A Quiet Vendetta

TWENTY-FIVE

Everything had changed, and yet everything had stayed the same.

The house on Mulberry, the Blue Flame on Kenmare Street, Salvatore’s Diner on the corner of Elizabeth and Hester. All these places were familiar to me, but the atmosphere was different. I had gained as many years as the city, but the city had lost its spirit.

It was October of 1996. I had left this place in November of 1982, with a wife and two small babies, almost fourteen years before; left this place for another city called Los Angeles believing that what I had found here in New York would always be mine.

Desire and reality could not have been more distant.

The people I knew here were gone also. Angelo Cova, Don Alessandro’s boy Giovanni, Matteo Rossi and Michael Luciano. Carlo Gambino was gone, as were Frank Tieri and Anthony Corallo. Thomas DiBella, head of the Colombo family, had been deposed by Carmine Persico, and Caesar Bonaventre, the youngest head of the Bonanno family, had been replaced by Philip Rastelli after Rastelli’s release from jail. Stefano Cagnotto was gone of course, because I had been the one to kill him.

Ten Cent was there to meet us at the train station, and I introduced him to Victor as Uncle Sammy. Ten Cent grinned and hugged me and kissed my cheeks, and then he did the same to Victor. Ten Cent had brought a toy bear with him, and when he saw the size of Victor and realized that he was no longer a child he laughed at himself. We all laughed, and for a moment I believed everything would be alright.

The Mulberry Street house was still there, and Ten Cent drove us down to meet with Don Calligaris. While his housekeeper fed Victor in the kitchen, Don Calligaris took me aside and sat with me near the window in the front room.

‘We have become old men,’ he said, and in his voice I could hear the fatigue and broken promises. ‘I have come back to America. I cannot die alone away from my family. And this thing… this thing that happened with Angelina and Lucia-’

I raised my hand. ‘These things belong to the past,’ I said, and said it merely because I could not face talking of it. Despite the years that had intervened, it was still something that hung over me like a black shadow.

‘It is the past, yes, Ernesto, but all these years you have been away I have carried a weight of guilt about that night. We still, to this day, have nothing more than rumors about what happened. It is clear that whoever killed your wife and daughter intended to kill me. Some men have died in our attempts to find out, and we are still looking. This thing was more than five years ago, but people like us never forget the wrongs that have been done to us. Now you are back we can work on this together, we can find out who was behind it and take our vengeance.’

‘I have come here as an old man, to have my son see America,’ I said. ‘I will take him places, show him some of the things that I saw, and then, more than likely, I will return to Cuba to die.’

Don Calligaris laughed. He seemed out of breath for a moment and took some seconds to clear his throat. The lines and wrinkles in his face said everything that needed to be said. He was older than me by some years, and where a regular man would have retired – moved to Florida and spent his months fishing and walking and having his grandchildren visit him in the sunshine – Fabio Calligaris held onto his life with a vice-like grip. This territory was all he had, and to let it go would have seen him welcome the end of all that mattered. He was a tough man, always had been, and he would rather have died right there in the house on Mulberry Street than see his life’s work passed over to someone younger.

‘We do not talk of dying,’ he said quietly, and he smiled. ‘We do not talk of dying, and we do not talk of giving up. These are the subjects of conversation for weak and spineless men. We may be old, but we can still take what we want from this world for the years we have remaining to us. You have a boy, and he needs his father to be there for him until he is himself a man. He has lost a mother and a sister, and to lose you would break him before he has had a chance.’

‘I will be around for some years yet,’ I said. ‘There is no question about that. But with him beside me there is no way I can once again become part of this life.’

Don Calligaris leaned back in his chair. He looked at me directly, and though there was warmth and friendship in his eyes there was also the cold determination for which he was renowned. ‘This life… this thing of ours, it is not something that you leave behind, Ernesto. You make your choices, you make your mark, and that mark will always be your signature. You have lived the life you chose to live and, though there will always be things that a man regrets, it is nevertheless a stupid man who believes he can undo what he is, what he has become as a result of his actions. I watch the TV now, I see movies about the kind of people we are.’ He laughed. ‘We are portrayed as a gang of thugs, mindless hooligans in silk suits who kill for no purpose. We are seen as vicious and unreasonable men, without hearts, but nothing could be further from the truth. More often than not people have died because it was a matter of life and death. It was a matter of you or them. And then there is the matter of honor and agreement. Men make promises on the lives of their families, and then they betray not only those they promised but also themselves. These are the kind of men that die, and these men deserve nothing better.’

I listened to what Don Calligaris was saying, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it was true. Even as I had seen my own son drifting away from me and had contemplated the possibility of returning to America, I had known that if I returned it would not be because of his need alone. It would also be because of me. I was a man who had made choices which had involved the lives and deaths of so many people over the years. I knew that if I returned to New York, if I once again re-established my old friendships and bonds, then it would also mean once again wearing a coat cut from the same cloth. The man I was had been the result of what I had done, and what I had done could not now be undone. I was, and perhaps would always be, a part of this greater family. Just because I had a son did not change that fact.

