I smiled. I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing. I had done what was required, what was asked of me, and by the time I sat in my own room, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, my feet up on the edge of the table and a movie on the TV, I felt distant enough from what had happened to feel absolutely nothing at all. I was numb, insensate to Benny Wheland and Momo and whoever else might have had a beef with either of them, and I just wanted a little time to myself to gather my thoughts.
It was then that I thought of Angelina and Lucia. I had not permitted myself the luxury of real memories since their deaths. After the shock, the horror, the pain and grief and crying jags that had racked my body for so many nights in the first weeks in Havana, I had separated myself out from everything that had happened and tried to start all over again. At least mentally and emotionally, or that’s what I believed. It was not true. I had not overcome my sense of rage and despair about their loss, and though Don Calligaris had several times assured me that there were people still looking into what had happened and why, who had been behind the attempt on his life that had killed my wife and daughter, I knew well enough the way this family worked to realize that he was merely placating me. In this life of ours, things happened and they were forgotten. Within an hour, perhaps a day at most, Benny Wheland would be forgotten. The police would find him after some neighbor reported the smell of his decomposing body in a fortnight, and there would be a perfunctory investigation. Some eight-year-old kid two weeks out of detective school would come to the conclusion that it was a straightforward robbery and homicide, and that would be the end of that. Benny Wheland would be buried or cremated or whatever the hell was planned for him, and there would be nothing further to say. His death would be as insignificant as his life. Much like my father.
It was the same for Angelina and Lucia. Someone somewhere had ordered Don Calligaris’s death, a bomb had been placed in his car, Don Calligaris had survived without a scratch. Someone somewhere would make a phone call to someone somewhere else, the differences would have been resolved in a handful of minutes, and the matter would have been closed. End of story. Evidently whoever had ordered the hit no longer wanted Don Calligaris dead or they would have tried again, and they would have kept on trying no matter how many attempts it took, and no matter who might have gotten in the way. Angelina and Lucia, well, they had gotten in the way, and had I been blood, had we been a part of this family for real, then perhaps someone might have done something. But I was Cuban, and Angelina had been the unwanted product of an unwanted embarrassment to the family, and it was not necessary for anyone to balance the scales in my favor. My connection to Don Calligaris had been enough to put my family in the line of fire, and though I bore no grudge against him, though I understood that he could do nothing directly to help me, I also knew that someone somewhere was responsible, and someone should pay.
That thought stayed with me until I slept, but when I woke it had left my mind. I did not forget, I merely changed its order of priority. It was there, it would never disappear, and there would come a time to do something about it.
The summer of 1999, and Victor’s seventeenth birthday in June. It was then that I met the first girl he brought home. She was an Italian girl, a fellow student from his school, and in her deep brown eyes I saw both the innocence of youth and the blossoming of adulthood. Her name was Elizabetta Pertini, though Victor called her Liza and this was the name by which she was known. In some small way she was not unlike Victor’s mother, and when she laughed, as she often did, there was a way she would raise her hand and half-cover her mouth that was enchanting. She wore her raven hair long, often tied at the back with a ribbon, and I knew within a matter of weeks, good Catholic girl or not, that she was the one who took my son and showed him that which had been shown to me by Ruben Cienfuegos’s cousin Sabina. He changed after that, as all young men do, and he became independent to an extent I had not seen before. Sometimes he was gone for two or three days, merely calling to let me know that he was fine, that he was with friends, that he would be back before the week was out. I did not complain, his grades were good, he studied well, and it seemed that Liza had carried something into his life that had been altogether missing. My son was no longer lonely. For this alone I would have been eternally grateful to Elizabetta Pertini.
The discussion that took place between her father and myself in the spring of the following year did not go well. Apparently Mr Pertini, a well-known bakery owner from SoHo, had discovered that his daughter, believed to be visiting with girlfriends, perhaps studying for her school examinations, had been spending time with Victor. This subterfuge, orchestrated no doubt by Victor, had continued for the better part of eight months, and though I was tempted to ask Mr Pertini how he had managed to be so utterly unobservant of his daughter’s comings and going, I held my tongue. Mr Pertini was irate and inconsolable. Apparently, and this unknown to his daughter, he intended her to marry the son of a family friend, a young man called Albert de Mita who was – even as we spoke – studying to be an architect.
I listened patiently to what Mr Pertini had to say. I sat in the front room of my own house on Baxter where he had come to find me, and I heard every word that came from his lips. He was a blind man, a man of ignorance and greed, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that his business had been struggling financially for many years, that the intended marriage of his daughter into the de Mita family would reap a financial benefit sufficient to rescue him from potential ruin. He was more interested in his own social status than the happiness of his daughter, and for this I could not forgive him.
