House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  Reading on, Jeffrey learned that Fiore was married but was never seen in public with his wife. He got his female companionship from a series of attractive actresses and models, each one his exclusive companion until she was replaced by the next, a pattern the writer drolly characterized as serial bigamy. Nothing at all was known about his wife. In addition, there were rumors that couldn’t be substantiated about an earlier marriage that resulted in a child and ended in an annulment.

  The remainder of the article detailed Fiore’s rise to power under the wing of Gaetano Falcone, an old-school mobster who united New York’s underworld under his command after a series of bloody purges in the early 1960s and who still ruled the scene, through deputies like Chet Fiore, from his seaside estate in Orient Point on Long Island. Shortly after Fiore appeared on the scene, three gangsters reputed to be the mob’s enforcers at the Fulton Fish Market were found dead under an elevated section of the FDR Drive. Although the police never made a connection, the writer of the article speculated that this triple assassination was Chet Fiore’s revenge for his grandfather’s death.

  Jeffrey turned off the computer. He had read enough.

  Traffic crawled out of the city and then gradually thinned as Martin and Jeffrey made their way east. For the last sixty miles they made good time, but still it took more than two and a half hours to get to Orient Point. The village itself consisted of only a few stores and a gas station. Martin pulled into the gas station away from the pumps and Jeffrey got out of the car. The sun had set already but night hadn’t yet taken hold. It was just after seven.

  The gas station attendant was a skinny man with stringy blond hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around one of his biceps. “Help you?” he asked, wiping his hands as he approached.

  Jeffrey said that he was looking for the home of Gaetano Falcone.

  The attendant sized him up with a long look that took in not only the thousand-dollar suit and the sixty-dollar haircut but the car and the colored chauffeur as well. Definitely not cops. Anyway, cops wouldn’t ask for directions at a gas station. Or maybe they would. He didn’t much care. He thought of asking the well-dressed guy if he had business with Mr. Falcone, just to sound like he was doing the right thing, but he figured the old man had his own bodyguards and didn’t need his help.

  “Just follow the shore,” he said. “Stone wall with a gate, mile and a half, maybe three-quarters.”

  Jeffrey thanked him and walked back to the car, with the attendant’s eyes following him the whole way. He relayed the instructions to Martin as he got in and then glanced back as Martin rolled forward to pull out of the station. The attendant was jogging back to the office. Probably to put in a call, Jeffrey figured. That was fine.

  As they drove out of the tiny town, they passed immense estates on both sides of the road. Shielded from sight by forests of scrub pine, the houses, with one or two exceptions, couldn’t be seen from the road except for a few lights that managed to pierce the greenery, but the distances between the driveways gave a good indication of the size of the properties. Because of a rise in the land, the ocean wasn’t visible from the road but the salt smell of it thickened the air.

  A mile past the start of a chest-high stone wall, an immense iron gate rose as predicted to a height of perhaps twelve feet. The gate was set back from the road about ten feet, so that visitors could pull off the road while they waited for it to be opened. A considerate touch, Jeffrey thought.

  So were the two men in dark suits who stood on the other side of the gate, confirming Jeffrey’s guess about the gas station attendant. They looked enough alike to be father and son, which in fact they were. The older man opened a door in the gate and stepped through. Jeffrey rolled down his window but didn’t get out.

  “This is private property,” the man said.

  Jeffrey held out a business card. “My name is Jeffrey Blaine,” he said. “I’m an investment banker. I’d like to speak with Mr. Falcone. Please tell him that I handle the Atlantic accounts.”

  The bodyguard took the card and studied it a moment, turning on a flashlight to read it, as though he expected to find additional information there. His name was Sal and he was called Big Sal to distinguish him from his son, Little Sal, who stood three inches taller and outweighed him by forty pounds.

  “He’s not expecting you?” Big Sal said, phrasing it as a question.

  “No, but I’m sure he’ll want to see me. If this isn’t a good time, tell me when to be back and I’ll be back.”

  Big Sal considered the offer and answered with a grunting sound. He clicked off his flashlight and walked back through the door in the gate, which his son dutifully closed. The two of them vanished from sight.

  A motor of some sort started nearby, and then a golf cart, which had been hidden by the stonework, bounded onto the pine-speckled gravel drive, heading away. It had only one occupant, the father, so apparently Junior was still lurking somewhere on the other side of the gate.

  The drive was flanked on both sides by skinny, stunted pines, the only thing that would grow in the sandy, alkaline soil. The golf cart bounded comically down the path, bearing the squat, comical body of the bodyguard. Unfortunately for Big Sal, it’s impossible to appear formidable in a golf cart, and so he had to accept the indignity of looking like an oversized, loose-jointed puppet as he bounced down the lane until, about a hundred yards away, he and his cart outran the reach of Jeffrey’s headlights and disappeared from sight.

  Fifteen minutes passed. It was possible, Jeffrey realized, that he had misunderstood. Not that there was anything either to understand or misunderstand. Falcone undoubtedly operated in a world of almost telepathic communication, where messages didn’t even have to be sent to be received. Perhaps the elder bodyguard’s departure alone in the golf cart meant that Jeffrey was supposed to leave, with Bodyguard the Younger remaining behind just to make sure that he did. And to shoot him if he tried to crash the gate. He decided to give it another ten minutes and checked his watch.

