“But, Mike—I ain’t never forgot who you are, what you are. You’re still the guy that shot Frank Abatte in Cal City that time. You’re still the guy that single-handed took out that hit team on Al down in Palm Beach. And you’re still the guy that nailed those two disloyal prick bodyguards that turned on Frank.”
Michael leaned back; he twitched a smile. “Actually, Sam, I’m not.”
“Not?”
“That’s not who I am anymore.”
Giancana offered up yet another shrug, gestured with open hands; for Michael’s taste, the man was working way too hard to seem casual.
“Who’s to say any of us is who we was when we was kids? Used to be, I could hump three, four broads in a night.…Maybe them days is behind me, but, Mike.…”
And Giancana removed his dark glasses, and small beady shark’s eyes locked unblinkingly on Michael.
“…I can still get it up.”
Michael raised an eyebrow. “Good for you.”
Giancana tossed the glasses on Michael’s desk; they clunked and slid a little. “First time I really got a good look at you was, hell, when was it, ’42? When you came over to the Bella Napoli, to talk to the Waiter.”
The Bella Napoli was a restaurant in River Forest, a Chicago suburb; but the “waiter” in question didn’t serve food: Giancana was referring to Paul “the Waiter” Ricca.
“I miss him,” Michael said, referring to the recent death of his godfather.
“Great loss. Great man. Personally? I always thought it was tragic, you know—prison time depriving him of the chair that was rightfully his. Joe Batters, all due respect, a good man himself, never was no Paul Ricca.”
“Joe Batters” was a Tony Accardo nickname that dated back to Capone’s day.
“I owe a lot to Paul,” Michael said.
“Yeah…yeah…don’t we all. Hate I couldn’t make it back for the funeral, but hell—the feds musta been on that one like flies on dog shit.”
To this touching sentiment, Michael replied, “They were.”
“That time, back at the Bella Napoli? I was impressed with you.”
“Were you?”
“I was. Really, truly.” The little man shifted in his chair; he was “little” literally, but he had a presence, even a charisma, that filled the office. “You stood up to Mad Sam. You didn’t cut him no slack.”
“Did he deserve any?”
Giancana’s laugh was curt. “Hell no! He was a psycho then, and he’s a psycho now. You know them glasses he wears?”
“Sure.”
“There’s no prescription in ’em. He has perfect eyesight. But sometimes he takes ’em off and rubs his eyes and then he sneaks peeks at people, thinking he’s catching ’em off -guard. Like we all think just ’cause he wears glasses, he’s blind as a bat or something!”
Michael managed a smile. “Really?”
Giancana sat forward, his small eyes huge. “Did you know he’s a satanist?”
“A satanist.”
“A full-blown fuckin’ no-shit satanist! He told me the people he’s hit. Blood sacrifices to the devil! I saw him rolling around on the floor one time, havin’ some kinda damn fit, foamin’ at the mouth, screamin’, ‘Show me some mercy, Satan, I’m your servant, Satan, command me!’…kinda shit.”
Michael sipped his Coke, put the bottle back on the cocktail-napkin coaster. “Well, that’s fascinating I’m sure, Sam.”
“‘The devil made me do it!’” Giancana said, in possibly the worst Flip Wilson impression of all time. He pawed the air. “Hell! The stories I could tell.…”
“You’ve convinced me. Mad Sam is nuts.”
Giancana leaned so close, he almost climbed onto the desk. “He’s more than nuts, Mike. He’s dangerous.”
“Doesn’t that go without saying?”
“I don’t just mean ‘dangerous’ he might stick an ice pick in your ball sack. I mean ‘dangerous’ this business with Grimaldi, this trial—you know how Sam behaves in court!”
“Likes to defend himself.”
“Talk about a fuckin’ fool for a client. Layin’ on a stretcher in his pajamas, yellin’ through a bullhorn. Tellin’ the judge he’s worse than fuckin’ Stalin!”
“So what?”
“So an unpredictable prick like Sam, knowin’ the things he knows about all of us? Can you wrap your brain around the risk? And if they grant him immunity.…”
“What does this have to do with me?”
