Classics Mutilated

by John Shirley

  “I’m protecting la famiglia. I made a promise.”

  “We’re no closer to finding out who killed Frankie.”

  That wasn’t true. I’d had visions, seen images. Light breaking upon the darkness. Blood splashing on a tree. A beautiful blonde without a face, who wasn’t a woman. Pythoness. Fishwives. Familiar spirit. I remembered what the words meant in the Bible.

  “We’re a little closer,” I told him. “The Ganooch was murdered by witches.”

  That night I slipped into Gina’s room and held her while she sobbed. Grandma was upstairs with the cousins and uncles and the rest of the family, half of them having flown in from Sicily. Every so often we could hear her bolt across the room and grab something off the wall, maybe Frankie’s portrait, and bang it around.

  “It doesn’t feel like we’ll ever get over this,” Gina whispered.

  “You will. It’ll just take time.”

  “You’re still not over your father’s murder.”

  It was the truth. “You learn to live with it. You have no choice.”

  “Is that why you do what you do? Is that your way of living with it?”

  “Maybe. In some fashion.”

  She fell back against the pillows and turned herself to me and hooked one hand around the back of my neck and drew me to her, into a kiss abandoned to pain and despair. Those emotions drove me much more deeply than love. I was comfortable among them and lifted her into my arms like a child and hugged and rocked her while she wept.

  At midnight Gina fell into a restless sleep where she occasionally whimpered and whined. I stared at the ceiling and wondered how I was supposed to defend the family against someone who could kill a man just by willing it.

  I nodded off at four a.m. but was awake again twenty minutes later. I turned and Gina was staring at me. Moonlight backlit her so that her face was heavy with twining shadows. She kissed me but it was almost chaste.

  “It’s wrong,” she said.

  “What is? Us being together? We’re not wrong.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  “Why should it be wrong?”

  I couldn’t read her eyes in the darkness. What had attracted me to her the most was the fact that she could always keep me guessing. Others were easy to read. Once you knew what they coveted, you knew what drove them, and you could figure out exactly how far they would go to get it. I knew what went through people’s minds and could take advantage of that. I could see if they were going to jump left or right, pull a gun or call the cops or make a run for it. I could predict their actions and ascertain their weaknesses.

  But Gina was a paragon of cool, calm, and seeming indifference most of the time. Like her brother, she was attending Brown, attending some kind of nonsense accounting and management courses. Unlike Tommy, she was destined to be in the business. The Ganooch never wanted it for her, and Gina never said anything about it, but I could see her running the show in a couple of years when guys like Chaz Argento went up on RICO charges and the other old wiseguys retired to Miami. I always expected to do for her exactly what I did for her father and grandfather.

  I was hired help. Mafia princesses didn’t fool around with hired help. Well, they did, but they weren’t supposed to. They were being prepped to be the wives of politicians or movie producers or Mafia princes, so they could beget other little heirs to the throne. Chaz was too old for her but I knew he’d always wanted to make a move on her. With Frankie dead, maybe he would go for it now, once he got me out of the way.

  “Are you going to catch whoever killed my father?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And make them pay.”

  “In the worst way.”

  “When that day comes will you let me know? I want to see it. I want to watch.”

  I nodded in the dark, with her head pressed against my chest. “I’ll let you know. I’ll let you watch.”

  Cole Portman knew about my mother. He knew about my fevers. He was the consigliere to the Ganucci family but could trace his family roots back to the Mayflower and was as WASPish as you could get. He didn’t share our Catholic penchant for drama, history, and superstition. He didn’t believe my mother had been blessed or cursed. He thought she was a schizophrenic and that I shared some of the same traits. He didn’t mind so long as I remained effective. Now he was having doubts. He told me as much that morning. I had to keep an eye on him, like I had to keep an eye on everyone else.

  I hit the streets. Most of the guttersnipes, low-level dealers, heisters, and wharf rats knew my name but didn’t know my face. I threatened, coerced, blackmailed, and paid informants looking for any clue as to who might be behind this.

