The Family Hightower (16 page)

“Watch me,” Sylvie says.

Now Kosookyy laughs. “That's your father talking.”

“You better believe it.”

“Sylvie?”

“What.”

“I was wrong just now. Maybe he'd be proud of you.”

“I think you were right the first time,” Sylvie says. “He'd say I was being a dumb bitch. But I never liked him much anyway.”

“Good night, Sylvie.”

“Get out of here, now, okay? Lie low for a while?”

“Oh, honey,” Kosookyy says. “Those days are over. I got nowhere else to be than where I am. Just do it already, all right? I'll take care of me and mine.”

“All right. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Kosookyy hangs up. Sylvie doesn't put down the phone. She dials again. The voice on the other end is thick with a Russian accent.

“Feodor,” she says. “It's the White Lady.”

“Good evening. Are you calling about your investment?”

“Yes. I'm pulling it out. In cash.”

“I see.”

“Though not all of it. I want you to keep a sizeable amount.”

“For what?”

“To kill the Wolf.”

Feodor laughs.

“I'm serious,” Sylvie says.

“You invest with him, too, don't you?” Feodor says. “I've always admired that about you, the way you don't take sides. Why are you taking one now?”

“It's not in your interest to know, is it?”

“Well, we aren't interested in going after the Wolf, then,” Feodor says.

“How much would I have to pay you to become interested?”

“A much larger percentage of your investment than you would be comfortable with.”

“How much?”

He gives her the number.

“Done,” she says. “And I'll be able to make the job easier for you. Much easier.”

“How.”

“That's my business.”

There's a long breath on the other end of the phone. “You are serious.”

“I'm serious.”

“When do you want this done?”

“You'll know when. I'll give you everything you need. Also, I have a message—no, a series of messages—that I want you to help me deliver to his organization.”

“I will make the calls. But I have to warn you, whatever you may be planning, there is no way to make it clean. You will need plans. For you and your family.”

“I have plans,” Sylvie says.

“I hope so, for their sakes,” Feodor says.

“So we have an understanding?”

“Yes.”

“Good. We'll talk again soon. And Feodor, after this is done, we have no more ties between us, yes?”

“That's right.”

“I'll make no more trouble for you.”

“Nor I for you. Unless you give me a reason.”

“Understood.”

“It's been a pleasure doing business with you, White Lady.”

“And you, Feodor. It's morning there now, yes? Have a good day.”

“And you have a good night.”

She looks at the clock. It's late.
The day after tomorrow I'll talk to the FBI,
she thinks. She goes out on the patio. It's already dark, colder than she thought it would be. The lawn runs away, fast, down to the lake she can't see, though there are lights on it, boats moving across the water. Curly's down there somewhere. It doesn't matter whether they find him or not. She knows the police and the FBI have always had half the story, always knew they were looking at pieces of a scattered body. They'd found fingers in a field. A leg. A toe. All she has to do is show them where the rest of it is. Where to go, around this town, everywhere between here and Moldova.

She thinks, then, about the bonds of flesh and blood that lead back to her father, her father and the people who are still living with his ghost.
We're ready,
Sylvie thinks,
at last we can get out and be free of him, him and all he did.
But what will she do then? It's a trait Sylvie inherited from her father, to stay practical, to not think too hard about the bigger questions that lurk behind the choices she makes. From what Sylvie can remember, Peter Henry Hightower was a master at it; in all her years with him, she never saw him flinch, or take back a decision.
We all play the hand we're dealt,
he used to say.
We all do what we can with what we have, and we can't be blamed for it.
But Sylvie's fifty-seven now, only ten years younger than her father was when he died, and it's hard for her not to think about what his life was like then: his financial empire stagnating, his family in ruins.
You never said anything, Dad, but you must have started thinking about your legacy,
she thinks.
How things might have been different.
She's started to think that for Peter Henry Hightower, his ambitions, strategy, and practicality were the walls of a fortress. All the carnage, the people he hurt and killed—the things that would force him to come to terms with the things he did—lay on the field beyond, and if he ever looked outside, he never let on.

