by Don Winslow
“Okay,” Sal says. “How about meeting the women at the Copa, after Sparks?”
“Fuck that.”
“Jimmy—”
“What?”
“This is serious business tonight.”
“I know that.”
“I mean, it doesn’t get more serious.”
“Which is why,” Peaches says, “I’m going to do some serious partying.”
“Look,” Sal says, bringing the hammer down, “I’m in charge of security for this thing—”
“Then make sure I’m secure,” Peaches says. “That’s all you gotta do, Sal, then forget about it, okay?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Don’t like it,” Peaches says. “Fuck you. Merry Christmas.”
Yeah, Sal thinks as he hangs up.
Merry Christmas to you, Jimmy.
I got your present all ready for you.
There are a few packages under the tree.
Good thing it’s a small tree because there aren’t many presents, money being tight and all. But he’s gotten her a new watch, and a silver bracelet and some of those vanilla candles she likes. And there are a few packages for him—they look like clothes, which he needs. A new work shirt, maybe, some new jeans.
A nice little Christmas.
They were planning to go to midnight Mass.
Open presents in the morning, try to cook a turkey, hit an afternoon movie.
A nice, quiet little Christmas.
But that ain’t gonna happen, Callan thinks.
Not now.
It was going to end anyway, but it ends quicker because she finds the other package, the one he shoved way under the bed. He comes home early from work that evening and she’s sitting there with the long box at her feet.
She’s turned the tree lights on. They blink red and green and white behind her.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“How'd you get that?”
“I was dusting under the bed,” she says. “What is it?”
It’s a Swedish Model 45 Garl Gustaf 9-mm submachine gun. With a folding metal stock and a thirty-six-round magazine. More than enough to do the job. Numbers filed off, clean and untraceable. Only twenty-two inches long with the stock folded. Weighs eight pounds. He can carry the box like a Christmas present down to midtown. Drop the box and carry the gun under his pea coat.
Sal had it delivered.
He doesn’t tell her all that. What he says is stupid and obvious: “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
She laughs. “I thought it was a present for me. I was feeling guilty for opening it.”
“Siobhan—”
“You’re back into it again, aren’t you?” she says. Gray eyes hard as stone. “You’re doing another job.”
“I have to.”
“Why?”
He wants to tell her, but he can’t let her carry that weight around with her the rest of her life. So he says, “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, I understand,” she says. “I’m from Kashmir Road, remember? Belfast? I grew up watching my brothers and uncles leave the house with their little Christmas boxes, going out to kill people. I’ve seen machine guns under the bed before. It’s why I left—I was sick of the killing. And the killers.”
“Like me.”
“I thought you’d changed.”
“I have.”
She gestures down to the box.
“I have to,” he repeats.
“Why?” she asks. “What’s so important it’s worth killing for?”
You, he thinks.
You are.
But he stands there mute. A dumb witness against himself.
“I won’t be here when you come back this time,” she says.
“I’m not coming back,” he says. “I have to go away for a while.”
“Jesus,” she says. “Were you planning on telling me? Or were you just going to go?”
“I was planning on asking you to come with me.”
It’s true. He has two passports, two sets of tickets. He digs them out from the bottom of the desk drawer and lays them on top of the box, at her feet. She doesn’t pick them up. She doesn’t even look at them.
“Just like that?” she asks.
A voice inside him is screaming, Tell her. Tell her you’re doing it for her, for the both of you. Beg her to come. He starts to tell her, but then he can’t. She would never forgive herself, being part of it. She’d never forgive you.
“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much.”
She gets up from the chair.
Comes close and says, “I don’t love you. I did, but I don’t now. I don’t love what you are. A killer.”
He nods. “You’re right.”
He walks past her, puts his ticket and passport into his pocket, closes the box and hefts it over his shoulder.
“You can live here if you want,” he says. “The rent’s paid.”
“I can’t live here.”
This was a good place, though, he thinks, looking around the small apartment. The happiest, best place of his life. This place, this time, here with her. He stands there trying to think of the words to tell her that, but nothing comes out.
“Get out,” she says. “Go murder somebody. That’s what you do, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
He gets out in the street, it’s raining like hell. A cold, icy rain. He pulls up his collar and looks back up at the apartment.
Sees her still sitting by the window.
Bent over, her face in her hands.
The tree lights blinking red and green and white behind her.
Her dress sparkles in the lights.
