Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  Red made dinner for the two of us. My mother had the kids, all three of them, and was taking them for ice cream at one of those multi-flavored joints after they’d got pizza at the mall. Eleanor loved taking the baby through the mall in a stroller, and my grown-up boy and girl loved Eleanor to spend money on them.

  Natalie and I ate our Italian beef sandwiches and our fries slowly, without much relish. We watched the evening news together. It was the first time we’d both been on days in a while.

  Theresa Rojas was not the only one whose life had been stolen.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  [November 1968]

  Anglin recovers well. And quickly. It was too much to ask that a piece of bad food take him out of the picture. He’ll live to be an old man. I’m hoping that somehow most of that natural life will be spent in a cage.

  My life continues as it has for months now. I see fleeting and transient images of my wife. I await letters from my son in Vietnam, and I dread anyone who’s dressed in Army green coming up to my front door. In my war they knocked on your front door and told you the bad news about your loved one. In this conflict, I assume the SOP is the same. I know Eleanor must live in terror of seeing someone from the military walk up the sidewalk to our house. She survived World War Two without losing her brother and her father, but she remembers what it was like for her mother and for herself, wondering every day if bad news was on the way.

  Eddie votes we shoot Anglin. We use a throwaway piece and we pop him on the street, some dark night, and we dispose of the gun in the Lake, part by part. I laugh and tell him I’ll think about it. The joke is that I have indeed brooded about doing the unthinkable. I killed men in the war with far less provocation. Anglin tests me to my limits. He has crawled beneath my skin. But without that Army uniform the word for offing him would be ‘murder’. I know there are those who might ask how a uniform affects the concept of murder, but I suppose I’m too old-fashioned to set aside my stubborn notions about propriety.

  We cannot get the government to come clean about Carl Anglin’s dark career as a pro assassin during the years of the Korean War and afterwards because the information is classified due to ‘National Security’. All the doors have been slammed in our faces. And that is why I’ve become hellbent on bringing it all to a close.

  Anglin did something big enough to get himself protected by the G. Something serious enough for the horror of seven rapes and murders to be ignored and set aside.

  I’m dialing Marty Genco’s number again. My cousin, the Outfit guy. Originally I swore I’d never deal with him even once, let alone go running back to him. But I’ve got no other alternatives.

  *

  We meet at Luigi’s, his favorite North Side eatery.

  ‘You gonna get me killed, cousin,’ Marty says and smiles. But it looks more like a weary grimace.

  ‘How ’m I going to get you whacked?’

  ‘People notice. They know I haven’t seen you in years and now they see we’re practically brother goombahs. Twice in six months. What the fuck, Jake, people ain’t stupid. They know who you are and what you’re looking for…I gave you everything I know about that fuck Anglin. What else can I tell you?’

  ‘You can tell me who he did to rate him all this juice, all this protection.’

  ‘I can’t tell you because I don’t know.’

  ‘Then find out for me or watch your business get visited by Burglary/Auto Theft.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be such a prick, Jake.’

  I watch his brown, stupid eyes.

  ‘I can’t fuckin’ believe it…We’re blood and you’d turn me just to catch this prick Anglin?’

  I keep watching his eyes.

  ‘Jake…How do I convince you that I ain’t got enough clout to know names the way you want — ’

  ‘You know who to ask.’

  Marty groans and looks down at the appetizing plate of lasagna the waiter’s just set down before him.

  ‘You ruin a good meal, Lieutenant.’

  But he takes his fork and stabs at his dinner, and then he takes a swallow of the food.

  ‘Best lasagna in the freakin’ city and you have to ruin my appetite. If I find this name for you, all other bets are off. I owe you nothing and you don’t pull this familia shit on me anymore. And you personally don’t get involved in busting my balls over my business. Does that sound fair, Jake?’

  *

  Marty’s call comes to me downtown three days later. I’m to meet him at the Loop Laundry at noon. Eddie and I are there waiting at 11.52.

  The time passes as we wait for my cousin. First fifteen minutes. And then it’s suddenly 1.00 p.m.

