I said, “Ganolese threw you away. He’s got too much to worry about, and you’re just a cheap Harlem shyster. He can replace you with a nod of his head.”
“No.” The word jolted out of him. His hands started to twitch together in his lap. “Ed listens to me. Ed respects my advice.”
“He threw you away.”
“Oh, God!” His hands snapped up and covered his face.
I crossed the room and sat down opposite him and waited for him to finish. When he finally took his hands down, his eyes were red and puffed, his flat cheeks gleamed wet. The little mustache was only silly, like a little girl wearing her mother’s shoes. He said, “He called me boy. Like the kid who shines his shoes.”
“Eddie Kapp is taking over,” I said. “Ganolese doesn’t have time for shoe-shine boys. Not even if they went to college.”
“He’s a son of a bitch. Goddamn him, I treated him right.”
“Drive me up there. I’ll put in a good word for you with Eddie Kapp.”
He stared at me a second, than shook his head. “Not a chance. Not a chance.”
“Ganolese is losing. If he was winning, he’d have the time to kid you along like always.”
“Oh, damn!” His eyes squeezed shut and he pounded the chair arms with clenched fists. “I never tommed!” he cried. “I never sucked! He treated me like a white man, he never made me play the color!”
“That was when he needed you.” I got to my feet. “Take me up there.”
He was calming again. He brooded at the wall. “He shouldn’t have hung up on me,” he whispered. “He shouldn’t have called me boy. He’s a slick wop, he’s nothing but.”
“Come along,” I said.
He looked at me, and started to calculate. “You’ll put in a good word for me with Kapp?”
It was easy to lie to him. “I will,” I said. “You’ve got no reason not to trust me.”
“All right,” he said. And bought himself an hour or two more of life.
Twenty-Five
His car was this year’s Buick, cream and blue, half a block away in a tow-away zone. He had a special permit in the windshield that let him park there.
He drove across 110th westward and turned north and boarded the Henry Hudson Parkway. I sat beside him, Smitty’s gun in my lap. We didn’t talk.
He took the George Washington Bridge into Jersey, and 17 a while. General Motors cars are all very much alike. The last time I rode this way, it was with Dad in an Oldsmobile one year older than this Buick. I was sitting in the same seat. I felt the nervousness creeping up from my stomach.
He left 17 and crossed the Jersey border back into New York State, still heading north. I said the first words spoken by either of us in the car: “How much farther?”
He looked quick at me, and then out at the highway again. “A little ways beyond Monsey,” he said. “Up in Rockland County.”
“What’s this Monsey? A town?”
“Yes. Small town, built up in the last few years.”
“Then they’ll have a shopping center. Stop at a sporting goods store.”
“All right.”
After a while, he turned off the highway on a curving exit that took us under the road we’d just been on and, a little farther, over the Thruway. Then we were on 59, which was lined with newish stores fronted by blacktop parking spaces. Cheever braked nose-in before a sports shop with shotguns and hip boots displayed in the window.
I took the key out of the ignition. I’d already checked the glove compartment and it was clean. I said, “You wait here.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. He had some of his bounce back. “All I can count on now is you and Eddie Kapp. I won’t try to run away from you.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. The fact that, under other circumstances, I might have liked this smooth and quiet collegian only irritated me.
I bought, in the store, a .30-.30 rifle and a box of cartridges. It cost me a hundred eighty dollars, almost all I had with me.
Back in the car, Cheever drove again while I read the instruction booklet and practiced loading the rifle. Then Cheever said, “About a mile more up this way.”
We were passing an intersection. There was undeveloped land around us, and a general store called Willow Tree Corner. I said, “Is the house right out on the road?”
“No. It’s set back about half a mile. All uphill from the road. There’s a dirt road in.”
“Will there—slow down a minute—will there be people watching out at this end of the dirt road?”
“Yeah, there will. That’s why I had to get permission to come up. I wouldn’t want to turn in there without permission.”
