The Gate House

by Nelson DeMille

  “That shouldn’t interest a married man.”

  He thought that was funny. He said, “I almost got her to move into the city, but after 9/11, forget it.”

  I said, “This is a good place to raise children.”

  “Yeah. I got two. A boy, Frank, five years old, and a girl, Kelly Ann—Ann for my mother. Kelly is Megan’s mother’s maiden name.” He continued, “My mother—you know how they are”—he did a bad impersonation of Mom’s voice—“‘Tony, what’s this Kelly name? The only Kellys I know in Williamsburg are drunks.’” He laughed, then realizing he’d broken the rule on revealing anything negative about la famiglia, he said, “Forget that.”

  Returning to the subject of life in the country, he said to me, “Do you know that the road that runs by the estates is private? Grace Lane is private.”

  “I do know that.”

  “Yeah, well, it was falling apart, and those cheap bastards along the road didn’t want to repave it. So I got one of my companies to do it as a favor to everybody.”

  That was interesting, and it revealed something about Anthony. His father didn’t care what anyone thought about him, as long as they respected him and feared him. Anthony seemed to be looking for acceptance. But it’s really hard for narrow-minded suburbanites to accept a Mafia don as a neighbor. I mean, I had a problem with that myself. I said to him, “That was very nice of you.”

  “Yeah. Do you think I got a thank-you? Not one fucking thank-you.”

  “Well, I thank you. The road looks good.”

  “Fuck them. I should tear it up.”

  “Hold up on that. Maybe they’re planning a surprise party for you.”

  “Yeah? Maybe I got a surprise for them.”

  Don’t whack your neighbors, Anthony. Your kids have enough problems with Dad being a Mafia guy. I hesitated, then asked him, “Did the developer save the reflecting pool and the statue of Neptune?”

  “Huh . . . ? Oh, yeah, I remember that when I was a kid. There was, like, make-believe Roman ruins, and gardens and stuff. That was some place. You remember that?”

  “I do. Is it still there?”

  “Nah. It’s all gone. Just houses. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Yeah. I loved that place.” He informed me, “I went skinny-dipping once in the pool.” He smiled. “With the college girl who my father hired to be my tutor.”

  “What subject?”

  He laughed, then seemed lost in that memory, so I took the opportunity to think about how to get the hell out of here. I also looked around to see if there was anyone in Wong Lee’s whom I knew. Or anyone who looked like the FBI.

  The restaurant was mostly empty, except for a few families with kids, and people waiting for takeout orders. Then I noticed a guy sitting by himself in a booth on the other side, facing toward the back of the restaurant.

  Anthony noticed my interest in the gentleman and said, “He’s with me.”

  “Good.” So we had interlocking fields of fire if a situation developed. That made me feel much better. More to the point, Mr. Bellarosa was definitely in full security mode. I looked back at him, and it appeared to me now that under his loose-fitting Hawaiian shirt was quite possibly a Kevlar vest. This is what had saved his father’s life at Giulio’s. Maybe I should ask if he had an extra vest.

  If I wanted to speculate on what or who was making Anthony jumpy, I’d guess it was Sally Da-da. Though why this should be happening now, after ten years, was a mystery. So maybe it was someone else. The only way I’d know for sure is if the same two guys with shotguns who were at Giulio’s suddenly appeared at the table and blew Anthony’s head off. Maybe I should order takeout.

  The waitress brought the menus, and we looked at them. He asked me, “You like Chinese?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I dated a Chinese girl once, and an hour after I ate her, I was hungry again.” He laughed. “Get it?”

  “Got it.” I studied the menu more intensely and took a long swig of Scotch.

  He continued, “So I was dating this Chinese girl, and one night, we’re making out hot and heavy, and I said to her, ‘I want sixty-nine,’ and she says, ‘Oh, you want beef and broccoli now?’” He laughed again. “Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “You got one?”

  “Not one that comes to mind.”

  “I once heard my father say to somebody that you were a funny guy.”

