Bitter Truth (46 page)

Calvi took another suck at his cigar and let the vile smoke out slowly. “Too close.”

“Tell me, Gualtieri. What about Australia?”

“Too close.”

Raffaello leaned toward Calvi and squinted his eyes as if peering at a strange vision. “Yes, now I see. Now I understand fully.”

“You should have killed me when you had the chance, Enrico,” said Calvi. He took a step forward and raised his arms and shouted as if in invocation to the heavens, “A-whore-a!”

I cringed from the fusillade I expected to thunder down upon the four men and the Cadillac but instead of thunder there was a towering silence.

Calvi looked up to the decks of the carriers, first to his left then to his right, again raised his arms and shouted, “A-whore-a!”

Nothing.

Calvi turned to Anton, who shrugged. Peter Cressi, next to me, stepped back and stared up. The Cuban looked around, dazed.

“Now, you idiots!” shouted Calvi. “Now!”

A sound, a dragging scraping sound, came from the flight deck of the
Saratoga
to our left and when we looked up we saw someone, finally, but he wasn’t standing, he was falling, slowly it seemed, twisting in the air like a drunken diver, spinning almost gracefully as he fell until his body slammed into the cement surface of the pier with a dull, lifeless thud, punctuated by the sudden cracking of bones.

Another scraping to the right and a body rolling off the deck of the
Forrestal,
like a child down a hill, rolling down down, arms flailing, legs splitting, back arching from the fall and then the cracking thud, followed by another, softer sound from the body returning to the pier after its bounce. And even before that second soft sound reached us with all its portent, another scraping and another body falling, the feet revolving slowly to the sky and the head dropping until its dive was stopped by the urgency of the pier and this time there was no bounce.

From the left another body, from the right another, this one hitting not cement but water, and from the hammerhead crane behind the Cadillac still another, all falling lifeless to the street, with thuds and cracks like chicken bones being broken and sucked of their marrow, or into the river with quiet splashes, and soon it was raining bodies on Pier Four and in the middle of this storm of the macabre, Raffaello, still leaning on his cane, said in a soft voice that cut like the tone of a triangle through the strains of death, “You’re right, Gualtieri. I should have killed you.”

Suddenly a pop came from the hammerhead crane behind the Cadillac and the Cuban’s throat exploded in blood and he collapsed to the cement like a sack of cane sugar. Before I could recover from the sight another shot cracked through the sound of breaking bodies and Anton Schmidt lay sprawled on the pier beside Calvi, the black satchel still gripped in his pale hand.

After the two shots the sounds of falling corpses and breaking bones subsided and there was a moment of silence on Pier Four.

Calvi reached a hand into his raincoat before shrugging. “Maybe the thing on the expressway, it was a bit much, hey, Enrico?”

“You could never have handled the trophy, Gualtieri,” said Raffaello. “You’re too small. You’re a midget. Even on top a mountain you’d still be a midget. But think of it this way, you greedy dog. Whatever hell we’re sending you to, at least it’s not Florida.”

Before Calvi could pull the pistol out of the raincoat, gunfire erupted from the
Saratoga
and the
Forrestal
and the crane and Calvi’s chest writhed red as if a horde of vile stinging insects were struggling to escape the corpse as it fell.

I couldn’t even register all that was happening right next to me on the pier before I felt an arm wrap with a jerk around my throat and a gun press to my head. The arm tightened and I was pulled backward.

Peter Cressi, his breath hot and fast in my ear, shouted, “You take me then you’re also taking Vic.”

I was so stunned by the maneuver it took me a moment to realize I couldn’t breathe. I started yanking at the arm around my throat but it was like steel.

“Pietro, Pietro,” said Raffaello, shaking his head. “You never were the brightest, Pietro.”

“He’s a lawyer,” shouted Dante. “A fucking lawyer. You think you can threaten us by taking as a hostage a lawyer?”

Cressi stopped backing up. The arm around my throat tightened. I could feel the blackness starting to expand in my brain even as the gun barrel left my temple and pointed at the Cadillac. I stopped scrabbling at the arm and went limp as I reached into my pants pocket and gripped the handle of the pairing knife. With a last burst of conscious energy I pulled it out and jabbed it as hard as I could into the forearm squeezing my neck.

