A Quiet Vendetta (64 page)

‘One dollar?’ I asked. ‘What the hell we gotta give him one dollar for?’

Don Calligaris smiled. ‘It’s traditional. It’s a Jewish thing. They gotta get their pound of flesh, you know?’ He laughed, waved my question aside, and went back to business.

‘It’s worth it to us to keep Momo sweet,’ he said. ‘This guy Wheland is a fly in the fucking ointment as far as he’s concerned, about as significant in the grand scheme of things as a heap of dog crap on the sidewalk. It means nothing to us to clip him, and this is what Momo wants. Besides, Benny Wheland has been known to open his mouth a few too many times, and things would be altogether quieter if he was out of the way.’

I sat quiet for some moments.

‘Hell, Ernesto, if I had someone else to send, someone I could trust, I would send them. You know that. This may not seem like a big deal, thirty grand owed to some Jewish guy running the fight circuit, but I got my orders, and orders is orders as you well know. Now, you gonna do this thing or do I gotta get some pimple-faced teenager with an attitude to go fuck it up for me?’

I smiled. ‘Of course I’ll go,’ I said. I would not have questioned Don Calligaris’s request. It was not in my nature to go up against him. He was in a tight spot. He needed someone to do the work. I agreed to take care of it.

And so we sat in that car as New York went on snowing down on us, me and Ten Cent in our overcoats and gloves, and when Ten Cent started the car and I looked at him I realized that he would do these things for ever. Ten Cent was a soldier, he was not a thinker. He was a smart man, no question about it, but he had accepted the fact that he was not a leader. He was a man who made kings, not a king himself, whereas I had always questioned everything. I did not want to be a king, I did not want to sit in a chair someplace and give the orders to have men’s lives ended, but at that point in my life I didn’t want to be the emissary either. What I wanted I didn’t know, but in that moment I had agreed, and once I had agreed there was no going back. That unwillingness to compromise my word had perhaps been the only thing to keep me alive that long.

We drove south towards Chinatown and then headed into the Lower East Side along Broadway. We had been given Benny Wheland’s address, and we knew he lived alone. Apparently Benny had never trusted a woman enough to marry her, and the money that he had he kept beneath the floorboards.

‘You gonna do this?’ Ten Cent asked me as he pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t wanna do this, you know? You got a kid an’ all, and I know that must change the way you think about things. I’m easy come, easy go on this if you don’t actually wanna clip the guy.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘We’ll take it as it comes,’ I said. ‘Let’s go talk to Benny and see what he has to say for himself, eh?’

Ten Cent nodded and opened the door. A freezing gust of wind and snow rushed in to greet us, and Ten Cent swore. He stepped out and slammed the car door shut.

I climbed out on the other side and walked around to where he stood. We looked up and down the street both ways. Smart folks were inside bundled up in blankets watching the tube. Only us – two old men in topcoats and scarves – were dumb enough to be out on a night like this.

Benny opened the door but it was held by two security chains. He peered out at us through the four-inch gap, his face screwed up against the cold wind that hurried in to piss him off.

‘Benny,’ Ten Cent said. ‘How ya doin’ there? You gonna open the freakin’ door and let us in or we gotta stand out here like a coupla schmucks freezin’ our fucking balls off?’

Benny hesitated for a second. It amazed me, never ceased to amaze me, that in situations like this people didn’t realize what was going to happen. Or perhaps they did, and they knew there was an inevitability to it, and thus they consigned themselves to fate. Perhaps they would survive. Perhaps they believed that God might be on their side and see them through. I knew for a fact that God was the greatest welch-artist that ever existed.

‘Whaddya want?’ Benny growled through the narrowing gap between the door and the frame.

‘Aah, come on for Christ’s sake, Benny. We got to talk money with you. We got a means to work out this thing with Momo and it won’t take more than a coupla minutes and then we’ll be on our way.’

I didn’t know what Benny Wheland thought then, but his expression changed. Perhaps he believed that Momo, and whoever else Momo might have been connected with, wouldn’t have sent two old men over to sort him out. Maybe he believed that if he was gonna get clipped it would be some wiseass kids who just muscled their way in and shot him in the face.