I believed then that the difficulty I’d had in deciding to come back was not for fear of what Victor might find out, what he would see or hear, but my own unwillingness to resume my position in the grand scheme of things. I had a place, and in leaving I had left that place vacant. No-one had come forward to take my mantle and assume my responsibilities, and no-one ever would. No-one but me. And now I was here, sitting by the window in the Mulberry Street house; my son in the kitchen; Ten Cent in the back room watching a ball game on the TV; Don Fabio Calligaris, old and gray and wrinkled, opposite me in his chair, and I realized that whatever I had left behind possessed the patience of Job. My clothes had been cut. I had worn them. I believed I could take them off and store them away somewhere in perpetuity. This was not the case. They were the only clothes that had ever really fitted me.

‘So you see,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘We are who we are, no matter what the world and all its voices might say about us. These things we have done are as much a part of us as our fingerprints, and they cannot be removed, they cannot be exchanged for something else. I know you well enough, Ernesto-’ He smiled. He leaned forward and took my hand. I looked down at his liver-spotted skin and saw that his hand and mine were almost identical in their appearance. ‘I know you well enough to realize that you would never be happy crawling into some hole in Cuba and dying like some insignificant and inconsequential nobody. You are here. You have come home. The house where you once lived with Ten Cent is still there. The rooms are not the same-’ He laughed. ‘At least we took the trouble to have the walls painted! But those rooms are there for you and your son, and while he goes to school, while he learns to be a good American citizen, you can be here by my side and help me straighten out the mess these kids have made of our city. The five families were here. They may be quieter now, they may have less influence than they did thirty years ago, but they are still alive and well and living in America. America was our country, and with the last breath in my body it will stay our country if it has anything to do with me.’

He gripped my hand tighter. He was asking me to stay, to be one of the family again. I would return to a life I believed I had left behind. This time it would be different. This time I had a son of fourteen years old, and he would have to be protected from the truth of what I had done – and might yet do. This, of all things, would be the greatest challenge. And what was my other option? To visit New York, to see America for a handful of weeks, and then to return to Cuba, my son perhaps unhappy, homesick for the wide and awe-inspiring world he had glimpsed, and wait until I died?

I looked down at the floor. I closed my eyes.

I believed I had already made my decision as I sat on the edge of Victor’s bed that night and told him we would come.

‘Yes,’ I said, my voice barely audible. I looked up and cleared my throat. ‘Yes, Don Calligaris. I will stay here. This is my home, and I have returned.’

Don Calligaris clapped his hands together. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, his smile wide. He rose from the chair. I rose also. He reached out and placed his hands on my shoulders. He pulled me close and hugged me. ‘My brother,’ he said. ‘Ernesto Perez, my crazy Cuban brother… welcome home!’

It began with the little things; always the little things.

We made arrangements to keep my life with Victor separate from my life with Ten Cent and Don Calligaris. He was enrolled in a good school, a Catholic school with family connections. Money changed hands and Victor did not need to provide identification or a Social Security number. He arrived on time, he worked hard, he showed great promise in his studies, and he seemed happy. After school he would return to the house where we lived, back a half a block or so from Mulberry on Baxter, and here he would watch TV and occupy himself as he wished when I was not there. Ten Cent lived there too, and I employed a woman much as we had employed Claudia Vivó in Havana. Her name was Rosa Martinelli, a middle-aged Italian widow with teenage sons of her own, and Victor fell in with them, good boys, honest and studious, and often he would stay over at their house or visit the movies with them. I did not worry for Victor, he was in good company, and for this I was happy.

So the little things began.

‘Go and see Bracco,’ Don Calligaris would say. ‘Tell him we need the track money tonight. Tell him he has been late three weeks in a row and it will not be tolerated again.’

And Ten Cent and I would go and see Bracco, the two of us – old men in our fifties – and we would scare up the neighborhood and remind people who we were.

‘You’re the one,’ they would say. ‘You’re the one who clipped Jimmy Hoffa,’ and I would smile and say nothing, and they would read everything they wanted to read in that expression.

Sometimes we would meet at Salvatore’s and discuss business, and in such moments I could have been twenty years younger and feeling that rush of anticipation knowing that I would be out in a couple of hours, out and down the street to call on Angelina Maria Tiacoli.

You’re back again?

Yes.

You’re not gonna give up, are you? How was the music show? I didn’t go.

You want me to pay for the tickets, is that it?

No, I don’t want you to pay for the tickets.

So what do you want?

I want to take you out someplace nice, maybe see a movie-

And then the moment would pass, and I would look away towards the street and realize that, regardless of whether the past had waited here for me, there was no way I could find it again.

And then the little things became bigger things.

‘That Bracco, he’s got some kid called Giacomo something-or-other. He’s making some noise downtown about how he does this and that for the family. Go with Ten Cent, go find the kid, bust his fingers or something and tell him he better keep his freakin’ mouth shut or next time you’re gonna put some vents in his cranium.’

And me and Ten Cent would go down there, to some broken-down warehouse on the south end of Bowery, and I would hold Giacomo in a chair while Ten Cent broke three or four of the fingers on his right hand with a monkey wrench. Stuffed an oily rag in the kid’s mouth to keep him quiet, heard later that he got sick as a dog from whatever the fuck he might have swallowed, but sure as shit he kept his mouth shut from that point forward and we didn’t hear another word.

