Condemned

by John Nicholas Iannuzzi

  When he returned to the table, the violinist from the lodge in Poiana Brasov was seated at the table with Fabusayvich.

  “This is Georgi,” Fabusayvich said as Sascha sat. “You remember, from the lodge?” Sascha nodded.

  “How was your trip?” said Georgi, smiling.

  “So far—” Sascha shrugged.

  “A little vacation back to the old days?”

  “Something like that,” replied Sascha.

  “You still have family in the Ukraine, yes?” said the violinist.

  Sascha’s eyes narrowed on the violinist, then he looked at Fabusayvich. “Everybody’s got family. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Just a harmless question,” said the violinist.

  “A harmless question,” repeated Fabusayvich.

  “Nothing is harmless,” said Sascha. “The questions about my family are to remind me that if anything goes wrong, you people know where my family is. Don’t give me shit,” he said to the violinist.

  The violinist pursed his lips. “None of us know the other, and sometimes, the people from America …”

  “I am not an American,” Sascha said sharply. “I am the same as you, doing what I have to do to make a living, only in the States.” Sascha’s eyes had become steely, his mouth harsh. “Nothing is going to go wrong from my end. And, remember what I said, everybody has family. Everybody.”

  Fabusayvich stared from one to the other of the two men, amazed at the turn of the conversation. The violinist smiled. “I like your eggs,” he said to Sascha.

  “You shouldn’t think that because I am now living in America, that I have become like an American woman,” said Sascha. “Now, can we arrange whatever we have to do for the deal?”

  The violinist smiled. “You brought a package with you?” The violinist looked around as he rubbed his index finger and thumb together.

  “I don’t have it with me tonight. You have the … the musical instruments with you?”

  “You should rent a car from the rental place on this card.” The violinist pushed a business card across the table toward Sascha.

  “I like the way you people work. Each time it is different.”

  “Naturally. Caution is part of our business. The car is being watched for two days now. In it you will find the musical instruments.”

  “The car’s not being watched by the police, I hope?” said Sascha.

  The violinist laughed. “No. Our people are watching to see if the police are watching.”

  “And how do you get what I have?” asked Sascha.

  “Leave it in the car.” Sascha looked at the violinist skeptically. “If we thought we had anything to worry about,” the violinist said, “we wouldn’t leave the musical instruments in the car.” He smirked. “Besides, it’s a long walk from the departure gate to the plane.”

  It was now Sascha’s turn to smirk.

  The Bank Café, Manhattan :July 28, 1929 : 3:45 P.M.

  The Bank Cafe had, years before, been a small, local bank for the Kips Bay area of New York City. When it was merged into the larger Corn Exchange Bank, the branch was closed, its customers absorbed into another branch. The space was then turned into a restaurant on the street level, with a speak-easy up the interior marble stairway which led to what had been the executive banking offices.

  In the kitchen area, which was at the back of the street level, Izzie Perlman and Sean O’Callaghan, two Prohibition Agents in civilian clothes, were seated at a small table which was ordinarily used by the kitchen help. The table was set with a linen tablecloth. Before the Agents, sat steaming plates filled with the chefs special of the day. The two men saluted each other with glasses of red wine.

  At the same moment, on the mezzanine balcony above, Charlie ‘Lucky’ Luciano sat at a table assiduously counting a large pile of currency. Greg Diamond sat at the table with Charlie Lucky. Victor Caiafa stood at the bottom of the stairs, casually talking with Marco Giordano. After the currency was sorted into seven vari-sized bundles, Charlie Lucky put rubberbands around each one. The four largest bundles he placed beneath a layer of tablecloths in a side board. He placed a napkin over two other bundles of cash on the table in front of him, picked up a Haig and Haig ‘pinch’ bottle that was at his elbow, and filled two pony glasses. He raised his glass in salute to Greg Diamond and they both knocked the Scotch back neat. Charlie Lucky slid two crisp fifty dollar bills from the last of the bundles on the table, folded them, and slid the two bills down into his left vest pocket.

  “Vic, Vic, come on up. Bring Marco, too,” Charlie Lucky called toward the stairway.

