Apaches

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  More praise for

  Lorenzo Carcaterra

  and APACHES

  Apaches “makes The Silence of the Lambs seem a bit of an Aesop fable. … Carcaterra makes us rethink our notions of American culture. … Nobody makes you root more for the Dirty Harrys. … And nobody leaves you wondering more about that line—so very thin indeed in Carcaterra land—between revenge and justice.”

  —The Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “Darkly atmospheric … Carcaterra’s novel succeeds admirably in describing a hostile, unforgiving world in which a life can be snuffed out ‘in a New York minute’ and where good and evil frequently intermingle. … A fervent cry for justice and a tribute to crime’s courageous avengers.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  “Carcaterra is an excellent writer, changing the pace here and there but never letting the reader go.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Consistently hard-hitting … Savage … Wrenching.”

  —Daytona News-Journal

  “A gritty revelation of the underbelly of life … A story that grabs you from the beginning and just doesn’t let go.”

  —Affaire de Coeur

  By Lorenzo Carcaterra

  A SAFE PLACE:

  The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder

  SLEEPERS

  APACHES

  GANGSTER

  STREET BOYS

  PARADISE CITY

  CHASERS

  For the fallen.

  Acknowledgments

  None of what follows would have happened without the help and guidance of many. Here are a few:

  Peter Gethers, who proved once again to be a great editor and, as I learned with the writing of this book, a patient one. The jokes aren’t bad either. No writer could hope to have a better publisher or friend than Clare Ferraro. A tip of the hat to the rest of my Ballantine gang: Linda Grey, Alberto Vitale, Sally Marvin (no more Big Macs), Liz Williams, and Nate Penn.

  Loretta Fidel has always had my respect and this time around, she earned her stripes; Amy Schiffman, Rob Carlson, and Carol Yumkas are great agents and good friends. A big thank-you also to Arnold Rifkin. Thanks to Jake Bloom and Robert Offer for taking me along for the ride. And to Barry Kingham for being there.

  A warm thanks to Jerry Bruckheimer, Susan Lyne, Jordi Ros, Donald De Line, and Joe Roth for their passion. And to Christy Callahan and Christian McLaughlin for their help.

  To John Manniel for all he did for my family. A heartfelt thank-you to Steve Collura. I’ll see you at Toscana’s. And to Sonny Grosso, the best cop ever to pin on an NYPD badge and a friend for life. The next Fernet’s on me.

  To my phone circle: Liz Wagner, Leah Rozen, William Diehl, Stan Pottinger, Mr. G., Brother Anthony, Hank Gallo, and Joe Lisi. Thanks for listening.

  To Vincent, Ida, and Anthony—for the great meals and the happy nights.

  To Susan, who makes what I write read better than it should. In return, I can only give my heart. And to my two best accomplishments: Kate, who lets me steal her great plot ideas without complaints, and Nick, who keeps me laughing.

  They have taught me how to love.

  PROLOGUE

  My mother groan’d, my father wept,

  Into the dangerous world I leapt;

  Helpless, naked, piping loud,

  Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

  —William Blake,

  “Infant Sorrow”

  February 18, 1982

  CARLO AND ANNE Santori wanted nothing more than to be alone.

  They had planned this weekend getaway for six months, their first one in fifteen years. No kids, no phones, no work, nothing but music, dance, and a little bit of romance at the Jersey shore.

  They left behind their fifteen-year-old son, Anthony, to care for the house and his twelve-year-old sister, Jennifer. They felt that both children were old enough to be trusted, allowing them to enjoy a short respite from the daily grind of parental responsibility. Carlo handed Anthony the house keys and three simple instructions—don’t stray from the neighborhood, set the burglar alarm and lock the house, and never let Jennifer out of your sight. The boy stared at his father and swore to obey all three.

  Anthony, however, had his own plans for the weekend.