I didn’t kill anyone until the winter of 1998. A few weeks before Christmas it was, and the snow was thick and heavy along the sidewalks. I remember how much I felt the cold, something that had never bothered me before, and it came home to me that perhaps I should have been lying on a sunlounger near a pool outside of a rest-home in Tampa Bay. I had smiled at that thought as I left the house on Baxter, as I walked half a block down and climbed into the car where Ten Cent was waiting for me.

‘This is a fucking mess and then some,’ he said, and he clapped his gloved hands together and exhaled white mist towards the windscreen. ‘You ready for this?’

‘As I’ll ever be,’ I replied, and yet in my gut there was a cool sense of something unraveling. It was late evening, a little after nine. Victor was having a sleep-over at Mrs Martinelli’s house, believing perhaps that his old father had already gone to bed with a mug of cocoa, but no – here I was, in a car on the corner of Canal Street with his Uncle Sammy, and me and Uncle Sammy were going to drive across to the Lower East Side and clip some asshole called Benny Wheland. Benny was a smalltime loan-shark, one of those assholes who charged a quarter on the dollar per week. Hit him for a thousand bucks and three weeks later he’d come looking for seventeen hundred and fifty and expect you to be real polite and grateful when you gave it him back. He didn’t carry any muscle to speak of, just a couple of Irish fistfighters who fought bouts in the clubs around Water Street and Vladek Park. Meatpackers they were, nothing much more than that, but they were big enough to intimidate the kind of people Benny Wheland lent money to. The problem with Benny – sweetheart though he was – was a mouth the width of the Williamsburg Bridge, and when he opened it you could have ferried three cars and a tow truck right down his throat. He had laid up a deal with a fight arranger called Mordi Metz, a decidedly dishonest Jewish businessman who was known as Momo. Momo governed the financial matters relating to all fights on the Lower East Side. He had a strong working relationship with our people, and when he needed a little heavy-handing on paybacks we were always happy to oblige. We took a ten percent cut, we handed the cash clean and simple to Momo, and everyone was happy. Benny Wheland had welched on a pay-out to Momo, something in the region of thirty grand, and Momo called in a marker he was owed by the Lucheses. The Lucheses gave the job to Don Calligaris, and Don Calligaris gave it to us.

‘Simple thing really,’ he told me. ‘He’ll have the money, no question about it, and the deal is that whatever we get we keep all but a one-dollar token we give to Momo.’

‘One dollar?’ I asked. ‘What the hell we gotta give him one dollar for?’

Don Calligaris smiled. ‘It’s traditional. It’s a Jewish thing. They gotta get their pound of flesh, you know?’ He laughed, waved my question aside, and went back to business.

‘It’s worth it to us to keep Momo sweet,’ he said. ‘This guy Wheland is a fly in the fucking ointment as far as he’s concerned, about as significant in the grand scheme of things as a heap of dog crap on the sidewalk. It means nothing to us to clip him, and this is what Momo wants. Besides, Benny Wheland has been known to open his mouth a few too many times, and things would be altogether quieter if he was out of the way.’

I sat quiet for some moments.

‘Hell, Ernesto, if I had someone else to send, someone I could trust, I would send them. You know that. This may not seem like a big deal, thirty grand owed to some Jewish guy running the fight circuit, but I got my orders, and orders is orders as you well know. Now, you gonna do this thing or do I gotta get some pimple-faced teenager with an attitude to go fuck it up for me?’

I smiled. ‘Of course I’ll go,’ I said. I would not have questioned Don Calligaris’s request. It was not in my nature to go up against him. He was in a tight spot. He needed someone to do the work. I agreed to take care of it.

And so we sat in that car as New York went on snowing down on us, me and Ten Cent in our overcoats and gloves, and when Ten Cent started the car and I looked at him I realized that he would do these things for ever. Ten Cent was a soldier, he was not a thinker. He was a smart man, no question about it, but he had accepted the fact that he was not a leader. He was a man who made kings, not a king himself, whereas I had always questioned everything. I did not want to be a king, I did not want to sit in a chair someplace and give the orders to have men’s lives ended, but at that point in my life I didn’t want to be the emissary either. What I wanted I didn’t know, but in that moment I had agreed, and once I had agreed there was no going back. That unwillingness to compromise my word had perhaps been the only thing to keep me alive that long.

We drove south towards Chinatown and then headed into the Lower East Side along Broadway. We had been given Benny Wheland’s address, and we knew he lived alone. Apparently Benny had never trusted a woman enough to marry her, and the money that he had he kept beneath the floorboards.

‘You gonna do this?’ Ten Cent asked me as he pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t wanna do this, you know? You got a kid an’ all, and I know that must change the way you think about things. I’m easy come, easy go on this if you don’t actually wanna clip the guy.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘We’ll take it as it comes,’ I said. ‘Let’s go talk to Benny and see what he has to say for himself, eh?’

Ten Cent nodded and opened the door. A freezing gust of wind and snow rushed in to greet us, and Ten Cent swore. He stepped out and slammed the car door shut.

I climbed out on the other side and walked around to where he stood. We looked up and down the street both ways. Smart folks were inside bundled up in blankets watching the tube. Only us – two old men in topcoats and scarves – were dumb enough to be out on a night like this.

