A Quiet Vendetta (52 page)

I’ll tell Jess goodnight for you, okay
?

‘Carol—’

I’m taking her to bed, Ray . . . I don’t have anything else to say
.

The line went dead and Hartmann sat there with the cellphone pressed against his ear for some seconds. There were tears in his eyes, a fist of emotion in his throat, and when he turned and handed the phone back to Verlaine he said nothing.

‘It’s gonna be okay,’ Verlaine said. ‘Hell, she let you talk to your kid, right?’

Hartmann nodded. He wiped his eyes with the ball of his thumb. He reached for the lever and opened the door.

‘Thanks John,’ he said as he started to climb out of the car.

‘Hey,’ Verlaine called after him.

Hartmann looked back over his shoulder.

‘You’re gonna come out of this fine,’ Verlaine said. ‘Believe me, I’ve seen worse. The trick is to keep breathing, right?’

Hartmann smiled. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘The trick is to just keep breathing.’

*

He slept better. That much at least. And he did not dream. And when Ross came to collect him in the morning Ray Hartmann just held onto the memory of his daughter’s voice. Amidst everything – the madness, the killing, the brutality of everything he was hearing, everything he was witness to – that memory seemed like his only anchor in the storm.

Schaeffer and Woodroffe were no further forward on identifying Perez’s wife and children, and all of them – even if unspoken – knew that that line of investigation was a hide into nowhere. None of them voiced it because none of them wanted to lose any more hope. There was little enough to go around. First twenty-four hours were the most important in a missing persons case. They knew that as well as they knew their own names. Within another twenty-four hours Catherine Ducane would have been gone for two weeks.

Her time was running out.

Perhaps it had vanished already.

And then Perez arrived with his escort, and he was shown down to the office where Hartmann was already waiting for him. He removed his coat and handed it to Sheldon Ross, and Ross closed the door gently behind him.

‘Mr Hartmann,’ Perez said quietly as he sat down in the small office at the back of the building. ‘Have a cup of coffee and let me tell you what happened in Chicago.’

‘I have had two cups of coffee already, Mr Perez.’

‘To stay awake?’ Perez asked.

Hartmann waved the question aside. ‘You need to tell us what is happening here, Mr Perez,’ he said.

Perez frowned. ‘Happening here, Mr Hartmann? What is happening here is that I am going to tell you about Chicago—’

‘You understand what I mean—’ Hartmann started.

Perez leaned forward. His expression was cold and aloof. ‘You will listen to me,’ he said quietly. ‘You will listen to what I have to say and then I will tell you where she is.’

Hartmann shook his head. ‘We need to know that she is at least alive, Mr Perez.’

‘
We
need to know?’ Perez asked. ‘And who would
we
be, Mr Hartmann? Is this simply a matter of your own situation—’

‘Enough,’ Hartmann interjected. He could sense Schaeffer beyond the door. He knew that there was nothing he could say to impress upon Perez the frustration and anger he was feeling. Everything was closed up inside, everything tight and breathless, and he knew that whatever he said there was no way around this. Perez would tell them what he wanted
when
he wanted, and that was the bottom line.

‘So tell me,’ Hartmann said. ‘Tell me what happened in Chicago.’

Perez nodded and leaned back in his chair. ‘Okay,’ he said, and for a moment he closed his eyes as if in concentration.

When he opened them he looked back at Ray Hartmann, and for the first time in all the hours they had spent together Hartmann believed there was a spark of real emotion inside the man, like something had welled up inside him and was ready to burst.

‘Family,’ he started. ‘It was, and always will be, everything to do with family.’

‘Now here,’ Don Calligaris said, ‘
here
you got some fucking history.’ He laughed. He seemed in good humor. Three days we had been in Chicago, Angelina and me, the kids, all of us installed in a house on Amundson Street. Don Calligaris, Ten Cent, a couple of other guys who were part of the original Alcatraz Swimming Team back in Miami, were in a house across the street.
We got our own little neighborhood
, Don Calligaris kept saying, like he was trying to convince himself that whatever he had left behind in New York wasn’t as good as this. I did not ask why he had left; I did not care to know; all that mattered was that my family was out of Los Angeles, and Chicago – bitterly cold, its vicious wind that rushed in from the edge of Lake Michigan seeming to find you wherever you hid – was an awful lot better than living with your eyes in the back of your head.

