by Rachel Ford
Alfred blinked. “No.”
“Yeah, man. The kitten’s a dry run, a test to see how you’d handle the real thing.” He shrugged. “And you just called your baby Satan.”
“That’s crazy,” he snorted. “If Nance wanted a baby, she’d just say so.”
“Right. Because that’s what women do. They just communicate.” He laughed, as if he was dealing with the simplest of neophytes. “Oh Freddie.”
Alfred felt his cheeks burning. “Not that it’s any of your business, but we have actually talked about kids.”
“Uh huh.” Justin was all skepticism. “And let me guess: ‘maybe, someday, we’ll see.’”
Alfred blinked. “Well…yes, actually.”
The other man groaned. “Bro…you fell for the oldest trap in the world: you believed a woman when she equivocated about kids.” Now, he nodded sagely. “They always want kids. Always. It doesn’t matter what they say. They’re built that way. Just like when a man says he doesn’t want – well, you know.” He grinned, and Alfred grimaced. “It’s evolution’s way of preserving the species. They’re built to want babies, and we’re built to want to make them.
“I mean, you’re in the nesting phase right now.”
Despite himself, Alfred ignored his better judgement and asked, “The what?”
“The nesting phase. Once women reach a certain age, they stop going after the alpha males.”
Alfred frowned at all that that statement implied, about himself and Nance. “A certain age? Alpha males?”
Justin just nodded. “It’s just science. They pick a nester: you know, not low-t exactly, but someone they won’t really have to worry about chasing other females. Someone a little more…domesticated. Who they think will help raise their offspring.”
“Okay.” Alfred was definitely sorry he asked. “Look, I’ve got work to do.”
“It’s just science, dude. Just evolutionary biology at work.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s not.”
“All I’m saying is, you’re in the test pilot program. That cat? He’s the fill-in for your baby. And you?” He smirked. “As far as she sees it? You’re calling your kid – her kid – Satan.”
“Yeah, that’s not what’s happening.”
He shrugged. “I mean, you’re living with a healthy, regularly ovulating female, Freddie. It’s just nature.”
Here, it was time to shut Justin down. It was bad enough to hear his theories, but this? “Okay, you know what? I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say any of that, because I have never heard such a load of pseudoscientific babble in my life. And I never – as long as I live – want to hear you talk about Nance…well, ovulating, or anything related.
“And you? You’re going to get the hummus out of my office. So I can get to work.” The other man seemed about to protest, but he lifted a hand to stem the tide of pseudoscience and creepiness. “Now, Justin. I don’t want to have to explain to Caspersen why my projects are running behind…”
He let the threat hang between them, and finally Justin shrugged. “Alright, Freddie. I’m just trying to help.”
Chapter Two
Alfred wasn’t actually at risk of falling behind on his project work. On the contrary, his calendar was mostly empty for the day. Which worked out alright as far as the taxman was concerned. It gave him a chance to work on his presentation.
He was slated to speak that Friday evening at a tax law symposium. The theme of the evening was tax law in the first half of the twentieth century.
For his presentation, Alfred had chosen a topic that was dear to his heart: the role of tax law professionals in bringing down some of the twentieth century’s most infamous mobsters and gangs.
It was his favorite kind of tale – of the often overlooked, ever crucial, work of humble officers of the law like himself, in maintaining order and decency in a world turned chaotic and cruel.
He’d selected three cases for his presentation. He started with ten, but Nance convinced him to pare it down. “You know how you tend to get so excited when you get on a topic. You might not have time for all of them.”
That was, he thought, her diplomatic way of saying that he ran on at the mouth when wound up. And, she was right. What’s more, little wound him up more than a good tale of the derring-do of taxmen.
So he’d selected three stories of intrepid taxmen whose dogged pursuit of justice had taken bad men off the streets.
The first was a riveting recounting of Las Vegas’s brutal Gambini crime family, and the eagle eyes of the junior analyst who brought them down for tax filing irregularities.
