Jimmy waited in the car, with the engine running.
Fiore rang the front door bell and let his eyes roam down the line of identical two-family houses set almost side to side. Each had a little ten-foot driveway that marked the end of the property and doubled as a passage to a little backyard the size of a dinner napkin. The houses were set back about four feet from the sidewalk behind a tiny rectangle of lovingly tended grass. Window boxes of potted pansies and chrysanthemums hung from the front windows of each home. But it was those patches of grass that Fiore’s eye kept coming back to as he stood with his back to the door, facing the street, waiting for someone to come to the door. He could understand a window box of flowers. It is what it is. But this four-foot-by-eight-foot patch of lawn shared by two families struck him as inexpressibly sad. It’s a lie. Worse, it’s a lie that doesn’t even call to mind what the truth is. It was barely enough grass to be buried under.
He heard footsteps on the other side of the door and he heard the door open, and when he turned he was facing Benini’s daughter. “Theresa,” he said, “how are you doing?”
She said she was fine but her voice sounded tense and overwrought.
Fiore made it a point to know the families of the men who worked under him. During the holiday season they would have dinner together, two or three families at a time, with Fiore at the head of the table and his wife just to his left. His guests brought their wives and their children, if the children were old enough to sit still through a meal. It was always a big deal the first year a son or a daughter was old enough to come. Fiore started a couple weeks before Christmas, and by Christmas he had been host to all of his people. In organized crime circles this was a very unusual thing to do. In fact, it wasn’t done at all. Gaetano Falcone himself had summoned Fiore out to the Island to question him about the practice. “A man doesn’t mix family with his business,” he said.
“With all due respect, Mr. Falcone,” Fiore answered, “how do you trust a man if you don’t know who he is?”
Very few of the wives knew in any explicit way what their husbands did. Fiore was introduced to the wives and the children simply as Mr. Fiore with no explanation as to the nature of the relationship. This might have been expected to produce some awkwardness but it never did.
“Is your father here?” he asked Theresa Benini. “I’d like to talk with him.”
She shook her head and then said, “He’s not here,” as though the words were an afterthought.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
She looked at him a moment, a careful look, and then she stepped backward, widening the door. He’d been on the stoop to this point while she held the door. Now he stepped in and she closed the door behind him. He could see that she would have been crying if she let herself.
“The police were here this morning. They took him,” she said, keeping her voice low but still managing to convey all the ferocity she had kept bottled up to this point. “They said they weren’t arresting him,” she added, as though she didn’t believe this part of it.
From the moment her father was taken away, she fought with herself hard over what she should do to help him, but couldn’t come to a conclusion. Her uncertainty intensified when she saw who was at the door, but in the end she decided she had to ask Mr. Fiore for his help. He was the most powerful man her father knew. All he had to do was pick up a phone and her father would be home.
“The police?” he asked.
“I’m sorry, not the police, the government,” she corrected.
“Federal agents?”
“Yes.”
“Did they say what they wanted?”
He knew the answer. He wanted to know what she knew.
She shook her head. “Just that they wanted to talk to him and they weren’t arresting him,” she said.
From upstairs a voice, thin and pinched, called down, “Who is it, Theresa?”
“It’s all right, Mom,” the girl called back. “It’s just someone for Daddy.”
Apparently that answer was enough.
“Is your mother all right?” Fiore asked.
Benini’s wife was always sick with one thing or another. Gus himself had given up trying to do anything about it a long time ago.
“Just the flu,” Theresa said. “She’s mostly over it.”
Fiore put his two hands firmly on the girl’s shoulders, squaring her away to him, and looked deep into her troubled eyes. They were dull eyes, as lifeless as stone. “Don’t worry, Theresa,” he said. “It’s all right. I can take care of it.”
She was sure this was true and she was grateful to him already just for telling her that and saying it the way he did. Now she knew she had done the right thing in telling him, even though her father wouldn’t have approved.
Mr. Fiore told her to tell her father to come see him that night. She invited him to wait, offering coffee. “I have things to do,” he said, and she didn’t press the point.
In the car he told Jimmy to drive halfway down the block and park there. He wanted to talk to Benini before he went into the house. There was no danger of the feds driving him back. If he told them he wouldn’t cooperate, they weren’t about to provide him with free cab service, and if he told them he would, then they wouldn’t risk being seen with him unnecessarily.
