by Thomas Laird
He thinks he might have to give up the notion of returning to Chicago altogether.
The ER doctor insists that he and Marilyn go home and get some rest. He tells the husband and wife—he bought her a golden band, and he purchased a golden mate of his own and they’re both wearing them on the ring finger on the left hand—to get out of here.
The physician says the girls might be able to go home tomorrow night if their temperatures are normal, but they’re reading at 102, so he’ll wait and see if they break sometime tomorrow. Then they can all go home. But the ER resident says the two adults will serve no purpose by hanging around, and he tells Marilyn that she should keep an eye on her own temp, too.
So they follow medical orders and return to the cabin. Mark tells her it’s logical. They wouldn’t be helping by hanging around the girls’ room because they are both old enough to be without their mother overnight at their age.
Marilyn makes them something to eat. Soup and toasted cheese. Neither of them are very hungry, but they’re both exhausted, so after the light meal they retire to the bedroom.
Marilyn feels a bit warm to Mark, so he takes her temperature with the oral gadget. It’s only 99, but he gets her a couple of Tylenol to help steady it. This bronchitis thing and an upper respiratory thing have been sweeping through the girls’ school, and now adults are catching it, too.
He holds her close. He wants her, but he won’t press the issue. Marilyn starts it up, anyway.
He lifts her nightgown, mounts her, and he begins gently, carefully, and she insists that he come at her harder, hotter, and they both erupt almost simultaneously.
She stares at him as if she’s dazed.
“Are you all right? We shouldn’t have done that now. You’re sick and I’m going to make you worse.”
“Stop it. You know how much I need you, how much I want you. You might as well get sick, too. It’s one way of keeping you here.”
He gets up on his right elbow.
“I’m not going back to the city,” he tells her.
“You mean not until we’re better.”
“No. I mean I’m not going back there. Ever. It’s finished.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You will when you can’t get me the hell away from the three of you for the rest of our lives.”
“But you said they’ll come looking for us.”
“If I think it’s unsafe, I’ll move us again. The girls can get to see the country.”
“But we love it here, Mark.”
“And we’ll stay unless I think there’s something wrong.”
“How will you know it’s wrong?”
“I have a very finely tuned sense of survival. It’s what I did, Marilyn. Intuition, call it whatever you want. If I think they’ve found us, we’ll leave. Right now, I think we’re okay.”
She kisses him.
“It really is like a dream. When David died, I thought our lives were finished. I didn’t know what to do or where to turn. Then you showed up, and everything’s changed. Everything’s almost normal again. I know it really isn’t, but I feel…safe with you. I couldn’t hope that you’d just stay here with us, but it’s happened. I’m not used to being happy.
“I loved your brother. He was a decent, good man. But if I tell the truth, God forgive me, I was never in love with David. We found each other and we got along, and he gave me the two girls…
“I shouldn’t tell you any of this. He was your brother. But I was in love with you right from the beginning. When you took care of us, when you took us here.”
He feels her forehead. It seems warmer, now.
“You need a couple more pills.”
“Don’t get up. Not yet.”
“All right, I won’t. But soon. You need to be okay for when they come home.”
“They love you like you’re their father.”
“David will always be their father.”
“I know, but you’re here now and they love you the way I do. Almost the way I do.”
“Don’t talk so much. I’m getting those meds.”
He gets up and goes into the bathroom, and then he returns with two tablets and a glass of lukewarm water. She takes the tablets from him and puts them in her mouth and then flushes them down with two gulps.
“I don’t know why you love me, Mark. I’ve always been plain. I had myself resigned to be the wife of a plain man, and forgive me again, but David wasn’t exactly handsome.”
“Neither am I.”
“Yes, you are. You’re everything I never thought would happen to me.”
“You’re talking too much again.”
She throws her arms over his shoulders and pulls him close to her.
“Don’t leave. Not now, not ever. Don’t be lying to me. Calming me down so you can slip out on us and finish that horror, back in the city.”
“I’m not setting you up, Marilyn. I’m staying…look at me. I’m not going anywhere. It’s over. I’m done with it. I’m done with them.”
He forces her back down.
“You need to sleep. We both do. When you wake up, I’ll still be here. You have to trust me. I’ll be right here in the morning, and then we can bring Morgan and Elizabeth home tomorrow.”
He spends a lot of time stroking the hair at the side of her head. He cannot believe she thinks so little of herself. When he looks at Marilyn, when he looks at his new bride, he sees something that reaches far beyond the cosmetic. She is in his eyes, and Mark Johansen is the beholder.
*
David Serpella was the top tier in his business, which was to locate difficult-to-find people. He had his contacts, and they varied from ex-military to Outfit stoolies to police informants. He had a dossier full of information on Mark Johansen, but at the moment everything stood at a dead end.
“You got nothing?” Benny Bats said, a little too loudly.
Some of the crew in The Green Door looked back at Rossi’s table in the rear of the hangout, but when Ben shot them a stare, they turned their eyes back on their own tables.
“You want to find him, Mr. Rossi, as I said, it might take time. There are guys who really don’t want to get found, like Johansen. He’s been living in the fuckin’ woodwork ever since the military called him KIA. Those guys are very adept at staying invisible.
