by Jackson, Gil
THE RESURRECTIONIST
A Paranormal Novel
by
Gil Jackson
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PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 – 1920
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
EMMA LAZARUS 1849–87
MARCO GIUSEPPI took a deep breath, screwed his hand into a fist, brought it up level with his head crashed it hard onto the wooden packing case that was between him and what he regarded as his first lieutenant. That same regard, Tony Di Sotto — his mind concentrated with the thought of a hot ship’s seaming rivet being closed into his taped-up hand, its intensity of heat between white and black depending on the punishment, something he could regard as a reality: being meted out by Giuseppi’s new second lieutenant, Sledge ‘The Rivet’ Driver, and the man, Tony (not to mention the 7th Precinct of the Lower East Side, New York Police Department), regarded as the worst kind of head-case he had ever come across, who until now, the one-on-one kind of brutality he had for better or worse risen; had Giuseppi’s new seal of approval as his favoured weapon of psychological enforcement with the physical ramifications of permanent disability as its rider.
Giuseppi’s fist came down three more times scattering dust into the air from the wooden joints of that packing case reflected the sunlight that streamed through the dirty glass window of what passed for an office in the dockyard warehouse Giuseppi’s Union occupied. His eyes slowly lifted to meet those of Tony’s. Suspended dust — like plankton – was all that separated the two men.
Giuseppi stood up. The filthy green leather-studded chair that he was sitting tipped over and hit the wall. The two of its three castors remained in contact with the floor the chair performing its own perfect balancing act. He sidestepped crablike to the other side of the packing case and faced Tony full on.
Tony began to feel his anus loosen. Giuseppi was too close and was hemming him in; his space invaded with his presence, and Tony was forced to concentrate on Giuseppi’s mouth in favour of red-hot rivets. The spray of mouth-odorous saliva splashed over him as Giuseppi spoke between gasps of warm breath. The cigar-stained teeth of his open mouth, revealed a thread of spittle which joined his top lip to his bottom. Tony expected it to break.
This was not he first time he’d seen Giuseppi ramped up like this, another time, another place had elevated the man into new depths of depravity to achieve what the Sicilian Mafia would regard as beyond the pale.
* * *
The new settlers to Manhattan’s Lower East side - Italian, Jewish, German, Eastern European, counted the Giuseppi and the Di Sotto family. Close enough to pass as neighbours in their natural country, it had changed: Marco Giuseppi had gone anti-sociable pulling Tony in with him and getting themselves and their family known to the police – and more worrying, the immigration authority. Both families had blamed the other for the bad influences of their own. Taking advantage of emigration to the New World the influence of Sicilian banditry and crime of their past lives was something they could put behind them, but high expectations and hope of the family was not to be – Cosa Nostra ran deep in the veins of their offspring in spite of a New World start were clearly not going to be easy and for the better and worse of it, their family partly disowned them. Finding solace in each other’s company. Giuseppi took the mantle of God-father keeping Tony close and at the same time distant though they’d formed a pact of easy-street by whatever means. Stealing, racketeering, protection was to be the Sicilian way in this New World; but Marco Giuseppi had the edge over his contemporaries few understood: a manifestation of abhorrence few spoke of, that needed a special kind of nurturing – a grooming. A breed of humanity that takes its pleasures from the bowels of all that is Satanic. Where 666 is stamped forever, on whoever’s forehead; where Judgement’s reckoning will be under no misapprehension.
Marco Giuseppi had taken that leap and the change came like a thunderbolt its accompanying flash of lightning indelibly reflected off Tony Di Sotto’s cornea.
An émigré Jewish boy with aspirations, fancying his chances of a take-over bid wandered onto Giuseppi’s patch and started trading protection. Business was good, too good. Giuseppi was not impressed. Any question of taking Marco Giuseppi’s advice to leave peacefully with no hard feelings fell on deaf ears. And so a showdown with the two of them became inevitable.
