18

Di Titulo sat in the airplane for over an hour beside Al Castananza listening to engine sounds. The second in command, Castananza’s old friend Tony Saachi, had told Di Titulo the rules while he was waiting in the car for the old man to collect his things. He had said it impersonally, in an even, genial tone. People like Di Titulo were not expected to speak except to answer questions. They would go where they were told and do as they were told, and, if all went well, they would come home. If they said things in public, they might not.

Di Titulo had asked, “Do you think it’s really necessary for me to come at all?”

Tony Saachi had smiled; his long spade-shaped teeth looked ghastly and his face was a skull. “Al likes you. It’s a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

“If he goes and you’re here, then whoever blew up your car takes another crack at you. These bomb things are embarrassing. I would guess this time maybe they’d throw a bag over your head and run a chain saw through the bag. They won’t do anything if you’re with Al.”

Di Titulo stared at the headrest of the seat in front of him. He heard Saachi’s voice from a distance. “You should have been with us in ’87 when the Castiglione thing broke. Nearly two hundred guys went, just like that, in one night.”

He spent the flight with the earphones in his ears and the sound turned off, considering the strangeness of fortune. He could remember when he was a kid, thinking about the rich and powerful people who seemed to him to actually run the city. He used to picture them sitting around a big poker table in a smoke-filled room like the ones where people said deals were made. There would be the owner of the Indians, the owner of the Browns, the mayor, a couple of presidents of big companies that signed every third father’s paycheck, and Big Al Castananza. That was what the papers used to call him in those days, before it had become more fashionable to use quotation marks. Now they said Alphonse “Big Al” Castananza, 69: always his age, as though they were counting the days until he died. Di Titulo had never been this close to him before, so the celebrity still affected him. He leaned away into the aisle to stay out of accidental competition for the armrest between them, and after an hour, his spine felt as though it had been rotated a full turn at the pelvis.

When the plane landed in Pittsburgh, he followed Castananza to a pay telephone and watched him not dial it. A man wearing aviator glasses who looked a little like a pilot stepped up and stood beside him, then ushered Castananza along the concourse without ever looking at Di Titulo.

They took the elevator to the ground floor and stepped out to the curb. A car with tinted glass pulled up at their feet and they were in motion before Di Titulo noticed that the man had not come with them. The driver never spoke, and didn’t appear to look at the two men in the back seat. Di Titulo watched Castananza’s face. As they passed under street lamps, a stripe of light would move down it and then leave it immersed in darkness again. Castananza’s small eyes were directed forward in a sleepy gaze, as though he were unaware that anyone was looking. The jowls spilled over the rim of the stiff white collar, and his jaw was loose, not tight and working like Di Titulo’s.

Several unwelcome hypotheses flickered to life in Di Titulo’s mind. Maybe the old man wasn’t looking at him because the purpose of the trip was to deliver him for execution. Maybe the old man’s summons had been intended to bring them both for execution. No, the old man must know when an invitation was real and when it wasn’t. But how could he know? Bosses were killed all the time.

Slowly, the conclusion began to seem inevitable. Castananza couldn’t know. The small, unmoving eyes looked like the glass-bead eyes of a stuffed animal. He had been in this position for thirty-five years, and he had learned to live with it—no, learned to get along without actually living. He had known since the beginning that any time he stepped through a doorway, the muzzle might already be pointed at him, so he had killed off that part of his brain. Di Titulo began to sweat.

Di Titulo wondered what he himself looked like to observers. He might very well look like a bodyguard. What else could he be? They would take him down first, and he would never see it coming. He grasped for a hint of hope. Maybe he would never even feel it.

The car seemed to be slowing down, so he looked over the driver’s shoulder as it pulled up to the curb. There seemed to be nothing around here—the parking lot of a plaza behind them, a row of unlighted store windows across the street, a trash can. Castananza got out, so Di Titulo got out and joined him on the sidewalk while the car pulled away. Castananza turned to look up the street, looked at his watch, then looked down the street, but he seemed to have no impulse to say anything.