  A patrolman walks into the Laundry place, here on Monroe Street.

  ‘Lieutenant Parisi?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell the uniform.

  ‘You have a call from downtown. They said they couldn’t get you on your radio.’

  We’ve left our radio in our unmarked car. Eddie and I go out to the vehicle on Monroe Street.

  I make the call. I get the address, and then Eddie and I are on our way.

  *

  There’s nothing of Marty Genco really remaining. The roof of his car has been blown forty feet away from his Cadillac Seville. The doors have been hurled twenty feet to either side of the explosion, and the only thing recognizable as a piece of the body is on fire. My cousin has been reduced to a charred, overcooked beefsteak. There’s not enough of him left to fill a coffin.

  There are plenty of other coppers on hand. Their word is that it’s a mob hit, pure and simple.

  This kind of explosion looks to me more like something military. The level of overkill is what strikes me first. The Outfit kills efficiently. They’re usually very careful about trying to avoid hurting innocent bystanders. But this blast has sent shards of the auto’s glass into the scalps of some pedestrians who were at least a hundred feet away from the vehicle when the bomb went off.

  ‘It looks like they were blowing-up a fucking half-track, Jake, instead of a fucking Cadillac,’ Eddie says.

  ‘That’s the way it looks to me, too.’

  ‘You don’t think it was his own people?’

  I look over at him. There are numerous FBI agents in the vicinity, so I don’t say anything more. We’re not involved in this investigation. Clarence Cahill is the Homicide cop on scene. Calling me was a courtesy because they know Genco and I are related. So Eddie and I bow out and leave.

  *

  I call Marty’s wife, Maria.

  ‘I don’t want to speak to you, you son of a bitch,’ she says over the phone. I’m calling her from my house in the northwest part of town.

  ‘I know you think I’m involved in this, but I’m not…Don’t hang up, Maria…I always liked Marty. You know I wouldn’t hurt him intentionally.’

  ‘So you did this unintentionally,’ she accuses me.

  ‘No. Somebody outside the cops and outside the Outfit did him. But I don’t want to talk about it over the phone.’

  Her interest is aroused. She allows me to come over to their apartment in Berwyn.

  Maria has kept her good looks. I was at their wedding, about twenty years ago. She’s in her prime, actually. Early forties.

  And now she’s a widow.

  But I sense anger more than grief in her attitude.

  I walk into their flat on the third floor.

  ‘Who killed Marty, Jake?’

  ‘It wasn’t us and it wasn’t his own.’

  ‘Who’s that leave?’ she demands.

  ‘Did Marty say anything to you about why him and me were supposed to meet yesterday?’

  ‘He said you were squeezing his balls. That’s my job, Jake.’ She’s not smiling. Still angry. ‘I’m a widow, now…And I hear you might as well be a widower, the way it’s going for you and Eleanor…I never liked her much.’

  ‘What’d he tell you, Maria? It’s important. Much more important than starting a vendetta against me…Sure, I put his nuts in the vice, but that
’s the way it goes when you’re in Marty’s trade…Come on, this is important.’

  ‘When’s the last time you had a woman?’ She’s not teasing me; she’s tormenting me. ‘Come on, Maria — ’

  ‘It’s about this Anglin guy, no?’

  ‘Yes. It’s about Anglin.’

  ‘Marty told me in bed three nights ago that this guy killed a major player and that if Marty even whispered the guy’s name we all might wind up like my husband just did.’

  ‘He didn’t even suggest who this victim was?’

  ‘I gathered it wasn’t anyone in the crew or in any of the crews in this city. No. It had to be a bigger name than anyone in the Outfit’s got. It’d be someone in the big headlines. You know, the bold print…You never answered my question, Jake. How long’s it been?’

  I sit down on their love seat.

  ‘A long time…That make you feel better?’

  ‘Yeah. Because it’s going to be a long time before I have Marty again. A real long time, Jake. Does that make us even? I don’t think so.’

  I stand and let myself out her door. Her stare follows me all the way out.

