by James Lepore
The track event was the Nike Outdoor Classic high school meet, held at Columbia’s Baker Field. Chris had purchased tickets weeks in advance – unnecessarily, since the seventeen-thousand-seat stadium was only about a third full – hoping he would be able to bring Tess and Matt, to show them something of what he had done, once, in his life. The day was beautiful, and there was a full schedule of both boys and girls events, involving individual runners and relay teams from all over the country. With Chris’ help, Tess was able to follow the girls pentathlon, in which identical seventeen-year-old twins from Texas vied for the lead all day. The one Tess was rooting for won the championship when she beat her sister by a fraction of a second in the eight hundred meters, a race that had the entire crowd on its feet.
Chris caught his breath at the staging of the boys mile, wondering if his record would be challenged or broken, but no one came close. The winner, a tall, angular boy from Maryland, ran the race in 4:28, with a Haitian boy from LaSalle Academy coming in second at 4:29.5. After this race, Tess went off to the ladies’ room, handing Matt her program. Chris watched him as he studied, at first casually and then with increasing interest. Chris knew that his name, with the numbers 4:07 after it, appeared in the world high school records section, under the names of Jim Ryun and Marty Liquori. Matt had been told about Chris’ running career, and the car accident that ended it, but had never spoken of it. He had seen the top six school boy milers in the country – twenty-five years after his father set his record – run their hearts out with the winner twenty-one seconds off his father’s pace.
“Dad,” he said, showing Chris the program, “did you see this?”
“Yes,” Chris answered, “that’s me, or was me. Did you see the kid from LaSalle? He’s only sixteen. He can be really good.”
“How old were you?”
“Two days short of sixteen.”
“That’s unbelievable.”
“What would you think about going to LaSalle, Matt,” Chris said, “living with me in the city? You could run track, break all my records.”
Chris could see that Matt was about to say something, but checked himself. They locked gazes for a second, and in that second, Chris had his first glimpse in months of his son.
“The exam is in July,” Chris continued. “I can pick up an application for you.”
“That’s an impossible record to break.”
“I wasn’t finished. I wanted to beat Ryun and Liquouri. It was all I thought about. Until my accident.”
Matt had made an effort today to suppress the gangster pose he had been affecting. He did not realize that the sullenness that had taken its place was just as wearing on his Chris’s nerves. Chris now saw what looked like thoughtfulness in his son’s eyes, and he was grateful. After twenty-five years, his few moments of glory as a track star had finally done him some good. “Think about it,” he said, and then Tess returned, and all three turned their attention back to the stadium floor.
After the meet, Chris drove downtown to Carmine Street, where they browsed in the Unoppressive Nonimperialist Bargain Bookstore. Tess, a voracious reader and nascent political junkie, bought five books. They had dinner at Cent’Anni, the only Italian restaurant left from Chris’ boyhood days on the three blocks that make up the whole of Carmine Street in its diagonal span from Seventh to Sixth Avenue. Chris had left a message on Joseph’s answering machine inviting him and Marsha to meet them, and to his surprise, they did.
Chris had never met Marsha, and she surprised him as well by turning out to be very far from the newly, and richly divorced, fashion-obsessed, desperately fading beauty he had pictured in his mind. She was a petite blonde with a British accent and freckles, looking more like thirty-two – Joseph’s age – than forty-two. An illustrator who had crossed over into the fine art world, and whose work was selling at a fancy Soho gallery, Marsha certainly had money, but she had earned it, and, if talking to her for one evening was any guide, she seemed to really like Joseph, and why not? Chris had never seen his charm and gentlemanly attentiveness, not to mention his luxurious beauty, more on display than they were that night.
Marsha noticed Tess’ bag of books, and they began discussing politics, while Matt told Joseph about the track meet, emphasizing the twenty-one second difference between Chris’ record-setting race in 1977 and the time run today by the “best high school miler in the country.” Their conversation shifted to major league baseball. They were both avid Yankee fans and they began to plan their first outing of the year to Yankee Stadium. Chris had always had misgivings about their relationship. Not because he was afraid that Joseph would be a bad influence on his impressionable son – the only time that Joseph acted like half a man was when he was around Matt – but because he was certain that sooner or later Matt’s heart would be broken when the real Joseph – the sweating, trembling, pasty white, morally weak heroin addict – was revealed to him. Tonight, he was grateful for their bond, for their talk of track and baseball. Tonight, Matt was just a boy talking to the uncle he idolized. Soon, Chris would take a step that would put him beyond redemption. But tonight, he would try to enjoy what was left of his small family, putting aside for an hour or two the thoughts of skulls on desks, body parts in suitcases, childhood daemons and revenge that had been swirling in his head for the last ten days.
10.
“I spoke to Teresa,” Junior Boy said.
“She told me,” Chris replied.
“What did she say?”
“She thinks we’re in collusion.”
“She’s a smart girl.”
“She’ll fight you.”
