. It is our life. It is who we are. We can’t afford to let Provensano take an inch of it away from us.”

  “Or even try to,” DeLuca added.

  “What do you suggest, Don Stefani?” Mick asked.

  “Postpone the shipment if we have to. Call it back to Rome. Our buyers will wait. If that won’t fly, then we need to at least keep it in the harbor, but do not unload.”

  “And risk seizure by the authorities?” Mick asked. “By those money grubbing pricks? I would rather Stanislav have it.”

  Then Mick leaned forward. He was on one side of the table, the three Dons were on the other side. “If a man cut and run from me, I will cut him down. That’s the law of the jungle, gentlemen. A jungle Stanislav Provensano knows too well. We are not cutting and running from any man. I already have my men at that dock. I already have them working the area as if they had been there for years. Provensano’s men haven’t even shown up yet, and probably won’t until the shipment ports in three months. The only way to kill a snake is to kill a snake. Head and tail. This is our opportunity to trap and to kill that snake. And then you, my three colleagues, will take over that territory that the snake once commanded. It will be handed to you on a silver platter.”

  But Teddy stared at Mick. “And what’s in it for you?” he asked him. “You are not the charitable type. Something is always in it for you.”

  Mick smiled. “Of course,” he said, and leaned back. “I will leave you to it,” he said.

  “Leave us to it?” DeLuca asked. “What do you mean? You’ll pull out?”

  Mick nodded. “Yes. All of my shares, all of my interests in that area of my life will be your interest. Provensano’s take will be your take alone. I will take no parts of it.”

  It was the proverbial offer they knew they couldn’t refuse, but Mick ran their operations too. Mick was the brains, not just the brawl behind it all. They weren’t business people. They were just thugs. How were they going to make it, and continue to make the kind of money they were making, without him?

  But before they could ask the question, the intercom buzzed. Mick answered it.

  “Miss Rosalind Graham is here to see you, sir.”

  Mick felt a sense of relief that she had arrived safely. He had been worried about her all morning. “Send her in,” he said, stood up, and began buttoning his suit coat.

  The three Dons stood up too, although they had no clue why Mick had. “Who is this person that they can’t wait until we finish our meeting?” Carp Bianchi asked. “We’re still meeting here!”

  Mick ignored him and began walking toward his office door.

  Carp looked at Teddy. “Who is she?”

  Even Teddy had to shrug his shoulder. “Never heard of her,” he said.

  Mick opened his office door just as Roz was reaching for the knob. She smiled when she saw him, looking so handsome in his double breasted suit. And he smiled when he saw her, looking gorgeous even casually dressed as she was.

  He kissed her on the lips and pulled her in. “Didn’t get lost?” he asked as he closed the door.

  “Not with that GPS,” Roz said gaily. “That chick’s a pain in the ass, but she’s good.”

  Mick laughed. “I call her Blanche. Annoying enough, right?”

  Roz smiled. “Right,” she said. Then she looked at the three older men standing in his office.

  Mick knew this was a crucial moment in their budding affair. He knew she either was going to look and listen to these guys and get it, or she was going to look and listen to these guys and ignore it. If she ignored his reality, they had a problem.

  He placed his hand in the small of her back and escorted her toward the three men. “Rosalind, I would like you to meet three of my business partners. This lovable lug here is Teddy Stefani. One of my sons is named after him.”

  Teddy smiled and nodded his head. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Roz responded.

  “This guy here,” Mick said, “is the guy you love to hate. Vito DeLuca.”

  Vito didn’t like that description. “Ma’am.”

  “And this fellow here, the one you avoid at all costs, is Carp Bianchi.”

  Bianchi was likewise unimpressed with his description. “Very funny,” he said, and shook Roz’s hand. “Good knowing you, ma’am.” Then Carp, being Carp, looked at Mick. “So this is the problem,” he said. “A dame. That’s why you don’t wanna postpone. That’s why you’re talking that nonsense today. Which head have you been thinking with, Michello?” he asked.

  Mick’s anger flared at that very moment and he grabbed Carp and started slamming his head, over and over, into the conference table, slamming it until he was drawing blood. And then he grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and slammed his head into a file cabinet, causing him to fall down.

  Both Teddy Stefani and Vito DeLuca did nothing but watched. Carp should have known better by now not to ever play like that with Mick the Tick.

  Roz, however, was not nearly as circumspect as that. Because she’d never seen Mick fully unleashed before. She’d never seen Mick, with a man already down, kicking him in the face as if he were a dog.

  “Which head am I thinking from?” Mick was angrily yelling at the downed man. “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? You think I’m some fucking punk? With this head,” he said, kicking Carp in the head. “That’s which head. With the same one I’m bashing in now, you cock sucking motherfucker!”

  “Okay, Mick, I’m sorry,” Carp Bianchi was crying. “I was out of line, I’m sorry!”

  Roz wanted Mick to have mercy on the man. But Mick didn’t. He grabbed him up and slammed him against his office wall. Then he jacked up the bigger man with his bare hands. “Quit fucking with me,” he warned Carp. “You’ve been doing too much of that lately. Cut it out or I’m going to put an end to it myself. Once and for all. Clear?”

