Rossi stepped onto the north end platform and stood next to the burly man. “Let’s walk,” he said. “There’s a coffee shop three blocks up. We can talk on the way there.”
“I appreciate you agreeing to see me like this,” the burly man said. “I know you don’t usually do the meets.”
“You said you had important information to give me,” Rossi said, his manner detached, his words cold and distant. “I like to hear news like that firsthand.”
“Truth be told, there’s two ends I need to touch base with you on,” the burly man said. They stopped at a red light, both standing silent, letting the late afternoon traffic slither past. The burly man shifted his feet from side to side, trying to calm his nerves, still not sure he had made the right call by putting himself in a one-on-one position with the don. He had worked exclusively for Pete Rossi the past six years, handling assigned hits on both ends of the ocean. But this was only the second time he had stood close enough to the young boss to touch him and the first time they had ever exchanged any words. The burly man, Gregory Flash Randell, had been a paid hitter long enough to know the hard rules of his world. He had crossed a line by making direct contact with a sitting don, eliminating the middlemen he had always been instructed to call. His life now depended on how crucial the information he would impart to Pete Rossi would be perceived to be. If it was deemed important enough for the boss to take notice and then action, his mission would be a success and he could count on scaling the heights of the mob kingdom, having earned the eternal gratitude of a man who trusted no one. If, on the other hand, he was passing on street rumor as fact, handing over names that had already been checked and cleared by Rossi and his crew, he could count on being chopped and dropped, another summertime floater lost in the depths of the Hudson River.
“I know there are going to be four heavy hitters going down after that Italian cop,” Randell said as they walked across the street, both careful not to step in the wide potholes that dotted the crossing. “They’ll try and drop him somewhere out in the open. It’s a smart move and they’ll no doubt go in with a good plan.”
“What’s your point?” Rossi asked, disguising his surprise that the paid shooter knew as much as he did. Hit men traveled in a business that was ruled by tight lips and the need to keep their work hidden from even the friendliest eyes. It was unlikely that Randell had heard about the four hires from anyone connected to the hitters, since there would be no need for them to advertise their acceptance of the assignment. That left Rossi nowhere else to turn except in the direction of his own camp. It was there that the names were first floated and the plans for the execution drawn up. And it would be there that any signs of betrayal would be found.
“I’d like to be kept in on that job,” Randell said. “I don’t want any part of the group that you got working. I’m sure they got their orders and will do their best to see them through. But I still want to go at the cop. And I won’t charge you anything close to what the street says is going into their pockets.”
They were standing across from the train station, their backs against a chain-link fence, the heat of the day heavy enough to lift. “Why are you telling me this?” Rossi asked. “And why now?”
“I won’t move without permission,” Randell said. “I never go in without the supplier wanting me on the scene. The word gets to the four hitters, they take it the way they take it. Them I don’t really care about. You I do. You shake your head on this, I walk away from it, act like we never met. You keep me in the game, then I promise you, when that cop goes down it’ll be my bullets that do it.”
“You follow boxing at all?” Rossi asked Randell.
“A regular fan, nothing big,” Randell said. “I catch all the fights they show on HBO, but other than that I don’t go crazy over it.”
“That’s more than enough to cover my example,” Rossi said, locking eyes with a tall brunette in a tight black skirt moving gingerly in high heels across the ruined pavement. “Any man can go down at any time. No matter who it is. And most of the time, he never sees the blow that sends him to the canvas. He just drops. And if I’m betting for a knockout to happen sometime that night, then I don’t really care, either. The only worry I bring to it is that the guy I bet against is out of the game.”
“A knockout’s in the cards,” Randell said. “You can rest easy on that end of the bet.”
“What’s a bet like that run a man?” Rossi asked, turning away from the woman but not before throwing her a casual smile. “Given the odds and the opponent.”
“A quarter of what the current spread is now,” Randell said.
“Seems like a fair bet to make,” Rossi said. “I would lay my own money on something with that kind of payback.”
Rossi moved away from the fence and started to walk down the narrow street, Randell by his side. “You said there were two things you had on your mind,” Rossi said to him. “I figure boxing was one of them. Now, it wouldn’t make much sense for me to leave here without hearing about the other.”
“I’ve been in my end of the business a lot of years,” Randell said. “Was born into it I guess you could say, a hand-down profession.”
“I want to hear about somebody’s biography, there’s a TV channel for that,” Rossi said, not bothering to disguise his irritation. “You have something I need to hear then let me hear it.”
“You got a mouth inside your operation,” Randell said. “And it talks into that Italian cop’s ears whenever it gets the urge. It’s one of the ways he’s always a step ahead of you, both here and on the other end of your business.”
Pete Rossi stopped in the middle of the street and glared at Randell. “Listen to me well, shooter,” he said. “If you have a name, tell me. If you have the proof, show me. This isn’t Jeopardy!. I don’t want to ask a lot of questions. I just want the answers.”
Randell looked around, cars and trucks rumbling down the choppy street, a straggle of pedestrians inching their way past them, many rushing to catch the next train into the city. “You sure this is a good place to have that kind of talk?” he asked.
