by David Mark
“Aector. You didn’t listen. You’re supposed to be gone.”
Another man. Local, from the sound of him. Smells of last night’s whiskey and expensive aftershave.
“Ronnie. I couldn’t.”
“Shall we talk?”
“Here?”
“No. We don’t know what he can hear.”
“You think he can hear anything?”
I can! I fecking can!
—
You’re redder than usual. You okay?”
McAvoy presses the can of Coke to his forehead, imagining the contents starting to bubble, spit, and steam. Molony has angered him. He kept giving little twitches with his nose, as if trying to reposition a pair of spectacles without using his hands. He looked as though he could smell something faintly distasteful.
“Molony,” says McAvoy. “He spoke to me like I was a fool.”
“He’s a lawyer. That’s what they’re good at.”
“But he had no need to be that way. And why was he even here?” McAvoy considers Alto. “He looked ill. That yellow look to him. There was a smell coming off him I can’t place.” He stops talking and looks at Alto. “What are you doing here, anyway?”
Alto sips at his espresso. They have a seat by the window in the hospital cafeteria but neither man particularly wants the beverages or bag of potato chips on the plastic table in front of them. Outside, despite the hour, the sky is slowly darkening and it looks to McAvoy as if someone is leaching the color from the city with a straw.
“I didn’t feel I could let you go with so little reward,” says Alto, scratching his hairline. “I understand that you didn’t come here wanting to stir things up or cause trouble. New York must seem like a different world to you. Maybe I’m being naïve here but I get the sense that in your world you know who the villains are and who the good people are, and the villains go to jail.”
McAvoy looks at him with the tiniest flicker of contempt. “You think that, huh? Believe me, no one place is more rotten than the next. Some places are just bigger.”
Alto is not really listening; stirring a second sugar into his drink. “You don’t think about it,” he says, more to himself. “Cops, I mean. Cops here. You get used to how things are and then you just become a part of it. It’s only when you have to explain it to somebody else you realize how bad it all is.”
“How bad what is?”
“All this,” says Alto bleakly, gesturing with his spoon. “You tell yourself that if you catch enough bad guys then the streets will be safer, but that’s so much bullshit. I’m a garbageman but I can only pick up the shit that falls out the top of the trash cans. I can’t rummage all the way to the bottom because the stench is too goddamn strong.”
McAvoy considers his companion. Alto looks energized but tired, as if somebody is running a battery through a corpse.
“What is it you want me to know?” asks McAvoy gently.
“The feds are all about headlines,” says Alto through a sigh. “They want to bring down the people that voters have heard of. They want seizures worth a hundred million. They want to be able to say they’ve smashed a cartel or brought down a corrupt senator, rescued a hostage or saved a little girl’s life.”
McAvoy nods. He understands. He’s familiar with the same pressures.
“They don’t give a damn about Brishen and Helden and it’s not their responsibility. It’s not even mine. It’s a case for the upstate police and they’ve been told to give it to me and back off. Some of the suits think the Chechens are making a move on the Italians. The others think it’s the other way around. There are some who think the Irishmen were connected to the Boston Mob and that we’ve got some sort of three-way to look forward to. Then there’s the other theory—this was all a gigantic fuckup and everybody involved is trying to find out if they’re being messed with. In among all that, the lives and deaths of the Irish boys kind of get forgotten. Every department head is trying to use the escalation of events as an excuse to get more budget and resources for their departments. That’s what this is to the people who authorize the overtime—an opportunity to further their own agenda. Nobody really wants to know what happened to the Irishmen, Aector. Just you.”
“And you, too,” says McAvoy hopefully.
Alto smiles ruefully and finishes his coffee. “Everything will change inside the next twenty-four hours. Now that word is spreading about Luca Savoca’s body, this is all most definitely a federal case and it will be folded into their investigation into organized crime. The Italians will have known for days that their boy’s dead but now the body’s been found they can’t be seen to do nothing. They’ll already be asking questions in their own way. It’s about to get very loud. You don’t have long.”
“Long for what?”
“To find out what actually happened before the powers that be concoct a lie that everybody can live with.” Alto sighs, unsure of where to start. “We all tell lies, Aector. That’s part of our job. We tell little ones and big ones and they fold into one another and overlap and nobody ever knows the whole truth. I sometimes don’t know when I’m keeping a secret. I was asked to assist the feds on their Chechen investigation because I have some associates who can help. I was asked to look after you because when I’m not drinking I can be relied upon to not cause any trouble. But since you arrived, I swear, my reflection seems to keep telling me that I’ve got a chance to do something good. There are things you need to know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Read this,” says Alto, and he passes a manila folder across the table. “This is the investigation that got me transferred. The one that was shut down the second I found anything interesting. I wasn’t sure it mattered. Now I think it does. Here’s the inside track on your new friend Mr. Molony.”
McAvoy does as he is told. He opens the file and acquaints himself with the man who has been sitting praying at Brishen Ayres’s bedside, and who has made McAvoy’s spine twitch in frustration.
McAvoy looks up, eyes wide. “He trained as a priest?”
