by Thomas Laird
“When are you going to call me Carmen?”
“Right now. From now on. Okay?”
She nodded, and the streams ceased, and her cheeks dried.
“It’s not that the pain will go away, Carmen. It won’t. I can’t lie to you. And I can’t imagine what you’re feeling because I have no children.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Then you’re lucky on two counts. You can’t lose a wife or a child.”
“But you still have your husband, Carmen.”
“Him? That prick shows up on Sundays because it wouldn’t look good if he didn’t.”
Banion stared down at his hands, on top of his desk.
“We can talk about that issue after we talk about Nick.”
“What’s left to say? He’s gone. Forever. And he’s never coming back. I only got two choices, right? I can stay here the rest of my life, or I can kill myself. Or I can learn to live with it. I can resign myself to the fact that my son is no longer with me. That he’s gone and he’s never returning to me. Don’t look like the options are all that good, but for whatever reasons, I don’t plan on dying or staying here for longer than that one month, so let’s get on with it.”
Banion tried to smile some encouragement back at her, but he somehow he couldn’t pull it off.
*
The night club was the landmark joint on Rush Street. All the greats had played here: Frank, Dino, Al Martino, Jerry Vale—all the goombah favorites.
Tony C almost lived at Mama’s on Rush. There was a huge sign with the picture of an old lady with her ass sticking out, out in front of the nightclub that made the place the hot spot that it was. All the suits came here looking for young babes on the make. They didn’t care if you were legit or not because money was money. There were Congressmen and downtown ambulance chasers and city pols and sometimes even the Governor of Illinois. The Attorney General popped in, on occasion, and so did all the big shots from the Outfit. All of them were on a first-name basis with each other in Mama’s on Rush, and they usually walked out of here around three in the morning with some lush female companionship.
Anthony Calabrese didn’t look for that type of broad. His tastes were specialized, in the not-quite-legal classification. He came to Mama’s for the scene, for the heat, for the glam, for the noise, and he was treated with great respect. He never paid for a drink; they were always on the house. And it didn’t hurt that he owned a piece of the joint. With his ties with the union, he kept the place from being rousted by the CPD or any other cop in Cook County. Tony C was the life of the party every time he walked into this upper crust saloon.
Frank came to his table about 11:00 P.M. The ageing crooner was getting a bit crusty, but his pipes weren’t totally gone, yet. He was performing three sets tonight, and the orchestra was crammed into the tight space they had for a stage. He couldn’t use the full accompaniment that he used in places like the Hollywood Bowl in California, but Tony C had requested Frank’s presence, and the singer/actor never refused his good friend, the Boss of Bosses in Chicago. Frank’s original ties were to the New York Dons—that’s how he got his big break in the movies. Everyone knew the story, and that prick Coppola had defamed Frank in the gangster movie of all gangster movies.
Tony C had offered to whack the big shot Hollywood director, but Frank had told him to refrain. There would be too much heat on everyone.
“You sounded good in the first two sets,” Anthony told him as they both sipped champagne at Tony C’s ‘special’ table, right next to the stage. Frank had a glow on, but he wasn’t drunk yet. He had another performance to go, and he’d promised Calabrese that he’d do a new bunch of songs, ones he hadn’t done in the first two sets, including ‘Chicago’, Tony C’s favorite.
“I hear you’re playing The Garden in New York, next week,” Calabrese smiled.
“You have two front row seats if you want them,” the crooner smiled.
Frank’s wig was one of the best in the business. It wasn’t like some dead fucking skunk lying atop his head. It was receded enough to look almost real, Tony decided.
“Only two?” he laughed.
“Shit, I’ll get you the whole first row if you like,” the Big Star laughed back.
“No, two’ll be enough. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Frankie.”
