by Albert Demeo
Without a word Dad stopped the car and went back inside. A minute later he was back, shoving Major into the backseat and putting Benji into Debra's arms. We pulled out of the drive and into the darkness.
Within minutes we were speeding through the quiet streets of Massapequa at more than eighty miles an hour. My mother, thin-lipped and white-faced, said, “When are we coming back, Roy?”
“Never,” my father replied. “We're never coming back.” My mother and sisters started sobbing, my mother turning her face away from my father as she began to cry. Only my father and I didn't weep. I patted my gun for reassurance as I looked down at the floor. There were bullet holes in the matting.
My father was silent until we were out of the city, but as the hours passed, he began to talk to us. I kept waiting for one of my sisters to say, “Why, Daddy?” but they didn't. I didn't know whether they already knew the answer, or whether they didn't want to know. I only know that they didn't ask, then or ever. My father began talking more calmly, trying to soothe us.
“It'll be nice, you'll see. We'll wait a few weeks until things calm down and I can get some money together. Then we'll move on north, buy some land, maybe do some farming. I'll be home a lot more. You can go to school there. You'll like it. I hear it's really pretty.” My mother just stared straight ahead, without saying a word.
We drove well into the night, out of the city, north to upstate New York. Finally, in a rural area I had never seen before, we stopped at a small motel. While my father checked us in, we unloaded the Cadillac as fast as we could. Once we were in the room, my father told us to stay there until he returned. He had some business to take care of, but he would be back as soon as he could. Once he'd done what he needed to, he told us, we would be going north, across the border into Canada. And with that, he was gone. My mother comforted my sisters and told us all to go to bed. I went into the bathroom to change clothes and hide the gun in my pajamas, then climbed into bed and lay there in the darkness and listened to my sisters' breathing as they slowly drifted into exhausted sleep. I don't think my mother slept at all that night. Neither did I.
We remained at the motel for nearly two weeks. My father came back the next day to make sure we were safe and give my mother some cash and then left again. He was driving a new car. My mother did her best to keep us fed and entertained, but there was no way she could camouflage the grimness of the situation. There was anger in her face, a mixture of rage and sadness that I had never seen before. We passed the time as best we could. Debra had brought her camera, and she went outside in the mornings to take pictures around the cabin. I wandered along behind, keeping her in view, my gun hidden. Lisa buried herself in a book the way she always did, and my mother alternately watched television and paced around the cabin. I made grocery runs and patrolled the perimeter, pretending to take hikes. The time crawled by. My father came by twice more to check on us but then left again immediately. He did not tell me where he was going.
At the end of the second week, my father returned and abruptly announced that we were going home. No one asked any questions. We simply piled into the car and drove back to Long Island. When we finally pulled into the driveway, I remember thinking that the house looked different now. Maybe it was because I'd never expected to see it again. My sisters and I picked up our garbage bags of belongings and went inside to unpack.
The man who returned to the house with us that evening was different, too. He was not the father I remembered. We didn't have access to newspapers while we were in hiding, but now I watched as my father sat in the kitchen that night, reading through the papers we'd found piled on our front porch. Debra helped my mother start dinner. Suddenly I saw him stiffen and stare at the paper. He put it down, then picked it up and read it again. He must have read it a hundred times. It was as though he simply couldn't take in what it said.
The article described a gangland hit two week earlier, a dramatic daylight chase through the streets of Long Island culminating in a shoot-out. Or more accurately, a shooting, for the victim had never returned fire. A speeding car had pulled up next to a young Hispanic man, the occupants emptying nearly three hundred rounds of ammunition into his car. The victim's body was riddled with bullets. Witnesses gave conflicting descriptions of the assailants, and so far the police had no leads. The motive for the shooting remained a mystery. The victim, a young Long Island man who was selling vacuums door to door to pay his way through college, had no criminal ties. No guns were found in his car.
All the color drained out of my father's face. The kid who had come to our front door hadn't been part of a hit squad. He was just an innocent bystander who had stumbled into a lethal situation. Over and over, my father read the articles, unable to take in what he was learning. He had killed an innocent kid. Somebody's son. As Debra and I watched in stunned silence, my father started to cry. He sat there, staring down at the paper, tears running down his face. Then he stood up and, without saying a word, went up to his study and shut the door.
My father continued to go through the motions of doing what was necessary, but the light was gone from his eyes. I learned that he had been able to dispose of the car and other evidence. Cousin Joe, who couldn't even shoot straight, had shot several holes in our own car in the excitement of the chase. Our car contained damning ballistic evidence, but my father had gotten rid of the Cadillac that first night. He and my mother spoke to each other less and less. My sisters gradually returned to normal, and I began going through the summertime motions, swimming every day in the canal behind our house. Everything resumed its normal course. Everything, that is, but my father.