  Before the ten minutes were up, the gate swung open with a whir of well-oiled machinery. Little Sal, two hundred twenty muscular pounds of him, stood in the glare of the headlights. He approached the car on the passenger side even though Jeffrey was seated directly behind Martin. He gestured for the window to be rolled down and Martin complied. Leaning in through the open window, he said, “Yeah, he says it’s okay. I’ll ride up with you.” He had skin like a road in need of repaving. He was no more than twenty years old.

  He tried the door but Martin had taken the precaution of locking them all.

  “Let him in, Martin,” Jeffrey said.

  Martin hit the switch and the young bodyguard slipped into the front seat. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

  Martin eased the car through the gate, which swung closed behind them.

  “My name’s Sal,” the young man said. “There’s rabbits and stuff running around. You gotta take it kind of slow.”

  Jeffrey thought about Lenny in Of Mice and Men. He wondered if Sal patted the rabbits.

  The drive wasn’t nearly as long as Jeffrey had imagined it would be. There was a turn to the left at about the point where he had lost sight of the golf cart, and the trees ended abruptly about fifty yards beyond that as the land rose in an immense clearing, with the sea behind it. The house itself was situated on the highest point of land, an attractive, old-fashioned house, large but without pretension. Light washed out from the neatly ordered rows of casement windows, the curtains all drawn back, suggesting that the occupants enjoyed the surroundings during the day and found no reason to close themselves off from the night.

  The elder bodyguard was waiting for them in front of the house. “Pull up where my father’s standing,” Sal instructed.

  Sal the Elder said only, “He stays out here,” when Jeffrey got out of the car. He meant Martin.

  Jeffrey followed Sal up the short flagstoned walk to the front door. Well-tended beds of rust-colored chrysanthemums, pale dahlias, and dull red sedum flank
ed the walk, dying back, at the end of their season. A few months ago the area must have been a blaze of color but now it wore the sad and forsaken look of fading flowers. Myrtle beds did their best to keep the illusion of summer alive. Possibly this was the handiwork of a well-paid gardener, but something told Jeffrey otherwise. Someone in the family tended this garden.

  Gaetano Falcone stood waiting for him in the front foyer, a round-faced man with large, soft hands and a soft, paunchy body that still gave evidence of the hardness underneath. He was wearing a sport shirt and rumpled pants. Jeffrey, who had expected to be ushered into a darkly paneled office where the godfather would be waiting for him behind an immense desk, said only, “It’s good of you to see me, sir.”

  “If you came all the way here, I can at least offer you hospitality,” Falcone said. “I’m not aware of these accounts you mentioned to my associate.”

  Falcone, of course, was being cautious. He could have had Jeffrey searched for a recording device but it was simpler and less offensive to say nothing.

  “I understand,” Jeffrey said. “I didn’t come here to talk to you about the accounts.”

  Falcone studied him quizzically for a moment. “We eat early, I’m afraid,” he said. “My wife has theories on these things, so we’ve already had dinner. But come, we’ll find something.”

  He turned and led the way past the main staircase and through a door to a short corridor that led to a spacious kitchen. He threw on the lights as he entered and made straight for the immense stainless steel refrigerator. He took out cardboard baskets of blueberries and raspberries, as well as a cantaloupe and a honeydew melon. “If you want coffee, hit that button,” he said, indicating a coffeemaker that stood at the end of the long slate counter in the middle of the room.

  Jeffrey declined.

  “Good,” Falcone said. “It’s not good for you, too much coffee. You’re an investment banker but you don’t want to talk about investments.”

  It was an invitation for Jeffrey to get to the point of this meeting while his host busied himself rinsing the blueberries and raspberries.

  “No, I wanted to talk to you about my daughter,” Jeffrey said, choosing his words carefully. Falcone’s denial of knowledge about the Atlantic accounts put him on notice that he had to be circumspect in what he said or Falcone would end the conversation with an abrupt denial. “In the spring she became involved with a young man named Eddie Vincenzo. He wasn’t interested in my daughter, Mr. Falcone, he was interested in gaining access to me on behalf of the people he works for.”

  “I don’t need the details, Mr. Blaine,” Falcone said, tacitly acknowledging that he knew them already.

  “Fine, then I can shorten the story,” Jeffrey said. “I was given assurances that this man’s involvement with my daughter would end if I complied with the wishes of the people he worked for. That hasn’t happened.”

  “Do you know for a fact that this young man is still seeing your girl?” Falcone asked.

  He added a few slices of the melons to the bowl.

  “So I’m told,” Jeffrey said.

  “And you have no control over your daughter?”

  “I do now,” Jeffrey said. “I’ve spoken with her. She understands the situation.”

  This was the right answer. Falcone had little sympathy for modern parents who believed in the possibility of fixing their children’s problems without fixing the children.

  He divided the fruit into two serving dishes and set them on the counter along with spoons and a cut-glass sugar bowl. He spooned sugar onto his own helping. They ate standing up.

