Cold Fury

The morning officially began with sunlight tiptoeing through the caged windows of the warehouse, throwing crisscross shadows on the cement floor, but by then I’d been up for hours. Waking early is what I do and who I’ve become out of fear and necessity. My brain, which clicks off at night like a low battery and pops back on when it’s recharged, is especially active at the very start of a day. Conscious while the rest of the world sleeps, I make decisions, filter facts, and steel my gut for what lies ahead.

Today I began at four a.m.

I did a hundred push-ups on the cold floor and a hundred sit-ups.

Afterward I cracked the notebook, searching for guidance.

First I learned that the Bird Cage Club, where I was scheduled to meet Knuckles and his counterpart, Strozzini, was located at the very top of an old skyscraper in the Loop, on the thirty-third floor. It provided a general location (but oddly, no address) and a warning-never enter through the main entrance, only through a Capone Door hidden in the adjoining barbershop. Next, I studied the chapter titled “Loro-Them,” which explained in detail the many different groups regarded as a threat to the Outfit and how to avoid or neutralize them. It includes sections on the police (“Bribing a Cop”), the FBI (“Planting a Mole”), methods to avoid prison sentences (“Feigning Insanity and Faking Cancer”), dealing with rats (“Dead”), and on and on. Each section echoed Doug’s advice-when all else fails, take the fight to loro-them.

At seven a.m. I was parked down the street from my house.

Balmoral Avenue was deserted and the streetlights buzzed off.

The.45 was freshly loaded and I flicked the safety on.

The homes on my street are too tall and far apart to travel from roof to roof, like at the bakery. Cutting through the backyard meant an exposed patch of grass, and besides, there was no way I was going through those dark cellar doors again. In the end, there were no safe options to approaching the house-it was all risky-so I lifted the gun, crossed the street, and walked up to the front door. I was prepared to kick it off its hinges and enter swinging, but there was no need-it pushed open easily. I hadn’t been inside my home since I’d fled from Ski Mask Guy in the pouring rain. Now I had a gun, and more than that, a dangerously low tolerance for bullshit. Uncle Buddy and Greta had taken over our house-our damn house! — and they were now going to tell me everything they knew about my family, or else. Any anxiety I’d felt about shooting that freak had vanished like smoke up a chimney.

I entered imitating a cop flick, looking left to right with the.45 raised in both hands, and froze.

What I saw was a funhouse deja vu of the last time I walked through the door-complete disarray-except that there were no longer any signs of violence. The shades were drawn, curtains pulled, and the odor of old socks and dead cigarettes was pervasive. Yawning pizza boxes and greasy carryout cartons competed with crushed beer cans and empty liquor bottles, with ashtrays overflowing on every surface.

Just like last time, noise cut through the gloom.

It was clearly a voice; talking, stopping, repeating itself.

There was desperation in it, and it was on TV.

I walked over to the big flat screen where I’d watched so many movies with my family and recognized the scene immediately-one man, lanky and drawn, spread out on a chaise lounge, raging helplessly at a smaller, darker man who stood by watching coolly. The DVD was stuck, playing over and over again, with the man on the chaise saying, “I’m your older brother, I was stepped over!. . I’m your older brother, I was stepped over!. . I’m your older brother, I was stepped over!. .”

I lifted the remote control and pushed a button, the scene went forward, and the smaller man said quietly, “It’s the way Pop wanted it.”

The lanky man clawed at the air around him, jittery and pissed, saying, “It wasn’t the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I’m not dumb, Christ, like everyone says! I’m smart. . and I want respect!”

That scene in The Godfather, Part II, is the reckoning between the younger brother, who has taken control of the Mafia, and his older brother, who was passed by-the exact opposite of my dad’s and Uncle Buddy’s relationship. There was a stink of fantasy to it, as if my uncle had been obsessively staring at what he hoped for. I turned it off and the screen went black, further darkening the room. In the sudden quiet I heard the tink of cutlery. I checked the gun and moved toward the kitchen door, which I opened silently to Uncle Buddy sitting alone at the table, shoveling cereal into his unshaven face. A box of Froot Loops sat to his right, a half-drunk bottle of vodka to his left, and a burning cigarette in an ash-packed coffee cup before him. I pointed the gun at him and the motion drew his attention. He looked up, bleary-eyed, and said, “Greta left me.”

I held the kill-shot position just like I’d seen in movies, uttering the only thing that occurred to me. “Greta’s smarter than I thought.”

Uncle Buddy nodded slowly. “I deserve that,” he muttered, in a voice that was sincere and bitter and completely wasted. “I ruined it. I ruin everything.”

“Where are my parents and Lou?”

“You know what Greta told me before she took off? She said, ‘Even if you had gotten your hands on that notebook, you would have screwed it up!’ She spit at me and said, ‘Your old man and your brother were right, Benito. . you were born to mix dough!’” He took a swig of vodka and said, “So, anyway. At least she gave me the ring back. I wonder where I put it. .”

“Uncle Buddy,” I said, feeling the blue flame flicker and ignite, filling me from the pit of my stomach to the tip of my brain with a cold fury that strongly advised a bullet to his booze-blasted skull. The ghiaccio furioso was so powerful and alive that it threatened to take me over completely, sending sharp little electrical volts to urge on my trigger finger. Maybe it was because I’d once loved Uncle Buddy and now hated him, or because the terror he’d caused me now seemed so small and cowardly, but this time I held on to the cold fury and focused it behind my eyes, controlling it rather than being controlled by it. I said it again, “Uncle Buddy,” and when he looked up at me, what he saw looking back registered on his puffy face in an awful way.

“No, please,” he said, shaking his head. “Not you too.”

“Where are they?” I said, moving toward him. He shrunk back into the chair, cowering, until I was standing over him. “Look at me,” I said. “Look at me right now and tell the truth. You don’t have a choice.”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled at the table. “That dog, what’s-his-name. .”

“Harry?”

“He was here, hanging around, like he was waiting for Lou.”

Or me, I thought, and I’d suddenly had enough of this mumblefest. I grabbed a handful of greasy hair and yanked it back until his unwilling eyes, wide and wet, locked on mine. “Where are they?” I said, so calmly that it sounded dead to my own ears.

He stared at me, and I saw what he feared most.

It was himself, not old and alone, but worse-young and alone.

It was Uncle Buddy, not hated, but forgotten.

He paused, jaw trembling, and said, “I swear I don’t know where they are! I swear to God!”

“What about the government? Did my dad make some kind of deal?” I said, remembering Uncle Buddy’s confrontation with him, how he’d implied that he had spied on my father’s voice- and e-mail.

Uncle Buddy was crumbling under my gaze, looking paler and more translucent by the second. His mouth was wet and sloppy when he said, “I picked up the other line at the bakery. There was a woman on the phone, real official sounding, saying something to your dad about ‘coming in safely’ and ‘guaranteed anonymity.’ And the letter. . the letter was just a list of towns and cities. .”

“Where we could relocate,” I said to myself.

“But the government?” Uncle Buddy stammered. “The government doesn’t take in witnesses by tearing apart a house like I found this place.” He was shaking now, sucking air like a beached whale, and said, “Please. . I don’t know anything.”

“You know about the notebook,” I said, feeling frost on my tongue.

“My pop and Anthony, they used to have this weird language, like a pig Latin that wasn’t English and only sort of Italian,” he said, swallowing thickly. “They’d use it when they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about. Except one time, right before my pop died, I was hiding in the broom closet. And I overheard him and Anthony talking about it in plain old Italian, explaining that it contains potenza ultima. .