King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  The words came easily and could have been a joke. Master Masuda’s sense of humor is well developed but unusual. I hesitated in the doorway, wondering if he could be serious.

  But one look at him left no doubt.

  So there was nothing to do but offer the final bow of respect and close the door behind me.

  Something to think about besides the wind and cold on my way home. And to fuel continued speculation through the afternoon and evening while the sky continued to spend its fury on the snowpack.

  Always something new to learn.

  A world of wonders . . .

  But speculation cannot last forever.

  Nor can bad weather. And the first telephone call that came through after the clouds finally parted set laughter at a distance. It was from a doctor at the VA hospital in Sacramento, who said Dominic Gianelli was scheduled for surgery in a few days and wanted to talk to me before the cutting began.

  I was packed in five minutes and en route by helicopter in twenty.

  Dom was a friend, and more.

  It had happened on my second tour in ’Nam, when we tossed a coin to see who would get the first three-day pass to Saigon and who would go the following week.

  The coin wasn’t gaffed and Dom did the flipping himself, so there were no hard feelings when I won the toss. And no recriminations when I got back to discover he’d run into a number one Charlie ambush and been sent back to a hospital in The World with half of his body missing.

  All the same, Dom was one of the first people I brought up to Best Licks when I won enough money to buy the near-deserted little mining town and start putting it back in running order.

  He couldn’t stay all the time, though. VA doctors—the surgeons in particular—seemed fascinated by his case, and each time the ambulance took him down the hill again they found reason to remove more parts of him. They said the operations were necessary to his survival, and I have no reason to doubt their word.

  But there were other reasons, too.

  Dom had a peculiar effect on other people with problems. He was blind; both eyes had gone when a grenade exploded three feet in front of him. But having no eyes of his own didn’t keep him from helping me through the moments when I thought I couldn’t live with the idea of having only one.

  His right leg was gone just below the hip, the left foot so badly chewed up the doctors finally took what remained, even though they knew it meant the end of any hope that he might walk again. But the loss didn’t prevent him from needling and wheedling and cajoling another early resident of Best Licks who was ready to give up on the stainless-steel-and-wire surrogates that had been issued to him in trade for the hands he had lost to a helicopter crash at Hue.

  Dom was an asset.

  Absolutely irreplaceable.

  So my breath came short as the airport cab moved through the gates and dropped me at the visitors’ entrance to the hospital. Dom’s message hadn’t put it into words, but I knew the coming operation had to be somehow different from the others.

  He was a man of few idiosyncrasies and no hang-ups at all that I had ever been able to discover. But he did have one strong preference, and that was for what he called “running room” before each cutting session. Dom liked to be alone—no friends, not even close acquaintances—for a day or two preceding each visit to the waters of Lethe, and after the first time I never argued except to say that we were on call if needed. But the call had never come.

  Until now.

  The chief surgeon told it straight when I buttonholed him before going in to see Dom.

  “It’s not hopeless,” he said. “No! You can’t look at it that way, because it’s never hopeless.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t, and I decided it might be just a problem with words.

  “Expressed as betting odds . . . ” I prompted, and he managed a starveling little smile.

  “Heard you were a gambler,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Don’t hold with gambling,” I said. “Immoral and chancy if you’re on the level—more immoral and even chancier if you’re not. So I just play poker.”

  Another smile. Just as thin. “Dom told me you’d say that,” he said.

  He picked up a thick medical folder and offered it to me. “Dom’s records,” he said. “It’s illegal for you to see them. I’ll leave you alone to read the damn things if you want, and then swear you never did. Or I can give you a capsule version right now.”

  “The capsule, please,” I said.

  “Good!” He tossed the folder back on his desk and leaned back, keeping both eyes on me. “The problem,” he said, “is Dom himself. For the first time, we’re having trouble getting him to relax and go with the flow. He’s tense. Depressed. Worried about something—and won’t talk about it. If he were someone else, I’d know what to do: Put him in with Dom Gianelli . . . ”

  “But this time it’s his turn.”

  “But this time it’s his turn. And yours.”

  The eyes bored into me with the rest of a paragraph, which he didn’t have to turn into words. Nothing changed in his face. But after a moment I could feel something tight and painful beginning to relax and uncoil in the space behind the eyes, and the temperature of the room seemed to change a little. Upward.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Fair enough . . . ”

  Dom was sitting up in bed when I arrived, and I saw at once what it was that had the chest-cutter so worried.

  His wa had changed.

  I’m not a mind reader; if I were, I’d never lose at poker and no one would play against me. No pain, no gain, and I have got broke as often as anyone and a lot oftener than some.

  The ability to sense the aura—personality and emotional condition—of a given individual does nothing for my game except to offer an occasional warning when I’m walking into a trap or about to back away from a cold bluff. And even that is far from certain. Poker pros survive by controlling the emotions and so do the very best amateurs. The aura can be as bland and unreadable as the face of a man who has himself under full command.

  But Dom Gianelli was no poker player, and never could have been.

