Bloodline (34 page)

“He won’t get away. None of them will.”

A few minutes later, as Tony Falcone was cleaning up his desk at the Italian Squad to go home for dinner, his telephone rang.

In thick Sicilian, a voice told him: “I know where to find the man you’re looking for.” Before Tony could ask any questions, the voice said, “I heard him say that tonight he’s going to be at a liquor club on One Hundred and Seventeenth Street.” The man gave the name of the club.

“When’s he going to be there?” Tony asked.

“Sometime tonight. I don’t know. Maybe early. Maybe late. Just tonight.”

“Who is this? Why are you telling me this?”

“I hate the bastard and I want you to get him.” The line went dead.

Tony sat at his desk for a few moments, then put on his jacket and walked from the squad room. On the way out he told the duty sergeant, “Call my wife. Tell her I won’t be home for dinner.”

As Tony drove away from police headquarters, a man in a dry-cleaning shop across the street dialed a telephone number.

“He just left,” the man said.

“Thanks,” said Luciano.

*   *   *

T
WO HOURS LATER,
the telephone rang in the Falcone apartment, where Mario and Tommy had just finished dinner with their mother. When Tommy answered it, a voice said in a hard New York accent, “Listen, Falcone. I got news about your cousin.”

“Yeah?” Tommy said suspiciously.

“He’s getting ready to skip the country. Right now he’s in a warehouse down near the Five Points. But in about an hour, he’s gonna be leaving. He’s there alone now, and if you want him, you can get him.”

The guttural voice gave an address on Worth Street and hung up before Tommy could ask any questions.

“Problems?” Mario said as he came into the room and saw Tommy holding the phone near his waist before hanging it up.

“I don’t know. Does anybody know where Papa is?”

Mario shook his head. “The desk sergeant called and said he went out but didn’t tell anybody where. They can’t reach him. What’s the matter?”

“Some guy just called. He told me where Nilo is.”

“Oh?”

“He said a warehouse on Worth Street. He’s only gonna be there a little while. You think it’s a crank call?”

Mario remembered his visit to the warehouse to see Nilo. “What if I told you it was true, that Nilo is there?”

“I’d wonder how you knew. But Papa wants him picked up. I’d go and get him.”

“
We’ll
go and get him,” Mario said.

Tommy thought of protesting for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. There was no point in arguing with Mario when he had his mind made up. “Not a word to Mama,” Tommy said softly, then went into his bedroom to get his gun.

*   *   *

L
UCIANO, ACCOMPANIED BY
Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, was having a quiet catered dinner with Arnold Rothstein in a private suite at the Plaza Hotel across from Central Park.

For the last year, Rothstein, the gambler and fixer, had taken Luciano under his wing, acting as the younger man’s mentor. Rothstein knew talent and he could see that Luciano was a rising star in the crime world. In a few years, when the old-line Mafia chieftains were out of business, Luciano would be running things. This was Rothstein’s belief and he had always made it a habit to bet big on his beliefs.

One of his projects had been to get Luciano to drop the cheap gangster image he had, like so many others, to cultivate and adopt a quieter manner of dress and speech. So he was pleased to see Luciano show up wearing a quiet, well-tailored dark suit that would have been at home in a Wall Street boardroom.

Luciano had immediately poured himself a large Scotch and then raised a toast in the air.

“To a wonderful night,” he said.

“You seem pretty happy,” Rothstein said. “What’s the occasion?” He was a tall lean man with slicked back hair that he constantly pressed into place with his fingers.

“Tonight I start squaring accounts with some pests who’ve been on my mind a long time,” Luciano said. “It’s a night for a party.”

Siegel laughed.

“What’s so funny, Benny?” Luciano asked.

“Here you are, a Sicilian celebrating, and all you got with you are us three Jews.”

“You three and me?” Luciano said. “I’ll take my chances on us. We’re the future.”

*   *   *

T
OMMY LEANED FORWARD
and told the cabdriver, “Third streetlight down on the right. Pull over there and park. We’re going to walk to that warehouse down the block. You wait for us for just thirty minutes. If we’re not back or if you hear some kind of disturbance, go get some cops quick and bring them back here. Got it?”

