Gangster Read online

  “Yes,” Josephina said.

  Angelo lowered his head and turned away from the bed. Josephina reached out, grabbed his hand and held him in place. “You must not let him know,” Josephina said. “Do not show him your true face until the time is right.”

  “When will that be?” Angelo asked.

  “When you have made your choice,” Josephina said. “Until then, say and do nothing.”

  “He will see it in my eyes,” Angelo said.

  “He is a broken man,” Josephina said, her head back on her pillow. “And broken men are blind to what they should see.”

  “Why did you tell me?”

  “You must never be the man he is,” Josephina said, her words spoken in softer tones. “You need to be strong where he is weak. You must stand up to your enemies and not run from them. You can never hide, Angelo. But you can always fight.”

  “Is that why Papa tells me to stay away from Ida?” Angelo asked, the slants of the sun bringing sparkle to his eyes.

  “He fears her,” Josephina said. “The Englishman, McQueen, too. But you will let them be the ones to show you the way out. Don’t worry, little one. You will live to meet your destiny.”

  “What will happen to Papa?” Angelo asked.

  “He, too, will meet his destiny,” Josephina said.

  Angelo walked away from the bed. He drew open the shades and stared out across the rows of tenement rooftops, his arms folded against the pain in his chest, his mind crammed with clouded images of a mother he would never know and a brother he never met.

  And of a father he would one day have to confront. All of it fueled by a feeling new to his soul—hate.

  • • •

  TO UNDERSTAND A gangster’s true motives always look to revenge. It is the engine that sustains and drives him forward, augmenting an insatiable quest for power. The thirst for revenge can be found boiling below the hard surface, coiled and waiting silently to strike. It is the calling card of all the great gangsters—the hunt for the get-even. “Revenge is something we all want,” Pudge said. “But there’s nothing that gives you a better taste of that than being a gangster. Who knows? Angelo would have turned to it anyway, seeing as how he didn’t have all that many choices. But the day he found out about his brother, the day he learned the truth about his father, it was on that day, Angelo Vestieri became a gangster. The old woman had done the job she set out to do. She blew up the bridge connecting Angelo to his father and set him free to be one of us.”

  • • •

  TWO WEEKS AFTER he had learned about his past, Angelo Vestieri was on his knees, holding Josephina’s hands, his head bowed, listening as she took her final breaths. The boy fought back tears with stubborn determination, not wanting to show weakness in front of a woman who had taught him that it was a trait to be feared more than any illness.

  “I am glad you are with me,” Josephina said, her voice a whisper.

  “I don’t want you to die,” Angelo said, his head still down, resting on the old woman’s sunken chest.

  “It is my time,” Josephina said.

  “I will never forget you,” Angelo whispered.

  “Never forget my words,” Josephina said.

  Angelo lifted his head and stared at Josephina and nodded.

  The room was dark and still, the blinds moving to the cool breeze of a late-night wind. Angelo stayed there, holding tight to the old woman, his eyes closed, his hands gently stroking her face. Her body keeping him warm for a final time.

  3

  * * *

  Summer, 1918

  ANGELO AND PUDGE reached the top rung of the factory’s rear fire escape and looked down at the alley four stories below. A heavy rain had soaked their pants and shirts and their palms were brown from gripping the rusty handrails on the way up.

  “As if getting here wasn’t enough of a bitch,” Pudge, now fifteen and treading the road between man and boy, said, peering into the darkness. “Going down’s gonna be twice as hard. We gotta find a way out through the front.”

  “Spider’s in the alley,” twelve-year-old Angelo said. “And he’s not going to wait long.”

  “We’ll go from the front to the back,” Pudge said. “I don’t see a big problem.”

  “It’s not part of the plan,” Angelo said, gazing into the factory through the panes of a locked window.

  “The rain wasn’t part of the plan,” Pudge said. “But here it is and now we gotta make it work for us.”

  “Let’s get inside and do what we came to do,” Angelo said as he yanked a small lead pipe from his back pocket. “We finish up and then figure which way out is the best.”

