Buncha Grief said as they sped across town, “Charming, we gonna get hot and rank the Double Head score. Let’s lay off for a while and score when the police got their pants down.”
Charming dropped off Buncha. He felt good, on his way back to the Zone to report to Kong, that the going up against Double Head’s machine gun had been postponed indefinitely.
23
It was two weeks after the big Cocio snatch. Collucci sat sprawled out on his easy chair behind the locked door of the study. He had perfected the Dinzio swagger that he needed to invade the penthouse.
He spent most of his time here of late. He had even slept, for the past week, on the sofa in the corner. Olivia had grown very irritable, and her flailing nightmares prevented the rest he needed to stay alert and alive in the rush of risk and death.
He had a week ago installed tiny transmitters in Olivia’s bedroom and phone. He monitored the input with a receiver and tape recorder locked in a desk drawer.
He’d decided it was Bellini’s doomsday senility vibes and his frequent visits that had put Olivia out on an emotional limb. He’d dreaded something else that day. He was ready to put Bellini to sleep at his first wrong move.
He wasn’t worried that Bellini would break his oath of silence to Olivia, or anyone outside of his Honored Society. He also wasn’t worried, at this point, about the Commission. He felt he could make the move for Tonelli, for he had also correctly surmised the basis of the reluctance of Tonelli and Bellini to take any suspicion to the National Commission without hard evidence.
He heard a buzzing of the monitor and knew Olivia’s phone had rung. He watched the activated reel of tape spin as it recorded the call. He played it back when it stopped and listened to dull chitchat between Olivia and Tonelli until near the end of the call.
Then he was excited to hear Joe Tonelli say, “I’ve got to get off the phone. My mouth is killing me.”
Olivia said, “Papa, please get them all out.”
He said, “I am, tomorrow night.”
She said, “What hospital?”
He said, “My dentist is going to extract them in his office, after hours.”
She said, “Give me the phone number.”
He said, “I’ll be out from the gas and out of there in no time.”
She persisted. “I still want the phone number, Papa.”
He said, “Wait a second.” A moment later, he gave it to her and they said good-bye.
Collucci looked at six P.M. on the study clock. He dialed the number, and a PBX operator told him the dentist had left for the day, and the medical complex building would shortly be closing. Collucci wrote down the address of the complex. Then he went to the apartments behind the mansion.
He got Angelo and went to the Rizzo brothers, who were drinking beer and dogging around with their girlfriends in their apartment over Angelo’s.
The Rizzos sent the girls away as soon as Collucci and Angelo showed. Collucci sat with them until midnight, perfecting Tonelli’s scratch-out down to the most minute detail.
• • •
Taylor jailed his mind in his hate hermitage beneath the Zone on the same afternoon that Mario Rizzo picked the lock on an important door. It was the door of a vacant suite on the second floor of the medical building that housed Tonelli’s dentist.
Angelo waited a half block away in the Cougar Collucci used when he secretly backed up Cocio’s execution. Collucci, disguised as Dinzio, and the Rizzos waited impatiently in the empty suite for the building to close and Tonelli’s arrival.
They heard the assistants in Tonelli’s dentist’s office across the hall say good-bye to the last patient of the day. They watched medical practitioners and their aides leave the building and swarm into the parking lot in the rear. Finally, an elderly black man, who was apparently the building custodian, shuffled away across the street.
Shortly, Collucci and the Rizzos saw Tonelli’s Lincoln pull to a stop at a side entrance. Collucci was disturbed by the platinum flash of Consuella’s mane inside the car. Everybody in the building, and all who entered it, would have to be put to sleep. Collucci chewed his bottom lip. He didn’t want to orphan Consuella’s twins. But neither did he want to postpone Tonelli’s execution.
Two penthouse guards got out with Tonelli and Dinzio. Collucci smiled as he watched Dinzio’s arm-waving protest to Tonelli. Tonelli waved the guards back into the car. The chauffeured Lincoln pulled away behind them, carrying Consuella, as they crossed the sidewalk to the side door. Dinzio inserted a key, sent by messenger to the penthouse. They entered the building. Dinzio saw his boss into the dentist’s chair. Then he left the office for a routine walk-around inspection of the building.
