"I asked a question," Remo said, clamping down with both hands. He lifted the man straight off the rug, even though the man was a half-foot taller than Remo. Just to drive home the point.
"You're . . . making a . . . mistake," the man wheezed.
"Give me a name."
"Talk . . . to the boss. He'll . . . straighten it all . . . out."
"Who's the boss?"
"Talk . . . to . . . Fuggin," the man gasped.
"Who's Fuggin?" asked Remo, giving him a little air.
"What are you, stupid? Fuggin is Fuggin."
Since an answer that made no sense was just as useless as no answer at all, Remo suddenly released the man from his two-handed throat grip.
Gravity took hold of the man. He started to fall. Before he got an eighteenth of an inch closer to the rug, Remo's hands came back, open and fast.
The sound was like a single sharp clap.
When the man's feet hit the rug, the top of his head struck the ceiling. Since the distance between the two was eight feet, and the man just under six-foot-four, there was about one and a half feet of distance unaccounted for.
When the man's head struck the rug, it bounced twice and stopped suddenly. It would have kept rolling but was stopped by a two-foot length of stretched matter that resembled chewed bubble gum after it had been drawn between two hands.
Of course, it was not bubble gum. It was the man's limp, shock-compressed neck.
Remo turned away and helped the one called Frank to his feet.
The man allowed himself to be set on his feet in front of the bed. He allowed this despite outweighing Remo by almost eighty pounds because he had seen the fate that had befallen his coworkers after he had extracted his head from the pillowcase.
"What'd you do to Guido?" the man asked, pointing to the pink taffylike mass that connected the dead man's trunk and head.
"The same thing I'm going to do to your balls if you don't answer my question," Remo warned.
"Look, I don't know who you are or what you want, but you really, really want to talk to Fuggin. Get me?"
"Who's Fuggin?"
"The boss. My boss. The boss of the guys you just croaked. Fuggin don't like for his guys to be croaked."
"Tough. "
"This is a big mistake," the thug said in an agitated voice. "I want you to know that."
"What's your connection to IDC?" Remo demanded.
"None."
"I believe you. Now, what happened to the IDC technicians who came to fix that computer?"
"Can I take the Fifth on that?"
"Are your testicles made of brass?"
"No."
"Shall I repeat the question, or do you want proof of that immutable quirk of biology?"
"They got whacked," the man said dispiritedly.
"Why?"
"They screwed up."
"What's so important about the computer?"
"Ask Fuggin. I don't know nothin'. Honest."
"Is that the best answer you can give me?"
"It's the only one I got."
"It's not good enough," returned Remo, feinting toward the man's neck. The man grabbed his own throat with both hands in order to protect it from Remo's terrible fingers.
So Remo took hold of the man's head with both hands and inserted his thumbs in his eye sockets. He pushed. The sound was like two grapes being squished. The man fell back on the bed with his eyes pushed all the way to the back of his skull and two spongy tunnels through the brain.
Whistling, Remo recovered the rope and, looping it through the ceiling fixture and around the throats of the three dead thugs, created a scene that eventually went down in the annals of Boston homicide as a first.
As the homicide detective asked when he first viewed the macabre scene, "How could three guys hang themselves from the same rope like garlic cloves?"
Remo left the motel room surreptitiously.
The chauffeur was still behind the wheel, his nose buried in a racing form. He tried to look casual, but his face was like a stone chopped out of a granite outcropping.
Remo figured he knew less than the three dead thugs, so he left the man alone as he slipped away in search of a pay phone.
He wondered what Harold Smith was going to say when he informed him that International Data Corporation, the largest company in American, had somehow become embroiled with the Mafia.
Most of all, he wondered who the hell this Fuggin was.
Chapter 7
From an early age, Carmine (Fuggin) Imbruglia had only one burning ambition in life. To become an arch-criminal.
"Someday," he would boast, "I'm gonna be a kingpin. You'll see."
Carmine had worked his way up from mere hanger-on to proud soldier in the Scubisci crime family of Brooklyn in only thirty years. No crime was too heinous. No infraction of the law too petty. Dock pilferage was as sweet to him as payroll robberies.
