Pool_1

Nino was calculating, perceptive, always with a direct solution to any problem. As if he could look across a body of water and tell you its temperature and what lay at the bottom, he could read the slightest misintonation or hedge in a single word spoken in a sea of other words, the most subtle sweat on a lip, the most minimal deviation of one eye in a stadium of eyes. He formed loyalties at great distances. Uncanny. He wasn't just lethal, he was invisible, he was spiritual - worse - he was Nino. Louis Prio quickly kept his word given in the wine cellar. His unsavory possessions were shed, immediately, as gifts. The more ambiguous benefactions went to people of official high power or potential future utility, case in point, the free and clear gift of all cigarette concessions and vending machine trade to the very influential so called crime reporter Thomas Stone Senior, the father of a future shoo-in mayor. That mayor, of the town of ghosts below, in turn, was married to the daughter of DeLuca the Rat, another lieutenant of Illinois Fat, as a bond on a loyalty arrangement. In any event, Stone, although, officially, a reporter, was a star player snoop on the team of Harrison Hayn, whose newspaper empire nicely fronted his tight control of more than half of the city governments in the state. There was no sense asking whether Hayn approved one specific candidate over the other. No candidate existed, on either side, without his say so. The populace picked from Hayn's preselection choice A or Hayn's preselection choice B. Prio released his overtly illegal operations, including prostitution, numbers, and fencing to guys like Joe Bozia, who controlled the local unions, and to others who controlled out of state unions, and trucking. The big one, supermarket product control, he kept. It wasn't illegal, just powerful, a money machine. His young new son-in-law could not believe how quickly and totally interested markets all over the country and all