Benny opened the door but it was held by two security chains. He peered out at us through the four-inch gap, his face screwed up against the cold wind that hurried in to piss him off.

‘Benny,’ Ten Cent said. ‘How ya doin’ there? You gonna open the freakin’ door and let us in or we gotta stand out here like a coupla schmucks freezin’ our fucking balls off?’

Benny hesitated for a second. It amazed me, never ceased to amaze me, that in situations like this people didn’t realize what was going to happen. Or perhaps they did, and they knew there was an inevitability to it, and thus they consigned themselves to fate. Perhaps they would survive. Perhaps they believed that God might be on their side and see them through. I knew for a fact that God was the greatest welch-artist that ever existed.

‘Whaddya want?’ Benny growled through the narrowing gap between the door and the frame.

‘Aah, come on for Christ’s sake, Benny. We got to talk money with you. We got a means to work out this thing with Momo and it won’t take more than a coupla minutes and then we’ll be on our way.’

I didn’t know what Benny Wheland thought then, but his expression changed. Perhaps he believed that Momo, and whoever else Momo might have been connected with, wouldn’t have sent two old men over to sort him out. Maybe he believed that if he was gonna get clipped it would be some wiseass kids who just muscled their way in and shot him in the face.

He hesitated a moment longer, and then he slammed the door.

I heard the chains releasing, both of them, and then the door opened wide. Ten Cent and I went into Benny Wheland’s house with gratitude and.38s.

There was a lot of talk, much of it from Benny, a little from Ten Cent, and after a while I got real tired of listening and shot Benny in the face.

When I walked over and took a look at him it was difficult to see anything but a whole handful of shit around his eyes and nose.

Ten Cent stood there with his jaw on the floor.

‘Fuck, Ernesto… what the fuck?’

I frowned. ‘Whaddya mean, what the fuck?’

‘Shit, man, you coulda told me you was gonna do that.’

‘What the hell d’you mean I coulda told you? What the hell did we come over here for? A cup of fuckin’ tea and a chat with the asshole?’

Ten Cent shook his head. He lifted his right hand and massaged his ear. ‘No, I don’t mean that. You know I don’t mean that. I mean you coulda told me you was gonna just shoot the guy. I coulda put my fucking hands over my ears or something. Jesus, feels like I ain’t gonna hear right for a fucking week.’

I smiled and Ten Cent started laughing.

‘You didn’t wanna listen to any more of that horseshit, did you?’

Ten Cent shook his head. ‘Guy was a fucking radio station all by himself. Now, let’s find this fucking money, right?’

We went through every room in the house. We prised up the floorboards, ripped open the backs of chairs and sofas. We found food cartons and dirty washing pretty much everywhere we went. We even found the remains of something that had been cooked black in the oven and then just left there because Benny hadn’t been bothered to clean up after himself. The guy had lived like an animal. That said, regardless of his personal hygiene and housecare skills, we collected together something close to a hundred and ten thousand dollars, much of it in fifties and hundreds. It was a good take, better than Don Calligaris had expected, and as a show of good faith he sent a single dollar over to Momo in an envelope, and a further thirty grand in a jiffy bag.

‘Straightforward enough?’ he’d asked me when we’d returned to Mulberry Street.

‘Straight as ever,’ I’d told him.

‘Good job, Ernesto. Good to get the old juices flowing again, eh?’

I smiled. I didn’t know what to say, and so I said nothing. I had done what was required, what was asked of me, and by the time I sat in my own room, a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, my feet up on the edge of the table and a movie on the TV, I felt distant enough from what had happened to feel absolutely nothing at all. I was numb, insensate to Benny Wheland and Momo and whoever else might have had a beef with either of them, and I just wanted a little time to myself to gather my thoughts.

It was then that I thought of Angelina and Lucia. I had not permitted myself the luxury of real memories since their deaths. After the shock, the horror, the pain and grief and crying jags that had racked my body for so many nights in the first weeks in Havana, I had separated myself out from everything that had happened and tried to start all over again. At least mentally and emotionally, or that’s what I believed. It was not true. I had not overcome my sense of rage and despair about their loss, and though Don Calligaris had several times assured me that there were people still looking into what had happened and why, who had been behind the attempt on his life that had killed my wife and daughter, I knew well enough the way this family worked to realize that he was merely placating me. In this life of ours, things happened and they were forgotten. Within an hour, perhaps a day at most, Benny Wheland would be forgotten. The police would find him after some neighbor reported the smell of his decomposing body in a fortnight, and there would be a perfunctory investigation. Some eight-year-old kid two weeks out of detective school would come to the conclusion that it was a straightforward robbery and homicide, and that would be the end of that. Benny Wheland would be buried or cremated or whatever the hell was planned for him, and there would be nothing further to say. His death would be as insignificant as his life. Much like my father.

