The first thing a pro learns is to never compromise your hands. Don’t read the paper on duty, don’t have donuts and coffee, don’t run off to the john. Don’t hold the fucking bag of zeppoles. Drop the fucking zeppoles, idiot. These guys, they spent most of their time trying to find the TV remote behind the couch cushions.
When Big Joe and Jack were finally alone, the Ganooch just sitting in his wheelchair in the center of the room, with the sacred heart of Jesus picture overlooking the gutted bodies, the old man looked around a little sadly like he expected to leave more behind in this world.
“You’ve done a good job of taking me out of the game,” the Ganooch said calmly. “Who the fuck are you?”
Pacella told him.
“The schoolteacher. The fucking schoolteacher. Jesus. Never count out the common man.”
Jack liked that. The old guy showing no fear at all. Jack was a grinner not a talker, so he slid aside and let Pacella answer.
“Yes.”
“I always thought maybe it was you doing all this, something in the back of my head telling me it might be you, but nobody believed me. You’re a pantywaist. No one could pin anything on you.”
“You’re not very good.”
“No, I guess not. You hire the private eye that was watching us?”
“Yes.”
“Things are falling into place. He used to steal cars around here, that one, first when he was a kid in the Sixties, and then lately to follow my men. Drive around in their cars, the prick.” Nodding, glad that he could finally scratch some of the itches that had been bothering him. “How have I wronged you?”
“Emilio’s restaurant,” Pacella said.
Ganooch thought about it. “Place on 67th and Madison. Where your wife died.”
“You burned it to the ground.”
“Me? No. Not personally.”
Like that might matter, after everything that had gone down.
“You ordered it done.”
“That’s what this is all about?”
“Three people died.”
“Yeah, yeah, that I knew, but I didn’t think you’d blame me. The whole job was sloppy. Bad for business. But it was a favor. You understand? Cavallo asked me to do it. You skip him and come at me and all my crew? What are you, a child? You should’ve just taken him out. He’s the one who had it done.”
Pacella’s jaw hung open at that. He’d known Emilio Cavallo for almost five years, since Jane had first became manager of the restaurant.
“Why?” he asked.
“You really got to ask that? You gotta ask why? In this economic climate? Why else? He was losing his shirt and wanted out of the business. He did it for the insurance. Everybody does every goddamn thing for the fucking insurance, I have to explain this to you?”
Blinking, Pacella realized just how naive he was. He wanted to go back to sleep and let Jack return, but Jack was having fun watching Pacella twisting like this. “Cavallo did it himself? He torched his own place?”
The old man started to get excited in his chair, sorta hopping in it now, his fists jumping in the air. “I took a small interest in the restaurant at the beginning, back in ’67. We grew up on the same block in Ozone Park, me and Emilio. You always help somebody from the neighborhood, that’s old school, it’s the rule. I lent him money a year or two ago when things started to slide for him, but nothing helped him dig his way free. So he took the only way out he had left.”
“Three of his own employees burned to death.”
“You wanted to kill somebody, you pazzo son of a bitch, you should’ve killed Cavallo! My men had nothing to do with it. But you want the truth, it wasn’t Emilio’s fault either, or mine. My consigliere set that up with some pyro on the outside. My right hand man, you killed him two months ago. Strangled him, from behind. Broke his neck. I got guys...had guys...who told me how hard that was to do. Breaking somebody’s neck from behind.”
Jack, the mad surgeon inside, was starting to cackle, because it had been so easy.
“Who was the torcher?” Pacella asked. “I want a name.”
“I don’t know, and that’s the truth. I never had anything to do with that side of the business anymore. Even when I did, I never knew the details. I gave the order and others got it done. You pazzo prick, you murdered all my guys for this? You got it all wrong. You weren’t even close.”
“You should’ve hired a smarter consigliere, it would’ve saved us both a lot of grief,” Pacella said, rolling over and sinking down to where it felt like death, even though he couldn’t die. The old man only managed a small whimper before Jack finished the job.
