Paul and Maureen Vasco never raised a hand to each other, but they sure could yell. A boy got used to covering his head with a pillow to get his rest. The next morning everything would be fine.
Peter didn't really believe that story about outracing a high-powered automobile with a lubberly truck. It was just the kind of tall tale a father made up to impress a son he knew was drifting away from him. It was sad and a little pathetic, but things changed and a man couldn't stop them. What concerned him more was he didn't believe that Paul had known John Scalise and Albert Anselmi only from his beer route. Assassins were specialists. They didn't moonlight, guarding shipments and strong-arming reluctant customers. He'd learned that much from studying the Capone file.
Who was Paul Anthony Vasco, and how had he come to be friends with coldblooded killers?
"Coffee, gentlemen?" The waiter cleared their dishes onto his tray. Peter jumped; the young Cuban moved soundlessly on gum soles.
"Another Schlitz for me," said his father. "I seen them teeny cups you use. They can make a pot of Chock Full o' Nuts last for the duration," he told Peter. "Coffee'd be nice, thanks."
The cup could have belonged to a child's tea set. The waiter poured slowly from his silver carafe, looking a little nervous at the charade. Peter had noticed that serving containers had been shrinking, to fool the eye into seeing life as normal. If the war went on long enough, everyone would be eating from the head of a pin. "Flea couldn't drown in it." Paul drank from a fresh beer glass.
"What about it, Dad? Will you introduce me?"
"If you'd read them Sunday supplements, you'd know his house is protected like a U.S. convoy. If we was to drive up to the gate they'd shoot me second."
"Why second?"
"You're the bigger target."
"I didn't say not to call first."
"Sure. Just look him up under 'Gangsters.' "
"Why not 'Al Brown, Antique Dealer'?"
Paul swallowed, nodded, looked across at the lunch crowd piling up in the entrance. "Appears I do talk too much when I'm drinking. You were too young to remember that."
"There must be someone you can call. You said you had connections."
"I only said it so you wouldn't think I'm just a harbor rat."
"I don't believe you."
"Why should I call? It's been four Father's Days since I got so much as a card."
"That was a mistake. But you should have told me about Mom."
Paul raised his glass from the table, but he didn't drink. "You know that painter, Norman Rockwell?"
"Not personally."
"Nobody knows everybody else, like you think I know Al Capone. I was asking, you know the stuff he paints, all that warm family shit?"
"I've seen The Saturday Evening Post."
"My theory is he's an orphan."
Peter sipped coffee. It was as weak as expected.
"This means a lot to you?"
Peter looked at his father, still looking off into the void. "It does."
"You're at Blessed Sacrament, you said?"
"Our Lady of Redemption."
"Right, the other one. Stick by the phone. I ain't leaving no messages with no altar boy."
"Thanks, Dad."
"I ain't promising nothing. No, that ain't true. Nothing's just what I am promising. Last time I talked with anybody from the old days, we was friends with Germany and Japan."
Peter didn't know what to say to that. He didn't try. He clicked his cup in his saucer and smiled.
"So. If you'd never left the Old Country, my name would be Pietro Bascano."
"Be a different person, though. Back in Strongoli we didn't know no Irish girls."
It was getting on toward train time. Peter paid the bill, tipping 10 percent. His father watched him return the rest of the money to his wallet. "I didn't know the Lord's work paid overtime."
"Travel expenses. I have to account for every penny."
"I was just kidding about the pope. My treat next time; not here, though. There's a spaghetti joint six blocks away serves meatballs a-size-a oranges. Ralph Capone's got a half interest, so red points are no problem."
"Did you ever meet Ralph?" Hoover had said Al's brother kept track of old acquaintances.
"Not to talk to. There was six brothers in Chicago, all of 'em big as the Board of Trade. You couldn't hardly tell one from another on the street. Brooklyn wops breed like guinea pigs. Guinea pigs, get it?"
He said he got it.
