Chapter Text
December 1924
Chicago had never been a city that played fair, from its icy winter nights to its merciless summer humidity with air so thick you could drown. From its dressed up social gatherings where the well to do gathered to pat each other on the back, to the crime-ridden poverty-tired neighborhoods he knew. Billy Dunne was no stranger to Chicago's mercurial nature nor was he naive enough to think that she would ever really change. On the surface she was beautiful with Lake Michigan sparkling in the background, but underneath her secrets were dangerous and toxic, too eager to grind a man into nothing.
Politics were determined more by who owned your street and which gang you paid protection to or the blood that ran through your veins, than by any form of organized government or what official was elected. Many of the elected officials were helped into office through fraudulent methods anyway, which only made them eager to help the wrong people. The most organized aspect of Chicago was the crime and its effort to bleed the city dry. If money didn't buy the way, violence always solved the problem.
The cops took in more looking the other way than doing their actual job, which gave them little incentive to change anything, or protect anything other than the way things were. Earlier in the year they even helped the North Side rob a distillery in broad daylight. So it was easy to get away with pretty much anything if you had the right connections. Staying on the right side of those connections was imperative if you wanted to stay out of trouble, or at least out of danger. Trouble often rode on the back of those connections and was impossible to escape.
It was in that fire that Billy learned what it meant to be a man. How to provide and more importantly, how to survive.
When his mother left him alone in the world at twelve with a younger brother and secret father with a family in the better part of town who refused to even acknowledge their existence, he jumped into those flames feet first.
There had never been another choice for him. He was too young for the steel mills and he was not going to let his brother end up in an orphanage.
He worked his ass off first running messages and packages for Nicky Fitzpatrick until he was old enough, or as Nicky liked to tell him, strong enough—he was little more than skin and bones even then—to enter the ring and fight.
He hated the ring, hated the blood and the fists and the violence of it all, but he was good. He was fast, and clever, and he brought in enough money to send Graham to a nice school and keep him away from Nicky's reach.
Nicky wasn't satisfied with just the ring though, and soon had him collecting debts as well. His skills in the ring were invaluable in that second job.
It's where he first met Teddy and the first real love of his life, music. It's also where he met her, the second great love of his life. Alcohol.
She was always a more demanding mistress.
He credits her for his sanity in those miserable early days though, before he learned to tune it all out. The only thing that kept him from joining his mother on the other side really. Graham was off at school, becoming a man their father wouldn't be able to ignore, and he was funding the entire thing with his fists and keeping a bottle handy to try and black it all out.
Teddy could get him to put down the bottle long enough to let the music take her place, but he always came back to her eventually. She was easy to take with him, to sneak in his pocket and carry around when his fists were bloody and bruised. The music eased something in him that the alcohol never could, but he couldn't carry it with him as easily. He could spend long hours at the black and tan Teddy owned, could spend countless hours listening to Teddy tell him about this musician or that song, about how if it lived in you, you could never escape it, but at the end of the night he'd come home and forget it under her siren song. He'd drown that song, so deep he couldn't find it.
There was no place in his world for that kind of thing. No time. If Teddy was right, and it did live in him, it was hiding so far down he wasn't sure it even existed anymore. He only believed it in those rare moments when he could slip away and find her at Teddy's club. In those nights that were clear, between the fights and the collections, before the drinks dulled his senses and made him forget. He picked up a lifetime of sound at Teddy's feet, learned about creating music, and once Teddy even let him pick out a tune on the piano after everyone had left. He told him to come back whenever he wanted, but Billy rarely got a free night, and the sounds haunted him. That desire to forget his responsibilities and lose himself in something other that the whiskey terrified and excited him too much.
The idea that Nicky would somehow find out and ruin it too, was too much to carry.
The alcohol was easier, and it wanted nothing more than his attention. It never asked him to dig any deeper than his pocket.
He tried once to get out of all of it, to hop a train and get lost. To hide someplace so far away Nicky would never want to even bother with looking for him. But Nicky never did his own dirty work. He sent all the people he owned after anyone with the nerve to even think about leaving for a better life. And he owned Billy, since the day he offered shelter to that twelve year old boy and his little brother, even if that shelter was a piss-poor hovel with cracks in the windows and walls and a gap under the front door large enough to let in every icy breeze and every rodent in the area looking for a few scraps or a warm place to hide.
Billy knew he wanted to own Graham too, so he did everything in his power to keep Graham clear of it. Graham hated him for sending him away, hated him for funding his schooling and not letting him decide, but when he returned and got a nice job in a bank, and a little place in a safer neighborhood, Billy didn't care what Graham thought, only that Nicky didn't get his hooks in him.
That felt like a victory. That felt like the only important thing he'd ever do. Maybe it was what gave him the courage to try to get away himself that day.
It's how it works in places like Chicago, the big fish swallow the little fish, unless the little fish can prove their worth. Billy had been swimming just inches from those jaws for as long as he could remember. That day he was tired of swimming, tired of that constant battle to stay just out of reach.
