R. Ellory - A Quiet Vendetta

Los Angeles, The Angels, surrounded to the north and east by the Mojave Desert and Death Valley, but despite the vision and the apparent romance of this place, despite the promise of sun, of twenty miles of white sand and warmth at the Santa Monica beachfront, we came to this city in March of 1982 as immigrants and strangers.

Our welcome was no welcome at all. We moved into a three-story walk-up on Olive Street by Pershing Square in downtown LA. We paid for the place in cash and registered under Angelina’s maiden name, and though we had been people in New York, though we had possessed faces and characters and personalities, in LA we possessed nothing. We were swallowed silently, effortlessly, into the great maw of humanity within that pinpoint microcosm of America.

It was three weeks before I saw our neighbor. I came back from a meeting with Don Fabio Calligaris’s cousin who ran a chop-shop on Boyd Street. I saw a man leaving the house adjacent to my own, I raised my hand, I called out Hello , and he turned and looked at me with a sense of distrust and resentment. He said nothing in return, did not even acknowledge my presence but hurried away, glancing back only once to repeat the look of hostility. I wondered for a moment if my sins were painted on my face for all the world to see. They were not. It was not me; it was Los Angeles that did it to them, relentlessly and irreversibly.

We came here for Angelina, for the children also.

‘The sunshine,’ she said. ‘The sun shines here. It is always dull and gray in New York. There are too many people who know of me back there. I wanted to get away, Nesto. I had to get away.’

I could empathize with her. I felt the same way for New Orleans, perhaps for Havana, but the coldness of the city, the absence of feeling and family in California was disturbing.

There was no shortage of work, however. Through Fabio Calligaris’s son I met Angelo Cova’s brother, Michael. Michael was a man unlike any I had met before. He was a big man, in stature – much the same as Ten Cent – but more so in personality. We met in the first week of May, and he explained to me that there were matters of business that I could attend to in Los Angeles that would be gratefully acknowledged by New York.

‘LA is Lucifer’s asshole,’ he said. We sat in a small diner back of Spring Street. The narrow building seemed to rumble constantly with the traffic running along the Santa Ana Freeway. Ahead of us was the Hall of Justice, behind us the US Courts, around the corner the Criminal Courts Building. I felt cornered in a way, fenced in by the presence of authority and federal residence. ‘LA is what God created for human beings to exercise their depravity. Here you got hookers with faces like a bulldog licking piss off of a lemon tree. You got thirteen-year-old boys peddling their asses for barbiturates and amphetamines. You got drugs the like of which you wouldn’t give a dying man to ease his pain. You got gambling and murder and extortion, all the shit you’ll find in New York and Chicago, but in LA there’s a difference. Here you’ll find something missing, and the thing that’s missing is a basic respect for the value of human life.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Take last week,’ Michael Cova said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. He held a small espresso cup in his hand despite the fact it was empty. ‘Last week I went down to see a guy who runs a few girls. They ain’t bad-looking girls, little rough around the edges, but slap some face paint on them ’n’ they look halfway decent. Sort of girl you’d slip the old salami and have a pretty good time, you know? So, I went down there to see him. He wanted some help dealing with some assholes that were trying to muscle in on the turf, and there was this girl down there, could’nta been more ’n’ twenty-one or two and she had half her face banged up so bad she couldn’t see out of her eye. Her lips was all swelled like a punchbag, and across her neck and throat were these dark black welts like some motherfucker had tried to strangle her.’

Michael cleared his throat.

‘I says to this guy, I says, “Hey… what the fuck happened to her?” and he says, “Oh, take no notice of the bitch”, ’n’ I says, “What the fuck happened, man? She get hit by one of these assholes you tellin’ me about?” ’n’ he laughs ’n’ he says, “No, she got herself teached a good lesson”.’

Michael uncrossed his legs and leaned forward.

‘So I says, “What the fuck is that all about? She got a lesson about what?” and this dumb fuck he says, “Bitch tried to hold out on me, bitch tried to hold out on me for fifty bucks she got off some rich asshole from uptown so I had to teach her a lesson, right?” and he started laughing.’

Michael shook his head and frowned.

‘I was shocked, man, I can tell you without any problem. This asshole beats the living crap outta this poor girl for the sake of fifty bucks. Never seemed to occur to him that she wasn’t gonna be entertainin’ anyone with her face all smashed up. Never thought to occur to him how much money he would lose with her out of business ’n’ all. And that’s the kinda thing I see every day down here. Basic lack of respect for the value of human life. It’s like they’s all lost their own self-respect and dignity, and sometimes it can’t help but stick in my craw.’

Michael put his empty cup on the table.

‘So things is a little different down here, and though we didn’t wanna have you involved with any of this kinda shit I’m afraid that you’re gonna come across it whether you look for it or not.’

‘So what d’you want me to do?’ I asked.

‘A bit of this, a bit of that. Angelo told me something about the kind of work you were doing for Fabio Calligaris, and we figured we could always use a little help in that quarter, you know what I mean?’

I nodded; I knew what Michael Cova meant. ‘So is there something specific?’

Michael smiled. ‘Well, that little story I told ya just then, I didn’t tell ya just for the sake o’ shootin’ the breeze and passin’ the time of day. I told you because the guy, the hitter, you know? The one who slapped the girl around?’

I nodded; I knew what was coming.

‘Well, seems she’s not the only one who’s been holdin’ out on fifty bucks here and fifty bucks there. Seems he’s as guilty as any of those girls of his, and we need you to go down and have a few words with him, sort of words he will thoroughly understand and never have the chance to repeat.’

‘You want him clipped?’

Michael looked surprised, and then he started laughing. ‘Shit, Angelo was right about you. You don’t fuck around, do you?’

I shrugged. ‘What’s the point? You want him clipped then say you want him clipped. We’ll save all the nice things about the weather and whatever the fuck else for sometime when I come over to yours for a barbecue.’

Michael dropped the friendly face. I heard it hit the floor of the narrow diner near the Santa Ana Freeway.

‘Sure, so we want him clipped. You can handle that?’

‘Consider it done. Any particular way you want it done?’

Michael frowned. ‘Whaddya mean?’

‘There’s as many different ways to clip someone as there are different people. Sometimes it needs to be fast and quiet, like the guy disappears for a holiday and never comes back, other times it’s because someone needs an example made to anyone else who might have the same idea-’

Michael brightened up. ‘That’s the baby. You got it there. We want him done like he’s an example to any of the other smalltime lowlife scumbags who might be getting the wrong idea about who they’re working for.’

‘When?’ I asked.