Marked Man (21 page)

“It was tough, what
happened to Ralphie Ciulla,” said my father, rooted in position on his Naugahyde lounge chair. He sipped his beer, belched softly. However tough it was on Big Ralph, my father wasn’t taking it personally. “He didn’t deserve to get it that way, a bullet in his head in his mother’s house.”

“No one does.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“It looks like it was an enforcer for the Warrick Brothers Gang.”

“I didn’t know Ralph was involved with those clowns.”

“He was involved with Charlie Kalakos, which was apparently enough for them.”

“Who else they after?”

“Joey Pride, Charlie, the other two also, I would suppose. For some reason it looks like they’re going after everyone involved in the Randolph heist.”

“It could be a bloodbath.”

“It’s shaping up to be.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah.”

“Real tough.” Pause. You could see him think it over, my father, not so much working out the intimations of all our varied fates in the grisly death of Big Ralph, but more wondering at the appropriate period for remaining somber in the face of such news. I suppose, after due deliberation, he decided it wasn’t that long. “You want to get me another beer?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“And while you’re up, some chips, maybe.”

When I came in from the kitchen with the Lay’s and two Iron City Beers, the television was on. My dad had been itching to press the power button on his remote from the moment I stepped into his little house in Hollywood, PA. As proof of my theory that he would watch anything so long as it was on, there he was, staring at a little white dot hurtling across an impossibly blue sky.

“Golf?”

“The Phils are in L.A.”

“But you hate golf.”

“Except when they hit the ball into water and get the whiny face. I love the whiny face. ‘Ooh, I’m making six mil a year plus endorsements, but I just hit the ball in the water. Ooh.’”

I handed him his beer and the chips and then walked to the television and turned down the sound. He looked at me with the startled expression of a little kid who’d just had a candy bar snatched from his hand.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said as he pressed the volume-up button on his remote.

I killed it again. “We need to talk,” I said.

“What, are you breaking up with me?” He turned up the volume once more. “Just close the door on your way out.”

“Dad, do you really need for Johnny Miller to tell you that the guy should have made the putt he just missed?”

“It adds ambience.”

“We need to talk,” I said, “about why you owe a favor to that Mrs. Kalakos. She’s roped it around my neck like a horse collar.”

He looked at me for a moment, thought about it, and then let the volume bleed out until it died. He flipped open his beer, took a sip. I sat down in the chair catercorner to his and opened my own.

“It was my mother,” he said.

“M
Y MOTHER
was an artist,” my father told me as golfers moved grimly and silently across the television screen. “Or at least she thought she was.”

“I don’t remember Grandma Gilda painting.”

“This was before you were born. Our house was filled with her paintings. She was also a poet, and she liked to sing. This was all when I was still young, after we left North Philly and were living in Mayfair.”

“Near the Kalakoses?”

“That’s right. There was an art class at the community center, and every Tuesday and Thursday night my mother would pack up her paints and brushes in her wooden artist’s box and go to class. And in that same class was guess who?”

“Mrs. Kalakos?”

“Right. One night I was hanging outside the community center with my pals when the class was breaking up. My mother came out with her little wooden box and her smock draped over her arm. But the strange thing was that she was laughing, which was not a usual thing for her. And next to her, laughing also, was a tall, ungainly man, stooped, with a shiny bald head and a pipe in his girlish lips. Not much to look at, but the son of a bitch was making my mother laugh. His name was Guernsey.”

“Guernsey?”

“Like the cow. And after that, I noticed my mother was distracted at home. Before, she was always telling my father what to do, complaining about all the stuff I wasn’t accomplishing with my life. But now she just stopped, as if she had other things on her mind. It was kind of peaceful and nice, until the night she went off to art class and didn’t return.”

“Guernsey.”

“She called my father so he wouldn’t worry. She was leaving him, moving in with Guernsey, becoming an artist. She was still young, in her thirties, and she said she needed to break out before she was swallowed whole by the narrow life of a cobbler’s wife.”

“How’d Grandpop take it?”

“Not well. The next Thursday night, I stood with him as he waited silently outside the community center. When the students came outside after the art class was over, he confronted her. He begged her to come home. She refused. He spit out some words in Yiddish, and she spit them back. Enraged, he went after Guernsey with his little fists.
I held my father back as the tall, stooped man recoiled in fear and then ran away. I remember the holes in the bottom of his big shoes as he ran. My mother pushed my father down before she went after Guernsey. It was all quite the scene. And when it was finished—the scene, the marriage, everything—Mrs. Kalakos, who had seen it all, came over to my father.

