Forgotten (48 page)

“
You
’re such a self-righteous
bastard.”

“
I try,”
Reardon said in his best
self-righteous bastard
tone.

“You think you have all the fucking
answers?”

“Not even close. This, whatever it is, goes
far deeper than even you are aware of.”

Macey laughed. “What crap.”

“
Really?
Then I only have to ask,
did
you want Thomas Bellante dead
?”

Silence.

“
I’m
guessing not. I’m guessing for once,
you
were the pawn, the one that
provided a fall guy for someone else, someone of a higher
authority. You see, I believe there are other forces in play in
this game of yours, Senator. I have a certain role, and
interestingly so do you. As for Claudia? Her role, at this stage,
is minor. What I fear is that her role won’t be minor for long.
What fears me more is that you know exactly what I’m talking
about.”

Was he
bluffing this time? Reardon wasn’t sure himself. He only knew that
too many coincidences had been in play and for far too long. Like
his supposed leads, so promising at first but always leading him to
that proverbial and very frustrating brick wall. And then there was
Claudia, the woman he was helping, and reluctantly falling for,
incontrovertibly linked with this federal senator, racketeer boss
and one-time friend of her father.

As
ridiculously paranoid as it sounded, Reardon believed someone else
was pulling the strings. He suddenly understood how a puppet felt,
sensed the strings tighten with every questionable thought dogging
his head. And if his instincts were correct, uncovering the
puppeteer would then become a major priority. In the meantime, as
the old adage goes, he had other fish to fry.

Macey was
silent; his eyes were not. They were searching, ravenous for
escape. Was he that much of an amateur? Reardon had hoped for a far
worthier adversary.

It
wasn’t to be. Macey scrambled into the darkest
section of the forest. And then disappeared.

“Want us to go after him?”

It was
Scotty.
How he liked the guy, his bizarre
bandanas, his quirky metaphors; more importantly, his unbinding
loyalty. Reardon slipped off his watch and handed it to him. “Let
me know when you have him.”

Scotty
nodded and left. That slick, that quick. Reardon expected nothing
less. He then stole the free time to indulge.

And immediately thought of Claudia.

He could
picture her so well now, laying low in the car simply because he
had asked it of her. How he admired that trust, admired her. And
yet, he still couldn’t shake off his perpetual misgivings about
their relationship.

“Saul, we have him.”

Of course,
they had him. Reardon’s trackers never failed. He followed Scotty
through a section of thick bushland and into a cavern of tangled
brushwood, low to the ground. Amongst it, sat a worn-out Macey.
Andy stood nearby.

Reardon
breathed in the unique, pacifying scents of the eucalypts and
centered himself. Again, he extracted his switchblade and dropped
to his haunches before a sly-eyed Macey. “You disappoint me,”
Reardon said.

A shaft of
moonlight caught something wholly wicked in Macey’s eyes and
magnified it. “Because I fought back, didn’t bend to your
will?”

“
No, because
you didn’t fight back with any ingenuity.”

“And you wanted more?”

Reardon was silent.

“
Like I
said, you’re definitely one fucked up piece of
engineering.”

Reardon
ignored the comment. “Let’s get back to this racketeering business
of yours.”

“
What’s the
point? You have Hollinger. You win.”

“
Hollinger
is my temporary insurance. You play your end of the game; give me
what I need to know, and Charles Smith returns to the oblivion
where he belongs. But only on the condition that his organization
shuts down.”

“As if you would do that.”

“
Oh, yes, I
could, very much so. My only interests are in my clients’ welfares,
which now includes Mark Hollinger. I’ll do whatever I have to do to
ensure that, even if it’s outside the law. Just the knowledge that
Charles Smith’s racketeering days are finished will be enough for
Hollinger. His family, his wife, kids don’t need to be dragged
through the media yet again. A quiet, backstage resolution is far
more preferable.”

“And exactly how would you know if I gave up
the business?”

Reardon
burnt his direct gaze straight into Macey. “
I… just… would.
”

Macey pulled
away, cleared his throat, readjusted a tie that didn’t need
readjusting. “Fuck you, Reardon. You have no idea who you’re
dealing with.”

“Are you talking about yourself or the
mystery person who appears to control you and your business?”

Macey bucked
with all the virility of a well-seasoned fighter.
“
No-one… controls…
me.
”

“
But
he
does,
Senator. Do you even know who he is, how to contact him, where to
find him if you needed to? Isn’t he the one always giving the
instructions, you always following them?”

Macey’s
cheeks reddened to a hot shade of crimson. “He knows
you.”

Reardon
’s puppeteer theory grew
momentum. “I already figured that.”

“
He’s
someone you can’t fight.”

“
I seriously
doubt it. In the meantime, let’s get back to what happened to
Claudia at Araneya.”

Macey grazed
his face with his hand. Anger still burnt bright on his skin.
“Claudia Cabriati,” he began. “So fucking uncontrollable, strong
willed, opinionated, so unlike
my
own children. They knew the
term respect.”

“More like you were incapable of
manipulating Claudia as you did your own.”

“
Incapable
is not in my blood. It was that
fucking
Polinski woman, always filling Claudia’s head with some bloody
moral rectitude. That’s what made Claudia impossible. She believed
all Alice’s bloody crap, that
she
was someone special. She was
seven fucking years old.”

“
Imagine how
you must have felt, that a seven-year old could rattle you like
that,
even now. That’s power.”