When he tried to get out, Nicky had been ready, like he'd been waiting all along for Billy to try and break free. Maybe he had, maybe he could see the anger and resentment in his eyes, or feel the barely contained wrath every time he met with him. Maybe everyone eventually tries to run and Nicky knew it was only a matter of time with him as well. It didn't really matter how he knew in the end.
Three broken ribs, a concussion, eighteen stitches and permanent damage to his right knee later, Billy saw the error in his thinking. The only thing he really got from it was early retirement from the ring when Nicky finally acknowledged that with the knee injury he was never going to be the same fighter again. He was pissed as hell about losing his best fighter and Billy paid for that loss as well, with a significantly smaller cut and a bigger role in collecting.
The knee injury kept him from the war as well, though he sometimes thinks that dying in a field in Europe may have been a preferable ending than the prolonged dance he lived in. He would end it in a heartbeat if he thought that Graham would continue to be safe after. But he knew how Nicky works, and he knew he'd find a way to get to him.
Graham is his leverage. Nicky knows that too, so he leaves him alone to keep Billy in his pocket. Only bringing his power into play when Billy resists something, so Billy doesn't bother resisting anymore.
After the ring, and his anger from losing his best fighter died down, Nicky gave him a new opportunity at Fitzpatrick's as a bartender when it was only a pub with a gambling den in the basement. Gave him unlimited access to the liquor if he would break up the fights and collect on his debts during the daylight hours.
He knows now it was just another trap, another way to tie him up even tighter.
It was during that time that he first gave into the drugs. When he first found out that there were other ways, entirely more effective than just the alcohol, to deal with the life he found himself trapped in. At first it was only once in a while, but that changed once he met Camila and Nicky gained another way to control him.
He remembers it was a chilly October afternoon and Nicky had sent him to a part of town he didn't find himself in often, it was a little more affluent, but still on the poorer side of town. He could imagine families making an honest, if somewhat simple, life there. Could easily see how someone from this part of town might want to risk it all to have a chance at improving their life just a little bit more. How they could get caught in Nicky's net without even knowing they never had a chance at that better life.
When he knocked on the door and she opened it smiling with such a happy bright light in her dark eyes, he immediately hated himself for it. For what he knew would happen next, how he would take that light from her eyes and ruin her world because Nicky wanted it. Because whoever it was, her father, her husband maybe—though she looked like she might be a little too pure still to know that part of the world yet—brother maybe, decided to gamble on their life.
Her face, that first time she ever saw him, will live inside him forever. It was a look he never saw her wear again, and one he thinks she probably never will wear again. She never holds it against him, but he always will. He will always remember how light and carefree she was before he walked into her life and pulled her down into hell with him.
He thinks sometimes that they should have met in a different time and place, that maybe then things could have been different between them. Maybe then he could have given her the life she deserved.
That day he met with her father in his little office, and he didn't use violence. He couldn't when he knew she was on the other side of that door—that beautiful angelic creature who stole his breath and still held so much hope and life in her eyes. He couldn't leave her father with a broken nose or misshapen finger, or blood trailing from his mouth.
Looking back he thinks maybe he should have. Maybe if he had then Cami would never have gotten dragged into it all. Maybe she would have stayed at home in that little neighborhood where life was simple and a little hard but not impossible. Maybe she would have met a nice man who could love her and provide for her. Maybe she would have been safe.
But he didn't use violence and Nicky figured out why in less time than it took to even knock on that door. He didn't love Cami, he didn't even know her, but he could and that was all that Nicky really needed. That possibility damned her too, and he knows he will never forgive himself for it.
It took all of six months for Nicky to have Cami waiting tables and getting groped at Fitzpatrick's pub instead of paying her father's debts in his bed. Though The North Side didn't traffic in girls, Nicky wasn't exactly quiet about his desire to be a little bit more like The Outfit with their brothels and pleasure houses. It made Billy sick to even think about how close Cami could have come to finding herself in a place like that, if her father had chosen to gamble on the other side of the city.
He walked her home every night, because he knew what happened to pretty girls alone in the city at night, and he knew it was his fault she was there. At first he avoided conversation with her at all, but the longer he spent with her, the more that other part of him argued that the damage had been done. She could never go back to before he walked into her life. She was breathtaking and kind, and she didn't hate him for what he was, well for what she thought he was.
He doesn't think she could ever know the depths of the shame and guilt he carries. He can't ever tell her all the horrible things he's done to keep Graham, and now her as well, safe. He doesn't think she would still take his hand, or press close under the streetlight outside her house. He knows she wouldn't let him steal kisses, or slip his hand under her dress in the alley out back when no one was looking.
He doesn't love her like she deserves, and he knows that, but she loves him and he doesn't want to break her heart either. He's already damaged her world beyond repair and now she's the only bright spot in his fucked up universe.
