by Thomas Perry
“And you said yes.”
“I went to her and asked her what to do,” he said. “She told me that Sal was absolutely right. She said I had to go to New York, so she could help Sal work it out with her father. That night I got on a train with Carmine Langusto and eight guys.”
“I take it her father didn’t go for it,” said Jane.
“I’ll never know,” said Bernie. “I said there were at least two side deals arranged that week in Florida. That was the second one. She and her father and his guys went back to Detroit. About two days later, he comes out of a restaurant and gets his head blown off in the street.”
Now Jane was moving into familiar territory. She had heard stories like it a hundred times. “Who did it?”
“I’m not sure even now. There was a story around then that some guys in Chicago wanted to break away and take charge in Detroit. Maybe it was them. If it was, it backfired. They never got to set foot in Detroit.”
“What stopped them?”
“It was way over my head. It was a Commission thing. They met in New York while I was there, but by the time I heard about it, it was over. The family in Detroit—what we used to call the Giannini family—was going to stay put. The new don there would be some local guy I’d never heard of, named Ogliaro. And he would hold the family together by marrying the old don’s daughter. Period.”
“They arranged the marriage without her consent?”
Bernie’s eyes squinted at her as though the light was hurting them. “That week in Florida, the cards got reshuffled, and we were all holding new hands. It was 1947, and this is a twenty-year-old girl who is pregnant. I didn’t know it, but she did. She is also the last remaining daughter in the direct line of men who have been in power in that city for three generations. If she holds out on the off chance of marrying me, the people who killed her father are going to take everything he had. They’re going to kill people who were loyal to him. And if anybody knows she’s carrying the heir apparent, she’s probably first.”
Jane struggled to take it all in. The name Ogliaro meant something to her. Bernie had said “heir apparent.” If there was a child, could it have been Vincent Ogliaro? He would be about the right age. She remembered reading about a conviction a couple of years ago, and some sort of a federal sentence. Jane needed to fight the feeling of sympathy that had been growing in her. She used the only method she had. “She didn’t just go along with it, did she?”
He looked down at the carpet again. “No. She arranged it. She thought of it and got some old guys to go to the Commission with it. I don’t even know if she had Ogliaro’s consent in advance or not. It doesn’t matter. He had to do what they said, just like I did.”
“Why him?”
“He was the perfect choice, exactly the sort of man that everybody would accept. He was a brute, with an animal’s face and an animal’s constitution, and the kind of cunning that some animals have.”
“What do you mean?”
“He started out by cleaning house. Everybody who might be a problem got killed. He built on what was left and went on from there. He was never foolish enough to get in on anything outside his own territory, but he protected the city line like it was made of his own skin. There are people who say that she had something to do with that—that it was too smart for him.” He added unconvincingly, “But I don’t believe that.”
Jane had listened to the description and had already decided that the woman must have done it. She shrugged. “Then don’t. Did you ever see her again?”
“A few times.”
“How?”
“In those days, a lot of women with money used to go to New York twice a year to buy clothes: fall and spring. They’d take the train and go on a shopping spree. A few times I could meet her in her hotel. Then it got too dangerous.”
“Ogliaro suspected?”
His face showed distaste and contempt. “Ogliaro wouldn’t have cared. It wasn’t a marriage. They both went into it with their eyes open. She made him powerful and rich, and he made her and the boy safe. There wasn’t any love. No, the problem was me.”
“You?” Jane was distracted. He had said “the boy.” She was almost sure she knew who the boy was.
“Years were going by. I was handling money for the New York families, and it was training my memory. They started bringing in more families, as a favor.”
“Detroit, too?”
“Never Detroit. Ogliaro couldn’t stand it. He knew he couldn’t do anything about what had already happened, but he wasn’t going to leave any of his money with me. But by the mid-fifties there were the New York families, Pittsburgh, Boston, two New Jersey families, one of the Chicago families, New Orleans. The ones in Los Angeles were connected to families in the East, so they were part of the package. The only person who knew where any of it was invested was me. You can see the problem.”
“They wouldn’t let you out of their sight,” said Jane.
“In the fifties there were a couple of wars. They were afraid somebody would clip me just to cause trouble. Then it was the big uproar caused by the wars. Citizens had found bodies lying around, so the government had to start making noise about the Mafia—holding hearings, doing raids. People started to worry about me getting picked up. They moved me out of New York and set me up in a house in Florida.”
“So you couldn’t go to New York anymore.”
“She couldn’t either. It was the sixties by then, and women weren’t doing that anymore. A department store in Detroit had the same clothes as one in New York. Then a bad period started. From the late sixties on, you couldn’t trust your telephone or go talk to somebody outdoors without getting your picture taken. The FBI raided my house six times, and each time I got hauled in for forty-eight hours so they could ask me questions while the families were crying real tears and wringing their hands. In 1978 my house burned down.”
