“THERE HE IS,” JACK said, squinting through the binoculars against the glare of the afternoon sun. He turned to Lieutenant Cardulli in the driver’s seat.
“We’ve got you covered,” his boss replied. “Go see what this bastard has to say.”
Jack nodded, then stepped out of the car. Behind him, the Shore Parkway thrummed with early rush-hour traffic; ahead, a fishing pier stretched several hundred yards into New York Harbor. Out in the open like this, he felt seriously exposed, but there was one thing you could say about the NYPD: like any large bureaucracy, it had its share of inefficiencies and inanities, yet when it came to the attempted murder of a member of service, it didn’t fool around. Behind Cardulli sat two other cars, both RMPs containing highly capable-looking uniforms. It seemed hugely unlikely that a mobster would issue such a public invitation to a cop, then try to bump him off, but there was no point in taking chances.
Jack pulled on his sports jacket; it was always cooler by the shore, with sea breezes sweeping in off the harbor. As he walked out onto the broad concrete pier, the traffic noise behind him faded away, leaving the sound of seagulls cawing overhead and the cable for a flagpole pinging against the hollow metal. As Jack walked forward, a man sitting on a bench stood up, a big bruiser with deep-set eyes and a face the color of liverwurst. One of Frank Raucci’s crew, evidently. Jack glanced behind him: the NYPD vehicles seemed a long ways away. The muscle gave Jack a quick but thorough pat down, checking for a wire; not finding one, he nodded and sat back down. Next to him, a little sign read DO NOT CUT BAIT ON BENCHES OR PICNIC TABLES.
Jack walked on, out into the harbor, under the vast blue plain of sky, toward a lone figure standing out at the end of the pier. He understood Frank Raucci’s stipulation that he wouldn’t talk on record—the last thing any mobster wanted was to have proof lying around that he had cooperated with the NYPD—but he couldn’t understand why the man had insisted that they meet at this isolated but still public spot.
Jack passed several fishermen; none of them looked suspicious. A wrinkled old Asian man reeling in his line, a couple of Hispanic homeboys joking around as they baited their hooks. The concrete was spattered with seagull shit. Ahead, a big green brass torch rose up in the middle of the concrete. As he drew closer, Jack was able to read the inscription around the monument’s base: BROOKLYN REMEMBERS … FOR THOSE LOST ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001. He glanced to the north, across the broad harbor. Who could ever have imagined that the Empire State Building would once again rule that distant skyline—that those brash usurpers, the twin towers, might simply disappear?
Out at the end of the pier, free as a bird in the bright sunshine of a glorious spring day, stood the man who had likely ordered the killing of Petey Leightner. And ordered a bomb placed under Jack’s car. Jack felt a fury rising in him but tamped it down. He was a professional, and he wasn’t about to give this thug the slightest excuse to skate from the murder charges he so richly deserved.
The gap-toothed old man rested both hands on a cane and squinted up into the sun as Jack approached. Jack thought of the mafiosi he had seen around as a kid, who prided themselves on their sharp hand-tailored suits and their impeccable Italian shoes; he compared them to this one-eyed old-timer, who wore ancient white loafers, Sansabelt poly slacks, and a beige jacket from the seventies, with epaulets and too many pockets.
“Thanks for comin’,” Raucci said.
Jack, expecting a mobster’s usual sarcasm, was taken aback. “You must be pretty disappointed to see me standing here in one piece.”
“You got the wrong idea about me, Leightner.”
Jack snorted. “I don’t think so. I know exactly what kind of creep you are.”
The old man frowned. Clearly, he wasn’t used to being talked to with such disrespect—but he didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he turned, hooked his cane on the railing, grasped the metal with gnarled hands, and stared out at the vast silvery plain of the harbor. The breeze ruffled his wispy white hair.
Jack edged closer. “So what do you have to say that you didn’t already try to say the other night?”
Raucci shook his head. “Other than you comin’ around my house like that, I got no problem with you.”
