Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  On the streets of Naples, Lo Manto was respected if not revered by the thieves. They knew he would never arrest them and felt they could always seek him out, knowing he would come through with whatever the emergency need of the moment happened to be. In return, they trusted him with information, giving the Italian detective hundreds of eyes and ears on the streets of his city. He never treated them as beggars or crooks and always paid for the street info he was given with a meal or a cold drink or a doctor’s referral. He made them feel as if they were all partners in a joint venture, keeping intact their dignity and never making it appear that he felt sorry for them in any way.

  In New York, Lo Manto was counting on Felipe to fill the void of his Naples informers. It was a lot to place on one small set of shoulders, but he felt the boy came to the table armed with a certain edge, an ability to read the temperature of the streets and understand the subtle difference between rumors and facts. There was a sense of purpose to Felipe, but not lost in all the tough talk and bravado was the fear he had learned to live with and embrace as if it were a winter coat designed to shield him against blasts of arctic cold. It was a fear Lo Manto had detected in others from the very first day he carried a badge. It was a fear whose primal origins he clearly understood. A fear he had come to respect.

  A fear that Lo Manto felt every day of his life.

  “Thanks,” he said, walking away from Felipe and heading toward the elevated subway station. “It’s nice to know I’ll be missed.”

  “A guy with money is always missed,” Felipe shouted after him. “Even if he is a cop.”

  Jennifer closed the police folder and shoved it under her car seat, watching as Lo Manto quietly approached the idling unmarked. She pressed a button, rolled down the passenger side window, and waited until he reached for the door handle. “A cup of coffee would have been a nice touch,” she said to him.

  Lo Manto jumped into the seat next to her, slammed the door shut, and smiled. “I never drink coffee before a meal,” he said. “Or a shoot-out.”

  “Which are we planning?” she asked.

  “A rooftop two blocks up, there was a guy with a rifle scope spread out just beneath the edge,” he said. “I was right across the way. He could have taken his shot then. I gave him plenty of time and open space to do it, but he didn’t make the move.”

  “You like doing that, do you?” she asked. “Standing out in the street, making yourself a clear and open target, just waiting to see if a guy with a gun has the cubes to take you out?”

  “It helps to pass the time,” he said, shrugging.

  “Making a move on the guy might have knocked another hour or so off your day,” she said. “Unless you’re just eager to find out how good a shot the guy is.”

  “I wasn’t alone,” Lo Manto said. “And neither of us seemed ready to make the jump to the next step.”

  “And now?” she asked. “Where’s that put us? Given that he’s had enough escape time to shave, shower, and find his way home.”

  “He didn’t run,” Lo Manto said, his voice filled with its usual calm. “There’d be no need for him to do that. The man’s a pro and the only reason he was seen was because he wanted to be seen. He wanted to let me know he was there and that we’d be going up against one another.”

  “You two have done this before?” she asked.

  “We came close a couple of times,” Lo Manto said. “Once in Naples and once here while I was on a joint task force. I had heard they had offers out to him, but he passed on them each time.”

  “You ever figure out why?” Jennifer asked.

  “Money’s the only reason,” Lo Manto said. “It’s why guys like him do the work they do. He enjoys the planning, the prep work, following the target and then taking it out. But you bottom-line it and the only reason he tugs at that trigger is for the money.”

  “Which means they either upped their offer or he lowered his asking price,” Jennifer said. “Either way, that paints a very attractive bull’s-eye on your back.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lo Manto said. “It’s just me he’s getting paid to take out. He doesn’t get extra for the collateral damage.”

  “I’m not worried,” Jennifer said, slow-to-surface anger and frustration etched in her words. “If I was, I’d be talking to you from a much safer location.”

  “He’s warned me,” Lo Manto said. “The next time there’ll be no glint in the sun. He’ll just take his shot.”

  “My guess is you have some sort of a plan,” Jennifer said.

  He turned to look at her, the sharp cut of the sun coating her face and hair, highlighting her natural beauty, making him wish, ever so briefly, that she wasn’t a cop and that they weren’t parked in an unmarked planning a move against a shooter paid to end his life. It would be so much simpler if they had the rest of the day to talk, to get to know each other in a slower, steadier way. Both Lo Manto and Jennifer had suffered through the hard lessons of on-the-job relationships. They often grew not out of love or passion but from an understanding of the job that needed to be done. There was an artificial quality to love affairs between cops, feeding into the isolation and loneliness of the profession, the long hours spent together and the adrenaline rush that came from the actual work. Few of the romances blossomed beyond much more than dalliances, which lasted as little as a weekend or as long as six months. And when they did end, it was often on a harsh note: the partnership ruined, the friendship severed. Lo Manto always felt it was best to resist the temptation, that to stray too close, even to such an alluring flame, would only lead to a bad burn.

  “So,” Jennifer said, coaxing him out of his silence. “What are you going to do about the shooter?”

  “Duck,” Lo Manto said. “This way, if I’m at all lucky, I’ll throw off his timing.”

  “I’m serious about this,” she said. “And you better damn well be, too.”

