Blood Money

4

Jane awoke, already aware of the sound. It was a man walking along the corridor. She heard him stop at her door, and she identified the disturbance that had brought her out of her sleep. The man had been trying to walk quietly. She rolled off the bed, picked up the heavy ashtray from the nightstand, stepped close to the door, and waited in the darkness.

She heard something go into the lock, then saw the door open until the chain caught it. A bent coat hanger snaked inside, hooked onto the last link of the chain, slid it to the end of its track, and removed it. The door opened a few more inches, and Jane saw him through the crack at the hinges.

“Hello, Bernie,” she said quietly.

“Oh, there you are,” said Bernie. “Can I come in?”

“It’s a little late to ask for an invitation.”

The old man stepped inside and closed the door, then flipped the light on, and quickly averted his eyes. “Sorry,” he said.

Jane remembered, picked up the jeans and white blouse she had left at the foot of the bed, and slipped them on. “How did you learn to open a hotel door?”

He shrugged. “Oh, it’s just an old trick from when I was young. I was so broke I couldn’t afford hotels in those days, so once in a while I needed to use one without paying.”

She shook her head. “Bernie, when they’re unoccupied, the chain isn’t fastened.”

“That’s a different trick. I thought you meant the lock. Motels like this don’t give a shit about what happens to their customers. The doors are hollow and easy to kick down, so they put cheap locks on them to save the expense of replacing them.”

Jane decided that she didn’t really care why the old man had once broken into occupied hotel rooms: armed robbery, probably, but that had been long ago. “What do you want, Bernie?”

“Just friendly concern. I went out for a walk, and I happened to notice the light in the window. I thought I’d see why you were up.”

“If there was a light, it wasn’t in my window,” she said. “Let’s get beyond the preliminary lies and get to the big ones. You want me to take you to some safe haven.”

“That would be nice,” he agreed. “But I guess I’ll have to figure out how to close out my own life.”

“That’s how you’re seeing this?”

“How can it be anything else?” he asked. Then he said thoughtfully, “Did you hear how I got killed?”

Jane nodded. “I watched the television news before I went to bed. They said that a seventy-year-old woman died when you did. How did that happen?”

“She was the one who shot me.” He looked sad. “I guess the excitement was too much for her heart. She died on the way to the hospital.”

“You were supposed to be killed by an old woman?”

Bernie sighed. “It wasn’t my idea, believe me.” He looked at her, and the pain in his eyes seemed genuine. “I loved her. Francesca Giannini.” The eyes looked colder now, as though they were judging Jane. “People saw her near the end, and they probably saw this old lady with hard, sharp black eyes like a hawk, and wrinkled skin. They wouldn’t have been able to imagine what she was like in the old days.”

Jane could tell that Bernie was testing her: whether she was smart enough to know that she would be old too. She sat at the foot of the bed beside him.

Bernie said, “I met her at the Fontainebleau in Miami. She was twenty, I was twenty-two. In those days, mob sit-downs were different. They used to meet in places like that. It’s hard to believe now, but they’d bring their wives, kids, dogs. Her father was Dominic Giannini. He brought her along, like it was a vacation. Looking back on it now, I think he probably did it because he was afraid to leave her home alone. Not that she was in danger or something—he had Detroit sewed up tight. He just knew that if he left her home, what he told her not to do was only talk.”

Jane nodded. “I guess things like that don’t change much.”

“You have to understand what the problem was,” said Bernie. “She was beautiful.” Jane could see his eyes glaze over, and then he gave a little shake, as though coming back to the present was painful.

Jane was astonished. “You’re not just remembering, are you? You’re seeing it.”

Bernie touched Jane’s arm gently, as though he were a parent soothing and reassuring her. “That’s part of it, too, you know. You don’t just get to bring back what will make you happy. Once you’ve seen something, you’re stuck with it. If I think about it, I can see her now. She isn’t any different from the way she looked then. Where every long black hair was, every pore of that smooth white skin, whatever was reflected in those huge brown eyes at different times; even things I didn’t notice at that moment—things in the room. There was a lace cover on the counter behind me, and the corner was folded up, just like this.” He folded the edge of Jane’s sheet to demonstrate. “There was a sand fly that was on its way to the window to get out.”

Jane’s throat was dry. She cleared it, and said, “It must be hard.”

