Sons and Princes (20 page)

7.

The next morning, Chris was up early and had finished his coffee and was ready to leave by seven-thirty. On Sunday, after his meeting with the DiGiglio brothers, he had stopped by LaSalle Academy to ask John Farrell if he would be willing to lure Ed Dolan to a meeting at which Chris would kill him. As plainly as he could, he told Farrell that killing Dolan was not just a matter of avenging Joseph, but of stopping the prosecutor before he either killed Chris or brought him to his knees via a phony murder charge. Twenty-five years of bad blood and hate had to end here and now, and only by using a trusted intermediary would Chris have any reasonable chance of success.

Sitting in a pew at the back of the school’s simple, boy-proof chapel, his hands folded in his lap, occasionally glancing up at the altar, the old man nodded when Chris finished, and said,
Do you know The Maze? It’s the fortress prison in Long Kesh, outside Belfast, where the English lock away convicted IRA members. My brother Frank died there last year. He helped blow up a convoy of English soldiers in 1971. Combatants are fair game, Chris. I doubt I’ll burn in hell for helping you kill this madman. If I do, I’ll meet Frank and we can have a laugh. The hatred and bad blood between the Irish and the English, by the way, go back six hundred years.

They planned to meet at eight this morning, in the chapel again, to discuss the details. As Chris was washing and putting away his coffee cup and spoon – an old habit – Michele appeared in the kitchen rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

“I slept,” she said. “The sleeping pill must have knocked me out.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s just another drug.”

“Don’t beat yourself up. You need to sleep.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see John Farrell.”

“Are you coming back?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I never asked you about your brother.”

“We’ll talk about it tonight.”

“You have beautiful eyes.”

“You do too.”

Michele, barefoot, wearing a short tee shirt and yellow bikini panties, with her arms folded across her chest, smiled on hearing this, at first tentatively, as if she had forgotten how, and then fully, revealing even white teeth and a light in her eyes that Chris guessed had not shined for a long time.

“How tall are you?” he asked, assessing her from her feet to the vee of her crotch to the planed surface of her too-thin but lovely stomach to the top of her nearly bald head.

“Five-seven, taller in heels.”

“Are you going out today?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have money?”

“I still have all those twenties you threw at me.”

“Why don’t you pick up something for dinner?”

“I will.”

Chris turned to leave, but before he reached the door, Michele called his name, and he turned around.

“Yes?” he said.

“Nothing. Be careful.”

“I will.”

When Chris left, Michele stood staring at the door.
What if I get addicted to you, Chris, instead of heroin? What if I fall in love with you – a man from a world as different from mine as the Earth is from the moon – and you break my heart, you laugh at me, or reject me because I sold my body, or fuck me and leave me, then what do I do?
These thoughts propelled her to the front window, where, looking down she saw Chris a moment later emerge from the building and stop for a second at the bottom of the front steps to look at his watch. When he looked up, a blond man, his eyes blazing like a martyred saint’s, was approaching him rapidly from the opposite side of the street. Chris took a step back, but the crazy blond man, pointing a gun, was on him in a heartbeat, and sticking the gun hard into Chris’ side. Then, stabbing at Chris with the gun, he was leading him by the arm back across the street to the passenger side of a black car covered in dust and grime. First Chris and then the blond man entered the car through the passenger door, and Michele could clearly see Chris’ face in profile as he situated himself in the driver’s seat, and, after an exchange of words, buckle his seat belt, then slowly edge out of the tight parking space and drive away.

Michele, standing rigid at the window, was so stunned by what she saw, it took her brain a few seconds to register that it was real. When this happened, she pulled on her jeans, raced down the five flights of stairs to the street and ran at full speed on the sidewalk toward East Broadway, the direction Chris and the blond man had taken. But the black car, when she got to the corner and looked frantically north and south, was nowhere to be seen amid the river of traffic that courses all day long on the city’s main avenues.

Standing in the morning sun, oblivious to the pedestrians flowing by, she was seized by the same feeling of helplessness and despair that a year ago had gripped her outside her apartment on Henry Street as she watched firefighters smash windows and spray tons of water on the burning cauldron that was consuming her son. Turning back, she wished, as she had on that night, that she were dead, and decided that as soon as she got back to the apartment she would find a way to kill herself. About halfway back, near Grand Street, she was stopped and surrounded by four Asian teenagers, one of whom, a girl with orange spiked hair and several face rings, Michele had apparently knocked to the ground on her fruitless chase after the black car.

“You crazy fucking bitch,” this girl said. “Are you crazy? Are you fucking crazy? We should cut you, bitch. Where’s your money? Where’s your stash?”

