A Quiet Vendetta (54 page)

It was the beginning of December. I sat in my car a half block away from the exit of the apartment building where James Hackley lived, and I was set to start up the engine and go home when the door opened and the man himself appeared. He was dressed for the weather in a long overcoat, a scarf and gloves, and he hurried across the street to where his car was parked and climbed in.

I followed him a good two miles downtown, through the less wealthy areas of the city to the edge of the northside. Here he slowed, stopped on Machin Street, and after spending a few moments looking for something in his car he climbed out and started down the street. I followed him on foot a good fifteen yards behind, ever alert for the moment he would turn and glance back over his shoulder. He did not, and I watched as he crossed at the junction and entered at the side door of a porn cinema on Penn Street. He was in the Cicero Gang’s territory, right there in the heart of the area his own father was planning to demolish, and he was frequenting one of the cinemas more than likely owned by Kyle Brennan. Irony put a smile on my face. It did not give me what I wanted – hell, half of America’s model citizens went to porn shows and strip clubs, and there wasn’t a thing in the world that could be considered illegal about it, but it was something, it was a start, and a start, however small, was better than nothing at all.

I went into the cinema after him. I walked to the counter and asked after the young man that had just entered.

‘And what the fuck business is it of yours?’ an overweight greasy-vested man behind the counter said.

‘Important business,’ I said. ‘I’m here on behalf of Gerry McGowan, and I need your assistance.’

‘Oh shit,’ the man said. ‘Oh shit, I’m sorry, mister . . . I didn’t know Mr McGowan was sending anyone down here tonight. I think we’re all paid up . . . in fact I’m sure we are . . . let me call the boss down and you can have a word with him. Hell, what the fuck am I thinking? Come with me, come through here and up the stairs and you can speak with him yourself.’

I followed the overweight guy as he heaved his vast girth up a narrow flight of stairs. We turned right at the top, and he knocked on a door.

‘Come!’ Someone shouted from within.

The fat guy went in. I followed him. We stood in a small but neatly decorated office, plain walls, a wide mahogany desk, behind it a smartly-dressed man with the same dark hair and bright eyes as Daniel Ryan.

‘Julie, what the fuck is this?’ the man behind the desk said. ‘I’m busy up here . . . you should be on the desk downstairs making sure those asshole kids don’t sneak in without payin’.’

‘Someone here,’ the fat guy said. ‘Someone from Mr McGowan.’

I stepped around Julie and faced the man behind the desk. He smiled. He came around and reached out his hand. ‘Hey, how goes it there?’ he said. ‘Name’s Michael Doyle . . . what can we do for you and Mr McGowan?’

‘I told him we were all paid up, Mr Doyle . . . soon as he said he was from Mr McGowan I told him we were all paid up,’ the fat guy said, nervousness evident in his voice.

‘Okay Julie, okay . . . you don’t mind yourself with this, you go on back down and tend to the desk, okay?’

‘Okay Mr Doyle,’ Julie said, and worked his width out through the doorway and thundered down the stairs.

‘Not so easy to find good help these days, eh?’ Michael Doyle said. He indicated a chair other side of the desk and asked me to sit down. I did so, and Doyle resumed his chair opposite. ‘So what can we be doin’ for you an’ Mr McGowan?’ he asked.

‘You have a customer here, a man by the name of James Hackley.’

Doyle shrugged. ‘Christ, I wouldn’t know . . . sure as hell ain’t my hobby to go associatin’ with the people that come here to watch this stuff.’

‘He is the son of a very important Chicago real estate developer called David Hackley. Mr McGowan needs your help to make something go away, and there’s a good possibility it may involve putting his son in a somewhat embarrassing position.’

Doyle laughed. ‘Well, I’d consider being found with your pants round your ankles in a joint like this somewhat embarrassing.’

I shook my head. ‘Something a little closer to the bone,’ I said.

Doyle leaned back in his chair. ‘Something he wouldn’t walk away from without it dirtying the family name a little?’ he said.

