Bloodline: A Novel

by Warren Murphy

  Nilo thanked him and went outside to wait. He paused at the mailboxes. None of them had Selvini’s name. He pried open one of the boxes at random, took out a letter, then ripped the flap from the back of the envelope. He walked back upstairs and at Selvini’s apartment he pasted a small piece of the envelope paper across a top corner of the door. It would be very hard to see unless someone was looking for it. But anyone opening the apartment door would tear or dislodge the paper. He looked inside the letter to see if there was a check or cash, but there was not, so he crumpled the letter and threw it into a corner of the hallway.

  Nilo went out, found a quiet restaurant three blocks away that handled Maranzano’s liquor, and tried to eat lunch. But his stomach was too unsettled and instead he sat alone, quietly consuming a bottle of red wine.

  After a couple of hours, he went back to Selvini’s apartment building. Pulling his hat down low over his face, he walked up the steps. At Selvini’s apartment, the small piece of paper was still glued to the top of the doorframe. No one had entered since Nilo had left.

  He had barely gotten across the street, lounging in a doorway, casually smoking a cigarette, when he saw Selvini walking down the opposite sidewalk, whistling quietly to himself. The man was dressed in peasant style and seemed to have put on weight. Not that he was fat, but he no longer had the gaunt, starved look of the impoverished Sicilian fisherman he had been. It took Nilo a moment to recognize him, and by the time he did it was almost too late.

  It was dinnertime now and the street was no longer crowded. Earlier, children had been playing stickball and the stoops had been filled with men in undershirts and women in black dresses that looked as if they weighed ten pounds each. But now people were inside eating, it was growing dark, and only a few kids lingered on the street.

  Nilo felt in his pocket again for his gun. Its cold weight in his hand was comforting. He had not realized until he touched it that he needed comforting, but Selvini, he remembered, had survived an up-close shotgun blast. He should not have, unless he was under the protection of some especially powerful demon.

  Nilo began to walk across the street, angling so he could meet Selvini at the steps to his apartment building. For a moment, Nilo thought he should get away, not make this effort now.

  Nilo called out his name: “Enzo.”

  Selvini turned toward the street, looking for a familiar face, smiling. The smile lingered for just a fraction of a second, and then Selvini seemed to recognize him. A fearful, hunted look appeared in his eyes. Nilo slowly pulled the pistol from his pocket and raised it to fire at Selvini.

  The other man moved more quickly than Nilo expected. Just as Nilo was ready to pull the trigger, a young boy strolled past and Selvini grabbed him and yanked him toward him as a shield. He snatched a pistol from his own jacket pocket.

  Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Nilo’s mind screamed the warning, but was it too late? His finger was already tightening on the trigger, but to avoid hitting the child, he tried to turn the gun toward the sky. There was the loud report of his pistol and then return fire from Selvini.

  Nilo dove into the street, rolling to avoid the gunshots from the other man. He got to one knee and tried again to aim at Selvini, but the child was still in the way. Nilo heard another shot, found himself squeezing the trigger. Just as he did, Selvini pushed the boy toward Nilo as both men fired. Nilo felt the weight of the child as his body slammed forward into Nilo and carried him to the pavement. Behind him, he heard a shout. He scrambled to his feet and looked down at the boy. He was dead. Nilo knew it. He had seen death before.

  He heard more shouts and fled down the street, running after Selvini.

  There are others there. They will care for that child. But I think there is no hope. No hope for Selvini, no hope for my immortal soul. A child is dead.

  He did not know if he was being chased, but after several blocks Nilo cut through an alley, came out on another street, and was quietly alone in this foreign world.

  It would be dark soon. Nilo wandered around, not knowing for certain where he was going, hoping against hope that somehow he would come across Selvini’s trail again. The man would not return to his apartment anytime soon, and when he did, it would be with friends to protect him.

