The Vendetta

by Thomas Laird

  The rear door was unlocked. They figured the lone uniform was sufficient security, it appeared. When he entered, there was a long hallway that lead to the kitchen. Along the way there were two or three waiters’ jackets hanging by hooks. Mark wore black dress pants and a white shirt. He clipped on a black bow tie as he progressed down the hall. He stopped short of the kitchen and secured the .44 in his waistband at the back. Then he buttoned up the burgundy coat in front. There was room in the jacket pocket in front to place the only other item he was carrying into the concert. But that object was for a little bit later. He left the bag in the hallway. He wouldn’t need it again, tonight.

  He entered the kitchen finally and just kept going through the chaos of the assistants and the chef and the other wait staff. Most of the waiters were male, but there were a few women working the tables as well.

  He grabbed a tray and picked up a few dishes and glasses. All of them were empty, but no one seemed to notice what he was doing amidst all the noise and fury, back there. People were bellering at their loudest, and the Greenie couldn’t figure out how any meals got prepared or delivered with all this uproar and confusion.

  He looked at his wristwatch. It was five to nine. He could hear a new sound coming from out front.

  It was Dean Anthony’s full orchestra warming up. Dino would be hitting the stage very soon, so the sniper kept moving about so that no one would notice there was nothing on the china or in the glasses that he was toting up in the air like a seasoned waiter.

  *

  Ben and Carmen arrived at 8:45, and they made their way to the front, toward the stage where the musicians were warming up. The twins, Charlie and Chris, were right there with them. Romano and Cordero were in the lobby if anything went wrong inside, but the Balboas didn’t want those two assholes getting in the way of their security for the evening.

  All of the men wore tuxes, black ones, and Carmen was featuring her magnificent breasts in her expensive French gown she bought from an upscale yuppie store on the Gold Coast.

  Calabrese walked in with six bodyguards at five to nine. The lights were beginning to dim and there was a sudden hush over the thousand lucky members of the audience. There wasn’t an empty chair at any of the tables. It was SRO, standing room only, but the only people on their feet were the cops.

  Parisi and Gibron stood stage left, watching the Boss of Bosses find his elite table, three tables away from Benny Bats and his fully- loaded wife, Carmen. There were perhaps thirty officers scattered inside, here, in the Ambassador’s ballroom. There were thirty more uniforms in the lobby, and there was Lucky Pierre, the lone uniform back with the trash in the alley. Jimmy thought they ought to reinforce the guy in the back, but it slipped his mind because he was focusing on Tony Calabrese and Ben Rossi. He shot a glance toward Carmen in her burgundy evening dress, and he also was impressed by her wonderful pair of knobs.

  The ballroom went black, suddenly, and the orchestra blared out an introductory blast from the horn section. The crowd erupted in anticipation, and then the spotlight hit the green curtains in front of the stage. The musicians were seated on the floor in a large pit that was illuminated by individual little globes of light that threw rays on the music on their stands.

  An announcer’s voice burst forth with strained enthusiasm.

  “Ladies and gentlemen…DEAN ANTHONY!!”

  Everyone rose to their feet and applauded wildly.

  Parisi thought the audience had to all have originated from Sicily, where Dino’s parents came from.

  Dino had a perfunctory cigarette in one hand and a drink with ice cubes in the other. Parisi had heard that Anthony was a diabetic and he didn’t really drink anything onstage except a cola, soda pop, but he didn’t believe that story. There was a crimson glow on the entertainer’s brown face, and his hair was well-pomaded.

  Dino went right into “Volare.” The crowd went nuts.

  After the first song, Anthony spent five minutes playing the crowd by telling anecdotes about his old Vegas partner, the comedian who made all those movies with him, once upon a time in the fifties. The audience ate it up. Dino could do no wrong.

  At one point, the singer looked down at Tony Calabrese’s table, and the crooner waved at the Boss. The Mayor had his fat ass perched five tables away from Tony C, but Dean never looked at the Mick and his flunkies.