“I know about you. About your crew, about what happened down in Philly.” Of course, Jack didn’t know much about it at all, but it was always good to start an interrogation at least pretending that you held some cards.
Raucci waved a liver-spotted hand. “That’s ancient history.”
Jack gritted his teeth. If he heard that damned phrase once more, he wasn’t going to be responsible for his actions. “I know how you hired Darnel Teague. I know all about you.”
The old man gave him a look over his shoulder. “You know nothin’.”
Jack made a face. “What the hell are we doing here? You’re just wasting—”
Raucci held up a hand. “Here’s an idea, cop: How about you just shut up for a minute? You’ve got everything ass-back wards.”
Jack was about to argue but held his tongue. He wouldn’t have gotten far as a detective if he didn’t know that you learned more from listening than from talking.
Raucci turned back to the harbor and pointed just to the left of the Statue of Liberty, toward the distant Jersey docks bristling with loading cranes. “Lemme tell ya about me and your old man.”
“THE DAY WAS APRIL twenty-four, Nineteen forty-three. We were workin’ the docks over there in Jersey City, loadin’ a ship called the El Estero, a freighter out of Panama.”
“You and my father?” Jack asked.
The old man frowned. “Don’t innerupt. Yeah, me and your pop. We were filling the holds with bombs.”
That, of course, reminded Jack of the purpose of his visit, but he decided to wait and see where the story was going.
“The ship was bound for what they called the European theater.” Raucci shook his head in wonder. “God, you should’a seen it! We’d come up on deck for a break, and this whole goddamn harbor was crammed with warships, ready to go give them Nazis a serious ass-kickin’—if the U-boats didn’t get ’em first.”
He patted his shirt pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offered them to Jack, then lit one up. “See what I’m doin’ right now? I would’a had my tail thrown right off the job for this. We were bein’ watched over by these pimple-faced Coast Guard knuckleheads in what they called the Explosives Loading Detail. We couldn’t smoke, couldn’t wear boots with nails in ’em, got a lot of guff if we overloaded a cargo sling. Nobody griped, though: we had more than two and a half million pounds a’ munitions sittin’ under us, from small arms ammo to half-ton blockbusters. And the three ships next to us were filled up too, not to mention all the railroad cars next to the docks.
“In case the point was lost on any clown who still wanted to sneak a smoke, the Coasties made sure to tell us about what happened in Halifax back durin’ W.W. One. You know about that? No? I’ll tell ya: a munitions ship smacked into another ship in the harbor. That explosion killed more than fifteen hunnert people. It sent goddamned railroad cars flyin’ in the air. And that was just Nova Scotia; it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see how much worse things would’a got if somethin’ like that happened here. If a nail in somebody’s boot sparked some gasoline fumes, say, and one ship went up, and then the other ships went kablooey … Did I mention that one’a the biggest oil refineries in the U.S. was right next door? The shock wave would’a taken out Jersey City, and Bayonne and Hoboken, and it would’a smashed out across the harbor, rippin’ through the convoy like the worst hurricane ever, and flattened the north end of Staten Island over there, and knocked down half’a downtown Manhattan. As if that wasn’t bad enough, all’a them bombs would never have made it over to our boys in Europe, and then who knows what would’a happened with the whole goddamned war …”
Raucci paused to take a drag off his cigarette, then heaved up a rattly cough. “So anyhow … The convoy was leavin’ the next morning, and ours was the last ship to be loaded, and we were fillin’ up the last hold. The next day was Easter, and I’ll tell you this: we were ready for a coupl’a days of rest. We went up on deck for an afternoon break, and I was lookin’ across the harbor at Red Hook over there, and I could practically smell my mother’s basil lamb roast.
“Our foreman called out, ‘We’re in the homestretch, fellas,’ and down we went, back into the number two hold. That was a weird, grim scene down there, I’ll tell ya. On a normal job you would’a had guys goofin’ around, but a munitions ship is the most dangerous thing in the world; it doesn’t make ya feel much like jokin’. The cargo was almost up to the ceilin’. See, first the carpenters lay down some wooden flooring, and then we’d load in the bombs, real careful, with chocks between ’em to keep ’em from rollin’ around once they hit the high seas. Then another layer a’ wood, another layer a’ bombs … That was some hard goddamn work.
