Vespers Read online

  “Don’t mention it.”

  She looked at her maimed hand. “I used to have a lot of fun with that pinky.”

  “I remember,” I said, and we both managed to laugh a little. I pulled out Lorenzo’s keys and lifted the cash from his wallet, about five hundred in twenties. I handed it all to her. “Stay here for another ten minutes. You’ll find a Buick out front. Don’t try for the airports, they’re all jammed. Don’t take the Verrazano or try to go through Manhattan over to Jersey. Your best bet is to take the Whitestone or the Throg’s Neck up to Whiteplains and fly out of there, if you can.”

  “Command will send a jet for me. Or a helicopter.”

  “If they can. Do me a favor. Call Renning for me. Tell him I’m almost done at the Ganucci complex and I’ll want an extraction soon.”

  “Just come with me now,” she said.

  “I can’t, I’m not done yet.”

  “Yes, you are,” she told me. “Everything is finished.”

  Her nostrils flared. We smelled smoke. The city was already burning. It was all going to fall apart soon. But I couldn’t run out yet. I was still part of the family. I still had business to finish.

  I walked back out to Johnny Tormino, who stood with two of his bruisers, the three of them leaning against the grille of the Lincoln. The Lincoln belonged to Nicky, and I knew that by shining the hood with his ass, Johnny was subtly showing that he held the reins to the Ganucci syndicate now.

  Like me, Johnny had a touch of gray in his black hair. With him, it was mostly on the sides. With me it was just one thick curl right up front. Grandma Ganucci liked to walk past me and run her hand through my hair, flipping the white curl one way and then the other. It made her laugh deep in her stout short body. Like me, Johnny was in shape. We had to get our suits specially tailored to streamline our muscular statures and hide our shoulder holsters. Like me, Johnny was orphaned early. He lived with his grandmother in Red Hook and I lived with my aunt a block away. By twelve we were stealing cars to visit with Nicky at his home on the wealthiest corner of Prospect Park. None of us could remember how we met or became friends.

  Like me, Johnny was a born killer. At sixteen we went to work for Nicky’s father, Don Guiseppi Ganucci, the Ganooch. We were muscle at first and quickly moved up to enforcers and then ace hitters. At twenty-two, we’d both gone down for minor crimes nowhere near the worst of what we’d ever committed.

  He took a five year jolt in Sing. I said yes to Iraq.

  The feebs didn’t come after me immediately. They wanted to see what I was made of. They let me stew in the desert for a couple of years. The Army turned me into a sniper, a bomb expert, an interrogator, and a spy. I had a facility with desert languages and could infiltrate cells. I was Sicilian. I understood blood culture.

  I dreamed of lasagna, Coney Island, and crucifixes practically every night. The first three times the feebs asked me to rat on the Ganucci family I said no. The fourth time they showed up with proof that Don Guiseppi had ordered the hit on my parents.

  Turned out my father, an off the boat cobbler from Sicily, had a shop on a corner in Ozone Park, Queens. It was next door to a fish market front of some Russian mobster who was making a play against the Italians. It wasn’t Brooklyn, but the Ganooch still had investments in the area. Don Ganucci’s men were supposed to set fire to the market to teach the Ruskies a lesson about crossing turf.

  My father saw the flames and did the only thing a good American citizen who’d just taken his naturalization oath could do. He put out the fire. A week later he was driving into Manhattan to take my mother to see a Broadway show for their fourth wedding anniversary. My mother took two in the face. I was at home with the babysitter. The next day I was shipped off to my aunt in Red Hook.

  The feebs didn’t just want me to nab the Ganooch and his capos. They wanted me to rise through the ranks, probe all the operation activity, and give up everybody. All the families, all the mobs, all the syndicates, all the action across the entire country. The Chi boys, the Hollywood connection, the Memphis Mafia, the South American cartels, all of them.

  The evidence and documents could’ve been faked. It all could’ve been a big set-up designed to make me flip. But I knew it wasn’t. I suppose I’d always known there was a reason I’d been treated like a member of the family. I figured that Johnny’s parents had been iced for by the Ganooch for similar reasons. Unlike me, I knew he wouldn’t care.