  Apparently, Ben Rossi didn’t rate a wave, either, and if you were close enough to him and Carmen, you could see a sour look on his mug. Carmen didn’t appear thrilled by the ‘snub’ either.

  *

  Mark Johansen came out of the kitchen by bursting through the swinging doors. He knew where he was headed. No one in the Outfit was going to settle for back row seats. Not Tony C and not Benny Bats. They’d be all the way up front. Mark made his way in the dim lighting toward the stage where the Italian movie star/singer was doing his thing. Everyone had their eyes planted on the heart throb, and it was all going pretty smoothly, so far. No one noticed a waiter with the maroon or burgundy jacket beelining his way toward the man who directed the murder of his brother, David.

  In the corner of his peripheral vision, he caught sight of two men standing to the right side of the stage. They weren’t in tuxes, which meant they were cops.

  But Mark wasn’t turning back, now. He kept weaving his way between tables until he closed the distance between him and Ben Rossi.

  Dino ripped into ‘That’s Amore’and all that crap about pizza pies in your eye, and the joint was singing along with Anthony. A thousand voices were in unison screeching out the lyrics together as if it were a sing-along, and Dino didn’t argue with them.

  The lighting was minimal. There were only nightlight kinds of bulbs adjacent to all the tables. It was just bright enough that the wait staff could bring out the bottles of champagne and the glasses of mixed drinks. There was no beer to be seen in this posh auditorium. There was no middle-class brew in sight anywhere.

  Half a dozen more steps and he was there. Mark felt his pulse quicken.

  He’d never see Marilyn again. Or Morgan or Elizabeth or his unborn son. His unborn daughter, whichever. Maybe it was just as well. He couldn’t see a way to tell them all, the kids, who their ‘daddy’ was. He felt as though he’d acquired the role of father for David’s children, but he really was the baby’s old man. Perhaps it was just as well the infant never knew him.

  He reached Rossi’s table from behind. No one was paying any attention to him. They were all looking at the greaseball on the stage, the guy they’d paid the big money to see.

  When ‘That’s Amore’ came to its close, the crowd stood up and screamed its blessing on Dean Anthony. It was deafening in the theater. No one could hear anything other than the roar of the audience and the wild clapping of their hands. It was like a subway train arriving in a station, like the El screeching to a halt to pick up its riders at rush hour.

  He pulled the big gun from his waistband.

  “Rossi!” Johansen bellowed.

  He was standing a foot behind the capo. The twins looked in their boss’s direction, finally, but it was too late. Benny Bats had pivoted around to seek the source of his shouted name.

  Mark pulled the trigger and sent a round into the capo’s face, but the noise of the crowd partially obliterated the boom of the discharge and the terrified shriek of Carmen Rossi. The twins were caught off guard and couldn’t seem to go for their own holstered pieces beneath their smartly tailored tux jackets.

  The bullet tore through Benny Bats’ forehead and sent a shower of blood onto Chris Balboa’s chin.

  Now there was screaming emanating from nearby tables. Tony C’s bodyguards covered the Boss with their own bodies and everyone hit the floor. The twins finally figured out that they should retrieve their weapons.

  Gibron and Parisi rushed toward the table where Ben Rossi had literally shed his brains onto the white cloth as he was hurled atop and over the circular table and onto the floor on the other side.

  Johan
sen finally reached into his jacket and withdrew the smoke grenade. He pulled the pin, and soon the immediate area was engulfed in red smoke.

  Dino had left the stage, and the musicians had all hit the floor. The place was up for grabs.

  Mark dropped the .44 and started to walk quickly toward the kitchen. The red mist was billowing all about the table that Benny Bats had flown over with a wave of gore spread behind him. He knew the cops would be closing in on him, but he walked determinedly toward the kitchen. He awaited the first round that would strike him in the head or in the middle of his back.

  But the shot never came, and there was only the bleating of mostly feminine voices in the arena. No one seemed to be pursuing him, but he knew it couldn’t be true.

  The smoke concealed his exit, and miraculously not one of Chicago’s Finest was between Mark Johansen and the food service area.

