Deacon King Kong(62)

And there it was, Elefante thought bitterly. He’s got nobody. If a big shot in Europe wants a fucking artifact worth an arm and a leg and the only stumbling block between him and that dough is a bagel maker and his daughter . . . well there it is.

“I thought you told him you’re in Staten Island,” Elefante said.

“People like that can find you,” the Governor said. “On the other hand, he’s like my brother Macy. These guys are fanatics. We got a little maneuvering room. I let him know that the minute I smell a rat, the statue is gone forever. Flushed down the toilet. Peeled to pieces. Tossed in the river. But I still think of Melissa here. So when I came to you . . . well, with you, knowing how your father was, I know I have at least one guy on my team who won’t cut and run.”

Elefante was silent. “My team,” he thought. How the hell did I get on his team?

The Governor sat up on the couch a moment, arched his back awkwardly, then reached under the couch and pulled out an envelope. “One more thing,” he said.

He handed the envelope to Elefante, who instantly recognized the painful scrawls of his father’s handwriting, which toward the end of his life was shaky and big. The envelope was addressed to the Governor.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Your poppa sent this to me when I was in prison.”

Elefante opened the envelope. Inside was a simple greeting card, with a picture of the old Cause docks, taken perhaps in the 1940s, the familiar Statue of Liberty in the distance. On the back was taped the traditional Irish blessing, obviously clipped from a book or a newspaper:

    May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.

May the sun shine warm upon your face,

The rains fall soft upon your fields.

And until we meet again,

May God hold you in the palm of His hand.



Next to that was a sketch, in his father’s hand, of a tiny box. Inside the box was a wooden stove, with small bits of firewood, crudely drawn, and a cross above it. The box had five sides; on one of the sides was a circle with a stick figure drawn in the middle, its arms outstretched.

“If this weren’t his handwriting, I wouldn’t believe he’d drawn it,” Elefante said.

“Do you recognize anything?”

“No.”

“It’s an Irish blessing,” the Governor said.

“I figured that much,” Elefante said. “But what’s with the firebox and the firewood?”

“Do you have a storage locker with something like that in it?” the Governor asked.

“No. That box could be anything. A garage. A house. A milk crate. A cabin in the woods. It could be anywhere.”

“Yes, it could,” the Governor said. “But where would Guido Elefante go?”

Elefante thought a long moment before he answered.

“My father,” he said dryly, “never went anywhere. He never went three blocks outside the Cause District. Hardly ever. He couldn’t walk very well. Even if he could, he wouldn’t go far. Maybe to the store in Bay Ridge once in a while that sold food from Genoa. There was a place on Third Avenue that sold Genoese stuff, focaccia, cheese mostly from the old country, but he hardly went there.”

“How do you know?”

“He never went anywhere, I tell you. He went to the boxcar every once in a while. He went to the storage place hardly ever. Maybe three times my whole life I saw him walk in there. I took care of the storage place, not him.”

“What else is around you?”

“Nothing. Just the housing projects. The subway. Some abandoned buildings. That’s it.”

The Governor looked at him oddly. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“That box is somewhere. Sure as I’m living, it’s sticking out like a blind cobbler’s thumb someplace. Somewhere your poppa put it.”

“How would I know where?”

The Governor yawned. “He’s your father,” he said sleepily. “A son knows his father.”

Elefante stared at the paper in his hands a long time. He wanted to say, “But you weren’t my father’s son. You don’t know how difficult he was. He was impossible to talk to.” But instead he said, “That’s not gonna be easy.”

He looked over at the Governor. He was talking to himself. The old man had fallen asleep. As quietly as he could, he rose from the rocker, stepped out the door, and slipped silently out into the hallway just as Melissa was coming up the stairs.





14





RAT



Bunch sat at the table of his dining room in his Bed-Stuy brownstone and chewed a chicken wing. A huge spread of wings and a platter of barbecue sauce were on the table. He motioned to the young man seated at the table across from him. “Help yourself, young brother.”

Lightbulb, Deems Clemens’s right-hand man, reached deep into the chicken wings, his fingers scooping out two, and then dipped them in the sauce. He sucked down the tender meat and reached for the plate again.

“Slow your roll, bro,” Bunch said. “The chicken ain’t going nowhere.”

Lightbulb still ate fast—too fast, Bunch thought. Either the kid was starving or he might be a dope user already. He guessed the latter. The kid was awful thin and wore long sleeves to cover what might be tracks in his arms.