by Thomas Perry
“But they would have enough guns to turn our car into a pile of scrap.”
“I’m not sure. Look at the ice now.”
The seven corpses lay wherever they were when the bullets had found them. But now there were new figures on the ice. “What are they doing?”
“What I’d be doing is taking wallets, watches, and keys. They’re going to want to know who attacked them, and to take a car or two from the lot by the hotel to get them out of here. But I’ve seen Barzoni, and I know his face. He’s a big guy, about two sixty and tall. I don’t see him out on the ice. Maybe he’s afraid he’ll fall through.”
“So what do we do?”
“You take the wheel. Keep the lights off. Put the car in low gear and drive slowly and carefully toward the cottage. Try not to step on the brake pedal, because that will make the taillights go on. It’s hard as hell to sneak up on anybody in a three-thousand-pound car, but the wind will help muffle the sound. We head for the garage. I’ll try to mess up their car. If Barzoni is the one to come see what’s up, we kill him. If not, we just keep going.”
The boy reached for the door handle, but Eddie said, “Don’t. It’ll light up the dome light. Just climb into the backseat so I can slide to trade places. Then you climb forward over the driver’s seat and take the wheel.”
“Okay.”
When they had traded seats, Eddie reached into the back seat and picked up the rifle and its two magazines he’d hidden under the floor mat. He loaded the rifle, put the second magazine in his breast pocket, and switched off the safety. The boy took one of his .45 pistols out of his coat and stuck it in his belt.
Eddie said, “Okay, let’s go. Don’t back up. Swing around so the backup lights don’t go on.”
The boy made a wide turn between trees and then found the shallow ruts that Eddie had made driving onto the lot. When he reached the edge of the road, he had to let the car coast and simply steer it between the snowdrifts. Even in the short time they’d been parked to watch the slaughter, the configuration of drifts and the depth of snow had changed, but he kept the car moving and got through.
The slow progress made it feel as though the trip along the lake road was taking forever, but his fears about who and how many would be at the cottage when they arrived made him want to make time stop.
When he swung around the last turn before the cottage, the boy could see the lights on the ice, and some of the crew of defenders struggling to keep their footing while dragging the corpses to shore. It had not occurred to him before that they would do that, but he supposed it would delay their discovery.
Three men were up on the road near the cottage, watching the others work. He knew that as soon as one of these men turned his head, he would see the car rolling toward them. They would produce guns and start shooting.
“There. The big one,” Eddie said. “That’s Barzoni.” He opened his window, leaned to the side, and stuck out his rifle.
The three men turned in unison. They reached into their heavy coats to free pistols from belts and pockets.
Eddie shot the big man, who fell backward. He fired at the others and clearly missed, because they ran to hide on the lake side behind the cottage. The boy stopped the car next to the open garage, and Eddie fired about ten rounds rapidly into the radiator, windshield, and front tires, and then swung the rifle forward again. He ejected the magazine and clicked the spare into place.
The boy began to move ahead, but Eddie said, “Stop.”
He braked but slid a couple of feet, and Eddie got out. He went to the corner of the cottage and stepped one pace past it. Eddie fired another rapid series of shots in that direction. The boy saw Eddie kneel by the big man’s body, reach into his pocket, and fiddle with the man’s hand before running back to the car.
The boy shifted into drive and accelerated gradually, trying to keep the car from fishtailing. He was aware of when he passed the hotel where they had spent the evening, but he was looking straight ahead. He just kept on the road, adding every bit of speed he dared. “What were you doing back there?”
“Taking his ring.”
“What for?”
“So I could give it to Bobby Moscato to collect our money. Be sure to watch for the blind curve up there about a mile. By now it must be smooth as a mirror.”
Eddie was wrapping something in his handkerchief while the boy drove, and the boy didn’t need to see it to know what it was. After he thought about it for a few seconds, he conceded it had been the thing to do. That thickening at the knuckle was easy for a butcher to find in the dark.
29
Eddie died alone. It was six months later, the next summer. Eddie had received a couple of phone calls that week from a man named Pirizelli who wanted to arrange a hit. The boy had been working with Eddie for about five years by then, but Eddie still did certain jobs alone. There were times and places where it was easiest for one man to get in and out. Eddie was good at working alone, and sometimes the boy wondered if Eddie just asked him to come along to give him experience.
That night one man was not enough. Afterward the boy knew that he had no right to be surprised. Nobody who made a living discharging firearms into the bodies of other men could be ignorant of the damage bullets caused, or how easy it was to hit an opponent who wasn’t expecting to be a target. He was even aware that reacting by hunting down the ones who had killed Eddie would be an empty gesture, but he occupied himself with plans to accomplish it because it made him feel less alone and helpless.
He knew that Eddie wouldn’t have wanted him to avenge his death. He would have said he had spent too much time and effort teaching the boy about the world to have it all bleed out of him now. Eddie was a mercenary, and mercenaries knew revenge was for the deluded. There was no such thing as getting even for being dead.
