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  "Cazzo!" Jo Jo said. "We're gonna be making a lot of people very angry."

  "That's the point," Vince said. "After three, four weeks of this, then we'll head upstate."

  Loretto spoke up for the first time. "Who's running Diamond's gang now? Joe Rock?"

  "We are," Mike said. "Only Joe don't know it yet."

  Vince said, "Don't worry about Rock. Once we show up in Albany, we'll be running things."

  Florence said, "Eat up, boys! Don't be letting all this good food go to waste." And with that, the business of the meeting was over and the men went about helping themselves to sandwiches and booze. Mike and Patsy joined Loretto as Vince and Lottie slipped off into another room, out of sight. A minute later, Lottie came back, found Loretto, and told him Vince wanted to see him.

  "Go ahead," Mike said to Loretto, turning his back to the others and lowering his voice. "We got everything straightened out."

  "You don't have to worry about nothin'." Lottie slipped in between Mike and Patsy. "We fixed it all up." She gave Loretto a playful kiss on the lips. The three of them—Lottie, Patsy, and Mike—made a small, intimate circle, the old-timers, the remains of Vince's old gang.

  "Guess I'll go see what he wants." Loretto straightened his tie and exited the circle. He paused at the entrance to the room where Vince had disappeared, considered knocking, and then pushed open the door and walked in. He found Vince stretched out on a chaise longue next to a bed that looked big enough to sleep six people. Spread out over the surface of the bed was an array of tommy guns, sawed-off shotguns, pistols, and pineapples.

  "Vince." Loretto took a seat on the edge of the bed, next to the chaise longue. "Lottie said you wanted to talk to me."

  Vince lay with his arms folded over his chest and his eyes on the ceiling. If he was aware of Loretto entering the room and addressing him, he wasn't showing it. His eyes remained fixed on the ceiling for several awkward seconds before he turned to face Loretto and stare at him in silence.

  Loretto said, "Did you want to talk to me, Vince? Or am I supposed to be getting some kind of message by the way you're looking at me?"

  "How am I looking at you?" Vince asked.

  "Like maybe you want to put a bullet in my face."

  "And why would you be thinking that, Loretto?" Vince rubbed his forehead as if trying to relieve a headache. The motion took some of the tension out of the room. By rubbing his forehead, he was at least not pulling out a gun.

  "Rumor was you weren't especially happy with me."

  "You're here, aren't you?" Vince said. "If I weren't happy with you, somebody'd be patting you with a spade about now."

  "All right," Loretto said. "So what did you want to talk to me about?"

  Vince sighed and closed his eyes as if resting for one more second. Then he pulled himself upright. "I'm glad you're in with us," he said. "I like you. I've always liked you. And I'm gonna make us all rich."

  "Great," Loretto said. "I'm in. I quit my job at the park. I'm with you."

  "I know that," Vince said. "You been working with Mike and Patsy. I know about you murderin' a chandelier at one of Jablonski's joints. Lottie thinks you're aces. I've been kept informed while I was out of circulation."

  "So?"

  "So these new guys," Vince said, "between them, they've kept the cemetery business thriving. You understand? They're killers. We're all killers. Except you, Loretto. You're like a virgin shows up at a cathouse and wants to join the party."

  "Yeah, but you invited me to this party, Vince."

  "And like I said, I'm glad you're here because we go way back—and I hate to see a guy like you playin' the sucker, breakin' his back for nothin'. I just want to be sure you understand the situation we're in. There's about to be a lot of blood spilled, and we'll be the ones doing the spillin'."

  Loretto's arm twitched, a quick spasm that made his fist close as if it were somehow separated from him, a creature moving beside him on the bed. When it twitched again, he stood and shoved his hand in his pocket. "I know what I'm getting into," he said. "I'll do my part."

  "Good." Vince gestured toward the door, meaning Loretto could leave. "Ask Lottie to come back in, will you?"

  "Sure." Loretto pointed to the bed. "We've got an arsenal here."

  Vince said, "One more thing, Loretto. You ever disappear on me again, whatever it was got you sick, you can be sure it'll be fatal."

  Loretto thought about saying something more and decided against it. He left the room and closed the door gently behind him.

  Vince stretched out again on the chaise longue. He was tired. His thoughts kept going back to Schultz and Madden and the Lennox Bonding Company. He imagined the two of them meeting at Polly Adler's place or the Cotton Club, in a posh room somewhere, sitting over a table with drinks in their hands, talking about killing him, killing Vince Coll, putting up fifty thousand dollars bail like the chump change it was just to get him out on the street and make him an easier target—and what infuriated him, what made his heart start beating like it might tap-dance out of his chest, was the thinking of those bastards, that all they needed was to get him out on the street and they'd kill him, the way they'd killed Pete, the way they'd killed Jack.