  Pudge cast his eyes down, watching sheets of rain disappear into a void. “I liked it better when you didn’t talk so much,” he said, watching Angelo smash a pane of glass with a swing of the pipe.

  Angelo eased his hand past the shards of glass and unlatched the lock. “Me too,” he said.

  “There’s gotta be over a hundred crates here,” Pudge said, walking past wooden boxes packed from floor to ceiling, a lit candle in his right hand. “How are we supposed to know which ones got pocket watches in ’em?”

  “Look for the ones with the blue stamps on the sides,” Angelo said. He was on the other end of the massive warehouse floor, his voice echoing across the large room, his shadow a string of eerie shapes moving to the flicker of the candle. “And they’ll have French words written on ’em.”

  “I can’t read French,” Pudge shouted.

  “Then pull down the crates not written in English,” Angelo said. “Even if they don’t have watches, there should be something inside worth money.”

  “Now you gotta speak more than one language to pull a heist,” Pudge muttered as he hoisted himself up a side of stacked crates, trying to read the labels in the dark.

  The two worked the room in silence, going about their task like two trained professionals, which is what they had become in the five years they’d spent under the guidance of Angus McQueen and Ida the Goose. McQueen broke them into his ranks at a slow pace. He spent months working with both on the art of the con, giving verbal lessons deep into the night about the multitude of ways to turn an honest man’s cash into a hardened one’s profit. McQueen chose selected members of his lift team, pickpockets who prowled the financial district, to teach the boys the best way to pull a thick wallet from a well-cut pair of trousers. Once they mastered that, he let them work on midnight hijack runs, hiding them in the shadows until the signal was given to come in and help shift the stolen cargo from one packed wagon onto another.

  Both Angelo and Pudge had left school after the third grade, their formal education officially replaced by the more regimented demands of daily gangster lessons. Angelo improved his reading skills by following the crime stories written up in the New York tabloids. Pudge spent his leisure time working in the Maryland, helping Ida keep the place clear of unwanted guests. “Those were their innocent years,” Mary said to me, as we walked down the well-lit hospital corridor. “I know it may sound strange to say, given what they were doing and what they were being taught, but it was a good time for the both of them. Maybe their happiest time.”

  • • •

  ON ANGELO VESTIERI’S twelfth birthday, McQueen and Ida handed him a large box wrapped in brown paper and topped by a thick blue ribbon. Angelo took the package and held it firmly to his chest, looking up at the smiles spread across the faces of both Ida and Angus. Pudge stood behind him beaming.

  “Happy birthday there, kiddo,” Angus said.

  “You earned this one,” Ida the Goose said as she leaned down and kissed Angelo on the cheek.

  “Whatever you do, don’t use it on me,” Pudge said, giving Angelo a playful nudge in the ribs.

  Angelo lifted the ribbon from the package and rested it on the bar. He undid the wrapping paper, letting it fall to the floor. He ran his fingers across the soft surface of a red velvet box and smiled as he opened the lid. Inside was a small-caliber revol
ver, surrounded by a circle of a dozen bullets.

  “Thank you so much,” Angelo said in a voice still many miles from manhood. “I will never forget you did this for me.”

  Angus McQueen curled an arm around Angelo’s shoulders. “Use it in the best of health,” he said.

  • • •

  PUDGE TOSSED THE crate to the floor and watched it crack open. Half a dozen pocket watches slid toward his feet. “Over here,” he shouted, scanning the crates above his head. “They’re stacked about eight deep in the corner.”

  “This is going to take time,” Angelo said, now standing next to Pudge, watching as he stuffed the watches back into the open crate.

  “All night, from the looks of it,” Pudge said. “And that’s even if we bring Spider up from the cart to help.”

  “Leave him where he is,” Angelo said. “We hold to Angus’s plan. No changes.”

  “Angus couldn’t have been thinkin’ we’d find us eight full crates,” Pudge said. “If he was, he woulda sent out a bigger crew. The time it’s gonna take to pull all these ain’t worth the gamble. There’s gotta be a guard someplace in this building and he’s gonna hear us and that means he finds us.”

  Angelo bent down and picked up one end of a crate. “We’ll deal with it when he does,” he said, looking over at Pudge.

