Paradise City

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “Do we use the niece as bait?” Silvestri said. “Hold her out to lure him in?”

  “He’s already been lured in,” Rossi said impatiently. “He’s here. He’s where we want him to be. That seems to have been the easy part. Getting him dead is proving to be a bit more of a challenge. Make this your priority. Clear everything else, pass it to whoever needs to deal with it. This man, this cop, is your only mission. And I expect it to be a successful one.”

  Silvestri stared at his don and nodded. He had been a member of the Camorra long enough to understand the importance of such an order, spoken in a rare and direct manner. Pete Rossi’s family had suffered many personal losses, in manpower and in business, due to Lo Manto’s aggressive actions both on the streets of Naples and here in New York. The dozens of other factions of the vast enterprise that ruled the crime roost in both cities had sustained equal amounts of damage, but they seemed content to write it off as the price of doing business. They were not as willing to waste the time, energy, and dollar commitment required in the vain pursuit of a lone cop. With Rossi, the level of anger and frustration seemed to go beyond the mere loss of men and money. Rossi had crossed a crucial and discernible line, delving into the personal, the one arena that all the great dons of the past had done their best to avoid. And now, by direct order, Silvestri had been pulled into the line of fire as well. “I won’t fail you,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster. “There’s only one way that cop from Naples gets back on a plane to Italy. That’s in a coffin.”

  Pete Rossi stared across at Silvestri, his face as solid and unflinching as it was when their conversation first started. He reached for his glass of iced espresso and took a long swallow, wrapping his fingers around the cold base. “You’re not the first to say that,” he said. “He’s been fighting the organization for fifteen years and no one has yet put him in a grave. A few have come close, but more have gone down than walked away.”

  “I’ll take care of the hospital situation first,” Silvestri said, once again feeling the harsh weight of his don’s unspoken words. “Then our friend from Naples will have my full attention.”

  “I hope you still have it in you to win,” Pete Rossi said to him. “For my sake and even more for yours.” He then stood up, pushed his chair back, and walked slowly out of the office.

  The hospital room was all ruffled shadows and quiet darkness. An IV drip was hanging off an iron pole and a TV hung in the corner next to the shuttered blinds. The young man in the bed was asleep, his eyes fluttering, his face grimacing with every jolt of pain that shot through the open wounds in his body. His head was bandaged, caked blood coating the center, under which were buried the dozen stitches required to seal shut the thick vertical cut caused when he banged violently against the doorjamb. Six hours earlier, he had been wheeled into surgery, where a team of doctors worked quickly and with calm precision to remove the two bullets lodged in his chest cavity. Within two hours and after a great deal of blood had been lost, they had managed to remove all but the smallest of the fragments fired from the barrel of Jennifer Fabini’s gun. As the doctors left the operating room to wash off the bone matter and toss out their stained gowns, they were relieved to have accomplished as much as they had in such a short span of time and realistic enough to know that their work had done nothing but delay the inevitable. “If he lives to feel the sun on his face in the morning,” one surgeon said to a nurse walking by his side, “we’ll have more than done our jobs.”

  “I haven’t seen that much blood loss in years,” she said, a bit shaken despite more than a decade of operating room experience. “He was close to a bleed-out by the time we got him to the table.”

  “What put him there?” the doctor asked, tossing off his mask and gloves and dropping them into a blue canister.

  “Shoot-out with the police,” the nurse said. “At least that was the rumble among the EMS crew that brought him in.”

  “It always ends up that way,” the surgeon said. “Especially these last few years.”

  “How do you mean?” the nurse asked.

  “I do my best surgical work on criminals,” the surgeon said. “Seems a shame and a waste, any way you look at it.”