“Not in the same way as it used to be,” said Bernie. “I told you we were at the Fontainebleau. The big guys were in a meeting in a suite upstairs with their consiglieres. Their caporegima were mostly in the bar by the pool keeping an eye on each other. There were a few soldiers, mostly older guys sitting in the hallways on those French chairs with the squiggly gold edges that nobody ever sits on, pretending to read newspapers. I saw her in the dining room. She looked right at me, not peeking and looking down, or any of that. She came to me and took me by the hand. We went for a long walk, and talked. All of a sudden she stopped, turned around, and started leading me back. I said, ‘Do we have to go back now?’ She said, ‘I thought you’d like to see my room.’ ”

“You don’t need to tell me this.”

“Yes,” he insisted. “I do. She locked the door and started taking off her clothes. It wasn’t like she had any experience at it, just determination. This was something she was going to do. She got down to the skin in about five seconds—sort of a ‘There. That’s done’ look on her face. Then she looked up at me for a minute. I’m still standing there with my mouth open. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ Do you understand?”

Jane remembered. The event that you were warned about as most to be feared slowly became an obsession, until virginity was like carrying a handful of hot coals. “I think I do.”

He nodded, and gazed at the rug for a moment. “That was how it happened. It wasn’t one of those things where she just lays there with her eyes shut tight and tolerates it while you work your will on her. She wanted to do everything a man and a woman ever did together. She just didn’t know how.”

In spite of her resistance, Jane could feel it in her own memory. Of course that must always have been a part of it since time began—she remembered the fumbling and clumsiness because she hadn’t been exactly positive about how things were supposed to happen, and had been so afraid that she might be awkward. She remembered the longing to have everything be beautiful and seamless, but it was impossible because she had been watching herself with a critical, unforgiving eye.

“I didn’t know anything either,” said Bernie. “In those days, at that age you were just a kid. But we learned, like everybody does. We sneaked off six more times. Every time the bosses would disappear into the suite upstairs, she would find me.”

“What happened afterward?”

He sighed, and there was a rattly sound in his throat. “She said she was going to work it out with her father, and we would get married. I was a kid, and an outsider. I didn’t know what a job that was going to be. See, I didn’t really fit in. I was only there because I was working for the Augustinos in Pittsburgh.”

“Doing what?”

“Not much. In my one conviction, I was in with Sal Augustino. We were the same age. They didn’t have libraries and college courses and counselors. Radio wasn’t allowed. There weren’t many TVs anywhere, and there sure weren’t any in that prison. What you had was a cell and a bunk. I used to do tricks to keep myself from going crazy—describe baseball games I’d seen, batter by batter, you know? I had read a few books, so once in a while I’d recite one out loud to them. When I got out, Sal told the family about me. They didn’t know exactly what to do with me, but they put me on the payroll. I was a city housing inspector. I had to show up bright and early every Friday for five minutes to get my pay.”

“I take it that wasn’t impressive enough for her father.”

“Worse than that,” he said. “At those big meets there were lots of people around, so a lot of little side deals got made.”

“What kind of deals?”

He sadly shook his head. “You have to understand. These were—are—people for whom everything is for sale. The only issue is price.”

Jane said, “He arranged a marriage for his daughter?”

“No,” said Bernie. “Two things were decided that week. The first was the reason the Augustinos brought me along. They sold me.”

“Sold you? Like a baseball player?”

“Yeah, it was a lot like that. They wanted something from the Langustos in New York. You got to remember what happened after Capone. They got him for tax evasion, and everybody realized that was the easy way to get all of them. I had been keeping the books for the Augustinos in my head, moving money around and keeping track of it. If having a lot of money you can’t explain is a crime, you have to hide it. The Augustinos didn’t have that much, so it didn’t take a lot of time. But the New York families had a lot. I was supposed to go live in New York under the care of the Langustos. The Langustos had worked out a side deal in advance. I would start keeping track of money for all five families in New York. That way, all of them had some protection from the government, and they all had a stake in protecting me.”

“When I heard of you I always wondered how that came about,” said Jane. “I mean, these people don’t seem to trust each other very often.”

“It was a special time,” he said. “Some of these guys hated each other, but the idea of going to jail just for having money was new, and it was killing them. And the New York families had been breathing down each other’s necks for thirty years by then. I was a way to protect their money from each other, too.”

“And you agreed to the arrangement.”

“Who asked me?” said Bernie. “What happened was that my friend Sal got called upstairs. When he came back down, I’d barely made it back from meeting Francesca in her room. I was almost into the bar before I noticed I’d forgotten to tuck my shirttail in my pants. Sal hugs me and says, ‘Bernie, I just got the best news in the world about you. You’re going to be an important man, and you deserve it.’ ” The old man sat silent for a moment. “I told him, ‘Sal, I met a girl. I can’t go to New York.’ He said, ‘Bring her with you.’ I told him who she was. I told him all of it. He looked sick. After about a minute, he says, ‘You’re my friend, and I’ll try to help you. If she really loves you, then no father is going to stand in the way. Just go to New York and I’ll call you when I’ve got it arranged.’ I told him, ‘I can’t go to New York.’ He said, ‘Bernie, if you’re in New York, you’re an important man. You’ll have money, respect.’ He could see I wasn’t getting it, so finally he said, ‘If you’re with the five families, he can’t kill you.’ ”

“And you said yes.”

