Ambition

“Arms up,” the man said. A smile touched my lips, and I did as I was told. I knew that I’d fucked up, there was no denying it. This meeting was a formality, not a death sentence. I lifted my arms lightly above my head, my suit coat hung along my shoulders like torn-back sails. The man patted me down, unholstered my gun and tucked it along the back of his waistband and I looked at him with a questioning glance. The nerve of this one, I thought but remained silent, smelling the wafting cigar smoke pouring out of Father’s office. “You’ll get it back when business is concluded, this your only piece?” he asked, sizing me up. I nodded and tucked in my shirt along the waist again, shimmied my pants into a better position. The man stood aside, gesturing for me to enter. My hand wrapped around the brass doorknob, and the thick wood creaked inward and all at once the smell of father’s cigars hit me harder than a ton of bricks. My eyes watered, making my way inside through the haze reminded me of the night we went down to the docks to pitch the body of Lenny Chesnetter over into the dark water. Not me, Lenny’s voice echoed in my mind. I didn’t do nuthin, I swear it. Nuthin I tell ya.

The gunshot always sounds louder when it isn’t you pulling the trigger.

I entered the lavish office, my father sitting behind his desk like an old king at his thrown. And to the chair along the right of the desk, my brother, turning his head to look at me. Even for all the years since the day of his automobile accident, I can never get used to the sight of that scar, a jagged line running along the left temple toward the middle of the cheek.

“Have a seat,” father said. I listened to my shoes clacking across the hardwood, listening to the sounds of the door shutting behind me but didn’t have to look back to know that the man outside had done it. Other scents were mingling in the air, father’s cologne, as well as my brother’s, one of the housekeepers had set up a bouquet in this dark room as if it had seemed to mask the constantly wafting cigar smoke drifting up toward the ceiling. It didn’t. I found the open chair, to my father’s right diagonal from his spot behind the desk, and took the wide way around, pulling the chair back so that the three of us now sat almost in a perfect triangle. I did this because whatever bad water had been spilled between my brother and me, I wasn’t in a fighting mood. Maybe it was the Irish in me, some instinctual thing to wanna fuck strange women and fight all the goddamn time. My brother scoffed at this, gusting his air and flapped his coat back to the center of his torso over the velvet blue vest beneath, a single gold chain clipped to one of the button holes… the same pocket watch I gave him for Christmas two winters ago. I sat with ease and crossed my right leg over the other.

“Let’s get down to it boys,” Father said. “Which one of you did it?” There was silence for a moment. My brother and I exchanged a glance. Not saying a word. “Alright, if that’s how you want to do it…” he said, pulling back one of the desk drawers and withdrawing a Colt 1911, .45 semi-automatic pistol. He thumbed back the hammer and pointed at me. “Which one of you sons-a bitches killed Jimmy Booker?”

“Oh, you think I fuckin’ did it do ya?” I asked with a sneer. “Go on then, shoot me. Get it over with,” I said resting my hands along the armrests. In truth I didn’t give a shit one way or the other. I looked over at my brother trying to read his expression, but he sat there with a calm that I’d only ever seen a few times before. For once, I was the loose canon here, for once I was the one losing my mouth when what I needed to do was shut the fuck up. “Why don’t you point the gun there,” I said pointing at my brother. “He’s always the one stirring up problems in this family. Put one, right between his fuckin’ eyes and let’s get this thing over with.”

The sound of the gunshot was deafening. I flinched at the recoil and to my amazement realized that I’d still been alive, my eyes widened as a smile crept onto my face. I looked at Father, the gun had been pointed upward, and the muzzle drifted a thin line of smoke from the barrel up to the ceiling where it mixed with the wafting cigar smoke. “Are you fuckin’ crazy?” I asked sitting forward, my foot dropped to the hardwood floor with a thud. “You know how many coppers walk these streets?” I asked squinting at him.

“I own the cops,” Father said with a smile and set the gun down atop the desk there, where it sat pointing between both of us and not at one of us in particular. Father picked up his cigar and gently rounded the ash from the lit end, brought it to his lips where he bit down lightly, perching it along the corner of his teeth. “I’m gonna ask you both again. Which one of you did it?” he asked, drawing on the chewed bit of his cigar, with a wash of grey smoke drifting down from his parted lips. His wrinkled eyes studied us one by one.

“Does it matter?” my brother chimed in. “That guy was a crook. Bookie or not, he’s been stealing from us for years.”