  I thought of Don Guiseppi saying to me, “Tommaso, we are bound by blood. You’re as much a son to me as Niko.”

  I closed the files and told Renning, my new handler, a fat, smug, weak-willed cunt with eyes like a barracuda, “Sure.”

  Johnny Tormino stepped to me and his legbreakers followed. Technically they were my legbreakers too, but Johnny always kept a couple of guys especially close who were loyal to him above everybody else, even Nicky and the Ganooch.

  “Everything go okay, Tommy?”

  I nodded.

  “You leave any of them alive?”

  “You already know the answer to that.”

  “I do. You’re right, I do.” He glanced at my hands, searching for blood. He checked my jacket, my tie, my shirt. He was always impressed that a man could be killed without splattering blood and brains everywhere. “We don’t want to ruin what good will we’ve got with Finn. Did you do them ugly enough so we can blame it on the Russians or the Koreans?”

  I looked Johnny deep in his handsome grinning face. “You going to spend the rest of the day asking stupid questions?”

  “Maybe,” he said. The corners of his mouth hiked a little higher. He let out a titter Johnny never got angry. At least he never let anybody see him get angry. The smile never dropped, it was always there, even when he was asleep. “If I feel like it. Get any information from them?”

  “Yeah, Finn’s got a dirty D.A. in his pocket.”

  “Think that’ll help us at all?”

  “I’ll let you decide on that, Johnny.”

  He liked that. “What about the girl?” he asked.

  “They gang-raped her and cut her throat.”

  “Animals. Coming to Brooklyn to do that, makes us all look bad. What should we do with her?”

  “Leave her. Tell Finn we found his men dead. He’s probably got a few other mooks circling around the area. Tell him that the bookkeeper is in a safe house in Southwest DC.” I wrote an address down. “He can try again, if he feels like it.”

  I hoped Finn did give it another whirl. I hoped Viv was there when it happened. I hope she made the mooks eat their own fingers.

  “She didn’t say a word to Finn’s boys for four days, but ten minutes with you and she can’t shut up, eh, Tommy?”

  “The army was good for something,” I said.

  It had been like this since Nicky got sick. Johnny questioned my every move, pushed me as far as he thought he could, then a little further, wanting to see if I’d spring his way or stay loyal to the Ganooch. “The Gowanus is only two hundred yards away and there’s twenty tons of cinder blocks stacked right over here. You do what you want to do.”

  I climbed in the back of the Lincoln. Johnny lit a cigarette and stood there staring at the shack, as if he didn’t quite believe what I’d told him and he wanted to see for himself. I halfway hoped that he would. If he pushed through the corrugated metal door, he and his boys were dead. It didn’t matter to me. I hadn’t felt any real friendship for Johnny since we were kids, and maybe not even then. I’d always had the feeling that I’d one day wind up killing him, and I knew he felt the same way about me. Neither of us were worried about it, nor felt any ill will or anger about it. I think we both looked forward to it a little, wondering if this was the day, if this was the hour.

  His cell phone rang and he answered. He muttered under his breath and snapped the cell shut. “Come on, we’ve got to go. Niko is getting worse.”

  Johnny got in the passenger side. One enforcer got behind the wheel and peeled out while the other jumped in bac
k, looking like he was there to protect me.

  An emergency news report about the CDC started coming over the radio, but Johnny just pulled a face and slid in a CD of Deano crooning Amore.

  “Another epidemic of the bird flu or the swine flu or whatever the fuck new kinda flu they got floating around,” Johnny said. “It’s just another reason for the jigs to burn down their neighborhoods. Who gives a shit?”

  Johnny was smarter than that, but he liked to wrap himself in his ignorance like armor. His boys muttered assent and we sped across Brooklyn back to Prospect Park. Traffic was murder. It would take Viv hours to get to the Whitestone or Throg’s Neck. Dark gray and orange clouds hovered above parts of Manhattan, the other boroughs, Jersey. I hadn’t seen anything like it since Kuwait. I could taste the ash in the air, my throat thick with the stink of burning bodies. The hospital morgues and crematoriums were working overtime.

