Read The Lucifer Messiah Online
Authors: Frank Cavallo
The Lucifer Messiah
Published 2006 by Medallion Press, Inc.
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is a registered tradmark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2006 by Frank Cavallo
Cover Illustration by Adam Mock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Edition
Thanks first to my parents, for everything. And to the rest of my family, who supplied me with many of the anecdotes herein, as well as lots of little details about old New York that aren't in any book. Thanks to the folks at Medallion, who gave my weird little idea a home; to my agent Rebecca, who took me on blind; and to Haewon Yom, who spent many hours of her time with my imaginary friends.
Finally, a nod each to the gang from Marguerite Street, the boys in the Corporation, and to all the former residents of Snaithville, about whom I need say nothing more.
“Old Friends”
ONE
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY
N
OVEMBER
19, 1946
S
EAN
S
TAGGERED.
A stench crawled into his nostrils. Garbage. Rotten food. Shit. Even the shadows stank.
They were still out there. Somewhere. Stalking him.
He forced himself to move, creeping through the filth and the darkness. His gut ached. He felt the blood drooling out of him. It trickled into his pants, ran down his leg. It was sticky and wet.
He had to keep going.
He recognized the street ahead. Ninth Avenue and the corner of West Thirty-Sixth Street. The edge of Hell's Kitchen.
Street lamps buzzed overhead; an electric swarm of pale, flickering light. Across the way, the minute hand of an old gothic clock moved one click. That made it 1:13 AM.
Sean didn't care.
Steam exhaled from a sewer vent. Sulfurous ghosts washed over him. For a moment he welcomed the warmth. But he couldn't linger. He only bathed in the hot odor for a moment.
He fell, toppling a half-filled trashcan. Noise was the last thing he needed. He didn't get up, not right away. First he grabbed his dented felt hat from a puddle. His overcoat was already ruined, but that hat meant a lot to himâsweat stains and mildew notwithstanding.
A sedan turned from around the far corner. Headlights skimmed the street. Tires squeaked on blacktop.
Sean scrambled to his feet. He stumbled backward, hoping to reach the safety of the reeking dark.
His chin dripping sweat, he watched as the car drove by. It was motoring slowly, agonizingly so as it rolled past his little alley-hovel, then beyond him, and finally around the next block.
He counted in his head.
One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three â¦
After what he figured was enough of a pause, he chanced an appearance. Hobbling out into the dangerous light, he gasped for air and hurried across the street.
He only made it halfway.
A pair of shots ricocheted. The sedan screeched from around the corner. It roared like a mechanical predator. Lead and fire and noise spewed from two
Thompson
submachine guns.
Sean faltered. He dragged his feet with an urgency that was nothing short of panic, across the bullet-marked
street and into a second alcove.
The grinding steel-on-steel whine raced behind. He made it into the narrow passage between a bakery and a shoe store. His feet crushed broken glass. He slipped as he ran. Before he could gain much distance, with the sedan plowing toward him through the debris, he came face to face with frustration.
A ten-foot iron fence blocked his way, mocking his flight in rusted silence. Razor wire ringed the top, though the barbs were barely visible through the shadows and the steam. The headlights were on him.
Gunfire clanged at his feet.
He winced. The bullets were close, but there was something else. He shivered, though not from the cold, closed his eyes tight and fell backward.
The gloom swallowed him.
A moment later, the sedan skidded to a halt inches from the fence. Rocco Gallucci heaved the passenger-side door open. He bounded out with a Tommy gun braced in his arms. The barrel was dripping smoke.
“We know you're out there Mulcahy. The boss wants a word with you. He ain't gonna shed no tears if we bring you back in pieces,” the fat man shouted.
Two others joined him from within the massive automobile.
“He ain't back here,” one whispered.
“He's here. He ain't got no way outta here,” Rocco said.
A rustle stirred behind a dumpster. Jolted, the third gunman squeezed his trigger, firing off a pair of rounds.
His comrade was quick to grab him. Rocco rebuked him just as fast.
“It's just rats Gino!”
The smoke from the shots took a moment to clear. When it did, they saw a brood of rodents, nine or ten strong, squealing and crawling over one another. The pests scurried in a half-dozen directions, a mess of whiskers and scaly tails burrowing through a pile of old clothesâa dented felt hat and a once-fancy overcoat among them.
“Looks like they ate some bum,” Gino said.
The men continued their search. They rifled through every inch of the trash in the alley, but of the fugitive they had cornered, there was nothing. Just some blood smeared on the lower links of the fence.
“He's gone. There ain't no two ways around it,” Gino said.
“That's impossible,” Rocco answered.
“Unless he climbed the fence.”
“Climbed the fuckin' fence, my ass. You wanna be the one to tell Mr. Calabrese that we lost 'em? After what that son of a bitch did to the new guy?”
“We gotta tell him something. And I don't see nobody back here,” Gino said.
Rocco spit. He cursed again, this time in his native Sicilian dialect. Within a few moments, they were back in the sedan, and gone from the alley.
A short while later, after the block had settled back into the slumber from which it had been so rudely awakened, Sean Mulcahy limped out of the alley. He was still dressed
in the tattered overcoat and the beat-up felt hat.
A rat scampered across his shoe. It climbed up and disappeared under the leg of his pants.
He was finally home.
T
HOUGH LATE INTO THE NIGHT, THE DOORS WERE STILL
open at the
Catanzaro Sunset Cafe and Social Club.
None of the patrons, all regulars who were mostly arguing and conversing along the bar, ever called it that. Most of the locals on Mulberry Street knew it simply as
The Sunset.
And most knew that despite its congenial name, it was not an establishment that welcomed outsiders.
When Rocco and his men came in through the entrance on Hester, all the talking stopped. It didn't take long for the guys at the bar, or the ones seated at the back table to recognize them. Their chatter soon picked up unabated.
Rocco clapped his hands in the direction of the barkeeper, who looked much older than the place's aging turn-of-the-century décor.
“Hey, Mikey, is he in?” he asked.
The bartender nodded. A second later he shifted from his nearly incomprehensible
Campania
dialect into only barely comprehensible English.
“He's upstairs, been askin' about you all night,” the
olive-skinned
Napolitano
answered.
Rocco had only one word, which everyone in the joint understood.
“Shit.”
Salvatore “Sam” Calabrese's lips curled in a grin that stretched between bloated cheeks. His fingers twisted over the naked breasts of a dancer. His breaths came in short, excited huffs. Though he did not at first notice it, the door to his office slowly opened. Rocco Gallucci entered quietly, his cronies in tow.
“Jeez, boss, I'm sorry. The guys outside, they didn't tell me nothin',” he said.
Calabrese shook his head.
“Relax Rocco. If I didn't want to be disturbed I'd have left word,” he answered.
He extended one of his plump hands, and the three men stepped into the room. They closed the door behind them.
Calabrese's private hold, a converted loft above the Sunset Club, was an oasis of luxury amid dingy surroundings. Once merely an office, a recent swing of his fickle mood had spurred a remodeling of the entire place.
Seven hundred dollars and three missing workmen later, it resembled something of a harem. Plush-cushioned furniture lined every wall. Oriental rugs lay spread across the floor and silk tapestries dangled dangerously close to rows of black candles. Aside from the occasional intrusion
of headlights through the windows, the golden whispering tapers provided the only light in the room.
Like some regent on a barbarian throne, Lower Manhattan's most despised loan shark reclined in a silk robe, his girth spilling out everywhere. The three men approached with caution. They did not have good news.