Bernice Pappas added the mixture of water-soaked bulgur wheat, onions, ground lamb, pine nuts, salt and pepper. She tasted the mixture, found it acceptable and kneaded and laid it out on a baking pan. She looked down at what she had done and smiled as she turned her head toward her son and placed the pan in the oven.
“Will they have the balls to kill him?” she asked, closing the oven door, wiping her hands on her apron and looking at her son.
“Yes,” said Pappas, lifting the palm of his hand to his mouth to get the last four pine nuts.
“Posno has to die,” she said, moving bowls, wooden spoons, cutting boards to the sink.
“I know,” said Pappas.
They had agreed to this a long time ago and many times since. He always listened dutifully when his mother brought it up again. It did have to be done. Posno was too great a threat to him and the family.
“Get rid of him before he gets you killed,” she said, searching for something in the refrigerator. She retrieved a small bottle of spring water and moved to the kitchen table where she sat in a wooden chair.
“Yes,” Pappas agreed.
He could already smell the Kibbeh Bissanieh baking.
What, he wondered, was Posno doing now?
Andrej Posnitki followed the Pappas brothers. He was careful. He would not and could not be seen. It was the reason he had survived his entire life. He was careful. He was ruthless. He thought neither of the future nor the past.
Posno drove a new Prius, which didn’t deliver nearly the hybrid mileage he had been promised. He accepted this fact. He knew he was capable of convincing the automobile dealer on Harlem Avenue to take the car back. Posno could be very convincing, but he also had a simple philosophy: Almost everyone can’t be trusted. If you were to right each wrong done to you, you would never get through the day and there would be a trail of the broken and the dead. Save your wrath for the big threats to your existence and your work.
Somewhere in the files of Catherine Fonesca, wherever they might be, was information that would end the existence of Andrej Posnitki. He would not let that happen.
Uncle Tonio was a dealer in merchandise.
Toys, DVDs, wallets, purses, chairs, you name it, from sources in China. Knockoff computers, watches from Japan. Rugs that looked like handmade Turkish from Poland. Lamps that looked like Art Deco 1935, but were made in 2006 in India. Leather sofas, both real and synthetic, from Indonesia. Ancient Peruvian jewelry made last year in Lima. In his fifty-one years in business, there was little that one imagined or made to fit in a crate that had not passed through Uncle Tonio’s warehouse on Fullerton.
Lew didn’t think anyone in the family, even his father, knew what most of the merchandise was or had been.
Every few weeks when Uncle Tonio came to dinner he brought a gift. Once, Lew remembered, it was two cartons of Cheerios. They ate it for a year. Another time the gift had been a small wooden tomato crate packed with forty dolls that looked like Barbies, but weren’t. They were all dressed in yellow tennis outfits complete with yellow visors and a plastic tennis racquet. For years Angie had given them away to her friends for birthdays and Christmas.
Lew’s cousin Mario and most of the family assumed there was something not quite legal about Tonio’s business. When they said it aloud, they did it with a knowing smile of pride. Maybe the family actually had a Mafia connection? Maybe Uncle Tonio had known Capone, Nitti, Giancanna?
Tonio did nothing to dispel the belief. He encouraged it.
“So,” someone might ask over dinner, “what’s new, how’s business?”
Tonio would keep eating, looking at his food, raising his fork as a prelude to answering and say, “You know, pretty good, not complaining. Pass the pepper.”
If Uncle Tonio was a family legend, his warehouse on Fullerton held the awe of a haunted castle. The two-story concrete building was about the size of a football stadium. It didn’t stand out in the neighborhood. Most of the buildings in the area were big, constructed for storage and shipping. The brick ones dated back to the late 1800s. One had been an icehouse till the 1940s.
Uncle Tonio’s warehouse had been built at the beginning of World War II to hold military vehicles-half-tracks, jeeps, trucks, staff cars. No one lived within six blocks of Uncle Tonio’s. During the day, the warehouse and the neighborhood were benign, a set for a television cop show chase, complete with fissures and buckles in the pavement and a very nice quartet of train tracks long gone to rust.
At night, the warehouse made the transformation to haunted castle, dark except for small night-lights on some of the buildings, looming, moaning distant sounds from traffic on the expressway and the occasional bark of guard dogs inside some of the surrounding buildings.
Franco parked in front of the loading dock that was also the main entrance. Uncle Tonio’s warehouse looked exactly the way it had more than twenty years ago when Lew had last seen it. It also looked nothing like it had twenty years ago. It was just as massive, but the man saw what the boy had not. The warehouse was sagging, with small, narrow and not clean windows. The concrete block walls were cracked. Lew stood still in front of the loading dock.
“What?” asked Franco.
“The castle’s gone.”
“What?” asked Franco, walking past Lew. “Castles? You worry me, Lewie.”
Lew moved to Franco’s side and they climbed up the steps of the dock. The rusting handrail shook. Franco had called Uncle Tonio who said he would meet them. And he did.
Uncle Tonio was at the open double door in front of them, arms at his side, legs apart. He wore what he always wore, dark slacks, a sweater in the fall and winter, and highly polished shoes, a long-sleeved light blue or white shirt and a colorful tie with matching suspenders. Uncle Tonio’s supply of sweaters, shirts and ties was nearly infinite, probably the tax-free tariff of hundreds of shipments. He never wore the same clothes twice.
Tonio’s hairline was now, as always, receded as far back as Lew’s. Tonio was lean and no more than five foot eight. He was, Lew thought, what Lew would be at seventy-two with some big differences. Tonio’s eyes danced. He bounced on his heels. His natural look was a smile.
“Come here,” he said, stepping in front of Lew, examining his face and giving him a hug.
Tonio smelled, as he always had, of peppermint.
He touched Franco’s arm and said, “Come on.”
They followed him inside. Tonio closed the doors behind them. Light through the few dirty windows and fluorescents tingled ahead of them as they followed the quick-paced Tonio down a wide aisle of wooden pallets on both sides. The pallets were stacked with cardboard and wooden boxes, fifty- and one-hundred-pound thick brown paper bags. The walls of merchandise were three or four times as high as Lew. Lew remembered that there were three more such aisles, each almost as long as a football field.
“Just got in from China,” Tonio said, nodding at a pallet full of brown boxes. “Fifty-thousand pair of women’s underpants, choice of pink, white, black. Would you believe there’s this big town over there where all they do is make women’s underwear?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He disappeared to the left. Lew and Franco followed. In front of them was a light.
“There,” he said. “Herman opened it for you.”
Franco and Lew shook hands with Herman. Herman was lean, black, hair still dark, and had served in Korea with Tonio.
“Good to see you,” Herman said.
Lew nodded.
The irony of Tonio and Herman’s friendship was that Tonio was a dark Sicilian and Herman a light-skinned offspring of the melting pot removed from Africa by six generations. People sometimes mistook them for brothers.
That was fine with Tonio and Herman. Herman had twice saved Tonio’s life. They never spoke about Korea. Not to strangers, friends, family or each other.