cast enough shade to keep the glare out of his eyes.
“Mitch, stand over here in front of me.” He pointed at a spot on the bricks and watched his nephew step into it, shuffle his feet sideways until his body blocked the sun, and then stand still. Molinari crouched in the cool shadow and felt the temperature of his skin begin to drop.
“You okay?” asked his other nephew, Steve.
“It’s like being on another fucking planet,” muttered Molinari.
“Why would anybody like him come here to live?” whispered Steve.
Mitch leaned forward confidentially, and an explosion of sunlight flashed in Molinari’s face. “Maybe it’s for his lungs.”
“Yeah,” said Molinari. “He wanted to make sure air only came in at the tops.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Mitch. “I meant here, instead of someplace else.” Even they knew that Castiglione had been the architect of the conspiracy of 1987. The other two bosses had been executed after the attempt, but the Commission had accepted Castiglione’s offer to go quietly into exile.
“Come in,” said a woman’s voice.
Molinari walked to the shaded porch with the two nephews flanking him, as usual, but the young woman in the white dress who was waiting in the doorway lowered her eyes and shook her head. Molinari said to his nephews, “Wait here.”
He followed the woman across a tiled foyer the size of a hotel lobby. Molinari was conscious of the tapping of his leather soles on the tiles, and looked down to notice that the woman’s feet were bare. He had wondered about her since he had first seen her. He didn’t remember hearing that Castiglione had any daughters. She seemed to be some kind of employee. Maybe she had a weapon hidden under the embroidered apron.
He found Castiglione sitting at a wooden table that looked as though it had been made by splitting logs into two-inch boards with an axe, then pounding ten-penny nails into them. The old man was thinner than the last time Molinari had seen him, but his skin had a healthy brown sheen that he didn’t remember.
Molinari bent his head in a little bow of respect. “Don Paolo, I see you’re looking good. This must be a healthy place.”
Castiglione smiled at his clumsiness. “It’s not as bad as you think it is. Sit down.”
Molinari sat. The young woman padded up behind Castiglione’s shoulder with a bottle of wine in one hand and two glasses in the other. Molinari watched her set them down, pour two glasses, and disappear through the rounded doorway. Castiglione lifted one of the glasses, said, “Salut’,” then sipped.
Molinari imitated him. “Salut’.”
“What are you here for, kid?”
Molinari was taken aback. After a moment he remembered that when the old man had last seen him, he had been a kid, not much older than his two nephews outside. “It’s a long story.”
“I know most of it,” said Castiglione. “All the families that gave Bernie Lupus money are trying to get it back. Forget it. Bernie died intestate.”
“What?”
“It doesn’t mean no balls, it means no will—nothing written down about where the hell the money is. All this stuff about him telling somebody before he died is a fantasy. Out here there’s a persistent old story about some prospector. He found a vein of gold as wide as Main Street in a mountain. He died. But every few years, a new bunch of suckers still get convinced he left a map. Why the hell would he make a map? You think a guy with a mountain of gold is going to want to show other people where it is? Do you think he’s going to forget how he got there?”
“I guess not.”
“Well, Bernie the Elephant lived by his memory. What the hell would have made him write anything down? That he wanted all his very good friends to get their money back? His friends would have taken the paper and dropped him in a Dumpster, and he knew it.”
Castiglione took a drink of his wine, then set it down. “Don’t get me wrong. I liked Bernie. It was always a pleasant experience to talk to a man who knew things, and Bernie couldn’t help knowing everything he ever saw or heard. I would have gone to his funeral, but there are people who would have considered that breaking my word.”
Molinari said, “I wouldn’t have.”
Castiglione gave a quiet chuckle. His head turned to look out at the garden, but his bright eyes were still watching Molinari from the side. “You should listen to your elders. Funerals are where a lot of deals get made.”
Molinari hesitated. “You’ve been thinking about coming back?”
Castiglione waved a hand lazily to dismiss the idea. “There are still too many people alive who remember. They have to, because they know I do, and that I think about them every day.” The way he said it made Molinari feel a chill in his spine.
Molinari said, “I came to talk to you because a lot of things are happening that I can’t figure out. I need advice. After Bernie died, we all agreed to get together and watch to see if big money started moving.”
Castiglione nodded. “I can’t blame you. It’s hard to lose that much money.”
“We made a deal, and we all watched. All of a sudden, about a week ago, money starts showing up from no place. It’s like a buried pipe broke under the street, and it starts gushing up from the manholes and the cracks in the sidewalks. Only it looks like it’s all going to charities.”
“I heard that.”
Molinari kept his face from revealing that he had noticed the response. Castiglione knew things that he had no obvious means of knowing. Molinari went on. “So we all send our people out to find out what’s going on. We pull every string, pressure every banker or broker or anybody we’ve got on the hook to trace the money back from the charities to where it came from. Finding out does zero, because the givers are made up. So we decide to find the people who might have had something to do with Bernie’s death. There’s Vincent Ogliaro. Bernie was killed in Detroit, and it’s his city, even if he’s in jail. But there’s not much chance he could be doing the rest of it.”
Castiglione nodded.
Molinari knitted his brows as though he had trouble reconstructing the list. “There’s one of Bernie’s bodyguards. He got scarce about the same time Bernie died. There’s this girl who cleaned Bernie’s house. And there’s this woman.” He shrugged. “Nobody knows anything about her, but somebody saw her with Bernie’s housekeeper. They made a drawing of her, like the cops do.”
Castiglione’s eyes shone with amusement as he watched Molinari.
“We sent people everywhere with pictures, offered rewards. We watched airports, hotels, car rental places, everything. The only one who gets seen is the woman, and it may not even be the same woman.”
Castiglione listened, his eyes gazing down into the deep, dark wine in his glass, letting the sunlight shine into it and turn it blood-red.
“Yesterday, my people start to look over their shoulders, and something has changed,” said Molinari. “Castananza’s guys are gone. Okay, I figure, he’s got a small family, and he just decided he’s lost enough on this. Next thing, it’s a few of Catania’s guys—not all, but some. This morning, my guys start seeing Delfina’s guys leaving for home.”
“So what did you come to me for? You think I got Bernie’s money?”
Molinari made the face of surprise that Castiglione expected. “I’ll be open with you, Don Paolo. I’m nervous. I want to know what you think.”
Castiglione sighed. “I’ll be open with you too. The money we all stashed with Bernie in the old days was big from the start. That was when a million dollars was still a million dollars. It’s billions by now.”
“That’s what we all figured.”
Castiglione spat toward the tile floor. “Kiss it good-bye. It died with him.”
“But somebody is moving it.”
“Maybe somebody in the FBI watching Bernie figured out where it was, and they’re washing it because they’re sick of asking Congress for money. Maybe Bernie confessed to his priest where it was, and now there’s a crew of Jesuit accountants secretly slipping it to the lame, the halt, and the blind. Who gives a shit? If you can’t find it and grip it with your hands, it’s gone.” He glared at Molinari. “The only question is, who was the first one to figure that out?”
