Cruel Mercy

by David Mark

  They consider each other for a moment. The older man is tall and loose-limbed, and though the water obscures it, Claudio knows he has a potbelly that makes him look pregnant, and a scythe-shaped scar on his lower back where one of his kidneys was removed a decade ago. His hair is dyed black and he squints when he talks. The squinting is a habit. Two years ago he underwent laser surgery on one eye and had a cornea transplant in the other. His vision is now perfect. But he still wears his thick glasses when doing business, albeit with non-prescription lenses. The FBI doesn’t know that he now has twenty-twenty vision. He plays this to his advantage. At his last trial for racketeering, the jury were shown him in conversation with a known Mafia boss. In it, he was pictured without his glasses. His defense attorneys demonstrated that he had no idea to whom he was talking. Here, now, neither he nor Claudio can be sure they are not being observed. But they know nobody is recording them. The feds are not allowed to do video surveillance in an environment where children are in a state of near undress. The old man now conducts most of his important meetings here. He knows nobody is wearing a wire, and with his mouth below the waterline, nobody can read his lips. His name is Giulio Pagano, and he is consigliere to the boss of the Philadelphia Mob. The boss is in a jail cell, on the same landing where Pagano spent twenty years. For two decades, Pagano was not allowed to swim. Since his release eight years ago, he has made it his business to swim every day.

  “She still on the blow?” asks Pagano.

  “She says not.”

  “We can find out for certain.”

  “I don’t need that. I trust her.”

  “Keep an eye on it.”

  “I will.”

  Claudio floats in the water, waiting for Pagano to speak again. They have much to discuss.

  “New York’s not happy,” says the old man at last. His green eyes catch the movement of the water and briefly sparkle. For a moment, he looks intelligent, as though he is working things out and making calculations a dozen moves ahead of everybody else. Claudio knows it to be an optical illusion. He has known Pagano for the better part of half a century and he’s a dumbfuck who has survived at the top of the Mob because he is no threat to anybody more important. He’s also a vicious bastard whose paranoia is becoming a cause for concern.

  “No?” asks Claudio.

  “Not happy at all,” says Pagano.

  Claudio waits for more. When nothing comes, he gives a shake of the head. “Don’t treat me like one of your punks, Giulio. I know this routine. I learned it from the same men you did. Talk to me.”

  Pagano considers for a moment, then smiles widely. “Still a ball breaker, eh, Claudio?”

  “I’m whatever you need me to be. Always have been.”

  Pagano purses his lips as though thinking. He rubs a hand over his face. “They like you,” he says, half his mouth now below the waterline and his words bubbling on the surface. “New York. That’s why they asked for you. It was important.”

  “So you said.”

  “And it went wrong,” says Pagano, without accusation.

  “How was I to know there was a fucking guy in the trunk?” asks Claudio quietly. “Luca only opened it up to see if there was a tire iron in there to hit the big man with. Some angry Russian jumps out, shouting curses. What were we to do? Luca tried to get him on his knees with the others but he wasn’t having any of it. Luca wanted to show what he could do. Took a knife to one of them. That wasn’t what we were there to do. I went to end it. Then the Russian runs. The Irish runs. Luca started shooting. Next thing the Irish is dead, the Russian’s somewhere in the woods. He knocked me down. Did what he did to Luca. Whole thing was a damn mess.”

  “Did he tell you who he was?” asks Pagano coldly. “Tell you how important he was to our new friendships? There are lots of unhappy people, Claudio. It’s going to be expensive. It’s going to cost somebody dear to smooth things over. We need to know what he was doing there. Need to know if the person who’s going to pay for this is one of ours or one of theirs. I spoke up for you.”

  Claudio considers him. Pagano is a crook and a killer. He’s a liar who would sell what is left of his soul if it helped add a few more feathers to his already comfortable nest. Despite their history, he knows Pagano would sell him out in a moment.

  “I bet you did,” says Claudio. “What was the decision?”

  Pagano looks at Claudio like a mechanic about to tell a naïve motorist how much it will cost to repair the damage under the hood.

