Blood Wine (14 page)

The Mausoleum

T
he
funeral of Vittorio Ciccone was the social hit of the season. Visitation at the mortuary on Danforth Avenue was overwhelming. They were forced to farm out other jobs to competitors just to accommodate the turnover of those coming to pay their respects, those coming to be seen for personal and professional reasons, those needing to participate in an event larger than anything else in their lives, those who wanted the assurance that he was dead, which would come only by seeing him lying in state, a neat cosmetic plug in the centre of his forehead.

At the cemetery, the service and those attending were more refined. Holding the wake and visitation near where the deceased had grown up, an Italian area surrounded by Greeks, had been his wife's idea. It was in deference to his humble beginnings. It was also her idea to celebrate the burial service in front of their family mausoleum in the most exclusive part of the most exclusive cemetery in the heart of the city. Etched into the marble lintel over the mausoleum door was the name “Ciccone.” The mausoleum was empty, built — bought, actually, with dynastic aspirations, the size of a small house with granite walls, no windows, and a massive door. Successive generations of the family would find their way here, eventually, where she and Vittorio would preside through eternity. It was all happening a little sooner than they had anticipated, but this was no reason to skimp on the grandeur of the event.

Morgan had never seen so many black limousines. A rock star had tried to enter the cemetery in a white limousine but was turned away at the gate. He was forced to walk in from the street. Limousines likely had to be brought in from Hamilton, Oakville, and Oshawa. Morgan arrived with Spivak and Stritch and walked in. There were police in street clothes here and there throughout the crowd, all of whom seemed to Morgan, themselves included, to be passively intrusive.

“You ever see so many fur coats?” said Spivak.

“Not in June,” said Morgan.

“I didn't know people still wore black to funerals,” said Stritch in a tone suggesting he approved.

“Yeah, well funerals are not all alike,” said Spivak, “even if we're equals under the sod.”

“Some are more equal than others,” said Morgan. A smile crept over his face as he observed the obsequies. “That's quite the tomb; it looks like Vittorio Ciccone will rest high until hell freezes over.”

“Or until the damn thing falls down, then they'll bulldoze it into the ground,” said Spivak, registering satisfaction at the prospect.
I wonder if he's heard of Ozymandias?
thought Morgan.

The casket lay on a gurney disguised with a white satin skirt, surrounded by rows of folding wooden chairs sitting on artificial turf, except in front of the mausoleum, where there were banks of flowers arranged in descending waves, like floral surf rolling out of the crypt.

“You know what's funny about this lot?” said Morgan.

“Yeah, everyone's here,” said Spivak.

It was true, there were city councillors, Bay Street brokers, members of various hospital boards (Ciccone had been a generous benefactor), representatives of major cultural institutions (Ciccone was a patron of the opera and of the ballet and gave considerable sums to theatre groups), there were bar musicians, recording artists, Rosedale neighbours who preferred to believe the Ciccone family were in construction, and representatives of several large unions, whose members were employed at Ciccone construction sites.

People not there included bikers, who had paid their respects by showing their colours at the funeral home; drug addicts, at least those who had degenerated to the point where they were unkempt derelicts; streetwalkers who would turn a trick for the price of a fix, call girls who would shoot up with weekend thrill-seekers from out of town or workaday addicts from the business district, hookers who had not yet lost their looks; and social workers who battled night and day the horrors of the mean streets most Torontonians drove through unknowingly or by accident.

Powerful members of the church and the legal profession were there, Morgan observed, even while pro bono lawyers and priests who ran shelters were absent.

“Everyone is here,” said Morgan, repeating Spivak's assessment. “But you know what?”

The three of them were standing off to the side in front of some manicured shrubs, the only members of the force not trying to blend in. There would be a few Mounties there as well, because of the drug connection, but they would be invisible. Spivak and Stritch waited for Morgan to answer his own rhetorical question. They knew from his tone he was on to something. None of them were in a hurry. They were here for the duration.

“Look around,” said Morgan. “Find me a gangster who is not here.”

