The Ninth Step (22 page)

The old man gave him a look over his shoulder. “You know
nothin’
.”

Jack made a face. “What the hell are we doing here? You’re just wasting—”

Raucci held up a hand. “Here’s an idea, cop: How about you just shut up for a minute? You’ve got everything ass-back wards.”

Jack was about to argue but held his tongue. He wouldn’t have gotten far as a detective if he didn’t know that you learned more from listening than from talking.

Raucci turned back to the harbor and pointed just to the left of the Statue of Liberty, toward the distant Jersey docks bristling with loading cranes. “Lemme tell ya about me and your old man.”

“THE DAY WAS APRIL
twenty-four, Nineteen forty-three. We were workin’ the docks over there in Jersey City, loadin’ a ship called the
El Estero
, a freighter out of Panama.”

“You and my father?” Jack asked.

The old man frowned. “Don’t innerupt. Yeah, me and your pop. We were filling the holds with bombs.”

That, of course, reminded Jack of the purpose of his visit, but he decided to wait and see where the story was going.

“The ship was bound for what they called the European theater.” Raucci shook his head in wonder. “God, you should’a seen it! We’d come up on deck for a break, and this whole goddamn harbor was crammed with warships, ready to go give them Nazis a serious ass-kickin’—if the U-boats didn’t get ’em first.”

He patted his shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered them to Jack, then lit one up. “See what I’m doin’ right now? I would’a had my tail thrown right off the job for this. We were bein’ watched over by these pimple-faced Coast Guard knuckleheads in what they called the Explosives Loading Detail. We couldn’t smoke, couldn’t wear boots with nails in ’em, got a lot of guff if we overloaded a cargo sling. Nobody griped, though: we had more than two and a half million pounds a’ munitions sittin’ under us, from small arms ammo to half-ton blockbusters. And the three ships next to us were filled up too, not to mention all the railroad cars next to the docks.

“In case the point was lost on any clown who still wanted to sneak a smoke, the Coasties made sure to tell us about what happened in Halifax back durin’ W.W. One. You know about that? No? I’ll tell ya: a munitions ship smacked into another ship in the harbor. That explosion killed more than fifteen hunnert people. It sent goddamned
railroad cars
flyin’ in the air. And that was just Nova Scotia; it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see how much worse things would’a got if somethin’ like that happened here. If a nail in somebody’s boot sparked some gasoline fumes, say, and one ship went up, and then the other ships went
kablooey …
Did I mention that one’a the biggest oil refineries in the U.S. was right next door? The shock wave would’a taken out Jersey City, and Bayonne and Hoboken, and it would’a smashed out across the harbor, rippin’ through the convoy like the worst hurricane ever, and flattened the north end of Staten Island over there, and knocked down half’a downtown Manhattan. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all’a them bombs would never have made it over to our boys in Europe, and then who knows what would’a happened with the whole goddamned war …”

Raucci paused to take a drag off his cigarette, then heaved up a rattly cough. “So anyhow … The convoy was leavin’ the next morning, and ours was the last ship to be loaded, and we were fillin’ up the last hold. The next day was Easter, and I’ll tell you this: we were ready for a coupl’a days of rest. We went up on deck for an afternoon break, and I was lookin’ across the harbor at Red Hook over there, and I could practically smell my mother’s basil lamb roast.

“Our foreman called out, ‘We’re in the homestretch, fellas,’ and down we went, back into the number two hold. That was a weird, grim scene down there, I’ll tell ya. On a normal job you would’a had guys goofin’ around, but a munitions ship is the most dangerous thing in the world; it doesn’t make ya feel much like jokin’. The cargo was almost up to the ceilin’. See, first the carpenters lay down some wooden flooring, and then we’d load in the bombs, real careful, with chocks between ’em to keep ’em from rollin’ around once they hit the high seas. Then another layer a’ wood, another layer a’ bombs … That was some hard goddamn work.

“What? Yer givin’ me the fish eye here. You don’t think I pulled my weight? Okay, so I admit I wouldn’t’a been doin’ any heavy liftin’ if this was Red Hook and a normal ship. I would’a been takin’ care’a business for the old guys. But ever since that goddamn Mussolini brought It’ly into the war on the Axis side, we Italians over here had to work double hard to prove we weren’t collaborators or spies. So yeah, Frankie Raucci got his hands dirty, loadin’ bombs that might be used against Milan or Rome. And I was glad to do it, ’cause the Nazis sure as hell didn’t care where we Allies originally came from. Every month, another shipment of Red Hook boys came home in pine boxes.”

