Last Don Page 9

  “You have a lawyer?” Pippi said. “You’re taking me to the law?” Then he began to laugh. His laughter seemed to carry him away. He was almost hysterical.

  It was strange to see a man who for twelve years had been a supplicating lover, a beggar for her flesh, her protection from the cruelties of the world, turn into a dangerous and threatening beast. At that moment she finally understood why other men had treated him with such respect, why they feared him. Now his ugly charm had none of that geniality that was so disarming. Oddly, she was not so much frightened as she was hurt that his love for her could so easily vanish. After all, for twelve years they had cradled each other’s flesh, laughed together, danced together, and nurtured their children together, and now his gratitude for the gifts she had given him counted for nothing.

  Pippi said to her coldly, “I don’t care what you decide. I don’t care what a judge decides. Be reasonable and I’ll be reasonable. Be tough and you won’t have anything.”

  For the first time she was terrified of all the things she loved; his powerful body, his large, heavy-boned hands, the irregular, blunt features she had always thought manly, that other people called ugly. All through their marriage, he had been more courtier than husband, had never raised his voice to her, had never even made a mild joke at her expense, had never scolded when she ran up bills. And it was true he had been a good father, only rough with the kids when they did not show respect for their mother.

  She felt faint, but Pippi’s face became more distinct, as though framed in some shadow. Extra flesh padded his cheeks, the very slight cleft in his chin seemed to be filled in with a tiny dot of black putty. His thick eyebrows had spears of white in them, but the hair on his massive skull was black, each strand as thick as horsehair. His eyes, usually so merry, were now a merciless flat tan.

  “I thought you loved me,” Nalene said. “How can you frighten me so?” She began to weep.

  This disarmed Pippi. “Listen to me,” he said. “Don’t listen to your lawyer. You go to court, let’s say I lose all the way down the line. You’re still not going to get both kids. Nalene, don’t make me be tough, I don’t want to be. I understand you don’t want to live with me anymore. I always thought I was so lucky to have you as long as I did. I want you to be happy. You’ll get far more from me than you’ll get from any court judge. But I’m getting old, I don’t want to live without a family.”

  For one of the few times in her life Nalene could not resist malice. “You have the Clericuzio,” she said.

  “So I have,” Pippi said. “You should remember that. But the important thing is, I don’t want to be alone in my old age.”

  “Millions of men are,” Nalene said. “And women too.”

  “Because they’re helpless,” Pippi said. “Strangers decide their lives. Other people veto their existence. I don’t let anyone do that.”

  Nalene said scornfully, “You veto them?”

  “That’s right,” Pippi said. He smiled down at her. “That’s exactly right.”

  “You can visit them all you want,” Nalene said. “But they both have to live with me.”

  At that he turned his back and said quietly, “Do what you want.”

  Nalene said, “Wait.” Pippi turned to her. She saw on his face something so terrible in its soulless ferocity that she murmured, “If one of them wants to go with you, then OK.”

  Pippi suddenly became exuberant, as if the problem were resolved. “That’s great,” he said. “Your kid can visit me in Vegas and my kid can visit you in Sacramento. That’s perfect. Let’s settle it tonight.”

  Nalene made a last effort. “Forty is not old,” she said. “You can start another family.”

  Pippi shook his head. “Never,” he said. “You’re the only woman who ever had the Indian sign on me. I married late and I know I’ll never marry again. You’re lucky I’m smart enough to know I can’t keep you, and I’m smart enough to know I can’t start over again.”

  “That’s true,” Nalene said. “You can’t make me love you again.”

  “But I could kill you,” Pippi said. He was smiling at her. As if it were a joke.

  She looked into his eyes and believed him. She realized this was the source of his power, that when he made a threat people believed him. She summoned her last reserve of courage.

  “Remember,” she said, “if they both want to stay with me, you have to let them go.”

  “They love their father,” Pippi said. “One of them will stay here with their old man.”

