Road to Paradise

Ten

Tony Accardo did not fool around.

Not in any sense of the phrase — as a businessman he was no-nonsense and fair, avoiding violence when possible but (if need be) sanctioning the worst, lesson-setting brutality. As a father he was aces — generous and loving, while not an easy mark; he’d made it clear to his two boys and two girls that his way was nothing they wanted to pursue, that the best that could be said for their papa’s profession was it had paved the road to a better life for the kids of a six-grade dropout son of an immigrant shoemaker.

And as a husband with never-ending opportunities, Tony had never once — not in almost forty years of marriage — cheated on his wife. When he married Clarice in 1934, she had been the best-looking blondie on the chorus line; and when he looked at her now, he looked past the extra pounds (who was he to talk?) and saw his same slender sweetheart.

Just because she’d been a show-biz honey didn’t mean Clarice had ever been a bimbo. She had a sharp mind and took college classes, educating herself, traveling the world to increase her knowledge, sometimes dragging Tony along. Her handling of the children was caring but disciplined, minus any favoritism; and when the Accardos hosted a party — Tony loved such gatherings — she was the most gracious hostess in Chicago.

Clarice was back home in Chicago, that is River Forest, in their ranch house on Ashland, the smaller (sixteen-room) digs he built when his Tudor mansion on Franklin caught too much media heat — God he missed his “Palace,” with the basement bowling alley and all that room for his antiques, and its vast backyard where he could throw wingdings like his annual Fourth of July bash.

But guys he trusted, including Murray Humphries, Paul Ricca, and his attorney Sidney Horshak (smartest man in the world) had preached to him of going more low-key — and Tony listened; like Frank Nitti, he knew that attracting attention was a bad thing. So — when federal heat and publicity made it necessary to send Giancana packing to Mexico, and Tony came off the bench to take the top chair again — King Accardo, back in the limelight, bit the bullet and sold his Palace.

Clarice didn’t mind; she loved the new house as much as the mansion — “It’s homey, Tony, it’s cozy, and we’re getting older” — and she adored the California digs, too, a low-slung, stone-and-wood-and-glass modern ranch number looking over a fairway of Indian Wells Country Club, twenty miles outside of Palm Springs. This second home was nicely secluded, no neighbors half a mile in any direction, except for the country club. His wife spent lots of time out here with him, but this was a business trip.

So the quartet of cuties scurrying around his swimming pool on this sultry Sunday night in June — two blondes, a brunette, and a redhead in bikinis that combined wouldn’t make up a single respectable swimsuit — were nothing more than eye candy to Tony, and perks for the boys.

Phil and Vic and Jimmy T. and Rocco, in swimsuits and open Hawaiian shirts to show off curly hair and gold necklaces, were playing poker at a dollar-bill-littered table, the shoulder-holstered tools of their trade slung over the arms of their beach chairs; though the sun had long since set, floodlights kept the pool and surrounding patio bright as noon.

This was two-thirds of his security force; two other men — Uzis on shoulder straps — were beyond the seven-foot tan-brick wall, taking turns, one staying at the front gate, the other walking the outer perimeter. They wore white sport shirts and khaki shorts, which amused Accardo; he’d said to one of them, Dave, “Kinda takes the edge off the Uzi, don’t it, looking like a tennis pro?”

“Ah, Mr. Accardo, you’re a riot,” Dave had said, and snorted a laugh, and waved it off.

Dave was a Chicago boy like all Tony’s bodyguards, and your average eggplant was smarter. That was the trouble with security staff: you couldn’t waste your best people in a job like that; but, shit, man, you were putting your goddamn life in their hands!

Not that Tony was worried. In all his years in the Outfit, from bootlegger to bodyguard, from capo to top dog, he’d never had anybody hit him at home. Oh, there was that burglar crew who invaded the River Forest place, when he and Clarice were out here having their housewarming party; but that had been strictly money, and anyway all those guys were dead now, castrated, throats slit, all seven of them.

The girls were giggly and cute — starlets Sidney, with his endless Hollywood connections, had rounded up — and seemed to like each other more than the boys they were here to entertain. Tony didn’t mind watching their boobies bounce — the redhead was something, a regular Jane Russell — and he liked the way their firm curvy butts didn’t quite fit inside the bikini bottoms.

No law against looking.

Tony himself was in a knee-length terrycloth robe — once the sun went down, it got cool, not that these kids noticed — and leaning back in a lounge-style deck chair, watching through big heavy-framed bifocals the size of goddamn safety glasses (Clarice picked them out — said they were “in style”). He was as dark as these sun-crazy starlets, but it came natural, and daytime he usually sat under an umbrella, avoiding the rays. Mostly he sat out here in the evening. Like tonight.

A broad-shouldered five ten, two hundred pounds, Anthony Accardo — “retired” boss of the Chicago Outfit — still had at sixty-eight the physical bearing of a street thug; his hairline had receded some, the hair mostly white now, the oval face grooved with years of responsibility, the nose a bulbous lump, with small dark eyes that had seen too much.

Smoking a sizable Cuban cigar, sipping a Scotch rocks, Tony was talking with Sidney about the Giancana problem.

Sidney sat in a beach chair, angled to make eye contact with his client. The slender, well-tanned, gray-haired attorney wore a yellow short-sleeve golfing shirt, dark green slacks, and moccasins with yellow socks, and looked younger than his sixty-one years. His features were unremarkable, small eyes crowding a long nose and a slash of mouth; nothing about him was distinctive except his intelligence and bearing.

Between them was a small round glass-topped table for their ashtrays and drinks; Horshak had a martini, but he’d hardly touched it.

“This terrible thing at the Cal-Neva,” Horshak was saying, in between drags on a filter-king cigarette, “it’s an embarrassment, a public-relations disaster. We have Walter Cronkite talking about us, Tony — it needs to stop.”

“I don’t know much more than you do, Sid,” Tony admitted with a shrug. “Two of Mooney’s crew get made dead in the Cal parking lot, and take some poor kid with ’em who didn’t have shit to do with anything.”

A small smile twitched the lipless line of the lawyer’s mouth. “That last, Tony, is not precisely true. Do you know who that kid is? Or rather, was?”

“No. Just some local twerp, not tied to us at—”

“This is Cal-Neva, Tony — everything is tied to us.” Horshak sat forward. “My people did some discreet checking — the young man was dating a young lady... by the name of Anna Satariano.”

“Satar...” Tony sat up, swung around, and sat on the edge of the lounge chair to better face the attorney. “Michael Satariano’s daughter?”

“That’s right, Tony.” Horshak blew smoke out his nostrils like a suntanned dragon. “And judging by descriptions of the shooter in the Lincoln? The individual the Giancana assassins were apparently trying to take down could well be Satariano. In fact, I’d say it must have been Satariano.”

Tony was shaking his head, dumbfounded. “The girl at the scene... who climbed in the car and got away with the shooter... That was the Satariano girl? But the Satarianos, they fuckin’ moved!”

“That’s one way to put it,” Horshak said drily.

“What would they be doin’ back in Tahoe, for Christ’s sake? They’re in WITSEC someplace-the-fuck!”

The attorney offered a tiny eyebrow shrug. “Apparently the girl came back home... for prom.”

“Shit.” Tony let out a huge sigh; he sucked on the cigar, blew smoke, shook his head. “What the hell is that crazy Giancana up to?”

“Trying to hit Michael Satariano, obviously — Michael Satariano, who came out of federal protection to go after his daughter. And as I say, I think we can reasonably extrapolate that the child ran off from the new life enforced upon her by WITSEC, to come home for prom.”

Tony frowned. “What’re you sayin’, Sid? That Mooney had people sittin’ in Tahoe all these months, watchin’, in case Satariano got homesick and turned the hell back up? That’s crazy! What the fuck is going on here?”

The attorney drew thoughtfully on the cigarette, then said, “I would say Giancana is trying to protect himself. Michael Satariano witnessed many things over the years.”

“Michael knows plenty about me, too,” Tony said gruffly. “He was my guy for a couple years, during and just after the war. Top notch, too.”

Horshak agreed, nodding. “And with his war hero status, he’s been very useful to us over the years.”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“And how do you think his celebrity stands to impact our interests in the public eye now, Tony?”

Tony thought about that, clearly an avenue his mind had not previously gone down. Finally he said, “Not in a good way?”

“Not in a good way, no.” The attorney gestured with two open hands. “But Mooney Giancana rarely considers such subtleties — he’s the original loose cannon. All Giancana knows is he would like to have Satariano removed from the equation — which is understandable. After all, we know Giancana is positioning himself to take over again — with Ricca dead, and you retired, Mooney’s a charismatic figure who—”

“Charisma my ass!” Tony chewed on the cigar as he spoke. “He’s a demented prick with delusions of grandeur and a talent for getting his ugly mug in the media. We shipped his ass to Mexico because of the attention he was attracting, and now he’s back, what, a month? And we got Senate hearings and fuckin’ shoot-outs!”

“Actually, Tony, Mexico is the key to this...”

Accardo and Paul Ricca had sent Mooney away, out of the spotlight in ’66, and allowed him to develop his own interests, internationally — chiefly, cruise ships and casinos. A modest 20 percent tax came back to the Outfit.

“...A happy arrangement, Mexico — Mooney’s out of your hair, and generating income. What could be better? But good things do not last forever.”

Both men knew that Giancana’s ties to the corrupt Mexican government had made all of this possible, until last month when a new regime came in and decided to seize all of that money and deport Giancana into the arms of the FBI. No outstanding arrests warrants were waiting, but an avalanche of subpoenas were.

“So now Mooney’s back,” Tony said, “but he’s broke, and his mind’s on that Senate hearing. Hell, first thing he did was get gallbladder surgery. He’s an old man! Washed up.”

“Ah,” Horshak said, lighting up a new cigarette, “but remember, Tony — a deposed king always has designs on his ‘rightful’ throne. What other option does Mooney have, but to stage the comeback he was already thirsting for?”

Tony shook his head, hard. “Can’t allow that. Can’t allow that. Maybe he’d like to retire someplace.”

Another twitch of a smile turned that slit in Horshak’s face into a mouth. “You tell me — is Sam Giancana the shuffleboard type? Does he walk away from those millions in Mexico, and settle for a pension? This is a man who has enjoyed power... and I do mean enjoyed... for decades.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed. “They say he looked like a little old man in baggy pants and beard when he turned up at the airport.”

“He was yanked out of his bed in the middle of the night and kidnapped by Mexican immigration officials. How would any of us look? Besides, Mooney always was a ham.”

Tony’s brow beetled in thought. “That was an act... what? For the feds who met him at the gate?”

Horshak waved that away with the hand holding the cigarette, making smoke trails. “I just offer it as a possibility. And meaning no offense, my friend, isn’t this ‘old man’ two years younger than yourself?”

“I’m not officially running things. Aiuppa is.”

“‘Officially’ being the operative term... But even if all we were facing here is Sam Giancana preparing to testify in front of a Senate committee exploring, among other things, the assassination of Jack Kennedy... Well, Tony? Do I really have to go on?”

Tony said nothing; he just sat puffing his cigar, his eyes on the girls frolicking in the pool, though he didn’t really see them.

“Not good,” Tony muttered. “Not good.”

Horshak drew smoke in, let smoke out. Then he smiled like a patient priest and asked, “How much security do you have here, Tony?”

Tony, still idly watching the pretty girls swim and splash at each other, said, “What you see is what you get. Half a dozen guys. Why?”

The attorney nodded, thought, said softly, “You must have personally approved the hit on Michael Satariano. The other hit at Cal-Neva, remember? The one Satariano deflected?”

His eyes flashed at Horshak. “I sanctioned that because Michael whacked DeStefano! What else could we do — tell Mad Sam’s crew easy-the-fuck-come, easy-the-fuck-go?”

“I would have advised against it — Satariano was a loyal man, and his Medal of Honor celebrity could have... Well, that’s beside the point, isn’t it? You didn’t seek my counsel.”

“That’s right, Sid. When I want your advice, I ask for it.”

“Which you are now, right?”

Tony swallowed. “Right.”

The attorney sat back; he gestured with a gentle open hand. “For the sake of argument — what if Satariano didn’t ‘whack’ Mad Sam DeStefano? What if Giancana framed him for it?”

“Why in hell?”

Horshak shrugged. “Perhaps to get the heat off the real assassins, and put them — and Mad Sam’s crew — securely in his debt. And if you’re Sam Giancana planning a comeback, wouldn’t that make perfect sense? Remove an obstacle — Satariano — and build allies with Mad Sam’s fatherless camp? But, then, you’re much closer to this kind of thing than I am, Tony. What do you hear?”

Tony shifted on the edge of the lounge chair; the girls giggled and splashed. “Well... Gotta admit that some are sayin’ Satariano didn’t do DeStefano. Some opinion says it was Spilotro and Mad Sam’s brother — the Ant and Mario.”

The attorney nodded sagely. “The very two stalwarts who fingered Satariano.”

“Yeah. Them stalwarts. They neither one wanted to see that crazy sadistic ice-pick-happy lunatic take the witness stand.”

“And speaking of crazy lunatics taking the witness stand,” Horshak said, with as wide a smile as the cut of a mouth was capable, “how do we feel about Mooney testifying before that Senate committee?”

Tony grunted. “‘We’ don’t like it.”

“You don’t anticipate Mooney pulling a Valachi, do you?”

“No! But he will go after those CIA cocksuckers — Mooney’s made it known that those spy pricks have been letting him twist in the wind. Says those feds shoulda found some way to keep him from bein’ deported, or at least get his millions back for him from them Mexicans. And as feds themselves, they oughta be able to prevent him havin’ to testify to a buncha senators.”

A slow nod. “And how do we feel about having this CIA dirty linen exposed to public view?”

Tony threw up his hands. “It’s what those bastards deserve, but I don’t see how Mooney figures he can give the spies up without giving us up, too! We’re too, what’s the word? Interwove with those cocksuckers.”

“Strange bedfellows indeed.”

“Yeah, but who’s fuckin’ who? We thought they could help us get Cuba back, and how the hell has that been workin’ out?”

