Badfellas (29 page)

Rosello was not the only one showing off his talents amongst the fairground attractions. Hector Sosa, known as Chi-Chi, the elder of the two Puerto Ricans, stopped in front of a punchball surrounded by a gang of young lads. Hector had always been capable of knocking out men three times larger than himself, and had made a speciality of charging head first towards the biggest and strongest, his bravery bordering on foolhardiness. He had become famous ten years previously, during the world middleweight championship in Santa Fe; employed as bodyguard to the reigning champion, Chi-Chi had reacted badly to a ticking-off, and put him
out of any condition to fight. During his two months of detention behind bars in San Quentin, the toughest and cruellest prisoners had treated him with the greatest of respect. Now, by breaking the machine with one blow of his fist, he had become a hero to the youth of Cholong.

A few yards from there, Joey’s older brother, Jerry Wine, ace driver, the one every gang wanted as a getaway driver for the big jobs, couldn’t resist a turn on the dodgems, and was having a whale of a time. The object was to crash into as many people as possible, bing, bang, smashing into every obstacle, charging head down into the traffic jams, sparing nobody. What could be more fun for a guy who was capable of finding an escape route through the middle of a group of ten police cars, or of driving through a parking lot at forty miles per hour without touching a single lamp post? He spotted a group of trouble-makers who seemed a little annoyed by his driving, and decided to annoy them further with his little red car.

Guy Barber – real name Guido Barbagallo – for his part was glued to the lottery stand, where he was driving the operator mad by using several number combinations he had perfected in the Las Vegas casinos. The smallest event could trigger his passion for gambling, making him lose all sense of time and reality. Guy was an expert at inventing new ways of gambling, and would bet on anything, from numbers on banknotes to car licence plates or street posters. The most astonishing thing was that he always ended up by finding some logic in the most random sequences of numbers. At that level of obsession no one ever enquired whether this gift enabled his addiction or vice versa.

The only one, apart from Matt, who remained focused on the object of the mission, was Gregorio Sanfelice. Gregorio, a heavy-arms specialist, had been chosen by Don Mimino himself for his absolute trustworthiness. Greg was the exact opposite to a Manzoni, the opposite to a snitch – this was a man who had chosen to take five years in jail when the FBI were offering him his freedom in exchange for three or four names, in complete secrecy, without a trial, in such a way that nobody in the Mob would have suspected any treachery. While he waited for orders, leaning on a table in the drinks tent, he finished a carton of chips and a glass of beer. He wore a cap and was dressed entirely in blue denim. As he watched the local people coming and going around the surrounding stands, he thought only of the new man he would become once he got his two million dollars. Now that he was fifty, Greg felt it was about time to hang up his boots and return to the woman in his life, the mother of his children; he would swear to her that he would never risk death or prison again. He would make up for lost time, buy them a house near Bear Mountain, in the middle of the woods, and would spend the rest of his days reassuring them and taking care of them. They would never have anything more to fear. Once Manzoni had been sorted out, he would fly home with his colleagues, claim his money as soon as they had landed at JFK, and there and then, he would salute them, shake hands for the last time, and take a taxi to Zeke’s at the corner of 52nd and 11th, where Michelle worked as a waitress. He would tell her to leave there and then, they would go and get the children out of school, and everything would begin again for them, somewhere far away. As he dreamed of this imminent future,
he wiped a trace of foam off his big pistolero moustache, and took a last mouthful of beer. He rose from the table, and came face to face with a ghost.

