Second Skin (20 page)

‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s in the genes, you know, a territorial thing, like in the old days protecting the family.’

He had caught her interest. ‘War is in men’s blood, is that what you mean?’

‘Yeah, kinda. They can’t help it.’

‘But you’re not like that.’

‘Maybe I got a genetic deficiency,’ he joked. They laughed together and he felt them drawing even closer, the dream and reality overlapping, exchanging places, reality and unreality fusing with the intoxicating scent of roses.

Then she shivered. ‘This discussion sounds eerily like a part of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Have you heard of him?’

‘No.’

‘He was a nineteenth-century German philosopher whose theories on the nature of man were expropriated and maybe even distorted by the Nazis. They used him to, in part, justify their aims of ethnic cleansing. He was all for the primitive man – who lived in the tropics and the primeval forests of the soul. Nietzsche had only contempt for those men who dwelled in the temperate zones, whose morality was, in his mind at least, timidity.’

‘In other words, he believed that war lived in men’s blood and souls.’

Jaqui nodded. ‘I’d say so. And he’d also say that the most warlike men, like, for instance, Napoleon and Caesare Borgia, were misunderstood. Nietzsche believed that these men were condemned by moralists looking for evil, but in fact, Napoleon and Borgia were merely acting out the true nature of man.’

Mick found this ideology irresistible since it at once made clear to him two points of view he had up to now found irreconcilable. Grandfather had said that education was the key to success because it showed you who you were, and Mick believed him. But what about Caesare? He was largely self-educated, having terrorized the local school into submission. He came and went there of his own volition. And yet, in his own despicable way, he was already successful. He had a fully formed outlook on life, an inner perspective, and now, in Nietzschean terms, Mick could understand his success without education. He lived in the tropics, the primeval forests of the soul. He was like Napoleon and his namesake, Cesare Borgia.

At that moment, he heard the slam of a heavy car door and he looked over the parapet on which Jaqui was sitting. She turned to look down also, and they both saw Grandfather Caesare walking across the courtyard as his driver took the Caddy to the parking spot across the street that, by common consent, was always left vacant for it.

Mick was about to call out to the old man when he heard a sound. It might have been a voice, harsh and piercing in the night. It might have said, ‘Caesare Leonforte!’

The old man must have heard it as well because he halted, turning back toward the street. And that was when Mick saw the two shadows stride into the courtyard. At the same instant he yelled a warning, they opened fire. Bright yellow flames leap from the muzzles of their handguns, and a great booming echoed off the stone facade of the courtyard. Blood spurted from the old man’s chest and head as he was thrown backward.

Jaqui put her hand to her mouth and screamed. Mick had the presence of mind to pull her down from the parapet where she could be seen by the assassins. He crouched down with her, feeling the involuntary tremors rippling through her. Her green eyes were wide and staring, and she was biting on a knuckle in order not to scream again. A tiny rivulet of blood trickled between her fingers, and when Mick pulled her hand away, he saw the series of small crescent marks her teeth had made as they punctured her skin.

He felt her trying to stand up and he kept a tight hold on her. She opened her mouth to protest, but he put a hand across her lips, shook his head, making a gun out of his forefinger and thumb so she would get the idea that they were in danger unless they remained hidden.

A voice began to wail from an open window fronting the courtyard. Voices began to shout. Mick stood up, peered over the parapet. The courtyard was alive with people, but of course the assassins were nowhere in sight. Mick let go of his sister, ran to the side of the building facing 101st Avenue. He saw a dark-colored Cougar pulling out, heading very fast toward the light at Eighty-eighth Street. It was going to run the light, which had just turned red, but at almost the last instant the driver saw the cop car nosing up the side street and screeched to a halt.

Mick ran for his telescope, lugged it back to his vantage spot. Swinging the barrel over and down, he peered through the lens at the back of the dark-colored Cougar. The cop car had turned on its siren and flashing lights, headed directly for his house. He just had time to make out the license plate number of the Cougar when the driver threw it in gear and hot-rodded down the avenue as the light hit green.

‘Did you see anything?’ Jaqui said, her eyes wide. ‘The police are here. Can you help them?’

Mick, thinking of how she had said he wasn’t like all the other males in Ozone Park, said, ‘There wasn’t anything to see.’

He could see the disappointment in her eyes. ‘Really and truly?’

