by Thomas Perry
The older generation had gotten very attached to Bernie Lupus, before anyone had known any better. He had kept some of their money safe from the government, and from one another, for a long time. When one of them wanted a million bucks for some emergency, Bernie would have it delivered. They weren’t considering all of the implications; they were just glad they didn’t have to hide their money under their beds anymore. But some younger minds had been dwelling on Bernie Lupus for the past few years. They were better at arithmetic than their parents had been, and, to the extent that LCN had not wasted its money educating them and staking them in businesses, they were more sophisticated about money. A few of them had begun to consider the potential of Bernie the Elephant. He had been taking in money for about fifty years and, the story went, investing it.
If he had put just a million dollars in a bank account that first year at five percent, then it would have doubled every fourteen years. That would be twelve point seven million by now. And the old guys didn’t seem to know that he almost certainly had not done that. The IRS would have taken its cut. More likely, he had spread it around in places where the tax bite had not been big and instantaneous. He had probably put a lot of it in home-state municipal bonds, where there were no taxes, gold, offshore banks, real estate, and stocks. That was the one that made Di Titulo’s mouth water. Since 1929, long before Bernie had begun remembering things, the stock market had averaged ten percent a year. That one million would be a hundred and thirty million by now.
But the real attraction was a possibility that had been floating around since Bernie was young. What LCN really needed to do was move the money that came in from labor-intensive activities like gambling, prostitution, extortion, drugs, and so on into safe, reliable businesses. Everybody knew that. In fact, that was the goal to which Di Titulo owed his existence. But there was a bigger, more tantalizing possibility that had never come to pass. If the LCN families saved their profits, pooled their resources, and used the face men wisely, they could start owning major corporations. The story was that they had never been disciplined enough to save, were never trusting or trustworthy enough to pool anything. But what Di Titulo and a few others thought when they heard the stories of Bernie the Elephant was that maybe they had.
If he had bought in early enough and acquired enough shares at the beginning, then automatic reinvestment, stock splits, and stock in small companies that got taken over by big companies for more stock would have multiplied the money incredibly over fifty years. LCN might already be majority owners of General Motors, IBM, AT&T, General Electric, and Coca-Cola, and not ever suspect it. The stock could be in five hundred different names known only to Bernie Lupus.
It might all be wrong: Di Titulo had no way of knowing what Bernie Lupus had done with all that money. But if any of Di Titulo’s assumptions were correct, then the whole half-century Bernie Lupus episode was one of those wacky ideas that could have worked. It was Hannibal pulling his end run across the Alps on elephants to take over Rome for Carthage. A couple thousand years later, Rome was like an enormous palace full of shiny cars and women wearing designer dresses, and it took an archaeologist to tell you where the hell Carthage used to be. People forgot that it could have been the other way around.
But maybe Paul Di Titulo had just happened to be looking in the window on the day they forgot to pull the shade down. He had studied the finances of the Five C’s for years, in the hope that someday he might find a safe way to divert a portion of the money that came in. It was only a coincidence that he had been there to hear about the Wilmont donation. And it took astuteness and imagination to understand that money moving into a charity in Cleveland just might have something to do with the death of Bernie Lupus. Everybody had assumed that what would happen was a steady stream of money flowing into some guy’s bank account. But Di Titulo knew that the sign might not be anything that obvious. It might be any unusual money moving anywhere. If somebody was liquidating big investments, he might very well need to dump a bit of it in charities. He might even do it to test a route for moving bigger money later—get a brokerage and a bank used to the idea that Ronald Wilmont was a zillionaire who wrote big checks.
Di Titulo could see his car parked another hundred feet away, and it made him feel pleased with himself. He loved the look of his brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. He had gotten an insane discount on it, because he had bought three GMC tractor-trailer rigs this month for his company. While he was at the lot, he had made a show of wishing he could afford a car too. That was what worming your way into the little brotherhood of above-the-surface business did for you.
