Rampage

by Justin Scott

  “There are? I guess they figure I’m going to shoot somebody back. They figure right.”

  “No. We don’t want another war.”

  “What do you think this is?”

  “Later. After the Strikeforce.”

  “Later? The rate the Cirillos are sucking up Brooklyn, they’re going to be charging us rent on the house.”

  Helen glanced at Pauly. He was driving nervously and watching them in the mirror. “I thought the Strikeforce getting Nicky Cirillo would slow them down.”

  “Not if Crazy Mikey comes up on top.” Eddie promised with grim relish. “Then we ll see a real fight.”

  Her brothers still couldn’t understand that it took more than guts, muscle, and snap decisions to fill Don Eddie’s shoes. They were like proud, brave bears, ferocious in battle, yet doomed to be puzzled by the events which led to the fight, and mind-blown by the diplomacy which would end it.

  She closed her suede bomber jacket because the van was ice-cold. Eddie noticed right away. “Cold?” He turned down the air-conditioning, threw his arm around her, and snuggled her close, like her father. Her heart flew to him.

  “How’s Pop?” he asked.

  “Not so good.”

  “I wish he’d let me and Frank visit.”

  “He can’t stand to see you guys inside. You know that. It’s like you’re convicted, too.”

  “Yeah, I know. So how is he?”

  “Some guy pulled a knife on him.”

  “What?”

  “It was taken care of.”

  “It goddammed better be.”

  “It’s tough. The blacks own the prison.”

  She realized with an almost giddy sense of triumph that she had already decided not to tell Eddie and Frank about his condition. She kept a private place within her where she told the truth about things of the heart, but this was business. Her family simply could not survive her brothers’ leadership, so she had lied about her father, so they could all survive.

  “We got black friends,” said Eddie. “Spanish, too.”

  “Maybe you better talk to them again. There’s a limit to what we can buy from the guards. I think maybe we should—”

  She had a funny feeling that Pauly was listening. She pressed the partition button. The glass hummed shut.

  “Wha’d you do that for? Pauly’s like my right hand.” Eddie flourished the bandage with an ironic laugh.

  “There’s some things to talk about.”

  “Sit on it till we’re home with Frank. You sure they took care of the knife?”

  She started to reply, but Pauly was still bothering her. Like most no-class Italian guys she knew, Pauly took his image from the movies. Saturday Night Fever almost a decade gone, he was still failing hard at a John Travolta image in a black leather jacket, white shirt, black pants. A real cafone. Who else would drive her brother around for ten years? But why so nervous tonight—the tense set of his shoulders? This wasn’t his first war. He kept cocking his ear toward the intercom. She touched the switch. It appeared to be off.

  She looked at him. Pauly’s eyes were flickering like snake tongues in the rearview mirror, and suddenly Helen felt herself reeling from her third sickening jolt of the day. What if the Strikeforce had turned Pauly? That was their style. Get right to the top. What if her brother’s bodyguard were wired? What if he had fixed the intercom so that he was transmitting every word that she and Eddie spoke to the federal agents tailing the van?

  Helen opened the vanity, lighted the mirror, and calmly examined her makeup.

  “Pop was wondering if you want to promote Pauly.”

  “What? Since when does Pop get into running my crews?”

  “He says Pauly’s earned it.”

  Pauly, the dumb cafone, proudly squared his shoulders.

  Early the next morning, Eddie Rizzolo entered the Florida room in the back of the house that Helen used as an office. She was dolled up in a tight silk blouse, tighter jeans, and the open-toe, high-heeled shoes with thin straps that Eddie’s girlfriend, who was jealous, called “fuck me shoes.”

  Helen looked up from a computer screen she was filling with financial spread sheets, swiveled her chair, stretched her perfect legs, and gave him her full attention. He knew she weighed a hundred pounds and stood all of five one without her spikes, and he towered over her, but when she fixed her violet eyes on him, he felt as if she filled the room.

  “Was Pauly wired?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Feds?”

  “Southern District Strikeforce.”