  His wa was, as always, open and readable in large type for anyone willing to see. And today its black edging was so heavy I wondered that someone hadn’t turned off the overhead lights. Looking more closely, I could see little fire-points of heat and anger at the center. And the blue-green of frustration.

  The doctor was no alarmist.

  Dom couldn’t go into surgery like that.

  “Shape up, Gianelli!” I growled from the door. “And stop chasing the damn nurses. You’re beginning to make a nuisance of yourself.”

  The ruined mouth shaped into a wide smile and he turned it in my direction, looking directly at me with the eyes that could not see.

  “Mind your own damn business,” he growled back. “And block that exit—I think I got the redhead cornered!”

  It wasn’t much, but it seemed to be some kind of signal and the red-haired nurse who had been puttering with the bed tray departed a moment later without even the usual admonition against tiring the patient. I knew she’d be back, though, looking official, when her inner clock decided it was time for me to leave.

  Best kind. Either the VA personnel office had changed its policies or Dom had stumbled onto the only careful and caring service in the system.

  And I could see he was going to need every break he

  could get.

  For he was certainly dying. Skin hung slack around the sides of his neck as though he had shrunk inside it, and there was a waxlike quality about the face, more common to hospice than to hospital.

  We went through the surface rituals of greeting and contact by rote, while I silently digested the rest of the information I needed from deep contact at the level of the wa and beyond.

  Dom had lived at Best Licks long enough to be on intimate terms with Master Masuda, and to have absorbed much of that remarkable man’s teaching and outlook upon l
ife. Yoichi Masuda’s own aura always warmed and softened with any mention of Dominic Gianelli, and he had spoken of him more than once as an anomaly—a spirit young in experience but already far advanced in the journey to final enlightenment.

  So I was glad he couldn’t see Dom now.

  The wa that I touched was cold and fleeting, and after a moment or two of contact it retreated beyond a wall I could not penetrate.

  I dragged a chair to the side of the bed and sat down to wait for him to explain the situation the hard way. In words.

  And after a while, he did. Hesitantly at first and then with increasing speed that accompanied a gradual relaxation of the inner control that had blocked me out, he told me how little I had really known of the man I had looked upon as a close friend.

  Or perhaps it was merely an old lesson learned again in new form.

  I sat listening to the life and deeds of a stranger.

  Because he had listed me with the VA as next of kin, I had assumed that Dominic Gianelli had no family. He had never spoken of parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, or sisters. But now he did.

  “Not only family,” he said, “but Famiglia. You follow me, old friend?”

  I nodded. Slowly.

  “The Friends of the Friends,” I said.

  “Esatto! Think back, about the time of the war, before you went to country the second time. There was another kind of war going on. In New York. The head of one of the Five Families—pezzovenante, a real ninety-caliber—was making waves, getting his face in the newspapers all the time and attracting attention. He wanted to be a man of respect, not just among the Friends of the Friends, but in the legit world, too. Maybe he was wrong, maybe he was right. Who knows? Either way, it didn’t last long. A button man put six slugs in him while he was making a speech to an Italian-American Society meeting in Brooklyn. Didn’t kill him, but turned him into a vegetable. He died seven years later without ever recovering consciousness.”

  I remembered. Vaguely. Time magazine and Newsweek and the television networks had carried the story. I hadn’t paid much attention; problems of my own at the time.

  But now a name surfaced, and I said it aloud. With a sense of shame for not having suspected the connection in all the years between.

  “Gianelli,” I said. “Don Giovanni Gianelli. The capo anziano . . . ”

  Dom nodded, a single twitch of assent.

  “My father,” he said.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  For example, consider the religious charlatan who knows that he is a charlatan—and enjoys the work . . .

  FOUR

  It was a familiar story. With a Sicilian twist.

  American public opinion had been sharply divided on the war in Southeast Asia, a fracture that would never entirely heal. But in the separate and insulated world of the Five Families there was no argument at all. The Mafia, which had been content to nibble the edges of the drug trade during the late 1950s, now moved into the field with a vengeance and began dealing directly with a new and powerful chief supplier—the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which had just gone into business for itself.

  Later CIA apologists would blame budgetary problems, and one prominent lunatic would even call it “simple patriotism and responsible citizenship,” to finance the agency’s programs by addicting a generation of young Americans. But in fact, it was simply an old, old tradition: All spy agencies eventually go into business for themselves, an inevitable result of the in-group/out-group siege mentality that is a necessary part of the spook trade. But this time the operations were so massive, the cash flow so tremendous, and the sudden affluence of the agency and its Air America commercial transport arm so obvious that it could not be covered up—and in the end, no one even seemed to try.

  “That was when my father began making speeches in public,” Dom said. “He was in business with the government of the United States, and I guess he thought that meant he was legitimate. But he still hit the ceiling when he found out I’d joined the army.”

  At first, he said, the don assumed there was some mistake. He had paid well, in cash and in obligation, to be sure that his eldest son was deferred.

  “You can imagine what he said when he found out I had volunteered . . . ”

  The brief and painful interview in which he tried, without success, to explain his act, Dom said, was the last time he ever saw his father or heard his voice.