A sequined top of red and green.
Very Christmasy, Haley had said, very sexy.
Très décolleté.
In fact, Jimmy Peaches can’t help looking down her dress.
Otherwise she has to admit that he’s acting the gentleman. Cleans up surprisingly well in his steel gray Armani. Even the black shirt and tie don’t seem horrible. A touch of goombah chic, perhaps, but not entirely gross.
Same with the restaurant. She expected some gaudy Sicilian horror show, but Sparks Steak House, despite the prosaic name, turns out to be done in understated good taste. Not her taste—the oak-paneled walls and hunting prints, basically the English look, are not her thing, but it’s tasteful all the same and not at all what she expected from a mob hangout.
They arrived in several limos, and a doorman held an umbrella to cover the two feet between the car and the long green awning. They make quite an entrance, the wise guys with their dates on their arms. Diners sitting at tables in the big front room stop eating and openly stare, and why not, Nora thinks.
The girls are fantastic.
Haley’s best, served to order.
Chosen by their hair color, their faces, their figures.
Cool, lovely, sophisticated women without a touch of the whore about them. Elegantly dressed, impeccably coiffed, beautifully mannered. The men practically blush with pride as they make their entrance. The women don’t—they take the adulation as their birthright. They take no visible notice of it.
A properly obsequious headwaiter shows them to the private room in the back.
Everyone watches them go in.
Well, not everyone.
Not Callan.
He misses their entrance. He’s around the corner, on Third Avenue, waiting for the word to move in closer. He sees the limos come, working their way through the thick rush-hour holiday traffic, then turning right onto Forty-sixth toward Sparks, so he figures that Johnny Boy and the Piccones and O-Bop have arrived for the sit-down.
He checks his watch.
It’s 5:30—dead on time.
Scachi’s there to greet them, all the wise guys and the girls in turn. He’s the host, right, he set up the meeting. He even (sneaking a glance down her dress) kisses Nora’s hand.
“A pleasure,” he says. God, he can see why Peaches woul
d want her for his last ride. An incredible beauty. They all are, but this one . . .
Johnny Boy takes Scachi by the arm.
“Sal,” he says, “ just wanted to take a minute to thank you for setting this up. I know it took a lot of diplomatic work, a lot of details. If we get the result we hope for tonight, maybe we can have peace in the family.”
“That’s all I want, Johnny.”
“And a place for you at the table.”
“I’m not looking for that,” Scachi says. “I just love my family, Johnny. I love this thing of ours. I want to see it stay strong, unified.”
“That’s what we want, too, Sally.”
“I gotta go out, check on things,” Sal says.
“Sure,” Johnny Boy says. “Now you can call and tell the king he can make his entrance, now that the peasants are here.”
“See, that’s just the kind of attitude—”
Johnny Boy laughs. “Merry Christmas, Sal.”
They hug and exchange kisses on the cheeks.
“Merry Christmas, Johnny.” Sal puts on his coat and starts to go. “Oh, and Johnny?”
“Yeah?”
“Happy fucking New Year.”
Sal steps outside under the awning. Miserable fucking night. Sheets of rain coming down, threatening to turn into an ice storm. The drive back to Brooklyn’s going to be a bitch and a half.
He takes the small walkie-talkie from his overcoat pocket and holds it under his collar and against his mouth.
“You there?”
“Yeah,” Callan says.
“I’m calling the boss in,” Sal says. “So the clock’s on.”
“Everything’s good?”
“Just like we talked,” Sal says. “You got ten minutes, kid.”
Callan walks over to a trash can. Drops the box into it, slides the gun under his coat and starts to walk down Forty-sixth Street.
Into the rain.
The champagne flows over the glass.
To laughs and giggles.
“What the hell,” Peaches announces. “Champagne we got.”
He fills all the glasses.
Nora lifts hers. She won’t really drink it, but she’ll take a sip for the upcoming toast. Anyway, she likes the bubbles in her nose.
“A toast,” Peaches says. “Hey, we got some bad stuff in our lives, but we got some good stuff, too. So don’t nobody be sad this holiday. Life is beautiful. We have plenty to celebrate.”
In this season of hope, Nora thinks.
Then all hell breaks loose.
Callan opens his coat and swings the gun out.
Pulls back the bolt as he aims through the driving rain.
