by James Lepore
Chris knew that Teresa, who had shared his bed for five years, did not miss the meaning of the look he gave Stabile. He watched as she paused, then, taking her lawyer boyfriend by the arm as if to draw him back, or keep him in place, said, “I’ve talked to him. You go ahead. I’m staying here all night.”
In the cubicle, Matt was lying on his back on a gurney, still in the baggy pants, loose shirt and sneakers he had worn to his party. A portion of his head had been shaved just above the hair line to expose his lacerated scalp. His lustrous black hair fell over a clean white dressing that extended across most of his forehead. Chris thought he looked handsome, lying there, the upper portion of the gurney tilted up so that he could survey his surroundings. That, he knew, was one of Matt’s problems. He was too good looking for his own good. People, even adults who should know better, deferred to him for that reason alone. Add to this beauty his place in a very powerful crime family and you had a brew much too heady for a pubescent boy. His face was drained of its usual high color, but he seemed alert, although disappointed that the person who walked through the door was his father and not someone else.
“Who were you expecting?” Chris asked as he stood at the foot of the gurney.
“No one.”
“Your grandfather, maybe?”
“No. Mommy, I guess.”
“What happened?”
“This kid attacked me.”
“Who?”
“Sean McBride.”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why did he attack you?”
Chris watched as Matt looked away, then over his father’s shoulder toward the door. The boy did not know it, but these movements were part of his answer. Although this was by far the most serious of any that had preceded it, Chris had been in similar situations with his children in that past. His rule of thumb was simple: the response he received, although important and telling, was not as critical as the fact that the question had been put with authority and with an unmistakable expectation that it be answered honestly.
“Tell me what happened, Matt.”
“He’s a jerkoff.”
“What did he do?”
“He’s been bugging me for weeks.”
“How?”
“He’s got things to say about grandpa.”
“What kind of things?”
“I don’t know. Things.”
“So he isn’t in awe of you or your grandfather.”
Silence.
“What did he do tonight?”
“He bugged me. He was drunk and wouldn’t stop.”
“So you hit him with a baseball bat.”
“An aluminum bat.”
“What difference does that make? He’s having surgery right now.”
“I’m glad he’s having surgery. He deserved it. Maybe he’ll shut up from now on.”
“Tell that to the judge when you go to court.”
“I’m not going to court. Tom took care of it already. And Uncle Frank.”
“The other kids at the party will be questioned.”
“They’ll never say anything against me. And neither will Sean. He’ll say he fell down some steps.”
When this exchange ended, the contempt on Matt’s face and in his voice made Chris want to slap him and slap him hard. It would have been the first time he had ever laid a hand on either of his children in anger. He controlled himself at the last second, his hand stayed by the realization that his anger, cold and pure, could be put to better use than striking his fool of a son. Where had this anger, an old friend, been these last two years? Why had it taken Matt’s painful condescension to arouse it?
Matt must have seen the fury that appeared for just an instant in his father’s eyes because Chris noticed the boy’s eyes widen and thought he saw the first glimmer of contrition, or fear, in them. Good, he thought, there will be more of both to come, I promise.
As he left Matt’s room, Chris almost literally bumped into Teresa, who was on her way in. She halted, and then tried to brush past him, but he took her arm and pulled her back into the corridor. They stared hard at each other for a second in the glare of the hospital’s fluorescent lighting.
“What?” Teresa said.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I know you. You would have made him into a criminal, blown it all out of proportion.”
“It would be hard to blow this out of proportion, Teresa. That was a violent thing he did.”
“You would have found a way.”
“That’s your excuse for taking the easy way.”
“It’s my father’s way. He sent Uncle Frank.”
“He’s at a party drinking on the night of his grandmother’s funeral. He beats another kid with a baseball bat. He drives – probably drunk – without a license. He ruins somebody’s car. And he gets off scot free. Not only does he get off scot free, but he sees how things are fixed for him, how everybody kisses his ass.”
“What would you have done? Let him go to court? Let him go to jail?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll never come to live with you, Chris. That’s my answer. You might as well know it now.”
Chris knew that even though their divorce had been a blow to Teresa, she had respected him for the way he handled his role as provider and father. She had swallowed her pride for the benefit of her children, who were ages four and two at the time of the separation and loved their father very much. Looking at her face now, tired but grim and defiant, he wondered if the bad taste still lingered in her mouth, and if this was her way of spitting it out once and for all. She would ruin Matt to hurt Chris, the way Rose had ruined Joseph to hurt Joe Black, who had been helpless to resist his relentlessly protective wife. But Chris was not Joe Black. Or was he? Suddenly, assassination did not seem so surreal, not if it meant tearing his son from the grip of Teresa and her family. The harsh irony of this thought forced a bitter smile onto Chris’ face.
“What are you smiling at?” Teresa asked.
“Nothing. I’m just tired.”
“You played your best card when you divorced me, Chris. You’re not getting Matt away from me, whatever’s going through your head.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Chris replied. Then, seeing a side exit at the end of the hall they were standing in, having no desire to shake hands with or say goodbye to Frank DiGiglio et al in the waiting room, he turned and left the hospital.