  In fact, Frank appreciated my sarcasm, irony, and humor, even when he was the butt of it. I wasn’t sure that his son was as thick-skinned or as bright, but the jury was still out on Anthony’s brain power. I said, “Your father brought out the best of my wit.”

  The waitress returned, and I ordered wonton soup and beef and broccoli, which made Anthony laugh. He ordered sixty-nine, which was not on the menu, and settled for what I was having. He also ordered another round of Scotch, and a clean ashtray, and I asked for chopsticks.

  He said to me, “You know why wives like Chinese food?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because wonton spelled backwards is not now.”

  I hoped that exhausted his repertoire.

  I noticed that Anthony, like Tony, had a flag pin on the lapel of his sports jacket, and my recollection of Frank and his friends was that they exhibited a sort of primitive, jingoistic patriotism, based for the most part on xenophobia, racism, and a lingering immigrant culture that said, “America is a great country.”

  Indeed it is, and despite some serious problems, I was seeing it more clearly now after three years of wandering the globe, and seven years in London. I mean, England was a good place for self-exiled Americans, but it wasn’t home, and I suddenly realized that I was home. So maybe I should stop playing the part of the ex-pat on a brief visit to the States.

  As though reading my mind, Anthony asked me, “So, how long you staying?”

  This, I guess, was the threshold question whose answer would determine if we had any business to discuss. So I needed to carefully consider my answer.

  He asked me, “You still up in the air on that?”

  “I’m . . . leaning toward staying.”

  “Good. No reason to go back.” He added, “This is where the action is.”

  Actually, that was a good reason to return to London.

  Anthony suddenly reached into his pocket, and I thought he was pulling his gun, but instead he produced a flag pin and set it down in front of me. He said, “If you’re staying, you want to wear this.”

  I left it lying on the table and said, “Thank you.”

  Anthony instructed, “Put it on your lapel.” He tapped the flag on his lapel, but when I didn’t follow instructions, he leaned forward and stuck the flag on the left lapel of my blue blazer. He said, “There you go. Now you’re an American again.”

  I informed him, “My family has been in America for over three hundred years.”

  “No shit?” He inquired, “Why’d they wait so long after Columbus discovered America?”

  Further on the subject of history, Anthony informed me, “I majored in history.” He added, “I went to college for a year. NYU. I fucked my brains out.”

  I could see that.

  “I read a lot about the Romans. That shit interests me. How about you?”

  I informed him, “I took eight years of Latin, and I could read Cicero, Seneca, and Ovid in classical Latin.”

  “No shit?”

  “Then, in my senior year of college, I got hit in the head with a baseball, and now I can read only Italian.”

  He thought that was funny, then got serious and said, “What I’m getting at is I see this country like Rome, when the Empire was in serious trouble. Understand?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Like, the days of the Republic are over. Now we’re like an imperial power, so every asshole out there wants to take a shot at us. Right? Like those fucks on 9/11. Plus, we can’t control our borders, like the Romans couldn’t, so we got ten
million illegals who can’t even speak the fucking language and don’t give a shit about the country. They just want a piece of the action. And the assholes in Washington sit around and argue, like the Roman Senate, and the fucking country is going to hell with weirdos screaming about their rights, and the fucking barbarians are at the border.”

  “What book was that in?”

  He ignored me and continued his riff. “The fucking bureaucrats are up our asses, the men in this country act like women, and the women act like men, and all anyone cares about is bread and circuses. You see what I’m saying?”

  “I know the argument, Anthony.” I gave him some good news and said, “At least organized crime is almost eradicated.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette, then said, “You think?”

  Anthony was a perfect example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Regarding the purpose of this dinner, I asked him, “So, what would you like to know about your father?”

  He lit another cigarette, sat back, then said, “I just want you to tell me . . . like, how you met. Why you decided to do business. I mean . . . why would a guy like you . . . you know, get involved in a criminal case?”

  “You mean organized crime?”

  He wasn’t about to go there. I mean, like, you know, there is no Mafia. No Cosa Nostra. Whaddaya talkin’ about?