“Not us,” he said. “From me. And I know that he’s been doing it, but what both of you don’t know is that Jimmy Booker has been fixing bets for the better part of the last two decades. It was only a matter of time before we took the hammers to his kneecaps, but I would have let him live… you smug prick.” Father leaned forward and stared at brother. “Scraps, that’s what he took from me, scraps… like a dog. And one of you two numbskulls whacked him before I could set him down and get the truth out of him good and proper.” Father sat back. “Besides, nobody gets snuffed out in this town without my saying so. Not even my dumb-fuck petulant rat children… prancing around like they’re doing the lord’s work. Is that what you thought you were doing? The lords work?” He slammed his fist down along the top of the wooden desk. “Killing a man in broad daylight… TWO DAYS BEFORE the race of the fucking century?!” He stood quickly, the chair behind him falling back as he towered over the desk in front of us. “Do you two idiots have any idea, how much fucking money I was going to make off of that race?”

“Fifty-five large,” I said. I knew I’d seen the books.

“How much money did you take him for anyway?” Father asked, pressing his knuckles down along the top of the desk. “How much money did you recover from Jimmy’s safe?”

“All of it,” I said.

“How much?” He asked again. His pupils were so large that you couldn’t see the blues there anymore. Only the blackened coals for eyes where color had once been.

“We’re wasting time,” my brother said absently. He had begun running his fingers along the scar across the left temple beside his eye. He did this of course; an old gambling tell of his… when he bluffed. “We had another bookie lined up, south side. Giovani’s man.”

My father was stunned into silence. He turned and picked up his expensive leather chair and set it upright once more, collapsing into it. “Let me get this straight. You killed my man so that you could use the Italians. Do you think because we have some truce with those Goombahs, you can take out one of our own, and fix bets with another organization? Looks like you boys are tryin’ to run this family.” Father rubbed his eyes, his cigar still perched in his teeth along the corner of his mouth. He breathed in deep, the cigar cherry lighting up the inside of his palm and he pulled it from his lips curling an index finger around it, wet and gnarled. His hand perched along the armrest, a thick line of smoke wafting from the end of the half-chewed cigar. “You boys, will be the death of me.” He said with his eyes closed. He turned to look first at my brother, and then at me. “What gave you smartasses the bright idea, to fix bets with the Italians?”

My brother glanced at me, and then back to father. “Because it’s our time to move on their territory. The Italians are weak, they lost three good men to bank robberies, another two to the bombing last month.”

My father’s eyes glinted. Between the three of us, none of us saying the thing there beneath the surface. That father had been orchestrating the bombings, there had been dozens in the months passed. He’d been killing off the Italians from whatever shadows that he’d been operating in… beneath the guise of a truce all this time. The bombs that had been planted, the coppers tipped off about the bank robberies… was only a fraction of the work that had been done. Explosives were planted in engine rooms aboard steamers docked in Boston Harbor, prized fighters dying suddenly from arsenic. There was a level of depravity not spoken of within this room and between the three of us, nobody had said a word. “Why Jimmy?” father asked. “Why in all of this, did you take out my very own fucking bookie?”

I sat forward, an elbow cocked behind me along the armrest. “Because Jimmy, wasn’t who you thought he was.” I stared across the desk, my brother shifted beside me. “Jimmy wasn’t just fixing bets for you; he was fixing them for the Italians at the same time. He might have been taking crumbs from you over the years, but he’s been raking it in hand over fist with the Italians for a decade or more. Jimmy, is a distant cousin to the Giovani syndicate, married to one of our very own.”

“How do you know all this?” Father asked raising an eyebrow.

“You’re not the only one who bribes cops,” Brother said. There was laughter then, father sat back against the leather chair and stared for a time at the ceiling, running his thick fingers through his thinning red hair. “Word on the street is Jimmy’s been letting bits and pieces of information slip past our lines for years. How do you think the Italians were able to take the southside so quickly?”

Father puzzled by this, shook his head and sat up once more. He centered himself behind the desk and laced his fingers. He seemed to know without knowing. “What do you suppose we do about all of this?” he asked, looking at me.

I looked at my brother, who finally smiled. “We know the name of their horse,” brother said. “Consider it a parting gift from Jimmy.”

The next day had been one of the fairer ones of the season, almost pleasant. The sun was shining brilliantly overhead. I squinted through my tinted glasses, my cap tucked low over the eyes. I stood in the open air, smelling the vibrant scents of the women in attendance all around, their floral dresses puffed beneath the small of their waists like delicate flowers… concealing something even sweeter there beneath. My eyes moved across the sea of faces there, the onlookers waiting for the next race to begin and with the gunshot that rang out, a few around were startled, but the next round of horses were padding down the track. Our horse wasn’t among them, but was the next to follow so I had little interest in this race except for the equestrian appeal of horses galloping along their curved track with each of their jockeys whipping their hindquarters in feverish gate. The crowd erupted into cheers and applause, the leader among them a tan beauty with a red-jacketed jockey standing above and hunched over the bobbing head of the horse that he rode. They crossed the finish line, the crowd erupting into feverish applause.

