Authors: Thomas Perry
“The instant the first batch of checks hits the mailbox, the situation is going to get worse. In a matter of weeks, or even hours, the people who thought that money was theirs are going to start feeling wounded and frantic. They’re already looking hard for Rita. If they see Bernie’s face, it will take them a whole half-second to get over their shock that he’s alive, and another half-second to come after him. This means that Bernie and Rita are going to stay in this house, invisible, while Henry and I mail the letters. End of speech, end of discussion.” She walked out of the room.
Rita stared after her for a moment, her eyes unfocused and thoughtful. Ziegler looked uncomfortably at Rita, then went back to his computer.
Bernie patted her shoulder. “I guess she’s right,” he said softly. “We’ll just lay low. It’ll only be for a while.”
Rita said, “That’s not what you said when this started. You said they’d keep looking for forty years.”
Bernie chuckled. “If they do, so what? You’re a kid. You can do that kind of time standing on your head. I just finished doing fifty.” He waited for Rita to see the humor in it, but it seemed to be lost on her. He left her alone in the kitchen.
The next morning, the men helped Jane load her big suitcases into the car. Jane took Rita’s arm and pulled her aside for a moment. “If nothing goes wrong, I should be back in a week or so. You have everything you’ll need, so don’t show
your face if you don’t have to.” Something in Rita’s expression worried her. “Are you all right?”
Rita shrugged. “Bernie and I will take care of each other.”
Jane hugged her and then got into the car. Bernie and Ziegler came close to her window. “Keep her safe until I get back,” she said to Bernie. “And yourself, too.”
Bernie answered, “What can happen—sunburn?”
Jane looked at Ziegler. “Good luck, Henry.”
As Jane drove off, she glanced at the small pile of letters on the seat beside her. She took a deep breath and blew it out. As soon as she mailed those first letters in Albuquerque, it would begin.
P
aul Di Titulo walked out of the bank building into a dull glow of hazy sunlight. Immediately the humidity settled on his neck and shoulders like a weight. He walked ten steps on the sidewalk and began to feel sweat beading on his forehead. The expensive climate-control system in the fourth-floor conference room of the bank had made him more vulnerable to conditions in real-life Cleveland, where invisible bits of grit settled on the starched collar of a white shirt, and the perfumy smell of half-burned diesel fuel tickled his nasal passages and made him wait for a sneeze that never came.
As he walked down the street toward his car, he tried to think of ways to determine whether he was spending his time pondering nothing. He could call other charities to inquire whether unexpectedly large donations had arrived lately. He could try to find out something about this Ronald Wilmont
who had sent the check to the Five C’s. If Wilmont was a legitimate donor to the Cleveland Coalition of Caring Corporations and Citizens, then probably there would be someone in town who knew him, or at least knew what connection he had with Cleveland. If he had been born here, then there would be a birth certificate on file in the courthouse. If he’d once had a business here, then there would be a record of a business license. The archives of the
Plain Dealer
would almost certainly contain some reference to him. The property-tax rolls might have a deed with his name on it. There had to be some reason why a person would hand four million bucks to Cleveland.
He decided he would have a couple of secretaries at his office start working on Ronald Wilmont today. Di Titulo had to take every step he could to either prove his own suspicion was a daydream or prove it wasn’t before he started making noises.
Di Titulo knew he was one of many people who had been watching whatever parts of the financial landscape were visible to them for the last month. Everybody in the country had been waiting, and by now there had probably been a few false alarms. He was sure that a man who blew the whistle without sufficient evidence would suffer later in prestige. For years, whatever he said or did would be denigrated and discounted. Just because men like him used computers and gold-nibbed fountain pens instead of cracking skulls with baseball bats didn’t mean that they were exempt from the standards of behavior that being part of La Cosa Nostra implied.