When Prohibition kicked into effect four years earlier nothing much changed in their city of vice. Visitors to the city were still shown the way to the seedier parts of the city, and had the time of their lives, until they realized their pockets were empty and they had no way to pay for the women or drinks. That the house owned them after that bad hand. The only thing that had changed was the grip of those criminal elements, it was tighter, a little more on edge as alcohol sales made their way to the basements, while upstairs turned to more legal businesses and restaurants.
Basements which once housed gambling dens and casinos now doubled as speakeasies and with the arrival and boom of jazz many also catered to the new music phenomenon . There was no city better equipped to deal with the transition. With a criminal element already so organized and with tunnels and connecting basements already in place before the amendment kicked in, it was easy to shift business to places not so easily seen. Easier to run booze. Easier to slip out the back, though to be honest most of the cops were just handed some cash to look the other away.
The real problem came with the Feds. Prohis were annoying as fuck and not as easy to bribe. Billy was glad that Fitzpatrick's had Rod upstairs to deal with them. He was remarkably smooth when it came to playing it cool and shifting their attention away from what happened downstairs where Billy was now in charge of keeping things in order and running the more illegal part of the business.
It was a reward, Nicky claimed. So he could marry that girl he'd been fucking around with for the last five years. Billy knows it was only because the man who had been running things double crossed Nicky and ended up with a bullet in his brain, his body somewhere in the river. That was one of the stories anyway, another was that Nicky's boss wasn't happy with the money disappearing from this particular establishment.
With O'Banion's death a month ago, things were heating up between the north and the south sides of the city and Billy knew now was not the time to test the new leadership. Hymie didn't seem like a man you wanted to mess with, especially not in the middle of what was looking to be the beginning of a war.
Billy was less than thrilled to step into the spotlight. If someone had been stealing money, it was probably Nicky himself, and there was less than nothing he could do about it. Nicky did what he wanted and screwed whoever he wanted, he had the power and the resources to get away with it, so if his former boss ended up in the river because of something Nicky did, Billy was well and truly fucked. The only hope he had of not ending up in that river himself was to make sure nothing got by him. A task made all the more difficult when he couldn't seem to stay sober long enough to care.
Nicky knew that too.
So his “promotion” felt more like a death sentence than anything else.
It did give him more time though. He didn't have to stand behind the bar every night or break up fights when things got a little too rough. He had his own people for that now.
It also gave him more control over what happened inside of those walls. He'd suggested more than once the extra money they could make with their own band. Everyone knew that Fitzpatrick's served some of the best liquor in the city. The south side specialized in more homemade brews and whatever they could get smuggled in. The north side had its own distilleries and breweries and control of the cops. Outside of McGovern's, Fitzpatrick's was the place to go, and Billy knew that adding jazz to the mix would make any missing money seem like a small issue with the extra they would be bringing in. At least until he could figure out how it was going missing and fix the problem.
Nicky didn't care one way or the other, as long as it didn't cost them more money than they brought in from it. He just had to find a band worth the risk, which is how he found himself headed to Teddy's with Cami on his arm.
He never took her places, she complained. She wasn't wrong, he didn't. Most of their time together was spent stealing moments so her parents wouldn't see. Even if he did want to marry her, which he wasn't entirely sure he did, her parents knew who he was. Her father hated him for what he did, which Billy always found a little hypocritical, seeing as how she got into this mess because of his actions. Things could have been much worse if it hadn't been Billy at his door that day. He was never going to give his blessing or let his oldest daughter marry some kid from the streets with no name and a reputation for breaking things.
Cami knew that too, so she didn't push, but he knew she looked at him like he was the only choice for her. He knew it when she let him kiss her that first time all those years ago, and he knew it when she let him hold her naked body next to him in his shitty one room tenement in the early morning hours before he walked her home.
He knows it's a dangerous game he's playing with her, not promising her anything but his body and a few hours here and there. But she knows he can't give her more, and it works for them. Her smile makes him want to get out of bed in the morning and face another day. It makes him want to be a better man, even if he hasn't figured out how to just yet. Her touch makes him want to leave the booze alone, if only for the night.
He knows it's out of control, that the pressure of trying to protect her from Nicky only led him to use and gave Nicky more control, but he doesn't know how to stop and he knows he's got to figure it out or they are both going to end up dead. He's got to get a handle on it, at least long enough to figure out this new problem.
Teddy will know who to hire, he'll know who is new to town and who is worth the risk.
He'll dance with Cami and they'll have a drink and then he'll corner Teddy and get his advice. He won't use anything again until after the new band is successful and he's caught whoever has been stealing the money. Maybe by that time he will want to. Maybe the whiskey will be enough, maybe Cami will be enough, maybe the new job will be enough.
When he walks into Teddy's and that quick beat, those horns, that happy little tune, fills his ears and makes his fingers twitch like they want to find something to play, some way to be a part of it, he thinks that maybe the music will be enough.
.