“‘Don’t you worry,’ she said in her thick Greek accent. My father, still on the ground, looked up at her with a pathetic hope in his eyes. ‘A wife and mother, she belong in her own house. I bring her back to you.’

“And she did. A week later Mrs. Kalakos marched into our living room with my mother following meekly behind, a suitcase in her hand. And the three of them, sitting across from one another, worked it out.”

“How?” I said.

“I don’t know. They sent me away. When I came back, it was as if none of it had happened. My mother kept house, my father hummed, my mother complained about my father, my father took it with a little smile. That was it. And it was never talked about again.”

“Grandma Gilda.”

“My mother, I think, always had a sadness in her eyes after that. No more painting or poetry or singing. But my father was always grateful to Mrs. Kalakos. Whenever he saw her, he would remind me what she had done and that I should never forget it.”

“Grandma Gilda. I didn’t think she had it in her.”

“That’s why I owe the old lady a favor. Can I turn up the volume now?”

“You don’t want to talk about it? How it made you feel?”

“Bewildered, abandoned, desperate for a hug.”

“Really?”

“Get out of here. It was just something that happened. But I’ll tell you this. First chance I had, I up and joined the army. Anything to get the hell out of that house.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Good, now that’s settled.” He aimed the remote, the golf commentators started yapping.

We sat and watched the golf for a while, until the sun started slanting and the baseball came on. Whatever you can say about baseball on the tube, it’s better than golf. I got us both a couple more beers, and as I drank my Iron City, I began to think about my grandmother.

I remembered her as old and complaining, never happy, never satisfied with how anything in her life had turned out. But there was a moment when she had made that move to change her life, was living in sin with that big lug Guernsey, devoting herself to her painting. It was almost romantic, a woman abandoning her placid domestic life for love and art. Like Helen leaving Menelaus for Paris, or Louise Bryant leaving her middle-class life for John Reed, or Pattie Harrison leaving George for Eric Clapton. These were the heroines of epic poems, Oscar-winning films, classic rock ballads. And in that immortal group, at least for a few weeks, was my Grandma Gilda.

I wonder if it would have worked out for her, if a life with Guernsey would have been richer, truer than the one she fell back into. More likely, after a few brief weeks she would have started nagging Guernsey about the dishes in the sink and the clothes on the floor, about his lack of ambition, about the way he never took her out dancing. But she never would know, would she, my Grandma Gilda, because Mrs. Kalakos had taken charge.

The Furies of Greek mythology were three sisters who scoured the earth for sinners to torment. One of them, Megaera, was a shriveled crone with bat wings and a dog’s head. Her harping often drove her victims to suicide. I bet she also drank old tea and kept her shades drawn. I bet she burned incense to hide the scent of death on her breath. I bet she inveighed against freedom and risk, against free will, against any chance to rise and become something other than that which fate had decreed.

“By the way, I got a message for you,” said my father.

I grew suddenly nervous. “From Mrs. Kalakos?”

“No, from that Joey Pride. He wants to talk. He said he’ll pick you up tomorrow morning same time outside your apartment house.”

“He can’t. Call him and tell him he can’t.”

“Tell him yourself. I don’t call him, he calls me.”

“Dad, I’m being followed all the time. I think they followed me to Ralph. And they’re looking for Joey, too. If he picks me up outside my apartment, they’re going to find him.”

“Tough for Joey.”

“Dad.”

“If he calls, I’ll tell him.”

“This is bad.”

“For Joey maybe.”

“Your sympathy for those guys is overwhelming.”

“They were punks,” he said. “Always were, always will be. If they was involved with that robbery, like you said, then they stepped out of their league, and now they’re paying for it. That’s always the way of it. You got to know your limitations.”

“Like your mother.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You know, after she came back like she did, she threw out all her paintings. Never touched a brush again.”

“Were the paintings any good?”

“Nah. But she sure was happy painting them.”

I got to the office
early the next morning, fiddled with some paperwork, made some phone calls. Then I headed off to City Hall.