  “Like I said, it needs cleaning up, Claudio. It’s a mess. There’s even a cop over from England. It was meant to be clean. They wanted the best. They asked for you.”

  Claudio controls his breathing. His fingers are twitching and he forces himself to stop them.

  “Why was I even there, Giulio? Somebody asks me to do a job, I do it. But somebody’s been lying to me. I want a chance to find out who. That’s why I came to you. That’s why I didn’t run.”

  “You know what would have happened if you ran,” says Pagano.

  “Do I?” asks Claudio, putting his face in the water and rubbing a hand over it. “I know who you send after the people who run. You send me. So who would you send, eh? Who you got who can do what I do?”

  The older man considers this. Claudio can almost hear his thoughts. He knows that nobody is irreplaceable, but for four decades he has been one of the Philly Mob’s biggest assets. He has never run a crew or risen above street level in the organization’s hierarchy. But he was a made man by the time he was in his mid-twenties and is the most lethal of his organization’s enforcers. For the Philly Mob, he has killed twenty-nine men. For their associates in New York, he was involved in a further sixteen murders. During a brief spell on the run in Italy, he put bullets in six members of the Camorra crime syndicate during a month of bloodshed on the streets of Naples. He is a stone-cold killer. And now, however gently, he is being threatened with the consequences of a failure that was not of his making.

  “There’ll be money spent over all this,” says Pagano, his face full of regret. “There has to be blood, too. People are asking questions.”

  “Maybe I should have done the same,” says Claudio, narrowing his eyes. “Asked questions, I mean.”

  “You’ve never asked before.”

  “I’ve never felt I was being lied to before. Those boys from Ireland? They’d only just arrived. How much harm could they have done? How much of a threat? That wasn’t a hit, it was a fucking murder.”

  Pagano concedes the point with a wave of his free hand. Behind him, Belle is standing on the edge of the pool, palms together, head tucked in, preparing to dive. The light comes in through the high windows and seems to make her glow. Pagano follows his gaze.

  “She’s a beauty,” he says, then gives a salacious wink. “Gonna be hard to keep her off the pole when she’s a teen, eh? Gonna have hips like her momma.”

  Claudio refuses to rise to it. “She’s going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine.”

  “You’re well liked, Claudio. You’re respected. You’re a neat worker and the people who know your name know you’re to be feared. You’re the guy we send when somebody’s really fucked up. You’ve never been thought of as a risk.”

  “And now?”

  Pagano shrugs ruefully. “There are loose ends, you know that. The way it looks . . . Luca’s dad wants blood. The Chechens will want it, too. If one of theirs killed one of ours, you know what has to happen—deal or not.”

  “Chechens or Russians or whatever you want to call your new friends—they killed Luca. Accident or setup, that’s the bit that’s eating me. And I’ll bet a dime to a dollar it’s what’s eating New York, too.”

  “Go do your thing,” says Pagano with the slightest of nods. “Luca’s old man needs answers. He deserves them. And you need to hand him somebody to hate that isn’t you.”

  Claudio li
cks his lips. “What if what I find upsets the new deal?”

  “Don’t start asking questions like that.” Pagano smiles. “They’re not for you to think about. Worry about what went down in the woods.”

  Claudio closes his eyes. He knows better than to argue. There is so much he could throw in the other man’s face, but it would be like slamming his fist into a wall. Pagano will never acknowledge what they both know to be true. Will never talk about that night in 1981 when they were forced to choose a side in the Mob wars that were ripping New York and Philadelphia apart.

  “Just find out why he was there,” says Pagano. “Find out who skewered Luca. Don’t let this English cop or any fucking angry Irishmen slow you down. Do what you do best.”

  Claudio nods. He expected nothing less. He is not a man who spends a lot of time worrying about what he cannot change, but these past days have taken their toll upon him. He had not even known whether to go home, whether he should expose Mia and Belle to the consequences of what went on upstate. In the end he came home purely to find out whether he was to be allowed to live. He is still unsure whether he has been reprieved or sentenced afresh.

