by Thomas Perry
The boy’s hand went to the glove, came out with the gun, and fired it into the second man’s head. As the man fell, Eddie took the boy by the hand. They walked off together and stepped down into the next subway entrance. Eddie had already bought tokens that would get them back to the hotel. They pushed through the turnstile and made it onto a subway car that was unloading its baseball fans and was now nearly empty. They sat down. The boy sat stiffly, his heart pounding while the train filled. He was looking at people to see if they had followed him and Eddie down. When he saw that they were just regular riders, he silently urged them on, begged them to hurry. Finally the train’s seats filled, the doors closed, and it moved ahead, picking up speed with that clacking and rattling noise that he knew was making them safe. Eddie looked up and saw two women standing above them, hanging onto a chrome-plated bar.
Eddie elbowed him and nodded, then smiled at the women. Eddie and the boy stood, and Eddie offered their seats to the two women. “Please have a seat,” he said.
The more attractive of the two women, who was tall with long blond hair and about thirty years old, turned away as though she hadn’t heard. Her companion slipped right in and slid over to the window.
Eddie leaned close to the blond woman. “Please. As a favor to me,” he said. “I can only keep teaching my boy manners by trying to have them myself.”
She looked at him and gave him a tentative smile. Then she said to the boy, “You should pay attention to your dad. I’ll bet women all love him because he’s so polite.” She slid past Eddie and sat in the aisle seat beside her friend.
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said. Then he added what Eddie always wanted him to say in these situations. “But he’s not my dad. He’s my uncle.”
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s been just us at home since I lost my parents.”
The woman was pretty enough to have been the target of many lines, overtures, and impostures, so she sensed this might be another. But would it come by proxy from a teenager?
Eddie held on to the chromed bar and made sure the boy had a good grip too. Eddie was too wily to try to expand this interaction into a conversation. He stood straight, stared ahead, and waited.
After a few minutes, the woman’s dark-haired companion half-stood. “My stop is coming up.”
The boy and Eddie stepped backward to give the blond woman the space to let her friend out. She had to lean forward while her friend slid out. The back of the dark-haired woman brushed against the boy—a sensation the boy found much nicer than he had imagined. The woman half-turned to look at him quizzically, because she could not quite ignore the fact that she had pressed her backside against his body to get out. She could see that he’d had nowhere to go to avoid her. “Sorry,” she said, and pushed the moment into her memory of the inconsequential events of the day, and not the outrages and offenses. She smiled at him and then said to her friend, “Bye, Brenda. See you tomorrow.”
Brenda slid into the window seat and looked up at Eddie. “There’s plenty of room.”
Eddie smiled and said, “Thank you.” Then he gently pushed the boy into the seat.
Brenda turned to the boy. “Is he always like this?” She glanced up at Eddie to be sure he’d heard.
“What do you mean?”
She leaned close to the boy, and he smelled her faint, sweet perfume. She whispered, “So nice.”
The boy shrugged. “I guess so.”
She kept her eyes on the boy. “What does your aunt think?”
“I don’t have one. It’s just us.”
After about five minutes the boy said to Eddie, “I’ll stand for a while.”
Eddie said to the woman, “Do you mind?”
“Of course not.”
Eddie took his place, and then the conversation was all Eddie and Brenda. When she got off at the next stop, Eddie and the boy got off too. Eddie explained that the boy was hungry. She told Eddie about a really nice restaurant not far from her stop. He seemed to have trouble understanding the directions, so she walked with them.
When they reached the restaurant, Eddie asked her to stay and have dinner with them. She refused. When he smiled in his friendliest way, she refused. But when he took her aside and, in a whisper, invented the story that the boy wanted her to because he missed having adult women around since his mother died, she said, “Oh, of course. I hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”
The dinner was as good as she had promised. They walked her home and somehow ended up staying the night in her apartment. He had not heard how that had been arranged, or if by then a story had even been necessary. He fell asleep on Brenda’s couch under a blanket. When he woke in darkness late at night, Eddie and Brenda were beyond the closed door on the other end of the living room.
The reality he woke to was that he had killed a man. He had not exactly forgotten it. Even during the long subway ride, the dinner, and the walk, he had seen flashes of it, but he hadn’t had time to stop to think it through. There had been too many things happening, being said or done. There were too many words in the conversations between Eddie and the pretty woman, Brenda, that he wasn’t supposed to hear, but did. For the next couple of hours in the dark living room, he revisited the whole day, step by step, seeing the sights, hearing the gunshots and the shouting, and then feeling the urgency of walking to the subway platform when his body wanted to run.
He heard the sounds of small, graceful footsteps and opened his eyes to see it was light. Brenda was making them breakfast before she had to get ready for work. She was wearing a short nightgown. When the food was ready, she went behind the door and woke Eddie so they could eat while she bathed and dressed.
As they ate, Eddie said, “Good, huh?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. “She’s a good cook.”
“Then don’t forget to tell her.”