All through the heady days of scams and heists, Carmine Imbruglia had never done a day in jail. His first brush with the justice system came one day in the summer of 1953, when he was arrested for having taken part in stealing a newsstand vendor's cash belt.
Carmine and two Brooklyn boys had executed the robbery. Carmine had pretended interest in a copy of Playboy that the newsstand vendor was keeping under the counter. He refused to sell it to Carmine, who, despite looking like a beetle-browed tree ape, was underage.
"Aw, c'mon, mister, please," Carmine wheedled, as Freaking Frasca and Angelo (Slob) Sloboni slipped up behind the angry news vendor.
The vendor said, "Get lost, punk!" and Freaking Frasca popped his gravity blade and sliced free the heavy canvas belt. The Slob caught it.
They cut out like thieves.
Carmine tried to run. He would have made it except that he made the mistake of trying to filch that copy of Playboy on the fly. The vendor caught him by the scruff of his neck and hollered for a cop.
"I can't believe I got pinched on my first heist," Carmine muttered from the cell he discovered himself sharing with a freckle-faced Irish kid named O'Leary.
"What'd you do?" asked O'Leary.
"I didn't you nothin'," Carmine snarled. "They think I did a robbery. What about you?"
"I didn't open a fire hydrant so I couldn't take a shower," said O'Leary.
"They pinch you for that?" Carmine said, figuring O'Leary for shanty Irish.
"They pinched me."
"What do you get for opening a fire hydrant, anyways?"
"Probation."
"I'm looking at three years in Elmira," Carmine said morosely.
"If you can't do the time, don't do the crime," O'Leary recited, turning over in his bunk.
When the court officers came for O'Leary, he was sound asleep.
"Hey, O'Leary," the court officer shouted. "Bag and baggage. Let's go."
"Shh," Carmine hissed. "You'll wake up Carmine."
"You O'Leary?" the court officer asked suspiciously.
"You sayin' I don't look Irish, copper?"
"No, I'm sayin' you don't look clean enough for a punk what got himself pinched for showering in the gutter."
"It's summer," said Carmine. "I sweat easy in the summer. Old dirt must come outta my pores or somethin'."
The court officer shrugged as he opened the cell with a dull brass key. "Come along, then," he said.
Standing with a contrite expression on his broad face, Aloysius X. O'Leary ne Carmine Imbruglia attempted to explain himself before judge Terrance Doyle.
"I was mizzled, your honor. I'm askin' for prohibition."
"What's that?" asked the bored judge.
"Them other two guys, they mizzled me. I didn't wanta do it, but I was mizzled."
"Mizzled?" said the judge.
"That's right, your honor."
"Spell that," requested the judge, now very interested, because he surreptitiously worked the Times crossword puzzle during the long, boring hours of testimony.
"Mizzled. M-i-s-l-e-d," said Carmine I
mbruglia, spelling the word exactly as he had seen it in the morning newspaper, wherein a made guy had defended his participation in a bank robbery, putting the blame on his confederates, thereby getting a reduced sentence.
"Who . . . er . . . mizzled you?" asked the disappointed judge.
"The other two what was with me. Freaking Frasca and the Slob."
"Slob?"
"Sloboni. His real moniker is Angelo. He didn't like 'Angelo' so we kinda call him Slob to keep him happy." Carmine cracked a lopsided gin. "What do you expect from a guinea?" He winked.
" I see," said the judge, frowning to keep from laughing. He banged his gavel once and announced that Aloysius X. O'Leary was free to go. He put out an order to pick up those notorious Italian punks Frasca and Sloboni.
The next day, Aloysius X. O'Leary, protesting that his name was not Carmine Imbruglia, had the book thrown at him.
"Six months for the robbery," pronounced the judge in a grave voice. "And another two for impersonating an Irishman."
After that, Carmine Imbruglia became a legend on the corner of Utica and Sterling in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
It wasn't long before a string of car thefts and house invasions brought a summons from Don Pietro Scubisci himself.
Carmine had entered the old man's august presence trembling. The scene was the back of the Neighborhood Improvement Society in Manhattan's Little Italy. It was a dim alcove paneled in black walnut, the walls covered with the sepia-toned pictures of obscure saints.