So the Ganooch wasn’t last after all.
Emilio Cavallo.
Pacella had always liked the guy. He’d eaten many meals at the restaurant and shared a lot of wine and Italian beer with Emilio, who was seventy and had been in the country nearly all his life but still talked with an Italian accent. Emilio was always admiring Jane from afar, telling Pacella how beautiful she was, what a lucky man he was, how he should never let her go. Pacella always agreeing, knowing it was all true.
If you weren’t already insane, a betrayal like this would push you over the big edge. Thinking about every time you laughed with the man, broke bread with him, listened to him the way you had never listened to your own father or grandfather. Believing he loved you and was forever looking out for you. That man, who made you promise aloud to protect your wife—that one, he was the one who took her away.
Pacella boarded the train into the city, took a cab out of Penn Station up to the east-side brownstone where Cavallo had lived alone since his wife died from a stroke a decade earlier. Pacella and Jane had visited the place a couple of times, attending Christmas parties and stopping over when Emilio celebrated his 70th birthday. Jane had bought him cuff links made of Italian gold, and Pacella had brought a rare biography of Dante Alighieri, written in Italian.
Pacella paid the cabbie and, as he turned and hit the first step of the brownstone stairs, Jack started urging him to move it faster, faster. Pacella sprinted up the steps and leaned on the buzzer, Jack’s hideous giggle at the back of his throat.
Cavallo was surprised to hear Pacella’s voice over the intercom, but buzzed him right in.
Pacella walked in and there was Emilio Cavallo, standing with his arms wide open. By then, Cavallo was going almost three hundred pounds but still carried it pretty good. He had a deeply bronzed tan, the kind that takes two months in Miami Beach to get.
Pacella walked into Cavallo’s huge arms and hugged the guy, pressed his cheek to Emilio’s chest, shut his eyes. He’d missed his friend.
“Beltrando,” Emilio said, supposedly an Italianized version of Bill. “Mio amico. Che se dice? What brings you to the city?”
“An important matter.”
“Che cosa?”
Cavallo had wept until he’d nearly collapsed at Jane’s funeral, this close to being one of those old world types that scream and throw themselves into the grave, pounding on the casket. He’d hugged Pacella this same way at the funeral, like a father, and Pacella could hear Emilio’s heart beating out rough, painful rhythms of grief.
“What matter, ah? You tell me.”
When they broke away from one another, Cavallo moved to a bottle of wine already open on the dining room table. He poured two glasses and he and Pacella sat across from one another, sipping the wine in silence. The surgeon inside hated the smell of any type of alcohol because it reminded him of the hospital where he was forced to take care of orphan children to keep up appearances.
Cavallo just sat there with a big smile, his false teeth way too white in the brown face.
Pacella put the glass down and said, “Why didn’t you clear them out first, Emilio?”
A shudder went through the fat man. It started at his ears and worked right down through him inch by inch. It was beautiful to see—to know they weren’t going to have to race around the bush for an hour before Cavallo admitted to it. The old ma
n knew exactly what Pacella was talking about. His eyes lit with fear and shame.
“What’s that? Che cosa? What’s that you say to me, Beltrando?”
On the wall, another sacred heart of Jesus picture. These killer Italians, all of them under the watchful eyes of Christ, like they’d never be called to judgment. “You should have made sure the restaurant was empty.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” Cavallo poured himself another glass, drinking it down fast. “What are you saying? Explain this.”
“You were right, I should’ve looked after her better. I got there too late. I almost got the torcher but he slipped away. I nearly got trapped in the fire myself, Emilio.” He wrenched open his shirt and showed off his scars. Repulsive as they were, he hardly ever thought of them anymore. It was good to get a chance to show them with some pride. “I watched her die, Emilio. Everything that’s happened, it’s your doing.”
“Will—”
The name lingering there without enough substance.
Will, always with the Will.