  *

  The explosion is definitely a military-type operation. Bombers usually leave their signatures on their blasts. We go into the files to see if anyone’s been using the kind of explosive utilized in this instance, and the only similar cases do indeed involve military-trained bombers.

  My cousin was done by the same guys who’re shielding Carl Anglin. I’m convinced of it. I was about to get that very important name and someone caught wind of it on Marty’s side. Anglin’s people must have high-level contacts on both sides of the fence.

  ‘If you hear a click or two when you turn on your car’s engine, Jake, turn around in a hurry and kiss it goodbye,’ Eddie cracks as we sit at the lunch table by the vending machines downstairs.

  ‘Kill a homicide copper? Why do that, when you can have so much more fun messing with his brains over this thing?’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Lieutenant. Otherwise we both might get scattered all over the Gold Coast and Lakeshore Drive, some early morning.’

  *

  Who’d Anglin whack? They got the guy who did Jack Kennedy. What other big names have been done lately? Maybe it isn’t even an American. Maybe I’m thinking too close to home. Carl Anglin was a world traveler, after all. Perhaps it was some African overlord. Maybe a Sicilian family member.

  And maybe it was a member of the American Spook Family who doesn’t get his name in the papers but is someone everyone in that small, clandestine world knows. Perhaps Carl’s killed a made man whose identity would prove embarrassing if it were brought out into the open.

  My cousin was my last chance, I’m thinking.

  Now the avenues are all closed for me. The Feds and the Bad Guys won’t tell me anything. The Spooks don’t talk to each other, let alone to a Homicide cop, and Carl Anglin still lurks in the alleys, free as the feral cat he’s always been.

  *

  Jimmy gets hit again. This time it’s in the other leg, in the thigh. Some guy detonates a mine, gets blown to pieces, and my son is standing close enough to him in a rice paddy to get clipped with some more hot shrapnel. The fragment barely misses the kid’s femoral artery, so Jimmy’s smiling all the way to the bank, he confesses. He’s not supposed to scare Eleanor, he understands, but he had to let us know of his ‘good fortune’.

  My son goes back on line within five days of his injury. It’s his second Purple Heart, he tells us. He can’t wait for his two tours of duty to be finished, and now that he’s re-upped, he’s got a wallet-sized calendar and he’s marking off the days.

  Jimmy asks me about the Anglin case. When I write him back, I tell him everything. I’m hoping my frustration might dissuade him from becoming the next gendarme in the family, but I don’t hear anything encouraging when he writes back each time with a continuing interest in my caseload.

  The Greek is my confidant. He fills my glass and he refills it until I’ve arrived at our mutually agreed quota. He won’t let me stagger out of his place, and I keep telling him all the updates on the big murder cases I’m involved in.

  There is only one case, no matter how many names are written on my section of the chalkboard downtown. There is only one.

  The Greek’s only concern is that I give him first rights to all the gory details. I sit in his tavern in the late afternoons. The place is pretty empty at that hour. I tell him about my days, as if he were my wife. But he just smiles and sends me on my way each evening, which is why we get along so well.

  I get into the car and I head home to Eleanor. But she’s not there even if she is there.

  I remember Maria asking when was the last time I was with a woman. I can’t remember. But I remember my prostate acting up last year and the doctor telling me then to ‘use it or lose it’. And I can’t handle the self-abuse alternative.

  This night I walk into Eleanor’s bedroom, which used to be our bedroom, and I burst right in. She sits up, shocked awake.

  I begin to take off my clothes.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Only a little.’

  ‘This is new. Tired of consorting with — ’

  ‘I’ve never whored in my life, Eleanor. I’ve been with no one else. Ever…Christ, Eleanor…I’m alone. I’m sick and I’m tired and I’m alone. For Jesus’ sake, have pity on me.’

  She rises from the bed and comes over to where I’m standing.

  ‘I’m sick and tired and alone, too, Jacob. Where have you been, all this time?’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  [May 1999]

  Special Agent Mason required information from us about the relocation of a material witness in an ongoing federal investigation. He was very unhappy with our insistence that we were ignorant about the matter. He thought we were full of shit. I’d like to have agreed with him, but I bit my lip.

