Eddie's Boy Read online

  “Thanks a lot, Don,” Eddie said. “But you don’t have to do that. We’ve got plenty of money.”

  “This one won’t take much of my time. When he’s fired five hundred rounds, he’ll be better than you are. When he’s fired a thousand, he’ll be scary good.”

  After lunch Don took the boy through the living room of his house to the gun room. It had a combination lock on its steel door like a safe. He opened it, and the boy walked in behind him and looked at his collection. He had military rifles and pistols from a variety of manufacturers, configured for the armies of a number of countries. He had at least a hundred pistols on the racks, a dozen sniper rifles, and five shotguns.

  At the end of the gun room tour, he opened a drawer with seven pistols in it. “Which one of these is worth the most money? Look at them carefully. You can pick them up.”

  The boy picked up each one, examined it, then put it back. There was a Glock, a Sig Sauer, a Makarov, an antique Webley from World War I, a Walther, a Beretta. He picked up the Ruger LC9, and said, “This one.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s got its serial number drilled off. If I had to drop it, I wouldn’t have to worry about it or take any risks to get it back.”

  Sarkassian said, “You’re Eddie’s boy, all right. Let’s go shoot.”

  They spent the first afternoon with nine-millimeter Glock 17 pistols, firing at paper targets at fifteen yards. Sarkassian could put all seventeen rounds into the three-inch bull’s-eye every time. When the boy fired, Sarkassian stared at him hard, looking at every muscle, watching his hands, his breathing, his eyes, legs, feet.

  He adjusted the boy’s grip. “Like this. The part of your finger that touches the trigger is the last bone, where your fingerprint is. Using any other part tugs your weapon to the side, off the target.” He adjusted the boy’s right arm. “You want the force of the recoil to push your shoulder back, like a piston, not make the barrel rise.”

  All afternoon the adjustments that were made got smaller and smaller until they would have been hard for an observer to see. And by the time the sun was behind the barrow, the boy could fire seventeen rounds into the bull’s-eye every time.

  As they walked back toward the house for dinner, Sarkassian said, “You did well. That’s the paper target that police academies use at nine yards, not fifteen. If you were a cop, you’d be getting a few bucks in your next paycheck for qualifying at that level.” Two steps later he said, “That’s not good enough, of course.”

  That evening they cleaned the pistols, and Sarkassian tested him on reassembling them blindfolded.

  Sarkassian was as firm as Eddie in the belief that the only kind of shooting that mattered was hitting moving targets. The next day the target was a steel disk swinging back and forth. The day after that it was a volleyball bouncing across the boy’s field of vision; the next day a softball, and then a tennis ball. Two days later the softball was simply thrown, either bouncing or flying straight across or up in the air, with no warning.

  Whenever the boy had trouble with the next stage, Don would repeat, “There’s no magic, no talent, no trick. All there is, is practice.”

  There might not be magic, but there were skills. These were mostly ways to control the mind, forcing all his concentration and his will to think of nothing except placing that round where it would pierce the ball.

  The first day of the second week, Sarkassian greeted him at breakfast and said, “Today we’re left-handed.” They began with the same exercises and firing sequences, except holding the pistols in their left hands. During a few breaks they fired different pistols—a .44 magnum revolver, a .380 pistol. But the main work of the day was applying each of the initial lessons to the boy’s left side.

  Day after day the practice continued while there was sunlight, and they disassembled and cleaned the guns in the evening.

  After the second week of shooting lessons, Sarkassian said, “Today I want to try something I don’t usually teach anybody, because for most people it’s just a stupid parlor trick. For you, it might be different. It might be what saves your life one day.”

  When they reached the range, Sarkassian opened his backpack, where he usually carried the guns and ammunition. This time there were the two Glock 17s again. He said, “You’re going to learn to use two pistols at once. There are moments when it’s worth directing a double barrage of fire at a single target, and there are times when having the ability to direct fire into targets in two different directions would be useful.”

  At the end of ten days, the boy had learned to do both. After that, he practiced firing over his shoulder with either hand. Sarkassian taught him to use a wide selection of weapons, and spent a few days on using sniper rifles and shotguns.

  Then Sarkassian and the boy worked on making some improvements to the firing range. Sarkassian even taught the boy how to drive and operate the backhoe to lift big scoops of sand into the sifter he’d made of wood and reinforced screen to recover bullets the two had fired for the past two weeks. They increased the width of the backstop, added more sand, and put together some wooden tables at various distances for holding ammunition and sighting in rifles.

  On the last day of the boy’s time with Sarkassian, Eddie’s car pulled up in front of the farmhouse around noon. At the end of an afternoon of shooting, they all came in to make dinner.

  Eddie said, “I’ve never seen anything like that. He’s twelve years old. And that took a hell of a lot more than a couple thousand bucks’ worth of ammo.”

  Sarkassian shrugged. “The more he learned, the more curious I got to see what else he could do. Now I’ll have two good friends who can shoot and owe me a favor. You have any idea what that could be worth?”

  Three years later, Eddie and the boy shot the two men in front of Yankee Stadium. In mid-summer they lived through the ambush at the motel in Chicago. Then fall had come, and the world was already getting cold when the next group of men came after them.