It was the same for Angelina and Lucia. Someone somewhere had ordered Don Calligaris’s death, a bomb had been placed in his car, Don Calligaris had survived without a scratch. Someone somewhere would make a phone call to someone somewhere else, the differences would have been resolved in a handful of minutes, and the matter would have been closed. End of story. Evidently whoever had ordered the hit no longer wanted Don Calligaris dead or they would have tried again, and they would have kept on trying no matter how many attempts it took, and no matter who might have gotten in the way. Angelina and Lucia, well, they had gotten in the way, and had I been blood, had we been a part of this family for real, then perhaps someone might have done something. But I was Cuban, and Angelina had been the unwanted product of an unwanted embarrassment to the family, and it was not necessary for anyone to balance the scales in my favor. My connection to Don Calligaris had been enough to put my family in the line of fire, and though I bore no grudge against him, though I understood that he could do nothing directly to help me, I also knew that someone somewhere was responsible, and someone should pay.

That thought stayed with me until I slept, but when I woke it had left my mind. I did not forget, I merely changed its order of priority. It was there, it would never disappear, and there would come a time to do something about it.

The summer of 1999, and Victor’s seventeenth birthday in June. It was then that I met the first girl he brought home. She was an Italian girl, a fellow student from his school, and in her deep brown eyes I saw both the innocence of youth and the blossoming of adulthood. Her name was Elizabetta Pertini, though Victor called her Liza and this was the name by which she was known. In some small way she was not unlike Victor’s mother, and when she laughed, as she often did, there was a way she would raise her hand and half-cover her mouth that was enchanting. She wore her raven hair long, often tied at the back with a ribbon, and I knew within a matter of weeks, good Catholic girl or not, that she was the one who took my son and showed him that which had been shown to me by Ruben Cienfuegos’s cousin Sabina. He changed after that, as all young men do, and he became independent to an extent I had not seen before. Sometimes he was gone for two or three days, merely calling to let me know that he was fine, that he was with friends, that he would be back before the week was out. I did not complain, his grades were good, he studied well, and it seemed that Liza had carried something into his life that had been altogether missing. My son was no longer lonely. For this alone I would have been eternally grateful to Elizabetta Pertini.

The discussion that took place between her father and myself in the spring of the following year did not go well. Apparently Mr Pertini, a well-known bakery owner from SoHo, had discovered that his daughter, believed to be visiting with girlfriends, perhaps studying for her school examinations, had been spending time with Victor. This subterfuge, orchestrated no doubt by Victor, had continued for the better part of eight months, and though I was tempted to ask Mr Pertini how he had managed to be so utterly unobservant of his daughter’s comings and going, I held my tongue. Mr Pertini was irate and inconsolable. Apparently, and this unknown to his daughter, he intended her to marry the son of a family friend, a young man called Albert de Mita who was – even as we spoke – studying to be an architect.

I listened patiently to what Mr Pertini had to say. I sat in the front room of my own house on Baxter where he had come to find me, and I heard every word that came from his lips. He was a blind man, a man of ignorance and greed, and it wasn’t long before I discovered that his business had been struggling financially for many years, that the intended marriage of his daughter into the de Mita family would reap a financial benefit sufficient to rescue him from potential ruin. He was more interested in his own social status than the happiness of his daughter, and for this I could not forgive him.

But there was a difficulty with whatever challenge I might have raised to his objections regarding my son courting his daughter. Pertini was a man of repute. He was not a gangster, he was not part of this New York family, and thus any issue of loyalty to Don Calligaris would carry no weight. Thirty years ago he would have been visited by Ten Cent and Michael Luciano perhaps. They would have shared a glass of wine with him and explained that he was interfering in the business of the heart, and sufficient funds to compensate for the loss of his daughter’s ‘dowry’ would have been delivered in a discreet brown package to one of his bakeries. But now, here in the latter part of the twentieth century, such matters could no longer be resolved in the old way. Any suggestion I might have made to Pertini about money would have been taken as offensive. No matter his thought or intention, no matter the fact that he knew I understood his motives, on the face of it he would have been insulted. That would have been his part to play, and he would have played it to the hilt. He professed an appreciation of his daughter’s best interests. He knew as little of those as he did of my business. But had I insisted that there was a change in his plan, had I attempted to persuade him to reconsider who his daughter might marry, then Pertini – I felt sure – would have done all he could to raise questions about my reputation and credibility. That route would have been the route to his death for certain, and however much I loved Victor, however much I might have cared for his happiness and the welfare of his heart, I also felt that I could play no part in depriving Liza of her father.

The relationship was ended abruptly in April 2000. Victor, not yet eighteen, was inconsolable. For days he did not venture from his room further than the bathroom and the kitchen, and even then it was to eat next to nothing.

‘But why?’ he asked me incessantly, and no matter how many times I tried to explain that such things were often more a matter of politics than love, there was nothing I could do to make him understand. He did not blame me, merely resented my apparent lack of effort in preventing what had happened. Liza was grounded at home for those weeks, and on one occasion when Victor attempted to call her the attempt was cut short within seconds by her father. Moments later Mr Pertini called me at the house and told me in no uncertain terms that I was responsible for my son, that if I did not ensure there were no further attempts to contact his daughter then he would seek an injunction against him for harassment. I assured him that no further attempt would be made. To me it was obvious why such a thing had to be prevented, but there was no way I could explain that to Victor. Again he saw me as failing to defend what he considered to be his God-given right.