  “Two days,” says Pagano, looking at him hard. He gives a little nod and turns away. He swims a dozen strokes, his eyes fixed on Belle. When he pulls his tall, potbellied frame from the water, a broad-shouldered man in a tracksuit emerges from the changing rooms and wraps a fluffy white bathrobe around Pagano’s shoulders.

  Belle swims to her stepfather. “Was that one any better?” she asks. “The dive?”

  Claudio enjoys the sensation of her wet, curly hair against his cheek. He has already lived more years than he expected to and never believed himself capable of the feelings that Belle has filled him with. Were he to consider it properly, he would admit to staying with the girl’s mother only because he loves the child.

  “You’re going to be a champion,” he says.

  “Your eyes look sad,” she says, considering him. “Do you want to be a shark?”

  “I’m too tired to be a shark, Belle.”

  The little girl looks at him thoughtfully. “Who was the old man?”

  “He thinks he’s a shark,” says Claudio. “Really, he’s a jellyfish.”

  She laughs at this. “He looked like a jellyfish who had lost some legs.”

  “He’s lost more than that,” says Claudio. “Will you be okay for a day or two if I go away?”

  Belle pulls a face. “You just got back.”

  “I’ll bring you a present.”

  “From somewhere good?”

  “New York,” he says.

  “That’s not very exciting,” says Belle. “I’ve got snow globes from there already. Could you go to Japan?”

  “Maybe next time,” says Claudio.

  She takes him at his word, confident that he will never lie to her. She has no reason to doubt him. He has made good on every promise he has made her. He’ll even make sure she becomes a diving champion, and if that means shooting every competitor, so be it.

  “Your brain looks busy,” says Belle, holding him by the chin and angling his head this way and that. “What are you thinking about?”

  Claudio wonders if she will ever be old enough to hear the truth. Wonders how her eyes would change if he spoke of the gunshots in the snow and the man who kept a veil of delicate skin in a leather bag in his pocket the way the superstitious fishermen used to when he was a boy. He knows she will never be old enough. Knows that he will go to his grave before he would allow this bright, precocious child to glimpse the images his mind is spitting out like a broken printer, handing him memories he neither wants to see nor has ever truly understood. For a moment he is a young man again, sitting in the front seat of the nondescript Buick and waiting for Salvatore Pugliesca to open the door of his home on South Broad Street and pay the price for his deceit. For a moment he is standing over what remains of him. He is remembering the mute prick with the fish eyes and gasping mouth, watching as he hacked at his own trapped limb with a kitchen knife as his lips moved, soundlessly, in forlorn prayer.

  But Claudio is a man who has spent forty years trying not to let his nightmares take control of his life, and he would not wish such pain upon the child.

  “I’ll watch Momma while you’re gone,” says Belle solemnly.

  Claudio pushes a tendril of hair behind her ear. Suddenly, Belle takes his hand and examines it like a fortune-teller.

  “You have nice hands,” says Belle. “Skinny fingers.”

  Claudio examines them. Gives a little laugh. Realizes he has never paid them much attention. Here, now, he feels an absurd dislike for his fingers; fingers built to hold the handle of a gun or detonate the bomb that blew a boss’s son to pieces.

  “I didn’t like that man,” says Belle, scowling, pointing at the door to the changing rooms.

  “No?”

  “What does he do?”

  Claudio considers this. “He makes decisions.”

  “Good decisions?”

  Claudio closes his eyes. “We’ll know in a day or so.”

  PART

  TWO

  1972: THE FIRST ABSOLUTION

  The boys and girls look like figures in a faded lithograph. Their skin is almost translucent from lack of sunshine. Their gums, ruptured by rotten teeth, bleed as they chew for comfort on arms through which the bones are clearly visible and that are patterned with the scabs left by the hypodermics that puncture their parchment flesh.

  Were he still the boy from Queens, Jimmy Whelan would find the nearest nurse and slam his head into the nearest wall. He wants to burn this place down, to watch the flames rise high over the treetops in this dark corner of Staten Island and start an inferno visible from every window in Manhattan.

