The Exceptions Page 3

  The McCartneys became a topic of conversation in our house the way most folks discuss cleaning out the gutters or getting an annual exam, an unavoidable task that can be repeatedly delayed. My father was no longer troubled by their potential testimony once his attorneys verified that everything the McCartneys witnessed could never again be allowed into a courtroom; the concern now was showing the world (mostly our peers and those under our influence) what happens when you cross a Bovaro.

  The first time I truly appreciated my oldest brother, Peter: One winter afternoon he and I were shooting baskets against a rusty backboard and netless rim in what was arguably a rougher section of our neighborhood near Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, before the renaissance got a foothold. We were halfway through a game of one-on-one when three kids started moving down the sidewalk in our direction. I knew there would be trouble for no other reason than all three were looking right at us. They were sizing us up. By the time these kids made their way around the chain-link fence and onto our lonely court, words were exchanged between the leader of my two-person gang (Peter) and the leader of what appeared to be three big Russian kids. I don’t remember the interchange, though it certainly would have been inane. Of the five of us, I was the smallest, and while looking at my brother and listening to him berate the leader of the other gang for being, essentially, not like us, a fist connected with my eye, knocked me to the ground, then out. A few seconds later, my head limp on the cold sidewalk, I opened my good eye and watched through a haze as Peter wiped out the entire group. Two were already on the ground, crawling in opposite directions, though clearly their collective destinations were away. Peter seemed to be taking his time kicking number three, the mouthy leader, while the kid begged him to stop. As the sirens approached, Peter gently scooped me up and we dashed down a nearby alley, our worn Spalding resting at the feet of the big Russian.

  The first time I truly despised my oldest brother, Peter: a few days before my twenty-first birthday. On a journey to Yankee Stadium in our blackened-out Suburban, my father, my siblings—Peter, Gino, and younger brother Jimmy, the kid fated to have been named after a guy whose blood can still be spotted in the grout between the tiles of Vincent’s kitchen floor—and I chatted about what I should be getting for my upcoming birthday.

  Gino, my older brother by two years and possessing the most practical personality in the family, offered up the tried and true. “How ’bout a convertible—or better yet, you always liked mine. Take it and I’ll get a new one. Got my eye—”

  “Nah,” Jimmy interrupted, “what Johnny wants is Connie Cappelletti.”

  “Pass,” I said. “I don’t consider syphilis much of a present.”

  “Jimmy just wanted you to have a gift that’ll keep on giving,” Gino said.

  “Isn’t Connie, like, thirteen?”

  “Seventeen,” Jimmy said, “going on twenty-five.”

  “The only thing Connie’s going on is penicillin.”

  Gino threaded his fingers together, cracked four knuckles at once. “This world needs guys like you, Jimmy, otherwise skanks like Connie Cappelletti would live lonely lives.”

  My father drove with a half-smile on his face, which to the unknowing eye might appear as fleeting contentment; I recognized it as a look of concentrated thought. Peter, riding shotgun, just stared out his window. Not a word.

  So there you have it, the offerings of my family as directed by their individual long-term interests in keeping the Bovaro dynasty in a flourishing state: Gino thrived in the materialism and Jimmy in the increased availability of female attention and companionship. My father offered his standard fare of aloofness and disinterest; unless reputation could be incorporated into the picture, his mind was elsewhere. Peter’s silence was more confusing, though. His particular interest would have only rested in one place: power. And sure enough, it was on his mind; he was perfecting the spin.

  As we sat at a red light, the gentle vibration of the engine the only sign of life, my father continued his unfocused gaze out the window.

  Then, with his eyes still out and away, Peter said quietly, “Pistola.”

  Pop finally snapped out of it. “Eh, Pete?”

  Still speaking to the window, he said, “Pistola for my little brother.”

