Jerome Johnson was nudging his way through the crowd at the same rate Colombo was, his heart rocking with the applause that surrounded him. Despite his clearly being African-American rather than Italian-American, his progress went unquestioned; Johnson had managed to acquire credentials as a member of the press, flaunting a dated and oddly adapted camera. Joshi had been working on this device at the time of his death, and not only that, but folded in Johnson’s pocket was the sheet containing the copied chants Joshi had uttered that night parked in front of the enemy soldier’s apartment building. Johnson had been memorizing the lines all last night and this morning.
Colombo had almost reached the stage now, but was pausing here and there to shake hands – under the stern and attentive gaze of his bodyguards, including his son, Joe Jr.
Johnson was tempted to call out for Colombo to stop and turn toward him, to give him more time to raise the camera to his eye and frame his target in the viewfinder, but he was afraid to be so obvious, to call attention to his supposedly innocuous actions. In his mind, he was already saying the chant over and over. It lay on his tongue like a bullet in the chamber of a gun, his finger slowly tightening on the trigger.
Colombo had stopped for handshakes enough times, luckily, for Johnson to have sufficiently closed the gap between them – and he had another stroke of luck, when a legitimate photojournalist asked Colombo to turn toward him for a shot. When the mob boss complied, still grinning like the showman he had become, Johnson pressed his eye to the viewfinder and centered Colombo’s face within it. “Say cheese,” he muttered, and then launched swiftly but carefully into the memorized words of power.
Three times he depressed the camera’s button, and three times loud cracks rang out. Blue streaks like tracer bullets launched from the camera’s lens three times. It wasn’t as subtle as he might have hoped, but Johnson reassured himself once again that if people did single him out, seize and search him, they would find no gun upon him. Just this harmless, quirky old camera.
Colombo had turned his head again just as Johnson pressed the button the first time. Three clean black holes appeared to open in his head and neck as if by magic, and in fact for an instant Johnson saw a few forks of bluish electricity flick from the wounds, like the tongues of serpents hiding inside his skull. Then the man dropped out of the camera’s viewfinder.
Johnson lowered his camera in time to be grabbed roughly. He twisted around, saw that it was one of Colombo’s bodyguards. “Hey, man,” he protested, his voice all but drowned out by a roar of horror and fear from the crowd, “what’s going on?”
But now Joe Jr. had a hold of him, as well, and a few moments later two uniformed policemen joined in. One of the four, Johnson wasn’t sure which, had grabbed the camera from his hands. That was okay. They’d find no weapon secreted inside it. Without the chants, without the knowledge of the Necronomicon, it was nothing but a piece of junk.
Johnson was still more confident than he was nervous, even as the policemen began to handcuff him. That is, until he turned his head and saw another man staring at him from a few feet away. This man was not crying out, screaming, panicking like all those others around him. Johnson met his eyes squarely – and realized he knew this man, though he had never known him to wear wire-rimmed glasses before.
“Gavin!” he said.
Then there were three loud reports, three bright blue flashes before Johnson’s eyes, and he felt three holes open as if by magic in his body. Three deep holes. After that, going limp in the arms of the policemen who had restrained him, Johnson felt no more...and the former collector of rare books turned junkie melted innocently back into the crowds.
5: Clam House
Joe Colombo didn’t die of his wounds...that is, not right away. Not until 1978, in fact. He remained in a coma, and who could say what strange and terrible dreams he might have experienced in those years – and been powerless to articulate, or escape?
Caporegime Vincenzo Aloi was moved up to take Colombo’s place as the acting boss of the family – at least, until the penal system was finished with the actual new boss, Carmine Persico. But regardless of who had run the family before, and who would run it now, they all hated Crazy Joe Gallo the same.