  But Jimmy Whelan is no longer a boy from Queens. He is a priest. He is a servant of God. He knows temper to be the pathway to hate and he knows hate, alongside temptation, to be the fuel of all true sin. He tries hard to be Father James Whelan. But right now he truly wants to be Jimmy.

  “I told you,” says Dr. Piechowiak under his breath. He has his hand to his nose.

  “No,” says Jimmy. “No, you said it was bad. This is evil.”

  The two men stand in the shadows of the dormitory and look upon a scene of biblical suffering. Boys and girls, their ages impossible to gauge, are scattered like stones around the square room with its drawn drapes, lit by a single bulb. Their heads have been shaved to prevent infection. Their fingers and chins are covered with oatmeal and drool. Some are little more than corpses, withered arms and atrophied legs, cuddling themselves in puddles of urine and coated in their own filth.

  “And they know?” asks Jimmy, refusing to make any attempt to protect himself from the smell. If these poor boys and girls can endure it, so can he. “The people in charge? The authorities?”

  “The authorities have been told time and again,” hisses Dr. Piechowiak. He has a mouthful of strong mints and they clatter off his teeth as he talks. With his flat features and his sharp teeth and mop of uncombed hair, the doctor looks like a frightened cat.

  “And?” asks Jimmy, casting anxious glances around.

  “Senator Kennedy even demanded answers and nothing changed,” says the doctor. “I had no choice. I’m bringing the TV reporter, the guy with the big mustache. Something has to change. I can’t be a part of this anymore.”

  Jimmy wants to shout. He wants to bellow and bang his hands on the metal cots and their threadbare mattresses. He knows he cannot. He and Dr. Piechowiak are trespassers. The doctor handed in his notice weeks ago, appalled at being part of such a regime, and he needs the help of the earnest young priest if he is to raise awareness of this place and have it shut down. Jimmy wants to do some good. He’s young but already has a reputation for getting things done. He is still unsure whether to accept the offer of a transfer out of his Hell’s Kitc
hen parish and into the splendor of St. Colman’s on the Lower East Side. He’s good with the neighborhood kids. He organizes the basketball leagues and referees the boxing matches and is not above banging on the door of a neighborhood punk who has been knocking his wife and kids about and promising to show him what hell looks like if he doesn’t mend his ways. He doesn’t want to be tempted by the splendidness of St. Colman’s. He knows there to be many ways to praise the Lord and does not want to be the kind of Catholic who believes that God is all about the gold brocade and stained glass.

  “Almost every patient has hepatitis,” says Dr. Piechowiak in Jimmy’s ear. “One member on staff for every eighty patients. They put on a good show when the parents come but any parent who makes too much of a fuss gets told that this is what is best for their children. Some of them aren’t even retarded. They just have problems, or they’re a little slow. Some can’t express themselves the way they want, or move as good as other kids . . .”

  Dr. Piechowiak stops talking as one of the figures detaches himself from a space by the wall. He’s perhaps in his mid-teens. He wears a nightshirt. His skin is pale as milk and his eyes have the pinkish tinge of a cornered rat.

  “Come on,” says Piechowiak, tugging at Jimmy’s sleeve. “We have to go.”

  Jimmy ignores the doctor. He waits for the boy to come close. He squints into his face. There is a sudden moment of recognition. He cannot place the boy but he knows he has seen him before.

  “Hello, my son. What’s your name?”

  The boy cocks his head. He opens his mouth but all that emerges is an ugly, rasping gulp. He has no teeth and his gums are black.

  “He can’t speak,” says Dr. Piechowiak. “Physically he’s fine but he can’t make a sound. He saw bad things when he was younger. His guardian placed him here three years ago.”

  Jimmy considers him. “Tony,” he says at length, and something flickers in the young man’s eyes. Jimmy puts his hand to his chest and tries not to let his thoughts show in his expression. “Your godfather,” he says. “I know you. Your family. Why are you here, my son?”