“I’m sorry if I sounded... abrupt.”
“You didn’t at all. Don’t worry about it. Will Davey and Penny be staying for dinner?”
“If it’s all right with you—”
“Of course it is. We love having them here, Jack. You know that. And will you be eating with us?”
“I’m not sure I’ll be free by then.”
“Don’t miss too many dinners with them, dear.”
“I don’t plan to.”
“Dinnertime is an important ritual, an opportunity for the family to share the events of the day.”
“I know.”
“Children need that period of tranquility, of togetherness, at the end of each day.”
“I know. I’ll try my best to make it. I hardly ever miss.”
“Will they be sleeping over?”
“I’m sure I won’t be that late. Listen, thanks a lot, Faye. I don’t know what I’d do without you and Keith to lean on now and then; really, I don’t. But I’ve got to run now. See you later.”
Before Faye could respond with more advice, Jack hung up, feeling both guilty and relieved.
A fierce and bitter wind was stored up in the west. It poured through the cold gray city in an unrelenting flood, harrying the snow before it.
Outside the hotel, Rebecca and Jack turned up their coat collars and tucked their chins down and cautiously negotiated the slippery, snow-skinned pavement.
Just as they reached their car, a stranger stepped up to them. He was tall, dark-complexioned, well-dressed. “Lieutenant Chandler? Lieutenant Dawson? My boss wants to talk to you.”
“Who’s your boss?” Rebecca asked.
Instead of answering, the man pointed to a black Mercedes limousine that was parked farther along the hotel driveway. He started toward it, clearly expecting them to follow without further question.
After a brief hesitation, they actually did follow him, and when they reached the limousine, the heavily tinted rear window slid down. Jack instantly recognized the passenger, and he saw that Rebecca also knew who the man was: Don Gennaro Carramazza, patriarch of the most powerful Mafia family in New York.
The tall man got in the front seat with the chauffeur, and Carramazza, alone in the back, opened his door and motioned for Jack and Rebecca to join him.
“What do you want?” Rebecca asked, making no move to get into the car.
“A little conversation,” Carramazza said, with just the vaguest trace of a Sicilian accent. He had a surprisingly cultured voice.
“So talk,” she said.
“Not like this. It’s too cold,” Carramazza said. Snow blew past him, into the car. “Let’s be comfortable.”
“I am comfortable,” she said.
“Well, I’m not,” Carramazza said. He frowned. “Listen, I have some extremely valuable information for you. I chose to deliver it myself. Me. Doesn’t that tell you how important this is? But I’m not going to talk on the street, in public, for Christ’s sake.”
Jack said, “Get in, Rebecca.”
With an expression of distaste, she did as he said.
Jack got into the car after her. They sat in the two seats that flanked the built-in bar and television set, facing the rear of the limousine, where Carramazza sat facing forward.
Up front, Rudy touched a switch, and a thick Plexiglas partition rose between that part of the car and the passenger compartment.
Carramazza picked up an attache case and put it on his lap but didn’t open it. He regarded Jack and Rebecca with sly contemplation.
The old man looked like a lizard. His eyes were hooded by heavy, pebbled lids. He was almost entirely bald. His face was wizened and leathery, with sharp features and a wide, thin-lipped mouth. He moved like a lizard, too: very still for long moments, then brief flurries of activity, quick dartings and swivelings of the head.
Jack wouldn’t have been surprised if a long, forked tongue had flickered out from between Carramazza’s dry lips.
Carramazza swiveled his head to Rebecca. “There’s no reason to be afraid of me, you know.”
She looked surprised. “Afraid? But I’m not.”
“When you were reluctant to get into the car, I thought—”
“Oh, that wasn’t fear,” she said icily. “I was worried the dry cleaner might not be able to get the stink out of my clothes.”
Carramazza’s hard little eyes narrowed.
Jack groaned inwardly.
The old man said, “I see no reason why we can’t be civil with one another, especially when it’s in our mutual interest to cooperate.”
He didn’t sound like a hoodlum. He sounded like a banker.
