World Gone By: A Novel (19 page)

By the time he looked up, she was gone.

After a few minutes or so, he retrieved the drink he’d left on the dresser and sat in the chair by the window. He couldn’t think through a gray cloud that settled in his head and seeped into his
blood. He understood on some fundamental level that he was in shock, but he couldn’t identify which stimulus—her pregnancy, her plan to abort it, her severing of the relationship, or the paper her husband held on Joe’s freedom—had most directly caused his paralysis.

To clear his head or at least get blood flowing to it again, he picked up the phone and asked for an outside line. He’d forgotten to call Dion and let him know that he’d relieved Bruno and Chappi of their responsibilities. It would be just his luck today that he got them fired.

There was no answer at Dion’s and then he remembered that it was Wednesday, which always meant a trip to Chinetti’s Bakery. Joe decided he’d just head back there after his next call; everyone would have returned by then and the sponge cake would probably still be warm.

He hung up, picked up the phone again, and got another outside line. He called into work and asked Margaret if he had messages.

“Rico DiGiacomo called twice. Said it was urgent you return his call.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“That gentleman from Naval Intelligence?”

“Matthew Biel.”

“That’s the one. He left an odd message.”

Margaret had been Joe’s secretary since 1934. In that time she’d heard plenty of odd.

“Relay it to me,” Joe said.

She cleared her throat and her voice dropped an octave. “What will happen next has already happened.” Her voice returned to normal. “Know what he means?”

“Not exactly,” Joe said. “But these government types sure do love making threats.”

When he hung up, he smoked a cigarette and worked his way, as best he could, through his one conversation with Matthew Biel. It didn’t take him long to recall the moment when Biel had promised that Joe wouldn’t like “what we do next.”

So whatever that act, it had already been executed.

Do your worst, Joe thought, as long as you’re not trying to put me in the ground.

Speaking of which . . .

Joe called over to Rico DiGiacomo’s, got his secretary, who put him right through.

“Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck, where you been?”

“What? Why?”

“Mank’s not in a sanitarium.”

“Sure he is.”

“No, he isn’t. He’s back in Tampa. And he’s looking for you. He was seen a block up from your house. Two hours before that, he cruised the block outside your office. Wherever you are, you need to stay there. Hear?”

Joe looked around the room. At least Vanessa had had the decency to leave behind the bottle of scotch.

“I can do that,” Joe said.

“We’ll hunt him down. Okay. We’ll put him in the ground if we have to.”

“Fair enough.”

“You just sit on your hands until we can fix this.”

Joe thought of Mank out there, trolling, him and his rheumy eyes and flaky scalp, breath smelling of rotgut and salami. Mank didn’t play a finesse game the way Theresa or Billy Kovich had. Mank just came at you, engine revving and guns blazing.

“All right,” he told Rico. “I’ll sit tight. You call me as soon as it’s done.”

“You bet. Talk soon.”

“Rico,” Joe said.

Rico’s voice came back on the line. “What? What?”

“You need the number here.”

“Huh?”

“To call me back.”

“Right. Shit.” Rico laughed. “Right. Let me get a pen. Okay. Go.”

Joe gave him the direct line to the room.

“Okay, okay. Be back in touch,” Rico said and hung up.

The curtains in the room were drawn, but Joe noticed there was a gap between the ones that covered the window that overlooked the jetty. He lay on his stomach on the bed and tugged the hems of the curtain panels until they crossed over each other.

Then he got off the bed in case Mank was out there right now, trying to ascertain his position in the room.

He sat on top of the dresser and stared at the tan walls and the painting of the fishermen casting off from a storm-drenched shore. The Cantillions had placed reproductions of the same painting in every room. In this room it hung too low, and two weeks ago Vanessa had accidentally knocked it askew, trying to find purchase as Joe entered her from behind. Joe could see the scratch the back of the frame had nicked into the paint. He could also see her hair again, its ends damp against the side of her neck. He could smell the liquor on her breath—it had been gin that day—and hear the slap of their flesh as their movements grew more frantic.

He was surprised how acute the memory was, how much it hurt to explore it. If he sat here all day and thought about her with nothing but a bottle of scotch and no food, he’d come out of his skin. He needed to think about something else, anything else. Like—

Who took a contract to kill someone and then entered a sanitarium in the middle of the job?