There was a streetcar stop on the corner. Paul told him where to transfer to the train station and shook his hand. They weren't at the hugging stage. Peter doubted they ever would be. But then as late as that morning he hadn't thought they'd get to the point where they shook hands.
"The interurbans ain't air-conditioned," Paul said. "You want to spruce up before you meet the boss. Father Cyril, you said?"
"Kyril. With a K."
"Sure he ain't a bolshevik?"
"Doesn't go with the job."
His father held up an index finger. His eyes were as bright as sun on steel. "You ever drop something?"
Peter waited.
"Make sure he's out of the room before you bend over to pick it up."
"I don't think Norman Rockwell has a painting for that."
The streetcar braked with a shrill squeal. An elderly couple got off, a matched set with shirttails outside their shorts, cocoa straw hats, blue-tinted glasses, and sandals; the man completed his ensemble with calf-length black socks. They were burned as dark as palm bark and wore cameras on straps around their necks.
Paul Vasco laughed in delayed reaction to his son's joke; and now Peter had one for all the fingers of one hand. He hoisted his valise aboard and plunked a token into the slot. He looked out the window, but his father had turned and started back toward the docks in his stoop-shouldered crouch.
Our Lady of Redemption was built on the same gothic design as Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, whose steeple Peter Vasco had spotted from the train, but much smaller, as if it were a neighborhood branch of the faith. Particolored birds he'd seen in Chicago and the District only when summer was in full swing perched on buttresses preening themselves for the northern migration. Their waste formed stalactites that were difficult to distinguish from the elaborate stonework, but apart from their presence the place might have belonged to any medieval village still standing in bombed-out Europe.
A novice wearing what must have been the only face in southern Florida untouched by the sun apologized, saying the pastor was engaged at present. He took his valise and led him across a courtyard paved with limestone and more splatter to the rectory. This was yet a smaller reproduction of the same building. Vasco was left in an eight-by-ten room with an iron bed, a pitcher and basin on a washstand with a cracked marble top, and a narrow wardrobe scaly from too many coats of inexpensive varnish with no sanding in between. A barred window looked out on a spiked iron fence. It was a mixed neighborhood, Cuban and colored, and the security precautions had obviously been installed to protect churchmen from the parish.
He stripped to the waist, filled the basin, and washed his face and under his arms with cold water and a cake of yellow soap. After drying off, he put on a clean shirt and fresh dickey and inspected himself for respectability in the tiny shaving mirror. He had a full face and his hair was beginning to thin. Had he inherited nothing from his father, other than his sense of irony?
He was peeling a thread of lint from his suit coat when the novice returned. "Father Kyril can see you now."
The room the young man took him to, at the end of a tapestry runner in a dusty-smelling hallway, was twice as large, but hardly less cramped. It doubled as storage for cartons of pamphlets and stationery. A chunky desk with a leather top claimed much of the remaining space, leaving little traveling room for the chair in front and the chair in back. Battered books with Roman and Cyrillic titles crowded a pair of glazed cases and there was about the place a moldy odor of old brandy, stale cigars, and melted wax. That la
st was universal, a feature of rectories everywhere. He wondered if the Vatican furnished pump sprayers filled with the scent. "Father Vasco. Sergei Kyril. Welcome to Redemption."
The man was all right angles in black broadcloth, a square hole punched by a railroad conductor. From hips to shoulders to the top of his head the lines of his body didn't vary by so much as a degree from the desk he stood behind. His collar was a chalk-white slash to tell the killer where to cut his throat.
"Thank you." Would no one on this assignment smile when he met him?
But when they sat down, the pastor was courteous. "You're young. That's not surprising. Everyone between twenty-five and fifty is in the military. The archdiocese is recalling men from retirement to take up the slack. A ninety-year-old priest in Tampa offered to horsewhip a boy for confessing to the sin of masturbation. He's back home now, bullying his roses."
Vasco said nothing. He couldn't tell if Kyril was amused. His speech had a burring rumble one heard in Balkan neighborhoods, where laughter was rationed like sugar.