Both men were well-aware that for almost ten years, Giancana — using his Mexico City mansion as home base — had traveled all around Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. This put Mooney in a perfect position to facilitate a major cocaine and heroin smuggling ring...

...but not for Chicago.

Tony Accardo was a legendary holdout in the drug business; he had never allowed the Outfit to get involved with junk — providing working stiffs with recreation like whores and gambling was one thing, peddling soul-robbing addiction a whole other.

But in Mexico, out from under Accardo’s watchful eye, Giancana could make side deals with anybody he pleased. Most likely in those Mexico City years, Mooney got in tight with not only the CIA but other syndicate guys, like Trafficante in New Orleans and Gambino in New York, who did not share the Accardo disdain for drugs.

“I respect and admire the stand you’ve taken on narcotics over the years,” Horshak said. “But the press isn’t going to make any such distinctions, nor is the general public... that Great Unwashed who elect our leaders. To John Q. American, the ‘mob’ and the CIA will just be bad guys together, and all sorts of structures could come apart... meaning lots of things, and people, could fall down.”

A sharp crack provided an exclamation point to the lawyer’s statement.

Narrow-eyed Accardo sat forward; wide-eyed Horshak reared back. The bodyguards dropped their playing cards and rose, turning toward the noise.

Another crack followed, one second after the first, and Accardo — already on his feet, a revolver from the pocket of his terrycloth robe now in his right fist — said, “Vic, Rocco, that’s the gate — check it out. Vic boy, go left; Rocco go around right.”

The two bodyguards had already snatched their guns from the shoulder holsters dangling off the beach chairs. Now the hoods in swimming trunks and Aloha shirts ran in opposite directions, out of the floodlights, and into relative darkness — a few security spots kept the entire grounds illuminated within reason — and around the side of the house, toward the gate.

The girls were all in the pool, terrified and treading water; eyes and mouths wide open, they were reacting to Tony’s words, not the cracks, which they’d heard but did not recognize as gunfire.

Taking a step toward the pool, Tony waved his revolver and said, “Out of the pool, girls.”

As they scrambled out, slipping on the watery edges, Tony said, “Go to a bedroom and get on the floor — stay low... Phil, escort them, then watch the front.”

Phil, a stocky, curly-headed kid, nodded and — gun in hand — herded the girls inside through the glass patio doors, saying, “Ladies, ladies, don’t trip over yourselves, gonna be fine...”

Another gunshot rang in the night, and another.

Then a terrible silence.

Four of his men dead, Tony figured — the single shots followed by no victory cry from either of his boys, well, that told the tale. Whoever this was was inside the gate, now...

Nothing left but Phil indoors, and Jimmy T. out there with them.

“Goddamnit, Tony!” Horshak said, waving his hands like a minstrel singer. “We have to do something!”

Tony whirled and thumped the lawyer’s yellow sport shirt with a thick finger, right on the little alligator. “You just stay close, Sid. Got it?”

Skinny Jimmy T. was hopping around like a demented jack rabbit, revolver in hand, looking behind him and to every side, throwing long shadows on the floodlit patio.

“Jimmy,” Tony called softly, “trouble will either come around the house, left or right, or through it, out these patio doors — or if it’s more than one guy, both; maybe all three. So get yourself some cover, watch the kitchen, and I got the rest.”

Jimmy T. nodded, and upended a glass table and used it for cover. Yeah, Tony thought, real brains these kids — hide behind glass.

A wooden picnic table near his barbecue pit, close to the wall, Tony turned over, then yanked the attorney back behind it, giving himself a view of the house where the intruder or intruders could come around either side. He also had a decent angle on the patio doors; the pool was off to the left, shimmering with reflected light, and to the right Jimmy crouched like a praying mantis behind his glass-and-steel table. Patio doors off the kitchen were between those two points.

“We need to get in the house,” the lawyer advised hurriedly. “We should call the cops, or—”

“Shut up, Sid.”

“This isn’t my thing, Tony! It’s not my thing!”

Tony slapped the lawyer. “Shut the fuck up.”

The floodlights went out; darkness descended like sudden night.

As his eyes adjusted, Tony thanked God for having the good sense to invent moonlight; then his nostrils twitched at a familiar odor — cowering beside him behind the overturned picnic table, the lawyer had pissed himself.

A sliding patio door opened quickly, and someone came lurching out.

Jimmy T. fired once, twice, three times, and pudgy, curly-haired Phil — shot to shit — stumbled sideways and fell into the pool, making a modest splash; Phil floated face down, blood trails streaming on the water’s moonlight-glimmering surface.

“Fuck!” Jimmy T. said, all knees and elbows hunkering behind the glass table again, not seeing a crouching figure — which Tony could barely make out — deeper inside the kitchen, aiming a rifle.

Tony called out, “Jim—”

But it was too little, too late.

Three sharp cracks, close enough to the pool to cause some pinging echoes, shattered the glass table, and Jimmy T. fell back, table glass shards raining on him, with a shot in the forehead and two chest wounds, any one of which could have killed him.

From the kitchen came a voice, “We need to talk, Mr. Accardo!”

Tony, hunkered down behind the picnic table with the wild-eyed attorney, frowned in thought. “...Michael?”

“Yes, it’s Michael Satariano, Mr. Accardo. I don’t have an appointment. Can you work me in?”

The lawyer whispered, “Is he crazy?”

“Unfortunately,” Tony said, “no... That rifle can shoot right through this table, Sid. Fucker can kill us anytime he likes.”

Satariano called out, “You have your attorney with you, Mr. Accardo. That’s good. I’d like Mr. Horshak to sit in on our meeting.”

Tony began to rise, and the lawyer clutched the gangster’s terrycloth sleeve and sputtered, “Are you crazy? You want him to shoot you, too?”

“I told you, Sid,” Tony said, jerking his sleeve from Horshak’s grasp, “we’re dead anytime he chooses.”

Satariano called out again, “Come out from behind the table, set it upright, and we’ll sit! And talk!”

Tony yelled, “You want me to throw my gun out, Michael?”

“I don’t really care, Mr. Accardo. Fuck with me and you’re as dead as your men.”

“As a show of good faith, I’m gonna toss it out! Mr. Horshak isn’t armed, but we’ll both stand with our hands up — agreeable, Mike?”

“Cool with me.”

The attorney was crying. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not...”

“Get your shit together, you gutless prick,” Tony snarled. “Stand up and stick your hands in the air, like a fuckin’ stagecoach robbery, or I’ll shoot you myself.”

Horshak swallowed. Nodded. Stood, with hands high.

Tony rose — his knees hurt him a little; he was in decent shape, but no spring chicken after all — and tossed the .38 onto the grass (it did not discharge) and raised his hands.

Michael Satariano stood, his silhouette in the kitchen clearly visible. Then he moved through the open doorway onto the patio — he wore black trousers, a black long-sleeve T-shirt, and a rifle slung on a strap over his shoulder, a .45 in his hand, trained on them.

Satariano walked over to Jimmy T.’s skeletal corpse behind and partially under the shot-up glass table, glanced at the body and its redundant death wounds, and didn’t bother to stop. His long shadow in the moonlight reached the gangster and lawyer well before he did.

“Gentlemen,” Satariano said, “put that table on its feet, and let’s have a talk.”

The two men did their guest’s bidding.

Satariano sat, putting the brick wall behind him, Tony — seated directly across from the intruder — and the attorney both with their backs to the house. The moonlight left Satariano mostly in shadow and washed Tony and Horshak in pale white. Of course, Horshak had already turned pale white...

“Obviously,” Satariano said, putting his hand with the .45 in it casually on the picnic-table top, “I’m not going to bother those girls.”

“They may call the police,” Tony said helpfully. “There’s a phone in there.”

“No, I cut the phone lines before I dropped by.”

Staying out of the conversation, the lawyer just sat with his hands folded prayerfully and trembled no worse than if a fit were coming on.

Tony asked, “You... you used that old rifle on Dave and Lou?”

“If that’s their names,” Satariano said with a nod. “I was in a tamarisk tree on the golf course ’cross the way. I was a sniper during the war, or didn’t you know that, Mr. Accardo?”

Tony’s eyes tightened. “And you killed all of my men. Six men — just so we could have a meeting?”

“So we could have it on my terms, yes.”

Satariano, though a man in his early fifties, had a bland babyish face that Tony found unsettling.

The intruder was saying, “I don’t relish killing, Mr. Accardo, but those men were soldiers. I killed fifty enemy soldiers one afternoon, in the Philippines. I’m prepared to do what I have to do tonight, or any night.”

“But you’re not here to kill me.”

A cold tiny smile formed in Satariano’s otherwise blank face. “That’s right. I just needed to make a point.”

“A point. Six men dead.”

Satariano shrugged. “It’s something I learned from my father.”

Tony barked a laugh. “Your father! Your old man tossed pizza pie in DeKalb, Illinois.”

“No,” Satariano said matter-of-factly. “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Accardo. I was adopted. My real father was named Michael O’Sullivan.”

Tony’s eyes tightened. “What was that?”

“My real name, Mr. Accardo, is Michael O’Sullivan, Jr.”

“...Angel of Death Michael O’Sullivan?”

“Was my father, yes.”

Tony Accardo had not truly been scared in many years, hardly ever in his life, in fact — he was a man of strength who usually held the upper hand. But he remembered a day in 1931 at the Lexington Hotel when he had been a young punk bodyguard and one of a handful of Capone soldiers to survive an assault by the Angel of Death — something like twenty-five men had died, scattered on several floors, in elevators, on stairways, in the lobby.

“And all these years,” Tony said, “nobody knew...?”

“Paul Ricca did,” Satariano said.

“Paul was my best friend. He would’ve told me.”

Satariano shook his head. “I don’t think so. He and I were close — closer frankly than you and I ever got. Mr. Ricca used me to remove Frank Nitti.”

Finally the lawyer spoke. “Frank Nitti committed suicide!”

Turning to Horshak, Satariano flashed a smile as awful as it was brief. “That’s the story, isn’t it?” Then he returned his gaze to Tony. “But Frank Nitti also betrayed my father. The O’Sullivans have a sort of family trait, you see — we settle scores.”

All of it rushed through Accardo’s brain: the loyal Looney family enforcer whose wife and youngest son were viciously murdered by Connor Looney, and when Old Man John Looney stood by his son, the Outfit had backed them up — putting business ahead of loyalty. And the Angel of Death and his son, who’d been all of eleven or twelve, traveled the countryside, robbing banks of mob deposits and leaving a trail of dead Outfit guys behind them like bloody breadcrumbs.

That was who was sitting across from him: the killer’s kid who had grown up into some kind of psycho Audie Murphy war hero. For decades Michael Satariano had been a front man, a nonviolent liaison with the straight world, because of his Medal of Honor celebrity; but Mooney Fucking Giancana had to go and wake up the Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., slumbering inside that soft-spoken casino manager...

Great. Fucking great.

“Why tell me this?” Tony asked. “I can better understand you just shooting me — I don’t deny letting Giancana sic Mad Sam’s crew on you.”

Satariano’s shrug was barely perceptible. “Giancana lied to you. You thought I’d taken Mad Sam out.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. Listen, I swam in these waters for a lotta years of my own free will; I understand the kind of barracudas I’m liable to run into. Something bad happens to me, such is the life I chose. However... if somebody touches a hair on my daughter, Anna’s, head, I’ll stuff the guy’s cock and balls in his mouth and then kill him.”

“Fair enough,” Tony said with a knowing nod. Then he turned to the lawyer, who seemed about to throw up, and said, “Don’t. You smell rank enough already, Sid.”

“And let me explain something else,” Satariano said. “Something... related.”

“Please,” Tony said.

“Mr. Accardo, no matter what happens — even if you personally sanction the killing of my entire family, including Anna, who is all I have left in this life — I still would not harm your family. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Tony said, “I think I do.”

“You and me, Mr. Accardo, we’re bad men. We’re killers. But we are not monsters.” Satariano shook his head, his mouth twitching in something that was not exactly a smile. “Do you even know?”

“Know what, Michael?”

“Know that Giancana sent three men into my house — the one in Arizona, where the feds put us to be safe? Sent them in dressed like Charlie Manson and they murdered my wife. They butchered my wife, Mr. Accardo.”

Tony swallowed slowly. “I... Michael, I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Michael... truly sorry. The feds must’ve put a lid on it, and Giancana sure as hell didn’t come to me for the okay.” The gangster leaned forward. “You have to know I wouldn’t sanction that.”

“That’s why you’re not dead, Mr. Accardo.” Satariano leaned forward, too, turning the snout of the .45 toward the ganglord. “But you do understand that I could have killed you? And that I may be one man, but I won’t be easy for your people to kill; I’m my father’s son, and if they try and fail, I won’t have any trouble repeating tonight’s little lesson... with the slight difference that you’ll be among the dead in the sum total.”

Tony lifted his palms up, as if in provisional surrender. “I do understand. But I’m not sure I understand why you wanted to talk to me.”

Satariano sighed. “Mr. Accardo, I owe the government nothing. They promised me safety for my family and they did not deliver. So all they have from me is a couple of weeks of interviews. Nothing they can use in court. I’m not saying what I told them won’t help them; but I am saying... I am pledging you, giving my word as a man... as a made man... that I will not testify for those people.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Michael.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Good... I’m going to kill Sam Giancana. Do you have a problem with that?”

Tony smiled. “None at all. Help yourself. We owe you that one.”

Satariano studied the gangster, then said, “I have an idea I might be helping you, taking Mooney out.”

Tony shrugged. “I won’t lie to you. You would be doing us a favor, yes.”

A nod. Then: “When this is over, Mr. Accardo, I intend to disappear.”

“Good idea.”

“I don’t need money. I’m just going to take my daughter and drop off the edge of the earth.”

“Which is what I would do, your shoes.”

Satariano leaned forward again. “Mr. Accardo, you’ll be pressured to do something about me. You may feel, as Al Capone felt, as Frank Nitti felt about my father, that letting me live would cause you to lose face.”

“Let me worry about that, Michael.”

“No, I prefer to do my own worrying.”

Tony thought for a moment. “You’ll settle for my word, son?”