  *

  There was no one waiting to nab him in the rear. He’d departed quickly enough that the cops hadn’t made it to the back alley, yet. He tore off the waiter’s jacket and threw it toward the first dumpster he found. It went right into the center of the trash gondola.

  He worried that he’d hit the cop in the alley too hard, but there wasn’t time to check on the man with the mashed face. He walked resolutely down the street toward his Ford.

  Where the hell were they?

  He ventured a look over his shoulder and saw that there simply wasn’t anyone there.

  But it was a long trip out of Chicago and back to Utah, and it was a longer still road to Vancouver.

  He figured he must be wearing a ghost shirt instead of the plain white one that he really had on. But he didn’t stop to analyze his great good fortune, and he arrived at his junker ride, got in, and started the motor. It kicked on the first try, and he drove off into his good night.

  *

  He remembered the surprise on Rossi’s face when he saw the barrel of the .44 pointed at his face. When the round was fired, it was as if Benny Bats was lifted off his feet by some force of nature instead of the .44 slug. The bullet blew through the top of his head, and he was airborne, and he crashed atop the table and tumbled still further onto the floor. His bodyguards appeared frozen. They could barely move. And then the smoke did its work just as it had a hundred times in the bush. You couldn’t shoot what you couldn’t see.

  The fact that his path to the kitchen had been unobstructed was beyond miraculous. It was inexplicable. Like a cow in a tornado, floating toward the stratosphere. He had no explanation for any of it. He had been certain he was never going to see another sunrise, let alone the highway that was taking him west, back to Utah and Marilyn and his new-found family.

  He kept peeking into the rear-view mirror, but there were no police coming up behind him.

  *

  He arrived in Rock Island and realized he couldn’t take the van back home. It would really be pressing his luck. If the cops had relayed the description of the kind of van he had driven back to the city…

  The state trooper in Nebraska had pulled him over by the motel off the highway. What if it occurred to the cop that he was the ex-Green Beret who was suspected of killing two Outfit thugs in Chicago? Parisi would’ve sent out an APB about Johansen even though he was officially dead. It wouldn’t take much of a sleuth to figure out who had motive to kill Ben Rossi and his two underlings.

  The van was lost.

  He hoped his lucky streak wouldn’t end out on this Interstate.

  He was in the middle of Iowa on I-80 when the sun finally began its ascent.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  They found the Plymouth Voyager in Rock Island a week later. It had been sitting unclaimed, and the coot who ran the garage called the police after payment was overdue. They hauled it out and brought it to the station where a fingerprints team went over it.

  The results were as expected, for Parisi and Gibron, who made the two-hour drive to the Quad Cities to meet up with the Rock Island five-ohs. The fingerprints were matched to the hands of Mark Johansen, ‘deceased.’ The military printed their people, so they knew who it was who shot a .44 slug through Benny Bats’ brains.

  The ride back to Chicago took longer because of traffic. They got on the Stevenson at 4:00 P.M., about the worst time you could get caught on I-55. It was the middle of rush hour, so it took an hour to get from the western suburbs to the Loop. And then the Outer Drive was a mess, as well—another twenty-five- minute journey.

  When they parked the Ford in the lot, Parisi and Gibron headed to the cafeteria. They were in no mood to drive in rush hour to grab something to eat.

  They sat in their favorite booth, by the east windows. The view was Lakeshore Drive.

  They ordered Cokes and burgers, the staples of comfort food. They shared the large fries.

  “So the cop at the kitchen door in the back of the hotel isn’t dead,” Gibron said.

  “No, he survived. But Johansen flattened his nose real nice. Going to take surgery to unflatten it.”

  “Why the fuck was this poor copper alone back there?”

  Doc was genuinely angry.

  “The other two uniforms called in sick and somebody screwed up and never assigned substitutes. There were supposed to be three patrolmen out there,” Jimmy explained.

  “Who was the fuckup?”

  “That would be Paul Patterson.”

  “Isn’t that idiot retired yet?”