He hesitated a moment longer, and then he slammed the door.

I heard the chains releasing, both of them, and then the door opened wide. Ten Cent and I went into Benny Wheland’s house with gratitude and .38s.

There was a lot of talk, much of it from Benny, a little from Ten Cent, and after a while I got real tired of listening and shot Benny in the face.

When I walked over and took a look at him it was difficult to see anything but a whole handful of shit around his eyes and nose.

Ten Cent stood there with his jaw on the floor.

‘Fuck, Ernesto . . . what the fuck?’

I frowned. ‘Whaddya mean, what the fuck?’

‘Shit, man, you coulda told me you was gonna do that.’

‘What the hell d’you mean I coulda told you? What the hell did we come over here for? A cup of fuckin’ tea and a chat with the asshole?’

Ten Cent shook his head. He lifted his right hand and massaged his ear. ‘No, I don’t mean that. You know I don’t mean that. I mean you coulda told me you was gonna just shoot the guy. I coulda put my fucking hands over my ears or something. Jesus, feels like I ain’t gonna hear right for a fucking week.’

I smiled and Ten Cent started laughing.

‘You didn’t wanna listen to any more of that horseshit, did you?’

Ten Cent shook his head. ‘Guy was a fucking radio station all by himself. Now, let’s find this fucking money, right?’

We went through every room in the house. We prised up the floorboards, ripped open the backs of chairs and sofas. We found food cartons and dirty washing pretty much everywhere we went. We even found the remains of something that had been cooked black in the oven and then just left there because Benny hadn’t been bothered to clean up after himself. The guy had lived like an animal. That said, regardless of his personal hygiene and housecare skills, we collected together something close to a hundred and ten thousand dollars, much of it in fifties and hundreds. It was a good take, better than Don Calligaris had expected, and as a show of good faith he sent a single dollar over to Momo in an envelope, and a further thirty grand in a jiffy bag.

‘Straightforward enough?’ he’d asked me when we’d returned to Mulberry Street.

‘Straight as ever,’ I’d told him.

‘Good job, Ernesto. Good to get the old juices flowing again, eh?’

I smiled. I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing. I had done what was required, what was asked of me, and by the time I sat in my own room, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, my feet up on the edge of the table and a movie on the TV, I felt distant enough from what had happened to feel absolutely nothing at all. I was numb, insensate to Benny Wheland and Momo and whoever else might have had a beef with either of them, and I just wanted a little time to myself to gather my thoughts.

It was then that I thought of Angelina and Lucia. I had not permitted myself the luxury of real memories since their deaths. After the shock, the horror, the pain and grief and crying jags that had racked my body for so many nights in the first weeks in Havana, I had separated myself out from everything that had happened and tried to start all over again. At least mentally and emotionally, or that’s what I believed. It was not true. I had not overcome my sense of rage and despair about their loss, and though Don Calligaris had several times assured me that there were people still looking into what had happened and why, who had been behind the attempt on his life that had killed my wife and daughter, I knew well enough the way this family worked to realize that he was merely placating me. In this life of ours, things happened and they were forgotten. Within an hour, perhaps a day at most, Benny Wheland would be forgotten. The police would find him after some neighbor reported the smell of his decomposing body in a fortnight, and there would be a perfunctory investigation. Some eight-year-old kid two weeks out of detective school would come to the conclusion that it was a straightforward robbery and homicide, and that would be the end of that. Benny Wheland would be buried or cremated or whatever the hell was planned for him, and there would be nothing further to say. His death would be as insignificant as his life. Much like my father.

