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.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Bakery
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 wr
enched 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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Lighting Out
JOE HELD HIS SON and surveyed the carnage around him on Seventh Avenue. Tomas shook in his arms and wept like he hadn’t wept since he’d suffered a dual ear infection when he was six months old. Joe’s car—the one he’d used to run over Anthony Bianco and Jerry Tucci—was totaled. Not from the crash with the light pole but from Sal Romano running up and unloading a full drum of Thompson rounds into it. Joe had come around the trunk of a car two spaces back and shot Romano in the hip while he was reloading. He could still hear him moaning in the middle of the street. Romano had played quarterback for his high school back in Jersey. Still lifted weights and did five hundred push-ups a day, or so he claimed. Joe had blown his left hip into the next block, though, so future push-ups were looking iffy.
As he’d crossed the street, Joe had shot a guy in a capeskin jacket. The guy had been firing a shotgun into the bakery, so Joe had popped a round into his back and kept walking. He could hear him too—screaming from the sidewalk about fifteen yards back, asking for a doctor, asking for a priest. Sounded like Dave Imbruglia, actually. Looked like him from the back too. Joe couldn’t see his face.
His son had stopped wailing, was trying to get his breath back.
“Ssshh.” Joe stroked Tomas’s hair. “It’s okay. I’m here now. I’m not letting go.”
“You . . .”
“What?”
Tomas leaned back in Joe’s arms and looked down at Freddy DiGiacomo’s corpse. “You shot him,” he whispered.
“Yup.”
“Why?”
“A lot of reasons, but mostly because I didn’t like how he looked at you.” Joe looked deep into his son’s brown eyes, into his late wife’s eyes. “You understand?”
Tomas started to nod, then shook his head slowly.
“You’re my son,” Joe said. “That means nobody fucks with you. Ever.”
Tomas blinked, and Joe knew he was seeing something in his father he’d never seen before—the arctic fury Joe had spent his life learning to hide. His father’s fury, his brothers’, the Coughlin male’s birthright.
“We gotta find Uncle Dion and get out of here. Can you walk?”
“Yeah.”
“You see your uncle?”
Tomas pointed.
Dion was sitting on the windowsill of the women’s hat shop, the glass blown out in the gunfire, staring at them. He was white as new ash, shirt covered in blood, breathing heavily.
Joe put Tomas down and they walked over, the glass crunching under their feet.
“Where you hit?”
“My right tit,” Dion said. “Went through, though. I fucking felt it exit. Believe that?”
“Your arm too,” Joe said. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Your arm, your arm.” Joe pulled off his tie. “That’s an artery, D.”
The blood was spitting straight out of the hole in the inside of Dion’s right arm. Joe tied his tie off just above the wound.
“Can you walk?”
“Barely breathe.”
“I can hear that. Can you walk, though?”
“Not far.”
“We’re not going far.”
Joe slung an arm under Dion’s left arm and pulled him off the window. “Tomas, open the back door again. Okay?”
Tomas ran to Dion’s car. He froze, though, when he reached Freddy’s corpse, as if it might wake up and lunge for him.
“Tomas!”
Tomas opened the door.
“Good boy. Hop up front.”
Joe sat Dion on the seat. “Lie back.”
He did.
“Pull up your legs.”
He pulled his legs onto the seat and Joe shut the door.
As he came around to the driver’s side, he saw Sal Romano across the street. Sal was up on his feet. Well, one foot. The other dangled as he leaned against what had been Joe’s car, breathing heavy. Hissing actually. Joe kept his gun on him.
“You killed Rico’s brother.” Sal winced.
“Sure did.” Joe opened the driver’s door.
“We didn’t know your kid was in the car.”
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“Yeah, well,” Joe said, “he was.”
“Won’t save you. Rico’s going to cut off your head and light it on fire.”
“Sorry about the hip, Sal.” Joe shrugged, nothing left to say, and got in the car. He backed out of the space and then backed down the street, hearing the sirens now, the sound coming from the west and the north.
“Where we going?” Tomas asked.
“Just a couple blocks,” Joe said. “We have to get this car off the street. How you doing, D?”
“World’s my oyster.” Dion let slip a soft groan.
“Hang in there.” Joe backed around the corner onto Twenty-Fourth Street and put the car into first, headed south.
“Surprised you showed up,” Dion said. “You always hated getting your hands dirty.”
“Ain’t about my hands,” Joe said. “It’s my hair. Look at it. And I’m all out of Brylcreem.”
“Such a nance.” Dion closed his eyes with a soft smile.
Tomas had never known fear like this. It turned his tongue and the roof of his mouth to dust. A ball of it pulsed in his throat. And his father was making jokes.
“Dad,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Are you a bad guy?”
“No, son.” Joe noticed specks of vomit on Tomas’s shirt. “I’m just not a particularly good one.”
HE DROVE THEM to a Negro veterinarian on a dinged-up stretch of Fourth in Brown Town. In an alley out back, the veterinarian had a carport that easily got lost in the cowls of rusted Cyclone fencing and razor wire the vet shared with his neighbors, an auto salvage yard and a pest exterminator. Joe told Tomas to stay with Dion, and before his son could reply, he ran up the back walk and let himself in through a white door warped by the heat.
Tomas looked into the backseat. Uncle Dion was sitting up, but his eyes were half closed, his breathing very shallow. Tomas looked at the door where his father had gone, then out at the alley, where two stray dogs loped along the fence line, snarling at each other whenever one got too close.
Tomas leaned over the seat. “I’m really scared.”
“Be a fool not to be,” Dion said. “We ain’t out of this.”
“Why’d those men want to kill you?”