that the mother of the head of the family had died the same day. Maybe she had been killed because she knew something.
The older generation had gotten very attached to Bernie Lupus, before anyone had known any better. He had kept some of their money safe from the government, and from one another, for a long time. When one of them wanted a million bucks for some emergency, Bernie would have it delivered. They weren’t considering all of the implications; they were just glad they didn’t have to hide their money under their beds anymore. But some younger minds had been dwelling on Bernie Lupus for the past few years. They were better at arithmetic than their parents had been, and, to the extent that LCN had not wasted its money educating them and staking them in businesses, they were more sophisticated about money. A few of them had begun to consider the potential of Bernie the Elephant. He had been taking in money for about fifty years and, the story went, investing it.
If he had put just a million dollars in a bank account that first year at five percent, then it would have doubled every fourteen years. That would be twelve point seven million by now. And the old guys didn’t seem to know that he almost certainly had not done that. The IRS would have taken its cut. More likely, he had spread it around in places where the tax bite had not been big and instantaneous. He had probably put a lot of it in home-state municipal bonds, where there were no taxes, gold, offshore banks, real estate, and stocks. That was the one that made Di Titulo’s mouth water. Since 1929, long before Bernie had begun remembering things, the stock market had averaged ten percent a year. That one million would be a hundred and thirty million by now.
But the real attraction was a possibility that had been floating around since Bernie was young. What LCN really needed to do was move the money that came in from labor-intensive activities like gambling, prostitution, extortion, drugs, and so on into safe, reliable businesses. Everybody knew that. In fact, that was the goal to which Di Titulo owed his existence. But there was a bigger, more tantalizing possibility that had never come to pass. If the LCN families saved their profits, pooled their resources, and used the face men wisely, they could start owning major corporations. The story was that they had never been disciplined enough to save, were never trusting or trustworthy enough to pool anything. But what Di Titulo and a few others thought when they heard the stories of Bernie the Elephant was that maybe they had.
If he had bought in early enough and acquired enough shares at the beginning, then automatic reinvestment, stock splits, and stock in small companies that got taken over by big companies for more stock would have multiplied the money incredibly over fifty years. LCN might already be majority owners of General Motors, IBM, AT&T, General Electric, and Coca-Cola, and not ever suspect it. The stock could be in five hundred different names known only to Bernie Lupus.
It might all be wrong: Di Titulo had no way of knowing what Bernie Lupus had done with all that money. But if any of Di Titulo’s assumptions were correct, then the whole half-century Bernie Lupus episode was one of those wacky ideas that could have worked. It was Hannibal pulling his end run across the Alps on elephants to take over Rome for Carthage. A couple thousand years later, Rome was like an enormous palace full of shiny cars and women wearing designer dresses, and it took an archaeologist to tell you where the hell Carthage used to be. People forgot that it could have been the other way around.
But maybe Paul Di Titulo had just happened to be looking in the window on the day they forgot to pull the shade down. He had studied the finances of the Five C’s for years, in the hope that someday he might find a safe way to divert a portion of the money that came in. It was only a coincidence that he had been there to hear about the Wilmont donation. And it took astuteness and imagination to understand that money moving into a charity in Cleveland just might have something to do with the death of Bernie Lupus. Everybody had assumed that what would happen was a steady stream of money flowing into some guy’s bank account. But Di Titulo knew that the sign might not be anything that obvious. It might be any unusual money moving anywhere. If somebody was liquidating big investments, he might very well need to dump a bit of it in charities. He might even do it to test a route for moving bigger money later—get a brokerage and a bank used to the idea that Ronald Wilmont was a zillionaire who wrote big checks.
Di Titulo could see his car parked another hundred feet away, and it made him feel pleased with himself. He loved the look of his brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. He had gotten an insane discount on it, because he had bought three GMC tractor-trailer rigs this month for his company. While he was at the lot, he had made a show of wishing he could afford a car too. That was what worming your way into the little brotherhood of above-the-surface business did for you.
He reached into his pocket for his keys and fingered the remote-control unit on his key chain. It was one designed for women who left their cars in dark parking garages. They could pop the door locks and turn on the lights before they got there. It was silly at noon on a respectable street in Cleveland on a hot summer day, but the sooner he was in the car and the engine was running, the sooner the air-conditioning would kick in.
Di Titulo gave a squeeze, and he felt as though someone had thrown a bag of rocks against his chest. A puff of hot wind seared his face and hands, tugged his coattails, and threw his silk necktie over his shoulder. He found himself lying down. His ears were ringing before he was aware that there had been a sound, and in his vision a patch of green floated in jerky puppet-jumps before the flash of the explosion emerged from his addled memory.
After a time Paul Di Titulo recovered enough to roll onto his side and look down. His clothes weren’t ripped or burned, and he seemed to have feeling in his arms and legs. He didn’t entirely trust that sensation, though. There might be some horrible pain that movement would trigger, so he moved his arms carefully and pushed himself to a sitting position. He watched the bright orange flames flickering up and down the length of his new Eldorado.
Di Titulo watched the waves of heat rising to make the tall buildings beyond them bend and wiggle, and understanding came to him. He had picked a rotten time to spend six hundred thousand on new trucks, and a worse time to be seen driving a Cadillac with the dealer’s stickers still on it.
As he got to his feet, he felt a wetness on his chest, and he looked down with alarm at the spots of blood that were appearing on his white shirt. In a second he realized that the blood was coming from above. His nose was bleeding. He touched it. It didn’t seem to be broken. The moving air had just slapped him in the face. But he gave himself over to a moment of despair. Some family had decided that Paul Di Titulo was involved in Bernie Lupus’s death. It was a sign of what mouth breathers some of these guys were, how impoverished their imaginations, how stunted their brains. Whoever had managed to get control of Bernie Lupus’s money wouldn’t reveal his crime in the form of three new trucks and a Cadillac. He would walk away from anything as paltry as Di Titulo Trucking and not bother to lock the front door. He would have more money than a small country, all nicely laundered and salted away a generation ago.
Di Titulo turned and walked unsteadily away from the fiery, blackening wreckage of his beautiful new car. He would find a pay phone and call Al Castananza himself. This was what bosses were for—to get the other bosses off your back. As he walked, he decided to tell him the rest of it too. Let the Castananzas use their time and money to look into the donation. This had already gotten too big and ugly.
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
