Page 94 of The Furies

CHAPTER XXV

I bought the cell phone that was to be passed on to Melissa Thombs, and input one number—my own—into its memory, because everything would run a lot smoother if I could find a way to communicate with her directly before we tried to get her out of the house. Now it was a matter of Melissa’s mother letting her know that the phone would soon be in place. According to Marjorie, Donnie Packard had never relished her company, and in the past would have left her and Melissa to their own devices, but as his paranoia increased he had taken to remaining in the room with them, even if his attention was focused primarily on his phone or whatever happened to be on TV at the time. When Marjorie had something important she needed to tell her daughter, or be told in turn, conveyance was by way of a note folded small and pushed behind a chair cushion.

Marjorie Thombs called as I was filling a to-go cup with coffee at Panera Bread.

“I got the note to Melissa,” she said.

“Any chance that Donnie might have noticed?”

“None. He was half-asleep when I slid it under the cushion. I was nearly tempted to make a break for it then and there with Melissa, but Donnie opened his eyes and looked at me, and I swear he was daring me to try it. He’s like a rattlesnake. You think he’s reposing, and then he up and bites you.”

“And the trash cans haven’t been moved?”

“They’re still halfway between the house and the sidewalk. Donnie was taking them in from the street when I arrived, dressed in a wifebeater with his pants hanging halfway down his ass like he’s some kind of hood. I hate that man, I truly do.”

I thanked her for her efforts and hung up. I could tell she wanted to talk more, but I couldn’t oblige her. I needed to get the phone to Donnie Packard’s house. Once that was done, I could put Melissa Thombs out of my mind until later and focus on Sarah Abelli’s problem. On reflection, I had decided not to ask Paulie Fulci to deliver the phone. Apart from my wanting him and his brother to remain close to Sarah’s home in case the blue Chrysler took another pass at it—or worse, its occupants decided to pay a personal call—Paulie, as had already been established, was not an inconspicuous person. If I sent him to the Packard place, it would be as though someone had just abandoned a refrigerator on the street. I drove to the Great Lost Bear and paid one of Dave’s servers fifty dollars to drop off the phone. I’d packed it in bubble wrap so she could just throw it if she had to. The priority was to ensure that it landed out of sight behind the trash cans in the yard. In fact, lobbing it might be preferable to entering the property, since the latter put her at risk not only of being seen by Packard but also by one of his neighbors. If he had a good relationship with any of them—unlikely, but anything was possible—they might mention that they’d noticed a stranger near his trash, which wouldn’t be good.

I took a moment at the Bear to catch my breath. Around me, the usual business of the bar was being conducted, but there was an edge to it. I remember my grandfather describing to me how he and his father and mother had listened to the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on a radio at a gas station as they were coming home from a church service. The hours between the attack and the declaration of war the following day had, he said, felt like being in limbo. The world had changed, and soon it would change again. They knew what was coming, and so the period between the assault on December 7 and Roosevelt’s signing of the U.S. declaration of war at 4:10 p.m. on the eighth had an air of unreality about it, a hiatus between the past and a future with which it could have nothing in common. Being in the Bear that day, with the pandemic at our doors, I thought I understood for the first time what my grandfather had meant.

My phone rang, and I saw Mattia Reggio’s name on the screen.

Time to go.

CHAPTER XXVI

Mattia Reggio had killed only one man in his life. He had never spoken of it to anyone, not even to his wife, Amara, and he both loved her and trusted her implicitly. He did not believe she would have thought less of him, had she known. She was the only woman he had ever slept with, and he was her only man. If she liked to remark to old friends that she had married young, but unfortunately her husband had lived, she did so within earshot, and would tip him a wink as she spoke. He might sometimes have frustrated her, but she never questioned his judgment. She understood that for much of his life he had engaged in criminality and consorted with men of violence. She knew, too, that he had inflicted harm on others when necessary, although only as a last resort. Mattia Reggio had a reputation as a calm man, and the voice of reason when others counseled rash acts. At home, it was Amara who had been forced to take on the role of disciplinarian when their children overstepped the mark. She could not recall Mattia ever raising a hand to them. To be fair, he was never required to. When he spoke, the kids had always paid attention, and acted accordingly. Only in his absence did they test the boundaries.

