Mia and the Mafia, Part 3

Mia and the Mafia, Part 3

Feeling excluded from the nascent sisterly relation between the girls, Jonathan was already walking back to the car. Yet, he turned back to see Mia standing by Cynthia’s wheelchair, kindly chatting with the quad amputee. However, noticing her boss moving away, Mia said goodbye to her new friend. Kept gazing at them, Jon stopped to let Mia catch up.

‘You shouldn’t have talked to her in this style,’ Jonathan reproached the young journalist.

‘Your sister needs honest words and not white lies and empty sympathy. Cynthia doesn’t want you to mourn her. She's alive.’

‘You don’t know how mentally fragile she is. Her cynical style is just the tough surface she shows. Do you know why we had to remove her artificial hands? Because she tried to commit suicide on the very first day when she got them.’

‘You must trust her. She’d deserve a second chance.’

‘You can be her honorary sister, but it’s my brotherly duty to protect her. Even from herself.’

‘Jonathan, this is not brotherly love. This is obsession.’

‘You don’t understand anything. Cynthia spent one-third of her life in hospitals and nursing homes. It happened because of me,’ Jon said, recalling the horrendous scene again as his sister had left the office with the keys of the company car. ‘For ten years, I’ve done everything to correct this mistake. But all I could do was nothing. She used to be a beauty queen in the college, and now I am not brave enough to tell her how stomach-turning she looks like.’

‘You and your parents should accept that she has changed.’

‘Mia, we are not here to analyse the connection between Cynthia and me,’ Jon tried to shut down this part of the discussion as Mia touched a sore point. ‘I brought you here to show you whom you could turn into if you fight the Mob.’

‘I can take the risk.’

‘You’re crazy. You cannot imagine what my sister went through.’

‘If a car bomb...’

‘No, car bombs are old-school. Bruno The Bomb-Builder has retired. The Mafia changed the ways how it handles the black sheep. They apply such low-key retaliation, which isn’t as unmissable as vehicles exploding in open streets.’

‘Oh, and what is that?’

‘I’ll show you the results,’ Jon said, and he began to walk quickly toward the opposite corner of the big yard.

Mia followed her. The couple stopped to study two nurses, who were busy with propelling the wheelchair of a seriously disabled patient. The sitting female was incapacitated not because of paralysis or amputation but because of the tremendous amount of casts, which stopped her from moving her body members.

The vastest piece of the medical shells was a single-piece cast suit of considerable size, which tightly hugged the entire trunk. Or to be exact, this cast was more than a bulky body cast. Because of its upper extension, it was a Risser cast. Its armour-like huge and flat front parts easily blurred the shapes of her upper body. The thick upper rims of the cocoon reached up to the chin line, and its back piece behind the skull was like a head restrain moulded from cast. Although it wasn’t as severely restrictive as a head-wrapping Minerva cast, it could almost perfectly capture the head, taking away the most of the possibilities from the upper body to move.

Besides the body cast, which kept the feminine figure firmly fixed, the patient wore several more casts, too. Unluckily for her, both of the arms were locked in long arm casts. Bound in bandages from shoulders to the base of the fingers, the cast-captured arms settled on the cushiony armrests of the wheelchair. The hard bandages started just below the shoulders, and they solidly flowed down to swaddle everything before stopping at the wrists; thus the two big pieces of arm cast made her upper limbs unusable. However, the arms casts weren’t attached to the body cast, since there was a slight gap between them.

To make her completely helpless, two identical fibreglass shells fettered the entire lower limbs, except for the toes, which lied on stable cast toe plates, or small extensions to the sole of the LLC. Firmly confined in a pair of long casts, the stretched-out legs rested on plastic legrests, jutting out like white tubes.

‘Do you know her?’ Jon asked Mia.

Though the wounded female was a bit familiar, the journalist just shook her head after seeing the pale face and the short brown hair of the heavily casted patient. Considering her white complexion, Mia supposed that she had been locked in a hospital room for a long time.

‘Celia Kellers,’ he solved the riddle after Mia couldn’t answer.

‘Do you mean that she is the one, who was hit by a car just before she could announce that she would run for mayor? But it was one and a half years ago! And is she still in hospital?’

‘Yes, officially, it was a simple hit-and-run accident. Now, I’m telling you what happened in real. A heavy SUV rolled back and forth over her body for six times. Compared to the supersized full body cast she had until now, this one is already a great improvement for her.’

‘Was it a Mafia job?’

‘The only sin she had that she campaigned for a Mafia-free city. And she received the fitting punishment,’ he drew the cynic conclusion. ‘Look, this is like using a gun with a silencer. Nowadays, the Mafia flies under the radar. Blowing up the cars of the ones who colour out of the line can cause unwanted collateral damage. But if you are hit by a car, and you’ll spend half of your life in big casts... well, it’s a boring story, and no one will be interested.’

‘They put the disobeying ones into big casts to remove them from public life. Great,’ Mia interpreted the sentences. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’

Next, Mia looked at the group of nurses taking care of the cast-wrapped Celia. The wheelchair halted, and one of the nurses walked forward to grab the long leg casts gently. The nurse slowly removed the cast-wrapped limbs from the leg rests and lowered them on the pavement. When the leg casts landed on the ground, the nurses hugged Celia’s body, which was entirely moulded around with unbending casts, and helped the patient to stand up.

