Only Child (8 page)

• • •

"T
his gets complicated," the Italian said.
I watched the smoke. The trick is to look into it, never through it.
"You got any idea how dirty the feds play, sometimes?" the Italian asked.
"There's all kinds of feds," I told him. "Vietnam was the feds. Waco and Ruby Ridge, that was the feds. So was COINTELPRO."
"What's that last one?"
"Political," the Latin answered for me.
"This isn't that," the Italian said.
"Political?"
"What it is, it's personal."
"I don't know any feds," I said, to head him off in case he was talking about solving his problems with a bribe. I've got no moral problem with being a bagman, but I'd never trust strangers at either end.
The Italian did the thing with his breath again. The Latin lit a cigarette of his own, apparently used to it.
"You know the best way to flip a man?" he asked me.
"Depends on the man," I said. "And where his handle is."
"Right. But it's not true that everybody's got one. Gotti took the ride alone. And he never said word fucking one."
"Uh-huh," I agreed. "Everybody talks Old School, but only a few walk it when the weather turns bad."
"Remember the first of the super-rats?" he asked me, like a kid testing a newcomer's knowledge with a soft lob down the middle of the plate.
"Valachi?"
"Joe Valachi. He blew the covers off our thing
major,
back in the day. You know what turned him?"
"Same thing Henry Hill said turned
him
. Barbosa, Pesnick, plenty of others, too."
" 'Said' is right. But Valachi, see, they
thought
he was going to roll over. So they put out a contract on him. And they missed. They didn't clip him, so
now
what's he going to do?"
"What he did."
"Yeah. You ever wonder how they got the idea that Valachi had gone rotten?"
"Who knows? Maybe some old man got paranoid. Or maybe they figured, He's doing forever, and you never know. So, what the hell, let's eliminate the
possibility
."
"What happened," the Italian said, his voice almost religious with conviction, "is that the
feds
planted that word. It's perfect. You hear you're on the spot, what're you going to do? Sit down with the boss, ask him, 'Hey, you got a hit out on me?' You got no place to run, because you been around the same people all your life and that's all you know. You know how easy it is to get someone done in prison. The only safe harbor is to make a deal with the feds. And since you got so much to trade . . ."
"Maybe so," I said.
"You don't sound convinced."
"I wasn't there. You know where I was once? In a war. That war's been over for a while. Guess which side gets to say who was in the right?"
"Verdad,"
the Latin said. "Same as in my country."
"This isn't fucking
history,
" the Italian said, his voice tight as piano wire. "This is right now. Today. Look at how the feds use the super-maxes. Pelican Bay, they lock you down for being a gang member. Then they tell you, right to your face, you're
staying
there until you get out of the car, all right? Only thing is, you do it, you have to
prove
it. And how do you do
that
? The only way
they
accept is, you turn rat. Give some people up." He stopped talking, closed his eyes so hard the corners crinkled. The way you do if you don't know the technique to fight a headache. "So, if they want to kill a man, all they have to do is fucking put him back in population, am I right?"
"Yes," I said, waiting.
The Italian did his breathing thing again. I ground out my cigarette, stayed patient.
"There's a new twist on that game," he finally said. "The way this one works, you put word out that someone's
already
cooperating."
"When he's not?"
"When he's not; right."
"What's the gain for them? Getting someone whacked?"
"No. They don't want the guy whacked. What they want is for the rumor they planted to be true. To be
come
true, see?"
"What you're talking about, it's too delicate. Valachi was a gift, dropped in their laps. They could never be sure a hit would miss."
"Exactly! But what if the guy got a warning first?"
"A warning
not
to rat? That doesn't make any sense. The way you're laying it out, the cops would already know he's not."
"It would make sense if the warning came from . . . people who weren't sure, maybe. But worried . . ."
"You've lost me now," I said, telling the truth.
I caught the glance between them again. Went back to waiting.
"Fuck it," the Italian said again. Not angry, resigned. "I got a daughter. By a . . . girl I knew when I was a kid. It was an outside-the-tribe thing, you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes."