  Anthony reminded me, “You defended him on a murder charge, which, as you know, Counselor, was bullshit.” He asked me again, “So, how did you and my father get together and wind up doing business?”

  I replied, “It was mostly a personal relationship.” I added, “We clicked, and he needed some help.”

  “Yeah? But why did you stick your neck out?”

  Anthony was testing the water to see what motivated me—why I hooked up with the mob, so to speak, and what it would take for me to do it again. In his world, the answer was money and power, but maybe he understood that in my world, it was more complex.

  I replied, “I told you the other night—he did me a favor and I was repaying the favor.” Also, the whole truth was that Frank Bellarosa, in cahoots with my wife, played the macho card, i.e., Frank had a gun and a set of balls, and nice guy John had a pen and a good intellect. They were very subtle about that, of course, but this challenge to my manhood worked well. Plus, I was bored, and Susan knew that. What she didn’t know was that Frank Bellarosa also appealed to my darker side; evil is very seductive, which Susan discovered too late.

  I said to Anthony, “Your father was a very charismatic man, and very persuasive.” Plus, he was screwing my wife so he could get to me through her, though I didn’t know that at the time.

  And I don’t think Susan knew that, either. She probably thought that Frank was interested only in her. In fact, Frank was partly motivated by the convenience of pillow talk with his attorney’s wife, not to mention the thrill of screwing an uppity society bitch. But on another level, probably against his will, Frank felt something for Susan Sutter.

  Anthony said, with some insight, “My father had a way of picking the right people. Like, he knew what they wanted, and he showed them how they could get it.”

  I recalled learning about a guy like that in Sunday school, named Lucifer.

  As per the supposed reason for this dinner, Anthony asked me a few questions regarding my personal memories of his father.

  I answered by relating a few anecdotes that I thought would give him some nice snapshots of Pop.

  I then recounted my and Susan’s first visit to Alhambra, at Frank’s invitation for coffee, and how I enjoyed Anna’s hospitality and warmth. I didn’t share with Anthony that I was royally ticked off at Susan for accepting the invitation, or that my impressions of the Bellarosas as my new Gold Coast next-door-mansion neighbors were not entirely favorable. In fact, I was horrified. But also a little intrigued, as was Susan.

  In any case, I kept it light and positive, skipping over my subsequent seduction by Frank Bellarosa, and Frank’s seduction of my wife (or vice versa), and our final descent into hell. That might be a little complicated for Anthony, and none of his business.

  This all took about fifteen minutes, during which my wonton soup came and sat there, while I sipped Scotch and Anthony smoked, flipped ashes on the floor, and said very little.

  When I’d finished, I said, “So, that’s about it.” I added, “I was sorry for what happened, and I want you to know that I share your grief, and that of your mother, brothers, and your whole family.”

  Anthony nodded.

  I announced, “I’m not really hungry, and I have a lot of work to do at home, so thanks for the drinks.” I reached for my wallet and said, “Let me split the bill.”

  He seemed surprised that I’d actually want to forgo his company, and asked, “What’s your rush?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Have another drink.” He called out to the waitress, “Two more!” then asked me, “You want a cigarette?”

  “No, thank you.”

  That settled, he returned to a prior subject and asked, “Hey, how did you let the Feds grab Alhambra? I mean, you do this for a living. Right?”

  “Right. You win some, you lose some.” I added, “Even Jesus said to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.”

  “Yeah, but Jesus was a nice guy, and he didn’t have a tax lawyer. Or a criminal attorney.” Anthony smiled and continued, “That’s why he got nailed.”

  I reminded him, “I was on my way to beating the murder charge.”

  “Yeah, okay, but if my father didn’t do anything criminal, then how did they get his property?”