The bus grew out of the darkness like an approaching locomotive. The only way that Di Titulo could even discern the shape was by forcing his mind to fill in the space between the bright headlights and the lighted marquee above the windshield that bore the single word CHARTER. The bus glided to the curb with a hiss, and Di Titulo tried to see inside, but the windows were smoked glass that looked opaque. The flat, featureless side of the bus was painted a glossy dark color that simply reflected distant street lamps but seemed to have no quality of its own. As he followed Castananza to the steps, he looked to his left three times, but still could not tell whether it was more gray, or green, or blue.

The door wheezed shut behind him, and the bus began immediately to accelerate while he was still wedged on the bottom step. The driver was another man like the one at the airport. He was in his thirties and had close-cropped hair and an unmemorable, expressionless pilot face. He ran up through the gears with precise, effortless motions that made him look like an automaton.

The bus reached cruising speed and it was easier to stand, so Castananza climbed the rest of the way to the aisle. Di Titulo stepped up after him. As his head came high enough to see over the first seat, he looked toward the back of the bus. There were about five rows of empty seats, but beyond them, at the rear of the bus, the normal seats ended and there were two long bench seats, like enormous couches, and a long table in the aisle. There were men sitting around it.

Castananza moved down the aisle to the back, and as he went farther, Di Titulo could see past him. There were a few faces he had seen before. There were the Langusto brothers, Phil and Joe. He recognized John Augustino, and a man named DeLuca from one of the Chicago families. There was one he knew everyone had seen, because it had been in magazines for thirty years. It was Giovanni “Chi-chi” Tasso of New Orleans. The man with him must be his son—what was his name?—Peter? Yes, Peter.

Castananza’s approach was acknowledged with friendly mutterings: “Good to see you, Al,” and “Mr. Castananza,” from the younger ones. Castananza stopped at the head of the table and held himself steady by wrapping a beefy hand around the overhead bar. “This is our friend Paul Di Titulo,” he said.

Some of the men seated around the table nodded vaguely at Di Titulo. A few others stared at him for a couple of heartbeats, not in greeting but as though they were memorizing his face. Castananza said pointedly, “He’s like my left arm.” Di Titulo’s breath caught in his throat. It was a lie. But the others seemed to take no interest in him.

“What do you think of my bus?” It was John Augustino from Pittsburgh.

Castananza looked around himself critically, glanced in the direction of the bathroom door, fiddled with the drink holder in the seat beside him, then peered up at the television set built into the wall above the space where the back window should have been. He shrugged. “Seems like a nice bus. You make anything off it?”

“Business is just so-so. I bought five of them. I do pretty fair during the football season if the Steelers are doing good. Off-season, I do runs to Atlantic City. But five is too many. You want to think about buying one, you talk to me. I’ll give it to you at cost.”

Castananza answered, “If the Steelers get their ass kicked, I’ll give you a call.” A few of the men around the bus looked up with little smiles. “Then you’ll give me one below cost.”

Di Titulo felt a little better. The bus wasn’t some weird, ghostly death ship. It was just part of a business. Di Titulo felt comfortable in the world of business. It was all simple, straightforward propositions and simple responses. Everybody’s motive was the same, and how passionate it was could be measured in numbers.

Di Titulo felt the bus slowing down again, and he looked past the Langusto brothers at the lights outside the tinted windows. The bus came to a stop at the curb, the door opened, and Di Titulo held his breath.

The three men who climbed aboard were frightening. The first looked like a professional wrestler, with a flat, pushed-in nose and a mouth that seemed to begin just under his ears and stretch six inches in a horizontal line. The two young men who came after were wearing jeans and windbreakers like teenagers, and they scanned the bus and the street behind them like Secret Service men. Di Titulo had no trouble inducing a premonition of these two pivoting to spray the back of the bus with bullets, but they simply followed the big man as he walked back.

The wrestler stopped and his big frog mouth opened. He spoke politely to the older men. He said, “Chi-chi, Al, John, Joe, Phil.” To the others he said, “Hi, guys.” He stepped aside. “These are my cousins, Mitch and Steve Molinari.”