  His parents were no less than ten minutes out of the driveway when Anthony woke Jennifer from a sound sleep, yelling for her to get ready. They had two hours to catch a bus for a ride into Manhattan, to spend a Saturday in the city his parents had always told him was not to be trusted.

  Anthony needed to get away almost as much as Carlo and Anne. He was a teenager eager for the taste of a day without parents, without rules, and with pockets jammed with allowance money. All of it out there waiting less than an hour’s ride from the safety of a New Jersey colonial. His only obstacle had been to convince Jennifer.

  She balked when she first heard the plan, and it was all he could do to keep her from spilling the secret. Jennifer was afraid something would go wrong, believing all the horror stories she had heard. But she stayed silent, her arms always wrapped around a Kermit the Frog doll, confident Anthony would protect her and allow nothing bad to happen.

  Confident that he would be the one to keep her safe.

  Jennifer was a frail girl, with a thin, freckled face, eager to cross the bridge from preteen to young adult. She wore a long-sleeved Gap denim shirt over a white pocket T. The jeans were tight and bleached, bottoms scraping a pair of red hightops. Black bangs brushed the corners of her eyes.

  “Should we really do this?”

  “Stay home if you’re scared,” Anthony said, walking from her room.

  “I’m not scared,” Jennifer said right back.

  “Then get ready,” Anthony told her. “And don’t forget to bring your own money.”

  They walked down a sloping hill, ice, dirt, and moldy leaves brushing against their shoes. Jennifer kept her hands inside her coat pockets. On her shoulders was a backpack filled with a change purse, Kermit, and a hairbrush. Anthony kept his face away from the arctic blasts of wind bouncing past trees and houses. They moved in silence, each excited at the prospect of doing something forbidden.

  Anthony held the door to the 7-Eleven across the two-lane street from the bus shelter. He checked his watch as his sister walked past.

  “Ten minutes,” he said. “Get what you want and meet me by the stop.”

  They boarded the 11:04.

  Anthony paid for the one-way tickets with exact change. They walked down the center aisle toward the back of the bus, taking two empty seats four rows from an old couple bundled into down coats. Anthony unzipped his black leather jacket and leaned back, thick black curls resting against the torn edge of the seat. He closed his eyes as the bus swung past a series of minimart shops, fast-food outlets, and used car dealerships, heading for the speed lane of a congested thruway and the streets of New York City.

  “I can’t wait to see the stores,” Jenny said, her Styrofoam cup of tea now cold in her hand.

  “We’ll walk around a bit,” Anthony said, eyes still closed. “Get a feel for the place.”

  “Will it be crowded?”

  “It’s New York.” Anthony turned his head toward the window. “It’s always crowded.”

  “We gonna be home before dark?”

  Anthony didn’t answer, rocked to sleep by the motion of the bus.

  “I hope we’re home before dark,” Jennifer Santori whispered to herself.

  • • •

  THE BUS PULLED into the top level of New York’s Port Authority terminal at 11:56 A.M., three minutes past its projected arrival. Jennifer put a hand on her brother’s shoulder and woke him.

  “What will we do first?” Jennifer asked, zipping her parka.

  “Find a bathroom
,” Anthony said.

  They walked among thick crowds, Anthony holding Jennifer’s hand. He repeated his warnings not to leave him. To wait where he left her.

  To speak to no one.

  To look at no one.

  Anthony pushed open the men’s room door, the one directly across from the Papaya King. He left Jennifer against the wall next to the door, pointed a finger in her face, and again told her not to move.

  She answered with a nod.

  He was out in less than five minutes.

  He looked to his left and swallowed hard, feeling the sweat and the chill. Anthony Santori stood there and did the only thing he could think to do. He shouted his sister’s name. Again and again and again and again. He shouted it as loud and as strong and as often as he could.

  But there never was a response.

  His ears were filled with the din of passing conversations. People stopped to stare at him now, curious about the panicked boy shouting out a girl’s name. But he didn’t care. Not about them. Not about what they thought. Not about what they were saying.

