She glared at me.
I opened my mouth.
‘Not another word,’ she said, and then she turned and hurried away.
‘I . . . I’m not . . . I’m not Italian,’ I stammered, but the sound of my voice was lost in the clatter of her heels on the hot-top, and before I could say another word, before I could raise my head or get my brain in gear sufficiently to take a step after her, she had reached the corner of the street and turned.
Another thirty seconds and I snapped out of it. I went after her at a dead run, but even as I turned the corner I knew she would have disappeared.
I was right. She had vanished. Not a sound.
I stood there for some time with my heart in my mouth, and then I swallowed it with difficulty and started back home.
Christmas came and went. New Year also. I didn’t see Angelina save for a fleeting glimpse near the bus station as I drove past with Ten Cent and Don Calligaris. I couldn’t be sure it was her, but even seeing someone who might have been her was enough to make me realize how much I longed for her. All the time I had been in New York I had not slept with any girl – no hookers, no strippers, no-one – and I believed that back of my celibacy was the belief that I was saving myself for Angelina. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to hear that voice, once so filled with venom and anger; I wanted to hear that same voice as she spoke words of love and passion, and spoke them for me.
The spring unfolded. Winter lost its bitter grip on New York, and with the change of seasons came a change of temperament and mood in the Luchese camp. There was discussion once more of the Teamsters, of this man Hoffa whom I had heard mention of so many months before in the Blue Flame.
‘Has to go, has to fucking go,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘He’s a short fat fuck, a nothing, a piece of shit arrogant cocksucker. Just ’cause he was Teamsters’ president he thinks he owns the fucking country. They sent him down on this jury tampering and wire fraud bullshit but that asshole Nixon grants him clemency and we got him back like a fucking cancer. Jeez, why can’t he just leave the fucking thing alone? We’re doing fine with Frank Fitzsimmons, hell, he’s a pussycat compared to Hoffa. But no, Hoffa’s got to stick his nose in where it ain’t fucking wanted, and he’s giving everyone ball-ache by the truckload. We gotta do something about this motherfucker . . . gotta make him get the fuck outta here and not come back.’
July of 1975 there were meetings, long meetings. I saw people come and go through the house, Don Calligaris’s place also – people like Tony Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone. I learned that Tony Pro was the current vice-president of the Teamsters, and whenever he spoke of Jimmy Hoffa he spoke like he was talking about something he’d picked up on his shoe from the sidewalk.
‘Whenever we want Frank to look the other way we find he ain’t even on the same block, and that’s just the fucking way we want it,’ Tony Pro would say. ‘Nixon told Hoffa to stay out of the unions for ten years, that was part of the deal on this clemency thing. He comes back and we got the Feds breathing down our necks like you wouldn’t fucking believe. The guy . . . Jesus, we tell the guy time and time a-fucking-gain to keep his face out of the business, but this guy is so hard of fucking hearing I don’t think he got no fucking ears at all.’
July twenty-eighth, a Monday, and Don Calligaris called me over with Ten Cent. When I arrived at the Mulberry house the place seemed packed with people, some I knew, some I had never seen before. No names were given, but later Ten Cent told me that the guy sitting next to Joey Giacalone was Charles ‘Chuckie’ O’Brien, a very close friend of Jimmy Hoffa’s, someone Hoffa referred to as his ‘adopted son’.
‘We’re gonna kill this motherfucker,’ Joey Giacalone said. ‘Vote’s been taken and he’s been voted a dead fuckin’ loser. We all had enough of this ball-ache he’s been dishin’ out.’
A meeting had been arranged in Michigan, place called the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township. Hoffa was going to meet with Tony Provenzano, Tony Giacalone and a Detroit labor leader to discuss Hoffa’s intention to run for presidency of the Teamsters again. Hoffa wanted to know if the heavy-hitters would back him if he challenged Frank Fitzsimmons.
