by Justin Scott
“Want to go downstairs?”
Downstairs was a wood-paneled family room where, since their mother died, they usually ate supper on trays, watching the TV news with their father. Tony started to turn off the living-room lights.
“Leave it, man.”
Chris settled on a puffed couch, beige like the carpet and covered in a shiny cloth. This had been their mother’s room, her special place for special events. It had a big glass coffee table, couches, and chairs flanked by enormous lamps. Shortly before she died, she had hung a picture of the Pope over the fireplace.
Before the cancer, she had enjoyed giving parties, and their father had knocked out a wall so the living room elled into the dining room, like a suburban house. Her grand piano filled the other end; it had been unplayed for years, although Tony had once taken lessons. The polished brown top was down and on it stood a realistic model of the Fifty-sixth Street building as it would look nearing the end of construction; the lower floors were sheathed in soft green glass and most of the steel frame was erected. On top was a little derrick hoisting a steel beam from a miniature truck with “Taglione” written on the side.
“Remember when he got the model?”
“That was one smart architect. That toy gave him Pop’s business for life... ”
They sat silently, looking around the room.
“Life,” Tony repeated bitterly. “We said dumb things like that when Mom died too.”
Chris said, “You know what I never got until now? He protected us when she died. When did he cry?”
“Ask Sylvia.”
“Get off it, man. That just started.”
“Chris, you are so fucking naive. Pop was balling her for years.”
“No way,” Chris retorted firmly. “She had a guy until after Mom died. She told me once. They were both lonely.”
Tony softened abruptly. “Hell, she’s a good-looking woman. Pop was lucky to find her.”
“Speaking of good-looking, did you check out Cousin Mary Jane?”
Tony grinned. “I wanted to jump on her right in the church. Remember when we met her at Uncle Eamon’s the first time? What was she, six? I was eight. You were six? We had the most incredible fight in the car on the way home.”
“Pop called us horny bastards. I thought Mom would croak... Shit, now I’m saying it.”
“Remember when he caught us at Uncle Vinnie’s?”
“Everybody at the kitchen table eating spaghetti.”
“Except us in the front room with what’s-her-name.”
“I don’t think he ever told Mom.”
Chris went to the piano and reached behind the model for a picture in a tarnished silver frame. “Mom when she met Pop. Is that Mary Jane today?”
Tony took the frame and studied her picture. “The Mick side is dynamite.”
“Tagliones aren’t bad. You notice Lucille?”
“The elephant?”
“No. Not Uncle Vinnie’s Lucille. Little Lucille Taglione.” Every branch of the Tagliones had a Lucille, named for their great-grandmother, a mythic figure from the old country who had died a year ago at age one hundred. Little Lucille belonged to Uncle Pete.
“What are you robbing, cradles? She’s fifteen.”
“I’m not saying jump on her, but in a couple years she’s going to melt some eyeballs.”
“A little bottom-heavy.”
“Baby fat. It goes away when they have sex.”
“It does?” Tony looked at him. “Oh, bullshit. Christ, you had me believing you.”
“Remember the time you asked Pop if it was true when I told you that dragonflies fuck flying?”
“He belted me for saying ‘fuck’—”
“For an older brother you were pretty dumb.”
“I didn’t now how else to say it. Then he came out to the pond with us. Remember?”
That was upstate in the Catskills, where they spent summers with their mother. Mike drove up on weekends; Chris and Tony would lead him barefoot and sinking in the wet grass around the pond Saturday mornings to show him the frog eggs, snakes, and baby fish they had discovered during the week. Chris remembered the water squelching around his father’s toes, the way he rolled up his pants and how white were his feet and legs, while theirs were brown from playing in the sun.
Tony threw his head back and gazed at the ceiling as if he were seeing the mountain sky. “Dragonflies swooping together twosies and threesies, really getting it on, laying eggs in the water and having a fine time. Pop watched about ten minutes, not saying a word. Finally he looked at you—real serious, his eyebrows got thick—looked at you, looked at me, and he said, They’re dancing.