“Arson?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know, because I did it myself. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. I talked them into taking me to Chicago while it was being rebuilt so I could be closer to her. I slipped my bodyguards once and spent the night in a hotel with her. That was the last time. A new house got built, only this time it was in the Keys. While my house was going up, they built houses all around it.”
“So those stories are true? The whole neighborhood is Mafia?”
“I don’t know what you heard, but here’s what’s true. There are three streets on each side. They built the houses and put people in them. The houses aren’t all occupied all the time, but some are. There are places on the island where you can see a boat coming from miles away in any direction, and there’s only one bridge. It was all for me.”
“Didn’t her husband die right around then?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That was why I had to see her. To propose.”
“Marriage? After thirty years?”
“What do you want from me? I couldn’t make the calendar go backwards. It was the first realistic chance I had.”
“She turned you down.”
He nodded. “I figured if anybody would understand that, it would be another woman. I sure didn’t.”
“It was the boy, wasn’t it? If her husband was dead, then her son was going to be the boss. Your son.”
“That’s just about the way she said it. Vincent was practically a kid, late twenties, when Ogliaro died. She was afraid that without her at his elbow to tell him what was what, he couldn’t do it. It would be like setting the baby on the ground while the wild dogs circled him. She couldn’t bring him with her to Florida to live with me. She said that would be like castrating him.”
“What about later, after he was established?” she said carefully. “He seems to have had an aptitude for it.”
“Then it was too late. People were already watching him, worrying that he might get too strong. If his mother came to live with me, then the families who gave me their money would decide he was trying to get his hands on it. They would have killed
him.” He shook his head. “That was our son. He was what she traded our lives for.”
Jane was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a sad story.”
She thought about the woman. This was her story, not Bernie’s. She tested it. “And your son—Vincent—he arranged for your death?”
He shook his head. “How could he? He’s in prison. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Jane nodded. “I remember seeing it in the papers.”
“She did it. She did all of it. All I knew about it was that if I could get that particular flight to Detroit that day, and come outside for some air, she would handle the rest. I see her, she fires a gun at me. I fall down. She gets hustled into a car and away. About six big guys all crowd around me. One takes my picture, then slips a coat on me and a wig on my head. Another lies down in my place. Another squirts blood all over the place with a plastic bottle. One takes my fingerprints. An ambulance shows up, they lift this guy into it and drive away. A couple of these guys take me into the airport with them, and push me onto a plane, where Danny is waiting for me.”
“That’s a lot of people,” said Jane.
“One of them works in the coroner’s office, a couple more are cops. Danny didn’t know anything about the others, but they were all people she had on the hook. He said she paid them all, but none of them would tell anyway, because they’d have to say they were in on it.”
“So now you’re dead.”
“I’m dead,” he agreed. “Only it didn’t work, because she’s dead too. All those years. All the waiting and wishing, and then this. She has a heart attack. When the hell did women start having heart attacks?”
There were tears streaming down his face. She could see they were coming from his tear ducts, but that meant nothing. There were no actors and few women who couldn’t cry any time they wanted to. What caught her attention were the lines on his face. As she studied them, she understood something that had distracted her since she had met him. The expressions she had seen on his face didn’t match the lines. He would say something cheerful and the voice didn’t match the words, and then he would smile, and the face would appear to wrinkle across the lines. The expression on his face at this moment made the lines and creases fit perfectly. There was only one expression his face had assumed habitually. For fifty years, he had been in anguish. He was old now. The skin on his temple was getting a thin, almost transparent look, like vellum, so she could see the veins.
She said, “She didn’t choose this time because it was good for her, or for Vincent, did she?”
“No,” he said. In his watery blue eyes was the worst agony of all. It seemed to contain within it all of the pain he had felt for fifty years. But she was sure that there was something new, too. “I was beginning to forget things.”
5
Jane looked at him a moment longer. She began to feel that her pity was what was giving him pain now, like the weight of a soothing hand on a burn. She turned away, walked to the other side of the room, and began to rearrange the magazines.
“You’re still a kid. Maybe my telling you this will help you out.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s a very strange little skill you’ve developed. Rita was telling me about it. Somebody is in trouble, you come along, and—poof!—he vanishes.” Jane turned to look at him, and the sad eyes were on her. “I had a strange little skill too.”
“It’s not a business,” Jane said. “I wasn’t trying to get rich.”
“I know, I know,” said the old man. “I wasn’t either. I did it because my friend Sal Augustino asked me to. I could save a friend from going to jail. I did it because there was no way not to. But it wasn’t over. You do a favor, it doesn’t make you paid up. It just proves you can do it.”
Jane was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He seemed to be able to intuit what had happened to her.
Bernie went on. “But pretty soon, it wasn’t just a favor for Sal. It was friends of Sal’s I never knew existed. That’s how they talk, you know. If the person is just some guy, they call him ‘my friend so-and-so.’ If he’s a made mafioso, they say ‘our friend.’ ”
“What about you?” she asked. “How did you get introduced?”