The second was the Chicago Irish mobsters known as the Quiet Boys. They were a grisly band, famous for collecting the tongues of those who crossed them. As with the Gambinis, tax fraud put them away for far longer than their trail of murders would have done. The Quiet Boys were silenced once and for all by an indefatigable IRS agent. It was a good story – and a good pun, too. He’d written it into his presentation. The topic was serious, but he felt it didn’t hurt to throw in a little humor now and then. And, though he’d gone back and forth on it, eventually he came down on the side of it being tasteful rather than irreverent.
It was the last case that was occupying his mind, though. It had all the right ingredients to be the perfect finish, the coup de grâce of his presentation.
The story of Ray Lorina was the story of a celebrated detective with the NYPD to the eyes of the public – but in private, a dirty cop on the payroll of the Tomassi crime family.
Lorina had a reputation for being a thorn in the mafia’s side. He’d put dozens of operatives away, and even survived a few attempted hits on his life. He was revered by the populace, and, as far as everyone knew, despised by the mob.
But when a curious IRS agent dug a little deeper into the Tomassi family’s financials, he learned the truth: Lorina had been on the take all along. He’d been an enforcer, eliminating enemies of the head of the family, Mario Tomassi, under the color of law.
It had been something of a sensation at the time and played out in newspapers across the nation: the hero cop, who was just another low down gangster.
The trial was an absolute spectacle. Lorina claimed to be innocent, of course, but the jury found him guilty on all counts; and the judge determined to make something of an example of him, and handed down the maximum possible sentence.
Not that Lorina had lived to see it. Eleven months later, he died on a shiv, planted in his ribs by a fellow inmate, Tony Bianchi.
The story should have been perfect. It exemplified to a tee the unsung but critical efforts of that most indispensable branch of law enforcement, the Internal Revenue Service. They were the watcher of the watchers, the last check, the final balance in the scales of justice.
When Alfred had first read it, he loved it. What better way to finish his presentation? But the longer he thought about the case, the more one point stuck out to him. Tony Bianchi was a longtime associate of the Tomassi family, and the murder did nothing to diminish his ties with them. On the contrary, as soon as he was out of prison, he married Mario’s grandniece, Angelina.
And no matter how much he tried to make it feel right in his mind, it just didn’t square. Tony wouldn’t have killed Ray without orders from Mario; and if he had, he would have paid for it. Instead, he’d been welcomed into the family. Which meant only one thing: Mario had called in a hit, and this time, shuttered behind bars, Ray didn’t escape.
Why? Had Ray known too much? It wouldn’t have been the first time someone’s ribcage got intimately acquainted with a knife, to make sure they never turned evidence against the mafia.
Still, the taxman felt uneasy with this solution. It was too neat, his mind argued. Something wasn’t right. He could feel it, more as an instinct than a logical objection.
Alfred stared unseeing at his screen, the wheels of his mind turning. He had been in law enforcement long enough to respect his gut. His hunches tended to pan out, his hits were a
lot more frequent than his misses. And when he felt something keenly, like he did now?
He was rarely wrong.
He flipped through the files he’d pulled, and the scans of grainy, black and white photos and newspaper clippings.
He studied the images taken the night of the fateful raid, when Ray Lorina marched into Fat Sal’s Pizzeria, bold as brass, with a warrant to arrest Salvatore Tomassi. Someone had tipped the press off, and they were there to capture it all. Only it wasn’t Fat Sal who wound up in cuffs that night.
Instead, the reputed mafia princeling watched, grinning, as the cuffs were clapped on his nemesis. A Joe Donnelly with The Globe captured the shot, preserving Sal’s look of triumph for posterity.
Alfred stared at it, trying to get a sense of the man. He was big – fat as his moniker implied, but tall too, and broad shouldered. He was handsome, in a very Italian way – dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin.
