Eddie the Kid Read online

  “There’s only the three of us,” the barber said.

  “With guns, more men will join,” Sammy said. “Can this man we’re meeting be trusted?”

  “Can any man who sells guns be trusted?” Luca asked, and shrugged. “He should be here soon.”

  The explosion came from behind them. A look of surprise crossed Carrado’s face. Blood oozed from his lips before it gushed. He dropped to his knees and toppled forward on his face. There was a deep, bloody crater in his back. Luca and Sammy turned slowly in the direction of the blast. A tall man in a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat stood in the dim light, pointing a smoking double-barreled shotgun at them. He was wearing a white Sicilian death mask that covered his face from the top of his forehead to the bottom of his chin. There were two eyeholes, but no openings for his nose or mouth. He looked like a ghost.

  Trap! The thought exploded in Luca’s brain.

  Boom! Luca’s brain exploded.

  Sammy ran. The man in the mask removed a second lupara from under his coat, aimed, and fired again. The fruit peddler’s legs, from the knees down, were blown out from under him. Pain became his world. He could no longer think, reason, love, or hate. He screamed like the wounded animal he had become.

  The assassin stood over him holding a sawed-off shotgun in each hand. His death mask revealed nothing, but his words did. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he lowered the barrel to his victim’s Adams apple, pulled the trigger, and decapitated him.

  Two hours after the slaughter, the assassin sat in a small apartment in an abandoned building on the south side of Chicago. The windows and doors were boarded and the rooms were dark except for the light provided by the kerosene lantern burning beside him. His custom-made guns, ammunition, tools, and disguises littered the room. His hands trembled and his eyes filled with tears. He didn’t belong here. He was not meant to be a killer. He wished his father and his father’s father had never taught him the magic of shotguns, how to shoot them and how to sell them to the Black Hand. The Black Hand had threatened to kill his ailing mother and his new wife if he did not go to Chicago to fight in their Mafia–Black Hand war and enforce their extortion demands. His father, Antonio Caradonna, had died testing a shotgun for the Black Hand; Stefano felt he would die using one for them.

  He missed his town, his family, and his old life. He cursed his reputation as “Lupara Mago,” the Shotgun Man. Had he not been the best shotgun maker and marksman in the land, had he not been noticed by the Black Hand, none of this would have happened.

  As Lupara Mago slept, the Chicago newspapers printed the story of the killings as told to them by a drunk living in a cardboard box in an alley nearby. He saw the assassin appear. “He was ten feet tall,” the drunk said. “He wore a long black coat, a wide-brimmed hat, and a white mask that covered his whole face. He looked like death itself. He had a shotgun as big as a cannon. Scariest thing I ever seen.”

  The intersection became known as “Death Corner,” and the Shotgun Man became the most feared man in Chicago.

  He killed thirty-eight people in two years, sixty in ten. Some of his victims were innocent, like Luca the Grocer. Many more were Mafia soldiers killed in the ten-year Black Hand War. By 1920 the Mafia had exterminated the leaders of the Black Hand, but the Shotgun Man was never found. Mafia leaders Johnny Torrio and Al Capone offered a reward for Lupara Mago dead or alive, but when prohibition was enacted that year, their focus shifted. “We’ll find him someday,” Torrio announced to his men at a party celebrating the future of bootlegging. “And when we find him we’ll kill everything he loves. Until then, drink up, it’s prohibition. We’re all going to be rich.”

  While Torrio and Capone celebrated, the Shotgun Man was in a small boat beginning his long journey home. He navigated the small boat near the shore of Lake Michigan and onto Lake Huron through the Mackinac Straits to Canada. Traveling overland, he reached the east coast of Canada where he paid a great deal of money to a tramp steamer captain for passage to Europe. He eventually disembarked in Palermo, changed dollars to lire, and paid for passage on a small boat to Catania. There he bought an old pickup truck and drove fifty miles to Vizzini. He went to the farm in the foothills of Mount Lauro where his wife, Maria, had awaited his return for ten years, as loyal Sicilian wives were expected to do. She greeted him with great affection and later took him to his mother’s grave on a hill behind the farmhouse.