“Thrown out, but ask me why and I’ll tell you to spend ten years caught up in legal wrangling, because that’s what it would take to get the seminary to open its files.”
“And this offense . . . ?”
Alto nods. “Occurred in ’seventy-two. He was arrested for the attempted abduction of an eight-year-old boy from a park in Yonkers. He’d been playing with his friends and Molony started talking to them. Asked them about whether they were good children or bad children. Told them if they were good they would get candy. This little boy, he wanted candy. Went off with him and didn’t come home. Molony was caught with him in the back room of a Bible wholesaler in Tribeca. Said he wanted to read the Scriptures together. Case was dropped when the little boy’s family withdrew his statement. Molony was still a seminarian at the time. It wouldn’t be a leap to suggest the Church leaned on them.”
“This is why he was kicked out?”
“Not long after that he was back living with Mother. Worked in soup kitchens. Joined Catholic charities that would have him. Took a beating that could have killed him. But this lost lamb was picked up by a shepherd. Somebody helped him find a job and find a better use for his brain. Started him on a different road. He never fell out of love with the Church.”
McAvoy purses his lips and stares at the words on the page. He scans the text but finds no physical evidence or witness testimony. “Do you think he did anything to the boy? Really? I mean, a mistake could be forgiven . . .”
“Absolutely.” Alto nods. “I’m not huge on forgiveness, but I’ll accept that he may have done a terrible thing and felt bad enough about it not to do it again. But take a look at what happened to him in nineteen seventy-six.”
McAvoy turns the page. His face falls.
“The ambulance was called by his mother, with whom he was living at that time. She fo
und him in the bathtub. He’d castrated himself. Nearly died from blood loss.”
“There’s a statement here. From his mother.”
“Yep. Says that her son had run himself a bath after having been out with his friend Jimmy. Jimmy had said his good-byes and her boy went about his ablutions.”
“But there’s no statement from Jimmy?”
“No. And in the statement that Molony made before he was discharged from the hospital, he didn’t mention him, either. It was only in the psych report that the name came up again.”
“Psych report?”
“Standard practice. You can’t just be stitched up and sent home when you’ve cut your own balls off.”
“And you have the report?”
“I spent a lot of the department’s money to get hold of this when I first got interested in him,” says Alto.
“That’s what got your superiors asking questions?”
“I’ve had it in my drawer for a while,” says Alto, looking uncomfortable. “It was compiled when he was allowed home.”
“Home from?” asks McAvoy.
“A state facility,” says Alto, examining the backs of his hands. “I’m sure it was luxury compared to the seminary. Either way, he said that his visits from Jimmy had helped him a lot.”
McAvoy presses the warm can to his head and closes his eyes. “They’ve still got visitor records, haven’t they? You’re going to tell me that Jimmy was James Whelan.”
Alto smiles. “I am. Father Whelan, then and now. A regular visitor, like you say. But he wasn’t just there for Molony.”
“No?”
“You remember we spoke about Paulie Pugliesca? The guy whose son was blown up during the Mob wars in nineteen eighty-one?”
McAvoy nods. “Salvatore was his son, yes? And his friend died, too.”
“The friend was called Tony Blank.”
“Right,” says McAvoy, waiting for more. “And?”
“And Tony was also a patient at Saint Loretta’s. He was there at the same time as Molony.”
McAvoy considers this, looking for connections. “So, who’s Tony Blank?”
“The godson of Pugliesca.”
“So he’s Mafia, too?”
Alto produces a piece of paper from a back pocket and hands it to McAvoy as if he is performing a magic trick. It shows the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, dated March 1961. The picture is pixelated and hard to make out, but there is no mistaking the shape of two human corpses beneath white blankets. Nor can McAvoy take his eyes off the wide, staring eyes of the five-year-old boy being carried from the scene in the arms of a tall police officer clad in blue. The eyes look as though they have watched another person’s nightmares.
“This is Tony Blank. He saw it,” says Alto. “Everything they did to his mother and father.”
McAvoy screws up his face, wishing he were making notes. His head is spinning.
“Somebody killed his parents.”
“And he saw it all.”
“Who did it?”
“Nobody was ever charged. But he was released into the care of his godfather.”
“Paulie Pugliesca?”
“The same.”
“So when Salvatore was killed, it was like Pugliesca lost two sons.”
“I doubt that. I don’t think the old man ever did particularly right by the boy. He had him put away without much of a fight—the sort of institution you have nightmares about. He went back to Pugliesca in his teens and things seem to have been happy enough for a couple of years. But Tony ended up at Saint Loretta’s when he attacked a dental assistant during a checkup. Bit two of her fingers off when she pressed on his gums. Pugliesca no doubt used some influence to ensure he went into a facility rather than a prison. Either way, he was sent to Saint Loretta’s, which was a holiday home compared to where he’d been before. Molony was there at the same time, for eight months between ’seventy-four and ’seventy-five. Saint Loretta’s had a connection with the Church. They had techniques for helping people deal with their urges, though I think he’d kind of taken care of that himself.”
Alto stops and gives McAvoy an appraising glance. “I don’t know what he’ll make of you.”
