by James Dargan
“Hello,” the young woman said as her two friends stood by, giggling.
“Did you enjoy movie a so much?” the young mobster asked in his basic English with an Italian accent that was so obvious it was covered in melted Mozzarella.
“Yes.”
Quatrocchi tried Sicilian on the girl – but she answered in an Italian that was as rudimentary as his New Yorkese.
“Listen, Fay, we're just going for ice cream,” one of her friends said.
“Okay. Hurry up and don't be long.”
“So, you-a, Fay?” Quatrocchi asked as Mantagna was standing right behind her. “Go buy ice cream, schmuck!” Fay laughed. “That my-a compadre, Enzo.”
“What's your name?” Fay asked.
“Giuseppe, but you canna call me-a Joe.”
“Pleased to meet you, Joe.”
“And a yours?”
“Fay.”
Fay Zacconi was an eighteen-year-old seamtress from Coney Island. Her father, Carlo Zacconi - who had come to America in the 1890s - was a native of Naples. He had brought his two daughters and son up alone ever since his Irish wife had died of cancer in the early 1920s.
“So, where from a you, Fay bella?”
“Coney Island.”
“Ah, you like a sea, then?”
“Yes.”
Quatrocchi was hypnotized by Fay's innocence and everyday beauty. He wanted to see more of her.
“And how a-bout you and-a me taking a date-a to a movie again or a something a more interestin'?”
“You want to go on a date with me?” Fay asked with an embarrassed giggle – she had been asked on dates with guys before, sure, but not from such a well-dressed, handsome man with a language problem. Fay's father had warned her about the mustachioed Petes who roamed the Coney Island boardwalk. “And what do you do, Joe?” she asked, her eyes containing the mistrust her father had instilled in her.
“This and-a that-a.” Fay started the retreat to her friends who were standing by a shaved-ice street vendor and sipping on his wares. “Where you-a goin', bella?!”
“Looks like you lost, you schmuck!” Mantegna said as his best friend chased after his girl across the street, narrowly missing being hit head on by a delivery truck.
“Where you-a going, bella?” Quatrocchi asked.
“Home.”
“Let's go,” one of Fay's friends said, her arm on Fay's shoulder.
Mantegna had already clocked her at the ticket office in the foyer.
“And what's your name, baby?” Mantagna asked Fay’s friend, born in the States and with a better command of English than his Sicilian roughneck friend.
That question deflected Fay's earlier annoyance – Quatrocchi was back in contention. The fifth wheel in the proceedings, Mary Phelan, knew her time was up:
“If I'm disturbing you, I can always go?” she asked rhetorically.
“Yeah, sweetheart,” Mantagna began, “you can leave if you wanna...”
*****
That had been the first day of the rest of Quatrocchi's life. He lived for his wife and nothing else mattered. Though their marriage had experienced its ups-and-downs, the Quatrocchis had had a good time of it.
“Take the plate of cookies with you?” Quatrocchi said to Dimissio as he stood up to go.”
“Sure, boss.”
“I'll ask my beloved to wrap 'em up for you.”
A DAY OUT AT CENTRAL PARK
Christopher Greco had never owned a car before Frank Dimissio sold him one. And it wasn't because Greco was a lazy bum and had never earned enough. He was a hardworking man whose young family came first above anything else. A bus driver out of the predominantly Irish neighbourhood of Breezy Point, Queens, he had been saving for an eternity to buy a car. When Dimissio, a friend of a friend of his cousin, Vinny Pizzi, offered him a red Buick Electra at an unbelievable price, Greco nearly snapped the mobster's hand off.
“You ready to go, honey?” Greco said to his wife as he was grooming his hair in the hallway mirror.
“Ah, almost!” Lisa Greco shouted from the bedroom of their modest three-bedroom house on Oceanside Avenue.
The couple's two kids, Ben and Antonia, were already waiting outside on the lawn in front of the family's new pride and joy, the Buick Electra.
Greco joined his children outside.
“You looking forward to the trip, guys?” Greco asked his kids.