Sylvie has lived inside the walls her father built all her life. Now her hand is on the gate and she's about to open it. She doesn't know what she'll see, but she can picture it. The staggering multitudes, the poor, the destitute, the starving, the people who weren't given their share so that two generations of Hightowers could draw their profits. Among them, the bodies of the dead. Two of them are old and mummified: a man in a suit with his throat slit, a yellow handkerchief dangling from his pocket; a mobster's son. But there are piles of fresh corpses, all Sylvie's doing. Raped to death and shot in the face. Slit down the middle and emptied out. No livers, no kidneys, no hearts. No eyes. And there are predators out there, the animals of commerce and its consequences, feasting on the living and the dead. If they find Sylvie, she knows, they'll rip her to pieces. After that, the only difference between her and the rest of them will be that she'll have deserved it.

 

 

 

Part 2

1896–1966

 

 

 

Chapter 7

So
you're starting to see the blood, the pieces all around, of the body of the truth. There's no other way to tell you what happened without lying to you. But every body has a spine; every story has a line. The spine of the Hightowers curls back decades, from
1995
to the end of the last century, and you need to see it, too, to know how the pieces used to fit together.

Petro Garko is born in
1899
in a house in Tremont, the neighborhood on the west bank of the Cuyahoga River, with a midwife in attendance; Galina, his mother, cleans up after the birth herself the next day. It's June, just in time for the streetcar strike, the riots and smoking wreckage of machinery, the National Guard patrolling the city. That's Cleveland all over, what America looks like when it's angry. There's a small crowd of their friends and neighbors in the church when Petro's baptized, dressed in their best while Father Tarnawsky, of St. Peter and Paul's Catholic Church, traces the cross on the baby's forehead with oil. A larger crowd is waiting back at the house. Mykhaylo, Petro's father, gives each man a shot of whiskey and a cigar as a favor, and there's more where that came from. There's beer, too, that the guy on the corner made in his basement and rolled down the street in a dark barrel. Homemade root beer for the kids. The musicians tear through all the songs they know the people want to hear, and couples whirl in lines and circles, the music whips them faster and faster, and just when it can't get any more frantic, the musicians go on strike, won't play another note until someone stuffs a five-dollar bill into the bass's F-hole. Some of the guests complain, say it wasn't part of the deal, but they pay anyway, because nobody wants the party to stop. This happens a dozen times, and three days later, when the guests at last can't drink any more and are asleep on the steps outside, the band packs up and goes around the corner. Once they're out of sight, the bandleader puts his violin down, opens a trapdoor on the bass's back, and divides up the earnings in the middle of the dusty street. By then, two of the men Mykhaylo works with in the mill are lying in the grass in the backyard with bloody faces; they started a fight with each other for a reason neither of them can remember later.
It must have been the booze,
the godparents say.
It wasn't the best.
The godparents say they'll do everything they can to protect the boy, and they have the best intentions at the time. But they end up moving out of Tremont within the year, and Galina never hears from them again.

In
1912
, Mykhaylo, who loved to dance, who got a kiss from Galina the first night they met in a social hall, after he spun her across the floor, dies in an accident at the mill. You can see it in the insurance claims for the Ruthenian National Union of America, soon to be called the Ukrainian National Association. Mykhaylo was killed by a train—that word,
train,
spelled out in Cyrillic on the form, but in phonetic English, those small but important signs of how the Ukrainians in America are becoming something else—down in the Flats, in the Cuyahoga's floodplain, in the black soot of a dozen steel mills and crisscrossing rails. Nobody knows how it happened. Nobody ever seems to know how any of these things happen anywhere: the deaths in the mines in Pennsylvania, the lost eyes, a man crushed in an elevator shaft. But it happens. One minute Mykhaylo's heading home from his shift, out of the river valley. Maybe he doesn't realize quite where he is, or maybe he doesn't hear a signal he's supposed to. Maybe there isn't any signal. The next minute, he's under the wheels, and a union representative is helping the grieving Galina make funeral arrangements, cashing out the policy she has on her husband. Trying hard not to look too much at the two sons. Petro is thirteen then. His brother Stefan is nine.

Galina remarries fast, some say a little too fast, even for her. Her new husband is Polish, which makes a little stir, but Galina doesn't care.
The hell with them,
she thinks.
They don't have no husband and two boys to feed.
The new husband isn't bad. He likes the boys' mother well enough. He works in the mills like Mykhaylo did, provides for them, but isn't around very often, doesn't talk to them very much when he is. Even less when Petro lets the man know how much he hates him. Father Tarnawsky is the closest thing the boys have to a real father now, and for Petro, that means not very close at all; for Stefan, it's closer. But it's Tarnawsky who puts them on the paths they follow. He sees the kindness in Stefan and tells him so. Sees how sharp Petro's ambition is and tells him to be careful.
Oh, I will,
Petro says, and Tarnawsky, who has dedicated his life to helping children, assumes the best. He shouldn't.