“I know,” the don answered, “but most battles are won before anyone takes the field.”
They were in the sunroom of Teresa’s house. The room, added after Chris left, with its sky lights and removable glass walls, was a screened porch in the summer and a solarium in the winter. The weather had been hot for late May, in the nineties, and the walls had been taken down. A ceiling fan spun some ten feet above them. The wicker chairs with floral print cushions that they sat in were tasteful and comfortable. On their return from the city, Tess and Matt had gone off to their rooms, and Teresa and Mildred were sitting in another part of the house. Outside, the night’s stillness was punctuated occasionally by the sound of an airplane overhead or the rustling of the tall trees that surrounded the property.
“What about the Velardo family?” Chris asked.
“You mean why aren’t they interested in avenging your father?”
“Right.”
On the wicker table between them was a tray containing a pitcher of lemonade, two tall glasses, a bottle of grappa and two short glasses. After pouring himself a half glass of lemonade, Chris gestured with the pitcher toward the other tall glass, an offer the don declined with a wave of his hand.
“The Velardos are no more,” DiGiglio said.
“What happened?”
“When the old man died, there was a lot of turmoil. His sons were old and sick. The grandsons fought each other for sole ownership. The nephews tried to form their own family. A small war started. Barsonetti helped the nephews kill the grandsons, then wiped out the nephews and took all the business.”
“Barsonetti again.”
“When the Boot was dying,” Junior Boy said, “I went to see him. He was from the old school. He lived quietly up on his hill. My father respected him, but he knew the sons were fools and the grandsons were greedy. He knew there would be trouble. He told me to do what I could for the old man. Velardo was ninety at the time. Barsonetti had been trying to ingratiate himself, especially with the grandsons, but the old don saw through him. He asked me to be watchful after he died, to use my judgment if I saw trouble for his family. When he died, it was Barsonetti who stirred things up.”
“Did you try to stop him?”
“No. There was nothing worth saving in the Velardo family. The grandsons and nephews were predisposed to kill each other, anyway. There wasn’t a man among them. But
a promise is a promise, so Barsonetti will die.”
“When did all this happen?”
“Six months ago. I’ve been waiting for things to calm down.”
“Have they?”
“Yes. Jimmy Barson thinks he pulled a fast one.”
“And Joe Black’s death brings me into it.”
“Yes. Have you thought about it?”
“It’s only been a week.”
“Ten days.”
“How long do I have?”
“Another week, no more.”
“I’ll let you know.”
Junior Boy leaned forward and poured grappa into the two short glasses.
“Have you read any history, Chris?” he asked.
“You can’t get through Columbia without reading some history.”
“Do you know why some nations thrive, and others don’t?”
“Why?”
“The sword. They’re not afraid to kill, not afraid of the consequences of killing.”
“Indiscriminately?”
“Of course not. But deciding who’s an enemy and who’s not is not difficult. The effete and the fat and the cowardly claim that it is. Everything’s relative to them. They’ll eventually be killed by people – nations – who smell their weakness.”
“Enemies are to be killed.”
“Yes. Before they kill you.”
“And this applies,” Chris said, “to Mafia families, as well as nations?”
“To all groups of humans that band together,” the don replied. “Tribes, nations, Mafia families.”
“Weakness always sets in, doesn’t it?” Chris said. “Rome declined and fell.”
“The Romans believed that Romulus and Remus were born of a she-wolf. Six hundred years later, they lost their feral nature and were destroyed.”
“Six hundred years is a good run.”
“There was no United Nations then, or academic elite, or New York Times. In a democracy, people can choose a policy of appeasement and cowardice. They can commit national suicide. But my family is not a democracy, and I won’t let it be destroyed.”
“Do Aldo and Frank know about your proposal to me?”
“No, but if you accept, I’ll tell them.”
“Why not tell them now?”
The don, his face in the shadows of the dimly lit room, drank down his grappa and poured himself another glassful. As he did, he leaned forward, into the cone of light cast by a nearby lamp. Chris had asked his last question with some trepidation. It came close to being an insult, challenging DiGiglio’s judgment as it did for no apparent reason. But the don’s face was unreadable. If he were playing poker, he could be holding a royal flush or a bunch of garbage.
“Are you asking that question,” his former father-in-law said, “because you don’t trust me?”
“I’m trying to understand your motivation here.”
“I told you my motive. I’m giving you a chance to avenge your father’s death, personally.”
“And then I go back to being a disbarred lawyer?”
“You’ll find something to do, I have no doubt.”
I will, Chris thought. I don’t know what it will be, but it won’t be a hitman for the Mafia, if that’s what you’re thinking.
“To your decision,” the don said, raising his glass.
Chris picked up his glass, and, saying nothing, clinked it against Junior Boy’s. Then they both drank down the fiery liquid that the Italians have been making from the dregs of the grapevine since the days of empire.
11.