  “Okay, then,” Lo Manto said. “If I can’t duck the shooter, then that leaves me with only one choice.”

  “Which is?”

  “To kill him first,” Lo Manto said.

  He stared into Jennifer’s eyes for several long seconds and then turned to look at the pedestrian traffic clogging the streets of the East Bronx on an otherwise peaceful summer day.

  Joey “Tugs” McGraw sat on an empty crate in the darkness listening to the loud voice, the words banging with an echo against the thick wooden slats of the long-abandoned pier. He had a large Florida orange in one hand and a shearing knife in the other, quickly cutting the fruit into four thick chunks. He chewed on the fruit and listened as the voice and the footsteps that followed in its wake both grew louder. “Your end, you looking at an easy million, maybe even a million-two,” the voice said. “And for what? Just for showing up, making a pickup one day and a drop the next. This were any easier, I’d take my kid out of school and hand the job over to him.”

  “Why don’t you do just that?” McGraw asked, staring up now at the face behind the voice. “Nothing I can see stopping you.”

  The man was tall, standing an easy six-foot-four in loafers, and big, packing a hefty 250 pounds across a massive frame. Some of it was fat, the bulge around his middle bigger than it used to be eight years ago, when they closed their first deal. But most of it was muscle, his hands wide as a picture frame and thick as coiled rope, the knuckles around them chipped and raw. McGraw had seen the shattered flesh and splintered bones that had been at the other end of those hands and he didn’t want to even begin to count the number of bodies they had helped to kill.

  “Because the kid’s only in the fourth grade, wiseass,” Reno the Squid, the man behind the voice, said. “And he can’t drive. Otherwise, why talk to you when I can talk to him? At the very least, he does as he’s told.”

  Reno the Squid had a voice that ricocheted off the ears, each word a garbled and hoarse blend of sound. Not much was known about the Squid’s early years, other than that he had made his way to New York from Naples in his late teens, working his wa
y up the intricate Camorra ladder, proving indispensable in whatever activity he was given. He had an affinity for the drug trade and, before he was much past his twenties, set himself up as the Camorra’s most trusted dealer. In the decades since his arrival, he had built a powerful network working the harbors of both cities, putting him in charge of a drug ring that netted a yearly profit estimated by mob insiders to be in excess of $150 million. He structured his drug deals in tiers, making it all but impossible for law enforcement to detect who was at the receiving end of the cash and who was supplying the drugs. Reno the Squid was never seen with so much as a cigarette in his hand, living a sedate suburban life in a four-bedroom colonial twenty minutes outside the city limits. He had a one-bedroom apartment in the center of Naples, which he had inherited from his mother. He listed his income at $75,000 a year plus a profit-incentive $25,000 bonus, working for a lower Manhattan contracting firm. He had no criminal record and steered clear of known Camorra hangouts. He changed his cell number every six weeks and had an unlisted home phone, which neither he nor his wife nor their two sons ever used to make outgoing calls. He was the very model of the perfect Camorrista, benign and law-abiding on the surface, brutal and treacherous below it.

  He stepped closer to McGraw, leaning down and staring with dead eyes at the much shorter, less stocky man. “Deal is all set to happen on Tuesday,” he said. “It should be clean and it should go off the way it was planned out. Anything happens that changes that, I expect you to deal with it. Understood?”

  “These people I’m meeting, they been cleared?” McGraw asked. “I like to keep my surprises limited to birthday parties.”

  “Two men, one woman,” Reno said, nodding, his eyes giving a quick scan of the vast emptiness around him. “The men are German, have a bit of an accent, but you won’t hear much of it, since they treat talk like it was work.”

  “Why the woman?” McGraw asked.

  “She’s the bank,” Reno said. “The Germans can move the drugs, but they can’t lay out the cash to buy in large supplies. She can.”

  “You’ve done business with her before?” McGraw asked.

  “Couple of deals over the last five years,” Reno said. “They all went off clean. Just like this one will.”

  “She good-looking?” McGraw asked, a snakelike smile inching its way across his pockmarked face.

  “You’ll meet her on Tuesday,” Reno said, not bothering to return the smile. “But I’d be careful. Men have a way of dying around her. Since I’ve known her, she’s had five different partners, always men, always European.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Ask her yourself,” Reno said. “It’d be a nice way to break the ice. But close the deal first. Give her the drugs on Tuesday. Get the cash on Wednesday. You want to fall in love, get married, move to Maui? Do it on Thursday.”

  “I’ll close the deal,” McGraw said, tossing the orange skins onto a corner of the pier. “As I always do.”

  “One more thing,” Reno said. “There’s a cop from Naples in the city. He’s hit the bosses more than a couple of times down the years. Some way, some how, he gets wind of when and where the deal goes down, takes both the drugs and the money. They don’t want to see it happen with this one.”

  “Why should it?” McGraw asked with a shrug. “You don’t tell people your business, I don’t tell anybody mine. Not a lot of ears get to hear what we work on. I’m not worried unless you’re telling me I got something to worry about.”

