“You’re the first cop to ever ask about my mother,” Rossi said, resting the now empty glass on his desk. “And I hope the last.”
“It’s a first for me too, believe me,” she said. “But I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t important.”
“This can’t be police business,” Rossi said. “So, let’s start by ruling that out. Which puts you into personal waters, and before I let you take a dive into that deep pool I need to hear a solid reason as to why you need to know.”
“Why don’t I tell you what I managed to dig up?” Jennifer suggested. She reached for her large black shoulder bag and pulled out a thick manila envelope. “You tell me what’s true and what’s not. And then we either go forward from there or stop it dead cold. I’ll leave that totally up to you.”
“Make it quick,” Rossi instructed. “And even better, make it good.”
Jennifer opened the folder and flipped aside a few pages, holding the last one in her right hand. “According to your birth certificate filed with the city of New York, you were born in a small clinic, in lower Manhattan, long since closed,” she began. “You are the only son of Nicola Rossi. The slot next to your mother’s name was left blank. I don’t know what you were told the reason for that was, but I do know whatever you were told it wasn’t the truth.”
“And you know this how?” Rossi said. “Neighborhood gossip, maybe? Or did one of those Italian gasbags fill your head with ideas you know nothing about? My mother’s name is not on my birth certificate because she abandoned me and my father as soon as she could get out of the hospital. Since she didn’t want me as a son, my father figured we go all the way with it and not put her down as a mother.”
“She didn’t abandon you,” Jennifer said. “At least not when your father said she did.”
Rossi leaned forward, elbows on the edge of his desk, hands folded across his face. “Keep going, cop,” he said, his voice hard, direct, laced with venom. “Finish what it was you came here to tell me.”
Jennifer closed the folder and jammed it back in her handbag. She stood and walked over to the desk, standing close enough to Rossi to pick up the scent of the expensive cologne he had splashed on his face earlier that morning. She sensed that while her presence had piqued his anger, her words had aroused his curiosity. She wasn’t exactly sure how much he knew or suspected about his mother, how much had simply been suppressed, and how much was buried long before he had any chance to discover the truth. And she had no way to gauge how he would react to what he was about to hear.
“Your mother was a brave woman,” Jennifer said. “And a tough one. She had to be to go through with what she did and still be standing long after it was over. She had a husband, a decent man with a bad gambling habit. The kind of man your father made money from, taking everything he could, until there was nothing left to take. Or almost nothing.”
“Did my father tell him to gamble away money he didn’t have?” Rossi asked. “Or did this loser go and do all that on his own?”
“He laid down all his own bets,” Jennifer said. “And your father built up the interest payments. The man paid off most of the time, usually late, but still working within the well of reason.”
“Then the guy’s lost any right to complain,” Rossi said. “The easiest play to make for a man like him is to turn and walk away. He does that and nobody can touch him or his family. But they can’t walk away. The action means more to them than what they got at home, and they’ll give up anything and everything to keep placing the bet, dreaming for that one big score that is supposed to change it all. It’s a score that never looks in their direction. Not in this life, anyway.”
“At least until the day your father calls in the final tab,” Jennifer said. “The man is given three choices. Pay the loans. Give up your life. Or give up your youngest son. My guess is that most men would choose either to pay off the money or take the bullet. It seems the easiest of the three ways out.”
“Which way did our hero go?” Rossi asked, words dripping with disdain. He had been raised in an environment that looked down on weakness, despising the actions of those who allowed themselves to be vulnerable.
“We’ll never know,” Jennifer said. “He never got a chance to make his choice. Your mother made it in his place. She threw a fresh card on the deck, one that not even your father had considered.”
“Which was what?”
“She offered to give him a son of his own,” Jennifer said. “One they would have together. A son that bled Rossi blood, not the blood of a much weaker man.”
“My father agree to this?” Rossi asked. His eyes betrayed no emotion, his body as still as an ancient statue.
“Why wouldn’t he?” Jennifer asked. “Why take a risk on some kid you know little about when you can raise one who carries your name and your genes? A son who would grow up one day and run the family business. Be as good a don, if not a better one, than he could ever be. A son of his own.”
“Nice story, Detective,” Rossi said, relaxing the muscles around his neck and shoulders and sitting back in his chair. “And I appreciate you taking time away from chasing down criminals to come here and entertain me. But we both have business that needs our full attention and I think it’s time we got back to it.”
“That woman was your mother,” Jennifer said. She was braced for the reaction, not sure in what shape or form it would take, anger or denial, indifference or histrionics. If Rossi had anything of Lo Manto in his veins, she figured now would be the best time for it to come to the surface.
“I’m going to humor you for a few more minutes,” Rossi said. “Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, this little tale of yours is true, and my father had a fling with some woman whose husband was buried in a financial hole. Let me take it one more step forward. Let’s say I concede to you that this sad, pathetic woman could well have been my mother. Giving you all of that, handing it over to you without any questions attached, it still comes out to a big so-what. It means nothing to me and it doesn’t touch me in any way.”
