Читать книгу Keeper of the Flame - Jack Batten - Страница 16

Maury picked me up outside the Kennedy subway station Saturday morning. In a few blocks, we were driving north and east through Scarborough. Or maybe it was North York. Clusters of high rises, built in the last twenty years in an uninspired style, alternated with streets of houses that had been around since the early 1950s. The houses were mostly bungalows on large lots. In a few places, the bungalows gave way to the tear-down treatment, replaced by giant, mock-Tudor residences that muscled up to the lot lines on either side. They looked like houses that natural-born bullies would go for.

Maury parked outside one of the old bungalows. It was surrounded by mature but healthy trees that must have been planted at the same time the houses went up. The effect was kind of charming.

“Jackie’s lived here fifty years,” Maury said.

“Here being where exactly? North York?”

“Markham,” Maury said. “Everybody else on the block moved in from China the last few years. Jackie’s the last holdout from the old days.”

Maury rang the bell, and a short, cheerful-looking woman in her seventies answered the door with a warm smile. She gave Maury a kiss on the cheek and shook my hand firmly. Maury introduced her as Irene Gabriel.

“Jackie loves company these days,” Irene said.

Jackie was sitting in the living room, watching television with the sound on mute. The screen showed five guys and a dealer playing cards. Poker, I thought. Jackie, also in his seventies, had his left foot tilted over on its side at an unnatural angle, and his mouth took a slight leftward slant. Otherwise he seemed free of visible stroke indications.

“You want to hear about my kid and these Heaven’s Philosophers?” Jackie said to me. His speech, as Maury had warned, sounded clumsy, but the words were entirely decipherable.

“And about where the Reverend Alton Douglas might fit into the picture,” I said.

“When he was our priest out this way,” Jackie said, “Father Al got a raw deal.”

“Couldn’t keep his hands off the ladies of the congregation?”

“Off one broad,” Jackie said. “It was only one woman Al got tangled with, but what a broad.”

“Hot stuff?”

“Ever heard of Chuckie Domenico?”

“The condo developer?”

“Biggest builder of condos anywhere in North America,” Jackie said. “Not bad for a guy from right around here. But it was Chuckie’s wife, Audrey, who happened to be the broad in question. Chuckie was so crazy about putting up his condos he never noticed his gorgeous wife was sleeping around.”

“And the Reverend Al was one of her lovers?”

“Audrey got a kick out of seducing guys. With her, it was like a game, getting guys in the sack who weren’t supposed to be there.”

“That’s what cost Al his job?”

“It was a political error on Father Al’s part, if you follow me,” Jackie said. “Al was the priest of our congregation, here in Markham, very popular guy with everybody. Audrey kept making eyes at him until he tumbled, and that’s when he committed what I call his political mistake. Church politics I’m talking about.”

Irene Gabriel came into the living room carrying a tray with a teapot, three cups and a plate of digestive biscuits without any chocolate or other sugary trimmings. I wondered about the tea. I read somewhere it had as much caffeine as coffee did, not necessarily a good thing. Or so I understood.

“This is herbal tea,” Irene said. “No caffeine.”

Maury looked like he wasn’t enjoying the herbal tea experience. I, on the other hand, felt I might dedicate myself to healthy practices.

“What Father Al didn’t know but everybody else did,” Jackie said after his wife left the room, “was Audrey had been banging Father John Capelletti for a couple of years.”

“Another man of the cloth?” I said unnecessarily.

“Father John’d been the big priest over in Woodbridge for somethin’ like twenty years,” Jackie said. “He had the ear of the archbishop, major contacts inside the hierarchy, all that, and he was so pissed off about Father Al doing his dalliance with Audrey he pulled the strings to get Al tossed out of the church.”

“Father John, have I got this straight, was having sex with Audrey Domenico at the same time as Father Al?”

“But he started way before Father Al came along, which was why Father John took his revenge.”

“How did Al end up in Heaven’s Philosophers?”

“That was Georgie’s idea,” Jackie said. “My son.”

“Ah,” I said, “I’m beginning to follow the chain of connections.”

“Georgie was always nuts about Father Al,” Jackie said. “Most of the young people back then felt the same. So what happened, all these years later, Father Al gets bounced, and Georgie gives him a helping hand. I got no quarrel with that. My objection is I want Georgie to come back into business with me.”

