Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  Paula walked along the edge of the thick privet hedges, feeling her way toward the rear gate, avoiding the glare of the row of outdoor floodlights buried in the ground that illuminated the back end of the Rossi property. She had managed to climb out the small window of her room, the one that looked out onto the garden, just as dusk had settled on the property. She crawled down the side of a small tar-shingled roof and then, using the gutters as a balance beam, worked her way along a corner of the stone house, moving with great care from the edge of one rock to another. She was standing on garden soil more than two hours after she had escaped from her room. She steered clear of the video cameras mounted on either side of the six-foot iron gate that could be opened only by key or electronic eye, her back braced against the sharp edges of the brick wall that lined the end of the property. She wrapped her arms around the bricks and began a slow shimmy up the side, cutting and scraping her arms and knees as she worked her way to the top. All around her was silence and darkness and shadow, the two-way street beyond the gate deserted. She had no idea where she was or in which direction she should head once she got to the top of the wall and jumped into the grass and leaf clearing below. She only knew that once she got there, she would be free.

  She struggled to the top of the wall, her legs cut and bleeding, the flesh on her right arm torn, the palms on both her hands open and raw. She looked back at the main house. A few lights were still on, and tall trees helped to hide most of it from view. She then turned away and jumped the six feet onto what she hoped would be nothing harder than grass and thick piles of shrubs. She landed with a muted thud, the left side of her face brushing against a rose bush, a long row of scattered thorns quick to break skin and draw blood. She lay there for several long minutes, catching her breath, her eyes closed, enveloped in the silence of the darkened countryside. She was tired, sore, and frightened, alone now, ready to walk down a dark and winding path, hoping to find help by the time the morning sun lit the sky. She got to her feet, brushed the leaves and the grass from her body, tried her best to ignore the pain from the cuts and scrapes, and began her journey into the darkness.

  Pete Rossi had watched her every move from his study, sitting in a thick black leather chair, the wall above him filled with video monitors that covered the property from every possible angle. He smiled when he saw the girl scale the wall and jump down on the other side to safety. “Nobody can get in or out of here,” he said to the thin man standing behind him. “That was one of the things you said to me when you put all this equipment in. And that I’d sleep safer than if I was the president of the United States. You remember saying any of that, Chris?”

  “I remember,” Chris Romano said. “And what I said then still holds. Don’t let what you’re looking at fool you, boss. Let’s not forget, we’re letting her get away. If we wanted to nab the kid, we could have done it at any point, from the minute she left the room to the time she scaled the back wall.”

  Rossi glanced away from the monitors, looked over at Romano and smiled. “She did pretty good out there,” he said to him. “I wasn’t too sure she’d even make it off the roof. She’s got nerve, scared as she probably is, to make a move like that. Most kids, if they were going to skip at all, would have done it in daylight, give themselves a chance to see where they’re going. This one flies off in the middle of the night instead, when she figures nobody’s going to be looking her way.”

  “I got three on the outside, following her on foot,” Romano said. “Then two cars in place a half mile down whichever end of the road she decides to take. Wherever she’s gonna end up, they’ll be right there with her.”

  “They should only surface if there’s trouble,” Rossi said, turning to look back at the monitors that now revealed nothing but hedges and trees. “I don’t want anything to happen to that girl. She’s not the target. She’s only the bait.”

  “There’s a tracking monitor in her wristwatch,” Romano said. “In case the field team loses her, even for a blip, they’ll be able to pick her up within seconds.”

  “What if she takes off the watch?” Rossi asked. “Or loses it? What then?”

  “I had a backup put in on her small waist pack,” Romano said. “And a third one was inserted in the glow light on her right sneaker. She might lose one of those things, maybe even two, but not three.”

  “I hope that’s true,” Rossi said. “We have no window built into this to be wrong. On anything.”

  “You think she’ll find him?” Romano asked. He was in his mid-twenties and cover-boy handsome, with chiseled features, olive skin, rich dark hair, and eyes the color of a crow. He had lived in the Camorra since he was a six-year-old boy, given up by an impoverished family in Naples that brought him to their local don and swore their allegiance to the honored ways. He was flown to the United States and placed with a family who lived in wealthy Westchester County, in New York. There he was placed in the best private schools and allowed to display his strengths and talents, which in his case happened to be in the field of electronics. After college, Romano was brought in to work for Pete Rossi and placed in charge of the security system for all the family enterprises, both legal and not. Romano was a wizard at placing surveillance detectors in places no one before him had even thought possible. He scored his first major coup when he secured a mini-camera in the front snap of the bra of a young secretary who was in debt to the family, and had her capture all the sealed details of a planned merger between two major financial institutions. The tape that was then shown to the principals involved allowed the Rossis to squeeze millions from both ends of the table in return for silence and a future chunk of profits.

  “Either she finds him or he finds her,” Rossi told Romano. “Any way it works is fine by me.”

  “We’ll have eyes up on him by tomorrow,” Romano said. “I needed a little time to get close to the car, his room, that lady cop he rides with. Once we get it all in place, we’ll know where he’s going even before he does.”