  There was a Haitian mob that had risen to some power in northern Jersey and I kept wondering if some voodoo priest was sitting in front of a shrine with a shriveled doll that looked like Frankie. I kept prodding. I didn’t expect much information and I didn’t find any. I just wanted my enemy to know that I was out there on the prowl. I needed word to get back.

  I shook things up for three days. In that time I paid out twenty grand, broke two men’s arms, and clipped one overzealous bartender who snatched up a sawed-off ten-gauge hidden beneath the beer tap. No one knew anything about the hand behind the Ganooch’s demise. A few mooks had heard whispers about how Chaz was planning to ice me. I wasn’t surprised or worried.

  The next morning, Portman phoned me to come to his home.

  He lived in his own cottage on the Ganucci estate, about a quarter mile from the main house. He’d never invited me there before, but I knew every inch of it. I’d crept the place and gone through his desk, his files, every hidden cache and cubbyhole. I knew the combination to his safe. I knew the password on his password-protected computer. I knew his habits, his sexual proclivities, his preference for track lighting, the fact that he hadn’t talked with his sister for thirty-seven years and the reason why.

  He met me at the door, smiling sadly, his face full of near-hysteria. I could smell the scotch on his breath. He’d managed to wrap a robe around himself, but he was still wearing his PJs and slippers.

  He didn’t look sick. Not the way that the Ganooch had when the illness had hit him. Withered, with that deep weakness and flood of age and infirmity taking him over. Portman just appeared to be scared as hell, and he was trembling so bad that his back teeth were clicking.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He ushered me inside his home, and I stepped into his small foyer. He led me to his living room, where a half-bottle of scotch stood open on a table. He hadn’t been using a glass but drinking straight from the bottle.

  “I noticed something when I woke this morning,” he said.

  “What?”

  The smile played in his face, twisting his lips like softened solder. “Don’t you see?”

  Sunlight streamed in from the open window, the breeze carrying with it the smell of the ocean, mixing with the stink of the liquor and his morning breath.

  And then I saw.

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Goddamn right!”

  I learned forward and double-checked. It was true.

  Cole Portman had no shadow.

  “I can feel it,” he told me.

  “You can feel it?”

  “Writhing. It’s in a bottle and someone’s holding it. I can feel his hand on it. I can feel him watching it.” His breathing came in ragged gasps now, the terror flooding his eyes. “It’s … it’s crying. It’s not just a shadow.” He let out a small, crazed laugh. “I think it might be my soul.”

  I remembered an image that had been passed to me by my mother’s seizure. A strange black bug in a jar.

  I took him by the shoulders and gave him a tremendous shake, hoping it might snap him back into himself. It did nothing but rattle him a little more loose. “You can fight,” I told him. “You can hold on, Cole.”

  “Ah God, it’s an easy thing to say, but … it’s like … it’s like having … I feel….” He coul
dn’t put it into words. “I’m not here. I’m not all the way here. I’m missing. I’ve vanished. I want you to kill me. You have to end this.”

  “Cole—”

  “You don’t understand … you don’t know what this is like. What it feels like. What it means. I’m … I’m….”

  I thought I understood enough. He wasn’t in pain. He might not even be dying. But the full horror of having no soul was slowly inflicting a terrible and bewildering knowledge on him. It was something that no man should be aware of. I was slowly watching him lose himself, his past, his mind. His eyes were completely unfocused, staring into the cosmic abyss. He smiled insanely at me and couldn’t even find his voice anymore. A newborn’s gurgle escaped him. Then a kind of mad giggle that was trapped inside his chest the way his soul was trapped in someone’s bottle.

  I rose, got my arms around his throat, and snapped his neck. It took twenty seconds, and all the while I had to listen to that laughter.

  For the first time since I was fifteen, I felt my flesh crawling as fear clamped around my heart.