“But you gotta figure he’s close enough to kill two of your men and get away without making notice of himself, and that tells me he’s probably at most a couple hundred miles away, in any direction.”
“That’s supposed to encourage me, motherfucker?”
Ben’s voice was raised another time, but the crew in The Green Door knew better than to look Rossi’s way twice without permission.
“I don’t appreciate being talked to that way.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. If you do it again, you might want to notice what’s pointed at you under the table.”
“You ain’t got the balls.”
“Look under the table, Benny Bats.”
He took a gander under the table cloth. There was a muzzle pointed at Rossi’s groin.
“I’ll blow your balls off. I don’t care if your soldiers get me because I haven’t been afraid of dying in a very long time. This life isn’t that precious to everyone, Ben. Try me and find out, but you’ll be the guy who’s the fucking eunuch, not me. I figure I can do a little damage in here. I got three clips with this piece.”
Serpella smiled at Rossi. Serpella’s eyes looked black in the dim lighting of the club.
“All right. I’ll play nice,” Rossi said.
He curled his lips into something like a smile.
“We good?” the capo asked.
“Sure. We’re fine…now you want me to continue after this Johansen or not? I got plenty of other clients.”
Rossi leered at Serpella once more.
“I’ll let you know when to quit.”
“I know the game, Captain. I’m part of it. You send anyone after me, I’l
l kill your old lady. I’ll kill your dog if you got one. You’re out of kids, but I’ll fucking shoot anyone who looks like you. You don’t even know what ruthless means, Benny Bats.”
“Yeah. You’re a tough guy. I got it.”
“I just want you to know what I’m all about. I’m not your fucking servant boy.”
“All right. Anything else?”
“I’ll be in touch. I’ll find him. You can lay odds on it. It won’t take forever.”
Serpella rose from the table.
“I hope we understand each other better, now.”
Then he walked away from Rossi and left by the front door.
*
Carmen was blowing hot or cold, and it had nothing to do with oral sex. One night she was insatiable, and the next she wanted to rack out right after Johnny Carson. They had a color TV in the bedroom. Ben liked to stay up late, but sometimes Carmen liked to crash by eleven. She was hard to figure. She’d fuck his skull off on Tuesday and then give him the Arctic shoulder on Wednesday.
Ben thought it might be an early change of life for Carmen, but he didn’t want to throw it in her face. He’d been seeing Maureen on Friday nights, but Carmen never grilled him about his whereabouts during the early weekends.
She was propped up with the pillow behind her watching Don Rickles insult everyone on the stage with Johnny, and the audience roared.
“That guy ain’t funny. He’s an asshole,” he told his wife.Ben lay with his head flat on his two lush extra-sized pillows.
“He’s a funny asshole,” Carmen retorted.
“You never said anything about Bertelli getting killed,” he said.
“Why’m I supposed to care about him? He was in your way, remember?”
“Yeah. I suppose so.”
“Am I supposed to shed a few tears if Calabrese goes down?”
Ben sat up.“You know, Carmen, sometimes I don’t know it’s you, the way you talk. You come on all hard-assed. It isn’t like you.”
“I’ve been trying to tell you I’m tougher than you think I am.”
“You still want in on my business?”
“Whatever happened to us, to ours, Ben?”
“Our thing isn’t for women, Carmen.”
“You need to read history, husband of mine. The books are filled with women who led countries, armies, legions. That redheaded bitch, Elizabeth I, in England. Check her out. You think women can’t be ruthless? Guess again.”
“See, when you talk that way I don’t think I know you anymore.”
“Maybe you don’t know me. Maybe you’re right.”
“You trying to creep me? Are you, Carmen? Because if you are you’re doing a bangup fucking job of it. I don’t remember marrying a female John fucking Dillinger or a Big Al Capone or a Bugsy Siegel or a Frank Nitti or any of those big-time gangsters. Maybe Ma Barker, but these guys were all men, Carmen. I don’t know that I want to dip my wick in Public Enemy Number One who’s wearing bikini panties with the greatest set of tits since Marilyn Monroe.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“You’re a female! Act like one!”
“I’m turning off the TV.”
“You going to turn something else on, Carmen?”
“Why don’t you turn on your fist? You can go five against one, tonight, but if you do, how ‘bout taking it out of the bedroom.”
“Carmen…”
“I’m too tired. Goodnight.”
She turned off the tube and doused the bedside lamp and the room became dark. Rossi looked over at her, but she’d turned on her side, away from him.
He thought about moving over toward her, but he was still angry, enraged. The way she talked to him. Like some sidewalk princess, like some whore.
After a while her breath became regular and he knew she’d gone to sleep on him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Tony Calabrese knew Capone when Big Al was a punk fresh off the streets of Brooklyn. Someone had opened his face and the mark delineated Capone as Scarface. Tony C had associated with Johnny Torrio, as well, and all the big names in the Outfit were familiars to him. They’d reaped the streets and they’d become wealthy terrorizing the citizens of Chicago and the suburbs, and the inhabitants of the city were so stupid that they’d lionized arch criminals and made gangsters into folk heroes.