There was a scream, whose I wasn’t then sure, and I dropped to the pavement, grappling at my throat and letting out a constricted wheeze as the scream raced away from me. Then there were two shots and the whine of angry bees over my head. The screaming suddenly stopped. I heard still another thud of death and the scrape of Peter Cressi’s monster gun skidding freely along the cement of Pier Four.

On my knees, on the cement, my hands still at my throat, I looked up and saw Earl Dante, smiling his evil smile, pointing a gun straight at my head, the smoke still curling upward from the barrel in a narrow twist. And as if that sight wasn’t scary enough, from out of the corner of my eye I saw a dead man rising.

52

I
T WAS ANTON Schmidt, rising to his knees, still holding onto the black leather bag with one hand, feeling around the cement of the pier for his glasses with the other. I stared at him in amazement, waiting for a bullet to take him down again as he found his glasses and then his hat and stood, dusting himself off. His thick glasses finally on, he looked around and saw me kneeling on the cement, with Dante’s gun trained at my face. He prudently backed away.

“I received a call last night on my private number,” said Raffaello. “It was from a Morris something-or-other.”

I started to yammer about Calvi coming at me in my apartment and my having no choice but to go along when Raffaello silenced me with his words.

“You gave my private number to a stranger,” he said softly. “You involved a stranger in our business.”

I pressed my palms to the ground and pushed myself to standing. “Morris is absolutely trustworthy,” I said. “I would trust him with my life.”

“That’s exactly what you did,” said Raffaello.

I almost sagged back to the ground with fear before I saw Raffaello smile and Dante lower his gun.

“This Morris person,” said Raffaello, “he told me that you had signaled him that this meeting was a betrayal. That was very brave of you to get out such a signal. As you can tell, I had matters already well in hand.” He nodded toward Anton Schmidt. “But still, such loyalty as you have shown, it touches my heart. Of course Earl, he is disappointed. He so wanted to kill you.”

Dante shrugged as he put away his gun.

“What happened here never happened,” said Raffaello.

“It’s a bit messy for that, isn’t it?” I said, gesturing to the street of corpses.

“It will be taken care of. You are to leave now. Our agreement is satisfied. Simply finish what you must finish and then you and Earl will meet to settle what needs to be settled and then you are free of us. Word of this may get out, Victor, but let’s hope not from you, or Earl will no longer be disappointed.”

He turned weakly toward the car. I noticed now that Lenny was holding onto his arm, as if even simply standing for Raffaello was a struggle. Anton Schmidt, with the black leather bag, and Dante and the weightlifter walked around the car. The doors opened and they entered the Cadillac while Raffaello was still maneuvering toward his door. I hadn’t realized before how serious his injury had been from the firefight on the Schuylkill. It wouldn’t be long before the trophy passed to Dante. Well, he could have it.

Just as Raffaello was about to step into the car he stopped, and turned again toward me. “Your friend, this Morris,” said Raffaello. “He seemed an interesting man. It is a precious thing to have somebody who you trust so completely. Maybe someday I will meet this friend. I suspect we have much in common. Do you know if he paints?”

“I don’t, actually.”

“Ask him for me,” said Raffaello before dropping into his seat in the car. Lenny closed the door behind him, entered the car himself, and started the engine. The Cadillac turned toward me, wheeled past, and slowly left Pier Four.

I followed it out with my eyes and then, for the first time since we began our walk down Pier Four, I thought about Caroline in the car with that Cuban. I started running.

Off the pier I turned left and sprinted to the dry dock where I turned right and ran along its edge to where we had left the car and then bit by bit I slowed myself down until I stopped and spun in frustration.

I spit out an obscenity.

The four garbage trucks that I had seen parked on the side of the road with their cabs empty now passed me by and turned left at the wharf on their way to Pier Four, their cabs no longer empty, men in overalls hanging onto the backs. The cleanup was about to begin, but that wasn’t what had set me to cursing.