  With Caiafa in the lead, the two men came up the stairs. Charlie Lucky motioned to two chairs at his table.

  “Things are picking up real good,” said Charlie Lucky. He took a cigarette from a pack of Chesterfields on the table. Caiafa quickly picked up a box of matches from the table and lit Charlie Lucky’s cigarette. Charlie Lucky slowly blew a plume of smoke toward the ceiling. He picked up the package of currency exposed on the table and handed it to Giordano. “This is for you and the Captain and the crew. You’ve been doing good for us. Keep up the good work because we’re going to be making more trips starting next week. You have to keep everything in ship shape”. He smiled at his own clever remark toward Greg Diamond. “It’s real important that the Captain is taken good care of. Understand? We need the bastard. Have a drink, Vic.”

  Caiafa took the bottle of Scotch and filled four pony glasses on the table. Charlie Lucky motioned toward the glasses. “Drink hearty,” he said, knocking back his glass. The three others did the same.

  “You understand what I’m saying about the Captain, Marco? Don’t short-change him, okay? There’s plenty for everyone.” Charlie Lucky cocked his head and nodded.

  “That son of a bitch say I short changed him?”

  “Nobody said nothin’. I just know you.” He laughed. “Wipe the innocent look off your face. Vic will call you in a couple of days. Keep that boat running good.”

  Giordano nodded and walked down the stairs.

  “He’s short changing the Captain?” asked Greg Diamond.

  “Can a cat change his stripes?” said Charlie Lucky. He took the napkin off the two bundles of currency on the table. “I know that guy from the other side. He’d steal the collection basket in the church if he had half a chance. Here,” he pushed one of the bundles of money toward Caiafa. “This is for you and the crew. Whack it up any way you want. Just make sure everybody’s happy, okay?”

  “They better be happy.”

  “Make sure they’re happy, okay? We’re doing good. Let’s keep it that way,” Charlie Lucky shook his head now, smirking. “Let the two ‘Amerigons’ in the kitchen come up. Tell ’em to take the back stairs.”

  Caiafa went through a nearby doorway, down a back staircase which led directly to the kitchen. In a few moments, the two Agents came up to the mezzanine.

  “Have a drink,” Charlie Lucky said in English. “Sit down, sit down. You guys must be tired, chasing bad guys all day long.” They all laughed. The two men sat. Diamond took the bottle and poured four pony glasses of Scotch.

  “Drink hearty,” said Charlie Lucky. He and Greg Diamond raised their glasses to the Agents, but didn’t drink. O’Callaghan knocked his glass back in one motion. As Perlman sipped, his face winced slightly. “You gotta knock it back in one shot. Then it don’t taste so bad,” Charlie Lucky said to Perlman.

  Perlman knocked it back and winced again.

  “Here. This here is for you and for all the guys downtown.” Charlie Lucky pushed the last bundle of money on the table toward the two men. O’Callaghan smiled and picked up the package eagerly.

  Charlie Lucky reached into his vest pocket and handed one of the fifties to Perlman, the other to O’Callaghan. “A little something extra for you two, for the tip you gave us the other night—about the raid you was going to make on Forty-Second Street. That helped a lot.”

  “Thank you, thank you.” O’C
allaghan spoke with a brogue. “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, too,” he smiled, tucking the fifty into his vest.

  “Forget it. You deserve it.”

  “Our pleasure, believe me, Charlie.”

  “I got to get going,” said Charlie Lucky. “You guys want another for the road? Help yourself.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said O’Callaghan reaching for the bottle.

  “Not me,” said Perlman.

  O’Callaghan took the bottle, poured himself another, and stood, raising his glass toward Charlie Lucky, Greg Diamond, then Caiafa.

  “Drink hearty.” Charlie Lucky shook hands with the two men. “Go out the back way. We’ll see you next week.”

  “We’ll be here, don’t worry about that,” said O’Callaghan. The two Agents went down the back stairs.