  That evening after dinner, the house iced with air conditioning, the desert heat outside too strong, the situation was explained to Cross, eleven years old, and Claudia, ten. Neither seemed surprised. Cross, as handsome as his mother was beautiful, already had the inner steeliness of his father, and his wariness. He was also completely without fear. He spoke up instantly. “I’m staying with Mom,” he said.

  Claudia was frightened by the choice. With a small child’s cunning, she said, “I’m staying with Cross.”

  Pippi was surprised. Cross was closer to him than to Nalene. Cross was the one who came hunting with him, Cross liked to play cards with him, to golf and box. Cross had no interest in his mother’s obsession with books and music. It was Cross who came down to the Collection Agency to keep him company when he had to catch up on paperwork on Saturday. In fact he had been sure that Cross would be the one he would get to keep. It was Cross he was hoping for.

  He was tickled by Claudia’s cunning answer. The kid was smart. But Claudia looked too much like himself, he didn’t want to look at an ugly mug so much like his every day. And it was logical that Claudia go with her mother. Claudia loved the same things Nalene did. What the hell would he do with Claudia?

  Pippi studied his two children. He was proud of them. They knew their mother was the weaker of the two parents, and they were sticking up for her. And he noticed that Nalene, with her theatrical instinct, had prepared cleverly for the occasion. She was dressed severely in black trousers and a black pullover, her golden hair was bound severely with a thin black headband, her face framed into a narrow, heartbreaking white oval. He was conscious of his own brutal appearance as it must appear to small children.

  He turned on his charm. “All I’m asking is for one of you to keep me company,” he said. “You can see each other as much as you want. Right, Nalene? You kids don’t want me living here in Vegas all alone.”

  The two children looked at him sternly. He turned to Nalene. “You have to help,” he said. “You have to choose.” And then he thought angrily, Why do I give a shit?

  Nalene said, “You promised that if they both wanted to go with me, they could.”

  “Let’s talk this out,” Pippi said. His feelings were not hurt—he knew his children loved him, but they loved their mother more. He found that natural. It did not mean they had made the right choice.

  Nalene said scornfully, “There’s nothing to talk about. You promised.”

  Pippi did not know how terrible he looked to the other three. Did not know how cold his eyes became. He thought he had controlled his voice when he spoke, he thought he spoke reasonably.

  “You’ve got to make a choice. I promise that if it doesn’t work out, you can have your own way. But I have to have a chance.”

  Nalene shook her head. “You’re ridiculous,” she said. “We’ll go to court.”

  At that moment Pippi made up his mind what he had to do. “It doesn’t matter. You can have your way. But think about this. Think about our life together. Think about who you are and who I am. I beg of you to be reasonable. To think about all our futures. Cross is like me, Claudia is like you. Cross would be better off with me, Claudia would be better off with you. That’s the way it is.” He paused for a moment. “Isn’t it enough for you to know they both love you better than me? That they would miss you more than they would me?” The last phrase hung in the air. He did not want the children to understand what he was saying.

  But Nalene understood. Ou
t of terror, she reached out and pulled Claudia close to her. At that moment Claudia looked at her brother beseechingly and said, “Cross . . .”

  Cross had an impassive beauty of face. His body moved gracefully. Suddenly he was standing beside his father. “I’ll go with you, Dad,” he said. And Pippi took his hand gratefully.

  Nalene was weeping now. “Cross, you’ll visit me often, as much as you want. You’ll have a special bedroom in Sacramento. Nobody else will use it.” It was, finally, a betrayal.

  Pippi almost bounded into the air with exuberance. It was such a weight lifted from his soul that he would not have to do what he had for one instant decided to do. “We have to celebrate,” he said. “Even when we divorce, we’ll be two happy families instead of one happy family. And live happily forever after.” The others stared at him stony faced. “Well, what the hell, we’ll try,” he said.

  Claudia never visited her brother and father in Vegas after the first two years. Cross went every year to Sacramento to visit Nalene and Claudia, but by his fifteenth year the visits dwindled to the Christmas holidays.