“Really?” Rebecca said. “You really see no reason? Please allow me to explain.”
Jack said, “Uh, Rebecca—”
She let Carramazza have it: “You’re a thug, a thief, a murderer, a dope peddler, a pimp. Is that explanation enough?”
“Rebecca—”
“Don’t worry, Jack. I haven’t insulted him. You can’t insult a pig merely by calling it a pig.”
“Remember,” Jack said, “he’s lost a nephew and a brother today.”
“Both of whom were dope peddlers, thugs, and murderers,” she said.
Carramazza was startled speechless by her ferocity.
Rebecca glared at him and said, “You don’t seem particularly grief-stricken by the loss of your brother. Does he look grief-stricken to you, Jack?”
Without a trace of anger or even any excitement in his voice, Carramazza said, “In the fratellanza, Sicilian men don’t weep.”
Coming from a withered old man, that macho declaration was outrageously foolish.
Still without apparent animosity, continuing to employ the soothing voice of a banker, Carramazza said, “We do feel, however. And we do take our revenge.”
Rebecca studied him with obvious disgust.
The old man’s reptilian hands remained perfectly still on top of the attache case. He turned his cobra eyes on Jack.
“Lieutenant Dawson, perhaps I should deal with you in this matter. You don’t seem to share Lieutenant Chandler’s... prejudices.”
Jack shook his head. “That’s where you’re wrong. I agree with everything she said. I just wouldn’t have said it.”
He looked at Rebecca.
She smiled at him, pleased by his support.
Looking at her but speaking to Carramazza, Jack said, “Sometimes, my partner’s zeal and aggressiveness are excessive and counterproductive, a lesson she seems unable or unwilling to learn.”
Her smile faded fast.
With evident sarcasm, Carramazza said, “What do I have here—a couple of self-righteous, holier-than-thou types? I suppose you’ve never accepted a bribe, not even back when you were a uniformed cop walking a beat and earning barely enough to pay the rent.”
Jack met the old man’s hard, watchful eyes and said, “Yeah. That’s right. I never have.”
“Not even one gratuity—”
“No.”
“—like a free tumble in the hay with a hooker who was trying to stay out of jail or—”
“No.”
“—a little cocaine, maybe some grass, from a pusher who wanted you to look the other way.”
“No.”
“A bottle of liquor or a twenty-dollar bill at Christmas.”
“No.”
Carramazza regarded them in silence for a moment, while a cloud of snow swirled around the car and obscured the city. At last he said, “So I’ve got to deal with a couple of freaks.” He spat out the word “freaks” with such contempt that it was clear he was disgusted by the mere thought of an honest public official.
“No, you’re wrong,” Jack said. “There’s nothing special about us. We’re not freaks. Not all cops are corrupt. In fact, not even most of them are.”
“Most of them,” Carramazza disagreed.
“No,” Jack insisted. “There’re bad apples, sure, and weak sisters. But for the most part, I can be proud of the people
I work with.”
“Most are on the take, one way or another,” Carramazza said.
“That’s just not true.”
Rebecca said, “No use arguing, Jack. He has to believe everyone else is corrupt. That’s how he justifies the things he does.”
The old man sighed. He opened the attache case on his lap, withdrew a manila envelope, handed it to Jack. “This might help you.”
Jack took it with more than a little apprehension. “What is it?”
“Relax,” Carramazza said. “It isn’t a bribe. It’s information. Everything we’ve been able to learn about this man who calls himself Baba Lavelle. His last-known address. Restaurants he frequented before he started this war and went into hiding. The names and addresses of all the pushers who’ve distributed his merchandise over the past couple of months—though you won’t be able to question some of them, any more.”
“Because you’ve had them killed?” Rebecca asked.
“Maybe they just left town.”
“Sure.”
“Anyway, it’s all there,” Carramazza said. “Maybe you already have all that information; maybe you don’t; I think you don’t.”
“Why’re you giving it to us?” Jack asked.
“Isn’t that obvious?” the old man asked, opening his hooded eyes a bit wider. “I want Lavelle found. I want him stopped.”