The big man had to be Salvatore Molinari from New York. Di Titulo noted that the two young men were given the same unenthusiastic stare that he had received, but not Molinari. The bus was beginning to fill up with extremely important people. The gathering of these men was like the building up of an enormous electrical charge, and Di Titulo felt uneasy as the bus stopped again and again. It began to seem to him that the bus would burn up, or the universe would seek to equalize this intense concentration of power in a bolt of lightning that would incinerate him.

As the bus moved from stop to stop, the talk among the notables was idle banter with obscure references to subjects Di Titulo knew nothing about. He noticed that the younger men seldom spoke, but smiled or chuckled politely when the bosses did. Finally the bus began to build up speed in increments that could only indicate a sustained stretch of open road.

John Augustino stood up in the aisle at the end of the table and said, “I’d like to thank you all for coming. The bus is going to keep moving while we talk. That way nobody can do much overhearing with a directional mike. It’s been swept for bugs, and we’ve got cars ahead and behind to watch for cops. If we can ever talk, now is the time.” He paused and looked somber. “I know we all share regret at the death of Bernie the Elephant. I think now is the time to express regrets of my own. It was my father who brought Bernie into our thing fifty years ago, and I apologize to each of you for what happened.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The bored, ironic tone shocked Di Titulo. He turned and saw that it was Victor Catania, from New York. “Bernie’s dead, and you’re sorry.” Two or three of the younger men stiffened, their shoulders flexed down from their necks, and their hands suddenly looked very empty. But Catania paid no attention. He adopted a parody of Augustino’s master-of-ceremonies tone. “And let me take this heartfelt opportunity to say I told you so. And I told Bernie so, too. I had computer experts, I had everything set. Everything he knew could have been on disks by now, but the old bastard thought he was immortal. First, he had to take time to get everybody’s permission, he had to have time to collect his thoughts, he had to be sure everybody was happy.”

“It wasn’t his fault that he got shot, Victor,” said DeLuca.

Catania rolled his eyes. “So he got shot. The man was seventy-two years old. If it wasn’t that, it would have been a coronary.” Di Titulo noticed that the slim, erect Catania had not taken wine like the others. He was drinking bottled water.

Molinari said, “He’s dead, and when we’re through talking, he’ll still be dead. I could have gone across town to hear Catania say he told me so. I thought I got invited here because somebody had a plan.”

It was Phil Langusto who spoke. “Let’s get to that. From the beginning, we all assumed that nobody dropped the hammer on Bernie without thinking he had a way to get to that money.”

The others considered the statement self-evident, so only a few nodded or mumbled affirmative words.

“And everybody was watching to see the minute when any big money got moved. We’ve had a lot of cooperation, a lot of tips. And today seems to be the day. Big money is moving.” Langusto paused. “Only it ain’t all moving in one direction.”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Catania.

“It’s complicated,” said Langusto. “My brother can probably explain it better.”

Joe Langusto cleared his throat. “Here’s what we’ve seen so far. Somebody, somehow, got a list of the accounts where our money was stashed. The accounts are being closed.”

Catania interrupted. “If you know it’s our accounts, why couldn’t you take it first?”

“We didn’t know,” said Joe Langusto. “You got a guy inside a brokerage. He notices a sell order on a big account. It’s been there since the fifties, and it’s got nine million in it. Because he belongs to us, he runs a credit check on the account owner. Besides this nine million, this man has got nothing. He’s got no record of charging anything, because he’s never had any credit cards. He has no driver’s license, no car registered to him. Pretty soon you realize you’re looking at a man who never existed. But the money is already gone.”

DeLuca said, “Nine million? That’s not necessarily ours. It could be some civilian.”

“We’ve found a lot of these guys over the past few days. The money goes to a bank, then to some strange place—a corporation, some nonprofit organization. We’ve been trying to hunt down the accounts, find out where the money is going from there. So far we’re not up with it. My guys tell me it’s the kind of thing where it takes months to follow the trail, and when you lose it at any point, you’re done. We don’t need anybody’s help to do the tracing, but we’re picking up odd things. Al, I think you found one.”

