“How is he?” Montara asked.
“Tight, very tight,” she said. “He’s not showing it, but he’s very hard hit. It’s going to be bad.”
“Can you blame him?”
“Gino was Gino,” she said. “He didn’t learn. If it hadn’t been today, it would have been tomorrow.”
“You’re a hard one, Mrs. Speranza,” he said with the sharp smile which seldom indicated humor and which could disappear like a water snake sliding into a shadow. “I hope you won’t feel that way when it’s my turn.”
“It won’t happen to you, Abe,” she said with certainty.
He dipped his eyes in recognition of the compliment. “I’d better get in there.”
The family was still crowded around old Speranza when Montara stepped down into the room. But when they saw his presence reflected in the old man’s face, the family fell back willingly and then turned to the long table in the dining area which Carmen had just finished stocking.
“Abe,” Speranza said, holding out his hand.
“Don Baptiste.” Montara moved quickly across the room and took the hand. Their eyes met, and there was no need for words of sympathy.
“We must talk,” Speranza said, retaining Montara’s wiry hand in his own. “Come, we’ll go to my room.” The two men left without a word to the others, who had begun to settle into the dining table. Delia and Carmen watched them go. Each wore a different kind of concern on her face.
“Sit,” said Speranza. He indicated the narrow bed still rumpled from his nap.
Montara sat down, marveling at the hardness of the bed and the austerity of this little room where Speranza had chosen to spend the last years of his life. Abe’s own house had the sleek, cold comfort of a new car. No one would call it ascetic.
Speranza sat himself down near the head of the bed and placed his big hands on top of his thighs. Montara had never seen the old man look so bleak.
Speranza broke the silence. “Well, Abe, what are we going to do?”
“I heard just a few minutes ago when I got back from the city,” Montara said. “You’d better fill me in.”
This wasn’t an answer the old man liked. But he restrained his impatience for a time. “I’ll tell you what I know,” he said. Speaking slowly, but with some of the command he’d once had, Speranza told of the visit from Rizzo that Wednesday morning, how he had refused Rizzo’s plea for help, and that apparently this was when Gino got connected with Rizzo. “I never saw Gino again,” he said, “or heard anything until Beddell called this morning.”
“What did you tell Rizzo when you turned him down?”
Speranza raised his eyes to Montara’s. “I told him that you were the only one who could take him off the hook.” The statement was an admission of weakness and a challenge at the same time.
Montara acknowledged this with a shrug and asked, “What about this Caster? Where’s he?”
“I don’t know. Gino was murdered in front of his house. I sent Renzetti over to find out for me. He—” Speranza saw a blank wall rise up in Montara’s face and stopped short.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?” the old man demanded stubbornly.
“You know why not. That block is not only crawling with local cops, but by now the feds have heard that your boy got himself killed. They’re just waiting for you to react. We’ve got enough problems without that.”
“Problems,” the old man said scornfully.
“Yes, problems,” Montara repeated. “Unless you want to go back inside and take a lot of people with you, you’ve got to stay clean. The investigators are going to come to a decision about prosecuting very soon, and it’s not all going to depend on what the accountants say.”
The old man said something obscene in Italian about investigators and accountants.
“I agree,” Montara said, laughing involuntarily. “But there are too many of them. They—”
“This is no laughing matter, Abe,” the old man said gravely. Montara knew he’d gone far wrong. “My son is lying dead, and you’re joking. I want revenge. I want somebody to pay for this. Are you going to help me?”
“Don Baptiste—”
“No, Abe, don’t. Don’t call me ‘Don Baptiste.’ You say it to humor me, to push me back to my garden and leave everything in your hands. Leave it to Abe…Abe knows how. Well, maybe I’ve left everything to Abe too long. If I can’t avenge the death of a son, I’m nobody’s Don. But I will see his death avenged. This is still the Speranza family, Abe, and I’m still the Speranza.”
He looked Montara in the face with eyes which seemed as hard as they’d ever been.
