by Don Winslow
“I’m just saying . . . you know.”
Callan lets loose of him. “Yeah, I know.”
He knows.
It’s a lot harder to walk out than to walk in. But he’s doing it, he’s walking away, and every day he gets more distance. Every day he gets closer to getting this new life, and he likes this new life. He likes getting up and going to work, working hard and then coming home to Siobhan. Having dinner, going to bed early, getting up and doing it all over again.
He and Siobhan are getting along great. They even talk about getting married.
Then Neill Demonte dies.
“I have to go to the funeral,” Callan says.
“Why?” Siobhan asks.
“To show respect.”
“To some gangster?”
She’s pissed off. She’s angry and scared. That he’ll slip back into all of it. Because he’s struggling with all the old demons in his life and now it seems like’s he just walking right back into it after he’s worked so hard to walk away.
“I’ll just go, pay my respects and come back,” he says.
“How about paying me some respect?” she asks. “How about respecting our relationship?”
“I do respect it.”
She throws up her hands.
He’d like to explain it to her but he doesn’t want to scare her. That his absence would be misunderstood. That people who are already suspicious of him would get more suspicious, that it might cause them to panic and do something about their suspicions.
“Do you think I want to go?”
“You must, because that’s what you’re doing.”
“You don’t understand.”
“That’s right, I don’t understand.”
She walks away and slams the bedroom door behind her and he hears the click of the lock. He thinks about kicking the door in, then thinks better of it, so he just punches the wall and walks out.
Hard to find a place to park at the cemetery, what with every wise guy in the city there, not to mention the platoons of local, state and federal cops. One of whom snaps Callan’s picture as he walks past, but Callan don’t care.
Right now he’s like, Fuck everybody.
And his hand hurts.
“Trouble in paradise?” O-Bop says when he sees the hand.
“Go fuck yourself.”
“That’s it,” says O-Bop. “You’re not getting your Funeral Etiquette Merit Badge now.”
Then he shuts up because it’s clear from the darkness on Callan’s face that he ain’t in the mood for humor.
It seems like every wise guy that Giuliani hasn’t already put in the slammer is here. You got your Cozzo brothers, all razor-cut hair and tailored suits, you got the Piccones, you got Sammy Grillo and Frankie Lorenzo, and Little Nick Corotti and Leonard DiMarsa and Sal Scachi. You got the whole Cimino Family, plus some Genovese captains—Barney Bellomo and Dom Cirillo. And some Lucchese people—Tony Ducks and Little Al D'Arco. And what’s left of the Colombo Family, now that Persico is doing his hundred, and even a few of the old Bonanno guys—Sonny Black and Lefty Ruggiero.
All here to pay respect to Aniello Demonte. All here to try to sniff out how things are going to go now that Demonte is dead. They all know it depends on who Calabrese picks to be the new underboss, because with the likelihood that Paulie’s going away, the new underboss is going to be the next boss. If Paulie picks Cozzo, then there’ll be peace in the family. But if he picks someone else . . . Look out. So all the goombahs are here to try to suss it out.
They’re all here.
With one huge exception.
Big Paulie Calabrese.
Peaches just can’t believe it. Everyone’s waiting for his big black limo to pull up so they can start the service, but it doesn’t arrive. The widow is appalled, she doesn’t know what to do, and finally Johnny Cozzo steps up and says, “Let’s get started.”
“Guy doesn’t go to his own underboss’s funeral?” Peaches says after the service. “That is wrong. That is just wrong.”
He turns to Callan. “I’m glad to see you here, anyway. Where the fuck you been?”
“Around.”
“You ain’t been around me.”
Callan’s not in the mood.
“You guineas don’t own me,” he says.
“You watch your fucking mouth.”
“Come on, Jimmy,” O-Bop says. “He’s good people.”
“So,” Peaches says to Callan, “I hear you’re supposed to be what, a carpenter, now?”
“Yeah.”
Peaches says, “I knew a carpenter got nailed to a cross.”
“When you come for me, Jimmy,” Callan says, “come in a hearse—because that’s how you’re leaving.”
Cozzo moves in between them.
“What the fuck?” he says. “You wanna make more tapes for the Feds? What do you want now, the 'Jimmy Peaches Live Album'? I need you fucking guys to stick together now. Shake hands.”
Peaches puts out his hand to Callan.
Callan takes it and Peaches wraps his other hand around the back of Callan’s head and pulls him close. “Shit, kid, I’m sorry. It’s the tension, it’s the grief.”
“I know. Me, too.”