“Yeah,” said Castananza. “My guy Di Titulo found something.” He looked at Di Titulo. “Tell them.”

Di Titulo had been rankling at the little lecture. Listening to Joe Langusto was like listening to all the New Yorkers he had ever met. Everything there was bigger, better, and closer to the action. Everybody else was a yokel. And these bosses were worse. Catania, the Langustos, Molinari all spoke with the assurance that each of their families was big—four or five hundred instead of sixty or eighty—and there were five of them in one city. But when he heard his name, his resentment turned to fright.

He straightened. “I’m on the board of a charity in Cleveland. Today they got a donation of four million, which is about a year’s goal. The money came from a man named Ronald Wilmont. I tried all afternoon to get information about him, but couldn’t find any. I called a few other charities, and every one I called had gotten a big donation today from some person or group they never heard of.”

“My dog had fifty fleas today,” Catania announced. “So did all the other dogs in the neighborhood.”

“I don’t get it,” said Molinari. “What the hell is going on?”

Catania smirked. “Nothing. Forget it. You got a year with big ups and downs in the stock and bond markets. The big ups, people make money. The big downs come because they sell. When they do, they got to pay taxes on the profits. So they take a charitable deduction.”

DeLuca had been lost in thought. “I’m not so sure. Four million to some charity in Cleveland is nothing. You’re right. But I got a little story too. I’ve got a construction company. My Chicago office got a call today from a guy who ferrets out jobs for me. The Red Cross has been talking about a new building for ten years. Today, they say they have the money in hand, and they’re preparing specs. An hour later, I get a call about renovating an old building for a Boys and Girls Club.”

“More fleas in Chicago,” said Catania. “Look, I’m as sure as anybody that our money is going to start moving eventually. But when it does, it’s not going to a charity in Cleveland.”

Di Titulo took a chance and spoke. “May I say one more thing?”

Nobody responded, but Catania watched him with suppressed amusement.

“There are a lot of reasons why they might do something like this.”

“Such as?” Catania looked eager. Di Titulo decided he was waiting to prove Di Titulo was an idiot—a small-town idiot.

“One is just what you said—the IRS. I don’t know how much money Bernie the Elephant was holding, but this might be a way to launder it. You have fake people donate it to a fake foundation. The fake foundation hands five percent of it to a real charity. Maybe it pays ten percent to a phony management company that owns the building it doesn’t occupy, ten to an advertising company that’s supposed to bring in new donations, twenty-five percent to imaginary employees, fifty percent to fake charities. You end up with ninety-five percent of the money, because it never left your hands. The imaginary donor owes no taxes: he gave it all to charity. The foundation has met federal standards by a mile. They only have to give away five percent a year. The best part is, it’s July. Nobody has to file any papers until next April.”

The men in the bus were suddenly animated. Advisers and counselors whispered to bosses in muffled tones. Finally, Molinari began to scowl. “You know a hell of a lot about this stuff, don’t you?”

Di Titulo’s heart stopped for a moment, then began again at a quicker tempo. He could think of nothing to say.

Al Castananza shrugged his big shoulders to settle into his seat more comfortably. “That’s one of the things I have on my mind. Somebody blew up Di Titulo’s new Caddy today. I would like to say two things. The first is that nobody in my organization killed Bernie or moved any of the money. Killing my people doesn’t help anybody.” The men in the bus watched him in silence, as though stricken by a common paralysis. “The second is that if anybody wants to play with bombs, I got guys who can do that kind of work too.” His eyes flicked to Catania and bored into him. “I got one who could drop the Empire State Building so the top hit Thirty-ninth Street.”

Catania held up both hands and shook his head. “Hey! Al! I didn’t do that.”

“I did,” muttered DeLuca. He focused his eyes on Castananza. “I apologize. I had a tip.” The apology had nothing to do with Di Titulo.