Both in their twenties, stature-wise the odds on Marco Giuseppi winning an all-out slogging match with David Sutton was not good for he gave him a foot in height and a good fourteen pounds in weight. There was also the little matter of David Sutton being a bit handier with his fists and unlike Marco (who had cut his teeth as a street fighter), David Sutton worked out an alternative employment as a boxer and body builder; and according to his trainer would be a formidable asset to the fight world. David Sutton was spoiling for the fight.
Tony couldn’t remember Sutton’s verbal assault. Something on the lines of: ‘You, Dixie mafia, you’re not half as smart as you think you are, nothing but schmucks, straw-hatted ice schmuck water salesmen’.
Marco did not at first rise, shrugged, smiled, turned and walked away slipping a knuckle duster on his chunky right hand as he went. This dismissal was not good enough for David Sutton: he had take-over in mind. He taunted him, shoving him the hard in his back and called him yellow. Giuseppi gave him a side glance and walked on.
Sutton shoved him in the back once again, this time Giuseppi was up against a wall and could walk no further. ‘Don’t turn your back on me, schmuck!’ he spat. Giuseppi turned and faced him, arms in the air in a gesture of defiant surrender with a slim smile on his face. Sutton hadn’t noticed Giuseppi’s seeming act of surrender close enough. The hand wearing the knuckle-duster came down the front of Sutton’s face so quick he was completely taken off guard and staggered backwards staying on his feet. Instinctively he put his hand up to feel his face finding a burning gash leaching blood from below his eye to the lower part of his cheek.
A street crowd of local business people and unemployed dock workers gathered and began shouting and jeering - they sensed blood and were getting it: they wanted more, preferably Marco Giuseppi’s, but knew that one or the other wouldn’t make much difference to the immediate outcome of their lives.
David Sutton gathered his senses. Ignoring his bloodied cheek, brought his fists up in defence. Balancing his feet and body he went on a full frontal attack with a southpaw punch catching Marco a vicious blow to his nose, followed up alternatively left and right, three or four more blows to his face before stepping back to reappraise his efforts: see what defence Marco had. Seeing none he went in for the kill and floored him with a single left-handed uppercut to his jaw. Marco lay a while before lifting and shaking himself; slowly made the effort to get to his knees. David seeing the glint of the knuckle duster, decided that the man wasn’t worth a sporting chance kicked him twice in the side of his head, reached down grabbed a handful of blooded hair, raised his head off the side-walk, slapped him hard across the face and let his head drop with a crack onto the cobble edging of the road. ‘Bastard wop!’ he said. Stamping on the hand wearing the knuckle-duster. Looking at the gathering crowd to make sure there were no hired hands to take on. Walking away backwards he shouted. ‘I’m your new boss, if there’s any argument let’s have a settlement now.’ He looked into the eyes of the gathering and saw no opposition. Satisfied at his work and pointing to Marco on the ground called out to the business people. ‘You’ve new insurance, proper protection from the likes of him, pretenders to the Mafia.’
For Marco to take a beating was one thing but a slap to the face, was something altogether different. In the flicks it was what Crawford did to Fairbanks after he’d got fresh wi
th her. Not done by a man – not to another. Not for any reason.
The crowd closed in, pushing and shoving for the best view of Marco Giuseppi, laid out, bleeding, bruised, sweating, torn, unable to get up and re-establish his domain.
To a man he could count no friends among this mob, excepting the tall, slim, Tony Di Sotto who didn’t hesitate to come to his friend’s aid.
The shouting died down to be replaced by a collective hush of silence as the other helped the man up he felt his brother, to his feet. But Marco Giuseppi was in league with forces greater than either Tony or the mob could possibly comprehend. Standing up, he acknowledged Tony’s assistance, pushed him aside and through partly closed swollen eyes looked in the direction of Sutton’s intended next move.
David Sutton turned briefly to re-affirm the continual state of the other before entering his office, the sight of which gave him an overwhelming sense of job done. He closed the door.