‘So here, here in Chicago,’ Don Calligaris went on, ‘is where a great deal of American people get their ideas about the family. The whole prohibition thing, and the way that politics ran down here at the beginning of the century, you know? Big Bill Thompson and Mont Tennes, and then out of New York the man himself, Al Capone. You heard of Al Capone?’

‘Sure I heard of Al Capone,’ I said.

Don Calligaris smiled.

I thought of Angelina and the children. She was out somewhere, walking them in the park or somesuch. I was here, in Don Calligaris’s house, when I wanted to be with them. I felt more and more that I was leading two separate and irreconcilable lives.

‘Capone was born in Brooklyn, was part of a street gang called the Five Pointers,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘One of the gang bosses back then, a guy called Frankie Yale, he recognized a certain quality in Al and put him to work as a meeter and greeter at this dime-a-dance club called the Harvard Inn on Coney Island. Then Al Capone starts to get ideas of his own. He starts to act outside his authority, and he kills one of Wild Bill Lovett’s White Hand Gang. He knows he’s gotta get out of there before Frankie Yale gets him whacked so he leaves New York. He was twenty then, maybe twenty-one, and he comes to Chicago to work for Big Jim Colosimo. Big Jim was the heaviest operator of hookers in Chicago, made a shitload of money, but he didn’t wanna get into the liquor business. Someone shot him in the Wabash Avenue Cafe, and word has it that it may have been Capone who did that.’

I watched Don Calligaris as he talked. He was speaking of his ancestors, if not by blood then by trade and reputation. Fabio Calligaris wanted to be ranked alongside these people; I could tell by the tone of pride in his voice as he spoke. He wanted to be remembered, for what I didn’t know, but he wanted his name alongside Capone and Luciano and Giancana. Don Calligaris would never be anything but an underboss, powerful in his own way and with his own reputation and recognition, but he lacked the necessary ruthlessness to take him to the top.

‘Johnny Torrio took over Colosimo’s rackets, and with Capone’s help they established breweries in preparation for the big thirst. They knew what was coming, they saw the opportunity, and they took it with both hands. Smart guy, Johnny Torrio . . . he worked to stop all the Chicago gangs fighting between themselves and gave them individual turfs. He gave the northside to Dion O’Banion, but the majority of the city belonged to Torrio and Capone, and by 1924 they were carving up the better part of a hundred grand between them every single goddamned week.’

Don Calligaris laughed. I wanted to use the head but I didn’t want to interrupt him in full flow. He was in his element; he seemed more at ease than I ever remembered him. Maybe there was something in New York that was shadowing him and he had escaped, just as I had from Los Angeles.

‘Capone put someone up for Mayor of Cicero, and Cicero became the power-base for the liquor operations. Things had never been as smooth as silk between Torrio and Capone and O’Banion, and then in late 1924 O’Banion gave the word on a brewery operation. The police raided the place, arrested Torrio, and he was fined five grand and sentenced to nine months. O’Banion got himself whacked in his flower shop a little while later. Northside gang took a new boss, a Polack called Hymie Weiss, and they went back for Capone and tried to off him and Torrio. They escaped, but Weiss wasn’t a man to quit, and they went after Torrio again the same day and shot him five times. Torrio didn’t die, but he was all fucked up, and he went to jail to do his nine months looking like the fucking invisible man. Couple of weeks after Torrio got out they hit Weiss and killed him. Guy called Bugs Moran came in to run the northside after Weiss was killed. He ran the operation from a garage on Clark Street. Capone sent a couple of his people, guys by the name of Albert Anselmi and John Scalisi, down there. He dressed them up as police officers. They had seven of Moran’s crew lined up against the wall and they killed ’em. St Valentine’s Day Massacre they called it, and later on Capone got Anselmi and Scalisi whacked. Bunch of businessmen went to see President Hoover at the end of the ’20s. They asked him to repeal prohibition and take out Capone. Hoover assigned a guy called Elliot Ness to the Chicago PD. Ness was a Treasury Department guy, but he was a tough bastard by all accounts. He went after Capone, but he never actually got him. That was when they came up with the idea of hitting him for tax evasion, and finally they arrested him in 1931. Capone did a couple of years in Atlanta and then they shipped him to Alcatraz.’

Don Calligaris sipped his coffee and lit another cigarette. The room seemed full of smoke, and each time I looked towards the window I thought of Angelina and the children. I wanted to be away from here, outside with the people I cared for, not trapped inside this house listening to old war stories.