“
That’s not
bloody power. Polinski had twisted her mind.” Macey heaved a huge
breath and blew out slowly. “You have to understand, during our
meets we, well… we did some things that people would’ve
disapproved
of.”

“Such as?”

“
Such as
alcohol, drugs, women,
amongst other
things
.”

It was
the
amongst other
things
that bothered Reardon the most.
“Sounds quite the party.”

“It was our way of surviving,” Macey
snapped. “Not that anyone comprehended that.”

Reardon knew
about surviving horrors; but something about the Senator’s version
bothered him, quite a lot.

“
After a
while, it wasn
’t enough. The longer the
foolish public subjugated us to their hostility, the angrier we
got, until we began questioning our love for this country. We’d
often joke how our initials formed the word Smith. And as much as
you hate coincidences, Reardon, there it was. We actually thought
it was meant to be, that fate was telling us something.”

“And in your screwed up states of mind you
believed it.”

“
It
wasn
’t hard; our need was great. We
would’ve believed anything to satisfy it. Anyway, Hercolani was one
bad bastard; he knew people. One thing led to another, and our new
racketeering group was formed.”

“Except for Cabriati.”

“Cabriati was a different story.”

“
And your
racketeering specialty?”

“Weapons and ammunition.”

Reardon sighed. He was past being surprised
anymore.

“
You have to
understand, we wanted to hurt this country the way it had hurt us,
especially after the whole Benjamin Lucas affair. As I said that
particular incident became our turning point.”

Reardon
didn’t want to understand. How many innocent people were victims
because of the clan’s so-called
needs
? “And did Cabriati
know?”

“
Cabriati
detested the whole idea, but he’d never rat on his
brothers.”

“So tell me more about Hercolani. You said
he knew people. Like who?”

“
At the time
I didn’t care who. Years later, when I felt I was
being….”

“Controlled.”

Macey glared
sharply. “
Manipulated
…, I approached
Hercolani. He swore he didn’t know who this person was.”

“Did you believe him?”

“
I never
believed a fucking word from that warped psychopath’s mouth. All he
could tell me was that no-one knew who he was or what he looked
like; that he was a man of many names and many faces.” Macey
scoffed. “What a load of shit, nothing more than scare
tactics.”

Shit,
perhaps. But there was no denying the fear in Macey’s
own
warped, psychopathic
eyes.

“And Thomas Bellante?”

“
Hercolani
brought him in. Said it’d be good to have a corrupt solicitor on
side. Bellante proved useful, many times.”

“But you had him killed.”

“I was ordered to.”

“
And you
don’t know why?”

“Of course not.”

For the
first time in a long time, Reardon felt real hope. Could
Hercolani
’s relationship with Bellante be
a link for his own personal cause? Could Hercolani have lied to
Macey, knew who this nameless, faceless
man was, this person Reardon now dubbed
The Puppeteer
? “Know
where Hercolani is?”

“
Reckon he’s
hiding. Are we bloody finished yet?”

Barely
, Reardon thought. “How did
you know about our plan for the hospital tonight? Via your
‘manipulating’ boss?”

A small,
wisp of confidence appeared to semi-energize the Senator. He glared
at Reardon through wickedly lowered brows. “What you should be
asking is why someone in your ranks would rat you out in the first
place?”

Inside?
Reardon
’s gut contracted.

Outside? He remained totally poker-faced.
“You know who?”

Macey
laughed. “Even if I did
, you’d think I’d
tell you?”

If Macey
wanted his freedom, yes he would. But oddly, Reardon believed Macey
didn’t know. “What really happened to Claudia?”

Macey rolled his hands, huffed and puffed
several times. “Claudia would hide out in the most ridiculous
places,” he began.

Hidey holes.

“
But there
was one place that was her
favorite. A
special room just for our group. I’d warned her many times to stay
out of it but she was such a contrary, willful little bitch. She
had overheard us talking about our new…
business
venture
. I didn’t know how much
she understood, but the girl was smart.

I cornered
her almost immediately, told her she was never to repeat what she
had heard to anyone, not even to Alice. She stood staunch in
that
fucking room and said,
Alice says that you have to do what
you feel is right and I will always do that
… or some such shit. Anyway, I managed to convince her that
her Papa and Alice could be in a lot of trouble if anyone found
out. She then promised to keep her mouth shut.”

Reardon
couldn’t imagine Claudia contrary
or
willful; so different to the
overly compliant and obliging adult today.

“
My warnings
didn
’t stop her.” Macey appeared lost in
his own rabid past. “But one very huge lesson did.”

“And what lesson was that?”

Macey stared into the dark and smiled.

“
She saw Ricky Taccone shoot himself.
”

1990

TONIGHT WAS SOMEHOW
different.

Wrong.

She could hear it in their loud, spirited
voices, their erratic, intoxicated movements, stumbling,
guffawing.

The little girl huddled in her hidey-hole, an air vent set
a few feet from the floor of her Papa and uncles’ special room.
Inside, the space was dark, narrow, filled with fetid odors and a
low, constant drumming noise like lots of tiny sledgehammers. On
either side of her were two endless black tunnels. Further into
those tunnels, she imagined sticky, thick cobwebs, scurrying rats
and large well-fed cockroaches. She shivered and stayed close to
the rusty, old-fashioned grill as silently as one her age
could.

She didn’t want to be caught, to bear Uncle Carlos’ awful
wrath again. But hiding there helped her to understand her Papa,
see if he were truly getting better.