Murder at Union Station

FOUR

How much longer to Washington?” Russo asked the conductor.

“Should be in Union Station in about forty-five minutes,” she said.

He nodded and closed his eyes again, the gentle swaying of the train combining with his natural fatigue to cause drowsiness.

He’d bought a piece of Danish and coffee from the café car, but had to ask another passenger to carry it for him to his seat because he was unsteady on his feet. He silently cursed his increasing feebleness. And cursed the watery, lukewarm coffee.

There was a time-and it didn’t seem very long ago-that he was strong and fast, a tough guy who could hold his own in a fight with anyone, including the bigger boys from the New York City neighborhood where he was born and raised. And he could run faster than any of them, which came in handy when boosting merchandise from local stores and having to outrun the owners, or when escaping from the local beat cop.

His father, Nicholas Russo, had come to New York from Italy as a young boy and worked hard to raise and support his growing family. After a series of odd jobs, he was hired by a local bakery to drive its delivery truck and had done that until he dropped dead of a heart attack at forty-eight, leaving his wife, Lillian, and six children without a source of support.

In a sense, his father’s death liberated the fifteen-year-old Louis. He’d begun hanging out with local members of the Gambino family, whose social club was two doors down the street from the building in which the Russo family lived. His father had forbidden his son from hanging out with many of his newfound streetwise friends, and had smacked him one day when Louis returned with money earned by running errands for the mobsters. Now, with his father dead and the family really needing money, he felt free to pursue what soon became a full-time criminal career-loan-sharking, numbers collections, running prostitutes, and acting as an enforcer for his second family. It was in that role that he committed his first murder, whacking a Gambino soldier who’d been accused of holding back money, skimming from his loan-sharking operation. The twenty-one-year-old Russo took no particular pleasure from the act, nor did he suffer any particular pain. It was what he’d been paid to do, and he’d done it effectively, including dumping the body in a landfill. The body was eventually found and Louis attended the funeral, where he paid his respects to the victim’s widow and children.

Those were good days, he mused, half asleep, dreams and fragments of such memories filtering in and out of his mind. Better days than what the last dozen years had been.

He straightened and looked at his watch. The conductor had said they were forty-five minutes from D.C.’s Union Station. That was fifteen minutes ago. He neatly gathered the paper in which the Danish had been wrapped, put it in the half-empty coffee cup, checked that his return airline tickets were still in his jacket pocket, and gazed out the window as the train neared its destination. Then, sitting up straight, he fell deeply asleep.