“I will, sir.”

“Then you got it.”

Satariano sucked in a breath, cocked his head. “Anything you can do, clear a path for me, with Giancana would be helpful. Starting with... where is the bastard?”

Tony chuckled. “Right at the first place you’d look: that crummy house of his in Oak Park.”

Satariano’s eyes tightened. “With the steel door in the basement?”

“Yeah. But maybe that could be unlocked, by accident; Sam goes out to tend his garden and sometimes forgets to lock up proper, when he comes back in.”

A single humorless laugh. “I can see how that could happen, Mr. Accardo.”

Now Tony’s head cocked. “Michael, I could give you a phone number... so we can stay in touch.”

“Why don’t you do that, Mr. Accardo?”

“Want me to write it down?”

“Just tell me.”

Tony did.

Then Tony Accardo stuck his hand out.

And Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., shook it.

Finally the slender figure with the World War II rifle slung over his shoulder, and the World War I automatic in his fist, trotted off the patio, heading around the side of the house, going for the gate.

Next to Tony, the attorney slumped. He was breathing hard, almost sobbing.

“You all right, Sid?”

“Angel... Angel of fucking Death? Who’s gonna show up next? Dillinger’s kid? Bonnie and Clyde’s niece? Fuck me!”

Tony put a hand on the lawyer’s shoulder. “Everything will be fine, Sid. Why don’t you go in the house and change your pants?”

The attorney, embarrassed suddenly, nodded, and almost ran inside, stealing a shuddery glance at the skinny corpse of Jimmy T.

And Tony Accardo, in his terrycloth robe, sat in the dark in the presence of the corpses of two of his men. He found a cigar and a lighter in his robe pocket and lighted up; then he sat and smoked, rocking just a little, eyes narrow, thinking about the bargain he’d made, and the word he’d given.

Eleven

Palm Springs had an unofficial ban on the word “motel” — you could find lodges, inns, villas, manors, and even the occasional “guest ranch.” But the Solona Court on the outskirts of the swanky resort town consisted of a dozen modest cabins whose sole creature comfort was television with rabbit ears. With the exception of the latter, this dreary little mission-style motel with its framed bullfighter litho, pale plaster walls, and featureless furnishings could have been one of a dozen such fleabags where Michael and his father stayed in 1931, on their six-month road trip to Perdition, Kansas.

In a courtyard illuminated only by the moon and the green-and-red of motel neon, Michael left the Garand rifle in the trunk of the Lincoln, but took the .45 Colt automatic with him, as he slipped inside Room 12, the cabin farthest from the highway.

He did not hit the light switch — Anna was sleeping in one of the twin beds — but the bathroom light had been left on, the door ajar. A small air conditioner chugged, making no more noise than a Volkswagen with a faulty muffler; but the girl — under the sheets in her pink nightshirt, lost in a deep sedative-aided slumber — was past noticing or caring.

In addition to throwing the bolt and the latch, Michael wedged the back of a chair under the knob. On the nightstand between the twin beds he set the .45 next to the .38 Smith & Wesson already there, and picked up an envelope propped against the lamp.

The letter, labeled anna, he tucked away — for now — in his Samsonite.

In the bathroom he pissed and brushed his teeth and lifted a few handfuls of water to his face. Back at his bed, he slipped out of his crepe-sole shoes, but left on the rest of his clothing — long-sleeve T-shirt and black jeans and black socks — then lay on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling, hands locked behind his head, elbows winged out.

He would take a chance on Accardo.

The man some called Big Tuna, others called Joe Batters, was the last of the Capone crowd — the surviving Outfit leader with any sense of Old World decency. Michael, in his brief mid-’40s tour of duty as Accardo’s lieutenant, had never really bonded with the ganglord — not as he had with Nitti and Ricca, anyway — but he had nonetheless witnessed a boss who must have been like the old turn-of-the-century Mafia dons, fair and never hasty to act, approachable, willing to help a “family” member.

Accardo truly viewed the Outfit as an extended family, and those backyard barbecues he used to throw every summer indicated his good heart, even though it eventually got the real-life Godfather into trouble, attracting more unwanted guests than invited ones — the press hanging around taking pictures of the attendees, and the FBI showing up with their own clicking cameras.

Still, while Michael could risk his own life, trusting Accardo, he would take extra precautions where Anna was concerned. Right now the motherless girl was a wreck — a newlywed who’d lost her husband on the honeymoon — and she had wept and slept in the backseat on the way from Tahoe to Palm Springs. At the Solona Court, she’d willingly taken the sedatives to help her sleep deeper, and he had not told her he was going out.

What he had done was leave her that sealed envelope with a letter in it. On the back, he had penned in his small cramped precise handwriting:

And the letter inside said,

The letter, written for tonight, would also serve later, when he went after Giancana. He’d designed it that way.

He’d called his wife’s sister before heading to Accardo’s estate at Indian Wells Country Club. Anna was already asleep, but he had used a telephone booth outside the restaurant next door, not wanting to risk waking the girl.

“Betty? It’s Michael.”

“Michael! Is something wrong?”

The response was appropriate: two months ago, Pat had made a supervised phone call, through the WITSEC switchboard, to inform her sister of their situation, to tell Betty that the family had been relocated by the Witness Protection Program, but not giving her their location or new names. He and Pat had the right and ability to make other such WITSEC-routed calls to Betty, their only close living relative, but hadn’t chosen to.

Betty’s husband, Ralph, was a nice guy but a born-again preacher of some kind, spun off from the Baptists, who were just not Holy Roller enough. Pat and Betty had rarely talked in recent years, because their conversations always deteriorated into political arguments. Nonetheless, the O’Hara sisters had grown up together and had been close for decades, until wild girl Betty suddenly got saved, after her second divorce, and grew a stick up her ass.

Carefully, he said, “You haven’t heard anything?”

“Haven’t heard what? Michael, what is this about?”

She sounded irritated, which was typical, but also frightened.

“Betty, I have bad news.”

“...Oh no. What is it? Should I sit down, Mike? I should be sitting down, shouldn’t I?... It’s Patsy Ann, isn’t it? Is she sick?”

“We lost her, Betty.”

Silence.

“Do you understand, Betty?”

The voice returned, with a tremor in it. “What... Mike, what happened?”

“She was killed, Betty. Our house was attacked by the people I’m supposed to testify against, and they killed her.”

“Oh my God... Oh dear Jesus.” She wasn’t swearing; but she wasn’t exactly praying, either. “Anna! What about Anna?”

He told his wife’s sister in almost no detail that Pat had been murdered in her sleep. That neither he nor Anna had been harmed, but that his daughter and he were on the road, and in danger.

“You did this to her! You did this to her! You and those gangsters you work for. Gambling and drinking and debauchery... you did this!”

He sighed. It would be unkind to point out that, in her time, Betty had indulged in far more gambling and drinking and debauchery than either Michael or Patricia.

Then her voice changed. “...Michael, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m so sorry that I...”

“Blame me if you like, Betty,” he said without rancor. “I really don’t mind. If it helps you, blame me.”

“What good d would it do? Nothing will bring her back. Was she... right with the Lord, Michael?”

“She loved Jesus very much, Betty,” he lied. “We were talking about it just the night before she died.”

“Thank God. Praise Jesus. What can I do to help, Michael? What can Ralph and I do?”

“I need you to do right by your sister.”

“How?”

“I’m going to give you a phone number and a name.”

“I’ll get something to write with...” Ten seconds later, she said, “Ready.”

He gave her the number and said, “Talk to Harold Shore, he’s the associate director of the OCRS — the government agency we were dealing with.”

“Were dealing with...? You’re not anymore?”

“No. For obvious reasons, I don’t have a high opinion of their ability to protect me and what’s left of my family.”

“Does that... include us?”

“You and Ralph are in no danger. Anna won’t be, either, when I’m out of the picture.”

“What does that mean, ‘out of the picture’?”

“It means people are trying to kill me, and they may well succeed. But in the meantime, you call Director Shore and tell him you want to claim your sister’s body.”

A sudden intake of breath leaped from the receiver. “Oh, Michael... I hadn’t even thought it through that far...”

“I’m sure the government can have Pat’s body sent to your local mortuary. I know they’ll do that much for us.”

“Michael, oh... oh, Patsy...”

“I won’t be able to attend the funeral. Neither will Anna. That would be a high-risk proposition, our being there... but not for anyone else. Pat had a life in DeKalb. Friends. History. I’d like her to be buried next to her parents in the cemetery there.”

“All right, Michael. All right.”

“I’ll send you money for—”

“I’d like you to let Ralph and me handle that, Michael.”

“Well, actually, that’s generous. Kind. Loving, but I need you to buy a plot for me, too. I’ll want to be buried next to my wife — when the time comes.”

“Oh, Michael...” She was crying. “...Forgive me for being so... so darn terrible.”

Yes, “darn” terrible. Betty wasn’t allowed to be “goddamn” terrible, anymore...

“There’s one other thing, Betty... There’s a chance Anna may turn up on your doorstep one of these days.”

“We’d love to have her,” she said, in a painfully forced, upbeat way. “Sheila’s only two years younger than Anna, and they could be like... like sisters.”

Betty was crying again. He heard a male voice, Ralph’s, saying, “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

Michael let her deal with her husband, then when she returned, told her, “I’m hoping, if something happens to me, that Anna will go to college there in DeKalb, and have you folks to fall back on. So she’s not... alone in the world. Would that be agreeable?”

“Of course it would, Michael.”

“She’ll have her own money.”

“Well, Ralph and I would be glad—”

“No. She’s a young woman, and she will be self-sufficient. What you don’t know, Betty, is that Anna was married recently.”

“Married! At her age! Michael, that’s—”

“Her young husband was murdered yesterday. He caught a bullet meant for me.”

“Ooooh... oh God...”

Fear in her voice now. Finally. Good.

“Betty, these are deep, dark waters. And treacherous. If she comes to you, treat Anna like a grown-up, because she is one, or anyway will need to be. And she won’t have time for... or, knowing her... patience with any sanctimonious bullshit. You just be a good loving aunt to her. I don’t mean to be unkind, but am I clear on that?”

“You are,” she said, nothing irritated in her voice at all now. “I promise you that, Michael.”

“Thank you, Betty,” he said, and hung up.

In the morning, Anna woke before him. She had already showered and was in bell-bottom jeans and wedge sandals and a dark blue scoop-neck tank top, all that brown hair cascading down her back. She was brushing her teeth when he approached, still in his commando black.

“What’s,” she said, and spit out toothpaste into the sink, “with the getup?”

“Oh. I slipped out for a little while last night, after you went to sleep.”

“Ninja convention in town?”

“There’s a powerful man I had to see.”

“What... one of your gangster friends?”

“Sort of. I needed to make sure where we stood with him.”

She rinsed, spat. “Where do we stand, Daddy?”

“He’s with us. I think.”

“Oh. Well, gee, that’s comforting. But other people still want us dead?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head, smirked humorlessly, said, “Bathroom’s yours,” and brushed past him.

He shat, showered, shaved, changed into a fresh Banlon, rust-color, and tan trousers. He was brushing his teeth when Anna popped up in the bathroom doorway, as he had done with her.

“What’s the plan?”

“The plan,” he said, and spat into the sink, “is to keep us both alive.”

“Okay. But with Mom dead, and Gary, being alive doesn’t quite have the... appeal like it used to, huh?” Her eyes were filled with tears that belied her flip manner. She’d had twelve hours of sleep to replenish her tear ducts.

“Ask yourself if Mom would want us to give up,” he said. “Ask yourself if Gary would want anything to happen to you.”

She nodded, numbly, and shuffled off.

When he emerged from the bathroom, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, facing his, slumped, legs apart, hands laced together hanging between her knees. Staring at the floor. Her handbag — an off — white crocheted jute shoulder affair — was next to her.

From the nightstand, he removed the .38 and handed it toward her.

“I want you to carry that in your purse.”

She didn’t argue. She took the gun and unsnapped the bag and slid the big weapon in among cosmetics and Kleenex.

“Guess all those gun club years are finally comin’ in handy, huh, Pop?”

He sat across from her. “Couple details. Couple realities... not any fun, I’m afraid.”

She looked up with an eyebrow raised. “Oh — is the fun over already?”

“Gary’s parents will’ve been called back from their Caribbean trip by now.”

She hung her head again, shaking it. “Those poor people... poor, poor people...”

“I’m assuming they knew nothing about the marriage?”

“Not any more than you and Mom did.”

“...Is there anything in the house — marriage license, photos, anything that might come in the mail, that would tell them about you two...?”

“Getting hitched?” she said archly. “No. I don’t think so.” She frowned at him, confused. “Why?”

“I’m thinking... there’s no reason for them to know about it. I’m thinking it would just complicate things. All they know right now, from talking to people who were there, is that you sneaked back to go to the prom with Gary. And that he was an innocent bystander in some kind of gangland violence that broke out in the parking lot of a casino with that kind of history.”

She was thinking. “Maybe... maybe it would be better this way. Just be harder on them, knowing... and they’d just be... madder at us.”

“I guess that’s right.”

“D’you suppose his funeral’s today?”

He nodded. “Or tomorrow.”

His father had led him to the bed where his mother’s body lay, where Papa had tucked her in. “Bid her Godspeed now, Michael — there’ll be no attending the services for us... no wake... no graveside goodbyes.”

He said, “We could have flowers wired. Would you like that?”

Looking at the floor, she swallowed. Sighed. Nodded. “What... what about Mom?”

“I called Aunt Betty. They’re handling it.”

“We won’t be going to her funeral, either, will we?”

He shook his head.

She grimaced. Then her face softened into a blank pretty mask. “Daddy, what is the plan?”

“A safe place and a fresh start for both of us, but, first... I have to do something back in Chicago.”

“What kind of something?”

“Do you want me to tell you?”

Her dark eyes flashed up from the floor. “I’m fucking asking, aren’t I?”

He held those eyes with his. “The monster who did this to us — who caused your mother’s death, and your... your husband’s. He has to die.”

“You have to kill him.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to Chicago to kill him.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. Shrugged. Said, “Can I help?”