The Rizzos listened to the thump of Dinzio’s feet on the rear stairway before they raced from the empty suite on rubber soles down the hallway. They peered down over the railing and sighted silencer-equipped forty-fives down on the top of Dinzio’s head as he paused to light a cigarette on the first-floor landing.
There was a melon-splattering-on-concrete kind of sound the dumdums made smashing in the lid of Dinzio’s skull. The impact sat him down violently on his bottom. Dead. For an instant, he balanced there and swayed limply like a scarecrow in a windstorm. Then he tumbled into a dark heap on the floor.
The Rizzos went back quickly to the dental office just as Collucci stepped inside.
Collucci turned and said, “If he’s under, make one of them bring him out before you . . .”
Collucci went to look at the street. The Rizzos went to the examining room and stood watching the backs of the dentist and his pretty brunette assistant as they gassed Tonelli under. The Rizzos pointed their guns.
Marty Rizzo said, “Keep your mouths shut and bring that guy around, fast.”
The couple spun around and nodded vigorously. The dentist, tremblingly, injected Tonelli with a powerful stimulant. The Rizzos stepped close and pumped neat holes into the backs of the dentist’s and his assistant’s head. They fell forward and shook the floor.
The Rizzos saw Tonelli’s eyelids twitch. They rushed to tell Collucci and covered the street while Collucci went to scratch off Tonelli.
Tonelli’s eyes fluttered open and locked on Collucci’s face, which was Dinzio’s face except for Collucci’s light eyes. At the same time, Tonelli’s tongue explored inside his mouth. He said with great irritation, “My teeth! I still got my goddamn teeth! Get that sonuvabitch back here to my teeth.”
Collucci threw his head back and laughed like Dinzio.
Tonelli frowned and said sharply, “Go on, Dinzio. Obey me!”
Collucci said in his own voice, “Relax, I am here to solve all of your problems.”
Tonelli turned up his still handsome face, composed except for wide eyes staring into Collucci’s.
Tonelli said, “I hope you are not waiting to harm Consuella. She is innocent and a good mother . . . She has also given me much pleasure.”
Collucci remembered that Olivia’s mother had been Tonelli’s first cousin. He said in Sicilian, “A filthy two-headed snake like you could get more pleasure with his sister or his mother in his bed.”
Tonelli’s face was impassive as he tensed and gauged distance for a lunge at Collucci’s Magnum.
Collucci stepped forward quickly and pressed the gun snout against the bridge of Tonelli’s nose. He stage-whispered, “I’ve got a human heart . . . Maybe I won’t pull the trigger if you can move me with some reasons why you should live.”
Tonelli’s upturned face was radiant with contempt. “You expect Giuseppe Tonelli to beg a piece-of-shit punk from the Westside for his life?”
Collucci’s teeth bared as he punched the snout of the gun into the center of Tonelli’s forehead.
Tonelli said softly, “Please, not my face . . . for Consuella and Olivia . . . the funeral.” He pointed a finger over his heart, “Here,” he muttered.
Collucci said, “You haven’t got a heart, cocksucker! That night outside Olivia’s bungalow, you ga
ve your soldati orders to crush my face because we were in love. For that, I will blow out the windows of your dirty soul.”
Instantly, Collucci literally stabbed the gun snout through Tonelli’s right eye socket before he pulled the trigger. Then he stabbed into the left eye and blasted inside the shattered head again. Tonelli flopped about in the chair for a moment. Then he fell back, stilled.
Collucci and the Rizzos left the building through a rear door. Angelo was parked there. They quickly stuffed the corpses of Tonelli and Dinzio into the trunk for burial. Then they crammed into the Cougar, and Angelo pulled away.
Collucci was exhilarated. He glanced at six P.M. on his wrist. Spino, his representative, should at the moment be putting it all together for his dream, in a sit-down with the representatives of dissatisfied Mafiosi in families across country. All waited impatiently to assassinate their way to more power and riches through the establishment of a new, young National Commission.