As Di Titulo thought about it, he wasn’t even positive that if he blew the whistle now, he wouldn’t be the first. Being first was dangerous, but it had all the rewards. His job in the Castananza family had been to build himself into a pillar of the community, insinuate himself into the local establishment as a prosperous, astute businessman and public-spirited citizen. Getting himself invited to join the board of directors of the Five C’s had been a verification of how well he had accomplished it. He had no idea how well face men in other families
in other cities had done. He decided he was not being arrogant to suspect that few had done as well as he had. And now, because of that success, he had received an odd bit of inside information that might mean something.
Everybody in the country had been waiting for signs of unusual financial activity. If somebody had popped old Bernie Lupus for personal reasons, so be it. But the world seldom turned on things done for personal reasons. So the whole LCN had been waiting quietly to see if money in accounts all over the country was going to start sprouting wings and heading to roost in one place.
The whole story of Bernie the Elephant, the version Di Titulo had heard since he was a kid, had been that he never wrote anything down. But not all stories were true, and almost none of them stayed true forever. It was just possible that, as he got old and weak, Bernie the Elephant had begun to make a ledger. The series of coincidences surrounding Bernie’s death had been mostly shrugged off by the old dons who had known him. People died at stupid times for stupid reasons, they said. But if what Di Titulo had heard was true, then it was not so easy to dismiss. He had heard that after Bernie died, his house in Florida had been searched. Nobody had found any papers, but they had also not found Danny Spoleto, one of his bodyguards. And when one of the families—he heard it was the Langustos, from New York—sent people to Detroit to see what the Ogliaro family there had to say, they had found that the mother of the head of the family had died the same day. Maybe she had been killed because she knew something.
The older generation had gotten very attached to Bernie Lupus, before anyone had known any better. He had kept some of their money safe from the government, and from one another, for a long time. When one of them wanted a million bucks for some emergency, Bernie would have it delivered. They weren’t considering all of the implications; they were just glad they didn’t have to hide their money under their beds anymore. But some younger minds had been dwelling on Bernie Lupus for the past few years. They were better at arithmetic than their parents had been, and, to the extent that LCN
had not wasted its money educating them and staking them in businesses, they were more sophisticated about money. A few of them had begun to consider the potential of Bernie the Elephant. He had been taking in money for about fifty years and, the story went, investing it.
If he had put just a million dollars in a bank account that first year at five percent, then it would have doubled every fourteen years. That would be twelve point seven million by now. And the old guys didn’t seem to know that he almost certainly had not done that. The IRS would have taken its cut. More likely, he had spread it around in places where the tax bite had not been big and instantaneous. He had probably put a lot of it in home-state municipal bonds, where there were no taxes, gold, offshore banks, real estate, and stocks. That was the one that made Di Titulo’s mouth water. Since 1929, long before Bernie had begun remembering things, the stock market had averaged ten percent a year. That one million would be a hundred and thirty million by now.
But the real attraction was a possibility that had been floating around since Bernie was young. What LCN really needed to do was move the money that came in from labor-intensive activities like gambling, prostitution, extortion, drugs, and so on into safe, reliable businesses. Everybody knew that. In fact, that was the goal to which Di Titulo owed his existence. But there was a bigger, more tantalizing possibility that had never come to pass. If the LCN families saved their profits, pooled their resources, and used the face men wisely, they could start owning major corporations. The story was that they had never been disciplined enough to save, were never trusting or trustworthy enough to pool anything. But what Di Titulo and a few others thought when they heard the stories of Bernie the Elephant was that maybe they had.
If he had bought in early enough and acquired enough shares at the beginning, then automatic reinvestment, stock splits, and stock in small companies that got taken over by big companies for more stock would have multiplied the money incredibly over fifty years. LCN might already be majority owners of General Motors, IBM, AT&T, General Electric,
and Coca-Cola, and not ever suspect it. The stock could be in five hundred different names known only to Bernie Lupus.
