Blood Wine

by John Moss

The Mob

  It came back to me on the bus. I was trying to sleep. You know what it’s like on a bus, you’re droning along, wheels humming, and you’re half awake and you lose track of where you are. It came back in images, but not as you’d imagine, not in random order on a scale of intensity. It came back in chronological sequence, like I was watching an old-fashioned movie.

  You remember I was in the wine shed, the bottling shed at the end. I was blindfolded, taped in a chair. I told you I heard someone, the others called him Mr. Savage. He chopped off the screaming man’s hand. Or someone did it on his order. They mostly weren’t speaking English.

  I had flown to Rochester to check out a wine source. We had cases of vintage Châteauneuf-du-Pape from an estate I couldn’t track down. I couldn’t get a price on it. We always publish an estimate of what something will bring at auction. This was a mystery wine, and the paper trail traced our lot through a retailer in Rochester.

  So, there I am at Bonnydoon when I hear a gunshot. I could picture what happened. I was blindfolded, but I could hear the body fall into the vat.

  “Get rid of her,” said a voice I assume was Mr. Savage’s. In English. Then he said something in another language, and then he said, “Not here.” Then he said in Italian, “I don’t want her found. She disappears.”

  He was speaking in three languages.

  I was blindfolded, but the blindfold slipped off. It didn’t seem to bother them. As far as they were concerned, I was already dead.

  He dumped my purse, motioning to another man, who picked up a severed hand. There was a gold ring. It seemed like the flesh was still pulsing. It seemed like it was alive. He wrapped it in tissues and dropped it into my bag. He scooped up my stuff, removed identification cards and papers, then dropped the rest into the bag.

  “The hand,” he said, then he said something in another language. Then in Italian, he repeated, “She disappears.”

  He leaned over me. I could see every pore in his face. He was breathing through his nose but I could smell his breath; it was sweet and minty. He ran his hands over me, not sexually, not so you’d know it. Even the crudest groper wants a response, but it was more like he was assessing a slab of meat at the slaughterhouse or trying to embed anatomical details in his memory, knowing I was going to die.

  He stopped, or he was stopped. I’m not sure.

  Mr. Savage told someone in Italian where to find you. Miranda Quin, he said. He gave your address on Isabella Street and spoke as if he were repeating known information. I got the impression the man he was talking to was supposed to find you and kill you. You were the main event. Your death. Mine was a nuisance, yours a necessity. Your name, your address, they were seared into my brain.

  I was placed in a car. It was night. I could see lights in the big house up behind the vineyards, the house where the old lady lived.

  My hands were taped at the wrists. I had gloves taped over my hands. They didn’t want fingerprints. My ankles were taped. The driver taped them after I walked to the car. He ran his hands up my legs. God, men are pathetic. He had a chance, he took it. I didn’t have tape over my mouth. I had not said a word since they picked me up in the Rochester parking lot. Nothing. Mute. I whispered in his ear as he was leaning over me, “Fuck you.” It startled him. He flipped my skirt to prove his power then smoothed it down to prove gentility.

  Gentility! The guy was going to kill me.

  We drove. The scenery, the highway signs — everything I saw — was intensified by the terror. I recorded every detail in my mind, I jammed my head with facts.

  After we got on the main highway, I started talking to him. In Italian. He answered in Italian but switched to English. His Italian was worse than mine. We talked in English. We might have been on an arranged date. Like I was from out of town, visiting his relatives.

  We drove along the Queen Elizabeth Way, the QEW as he called it. I told him I had to pee. Badly.

  It was his car. A big brutal sedan. He swore he would kill me.

  I said, that’s what you’re going to do anyway. I’m going to pee and I’m going to throw up in your car.

  He told me to wait, we’d be stopping soon. At a building site. I could pee there.

  I insisted, sooner. He pulled over then realized he’d have to free me legs and my arms too, or else hold up my skirt. By now we were friends in his mind, he had too much respect.

