by Robert Greer
“Marcello claims, Marcello claims. Who the fuck died and made him king? I said the same damn thing two weeks ago in Chicago. We shoulda gone with what worked in Guatemala or the Dominican Republic when we needed to resolve those problems. Eliminate the son of a bitch straight off. But no, instead Marcello and that wet-behind-the-ears cocksucker outta Denver dredge up some diversionary hare-brained ‘Let’s go home to Cuba’ scheme that was originally cooked up by the CIA to support a bunch of fuckin’ Cuban carpetbaggers. And to top it off, Ornasetti appropriates the government operation’s code name and tries to make it fit for us.” Trafficante shook his head. “Stealin’ the name of a plan conjured up by the fuckin’ CIA. Shit, that shoulda told us everything we needed to know, from the get-go, as the shines like to say.”
Benny Leopole shook his head, hoping not to rile Trafficante any further. He’d seen the results of Trafficante’s fully steamed ire, and he had no intention of being a convenient punching bag. Choosing his words carefully, he said, “We needed somethin’ floatin’ around out there as a diversion. How else could you have protected your shooter?”
“Yeah, a fuckin’ Mongoose Deception,” Trafficante blared. “Jesus Christ! Four fuckin’ Castro haters ridin’ around in a low rider, cruisin’ up and down a parade route guarded by an army of feds and cops. And to top it off we cart in some dumb-ass Puerto Rican as a two trigger. Some fuckin’ plan.” Seething, Trafficante stumbled over to a nearby chair, plopped down in it, took off his left tennis shoe, and rubbed his bare foot. “My foot hurts like hell. Wonder if I’m gettin’ arthritis.”
“Better go see a doctor.”
“Did,” said Trafficante. “And a smart one. A Jew boy, no less. And I can guarantee you this. He ain’t got one single connection to Cuba. Mongoose Deception, my ass. This whole damn plan’s busted flat on its face in two fuckin’ states.”
“We still got Texas.”
“Yeah, we sure do.” Trafficante broke into a fully engaged thoughtful grin. “Get me Rosselli on the phone. It’s time to cut out the Cubans, and diversionary nutcase right-wingers like the one Ornasetti pulled outta a hat up in Chicago, and Creole half-breeds. Time to go with our original plan, jettison Ornasetti, and put this diversionary shit to bed. Deception, my ass. This ain’t a fuckin’ war. We might as well have used a earful of spots to direct attention away from the kill zone. At least we’d a known the cops woulda jailed those motherfuckers right off.” Massaging the ball of his foot, Trafficante glanced up at Leopole. “Guess it could be arthritis or, God forbid, a blood clot.” He paused thoughtfully before reaching for a nearby towel. “But then, if it was a clot, I’d’ve probably bought it by now.” Both eyes suddenly blazing with sincerity, he added, “Maybe that’s what we should’ve ordered up. A blood clot for that fuckin’ traitor who promised us hands off. A blood clot right in the middle of his fuckin’ highbrow, potato-famine-escapin’, woman-chasin’, lyin’-ass brain.”
New Iberia, Louisiana, November 22, 1963
Antoine Ducane was home. He could feel the warmth and almost reach out and touch the soft amber glow of his mother’s kitchen—taste her cinnamony, sugar-frosted sticky rolls, hear the crackle of a late-November, first-of-the-season, cold-snap-breaking, New Iberia sugarcane country fire. But most of all, he could feel the protective blanket of his mother’s love.
He watched Willette limp barefoot around the kitchen, suffering through the sixth day of an acute post-Po’ Monkey’s Lounge onset of gout, her left big toe pulsating in pain, and grimaced. Willette had been hobbling around the clapboard-sided, four-room house for most of the morning, and as he watched her struggle, he wanted to say, W, no more red meat. Wanted to shout, I’m a grown man now, so you can stop the babying! After all, he was pretty good in the kitchen, and had been for several years. He could fend for himself, and he didn’t need her fighting off pain in order to whip him up a four-thousand-calorie, first-light-of-day, cane-field-worker’s breakfast, especially since it was now close to 10:30 in the morning. He wanted to tell her all those things, but he couldn’t—and wouldn’t. Refusing to eat would hurt her too deeply, cause her to think that somehow she wasn’t really needed, make her wonder if somewhere up North he hadn’t stashed himself a woman.