  “She died shortly after you departed for America,” Maria told him.

  He looked at the large gravestone and said, “I’m home, Mama. Back from the war.”

  Chapter 12

  The Vendetta Sleeps

  1920–1954

  In 1920, the same year Stefano returned, Maria gave birth to a son they named Rocco. Stefano worked on expanding the farm and raised a small flock of sheep. He tinkered with shotguns in his barn but he did not sell them, vowing there would be no more gun business in the Caradonna family. He had returned from America with enough money to support his family for years and had no need to deal in death again. Rocco grew into a handsome young man who developed an interest in farming, and he knew nothing of guns or his father’s past.

  The years flew by, as they will in good times, and in 1940, while Italy was in the throes of losing World War II, Rocco married a dark-haired beauty from Vizzini named Angelina Versace. They filled the rooms of the large farmhouse with children. Marissa was born in ’41, Gennaro in ’42, and Jacquilina in ’43. The Germans occupied Sicily in 1943 and Angelina and Rocco stopped having babies while the Nazis were there. After the Allies liberated Sicily, they began thinking about having a fourth child.

  When U.S. soldiers passed through Vizzini one day, the townspeople lined the streets, cheering the liberators. On impulse, Stefano went to the parade with an unloaded, highly polished four-barreled shotgun he had designed and gave it to a young American soldier who was passing by.

  “A memento,” Stefano told the GI. “I made it myself.”

  The soldier thanked Stefano for the gift and put the shotgun in his backpack. Stefano hoped the young man would survive the war and live to tell his family the shotgun story.

  In 1946, Maria died of cancer. They buried her on a hill behind the farm, next to Stefano’s mother, and placed a large headstone on her grave that could be seen from the house. Rocco and Angelina had their fourth child in 1947 and named him Gianni. He was seven years old when the men in black suits came.

  Chapter 13

  The Third Day of Busing

  Saturday, September 14, 1974

  9:00 A.M.

  The phone rang at nine in the morning and Patty answered. Eddie was still in bed, recuperating from his wound, when he heard her voice from the kitchen. She sounded upset.

  “Eddie,” she called. “It’s my cousin, Shannon.”

  He got out of bed, walked to the kitchen, and took the phone from Patty.

  “Eddie, you told me to call you,” she said, crying. “I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “He hit you again,” Eddie said, seeing red.

  “He broke my nose,” she said, sounding like she was on the verge of hysteria.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Carney Hospital in the emergency waiting room.”

  “We’ll be right there,” Eddie said.

  It took them an hour to walk to the private parking lot adjacent to Joe Tecce’s Ristorante on North Washington Street, get their ’66 Chevy Camaro, and drive to the Carney in Dorchester.

  “Son of a bitch,” Patty said every five minutes. They went to the emergency room, where they were told Shannon was still with the doctor. They waited. An hour later, Shannon emerged with bandages on and inside her nose. She had two black eyes and carried a bottle of pain pills.

  Patty hugged her cousin. “What happened?” she asked.

  “He was going to watch the Boston College–Texas game at Sweeney’s Bar,” Shannon said. “I asked him to be careful with his drinking and he told me to mind my own
business. One thing led to another and he hit me. He broke my nose and left me there in a pool of blood. He just didn’t care. My son took me here in a cab.”

  “Where is he now?” Eddie asked.

  “He waited till a doctor took me and then he left,” she said. “He was very upset.”

  “Where is your husband?” Eddie asked.

  “Probably at Sweeney’s,” Shannon said. “He just left me on the floor, bleeding. He didn’t care.”

  “You’re not going back to that house,” Patty said.

  They took Shannon to their apartment and made her as comfortable as possible. Eddie sat on his lounge chair and fumed. After a little more than an hour he got up. “I’m going to Sweeney’s,” he said, calling a cab company and giving them his location and destination.

  “It could take a while,” the dispatcher said. “With the riots I can’t send black or Latino drivers into that area. When I tell one of them to go to Southie, they tell me to go fuck myself.”

  “Send whoever you can as fast as you can,” Eddie said, and hung up.

  “Don’t go there, Eddie,” Shannon said. “They’re all dangerous drunks. I’ll be okay.”