  He’d been nosing around Homicide for the last day or two. In and out of my office. Bugging the captain, who didn’t take well to irritants on account of his background in the Army Rangers in Vietnam. Our captain was more used to shooting people who pissed him off. He’d had a great deal of trouble adjusting to the politics of the police, but he’d made the change.

  ‘Is there something I can do you for?’ I asked, with the most malicious grin I could muster.

  ‘Don’t fuck with us, Parisi,’ Mason threatened. His leggy, gorgeous assistant special agent was standing beside him inside my doorway.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and gestured to the young lady. She must have been fresh out of Quantico.

  She smiled, but didn’t blush. I could picture her pulling the trigger on any perpetrator. Tough young woman.

  ‘You’ve got Theresa Rojas, and you’re going to be facing federal charges once we find out where you’ve stashed her.’

  ‘It’s been amusing, Mason.’

  He wasn’t amused at all.

  ‘You don’t have any idea what you’re screwing around with, do you?’ he declared.

  ‘I heard that same message from someone else.’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Carl Anglin. Himself.’

  ‘Look, Lieutenant. Anglin is old news. Beyond history.’

  ‘Then why does his name keep coming up?’

  Mason reddened. Doc walked past them, into my rectangle of an office. He stood with his back blocking the view of Lake Michigan.

  ‘Hello, everyone. Especially hello to you, ma’am,’ he said warmly.

  She did not return Doc’s amicable, toothy smile.

  ‘Ohh, I see. We’re fighting,’ Doc observed, grinning.

  ‘Lieutenant…I’m not going to give you another…notice. You’d better deliver Theresa Rojas in twenty-four. Last chance.’

  He turned and waited for the great-looking special agent to head toward the elevators.

  We’d been duly warned.

  *

  The Dr Engstrom business gnawed at me. The last time I’d
called up the Food and Drug Administration, they’d told me that Engstrom was on extended vacation and that he couldn’t be reached — by beeper, cellphone, anything. If we ever got through to Theresa, we wouldn’t have his expert testimony on how someone’d kept a murder witness in hibernation for three decades. Doors kept slamming.

  Carl Anglin kept a low profile. We kept an eye on him, but we couldn’t justify round-the-clock surveillance on him because he was not officially under investigation. The murders were over thirty years old. But we tried to maintain a daily check on his whereabouts by agreement with brother Homicide cops who went out of their way on their own time just to make Anglin sightings.

  Well, the target had gone under for the last five days. His apartment was empty, according to the owner of the building on the nearby North Side. But Carl Anglin hadn’t broken his lease, the owner claimed. He was still paid up for six months in advance. It appeared the book deals and the movie deals and all the other spin-offs of his memoirs had kept our man’s head above water financially. He wouldn’t starve — and he wouldn’t pretend to go away permanently. We’d lost sight of him for two or three days on previous occasions but this was longer than usual.

  On the sixth day Jack Brennan, a Homicide cop, called me and told me Carl was back in his place. Jack had seen him emerge onto the street from the North Side apartment just a few hours ago.

  I wondered whether to be angry or relieved. I knew Anglin wouldn’t just disappear. He wouldn’t go under permanently. He wouldn’t be found in the Lake, face down or with a .22 slug in the back of his head, behind one of his ears. Anglin had the Feds by the very short hairs, and I figured that if he was as cute as I thought he was, he had another manuscript containing a lot of fascinating details locked up somewhere safe. And that prick literary agent of his was salivating to get it into print — but of course that would only happen if Carl Anglin fell victim to a terrible accident. Whatever trump card Anglin held was keeping the G at bay. Otherwise one small-caliber round would’ve dispatched our man long ago. You had to give Anglin credit for learning how to survive against bigger jungle animals.

  *

  I visited Theresa on Sunday nights. I had to be extraordinarily careful about seeing her. My wife Natalie dropped me off at Doc’s apartment building. Then I went out the rear exit of Doc’s complex, and I used his car to make my way to the small private hospital where we kept her. I knew they were following me, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to lose them for much longer.