“I love you, you dumb fucking mick,” Peaches whispers in his ear. “You want out, good for you. You’re out. You go build your cabinets and desks and whatever and be happy, all right? Life is short, you gotta be happy while you can.”
“Thank you, Jimmy.”
Peaches releases Callan and says loudly, “I’ll beat this drug thing, we’ll have a party, okay?”
“Okay.”
Callan’s invited back to the Ravenite with the rest of them, but he doesn’t go.
He goes home.
Finds a parking spot, walks up the stairs and waits outside the door for a minute, working up his nerve before he can turn the key and go in.
She’s there.
Sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book.
Starts to cry when she sees him. “I didn’t think you were going to come back.”
“I didn’t know if you were going to be here.”
He bends over and hugs her.
She holds him very tightly. When she lets go he says, “I was thinking we could go get a Christmas tree.”
They pick a pretty one. It’s small and a little sparse. It isn’t a perfect tree, but it suits them. They put some corny Christmas music on, and they’re busy decorating their tree the rest of the night. They don’t even know that Big Paulie Calabrese has named Tommy Bellavia as his new underboss.
They come for him the next night.
Callan’s walking home from work, the front of his jeans and the tops of his shoes covered with sawdust. It’s a cold night, so he has the collar of his coat pulled up around his neck and his watch cap pulled low over his ears.
So he doesn’t see or hear the car until it pulls up beside him.
A window slides down.
“Get in.”
There’s no gun, nothing sticking out. It’s not needed. Callan knows that sooner or later he’s going to get in the car—if not this one, the next one—so he gets in. Slides into the front seat, lifts his arms and lets Sal Scachi unbutton his coat and feel under his arms, the small of his back, down his legs.
“So it’s true,” Scachi says when he’s done. “You’re a civilian now.”
“Yeah.”
“A citizen,” Scachi says. “The fuck is this? Sawdust?”
“Yeah, sawdust.”
“Shit, I got it on my coat.”
A nice coat, Callan thinks. Has to be five bills.
Scachi pulls onto the West Side Highway, heads uptown and then pulls under a bridge and stops.
A good spot, Callan thinks, to put a bullet into somebody.
Conveniently near the water.
He hears his heart thumping.
So does Scachi.
“Nothing to be afraid of here, kid.”
“What do you want from me,
Sal?”
“One last job,” Scachi says.
“I don’t do that kind of work no more.”
He looks across the river at the lights of Jersey, such as they are. Maybe me and Siobhan should move to Jersey, he thinks, get a little distance from this shit. And then we could walk along the river and look at the lights of New York.
“You don’t have a choice, kid,” Scachi says. “Either you’re with us or you’re against us. And you’re too dangerous for us to let you be against us. You’re Billy the Kid Callan. I mean, you’ve shown from day one you got a taste for revenge, right? Remember Eddie Friel?”
Yeah, I remember Eddie Friel, Callan thinks.
I remember I was scared for myself, and scared for Stevie, and the gun came out and up like something else was moving it and I remember the look in Eddie Friel’s eyes as the bullets smacked into his face.
I remember I was seventeen years old.
And I’d give anything to have been anywhere but in that bar that afternoon.
“Some people gotta go, kid,” Scachi’s saying. “And it would be . . . impolitic . . . for anyone actually in the family to do it. You understand.”
I understand, Callan thinks. Big Paulie wants to purge the Cozzo wing of the family—Johnny Boy, Jimmy Peaches, Little Peaches—but he also wants to be able to deny that he did it. Blame it on the Wild Irish. We have killing in our blood.
And I do have a choice, he thinks.
I can kill or I can die.
“No,” he says.
“No what?”
“I’m not killing any more people.”
“Look—”
“I’m not doing it,” Callan repeats. “If you want to kill me, kill me.”
He feels free all of a sudden, like his soul is already in the air, flying over this dirty old town. Cruising around the stars.
“You got a girl, right?”
Crash.
Back to earth.
“Her name’s something funny,” Scachi’s saying. “Like it’s not spelled the way it’s pronounced. Something Irish, right? No, I remember—it’s like old dress material girls used to wear. Chiffon? What is it?”
To this dirty world.
“You think,” Scachi’s saying, “something happens to you, they’re just going to leave her to run to Giuliani, repeat pillow talk you guys maybe had?”
“She don’t know anything.”
“Yeah, but who’s going to take the chance, huh?”
There ain’t nothin’ I can do about it, Callan thinks. Even if I grabbed Sal right here, took his gun and emptied it into his mouth—which I could do—Scachi’s a made guy and they’d kill me and they’d still kill Siobhan, too.
“Who?” Callan asks.
Who do you want me to kill?
Nora’s phone rings.