3.
“You don’t have to have anything to do with my father.”
“Yes, I do. He’d be my father-in-law.”
“I mean his business.”
“That wouldn’t matter. I’d be in the family.”
“You decide. I’ll still love you, either way.”
Chris looked around Washington Square Park, seeing it but not seeing it. In his world – a world he had been trying to escape since he was fourteen – family had two meanings, equal and not separate. He felt today the way he did on the day ten years earlier when he woke up in St. Vincent’s Hospital, his nose and both of his legs broken, barely remembering the split second car crash that ended his meteoric track career, but not his running from Joe Black.
“Of course I prefer marriage,” Teresa continued. “I much prefer it. This is our son, or daughter, inside of me.”
“There’s no way you’re having an abortion.”
“We could elope. I don’t mind.”
“Why should we insult your parents when we’re the ones who caused this problem? You’re their only child. Your mother’s probably been looking forward to your wedding since the day you were born.”
“I’m sorry about this, Chris.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s the hand of God.”
“I don’t mean the baby. I mean who my father is. We could move away. I wouldn’t mind that either, if you thought we should.”
Number one in his high school class, Chris went from LaSalle Academy on the Lower East Side uptown to Columbia
on a full academic scholarship, and then on to NYU Law School, where he was named editor of the Law Review in his last year. In the spring of 1984, in the second semester of his first year, he went to a classmate’s party and there met a twenty-year-old undergraduate named Teresa DiGiglio. Drinking wine on a fire escape overlooking Washington Square Park, Chet Baker’s dreamy version of “Let’s Get Lost” drifting out to them from the crowded apartment, they clicked. Later, they walked in the park and sat on a bench near the arch and kissed, while nearby three black teenagers were rapping out a song about “niggah” brotherhood.
Two years later, they found themselves on the same park bench discussing a future that, to his disgust, Chris had refused to confront while having great sex and lots of fun with the cherished daughter of a Mafia overlord. That future had just landed on his head. On a trip they had taken in March to Florida, Teresa had, she said, missed a day taking her birth control pill. If she had told him the truth: that she had taken herself off the pill in January, Chris might have been angry, but he would have almost certainly respected her for taking her life in her own hands. In the face of his self-indulgence and immaturity, what were her choices? It was not this initial deceit that ultimately destroyed their marriage, it was the assumption that grew from it on Teresa’s part, the assumption that Chris would fit in in New Jersey and, eventually, come to see and accept the very great advantages of being in the DiGiglio family. Having manipulated him once – for the greater good of both of them was her rationale – she assumed she could do it again. But Chris was not controllable. His conscience had led him into marriage. His pride would lead him out of it.
That night, they broke the news to Anthony and Mildred at a casual dinner on the patio of the don’s estate in Upper Montclair, a verdant redoubt in North Jersey’s rolling hills. There was no gnashing of teeth. Indeed, it seemed to Chris that Junior Boy and Mildred were secretly delighted with the imminent prospect of a wedding and a grandchild in one fell swoop. They were a Mafia king and his queen, but, like virtually all Italians, they valued family – blood family – above all else. And, of course, it did not hurt that Chris’ father, an official member of la cosa nostra, was known to and respected by the don. After the meal, Chris found himself alone with Junior Boy in his book-lined study.
“You can have the use of this library whenever you want it,” the don said.
Chris, his back to the quiet, spacious room, had been looking at a shelf that contained Dante, Boccaccio and Gibbons, among others, all bound in soft and obviously worn morocco leather. Turning, he saw his father-in-lawto-be seated behind his large mahogany desk, leaning back, his elbows resting on the arms of his plush chair. The don, who had turned fifty the month before, was a roughly cut but handsome man. His graying hair and the age lines that were beginning to appear on his face served only to burnish his Imperial-Roman features with a dignity and a stark superiority that set him apart from most other men.
“Thank you,” Chris replied.
“Your father and I worked together once.”
“I don’t think I’ll ask what the job was.”
“Richie the Boot’s son was kidnapped in Italy by the Red Brigade,” DiGiglio said, smiling. “He asked my father to negotiate his release. My father sent me to Italy, and the Boot sent Joe Black to help me out. We delivered the ransom, picked up the kid and brought him home. Half of one of his ears was cut off. He was seventeen years old, a spoiled brat who thought he was an aristocrat.”
“When was this?”
“In the early seventies.”
“How is he now?”
“The kid?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a grown man. He raises horses in Kentucky. He wears his hair long.”
Chris knew that there was a reason for this meeting. In the silence that followed, he waited for it to be revealed. When it came, he was not ready for it.
“What do you think of me?” Junior Boy asked, breaking the silence.
Chris was tempted to say, I don’t know you, and leave it at that, but there was something about DiGiglio’s demeanor that made him think twice. Junior Boy, already a great and feared don, was not great and feared for no reason. Chris knew instinctively that a person would be wise to speak truthfully to him, that deceit and manipulation were games he played well and always won, making his opponent’s loss a painful one at the same time.
“I’m not sure what to think,” Chris finally answered.