Had that been some kind of ploy to throw Joe off the scent? Or an actual moment of madness? Because whoever had put the contract out on Joe would have been more than a little dismayed when Mank bugged out and checked into the cuckoo house. In that case, the man who’d taken out the contract would have hired somebody else to clip both Joe
and
Mank. No, killers on an active contract didn’t take time off to get their brains unfried and then pop back up on the day of the hit to finish the job. It made zero sense.

Joe had half a mind to go out on the street right now and talk to whichever of Rico’s men had seen Mank, because he’d bet a thousand dollars they’d mistakenly seen someone who looked like him. Make it two thousand dollars, that’s how sure he was.

His life, though? Would he bet that? Because those were the stakes. All he had to do was stay in this room—or this box, as he was already starting to think of it—and pretty soon this would be over. Rico and his guys would track down this Mank impersonator—or, okay, possibly Mank himself—and Joe could start sleeping again.

Until then, stay in the box.

He raised his drink to his lips, but stopped before it got there.

The box is the point
.

What was it Vanessa had said in her parting shot? He saw everything but what was directly in front of his nose.

If someone had been trying to kill him these past two weeks, he should be dead by now. Until he’d actually been made aware of the alleged plot, he’d walked the streets blithe and ignorant. An easy target. Even after he’d been appraised of the potential danger, he’d tried running the rumor down; he’d bartered for Theresa’s life; gone on the boat with King Lucius and twenty drug-poisoned killers.
He could have been easily killed on any of several drives—to Raiford, to the Peace River, hell, just tooling around town.

What was the killer waiting for?

Ash Wednesday.

But why wait?

The only possible answer was because they weren’t waiting. There was no “they.” Or if there were, “they” weren’t trying to kill Joe.

They were trying to keep him on ice.

He picked up the phone, got an outside line, and asked to be connected to the Lazworth Sanitarium in Pensacola. When he got through to the switchboard there, he told the girl who’d answered that he was Detective Francis Cadiman of the Tampa Police Department and he needed to speak with the chief of staff immediately in regards to a murder.

The girl put him through.

Dr. Shapiro got on the line and asked what this was about. Joe told him there’d been a murder last night in Tampa and they’d need to speak with one of his patients about it.

“We believe,” Joe told the doctor, “that this man could kill again.”

“Kill my patient?”

“No, Doctor. Quite frankly, our suspect
is
your patient.”

“I don’t follow.”

“We have two eyewitnesses who place a Jacob Mank at the scene of the crime.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I’m sorry, but it isn’t, Doctor. We’ll be coming by directly. I thank you for your time.”

“Don’t hang up,” Shapiro said. “When was this murder?”

“Early this morning. Two fifteen actually.”

“Then you have the wrong man. The patient in question, Jacob Mank?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Tried to kill himself two days ago. He sliced his own carotid with a shard of glass from a broken window. He’s been in a coma ever since.”

“You’re positive?”

“I’m staring at him right now.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

Joe hung up.

Who had the most to gain by removing Montooth Dix?

Not Freddy DiGiacomo. Freddy just got the policy racket.

Rico got the territory.

Who suggested he take Tomas and go to Cuba?

Rico.

Who just tracked him down to give him the one name guaranteed to keep him from sticking his head up?

Rico.

Who was shrewd enough to sideline Joe so he could make a play for the throne?

Rico DiGiacomo.

Where had Rico not wanted Joe to be on Ash Wednesday?

Church.

No, that wasn’t it. Joe had come and gone without incident . . .

The bakery.

“Jesus,” Joe whispered and reached for the door.

WHEN UNCLE DION’S DRIVER, Carmine, pulled up outside Chinetti’s Bakery, it was twelve thirty and the day had grown sticky, though the sun hid behind a woolen sky caught somewhere between light gray and dirty white. Uncle Dion patted Tomas’s leg and said, “The
sfogliatelle
, right?”

“I can come with you.”

Mike Aubrey and Geoff the Finn pulled up to the curb behind them.

“No,” Dion said, “I got this in hand.
Sfogliatelle
, right?”

“Right.”

“Maybe I’ll see if they’ll throw in a
pasticiotti
.”

“Thanks, Uncle D.”

Carmine came around and opened the door for his boss. “I’ll see you in.”

“Stick with the kid.”

“Boss, you don’t want me to just go in for you?”

Tomas looked up at Uncle Dion’s jowly face as it turned purple.

“I ask you to learn French?” he said to Carmine.

“What?”

