A Quiet Vendetta

not come until much later, or at least that was the way it seemed at the time, but when it came it was ferocious, like a tidal wave inside my head, and then there was the glass, and then there were people screaming, and then I felt the slow-dawning realization of what had happened.

The sensation was one of something trying to escape through my ears and eyes, as if everything inside my head had built to such a pressure there was nothing for it to do but burst outwards.

I remember climbing over spread-eagled people as I ran to the door.

I remember shouting at Ten Cent to hold onto Victor.

I remember wondering if the children would be too excited to sleep once we arrived home.

Colors rushed together in a confusion and my eyes could not focus. I fell sideways and felt a sharp pain rushing through the upper part of my leg. Instinctively my hand reached for the gun in back of my waistband, but it was not there. This had been a time for my family. That’s all it had been. Surely something was wrong; surely these things – these sounds and feelings, the awareness of pain and destruction – belonged to someone else’s life?

I remember a man bleeding from the head, a sharp jag of glass jutting from his cheek, screaming for help at the top of his lungs. I remember all these things, but even those things faded when I fell out through the front doorway and saw the burned and obliterated wreck that was once Don Calligaris’s car.

Black and twisted metal, the smell of cordite and seared paint. The wave of disbelief as I realized I had somehow been thrown into someone else’s reality, for this was not happening, this was not how the evening was supposed to end, this was wrong… so wrong…

The heat was unbearable, and even as I tried to approach what was left of the vehicle I knew there was nothing I could do.

The sense of hopelessness was overwhelming. The sound inside my own head as my life collapsed.

My wife and my daughter.

Angelina and Lucia.

I fell to my knees on the sidewalk, and from my throat came a sound that was inhuman.

That sound went on for ever.

It seemed to be all I could hear for hours.

Even now I cannot recall how I made it away from that place, nor what happened to me that night.

‘I am sorry,’ Don Calligaris was saying. ‘I have pleaded with them. I have told them that I was the intended victim of this terrible thing, but there is nothing I can do.’

My head in my hands, my elbows on my knees, Ten Cent standing behind me with his hand on my shoulder, Don Calligaris ahead of me, his face white and drawn, tears in his eyes, his hands shaking as he reached out towards me.

‘I know that you have been with us all these years, and there is no question of your loyalty, and perhaps if Don Accardo was still alive he would have done something… but things have changed. I am no longer in possession of the influence I once had. Don Giovannetti is now in control. He does not feel that he can take an action so soon-’

Don Calligaris leaned forward and buried his face in his hands.

‘I hurt for you, Ernesto. I have done all I can. I have spoken with Don Giovannetti, and though he understands that you have been a loyal part of this family he feels that he cannot violate adherence to tradition. He is the new boss. He also has to earn his reputation and loyalties. Tradition says that we cannot avenge the death of someone who is not blood. You are Cuban, Ernesto, and your wife was the daughter of someone who was not part of this family, and though I have argued your case for hours there is nothing further I can do.’

I raised my head.

‘I have done everything I can, Ernesto… everything.’

I looked at Don Calligaris as if he was a stranger. ‘And me? What of me and Victor?’ I asked.

‘I have money… we have money, more money than you could need, but it is time for change, Ernesto, and you must make whatever decision you feel is best for yourself and your son.’

I heard his words. They were swallowed into the vast dark silence that was my mind. I said nothing in return, for there was nothing to say.

Some days later I buried my wife and my daughter. Beside me stood my son, so in shock he had not spoken since the explosion. His sister and his mother had been murdered, by whom we did not know, but whoever it was had set their heart on killing Don Fabio Calligaris and had failed. Had Don Calligaris died there would have been retribution. Had Don Accardo still been boss perhaps he would have redressed the balance, because he knew who I was and would have made a case for me before the Council of la Cosa Nostra. But things had changed; there was a new godfather, and he believed that justice would be seen to be done in time. He was not a rash man; he was a strategist and a politician, and so early in his position he believed it would not be right to act on my behalf.

I never saw Don Giovannetti. I believed, and believe to this day, that he would not have been able to look me in the eye and tell me the lives of my wife and daughter meant nothing.

The following day, two days before Don Calligaris – fearing for his life – would leave for Italy, I boarded a family-owned ship bound for Havana. With me I took a suitcase crammed with fifty-dollar bills, how much in all I did not know, and beside me as we slipped away from the harbor was my eight-year-old son Victor.

He asked me only one question as we watched the land disappear behind us.

‘Will we ever come back home?’

I turned to look at him. I reached out my hand and finger-tipped away the tears from his cheeks.

‘Some day, Victor,’ I whispered. ‘Some day we will come home.’

TWENTY-TWO

‘And that,’ Hartmann said, ‘is possibly the best reason for not having been able to find the wife. Now we know that not only is she dead, but the daughter as well.’

‘But the son,’ Woodroffe said. ‘The son is still alive. Well, we can assume that he’s still alive. He would be what, born in June 1982… he would be twenty-one by now?’

‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ Hartmann asked.

‘That the killing of Gerard McCahill, at least the lifting of the body itself, could not have been done by Perez alone?’ Woodroffe asked.

‘Right,’ Hartmann said. ‘It has always bothered me that this whole thing was arranged and executed by one man… now there’s a good possibility that there were two of them.’

‘Speculation,’ Schaeffer interjected. ‘It’s nothing but another guess on our part. We don’t know anything about the son. He could be dead as well for all we know.’

‘I don’t disagree,’ Hartmann said, ‘but right now we have something to follow up on. We can assume from what Criminalistics and Forensics have told us that McCahill’s body could not have been lifted into the back of the car, and then again from the rear seat of the car to the trunk by someone alone.’

‘We can assume that, yes,’ Woodroffe stated.

‘And there was this thing about the scratches on the rear wing of the vehicle. Where’s the report?’

Schaeffer stood up and walked across the main room to a stack of bank boxes against the wall. He opened one, leafed through the pile of papers inside, and returned with Cipliano’s report.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘He says that there were some scratches on the rear wing of the car. He says they could be consistent with the rivets they put on jeans… you see Ernesto Perez wearing jeans?’

Woodroffe smiled. ‘Somehow I don’t think so.’

‘And the height?’ Hartmann asked.

‘Says that if the person who carried the body had used the rear wing for support, and if he’d been standing straight at the time, then his height would have been estimated at five-ten or eleven.’

‘How tall is Perez?’ Woodroffe asked.

‘About that height… but that tells us that his son could be about the same height as well.’

‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Schaeffer said. ‘I’m five-nine and my son is six-one-and-a-half.’