Wakes her up. She’s sleepy, having been out on a late date.
“Do you want to work a party?” Haley asks.
“I don’t think so,” Nora says. She’s surprised that Haley’s asking her. She’s a long way past working parties.
“This one’s a little different,” Haley says. “It is a party, they want several girls, but it’s all going to be one-on-one. You’ve been specifically asked for.”
“Some kind of corporate Christmas party?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Nora looks at the digital clock on her alarm radio. It’s 10:35 in the morning. She needs to get up, have her coffee and grapefruit and get to the gym.
“Come on,” Haley’s saying. “It’ll be fun. I’m even going.”
“Where is it?”
“That’s the other fun thing,” Haley says.
The party’s in New York.
“That’s some tree all right,” Nora says to Haley.
They’re standing by the skating rink in Rockefeller Plaza, looking up at the enormous Christmas tree. The plaza is packed with tourists. Carols blare through loudspeakers, Salvation Army Santas ring bells, streetcart vendors hawk warm chestnuts.
“See?” Haley says. “I told you it'd be fun.”
It has been, Nora admits to herself.
Six of them, five working girls and Haley, flew first-class on a red-eye, were picked up by two limos at La Guardia and driven to the Plaza Hotel. Nora had been there before, of course, but never at Christmastime, and it did seem different. Beautiful and old-fashioned with all the decorations up, and her room had a view of Central Park, where even the horse carriages were festooned with holly wreaths and poinsettia.
She took a nap and a shower, then she and Haley set out on a serious shopping expedition to Tiffany’s and Bergdorf’s and Saks—Haley buying, Nora mostly just looking.
“Spend a little,” Haley said. “You’re so cheap.”
“I’m not cheap,” Nora says. “I’m conservative.”
Because a thousand dollars is not just a thousand dollars to her. It’s the interest on a thousand dollars invested over the course of, say, twenty years. It’s an apartment in Montparnasse and the ability to live there comfortably. So she doesn’t spend money loosely because she wants her money out there, working for her. But she does buy two cashmere scarves—one for herself and one for Haley—because it is very cold and because she wants to give Haley a present.
“Here,” she says when they step back out onto the street. She pulls the chalk-gray scarf from the bag. “Wrap up.”
“For me?”
“I don’t want you to catch cold.”
“How sweet you are.”
Nora wraps her own scarf around her neck, then adjusts her faux-fur hat and coat.
It’s one of those clear, cold New York City days, when a breath of air is startling in its frigid intensity and the wind comes rushing down the canyons that are the avenues, to bite your face and make your eyes water.
So when Nora’s eyes tear up as she looks at Haley, she tells herself it’s the cold.
“Have you ever seen the tree?” Haley asks.
“What tree?”
“The Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center,” Haley says.
“I guess not.”
“Come on.”
So now they’re standing, gawking at the huge tree, and Nora has to admit that she’s having fun.
The last Christmas.
This is the point Jimmy Peaches is making to Sal Scachi.
“It’s my last freaking Christmas outside the joint,” he’s saying. Calling phone booth to phone booth to leave the Feds out of the conversation for once. “For a long freaking time. They got me dead to rights, Sally. I’m going away for thirty-to-life, this fucking Rockefeller Act. By the time I get pussy again I probably won’t care.”
“But—”
“But nothing,” Peaches says. “It’s my party. And I want a big fucking steak, I want to go to the Copa with a beautiful babe on my arm, I wanna hear Vic Damone sing and then I want to get the world’s best piece of ass and fuck until my dick is sore.”
“Think of how it will look, Jimmy.”
“My dick?”
“The fact that you’re bringing five hookers to the sit-down,” Sal says. He’s pissed, he’s wondering when and if Jimmy Peaches will ever grow the fuck up. The guy is a loose fucking cannon. You bust your balls to get something set up right, then this fat, horny fuck does something like fly five working girls in from fucking California. Just what he needs—five people in the room who aren’t supposed to be there. Five innocent fucking bystanders. “What does John think about this?”
“John thinks it’s my party.”
Fucking A, he does, Peaches thinks. John is old-school, John is class, not like that fucking old hump they got for a boss now. John is properly grateful that I’m going to go in like a man and take what’s coming, without trying to cut a deal, without naming any names, especially his.
What does John think? John’s footing the fucking bill.
Anything you want, Jimmy. Anything. It’s your night. On me.
What Jimmy wants is Sparks Stea
k House, the Copa, and this chick Nora, the best-looking, most delectable piece he’s ever had. Ass like a ripe peach. He’s never gotten her out of his head. Putting her on all fours and slamming her from behind, watching those peaches quiver.