It was not the only issue that contributed to my position in New York becoming untenable, but it perhaps marked a watershed. The matter that finally prompted our departure was far more serious indeed, at least for me, if not for Victor, though had we stayed there would have been questions asked that could never have been answered. The events of the latter part of March and the first week of April that year were perhaps indicative of how single-minded and relentless I had become in attempting to find some meaning for my own life. Back of all of it was the ghost of my wife, that of my daughter also, and though they were never far from my thoughts, it was in my actions that I recognized how unfeeling and brutal I would become if I did not assuage my sense of guilt about their deaths. That guilt could only be tempered by revenge, I knew that as well as I knew my own name, and it was in those weeks that my feelings of merciless rage were precisely demonstrated.

Where we had possessed strong ties with the Irish in Chicago, those of the Cicero Crew like Kyle Brennan, Gerry McGowan and Daniel Ryan, it was not the same in New York. New York, Manhattan in particular, had become a playground for all who wanted a piece of the territory and what it had to offer. Street-gangs of Puerto Ricans and Hispanics had running gun battles with the blacks and Mexicans; the Poles and the Jews were attempting to milk the Lower East Side and the Bowery of all it could give them; East Village, the southern end of SoHo, and Little Italy had always belonged to us, a tradition as old as the Bible itself, but towards the end of the ’90s the Irish, their leaders supported by the millions that had been invested in the construction industry, started to tread on our toes and demand a place at the table. Don Calligaris had no time for them – he had had little time for their ways and worries in Chicago – but here they served to remind him that things were changing, that things could not always stay the same, and that he too was approaching the end of his usefulness, and thus perhaps his life.

There were primarily two factions within the Irish community who held any kind of position: the Brannigans and the O’Neills. The Brannigans came from the construction background, their ancestors having built much of that part of the city at the turn of the previous century, but the O’Neills were new blood, the founder of their lineage a man called Callum O’Neill, an immigrant from the mid-west who believed he would make his presence felt in the capital of the world. There was no love lost between the two families and their bastard offspring. They would argue between themselves about the ownership of bars, bookies and boxing clubs. They were devoutly and vocally Irish Catholic; they built their own churches and turned up in their Sunday bows and brights to be as hypocritical as it was possible to be in front of their God and the Virgin Mary. After church was done they would drink until they fell down in the street, and then they would get up to knock each other six ways to Christmas just for the hell of it. They were like children, squabbling in the sandbox about who would win or lose which half of which street, but that did not make them any less dangerous. They were inbred and vicious, they did not have the class and intellect of the Sicilians and Genovese, and they didn’t seem to care whose toes they walked on in order to get what they wanted.

In the last week of April Don Calligaris sent Ten Cent down to fetch me from the Baxter Street house. Victor was still bruised, but the wounds in his heart were healing and he was finding more time for his friends and the Martinelli boys.

‘Sit down,’ Don Calligaris told me when I entered the kitchen. The room was filled with smoke as if he had been seated there for some hours contemplating some difficulty.

‘We have an issue,’ he said quietly, ‘and was there any way to deal with this without you then I would take that route, but this is an issue of significance and it needs to be addressed quickly and professionally.’

Someone needed to die; that was evident from his manner and the tone of his voice. Someone needed to die and he wanted me to kill them.

I respected Don Calligaris enough to let him talk, to hear him out, before I explained to him how this could not be done by me.

‘We have the Irish problem knocking at our door and we need to send them a message,’ he said.

Ten Cent stepped into the room, closed the door and took a chair beside me.

‘It needs to be a very clear and concise message, a message that cannot be misconstrued or mistaken for anything else, and a decision has been made that that message needs to be delivered by us.’

‘Who is it?’ I asked.

‘There is a history with the Brannigans,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘They are part of old New York. They have been here a hundred years or more, but this new crowd, these O’Neills, they have been here since last goddam weekend and they are becoming tiresome. Our people have spoken with the Brannigans, we have drawn some lines in the sand regarding territories and dues, and it has been agreed that we will take care of the O’Neill problem so as to avoid an all-out war between the Irish factions.’

‘So who is it?’ I repeated, knowing before Don Calligaris spoke whose name he would give.

‘James O’Neill himself.’

I exhaled slowly. James O’Neill was the godfather, the old man himself, the son of Callum O’Neill and the one who had brought the power and money to this part of Manhattan’s Irish quarter. He was a heavily guarded man, a man treated like the Pope himself, and to be responsible for his death was to be responsible for my own. To kill James O’Neill would mean a retribution killing almost certainly, and to protect itself the Luchese family would have to give me up. They would not wish to, but that was the way of this world, and with Victor’s life at stake also it would mean disappearing once again, disappearing somewhere where they would not think of looking.

‘You understand what this means, Ernesto?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I understand, Don Calligaris.’

‘And you understand what you would have to do as a result?’

‘Yes, I would have to vanish into thin air never to be seen again.’

‘And this thing… you would be willing to do this thing for us?’

‘There is no-one else?’ I asked, but in itself it was nothing more than a rhetorical question.

Don Calligaris shook his head. ‘There is no-one else who could disappear as easily as you. There are other men who could do this, other men who would do it very willingly, but they have families here, parents and grandparents, wives and children and sisters. To make them disappear would be too difficult, and it’s not as if we could enrol them in the Witness Protection Program.’

