A Quiet Vendetta (63 page)

Ten Cent was there to meet us at the train station, and I introduced him to Victor as Uncle Sammy. Ten Cent grinned and hugged me and kissed my cheeks, and then he did the same to Victor. Ten Cent had brought a toy bear with him, and when he saw the size of Victor and realized that he was no longer a child he laughed at himself. We all laughed, and for a moment I believed everything would be alright.

The Mulberry Street house was still there, and Ten Cent drove us down to meet with Don Calligaris. While his housekeeper fed Victor in the kitchen, Don Calligaris took me aside and sat with me near the window in the front room.

‘We have become old men,’ he said, and in his voice I could hear the fatigue and broken promises. ‘I have come back to America. I cannot die alone away from my family. And this thing . . . this thing that happened with Angelina and Lucia—’

I raised my hand. ‘These things belong to the past,’ I said, and said it merely because I could not face talking of it. Despite the years that had intervened, it was still something that hung over me like a black shadow.

‘It is the past, yes, Ernesto, but all these years you have been away I have carried a weight of guilt about that night. We still, to this day, have nothing more than rumors about what happened. It is clear that whoever killed your wife and daughter intended to kill me. Some men have died in our attempts to find out, and we are still looking. This thing was more than five years ago, but people like us never forget the wrongs that have been done to us. Now you are back we can work on this together, we can find out who was behind it and take our vengeance.’

‘I have come here as an old man, to have my son see America,’ I said. ‘I will take him places, show him some of the things that I saw, and then, more than likely, I will return to Cuba to die.’

Don Calligaris laughed. He seemed out of breath for a moment and took some seconds to clear his throat. The lines and wrinkles in his face said everything that needed to be said. He was older than me by some years, and where a regular man would have retired – moved to Florida and spent his months fishing and walking and having his grandchildren visit him in the sunshine – Fabio Calligaris held onto his life with a vice-like grip. This territory was all he had, and to let it go would have seen him welcome the end of all that mattered. He was a tough man, always had been, and he would rather have died right there in the house on Mulberry Street than see his life’s work passed over to someone younger.

‘We do not talk of dying,’ he said quietly, and he smiled. ‘We do not talk of dying, and we do not talk of giving up. These are the subjects of conversation for weak and spineless men. We may be old, but we can still take what we want from this world for the years we have remaining to us. You have a boy, and he needs his father to be there for him until he is himself a man. He has lost a mother and a sister, and to lose you would break him before he has had a chance.’

‘I will be around for some years yet,’ I said. ‘There is no question about that. But with him beside me there is no way I can once again become part of this life.’

Don Calligaris leaned back in his chair. He looked at me directly, and though there was warmth and friendship in his eyes there was also the cold determination for which he was renowned. ‘This life . . . this thing of ours, it is not something that you leave behind, Ernesto. You make your choices, you make your mark, and that mark will always be your signature. You have lived the life you chose to live and, though there will always be things that a man regrets, it is nevertheless a stupid man who believes he can undo what he is, what he has become as a result of his actions. I watch the TV now, I see movies about the kind of people we are.’ He laughed. ‘We are portrayed as a gang of thugs, mindless hooligans in silk suits who kill for no purpose. We are seen as vicious and unreasonable men, without hearts, but nothing could be further from the truth. More often than not people have died because it was a matter of life and death. It was a matter of you or them. And then there is the matter of honor and agreement. Men make promises on the lives of their families, and then they betray not only those they promised but also themselves. These are the kind of men that die, and these men deserve nothing better.’

I listened to what Don Calligaris was saying, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it was true. Even as I had seen my own son drifting away from me and had contemplated the possibility of returning to America, I had known that if I returned it would not be because of his need alone. It would also be because of me. I was a man who had made choices which had involved the lives and deaths of so many people over the years. I knew that if I returned to New York, if I once again re-established my old friendships and bonds, then it would also mean once again wearing a coat cut from the same cloth. The man I was had been the result of what I had done, and what I had done could not now be undone. I was, and perhaps would always be, a part of this greater family. Just because I had a son did not change that fact.

