Charlie Opera (2 page)

“Because that’s what this could be like,” the old man said. “If the guy talked to people, filled out a police report you don’t know about. If maybe his wife mentioned it to somebody. Which is why it’s smarter to wait a few months. Maybe you change your mind by then, forget the whole thing. That would be even smarter, you forget it, this bullshit.”

“The guy goes,” the nephew repeated. “I’m reaching out. Either you help me or you don’t.”

The old man looked off toward Rockaway Island. “I have a guy out there in Vegas,” he said. “Semiretired. A goodfella from here in New York. He used to do work for us, me and your father, ten, fifteen years ago. I know he takes on work from time to time.”

The nephew wiped at drool forming at one corner of his mouth. “I’ll pay him whatever he wants.”

“We can’t go through Vegas, though,” the old man said. “Not through the people out there. It has to be a private contract. Strictly private. The guy running things out there, Jerry Lercasi, he don’t meet with nobody. He has some accountant he sends in his place. They dress it up for the feds. You go out there for a sit-down with Lercasi, you gotta make like it’s a real-estate investment or some shit. You gotta sign up for land development tours or golf club lunches. You drive around looking at new houses while you do business. Lercasi is very careful.”

“So I don’t go near Lercasi’s people. That’s not a problem.”

“When I say you can’t go through protocol, you understand what I’m saying here? My guy in Vegas can’t be tied into Lercasi. My guy is strictly private. For everybody’s sake.”

The nephew nodded. “I understand.”

The old man belched into a fist. “You know enough about this guy you want to whack? You know where he’s staying and so on?”

“That’s what Vin Lano and Joey Francone are out there for.”

“And you’re sure he’s there?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’re gonna do this thing whether I help or not. It’s better I help.”

“I appreciate it.”

“It’s too bad that other kid got scooped up last year, Jimmy Mangino.”

“Jimmy Bench-Press?”

“Whatever the fuck his name is, yeah. He was a machine, that kid. You pointed him and he went, got it done.”

“He’s not around. All I got is what I got. Francone and Lano. They know what to do.”

The old man used a matchbook cover to remove tobacco from between his teeth. “About that other thing,” he said. “What we’re here to discuss in the first place.”

The nephew reached into his front pants pocket to activate the wire he was wearing. “The Russian thing?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are they ready to go?”

“This week sometime,” the old man said. “Few days. Week at the most.”

“Just say when.”

“It’s still in Jersey, right?”

“At my guy’s place.”

“The new guy?”

“The one with the trucks, yeah. Rizzi.”

“They won’t take it from there, the Russians. They want security.”

The nephew shrugged. “I can’t do everything.”

The old man spit loose tobacco from his mouth. He examined his cigar and tossed it over the side of the boat. “These fuckin’ things,” he complained. “They used to roll them tight. You open a box of six, you’re lucky you can smoke three.”

“You shouldn’t smoke that crap. At least go to Cubans.”

“Cubans are too expensive,” the old man said. He fished another cigar from his pocket, examined it a few seconds, and placed it unlit to one side of his mouth. “I think it’ll move this week,” he said. “Can you do it from Vegas?”

“No problem. I’ll have Rizzi fly out to Vegas to calm his nerves and you can take the truck. I can arrange it but you’ll have to oversee it.”

“I don’t expect otherwise. Couple million dollars is a lot of money.”

“Couple million in heroin is a telephone number.”

“Besides, who else I’m gonna send with that kind of money while you’re out there jerkin’ off in Vegas?”

The nephew waved at a dragonfly. “So, this week?”

The old man removed the cigar from his mouth. “Couple, tree days,” he said. “No more than a week. I want this over with already. I don’t like sweating this out. The more that shit sits, the more nervous it makes me. It’s one big headache, that stuff. These Russians have the money. Let’s make the exchange and give them the headaches.”

The nephew deactivated the wire. “And Charlie Pellecchia?” he asked.

The old man looked off toward the beach again. “Charlie who?”

The nephew smiled through the pain in his jaw.

“That was cute, your conversation on the boat,” federal Drug Enforcement agent Marshall Thomas told Nicholas Cuccia.

