Swimming with Sharks (26 page)

“Why are you wearing that thing?” she whispered, but slowly her mind started to make sense of it. Everything Kostidis had told her on the telephone was true.

“Sergio!” she said again, but he didn’t react at all.

“Have a drink,
cara
,” he replied. Armando pressed a glass filled with whiskey into her hand. “That’ll make you feel better.”

Alex obediently downed the whiskey, and her trembling subsided.

Armando pulled out dressing materials from a first-aid kit, and Luca set about bandaging Sergio’s intensely bleeding shoulder. They spoke
quietly in Italian, and then Luca opened the glass partition and ordered the driver to head to a certain address in Brooklyn. Alex was in a state of shock. She hadn’t noticed that the limousine was rolling over the brightly lit Brooklyn Bridge.

Luca made two quick calls on his cell phone. Sergio’s eyes were closed, and he pressed his hand on the bandage, which was turning red beneath his fingers. The sight of blood usually didn’t bother her, but this was something entirely different.

“Sergio.” Alex leaned forward, trying to subdue the trembling in her voice. “Who were they? Who was shooting at you?”

“Don’t worry about it.” He opened his eyes and gave her a flat smile. “This is just a little scratch.”

“You could be dead now!”

“Yes. But you warned me in time.”

Alex said nothing. The car turned onto a deserted street. Alex could see elongated warehouses and the light of Manhattan on the other side of the river.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Someone will take you home now.” Sergio avoided answering her directly as usual and grabbed her hand. “You saved my life,
cara
. Thank you.”

The car stopped.

“What are you doing here? Why don’t you go to a hospital?” Alex was too confused to grasp what was happening. Armando opened the door, and Sergio clumsily got out. Although it was raining harder now and the air was cool, he had beads of sweat on his forehead.

Some cars approached through the rain with their headlights turned off; a few men got out. The rain moved sideways through the light of the lamp above the entrance. No one paid any attention to Alex, and so she followed them into the warehouse. Pressing herself to the wall of the small office, she recognized Sergio’s son Massimo and Nelson van Mieren.

More cars arrived outside. Alex heard the sound of car doors slamming. Serious-looking men with determined, grim faces entered the warehouse and talked quietly amongst themselves in Italian. She could feel their tentative looks and saw that all the men were armed to the teeth. Up to now, the Mafia was no more than an abstract term with a negative connotation for Alex—and now she was right in the middle of it. She winced when Massimo suddenly addressed her.

“Dario will take you to the city now,” he said.

“Can I see him for a moment?”

Massimo gave her a searching stare, and then he nodded. She followed him through a room in which files were stacked up to the ceiling on shaky shelves. Why did they bring Sergio here and not to his apartment or a hospital? Massimo knocked on the door. When it opened, he whispered something in Italian to Nelson van Mieren. Nelson shot Alex a repulsed look.

Sergio lay on a narrow bed. His upper body was exposed, and an older man was examining his shoulder.

“The bullet is still inside,” he said, wiping his bloody fingers on a towel. “I’m afraid that an artery has been ruptured.”

“We’re taking you to Dr. Sutton, Sergio,” Nelson said. “I’ve already called him. You’re safe at his clinic.”

Safe? From what? From another attempt on his life? Alex’s knees started trembling. Kostidis had warned her. Now there could be no excuses, no sugarcoating, no doubts about Sergio’s involvement with the criminal underworld. Just a half hour ago, she’d witnessed an assassination attempt that only barely failed. Nearly fifty heavily armed men were standing outside. The thought that she was at the Mafia’s New York headquarters seemed almost grotesque.

“Okay,” Sergio said, his face contorted in pain, “where’s Natale? He should—”

Van Mieren made a gesture with his hand, and Sergio fell silent.

His eyes landed on Alex, who stood at the wall next to a filing shelf as if paralyzed, looking at him fearfully.

“
Cara
.” Sergio extended his right hand, smiling with difficulty. “Come over here.”

She walked toward him hesitantly and took his hand, which was unusually cold. His eyes had a feverish gleam. He was sweating even though it wasn’t particularly warm. He was obviously weak, but he still had full control of the situation.

“I’m very sorry that you had to witness this,” he said with a grimace, “but you wanted to know why I had bodyguards escorting us tonight.”

Alex was speechless for a moment, and then her fear turned into furious anger. She pulled her hand away.

“You were expecting something like this to happen,” she whispered, “but you didn’t consider it necessary to tell me. I’m so unimportant to you that you carelessly put my life at risk!”

“I’m sorry.”

Alex clenched her hands into a fist. She felt like punching his expressionless face.

“Go to hell, Sergio,” she hissed.

She turned away before he could respond. The faster she could leave this dark warehouse, these sinister characters, this entire nightmare behind, the better.

Marvin Finnegan was playing cards with a few colleagues when an emergency call came in to the Forty-First Precinct in Morrisania in the South Bronx. It was around one in the morning, a relatively quiet night, and the officers who weren’t on patrol killed time by playing cards. The area around the Forty-First Precinct was one of New York’s most run-down neighborhoods, far removed from Manhattan’s sparkling skyscrapers, the
luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue, and the Upper East Side’s posh apartment buildings. The city’s administrators rarely ventured to the South Bronx. Too few disillusioned and corrupt police officers barely maintained order here. Drugs were nothing unusual in the South Bronx. People living in the projects were embittered or had given up a long time ago. Most families had at least someone who was hooked on the needle. Many men boozed away the few dollars that they received from welfare. Violent family disputes were common in these tiny apartments, which sometimes housed more than ten people. The misery and neglect were depressing. The hideous apartment buildings were decaying because no one cared about maintaining them. Sometimes they burned down. Mountains of rubble were everywhere, and so were the prostitutes and hustlers at Hunts Point, the drug dealers, and the juvenile delinquents.