A few minutes later, she emerged to find Eddie washing the dishes. The boy said, “Thank you very much for breakfast. It was very good.”
When they left, Brenda stopped them at the door and gave Eddie a long, serious kiss. Then she said, “Let me know next time you’re back in New York.” As they stepped through the door, she grabbed the boy, hugged him, and kissed his cheek. “You too.”
They went out and walked toward the corner. Eddie looked at the boy for a few seconds as they walked. “You did great yesterday. Good nerves, giant balls. You okay?”
“Sure,” the boy said.
Eddie waved a cab to pull over, and they took the cab to the lot on Staten Island where he had left his car. Then they drove home to Pittsburgh.
When Schaeffer remembered the visit to New York now, he knew that it wasn’t just the first time he’d used Eddie’s teaching and preparation to take a step into the secret profession. It was also the start of bad times. Within a few days, Eddie was bringing home newspapers from other cities and reading them with a frown on his face. The boy would say, “What’s wrong?”
Eddie would answer, “A guy I knew died.”
“Who?”
“Just a guy. You didn’t know him.”
They had this conversation at least four times, once while he was reading the Chicago Tribune, then the New York Daily News, then the Buffalo Courier-Express, and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Finally, after a few months, after Eddie had tossed aside one of the papers and sat in silence, the boy said, “Another guy you knew?”
Eddie stared at him before saying, “Listen carefully. I’m going to tell you some things that will help you understand. The Mafia families were made up of southern Italians who immigrated around 1900 or so. Some had been criminals in Italy, and others were just desperate for a job. They established some ways of stealing money and got by. Then in 1920 the government made it illegal to sell whiskey or wine or beer. This was the best news they ever heard. If people couldn’t buy alcohol in
stores, they had to buy it from somebody. The crime families supplied it—made deals with people who knew how to produce it or smuggled it in from other countries—and earned a whole lot of money. Then in 1933, Prohibition was repealed. The Mafia came into 1934 rich and strong and heavily armed. They were also friendly with thousands of cops and public officials accustomed to getting bribed and expecting that to be the same in the future.
“Once anybody who wanted to could sell alcohol, the Mafia families had to rely on other ways to make money. They had learned how to run gambling joints and bookie operations because they’d been doing it all through Prohibition. They knew extortion because they’d been doing that since the Romans. They also knew prostitution and drugs. But at this point there was competition, and the families fought over territories with each other, and with the gangs of outsiders who competed. That brought public attention. In 1936, one of the most powerful bosses, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, got locked up in prison—though he still ran his businesses from there. But there were other big arrests too.
“In 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and started World War II. For the next four years the fighting between the gangs was start-and-stop, because most of the mob guys who would have done the fighting were drafted and sent to battlefields all over the world to fight somebody besides their cousins. There was rationing. People were only allowed to buy a certain amount of anything needed for the war—butter, meat, car tires, gasoline. And so the Mafia started black markets to get those things and sell them secretly. Sometimes they stole them, or paid somebody to divert the trucks, or counterfeited rationing coupons.
“The war ended in 1945, and Lucky Luciano got taken out of prison and deported to Italy. The government must have thought that would get rid of him, but he could run his Italian operations and his American businesses even better from there. And other bosses found new ways to operate. Things stayed pretty stable for a while, and the Mafia expanded into a lot of businesses, some of them not even illegal.
“Things got more profitable. There were about twenty-five families in the United States with maybe five thousand ‘made’ men who were full members. To join, they each had to kill somebody, burn a saint’s picture, and swear to follow omertà, which was a vow that they’d never talk. The whole shebang was run by a group called ‘the Commission,’ which was the heads of the five New York families and the heads of the Chicago family and the Buffalo family.
“In 1957 the cops stumbled on a big meeting on a little farm in upstate New York. They caught sixty-two bosses, including all seven members of the Commission, trying to run away through the fields in suits. No outsider really knows what the meeting was about, but probably it was about a lot of things. They were a worldwide conglomerate by then. They called the organization La Cosa Nostra—‘Our Thing.’
“But in 1962 Luciano was in the Naples airport and had a fatal heart attack. That took away an important force, a strong man at the top who liked things quiet. Right away in Palermo, the Sicilian boss Calcedonio Di Pisa was shot to death, apparently by the La Barbera brothers. His death set off what was called ‘the First Mafia War,’ a fight for control of Sicily. It was one of those fights that are like cats in a bag—no way out and everybody has claws.
“When the fighting moved to the United States, it was Frank Costello and Vito Genovese fighting over who would control Luciano’s American holdings. Right about that time, 1962, was when a friend got in touch with me. It was a guy I knew from the army named DeSilvio. He told me that somebody he was related to needed some help in the fighting. He had been in Vietnam with me, and he wondered if I needed money. I had just started the butcher shop, but it wasn’t paying for itself yet, so I was interested. I took a job, got paid for it, and then he called me again about a month later. That’s how I got into the other business. Before long I was getting calls from his uncles. Things were okay for a long time. But now I think we’ve got trouble.”
