Headstone City

by Tom Piccirilli

  “I mean at your grave.”

  “Nobody visits. They act like they miss me so much, but nobody takes the time to say a prayer or bring a shitty plastic flower.”

  “I'm sorry, Angie.”

  “Johnny, I need you.”

  Something began to soften in his belly then, and he felt himself going with it. A weakness that had always been there but was broadening, intensifying. Maybe he was about to cut loose with a sob. Twenty minutes ago he was almost ready to cut throats, and now this fragility and brittleness. He wanted to ask her if she held him responsible the way her family did. It was a question he'd never asked her before. She didn't appear to want to make him feel guilty, didn't try to get her claws into him, the way she had in life.

  Dane heard the bull coming for him, turned to watch as the guard stepped up to the cell door. “Danetello. Let's go.”

  He stood and the guard escorted him down the tier, through the gen pop, across the courtyard, and back into the visitation quad, where all the new cons first set foot in the can. The warden was nowhere to be seen. They handed him a ream of paperwork, but nothing for him to sign. The clothes he came in with had been pressed and folded into a pile that lay on the counter. He reached for them, and another guard said, “Hold it.”

  “What's the matter?”

  “You've got a phone call, if you want it.”

  “Why wouldn't I want it?”

  “Most cons who get this close to the outside on the day of their release don't turn around and go answer the phone.”

  Dane figured it was his Grandma Lucia, jonesing for sugar. He went back and took the call. His grandmother said, “Stop off at the bakery and get some cannoli and biscotti, will you, Johnny? And don't let the girl put you off. She's dead, that one. She doesn't know what she's talking about.”

  TWO

  This town, it took your blood and replaced it with cement, asphalt, and pigeon shit. You became a part of it as much as the steel and iron, all the bone meal sprinkled into its cornerstones. No matter who you were, you got hard.

  Brooklyn, New York.

  Fourth largest city in the United States, cradle of roughnecks and Nobel Laureates, center of America's most diversified gathering of angry cultures.

  You knew it, and it knew you. Every dark corner, edge to edge. Handball and knock-hockey in Highland Park. Nights sleeping in a tent under Stoney Bridge out near the reservoirs. Stickball on Schenck Avenue, the street tar on top of the old cobblestones getting soft in the August sun. You could lift it with a spoon. Watching a parade curbside on Flatbush Ave. Playing pinball and having an egg cream at Louie's candy store. A shot of syrup, a dollop of milk, and a steady stream of seltzer. The foam would rise to the rim of the glass but never overflow.

  Louie wearing a black merchant marine wool cap, even in the summer, never taking any shit off the kids. Once, Roberto Monticelli walked in and, because his voice had changed and he'd grown a few inches that year, tried to get protection money out of Louie. Kept making vague threats about arson, using a big word like “accelerant” and asking, Hey, anybody smell smoke? Louie smacked him in the mouth, took him outside, pried up a manhole cover with a tire iron, and threw Berto down into the sewer. About the funniest thing Dane had ever seen in his life.

  The Don never came after Louie for retribution. You didn't fuck with the corner candy stores. They meant too much to the neighborhood.

  A century ago Headstone City had been known as Meadow Slope, one of the richest areas in Brooklyn. Industrial-age barons, moguls, and merchants pursued their brazen luxuries in the new era of abundance. They'd ride their carriages from Manhattan to Outlook Park and attend masquerade balls thrown along the Mile, where the wealthy built their extravagant Victorian mansions. You could see it if you put your mind to it. The fashionable elite strolling the vast gardens and embracing the celebrated performers of the day.

  Politicians and businessmen wanted a hub for cultural pursuits, where the masters of fine art could lord it over the laborers who greased their axles or fetched their tea. Local entrepreneurs constructed Grand Outlook Hall, an Italian Renaissance gallery. Five lavish stories and 150,000 square feet, a shrine to the arts that became the jewel of the Meadow Slope community. Back in the day it was considered the equal in beauty to the Academy of Music, Botanic Garden, and Grand Army Plaza.