It might all be wrong: Di Titulo had no way of knowing what Bernie Lupus had done with all that money. But if any of Di Titulo’s assumptions were correct, then the whole half-century Bernie Lupus episode was one of those wacky ideas that could have worked. It was Hannibal pulling his end run across the Alps on elephants to take over Rome for Carthage. A couple thousand years later, Rome was like an enormous palace full of shiny cars and women wearing designer dresses, and it took an archaeologist to tell you where the hell Carthage used to be. People forgot that it could have been the other way around.
But maybe Paul Di Titulo had just happened to be looking in the window on the day they forgot to pull the shade down. He had studied the finances of the Five C’s for years, in the hope that someday he might find a safe way to divert a portion of the money that came in. It was only a coincidence that he had been there to hear about the Wilmont donation. And it took astuteness and imagination to understand that money moving into a charity in Cleveland just might have something to do with the death of Bernie Lupus. Everybody had assumed that what would happen was a steady stream of money flowing into some guy’s bank account. But Di Titulo knew that the sign might not be anything that obvious. It might be any unusual money moving anywhere. If somebody was liquidating big investments, he might very well need to dump a bit of it in charities. He might even do it to test a route for moving bigger money later—get a brokerage and a bank used to the idea that Ronald Wilmont was a zillionaire who wrote big checks.
Di Titulo could see his car parked another hundred feet away, and it made him feel pleased with himself. He loved the look of his brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. He had gotten an insane discount on it, because he had bought three GMC tractor-trailer rigs this month for his company. While he was at the lot, he had made a show of wishing he could afford a car
too. That was what worming your way into the little brotherhood of above-the-surface business did for you.
He reached into his pocket for his keys and fingered the remote-control unit on his key chain. It was one designed for women who left their cars in dark parking garages. They could pop the door locks and turn on the lights before they got there. It was silly at noon on a respectable street in Cleveland on a hot summer day, but the sooner he was in the car and the engine was running, the sooner the air-conditioning would kick in.
Di Titulo gave a squeeze, and he felt as though someone had thrown a bag of rocks against his chest. A puff of hot wind seared his face and hands, tugged his coattails, and threw his silk necktie over his shoulder. He found himself lying down. His ears were ringing before he was aware that there had been a sound, and in his vision a patch of green floated in jerky puppet-jumps before the flash of the explosion emerged from his addled memory.
After a time Paul Di Titulo recovered enough to roll onto his side and look down. His clothes weren’t ripped or burned, and he seemed to have feeling in his arms and legs. He didn’t entirely trust that sensation, though. There might be some horrible pain that movement would trigger, so he moved his arms carefully and pushed himself to a sitting position. He watched the bright orange flames flickering up and down the length of his new Eldorado.
Di Titulo watched the waves of heat rising to make the tall buildings beyond them bend and wiggle, and understanding came to him. He had picked a rotten time to spend six hundred thousand on new trucks, and a worse time to be seen driving a Cadillac with the dealer’s stickers still on it.
As he got to his feet, he felt a wetness on his chest, and he looked down with alarm at the spots of blood that were appearing on his white shirt. In a second he realized that the blood was coming from above. His nose was bleeding. He touched it. It didn’t seem to be broken. The moving air had just slapped him in the face. But he gave himself over to a moment of despair. Some family had decided that Paul Di
Titulo was involved in Bernie Lupus’s death. It was a sign of what mouth breathers some of these guys were, how impoverished their imaginations, how stunted their brains. Whoever had managed to get control of Bernie Lupus’s money wouldn’t reveal his crime in the form of three new trucks and a Cadillac. He would walk away from anything as paltry as Di Titulo Trucking and not bother to lock the front door. He would have more money than a small country, all nicely laundered and salted away a generation ago.
Di Titulo turned and walked unsteadily away from the fiery, blackening wreckage of his beautiful new car. He would find a pay phone and call Al Castananza himself. This was what bosses were for—to get the other bosses off your back. As he walked, he decided to tell him the rest of it too. Let the Castananzas use their time and money to look into the donation. This had already gotten too big and ugly.