Tragic (2 page)

“Gnat’s cool, he’s cool,” Franklin “Frankie” DiMarzo assured him.

“What’s
sooka
mean?” Gnat asked, scowling as he looked over his shoulder at his antagonist.

“Means ‘bitch,’ man,” Bebnev said. “You my bitch.” He laughed and made a kissing expression with his lips.

“Fuck you, Bebnev, I’m out of here,” Gnat snarled and reached for the key in the ignition. “This guy’s a nutcase. It ain’t worth it!”

DiMarzo reached over and grabbed his arm. “Chill, Gnat, we’re gonna get paid, and that’s going to make your old lady happy,” he said before turning around to plead with the Russian. “Give him a break. We’ve never done anything like this. He’s just a little nervous, that’s all.”

Alexei Bebnev laughed derisively again and took a drag on a cigarette before blowing a cloud of smoke at the back of Miller’s head.

“And don’t throw your fucking butts on the floor of my car again,” Miller complained.

Bebnev flipped him off but rolled the window down just enough to flick the butt out at the curb before rolling the window up again. He held up a snub-nosed .38 revolver. “Is easy. I stick this in the asshole’s face and ‘BANG BANG,’ asshole is dead! All you have to do is drive car and keep watch.”

“Put that thing down before someone sees you or you shoot one of us,” Miller said before spitting a stream of brown tobacco juice into a beer bottle.

“Is nasty habit,” Bebnev pointed out with a look of disgust.

“My girlfriend don’t want me smoking around the baby, so I chew.” Miller shrugged. “Besides, I’d rather eat cat food than smoke whatever it is you got there. What the hell is that shit?”

“Belomorkanal cigarette,” Bebnev replied as he shook another from the pack and lit it. “Good strong Russian smoke, not pussy shit like American cigarette.”

The three young men fell silent. They were parked next to the curb in front of the Hudson Day School in a well-to-do neighborhood of New Rochelle, keeping an eye on a large split-level house down a hill and across the street from where they were parked, waiting for the occupants to come home.

Although it was only six o’clock, it was already dark outside and the neighborhood was glowing with Christmas decorations.
But there were no lights on in the house, just a porch lamp and a fir tree on the front lawn adorned with twinkling blue Christmas lights. So they waited, sipping on beers to keep their courage up, lost in their own thoughts.

Miller had been called “Gnat” since elementary school due to his small size and inability to sit still for any length of time. It didn’t bother him. What did was the fact that he was a twenty-two-year-old, out-of-work housepainter with a six-month-old infant and a teenaged girlfriend, Nicoli Lopez, who was constantly reminding him that she was tired of living off food stamps in the basement of her parents’ house in Brooklyn. He hoped that the money he’d been promised for this job would allow him to find them an apartment of their own and prove he was man enough to support her and their child. He’d buy them both something nice for Christmas and life would take a turn for the better.

Sitting in the car, he was preoccupied that his Delta 88 stood out like a sore thumb in the neighborhood. He was nervously aware that not a single car that had passed them since they got there was older than a couple of years, while his old car’s green paint job was faded and in some places covered with gray primer. He wished he was home with his girlfriend, even if her father had referred to him as a “no-good bum” from the moment he walked in the door.

Next to him, Frankie DiMarzo was contemplating heaven and hell, and what it would do to his parents if he got put in prison for murder. The DiMarzo family was staunchly Roman Catholic. His mother kept a small shrine to St. Jude in her living room and went to Mass at least five times a week, most of the time to pray for Frankie’s soul. Even his four sisters, all of them older, went to Mass at least weekly and, as his father liked to point out, had never been in trouble with the police.

Frankie, a good-looking young man with dark hair and Mediterranean features, was the black sheep of the family and had strayed frequently. In the past, he’d go to confession, do some penance,
and all would be forgiven. But it was hard seeing how each new run-in with the law aged his mom and dad.

And that was back when it was all penny-ante bullshit,
he thought. No matter what the priests said about God’s unconditional forgiveness, he wasn’t so sure that murder could be easily absolved. He shook his head.