Marco, possessed of a strength that came from, he knew not where, kicked the door open. David Sutton was shocked to see the man standing there. He turned and knew that to finish Giuseppi would be a fight to the death and for the first time in his life feared for his own.
As far as Marco Giuseppi was concerned this Jew-boy, handy with his fists as he was no longer posed a threat. An excitement came from the pit of his stomach and between his legs. The same kind of excitement that he had felt when his father’s half-brother had got into bed with him on his ninth birthday and whispered:
‘Don’t tell your mama or papa - it’ll be our little secret. When you get older I’ll let you do it to me!’
He never got the chance.
His father had caught his brother in an act of fellatio with his son, went insane and had plunged a stiletto into his brother’s back severing his spinal column and putting him into a wheelchair for the rest of his unnatural life.
Marco was experiencing something he knew not what or where it came from. He sensed an image. A daydream. A horseman before him with an extended arm. A long scaly and bony finger pointed to the ground between them. Looking down an image of what he thought to be an angel lay, as if broken: its wing severed and bleeding. He laughed into David Sutton’s face.
David Sutton launched an ill-judged left-hander at Giuseppi which went wildly awry. Giuseppi easily parried it, clamped both his hands around the man’s throat and squeezed until Sutton’s eyes rolled in their sockets and his legs gave way. Still retaining his hold he gently lowered him to the ground.
Saying: ‘Schmuck, am I? We’ll see who the schmuck is.’ He put his arms underneath the unconscious body of David Sutton and in one move, hauled him to his feet, lowered his own legs, threw the limp body on his shoulder and walked toward the dockyard. This was the icebreaker for the dockyardies to begin again their jeering, this time for Marco Giuseppi. For you could never be sure where you were where he was concerned - that you didn’t say or do the wrong thing. But there was safety in numbers here. A brave-heart said, ‘What are you going to do, Marco? Have you killed him?’
‘Mind he doesn’t wake up and give you a right good hiding,’ said another expecting David Sutton to re-affirm his status.
Giuseppi turned to face them, the Jewish boy hanging unceremoniously over his left shoulder like a rag doll. ‘When he wakes up, it’ll be him that’ll know a hiding!’ he shouted back; at the same time walking away from them, added. ‘Nobody follows me, get it. Or they’ll get some of what he’s goin’ to get. I’m still in business! Tony!’
They didn’t. They didn’t know what David Sutton’s fate was going to be, and were not of minds to find out. ‘Sure thing, Marco, we don’t know nothin’, right boys,’ said another, taking an unaccustomed temporary leadership.
Marco nodded. He carried the body past D-Wharf until he got to its dry-dock basin. He lifted David Sutton high over his head and threw him thirty feet down onto the ledge of the half full dry dock. The body quivered before rolling off, falling another ten feet into the emptying dry dock water. The body of David Sutton drifted slowly at first and then faster as the current took hold until it was sucked out through a head gate sluice into the Hudson river.
* * *
The Union? Where desperate men in search of the empowerment to feed families would do anything to do that would be easy meat to those that could exploit in other ways than legitimate employment. Where payment to work by the employed would both satisfy the employer as it would the Union. Not a cigarette paper’s width between their interests, the US Government and the First World War had seen to that.