Bellavia sees him first. He’s just finished opening the car door for Mr. Calabrese and he looks over and sees Callan. There’s a small glimmer first of recognition and then of alarm in the man’s piggish eyes, and he starts to ask What are you doing out here but then he realizes the answer and goes for his own gun inside his coat.
Much too late.
His arm is blasted away as the 9-mm Parabellum rounds stitch across his chest. He falls back against the open door of the black Lincoln Continental, then slumps onto the sidewalk.
Callan turns the gun on Calabrese.
Their eyes meet for half a second before Callan pulls the trigger again. The old man staggers, then seems to melt into a puddle with the rain.
Callan steps in and stand above the two crumpled bodies. Holds the barrel near Bellavia’s head and squeezes the trigger twice. Bellavia’s head bounces off the wet concrete. Then Callan places the barrel to Calabrese’s temple and pulls the trigger.
Callan drops the gun, turns around and walks east toward Second Avenue.
The blood flows down the gutter after him.
Nora hears the screams.
The door flies open.
The headwaiter comes in yelling that someone’s been shot outside. Nora stands up, they all do, but they don’t know why. Don’t know whether to run outside or stay where they are.
Then Sal Scachi comes in to tell them.
“Everyone stay put,” he orders. “Someone killed the boss.”
Nora’s like, What boss? Who?
Now the keening of sirens drowns out everything else, and she jumps as—
Pop.
Her heart is in her throat. Everyone startles as Johnny Boy, still sitting, pours the champagne into his glass.
A car’s waiting at the corner.
The rear passenger door opens and Callan gets in. The car turns east on Forty-seventh, goes to the FDR and heads uptown. There are fresh clothes in the back. Callan takes his own clothes off and wriggles into the new ones. All the while, the driver doesn’t say nothing, just efficiently works his way through the brutal traffic.
So far, Callan thinks, it’s gone just the way they’d planned it. Bellavia and Calabrese arrived expecting to find a crime scene, their colleagues brutally murdered and the stage set for their own weeping and gnashing of teeth and cries of We came here to make peace in our family.
Only that’s not what Sal Scachi and the rest of the family had in mind.
You deal, you die, but if you don’t deal you die anyway, because that’s where the money and the power are. And if you let the other families get all the money and the power, you’re just on a slow road to suicide. That was Scachi’s reasoning, and it was correct.
So Calabrese had to go.
And Johnny Boy had to become king.
“It’s a generational thing,” Sal had explained on their long walk in Riverside Park. “Out with the old, in with the new.”
Of course, it will take a while for it all to shake out.
Johnny Boy will deny any involvement because the heads of the other Four Families, or what’s left of them, would never accept his doing this without their permission, which they would never have given. (“A king,” Scachi had lectured him, “will never sanction the assassination of another king.”) So Johnny Boy will swear that he’ll track down the drug-dealing cocksuckers who killed his boss, and there’ll be a few recalcitrant Calabrese loyalists who’ll have to follow their boss to the next world, but it will all shake out in the end.
Johnny Boy will reluctantly allow himself to be chosen as the new boss.
The other bosses will accept him.
And the dope will flow again.
Uninterrupted from Colombia, to Honduras, to Mexico.
To New York.
Where it’s going to be a White Christmas after all.
But I won’t be here to see it, Callan thinks.
He opens the canvas bag on the floor.
As agreed, a hundred thousand dollars in cash, a passport, airline tickets. Sal Scachi set it all up. A ride to South America and a new gig.
The car makes it onto the Triborough Bridge.
Callan looks out the window and, even through the rain, can see the Manhattan skyline. Somewhere in there, he thinks, was my life. The Kitchen, Sacred Heart, the Liffey Pub, the Landmark, the Glocca Morra, the Hudson. Michael Murphy and Kenny Maher and Eddie Friel. And Jimmy Boylan, Larry Moretti and Matty Sheehan.
And now Tommy Bellavia and Paulie Calabrese.
And the living ghosts—
Jimmy Peaches.
And O-Bop.
Siobhan.
He looks back at Manhattan and what he sees is their apartment. Her coming to the table for breakfast on Saturday mornings. Her hair mussed, no makeup, so beautiful. Sitting there with her over a cup of coffee and the newspaper, mostly unread, and looking out over the gray Hudson with Jersey on the other side.
Callan grew up on fables.
Cuchulain, Edward Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, Roddy McCorley, Pádraic Pearse, James Connelly, Sean South, Sean Barry, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Bloody Sunday, Jesus Christ.