I heard the ball go back over the far edge and drop into the return runway. I listened as it was projected back upwards and started its rapidly accelerating journey home.
The kid screamed. He knew what was coming.
The sound as that bowling ball hammered into the top of his skull was like Slapsie’s baseball bat colliding with a side of beef. The kid didn’t utter a sound.
I turned and looked at the kid with the bullet in his foot. His eyes were wide, his skin white like a nun in wintertime.
‘Try again,’ I told Slapsie, and he let another ball fly down the lane.
Bang on target. Strike.
The pins caterwauled away like frightened children, every last one of them.
‘Motherfucker!’ Slapsie shouted, and he did this little dance from one foot to the other.
We waited. We quietened down. The ball dropped down the back and started its way home.
The sound of contact was wet and crunching. Whatever tension may have existed in the kid’s body dropped out of him completely. I hauled him up and let him slide to the ground. The top of his head was little more than mush as far down as the bridge of his nose. One of his eyes lolled drunkenly out of its socket and dangled against his blood-spattered cheek.
I turned and looked at the kid on the floor.
‘Eight grand and change, please,’ I said quietly.
The kid raised his hand and pointed to a bag on the seats behind us. Slapsie walked over and opened it up. He smiled. He nodded. He picked up the bag with his left hand, and then he took one step backwards, another, and with his right hand he raised his bat way over his shoulder and brought it down like Thor’s hammer. The four-inch nail punctured the kid’s forehead. His eyes bugged out like they were on springs, and then there was nothing but the nail through the bat holding him up off the ground. Slapsie wrenched sideways and the nail tore free. The kid slumped to the ground and rolled onto his side.
I looked at Slapsie. Slapsie looked at me.
‘Figure the fat guy is off the hook,’ he said quietly.
‘Figure he is,’ I replied.
We left as quietly as we had entered. The teenager outside still sat there with his head on his knees. Back of his neck showed a dark black bruise just above his shoulders. Marco had more than likely stamped on him and just broken his freakin’ neck.
Business done, we went back to see Albarelli. We gave him the money. He would’ve sucked my dick if I’d asked him. Told him not to say a word. Way it worked was that you just dealt with the bad news, but you never passed it up the line. Albarelli wouldn’t have said a word anyway, would’ve shot his reputation to pieces, but despite that there was a form and a protocol to these things. Don Ceriano never knew what Don Ceriano didn’t need to know. Like he’d told me himself,
That was business, the kind of business that needed sorting out every once in a while, and me and Slapsie and Johnny the Limpet, all of us who made up the Alcatraz Swimming Team, well, we were there to take care of such things, and take care of them we did.
A couple of years later a ghost of Miami came back to haunt us. Irony itself. June of 1972 five men were arrested at the Watergate Complex in Washington: James McCord, security co-ordinator of the Republican Committee to re-elect Nixon, some other ex-CIA goon, and three Cubans. Remembered the Wofford Hotel, the base for Lansky and Frank Costello in the ’40s, how Costello had possessed strong ties with Nixon. One of those self-same Watergate burglars, a Cuban exile, was vice-president of the Keyes Realty Company, the outfit that mediated between the families and Miami-Dade County officialdom. When the shit hit the fan for the Nixon administration Don Ceriano knew more about what was going down in Washington than most of the Washington insiders. He was the one who told me about the White House informant, the guy that was later referred to as ‘Deep Throat’.
‘Some FBI big-shot,’ he said. ‘He was the one who gave the inside track to those two Washington newspaper hacks. Hell, maybe if they hadn’t made such a mess with Kennedy, they would have whacked Nixon, instead of all this complicated legal bullshit they’ve had to go through.’
Second irony, and one that was much closer to home, was that Nixon’s fall from grace was instrumental in the death of Don Giancarlo Ceriano the better part of two years later.
Nixon held on for dear life throughout that time. He fought the only way he knew how. Guy was as crazy as a bug on a hotplate, but he was a politician so we didn’t expect much else.
Don Ceriano kept his house in good order. He worked hard. He collected dues for the family and made good on their agreements. But there was word from Chicago, always the quiet word from Chicago. History in Chicago went way back to Capone, Don Ceriano told me, and when Capone was jailed for tax evasion his mantle was assumed by Frank Nitti. Nitti ran the business the way the National Commission of
It was New Year 1974. Christmas had been good. Don Ceriano’s three sisters and their families had come out to Vegas to spend time with him. They brought with them eleven children, the smallest no more than eighteen months old, the eldest a pretty girl of nineteen called Amelia. For those two or three weeks, perhaps even as far back as Thanksgiving, things had quietened down. 1973 had been fortuitous for Don Ceriano. He had sent all of eight and a half million dollars in paybacks to the bosses and they were pleased with him. Besides the Flamingo and Caesar’s Palace there were the dozens of smaller casinos and bars, whorehouses and bookmakers that Don Ceriano oversaw. These places provided the vegetables to run alongside the main course. As the New Year crept into the second week of January, as our minds turned back towards the business at hand, there was word from Chicago that Sam Giancana wanted a hand in what Vegas had to offer. Don Ceriano heard it along the grapevine, and when he mentioned it he spoke in words that were condescending and contemptuous.
‘Giancana… a fucking playboy,’ he would say. ‘Nothing more than six feet of shit in a five-hundred-dollar suit. Asshole thinks he can come down here and muscle in on this he can take a real long walk off of a short harbor, know what I mean?’
But for all the words, all the bravura, Giancana was a very powerful man. Chicago, everything that Capone and Nitti had established before him, was a major part of the family’s concerns. If Giancana wanted something he usually got it, and it was he who sent his right-hand man, Carlo Evangelisti, and his own cousin, Fabio Calligaris, to speak with Don Ceriano in the third week of that new year.
I remember them coming. I remember the limousine that pulled up on Alvarado Street. I remember the way they looked as they exited the vehicle and made their way towards the house. They had come with someone’s blessing, I knew that much, and whatever Don Ceriano might have wanted, the fact was that when it came to family decisions he was not a general but a lieutenant.
Calligaris and Evangelisti sat with Don Ceriano in the main room of the house. I brought them whiskey sours and ashtrays. I remember the way Fabio Calligaris spoke, his voice like something dead being dragged across the floor of a mortuary, and when he looked at me there was something in his eyes that seemed to command both respect and fear. Perhaps, looking back, there was something in him that reflected an aspect of myself. Perhaps, for the first time in many years, I recognized a little of what I had become, and beside that an understanding that I was nothing to these people. I was not family; I was not blood; I was not even Italian.
They stopped to eat at some point, and as Calligaris rose from his chair he looked at me and smiled. He turned to Don Ceriano and he said, ‘Don Ceriano… who is this man?’
Don Ceriano turned to me. He held out his hand and I walked towards him. He placed his arm around my