  We were almost in Toronto. He pulled off at a sign for Lake Shore Boulevard. We circled around and he parked at the base of a bridge. A sign said it was the Humber River. I remember everything.

  I really did have to pee. I was losing it. By the time he got my legs free, I thought I’d wet my pants. I was squirming, so he panicked and cut my wrist tapes. I started to drop my drawers, and he turned his head away, I grabbed his gun tucked in his belt right there in front of me. He turned his head back — he looked so surprised.

  I pulled the trigger. And again and again, it just kept firing. It was empty before he hit the ground.

  He was looking up at me like he was disappointed, only he was dead.

  I got in the car. The keys were still in the ignition. I dropped his gun, I guess, into my purse, then I backed up carefully so I wouldn’t run over him. I stopped when the headlights picked him up. I got out of the car. He looked unnatural, lying there. I pushed him over into the river. I tried to finish peeing, but I couldn’t. I had to go but I couldn’t.

  When I got to a subway, I dumped the car. Left it parked on a side street. Asked directions to your place, to Isabella. I had to rescue you. I had to connect. That’s about it. You know the rest.

  Do I? thought Miranda. She took a deep breath. The story was consistent with the facts. The woman wasn’t accounting sufficiently for the amnesia, but then, Miranda supposed, the thing about amnesia is you forget what it’s like when it’s over.

  “If Ivan betrayed you, why hold him hostage, why not just walk out? You had the gun, you could have left.”

  “The police were here before I knew what to do. It was instinctive. I wanted to hurt him. I don’t just mean he betrayed me, calling the cops. Miranda, he set me up.”

  “Set you up?”

  “Rochester. Ivan set me up to be killed.”

  “Elke, why on earth — you were there to find out about a shipment of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, somebody’s wine cellar you wanted to auction.”

  “But did I say where it came from?”

  “Yes. Someone’s estate. Originally from upstate New York.”

  “It was an estate Ivan told me he was working on.”

  “Not surprising. He was in the insurance business. He’s lying riddled with bullets outside the front door. Doesn’t that …” she searched for the right word, “… engage … engage your interest?”

  “Here’s what I think,” said Elke, ignoring Miranda’s question. “I think he tried to use me. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt — he’s dead — let’s say he didn’t know it was counterfeit. He just wanted to dump a bunch of wine. Fifty cases, a good year on the Rhône, say $200 a bottle, that’s $120,000. So, let’s say he really does moonlight for the mob —”

  “The mob!”

  “Gangsters, bad guys, Tony Soprano —”

  “He’s into garbage, that’s where the big money is.”

  “Let’s say I’m right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Somebody in the mob pays him off in wine, he doesn’t know how to sell it, he turns to me. Then what happens? I find there’s no such wine and no dead guy, no estate being cleared. So, I trace the wine back to Millennium in Rochester. Dead end. I go there to find out their supplier. You with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Meanwhile, the gangsters freak out. He wasn’t supposed to get caught. He was supposed to pay off a jobber, unload the wine through a few select stores with mob connections. That’s how these things are done. But he was greedy, he tried to sell it through me. ATF don’t care, in stores it’s only a few bottles at a time.”

 
; “ATF?”

  “The Feds. Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms. Whatever, it’s a government agency. But me, I was going to blow the whistle. Not intentionally. I’m just good at what I do.”

  “So good, they figured if you knew, you needed to be eliminated.”

  “Exactly, Miranda. These guys don’t fool around. They probably wanted to get rid of Ivan as well. When they saw you and Morgan and me back there at Bonnydoon, they figured the word was out. Everything was already wired for just such an occasion. They blew everything up.”

  “No question the house was a bomb, set for maximum destruction.”

  “Yes, in case things went wrong. There must have been evidence in the house, records and things.”

  Miranda smiled at the younger woman. “Come on. Take my arm. We’ll walk out together.”

  “Thanks for being here,” said Elke. “You came a long way.”

  “Not so far,” said Miranda. “Toronto’s about the same distance away as Cleveland or Raleigh, North Carolina.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  They stood in the shadows inside the open door. Miranda could feel Elke’s breast pressing against her arm as she leaned into her for support.

