The Family Hightower (8 page)

“I'm so sorry,” Petey says.

“No you're not,” Curly says.

Petey nods again. “Let me try again. I'm as sorry as I can be, given the circumstances.”

His coolness is infuriating. The hanging is coming, Curly knows. No. It's already here, he's already going down. He thought he'd at least have some warning.

“Petey, what did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Don't tell me that. If you're taking off, I'm done. You know that, and nothing you can do will fix it.”

“Like I said. If I were you, I'd get as far away from all of this as I can. They won't come for you.”

“In Parma?” Curly says.

“You know how to do it. You just step away. Just—” And stops himself. There's no way to say it without sparking the war all over again.
Accept it. Accept your low-wage, non-union job where you get shit on your hands all day and nobody gives a crap. The kind of job everyone always expected you to have. The kind of job I will never see.

“Just get out of here, Petey,” Curly says. “I can take care of myself.” Though he has no idea how he's going to do that. So he says it at last.

“I could use a little money.”

And just like that, Curly loses again. He wants to throw up. Petey nods again, reaches into his pocket. Hands Curly a wad of bills without looking at it.

“That's got to be enough to get you to Cleveland,” Petey says.

It is. It's more than enough.

He goes back to Parma, where his old friends smile, to his eye, a little too much at him. Ask him how he's doing and then follow it up fast with something else—
been a while, hasn't it?—
so he doesn't have time to answer the first question. He hates himself for hating being back. And despite everything he thought when he was in Kiev, he just can't get that normal job, the one that'll let him put his time in Ukraine behind him. Part of it's that, as far as the legitimate world is concerned, he hasn't been employed since he was a teenager, and that was slinging sausages at the West Side Market; once, when he was thirteen—he remembers every second of this—he was coming up the service elevator and spilled a hundred gallons of milk across the market's floor. He watched it in awe as it washed against the calves of two ladies and raced down the aisles, sloshed against the walls of the stalls. It was like a flash flood. He had no idea a hundred gallons was so much. His boss let him keep his job, but at seventeen, he left it anyway. Thought he had better things to do. He just can't go back to anything like that now. Wearing an apron, wearing coveralls. Wearing a powder-blue suit with a shiny tie. Checking his watch. Sweaty hands on a faux leather briefcase. All the jobs the men in his family do. He knows he's being an asshole, thinking he's above all that, but it doesn't change anything.

So he goes back to Kosookyy, who at first refuses to take him on.
It's too dangerous for you now, Curly,
he says.
I don't know what Petey did over there, but it was something. They're looking for him. They shouldn't really see you, and I can't really protect you.
He's acting like an uncle now.
The White Lady
told me not to get Petey mixed into this. I should have listened and I didn't. I'm sorry.
He likes Curly. Wants to keep him alive. But Curly persists, and Kosooky relents. Puts him on small jobs, the kind of thing he was doing before he ever met Petey Hightower.

“Come on,” Curly says. “Give me something else.”

“Start where you left off,” Kosookyy says. “Then instead of going this way,” jabbing his finger toward the floor, “try going this way.” Pointing at the ceiling. “Let's get you into some real business, something where you pay taxes, you know? Build up some assets instead of walking around with your money in a duffel bag.”

“We made good money over there.”

“Is that what you're calling it? Good? Curly, you didn't make good money, you made big money. Big difference. And you know what? You let it get to your head. Now we have to figure out how to get it out again.”

“You mean like you?” Curly says. He means it as a jab; he wants to hurt the old man a little. But Kosookyy just closes his eyes, shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “Not at all like me. Let's just get you out of this.”

But Curly never gets his chance. He's making a delivery with Kosookyy to a warehouse near the Agora, meets three men of a type he recognizes at once, which makes him understand why Kosookyy's with him. It's a rare example of the old organization working with a new one, and it's pretty obvious that Kosookyy isn't happy about it. Whatever it is they're shipping, it's important, though more important to Kosookyy than it is to the three men, who stand around with lazy expressions on their faces. They're not faking it, either; they've done this a million times, are ready to be done for the day and head over to a strip club, do something they'd be too embarrassed to do at home;
never shit where you eat,
Curly heard someone say once. He eyes the men. Multiple cars in Kiev, he thinks, just in case someone decides to blow one of them up. They have no idea who Curly is, which hurts him; he's fallen so far out of that game already. They're talking in soft Ukrainian, turning up the current slang so the old Ukrainian-American man can't quite understand what they're saying. But Curly catches every word. They're talking about a rumor going around the network, of having found someone who was from this very city, that they're going to do something about it. Kosookyy sees something change in Curly, cocks his head and shoots him a look—
don't you dare—
but it's too late. Curly doesn't like Petey very much right now, but he doesn't want to see him dead.