  “Let me understand,” Falcone said. “You didn’t drive all the way out here because you want me to save your daughter from this boy, did you? You’ve already taken care of that.”

  “That’s right,” Jeffrey said. “I have taken care of it.”

  “Then this is about settling a score,” Falcone said, with no particular intonation expressing either approval or disapproval.

  “That’s right,” Jeffrey said, even though Falcone’s statement hadn’t been a question.

  The old man’s shrewdness didn’t come as a surprise to Jeffrey. You don’t get to be who Gaetano Falcone obviously was if your eyes don’t look straight to the heart of the matter. What else, Jeffrey wondered, did this shrewd old gangster see? Did he see that Jeffrey’s problem was with Chet Fiore more than it was with Eddie Vincenzo? Did he understand that Jeffrey Blaine had driven almost the length of Long Island to let Gaetano Falcone know that Falcone’s protégé, if that’s what Fiore was, had failed to live up to his word and had insulted the family of Falcone’s banker?

  Yes, Jeffrey was certain Falcone understood all of this. And Jeffrey wanted him to understand it. There was a boldness to the move, because it posed a question Falcone would be forced to answer in his own mind. How many men did he have who could do what Chet Fiore did for him? And how many Jeffrey Blaines? If Jeffrey was right in his calculations, Falcone would come up with the only reasonable answer.

  Falcone nodded his head and walked with his ambling shuffle to the kitchen door. The man who had met Jeffrey at the gate, the older one, the father, was standing in the corridor off the kitchen as though he had been there all along, as though, in fact, he was always there. Falcone conferred with him briefly, his back to Jeffrey, making no gestures that Jeffrey could see, his words inaudible. Then both men turned and walked in opposite directions, Falcone returning to the kitchen.

  “I understand what you’re telling me, Mr. Blaine, and I’m glad you came to me,” he said, offering his hand. He picked up the two bowls and carried them to the sink. “The matter has been taken care of to your satisfaction,” he added as he turned on the water to rinse the bowls.

  Jeffrey had Martin drop him off on Fourteenth Street and Third. He walked across to Elaine Lester’s apartment, cutting through Union Square. The area teemed with people his daughter’s age, maybe a few years older, milling about with the indiscernible purposefulness of ants on the march.

  Elaine was asleep when he rang her bell. She buzzed him in and went back to bed as she always did, leaving the front door open. She didn’t come awake until he was in bed beside her. He kissed the back of her neck and let his hand drift down past her breasts and over her belly. She rolled over onto her back and turned her face to him. “Why do you always take so damn long?” she said.

  “I’m in no hurry.”

  She said, “I am,” and they made love, each taking care of the other with the patience of long-term lovers. She fell asleep afterward and didn’t wake up until she moved in her sleep and sensed that he was no longer at her side. He was getting dressed in the dark when she opened her eyes. She turned away.

  He sat on the bed to pull on his socks and shoes. When he saw that she was awake he said something about seeing her name in the Times.

  She seemed surprised. “Why was I mentioned in the Times?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t recent,” he said. “About a year ago. In the magazine section. I found it on the Internet.”

  Now she rolled over to face him. She never liked watching him get dressed. That was the worst part of having an affair with a married man. Not the leaving. Getting dressed. Because it meant that he was gone already even though he was still there, so that she could feel the presence of his other life palpably in the room beside them, like a leering intruder.

  “Why were you looking me up on the Internet?” she asked.

  “Not you,” he said. “Chet Fiore. He’s a client. I’m handling some investments for him.”

  Her mind didn’t feel clear. She couldn’t make herself understand why he was telling her this. So she said nothing.

  “But you probably knew that,” he added over her silence.

  She didn’t answer his question, if it had been a question. Instead, she said, “It’s a small world, Jeffrey.”

  He knew that it wasn’t.

  Before he got up, she put her arms around him. Their unspoken rule was that she wo
uldn’t ask him to stay, but there was no rule against asking without speaking the words.

  He lay back, resting his head on her breast, while she drew pictures with her fingers in his hair.

  They made love again, and this time when she fell asleep she didn’t wake up to hear him leave.

  The voice said, “Eddie.”

  Eddie didn’t recognize the man, so he kept walking.

  The man fell in step beside him, so Eddie stopped. “You want me?” he asked.

  “You’re Eddie Vincenzo.”

  It wasn’t clear if it was a question or not. If it was, Eddie wasn’t in the mood for answering questions. The guy was a couple inches taller than Eddie, bigger across the chest. But not so big that it would be a problem if he meant trouble. Eddie had a six-pack in his hand, in a paper bag. He was going home, and Georgie and some friends were coming over. They were probably going out after that; the six-pack was for until they figured out what they were going to do.

  Eddie started to walk again and the man said, “I’m talking to you.”

  It wasn’t until he turned that Eddie saw the second guy leaning against the door of a car parked at the curb. If they were cops, they were supposed to identify themselves, but there were a lot of wiseasses who never bothered with things like that. Eddie had run into his share. His mind raced through the possibilities of why a couple cops might want to talk to him and couldn’t come up with anything in particular. “What?” he said.