  “Coming out!” Miranda shouted. The street was in shadow now, and there was a flurry of restrained activity. Then everything stopped. The two women stepped into the open. The stoop was brilliant with splattered blood. They stood still.

  Clancy walked up the steps, followed by two cops swathed in bulletproof armour. He reached out and took Elke’s arm.

  “No,” said Miranda. “It wasn’t her.” She could not stop herself. She pulled Elke away from his grasp.

  “It was him,” she said. “He was holding her hostage.”

  “Say what!”

  “It was him, holding her! Ivan Muritori. He forced her to say it was her, the other way around, but he was going to kill her. And say it was self-defense. When I went in, he had the gun on her. He was sitting in the open so you could see him. He kept her out of sight.”

  “Jesus!” said Clancy.

  Miranda was astonished by what she was saying. Elke was stunned into silent compliance.

  “He had us both, he was going to kill us together.”

  “Where’d the other gun come from?” said Clancy, running all the known facts through his mind, still dubious but not antagonistic.

  “It was his,” said Elke. “They were both his. It was in the living room. In a desk drawer. I told Miranda, I told Detective Quin.”

  “She distracted him, I went for the gun,” said Miranda. “You heard the shootout. We were lucky. He took off.”

  “Yeah,” said Clancy, “you were lucky. What took so long, after he came out?”

  “I was hysterical,” said Elke. “Detective Quin talked me down.”

  “I know her,” said Miranda. “We’ve shared some pretty bad things. We need her for questioning. There’s no way she did the killing in Toronto, but we need her to process the details.”

  What Miranda knew was that Elke’s execution of the man under the Humber bridge was a reasonable act of self-defense, but if she admitted Elke’s involvement, the NYPD would have no option but to arrest her, and Miranda did not want that.

  “Yeah, well, we need her here, too,”

  Miranda felt her heart sink, but he continued.

  “She might help us figure who killed this guy.” He nodded toward the ambulance with the back door still open, where Ivan Muritori’s corpse lay under a plastic shroud.

  “Who killed him? It wasn’t us? Didn’t you? Didn’t he go down in the proverbial hail of bullets?”

  “He did,” said Clancy, “after a sniper picked him off from somewhere across the street. It was a perfect hit. Our guys were focused on the guy coming through the door. He’s waving a semi-automatic. Pop goes a shot. He drops. Before the guy hits the ground, our guys let loose. Reflex. Once the shooting starts, take no chances. But we didn’t fire the first shot, and neither did he. It was a hit.”

  “The mob!” said Elke.

  “The mob,” said Clancy. “It was professional, definitely the mob.”

  11

  The Mausoleum

  The funeral of Vittorio Ciccone was the social hit of the season. Visitation at the mortuary on Danforth Avenue was overwhelming. They were forced to farm out other jobs to competitors just to accommodate the turnover of those coming to pay their respects, those coming to be seen for personal and professional reasons, those needing to participate in an event larger than anything else in their lives, those who wanted the assurance that he was dead, which would come only by seeing him lying in state, a neat cosmetic plug in the centre of his forehead.

  At the cemetery, the service and those attending were more refined. Holding the wake and visitation near where the deceased had grown up, an Italian area surrounded by Greeks, had been his wife’s idea. It was in deference to his humble beginnings. It was also her idea to celebrate the burial service in front of their family mausoleum in the most exclusive part of the most exclusive cemetery in the heart of the city. Etched into the marble lintel over the mausoleum door was the name “Ciccone.” The mausoleum was empty, built — bought, actually, with dynastic aspirations, the size of a small house with granite walls, no windows, and a massive door. Successive generations of the family would find their way here, eventually, where she and Vittorio would preside through eternity. It was all happening a little sooner than they had anticipated, but this was no reason to skimp on the grandeur of the event.