“When he walked back to the house we heard Mom laughing. God, I wish... ”
“What did Uncle Vinnie say about the building?”
“He set me up with a guy at the bank. They want the trucks for collateral.”
Tony shrugged. “You going to?”
“Would you come in with me?”
“I’m going to law school.”
Chris wandered back to the piano and stared at the model of his father’s building. He twined his fingers through the threads that represented derrick guys, the cables that supported the derrick mast. The model builder was a nut for detail, right down to the spider, the round fitting atop the mast where the guy lines converged.
The funeral day began rushing though his memory—the window, the priest he didn’t like, the shylock, and the stilled machines. His hand clutched and snapped a cable. He put down his glass and tried to tie it. But his fingers were clumsy from the scotch and trembling from his exhaustion, and he snapped another. The mast started to lean; before he could stop it, it snapped a third thread, of its own weight.
“What are you doing to Pop’s model?”
“Nothing.” Chris gave up and released a fourth and fifth cable and laid the derrick gently on its side, resolving to repair it when he was sober. “What did Uncle Eamon say?”
“They’re investigating.”
“That’s what the cops tell strangers.”
“He’ll stay on it.”
“I wish I had stopped Pop! I saw he was mad. I should have pulled him back. I could have stepped between them.”
“It was too late. It was over in a second.”
“I didn’t think.”
Tony crossed the room and removed Chris’s hand from the model. “Pop was too fast. I didn’t even see that punch. Did you?”
“I saw him go up on his feet. I should of known when I saw him go up on his feet. He was so fucking fast.”
“I wish he had taught me to box,” Tony said sadly. “He’d always say I was too light, wait till I got bigger. Said he was afraid he’d hurt me. He never taught me. You were younger and he taught you.”
“I had the weight,” Chris said lamely. “He knew if he slipped that I could take a punch.”
“He waited too long.”
“What are we going to do about Rendini?”
“What do you mean?”
“He killed Pop.”
“I told you, Uncle Eamon—”
“Aren’t sons suppose to avenge their fathers?”
“Avenge?” Tony looked at him like he was nuts. “Sons sleeping in sheep shit in Sicily, maybe. Not Americans.”
His brother’s hand fell away from his and Chris suddenly felt so alone that he started to cry. “I should have stopped him.”
“You couldn’t.”
“If I’d moved a second sooner I’d have pulled him away from the truck.”
“You got there ahead of me.”
Chris shuddered. He could still feel his father’s grip go dead in his hand.
Tony said, “I’m going to bed.”
“Oh, stay up, man.”
“I can’t. I’m crashing.”
Chris watched his brother ascend the stairs; Tony was self-contained, a small, tight package, like a sealed, permanently lubricated electric motor humming along forever. Chris laughed. Tony tu
rned. “What?”
“The last thing Pop said was to take care of you.”
“Hey, Bro? He said the same thing to me about you. Good night.”
“How soon before you have to leave for school?”
“I’m leaving the job tomorrow.”
“What? I thought you had two months.”
“Congressman Costanza stopped by before you got back.”
“He did? Hey, that’s really nice of him.”
“He said he was sorry he couldn’t make the Mass, asked about you, said all the right things. Anyway, I hit him up for a job.”
“Doing what? Hey, I need you this summer at least.”
“He’s recommending me for a student internship in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office. I’m going over tomorrow for an interview.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“They don’t punch a time clock. I’m sorry about the timing, Chris. It’s a great shot for me. If I get in there now, I’ll have a leg up when I graduate.”
“But you were going to be Pop’s lawyer. Not some Fed’s.”
“That was Pop’s idea, not mine. Good night.”
“Jesus Christ, Tony. We always thought—”
“You always thought and he always thought. Nobody asked
me.
“It’s our company. Pop made it into something big.”