He reached into his pocket for his keys and fingered the remote-control unit on his key chain. It was one designed for women who left their cars in dark parking garages. They could pop the door locks and turn on the lights before they got there. It was silly at noon on a respectable street in Cleveland on a hot summer day, but the sooner he was in the car and the engine was running, the sooner the air-conditioning would kick in.
Di Titulo gave a squeeze, and he felt as though someone had thrown a bag of rocks against his chest. A puff of hot wind seared his face and hands, tugged his coattails, and threw his silk necktie over his shoulder. He found himself lying down. His ears were ringing before he was aware that there had been a sound, and in his vision a patch of green floated in jerky puppet-jumps before the flash of the explosion emerged from his addled memory.
After a time Paul Di Titulo recovered enough to roll onto his side and look down. His clothes weren’t ripped or burned, and he seemed to have feeling in his arms and legs. He didn’t entirely trust that sensation, though. There might be some horrible pain that movement would trigger, so he moved his arms carefully and pushed himself to a sitting position. He watched the bright orange flames flickering up and down the length of his new Eldorado.
Di Titulo watched the waves of heat rising to make the tall buildings beyond them bend and wiggle, and understanding came to him. He had picked a rotten time to spend six hundred thousand on new trucks, and a worse time to be seen driving a Cadillac with the dealer’s stickers still on it.
As he got to his feet, he felt a wetness on his chest, and he looked down with alarm at the spots of blood that were appearing on his white shirt. In a second he realized that the blood was coming from above. His nose was bleeding. He touched it. It didn’t seem to be broken. The moving air had just slapped him in the face. But he gave himself over to a moment of despair. Some family had decided that Paul Di Titulo was involved in Bernie Lupus’s death. It was a sign of what mouth breathers some of these guys were, how impoverished their imaginations, how stunted their brains. Whoever had managed to get control of Bernie Lupus’s money wouldn’t reveal his crime in the form of three new trucks and a Cadillac. He would walk away from anything as paltry as Di Titulo Trucking and not bother to lock the front door. He would have more money than a small country, all nicely laundered and salted away a generation ago.
Di Titulo turned and walked unsteadily away from the fiery, blackening wreckage of his beautiful new car. He would find a pay phone and call Al Castananza himself. This was what bosses were for—to get the other bosses off your back. As he walked, he decided to tell him the rest of it too. Let the Castananzas use their time and money to look into the donation. This had already gotten too big and ugly.
18
Di Titulo sat in the airplane for over an hour beside Al Castananza listening to engine sounds. The second in command, Castananza’s old friend Tony Saachi, had told Di Titulo the rules while he was waiting in the car for the old man to collect his things. He had said it impersonally, in an even, genial tone. People like Di Titulo were not expected to speak except to answer questions. They would go where they were told and do as they were told, and, if all went well, they would come home. If they said things in public, they might not.
Di Titulo had asked, “Do you think it’s really necessary for me to come at all?”
Tony Saachi had smiled; his long spade-shaped te
eth looked ghastly and his face was a skull. “Al likes you. It’s a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“If he goes and you’re here, then whoever blew up your car takes another crack at you. These bomb things are embarrassing. I would guess this time maybe they’d throw a bag over your head and run a chain saw through the bag. They won’t do anything if you’re with Al.”
Di Titulo stared at the headrest of the seat in front of him. He heard Saachi’s voice from a distance. “You should have been with us in ’87 when the Castiglione thing broke. Nearly two hundred guys went, just like that, in one night.”
He spent the flight with the earphones in his ears and the sound turned off, considering the strangeness of fortune. He could remember when he was a kid, thinking about the rich and powerful people who seemed to him to actually run the city. He used to picture them sitting around a big poker table in a smoke-filled room like the ones where people said deals were made. There would be the owner of the Indians, the owner of the Browns, the mayor, a couple of presidents of big companies that signed every third father’s paycheck, and Big Al Castananza. That was what the papers used to call him in those days, before it had become more fashionable to use quotation marks. Now they said Alphonse “Big Al” Castananza, 69: always his age, as though they were counting the days until he died. Di Titulo had never been this close to him before, so the celebrity still affected him. He leaned away into the aisle to stay out of accidental competition for the armrest between them, and after an hour, his spine felt as though it had been rotated a full turn at the pelvis.