“Me?” He looked shocked. “I wasn’t even Italian—ineligible by accident of birth. My parents were Polish. Besides, you think they needed to give me a blood oath to convince me I’d get killed if I talked?”
“So you were a mercenary.”
“Haven’t you been listening to me? What the hell did I need with money? I couldn’t leave the house to buy a loaf of bread. In the forties I got salaries for phony jobs. Even then, all I could do was invest it. After that, people gave me presents once in a while, that’s all.”
Jane’s breath caught in her throat. She had never taken money for her services. When someone had insisted, she had answered, “A year from now, or maybe two, when you’re living your new life and haven’t felt afraid for a while, think back on the way you felt tonight. Then, if you still feel like it, send me a present.” She waited a few seconds, then tried to simulate idle curiosity. “What kind of presents?”
“All kinds. Mostly money. But I couldn’t keep it lying around, any more than I could leave their money lying around. So I invested it, and kept the account numbers in my head. In the sixties, I flat refused to take even the presents. They were dangerous. I was handling a lot of money for these people. If they knew that I had millions of dollars of my own, what would it mean to them? Where could it have come from except out of their pockets? Even if they somehow got the records from my brokers, and found out I had invested it before they were born, they would have assumed I had stolen it from their fathers or grandfathers.”
Jane said, “When did you realize you were forgetting things?”
“About a year ago,” he said. “It was a new experience for me, so at first I wasn’t sure that was what it was. I would try to take an inventory, and my mind would feel … tired. I could kind of see the words and numbers like before, but it was an effort to pick one out.”
“Do they know?”
“No,” he said. “I figure I’ve lost maybe five or ten percent of what was in here.” He pointed at his head. “Most of the investments have gone up that much in the past six months. There was never any reason to tell anybody. What got them nervous was that I was getting old. They started talking about computers.”
“You were going to be replaced?”
“A little delegation came to me and we had a talk. They were polite and sympathetic and careful the way those guys never are except when they’re conning somebody. They had it all figured out. Everything in my head could fit on a three-and-a-half-inch disk.”
“Having a disk like that could be a dangerous thing.”
“There are ways around that. The world is full of expert consultants. There’s a system that the government uses called ‘strong encryption.’ Nobody else is supposed to, but a lot of people know how. Each code is different, so if the FBI gets the disk, they still can’t read it. And nothing gets lost, because you can make copies: hide one under a penguin’s nest at the South Pole, shove one up a camel’s ass in Saudi Arabia, tape one in a kid’s lunch box in Peoria. They even explained how my memory would get into the computer.”
“How?”
“I would start writing things down, one page at a time. Then I hand the computer guy the paper. He types it in and encodes it. Another guy shreds the paper, and another guy burns the shreds. There would be two other guys with nothing to do but watch to be sure nobody pockets a paper with an account number on it and burns an empty sheet.”
Jane raised an eyebrow. “It sounds a bit ornate for them.”
“This will show you the mentality. The shredder and burner are going to be guys they bring in specially from other countries—one from Central Europe and one from Asia, because they use different alphabets and can’t read letters in English. They won’t know where they are, or who the res
t of us are. The phones will be cut off, and everybody stays until the job is done. When it’s over, they’ll be strip-searched to be sure they take nothing with them, given brand-new clothes, and shipped home, where there’s nobody they could tell who would know what they were talking about. I figure probably when it comes down to it, these two are not going to make it all the way. Once the precautions get elaborate enough, one of the guards is going to say, ‘Oh, what the hell,’ and pull the trigger. The computer guy, I suspect, has problems too. These families are never again going to let themselves get into the position of having a big chunk of their money in one guy’s brain. There will be another disk that holds the program for decoding the encryption.”
“And you?”
“What do you think?” He smiled wearily. “Dead. I looked into their eyes, and I could see they didn’t know it yet. They didn’t know themselves well enough; these are not introspective people. They thought they were making a generous deal with me, and they would stick to it. I would stay on in Florida doing nothing forever. What they didn’t know was that the minute the money was on the disk, I would change. All of a sudden they would notice that I was so old and sick that it would be a favor to put me out of my misery.”
“So she saved you.”
He nodded. “She knew.”
Jane took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she contemplated the old man. She was tired. She knew what was coming and she knew that she would have to let it come before she could move on. “You came here to make a proposal. You’ve taken half the night working your way up to it.”
“I wanted to understand you first, and to let you know who it was making the proposal.”
“You had better say it now, so I can say no and go to sleep.”
“I’m a ruined person, used up. I didn’t get this way because I made the wrong decisions, but because I didn’t make any decisions. The woman I loved all my life just killed herself to show me that she cared. And I have our son on my mind now. He’s a problem.”