“I don’t care about making money. I want to serve.”
“Serve? Serving fucking who? Serve us.”
“I’m going to serve the law. I want to be part of it. Not just dodge around it.”
“I don’t believe you. You sound like a goddamned priest.”
“Chris, I’m sorry. This is a fight I was supposed to have with Pop two years from now. Good night.”
Stunned, Chris got up and took a slug of scotch from the bottle. It burned going down. He tipped the bottle again, but he knew he wasn’t going to get any higher tonight. Just a headache in the morning. He turned out the lights and climbed the stairs. Tony’s door was closed. Chris had left his bed unmade but an aunt had made it. He flopped on top of it and stared at the ceiling. He got up and went down the hall and looked at his parents’ bed. Then he took a shower and climbed into bed.
He lay awake in the dark and for some reason thought of Greenpoint—their taste of the street the end of his junior year of high school, a few months after their mother had died. They had started hanging out with a group who had an apartment in Greenpoint—a “crash pad” in the dated parlance of the middle-class American hippie drug scene that had finally seeped down to the Italians and Irish of Queens, even as the originals were getting haircuts and going back to school. Grass and acid and ’ludes fueled the scene, coke or the Procaine mixes that passed for it, and whispers of heroin nearby; couples joined, split, realigned, like the dragonflies. Chris and Tony, fleeing their mother’s death, had plunged into the free-and-easy difference of it all, the obliteration of time, and the dull kick of working angles dealing dope.
It hadn’t taken their widowed father long to realize something was wrong. His reaction had been typical Mike Taglione. He had driven to Greenpoint early one morning and collared his sons, who had crashed on a mattress with a girl from the Bronx. “You want to get high? I’ll make you high.” Clamping a big hand around each neck, he marched them down the stairs, tossed them into the Lincoln, and drove to Wall Street, where one of his friends was superintendent on a sixty-story tower. He pulled tools and gear from his trunk, shiny new stuff, straight from the supplier.
“Here’s your hardhat, spud wrench, bolt bag, gloves, and shoes. Put ’em on.” He handed his friend papers from the Ironworkers’ Union. “Here’s their tickets. This guy’s your boss. I’ll pick you up at quitting time.”
“Hey, Pop,” Tony protested.
“You want to go college, you’re going to pay for it. You can see your friends on the weekend. Meanwhile, a lot of people did a favor for this. Don’t make me look like an asshole.”
Chris, too, started to resist, until he was stunned to see fear on his father’s face—it flickered in his eyes and made his jaw work. The special bond they had always shared helped him understand that tough Mike Taglione was alone and helpless, and was desperately trying the only thing he knew how. Chris told Tony to shut up.
The super pointed at a spot five hundred feet in the sky. “Dougherty’s your pusher. Boss of the raising gang. Grab a keg of bolts on your way up.”
The keg weighed two hundred pounds. They manhandled it to the top, where Dougherty, a grizzled veteran of thirty-five, and some six inches taller than Chris, put them to work carrying small beams for the detail crew. It had been a turning point, forging a new family out of the lost sheep “Irish” Kathleen Taggart Taglione had left alone. They got hooked on the macho work, and by the end of the summer were bulging with muscle and had been promoted to bolter-ups, installing the final bolts where headers and columns joined over the city. Next summer they had advanced to connecting the girders. Only this year they had come back to the concrete to pour foundations because it was their father’s special building.
And in Greenpoint, Chris thought, as he drifted off, most of the kids they’d hung out with were still hanging out. A few had overdosed, and one had gotten shot while making a buy in Harlem.
He was asleep when the phone rang. He came up groggy, felt around on the floor, found it under his extra pillow. The luminous clock said three.
“Chris?”
“Yeah?”
“Uncle Eamon. You awake?”
“What’s the matter?”
“I had to call you before you read it in the paper.”
Chris sat up. “What happened?”
“We found the driver in a garbage can.”
“Dead?”
