Chapter 9 - The Cold Bezel
The winter of nineteen-eighty-five came early to Little Italy.
By the middle of November, the street trees along Mulberry were bare, their black branches dusted with fine white frost every morning, and the air off Lake Michigan smelled of deep ice, coal smoke, and dry timber.
The shop at 114 Mulberry Street was warm.
A new cast-iron stove sat in the corner of the back room, crackling with dry hickory logs that Maso brought from the woodyard near the canal every Tuesday morning.
I sat at my bench, wearing a thick dark wool sweater over my linen shirt, a brass loupe pressed into my right eye socket.
Held in the brass jaws of my hand-vise was a small, oval garnet—one of the rough stones from the cedar box that had arrived from Portland two weeks ago.
It wasn't a commercial stone. It wasn't the brilliant, fiery red of the Mozambique garnets that the high-end jewelers on Michigan Avenue sold in platinum settings. It was a dark, deep crimson—almost black until you held it up to the yellow flame of the oil lamp, when it revealed subtle, dark flashes of purple and deep iron-red.
I picked up my small steel bezel-pusher and began slowly, methodically rubbing the thin rim of heavy yellow gold down over the curved edge of the stone.
Click. Rub. Slide.
The rhythm was old, steady, hypnotic. My grandfather had done it this way; my father had done it this way; and now my fingers performed the same soft, cold burnishing that turned raw metal into a permanent frame.
Maso stepped through the curtain from the front shop, his green wool coat unbuttoned, carrying a wooden tray holding three hot meat pies from the Italian bakery across the street.
"Adriana," he said, setting the tray down on the timber chest beside the stove. "Father Thomas is in the front room. He brought a woman from Evanston who wants her grandmother's pearl necklace re-strung before Thanksgiving."
"Tell him I'll be there in five minutes, Maso," I said without taking my eye off the loupe.
Maso didn't go back through the curtain immediately. He stood by the stove, warming his large, rough hands over the iron top, watching the tiny gold bezel take shape under my steel tool.
"That's the fifth stone you've set this week," he remarked casually, his deep voice gravelly and warm in the small room.
"It's good practice, Maso," I said. "The gold is soft, but the iron in these Maine stones makes them hard enough to take a heavy burnish without cracking."
Maso reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small, folded newspaper clipping from the Chicago Tribune, laying it gently on the edge of my bench beside the whale oil tin.
"I found this in the morning paper," he said softly. "On page four."
I lowered my loupe and picked up the paper snippet.
It was a small, three-paragraph legal notice buried between commercial real estate auctions and maritime estate closures:
FINAL DECREE OF LIQUIDATION: ROMANO HOLDINGS LLC. By order of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, all remaining assets, real estate titles, and corporate entities formerly operating under the name Romano Real Estate & Transport have been formally dissolved.
All municipal claims, back tax liabilities, and outstanding commercial liens have been satisfied in full through the public auction of the Cicero terminal properties. No further criminal or civil actions remain pending against the trust or its former officers.
Below the notice was a list of four names whose power-of-attorney rights had been officially struck from the county register.
Ruggero Romano’s name was at the top, marked with a small cross symbol indicating deceased status.
Alessandro Romano’s name was at the bottom—marked with a plain blue line indicating voluntary surrender of all rights, titles, and claims within the jurisdiction of the State of Illinois.
I looked at the blue line for a long time.
It didn't look like a punishment. It didn't look like a sentence. It looked like the clean, white line my father used to score across a copper plate before he cut it away to start a new engraving.
"He's really gone, isn't he, Signora?" Maso asked quiet, looking at the floorboards.
"No, Maso," I said, folding the paper clipping into three neat squares and sliding it inside my father’s timber drawer beside the blue envelope from Maine. "He isn't gone. He's just stopped living in a house where every door has an iron bar across it."
I picked up my steel bezel-pusher again, leaned over the hand-vise, and brought the last corner of the heavy yellow gold down over the dark red stone until it sat tight, clean, and flush against the setting.
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The stone didn't rattle. It didn't move.
It sat in its yellow bed like a drop of frozen dark wine, catching the warm light of the hickory stove and reflecting it back into the quiet room like a small, stubborn flame that refused to be put out.
