It might all be wrong: Di Titulo had no way of knowing what Bernie Lupus had done with all that money. But if any of Di Titulo’s assumptions were correct, then the whole half-century Bernie Lupus episode was one of those wacky ideas that could have worked. It was Hannibal pulling his end run across the Alps on elephants to take over Rome for Carthage. A couple thousand years later, Rome was like an enormous palace full of shiny cars and women wearing designer dresses, and it took an archaeologist to tell you where the hell Carthage used to be. People forgot that it could have been the other way around.
But maybe Paul Di Titulo had just happened to be looking in the window on the day they forgot to pull the shade down. He had studied the finances of the Five C’s for years, in the hope that someday he might find a safe way to divert a portion of the money that came in. It was only a coincidence that he had been there to hear about the Wilmont donation. And it took astuteness and imagination to understand that money moving into a charity in Cleveland just might have something to do with the death of Bernie Lupus. Everybody had assumed that what would happen was a steady stream of money flowing into some guy’s bank account. But Di Titulo knew that the sign might not be anything that obvious. It might be any unusual money moving anywhere. If somebody was liquidating big investments, he might very well need to dump a bit of it in charities. He might even do it to test a route for moving bigger money later—get a brokerage and a bank used to the idea that Ronald Wilmont was a zillionaire who wrote big checks.
Di Titulo could see his car parked another hundred feet away, and it made him feel pleased with himself. He loved the look of his brand-new Cadillac Eldorado. He had gotten an insane discount on it, because he had bought three GMC tractor-trailer rigs this month for his company. While he was at the lot, he had made a show of wishing he could afford a car too. That was what worming your way into the little brotherhood of above-the-surface business did for you.
He reached into his pocket for his keys and fingered the remote-control unit on his key chain. It was one designed for women who left their cars in dark parking garages. They could pop the door locks and turn on the lights before they got there. It was silly at noon on a respectable street in Cleveland on a hot summer day, but the sooner he was in the car and the engine was running, the sooner the air-conditioning would kick in.
Di Titulo gave a squeeze, and he felt as though someone had thrown a bag of rocks against his chest. A puff of hot wind seared his face and hands, tugged his coattails, and threw his silk necktie over his shoulder. He found himself lying down. His ears were ringing before he was aware that there had been a sound, and in his vision a patch of green floated in jerky puppet-jumps before the flash of the explosion emerged from his addled memory.
After a time Paul Di Titulo recovered enough to roll onto his side and look down. His clothes weren’t ripped or burned, and he seemed to have feeling in his arms and legs. He didn’t entirely trust that sensation, though. There might be some horrible pain that movement would trigger, so he moved his arms carefully and pushed himself to a sitting position. He watched the bright orange flames flickering up and down the length of his new Eldorado.
Di Titulo watched the waves of heat rising to make the tall buildings beyond them bend and wiggle, and understanding came to him. He had picked a rotten time to spend six hundred thousand on new trucks, and a worse time to be seen driving a Cadillac with the dealer’s stickers still on it.
As he got to his feet, he felt a wetness on his chest, and he looked down with alarm at the spots of blood that were appearing on his white shirt. In a second he realized that the blood was coming from above. His nose was bleeding. He touched it. It didn’t seem to be broken. The moving air had just slapped him in the face. But he gave himself over to a moment of despair. Some family had decided that Paul Di Titulo was involved in Bernie Lupus’s death. It was a sign of what mouth breathers some of these guys were, how impoverished their imaginations, how stunted their brains. Whoever had managed to get control of Bernie Lupus’s money wouldn’t reveal his crime in the form of three new trucks and a Cadillac. He would walk away from anything as paltry as Di Titulo Trucking and not bother to lock the front door. He would have more money than a small country, all nicely laundered and salted away a generation ago.
Di Titulo turned and walked unsteadily away from the fiery, blackening wreckage of his beautiful new car. He would find a pay phone and call Al Castananza himself. This was what bosses were for—to get the other bosses off your back. As he walked, he decided to tell him the rest of it too. Let the Castananzas use their time and money to look into the donation. This had already gotten too big and ugly.
18
Di Titulo sat in the airplane for over an hour beside Al Castananza listening to engine sounds. The second in command, Castananza’s old friend Tony Saachi, had told Di Titulo the rules while he was waiting in the car for the old man to collect his things. He had said it impersonally, in an even, genial tone. People like Di Titulo were not expected to speak except to answer questions. They would go where they were told and do as they were told, and, if all went well, they would come home. If they said things in public, they might not.
Di Titulo had asked, “Do you think it’s really necessary for me to come at all?”
Tony Saachi had smiled; his long spade-shaped teeth looked ghastly and his face was a skull. “Al likes you. It’s a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“If he goes and you’re here, then whoever blew up your car takes another crack at you. These bomb things are embarrassing. I would guess this time maybe they’d throw a bag over your head and run a chain saw through the bag. They won’t do anything if you’re with Al.”
Di Titulo stared at the headrest of the seat in front of him. He heard Saachi’s voice from a distance. “You should have been with us in ’87 when the Castiglione thing broke. Nearly two hundred guys went, just like that, in one night.”
He spent the flight with the earphones in his ears and the sound turned off, considering the strangeness of fortune. He could remember when he was a kid, thinking about the rich and powerful people who seemed to him to actually run the city. He used to picture them sitting around a big poker table in a smoke-filled room like the ones where people said deals were made. There would be the owner of the Indians, the owner of the Browns, the mayor, a couple of presidents of big companies that signed every third father’s paycheck, and Big Al Castananza. That was what the papers used to call him in those days, before it had become more fashionable to use quotation marks. Now they said Alphonse “Big Al” Castananza, 69: always his age, as though they were counting the days until he died. Di Titulo had never been this close to him before, so the celebrity still affected him. He leaned away into the aisle to stay out of accidental competition for the armrest between them, and after an hour, his spine felt as though it had been rotated a full turn at the pelvis.
When the plane landed in Pittsburgh, he followed Castananza to a pay telephone and watched him not dial it. A man wearing aviator glasses who looked a little like a pilot stepped up and stood beside him, then ushered Castananza along the concourse without ever looking at Di Titulo.
They took the elevator to the ground floor and stepped out to the curb. A car with tinted glass pulled up at their feet and they were in motion before Di Titulo noticed that the man had not come with them. The driver never spoke, and didn’t appear to look at the two men in the back seat. Di Titulo watched Castananza’s face. As they passed under street lamps, a stripe of light would move down it and then leave it immersed in darkness again. Castananza’s small eyes were directed forward in a sleepy gaze, as though he were unaware that anyone was looking. The jowls spilled over the rim of the stiff white collar, and his jaw was loose, not tight and working like Di Titulo’s.
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