by James Lepore
“The don would like to speak to you,” he said quietly, when he reached Chris’ table.
“Sure,” Chris said, “where?”
“Upstairs.”
There was more nostalgia in store for Chris in the owner’s second floor flat, whose old world formality brought him swiftly back to the years he had spent on Carmine Street. The white lace doilies on the arms of chairs, the floral design cut into the green carpet, the linoleum in the halls: he would not have been surprised to see Rose crossing under the archway from the kitchen into the living room, wiping her hands on an apron that never seemed to get soiled. But it wasn’t Rose who greeted him, it was Anthony DiGiglio, who, turning from a window where he had been peering out through a slit in the Venetian blinds, extended his hand to shake Chris’ then pointed to easy chairs facing each other across an intricately carved mahogany coffee table.
“I’m sorry about those cameramen,” Junior Boy said to Chris when they were seated. To Joe Pace, who was standing with his hands clasped in front of him, DiGiglio said, “You can go. Tell Nick to stay by the door.”
Chris shrugged his shoulders slightly and remained silent, gazing with expectant interest at the man who, for five years, from 1985 to 1990, was his father-in-law. In those years, they had built a relationship based largely, though not wholly, on mutual respect. But they had only infrequently crossed paths in the years since, and even less frequently had they interacted in any meaningful way, though each knew the basic post-divorce history of the other. This included Chris’ indictment in 2000 for conspiracy to commit stock fraud, his trial, acquittal and subsequent bitterly fought battle with the New York Bar Association. Junior Boy, to Chris’ eye, had aged well. Though his classically Italian face had become lined and thickened, the years had done nothing to diminish its proud bearing and the force of character that stamped all of its features.
“Teresa tells me you lost your case.”
“Right,” Chris replied. “I’ve been disbarred.”
“This was recently?”
“I got the letter the day my mother died.”
“That wasn’t a good day, I guess.”
“No.”
“What now?” the don asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What about your father?”
“My father?”
“We know who killed him.”
“Who?”
“Barsonetti.”
“Barsonetti? Why?”
“He heard rumors,” DiGiglio said, “that Joe Black was holding two million in cash that the Boot had entrusted him with before he died. It was supposed to go to his grandsons, but since Barsonetti had killed them both, he felt it was rightfully his. He offered Joe Black a position as a capo and a share of the money if he would give it to him. Joe refused. Barsonetti took it as an insult.”
“Is it true?” Chris asked. “About the money?”
“Who knows? It sounds like old man Velardo. He never trusted the banks. And you know Joe Black. He could keep a secret like Fort Knox.”
“That’s it?” Chris said. “Over a rumor? An insult?”
“I believe there’s more to it.”
“Like what?”
“Who do you think wired Paulie Raimo?”
“He wired himself.”
“He wasn’t smart enough. I think it was Barsonetti.”
“The other defendants went down,” Chris said. “They were Barsonetti’s people.”
“He sacrificed them.”
“Why?”
“To get you, to ruin your life.”
Chris remained silent. Paulie Raimo, his last client, had come to him under indictment for securities fraud. Raimo and his two co-defendants worked for Jimmy Barsonetti, a rogue Mafia don who Chris had barely heard of at the time. Raimo, a punk who thought himself clever, began wearing a wire to all of his meetings relating to the case. Chris made the mistake of joining Paulie and his two cohorts for a hastily arranged dinner meeting one night at which there was an obscure discussion of a new scam they were contemplating. Obscure but enough to get Chris indicted.
“This is what I hear.” DiGiglio continued. “When the Boot died, your father’s obligation to the Velardo family was over. He turned down Barson’s offer without giving it a second thought. He did not mince words, as you probably know. He was done with killing, done with the life. He and Barson were from the same town in Sicily. To Barson, Joe Black was a hero, a legend. When Joe rejected him, it was – to him – the worse kind of insult. It meant that a paisano, a countryman from the same low social status, was contemptuous of him. He couldn’t kill him, however. He had just killed the Boot’s grandsons when he moved on their territory in Brooklyn. He knew the other families were angry. He was afraid of starting a war, afraid of Joe’s many friends in the other families, including mine. Then Raimo gets arrested. Who referred him to you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You were set up,” Junior Boy said. “Barsonetti avenged Joe Black’s insult by destroying his son’s life.”
