Futile Efforts (32 page)

"Nice place," Joey said.
 
I lived an hour outside the city in West Nyack with the rest of the family members who weren't involved in the business.
 
His eyes flashed on a birch beyond the window and he seemed confounded by the leaves and all the green.
 
He probably hadn't been outside of Brooklyn more than twice in his life. For him, stepping over Flatbush Avenue was more adventurous than trekking through the Andes.

Bone gave me his death gaze.
 
I didn't take it personally.
 
He wished murder on everyone, even himself, and he couldn't help walking around daydreaming about jamming a switchblade in somebody's throat.

"What's going on, Joe?"

"Listen, Tommy…ah…we got a little situation here…"

"That much I figured."

He was nearly as wide as he was tall, with a natural, almost graceful sense of brutality about him.
 
He could snap a baseball bat in half with his bare hands and he was the only guy I knew who could aim a shotgun and not just point it.
 
He had a sawed-off 12-gauge under his jacket right now.
 
I knew it even though I couldn't see it.
 
He, like everybody who worked for the family, had his clothes specially made to help conceal the hardware beneath.
 
He wore a hat size 9, and I'd once seen him take a ball-peen hammer to the head and all it did was make him sneeze.
 
The guy who'd hit him tried to run but Joey got one hand on him, made a fist, and that's all it took.

He was distracted and kept looking at the ceiling, puzzled by the noise up there.
 
"Ah, yeah, well, ah—"

"It's always easier if you just drop the bomb and run, Joe."

"Yeah, I know, but…what is that?"

It was my cousin Dante, who was walking the halls dragging a six foot cross around on his back.
 
Dante had some issues.
 
Most I knew of, a few I could guess at, and there was a whole cart full I didn't have any clue about.
 
I'd taken him to Jersey City once on a double date, but my night crashed out about the time he nailed his big toe to the dance floor and started singing the aria from
Il Crucifixion Di
Jesu
.

Ganooch's
thoughts roiled against my skull, thumping hard. The boosted electrical current in his brain had hyped up the neurotransmitters and high frequency waves. They'd told me he spoke telepathically now, and that it would be rougher on his relatives.

It began to hurt bad.
 
I stepped away from him.
 
In a few seconds the aching grew so intense that I let out a groan and backed up to the far wall.
 
"Grandpa, stop!" I shouted, but he couldn't.
 
He'd been tapping the computers of Columbia University's art department again, downloading archives on the Roman Empire.
 
He kept thinking about the days when Rome took over from Florence as the center of art, about 1495 until its sacking in 1527.
 
He was giving off waves of anger as if it had happened a week ago and he'd been personally involved.

I went to one knee and Bone came as close to smiling as he'd ever come in his life. His long white face looked only half-formed, like candle wax pressed into shape by somebody's thumbs.
 
I knew for a fact that his blood ran cold—when he was a kid most of his plasma had been transposed with a variant of amphibian hemoglobin. That was back when the government sub-agencies were doing experiments that would've given Josef
Mengele
the night terrors.
 
There wasn't any reason for it, they were just in the middle of viscera and tooling around on orphans.

Bone couldn't spit poison or regenerate new limbs or live underwater.
  
The only side-effect I knew about was that he breathed like a toad.
 
Infrequently, only when his body needed the oxygen.
 
He killed efficiently and without emotion, and I knew in my heart that he'd take a run at me one day.

The grin was unintentional and only something I could see.
 
The barest lilt of his lips.
 
It was the kind of thing that started wars, and it pissed me off so much I gritted my back teeth and stood against the blazing pain.
 
Barabbas barked and stomped forward and pressed his shoulder to my leg. His jowls swung back and forth and his bottom fangs pinched his cheeks and gave him dimples.

Ganooch's
mind was a chaotic whipsaw of colors, images, and knowledge without context.
 
I saw the interplay of light and shadow in Da Vinci's
Virgin of the Rocks
.
 
Donato
D'Angelo Bramante's architecture, including his redesign of St. Peters in the Vatican.
 
Classical High Renaissance ideals: proportion and balance.
 
It was as if my grandfather's brain had recorded a hundred museums and now fast-forwarded through the tapes.
 
His outdated sensibilities didn't jibe with the data.
 
Raffaello
Sanzio
, who disliked the dark subtlety of Da Vinci and preferred lofty idealism, had stolen Leonardo's pyramid concepts.
 
I could feel the conflict going on inside the old man as each new learned style, form, and abstraction struggled with another.

The link-up was through a hacked environmental satellite, and I kept getting weather reports and heat indexes from around the country.
 
Four inches of rain in northeast Pennsylvania, a low pressure system working out of Tampa Bay.
 
If the
Ganooch
wasn't already insane, this would throw him off the pier.

"What've you guys been doing to him?" I asked.

"His orders," Bone said, and he let the words ease over his tongue so he could squeeze off a hiss.

"Unplug him."

"He wants to learn."