‘Capone’s gang . . . hell of a gang, you know? That’s where people like the Fischetti brothers, Frank Nitti and Sam Giancana came from. Nitti was the one who took over control when Capone went down, and he and a bunch of others were indicted for extorting money out of some studios in Hollywood. Frank didn’t wanna go down, he didn’t wanna testify against his family, so he shoots himself in the fucking head with a .38. Then Tony Accardo took over and moved Chicago’s interests into Vegas and Reno, and he stayed until ’57 when he stepped down in favour of Giancana. Giancana was boss ’til ’66, did a year in jail, and then he came out and was living the high-life until ’75, by which time everyone had gotten sick of his bullshit. He got himself whacked, and then there was a whole bunch of assholes fighting over who should be boss so Tony Accardo comes back. He’s boss here now, and he’s who we’re gonna be working with. He’s an old-timer, a very smart guy, and he wants us to keep some areas of his operations in line so he can spend his time making new friends and gaining some territories. That’s where you and I come in. I had to come down here, and I wanted some people with me who I could trust to do the necessary things, right?’

‘Right,’ I said.

Don Calligaris smiled. ‘So how’s it goin’ with you and Angelina? How’s it to be a father now, Ernesto?’

I smiled back. Every time I thought of Angelina and the children there was a feeling of warmth and certainty. ‘It’s good, very good. It’s a helluva thing.’

‘Tell me about it. Nothing more important than family, you know? Nothing in this world is more important than family, but you gotta keep your priorities right, you gotta keep your head straight and your eyes going both the same way. You gotta remember how you came by what you got and that you owe your dues.’

He was speaking of Don Alessandro, Don Giacalone and Tony Provenzano, the people who had given their blessing for me to marry inside the family, albeit an unspoken connection; the fact that Angelina Tiacoli was born out of a relationship that brought the death of her parents and a sense of shame to the Alessandros, but family all the same.

Don Calligaris was warning me that whatever might have been given me could just as easily be taken away. I heard what he said and I understood it. I had no intention of displeasing these people; they were an awful lot more powerful than me, and wherever I might have run to, wherever I might have taken Angelina and the kids, the influence and communication lines of this family spanned the entirety of the United States, even as far as the Florida Keys and Cuba, and they would have found us. A man alone, perhaps just myself, I could have become lost. But with a wife and two small children there wasn’t a prayer. The simple truth was that there was nothing I would knowingly do to jeopardize what I had created with Angelina and the children. They were everything; they were my life.

‘I know the score, Don Calligaris . . . I understand the way things work. That thing in LA turned out a mess, but it got done.’

Calligaris nodded. ‘It got done, Ernesto, that’s the main thing, and I appreciate it. All of that is behind us now. We all have things we would change if we were given the time again, but it’s all water under the bridge, you know? We deal with whatever we have to, and then we move on. This is why coming here to Chicago is a good thing. It gives both of us a chance to make things better. There are important things happening here. It is a new start. We make it work for ourselves and for the family, and we do what we have to do.’

Once again I recognized the unspoken in his words. Something had happened in New York to prompt his departure. He would not tell me; Don Calligaris was a man who gave out information only when it was needed. I did not ask, it was not my place to ask, and had I done so he would have been both offended and annoyed.

Ten Cent came into the room. It was good to see him. We had years behind us, and though he was much more part of this family than I was, he was nevertheless a man I felt I could trust. He treated me as an equal, as much a part of this as himself, and I believed that whatever might happen he could always be depended upon.

‘So we relax for a few days,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘We take it easy. I go see a couple of folks, we get some things worked out, and then we wait and see what kind of work they’re gonna require of us.’

I stayed a little while longer. I talked with them of nothing consequential. Ten Cent asked about the children, said he would come down later that day and have some dinner with us. I was happy for him to come. Angelina liked him, the children just seemed to laugh when he was around, and with him in my house I always felt a sense of reassurance that nothing would come to harm us. That was the way it was then – knowing who would stand beside you, who would stand behind. Always present, even as you slept, was the certainty that no-one was defensible, there was no-one who could not be reached. These people took out their own if it served the purpose of the family, and though I had my connections, though I had given them loyalty and support for the better part of twenty-five years, my life would be gone in a second if I crossed the lines. I did not intend to do such a thing. It was the furthest thing from my mind. But I was not naïve, I was learned and wise in the customs and mores of this business. Business was business, and clipping someone was as significant as giving him a haircut if requirements dictated.