by James Lepore
“What if DiGiglio doesn’t go back?”
“He will. I’ll wait.”
“And stay with me?”
“Yes.”
More silence.
“Are we turning around?” Chris said. “We’re almost at the exit.”
“No,” Michele replied. “There’s no fighting this.”
Glen Cove, once a vital commercial and retail hub servicing Gold Coast communities like Lattingtown and Locust Valley, had, by 2003, lost whatever individual character it once had to the suburban sprawl that had swept from west to east across Long Island like a plague since the end of the Second World War. Its downtown was bleak and quiet and strangely inaccessible, and the surrounding neighborhoods were a jarring mix of lovely old homesteads and cookie-cutter tract housing.
Chris, who had been here the week before, showed Michele the small ranch – one of fifty or so of the same size, shape and style – where Grace lived, and then drove to the nearby Cole School, a retro red brick affair tucked into a sagging, crowded neighborhood that looked more like parts of Brooklyn than suburban Long Island. On one side of the school was a small parking lot, on the other an unimpressive asphalt-covered playground surrounded by a chain-link fence. The building, as they circled it looking for a parking space, seemed too quiet as it sat baking in the late morning sun, and Chris hoped he had not chosen a holiday of some sort.
He parked on a side street. As they were walking toward the perimeter of the playground, a bell clanged, and a moment later, thirty or so children poured out of the school’s side door, held open by a tall, angular black woman carrying a clipboard and a brown paper bag. Michele took hold of Chris’ arm as she scanned this noisy crowd, and he felt her stiffen at the sight of two little girls, one blonde, one brunette, who were among the last to emerge. These two stopped and talked for a moment, and then the blonde ran off toward the group of wooden picnic tables where most of the kids were settling in to their lunch. The brunette turned and went back into the building.
“Is that her?” Chris asked, looking toward the blonde, who had found a seat on an empty bench.
“No,” Michele answered. “She’s the dark one.”
Chris felt the pressure on his arm increase.
“Where did she go?” Michele asked in a soft, barely audible voice.
“I don’t know,” Chris answered. “She’ll come out again.”
A moment later, she did, this time carrying the lunch box she had apparently forgotten. When she emerged into the bright daylight, she stopped for a second and looked toward Chris and Michele, shading her eyes with her free hand.
“We’re too far away,” Chris said, feeling Michele’s nails digging into his biceps. “She can’t recognize you.”
And then Grace was in motion again, running toward the picnic tables, where she joined the blonde girl on the seat saved for her.
“She has a friend,” Michele said, releasing her death grip on Chris’ arm.
“It looks that way.”
The kids quickly ate their lunches and then dispersed to various areas of the schoolyard, leaving the teacher, her back to Chris and Michele, alone at a picnic table, flipping through the papers on her clipboard while slowly eating a sandwich. Grace and her friend ran to an aluminum sliding board where the blonde girl joined the line of kids waiting their turn. Grace sat on the ground nearby and watched her classmates climb the ladder and rush down the slide, some at daredevil angles, some in twos, squeezing together stomach to back. Their shouts and laughter drifted on the hot air to Chris and Michele.
“Why isn’t she playing?” Michele asked, but before Chris could answer, the blonde spilled off the end of the slide, ran to Grace and, pulling her up by her hands, ran with her to the end of the line. In a few seconds, they were at the top of the ladder and then flying down together, their hair streaming behind them. Jumping up, they returned quickly to the end of the line. After their third tandem slide, they walked together holding hands to a nearby bench, where they sat and talked, sometimes putting their heads together the way little girls do. At the lunch area, the teacher was getting up, straightening out benches and looking at her watch.
“We should go,” Chris said, taking Michele by the arm, “someone will see us and think we’re up to no good.”
In the car, Michele rolled down her window to take a last look at Grace, who, along with the rest of the class, was grabbing her lunch box and lining up to return inside.
“I could move out here,” she said, her eyes still on her daughter. “She can keep her friend.”