‘Really and truly.’

He folded down the telescope, put his arm around her. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’

They came out into the courtyard, having first deposited the telescope in the apartment. Sadly, it was an all too typical scene for Ozone Park. Women were weeping. The cops had already cordoned off the body and were interviewing everyone for potential witnesses. Caesare, in a rage of frustration and fear, was shouting at the cops. John was gone and Alphonse was three thousand miles away in San Francisco. Jaqui went immediately to their mother, who was sobbing in the arms of several other women.

Mick moved through the crowd until he was at the closest perimeter. His grandfather lay facedown in the courtyard in a pool of blood and brains and feces. It was a more horrifying sight than he could ever have imagined, and he stared fixedly at it, drinking in the horror as if for fortification. Slowly, he began to tremble.

Behind him, in ones and twos, the people dispersed as they were let go by the police. Caesare, vowing revenge, had stormed off. Mick’s mother, half-fainting with shock, had been led into the house, and now Mick and Jaqui, having endured the cops’ indifferent questions, stood together as police photographers took flash photos of the crime scene. Soon enough, the coroner arrived.

‘You don’t have to stay for this,’ Mick said quietly.

Jaqui took his hand, squeezing her fingers between his. ‘Yes, I do.’

And there they stood, in the stone courtyard. No band was playing, and instead of the glow of Chinese lanterns the night was filled with the harsh light of flashbulbs popping. And with the stench of death instead of the attar of roses in his nostrils, Mick was left with his grandfather’s ironically prophetic words:
And inna end they’re the ones’ll die like dogs with their faces inna pavement.

‘You want what?’

‘I told you, Caesare, a trace of this license plate number.’

Caesare Leonforte squinted at his younger brother. ‘You’re a cute kid, ya know that, but I got no time for you now. I’m tryin’ta run down every fuck inna Fulton-Rockaways. I don’t know who to whack first, the Vizzinis or the Pentangelis. Not to mention I’m not too sure where this young don, Dominic Mattaccino, stands. Y’know, with his father, Black Paul Mattaccino, to this day no one knows how he died. Then the widow takes up with Enrico Goldoni, it’s not even a year since Black Paul kicked the bucket. And her brat Dominic takes over, thinks his shit don’t stink. Maybe he ain’t even Black Paul’s son.’ Caesare threw up his hands. ‘An’ what’s Goldoni anyway, a fuckin’ Venetian, for Christ’s sake, that’s maybe not even Italian.’ The hands spun like pinwheels. ‘What the fuck’s he know from
la famiglia,
uh? Grandpa might’ve trusted him, but not me. This is fuckin’ war. I got suspects comin’ outta my ears, an’ now
this.’

The two brothers, along with perhaps a dozen of Caesare’s cronies, button men and minor family heads, were in Grandfather’s office above the Mastimo Funeral Home. Despite the clamor and grim tension, it seemed cold and lonely, and Mick was just now realizing how much Grandfather Caesare’s presence filled it up.

‘I know that.’

‘Okay, you wanna be useful,’ Caesare said, ‘gimme an espresso.’

‘But I need this. It’s very important. I think these wiseguys stole my telescope off the roof, the telescope Grandpa gave me.’

Caesare tore at his hair. ‘Stolen telescopes? Madonna, Richie, whattam I gonna do with this kid?’

‘Whyint I make the fuckin’ call?’ Richie said. ‘Get’em off our backs.’

Caesare snapped his fingers. ‘Go on. Fuck not?’

An hour later, the call back came from one of the Leonfortes’ contacts at the 106th Precinct. Richie, the receiver held between his shoulder and ear, scribbled frantically on a scratch pad. ‘Yeah, yeah, got it. Thanks.’ He cradled the receiver, ripped off the sheet, gave it to Mick.

‘Here, kid, don’t get inta no trouble wid dis or your brudda will kill da bothuv us.’

‘Thanks,’ Mick said, pocketing the paper.

Outside on the street, the late-afternoon sun was shining and a small breeze was ruffling the leaves on the elms and plane trees. Cars whooshed by on Conduit Avenue, and a bus spewed diesel fumes into the air. Mick took a look around his world and found that it all looked different. There was a sheen, no, more like an aura, like the halo around a saint’s head, over everything. The outlines of buildings and people came to him with the superreal crispness of things seen through the lens of his telescope. Colors were so vivid they almost made his eyes water. He would have slipped on his sunglasses, but the sensation felt too good.