  He wanted those bastards to fear him. He wanted them to pay fifty thousand dollars to keep him in jail because they were afraid he'd get to them if he was out on the street—and it made him crazy that it was the other way around, that they wanted him on the street because they thought they could get to him that easily. "One of us is wrong," he said aloud, under his breath, meaning either they were wrong to set him free and it'd cost them their lives and their businesses or he was wrong to think he could take it all away from them. If he could have somehow gotten up from his lounge chair and found himself in that room at Polly Adler's or the Cotton Club, he'd have killed them both and taken his time doing it.

  "You want to get out of here?" Lottie asked when she came in and found Vince lying down with his eyes closed. "Are you tired, honey?"

  Vince got up, found the new pearl-gray fedora Lottie had bought for him, and put it on. "Yeah, we're getting out of here."

  Lottie winked, thinking Vince was ready to catch up on some lost time in the sack. "Where we going?" she said. "I hear the rooms at the Waldorf are the cat's pajamas."

  "We're going to City Hall."

  Lottie's attitude quickly changed. "Why would we go there?"

  "To get a marriage license."

  For a second Lottie looked like she might fall over. Then she flew across the room. She leaped into his arms and they fell back together onto the bed.

  Vince pushed the guns and the pineapples aside as Lottie leaped up again, locked the door, slipped out of her dress, and climbed over him in her underwear.

  Vince looked at his wristwatch. "We got a couple of hours before the offices close."

  "That's time enough," Lottie said, and she went about unbuttoning his shirt and helping him out of his clothes to the accompaniment of laughter and shouting voices as the boys got drunker and louder on the other side of the door.

  9:00 p.m.

  Loretto had moved his two suitcases' worth of possessions out of Ma

  ma's before Augie and Freddie were back from work. The weather had turned bitter, and snow piled up on the sidewalks froze into ice barriers between the streets and the tenements. Mike had waited on the street with his car parked behind Dominic's Packard, in case Loretto needed a push, and Mama watched from the living room window as Loretto hauled his stuff out of the warmth of her apartment, down the steps, and out into the cold. "What's the matter?" she asked Loretto before he carried off the last of his suits. "He can't come up to see his mother?" Loretto kissed her on the cheek before leaving. "He'll come up later, probably," he said, and he made his way down to the icy sidewalk, threw the suits in the back of car, and then followed Mike as he led the way to an apartment downtown in the city, on Greenwich Street, a first-floor, two-bedroom flat hidden behind a warehouse.

  Mike had settl
ed into the apartment quickly. By the time it was dark, he'd packed his clothes away, made his bed, and stocked the icebox with a week's worth of food. Loretto had also gotten settled quickly, and the two of them were in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a bottle of wine between them, drinking and listening to The Shadow on the radio, when someone knocked on the door. The knock was soft and tentative, and the two men looked at each other as if neither had any idea who could possibly be looking for them. Mike took his pistol from the kitchen counter and tucked it into the back of his pants. He stood away from the door, asked who was there, and then opened it with a look of shock on his face when Gina answered and asked to be let in.

  "How the hell'd you find us? Che cazzo!" He turned to Loretto, who was watching from the kitchen. "How she'd find us?"

  "Don't get excited," Gina said to Mike. She stepped into the apartment and closed the door behind her. "One of you dropped this." She took a slip of paper out of her purse with the address written on it. "Mama found it in the boys' room."

  Mike made a fist, as if threatening to punch Loretto in the nose.

  Loretto, frozen at the entrance to the kitchen, was speechless. Gina said, "I had to see it for myself."

  Mike said, "Come on in. I'll make you some pasta. It's not Mama's," he added, "but I'm pretty good."

  Gina crumpled up the slip of paper, tossed it to the floor, and left.

  "Don't worry about it," Mike said on his way back to the kitchen and The Shadow. "That's just Gina. You know how she is."

  Loretto snatched his coat and gloves from the living room closet and followed Gina out the door. By the time he reached the street, she was already a block ahead of him, on her way to the subway stop. When he called to her, she ignored him.

  "Gina, listen," Loretto said, when he caught up to her. He was still pulling on his gloves. "Jeez, it's cold."

  "That's what you came out to tell me? That it's cold?" She walked on, and only after a full block, with Loretto continuing to walk alongside her in silence, did she stop. "Were you even going to tell me?" she asked. "Did you quit your job? Are you with Mad Dog Coll now?" She spit out the words Mad Dog Coll as if they were both funny and horrifying at the same time.

  Loretto rubbed his hands together and then pointed to a Greek diner across from the subway stop. "Let's get a cup of coffee," he said. "We can talk in the diner, where it's warm."

  "No. If you're back with Vince, if you and Mike . . ."

  "Gina . . ." Loretto shoved his gloved hands deep into his coat pockets. "Try to understand."

  "Understand what? I'm listening. Go ahead."

  Loretto looped his arm through hers and tried to pull her across the street toward the diner.

  Gina resisted. "I'm not having coffee with you," she said. "Tell me right here. What do you want me to understand?"

  A plume of condensation rose up from Loretto's lips. "I don't want to dig ditches," he said. "Try to understand that, could you? I don't want to spend the rest of my life like a glorifed draft horse, hauling tree limbs, carrying rocks, and getting treated no better than a horse, either. Could you try to understand that, please?"

