The Watchman of Ephraim (Book Club Edition) (5 page)

“…
yeah, yeah, I know your type … my sister … my DEAD sister is your only type!”

De Niro remained quiet. A moment later Ricci regretted what he said.

“
I’m sorry Cris … it’s just …you shouldn’t be alone. For the boys, you shouldn’t be alone!”

“
Don’t bring us into it, Uncle Mugs!” Richard shouted from the back seat.

Ricci turned to face the boys.

“
But wouldn’t you guys like to have a mommy?”

“
We have a mommy!” Richard snapped, “She’s just sleeping, is all!”

Ricci turned to see De Niro grinning. He threw his hands up in mock defeat.

“
I give up. I think you’re all crazy!”

De Niro adjusted his rear-view mirror so he could look right at Richard. The boy and his dad’s eyes met and De Niro winked at him bringing a smile to Richard’s face. De Niro reached over and patted his brother-in-law’s shoulder.

“
You know, Mugs, I think Lauren was impressed when I told her you were a former SEAL.”

Ricci was about to reply when he caught himself.

To that, both boys and their dad laughed and after a moment, so did their uncle.

Chapter 4

Estancia De Niro (The De Niro Ranch)

Henderson, Nevada

12:30p.m., Saturday, May 14, 2011

About a year after 9/11, De Niro decided he could no longer live back east. There were just too many memories of Lisa there. His wife was such a charismatic and social person that her presence and her absence seemed to permeate every facet of his existence – from their favorite restaurants and shops to just sitting on the front porch of their home. Their magnificent estate, their beautiful community, their friends and neighbors – none of it brought any joy to De Niro anymore. He knew he had to relocate, especially while Richard and Louis were still young, so he chose a place that made him happiest when he was a boy. His dad was a hard-working man that had only one vice – he liked to gamble. His old man told him though, that once he married his mom, he’d never gamble again unless he could do so with money they didn’t need – and then only in a place like Las Vegas, lest he’d be tempted all the time. So once a year, every year, his dad would take his mom and young Cris to Las Vegas. He couldn’t remember even one trip when he didn’t have the best time.

When De Niro got older he continued to meet his parents out in Las Vegas during their annual jaunts. In fact, it was in Las Vegas during one of those trips that he introduced his parents to Lisa. She and he used to talk about moving there when they got older and the boys moved out. Even after her passing, that dream didn’t die in his mind. So one day, after praying for guidance, he just boarded his Global Aviation jet with his boys, flew to Las Vegas and never looked back.

When they arrived, De Niro checked them into a suite at a resort then spent every day looking for property. It didn’t take long for several of the top real estate agents to get wind of his search. They each tried in vain to lure him to buy one of their exclusive “golf course” properties, where the estates abutted a picturesque hole of one of the private country club courses near the Strip, but De Niro had other plans. He finally settled on buying a 250,000-acre property southeast of the Strip. Most of the real estate agents thought he was crazy for selecting that parcel of land but it was exactly what he wanted. To the north, it offered a fabulous panorama of the entire Las Vegas valley. To the south there were miles of rough, rugged, hilly terrain, and to the west, magnificent views of the sunset. De Niro had constructed a sprawling hacienda-fortress complete with a 30,000 square-foot ranch-style home, modeled after the posh “estancia” ranch homes that he and Lisa loved so much in Argentina; a 4,000 square-foot guest house and 3,000 square-foot butler’s mansion; casita-sized abodes for the hacienda staff members and additional guests, with a community pool and work-out facilities just for ranch staff, and stables for his horses. He converted fifty acres of the land into an organic garden and farm to grow all of his own fruits and vegetables and another one hundred-fifty acres to raise his own cattle, chickens, turkeys, goats and lambs.

There were horse trails leading to all parts of “Estancia De Niro,” the name his head “gaucho,” Martin Fierro, gave to the ranch. De Niro met Martin in Argentina at a horse and cattle auction a decade ago. Although an accomplished rider himself, De Niro had never seen anyone better with horses – riding them, training them, and caring for them, than Martin. He knew that gauchos were considered undesirables in modern-day Argentina but he never paid attention to stereotypes of any sort. His dad taught him to head the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - to judge each man by
… the content of his character
and so De Niro offered Martin an opportunity to come to work for him, to run his stables. At first, Martin turned him down because he didn’t want to leave his wife and children in Argentina, but he was overjoyed when De Niro paid to relocate his entire family with him. That made Fierro extremely loyal to “Don” De Niro.

As was all of their staff, Martin was broken-hearted from the murder of Señora Lisa, so much so, that he told De Niro that he would gladly fly to the hills of Pakistan to find and kill Osama Bin Laden himself. Though De Niro turned down his offer, it wasn’t because he didn’t think Martin had the skills. He knew the man was equally proficient riding a horse, tracking, shooting a rifle and pistol, wielding a knife and tossing a lariat, but De Niro also knew with his Latin blood, he might very well start a war all on his own.

The horse trails also lead to a remote area where De Niro had a compound built deep within the foothills themselves. The only people that knew its location were his sons and his Personal Assistant William Brett, a transplanted proper English butler who Lisa had hired when they first moved to Colts Neck.

William was the butler for a British friend of De Niro’s, a member of the royal line, who was known as a playboy and daredevil. While Lisa thought Cris’s friend was a bit of an egocentric fool, she was impressed by William. When news reached them of the royal’s death in a boat-racing accident, De Niro and Lisa flew to London, De Niro to attend his friend’s funeral and Lisa to solicit William to come work for them. Although William was taken care of quite handsomely in his master’s will and had no interest in living in the United States, he took a liking to Lisa. As she was prone to do, Lisa finally got her way when she persuaded William by telling him that she was pregnant - with Richard, at the time - and that he could heal some of the loss he was feeling - he practically raised his former master from childbirth and was taking his loss as one would, losing a son - by helping to raise her children.