Holding the nine-by-twelve envelope in one hand, tapping it against his knee, Jack said, “I’d have thought you’d have a much better chance of finding him than we would. He’s a drug dealer, after all. He’s part of your world. You have all the sources, all the contacts—”
“The usual sources and contacts are of little or no use in this case,” the old man said. “This Lavelle... he’s a loner. Worse than that. It’s as if... as if he’s made of ... smoke.”
“Are you sure he actually exists?” Rebecca asked. “Maybe he’s only a straw man. Maybe your real enemies created him in order to hide behind him.”
“He’s real,” Carramazza said emphatically. “He entered this country illegally last spring. Came here from Jamaica by way of Puerto Rico. There’s a photograph of him in the envelope there.”
Jack hastily opened it, rummaged through the contents, and extracted an eight-by-ten glossy.
Carramazza said, “It’s an enlargement of a snapshot taken in a restaurant shortly after Lavelle began operating in what has been traditionally our territory.”
Traditionally our territory. Good God, Jack thought, he sounds as if he’s some British duke complaining about poachers invading his fox-hunting fields!
The photo was a bit fuzzy, but Lavelle’s face was sufficiently distinct so that, henceforth, Jack would be able to recognize him if he ever saw him on the street. The man was very black, handsome—indeed, striking—with a broad brow, deepset eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide mouth. In the picture he was smiling at someone who wasn’t within the camera’s field. He had an engaging smile.
Jack passed the picture to Rebecca.
Carramazza said, “Lavelle wants to take away my business, destroy my reputation within the fratellanza, and make me look weak and helpless. Me. Me, the man who has controlled the organization with an iron hand for twenty-eight years! Me!”
Finally, emotion filled his voice: cold, hard anger. He went on, spitting out the words as if they tasted bad.
“But that isn’t the worst of it. No. You see, he doesn’t actually want the business. Once he’s got it, he’ll throw it away, let the other families move in and carve it up among themselves. He just doesn’t want me or anyone named Carramazza to have it. This isn’t merely a battle for the territory, not just a struggle for control. For Lavelle, this is strictly a matter of revenge. He wants to see me suffer in every way possible. He intends to isolate me and hopes to break my spirit by robbing me of my empire and by killing my nephews, my sons. Yes, all of them, one by one. He threatens to murder my best friends, as well, anyone who has ever meant anything to me. He promises to kill my five precious grandchildren. Can you believe such a thing? He threatens little babies! No vengeance, regardless of how justified it might be, should ever touch innocent children.”
“He’s actually told you that he’ll do all of those things?” Rebecca asked. “When? When did he tell you?”
“Several times.”
“You’ve had face-to-face meetings?”
“No. He wouldn’t survive a face-to-face meeting.”
The banker image had vanished. There was no veneer of gentility now. The old man looked more reptilian than ever. Like a snake in a thousand-dollar suit. A very poisonous snake.
He said, “This crudball Lavelle told me these things on the phone. My unlisted home number. I keep having the number changed, but the creep gets the new one every time, almost as soon as it’s installed. He tells me ... he says... after he has killed my friends, nephews, sons, grandkids, then... he says he’s going to ... he says he’s going to ...”
For a moment, recalling Lavelle’s arrogant threats, Carramazza was unable to speak; anger locked his jaws; his teeth were clenched, and the muscles in his neck and cheeks were bulging. His dark eyes, always disturbing, now shone with a rage so intense, so inhuman that it communicated itself to Jack and sent a chill up his spine.
