by Erik Carter
El Vacío unlocked the trunk, popped it open. Now it was time to make a statement.
The thugs sensed what he was doing.
“Hey, now,” the driver said, looking at his associate and putting up a mediating hand. “We just want to talk.”
El Vacío reached into the trunk.
The other two looked at each other again. Frightened. They pulled revolvers from their overcoats.
And El Vacío grabbed the Cordoba’s tire iron.
Chapter Fifteen
The sun hid in the clouds, peeking out here and there. The sky was pale gray but streaked with bright blue, tinges of gold.
Dale had the windows down as he drove along the Pacific coast on the Great Highway in Outer Sunset. He was headed south toward Britta Eaton’s home, and he was driving Arancia, his magnificent De Tomaso Pantera—a ravenous, hungry, Italian sports car. His perfect machine. His faithful companion. Though Dale usually liked to drive her with a zestful, high-speed passion—and Arancia sure seemed to like it that way as well—they were enjoying a nice, semi-relaxed drive as the slightly cool, slightly moist ocean air swam through the cabin. Dale’s assignment in San Francisco was frenetic and time-sensitive, so he was going to have little time to sleep, let alone relax. But he was only a mile away from Britta Eaton’s address, and he was running early. He could afford a couple minutes to slow down before plunging back into the madness.
The breeze felt great, flowing through his hair and between the buttons of his shirt. Though he labeled himself a T-shirt-and-jeans guy, Dale wasn’t averse to mixing it up every now and then, and today he wore a light brown, button-up shirt with a faint paisley pattern. It was lightweight and comfy, and it seemed appropriate to his current environs.
While Dale had never been much of a big city person, this first visit of his to San Fran was certainly giving him the warm-fuzzies. New Orleans was a favorite city of Dale’s, and he’d often paraphrased the famous Tony Bennett song about San Francisco, saying that he’d left a small bit of his heart in the Big Easy. Now, having been to the City by the Bay, he knew that, just like Tony, he’d be leaving a piece of his heart behind here as well.
Because this was a really cool place.
Arancia fit right in, too. There was something very California about his orange, Italian, thoroughbred beast, and as they drove down the Great Highway, Dale pictured what she must look like from the outside, zipping along the coast. For a moment, his mind’s eye was an aerial camera, watching himself and Arancia, his elbow hanging out the window, as they smoothly traced the Pacific.
A bit later, Dale pulled up at Britta Eaton’s home. It was a bright blue, two-story house with an entrance and garage door on the ground floor and windows above, styled much like the other houses along the highway. And, like the other houses, it was built directly touching its neighbors, one continuous line of house broken up by the occasional street.
When he went in, his eyes immediately absorbed a general sense of disarray. In terms of dirt and grime, it wasn’t the filthiest place he’d ever been, but it was certainly one of the most disorganized. Somewhere beneath all the piles must have been a couple tables and some furniture, and the rolling chair in which Britta was seated faced a mound of chaos in which there was most likely a desk. All around Dale were stacks of boxes and folders and a tennis racket and a guitar and a tire and some dried flowers. A cat had greeted him at the door, and after he had stroked its head, it disappeared behind a filing cabinet. Every now and then Dale saw its little face poking out from its secret tunnels in the clutter.
Britta had requested that Dale call her by her first name. She was in her sixties. Dark gray, curly hair. Wild, alive eyes and a twinkling, almost anxious smile. Roundish figure. An overall cherub-like appearance. She looked a bit like Santa Claus’ wife, had she been coerced into an antacid-pink sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans.
She handed Dale a mug of tea. On the side of the mug was, Provo, Utah. Great American Mac & Cheese Cook-Off, 1966. How perfectly eclectic. Dale had just met her, but he already recognized that the quirky mug fit Britta’s personalities to a T. Dynamic personalities were like that—they announced themselves fully and without a damn thing to hide.
Britta took another sip from her own mug—this one with an image of a jack-o’-lantern—and she looked over the photos Dale had given her, the crime scene photos of the two messages that Felix had left. She set the photos on top of an open binder of baseball cards on the footstool in front of her.
“He’s right,” she said. “478 was a lie”
“How’s that?” Dale said.
“The number sounds a little low, doesn’t it? Only 478 people dead from a catastrophic earthquake in one of the nation’s biggest cities? Try 3,000.”
Dale almost couldn’t respond. “Wait… Did you say three thousand?”
Britta nodded. “Makes a lot better sense, doesn’t it?”
Dale’s head was spinning. Clearly inaccuracies were corrected in history all the time. But how could the numbers be that disparate?
“How did you figure this out?”
Britta turned her chair around and faced the desk mound, turned back around with a cardboard box brimming with copy papers.
“By every means possible. Listings in newspapers, state histories. Death records, voting records, military records, church records, tax records. I reached out to historical societies and genealogical groups all across the country, tried to find people who had gaps in their family histories.”
“And you blew 478 completely out of the water.”
“It was never 478 to begin with. Early on there were 378 bodies in the morgue, so the medical examiner just added a hundred to that number to make the total sound more believable. And that became the official count.”
“You gotta be kidding me...”