“You’re wrong on that count, Rossi,” Jennifer said. She had one hand flat on his desk now, leaning forward, her blond hair hanging low and partially obscuring the right side of her face. “It does mean something to you and it does touch you. Touch you in a way a man like you would never even dream was possible.”
“Tell me how?” Rossi said. “Lay it all out for me. Once that part is history, I’ll expect you to turn around and get the hell out of my house.”
“Your mother had two sons,” Jennifer said, staring down at Rossi as hard as she had at any criminal she had ever been up against. “The one with your father and another with her husband.”
“Finish it,” Rossi ordered.
“The one she had with her husband is Lo Manto,” Jennifer said, silently shaking as she spoke the words. “The cop you want so much to see dead is your brother.”
Pete Rossi pushed his chair back and stood. He walked over toward the bay windows and stared out at the passing traffic. He placed his hands inside his pants pockets and took in slow, controlled breaths. The cop who stood behind him had swung open a door he had long kept slammed shut and bolted. Even as a child, Rossi had never totally bought into the story of his mother abandoning both husband and son in search of a life with more meaning than the one she was destined to lead. Then, as an adult born and reared in the Camorra fashion, he found it even less likely to carry a candle close to the truth. He had long suspected he was the bastard son resulting from one of his father’s many flings. Don Nicola Rossi was a stickler in all the ways of the Camorra save for one. He was weak and vulnerable when it came to women and seduced and conquered as many as crossed his path. He was a man who happily substituted passion for love, sex for romance, a quick dalliance for a long-term relationship. Rossi learned early on to bury any curiosity he might have had about his mother, content instead to accept the constructed story that had been placed in his path.
Rossi glanced down at an old man
walking past his building, a small dog leading him on his leash. The man looked to be in his late seventies, long past the days when he had to heed a clock and a boss, yet he still dressed as if he were off for a day at the office. His suit was old but sturdy, his shoes worn but shined, his tie rigid and tight. The old man had lived long enough to know that appearances could often disguise foibles, serving as a mask for our true selves.
“What did you expect would happen once you told me?” Rossi asked Jennifer, his back still to her, the morning sun warming his face. “A family picnic, maybe? Or a cozy dinner between me and the cop to kick around some old memories? How is this information going to change anything that exists between me and Lo Manto?”
“I didn’t know what your reaction would be,” Jennifer said. “Tell you the truth, I can’t imagine it’s going to change anything at all between you and him. Maybe it’s not supposed to. I don’t know that part, either. I just figured it was time you heard the real story and I was the only one around willing to tell it.”
“Does he know?” Rossi asked. “Did you share your dark little saga with him as well?”
“If he does, he didn’t hear it from me,” Jennifer said. “And for what it’s worth, I don’t think he has a clue.”
“Odd, don’t you think?” Rossi asked, turning now to face her. “The great detective unable to piece together the clues to his own story.”
“Neither could the great don,” Jennifer said. “So I’d go easy on giving out pats on the back.”
“Then we all made a mistake, Detective,” Rossi said, walking toward her. He placed a hand on her elbow and started to escort her out of the library and into the foyer. “This one sad perhaps, but acceptable. It’s the next one that will determine the true direction of all our lives.”
They stopped at the front door, Rossi waiting as Mario opened it, letting in a warm blast of air and heavy doses of sunshine. On the street, just to their left, two girls played a fast game of jump rope, their giggling filling the morning with happy sounds.
“What are you going to do now?” Jennifer asked.
“What I was meant to do,” Pete Rossi said, the power of the gangster stitched across each word.
The four shooters sat in the back room of the small restaurant, each quietly finishing a large meal. Gaspaldi was at the head of the long table, sipping his third glass of red wine, staring at the men, running through their bloody résumés in his mind, content that he had finally found the right mix of hitters to take out a cop he so hated. He waited as a young, thin, and nervous waiter came through the thick red curtains separating the private dining area from the main part of the restaurant and jotted down mumbled coffee and dessert orders on a crumpled notepad.
“Hold on to that order for about twenty minutes,” Gaspaldi told the waiter. “Give us a chance to digest our meal and catch up on old times.”
The waiter nodded and walked silently out of the room. Gaspaldi reached down and pulled a thick folded spreadsheet from a briefcase by his feet, and brought it up to the table. “Clear some of this shit out of the way,” he ordered the four men around him. “I want to go over this one final time.”
“You’re acting like a virgin on his wedding night with this job,” the shooter sitting at Gaspaldi’s right, Elmo Stalli, said. “We’ve all done this work for a long time and we’ve been good enough at it to stuff our safe deposit boxes with cash. And there’s four of us aiming down at one cop. Where’s all the worry come from?”
“Old age,” Gaspaldi said. “Bad knees. A horrible marriage. A mother in the hospital. In other words, who gives a fuck where my worries come from? Why don’t we just worry that I get the right bang for all those bucks that have been doled out like penny candy? And if that means we go over the plan a half-dozen more times before I call it a night, then that’s what we’ll do. Anybody not good to go with that?”