  “I told you. Tax evasion.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “No, it’s criminal.” The truth was, as I said, and as Anthony surely knew, the Justice Department and the IRS had enough real and manufactured evidence on Frank Bellarosa to make his life a living hell. Plus, Frank’s own brother-in-law, Sally Da-da—Anna’s sister’s husband—had tried to whack Frank, and Frank’s aura of power and strength was waning. So he took the easy way out and accepted the government’s deal. To wit: Tell us about every crime you ever committed, Frank, and give us the names of your hoodlum friends. Then you abdicate your title, give us all your money, and you can go into exile a free man. Not a bad deal, and better than prison. Plus, the exile to Italy fit in nicely with Frank and Susan’s plans to run off together, but I didn’t think Anthony wanted to know all of that. In fact, he wanted the bullshit.

  “And there was nothing you could do to hold on to Alhambra?”

  “No.”

  “Okay . . . hey, I heard that my father also owned your place. He bought that, too.”

  “He bought Stanhope Hall from my father-in-law.” I was tempted to say, “I think he needed more room to bury bodies,” but I said, “He wanted to control the land development around his estate.” In fact, as I said, Susan had most probably talked her lover into that purchase. My father-in-law, William the Skinflint, wanted to dump this expensive white elephant, and for the right price he would have sold it to the devil. Actually, he did.

  Susan had been upset at the thought of the family home passing into the hands of some stranger or a developer, and I believe she saw don Bellarosa as her white knight who could save the estate for her. I have no idea what the deal was between her and her lover, but I suspected that she at least had thoughts of living there with Frank. But then Frank sold out to the Feds and went into the Witness Protection Program, and Italy, I think, became Plan B.

  I really should have insisted that I had to go, but Anthony seemed obsessed with the Federal government seizing a sizable fortune in property and cash from his father, going so far as to ask me, “Hey, do you think I have a shot at getting that back?”

  “You have about as much chance of recovering assets seized under the RICO Act as I have of getting the Man of the Year Award from the Sons of Italy.”

  He persisted. “How about those millions in bond money that you posted for my father? Right? He died be
fore the trial, and he didn’t commit the murder. So why can’t you get that back?”

  I saw where this was going, of course, and I definitely didn’t want to go there. I said, “As I understand it, those assets, including Stanhope Hall, were returned to your father’s estate, then seized as part of his tax settlement with the IRS.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There are no buts, Anthony. I did what I could at the time. Your father was satisfied with my representation, and there are no do-overs.”

  Bottom line, his obsession with the lost fortune was mostly smoke. What he was after was me, and thus his veiled criticism of how I handled this case a decade ago, and now he was going to give me the opportunity to get it right; to see that justice was done. Next stop after that was the slippery slope into his underworld. Thanks, but no thanks. Been there, Anthony. The pay is good, but the price is too high.

  He said to me, “If you took this on, I’d give you two hundred up front, and a third of what you got back from the Feds.” He added, in case I didn’t get the math, “That could be three, four, maybe five million for you.”

  He wasn’t actually as dim as I thought, and he also figured out that I probably needed the dough, which would make most men vulnerable to the temptations of the devil. I replied, “Actually, it’s about zero.”

  “No, you at least get two hundred up front and it’s yours.”

  “No, it’s yours.”

  He seemed a little exasperated and tried a new approach. “Hey, Counselor, I think you owe me and my family something on this.”

  “Anthony, I don’t owe you a thing.” In fact, Junior, your father owes me fifty large. I continued, “At the end, I wasn’t working for your father when he cut his own deal with the government. The only representation he had, as far as I know, was his personal attorney, Jack Weinstein”—who was actually a mob attorney—“so you should speak to him if you haven’t already.”

  “Jack is retired.”

  “So am I.”

  As far as I was concerned, this meeting was over. We’d covered the walk down memory lane, and I’d squashed the clumsy recruiting pitch, so unless Junior wanted to hear that his father had actually been a government stool pigeon, or wanted to hear about my feelings on the subject of his father pulling some strings to get my tax returns examined, or seducing my wife, then there was little else to talk about—unless he wanted to talk about the night his father was murdered. On that subject, I reminded him, “Don’t forget what we discussed regarding my ex-wife.”