Montara didn’t flinch or look away. Since Speranza had interrupted him, he’d sat quietly listening and watching the old man’s face. In the real sense, Montara was more of a son to Speranza than either Dom or Gino. Although he’d been young at the time, it had largely been Montara who had held the family together during Speranza’s years in prison. At first, he’d relayed orders to the other lieutenants. But when he recognized that Speranza was growing more and more distant and losing contact with the outside, Montara had begun to initiate policy that he pretended was Speranza’s. Finally, the trips to the prison became an empty ritual. And they both knew it.
“Don Baptiste”—there was no cajolery in his voice—“I owe you the respect due a father, but I also owe you the truth.” He saw the old man’s face harden in rejection of the words to come, and Montara purposely put more edge to his voice as if to grind them into that granite exterior. “You’ve been away from the business a long time…”
“I am no businessman,” Speranza burst out angrily.
“…and things have changed. You are the head of the family, and I honor you. We all honor you. But these are difficult times. The feds —the Treasury Department, Customs, even the FBI—have never been tougher. They mean business.”
“Business,” Speranza said, pretending to misunderstand, “always it’s business.”
“That’s why”—Montara tried to soften the words yet give them special emphasis—“I cannot allow you to start an action now. It’s the worst possible time. It’s—”
“You cannot allow.” Speranza said the words totally without inflection, as if by deadening them he could remove the sting. “You cannot allow.”
“I’m sorry,” Montara said. “I didn’t want it to come to this. We can’t risk trouble at this time. Later, in three months maybe, we can move. We can punish those who killed Gino. It will give me great pleasure. But now—”
“You cannot allow me?” Now it was a question, and Montara thought for a long moment before he answered. He knew no other answer.
“No.” He said it with finality. “Don Baptiste…”
“I have nothing more to say to you,” Speranza said, and he swiveled his heavy head to look away from Montara into the corner of the bare room at the shadow of a wardrobe which had been removed years ago.
Montara sat looking at the back of Speranza’s thick neck where the gray hair sloped unevenly over the collar of his shirt. Then he got up silently and left the room.
In the dining room, the family was still eating. The uproar grew as the strong red wine took effect. At a separate table in the corner, the children, with the two prep-school boys as their captive tyrants, drank their watered wine and giggled into their plates.
Abe ignored the tumult at the table except for a glance exchanged with Delia who had been silently watching the door. Rosalie looked up and saw him going away. “Abe,” she cried through a mouth half full of salad, “come have a bite.” But Montara didn’t pause. The door closed quietly behind him.
Carmen, sitting opposite Speranza’s empty chair, started to get up, but Delia put a restraining hand on her arm. “Let me go— please.” Delia slipped away from the table without causing a ripple in the flow of talk and food. Carmen watched her go, with hatred tempered by the knowledge that Delia was right. Papa would never listen to her, but he would listen to
Delia, the charmed outsider.
Delia touched the door with her slim knuckles and said, “Papa?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned the knob and entered the dark room. Speranza was sitting as Montara had left him, but the firm old chin seemed to have slipped like an undermined cliff. She sat down beside the old man, her sleek thigh not quite touching his leg. She put a hand on top of his where they lay useless in his lap.
28
After he rejoined the family, Speranza seemed much the same as before: kindly, distracted, saddened, slightly aloof. More family arrived, and Speranza greeted them gently, accepting their sympathy.
But all this time, Speranza was deep within his head trying to come to terms with the shattering insight he’d gained from the talk with Montara. When it came to important things, Speranza had imagined that he withheld some final authority that would be respected. Now he found that he hadn’t, and the knowledge stuck in his throat like a flat, sharp bone.
Speranza worked himself deeper and deeper into a feeling of helplessness and depression until he was responding with only a vacant stare and a mumbled word or two. Thinking that it was grief that preoccupied the old man, Rosalie and Doris stopped by from time to time to pat his brown-spotted hand or touch his lined check. The sons-in-law argued their own diagnoses of the old man’s state under their breath near the bar.