  The two different parents were two different poles in life. Claudia and her mother became more and more alike. Claudia loved school; she loved books, the theater, films; she reveled in her mother’s love. And Nalene found in Claudia her father’s high spiritedness, his charm. She loved her plainness, which had none of the brutality of her father. They were happy together.

  Claudia finished college and went to live in Los Angeles to try her hand in the film business. Nalene was sorry to see her go, but she had built up a satisfactory life with friends in Sacramento and had become an assistant principal at one of the public high schools.

  Cross and Pippi had also become a happy family, but in a far different way. Pippi weighed the facts. Cross was an exceptional athlete in high school but an indifferent student. He had no interest in college. And although he had extraordinarily good looks, he was not excessively interested in women.

  Cross enjoyed life with his father. Indeed, no matter how ugly the decision that had been made, it seemed to have turned out to be the right one. Indeed two happy families, but not together. Pippi proved to be as good a parent to Cross as Nalene was to Claudia, that is, he made Cross in his image.

  Cross loved the workings of the Xanadu Hotel, the manipulation of customers, the fight against scam artists. And Cross did have a normal appetite for the showgirls; after all, Pippi must not judge his son by himself. Pippi decided that Cross would have to join the Family. Pippi believed the Don’s oft-repeated words, “The most important thing in life is to earn your bread.”

  Pippi took Cross in as a partner in the Collection Agency. He brought him to the Xanadu Hotel for dinner with Grone-velt and maneuvered so that Gronevelt would take an interest in his son’s welfare. He made Cross one of the foursome in his golf games with high-rolling gamblers at the Xanadu, always pairing Cross against himself. Cross, at the age of seventeen, had that particular virtue of the golf hustler, he played much better on a particular hole where the bets were high. Cross and his partner usually won. Pippi accepted these defeats with good grace; though they cost him money, they earned his son an enormous amount of goodwill.

  He took Cross to New York for the social occasions of the Clericuzio Family: all holidays—particularly the Fourth of July, which the Clericuzio Family celebrated with great patriotic fervor; all the Clericuzio weddings, and funerals. After all, Cross was their first cousin, he had the blood of Don Cleri-cuzio running in his veins.

  When Pippi made his once-a-week foray at the tables of the Xanadu to win his eight-thousand-dollar weekly retainer with his special dealer, Cross sat watching. Pippi instructed him in the percentages of all forms of gambling. He taught him the management of the gambling bankroll, never to play when he felt unwell, never to play for more than two hours a day, never to play more than three days a week, never to bet heavily when he was on a losing streak, and always to ride a winning streak with a cautious intensity.

  It did not seem unnatural to Pippi that a father should let his son see the ugliness of the real world. As the junior partner in the Collection Agency, it was very necessary for Cross to have such knowledge. For the collections were sometimes not as benign as Pippi had described to Nalene.

  On a few of the more difficult collections, Cross showed no signs of abhorrence. He was yet too young and too pretty to inspire fear, but his body looked strong enough to enforce any orders Pippi might give.

  Finally Pippi, to test his son, sent him out on a particularly tough case, where only persuasion, not force, could be used. The sending of Cross was in itself a signal that the collection would not be pressed, a sign of goodwill to the debtor. The debtor, a very small Mafia Bruglione in the northern corner of California, owed a hundred grand to the Xanadu. It was not a big enough matter to involve the Clericuzio name, things had to be handled on a lower level, the velvet glove rather than the iron fist.

  Cross caught the Mafia Baron at a bad time. The man, Falco, listened to the reasoned approach made by Cross, then took out a gun and held it to the young man’s throat. “Another word out of you and I’ll shoot out your fucking tonsils,” Falco said.

  Cross, to his own surprise, felt no fear. “Settle for fifty grand,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to kill me for a lousy fifty grand? My father wouldn’t like it.”

  “Who’s your father?” Falco asked, his gun still steady.

  Cross said, “Pippi De Lena, and he’s going to shoot me anyway for settling for fifty grand.”

  Falco laughed and put his gun away. “OK, tell them I’ll pay the next time I come to Vegas.”

  Cross said, “Just call me when you come in. I’ll give you your usual comp RFB.”