  The door to the room slowly opened and a young man in a white lab coat walked in. He had a blue cap over his head and a mask dangling in front of his blue shirt. His brown deck shoes made no noise as he stepped on the cold floor, making his way toward the side of the bed. The young man stood against the edge of the bed, staring down at the damaged body of a mob wannabe who would never make it to his twentieth birthday. He reached behind him and grabbed a pillow from the empty green chair to his left. Gripping it with both hands, he shoved it down atop the silent, battered face of George Castioni. He held it in place for several minutes, bearing down with all his weight, waiting patiently for what little life there was left in the shooter’s body to dissipate. Once he was convinced the man in bed was no threat to the living, he tossed the pillow back onto the chair, yanked the IV out of the dead patient’s arm, and took three steps back. He then reached a hand into his waistband, pushed the white lab coat off to the side, and pulled out a nine-millimeter with an adjustable silencer screwed onto the barrel. He aimed the gun at the body in the bed and squeezed off two rounds, one to the chest and one through the closed right eye. The two quick pops forced the body to lurch forward and then drop back down on the bed, fresh blood oozing out of both open wounds. “Sorry about that, Georgie,” the young man said before putting the gun back against his hip and heading out of the room.

  Gaspaldi sat in the back booth of the empty Chinese restaurant. He sipped a small cup of tea, filled with three teaspoons of sugar, waiting for the burly man to squeeze his way into the booth. “You always this late?” Gaspaldi asked, more curious than irritated.

  “My clock shows I’m ten minutes past the meet time,” the burly man said. “For me that’s pretty good. Truth be told, it’s goddam fuckin’ excellent. Besides, I didn’t hear you screaming about this being an emergency.”

  Gaspaldi suppressed a laugh, showing only a quick smile. He allowed very few people he did business with to talk to him the way the burly man usually did, but he had grown a soft spot for his antics over the years, and he often let the disrespect go without comment. Besides, only a handful of soldiers in the crew were as ruthless and efficient in their work as the burly man. Gaspaldi had wasted a great deal of energy attempting to groom other members of the Rossi crew in the hopes that they would one day be in a position either to replace or bolster the burly man, but he had yet to find any fit to fulfill such a cold-blooded destiny. The burly man had never known failure in any assignment, always bringing the matter before him to its painful conclusion. Given the hunger Pete Rossi seemed to have for Lo Manto’s blood, it seemed foolish to turn to anyone else. The future of the cop from Naples would soon be in the hands of the burly man.

  “You hungry?” Gaspaldi asked. “Want to order something before we get down to it?”

  “I’m starving,” the burly man said. “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass off a dead Polack. But you’d have to shoot me before you’ll get me to put my mouth anywhere near this chink shit they call food.”

  “Have some soup,” Gaspaldi said. “Nobody can mess up soup.”

  “These people put cat in everything they eat,” the burly man said. “Soup included. I’ll grab something at Mario’s later. There I know what goes into the pot.”

  “Let’s get to it, then,” Gaspaldi said. “How much do you know?”

  “You got a cop you want disposed,” the burly man said. “You tried once and came away with empty hands, looking like a team of gang-bangers out on their first hit.”

  “You can get a full background check from the usual place,” Gaspaldi said. “Take a few days to study it and then play it any way you want, so long as the problem gets fixed.”

  “The same go for anybody might be with him?” the burly man asked. “He’s a foreign. NYPD keeps cl
ose tabs on visiting cops, stays on them like a wino on a bologna sandwich. Need to know if I can take out his watchers, too, if it comes down to that.”

  “I don’t care if the commissioner himself walks him to take a piss,” Gaspaldi said. “He goes down. Anybody gets in the way, take them, too. We’ll deal with any problems that may cause after the fact.”

  “What can you tell me about the cop?” the burly man asked. “I mean, something not in the file I’ll get later.”

  “He’s good,” Gaspaldi said. “Better than any badge we ever went against. I don’t mean shooter good, even though he’s solid in that department. I’m talking smart good. Plans out his moves, goes in anticipating all the angles, makes it his business to know his business. Don’t expect to catch him off-guard. That ain’t gonna happen. Not with this guy.”

  “Why’s he here in the first place?” the burly man asked. “Why isn’t he back in Italy arresting some guy for pinching some broad’s ass?”

  “A family member went missing,” Gaspaldi said. “He’s here to help find her. He hasn’t got it narrowed down yet as to who did the lift and why, but he’s too smart a guy not to work it all out pretty soon.”

  “Was the lift done to get him here?” the burly man asked. “Or we talking two separate situations?”

