Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Bartoni found that detective in Giancarlo Lo Manto.

  Lo Manto studied under the master detective’s supervision for ten years, working homicide and narcotics cases, the older cop marveling at his young protégé’s interrogation skills and crime-solving abilities. “You can never go into a case thinking you’re smarter than the man you are trying to snare,” Bartoni had told Lo Manto late one night, both men sitting in a corner of a dark trattoria after another successful takedown. “That leaves you open for mistakes. You must always be the one with the questions looking only for that one answer—how did he commit the crime? All your thoughts, all your actions, your entire time spent on the case should be directed toward finding that one response. The drive to get to that answer, the refusal to accept the inability to close out a case, is what stamps a detective as great.”

  “Do you remember all the ones you’ve solved?” Lo Manto asked him.

  “No,” Bartoni said. “Only the ones I didn’t. Those you can never forget.”

  “Have there been many?”

  “One would be too many,” Bartoni said.

  “What do you do?” he asked. “When that happens?”

  “You learn to carry it with you,” Bartoni said. “It’s branded onto you like a scar. It’s not like other jobs where a mistake or an occasional failure can be corrected. When you slip on that gun and badge, you take on all the good and bad it brings.”

  Lo Manto sat back and looked past Bartoni, gazing at a middle-aged man gently holding a sleeping infant to his chest. Bartoni was quick to catch the look and stayed quiet for several moments, lighting a fresh cigarette and pouring out the remains of his Peroni beer. “My father died when I was young, too,” Bartoni said. “It left me angry and resentful for many years. I always felt there was something I could have done, should have done to save him. There’s no real reason to feel that way, but you do.”

  “I couldn’t have saved my father,” Lo Manto said. “If I had been with him that night, they would have killed me too.”

  “But still you’re driven by revenge,” Bartoni said. “You want the Camorra to pay the price for what you lost.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Lo Manto asked, defiant as well as a bit defensive.

  “Anger and revenge will help make you a great cop, Giancarlo,” Bartoni said. “But they always leave in their wake a bitter man.”

  Lo Manto stared back hard at Bartoni. The older detective was an elegant-looking man, always stylish in dress and modest in temperament. His hair was a thick patch of white, kept razor-cut and combed back, matching the neatly trimmed Vandyke that helped give his tanned and lined face a regal look. He was slight of weight and build, his designer suits bought not through corruption but at a steep discount through a brother-in-law in the trade. The older members of the force referred to Bartoni as “The Baron,” and he did nothing to distance himself from the name.

  “Or a dead one,” Lo Manto said.

  Lo Manto turned his back to the bay and walked down a side street, heading toward his second-floor, five-room apartment near the Piazza Dante. He felt bone-weary; his workout-solid thirty-eight-year-old body seemed to be aging at warp speed. He hadn’t taken more than a week’s vacation since he joined the force and the only extended absences he had were spent recuperating from various battle wounds. At Bartoni’s urging, he had put in for a month’s vacation and booked a stay at a resort on the isle of Capri. He needed the time away and would take it as soon as this latest drug deal in Ercolano was cleaned up. He was tired of being alone, of having so few around him to trust or confide in, wondering if he would ever catch the criminals he so desperately sought. He had been putting dents in Camorra enterprises for most of his seventeen years on the force, and despite all that, all the arrests and the drug seizures, they had only grown stronger in power. Pete Rossi, who replaced Don Nicola as overlord of the Camorra, lived in a Manhattan brownstone and was married to a woman stunning enough to be a model, with three young sons who would one day be trained for a business the family excelled in. And all Lo Manto had to show for his efforts was a long string of arrests credited to his record and a wide array of scars decorating his body.

  He had grown into a double for his father. They both had thick dark hair, which Lo Manto kept long and loose over his ears and neck, and hot-coal eyes that pierced the skin. He was slightly taller than his father, standing at a firm six feet, and had his walk and many of his mannerisms. But the smile was Lo Manto’s alone. It was as expressive and open as a sunrise, instantly capturing the heart of its intended target. He turned many a woman’s head when he put it to proper use, usually to elicit information, but was shy in using it around the many young ladies his mother was always forcing him to meet.

  He crossed against a red light, ignoring the angry yells of a driver in a red Fiat, and stepped into Piazza Dante. He slipped a hand into his pants pocket and pulled out a fresh pack of gum. He unwrapped three pieces and jammed them into his mouth. In most cultures, the pressure to marry by a certain age is strong. In a city as ancient in its thinking as Naples, it was almost unbearable. But Lo Manto never gave the idea any thought, no matter how much family and peer weight was brought to bear. He had no intention of leaving behind a widow, and in his line of work, with the crew he was determined to go up against, he believed that would be the only possible result.

  Giancarlo Lo Manto wanted no one to waste her love and her years crying over his grave.

  4

  NEW YORK CITY

  Summer 2003

  PETE ROSSI SAT behind a thick mahogany desk, his back to a glassed-in view of the New York waterfront. His fingers rested on the arms of an Italian leather chair, his nails shiny and manicured. He had on a dark blue Armani suit and a blue-striped Tripler shirt, a bloodred tie knotted tight at the neck. His gold cuff links, with his initials embossed in their center, matched the gold pin holding his tie in place. He was thirty-two years old and GQ-handsome, his face tanned and wrinkle-free, his eyes winter dark and his rich brown hair combed back, two thick curls flopping at the edge of his forehead.

