A bookie named Cookie Pistolet had been serving a thirty-day stretch in the Orleans Parish Prison for beating his wife. Tom had been treating Cookie’s gout. Pistolet was apparently a man of some stature in the Marcello organization, because he received daily deliveries of food and liquor, not to mention a regular envelope filled with various papers and receipts, which he worked on far into the night—with police assistance when necessary. Tom had never seen anything like this, but it was the way of the world in New Orleans, so he turned a blind eye.
Twenty days into Cookie’s sentence, the godfather himself had showed up to visit his subordinate. Marcello had apparently been suffering from a wracking cough that had prevented him from sleeping for nearly a month. His doctors had diagnosed bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics, but they hadn’t helped. When Cookie discovered this, he praised Tom to the skies and sent a guard in search of the “jail doctor.” Tom soon found himself being led before the real ruler of the State of Louisiana, where he was asked to “take a look at” the don’s chest.
After examining the short but powerfully built Marcello, Tom had questioned the don about his symptoms. Half a dozen questions convinced Tom that the godfather was suffering an acid-reflux cough, a condition likely exacerbated by Marcello’s late-night consumption of acidic Italian-Creole cuisine. The don had brushed off Tom’s diagnosis as “old-women’s talk” and departed the prison. But one week later, a smiling stranger had shown up and handed Tom a set of keys to the prettiest 1957 Ford Fairlane he’d ever seen. Apparently Marcello had grown so frustrated at losing sleep to his cough that he’d tried Tom’s advice and avoided eating sauces and spices after 8 P.M. After five days of this discipline, the cough had subsided.
Naturally, Marcello had wanted to thank the man who’d relieved his discomfort. Through the prison grapevine, Carlos discovered that Tom and Peggy had no working vehicle: their twelve-year-old truck had been sitting dead in front of their apartment for the past three months. The don’s answer to this problem was the Fairlane, which could be Tom’s for a little more than one-tenth of the sticker price. Tom had tried to resist the gift, but one older cop whom he trusted had advised him that refusing gifts from the godfather of New Orleans was the surest road to ill health that a man could take. So Tom had withdrawn most of his nest egg from savings, paid the three hundred dollars, and accepted a bill of sale from a grinning young Italian who was surely a Mafia foot soldier. Then he’d concocted a story for Peggy that his wife, thankfully, had never analyzed too closely. After all, her daily grind involved trudging through torrents of French Quarter rain to ride the ferry over to the West Bank to teach English to immigrant grade-school kids. The car literally transformed her life for the better.
From this humble beginning had grown an unwanted relationship that ultimately provided Tom with the godlike power of saving Viola Turner’s life nine years later, when the worst Ku Klux Klan offshoot in the South wanted her dead. Carlos had been all too happy to accommodate the doctor who had cured his cough, especially when the favor was as trivial as safeguarding the life of a colored woman in Chicago. Of course, Carlos had not accommodated Tom gratis. Since he was doing a favor, he required a favor in return, and that favor turned out to be covert medical treatment for his men during any emergencies that might occur “in Tom’s neighborhood.” Tom had been in no position to refuse these terms. And both he and Carlos had lived up to their word for the next twenty-five years, though thankfully the burden had lessened for them both as time passed.
But the connection had never been forgotten. That’s what had placed him in the passenger seat of Ray Presley’s truck in 1990 as it turned into a secluded section of Old Metairie, Louisiana, and then into the driveway of the white marble home of Carlos Marcello.
Despite what Ray had told him, Tom expected to find an older version of the saturnine boss he had met back in 1959. But the don he viewed on that day was a man beset by Alzheimer’s disease and fast regressing toward infancy. Tom had no idea why he’d been summoned, unless someone in the family had decided to humor a casual whim of the old boss.
Marcello’s disease, combined with the sequelae of several strokes, had left him unable to care for himself. A team of nurses tended him around the clock, and with more than thirty years of medical practice behind him, Tom knew that the deathwatch had begun. He’d been as kind as he could be to the family, then made his exit as rapidly as possible. He never found out whether Marcello himself had requested his presence, and the question would vex him greatly. Because thirty seconds after he left the godfather’s sickroom, he realized that the shield that had protected Viola since 1968 would soon crumble into dust.
As soon as he got back into Presley’s truck, he asked Ray what would happen when Carlos died. “Is it like a royal succession? Will his oldest son take over, or one of his brothers?”
“Neither,” Ray said. “They’ve already lost most of what they had. Frank Carraci and Nick Karno have controlled the French Quarter for a while now. But Carlos always knew his brothers could never hold his empire together without him. So he made sure that when the time came, the family would be legit enough to make it without the old part of the business. And they are. They own more land than the goddamn Catholic Church, and they’ve got all kinds of other businesses. So Carlos is going to do something not many mob bosses get to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Die free in his bed. And his brothers are gonna do the same. His kids, too. See? He was always smarter than the other bosses.”
Tom found no comfort in this. He’d hoped that the business would be passed down to a son or brother who would honor the don’s old commitments, including the protection of Viola Turner, but this was apparently not to be.
“All the new players have been trying to carve pieces off the carcass. The Asians, the Jamaicans, the Russians . . . there’s always a free-for-all for a couple of years, till things settle out. Lots of blood, lots of payback.”