“Well, if they're not here …” Stritch's quibble trailed into contemplative silence.

“Think about it,” said Morgan. “Name me a big-time crook, a Mafia boss, a rival gangster …”

“What's your point?” said Spivak, who recognized the funeral of Vittorio Ciccone as a mandatory event. “Who would stay away?”

“That is the point,” said Morgan. “If it was a Mafia hit, don't you think the offending faction would avoid the proceedings?”

“Not really,” said Spivak. “I think they might come to gloat. Or as a display of supremacy. Or to begin organizing the succession.”

“Look at Frankie Ciccone, Spivak. She's radiant. The grieving widow — even gangsters grieve. But she's a smart woman, she knows the business. And she's showing no signs the killers are here.”

“A good-looking woman,” Stritch observed.

“What else!” said Spivak, as if there were no alternative for the wife of someone like Ciccone. Then he turned to Morgan, speaking confidentially as if Stritch were an outsider.

“She's savvy. If the assassins are here, she'd know it, you'd see it on her face.”

Morgan suppressed a smile. Spivak had said exactly what he had said, in almost the same words. Spivak was waiting to see what conclusion would be drawn from their shrewd observations.

“The gunman worked for the Ciccone family, but he was from Italy, an Albanian refugee, right?” Morgan looked at Spivak for agreement.

“Yeah. Who told you he was from Albania?”

“I heard it around.”

“Who from?”

“I called a friend.”

“Just a guy you know.”

“A friend, we went to school together, Jarvis Collegiate.”

“No shit! I went there too.”

“Before my time.”

“How old are you!”

“Younger than you, Spivak.”

“Everyone's younger than me. Look at this guy.” He nodded toward Eeyore Stritch. “I knew his father.”

“I thought you were Jamaican?” said Morgan, turning to the other man. “You're living a lie.”

“I'm not Jamaican, man. I keep telling you that,” he said in a rolling West Indian cadence. “You guys can't tell an accent.”

“Maybe if you shaved your head,” said Spivak as he started coughing.

“That's racial stereotyping,” said Stritch. “I don't call you a slap-head Slovak —”

“The shooter,” said Morgan. “He had no connections with the local community, he was taken on by Ciccone as a favour.”

“To whom?”

“We don't know. Nobody knows. That's the thing, nobody knows.”

“So where are you going with this?” said Spivak, between hacking and trying to breathe. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I gotta quite smoking.” He took a slow, shallow breath. “You're saying what?”

“Well,” said Morgan, “if it wasn't the bad guys who killed Vittorio Ciccone, then maybe it was the good guys.”

“Shit, Morgan,” exclaimed Spivak. “It's one thing to set him up for a fall, if that's what those bozos in Hamilton were doing, but killing him, man, that's nowhere, that didn't happen.”

“Why not? If Miranda's testimony was gonna get him off —”

“Then why not kill Miranda?”

“Because she's a cop. I'm saying, if cops were in on this, they'd go for the direct hit. There'd be heavier repercussions if they killed another cop, a good cop, than if they exterminated a bad guy.”

“No, Morgan. Any cop devious enough to hire a hitman knows there are an infinite number of replacements for Ciccone, just waiting for their turn to step up to the plate.”

“It sounds plausible to me,” said Stritch.

“I'm not saying it's not plausible, for Chrissakes, I'm saying it didn't happen.” Spivak glowered at his partner.

In the background, the rows of chairs were filling with Ciccone family and close associates. A solemn hush spread through the cemetery as a priest stepped up to the head of the casket. They could not hear what he was saying. Then he nodded to Frankie Ciccone and she nodded to someone else, and a hundred white doves were released from the shadows behind the mausoleum to rise in a fluttering melee of feathers and thumping air into the bright June sky. There was a gasp from the crowd expressing amazement, amusement, and an outpouring of grief.

“Be hard to top that,” said Spivak.