The harsh reality of what he had done opened a fissure in my father that widened with every passing day. He was a broken man. I watched in silence as he began to disintegrate. It was weeks before he could eat normally, days before he could eat at all. During the day he sat in the darkness of his den; at night he went out and then returned to pace until sunup. As I lay in bed listening to him walk back and forth, back and forth, the silence was occasionally broken by the sound of retching in the bathroom. After all the years of shutting his eyes to what he was doing, of hiding behind the rationalization that killing was just an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business, he was suddenly confronted with the reality of who he had become. This was no gangster he had killed; this was somebody's innocent son. He knew that in destroying the college student's family, he had also destroyed ours.
There was one final piece of business that would have to be taken care of if he were to survive. Paul Castellano was livid about the killing of the college student. To kill an innocent kid in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, was insanely stupid and risky. Castellano still suspected that my father had been involved in the hit on the Colombians, and because of the hit, the Gambino family now stood trapped between twin dangers: reprisals from the Colombians and investigation by the federal task force. Castellano knew that Chris had done it, and there was little doubt he would order Chris hit as soon as possible. They had to find a way to appease Big Paul, or he would have them all killed.
A few nights later, my father did not come home. Swallowing my fear, I walked the house all night with Major, guarding my family in his absence. When he finally came home the next day, I was weak with relief. He was pale and drawn, saying nothing as he went into his office and closed the door. That evening we ate dinner in the kitchen, and when my sisters went upstairs afterward, I sat in the kitchen with my father while my mother put the plates in the dishwasher. There was a small television in the kitchen, and we were playing cards and staring at it in silence when the evening news came on. I was looking down at my cards when I heard the newscaster say, “The body of a young man identified as Christopher Rosenberg was found early this morning on a deserted street in Brooklyn. Rosenberg had been shot several times, and his car was riddled with bullets from an automatic weapon. Police say it appears to be a gangland hit.” As I looked up at the screen, my father rose from his chair and snapped off th
e TV. My mother stopped rinsing the dish she was holding and stood unmoving. My mouth went dry, but my mind felt unnaturally focused, even calm. No one said a word. My father left the room, went upstairs to his office, and closed the door. He did not come out for nearly two days.
A couple of weeks later I went to the Gemini with my father for the first time since Chris was murdered. Freddy was there, and Joey and Anthony. As my father took his customary place at the table, I saw Anthony move with a hint of swagger to Chris's chair and sit down at my father's right hand. Joey slid into Anthony's old place. There was no grief in their faces, only a greater air of arrogance. I could smell it. I felt my father stiffen, but his face was impassive.
Prison officials use the expression “dead man walking” to describe a man on his way to be executed. My father was now a dead man walking. His own execution was just a matter of time, and he knew it. The life he had once gloried in as a great adventure had turned into a horrible dream from which there would be no waking. The life force he had once exuded was gone.
At thirteen, I knew my father was already dead.
six
SOLDIER
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
—SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar
When I was five years old, I chased off several twelve-year-olds who were trying to steal my sister's bike. I was half their size, but I made up for it with protective rage. That passion returned years later when I saw my father's life threatened. In the summer of my thirteenth year, I became a soldier in my father's army.
In the uproar following my father's murder of the college student, the crew went into hiding. Anthony and Joey disappeared, and for a while even my father didn't know where they were. Word eventually trickled back that they were in California. Cousin Joe went into hiding in a safe house near Times Square, and my father told my mother that he might have to leave unexpectedly for a couple of months. Only Freddy carried on normally for the time being, keeping an eye on the Gemini when no one else was there. My father was afraid to go near the place. There had been dozens of witnesses to the college student's shooting, and though my father had gotten rid of our car immediately, he lived in daily fear that someone would identify him.
The strain on my parents' marriage was obvious. They never fought, at least in front of us kids, but my mother was increasingly silent and tense. The relaxed affection I had always seen between them seemed to dissolve. My mother had always kept out of my father's business, being told nothing about his criminal pursuits, turning a blind eye to what she didn't want to know. Until I was thirteen, there was no reason for her to know. Now, however, she could no longer ignore my father's life outside our house. Our flight into hiding had changed all that. She had dedicated her life to creating a safe, happy home for us, and now she was living with the knowledge that her children's lives might be in danger.
Official-looking cars were parked down the street from our house almost twenty-four hours a day now. The black sidewall tires, silver half-moon hubcaps, and unusually large antennas marked them as government issue. It didn't take lettering on the doors to tell me they were surveillance vehicles. The men who sat in them, reading the newspaper or chatting as they watched the house, made little effort to hide their purpose. When either of my parents left the house, an unmarked car would pull out behind them and trail them wherever they went. Local police also began to appear in the area. The stop sign down the block suddenly required a patrol officer to monitor the intersection. The neighbors were well aware of the influx of cops roaming our normally quiet neighborhood. Cars would slow down when they passed our driveway, and I would see people leaning over to point at our house through the car windows. Some of them were neighbors, pointing us out to their passengers like a tourist attraction. If they noticed me watching, they drove away. Word spread rapidly in the wealthy little enclave, and at times it got so bad that there was a traffic jam in front of our house, with people anxious to see where “the mobster's family” lived. The days in the old neighborhood, when we were just Roy and Gina and the kids, were gone.