Don Calligaris smiled, but his moment of attempted levity did not unburden the weight of responsibility I felt. What he was asking of me was perhaps the most difficult thing I had ever been asked. Killing O’Neill would be very difficult. It would be like killing Don Calligaris… no, more difficult than that, because Don Calligaris had only two people to look after him, myself and Ten Cent, and many were the days when we were in the Baxter Street house while Don Calligaris was in the Mulberry house alone. James O’Neill had at least two or three men with him at all times, men who would be all too quick to take a bullet for him and who would come after me unrelentingly until they saw me dead. If I did this I would have to make no mistake, and once it was done I would have to disappear immediately from New York and go somewhere where I could not be found. I had not only myself but Victor to think of, and to risk his life after all that had happened would be too high a price to pay.

‘I would never be able to come back,’ I said. ‘I would have to leave New York and go somewhere… somewhere unknown even to you, and I would never be able to speak to you. If I was a younger man I could leave for ten years, perhaps more, and then I could return, but at my age-’ I shook my head. ‘It would be the end of me as part of this family.’

‘I have been instructed to tell you that you will be given everything you ask for. I have been told that you will be paid half a million dollars and you will be respectfully and graciously retired from the family, and that no-one will ever ask anything of you again. You will be treated as a made man, perhaps the first non-Italian made man in the entire history of the Luchese family. This is in itself a great honor, but I know you well enough to understand that money and status are not important to you. I know that the only important thing for you is the life of your son, but here is where you can take advantage of this. You can do this and then leave with Victor. You can go anywhere you want, and all the assistance you might need to accomplish that will be provided. Wherever you decide to go you can start a new life, Ernesto, a life without violence or killing… where people will not interfere with Victor’s happiness; a life where there is no chance he will find out what you have done and the things that have happened in the past.’

Don Calligaris understood me. He knew that the only way he would ever get me to do this was to present it in such a way as to benefit Victor. He was right. It was a clear decision. There was no question in my mind that at some point Victor would start to see things I didn’t want him to see, perhaps hear things in error and begin to put the pieces of this puzzle together, and this I wished to avoid at all costs. Doing this would mean that any such eventuality would be completely avoided. There was a choice, of course there was a choice. There was never a situation in life where choices could not be made. But this time, and for the reason that had been given me, a reason I felt to be true, I believed that the choice was simple.

‘I will do this,’ I said quietly. I could feel the tension within the room relax. Like the air released from a balloon. Don Calligaris had been charged with this task, and though Ten Cent would have given his life to honor Don Calligaris’s request, though he would have taken a bus to O’Neill’s house and waltzed in, guns blazing, with no concern for his own life, I could understand why Don Calligaris wanted me to see it through. No matter the past, no matter the years behind us, I was still an outsider, an immigrant from Cuba and the back end of the world. I could do this and there would be silence once I was gone. That was why it had to be me.

Don Calligaris reached out and took my hand in his. ‘You understand what this means to me?’ he asked.

‘Yes, Don Calligaris,’ I replied. ‘I understand what this means.’

‘You will have to prepare yourself in every way. Once this matter is dealt with you will have to leave without delay. It would be wise of course to send Victor on before you, perhaps some reason you could give him, somewhere he would be happy to go, and then you could join him afterwards.’

‘I will see to all the details,’ I said. ‘I won’t speak of them to you, nor to Ten Cent, and therefore you will never be in a situation where you are required to give information you do not wish to. You can have the money ready for me?’

Don Calligaris smiled. ‘The money is already available for whenever you want it.’

I tilted my head and frowned. ‘You were so certain I would do this?’

Don Calligaris nodded. He placed his hand on my shoulder. ‘Ernesto, you and I have been brothers for the better part of thirty years. I know you as well as any man, and I know that once you give your word there is nothing that can sway you from it. Who else could I trust with half a million dollars and my life’s reputation?’

I rose from the table. I walked around it with my arms wide. Don Calligaris rose also and we hugged.

‘We have had some life together,’ he said when he released me.

I stepped back. A tight fist of emotion lodged in my chest and I found it hard to speak. I looked at an old man facing me, an old man who had once been brash and arrogant and believed he would one day rule the world, and I realized that in some way he’d been more of a father to me than anyone else.

‘Don Calligaris-’ I started, but I could not continue.

He smiled and nodded his head. ‘I understand,’ he said, ‘and there is no need to speak. We have lived this life, you and I, and wherever we might find ourselves we will not be among those who will ask themselves what would have happened if they had sought such adventures. We sought them, we lived them, and now we are old we must look after ourselves, eh? There are people now dead because of us… but there are people who would not be alive had we not protected them. This thing of ours, eh? This thing of ours…’

I reached out my hand and took his arm. I held it tight and closed my eyes.

Don Calligaris closed his hand over mine. ‘For the rest of your life,’ he whispered, ‘I bless you and your son.’

I was released, and then I turned and hugged Ten Cent. He said nothing, but in his eyes I could see that he would remember this day as something important and meaningful.

I stayed a few minutes longer. Don Calligaris told me to let him know when the money was needed and it would be delivered to the Baxter Street house.

I stood for a moment on the porch stoop, the smell of spring in the air, a cool breeze making its way down Mulberry Street, a street where once upon an age ago I had walked hand in hand with Angelina Maria Tiacoli, and then I turned and looked towards the sky.

