York. He had a cousin who was made, and the cousin asked the Langustos if they could find something for him. Since the old days, the Langusto family was supposed to take care of Bernie. Maybe it meant something fifty years ago, but since then, it’s been kind of nominal, like the Swiss guards at the Vatican. They still supplied bodyguards, on a regular rotation. So they sent him down to Florida to take some other guy’s place. He didn’t get on Bernie’s nerves, so they left him there for a few years. Then they made him one of their bagmen. He would deliver money to Florida for them—most of it not even in cash—and Bernie would make it disappear. Bernie may have sent him on a few errands, too, but that was it. This was not a guy in training to enter the world of high finance. It was a guy who had to wait six or seven years before anybody would promote him to delivery boy.”
“What about the girl? Maybe she was smarter than she looked. Maybe she was the one who came on to Spoleto, knowing that he could get her into that house.”
“I thought of that, but she didn’t know in advance what was going to happen to Bernie.”
“She didn’t?”
“When our guys got to the house that night, it was about four hours after Bernie got shot. She wasn’t gone. She was still in bed.”
“Then what do you want her for?”
Delfina brought his lower lip over the upper one, then down again in a little shrug. “I think she can’t help but know something. She saw people come and go. Maybe they wouldn’t mean anything to her, but they would to me. But what she knows for sure is what happened before Bernie left for Detroit. It wasn’t normal. For years, Bernie barely went outside. I think somebody called him, or sent him a ticket or something, and I’d like to know who.”
“Why not Danny Spoleto? If he was a bagman, he must have brought briefcases full of money and stuff into the house—all for Bernie’s eyes only.”
“Maybe,” said Delfina. “But we just caught him when he didn’t expect us. The guys searched him, searched the bags, searched the room. They didn’t find anything that showed he had access to serious money. Bernie the Elephant might have carried a hundred account numbers in his head, but you can’t tell me this bodyguard did. So even if he had something to do with setting Bernie up, he didn’t end up with any way of getting at the money.”
“The girl? Nobody searched her. She might be carrying it for him.”
“That’s as good a reason as any to look for her.”
“She’s all we’ve got,” Caporetto agreed.
“Except that we don’t have her anymore,” Delfina reminded him. “We’ve got her picture, right?”
“Yeah. When they hired her, they told her it was for a work permit. She didn’t know any better.”
“Okay,” said Delfina. “Here’s what we do. First thing is, nobody in this family knows anything about Danny Spoleto. As far as the other families know, we didn’t find him, and we didn’t kill him, and it never occurred to us to look for a girl. Second, I want a full-court press on finding her fast. As of right now, nobody has anything to do but find her. Get the picture copied, and make it look like one of those mailers they send out: ‘Girl missing from her home since June twenty-third,’ and give a phone number that’s got nothing to do with us.”
“Okay,” said Caporetto.
“And what else do we know about her? Where’s she from? What family has she got?”
“She grew up in northern Florida. The only relative she’s got is her mother. Her name is Ann Shelford, and she’s doing five in Florida State Penitentiary at Starke.”
“For what?”
“Peddling meth,” he said. “Turns out it was ours, actually. Just a coincidence. Some of that stuff from the lab in California.”
Delfina nodded. “Find a couple of people inside that we can use. I want her watched. I want somebody reading her mail, listening to her phone calls. I want somebody at her elbow all the time.”
Caporetto nodded. “We’re already working on it. As soon as the girl disappeared, that was the best guess as to where she was going first.” He added, “We’re still looking for boyfriends or just girls she used to hang out with, but nothing has come up yet.” He waited for a moment for what Delfina was going to say next, but he got the familiar cold stare that always made him feel as though Delfina were a machine that had suddenly turned itself off. He hurried to the door of the garage and slipped out.
Delfina went out through the work room and shut the door. He picked up a bouquet of roses lying on the table, then moved through the shop carrying them. He paused in the darkened room and looked out the front window, up and down the street. He hated the inside of the florist business. The cutting rooms always smelled like the biggest funeral in the world was in progress. He had not been in this building in three years, and would never have come except that it was the only safe place he owned in Niagara Falls. After a moment he was satisfied that there was nobody in a car watching the door. He slipped out and locked the door behind him.
As he walked off carrying the roses, he breathed in and out rapidly and deeply, then forced a cough to clear his lungs of pollen and perfume. He looked around again to be sure he wasn’t under surveillance, dropped the flowers into a trash can, then got into the car he had rented and drove off alone toward his hotel. In the silence, he had time to think.
In the settlement after the failed coup twelve years ago, Castiglione had been forced into exile in Arizona, and his holdings had been crudely split up. Tommy DeLuca had gotten the Castiglione territory that amounted to half of Chicago, and Frank Delfina had gotten all the far-flung enterprises, the feelers that Castiglione had been extending outward for years before he made his failed attempt to gobble up his rivals. People still talked about the inequality of the partition: DeLuca had inherited an only slightly diminished empire, and Delfina had gotten an illusion—laughable assets like a flower business in Niagara Falls, a few radio stations in places like Omaha and Reno, a bakery in California. The partition had satisfied the coalition of families that had assembled against Castiglione: no single man would retain the power to harm them.
What nobody seemed to have known was that DeLuca had won the right to preside over a dying carcass. The old neighborhood-based mob that controlled city blocks and paid off the cops in the precinct and depended on enterprises like bookmaking on sports and moving stolen TV sets was dying before he and DeLuca were born. What DeLuca had inherited was the tentative loyalty of three hundred men with rap sheets who needed to be fed and kept occupied, and the attention of a variety of state and federal agencies that had been invented in the last generation for the sole purpose of harassing the publicity-cursed Chicago families.
Delfina had left Chicago within two days of the Commission’s ruling and begun to learn. He had taken a lesson from conglomerates, and begun to slowly, quietly, build the enterprises he had. He didn’t buy out his competitors. He starved them to death, then bought up their facilities and customer lists for practically nothing. He studied the suppliers and services his businesses used, induced them to borrow money so they could expand and meet his companies’ needs, then canceled the contracts. In a year he could buy them for the price of their loans.
The distance between his various businesses had made other people assume there was no way he could do anything with them. The distance had been full of advantages. He could move anything—money, people, contraband—from Niagara Falls to Reno, or Omaha to Los Angeles in trucks registered to corporations. When they got there, he could make even the trucks disappear into the fleets of other businesses. He could transfer profits from one company to another: declare income in states that had no income tax, report sales where there was no sales tax, or sell things to himself at a loss and write off the loss. He could do anything the big corporations did.
He had begun early to construct a culture that would separate his men from the old attachments to particular neighborhoods and the families that had run them for generations. What he had been given to work with was a small cadre of displaced Castiglione soldiers like Caporetto. If he had dispensed with them at the beginning, he knew, he would not have lasted a month. He had needed to find a new way to use them.
He paid them extravagantly, gave them praise and assurances, then split them up and sent them to regions as far apart as possible. He let them recruit new, younger men and assigned the trainees as overseers of his businesses. He rotated the young men regularly from one part of the country to another, the way major corporations did. They never stayed settled long enough in a single city to be tied to it. Within a year or two they knew all the cities well enough to navigate them comfortably, and by the end of the second cycle, they were experts. Each of them had spent some time working for all of Delfina’s underbosses, and their loyalty was to the only constant he permitted them: Delfina.
For Delfina, the scattered and diverse nature of his holdings provided various forms of security. He could count on the predictable, quasi-legitimate profits of his visible companies to pay his people. If one industry or region