  "Sure, I can understand," Gina said. "So what do you want to do? You're twenty-one years old. There's lots of things you can do."

  "I want to make some real dough," Loretto said, suddenly finding confidence. "I'd like a house with some property. Why shouldn't we have that? I want to buy us a reliable car and good clothes. I want to be somebody. I don't want to live six of us crammed into a two-bedroom apartment, like everybody I ever knew growing up. I want to stay in nice hotels when I feel like it. I want to go to the Cotton Club with the rest of the big shots. Does that make me crazy? Is it so crazy to want that?"

  "It's not crazy to want it," Gina said. She took a step back as if surprised by Loretto's tone of voice and his manner, which was suddenly different, louder and larger. "But are you willing to kill people for it? That's what's crazy, Loretto."

  "And the rich," Loretto said, "you think they don't kill people who get in their way?"

  "No. I don't."

  Loretto laughed at that, and his look—standing in the street, his hands back in his pockets—his look was a sneer.

  Gina said, "What happens if you get killed? Have you thought about that?"

  "It's the business," he said. "It's the risk everybody takes. Everybody that signs up knows the deal."

  "And that makes it okay?"

  Loretto repeated, "It's the risk everybody takes."

  "For the fancy clothes and their names in the paper and pockets lined with cash," Gina said. "And what about when a kid gets killed? What about the Vengelli boy? Is that okay? Is that the business, too?"

  "That was a mistake."

  Gina looked at Loretto as if he were a stranger. "I thought . . ." she said, and suddenly she was pleading. "I thought that night when you stayed with me instead of going with Vince . . . I thought you were done with him."

  Loretto said, "It doesn't have to be one way or the other, Gina."

  "Yes, it does," Gina answered, and then she shivered, the cold finally getting to her.

  "I thought . . ."

  "What did you think?"

  Loretto didn't know how to answer. His thoughts were tangled. "Don't go, Gina," he said. "Stay and have coffee with me."

  "You made your choice," Gina said. She turned and walked off to the subway and then disappeared down a flight of steps, out of the darkness and into the bright light reflecting off the white tiles of the subway walls. Loretto stomped his feet and clapped his hands, fighting off the cold, but he waited a full minute or more after Gina was out of sight before he finally turned around and went back to the apartment, where he went directly to his bedroom and lay down on his bed, still in his coat and gloves.

  Mike peeked into Loretto's room and sighed as if frustrated. "Jeez, Loretto," he said. "Look. Gina's a dame, and she loves you. For dames, that's the end of the story. Relax, will ya?" He shut the door as if he didn't want to be bothered by Loretto for another second.

  Loretto kicked off his shoes, turned off the lights, and got under the covers, where he lay in the dark, still shivering from the cold.

  Wednesday - January 6, 1932

  6:00 a.m.

  Stretched out in the back seat of a beat-up old Ford, Loretto tried to look like he was catching a little nap before the action started. Under his feet, a grease-stained red blanket covered a black tommy gun. Alongside him, Patsy was talking to Anthony Domini, who was gazing out the window as if bored to tears. Mike was in front, driving, and Paul Martone leaned forward in the passenger seat next to him, humming "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries" and tapping his fingers on the dashboard. They were following Vince and Jimmy Brennan and the Evangelista brothers in another old Ford, a two-car caravan making its way through the still-dark streets at an hour in the morning unfamiliar to all of them.

  Loretto knew that they were in the city, near Madden's brewery, but he didn't know exactly where they were. He had closed his eyes shortly after getting into the car, mumbled grumpily about the early hour, and hadn't opened his eyes or said a word since. He knew that if he talked, his voice would betray him. He'd been involved in all manner of rough stuff over his years on the street and then with Gaspar and Dominic, but nothing like this. They were riding in cars taken from brewery workers who were spending the night tied up in a machine shop in the Bronx. He was dressed in khaki coveralls, as was everyone else. He knew little of the plan beyond that their cars were full of bombs and tommy guns, with which they hoped to blow up the brewery and kill anyone who tried to stop them. The only thing in their way was Madden's goons, an unknown number of them, all of whom would be well armed. The plan was to go in and get out quick: blow up as much of the equipment as possible and shoot up anything and anyone left standing.

  Patsy shook Loretto by the arm, and he sat up as the car descended a long ramp to an underground garage and a couple of men waiting at a sawhorse blockade. When Vince's car approached th
e blockade, the workers moved the sawhorses aside and waved them through. Loretto glanced back at them as they jogged up the ramp.

  "I hope Vince paid those guys enough to get out of New York," Patsy said.

  Anthony Domini said, "If they're smart, they'll go all the way to California."

  Mike said, "Here we go," and he pulled into a parking spot next to Vince. At the other end of the garage, night-shift workers were fling out through a tall green door and making their way toward an exit or toward parked cars.

  "Keep your heads down," Vince said as he joined them. Behind him, Jo Jo Evangelista carried a cardboard box in his arms, clutched to his chest.