‘For your son, Angelina,’ I whispered, ‘and for your brother, Lucia… for you I will do this thing so he can begin his own life free from the past.’

And then I pulled my collar up around my throat and started walking home.

That night I made my decision. To return to Cuba would have been madness. Chicago was out of the question also, for what was there in Chicago but the memory of a life I had chosen to leave? Los Angeles, Las Vegas, even Miami – all of them carried their own ghosts. It was when I thought of something Don Giancarlo Ceriano had told me so many years before that it came to me.

The thing that a man most fears will be the thing that eventually kills him.

And I made my decision.

My life would end where it had begun: New Orleans, state of Louisiana.

It was the end of March, April would be upon us in days, and I broached the subject of a trip with Victor who seemed at once enthused.

‘The Mardi Gras?’ he said. ‘But why?’

I smiled. ‘We are here in America, Victor. You said you wanted to see the things I had seen. I was in New Orleans for some years when I was a very small boy and I saw the Mardi Gras. It is like seeing the Pope address the people in St Peter’s Square, like being in Times Square when the New Year turns… it is one of those things that you must witness to believe it can happen.’

‘And when would we go?’ he asked excitedly.

‘Almost at once… a couple of days perhaps. I have planned for you to go ahead without me-’

Victor frowned. ‘You’re not coming?’

I laughed. ‘Of course I will come. It will be a family holiday. But there is something I have to do that will take me a few days and then I will come down after you. We will meet there and stay for a week or so and then we will come back. Besides, there are so many things to do and see, so many places to go, I don’t think I would find the energy to keep up with you.’

Victor was nodding enthusiastically.

‘So you are pleased with this idea?’

‘Pleased? I think it’s a fantastic idea. Let me go tell the Martinellis.’

I shook my head. ‘Let me make arrangements,’ I said. ‘Until the arrangements are made I would ask you to say nothing of this to anyone, not even your friends the Martinellis.’

‘But-’

I raised my hand. ‘Remember the terrible trouble you caused for me in Havana when you wanted to come here?’

Victor smiled, looked a little embarrassed.

‘Well, we did as you wished. We came here. I did that for you even though I did not want to come, and now I am asking something of you. I do not want you to tell anyone where you are going, okay?’

Victor looked confused. ‘Are we in some trouble?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We are not in trouble, but there is a reason I want this to be only between you and me, and I want you to give me your word you will keep it a secret.’

Victor opened his mouth to say something.

‘Your word, Victor?’

He nodded. ‘I don’t understand, but if that’s the way you want it-’

‘I do, Victor.’

‘Then you have my word.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now go and prepare some things for your journey.’

And so it was done. On the third day of April I saw Victor board a train bound for New Orleans. He took with him clothes and money, one and a half thousand dollars in cash, and I had called ahead and made a hotel reservation for him in the center of the city. He would be there to see the beginning of the Mardi Gras. I prayed to a God in whom I did not believe that I would be there also.

I stood on the platform until the train had vanished from sight, and then I turned and walked back to my car. I drove to the Baxter Street house to collect my things, among them a suitcase containing half a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills. I carried my things to the car, stowed them in the trunk, and then I drove up through SoHo to the West Village, where I took a room in a cheap hotel, the fee paid in cash, a false name registered in the book.

I sat in the dank-smelling room for a little more than two hours. I waited until it was dark, and then retraced my journey back to the Bowery district.

At seventeen minutes past nine that evening, outside a small and fashionable Italian trattoria on Chrystie Street, eyewitnesses would say they saw a middle-aged man, graying hair, a long overcoat, step from the alleyway beside the building and open fire with two handguns. In a relentless hail of bullets three men would go down – James O’Neill, a second called Liam Flaherty, a third called Lonnie Duggan. Flaherty and Duggan were well-known boxing celebrities from the Lower East Side circuit. O’Neill was a multi-millionaire construction heavyweight on his way to the theater.

The man, he of the graying hair and long overcoat, did not so much as run from the scene as expertly dodge between the passing cars and disappear down a facing alleyway on the other side of the road. No-one could give a clear description, some said he looked Italian, others said he seemed more Greek or Cypriot. The guns were never found despite a three-day fine-tooth-comb scouring of the area by more than thirty policemen and a team from Manhattan’s 7th Precinct Crime Scene Investigation Unit. The man disappeared also, like a ghost, like a vague memory of himself, and those that mourned the loss of O’Neill, Flaherty and Duggan were as nothing amidst the vast rush of noise that was Manhattan.

Had you followed me that night you would have seen me hail a taxicab three blocks away. That taxicab took me back to the hotel, where I collected my things and left immediately, taking another cab ride across the Williamsburg Bridge and all the way to Brooklyn. There I took a train bound for Trenton, New Jersey, where I stayed for a further two days before leaving for New Orleans.

As I departed, I tried not to think about where I was going and what it would mean to me. I was away, I had done what I had promised and I had escaped. Victor was safe. No-one but I knew where he was, and that was enough for me. I knew I was entering the final chapter of my life, but I went without fear, without the sense of impending violence that had so often accompanied me, and safe in the knowledge that my son would survive me and know nothing of his father’s past.

To me that was the most important thing.

It was what his mother would have wished.