"My instructions are specific. You're to live here and come and go as you like. I'm to assign no duties. I won't ask why. Monsignor Donahue at Blessed Sacrament and Bishop O'Meara in Chicago belonged to the same class at the seminary, which is a bond only God can break."
"It's a Home Front project." Vasco repeated what he'd been told to say. "Civilian morale—"
"Not interested. Under normal circumstances I'd register a protest, but it so happens I'm awaiting my orders from the Corps of Chaplains. Nothing here has relevance when you've been promised a commission on an aircraft carrier."
"Congratulations, Father."
"Don't press your luck." Kyril opened a drawer and placed a key on the desk. "It seems we're a transportation service as well as a hotel. Brother Thomas will show you where the Ford is kept. I assume you'll furnish fuel. We'd use it more often if we could turn water into gasoline."
"Thank you." A drop of sweat trickled down under his collar. Kyril's blue-gray gaze followed it. He plucked at his own. It made a strumming sound.
"Celluloid. Our laundry bills are high enough as it is."
"Yes, Father."
"That reminds me. Your father called. When he asked if I'd read The Communist Manifesto I was inclined to believe him."
"I'm sorry."
"Mine butchered peasants in the service of the Czar. You're to call him at this number." He tore a sheet off a pad, put it next to the key, and rose. "I'll give you a few minutes. This is the only telephone."
Vasco stood and thanked him again. Kyril went out, cassock rustling, and drew the door shut behind him. Vasco lifted the heavy black receiver and dialed the operator.
A woman answered in Fort Lauderdale; the famous Sharon. When he identified himself she said, "Sec." A moment later his father came on. "You got a business card?"
"Yes." The same printer the Bureau used for its fugitive circulars had provided him with a hundred cards bearing his name and new title and the number at Our Lady of Redemption.
"Give it to the guard in front. He might tell you come back later and he might tell you get lost. Do what he says either way."
"Thanks, Dad."
"Don't thank the old man for asking somebody not to shoot his son on sight. That goes with the territory."
"I appreciate it anyway." Who had he asked? He envied Sergei Kyril his apathy. "Your boss sounds like a cossack."
"I think his father was one."
"Tell him about yours?"
"Did you have to ask him if he's a communist?"
"You rather I asked if he diddles boys?"
"I'll call you later, Dad."
Brother Thomas, the pale novice, unlatched the doors of a large toolshed on the church lot and dragged them open. Inside was a Model T opera coupe, a tin telephone booth balanced on a chassis that looked as if it would bend in half when Vasco stepped on the running board. He used a notched stick to check the tank for gas, then replaced the seat cushion and worked the crank, something he hadn't done since Cicero. He was rusty, but the Ford was not. The motor made two false starts and chucked into life.
Hoover's people had given him plenty of stamps, but rather than draw attention to himself at the station he asked for two gallons only, and picked up a complimentary map of the Miami area. He had the address memorized: 93 Palm Avenue.
The directions were easy: a left, a right, another left.
He drove east toward open sky, then south, with nothing outside his window but ocean and gulls and watercraft and bell buoys ducking and bobbing like shadow boxers. The sun westering behind hotels under construction cast purple fingers that followed the tide out to sea, reaching for the sinister violent line of the horizon. He saw no sunbathers, no one splashing in the surf. The war had whittled away at all that.
He turned left onto the County Causeway. The toll man—Hoover said he was a public employee in Capone's pocket, the latest in a long line—made change from his quarter without expression and raised the gate. In his rearview mirror, Vasco saw him on the telephone inside his booth. He'd have been told to report when a man came through wearing a clerical collar.
His grip tightened on the wooden hoop of the steering wheel. He wasn't in the war room any longer, pushing toy tanks across a hypothetical battlefield. He'd passed into enemy territory, and the enemy was watching.
He drove over empty air and Biscayne Bay, bumped over a metal grid, and was on Palm Island, an oblong built by man from excavated swamp, rusted automobiles, and crushed houses, with tons of sand added for presentation. It felt hardly more substantial than the thin strip of reinforced concrete that led to it from the mainland.