Most of the police officers were just as frustrated as the neighborhood’s inhabitants. If they couldn’t get out on sick leave or transfer to another precinct, then they took bribes from drug dealers and squeezed store owners for protection money.

Marvin Finnegan had been a police officer in one of New York’s most miserable neighborhoods for sixteen years. He was born and raised here, and had only left the South Bronx to serve in the army and later attend the police academy. He was a tough but fair cop, and his name had long ago become a legend because he was incorruptible, determined to protect honest people from criminals.

“Hey, Marvin!” Patrick Peters, the lieutenant on duty, stuck his head inside the recreation room. “A woman from an apartment at the corner of Flatbush and Sound View Avenue just called. That gang showed up again. I sent over Hank and Freddie.”

Finnegan put down his hand with a hint of regret. He had a full house, but that was tough luck.

Tom Ganelli, who had been Finnegan’s partner for three years, grinned in excitement.

“Pat,” Finnegan said, slipping into his jacket, “try to reach Valentine and Burns. I want them to come, but without the siren. We’ll end the game these bastards are playing.”

The patrol car stopped on a side street close to the apartment building just ten minutes later. The building was on one of those half-empty, dilapidated blocks, where working-class families lived alongside junkie squatters. Finnegan and Ganelli could hear screams and the sound of shattering glass from a distance as they approached. They scurried to the rear of the building in the shadow of the crumbling walls, while taking care not to stumble over rubble and garbage. They passed a burned-out car. Finnegan pulled out his gun. The past few weeks had seen an unusual accumulation of these nightly raids on dilapidated apartment buildings. Two buildings had been set on fire and burned to the ground because the fire hydrants in the vicinity had been intentionally blocked.

It was quite obvious to the men of the Forty-First Precinct that there was a coordinated effort underway to empty these buildings. After the tenants gave up and moved out due to the constant terror and fear, heavy machinery with wrecking balls moved in and razed the building to the ground. Property was scarce in New York City. New developments with expensive condos or offices would be built here eventually. This neighborhood would be cleaned up someday, and unscrupulous real-estate speculators, who bought these properties cheap, would make a killing. The poor people would be pushed to more run-down areas. The police officers coordinated their actions by radio and surrounded the building in a circle.

“How many, and where are they?” Finnegan wanted to know.

“They’re inside the building,” his colleague replied from the other side. “I think five or six.”

They slowly approached the building.

“It smells like gasoline here,” Ganelli said quietly. “They want to burn this shack down.”

The glow of a fire lit up the night just at that moment. Windows were flung open, and people screamed in desperation.

“Call the fire department,” Finnegan said, turning his radio on. “Everybody else move!”

Just as they approached the building, the arsonists tried to escape through the busted front door.

“Police!” Finnegan roared, charging ahead with his weapon pulled. “Freeze!”

Ganelli flared up a bright spotlight and aimed it at the men. The thugs were blinded for a second and stopped; then one of them pulled a gun.

“Get down!” Finnegan screamed, ducking. Not a second too late, because someone started firing in all directions. Finnegan aimed his .357 Magnum and pulled the trigger. A moment’s remorse or the slightest hesitation could be deadly in this situation. He heard a stifled cry behind him, and then the spotlight went out. The other officers charged the five thugs, who now stood there like well-behaved choir boys.

“Tommy?” Finnegan leaned over his partner in concern. “Hey, Tommy!”

“I think I got hit,” the young man whispered and moaned.

“Shit!” Finnegan raised himself up. “We need an ambulance! Tommy’s been hit!”

Two police officers rushed over. In the light of Mendoza’s flashlight, Finnegan saw that Ganelli had caught a bullet in his stomach. He’d forgotten to put on his bulletproof vest in the rush to the scene.

“God damn it,” he cursed, patting his partner’s face in desperation. “Hang in there, Tommy! You better hang in there! We’re taking you to the hospital, kid. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Ganelli smiled slightly. The sirens of the fire trucks were already approaching in the distance. Curious bystanders appeared. Biting smoke came through the broken windows of the building’s basement. The officers forced the five men against a building covered with graffiti, their legs
spread. They searched them for weapons before handcuffing them. Jimmy Soames leaned over the man who Finnegan had shot.

“This one doesn’t need an ambulance anymore,” he remarked, putting his weapon back into his holster. “He’s stone dead.”

Finnegan squatted on the ground next to his injured partner in the drizzling rain that soaked his uniform. Blood was tricking out of the corner of Ganelli’s mouth, and his eyes became increasingly glassy. He suspected that the twenty-eight-year-old man would die.

When they returned to the precinct, the news that a policeman had been shot was already making the rounds. There was an unusual frenzy of activity in the police station for this time of night. Hordes of reporters flocked like moths to light when they heard some guys were arrested in the South Bronx during an operation to forcibly evict tenants. An officer, Lieutenant O’Malley, stepped into Finnegan’s path.