They would be going to Central Park – an hour’s drive away from Breezy Point's beaches.
Ben and Antonia jumped on their father with excitement. They had been to Central Park a dozen times before, but never in such style. The car had been in Greco's possession for less than a week, and had become quite the topic of gossip for the people on his street: Who did he think he was, a Wop bus driver from Bensonhurst, coming to our neighbourhood and flashing his wealth in front of our eyes? And this was the Irish-American people who had a good relationship with Greco speaking.
“Going somewhere?” Ed Higgins, his neighbour from three houses down, asked Greco as he was walking past with his dog and a newspaper under his arm.
“Manhattan.”
“Manhattan.” Higgins' dog stopped to take a piss conveniently in front of Greco's gate, which gave the Irishman a chance to dig deeper. “In the car?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
Greco wasn't gloating, he was just Italian – happy-go-lucky and full of beans.
“So, Chris, please tell me, how in the hell did you afford her?” Higgins, a postman, then said, eyeing the red dream before him.
“I saved, Ed.”
And he had. Hard, too. But still, Greco wasn't an idiot: he knew Dimissio's Mob connections but thought he could trust him.
Once Lisa Greco had preened herself enough, she stepped out of the house. Lisa Greco was a beauty. Her younger sister, Maya Cirillo, also with looks to kill, was the Goomatta of a Bay Ridge wise guy, which told you a lot about the beauty of the Cirillo girls.
They headed off for a day of fun.
“Can I drive, daddy?” Antonia, six, asked her father as she hugged him around the neck from behind.
“Stop that while I'm driving.”
Antonia jumped back, joining her brother on the back seat. Lisa Greco then grabbed hold of her husband's hand. They were going 'Uptown'.
The Grecos were driving through the Carroll Gardens neighbourhood of Brooklyn and heading towards Brooklyn Bridge. The children were playing pat-a cake pat-a-cake in the back and Greco's wife was powdering her face. Greco, singing along to The Flamingoes' hit tune I only Have Eyes for You on the radio, was the happiest man in the world: he had a wonderful, gorgeous wife, two great kids and the best car in the neighbourhood. It didn't get much better for this humble Italian Brooklynite.
“Can't you be quiet and let me listen to the song?” Lisa Greco said with a chuckle to her husband. Greco knew his wife was only joking with him, but he didn't have the best of voices and he knew it. “So, after Central Park, you fancy going to that pizza joint on West 58th Street we went to with Carol and Vinny last year?”
“That shit hole?” Greco said, remembering about the pepperoni pizza he had eaten there with the utmost dissatisfaction.
“So where then?”
“I know a great restaurant out in Belmont.”
Lisa Greco didn’t want to go to Belmont, in the Bronx, because Greco's uncle, Lou Narducci, lived there and she had no intention of visiting him.
“Why, just so you can visit Lou and get drunk?”
Greco sniggered, then said:
“And risk totalling my baby?”
“It won't be totalled, baby,” Lisa Greco said with a smile, lighting a cigarette, “because I won't be driving home.”
“Okay, the place on 58th will do.”
Suddenly the car gained speed involuntarily, though Greco's foot wasn't pushed hard on the gas.
“What's wrong?” Greco's wife asked.
“I dunno, babe!” he answered, panicking
. “It's speeding up, it's speeding up!”
Chaotic screams from both front passengers. The children in the back seat were unaware of the threat but disorientated nonetheless. Greco, with great effort, tried with futility to control the car. It past 90mph. Ahead, a 1954 grey Oldsmobile with seventy-four-year old Frank Getz at the driving wheel was trundling along at a pedestrian 30mph. Greco rammed into the back of him, unintentionally, of course, which caused the Grecos' car to spin out of control.
“JESUS! HONEY! JESUS!” Lisa Greco screamed.
*****
Greco opened his eyes. All he could feel was the pain in his neck.
“Where am I?” he said as he starred up to the ceiling.
“Hello, Mr Greco,” a female voice called out.
It was Nurse Simpson. She rushed out of the four-bed ward and went to inform the doctors that Greco had regained consciousness.