  Falco had recognized Pippi’s name, but there had also been something in Cross’s face that had stopped him. The lack of fear, the coolness of his response, the little joke. All of this smacked of someone whose friends would avenge him. But the incident persuaded Cross to carry a weapon and a bodyguard on his future collections.

  Pippi celebrated his courage with a vacation for both of them at the Xanadu. Gronevelt gave them two good suites and a purse of black chips for Cross.

  At this time Gronevelt was eighty years old, white-haired, but his tall body was vigorous and still supple. He also had a pedagogical streak. He delighted in instructing Cross. When he handed him the purse of black chips, he said, “You can’t win so I’ll get these back. Now listen to me, you have one chance. My hotel has other diversions. A great golf course, gamblers from Japan come here to play on it. We have gourmet restaurants and wonderful girlie shows in our theater with the greatest stars from film and music. We have tennis courts and swimming pools. We have a special tour plane that can fly you over the Grand Canyon. All free. So there’s no excuse that the five grand you have in that purse should be lost. Don’t gamble.”

  On that three-day vacation, Cross followed Gronevelt’s advice. Every morning he golfed with Gronevelt, his father, and a high roller staying at the Hotel. The betting was always substantial but never outrageous. Gronevelt noted with approval that Cross was at his best when the stakes were highest. “Nerves of steel, nerves of steel,” Gronevelt said admiringly to Pippi.

  But what Gronevelt approved of most was the kid’s good judgment, his intelligence, his knowing the proper thing to do without being told. On the last morning, the high roller playing with them was in a sullen mood and with good reason. A skillful and ardent gambler, tremendously wealthy from a lucrative string of porn houses, he had lost nearly $500,000 the night before. It was not so much the money itself that bothered him as the fact that he had lost control in the middle of a streak of bad luck and had tried to press himself out of it; the mistake of a callow gambler.

  That morning when Gronevelt proposed the moderate stake of fifty dollars a hole, he sneered and said, “Alfred, with what you took off me last night, you could afford a grand a hole.”

  Gronevelt was offended by this. His early
-morning golf was a social occasion; linking it to the business of the Hotel was bad manners. But with his usual courtesy he said, “Of course. I’ll even give you Pippi as your partner. I’ll play with Cross.”

  They played. The porn house magnate shot well. So did Pippi. So did Gronevelt. Only Cross failed. He played the worst game of golf the others had ever seen. He hooked his drives, he dived into the bunkers, his ball sailed into the little pond (built on the Nevada desert at enormous expense), his nerve broke completely when he putted. The porn-house magnate, five thousand dollars richer, his ego restored, insisted on them sharing breakfast.

  Cross said, “Sorry I let you down, Mr. Gronevelt.”

  Gronevelt looked at him gravely and said, “Someday, with your father’s permission, you’ll have to come work for me.”

  Cross, over the years, had observed closely the relationship between his father and Gronevelt. They were good friends, had dinner together once a week, and Pippi always deferred to Gronevelt in a very obvious way, which he did not do even with the Clericuzio. Gronevelt in his turn didn’t seem to fear Pippi yet gave him every courtesy of the Xanadu, except a Villa. Plus Cross had caught on to Pippi’s winning eight thousand dollars every week at the Hotel. Cross then made the connection. The Clericuzio and Alfred Gronevelt were partners in the Xanadu Hotel.

  And Cross was aware that Gronevelt had some special interest in him, showed him extra consideration. As witness the gift of black chips on this vacation. And there had been many other kindnesses. Cross had total comp at the Xanadu for himself and his friends. When Cross graduated from high school, Gronevelt’s present had been a convertible. From the time he was seventeen, Gronevelt had introduced him to the showgirls of the Hotel with obvious affection, to give him some weight. And Cross, over the years, came to know that Gronevelt himself, old as he was, often had women to his penthouse suite for dinner, and from the gossip of the girls, Gronevelt was a catch. He never had a serious love affair, but he was so extraordinarily generous with his gifts that the women were in awe of him. Any woman who stayed in his favor for a month became rich.