DiMarzo had grown up in Red Hook, a neighborhood on the northwest side of Brooklyn on the Hudson Narrows and about as rough as it got. He was a tough kid, only twenty-three years old, and lived by the code of the streets: he didn’t rat on nobody, and he didn’t take shit off of nobody either. But he had a soft spot for his momma, and knew that a murder rap would probably kill her, and that his old man would disown him. It troubled him greatly and, like Gnat, his best friend since they’d met in a juvenile prison in upstate New York about eight years earlier, he too wished he was somewhere else. But he was tired of never having any cash in his pockets and of having no prospects for anything better than part-time construction work when the weather got nice. At least not until Bebnev had come to him with a job that would earn him and Gnat seven thousand bucks each.

DiMarzo had met Bebnev a few months earlier at a pool hall down in the Oceanside Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach, otherwise known as Little Odessa because of its large Russian immigrant population. The young Russian talked a big game about the women he’d had and often hinted that he was a hit man for the Russian mob that controlled the area. DiMarzo thought he was all talk until his new friend pulled out a small newspaper clipping about two old men who’d been shot dead in their apartment by an unknown assailant. Bebnev hadn’t said anything, just wiggled his eyebrows and grinned with his crooked brown teeth as he pulled his jacket to the side to reveal a revolver stuffed in the waistband.

When Bebnev had come to him a week earlier with his offer the Russian had made it clear that he was going to shoot someone and
was being paid well to do it. He hadn’t said much about where the instructions or money was coming from, just that a “friend” named Marat Lvov had set him up to meet two men, “Joey and Jackie,” in Hell’s Kitchen, who hired him to kill some union boss. Bebnev had said he wasn’t told directly who ordered the hit, but had overheard the other men tell Lvov that “Charlie wants it done ASAP.”

DiMarzo had balked until the Russian convinced him that all he had to do was find someone to drive and then act as a lookout. “Don’t worry, my friend,” Bebnev had assured him. “I do dirty work. You make easy money.”

So DiMarzo had let himself be talked into the plot. But sitting in the freezing cold in an old sedan waiting for a man to show up at his New Rochelle home so that Bebnev could shoot him was harder than it originally sounded. He figured there were going to be a lot of sleepless nights putting this one out of his mind.

In the backseat, Alexei Bebnev fingered the gun he’d put back in the pocket of the long black leather coat he was wearing. Unlike the other two, he was not troubled by a conscience. He’d been raised in an orphanage on the outskirts of Moscow—an odd, distant child, who’d been unwanted by any prospective parents and eventually ran away to the streets, where he made his living as a small-time criminal. He’d come into some real money when he attempted to rob an old Jewish watchmaker in his apartment and ended up killing the man, but not before his victim told him where he’d stashed a small fortune in gold coins. It was enough for Bebnev to buy his way out of Russia to the United States, where he’d believed he would soon be living the sweet life. Life, it turned out, was not that easy. He became a dishwasher at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn and dreamed of having money and respect as a hit man for the Russian mob.

Trying to prove himself, Bebnev accepted four hundred dollars to kill two nobodies who got behind in their gambling debts to Lvov, a small-time loan shark and bookie with connections to the Malchek
bratka,
or “brotherhood,” the Russian mob equivalent of
a gang. Bebnev had hoped that his cold-blooded efficiency would get him noticed by the bigger mob bosses and help him climb the organized-crime ladder.

It looked like this might be his big break. Lvov contacted him at the restaurant and said a friend of his in Manhattan had a big job that would pay good money, and more importantly get him noticed by “important” people. Lvov said he’d met this guy Joey some years ago down at the Brooklyn docks where Lvov ran small gambling operations and that the job had something to do with problems in the North American Brotherhood of Stevedores union that ran the docks on New York City’s west side.

Bebnev met with Lvov, Joey, and Jackie at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen. He’d walked up behind the men, who were sitting at a booth, just in time to hear Joey tell Lvov that “Charlie wants this done ASAP.”

They didn’t mention “Charlie” again, and Bebnev didn’t care. Joey, who did all the talking, offered Bebnev $30,000 to “eliminate” a man named Vince Carlotta. Excited by the money and the big-time nature of the hit, Bebnev agreed to take the job.

It was supposed to look like a home invasion robbery that got out of hand. But as the day approached, he started to get cold feet and decided to bring DiMarzo in on it “if you can find someone with a car.” He told DiMarzo that he and the driver would split $14,000 while Bebnev would keep the lion’s share for pulling the trigger.