I believed then that the difficulty I’d had in deciding to come back was not for fear of what Victor might find out, what he would see or hear, but my own unwillingness to resume my position in the grand scheme of things. I had a place, and in leaving I had left that place vacant. No-one had come forward to take my mantle and assume my responsibilities, and no-one ever would. No-one but me. And now I was here, sitting by the window in the Mulberry Street house; my son in the kitchen; Ten Cent in the back room watching a ball game on the TV; Don Fabio Calligaris, old and gray and wrinkled, opposite me in his chair, and I realized that whatever I had left behind possessed the patience of Job. My clothes had been cut. I had worn them. I believed I could take them off and store them away somewhere in perpetuity. This was not the case. They were the only clothes that had ever really fitted me.

‘So you see,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘We are who we are, no matter what the world and all its voices might say about us. These things we have done are as much a part of us as our fingerprints, and they cannot be removed, they cannot be exchanged for something else. I know you well enough, Ernesto—’ He smiled. He leaned forward and took my hand. I looked down at his liver-spotted skin and saw that his hand and mine were almost identical in their appearance. ‘I know you well enough to realize that you would never be happy crawling into some hole in Cuba and dying like some insignificant and inconsequential nobody. You are here. You have come home. The house where you once lived with Ten Cent is still there. The rooms are not the same—’ He laughed. ‘At least we took the trouble to have the walls painted! But those rooms are there for you and your son, and while he goes to school, while he learns to be a good American citizen, you can be here by my side and help me straighten out the mess these kids have made of our city. The five families were here. They may be quieter now, they may have less influence than they did thirty years ago, but they are still alive and well and living in America. America was our country, and with the last breath in my body it will stay our country if it has anything to do with me.’

He gripped my hand tighter. He was asking me to stay, to be one of the family again. I would return to a life I believed I had left behind. This time it would be different. This time I had a son of fourteen years old, and he would have to be protected from the truth of what I had done – and might yet do. This, of all things, would be the greatest challenge. And what was my other option? To visit New York, to see America for a handful of weeks, and then to return to Cuba, my son perhaps unhappy, homesick for the wide and awe-inspiring world he had glimpsed, and wait until I died?

I looked down at the floor. I closed my eyes.

I believed I had already made my decision as I sat on the edge of Victor’s bed that night and told him we would come.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice barely audible. I looked up and cleared my throat. ‘Yes, Don Calligaris. I will stay here. This is my home, and I have returned.’

Don Calligaris clapped his hands together. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, his smile wide. He rose from the chair. I rose also. He reached out and placed his hands on my shoulders. He pulled me close and hugged me. ‘My brother,’ he said. ‘Ernesto Perez, my crazy Cuban brother . . . welcome home!’

It began with the little things; always the little things.

We made arrangements to keep my life with Victor separate from my life with Ten Cent and Don Calligaris. He was enrolled in a good school, a Catholic school with family connections. Money changed hands and Victor did not need to provide identification or a Social Security number. He arrived on time, he worked hard, he showed great promise in his studies, and he seemed happy. After school he would return to the house where we lived, back a half a block or so from Mulberry on Baxter, and here he would watch TV and occupy himself as he wished when I was not there. Ten Cent lived there too, and I employed a woman much as we had employed Claudia Vivó in Havana. Her name was Rosa Martinelli, a middle-aged Italian widow with teenage sons of her own, and Victor fell in with them, good boys, honest and studious, and often he would stay over at their house or visit the movies with them. I did not worry for Victor, he was in good company, and for this I was happy.

So the little things began.

‘Go and see Bracco,’ Don Calligaris would say. ‘Tell him we need the track money tonight. Tell him he has been late three weeks in a row and it will not be tolerated again.’

And Ten Cent and I would go and see Bracco, the two of us – old men in our fifties – and we would scare up the neighborhood and remind people who we were.