  Rossi had an economics degree from Boston University and an MBA from New York University, graduating at the top of his class at each school. He was the president of a multimillion-dollar import-export house and had financial interests in three Manhattan restaurants and a Bronx catering hall. He steered clear of the stock market, investing his spare cash in municipal bonds, T-bills, and European cell phone enterprises. He was married and had maintained a hectic social schedule, his face gracing the gossip pages of the city’s tabloids as often as it did the financial broadsheets. To those who followed the day-to-day activities of the business world, Pete Rossi was a young man on the rise.

  In the criminal world, he was already there.

  He was the youngest and most powerful of the Camorra dons, the poster child for the syndicate’s new and intricate way of controlling their criminal base. Decades earlier, the Camorra rulers had decided to leave the headlines and the page-one arrests to their counterparts in Sicily, the Mafia. There was no profit in doing business in such a way and no gain to be had in advertising and flaunting their behavior. Instead, the Camorra chose quietly to raise their own members. They would recruit from impoverished families in Naples who were either in debt to them or eager to see a son set free into the world with the guarantee of a prime education and a chance to flee a life of despair and ruin. The elders studied each child and fit the schooling to match the boy’s skills, covering every base from medicine to finance. Within the span of four decades, the Camorra had infiltrated every ring of life both in Naples and New York, their surface legitimate, their dirty and more profitable work done in silence and cloaked in darkness. Among thousands of recruits, there had been no better match for the Camorra than Pete Rossi, the son of a respected don.

  Rossi took a deep breath and looked up from his ledger at the older man who sat across his desk, an unlit Cuban cigar in his right hand. “He’s got somebody on the inside tipping him of
f,” Rossi said, sitting back against the cool leather of the chair. “A street informant can only know or hear so much.”

  “Whoever it is, he can’t be that high up the circle,” the man said. “Otherwise, this cop be making bigger trouble for us.”

  “He interrupted a hundred-fifty million in business last year alone,” Rossi said, a tinge of anger to his voice. “How much more trouble you looking to get from him, Frank?”

  “He’s one guy, is what I’m saying,” Frank said. “We can handle one guy.”

  “I think it’s time we did,” Rossi said. “We can’t even let one step on us in any way. It might start to encourage others.”

  Frank Silvestri stood up from his chair, placed a pair of thick, pudgy hands into the pockets of his tailored pants, and walked toward the large window. He stared down at the waterfront. Silvestri was in his early fifties and had been a member of the Camorra since he was an eight-year-old abandoned on the streets of Naples by a young mother too desperate and deranged to raise her only son. The Camorra had tried the restless boy in a number of schools, but none seemed to fit his volatile personality. A year spent with the monks in an academy near Monte Cassino, just outside Salerno, helped curb his temper and taught him the value of patience. In time, Silvestri, tall and muscular and with a boxer’s stamina, matched his brawn to his brain and became an invaluable soldier to Pete Rossi’s father, Don Nicola.

  Silvestri knew when to attack and when to lay low. He learned early on that while it might be easier to exploit an enemy’s weak spot, it would be much more effective as well as profitable in the long run to destroy him by going against his strength. This method would not only put him in control of someone he had defeated but would eliminate any attempt at retribution through the sheer power of fear. When it came time for the old don to name a right hand for his son to turn to for counsel and strategy, he knew he would find no one better suited for the position than Frank Silvestri.

  “He’s a fly hovering over shit,” Frank said, his steel gray eyes following a garbage ship running down the center of the Hudson. “Let the locals handle him. There’s no reason for us to get our hands in this. Not at this level, anyway.”

  “The locals have had a shot at him since he was on the force,” Rossi said. “Hell, I was still in high school and you were still chasing guys behind on their loans when he first became a cop. They didn’t stop him then, they’re not stopping him now.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him, if that’s what you want,” Silvestri said. “Maybe put a tag on his head, give the locals a paycheck for their troubles. Other than that, I don’t think he’s worth us getting too involved.”

  “We are involved,” Rossi said. His voice was low and ominous, his eyes, gazing up at Silvestri, hard and unwavering. “And we’ve been involved from the start. This isn’t a cop looking to make captain before he retires. This is a guy out to stamp us. And he’s doing it in his own way and in his own time.”

  Silvestri turned away from the window and walked closer to Rossi. “You know him?” he asked.

  “We’ve never met,” Rossi said. “But I know enough about him to know I want him out of our business.”

  “So, it’s personal, then,” Silvestri said.

  “Anytime you touch our business, it’s personal,” Rossi said.

  “I can put a team on him,” Silvestri said. “Have them in place by the end of the week. Sooner than later, they’ll paint the target.”

  “No,” Rossi said, slowly shaking his head. “No farm jobs. I want to send a signal. It should be us that puts him flat.”