They were seated side by side in the first-class section of an America West flight to Las Vegas. Thomas looked younger than his thirty-five years. He wore navy blue sweatpants and a light blue North Carolina sweatshirt. He was a broad man. His left shoulder bumped Cuccia as he leaned over to look out the window.

“You check the flight for wiseguys?” Cuccia whispered. “Or you trying to get me killed before your big heroin bust?”

“That’s the second time today you used that word,” Thomas said. “But that doesn’t do me any good, you saying it. It’s your uncle I need to hear discuss heroin. Not ‘that other thing’ or ‘that Russian thing’ or ‘that stuff’ or anything else. I need to hear him talk about heroin. You see what I’m saying?”

Cuccia opened the
Playboy
magazine he had bought at an airport newsstand. He flipped toward the middle of the magazine to the centerfold. He held the book up to let the picture drop open.

“Where do you suppose she lives?” he asked Thomas.

Thomas turned away from the nude picture. He looked up at the male flight attendant serving cocktails.

“Naked broads make you nervous?” Cuccia asked. He folded the centerfold back inside the magazine and turned it upside down on the folding tray. “There,” he said. “Take deep breaths.”

Thomas leaned into Cuccia again. “Like I said, I heard you talk about heroin. I didn’t hear your uncle talk about it. I heard him talk about Russians.”

“The old man is careful. If I pushed it, he would have known something. Relax. The closer he gets to the money, the more he’ll talk.”

“What about the rest of your conversation? You were on that boat for three hours. You brought back less than two minutes of dialogue.”

Cuccia touched the edge of his chin. “Six fucking weeks I gotta have this thing in my mouth like this,” he said. “He’s got a guy debugs the boat every so often. I wasn’t taking unnecessary risks. It’s my ass, not yours.”

Thomas opened the
New York Times
he had brought with him. He pointed to a headline in the Metro section. It read: MOB INDICTMENTS IN BROOKLYN. “We’re in a race against time,” he said. “You’re in a race against time.”

Cuccia was still touching around his jaw with his fingertips. “There’s nothing I can do until the man wants to move. So why not relax about it, already. Have yourself a drink.”

The flight attendant leaned across Thomas to set a miniature bottle of Absolut vodka and a can of Canada Dry tonic water on a napkin.

“What’s in Vegas?” Thomas asked after the flight attendant returned to the galley.

“Pussy,” Cuccia said.

“How you gonna eat it with a broken jaw?”

“Who said I was gonna eat it?”

Thomas smirked. “I thought you guys were big on eating pussy. At least that’s what I read in all the books you guys write after you make your deals.”

“That’s just to make the books sell,” Cuccia said. “Me, I prefer going through the back door any day. Ask your wife, she’ll tell you.”

Thomas lost the smirk on his face. He leaned across his seat to whisper into Cuccia’s ear. “Just don’t get yourself in too much trouble while we’re in Las Vegas, Nicky. Or your deal will go down the same shitter your mother flushed when you were born.”

Cuccia forced a chuckle. “Tell me the truth,” he said. “You stay up all night and work that one out? ‘Down the same shitter your mother flushed.’ You guys kill me.”

Thomas sat back in his chair. He grabbed the headphones in the seat pocket in front of him and placed them on his head.

Cuccia continued forcing himself to laugh. “What a jerk-off,” he said somewhere in the laugh.

Cecilia Bartoli nailed
Una voce poca fa
as Charlie Pellecchia swayed back and forth. He watched from his hotel room as crowds of people waited for the Pirate Show in front of the Treasure Island Hotel-Casino across Las Vegas Boulevard. Charlie adjusted the volume on his headphones as the Rossini aria boomed into his ears. He felt the pure high of the violins as he closed his eyes.

A thick plastic hairbrush thrown from across the room smacked Charlie in the middle of his back. The sting of the hairbrush startled him. He dropped the portable CD player from his hands. The headphones remained attached to the unit and were pulled off his head.

Charlie turned to his wife as he reached behind him to rub at the red mark the hairbrush had left on his back.

“What the fuck?”

“I’ve been calling to you for five minutes!” Lisa Pellecchia yelled. “From the shower. In the bathroom. Five minutes!”