  We made it back to the Ganucci complex. The mansion and its outer buildings, with a ten-foot security wall around the entire area and twenty acres of prime real estate within, had always been fortress-like, but in recent years Nicky and the Don had really gone paranoid. There were guards everyplace, walking the perimeter with dogs. Nobody but me found it ironic that a church, convent, and Catholic high school stood less than a quarter mile away. Maybe my sense of humor was a little off.

  The sick huddled around the store fronts. The dying and doomed laid out on the front steps of brownstones while nuns and priests held out water for them to sip and tried to feed them thin soup. There were small clashes and breakouts of violence. That was only going to get worse. The nearby cemeteries held dozens of funerals every day. They couldn’t prepare a mass for each of the dead. They read off names, said prayers, and rang the bells constantly. We drove past and I watched a woman being chased down the street by three shambling men in ragged clothes.

  The Lincoln pulled through the gates and raced up to the main house. I stepped from the car expecting Johnny at my side but he held back. I wondered if he was going to make his play today. There wasn’t going to be much time left to give it a go, and even if he did take over the syndicate, it wasn’t going to matter much soon. The economy was falling to shit. Money was going to be worthless if things kept heading in the direction they were going. A part of me wondered if this was all because we’d brought back something from the middle east ten thousand years old that had destroyed civilizations far wider and mightier than ours before us.

  I rushed into the house, down the lengthy cherry-wood paneled corridors and up the immense staircase. I could hear the old women on the second floor sobbing and whimpering, the nuns muttering novenas. Nick’s door was open. A couple dozen people assembled around him, all dressed in black. The Ganooch wasn’t among them.

  Nicky raised a withered, pale hand and aimed a near-skeletal finger at me. The bite on his cheek oozed green beneath the bandages and stank like the dirtiest corner of hell. His breathing came in ragged gasps and he could barely manage to pant my name.

  “Tommy.”

  His voice came from the other side of death. I’d heard voices like that before, in the hospitals in the desert, on the streets of Kuwait. Men so close to death you could swear it was their ghosts talking to you.

  I pressed my way through his gathered family, the worried capos, the useless doctors, the frazzled nuns, the young priests, went to my knee beside his bed, and said, “I’m here, Nick.”

  His slack mouth tried to frame words, but nothing came out. I crowded closer and put my ear to his lips. I had my own agenda. I whispered, “Where’s your father? Where’s the don?” The muscles in Nick’s face didn’t even have enough motor control for him to look surprised. He breathed through his teeth and the delicate wisps of his white stringy hair blew across my cheek. His skin was so thin now that it had split along the seams of his face, leaving his crows’ feet and laugh lines crusted with dried blood.

  The virus, if it was a virus, ran counter to everything that medical science understood about infection. The CDC hadn’t jumped on the threat fast enough and the world was going to go down because of it.

  Niko Ganucci wasn’t even thirty years old yet and he looked like he was a weathered seventy. Two weeks ago we’d played three games of racquetball together and then gone out to dinner at Ventimiglio’s where Nicky picked up the best looking girl in the whole place. He always got the best looking girl in every place we went in. He was handsome, slender, fit, exuded real presence, had a boyish charm, had tough guy cool, loved to laugh, and was nearly as rich as an Arabian prince.

  He was trying hard to concentrate past his pain and despair. His eyes focused on me. They were so bloodshot I couldn’t even tell what color they were anymore. He sucked air like a dying fish. The nuns wailed. Grandma Ganucci howled. The enforcers all looked damned spooked. They were all trying to take shallow breaths so as not to breathe in whatever Nick was breathing out. Nicky said my name again.

  “Protect…la…famiglia…” he said, raising his right hand up a few inches.

  I took it and said, “I promise, Nick.”

  Nicky had heart. He had resolve, strength, and he was full of adoration for his family. He could afford it, even now, minutes or only seconds from death. He was surrounded by people who admired, feared, and loved him. I’d never be so lucky. Most of us wouldn’t be. I wondered what he’d think if he had any notion that I was going to burn his family to the ground and kill his father up close. Maybe with a blade, maybe with a .22 to the forehead so the bullet wound ricochet around inside his skull and turn his brain to whipped pudding. Maybe with my bare hands.