“It’s the only place we’re going to have that kind of talk,” Rossi said.
“It’s one of your capos,” Randell said. His mouth was dry and parched, tiny balls of sweat running down his neck. He stood in the glare of the late afternoon sun as it began its slow descent toward dusk and knew he had just put his life on the line on a nowhere street in New Rochelle.
“Before you tell me a name, tell me how you know,” Rossi said.
“This capo was born in Naples and is related by marriage to the badge,” Randell said. “He’s been feeding him the inside from his first day at cop school. That’s how he gets the jump on the deals that are in play.”
“How long have you had this information?” Rossi asked.
“For sure, less than a week,” Randell said. “Truth, though, I suspected it for about a year or so. Not the related end. Just that he was the main feed.”
“Based on what?” Rossi asked. “He take out billboard ads?”
“I had a job overseas a little less than ten months ago,” Randell said. “One from out of your group got caught dipping a few fingers into the profit pot and the word came down the line to erase.”
“Get to it,” Rossi said. He was walking as he listened, head low, hands jammed inside his pants pockets, breaking down the shooter’s information and disguising the anger he felt at the possibility that a key adviser had been working with Lo Manto for years. An insider, someone who had earned the trust and respect of the don, had broken the sacred seal of the Camorra, and Rossi had been the one who allowed it to happen. He knew that if word of what the hitter was spreading indeed proved to be true, then the crack in Rossi’s steel façade risked being exposed. It was a situation that required Rossi to act with swift and deadly precision. That meant taking out not only the informant but the shooter who made him aware of the situation.
“I was a day away from the finish line,”
Randell said. “All going as per the schedule of the deal: I go out for a late dinner, come back to the hotel, get ready, and head to the site. Instead, less than an hour into my meal, I was out of the restaurant, crouched down on the back of a motorboat, Italian cops hot on my tail. And the target went in the wind, under full custody protection.”
“Dominic Murino,” Rossi said. “I read about that one. He was on the hide at a small seaside town in Cassino. The papers I saw said that experiment failed because of a weak plan. And excess exposure on the bidder’s end.”
“You know my work and how I do it,” Randell said, jabbing back at the dig to his pride. “I wouldn’t be at this game for as many years and playing it at such a high level if I didn’t know how to cover every track. So my end was steam-cleaned. The reason I got trapped and my score walked clear was because somebody talked. And that was a somebody played on your team.”
“Name the player,” Rossi said, stopping to light a cigar with a thin butane lighter. “And back up the talk.”
“Frank Silvestri,” Randell said. “Him and the cop’s mother are cousins, linked up back to the old country. He’s loyal, by and large, dedicated to what he does and what you ask him to get done. The only time he ever crosses it is when it comes to that cop you’re hunting. He puts the feed bag to him on a regular basis. Not every job, mind you, but enough to keep him on your case and you on the move.”
“Why’d you wait this long to tell me?” Rossi asked. “A week is a lifetime in some circles, especially ours.”
“I needed to be a thousand percent sure,” Randell said. “I can’t risk coming to you with this kind of talk and not have the paper to back it up.”
“But you came today,” Rossi said. “So that means you rid yourself of any risk.”
“There’s no risk when you got the proof,” Randell said. “And that I got the other day. Soon as I knew for sure, I worked to set up the meet with you.”
“Do you have it on you?” Rossi asked. He turned a corner and walked across North Avenue, making his way back toward the train station and the adjacent lot, where he had parked his new black Mercedes 600SL. “Ready to hand over?”
“I got enough with me to make you a believer,” Randell said. “And it’s fresh. Less than five days old.”
Pete Rossi stopped, tossed the cigar to the pavement, checked the time on his watch, and stared over at Randell. “The meeting is over,” he said. “The next train to New York should be arriving in about six minutes. You can take it or walk to wherever it is you need to go or find a cab. Whichever way, it’s not a decision I need to know about.”
“What about the packet?” Randell said, sounding as confused as he looked. “I hand that to you now or sometime later?”
“You don’t need to show it to me,” Rossi said. “All I cared about was that you had it and no one but you had seen it.”
“Only two people know what we talked about,” Randell said. “And that’s us. I don’t bring anybody to the table that doesn’t need to be there.”
“Then our business is done,” Rossi said.
“Don’t you want me to at least tell what your guy told the cop?” Randell asked.
“You already did,” Rossi said. “You just were too busy talking to notice.” He turned away from Flash Randell and walked down a sloping hill toward his parked car, quietly working out the details to three murder plots in his mind.
Lo Manto stepped onto the IRT number 2 train seconds before the doors closed at the East 233rd Street station. He walked through three cars, using poles for balance. The cars were filled with a wide array of New Yorkers. Students gazed out with tired eyes at the nondescript buildings along the elevated route. Exhausted construction workers were heading home from bone-weary ten-hour shifts. A collage of old men and women sat arched forward, their eyes squinting at folded-over newspapers and thick magazines. An urban blend of young women, Walkman pads resting over their ears, eyes closed, listened to music in sync with the rhythmic motions of the subway.