  What had alarmed Eddie about the ambush in Chicago was that he’d fallen for the bait. And there were still people in Chicago who knew that Eddie and the boy had shot the two men in New York. Victor Castiglione knew. Eddie was pretty sure that nobody in the center of the country who knew would pass that information on to the New York people—the heirs of the late Mr. Luciano and their enemies. He told the boy that if trouble came, it would be people from the Midwest who got tempted by the money. Eddie was violating his own rule, which was not to think he knew more than he did.

  They attacked on an ordinary Thursday. The boy had just come in the front door of the butcher shop, carrying his books in a backpack to keep them dry. He remembered even now how quiet it was in the shop, as though someone had kept customers from coming in. The streets near the shop seemed empty.

  He saw a car pull up outside the front door. In the front seats and the right rear, he could see three men, all wearing overcoats and the brimmed hats that some grown-up men still wore in those days. After a second, he caught sight of a fourth man in the left rear seat. “Eddie!” the boy said.

  As soon as Eddie saw the car, he said to the boy in a quiet voice, “They’re here for us.”

  The boy had been trained and drilled for this moment. He ducked beneath the counter and crawled to the far end, took out the 12-gauge shotgun that was kept on the shelf below the scale, pressed the safety off, and then stuck the pistol from under the counter in his belt. He knew that Eddie was doing something similar, because there were a series of clicks and the whispery sound of metal against metal coming from his end of the counter.

  Eddie didn’t wait to tell the men to put their hands up. There was only the door swinging open, the bell above it tinkling, and the deafening blam of Eddie’s first shot. The boy popped up, saw the first man in the door topple backward, and fired his shotgun into the man coming in behind him. Eddie pumped his shotgun and got the third, who had been blocked and k
ept immobile by his two companions jammed in the front door.

  Eddie launched himself toward the back rooms and ran hard to come out the parking lot door and reappear at the front. He fired as the car rolled off from the curb, blowing out the rear window. His next shot peppered the back of the driver, blowing his hat forward off his head, but the car kept going. A shotgun was usually lethal at five yards, but by forty yards the pellets had spread and lost much of their velocity.

  Eddie turned and ran for his car. The boy, who was faster than the big man, caught up, but Eddie said, “Stay here.”

  The boy turned and ran back into the shop, stepping over the dead men. He heard a sound coming from the back of the shop, past the meat-cutting room and the walk-in refrigerator. He recognized the squeak of the back door. There were footsteps.

  He squatted beside the front of the counter. He knew that when these newcomers arrived, they would first gape at the three bodies in the doorway for a second before they could get their eyes to move on and search for him.

  He waited until the first man had cleared the doorway behind the counter and he could see the second man before firing the shotgun. He pumped it as the man fell, and got the second man too. He knew they must have come from a car parked in the small back lot where the delivery trucks parked. He stepped on one of the dead men to get through the front door and run around the building.

  He saw the car where he expected it to be. This was a cold afternoon, so he could see the steamy smoke puffing out of the tailpipe. He could see that the car had a Pennsylvania license plate held by twisted wire over another plate. He lifted it and saw that the one beneath was a New York plate. Since it was running, why wasn’t there a man in the driver’s seat? He didn’t see a third man anywhere. Had the two men just arrived in the car together and left the engine running?

  He heard a voice behind him. “Drop the shotgun.” The boy dropped it into the snow. Even now, he could still see how quickly the snow around the barrel melted because of the heat from his shots. “Now step back from it.”

  The third man had been hiding behind the wooden fence. The man stepped around it and picked up the shotgun with his free hand. As he did, the boy’s hand slipped under his butcher apron, freed the pistol from his belt, and fired it through the apron into the man’s face. Then he took it out and fired another round through his forehead.

  As the boy started to walk toward the back door, he saw Eddie push open the door and stick out his head. When he spotted the boy, Eddie came out the rest of the way and craned his neck to see if he recognized the man on the ground. Then he looked at the boy. “Going to be a big clean-up tonight.” He picked up the shotgun from the snow. He saw the boy’s head tilt back. “What are you doing?”

  “Listening for sirens. We fired seven shotgun shells and two pistol rounds.”

  “Most people who hear shots can convince themselves they didn’t if it’s over quick and they’re safe indoors on a cold day. They don’t want to get involved with police unless the shots were aimed at them. But we’d better get started.”

  They dragged the bodies to the two cars that had brought them. Eddie drove them away, one at a time, with the boy following each time in Eddie’s car. They pushed the one with the broken back window into the Ohio River with four men’s bodies in it and watched it sink. The other they drove into the city with three men’s bodies in it and left it at the back of a weedy vacant lot.

  Eddie and the boy drove home and spent the night cleaning the shop. They shoveled the blood-soaked snow into the storm drain and dragged the hose from the meat-cutting room through the front of the shop to hose the blood off the tile and sidewalk. They cleaned everything—walls, counters, floors. Then Eddie hung his sign in the shop door that said “Closed until” and set the hands of the sign’s clock for two in the afternoon. In the morning, while the boy was sleeping, Eddie called the school to say he had the flu but should be well by Monday.