  There was only one truth that mattered.

  Jennifer had disappeared.

  His only sister was gone.

  Swallowed by a city not her own.

  BOOK ONE

  No hero without a wound.

  —Bulgarian proverb

  1

  Boomer

  GIOVANNI “BOOMER” FRONTIERI never wanted to be a cop. He was a three-letter athlete during his school years at St. Bernard’s Academy, a private high school in downtown Manhattan his parents insisted he attend. He would leave their cold-water railroad apartment each morning before sunup and return each evening after dark, eating dinner and doing homework at the kitchen table facing the fire escape. He was a model student, never complained about his packed schedule, and kept the friends he trusted to a minimum.

  He had two younger sisters, Angela and Maria, whom he would either dote on or ignore, depending on his mood. His older brother, Carmine, had already dropped out of school and followed their father, John, into the heavy-lifting, well-paying labor of the meat market. Their relationship was reserved, at best.

  John Frontieri was a stern man who commanded respect and demanded his family’s full attention. His upper body, conditioned by years of lugging 250-pound hindquarters off the backs of refrigerated trucks, was a weight lifter’s dream. He was quick to give a slap of the hand to one of the children if he felt they were out of line, but never hit or screamed at his wife, Theresa, a homely, chunky woman whose face displayed a weariness far greater than her years.

  On spring and summer Sunday mornings, after the nine o’clock mass, Johnny Frontieri would change quickly out of his blue dress suit and into work pants, construction shoes, and a sweatshirt. He and little Giovanni would then take their fishing poles and tackle down from the living room closet and rush out of the apartment for a twenty-minute subway ride downtown. There, after a brisk walk, the two would spend the day, feet brushing the sand on the edges of the East River, their backs to the Manhattan Bridge, fishing for whatever could survive the currents.

  It was their time together.

  “If I catch a shark, can I stay home from school tomorrow?” Giovanni, then nine, asked his father.

  “You catch a shark,” John said, “and you can stay home from school for a month.”

  “What about if I catch an eel?”

  “You reel an eel and I’ll make you go to school on weekends,” John said.

  The two looked at one another and laughed, the morning sun creeping past the expanse of the bridge and onto their faces.

  “You’re always lookin’ to get outta school, Giovanni,” his father said. “Why is that?”

  “I hate it,” Giovanni said.

  “Then quit.” His father shrugged. “Quit right now. Today.”

  “You mean it?” Giovanni asked, his face beaming.

  “You should always walk from somethin’ you hate doin’,” his father said. “Turn your eye to somethin’ else.”

  “Like what?”

  “You can come work with me if you want. Put in your ten, twelve hours a day, help bring some table money home. Or maybe go down to the docks to work with your cousins. Do a full four-day shift with them and get locked into the union. How’s that feel to you?”

  “I don’t know, Dad,” Giovanni said, swaying his fishing line to the right of a swirl, pulling on the reel. “None of it sounds like fun.”

  “If you’re gonna forget about school, then you can forget about fun,” John said, sitting down on wet sand, gripping his fishing rod with both hands.

  Giovanni stared down at his father and then back across at the water, concentrating on a nibble. “You have fun,” he said after a long stretch of silence. “And you didn’t go to any school.”

  “Working man’s fun,” John said. “It’s not the same.”

  “Mama thinks I should become a dentist,” Giovanni said. “I don’t know why.”

  “I think she’s got a thing for Dr. Tovaldi,” John said, lifting his face to the sun. “She always dresses up nice when she goes to him and gets her teeth cleaned.”

  “What do you want me to be?” Giovanni asked. “You never say, one way or another.”

  “What you end up becomin’ is up to you,” John said. “I can’t lead you down any road. But whatever it is you do, don’t go into it half-assed. You’ll only wind up hatin’ yourself. Give it everything, the full shot. This way, at the end of the day, when the sun’s down and you know you put in a hundred percent, you’ll feel good about yourself. Maybe even feel proud.”