Angelo glanced back at Collucci’s face. Collucci’s thumb and index finger made a circle for Angelo, that everything was peaches and cream.
But, a window curtain fluttered in a hotel facing the rear of the medical building. Behind the curtain, Barrantino, photographer and wizard of snoop, packed away camera and telescopic lenses. He left the hotel in frantic haste to deliver his pictures and report to Bellini.
24
Collucci boarded a plane for Rome as Bellini’s New York-bound plane moved above a sun-swept ocean of clouds. The plane was jolted for a moment when it dipped through a tidal wave of pearly clumps.
Bellini felt a sweet death wish flutter a thrill in his belly pit. So, let the big bird shake to pieces up here, he thought. My Angelita must be lonely waiting for me to join her.
He sighed. He loved Olivia and Petey so very much. What an ironic pity, he thought, that he must present the death sentence evidence against Jimmy Collucci to the National Commission.
From the beginning, he’d always done everything within his power to bless the life of Jimmy Collucci with success, some power, and money, he thought. Like a father, he had followed and felt the highs and lows in his life. With great pride, he had observed him all through his wedding to Olivia and for years after. And he had been satisfied to note that he kept his union with even the spectacular Olivia properly secondary to his union with the Honored Society.
Like a fond father riffling an album for his favorite still, expressing the most joyously fulfilled moment, Bellini remembered the look on young Collucci’s face that evening he had inducted him into the Honored Society. His face had been ethereal there in the candle glow of the secret ceremony after Bellini had let Collucci’s blood and given him the sacred oath of silence and respect for the Honored Society.
Now, it is my obligation to persuade the Commission Court to entrust me with the responsibility to end Jimmy Collucci’s life for breaking that oath. Perhaps, he mused, he’d strangle life from Jimmy Collucci with his hangman’s knot technique of the hand garrote. Or maybe he’d use a version of what he had called his dish dome technique, since the fulfillment of his maiden contract.
He smiled ruefully to remember his kid pals coined “Dish Dome” as a nickname for him. A half-moon ridge of brass knuckle bone deformed the rear of his skull top. His mother had been rich and invalid. His stepfather had been cute and nineteen. The stepfather hated ten-year-old Bellini. He kept Bellini’s ugly skull shaved clean of camouflaging hair to punish him.
Bellini crept to the living room one quiet midnight and stared down on his stepfather, passed out on the sofa from too much vino. Right then and there, for the first time, he put out a contract, to himself, on his stepfather’s life. He arranged the drunk’s head. Then he had bashed in the back of it with his bone half-moon until the stepfather drifted away in a forever coma.
Bellini smiled as the plane lurched down on Kennedy Airfield. He had set his mother free to enjoy himself, exclusively! The police had glanced at the stepfather’s death. They saw it as just another drunk departed after busting his head open in a fall.
Bellini left the plane and spotted the limousine that would take him to the meeting with the Commission in a back room of a restaurant in Little Italy.
25
Collucci walked on Rome air from the meeting that made his drug dream come true. He had decided to stay in Rome to rest and refine, for a couple of days, his plans.
He would, on his return, arrange to slip on Tonelli’s mantel of power in his own name. He would find and use a clever way to take over the penthouse in Olivia’s name. He would plan and make moves from the Tonelli fortress.
At that moment, Bellini sadly fastened himself into his seat for the return flight to Chicago. He had the granted responsibility to serve the Commission’s death warrant on Collucci.
Only hours after Bellini’s departure did the Commission hack out its major decisions on strategy for handling those traitors, deduced as such, and others already strongly suspected. They agreed to temporarily handcuff the plotters with heavy-handed surveillance and beefed-up protection for the members of the Commission. This was the strategy until Collucci, the apparent strongman of the rebellion, was executed. Then they would seize all suspects and give them a torture lie test. Then justice in the Commission’s Court.
