Greenmantle (24 page)

Valenti touched the gun in his pocket. “We’ll just keep our eyes open going in,” he said. “That’s all.”

Bannon sighed. “You’re the boss.”

“It’s going to be okay,” Valenti said. He picked up a tea mug and brought it over to Ali, who’d returned to the table. “
Salute
,” he said, raising his own mug to her.

Ali grinned at him and took a sip.

8

Earl watched Fingers take the weapons out of the suitcase, one by one, and lay them on the bed. He glanced at Louie, standing by the window, then back at Fingers. What they had here was a fucking arsenal. His man hadn’t believed it when Earl had put the order in earlier today. “What’re you going to do with all this?” the man had asked. “Start a war?” Earl had simply shaken his head, unsure.

He still wasn’t sure. He could understand the handguns—anything had more punch than those two little peashooters that Fucceri and Maita had smuggled in through customs. It was the heavy-duty artillery that had him puzzled. A 9mm Ingram submachine gun. A.30 calibre Browning automatic rifle. A sawed-off shotgun. An auto-reload shotgun. Together with the pair of Smith & Wesson .38s, they really did have enough here to set up their own army.

“You figure we’ll be needing all this?” he asked.

Louie turned from the window. “It’s nice to be prepared,” he said. “What we’d like is to knock him down a flight of stairs, run his car off the road—something simple. But if it comes right down to it, I’m ready to shoot him into little pieces. Be my pleasure.”

Fingers grinned. He was taking apart one of the .38s. When he got back to what he was doing, the grin was replaced with a frown. “You got burned,” he said as he sighted down the barrel.

“What do you mean, I got burned?”

“Check the calibration on this—it’s going to throw off your shot. The breech is worn, too.” He spun the cylinder and shook his head. “I hope the rest of these are in better condition.”

“Hey, what do you expect on short notice? This isn’t the U.S. of A., pal. We got handgun laws here like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’m familiar with Canadian regulations,” Fingers said.

“I’ll bet you are.”

“Okay,” Louie said. “Let’s take it easy. Earl here’s doing the best he can for us, Fingers. Aren’t you, Earl?”

“You bet,” Earl said. What a pair of fucking monkeys. “So are we hitting Valenti tonight, or what?”

“The way I figure it,” Louie said, “if he’s not gone, he’s going to be expecting us tonight or tomorrow, so what we’re going to do is lay off for a couple of days. That gives us a chance to set things up right.”

“What if it’s taking him a couple of days to get out of there?” Earl asked. He waved a hand at the weapons on the bed. “With all that shit in our hands, he won’t be going nowhere if we hit him now. Wait too long and all you’ve got is an empty house.”

Louie shook his head. “If he’s going, he’s gone now. Maybe we’ll take a quick spin round there later tonight—check it out. But if he’s there, he’ll be holing up tight. The thing we got to do then is keep him on edge. He’ll be sitting in there waiting for us, knowing he fucked up, knowing we’re coming. I don’t care how cool he used to be, he’s carrying lead in his leg now and he’s lost his edge. The man just won’t be able to move fast.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Look,” Louie said. “We’re doing this my way and we’re doing this right. Any dumb ass could blow him away. I want him taken out clean. So clean, the police won’t be looking for anybody, even when they figure out who he really is.”

“Okay,” Earl said. “You’re calling the shots.”

Louie nodded. He didn’t bother explaining that he’d already tried the frontal approach on Valenti that time in Malta—hit him two, maybe three times, and the guy still disappeared like a ghost. It hadn’t done a whole lot for Louie’s rep. So this time he wanted it to be perfectly planned. He wanted to work in so close that he could tap Tony on the shoulder just before they blew him away.
If
they blew him away.

Louie also liked the idea of taking Tony out without any evidence that it was a hit. In a way, Tony was an example. For two years or better he’d been thumbing his nose at the
fratellanza
and getting away with it. That wasn’t good for business. Other people might think they could get away with it too. But if he took Tony out without making it look like a hit, and let the word go out that Louie Fucceri had been in the area, it wouldn’t take too long for those others in the business to put two and two together.

It made a nice example. Told them Louie Fucceri worked clean, and he always finished a job he started. That had been one of Tony’s own specialities before he fucked up. Louie liked the idea of using it on him.

“So who’s going to check the place out tonight?” Earl asked.

“We’ll work that out later.” Louie paused as a thought came to him. “What happened to the guy you were with last night? Did he know we were flying in?”

Earl shook his head. “He doesn’t know dick about you being here. He got hurt last night so I left him at a friend’s place.”

“What kind of place?”

“A cottage—maybe a twenty-minute drive from Valenti’s.”

“Maybe we should work out of there—what do you think?”

Earl nodded. “Sure. But you’ll have to ditch those suits. People up here don’t wear many three-pieces in cottage country.”

“That’s not a problem,” Louie said. Though Earl was. He was getting on Louie’s nerves. Maybe when this Colombian deal that Earl was setting up was done…maybe the
padrone
would give Earl to Louie as a favor.

“I’m going to enjoy seeing you guys in T-shirts and cut-offs,” Earl said.

“You talk too much,” Fingers told him.

“Is that true?” Earl asked Louie.

Broadway Joe’s son just smiled.

* * *

Late Monday afternoon, a black van splattered with mud pulled over to the side of the read just before the turnoff to Tony Valenti’s property. The driver carefully checked the road both ways to make sure he was alone, then backed the van off the road.

The bed of the van rode high and there was no ditch, so the driver had little trouble squeezing his vehicle in among the trees. Branches scraped its sides and it drove right over saplings. When he got it far enough from the road, the driver killed the engine and disembarked. He moved quickly forward and began to straighten saplings that hadn’t sprung back on their own, moving on to do the same with the grass and weeds. These latter didn’t fare quite as well as the more resilient saplings, but by the time the man had brushed away the van’s tracks from the mud on the side of the road and had thrown a camouflage net over the van itself, the vehicle was barely visible.