  When the Agents were gone, Charlie Lucky reached into the sideboard and took out the four bundles of currency. He put one in each of his jacket pockets, handing the other two to Greg Diamond, who did the same. They started down the marble stairway. “You see the way I did it,” Charlie Lucky said to Greg Diamond and Caiafa in Italian as they walked to the front door of the restaurant, “you two sitting in on the payoff with those two—” Charlie Lucky stopped talking. An ‘El’ train was just passing noisily on the steel structure over Third Avenue. A young driver, one of Greg Diamond’s crew, was sitting in a car at the curb. “With all of us sitting in on the payoff, we all got the goods on the Amerigons. They feel more dirty, more obligated to us.”

  Caiafa nodded, opening the car door for Charlie Lucky. “Where we headed?” asked Greg Diamond.

  “Lanza’s. The Boss is waiting for this.” He patted his jacket pocket.

  “Lanza’s,” Diamond said to the driver.

  In and Around Foley Square : July 22, 1996 :10:30 A.M.

  “This is a really ugly one,” said A.D.A. Quintalian. Sandro had come to the Prosecutor’s office to pick up whatever Discovery material the D.A. intended to use against Hettie Rouse, and also to gauge Quintalian’s view of the case. “Look at the crime scene photos for starters,” said Quintalian, “and hold on to your stomach.” He handed Sandro a manilla envelope.

  The Crime Scene Unit of the N.Y.P.D. is charged with finding, retrieving, photographing, and preserving all the forensic (physical) evidence to be found at the scene of major crimes for possible use at a future trial.

  In vivid color, from every angle, Sandro viewed a limp, brutalized, undernourished, ill-kempt child who was scarred, bruised, and cigarette-burned. The child’s mouth, frozen agape, had tiny, square white baby teeth. Never to be put under a pillow for the tooth fairy, Sandro thought to himself as he handed the pictures back to Quintalian.

  “Ugly, right?”

  “Very.”

  Rob Quintalian was the quintessential Assistant. He was about six feet, two inches, thirty-five years old—ten of those years as an Assistant D.A.—pale skin, red hair, slicked down, parted almost in the middle. He was clever, unemotional, righteous, and dedicated to the conservative view of life. He tended to see things, everything and everyone, in very simple, uncomplicated, black and white terms.

  “The Medical Examiner’s report indicates that the little girl was sexually abused; her vagina was ruptured from the insertion of Alvarado’s schlong. Worse, the M.E. suspects that some other foreign object may have been used as a dildo to sexually abuse the child as well, a Coke bottle maybe, something. They weren’t a hundred percent on that one, to be perfectly honest, but they’re pretty sure there’s enough to hang that on. Cause of death: the child expired as a result of her entire system literally exploding with the pain from whatever object or objects were forced into her. I won’t even mention the fractured sternum, the multiple cigarette burns, the bruises and contusions—which you can see in the photos—many of which were sites of previous attacks.” Quintalian was reading from a report on his desk. He looked at Sandro. “Not that it would be any kind of mitigation in front of a jury,” he said, looking up at Sandro, “but the child probably wouldn’t have lived to maturity anyway. She had AIDS.”

  To keep any sign of revulsion escaping, Sandro concentrated on Quintalian’s eyes.

  “Coupled with your client’s inculpatory statements, four of them, two to the police at the scene, first the Uniforms, then the Detectives, later, a second to the Detectives at the Precinct, and the last, a video tape in the squad interview room with yours truly, the case against your client is, to say the least, formidable. If we have to get to a death penalty phase, the psych people will testify to her physical affect; her response to the horror she was confessing to was one of total passivity. She was calm and bold as a jaybird. A deliberate, cold-blooded killer, with no remorse or concern about what she had done to her own child.”

  “Do I get a chance to practice my summation, too?” said Sandro.

  Quintalian smirked.

  “Perhaps I would say,” Sandro continued, “Hettie Rouse, a semi-retarded young woman, daughter of a prostitute, abandoned by her father, sexually abused by her step-father, who was really her mother’s live-in lover, beaten by her boyfriend when she was older, forced into prostitution, who became addicted to drugs to ease the horror, surfaced one day from the midst of a deep, drug binge to find that while she was in a state of total hallucination, her child had been killed. At the time these statements were made, she was suffering from extreme shock, bordering on hysteria, which resulted from the dawning realization of the enormity of what had happened during her drug-induced state. It won’t bring the child back to life, of course, but it surely will cut big time into the intentional element that you’ll try to build into your death penalty spiel.”