But if the relationship between husband and wife was one that seemed almost perfectly complementary, it was not without its secrets. Amara had learned that if Mattia wished to share something with her, he would tell her in his own time, and without prompting. He was a man who was comfortable with silence, and thought before he opened his mouth—a rare quality in his gender, she reckoned. She recognized when he was troubled, and had learned how to subtly alter the contours of their existence to permit him the space, both physical and emotional, to process whatever he was feeling. And if, in her more melancholy moments, she reflected that she had spent far more of their marriage trying to figure out her husband than he had in contemplating her nature, it was a small price to pay for a happy life, and she could at least console herself with the fact that virtually every married woman she knew could claim the same experience.

So it was that, had Mattia chosen to share with her the details of the killing, she would have been able to tell him, unaided, the date on which it had occurred, and what he had been wearing when he returned home that night. She could have detailed how he smelled, and spoken of the red stain behind his left ear, a smear of blood that had vanished by the time he came to bed, by then not only showered but also wearing some of the English Leather aftershave she had bought him for Christmas, even though he had not shaved since morning. She spent the following three days watching him brood, his face changing only when he left the house, just as if he were slipping on a mask in order to be able to consort with his peers, to be hung on the rack with his cap and coat when he came back in the evening.

On the fourth day, the clouds broke, and some version of normality was restored, but it was the beginning of the end of their life in Boston. It happened gradually—almost to avoid drawing attention to any particular time or incident, one might have said—but within a year Mattia Reggio had severed his ties with the Office, and he and his wife had moved to Portland, Maine. By then their children had already left home, and Mattia had suffered one mild heart attack, so the big men in Boston and Providence understood—or appeared to understand, because with such beings one could never be sure—why he might have wanted to find a new and less onerous path in life.

But had they known of the man he had murdered, it might have been a different tale. His wife would have become a widow, and Mattia would not have lived to see the birth of his grandchildren, because his own people would have killed him to prevent a war. It would have been quick, and he wouldn’t have known a whole lot about it, if he was lucky. He might not even have seen the gun or heard the shot, and his demise would have occasioned some regret. Because of who he was, and the respect in which he was held, the necessity of a closed casket might have been avoided. It was the exit wound that would have made the mess. A .22, then, close up, fired at the temple or the back of the skull, where the bone was thinner; one shot, two at most. Actually, he probably would have felt it: the first one, at least, while it rattled around inside his skull. The second would have brought any pain to an end.

Mattia hadn’t gone looking for trouble. In fact, he’d been trying to prevent the deterioration of an already perilous state of affairs. Mattia thought of the individual responsible almost as a kid, even though he was twenty-five, but that was because of the way he was behaving. Alessandro Angioni was hooked up with the Genoveses, running rackets for them in Springfield, Mass. But Angioni was ambitious, a hothead, and elected to regard territorial boundaries as purely optional. Alessandro Angina, the Office began calling him, because he was such a pain, but both Boston and Providence preferred to avoid a confrontation with the Genoveses, though some grayhairs speculated that Angioni wasn’t acting solely on his own initiative, and was being given a long leash by his bosses to test for weaknesses in the Northeast.

Matters proceeded uneasily in this way for a time, until a girl named Donna Sirola caught Angioni’s eye. Donna’s family were ordinary Springfield folk, and the closest they’d ever come to breaking the law was crossing at a red light. They bought their pastries from La Fiorentina and their groceries at Frigo’s, and knew the staff of the Italian consulate by name from social gatherings. The father was a security guard at Smith & Wesson, the mother a nurse at Mercy Medical. Donna was their only child, majoring in elementary education at Western New England University. She didn’t have a boyfriend, didn’t want one until she’d settled in at college, and even when she did get around to going out with someone, he wouldn’t look or act like Alessandro Angioni.