At a Denny’s across from the motel, they both ate modest breakfasts, but at least they were able to eat. Michael checked the Los Angeles newspapers to see how much coverage the Cal-Neva incident was getting.

Much as he’d outlined it to Anna, the papers reported that at Lake Tahoe, the Cal-Neva, “which had attracted headlines in the days when singer Frank Sinatra was an owner,” had been the scene of “mob-style” violence. Gary Grace, eighteen, had taken a bullet intended for the unidentified male target of two mob assassins who had been killed by said target. The names of the dead men were being withheld by federal authorities, although an unnamed source linked them to “notorious” Chicago gangster Sam Giancana, “recently returned from Mexico and said to be contemplating a comeback in organized crime circles.”

No mention of Michael by name or even description, though the cops would surely know about the Lincoln. A small mention of Anna: “The young victim had been attending the prom with a teenaged girl who had moved away recently and returned for the event.” His daughter’s name — and that she’d got in the car with the “unidentified target” prior to the bystander teenager’s killing — was not mentioned.

Had the feds withheld that info, or didn’t they know? Maybe the eyewitnesses hadn’t seen Gary open the car door for Anna, and her get in, their attention not attracted until the gunfire began. In the midst of weapons blazing in the night, and the Lincoln screeching out of the Cal-Neva lot, perhaps no one noticed the girl in the front seat. Of course, she had been screaming...

They drove down a commercial strip toward Palm Springs and stopped at a florist, sending flowers to the funeral home in Incline Village for Gary. Then Michael trawled for just the right used-car lot, found it, and traded his Lincoln in on a three-year-earlier model Eldorado, a deep-blue vinyl-top number with sixty thousand miles, paying the guy eight thousand cash. In reality, the used-car salesman should have been paying Michael a couple grand, but this was a no-paperwork, off — the-books transaction.

Father and daughter transferred their possessions to the big boat of a Caddy — everything from the rifle to their suitcases to the four-track tapes — and soon were heading up North 95 to connect with Interstate 40, east.

As they sat in air-conditioned comfort, listening to Bobby Darin sing “The Good Life,” his daughter said, “These aren’t the most inconspicuous wheels I ever saw, Daddy.”

“They’re less conspicuous,” he said, “than that Lincoln, considering I got it from the government... and we were seen in it at the Cal-Neva.”

“Ah. But, still...”

“Baby, I hardly have the heart to tell you, but—”

“Oh, bad news now?”

He sighed. “We have three days of driving ahead of us, ten or twelve hours a day.”

She frowned. “If we’re going that far, and were getting rid of our car, anyway, why didn’t we just fly? Or take the train or something?”

“The G-men may be watching the airports and train stations for us.”

She laughed. “Did you just say ‘G-men’?”

He smiled, embarrassed. “I guess I did. Kinda dates me, huh?”

“Only to around the turn of the century.”

The first day took them home, in a way — Arizona, the turnpike cutting through endless stretches of mesas and buttes dotted with yucca and sagebrush. Heat and clouds conspired to turn the desert shades of yellow, pink, brown, and gray, overseen by ragged barren mountains.

They didn’t talk much in the morning, Anna catching naps, the depression breaking through a few times, and she’d cry softly into Kleenex, though neither would comment.

At a gas-station greasy spoon on the Seligman turnoff, they had delicious cheeseburgers and french fries and Cokes, and Anna offered to take the wheel awhile.

“Let me help out,” she said. “I’m used to it.”

She was referring, obliquely, to the driving she’d done when she’d gone with Cindy Parham to meet Gary in Vegas, and then on with Gary to Tahoe.

“That’d be good,” he said.

The start of the afternoon took them into a forest preserve, the world green suddenly, pines and firs and oaks and spruce and piñon.

“What’s the rest of the plan?” Anna asked. Behind the wheel, now.

“After Chicago, you mean?”

“Yes, after Chicago.”

“Assuming all goes well, I’m thinking Vancouver.”

She flashed him a surprised look. “Really? Why?”

“Money won’t go as far there as in Mexico, but we’ll fit in better, be an easier... transition. You can go to college up there, pursue your theater. I can find work.”

Her eyes, on the road again, tensed; she was thinking.

Some while later, they’d run out of forest, in fact run out of Arizona — this was New Mexico now — and he was driving again, when she said, with quiet bitterness, “Canada, huh?”

“Hmmm? Yeah. Canada.”

“Kinda funny, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“That’s where Mike’d be. If I’d had my way, anyway.”

She looked out the window, and he could see her reflection in it — she was crying again, chin crinkled; she dried her eyes with the knuckles of a fist.

They had supper at a diner in Gallup, New Mexico, and outside Albuquerque found a motel not unlike the Solona, arriving about ten o’clock. Very little conversation preceded bedtime, although they did watch Johnny Carson (which jarred Michael, remembering the last time he’d heard Ed McMahon summon the host with “Hiiii-yo!”). Neither laughed at anything, though they did smile occasionally.

The following morning, with Michael behind the wheel, the rolling plains of New Mexico encouraged boredom so severe that the daughter actually initiated a conversation.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Can I ask you something?”

He let out a laugh. “What, and take me away from this fascinating scenery?”

She smiled politely, then said, “Who were your real parents? What did you mean when you said that you’d... sat where I sat? Was your mother... my real grandmother, was she... murdered, too?”

He’d forgotten he’d blurted that to her, at the prom; and her words punched him in the belly. He glanced at her, his mouth open but no words finding their way out.

“And your father, not Gran’pa Satariano, but your real father, who he was has something to do with why you got in with those... those Mafia people... doesn’t it?”

He was still searching for words.

She went on, “Hey, I know you provided for us well and everything, and we had really nice lives, really great lives, till, uh... recently. But why’d you choose that road to go down? Or did it choose you?”

He glanced at her, hard. “You really... really want to know all this?”

“I would, yes.”

“It’s a long story.”

“Daddy — it’s a long drive.”

“I’m not much for talking, sweetie.”

“Hmmm. Must’ve been some other father lecturing me and Mike all those years.”

He grinned a little. “All right. Only... if you get bored, or tired of it or anything... just say so, okay?”

She did not get bored.

For almost two hours, until his throat was as dry as New Mexico itself, he told her, the words tumbling out, the story of the Michael O’Sullivan family in Rock Island, Illinois. How his father worked for John Looney, the patriarch of the Irish mob in the Tri-Cities, and how Mr. Looney had been wonderful to the O’Sullivans. How he and his brother, Peter, wondered exactly what their father did for Mr. Looney, and how Michael had stowed away in the back of a Ford and wound up witnessing a murder committed by Mr. Looney’s crazy son, Connor, and also saw a machine-gun massacre, with Michael O’Sullivan — his father, her grandfather — wielding the tommy.

And how John Looney’s son, Connor, had killed Peter — thinking the younger boy was murder-witness Michael — and his mother, Annie.

That had been one of a handful of times the girl interrupted: “Annie...? My real grandmother was named Annie? I was named for her?”

“Yes.”

“But Mom never lived in Rock Island or anything...”

“No, I didn’t meet your mother till I was in DeKalb, a year or so later. But she knew everything about me, including that I’d lost my mother. It was her idea to name you, more or less, after your late grandmother.”

Anna smirked. “But I couldn’t ever know, right?”

“You know now.”

She blew air out, shook her head, said, “So what happened after my grandmother was murdered? What did your dad do?”

And so he told his daughter about the eventful road trip he and his father had taken in 1931 — how he’d been an underage getaway driver. This, and various exploits he related, earned a number of exclamations from Anna, all pretty much the same: “Wicked” or sometimes “Wicked cool” or the ultimate, “Wicked awesome.”

She was appropriately somber, however, when he came to the end of his tale — the death of his father at the hands of an assassin in a farmhouse outside Perdition.

“And you... you killed the guy?”

“Yes.”

“How old were you, anyway?”

“Twelve.”

“That is out there. That is way the fuck out there.”

“Anna...”

“Oh, the kid getaway driver wanted in six states thinks his daughter’s language is too salty? Sorry!”

She had him, and he laughed.

“And what’s...” She did a silly impression of cornball Paul Harvey from the radio. “...the rest of the story?”

“Why don’t we save that for later. I’m getting hoarse from all this. Aren’t you hungry yet?”

In a roadhouse-type diner outside Amarillo, Texas, they sat in a booth by a window and shared one order of Texas fried steak the size of a hubcap, with country swing on the jukebox that wasn’t half-bad.

“You and your father... my grandfather... were you kind of, like — famous?”

“In a way.”

“I think I saw an old movie about you on TV.”

“There were a couple, actually.”

“Who played you?”

“Jimmy Lydon in the ’40s one. Bobby Driscoll in the ’50s.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Well, your grandfather fared better — Alan Ladd and Robert Mitchum.”

“Cool!”

He promised her the second half of the story on tomorrow’s drive, and let her tool the Caddy across the rest of the Texas panhandle.

In Oklahoma, the red earth and the rolling plains sparking memories, he said, “We traveled through here, your grandfather and I. No turnpikes, then.”

“Like in that movie — Bonnie and Clyde?”

“Right.”

Then, as they left 40 and headed north on 35, he found himself telling her about the time he caught scarlet fever, and he and his father had to stay put in one place for a while, and how bounty hunters had caught up to them, and how they’d gotten away. Over supper in Wichita, he told her about the shoot-out in the country church, and when they stopped for the night, at a motel outside Kansas City, shared with her the time his father had robbed a police station of the week’s bag money — right here in K. C., the very town they were staying in!

In the dark, after The Tonight Show, she said, “Daddy? Is it terrible that we... had kind of a good time, today?”

“I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

“Mom... Gary... Your life with Mom is over... and mine with Gary never really got... got started; and we’re laughing and talking and eating and... are we evil?”

“No. We’re just... I don’t know.”

“Dealing with it?”

“In our way, yes.”

This was the first night she hadn’t cried herself to sleep, and Michael felt more alive than he had since losing Pat. He and his daughter were closer now; they’d always been close, but finally she knew him. Knew who he was. Knew who he’d been.

And didn’t hate him for it.

That day, they angled up 35 through Nebraska — “Great,” Anna said, “Oklahoma again, minus the interesting red dirt” — into Iowa, which seemed rich and green and varied, compared to what they’d endured. They shared the driving evenly, and he told her “the rest of the story.”

Anna already knew about her father’s life growing up in DeKalb with the Satarianos, and going steady with her mother in high school. And the heroic service on Bataan, and coming home and getting married.

But she did not know that he’d gone to work for the Chicago Syndicate in order to take revenge on Al Capone and Frank Nitti. The ins and outs of that were complicated, and the tale made today’s trip a more somber one, with not a single “wicked,” much less “wicked cool,” though the girl listened in awestruck attention.

On Interstate 80, he said, “Short side trip,” and took 61 down into the Quad Cities. Anna said nothing; she seemed to know what he was up to, if not where exactly he was headed, which turned out to be downtown Davenport and across a black ancient-looking government bridge over to Illinois.

In Rock Island, in Chippiannock Cemetery, father and daughter stood with bowed heads, paying silent respect at small simple gravestones honoring Michael O’Sullivan, Sr., Anne Louise O’Sullivan, and Peter David O’Sullivan. The afternoon was cool for June, and a breeze ruffled the many trees on the sloping grounds. Alone together in the vast graveyard, surrounded by stone cherubs and crosses — “City of the Dead,” the cemetery’s Indian name meant — they held hands, and Michael was surprised to find himself praying, silently.

After a while, Anna said, “You didn’t go to your mother’s funeral, either, did you?”

“No. And I’m afraid, for us... for all our sorrow right now... this will have to do.”

Her hand slipped from his, and she knelt at her grandmother’s gravestone and touched the carved name there. Looking up at him, she said, “O’Sullivan... Is that who I am, really, Daddy? Annie O’Sullivan?”

He reached out to her, helped her back up, slipped an arm around her shoulder, and said, “No, sweetheart. You’re Anna Grace.”

She sucked in a breath. “I am, aren’t I? I am.”

“Lovely name. For my lovely girl.”

She hugged him, and they made their way out of the cemetery.

In twenty minutes, they were back on Interstate 80. A quick supper at a truck stop would mark their last meal on the road.

By mid evening they would be in Chicago.

Twelve

At the turn of the century, Oak Park had been dubbed Saints’ Rest, due to its many churches, and perhaps because the idyllic, largely white village was so quiet, and quietly affluent.

But on this June night, Chicago’s nearest neighbor to the west suffered under a hellish humidity, heat lightning streaking the sky, wind rustling the leaves of the suburb’s many sizable trees in an unsettling, ceaseless whisper.

Just before ten, walking easily up Lexington Street, Michael — in a black sport coat over black Banlon with black slacks and matching loafers and socks — might have been a priest but for the lack of white collar. Despite the thick-aired swelter, and the ominous atmosphere, the neighborhood seemed peaceful; a dog barked, crickets chirped, window air conditioners thrummed. Houses here dated to the 1920s, substantial bungalows blessed with generous yards, while countless shade trees — mostly namesake oaks — stood sentry.

He and Anna had arrived in Oak Park less than two hours ago. This represented something of a homecoming, as the Satarianos had called the village home until about ten years ago. But Anna had just been in first grade, and her memories were hazy, while Michael had maintained no friendships here. No real risk being seen.

Though the suburb boasted a few gangster residents, it wasn’t nearly as dangerous for them as that nearby Outfit enclave, River Forest (where Tony Accardo lived, when he wasn’t in Palm Springs). The downtown might have been a theme-park replication of a typical quaint shopping district of the 1950s, before shopping-mall casualties. At the south edge, they sought out the Oak Arms, a four-story tan-brick residential hotel whose specialty was being nondescript.

In a featureless lobby, Michael paid the desk clerk seventy-five dollars and eighty-five cents, cash — the weekly rate — for a “suite” on the second floor. What father and daughter got was a small apartment consisting of a bedroom, living room with “sleeper” couch, and a kitchenette — everything brown, tan, or dark green, and not because any long-ago decorator had been thinking “earth tones.” They were on the alley, which was fine with Michael, the fire escape access next door, sharing space with Coke- and candy-vending machines.