“But you’re saying he killed him anyway.”
“When Joe Black found out Jimmy Barson was behind Raimo’s wire – had orchestrated your disgrace – he went after him. Something went wrong. Joe Black was killed.”
“A justified killing,” Chris said.
“Yes. There could be no reprisals.”
“Did my father actually have friends in the other families?”
“He allowed no one to get close, but he was highly respected. He was the last of his kind, Chris.”
“What kind is that?”
“Honorable, loyal, tight-lipped, reliable; one hundred percent in all categories.”
“A good honorable tight-lipped killer.”
“When the need arose, yes.”
“How did Barsonetti know about the money?”
“The Boot’s grandsons probably offered it to Barson,” the don replied, “to save their lives. The people who killed Joe Black tortured him to get him to talk. Of course he didn’t. That kind of a story gets around. As to the rest, I’m surmising, connecting dots. For one thing, Raimo would never have worn a wire like he did – one of his co-conspirators was a made guy, a captain – without Barson’s permission. It would have meant instant death.”
Chris shook his head, the full import of what his ex-father-in-law was telling him beginning to sink in. His father had died trying to avenge Chris, and had withstood brutal torture in order to keep his word to his don. This was at once both a comfort and a blow to Chris, whose heart had ached at not knowing how or why Joe Black had died. But that hurt was replaced by a new one. Joe Black had been done with killing, done with looking over his shoulder, freed from the hushed prison of caution and silence that had been his professional life. Yet he had picked up his gun again to avenge his first-born son of the wreckage that had been made of his life.
“He still has the head,” Junior Boy said.
“What?”
“They brought Jimmy Barson your father’s head. He boiled it down. He keeps the skull on his desk.”
Chris shook his head. He thought his surprises were over, but it seemed his whole life lately consisted of surprises.
“Do you know how to use a gun, Chris?”
“Yes. Joe Black taught me when I was a kid.”
“I have a proposal. It’s one you can refuse if you want.” Chris saw, not amused, a flicker of a smile cross the don’s craggy face as he said this.
“I’m listening.”
“We’ll set Barsonetti up for you. You look him in the eye, then kill him. We’ll take care of the body. Afterward, you’ll have our protection.”
“This,” Chris said, “is a favor you’d be doing for me?”
“Yes.”
Chris did not respond immediately. He looked over toward the front windows, their blinds drawn tightly closed. He could hear an air conditioner humming somewhere in the apartment, which was, otherwise, as respectfully silent as a church. He had
quit smoking ten years before, at the age of thirty-two, but would have gladly lit up now if he could. Junior Boy was appraising him across the coffee table, his arms and hands forming a steeple and resting on his chin. Such was the mundane setting for the pivotal moment of his life.
“I’m worried about my son,” Chris said.
“Matt?”
“Yes. I want him to live with me in New York, go to high school there. I don’t want him in your world.”
“Have you spoken to Teresa?” Junior Boy asked.
“She’s against it,” Chris replied. “She thinks you really are in the trucking business.”
“Is this a condition?”
“Yes.”
“So,” the don said, “you’re putting conditions on a favor I’m doing for you?”
“Something tells me,” Chris replied, “you’ll benefit from Barsonetti’s death.”
Junior Boy smiled broadly, and not without warmth. “So I’ll be doing you two favors,” he said.
“You don’t have to do either.”
“Where can I get in touch with you?”