“Where’s your money, bitch?” said another, a boy no more than sixteen, with tattoos up and down both arms. “You owe us.”

Michele, breathing heavily, adrenalin racing through her veins where once there was blood, leaped on the orange-haired girl, grabbed her by the throat and ran her against a nearby brick wall. The girl, the back of her head opened up and bleeding, slumped to the sidewalk. The others, stunned, took a tentative step or two toward Michele, but without stopping to catch her breath, she ran at the boy with the tattoos and, closing with him, began clawing his face with her nails, digging in hard and with a fierceness and a feeling of satisfaction she had not before this confrontation known existed. The boy broke free, and he and the other two bolted, leaving the orange-haired girl moaning on the ground and Michele standing there in her bare feet ready to kill anyone who came near her. No one did. Indeed, if any of the dozen or so people walking along Suffolk Street had seen anything like a fight they were not acting like it, and so Michele, collecting herself, hurried back to the apartment.

When she got there, she was no longer interested in killing herself. She had found and charged her cell phone the day before, and now she turned it on and put it on the kitchen table. Then she washed her hands, face and feet, put on an old pair of running shoes she found in Allison’s closet and sat facing the phone. She did not know Vinnie Rosamelia’s last name or how to get in touch with him, or John Farrell. Her parents lived in Queens, and would refuse to talk to her, thinking she wanted money. Her only friend in the neighborhood had been Allison McRae. The police were out of the question. She knew instinctively that Chris was in trouble beyond their reach, and besides, why would they believe an emaciated whore with tracks up and down both arms?

She had come to Suffolk Street to die, believing that the God she knew as a child had long ago forsaken her. Clean of heroin only four days, absurdly in love with a man she barely knew and well beyond her station in life, her will to live returned with the force of a river breaking through a dam. With it came the ancient language of prayer, forgotten words that appear without effort in our hearts in times of crisis. She prayed that someone would call or stop by, and that Chris would somehow endure whatever it was the man with the blazing eyes had in store for him.

8.

As Michele began praying, Chris was driving the black sedan through the Holland Tunnel. Ed Dolan, turned in his seat, was aiming his .38 revolver at Chris’ rib cage.

“How did you find me?” Chris asked.

“Your friend Vincent went once too often to Suffolk Street.”

“Where are we going?”

“When you get out of the tunnel, get on the Turnpike going north.”

“And then where?”

“A nice place where we can talk.”

“Let’s talk now.”

“You want to try to talk yourself out of this predicament, is that it, Chris?”

“Why not? What do you want from me?”

“I want the tape you’ve been playing for me all week long.”

“Let’s turn around, then. It’s at the apartment. I’ll get it for you.”

“No, Chris, there’s more to it than that.”

“If you kill me, there’s a copy in a safe place. It’ll come out.”

Chris was bluffing, looking for leverage, but he could see from the deranged look in Dolan’s eyes, and the dried spittle around his mouth, that his one-time friend was very close to becoming untethered from the world of reason.

“That’s one of the things we’ll talk about. There’s a service area up ahead.
Vince Lombardi
. See it?”

“Yes.”

They had just entered the New Jersey Turnpike, which was swollen with rush hour traffic. On either side of the eight-lane, mega-highway, stood reed-filled marshland – the New Jersey Meadowlands – a small brown and yellow ocean, stagnant under the sun’s hot eye, rimmed by the Manhattan skyline to the east and the fringes of North Jersey’s flinty old factory towns to the west.

“Pull in and go all the way to the back, past where the trucks park. There’s a dirt road back there.”

Chris made his way through the service area, past the busy car parking lot, past a herd of behemoth tractor trailers, past the Dempsey dumpsters, to a desolate area where the blacktop was crumbling and the marshland confronted him like a wall. Directed to the left by Dolan, who intermittently jabbed him with the barrel of his gun, Chris edged along this wall of reeds until he found and entered the narrow dirt road, and followed it into the marshes. Someone, probably a hundred years before, had found the hard ground and beaten a snaking, now long forgotten path through the wetlands. The feathery tops of the reeds and bulrushes on either side reached delicately toward a very pretty blue sky, but they were so thick and high and still that, driving carefully through them, Chris realized that civilization was behind them, and that dead bodies, left here to mingle with the garbage, whether fifty feet or a mile from a road or a parking lot, could go undetected for eternity.