“I remember what you did for me in Vegas. I remember the way you took care of me when everybody was saying I was finished. I’m like you, Tony. I don’t forget a favor. If I can do something for you, let me know and it’s done. I can arrange the best blow job on the strip. All you gotta do is let me know…I have to go backstage and rest for a little while before my final set. I’m up past my fucking bedtime, Anthony. Neither of us is getting any younger.”
“You sing as well now as you did when all those bobby-soxers were creaming in their panties for you. You were bigger than Valentino ever was.”
“Thanks for the friendly lie, but I know what I sound like. But like that guy Fitzgerald said in the book, boats against the current. You gotta keep going, Tony.”
“What else you gonna do?”
Frank rose and bent over and kissed Calabrese on either cheek. Tony C’s two bodyguards smiled and applauded, and the people at neighboring tables applauded, as well.
Ben Rossi strode into Mama’s like he owned the fucking place. Calabrese’s bulldogs both rose from their seats.
“Sit the fuck back down,” Tony commanded.
They sat.
“Hello, Boss,” Rossi smiled widely.
“I thought you were holed up inside your fortress of solitude in Cicero,” Calabrese said.
But he didn’t rise for his best earner.
Tony C motioned for his two soldiers to get up and let Rossi sit down. The music on the sound system in Mama’s was almost deafening. You had to shout to be heard. There were pairs of dancers writhing about on the dance floor in front of the stage, and the sound was the Rolling Stones, which irritated the Boss, but Calabrese understood that young people came to Mama’s and you had to keep the numbers up to make a profit. So he put up with that rock ‘n roll shit.
“I decided to get some air.”
“I heard you lost Cabretta.”
Benny Bats’ face darkened. It almost frightened Tony C. But his two goons were standing close by.
“Yeah. I lost a good man.”
“And I hear you’re looking everywhere for this prick.”
“Your hearing is very acute, Tony.”
“I guess that’s right. Got any idea who it was?”
“I’m hearing this guy Johansen had a brother. But he’s supposed to be off the board. He was supposed to have been waxed somewhere in some fucking jungle in Vietnam. He was some badassed Green Beret or some goddam thing.”
“I hear those guys are nobody to fuck with.”
“Tony, I’m the guy nobody wants to fuck with. Not some punk who fought for a bunch of strangers in Southeast Asia. I can handle him, if he’s the guy.”
The noise grew to a crescendo with the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter.”
“What’s with this jiggaboo music?” Calabrese complained.
“Fucking limeys. Bunch of goddam dopers. Amazing they’re still breathing. Want me to get the music turned down, Boss?”
“You got that kinda clout here?”
“No, but you do, and everybody knows it.”
“Never mind. Frank’ll be out in a few minutes, and he told me he was doing a special set.”
“I read in the paper that his voice is going.”
Calabrese shot a death stare at his captain from Cicero.
“No offense, Tony. It’s just what I read in the papers.”
“Don’t believe all the shit you read in the news.”
“Hey, I was just sayin’. I know he’s very tight with you. I didn’t mean nothin’.”
“I know. No offense taken.”
A blonde who was at least six two and who had all the right tools wa
lked right up to the table. Her tits were almost fully exposed, and the nipples were ready to pop out and bark at the crowd. She was very drunk, and she bent over in front of the younger man, and her breasts did flop themselves loose into that good night.
“I hear you’ve got an unbelievably big dick,” she laughed.
They could both smell the overabundance of alcohol on her breath.
“Perhaps you need an escort on the way out of here,” Rossi offered.
“Sure,” she giggled.
She rearranged her dress, but she managed to re-tuck only one boob.
Ben fondled the still-exposed breast.
“Why don’t you wait at the bar. Tell the bartender it’s on Ben Rossi’s tab.”
“I know who you are. And I know him, too,” she nodded at the Boss.
“You want to tell your Amazon friend to beat it?” Calabrese laughed.
“I can take a hint,” the tall blonde shot back.
“Go wait for me at the bar, like I said,” Benny Bats told her.
She staggered away, almost tripping over her six inch spiked heels.