After the luncheon, Chris, in no hurry to get back to New York, where he was living in two small rooms above a bar owned by his old friend, Vinnie Rosamelia, returned to the cemetery. The mid-May day was still cloudless and beautiful. Rose’s handsome bronze casket had been lowered into its grave, which was covered with raw, reddish-brown earth. His father’s headstone stood next to it. Someone had placed a bouquet of white carnations on Joe Black’s grave. Peering at it, Chris noticed a card among the flowers. He bent down to pick it up, then shaded his eyes with his right hand as he read: To Grand pa Joe, We love you and miss you. Tess and Matt. The card fluttered to the ground as Chris put both of his hands to his eyes and sobbed into them. It is one of the rules of life that parents give their children a lot of heartache, but when they die, it is a wrenching loss, as if that heartache was after all something we needed more than anything else in the world. Tonight, or tomorrow, Chris would think about becoming a killer, about trading his soul for his son’s. At the moment, childhood images of his parents, Joseph and Rose Massi, filled his head to the exclusion of all else.
2.
“Dad?”
“Tess?”
“Yes. It’s me.”
“What is it?”
“Matt’s been in an accident. I think he’s okay. The police were here. They say he beat some kid up at a party. Mom’s on her way to the hospital. She just left with grandma. I thought you should know.”
“What hospital?”
“St. Barnabas.”
“Are you sure he’s okay?”
“The police said he was hurt but not bad.”
“I’m going over there. I’ll call you later.”
“Dad, you don’t have a car.”
“I’ll borrow Joseph’s or I’ll take a cab. I’ll call you later.”
Chris had had dinner the night before at La Luna, a restaurant on Hester Street owned by a family friend named Lou Falco. Falco, who had been at Rose’s funeral earlier in the day, had spent much of the evening at Chris’ table, reminiscing about Joe Black and the various Carmine Street characters that populated the fifty-eight-year old restaurateur’s memory. To Lou, the fifties and early sixties constituted Lower Manhattan’s golden age, before the Chinese swamped Little Italy, and Greenwich Village became a gay circus. Chris lingered over his espresso, only half listening but not unappreciative of Lou’s obvious attempt to comfort and divert him. He was in no hurry to get home where four walls and a long night of weighing Anthony DiGiglio’s surreal offer awaited him. Or was it so surreal? That was the question. As he was leaving, Lou, a devotee of Italian wine, had given Chris two bottles of a private label Chianti. “This goes down like velvet,” he said. “You’ll sleep like a baby.”
Chris had not drunk the wine. The bottles were still on the counter in the apartment’s closet-sized kitchen. Neither had he slept much. The noise from Vinnie Rosamelia’s bar, The African Queen, just two floors below, although as irritating as ever, was not the problem. Laying in bed in the dark, staring mindlessly at the outline of the few objects in the cramped bedroom, the problem took on shapes of its own: Joe Black putting on his overcoat and fedora, checking the clip of his gun, his movements deliberate, heading out for one last job; his skull – eye sockets gaping – on Jimmy Barsonetti’s desk; the gleam of near omnipotence in Anthony DiGiglio’s eyes as he offered Chris his devil’s bargain; his thirteen-year-old son’s idiotic parody of a gangster dauphin; the tall, athletic form of Chris himself, aiming a gun very similar to Joe Black’s at Barsonetti’s chest, firing, then moving closer, leaning over and squeezing off another round into the barbaric don’s forehead.
The ringing of the phone next to his bed at three a.m. had neither awoken nor startled Chris. Indeed, he had picked up the receiver calmly as if he had been stoically expecting more painful images to be presented to him, and there they were: Matt in a car flipping over or slamming into a tree, Matt lying bleeding on a hospital gurney, doctors and nurses and DiGiglios and their sycophants swarming around him.