“What do you think?”
“What about Rendini? He’s the one who told the driver to do it.”
“He didn’t tell him in front of witnesses. So with the driver dead, the scum bag is scot-free.”
Eamon Taggart and Mike Taglione had met in Korea; after the war, Eamon had introduced Mike to his sister. In the sheer ignorance of his bigotry, he had never dreamed that the tall, blond Kathleen could be attracted to his dark, barrel-chested Italian war buddy, and he had been stunned, even betrayed, when Mike and “Irish” married. But they had stayed friends of a sort, and when she died, it was Eamon who brought a bottle and sat with Mike through the night.
Now he perched on the edge of their father’s chair with his captain’s cap on his knees, and tried to explain why the police couldn’t arrest Mike Taglione’s killer. Tony listened silently. Chris hammered him with questions he could not answer.
“How can you believe that driver lost his air brakes?”
“The driver said he did. By the time we got to the truck, they weren’t working.”
“There were fifty men hanging around that truck! Rendini’s people had time to mess up the lines.”
“You know that. I know that. But we can’t prove it.”
“But the driver was one of Rendini’s hoods. Didn’t you say he had a record?”
“He’s dead. We can’t offer immunity to a dead man. I wish I could say we’ll bring Rendini to trial. But we won’t. We can’t, as much as we want to. But it’ll be a long while before they hit you for another payoff, I guarantee it.
“But Rendini had the motive to kill my father.”
Uncle Eamon sighed. “Chris, just between you, me, and Tony, Rendini didn’t likely act on his own. A Cirillo crew leader might have been waiting in the car. He might have okayed killing your father. But I’ll bet even he called upstairs to an underboss on the mobile phone.”
“The Cirillos gave orders to kill my father on the CB radio?”
“They don’t come right out and say it.”
“I can’t believe they’d say it on the radio,” Chris protested, fighting the idea that the murder went above Rendini. It was too complicated. How many names and faces could he hate?
Chris started to protest the slur. Eamon ignored him. “Same thing here,” he continued blandly. “You know what I’m saying. Take my word for it—Rendini’s just one little link in a long, long chain. You wouldn’t believe the command charts the organized-crime squad has drawn. They look exactly like a corporation’s.”
“Show us,” Tony said.
“Beg pardon?”
“Let’s see them.”
Eamon drove them to One Police Plaza.
The Mafia’s command charts drawn by the Organized Crime Control Bureau were draped on easels like architectural renderings. Chris recalled how his father had practically danced with anticipation at the first plans presentation for his Manhattan tower. A young, heavyset detective was waiting for Eamon.
“This guy knows more than anybody, right, Jack? Jack Warner, my nephews Tony and Chris Taglione. Show ’em what you do here.”
“Yes, Captain.” Warner did not mention their father, but it was clear by the chart he chose to illustrate that he knew what had happened. “Here’s the Cirillos, the biggest of the New York families. The family Joey Rendini answers to. Rendini is here, pretty high up ’cause that union local is a real money earner. I’m pretty sure he’s a soldier, a “made” guy, but maybe just an associate. These guys here are what they used to call capos; the young ones call ’em crew leaders. Above ’em are underbosses. This Salvatore Ponte, called Sally Smarts, is consigliere, counselor to the boss himself, old man Cirillo. ‘Don Richard,’ he calls himself, but he used to be just ‘Little Richie,’ ’cause he’s a runt.”
“Who are these two?” Tony pointed at blocks beside Don Richard.
“Michael, ‘Crazy Mikey,’ is Don Richard’s younger son and chief enforcer. He acts as his father’s personal, private hitter. Crazy Mikey loves his work. Wears a little coke spoon around his neck shaped like a sawed-off shotgun—sort of his badge of office. Nicholas is his older brother—the one with the brains. They’re Don Richard’s heirs. When he retires, they inherit, if they can hold off the underbosses. But you gotta remember the chart’s only about half right.”