  Nilo walked the streets for an hour without success. What had happened was terrible, but at least no one had seen him, no one could recognize him. Night came and he gave up. It was the end of everything. There was no way he would ever be able to get that close to Selvini again.

  Maybe I’m wrong and maybe the child will live. What kind of animal is it, anyway, who would hide from his fate behind a child?

  He found a small speakeasy and went inside. He sat in a corner, nursing yet another bottle of wine, feeling lonely and morose. He said a prayer that the child would be all right, then another and another. Then he said a prayer asking God to forgive him. He had begun a gunfight, and a child had died. He wondered how much money he should send the parents to compensate for their child’s death. Finally, he paid his bill and left.

  He stepped out on the sidewalk. He was only a few blocks from where Selvini lived. He looked left and right, searching for a cab to take him back downtown.

  I will have to tell Don Salvatore about it, about the dead child, about everything. And it is best to do it now and get it over with.

  He still had the gun in his pocket and wished he did not have it with him. The damned thing had done him no good. Don Salvatore had told him to put his gun away, but he had insisted on using it one more time. He walked to the gutter and dropped the gun into a sewer.

  When he turned, incredibly he saw Enzo Selvini leaving a restaurant only a few doors away and walking down the block.

  Nilo darted into a doorway and waited until Selvini was almost a half block ahead of him before he began walking slowly after him.

  The other man seemed to be strolling through the streets, but finally, after fifteen minutes, he turned a corner, then went into a movie theater. Nilo quickly bought a ticket and followed him in.

  Selvini took a seat in the last row, scrunched down in it, and within moments was sound asleep.

  Nilo took a seat on the opposite side of the movie house. Now, seeing that his prey was asleep—Nilo could hear the snores, as he had heard snores years before on the tonnara fishing boat—he got to his feet and walked around the back aisle of the theater, wishing he had not thrown away the gun.

  He came up to the chest-high wall that bordered the last row of seats. Selvini was now in front of him, just a few feet away. No one else was in the row and Tony thought for a moment that maybe he could strangle the other man.

  He rejected the idea. It might take too long. Selvini may be too strong. Surely, people will see me. Some might even try to stop me.

  He backed away for a moment to think; then he saw what he needed. A three-foot-long fire ax was mounted inside a glass case on the wall. Nilo opened the box, removed the ax, and carried it back to the last row of the theater.

  He came around the wall and stood next to Selvini. In the bright light reflected from the movie screen, he could see the man’s eyes were closed; a dribble of spittle ran down his chin. He was snoring softly.

  Nilo leaned close to him and said, “Enzo. Guess who’s here?”

  Selvini opened his eyes and instantly recognized Nilo. He saw the ax. He opened his mouth to scream.

  Too late. Nilo swung the ax and its blade bit deeply into the center of Selvini’s face.

  The man uttered not a sound. Nilo stood back and admired his handiwork. The ax was embedded into the other man’s head, and Nilo just removed his hands from it and the ax stayed in place a moment before slowly sagging toward the floor.

  Suddenly someone in the audience saw what had happened and shouted. A woman screamed. Nilo took his handkerchief and wiped his fingerprints from the ax handle.

  Then, while people were screaming and shouting, he casually walked out of the theater.

  * * *

  AT
115TH STREET, Tony Falcone, sweating, now unaccustomed to the weight of his heavy blue uniform, turned east toward the river and Holy Rosary Church, the center for the next three days’ activities. Earlier, he had heard sounds like fireworks and then police sirens, but they were too far away for him to concern himself with. Instead, he kept meeting, as he had planned, with each of the merchants who would be providing food for the festival. None reported any trouble, and Tony was beginning to think that maybe everyone would live up to their agreements and this festival could go on without serious trouble.

  As he neared one corner, he passed a movie theater and stopped to study the posters outside. They advertised an Italian film, some blood-and-thunder-spectacle of the days when the Italian city-states dominated the culture and commerce of the civilized world. Tony smiled to himself. Despite what he had told the group of festival organizers at their conference, he did not give a damn about ancient Rome, and as far as he was concerned, too many immigrants spent too much time mooning over the Old World.