It was the same for Angelina and Lucia. Someone somewhere had ordered Don Calligaris’s death, a bomb had been placed in his car, Don Calligaris had survived without a scratch. Someone somewhere would make a phone call to someone somewhere else, the differences would have been resolved in a handful of minutes, and the matter would have been closed. End of story. Evidently whoever had ordered the hit no longer wanted Don Calligaris dead or they would have tried again, and they would have kept on trying no matter how many attempts it took, and no matter who might have gotten in the way. Angelina and Lucia, well, they had gotten in the way, and had I been blood, had we been a part of this family for real, then perhaps someone might have done something. But I was Cuban, and Angelina had been the unwanted product of an unwanted embarrassment to the family, and it was not necessary for anyone to balance the scales in my favor. My connection to Don Calligaris had been enough to put my family in the line of fire, and though I bore no grudge against him, though I understood that he could do nothing directly to help me, I also knew that someone somewhere was responsible, and someone should pay.

That thought stayed with me until I slept, but when I woke it had left my mind. I did not forget, I merely changed its order of priority. It was there, it would never disappear, and there would come a time to do something about it.

The summer of 1999, and Victor’s seventeenth birthday in June. It was then that I met the first girl he brought home. She was an Italian girl, a fellow student from his school, and in her deep brown eyes I saw both the innocence of youth and the blossoming of adulthood. Her name was Elizabetta Pertini, though Victor called her Liza and this was the name by which she was known. In some small way she was not unlike Victor’s mother, and when she laughed, as she often did, there was a way she would raise her hand and half-cover her mouth that was enchanting. She wore her raven hair long, often tied at the back with a ribbon, and I knew within a matter of weeks, good Catholic girl or not, that she was the one who took my son and showed him that which had been shown to me by Ruben Cienfuegos’s cousin Sabina. He changed after that, as all young men do, and he became independent to an extent I had not seen before. Sometimes he was gone for two or three days, merely calling to let me know that he was fine, that he was with friends, that he would be back before the week was out. I did not complain, his grades were good, he studied well, and it seemed that Liza had carried something into his life that had been altogether missing. My son was no longer lonely. For this alone I would have been eternally grateful to Elizabetta Pertini.

The discussion that took place between her father and myself in the spring of the following year did not go well. Apparently Mr Pertini, a well-known bakery owner from SoHo, had discovered that his daughter, believed to be visiting with girlfriends, perhaps studying for her school examinations, had been spending time with Victor. This subterfuge, orchestrated no doubt by Victor, had continued for the better part of eight months, and though I was tempted to ask Mr Pertini how he had managed to be so utterly unobservant of his daughter’s comings and going, I held my tongue. Mr Pertini was irate and inconsolable. Apparently, and this unknown to his daughter, he intended her to marry the son of a family friend, a young man called Albert de Mita who was – even as we spoke – studying to be an architect.

I listened patiently to what Mr Pertini had to say. I sat in the front room of my own house on Baxter where he had come to find me, and I heard every word that came from his lips. He was a blind man, a man of ignorance and greed, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that his business had been struggling financially for many years, that the intended marriage of his daughter into the de Mita family would reap a financial benefit sufficient to rescue him from potential ruin. He was more interested in his own social status than the happiness of his daughter, and for this I could not forgive him.

But there was a difficulty with whatever challenge I might have raised to his objections regarding my son courting his daughter. Pertini was a man of repute. He was not a gangster, he was not part of this New York family, and thus any issue of loyalty to Don Calligaris would carry no weight. Thirty years ago he would have been visited by Ten Cent and Michael Luciano perhaps. They would have shared a glass of wine with him and explained that he was interfering in the business of the heart, and sufficient funds to compensate for the loss of his daughter’s ‘dowry’ would have been delivered in a discreet brown package to one of his bakeries. But now, here in the latter part of the twentieth century, such matters could no longer be resolved in the old way. Any suggestion I might have made to Pertini about money would have been taken as offensive. No matter his thought or intention, no matter the fact that he knew I understood his motives, on the face of it he would have been insulted. That would have been his part to play, and he would have played it to the hilt. He professed an appreciation of his daughter’s best interests. He knew as little of those as he did of my business. But had I insisted that there was a change in his plan, had I attempted to persuade him to reconsider who his daughter might marry, then Pertini – I felt sure – would have done all he could to raise questions about my reputation and credibility. That route would have been the route to his death for certain, and however much I loved Victor, however much I might have cared for his happiness and the welfare of his heart, I also felt that I could play no part in depriving Liza of her father.