Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “The call is out for four top shooters, the best around,” Silvestri said, his voice low, direct, and strong. “The don wants them in place before the week is out. Half a million in cash to each. He expects them to all work together, function as a team. And they all get the money, regardless of who brings down the target.”

  “That news don’t make my heart beat faster,” DelGardo said. “I ain’t shot a gun since I was a kid. And I missed what I was aiming to hit.”

  “The target’s a friend of yours,” Silvestri said. “That cop from Naples. The boss wants him flat and out of the picture. And he wants it done by this time next week.”

  DelGardo hit his shot, then stood up as he chalked his pool cue, his manner cool and indifferent, as if he were being given an update on the week’s weather. “How hard can that be?” he asked. “One badge up against four top-tier shooters. Two million in cash waiting on the table. Once word gets around, there are gonna be more hit men in this city than there are Arab cabdrivers.”

  “The cop’s been a hard target up to now,” Silvestri said. “But even with help, I don’t see how he walks from this one. They’re going to be lined up on every corner taking their shots.”

  “So you should be happy, no?” DelGardo said with a shrug. “What I hear, he’s been a nasty thorn in your rib since he first pinned on the tin. Maybe you should have moved down this road a few years back. Saved yourselves a ton of money and a belly full of grief.”

  “Which way you going to go on this?” Silvestri asked.

  “There ain’t many ways for me to go,” DelGardo said. “The call’s already been made. Shooters are starting to pack and check their clip loads. Not many places for me to bring this news.”

  “You can go back to your candy store and keep doing whatever it is you do in there,” Silvestri said. “Or you can reach out to a friend and spread the word. Give him a heads-up. A feel for what’s about to come his way.”

  “That leaves my door open for two questions,” DelGardo said, taking a slow walk around the pool table. “What’s in it for me to do that and what’s in it for you to ask?”

  “The cop’s been an issue for too many years,” Silvestri said. “On the matter of him going down, its never been a question of if but when. You’re his friend, known him since his puppy days. You’ll be doing him a favor, is all. Give him a chance to fire back before he goes down. There isn’t anything you can say or do that is going to change the end result. He’s going to die whether you talk to him or not.”

  “Okay,” DelGardo said. “That covers why I might want to help the hothead. It still don’t explain your end of it.”

  “Let’s just say I’d be paying off a debt,” Silvestri said. “No more to it than that.”

  “Not like somebody in your line of work to be owing somebody in his, if you catch my float,” DelGardo said. “At least with me and him there’s a history, what with his papa and all.”

  Frank Silvestri stood, his large shadow dominating the light in the musty room. “You’re not the only one with a history, candy store man,” he said. He tossed his lit cigar to the ground, finished the last of his drink, and walked out of the pool room, the sound of his heavy steps bouncing off the chipped walls.

  19

  JENNIFER CHECKED THE NAME written on her notepad, closed it, and jammed it back into the rear pocket of her jeans. She walked up the well-maintained tenement steps and pushed open the polished wooden door leading into the foyer. She gently pressed down on the buzzer to the fifth-floor apartment and waited for a voice to come crackling over the silver intercom box. Instead, the buzzer by the door handle went off, and she was let into the building that a day earlier had been a crime scene. She walked up the first-floor steps, glancing off to her right at the large blood circles still staining the ornate cement, a long strip of yellow police tape blocking any access to the area. She had been at so many of these scenes in her years as a cop, the modern-day symbols of a life taken, that it would be easy to be indifferent to what passed before her eyes. She had learned early on the lessons of keeping it all a safe distance away, of treating any crime she was called into as a puzzle that needed to be solved, and never to cross the deadly line into the personal. It was a lesson that had been hammered home on an almost daily basis by every cop she had ever met, from her father to the instructors at the Academy to her first partner and up to and including Captain Fernandez. Still, despite the mental adjustment to the hard ways of doing a difficult job, Jennifer Fabini had never quite managed to shake off the cold finality of a murder.

  Assunta Conte opened the door to her apartment a moment before Jennifer’s second knock. She glared through a set of clear, sharp eyes at the younger woman and took two steps back. “You want to come in, I won’t stop you,” she said. “But I told the other cops everything I knew and did. They seemed happy with the answers when they left.”

  “I’m not here about the shooting,” Jennifer said as she stepped into the apartment. “It’s not my case. Even though from what I hear, it came down pretty clean. And I don’t think anybody’s going to make an issue of the gun charge.”

