“Who the hell hasn’t?”
“Lots of people have already forgotten it,” Leon said, the words coming out hard. “My son was there, fighting for the Filipinos, fighting for the U.S., fighting for you, Mister Delano. Don’t you feel any sense of … oh, I don’t know, thanks for what he and hundreds of thousands of others did? Respect? Guilt?”
Delano tossed his cigarette butt to the ground. “Clean that up, old man, and leave me the hell alone. I’m meeting someone important this morning.”
Leon reached over with his broom, caught the cigarette butt, swept it back to him. “I bet you are. Let me guess. Ty Mulcahey, right? Connected with the dockworkers union. Was going to meet you because, pretty soon, lots of troop ships are going to come through this wonderful harbor, and you and Ty wanted to see what kind of action you could get from all those ships and soldiers coming here.”
Delano stepped out of the alcove. “How the hell did you know that?”
Leon smiled, leaned on his broom. “You’re gonna love this, Mister Delano. You see, I never did tell you what I did before I came here today as a broom sweeper. I worked for the government. Department of Justice. When I started, it was called the Bureau of Investigation, but now you and folks listening to the radio know it as the FBI.”
He wondered if Delano was going to make a break for it and was happy to see the guy stay in one spot, like he wasn’t about ready to back down. “What … the … hell?”
“Got friends in the field office here, pulled a couple of strings—hey, just like you—and got word to you that Ty Mulcahey wanted to meet you here at Spike’s Place. But Ty’s not coming. He’s probably sleeping off a drunk over at Hell’s Kitchen. Nope, Ty didn’t want to meet you, but I sure as hell wanted to.”
“You got nothing.”
Leon laughed. “Hell, tell me something I don’t know! Me and the boys in blue here, we’ve been chasing you for years, right up until I was forced out on retirement. Just like Tom Dewey and Frank Hogan, the DAs. Even the Little Flower called you New York’s Public Enemy Number One last year. He wanted to do to you what he did to Lucky Luciano, arrest him and line him up to get deported, but it never panned out. So here you stand, still a free man. Feel pretty good about yourself?”
More trucks and cars rumbled by. Some horns were honked in a joyful fashion, signaling no more war, no more death, no more waiting to hear bad news.
Leon said, “Cat got your tongue? For real? Let’s talk about real. The last thing I ever heard from my boy”—and damn it, right then, his voice broke, and he hated sounding like a weepy old man—“was a letter from him, sent before Bataan fell. I must have read and reread that one sheet of paper a thousand times over the year. Never heard anything else. Then MacArthur invaded the Philippines and the main POW camp was liberated back in January. I waited, and I waited, and then I got that telegram from the Red Cross. You know what it said?” Delano started to walk away, but Leon got right in front of him. “It said my Jimmy had died one month before the camp was freed. One month. Thirty damn days!”
Leon’s throat constricted again. “So, I’ll let you be. Only if you answer one question.”
“I don’t have to answer a damn thing, old man.”
“Maybe. But maybe it’ll be in your best interest to answer, sonny. Maybe you answer this question, I leave you be, so you can keep on being a parasite.”
Delano tugged at his jacket, straightened his flashy necktie. “Ask your damn question.”
Leon nodded. “Ever since Pearl Harbor, ever since that day … you ever feel sorry, or guilty, about what you did? How you lived off the war, how you let other sons and fathers take your place? Sons and fathers who might have bad eyes, or flat feet, or bad hearing, but were still called up and drafted because they didn’t have your connections, your way of doing things. You ever feel guilty about that?”
Delano reached into an inside jacket pocket, took out a pack of Camels and a gold lighter. He lit off the cigarette, took a deep puff, and returned the cigarettes to his coat; he did the same with the lighter after snapping it shut with one satisfying click.
“No,” he said, smirking. “Not for a goddamn minute. I lived and those dopes died, and that’s all right by me.”
Leon just nodded again, went back to his trash cart, reached down inside, and from a crumpled-up paper bag—the bag the sanitation worker had thankfully overlooked—he took out a .45-caliber Colt model 1911 pistol with a tube silencer screwed onto the end.
“Wrong answer,” Leon said, pointing it at Delano’s chest.