“All right. Then go on by. But point it out to me.”
“All right.”
“You can drive faster again now.”
A couple of minutes later he said, “That’s it. On the right.”
I saw a dirt road that jolted down a bank and curved into the trees. There was a thick wood along here, climbing a steep slope away from the road toward the Ramapo Mountains. I caught just a glimpse of an automobile parked in the road under the trees.
Cheever said, “Now what?”
“Make the first right you can.”
About a mile farther on we turned right. It was a smaller road, asphalt, climbing steeply upward. Incongruously, there was suddenly, to our left, a small gravel parking area and a fireplace and picnic table and mesh rubbish basket. I said, “U-turn, and stop over there.”
The car was too big and the road too small. He had to back and fill. No other cars came along. It was Monday, the tenth of October, the wrong time of year for traffic on this road.
Cheever stopped on the gravel and pulled on the emergency brake. I got the keys out of the ignition and climbed out of the car. I carried the rifle and Smitty’s revolver over and set them on the picnic table.
Cheever came over after me. I said, “Sit down here.”
Something in my face or voice tipped him off. He stopped, across the table from me, and looked at my face, warily. His hands were out in front of him, the fingers splayed wide apart. He said, “What is it? What’s the matter?”
I said, “Do you know who I am?”
“You were with Kapp. Up at Lake George. You were the one came up to the car.”
“But do you know my name?”
He shook his head.
I said, “Ray Kelly. Will Kelly’s son.”
He kept shaking his head. “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. I don’t know what you think, but you’re wrong.”
“Kill the Kellys,” I said. “That’s what I’m thinking. Somebody whispered that in Ed Ganolese’s ear. Kill the Kellys, kill them all. The old man and both sons and the daughter-in-law. The whole tribe, because Eddie Kapp is coming out of Dannemora, and we can’t be sure—”
He cried, “No! You got it all wrong! It wasn’t me!”
“Because we can’t be sure,” I finished, “which boy is Eddie Kapp’s son, and even if we get the right one, some other member of the family might stand in for him, and Ed you know how sentimental those old wops can get. Isn’t that right, Cheever? Somebody whispered that to Ed Ganolese, and then he pointed the finger.”
His head was shaking again, and he was backing away from me, away from the table. “Not me!” he was crying. “You got it all wrong, Kelly, you got to believe me! It wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like that!”
“You set the whole thing in motion, Cheever,” I said. I picked up Smitty’s gun.
He turned and went running off into the woods, away from the road. In just a second, he was out of sight, and I could hear the sounds of his thrashing getting farther away.
I should have killed him. I could have. When he took his first running step, I had the revolver on him. There was one fraction of a second there when I was sighting down the top of the revolver barrel right into his left side, under his arm, his arm up in the running motion, and my brain told my finger to squeeze the trigger. And it didn’t.<
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I lowered my arm, and listened to him tumbling away through the woods, ripping his trouser legs, catching his shoelaces in the tough weeds, falling and scrabbling and running scared.
I couldn’t kill him. I told myself it was because I wasn’t sure of him, because there was still a chance it was somebody else who’d done the whispering in Ganolese’s ear. There were other reasons why he might have been the one picked to go up to Lake George.
It was true. But it wasn’t the reason. I hadn’t killed him because I couldn’t kill him.
He was gone. The woods were silent. Right doesn’t make might.
I went over and tossed the keys on the front seat of the car. I picked up the rifle and the revolver, and went across the road and into the woods on the other side, heading toward where the farm hideout should be.
I had to kill Ed Ganolese. I had to.
Twenty-Six
It was late afternoon, the sun was orange-red low in the sky behind me. It was evening dark there under the trees. I kept my direction by following the slant of the long red sunbeams.
I came to the dirt road first. I stepped out on it before I knew it was there, and then I pulled back into the trees again. I stood still and listened. Off to my right I could hear faint sounds of men talking. That would be the guards, down near the road. I turned left and moved slowly uphill through the trees, keeping close to the road.