  “You want some coffee?” Assunta asked. “I just made a fresh pot. I always make more than I should drink. It’s a bad habit. But when you get as old as me, all that’s left are bad habits.”

  Jennifer nodded. “If it comes with milk and two sugars I won’t pass it up,” she said.

  “Comes with pastry and biscotti, too,” Assunta said, padding off into her large eat-in kitchen. “The coffee helps jump-start your heart, but it doesn’t do much for your stomach. That’s why you need that side dish.”

  Jennifer followed her into the kitchen, pulled a wooden chair away from the thick, hand-carved table, and sat down. She watched the old woman reach into a cabinet and pull down two large cups, moving with a speed and dexterity that belied her years. She gave no emotional indication that less than twenty-four hours earlier she had stood with feet planted solid and pumped three bullets into a predicate felon and dropped him dead, allowing a young girl to escape to safety.

  The kitchen was Italian-American Bronx. The walls were papered with a rich pastel flower arrangement, a row of commemorative plates featuring the images of President John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII lining one side of the room. An Italian calendar, with each month highlighted by a drawing of Jesus or a saint, the holy days of the Catholic year highlighted in red ink, hung from one of a series of white cabinets. The slop sink was filled with soapy water and soaking clothes, the old woman’s chore for the afternoon. The back burners of the small stove were covered by two large pots, one slow-boiling a red sauce swimming with fresh fish, the other keeping the pasta water at a simmer. The odors of food mingled easily with the harsher smells of cleaning liquids, and it all quick-flashed Jennifer back to childhood and her Grandma Francesca’s kitchen in Queens. She would do her homework, while the chubby old woman she knew for too short a time sang Neapolitan love songs and whipped up enough food to feed a family of twelve, always insisting on making four times more than was required. Those were the special moments of a childhood shortened too harshly by her mother’s death, and Jennifer held on to them as if they were her only remaining possessions.

  Assunta sat across from her and slid a large cup of coffee her way. She then reached behind her and placed a platter of Italian cookies and pastries between them. “I warn you,” she said, “I make my coffee very strong. It’s how my husband used to take it. It’s not for everyone—this I know.”

  Jennifer put the cup to her lips and took a long, slow sip. The coffee was as thick as roof tar and had a sour licorice taste to it. It burned her throat and chest going down and the aftertaste was one that lingered. “It’s got a kick, that’s for sure,” she said to the old woman. “You can’t get anything like this at Starbucks.”

  “And it’s better for you,” Assunta said as she wrapped her heavy hands around the large cup in front of her and drank down half the coffee in two quick swallows. “Helps kee
p the head clear. Makes it easier for you to ask me your questions.”

  “You’re a brave woman,” Jennifer said. “You saved that girl’s life yesterday. And you took a man down to do it. That’s not something that’s easy to do. I haven’t seen as much of life as you have, but I’ve seen enough to know that.”

  “Maybe we both have just done what needed to be done,” Assunta said, finishing her coffee. “It is how we have chosen to live our days. You with a gun and a badge and me with the memories of my husband.”

  “I came here because I need your help,” Jennifer said, her eyes square on the woman’s layered face. “I don’t know why you’d give it to me. But I figured you cared enough for Lo Manto to risk your life for him. And he cared enough for you to trust his niece would be kept safe. That’s pretty much all I have to go on.”

  “It’s always easier to trust the old,” Assunta said. “We have very little time left to betray the ones we have come to love. Age forces us to keep our circle small.”

  “You’ve known Lo Manto since he was a boy,” Jennifer said. “You knew his parents. You know what he was like here and why he left. And you know him as a cop. And you’re the only one that has all the answers.”

  “That depends on the questions,” Assunta said. “And the reasons they are being asked.”

  “The only reason worth asking,” Jennifer said. “I want to try to keep him alive. And while I’m at it, maybe duck and dodge a few bullets myself.”

  “Gianni’s very good at doing that on his own,” the old woman said. “He has been for a very long time.”

  “It’s different now,” Jennifer said. “This isn’t just him against a small band of hoods he can track through informants and phone taps. There are a lot of people out there looking to bring him down. I don’t know for sure how many, but I’ve been a street cop long enough to know something’s building and the two of us together aren’t going to be any match to handle it.”