  “What are they doing over here in Brooklyn?”

  “They cut a deal with the Eastern District—joint investigations.”

  “Great. Was he alone?” Meaning, had the Strikeforce wired other Rizzolo lieutenants to transmit conversations with their bosses?

  “Guaranteed. We had a little talk, first. It’s a bitch with somebody you like.”

  “How long was it going on?”

  “It just started, thank God.”

  “Thank God. How’d they get him?”

  Eddie rubbed his mouth. He saw where she was going and didn’t like it. “Pauly had a little heroin action on the side.”

  Her eyes flashed. “So they waved twenty years at him and he flipped?”

  “His little cousin was in on it. That nice kid, Joey? The Feds told him they’d get the kid, too. Pauly got scared what the fags in jail would do to little Joey, so he flipped. They had him by the balls.”

  “Did you know about Pauly’s heroin action?”

  “I didn’t really know....”

  She leveled her gaze on him, cold, silent, watching.

  “I guessed, but I stayed out of it.”

  “Eddie. We’ve agreed—no heroin! It’s how they got Pop. It’s not worth the heat. You’ve got to stop acting like one of the boys. You make ’em think you’re just another guy, so there’s no respect, there’s no fear. You think Pauly would have dared pull that on Pop?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe they know I’m not that smart.”

  She made a face, motioned him over, pulled his head down to her, and kissed his cheek. “Do me a favor? Remember something?”

  “What?”

  “Remember you’re not alone, okay? It’s you and Frank and Pop. And me.”

  Yesterday’s unseasonably muggy heat had given way to a clear, chilly morning. After dead-heading some pansies in the backyard, she glanced up and surprised her smoky reflection in the bullet-proof plastic that her brothers had attached to the jalousie windows. A trick of the light made her face appear clear against a murky background, like an old-fashioned studio portrait of a passionate girl with serious eyes. She moved to touch it, but the shift caused the glass behind the plastic to appear, and the narrow slats seemed to slice her face into many parts. She shivered, shook her head violently, dropped the petals on the grass, and went back inside.

  She cleared the computer in which resided the legitimate books for the Rizzolos’ bus company, wedding palaces, and dance clubs. The blank screen stared back, another mirror. She got up to tend her house plants, but excess water was standing in their drain saucers, turning the jade leaves yellow. She punched some Corelli out of her stereo, but it did not soothe her and she turned it off. She stared at the oil portrait of Joannes Baptista Guadagnini that she had bought when she went to Italy to help after a big earthquake there. Her “patron saint”—but even the great trickster of the Cremonese violin makers could not make her smile today.

  The light was making her crazy; it looked dirty because of the bullet-proofing. Her brothers were proud of the offset mountings which allowed her to crank the slatted windows to let in air, but, as with many things Frank and Eddie did, execution never quite matched intention. The special plastic had grown cloudy since her father had led them through the last mob war, when they had broken away from the Cirillos. It was so murky that her Canarsie neighborhood appeared to be underwater, while at night the glare of the security floodlights on the postage
-stamp front lawn, the driveway, backyard, and alley was diffused like a snowstorm.

  Ordinarily, when she felt trapped, she had many escapes— the old farm their grandfather had bought upstate in Westchester, a whaler’s mansion on the north fork of Long Island which the connected side of her mother’s family had owned since Prohibition, and a summer cabin in the Adirondacks. Cousins, people she liked, lived on handsome estates in the New Jersey hunt country, where she was welcome, even courted; for even the best Sicilian families had divorced sons in need of remarriage. And there was always, of course, Uncle Frank in Westport; and now, his handsome pitcher.

  Once, when she got the itch to really break loose, she had boarded a plane alone to an isolated Club Med on Martinique, and for a week that still shimmered in memory she lived like somebody else. But since the Strikeforce, nothing was ordinary, and she wasn’t going anywhere until things got a lot better, which didn’t look to be soon.