What had set me to cursing was that the black Lincoln that should have been parked right there where I stood was gone.

53

P
SSSST.”

I twisted around.

“Psssst. Victor. Over here.”

It came from down the way a bit, from behind one of the green and yellow cranes that tended to the dry dock. I walked cautiously toward the sound.

“Victor. You can’t know how relieved I am to see your
tuchis,
Victor.” Morris Kapustin stepped out from behind the crane. “Such shooting I haven’t heard since the war. I was so worried about you. What was it that was happening there?”

“Where’s Caroline, Morris?”

“I left her with the car, of course. With Beth. How was I to know what it was that was happening, who was shooting who or what?”

When I came up to him I didn’t stop to say anything more, I just reached down and gave him a huge hug.

“Couldn’t you maybe just thank me instead of this hugging business,” said Morris, still tight in my grip. “Me, I’m not the new man they are all talking about.”

“You saved my life.”

“I did, yes. But such is my job and really, really, it wasn’t much. Just a phone call and following such a car as that through the gate, it really wasn’t much. It was your friend, Miss Beth, who did most of it. I gave her the job of watching your apartment. It was getting late and I was tired and I needed some pudding. Rosalie, mine wife Rosalie, she made for me last night some tapioca. So Beth is the one you should be hugging. Now let go already, Victor, before I get a hernia.”

I released him and looked down to the wharf, where the garbage trucks had disappeared on their way to the pier. “This is a dangerous place to stay.”

“This way,” he said, leading me across a street and through an alleyway between warehouses. “I hid the car as best I could.”

“What about the man who was with Caroline?” I asked.

“What was I to do? I didn’t know what I was to do so what I did is I put him in the trunk. I figured later we’ll figure out what is to be done with him.”

“But he had an automatic assault rifle.”

“Yes, well, a rifle in the hand it is powerful, but not as powerful as a gun at the head, no? So the rifle, now, it is in the river and the man he is in the trunk.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

The Lincoln sat in a small parking area behind a deserted factory building, the engine still running. Morris’s battered gray Honda rested beside it. Caroline and Beth were leaning together on the side of the Lincoln. When Beth saw me she ran up to me and hugged me and I hugged back.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“What happened?”

“I survived is what happened. And we’re going to need to find ourselves a new clientele.”

I looked over to Caroline, still leaning on the car, looking at me, her arms wrapped so tight against her chest it was a wonder she could breathe.

“How is she?” I asked softly.

“Shaken,” said Beth. “Tired. Mute.”

I let go of Beth and walked hesitantly up to Caroline.

She looked at me for a long moment and then took two steps forward and put her arms around my neck and kissed me.

“Is it over?” she asked in a voice as soft as a whisper.

“That part at least.”

“What now?”

“I have something more to show you, back at the apartment.”

“I’m still shaking.”

“Just this one thing more.”

“I haven’t slept.”

“It’s back at my apartment.”

“Let’s just pretend it’s over, everything is over. Please?”

She looked at me with pleading eyes but I just shook my head. I didn’t tell her just then what was most pressing on my mind, not there, in the middle of the Naval Shipyard, with the bodies being thrown into the garbage trucks from a pier just a few hundred yards away. I didn’t tell her what Calvi had said about her father, how he was Calvi’s patron, the one who had paid for Jacqueline’s death and for Edward’s death and for the retrieval of the box and for her protection. I didn’t tell her that, not there, not yet, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. I just told her we needed to see something at my apartment and that she should get into the car.

Morris had hot-wired the Lincoln’s engine, which was why it was still running. He and Beth had followed us to the Naval Shipyard in Morris’s Honda but it was Caroline and I who followed Morris and Beth out, alongside the dry docks, back across the lift bridge that forded the mouth of the reserve basin, under I-95 and through the gate to Penrose Avenue. Morris took a right onto Penrose and then another right onto Pattison and we followed that to the Spectrum, where the Flyers win and the Sixers lose. Morris stopped the Honda right in front and I stopped behind him. The sign said “TOW AWAY ZONE,” which was fine by me. Let the car sit in a police lot while they tried to figure out what had happened to its owner. I pulled apart the wires to kill the engine, wiped down the steering wheel and door handles to obliterate my prints, and flipped up the inside lock of the trunk. The Cuban leaped out and, without saying a word, ran, arms pumping like an Olympic sprinter. Raffaello might have had different plans for him, but I didn’t work for Raffaello anymore.