‘Today’s dose of movement therapy is a distance of thirty feet,’ the nurse capturing Celia’s left arm told the patient the designated target.

‘Thirty feet? It’ll last forever,’ Celia said, relatively gladly. Although the movement abilities were very restricted, she enjoyed bathing in the sunshine after seeing the artificial lights of the hospital room for months.

‘No problem, Mrs Kellers,’ the other nurse said. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

Standing on her sides, the two nurses supported Celia, preventing her from falling. Kept in balance, she started her snail-paced walk. Perhaps, she was too weak to move, or the weight of the immense casts was multiplied by gravity. Inch by inch, she struggled hard to move the legs hindered by the heavy long leg casts. She worked hard, but the bulky dressings dragged her back, and just after four steps, she stopped to gather strength.

‘If you don’t stop chasing the Mafia, you’ll be taken here,’ Jon warned Mia. ‘Maybe, you’ll end up in the Section B.’

‘What is the Section B?’

‘You didn’t know it, although you wrote articles about the Mob?’

‘I’ve just started to scratch the surface.’

‘The Section B is the darkest secret of this nursing home. Run indirectly by the Mafia, it’s like an inverse prison, in which the good ones are sentenced and captured. The persons, who are not cooperative enough, land there to be buried in casts until they die. This is a perfect solution: there aren’t any martyrs any longer.’

‘And what do you know about this place?’

‘Not too much. Just some rumours. For example, there was a female called Moira Johnson, who took part in the witness protection program. However, the Mob found her. And, allegedly, she is somewhere there...,’ he pointed at the furthest building far beyond the trees. ‘In a full body cast. For nine years.’

‘Great. So do you think that this is my future? Then I’ll have got a tremendous amount of free time.’

‘This is not funny.’

‘Yeah, this is serious... But Celia isn’t in the Section B,’ Mia said, peering at the badly broken politician, who sweat blood to relearn walking.

‘Yeah, even the exemplar of the incorruptible mayor candidates bent the knee after she was freed from a full body cast. Everybody breaks.’

Obviously, after her horrible full body cast experience, Celia had submitted to the power of the criminals, whom against she had crusaded in all her life. Well, Celia would be an excellent collaborator - Mia thought. The disappointed journalist secretly hoped that her boss would be more supportive, and he would tell her that she should continue the investigation. But Jon said anything more. They were already in the car heading back to the city when they began to talk about this topic again.

‘You told me that everybody breaks. How could they crush your resistance?’ Mia asked.

‘My boss died. My sister was almost burnt alive. Next week, the archive of the newspaper was set on fire, and all the documents were destroyed. Is this not enough?’ Jon asked, and his fingers crazily grasped the steering wheel.

‘I feel there is something more,’ Mia guessed.

‘Well, there is. Two days after Cynthia’s accident... I already knew how serious it was, and I didn’t know whether she would stay alive... I reached a compromise with Mr Calabrese.’

‘With the almighty boss of the Mafia?’ Mia asked, disbelieving as if Jon had become a member of the Mob.

‘Mr Calabrese told me that they wanted to kill me, obviously. And they were terribly sad to hear what happened to Cynthia.’

‘Terribly sad?’ Mia repeated with offended intonation. ‘And then you kissed the ring of the Godfather, didn’t you? And what is included in your unholy agreement?’

‘If I help them, they help my sister. I told you that I did anything to save her. I meant it seriously. We needed a tremendous amount of money to pay the cost of her countless operations and permanent treatment. The 24/7 nursing of a burnt, blind and quad amputee in a premium health centre is very expensive. To be honest, Mr Calabrese funds her staying in the St Helen’s, indirectly.’

‘This is getting better and better. And does she know anything about it?’

‘Of course, not. No one knows it, except for you. Legally, I pay all her medical invoices. But my salary is well above average. I earn much more money than I deserve for this position. In return, it’s my task to stop every journalist from investigating the organised crime activities. I must control The Local Herald with strong hands.’

‘Geez, you have sold your soul to gangsters.’

‘Yes, this is what I've done, clearly. And I would do it again to keep her alive. This is the reason why I cannot publish your articles. Apart from that, I congratulate you on it. A good story exists even if there is nobody to read it.’

‘Jon, I’ve met anybody, who was brave enough to talk to me. Do you think that all I did was unnecessary? Someone must defy the Mafia... Hey, stop. I want to get out!’ she ordered, feeling sick when seeing her opportunist boss.

Jonathan halted the car. Not saying goodbye, Mia simply got out and slammed the door. The vehicle rolled away, and, left alone, she began walking along the roadside toward the town.

Seeing Mia in the rear-view mirror, Jonathan knew that he couldn’t control her any longer. Worst of all, Mia was a threat to Cynthia. He picked up the mobile phone, and he dialled a known but rarely used number.

‘Hello, this is Jonathan Taylor from The Local Herald. I’d like to talk to Mr Calabrese.’

to be continued

amputation, disabilities <--Previous (Part 2)     Next (Part 4)--> cast, amputation