A Quiet Vendetta (48 page)

‘L-L-Lourdes.’

I frowned. ‘Lourdes? What the fuck kinda name is that?’

‘Tha-that’s hi-his n-name,’ Clarence mumbled. ‘That’s his name . . . Lourdes.’

I leaned back towards the door and shouted the Hispanic’s name.

‘What?’ he hollered up from below.

‘Up here,’ I shouted.

‘Up here what?’

I looked at Clarence. Clarence nodded.

‘L-Lourdes, get the fuck up here right now!’ Clarence shouted, like he believed that co-operating with me would make the damndest bit of difference.

Lourdes came up the stairs. I stepped behind the door, and when he walked in I shoved him hard and he went sprawling across the floor.

‘What the fu—’ he started, and then he turned and saw me standing there with a .38 and he shut up real quick.

From my inside pocket I took a knife, small and sharp. ‘Take this,’ I said, ‘and cut Clarence’s tee-shirt off.’

‘Wha—’

‘Do it.’ My voice was direct and firm. ‘Do what I say real quick and real quiet and maybe someone’s gonna walk out of here alive.’

Lourdes took the knife. He cut Clarence’s tee-shirt off at the shoulders, and within a few moments stood there with the filthy rag in his hand.

‘Now cut it in strips and tie Clarence to the chair over there.’ I indicated to the left where a plain deal chair stood against the wall.

They didn’t need prompting; the pair of them co-operated and said nothing.

Three or four minutes and Clarence Hill, shaking and sweating profusely, sat tied to the chair in the middle of the room.

‘Take the cover off the cushion and jam it in his mouth,’ I said.

Clarence’s eyes were wide and white; looked like two ping-pong balls balancing on his great fat face.

Lourdes did as he was told, and then he stood there with the small, sharp knife in his hand and waited for me to say something.

‘Now cut his pecker off.’

Lourdes dropped the knife.

Clarence started screaming, but with the material in his mouth he made barely a sound. He was thrashing wildly in the chair, every ounce of his strength fighting against the restraints that held him.

‘Lourdes . . . pick up the goddamned knife and cut that fat fuck’s pecker off or I’m coming over there and do you first.’

Lourdes, his whole body rigid with terror, leaned down to pick up the knife. He held it gingerly in his hand. He looked at me. I nodded in the affirmative.

Clarence passed out before the blade reached him. That was a good thing for him. Lourdes did what I told him to do, but it took a good five or ten minutes because he stopped to retch and heave about once every thirty seconds. The blood was unreal. It flooded out and soaked the chair, ran in rivulets onto the floor beneath, and soon Lourdes was nothing more than a gibbering wreck of a man, kneeling there on the floor in Clarence’s blood, in his right hand the knife, in his left Clarence’s pecker.

At one point Clarence seemed to come round, his eyes opened for a split-second, and when he looked down at his own lap he passed out once more. Ten minutes, maybe less, Clarence would be dead from blood loss if he hadn’t had a coronary seizure already.

‘You did good, Lourdes,’ I said, and then I took the cushion, pressed it down against the back of his head as he kneeled on the floor, and I shot him.

Lourdes collapsed forward, and within a moment you couldn’t tell whose blood was whose.

I tucked the gun into the waistband of my pants. I stepped out of the room and closed the door quietly behind me. I went down the corridor, passed a door through which I could hear some guy hollering
Baby baby baby
, and went down the risers two at a time to the lower hall.

I paused for a moment, breathed once through my nose to remind myself of how goddamned awful the place smelled, and then I went out through the front door and closed it tight behind me.

Later, after dinner, I called Michael Cova at home.

‘Done,’ I said quietly.

‘Already?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, Ernesto, okay. Hey, how’s the wife?’

‘She’s good, Michael, thanks for asking.’

‘When’s the baby coming?’

‘June . . . should be June.’

‘Well, God bless you both, eh?’

‘Thank you, Michael . . . appreciated.’

‘You’re welcome. Tell her “Hi” from me.’

‘I will, Michael.’

‘See ya tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, and hung up the phone.

‘Nesto?’ Angelina called from the front.

