“Charley, or Max Bagnio, or even someone higher.” Albano watched the road. “An important event, Dan. Max Bagnio should be there, unless he’s afraid to be.”
“Or unless someone else is afraid to have him there.”
I saw the house a half mile away. It was white and Colonial, as big as the Dunlap house, and richer. Cars were massed around it like a great swarm of bees. The private cars and the rows of limousines just starting to leave. The brotherhood buried its dead according to the book. Formal clothes, a limousine for all. The soldiers packed in six-in-one, the generals and statesmen riding in secluded splendor with, perhaps, a single peer.
John Albano parked. We got out. Two guards hurried toward us. John Albano waited, the picture of a Sicilian patriarch. One of the guards recognized him, stopped, wary.
“Excuse, padrone. I wasn’t told you’d be here.”
“You see me.”
“The Mass is over. Funeral, too.”
“Is my daughter also buried?” Albano demanded.
The guard nodded, stepped back, and we went on into the big white house. Crowds of men in formal dress, and women all in black, filled a giant living room, a banquet-sized dining room, and smaller rooms. They saw me, and froze; saw John Albano, and fell silent.
Stella Pappas sat at the rear of the living room, women and older men hovering over her. One of the women was Mia Morgan. John Albano strode straight toward his daughter. I felt like one of those African movies where the white hunter and the nervous redhead walk down massed rows of silent warriors with sharp spears and nasty faces. Stella Pappas hadn’t seen us, her head down. Charley Albano had. The little under-boss stepped into our path, jerked his head at me.
“You bring him here?”
“I bring who I want to my daughter’s house.”
“Why even come yourself?”
“Get out of the way, boy,” John Albano said.
Charley paled again. The rules of patriarchy were rigidly honored in his world, at least in custom if not always in fact. But he couldn’t back down too far here. Not before his rivals and the old men who made the decisions, handed out the power.
“You got no place here, old man,” Charley said. “You got no daughter here. Mr. Pappas’s house. I’m the head of this family in this house.”
“A dead man hasn’t got a house,” John Albano said. “Or a business, eh? You head of the business now, too, Charley?”
“You ain’t wanted here, old man.”
John Albano shook his head. “I’m tired, Charley. You know why? Because I was hiding all night in a garbage dump. I’m too old to get chased by punks. Maybe you, Charley? You have something worrying you, boy? You know, you start ambushing me and my friends, people are going to look at you, maybe wonder what you’re so worried about. Bad business to get noticed, Charley.”
The old man had raised his voice, loud enough for the whole, silent room to hear him. Chalk-white, Charley Albano spoke so low to his father that I could barely hear him:
“Shut up, old man. Shut up.”
Mafia justice is fast and capricious. A doubt can be enough, not bothered by rules of evidence. They were listening, the swarthy men in their almost ludicrous formal suits, and Charley was losing more than face. The situation was slipping away from him, he had to act. Do something. What? He was saved from the decision by Stella Pappas.
“Papa?” Stella said. “You came?”
The plump widow’s voice was tremulous, grieving, yet there was a flash in her eyes as she looked at her father, an anger a lot like Charley’s. Her delicate face was swollen with crying, the bereaved “Mama” of the dead Papa, but there was something of the self-possession of the independent American woman, too. In black she seemed somehow younger, at home in the simple black of an Italian matron, less awkward. As if she had adopted, even wanted, the old-world wife role. But she was an American girl, and less subdued in her own home.
A perpetual conflict inside her, the American woman versus the Mafia wife? Or an act? The old-world wife only a facade for the world, for Andy? Not really subdued at all? The way her eyes flashed at John Albano as Charley stepped aside and let Albano go to her. Charley saved, for now, because the widow was paramount at such a time. Funerals belonged to the women.
“You could have come to the Mass, Papa. A prayer for him.”
“Are you all right?” John Albano said.
“Not even to his grave? You hated him that much?”
“I came for you, Stella, nothing else.”
“But no tears even for me, Papa?”
“I told you how it would end twenty-five years ago,” John Albano said. “And I told you what you’d live with.”
“They were good years!” Stella Pappas cried.
A rumble of anger in the big room, a stirring. John Albano didn’t appear to notice. There wasn’t anyone in the room worth his notice. Except one person. Mia Morgan stepped closer to her mother, her dark eyes reflecting the black of her dress.
“Were they, Mother? With him? The things he did to people? Fear and extortion? A man who died in bed with-”
Stella Pappas jumped up, her hand raised to slap Mia the way she had earlier. Her arm never moved forward. A hand caught her wrist, slowly sat her down again. I hadn’t seen Levi Stern. Tall as he was, the gaunt-ugly face, he had a way of melting into the background.
“I have asked you not to slap Mia,” he said.
Stella Pappas shook off his hand, but didn’t try to get up again. “Her own father! She hated him. Hired men to spy. For me? Who knows for what? Who else did she hire?”
“Mama!” Mia said. “I never-”
Charley Albano took Mia’s arm. “Get out. Take your friend, and the old man, and-”
Levi Stern pushed Charley away. They stood facing each other. Stern, tall and whiplike, towering over the short, dapper Charley. Almost touching, like two elk with locked horns, Charley’s cat face tilted up in pinch-nosed fury. What happened next only I saw.
Levi Stern stood with his back to the rear wall, no one behind him. Charley had his back to the room. I stood alone to one side. The Mafia men waited for the fight.
It didn’t come.
Charley Albano stood with his hands at his sides. Levi Stern spoke in a quiet voice that carried through the room.
“I do not want Mia touched by anyone here, given orders, or accused. You won’t bother her, Mr. Albano.”
“No,” Charley said, his voice oddly thin.
“Mia does not belong here. We will go. Mia?”
A short old man in formal clothes came out of a side room. About the same age as John Albano, he looked older, and the Mafia people parted before him like water rolling back. He came to where Levi Stern and Charley Albano were still standing face to face. He glanced at John Albano.
“What goes on here?” the old man asked.
“Mia and I are leaving now,” Levi Stern said.
“Then leave,” the old man said.
He moved his hand, palm flat down. An order to everyone in the room to do nothing. Stern took Mia’s arm, and they walked through the crowd and out. The room began to buzz, half in anger and half in contempt for Charley Albano, who had been faced down.
Only I had seen the knife.
A thin knife that had appeared like magic in Levi Stern’s bony hand. From his sleeve. One moment they had been chest to chest, the next moment the knife had been under Charley’s chin, hidden from everyone but me. The knife against Charley’s jugular all the while Stern talked, then vanishing as it had appeared.
I watched Charley sit down. His hands shook. The old man in formal clothes watched Charley, too, turned to John Albano.
“Charley took it, the insult? Why?”
I told him. His thick gray eyebrows went up, and he looked toward the door where Stern and Mia had gone out.
“A dangerous man, the Jew,” he said. “I have thought about Andy, how the police say it happened. To come up the stairs, shoot the boy in the hall with an automatic rifle, break in the door, line up Andy and the woman, shoot many times very loud, and escape unseen? Max Bagnio must have been very slow.”