Gallo knew the war was hardly over, whomever his opposing general might be, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to celebrate his 43rd birthday in a big way. (Did he ever do anything any other way?) He started out on the night of April 6th, 1972 with a trip to the Copacabana night club with some of the celebrity friends who had lionized him since his release from prison – the comedians Don Rickles and David Steinberg and the actor Jerry Orbach. But from there, in the early morning hours and in search of breakfast, Gallo and his wife Sina (a former nun, whom Gallo had married only a few weeks earlier), Sina’s young daughter, Gallo’s sister, and his bodyguard Pete “The Greek” Diapoulos, moved on to Umberto’s Clam House. This was in Little Italy, considered to be sacred ground, not to be violated. That was part of Gallo’s reasoning. But Little Italy or not, what was it all worth if one couldn’t enjoy the fruits of one’s labor? Gallo had just spent ten years behind bars, and now those bars were gone.
“Fantastic,” Gallo raved about his dish – scungilli in clam sauce – to Sina, “this is just the best. I’m gonna want seconds. Seconds for everybody, all right? Except for you,” he teased Sina’s daughter Lisa, imitating Don Rickles’ voice and mannerisms. “You win a cookie.”
Pete the Greek spluttered and almost choked on his food. “Stop it, Joey!”
Gallo craned his neck, looking for their waiter so as to call a second round of food to their table. He was seated facing the door, and so it was that he saw a curious figure enter Umberto’s before any of the others in his party could notice.
The man wore a fedora pulled down low over his eyes, shadowing a pasty white face. He was tall, and an oversized overcoat made him look broad and bulky, but it hung on him oddly – as if on some strange framework instead of a man’s body. His baggy trousers were knobby in the wrong places, too loose and empty elsewhere. And his gait...weirdly awkward, like a man tottering drunkenly, or on new prosthetic legs.
Could any other man possess these same peculiarities? Unless he was an identical twin, in identical clothing? Yet on the heels of the first strange figure, a second man stepped through Umberto’s doorway. Same fedora, bulky and ill-fitting coat, baggy trousers jutting in unusual places. And as the pair crossed the threshold, a funny sound accompanied them. It was rather like the buzzing of electric hair clippers, and it mounted in volume quickly.
Whatever was wrong with these two men, it all added up to no good as far as Crazy Joe was concerned, and even before the second man had passed through the doorway Gallo said sharply to his bodyguard: “Pete!”
Pete the Greek looked up in mid-chew and said, “Huh?” Too late, he spotted the figures. Saw the two of them had raised both their hands. Clenched in each hand of the freakish duo were revolvers, and the four revolvers began firing simultaneously in an abrupt and deafening barrage.
Gallo threw their table over immediately in order to shield his family. “Get down!” he yelled at them. Peripherally, he saw Sina drag Lisa to the floor. Amid the wild firing, as the two shooters came shambling closer, Gallo bolted in their direction so as to pass them, headed for the door. His intention was to draw fire away from his loved ones, but also to escape outside, to where his Cadillac waited at the curb.
But he felt a bullet smash one of his elbows. Another struck him in the spinal column. He followed through with his momentum, however, charged as he was with adrenaline. In his desperation to escape, he crashed through the restaurant’s plate glass door. The shooters had turned, however, following him with their fire as he’d lunged past them. A last bullet caught Gallo in the neck, severing his carotid artery.
He went down on the cold pavement, his Cadillac tantalizingly near – gleaming in the early morning light that was resurrecting his beloved city from the formlessness of night. He was dyin
g, his blood pumping out of him onto the sidewalk, but he turned his head and watched the two assassins push their tall, wide bodies sideways through the shattered glass of Umberto’s doorway. The first assassin tore his sleeve open in the process, but the second one was even less lucky. A fang of glass snagged him under the jaw. Seemingly heedless to this, however, the shooter kept going – and his head, hat and all, was lifted off his shoulders and thudded to the sidewalk.
Gallo wondered if what he was seeing was the delirium of his encroaching death.
The first killer had somehow folded his uncanny form into the backseat of a car that had just pulled up to the curb behind the Cadillac. (From behind, his coat jutted here and there even more bizarrely than did his legs, as if he carried something on his back beneath the coat.)
The second killer, though, paused, turned around, and with some effort stooped to retrieve his dropped head. Gallo saw two things then that only furthered his sense of delirium. One was that the hand reaching for the head now extended beyond the cuff of its sleeve, and in so doing, revealed a wrist that looked like bare, spiky bone. Or perhaps, the chitinous limb of an insect. The appendage seemed to wear the human hand at the end of it like a glove.