  The marble corridors, rich oak and mahogany paneling, ballrooms, opera house, chandeliers, and terrace nurseries brought the rich and prominent flocking. They'd come in their top hats and tails, ladies dressed in Parisian gowns, to hear the star entertainers.

  During prohibition, opera connoisseur Al Capone frequented the Hall and had his own balcony seat in the ballroom. One of Al's cronies from Chicago, guy with the stupid name Peachy Fichi, tried to whack him in the loge, but Al hid behind one of the brass statues until he could get his pistol out and return fire. You could still see the bullet holes in the garlands of gold-leaf molding. Neither Al nor Peachy could shoot worth a shit. After reloading three times each, they both ran for it.

  The bus let Dane off at the corner in front of the Grand Hall. The mid-October wind braced him, leaves skittering against his ankles. He allowed two teenage couples coming out of the parking lot to precede him onto the street. Guys in tuxes and the girls in silk dresses and mink stoles. Dane asked, “Who's on tonight?”

  “Kathryn Mondiviaggi,” one of the kids said, his bow tie just a little askew. His cheeks sprouted crimson from the chill. “In the revival of La Traviata.”

  “I heard Sophia Campescio sing it on her last tour, about twenty years ago,” Dane told them.

  “Really?”

  “Michael Finelli played Alfredo Germont.”

  “Oh, he's so handsome,” the kid's date said, moving closer and speaking with a hushed tone, as if to a conspirator. This was how the real fans talked about opera, in close, like it was somehow gossip. She had a smile that caught Dane low and almost made him flinch. Her hair flowed back and forth, reaching for him. “Even more so now, with the white patches in his beard. Truly debonair.”

  “He was still new on the scene back then, before he'd made any movies.”

  “I saw Venice in the Morning seven times.”

  “He threw a rose to my grandmother in the fourth row. She rushed the stage and nearly tackled him.”

  “I would've too. Did she save the flower?”

  “Yeah. It's pressed in the front of her Bible, where the family history is filled out. All the vaccinations my father had back in the fifties, stuff like that.”

  The guys turned a deaf ear, put off by the intrusion. Dane understood, so he watched them escort their girls off without another word. You never knew who might be moving in on you, even in the opera house parking lot. Dane called out, “Have a good night!” He grinned, turned, and began to walk home.

  The neighborhood had been going to hell on the inside track for the last four decades and looked like it'd just about gotten there. Even the graffiti lacked style, none of that old, cool flair of the seventies. Now it was just a lot of fuck you's and Freddy + Boopsie on the brickwork. Kids didn't know what to do with themselves, no creative expression at all. More bars on the windows, but the small lawns still perfectly manicured and just as many people in the street, walking store to store. The old Italian ladies in black heading to the cemetery.

  Wisewood cemetery had been inspired by Central Park landscaping, laid out in the middle of Meadow Slope. It was meant to be a retreat where visitors could ponder death, guilt, and redemption.

  Trunks of stunted oak broke the hilly terrain. Rutted paths channeled through the area, cutting around knolls. The afternoon sun glazed the battered, blunt faces of granite saints and martyrs. Tombstones—rounded, sharp, or opulent—jutted at odd angles. Some less than six inches from each other.

  There were miles of the dead. Sixty thousand supposedly in Wisewood, his mother and father among them, but Christ only knew how many more had been dumped in the ravines and sumps bordering the highway
. Or like they did it in Naples, four to a casket when nobody was looking.

  There was a church within three blocks' walk in any direction. The rich and fashionable would wander the paths and picnic, playing charades on the vast lawns while funerals were being held just a few feet away. The cemetery's most prominent feature was its Gothic-style front gates. They stood wide and inviting just down the block from Grandma Lucia's place.

  Dane had been to four wakes before he was nine years old. No one would ever tell him how anybody died, just that they'd had an accident. It scared the hell out of him, thinking that all these people were croaking from falling off ladders, running with scissors, slipping on the stairs.

  It brought him together with strangers in an obscure, shared grief. Funeral processions moved through town every weekend with a fierce and forbidding commitment.