“I went to her and asked her what to do,” he said. “She told me that Sal was absolutely right. She said I had to go to New York, so she could help Sal work it out with her father. That night I got on a train with Carmine Langusto and eight guys.”

“I take it her father didn’t go for it,” said Jane.

“I’ll never know,” said Bernie. “I said there were at least two side deals arranged that week in Florida. That was the second one. She and her father and his guys went back to Detroit. About two days later, he comes out of a restaurant and gets his head blown off in the street.”

Now Jane was moving into familiar territory. She had heard stories like it a hundred times. “Who did it?”

“I’m not sure even now. There was a story around then that some guys in Chicago wanted to break away and take charge in Detroit. Maybe it was them. If it was, it backfired. They never got to set foot in Detroit.”

“What stopped them?”

“It was way over my head. It was a Commission thing. They met in New York while I was there, but by the time I heard about it, it was over. The family in Detroit—what we used to call the Giannini family—was going to stay put. The new don there would be some local guy I’d never heard of, named Ogliaro. And he would hold the family together by marrying the old don’s daughter. Period.”

“They arranged the marriage without her consent?”

Bernie’s eyes squinted at her as though the light was hurting them. “That week in Florida, the cards got reshuffled, and we were all holding new hands. It was 1947, and this is a twenty-year-old girl who is pregnant. I didn’t know it, but she did. She is also the last remaining daughter in the direct line of men who have been in power in that city for three generations. If she holds out on the off chance of marrying me, the people who killed her father are going to take everything he had. They’re going to kill people who were loyal to him. And if anybody knows she’s carrying the heir apparent, she’s probably first.”

Jane struggled to take it all in. The name Ogliaro meant something to her. Bernie had said “heir apparent.” If there was a child, could it have been Vincent Ogliaro? He would be about the right age. She remembered reading about a conviction a couple of years ago, and some sort of a federal sentence. Jane needed to fight the feeling of sympathy that had been growing in her. She used the only method she had. “She didn’t just go along with it, did she?”

He looked down at the carpet again. “No. She arranged it. She thought of it and got some old guys to go to the Commission with it. I don’t even know if she had Ogliaro’s consent in advance or not. It doesn’t matter. He had to do what they said, just like I did.”

“Why him?”

“He was the perfect choice, exactly the sort of man that everybody would accept. He was a brute, with an animal’s face and an animal’s constitution, and the kind of cunning that some animals have.”

“What do you mean?”

“He started out by cleaning house. Everybody who might be a problem got killed. He built on what was left and went on from there. He was never foolish enough to get in on anything outside his own territory, but he protected the city line like it was made of his own skin. There are people who say that she had something to do with that—that it was too smart for him.” He added unconvincingly, “But I don’t believe that.”

Jane had listened to the description and had already decided that the woman must have done it. She shrugged. “Then don’t. Did you ever see her again?”

“A few times.”

“How?”

“In those days, a lot of women with money used to go to New York twice a year to buy clothes: fall and spring. They’d take the train and go on a shopping spree. A few times I could meet her in her hotel. Then it got too dangerous.”

“Ogliaro suspected?”

His face showed distaste and contempt. “Ogliaro wouldn’t have cared. It wasn’t a marriage. They both went into it with their eyes open. She made him powerful and rich, and he made her and the boy safe. There wasn’t any love. No, the problem was me.”

“You?” Jane was distracted. He had said “the boy.” She was almost sure she knew who the boy was.

“Years were going by. I was handling money for the New York families, and it was training my memory. They started bringing in more families, as a favor.”

“Detroit, too?”

“Never Detroit. Ogliaro couldn’t stand it. He knew he couldn’t do anything about what had already happened, but he wasn’t going to leave any of his money with me. But by the mid-fifties there were the New York families, Pittsburgh, Boston, two New Jersey families, one of the Chicago families, New Orleans. The ones in Los Angeles were connected to families in the East, so they were part of the package. The only person who knew where any of it was invested was me. You can see the problem.”

“They wouldn’t let you out of their sight,” said Jane.