  “That doesn’t fall under your umbrella,” Gaspaldi said. “If it did I would have said so by now. I’ve given you all you need to know.”

  “Except to tell me how much,” the burly man said, irritated and anxious to get out of the empty restaurant and step back into the warm, humid air.

  “Same as you always get,” Gaspaldi said. “Plus expenses.”

  “Not good enough,” the burly man said. “This ain’t an old wiseguy on the run, hiding out in some black neighborhood on Long Island, thinking we would never look there, let alone go in after him. This is a cop and that comes with a whole set of its own headaches, not the least of which is the death penalty if I get nabbed.”

  “He’s an Italian cop,” Gaspaldi said. “That carries no weight here—at least not the kind you need to worry about.”

  “A badge is a badge, no matter what country’s stamped on his passport,” the burly man said. “And that makes it a risk. Now for me to make that risk worth my time and maybe my life, I’ll need double the usual stack and enough on the expenses to cover a three-week vacation on a warm spot of sand.”

  Gaspaldi drank the last of his tea and waved over a waiter standing with his arms folded in a corner of the room. “That’s a heavy dose of bling bling,” he said to the burly man, watching as the waiter moved toward their table. “A lot more than we’ve put out before. Especially since it’s to take out only the one guy.”

  “You came to me, as I remember it,” the burly man said. “You want to reach out for a cheaper gun, that’s your call. I gave you my price and there’s no movement on it.”

  Gaspaldi handed a folded-over twenty to the waiter, waving away the check the young man had written out for the tea. “What’s left is yours,” he told him, and waited as the kid cleared away the empty cup and pot and nodded his thanks. Then he turned his attention back to the burly man. “I’ll meet the asking price,” he said. “Just make sure it’s done right. There’s no miss on this. Bigger eyes than mine are gonna be tracking the job. It don’t go the way we want and you’re still walking, there’ll be money put out to change that. You hear the words okay?”

  “You know how I work,” the burly man said. “I don’t take a nickel until the package is delivered. If the cop is good enough or lucky enough to wash me away, your guys are out of pocket nothing. So, save the Joe Pesci hard-ass lectures for the rookies. This ain’t my first fuckin’ barbecue. And I don’t plan on it being my last.”

  “It’s on you, then,” Gaspaldi said, easing out of the booth, his stomach rubbing against the flat edge of the Formica table. “Me and you are done here.”

  “Glad to hear it,” the burly man said. “Now I can finally get out of this shit hole and get myself a decent meal.”

  “I still think you would have liked the soup here,” Gaspaldi said as he walked toward the white exit sign next to the darkened coatroom. “Shame you didn’t try it.”

  Felipe Lopez stepped out of the basement apartment and dropped a small plastic bag into the garbage can closest to the curled black iron gate. He walked up the two short steps, undid the bolt lock, and swung the gate out, stepping onto the sidewalk in front of the four-story building. It was early in the morning of what was shaping up to be another day of intense summer heat, and the street was empty except for a jogger finishing his run in what passed for the cooler hours. Felipe felt for the ten-dollar bill in the rear pocket of his torn jeans, making sure the folded money that Mrs. Claire Samuels had handed him a few minutes earlier was still there. He had been running errands for Mrs. Samuels for about two years now, starting just around the time her husband, Eliot, fell face-to-the-floor dead in the small foyer of their two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment. She didn’t need much: milk, juice, eggs, half a pound of ham, and bread were what she usually sent him out for and what she seemed to live on.