“Don’t get your cock trapped inside all that,” Tony C grinned.
“What goes in must come out,” the capo returned.
Calabrese leaned across the table, confidentially, even with the blare of “Satisfaction” and the strobe lights from above and the swirling shadows of the couples on the dance floor who were captured in their mating ritual.
“You gotta learn to move slow, Ben. You take too many chances. And you never underestimate anyone who seeks the vengeance on you. You stick your neck out too many times and someone will certainly slit it for you.”
Rossi stared at the Boss in silence.
“You’re a very talented young man, but the idea is to live to be a very talented old man. Capone’s dead. Torrio’s dead. Nitti is dead. All of them gone for a long, long time. Survival’s the thing. You heat up too hot and you flash out in seconds. That’s what I see in your future, Benny Bats, if you don’t cool off. Be careful with this Army assassin. He probably knows his business. You better hope that army you hired is very, very good, because you’re gonna need them, looks like.”
Rossi got up. He nodded and walked away, and magically three of his new crew members materialized as Ben headed toward the bar and the tipsy big blonde.
He aimed her through the sweating crowd on the dance floor, and the five of them departed from Mama’s on Rush, out into the chilled night of September.
The first freeze of the season was due to hit in the wee hours, and it felt like that chill had already arrived.
CHAPTER NINE
He lost Manny because Fortunato was a heavy sleeper and because his bulldog had put away a twelve-pack last night and he was snoring on the divan downstairs in the living room. He cut loose the rest of his army that had been camping out here in Cicero three days ago. Things had calmed down, and Ben didn’t want everyone in the Outfit to think he was panicking or overreacting to the hit on Vince Cabretta. Ben didn’t think this guy who did Cabretta would try for him in his own home. There was just no sense in trying for a hit here in Cicero, his home turf. He was convinced the Green Beret or whoever it was would try for him out in the open where there were more escape routes. And he’d had electrical gadgetry installed so that no one could approach the house without alarms waking up the whole neighborhood as well as the security guys who were supposed to come around in under eight minutes.
Rossi felt a little more secure than he did a week ago, anyway. But he understood that the supposedly dead brother of David Johansen probably hadn’t gone away. He just didn’t want to appear he was running scared from this ex-military killer or whatever he was.
He lost Manny because he wanted to take a walk over to David Johansen’s house, a few doors down. He knew it was crazy, but he couldn’t kill the old man again, so he was thinking about killing the three remaining members of his family. Just taking the baker out wasn’t good enough. It’d be a much clearer statement if he murdered them all. David Johansen didn’t seem hardly enough for Ben’s version of justice. They take one of his out, he takes all of them out. It was more satisfying mathematics than an eye for an eye. The crazy Jews in the bible didn’t understand the vendetta, Rossi felt. It wasn’t even, until you took anybody connected with the Johansens out of the picture, and that included the old lady and the two girls.
It was very dark outside. It was three in the morning or thereabouts, and Rossi was fighting sleeplessness again, and this time even the pills didn’t put him out.
He felt as though he might have a fever, but when he put his palm to his forehead, just after he’d stepped onto the porch, he knew his temperature wasn’t where the heat was coming from. It burned inside him. There was a flame that flared deep in his guts, and it wouldn’t allow him to rest.
He walked down his steps and then headed down the sidewalk until he stood in front of the baker’s place. It was a much shabbier joint than his own brick home. There wasn’t much of a lawn, front or back, and the grass was sparse and bald, in spots. The guy neglected the place, and Ben felt like torching the goddam thing.
But he wanted to look in those three sets of eyes when he strangled all of them. He didn’t want to leave it up to a can of gas and a match. They might escape, and then he’d have to start all over again. Rossi was surprised that Marilyn Johansen hadn’t put the house up for sale and that she hadn’t gotten the hell out of the neighborhood.