  “Maybe,” Rossi said, not sounding as confident as the young man to his right. “You’re not the first to think you’re two steps ahead of this cop. Dozens of others came into it feeling the same way. They’re dead now or so deep inside a prison cell they pray they’ll wake up dead. That’s why it’s us who are in it now. We need to bring this all to an end. So let’s be confident after it’s over, not before.”

  Romano nodded, knowing enough not to push the matter any further. “I didn’t farm the drops out on this one,” he said. “I’m laying them in myself. Make sure they’re done the right way. We should start getting video on him by tomorrow, day after at the latest.”

  “Keep Silvestri informed with every step,” Rossi told him. “He’s working his own end and I don’t want there to be any traffic on this. Let’s keep it clean and simple, with every free hand knowing what the busy hand is doing.”

  “I’ll keep him in the main loop,” Romano said, slightly irritated. “Like I always try to do. But you know how Silvestri feels about what I do. He’s as Old World as grappa, thinks all this electronic work belongs on a shelf at Radio Shack. And nothing I say, do, or show him is ever gonna budge his way of thought.”

  “Work out your problems with him, not with me,” Rossi said in a dismissive tone. “Just stay focused, the both of you. I’m going to clear the table of this cop and I don’t care who needs to die for that to happen. On his side or on mine. So make living your incentive to get the job done.”

  “What if he’s in my way?” Romano asked. He sensed an opening, a chance not only to impress his boss by taking down the cop, but also to rid himself of an internal obstacle to his rise up the Camorra hierarchy. “Silvestri, I’m saying.”

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told him,” Rossi said. “Clear the path and get the job done. Is that clear enough?”

  “Like a waterfall,” Romano said.

  15

  LO MANTO WALKED down a busy street of the neighborhood where he had once lived, glancing at the crammed
storefronts and changed landscape. In was late in the afternoon of what had been a long day filled with dozens of difficult questions that brought forth few satisfactory answers. Captain Fernandez and Jennifer had taken the brunt of the blitz, first from the team of detectives who drove down from Westchester primed to grill two cops who had dared to shoot and kill on their turf, and then from the truth seekers in NYPD’s Internal Affairs Division. Lo Manto had been involved in enough force-of-arms situations to know it was often best to stay silent, answer only in short sentences, and play the room as ignorant as a bell ringer. He and Jennifer kept to their stories, both admitting only to the bare bones of the facts, avoiding as best they could any reasons or motives for the actions that took place outside the small restaurant. After the interrogators had packed up their audio equipment and left, content that they had gathered enough information for one day, Lo Manto and Jennifer had to sit and face the very real wrath of Fernandez.

  “You handed out enough of your bullshit to maybe walk away from the IA squad without any heat coming down on your ass,” he said, pouring his fourth cup of black coffee of the afternoon. “But now, right here, the two of you better start talking the truth. I hear just one word that’s not right and I’ll carry your ass back to Kennedy Airport myself.”

  “Did you get a background make on the shooters yet?” Lo Manto asked. “I hate having to leave it to a guess as to who hired them out.”

  “The driver was local product,” Fernandez said. “Three rungs below a wannabe player. He took a hard gamble. Taking you out might have impressed enough of the dark shirts to help put him in the game.”

  “Who put out the deal?” Jennifer asked.

  “Could have come from any one of the main Camorra crews,” Fernandez said, sipping his coffee. “If I had to bet, I’d put my cash on the Rossi outfit, since Gian’s last job in Naples cost them a score. And they’ve got a history of giving low-enders an occasional play; costs them nothing but talk.”

  “And still no word on my niece?” Lo Manto asked.

  “She’s invisible right now,” Fernandez said. “A couple of runaways were found dead near the Jersey Turnpike the other night, but descriptions didn’t match up. I got as many of my people on it as I can spare. She’s out there, we’re gonna find her—much sooner than later.”

  “So what happens now?” Jennifer asked, sitting across from the captain, her hands folded in her lap, looking more like an innocent college girl than a street-hardened cop. “To the two of us, I mean.”

  “That all depends,” Fernandez said to her. “On the both of you being square with me on this shooting. On Gian here telling me what he’s really up to and what his plans are. And on whether or not you still want a piece of all this. It might be best for your career and maybe even your life if you walked away from it now. You won’t get any arguments out of me if you do.”

  “There were shots fired today,” Jennifer said, looking from Lo Manto to the captain. “I want to be in this to find out why it was I had to put a man in an ICU. And better still, why he was aiming to put me in the morgue.”

  Captain Fernandez sat in his chair, braced his feet against the side of his desk, and folded his hands against the back of his neck. “Then it looks like it’s your move, Gian,” he said to Lo Manto. “It’s time for you to take us down the right road.”

  “I’m not keeping anything from you,” Lo Manto said, turning his back to Jennifer and the captain, gazing out at the bustling squad room outside the glass office. “I wouldn’t be here looking for answers if I was. I’m as much in the dark about this as the two of you. I might have a better gauge on who the shadows behind the door calling in the decisions could be, but even then it’s more a guess than a sure bet.”