“I tell you,” Lou said, “he’s not drunk. He’s old, and he’s had a hell of a blow. What do you expect?”
“You’re crazy,” Bruno said. “If he’s senile, I’m senile. I wish I was as sharp as that old bastard. Go up and get a whiff of his breath, why don’t you! I bet it’ll knock you over.”
“Five bucks?” Lou asked.
“Make it ten.”
Lou won the bet, but they were both astonished a few minutes later when Speranza came to life and took complete charge of the family gathering. It was as if twenty years had fallen from him. He was everywhere in the room: consoling, joking, teasing the children, drawing forth recollections of events and people that everyone else had forgotten.
“Hey,” Speranza cried, “why is it so quiet? What is this—a wake?” He gave the old booming laugh they knew so well. “Let’s have some music, Rosalie! You and I used to be a great dancing team.” He held out a hand. “Come! Dance a tarantella with me like you used to.”
“Oh no, Papa,” Rosalie laughed, flashing her big black eyes. “I couldn’t.”
But the old man caught her hand and pulled her to a space in the middle of the room made clear by scurrying relations. An old record was started on the hi-fi, and Speranza whirled his heavy daughter around until he made her laugh and throw her head back shamelessly revealing her aging neck.
“What did I tell you,” Bruno whispered. “The old man will put us all in the grave.” He wondered how he could get his ten dollars back.
“Especially Rosa,” Lou said. “She can’t take too much of that.”
From that point, the gathering became a party, the first real party the house had seen in several years. Only Carmen and Delia exchanged worried looks as they moved about serving food and drinks. Both thought the old man was putting on an act. What would happen when the party was over?
But it wasn’t an act. Speranza had simply made up his mind what he would do. And the relief had made him light-hearted. Besides, he loved his family. They would cry at the funeral, but he wanted them to laugh tonight.
The party went on until late, and the last relations had to be practically ejected. But when the time came when he thought they must go, the old man was just as vigorous in getting rid of the family as he had been in making them lively.
“Good, good!” he cried as, unbelievably, Lou Altomare danced Rosa down the front walk toward their big Chrysler trailed by their sleepy and embarrassed children.
Delia was the last guest to leave the quiet house. Kathy had been driven tearfully up the stairs to her room by whispered threats, and Carmen was in the living room beginning to repair the damage from the party. When Delia, her near-black sable coat thrown over her shoulders, came to the door, Speranza took her hands in his. He looked into her eyes silently.
“Papa,” she said softly, “may I stay tonight?”
“No, my darling.” Speranza continued to hold her hands in one of his and touched a lock of her ashen hair with the other. “You must go. But thank you for coming. You are kind to an old man.”
“Papa—”
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” Delia said, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “Good night. Papa.” She gathered the collar of her coat around her throat and hurried down the front walk, her thin heels tapping like a telegrapher’s key.
Speranza closed the door behind her and switched out the hall light. He walked back into the living room where Carmen was working.
“Carmen. It’s late. Leave all this. Go to bed. Let Ella help you with it in the morning.”
“There’s not much to do, Papa,” Carmen said, emptying another ashtray into a plastic bucket.
“Leave it, I say,” Speranza commanded. “It’s time you were in bed. It’s time everybody was in bed.”
“All right, Papa.” Carmen put down the bucket. “Good night, Papa.” She threw her apron on the back of a chair and walked toward the stairs.
“Carmen,” said Speranza, stopping her.
“Yes, Papa?” Carmen turned and looked at him with anxious eyes.
Speranza walked over to his youngest daughter and put a hand on her arm. “You’re a good girl, Carmen,” he said. “You’ve always been a good girl. Give your papa a good-night kiss.”
Carmen put her dry lips to his chin. “Good night, Papa. I love you.”
“Bless you, Carmen,” Speranza said, and he let her go. He stood watching as she disappeared up the stairs. Then, flicking off the last lamp, Speranza sat down in his big leather chair and listened to the sounds of the house. Finally, he heard Carmen’s footsteps going down to Kathy’s room. Then, a door closed, a few more footsteps, and a final door closed. He sensed that the last light in the house had gone dark.
