Tad Matthews absorbed the spoken barb quietly, stoically. Like he always did. But it was time to get back to business.
“Nixon will try to position himself as the foreign policy expert,” Matthews said. “Cabot Lodge will have trouble overcoming that he appears to be too friendly with Khrushchev. Having to play nursemaid to the Premier on his trip around the US hurt the Ambassador’s image badly. He had to kiss that fat Russkie’s ass on a daily basis. Nobody will ever believe that he can be tough with the Russians now. He’ll just be seen as another soft, upper crust New England aristocrat, out of touch with real Americans.”
“And who’s going to believe that Nixon can be a tough guy?” Max Pilcher said with a laugh. “He looks like someone who runs and cries to his momma at the first hint of trouble.”
“Exactly my point, sir. Ike has already helped us out by putting a few nails in his coffin. Now, we need to create the image that Leonard is the strong man the public really wants.”
“Then make it happen,” Max Pilcher said, the dismissive wave of his hand signaling the conversation was closed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Joe Gelardi’s marriage to Mary had begun to crumble, no doubt, while he was still away at war, or your little vacation in Sweden, as she had come to refer to his internment in their last days together. His wartime affair with Pola MacLeish was not the reason. Mary Catherine McSweeney Gelardi could not have known about it. Of that, Joe was certain, and he was right. Mary did not know. Her disillusionment with him and with their life together had different origins.
There had been some talk in town during the war—whispers mostly—that some, if not all, of the aircrews interned in Sweden and Switzerland were actually opportunists who had used the freedom of flight to sit out the war in safety. But the internee issue was a tiny, little known corner of a gigantic world war, and the talk remained muted. That did not stop the occasional blowhard from proclaiming that the internees were deserters, plain and simple…traitors that should all be shot! At first, Mary ignored the talk; her husband was neither a deserter nor a traitor. She was sure of that. The blowhards could go to hell.
One morning while riding a Boston trolleybus, she had overheard a wild-eyed airman in uniform talking in hushed tones to an older man. His words carried much farther, perhaps, than he intended. He claimed to be a tail gunner on leave who had survived his required number of missions and made it back home alive, never to fight again. If he had it to do over again, he said, he would have promptly teamed up with a crew who planned to take their plane to a neutral country and be interned. “It happened all the time,” the airman said. “The officers would get to talking real secret like…one way or another they’d get rid of the guys on their crew who didn’t want to play ball and replace them with guys who did. Next mission…they’re gone. Relaxing for the duration in one of them yellow countries that don’t have the balls to fight Hitler. Why get your ass shot off? The brass couldn’t do a damned thing about it…They couldn’t prove nothing.”
Mary McSweeney Gelardi had known her husband since they were kids in elementary school. She wanted desperately to believe his military service was honorable—just like it said on his discharge papers—and that he would never be party to desertion. But doubt began to fester. Joe possessed that keen, analytical mind; he was a thinker, not a fighter. It did not take a mathematician to figure the dismal odds of survival in the skies over Europe; even an English teacher like herself could understand what battle statistics really meant. Could she really blame him for conspiring to take the safe way out and come home to her in one piece?
Joe had been home exactly one day when she asked him. His story sounded plausible at first; the plane was shot up, it had been the aircraft commander’s decision, and nobody else had a say in the matter. He chose to follow his commander’s orders and not join the “mutiny” of the three who parachuted. But his answers to her questions about his life in Sweden had been guarded and vague; he seemed to be making it up as he went along.
He was hiding something, she was sure. After a few more sessions of increasingly pointed questions, he became defensive and refused to discuss it anymore.
Mary really needed the truth. She was even willing to risk that the truth might be that he had been consorting with Swedish women. But she doubted that. He was not the roving sort—never had been—and had returned home with a tidy sum of money: his airman’s pay, intact almost to the penny. Surely a man indulging in wine, women, and song would have found a way to part with a fair amount of that cash, if not all.