  Nick huffed more air. The soaked bandage didn’t have enough adhesive to stay in place and began to slide down his face. The ragged wound of the sick altar boy had become necrotic and the flesh had turned black. I could see his perfect capped teeth through his torn cheek. The smell grew so bad that everyone near him went into a short coughing spell and backed up a few feet, even his mother. Sicilian theatrics called for her to throw herself on his chest and scream, but Ma Ganucci wasn’t having any of it. She held a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. Others gagged. The nuns and priests continued with their vigilant prayers, choking. Somebody opened a window. The stink of smoke rushed into the room. It wasn’t worse but it was just as bad.

  I watched Nicky’s mouth. I kept an eye on the muscles bunched beneath his ears. I wanted to know a split second ahead of time if he made a move to bite me. I could snap his spindly neck easily.

  I thought about putting Nicky out of his misery. I didn’t think anybody would try to stop me or hold me accountable. It would be a mercy. I checked the door. Johnny Tormino still hadn’t come in. I stood and reached for my piece. Nick gurgled out one final breath and then let go at last.

  A part of me went with him. Grandma Ganucci went totally shitstorm crazy and began to scream and hurl herself across the room, calling down all the saints. There were a fucking million of them. She knew them all by name. It went on and on. The rest of the clan tried to calm her but she went two-forty of stocky muscle and broke free easily, slamming into furniture. The crucifixes nailed to the walls nearly shook loose. Her rosary whipped around her like a single engine motor. She could snap the neck of a gorilla with those arms. For fifty years she’d been getting up at dawn to cook for the family, the consigliere, the accountants, the capos, all the legbreakers, the hitters, the torpedoes, stirring pots of sauce and making fresh cannoli and zeppoles every day. She ran through the family and knocked them around, her cries shaking the reinforced glass in the window frames.

  When she finally got to me, I grabbed her in a bear hug. She resisted and brayed in my ear. It was like trying to hold onto a hurricane. For a second I thought she might actually break free, and then all at once she went completely slack. I held her up and carried her over to a fancy antique chair in the corner. She said, “Grazie, Tommaso,” and passed out.

  One of the doctors checked her. He got some smelling salts out of his black bag and Ma Ganu
cci said, “Let her sleep. She’s been shrieking for three days.”

  He sighed and returned the smelling salts to his bag. After that, he felt the need to do a final examination and call time of death. He put a stethoscope to Nicky’s chest and tried to get a blood pressure reading. He checked his watch and wrote a few lines on his little chart. He stood and raised the top sheet over Nicky’s head.

  “We’ve got to remove the body from the premises immediately,” he said. “Now. The ME’s wagon is waiting downstairs. We’ll prepare him for the funeral.”

  I caught Ma Ganucci’s eye. We both knew that meant they were going to burn him as soon as possible. I wasn’t sure who else knew or wanted to know or even cared. The fear was palpable. So was the relief. Everybody was thankful it was Nicky and not them. Everyone was glad we were safe inside the complex and not out on the rest of the streets of New York. We had provisions. We had ammo. We had shooters and icers. For the first time I was moderately thankful for what I’d been taught in Iraq.

  I gestured to a couple of the thugs. They wrapped Nicky’s corpse tightly in the blankets and carried him out. The doctor and I followed.

  In the well-lit hallway, Don Guiseppe, Johnny Tormino, and Cole Portman, the Ganooch’s consigliere, stood looking at the muted wine-colored carpet. The three of them had been talking business outside his door while Nicky died. I should’ve been with them, listening in. I’d made a bad play. I wondered what it would cost me.

  The Ganooch watched them carry his dead son away and called, “Don’t drive him anywhere until I get a chance to say goodbye.”

  The doctor started to argue, but the Ganooch quieted him with a glance. The thugs proceeded down the staircase, and the doc moved behind the body like he was afraid the venting toxic fluids might eat into his brain.

  Don Guiseppe looked at me and opened his arms. I went to him. We embraced. Our chests touched. Our hearts pounded like boxers slugging it out. I thought of the parents I had never known. I thought of a Sicilian shoemaker who never had a chance. I wanted to tell the man to take his wife and son and run back home across the sea.