“Tonio,” he said. “Buon giorno, Tonio.” There was some more in Italian that I couldn’t catch.
Tony said, “Buon giorno, Mr. Scarpino. Is your son at home?”
“He sleeps, Tonio. He sleeps all morning.”
“We have to see him, Mr. Scarpino. You wait right here, Mr. Scarpino, while we go see your son.”
We left the little old man in his kitchen and went up a squeaking flight of stairs. I said, “Won’t the old guy remember us?”
“He doesn’t talk to cops. He hates cops and priests. He learned that in the old country and never forgot it. Scarpino is here.”
We went into a messy little bedroom. Scarpino was sleeping under a thin blanket. He woke up, blinked and started to open a drawer in the bedside table. Moscato closed it on his hand. Scarpino didn’t yell. He lay down in bed again and put his bruised fingers to his mouth.
Tony said, “Get up and get dressed, Scarpino.”
“Why?”
There were three guns pointed at him. He looked at each gun in turn. Then he focused on Tony.
“Why me, Tony? We get along. We been friends for—”
“Cut it. You and I hated each other since ’forty-eight. Get up and get dressed.”
Scarpino got out of the bed and into his clothes. He took a tie off a hook in his closet and started to put it on. Tony took it away from him.
“Forget it,” he said. “You don’t need a tie.”
“You want to be Number One, huh, Tony? Want to push Lou out?”
“You’re smart today.”
“You’ll never make it. You know why? You ain’t got the guts it takes. You’re soft inside.”
Tony turned the pistol around and held it by the barrel. He laid the gun butt along the side of Scarpino’s cheek. He hit him with it on the other side of the face. A trickle of blood came from Scarpino’s mouth. Scarpino wiped it away with his shirt sleeve.
The old man was waiting downstairs. Scarpino was made of wood now. He didn’t talk, didn’t make extra moves. He went to his father and began speaking slowly in Italian. I asked Tony what he was saying.
“Telling him he’s going on a trip, Nat. He’ll be gone a long while and the old man shouldn’t worry.”
We left the house and walked down the skinny driveway to the car. Angie got behind the wheel. Scarpino didn’t want to get in — he stood next to the car without moving until Tony poked him in the ribs with the gun. Then Scarpino climbed in. Tony sat next to him and I got in back. Angie started the car.
“Where now, Tony?” Scarpino’s voice had lost the toughness. He wasn’t whining yet, but it was close.
“Angie knows where.” Quince turned and grinned at me. “This is cute, Nat. You’ll like this. And it’s still early enough.”
“Tony—”
Scarpino got the pistol butt over the jaw again. He didn’t ask any more questions after that. Angie gunned the car and then headed north. It wasn’t long before he whipped into the entrance of the cemetery where Tony Quince and I had had our little talk.
Tony was laughing now. “You get it, Nat? I told you I like this place — it’s peaceful, quiet. I set this up earlier, sent a few boys over with shovels. It’s cute, Nat.”
Angie knew the way. He drove over a variety of little roads, pulled over and stopped. A fresh grave yawned at the sky, a raw brown mouth in the earth. Scarpino saw it and went dead white. It was all real for him now.
It was tough getting Scarpino out of the car. He didn’t want to go. A pair of guys stood beside the grave and leaned on shovels. They smiled at Tony and he waved a hand at them. They watched as we dragged Scarpino over to the open grave.
Angie Moscato shot him. He wrapped his pistol in a car blanket to muffle the noise and then put the muzzle about six inches from Scarpino’s face. He squeezed the trigger and there was a soft wet popping sound. Scarpino fell down dead and Tony kicked him over into the grave. We all walked to the edge to look at him. Most of his face was missing. My stomach was a huge hard knot.
The pair with the shovels looked at Tony. He looked back at them for a second and then gave them a nod. They put the shovels to work on the mound of earth alongside the grave. The first shovelful landed on Scarpino’s chest. The three of us turned together and walked away from the grave. I could hear the rhythm of the shovels, and the sound of dirt covering Scarpino.
“Five years,” Tony said. I looked at him, “Five years ago I bought the plot, the cemetery plot. I bought it under another name, paid cash for it. You do that and the plot’s yours forever. Whether you use it or not, it’s yours. A handy deal. Pay now, die later.”
He laughed at his own joke. Moscato and I did not laugh. Tony stopped suddenly. He reached out one hand and I gave him a cigarette. I cupped my hands, scratched a match and gave him a light. He inhaled deeply.
“So I bought it five years ago,” Tony said. “For Scarpino, for whenever the time came. Now he’s in it. Now they cover him up and put the sod back on top. He’s gone, all gone. Just one more fresh grave and the only way anybody knows something’s wrong is checking the map. How many people sit around reading graveyard maps?”
I lit a cigarette of my own. It was getting brighter now and there was no time to listen to eulogies for Scarpino. There were three to go, Baron last.
“A fresh grave without a marker,” Tony Quince went on. “You know what I’m going to do? In a month, two months, three months, some guys are going to come in here in the middle of the night and put up a stone. Scarpino, with his name and when he was born and when he kicked. To make it official.”
I watched Tony’s face. He wanted to laugh out loud but he just couldn’t bring it off. He’d been planning this, setting it up, but now he couldn’t laugh over it. Later, maybe. Not yet.
One at a time we walked over to the car and got in. Nobody said anything. It was real now, real all the way. This wasn’t a movie, and there was no turning back, not with Scarpino in the hole and the dirt falling on him.
That was part of it.
The rest was identification. An obvious identification, one our minds couldn’t miss. A strong identification with Scarpino, and a fairly good understanding of what it was like to face a gun and know it was going to blow your head off in a minute or two. A picture of Scarpino in his grave and a far more frightening picture of ourselves in graves of our own.
Angie started the car and headed for the rooming house where Johnny Carr and Leon Spiro lived.
We left the car around the corner. We walked to an old rooming house with rocking chairs on the porch. Once it had been a private home, somebody’s mansion. I don’t think they had painted it since then and that had been a long time ago. The front door was locked. Angie took a long-bladed knife from his pocket and opened the door. We trooped inside.
Somewhere somebody was taking a shower. The sounds of the plumbing carried through the large old house. Someone somewhere else was cooking something and the smells got around as well as the plumbing noises. Tony said, “Two flights up.” We followed him.
There was a threadbare carpet on the stairs for one flight, then just bare wood. Both sets of stairs creaked magnificently. On the second floor a door opened and a haggard woman shuffled down the hall to the community bathroom. She looked like a superannuated whore. The third floor was empty and silent. Tony paused for a minute to find his bearings. Then he pointed to one of four identical wooden doors.
We walked to it. Angie had his knife out. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked and he eased it open slowly, gently. It whined at us but quietly.
We stepped inside. Tony was the last in and he closed the door. This time it didn’t make a sound. The room was dark, all the shades drawn and no lights on. It took my eyes a while to get used to the darkness. Then I could see — for what it was worth.