Gangster

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “I’m sorry you had to see him die the way he did.” It was the first time Angelo had spoken to me about Pudge since his death.

  “I know it’s crazy, but I always thought he was like Superman,” I said with half a smile. “That nothing could kill him, nothing would bring him to a stop.”

  “Now you know better,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything to him. He was wrong. I didn’t know better. I still felt the same way about him.

  We sat in silence as Nico drove. Then suddenly, Angelo started talking again. The edge was gone from his voice and there was an eerie gentleness to his tone. “Me and Pudge, we built what we have from scratch,” Angelo said. “We put it together with our blood, with a lot of people’s blood. You can’t take something like that and give it away. It’s a part of what I am and it deserves to be handed down. And not just to some guy from another crew who did me a favor. What we built should go to someone who will build off it and make it even more powerful.”

  I stared at his profile, his head rising slowly, his eyes settling on my face and knew that the someone he had in mind all along was me.

  • • •

  I WASN’T SUPPOSED to have seen any of it. I was not meant to have been at the middle-of-the-night pickup of Little Ricky Carson from the rear bedroom of a six-room Manhattan apartment. I should have been at home and not standing there next to Angelo, watching a mask of chilled fear penetrate Carson’s once solid confidence. I should not have heard the only words Angelo spoke to him in that room. “Never give an old man an extra day to live,” Angelo said to Carson, in a manner cold enough to cause a shiver. I should not have been there for any of what followed, none of it was meant for my eyes. I was still a boy and even Angelo sought to spare me from the sight of another man’s murder. Even if it was the man who had killed Pudge.

  “I have to come with you,” I said to Angelo earlier that evening. “I want to be a part of this. I need to be there.”

  Angelo shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “Why not?” I asked, walking on tentative ground as I questioned a decision.

  “A man will die tonight,” Angelo said. “And that’s all a boy needs to know.”

  “I belong with you,” I said, standing up to him, fearful but defiant. “At least for this part of it.”

  Angelo sat in a lounge chair, hidden by the shadows of his desk lamp, the only sound the raspy breath coming up from his lungs. “I leave in an hour,” he said. “Be ready.”

  He reached up and turned off the light, blanketing the room in total darkness.

  • • •

  WE WERE STANDING on the roof of a seven-story building on Columbus Avenue, the night sky brimming with stars and a half moon. Off to my right, the lights of Lincoln Center cast their studied glow on thickets of the exquisitely dressed out for a night of age-old music and refined conversation. I looked down at them, as they mingled near the doors, cramming to get in, each one careful not to get scuff marks on their designer shoes, and I wondered how many could even believe that a few short blocks away a man was about to die.

  The thick door leading up to the roof slammed open and Little Ricky Carson was thrown headfirst to the hard tar ground. He landed on his hands and knees, scraping his chin as he skidded to a halt. “Help him up,” Angelo said to Nico. “And bring him over by the light.”

  Nico lifted Ricky by the collar of his silk bathrobe, pulled him off the ground and carried him over to where Angelo waited. Carson shook off Nico’s grip, straightened out his robe and smiled at Angelo. “This all the crew you got left?” he asked, still flashing a hint of bravado. “One piece of muscle and a boy? Guess I did you a lot more damage than I thought.”

  Angelo reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out an old black-and-white photo and showed it to Little Ricky. It was a faded shot of two young men, their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, wide-eyed and smiling into the camera. Even in the shaded darkness, shadows bouncing off a series of hanging bulbs, I recognized it. It was a picture of Angelo and Pudge as young men, taken on the day each bought his first suit. Angelo kept the photo in a small gold frame on top of his bureau, next to a head shot of Isabella and another of Ida the Goose. Many times, I would sneak into his room and stare at the pictures, trying to imagine what the young Angelo Vestieri had been like.

  Angelo nodded to Nico, who walked over and handed him an open four-finger knife. Angelo stabbed the knife into the photo. “This is a gift,” he said in a voice that was as calm as it was frightening. “From Pudge.”