“Ours is next,” my brother said beside me.

All was taken care of; I needn’t bother with going over the morning’s events as I’d known well into the mid-afternoon what had transpired. Giovani now lay along a cold slab downtown, the mortician sifting through the gunshot wounds that had been inflicted by the Tommy guns that took out their entire entourage as they approached their prize-winning horse named ‘Winn-Dixie.’ Our man inside had seen to poisoning Winn-Dixie, with enough tranquilizers… to kill a horse, to pun. But we’d be there to watch it as it happened.

The horses had left the track, their riders collecting their wreaths of flowers before padding along the high walls to adoring and cheering fans.

“You’re certain it’s been taken care of?” I asked, looking at him, my eyes trailing over the scar along the side of his face.

“It’s done,” he said without looking at me, feeling my eyes running along the course of that jagged line. I focused forward once more.

“Father will be pleased,” I said.

There wasn’t anything else to say. This was the first in many events moving forward… the decision that we were consciously making, in a coup, to take out our flesh and blood and run the organization the way that we saw fit. The world was moving right along beyond the cozy place that Father had built and remained. This was the world of the steam invention, industrialization… changing political landscapes and even grander concepts that eluded father. It seemed, that in just an evening’s pass, the world had left him there, a fossil amongst the living… and that no world would welcome his old ideals and aging perspective. I glanced at my brother now, not knowing how long he’d been staring at me. Both of us knew. “When this is all over, you’ll take the north, and I’ll take the southside,” he said.

I focused my attention on the track before us and nodded. I would take over my father’s estate, and my brother would take control of the Italian’s. Boston was ours for the taking.

There was a long pause between us, waiting for the next race to begin. A stir of excitement amongst the onlookers… and then, the gunshot came.

The gates opened, our horse ‘Lil Red One,’ roared passed the others, but at the third gate… Winn-Dixie trotted forward in hopefulness, keeping a fair speed at first before arching its head backward and falling onto the ground with its back legs splayed as it rolled to its side… knocking its rider from its back. Everyone jumped to their feet and stood watching the downed rider. Winn-Dixie, writhing in pain, kicking its legs beneath it as it lay upon its side, bobbed its head as it scraped gently along the ground there. Everyone around murmuring with feverish anxiety. Winn-Dixie panting, kicked its feet a few more times, stopped… heaved and let out the last of its breath.

‘Lil Red One, crossed the finish line in first place, without the other riders knowing what had happened. I glanced at my brother; the crook of a small smile touched his lips. I looked back to Winn-Dixie, forgetting all about our own prized horse winning the race and stared with wide eyes in horror at the fallen stud with his rider knelt beside it, one small hand rested along the ribcage of the dead animal. “That settles it,” brother said. He turned to look at me, and I to him finally forcing my eyes from Winn-Dixie. “Pleasure doing business with you,” he said extending a hand. I shook it, feeling the embrace of my brother there amongst a crowded bandstand of race enthusiasts. For a moment I felt the warmth of his hand, a subtle reminder of the man that he was… a handshake with someone that I loved… and then felt the cold and calculated business transaction that had just concluded.

“Til we see each other again,” I said.

We parted there, he took his leave and mingled with the crowd beyond, making his way down the steps, rounded the corner and was gone.

That was the last time that I’d spoken to my brother aloud.

Not long after the events of that day, my father had been fatally stabbed to death late one evening. Of course, this was part of the plan all along, though I had never been the one holding the knife. It was my brother. Releasing us unto the splinters of this syndicate. It wasn’t long, before the fires started, as his men had been ordered to take out the Italians in force… the gunshots for a time had been frequent and unrelenting, often in broad daylight but skirmishes clamored through the nights in those early days. Only rumors of these prominent Italian family members slain in cold blood or that of the houses that had been burned in the early morning hours while they slept cozied in their beds. My brother is always the benefactor, or presumed to have been, as I sat in father’s study swirling a brandy… I’d not had the slightest care. My brother, unbeknownst to him… had been working for me all along, doing the dirty work with bloodstained hands… as the plans that I’d set into motion, had finally come to pass.

“Cheers,” I said, raising a toast.