  The entire cab of the Suburban went quiet, and here’s why: There could be absolutely nothing significant about giving me a gun as a birthday present. We had them tucked away in our house the way most people store ballpoint pens. If you opened a drawer to get a pack of matches, you’d probably have to move a .22 out of the way to get to it. Our world is one where guns are, far and wide, disposable. After a hit they’re usually left at the scene, clean of fingerprints and serial numbers—anything that might trace them to a buyer or shooter—because it’s the safest place for them to be. Once a gun’s been used to take someone down, the last place it should be is on you. “Maybe,” he said, “we give Johnny his manhood this year.” He glanced at Pop like he might get a congratulatory chuckle out of him, but Pop merely focused on getting us to 161st Street.

  Peter had helped me to become a man in many significant ways: my first cigarette, to which I developed a fervent addiction; my first taste of hard liquor at age eleven; the way to take someone out at the knees; a comprehensive inventory of profanity that may have sounded weirdly amusing coming from a seven-year-old boy but stinks like sulfur from an adult; countless ways to use girls and misuse masculinity.

  And now, the crown jewel: Peter intended on introducing me to the value of killing.

  Gino turned to me, broke the silence. “Wouldn’t you rather have a Mustang?”

  I stared at the headrest that blocked the back of Peter’s head. “Your point, Pete?”

  He turned in his seat and offered his answer to my father. “Johnny’s old enough now to clean up his own messes, yeah?” Then to me, “Our family’s been embarrassed long enough.”

  These were the first years where Peter made it clear that he viewed himself as the coming replacement for my father, the heir to the empire, the chosen one to lead the Bovaro organization into a new generation. The decision to take a life—anyone’s life—was never made lightly in our house. It served some specific purpose: righting a wrong, teaching a lesson, balancing the scales. Like farm kids who learn to butcher pigs as a regular responsibility, so were the bloody duties of our home; the gore is never questioned.

  But the embarrassment comment was pointed to the McCartneys, crafted specifically for me, for there was one final item in the list of things Peter taught me in the pursuit of becoming a real man: the power of humiliation.

  So where did my interests rest within the Bovaro power structure? Perhaps the answer shines brightest in what I really did want for my twenty-first: my mother’s food, my family’s congregation, and a time of celebration—didn’t even have to be about me. I wanted everyone to be there. The cousins and aunts and uncles, the associates, the nut jobs. Guys like Tommy Fingers and Paulie Marcone who could rip out your liver and fry it up with peppers and onions, but they understood the value of family. When I was eight, Paulie spent four straight hours one summer night teaching me how to play poker, how to gauge the table, how to bluff. No matter how many times I got it wrong, the guy never lost his cool, would just smile and slap my back and say, “Let’s try it again, Johnny.” It might be best explained as a matter of culture, but to exist around these men and women is a warm thing. Tommy Fingers, a near-illiterate man of girth and fury, used to spend most mornings making breakfast for whoever would break bread with him, a culinary artist of notable capability in any other setting. All you’d have to do is casually say to yourself, “Man, I’m hungry,” and the next thing you know Tommy is sliding a steaming bowl of pasta fagioli in front of you—unless he’s out muscling some guy into submission. (Tommy got his nickname from his calling card, what we routinely called a souvenir, something to act as a permanent reminder of our power and the related event; Tommy’s was the snapping of the middle finger of whoever he assailed.)
I wanted Tommy to celebrate with me, put his thick arm around me and talk food. I wanted Paulie to argue with anyone who would listen about what Steinbrenner was doing to the Yankees. I wanted Peter to be my older brother and my dad to be my father and my mother to be my mother, just for one day. I wanted a room full of laughter, glasses filled with beer and wine, and the simple excuse to eat to the point of discomfort.

  The silence that continued in the Suburban hinted at one of two things: Peter’s suggestion was either being considered or completely ignored. We circled the block before entering the Gerard Avenue lot. Disregarding the valet, my father snaked our monster into a tight spot in a lot where the lines were readjusted year after year into slighter spaces. All four doors opened and slammed into the Benzes on either side of us, then Pop chucked the keys in the general vicinity of the nearest valet, over the hoods of two rows of cars, and the valet dove for them like he’d been tossed a handful of diamonds; no return ticket was handed our way, never was.