Philadelphia’s City Hall is a grand monstrosity of a building set smack in the very center of William Penn’s plan for the city. Four and a half acres of masonry in the ornate style of the French Second Empire, the building is bigger than any other city hall in the country, but that doesn’t say enough. It is bigger than the United States Capitol. The granite walls on the bottom floor are twenty-two feet thick, the bronze of Billy Penn is the tallest statue atop any building in the world. You want to get an idea of the size of the thing? About ten years ago, they removed thirty-seven tons of pigeon droppings from its roofs and statuary. Seventy-four thousand pounds. Think on that for a moment. That’s a load of guano, even for a building designed for politicians. If you can’t get lost in Philadelphia’s City Hall, you’re not trying very hard.

I entered the doors at the southwest quadrant, climbed the wide granite steps to the second floor, where I headed toward the prothonotary’s office. Prothonotary is our local term for clerk, like cheese steak is our local term for health food and councilman is our local term for crook. I ducked in, looked around, ducked out again, spotted no one suspicious in the hallway. I proceeded to make a grand tour of the building, starting with the mayor’s office. A cop was stationed at the door, to keep the FBI from sneaking inside and bugging it again, no doubt. I took an elevator to the fourth floor and walked past the Marriage License Bureau and the Orphans’ Court, two locales still thankfully foreign to me. I climbed down another huge stairwell to the
third floor, walked past City Council offices, felt my sense of morality disappearing into some strange vortex. At the elevator I looked around and went back down to the second floor.

The cop in front of the mayor’s office eyed me as I passed by. “You looking for something, pal?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “but fortunately I’m not finding it.”

I entered another of the wide stairwells and climbed down to the ground floor again. I was now at the northeast corner of the building, the exact opposite of where I had entered. I slipped out of the building and quickly raised my hand.

A battered old Yellow Cab with its top light off pulled up beside me. I opened the door and slid inside. The cab veered around a few lanes and then headed north on Broad.

“I expect there’s a reason for all this subterfuge and flimflam,” said Joey Pride from behind the wheel.

“Just trying to keep the body count down,” I said.

“Whose body you talking about?”

“Yours.”

“Well, then, boy, flimflam away. And at least you sent me a messenger easy on the eyes.”

“Yes, I did,” I said, smiling at Monica Adair sitting beside me on the backseat, her hair back in a ponytail, her face freshly scrubbed. While I was staying busy at my office, I had sent Monica to intercept Joey in front of my apartment and direct him to our rendezvous. I hadn’t been able to spot who was following me—I was no Phil Skink, who could spy the tail of a mouse at fifty yards—but after what happened with Charlie at Ocean City, I had begun to take precautions.

“So, Joey,” I said, “you wanted to see me?”

“Your boy’s trying to screw my ass,” said Joey Pride, “and I just wanted you to tell him it’s not worthy of our past together.”

“Do I have any idea what you are talking about?”

“Maybe we ought to drop her off before we keep talking.”

“Oh, Monica’s fine,” I said. “Anything I can hear, she can hear, too. Her profession is all about secrets.”

“Okay, then. Remember that fish we was discussing before Ralph got it in the head, the one handing out the Benjamins?”

Lavender Hill. Damn. “Yes, I remember.”

“He got hold of me once again. Said he was close to working out a deal with Chuckles the Clown, and that Chuckles, out of the generosity of his shriveled Greek heart, had decided what my share will be when the deal goes down.”

“And what share is that?”

“Well, he figured, since there was five of us in that long-ago escapade, that I should get a fifth.”

“That makes some sense.”

“Did thirty years ago, don’t make that kind of sense now. Ralph is dead, Teddy has been missing since the painting was took, and considering what he ended up with, he don’t deserve nothing more, and Hugo ain’t going to be begging for his share, I can tell you that.”

“What does that mean?”

“It don’t matter. What matters is that, the way I see it, the split should be fifty-fifty.”

“Fine, but leave me out. I can’t be part of any negotiation.”

“You part of it already, Victor. You the one who set this up.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No other way it could have played out, so don’t pretend you’re wearing a white suit here and glowing like an angel. You get back to our boy and tell him it’s fifty-fifty or there will be trouble.”

“What kind of trouble, Joey?”

“He’s still got a mother and sister, don’t he? They still got a house, don’t they? It ain’t smart business to trifle with a desperate man on the run from ghosts.”

“Did you hear that, Monica?”

“I heard that.”

“That is a threat, which is absolutely against the law. As an officer of the court, I have a duty to report any crimes I see.”

“I have a cell phone,” she said.

“You ain’t making no call.”