Pacella’s rage took on its form—a process of growth and movement—as he stood quickly, the seams of his soul stretching to their breaking point, everybody inside wanting out.
It wasn’t time yet. He still had questions. He struggled to continue talking, as demands and promises began to fill his head. “You knew what night it was set for. Why didn’t you protect your own employees? They were your family. You always said the people who worked with you were family.”
Cavallo’s false front totally collapsed and he went on the defensive, angry and self-righteous. He waved his arms, the thick fingers covered in rings fluttering in the air. “I couldn’t be there, it wouldn’t look right! I was in Atlantic City for the weekend, I had to be seen, don’t you understand? I did not do this thing, I was not even there!”
“Maybe you weren’t there, but you did it.”
“You don’t know, Will! I did everything! Everything to keep Emilio’s alive in this economy. My dream, and they took it all away! Taxes, they increase my rent, the licenses, all the kickbacks—the people I have to pay. Everybody getting a piece of me and my dream—”
Pacella, grinning a little like Jack now, the killer seeping through. “Sing me a sad song, Emilio, tell me your troubles.”
“Vaffanculo, talking to me like that!” The fat man had to make a last try of it, lumbering to his feet, driving his fists down into the table. It should’ve been a powerful blow, but Cavallo still thought he might get out of this and he didn’t want to scratch the table top. The wine in Pacella’s glass hardly rippled. “Damn you, it was not my fault, Will! It was supposed to happen after midnight, after everybody finished up and had gone home. Nobody was supposed to get hurt! I loved Jane! I loved her! I loved them all!”
“Who was the torcher, Emilio?”
“I don’t know that! I asked Joe Ganucci for a favor, he set everything up. He owned a couple’a points on the place. It went through his consigliere. But that one, he’s dead.”
“So’s the Ganooch.”
Finally, Cavallo started catching on. His eyes brimmed with understanding, realizing who he had to be talking to, what was happening now. What was about to happen.
“No. No, Will.”
“Yeah, Emilio.”
“It—it—”
“Yeah.”
“It’s been you, Will?”
“Yes.” Pacella felt a wonderful warmth flood through his belly.
“You...Beltrando, you’ve been doing those things to the syndicate guys? The capos? Carving them up like that? Taking their hearts? Their kidneys?”
Pacella wanted to say, No, not me, Emilio, what we have here is a fractured psyche that allows for the release of tension and frustration via disassociation and yet keeps the primary personality intact, at least for the time being. A psychological mechanism that allows the mind to split off traumatic memories or disturbing ideas from conscious awareness.
He said, “Yes, it’s been me.”
“How could you do this? How could you do any of this, Will? With the knives? Snapping necks? Cutting open the...dio mio! You’re a schoolteacher!”
“Sometimes.”
Pacella, one of the many Pacellas, moved fast now, lithely leaping onto the dining room table and easing himself over it. Pressing Cavallo back down into his chair, the chair against the wall, the picture of Jesus and his bleeding, broken, thorn-entwined heart bearing down.
It wasn’t quite Pacella’s voice anymore. The timbre was off, the tone pulled taut like it was ready to snap. “Please think, Emilio—think extremely hard now. Put some effort into it. I want a name.”
“I don’t know, I swear, on the eyes of my children! I don’t—”
“Shh, think about it a second. Who is the torcher? They must’ve told you something, given you a clue.”
“No, nothing like that!”
“A favor, just do me a favor, Emilio, all right? Just a hint.”
Jack was thinking about the eyes of children, staring back at him from a little jar.
The fat old man struggled to get out of the chair but was unable to move because there was a hand like iron pressed against his chest. His jowls flapped as he started to mewl. He saw the edge of the knife reflecting the chandelier light, so bright that he couldn’t even look at the blade in Pacella’s fist. He had to turn his face away. “Madonna mia! Will, it wasn’t my fault. You have to believe me. I loved Jane! Like my own child, like my daughter. You know this! Dio mio, I’d do anything for her!”