“I just want to know the truth,” she begged. “I’ll understand, Joey…I swear. Whatever it is.”
He remained silent.
The blowhards must be right after all, her mind concluded.
She tried desperately to put it behind her. At least she had gotten her husband back alive, she told herself. Others had not been so lucky. But her disappointment would always descend like a dark curtain across their relationship. She would attack herself for the irrationality of her feelings: What’s wrong with me? Why should I be ashamed of my husband if he chose not to get himself killed?
But the stench of suspicion pervaded her every waking moment. She could not shake the feeling that he had participated in an act of cowardice, a dereliction of duty. She had always believed that grown men faced their fears. Only petulant children ran away.
And why was he so defensive, so secretive about it?
She had no choice but to keep those poisonous notions bottled within her. There was no one with whom it could be discussed. Joe’s tight-knit Italian family—mother, father, and adoring sisters—thanked the Lord Jesus and a host of patron saints daily for the safe return of their brilliant, beautiful boy, for all the prayers they had expended for his safe return had been answered. Their Joey was home. Mary’s two brothers had both served in the Navy and seen no combat. They never questioned Joe’s telling of his strange odyssey aboard The Lady M. The Brothers McSweeney, never the sharpest tools in the drawer, remained in awe of the whiz kid math scholar their big sister had married. Her closest friend at the Catholic high school where she taught had lost a fiancé at Okinawa and was beyond caring about anyone else’s postwar burdens.
In May 1945, Joe received his discharge and resumed graduate school. As his studies claimed his every waking moment, Mary could feel their marriage dying. The tender love of childhood sweethearts, which had blossomed into a symbiotic, yet passionless bond that blended academic achievements with young married life, had soured in a cauldron of doubt and mistrust. What was once the joyful adventure of life together was now nothing but the tedium of subsistence. Their infrequent attempts at sex were mechanical and impersonal, mere release that was more embarrassing than satisfying.
Then Joe became weird in bed. It had seemed like playfulness at first, a pinning of her wrists above her head that seemed to inspire his lovemaking to a new, robust level. It was different—even exciting—and it startled her, but she did not mind. It inspired the hope in Mary that perhaps through passionate sex they might find their way back to the closeness they had lost.
But he had gone too far. One night, as they lay naked and about to make love, he grabbed the satin sash from her robe and started to bind her hands above her head. There was something in his eyes—something maniacal—that upset her. Before he could complete one encirclement of her wrists with the sash, she jerked her hands free.
All hint of sexual arousal had drained from her voice. “What do you think you’re doing, Joe?”
His arousal had not drained at all. “C’mon…this’ll be fun,” he replied, the sash still at the ready in his hands.
Unimpressed, she said, “Maybe for you.” Annoyance crept into her voice as she continued, “Why would you think I’d want to do that?”
He seemed genuinely surprised by her refusal. “Ahh, come on, Mary…Let’s just try it,” he pleaded.
She rolled away and pulled the covers to her chin. “No, Joe,” she said. “I do
not want to be tied up. Ever. Just forget it and go to sleep.”
In an attempt to gently roll her back into his arms, he touched her shoulder. Her hand flew in his direction wildly, slapping him squarely in the ear.
Joe recoiled to the edge of the bed, his ear ringing like a church bell. “OW! WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO THAT FOR?”
“Serves you right, pervert. Maybe you should go sleep with your thesis.”
Unable to think of a single word that would make things right, he skulked to the living room couch.
In the weeks that followed, he rarely bothered coming to their bed anymore. When he did, it was just to sleep, perched precariously at the edge of the mattress so their bodies had no chance of touching. Most nights, he would work on his doctoral thesis at the desk in the living room of their tiny Cambridge apartment until the early morning hours, then crash on the couch for a few hours before heading off to campus.
There was not much left of the Gelardi’s marriage save a common address and bank account. Divorce was out of the question. They were simply too Catholic, burdened by the holy mandate to preserve the marriage bond, yet devoid of ideas—and the energy—to accomplish that mandate. They descended to that limbo of married couples living separate lives under the same roof. If Joe Gelardi was married to anything, it was the doctoral thesis he was struggling to complete.
