A Quiet Vendetta (38 page)

We took Don Ceriano’s car. Don Ceriano drove, beside him Carlo Evangelisti, myself and Don Calligaris in the back. We drove for an endless time, it seemed, but the streets were still familiar and so we could not have traveled for very long. Don Ceriano spoke incessantly. I wanted to tell him to shut up, that he would need all his energy to fight against what would inevitably come, and when he asked questions of me there was nothing I could do but murmur an affirmative or a denial.

‘Once again you think too much and say too little, Ernesto,’ he said, to which Don Calligaris interjected, ‘Seems that would be a good attitude for a whole lot more of our people,’ and they all laughed, and they were laughing in the face of something terrible, and it seemed that Don Ceriano was the only one who could not see it. Perhaps he was blinded by greed, the promise of money or reputation or acknowledgement from the family, but he was blind whatever the reason, and inside I had already done my grieving because I knew there was nothing I could do to save him.

Don Ceriano was dead even in the moment that he had awoken that morning, perhaps earlier, perhaps in some brief exchange of words that had taken place between his visitors from Chicago the night before. Only later would I understand the weeks and months of prelude to his death. Only later would I understand that the decision had been made by someone he had never even met.

We pulled over at the back of a warehouse downtown. We were close to the edge of the desert. The sun was high, the air heated and dry, and there was a breathless tension in the atmosphere.

‘Here we can do anything to a car that you can do to a car,’ Don Ceriano said. ‘Here we have a crew who can steal cars to order, who can strip and remove chassis numbers, change plates and log books and whatever the hell else in a handful of hours. We run maybe six to a dozen vehicles through here a week, many of them winding up in the mid-west and the northern states.’ He was lighthearted, proud even, and he sat back in the driver’s seat with the window open, in his hand one of the expensive cigars that had been delivered that very morning.

It was in that moment, as he raised the cigar to his lips, that Don Fabio Calligaris whipped the wire over Don Ceriano’s head and pulled it back again with every ounce of strength he possessed. Caught between the wire and his neck was Don Ceriano’s right wrist, and I watched with a sense of abject and disconnected horror as the wire cut into the flesh and the cigar he was holding was crushed into his face.

Even as instinct urged me forward, urged me to do something to help Don Ceriano, I glanced to my left and saw Don Evangelisti looking at me. His eyes challenged me to move. The way he held his body, the way he leaned against the back of the seat, I knew he held a gun that was aimed directly at some part of my body.

Everything seemed to slide away into a vague unreality. I felt the urgency of Don Ceriano’s helplessness. I felt the need to do something to help him. I was aware of my loyalty to him, the agreements that had been made, and against all of these things the necessity to preserve my own life and the memory of my family.

‘Aah fuck, fuck, fuck,’ Don Calligaris was saying, and then Don Ceriano started thrashing and screaming.

Don Calligaris leaned back and placed the bottom of his right foot against the back of the driver’s seat. He clenched his fists, and started jerking the wire back again and again. Don Ceriano screamed louder. Blood poured from the gash in his wrist, a gash that grew deeper with every sudden movement.

I watched in horror. I could not move. Everything inside me told me to do something,
anything
, but I seemed unable to move.

Don Ceriano, his eyes wide, his mouth open – screaming in agony as the pain increased – looked at me.

I looked back at him – blank, feeling nothing.

I was oblivious of the gun that Don Evangelisti held. I had gone beyond the point of concerning myself with what might happen if I reacted. All I knew was that this was not my time to die. It could not be.

‘For Christ’s sake shut the fuck up!’ Evangelisti was shouting, as if Don Ceriano had a choice, and it was in that second, as I watched the blood pumping from his wrist, as I watched the muscles straining in Fabio Calligaris’s face, as I saw the sudden panic that registered on the face of the man beside Ceriano, that I knew I had to do something.

I looked to my left. I remember that. I looked to my left out through the window, looked out towards the desert, the sheer absence of anything recognizable against the horizon, and I asked myself if this could be the end of my life also.

My mother looked back at me. I had to survive, if only for her. That was my decision. The decision prompted action, and I clenched my fist. I leaned forward, past Don Calligaris, and with my right hand I hammered sideways into Don Ceriano’s temple.