“So, what happened?” Greco asked his elderly mother, Maria Greco. His mother had yet to tell him the bad news, that his wife and children had been killed.
“Car accident, dear,” she said with red eyes, tired and heartbroken. Her son had been in a coma for six days. “But you're fine now.”
Greco was full of morphine, and though awake, he couldn’t distinguish what was real from what wasn't.
“Where are Lisa and the kids?”
Here was the question Maria Greco dreading answering.
“Rest, dear, please, you've had a hard time of it.”
With eight busted ribs the less serious of his injuries, it was easy to understand Greco was lucky to still be alive.
“No, I want to know where they are...”
THE ALTER-EGO OF FRANCESCO DIMISSIO
Of the seventy-three cars that Dimissio had already sold, there had been three accidents, two fatal. Another twelve had come back to Dimissio with complaints regarding the engines and overheating.
“Well, what the fuck do you want me to say, the car was a good deal? Get it repaired,” Dimissio had said to one customer, Thomas Aiello.
Aiello and many others knew who they were buying off when they had bought the cars. But since Parrino's mother and Greco's family had been wiped out, he knew he had to act.
Dimissio was waiting outside Purcell's Tucson home with another mobster, Peter Silvestri, ready and waiting to kidnap the car salesman and bring him to a secret location where Quatrocchi would be ready with some important questions to ask him.
“We've been waiting for an hour now, Frank, maybe the prick aiyn't in?” Silvestri said. Dimissio was getting worried – Purcell should have left for work already. “Maybe you should knock on the door?”
“Maybe you gotta point... I'll give it five more minutes and then we'll move.”
*****
Martha Purcell was in the kitchen flower arranging when the doorbell rang.
“Coming!” she exclaimed joyfully. “Can I help you?” she asked the man in the immaculately tailored black suit and shades at the door.
“Hello, my name's Christopher Wellman,” Dimissio replied in his thick Brooklyn accent, Wellman being his impromptu alter-ego for the situation, “is this the residence of Mr Bernard Purcell?”
“It is, yes.”
“I'm here to pick up the documents from your husband to the car I purchased off him a few days ago... He said he'd be in at this time for me to collect ‘em.”
Martha Purcell was aware her husband never allowed clients to pick up documents from their home address: the office was the office and home was home.
“I'm afraid he's not here.”
“Then where is he, ma'am?”
“In Albuquerque. Last minute business trip. Should be back on Friday night.”
Martha Purcell wasn't lying: her husband was out of town, but the trip to New Mexico’s biggest city wasn't for business – he was doing something else there that had little to do with cars.
“Okay,” Dimissio said, winking, “I guess I'll see him when he gets back then.”
“Where is he?” Silvestri asked when Dimissio had returned to the car.
“Not at fucking home. In New Mexico on a business trip, the cocksucker.”
“What's she doing?” Silvestri then said as Purcell's wife was looking at them from her front lawn.
“I have no goddamn idea.”
“So, what we gonna do now?”
“I dunno.”
Just to make sure the car salesman's wife wasn't bullshitting them, Dimissio and Silvestri took a visit to Purcell's car lot.
“You want me to do this?” Silvestri asked Dimissio.
“Yeah, go ahead... Talk to the pricks in there. See if you can find out something on Purcell?”
“And should I break any heads in due course?”
“No, leave that shit to me.”
“Okay.”
Silvestri got out of the car. Dimissio watched as he went into Purcell's office. Out on the parking lot thirty cars were stationed horizontally next to each other, sale signs emblazoned across their windshields.
What the fuck is he doing? Dimissio thought. It had been fifteen minutes already by his watch.
“So, Sal, your boss, you gotta name of the hotel where he's staying at in Albuquerque?” Silvestri asked Sal Kimble, Purcell's sales manager.
“Nah, sorry, I don't,” Kimble answered from his side of the desk.
“Can I ask you a few questions about some recent-”
“Go back to the car,” Dimissio said to his cohort, interrupting him.
Silvestri disappeared.
