The Prince (46 page)

Dixie was enjoying greater and greater success in the bands he played with, but his and his wife's schedules didn't coincide anymore. When Isabel left the house to go to the Army's Outpost, Dixie, having just returned a couple of hours ago, would be sleeping soundly until at least noon. Then when she came home in the evening, her feet sore from long hours roaming the streets, he would be getting ready to leave.

Isabel wasn't happy. She absolutely had to break that cycle.

Returning with her fellow soldiers one day from yet another mission in search of souls to redeem and bellies to fill, she asked Captain Virginia if she could leave early that day because she wasn't feeling well. She had stomach cramps, and the cold weather made things worse. Virginia understood. Once a month shifts were relaxed a bit for women, so she gave her permission to go home to bed. Isabel thanked her with a contrite face and, without even taking off her uniform, hurried back to the hotel.

“I'll go to bed,” she thought cheerfully, “but for a different kind of relaxation.” She was already looking forward to being with Dixie, and she laughed at the face he would make when he saw her. It had been almost two weeks since they'd been together.

She ran up the stairs, as excited as on a first date. She slid the key in the lock and turned it slowly. She heard the spring lock click and opened the door. It was just a little past noon; she might still find him in bed. Isabel took off her jacket and began unbuttoning her Army blouse. She continued down the corridor. Dixie wasn't in the kitchen, nor in the living room. She was in luck, she thought. So she moved on to the bedroom, where the door was ajar. She took off her blouse and stood there in her slip and blue skirt. But all of a sudden deep sighs made her blood run cold. She froze, straining to hear. The sighs were moans of pleasure. She pressed her hands to her mouth to keep from screaming. In an instant, her joy turned to despair. The moans were growing more and more intense. Dixie's voice was unmistakable. How often she had taken pleasure in the sounds of his coming. Now he was doing it with someone else. A strangled cry of collapse and climax put an end to the act.

Isabel finally found the will to push open the door. Dixie whirled around. The woman covered herself, pulling the sheet over her head.

Isabel stopped feeling sorry for herself and displayed her Irish temperament. She rushed at Dixie who, naked as he was, tried to hold her off.

“You crummy piece of shit, goddamn you and the shitty Italian family you came from! How dare you! How could you bring this bitch into our bed!” She tried to strike him with her fists, but Dixie was adept at dodging her punches.

“Hold on, Isabel, it's not what you think! Calm down! Let me explain!” Dixie was dodging the objects that Isabel had begun throwing at him.

“How long has this been going on?”

“For a while. But it's not important—”

“What do you mean, it's not important!” Isabel yelled. “It may not be important to you, but it is to me! You have absolutely no moral scruples. How did I ever fall in love with a monster like you! I hate you, I hate you!” She burst into hopeless tears. He tried to kiss her, but Isabel drew back in disgust. “I told you not to touch me! You make me sick! In our bed . . . I never want to see you again! Get out! Better yet, no. I'll go! This room makes me want to puke.”

And she walked out of the apartment and out of his life.

C
ontrary to all the rules that had always governed his life, old Tom Bontade paid a visit to Brian Stoker alone and unarmed.

The elderly Stoker was surprised to see him. For a moment, he thought he had come to kill him, but Bontade quickly reassured him.

“I'm here as a father, to talk as one father to another. Let's leave the wheeling and dealing that have poisoned our lives outside the door,” Tom Bontade began, extending his hand.

The other man approached him. “I'm shaking the hand that killed my son,” he said, his spirit broken.

“That's why I'm here. I want to understand what happened. Someone wanted to turn us against each other.”

“And he succeeded perfectly,” Stoker concluded.

“Right. He wiped out your family, making the blame fall on us Bontades. But I swear on my honor that I had nothing to do with it.”

“Only you and we knew about the transaction,” Stoker said bluntly.

“Someone must have leaked it. But it wasn't us, I swear to you.”

“I believe you, Tom. Still, my son is gone now. I had to bury him.”