Giancana leaned back; he was framed against a peaceful background of blue sky and green forest and purple mountain in the picture window behind him. “Sam’s the problem. You’re the solution.”
Michael drew breath in through his nostrils.
“We need somebody to take care of this,” Giancana said, and gesturing with open hands again, “who’s not one of the, you know, usual suspects. You can walk right up to Sam, he wouldn’t think nothing of it; and the cops? Even the feds? You been a saint so long, who the fuck’s gonna—”
“No.”
Giancana’s eyes tightened; his frown reflected confusion more than displeasure. It was as if the word Michael had uttered had been in Swahili.
“You’ve got a pretty cushy job here, Mike,” Giancana said slowly. “You really wanna throw that away?”
“Fire me if you want. I have half a dozen standing offers from legit bosses in Vegas.”
Nostrils flared. “Le-git bosses…?”
“All due respect, Sam,” Michael said, raising a pacifying palm, “that part of my life is behind me.”
To a bystander, Giancana’s smile might have looked pleasant. “Mike…‘no’ ain’t an option.”
“Is this coming from Accardo?”
The oval face flushed. But the voice remained calm: “It’s coming from me, Mike. It’s coming from this-ain’t-a-fucking-topic-of-conversation. We ain’t breaking up into fuckin’ discussion groups.”
Nodding, Michael rocked back in his chair. “You’re right. Nothing to discuss. I won’t do this for you, Sam. Or for Tony or anybody.”
Giancana’s eyes were moving side to side, frantically; and yet he managed to glare at Michael, nonetheless.
Michael was saying, “You don’t just waltz into my office, thirty years later, and say suddenly I’m a torpedo again.”
Giancana stood.
And pointed a finger.
The finger did not tremble, but his voice did, just a little. “I’ll tell you, thirty years ago. Thirty years ago you took an oath. Thirty years ago—”
Michael shook his head. “I don’t care about guns and daggers and burned pictures or any of your Sicilian Boy Scout rituals. I was a fucking kid. Now I’m a grown man with a family and a reputation, and I’ve made you people a lot of money over the years.”
“You people! You people!”
“Go out the way you came, Sam, and get off this property—you’re still in the Black Book, and I have investors to protect. Go and find some goombah to do your bidding. I run a business for the Outfit. It starts and ends there.”
Giancana’s face was tomato red. “You’re a man with a family is right, Mike—”
Michael stood. He looked Giancana squarely in the eyes. His voice delivered words that were hard and cold and even—no inflection at all.
“Understand this, Momo. I may have put killing for you people behind me…but self-defense I’m fine with. Touch my family, even look at them, and you’ll wish you were dealing with Mad Sam, not a ‘saint’…capeesh?”
Giancana drew in a deep breath.
The little gangster plucked his sunglasses from the desk, put them on, and moved to the fireplace, where he worked a hidden lever on the mantel. The left stony pillar swung out, revealing a dark passage.
“Capeesh,” Giancana said quietly, and stepped into the blackness.
The stone door closed behind him, making a scraping sound, like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Michael winced, but that sound had nothing to do with it.
; TWO
Two days ago, Patricia Ann Satariano had celebrated her forty-seventh birthday. Like her husband, she looked young for her age, though (unlike her husband) some minor plastic surgery had aided the effect.
Pat smoked, and that had put vertical lines above her upper lip, and she’d had her eyes done, too (she didn’t know any mother of two who could reach her age without showing years around the eyes). As for the smoking, the health concerns hadn’t been publicized when she began, and the habit had helped her with various tensions over the years.
So she’d had all of that erased, and a little breast lift, too, two years ago (she had met forty-five with the terror some women experience at fifty), and Pat Satariano remained a reasonable, very recognizable adult version of the astonishingly beautiful Patsy Ann O’Hara, who had been a high school homecoming queen in DeKalb, Illinois, back in 1938.