The boy arranged a funeral. Eddie’s religion had not been part of his adult life. The boy guessed he had probably been raised Catholic, so he lied to the parish priest and said he was, then had the priest do the service. The event drew a healthy crowd, partly because Eddie had been a familiar and popular figure in the neighborhood, and partly because his death was surprising and notorious. The boy heard a number of people marveling that such a nice, ordinary guy should end up dying of gunshot wounds on a simple weekend trip to New York. The boy also noticed that several—and maybe all—of Eddie’s special home-delivery customers attended.
A few days after the funeral, the boy sat in the office of the butcher shop and called numbers that Eddie had written down on the strip of white butcher paper he always had taped to his desk for messages and orders. Only a few had area codes, and some of them the boy recognized. There was a 212 number that had a time of day written beside it: 10:15 p.m., after Eddie’s shop was closed. The boy waited until that time of the evening and called the number. After a couple of rings, a woman answered. “Hello?” He recognized a New York accent.
He said, “Hello. Is this Nora?” He didn’t know where that name came from.
“No. This is a phone booth. I was just walking past. I don’t see anybody near here that could be a Nora. Sorry.”
“Wait. Don’t hang up yet. Can you tell me where the booth is?”
“Twenty-fourth and Lexington.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re a good person and I’m glad you answered.” He had already put the “Closed” sign in the window of the shop the day he’d learned of Eddie’s death. Now he put tape around it and over the clock face so it was permanent. He packed and got into Eddie’s car to drive to New York City. He checked into a hotel and left Eddie’s car parked in its underground lot. He took a cab to Twenty-Fourth and Lexington and found the phone booth.
It was outside a large office building that held a few shops and two restaurants at street level. He walked, coming back to that corner now and then to see whether anyone was using the phone. Most of the time nobody was. Only once did h
e see anyone in the booth, a girl about his own age whose talk was animated, her happy face breaking into sincere laughter now and then. After a few minutes a young man who appeared to be her boyfriend stopped and waved through the window. She hung up the phone, came out of the booth, and put her arm through his as they walked away.
He spent hours floating around the neighborhood like a ghost, watching everything, seeing so much that he had no way to decipher or even remember for long. He made sure to be in sight of the booth at 10:00 p.m. Soon he saw a man about fifty years old, wearing a golf shirt and a windbreaker with pants that looked like they came from a suit. He walked along Lexington at a quick, businesslike pace, the soft fabric of the pants flapping a little as he went. He sidestepped into the phone booth, looked at his watch, and then slid the door shut. The boy noted that it was now 10:15 p.m. The man took a small spiral pad and a pen from his jacket, dialed the phone, put money in, and talked. He wrote some things while he was talking and after he’d hung up. He made four calls and then left.
The boy followed him, staying on the other side of the street and a hundred feet behind. Only a couple of blocks down the street and around the corner, the man went into a door on the side of a building. The boy walked past it. Above the door was an inscription that looked like the engraving on a tombstone, reading “Napolitano Social Club, est. 1921.”
The boy left and then came back about an hour later. This time four men were outside the building, two older men smoking cigars and two younger companions hanging around to listen to their conversation. It was a calm night, and he could tell why they’d come outside. The smell of the cigars was still pungent and strong more than two hundred feet away. He watched them for a while, picked up a few words and phrases, but couldn’t assemble the words into a topic, let alone a conversation. Occasionally others would come outside to smoke or would arrive from the street. There were men from twenty years old to about eighty, but he saw no women. What he’d seen was enough.
Pirizelli was probably a false name, but the club was real enough. These were likely to be people who still held a grudge over the Opening Day shootings or wanted to collect for them, but that didn’t matter to him. What mattered was that the phone booth was just over a block from their club, and somebody had used the phone to get Eddie to New York to kill him.
He went back to his hotel, walked down the ramp to the underground garage where he’d parked Eddie’s car, and selected his equipment.
Eddie and Don Sarkassian had taught him to break down, clean, and reassemble most common weapons in the dark. He put on surgical gloves, partially assembled the AR-15 rifle he had brought from Eddie’s house into four pieces—the upper and lower receivers, buttstock, and barrel assembly. He had Eddie’s razor-sharp folding knife and both of his .45 pistols with spare magazines in case he needed to discard the rifle. He also brought a device he had made for an earlier job. It consisted of about twenty feet of hundred-pound-test fishing line with a lead sinker firmly tied on each end. He put them all in a backpack.
He took a cab to Lexington and walked to the place he had chosen on his earlier visit, a fire escape a half block away from the Napolitano Social Club. The fire escape consisted of a flat platform at each floor level and beside it a window from the end of that floor’s hallway. So the fire escape couldn’t be used to enter the building, the fire escape ladder extended from the second floor down to about twelve feet from the ground. It was attached to a counterweight, so if a person on the second floor stepped on the nearest rung, the person’s weight would make the ladder slide downward almost to the ground, but not quickly enough to cause injuries.
