An Offer of War

The Commission convened at two o'clock in the morning inside an abandoned refrigerated meatpacking vault beneath the Chicago stockyards. Beneath flickering industrial fluorescent tubes, surrounded by stainless steel meat hooks and walls covered in permafrost, sat the five bosses of the Midwestern syndicates. The cold was bitter enough to make their breath billow in white clouds, but the tension in the room burned hotter than a furnace. Don Carmine Valenti…