  “You’re telling me you have no idea why those two losers tried to stick you against the wall after lunch?” Fernandez asked. “And remember, Gian, this is me you’re talking your shit to.”

  “I know they’re Camorra,” Lo Manto said with a slight shrug. “So did you as soon as you heard, and Jennifer would have figured it out quick enough. That doesn’t make any of us special, it just means we know the turf we walk on. Besides, who the hell else would be gunning after a cop from Naples?”

  “They had to know you were here, then,” Fernandez said. “And they had to know you were coming. It takes time to set up the meeting, work out the plan, and put the hit in motion. That doesn’t just happen overnight. So, even before you got on the plane to get out of Italy, they were working their phone lines.”

  “Which also means they knew why I was coming,” Lo Manto said. “That takes my niece out of the runaway category.”

  “And puts her where exactly?” Jennifer asked.

  “In their hands,” Lo Manto said. “Just as Bartoni had suspected.”

  “That a name I should remember?” Jennifer asked him.

  “Only if we get to know each other better,” Lo Manto said.

  “I’ve got a call out to both Jacobs and Rivera,” Fernandez said. “One of my best young homicide teams. You’re going to need some help on this, they’re as good as it gets.”

  Lo Manto caught Jennifer’s look of disappointment, her lips pursed, her jaw set tight, her eyes lit with anger. “I didn’t come here so I could stand in your office and tell you what to do,” he said to the captain. “You’re the one with the stripes on the jacket, not me, and I respect that. But I came to you as a friend. And as that friend I’m asking you to leave this the way it is, with me and Jennifer. She knows the streets and I know the enemy. That about covers as much as we need. Two more cops, as good as they might be, could bring more trouble than we’re already looking at. And none of us wants to see that happen.”

  “You’re okay with that?” Fernandez asked, pointing a finger across his desk at Jennifer.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. “I am.”

  “You wanted out of this not too long ago,” he said. “Told me you’d rather work the horse detail, as I remember it. Now the two of you are tighter than Lucy and Ricky. I’m always amazed at how far a nice lunch and a shoot-out takes you.”

  “I want to help find the girl,” Jennifer said, not backing down, staring at her boss with a hard set of eyes. “And the ones who grabbed her. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

  Fernandez leaned back in his chair and looked away from the two detectives. He stayed silent, lost in his thoughts for several long moments, leaving both Lo Manto and Jennifer with little to do but wait. “I’ll back you both,” he said, finally. “But only as far as I can. If this gets out of hand, if bodies start to fall and I start getting heavy heat from the borough command, then I’m going to do what needs to be done. And that’s the best deal I put on the table. As a captain and as a friend.”

  “Then it’s the one we’ll take,” Lo Manto said.

  Lo Manto sat gazing out at DelGardo’s crammed store, his back against the glass window, a cup of espresso in his right hand. “I don’t think this place has been painted since I was a kid,” he said. “Yellow walls then. Yellow walls now.”

  “It’ll get painted when it needs to get painted, no sooner than that,” Carmine DelGardo said. “When Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel, he didn’t rush out, pick up a few gallons of Benjamin Moore, and slap on a second coat of paint, am I right? No, he left it alone. Same with me and this place.”

  “I didn’t realize I was standing on holy ground,” Lo Manto said, sipping his coffee. “I would have dressed better.”

  DelGardo dropped a Supremes LP on a dusty old stereo turntable and carefully placed the needle on the first track. “You been in town couple of days,” he said, as the sweet voice of Diana Ross filled the small store. “And already somebody tried to take you out. Or did I hear that wrong?”

  “What else did you hear?” Lo Manto asked, resting his empty cup on a countertop, next to a stack of sugar-free gum.

  “That you might as well have been on America’s Most Wanted for a full hour,” DelGardo said. “That’s how
many guns and shooters are gonna be coming your way. Be safer for me in downtown Baghdad than to be seen with you.”

  “And what about my niece?” he asked. “What’s the word on her?”

  “They’re playing a strange hand of poker with that one,” DelGardo said. “The Camorra took her and they’re letting everybody on the street know it. They’re calling you out to come get her. They’re using her, like that fake rabbit at the dog track. Anything it takes to nail your ass, that’s their end-of-the-day goal.”

  “And what do you think I should do about that?” Lo Manto asked, helping himself to a pack of gum.

  DelGardo walked down the center aisle of his small candy store. He was a tall man, thick head of white hair combed back, his full white beard trimmed and neat. He wore a cream-colored loose-fitting short-sleeved shirt and gray slacks, the creases sharp enough to draw blood. He had clear blue eyes and pale white skin and a large tattoo of a serpent’s head running down the side of his right arm. He was a confident man who had survived decades working outside the law, trusting only those he knew would take the bullet when the word wouldn’t do.

  “It don’t matter what I think,” DelGardo said. “You already made up your mind on that end, otherwise you wouldn’t even be standing here. I know they got gum in Italy and I know you didn’t miss seeing my skinny ass. Which makes it down to where and when and who’s on your side and who isn’t.”