The other thing was the head itself. It lay on its cheek, as did Gallo, and he could see the slack white face well enough to recognize it. The fallen, sightlessly gazing head was that of his old fellow prison inmate, Joshi.
The headless killer scooped the dropped head under his arm, turned back toward the waiting car and staggered to it as quickly as he could manage. With the roar of shooting now finished, Gallo could hear that buzzing sound again, following after his assailants. He could also hear a cacophony of screams and shouts through Umberto’s shattered door.
Gallo again turned his head on the sidewalk to follow the second assassin as he crammed himself into the passenger’s seat, up front beside the driver. For a few moments the dome light was on, and in that light Gallo saw the driver look over at him with a small, satisfied smile. It was the last face Crazy Joe Gallo would ever see – and yet he had never met the book collector Gavin before, and so he didn’t recognize him.
Epilogue: Uneasy Legends
Crazy Joe Gallo was as controversial in death as he had been in life. And to some, the actions of the Colombo family in bringing about that death had been just as controversial. Some critics of the murder (besides Bob Dylan) would ask what self-respecting Italian would hit a man in Little Italy? In front of his wife and a child, no less? Unless those two unnamed killers were something other than Italian.
Gallo had raised eyebrows by introducing African-Americans into his crew. But what kind of people had the Colombo family recently been recruiting?
In the years to come there would be rumors (and rumors that people had been killed for spreading those rumors) that the true head of the transfigured Colombo family after Joe’s shooting was not Carmine Persico, after all, but a man above even him. But who could believe such a rumor, given that this supposed puppet master was not even Italian himself, and that he was said to have risen to power in just a matter of months – from junkie, to triggerman, to crime boss?
Surely – like so much talk that would persist about Crazy Joe Gallo himself – just the stuff of legend.
CHILDREN OF THE DRAGON
Though a man of science, French still found myth and folklore fascinating, and so he had become familiar with the notion that the Vietnamese were the descendants of a dragon. As the story went, the dragon king Lac Long Quan had married the goddess Au Co, and their union had resulted in one hundred offspring, the forefathers of Viet Nam. Hence, the Vietnamese referred to themselves as “Children of the Dragon, Grandchildren of Gods.”
Trying not to be obvious as he eyed the bar’s hostess, French understood how the notion of a “dragon lady” had come into being, too. “Come play pool with us,” she called over to him. She wore a red velour dress that flowed over her so softly that French could feel her body through it without even touching her.
He smiled shyly. “No, no...I’m no good at it. I’d rip the felt or something.” Velour, came his unbidden thought. Rip the velour.
“I can teach you,” chimed in his waitress, hovering at his side after having brought him another Tiger beer. “Come on.”
“No, no...really, I can’t.” He squirmed inside, almost wishing he hadn’t let his eyes follow the hostess as she set up the billiard balls and shattered their triangle to all corners. They had noticed him watching. They watched for watchers. They worked in a team like wolves.
His waitress relented but asked him instead, “You’re from the USA, right?”
“Yes. Massachusetts.”
“Oh.” She nodded, but then scrunched up her face prettily. “Where is that?”
“On the eastern coast of the country.” He made an incomprehensible map in the air with nervous hands. “Um, not too far from New York?”
“Oh, yes, New York.” She grinned and nodded again.
He had been drawn to this bar, owned by Australians and with an Australian theme – boomerangs and pictures of kangaroos and such abounding on the walls like trophies from a bad movie set – because it offered western food. As much as he had taken to Vietnamese cuisine, in the past two weeks he had come to crave a cheeseburger and fries. He had noticed that there were western men in here but no western women. One man was almost twice the height of the baby-faced cutie beside him. French felt that if he had kept turning the sticky laminated pages of the menu, he would have found his waitress and these other bar girls amongst the rest of the tourist fare.
His waitress spoke good English. Was it a prerequisite for employment, or had she learned it in the course of her work? She went on, “How long are you staying here?”
“Two more weeks,” he told her.
She gave a monumental pout. So little time; it was a disappointment to her. How quick her attachment!