‘A lot,’ I replied. ‘Something that could be held in limbo, something that could come out of the woodwork if the developer doesn’t see eye to eye with Mr McGowan.’

‘And if this could be done, then I’m sure it would mean a good word in Mr McGowan’s ear for me, right?’

‘And a good word in Mr McGowan’s ear is a good word to Kyle Brennan,’ I said. ‘I figure you might find yourself working somewhere a little more upmarket if this goes the way we want it to go.’

Doyle grinned. ‘I think we can fix something up, Mr—?’

‘Perez,’ I said. ‘My name is Perez.’

‘I think Mr James Hackley will be gettin’ a polite invitation to see something a little more colorful than whatever the hell he might be watching tonight.’

It was that simple.

Three days later James Hackley was arrested in the back room of a small cinema on Penn Street. Three other ‘clients’ were arrested with him. They were charged with ‘solicitation to view minors engaged in illegal sexual activities’. Michael Doyle had organized a private showing of some kiddie porn. James Hackley was arraigned and bound over, bailed for thirty thousand dollars, and scheduled to appear for further questioning on 11 December.

On 9 December a brief conversation took place between the captain of the Chicago Police Precinct where Hackley had been charged and two of Kyle Brennan’s trusted consiglieres. A deal was made. A contribution of an undisclosed sum would be willed to the 13th Precinct Widows and Orphans Fund within the week if the charges against Hackley were dropped for lack of evidence.

Two hours later, one of those same consiglieres met with a reputable and upstanding member of the Chicago Rejuvenation Council on a park bench near Howard Street. The conversation lasted no more than fifteen minutes. The men, one of them a crestfallen and dejected-looking David Hackley, walked away without a word.

On Thursday 16 December, 1982, David Hackley rose before the Chicago City Council Board Meeting and presented his case. He advised in the most determined and unreasonable words that planning permission to redevelop the northside of Chicago at this time be denied. He presented a good case, even issued an eleven-page proposal as to why such a move would be detrimental to the history and character of the city.

The Council came back with a unanimous decision on the twenty-second, three weeks ahead of schedule. Permission to redevelop was denied. Paul Kaufman was sent home with his tail between his legs.

The following day, 23 December, just in time for Christmas, all charges against James Hackley were dropped due to lack of sufficient evidence.

The Cicero Gang were joyous, as was Don Calligaris. We had an Irish-Italian party at a club on Plymouth Street on the northside, and I met Kyle Brennan. He gave Angelina five hundred dollars
for toys and things for the babies, you know
? and I believed that here in Chicago – despite the bitter wind and often vicious rain from Lake Michigan, among the itinerants and stragglers, the Irish gangsters with their brogue and brash manner – we had perhaps found a home.

For the subsequent eight years, as we watched our children grow, heard them speak their first words, saw them learn their first alphabet and write their first sentences, we stayed in Chicago. We kept the same house down the street from Don Calligaris and his own extended family. I cannot say that there weren’t times that I was required to go back to my old trade, to exercise my muscles and consign some miscreant to the hereafter, but those times were few and far between. It was approaching the end of the decade, the world had grown up also, and as I reached my fifty-third birthday in August of 1990 – as I stood at the doorway of my house and watched as Victor and Lucia, now eight years old, came running down the street from where the schoolbus had let them off – my mind turned to thoughts of where I would go when I became too old for such things. The world was changing. Influences from Eastern Europe were cutting across the family’s business in America. Streetgangs of teenage youths were killing one another with no more mercy than one would kill an insect. Russians and Poles and Jamaicans were all providing supply lines for weapons and drugs and hookers, and they had the manpower and artillery to command and maintain their place at the table. We were aware of what was happening, and we believed that the generation following ours would have to fight so much harder than we did to keep any part of our operations alive. But we also knew that, just as you could never resign from such a life as this, so you could not retire. You were permitted to see out your latter days in Florida perhaps, even California near the mountains, but you were always there, always remembered, and if there was some action that needed to be taken and your presence was required, then so be it.

Don Calligaris himself was close to sixty-five, and though Chicago had served him well I could see his thoughts also turning to where he might go and what he might become when working was no longer an option.