  If Italy was so damned great, he thought, why didn’t they stay there? Why bother coming to America?

  He was about to walk away when the doors of the theater burst open. A straggling crowd started to pour out, some shouting, some women crying. At first, Tony thought it might be a fire, and then he heard the shouts, “Murder! Murder!”

  He pushed through the crowd to get inside. People bumped into him. The crowd started to thin. He pushed his way into the lobby, then turned toward the entrance doors, where he thought he saw somebody he recognized. He could only see the back of the man’s head. The man pulled his hat down lower over his eyes and went quickly from the theater.

  Nilo? Was it Nilo? Tony went inside and found Selvini’s body.

  * * *

  WHEN NILO WENT TO DON SALVATORE’S APARTMENT to tell him what had happened, Maranzano had to struggle to control his anger. “You have jeopardized all my plans for you,” he snapped.

  “I could not let Selvini live,” Nilo protested.

  “And we have people who can take care of things like that. Why must you get your hands dirty? Must you always be a street hoodlum?”

  “I am sorry, Don Salvatore.”

  It was agreed that Nilo would go into hiding until it was determined whether or not he was suspected of the killings. Nilo found a place to hide, but he could not get the murdered child out of his mind.

  * * *

  WHEN HE HEARD THE RECTORY housekeeper at the door of the dining room, Father Mario spread out the copy of Progress, the Italian-language newspaper, on the table in front of him. But as soon as the woman had left, he put the paper to the side and began to read the Daily News, which he had hidden underneath it.

  The headline was the same as it had been since last week:

  POLICE SEEK BABY-FACED AX KILLER

  And inside the paper, one story wondered whether the “Dago of Death” would ever be found or if he had sneaked back to Italy in the dead of night.

  A BULLET FOR A KID; AN AX FOR A REFUGEE read another headline, recounting how the killer had murdered a young boy in cold blood with a pistol while trying to shoot Selvini and then tracked Selvini into a movie theater and buried an ax in his face. It described Selvini as a recent immigrant from Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily. No one apparently had seen the killer’s face, except one old woman with bad eyes who thought that “he looked young,” which was enough for the press to call him “baby-faced.”

  Mario sighed and picked at his breakfast. He was tired and felt far older than his thirty-one years. He had never wanted to help people solve their problems, either with earth or with heaven. He had never been good at that. The only contact with people that he had ever been good at was contact with his boxing gloves.

  He knew he should have been a monk, away from the world and its people. Sometimes he wished that there were someplace he could go for just a few hours, where no one would know that he was a priest, where no one would know that he was a man of God, where he could just be Mario Falcone, surprisingly devout ex-pug. But the priesthood had been his choice.

  Every day, people had choices. His father had one when he thought he saw Nilo Sesta leaving that theater, and his father’s choice was to tell the department, but only as much as he had to. He went to his commander and said he thought he had a line on who the killer was. But if it was announced, he said, the killer would vanish from the country.

  “Keep it quiet,” Tony had told his boss, “and I’ll bring the guy in.”

  Captain Cochran had looked at Tony silently for a long few seconds. “Do I get the idea there’s something personal in all this?” he asked.

  “Captain, I think the guy who’s involved in these killings is somebody I know. Now if I was playing it cute, there wouldn’t be anything easier for me than not tell you anything, not anything at all. Remember, I didn’t have to tell you that I thought I had a lead on this case. It’s not really our jurisdiction. But I did, because I want to bring this guy in. I think I deserve the benefit of the doubt and a chance to do it my own way.”

  “Fair enough,” Cochran said. “Just so long as you know that if there’s any backlash over this, I’ll hand you up in a flash. Put all the blame on you.”

  “Okay,” Tony said.

  “And what about the Holy Rosary Festival?”