Jack squinted. “Is, uh … is my father in this story somewhere?”

Raucci stubbed out his cigarette on the concrete of the pier. “Young people these days, so impatient! Anyways, down in the holds it wasn’t about where your people came from, it was about how hard you worked. And on that score, I have to hand it to your old man: he wasn’t the friendliest bastard in the world, but he worked as hard as two men.

“So there we are, I’m down there wipin’ the sweat out of my eyes, waitin’ for the dinner break, and I hear somebody say, ‘You smell somethin’?’ And I sniff the air, and there’s
smoke
. And I’m standin’ near a bulkhead, and I reach out and touch it, and I snatch my hand back: it’s
hot
.

“Our foreman turns to me. ‘Raucci! Go out and see what the hell’s goin’ on.’ So I walk between the bombs and go out in the passageway. There’s definitely smoke out there, thick and horrible smellin’. Burnin’ oil. And my heart goes up into my t’roat, and I run for the engine room. As I step over the hatchway, I see open flames flickerin’ away in the back. I damn near shit my pants. An engineer is runnin’ around sprayin’ a fire extinguisher, but it don’t do no good. Suddenly, oil on the bilge water beneath the gratings goes
whoosh!
To tell ya the truth, I’m panicking now, but I grab a fire extinguisher and try to get in there to help, but within five seconds I’m down on my knees, on account’a all the smoke. I try to get up again, but the heat and all is squeezin’ the air out of my lungs. And I fall down, and I’m lyin’ there on the hot metal floor, waitin’ for the ship to blast into hellfire and damnation. Ya know what was my last thought? I’m prayin’,
Please God, don’t let the shock wave reach Red Hook and my mother.

“And then, all of a sudden, I’m movin’. I feel an arm around my chest, and I’m bein’ dragged through all the smoke, outta that blazin’ engine room. And I feel myself lifted up onto somebody’s shoulder, and I see a little spot’a daylight up top, and I’m thinkin,’
I died and an angel is carryin me to heaven.
But it wasn’t an angel; it was your old man, that little Russkie prick. And he dumps me on deck, and we’re both gaspin’ for air, and then he turns around and he goes back in.

“He brought the engineer and another guy up, before he passed out himself.”

Jack stared across the harbor, dazed, struggling to reconcile this heroic Maxim Leightner with his own memories of the man. “And then what happened?”

“We couldn’t put the damned fire out. We had some pumps on the dock, but there wasn’t much water comin’ out of ’em—it was like tryin’ to piss on the flames. We would’a just scuttled the ship right there, but we couldn’t get to the seacocks because they were in the engine room.”

Jack pictured the roaring flames, the men frantically darting through the greasy smoke.

“Lemme tell ya,” Raucci said. “If the
El Estero
had gone up, it would’a been the biggest disaster in all of human history.”

“Why didn’t it?”

The old mobster snorted. “There was no love lost between us stevedores and them young Coasties, but I gotta give ’em this: they put up a hell of a fight that day. Most of ’em were already a couple’a miles away, in their barracks, shining their shoes and getting ready to go on leave. When the alarm sounded, their commander asked for volunteers. Them kids knew damned well what could happen, but they jumped on a truck and came haulin’ ass back to the pier. And a couple’a New York fireboats came runnin’ up too.”

Raucci’s voice caught, and Jack was astonished to see that his good eye was wet. “I had never seen nothin’ like that, and the only other time I seen it since was on Nine-eleven. When everybody else was runnin’ away, those boys ran right toward the trouble.”

“Did they put the fire out then?”

Raucci shook his head. “They ordered all us longshoremen off the ship, and then the fireboats tried to pump as much water as they could up onto the fire. And still the goddamn flames were winnin’. Finally, the Coastie commander decided that the only thing they could do was to tow the ship away from the pier and out into the harbor, and fill ’er with water and sink her before she could go up. A couple’a tugs showed up, and those brave goddamned bastards towed the
El Estero
out and to the south.” He pointed across the water. “As they went, there were still firemen on her deck, with their goddamn boots sizzlin’ on the metal. And there was guys down in the holds, feeling for hot spots so they could tell the others where to put their hoses. Can you imagine that? Before they got on the ship, they threw their wallets to the guys on shore, ’cause they figured they probably weren’t comin’ back.”