With his world crumbling around him, my father began turning to me in ways he had never done before. One night not long after we came back from hiding upstate, my father asked me to come to his study. He sat in his desk chair, his head in his hands, his body sagging with fatigue. I knew he hadn't slept in nights. When he looked up at me, his face was pale, his eyes haunted. He had to keep clearing his throat as he spoke to keep his emotions under control.
“Al, I need your help. I have to bring you into this. I'm so sorry, Son. I don't want you to do any of this, but I can't think of another way. I can't trust anybody else.” His voice was shaking.
Instead of being frightened by his words, I felt myself growing stronger. My father needed me.
“It's all right, Dad, don't worry. What do you need?”
“It's like this. Big Paul's pretty upset about what's been going on. There's a lot of pressure on him. Rats are coming out of the woodwork with this witness-protection program. It's not like the old days. The FBI's got him under surveillance for this RICO law. The Colombians are okay for now, but I don't know if it'll last. There are people looking to kill me. I don't know where Anthony and Joey are, and that worries me. They should have told me if they were going on the lam. Your uncle Nino's worried that Dominick will turn, thinks we ought to take him out, but I don't want to do it. He's got his kids and all, and his wife's a real nice girl. Freddy will do anything I ask him, but Freddy's just . . . well, you know Freddy. I need your help to get away.”
“Whatever you need, Dad.”
“It's like this. I may have to leave in a hurry, and I may not be able to come back. I need to be able to get word to you, make sure the family's all right, have you take care of things for me. Can you do that, Son?”
“Sure, Dad, it's not a problem.”
“Okay.” He got out of his chair. I stood up, too, and followed him to the large cabinet on the far wall of his study. It was a beautiful piece, hand-carved and made to order for the new house. “Let me show you something.”
He reached up above the carved panel to twist the knob that crowned the piece. I heard a click, and he put his hands on the top panel and lifted it off. Reaching inside, he took out a bundle of hundred-dollar bills.
“I keep extra cash in here. There's enough for a couple of months if you need it. I'll give you the bank account numbers. There's plenty there, and it's legit. Your mother and sisters will be all right if anything happens.”
I nodded. “I got it.”
“Okay. Tomorrow we'll go for a little drive, and I'll show you how I'll contact you. We can't use the phones at home anymore, not for anything important. They may be bugged. You'll have to check the house for bugs, too. Freddy's getting me something for that.”
“Whatever you need.”
My father nodded. “Okay, then.” He looked exhausted.
It was past midnight. “You want me to stay up with you, Dad?”
“No, Al, you get some sleep. You got school tomorrow. I don't want you missing school.”
“Sure.” I moved to hug him. “Good night, Dad.”
“Good night, Son.” I felt his arms tighten around me as he held me close for a moment. He kissed me on the head and in a voice tight with emotion said, “I love you, Allie.”
“I love you, too, Dad. Don't worry about me. Everything's going to be all right.”
The next day after school, Dad and I went for a drive. As he pulled into traffic on the main drag near our house, he handed me a list. “You need to memorize this, Al, and then you need to get rid of it.” I looked down at what he'd written. “#1 pay phone by men's room in pizza parlor. Sundays at 1. #2 pay phone on sidewalk by Burger King. Mondays at 3:30. #3 pay phone on second floor of May's, by electronics section. Tuesdays at 4. #4 pay phone in parking lot of grocery store. Wednesdays at
6.” The list went on and on.
“If I need to go away in a hurry, I'll give you one of these numbers, so you'll know where and when I'll contact you. If I can't make the phone appointment, go to the next number up. Got it?”
“Got it.” He slowed down as we approached the first location, a pizza parlor about a mile from our house. “That's the first one. I'm going to drop you off and go around the block. You go pretend you need to use the phone and meet me back outside.” I got out of the car and went inside. The hostess directed me to the phone. No one paid the slightest attention to a polite thirteen-year-old kid looking to make a call.
A couple of minutes later Dad picked me up at the curb, and we continued on our route. It seemed normal, like learning the houses for a paper route. Dad continued, “Now this is very important, Al. You have to make sure you're not being followed. There's cars watching the house more and more these days. You need to practice taking as many different routes as possible, and you never go directly there. Make some stops on the way, pick up a burger, you know, normal stuff, so they won't get suspicious. Just make sure you lose them before you get to the destination.”
“No problem, Dad. I'll start practicing on my bike tomorrow.”
“Good.” He paused a moment, then said, “Oh, and Al?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“If I disappear and you don't hear from me, just go to number four. Keep going there every day until I call. It could take a couple of days.”
“Sure, Dad, whatever you say.” He seemed worried, but I told myself there was nothing to worry about. This was simple. Dad and I were going to take care of things. Everything would still be all right.
A few days later my father disappeared, leaving me the most cryptic of messages: the number of a phone booth. I was to be there at the end of the week to receive his call. I told my sisters Daddy was away on business. They seemed to assume that Dad was having money problems that he was trying to resolve. School was out by then, and I was glad I didn't have to leave the house every morning for the time being.