  I knew how to cover up a crime scene. The cops weren’t going to be called in but I had to make things look right for the rest of the troops. I set the scene to look as if Portman had gotten drunk in his despair over Frankie’s death, tried to sober up in the shower, and taken a tumble across the bathroom floor. It would play. I left him and headed back to the house.

  It was the day of Frankie’s funeral. There were mourners all over the estate. The Sicilians were hugging each other, screaming blood oaths, and promising vengeance.

  No one would miss Portman for the next few hours, everyone already had too much on their minds. I got dressed and listened to the wails all across the house. Grandma Ganucci was never going to settle down. She’d live another twenty years and never wear anything but black. I fully expected her to leap down into the grave when they lowered the coffin in.

  Gina came to my room, looking beautiful and bruised, her eyes with a little more steel in them than usual. She said, “Will you escort me?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want to ride in the Caddy. Will you take your own car?”

  “Sure.”

  “What can I do to help my mother?”

  “There’s nothing you can do. She’ll pull it together.”

  “She’s got to.”

  Tommy found us there, my hands on her shoulders in a half-embrace. He probably already suspected Gina and I were sleeping together. He was a handsome kid wearing an uneasy smile and one of his father’s best suits. The handkerchief in his pocket was crumpled and dark with tears. I could guess he’d used it to wipe his mother’s face.

  It would take him another decade or two before he was mature enough to realize what losing his father actually meant. He didn’t know it was going to color all of his days from this point on. He didn’t know that there was a heaviness growing inside him even now that he’d have to carry for the rest of his life. He was just a kid trying to keep the women in his family from completely breaking down.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  Gina and I followed the stretch limos and drove over to St. Mark’s. The church was filled to capacity and mourners were lined up out onto the street, several square blocks’ worth. The feds were taking photos and video of everybody. Inside I spotted wiseguys from the Chi mob, the west coast syndicate, the Dixie mafia, the Ozark gangs, the bamboo triangle. Frankie’s business associations were far-reaching.

  It seemed like the entire neighborhood was there as well. You could barely hear a thing over all the weeping. Father Mike presided over mass and catalogued all of Frankie’s many good deeds. All the money he’d donated to the hospital wing, the schools, the university library, the homeless shelter, the drug rehab clinic, the mother church. All of it was true, but of course it wasn’t the entire truth. It wasn’t any man’s entire truth. Tears ran down Father Mike’s face too. Gina took my left wrist and dug her nails in, determined not to fall apart in front of just about everybody she knew in the whole world.

  After the service we all filed out and headed over to the cemetery. I was wrong about Grandma Ganucci. She didn’t take a header into the open grave. It was Frankie’s wife, Helen, who decided to give it a go. I saw her gearing up for it, her body still twitching with grief, as she took a flying run and launched herself forward.

  If I hadn’t been ready for someone to give it a try I wouldn’t have been ready to catch her. She would have flung herself six feet down onto the coffin and broken her spine. I caught her in mid-flight and carried her back to her seat, where she almost fell over sobbing. Tommy went to his knees and wrapped his arms around her waist and buried the side of his face in her lap. After a moment, Gina did the same.I made sure that someone else besides me found Portman. One of the troops went out to see why he hadn’t come to the funeral and found his body. After meeting the capos we all came to the decision that we had too many eyes focused on us and Portman should simply disappear. I put three guys on it and told them what to do and where to do it. They weren’t happy and came back a few hours later smelling of lime and manure. I wondered if Portman’s soul would continue thrashing in a witch’s bottle for years to come or if it too would eventually just drift off and die.

  In the middle of the night I awoke on fire.

  I burned so badly that I rolled off the bed and onto the floor, trying to pat out flames that weren’t there. I could feel smoke and steam rising off my body even if I couldn’t see it. Worse, it felt like I had swallowed burning coals and I was cooking from the inside out.

  The witch had finally made an attack on me.