Back home, he went into his brother’s bedroom and, reaching into the back of the closet, pushed aside the neat stack of winter clothes. Behind that, he took down an olive-colored metal ammo case from World War II. He had been with Caesare when he had bought it at a war-surplus store and, curious as to why his brother would want such a useless item, had spied on him as Caesare had filled it and had carefully hidden it away.

Now he brought it over to the bed and opened it. Inside, wrapped in oilskin, was a .45-caliber handgun and rounds of ammunition. Mick took out the gun, hefting it in his hand. He loaded it as he had seen his brother do many times, slipped extra ammo into his trousers pocket, and replaced the ammo case inside the closet. Before he left the apartment, he took a wire coat hanger out of his own closet and slipped his mother’s long-bladed paring knife into the waistband of his trousers at the small of his back.

Only then did he open the slip of paper on which Richie had written the name and address of the person who owned the dark-colored Cougar he had seen racing away from the scene of his grandfather’s murder. A name he did not know, an address in East New York. But they meant everything to him now, because he realized that the moment his grandfather had been killed his whole life had changed. Standing there with Jaqui in the bloody courtyard, he had felt it, intangibles swinging on an invisible axis, canting the world –
his
world – over on its side. Nothing would ever be the same again. He did not know why, but he knew it was so.

He walked more than a mile from his apartment before he stole the car. He broke in using the wire hanger and hot-wired it without any trouble. Then he set off for East New York.

He pulled up across the street from the address, nosing into a parking spot. He did not see the dark-colored Cougar anywhere around, so he got out, scouted around to get the lay of the land. Then he returned to the stolen car and sat back, folded his arms across his chest, and waited. Into his mind swept the darkness of his grandfather’s fate: to be walking across the familiar pavement of home one instant, to be ripped asunder by assassins’ bullets the next. To die like a dog with his face in the pavement.

Oh, Christ!

Tears stood in the corners of Mick’s squeezed-shut eyes, and he felt a red rage filling him. He would not – could not – allow this to be his grandfather’s fate. He was a great man, not a dog. Vengeance would be his salvation. Mick was no longer living in the temperate zone of his youth. He had crossed over to the tropics, the primeval forest of the soul.

A cool, clear wind blew through Mick when he opened his eyes. A dark blue Cougar was heading down the street as if looking for a parking spot. He spotted the license plate in his rearview mirror and it matched up. He started his engine, pulled out so the Cougar could park. It was a joke. The driver actually waved at him in thanks as he took the spot.

Mick double-parked around the corner. He hurried back and was in time to see a tall, dark-haired individual with deep olive skin locking his car. He was in his early twenties and, on closer inspection, had a scar separating one eyebrow.

‘Hey, there!’ Mick called, putting a smile on his face as he jogged toward the man. ‘Vinnie Mezzatesta.’

He turned. ‘Fuck you want, kid?’

‘Not much,’ Mick said as he put all his weight into a solid punch to Vinnie’s solar plexus.

Vinnie doubled over and Mick hauled him into a dank and narrow alley he had discovered on his reconnaissance. He slammed Vinnie into the wall and slapped his face. ‘Hey, fuckface! Hey, Vinnie Halfahead, you with me? My name’s Michael Leonforte.’ He put his lips against Vinnie’s ear. ‘That’s
Leonforte,
asshole.’

‘Sofuckin’what?’ Vinnie said.

‘So fuckin’
this
,’ Mick said, kneeing him in the groin.

Vinnie groaned and slumped so that Mick had to pin him against the wall. He slapped the man until his bloodshot eyes opened and he could see the .45 in Mick’s left hand. ‘So you killed my grandfather.’

Vinnie stared, entranced, at the muzzle of the gun. ‘Kid, you’re fuckin’ outta your mind.’

‘You and someone else.’

‘You little fucknuthin’, you know who I work for? Gino Scalfa. Sure as I’m standin’ here, you’re a fuckin’ dead man.’

Mick pushed the gun against the side of Vinnie’s neck, and as he stared him in the eye, he reached into his waistband and in one fluid motion drew the paring knife and jammed the entire blade into the outside of Vinnie’s right knee.