“You’re ambivalent?”
“Yes.”
“That’s originally a psychological term, describing the state of conflicting emotions in a person for another person, like love and hate.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“It’s debilitating unless it’s resolved.”
“Have you studied psychology?”
“A little. Human nature, though, I’ve taken a hard look at.”
“You asked me how I felt.”
“And you gave an honest answer. What are your plans after your clerkship?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to stay in the city. The U.S. Attorney’s office interests me.”
“You’d be creating another conflict.”
“I know.”
“Would you like a brandy?”
“Sure.”
In July, Chris and Teresa were married on the estate. Three hundred people, some of whom canceled plans a lifetime in the making to be there, toasted the newlyweds with Dom Perignon, and celebrated under the stars and elegant tents into the night. When Chris told his father about Teresa, Joe Black had looked at him steadily for a moment or two, his dark Sicilian face unreadable, then said, “They’ll make you choose.” All night long, along with the music and the noise of the party, Joe Black’s words buzzed in Chris’ head.
For the next five years, the agenda of the DiGiglio family was, though subtle and not undignified, in fact, to make Chris choose. No one asked him to be a killer, or hijack trucks, but with his law degree and good mind, he could analyze businesses vulnerable to Mafia takeovers, he could speak intelligently with the family’s outside lawyers, of whom there were too many and who were never wholly trusted, and he could help immensely in the intricate laundering schemes that cleaned the millions of dollars of dirty money that came into the family from its various enterprises each year.
Chris knew that everyone expected him to eventually abandon his idealism and leave the straight world behind. Everyone, that is, except Junior Boy. You’re stiff necked, like your father, he would say, an outlier. He’ll get killed for it one day, but he’ll die his own man. Chris was grateful for Junior Boy’s hands-off attitude. It might have been a strategy, but it helped at home, where his refusal to commit caused a great deal of friction between him and Teresa, who did not want her husband to be forever an outsider, but who took her father’s lead in all things. The family waited, hoping for a change, but Chris continued to make the deadening commute from his home in the north Jersey suburbs to his job prosecuting securities fraud at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan.
Chris’ primary antagonists were Junior Boy’s brother, Aldo, and Aldo’s two sons Aldo, Jr. and Sal. Aldo, whose crude exterior camouflaged a keen if parochial mind, a mind that saw Chris from the beginning as a threat to his sons’position in the family. Unfortunately, the don seemed to respect Chris, and thus it would not do for Aldo to reveal his true feelings. His boys, however, were Chris’ age, and a challenge coming from them would be seen as natural, even expected. Neither Aldo Jr. nor Sal was very bright. Both were spoiled and arrogant, and predisposed to resent Chris, an Ivy League lawyer who refused to get his hands dirty in the family business. Chris saw early on that they were their father’s surrogates in a guerrilla war aimed at undermining the elitist son of the notorious Joe Black Massi.
Family gatherings, of which there were many, were the battlegrounds. The weapons were remarks—only half in jest, usually tinged with a crude sarcasm, sometimes openly insulting—aimed at Chris’ loyalty to the hated
U.S. Attorney and FBI in Manhattan, offices that had been systematically decimating the Mafia families in the five boroughs of New York through the decade of the eighties. “It’s too bad your father didn’t have a son” was one of Sal’s favorite statements to Chris.
The war ended, along with Chris’ marriage, on a Sunday in April of 1990 after a party held at Aldo Sr.’s house to celebrate the christening of Aldo III, Aldo Jr.’s first son. It appeared to Chris, at least, that Aldo Jr. viewed the fathering of a son as a feat of substantial magnitude, so puffed up was he the entire day. He referred to the child more than once as “the little don” and asked Chris with mock curiosity why he had given his son an American name like Matt. Sal also had a son, age four, who took pleasure in torturing Matt, then two. Before dinner Chris watched as Sal Jr. ripped a toy truck from Matt’s hands, pushing him to the floor in the process, while out of the corner of his eye he saw Sal Sr. beaming.
Before the desert was served, Chris excused himself and quickly drove to his and Teresa’s house, only ten minutes away, where he picked up the Glock .45 caliber semiautomatic pistol that had been one of Junior Boy’s wedding presents, along with some rope. When he returned to Aldo’s house, he saw Sal standing by himself in the driveway smoking a cigarette. He parked and got out of his car with the Glock pointing at Sal’s chest. He forced Sal into the driver’s seat of his car, then got into the rear seat behind him and whacked him on the head with the gun with enough force to daze him so that he could tie him up at hands and feet with no trouble. In the house, he found Aldo Jr. and told him there was something he wanted to show him in his car. Outside, he poked the Glock hard into Aldo Jr.’s ribs and told him to get in the car next to his brother, who was awake but moaning. Chris got in the back seat and placed the gun against the back of Aldo,Jr.’s head.
“I don’t ever want to hear your voice again,” he said, “or your brother’s. I don’t ever want to see a cross-eyed look from either of you. And I want Sal’s jerkoff son to stay away from Matt. I would kill you both right now, but I think you should have this one warning. Do you understand?”