  Silvestri looked down at the polished wood floor, the shine clear enough to give off a reflection. He had been in the Camorra most of his life and had learned many lessons during those years. Those lessons had helped make him a rich man, owner of three homes, with several million dollars safely washed and stashed in a half-dozen offshore accounts. The most valuable of those lessons had been the easiest to learn—know your don even better than you know yourself. Anticipate his moves, learn to adjust to his mood swings, and, most important of all, quickly grasp when a decision is grounded not on sound business reasoning but on personal motivation. Silvestri’s old boss, Don Nicola, was a hot-tempered man, making it often difficult to divide the business end of the ledger from the personal. He was an old-school don, in line with the modern way of running a crime family, but more suited to the knife and gun ways of the past. To Don Nicola, every decision was a personal one.

  Pete Rossi was cut from a thicker cloth. He shielded his emotions and buried his motives, even from the tight circle of advisers he had known since he was a child. He didn’t need to be taught not to trust too willingly; that seemed as much a part of his personality as his taste in expensive clothes, fine wine, and antique cars. He sought advice to reinforce a decision he had already made, not to help him decide which direction to go in. He was a model don, the brutal face of his business brilliantly shielded behind the mask of civility he presented to the outside world. So Silvestri understood without having to be told more than he already knew that this situation with the cop in Naples meant more to Pete Rossi than clearing away a dent in the family business.

  “You want me there to handle it?” Silvestri said. “I can be in Naples by midweek.”

  “No,” Rossi said, in a whisper of a voice. “Let’s bring him to us. It’s time for this cop to come home. He deserves to die in the city where he was born.”

  5

  ERCOLANO, ITALY

  Summer 2003

  LO MANTO STOOD in the center of the House of Telephus, staring at the first-century relief that narrated the tale of Achilles. He stood apart from the small throng of two dozen tourists, an odd mix of German, Italian, and British, all listening intently as a young tour guide explained in three languages the history of the myth that had lasted centuries. He stepped back into the cool shadows of the long hall, watching as the tourists took pictures and ran their hands across the wall of ruins. He rested his head against the cool stone, closed his eyes, and listened to the droning voice of the college-aged guide rattle off a speech he had already given to three other groups that morning.

  Ercolano was home to Herculaneum, which, like everything else in Naples and the land that neighbored the city, had spent several centuries under Greek rule. It wasn’t until 89 b.c. that the town fell into the hands of the Roman Empire and was turned into a residential municipality and resort. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in a.d. 79 brought the tranquil period to an end, and the lava that had buried Pompeii left Herculaneum covered with a deep layer of mud. In the eighteenth century, a long period of excavations helped to uncover the Roman houses that had been structured in a rectangular order, including one such home, the Villa dei Papiri, that the tour guides claimed was the inspiration for the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California. It was a place rich in history and touched by the hands of honor. And now, it was less than fifteen minutes removed from being the location of a million-euro drug deal.

  Lo Manto had walked the path of the ruins many times in his life, both as a teenager and as an adult. He found pleasure in each new ancient discovery, his trips feeding an insatiable curiosity in history, one of a handful of hobbies that consumed him, each designed, in its own peculiar fashion, to make him a better detective. His firm belief, and one that had been reinforced many times by Bartoni, was that a wide and wealthy range of knowledge, in combination with a finely honed brand of street savvy, would be the deadliest combination for an enemy of the Camorra. So, Lo Manto made it his business to learn. He haunted the dark halls of museums and art galleries. He read the great works of literature as well as the latest bestsellers. He consumed a wide array of magazines and newspapers, keeping current with events of the day as well as those from past centuries. He loved the old mov-ies of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini and the modern brilliance of Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann. He was comfortable with the sweet sounds of Tony Bennett and the pounding beats of Italian and American hip-hop and
rap. He was a fixture in the cavernous halls of the Naples Public Library, known by name and face to the librarians who worked in silence as he read books under the dim light, sipping iced espresso as he gently turned the pages of each new book.

  He had helped chisel his own private world, removing himself mentally from the dangers of his job and the ghosts of his past. He cast a wide net with his choice of reading. He devoured books on organized crime, allowing him to see the apparent links and patterns among the Japanese Yakuza, Sicilian Mafia, Chinese Triads, Russian gangs, and the Camorra. He was current on forensics and the latest technology used by international police forces to snare criminals and by organized crime members to avoid detection. He read biographies of world leaders, celebrities, and military men, always eager to find what common thread they might have all shared to drive them to their goals. He was especially drawn to stories about fathers and sons, trying to find in those tales signs of the bonds he had longed for since the death of his father.

  Lo Manto was a well-rounded man. That, in turn, helped make him an even better and much more dangerous cop. “The most experienced man on the force will tell you that in order to catch a criminal, you must think and act like one,” Bartoni said to him during one of their many late-night stakeouts. “And anyone who believes that is a fool. The average criminal is an idiot and yet most of them spend their lives without ever once getting caught. That’s what thinking like them gets you. If you truly want to trap the rat, then you must be smarter, better, more cunning, know everything they know, plus everything they can’t even conceive of knowing. For a detective to be great, his brain must be as important a weapon to him as his gun.”