When the plane landed in Pittsburgh, he followed Castananza to a pay telephone and watched him not dial it. A man wearing aviator glasses who looked a little like a pilot stepped up and stood beside him, then ushered Castananza along the concourse without ever looking at Di Titulo.
They took the elevator to the ground floor and stepped out to the curb. A car with tinted glass pulled up at their feet and they were in motion before Di Titulo noticed that the man had not come with them. The driver never spoke, and didn’t appear to look at the two men in the back seat. Di Titulo watched Castananza’s face. As they passed under street lamps, a stripe of light would move down it and then leave it immersed in darkness again. Castananza’s small eyes were directed forward in a sleepy gaze, as though he were unaware that anyone was looking. The jowls spilled over the rim of the stiff white collar, and his jaw was loose, not tight and working like Di Titulo’s.
Several unwelcome hypotheses flickered to life in Di Titulo’s mind. Maybe the old man wasn’t looking at him because the purpose of the trip was to deliver him for execution. Maybe the old man’s summons had been intended to bring them both for execution. No, the old man must know when an invitation was real and when it wasn’t. But how could he know? Bosses were killed all the time.
Slowly, the conclusion began to seem inevitable. Castananza couldn’t know. The small, unmoving eyes looked like the glass-bead eyes of a stuffed animal. He had been in this position for thirty-five years, and he had learned to live with it—no, learned to get along without actually living. He had known since the beginning that any time he stepped through a doorway, the muzzle might already be pointed at him, so he had killed off that part of his brain. Di Titulo began to sweat.
Di Titulo wondered what he himself looked like to observers. He might very well look like a bodyguard. What else could he be? They would take him down first, and he would never see it coming. He grasped for a hint of hope. Maybe he would never even feel it.
The car seemed to be slowing down, so he looked over the driver’s shoulder as it pulled up to the curb. There seemed to be nothing around here—the parking lot of a plaza behind them, a row of unlighted store windows across the street, a trash can. Castananza got out, so Di Titulo got out and joined him on the sidewalk while the car pulled away. Castananza turned to look up the street, looked at his watch, then looked down the street, but he seemed to have no impulse to say anything.
The bus grew out of the darkness like an approaching locomotive. The only way that Di Titulo could even discern the shape was by forcing his mind to fill in the space between the bright headlights and the lighted marquee above the windshield that bore the single word CHARTER. The bus glided to the curb with a hiss, and Di Titulo tried to see inside, but the windows were smoked glass that looked opaque. The flat, featureless side of the bus was painted a glossy dark color that simply reflected distant street lamps but seemed to have no quality of its own. As he followed Castananza to the steps, he looked to his left three times, but still could not tell whether it was more gray, or green, or blue.
The door wheezed shut behind him, and the bus began immediately to accelerate while he was still wedged on the bottom step. The driver was another man like the one at the airport. He was in his thirties and had close-cropped hair and an unmemorable, expressionless pilot face. He ran up through the gears with precise, effortless motions that made him look like an automaton.
The bus reached cruising speed and it was easier to stand, so Castananza climbed the rest of the way to the aisle. Di Titulo stepped up after him. As his head came high enough to see over the first seat, he looked toward the back of the bus. There were about five rows of empty seats, but beyond them, at the rear of the bus, the normal seats ended and there were two long bench seats, like enormous couches, and a long table in the aisle. There were men sitting around it.