  One night he'd gone out to Wildwood with his first girl and made a mad, quiet love to her on a sheet of marble tomb. When they were finished she had the name of a dead guy pressed into her back and an ugly bruise from a bas-relief cherub.

  Dane stood in the middle of the street, staring off to the north, where the Monticelli mansion could be seen at the top of the rise, the waves in the bay breaking gently in the horizon. The surrounding woodlands of Outlook Park seemed to clutch at the skyline.

  He walked around the corner and down three blocks to Chooch's Lounge. He hung back against a nearby stoop, watching the door.

  Lit a cigarette and thought, by the end of this smoke, I ought to just do it.

  There was a reason why the big mob families were fading fast. They weren't as sharp as they used to be, not as careful anymore. In the old days, the bosses lived in their little houses and watered their tomato gardens and hid their big cash offshore or under their mattresses. Now their grandkids drove Mercedes and flashed black diamonds and didn't even bother to come up with a cover story for where the money was being filtered in from. A twenty-five-year-old in a Jag wearing suede and silk, partying at the fanciest clubs in New York, telling people he bussed tables in his uncle's pizza parlor for a living. No calm, no cool, and no code.

  The Monticellis weren't quite as sloppy as some of the others, but Vinny and Berto had cut their crews too much slack. It used to be if you spent too much out in the open, the capo would take you for a drive and stick a knitting needle in the back of your head. Then go and gather up the wife's mink stole, the Caddy, the $1,200 Italian shoes, and burn it all out in the pine barrens. The families had a quiet class and knew how to keep it under wraps.

  Nowadays, the goombas were mostly fat and slow, but they could still play pretty rough when it came down to it. You had an edge if you moved fast and didn't pick their pockets. So long as money wasn't involved, they all had to sit back, hold meetings, and have discussions on what should be done. The organizations gathering together in drunken cabals down in Atlantic City.

  Then the bosses talking to the capos, and the captains to the crews. Then more dinners and gatherings and councils to figure out who would do whatever had to be done. Maybe the verve had drained out of the process because so much of it was legal on paper now, all stock market reports and swanky coffee shop investments.

  Dane saw how it would go down.

  He'd walk into Chooch's and they'd give him the slow turn, the slick smiles, until he got up closer. The muscle would lumber to their feet, try to straight-arm him. He'd buck past and tight expressions of worry would cross their heavy faces and crinkle their bloated features. Now they'd have to move faster, reaching inside their jackets and going for their pea shooters and popguns.

  He'd known them all for most of his life. In Brooklyn, your neighbors were as much your family as your own blood. The fact that they'd had his father killed only brought them all closer together.

  By the time Dane hit the table they'd have two or three pistols in his face. Vinny would hold out his graceful hands, the thin alabaster fingers patting the air like the symphony conductor his mother always wanted him to be. He used to practice violin when they were kids, Dane riding his bike to the estate and calling up on the guardhouse phone. Vinny standing there in the high window with a look of superiority on his face. Seeing all the things that would be coming to him one day when he wouldn't have to play the fucking violin anymore.

  Back then, Dane didn't fully understand their differences, though his dad had tried to warn him.

  So he'd be at the table and Vinny would pat the air, his head angled but with that patronizing grin, as if prepared to listen to the excited musings of a child. The glass eye fixed and rigid, the fake teeth not very white so they'd look more real.

  Dane would have the chance for a beautiful uppercut if he wanted to take it. Lift Vinny right up out of his seat, snap him four feet into the air, and maybe even break his neck. In the excitement he might even be able to run, but then the whole mess would just keep following him around forever anyway.

  It would leave him only the chance to get off a wiseass insult or two. Vinny would smile, then chuckle and cock his head again, this time the other way. Like he was listening to the whispers of angels, then he'd let out his hyena laugh.

  Vinny wouldn't say much, just something innocuous and meaningless. “Welcome back, how you been?” Three or four thugs would grab Dane's arms and pull him away, rough him up a little before shoving him against a parked car. You couldn't toss people in the gutter anymore, there was too much traffic.

  This little meeting, it would hold them both until later, when one of them would have to die.

