Stuart Kaminsky - Always Say Goodbye

“Yep,” said Milt writing quickly, “I remember now. A noble family. The old woman, kids. Yeah, I remember John.”

“See what you can find on all of them.”

Holiger looked at his list and read: “Santoro, Posnitki, the Pappas clan. Anything else?”

“Not for now,” Lew said.

Holiger closed and pocketed his notebook as Franco came back and sat next to Lew.

“I’d ask you to come to the house for dinner with me and Ruthie, or we could take you out someplace,” Milt said. “But I know better. If you decide down the line while you’re in town to take up the offer, you’ve got my number.”

“Thanks, Milt,” Lew said.

“No, Lewis, I mean it. Ruthie would like to see you.”

“I’ll-” Lew began.

Holiger held up a hand and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

He got up. So did Franco and Lew. Milt said, “Good to meet you, Franco. Take care of yourself, Lewis, and call me tonight about this.”

He patted the pocket of his jacket where he had placed his notebook.

“Now?” asked Franco when Milt was gone.

“Uncle Tonio’s,” Lew said.

“Right.”

“You ever hear of Rebecca Strum?” Lew asked as they walked to the garage where Franco’s tow truck was parked.

“Sure, yeah,” he said. “You kiddin’? Angie’s a reader, read all of her books. They’re lined up in the case in our bedroom, a couple in the built-in case in the dining room. Everybody knows Rebecca Strum.”

John Pappas stood against the wall in the kitchen watching his mother lay out the ingredients for her famous Kibbeh Bissanieh, baked lamb and wheat. It was one of his favorites. He enjoyed the smells of the kitchen, the clanking of mixing bowels and wooden spoons, the sound of cracked wheat being crushed.

His mother, wiping her hands on her apron, looked over her shoulder at Pappas for an instant smile and then went back to work. She sang a medley of random lines she remembered from almost forgotten songs.

“‘Born free,’” she sang, “‘Free as a rainbow round my shoulder, free as that old devil moon in your eyes, free as the wind and the rain in your hair.’”

Pappas plucked a pine nut from a small pile in his left palm and dropped it on his tongue.

Stavros and Dimitri were born into the world of their father and their grandmother. Their mother had disappeared when Stavros was learning to talk and Dimitri learning to walk. Stavros remembered her as tall, thin, pale with red hair. Dimitri remembered her not at all. Her name was Irene and she was not to be spoken of. The few times the name Irene had come up-a television character, a waitress in a restaurant-John Pappas had looked at his sons, seeking a reaction. He got none.

It was not a world they would have chosen, but they had accepted it without childhood whimper or teenage rebellion. This was a family in which nothing but complete loyalty would be tolerated.

The brothers didn’t want to walk in their father’s shoes. They didn’t know what might be lurking in those shoes and they did not want to know.

They did what they were told, what they had to do, to protect father, grandmother and each other. But in the end, Stavros and Dimitri, though they might well be willing to die to preserve the family, most certainly did not want to be a part of the family business. John Pappas accepted this. The line of assassins went back forever. It would probably stop with him. It was time.

Bernice Pappas added the mixture of water-soaked bulgur wheat, onions, ground lamb, pine nuts, salt and pepper. She tasted the mixture, found it acceptable and kneaded and laid it out on a baking pan. She looked down at what she had done and smiled as she turned her head toward her son and placed the pan in the oven.

“Will they have the balls to kill him?” she asked, closing the oven door, wiping her hands on her apron and looking at her son.

“Yes,” said Pappas, lifting the palm of his hand to his mouth to get the last four pine nuts.

“Posno has to die,” she said, moving bowls, wooden spoons, cutting boards to the sink.

“I know,” said Pappas.

They had agreed to this a long time ago and many times since. He always listened dutifully when his mother brought it up again. It did have to be done. Posno was too great a threat to him and the family.

“Get rid of him before he gets you killed,” she said, searching for something in the refrigerator. She retrieved a small bottle of spring water and moved to the kitchen table where she sat in a wooden chair.

“Yes,” Pappas agreed.

He could already smell the Kibbeh Bissanieh baking.

What, he wondered, was Posno doing now?

Andrej Posnitki followed the Pappas brothers. He was careful. He would not and could not be seen. It was the reason he had survived his entire life. He was careful. He was ruthless. He thought neither of the future nor the past.

Posno drove a new Prius, which didn’t deliver nearly the hybrid mileage he had been promised. He accepted this fact. He knew he was capable of convincing the automobile dealer on Harlem Avenue to take the car back. Posno could be very convincing, but he also had a simple philosophy: Almost everyone can’t be trusted. If you were to right each wrong done to you, you would never get through the day and there would be a trail of the broken and the dead. Save your wrath for the big threats to your existence and your work.

Somewhere in the files of Catherine Fonesca, wherever they might be, was information that would end the existence of Andrej Posnitki. He would not let that happen.

Uncle Tonio was a dealer in merchandise.

Toys, DVDs, wallets, purses, chairs, you name it, from sources in China. Knockoff computers, watches from Japan. Rugs that looked like handmade Turkish from Poland. Lamps that looked like Art Deco 1935, but were made in 2006 in India. Leather sofas, both real and synthetic, from Indonesia. Ancient Peruvian jewelry made last year in Lima. In his fifty-one years in business, there was little that one imagined or made to fit in a crate that had not passed through Uncle Tonio’s warehouse on Fullerton.

Lew didn’t think anyone in the family, even his father, knew what most of the merchandise was or had been.

Every few weeks when Uncle Tonio came to dinner he brought a gift. Once, Lew remembered, it was two cartons of Cheerios. They ate it for a year. Another time the gift had been a small wooden tomato crate packed with forty dolls that looked like Barbies, but weren’t. They were all dressed in yellow tennis outfits complete with yellow visors and a plastic tennis racquet. For years Angie had given them away to her friends for birthdays and Christmas.

Lew’s cousin Mario and most of the family assumed there was something not quite legal about Tonio’s business. When they said it aloud, they did it with a knowing smile of pride. Maybe the family actually had a Mafia connection? Maybe Uncle Tonio had known Capone, Nitti, Giancanna?

Tonio did nothing to dispel the belief. He encouraged it.

“So,” someone might ask over dinner, “what’s new, how’s business?”

Tonio would keep eating, looking at his food, raising his fork as a prelude to answering and say, “You know, pretty good, not complaining. Pass the pepper.”

If Uncle Tonio was a family legend, his warehouse on Fullerton held the awe of a haunted castle. The two-story concrete building was about the size of a football stadium. It didn’t stand out in the neighborhood. Most of the buildings in the area were big, constructed for storage and shipping. The brick ones dated back to the late 1800s. One had been an icehouse till the 1940s.

Uncle Tonio’s warehouse had been built at the beginning of World War II to hold military vehicles-half-tracks, jeeps, trucks, staff cars. No one lived within six blocks of Uncle Tonio’s. During the day, the warehouse and the neighborhood were benign, a set for a television cop show chase, complete with fissures and buckles in the pavement and a very nice quartet of train tracks long gone to rust.