But there was a difficulty with whatever challenge I might have raised to his objections regarding my son courting his daughter. Pertini was a man of repute. He was not a gangster, he was not part of this New York family, and thus any issue of loyalty to Don Calligaris would carry no weight. Thirty years ago he would have been visited by Ten Cent and Michael Luciano perhaps. They would have shared a glass of wine with him and explained that he was interfering in the business of the heart, and sufficient funds to compensate for the loss of his daughter’s ‘dowry’ would have been delivered in a discreet brown package to one of his bakeries. But now, here in the latter part of the twentieth century, such matters could no longer be resolved in the old way. Any suggestion I might have made to Pertini about money would have been taken as offensive. No matter his thought or intention, no matter the fact that he knew I understood his motives, on the face of it he would have been insulted. That would have been his part to play, and he would have played it to the hilt. He professed an appreciation of his daughter’s best interests. He knew as little of those as he did of my business. But had I insisted that there was a change in his plan, had I attempted to persuade him to reconsider who his daughter might marry, then Pertini – I felt sure – would have done all he could to raise questions about my reputation and credibility. That route would have been the route to his death for certain, and however much I loved Victor, however much I might have cared for his happiness and the welfare of his heart, I also felt that I could play no part in depriving Liza of her father.
The relationship was ended abruptly in April 2000. Victor, not yet eighteen, was inconsolable. For days he did not venture from his room further than the bathroom and the kitchen, and even then it was to eat next to nothing.
‘But why?’ he asked me incessantly, and no matter how many times I tried to explain that such things were often more a matter of politics than love, there was nothing I could do to make him understand. He did not blame me, merely resented my apparent lack of effort in preventing what had happened. Liza was grounded at home for those weeks, and on one occasion when Victor attempted to call her the attempt was cut short within seconds by her father. Moments later Mr Pertini called me at the house and told me in no uncertain terms that I was responsible for my son, that if I did not ensure there were no further attempts to contact his daughter then he would seek an injunction against him for ha
rassment. I assured him that no further attempt would be made. To me it was obvious why such a thing had to be prevented, but there was no way I could explain that to Victor. Again he saw me as failing to defend what he considered to be his God-given right.
It was not the only issue that contributed to my position in New York becoming untenable, but it perhaps marked a watershed. The matter that finally prompted our departure was far more serious indeed, at least for me, if not for Victor, though had we stayed there would have been questions asked that could never have been answered. The events of the latter part of March and the first week of April that year were perhaps indicative of how single-minded and relentless I had become in attempting to find some meaning for my own life. Back of all of it was the ghost of my wife, that of my daughter also, and though they were never far from my thoughts, it was in my actions that I recognized how unfeeling and brutal I would become if I did not assuage my sense of guilt about their deaths. That guilt could only be tempered by revenge, I knew that as well as I knew my own name, and it was in those weeks that my feelings of merciless rage were precisely demonstrated.
Where we had possessed strong ties with the Irish in Chicago, those of the Cicero Crew like Kyle Brennan, Gerry McGowan and Daniel Ryan, it was not the same in New York. New York, Manhattan in particular, had become a playground for all who wanted a piece of the territory and what it had to offer. Street-gangs of Puerto Ricans and Hispanics had running gun battles with the blacks and Mexicans; the Poles and the Jews were attempting to milk the Lower East Side and the Bowery of all it could give them; East Village, the southern end of SoHo, and Little Italy had always belonged to us, a tradition as old as the Bible itself, but towards the end of the ’90s the Irish, their leaders supported by the millions that had been invested in the construction industry, started to tread on our toes and demand a place at the table. Don Calligaris had no time for them – he had had little time for their ways and worries in Chicago – but here they served to remind him that things were changing, that things could not always stay the same, and that he too was approaching the end of his usefulness, and thus perhaps his life.
There were primarily two factions within the Irish community who held any kind of position: the Brannigans and the O’Neills. The Brannigans came from the construction background, their ancestors having built much of that part of the city at the turn of the previous century, but the O’Neills were new blood, the founder of their lineage a man called Callum O’Neill, an immigrant from the mid-west who believed he would make his presence felt in the capital of the world. There was no love lost between the two families and their bastard offspring. They would argue between themselves about the ownership of bars, bookies and boxing clubs. They were devoutly and vocally Irish Catholic; they built their own churches and turned up in their Sunday bows and brights to be as hypocritical as it was possible to be in front of their God and the Virgin Mary. After church was done they would drink until they fell down in the street, and then they would get up to knock each other six ways to Christmas just for the hell of it. They were like children, squabbling in the sandbox about who would win or lose which half of which street, but that did not make them any less dangerous. They were inbred and vicious, they did not have the class and intellect of the Sicilians and Genovese, and they didn’t seem to care whose toes they walked on in order to get what they wanted.
In the last week of April Don Calligaris sent Ten Cent down to fetch me from the Baxter Street house. Victor was still bruised, but the wounds in his heart were healing and he was finding more time for his friends and the Martinelli boys.
‘Sit down,’ Don Calligaris told me when I entered the kitchen. The room was filled with smoke as if he had been seated there for some hours contemplating some difficulty.
‘We have an issue,’ he said quietly, ‘and was there any way to deal with this without you then I would take that route, but this is an issue of significance and it needs to be addressed quickly and professionally.’