Right now, mowing their lawn on this crisp spring day in her white tube top and blue short-shorts and white sneakers, she was still wolf-whistle-worthy, a slender, long-legged, shapely blue-eyed blonde with shagged hair brushing her shoulders, Carly Simon–style. She’d always kept trim, exercising decades before fitness was “in”; her grooming remained impeccable, and she stayed as fashionable as possible, considering the nearest “big” city was Reno, an hour away. (If it weren’t for the I. Magnin shop at Cal-Neva, she would have gone mad in Crystal Bay.)
She and Michael had been high school sweethearts, and she’d gone to college right there in DeKalb, at Northern, while initially Michael worked for his folks, Mama and Papa Satariano, at their spaghetti house. Then her beau had been among the first to enlist—even before Pearl Harbor—and was likewise among the first to return.
He’d come back from Bataan with a glass left eye and the war’s first Congressional Medal of Honor.
She knew of the torturous history behind Michael using that heroic distinction to go to work for Frank Nitti; she was aware of his misguided and dangerous attempt to take revenge for the murders of his mother, brother, and father. She knew, too, the convoluted circumstances that had led to his remaining among those people.
All these years.
And yet, despite the underlying tensions of who her husband’s employers were, their life had been almost placid. Michael’s job paid very well, they had a lovely home (a rambling ranch-style in the Country Club subdivision), and their children had grown up here in the small affluent community of Crystal Bay (California), under the bluest sky God had ever whipped up in His celestial kitchen.
For the first ten years or so, the couple had stayed in the Chicago area, Patsy Ann teaching (high school literature) and Michael working for…those people. The Satarianos had settled in Oak Park, and she taught at nearby working-class Berwyn; and the first few years—when Michael was assisting Mr. Accardo, mostly out of the Morrison Hotel in the Loop—had been tense. Pat wasn’t sure what Michael had done for Mr. Accardo in those days, and never asked.
But after that, Michael strictly worked in legitimate areas for his employers, usually a restaurant or nightclub. Occasionally the Satarianos spent time in Vegas, sometimes as long as several months—vacations, really—and almost always over Christmas, when he’d be filling in at the Sands.
The plan had been for Pat to work for a while, and then they’d start their family. They began seriously trying in the late forties, and for a while it looked like she might be teaching school forever; but Mike, Jr., came along in 1951, and Anna in 1956. Good Catholics though they were, the Satarianos nonetheless decided to hold it at two.
Somehow they’d managed to create little replicas of themselves—young Mike was a quiet, serious boy who loved to read, not an A student but a good one, who excelled at sports, football and baseball, as had his dad. Anna was dark-haired and dark-eyed but otherwise the image of her mom; and like her mom, Anna was popular and a cheerleader and an honor student, obsessed with movies, theater, and pop music.
No one ever had better kids.
And moving to Crystal Bay had only been beneficial—even in the suburbs, Chicago had a dark side. Mike—their son was always “Mike,” and his father “Michael,” to differentiate them around the house—had been old enough, at twelve, to find the uprooting traumatic; but the boy got over it, particularly when the girls ooohed and aaahed over his dark hair and dark eyes. Anna was only in the first grade, so that had been less of a problem.
With no Catholic church in either Crystal Bay or its Nevada neighbor Incline Village, the Satarianos joined St. Theresa’s in South Lake Tahoe—though only thirty miles, the journey in this mountainous, twisty territory took easily forty-five minutes. Both kids had complained, every single Sunday, from grade school through high school, about this imposition on their time; but the parents insisted, and Pat had been fairly active in the church, now that she was no longer teaching.
Pat couldn’t really say Michael had been a warm father, not in the effusive sense—he showered both kids with gifts, and always had time for them, but he was quiet and sparing with praise. Somehow their daughter had always been closer to her father, and their son to his mother.
A funny split between father and son occurred during grade school, when Mike—ever the sports nut—started obsessively following college and national teams, his room a collage of posters and pennants. Though he’d been a high school star athlete himself, the boy’s father had no interest in either collegiate or professional sports—to him, they were only games that fueled gambling, and represented a sort of busman’s holiday.