Don Pietro was eating fried peppers out of a simple brown paper bag so spotted with grease it looked like a faded leopard skin.
"I'm honored to meet you," said Carmine sincerely.
"You been doing crime in my territory," said Don Pietro.
"You heard of me?" Carmine blurted, pleased.
Don Pietro glowered. "I heard you owe me money."
"Me?"
"You steal in Brooklyn you give thirty percent to me."
"But . . . but that's robbery!" Carmine had spluttered.
"You rob from others. I rob from you. It is a dog-eat-dog world."
"All I got is five hundred bucks to my name," Carmine had protested. "If I give it to you, I got nothing left."
"So? You go rob again. Around and around goes the music, but thirty percent always ends up here," said Don Pietro, smacking a greasy hand on the worn black walnut table. He left a palm print that could be fried and served up whole.
Having no choice, Carmine Imbruglia did as he was ordered. The more he brought to Don Pietro, the more Don Pietro asked for. The percentage jumped from thirty to thirty-five and then to forty.
"This is fuggin' worse than inflation," Carmine complained to his wife, Camilla, one day.
"Then get a job."
"How'm I gonna fuggin' become an amico nostro if I bail out now?" had demanded Carmine, who had a dream. And was terrified of physical labor to boot.
One day, as Carmine dumped a pile of bills and loose change on the dark greasy table in the back room, Don Pietro spoke up with his hand deep in the ever-present grease-stained bag of green peppers.
"I'm gonna make you, Carmine," he intoned.
"You're already making me," said Carmine sullenly.
"No, I'm gonna make you one of the guys."
"Will it cost me?" asked Carmine suspiciously.
Don Pietro popped a fried pepper into his mouth and casually indicated the money on the table. "What you just paid is the final installment."
Carmine perked up. "Does that mean I don't gotta pay you a percentage no more?"
"No," returned Don Pietro. "It means that from now on you, Carmine Imbruglia, steal when I say you steal, from who I say you steal from, and you give me all the swag you steal. I, in turn, give you a percentage."
Carmine squinted in the dimness of the alcove. "How much?"
"Twenty. "
"That's fuggin' highway robbery!" shouted Carmine Imbruglia, who was instantly surrounded by a dry moat of pinstripes.
"Or I can have you shot in the face and stuffed into the trunk of a crummy Willys," said Don Pietro casually. "You make the choice."
"Twenty sounds fair," Carmine mumbled.
The next day in a house in Flatbush where the curtains were drawn to create a kind of sad gloom, Carmine Imbruglia was officially inducted into the Mafia.
The induction was done in Sicilian, which Carmine did not understand. For all he knew, they were inducting him into the Portuguese navy.
When they pierced his trigger finger with a needle, he cried at the sight of his own blood. Laughing, they lifted Carmine's bleeding finger to Don Pietro's pierced trigger finger. Their blood mingled.
When it was over, Don Pietro asked, "What is your street name?"
Since Carmine didn't have a street name, he made one up.
"Cadillac. Cadillac Carmine Imbruglia," said Carmine proudly.
Don Pietro considered this for some moments. "No, no good,"
"What's fuggin' wrong with 'Cadillac Carmine'? It's a fine car. "
"I own a Cadillac," explained Don Pietro, patting his pockets absently. "How will it sound if I'm asking for you, and they bring around the car? Or vice versa. I ask for my car and I get you. No, this will not work. You must have a more fitting name."
"Why don't you fuggin' get another fuggin' car, then?"
"Fuggin," said Don Pietro thoughtfully. " I like the sound of this. Yes. You will be known henceforth as Fuggin."
" I don't fuggin' wanna be called Fuggin. What kinda name is that for a fuggin' wise guy?"
"You can accept 'Fuggin' as your name or you can accept only ten percent of all the money you steal for me," said Don Pietro, looking around for his greasy paper sack. He found it in the vent pocket of his suit, which was mysteriously spotless, if hopelessly wrinkled.