The air in the bus seemed to retain a steamy quality, but some of the men squirmed and shuffled their feet, as though the tension was dispersing. There was a sudden, deep growl, and Di Titulo involuntarily followed it with his eyes. It had come from the big chest of Chi-chi Tasso. He was the oldest man in the bus, a massive lump of fat settled in the wide rear seat, and it had not been clear that he had been listening. He said, “That’s why I’m here too. I lost a guy a week ago. It made me sick. This isn’t the first time we started killing each other for nothing.”

Augustino spoke. “You’re right, Chi-chi. Let’s not turn on each other. The one behind it is obvious. Bernie gets shot in Detroit, and this bagman, Danny Spoleto, who used to be his bodyguard, disappears. So does the maid at his house in Florida. I had two guys there the day after they left.”

Tasso gave a deep laugh. “What good are they? You could have read it in the papers like I did.”

Molinari said, “I had some guys waiting in Spoleto’s old neighborhood. He never showed up.”

Tasso muttered, “You two should get together and look for some new guys.” There was a nervous chuckle in the bus.

Phil Langusto said, “Has somebody eliminated Vincent Ogliaro? I mean, this happened in Detroit, right?”

Catania smirked. “He’s in jail.”

Langusto snorted. “I know. And when you were in jail, you never ordered a hit, did you?”

Catania said, “His mother got killed in this thing. You think he set it up to kill his own mother?”

Langusto said, “I don’t know. What the hell was she doing at the airport?”

Tasso cleared his throat. “Let me tell you something about Vincent Ogliaro.” He looked at the men around him. “He does things himself—like his father. You’re lucky his father isn’t alive to hear this. Mickey Ogliaro would have taken your arm off and beat you to death with it.”

“I don’t think Ogliaro did it either,” said Catania. “It has to be Danny Spoleto.”

Tasso looked at Catania with pity, then spoke to the others. “Of all the dumb talk I’ve heard since I moved to New Orleans, this is right up there with ‘The South will rise again.’ Listen to what these guys are saying. All this money is moving here and there: you can barely follow it yourself. This kid was a bodyguard, a pair of eyes with a gun attached. If Bernie got his throat cut and he had a million in cash lying around the house that ain’t there anymore, you look for a bodyguard.”

Catania was offended. “You say Phil’s stupid to go after Ogliaro. I’m stupid to go after the bodyguard. Who do you think is moving all this money around?”

Tasso said, “I think Bernie found Jesus.”

“I think Jesus found Bernie,” snapped Catania.

“It’s not a joke.” Tasso’s angry stare silenced the laughter. “You said before that Bernie was old enough to know that he was going to die even without a bullet. He sure as hell was. I think it’s just possible that Bernie gave all our money away.”

“He’s dead, Chi-chi.”

“He was perfectly capable of setting all this up in advance.”

“And then what? Did he fly to Detroit and shoot himself six times?”

“I’m saying that you look around for who has our money and you come up with a bodyguard. You come up with Vincent Ogliaro, who is a tough son of a bitch, but no mastermind. You come up with Al’s bookkeeper in Cleveland. You think a guy who just stole billions of dollars is going to buy himself a Cadillac?”

Di Titulo was stung, but this was not a good time to claim that he was more than a bookkeeper.

Tasso looked around him at the men on the bus. “The only one we know with absolute certainty could move this money around is the only one you don’t think of: Bernie Lupus. He moved it around in the first place. He knew where all of it was, he knew what names he used when he put it there.”

Phil Langusto’s expression was so respectful that Di Titulo could see that the only thing behind it could be sarcasm. “Chi-chi,” he said quietly. “I’m just not sure how Jesus is implicated.”

Tasso shrugged his shoulders so his pendulous belly bounced. “You think I’m old and crazy. Maybe I am. I can tell you, after my triple bypass, I had a bout of that myself. They gave me the last rites a couple of times. I had a lot of strange thoughts in that intensive care unit. And Bernie—who knows what might have been going through his head? Some weird holy-roller religion, maybe. What do we know? He was some kind of Polack.”

“They’re Catholics,” said Molinari.