“Did I ask you to learn French?”

“No, boss, no. Of course not.”

“Did I ask you to paint the hardware store across the street?”

“No, boss, you sure didn’t.”

“I ask you to fuck a giraffe?”

“What?”

“Answer the question.”

“No, boss, you didn’t ask me to—”

“So, I didn’t ask you to learn French, paint the store across the street, or fuck a giraffe. What I did ask you to do is stay with the car.” Dion patted Carmine’s face. “So stay with the fucking car.”

Dion walked into the bakery, fixing the line of his suit and smoothing his tie. Carmine sat back behind the wheel and adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see Tomas.

“You like bocce?” he asked Tomas.

“I don’t know,” Tomas said, “I never played it.”

“Oh,” Carmine said, “you gotta. What do they play in Cuba?”

“Baseball,” Tomas said.

“You play?”

“Yes.”

“You any good?”

Tomas shrugged. “Not as good as the Cubans.”

“I started playing bocce when I was about your age,” Carmine said, “back in the Old Country. Most people think my father taught me, but it was my mother. You picture that? My mother in her brown dress. She loved brown. Brown dresses, brown shoes, brown
dinner plates. She was from Palermo, which my father said meant she lacked imagination. My father was from . . .”

Tomas tuned Carmine out. His own father had told him on numerous occasions that a man who listened to other men—truly listened to them—gained their respect and often their gratitude. “People just want you to see them as they hope to be seen. And everyone wants to be seen as interesting.” But Tomas could only pretend to listen when the speaker was clearly a bore or simply a poor conversationalist. There were times when he wished he was half the man his father was and other times when he knew his father was simply wrong. On the matter of suffering fools, however, he wasn’t sure who was right, though he suspected they both might be.

As Carmine prattled on, the postman’s bell rang and he rode past them on his yellow bicycle. He parked it against the wall just past the bakery and went sifting through his bag for the block’s mail.

A tall man with sunken cheeks and an ashen cross on his pale forehead stopped just past the postman and bent to tie his shoe. Tomas noticed that the man’s shoelaces were already tied. But he remained there, even as he looked up and locked stares with Tomas. His eyes sat high in the sockets and Tomas noticed the top of his collar was damp. The man dropped his eyes and went back to fiddling with his shoelace.

Another man, a much shorter, stockier man came up the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue from behind their car and walked into the bakery with fast, certain strides.

Carmine was saying, “ . . . but my aunt Concetta, she was . . .” and then his words faded away to nothing, his head turning toward something in the street.

Two men in dark purple raincoats stepped off the opposite sidewalk. They paused in the street to allow a car to pass, then walked
in unison, their raincoats loosely belted, but both of them reaching for the belts.

Carmine said, “Stay here a sec, kid,” and got out of the car.

The car moved a little bit when Carmine thumped back against it and Tomas stared at the man’s back as the fabric of his coat changed color and the echo of the gunshots revealed themselves to Tomas for what they were. They shot Carmine again and he fell away from the window. Some of his blood speckled the glass.

Mike Aubrey and Geoff the Finn never even got out of their car. The two men in the street took care of Aubrey, and Tomas heard the boom of a shotgun and then all that was left of Geoff the Finn was a shattered passenger window and blood splattered on the inside of the windshield.

The two men in the middle of the avenue held Thompson machine guns. They turned toward Tomas, one of them squinting in surprise—
Is that a kid in there?—
and the muzzles of their Thompsons came with them.

Tomas heard shouts and loud cracks in the air behind him. Shattered glass fell from the storefronts. A pistol report was followed by another and then something louder that Tomas took for a shotgun. He didn’t turn to look but he didn’t drop down into the foot well, either, because he couldn’t take his eyes off his own death. The muzzles of those Thompsons remained pointed at him and the men were looking at each other, deciding something unpleasant without exchanging a word.

When the car hit them, Tomas threw up. Just a little—a hiccup of shock and bile. One of the men flew high out of view and then crashed back down on the hood of Uncle Dion’s car. Landed on his head. The head turned in one direction while the rest of the body turned in the other. Tomas had no idea what happened to the other man, but the one on the hood looked in at him, the right side of
his face and chin looking over his left shoulder like it was the most natural thing in the world. It was the one who’d squinted when he’d looked in the car at Tomas, and Tomas felt the bile rising up the center of his chest as the man continued to stare, his pale eyes as dead as they’d been when he’d been alive.