The Union, had a new leader in waiting who was not about to be voted in officially. Marco Giuseppi, was to move up in the world and had orchestrated the buggering of a young office boy by the Chairman of the Dockyard Board early one evening. Rumours of the Chairman’s peccadillo for young men was not without foundation. Talk was plural. Giuseppi organised a photo session and the Chairman was nailed. Presented with the photograph he, - a Quaker, with a wife, three children and not without a little respect within his community and Friends at William Pitt House – decided that Giuseppi should take over the running of the Union on the dockyard’s behalf with every intention of reversing the decision once he was in possession of the photograph. The Chairman with nothing to lose set about embezzling the dockyard finances, paid off the outgoing union executive with them; got Giuseppi installed as union boss, and the photograph returned to him. Thinking himself in the clear, unfamiliar with photographic technology, went back to the Government official claiming he had been mistaken putting forward Giuseppi, who was in fact, on the face of it, a small-time criminal, and not a fitting person for the job after all; asking them to reverse their decision in the light of his new evidence of the man. With police files to back up his statement, they agreed. Giuseppi gave the glass plate negative to the Government official, saying that the Chairman of the Dockyard Board and the 7th Precinct of the Lower East Side, New York Police Department had it in for him because of his Italian background and that they had connived against him: a man of integrity that had only the interests of working men and the US Government at heart. The Government official agreed that he had a point and promptly confronted the Chairman with this evidence against him, asking for an explanation for his behaviour within 24 hours or Marco Giuseppi: A man obviously maligned for bringing to the attention of the US Government acts of gross indecency by people that were taking advantage of their authority and that he would see that his Church would be made aware of his sins, would be re-instated as head of the dockyard’s union. The Chairman shaking, snatched the plate, threw it to the floor, picked up a shard of it, went out the office and slashed his throat with it.
* * *
The thread of spittle snapped like an over-tightened violin E-string causing Tony to flinch involuntarily. He stuttered out the words. ‘He’s called Fariq, Mr. Marco. You remember the one that came to you for a job?’
Marco held the menacing stare, ‘Is he now?’ Then indiscernibly nodded. A slight smile went across his closed lips and Tony risked a concealed breath of relief. ‘No sense of loyalty these days, eh, Tony?’
Marco turned and looked in the direction of a dirty window that looked out onto the docks. The griminess of it made the silhouette of distant cranes appear like a painting against the Long Island skyline: the sun having not quite burnt the morning mist away. He turned back in Tony’s direction.
‘Is anyone else involved?’
‘Far as I know there isn’t, Mr. Marco ... if there are they’re keeping it to themselves—’
‘As long as someone else is prepared to do their dirty work, eh, Tony? Makes our job all the easier. We’ve only one to make an example of ... the rest will fall into line.’
Tony smiled and nodded. He knew Marco well enough that he would not give another an even break if they crossed him. He also knew that it would be him and the new boy Sledge ‘The Rivet’ Driver that would do the dirty work. Not that Marco was above that these days — he wasn’t — he wanted it
known that he was last resort, saving his obvious powers that came from someone up there, or down as Tony was more apt to think at times.
Tony was happy that Marco was speaking to him as an old friend again. ‘As you say, Mr. Marco, the rest will fall in line.’
‘What we should do, Tony ... is ... ’ He paused relishing his options. ‘Go see Fariq ... go see him, and explain the way we do business. Explain to him carefully, get him on side ... so he’s got it clear in his mind, my Union expects his co-operation and that he has to pay. We all have to pay in this life. Explain that to him, will you Tony?’
Tony shuddered. It was an instruction to him to come down hard and heavy. ‘Sure thing, boss,’ he said, but not convincingly. For though he could be heavy when he had to his heaviness was confined to others’ muscling in, not quite the likes of David Sutton, but others — he could deal with most. Fariq, on the other hand was somebody in Marco’s way; an immigrant like themselves trying to make a way. It was a different ball game to what he was accustomed. Marco wasn’t, however, not bothered who they were as long as he got his way. ‘That, Tony,’ he had said on more than one occasion, ‘Is what separates the punks from the spunks.’
* * *
There was a little matter that had always troubled Tony though, regarding Marco. A perversity that he had not been able to accept. It was clear that they had taken the ways of Cosa Nostra on board; but not Sicilian mafia, with loyalty to ‘Family’ being uppermost in their minds had dreamed another slant to prostitution. Where on earth did he get the idea to abduct children for the pleasure of others’ and their money?
* * *
Fariq Mihalyvich shouted from inside the hold of the ss. St. Lawrence Seaway. ‘Lower! Lower!’
The hook from the sky-hugging shore side crane came into the ship’s hold like some uninvited intruder. He grabbed at it and made it good to a bale of timber.
‘Take it up ... easy. ... Hold it - OK.’