“No, that’s some other guy.”
“It sort of looks like youse.”
“I got that kind of face,” I said, and it would have been a pretty brave line if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle of it.
“Maybe it’s not youse after all,” said the bruiser. “Maybe not, you know, because the guy here in the picture, this guy looks like a handsome guy and you, you look like a punk. But there’s a man wants to see youse. If it turns out youse ain’t you then I’m sure he won’t want to see youse no more.”
“Huh?”
“Whatever. He’s waiting up the block, here.”
He squeezed the hand on my shoulder, yanking me away from my car and toward Arch Street.
“What about my keys? I left them in the car door.”
“From what I hear,” said the bruiser without slowing down, “this here’s become a very safe neighborhood.”
That was the sum of our conversation as he led me to Arch Street. The front, squared-off nose of some big white American car parked on Arch jutted out from behind a brick wall. I didn’t know whose car it was, I couldn’t tell if it was a limousine from what I could see. I expected it was Norvel Goodwin inside, or maybe Jimmy, but no matter who it was there waiting for me I knew it wasn’t a good thing to be snagged by a bruiser outside Veronica’s apartment after sticking my thing in her thang. I thought about running, but the hand was tight on my collarbone, squeezing so hard my shoulder rose as we walked. When we were closer to the car more of it came into view. It wasn’t a limousine, it was a Cadillac, long, shiny, dangerous with chrome. Its windows were up and tinted black so that it was impossible to see inside.
The bruiser stopped me just in front of the rear door. He knocked on the window and slowly the door opened. For a moment I saw nothing but the blackness inside. And then a man stepped out and smiled at me.
“How’s it going there, Sport?”
It was Jasper, the gregarious poker player at the Sons of Garibaldi Men’s Club, and he was smiling at me in a way I didn’t like.
“We want you should come for a ride with us,” he said.
“Thanks, but I’d just as soon go home alone.”
“C’mon, Sport, a short ride. I got someone here you need to meet.”
As he was speaking the darkened window on the front passenger side opened slowly, electrically, and appearing like a ghost at some boardwalk house of horror was Dominic, Bissonette’s second cousin twice removed, the hit man whom I had falsely accused of cheating. “Get in, kid,” he said softly and, with a push from the bruiser, I was in the car.
There was an old man on my left and Jasper got in so that he was on my right. It was a big car, with a wide bench seat in the back, and there would have been plenty of room if Jasper hadn’t jammed himself next to me. The bruiser closed the door and immediately went around the car to the driver’s seat. The bench seat was black leather; the car smelled of Brylcreem. The old man on my left was looking out the window, out into the night. He wore a cream-colored suit, his thick hands were carefully laid one on the other in his lap. There was a diamond in his lapel. Slowly, easily, we pulled out on Arch Street and the bruiser turned up 2nd Street and we drove on for a while, south, toward Society Hill Towers, without anybody saying anything. And then the old man spoke.
“I wanted to meet you, Victor.” His voice was soft and lightly sprinkled with an old world accent. When he turned I saw his face, pitted ugly, his hair gray but pulled back elegantly and heavily greased. “I thought it was time we should talk. Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” I said. The word came out in a gush of breath that I had been holding once I recognized the man. I had seen his face in newspaper photographs, on mug shots flashed on TV, in gory hard-boiled articles in Philadelphia magazine. The man sitting next to me, his swollen hands calmly resting on his lap but close enough to my throat so that he could have reached up and strangled me before I let out a yelp, that man was the boss of bosses, Enrico Raffaello.
34
PHILADELPHIA HAS FIVE major spectator sports: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and the Mafia wars. Whenever one of the subtle mob hits occurs somewhere in South Philadelphia or in the new ganglands of New Jersey, the papers and the television stations go crazy with coverage. There are photographs of the victim, sprawled in an alley or in his car, puddles of blood leaking from his newly created orifices. There are statements from the victim’s neighbors saying what a stand-up fellow he had been and that no, they hadn’t known, had no idea he was associated with the mob. The necrologies are printed in the papers like an honor roll. Speculation as to who ordered the hit and who performed it is rampant. And the charts come out; the deceased’s name is crossed off the list and everyone below rises a notch. The mobsters have nicknames, just like ballplayers: Chicken Man, Shorty, Weasel, Tippy, Chickie, Toto, Pat the Cat. We root for our favorite as he rises and drink a beer to him when he winds up on the front page of the Daily News, slumped over the wheel of his Cadillac, his once handsome and arrogant face disfigured from the force of the bullet that came in the back of the neck at close range and exploded out the front of his face, taking the jaw along for the ride.
For a long time there was peace in the city’s mob and folks followed the Phillies and the Eagles. But one night Angelo Bruno, the boss of Philly bosses, the man who kept the peace, was sitting in his car when his driver, a Sicilian named Stanfa, powered down Bruno’s window, through which a wiseguy with a shotgun blew apart Bruno’s skull. After the Bruno hit the necrology began to grow. “Johnny Keys” Simone, Bruno’s cousin, shot dead somewhere and dumped in Staten Island; Frank Sindone, Bruno’s loan-sharking capo, found stuffed into two plastic bags in South Philadelphia; Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, blown apart on his porch with such savagery that Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it. And after that, about once every quarter, as regular as 10Qs from a Fortune 500 company, another one fell. Chickie Narducci, gunned down outside his South Philly home; Vincent “Tippy” Panetta, sixty, strangled along with his teenage girlfriend; Rocco Marinucci, found a year to the day from the Chicken Man’s incineration with firecrackers stuffed in his mouth; Frank John Monte, shot to death next to his white Cadillac; “Pat the Cat” Spirito; Sammy Tamburrino; Robert Riccobene; Salvatore Testa, the Chicken Man’s son; “Frankie Flowers” D’Alfonso. And after each of these unfortunate accidents the charts came out, names were crossed off, one by one the bigger players fell off the list and the smaller players rose. Nicky Scarfo was on top for a while, but the killing continued and soon Scarfo was indicted in federal court for racketeering and in state courts running from Delaware to New Jersey to Pennsylvania on numerous charges of murder. There was quiet during this period of uncertainty, but after Scarfo was shipped to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the high-security jail that replaced Alcatraz, and left there to rot, the battle for power began again.
Enrico Raffaello wasn’t even on the charts at the start of this second war. He had been peripherally involved with the mob, a friend of friends who were cousins to some of the boys, like almost everyone in South Philly. Enrico was a merchant. He sold pastries in the Italian Market, content, it seemed, to bake cannoli shells and mix the ricotta custard and sprinkle the filled shells with freshly ground cinnamon until he died. It was his son, “Sweet Tooth” Tony they called him, who was the comer. He was one of the guys you saw in the pictures of Scarfo as the boss walked triumphantly into court to pick up another twenty years here or forty years there or a Lucky Strike bonus of life without parole. Sweet Tooth was in the back, carrying the boss’s bag, smiling like a sweet fat kid from the neighborhood who was thrilled to be hanging around the downtown boys. But when it was decided finally that Scarfo was through, decided not by the feds or the DA but by the guys underneath who were sick of waiting, and a new war of succession broke out, bit by bit Sweet Tooth Tony’s name started rising up the charts. First he was just on the list of mob associates, then he was in the group of enforcers, then he was one of the lieutenants, and then he was listed as a possible successor, number four on the charts, but rising fast, number four with a bullet.