Don Calligaris leaned back in his chair. He looked at me directly, and though there was warmth and friendship in his eyes there was also the cold determination for which he was renowned. ‘This life… this thing of ours, it is not something that you leave behind, Ernesto. You make your choices, you make your mark, and that mark will always be your signature. You have lived the life you chose to live and, though there will always be things that a man regrets, it is nevertheless a stupid man who believes he can undo what he is, what he has become as a result of his actions. I watch the TV now, I see movies about the kind of people we are.’ He laughed. ‘We are portrayed as a gang of thugs, mindless hooligans in silk suits who kill for no purpose. We are seen as vicious and unreasonable men, without hearts, but nothing could be further from the truth. More often than not people have died because it was a matter of life and death. It was a matter of you or them. And then there is the matter of honor and agreement. Men make promises on the lives of their families, and then they betray not only those they promised but also themselves. These are the kind of men that die, and these men deserve nothing better.’
I listened to what Don Calligaris was saying, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it was true. Even as I had seen my own son drifting away from me and had contemplated the possibility of returning to America, I had known that if I returned it would not be because of his need alone. It would also be because of me. I was a man who had made choices which had involved the lives and deaths of so many people over the years. I knew that if I returned to New York, if I once again re-established my old friendships and bonds, then it would also mean once again wearing a coat cut from the same cloth. The man I was had been the result of what I had done, and what I had done could not now be undone. I was, and perhaps would always be, a part of this greater family. Just because I had a son did not change that fact.
I believed then that the difficulty I’d had in deciding to come back was not for fear of what Victor might find out, what he would see or hear, but my own unwillingness to resume my position in the grand scheme of things. I had a place, and in leaving I had left that place vacant. No-one had come forward to take my mantle and assume my responsibilities, and no-one ever would. No-one but me. And now I was here, sitting by the window in the Mulberry Street house; my son in the kitchen; Ten Cent in the back room watching a ball game on the TV; Don Fabio Calligaris, old and gray and wrinkled, opposite me in his chair, and I realized that whatever I had left behind possessed the patience of Job. My clothes had been cut. I had worn them. I believed I could take them off and store them away somewhere in perpetuity. This was not the case. They were the only clothes that had ever really fitted me.
‘So you see,’ Don Calligaris said. ‘We are who we are, no matter what the world and all its voices might say about us. These things we have done are as much a part of us as our fingerprints, and they cannot be removed, they cannot be exchanged for something else. I know you well enough, Ernesto-’ He smiled. He leaned forward and took my hand. I looked down at his liver-spotted skin and saw that his hand and mine were almost identical in their appearance. ‘I know you well enough to realize that you would never be happy crawling into some hole in Cuba and dying like some insignificant and inconsequential nobody. You are here. You have come home. The house where you once lived with Ten Cent is still there. The rooms are not the same-’ He laughed. ‘At least we took the trouble to have the walls painted! But those rooms are there for you and your son, and while he goes to school, while he learns to be a good American citizen, you can be here by my side and help me straighten out the mess these kids have made of our city. The five families were here. They may be quieter now, they may have less influence than they did thirty years ago, but they are still alive and well and living in America. America was our country, and with the last breath in my body it will stay our country if it has anything to do with me.’
He gripped my hand tighter. He was asking me to stay, to be one of the family again. I would return to a life I believed I had left behind. This time it would be different. This time I had a son of fourteen years old, and he would have to be protected from the truth of what I had done – and might yet do. This, of all things, would be the greatest challenge. And what was my other option? To visit New York, to see America for a handful of weeks, and then to return to Cuba, my son perhaps unhappy, homesick for the wide and awe-inspiring world he had glimpsed, and wait until I died?
I looked down at the floor. I closed my eyes.
I believed I had already made my decision as I sat on the edge of Victor’s bed that night and told him we would come.
‘Yes,’ I said, my voice barely audible. I looked up and cleared my throat. ‘Yes, Don Calligaris. I will stay here. This is my home, and I have returned.’
Don Calligaris clapped his hands together. ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, his smile wide. He rose from the chair. I rose also. He reached out and placed his hands on my shoulders. He pulled me close and hugged me. ‘My brother,’ he said. ‘Ernesto Perez, my crazy Cuban brother… welcome home!’
It began with the little things; always the little things.
We made arrangements to keep my life with Victor separate from my life with Ten Cent and Don Calligaris. He was enrolled in a good school, a Catholic school with family connections. Money changed hands and Victor did not need to provide identification or a Social Security number. He arrived on time, he worked hard, he showed great promise in his studies, and he seemed happy. After school he would return to the house where we lived, back a half a block or so from Mulberry on Baxter, and here he would watch TV and occupy himself as he wished when I was not there. Ten Cent lived there too, and I employed a woman much as we had employed Claudia Vivo in Havana. Her name was Rosa Martinelli, a middle-aged Italian widow with teenage sons of her own, and Victor fell in with them, good boys, honest and studious, and often he would stay over at their house or visit the movies with them. I did not worry for Victor, he was in good company, and for this I was happy.
So the little things began.
‘Go and see Bracco,’ Don Calligaris would say. ‘Tell him we need the track money tonight. Tell him he has been late three weeks in a row and it will not be tolerated again.’
And Ten Cent and I would go and see Bracco, the two of us – old men in our fifties – and we would scare up the neighborhood and remind people who we were.
‘You’re the one,’ they would say. ‘You’re the one who clipped Jimmy Hoffa,’ and I would smile and say nothing, and they would read everything they wanted to read in that expression.
Sometimes we would meet at Salvatore’s and discuss business, and in such moments I could have been twenty years younger and feeling that rush of anticipation knowing that I would be out in a couple of hours, out and down the street to call on Angelina Maria Tiacoli.
And then the moment would pass, and I would look away towards the street and realize that, regardless of whether the past had waited here for me, there was no way I could find it again.
And then the little things became bigger things.
‘That Bracco, he’s got some kid called Giacomo something-or-other. He’s making some noise downtown about how he does this and that for the family. Go with Ten Cent, go find the kid, bust his fingers or something and tell him he better keep his freakin’ mouth shut or next time you’re gonna put some vents in his cranium.’
And me and Ten Cent would go down there, to some broken-down warehouse on the south end of Bowery, and I would hold Giacomo in a chair while Ten Cent broke three or four of the fingers on his right hand with a monkey wrench. Stuffed an oily rag in the kid’s mouth to keep him quiet, heard later that he got sick as a dog from whatever the fuck he might have swallowed, but sure as shit he kept his mouth shut from that point forward and we didn’t hear another word.
I didn’t kill anyone until the winter of 1998. A few weeks before Christmas it was, and the snow was thick and heavy along the sidewalks. I remember how much I felt the cold, something that had never bothered me before, and it came home to me that perhaps I should have been lying on a sunlounger near a pool outside of a rest-home in Tampa Bay. I had smiled at that thought as I left the house on Baxter, as I walked half a block down and climbed into the car where Ten Cent was waiting for me.
‘This is a fucking mess and then some,’ he said, and he clapped his gloved hands together and exhaled white mist towards the windscreen. ‘You ready for this?’