Someone needed to die; that was evident from his manner and the tone of his voice. Someone needed to die and he wanted me to kill them.
I respected Don Calligaris enough to let him talk, to hear him out, before I explained to him how this could not be done by me.
‘We have the Irish problem knocking at our door and we need to send them a message,’ he said.
Ten Cent stepped into the room, closed the door and took a chair beside me.
‘It needs to be a very clear and concise message, a message that cannot be misconstrued or mistaken for anything else, and a decision has been made that that message needs to be delivered by us.’
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘There is a history with the Brannigans,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘They are part of old New York. They have been here a hundred years or more, but this new crowd, these O’Neills, they have been here since last goddam weekend and they are becoming tiresome. Our people have spoken with the Brannigans, we have drawn some lines in the sand regarding territories and dues, and it has been agreed that we will take care of the O’Neill problem so as to avoid an all-out war between the Irish factions.’
‘So who is it?’ I repeated, knowing before Don Calligaris spoke whose name he would give.
‘James O’Neill himself.’
I exhaled slowly. James O’Neill was the godfather, the old man himself, the son of Callum O’Neill and the one who had brought the power and money to this part of Manhattan’s Irish quarter. He was a heavily guarded man, a man treated like the Pope himself, and to be responsible for his death was to be responsible for my own. To kill James O’Neill would mean a retribution killing almost certainly, and to protect itself the Luchese family would have to give me up. They would not wish to, but that was the way of this world, and with Victor’s life at stake also it would mean disappearing once again, disappearing somewhere where they would not think of looking.
‘You understand what this means, Ernesto?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I understand, Don Calligaris.’
‘And you understand what you would have to do as a result?’
‘Yes, I would have to vanish into thin air never to be seen again.’
‘And this thing . . . you would be willing to do this thing for us?’
‘There is no-one else?’ I asked, but in itself it was nothing more than a rhetorical question.
Don Calligaris shook his head. ‘There is no-one else who could disappear as easily as you. There are other men who could do this, other men who would do it very willingly, but they have families here, parents and grandparents, wives and children and sisters. To make them disappear would be too difficult, and it’s not as if we could enrol them in the Witness Protection Program.’
Don Calligaris smiled, but his moment of attempted levity did not unburden the weight of responsibility I felt. What he was asking of me was perhaps the most difficult thing I had ever been asked. Killing O’Neill would be very difficult. It would be like killing Don Calligaris . . . no, more difficult than that, because Don Calligaris had only two people to look after him, myself and Ten Cent, and many were the days when we were in the Baxter Street house while Don Calligaris was in the Mulberry house alone. James O’Neill had at least two or three men with him at all times, men who would be all too quick to take a bullet for him and who would come after me unrelentingly until they saw me dead. If I did this I would have to make no mistake, and once it was done I would have to disappear immediately from New York and go somewhere where I could not be found. I had not only myself but Victor to think of, and to risk his life after all that had happened would be too high a price to pay.
‘I would never be able to come back,’ I said. ‘I would have to leave New York and go somewhere . . . somewhere unknown even to you, and I would never be able to speak to you. If I was a younger man I could leave for ten years, perhaps more, and then I could return, but at my age—’ I shook my head. ‘It would be the end of me as part of this family.’
‘I hav
e been instructed to tell you that you will be given everything you ask for. I have been told that you will be paid half a million dollars and you will be respectfully and graciously retired from the family, and that no-one will ever ask anything of you again. You will be treated as a made man, perhaps the first non-Italian made man in the entire history of the Luchese family. This is in itself a great honor, but I know you well enough to understand that money and status are not important to you. I know that the only important thing for you is the life of your son, but here is where you can take advantage of this. You can do this and then leave with Victor. You can go anywhere you want, and all the assistance you might need to accomplish that will be provided. Wherever you decide to go you can start a new life, Ernesto, a life without violence or killing . . . where people will not interfere with Victor’s happiness; a life where there is no chance he will find out what you have done and the things that have happened in the past.’
Don Calligaris understood me. He knew that the only way he would ever get me to do this was to present it in such a way as to benefit Victor. He was right. It was a clear decision. There was no question in my mind that at some point Victor would start to see things I didn’t want him to see, perhaps hear things in error and begin to put the pieces of this puzzle together, and this I wished to avoid at all costs. Doing this would mean that any such eventuality would be completely avoided. There was a choice, of course there was a choice. There was never a situation in life where choices could not be made. But this time, and for the reason that had been given me, a reason I felt to be true, I believed that the choice was simple.
‘I will do this,’ I said quietly. I could feel the tension within the room relax. Like the air released from a balloon. Don Calligaris had been charged with this task, and though Ten Cent would have given his life to honor Don Calligaris’s request, though he would have taken a bus to O’Neill’s house and waltzed in, guns blazing, with no concern for his own life, I could understand why Don Calligaris wanted me to see it through. No matter the past, no matter the years behind us, I was still an outsider, an immigrant from Cuba and the back end of the world. I could do this and there would be silence once I was gone. That was why it had to be me.
R. J. Ellory Page 51