Speranza walked noiselessly up the stairs to the big room that had been his and his wife’s. He walked to the big desk near the window and snapped on a small, downward-thrust desk lamp. Sitting down, he unlocked the wide central drawer and withdrew several big manila folders and stacked them at the side of the desk. Taking one from the stack, he began to pore over the papers it held. Occasionally, he wrote something with the thick black fountain pen he’d owned for so many years.
Before long, Speranza had been through all of the folders. Shoving them to one side, he drew out a clean sheet of paper and filled the fountain pen. In a large script, he wrote the date at the top of the sheet of paper and then paused to think. Nothing came. He wanted to say something, but nothing came. Crumpling the paper, he threw it into the wastebasket and capped the old pen. Then he squared the folders in the middle of the desktop and placed a rectangular slab of magnifying glass across them diagonally as a paperweight.
He reached down and opened another drawer. From it, Speranza lifted a chamois bag which clanked softly. From the bag he drew a large revolver and a handful of loose bullets. Speranza spun the cylinder and smiled with satisfaction at the smooth action. Then he broke the gun and began to fill the round chambers with fat cartridges. Fixing the safety, he snapped the revolver shut with a gratifying snap and put it into his large trouser pocket. Speranza then relocked the middle drawer, threw the key ring on top of the file folders and killed the light. He sat waiting a moment for his eyes to readjust to the dark and then walked out into the hallway.
Speranza moved down to the room at the end of the hall and opened the door slowly and quietly. At first, the small bed seemed to be unmade but empty. But then Kathy’s slight form became apparent, curved into a U halfway down the thin bed. By morning, she would be down to the footboard.
Speranza stood watching the covered hump that was his favorite grandchild. He mouthed something toward her a
nd then stepped back out of the doorway. Walking swiftly, a man going somewhere, Speranza passed Carmen’s room and moved on down the stairway to the main floor. In the front hallway, he took a jacket at random and transferred the revolver to the jacket pocket. Outside, he silently lifted the garage door and rolled the small sedan, usually Carmen’s automobile, down the driveway to the street and then down the sloping street. He started the engine in second gear, flicked on the headlights, and drove toward a house not many blocks away.
Upstairs in Speranza’s house, Carmen dropped the window curtain and turned back to her bed. She slipped between the still-warm sheets and lay there open-eyed and thinking.
29
Bobby Rice was red-eyed from crying and red-faced with shame. He hadn’t cried in years. He was a big boy for sixteen, heavy in the shoulders and arms but nearly as slight as a child below the waist.
Now Bobby sat on his bed and looked at himself with pity and disgust in the dresser mirror. Beside him was a small bag packed with the necessaries for the night’s football game: a fresh jockstrap, clean woolen socks, his own cleat tightener and four extra cleats, lampblack to cut the glare from the stadium lamps, and a small white hand towel. It was packed as carefully as a doctor’s bag.
At the dinner table a few minutes before, Bobby had refused to eat and had come to the table only after his mother had begged him with tears in her eyes. He didn’t mind not eating. He felt so devoid of hunger that it seemed impossible that he would ever eat again. Bobby stolidly watched his family eat the cheese-and-tomato laden pieces of veal as if they were machines chewing up cardboard. Finally, his father left the table without a glance at him, and Bobby climbed back up the stairs to his room.
He had known for years that there was something funny about his father’s business. Rizzo had tried to keep his affairs secret, but Bobby was a clever boy who had fitted together all the pieces and decided that his father was some kind of crook. At first, when he was nine or ten years old, Bobby was thrilled by this discovery. But as he grew older, he became ashamed of Rizzo’s shady dealings and tried to block out all knowledge of them. If anybody asked, he said his father was a businessman and let it go at that. He often secretly wished that his father would die in an accident. Father Cony urged him to fight these fantasies and to try to understand.
The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels Page 57