She was obligated to leave him to tend to other patrons, but kept returning to continue her fragmented interview. After all, these other men were Australians and maybe Brits or other Europeans, but he was an American. “Hey, Number One!” people had yelled at him in the street, giving a thumb’s up. They could smell it on him. The number one country in the world – which they had beaten.
“What’s your name?” his waitress asked French this time, offering her hand. One of his travel guides said that it was impolite to shake a Vietnamese woman’s hand; too forward, too intimate. If that didn’t stop her, it wouldn’t stop him. He took hold of it.
“George,” he told her. “And you?” She said it but he didn’t hear it well, so he kept holding her hand and leaned forward for her to repeat it.
She said, “No.”
“No?”
“Yes.”
“Yes or No?” he joked.
“My first name is No. But we put it last. I am Tran Thi No.”
“Nice to meet you, No.” He finally let go of her small, warm hand.
“Is this your first trip to Viet Nam, George?” she asked. Maybe she was an undercover agent for the communist government, grilling tourists after loosening them up on Tiger or 333?
“My second, actually. I came here last summer, too.”
“Oh, really? You must love Viet Nam a lot, then!”
“Yes, yes, it’s a beautiful country. Very friendly people. And, ah, I’m writing a book, so I’ve been researching parts of it here.”
“A book? About Viet Nam?”
“Well, back home I’m a high school biology teacher.” He saw the lack of comprehension. “Uh, science? Animals?”
“Yes, I see.”
“So my book is about...animals.” It was easier to say it this way. How to explain cryptozoology to someone who didn’t know Massachusetts from Shangri-la? He had enough of a hard time getting his colleagues to understand the interests he pursued during his summers off from teaching the dissection of spread-eagled frogs (and earthworms as delicately sliced as a baby circumcised by a rabbi) to a
rtfully mop-haired kids with earplugs forever feeding music into their skulls and cell phones ever ringing in their backpacks. He had hoped to find Viet Nam exotic, safely dangerous, scarred by war but healed over with verdant wildness. Well, it was partly that. But everyone seemed to own a cell phone here, too.
The next time No came to his table, bringing him the coffee he’d ordered to put a punctuation mark to the food and beers, she said with a look of grave concern, “You look tired, George. You could use a massage, huh? I’m very good at massage.”
“Yeah?” he said, barely able to look into her glinting, narrow dark eyes.
“There is a room upstairs.”
“Could you...ah, I’d rather go to my hotel, if that’s all right. It isn’t far away. If you could do the massage there.” He swallowed saliva after having made it through such a long speech.
“Okay, but a massage at your place would cost more money.” She made an apologetic face. She shuffled these expert masks, one after the next.
“Okay,” he echoed her.
She told him she needed to finish a few things and she’d be right with him. Soon he would be riding on the back of her Honda through the hot night air along the border of the black, black sea with the lights of Russian oil ships hovering at the horizon like drowning galaxies, his front pressed to the back of her as if she carried him, her streaming hair lashing at his face. While he waited for her, though, he stared at a framed picture of the very strange animal called a platypus, stranger even than some of the creatures he had sought to find here and elsewhere in the world. Sometimes what was considered normal for nature was more freakish than the wildest human imaginings.
***
Her brown, bird-boned body made French feel fat with sugars, a big white cake of flesh. They showered together first, and she scrubbed him with disconcerting thoroughness, soaping between his buttocks with the blade of her hand. In bed, he went down on her, telling himself that one wasn’t likely to catch AIDS through oral sex, though that didn’t rule out other biological threats. He savored the clean odor of her pussy and marveled at the lush jungle of her black bush in his nose and mouth. (Deep into the Mekong Delta, he thought.) She apologized again. “I know I should cut it, but that’s not lucky.” He assured her it was okay. It was very much more than okay. He put on one of the condoms he had brought on his first trip – just in case, like an item in a medical kit – but had never used until now. He crushed her little body beneath his, bending her legs up to her shoulders as if to fold her into something he could swallow entirely, and he labored in the sweltering heat staring and staring at her face with its prominent cheekbones and golden skin. So beautiful for being so foreign to him.
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