“The last time they sent anyone around, you know what happened.”
“The McCracken fuck-up.” Frank shook his head. “Seemed like we were tripping over dead bodies for a week.”
“They got no finesse. Their example makes me glad we’re getting to be mostly legitimate nowadays.”
“Well and good, Vince, but if Papa was alive...”
“He isn’t.”
“If he was, he’d say this is a matter of blood, and we got to forget our goddamn business ethics and civic image and that bullshit. We got Joey’s death to even up for, Vince, and we’re going to even up, goddamnit. Not slop-ass, like the Chicago wise guys’d handle it. No way. We just find the guy and whack him out, clean and simple, and it’s not even going to be remotely connected up to us.”
Vincent studied his brother. Inside Frank’s cool shell was a hothead wanting to get out. Frank was prone to violence anyway, as for example, his carrying a gun all the time, even though that part of the business had faded into the past long ago. This situation, Vincent thought, could prove to be a bad one for Frank, as bad or worse than when his wife died. This situation could open the door on all the bad things in the secret closets of Frank’s mind; it could tear down Frank’s wall once and for all.
Vince touched his brother’s arm. “Let’s sleep on this, let our emotions settle. We’ll take care of whoever killed Joey. Well choose a course of action on that tomorrow. But first we got a brother to bury.”
Frank nodded and fell silent for a moment. Then something occurred to him, and he reached inside his sports coat to get at the inner pocket and withdrew an envelope. “Tell me what you make of this, Vince.” He handed the envelope to Vincent
Vincent looked at the outer envelope. It was typewritten, addressed to Joseph DiPreta, no return address. Judging from the postmark, it had been delivered yesterday, mailed locally. Inside the envelope was a playing card. An ace of spades.
“Hmmm,” Vincent said.
“What the hell is that, anyway? Who sends a goddamn playing card in the mail, and for what?”
Vincent shrugged. “For one thing, the ace of spades signifies death.”
“That thought ran through my mind, don’t think it didn’t. So what the hell’s it mean? Is it a warning that was sent to Joey? Or maybe a promise.”
Vincent withdrew a similar envelope from his own inside pocket. “Maybe it’s a declaration of war,” he said. He opened the envelope and revealed the playing card inside — also an ace of spades — to his brother.
“I received this at the office, Frank, in the mail. This morning.”
Two: Thursday Night
5
Nolan didn’t know what to think. The situation was ideal, really, but he wasn’t sure how the Family would react to his wanting out.
It wasn’t as if he were someone important in the Family; in fact, it wasn’t as if he were someone in the Family at all. He was a minor employee who was probably more bother to them then he was worth, and he certainly wasn’t involved in anything important enough to make it matter whether or not he stayed.
Years ago it had been different. Years ago he’d left the Family and all hell had broken loose. He had been in a position then not so very different from the one he was in now. He’d been managing a nightclub on Rush Street for mob backers; today he was doing the same thing, essentially, with a motel and supper-club arrangement out in the Illinois countryside, sixty or seventy miles out of Chicago. But today, at least, they were leaving him alone, not trying to involve him in any of their bloodletting and bone-breaking bullshit. Fifteen, sixteen years ago they had asked him to leave his club on Rush Street and move into head-crushing, a field that didn’t particularly appeal to him.
He supposed his reputation for being a hard-nose, which had developed from his doing his own bouncing in that Rush Street joint, had convinced the Family high-ups that he’d make a good enforcer and that because of his administrative background in managing clubs he’d therefore have the potential to move up in the organization, a young exec who could start at the bottom and work up.
Except up was one place Nolan had no desire to go. Not in the Family, anyway. There were few things in life Nolan wouldn’t do for money, but killing people was one of them. Later on, when he’d become involved in full-scale, big-time heists, an occasional innocent bystander might get in the way of a bullet, sure. A cop, a nightwatchman could go down; that was part of his job and theirs. A fellow heister with ideas of double-cross on his mind might get blown away — fine. That was a hazard of war; he could live with that. Going up to some poor guy in a parking lot and putting a .45 behind his ear and blasting — that was something else again. That was psycho stuff, that was for the ice-water-in-the-veins boys, the animals, and he wanted no fucking part of it.
But the Family had decided that that was the way they wanted him to go, and to start him off, to make him a “made man,” they asked him to knock off a friend of his who worked with him at the club. This friend had evidently been messing around with some Family guy’s prize pussy and had earned himself a place on the shittiest shit list in town. Nolan said no on general principles, and besides, he couldn’t see knocking off a piece was worth knocking off a guy over and told them so. Told them he was going to tell his friend all about it if the hit wasn’t called off. And he was assured it would be. The next day his friend was found swimming in the river. And a couple of gallons of the river was found swimming in his friend.
So Nolan resigned from the Family. This is how Nolan resigned: he went to the office of the guy who’d ordered the hit — the same stupid goddamn guy who’d been trying so hard to get Nolan to kill people for money — and Nolan shot him through the head. For free. Or almost for free. Afterward Nolan and twenty thou from the Family till disappeared.
An open contract went out.
The open contract stayed open for a long time. Something like sixteen years, during which time Nolan moved into heisting. He’d shown a natural ability for organization, running that club for the Family (getting Rush Street’s perennial loser into the black in his first three months), and that same ability worked even more profitably for him as a professional thief. Nolan organized and led institutional robberies (banks, jewelry stores, armored cars, mail trucks) and had a flawless record: a minimum of violence, a maximum of dollars. A Nolan heist was as precise and perfect as a well-performed ballet, as regimented and timed to the split-second as a military operation, with every option covered, every possibility of human error considered. It was the old Dillinger/Karpis school of professional robbery, with refinements, and it still worked good as ever. Perhaps better. No member of a Nolan heist had ever spent an hour behind bars — at least not in conjunction with anything Nolan had engineered.
A couple of years ago Nolan had heard that his Family troubles had cooled off. His source seemed reliable, and after all, it was into the second decade since all that happened, so why shouldn’t things cool off? He loosened up some of his precautions (the major one being to stay out of the Chicago area altogether) and had been doing preliminary work in Cicero on a bank job when some Family muscle spotted him and guns started going off. It took over a month to recover from that, and when he came out of hiding, recuperated, but weak and tired of getting shot at, he arranged a sitdown with the Family to negotiate an end to the goddamn war.
The sitdown hadn’t worked. There’d been more gunfire and more months of recuperating from Family-induced bullet wounds. But then something had happened. A change in regime in Chicago, a relatively bloodless Family coup, turned everything around. One day Nolan woke up and his Family enemies were gone and in their place was the new regime, who viewed Nolan, enemy of the former ruling class, as a comrade in arms.