“Molony? He didn’t think much of me at all.”
“No, the old man. Pugliesca.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“He’s been asking questions. Doesn’t know what to believe. Mean old bastard needs to have his mind put at ease and in this particular matter, you represent the Irish involvement. You’re Valentine’s family. It can’t hurt to answer a question or two and ask some of our own. Finish your drink. Straighten your collar. He likes us smart.”
“Ronnie, I don’t . . .”
“His driver’s outside.”
NINETEEN
The discovery of Luca Savoca’s body is the second item on the news website that Alto shoves under McAvoy’s nose as they climb from the back of the Honda. The press conference trumpeting Murray Ellison’s arrest is the first.
“Don’t start thinking that Luca’s father has just found out,” warns Ronnie. “He’ll have known about this long before we did.”
McAvoy says nothing. He doesn’t want to be here. Doesn’t know what to say. They’re back on Mulberry Street, Little Italy. The Christmas lights are red and green and white and they sway on a rapidly increasing breeze, sending gaudy shadows across the restaurant awnings and shop fronts and chinking against the walls of the tall buildings. It has begun to snow and only the most hard-core smokers sit outside the oyster bar opposite where Ronnie, McAvoy, and a fat man who declined to introduce himself now stand. It’s only a little after lunchtime, but the sky is so dark it could be midnight.
“They barely mention the Irish boys in the article,” says Ronnie, taking his phone back. “Just a passing sentence. Now it’s a gangland thing, that’s how it will stay.”
McAvoy tries to digest the information. His head is spinning. The bulletin spoke of how a rising star in a ruthless crime family had been found impaled on a tree in woodland in upstate New York. The rest is speculation and a collection of anodyne comments from the authorities. McAvoy ran out of enthusiasm to read on around the time the journalist who wrote it ran out of things to say, padding out the rest of the piece with bland information on the area where Luca Savoca was found. There’s a quote from a local woman saying she’s never seen so many cops. “This way,” says the driver, ushering McAvoy and Ronnie through the side door of a pleasant-looking restaurant. “Down the stairs.”
McAvoy fears that if he hesitates, he will never pluck up the courage to get himself moving again, so he does not pause. He follows Alto down a wide dogleg staircase. Pictures of the Roman Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain stare down from butter-colored walls.
They emerge into a large function room. It’s a tasteful space with a high ceiling and round wooden tables and chairs. A bar runs the full length of one wall, stocked with a dazzling array of spirits. Large art deco adverts for Italian staples like Limoncello and Vespas take up the space between the tops of the crushed red velvet booths and the wooden panels in the ceiling. Three-dimensional busts of various Roman emperors scowl out from the alcoves, garlanded with laurel wreaths and Italian flags.
There are three men in the restaurant. Two are seated together at a round table beneath a black-and-white image of a large tenor, caught in full operatic warble. To their left is a bust of Caesar. The third man sits at the bar, sipping water.
“Go on, they don’t bite.”
McAvoy’s footsteps sound loud in the silence of the almost-empty restaurant. He follows Ronnie around the tables toward the two seated men.
Nicky Savoca and Paulie Pugliesca are the right age to be father and son, but the two most senior figures in their crime family share no physical similarities. Old Man Pugliesca lives up to his moniker. He loo
ks as though he has spent every day of his eighty years engaged in a fight with enemies only marginally less tough than himself. He is a small man, and in a different life, his features might have been thought of as delicate. Originally, he had high cheekbones and an aquiline nose, a slender jaw and dainty fingers. Now he looks the way a mannequin would look after being hit with a hammer for a few days. What’s left of his hair is slicked back from his head and pushed behind ears that both carry hearing aids. He’s wearing a black sweater over a button-down shirt. A pair of spectacles hang on a chain around his neck. He is staring intently at something on the table in front of him, his hands busy. It looks as though he is doing a jigsaw puzzle.
Beside him, Nicky Savoca looks huge. He’s pushing three hundred pounds and his jowly face looks like orange peel. His hair is dyed the same black as his leather jacket. He’s sipping from a crystal glass half-full of amber liquid. A long, thin cigarette is burning in the ashtray at his elbow.
McAvoy operates without thinking. He offers a smile and his hand. “Mr. Savoca. I’m so dreadfully sorry about your son.”
Savoca looks up into McAvoy’s eyes with a fierceness that could shatter glass. For a moment he does nothing. Just stares into him, hard. McAvoy feels as though the inside of his skull is being stirred with a finger. Then Savoca extends his hand and takes McAvoy’s. The grip is strong, the flesh warm.
“I appreciate that,” says Savoca, still looking hard at McAvoy. “You’re the first cop to say that.”
McAvoy senses Ronnie shuffling up beside him. “We appreciate you giving this time,” he says.
Pugliesca raises his head from the task that has been distracting him. He squints at McAvoy, then Alto.
“Fucking phones,” he says, nodding at the shattered cell phone in front of him. “Used to be that when you threw a phone at the wall, you bought another fucking phone. Now it’s all so complicated. I’ve never liked the damn things but you have to move with the times, or at least that’s what they tell me.”