  “He has to go,” Patty said as Eddie left the apartment. “It’s what he does.”

  The cab driver was a curly-haired white man with a bushy mustache.

  “You sure you want go Sweeney’s?” he asked, with a thick Eastern European accent.

  “I’m sure,” Eddie said, and looked at the identification license above the glove compartment: Janos Bezeredy.

  The driver made a face like something stunk. “You not Sweeney’s type,” he said.

  “What type is that?”

  “Big fahkin’ meatheads with necks like fahkin’ buffalo.”

  Eddie laughed. “Where you from, Janos?”

  “Hungary,” he said.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Since 1957,” Janos said. “Was freedom fighter against the fahkin’ Russians. We lost. I escaped.”

  “You like it in Boston?”

  “Not much, but is better than Hungary,” Janos said. “Too much fahkin’ war and anti-Jews in Hungary.”

  “Are you Jewish?”

  “You got a problem with Jews?” Janos said, ready to fight.

  “I’m Jewish,” Eddie told him. “My name’s Perlmutter.”

  “No shit. You look like little Irish prick,” Janos said. “Yes. I’m Jewish. Lucky to be alive. Survive Hitler too. Parents didn’t. Sisters didn’t. Fahk Hitler. Fahk Stalin. Fahk ‘em all.”

  “I’m sorry you lost your family.”

  “Tenk you. So why you going to fahkin’ Sweeney’s.”

  “I’m going to break a wife-beater’s nose,” Eddie told him.

  “Is he big meathead with buffalo neck?”

  “Exactly,” Eddie said.

  “In case you not notice, Superman,” Janos said, “You little shit. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Eddie said. “I’m trained to do this.”

  “You hit man?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  Janos looked in the rearview mirror then pounded his steering wheel. “I thought you look familiar,” he said, waving his index finger in the air. “You Eddie the fahkin’ Kid. I see you in papers.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Shotgun murders, right?” Janos asked.

  Eddie nodded again.

  “Eddie Kid in my cab. Wait till I tell wife,” Janos said. “But, Kid, in America cops not supposed to go in bars and pick fights. In Hungary, yes. It happens all the time. Not here.”

  “I’m a different kind of cop,” Eddie said. “Besides, I’m off duty and I won’t start the fight.”

  “Whatever you say, Kid,” Janos said. “I still don’t believe Eddie Kid in my fahkin’ cab. Only in fahkin’ America.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way. Janos stopped in front of Sweeney’s. The sign was green, with shamrocks at the beginning and end of Sweeney’s name.

  Eddie handed Janos thirty bucks. “Do you mind waiting for me?”

  “No problem.”

  “You know there’s been a lot of trouble in Southie lately.”

  Janos pulled a lead pipe from under the driver’s seat. “I survive Hitler. I survive Southie.”

  Chapter 14

  Saturday at Sweeney’s

  Saturday, September 14, 1974

  3:00 P.M.

  Sweeney’s was a smoke-filled, dimly lit dump with eight large men sitting at the bar, their thick forearms resting on worn-out fake oak. Eddie stood in the doorway while his eyes adjusted. A television set above the bar showed BC losing forty-two to nineteen. Eight angry men at the bar turned toward the light from the open door, eyes at half-mast and glazed. The hometown Catholic college kids were getting their asses kicked by cowboys from Texas and the patrons looked frustrated.

  If our team loses we must be losers, Eddie observed, reading their body language.

  Bobby Collins saw Eddie Perlmutter. “What the fuck are you doing here, you little Jew bastard?” Collins asked.

  Bleary beer eyes appraised the half-pint at the door, their minds trying to process the material. A Jew at Sweeney’s? Texas beating BC 42–19? The world they knew was crumbling.

  “How the Eagles doing?” Eddie asked, limping to the bar, ignoring the angry, half-mast eyes.

  “Fuck you,” Collins said, and turned his back on Eddie.

  “I came here to tell you that your wife has a broken nose, two black eyes, and a split lip,” Eddie said.

  “That’s none of your goddamn business,” Collins said, staring at the TV.

  “I made it my business,” Eddie said.