“It would probably be a good idea if you were living here when Barbara Lopez files her petition with the court.”
“Would you come and visit me?”
“Of course.”
Michele watched intently until Grace was in the building, then turned in her seat to face Chris and said, “I’ll take that waitressing job first.”
“You don’t have to. You could move now if you want. I’ll find another way to get in.”
“No,” Michele said. “We’re a team.”
“An unlikely team, but you’re right.”
Chris started the car and was about to pull away from the curb, when Michele put her hand on his arm to stop him.
“Chris,” she said.
“Yes.”
She was silent for a second, lightly caressing the puckered scars remaining from Chris’ burn wounds, as if attempting to divine in them the future or, at least, the combination of words that would correctly express her thoughts.
“Do your wounds still hurt?”
“Yes,” he replied, thinking of Joe Black and Rose and Joseph, of all of the hurt that family can pile on as it burns its way across the years from one generation to the next. “And I need you to help me heal them.”
12.
Chris picked his cell phone up in the middle of its first ring.
“They’ve arrived,” Vinnie Rosamelia said at the other end.
“Good. Who’s on the corner?”
“It looks like the same guy.”
“Not Nicky or Joe Pace?”
“No.”
“We’re leaving.”
Chris snapped the phone shut, then turned to John Farrell, who was sitting on the couch, and said, “Are you ready?”
“Yes, I’m ready”
“Then let’s go, before the car gets towed.”
Chris locked the door to Michele’s apartment – they had moved into it six weeks ago, on their return from their trip to Long Island – and he and the old man headed down the stairs and across the street to the ten-year-old blue Chevy sedan that belonged to LaSalle Academy and that Farrell had borrowed for the evening. A week earlier, Michele had moved to Glen Cove. She had done her job: worked for five weeks at Sorrento, the restaurant on Canal Street, made an impression of the key to the back door using her makeup case, which Vinnie had lined with clay, told of Junior Boy’s first visit, and then of the second one, scheduled for tonight.
On the night of the first visit, Chris and Vinnie had driven by to check out the security arrangements, which were simple enough: Nicky Spags and Joe Pace at the front door and a slender but obviously hardened and experienced soldier at the corner of the alley. Yesterday, with Farrell in civilian clothes, he and Chris had made a dry run. Tonight, in his clerical garb, Farrell was a priest who had been called to give the last rites to a parishioner living in one of the tenements at the end of the alley.
On the back seat of the Chevy, there was a folded canvass tarp, several gallon cans of house paint, trays, brushes and other tools of the painter’s trade. Chris lay down on the floor and Farrell covered him with the tarp. The Saturday night special – a.22 caliber Beretta – that Vinnie had purchased for him, was tucked into the waist of Chris’ jeans. On its barrel was a silencer fashioned from a cardboard toilet paper tube and duct tape. The drive to Canal Street, through a light, misty rain, took fifteen minutes. To Chris, it seemed endless, fifteen minutes in the dark on the floor of a moving car being m
ore than enough time to confront his fears and to review his life.
His nuclear family – as outside-the-box as any in history – paraded across his mind’s eye. It hurt him to think that of them; it was only Joseph he knew at all and only because Joseph had given his life for him and then penetrated his heart from the grave with his letter. By his children, he hoped he had done well and tried to think only of the love and concern on their faces when he saw them last six weeks ago. As to women, there were only two, Teresa and Michele. Teresa was a surprise, but in the dark, Chris understood that his passion for Michele must have run along the same long forgotten channels through which he and Teresa had connected twenty years ago. It was with great relief, and a strange sense of freedom, that Chris heard John Farrell say, after the longest journey of his life, “The restaurant’s just up ahead, I see our man.”