The farmhouse was painted yellow. It was two stories high and sprawling. Three cars were parked in front of it, a black Cadillac and a tan-and-cream Chrysler and a green Buick. Four men sat on the stoop, talking together in monotones.
The house was shabby. Stretching away to the right, along a leveling of the ground, was what had once been cleared land. Behind and to the right of the main house was the barn.
Keeping to the woods, I circled to the left around the house. Once past it, the ground sloped more sharply uphill. I climbed until I could come around directly behind the house, and then I moved slowly back down to the nearest safe point. Then I sat down with my back to a tree, and watched the rear windows, and waited.
It got dark almost as suddenly as turning off a light. Then it got colder. The jacket and raincoat weren’t enough to keep the cold out. I stood and walked back and forth, flapping my arms.
From time to time, a light went on in one of the back rooms. Whenever that happened I stopped my prowling around to study the room and the people in it. I saw the kitchen, and a number of bedrooms. There were a lot of people in the house, men and women both. But it was almost ten o’clock before I finally saw Ed Ganolese.
He came into the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard and ice cubes from the refrigerator. There were bottles on the drainboard. He stood with his back to me and made himself a drink.
I’d been out there nearly five hours. My hands were cold and I hadn’t chanced smoking a cigarette. Now I was afraid my aim wouldn’t be any good. I’d always done well with the carbine in the Air Force, but this was a different weapon and I was shivering and I was nervous for need of a cigarette.
So I let him go the first time. I hunched over with my back to the house and lit a cigarette, and stood behind a tree smoking it, my hands under my jacket pressed against my sides. When the cigarette was gone, I checked through the scope again. The kitchen was empty.
This wasn’t any good. I hadn’t been able to kill Cheever. Now I’d seen Ganolese in the sights, the chiefest devil, and I’d found another reason not to pull the trigger.
I couldn’t let that weakness come over me again, the way it had with Cheever. I had to do this, and get it over with.
The sky was overcast, with no moon. I moved down the slope closer to the house, until I was nearly down to the level of the kitchen windows. I was in the open now, but I couldn’t be seen from the house. I was beyond the rectangles of light from the windows.
I crouched, the rifle leaning against my shoulder, my hands kept warm against my sides beneath my jacket. And when Ganolese came back to the kitchen, the empty glass in his hand, I refused to think of excuses.
I was so close now that his white-shirted back filled the scope. I got into kneeling position, as I’d been taught in the service. Right knee on the ground, left knee up, left elbow over left knee. I sighted down to his left shoulder blade in the white expanse of his shirt, and when I fired, the barrel kicked up and for a second I couldn’t find the kitchen window through the sight. I didn’t hear the sound of the shot at all.
When I found the window again, Ganolese was slowly folding forward over the drainboard, bottles skittering away down the slope into the sink. A tiny dot of darkish red had stained the back of his shirt, low and to the right of where I’d aimed.
I fired again, a bit high and to the left, and this time I was ready for the recoil, and I kept the target in the sight, and saw the bullet kick him forward, and the second red dot form, and then he slid down out of sight and I got to my feet, the rifle slack in my right hand.
Then sound came back to the world. I hadn’t heard either shot, or anything else between them, but now all at once, as though a radio volume knob had been turned up, I heard men calling and shouting to one another, and even the sound of heavy feet running on wooden floors inside the house.
I turned and went back up into the woods and over to the right, moving slowly in the blackness. I kept moving for half an hour or more, only the slope of the land keeping me going in a straight line. When I stopped, I was alone in silence. There was no pursuit.
I sank down against a tree to wait for dawn. It got deadly cold. I slept fitfully, dreaming of ogres and childish things. Every time I awoke again, I smoked a bitter cigarette, cupping my hands around it for warmth.
With dawn, I stood and moved around, trying to get warmth back into my body. But I kept near the same tree until the sun was up. Then I walked back through the damp woods to the house, leaving Smitty’s gun and the rifle against the tree.