Fiore didn’t have long to wait. In less than half an hour he saw Gus heading toward him, loping from the corner with his erratic, headlong gait, his body pitched forward as though he were tacking into a heavy wind. Fiore’s car was on the opposite side of the street and Benini didn’t see it until he was almost past it. Fiore got out, and the movement caught Benini’s eye.
“Jeez,” he said as he crossed the street, “what are you doing here?”
Fiore had never come to his house before. This should have alerted Benini. If he were a more intelligent man it would have. But the thought passed through his mind quickly and he just as quickly decided that Fiore couldn’t possibly know about the feds yet.
“I was on my way out to the Island. There’s a couple things I wanted to talk to you about,” Fiore said offhandedly, his voice comfortable and relaxed. “Come on, get in, we’ll talk. I’ve only got a few minutes.”
He opened the door for Benini and then slid in after him.
“How you doing, Jimmy?” Benini asked.
“Yeah, and you?” Jimmy answered over his shoulder.
Benini shrugged and turned to Fiore. “I hope you weren’t waiting long,” he said. “You should have rung the bell. My girl’s there, she would have given you something.”
“I did,” Fiore said.
There was a flicker of confusion in Benini’s eyes. His upper lip did something funny. “You went in?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Fiore said. “That was Theresa, right? I hope so. I called her Theresa.”
Benini’s tongue flicked in and out like a lizard’s. “Right, Theresa,” he said. “What did she tell you?”
Fiore saw Jimmy’s eyes in the rearview mirror, watching. What did she tell you? It wasn’t a question Gus Benini had any business asking.
“She said she didn’t know where you went,” Fiore said. “She said she didn’t know when you’d be back.”
Benini’s whole face seemed to come instantly alive. “I’ve been having this prostate problem, you know,” he said. “Just gotta pee all the time. I figured I’d better get it checked out.”
“You were at the doctor’s?”
“Yeah. I didn’t tell her, I didn’t want her getting worried, you know.”
Jimmy Angelisi didn’t need to be told what to do. He started the engine and put it in drive.
“And what did the doctor say?”
The Mercedes slid from the curb even before Benini answered.
“He says it’s not cancer,” he said.
But he knew they knew he was lying. He knew he had something worse than cancer now.
22
It was almost six o’clock when Chet Fiore showed up at the Layne Bentl
ey reception desk. In a minute Jennifer came out to meet him. “I’m sorry,” she said, “Mr. Blaine’s gone for the day.”
The man looked at her as though she had just insulted him, his eyes dark and hooded, so cold she could almost feel the temperature drop. If she didn’t know better she would have had trouble convincing herself that this was the same man who had come to the office before. This one, she realized, was the Chet Fiore who got written up in the newspapers. There was no telling who the other one might have been.
She knew without his even telling her that her answer had been inadequate and she didn’t want to wait to be told. “I’m sure I can reach him,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
There were half a dozen telephones next to the couches in the reception area. She made the call right there. Fiore came and stood over her. He wanted to know what she said and what Blaine said.
“Mr. Blaine, it’s Jennifer. Mr. Fiore just came in. He wants to see you.”
She waited. And then she covered the mouthpiece. “He’s got concert tickets. He’s on his way to Lincoln Center. He wants to know if you can meet him there,” she said.
“Yeah,” Fiore said. “That’s fine.”
He had Jimmy drop him off on Broadway across the street from Lincoln Center. He told him not to wait. As he crossed the wide double avenue where Broadway and Columbus cross each other, he looked across at the three monstrous buildings with a displeasure that was more a function of his mood than anything else. They didn’t look like they belonged in New York. They didn’t look like anything else in the city. And if they had to put a fountain right in the middle of the whole thing, then they should have at least put a little grass around it, made a kind of park out of it. One of the buildings was all stone, one was all glass, and one was kind of a combination of the two.
He saw Blaine standing near the fountain. All in all, it wasn’t a bad place to meet. Two men with time on their hands could count on being inconspicuous here, just two cultured music lovers who got there early.
Blaine saw him coming and started toward him. He spoke before Fiore had a chance to say anything. “Our friend in Oklahoma City passed away,” he said.
It was hard to tell what point he was making. There was an edge in his voice, a sharpness. What? He didn’t approve? Nobody asked him to.
Fiore pursed his lips and shrugged. “Those things happen,” he said.
“I suppose,” Jeffrey said. “Let’s get something to drink.”
He didn’t wait for Fiore’s response, but led the way toward a kiosk that would soon be dismantled as the weather turned cooler. Right now it was doing a lively business selling overpriced pastries, shrimp and avocado sandwiches, cocktails, and wine.