  “Let it go on,” Tony said. “This dead guy, Selvini, wasn’t part of any gang, so I don’t think this has anything to do with the gees. The truce should hold, and maybe the festival will calm people down.”

  Cochran agreed and they finished their conversation in light, joking phrases, but the truth had been told in jest. It was up to Tony to get the Dago of Death. If it was learned that the man escaped before Falcone ran him down, Tony’s neck would be in the noose.

  Mario knew about this because his father had told him the previous evening while they were sitting on the front steps of the family’s apartment building.

  “Why not just give them Nilo’s name?” Mario had asked.

  “Because maybe, just maybe, he was just going to a movie and didn’t have anything to do with the killings. I don’t think so, but I think he merits that much of a chance.” His voice sounded tired and unconvinced. “If I’ve done wrong, I’ll admit it at confession.”

  Nilo had also had a choice, Mario thought. He had not been compelled to go after this Enzo Selvini to kill him. If he had not made that choice, two other people would have been alive and Nilo would not now be a fugitive, being hunted down by his own family.

  Another choice. Was it always that simple to make the right one?

  When he had left Tony and returned to the rectory, there was a message, with no name attached, which read merely that a parishioner was in deep trouble and needed help. An hour later, a man showed up to bring Mario to that parishioner. Mario had gone, even though the man refused to tell him who he would be visiting.

  He skipped his dinner to go.

  The meeting place turned out to be an old warehouse over on the fringes of Little Italy, in a neighborhood Mario did not know well. Loiterers, many with liquor bottles hidden inside paper bags, dotted the nearby street. A guard at the warehouse door had patted Mario down and searched his valise before letting him in. Another man took him upstairs and pointed him to an office, where he found Nilo sitting behind a desk.

  “Hello, Mario,” he said politely.

  “Morning, Nilo. The message was from you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had half-expected to find someone dead or dying.”

  “Disappointed that I’m not?”

  “Of course not. I’m not your enemy, Nilo.”

  Nilo had a petulant look of disbelief on his face, almost like a spoiled young boy, and Mario realized that no matter how much Nilo had grown up in his handful of years in this country, he was still not much more than a boy.

  “I don’t approve of how you live your life. You know that. And you knew that before you called me here. Now if you have something to say, I’m he
re to listen and to help, if I can.”

  Nilo stared at him a long time and then went over to lock the office door. When he spoke, the words came slowly, his voice threatening to crack.

  “Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.” Nilo dropped to his knees in front of Mario. “That little kid is dead and I had something to do with it. It’s the first time I’ve ever been sorry for anything I’ve done. The first time. I’ve tried to ignore it, but I can’t. I’ve done something really, awfully wrong. I have killed before, Father, but it was the right thing to do and I have never regretted it. But this … it’s driving me crazy. I need to know what to do.”

  Mario helped Nilo to his feet, and the two men sat in chairs facing each other. “Tell me about it,” Mario said softly. “Did you kill that boy?”

  Nilo hesitated. He covered his eyes. It took almost a minute before he spoke again.

  “No. But I caused it … and it wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to be that way.”

  “You will be forgiven,” Mario said firmly.

  Nilo’s face seemed relieved, then darkened over. “But there’s a penance, isn’t there?”

  “The penance is to go to the child’s parents and ask their forgiveness, to seek to help them in Christ’s name.”

  “I didn’t shoot the kid,” Nilo protested.

  “It doesn’t matter. You know your own responsibility. Get the parents’ forgiveness.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” Nilo fairly shouted. “I’ll tell you why not. They’ll kill me. That’s why not. Even you must know the rules of vendetta. They’ll kill me. Or the cops’ll kill me. I can’t take the chance.”

  “Then there can be no forgiveness,” Mario said.

  Nilo glared at him.

  “Get out of here, you goddamned eunuch,” Nilo shouted. “Go on back to your incense and candles and all the rest of that crap. I know people who have studied for the priesthood, too. I’ll get their advice. They will take care of this.”

  “Thank you,” Mario said with a faint smile.