Warren Murphy - Mob Psychology

" 'As burns this saint . ' "

" 'As burns this saint,' " said Tony, watching Saint Pantaleone begin to darken.

" 'So burns my soul. I enter alive into this organization and I leave it dead.' "

"Do I have to say that last part?" asked Tony, watching the card blacken and shrivel, giving off a pungent stink.

"Not unless you wanna enter the organization dead," said Don Carmine blandly. "In which case that's how you will leave it. The river runs only one way. Get me?"

Gulping, Tony Tollini finished the oath of allegiance.

Beaming, Don Carmine dropped the card into a green glass ashtray, where it curled up like a grasshopper in its death throes.

"Congrats!" he said. "You are now one of us! With all the rights and privileges of bein' a made guy."

"Thank you," said Tony Tollini miserably. When he had entered the corridors of IDC a decade ago, he had never imagined it would come to this.

Don Carmine spanked the table hard. "Bruno, get us some wine. Red. While I think up a new name for Tony, here."

"I have a name," protested Tony, looking at his Tissot watch.

"What, you in a rush? This is a sentimental moment. Me, when I think back on my baptism, I get all choked up. You, you look at your fuggin' no-numbers watch. That's it!"

"What is?"

"No Numbers! That's what we're gonna call you. No Numbers Tollini."

"Hey, I like that, boss," said Bruno the Chef, setting down several glasses and beginning to pour blood-colored wine from an oblong green bottle.

"No Numbers?" said Tony (No Numbers) Tollini.

"You'll get used to it. Now, drink up."

They drank a toast. Tony thought the wine tasted a little salty until he realized he was bleeding into the glass. He switched hands and started sucking on his trigger finger, which really tasted salty.

It was then that Don Carmine grew serious.

"No Numbers, on account of your quick rise in our organization, we're gonna give you a very important job to do."

"Yes?"

"One that's gonna help you make your bones."

"Please don't break my bones!" No Numbers Tollini said tearfully.

"I said make. That means you gotta kill somebody."

"Oh, God. Who?"

Don Carmine Imbruglia leaned into No Numbers Tollini's melted-by-fear features and exhaled sweet wine fumes.

"Don Fiavorante Pubescio, the rat," he whispered.

"My uncle?"

"He's screwin' us. He's gotta go."

"I can't kill-"

"What 'can't'? You took the oath, same as me. Same as Bruno there. If a made guy don't do like he's told, other made guys have to discipline him. It ain't pretty, either. It usually means expulsion from the organization."

"Does that mean . . . ?" Tony gulped.

Running a finger across his throat, Don Carmine nodded sagely. "This ain't IDC, kid. Remember that oath."

Tony swallowed. He tasted the blood on his trigger finger. His blood. He decided too much of it had been spilled already.

"Whatever you want, Don Carmine," Tony (No Numbers) Tollini said hollowly.

Chapter 34

Antony (No Numbers) Tollini parked his red Miata on Canal Street in lower Manhattan, where the scent of tomato sauce from Little Italy and soy-sauce aroma wafting up from Chinatown commingled into a breathable cholestoral-MSG mix.

He got out, buttoning the lower button of his Brooks Brothers suit to conceal the silenced .22 Beretta that Don Carmine had presented to him with words of fatherly advice.

"It's very simple, kid," Don Carmine had said. "You walk up to the hit, tell a few jokes, make him feel good, and whack him out while he's laughin' with you. He'll never know what hit him."

All during the ride down from Boston, Tony Tollini rehearsed how it would be. He would meet his Uncle Fiavorante in the walnut alcove where he held court. He would surreptitiously pull the Beretta from his belt and fire from under the table. He had seen it done that way in dozens of movies. Uncle Fiavorante would never know what hit him. The threat of the deadly weapon would be enough to get him out of the building alive.

Tony Tollini turned onto Mott Street, nervously wiping his sweaty palms on his gray trouser legs. He had never killed a man before. At IDC he had stabbed a few in the back, corporately speaking. But that was different. It was business. There wasn't any blood.

Tony Tollini decided that he would approach the task before him in true IDC fashion, forthright and unflinching. It would be no different than an employee termination. Besides, how much blood could there be? The bullets were .22's.

Resolutely Tony knocked on the blank panel that served as the door to the Neighborhood Improvement Association. It opened quickly and the blue-jawed tower of bone and muscle asked, "Yeah?"

"I'm here to see the don."

"Who're you?"

"His nephew, Tony."

"One sec." The guard called back. "Boss, you gotta nephew named Tony?"

A distant voice croaked back, "Sure, sure. Show him in."

Tony was practically hauled inside and marched between two men into the dim black walnut alcove. A figure sat hunched in the gloom. Tony squinted in an attempt to make him out. The figure looked up querulously.

He frowned, "You ain't my nephew, Tony."

"You aren't Don Fiavorante," Tony blurted, staring at the waxy yellow face before him.

No Numbers Tollini realized he had said the wrong thing when the two guards threw him to the floor and pulled his clothes apart. One came up with the Beretta. The other hauled him back to his feet and sat him down so hard in the chair facing the strange old man that Tony felt a bone break somewhere. He thought it was his coccyx.

The old man-he looked like an anorexic corpse-dug a pale shriveled talon into a stained paper bag and extracted a single greasy fried pepper, which he began to chew methodically.

"I don't know you," he said, his voice a dry rattle.

"Cadillac sent me."

"I don't know that name."

"Cadillac Carmine, the don of Boston."

The old man stopped chewing. One eye narrowed in slow thought. The other fixed Tony with watery wariness.

"We ain't talkin' about Fuggin Imbruglia, are we?"

"He calls himself Cadillac."

"He would. How'd that assassino get to be in charge of Boston?"

"Uncle Fiavorante gave him the territory," said Tony, figuring only the truth would save him now.

The old man resumed his chewing. "Fiavorante, he is your uncle?"

"Yes. "

The old man waved a well-chewed pepper in the direction of the Beretta, held loosely in a guard's hand. "You come to see your uncle with a cold piece in your belt?" he asked.

Tony said nothing. The other watery eye opened to match its mate. "I see things very clearly now. Can you handle a shovel?"

"Why?" asked Tony.

"Because somebody's got to dig the grave."

"Not Uncle Fiavorante?" Tony asked in horror, momentarily forgetting his mission.

"Naw, we already planted him. I was thinking of giving you the adjoining plot. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

No Numbers Tollini leaned forward across the scarred walnut table, not noticing the fresh gouge that was the rusty brown of dried blood.

He decided to play his trump card. "Listen. I'm a very, very good friend of Don Carmine's," he confided, trying to sound like Robert De Niro.

"And I got a very, very big vendetta against that rotten Fuggin," returned the old man.

"I'm a made guy, I'll have you know," Tony added, lowering his voice to a sinister growl. "They call me No Numbers. No Numbers Tollini. Maybe you heard of me."

"If I ain't made you, you ain't made. I wouldn't have a guy in my outfit calling himself No Numbers. What kind of name is that?"

"I can get you computers," Tony said quickly. "All you want. I can make your operation as successful as Carmine's. More successful. I swear."

"Fuggin' Carmine couldn't operate a laundry."