Leaning against the countertop and smiling through her pain, Willette said, “You want a splash of goat’s milk and clover honey to sweeten up your coffee?”
Antoine nodded, preoccupation showing on his face.
“Somethin’ hangin’ you up, Sugar Sweet?” Willette asked, gingerly making her way across the soft pine flooring toward the refrigerator. Extracting a pitcher of goat’s milk from the Kelvinator’s top shelf, she wrangled a squeeze tube of clover honey off an adjacent countertop with her thumb and forefinger, limped back across the room, and deposited the milk and honey on the table where Antoine was seated.
“Nothin’ I can’t fix.” Antoine’s response had a nervous edge.
“Can’t you tell me about it, baby?”
“It’s nothin’. My pay’s a little late this month, that’s all.”
Willette winked knowingly. “You gotta expect that when you work for folks up North. Money don’t mean the same thing to them that it means to folks down here.”
“Guess not.” Antoine added a generous pour of goat’s milk to his coffee until the drink soon matched the light mocha color of his skin, squeezed in a tablespoon-sized dollop of honey, and stirred the concoction with his middle finger for several seconds before extracting the finger and licking it clean. “What’s on the agenda for today, W?” he asked, taking a sip of coffee, unwilling to tell his mother that if he didn’t have a resolution to his money problem by that evening, he was headed back up North.
“I gotta run over to Loralene Goodson’s to pick up a stash of weed she wants me to dry out for her, and there’s my daily numbers run, and I got a few of the boys over in the sheriff’s office to fix up with dates.”
Holding up his hand, Antoine cut his mother off. “I’d say you’ve got a full day.” He had no idea where W’s incandescent energy came from, but for over twenty years she’d managed to be the eyes, ears, and trusted go-between for local organized crime and the people of New Iberia’s predominantly black section of parish. He’d never fully understood her true connection to the larger Louisiana crime beast that had swallowed her whole when she was young, and she’d never ever attempted to explain it to him. All he knew was that she had tenacious threads anchoring her to political and criminal movers and shakers all over the state. If it ever came down to it, he knew that W could, at the drop of a pin, seek counsel from the very top echelon of folk who fed and managed organized Louisiana crime. Even knowing what he did about his mother and her friends, he had, regardless of personal need, rarely broached the issue of her underworld connections. It was a hard-and-fast rule and, except for his youthful face-off with the rent-a-cop bank guard he’d almost killed, to his knowledge she’d never sought any special favors.
Shaking his head in awe of her stamina, he said, “You’re always on the move, W.”
“Keeps me young and supple.” Ignoring the screaming pain in her big toe, she flexed into a deep knee bend, floundering momentarily on the way back up.
Rushing to her aid, Antoine said, “No need to prove it. Now, if you don’t mind, would you stop with the Radio City showgirl choreography and sit down with me for breakfast?”
Willette smiled and limped over to the claw-footed, inlaid walnut kitchen table, a table that had long ago belonged to her mother. As she sat down across from Antoine, she eyed an eight-inch-long gash that radiated from the table’s center toward her. The gash, its edges once quite sharp, had rounded off over the years, and the wound in the wood that had been made by a hatchet on the last day she’d ever seen her baby sister, Monique, had become a retracted scar. Willette slowly ran an index finger along the entire length of the gash until her eyes turned misty.
Knowing that if he let his mother’s thoughts drift off into the sad, seductive no-man�
��s-land that had swallowed, then devoured, her long-dead sister, the rest of the day would turn predictably morose, Antoine said, “How ’bout some coffee, W?” hoping to skirt certain darkness. “And while you’re at it, you better catch those grits. They’re steamin’.”
Willette’s response was a pleading look skyward, a sad, dependent look that asked, Why? Forcing herself to smile, she rose and hobbled toward the stove and a pot of steaming grits, telling herself as she did that she had her baby there, her “Sugar Sweet” baby Antoine, and there was no earthly reason once again to walk down a road that always turned her insides into vacuum-filled mush. Stirring the grits, she eyed the rising cloud of steam. “They’re just about ready, baby.” She winked at Antoine to let him know that the darkness would pass, but for the moment she remained in a pit of sorrow.