As soon as Caroline and I entered my apartment I opened all the windows to air the place out. The metal box still sat on the table. As I was putting the cushions back on the sofa, Calvi’s black cat, Sam, leaped from underneath a lamp. I had forgotten it was still there. It no longer had a master, it no longer had a home. It stood between Caroline and me and inspected us, haughty, still, in its impoverishment.

“It’s an orphan now,” I said. “What are we going to do with it?”

She lit a cigarette and looked down at it for a while and then, giving it a wide berth, she walked around it and into my kitchen. I thought she might be looking for a cleaver to butcher it to death but what she took out instead was a can of tuna fish from my pantry and a carton of milk from the fridge. She set out two bowls onto the floor. The milk clumped like loose cottage cheese when she poured it but the cat didn’t seem to mind. Caroline stood back and watched it eat from afar and I watched her watch it.

“I never thought I’d see you be nice to a cat,” I said.

“After what we’ve just been through, the little monsters seem almost benign. Almost.”

When we were both showered and dressed in fresh clothes, me in jeans and a white tee shirt, her in a pair of her leggings and one of my white work shirts, her face scrubbed clean of any makeup, we sat down together on the couch, leaning into each other, as if both of us at that moment needed the physical presence of the other. Thinking of her as she fed the cat, the first act of kindness I had ever seen from her, I wondered, maybe, if after everything, maybe, we might actually be right for each other. Maybe we could make whatever was going on between us work. We were both lonely, I knew that, and we were together now and maybe that was enough. And she was stinking rich, so maybe that was more than enough. We sat quietly together, not so much embracing as leaning one on the other, watching the cat as he sat near our feet and licked its paw. Then I reached down and pulled my pack onto my lap.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” I said, drawing from the pack the bundles of letters I had found in the locked drawer of the breakfront. “I found these at the old Poole house.”

“All right.”

“I think we should read them.”

“All right.”

“We can do this later if you want.”

“No, let’s do it now.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to run away anymore?”

“Of course I want to run away. I’m desperate to run away. But wherever I ran I’d still be a Reddman. I can’t control who I am, can I?”

“No.”

“And I can’t control who wants to kill me because of it, can I?”

“Apparently not.”

“It’s funny what you learn at the wrong end of a gun. You told me the men who killed my sister and brother are dead, but we still don’t know who hired them. Maybe the answer is somewhere in these letters.”

“Maybe.”

“And maybe the one good thing I’ve been looking for is in there, too.”

“Maybe.”

She waited a moment, looking down at Sam the cat, steeling herself. “Or maybe it’s just more shit.”

“Probably.”

She waited a moment more and then, hesitantly, she reached for one of the bundles. She untied the old ribbon carefully and looked through the letters, one by one, before passing them, one by one, to me. “These are love letters,” she said. “From an Emma.”

“They must be from Emma Poole. Who are they to?”

“They are each addressed ‘To My Love,’ without a name,” she said. “Listen to this. ‘To feel your hand on my face, your lips on my cheek, to feel your warmth and your weight surround me, my darling, my love, my life can hold no more meaning than this. You swear your devotion over and over and I place my fingers on your lips because to speak of the future leaks the rapture from our present. Love me now, fully and completely, love me today, not forever, love me in this moment and let the future be damned.’ ”

I took one of the letters she had passed to me and began to read aloud. “ ‘If we are cursed with this passion, then let the curse torch our souls until the fire consumes itself and is extinguished. I fall not into happiness with you, my beloved, for that is impossible for cursed souls such as we, but instead in your arms I rise to the transcendent ecstasy of which the great men sing and if it be necessarily short-lived than still I wouldn’t treasure it any less or bargain even a minute’s worth for something longer lasting but tepid to the touch.’ ”