Eventually, Carramazza regained control of himself. When he spoke, however, his voice never rose above a fierce, frigid whisper. “This scum, this nigger bastard, this piece of shit—he tells me he’ll slaughter my wife, my Nina. Slaughter was the word he used. And when he’s butchered her, he says, he’ll then take my daughter from me, too.” The old man’s voice softened when he spoke of his daughter. “My Rosie. My beautiful Rosie, the light of my life. Twenty-seven, but she looks seventeen. And smart, too. A medical student. Going to be a doctor. Starts her internship this year. Skin like porcelain. The loveliest eyes you’ve ever seen.” He was quiet for a moment, seeing Rosie in his mind’s eye, and then his whisper became harsh again: “Lavelle says he’ll rape my daughter and then cut her to pieces, dismember her... in front of my eyes. He has the balls to say such things to me!” With that last declaration, Carramazza sprayed spittle on Jack’s overcoat. For a few seconds, the old man said nothing more; he just took deep, shuddering breaths. His talonlike fingers closed into fists, opened, closed, opened, closed. Then: “I want the bastard stopped.”
“You’ve put all your people into the search for him?” Jack asked. “Used all your sources?”
“Yes.”
“But you still can’t find him.”
“Nooo,” Carramazza said, and in the drawing-out of that one word, he revealed a frustration almost as great as his rage. “He’s left his place in the Village, gone to ground, hiding out. That’s why I’m bringing this information to you. You can put out an APB now that you’ve got his picture. Then every cop in the city will be looking for him, and that’s a lot more men than I’ve got. You can even put it on the TV news, in the papers, and then virtually everyone in the whole damned city will have an eye out for him. If I can’t get to him, then at least I want you to nail him and put him away. Once he’s behind bars...”
“You’ll have ways of reaching him in prison,” Rebecca said, finishing the thought to which Carramazza would not give voice. “If we arrest him, he’ll never stand trial. He’ll be killed in jail.”
Carramazza wouldn’t confirm what she had said, but they all knew it was true.
Jack said, “You’ve told us Lavelle is motivated by revenge. But for what? What did you do to him that would make him want to exterminate your entire family, even your grandchildren?”
“I won’t tell you that. I can’t tell you because, if I did, I might be compromising myself.”
“More likely incriminating yourself,” Rebecca said.
Jack slipped the photograph of Lavelle back into the envelope. “I’ve been wondering about your brother Dominick.”
Gennaro Carramazza seemed to shrivel and age at the mention of his dead brother.
Jack sa
id, “I mean, he was apparently hiding out, in the hotel here, when Lavelle got to him. But if he knew he was targeted, why didn’t he squirrel himself away at his own place or come to you for protection? Under the circumstances, no place in the city would be as safe as your house. With all this going down, surely you must have a fortress out there in Brooklyn Heights.”
“It is,” the old man said. “My house is a fortress.” His eyes blinked once, twice, slow as lizard eyes. “A fortress—but not safe. Lavelle has already struck inside my own house, in spite of the tight security.”
“You mean, he’s killed in your house—”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Ginger and Pepper.”
“Who’re they?”
“My doggies. A matched pair of papillons.”
“Ah.”
“Little dogs, you know.”
“I’m not really sure what they look like,” Jack said.
“Toy spaniels,” Rebecca said. “Long, silky coats.”
“Yes, yes. Very playful,” Carramazza said. “Always wrestling with each other, chasing. Always wanting to be held and petted.”
“And they were killed in your house.”
Carramazza looked up. “Last night. Torn to pieces. Somehow—we still don’t know how—Lavelle or one of his men got in, killed my sweet little dogs, and got out again without being spotted.” He slammed one bony hand down on his attache case. “Damnit, the whole thing’s impossible! The house is sealed tight! Guarded by a small army!” He blinked more rapidly than he had done before, and his voice faltered. “Ginger and Pepper were so gentle. They wouldn’t bite anyone. Never. They hardly even barked. They didn’t deserve to be treated so brutally. Two innocent little creatures.”
Jack was astounded. This murderer, this geriatric dope peddler, this ancient racketeer, this supremely dangerous poisonous lizard of a man, who had been unable or unwilling to weep for his dead brother, now seemed on the verge of tears over the slaying of his dogs.
Jack glanced at Rebecca. She was staring at Carramazza, half in wide-eyed wonder, half in the manner of someone watching a particularly loathsome creature as it crawled out from under a rock.
The old man said, “After all, they weren’t guard dogs. They weren’t attack dogs. They posed no threat. Just a couple of adorable little toy spaniels ...”