William had the utmost respect for Lisa and took her death with the heaviest of hearts. After her funeral, his loyalty to De Niro grew when De Niro offered him the opportunity to become his Personal Assistant. William also became fiercely devoted to Richard and Louis after their mother’s death. In fact, De Niro would entrust no one else with his sons – even making sure to stipulate that in his will.

Martin and William were the two men De Niro most relied upon. They had both remained with him and his sons through their most trying and depressed times. They not only looked after him but they were fiercely protective of Richard and Louis, partially a result of 9/11. Just as De Niro did, William and Martin both harbored irrational guilt about not protecting Lisa that day. They were two very different men, but they shared an unbridled loyalty to De Niro and the boys. They also shared mutual respect for one another but you could never get either of them to admit that out loud.

Since 9/11, De Niro tried desperately hard to make sense of it all. His Italian-Spanish blood boiled as his old neighborhood temperament demanded revenge, but something else had taken root in his life too. In the middle of the night and in solitude, he found himself on his knees praying to his Father in Heaven, calling out as a boy does for his Father to save him from what lurked in the darkness around him …and the darkness inside him. Night after night, after tucking his sons in, he’d cry his eyes out. It was as if a deep crater formed in his heart, in the place where Lisa was ripped from it. That hole, as deep as his soul, was filling with self-pity and rage and both were consuming him. De Niro sensed the cold presence of demons in his midst, waiting for an invitation to let them dwell with him. Something had to give… and it did, on the first anniversary of Lisa’s death, on the first anniversary of 9/11, De Niro felt himself die.

While the rest of the country mourned and kept vigil; the masses comforting each other with their tears and their prayers, De Niro spent the day locked in his room, missing Lisa so badly he could no longer breathe. Not even looking at the faces of his children could save him. He lashed out as someone would if they were suffocating to death, breaking everything in his reach. Shelves once filled with photos of his wife lay shattered and lying around him in tatters. With his arms and hands bloody and his face covered in sweat and tears, he fell into a deep, dead slumber. It was only when rays of sunshine broke through his bedroom window and touched his face the next morning that he realized he was still alive; he had survived the night, but it was more than that.

De Niro felt reborn, not of the same kind that some Christians professed, with their hands poked out to the heavens hollering, “I accepted
Jay-zus
and he saved me,” as if they had already arrived in the Kingdom. De Niro didn’t feel like he arrived anywhere, yet. It was more like he was setting off on a new path, one without his soulmate Lisa, but nevertheless one that he wouldn’t travel alone. And though the rage inside him didn’t abate, over time he believed his newfound faith would teach him how to harness its power. De Niro learned he could live with his wounded heart if he dedicated the rest of his life to honoring her memory. The focus of his life would no longer be just making money; it would be putting all of his vast wealth to work for a purpose. Lisa and he had always given to charities. He continued that giving by setting up a trust in her name but he had to do more. While his primary focus was his sons, he vowed to do more.

The terrorists made it personal on 9/11. As they always do, they targeted civilians. To them, no American is innocent. It didn’t matter that they murdered people from over seventy different countries on 9/11, they considered them collateral damage. It didn’t matter that some of their own faith would have to commit suicide to get the job done; to them they would be rewarded in heaven. It made De Niro furious. He felt that his country let him down on 9/11 too. To him, democrats and republicans alike politicized our nation’s security, their ideologies once again colliding like a train wreck. This time though, the result wasn’t higher taxes or unemployment, this time innocent lives were lost. Nevertheless, De Niro was still a patriot, he just didn’t feel patriotic anymore – the fireworks on the fourth of July would never burn as brightly to him as the candle he lit each year, in remembrance of his wife and the others that lost their lives on 9/11.

The most difficult thing De Niro had to come to terms with was his faith. At first, he studied scriptures looking for a loophole – some tenet that would allow him to strike back at the people that murdered Lisa, but there were none. In fact, De Niro’s God, the Christian God commanded that vengeance was His and His alone. So that he would never forget that, he hung a plaque over his desk in his office that had a verse from the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians engraved in brass. It read, “
Be angry, and do no sin: do not let the sun go down on your wrath" (Ephesians 4:26)
. That left no room for interpretation, no room for “old neighborhood” ethics. Revenge was out of the question, if De Niro were to keep to his faith, so he continued to study his Bible and prayed that he would find something that would allow him to channel his rage in a righteous direction. The more he studied, the more he felt that God was giving him the ability to understand prophecy. De Niro focused on prophecies concerning the United States. He learned that since Jacob was renamed Israel, all of his offspring were Israel. Each of Jacob’s sons became a tribe and each tribe eventually would become nations of people. Jacob’s son Joseph had twin sons of his own. They were Manasseh and Ephraim. The descendants of those two tribes became Great Britain and the United States. The prophecies of Ephraim became his obsession.

De Niro drove around the long circular driveway and pulled up to the front of his sprawling hacienda. There were already several cars parked here and there, most likely parents and kids from the Yankees who got a head start to his home. De Niro’s ranch was well known to most everyone in his community. Without Lisa though, De Niro didn’t socialize much. She was the one that volunteered in their community and was known by all of their neighbors. As a result, most people who lived nearby were curious to see the ranch and jumped at any chance to visit it.

William was standing outside with a few of the other hacienda staff. One of them opened the passenger doors to the Escalade as William opened the driver’s door. The boys jumped out and grabbed their own bags from the trunk - De Niro and William were on the same page about raising the boys to pull their own weight, including tending to chores and taking care of their things.