‘Sweetheart?’ ‘Come massage my feet for me, would you, honey? I ache all over.’

‘Sure thing, sweetheart. Just gonna lock up the front.’

I locked the door, flipped the deadbolt, and walked back in front to see my wife.

June seventeenth 1982, St Mary Magdalene Hospital on Hope Street near the park, Angelina Maria Perez gave birth to twins. A boy and a girl. I cannot begin to describe what I felt, and so I will not attempt to, save to say that there had never been anything before and nothing since that could even come close to what I experienced in that operating theater.

We had no idea there were two. I knew she was big, but big compared to what? I had expected one child. We were blessed with two. I counted their fingers, their toes. I held one within each arm. I walked around in circles looking down at them until I believed I would fall over with the sheer weight of joy and emotion and pride and love.

My babies. My blood.
My
family.

At that time I did not question whether I would be caught in some conflict between the family of my business and the family of my blood. I questioned nothing. I asked for nothing. In that moment I believed that whatever God may have existed, whatever power was out there beyond the parameters of my understanding, I had been blessed with something priceless and beyond measure.

Three days later we took Victor and Lucia home. They cried, they were forever hungry; they woke us with their pleadings in the cool half-light of nascent morning, and we went from our bed with something in our hearts that had never been there before; something that we had once believed unattainable.

For six weeks, right until the end of July of that year, I made no attempt to contact anyone. In some way I was grateful for this. I received one call from Michael Cova. He expressed his good wishes and sent the blessings of his family. Ten times, perhaps more, we would wake, we would go outside the front door, and there on the porch we would find baskets of fruit, wickerwork jars of dried meats and salami. I understood then that whatever kind of people they were, whatever blood may have been spilled in the name of greed, of vengeance, of hatred and possession, they were still human beings. They respected blood and family and the ties that bound such things more than anything else. They respected me, and in this way they gave me the time I needed to be with my wife and my children.

Angelina and I – like teenagers caught with the first enthusiastic sweep of love – could find no wrong with the world. Each day dawned with a brighter sun, a bluer sky, a sweeter smell in the air. Angelina did not ask why there was no business to attend to, and it was perhaps for the first time during those weeks that I began to question why she had never asked me what I had done, what business I would leave to attend to in the days before the birth of our children. At first I imagined it was because of her heritage, the fact that she had been born herself within the confines of this world, that her father, her father’s brother – all these people surrounding her as a child – had been there inside the dark underbelly of American organized crime. Later, as I watched her play with Victor and Lucia, as I caught her watching me from the doorway of the kitchen when I pulled faces and made them smile, I realized that she did not
want
to know. She asked no questions because she already knew the answers, and thus she stayed silent, even as the telephone calls started in the first week of August; silent as I stood in the hallway, my words hushed to a whisper, as I explained to the world beyond our door that I needed a little more time: another week, perhaps two.

After the calls ended I would walk back in to see her.

‘Everything okay?’ she would ask.

I would nod and smile and tell her everything was fine.

‘They want you back?’

‘Sure they do, Angelina, sure they do.’

‘And you’re going?’

‘Not yet . . . a little while longer.’

Silence for a brief while, and then, ‘Ernesto?’

‘Yes?’

‘You have a family now—’

‘Angelina . . . we have spoken of this before. Everyone I know has a family. All of these people have families. Their families are the most important things in their lives. They still have things to attend to, business still goes on and it has to be dealt with. Just because I now have a family doesn’t change the fact that I am responsible for my agreements.’

‘Agreements? Is that what you call them?’

‘Yes, Angelina, agreements. We are here because people helped us be here. I have a duty to return the favors that are granted. This is a long-term thing, Angelina . . . you have been part of this life even longer than I. You understand the way these things work, and there’s nothing that can be done to change it.’

‘But Ernesto—’

‘Angelina, enough. Seriously, enough for now. This is the way that our life is—’

‘But I don’t want this life any more, Ernesto.’

‘I know, Angel, I know,’ and then I would hold her and she would say nothing, and I would be afraid to look at her because I knew she would see right through me, and understand that I also did not want this life any more.