The road ended at a cul-de-sac on which sat a weathered plank shack, no more than fifteen-by-fifteen feet square, with a sagging pitched roof and sunlight gleaming through chinks on all sides. Behind it was a pond formed by the elbow of a stream that had been dammed up by garbage at both ends. Rusted metal drums and a dozen charred tires were strewn along the far bank. The rotting carcass of a once white heron was floating on the viscous petroleum-like scum that covered the pond’s surface. The sun, rising to the east over Manhattan, beat down on this scene of desolation without mercy.

“Park there,” Dolan said, nodding toward a bare patch of ground to the right of the shack.

Chris did as he was told. As he was turning the car off, he watched out of the corner of his eye as his boyhood friend took what looked like a camera in a leather case out of his jacket pocket. Using his left hand – the gun was still in his right hand pointing at Chris’ stomach – the prosecutor unsnapped the leather case and drew the cattle prod out. In an instant, Dolan was jabbing the prod’s metal ends into Chris’ right arm, up near the shoulder. Reflexively, Chris struck out at the prosecutor, shoving him in the chest, but the prod had done its work, burning two holes through the sleeve of his navy blue polo shirt, and hissing though his skin and muscle before the force of his shove forced Dolan to pull it away. The smell of his burning flesh reached his nostrils at the same time as the pain reached his brain. Although he was in shock, he managed to take another backhanded swing at Dolan with his burnt arm, but the prosecutor easily warded it off with his gun hand, and then quickly opened the car door and got out, dragging Chris with him by the front of his shirt.

Outside, he pushed Chris through the stifling heat into the cabin, where he forced him into a battered chrome chair next to a table made of two saw horses and three planks. Chris, nauseous, about to pass out, slumped forward, hoping to get some blood back into his brain. Dolan let him stay that way for a second, then pulled him up by his collar and gazed with demented pleasure at Chris, who stared back through eyes cloudy with pain.

“That was in case you were thinking of trying something,” Dolan said, placing the prod on the table and taking the handcuffs out his pocket. “Put your hands behind your back.”

Chris complied, and Dolan snapped the cuffs onto Chris’ wrists. He threw the key onto the table, then resumed his one-sided conversation. “If I poke that thing in your heart, you’re dead, massive heart attack; in your balls, instant sterilization, not to mention the pain. Are you following me? I want the original tape and any copies you have. If you hold one back and try to hurt me with it, then this is what I’ll do: I’ll hunt down your children and I’ll torture and kill them. I won’t go to jail behind the tape, Chris. It’s too ambiguous. And if I do, it won’t be forever. When I get out, your kids are dead. Then they can put me away again, or maybe I’ll kill myself, or maybe I won’t get caught. I’m free as a bird right now, and I’ve been a bad boy.”

“The tape’s at the apartment,” Chris said. “Let’s go get it.”

“No. It’s too dangerous. Your friend Vinnie might be there. Anything can happen. Whose apartment is it? Your junkie girlfriend’s? Michele Mathias? Is that her name?”

“Yes.”

“Is she home?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

“Does she have a car?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a phone?”

“In my front pocket.”

Dolan fished the phone out of Chris’ jeans and flipped it open, keeping the .38 pointed at his chest with his other hand.

“What’s the number?”

“It’s programmed. Push Speed Dial, then one.”

Dolan pushed the two buttons on the phone, then placed it against the side of Chris’ face.

“Tell her to bring the tape here. Something came up. You need it right away. She’ll be happy to do you the favor. She’ll give you great sex tonight, her hero.”

After half of a ring, Michele picked up.

“Michele,” Chris said into the phone, “it’s me, Chris. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Where are you?”

“In Jersey.”

“I saw that guy take you away.”

“Okay. Fine.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“There’s a plastic bag under the sink. The car keys are in it, and the garage ticket, and some other stuff, some tapes. I need you to bring everything to me.”

“Where?”

“Write this down.”

He gave her the directions, which were pretty simple, and as soon as he was finished, Dolan yanked the phone away and threw it on the table. Picking up the cattle prod, he stood behind Chris and brushed the prongs lightly over the top of his head.

“When she pulls up,” he said, “I’ll be standing behind you with the gun to your head. That should disabuse her of any funny ideas.”

The shack’s front door had long since been removed, and the two of them were facing the rectangular open space where it once stood. Outside, they could see the marshes sitting stonily still in the day’s yellow heat, and, in the silence around them, they could hear the rumbling and whooshing of traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike. In twenty minutes or so, they would hear Michele’s car as it came down the dirt road and then see it as it rounded the last bend on its approach to the shack.

“There’s a copy of the tape in a safe deposit box.” Chris said. “If I die, my executor will give it to the police.”