Nothing identified the estate, only a solid block wall that permitted no view of the habitation behind it and a spiked iron gate buttressed by heavy oaken portals, like a Spanish redoubt or a prison in the Mediterranean. He hadn't been looking for a homely rural mailbox with capone stenciled on it, but on the other hand he hadn't expected the occupant to have stripped it of its street number to turn away uncertain assassins. Idling in the outside lane in front, he peered through the window until the ghosts of two numerals came into focus, a shade darker than the surrounding concrete, hammered by sun and blasted by salt: 93. Raised figures of brass or copper, recently pried away. Surveillance reports had recorded a descent into paranoia.
Well, he'd wanted a challenge.
He pulled as far as he could into the drive, set the parking brake, got out, and crunched through crushed limestone to a metal box containing a telephone, like a policeman's call box. He was connected the instant he lifted the receiver.
"Yes?"
That surprised him. The tone was almost polite. He'd anticipated a surly "Yeah?", a gutter accent.
"Paul Vasco's son, here to pay his respects to Mr. Capone." At the last moment he'd chosen family over church.
"Wait there, please."
The sun slipped perceptibly in the interval. A puff of Atlantic air touched the back of one ear like a damp breath.
There was a sliding sound and a clack. A Judas window had opened in the left portal, but the face behind it was blurred by steel mesh. He felt himself scrutinized. The panel shuttled back into place. A bolt slid and banged, the portal pivoted inward, and a man in a blue serge suit unlocked the iron gate on that side and opened it just wide enough for Vasco to pass through. The man clanged it shut behind him, sealing the visitor between himself and the gate.
Vasco had a card ready and handed it to him. The man glanced at it, then slid it into a handkerchief pocket. "I have to check you for weapons." He sounded apologetic.
"I was told just to leave my card."
"It will just take a minute."
Bewildered, he held his arms out while a pair of hands slid down his sides, patted his coat, grazed his groin, and continued down to his ankles inside and outside each leg. When the man squatted, something heavy in a reinforced inside breast pocket tugged his coat away from his chest, but his tailoring prevented anything from s
howing when he straightened. Vasco's hat was lifted from his head, a finger slid inside the leather sweatband and followed it all the way around. The man handed him the hat and stepped back. He was a few years older than Vasco, with wavy chestnut hair neatly barbered and freckles all over, even on his eyelids. His accent was American Midwest. This would be one of the licensed private detectives Hoover had mentioned, legally permitted by the State of Florida to carry a firearm.
"Thank you. You can drive up to the house." He pulled the iron gate back open.
Climbing onto the driver's seat, Vasco had a panicky urge to reverse directions and drive back to Our Lady of Redemption. He'd prepared himself for a courtesy call, not a face-to-face meeting with the ogre, not the first day. But he shifted into low gear, let out the clutch, and crept forward past a gatehouse as large as all the apartments his family had crowded into put together.
The main house stood in a grove of royal palms, two pink stucco stories of Moorish design with a green tile roof. All his life, it seemed, he'd heard stories of the gangster's exotic Xanadu, a palace of Sodom, but it seemed modest compared to many he'd seen on the drive there. Was this the scene of all those wild revels, women squealing and men discharging Thompsons from balconies, that had disturbed President Herbert Hoover's sleep as a guest at the J. C. Penney estate, and resolved him to demand Capone's destruction? To begin with, there were no balconies.
A mosaic walk led to the front door. He pressed a coral button. Stately chimes reverberated deep inside the house.
He expected another bodyguard, more brutish, as must be the case the closer he got to the center. A pretty colored girl opened the door. She wore black-and-white maid's livery with a lace cap over hair that reminded him of delicately carved mahogany. Her eyes were large and tawny in a face the golden shade of cognac.
She dropped into a light curtsy. "Please come in, Father. Mrs. Capone is expecting you."
The Confessions of Al Capone Page 8