‘Time has closed up on us,’ he said one time. ‘It comes and goes in an instant, it seems. I can remember running down the street as a child, thinking that a day lasted for ever. Now most of the day has gone by the time I have eaten my breakfast.’

We sat in the kitchen of his house. Ten Cent was in front watching TV.

‘My children keep me thinking like a teenager,’ I said.

‘How old are they now?’

‘Eight last June.’

Calligaris shook his head. ‘Eight years old . . . I remember when Ten Cent used to carry both of them in one arm.’

I laughed. ‘Now my son Victor, he could probably wrestle Ten Cent to the ground. He is a tough little man, the head of the house as far as he is concerned.’

‘But his sister, she is smart like most girls,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘The men are the head of the house, but the girls, they are the neck, and they can turn the head any which way they please.’

I heard the phone then, and with it came a sense of foreboding. Business had been without trouble for some time, and there had been no calls for the better part of a month.

I heard Ten Cent shut down the TV and walk out into the front hall.

‘
Si
,’ I heard him say, and then he set down the receiver on the table and he walked to the kitchen.

‘Don Calligaris, it is for you, from upstairs.’

‘Upstairs’ was the word we used for the boss and his people; ‘upstairs’ meant that something was going to happen, something that would require us.

I listened for words I could understand in Don Calligaris’s conversation, brief though it was, but despite all my years with these people I had never taken the time to learn Italian. I tried to speak Spanish as often as I could, even to myself, but Italian, though similar in many ways, just seemed too difficult to manage.

Don Calligaris was no more than a minute, and then he returned to the kitchen and looked at me.

‘We have a sit-down,’ he said.

‘Now?’ I asked.

‘Tonight.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Three hours from now at Don Accardo’s restaurant. He wants all three of us, and there will be a good few more, I think.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘I don’t know, Ernesto, so don’t ask me. We do not discuss details on the telephone. All I know is that we meet at seven at the trattoria.’

I went home to dress. I spoke with Angel, told her not to wait up for me. The children were away with some friends and would return later. I told her to say goodnight to them for me, to tell them I would see them in the morning.

I looked at her, a woman of forty-four, but still in her eyes that difficult and awkward young woman I had first met in New York.

‘You have made my life something of which to be proud,’ I told her.

She frowned. ‘What is this? Why are you talking like that?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I have been thinking the past few days that I am becoming an old man—’

She laughed. ‘There are few old men who have as much energy as you, Ernesto Perez.’

I raised my hand. ‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I have been thinking that soon it will be time to make some changes, to find somewhere to live where the children will be away from all this.’

Angelina looked at me then. There was an expression in her eyes that told me she had been waiting to hear these words for as long as she had known me. She shook her head, perhaps with an element of disbelief. ‘Go to your meeting, Ernesto. We will talk about such things another time.’

I leaned forward, I held her face in my hands and I kissed her.

‘I love you, Angelina.’

‘And I you, Ernesto. Now be gone with you—’

Then I saw tears in her eyes, welling up in the corners. I brushed the hair back from her cheeks and frowned. ‘What?’ I asked.

She shook her head. She closed her eyes and looked down at the floor.

I lowered my hand and raised her chin. She opened her eyes and looked back at me.

‘What?’ I asked again. ‘What is it?’

For a second there was a flash of anger in her expression, and then it softened. She shook her head once more and said, ‘Go Ernesto, go now. I have things to do before the children come home.’

I did not move. I waited until she looked at me once again and I opened my mouth to ask her what was happening.

She shifted to the left and rose to her feet. I stepped back for a moment, puzzled at first, and then I recognized the fire inside her.

‘You know what it is, Ernesto,’ she said, and in her voice was the edge of defiant independence that had so attracted me when I first knew her. ‘You go to your meeting now. I will not question what you are doing, and when you come back I will not ask what you have done. You are a good man, Ernesto. I know this, and if I did not believe that there was more good in you than evil I would never have stayed. You are who you are, and I am wise enough to know that I will never change that . . . but I will not have you risk my life or the lives of our children—’