California?-and they all spotted him immediately though he was half an acre away. He saw the bodyguards reaching for weapons in their shoulder holsters, so he had no choice but to fire indiscriminately with his Uzi, spraying the entire patio area, taking out Velazquez, both bodyguards, a middle-aged woman who must have been somebody’s wife, and an old dame who had to be somebody’s grandmother.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Ssssnap.
Everyone else, inside and outside of the house, was screaming and diving for cover. Vince had to climb the wall back into the yard of the house next door-where nobody was home, thank God-and as he was hauling his ass over the top, a bunch of Latino types at the Velazquez place opened fire on him. He barely got away with his hide intact.
The day after Christmas, when he showed up at a San Francisco restaurant owned by Don Tetragna, to meet with Frank Dicenziano, a trusted Family capo who answered only to the don himself, Vince was worried. The fratellanza had a code about assassinations. Hell, they had a code about everything-probably even bowel movements-and they took their codes seriously, but the code of assassination was maybe taken a little more seriously than others. The first rule of that code was: You don’t hit a man in the company of his family unless he’s gone to ground and you just can’t reach him any other way. Vince felt fairly safe on that score. But another rule was that you never shot a man’s wife or kids or his grandmother in order to get at him. Any hit man who did such a thing would probably wind up dead himself, wasted by the very people who had hired him. Vince hoped to convince Frank Dicenziano that Velazquez was a special case-no other target had ever eluded Vince for a month-and that what had happened in Oakland on Christmas Day was regrettable but unavoidable.
Just in case Dicenziano-and by extension, the don-was too furious to listen to reason, Vince went prepared with more than a gun. He knew that, if they wanted him dead, they would crowd him and take the gun away from him before he could use it, as soon as he walked into the restaurant and before he knew the score. So he wired himself with plastic explosives and was prepared to detonate them, wiping out the entire restaurant, if they tried to fit him for a coffin.
Vince was not sure if he would survive the explosion. He had absorbed the life energies of so many people recently that he thought he must be getting close to the immortality he had been seeking-or was already there-but he could not know how strong he was until he put himself to the test. If his choice was standing at the heart of an explosion… or letting a couple of Wiseguys pump a hundred rounds into him and encase him in concrete for a dunk in the bay… he decided the former was more appealing and, perhaps, offered him a marginally better chance of survival.
To his surprise, Dicenziano-who resembled a squirrel with meatballs in his cheeks-was delighted with how the Velazquez contract had been fulfilled. He said the don had the highest praise for Vince. No one searched Vince when he entered the restaurant. At a corner booth, as the first men in the room, he and Frank were served a special lunch of dishes not on the menu. They drank three-hundred-dollar Cabernet Sauvignon, a gift from Mario Tetragna.
When Vince cautiously raised the issue of the dead wife and grandmother, Dicenziano said, “Listen, my friend, we knew this was going to be a hard hit, a demanding job, and that rules might have to be broken. Besides, these people were not our kind of people. They were just a bunch of wetback spics. They don’t belong in this business. If they try to force their way into it, they can’t expect us to play by the rules.”
Relieved, Vince went to the men’s room halfway through lunch and disconnected the detonator. He didn’t want to set the Plastique off accidentally now that the crisis was past.
At the end of lunch, Frank gave Vince the list. Nine names. “These people- who are not all Family people, by the way-pay the don for the right to operate their ID businesses in his territory. Back in November, in anticipation of your success with Velazquez, I spoke to these nine, and they’ll remember that the don wants them to cooperate with you in any way they can.”
Vince set out the same afternoon, looking for someone who would remember Travis Cornell.
Initially, he was frustrated. Two of the first four people on the list could not be reached. They had closed up shop and gone away for the holidays. To Vince, it seemed wrong that the criminal underworld would take off for Christmas and New Year’s as if they were schoolteachers.
But the fifth man, Anson Van Dyne, was at work in the basement beneath his topless club, Hot Tips, and at five-thirty, December 26, Vince found what he was after. Van Dyne looked at the photograph of Travis Cornell, which Vince had obtained from the back-issue files of the Santa Barbara newspaper. “Yeah, I remember him. He’s not one you forget. Not a foreigner looking to become an instant American like half my customers. And not the usual sad-assed loser who needs to change his name and hide his face. He’s not a big guy, and he doesn’t come on tough or anything, but you get the feeling he could mop up the floor with anyone who crossed him. Very self-contained. Very watchful. I couldn’t forget him.”
“What you couldn’t forget,” said one of the two bearded boy wonders at the computers, “is that gorgeous quiff he was with.”
“For her, even a dead man could get it up,” the other one said.
The first said, “Yeah, even a dead man. Cake and pie.”
Vince was both offended and confused by their contributions to the conversation, so he ignored them. To Van Dyne, he said, “Is there any chance you’d remember the new names you gave them?”
“Sure. We got it on file,” Van Dyne said.
Vince could not believe what he had heard. “I thought people in your line of work didn’t keep records? Safer for you and essential for your clients.”
Van Dyne shrugged. “Fuck the clients. Maybe one day the feds or the locals hit us, put us out of business. Maybe I find myself needing a steady flow of cash for lawyers’ fees. What better than to have a list of a couple of thousand bozos living under phony names, bozos who’d be willing to be squeezed a little rather than have to start all over again with new lives.”
“Blackmail,” Vince said.
“An ugly word,” Van Dyne said. “But apt, I’m afraid. Anyway, all we care about is that we are safe, that there aren’t any records here to incriminate us. We don’t keep the data in this dump. Soon as we provide someone with a new ID, we transmit the record of it over a safe phone line from the computer here to a computer we keep elsewhere. The way that computer is programmed, the data can’t be pulled out of it from here; it’s a one-way road; so if we are busted, the police hackers can’t reach our records from these machines. Hell, they won’t even know the records exist.”
This new high-tech criminal world made Vince woozy. Even the don, a man of infinite criminal cleverness, had thought these people kept no records and had not realized how computers had made it safe to do so. Vince thought about what Van Dyne had told him, getting it all sorted out in his mind. He said, “So can you take me to this other computer and look up Cornell’s new
ID?”
“For a friend of Don Tetragna’s,” Van Dyne said, “I’ll do just about anything but slit my own throat. Come with me.”
Van Dyne drove Vince to a busy Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. The place must have seated a hundred and fifty, and every table was occupied, mostly by Anglos rather than Asians. Although the joint was enormous and was decorated with paper lanterns, dragon murals, imitation rosewood screens, and strings of brass wind chimes in the shapes of Chinese ideograms, it reminded Vince of the kitschy Italian trattoria in which he had murdered the cockroach Pantangela and the two federal marshals last August. All ethnic art and decor-from Chinese to Italian to Polish to Irish-were, when boiled down to their essence, perfectly alike.