The fact was, Alfred’s own family tree was full of men who looked an awfully lot like this. And, if family legends were anything to go by, a few of them might have made similarly questionable career choices, though with less success than the Tomassi prince. There was great uncle Louis, who had disappeared in highly questionable circumstances in the twenties. There’d been a brother-in-law of one of the Favero great-grandfathers, too – Anthony – who was said to be in cahoots with the mob, plying his trade bootlegging, back in the day.
Alfred shook his head, to clear the thoughts away. Whatever criminality the Faveros might or might not have dabbled in a few generations back, there were no Fat Sal’s in his lineage. The easy smirk and casual posture might seem approachable. But this was a man who killed by the dozens. He’d gunned down children in front of their mothers, and mothers in front of their children. He’d made men watch as he massacred their entire families. He’d burned people in their beds, and even, rumor had it, buried his best friend alive, when he caught him skimming money from the family.
In the end, he got away with it all, because the NYPD couldn’t make the charges stick. The only jailtime Fat Sal saw across his entire, blood-soaked career was a six week stint for drunken disorderliness. And that was only because he’d got in a fight in front of half a dozen reporters.
And once police got a little too close, Salvatore Tomassi retired to Miami, where he spent the rest of his days in the lap of luxury, dying of natural causes at the age of eighty-five.
Alfred found himself frowning at the grainy picture, at the self-satisfied smirk plastered on the other man’s lips. It was the expression of someone who had won, and knew it. It was the look of Count Mondego, watching Edmond disappear forever. It was the face of Brutus, plunging the dagger into Caesar’s ribs. It was the kiss of Judas, before the soldiers. It was betrayal.
Ray’s case against Sal had fallen apart as soon as he was taken in, overshadowed by his own arrest, and eventually forgotten. An idea flitted around the taxman’s brain. It seemed impossible, but the more he entertained it, the more it blossomed.
What if, he postulated, the knife was the second hit? What if the first hit – the real hit – against Ray Lorina had happened that night, February 3rd, 1940? What if Ray Lorina had gotten too close to a mafia prince, and Mario Tomassi took him out before he could take out one of his grandsons?
Chapter Three
“And that got me thinking, Nance: what if Ray didn’t do it at all? What if they framed him? What if the whole thing was a set up?” They were seated in the dining room, having swapped dinner plates for their respective work.
“Wait?” Nancy said, glancing up from her tools. “You think the IRS guy – what’s his name?”
“Walton Kennedy.”
“You think Kennedy was in on it?”
“I don’t know, babe. Maybe they planted evidence, and he was taken in. Maybe he’s dirty. I don’t know.”
She nodded slowly. “Still, that’s a hell of a conspiracy.”
“I know. But it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Maybe.” Her tone didn’t sound convinced. “Or maybe he just crossed the family. Maybe he got too big for his britches. Maybe he wanted a bigger cut.”
“No, Lorina was a smart guy. If you’re going to play ball with the mafia, you know what that entails. He wouldn’t have done something that stupid.”
She shrugged, turning back to the device. “I guess.”
He paused from his own rambling long enough to scrutinize her progress. Nancy had been rebuilding portions of the Futureprise spacetime field generator, after it was damaged in a rainstorm. They’d managed to hobble it back together, enough to get home anyway. But she’d since refabricated and repaired the components with more durable, and scalable, technology. “How’s that going, anyway?”
“Well, I need to swap out a few more capacitors, but then I think it’ll be ready for a test run.”
Here, the taxman hesitated. He was always a bit nervous about jumping through time or across dimensions. But the prototype device had been designed by an entire team of geniuses at Futureprise Corporation. Not that he didn’t have faith in Nancy’s abilities, but she was sort of flying blind here. “Uh, right.”
She picked up on the tone, and frowned at him. “Chicken.”
“I’m not a chicken, Nance. I just don’t want my atoms sprinkled across all of time and space.”
“I got you home last time, didn’t I? No atom-sprinkling?”
“That’s true,” he conceded.
“And I was working with medieval tools then.”