  Morgan had never seen so many black limousines. A rock star had tried to enter the cemetery in a white limousine but was turned away at the gate. He was forced to walk in from the street. Limousines likely had to be brought in from Hamilton, Oakville, and Oshawa. Morgan arrived with Spivak and Stritch and walked in. There were police in street clothes here and there throughout the crowd, all of whom seemed to Morgan, themselves included, to be passively intrusive.

  “You ever see so many fur coats?” said Spivak.

  “Not in June,” said Morgan.

  “I didn’t know people still wore black to funerals,” said Stritch in a tone suggesting he approved.

  “Yeah, well funerals are not all alike,” said Spivak, “even if we’re equals under the sod.”

  “Some are more equal than others,” said Morgan. A smile crept over his face as he observed the obsequies. “That’s quite the tomb; it looks like Vittorio Ciccone will rest high until hell freezes over.”

  “Or until the damn thing falls down, then they’ll bulldoze it into the ground,” said Spivak, registering satisfaction at the prospect. I wonder if he’s heard of Ozymandias? thought Morgan.

  The casket lay on a gurney disguised with a white satin skirt, surrounded by rows of folding wooden chairs sitting on artificial turf, except in front of the mausoleum, where there were banks of flowers arranged in descending waves, like floral surf rolling out of the crypt.

  “You know what’s funny about this lot?” said Morgan.

  “Yeah, everyone’s here,” said Spivak.

  It was true, there were city councillors, Bay Street brokers, members of various hospital boards (Ciccone had been a generous benefactor), representatives of major cultural institutions (Ciccone was a patron of the opera and of the ballet and gave considerable sums to theatre groups), there were bar musicians, recording artists, Rosedale neighbours who preferred to believe the Ciccone family were in construction, and representatives of several large unions, whose members were employed at Ciccone construction sites.

  People not there included bikers, who had paid their respects by showing their colours at the funeral home; drug addicts, at least those who had degenerated to the point where they were unkempt derelicts; streetwalkers who would turn a trick for the price of a fix, call girls who would shoot up with weekend thrill-seekers from out of town or workaday addicts from the business district, hookers who had not yet lost their looks; and social workers who battled night and day the horrors of the mean stre
ets most Torontonians drove through unknowingly or by accident.

  Powerful members of the church and the legal profession were there, Morgan observed, even while pro bono lawyers and priests who ran shelters were absent.

  “Everyone is here,” said Morgan, repeating Spivak’s assessment. “But you know what?”

  The three of them were standing off to the side in front of some manicured shrubs, the only members of the force not trying to blend in. There would be a few Mounties there as well, because of the drug connection, but they would be invisible. Spivak and Stritch waited for Morgan to answer his own rhetorical question. They knew from his tone he was on to something. None of them were in a hurry. They were here for the duration.

  “Look around,” said Morgan. “Find me a gangster who is not here.”

  “Well, if they’re not here …” Stritch’s quibble trailed into contemplative silence.

  “Think about it,” said Morgan. “Name me a big-time crook, a Mafia boss, a rival gangster …”

  “What’s your point?” said Spivak, who recognized the funeral of Vittorio Ciccone as a mandatory event. “Who would stay away?”

  “That is the point,” said Morgan. “If it was a Mafia hit, don’t you think the offending faction would avoid the proceedings?”

  “Not really,” said Spivak. “I think they might come to gloat. Or as a display of supremacy. Or to begin organizing the succession.”

  “Look at Frankie Ciccone, Spivak. She’s radiant. The grieving widow — even gangsters grieve. But she’s a smart woman, she knows the business. And she’s showing no signs the killers are here.”

  “A good-looking woman,” Stritch observed.

  “What else!” said Spivak, as if there were no alternative for the wife of someone like Ciccone. Then he turned to Morgan, speaking confidentially as if Stritch were an outsider.

  “She’s savvy. If the assassins are here, she’d know it, you’d see it on her face.”

  Morgan suppressed a smile. Spivak had said exactly what he had said, in almost the same words. Spivak was waiting to see what conclusion would be drawn from their shrewd observations.