Blood Money (48 page)

Jane said, “I’m on my way home. It will take a few days. I love you.”

She hung up, and reached into her purse to put her extra change back. In the corner of her purse she detected something unfamiliar. It felt like tissue paper. Could she have left that in since she had bought this purse? She pulled it out, but it felt heavier than it should have. She squeezed it between her fingers. There was something hard and round in it, like pebbles. As she took it out, carefully pulled apart the folds of tissue paper, and looked down, she remembered Bernie handing her the purse. The light from the street lamp glinted off the facets of the diamonds, and made them look like small, cold stars.

M
olinari sat on the bench beside the enormous fake adobe building and stared at the scrubby cactus plants across the walkway. The sun was low, and no matter how he turned his head, the sparse, dry Arizona trees didn’t 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?”

“I don’t know … Castananza pulled his guys out first.”

“I’m sorry, kid,” said Castiglione gently. “But you’re way behind on this. Somebody used this to see what he could take that was worth more than Bernie’s money. When you had this sit-down and decided everything, who was the one that arranged it? Where was it held?”

“John Augustino got everybody down to Pennsylvania. We met in this bus he has.”

“It figures.”

“Why? The Langustos seemed to do all the talking, and they were the ones who brought Bernie into the city in the first place. Or their father was.”

“I’m talking about way before that. Bernie was from Pittsburgh. There was a meeting in the forties in Miami. The one who brought Bernie in and sold him to all of us was Sal Augustino, John’s father. The Langustos just had the job of keeping Bernie fed and protected because in those days we wanted him in New York. I’d say that the one you want to watch out for isn’t the one who’s doing the talking. It’s the one who’s sitting behind him and watching everybody’s faces. If Phil and Joe Langusto did all the talking, forget them. The one who’s getting ready to cut your throat is John Augustino.”

“I never would have thought of it that way,” said Molinari. He stared at Castiglione for a few seconds. “I know that when you came here, you didn’t get out of the life. I can see you still have money coming in, and somebody is telling you things.”

Castiglione’s face was empty of expression.

Molinari said, “I think maybe you still have people who work for you but don’t say they work for you. I think maybe, if you said the word, all of a sudden you would have some soldiers.”

Castiglione stared into his glass of wine. The time was here. “That’s a dangerous thing to talk about. If anybody thought there was a chance you wanted that, they’d get together and come for your head.”

Molinari shrugged. “If I get through this and they don’t, it won’t matter what they would have done.”

Castiglione lifted his wine glass, held the stem between his thumb and forefinger and twirled it, watching the wine try to catch up. “I’ve been here for a long time. The soldiers I had, they’re still where they always were. Their bosses probably don’t remember what family these guys belonged to before.”

“I want you to come back with me.”

Castiglione pretended to think about it. He had known that this day would come. After all these years sitting in the desert and waiting, it was all coming together. Molinari had no idea who he was asking for help. He was too young to remember. In a month or a year, all of the capos who had forced Castiglione to come here would be dead. Then it would just be
Castiglione and Molinari, then just Castiglione. “I’ll try to help you,” he said.

“How many of these guys from the old days will come if you call? How many are you sure of?”

Castiglione pursed his lips. “Not many. Two hundred.”

Molinari’s heart began to thump. He had been right all along, but this was beyond his expectations. Let Augustino come; let all of them come. It just could be that when they did, the guys they had come to trust, the middle-aged, reliable ones who had worked for them for a dozen years, and before that had been part of the old Castiglione organization, would put the shotgun to the backs of their heads.

P
hil Langusto stared at his brother, then at Tony Pompi. Their faces were expressionless. They didn’t want to come in and tell him anything that required them to draw a conclusion. They just wanted to pretend they were technicians, showing him facts and figures because facts and figures weren’t their fault. He waited impatiently while Pompi extracted the folded map from its envelope and laboriously unfolded it. His brother Joe took the other end of it, and they held it like a blanket and set it on the floor.

Phil walked to the edge of the map and looked down. It made him sick. The country looked like the body of a dead hippopotamus, lying there on its side with blood-red dots all over it. The spatters of red that had been concentrated on both coasts now overlapped into huge streams that ran down from Canada to Mexico in the west, and from New England to Florida in the east. But the part that had changed most was
the midsection. There were dots on most of the major cities from Minneapolis to New York, and from the Great Lakes south to the Mason-Dixon line.

Phil said quietly, “This is what you wanted to show me?”

Joe nodded. “It was pretty much what we thought. They were on their way into the Midwest to mail the rest of the donations.”

Phil glared at Joe, then at Pompi. “What is it? Did you come in just to tell me that you were right and get a pat on the head? Do you have some new theory, some new plan?”

Joe stared down at the map regretfully. “Not exactly. We just thought it was time to show you what we were seeing.”

“I see a few thousand bright red dots. What do you see?”

Joe cleared his throat, nervously. “The map hasn’t changed in a few days.”

“What do you mean? It looks terrible.”

“Yeah,” said Joe. “It does. But what worries us is that it isn’t any more terrible than it was about a week ago.” He waited for Phil to catch on, but his brother’s eyes just burned into his. “We think they’re through mailing letters.”