“The Pope is a Polack,” DeLuca added helpfully.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Tasso. “I think that the only possibility I’ve heard that makes sense is that Bernie set this up before he died. Everybody’s saying he must have written it down somewhere, or it couldn’t be moving now. So am I. I don’t know why he would. Maybe it was just that somebody pissed him off with some scheme like replacing him with a computer.” His eyes passed across Catania and then to the others. “If we don’t know where he put our own money, how does anybody else know?”

Phil Langusto shrugged. “That’s what we’ve got to find out.”

Suddenly, Molinari spoke. “Where’s Frank Delfina?” Di Titulo saw several heads turn to face Molinari, but others were looking around the bus, as though they were searching for Delfina in vain. Molinari raised his eyebrows. “Well, shouldn’t he be here?”

DeLuca drew himself up straight. “I’m here,” he said. “I didn’t think there was any reason to invite more of my guys than necessary.”

Molinari’s eyes shot to Tasso—not in puzzlement, Di Titulo saw, but in silent communication.

Tasso said, “That wasn’t the deal the Commission set up, Tommy. He’s not part of your family anymore. He should be here. Everybody should be here who laid off money with Bernie.”

DeLuca could see that his response had put him in danger. He shrugged. “I didn’t mean I told him not to come. Like you said, he’s got his own family now. I just meant, I didn’t invite him myself. This isn’t my meeting.”

Tasso turned to Langusto. “Did anybody invite him?”

Phil Langusto looked at his brother, then at John Augustino, then back at the rest of the men. “We’ll check on it.” He took a deep breath, to signal that he wanted to change the subject. “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re trying to reach a conclusion, and we don’t have to. All we’ve got to do is stop this before it goes any farther.”

Joe Langusto said, “Nobody seems to know how much money it is. I remember our father telling us it was at least a billion dollars when we were kids. To be conservative, let’s say it’s five by now. If there’s anything any of you can do in the next week or two that will bring in that much extra money, go ahead. What we’d like to do is get it back.”

“How are we going to do that?” asked DeLuca.

“We turn up the heat. Do everything at once. We look for any sign that more money is on the move. If there’s five billion, the really big stuff hasn’t budged yet. We put people on tracing all of these charity donations that already showed up back to their source.”

Al Castananza said, “This isn’t any different from what we’ve been doing.”

Joe Langusto answered, “We’ve got more to work with now. We don’t ignore any theory, any possibility. Some people think Ogliaro is involved. So let’s watch his guys. See who visits him, have people on his cell block keep an eye on him. He might be able to order a hit without anybody noticing, but he can’t run money all over the place without attracting some attention.”

Catania sighed in weary resignation.

Di Titulo kept him in the corner of his eye, but didn’t let it be known that he was watching him.

Phil Langusto said, “Some people think that Danny Spoleto was involved. So let’s look harder for him, too.” Di Titulo watched him hold up a photograph that had been blown up from a snapshot. Di Titulo could see a clean-cut, athletic-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties. He was positive that he would not have recognized him again in five minutes.

Langusto continued, “There’s the maid.” He held up another photograph. “This is the shot we had taken of her when she came to work for Bernie.” Di Titulo could see an enlarged shot of a girl with shoulder-length, stringy blond hair. She looked younger than his own daughter. She was just a child. He waited for somebody to say something—someone strong and powerful—but nobody interrupted Phil Langusto’s monologue.

“We’ve got five thousand copies of each of these pictures. What we want to do is cover the country. We’ve already got guys in airports and a few hotels. What we’d like to do is have everybody out looking—every made guy, every stringer, every wanna-be.”

Al Castananza frowned. “Are you thinking we’re going to find the two of them together?”

Langusto shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but some are more likely than others. I think that if somebody’s mailing letters with checks in them, it ain’t Vincent Ogliaro, and it sure as hell ain’t the ghost of Bernie.”

Di Titulo sat still as the bosses around him accepted stacks of pictures and their bodyguards and lieutenants and coat holders stowed them in flight bags and briefcases. Di Titulo had not felt motion sickness since he was a child, but he felt it now. He looked at the window across from his seat. He could see the dim shapes of trees slipping past and, far away, fixed lights that were no bigger than stars. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.