“I’ve got to piss,” Miller said and opened his door. He got out of the car and walked over to a hedge that bordered the school grounds and relieved himself on a patch of snow left over from a storm a week earlier. Spitting one last time into the beer bottle, he tossed it into the bush. If they had to take off fast, he didn’t want its noxious contents spilling on the front seat.

Miller had just turned to walk back to the car when headlights suddenly appeared from behind his car moving in their direction. He crouched by the hedge as a large SUV passed the Delta 88
and continued on down the hill until it turned into the driveway of the house they’d been watching. A man and woman exited the car, with the woman opening a rear door and removing an infant. Then the family entered the house.

Jumping back in the car, Miller turned to DiMarzo, who was studying a photograph that had been torn from the
Dock: The Official Magazine of the North American Brotherhood of Stevedores
in the light given off by a streetlamp. The photograph showed four middle-aged men, one of them with a circle drawn around his face and some writing. He knew that Bebnev’s contact had given him the photograph and that the Russian had turned it over to DiMarzo as the “lookout.”

“That’s the guy,” DiMarzo said, looking up before placing the photograph back into his coat pocket. “That’s Carlotta.”

“Let’s go,” Bebnev replied. He put his hand back in his coat pocket to feel the comfort of the revolver and took another puff on his cigarette.

Miller turned the key in the ignition and the old V-8 roared to life. He pulled up to the curb in front of the house but left the engine running. He thought about saying something to put a stop to what was about to happen, but then he pictured his girlfriend’s perpetually disappointed face and heard her father’s voice.
You’re a bum.
He scowled. He didn’t know Vince Carlotta. All those guys with the dockworkers’ unions were crooks, and this guy just got on the wrong side of some other crooks. What did he care if the guy died?

DiMarzo was experiencing a similar crisis of conscience.
You’ll go to hell. And if you’re caught, Mom will die. . . .
But the thoughts fled his mind when Bebnev snarled from the backseat.

“It’s time,” the Russian said tersely. “Come on, Frankie.
Sooka,
keep the car running.”

“Just do it,” Miller replied, his voice rising from the tension.

Bebnev jumped out of the car, flicking the still-smoking cigarette butt to the side of the road as he walked up across the front lawn and
rang the bell. The Russian tensed as the door opened, but instead of the man he’d been sent to kill, the pretty woman he’d seen get out of the car stood there with the infant in her arms.

She looked confused but then smiled. “Yes, can I help you?” she asked with a slight accent.

Bebnev looked from the woman’s face to the infant, and then released his hold on the gun in his pocket. “Uh, we are looking for Mr. Carlotta,” he said meekly.

“He’s washing up,” the woman said. “I’m Antonia Carlotta. Can I tell him who’s calling?”

Before Bebnev could answer, the man from the photograph walked up and stepped in front of his wife. He frowned slightly. “What can I do for you?”

Bebnev fidgeted. He pulled his empty hand from his pocket and extended it. “
Da
, yes, we are from San Francisco where we work on docks. We hope to find work here,” he said. “We were told you might help.”

Carlotta shook Bebnev’s hand but his brow furrowed. “How did you know where I lived?” he asked.

Bebnev licked his lips. “We arrived late today and went to docks. Man there tell us New Rochelle. Then we ask neighbors. Sorry for intrusion, but we need work.”

Carlotta nodded. “Well, you’re enterprising and that’s good,” he said. “Show up tomorrow at the union headquarters, and I’ll get you on the rolls. There may be a few openings for good workers.”

Bebnev grinned. “Thank you. We are good workers,” he said and then turned to DiMarzo, who was standing with his mouth open watching the exchange in confusion. “We leave this nice family alone. Tomorrow we find work.”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” DiMarzo said before nodding at the Carlottas. “Thank you.”

“Not a problem,” Vince Carlotta said as he looked past them at the old sedan parked in front of his SUV. “Drive safe.”

As they walked back across the lawn and got in the car, DiMarzo
turned to glare at Bebnev. “Why didn’t you do it? He was right there!”

Bebnev scowled. “No one pay me to kill woman and baby,” he growled. “I am professional, not baby-killer.”