“And who are you?” Kimble asked Dimissio, his tone uptight, formal, an exact mirror image to his external look of white, educated, middle-class respectability, which was a world away from the place Dimissio and Silvestri really came from.
“A friend of his. I got some questions I wanna ask you about him.”
“Purcell isn't here.”
“Then where is he? His wife says he's in Albuquerque.”
“He is.”
“And what's he doing there?”
Kimble, who wore glasses, took them off and stood up:
“Excuse me, but who are you, sir... And who, in God's name, is he?”
“That's my associate.”
“And what's your name,” Kimble asked, his patience wearing thin, “because I've yet to find out who the hell any of you are?”
“Christopher Wellman.”
“Well, Mr Wellman, I don't appreciate you coming into my place of work unannounced and disturbing me.”
Dimissio knew when he had to be polite and when the need for violence preceded all else – now was not the time for the latter. Quatrocchi's orders.
“I'm sorry for barging in on you like that, but, well, you know, I'd like to know when Purcell will be back?”
“Friday.”
Dimissio sensed Kimble was telling the truth – Mrs Purcell had said the same thing.
“Friday, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for your cooperation, Mr Kimble. I'll be seeing you some time in the future.”
Dimissio left.
“What did the cocksucker say?” Silvestri asked Dimissio as he was looking at a 59' red Chevy Impala.
“Friday. He'll be back on Friday.”
“So, what, we gonna get him then?”
“I think so, yeah.”
THE 1706 SALOON
Purcell had booked into his hotel, The Shamrock Inn, under an assumed name. He had used 'Giles Calthorpe' on countless occasions before on his business trips around the country. When Purcell was Giles Calthorpe he changed from the loving husband he was at home with his wife and became something that Martha Purcell would have barely recognized if she had ever got the chance to see him for herself. Now, though, with more money than he had ever had in his life, Purcell swore to himself he would have the best time ever. He had got himself two hookers, Adele and Dolores, a sexy brunette and blonde double team he intended to get drunk and take as much cocaine with as possible without O.D-in
g, then – and only if he had enough energy for the job - fuck their brains out. Over forty grand richer now off the deal he made with Quatrocchi, the car salesman was unaware the trouble the deal had caused innocent car owners in NYC and the surrounding area.
“You fancy going to a bar first or should I just go to a liquor store and get some booze?” Purcell asked the two women, still in his suit and tie after a business meeting with an Albuquerque haulage firm boss who was interested in transporting Purcell's deliveries of automobiles from Texas and Oklahoma.
Adele and Dolores weren't fussy – what interested them was the smartly dressed businessman had money and was willing to part with it.
“Whatever you wanna do, baby?” Dolores, the blonde, said, cigarette in her mouth.
Dolores had transplanted herself to New Mexico's biggest city from her hometown of Santa Fe, the state's capital, after her abusive marriage had ended. The dark-haired Adele, a native of Edinburg, Mississippi, was of part Choctaw descent, and she was the most beautiful out of the two.
“Okay, let's go find a bar.”
The Shamrock Inn lay on Central Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Albuquerque, about a mile from downtown. Since the new Interstate 40 had been completed just outside the city, residents in the neighbourhood had noticed the decline in road traffic. Business owners, especially of the bars and liquor stores, were feeling it in their pockets.
Working girls, too, didn't go unaffected:
“You wouldn't believe how much custom we've lost since that goddamn highway was built,” Dolores said as they walked west, heading towards downtown.
“That's modernity for you, girls,” Purcell said with a snigger. Purcell was a car man, and the new Interstate Highway system - implemented four years before - was and would be his bread and butter for some time to come. He planned on having a good time, though, and didn't want to rub the whores up the wrong way: “But I do see your point... And what about you, sweetheart, are you Mexican or Italian?”
“My mother's Choctaw Indian,” Adele answered.
“You're an Indian?”
“Yeah, darling... Why, you changed your mind about my pussy now?” Dolores burst out into uncontrollable laughter at her friend’s sarcastic riposte. “Have you?!”