  “You think that’ll fly in front of twelve working stiffs who struggle their asses off forty hours every week, and who feel guilty twinges any time they have to give a warning spank on their kid’s diaper-padded ass?”

  “We’ll have to see,” said Sandro.

  “There are also an equal number of statements from Alvarado,” said Quintalian, leafing through another file folder on his desk, “Both defendants’ station house statements are in writing and signed, by the way.”

  “Of course,” said Sandro.

  “We have everything, including the kitchen sink on this one. You can keep these,”

  Quintalian said, handing Sandro a folder that contained the Discovery materials.

  “I’ve always said you were nothing if not a generous man,” smiled Sandro.

  Quintalian flickered a momentary smile. “Not that I’m offering you any sort of disposition, because I’m not. If any case cries out for the death penalty, if there had been, in fact, any reason to reinstate the death penalty, it was for a situation like this. But I’m curious, Sandro. You haven’t even asked if I’d be willing to let her cop out to life without parole. Sir Walter Cohen did for his guy. Even suggested his client would cooperate against your client in return for a plea and life without parole. With all of that on the table, you don’t actually expect to go to trial on this thing, do you?”

  “I don’t know yet, Rob. I’m just here to pick this stuff up, and to listen to you tell me how bad it is,” said Sandro. “From what you’re telling me, and given your present position, we’re going to have a death penalty phase, for sure. All you’re offering me, right now, seems to be the death penalty. You have to do something better for me than that. I’ll get life without parole, hands down, if we go to a jury.”

  Quintalian studied Sandro. “Are you serious or just breaking my balls to get my Irish up.”

  “A little of both.”

  Quintalian’s smile grew warmer.

  “Considering she’s twenty-seven,” continued Sandro, “with a life expectancy of what, fifty, fifty-five years, life without parole would mean living in a cage about the size of my bathroom for a long, long time. Some people might prefer death, particularly lethal injection. They make you drowsy, then you go to sleep, that’s it. No big deal. Life isn’
t all that it’s cracked up to be anyway, is it?”

  “Now I know you’re breaking my balls.”

  “No, actually, now I’m being quite serious,” said Sandro. “If someone said to me, listen, you can live fifty-some-odd years in a cage, or you can lie on a gurney and … Let me tell you a personal experience; recently, I had this examination, in the doctor’s office. He had to put tubes up my keester to check something or other. He gave me some liquid Valium, says this will make the examination less uncomfortable. Hell, in seconds I was groggy. Next thing I know, while I was out, they did the whole procedure and were wheeling me out to the recovery room. So, now, coming back to lethal injection. They give you something like liquid Valium, you go into a nice peaceful snooze, they give you the lethal injection—you don’t even feel it—and, it’s over. You really think that fifty-five years in a cage is more attractive?”

  “Isn’t that up to your client?”

  “I’ll ask her. But, if she asks me, I’ll also tell her I’ll get her life without parole, hands down from the jury.”

  “You did come here to break my balls.”

  “No, to psych you. We both have to have some fun, don’t we?”

  Quintalian laughed. “Take a fucking hike, you screwball. While you’re at it, check with your client, and see if she’s less fatalistic than your jaded, miserable ass.”

  “I’ll do just that.”

  * * *

  “He’s still Mr. Big on the outside, even though he’s inside, even though the jury came down and said he was guilty. He’s still Mr. Big,” Awgust Nichols said bitterly to Supervisor Michael Becker as they stood at the bar of the Sporting Club, a multi-television cocktail bar, several blocks north of 26 Federal Plaza. An array of television screens were lit up around the room, featuring several baseball games and tapes of past basketball and hockey playoff games.

  Becker finished a Stolychnia on the rocks. “Look, it was you who wanted the guy off the street, I got him off the street. He’s been convicted. The Judge is going to give him plenty of years when she sentences him—wow, did you see that play by Bernie Williams? Unbelievable!”