He found a seat in front of a subway map, the various lines slithering their way from one borough to the next, all linked by a random series of letters and numbers. He turned to his right, glancing over at Carmine DelGardo, his head buried deep inside a New York Post story detailing a multiple murder at a dance club in downtown Brooklyn. “This must be important,” Lo Manto said, staring straight ahead at the abandoned buildings that still dotted the streets of the South Bronx even after decades of political promises. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you away from the store or the pool hall. What happened? They burn down?”
“Stick to the badge work, wop,” DelGardo said, still immersed in the story. “Your jokes just flat-out suck.”
“I could sing you a song, if that’s the way you want to go,” Lo Manto said with a wide smile. “You spend as much time in Naples as I do, you pick up a lot about music.”
“Not enough to warm my ears,” DelGardo said. “But let’s save all that shit for later. We got business.”
“We’re on the local,” Lo Manto said, resting the back of his head against the hard edge of the subway map. “Plenty of time to cover all your bases.”
“You got yourself two big problems,” DelGardo said. “And both of them are gonna come down faster than a bullet.”
“Start with one,” Lo Manto said.
“The Rossi crew is onto your inside hand,” DelGardo said. “Some hired gun calls himself Flash dropped the words right into the don’s ears. Put the guy out on a thin branch. I’m not saying it’s going to be today or even tomorrow. But if it were me sitting where you are, I’d expect him to disappear real soon.”
Lo Manto looked past DelGardo, staring at a middle-aged woman in a faux fur, her eyes fixed on the hardcover book spread open on her lap. She was thin, with long brown hair covering half her face, her beauty clear and unlined, her features proudly daring the arrival of old age to tend to their chore. “What’s the second problem?” he asked.
“Four guns and two million dollars in cash,” DelGardo said. “Each one with their scopes aimed down at your head. My guess is they’re going to come at you on the street, work together and hit you from any direction you could turn. And they ain’t gonna leave or get to take their cash until they zipper a black bag over your dead ass.”
The subway screeched into the Tremont Avenue station, side doors slipping open, a crew of Hispanic kids in high-top sneakers and baggy jeans jumping aboard, laughing over a story whose punch line was left on the platform. “You have any names?” Lo Manto asked. “On either the shooters or their handlers?”
“Nothing solid yet,” DelGardo said. “But you have to think they’re coming off the top of the charts, given the dough that’s being shelled out and the target they’ve been asked to take down. My money tells me there’s no local talent in this bunch. These are Armani imports.”
“You work on that end,” Lo Manto said. “Tab the hitters coming in from overseas. It’s a better bet that Rossi would lay both his trust and his money on shooters from out of the country. I’ll move to get my inside man to a safe place outside.”
“Might already be too late for that,” DelGardo said. “Nothing those wild Italian cowboys hate more than a guy breaks rank, and they like to deal with shit like that in a heart-attack hurry. He could be dead now for all I know, but he’ll be dead soon, that’s straight and sure.”
The train was now submerged in darkness, entering the main tunnel at East 149th Street, zooming like a runaway toward the first big city stop at 125th. Lo Manto stood up, holding on to a high bar, looking down at DelGardo, folded newspaper still on his lap. “I get off the next stop,” he told him. “I’ll reach out to you when I’m back up East again. You get some solid street information before then, get it to me through the relay.”
“Next stop is Harlem,” DelGardo said. “You don’t have enough people that are ready to put bullets in your ass? You want to go piss off some black gangsters now, too?”
“You can come
with me if you want,” Lo Manto said. “Make sure nothing bad happens.”
“The only way I get off the train in Harlem is if you carry me off,” DelGardo said. “I only walk the streets of one neighborhood. That’s the one I was born in and the one I’m going to be more than happy to be found dead in.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Lo Manto said, stepping off the train. “They’re all southern Italians up here. Just like you and me.”
Carmine DelGardo smiled and waved a fast good-bye. “That the case,” he said, as the doors were closing and Lo Manto was heading down a long flight of steps, “then you can walk without fear.”
Jennifer was leaning on the front of her car, arms folded across her chest, a bored look stretched over her face. Lo Manto came up to her left and handed her a container of black coffee. “I didn’t know how you liked it,” he said. “So I kept it simple.”
Jennifer took the cup from his hand and lifted the lid. “This is good as is,” she said. “I like it regular, milk with two sugars, but I’ve been trying to cut back on calories.”
Lo Manto took a sip from his coffee and smiled. “Americans are always trying to lose weight,” he said. “They move from one diet to the next, willing to try anything in order to stay slim.”
“What are you saying?” Jennifer asked. “That Italians don’t diet? That they don’t care about how they look?”
“They very much care about their appearance,” Lo Manto said. “It’s just not as big an obsession with them. Their day is built around the big meal, not spent avoiding it. Food is as important to them as friendship, love, and religion. It is one of the keys to who we are. You want to understand an Italian, find out what he likes to eat.”
“That hold true for you as well?” Jennifer asked.
“Why?” Lo Manto asked, staring at Jennifer above the lid of his coffee container. “Do you want to get to know me better?”