“What? Yer givin’ me the fish eye here. You don’t think I pulled my weight? Okay, so I admit I wouldn’t’a been doin’ any heavy liftin’ if this was Red Hook and a normal ship. I would’a been takin’ care’a business for the old guys. But ever since that goddamn Mussolini brought It’ly into the war on the Axis side, we Italians over here had to work double hard to prove we weren’t collaborators or spies. So yeah, Frankie Raucci got his hands dirty, loadin’ bombs that might be used against Milan or Rome. And I was glad to do it, ’cause the Nazis sure as hell didn’t care where we Allies originally came from. Every month, another shipment of Red Hook boys came home in pine boxes.”
Jack squinted. “Is, uh … is my father in this story somewhere?”
Raucci stubbed out his cigarette on the concrete of the pier. “Young people these days, so impatient! Anyways, down in the holds it wasn’t about where your people came from, it was about how hard you worked. And on that score, I have to hand it to your old man: he wasn’t the friendliest bastard in the world, but he worked as hard as two men.
“So there we are, I’m down there wipin’ the sweat out of my eyes, waitin’ for the dinner break, and I hear somebody say, ‘You smell somethin’?’ And I sniff the air, and there’s smoke. And I’m standin’ near a bulkhead, and I reach out and touch it, and I snatch my hand back: it’s hot.
“Our foreman turns to me. ‘Raucci! Go out and see what the hell’s goin’ on.’ So I walk between the bombs and go out in the passageway. There’s definitely smoke out there, thick and horrible smellin’. Burnin’ oil. And my heart goes up into my t’roat, and I run for the engine room. As I step over the hatchway, I see open flames flickerin’ away in the back. I damn near shit my pants. An engineer is runnin’ around sprayin’ a fire extinguisher, but it don’t do no good. Suddenly, oil on the bilge water beneath the gratings goes whoosh! To tell ya the truth, I’m panicking now, but I grab a fire extinguisher and try to get in there to help, but within five seconds I’m down on my knees, on account’a all the smoke. I try to get up again, but the heat and all is squeezin’ the air out of my lungs. And I fall down, and I’m lyin’ there on the hot metal floor, waitin’ for the ship to blast into hellfire and damnation. Ya know what was my last thought? I’m prayin’, Please God, don’t let the shock wave reach Red Hook and my mother.
“And then, all of a sudden, I’m movin’. I feel an arm around my chest, and I’m bein’ dragged through all the smoke, outta that blazin’ engine room. And I feel myself lifted up onto somebody’s shoulder, and I see a little spot’a daylight up top, and I’m thinkin,’ I died and an angel is carryin me to heaven. But it wasn’t an angel; it was your old man, that little Russkie prick. And he dumps me on deck, and we’re both gaspin’ for air, and then he turns around and he goes back in.
“He brought the engineer and another guy up, before he passed out himself.”
Jack stared across the harbor, dazed, struggling to reconcile this heroic Maxim Leightner with his own memories of the man. “And then what happened?”
“We couldn’t put the damned fire out. We had some pumps on the dock, but there wasn’t much water comin’ out of ’em—it was like tryin’ to piss on the flames. We would’a just scuttled the ship right there, but we couldn’t get to the seacocks because they were in the engine room.”
Jack pictured the roaring flames, the men frantically darting through the greasy smoke.
“Lemme tell ya,” Raucci said. “If the El Estero had gone up, it would’a been the biggest disaster in all of human history.”
“Why didn’t it?”
The old mobster snorted. “There was no love lost between us stevedores and them young Coasties, but I gotta give ’em this: they put up a hell of a fight that day. Most of ’em were already a couple’a miles away, in their barracks, shining their shoes and getting ready to go on leave. When the alarm sounded, their commander asked for volunteers. Them kids knew damned well what could happen, but they jumped on a truck and came haulin’ ass back to the pier. And a couple’a New York fireboats came runnin’ up too.”