  Beer-soaked eyes turned toward Collins, trying to process this new information.

  Bobby’s a wife beater?

  I need a drink.

  This little Jew is starting a fight in Sweeney’s with a guy twice his size.

  Gimme a beer.

  Texas 42–BC 19.

  Give me a long neck and three shots of Bushmill.

  “Bobby said it’s none of your goddamn business,” a fat drunk next to Collins said. “Sometimes a man’s gotta put his wife in her place.”

  Alcoholic Neanderthal, Eddie thought, but he remained focused on the wife-beater.

  “Do you know how it feels to have your nose broken?” Eddie asked Collins.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Collins shouted. He turned, slapped his large, thick hand on Eddie’s chest, and pushed.

  Eddie forearmed the hand aside and delivered a compact, powerful punch to Bobby’s face. His knuckles crushed all the cartilage in the bully’s nose. Blood spurted up Eddie’s arm and all over the big man. Collins toppled backwards off the stool and onto the floor with a bigfoot thud.

  “It feels like that,” Eddie said.

  Two drunks lunged at Eddie, one from the front, one from behind. Eddie clapped his open hands hard over the ears of the man in front of him. The beer-bellied attacker yelped in pain, covered his ears, and slumped to the floor. Without missing a beat, Eddie elbowed the man behind him in the eye and he went down. Everyone in the bar looked at the three stooges on the floor. Collins was covering his bloody nose and mouth with his hands. One guy covered his ears and the third covered his eyes.

  Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, Eddie thought. He scanned the bar. The six remaining drinkers seemed transfixed while the bartender calmly dried shot glasses with a towel.

  “This is personal,” Eddie said, and pointed a finger at the patrons. “I got no problem with you guys.”

  No one moved. All of them blinked rapidly, trying to understand the situation and make a decision.

  Eddie thought fast. “Hey, the next round’s on me,” he said in a loud, friendly voice.

  The six drunks stared at Eddie uncertainly. The bartender slapped six wet bottles of Schlitz on the bar. The tension broke. One man picked up his beer and took a drink and the five others followed his lead. They tipped their bottles towar
d Eddie in a silent toast. The football game ended Texas 42, BC 19. Consensus: Who gives a shit? Wait till next year. I love a cold Schlitz.

  Eddie squatted next to Collins, who was still holding his nose. “Stings like a son of a bitch, doesn’t it, Bobby,” Eddie said.

  Collins didn’t answer.

  “If you ever hit Shannon again I’ll put you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life,” Eddie whispered in the big man’s ear. “You understand?”

  Collins just stared at him.

  Eddie pushed on the back of Collins’s hands, forcing them down on his broken nose.

  “Son of a bitch,” Collins muttered in pain through clenched teeth.

  “Got it?”

  Collins nodded.

  Eddie stood and walked to the bar. “How much do I owe you?” he asked the bartender.

  “Ten bucks,” the bartender said.

  Eddie handed him a twenty. “I’m buying everyone another round for staying out of this.”

  This time they cheered. The three guys on the floor were forgotten. It was private business, and besides, Billy Collins beat his wife—the prick. Eddie walked out of Sweeney’s as one man passed out and fell off his bar stool. Everyone laughed.

  The cab was waiting.

  “Your hand bleeding,” Janos said.

  “It’s not my blood,” Eddie told him.

  “Good,” Janos said. “Any problems?”

  “They love me in there,” Eddie told him.

  “Like they love me,” Janos said and chuckled. “Fahkin’ Hungarian Jew not get much love in fahkin’ Sweeney’s. So Kid, what’s with fahkin’ shotgun murders?”

  “I’m up against a very clever, dangerous man,” Eddie told him.

  “The Shotgun Man not have a fahkin’ chance against Eddie the Kid.”

  “You know that and I know that,” Eddie said. “But does the Shotgun Man know that?”

  Chapter 15

  After Sweeney’s

  Saturday, September 14, 1974

  5:00 P.M.

  Janos drove Eddie to Unity Street where they shook hands like old friends. Eddie limped up the stairs, entered the apartment, and saw Shannon lying on the sofa with ice packs on her eyes.