The next day, Sunday, Chris walked the thirty-odd blocks east to Allison McRae’s apartment on Suffolk Street. On the way, he passed LaSalle Academy, still in business, the Christian Brothers still plugging away at their largely unnoticed mission of educating the country’s urban poor. In 2001, Chris had donated ten thousand dollars to the school. Passing its grime-darkened, yellow brick building, unchanged from the years he was there in the mid-seventies – and probably since it was built in 1838 – he contemplated the pledge of another ten thousand he had made for 2002, which would have to come out of his share of the money from the sale of his parents’ house. Luckily, he had made no pledges beyond that. He also passed the section of elevated railway on Sixth Avenue, long abandoned even when he was a boy, under which he and Ed Dolan had battered each other on that grim winter afternoon in 1977.
On the Lower East Side in the summer, people are out in droves on the streets, their give and take generating an edgy, in-your-face energy that Chris knew from years of walking the city demanded a certain amount of respectful attention. As he approached Delancey Street, he turned his mind to the present and altered his gait from the steady, easy striding of the last thirty minutes to a sort of alert gliding as he drifted on the surface as it were of the crowds, the better to negotiate their various eddies and crosscurrents. These crowds, speaking many languages and in a wide range of decibels, thinned as he approached Suffolk Street near the entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge, where the traffic on the inbound side appeared to be backed up all the way to Brooklyn. The day was sunny and the air freshened by an early morning shower, giving the neighborhood a patina of pleasantness, which, looking around, Chris knew was an illusion. This was not the New York of postcards or even of romanticized starving artists. Starving artists may live here, among the drug addicts and prostitutes and the dirt poor – the rents were cheap for all – but they would not deceive themselves about the character of the neighborhood. It was seedy and dangerous and not even remotely romantic.
At the corner of Delancey and Suffolk, three black men, looking to be in their mid-thirties, were standing with their backs against a temporary construction wall passing around a bottle wrapped in a brown paper bag. Chris kept them in his peripheral field of vision as he turned the corner and headed down Suffolk Street to number one-twelve in the middle of the block. At the top of the building’s front steps, he saw a young woman, in her mid-twenties, searching through a large, woven bag that was slung over her shoulder. As he approached, she drew out a pack of cigarettes, extracted one and lit it with a plastic lighter. She sucked it down like it was marijuana, then turned her gaze to Chris, smoke streaming from her nostrils. They assessed each other for a second, aliens making random contact, Chris in his khakis, walking shoes and polo shirt, his attitude open but careful; the woman in low-cut jeans, a tight fitting, long-sleeved black cotton shirt with a pink lightning bolt on the front, darting between her small breasts, a leather cuff bracelet on one wrist and a look of challenge in her heavily made-up eyes.
“You can’t be a narc,” she said.
“No.”
“Or vice.”
“ No.”
“Or a john.”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I’m looking for Allison McRae.”
The woman did not answer immediately. Instead, she took another drag on her Marlboro Light, then ran her free hand through her short, platinum blonde hair, exposing a quarter inch of brown roots, her demeanor and body language changing from confrontational to something else, something Chris could not quite read. She wasn’t hiding her drug habit or her prostitution, but she was no longer flaunting it.
“Are you a movie guy?” she asked.
“Movie guy?”
“Allison’s an actress.”
“No. I’m her cousin. Her mom asked me to stop by. She hasn’t heard from her in a while.”
“What’s your name?”
“Chris Massi. And you are?”
“Michele. I live across the hall from Allison.”
“What floor? I’d like to go up and see her.”
“The fourth, but she’s not home. She’s doing a movie in Los Angeles.”
“When did she leave?”
“About a month ago.”
“Why wouldn’t she tell her mother?”
“She never mentioned a mother. I’ve been putting her mail in her apartment.”
“Have you he
ard from her?”
“She called last week. She said she’d be back soon to pick up some things and close down the apartment. She’s staying out there.”
“Do you have her number?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Are you an actress?”
If Michele was an actress, then Chris was an astronaut, but his instincts told him that he should look around Allison’s apartment, and Michele was his easiest way in.
“No,” Michele answered.
“Would you like to be?”
“You want me to let you in? Is that it?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“You want sex?”
“No,” Chris answered, taking out his wallet, “but I can loan you fifty bucks. You can pay me back when you’re working.”
“Fine,” she said, snatching the bill from his hand. Chris could see by the surprise and avarice that flashed in quick succession in Michele’s eyes that the fifty dollars was a godsend. It meant an easy score of dope and a few less hours of dealing with the perverts and desperados on the street.
Allison’s apartment consisted of a small living room with a kitchen alcove, a bathroom and a tiny windowless bedroom. There was a dirty plate and a glass coated with the remains of some dark liquid, probably soda, on the coffee table in the living room. The rest of the place was fairly neat, with a tired cotton rug under the coffee table, a rocking chair, a bookshelf and a hardwood floor worn thin but swept clean.