“In the fifties there were a couple of wars. They were afraid somebody would clip me just to cause trouble. Then it was the big uproar caused by the wars. Citizens had found bodies lying around, so the government had to start making noise about the Mafia—holding hearings, doing raids. People started to worry about me getting picked up. They moved me out of New York and set me up in a house in Florida.”

“So you couldn’t go to New York anymore.”

“She couldn’t either. It was the sixties by then, and women weren’t doing that anymore. A department store in Detroit had the same clothes as one in New York. Then a bad period started. From the late sixties on, you couldn’t trust your telephone or go talk to somebody outdoors without getting your picture taken. The FBI raided my house six times, and each time I got hauled in for forty-eight hours so they could ask me questions while the families were crying real tears and wringing their hands. In 1978 my house burned down.”

“Arson?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know, because I did it myself. I hadn’t seen her in fourteen years. I talked them into taking me to Chicago while it was being rebuilt so I could be closer to her. I slipped my bodyguards once and spent the night in a hotel with her. That was the last time. A new house got built, only this time it was in the Keys. While my house was going up, they built houses all around it.”

“So those stories are true? The whole neighborhood is Mafia?”

“I don’t know what you heard, but here’s what’s true. There are three streets on each side. They built the houses and put people in them. The houses aren’t all occupied all the time, but some are. There are places on the island where you can see a boat coming from miles away in any direction, and there’s only one bridge. It was all for me.”

“Didn’t her husband die right around then?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That was why I had to see her. To propose.”

“Marriage? After thirty years?”

“What do you want from me? I couldn’t make the calendar go backwards. It was the first realistic chance I had.”

“She turned you down.”

He nodded. “I figured if anybody would understand that, it would be another woman. I sure didn’t.”

“It was the boy, wasn’t it? If her husband was dead, then her son was going to be the boss. Your son.”

“That’s just about the way she said it. Vincent was practically a kid, late twenties, when Ogliaro died. She was afraid that without her at his elbow to tell him what was what, he couldn’t do it. It would be like setting the baby on the ground while the wild dogs circled him. She couldn’t bring him with her to Florida to live with me. She said that would be like castrating him.”

“What about later, after he was established?” she said carefully. “He seems to have had an aptitude for it.”

“Then it was too late. People were already watching him, worrying that he might get too strong. If his mother came to live with me, then the families who gave me their money would decide he was trying to get his hands on it. They would have killed him.” He shook his head. “That was our son. He was what she traded our lives for.”

Jane was quiet for a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a sad story.”

She thought about the woman. This was her story, not Bernie’s. She tested it. “And your son—Vincent—he arranged for your death?”

He shook his head. “How could he? He’s in prison. You knew that, didn’t you?”

Jane nodded. “I remember seeing it in the papers.”

“She did it. She did all of it. All I knew about it was that if I could get that particular flight to Detroit that day, and come outside for some air, she would handle the rest. I see her, she fires a gun at me. I fall down. She gets hustled into a car and away. About six big guys all crowd around me. One takes my picture, then slips a coat on me and a wig on my head. Another lies down in my place. Another squirts blood all over the place with a plastic bottle. One takes my fingerprints. An ambulance shows up, they lift this guy into it and drive away. A couple of these guys take me into the airport with them, and push me onto a plane, where Danny is waiting for me.”

“That’s a lot of people,” said Jane.

“One of them works in the coroner’s office, a couple more are cops. Danny didn’t know anything about the others, but they were all people she had on the hook. He said she paid them all, but none of them would tell anyway, because they’d have to say they were in on it.”

“So now you’re dead.”

“I’m dead,” he agreed. “Only it didn’t work, because she’s dead too. All those years. All the waiting and wishing, and then this. She has a heart attack. When the hell did women start having heart attacks?”

There were tears streaming down his face. She could see they were coming from his tear ducts, but that meant nothing. There were no actors and few women who couldn’t cry any time they wanted to. What caught her attention were the lines on his face. As she studied them, she understood something that had distracted her since she had met him. The expressions she had seen on his face didn’t match the lines. He would say something cheerful and the voice didn’t match the words, and then he would smile, and the face would appear to wrinkle across the lines. The expression on his face at this moment made the lines and creases fit perfectly. There was only one expression his face had assumed habitually. For fifty years, he had been in anguish. He was old now. The skin on his temple was getting a thin, almost transparent look, like vellum, so she could see the veins.

She said, “She didn’t choose this time because it was good for her, or for Vincent, did she?”

“No,” he said. In his watery blue eyes was the worst agony of all. It seemed to contain within it all of the pain he had felt for fifty years. But she was sure that there was something new, too. “I was beginning to forget things.”