Tony Pro and Tony Jacks would never arrive. Tony Jacks would go to his usual appointment at the Southfield Athletic Club to work out, and Tony Pro would be over in Hoboken, New Jersey visiting local Teamsters’ offices. He would make sure he shook lots of hands and spoke to lots of people who wouldn’t forget him being there. The labor leader would be suitably delayed and would arrive at the Machus Red Fox sometime after three. Joey Giacalone had a maroon-colored Mercury he was going to lend to Chuckie O’Brien. Chuckie would arrive at the restaurant and tell Hoffa the meeting place had been changed. Hoffa would trust Chuckie without question. He would get in the car. He would leave his own Pontiac Grand Ville right there in the Machus Red Fox car lot. He would never get out of the Mercury alive.
There was another element that caught me off-guard.
‘You gotta understand that it also comes back to this thing with Feraud and his connection with Vegas and the Luchese family,’ Tony Pro said. ‘You wanna keep this going with New Orleans, and believe me there is a great deal more money to come out of there than is coming right now, then you gotta understand that we’re doing this not only because we wanna keep Frank Fitzsimmons as president of the Teamsters, but also to keep the south states happy. Who’s the guy we got down there?’
‘Ducane . . . Congressman Charles Ducane,’ Tony Jacks said.
‘Right, Ducane. He’s the lead figure down there right now, he’s the one who has the say on the Teamsters’ contributions, where the money goes, who gets what. Feraud has him in his pocket, and if we don’t keep Ducane happy by doing this then we stand a chance of losing all the southern states’ funding as well. These guys have got their fingers in everyone’s fucking pies, and if we upset them then there’s gonna be some bloodshed and warfare. This is a necessary thing for everyone concerned, and it cannot, it must not, go wrong.’
‘That’s why I want your blessing to send Ernesto,’ Don Calligaris said.
Tony Provenzano looked across at Calligaris and then at me. ‘Right . . . this is what we gotta talk about. This Ducane has one of his own people, some ex-military guy or something.’ He turned and looked at Joey Giacalone. ‘What the fuck was this guy’s name?’
‘McCahill, something-or-other McCahill.’
‘Right . . . so Ducane wanted to send this guy down here to do this thing with Hoffa, but we wanna use our own people.’
‘Definitely,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘This is family business and it stays within the family. Like I said, I wanna send Ernesto.’
Tony Pro raised his eyebrows. ‘How so?’
‘Ernesto is from New Orleans originally, he did some work for Feraud and Ducane through Don Ceriano back in the early ’60s. I wanna send him and then I want word to get back to Feraud that we used one of his own on this thing. This fixes any difficulty these boys might have with us not using this McCahill guy, right?’
Tony Provenzano nodded. ‘Makes sense to me. Ernesto?’
I nodded. I said nothing.
Tony Pro smiled. ‘He ever speak?’
Calligaris smiled. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. ‘Only when he has to, and only when it’s people he likes, right?’
I smiled.
‘Shit, I better do something nice for him then,’ Tony Pro said. ‘He ain’t the sort of guy I want disliking me.’
They laughed. I felt good inside. It was a feeling I was getting used to. I was someone. I mattered. I thought also of Feraud and Ducane, people whose names recurred time and again in my business dealings, people who seemed to have become more and more significant as time had passed. Where once I had believed this Charles Ducane a small and nervous man in the employ of Antoine Feraud, it now seemed that he had mastered his own territory. He had become someone, just as I had, but in a necessarily different way.
‘So this thing goes down
on Wednesday,’ Tony Jacks said. ‘From now on it’s called Gemini. That’s all, just one word. I don’t wanna hear no names or dates or places. I just wanna hear one word when you guys refer to this thing, and that word is Gemini.’
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Tony Pro asked.
‘It’s a fucking star sign, you dumbass motherfucker. It’s a fucking star sign, like a zodiac thing, and there’s a picture of a guy with two heads or some fucking thing. It’s just a fucking word, okay?’
‘So why that?’ Tony Pro asked.
‘’Cause I said so,’ Tony Jacks said, ‘And because Jimmy fucking Hoffa is a two-faced motherfucker who’s gonna lose them both come Wednesday.’