  “You only have something to worry about if this cop hits this deal,” Reno the Squid said. “That happens, though, it won’t be the bosses you need concern yourself with. It’ll be me.”

  McGraw pushed aside the wooden crate he was sitting on, stood and glared up at Reno. “This cop or any cop comes close to this, he’ll be taken care of. Just like always. So save your breath on the threats. They don’t work on me.”

  Reno the Squid nodded and quietly turned away from Joey McGraw, disappearing into the mist, dust, and darkness of the empty pier, the heavy bounce of his step the only sound to be heard.

  Jennifer, driving with one hand, gently eased the unmarked into the slow moving traffic of the Henry Hudson Parkway. Lo Manto sat next to her, his hands cupped around a large container of Starbucks Caffè Verona. “I hope you got a good reason for us to be sitting in this?” she asked him, working the brakes as the car inched its way forward.

  “I hope so too,” he said.

  “Want to share it?” she asked.

  “You’re impatient,” Lo Manto said. “Want to know things right away, sometimes even before you should. It’s natural for a woman to be that way. But it might not be the best thing in the world for a detective.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked, her temper ready to spark. “I’m not a good cop? Just because I dared to ask you a question?”

  “You go up like a match, too,” Lo Manto said. “That could be one more thing to hold you back.”

  “Hold me back from what?” she said, her right hand slapping the steering wheel in sheer frustration.

  “You got great cop instincts,” Lo Manto said, sipping his coffee as he talked. “Doesn’t take you long to read a situation or size up an opponent. And you’ve learned how to bury the fear. You go out there without even a thought of the risk.”

  “Enough with the praise,” Jennifer said. “Get to the but.”

  “You lose control,” he said. His voice was calm, direct but soothing, as if he were a doctor offering a medical opinion about a rare ailment to a junior physician. “Whether it’s due to temper or impatience, it doesn’t matter. You have to learn to work it in your favor, make it a strength, not a weakness.”

  “And if I do that, then what?” she asked, glancing his way. “Just out of curiosity.”

  Lo Manto placed his cup in the holder next to the heater and leaned against the headrest, closing his eyes for a brief moment. “Then nobody can touch you,” he said. “You’d be better than a good cop. You’d be someone that they can’t figure out. And that would make you both dangerous and feared.”

  They drove in silence for a while, the sedan slowly winding its way past the quiet streets of Riverdale. The day was hot and muggy, the humidity coming off the warm tar of the road in waves. They had all the windows up and the air conditioner running at medium cool, neither one quite ready to brave the harsh heat of another brutal New York summer. “Is that what you are?” she asked, veering the car into the speed lane. “Or at least think you are?”

  “It’s what I try to be,” he said. “I need to control the situation, be ready to take it where I need it to go. You can’t always do that, but you can at least try. You give up a lot, though, in return for that.”

  “Like what?”

  “A reasonable chance at a personal life,” he said. For the first time since they met, she sensed a degree of sadness in Lo Manto, a melancholy longing for a less complicated existence. His time away from New York hadn’t done much to chisel down the rough edges and street attitude that came from living in a city without much give to it. And his years working the alleys and hallways of Naples, bringing down the dealers and the doers who preyed on impoverished soil, only added to the hard core. But there was a soft spot beneath all of Lo Manto’s steel-like determination, a gust of warmth that was unable to shake totally free of its southern Italian roots. “Once you learn how to control the action on the street, it isn’t long before it becomes a habit and you look to do the same with the people in your life. Which, I suppose, explains why most cops are either single, divorced, or talking to a bartender instead of their wife.”

  “Or worst of all,” Jennifer said, “married to other cops.”

  Lo Manto nodded and smiled. “We’re just about there,” he told her. “Grab a right up ahead.”

  Jennifer switched lanes, looked up at the signs and then back at Lo Manto. “What’s at the Cloisters?”

  “Great works of medieval art,” he said. “A cool place to walk and ta
lk. A nice restaurant to have lunch in. And two drug dealers who want their deal to go down without any problems.”

  The two men stared with indifference at the centuries-old cross at rest behind a thick glass display case. They relished the coolness of the dark rooms, a pleasant break from the crushing heat outside. The taller of the two wore a short-sleeved black shirt, an Armani jacket, and tan slacks. He gazed away from the cross and stared at the small group that had gathered, studying their faces and watching their reactions to the works around them. The museum was crowded for this early in the day, the clock just shy of eleven, a good two hours before the lunch break began. It was a typical blend of museum visitors, bored junior high school students on a class trip, senior citizens out on a rare excursion, and academics gazing at the works as if they possessed a secret knowledge available to few others. The tall man wasn’t interested in any of them.

  He tapped his program against the shoulder of the man next to him and nodded for them both to move on. “He’s not anywhere in this group,” he said. “Let’s check some of the other exhibits.”

  “There’s a lot of history in this place, Terry,” the other man said. He was shorter, with hair hanging down just to the tips of his shoulders, a scarred but still youthful face and a pleasant manner. “I didn’t know this was even here until we got the job.”