The driver nodded. He had seen Tommy’s badge and had his five-dollar bill in his pocket. He could afford to wait a half hour.

Tommy and Mario got out of the cab and moved quickly down the block. Tommy reached into his jacket and touched his service revolver.

“Nervous?” he asked his brother.

Mario shook his head.

“No. Scared. And maybe most scared about what Papa’s going to say.”

“Me too, Mario. But I’ve got to do this. Otherwise…”

Mario grunted.

“There’s still time for you to back out,” Tommy said.

“What are brothers for?”

Brothers. The word made Tommy think.
Nilo once said that he and I were brothers, too.

“Well, if we’re afraid,” Tommy said, “pity poor Nilo. He must be really scared at all this.”

“Which means that he won’t worry about shooting us,” Mario said.

“Can’t nothing happen to me,” Tommy said. “I brought my priest.”

They were in the shadows across the street from the warehouse door. The light over the door was out. There were no signs of light inside the building, and up and down the block there were only a few parked cars. All of them looked empty. There were no pedestrians.

The two brothers went down a long alley separating the warehouse from a low factory building on the next lot, looking for a back way inside the building. They found one, but the door was bolted and padlocked.

Tommy cursed, but Mario whistled softly. “There,” he said, pointing at a window.

The window was large and metal framed, but its base began only three feet above the ground. A rectangle cut from an old box covered one of the panes and Tommy used a penknife to cut a hole in the cardboard. He peered inside and turned back to Mario.

“All dark. He might not even be here,” he whispered.

“Still worth a try.”

“Just don’t trip over your own feet, you big elephant. I’m too young and beautiful to be shot.”

Trying to work without sound, Tommy pried the taped piece of cardboard loose from the broken shards of glass still left inside the window frame. He was able then to snake his arm through the hole and unlock the inside latch.

Carefully, so he did not rip himself on the glass, he pulled his arm back out.

“I’ll try to open this,” he said. “If it squeaks or sounds an alarm, run like the devil himself is after you,” Tommy said.

Tommy held his breath, but the window, hinged on pins at its center, swung open quietly, and both men had room to clamber inside the warehouse. It was still dark.

“There are stairs over there,” Mario said, pointing. “There’s rooms upstairs.”

“How do you know that?” Tommy asked.

“Don’t ask.”

Tommy flicked on a small pocket flashlight, just long enough to make sure there was nothing on the floor between them and the stairs, which were barely visible in some reflected moonlight from outside. It was a little better now; his eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark.

When he reached the steps, Mario started to go up first, but Tommy brushed him back and led the way himself. The top of the stairs opened into a large area, big enough for a meeting hall, with doors on the far side that apparently led to rooms. Here it was lighter. The moonlight shone through the windows, which had not been painted over as they had been on the ground floor.

From under one of the doors across the way, a thin strip of light was visible.

“There,” Tommy said.

He started toward the door, unsure how he would enter the room. He had been a policeman for more years than he had wanted to be, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for this.

He could not just knock because then somebody might say, “Who’s there?” and what would he reply? Nor could he just grab the door and yank it open. There might be somebody on the other side with a gun, ready to shoot at anything that moved.

He had no chance to figure out a strategy, because a voice suddenly snapped out in the dark.

“Hold it. Don’t move.”

Tommy turned toward the sound of the voice, trying to move his body between the sound and Mario behind him. But he couldn’t sense where Mario was.

“Who are you? What do you want?” the voice demanded.

“Nilo?” Tommy said.

“Tommy, what are you doing here?”

“I’ve come to bring you in.”

Still invisible, hidden in the darkness, in a corner somewhere, the other man groaned.

“Oh, no, it’s not going to be that way.”

“You come with me peaceably now or there’ll be a gang of cops here, and you know they want to bring you in feetfirst.”

It felt curious, Tommy thought, to be talking into the dark, as if the dark had an identity, had a soul of its own.

“Dammit, nobody’s supposed to bring me in. The whole thing is being taken care of. Why do you have to be sticking your nose in here for anyway?”

“Because it’s my job. Because they want to talk to you about two killings.”

There was a long silence. Tommy thought he should reach for his gun, and then the chilling thought came to him that if he did, Nilo—if he was armed—might fire without warning.