“What kind?” the boy had asked.
“That guy that I got hired to kill on opening day outside Yankee Stadium was involved in the argument over the Luciano family’s holdings in the United States. The other guy, the one who was going to kill me if you hadn’t gotten him first, was a visitor from Italy who was on the same side of things there. I didn’t know anybody was going to be with the guy ahead of time, and I didn’t know the target was that important. Maybe I would have done it different, or turned the job down. But what we did was help turn an argument into a war.”
He gestured toward the newspaper he had thrown aside. “These people want to know who did that. I hope they don’t find out, but they’re going to offer a lot of money for our names.”
The boy understood that he and Eddie were in danger, but not much more. None of the names meant anything to him. The places seemed either impossibly distant or all around him and moving nearer. He listened closely, but knew instantly that there was nothing he could do about it. He and Eddie were not members of a Mafia family. They weren’t even Italian. They had done a job, which was like an errand—do it, get paid, and go home. He thought that if Eddie didn’t take on any other jobs, they might stay safe.
At first things went on just as they always had. The boy had to spend each day in school because he and Eddie couldn’t afford to have a truant officer or cop come to ask questions about the boy.
During school hours, Eddie was devoted to his butcher shop. In the mornings he cut sides of beef into steaks and roasts, and lamb carcasses into racks of lamb. He sliced and weighed and wrapped hams, cut meat into pound packages, sliced bellies into bacon or pork belly, cut pork ribs. He butchered chickens and turkeys. His knife work was fast and surgical—clean, precise cuts that made meat into a fantasy portrait of a meal in a women’s magazine. He always dealt in high-quality meat from special wholesalers in western Pennsylvania and charged his customers only slightly more than the big markets did, weighing everything in plain sight with accurate scales.
The only exceptions to Eddie’s policies were his special-delivery customers. There were very elderly customers, some in wheelchairs, who couldn’t come to the store. There were also a few neighborhood housewives whose orders he would personally deliver to their houses while their husbands were away at work. He would often charge them special-friend prices. If one of them was having an important dinner party, Eddie would make sure that everything was just right.
Eddie was not the sort of man women looked after wistfully as he passed. His features were regular and straight but not remarkable. What he had were three things. One was a presence that exuded physical strength. He spent his days lifting, carrying, and cutting, on his feet for many hours. The second was his genial affability—a happy disposition. The third was a respect for technique. The reason he was a great butcher and the reason he was a great killer were the same: his concern for mastery.
While the boy was growing up, Eddie lectured him on the importance of technique in every endeavor, and if the boy failed to cut, weigh, or wrap the customer’s order right, Eddie made him do it again. If he missed a spot in cleaning the shop floor, Eddie made him start over and mop the whole floor again.
During this period, Eddie’s special home-delivery customers included four or five of the most attractive married women in the district. During the hours when these deliveries took place, the boy had to take over the shop. There were also occasions when one of Eddie’s special customers would come to the shop to pick up her order. Eddie would go with her into the office at the back of the building. There was plenty of meat in the case at the front of the store, and there were thousands of pounds of it in the refrigerator room. There was nothing for sale in the back office, and nothing there of interest except, possibly, technique.
7
Eddie took his role as a teacher seriously. While he was teaching the boy to be a skilled meat cutter, he was encouraging but watchful. Once, after a particularly long and successful day at the shop, Eddie told him,
“You’re a smart, hardworking kid, and you’ve learned what I taught you, so you’ll always be able to support yourself as a butcher. And you’re learning the other trade too. There’s not much you don’t notice.”
“Where did you learn?”
“The army taught me both my trades. They trained me to cut meat and sent me to a war, where I learned how to be the one who came home.”
Eddie had a friend who owned a farm about forty-five miles northwest of Pittsburgh near Kittaning. On Sundays, when the shop was closed, he and the boy would sometimes drive out there and take the key placed atop one of the struts that held up the porch roof. They would use the bathroom, write a note to the friend to say they’d been there, and then go out to the back hundred acres to shoot.
Eddie taught the boy special lessons about the physical act of killing. Every lesson was clear and practical, and now, all these years later, Michael was sure that every lesson had come back during some moment when he needed it. One was about knives: “Guys get into knife fights without having any idea what they’re doing or how to do it. They have an excuse. You won’t.”
“What’s their excuse?”
“That nobody wants or expects to be in a knife fight. It’s hard, and shooting somebody from a distance is easy, so they think that’s all that can happen. It isn’t. The real reason they don’t prepare is that they’re just on their way to being killed, only they don’t know it yet. You’re not the loser, so you don’t get an excuse. You were raised to use knives. You know them from working in the shop, and you have years of muscle memory for how they feel, how to get the deepest cut, how to hold one to keep your hand from slipping down to the blade, even when the handle is wet with blood.”
Eddie had a roll of red electrical tape. He cut strips of it and put them on his own shirt and pants and around his neck to remind the boy where the vital blood vessels were. Then they fought, using knives with the blades wrapped in several layers of black electrical tape.