Thomas Perry - Blood Money

Several unwelcome hypotheses flickered to life in Di Titulo’s mind. Maybe the old man wasn’t looking at him because the purpose of the trip was to deliver him for execution. Maybe the old man’s summons had been intended to bring them both for execution. No, the old man must know when an invitation was real and when it wasn’t. But how could he know? Bosses were killed all the time.

Slowly, the conclusion began to seem inevitable. Castananza couldn’t know. The small, unmoving eyes looked like the glass-bead eyes of a stuffed animal. He had been in this position for thirty-five years, and he had learned to live with it—no, learned to get along without actually living. He had known since the beginning that any time he stepped through a doorway, the muzzle might already be pointed at him, so he had killed off that part of his brain. Di Titulo began to sweat.

Di Titulo wondered what he himself looked like to observers. He might very well look like a bodyguard. What else could he be? They would take him down first, and he would never see it coming. He grasped for a hint of hope. Maybe he would never even feel it.

The car seemed to be slowing down, so he looked over the driver’s shoulder as it pulled up to the curb. There seemed to be nothing around here—the parking lot of a plaza behind them, a row of unlighted store windows across the street, a trash can. Castananza got out, so Di Titulo got out and joined him on the sidewalk while the car pulled away. Castananza turned to look up the street, looked at his watch, then looked down the street, but he seemed to have no impulse to say anything.

The bus grew out of the darkness like an approaching locomotive. The only way that Di Titulo could even discern the shape was by forcing his mind to fill in the space between the bright headlights and the lighted marquee above the windshield that bore the single word CHARTER. The bus glided to the curb with a hiss, and Di Titulo tried to see inside, but the windows were smoked glass that looked opaque. The flat, featureless side of the bus was painted a glossy dark color that simply reflected distant street lamps but seemed to have no quality of its own. As he followed Castananza to the steps, he looked to his left three times, but still could not tell whether it was more gray, or green, or blue.

The door wheezed shut behind him, and the bus began immediately to accelerate while he was still wedged on the bottom step. The driver was another man like the one at the airport. He was in his thirties and had close-cropped hair and an unmemorable, expressionless pilot face. He ran up through the gears with precise, effortless motions that made him look like an automaton.

The bus reached cruising speed and it was easier to stand, so Castananza climbed the rest of the way to the aisle. Di Titulo stepped up after him. As his head came high enough to see over the first seat, he looked toward the back of the bus. There were about five rows of empty seats, but beyond them, at the rear of the bus, the normal seats ended and there were two long bench seats, like enormous couches, and a long table in the aisle. There were men sitting around it.

Castananza moved down the aisle to the back, and as he went farther, Di Titulo could see past him. There were a few faces he had seen before. There were the Langusto brothers, Phil and Joe. He recognized John Augustino, and a man named DeLuca from one of the Chicago families. There was one he knew everyone had seen, because it had been in magazines for thirty years. It was Giovanni “Chi-chi” Tasso of New Orleans. The man with him must be his son—what was his name?—Peter? Yes, Peter.

Castananza’s approach was acknowledged with friendly mutterings: “Good to see you, Al,” and “Mr. Castananza,” from the younger ones. Castananza stopped at the head of the table and held himself steady by wrapping a beefy hand around the overhead bar. “This is our friend Paul Di Titulo,” he said.

Some of the men seated around the table nodded vaguely at Di Titulo. A few others stared at him for a couple of heartbeats, not in greeting but as though they were memorizing his face. Castananza said pointedly, “He’s like my left arm.” Di Titulo’s breath caught in his throat. It was a lie. But the others seemed to take no interest in him.

“What do you think of my bus?” It was John Augustino from Pittsburgh.

Castananza looked around himself critically, glanced in the direction of the bathroom door, fiddled with the drink holder in the seat beside him, then peered up at the television set built into the wall above the space where the back window should have been. He shrugged. “Seems like a nice bus. You make anything off it?”

“Business is just so-so. I bought five of them. I do pretty fair during the football season if the Steelers are doing good. Off-season, I do runs to Atlantic City. But five is too many. You want to think about buying one, you talk to me. I’ll give it to you at cost.”

Castananza answered, “If the Steelers get their ass kicked, I’ll give you a call.” A few of the men around the bus looked up with little smiles. “Then you’ll give me one below cost.”

Di Titulo felt a little better. The bus wasn’t some weird, ghostly death ship. It was just part of a business. Di Titulo felt comfortable in the world of business. It was all simple, straightforward propositions and simple responses. Everybody’s motive was the same, and how passionate it was could be measured in numbers.

Di Titulo felt the bus slowing down again, and he looked past the Langusto brothers at the lights outside the tinted windows. The bus came to a stop at the curb, the door opened, and Di Titulo held his breath.

The three men who climbed aboard were frightening. The first looked like a professional wrestler, with a flat, pushed-in nose and a mouth that seemed to begin just under his ears and stretch six inches in a horizontal line. The two young men who came after were wearing jeans and windbreakers like teenagers, and they scanned the bus and the street behind them like Secret Service men. Di Titulo had no trouble inducing a premonition of these two pivoting to spray the back of the bus with bullets, but they simply followed the big man as he walked back.

The wrestler stopped and his big frog mouth opened. He spoke politely to the older men. He said, “Chi-chi, Al, John, Joe, Phil.” To the others he said, “Hi, guys.” He stepped aside. “These are my cousins, Mitch and Steve Molinari.”

The big man had to be Salvatore Molinari from New York. Di Titulo noted that the two young men were given the same unenthusiastic stare that he had received, but not Molinari. The bus was beginning to fill up with extremely important people. The gathering of these men was like the building up of an enormous electrical charge, and Di Titulo felt uneasy as the bus stopped again and again. It began to seem to him that the bus would burn up, or the universe would seek to equalize this intense concentration of power in a bolt of lightning that would incinerate him.

As the bus moved from stop to stop, the talk among the notables was idle banter with obscure references to subjects Di Titulo knew nothing about. He noticed that the younger men seldom spoke, but smiled or chuckled politely when the bosses did. Finally the bus began to build up speed in increments that could only indicate a sustained stretch of open road.

John Augustino stood up in the aisle at the end of the table and said, “I’d like to thank you all for coming. The bus is going to keep moving while we talk. That way nobody can do much overhearing with a directional mike. It’s been swept for bugs, and we’ve got cars ahead and behind to watch for cops. If we can ever talk, now is the time.” He paused and looked somber. “I know we all share regret at the death of Bernie the Elephant. I think now is the time to express regrets of my own. It was my father who brought Bernie into our thing fifty years ago, and I apologize to each of you for what happened.”