On Easter
1917
all the bells in all the churches in Cleveland, a city of churches, churches and factories, are ringing everywhere, all the notes in the scale at once. They've been ringing since seven in the morning, and they'll still be ringing into the afternoon. The churches are packed, like they are every Sunday, but today's the big one: The three-hour mass has just let out at St. Peter and Paul, and you could say this story's born here, on this sacred ground, because everyone's there. There are the factory workers and their families, the mothers and children in smart outfits they bought just for today, the fathers in the same suits they've been wearing to Easter for years. They've got baskets of food they put in rows for the priest to bless, sausage and eggs, ham and bread and cheese, cloves of garlic, the makings of the giant meal that's coming. There are the factory managers in finer clothes, too, the guys who made it that far up and live along Lincoln Park now, but come out on the lawn to hear the bands in the gazebo in the evening, just like everyone else. The shopkeepers and the grocers, the local politicians, they're all there, too. In the middle of it all is Father Tarnawsky, spectacled and balding, but with so much life still in him. He's building schools, starting businesses. Doesn't worry much about the conflicts of interest among business and church and politics; he just wants to get things done. He'll meet with the president in a few years, still speak his native tongue as well as ever. Next to him are two of his altar boys, the Garko brothers, Petro and Stefan. Stefan's fourteen and small, a little fidgety, hiding in the robes. The look on his face is too open, too earnest, for this place.
What a good boy,
his teachers in school say.
What a good mark,
say the kids in the gangs who intercept him on the way home. Petro's almost his opposite, just this side of eighteen, and if you look at him the right way, you can see how he doesn't belong in those altar boy clothes anymore, because the beyond he's contemplating doesn't have much to do with heaven.
Watch out for that kid,
the teachers say. The kids in the gangs say the same thing. Both with admiration and fear, because the thing that makes him so strong—untouchable, some people say—makes him dangerous, too. One of these days, Petro's going off like a firework. And everyone who wants to be near him is trying to figure out if they can go for the ride without getting scorched, or losing their fingers, or worse.

But the trouble takes some time to start, because for a while, Petro can't see any way out of the South Side, out of Tremont. The streets are a labyrinth, tangling into alleys too narrow for two carts to pass each other. For the people who don't think of leaving, it can seem as though all the world is on Professor Avenue, with its bakeries and candy stores, used furniture and appliance places. A photo studio. A bowling alley. A bank building like a tiny temple. Two funeral parlors. Kids following the pie man down the street; when he opens the back door to make a delivery, they all get in close just to smell it. The streetcar, the dinky, running down the middle to Starkweather Avenue, the women going to the West Side Market in Ohio City asking for a free transfer. The street peddlers shouting out their wares. Boys making small change any way they can. They pick up cigarette butts that still have some tobacco left, fill a cigar box with them, and sell them to some addict for a penny. They sell empty booze cans, shell peas at the market stalls if they can get over there, beg for chicken feet from the poultry house, fill a sack with them, and run them home so their mothers can make soup. They collect scrap metal, iron and steel, copper and aluminum if they get lucky. They wander around on the tracks of the Erie Railroad with burlap sacks, looking for any coal that might have fallen off, because the house doesn't stay warm by itself. When the railroad cops aren't looking, a couple of them climb into the cars and throw the coal down, and for the children on the ground, it's like black hail, until they get chased away. They gather rags to sell to the paper and rag man who comes through the neighborhood on a horse and wagon, shouting
paprex, paprex.
A band of little criminals tails the man down the tiny streets; the kids raid his cart when someone lures him into a house with the promise of a big stash. Or they ambush him on the Central Viaduct Bridge when he's going back to the East Side, beat him down and sell what he's got at the junkyard before he wakes up again. At home, Galina makes curtains out of wallpaper and beads, hangs a cardboard triangle in the window when they need more ice from the iceman, who carries a fifty-pound block on a leather pad draped on his shoulder while the kids in the street suck on the shards that drop off the back of the truck. The stepfather takes a shot of booze before work, a shot of booze when he gets home. Galina doesn't say anything; Mykhaylo did the same thing. On Sunday evenings there's a party, and they bring out the good stuff, have a shot of it chased with a mouthful of black pumpernickel bread they tear off the loaf with their hands. They're there long after dark, the boys slaughtering songs new and old on ocarina and ukelele, beating on the bottom of a booze can for a drum. There are fights between people who want to hear obereks, the Polish dances, and people who want to hear the Ukrainian songs. The boys can't play either very well. Then all the guests stagger home, or almost home. The stepfather doesn't always make it to the bed. They go to a wake of a friend's cousin, see the wreath on the front door of the house of the deceased, the open coffin in the living room. Men sitting around playing cards and drinking, again, telling each other all the good things the dead man did. Everyone looks at the coffin, at each other.
None of us is ever getting out of the South Side alive,
they think. It's an island in the middle of Cleveland, surrounded by fire. The trains howl in and out along the tracks, day and night. When the wind blows in from the north or the east, the smoke from the mills and the freight yard, the tar and asphalt plants, the stink from the slaughterhouse, covers everything in the neighborhood. The church steeples are black with it, and the South Siders who go downtown that day can't get the smell off their clothes. No one will ever swim in the river again. But so many people who lived there will be proud they did, until the day they die.