"The girl, when she told me, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't ask anybody, either. I offered her money to get rid of it, but she wouldn't. I even didn't feel right about that myself. Abortion— by the church, that's murder. I was just getting some traction then. I wasn't made or anything, but I was on my way; sure thing. What was I going to tell my people? What was my mother going to say? 'Oh, my Giovanni don't live here no more. He's over in the Village, married to a
moolingiane
. I got a beautiful granddaughter, too. Sweetest little half-breed you ever saw.' That was all the choice I had.
"The girl, she wasn't some whore I had on the side. She was . . . a very pure person. I was the first man she'd ever been with. I had . . . feelings for her, for real.
"But if I went with her, that was the end of everything. I'd end up like one of those robots from my old neighborhood. Ride the subway to work every day. Hope you get on with the union; be like every good
paisan
with a steady jay-oh-bee. Keep some tomatoes out back, some pigeons on the roof, maybe. Play some bocce, get a weekend in Atlantic City once in a while. Once a year, two weeks in Florida; do some fishing or whatever. Always making payments on something. What's all that? Just putting in time until they get old enough to go down to Florida for good. Get fucking buried there.
"I told her I could get money. I mean, even then, I was doing good. I had a new Camaro, my own place . . . but no way I was having my name on the birth certificate.
"She didn't get mad. Didn't even cry or anything. But she told me she wasn't getting rid of the kid. And if she had to go on Welfare, they'd make her tell who the father was, and she wasn't going to act like some tramp, pretend she didn't know. She had an aunt she could go live with. Her aunt could watch the baby while she went to work.
"She wasn't jacking me up for money, just telling me the way things were. If I'd thought it was a shakedown, I would have . . . I don't know what I would have done. It doesn't matter. What I
did
was, I pulled a job. Down in Jersey, with two cousins of mine. I didn't keep a dime for myself— I gave her my whole share of the take."
He looked at me. I looked back, as unreadable as rain.
"I never saw her again," he said. "But I know she had a little girl. Every once in a while, I'd get a letter. Not a written one, just an envelope with pictures in it, some little notes on the back. Pictures of the girl. Her name was Vonni. After me, I guess.
"I got other stuff. Report cards, copies of letters from her school . . . I know what you're thinking, but this wasn't nothing like blackmail. Sure, I sent money. I figured the pictures was her way of telling me that kids need things. Like . . . a school picture, okay? That maybe meant the kid needed stuff for school, you see what I'm saying?"
"Yeah," I said, just to let him know I was listening.
"They lived out on the Island. Got her own house. I . . . helped her with that. Money, I mean. But Hazel, the mother, she always worked. She never went near the Welfare," he said, completely unaware of the pride in his voice.
"And the girl, she wasn't into anything. Not in her whole life. She was an honor student. Going to college. I mean, not some
dream,
okay? She was already accepted. To SUNY. That's a very good school," he said solemnly.
He stopped and did his breathing thing again.
The Latin lit another smoke, tilted his pack toward me. I accepted.
"Some sick fuck killed her," the Italian said, his voice flat and hard, tiptoeing past emotion like a mouse around a cobra. "Stabbed her to pieces. For no reason, you understand?"
"Yes," I said, going even flatter than he was.
"What it was, it was a warning. But not the kind my people use. You see what I'm saying?"
"The kind of warning Felix's people might use," I said, no longer mechanical.
"Yeah. But whoever did this, there's one thing they never counted on."
I kept quiet, waiting.
"If Felix was warning me, then someone must have warned Felix. You see what a mess this is? Someone tells Felix I already turned. I'm wearing a wire, maybe. Who would do that? If I got scared enough that
my
boss was going to find out what . . . what we were doing to make money . . . if I got scared and made a deal with the feds, Felix's people wouldn't care. Not unless I was going to bring
them
into it . . ."
"I understand."
"You know what they never counted on? Me and Felix. That I'd go to Felix. And that I'd take his word when he told me he had nothing to do with . . . what . . . happened."
"Did the cops ever ask you—?"
"I was never in it," he said. "When I . . . heard, I . . . I called her. For the first time since we . . . She told me the cops said it was a sex maniac."
Another breath. Close to a sigh.