To John Farrell, whose cancer had spread to his brain, the ride was all too brief. He had refused chemotherapy and been told the week before by his physician to expect to die in “two or three weeks, maybe four.” He had missed out in helping Chris do away with Ed Dolan, and this hurt even more when Chris told him about Dolan cutting the brake line on his car on that long ago but vividly remembered night twenty-seven years past. Tonight, he felt redeemed, his belief in God resurrected. On the verge of death, he wanted nothing more than to live fully until his strength was gone, and what better way to do that than to play a key role in the execution of a plot to murder a Mafia don? Since he had been given his fatal diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, only three short months ago, John Farrell had thought long and hard about how he wanted to die, and now the universe, in the form of Chris Massi, comes along and hands him a choice: lay on his back and say the rosary for a month or two, his senses dulled by morphine, or walk onto the stage in a modern and very real passion play. He had swiftly chosen the latter. As he negotiated his way carefully across Lower Manhattan, the hazy glare of the headlights from on-coming vehicles penetrated his skull through his eyes like a knife. He had recently succumbed to the dire need for codeine tablets to ease his pain, spreading the dosages out to the last possible unbearable second. Today, he had not taken any, and yet the pain had somehow subsided. He knew that later, or tomorrow, it would return with a vengeance and so drove slowly. Nevertheless, he drew nearer each minute to his destination and, when almost there, was forced to say, in a voice that sounded too loud and too strong to be his own, “The restaurant’s just ahead, I see our man.”
In the ten or twelve times that Junior Boy and his top people had had dinner at Sorrento, no one had ever driven in or out of the small, unnamed street that was only fifty feet from the restaurant’s entrance on Canal. Still, Phil Purcell, the trusted soldier who had so professionally executed Woody Smith, had no reason to doubt the frail old priest in the battered Chevrolet when he stopped him to ask him his business. For his part, John Farrell had no trouble acting the innocuous old man, hoping only that the pounding in his chest could not be heard and that his words were not as shaky as they sounded.
Halfway down the alley, the car was shrouded in complete darkness. At the end, Farrell parked diagonally to a group of overflowing garbage cans and, as planned, got out and went up the rickety steps of the tenement straight ahead. Perched on the landing, in deep shadow, he peered toward the street until he was certain the guard was not looking his way, then lit a cigarette and quickly threw it down and stamped it out, his signal to Chris that all was clear.
Chris, his jeans and black shirt matching the darkness, emerged slowly from the car, staying on his knees at first to get his bearings and adjust his eyes to the misty night. At the corner, about a hundred feet away, he could see a man in a dark trench coat, holding an umbrella, standing motionless in the rain with his back to the alley. Hugging the brick wall to his right – like someone escaping from prison in a B movie – he was about halfway to Sorrento’s back door when Nicky Spags, his profile painfully clear in the cone of the street light on the corner, joined the man in the trench coat and, offering him a cigarette, tried several times to light it for him under the umbrella. When this could not be done, the two men turned and headed down the alley toward Chris, who put his hand to the handle of the Beretta and pressed his back closer to the wall. Nick and the tall soldier stopped after a few steps, and this time they managed to light the cigarette. Nick lit one for himself, and the two men stood and chatted for a minute, which seemed like an hour to Chris. When Nick left, the guard resumed his position on the corner, and swiftly, Chris made it to the door, where, using the key Vinnie had had made from Michele’s clay impression – taking one last look at the guard – he unlocked the deadbolt and slipped inside.
Once inside, Chris put the key back into his pocket, returned the deadbolt to its locked position and surveyed his surroundings. They were as he expected them to be from Michele’s description. He was in a small room with a cement floor and a high exposed ceiling from which swung a lone fluorescent fixture, not on. There was a stack of boxes about four feet high and several feet long to his left. Restaurant supplies filled the rough wooden shelves that lined the sheet-rocked but unfinished walls. The bathroom door was to his right. The door to the restaurant was straight ahead. It was closed, but light from the outer hall seeped weakly into the storeroom around its perimeter, which enabled Chris to get his bearings. He crouched behind the wall of cardboard boxes, moving one slightly so that he could see through them to the entry door. Then he checked his watch and sat Indian style to wait.