Fiore followed. He knew that Blaine understood what happened in Oklahoma. You don’t get rich believing in coincidences and Blaine was pretty damn rich. For an upright solid citizen, Blaine had come a long way in a short time. No hysterics. No wailing of offended innocence or cries of outrage. Our friend in Oklahoma City passed away. He supposed that those things happened. He wasn’t crying about it and he wasn’t going to cry about it.
They were standing on line behind an elderly gentleman in a suit that hung so loosely on him one could chart the progress of terminal illness in its folds. The man ordered by pointing and then thanked the girl who served him in a croaking voice so faint she couldn’t possibly have heard him. Fiore and Jeffrey helped themselves to plastic glasses of white wine already filled and marshaled on the countertop, the empty bottle next to them so that those who cared could inspect the label. Fiore slapped a twenty on the counter before Blaine had a chance to. He didn’t wait for change. As they turned to walk off toward the gaudy murals of the opera house, Fiore said, “I watched my old man shrink like that. There’s got to be a better way.”
Jeffrey resisted the impulse to point out that Fiore apparently had the better way at his fingertips. Euthanasia means “good death” but leaves open the question of whose good is being served. Sometimes it’s the good of the person dying, sometimes, as in Bolling’s case, the good of others.
They walked around the side of the concert hall, where there was less traffic. Suddenly Fiore’s hand was on Jeffrey’s shoulder and the force of the man’s grip pulled him around with sudden and unexpected violence. Even before he had a chance to frame an objection, Fiore’s face was inches from his own and his left hand was under Jeffrey’s throat. The rage had come from nowhere, turned on by the simple flick of a switch. Or maybe it was the other way. Maybe it had been there all along, covered over with smiles and pleasantries the way snow covers the contours of the land. Either way, there was something terrifying about a man who could hide or summon such ferocity with such impulsive haste.
“You’re an important man, Blaine,” Fiore said. “If you fuck with me or any of my people, you’ll be a sorry man. I’m the one who made you important. Do you understand that?”
From the moment Gaetano Falcone assured him that his problem with Eddie Vincenzo was taken care of, Jeffrey had known this moment was coming. “Your friend Eddie was still seeing my daughter,” he said. “That wasn’t our deal.”
The grip on his throat tightened, the pain so sharp and precise he could feel each of the man’s fingers. People were passing behind them in greater number now. Not one of them stopped or slowed or turned his head to where one man was strangling another two feet from the side entrance to Avery Fisher Hall.
“I don’t care what he was doing,” Fiore hissed. “If you’ve got a problem, you come to me. You tell me about it and I take care of it. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” Jeffrey gasped.
“You don’t go to Falcone. You come to me. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
Fiore released his grip and Jeffrey found himself taking in great gulps of air. Fiore took a step back and let his face relax into a smile, the same smile he was wearing when he walked onto the plaza. “The only reason you’re still alive,” he said, “is because I’m thinking maybe you didn’t know the rules. I know that’s not true but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. What time does your concert start?”
“Seven-thirty,” Jeffrey said. They were just two normal men again.
“Isn’t that your wife?” Fiore said as they walked back toward the fountain. He pointed across the plaza to where Phyllis was hurrying toward them.
Jeffrey and Phyllis exchanged meaningless kisses. “I was so afraid you’d be late,” she said. “This is a pleasure, Mr. Fiore. Are you joining us?”
Jeffrey was surprised that she remembered his name and even more surprised by the invitation. She had done everything she could to put the aftermath of Jessica’s party out of her mind.
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about music,” Fiore said.
“Then why are you here?”
“Mr. Fiore is a client these days,” Jeffrey said.
Her eyes hadn’t left Fiore. “Really,” she said. “I hope my husband is making you lots of money.”
“He tells me it’s a good time to invest,” Fiore answered noncommittally.
“Always,” she said. “When the market’s up, when the market’s down. Jeffrey believes in investing. I’m sure there are plenty of tickets available. Do join us.”
Fiore shocked Jeffrey by accepting the invitation. They had no trouble buying an extra ticket at the box office. In fact, tickets had been turned in for all four of the other seats in the Blaines’ keyboard-side first-tier box.
The orchestra played Ives’s Second Symphony. He wrote it, according to the program notes, in 1902, when he was twenty-eight years old and still had hopes of hearing his music played. By the time of its premier forty-nine years later, he was too old to attend and listened at home on the radio.
“That’s kind of sad,” Fiore said when Phyllis relayed the facts to him.