“I was listening to something,” Charlie said. He was still trying to reach the painful spot on his back. “That hurt, damn it.”

Lisa’s face tightened. She looked about to burst with more rage. She shook her head instead and returned to the bathroom.

Charlie picked the CD player and headphones off the floor. He set them down on the small round table alongside the carton of cigarettes he had brought from New York. He turned to one side to look at his back in the mirror. He saw a red welt.

“Shit,” he said.

He tried to reach the red mark on his back one more time. In the process, he noticed the roll of flab that had formed around his waist. He stood up straight again, turned to one side, and looked at his profile in the mirror.

He had gained weight. He guessed his weight was 230 pounds, maybe 240. At 5-foot-10, he figured he was at least 30 pounds overweight.

He struck a muscle pose. He was still well defined for his age. He had maintained a barrel chest and big arms. He flexed both his biceps in the mirror and quickly dropped his arms when he heard his wife in the bathroom. When he thought he was safe again, he looked into the mirror and whispered, “Figaro, Figaro... Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Fi-ga-ro.”

It was the second time since they’d come to Las Vegas that his wife had thrown something at Charlie. Earlier in the morning Lisa threw a pillow at him for whistling the overture to Mozart’s
La Clemenza di Tito
. She was watching the
Today Show
on NBC, after her first cup of coffee. Charlie had just come back from a long walk and was listening to the Mozart opera through his headphones.

Lisa hated opera.

Charlie was starting to think maybe his wife hated him, too.

In the afternoon, he took his second long walk of the day. He walked north along Las Vegas Boulevard and noticed a busy construction site a few blocks off the Strip. He walked farther north passed the Desert Inn, the Riviera, and the Sahara. He finally stopped walking when he reached the Stratosphere. He wondered how Las Vegas looked from the top of the Stratosphere.

Charlie had been a window cleaner for fifteen years in New York City before starting his own business in the same industry. He worked house rigs on fifty-story buildings. He had worked portable rigs on ten- and twelve-story buildings. He also had worked belts and ladders and an occasional boatswain chair. Heights were never a concern to him. He had always been fascinated with tall buildings.

He had recently sold the window cleaning business he started more than ten years ago. Charlie was retired now, but he wasn’t sure what he would do with himself.

He wondered how the glass at the top of the Stratosphere was cleaned when he looked up at it from the street. In the lobby he wondered how many men it took to clean the transom glass.

On his way back to his hotel he stopped at the Mirage, where he bought a stuffed animal, a small white tiger, for his wife. He was feeling guilty about ignoring her earlier in the morning. Charlie hadn’t turned up the volume on the opera intentionally, but he could understand why his wife thought he had. Lately they weren’t getting along. Opera was one of many distractions Charlie used to escape their problems. He thought Lisa might be jealous of his distractions.

He hoped his wife would like the tiger. She had always liked receiving a surprise bouquet of flowers in the past. As he crossed Las Vegas Boulevard, a strange thought suddenly entered his mind.

Charlie wondered if his wife was having an affair.

“I almost killed him before,” Lisa Pellecchia told her lover.

She cradled the telephone against her right shoulder as she lowered the volume on the television. She turned on the bed so she could hear the door if it opened.

“Stay calm,” John Denton said on the other end of the line. “You know what you have to do. It’ll be over soon enough.”

Lisa shook her head as she leaned her back against the headboard.

“I feel terrible,” she said. “I can’t believe I hit him like that. I threw something else at him earlier. I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.”

“It will be all right. Just stay calm.”

“I wish you were here.”

“Me, too.”

Lisa felt herself tearing. “I better hang up. He should be back any minute.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

Lisa kissed Denton through the telephone. “Good night,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said.

When she hung up, Lisa took several deep breaths. It was a method of controlling her emotions she had learned the year before in therapy. She tried to focus on what she needed to do as she controlled her breathing.

Her nerves had been on edge all day. She was anxious to end her marriage. She needed to confess the extramarital relationship she was having with the same man for the second time in two years.

As her breathing finally returned to normal, Lisa reached for a tissue. The door opened as she held the tissue up to her nose. When she looked up, Charlie was standing at the foot of the bed with a stuffed animal. It was a white tiger. Lisa burst out crying.