“A father should never have to bury his child. I know what that's like.” The recollection of his son who'd been killed in a shoot-out with an enemy gang had never left Bontade. “It's a memory you can't erase. You'll carry it with you forever.”

“I feel old, I don't want to live anymore,” Stoker said bitterly.

“Old age is sad not because joys cease, but because hopes end. As long as you have a child, you hope to see him settled down, with a promising future. But when he's taken from you . . . everything comes crashing down. Your life is over.”

“I'm going to tell you a secret, Bontade. A decision I just made tonight: I'm going to retire. I have a nice nest egg set aside, which will allow me to live like a king to the end of my days. I'm going to Florida, to the elephants' graveyard, and I'll end my days there. I'm leaving New York.” Those words were heavy as boulders. The feisty Brian Stoker never thought he would have to say them.

“But you can't give up right now. Don't you want to find out who played this loathsome trick on us?”

“I made my decision. It's final.”

Brian Stoker was adamant. Reaching that decision had cost him great sacrifice. Above all, a sacrifice of pride. During his life, he had always struck back, blow for blow; he had never retreated, even at the riskiest moments. But now he had reached his limit.

Without Damien and the men who formed his team, the person responsible for the slayings would certainly seize the territory before he could organize a new force.

Tom Bontade, on the other hand, wanted to go back over the stages of the deal to try to figure out who had set the trap. He was now certain that scoring the cocaine was merely an excuse to wipe out the Stoker family and finance the new family through the sale of the drug.

Bontade obtained Stoker's permission to question the survivors of his group. Only Fryderyk Marek was still alive. Tom Bontade questioned him, but the Pole was clearly of no help.

Still, Bontade had waded through lies too often not to know when someone was telling the truth or lying, and that Pole, who had saved his own hide in two shootings, wasn't telling the truth. He ordered Barret, Cooper, Carmelo Vanni, and Vito Pizzuto not to let Marek out of their sight in the following weeks.

The four men organized surveillance shifts around the clock, and at the end of the first week, their efforts were rewarded.

Fryderyk Marek left his house on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side one morning and got into a taxi.

Maintaining a discreet distance, Vito Pizzuto and Barret tailed him to Bensonhurst. There Marek entered a little Italian cafe. As they passed in their car moments later, Pizzuto and Barret saw Jack Mastrangelo frowning as he spoke to Marek, evidently chewing him out about something.

So Mastrangelo was the man who had conducted the negotiations on behalf of a mysterious client, and the Pole had been the informer who tipped him off that the Stokers were about to trade ten kilos of cocaine.

When they reported the results of their surveillance of Marek to Tom Bontade, the old boss recalled that it had been Big Jordan who'd told him about the deal. He'd heard about it from his hooker. A certain Marta. She was the only one who could make him get it up. But how had Marta known about the offer?

“I should have thought of it sooner,” Bontade reproached himself. “You have to find the hooker. We'll ask her about her recent clients, not her regulars; our man is on that list. The one who orchestrated this whole production.” Cooper was familiar with Marta's girlfriends. He had personally accompanied Big Jordan to her place on more than one occasion, taking advantage of the opportunity to do it with one of her coworkers.

The girls told him that Marta had been attacked by a maniac the week before: some guy had killed her john and beaten her up, leaving her in a coma for several days. She was now at St. Vincent's Hospital in critical condition.

Barret had a cousin who was a paramedic at St. Vincent's. He asked him to do him a favor and let him see the girl. Barret's cousin was initially a bit reluctant because he didn't want to get mixed up in his relative's affairs, which he knew weren't totally on the up-and-up. But when handed a ten-dollar bill, he managed to silence his conscience, and during his shift he let Barret into the poor girl's room.

Marta was unrecognizable, her face purple from profuse bruising. A bandage covered her forehead, and another supported her jaw. Her eyes were so swollen that the irises were barely visible through the slits. Her nose was also bandaged, and the skin around her ears and eyebrows bore numerous stitches.