  • • •

  ANGELO AND PUDGE had moved the first three of the eight crates into the back of Spider MacKenzie’s cart, rain still coming down hard and cool, a touch of relief to a sweltering summer night. They walked back to the warehouse, eased past the jimmied front door, their confidence at full boil.

  “This is gonna end up to be some haul,” Pudge said, taking the steps two at a time. “We might even get boosted for a job like this one.”

  “If I remember, you wanted to take out only three crates,” Angelo said.

  “That was just a quiz, like those nuns used to give us,” Pudge said. “Wanted to see how you did with some heat on.”

  “It looks to me like I passed,” Angelo said.

  “I’ll let you know when we finish,” Pudge said.

  They were on the fourth-floor landing when they saw a shadow from a lantern on the wall. They threw themselves to the ground, their hands gripping the edges of the iron steps.

  “Stay low and stay quiet,” Pudge whispered. “He might just be doing his rounds.”

  Angelo glanced down between the landings, the light from the lantern moving back and forth as if on a swing.

  “He’s coming this way,” Angelo said.

  Pudge eased down three steps until he was next to Angelo, close enough to smell the lingering odors of the pan-roasted onion dinner they had shared earlier. “We can break for it easy,” Pudge said. “Odds are good he’s old and don’t give too much of a shit about his job. We leave with what we got.”

  “We still got five crates left to take,” Angelo whispered. “And if he don’t care about the job, he won’t care about five more crates.”

  Pudge reached into the back of his waistband and pulled out a brown revolver, holding it against his chest. They waited, quiet and calm, as the guard moved up the steps, flashing his lantern into corners, seeing nothing but shadows and rats. Angelo pressed a hand against his chest, the burning pain in his lungs always kicked into higher gear by tension. He had yet to grow comfortable with confrontation and had still not mastered the calm poise that he felt he needed in order to not only survive but to thrive. He loved the planning and all the work, thought and detail that went into running a heist, but as he looked over at Pudge, primed and ready for action, he knew he was still years removed from pulling a gun and taking a life. What he lacked in the violent end of the gangster trade, however, Angelo more than made up for with a bulletlike quickness of mind. In that sense, he and Pudge were the perfect team, one prone to violence, the other quick to settle a dispute with thought.

  The guard was a retired police officer fifteen years into a meager pension. He swung a wooden baton in his right hand and held the lantern in his left. His name was Seamus Connor, father to two and grandfather of three. He was unarmed and had finished half a pint of whiskey before beginning his nightly tour. He turned toward the top rung of steps, his breath heavy, whistling a childhood ballad.

  Seamus froze when he saw the two boys sitting with their backs to the steps and their legs spread open, two pistols aimed straight at his chest.

  “Does your wife like watches?” the younger of the two asked.

  “What kind of watches are we talkin’ about now?” Seamus asked. He rested the baton on the step nearest his feet and wiped at his forehead with the flat of his free hand.

  Angelo and Pudge uncocked their guns and shoved them back in their waistbands. Pudge walked down the steps toward Seamus and put a hand on the older man’s shoulder.

  “The kind you’re gonna help us cart out of here,” Pudge said.

  “The wife loves those,” Seamus said.

  He walked past Angelo and Pudge, the lantern shoved forward and led the way to the storage area to help finish a night of plunder.

  “You think there’s anybody left that’s not dirty?” Pudge whispered to Angelo.

  “I don’t know,” Angelo said. “But I think the answer is no.”

  “And what does that tell you?” Pudge asked.

  “We die rich,” Angelo said.

  • • •

  PAOLINO VESTIERI STARED at the gun cupped in his hands. He was in Angelo’s room, a compact area large enough to hold a small bed and a broken bureau, nestled toward the back of the railroad apartment the two shared. He had found the gun shoved under the bottom of a thin feather mattress. He sat on the edge of the bed, his body trembling with anger. Paolino was well past the point of shedding tears for his son. They seldom spoke, and when they did, the conversation drifted toward argument. Paolino felt overwhelmed and overmatched. The corruption that was a way of life in New York had crept into his home and stained his son and there was little he could do about it. Attacking Angelo with physical or verbal violence only served to firm the boy’s resolve. Attempts to reason with him were volleys of wasted words. He was in the midst of a losing fight and it was aging him faster than the long, hard hours of work and the nights of scant sleep. Paolino Vestieri was a beaten man seeking a painless end to a futile battle.