  Carp Bianchi had pride, and considerable authority himself, but he knew who was running this show. “Clear,” he said.

  And Mick finally, to Roz’s relief, let him go.

  Then Mick stood there momentarily, his back to Roz as if he was gathering his nerve to face her again. But then he pulled a handkerchief from his suit coat, turned around, and faced them all. He did not look like an embarrassed man to her. He looked like a tired man. “Anything else, gentleman?” he asked. He wasn’t embarrassed, but he would have preferred not to lose his cool in front of her just yet.

  “Maybe we can talk later,” Teddy Stefani said. “You and your lady go. We’ll take care of big mouth.”

  Mick nodded at Teddy. He knew he could count on him. Then, without saying a word to Roz, he placed his hand on the small of her back and escorted her out the door. He knew what time it was. She was going to either tell him to take her to the airport now, or not leave him and deal with it. His entire soul was praying that she could deal with it.

  It wasn’t until they got into his Bentley, drove all the way to his mansion, and had settled in the parlor, with her sitting on the couch and him sitting on the chair, before a word was uttered. It was times like these that Mick felt like a very foolish man. The idea that a woman like Rosalind could want him with all his warts was foolhardy to even entertain. Reno Gabrini found himself a woman who could handle it. But Reno wasn’t Mick. Mick was Mick. What woman would ever want to deal with him? He had hoped Rosalind was that woman. Now he felt as if he was hoping for too much.

  He assumed he would have to be the one to bring it up, since it was his outburst that was at issue
here. But he was wrong. Roz brought it up.

  “Was it business?” she asked him.

  Mick looked at her, his heart hammering. Was she toying with him? “Business?” he asked.

  “When you roughed up that man,” she said. Her arms were folded, and her heart felt guarded too. “Are you in a line of work that requires you to flex your muscles as if you were some Iron Man? To prove that your cock is bigger than his cock? Is that it?”

  Mick realized quickly that she wasn’t toying with anybody. She was dead serious.

  “You’re going to have to explain this to me, Mick,” she continued. “You’re going to have to tell me something here. Because I didn’t see a businessman in there. I didn’t see the man I’ve been seeing over the last three weeks. I saw a straight-up gangster. A thug. Talk to me, Mick.”

  Mick felt the intensity of her concern as if it was his intensity and concern. But the fact that she did not leave his office in tears, or run upstairs and pack her bags, was telling to him. But he couldn’t underestimate what she was getting herself into if she stayed. He had to keep it real.

  “What you saw,” he said, “is who I am. I’m a businessman, yes I’m that. What you see in my businesses, at the Carson, at my office, is the truth. But the thug you saw is also me. Is also truth. I’m a thug too. I’ve been a thug all my life. It’s so deeply ingrained in me I don’t think it can come out of me.”

  Roz needed more clarity. “What you’re telling me is that a man says something you don’t like, the way that man in your office did, and you’re take him to within an inch of his life? Are you telling me you’re that kind of man?”

  “I’m telling you I am what I am. It’s not simple, Rosalind.”

  “That was simple. What I saw in your office was simple. You didn’t like what that guy said and you nearly killed him! Who does that? What kind of rational human being does something like that?”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” he blared out. “What the fuck would you know about it? You never lived your life as a hunted man. You never had men stronger than strength itself depending on you because they see you as even stronger! And as soon as they see weakness; as soon as they see that slither of opening that they can slither through, you’re dead. Because the mystique is gone. Because they realize you’re no stronger than they are. You’re vulnerable. And vulnerable people never survive. Not in my world. Not ever.”

  Mick said this with such feeling in his voice that Roz was mesmerized by the depth of those feelings. She continued to listen to him, to stare at him.

  “Those were words to you,” Mick continued. “All you heard were words. But all I saw was that slither opening. All I saw was my absolute authority being questioned. All I saw was my own demise. I have to do it to them before they do it to me.”

  On the one hand, this kind of talk was as foreign to Roz as a walk on the moon. You annihilate somebody on the off chance they might annihilate you? But on the other hand, on the hand that Mick held with tenderness, she understood every word. He undoubtedly came up on the rough side of that mountain. He had to kill or be killed. She couldn’t begin to know what that was like. But if she stood any chance whatsoever of making this work, she had to begin to find out. She had to get this highly intelligent, highly successful man to come out of his emotional hiding place, and tell her something. “Where does it come from?” she asked him. “Where does this sense of survival come from?”

  Mick looked at her. She could see the pain in his eyes. But she also knew he wasn’t going to start telling his life story that easily. He was not that kind of man. The only way he was going to talk was if he had already reached the conclusion that having her in his life was worth it. Otherwise, Roz was convinced, he was going to shut this down now.

  But he didn’t. He apparently wanted her around enough to answer her question. And answer it in that methodical, reasonable, intelligent way she was beginning to see as his way.

  “To say I came from a dysfunctional family,” Mick said, “would be like saying Jeffrey Dahmer, to use the example I used when we first met, enjoyed a good meal. Because it wasn’t in the dysfunction, or in Dahmer enjoying a good meal, that proved the problem. It was in the kind of dysfunction, the kind of meal Dahmer enjoyed eating, that broke it wide open. That’s what creates the chasm. That’s what creates the belief that your life is so fucked up you may as well fuck up everybody else’s.”

