The dull patter of the rain against the stone streets of Venice played like violent drums in my head. With the fog lifted, the painful dark of the city now began to seep through the cracks of the walls and roads, slowly capturing the whole landscape. Angelo was leading me through these passages, through these once familiar streets, through memories that all fell second to my thoughts of my son.

"Do you know about much about Anthony D'Amerigo, Joseph?" he asked, still vigilantly pressing forward hoping I would take credence to his call. "I always thought, with your job, you knew everything around here." He pushed his left hand into his jacket, keeping his right holding his umbrella, and pulled out a small paper package. He lifted a cigarette from it with his thumb and motioned it towards me.

I tore the cigarette from his fingers and pressed it to my lips, then motioned towards him as he extended a match. With my first breath I choked and coughed the lit stick to the ground as we pressed on.

"Oh, Joseph." Angelo laughed, "You are far too nervous. Besides, you know those things can kill you." I still had to catch my breath before I could answer.

"I haven't smoked in years, but I didn't think I'd find a better opportunity to start again." I mumbled through my wheezing, my lungs still etched with the smoke. I took another long drag, to spite myself, and hung on it for far too long, as if trying to speed up some kind of cancer in hopes that I'd drop dead right there and not have to deal with any of the confusion that was rotting my brain. I was afraid.

I knew that Angelo sensed it, too. His demeanour had the same confidence I had always admired in him, but his swagger carried a brighter bounce, and given the current circumstances it was unsettling, to say the least. I couldn't catch a glimpse of his face now without his eyes catching mine and a smile would slowly crawl onto his face, like it was oozing out of him. And suddenly, I felt it. A surge of pain ripped through my stomach, which I thought was just brought on by the cigarettes and worrying expression on Angelo's normally bright face. I almost was surprised when I vomited onto the ground, a retching that brought me to my knees all too quickly. Angelo looked almost concerned, but seemed at the ready and held my arm to keep me from falling all the way down.

"Get up, Joseph." He decreed, pulling up on my arm underneath my coat as curdles of what little I had to eat that day was running through my teeth and onto the bricked streets below. "You're not dying here."

His coldness shocked me. There was a finality in the way he extended that almost positive sentiment, but he was also inferring to me that I was indeed dying, but that this wasn't his chosen place. Things were worse now, worse than I could have imagined. I wiped my mouth with the heel of my sleeve and stared him in the eye, his grin now dissolved into a grimace that, if I wasn't so frightened, would've caused me to reach out and knock out his front teeth. "What do you want from me, and where is my son?"

His smile returned as he lifted me strongly to my feet. "D'Amerigo," he pressed, "what do you know?" He placed his hand on my back and continued his pace, all the while staring me straight in the eye. He wanted me to stay alert, to answer him. The almost desperate tone at this point that he exuded ceased my questions, as well, and I knew that he would get to things only in due time. If I knew anything about this man, it was that he was a man of process, like me.

"I heard that he's the one pulling all the strings in Venice where I first attempted to make my move into Italian politics." I had to stop and cough, choking on straggling acid left from my recent episode, and it hurt far more than it should have. "I know that people are afraid of him, but I haven't pursued it much else. He's a ghost, though, and I don't know anyone around here could come up with a description of any sort. I always thought that Don worked for him, though the way he would tell it the man himself was under his thumb."

Angelo laughed. Full, head back, like he had been struck in the chin by what I had said. I was distracted more, though, by the bubbling in my chest. That cough had hurt far too much, and when I looked down at my hand that I had used to cup my mouth, I saw a trickling, red spatter, still moist and dripping from the rain water mist floating in the air. I wiped it quickly into the sleeve of my coat, not wanting to give my companion the satisfaction of seeing how much stress this was causing me. It could only be stress, I thought, I don't think that even if I had wished that hard that lung cancer would've set in from a single cigarette. Angelo was still on point.

"Giesieppé is a dog." he said, his voice now ringing with disgust. "And thanks to you, Joseph, we'll see that he is put down like one tonight." I shuffled back a few steps, not wanting to disturb our pace any further than my would-be captor would allow. He was drawing me towards something, and I needed to know what now. "What do you mean 'we'?"

"D'Amerigo has expected that the Don was skimming from his funds for a long time now. His crowd, however, are just the kind of lifeless thugs that the people of this city had thought to been purged of years ago. This is a modern world, Joseph, and he wants to drive us back to the days of the mobsters who break fingers and terrorize the citizens. He's less a politician than a mercenary." He turned his head to face me, my eyes affixed on his lips since his story began waiting for an answer to anyone of my posed questions. I began to feel, however, that my son was safe and that this was only involving me. Those troubles, now, felt miles away. "And yes, it is the both of us, Joseph. You've been the main line of communication between Anthony and the Don for quite a long time now. You're the bloodline of the most corrupt communication in this town, Joseph. And I know that you hate Giesieppé for what he did to you here, so you'll help us end this tonight."

We suddenly shifted direction towards a cathedral, derelict and lit archaically by stalwart candles, still flickering against the droplets of water clinging to the air. He pressed, holding my arm as if I were a child, pulling me towards the doors as he violently swung them open, light flooding the streets and my eyes as the burn of florescent bulbs and flood lamps pooled in from the unsuspecting hall. I stumbled forward in almost blindness until I heard a voice, trembling deep within the light. "Anthony, don't do this, I beg you." It was the voice of the Don.

When the light began to shrink back to its source, my vision returning, I searched the room for the voice. My eyes caught a glimpse of a man, tied in a chair underneath a set of flood lights. His face bruised, and blood trickling down his twisted face. This was the face of the man whom had threatened me this morning, and as he cried out in agony, in terror, I saw that he was looking right at me. Or, rather, at us. I followed his eyes, filled with a fear unseen within this toughened face I had grown to resent over the time I had been here. He was afraid for his life, and he was looking straight at...

"Giesieppé." Angelo bellowed from behind me, "I can't stop this now. Not with all that has happened, my good man. You've been stealing from me." My jaw sank, and I jerked my head quickly to my side, where Anthony D'Amerigo now stood, my friend Angelo Bestelli had just faded into memory. "I've had a nice long talk with our mutual friend here and I have come to the conclusion that he is smart enough not to be stealing from me." He turned and half-winked as he affixed his gaze, sternly, back to the old man sitting in a chair at, what I could now see as, an altar. "You, on the other hand, are incalculably stupid, Don."

The Don shifted in his chair, where I could now see he was bound with tight ropes, shaving skin off his arms where they were bare, blood loosening their grip, but not enough were he could wrest himself away. I shared his sentiment, I was bound to this moment, inescapable, and I was bleeding.