Raucci’s voice caught, and Jack was astonished to see that his good eye was wet. “I had never seen nothin’ like that, and the only other time I seen it since was on Nine-eleven. When everybody else was runnin’ away, those boys ran right toward the trouble.”
“Did they put the fire out then?”
Raucci shook his head. “They ordered all us longshoremen off the ship, and then the fireboats tried to pump as much water as they could up onto the fire. And still the goddamn flames were winnin’. Finally, the Coastie commander decided that the only thing they could do was to tow the ship away from the pier and out into the harbor, and fill ’er with water and sink her before she could go up. A couple’a tugs showed up, and those brave goddamned bastards towed the El Estero out and to the south.” He pointed across the water. “As they went, there were still firemen on her deck, with their goddamn boots sizzlin’ on the metal. And there was guys down in the holds, feeling for hot spots so they could tell the others where to put their hoses. Can you imagine that? Before they got on the ship, they threw their wallets to the guys on shore, ’cause they figured they probably weren’t comin’ back.”
Raucci pointed again. “The tugs hauled the ship out by Robbins Reef there, and for two hours the fireboats kept pumpin’ her with water. She started listin’ to starboard. Then, around nine o’clock, we was watchin’ from the docks, we saw a flash of light and heard a couple’a explosions, but the old gal finally went down. It took a while for all the fires to go out, even underwater; we could see this ghosty glow comin’ up from the bottom of the harbor, out there in the night.” He nodded, remembering. “We didn’t lose a single goddamn man.”
Jack blinked, awestruck. “I can’t believe this isn’t in every history book.”
Raucci shrugged. “Ya gotta remember: this was the middle of the war. There were a couple’a little stories in the papers, but I guess the Navy didn’t want word getting around that the whole port was so vulner’ble. After the war, there was a parade in Bayonne for the firemen and the Coasties, but those guys never really got their due. Goddamned heroes, every one of ’em.”
The old man hocked up some phlegm, then spit it out onto the water. “Anyhow, the point here is simple: I didn’t have no beef with your old man.”
Jack frowned, thinking about his father, such a riddle. Loving one moment, brutal the next. A drunk, a criminal, a hero. A proud man, and stubborn, ashamed of what he had turned to in order to feed his family. “He was helping you, down in Philly, and then he stopped. Weren’t you pissed off?”
Raucci shrugged. “We were makin’ some good money down there, I’ll give you that. Some of the other guys were sore, but I let it go. That Russian bastard saved my life, and I never forgot it. I tole the guys: you mess with Leightner, you mess with me.”
Jack grimaced. “So they hired some punks to mess with me and my brother instead.”
Raucci’s face closed up. “I don’t know nothin’ about it.”
“Come on,” Jack said. “You knew they were angry at my father. And they got his son killed.”
Raucci made a pained face. “I wanted to do somethin’ about what happened to your brother, but we, ah, we had an organization, see? The bosses were not too happy about what went down, but they decided to let it go. You weren’t even Italian.”
Jack clenched his fists. “Who were the guys that were riled up at my father?”
Frank Raucci ran a hand over his mouth. “Listen, Leightner: we got a little thing you might’ve heard of. A code. Now, I just explained to you why I would never hurt your old man. And why I had nothin’ to do with that crap under your car. But that’s as far as I’m gonna go.”
The old man waved at his muscle man, who came lumbering up like a big rhinoceros. And as much as Jack pestered him as he shuffled off down the pier, Raucci refused to say another word. When they reached the shore, the mobster climbed into his car and his soldier started the engine.
Jack stood at the edge of the pier, watching them zoom off down the parkway, marveling about his father and wondering how he was ever going to discover who had really been behind Petey’s killing. And who had the sheer gall to plant a bomb beneath an NYPD detective’s car.