  Nico reached behind Little Ricky, grabbed both his arms and held them tight against his back. Angelo plunged the knife, with the photo facing out, deep into Little Ricky’s shoulder. Carson tossed his head back and let out a pained howl, his legs slumping and losing their strength. Angelo turned away from Carson and looked over at me. “Get the ropes out of the box,” he said. “And bring them to Nico.”

  I ran to the edge of the roof, reached down into an open cardboard box and pulled out three large circles of thick cord and brought them to Nico. As I turned away, I felt Angelo’s hands around my shoulders. “You’ve done your part,” he whispered. “Now, go downstairs and wait in the car.”

  “I came to help,” I said.

  “You have,” Angelo said.

  I stared over at Carson, watched him start to tremble as Nico bound his hands and feet with the cord. What was left of his courage was doing a fast fade, replaced by the simplicity of human fear. His fate was now in gangster court, where the verdicts were reached quickly and where the punishment more than met the crime.

  “I’ll be downstairs,” I said, glaring at Carson with scorn.

  “You’ll see everything better from the car,” Angelo said, pushing me toward the door leading down the tenement stairs. “Trust me.”

  • • •

  I SAT IN the front seat, gazing up at the roof through the open window, Ida nuzzling her large head under my arm. I knew enough to know that Angelo would do more than simply kill Little Ricky Carson. He would send a stern message, clear and forceful enough that it couldn’t be ignored. Carson’s death would not serve merely as punishment for what he’d done to Pudge. It would be a warning shot to the dozens of other crews that were amassing money and strength, telling them to be content with what they had and to stay away from what belonged to others. Little Ricky Carson’s death was to be both revenge and emblem. And there was no one alive who was better at that than Angelo Vestieri.

  I jumped when I saw the burning body hanging off the edge of the roof, held aloft by a dozen feet of cord. Little Ricky’s torched corpse swung back and forth in the fall wind, lighting up the night. Angelo and Nico had tied a noose around his neck, drenched his body in gasoline and tossed him off the side. It was Angelo who reached down and dropped the lit sleeve of a shirt on the top of Little Ricky’s writhing head and shoulders. The sleeve had been cut from the shirt Pudge wore on the day he died. I looked up and saw Angelo peering off the roof, the hot flames casting his face in a red glow, as he stared at the man whose death would finally bring an end to a long and draining war.

  Within minutes, the fire wound its way to the base of the cord, causing it to snap and send Little Ricky Carson’s charred remains in a straight drop down to the empty pavement. The crumpled body lay there and sizzled, frightened screams and the distant blare of fire and police sirens following fast in the wake of its crash. I stared over at Carson’s corpse, at the smoke rising off the burnt clothes and skin. His limbs were still twitching and thin lines of flames were burning through the holes in his face. I was shaken by what I had just witnessed, horrified by the forced brutality of it all. Yet I was glad to have been there and seen Pudge’s death properly avenged. This was the part of a mobster’s life I most appreciated. I hungered for the taste of revenge and reveled in the thrill it left in its wake. Most everyone dreams of getting even, but they lack either the ability or the desire to bring such inner hate to life. I was one of the lucky ones. I h
ad been raised by a man who was a master of the payback, expecting nothing more from life than to punish a scorned enemy and right a wrong.

  And on this day, I was allowed to be a part of it all.