It was the Depression that was the enemy, and the Outfit had thrown a few bucks to the peasants via menial jobs, and they were loved for doing it. The pols were bought and sold, and Chicago belonged to Capone before Tony Calabrese took over. There had been plenty of internecine bloodshed, but Calabrese had unified his crew into a single entity, and the profits rolled in.
That was then. Now there was all this dissension with Benny Bats, and everything was on the verge of disaster. The Chicago cops were all over this David Johansen murder, and the feds were waiting at the gates, hungry to cannibalize everything that Tony C had built after Capone got tossed in prison by a bunch of accountants from the IRS.
He needed to eliminate the stone from his shoe. He needed to get rid of Rossi and his whole crew. It came down to self-defense. Benny Bats represented a real threat to business, and no matter what kind of an earner Rossi was, it wasn’t worth civil war. Bertelli caught one in the gourd at the motel, and now Ben Rossi would come scalp hunting for the Boss of Bosses. Tony hadn’t survived all these years by not being aware of his environment, and that environment had gone toxic on his whole organization. Ben Rossi was going down, and there was no more room for negotiation. The talking was done. Conciliation no longer worked with the son of a bitch. You couldn’t reason with Benny Bats.
*
He was tired of visiting the dick doctor. Tony’d tried all the pills. He took testosterone injections and smeared cream all over his arms, and his limp member still didn’t cooperate. He hired the best-looking hookers in the city, and they tried every move on the Boss that they knew, and his putter never even fluttered a little bit. They did oral and a couple whores did each other in front of Tony and then invited him for a threesome. Nothing aroused his flaccid member.
Calabrese watched the best porn from all over the world and still his gelatinous cock moved not a fraction from its sag against his loose, flabby balls.
Only the young girls could gather his undivided interest, and when they aroused him enough to invite an orgasm, one of the teenaged whores had to masturbate him vigorously to get the job done.
Vaginal sex was a faint memory for Calabrese. He hadn’t poked the old lady or anyone else for six or seven years, now. His manhood began to betray him almost a decade ago, and it had been downhill ever since.
Tony C had to pay off a legion of vice cops to get away with his thing for under-aged girls. It cost him more to do young boys, but he didn’t have much interest in the illicit juvenile males. If it got out that Tony Calabrese did boys, he’d be shunned, so he only indulged with the same sex on very isolated instances. It was just too dangerous for his rep.
He was becoming more and more fond of reading history. Tony enjoyed reading about the Caesars of Rome and the Czars of Russia. He read copiously about the emperors who had been determined to take over their worlds only to fail in the end. He thought he should have paid more attention in school for the few years he’d endured an education in the public grade schools.
Everything seemed on the wane. Everything seemed lost.
But he could never express his private thoughts because those notions would make him look as vulnerable as he really was. There was no need to speed up the overthrow of his syndicate, of his beloved cosa nostra. Rossi would go down before Tony C did. It would be his legacy, how he’d overcome that punk in Cicero, how he’d dismantled his whole fucking crew before he gave up the reins in the organization.
Over six decades he’d been in the Outfit, and more than half of that time he’d been the Boss. But you reached your peak when you were around twenty-five, he’d read somewhere, and then the pendulum swung downward.
/> It was bound to happen. He’d lose everything he’d created. Everyone’s story ended in the same location. In a hole about six feet deep.
So he had his little sidelights even if he couldn’t partake in the kind of sex he used to love. He’d been a real cocksman, which was why Tony took it so hard to give up women. There’d been strange pussy all his adult life, and his old lady was aware of it throughout their marriage. She lived with it the way Outfit spouses tolerated their husbands’ infidelity. It was part of the job description.
Like Bertelli fucking Benny Bats’ wife Carmen. No one knew that Tony C knew about their relationship, but there wasn’t much the Boss didn’t know about his associates. He kept tabs on all his capos. What their habits were, where they hung on the weekends. He had his guys tail each of his captains so that Tony C was always one step ahead of his subordinates. It was smart business, knowing where all of them lived, what their weaknesses were. Information was more valuable than money, in the long run. It was how he acquired judges and mayors and aldermen and any other honcho in the city. They had Daley in their pockets and every other mayor who preceded him. You had to accumulate them in order to stay in business.
It was the same for cops. You bought off the Superintendent and all his lower echelon underlings. Bars were open only because cops were on the take, on the pad.
But there were a few like this Homicide, Parisi, and his partner, Gibron, who were not reasonable men. Tony knew Parisi’s father, Jake, and you couldn’t do business with the old man, either. Jake Parisi came back from the Second World War and immediately refused every overture the Outfit made to him. It was stupid. Jimmy Parisi’s father could’ve been a wealthy man before he got himself dead tumbling down the stairs at his own house. Calabrese knew the story. Some guys thought the wife had given him a little help on his way down the steps, but no one knew for sure what really happened.
His son could’ve gone to a fancy college out East if he’d just played ball with all the offers the Outfit had tendered him. Stupid. Stubborn. And the kid was just like his old man.