They sat on the uncomfortable nubby couch, pregnant with fold-out bed; he was in a light blue sport shirt and tan chinos, she in an orange tank top and brown bell-bottom jeans — what they’d worn driving today. The glow of a streetlight bounced off a brick wall in the alley and filtered in through a gauzy secondary layer of curtain; a small lamp on an end table provided the only other illumination, a parchment-style shade creating a yellow cast.

He told her, “I think you should get some rest — maybe take a couple of Mom’s sedatives again.”

She eyed him with frank suspicion. “Why? I’m not having any trouble sleeping, anymore.”

“It’s just... tomorrow’s a big day.”

“What’s big about it?”

He shrugged a little; they were eyeing each other sideways. “Tomorrow’s when we’re taking care of the problem.”

“The ‘problem.’ That man, you mean... Giancana. That problem.”

He sucked in air, nodded, let it out.

“I thought you respected me,” she said, chin crinkling.

“I do, sweetheart.”

“Then don’t yank on my ying yang.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t lie to me. You wanna dope me up, like you did in Palm Springs, so you can go play Charles Bronson again! Well, I won’t put up with it — I’m part of this, too, you know.”

He patted the air with a palm. “Baby — really. It’s better I do this alone.”

She crossed her arms; her jaw was set. “No fucking way.”

“I can’t involve you in this — if we got caught, or, or...”

“Killed?” Her eyebrows hiked. “What if I was Mike? What about that... Daddy?”

“I, uh... don’t know what you mean, honey.”

She swung around, and sat on her legs Indian-style, so she could face him, confrontationally. “If it was Mike, with Mom murdered, you’d hand him a goddamn gun and say, ‘Come on, son.’ Man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Tell me I’m not right!”

“You’re not right.”

“You’re lying.”

And he was.

Then he said, “Baby, this is no time for some kind of... what, feminist stand. I want you to stay here, right here, while—”

“You want to knock me out with sedatives, I-am-woman-hear-me-snore, while you go off and maybe get killed, maybe because you didn’t have, what, backup when you needed it.”

He was shaking his head. “Don’t be absurd.”

She played patty cake with the air. “Wait a minute, wait a minute — aren’t I talking to the eleven-year-old baby-face bank robber? Wanted in six or seven states?”

“...That’s beside the point.”

“Hell it is! It’s right to the point — your father took you along, made you his partner, trusted you to drive the damn getaway car. Me? I’m supposed to take my medicine like a good little girl and zonk out, and maybe wake up an orphan. No way. No fucking way, Daddy.”

He just looked at her — she seemed so young and yet much older than when this trip had started. Did he have any right to leave her behind? Giancana was responsible for her mother’s death — and her husband’s death — and had created the utter shambles that was now both their lives...

Of course he had the right: he was her father. When Michael O’Sullivan, Sr., had gone for the final showdown with Connor Looney, Michael O‘Sullivan, Jr., had been left behind in a residential hotel not unlike this one, in Prophet’s Town, Illinois... What had it been called? Could it have been... the Paradise Hotel?

And Papa had left him a letter, like the one he had ready to leave Anna, and... how had he felt about it? Frightened, alone, and a little betrayed. He’d promised his father he would not open that envelope, and he had stared at it long and hard, wondering what was inside, terrified of what was written in there, and that his father would never return.

What an awful, endless night that had been...

“All right,” he said. “You can drive.”

“All right!” she said, and swung a tiny fist. “And I’ll have my gun along? I’ll be armed and dangerous, won’t I?”

“Bet your life,” he said.

But he left his eighteen-year-old getaway girl in the Caddy, parked on Lexington, and walked a block before turning right and walking another three to Wenonah Avenue, where he turned right again. Two blocks later he could see the house on the corner of Wenonah and Fillmore, a distinctive red-tile-roofed yellow-brick bungalow, one-and-a-half stories with arched windows — solid, spacious, unassuming, perfect digs for the gangster who wants comfort without calling undue attention to himself.

Earlier, from a phone booth at the Interstate 80 truck stop, Michael had called the number Accardo gave him, and Accardo himself called back in two minutes — better service than the WITSEC panic button.

“Edgar’s kids’ve been watching the place,” Accardo’s rough baritone had informed him, meaning the FBI had an ongoing surveillance of Giancana’s residence. “Kind of trading off with the neighborhood kids.”

Indicating the Chicago PD’s organized crime unit was also keeping an eye on the house. Though using a supposedly “secure” line, the ganglord was speaking somewhat elliptically, so Michael followed suit.

“Hmmm,” Michael said. “Well, I might make some noise.”

“When you thinking?”

“Tonight.”

“Any special time?”

“Around Johnny Carson.”

“...Okay. You been to the guy’s house before?”

Meaning Giancana.

“Couple times,” Michael said. “Wasn’t exactly on a recon, though.”

“A garage back there, on the alley. You’ll see some garbage cans. People throw the damnedest things away these days. Perfectly good items.”

“Yeah, it’s a real waste.”

“Backyard’s fenced in — I hear there’s been trouble with the lock on the gate in the fence, lately.”

“Too bad. Risky with all the vandalism.”

“Sure is. Garden back there, head of the house likes to putter, but never at night. Sometimes he forgets and leaves the house open in back.”

“Isn’t that the door we spoke about?”

The steel door with the Joe-sent-me peephole. Joe Batters, in this case.

“Yeah,” Accardo said. “That door.”

“Okay. Will he have any friends over?”

Bodyguards or security staff?

“No. I have on good authority, a couple guys who usually keep him company won’t be around. They work hard. Deserve a night off.”

“What about his housekeeper and his wife?”

That was the DiPersios, Giancana’s longtime seventy-something caretaker and his housekeeper wife, who were live-in.

“Their apartment’s upstairs, on the second floor. They go to bed early.”

“Probably early risers, too, then,” Michael said. “Do they set the alarm, d’you suppose?”

Giancana was known to have an electric-eye burglar alarm.

“Not tonight,” Accardo said darkly. “...Anything else I can help you with, son?”

“No, sir. Thank you.”

But now as Michael strolled down the tree-lined street toward the alley beside the bungalow, he noted with surprise no suspicious cars. Several vehicles were parked along nearby curbs, but not the unimaginative standard-issue black sedans both the feds and Chicago PD were noted for — in fact, right across from 1147 South Wenonah were a red Mustang convertible and a white Pontiac Trans Am with a blue racing stripe.

No surveillance here, not at this moment — of course, the feds and cops liked to eat, and everybody had to piss now and then.

In the alley he found the garbage cans, three of them, nestled next to the yellow-brick garage. The first lid he lifted revealed a .22 target pistol perched cherry-on-the-sundae atop a fat filled garbage bag.

With a black-leather-gloved hand, Michael lifted the target pistol out — a High Standard Duromatic whose four-inch barrel had been tooled down to receive a six-inch homemade noise suppressor, a threaded tube drilled diagonally with countless holes. Fairly standard Outfit whack weapon, these days — a .22, not unlike the ones the two DeStefano hitters brought to the Cal-Neva, before Michael killed them. He checked the clip — full. The ammo looked fine.

If Accardo’s people had left him a sabotaged gun, he still had his .45 in a shoulder holster. But with the chance of cops or feds returning, within easy hearing range of gunfire, this silenced .22 would do the trick nicely. He stuck the somewhat bulky weapon in the waistband of his slacks, leaving his sport coat unbuttoned.

As promised, the gate in the stockade-type fence was unlocked. Michael opened and closed it with little sound, entering a backyard with no security lights, though the moon gave an ivory glow to this immaculately tended little world of putting green, clipped hedges, and colorful flower beds. A circular stone patio hugged the house, but Michael’s crepe soles made no sound as he crossed to descend the cement steps to the steel door, which stood slightly ajar. A pleasant, spicy cooking odor wafted out.

That was not surprising. Michael had been at the Giancana home several times, and had been in the elaborately “finished” basement, with the spacious paneled den where the little gangster loved to spend his private time, and sometimes hold court. What lay beyond the steel door was a fully equipped modern kitchen.

One hand on the butt of the .22 target pistol in his belt, Michael pushed the door open — it creaked just a little, but the voice of Frank Sinatra covered for him: “Softly, As I Leave You” was playing, not loud, just background music, a nearby radio or distant hi-fi. Michael recognized the album — it was one of the four-tracks he’d tossed in Walker Lake.

He stepped inside to air-conditioned coolness, shutting the door behind him, as the pleasant cooking smell tweaked his nostrils. The counters and appliances were white, the paneling and cupboards a blond oak, the overhead lighting fluorescent. At the stove a swarthy, skinny little man — bald but for a friar’s fringe of gray — in a blue-and-white-checked untucked sport shirt, baggy brown slacks, and slippers with socks was tending two pans, frying sausage in olive oil in one and boiling up spinach and ceci beans in the other.

Both Mama and Papa Satariano had been magicians in the kitchen, so Michael knew exactly what the basement chef was up to — the sausage would be removed, and the spinach (or was that escarole?) and beans would eventually be transferred to the other pan to sauté in the sausage grease, with pinches of garlic no doubt, while the sausage would be added back in, for a killer of an Old Country snack.

The man at the frying pan sensed the presence of another, and before turning, said, “Butch — is that you? Forget something?”

“No,” Michael said, and withdrew the .22.

Sam Giancana — deep melancholy grooves in his stubble-bearded face, his nose a lumpy knob, his eyes at sad slants, an effect echoed by white bushy eyebrows — looked at the gun first. Then up at Michael.

“So it’s a Saint they send.” Giancana laughed hollowly. He nodded toward the sizzling pans. “You want some of this?”

“Step away from the stove, Momo. I don’t want grease in my face.”

Giancana — looking a decade older than just a few months ago, when he’d slipped into Michael’s Cal-Neva office and started all this — shrugged and did as he was told. He even held his hands away from himself, a little, and up. “Those need to cook awhile, anyway. You want some wine? Beer? Wait... Coca fucking Cola, right? You’re the Saint, after all.”

“No thanks. Nothing for me.”

Giancana sighed, nodded, offered a chagrined grin. “Guess we kinda underestimated each other, didn’t we, Mike?”

“I guess.”

Giancana’s head tilted to one side. “Why didn’t you shoot me, standing at the stove? Wanted to see my face, first?”

“Frankly, Momo, your face doesn’t do jack shit for me.”

The little gangster frowned, more confused than angry. “Then why ain’t you shot t my ass? Ain’t that why Joe Batters sent you around?” He sneered. “Funny! I ask you to knock off that head job Mad Sam, and you go all righteous on me. But Accardo you play torpedo for, no problem... I told you, Mike, told you you’re the same bad-ass today who shot Frank Abatte back in—”

“Shut up.”

Giancana sneered. “Then shoot, Saint.” Shrugged.

“Didn’t I always say, ‘Live by the sword, die by the sword’? So my string ran out, finally. It was a good ride. I fucked men over and fucked women silly — who could ask for more?”

Michael’s finger began to tighten on the trigger.

Giancana braced himself...

...but the diminutive don had said it before: Why wasn’t Michael shooting?

“Or maybe,” Giancana said, smiling just a little, the sideways slitted eyes narrowing even further, deep creases in the forehead signaling thought, “maybe you know that when you kill me, certain questions go unanswered — maybe forever. Questions like — how did I know you were in Arizona? Tucson? In Paradise the fuck Estates?”

Michael’s eyes tightened. “How did you know, Momo?”

A smile blossomed on the stubbly, wrinkled face; he looked very small, chest sunken, even frail. Of course, the man was in his late sixties, and recovering from gallbladder surgery.

Mooney’s voice was soothing now, almost charming. “Saint, why don’t we talk...”

The gangster gestured past the adjacent dining area through the open doorway into the den, where the large, rectangular dark oak table and ten high-backed chairs had been home to many an inner-circle Outfit meeting, back when Giancana was boss.

Michael knew he should just shoot this son of a bitch; but Giancana was right: when Mooney died, information would die with him.

“You first, Momo.”

Slowly, hands half-raised, Giancana led Michael into a spacious light-oak-paneled room cluttered with armchairs, a sofa, and endless bric-a-brac: porcelain ashtrays, beer steins, sterling silver pieces, glassware and bowls, some filling a Gothic hutch, others decorating tables; oil paintings, lighted from beneath, ran to Sicilian landscapes, and from a low-slung stereo cabinet, Sinatra was singing “Talk to Me, Baby” next to a fully stocked liquor cabinet.

One area of the den was devoted to golf, including a golf-bag wastebasket and a framed golfing clown print. Half the pipes in Chicago were displayed on a rack, and on a Louis XV desk a cigar humidor was initialed G.

But the vast conference table was dominant, and Giancana and Michael sat across from each other at the near end, closer to the scent of sizzling sausage.

Michael of course had checked for hidden weapons, alarm buttons, and patted down the scrawny gangster, who seemed vaguely amused. But the shark’s eyes had a glimmer Michael recognized: fear.

“Let me tell you why you shouldn’t kill me, Saint,” Giancana said, hands flat on the tabletop.

“Why don’t you.”

“You’re a smart man. You recognize power when you see it. You see the possibilities.” Another shrug. “Aiuppa doesn’t have the brains to run an organization like ours, with its national and international interests. And Accardo is an old man who just wants to retire and clip coupons. You know, I spent the afternoon talking with Butch Blasi and Chuckie English. Planning.”

“Don’t they work for Aiuppa now?”

Giancana snorted a laugh. “Aiuppa thinks they do. They go back with me, for... for fuckin’ ever. I got friends in the Outfit, from the old days, who remember what it was like having a real leader. The new turks, they heard of me, they heard the stories, the legend. Whispers about Jack Kennedy and Marilyn and Bobby. And how I fucking killed all three.”

“This is quite an argument you’re making.”

He raised a withered palm. “Just providing a... whaddyacallit, context for all of this. First thing you need to know is, I didn’t authorize what happened at your house. In Arizona.”

“Really.”

“I ain’t gonna tell you I was not in favor of shutting you up, permanent. We both know the kind of things you could yak about on the witness stand.”

“That’s funny, Momo. Lot of people feel the same about you.”