Willette had been gone for nearly half an hour and Antoine’s belly still growled from overstuffed pleasure when he left the house to walk the quarter mile to Highway 182 to use a roadside pay phone. He didn’t want a record of a call to Rollie Ornasetti showing up on his mother’s phone bill, and he also didn’t want to chance being interrupted by Willette in the midst of a potential long-distance argument with the self-centered Colorado mobster. Antoine knew he certainly wasn’t a big enough fish to warrant a wiretap, and although Ornasetti would’ve liked people to think he was, the Rocky Mountain crime boss wannabe wasn’t in that league either, so a pay-phone call was a pretty safe bet.
The sun had slipped out from behind a blanket of high, thin clouds as the warm Gulf Coast air once again asserted its mugginess. A semi loaded with chickens rumbled by on the highway just as Antoine reached the phone booth. The barnyard smell wafting from the truck hung in the air until it crested a rise the locals referred to as a hill. The semi’s illegal jake brake backed off loudly, and moments later, except for the hum of a generator far up the road, Antoine’s world fell silent.
Extracting a handful of change from the right pocket of his shorts and stepping into the urine-smelling phone booth, he arranged a column of nickels, dimes, and finally quarters on the stainless-steel shelf beneath the phone, dropped a dime into the pay slot, and dialed Rollie Ornasetti’s Denver number. When a robotic-sounding operator came on the line and asked for a deposit of seventy-five more cents, Antoine obliged, leaned against one of the phone booth’s grimy walls of glass, and waited for an answer on the other end.
The gravelly voiced man who answered wheezed his displeasure. “Ornasetti’s.” The sound of high-powered blow dryers hummed in the background. It was a signature sound that Antoine, a car-wash-and-buff-and-shine jockey during his early teens, knew well. “Need to speak to Ornasetti. Tell him it’s Antoine Ducane callin’ from Louisiana,” Antoine said in a single quick clip, hoping the man would consider a long-distance call weighty enough to at least try to locate Ornasetti.
“I’ll see if he’s around,” the man said noncommittally before clunking the receiver down and walking away.
Moments later, Ornasetti came on the line. “Antoine, my friend—and all the way from the Pelican State. What can I do for you?” The crystal-clear connection had Ornasetti sounding as if he were standing in the phone booth with Antoine.
“You can pony up my ten grand, for openers,” Antoine said forcefully.
Ornasetti squeezed out a weak-sounding snort. Demanding people, and he was clearly one himself, had always irritated him, and a demanding high-yellow, green-eyed, swamp-mucking, third-string Creole hit man rubbed him raw. He’d been traveling in heady company of late, standing shoulder to shoulder with three of America’s top crime bosses, and that fact alone had turned his normally inflated ego into a swift tide rising. “Come again?”
“My money from the Chicago transaction. I need it.”
“And that transaction would have been?”
Antoine stepped back from the phone, stood ramrod straight, and clenched his teeth, a painful, jaw-joint-popping sure sign that a full head of anger was about to consume him. A queasy feeling shimmered along the wall of his gut, the same undulating bottom dropping out from under him feeling that he’d experienced when, years earlier, he’d pulled the trigger of the .32 that had stopped an overeager bank guard in his tracks. The same hill-cresting, free-fall feeling he’d experienced the first time he’d agreed to kill someone for money. Relaxing his jaw muscles, he said, “Come off it, Ornasetti.”
“Okay.” Ornasetti’s tone was staccato and less than friendly. “You had a Chicago assignment. No question about that. But it didn’t come off. Too many technicalities. We agreed on that earlier.”
Antoine’s voice rose a full octave. “And that’s why, like we agreed before I headed back home, I’m settlin’ for ten bills instead of the full paycheck.”
“Our agreement called for a job to be completed, and as far as I can tell, nothing was ever finished. Tell you what, Antoine. I’ll cover all the costs you had out of pocket and pony up for your stay over in Gary. I’ll even double up on the expenses you incurred on your way up to the Windy City and back to Louisiana. Let’s say we settle on an even fifteen hundred.”
“Are you fuckin’ crazy?”