Of course he was armed. Nilo was a killer and had nothing more to lose.

“I’m sorry, Tommy. I won’t go with you.”

“There’s only one way to stop me.”

“Then that’ll have to be the way.”

For a moment, there was only silence in the loft, and then Tommy heard a grunt. He heard the sound of a pistol dropping to the floor. And then a voice.

“Come on, lump, you going to help me or not?”

Mario!

Tommy ran across the floor and saw a pileup of bodies on the floor. He flicked on his flashlight and found Mario sitting astride Nilo’s back. The gun was a few feet away and Nilo was trying to stretch to reach it.

Tommy picked it up and stuck it into his pocket. Then he came behind Nilo and, with Mario’s help, handcuffed the suspect’s hands behind his back.

“Sorry, Nilo, but it has to be this way,” Tommy said. “Get up.”

“Damn you,” Nilo snarled. “You two. All you Falcones. Damn all your souls to hell.”

Tommy pulled Nilo to his feet, grabbed the handcuffs, and pushed him toward the stairs.

On the first floor, Tommy walked toward the front door.

“Shouldn’t we go back out the window?” Mario asked.

“No need. Nobody’s here. Let’s just get our cab and beat it.”

Tommy looked up and down the street. The cab was still in the next block; he could hear its motor running. But something was different. Not wrong exactly, but different.

It took a moment to figure out what it was. Before, most of the parking places had been vacant; now, many more were filled with cars.

“Let’s go,” Tommy barked.

Mario and Nilo stepped out into the street. Tommy kept between the two of them and the curb. Something felt very wrong. He saw a worried look on Nilo’s face as the young man looked up and down the street.

He sees it, too. Something’s going to happen.

His hand tightened around the gun in his pocket; then he caught a glimpse of some movement out of the corner of his eye.

“Hey, baby-killer,” somebody shouted.

“Run,” Tommy called.

Mario started to pull Nilo along; the prisoner hesitated for just a second and then the night exploded into blinding whiteness. The world stopped for a second. Tommy tried to blink the purple and orange spots out of his eyes. They had almost gone when another white light burst in the night and then a second and a third and a fourth. After that, Tommy lost count. He heard the sound of men running. Photographers: the exploding lights were flashbulbs.

Somebody’s gone and told the damned press where we were going to be. They had the place staked out.

A pack of reporters surrounded them, baying questions, acting like a pack of wolves trying to down a wounded deer.

“Keep moving,” Tommy said to Mario and Nilo, and turned back to keep the crowd from them. Something new had been added; he was not sure what, but it was bad. Newsmen began making way for someone else, parting like a sea. Tommy glanced ahead at Nilo and Mario and saw them go down in a heap, Mario’s foot sweeping Nilo’s legs out from under him and then Mario jumping on top of him.

When Tommy glanced back at the reporters, two simultaneous explosions went off in front of him and to one side. These were different from flashbulbs. Behind him, Tommy could hear a metal hailstorm on the wall of a building. Somebody was blasting them with shotguns. By dragging Nilo to the ground, Mario had probably saved his life.

Tommy did not even try to get his gun out of his pocket. He twisted the jacket up and fired right through the cloth. One, two, three, four times.

His shots missed, but he saw two men turn and run from the scene. The sawed-off shotguns they had been carrying clattered onto the pavement.

Tommy waited a moment to make sure they had gone, that there were no more of them, then turned to hustle Mario and Nilo back toward the taxicab. Already flashbulbs were lighting the night again.

Inside the cab, Nilo vowed softly, “You’re dead. You two … every one of you Falcones. I will dance on your graves.”

• When the young immigrant thug named Albert Anastasia was released from Sing Sing after a short term for murdering another longshoreman, he went back to the seedy little Brooklyn candy store, just down the block from the real estate office, and set up a loan-sharking operation. He was disappointed that Nilo Sesta, whom he had liked, no longer came around. But he made new friends. Eventually the store changed ownership and became known as Midnight Rose’s. Anastasia’s gang, with the encouragement and help of Meyer Lansky, would also change their name. They would call themselves Murder Incorporated. Anastasia’s idol was Charlie Luciano.