  “Put the gun back, Papa.”

  Paolino had not heard Angelo come in. The boy had the footsteps of a ghost, a worthy trait in his profession. Angelo stood in the entryway, his hands at his sides.

  “Where did you get this?” Paolino asked quietly.

  “It was a gift,” Angelo said. “From a friend.”

  “A friend does not give a gun as a gift.”

  Angelo walked into the room and sat down next to his father. “This one does,” he said.

  “And what will you do with such a gift?”

  “It will remind me,” Angelo said in a near whisper.

  “Of what?” Paolino’s eyes searched the boy’s face.

  “Of what I am without it, Papa.”

  Paolino tossed the gun to the center of the bed. He thrust out his hands and balled them into fists. “These are all any man needs to get him through life,” he said. “They will feed those who depend on him and protect those he loves. A gun can never do that.”

  “A gun can earn you respect,” Angelo said, his eyes on his father’s scarred hands.

  “No, Angelo,” Paolino told him. “It will only earn you an early death.”

  Angelo lifted his head and stared over at his father, his face a blank mask. “Like it did for my brother,” he said.

  The words struck Paolino like a hard blow and left him short of breath. He closed his eyes and tried to shed the image of the bullet going through Carlo’s body, an image so vivid and real, he felt he could extend his hands and touch his first son’s soft, bloody skin. He had fought so hard to bury such pictures from his mind, to leave them behind him as he had with so many other, less painful memories. But now
, fueled by Angelo’s surprising words, this one had come back from his haunted past and hurled its way vividly into his mind’s eye. He could smell the smoke from the hot lupara, feel the heat in the small room, see the life drain from his son’s angelic face. All of it arriving with a force fierce enough to shake him and send him reeling downward into a dark and empty void.

  “You put a bullet into your own son,” Angelo said, standing now, hovering over his father. “With your own gun. And it wasn’t an act of love. It was the act of a coward.”

  “That moment follows me to the grave,” Paolino said, struggling with the words. “It haunts me every day. There can be no forgiveness.”

  Angelo leaned past Paolino and grabbed the gun from the bed. He held it against his leg, one finger toying with the trigger. “I live with a father who has killed his own son,” Angelo said. “Do you still need to know why I need such a gift?”

  “I would never do you harm, Angelo,” Paolino said. “There was a reason for my mad act against your brother. And it is not a pain I wish to ever repeat.”

  “You didn’t want to lose him to the camorra,” Angelo said. “So you lost him to a bullet.”

  “And now I have lost you to the Americans,” Paolino said. “The price of my sin only grows stronger.”

  “I am sorry for that, Papa,” Angelo said, sadly. “But you have not lost me. I will be there for you if there is ever the need.”

  “I need a son by my side,” Paolino said, tears crowding his eyes. “Not a gangster.”

  “A son can be both,” Angelo said.

  “Not for me,” Paolino said.

  Angelo nodded and slid the gun into the back of his pants and walked out of the apartment, the sound of the door slamming behind him echoing through the empty rooms.

  • • •

  GANGSTERS AND THEIR fathers seldom get along. It is why, as children, they seek out other role models, neighborhood men to whom they can turn for guidance and attention. But the men they seek serve more as recruiters than as parents, their ultimate goal being to bring one more member into their ranks. Often gangsters are raised in homes without a father, the absence caused by death, prison or abandonment. When his father is around, the budding gangster will compare him to his street mentor in a contest that cannot be won. “Paolino was born scared,” Pudge once told me. “He was afraid to stand up for himself in Italy and he was twice as scared over here. The one brave moment in his life came on the day he killed his son. Strange enough, that was a gangster move. The only one he ever made. And it cost him Angelo, his wife and everything else that ever meant anything to him.”