“I don’t need to,” I said. “Let me give you a piece of advice, Joey. Don’t mess with Mrs. Kalakos. She’ll carve you proper and then make soup from your bones.”

He thought about it for a while, driving north on Broad, toward her territory and his past. “She’s old.”

“Not old enough. Your concern about the shares is duly noted and, all the time remembering my responsibilities, I’ll see what I can do to make your grievance understood.”

“Am I going to get any more than that lame assurance from your skinny ass?”

“No.”

“Then I guess it will have to do.”

“Good. Now I have some questions for you.” I leaned forward, took a photograph out of my pocket, shoved it in front of him. As he drove, he glanced down at it, looked up, glanced down again.

The taxi swerved left, a horn honked, the taxi swerved right again.

“Mind your own damn lane,” Joey yelled out the window.

“You recognize her?” I said.

“No.”

“So says your words, but the steering wheel gave you away.”

“Take another look,” said Monica. “Please.”

He glanced nervously up to the rearview mirror.

“Her name was Chantal Adair,” said Monica. “She was my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“She disappeared twenty-eight years ago,” said Monica. “Could you please take another look?”

He glanced again at the photograph. “Never saw her before.”

“That’s what Charlie said, too,” I told him, “but he was lying, just like you.”

“Who you calling a liar?”

“Calm down. Let’s talk a little bit about what happened after Teddy gave you his speech in that bar. When did he tell you that the opportunity he had in mind for all of you to save your miserable lives was to rip off the Randolph Trust?”

“That very night. He laid it out, and then he left us to chew it over. I had already been in the pen, didn’t want to go back, ever. Ralph never had a larcenous bone in his body and Charlie was not the type. But with Teddy gone, it was Hugo who went about convincing us. Said all
that talk about changing our lives didn’t have to be only talk, that we could do it. We just needed the balls to step up and take what was ours.”

“He was in on it from the start.”

“Hugo?”

“Sure,” I said. “How else did Teddy know so much about what was going on in your lives? From what you told me before, I figured one of you was recruited before Teddy ever stepped into that bar.”

“Hugo. Damn.”

“So the four of you signed on.”

“All that talk of becoming something new, it was more intoxicating than the booze we were swilling. So we were in, and Teddy, he had a plan for each of us.”

“You took care of the burglar alarm.”

“That was my job, that’s right, that and the driving. Teddy, somehow he got the electrical drawings for me. The setup was complicated, the drawings looked like a plate of spaghetti, but I eventually figured a way to beat the thing. A wire’s just a wire, a current’s a current, it ain’t too hard to make them electrons dance the way you want.”

“What was Ralph’s job?”

“Muscle during the operation. And all the while we was preparing, he was quietly setting up a shop in his mother’s basement to take charge of whatever gold and silver we brought in. He was going to melt it into something we could sell without it being traced.”

“What happened to all the equipment after?”

“We buried it, right there in the basement. Cracked the cement floor with a sledge, buried it in the dirt, along with our clothes and the guns we used to keep the guards quiet. We poured homemade concrete right on top. It’s all still there, best I know.”

“Buried in the basement so that nothing could be traced.” I made a mental note to give Sheila the Realtor a call. “And Charlie was there to take care of the safe, right?”

“If he could. If not, Teddy said they’d blow the damn thing. When he laid out his plan, it was all ‘if this, then that, if not that, then this.’”

“How did you guys get inside?”

“That was Hugo’s department. Hugo was hard and sly, like a fox with brass knuckles.”

“How did he get in?”

“I’m not talking about Hugo.”

“Why not?”

“Remember what I said about ghosts? Some of them are more dangerous than others. More solid, too.”

“Then just tell us how the girl got mixed up in everything.”

“What girl?”

“The girl in the picture, Joey. Chantal Adair.”

“I never saw her.”

“Joey?”

“No, I admit, I recognize her picture. I seen that picture before, in all the papers. About the same time as the heist, this girl went missing. It was that girl, right?”

“That’s right,” said Monica.

“But it wasn’t her who was hanging around all the time as we were making our preparations.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Who was hanging around?”

“Teddy was a real pied piper. All the kids took to him. Always had a piece of candy or a little toy. It was just the way he was. And there was one kid who was hanging around all the time, flitting around like a moth. A boy. Towheaded dude.”

“What was his name?” said Monica.

“Who the hell remembers?” said Joey. “Who the hell knows?”

“I do,” I said.