  “But you are still with him,” Assunta said. “You can leave him alone or pretend to be sick. Even ask your boss to put you with someone else. I have nephews on the police force. I understand how they work. You stay, though, because you choose to stay. So, then I must ask the first question. Why?”

  Jennifer pushed the coffee aside and rested her elbows on the table. “Part of it is because it’s my job and I don’t like to walk away from one until it’s done,” she said.

  “That’s the cop part,” Assunta said. “The woman part is what interests me. What does that answer tell me?”

  “I don’t want to see him get hurt,” Jennifer said. “I could help him more if I knew what it is he’s going after. I’ve only been working with him a few days, but that’s long enough to find out that these busts, shoot-outs, setups he’s in the middle of go way beyond just normal police work. It’s personal with him, and I think it’s something that started here, when he was a kid.”

  “His father was murdered,” Assunta said. “By the Camorra. The Rossi family end of the business. But those facts, I’m sure, are all in his police folder. And you seem like a smart enough someone to have already read those.”

  “There’s more to it,” Jennifer said, reaching over and placing a hand on top of the woman’s folded grip. “He’s buried it and maybe so have you. I don’t know yet. But I’d like to find out before I leave here.”

  “You care for him,” Assunta said. “I can hear it in your voice. See it in your eyes.”

  Jennifer smiled and sat back in her chair. “I’ve only known the guy a few days,” she said. “It’s a little too soon to turn this into Casablanca.”

  “How long should it take?” Assunta shrugged. “I knew my husband less than an hour before I came to believe he would be the one man I would always love. There is no clock on a woman’s heart. It just drifts away on its own time.”

  “Maybe under different circumstances,” Jennifer said, feeling her cheeks heating into a full blush. “But not the way it is right now. We’ve never even talked about it.”

  “Which means he doesn’t know,” Assunta said, her smile flashing a row of brown teeth and tobacco-stained gums. “That’s always the best way.”

  Assunta stood, grabbed the empty cups from the table, and moved them over to the sink. “Let me finish my sauce and wash the dishes,” she said. “Once that’s done, I will go into the back bedroom and rest on my bed. You leave and go for a nice walk, take as long as you need. Bring the key from the small saucer in the hall with you. If you come back, wake me and then I will give you the answers you seek. Answers that my own godson doesn’t even know. But I tell you this now. Think on it hard. For the easiest answer is not to come back at all.”

  Eduardo Gaspaldi stared out at the waves lapping against the side of the large boat docked alongside the abandoned pier. He lit an unfiltered cigarette and took a deep drag through clenched teeth, letting the late afternoon sun warm his face. He pulled the lid off a small container of hot tea and wrapped his hands around it, warming his thick, beefy palms. The four shooters were waiting for him down in the hull of the ship, all newly arrived, their gear in tow, eager to accept the lucrative job awaiting them. He had devised what he felt would be a strong plan, one designed finally to entrap a man who had haunted him for the past fifteen years. Gaspaldi and Lo Manto had first crossed paths in Naples back in the late eighties, when he was running a small brothel less than ten miles from the center of the city. It was a protected site, the weekly payoffs to both the police and the Camorra insuring his safety and allowing him to do business free of any worry. In the first three years of operation, Gaspaldi’s end from the eight girls he kept under his roof totaled out to a neat and clean $4,800 a week.

  Then, in what Gaspaldi felt was a legitimate dispute over an unhappy and frequent customer, he slashed the face of a young prostitute with the jagged edge of a broken bottle of Campari. The girl, Rosalia Ventura, was a seventeen-year-old runaway from a small town in northern Italy. She was dragged out of the brothel and brought to a nearby hospital, where her face was stitched and she was kept overnight by the elderly nun who ran the emergency room. At some point during that night, while the young girl slept soundly and sedated, the nun placed a call to a young cop working undercover vice. The cop went to the hospital, talked to the nun, checked on the girl, and came to the brothel looking for Gaspaldi. “You’re two days early,” he said to the cop, assuming he was there for the pickup. “Come back on Monday. I’ll have the cash for you then.”

  “You won’t be here on Monday,” the cop, Giancarlo Lo Manto, had said to him. “No one will. This place will be empty.”

  “And where are we all going?” Gaspaldi answered with a loud laugh. “Church?”