At the hospital waiting room an hour later, Chris found, in addition to Teresa and her mother, Mildred, her mother’s spinster sister, Carmela and Junior Boy’s brother Frank. Also in attendance were a New Jersey State Police lieutenant named Jorge Corrado, who was a family friend, and Tom Stabile – a family lawyer and Teresa’s boyfriend of the last five years. At the nurse’s station, two uniformed West Orange police officers were talking to an Indian woman in a white smock with a stethoscope around her neck. Teresa, her face haggard, was sitting on a couch filling out a hospital form on a clipboard resting on her lap. Mildred and Carmela sat protectively on either side of her. Corrado, in full uniform, was sitting Mussolini-like in a chair to the side of the women, with Stabile and Frank DiGiglio standing behind him. Two televisions mounted high on the walls on either end of the waiting room were blaring out news from a twenty-four hour cable channel. In this din, Chris was told that Matt had indeed not been hurt badly. He had a gash on his forehead, which had been stitched, and he was resting in a nearby E.R. cubicle waiting to be admitted to a room for purposes of observation overnight as a precaution due to his head trauma.
“How did you get here?” Teresa said.
“Joseph’s car. What happened?”
“Nothing,” Teresa answered.
“What do you mean, ‘nothing’? What are those cops doing here?”
Mildred and Carmela stiffened at the tone of Chris’ voice, and Stabile went to stand behind Teresa, placing his hands on her shoulders.
“That’s been taken care of,” Frank said, as he came over to address Chris quietly, leading him by the elbow away from the women. Chris allowed himself to be led, but after ten paces or so, he shook DiGiglio loose.
“What happened, Frank?”
“Another kid went after Matt. Matt fought back.”
“This is Matt’s version?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And the car accident?”
“The cops were called. Matt and his buddy panicked. They took off in the kid’s parents’ car. They went off the shoulder on 280 into a ditch.”
“Why were the cops called?”
“The other kid was hurt pretty bad.”
“How bad.”
“Broken arm, broken ribs.”
“How could that be?”
“Matt had a baseball bat, one of those aluminum ones.”
Chris shook his head. He had known immediately that the presence of Frank DiGiglio, the calmer and more sophisticated of Junior Boy’s two younger brothers, meant that Matt was in deeper trouble than what would follow from a boyish tussle and a joyride. But to hear that his son, who would turn fourteen in two weeks, would take a baseball bat to someone, for whatever reason, was a jolt. Pretension to gangsterhood was one thing, true violence was an altogether different story.
“Where’s the other kid?” Chris asked.
“He’s having surgery at St. Michael’s.”
“What’s Corrado doing here?”
“He put in a word for us with the cops.”
Chris looked over to the couch where Tom Stabile had pulled up a chair and was sitting facing Teresa. Corrado, who would receive an envelope with, Chris guessed, at least twenty-five hundred dollars in it for his night’s work, was still sitting stiffly, staring up at the nearest television. Such was Anthony DiGiglio’s power, and the enormous burden of being in debt to him, that a high ranking state police officer would allow himself to be on public display this way, the purpose of his presence obvious to anyone with half a brain. This thought led Chris to take a closer look at Frank, outwardly unprepossessing with his receding hairline and in his off-the-rack slacks and shirt. Did he know about Junior Boy’s offer? Chris could see no extra interest in Frank’s eyes and guessed he did not. What this meant, he would leave for another day. At the moment, there were other things on his mind.
“Which room is Matt in?” he asked.
“Down that hall on the right,” Frank replied, nodding toward a corridor just before the nurse’s station. “The first door.”
Chris headed that way, but after only a few steps, he saw Teresa in his peripheral vision rise, and heard her call out to him, “Where are you going?”
“To talk to Matt,” he said, turning to face his ex-wife.
“That’s not a good idea,” said Tom Stabile, who had followed Teresa to his feet.
Chris turned his full gaze on Stabile, whom he knew was proud of his position as one of Anthony DiGiglio’s top lawyers and the trusted boyfriend of his daughter and only child. In the years that Chris had known him, Stabile had never displayed the least bit of insight into the high price he had paid for his “position.” Though their backgrounds were similar, self-respect did not seem to be part of Tom Stabile’s lexicon. It occurred to Chris that if he was ultimately to decide to put himself in DiGiglio’s debt, he would do it – unlike Tom Stabile – knowing that he had sold a piece of his soul. He held Stabile’s gaze for another second, his eyes neutral – to someone who did not know him well – then turned to Teresa, and said, “Come on, let’s go talk to our son.”