  As a crowd gathered, I slid over to the passenger side of the car, waiting for Angelo and Nico to make their way down from the rooftop. I leaned across the dash, pressed down on the key and kicked over the ignition. I opened the glove compartment, rifled through Nico’s tapes until I found the one I wanted, and shoved it into the slot, turning the volume up. I rested my head back and shut my eyes, Ida sitting curled and warm by my side, both of us listening to Benny Goodman and his quartet rumble their way through “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

  18

  * * *

  Summer, 1971

  I WAS WALKING on the long strip of white sand beach, Nico alongside me, the hot Italian sun warming our backs, turning our dark tans even darker. I looked out at the calm waves splashing gently onto the shore as an army of pale white sailboats glided by in the distance. We had been staying on the small island of Procida for two weeks now, in the top floor of Frederico and Donatella Di Stefano’s three-story pink stucco villa, twelve miles from the mouth of the harbor. I had initially dreaded the thought of leaving the States and my accustomed New York life, but as I walked next to Nico, both of us with white towels draped around our necks, I couldn’t think of ever finding a better place in the world. It was an island of peace, filled with warm people who took enjoyment from the simple moments of each day. The main industry was fishing, with the occasional tour bus making the local rounds. The houses were made of stone and dotted the shoreline, surrounded by fresh pine trees and lofty hills. The women dressed in colorful cotton dresses and wooden clogs, hand-sewn shawls crammed inside straw purses, set to ward off the chill of an early evening walk. The men wore work pants and sandals, short-sleeved shirts open halfway down to their stomachs, arms and necks burned brown by the sun, the rest of their bodies as white as newly bleached sheets. The island boys seemed to run in gleeful packs of six, their days devoted to long swims, napping under a sun hot enough to broil meat and topped off by a stop at the outdoor movie theater, which presented a new feature each night, usually a dubbed American import. They all smoked and chewed gum and were infatuated with any products from the United States. And of course, they were obsessed with women, their southern Italian blood working at a hormonal boiling point that put the awkward moments of my teenage years to shame. “These kids would screw a rotting tree,” Nico said to me one afternoon. He was sitting in an outdoor café and sipping an iced espresso. “You give them a woman and a fresh bowl of pasta and it’s like handing them a million dollars. When I was their age, all I wanted was for the Dodgers to win the World Series.”

  The women who captured the attention of the boys were divided into two categories. Of immediate interest were the stranieri, offshore beauties who came to Procida on their summer break, eager to escape the draining city life to the north. These women, regardless of age or marital status, were marked prey, pursued by the young men of the island as if they were rare and unique treasures. A summer romance was a most sought-after prize and any teen fortunate enough to be part of such a situation earned the pride and respect of his pack. The sexual conquest of an older woman was viewed as an important first step to an island boy’s arrival into manhood.

  The island girls were treated in a different manner. These were the giggling teens a few years removed from becoming young brides and mothers. They were treated with respect and their beauty was acknowledged with whispers and glances. Most of the island girls were engaged by their sixteenth birthdays and wed before they turned twenty. “Be careful how you handle yourself with the local girls,” Nico told me one warm night. “What to you might be an innocent gesture, could be a whole other ball of wax over here. They grow their own on this island and they watch out for their own. You find a girl you like, think twice. If not, you might find yourself a married man by week’s end.”

  Living on Procida was like being tossed back into an earlier century. The moral code was rigid, unbending and upheld. A woman was expected to be a virgin on the day she married and needed to prove it not only to her husband but to the locals as well. This was done by hanging the bloodstained wedding night sheets out the window at daybreak. If her husband was unable to complete such a task, the marriage could be annulled, and if it wasn’t, a cloud hung over the couple that wouldn’t pass for decades. The Catholic Church held a great deal of power, but the priests seemed less formal and much friendlier than their counterparts back home, their Sunday sermons filled with joy and laughter rather than gloom. The priest and the crime boss were the two most trusted men on the island, the ones everyone turned to if a problem needed to be solved or a difficult decision made.

  “I heard this story the other day from Frederico’s driver, Silvio,” Nico told me, turning his face up to the warm sun. “Happened during the war. One of the locals went off to fight the Germans, or maybe it was the English. Whoever it was, he was gone. The island was hit pretty hard back then, all of Italy really, and money was hard to come by. His wife finds herself with three kids and no income and, as far as she knows, her husband’s lying dead on some battlefield. Anyway, she starts turning tricks to help feed herself and the kids.”