Bullets moved through the air like squalls of wasps. Again, Tomas knew he should get down behind the seat, get as low as he could, but what he was witnessing was so far beyond his comprehension or experience that the only thing he knew for sure was that he’d never see it again. Everything unfolded in jagged bursts. Nothing seemed connected but everything was.

The car that had hit the two men had crashed into the side of a truck and a man in a pale silk suit fired into it with a machine gun.

On the sidewalk, the man who had pretended to tie his shoe fired a pistol into the bakery.

The postman lay crumpled across his toppled bicycle, his bright blood spilling all over the mail.

The man who’d pretended to tie his shoe screamed. It was a scream of shock and denial, as high pitched as a girl’s. He dropped to his knees and lost his grip on his handgun. He covered his eyes with his fingers, the ashen cross on his forehead beginning to leak in the heat. Uncle Dion staggered out of the bakery with blood all over the lower half of his blue shirt. He held a cake box in one hand and a gun in the other. He pointed the gun at the kneeling man and fired a bullet straight through the cross in his head and the man fell over.

Uncle Dion wrenched open the car door. He looked like something that had emerged roaring from a cave to eat children. His voice was the growl of a dog.

“Get on the fucking floor.”

Tomas curled up in the foot well and Dion reached over him and dropped the cake box behind the driver’s seat.

“Do not move. Hear me?”

Tomas said nothing.

“Hear me?” Dion screamed.

“Yes, yes.”

Dion grunted and slammed the door and pings of hail hit the side of the car, Tomas knowing it wasn’t hail, it wasn’t hail.

The
noise
. Rifles and pistols and machine guns all erupting. The high-pitched squeals of grown men being shot.

The slap of shoes on pavement, men running now, most in one direction—away from the car. And the sound of gunfire dropped away to almost nothing—a stray shot coming from up the street, another from the front of the car. But it was as if a chain had been pulled and the noise snapped off.

Now the street bore that echoing silence of streets that had just hosted a parade.

Someone opened the door and Tomas looked up, expecting to see Dion, but a stranger stood there. A man in a green raincoat and dark green fedora. He had very thin eyebrows and a matching mustache. Something about him was familiar, but Tomas still couldn’t place him. He smelled of cheap aftershave and beef jerky. He’d wrapped a handkerchief around his bloody left hand but held a pistol in the right.

“It’s not safe,” he said.

Tomas said nothing. Upon a second look, though, he realized this was the same man who stood in the playground sometimes after Sunday mass with the witchy old lady who always wore black.

The man poked Tomas’s shoulder with his damaged hand. “I saw you. From across the street. I’m taking you somewhere safe. It’s not safe here. Come with me, come with me.”

Tomas clenched even more tightly into a ball on the floor.

The man poked him. “I’m saving you.”

“Go away.”

“Don’t tell me to go away. Don’t. Don’t tell me. I’m saving you.” He patted Tomas’s shoulder and head like a dog, then pulled at his shirt. “Come on.”

Tomas batted at his hand.

“Sssshhhhhh,” the man said. “Listen,” he said. “Listen, listen. Just listen. We don’t have much—”

“Freddy!”

The man’s eyes bugged at the sound of his name.

And the man out on the sidewalk called again, “Freddy!”

Tomas recognized his father’s voice and the relief was so overwhelming he wet his pants for the first time in five years.

Freddy whispered, “Right back,” and straightened. He turned toward the sidewalk. “Hi, Joe.”

“That my son in there, Freddy?”

“Is that
your
son?”

“Tomas!”

“I’m here, Dad!”

“You all right?”

“I’m okay.”

“You hit?”

“No. I’m okay.”

“He touch you?”

“He touched my shoulder, but—”

Freddy danced in place.

Tomas found out later his father fired his gun four times but the shots came so fast he never would have guessed the number. All he knew was that suddenly Freddy DiGiacomo’s head was lying on the seat above him, the rest of him splayed on the sidewalk.

His father reached into Freddy’s hair and yanked his head out of the car. Dropped him in the gutter and reached for Tomas. Tomas wrapped his arms around his father’s neck and without warning
began to wail. He howled. He could feel the tears pouring out of his eyes like bathwater and he couldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop. He just kept wailing. Even to his own ears, it sounded alien. It was a cry of such outrage and terror.

“It’s okay,” Joe said. “I got you. Daddy’s here. I got you.”