Just then a bugler hidden from view inside the crypt started playing Taps, which echoed within the stone chamber and emerged in a resounding cacophony of thunder and brass. Without a break, the bugler switched to Reveille and as he did so emerged from the shadows to stand full-throated in the doorway of the tomb, engulfed in flowers, and the notes rang out as crisp and clean as a prayer.

“Yeah,” said Morgan, “or that.”

The service proceeded, but instead of the obsequies ending with the casket being lowered into the ground, it was hoisted on the shoulders of six burley pallbearers who stood waiting as a passageway was cleared through the flowers, then started to carry it into the crypt, but stopped when someone realized their load was being carried too high to clear the lintel. Excessively efficient attendants had already removed the satin-covered gurney, and the pallbearers had to lower the casket from above their shoulders, a more cumbersome task than might have been expected as they struggled to avoid the indignity of allowing Vittorio's head to rise higher than his feet. One of the pallbearers stumbled but the other five recovered equilibrium and he sheepishly rejoined them as they disappeared with the casket into the dark shadows of the mausoleum.

After they came out, the priest and Frankie Ciccone and her stepchildren, who were adults, their mother having died when they were in their teens, went into the dark chamber. One by one, the priest and then each of the four grown children came out and, after a considerable time, the widow emerged and the great door, molded in the manner of one of the Ghiberti doors on the southernmost side of the campanile in Florence, was swung shut with a heavy clang and the giant key turned to lock it in place until the necessity should arise for another Ciccone to join Vittorio. His first wife, who had been born in Toronto, was buried in Tuscany where her people originated, outside the town of Arezzo.

Morgan walked down to where the last few guests were mingling, some of them reading the cards on the floral arrangements and hoping to have a word with Frankie Ciccone, although she was being shielded by the cluster of pallbearers who now acted as a barricade, letting though one or two at a time as the widow indicated by the most subtle of eye movements. Morgan stood off to the side, surveying the scene. Spivak and Stritch had gone back to Headquarters. The remaining police presence had vanished.

Frankie Ciccone was sitting on the edge of her folding chair, comforting an elderly woman dressed in habitual black. Her children had gone back to the house where immediate family was gathering for a small reception. She glanced through the barricade and caught Morgan's eye. She dropped her eyelids in a subtle gesture and allowed the hint of a smile to compress her lips.

Morgan tilted his head to the side in a restrained expression of sympathy.

Her entourage knew Morgan was a homicide detective. He was seldom involved directly in the family's affairs. In the interpenetrating worlds of crime and the law, people know each other. No one was surprised when the widow rose to her feet and walked in his direction. In fact, the others fell away to let the two of them converse in private, off the record, on a one-to-one basis.

“David,” she said.

“Francine. Sorry for your loss,” he said.

“Are you here professionally?”

“Yes and no.”

“For the no part, thank you.”

“I am sorry, Frankie.”

“Me too. He was a bastard, Morgan, but he was a great man.”

He smiled at the grieving widow. She truly believed her husband could be ranked in death with bishops and senators and business tycoons. While alive, it had been enough that he lived in their neighbourhood. Now she envisioned him as their peer. By the fact of his death, if not the manner of his dying, she as his widow had been moved up the social scale. From here on she would be concerned with family philanthropies, not business.

“He did a lot of good things, David.”

Morgan shrugged without rancour. This was not the time for aspersions. “You've come a long way since J.C.V.I.,” he said.

“Jarvis Collegiate and Vocational Institute, rah rah rah. Yeah. Do my roots show? Just thinking about it makes you want to burst into songs from
Grease
.”

“You spend more time at
Les Mis
and
Phantom
and
Cats,
I hear.”

“Yes, David, I do, or I did. Vittorio loved those shows. Myself, I'd rather watch John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, over and over, but there you are.”

“There you are,” he agreed. “Are your people any closer to finding the Albanian?”

“My people? No, they're not. And yours?”

“No leads.”

The pallbearers were standing in a cluster, making a show of not paying attention to the widow and the detective. They were at a level in her husband's organization where it would not have occurred to them it was anything but business.