“Also true.”
“So don’t be a baby.”
“Fine, fine,” he sighed. “I’ll go. If we’re going to disintegrate ourselves, at least we’ll disintegrate together.”
“Always the romantic,” she grinned.
“Always. So, when do we leave?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll finish tonight, but I want to test all the connections before I put it back together.”
“Good thinking.”
She shook her head at him. “Anyway. You were telling me about the detective?”
“That’s right: Ray.”
Nancy smiled. “So he’s Ray now, is he? The other day he was Lorina.”
“Well, the other day, I thought he was a dirty cop. Today, I think he was a railroaded cop.”
It was then that a small, furry orange form materialized onto the table, seeming to come from nowhere. Alfred jumped back. Nance gasped. “Fluff! You’re not supposed to be on the table.”
The taxman waved a hand at the kitten. “Shoo, Satan. Get out of here.”
She turned her attention from the cat to him, and a frown crossed her brow. “Babe, I really wish you’d stop saying that.”
“What?”
“Calling Fluff ‘Satan.’”
Alfred glanced at her warily. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Justin’s words from earlier in the day lingered. “Why?”
“Because,” she said, exasperated. “He’s just a baby. You shouldn’t say things like that.”
He gulped, his mind racing. Just a baby. “Uh, well, uh…”
“It’s a terrible thing to say.”
“But, uh, he’s not a real baby, Nance. I mean, it’d be different if he was a real baby. I wouldn’t call a real baby Satan. Like, if we had a son, I wouldn’t call him that.”
She stared at him, seeming at once confused and alarmed. “Well…obviously, Alfred. That goes without saying. Doesn’t it?”
“Exactly. It’s just a cat.”
She frowned. “I know it’s just a cat.”
“Not a baby,” he felt it necessary to reiterate.
Her frown deepened. “That doesn’t mean I like hearing you call this poor little guy Satan all the time.”
He nodded, relaxing a pinch. “Alright. Alright, Nance, I’ll think of something else.”
“He’s got a name…”
“It doesn’t fit him.”
“He’s fluffy.”
“Yeah, but he’s more evil than he
is fluffy. Would you mind if I called him Demon?”
“Not as bad as Satan,” she conceded. “But yes, I hate it, too.”
“Okay…how about Daemon?”
She pulled a face, but he was grinning. “It’s not as clever as you think it is, babe.”
Alfred shrugged. “I like it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. It’s better than Satan, I guess.”
He nodded. “Alright. In that case: down, Daemon. Off the table.”
The kitten was cleaning one of the two matching white mittens of paws, and it didn’t bother to glance up when he addressed it. It was, Alfred had to admit, adorable. Still, it was an animal, and it was on the dining room table. “I said down.”
He tried a few more times, but finally Nance, laughing at his ineffectualness, picked Fluff up, cooing and kissing him a few times, and set the cat down on a chair beside her. It seemed content to stay there, and the taxman sighed. “You see? It doesn’t even listen to me?”
“Fluff doesn’t listen to anyone, darling. He’s a cat. It goes with the territory.”
Alfred printed the scanned documents he’d been reviewing, and slipped them into a manila folder. Then, he’d slipped that folder under his arm and walked into work the next day, as if he was carrying any other case file.
Not a file he’d put together on a case that had been closed for decades.
But, the fact was, talking to Nance had only ignited his imagination. He couldn’t get over the smirking face of Fat Sal. He’d found images of the trial, too, and the haunted expression in Ray Lorina’s eyes as the sentence came down was seared in his brain.
Lorina was the Edmond Dantès to Sal’s Count Mondego, and the moment of that sentence was the moment he understood he was truly bound for the Château d'If. But there had been no bittersweet revenge for Detective Ray Lorina. There’d been no escape, no getting back at the men who had wronged him.
Ray had died in that prison, and his killer had gone on to be rewarded for the crime, just as Sal had lived out the rest of his days free from any fallout.