Michael would say to Pat, “That shit’s just the point spread.”
So it had been Pat who sat and watched TV with her son, and followed the teams, football and baseball, while Michael accompanied Anna to the movies they both loved, and theater, and he always made sure the whole family got ringside seats in Vegas and at the Cal-Neva for Sinatra and Darin and Judy Garland and Elvis…plus backstage handshakes and autographs.
Because of his line of work, Michael was in a position to put Anna in contact with her dreams, and just last year he had ushered her around Hollywood, introducing her to top actors and actresses and directors and producers, getting the full tour of various Hollywood studios, going on set during the making of (wouldn’t you know it) The Godfather. Acting and singing were Anna’s big ambitions, and her father clearly intended to pave the way.
Pat appreciated both her daughter’s talent, and her husband’s interest in helping their gifted girl, but Mom was afraid their little A student might skip college and go right into show business, which was—let’s face it—just a bunch of low-life carnival people (however talented) doing the bidding of garment merchants and gangsters. This particular argument was one of the few recurring ones in a predominantly happy, mutually supportive marriage.
“You’re a closet bigot,” Michael would say.
“I am not!” These were always fighting words to liberal Pat.
“You say ‘carny people,’ but you mean ‘wops’ and ‘kikes.’”
“I do not!”
“Never forget the world thinks I’m one of those wops…who happens to have provided a pretty goddamn good life for us, I might add.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?”
“And what makes you think ‘micks’ are any better than the other European riffraff! We all washed up on the Ellis Island shore, didn’t we?”
This was an argument that always ended with Pat retreating to a brooding silence, which was unusual, because the pattern on just about every other topic was the reverse. Michael seldom got as verbal as he did when this particular button got pushed.
And she understood: deep down, he felt guilty about the life he led; but, as he’d pointed out, the result for his family had been overwhelmingly positive. And he was, after all, a legitimate businessman, despite certain ties.…
Now, it should never be said that Michael treated Anna as his “favorite.” He backed his son’s interests, too—however disinterested Michael might be in professional sports, the fat
her had always been a keen follower of his son’s local endeavors in the athletic arena. Even with his demanding, often punishing schedule, Michael had rarely missed a Little League, junior high, or high school game—even the intramurals at St. Theresa’s.
And high school had found mother and daughter forging a tighter bond—the worries and pressures of the various high school musicals Anna had gone out for called for a maternal touch, since Michael didn’t deal with emotions that well, his own or anybody else’s. Plus, there had been “boy” issues, which (until lately) they had discussed like two girls at a slumber party.
And, then, along came Vietnam.…
Pat and her son had had a major falling out over the Great American Misadventure. Pat—a lifelong Democrat—stayed active with local, state, and even national politics, and during the late ’60s actively protested the war. (Michael, also a Democrat, always seemed to agree with her, but never participated in marches and sit-ins—though he did not discourage her.)
She so hated the war, she’d even been conned into voting for Nixon!—fucking Nixon!—in 1968, because the Democrats had imploded at their convention, and Bobby Kennedy had been murdered, and Tricky Dick at least had a secret “plan,” right? Who could have predicted that plan was the secret bombing of Cambodia!
Back in ’70, when young Mike—a graduating senior who had several football scholarship offers—drew a three-digit number in the draft lottery…meaning he would likely not be called…Pat had been ecstatic. And her husband had taken her into his arms and squeezed her tight, and whispered, “Thank God. Thank God.”
But then Mike sat his folks down in the living room, one terrible Saturday morning, and explained that he was enlisting in the army.
“Dad served his country,” Mike said, “and I want to do the same.”
“Are you serious?” Pat said, almost hysterical. “Why would you risk your life in that senseless, immoral war?”
She obviously was well-aware that her son—like so many children—had opposite politics to her own; that he had been president of Incline Village High’s Young Republicans Club had not been her proudest moment as a parent. For several years now, Mike had pooh-poohed his mother’s “hippie anti-war ravings” in that soft-spoken wry way of his.
Road to Paradise Page 4