The music seemed strange to him, odd and awkward, as though it was stumbling from place to place. There were moments, though, when it sounded fami
liar, and he settled lower into his seat and let the clamor of it invade his senses. When he glanced to the side, Phyllis Blaine felt his eyes on her and looked over at him, her gaze as steady as if they were in the middle of a conversation. He could see Blaine sitting stiffly on the other side of his wife and at the moment he hated the man.
The music turned suddenly loud, like a child demanding attention, and his eyes went back to the stage, where the conductor was gesticulating wildly for the benefit of a hundred musicians who sawed away on their instruments with such ferocity that they didn’t have time to pay him any attention. Phyllis’s hand moved until it rested on his, on the seat arm between them. He looked over again but she had turned her face back to the music. The corners of her mouth moved slightly in the faintest gesture of a smile.
Now the music was a march instead of a dance. Fiore was, it had been said, the most powerful man in New York, and he knew for a certainty that it was almost true. Only a powerful man would have one of his best men killed because the man lied to him. Fiore hadn’t been given a choice about it. If there had been a choice at all he wouldn’t have done it. So that was the funny thing about power. It didn’t free you up to do whatever you wanted. It cut down on your options. It issued commands. It told you what to do and you had to do it.
As the music slowed and softened, like a clock running down, he remembered a time when he was a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, and he and Jimmy and two other kids got into a fight with some black kids waiting for the 6 train in the 125th Street station. It was a stupid fight, somebody taking exception to the way somebody looked at him. There were words, and then they were punching each other and wrestling around, which was okay for a while until one of the black kids pulled out a box cutter and cut a friend of Fiore’s named Albert, whom they all called Angel, right across the biceps. Nowadays he was Albert again, and he worked for Con Ed, but that night he was Angel and he kept fighting with blood running down his arm and all over the platform. It was summer and he was only wearing a shirt or he would have had a little protection. This was at a time in Fiore’s life when he carried a gun. So did Jimmy. Angel and the other kid didn’t or they would have been wearing coats to cover them. Fiore kept his piece in his pocket, even after the box cutter came out, because even at that age he knew that if you capped a colored kid on 125th Street it was game over. In a white neighborhood it would have been a different story. But Jimmy, who didn’t think it through like that because he couldn’t fight and think at the same time and didn’t know anyone who could, except of course for Charlie (which is what they called Fiore in those days), came out with his gun and yelled, Back off, nigger! The kid with the box cutter looked at him with a kind of wild-eyed, crazy fear, like someone who has just seen Jesus, and Angel, who still had one good arm, clocked him with a straight overhand right that sent him crashing backward and upside down off the platform and onto the track. For a minute they all could have been pictures of themselves. No one moved, as though, if they held their positions like that, something would tell them what came next. There was something actually funny about the way that kid flew off that platform, with the soles of his Felony Flyers facing out. And then one of the colored kids with him said Jesus fucking shit because a train was coming down the tracks and they were standing right at the north end of the platform, so it would still have a pretty good head of steam when it got close enough for the motorman to see the kid on the track. They all rushed forward, to the edge of the platform, and looked down. The kid was lying on his back, with the box cutter still in his hand and his head twisted funny, kind of over on his shoulder and turned around to the side, and his legs were bent funny, too, one leg over the other, the one underneath bent in the middle in a way no leg was supposed to bend. Jesus, he looks like Theismann, Angel said, because that was exactly the way Joe Theismann’s leg looked when Lawrence Taylor snapped it for him in the Meadowlands. Except that Joe Theismann’s head wasn’t busted open, which this kid’s might have been, and his neck wasn’t broken, which this kid’s probably was, and there was no subway train headed for Theismann as he lay there on the twenty-three-yard line. And then one of the black kids, the one Fiore had been fighting, a gangly skinny kid with long dangling arms, jumped down onto the track with the subway coming closer and shouted something but none of his friends moved. He crouched down over his friend and said something to him and his hands fluttered over the kid, big, long-fingered hands, fluttering like a bird that can’t take off for some reason or other, as though he didn’t know how to touch him or where. The next thing any of them knew, he was running up the track, straight toward the one-eyed headlight of the train, screaming Stop, stop! with those long arms waving like windmills. It was the bravest thing Fiore had ever seen anyone do, black skin and black clothes running right at a subway train coming toward him out of the darkness, but it made sense because at least he stood a chance of flagging the train in time if he ran toward it.
House of Lords Page 37