The boy stepped below the end of the raised ladder, took out his coiled fishing line, and tossed the sinker up twelve feet and over the bottom rung. Then he let out enough weighted fishing line so that he could reach both ends of the line. He wrapped them around his sleeve, gripped them tightly, and pulled the ladder down to the ground. He stepped onto the ladder, freed his fishing line from the bottom rung, and put it in his coat pocket. He climbed the ladder up to the second-floor level.
The second-floor level of the fire escape was an iron grating about twenty feet aboveground. He assembled the four pieces of his rifle, loaded it, sat on the fire escape, and sighted the rifle on the front door of the Napolitano Social Club. His own position was above the street lamps and the light that spilled from ground-floor windows onto the sidewalks, and was in the shadow of the building’s wall.
At around midnight, a group of five men came out of the Napolitano Social Club. One of them lit a cigar, then gave one to another man and lit it with the high yellow flame of a Zippo lighter. Soon they were in the middle of a heated discussion, puffing and gesturing with their cigars as they talked. One by one, the three younger men left, but the two older men stayed.
The boy chose one of the two older men. He was wearing a good gray suit with a silk tie and a matching pocket square, while the other man had a dark blue jacket that looked like the kind baseball pitchers put on when their team was at bat. The boy watched until the man in the suit made a gesture with both arms wide, so he could easily see where his heart was, then squeezed the trigger. The round made a loud pop, and the man fell dead. The second man was dumbstruck, looking around in all directions. It occurred to the boy that he would gain time if the man didn’t run back inside to raise the alarm. He aimed at the door, and when the man reached for the knob, he shot him through the back of the head.
The boy stepped on the fire escape, rode the ladder down, dropped the last couple of feet, and then walked swiftly around the first corner into an alcove at the entrance to a dark building. He knelt there long enough to divide the rifle into four pieces again and put them into his backpack. Then he ran to the end of the block and came out on Lexington. He went to the 23rd Street subway station and descended the steps. It took only a few minutes before the first train appeared, and he took it.
Then he drove Eddie’s car to Philadelphia and checked into a hotel. He bought the New York newspapers the next afternoon. The papers were full of photographs and descriptions of the victims, the scene of the crime, and gang assassinations of the past. He noticed that many people in New York had begun to think of LCN as faintly antiquated, dying out, and unrelated to honest people’s lives, even though everything in New York—from the cost of a dinner to where the napkins came from to who picked up the garbage afterward—was determined by agreements among five bosses. What people knew or didn’t wasn’t his problem. He was just looking for obituaries.
The obituaries were delayed, probably because the bodies were part of the evidence against the killer and were at the medical examiner’s, so the decisions about the wakes and the funerals were held up. Then, after about a week, the two obituaries appeared in the same edition. The two older men had been cousins, both named Tronzoni. The viewings would be held for two days in the Florellio Funeral Home, and then the bodies would be buried at Saint John’s Cemetery, 80-01 Metropolitan Avenue, Middle Village, in Queens.
He looked at city maps, drove to the cemetery and looked around, and then drove back to his hotel in Philadelphia. On the night before the funerals, he left Eddie’s car in the underground lot and packed his weapons in his backpack. He took a cab to the train station and then rode the train to New York. When night came, he took a couple of buses and got off near the Florellio Funeral Home.
He visited the funeral home long after it had closed. There were a dozen hearses and even more black limousines parked inside a high fence with four strands of barbed wire along the top. He could see that there was a coiled hose with a high-pressure nozzle for washing hearses and limousines, and a carport to provide shade for waxing and detailing them. Twenty feet farther along the building was a large steel door, and across from it was a second steel door to the big garage.
He walked around the garage. There were no windows, and the front had a large metal door. He saw that on one side was an air-condit
ioning unit mounted on a concrete pad. He stepped closer to hear if it was running, and it was. The way in and out of the yard where the hearses were parked was through the back garage door, out the front garage door, and down the driveway.
He went over to look at the big metal garage door. A bolt with a hasp and a padlock anchored the door to the building. The boy looked closely at the padlock. It was a popular brand in a very common size. He knew that on Eddie’s key ring were a few bump keys for getting into houses, but also at least a couple of filed-down padlock keys. He looked and listened for a couple of minutes before testing the key on Eddie’s ring that looked closest to the right size. He turned it just until he felt resistance, then pushed it a little farther, tugged the lock tight, and turned it. The lock opened.
He removed the lock, withdrew the bolt, opened the garage door, stepped in, and saw the sets of car keys hanging on a board with hooks. There were even keys for the padlock on the second garage door. He went out, looked in the back of the first hearse, saw there was no coffin inside, looked at the license plate, and took a set of keys with a tag that matched the license plate. He drove the hearse into the garage, loaded a couple of rolls of fake grass and some folding chairs into the back, stopped to pull the doors back down, and drove off.
When he arrived the next morning at the cemetery, workmen were riding lawn mowers up and down the long rows of bronze plaques, while others sat along the sides of a stake truck with shovels. There were a couple of power shovels for digging graves.
He drove his stolen hearse to the kiosk at the entrance, where the guard leaned out and said, “Can I help you?”
“The boy said, “Yes, please. Where is the Tronzoni service going to be?”
“You from Floriello’s?”