" 'Fuggin' is fuggin' spelled with two fuggin' G's, not three," said Carmine (Fuggin) Imbruglia in a sour voice. "Everybody remember that."
"That is good, Fuggin," said Don Pietro. "Now, the first thing I ask of you as a soldier in this thing of ours is to get me a few shrimp cocktails."
"What do I look like, a fuggin' waiter?" exploded Carmine.
"No, you look to me like a man who has respect for his capo," Don Pietro said evenly.
Listening to the steel in his capo's voice, Carmine Imbruglia swallowed once and asked, "How many shrimp cocktails you want?"
"One truckload. I understand there is one leaving Baltimore for the Fulton Fish Market at two o'clock this afternoon."
"Oh, swag," said Carmine. "Why dincha say so? I can handle this."
It was not easy. The truck was a sixteen-wheeler and Carmine's aging Volkswagen Beetle was not up to forcing a sixteen-wheeler over to the side of Interstate 95.
So Carmine executed the only strategy available to him. With the driver's door open, he cut in front of the truck, jammed on the brakes, and dived for the shoulder of the road.
In a grinding cacophony, the Beetle disappeared under the truck's front grille and bumper, lodging under the cab like a bone in a rottweiler's throat. The sixteen-wheeler jackknifed to a stop, rubber burning and smoking.
"Okay, stick 'em up," said Carmine to the driver.
The driver was obliging. He got out of the cab and stood white-faced as Carmine climbed behind the wheel. He got the engine started. He pressed the gas.
The truck lurched ahead and stopped amid a squealing of tormented metal.
"What the fug's wrong with this pile of junk?" demanded Carmine.
"The pile of junk under the cab," said the white-faced driver.
Carmine remembered his Volkswagen, which he had intended replacing with his share of the shrimp. Without the shrimp, there would be no replacement. And without wheels, his career as a wise guy was finished.
Rescue in the form of a tow truck happened along then.
Brandishing his Saturday-night special, Carmine made the hapless truck driver get in front of the tow truck. The wrecker screeched to a halt. Carm
ine jumped into view.
"You!" he told the wrecker driver. "You hook this wrecker up to that truck there."
"You crazy?" demanded the driver. " I can't haul a sixteen-wheeler. It'll bust my rig."
"You fuggin' do as I say, cogsugger, or I'll give you a lead fuggin' eye."
The driver didn't understand all of it, but the part about the lead eye was clear enough. He lifted the cab, and as cars whizzed by without pause or interest, Carmine made the two drivers haul the remains of his Beetle out of the way.
Then he made the driver of the wrecker tie up the truck driver. Carmine then bound the latter.
Carmine Imbruglia left them by the side of the road saying, "I hope yous jerks rot." It all had been too much like work.
After Carmine had gotten through telling Don Pietro Scubisci the whole story, Don Pietro paused to extract a toothpick from between his teeth and casually inspected a fragment of cold pink shrimp meat impaled on it.
"You left the wrecker?" he asked, unimpressed.
"What was I to do? You wanted shrimp. I brought you shrimp. When do I get my cut?"
Don Pietro snapped his fingers once.
Soldiers began bringing in cases of bottled shrimp cocktails and set them beside Carmine.
"What's this?" he asked.
"Your percentage," said Don Pietro.
" I expected money!"
"You are a smart boy, Carmine. I will let you sell your share of the shrimp for whatever price you see fit. This is only fair, since I will be moving volume at a very low price."
"You are very kind, Don Pietro," said Carmine sincerely, touched by the consideration of his capo.
He was a happy man as he carried the shrimp, one case at a rime, on the HIT back to Brownsville.
"We're gonna make a fortune," he told his wife. "Restaurants will be fallin' all over themselves for quality shrimp like these!"
"At least you got work, you bum," Camilla had said.
The next evening, Carmine Imbruglia dragged himself home with a solitary case of shrimp under his arm. It was the same case he had started the day with. The others remained stuffed in his refrigerator and in the cool air of his basement.
"I got no takers," he complained to his wife.
"What're you talking? No takers?"
"Somebody got to every fuggin' restaurant first. I got undercut. Except the last guy, who still wouldn't buy."
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