Raucci pointed again. “The tugs hauled the ship out by Robbins Reef there, and for two hours the fireboats kept pumpin’ her with water. She started listin’ to starboard. Then, around nine o’clock, we was watchin’ from the docks, we saw a flash of light and heard a couple’a explosions, but the old gal finally went down. It took a while for all the fires to go out, even underwater; we could see this ghosty glow comin’ up from the bottom of the harbor, out there in the night.” He nodded, remembering. “We didn’t lose a single goddamn man.”

Jack blinked, awestruck. “I can’t believe this isn’t in every history book.”

Raucci shrugged. “Ya gotta remember: this was the middle of the war. There were a couple’a little stories in the papers, but I guess the Navy didn’t want word getting around that the whole port was so vulner’ble. After the war, there was a parade in Bayonne for the firemen and the Coasties, but those guys never really got their due. Goddamned heroes, every one of ’em.”

The old man hocked up some phlegm, then spit it out onto the water. “Anyhow, the point here is simple: I didn’t have no beef with your old man.”

Jack frowned, thinking about his father, such a riddle. Loving one moment, brutal the next. A drunk, a criminal, a hero. A proud man, and stubborn, ashamed of what he had turned to in order to feed his family. “He was helping you, down in Philly, and then he stopped. Weren’t you pissed off?”

Raucci shrugged. “We were makin’ some good money down there, I’ll give you that. Some of the other guys were sore, but I let it go. That Russian bastard saved my life, and I never forgot it. I tole the guys: you mess with Leightner, you mess with me.”

Jack grimaced. “So they hired some punks to mess with me and my brother instead.”

Raucci’s face closed up. “I don’t know nothin’ about it.”

“Come on,” Jack said. “You knew they were angry at my father. And they got his son killed.”

Raucci made a pained face. “I wanted to do somethin’ about what happened to your brother, but we, ah, we had an organization, see? The bosses were not too happy about what went down, but they decided to let it go. You weren’t even Italian.”

Jack clenched his fists. “Who were the guys that were riled up at my father?”

Frank Raucci ran a hand over his mouth. “Listen, Leightner: we got a little thing you might’ve heard of. A code. Now, I just explained to you why I would never hurt your old man. And why I had nothin’ to do with that crap under your car. But that’s as far as I’m gonna go.”

The old man waved at his muscle man, who came lumbering up like a big rhinoceros. And as much as Jack pestered him as he shuffled off down the pier, Raucci refused to say another word. When they reached the shore, the mobster climbed into his car and his soldier started the engine.

Jack stood at the edge of the pier, watching them zoom off down the parkway, marveling about his father and wondering how he was ever going to discover who had really been behind Petey’s killing. And who had the sheer gall to plant a bomb beneath an NYPD detective’s car.

“I
NEED TO GO
in alone,” Jack said to Lieutenant Cardulli. “He won’t talk if he sees all of us on his doorstep.” They were parked up the street from Orlando Farro’s Bay Ridge home; Jack liked to keep a low profile, but with this security retinue he moved with all the subtlety of a Mack truck.

“You sure you’ll be okay in there?”

Jack snorted. “The guy’s in a wheelchair and he’s about two hundred years old. I’ll be fine.”

The Caribbean nurse answered the door.
Shirley.
She let him right in, which he found surprising: Why hadn’t she asked her boss first if it was okay?

“He’s not having a very good day,” she said, and he noticed that she looked considerably less placid than the last time he had seen her. In fact, her statement clearly translated to
We’re
not having a good day. “He’s like an old TV set,” she said over her shoulder as she led him down a hallway inside the musty house. “He goes in and out.”

Jack soon discovered what she meant. He found Orlando Farro sitting in a gloomy living room, watching the local news on TV. The old man was bald as a cue ball; when he saw that he had a visitor, he gave a quick panicked glance at his hairpiece, which bristled on top of the old TV like a sleeping muskrat.
Ah, vanity.
Then he turned to Jack with a befuddled air. “Who the hell are you?”

“We talked the other day, Mr. Farro. Up in the park.”

The room smelled sour, like a bathroom in a dive bar. In a corner, several gold statues glinted in the flickering light of the television: boxers, raising their dukes. A bunch of old photos decorated the walls above them: Jack recognized a young Farro, in his Golden Gloves days.