On Monday 9 August 1982, the same day that John Hinckley was detained indefinitely for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, Samuel Pagliaro, a man I had known as Ten Cent in another life, came to the door of our house and asked for an audience with me.

I greeted him warmly, I had not seen him for the better part of five months and I was happy to see his face, happy as he gripped my shoulders and hugged me, and kissed Angelina, and then lifted my children from the carpet as if they were nothing more than feathers, and complimented their beauty, their bright eyes. It was good to see Ten Cent, but beneath my superficial welcome there was a sense of darkness and foreboding that warned me of what was to come.

Later, after we had eaten, he took me aside. We sat in the room at the front of the house. Angelina was upstairs with Victor and Lucia attempting to get them to sleep.

‘Don Calligaris is pleased for your good fortune,’ Ten Cent began. ‘He is very pleased with the work you have done out here, and good words have come back home from Michael Cova also. But this time has come to an end—’

He looked at me with a flash of anxiety in his eyes. He knew me well enough to understand that I could be capable of violence and passion. He was – despite his size – perhaps a little concerned about my potential reaction.

I said nothing. I merely nodded. I understood enough of the way these things worked to know that, with a word, all that I had could be taken from me in a heartbeat. These people, fiercely loyal to their own, would nevertheless see me as an outsider if I chose to cross them. I had no intention of doing such a thing, but I was aware that there was indeed a conflict within me. Perhaps what I felt was a reflection of some earlier part of my life. I had never possessed an introspective mind; I had never questioned things deeply. I could relate the sense of conflict I was experiencing to two other events in my life: the killing of Don Ceriano, how my loyalty to him was challenged by my necessity and will to survive; and the death of the salesman in Louisiana. Wishing so hard to become something my mother would have wanted me to be, I became something that was so much like my father. It was not a good thing for me to experience, but I felt it again in the presence of Ten Cent as he reminded me of who I had been, who I was now expected to be once again.

‘There is something that needs to be done,’ he went on. ‘Something that Don Calligaris feels would be most suited to your abilities, and he asked for me to come here and ask this of you.’

I nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘There has been an injustice done, a grave injustice. For many years the ties between New York and Los Angeles have been strong. Don Calligaris has family here, and they have always looked out for each other.’ Ten Cent shook his head and looked at his own hands in his lap. There was a tension and an awkwardness in his manner that were new to me.

‘Ten Cent?’

He looked up.

‘Tell me what it is that Don Calligaris wants.’

Ten Cent cleared his throat. For a moment he looked away towards the window, towards the night sky, the lights of the city. ‘Don Calligaris’s wife has a sister. She is married to an American. They have a daughter, a good girl, a fine and pretty girl, and she came out here to Los Angeles to be an actress. Last month they received word that she had been drugged and raped at some party in Hollywood, that she had been violated in the worst manner possible . . . things too wicked to describe.’ Ten Cent paused, as though it was difficult for him to talk about such things. ‘The girl’s parents, they spoke with the police, but the police know who the mother is, that she is the sister-in-law of Fabio Calligaris, and they tell her that there is no real evidence that their daughter did not consent to the things that were done. I understand it was some movie actor’s house, someone who is well known out here, and his father is an influential man in this business. The movie actor was not the one who did these things, but some other man, a clothing designer or something, and he has done this thing and there is no justice for what has happened. Don Calligaris asks if you will act on his behalf and see to this matter. He does not wish for there to be any further trouble beyond whatever justice you see fit, but he wishes this to be done or he will lose honor within the family. He told me to show you the pictures of what they did to his niece, and for you to make a judgement regarding what you felt would be appropriate justice.’

I nodded. I looked back towards the half-open doorway. I could see the light coming down from the upper landing and I knew that no more than twenty feet away my wife lay with my children as they slept. I understood blood, I understood family, and I respected and loved Don Fabio Calligaris enough to take care of his business. But my sense of responsibility to Don Calligaris did not lessen my inner conflict. As always, I had no choice in the matter, and as time would go on it would become more and more difficult to reconcile those situations where choice was not an option. I went out of duty, that was the truth, but for the first time in my life I questioned it.