James Grippando - Born to Run

It had been two years since Madera had last seen Joseph Dinitalia. He looked the same-handsome, slightly overweight, and still showing the jet-black hair and dark Sicilian eyes that had labeled him a lady killer since high school. That was where the two men had first met. Every day after baseball practice they’d head over to Corona Heights, hit the Lemon Ice King, and talk about their plans to take over the world while watching the old Italian men play bocce ball in the park. After graduation, Dinitalia stayed in New York to join the family business, so to speak. Madera chose the straight path, went to college on an ROTC scholarship, served two tours of duty in the Middle East, and finally came home to a coveted job with the Secret Service. Then he hit a wall: not once, not twice, but six separate times the service turned down his request to work directly for the president. At their twentieth high-school reunion, Dinitalia took him for a limo ride. It was then that he laid out his plan to have the president work for them.

Sometimes Madera cursed his old friend for getting him involved, but it was all too perfect-the two smartest kids from the old neighborhood in Queens, one with the goods on the president of the United States, the other a Secret Service agent who was suddenly-but not coincidentally-handpicked by the president to be his right-hand man. All Madera had to do was whisper into his new boss’s ear, and the most powerful man in the world had two choices: grant Dinitalia his wish, or pack his bags and leave the White House.

“LaGuardia,” Dinitalia told the driver. “Go the long way around Jackson Heights and come back past St. Michael’s.”

“Yes, sir.”

The privacy partition rose automatically, and the men were alone, facing each other in the split rear seating.

Madera had just come from the airport, but he didn’t complain about returning. No one ever complained to Dinitalia. The last guy to do it had been mad enough and stupid enough to twist his surname into “Genitalia”-and he promptly lost his with a flick of the knife in a scene right out of The Valachi Papers. Stories like that became legend. So if Dinitalia wanted you to hop on an airplane, fly into LaGuardia, and cab it over to his restaurant just so that he could have a backseat talk while taking you straight back to the airport, then you hopped on an airplane, no questions asked.

“My father is unhappy,” said Dinitalia.

Madera’s throat tightened. There were ways to smooth things over between friends, but Dinitalia’s old man still ran the show. If he was unhappy, friendship didn’t matter.

“How do we fix that?” said Madera.

Dinitalia looked out the window as he spoke. It had the desired effect, making Madera feel as if he were of no more substance than his reflection in the dark tinted glass.

“We get the job done right,” said Dinitalia. “That’s how we fix it.”

“That was not my fuckup in Miami tonight.”

“Of all the stupid plans,” said Dinitalia, scoffing. “Spray the office with machine-gun fire? What do your boys think this is, an old rerun of Miami Vice ? They should have walked up and put a bullet in the Greek’s head. Bang. Game over.”

“It was impossible to just walk up to him,” said Madera. “He was with some Russian Mafiya. We don’t mess with them.”

“So thanks to you cowards, not only is the old man still alive, but he’s got complete control of a newsroom and is ready to talk to the camera.”

“What?” said Madera.

“You haven’t seen the news?”

“I’ve been on an airplane.”

Dinitalia filled him in on everything that he’d missed since boarding the shuttle from Washington. It was the proverbial bad-to-worse scenario, and by the time Dinitalia had finished, Madera was literally feeling sick to his stomach.

“I don’t think anybody saw that coming,” said Madera.

Dinitalia’s gaze drifted back in Madera’s direction. “My father paid the Greek good money for valuable information. It changed everything. Two years ago we were still paying off city managers to grant us recycling contracts so that we could haul bottles and newspapers straight to the dumps for pure profit. A nice piece of change, if you like small potatoes. This year, when the new contract comes in from the Pentagon, we’ll be over a hundred million dollars in private security contracts alone. Pretty good work for a company that doesn’t even have a private security force, but who the hell is gonna fly over to Iraq and check? And all this is possible because we know something about President Keyes that nobody else knows.”

“That’s still the case,” said Madera.

“For now. But it’s all over if the Greek starts blabbering on television. And once that unravels, do you have any idea what kind of problems we’ll have on our hands?”

Madera lowered his head. “I’d say no one has a better understanding of that than I do. Except for the president himself.”

The two men rode in silence for several minutes. It was a dark night, but Madera recognized much of the old neighborhood passing by outside the car windows. Finally, they’d completed the big loop, and the limo was back on Grand Central Parkway and headed toward the airport. St. Michael’s cemetery was coming up, and right next to it was the former Bulova watch headquarters. A famous watch manufacturer beside a cemetery. Madera had always thought it was the world’s greatest metaphor for time marching on.

“I have friends there,” said Dinitalia.

Madera knew he wasn’t talking about the Bulova Corporate Center.

“My father has friends there, too,” said Dinitalia.

Madera glanced out the window. He couldn’t really see anything, but he’d traveled past St. Michael’s so many times that he knew what was there.

“We’ve put friends there,” said Dinitalia, crossing himself.

Madera said nothing.

Dinitalia said, “You and I have been friends for a very long time, Frank.”

“A long, long time.”

Dinitalia nodded. “But this is business. Very important business.”

“I understand.”

“I’m not sure you do. So let me spell it out. The Greek dies tonight-before he starts shooting his mouth off. Period, end of story. Tell me you can get it done, and I’ll tell my father to let you live.”

Madera felt numb. Never before had the disparity in power between the two old friends been more apparent.

“I can do it,” said Madera.

Dinitalia leaned forward, deadly serious.

“Listen to me. At this point, I don’t care if you, personally, have to run into that television studio with a machine gun and shoot the place up. This problem has to be taken care of.”

“It’ll happen,” Madera said.

Dinitalia grabbed Madera by the earlobe and forced his old friend to look him straight in the eye.

“I want your word on it.”

Madera met his stare and said, “You’ve absolutely got my word on it.”

“Good man,” said Dinitalia, as the limo steered onto the airport exit ramp. “There’s a twelve-fifteen red-eye to Miami. Be on it.”

Andie almost had to shoot her way through the media.

The two-lane access road to the Action News studio was completely choked off. Police had established a perimeter around the property with teams of uniformed officers stationed about every twenty feet. Outside the police tape, hungry reporters poked and probed at the yellow membrane like free radicals on a skin cell. The largest concentration was at the main entrance to the parking lot. Media vans with satellite dishes and microwave antennae were parked two and three deep. The story of a newsroom held hostage was to the media as mirrors were to supermodels, and everyone from CNN to Noticias 23 was on the scene.