  “The girls will be sent to a shelter,” Lo Manto said. “And you will be in a hospital bed, with tubes running into your arms.”

  Gaspaldi lunged for Lo Manto, who sideswiped the bigger man and pushed him down to the floor. Lo Manto reached for a bottle of red wine, broke the front half across the top of a wooden table, and jabbed it into Gaspaldi’s chest, puncturing his right lung and leaving him with a ragged scar and a heavy wheeze for the rest of his life. Lo Manto straddled the bleeding Gaspaldi, lifted his head so his eyes gazed up at him, and put the sharp end of the bottle against the pimp’s exposed throat. “When you leave the hospital, you leave this city,” he told him. “I see you now, here, on the floor of this shit hole. If I see you in Naples again, I’ll kill you.”

  Two weeks later, Gaspaldi had moved to New York and begun his climb up the Rossi family ladder. He was not the type they usually sought, but he knew how to manage a brothel and, over the course of time, would learn both the drug trade and the restaurant business. He became someone the Camorra valued, a six-figure earner who could be counted on to bring in a steady stream of income and take a prison fall if one came their way. Pete Rossi also knew he could throw Gaspaldi’s body to the federal wolves if they needed to make a tabloid bust.

  Gaspaldi had managed to avoid Lo Manto on
the occasions the detective made his way back to New York as part of a series of high-profile joint task forces. Until this latest visit, when Lo Manto had walked into his bar unannounced less than a week ago and sliced off a piece of his ear. He had no choice then but to ignore the cop’s action and allow the Rossi plan to take shape. But now, with four shooters sitting on a stash of two million in cash just waiting for the go-ahead, Gaspaldi could finally put into motion the moves that would eliminate a man he had grown to loathe. He finished off the last of the tea and tossed the empty container into the water below. He took a deep breath of the harbor air, allowing the spray of wet salt to coat his face and fill his lungs. Then the pimp from Naples turned and walked toward the stairwell leading to the bottom tier of the ship, ready to approve a plan to kill an Italian cop on the streets of New York.

  Lo Manto stood with his back against the rooftop door. His hands were braced against the side of the brick walls. It was late at night, a light, misty rain coating the hot tar ground, the city not yet cooled down from an oppressively humid day. The lights from the top-floor apartments surrounding him cast the area in a shadowy glow. He shifted his feet slightly and checked the rounds in his .38 Special. Lo Manto did not, as a rule, go into a situation anticipating a shoot-out. In fact, he made it a practice to avoid it as much as possible. He had steered clear of the shoot-first mentality that becomes the reflex of so many cops after a number of years on the job. He preferred to bring his prey in standing. But on this night, he wondered if that philosophy would stand a chance.

  This night Lo Manto was going up against Reno the Squid.

  Lo Manto walked the edge of the roof and peered over. He moved toward the rusting steps leading down to the fifth-floor fire escape, gripped the bars, and stepped over the edge. He stopped to gaze out at the wide streets and low buildings of the East Bronx neighborhood where he had spent the bulk of his childhood. These were the streets that shaped him, giving his life its purpose and direction. They were the streets where he had played ball, walked to school, run under the cool flow of open fire hydrants, learned the words to favorite songs by the Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, and Frank Sinatra, and kissed a girl for the first time. He had served as an altar boy at the local Catholic church, dutifully working both the scattered crowds of the Saturday five o’clock mass and the packed house on Sunday morning at nine. He began his first job, after school and on weekends, at Dellwood’s Dry Cleaner. He spent four hours a day alongside the owner, Murray Saltzman, a stoop-shouldered, hardworking widower who filled Lo Manto with sorrowful stories of lost lives and ruined bodies left in the wreckage of a war and a hatred he would never come to understand. Saltzman was the first non-Italian Lo Manto had ever met, a deeply religious man who ate cottage cheese every day for lunch and laughed at his own rendition of stupid jokes. A man who had built a business with a small loan from his wife’s father and had worked it six days a week, twelve hours a day for close to forty years. Lo Manto grew to respect him as a man and love him as a friend. Mr. Saltzman opened Lo Manto’s young eyes to the short stories of Irwin Shaw, the comedy of Mel Brooks, and the genius of Sid Caesar. He also took him to his first Broadway play, a Sunday matinee of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. “It seemed so real,” Lo Manto said to him as they walked toward the subway for the ride back up to the Bronx. “And so sad.”