They managed to conceal their diseased marriage from almost everyone. Mary’s Aunt Milly was a clever old girl, though, and figured it out quickly. At a family picnic, she had pulled Mary aside and said, “You two never touch. Young married couples touch all the time…just look around.” And she was right. At this assembly of the large and prolific McSweeney clan, there were at least a dozen newlywed couples, the marriages made possible by the mass release from service of European campaign veterans. As they mingled, their hands would unconsciously reach for each other, touching arms, shoulders, buttocks; Cousin Eddie, the family’s inveterate joker, stole a caress of his wife’s breast. She twirled away from his grasp with mock annoyance, after which they snuck away to make rambunctious love in the back seat of their battered Plymouth.
Joe and Mary had not come within 10 feet of each other since their arrival.
Mary had felt close to Aunt Milly her whole life, even though the rest of her family—and her father, Milly’s younger brother, especially—shunned her as “odd” and “a queer duck.” Aunt Milly was different from the workaday McSweeneys. She was an artist, a painter. Until Mary, she had been the only McSweeney to attend college. She never married and lived with a succession of women. One uncle described Aunt Milly most succinctly: dyke.
Alone on an outdoor bench, Mary had broken down and spilled out her marital woes to Aunt Milly. The old woman listened impassively, then took her niece’s hand in hers and uttered one word: annulment.
Mary had no idea what her aunt was talking about. Catholic marriages were forever, were they not? What God has put together, let no man put asunder? Sure, you could get a civil divorce, but you were going straight to hell. I’m in hell right now, Mary thought. That’s all I have to look forward to for eternity?
The old woman threw back her head as she took another drag on her Pall Mall. She uncrossed her trouser-clad legs. The oxfords she wore on her feet reminded Mary of another expression her father had used to illustrate his sister’s lesbianism: she wears comfortable shoes.
“Annulment…that’s Catholic divorce, Mary Catherine,” Aunt Milly said. “The diocese here in Boston will grant an annulment with a minimum of fuss, provided both spouses are agreeable and no child has been conceived of the marriage. If there’s a kid, it gets a bit sticky, but not impossible. You do a couple of interviews with the priest, attest to a bunch of crap in writing, like you didn’t enter into the marriage with the full intent to honor the sacrament and hokum like that. A couple of months, and voila, you’re no longer married in the eyes of the Church. Then you can get a civil divorce…and you’ll have to find another way to get yourself into hell, young lady.”
It all sounded like an ironic answer to Mary’s prayers. She scheduled an interview with a priest from a parish across Boston, away from Cambridge and her family’s neighborhood. The ball was rolling. All she had to do was summon the courage to broach the topic with Joe.
But before she could do that, as if on cue, Mary found out she was pregnant.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Since picking up the phone several minutes ago, Lou DiNapoli had uttered little more than hello. The caller at the other end, Fred O’Hara, had announced himself only as “your brother,” then talked non-stop. But Lou sat and listened patiently, absorbing Fred’s frustration, for they were closer than brothers. The war had seen to that. The passing of years since release from the Stalag Luft had not weakened that bond.
Fred had finally ventured into some dangerous verbal territory, something no ears but Lou’s should be hearing, and he was forced to interrupt. “Man, this ain’t the place. How about we go fishing?”
Go fishing. The code words for a face-to-face meeting, away from prying ears. Away from government wiretaps.
Lou’s phone could very well be tapped by NYPD or J. Edgar Hoover and his pistol-packing college boys. Maybe even Eisenhower himself. It would not be the first time. This was the reality of life for an organized crime boss.
Lou DiNapoli, once the 18-year-old ball turret gunner of The Lady M, was now a captain—or caporegime—for the Montemaro crime family, the youngest man to ever hold that lofty position. His nickname—The Gunner—was as much for his wartime exploits as his civilian career. The crew he headed worked the Bronx, controlling prostitution, bootleg cigarettes, and booze for that borough of New York City.