  He stopped in to check on her twice a week, usually Wednesdays and Sundays, taking out her trash and bringing in the mail, tossed in a pile in front of her locked door. More often than not, she insisted he stay with her for breakfast, both eating their sandwiches and drinking small glasses of orange juice as they sat in front of a TV screen, watching the latest news on MSNBC. They seldom spoke, preferring the peace of each other’s company, but when they did, it was more often Mrs. Samuels who took up the majority of the conversation. She talked about a city she once knew and one he was much too young to have seen, a time when their neighborhood was alive with the sounds of newly arrived immigrants, each eager to put his or her stamp on their new home. She talked about her husband, Eliot, and about how hard he had worked running the local laundry, putting in twelve-hour days in front of the heavy-load washing machines and large tumble dryers, the short brown apron tied around his waist always filled with quarters. She would shake her head slowly, her words coming out in spurts, the pain from her withering lungs apparent as she remembered the money her husband wasted betting on the horses and sitting in on the weekly card game held in the back of Giacomo’s Deli. “We would have had a nice big house,” she’d say to Felipe. “Like the ones on Ely Avenue. Maybe a car and money in the bank for a vacation. We would have had all of that. Instead, all Eli had was his laundry and his debts. And when he died they came to see me, the men he owed all his money to, and they took his business. Made me sign the papers over to them in the kitchen.”

  “Why didn’t you just say no?” Felipe had asked her. “The debts were your husband’s, not yours.”

  “Then I would have been dead, too,” she said. “And the business would still belong to them.”

  Most of the time, when she wasn’t remembering the lost days of the neighborhood or the defeated dreams of her husband, Mrs. Samuels would tell Felipe stories about cities in Europe he had only read about in books and foods he had never even heard of, let alone tasted. She recalled her days growing up an orphan and being shuttled off from one family to another, until she was placed in a home that was run by nuns in Salerno, in southern Italy. It was where she lived until she was one week shy of her eighteenth birthday and saw her Eliot for the first time at a local café, in a meeting arranged by his parents and the mother superior. Mrs. Samuels spoke of her early years living in a strange city in a foreign country, finding work as a seamstress in a downtown sweatshop. She gave birth to three sons and survived brutal summers without the aid of fans or air conditioners and winters warmed only by the heat from a lit gas oven.

  Felipe liked listening to her stories as both of them sipped tea, the television playing in the background while outside the sounds of the neighborhood rose to greet the day. She never asked about his life and his struggles living without a home and family, and he offered up little in the way of information. Sh
e knew all she needed to know about him from her landlord, Luis, a wiry, wobbly little man who had initially convinced her to trust the boy enough to let him into her home, to help with her errands and serve as a buffer against the ravages of loneliness. She had never asked him to spend a night on the couch next to the crowded bookcase, its wooden boards sagging from the weight of first editions long left unread, regardless of how beastly the weather outside or how poorly prepared for it the boy seemed. Felipe never asked to stay, nor did he mind not getting the invitation. He accepted the relationship for what it was, grateful for the time they spent together and the money she paid him. They made no demands on each other, content to let it remain as it had been from their first day together.

  Felipe never stole from Mrs. Samuels. He had ample opportunity to lift silverware, riffle through the jewelry box she kept hidden under the night table near her bed, or even grab the small television on those rare occasions when she fell asleep while listening to the morning news. But he never did, and if asked, Felipe would have no easy answer as to why not. He liked the woman, but he also liked the guy who managed the neighborhood Key Food, and over the years he had lifted enough groceries out of that supermarket to put them on the verge of bankruptcy. Maybe it was because it was too easy to steal from someone who had so little to take. Or maybe he only stole what he could eat or wear. Or it just might be he didn’t want to disappoint an old woman who, without ever saying a word, seemed to expect so much from him. And he wasn’t ready to let her down.

  Felipe trusted Mrs. Samuels and knew of no better place to hide the packets of money given him by Ben Murphy than in one of the dark corners of her apartment. He also felt confident that if she ever did find the three thick packets she wouldn’t simply pocket them—she’d ask the questions she needed answers to, the money still resting safe in her hands. No one he knew would ever think he would have access to that kind of cash. And no one putting the hard squeeze on Murphy would even consider a look in his direction in their mad search for a hundred grand. In the event they ever did, or if Murphy caved and gave in to the pressure, they would look everywhere but in the basement apartment of a withered widow. Her husband was long dead, her friends had been gone for decades, and her three sons’ lives were all tragically cut short before they even got a taste of middle age. Leaving the three thick packets of cash behind the tattered volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories was as safe as placing them in a bank vault. Now, as he jammed his hands into the front pockets of his blue jeans, all Felipe Lopez had to do to see half that cash land back in his lap was to stay alive on the streets of the city for two more years.