“There wasn’t even a list of the dead.”
Dale reached out and grabbed the photos of Felix’s messages. He looked at the message from the first crime that Felix had committed before the break out.
“‘Tell the truth about the quake.’” He flipped to the second image. “‘A lie…’” He let his mind wander for a moment, staring past Britta. Then he looked at her again. “Felix seems to think that the inaccurate death total was somehow orchestrated by someone.”
“I would be inclined to agree,” she said and plunged her hand back into the boxful of research. She rummaged around for a moment, wrenched her lips to the side as she reached down low into the box, and pulled out a stack of papers clipped together at the top. She removed the clip and handed the stack to Dale.
It was a collection of black-and-white photocopies of post-earthquake images. Badly damaged buildings. Utter destruction. They looked like post-bombing war photographs, London during the Blitz. Dale flipped through them. A wry smile came to the corners of Britta’s lips, and she stood up, walked behind him.
“Anything look funny about those pictures to you?” she said.
“Funny?” Dale said. “Not in the slightest. Looks like a whole lot of carnage to me.”
“A lot, yes,” she said. “But what if I told you there was even more damage than is in the images?”
Dale glanced up at her, raised an eyebrow.
She pointed to one of the ruined buildings. “Just look at the windows in that building there.”
Dale got his face closer to the image.
And he saw it.
“I’ll be damned. The shading looks slightly different in this row of windows than those,” he said, moving a finger between two sets of intact windows.
Britta nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right. The photos have been touched up, making the damage look less severe.”
Dale set the copies in his lap. “A cover-up…” He thought for another moment. “San Francisco was corrupt. Controlled by Abe Ruef and administered through his mayor, Handsome Gene Schmitz. It would make sense that the cover-up went from the top down. But what would Schmitz and Ruef have to gain by concealing the tr
uth about the quake?”
Britta sat back down. “San Francisco needed to appear like a city of quick repair, a vibrant comeback story. How would they have piqued the interest of future investors if their city was seen as the epicenter of death that it was? And, remember—there was a world’s fair coming to town in a few years.”
“Right,” Dale said. “The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.”
The fair had been a celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal, and it left the city of San Francisco with one of its most celebrated and beautiful landmarks—the Palace of Fine Arts.
“And don’t forget the railroad,” Britta said.
“Southern Pacific?”
“Mmm-hmm. Southern Pacific controlled both political parties in California. My thought is that Schmitz plotted with Southern Pacific to downplay the disaster so as not to scare off any financing to rebuild the city.”
Dale nodded.
Like many large companies, there was corruption in Southern Pacific Railroad’s corporate history. But Southern Pacific had gone on to do many amazing things as well. They founded hospitals in several cities, and recently they’d formed a telecommunications network with advanced microwave and fiber optic technologies. They named the network the Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telephony. Or, Sprint.
Britta sat her mug of tea on a stack of folders. It wavered for a moment, and she made sure it was steady. “But don’t blame the government for everything. There was likely a lot of insurance fraud as well. Folks’ coverage didn’t extend to earthquake damage, but it would cover fire damage. So what sort of claims do you think they filed with their insurance companies? And then there was looting, too. There was so much looting that Schmitz made a public proclamation giving police shoot-to-kill powers. Even some of the California National Guard members who had been called in to help were reported to have looted.”
The wealth of information that Britta had provided made a cannonball splash in the pool of research Dale had done that morning. His mind furiously mulled over everything. Connections began to form.
And a crazy thought came to him.
He bolted out of his chair.
“May I use your phone?”
Dale stood in Britta’s kitchen, awkwardly propping himself against the cabinets—which were painted a bright, canary yellow—to keep his balance among the towering stacks of National Geographic magazines around him. The cat—who went by the name Edamame, Britta had told him—had reappeared and was rubbing against his ankle happily.
“Yorke, listen to me. I know what Jonathan Fair is doing.”
Dale heard Yorke breathe in. She clicked her tongue.
“I hope you’re onto something, Conley, because Fair struck again. Robbed a pool hall this morning.”
“Let me guess. The pool hall was another Alfonsi front operation.”
“Well, yes, but how do you—”
“I have a pattern to track down Fair,” Dale said. “When he was first arrested, Fair was Felix Lyons, thinking he was a journalist living in 1906. That’s all they could get out of him. He refused to tell them about his supposed mission. But we know that Felix thinks the earthquake casualty numbers were a lie, and from what I just learned, he’s undoubtedly correct. Like I said, reality is always the most important thing.”
“Get to the point, Conley.”
“Felix’s first message, ‘Tell the truth about the quake’ was clearly aimed at someone he thought was involved in a cover-up. All the places he’s hit so far have been connected to Angelo Alfonsi, a modern-day criminal boss with a stranglehold on San Francisco—much like the political boss, Abe Ruef, who had a stranglehold on the city in 1906. Felix is a whistleblower; he’s trying to inform the public about the earthquake cover-up. And he’s doing so by attacking Abe Ruef.”
“Which means, he’s actually...” Yorke trailed off as she was clearly putting the pieces together.