“Then I’ll go after your kids, like I said. But this isn’t really about the tape, Chris. It’s about us, you and me.”

“All these years of hate, and for what? I didn’t kill your father. I couldn’t control what Joe Black did. I was fifteen years old.”

“A cocky fifteen.”

“You must have hated me before the killing.”

“A little.”

Chris’ arm was starting to get red and swollen, and to ooze something like pus, and the pain where the prongs of the cattle prod had come close to bone was coming in stronger and stronger waves. He was talking only to avoid thinking about it.

“Don’t hurt the girl, Ed. She hasn’t done anything to you.”

“So solicitous. Maybe I’ll poke her in the pussy with my cattle prod. No more orgasms for Michele.”

“Christ.”

“How are your legs, by the way? What a career you could have had. The third fastest high school miler ever.”

“They’re fine.”

“I think now’s a good time to tell you: I broke those legs.”

“What?”

“Sure. Your accident. I cut the brake lines on Brother Farrell’s car. The poor fuck helped me out by having his usual few beers.”

Chris’ head slumped to his chest, the pain getting the better of him. Dolan stepped around to face him, and, lifting his face up by the chin, said, “Did you hear me? I broke your legs, and now your arm is a mess, and before I’m done, I’ll maim you some more.”

Although the pain in Chris’ arm had if anything gotten worse since the initial burning, he was coming out of shock and finding that some of his natural reserve of strength was returning. He would have spit in Dolan’s face, but his mouth was too dry to generate any saliva, which was just as well, because it was obvious that Dolan needed little or no excuse to use the cattle prod again. The look in the prosecutor’s eyes was the look of a fanatic consumed by his cause. He was enraptured by his hate, and the only way Chris could think of to survive minute by minute was to continue talking, his words like lashes that Dolan hated and loved and somehow desperately needed.

Michele, driving the Jeep Cherokee that Vinnie had bought for Chris just two days before, found the dirt road easily enough, but after traveling only fifty feet or so on it, she drove down a gully to her right directly into the high reeds and stopped after about twenty feet. Getting out and looking around, she saw that the car was completely concealed from the road, as she had hoped it would be. In her hand was a plastic bag containing two mini-cassettes and Joe Black Massi’s .44 Ruger with a clip inserted and the safety off. Sticking to the marshes, she followed the contour of the dirt road until she was at the right side of the shack, which she could clearly see through the reeds only twenty feet away. In front was the black car driven by the blond madman.

Taking the gun, a compact canon, from the bag, and holding it in front of her with both hands, Michele made her way silently to the shack. Once there, trying to breathe without sound, she squatted and looked through a chink to where the blond fanatic was standing in front of a slumping and very pale Chris, pointing a gun at his head. Kneeling on all fours, she crept to the front, peeked her head in the opening and found them in the same position. Without thinking, she brought herself to one knee in the doorway, aimed the Ruger at the blond man’s back and pulled the trigger. The gun’s powerful kick flung her hand upward as she fired, causing her to miss high, knocking her onto her back at the same time. Dolan, his eyes bulging, whirled when he heard the blast of the .44 and fired point blank at the doorway, missing Michele, who was lying prone on the ground.

Dolan, seeing Michele scrambling to get to her feet, was taking careful aim at her when Chris leaped at him, dragging the chair with him, head-butting the prosecutor into the door post, the chair slipping away from him from behind on impact. Keeping his balance, Chris then lunged again, aiming his head at the slumping Dolan’s face, catching him on the bridge of his nose. Dolan crumpled to the floor, moaning, blood pouring down the sides of his nose and into his mouth. In an instant, Michele was over him pointing the Ruger at his head.

“Don’t kill him,” Chris shouted. “Pick up his gun. It’s right there. Keep your gun on him.”

Doing as she was told, Michele backed up slowly and retrieved Dolan’s .38 from the floor.

“Unlock these handcuffs,” Chris said. “The key’s on the table.”

Chris was facing Dolan, who had managed to get himself to a sitting position against the wall next to the doorway. Michele put the .38 in the belt of her jeans, then, keeping the Ruger on the prosecutor, found the key and unlocked the cuffs.

“Give me the Ruger,” Chris said, and Michele handed it to him.

Dolan was still dazed, but his eyes, rimmed with blood, were open and focusing on Chris, and his hands were braced on the floor on either side of him, as if he was preparing to pounce. Without hesitation, Chris covered the few feet between him and Dolan and swung the barrel of the .44 into the side of the prosecutor’s face, absorbing with great satisfaction the unmistakable sound and feel of the crunch of bone breaking on impact.