Barret, disguised as a nurse, approached and pretended to adjust the IV drip. Then he bent over her to see if she was awake. He saw her pupils flash. He realized that she was terrified by his presence.

He moved close to her ear and whispered, “Marta, some friends are asking me if you remember the name of the man who told you he wanted to buy a batch of coke. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

The girl didn't move, but her eyes never left him.

“Can you speak?”

Marta made an imperceptible movement with her head, and Barret realized that it was a “no.”

He saw a notebook and pencil on the bedstand. “That must be how they communicate with her,” he thought.

Barret placed the pencil in her hand and held the notebook for her. With a great deal of effort, Marta finally managed to write “Ferdinando Licata.”

The name didn't mean anything to Tom Bontade. But Vito Pizzuto knew him.

“I know the big bastard,” he said, stepping forward. “It's Prince Ferdinando Licata; he owns half of Salemi. He fled from Sicily too; we were on the same ship. Good for the prince, he's managed to adapt to our way of life,” he added mockingly.

Cooper entered the room of the apartment that Bontade used as an office and meeting place, went over to the boss, and handed him a newspaper. Bontade read the banner headline: “Gangland-Style Killing.” The morning papers had published news of the discovery of three corpses in a shed on the bank of the Harlem River, killed execution style with a bullet through the head. Their description matched those of three men seen by an eyewitness leaving the
Paraguay Star
around the time of the massacre. The authorities believed them to be associated with the slayings, even though no weapons had been found in the shack.

The scenario was becoming increasingly clear to Bontade. The three had evidently been used as hired guns; then the one who had enlisted them must have also killed them. In order to understand whether the Sicilian prince was responsible for the two mass executions, he had to go back to Brian Stoker. What had occurred had all the appearances of a vendetta.

When Tom Bontade went to see Stoker for a second time, the old man was getting ready to leave for Florida.

Bontade approached him with open arms, as if to embrace him.

“So you've come to say good-bye?” Brian Stoker asked.

“Life can be understood only if you look back at it in perspective. We were at war for all these years, when we could very well have lived in peace, without bothering each other.”

The two men embraced. They actually seemed like two old friends, even though one of them had killed the other's son. “I may have found out who set us against each other,” Tom said, breaking away.

“As far as I'm concerned, it's too late,” Brian said dejectedly.

“Still, I have to make him pay for it. Does the name Ferdinando Licata mean anything to you?”

Brian Stoker mentally reviewed the people who had run up against his family in recent months.

“Licata . . . Kevin spoke to me about him. He's the old guy at La Tonnara, a restaurant run by some Italians. We had some problems with those people, and one night we had to teach them a lesson. Water under the bridge. All our troubles started there. Kevin was tortured, then we started getting threatening phone calls—threats against the Stokers. Then that massacre . . .

“My time has come, my friend.”

When he got home, Bontade met with Vito Pizzuto alone. “Why do you hate Prince Licata so much?” he asked.

“When we were on the ship, he insulted me in front of my friends. You don't disrespect someone like me. He called me a pimp.”

Bontade felt like smiling but restrained himself. “They say a mosquito's sting itches less after we've managed to crush the mosquito. Licata has to die.”

Pizzuto smiled.

“Prepare a plan,” said his boss. “But you have to hurry if we want to take over the territory vacated by the Irishmen.”

Ferdinando Licata had actually been established for some time in the territory to which Bontade referred. After the disappearance of the Irish gang, and particularly with Damien's death, the residents of Tompkins Square and the surrounding neighborhood had begun to breathe freely again. Mothers allowed their daughters to go out without being escorted by their fathers or older brothers; shopkeepers had lowered the prices of goods, now that they were no longer harassed by the Stokers' demands; and restaurant owners were able to smile again, released from the disagreeable presence of Damien and his buddies. And when Ferdinando Licata ran into some neighborhood friend who had benefited from his actions, he was greeted with the old title of Father. In fact, the older people continued to address him in the original dialect: “
I nostri rispetti, Patri.
” “Our respects, Father.”