“Exactly. Somehow Felix’s interpretation of our modern world has substituted Alfonsi for Ruef,” Dale said. “Felix Lyons is attacking Angelo Alfonsi.”
Chapter Sixteen
Paulie waived the men off. They exited the study, leaving him and Danny standing by the desk with the three photographs.
Paulie slapped the photos on the surface of the desk. The first photo showed Marv, on the cement, his head smashed in. Next was Bram, hands over his stomach, drenched in blood. A gunshot wound. The third photo was of their vehicle. It was crushed in the back, rear window shattered. A symbol had been scratched into the passenger door.
Danny leaned over and studied the symbol. “It’s El Vacío...”
Paulie didn’t need his son to decipher it. He was more than familiar with the marking. Everyone in the darker realms of the world recognized it.
Paulie had only considered employing the services of El Vacío once, when there was a particularly problematic leader within the Japanese Yakuza who had been giving him grief at the docks. But, even then, Paulie had found a way to handle the issue in-house. He would rather go his entire career without associating with El Vacío. It was like signing a contract with the Devil himself.
Paulie shoved the photos aside, rolled out his desk chair and sat. The springs squeaked beneath his mass.
Anger surged through him, something like he’d never felt before. How could Angelo Alfonsi be so bold? Bringing someone like El Vacío into the fold ... to hunt down his son. He put his hands on the desk and saw that his fingertips were quivering. He squeezed them into fists.
Danny picked up the photos and stared. There was concern in his eyes but almost a bit of twisted admiration for El Vacío’s handiwork.
“What does this mean?” he said.
“It means the Italians have brought one of the world’s deadliest assassins to San Francisco to kill your brother, Danny.” He looked at his son. “And we have to take immediate action.”
Chapter Seventeen
Marco strode confidently down the hall. He held his chin up proud, back straight, and had Simona on his arm. He didn’t care what anyone thought about his brazenly walking with her as she wore another one of her ludicrous dresses—skin-tight, halfway up her thighs, everything bouncing and shaking. He didn’t give a damn who he pissed off.
She gave his arm a little squeeze. “This is soooo amazing, Marky. You told him your plan?”
Marco shook his head. He didn’t turn to her as he replied, just kept his self-assured gaze facing forward. “That’s the thing. I haven’t told him yet. He came to this decision on his own.”
Simona squeezed his arm again and put her head on his shoulder. Her big, curly hair pressed against his cheek. The smell of her hairspray and mousse was overwhelming. “So proud of you.”
At the end of the hall, the other men were entering the conference room—shaking hands, straightening ties—and Marco could see them stealing glances at him as he approached.
Let them look.
As he made it to the conference room door, he guided Simona away by the lower back, gave her a little smack to the butt.
Moments later, he was seated at the conference table. A few seats away from him was Matt, and when Marco looked at him, his brother gave him a small smile and a respectful nod that said, I knew you could do it.
Marco felt all those other eyes upon him again. Across the table was Carlo Torrisi, the consigliere, who had been one of Marco’s long-time skeptics. They made eye contact. The old man stared upon him for a moment. It was clear that Torrisi was dubious of his presence at the table. Some of the capos also eyed him with disdain, though they tried to hide it.
Marco couldn’t care less. This crisis with Jonathan Fair was Marco’s opportunity to shine, and someday Matt would undoubtedly be running the show, which meant that everyone but Matt himself would be working for Marco.
So they could stare all they wanted.
Papà stepped into the room, closed the door behind him. Immaculate suit, silver hair slicked back. He took his seat at the head of the table and lo
oked upon his men for a moment before speaking.
“We’re at war. If there was any doubt that Jonathan Fair is competent and is attacking us, that’s been completely erased now. He hit us again. One of our pool halls. Took cash. Left another message.” He took in a long breath and leaned forward, crossed his arms on the table, swung his gaze over all the other men, making sure they saw the gravity in his eyes. “Unfortunately, that’s not our worst piece of news. El Vacío has been seen in the city.”
Gasps from the men. They sat up taller, looked at each other.
Torrisi spoke. “You didn’t—”
“Of course I didn’t,” Papà snapped. Marco had never seen him be so rude to Torrisi, to whom he was always very respectful.
“Then who did?” Torrisi said.
Papà shook his head. “Yakuza. Or the Chinese, perhaps. Someone else who has beef with the Fairs, someone using this Second Alcatraz fiasco as an opportunity to take Jonathan out, make a statement. Or it’s someone who has beef with us, trying to convince Big Paul that we’re the ones who hired him. But now’s not the time for speculation. What we know for certain is the Fairs’ prodigal son is out there attacking us. And we have to strike back hard and fast. Starting this very afternoon.”
Angelo’s attention now fell directly on Marco.
He sat up taller.
“And I’m glad to welcome my son, Marco, back to the table for this operation.”
Marco felt prideful, vengeful as all those eyes looked upon him again.
Papà continued. “Marco will be heading a team for Oliver.”
Marco started. His eyes flicked to Oliver and back to his father.
“You’re putting me under one of the capos?” he said. “I was already a capo myself.”
There was tension at the table. Shifting in chairs. Movement of pens and paper. Hints of stifled laughs.