She dropped the letter in her hand and picked up another. “ ‘Glorious, glorious, glorious is your breath and your touch and the rich warm smell of you, your skin, your eyes, your scar, the power in your legs, the rosy warmth of your mouth. I want you to devour me, my love, every inch of me, I lie in bed at night and imagine it and only delirious joy comes from the imagining. Lie with me, now, this instant, wait no longer, come to me and lie with me, now, your arms around me, now, your mouth on my breasts, now, the wild smell of your hair, now, your teeth on my neck, now, devour me my love my love my love devour me now.’ ”

I stared at Caroline as she read the words and was not surprised to see a tear. At least some of what she was feeling I felt also. I moved closer to her and put my arm around her.

“Who are the letters to?” I asked.

“They don’t say, as if she was purposefully hiding his identity. But whoever it was we know how it ended.”

“Yes, we do,” I said. Whomever Emma Poole had written these paeans of love to had been the one to impregnate her and desert her, to leave her alone as she nursed her dying mother while her stomach swelled.

“Get rid of them,” she said as she grabbed the letters from my hand and threw them on the floor. The cat leaped away for a moment and then jumped onto the sofa next to Caroline, who barely flinched. “I can’t bear to read them. I feel like a voyeur.”

“These were written more than seventy years ago,” I said. “It’s like looking through a powerful telescope and seeing light that was emitted eons ago by stars that are already dead.”

“It’s not right,” she said. “Whatever she felt for the man who deserted her it has nothing to do with us. The emotions were hers and hers alone. We’re trespassing.”

“There’s another letter,” I said. “It’s not from Emma.” I reached into the pack and pulled out the letter entitled:
To My Child on the Attainment of Majority
.

She hesitated for a moment and then took the envelope. She unwrapped the string that bound the envelope shut and pulled out a sheaf of pages written in a masculine hand. She quickly looked at the last page to find the signature.

“It’s from my grandfather,” she said. “It’s written to my father. Why was this letter with the others?”

I shrugged my ignorance.

She read the first lines out loud. “April 6, 1923. To my child. By the time you read this I will be dead.”

She looked at me and shook her head but even while she was shaking her head she trained her gaze back onto the letter and started reading again, though this time to herself. When she was finished with the first page she handed it to me and went onto the second. In that way I trailed behind her by a few minutes, as if my telescope was a few hundred light seconds farther away from the source of the dead star’s light than hers, and my emotional response similarly lagged behind.

It is hard to describe the effect of that letter. It solved mysteries that spanned the century, resolved questions that were lingering in our minds, threw into even greater highlight the terrors that stalked the Reddmans and the Pooles. But even with our out-of-synch emotional responses a peculiar reaction took place between the two of us, Caroline and me, in our separate worlds, as we read the letter. Slowly we drifted apart, not just emotionally, but physically too. Where we had been leaning upon one another when we started reading the letter, our sides and legs melded as though we were trying to become one, as the words drifted through us we separated. First there was just a lessening of pressure, then a gap developed that turned into an inch and then into a foot and then into a yard and finally, while Caroline was sobbing quietly, Sam the cat curled in her lap, and I was reading the last lines and the bold signature of Christian Shaw, Caroline was leaning over one arm of the couch and I was leaning over the other, as far apart as two could be on one piece of furniture. Had the sofa’s arms not been there I fear we would have tumbled away from each other until we slammed like rolling balls into opposite walls.

What caused this fierce magnetic repellence was not any great puzzle. What had come between Caroline and me so strongly in that moment was what had never been between us and the letter was the most vivid confirmation of that yet. Christian Shaw’s letter to his child gave us something that was completely unexpected in this tale of deception and betrayal and murder and desertion and revenge, it gave us an unexpected burst of hope. The letter gave us hope because what Caroline Shaw had believed to be a fiction had been shown to be real, alive, transforming, redeeming. The hope was unexpected because who could have thought that in the middle of the cursed entwining of the Reddmans and the Pooles we would find, like a ruby in a mountain of manure, a transcendent and powerful love.