Castananza moved down the aisle to the back, and as he went farther, Di Titulo could see past him. There were a few faces he had seen before. There were the Langusto brothers, Phil and Joe. He recognized John Augustino, and a man named DeLuca from one of the Chicago families. There was one he knew everyone had seen, because it had been in magazines for thirty years. It was Giovanni “Chi-chi” Tasso of New Orleans. The man with him must be his son—what was his name?—Peter? Yes, Peter.
Castananza’s approach was acknowledged with friendly mutterings: “Good to see you, Al,” and “Mr. Castananza,” from the younger ones. Castananza stopped at the head of the table and held himself steady by wrapping a beefy hand around the overhead bar. “This is our friend Paul Di Titulo,” he said.
Some of the men seated around the table nodded vaguely at Di Titulo. A few others stared at him for a couple of heartbeats, not in greeting but as though they were memorizing his face. Castananza said pointedly, “He’s like my left arm.” Di Titulo’s breath caught in his throat. It was a lie. But the others seemed to take no interest in him.
“What do you think of my bus?” It was John Augustino from Pittsburgh.
Castananza looked around himself critically, glanced in the direction of the bathroom door, fiddled with the drink holder in the seat beside him, then peered up at the television set built into the wall above the space where the back window should have been. He shrugged. “Seems like a nice bus. You make anything off it?”
“Business is just so-so. I bought five of them. I do pretty fair during the football season if the Steelers are doing good. Off-season, I do runs to Atlantic City. But five is too many. You want to think about buying one, you talk to me. I’ll give it to you at cost.”
Castananza answered, “If the Steelers get their ass kicked, I’ll give you a call.” A few of the men around the bus looked up with little smiles. “Then you’ll give me one below cost.”
Di Titulo felt a little better. The bus wasn’t some weird, ghostly death ship. It was just part of a business. Di Titulo felt comfortable in the world of business. It was all simple, straightforward propositions and simple responses. Everybody’s motive was the same, and how passionate it was could be measured in numbers.
Di Titulo felt the bus slowing down again, and he looked past the Langusto brothers at the lights outside the tinted windows. The bus came to a stop at the curb, the door opened, and Di Titulo held his breath.
The three men who climbed aboard were frightening. The first looked like a professional wrestler, with a flat, pushed-in nose and a mouth that
seemed to begin just under his ears and stretch six inches in a horizontal line. The two young men who came after were wearing jeans and windbreakers like teenagers, and they scanned the bus and the street behind them like Secret Service men. Di Titulo had no trouble inducing a premonition of these two pivoting to spray the back of the bus with bullets, but they simply followed the big man as he walked back.
The wrestler stopped and his big frog mouth opened. He spoke politely to the older men. He said, “Chi-chi, Al, John, Joe, Phil.” To the others he said, “Hi, guys.” He stepped aside. “These are my cousins, Mitch and Steve Molinari.”
The big man had to be Salvatore Molinari from New York. Di Titulo noted that the two young men were given the same unenthusiastic stare that he had received, but not Molinari. The bus was beginning to fill up with extremely important people. The gathering of these men was like the building up of an enormous electrical charge, and Di Titulo felt uneasy as the bus stopped again and again. It began to seem to him that the bus would burn up, or the universe would seek to equalize this intense concentration of power in a bolt of lightning that would incinerate him.
As the bus moved from stop to stop, the talk among the notables was idle banter with obscure references to subjects Di Titulo knew nothing about. He noticed that the younger men seldom spoke, but smiled or chuckled politely when the bosses did. Finally the bus began to build up speed in increments that could only indicate a sustained stretch of open road.
John Augustino stood up in the aisle at the end of the table and said, “I’d like to thank you all for coming. The bus is going to keep moving while we talk. That way nobody can do much overhearing with a directional mike. It’s been swept for bugs, and we’ve got cars ahead and behind to watch for cops. If we can ever talk, now is the time.” He paused and looked somber. “I know we all share regret at the death of Bernie the Elephant. I think now is the time to express regrets of my own. It was my father who brought Bernie into our thing fifty years ago, and I apologize to each of you for what happened.”