They also agreed to immediately send the most efficient assassin team available to Chicago to back up, if necessary, or carry out the execution if Bellini had not accomplished it within a week.
In Chicago, Olivia had summoned Bellini after she had reached a momentous decision. Bellini hurried to visit Olivia for the second time in the week after he returned from New York.
It was the day after Olivia had held a small private memorial service for Tonelli after Bellini had convinced her Tonelli was dead and buried by Collucci’s hands.
Bellini paid his cabdriver and went up the walk toward Olivia, framed in the open front door. He noticed pieces of Olivia’s and Petey’s luggage stacked at the bottom of the staircase. Olivia greeted him coolly for the first time since he’d known her, he thought.
She led him into the living room. They sat down on the sofa. Bellini watched her read the front page of a newspaper headlined “MAFIA WAR.”
She lifted her eyes and stared accusingly at Bellini. “You, Jimmy . . . and Papa have the money for bonfires. This paper says you . . . the Mafia kill each other in greed . . . for money mostly. Why do you kill, even your friends and relatives, for it when you don’t need it?” Olivia exclaimed.
Bellini dry-spat with violence. Then he said, “Mafia! It’s fabricated media garbage! Take the solemn word of your friend and your spiritual father. No such organization exists in these times.”
The silence lay heavy between them as they stared into each other’s faces.
Bellini’s eyes and voice lowered in reverence as he spoke in a soft monotone. “There does exist an ancient and oppressed honored society of elite Sicilian strongmen who vowed to forcefully conduct and protect their business methods, interests, and families in a corrupt and vicious world. Their enemies plant lies in the press for the pub—”
Olivia’s “Please!” cut Bellini off slack-jawed. “You trusted me and respected my strength and intelligence enough to show me Papa’s death pictures. I’m not a child! I’m a woman!”
Bellini tensed and hawkeyed her as she went to her purse and lit a cigarette. She glanced at Petey napping on the floor across the room on a giant pillow. Then she strode back to the sofa and paced silently before Bellini for a long moment before she burst into a torrent of impassioned words. “I am so ashamed that all of my life I let myself, forced myself, not to realize, not to see yours and Jimmy’s and Papa’s wretched world.”
She paused, and her eyes were on fire when she continued. “I’m liberated from my stupid cocoon of delusion. I’m glad women have declared war on men to force their humanity. I’m thrilled to join that war to save the world’s sanity for our children.
“You went to New York to make sure Jimmy joins Papa
. All of you should be sent to join Papa . . . You are all enemies of sanity . . . of children.”
Bellini flushed scarlet. He got to his feet and faced her. He said, “I will not let you insult me. You are very upset. I am afraid for you.”
He raised his arms to embrace and comfort her, and then stared with his mouth open as she cringed away.
He was hurt to the quick by the fear in her face and her words. “You won’t have to kill me. I’d be too ashamed to admit I’d ever lived with your horror.”
He choked out, “Before I would let myself harm you, dear daughter, I would end my own life.”
She glanced through the window and said, “My cab is here . . .”
He followed her to the front door with a sad face. She opened it and beckoned to the driver.
Bellini said, “Why are you leaving your home in such haste?”
She pursed her lips and said softly, “My conscience wouldn’t let me stay in the Church if I stayed here . . . with him.”
The driver came past them, following Olivia’s finger to the pile of luggage at the bottom of the staircase.
As Olivia went to wake up Petey, she said, “Petey and I need a cleansing.”
They stood staring down at Petey mumbling in his sleep.
Olivia said, “I will use only my mother’s money for Petey and myself . . . their money, Papa’s and Jimmy’s . . . all of it, I’ll return it to the people who need it!”
Petey rode Bellini’s back to the door.
Olivia said, “Our cab can take you to a cabstand.”
Bellini scarcely heard her through the roaring birth of an exciting way to steal Collucci’s life. He mumbled, “I’ll get coffee . . . Lock up before I go . . . alright?”
Olivia nodded and said, “Good-bye and good luck.” She turned away. Petey dismounted and followed her down the walk to the cab.