The man stood for a few moments in the misting rain, regarding his handiwork. He had short dark hair and a day’s worth of salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks and chin. His complexion was dark, made more so by his black water-repellant clothing and the shadows of the trees.

Going back into the van, he returned a moment later with a self-cocking commando crossbow in his hands. It was fitted with a scope that he checked out, sighting it on a nearby blackbird taking shelter in a cedar from the rain. The scope brought the bird in startlingly close.

“Bang,” the man said.

Laying the crossbow down for a moment, he attached a belt around his waist. A small quiver of crossbow bolts hung from it. Then he picked up his weapon once more and slipped off into the woods, moving back toward Tony Valenti’s house. His passage was silent in the wet forest.

9

“You understand what the old man was talking about in there?” Valenti asked Ali.

The two of them were sitting on the top step of the stairs going into the cabin, watching the rain. A small overhanging roof kept them dry. Inside, Bannon was reading while the old man sat at the table, doing what, Valenti didn’t know. He just sat there. Thinking maybe. Valenti and Ali had come out to get a breath of air.

“How’s your leg?” Ali asked.

“It’s okay. It always aches a bit in this kind of weather.” He turned to look at her. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Ali glanced at him, “Jeez, Tony. I’m just a kid. What do I know about this kind of stuff?”

“Don’t give me that.”

“Okay.” She spent a moment picking at a thread on her jeans, then looked out into the rain. “The things he was saying confused me. I mean, all these old gods he was naming—some of them are sun gods, some of them are sort of hunter figures, some are a bit of both. But they come from all different kinds of mythologies and cultures.”

“You figure they can’t all be the same?”

Ali shrugged. “I don’t know enough about it. I really am just a kid, Tony. The kind of stuff Mr. Datchery talks about—that’s for scholars to figure out.”

“Yeah, but you’ve read a lot. You’re smart.”

“And you’re not?”

“I’m just a dumb Italian,” Valenti replied, mimicking her. “What do I know?”

“Okay. I get the point already.”

“So what do you think?”

“Well, I know there are similarities all around the world. And when it comes to Christianity—well, they did borrow a lot from other cultures. Easter comes around the same time as the vernal equinox—that’s the Spring equinox when day and night are the same length—and even the whole business with Easter eggs is based on pagan fertility rites. In fact, even Christ’s being crucified has parallels in other cultures. The Norse god Baldur was nailed to a tree as well.”

“You’re kidding.”

Ali shook her head. “So I understand what Mr. Datchery was getting at, but at the same time I find it confusing. And then…” She looked at Valenti. “Then there’s what I feel inside. About the music and the stag. When I think about just that, not about things that I’ve read or stuff that you learn in church, then it all starts to make perfect sense. Maybe I’m going a little crazy—I don’t know.”

“I don’t think so,” Valenti said. “I get the same feeling. And I’ve been hearing that music a whole lot longer than you have. But then I talk to Tom and he just says it’s all a load of crap and that makes sense, too. I mean, how can any of that stuff Datchery’s talking about be real?”

Ali sighed. “I don’t know. What do you think’ll happen at this stone tonight?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

“You don’t think these people belong to a…well, a cult or something?”

Valenti shrugged. “The thought’s crossed my mind.”

“My mom used to know this guy who claimed he was a witch—not like riding a broomstick and casting spells and stuff like that, but it was some kind of religion. I talked with him about it a couple of times, but I was pretty young and I didn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. Then Mom got mad ’cause he was telling me all this stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Well,” Ali said. “I read up on it after he stopped coming around—Mom didn’t make him too welcome. Anyway, one thing I remember is that they had two gods instead of one: the Moon Goddess and her consort, the Horned Man. And that’s—”

“Just like what we’ve got going on here.”

“Or so Mr. Datchery says.”

“But we’ve seen the stag, Ali. We’ve heard the music. And ordinary deer don’t come to people’s rescue like some kind of cavalry—not like the stag did that night.”

Ali nodded. “Yeah. Only why did he do that?”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it?” Valenti said. “Maybe we’ll find out tonight.”

“I suppose.” Ali thought about it. She wanted to go to the stone tonight—to hear the music right up close, to see what Lewis Datchery was talking about, but at the same time she found the whole idea a little scary. At least Tony was going to be there. And Tom. They’d make sure that nothing happened to her. Only, what if whatever took place happened inside her? The music hadn’t made her look or talk any different, but ever since she’d first heard it, she’d felt different inside. She wondered if Mally would be there tonight, then realized that that was something else they hadn’t talked to Lewis about.

“Rain’s letting up,” Tony said. “Just like the old man said it would.”

“Tony,” Ali said. “We never asked him about Mally.”

“That’s right. We never did.”

* * *

“She says she’s always been here,” Lewis said, “and while she seems to know the mystery better than any of us, it doesn’t affect her the way it does us.”

“She told me she was a secret,” Ali said.

Lewis nodded. “The Moon’s secret—but I don’t rightly know what she means by that.”

They were all sitting around the table. Bannon had a poetry collection of Padraic Colum open in front of him and was obviously more taken by the book’s contents than their conversation. Glancing at him, Ali wondered at the incongruity of someone involved in Tony’s old business being interested in early twentieth century Irish poetry.

“You have to understand,” Lewis went on, “that Mally’s as much a riddle to me as she is to you. I’ve known her a great deal longer, of course, but while she lets enticing snippets fall my way during our conversations, she’s never really come out and spoken plainly to me about anything.”