"This isn't the way."

"You ain't the boss."

"You're overloading him.
 
It's like mid-term cramming taken to a whole new level."

"Why is it I never have any idea what the hell you're talking about?" Bone asked.

"Because you're stupid.
 
Unplug him."

He settled the death gaze on me again, but he couldn't get any more mileage out of it than he already had.
 
The trouble with always looking homicidal is that you had nowhere left to go when you really wanted to carve somebody up.

Joey stepped between us and said, "He wants to paint."

I looked at him and then glanced over at the
Ganooch
, who was nodding happily.
 
His head bobbed at just the right angle so that sunlight glared off the edge of his plastic casing and scattered a patina across the walls.

"You've got to be kidding."

"You think I'd be out here in the sticks if it wasn't the truth?
 
He wants to paint.
 
He wants you to teach him how to do it.
 
You know.
 
With brushes, the easel, all that shit."

I couldn't quite grasp it.
 
My grandfather's only creative urges so far had gone along the line of imaginative body disposal.
 
"Why?"

"Like I should know?
 
He said he's unfulfilled.
 
Has no aesthetic in life, which ain't true.
 
We got plenty from the doctors in case we ever need it.
 
For bullet wounds and such."

"That's anesthetic."

Joey blinked a couple of times.
 
"You hear him better than me.
 
When he talks now it's like a whisper in the wind.
 
But he's still the boss.
 
What he wants, he gets."

Tommaso
,
il
mio
nipote
,
aiutilo
—
help your old grandfather, my good boy, my grandson
—

"How am I supposed to help?
 
I'm not a painter."

"You been to college.
 
You know more about art than anybody else in the family."

Joey talked like one of the family soldiers from the old days, but I knew he was a high-tech wizard and had at least two Ph.D.'s in molecular biotechnology.
 
A lot went into protecting his image.

"We can hire somebody," I said.

"He wants you."

The
Ganooch's
hypothalamus had been shoved aside to allow more room for the enhanced cerebrum.
 
I couldn't be sure that his temporal lobe was still where it was supposed to be.

Dante kept hauling his cross all over the place upstairs.
 
I looked at my dead grandfather's leering face and shrugged.
 
He slung himself forward out of the chair and hugged me.
 
It felt like being covered in dust.

Joey Fresco was making a break for it when he turned and said, "One more thing—if the Rossi family learns about this we're all dead."

That stopped me.
 
"What?
 
The Rossi's?
 
Why?
 
We've never had any trouble with them before."

"Here's the bomb, Tommy.
 
I'm gonna drop it and run, like you said.
 
Carla Rossi is taking over her family and I hear the first order of business is to get rid of the
Ganooch
."

"The hell for?"

"Second order of business is to put a double tap in your head."

Bone let out another hiss of laughter as Joey trundled towards the door and said, "We'll be downstairs if you need us.
 
Jesus, I always thought the sticks was supposed to be quiet.
 
This place is louder than Coney Island on Labor Day. There any pasta
fagliogli
left?"

I stared at the
Ganooch
and he gazed back at me with a puppy dog expression of tentative joy and fear.
 
When I was five, I had seen this man kill one of his own capos for betting against the family racehorse, even though it ran like a wounded water buffalo and liked to chase after flies.
 
My grandfather, who was tall and lean and filled with an assertive smug power, shot the capo in the face with a nickel-plated .38 during Sunday pasta.
 
Now I could barely recognize the Don, lost inside all this hardware and infirmity.

My father had been a financier and took the family into legal ventures with an emphasis on biotechnology, genomics, and molecular electronics research stock.
 
He knew it wouldn't be long before the bosses like the
Ganooch
would put it to good use rewiring their hearts, brains, and DNA strands in order to steal a few extra years from the devil.
 
It had been his idea to hardwire the environmental satellite and hack into the museum storehouses and depository indexes.
 
You couldn't wrangle too far into the government systems without causing a major stir, but you could ease in sideways.
 
Knowledge was power, even if you only read up on the ancient world.

Now I watched my grandfather's creative juices flowing: the
neuro
-chemicals splashed inside his slowly decaying brain.
 
My history lay in there, my name and maybe even a part of my soul.
 
I could see a portion of his uncovered brainstem, where they'd rutted into his spine to give him a little mobility and the ability to breathe on his own again.

"Why do you want to paint?" I asked.

Tommaso
,
il
dolore—il
dolore
…
l'agonia
—

I kneeled before him and put my hand on his, the way I used to do as a child.
 
"What pain, Grandpa?"

I shouldn't have asked.
 
His frothing emotions rioted in my bloodstream and I felt an anguish and dread that was as intense as my own though it had nothing to do with me. Even Dante felt it upstairs and let out a howl.
 
I had enough of my own grief and didn't need another man's sorrow coupled to my own. I couldn't make much of it out, the rapid-fire feelings that a person can undergo when thinking back on his own life—and his death as well.