  She fled upstairs, removed her spike-heeled shoes, and peeled out of her jeans and blouse. She hung up her clothes, put her shoes in a shoe bag, and tossed her panties in the hamper. She confronted the mirror on her high school dressing table and regarded her body with pleasure. She was slight yet strong, fine rather than delicate. She chose a gray sweatsuit piped with lavender and tied a matching lavender sweatband around her head.

  Eddie and Frank fell silent when she strode into the family room. Frank was even bigger than Eddie, a quiet, robust man of great and often indiscriminate appetites—quick to anger, quick to forget. They looked guilty about something, and Frank, who, unlike Eddie, could never lie to her, glanced anxiously at the unlisted telephone.

  “I’m going running.”

  “It’s dangerous to make it a habit, Helen. You set up a pattern and they’re waiting.”

  “I have to get out.”

  Frank, whose street crews were responsible for the Ca-narsie area, sent reluctantly for her bodyguards. He cast another guilty glance at the telephone.

  “What are you two up to?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  Eddie looked obstinate, but Frank said, “This guy got in touch.”

  “No dope deals.”

  “Fifty keys,” Eddie shouted, waving his bandage.

  Frank said, “The price is going through the ceiling with the shortage. We could use the cash, Helen. Let me go upstate and dig up some bread.”

  “You guys! You got a Strikeforce just waiting to nail you. Did it ever occur to you that phone’s probably bugged?”

  “I swept it this morning,” Eddie retorted, and Frank added, “We didn’t say nothing.”

  “Besides,” Eddie said, “the Feds can’t just call us up to buy it. That’s entrapment.”

  “Now you’re lawyers. Listen, lawyers—you buy, you possess. Then you say hello to some guy the Feds wired and you’re conspiring to sell it. I told you, no deals, no business.”

  “But this is different.”

  “We have an agreement, Eddie. You and Frank and me. When they put Pop inside we agreed. You and Frank run the business, but I make the decisions.”

  “I’m talking about running the business. You’re moving into our territory now.”

  Eddie looked very determined and started pacing. Frank pushed his closed fists together, causing muscle to swell in his upper arms—his way of shrugging. Eddie, as usual, was the problem.

  “Frank, did we have a deal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you tell Eddie, please?”

  “Come on.” He pushed harder and his knuckles turned white.

  “Eddie. Did you agree, too?”

  Eddie broke off pacing. “Yeah.”

  “Did Pop go along?”

  “Sure. He knew we was a couple of dummies.“

  “Hey.” She went to Eddie, her heart filling. She tugged him toward Frank, and put her arms around both of them. “This is us. Right?” Teasing, she dug her nails into the rolls around their waists. “You want to come running? Get rid of those guts?”

  Eddie pulled away. “What if we rip it off? This guy’s a schmuck.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “How about it, Helen? Can’t we just steal it?”

  The listed telephone rang in the kitchen. They waited, glaring at each other. Their mother appeared in the doorway, holding a towel, and Helen thought, as she often did, I’ll never be that beautiful when I’m her age. Despite ribbons of gray in her hair, she had a showgirl’s body and a face every boy in the family fell in love with as he came of age. Helen was never sure whether her mother really missed her father or preferred being sole boss of the house. She must miss sex—not that they ever talked about it. Like they didn’t talk about business, either. Even the time the Cirillos blasted the picture window with shotguns, and the Post had Don Eddie’s picture on the front page, she had clung to the fiction that her husband was a bus company executive.

  “Some girl named Marcy on the telephone.”

  “Marcy Goldsmith?”

  “Some Jewish name.” Her mother shrugged. “She says she was your roommate in college.”

  “Tell her I’m out.”

  “Don’t you want to say hello?”

  “Mom. Please.”

  “Okay. I’ll lie.”

  “Thanks.”

  Eddie started to speak as soon as she left, but Helen stopped him with a gesture. “Wait. She’ll be back.”

  “How do you—?”

  “I know.”

  Her mother returned, perplexed. “Marcy says you’re alumnae.”

  “Didn’t you tell her I’m out?”

  “We got talking. She sounds like a nice girl.”

  “Tell her I’ll send a check.”