It was deserted. All the cars were gone. I walked down the dirt road to the asphalt two-laner and turned left. A woman in a station wagon with two young kids and a Doberman pinscher gave me a lift to Suffern. I got a bus there for New York. I went back to the hotel room and took a long hot shower and went to bed. I slept fourteen hours, without dreams, and woke up drugged, to find there was mail for me.
It was a letter from Uncle Henry, a thick envelope fat with papers. There was a note from him, telling me to be careful, telling me I should come home to Binghamton. There were documents to be signed, about Bill’s house and Bill’s car and Bill’s kid. And there was a clipping from the Binghamton Press.
In the note, Uncle Henry said about the clipping, “This ought to relieve your mind.” The clipping showed a photograph of a scared balding man in a dark suit, his elbow held by a sun-glassed policeman. The story with the photograph told how methodical police laboratory work had finally cracked the hit-run accident of August 29th, in which Mrs. Ann Kelly, mother of one, had been killed. The driver of the death car was an electrical appliance salesman from Scranton, named Drugay.
He had nothing to do with the Organization at all.
Twenty-Seven
Eddie Kapp lied to me. He lied to me.
The Organization didn’t kill my sister-in-law.
He lied to me. In some ways, in every way, in how many ways I didn’t know.
Why did he lie to me? So I would stay with him.
But if he wanted me to stay with him, then his lies should have been the truth. His lies made sense, or there was no sense in his wanting me to stay with him.
He said I was a symbol, around which his cronies would gather. Was that a lie? If so, it had no purpose. His cronies had gathered around him. Nick Rovito had tested me. No one had asked what I was doing there. So how could that have been a lie?
He said Ed Ganolese knew about the symbol, and was trying to destroy it. Was that a lie? But a tan-and-cream Chrysler had killed my father, and had tried to kill me. And the same tan-and-cream Chrysler had tried to kill
Eddie Kapp. And the same tan-and-cream Chrysler had been parked at the farm where Ed Ganolese was hiding out. So how could that have been a lie?
Or was it only half a lie?
I was alive. I was alive.
The tan-and-cream Chrysler had pulled up beside us, thirty-eight miles from New York, and the man on the right-hand side had reached out his arm and shot my father. That was all.
They must have known my father was dead. They must have seen their bullets hit. And they had driven on.
They hadn’t stopped to be sure that I was dead. They hadn’t even fired a shot at me.
They hadn’t been trying to kill me. They had killed the man Ed Ganolese had pointed at. Will Kelly.
He was the symbol. The trusted lawyer, the right-hand man from the old days. The others might have objected that Eddie Kapp was too old, that he couldn’t handle the whole operation by himself, or that he might die very soon after they’d made their coup, and then there’d only be another power fight, and they wouldn’t want two fights like that so close together. So there was a second man, a younger man, the trusted lawyer, who knew the operation and who could handle its administration, a man they could all agree on to succeed Eddie Kapp. Will Kelly.
Without Will Kelly, Kapp couldn’t rally the others around him. So Ganolese had Kelly murdered.
And Eddie Kapp had given up. He’d written his sister, he’d planned his retirement. And then I came along.
He hadn’t been sure it would work. He’d had to talk and argue and reason and explain for a week on the telephone at Lake George, before the others would go along with it.
I could almost hear the way he’d put it: “Here’s my son, Ray Kelly. Will Kelly took care of him for me while I was out of circulation. Will trained him, gave him the background, explained the set-up to him. The boy’s young, but he knows what’s going on, and he learns fast. He’ll take over when I’m gone, and he won’t be greedy, he’ll be content with New York. And there’ll be forty, fifty years in him.”
It took him a week, and probably a lot more arguments than that, but he talked them into it. And he gave me that song-and-dance about me as a symbol because he knew I didn’t want to have anything to do with his mob. Once he was in the driver’s seat, after the coup, he didn’t care how many of his cronies knew the truth.
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