Which led him to believe that perhaps the brother really had returned. Why else would she stick around? And how the hell was she paying the bills, a single woman with no job? And no insurance, either, from what Rossi heard in the neighborhood.
The brother had to be the answer. He had a few contacts in the military from some crew members who knew guys on active duty, and they told his contacts that it was the rumor that a lot of operators in Special Forces were working totally off the radar. The service just wiped away their records so they could do what they called black ops without a paper trail. It kept the cops, the civilian police, off their scent, all over the world. Dead men couldn’t pull triggers, so they were looking for phantoms when someone got wasted from a range of over a thousand yards with what they called a ‘surgical strike.’ It didn’t have to be an explosion that was instigated thirty thousand feet up in the air from a jet. It could comefrom a rooftop, or from anywhere, via a lone shooter.
Ben figured he should be scared, frightened to come outside all alone. But his rage overrode any trepidation he had about encountering this spook, this ‘dead’ Johansen who might or might not have whacked Cabretta.
Rossi walked right up the stairs to Johansen’s front door. He could pop that lock with the switch blade in his pocket. It didn’t look too tough to crack open. It would only take a second. And the cops didn’t have the manpower to have a squad sitting out at the curb, and they probably figured Marilyn and the two kids were civilians and that Rossi wouldn’t harm civilians. It just wasn’t done.
Maybe in the movies it wasn’t done, but here he was, Outfit capo with multiple murders in his heart.
All he had to do was get past that flimsy front door.
“What’re you doin’, Boss?”
Ben almost leapt up like a frightened cat.
“What the fuck are you doing, Manny? You scared the shit out of me!”
“You need to come back into the house, Ben. It ain’t safe out here.”
Rossi turned and looked back at the Johansens’ entry.
“That don’t make any fuckin’ sense, Boss. It’s a woman and two little fuckin’ girls. What’s wrong with you? This is just nuts. Come on back home.”
Rossi wanted to pop him in the face, but the rage passed over, and he walked down the steps and headed back to his brick home.
“This guy didn’t do shit to keep up his property,” the capo muttered.
“Fucker’s dead, Ben. Let it go.”
Rossi stopped and faced Fortunato.
; “You didn’t lose your kid.”
“No, Boss. I know. But this is fucking crazy. You gotta let it go.”
“It isn’t how it works.”
“Yeah, it is how it works, Benedetto. It is how it works. Killing civilians is stupid, and you know it, and you ain’t stupid. I know that much.”
They started back down the block, and they walked into Rossi’s house without another word between them.
*
Mark Johansen was getting tired of the Holiday Inn and he was getting tired of fast food and pizza. And he was really getting impatient with Ben Rossi, now that he was holing up in his ‘compound’, his fortress or whatever he thought it was.
There were occasional squads that rolled past the Outfit capo’s house, but the cruisers were dwindling in number and in passes by. They were really checking out his brother’s house, but he knew it was too expensive for the police to keep up the surveillance. He knew about manpower hours because he’d known plenty of MP types in the Army. Had a few run-ins with several, also.
No, he wouldn’t get any clean shots at Fortunato or Rossi while they locked themselves away, but he had been in a car down the street when the Outfit thug dismissed the small band of hitmen he’d assembled to protect him from Johansen. Nailing Cabretta put the seed into him that someone like Mark was on the way to finish the job on his other gunman, Fortunato, and on the prime target, Ben Rossi, as well.
*
He only came to his brother’s house after dark, and he always made sure neither the cops nor any of Rossi’s men were staked out on the curb outside. Mark always did a drive-by, and then he pulled around via the alley behind his brother’s place, and he always came in from the backdoor in the backyard. Marilyn knew it was he when she heard the knock. She opened up and let him inside. He’d told her to keep the outdoor lights off, and he looked around and made certain he had come in without any eyes on him from the alley or from the two neighboring yards.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Yeah. I could eat.”
“The girls are up in their room.”
“Good. It’s late, and I didn’t want to disturb them anyway.”