Over the next hour, several men came in to use the john, including Aldo and Rocco Stabile. Aldo had flicked on the overhead light when he entered, using the wall switch to his right, and no one bothered to turn it off. The don entered a few minutes later. While he was peeing, Chris rose and, moving quickly, carried two of the cardboard boxes – one of cans of peeled tomatoes, the other of gallon tins of olive oil – and stacked them against the door. He was standing outside the bathroom, the Beretta in his right hand, the safety off, aimed at the door, when Junior Boy emerged, smoothing the lapels of his conservatively cut, banker-gray suit. There was no mistaking the unguarded weariness on the don’s lined and craggy face in the instant before he looked up and saw a gun pointed at him; nor the total comprehension and quiet command that shone immediately in his eyes when he saw who was holding that gun.
“I’ve been expecting you to turn up,” Junior Boy said, his tone conversational, as if they were resuming a prior dialogue.
“You have to answer for Joseph, Junior Boy.”
“I understand how you feel, but you’re making a mistake.”
“Where’s his body?”
“On some property we own in the Catskills. I sent a priest up there a couple of weeks ago to give him a proper burial.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. I didn’t kill your brother, Chris. He killed himself. Suicide by Mafia, you could call it.”
“He thought Dolan would save him.”
“Maybe. He was cursed, your brother. It fell to him to pay Joe Black’s cosmic debts. I had to kill him, you know that.”
“Just as you know I have to kill you.”
“No, that I don’t know. Kill me for some other reason, but not to avenge Joseph.”
“I don’t have another reason.”
“Then you can’t pull that trigger. It would be a senseless murder. You’d be in the gutter with the rest of the scum.”
I could easily kill this old man, Chris thought, and escape into the night. No one would ever know it was me. But why? To be able to kill – with or without mercy – is one thing. But to kill without honor, what does that make me?
“If it’s any consolation,” the don said, “your brother died like a man.”
“The same way you’ll die if I pull this trigger.”
“Yes, exactly.”
They’re all gone, Chris thought, Joe Black, Rose, Joseph, abruptly, in the middle of lives they couldn’t finish. Why is that? Why didn’t I get the
chance to say goodbye to any of them?
“Would you have killed me?” Chris asked.
“You didn’t threaten me or my family.”
“Yes, but what if I had?”
The two men, nearly the same height, stared at each other. A spark of recognition, of understanding, flashed quickly across Chris’ mind. He thought he saw the same spark come and go in the old man’s eyes. Anthony DiGiglio had never had a son.
“I would not have harmed you,” the don answered, finally.
Chris eased his finger off of the Beretta’s trigger, flicked the safety on with his thumb and lowered his hand.
“There’s been enough bloodshed,” he said.
“No, Chris, don’t fool yourself. Don’t spare me for humanitarian reasons. They’re the worst and most evil of all reasons not to kill. Think of Dolan and Labrutto and Rodriguez. If you had spared them, they would have gone on to wreak more havoc.”
“I have to go. Someone will realize you’re taking too long.”
“One last thing.”
“What?”
“Succeed me as the head of the family.”
“What?”
“I’m offering you my job, with my blessing, which guarantees your acceptance.”
“You’re not serious.”
“I’ve never been more serious. Have you thought about what you’ll do with your life? Even if you could, would you go back to lawyering after what you’ve done? It seems trite, doesn’t it? You know the Mafia culture, our culture. You were raised in it. You can kill, and you can think. In fact, you’re a brilliant thinker. And you’re brave. How else to explain your presence in this room, with a gun pointed at me, the great don, with a dozen of my loyal retainers – all killers – just on the other side of that door?”
Before Chris could answer, there was loud knocking on the storeroom door, and Aldo DiGiglio said, in a raised voice, “June, are you okay?”
“Yes,” Junior Boy answered. “Come in.”
The door was stopped at first by the boxes, but Aldo shoved his shoulder against it, which forced the boxes back, knocking the one on top to the floor. This seemed to startle Aldo, who burst into the room with his gun drawn.