Giancana paused. “I did not tell Inoglia and them guys to do that terrible thing to your family. I would not do that. I got kids, too. I lost a wife who I still love to this day... Don’t look at me like that. It’s the truth.”

“Who did tell them to do it?”

“Thing is...” He twitched a nervous smile. “...I don’t know exactly. I only know what went down in your place ’cause... well. You probably heard I picked up, over the years, certain... contacts in government. These contacts are concerned about, you know... what you said. Me testifying.”

“CIA. I heard the rumors. But you don’t remind me at all of James Bond, Momo.”

His slash of mouth tightened. “I am not shitting you, Saint. I was dealing with a voice on the phone. This voice said, don’t give us up to the committee... Senate committee, you know... and we’ll protect you. We’ll give you Michael Satariano.”

“I’m not a fool, Momo...”

“Hell, I know you aren’t! But think about it, Mike — think! How could I know you headed back to Tahoe, to pick up that prom queen daughter of yours? How could I know that?”

His gloved hand tight on the pistol grip, Michael said, “Anna and her boyfriend kept in touch.”

“How?”

“By phone.”

“Who taps phones, Mike? Do I tap phones? Does the Outfit tap fucking phones? Who the hell does that sound like — the fuckin’ G, and that don’t-the-fuck stand for Giancana, does it?”

The truth of it sizzled inside Michael’s brain like that damn sausage on the stove.

“A leak,” Michael said. “In WITSEC.”

“Has to be,” Giancana said, and pounded the table in emphasis. “Has to be — working with the spooks, one government agency leaning on another.”

“Who?”

He threw his hands up. “Hey, you got me by the balls.” His hands came down and folded, prayerfully, respectfully. “But you come over to my side, Mike, you be my right-hand man... like you were Frank Nitti’s? And when I retire—”

“All this will be mine?” Michael grunted a mirthless laugh. “I’m not into ashtrays and beer steins, Momo.”

Giancana swallowed, sat forward, urgency in his voice. “You take my off er, you ride back to the top with me, Mike, and I promise you, I will play those government cocksuckers like a ten-cent kazoo, and we will find out who ratted you out! We’ll find the WITSEC leak and you will plug the bastard. Personally!”

Michael stared at the little shell of the once powerful mob boss, in whom desperation had replaced charisma.

“Inoglia, Nappi, Caruso — they were your men, Momo, before I sent them to hell.”

“Who said they weren’t?”

“You say what happened in Paradise Estates wasn’t your doing. That some faceless voice on the phone, representing the CIA skeletons in your closet, gave me up to you as a favor...”

“Yeah! What don’t you get, Saint? I let it be known I was unhappy about my ‘company’ pals not protecting me from those fuckin’ Mexicans! I had tens of goddamn millions in the bank down there... and Uncle Sam can’t do anything about it? And now I gotta testify, and make Accardo and every paranoid asshole in the Outfit think I might spill the secrets, like that prick Valachi?”

“They couldn’t get your money for you, and they couldn’t put the brakes on the Senate committee... but they could give me up.”

“Fucking exactly!”

“Fine. Who ‘exactly’ is ‘they’?”

An elaborate shrug. “I met dozens of these spooks over the years, gray assholes in gray suits, and I could give you names, but you think they’re real names? You think I got an address book so I can send you and your vengeance hard-on to the homes of every government spy in Washington? Get real, Saint.”

“Maybe. But you sent those three Outfit goombahs to my house, Momo. And Inoglia murdered my wife. Explain that away — I’m listening.”

“Wait, wait, wait the fuck! I was in the goddamn hospital, in Houston, getting my gallbladder filleted! I gave that... that voice Inoglia’s name and contact crap. Do you think I woulda had them dress up like hippies? If I was gonna kill you, Saint, I’d want the world to know. You’da been an example. Whose fucking interests did it serve havin’ that hit look like Charlie Manson?”

Very softly Michael said, “The Witness Protection Program.”

Giancana was nodding. “Right, Mike, right. If it’s some whacko drugged-out flower people who butchered an innocent family, the government’s not to blame. But an Outfit hit, on a protected witness and his family? They’d be over. Done. WITSEC’d never have another player for their new-name-fresh-start game show.”

Sinatra was singing “The Look of Love.”

Feeling a little numb, Michael asked, “Who killed Mad Sam DeStefano?”

A small shrug, this time. “Just who you think — the Ant and Mario, Mad Sam’s own damn brother. Hey, I don’t deny framing you for that. Shit runs downhill — I gave you a direct order, and you thumbed your nose at me. What did you fucking expect me to do? Who twisted your arm to be part of Our Thing? Did you or did you not go down this road of your own free will?”

“I did,” Michael admitted.

“Well, then. I rest my fucking case.” He stood, scooching his chair back, making a tiny chalk-on-the-blackboard screech. “My offer is sincere. Why don’t you and your daughter just... take a vacation for a while. Mexico went south on me, so to speak, but I still have friends in very nice places — Bahamas, Jamaica — where you and your kid can relax... Let me get my house in order, recuperate a little from this damn surgery — and I’ll deal with this Senate thing, and in the meantime, Butch and Chuckie and me’ll gather my forces, and if it means taking Aiuppa out, so be it.”

“You mean, just watch from afar,” Michael said, “and you’ll call me in, when the time is right.”

A big grin split Giancana’s grooved, dark face. “Works for me!... I better get back to my sausage and beans. Be a goddamn shame to waste ingredients like them... My daughter Francine brought ’em over today.”

Sinatra had stopped singing, the album over.

Some cockiness in his step now, Giancana headed through the dining room and back into the kitchen, Michael right behind him, the .22 at his side.

Giancana returned to the two pans and began stirring the sausage. “A little too brown on the one side, but it’s still gonna be nice... You know, Michael, what our problem is? We’re too much alike, you and I. Pity we got off to such a bad start.”

“It really is,” Michael said, and shot him in the back of the head, the silenced pistol’s report like a cough.

Giancana jerked, then crumpled to the floor, sprawling on his back. Life flickered in the dark shark eyes, and he was still breathing, so Michael stuck the snout of the silenced weapon in the man’s mouth, and the pistol coughed again.

No more life in the eyes now, but Michael, lips peeled back over his teeth in something that was not at all a smile, shoved the gun under the gangster’s chin and fired again and again and again and again and again.

Giancana, quite dead now, lay on his back with his ankles crossed, right arm crooked at his side, his left hand above his head as if doing a native folk dance. Dark red streamed from the gaping throat wounds, and trails trickled from his nostrils and began to pool beside him on the linoleum.

Michael turned off the stove and slipped out into the garden, shutting the door behind him. He stood under a sky that flashed with heat lightning while the moon painted pale ivory the lovely landscaping, muting the color splashes of flowers.

He should have fled quickly, but he froze there, a voice in his mind — belonging to, of all people, his wife’s sister, Betty — saying, What good would it do? Nothing will bring her back.

Sam Giancana, the man responsible for Patricia’s death, was dead. And nothing had changed. Michael felt only an emptiness. No satisfaction. What had his father felt, when Connor Looney died?? Heat lightning flashed, as if a coded answer, daring him to figure it out, and he suddenly sensed something.

He looked up at wispy gray clouds and spasms of lightning and a strangely accusatory moon, and he could feel God watching.

And in Sam Giancana’s garden, with the dead gangster still bleeding onto a kitchen floor but a few yards away, Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., knelt on the stone patio and prayed, clasping gloved hands, one of which still held the murder gun.

“Forgive me, Father,” he said quietly, but out loud, head unbowed, beseeching the electricity-pulsating sky, “for I have sinned.”

Confession over, he got to his feet, and the hell out of there.

And he didn’t even realize he was crying until he was back to the car and his daughter said something.

“Are you all right, Daddy?”

“Fine, sweetheart. Fine. Drive. Normal speed.”

She drove them through the shady lanes of the residential suburb. The pistol was not in the car with them — he had tossed it in the sewer walking back.

“You’re crying, Daddy. Why?”

“Just... your mother. Thinking of your mother.”

“...Is he dead, Daddy? The man... the man who killed Mom?”

“He is. I killed him, baby.”

She was about a block from the residential hotel when she asked, “Do you feel better about it? With him dead?... Should I feel better?”

That was when he noticed she was crying, too.

Thirteen

At first glance, the stone-gray monolith — somehow simultaneously squat and towering — might have been a government building, an art deco courthouse from New Deal days, perhaps. On closer look, the wildly contradictory geometric overhangs and vaguely Egyptian columns of the washed-pebble, poured-concrete study in cubism suggested something more ethereal than tax money might buy, even under the WPA.

This was Unity Temple, the most famous of Oak Park’s many churches, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1906 study in cantilevered concrete, built to replace the former temple, which had been hit by lightning in 1905 and burned to the ground, a heavenly hint the church leaders hadn’t taken. Perhaps that explained the lack of a spire, though Wright claimed to be avoiding cliché when lightning rod was more like it.

An architectural landmark and tourist attraction, the cement church at Lake Street and Kenilworth gave daily informal tours — nothing too structured from a denomination that defined itself as nondenominational. The last one, on this sunny afternoon in June, had ended at five p.m., fifteen minutes ago — Michael had instructed Associate Director Harold Shore of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section to take that final tour.

On returning last night from Giancana’s house, Michael had called the panic-button number, and said he was ready to come in from the cold — and wanted to meet with Shore, ASAP.

“Where?”

“Chicago.”

“Can you be a little more specific, Michael?”

“I will be, after you arrive.”

“Then I’ll fly out tomorrow — first thing.”

“I’ll only talk to you and Hughes. Nobody new. Understand, Harry? I spot any backup, I’m vapor.”

“Understood.”

“Do you have a regular hotel?”

“Usually the Drake. Give me a second, Michael — let me check the plane schedule...”

“If you’re trying to trace this call, Harry, I’ll be annoyed.”

“No, no, no... Assuming no airline delays, I’ll be at the Drake no later than two thirty p.m.”

“I’ll call you there at that time.”

And Michael had, giving Shore detailed instructions about meeting him at Unity Temple, including attending the final tour of the day, and lagging behind in the sanctuary.

Now the last visitor had trailed out — actually around, because the entrance was behind the structure, which had no doors on the street, another stated avoidance of cliché by the architect, probably in reality an effort to evade nearby El noise.

Across the way, Michael waited and watched another ten minutes, tucked behind some trees next to a church as Gothic as the Wright structure was modern. His post provided him a necessary catercorner view, since that rear entrance could be approached from either side.

As he jaywalked over to the Temple, Michael — in a brown sport jacket, yellow pullover, and lighter brown slacks — might have been another tourist, albeit not one with a camera, rather a .45 Colt automatic in a shoulder holster. He followed the sidewalk back to a bank of wood and stained-glass doors — adorned with Wright’s usual geometric designs — that joined the two wings of the modernistic monument. He unbuttoned his sport jacket, for easier access to the weapon, as he entered beneath the bold bronze words:

Michael had already thoroughly scoped the building out, and arranged for the use of the auditorium. He’d said (truthfully, as far as it went) that he needed to talk to some gentlemen from the government about the welfare of his daughter, and wished to do so in the privacy of this spiritual, sacred space. Michael’s sincerity — and a one-hundred-dollar contribution — convinced the reverend, who would be off having his supper with his family in the parish house.

The low-ceilinged, almost dreary foyer, with typical Prairie-style high-backed wooden chairs, did not provide direct access to the inner church — corridors at left and right led around it, to various entrances... Apparently Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t want worshipers in search of something meaningful finding it too easily. Michael chose left, continuing on a journey that — from street to sanctuary — took seven turns and a walk equal to twice the building’s length.

A short flight of dimly lit steps rose into the brightness of the sanctuary, a mode of entrance designed to allow latecomers a discreet arrival — not a bad thing for Michael, under the present circumstances. He emerged at the rear of the worship area, a sort of glorified box of cool pastel planes with dark horizontal and vertical wood trim, with room enough for hundreds yet as intimate as a tea room, double tiers of balcony on three sides, and a front-and-center pulpit facing a handful of central pews, four rows divided by an aisle.

In the second pew from the back, seated as per Michael’s instructions, were Shore and Hughes, the two feds staring up in awe at the ceiling’s grid of wooden beams with countless inset squares of stained-glass skylight. Even in late afternoon, sunshine streamed down, turned amber by the leaded windows, whose geometric shadows made their presence known as well.

Michael slid in behind them. “Gentlemen.”

Shore and Hughes slid left and right, respectively, and turned toward their host. Against the brown suit with brown/rust/yellow paisley tie on a tan shirt, bald Shore looked puffy, pale, and annoyed, his eyes slitted behind the big heavy frames and buggy lenses. Hughes, on the other hand — in a dark blue suit with blue-and-white polka-dot tie against pale blue shirt — seemed detached, the Apache-cheeked, light blue — eyed marshal still taking in the unique architectural surroundings.

His tone both soft and tight, Shore said, “Before we begin, Michael, tell me you didn’t hit Sam Giancana last night.”

“I did not,” Michael said. Lies had been told in churches before. Offhandedly he added, “But I did go see him and talk to him.”

Now Michael had Hughes’s arched-eyebrow attention, too. “And you didn’t whack the son of a bitch?” Then the marshal winced, remembering where he was, whispering to Shore, “Sorry.”

“I talked to him,” Michael said, matter of fact. “Got some interesting information. But I didn’t kill him.”

Shore sighed heavily, eyes rolling behind the magnifying lenses. “We can’t do business if you did. You do understand that, don’t you, Michael?”

Their voices echoed somewhat, in the resonant room.

“I understand. But I saw the papers, the TV, like everybody else — so I know what went down there last night, after I left. You tell me, Harry — would I have shot Mooney with some kind of half-assed silenced weapon... What did they find again?”

Hughes said, “A Duromatic .22.”

“What,” Michael said, “a target pistol?”

Shore nodded. “With a silencer out of shops class. Admittedly not your style.”

“That was a mob hit,” Michael said, with a dismissive shrug. “Would I have shot him, how many times?”

“Six,” Shore said, eyes glued to Michael.