  “She became a prostitute?” I asked, the sun blinding my attempt to look up at him.

  “How else was she going to make money?” he asked. “Be a hit man? She did what she had to do to feed her family. Then the war ends and guess who comes marching back home?”

  “Her husband?”

  “Bingo,” Nico said. “He’s on the island about fifteen minutes when about a hundred of his closest friends tell him how his wife had kept herself busy at night while he was away. The guy, understandably, wants her dead. He wants a divorce. He wants her out of his life. Tell you the truth, he’s so pissed off, he don’t know what he wants.”

  “So what’s he do?” I asked, eager to hear the rest of the story.

  “He goes and sees the local priest,” Nico said, now facing me, his back blocking the sun from my eyes. “They go over the whole story and when they finish, the priest sits back, lights a cigarette and sets him straight.”

  “Sets him straight how?”

  “He tells him that if he leaves this wife and goes out to look for another, how the hell’s he gonna know the new one wasn’t a prostitute, too. So the priest says, ‘At least at home, you got a prostitute you know. Why go out and take a chance on one you don’t know?’ The guy nods, stays pissed for a few more years, but stays with his wife.”

  “Are they still together?” I was walking again, my feet cooled by the licks of the waves.

  “Not only are they still together, they went and had another kid. Beautiful girl about your age. So, there you have it, two people who loved each other were kept together, all because some smart old priest knew how to think. See if you get that kind of advice in New York, from one of those dry-ass Irish drunks.”

  “Not for free, anyway,” I said.

  • • •

  I SPENT MY mornings with Frederico Di Stefano. He was a stout man in his late sixties, with a thick head of white hair, trimmed white handlebar mustache and a leather face, lined and aged from years under the southern Italian sun. I sat with him at a table that was shaded by a thick overgrowth of grapevines. His villa was edged on top of a hill and had an impressive view that overlooked the sea and the mouth of the harbor. Behind us, a dozen acres, lined solid with vines and poles, sliced down the slope of a hill, the land worked on by a quiet army of laborers. It was in this still, graceful and majestic setting that Frederico began the lessons that were meant to further prepare me for a life in the underworld. He would come out the back door of his kitchen, carrying a silver tray filled with cups, plates, a large pot of hot espresso and a basket of fresh rolls. He poured us both a cup of coffee, always serving it without sugar, and sat across from me on a thick hand-carved wooden chair. His English was
accented but fluent, helped along by a two-year stay in London where he had been sent by relatives when he was ten to combat an early battle with cancer. He left behind a diseased kidney and a deep affection for all things British except tea. “I hear people say the English are a cold people,” he told me. “In my experience, I never found it to be true. They love life, embrace it, understand it in ways few cultures do. But, unlike us Italians, they keep themselves at a distance, and let you know as much as you need to know. Just like you must learn to do.”

  “Was your father in the life?” I asked him, gripping the heavy cup with both hands and drinking the hot espresso the way he had taught me, fast and in less than five gulps.

  “My father and his father and, before him, his father,” Frederico said with a shrug. “It is the only life we have known. The ways of this island and the ways of the camorra are the ways of my family.”

  “Have you ever wished that wasn’t true?” I asked, reaching for a roll and a jam spread. “That you weren’t locked in to one way of life?”

  “When I was younger, about your age, I would stare out at the water’s edge and follow the big ships as they passed by on their way to Germany, France, even America,” he said, looking down the slope at the blue seawater of the harbor below. “In those moments I would wonder what it would be like to be free enough to board such a ship and travel to lands I had only heard others talk about.”

  “Why didn’t you go?” I asked him. “You know, once you were old enough not to need anybody else’s okay?”

  “Such thoughts are the sole property of young boys,” he said, pouring us both a second cup of coffee. “They must not get in the way of what it is a man must do with his life. To turn my back on that would have been a betrayal to my family and to myself.”