  I tried getting to the shower and seeing if I could put the fire out, but as I crawled across the floor in agony I saw a pair of beautiful legs standing before me, waiting. A foot lifted and was brought to my mouth, determined that I kiss it. When I didn’t, I got a kick to the face and fell over onto my back swallowing my screams.

  I looked up and she stood over me, a goddess come to demand worship and sacrifice.

  She was the iconic beautiful blonde of my every man’s life. She was Marilyn, and Betty Grable, Mamie Van Doren, and Jayne Mansfield. I’d always had a preference for Jayne, and as I watched, her features and form seemed to subtly shift before my eyes, until she was entirely Jayne Mansfield. My first heartfelt love.

  My old man used to have a poster of Jayne on the garage wall, behind his heavy bag so he could watch her while he worked his hooks and jabs. She had been a part of my first vivid sexual fantasies, and even now I could feel the attack on my libido. She exuded carnality. She knew what would set me on fire, the way to smile, pose, turn her chin, sip air between her pouty lips.

  In the real world I’d always gone for the slim, brunette, dark Mediterranean types, but this wasn’t the world. This was fantasy, and in fantasy Jayne had everything I wanted. My belly twitched as my stomach acids boiled. So did my heart.

  It was only partly about lust. The flesh is weak. It burns. It needs. It cries in the night. It thrashes.

  But if you’re stone as I am stone then it can be controlled. Pain can be compartmentalized. Desire can be stashed in the deepest black places within.

  A growl escaped my throat. I was the Ganooch’s number-one torpedo. I was cool. I was ice. I did what other men could not bring themselves to do. I didn’t break. I didn’t bend. I didn’t rattle. I didn’t beg.

  But everything that made me who I was seemed to diminish in her presence. It was a dirty trick. This was human chemistry. It was what made me a man, the need beyond control, the draw of that inexplicable compulsion, that magic. It was sex symbol insanity. It was movie star madness.

  She reached for me and I thought, No, I can resist.

  I will not break. I am rock.

  I thought of my capacity to inflict and endure pain. I’d suffered fever dreams for years, and this was only a little different. A will at work. Every minute that I managed to abide and bear the witchcraft, I was proving that I was stron
ger than they were. Whoever was concentrating on me would begin to feel fear and eventually despair because I would not succumb. No one had more willpower than I did.

  The goddess fell on top of me giggling.

  It was a human sound, a luscious full-bodied womanly laugh that made me want to roll with her and ignite the sheets. She reached for me and held my face in both hands. Her eyes were dark but alive with passion. They were Jayne’s eyes as well as the eyes of my first love, Carmella Andagio, who drew me to her in the back of my father’s Chevelle while the world kept spinning out of control around us and we burned on the seat covers only for each other. Another nasty game, another gimmick.

  “I’m yours,” she said. “I exist for you and you alone. Take me.”

  I wondered who was speaking. The witch or the demon? Or the devil himself? Should I remain silent or let it know that I wasn’t going to die as easily as the Ganooch and Portman? I’d made my own blood sacrifices in the past. The mud around Sheepshead Bay was thick with my kills.

  “No.”

  “You’re on fire for me.”

  I knew it was the truth. I was in agony. Cramps seized me and my guts were boiling. My heart hammered and tripped along. My blood pressure had to be near stroke levels.

  “You … can’t … hurt … me,” I gasped.

  Jayne wooed me, the way she wooed male moviegoers everywhere. “I don’t want to hurt you. I love you.”

  She bent over me, her perfectly draped blonde hair framing a face so beautiful that I wanted to sell whatever was left of my soul to have her for just a night, an hour, a moment.

  As she dipped even closer the shadows covered her over until I couldn’t even see the heavenly glint in her eyes anymore.

  “I need you. I want you.”

  I turned away and crossed my arms over my face while her body pressed against mine and she crooned in my ear. All my love and hate roared up through my brain. My hands, my strong and powerful hands, flashed out for an instant in an effort to shove her away.