“Back of the head, then five times in the jaw, to rip his tongue apart? Outfit symbolism for a squealer, right? What would I have done, Harry?”

“Once in the head,” Shore said, locking eyes with Michael. “Looking right at him.”

“Using what?”

Hughes half-smirked and said, “That .45 of yours.”

Michael smiled genially. “Fellas, we see eye to eye on this.”

Hughes said, “Giancana’s old buddy Butch Blasi was seen in the neighborhood, not long before that caretaker upstairs found the body. Chicago PD and FBI both like him for it.”

“Butch works for Aiuppa now,” Michael said, “but Giancana would’ve still trusted him. Makes sense.”

Shore made a face as if tasting something sour; his usual smiles were nowhere to be seen. “This has Accardo written all over it.”

“No argument,” Michael said.

Hughes was still taking in the multileveled but simple sanctuary with its tinted glass, natural colors, abstract designs. “Why this place?”

“I wanted someplace public,” Michael said, “where we could talk in private.”

Hughes frowned as he looked around. “Yeah, but what’s the deal with this crazy-house, anyway? What the hell kind of church is this?”

Shore frowned, too — but at Hughes. “Be respectful.”

But Michael answered him, “As I understand it, they believe in peace, respect, and justice. Hey, you’re Justice Department guys. What better place?”

Vaguely irritated with this line of chitchat, Shore said, “It’s sort of... nondenominational.”

“I’ve made a contribution to the church,” Michael said, “so that we can talk without interruption — for at least an hour.”

Shore said, “Our business won’t take that long. You’ve convinced me that you had nothing to do with Giancana’s murder. And the Outfit scum you encountered at your house in Paradise Estates, and the other two lowlifes at the Cal-Neva parking lot, prom night... well, that was clearly self-defense. So WITSEC feels it can welcome you back into the fold, Michael, open arms.”

Hughes said, “We’re looking at maybe a half a dozen major organized crime trials in the next three years — you’ll be valuable to the process. Welcome home.”

“And,” Shore said, “there’ll be no slip-ups, you have my word. You and your daughter will be safe in your new lives... Where is Anna, Michael?”

“She’s safe.” He let the sarcasm show as he said, “Not as safe as if she were in the protective arms of WITSEC, of course — you guys being so expert at protecting people and all.”

Shore’s sigh was weight-of-the-world. “I understand your bitterness, Michael. But you are making the right decision, and—”

“You may not like my terms, gents.”

Hughes grunted a laugh. “Why? What kind of ‘terms’ do you have in mind?”

“Well,” Michael said, leaning back in the pew, putting his arms along the back of the bench, enjoying the way the two feds had to twist around to talk to him, “while you will be relocating Anna and me, in new lives of our choice... I won’t be testifying.”

Shore said, “What?”

Hughes laughed harshly and said, “Then why the hell would we want your ass back? If you’re not gonna play the game.”

“I’ll play the game, fellas. But my rules. My conditions.”

Shore’s eyes were half-lidded behind the glasses. “Which are?”

“You relocate us. Set us up, the full WITSEC boat, to my specs. I don’t testify.”

“Don’t testify!” Hughes said, forehead taut.

“Don’t testify. But I also don’t go public.”

Shore frowned, but said nothing; he didn’t have to — he got it at once.

But Hughes asked, “Public, what the hell, public?”

“Public about how WITSEC got my wife killed. About how I had to go on the road with my daughter and protect her myself because you people didn’t. Or couldn’t.”

Shore swung around in the seat, facing the empty pulpit, his back to Michael, now. The man lowered his head, covering his face with a hand, an elbow on a knee; but he was not praying.

Hughes, sideways in the pew and still looking back at their recalcitrant witness, said, “Who’s gonna believe you? You don’t think the government isn’t capable of denying everything? You haven’t heard of disinformation, dipshit?”

Shore looked at Hughes. “Don, shut up.” Then he craned back around in the seat and said to Michael, “You have a deal.”

Hughes blurted, “Are you crazy, Shore? You’re gonna let this asshole—”

“Please, Don,” Michael said. “It’s church, remember? Voice down. Little respect. Please.”

Shore in a gravel whisper said to the marshal, “WITSEC won’t last a ‘sec’ if what happened to the Satarianos gets in the media. The program will be over. No one will trust us to testify. We’d be the Watergate of law enforcement. Mr. Satariano will... I should say Mr. Smith will—”

“Actually,” Michael said, “I’ll be using O’Sullivan.”

Unaware of the name’s significance, Shore waved that off. “Fine, fine, that’s the least of our problems... So are you and Anna prepared to pack your bags and come with us, then?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Michael said. “You haven’t heard the rest of my terms.”

Hughes’s eyes showed white all around. “Rest of your terms? Jesus!”

The word echoed in the sanctuary.

Quietly, patiently, resignedly, Shore said, “What else do you want, Michael?”

“First, I need to tell you something, something that you may not believe. It’s one reason why I thought a church would be appropriate for this meeting. Anyway. See, I’ve had what’s sometimes called an epiphany.”

Hughes frowned. “A what?”

Shore’s eyes were closed.

“Something happened, recently — something personal, private, that I don’t feel like sharing with you.” Because that would have involved telling the truth about killing Sam Giancana. “But let’s keep it simple, and just say I’m turning over a new leaf.”

Shore shook his head, sighed yet again. As if in pain, he said, “What kind of ‘new leaf’ would that be, Michael?”

“A long time ago I chose a path... a road. Where it led was violence and revenge. And, looking back, I don’t think that ever worked out all that well — for me, or anybody. Right here in this sacred place, gentlemen, I’m telling you that I am no longer seeking revenge. I hope never to have to perform another violent act in my life.”

Hughes, bitterly amused, said, “Well, glory hallelujah, and goodie for you.”

Shore, relieved, flashed Hughes a dark look, then brightened and said, “Well, that’s a ‘condition’ I’m pleased to embrace, Michael. In fact, I’d insist upon it.”

“Understand,” Michael said, and raised a gently lecturing finger, “I have no moral barrier against self-defense, or protecting my daughter.”

“Fine,” Shore said, and smiled, more strained than usual. “Who can argue with that? So. Are we done?”

“Almost. Harold, I just need you to take Don here into custody.”

Shore started to smile, but then noticed the stricken expression on his marshal’s face.

Michael’s eyes locked with those haunting sky-blue eyes bookended by Apache cheekbones, and said, “You may not know what ‘epiphany’ means, Don... but you’re fucking lucky I had one. Or you’d already be dead.”

Hughes swallowed thickly. “What the fuck are you babbling about? What are you, high?” He swiveled to Shore. “Harry, the guy’s fucking nuts, or coked to the gills or some shit — he’s talkin’ out of his ass!”

Calmly Michael said, “Giancana told me last night that the CIA made a gesture of goodwill to him, partially paying him back for various inconveniences, by giving me up to him. And they did that through somebody in WITSEC, Harry. Some security breach. But really, only you two were in on my family’s relocation every step of the way — the program is set up on a ‘need to know’ basis, right, Don? Very tight. Controlled.”

Hughes was shaking his head, smiling, but a sick smile. “Harry, you can’t be buying any of this shit. I don’t know what he’s up to, why he’s doin’ this, maybe he believes it, and is so upset by his wife’s death that—”

Michael slapped Hughes. Hard. It rang in the high-ceilinged chamber.

“Don’t ever mention her,” Michael said.

Hughes, his cheek blazing red, was trembling — with fear, with rage.

“The tap on Gary Grace’s phone,” Michael said, calm again, “that’s federal; Outfit doesn’t tap phones. Telling Giancana’s assassins to disguise the hit on my home as a mass murder by mad hippies, who would do that? Someone protecting the Witness Protection Program. Someone inside. Actually, Harry, I thought it might have been you...”

“Only it wasn’t me,” Shore said quietly, and his eyes were on Hughes, blazing.

“I don’t know whether Marshal Hughes was acting out of patriotism,” Michael said, “helping out the government’s intel boys, or if an investigation into his finances will reveal recent windfalls. Of course, knowing the CIA, we might be talking Swiss accounts. Even so, an upswing in Don’s lifestyle might be apparent if—”

Hughes leaned toward Shore and said, words tumbling, “Come on, Harry, you can’t believe this fractured fairy tale, come on, man! How long have we worked together?”

Michael said to Shore, “Harry, we can wrap this up, quick... with a simple question about Don, here — where does Marshal Hughes work out of?”

“You know the answer to that, Michael,” Shore said. “Washington, DC. We both do.”

Michael’s gaze moved back to Hughes, whose brow was beaded with sweat, though the sanctuary was cool. “Don, maybe I’m wrong about you.”

“I’m telling you, Satariano, you are wrong!”

“It’s O’Sullivan. Just answer one question. If you work out of DC, why were you in Tucson the night my wife was murdered? Why were you at the airport, waiting for me?”

The nine-millimeter Browning was in Hughes’s hand — snatched off his belt holster — in less than a second.

“Don’t bother, Don,” Michael said. “You’re already covered.”

And Michael nodded behind and up, to the balcony where Anna pointed the Garand rifle right at the marshal.

“You may remember from the night you helped us move, Don,” Michael said, “all those first-place ribbons from the Tahoe Gun Club...?”

The girl held the gun with confidence, sighting down the barrel.

“And if you’re thinking,” Michael said, “she’s just a kid... well, you’re right. A kid whose mother you killed. And the Grace boy? Her prom date? They got married in Vegas, the night before your Outfit trash murdered him.”

Nostrils flaring, cords standing out in his neck, Hughes jumped to his feet, grabbed Shore with his free hand, and thrust the plump, shorter fed in front of him as a shield, nine mil’s nose in Shore’s neck. The marshal’s eyes were moving very fast. Michael could almost read the man’s thoughts: if everyone died here but him, he could find a story, he could find a story the world would buy...

Michael said evenly, “Don, just put the gun down. I’m sure your buddy Harry, here, will have a nice warm spot in WITSEC for you... because I’d rather you lived... really, truly. I’d rather you testified and brought down the faceless ‘company’ assholes whose lackey you are. The people really responsible for Pat’s death, cold-blooded CIA renegades in bed with gangsters, self-serving traitors who need to be exposed.”

“You don’t know the kind of people you’re dealing with,” Hughes said, with hollow laughter; he was trembling, the nine mil’s snout stuffed deep in the fleshy folds of the other fed’s neck. “Petty little dago dog shit like you, what do you know?... Those boys are the big leagues, and you’re outa yours, you stupid son of a bitch...”

“Anna!” Michael said. “I warned you, honey, it might come to this. Sweetheart — got to be a head shot. You can do it. It’ll shut off his motor skills like a light switch.”

“Okay, Daddy,” she called down, and it echoed.

Past a terrified Shore, Hughes looked up with a little fear but mostly arrogance at the teenage girl pointing the rifle at him from the higher of two rear balconies. “You really think I believe—”

The shot sounded like a thunderclap.

Director Shore’s eyes and mouth were open wide, as just behind the human shield, Marshal Don Hughes froze for a particle of a moment, just long enough for Michael to see the blankness in the eyes in a skull cracked like an egg by the bullet that had pierced it between, and just above, the sky-blue eyes.

Then Hughes dropped out of sight between pews, hitting the floor noisily, like a bag of doorknobs, punctuated by his nine mil clunking to the wooden floor, leaving a stunned Shore just standing there, saved in church.

Michael got to his feet. “You’re going to have to deal with the reverend, Harry — Anna and I will be in touch.”

Shore’s eyes pleaded as he reached out and said, “Michael!”

The director was getting a crash course in the violent realities behind the abstraction of his program.

“You’ll be fine, Harry. But I can’t be here when the cops come. You’ve cleaned up crime scenes before. Cheer up — didn’t we repair your security breach?”

And Michael slipped out of the sanctuary, where the sunlight was fading, creating an indoor dusk. An ashen Anna was coming down the stairs in a tank top and jeans with the rifle in her hands, clearly shaken.

“I killed him, Daddy,” she said.

He took the Garand from her, and wrapped it in his sport coat (they’d brought the rifle in, field-stripped in a gym bag, and he’d assembled it for her in the balcony).

“Only because you had to, sweetheart. Only because you had to.”

Not revenge, he thought. Justice.

Weapon tucked under one arm, he slipped the other around her, and they moved quickly down the long corridor.

Her face was white. “I... I feel weird.”

“Can you hold it in?”

She nodded.

“Good girl,” he said, and they were to the car, parked right along the Temple on Kenilworth, before she puked.

Fourteen

In their suite at the Oak Arms, Michael and Anna sat at the small ’50s-era Formica table in the kitchenette and, over a Coke and a Tab, talked. The night was sultry, humid with rain that desperately wanted to happen, the window open, two layers of drapes fluttering — the bedroom had an air conditioner, which was on and chugging mightily, but its efforts never made their way into the tiny living room/kitchenette.

“You’re going to be okay,” he told her gently.

She sat slumped, staring at the gray speckles of the tabletop. “I know I am. But I feel... guilty...”

“That’s to be expected.”

“...About not feeling guilty.” She looked up at him. “I could hear everything in that church, Daddy. I heard what you said to them about that... that Giancana...”

“I had to lie, sugar. We need Director Shore and what he can do for us through WITSEC. My only other option is to go back to work for the Outfit.”

Her brow tightened. “They’d take you back?”

He nodded. “I did a big favor for Tony Accardo, removing Mooney Giancana. And Accardo knows we were victims in this thing, from the start. He’s like Frank Nitti — best man in a bad world.” He shook his head. “But, honey, that’s not what I want for us.”

“You did kill that man, though — Giancana. You shot him over and over, the papers say. Was that... to make it look like some... Mafia thing?”

He could have lied to her; but instead he said, “No. I used that to convince Shore I hadn’t done it, but no, baby. I was over the edge — way over, thinking of what they did to Mom. It was pure rage. Normally, I’m... cool. That’s how it is in war. But not last night, not killing that creature. The expression — seeing red? I saw it. Nothing but red. Blood red.”