The four men each nodded as they poured themselves wine refills. They sat in stony silence as Gaspaldi opened the spreadsheet and rested it on the cleared table, careful not to get any smudges on the designs and street locations drawn across it. “Let’s take it from the start,” he said to them. “Who moves first and where?”
“I’m there,” Carlo Bertz said. He was the youngest of the assassins gathered, a muscled British expatriate who had been working as a paid gunman for fifteen years and had notched twenty-seven murders. He had extensive military training, was an expert marksman with both a pistol and a high-powered rifle, and could take out a target as far as three hundred feet in the distance. “On the roof of the six-story building on the corner. I hold my shot, keep the target in my scope, and wait for him to be fully exposed.”
“I fire first,” John Rummy said. He was of German and Italian ancestry, a professional killer for thirty of his fifty-four years and a wounded veteran of four civil wars and three government uprisings. He used the bulk of his money and time to fund right-wing takeovers of shaky regimes throughout the world. He liked to mark his kill at close contact, not afraid to look in the eyes of the men he had been paid cash money to murder. “But I hit to stop not to drop, the wound not severe enough to bring him down. He’ll give chase and I lead him out into the middle of the narrow street.”
“Sounds good to me so far,” Gaspaldi said. He always found professionals of any stripe to be pleasant company, none more so than hit men. They went about their work in a calm and direct manner, the business not a good haven for those who were quick to panic. They very often brought to the table an odd and sometimes exotic array of hobbies and were as curious about life as they were indifferent to death. “Mifo, it’s your turn.”
“I work the lead car, parked in the middle of the street, engine idle,” Mifo said. He was a rare killer, a man who brought his targets down not with bullets but with the blunt and brutal force of an automobile. He was born somewhere in Southeast Asia and fell into his chosen profession quite by accident. He had been a teenager in love with fast cars and clean, power-fueled engines who harbored a dream of one day racing on the famed Formula One tracks that dotted most of Europe. He longed to drink from a champion’s cup and wrap his arms around the ravishing beauties who often came with such victories. Instead, he was speeding along a highway in Poland, revving the engine on a Fiat 124 as fast as a meager four cylinders could take it, when he zoomed past an embankment and crashed head-on into a dazed young woman flagging down help in the evening mist, flares lit on her left and right, her stalled car parked and smoking in an off-lane one hundred yards to her back. The girl died on impact. Mifo, due in part to the half-empty bottle of Russian vodka lying on his front seat and the levels of alcohol in his bloodstream, ended up with a five-year vehicular manslaughter conviction and a new career path. “The shooter on the street leads him up my way. At two hundred and fifty feet, give or take, I shift gears and aim square for the cop. I hit him and keep moving, make a left on the corner, right at the next, one more quick left, and onto the highway leading out of the city.”
“That just leaves you,” Gaspaldi said, pointing at Stalli. “If you got your part down, then we can get that waiter back in here with our coffee and pastries.”
“I wait inside the hallway at 238 East 234th Street,” Stalli said. He was a known face to Gaspaldi, a Camorra shooter who began picking off targets in the woods outside Naples as a child, starting with rabbits and pigeons and graduating to his first murder at seventeen. He got into an angry dispute with a local grocer over the price of three farm-fresh tomatoes and settled it with a hunting rifle rather than a conversation. The killing of a sixty-seven-year-old fruit vendor forced Stalli underground, and his escape was helped by several junior members of the Camorra, who were always on the lookout for a man quick to pull a gun and fire it. He ended up in a small town to the north, earning his keep by toiling as a busboy in a local restaurant. He spent his evenings in the quiet company of paid Camorra hitters, each imparting his wisdom and techniques to the willing young man. “If he’s still moving and breathing after taking
the street hit and the bump from the car, I make my move. I pump as many bullets his way as I can pack in my guns and pockets and then head for the subway ride downtown and out of the picture.”
“And once the cop is down on the ground?” Gaspaldi said. “What happens to him at that point?”
“I pull on my high-power and put three garlic slugs in his upper torso, front or back, it makes no difference,” Bertz said, lighting a French cigarette. “Anybody happens to be in the way, curious as to who went down or just looking to help, gets taken out just as fast. I then lock up my gear, jump down to the next roof, and get out as fast as I came in.”
“Any other questions you want us to answer?” John Rummy asked, pushing aside his empty glass of wine.
“Just one more,” Gaspaldi said, not bothering to hide his smile.
“What is it?” Elmo Stalli said.
“What kind of booze do you want to go along with that coffee?” he asked.
Lo Manto sat in the front pew of the empty church, facing the altar. The shadows of the lit votive candles bounced off the four walls around him, the faces of the silent saints staring down. He loved old churches and liked them even more when he had them all to himself. Here, he found a serenity that eluded him in all other areas of his life. He had served as an altar boy in this weathered old building, wearing the white cassock and dark surplice, working early afternoon masses, the ones that attracted the true believers. Most of the parishioners were elderly, often praying for the souls of loved ones long gone, themselves painfully approaching a funeral mass and the smoking of the incense.