That night Curly calls Dino in Ukraine.
You're in deep shit, Curly,
he says.
I know, I know,
Curly says.
I want to make it right. I want to help you get him.
That's when Dino tells him they think they found a Peter Hightower in Granada, and what are the chances that it's not the same guy? They have the address, the telephone number.
Mind if I have it?
Curly asks.
I can call him. Tell him to stay put, you know what I mean?
There's a moment's hesitation, and then Dino says:
Sure. How much is it worth to you?

Curly pays. Then makes that call to Granada that starts the whole thing. He'll never know he's called the wrong guy. And forty-eight hours later, the same three men Curly saw near the Agora throw his body, beaten with a metal pipe and shot in the face with a large-caliber pistol, into the bottom of a small motorboat they launch from a dock outside the city and drive out to the middle of Lake Erie, almost to the line across the water separating Ohio from Canada. They sit there for a minute, smoking in the dark, watching and listening for any other boats. They don't hear a thing. Then they take what's left of Curly, drape it over the side of the boat, tie a stolen anchor around the body's neck, and roll everything overboard, nice and easy. So Curly slips into the water without a splash, sinks headfirst one hundred eighty-six feet and stops, suspended in the water, when the anchor hits bottom. The body of the young man hangs there for days, trying to slip out of its noose and come up for air. But the fish get him first.

 

 

Chapter 4

You
got it so far? For four days, while Curly's at the bottom of the lake, he's not even a missing persons case; he's just missing. This whole thing is under the surface. One Peter Henry Hightower has vanished from Kiev. The other's boarding a plane from Lisbon to New York after having gone by train from Spain to Portugal. At least one man has died. Well, a lot more than that—men, women, and children—and a lot more death is coming. But we're not ready for that.

The police in five countries all have just a small piece of what's going on. In Granada, they're examining the break-in at Peter's apartment, wondering where the tenant has gone, wondering what kind of man lives like he does. In Ukraine, local, state, and international authorities have noted the appearance of the two Americans, and their disappearance, too. But Curly and Petey don't seem important enough to distract them from much bigger problems, or to find out where they went. In Cleveland, the police know the most. Just like Kosookyy hoped, the FBI's got files on him and all his buddies; they have a pretty good sense of what they're all up to. It's been that way at least since the Organized Crime Control Act got passed in
19
70
, when the feds started being able to prosecute RICO cases—after the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for the people out there taking score at home. See, for the FBI to bust a bunch of guys at once, it's not enough that those guys are just doing bad things. The FBI needs to show that those guys are, you know, organized. That they know each other, work together. That there's a hierarchy, a system, people giving orders, people taking orders. So they've been collecting that kind of information for years, for at least a generation. Then they wait until the smoking gun appears, or until something big's about to happen, something big and bad enough that they can bring everyone in and put them away for a long time. They work, these RICO cases, and the Cleveland FBI office has done some good busts. They've gotten Angelo Lonardo, who started off in
1929
by killing the people who killed his father, just a year after the big Mafia convention at the Hotel Statler, and risen to run the Mafia rackets in all northeast Ohio by
1980
. They got Joseph Gallo, Frederick Graewe, and Kevin McTaggart, too. Drug running, murder, a bunch of other charges. Twenty-five federal convictions and twenty state ones. Just a couple years ago, they started going international. They're investigating a Taiwanese company for stealing trade secrets from an Ohio glue factory; they'll gather enough to convict the company's president, along with his daughter, in
1999
. They're doing a lot of drug cases; they'll do a lot of cyber crime. And by
1995
they've learned a couple things that don't make them very happy.