When Petro and Stefan are older boys, Galina takes them to the edge of the neighborhood with her and tells them a thing or two.
Look behind us,
she says. Takes all of the South Side, everything they've ever known, in one gesture, with one hand.
Now look ahead. Look how big this city is,
she says. Opens her arms wide.
Now think about the world.
And Petro starts sitting on the edge of the ravine to the Flats, too, trying to take it all in. Below him, the slope is tangled with weeds. He can see the bobbing heads of a few boys harvesting the marijuana; in a few months, the police will come and burn it all, but it'll just grow back again. In the valley, a freight train heads out of town with a hobo on the roof. He's tying himself down so he can sleep. Across the river, Petro can see the great lit arc of the city, from the opposite bank of the Cuyahoga to the shore of the lake. He's going to get out of Tremont; he can feel it. He's going to rise above it, so far that they won't be able to see him. Just the trail he left in the air.

It's when Prohibition starts that Petro gets his shot. It's
1919
. They read in the paper that alcohol's illegal, hear about it on the street. At first, it doesn't seem like that big a deal. It's just another rule that people in the South Side can ignore, and they're almost cheerful about it. They're ahead of the rest of the city; they start making booze themselves about as soon as they can't buy it from the store. Soon every fourth house is making beer or liquor and selling it to the other three. On Saturday night, they go out to the dance halls, where the bands play loud and the singers use megaphones to be heard above the music. They can't drink there because the police make sure they don't, ruining a good time. But when everyone gets home, after the band sends them off and the dance halls close, everyone drinks as much as ever. It's just that the stuff they're drinking is a lot worse. Some of it's bad enough to cause seizures. Some of it'll put you away for good.

And everyone gets a little too used to seeing guns when the bootleggers come around, people from the East Side. They have good wine that the Italians are making—Dago Red, they're calling it. Whiskey from Canada, the real thing; they bring it right across Lake Erie into Cleveland at night. They fight with each other over who gets to control Tremont, and now and again that ends in gunfire. A couple people end up under the ground. But they're nice as anything to their potential customers. A gangster named Cesare, who can't be much older than Petro is, does a deal with a man who lives just down the street named Bogdan; Bogdan's daughter's getting married, and he wants to have something for his guests as a treat, to express his happiness and gratitude. The neighbors gather around when the transaction happens; they want to see how good the stuff is. Almost everyone's eyes are on the alcohol. Petro's are on the money. He sees just how much more Bogdan's willing to pay for the quality—a quarter a pint—than for the rotgut his neighbors are making, which doesn't taste like anything good. And Petro sees where the money's going. It starts with the clothes Cesare's got on, the tailored suit, the tilted hat. He saunters up the road in that, and all Petro's neighbors, all at once, look like they just got off the boat, like they can't speak a word of English. For some of them, that's the truth: they've been here for two decades and English is as far away from them as ever. Petro's own mother struggles with the language, has trouble getting her tongue around some of the phrases that have crept into American Ukrainian—
receipt, umbrella, strike breaker, smart man.
Stefan's not much better; his English is okay, but he speaks it with such a thick accent that people outside of the South Side have to use their imagination to comprehend him.