Susan’s Camorra

#9 from my 30 In Thirty Series Vol. 1 Short Stories

When Susan moved from the neighborhood she left me a desk and her collection of DVD’s. A curious aspect of the DVDs is that they mostly had to do with the Mafia. All the Godfather movies were in there so were several television documentaries about the Cosa Nostra. She seemed especially fond of the Sopranos, which starred the late James Gandolfini as Tony the mob boss. As I went through these I smiled to myself recalling some of the times Susan and I had spoken. She seemed to enjoy condemning gangsters; she got intense about the Ndrangheta and the Camorra. I wondered if there were were gangsters in her family. Her ex-roommate had been a bit of a thug. As a gag he would pull a replica hand gun on her. He did this one many times so she asked him to leave. Recently I paid her a visit at her new place on the Danforth in Toronto’s east end. While on the way to a local cafe a dapper man sitting in front of a bakery called out to Susan and waved. She waved back but kept walking. She blushed like a school girl. Who is that? I asked. My neighbor, she answered. Curious character, I said vaguely. Yeah, she said. He lives in that neat house across from me. Oh, I said. He’s Mafioso, she lowered her voice. He runs things around here. Funny you should end up living across from somebody like that, I said. Yeah? she frowned. Why would you say that?