Agents George Guarino and Anne Easton have been put onto the Cleveland office's organized crime investigations, Easton because she's smart, Guarino because he's almost as smart and knows a thing or two about Cleveland; he grew up around here. We're in the days before September
11
, before organized crime takes a backseat to terrorism in the FBI's priorities. So Guarino and Easton have some bureau money to spend. They've set up a nice little network of informants, they've been doing surveillance. They know the restaurant Petey and Curly visited, though they didn't see them go in there. They know the man who owns the place and have been tracing the connections—of money, for the most part, because it's all about money, right?—back to Russia and Eastern Europe, to someone, or something, called the Wolf. They know about a rival international group, whose Cleveland contact appears to be a man named Feodor. They know about someone called the White Lady, who they're pretty sure lives in town, appears to have connections to a few different organizations, including Feodor's and the Wolf's—as if she's playing a few sides at once. But they're not sure why she'd do that, or even who she is. They're just gathering their information on who's dealing with whom, trying to build up an organization in their files that matches the one in the world. Their desks, not far apart from each other, are piled with pictures and printouts—we're just at the beginning of the point where everything goes electronic—and now and again Guarino, who's better at finding things than Easton is, gives her a tap on the shoulder:
What do you think of this?
And Easton, who's better at making the connections than Guarino is, gives whatever he's holding a good stare. Starts to talk.
They must be involved. I'd say this is some kind of code, except they don't seem to work that way.
They're catching up, figuring out how the new crime organizations work.
But here's the discouraging thing: The organizations don't ever seem to end. The connections lead only to more connections, all over the world. They jump from country to country, never-ending webs of people and currency that involve as many rackets as the agents can think of, from money laundering and loan-sharking to arms dealing and human trafficking. If there are real lines between them, the agents can't see them; they have no idea what the structures of these things look like on paper, let alone who's running them. So they keep having the same little confrontation between them.
Look, it's okay,
Guarino says.
We can still use RICO to get them, right? We just define the organization how we need to.
He's trying to move the case forward, put some guys away. But Easton doesn't want to do it that way.
That's not the organization, then,
she might say.
It's just something we made up. We can do it that way, but it doesn't change anything. We never get the guys who matter.
Sometimes she hauls out the tired old analogies to hydras, to octopuses—you know, cutting off one tentacle when there are a hundred more, and the one you cut off grows back anyway—and Guarino just shakes his head. They both know what the problem is: They're hacking apart the facts to make a story, and that their story's got a lot of truth in it is beside the point. Maybe that truth'll be enough to do the job, to serve some kind of justice, to do right by the people who've been wronged. But the people left out of the story—the victims and the perpetrators—are going to notice what's been done. They'll see the places the story doesn't touch, and know that there, it's open season.

Curly's friends, his family, his mother, are calling each other more and more, getting more frantic with every call.
Have you seen him? He didn't go somewhere without telling us, did he? He wouldn't do that. Where is he?
It feels like a prophecy coming true. He was such a good kid, just a little wild, but that wildness led him somewhere they couldn't follow, and they lost him. How could that ever end well? For the Hightower clan, though, things are a bit more complicated. Muriel's been too afraid of her son for a couple years to ask what he's been up to, too used to him being gone for months to know that he's in trouble. Jackie doesn't talk to anyone but herself. And Sylvie doesn't say anything. She's known for thirty years that her best chance of surviving in her family, and keeping her family alive, is to embody her mother's spirit most of the time, friendly, steadfast, quiet. To observe and wait, and act only when she thinks she can make things better. Then her father comes out of her, and man, watch out.

Henry and Rufus are another story. They both have so much of their father in them. The same fire, the same shrewdness, the same cynical understanding of laws as things to be manipulated, skirted, ignored when necessary; the same quick separation of laws from morals and values. The same desire to take care of the people closest to them, the Old World instinct that helped so many people get out of Europe when they had to, and if Rufus and Henry could ever talk about it with each other, they would lament, together, how they failed in not giving it to their children. That conversation will never happen, though, because the things that make them so similar are the same things that drive them apart.