Without showing any surprise, Greg lowered his cap over his face, left a few coins on the counter and went over to a row of game consoles. As he slid a coin into a pinball machine, he kept his eyes glued to the ghost, who was wearing an open-necked Hawaiian shirt over a white T-shirt and wandering around the fairground with his hands in his pockets. Greg didn’t have to think very hard to remember him: that was the motherfucker who had almost sent him down for twenty years. The bastard, whose name was something like Di Morro or Di Cicco, had managed, ten years ago, to infiltrate a gang of robbers who were preparing a heist on a bank in Seattle. He had put on an incredibly effective performance and, in a feat almost unknown for an undercover agent, the fucker had succeeded in gaining Greg’s trust through drinking sessions in the company of friendly nightclub hostesses; they had almost become friends. But Di Cicco had turned out to be a better actor than cop; he had successfully passed himself off as a gangster amongst real gangsters, but he had blown the operation through lack of coordination with his colleagues, and Greg had escaped by the skin of his teeth. Di Cicco’s presence in this backwater was proof that Manzoni was there too. Greg, keeping an eye on the FBI agent, made a sign to Franck Rosello to warn Matt, who in turn felt a surge of adrenalin at this news. And then a sort of ballet began to take place around Di Cicco and Caputo, without either of them being aware of anything untoward.

While Jerry drove the minibus into the centre of town, Greg and Chi-Chi waited for the precise moment when
the two agents would leave the Place de la Libération. Matt wanted to avoid unnecessary risks, and preferred to neutralize them immediately so he could work them over. Caputo, who was walking behind his partner, had a sudden premonition of trouble as they turned the corner of the Rue du Pont Fort. He couldn’t have described what it was that had entered his mind, which was numbed by the fairground music, the beer and the sunshine. When this sort of thing happened, he simply handed himself over to his instinct for survival, something he called upon more often than others did. It was an instinct that had been honed by the ever present fear of death, in particular the fear of a stupid and pointless death, brought about by carelessness. To die fighting was one thing, but to die in an ambush was to die a rat’s death, with no glory. However, with or without the premonition, there was no time to warn Richard or to reach for his gun: they both found themselves with a gun stuck in the back of the neck, and they raised their hands. Greg, pointing his at Di Cicco, was about to satisfy an unhoped-for personal vengeance. Chi-Chi searched Caputo, relieved him of his gun and silenced him with a blow on the back of the neck from his rifle butt. Matt, Guy and Franck joined them at the corner of the Allée des Madriers, and the minibus drove in silence through the empty streets of Cholong, bearing six members of the Cosa Nostra and two federal agents, who fully understood the purpose of the visit. Matt cocked his gun.

“Now – which one of you is prepared to die for Giovanni Manzoni?”

Five minutes later, Jerry parked the minibus at the corner of the Rue des Favorites, with the Blakes’ house in their sights, fifty yards away.

Hit hard and without warning. No chance should be missed to destroy Manzoni at the first opportunity, making maximum use of the element of surprise. Strategy must be sacrificed to impact. Sanfelice got out the wooden box containing the AT-4 Viper, and set to work preparing the rocket.

“Penetration power fifteen inches of armoured steel, speed three hundred and thirty yards per second, light, easy handling, dependable, our GIs love it,” he said, putting it on his shoulder. “Get back behind me, you guys, if you don’t want to look like a pizza for the rest of your lives.”

Matt Gallone, Franck Rosello, Guy Barber and Jerry Wine all stood beside him, watching. Hector Sosa, in the minibus, kept an eye on the agents, who had made no attempt to resist. Matt was right: Feds they might be, but they had no desire to die for the sake of a Manzoni. Sooner or later, Don Mimino’s men would have found the Rue des Favorites, and nothing could have prevented what was about to happen. To croak just in order to delay the operation would have been a professional mistake. They had been taught that during their training: don’t die uselessly.

Hector couldn’t help looking away from them to watch the spectacle. The rocket flew straight, softly piercing the façade of the house before exploding inside, throwing the walls outwards, opening the whole building up like a flower, so that the roof and the first floor collapsed in one block, down to the ground. Sprays of brick flew up and crashed down in a hundred-yard perimeter
around the point of impact. A thick cloud of dust, like poisonous fog, hung over it for several seconds, before dissolving and gradually letting the light of day return to the Rue des Favorites.