“Watch your tone with me, Ducane.”
An operator’s voice interrupted, “Seventy-five cents for three more minutes, please.”
Palms sweating, temples pulsating, Antoine deposited an additional three quarters. Realizing that Antoine was on a pay phone and incensed over the fact, Ornasetti said, “You’re on a goddamn pay phone? Are you stupid?”
Antoine rolled his tongue slowly up and down the inside of his right cheek until his mouth suddenly went dry. He gazed out the door of the phone booth into what was now a classic New Iberia misty midday haze, toward the path that led back to his mother’s house, and thought about the day five and a half years ago that he’d followed that path, not to some foul-smelling phone booth on the edge of a highway but to a life of no return. “You’re playin’ with fire, Ornasetti. Hope you understand that, and just for the record, nobody gives one shit about who you’re on the phone with.”
“You’re startin’ to sound like you need a lesson, friend.” Ornasetti’s response was haughty. “I was called in to run the Chicago operation out of respect for the quality and integrity of my services. There’s more to this deal than a slow-moving sugarcane country boy like you could ever appreciate. You’ll find out quick enough. Take my advice, Ducane. Take the fifteen hundred and vanish.”
His eyes still locked on the path that led homeward, Antoine said, “I know the level of the prey, Ornasetti, and country boy or not, I’m really not stupid. So listen up while I’m still in the mood to talk civil. I’m comin’ up to get my money, and when I get there you better have it. If you don’t, trust me, you’ll regret it every day you live afterward.”
Ornasetti responded with a truncated bellow: “You’re in over your head, bayou boy, and you’re gonna end up drowning. Threaten me again and I’ll pull the switch on you forever. Peace, brother!” He slammed down the phone.
Enraged and fighting to remain calm, Antoine listened briefly to the insulting hum of a dial tone. He yanked the receiver from its cord, kicked open the phone-booth door, and threw the receiver twenty yards down the path that led to W’s. Scooping up his coins and jamming them into his pocket, he glanced at his right arm. A swirling tattoo made up of red, white, and blue flames encircled his right forearm from wrist to elbow. Just above the top of his wrist, the words breed love had been scripted in black. He patted the tattoo with an open left hand as if to quell the flames.
Gnawing at his lower lip, he stepped from the phone booth and started down the trail that led back home. He reached the ejected receiver twenty yards into his trek. Kneeling, he picked it up and threw it toward a marsh that was half a football field away. The red, white, and blue flames encircling his forearm sparkled like fireworks in the hazy midmorning sun. “I’ll get my money,” he muttered, continuing down the path toward home. “Believe me, Ornasetti,” he added in a near whisper.
“Or there’ll be hell to pay.”
Chapter 6
Pitching quarters at a wide-mouthed mason jar, Antoine stood in the backyard of the house he’d grown up in, lost his virginity in, and first smoked dope in, looking at once angry and perplexed. The yard, his onetime playground, amounted to just under two acres of rural, largely subirrigated swamp bottom that flooded every spring and smelled of dry rot most of the summer.
Trying his best to control his anger, he continued pitching quarters as he heard a car pull up to the front of the house. The engine noise from W’s big-block V-8 and the sound of the car’s rear tires skidding to a stop in the front driveway’s gravel made him miss his mark with his last quarter by almost a foot. Mumbling “Damn” as he realized he’d missed the jar by his largest margin of the afternoon, he headed across the soft, mushy grass to tally up his hits and misses.
He’d pitched twelve quarters into the jar, or more accurately flicked them in off his thumb and forefinger, launching the coins effortlessly in what had been the final round in ten games of what folks in New Iberia had always simply called pitchin’ twenty. He’d played the game endlessly as a child and as a quarter-hustling teenager from the same backyard spot, using the very same mason jar. The jar, its rim and neck scarred and nicked from thousands of encounters with quarters, glistened in the sunlight, a testament to its durability.
As his feet sank into the grass, Antoine silently thanked W for teaching him a game that fostered relaxation. What W, he now realized, had recognized during his sometimes turbulent youth was that a simple game could teach her standoffish, fatherless child, who was trying all too fast to become a man, the elements of eye-hand coordination, the art of depth perception, and, more importantly, a little bit of patience.