He stopped screaming for a split second.

He looked back at me over his shoulder. He realized in that moment that I was not going to help him, that I had made a decision to let him die in that car.

He started screaming again.

I pushed Don Calligaris aside, the wire loosened from its hold, and awkwardly thrusting myself between the two front seats I gripped Don Ceriano’s throat with my hands. Again his screaming ceased. I pushed his arms down, removed the obstruction to the wire, and then I fell back into my seat.

Calligaris looked at me for a heartbeat moment, and then, once more and with force, he jerked the wire back. I heard it slide through the flesh of Don Ceriano’s neck. I heard his breath fighting to escape through the sudden rush of blood, heard his feet as they kicked against the pedals in the well of the car, and within seconds he slumped back.

Don Ceriano was dead. He, who had been spoken of weeks before in New York; he, whose death warrant was signed, sealed and delivered before Christmas; he, whose name had already passed into the vast and forgotten memory of the National Commission of
la Cosa Nostra
, was dead.

Don Ceriano, his head lolled back against the seat-rest, bled out into his own lap while Fabio Calligaris and Carlo Evangelisti closed their eyes and regained their balance.

I said nothing. Not a word.

After some minutes Don Calligaris opened the door and stepped out of the car. I followed him and walked a good ten or fifteen yards away from the vehicle. Don Evangelisti followed suit, but then he turned back towards the warehouse and made his way towards it swiftly. Somewhere I heard an engine revving, a heavy diesel engine. From the back doors of the warehouse a wide tractor with a loading scoop on the front emerged. We three watched as the tractor rumbled across the dirt and neared the car. Within a minute or two the tractor had lifted the car as if it were made of nothing but paper, and turning slowly, lumbering like some vast prehistoric creature with prey in its jaws, the tractor made its way back towards the warehouse, towards the car crusher that sat idling and patient on the other side of the lot.

I watched it go. My heart beat slowly. This was life and death in Las Vegas, family-style.

Don Calligaris walked towards me and offered me a cigarette. He lit it for me, and then with the same dead stare he fixed me to the ground. He smiled coldly. ‘What did you see here, Ernesto Cabrera Perez?’

I shook my head. ‘Here? I didn’t see anything here, Don Calligaris.’

I saw then, as he raised his cigarette to his lips, the blood on his hands. I looked down and saw blood on my own. There was blood on Carlo Evangelisti’s five-hundred-dollar suit. Don Giancarlo Ceriano’s blood.

‘You saw nothing here,’ Don Calligaris stated matter-of-factly.

I shook my head. ‘There was nothing to see.’

He nodded and looked down at the ground. ‘You ever seen New York, Ernesto?’

I shrugged.

‘No?’ he asked.

I shrugged again, shook my head. ‘No, I’ve never seen New York.’

‘There could be a place in New York for a man such as yourself, a man who sees little and speaks less.’

‘There could be,’ I said.

‘Man like you could make some money in New York, have a position of influence . . . have the time of his life in fact.’ He laughed as if remembering some personal experience.

I looked across at Don Evangelisti. He was smiling too.

‘You’re not from Chicago, are you?’ I asked.

Don Calligaris shook his head. ‘No, we’re not from Chicago.’

‘You don’t work for Sam Giancana, and you are not his cousin?’

Calligaris smiled once again. ‘Sam Giancana is an asshole, a shoeshine boy in a five-hundred-dollar suit. Sam Giancana will be dead before the year is out. No, we do not work for him, and no I am not his cousin. We work for people who are an awful lot more powerful than Sam Giancana, and you can come work for us if you wish.’

I was quiet for a moment. With the death of Don Ceriano there was nothing for me here. I was the hired hand, part of the wet-job crew, and for all I knew Slapsie Maxie, Johnny the Limpet and the rest of the Alcatraz Swimming Team were as dead as Don Ceriano somewhere in Vegas.

‘There is nothing for me here,’ I said. ‘I can come to New York.’

They both smiled. Don Evangelisti said something in Italian and they laughed some more.

Don Calligaris walked towards me. He reached out his blood-spattered hand and I shook it. ‘Welcome to the real world, Ernesto Perez,’ he said quietly, and then he released my hand, and started walking, and I followed him back to the warehouse where a car was waiting for us.

