John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

“You got some balls coming here,” he said, still smiling, his head shaking gently from side to side as he said it.

“That an admission of guilt, Bobby?” I asked.

The smile never faltered. “Why do you want to see the boss? He’s got no time for shit like you.” The smile broadened perceptibly. “By the way, how are your wife and kid? Kid must be-what?-four by now.”

A dull red throbbing began to pulse in my head but I held it back, my hands tightening at my sides. I knew I’d be dead before my hands closed on Sciorra’s white skin.

“Stephen Barton turned up dead in a sewer this evening. The feds are looking for Sonny and probably for you as well. I’m concerned for your welfare. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to either of you that I wasn’t a part of.”

Sciorra’s smile remained the same. He seemed about to answer when a voice, low but authoritative, sounded over the house intercom system. Age gave it a gravelly resonance from which the rattle of death was not absent, lurking in the background like the traces of Don Ferrera’s Sicilian roots.

“Let him in, Bobby,” it said. Sciorra stepped back and opened a set of draft-excluding double doors halfway down the hall. The gray-haired guard walked behind me as I followed Sciorra, who waited until he had closed the draft doors before opening a second door at the end of the hall.

Don Ferrera sat in an old leather armchair behind a big office desk, not entirely dissimilar from Walter Cole’s desk, although its gilt inlay raised it into a different league from Walter’s comparatively Spartan possession. The curtains were drawn and wall lights and table lamps gave a dim yellow glow to the pictures and bookshelves that lined the walls. I guessed from their age that the books were probably worth a lot and had never been read. Red leather chairs stood against the walls, complementing Don Ferrera’s own chair and some sofas that surrounded a long low table at the far end of the room.

Even sitting down and stooped by age, the old man was an impressive figure. His hair was silver and greased back from his temples, but an unhealthy pallor seemed to underlie his tanned complexion and his eyes appeared rheumy. Sciorra closed the door and once more assumed his priest-like stance, my escort remaining outside.

“Please, sit,” said the old man, motioning toward an armchair. He opened an inlaid box of Turkish cigarettes, each ringed with small gold bands. I thanked him but refused. He sighed: “Pity. I like the scent but they are forbidden me. No cigarettes, no women, no alcohol.” He closed the box and looked longingly at it for a moment, then clasped his hands and rested them on the desk before him.

“You have no title now,” he said. Among “men of honor,” to be called Mister when you had a title was a calculated insult. Federal investigators sometimes used it to belittle mob suspects, dispensing with the more formal Don or Tio.

“I understand no insult is intended, Don Ferrera,” I said. He nodded and was silent.

As a detective I had some dealings with the men of honor and always approached them cautiously and without arrogance or presumption. Respect had to be met with respect and silences had to be read like signs. Among them, everything had meaning and they were as economical and efficient in their modes of communication as they were with their methods of violence.

Men of honor spoke only of what concerned them directly, answered only specific questions and would stay silent rather than tell a lie. A man of honor had an absolute obligation to tell the truth and only when the behavior of others altered so far as to make it necessary to break these rules of behavior would he do so. All of which assumed that you believed pimps and killers and drug dealers were honorable in the first place, or that the code was anything more than the incongruous trapping of another age, pressed into service to provide a sheen of aristocracy for thugs and murderers.

I waited for him to break the silence.

He stood and moved slowly, almost painfully, around the room and stopped at a small side table on which a gold plate gleamed dully.

“You know, Al Capone used to eat off gold plates. Did you know that?” he asked. I told him that I hadn’t known.

“His men used to carry them in a violin case to the restaurant and lay them on the table for Capone and his guests, and then they’d all eat off them. Why do you think a man would feel the need to eat from a gold plate?” He waited for an answer, trying to catch my reflection in the plate.

“When you have a lot of money, your tastes can become peculiar, eccentric,” I said. “After a while, even your food doesn’t taste right unless it’s served on bone china, or gold. It’s not fitting for someone with so much money and power to eat from the same plates as the little people.”

“It goes too far, I think,” he replied, but he no longer seemed to be talking to me and it was his own reflection he was examining in the plate. “There’s something wrong with it. There are some tastes that should not be indulged, because they are vulgar. They are obscene. They offend nature.”

“I take it that isn’t one of Capone’s plates.”

“No, my son gave it to me as a gift on my last birthday. I told him the story and he had the plate made.”

“Maybe he missed the point of the story,” I said. The old man’s face looked weary. It was the face of a man who had not enjoyed his sleep for some time.

“The boy who was killed, you think my son was involved? You think this was a piece of work?” he asked eventually, moving back into my direct line of vision and staring away from me at something in the distance. I didn’t look to see what it was.

“I don’t know. The FBI appears to think so.”

He smiled an empty, cruel smile that reminded me briefly of Bobby Sciorra. “And your interest in this is the girl, no?”

I was surprised, although I should not have been. Barton’s past would have been common knowledge to Sciorra at least and would have been passed on quickly when his body was discovered. I thought my visit to Pete Hayes might have played a part too. I wondered how much he knew, and his next question gave me the answer: not much.

“Who are you working for?”

“I can’t say.”

“We can find out. We found out enough from the old man at the gym.”

So that was it. I shrugged gently. He was silent again for a while.

“Do you think my son had the girl killed?”

“Did he?” I responded. Don Ferrera turned back toward me, the rheumy eyes narrowing.

“There is a story told about a man who believes he is being cuckolded by his wife. He approaches a friend, an old, trusted friend, and says: ‘I believe my wife is cheating on me but I don’t know with whom. I have watched her closely but I cannot find out the identity of this man. What do I do?’

“Now his friend is the man who is cheating with his wife, but to divert the other’s attention he says that he saw the wife with another man, a man with a reputation for dishonorable conduct with other men’s wives. And so the cuckold turns his gaze on this man and his wife continues to cheat on him with his best friend.” He finished and gazed intently at me.

Everything has to be interpreted, everything is codified. To live with signs is to understand the necessity of finding meanings in seemingly irrelevant pieces of information. The old man had spent most of his life looking for the meanings in things and expected others to do likewise. In his cynical little anecdote lay his belief that his son was not responsible for Barton’s death but that whoever was responsible stood to benefit from the concentration of the police and FBI on Sonny’s assumed guilt. I glanced at Bobby Sciorra and wondered how much Don Ferrera really knew about what went on behind those eyes. Sciorra was capable of anything, even of undermining his boss for his own gains.