“So Wood’s okay,” he said. “You can work for me.”
“You wouldn’t want me to. I can’t help.”
“You can help find the truth, clear Mia clean.”
“I’d ask the wrong questions,” I said. “Like where were you when Pappas was killed?”
“Home in bed. I usually am at two A.M. Not very good, but the best I can do. Ask your questions, find out.”
I couldn’t see his face well, but I knew it wouldn’t tell me anything anyway. I wanted the gloom in the office, it separated us. It made me feel detached. Somehow, if I put on the light, that would be taking the case, joining Albano.
“Did Mia want more than proof Andy was cheating on her mother, something else?” I said. “Maybe doing something Andy wouldn’t have liked, tried to stop? Mia and Captain Stern?”
“Like what?”
“She has wide contacts abroad. So does Stern. She’s Andy’s daughter, would know contacts here. An ex-con and hustler named Sid Meyer was murdered. I asked you about Meyer before, because he’d tried to see Mia just before he got killed.”
Albano smoked his cigar. “Dope, you mean. One of Andy’s enterprises, but not Mia’s. She hated Andy for that filth.”
“People can change fast when opportunity knocks,” I said. “Did she know Sid Meyer? Did you? Or Irving Kezar?”
“I told you I didn’t know any Sid Meyer.” He shifted in his chair, uncomfortable. “Kezar I’ve met. I’ve met men like Kezar all over the world-Saigon, Africa, every South American capital. Playing all sides for themselves. Parasites, leeches on every good work. You can’t build a dam or dig a well without paying them a share. Mia wouldn’t have a damned thing to do with a man like that. She’s defiant and conceited, thinks too much of herself sometimes, but she’s a builder, not a destroyer.”
Anger in his voice, a judgment of iron. I sensed that he thought a lot of himself, too, he’d gone his own way a long time, but I liked him. Only he was an old man now, no matter how young he acted, and Mia Morgan was his whole hope for tomorrow.
“It looks like the guard in the corridor knew the killer,” I said. “Have you heard anything about Max Bagnio? What the brotherhood thinks? Have you talked to your daughter?”
“We’ve talked,” Albano said. “I haven’t heard much. They’re being very quiet. Some think Bagnio is underground after the killer, others think maybe he did it himself.”
“Why? Little Max’s been close to Andy for years?”
“Who knows, Dan?” Albano said.
In my dark office his cigar glowed. I could barely see him now, his shoulders only a wide shape against my air-shaft window, the white hair seeming to float by itself. His voice was hard:
“You have to understand them, Dan-the Mafia brotherhood. They’re basically peasants, with all that means in the ancient European sense. No matter how modern they look now, they still have the minds of medieval European peasants. Even the third-generation sons, because it’s an ingrown, closed community. It’s one key to who they are and what they do.
“You know what a peasant mind is, Dan? A medieval peasant mind from a poor, harsh land? It’s a cunning mind, shrewd, but very narrow, very basic, very practical. Money, women, religion, the seasons, the family, the village. Period. The people in a village a mile away are outsiders, and any outsider is less important than your own pig!”
Passion in his voice, and violence. He’d thought a lot about them, his countrymen, and he hated them.
“To kill outside your own family isn’t murder to a peasant. A fact of life, even a tool. A French peasant kills the English family camped on his land just for their clothes, a few dollars, and sees nothing wrong. An opportunity, what practical man wouldn’t take it? It’s proper to kill an enemy, an outsider who has something you want, a friend who insults your family. And it’s more than proper to eliminate a leader you’ve lost faith in. It’s a necessity.”
The office was all dark now. A darkness that seemed to rest on the whole world, to be everywhere as I listened to John Albano. The distant street sounds of the city weren’t real, a tape recording from some other time, some other place.
“You mean Max Bagnio lost faith in Andy because of Diana Wood, the divorce?” I said. “Maybe someone else lost faith, and Little Max changed sides, followed a new leader?”
“Divorce is against the religion, and the religion is part of the code. Andy broke the code.”
“You think Max Bagnio is religious? Any of them? Today?”
“Not religion in the spiritual sense, no. But a kind of magic, a totem, the rules. Peasants don’t care about substance, what a religion means, but only about form. To a peasant the golden rule makes no sense, except in reverse-do to him before he can do to you. Yet he goes to church every Sunday, is a fierce Catholic. The code, Dan, rigid custom. A sign of being normal.
“And a leader has to act normally, keep the code, or how can he be considered reliable? To a peasant mind a leader who breaks custom loses reliability. How can he be trusted? What custom will he break next, what will he try to change next? Who will be hurt by some change? Peasants hate change, Dan, it scares them.”
The passion in his voice was almost too strong, maybe because he saw part of himself in them and hated that, but he was right about peasants, and roots go back far and deep. In the darkness I could feel the thick tentacles reaching out from the medieval dark of Sicily, the blood codes, the violence.
“Family honor, too,” I said. “That’s part of the medieval peasant code. Sicily, Corsica-the vendetta, honor avenged. A divorce could be dishonor, injury. To Stella Pappas, to your son Charley, to Mia. Maybe to others, their friends.”
“Not to Mia, no!”
It came out sharp. I waited, but that was all he said.
“But ‘yes’ for Stella, Charley, and their friends?”
“Maybe.” His voice was stone. His children, Stella and Charley, but they had broken his code. He cared only about Mia now.
“Max Bagnio and all of them?” I said. “Or one of them?”
“I don’t know. They talk to me, but they say nothing. The old men I grew up with are polite, but tell me nothing. They’re worried, all of them. I can smell it. Mia could be hurt.”
“Worried? About what?”
His cigar glowed in the dark. “People wonder why judges, mayors, officials betray their duty for the Mafia. Money, sure, for outsiders. But for officials who’re members, brothers, the answer is simpler-they’re not betraying their duties to America because they don’t serve America. They serve another country.
“The Mafia is a country, a nation, and that’s where their first loyalty is. The way Robert E. Lee gave his first loyalty to Virginia, not to the U.S. When Luciano worked for the U.S. Army in Sicily it wasn’t patriotism to America, it was an alliance between two countries with the same enemy at the time. They’ll fight for America-second. First they’re Mafia soldiers.”
He was silent for a time. “They came to a big, alien world that had rules and methods they didn’t understand, couldn’t succeed with, were lost in. So they stayed with the country they knew, the brotherhood, and they still serve it. Their private nation that gives them security and success. Now I smell worry here, they’re looking over their shoulders. Something’s wrong, unknown. Maybe an enemy among them, hidden? They’re as afraid of an unknown danger around them as anyone.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” I said. “They don’t trust you. It could be an act for you, a cover-up.”
“It could be.”
“Then it’s too big, Mr. Albano. Let the police-”
“Make it John, okay?”
I didn’t want to make it John. “I’m sorry. I can’t help-”