‘You’re the one,’ they would say. ‘You’re the one who clipped Jimmy Hoffa,’ and I would smile and say nothing, and they would read everything they wanted to read in that expression.

Sometimes we would meet at Salvatore’s and discuss business, and in such moments I could have been twenty years younger and feeling that rush of anticipation knowing that I would be out in a couple of hours, out and down the street to call on Angelina Maria Tiacoli.

You’re back again
?

Yes
.

You’re not gonna give up, are you? How was the music show? I didn’t go
.

You want me to pay for the tickets, is that it
?

No, I don’t want you to pay for the tickets
.

So what do you want
?

I want to take you out someplace nice, maybe see a movie
—

And then the moment would pass, and I would look away towards the street and realize that, regardless of whether the past had waited here for me, there was no way I could find it again.

And then the little things became bigger things.

‘That Bracco, he’s got some kid called Giacomo something-or-other. He’s making some noise downtown about how he does this and that for the family. Go with Ten Cent, go find the kid, bust his fingers or something and tell him he better keep his freakin’ mouth shut or next time you’re gonna put some vents in his cranium.’

And me and Ten Cent would go down there, to some broken-down warehouse on the south end of Bowery, and I would hold Giacomo in a chair while Ten Cent broke three or four of the fingers on his right hand with a monkey wrench. Stuffed an oily rag in the kid’s mouth to keep him quiet, heard later that he got sick as a dog from whatever the fuck he might have swallowed, but sure as shit he kept his mouth shut from that point forward and we didn’t hear another word.

I didn’t kill anyone until the winter of 1998. A few weeks before Christmas it was, and the snow was thick and heavy along the sidewalks. I remember how much I felt the cold, something that had never bothered me before, and it came home to me that perhaps I should have been lying on a sunlounger near a pool outside of a rest-home in Tampa Bay. I had smiled at that thought as I left the house on Baxter, as I walked half a block down and climbed into the car where Ten Cent was waiting for me.

‘This is a fucking mess and then some,’ he said, and he clapped his gloved hands together and exhaled white mist towards the windscreen. ‘You ready for this?’

‘As I’ll ever be,’ I replied, and yet in my gut there was a cool sense of something unraveling. It was late evening, a little after nine. Victor was having a sleep-over at Mrs Martinelli’s house, believing perhaps that his old father had already gone to bed with a mug of cocoa, but no – here I was, in a car on the corner of Canal Street with his Uncle Sammy, and me and Uncle Sammy were going to drive across to the Lower East Side and clip some asshole called Benny Wheland. Benny was a smalltime loan-shark, one of those assholes who charged a quarter on the dollar per week. Hit him for a thousand bucks and three weeks later he’d come looking for seventeen hundred and fifty and expect you to be real polite and grateful when you gave it him back. He didn’t carry any muscle to speak of, just a couple of Irish fistfighters who fought bouts in the clubs around Water Street and Vladek Park. Meatpackers they were, nothing much more than that, but they were big enough to intimidate the kind of people Benny Wheland lent money to. The problem with Benny – sweetheart though he was – was a mouth the width of the Williamsburg Bridge, and when he opened it you could have ferried three cars and a tow truck right down his throat. He had laid up a deal with a fight arranger called Mordi Metz, a decidedly dishonest Jewish businessman who was known as Momo. Momo governed the financial matters relating to all fights on the Lower East Side. He had a strong working relationship with our people, and when he needed a little heavy-handing on paybacks we were always happy to oblige. We took a ten percent cut, we handed the cash clean and simple to Momo, and everyone was happy. Benny Wheland had welched on a pay-out to Momo, something in the region of thirty grand, and Momo called in a marker he was owed by the Lucheses. The Lucheses gave the job to Don Calligaris, and Don Calligaris gave it to us.

‘Simple thing really,’ he told me. ‘He’ll have the money, no question about it, and the deal is that whatever we get we keep all but a one-dollar token we give to Momo.’