  “You proud of me now?” Giovanni asked.

  “You goin’ back to school tomorrow?” his father asked, standing up, dusting off the back of his pants.

  “Yeah,” Giovanni said.

  “Then I’m proud of you,” Johnny Frontieri said. “And if you end up catchin’ a fish we can all eat, I’ll be even prouder.”

  • • •

  AS HE GOT older, Giovanni would often dream of a career designing great structures in cities around the world. His would be a life far removed from one confined to tenements and churches, a life in which a hard day’s labor was rewarded only by a solid meal. As a young man, he looked with disdain upon the fabric of his neighborhood—the old women longing for dead men, street hoods living off the gambling habits of the working poor, the church offering solace and peace to the faithful, demanding silent suffering in return. As an adult, he would pine for that lost world, but in his early years in the New York City of 1955, Giovanni Frontieri was intent on hitting the fast lane out of his East Harlem ghetto.

  The murder of his father brought those plans to a halt.

  • • •

  IT RAINED THE day Giovanni’s father died. His legs crossed, John was leaning back in a two-seater in the third car of a near-empty IRT train, on his way to work. It was nearly three in the morning when they passed the Twenty-third Street station. The passengers were either heading to a working man’s job or coming back from an uptown night of drink and dance. Three of the latter, two loud men and one giggling woman, sat in the middle of the car, to the left of John Frontieri. The men were drunk and unsteady, the taller of the two drinking from a pint of Jack Daniel’s, free hand resting on the woman’s knee. The train was stifling, heat hissing from open vents under the seats.

  John Frontieri shook his head as he read his Italian newspaper. He was more concerned about Naples losing a title game to Florence than about the hard looks exchanged by the two men across the aisle. He didn’t see one of the men stand and reach for an overhead strap handle. John was reading about an open net goal scored on an inept Naples defense when the man standing pulled a gun and aimed it at the other man, who, five hours earlier, had been his best friend.

  In a hard city, a man’s life is often decided by the actions of a simple moment. For Johnny Frontieri that moment arrived in the form of a train engineer who hit the brakes too hard coming into the Fourteenth
Street subway stop. The squealing halt turned the man with the gun away from his friend and toward Johnny. The man stared at Frontieri, knowing, even through the haze, that it was too late to stop what had been done.

  Frontieri looked up from his paper and knew he was about to die.

  He was forty-one years old and had never missed a day’s work in his life. In the spark of an instant, the images of his wife and children meshed into one warm thought.

  The doors to the train opened.

  The bullet from the cocked gun hit John Frontieri in the forehead. The back of his skull spread across a subway map behind him as his newspaper fell to the floor.

  The woman stared up at the standing man and the thin line of smoke from the fired gun in his hand. She then turned to look at the man in the corner of the train, slumped in his seat, blood thick as mud dripping down his chest. She shook her head, tears frozen to her eyes, and screamed.

  A scream Johnny Frontieri never heard.

  • • •

  GIOVANNI WAS DRIVEN downtown with his older brother to identify their father’s body. He looked with impassive eyes as the white sheet was lifted to reveal the dead man whom he loved more than any other. There had been few words between the two, fewer smiles, no middle-American fantasies of touch football games in the yard, camping trips in the summer, or boisterous talks around a dinner table. There was just a love and respect built around a solid wall of silence. A love built on trust.

  Giovanni Frontieri reached down, grabbed his father’s cold hand, and kissed it. He then turned away and never looked back. He never cried for the man on the icy slab, not then, not at the well-attended funeral, not at the cemetery. Giovanni would shed his tears in another way, one which his father would appreciate.

  He would get even.

  That night, riding in the back of a quiet squad car, heading home to a crying mother and two hysterical sisters, his slow breathing clouding the sides of the window, Giovanni Frontieri decided to become a cop. He was sixteen years old.