So I went to Michigan and I met with Jimmy Hoffa on a warm Wednesday afternoon in Bloomfield Township. He was a big guy. Big hands. Big voice. But he was nervous. I think he knew he was going to die. He got in the Mercury when Chuckie O’Brien turned up at the Machus Red Fox, and though I was sat in back he didn’t ask me who I was. He was talking too fast, asking why the meet had been changed, if Provenzano and Giacalone were already there, if Chuckie had heard any rumor about whether or not they would back him in his attempt to be Teamsters president again.
He kicked a lot when I put the wire around his neck from in back of the car. He kicked like Don Ceriano, but I felt nothing at all. Chuckie had to hold his arms in his lap, and it took some doing because he wasn’t no hundred-and-forty-pound sapling. Jimmy Hoffa had some fight in him, right until the end, and there was one fuck of a lot of blood. It was just a business thing this time, and there was very little to say about it. He had pissed my employers off something serious, and that was all there was to it. President of the Teamsters he might once have been, but the look in his eyes in the rearview, the look I saw as he choked up his last breath, was the very same as all of them. Didn’t matter whether they were the Pope or a labor leader or the second coming of Christ, when they saw the light behind their eyes going out they all looked like frightened schoolteachers.
Figured I might look like that one day, but I figured I would jump off that bridge when I got there.
A little more than twenty minutes later I stepped from the car with a bloody piano wire in my coat pocket. Jimmy Hoffa, sixty-two years old, was driven south to a family-owned fat rendering plant and he was blended into soap. I walked back towards the Red Fox. I caught a bus into Bloomfield. From there I took another bus to the train station. I arrived back in Manhattan on Thursday 31 July. Thirteen days later it was my thirty-seventh birthday. Don Fabio Calligaris and Tony Provenzano threw me a party at the Blue Flame, a party I will never forget.
It was Tony Giacalone who asked me, asked me what I wanted for my birthday, told me I could have anything I wanted in the world.
‘Your blessing,’ I told him. ‘The blessing of the family.’
‘Blessing for what, Ernesto?’
‘To marry a girl, Don Giacalone . . . that’s what I want for my birthday.’
‘Of course, of course . . . and who do you want to marry?’
‘Angelina Maria Tiacoli.’
They gave me the blessing, reservedly perhaps, but they gave it, and though it would be another four months before I saw her again it was on that day that my life changed irreversibly.
Later many other things would change also. In August Nixon would finally concede defeat and resign, taking with him the spider’s web of connections that ran throughout the families right across the United States. On 15 October the following year Carlo Gambino would die of a heart attack while watching a Yankees game on the TV in his Long Island summer home. He would be succeeded, not by Aniello Dellacroce as everyone believed would be the case, but by Paul Castellano, a man who built a replica of the White House on Todd Hill, Staten Island; a man who negotiated a truce with the Irish-New York Mafia and offered their leaders – Nicky Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan – permission to use the Gambino name in their dealings for a ten percent cut of all their earnings from Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side; a man who would ultimately contribute to the relinquishing of power the Italian crime families held in New York.
Carmine Persico would depose Thomas DiBella as head of the Colombo family in 1978; Carmine Galante would hold sway in the Bonanno family until 1979 when he was murdered at Joe and Mary’s Italian Restaurant in Brooklyn, and he was replaced by Caesar Bonaventre, the youngest ever capo, merely twenty-four years old. By then my time in New York would be coming to a close; by then I would have long-since graduated from the clip jobs and shootings where I had earned my reputation, and my apprenticeship would have ended.
I believed I came to New York to find something. What it was I was looking for I did not know then, and even now cannot be sure. What I found was something I could never have anticipated, and that is something I will share a little of with you now.
It was close to Thanksgiving, and though Thanksgiving was not a particularly significant event in the Italian calendar, it was nevertheless a reason to eat more, to drink more, have parties at the Blue Flame and make wisecracks about one another.