  “Don’t yell at me.” She turned to Eddie and Frank. “You guys hungry?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Sure.”

  “I’ll bring something.”

  Eddie waited until their mother had gone again. “What do you say, Helen?”

  “No.”

  Outside, two of her best men waited in a car. A third, a young zip from Sicily, warmed up in running shoes. She flopped beside him on the grass and did stretches, aware that grandmothers and widowed aunts were fluttering curtains up and down the block—Helen, the wild one, was at it again. The houses to the left and right were occupied by Rizzolo lieutenants, as were those that backed on them from the next street. The grouping offered a sense of security, but the street was no fortress if the Cirillos provoked a really bloody war.

  “Let’s go!”

  Helen jogged out of the neighborhood, trailed by the car and the young zip, and took a road that cut across a marsh, through the park, and onto a path beside the Belt Parkway. The clear sun sparkled on Jamaica Bay. A land breeze, dry and chill, swept the shore. When the car had to cut ahead to intercept her at the next entrance, she motioned the zip to catch up. He was cute, with a little angel smile; but appropriately tough. What a way to blow a family apart, Helen thought; sleeping with a bodyguard. Brought up by decent people, he knew his place and never once threw anything remotely like a pass. Respecting that, she treated him with the same cool remoteness as she did all her family’s retainers, and when she ran with him she wore baggy sweats to play fair.

  She wished, as she often did, that there was some way of getting regularly and happily laid without jeopardizing her empire. A sudden dazzling-white smile made her look like a gypsy girl; in a few more good years she could afford to buy Club Med. But then the handsome French kids would be employees and it wouldn’t be the same. Besides, thanks to the Strikeforce, the Bizzolo enterprises had stopped growing for the first time since she had taken over.

  “Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Two miles and she was feeling good, up for the long way back, another three miles. The bodyguard tinkered with his Walkman, which had been altered to serve as a radio connection with the car, and he repeated the direction into a dummy earphone.

  Two runners came the other way.

  Helen and her bodyguard
automatically closed ranks to make them split and go around. They were jocks, big and muscular. The one on her side—a handsome Irish guy who looked like a fireman—gave her an appreciative grin, which she fell for hook, line, and sinker, smiling back even as his partner practically tore her bodyguard in half with a fist to the stomach.

  The zip went down with an explosion of breath, blood, and vomit, clawing for the gun in his sweats. They were ready for that, too. One of them got to it first, pulled the gun, and ripped the wire out of the radio. The other caught Helen as she lunged toward the highway. She screamed for help. A car screeched to a stop. Two men were inside. It seemed like a miracle until they held the back door open while the runners forced her onto the seat.

  She fought, kicking, biting, screaming. One threw himself on top of her. She levered her knee into his groin. He yelled and rolled off. His partner grabbed her by the shoulders. She laced into his wrist with her teeth, kicked a third man in the face, and threw herself at the door. She got the handle open. But they pulled her back and slammed her face down on the seat, where they pinned her bucking hips and jabbed her with a needle.

  9

  CHAPTER

  Twelve miles to the northwest, as Helen Rizzolo’s captors sped toward Kennedy Airport, Christopher Taggart’s White Rolls-Royce Silver Spur rounded a Harlem street corner, crunching broken glass beneath its tires. Reggie, his face hidden by doper shades and the polished visor of his hat, drove slowly down the block of derelict houses and dusty trees. Taggart sat stock-still in back, staring at the one-way bronze windows that made Harlem appear to bask in a golden sun.

  Heroin addicts gazed at the corner, waiting for their man. Some were crying; some waited stoically in holes battered through the cinder blocks that sealed the gutted brownstones; the strongest clambered up rickety stairs for a better view. All stared in the same direction, like spring flowers tracking the sun on a cold day, and no one gave the gleaming car a second glance. Their man would come on foot, and he was late, if he was coming at all, for junk was getting short.

  Reggie repeatedly checked Taggart in the mirror, but his regular smile had died, and he hadn’t barbed him with a joke all morning.