"That was over a year ago," he went on. "And nobody's ever been popped for it."
"And your boss . . . ?"
"Hey,
fuck
my boss, all right? This isn't about him. I'm a boss myself now. It's about me. Me and Felix. About
our
thing. Somebody was trying to send a message, wreck what me and Felix have. Who else but the feds? They spook me into going over, they get
everything,
the dream RICO case."
"It's too subtle for them," I said.
"Yeah? Who
else
would know about my . . . about her? It was so long ago. And I never told anybody. Not in my life. Not my mother. Not no priest. Not even . . . Nobody knew. There's nothing to tie her to me. But the feds, they've got everything in the world in their computers. . . ."
"I still can't see the feds actually—"
"Not
the
feds.
A
fed. Someone who hates . . . us to death. Hates us that much that he'd want to see us kill each other."
"Who's 'us'?"
He looked ice-picks at me for a few seconds, then held his finger under his nose, pinched one nostril, and snorted an imaginary line.
"You have a name?" I asked, eye-sweeping to include them both in the question.
"We do not have a name, but we have a way to the name . . . if there is one," Felix said. "What we need is the truth of what happened. And only one man can tell us."
"The killer," I said.
"Yes."
"And you want me to, what, exactly?"
"Here's the deal," Giovanni said, leaning forward, handcuffing my eyes. "I promised Hazel that I'd find out who did this. If it was some fucking skinner, that's easy. I can fix that." He paused, did his breath trick again. "But if it's a game, if it's someone trying to crush me and Felix, what we have, then I want whoever did it to talk.
"That's not your problem, getting him to talk. What we want to do is hire you. Hire you to find whoever did it. We'll take it from there."
I lit another smoke, letting them see I was thinking over what they'd told me. And I was— hard, now that I knew the relationship between the two men. The one their bosses would never understand.
"It's a long shot," I finally told them.
"We want to play it," Felix said, his eyes holding Giovanni's the way his hands never could, in public.

• • •

R
ound Two was all business. Giovanni talking, me listening.
"That's it," he finally said, maybe twenty minutes later. "I'm empty."
"Where are the pictures?"
"The . . . ?"
"The photos. The ones the mother sent you over the years."
"I burned them," he said, as if daring me to make something of it.
"Couple of more things . . ."
"What?" he snapped, like I'd been asking him for favors all night.
I turned to Felix. "No offense, but you can see why I have to ask you. Did you know about this?"
"After she was—"
"No. Before. Did you know there even was a daughter?"
"He knew," Giovanni said. "But there's no way—"
"I'm not asking because I think your partner would betray you," I said, sliding the words through his upraised hands like long-stemmed roses— quick, before he felt the thorns. "But you know how it works. Whatever one man knows, another man can—"
"No," Felix cut me off. "What you say is true. But if an enemy, if
anyone
knew, they could only know from listening to Giovanni, not to me."
"You mean, listening at the exact time he told you?"
"That is right. Only then. Because it was never said again, when we were together, by either of us. And, myself, it is as if I was never told." His eyes were immortal with honor.
I moved my head a little, somewhere on the borderline between a nod and a bow. Accepting that, at the time Giovanni told him, neither man had been wearing a wire. And that it hadn't been over the phone.
"There
is
such a thing as coincidence," I told them. "But— say it's not; who profits?"
"The feds." Giovanni, saying his rosary.
"Or somebody in one of your crews," I said, my eyes including the both of them.
Both of them shrugged. Too professional to dismiss such a possibility, but not going for it, either.
"I can't go there," I told them. "You understand, right? I've got to work backwards, from the killing. I'll give you whatever I find, but if there's any Machiavelli stuff going on in your outfits, it's up to you two to sort it out."
"Understood," Felix said. He looked over at Giovanni. Something passed between them.
"Okay," Giovanni said. "You got anything to tell me, you know how to do it."
"I'm not making progress reports. And I won't be coming back to you unless there's something you can help me with."
"Like what?"
"Like a phone call," I told him. "A phone call to the mother. Tell her I'll be around. Ask her if she's willing to talk to me."
"I'll do it," he said. "I'll do it tonight."