Her eyes were on him, now. She nodded and sipped the glass of Tab on ice (he was drinking from a can), and stared at the gray table flecks again. “I killed him as much as you did.”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t the law think so?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t care. I’m glad he’s dead. I don’t think I could have done what you did, but... maybe I could. But I was... like you said? Cool, cold. In the church? I just aimed at that marshal, that fucking bastard, and...” She covered her face; her eyes were shut. She was not crying.

He reached for her left hand, took it, squeezed it, then held it. “That was not murder, sweetheart. I saw that animal’s eyes — he was about to kill me, and Director Shore, and if the reverend of that church had come running in, followed by a class of Sunday school kids, Hughes would’ve shot them, too. Feeling a lot less than you’re feeling.”

“So what I did... it was like, self-defense?”

“Survival.”

“Anyway, I’m glad he’s dead, too. Gary died because of that fucker. Mom, too. I could do it again.”

He squeezed her hand. “But you won’t. Honey, my father did not want me to go down his road. He wanted more than anything in this world that I would not turn out like him — but I did.”

“Because of him?”

He shrugged. “Well, sure... on some level. But I made the choice. We have to choose where we’re headed, baby, and carefully.”

She formed a half-smile, fully wry. “It’s not like we have a lot of options.”

“No.” He smiled, just a little. “But Director Shore will help. You want to go back to school, don’t you? Get back in theater?”

Her laugh was short yet hollow. “I don’t know. It seems so... abstract now. I feel removed from it, distant, detached... Have I gone dead inside?”

Patting her hand, he said, “No, baby, you’re just protecting yourself... Hey, it’s over; we’ve woken from the nightmare.”

Her eyes and forehead were tight. “Are you sure, Daddy?”

“We’ll always have to be careful in a way most people aren’t. What I’m asking you to do is join up with your life again, your goals, your dreams.”

Her eyes looked past him, at nothing. “My dreams had Gary in them.”

“I know. And my dreams had your mother in them. But we have to go on, anyway. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re wrong — you will fall in love again.”

She shook her head, her expression blank. “But I won’t.”

“You won’t stop loving Gary, even — but you will find someone else.”

She didn’t argue. Her expression turned quizzical. “What about you, Daddy? Think you’ll find someone else?”

“...No. No, sweetheart, your mother was the only woman I ever really loved. That’s a road I won’t go down again. I had many wonderful years with her, and with my family, and that part of me is... satisfied.” He shifted in the chair. “And that’s one thing I wanted to talk to you about, darling... It’s something I’ve been thinking about, a lot, but I’m afraid I’m just being foolish. Or maybe gone crazy.”

Now she squeezed his hand. “What, Daddy?”

What the hell. He just said it: “How would you feel about going back to school — together?”

The immediate response was amusement, but she caught herself, and said, “You want to go to college?”

He couldn’t look at her. “Well... actually, that’s a string I need pulled for me, but Director Shore has managed bigger miracles. See, I took junior-college night classes, oh, twenty years ago, getting a two-year business degree.”

She regarded him with one eyebrow arched. “And you want to finish?”

“No... no. I’m going to ask Shore to turn Michael O’Sullivan, Jr., into a college graduate. So that I can go on to seminary.”

Her expression froze. “...Seminary.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to be a... priest?”

He shrugged, still couldn’t look at her. “A lot of priests were married, once. Widowers who wanted to take another path.”

She leaned toward him, smiling gently. “You want to go from bullets to Eucharists? You’re joking, right?... You’re not joking, are you?”

“No.” Now, finally, he committed his eyes to hers. “I haven’t had some mystical experience, honey; Jesus didn’t come talking to me in the night or anything. But I was raised in the Catholic Church, it’s a tradition that comforts me. And it’s a world where I can make up for... things I’ve done. I can find some kind of redemption, and I can help others.”

She wasn’t smiling now. “Do you even believe in God?”

“I do. Your mother didn’t. But I do.”

Again she smirked. “Well, I sure as hell don’t. Not anymore.”

“I can’t blame you. But, just the same, I’m asking you to respect my decision.”

“I don’t know, Daddy...”

“Will you try? Will you at least try?”

She swallowed. Her brow tightened.

“What I’m hoping is,” he said, trying not to sound desperate, “we can find some college somewhere, some university, where you can study in the arts while I’m taking the seminary. Small apartment, live together. Maybe not a college girl’s dream, but—”

Her smile was back. “But for the next few years, Father O’Sullivan, the fighting priest, wants to make sure no Mafiosi come out of the closet to kill his baby’s butt. Or his own holy heinie?”

“...Does it sound so very absurd to you?”

Nodding, she said, “Frankly, Daddy, yes, it does.”

“But will you try to accept it?”

She sighed.

Thought for a while.

Finally said, “If you don’t come to your senses, in the days and weeks and months ahead? Sure. I can learn to stop calling you ‘Daddy’ and start calling you ‘Father.’ If I really, really have to.”

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You’ll always be my best girl.”

“Don’t tell the Virgin Mary.”

They would leave the next morning. Michael had in mind flying to Hawaii and spending a couple of weeks on the beach, giving Anna some genuine vacation time, really getting away while Director Shore put their house in order. His daughter certainly had no objection to that, and they went across the street for Chinese, then returned to watch a little television. Early on in Johnny Carson, Anna got sleepy, kissed her father’s forehead, padded into the bedroom yawning, leaving the uncomfortable couch all to him.

He didn’t make it through Carson, either, and stripped to his underwear and pulled out the bed and climbed between the sheets; he was so exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally, that even the paper-thin mattress and cruel springs did not keep him from dropping off almost instantly.

He dreamed of his son. Mike was in full battle gear, but he was sitting at that kitchenette table with them, listening to Anna and Michael conduct a somewhat garbled version of their real conversation. Mike just listened politely, his helmet on the Formica table; then finally he said, “Dad — sis! I’m here. I’m still here — why don’t you talk to me?”

Then Mike said, “Wake up, you cocksucker,” a harsh whisper, but it wasn’t Mike, and something cold was in his neck.

The snout of a gun, a revolver’s nose.

His eyes shot open, and his right hand made a break for the end table where the .45 was, or rather had been, because his fingers found nothing but wood for his nails to scrape, and the voice whispered, “It isn’t there, asshole.”

The intruder, keeping the gun in Michael’s neck, sat on the edge of the sleeper, making the springs creak and whine, and, still sotto voce, said, “Just be quiet. I don’t want to have to do sleeping beauty, too, in the other room. She don’t deserve what you’re gonna get, you fucking prick.”

The curtains were back to let air in the open window, so streetlamps bouncing off alley brick sent in enough illumination for Michael to take stock of his guest. This was a young man — probably around his son, Mike’s, age — who Michael did not recognize, though he made him as an Italian kid, from the dark complexion and eyes, the dark curly hair worn shoulder-length, and a Roman nose too big for his young Dino-ish face. The black leather jacket and black jeans fit the profile, too, as did the gold chain around the neck.

“Then fucking kill me,” Michael whispered, “and go.”

The kid shook his head; he was grinning and cocky, but it was a front — this boy was nervous, and his dark eyes were glistening. If that .38 nose weren’t buried in his neck, Michael could have easily done something about this...

“You don’t get off so fuckin’ easy, old man. It ain’t enough for you to just fucking die.”

“Sure it is. Squeeze the trigger and run.”

He shook his head, and drops of sweat traveled. “No, no, no — you gotta know, you gotta know who did this to your evil ass. Why he... I... did this!”

The kid was getting tripped up in his own melodrama.

“Okay, son, I’ll bite — who are you?”

Teeth were bared in the almost-handsome face like a wolf getting ready for a meal. With exaggerated, stupid deliberation, he said, “You are looking at Sam DeStef-ano.”

Michael frowned. “The hell...?”

Kid smacked his chest with a fist made from his free hand. “Antonio DeStefano — Little Sam, they call me. Sam was my uncle. And you fucking killed him, you rat fuck bastard...”

“Step away!”

Goddamnit! Just what Michael feared...

The door had swung open without either him or Little Sam seeing, and framed there in a pink-and-blue floral nightshirt that ended at her knees, nipples perking the cotton accusingly, hair an endless dark tangle, stood tight-jawed Anna with the long-barreled .38 in her two clutching, aiming hands — the Smith & Wesson that Michael had plucked from the belt of Inoglia, her mother’s murderer, back in Arizona.

If the kid had known what the hell he was doing, he would have fired the gun in Michael’s neck, then swung it around and used the shock of the moment to blow the girl away, too.

But the kid was, well, a kid, inexperienced, afraid, in way too deep here, and reflexively jerked away, scrambling to his feet, lurching from the bed to thrust the gun toward Anna.

Thank God neither fired!

The two children weren’t three feet away from each other, now — the weapons aimed at each other’s young faces.

“Back away, bitch,” Little Sam snapped. “This isn’t your fight!”

“Not yours, either,” she said coldly.

Michael eased out of bed and positioned himself alongside them, a referee trying to break up a fight on a basketball court. He was so close to them both he could hear Anna’s slow steady breathing and the boy’s heavy ragged variation; but these kids were facing each other, and to throw himself between them risked a stray bullet finding Anna, even making its way through her father’s body into hers.

“Anna,” Michael said, “don’t do anything. Antonio, you have to listen to me.”

Through clenched teeth, the wild-eyed kid said, “Fuck I do!” the mane of curly black hair catching the alley light in a shimmer, a side effect of how bad the boy was shaking.

“Son...”

“Don’t call me that!”

Michael raised two surrendering palms. “Mr. DeStefano, I know all about family loyalty. And can give chapter and verse on revenge. I could tell you it’s a dead end and you’d never believe me...”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“...But you need to know a couple of things before you take this any further, starting with I didn’t kill your uncle. Sam Giancana did.”

The kid shook his head, and sweat flecks flew. “You’re a liar! You’re a goddamn liar!”

His voice as calm as young Sam’s wasn’t, Michael said, “You are looking at the two people who killed Giancana, just last night — because my daughter lost her husband, and she and I lost her mother, when Giancana framed me for killing your uncle, and the DeStefano crew came looking for us.”

He shook his head, a dozen spastic times. “You’re not telling the truth! Why should I listen to this shit...?”

“Because you’re about to lose your life, or maybe take a life or two, for the wrong reason. The man who killed Mad Sam DeStefano was Spilotro — the Ant? I’m sure you know that charmer, and he did it for himself and for Giancana.”

“...The fuck, you say.”

“I can prove it.”

“Fuck you can!”

“You followed us here from the Temple, right?”

“What if I did!”

“Because a bent marshal dropped the dime. Guy named Hughes... Only he’s dead now.”

The boy’s eyes somehow got wilder. “Who says he’s dead! And so what if he told me!”

Patting the air, just a little, Michael said reasonably, “I knew that, only because I also knew this same bent cop sicced your DeStefano guys — and some Giancana crew, too — on me and my family. It was part of the same damn frame.”

Spittle flitted. “Talk till you’re fuckin’ blue, you still killed my uncle!”

“Are you Mario’s boy?”

“No! He’s my other uncle...”

“Mario was in it with Spilotro.”

Little Sam seemed about to cry, the gun trembling in his hand, but still pointed right at Anna’s face. “...Why should I believe you? You wanna send me off to kill somebody else? What kinda putz do you take me for?”

Anna said, “Is that a trick question?”

“Shut up, bitch!”

“Anna... please... Antonio, I am not suggesting you go after your uncle and that crazy asshole Spilotro... You’ll really get yourself killed, then. But you need to know who you’re defending. Your father was Angelo, right?”

His chin quivered; his eyes were moving side to side. “What, what are you bringing up that ancient hist—”

“You never really knew him, though. Your father. He’s been gone a long time.”

Little Sam’s voice seemed small, now, though the gun remained big enough. “What does that have to do with shit?”

“Did you know he was a drug addict?”

The voice grew large, again. “What the fuck business is that of yours! You are so going down...”

“You must have been told that your father was murdered.”

“...That, that, that’s the kind of business we’re in, Satariano. You know that!”

“What you don’t know is, your beloved Uncle Sam? The man everybody but you called ‘Mad Sam’?... killed your father. And everybody but you knows it.”

Little Sam’s face whitened, and his eyes grew big. But the voice was back to small. “...You’re lying. That’s crazy. You’re lyin’, that’s crazy horseshit...”

“Everybody knows Sam was ashamed of Angelo — considered him an embarrassment, a burden. Mad Sam stabbed your father to death, in a car, and then he took him somewhere and washed him clean. Your uncle bragged about it. Told people he wanted to make sure his brother went to heaven with a clean soul. That’s why your father was found the way he was — naked... dead... freshly bathed. In the trunk of a car, right?”

Little Sam was shaking, head to foot, including the .38 in his grasp. “...My uncle... my uncle wouldn’t...”

“How well did you know your uncle, son? Did you ever see his private workshop? With the ice picks? What kind of life advice did he give you? Do unto others? Fuck them before they can fuck you, maybe?”

The boy swallowed; he was breathing very hard now, tears streaming down his face in glistening ribbons. He began to hunch over, the revolver limp in his hand.

“I’m going to take that, son,” Michael said, stepping forward, holding his hand out for the gun.

“You’ll... you’ll shoot me... you’ll... shoot my ass...”

But the boy allowed Michael to take the revolver from him, and Michael said, “No, Antonio, I won’t shoot you. Anna, put that gun down. Get our guest a glass of water, would you?”

She looked at her father as if he were crazy, but the unspoken “Huh?” did not come out.

“Anna? Please?”

Into the kitchenette she went, smirking and shaking her head, but obviously relieved, though her definition of putting the gun “down” was aiming it at the floor, and not setting it anywhere. She switched a light on.

The boy dropped to his knees. Hung his head. He was crying.

“Forgive me,” Antonio said. “Forgive me.”

Michael put his hand on the boy’s shoulder; then he knelt beside him.

“Only God can do that, son.”

“I’m sorry... I’m sorry... God forgive me.”

“He will,” Michael said. “Pray to Him... right now, pray to Him. And ask. Just ask.”

Antonio snuffled snot and nodded, black locks of hair shimmering in the dim light, and clasped his hands and began to pray, silently, while Michael squeezed the boy’s shoulder, his own head bowed, too.

Knowing that this time, finally, he’d made the right choice.