But Angioni wanted her, and his attentions quickly began to make life miserable for her. He knew her class schedule, where her friends lived, where she liked to go for coffee. He knew her car, the used VW Beetle her parents had bought her when she was accepted into WNE, and no matter where she parked it, he would find it, and often be waiting for her nearby when it came time for her to go home. She gave up driving to class, and either took the bus or grabbed a ride with classmates, but this didn’t stop Angioni from shadowing her. Her parents were afraid to go to the police because of who he was, and when her father tried to speak with him at the Mule, the dive bar off Main that was his preferred haunt, Angioni laughed in his face. That evening, an envelope addressed to Donna’s father was left in the mailbox. It contained a business card for a funeral home, with his name written on the other side.

The Sirolas were distantly related to Mattia Reggio’s wife: cousins of cousins, but it was enough. Mattia was asked to intervene, but they’d all been ordered by the Office to maintain a distance from Angioni. Wheels were grinding. People were talking to people. In a few weeks, once it could be done without anyone losing face, Angioni might be reined in, or preferably sent someplace else: Jersey, South Florida, fucking Cuba, who cared? As long as it wasn’t anywhere the Office would have to deal with him.

But Mattia didn’t think the Sirolas had that kind of time, because the word was that Angioni was tiring of the chase, and was now of a mind to teach Donna Sirola a lesson. After all, the Sirolas were nobodies. If, as he put it within earshot of a waitress at the Mule, he “reamed the bitch,” the most he could expect was a slap on the wrist and an order to pay compensation to the family. Angioni was making money for the Genoveses. Say what you liked about him, but he had the golden touch, and talent invited tolerance.

The next day, Leo Sirola called Mattia Reggio and asked to meet with him in Boston. Over take-out coffees by Revere Beach, Leo said that he was considering shooting Alessandro Angioni.

“I didn’t hear that,” said Mattia.

“I got no choice. He’s talking about raping my little girl.”

Leo’s voice caught. His hands were trembling so much that he was spilling his coffee. Mattia wouldn’t have put it past him to go through with what he was threatening, but he’d probably end up winging Angioni, even at close range, assuming he could hit him in the first place. It wasn’t like on TV, shooting a man. Mattia knew of experienced button guys who’d missed a shot from a few feet away, because who knew what might happen in the seconds between producing a gun and pulling the trigger? And human beings were startlingly resilient, particularly the ones, like Alessandro Angioni, you really wished weren’t so dogged. Unless they went down straight off, there was a good chance they’d either run, in which case you’d be forced to run after them, and few things were more likely to attract attention than a man with a gun chasing another man who was bleeding all over the sidewalk while screaming his guts out for all he was worth; or almost as bad, they could come at you, leaving you wrestling a wounded man for a gun, getting his blood all over you, and possibly one of your own bullets in the foot or belly for good measure. These outcomes were not only undignified but also a surefire way of ending up before a judge, either terrestrial or divine. Mattia reckoned Leo Sirola’s chances of punching Angioni’s ticket at somewhere between zero and less than zero, which meant that Leo’s concerns for his daughter would be unlikely to trouble him for much longer, because the only thing worse than killing Angioni would be failing to kill him.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Mattia.

He didn’t tell Leo that he’d already tried to exert his influence on the Sirolas’ behalf. He’d let it be known that they were family, and he didn’t like family being harassed, but the message wasn’t getting through. What was going on between the Office and the Genoveses was capo to capo stuff, so whatever he said was merely passed up the chain, and nothing ever came out the way it should when you played Broken Telephone.

But Mattia couldn’t have Leo Sirola hanging around outside the Mule, waiting for Alessandro Angioni with a gun assembled from parts smuggled out of the Smith & Wesson factory, like some lethal version of that old Johnny Cash song “One Piece at a Time.” And should Angioni make good on his threat against Donna, Mattia would have difficulty sleeping at night, assuming Amara didn’t smother him for failing to prevent the rape from happening in the first place.

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