Showing all his teeth, Pacella’s voice was almost gone, little more than a high-pitched shrill cry. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Emilio.”
“Jesus Christ! Dio! Jesu!”
The blade Jack used at the time was the six inch hunting knife topped with a gut hook. Jack liked the way it moved through flesh—not too easily, you actually felt the ripping and shredding as you cut sideways, yanking at the muscle and tendon. He had fun aiming the arterial spray up into the compassionate face of Christ above, until the forlorn nailed god was dripping with red ribbons.
fifteen
Are you ready?
Pace woke at dawn and walked downstairs, expecting Vindi or other men to be standing in the living room. There weren’t any.
Instead, a black leather briefcase sat in the foyer, just inside the front door. It contained their passports, other identification and paperwork, tourist maps of Athens, five thousand Euros, and fifty thousand drachmas. Altogether that was more than fifteen grand Vindi had handed over.
Kaltzas wanted them to be tourists for the afternoon, have a good time, before heading on to Pythos. There were instructions on where to find his private jet, and what to do when arriving in Athens. The best places to eat, the most hospitable tavernas. Where to catch the ferry to Voros and its scheduled departures. Where to rent a boat.
While he was studying the contents of the case he must’ve had another attack of aphasia because when he turned the others were at the kitchen table having breakfast. He didn’t know where Pia had learned to cook so well, but she’d made a full meal of pancakes, eggs, hash browns, orange juice, everything you think about when you imagine having breakfast with your family when you’re a kid. Your brother stealing your bacon, your Dad reading the paper but keeping a watchful eye. Sissy with a doll in her lap, trying to feed it toast.
It had never happened this way, but it was truer than anything that had ever happened to you.
Now you imagined having breakfast with your wife, who swept past you moving from the stove to the sink, the floors shining, the kitchen windowsill filled with sunflowers. Your tow-headed son chattering on about his model cars, his video games, baseball cards. Lovely baby girl with a new doll in her lap, trying to feed it toast. Your dreams were pedestrian but honest. Your anguish common, your insanity only average. Jane asking you how much work you’d done on the book last night.
Six pages, it was going good. They’re already pretty clean, just nee
d another pass to tighten up some dialogue, clear out a couple of fragments.
Pia spun from the oven and told Pace to sit. He ate quickly, listening to Faust and Hayden discussing torture. The Greeks liked to do dramatic things like putting a guy inside a large metal bull and then making a roaring fire under it and roasting him alive. Funky stuff like chaining somebody to a cliff side and letting the birds chew him to death. But besides that, it seemed like the Greeks preferred straightforward murder. Ramming a sword diagonally through a man’s collarbone to chop him almost entirely in half. Plunging a spear through somebody’s guts. No prisoners, no waiting around, clean your blade and get on with your day.
Sitting about a foot too far from the table, Dr. Brandt stared at them, a mixture of loss and shame inscribed across her radiant features. This lady, never one thing on her face, always fifty different emotions working her over.
“If you don’t practice your smile,” Pace said, “you’ll forget how it’s done.”
Dr. Brandt only frowned further.
Pia said, “Should I leave the dishes for the lady who cleans the house? That might be rude, but maybe she’ll be glad to do them. To see there were people in the house again. It’s the kind of thing my mother would have liked.”
The mother who had chased her around the neighborhood with a shovel, who had brained her sister, and drank the Drano.
“This is the kind of thing we should be worried about right now?” Hayden asked. “You didn’t hear us talking about the Brazen Bull? They cook you alive in it!”
Faust sounded resigned, like he just wanted to get it over with. “More likely we’ll be disemboweled and our entrails will be burned in a pyre as a sacrifice to the oracles.”
“All of our organs?” Pia asked.
“The preference seems to be for livers and lungs.”
“I’d rather not part with them.” Saying it almost happily while she cleared the table, sticking plates in the sink. “If the choice were mine to be made.”
Nightjack Page 12