  I knew something about things like that.

  Neither my wife nor my friends had ever understood my decision to become an army chaplain instead of joining the peace movement. Some of my friends reserved judgment; some decided to forgive me. But my Sara’s last letter had been more than a year old the day a Red Cross officer took me aside to say my wife had been killed during a peace demonstration back in the World.

  “My whole personal family was the same,” Dom said. “The Famiglia—the Friends of the Friends—sure. They would forget my name and face as a matter of respect for the don. But my mother and my sister . . . that was different.”

  And the worst of it for Dominic was the break with his sister. Angela.

  “Angie was three years younger than me,” he said, “and Ma was sick a lot after she was born. We had people to take care of us, of course, but all the same it was sort of like I was more than the big brother. People used to make jokes about it, how you never saw me without her or her without me. But we didn’t care.”

  Even adolescence didn’t break the bond, Dom said, and it came as a shock when Angela turned away with the rest.

  “I wrote to her,” he said, “and I kept it up even when my letters came back unopened. Thought she’d come around. Give me an answer of some kind, at least. And then I heard she was married . . . to some guy in the Green Berets!”

  At first he had been pleased and even hopeful. Perhaps Angela could see it his way now. But weeks passed and the mail orderly still passed his hooch without a second look and gradually the truth began to filter out of the city of New York and into Southeast Asia.

  “Angie’s husband,” he said, “was an SFC name Pietro Palermo, and knowing as much as I did about what was going on there in country I should have figured out his angle with no trouble. But I didn’t. And by the time I started to get the picture, it was too late. For everyone.”

  Pete Palermo, he explained, was what his father the don would have called an “expediter”—a “made man” sent first into the army and then into the Berets and finally to Vietnam in order to protect Famiglia interests. Green Berets were routinely loaned to the CIA for special duty in those days, and the assignment of SFC Pete Palermo as supercargo on one of the Air America transports shuttling raw gum opium out of the golden triangle raised not even a ripple of comment. Everyone assumed the truth, and no one seemed to care.

  Until the sergeant got home.

  “I was back here in the hospital by that time,” Dom said, “but I didn’t hear about what happened until Angela came to see me—the second time I came down here for a cutting session.”

  A lot had happened, but because of the estrangement from his family and the semi-isolation of our little town, Dom had heard none of it.

  “Her husband, the Green Beret, was in prison,” he said. “Doing twenty years in Leavenworth, and no help coming from the family—or the Famiglia—because the don was out of it by then and also because Pete had gone into business for himself without Famiglia permission.

  “Angie was in awful shape,” Dom said. “She’d had a baby—a little girl—after Pete went to the joint. He’d never seen anything but pictures of the kid. No word, nothing, from the family. And now the feds were on her back.”

  Palermo had started dealing raw opium on his own behalf while still working for the CIA in Vietnam, Dom said, and the Drug Enforcement Agency had been aware of his personal operations almost from the first. So when the tour was over and he was ready to come home, everyone expected him to make a final big buy and try to bring it in with him.

  “But h
e didn’t,” Dom said. “Pete might not have been the smartest guy in the world, but he wasn’t stupid, either, and he knew that any guy coming home from country was going to be searched and re-searched for a stash. So he made sure he wasn’t carrying—and that no one was carrying for him.

  “Somewhere along the way, on his last trip around the triangle with Air America, he converted everything into cash. But then the DEA lost track of him for a day. In Singapore . . . ”

  DEA agents picked Sergeant Palermo up again when he got back to Saigon, Dom went on, stuck to him like a poultice the rest of the way back to the States, and were still on him when he got home. To Sonoma County, California.

  “Pete’s family—his personal family, you know—had been in the wine business,” Dom said. “A vineyard and winery at some place called Glen Ellen, east of Santa Rosa. His folks were dead, and Angie had been living there. The vineyard itself was rented out to someone else, and the little winery was more or less out of business, though I think she said something about still having some bottles in storage and some wine working in vats on the premises or something. Anyway, she was just waiting there.

  “But Pete came home like a dynamo.

  “After the reunion and after he was officially out of the army, he began fixing up the home place like the end of the world was Tuesday. Angie’d saved most of the allotment the army had sent her, and he went through that plus his mustering-out pay, painting and fixing the house and putting the winery—the press and the bottling equipment and all the rest—back in working order.”

  I thought it over.

  “Must have been some allotment,” I said. “And some mustering-out pay.”

  He nodded, eyes fixed on me almost as if he could see. “That’s what Angie decided,” he said. “But way too late. And the DEA didn’t even have to guess. They knew he had found some way to get at least a part of the fortune he’d made out of Southeast Asia, and get access to it back here. Had to be that way, because he’d paid cash for everything he’d done at the winery and there was still a balance of nearly fifty thousand dollars in the accounts he had with various banks around the area . . . which came as a pleasant surprise for Angie. But she wasn’t so happy when she tried to write checks on the accounts and they bounced because the feds had slapped liens on all of them.”