  “We have a very strong union, Doctor.”

  “And Johansen gets to be Ben Rossi’s executioner. I don’t like him doing our job, Jimmy.”

  “Why? You expected to shoot Benny Bats?”

  “I was expecting the two of us to arrest the prick for the demise of David Johansen.”

  Jimmy took a chomp out of the burger on his tray.

  “I would’ve preferred to blow up Rossi’s shit myself,” Jimmy remarked.

  “So where’s this guy now?”

  “Out in the weeds. Some guys you don’t catch. Nobody’s ever had a perfect arrest record in this department that I know of.”

  “How’d he know to ditch the van?”

  “Intuition. Only thing I can figure, Doc. This guy escaped the jungle. That’s a pretty special feat, all by itself. He probably has an extra sense about the boogie man in the dark. He probably figured the state cop in Nebraska called him in, finally. Who the hell knows?”

  “I don’t like loose ends, James.”

  “Whattayagonnado?”

  “Finish this fucking cardboard burger. That’s what I’m gonna do.”

  When they finished the meal, they took the elevator back up to their offices.

  *

  Carmen Rossi threw her old man an enormous wake. Everybody showed up, even Tony Calabrese and most of his crew. Tony C gave her a kiss on either cheek, and then he knelt in front of the closed casket and made like he was actually saying a prayer. Crossed himself and everything.

  The line was long to get to see the casket with a few thousand dollars of flowers covering it. It went on for four hours, and then the Balboa twins took Carmen back to Cicero. They would plant her husband at Oak Park Estates next to his parents in the family plot tomorrow.

  When they opened the door, she turned to Chris and Charlie.

  “I want to talk to you two,” she told them.

  They sat on the couch. Carmen sat on the high-backed leather chair.

  “I want you both to help me.”

  “Sure, Carmen,” Charlie proffered.

  “I don’t think you two understand what I’m asking. I want to run this crew. I want to take over for Ben.”

  They both shot a smile her way.

  “Something amusing?” she scowled at them.

  “No,” Charlie answered. “It’s just that a woman—”

  “Can’t run a crew.”

  “Yeah. Something like that,” Chris added.

  They both appeared on-edge, now.

  “Why can’t a woman do this job?”

  They had no an
swer for her.

  Then Charlie seemed to catch on.

  “I guess you could,” he told Carmen.

  “You guess?” she smiled.

  They both remained mute, momentarily, and then they looked at each other. Their heads swiveled simultaneously, in synch.

  “Why the fuck not?” Chris told her.

  “Yeah, why not? Like my brother said,” Charlie concurred.

  She folded her hands in her lap. She wore the required black dress, but no veil. She knew the black dress was history after the funeral, the next day.

  “I want you to come along with me in what I want to do. The first thing is I want that old bastard dead. Morte.”

  Chris and Charlie shot each other a glance. Then they turned back to her.

  “You mean Calabrese,” Chris said.

  “What other old bastard do you suppose?” she smiled.

  They stared at each other again.

  “You gotta stop that shit,” Carmen told them. “You don’t need each other’s approval. I’m giving the goddam orders. Remember?”

  “Sure,” Chris said.

  “Sure,” his twin agreed.

  “You figure out the details, but I want it done within a week after the funeral tomorrow. I want this war ended our way, not Calabrese’s way. You understand?”

  They nodded.

  “Get it done. Recruit more help if you need to,” she told them.

  “We don’t need any help. I know we didn’t stop that Green Beret guy, but he caught everybody off guard. Even the cops had no idea he was actually going to…”

  Chris’s voice trailed off.

  “I’m not blaming either one of you. What’s done is done.”

  She stood.

  “Get going on this thing. I want another big funeral in this city very, very soon.”

  “Who’s going to keep an eye on you, Carmen?” Charlie asked.

  “Romano and Cordero.”

  “You sure you want those two?” Chris queried.

  “Don’t you trust them?” she demanded.

  “I guess,” Chris returned.

  “There you go with that ‘I guess’ shit again.”