Jimmy T. nodded, and upended a glass table and used it for cover. Yeah, Tony thought, real brains these kids — hide behind glass.
A wooden picnic table near his barbecue pit, close to the wall, Tony turned over, then yanked the attorney back behind it, giving himself a view of the house where the intruder or intruders could come around either side. He also had a decent angle on the patio doors; the pool was off to the left, shimmering with reflected light, and to the right Jimmy crouched like a praying mantis behind his glass-and-steel table. Patio doors off the kitchen were between those two points.
“We need to get in the house,” the lawyer advised hurriedly. “We should call the cops, or—”
“Shut up, Sid.”
“This isn’t my thing, Tony! It’s not my thing!”
Tony slapped the lawyer. “Shut the fuck up.”
The floodlights went out; darkness descended like sudden night.
As his eyes adjusted, Tony thanked God for having the good sense to invent moonlight; then his nostrils twitched at a familiar odor — cowering beside him behind the overturned picnic table, the lawyer had pissed himself.
A sliding patio door opened quickly, and someone came lurching out.
Jimmy T. fired once, twice, three times, and pudgy, curly-haired Phil — shot to shit — stumbled sideways and fell into the pool, making a modest splash; Phil floated face down, blood trails streaming on the water’s moonlight-glimmering surface.
“Fuck!” Jimmy T. said, all knees and elbows hunkering behind the glass table again, not seeing a crouching figure — which Tony could barely make out — deeper inside the kitchen, aiming a rifle.
Tony called out, “Jim—”
But it was too little, too late.
Three sharp cracks, close enough to the pool to cause some pinging echoes, shattered the glass table, and Jimmy T. fell back, table glass shards raining on him, with a shot in the forehead and two chest wounds, any one of which could have killed him.
From the kitchen came a voice, “We need to talk, Mr. Accardo!”
Tony, hunkered down behind the picnic table with the wild-eyed attorney, frowned in thought. “...Michael?”
“Yes, it’s Michael Satariano, Mr. Accardo. I don’t have an appointment. Can you work me in?”
The lawyer whispered, “Is he crazy?”
“Unfortunately,” Tony said, “no... That rifle can shoot right through this table, Sid. Fucker can kill us anytime he likes.”
Satariano called out, “You have your attorney with you, Mr. Accardo. That’s good. I’d like Mr. Horshak to sit in on our meeting.”
Tony began to rise, and the lawyer clutched the gangster’s terrycloth sleeve and sputtered, “Are you crazy? You want him to shoot you, too?”
“I told you, Sid,” Tony said, jerking his sleeve from Horshak’s grasp, “we’re dead anytime he chooses.”
Satariano called out again, “Come out from behind the table, set it upright, and we’ll sit! And talk!”
Tony yelled, “You want me to throw my gun out, Michael?”
“I don’t really care, Mr. Accardo. Fuck with me and you’re as dead as your men.”
“As a show of good faith, I’m gonna toss it out! Mr. Horshak isn’t armed, but we’ll both stand with our hands up — agreeable, Mike?”
“Cool with me.”
The attorney was crying. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not...”
“Get your shit together, you gutless prick,” Tony snarled. “Stand up and stick your hands in the air, like a fuckin’ stagecoach robbery, or I’ll shoot you myself.”
Horshak swallowed. Nodded. Stood, with hands high.
Tony rose — his knees hurt him a little; he was in decent shape, but no spring chicken after all — and tossed the .38 onto the grass (it did not discharge) and raised his hands.
Michael Satariano stood, his silhouette in the kitchen clearly visible. Then he moved through the open doorway onto the patio — he wore black trousers, a black long-sleeve T-shirt, and a rifle slung on a strap over his shoulder, a .45 in his hand, trained on them.
Satariano walked over to Jimmy T.’s skeletal corpse behind and partially under the shot-up glass table, glanced at the body and its redundant death wounds, and didn’t bother to stop. His long shadow in the moonlight reached the gangster and lawyer well before he did.
“Gentlemen,” Satariano said, “put that table on its feet, and let’s have a talk.”
The two men did their guest’s bidding.
Satariano sat, putting the brick wall behind him, Tony — seated directly across from the intruder — and the attorney both with their backs to the house. The moonlight left Satariano mostly in shadow and washed Tony and Horshak in pale white. Of course, Horshak had already turned pale white...
“Obviously,” Satariano said, putting his hand with the .45 in it casually on the picnic-table top, “I’m not going to bother those girls.”
“They may call the police,” Tony said helpfully. “There’s a phone in there.”
“No, I cut the phone lines before I dropped by.”
Staying out of the conversation, the lawyer just sat with his hands folded prayerfully and trembled no worse than if a fit were coming on.
Tony asked, “You... you used that old rifle on Dave and Lou?”
“If that’s their names,” Satariano said with a nod. “I was in a tamarisk tree on the golf course ’cross the way. I was a sniper during the war, or didn’t you know that, Mr. Accardo?”
Tony’s eyes tightened. “And you killed all of my men. Six men — just so we could have a meeting?”
“So we could have it on my terms, yes.”
Satariano, though a man in his early fifties, had a bland babyish face that Tony found unsettling.
The intruder was saying, “I don’t relish killing, Mr. Accardo, but those men were soldiers. I killed fifty enemy soldiers one afternoon, in the Philippines. I’m prepared to do what I have to do tonight, or any night.”
“But you’re not here to kill me.”
A cold tiny smile formed in Satariano’s otherwise blank face. “That’s right. I just needed to make a point.”
“A point. Six men dead.”
Satariano shrugged. “It’s something I learned from my father.”
Tony barked a laugh. “Your father! Your old man tossed pizza pie in DeKalb, Illinois.”
“No,” Satariano said matter-of-factly. “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Accardo. I was adopted. My real father was named Michael O’Sullivan.”
Tony’s eyes tightened. “What was that?”
“My real name, Mr. Accardo, is Michael O’Sullivan, Jr.”
“...Angel of Death Michael O’Sullivan?”
“Was my father, yes.”
Tony Accardo had not truly been scared in many years, hardly ever in his life, in fact — he was a man of strength who usually held the upper hand. But he remembered a day in 1931 at the Lexington Hotel when he had been a young punk bodyguard and one of a handful of Capone soldiers to survive an assault by the Angel of Death — something like twenty-five men had died, scattered on several floors, in elevators, on stairways, in the lobby.
“And all these years,” Tony said, “nobody knew...?”
“Paul Ricca did,” Satariano said.
“Paul was my best friend. He would’ve told me.”
Satariano shook his head. “I don’t think so. He and I were close — closer frankly than you and I ever got. Mr. Ricca used me to remove Frank Nitti.”
Finally the lawyer spoke. “Frank Nitti committed suicide!”