  I remember thinking that day was going to be great—the Yankees were playing the Orioles, after all—but I’d become jammed up, leveled by the reminder that I was a Bovaro and that that meant something the way it meant something to be a Kennedy, a Rockefeller, a Du Pont; the expected legacy is expected for a reason, and fulfillment a near requirement.

  Peter set me up, the bastard. There would be no way to avoid accepting the task. To back down would be weak, to let—continue to let—others clean up my childhood embarrassment and not feel some sort of anger over what happened. The McCartneys had dared to testify against my father, and for that reason I should have been incensed myself, insulted to the point that retribution served as the only natural course. But I knew as my family did—they were the ones to educate me—that the fear we perpetrated upon the masses was only bolstered by the stories told by the feds to encourage, to frighten, people into testifying.

  I had to take whatever assignment they asked of me, lest I become the standout. The loser. I had one hope only: that my father would ignore the entire suggestion, that his pride and reputation regarding a matter of many years prior was rightly no longer an insult, that he would never consider asking his almost twenty-one-year-old son to empty a clip into the bodies of innocent people.

  My father’s decision had been concealed right up to our entrance of the cheer-filled stadium. He put his arm around me, tightened it around my shoulder as we walked together toward our seats, Bovaro men, and said to me gently, “Don’t worry, we’ll get you the car, too.”

  The first time you hold a gun is like the first time you hold an infant. You’re not sure what to do with it. You watch the people around you for some signal that you’re holding it correctly. You bounce it a little and comment on its weight. You’re amazed at how beautiful the thing is. You prefer it to remain in a state of deep sleep. And ultimately, you wonder what it would be like to have one of your own.

  No one ever gets a gun and thinks, I wonder what it would be like to kill someone. Unless you’re a hunter, most balanced people never want to discharge a firearm in the direction of another living thing, including everyone in my family—even Peter, who’d prefer a fisticuffs over a gun battle any day of the week. On the scale of weapons, the gun is the weakest form of power. After all, how did my father take care of Jimmy “the Rat”? A knife to the man’s gut, a gesture that read not only to Jimmy but to his peers, This was personal, and I was not afraid to take his life with my own hands. When people compare the Mafia to drug gangs, I’m baffled. In the early twentieth century, our types may have killed with great disregard, but when was the last time someone from the Mafia drove into a neighborhood and unloaded a half dozen automatic weapons into the side of a building, killing countless people? We are surgeons picking the particular cancer running through a system and carving it out, disposing of it, allowing life to resume like the disease had never even taken hold.

  My first gun had strings. It had a purpose. They could have loaded the thing with just six bullets—two for each McCartney. All that remained was to find the targets.

  It never occurred to me, as I’d previously searched the list of psycho killers in our family, running fully through the roster of men in my father’s organization for the sociopath who might be able to level the barrel at a young girl and pull the trigger, that the spinning dial would slow, tick gently in my direction, and come to rest at my name. I was the selected nut job.

  FOUR

  Years after my father’s elimination of Jimmy “the Rat,” he was still riding the wave of reputation from that hit. And I suppose he managed to go out with quite a bang: The Rat was the last time my father ever took someone out, ever needed to. That hit contained all the components necessary to propel fear and notoriety: It was grisly; it was a power play; it was sloppy—a mess everywhere—yet no one took the fall. It spoke to our community of an authority and immunity reserved for few others. To set another example would not be necessary; my father’s minions would now do the dirtiest work and take the biggest risks. Regardless of the end result, I always suspected that the McCartneys haunted him—not as ghosts like they did with me, but as reminders that we are not gods but merely participants in a world under His command. And I don’t think my father was ever able to shake the warning.