“Let’s say we meet in Jersey, okay?” Lou said, then waited for Fred’s reply. “Good. Take care, brother,” Lou said, and hung up the phone.
Jersey: code word for Friday. The meeting would be at the usual place—a little resort in the mountains north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—a mid-point between Pittsburgh and New York City. Resort was probably giving it too much credit. It was really just a few tiny, run-down cabins in the woods near a small lake made unnavigable by fallen trees and submerged stumps. Not exactly a fisherman’s paradise, but the fish probably loved it, as did the locals who needed an out-of-the-way hot-sheet motel for their illicit liaisons. The owner was a retired Bronx merchant who owed the fact that he was still breathing and upright to The Gunner’s intervention on his behalf in a local feud a few years back. His silence was assured. Fred O’Hara, union official, and Lou DiNapoli, crime boss, had met there, alone, many times. If any snooping lawmen had ever tried to follow them, they never succeeded in finding this secret haven.
Business was good for Lou and his crew. It was hard not to make money running girls. There seemed to be no end to the supply of women desperate enough to join the game or the demand of men willing to pay for their services. Keeping the girls off drugs was a constant concern, though; the Montemaro family did not traffic in drugs. Any member of the family caught dealing would be severely punished. So far, only a couple of family underlings had been stupid enough to defy that edict. Dim-bulbs, Lou called them. The Gunner had dealt with one of them personally. That man’s body was never found.
The Gunner prided himself on keeping a clean house. Of course, on occasion a john would offer a girl drugs, sometimes marijuana but more often narcotics—morphine, cocaine, barbiturates, heroin. And she would take them. That earned her a good beating, and the same for the john, if he was in reach. If it was a second offense, bones were broken. If it was a third, the bodies would never be found. A Montemaro prostitute could not live long enough to become a dope addict. That was a great selling point for the droves of cops, judges, and city officials who patronized them.
Making a bundle on bootleg cigarettes was even easier. The family would buy up vast lots of cigarettes at their source that were slated to be sold in the American South and therefore subject to those states’ dirt cheap taxes. These ciga
rettes would then be trucked to high tax states in the North and the Midwest and sold on the black market for pennies below local retail. Since the wholesale price paid by the family reflected only the lower Southern state tax, the profits were astronomical. The product was stored in dozens of locations around the Northeast, so damages from the loss of one raided warehouse were minimal. And the raids were infrequent; the local cops and politicians could be bought and did not care, unless some bigwig got a temporary bug up his ass. The federal revenue agents did not want to admit that their occasional busts were little more effective than scooping a cupful of water from the ocean. The raids were just a cost of doing business to the family. A very small cost.
Friday was a cold January day in central Pennsylvania, but clear skies and no snow on the roads had made it a pleasant drive. Lou DiNapoli slid the borrowed Ford Fairlane next to Fred O’Hara’s Hudson Hornet in the gravel-covered parking area. Fred was standing on the cabin’s porch, already halfway through a bottle of Rolling Rock. The crunch of Lou’s tires on gravel as they slowly navigated the winding path had heralded his approach a long way off.
“Where did you find that piece of shit?” Fred asked in greeting, pointing to the dingy Fairlane, his words floating away in clouds of wispy condensation. “Traveling incognito is one thing, but still…a beat-up Ford?”
Lou pulled his ever-increasing girth from the driver’s seat. Several chocolate bar wrappers fell from the car as he exited. He laughed and pointed to the ponderous Hudson. “Anybody who drives a lump like that should keep his fucking mouth shut.”
“My God, Louie…you must’ve gained another twenty pounds! How the hell did you ever fit into the ball turret?”
And in another moment, they were in a bear hug that ended quickly with playful punches to ensure the proper level of masculinity was demonstrated. Even though they were sure no one was watching.
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