“Don’t go there yet. The temperature inside will be up to two thousand degrees.”

Greg knew the AT-4 Viper of old. He had used it during an attack on a bullion convoy: it had completely melted the driver’s cabin, like something in a cartoon. For this one brilliant single shot he had spent days training in a bus graveyard in the middle of the Nevada desert. Considering his contribution over, he packed the launcher back into its container. All he had to do now was wait for confirmation of a single fact – that Giovanni Manzoni had been destroyed.

A second before the conflagration, Fred had been lying on the ground, his eyes sore from so much crying. He had made the terrible decision to leave Cholong immediately and break out of the Witness Protection Programme, to give up expecting any help from the American government. After Maggie’s denunciation, all that was left for him was to flee, leaving his family to live out in the open, without the awful sensation of being watched night and day by a third party. By going it alone, he would be removing his family from danger, giving them back their lives. He just needed to go by the house to fetch a few things before evaporating into the background. Then came the explosion, so sudden and so intense that he stopped dead, frozen to the spot. Feeling weightless, he slid along the side of Quint’s headquarters to have a look down the street; he saw that the very spot in which he had spent most of the last few months was now no more than a dusty
cavity, a hole filled with rubble. Suddenly he heard a strangled cry, which he recognized. He ran into the Feds’ house, where he saw a hysterical Maggie trying to escape from Quint’s grasp. He was holding her flat on the ground, his hand over her mouth. Fred threw himself down to help him put his wife out of action, and prevent her from screaming for help. Quint pulled his hand back and stunned Maggie with a blow on the back of the neck. Then he placed her head carefully down on a corner of the carpet. He left the room for a moment and returned with a first-aid kit, from which he drew a metal box containing a syringe. Maggie had to be protected from herself, and straight away.

“She’ll sleep for at least six hours.”

They crawled a few yards over to the window, and raised themselves up just enough to glimpse, at an angle, a minibus surrounded by a handful of armed men who were about to approach the rubble.

“Apart from Matt Gallone and Franck Rosello, I don’t know the others,” Fred muttered.

“The little dark one is Jerry Wine, and the one putting away the RPG is Greg Sanfelice.”

Quint wondered how these lowlifes had found their way to the Manzonis. Six years of work had been wiped out before his very eyes. He couldn’t believe that anyone in Washington or Quantico would have talked, and put the problem off until later. How many were there? Five? Ten? Twenty? More? However many they were, he knew that this was the elite, and that Don Mimino’s men would blindly obey any order they were given. If it had been established in New York that that rat Manzoni was living in a little town in Normandy, France, they would raze the little town in Normandy, France to the ground
and carry on from there. Much as Thomas Quintiliani hated the Mafia, he couldn’t help respecting men who pursued their aims with such determination. Don Mimino lived according to his own rules, you had to give him that.

Once the dust cloud had evaporated, Matt rushed over to the ruins, with his Smith & Wesson in his hand. Greg was adamant about it: if there had been anything alive at the moment of the conflagration, whatever it was was now truly dead and already buried, so what was the problem? But Matt was determined to obey his grandfather’s orders to the letter, not to leave the premises until he had spat on the body of his enemy. If it hadn’t been for possible problems with customs, Don Mimino wouldn’t have said no to a little souvenir for himself, Manzoni’s heart in a jar of formaldehyde, for example. It would have been something to show to anyone who might have been considering following in his footsteps, and it might also have been a nice decorative piece for one of the shelves in his prison cell. Matt told the men to come and help clear up so as to be certain. Jerry brought the picks and spades out of the boot.

Quintiliani, still crouching on the ground, was trying to call his men, but neither Caputo nor Di Cicco were picking up, and he drew his own conclusions. Fred remained spellbound by the spectacle of these men, some of whom he had known, and loved like brothers, now digging in the ruins of his house, searching for his body.