  During those years, though, something else changed: the landscape of influence. Through my young life, the most valuable tool we had was the distribution of force and fear. But an evolution was occurring, and it wasn’t long before information became increasingly valuable. Some of our highest-volume debtors, mostly bottom-dwellers, were transformed into agents of utility. Guys working clerk jobs in the city with access to databases we could’ve never imagined suddenly captured our attention—and so did the status of their debts. One of our most consistent losers at betting pro football, Randall Gardner, managed to sustain his day job developing a system for the federal government. In lieu of paying back a debt, he gave Peter and Pop access to a particular database whereby they could see the FBI’s general plans, budgets, and priorities—information that was more interesting than valuable. Our access to this fascinating system lasted a mere twenty-two hours before our login was revoked, but the taste gave Peter a lust for information. To his credit, he began to marginally shift the power of our family to a slightly cleaner though equally illegal level of influence; we started playing more Monopoly and less Sorry.

  I managed to keep my Beretta in secluded silence, hoping it would serve as nothing more than a defense weapon. Though I suppose it might be obvious where Peter’s longing for information took us, our family, and ultimately me.

  By the time the football season was cresting the playoffs, Randall Gardner was betting his house—almost literally—on the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the Dallas Cowboys and cover the spread. Philadelphia didn’t show up for that game, and by halftime it was clear there was no hope Randall could save his house—or his marriage or the ability to see his kids again. Soon the Bovaros would be arriving at an odd hour with a pair of Louisville Sluggers if he didn’t fork over the five figures owed to us by the end of the week.

  But Peter performed his magic on old Randall, working the guy’s Rolodex like an insurance salesman looking for potential leads. Make a list of ten people who could help you out, Randall. Three of the four built-in advantages to dealing with addicts are: (1) They have no pride remaining; (2) They tend to automatically leverage themselves; (3) They will work everyone they know for help. And Randall needed a lot of help. By that time, he served as a computer programmer in the information technology department at a small federal contractor that developed systems for the Department of Justice. Earlier that year, he had attended a conference in Washington, DC, where he met two other programmers he casually befriended. They exchanged numbers as a means of expanding their circle of potential job opportunities.

  So when Peter approached Randall and gave him an opportunity to wipe away his entire debt—the proverbial second chance—Randall wept like a girl, said he would do anyth
ing.

  Anything.

  We never knew how Randall manipulated his friends from Washington, never came to understand if the information materialized through charm or force or threat, for therein lies the true benefit of the minion. We never cared if the information was acquired through hacking or social engineering or stealing someone’s briefcase, for therein lies the true benefit of the hopeless spirit with a need to supply a demanding addiction, the at-any-cost means of completing a mission.

  Suddenly we had the exact address of the McCartneys, their latest aliases, everything.

  My first gun had strings. It had a purpose.

  Randall Gardner became one of our greatest assets. As for the fourth built-in advantage of addicts: (4) No matter how many times you wipe the slate clean, you can count on this: They’ll be back in debt to you even sooner than before. No more than two weeks later, the Redskins cost Randall another five figures. Mr. Gardner gave us more collected data over the years than the Farmers’ Almanac and Encyclopaedia Britannica combined, and Pop made sure we fed the man’s compulsion for gambling like a stray cat, doled out a fresh can of tuna and a saucer of warm milk with assured regularity. Randall always arrived on our doorstep looking for more, along with a cache of information in return.

  I didn’t go to the McCartneys’ on my own. The hits were planned, and part of those plans included my older cousin by five years, Ettore Vido, an overstrung, highly skilled marksman who’d recently proven his talent to my father, who consequently found him endearing. Ettore—Hector, if translated—spoke infrequently, as though he’d recently arrived from Catania. He possessed a peculiar personality trait of being interested in absolutely nothing at all—no sports, no music, no television. He had not a single hobby. He didn’t have a favorite food, favorite car, favorite movie. He didn’t prefer blondes over brunettes, voluptuous over skinny. On the other hand, ask him to scrape the serial numbers off a collection of guns or clean the kitchen and he would silently oblige. As for the overstrung part: If you did anything to keep him from finishing an assigned task—say, dropping a glob of marinara on his clean kitchen floor—he would come apart at the seams, occasionally to the point of requiring restraint. All I can say is this: robot. And here, on our trip to find the McCartneys in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, he served as an automaton to make sure the assignment of taking out the McCartneys would be brought to a clean, comfortable close.