  Mick paused again, as if he could see that fucked up life as clearly as his bright eyes saw the day. “I was born in Maine,” he said. “Jericho, Maine. We weren’t what anybody would consider poor back then. We weren’t rich either, but we survived alright. My father was a drunk. My mother was a whore. But so what, right? No parents are perfect. Besides, my sister Sprig and I had Charles. He’s my big brother. He was everything our folks were not.”

  Mick paused again. Roz could still see the difficulty he was having in going there with her. They had only known each other for a little less than a month. Who was she for him to confide in?

  But apparently she was someone, because Mick continued to confide in her. “If my father was just a drunk, then that would be one thing. If my mother was just a whore who slept around, that would be one thing. But my mother was the town whore. She didn’t just sleep around, around slept with her. Every fucker from Jericho to Van Buren got a taste of that ass. Even my brother’s friends, my father’s friends, got their taste.”

  He paused. “My father didn’t just drink, he raped my sister when he drank. He kicked my brother’s ass when he drank. And my brother? He could have kicked our old man’s ass easily. But he wouldn’t do it. Not Charles. He had too much respect for authority. He honored his mother and father. He was the toughest sonafabitch I’ve ever met.”

  Another pause. “But I didn’t have that sense of loyalty. I hated my father. I blamed him for why my mother turned to the town for love and affection. And unlike Charles, whenever he tried to kick my ass, I didn’t lay there and take it. I kicked his ass back. I was only five years old when I first tried, and if he would have caught me, he would have killed me. But I fought back. He didn’t like it. He hated me as much as I hated him. One night, he tried to burn me in my bed. He said it was an accident. He said the cigarette slipped from his hand while he was in one of his drunken stupors. I had no proof, but after that he started smiling at me whenever he saw me. But I knew I was going to get my retribution. It wasn’t going to be then. But one day, I was going to get him back. And I did.”

  Yet another pause, as his look turned more tragic than sinister. Roz could barely breathe.

  “One night he killed her,” Mick said so calmly that it confused Roz. Surely he couldn’t be talking about who she suspected he was talking about. Not that calmly.

  “Killed who?” she asked.

  “My mother. My father killed my mother right in front of myself, Sprig, and Charles.”

  “Oh my God,” Roz said, horrified. “And you saw it too? Oh my God, Mick!”

  “Yeah, talk about dysfunctional, right? But Charles, being the honorable man he is, held my father to account, and at gunpoint until the Sheriff could arrive.”

  “Was your father convicted?”

  “Yeah. He got convicted. Thirty-plus years later, my brother’s son Brent had this special prosecutor of a girlfriend who got him out. But that didn’t last a full day.” He looked at Roz. He couldn’t utter the words that he had his father killed that day. That, he knew, would be too much for her to take right now. Besides, those words wouldn’t be true anyway. He didn’t have him killed. He did it himself.

  “I was only six when my parents were snatched from us, so Charles, who was only thirteen himself, raised us. But he raised me too late. I had too much within me and he never allowed me to explode. He forced me to keep that rage so tucked inside of myself that I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear anything about that life, that town, those people. By the time I became a teenager, I was a walking time bomb. Before I exploded, before I tor
e down everything my brother was trying to build up for us, I got the fuck out. My sister got out too and became an alcoholic and general fuck up like our father. But I made a name for myself right away. Nobody fucked with Mick the Tick and everybody understood that.”

  He looked at Roz. He was surprised she was still there. But she was. “That’s me,” he said. “That will always be me. You might think I can change. You might think you can change me. I say don’t hold your breath. You saw the real me in my office today, Rosalind. Mick Sinatra, the businessman, the man you can do business with, I’m that person, yes. That’s the real me. Mick the Tick. The one they don’t want to fuck with? That’s the real me too.”

  Roz’s heart was pounding as she listened to him speak so freely. He didn’t have to tell her she was at a crossroad. She knew she was there. She’d known bad boys before, but Mick was a bad man. He was also a kind, generous, loving man too. She also had feelings for him. Or she wouldn’t be there.

  She sat there for a few moments longer, then she headed upstairs. She appreciated the fact that he didn’t try to follow her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Not only did Mick not come upstairs, but he left the house altogether. He left and stayed away all night. When he returned, early that next morning, he was as shocked by what he saw, as what he didn’t see.

  He saw Roz lying in his bed, wide awake, in one of his dress shirts. What he didn’t see were packed bags anywhere. He had been certain she was going to leave him. He had been certain she was going to decide he was too fucked up for her to have to deal with, and take off. He thought happiness was going to elude him once and for all and he would have to keep bringing different women to his bed whenever he needed sexual gratification, and live the rest of his life without love. Because he knew a profound truth. He knew that if Roz gave up on him, he wasn’t ever again going to give another woman the chance.

  But Roz was still there. He was too shocked to be happy. It was too soon to be glad.

  He stood there, his hands in his pockets, his eyes trained on her beautiful eyes. The fact that she was there soothed his troubled soul.