I borrowed Ten Cent’s car, took it to an autoshop and had them valet it. God almighty only knows what they found inside, but they were family people and wouldn’t have cared anyway. I parked the car a block from the house so Ten Cent wouldn’t forget he’d lent it to me and drive off someplace, and I walked home. I dressed nice, like for church or something, and I cleaned my shoes and knotted my tie. It was early evening, a Saturday, and by seven I was leaving again with a spring in my step and two thousand bucks in my pocket.
When she opened the door she was dressed in nothing but slippers and a housecoat. Her hair was tied back of her head like she’d been cleaning or something, and when she saw me standing there with a thousand-dollar suit and a thirty-five-dollar bouquet it was all she could do to keep her eyes in her head. I was not a spectacularly handsome man, I mean hell, I couldn’t have modeled for magazines or whatever, but I scrubbed up clean and you could have taken me anyplace and not felt ashamed.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘There’s a show at the Metropolitan Opera,’ I said. ‘A music show.’ I handed her the flowers. She looked at them like I was handing her a bag with a dead rat inside. ‘Anyway, there’s a music show at the Metropolitan Opera—’
‘You said that already . . . you better hurry now or you’re gonna miss the start.’
I looked at her. ‘I worked hard to look this good, and you look good even in your housecoat and your slippers. You get happy just being mean to people, or is it because you’re sick in the mind or something?’
She laughed then, and the sound was like something better than anyone might ever hear at the Metro.
‘No, I’m sick in the mind, and I can’t help but be mean to people,’ she said. ‘Now go away with your stupid flowers and whatever. Go find some pretty blonde with legs to her neck and take her to the opera house.’
‘I came to take you.’
Angelina Maria Tiacoli looked aghast. ‘I seem to remember seeing you in the street. That was you, wasn’t it?’
‘On Hester Street when you came from the hairstyling salon.’
Angelina frowned, was momentarily taken aback. ‘What, you take notes or something?’
I shook my head. ‘No, I don’t take notes . . . I just have a knack for remembering important stuff.’
‘And where I get my hair done is important?’
‘No, not where you get your hair done . . . the fact that it was you was what was important.’
‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’
‘Serious enough to ask for Don Giacalone’s blessing, and for the blessing of the family.’
‘Blessing for what?’
‘To marry you, Angelina Maria Tiacoli . . . to marry you and make you my wife.’
‘To marry me and to make me your wife, is that so?’
‘Yes, that’s so.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘And you know who I am?’
‘I know en
ough about you to want to take you out, and I don’t know enough about you to find you very interesting indeed.’
‘So I’m interesting, eh?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Interesting and beautiful, and when you speak I can hear everything in your voice that makes me think I could love you for the rest of your life.’
‘Did you practise this before you came over, or did you get a Hollywood screenwriter to make this stuff up?’
I nodded my head. ‘You got me there. I got a Hollywood writer to put it all down on paper for me, and I told him if it didn’t work then I was gonna go over to his house and shoot him in the knee.’
She laughed again. I was getting through.
‘So you went and dressed up all smart and you bought some flowers and you came over here with no invitation to ask me if I would go to the Metropolitan Opera with you?’
‘I did.’
‘I can’t come.’
I frowned. ‘Why?’
‘Because I can’t go out with you, or anyone like you, so you’re gonna have to get over it real quick and find someone else to harass.’
Angelina Tiacoli smiled once more, but it wasn’t a warm or well-meaning smile, and then she closed the door hard and fast and left me standing on the stoop.
I waited for thirty seconds or so until I heard her footsteps disappear inside, and then I stepped back, laid the bouquet against the door and drove home.
I went back the following afternoon after lunch.
‘You’re back again?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not gonna give up, are you?’
I shook my head.
‘How was the music show?’
‘I didn’t go.’
‘You want me to pay for the tickets, is that it?’
‘No, I don’t want you to pay for the tickets.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘I want to take you out someplace nice, maybe see a movie—’
‘Or a show at the Metro.’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘a show at the Metro, or maybe just have a cup of coffee someplace and talk for a while.’
R. J. Ellory Page 34