  15

  Schaeffer left his hotel to drive to a mall. He parked in the middle of a row of cars and walked to the big pharmacy, the nearest store. He bought a pair of throwaway cell phones and a couple of hours of talking time. Then he went to the aisle that was just one long selection of hair dyes. He walked along the aisle, looking at the picture of a woman on each box, trying to find exactly the right shade. He picked a couple of boxes that seemed close to correct, and then went to a display of sunglasses that had a mirror. He held the boxes up beside his head, studied his reflection, and then chose a shade. He also bought two pairs of sunglasses, one very dark and one with a faint brownish tint.

  He paid for his purchases and went in search of a computer store, where he bought an iPad. He made a final stop at a department store, where he bought some new clothes. He knew that when people were searching for him, it was best to wear new or freshly pressed clothing in darker shades, so he replenished his supply.

  When he returned to his hotel, he felt a strong urge to call Meg’s phone. He wanted to know for certain that she had made it to the home of some friend or relative and settled in where she would be hard to find. He stifled the urge. All he could possibly accomplish with an international call would be to endanger her.

  He took the hair dye into the bathroom and went through the process of dying his gray hair. The color he had selected was as close as he could find to his natural shade, a light, sandy brown. He had dyed his hair a few times in the past, and he was efficient and competent. In a couple of hours he had changed his appearance significantly. He spent a few minutes studying his reflection while wearing the sunglasses he had bought, and decided they brought him another few degrees of difference from his original appearance. The very dark pair covered a large part of his face, and the tinted ones projected a personality that was alien to his.

  He went directly from disguising himself to getting used to his iPad, signing onto the hotel’s Wi-Fi network and searching the Internet for familiar names like Balacontano, Tosca, Scarpi, and Castiglione. In items about those important names he picked up names of their associates who were new to him. He read stories that were out of date and archived, and others that gave him information about recent crimes and arrests. There were far more books about the Mafia than there had been in the old days, when an interview with a reporter would get a man killed, and the government’s ability to intercept conversations was more limited.

  Easiest to find were the articles about established history. Carlo Balacontano was the third generation of his family to be in La Cosa Nostra. He had been born, like Joe Marsala and Salvatore Maranzano, in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, but two generations later. By the time he arrived in the United States at age eighteen, all the living generation from Castellammare del Golfo—Joe Bonano, Vincent Magaddino, Joseph Profaci, Joe Aiello—were near the end of their careers.

  Balacontano never had any interest in joining or rallying Castellammare natives as a faction. What he wanted was to be the head of an American crime family, and someday capo di tutti capi, the boss of bosses, a title nobody had claimed since 1931, when claiming it was enough to get Maranzano killed by Luciano’s hit men.

  By the time the boy was growing up in Eddie’s butcher shop in Pittsburgh, Carl Bala had become the boss of one of the five New York families.

  The next part was extremely familiar to Schaeffer. Carlo Balacontano was convicted in 1983 of murdering Arthur Fieldston, owner of a Nevada investment and real estate firm called Fieldston Growth Enterprises. The real owner was Balacontano, but Fieldston made a good front for him. One night, after a mysterious phone call told them where to look, New York State Police found Fieldston’s severed head and hands buried on Carl Bala’s horse-breeding farm in Saratoga, New York. And on August 1, he would have his first parole hearing.

  Outsiders, like the writer of the article and the law enforcement agencies called in at the time, had no idea that this event had anything to do with an earlier disturbance in Las Vegas, when a
professional killer known as the Butcher’s Boy had been ambushed on the Strip by a contingent of armed men, had killed them and escaped. But the two events had everything to do with each other.

  The savagery of the details had, in the opinion of at least one of the reporters whose accounts had survived, helped persuade the jury and the judge that Bala’s personal involvement in the physical crime didn’t need to be established. Balacontano was a New York crime boss, and bosses didn’t cut off people’s heads themselves. The partial remains had been found on his land two hundred feet from the main house. How could this not have been done with his knowledge and on his orders?

  Bala’s men would have caught him if he hadn’t jumped onto the back of a thoroughbred horse in the stable and unlatched the gate on its stall. The horse went wide-eyed and tried to kick its way out. It saw the gate swinging open as a divine act of liberation and ran through it. The horse galloped across a broad pasture, jumped a fence, ran even harder, and got scared by the next, higher fence, built to keep people off the property. It stopped long enough for Schaeffer to roll off its back and run through the darkness to the place on the next farm where he’d hidden his car. Later that night, Schaeffer had called in the tip to the state police telling them where to dig. The next morning he’d left for England.

  The writer noted that Balacontano had been in a federal prison for a very long time. He had been suspected of crimes, including many counts of extortion, robbery, assault, human trafficking, smuggling, selling drugs, bribery, tax evasion, racketeering, and theft. But when he had been convicted of murder all those years ago, the authorities had let everything else drop. Maybe they thought it was a waste of money to convict a murderer of fifty other things too. Now the statute of limitations had run out on all the incidental crimes that were part of his business life, and all but a few of the witnesses to the murders had died or been killed themselves.