Henry still lives in New Canaan, in the same house Peter found him in nine years ago, and it's been an interesting decade for him. In
1992
, a premature heart attack puts him into semiretirement. His doctor shrugs, can't diagnose what caused it, but says maybe he should stop working so hard. His wife is more specific: She tells him he has to work on eliminating the things from his life that are causing him stress. So he divorces her. Cuts back on his hours, starts doing everything by phone, starts talking about being bought out. He's done. He throws out all his old clothes, buys new ones, dresses casual, or at least more casual. No cufflinks, no ties, blazers only when necessary, though the cut of his pants, the style of his shirts, give away that he's got some money. That's intentional. Henry's too aware of the signals himself, knows that he can't hide everything and can't be bothered working so hard to try. He's seen too many rich people try to pass themselves off as middle-class; everyone he knows, his neighbors, his former coworkers, all think they really are middle-class. It's laughable. They fail to pass and don't know they failed. People who don't have their kind of money can get the right order of magnitude of their wealth just by looking at their European-sized shoes, the angle of the collar of their designer T-shirts. Maybe that's why the rich are always building walls and fences around their houses, Henry thinks. If they didn't, everyone would be able to see right through them.

He meets Holly, a woman from Winsted, not six months after the divorce is final, marries her in
1994
. Alex seems to understand.
She's nice,
she says to his father, and Henry's glad that Alex is comfortable around her. But deep down, at the time, Henry doesn't think about that too much. He's too busy putting another life together for himself, wants Alex in it only if she wants to be in it, too. He's not being callous; just loosening the rules, trying to give his daughter her freedom. When Henry was young himself, he used to think that the family bond was iron. After their father died, he never made that mistake again. He understands now that it's just a question of keeping the lights on, the door open. Doing what you can to help that doesn't kill the other's pride. Though now and again he forgets, and has to relearn the lesson all over again.

It's
1995
. Henry's smiling when he sees the taxi pull up at the front of the house, sees Peter get out, squint down the driveway. The boy's leaner, sharper than he was
1986
. A decent haircut, the hang of his clothes more suitable to his frame. Still not a shred of America in him. The taxi driver must have asked him some questions, or maybe he was afraid to. Or maybe he already knew what Peter was all about, being the same way himself.

“You could have called first,” Henry says. “I would have picked you up at the airport.”

“Your phone number changed,” Peter says.

“Good thing I didn't move,” Henry says.

He's in trouble,
Henry thinks, but doesn't ask how. Figures Peter will get around to it. It takes five hours, after a tour of the property, the things that have changed since Peter last saw it. The first wife's office is gone; it's a study now, with a loom folded in the corner. They've filled in the pool and let the land go, let all the land go around their house. They like the way the trees are taking over.
Soon we'll have our own little preserve here,
Henry tells him, and chuckles in a loose, genuine way that Peter doesn't remember him doing back in
1986
. Holly is the kind of woman who glows; she's warm and nurturing. Thick curls woven into a loose bun at her neck and tied with a colored scarf.
The kind of woman my dad should have ended up with,
Peter thinks. They make fish and rice, curried vegetables. Split a bottle of wine, open another one, and at last Peter begins to talk.

“I got a call from someone named Curly,” he says. “From Cleveland.”

“Curly? I'm assuming that's not his real name. Who is he?” Henry says.

“I have no idea who he is. But he says he was looking for Petey.”

Henry nods. In his brain, the first pieces are clicking into place. “That's what they've been calling your cousin for years, now,” he says.

“I think Curly thinks I'm him,” Peter says.

“I was about to say the same thing,” Henry says, and becomes very still. Takes his wife's hand. “What happened after the phone call?”

Peter tells him, about the break-in, his escape. The train from Spain to Portugal, the flight out of Lisbon. He's almost positive no one saw him do any of this.

“How'd you get the money for the flight?” Henry says.

Peter doesn't know which question Henry's asking, decides to answer both.

“I'm a journalist,” he says.

Henry raises an eyebrow.

“And my dad gave me some money I've been hanging on to for a while,” Peter says.

Something in Peter's voice tells Henry about what's happened between Peter and Rufus. Father and son haven't talked in a while.

“Peter,” he says, “I think it's time you start to know a few things. Do you know what your father does for money?”

“No.”

“Well. Maybe he does something to help support himself a little. But the money comes from me. It's always come from me.”

“I see,” Peter says. Henry can almost see the young man putting it together; a big part of his life that never made much sense is starting to make lots of sense. “Why did you do that?”

“Because we're family.”

“Why did my dad go to Africa, then?”

“Because we're family,” Henry says. “At first, I think it was disgust. But once you were born, I think he was trying to protect you.”