I looked back as we drove away, saw the tractor as it raised Don Ceriano’s car high above the ground and then let it fall into the crusher. I closed my eyes and said a prayer for his soul, even now on its swift and inevitable passage into Hell.

I turned around and looked forward, because forward was the only way I could look, and if New York was my destination then so be it.

I was thirty-six years old. I was alone. I was no longer part of this family. I took what was given to me and there seemed no choice.

By the time I boarded an aircraft, in my hand a single case holding all my possessions, I had separated myself from all that had come before, and prepared to start over again.

This was how it had to be done, for to look back was to see the past, and the past was too painful to see.

New York beckoned; I flew out of Las Vegas towards it with hope in my heart.

‘We have the salesman . . . we don’t have a body, but we have a confession,’ Woodroffe said.

They were seated in the main office of the building, he and Hartmann and Schaeffer; it was early evening, an hour or so after Perez had been escorted back to the Royal Sonesta.

Hartmann had a headache the size of Nebraska. He was drinking too much coffee, smoking too many cigarettes; felt as if he had been cornered in a nightmare of his own worst devising.

‘We have the murder of Gerard McCahill, Pietro Silvino, this guy McLuhan, two people in the Shell Beach Motel and this Chester Wintergreen, whoever the fuck that might be. Now there’s the three Puerto Ricans and Giancarlo Ceriano in Vegas. We believe that we can verify at least six of these killings, and we have no reason at all to suspect that Perez is not guilty.’

Hartmann looked across the table at Schaeffer. Schaeffer’s expression was black, the expression of a tired and desperate man, and Hartmann believed that there was nothing in the world that could help him. They were all in the same predicament, the same tortured reality that Perez had so effortlessly created, and at the same time the three of them were ultimately responsible for what might happen as a result.

‘So?’ Hartmann asked.

Woodroffe looked at Schaeffer; Schaeffer nodded and Woodroffe turned back to Hartmann.

‘The men we sent out have still found nothing.’

Hartmann looked down. ‘Perhaps she is not even in New Orleans,’ he suggested, a thought that he imagined had been present in all their minds from the very start. Perez had been ahead of them by days, and he could have driven the girl halfway across the United States and they would have been none the wiser.

‘So we have the authority to make a deal with him,’ Woodroffe said, and even before he had explained his rationale Hartmann started to smile. He smiled like the similarly tired and desperate man he was.

‘We have authority from both FBI Director Dohring and the attorney general himself, Richard Seidler, to make a deal with Perez,’ Woodroffe went on. ‘And we want you to go over to the Sonesta and speak with Perez and see if he is willing to trade.’

‘And what would the proposal be?’ Hartmann asked.

Once again Woodroffe glanced at Schaeffer.

‘At least six counts of murder,’ Schaeffer said. ‘Six counts of murder that Perez has confessed to and that we can find evidence to corroborate, and in exchange for information on the whereabouts of the girl and her safe return—’ Schaeffer looked down at his hands. He paused for a moment and then looked up once more. ‘In exchange for the girl he walks.’

‘He
walks
?’ Hartmann was astounded.

‘Well, he walks as far as the United States justice community is concerned. He will be extradited back to Cuba, and if the Cuban government wants to make something of whatever crimes were committed on Cuban soil, then that’s their business. We would not be willing . . . well, let’s just say that we would not put ourselves in a co-operative position as far as forwarding any evidence to them is concerned.’

‘And if she’s already dead?’ Hartmann asked. ‘If she’s already dead, and this wasn’t just a kidnapping but a seventh murder you can corroborate?’

Schaeffer shook his head. ‘That is a gamble we are prepared to take.’

‘We?’ Hartmann asked, his tone a little accusatory. ‘Don’t you mean you, or Dohring and Seidler, and back of them Charles Ducane with whatever pressure he’s brought to bear through his political connections?’

Woodroffe leaned forward. He rested his hands flat on the table. ‘We are operating on the assumption that the girl is still alive,’ he said. ‘We have simply been granted the authority to put this proposal forward to Perez, and seeing as how he chose you to come down and hear him out we are choosing you to go over and tell him what we are prepared to do.’