  So Dane decided to walk in, just to see if he could rush things along, get the ball rolling. For two years in the can he'd been pretty calm, but now it seemed like he just didn't want to wait anymore. It could be fun.

  THREE

  Dane had taken a step toward the front door, feeling the possibility of his own murder about to come down, when Phil Guerra, his father's old partner, drove up in a sky-blue Cadillac.

  “Oh man, beautiful.”

  Dane took a step back and nodded his approval. The car had been waxed to perfection, radiant and gleaming. He could see his reflection in what they called the Magic-Mirror acrylic lacquer finish. Looking really uptight and more than a little lost.

  It was a sin to be that uncool around a '59 Caddy.

  Sixty-two hundred Series. The dream car and pinnacle of success for every man in Headstone City around Phil's age. And their sons and grandsons.

  Outrageous rocket tail fins and jet pod taillights. The grille was a glittering partition of chrome. Dane checked and saw there was even a dummy grille across the lower rear deck. The parking and turn signal lights were paired at the outer ends of the massive front bumper. The rear bumper had huge, chrome outer pods with recessed backup lights. It got his pulse thrumming just to see the car in such cherry shape.

  Phil lowered the driver-seat window, leaned over, and asked, “You like it?”

  “Oh yeah. I know it's what you've always wanted.”

  “Me and everybody else. My old man had one of these, right off the line. Same color. I was thirteen and he never let me drive it. Not once, the prick. But he'd make me wash it twice a week after school until I had soapsuds coming out of my ass.”

  “Looks like retirement's been good to you.”

  Grinning now, posturing a touch. Phil had a self-satisfied smile that just kept going and going until you could see all the way down the back of his throat. “You ought to get something for your thirty years besides a gold watch.” Some acute bitterness there, but not like the cops who'd really gone to the wall. “Putting your life up against it every day, in the street with the garbage. I would've been better off in sanitation with the rest of the mooks.”

  Dane's father had been proud of his badge, never bitched once, and had died on the job. So Dane didn't have much sympathy for Phil. “You get a full pension, insurance, and benefits. Then you take a security position in a warehouse someplace, sleep on the job, and draw another check.”

  “Why don't you g
et in, Johnny? Before some wiseguy decides to shoo you off the sidewalk.”

  Dane thought about it. Maybe he should take care of this first. When you had accounts to square going all the way back to your childhood, it was tough to prioritize. They all threaded together and snarled into the same web. There'd be time enough for the showdown after he'd cleared up a few other matters. He took another look at the front door of Chooch's, imagining blood on the ceiling. He grinned at Phil and climbed in. “Sure.”

  Fifteen years ago, when he was seventeen, he could've stolen and sold this car for maybe twenty grand cash. Now, he couldn't even guess what it might run.

  “You know why the Caddy has such ludicrous fins?” Phil asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You do?” Like he was afraid if he said some kind of bullshit now he'd get called on it.

  Dane looked at him. “Yeah. The designers were fascinated with rockets and space missions. Before man walked on the moon, but they knew it was coming soon. You take a look at the rear, it resembles the exhaust ports of a jet, right? Even when it's sitting in your driveway, it's still cruising. Cadillac was going head-to-head with Chrysler at the time. They put a rush schedule to get the 1959 draft completed. The entire lineup flaunted visibility. Spaciousness. You can see all four corners with this windshield.”

  “I like how it curves.”

  “Nice. They did a good job refitting it.” Dane ran his hand over the seat. “You got burned on the fabric though.”

  Phil froze, the proud smile going rictus. “What?”

  “The interior isn't original.”

  “You fuckin' with me, Johnny?”

  “No.” Dane felt good, showing off. A couple hundred hours stealing cars and working in chop shops came in handy for conversations like this. “You've got the metallic fabric used on the Fleetwood Sixty Special. It trapped the hairs of women's mink coats so the manufacturer switched it out. Weird that your restorer would put this in.” Stroking it, enjoying the feel, like petting the back of a sleeping woman's head. “Same period . . . even more rare, really, when you get down to it. But not the high-class stuff.” Dane tried to think which mob garages might've had the old Fleetwood fabric tucked away for fifty years.