“Running card games?” I said.

“Look at those guys on TV,” Jackie said, pointing to the figures slumped over their cards on the television screen. “Poker’s hot as a pistol right now.”

“George’s running gambling for Heaven’s Philosophers?”

“That goddamn church outfit.”

“My contacts,” I said, not mentioning the contacts consisted of my office researcher, “tell me Heaven’s Philosophers are laundering tens of millions of dollars every year.”

Jackie nodded. “Georgie would pull in a nice chunk of that from the gambling,”

I reached into my inside jacket pocket, and got out the list of names from the Heaven’s Philosophers computer. I handed the list to Jackie and asked him which names he could tell me anything about.

“I know that loudmouth Squeaky Fallis,” Jackie said after a minute or two. “Smart enough, but not a man I trust. The only other guy whose name means anything to me, apart from my son, is Willie Sizemore. He once made me a lot of money on the stock market. Other times, he lost me some.”

“I met Willie briefly,” I said. “A guy with a slick line of patter.”

“I gotta tell you a story about him,” Jackie said. “Willie comes from a rich family that sent him to Upper Canada College. Private boys’ school, you heard of the place I’m talking about?”

I said I knew the school.

“They played cricket there instead of real sports,” Jackie said. “This one time, in a game Willie talks about, a kid from the Eaton family swung his cricket bat and whacked Willie in the head by accident.”

Jackie leaned forward. “You know who I’m referring to? The Eaton family?”

“Everybody in Toronto knows the Eaton family,” I said. “They had department stores going back to Timothy Eaton in the nineteenth century.”

“Crang,” Jackie said, “I heard my grandson saying to his friend the other day, ‘The Eaton Centre? Who the fuck is Eaton?’ He’s sixteen, my grandson. My point, not everybody knows about Timothy Eaton and all the rest of the Eatons since him.”

“Point taken, Jackie. What about the Eaton at UCC smacking your stock broker guy with the cricket bat?”

“Right in the temple,” Jackie said. “Willie describes it so graphic he makes you want to inspect his head up close, check out if it’s got a dent.”

“You can’t miss the dent,” I said. I still didn’t see the relevance of the cricket incident, but I imagined Jackie would get back to it somewhere in his narrative.

“Willie’s been in the stock market his whole life,” Jackie said. “Most of the time, he makes money for his clients without either him or them getting caught in what I might call shady shit.”

“But not all the time?”

“Willie’s been known to take his own clients for a ride,” Jackie said. “What happens, the client suddenly loses his whole investment. Willie says, too bad, it’s just a case of he got a bad tip on a stock or the market did something nobody expected. Willie’s always got a sorry excuse. But the truth is the poor schmuck’s money ended up in Willie’s pocket, and usually there’s nothing the schmuck can do about the loss.”

“You’re not going to tell me this happened to you?”

“Something like twenty years ago. Willie lost me one hundred grand. A misfortune was what he said. I told Willie it’d better be your fucking misfortune because I’m calling in somebody not so friendly as me. I was talking about a muscle guy who would beat the shit out of Willie. I named who I had in mind — a guy from the mob in New York City. Willie knew I meant businss, and the very next day, he brought me back my one hundred grand. That was when he told me the story about the Eaton kid and the cricket bat. He said every now and then he had an episode where he did something crazy, something out of his control, and it was all on account of the crack in the head.”

“Are you saying Willie is never purposely crooked? But he gets a little addled from time to time?”

“That’s his line,” Jackie said. “Just a couple years ago, a good friend of mine was out two million bucks on an investment he made with Willie. I went to Willie and asked him if he was having one of his cricket bat episodes. Willie knew this was code for he better rethink the situation of the lost two million bucks. The result was my good friend got his money back, just like I did twenty years ago.”

Jackie seemed to have gone as far as he cared to with Willie the stockbroker. But taking Willie and Georgie as examples, I thought there might be a discernible pattern of specialization going on at Heaven’s Philosophers. Maybe each guy on my list brought a particular criminal activity to the table. Willie did crooked things on the stock market. Georgie looked after the gambling side. Other guys tended to other money-making criminal ventures. There had to be somebody in the group lending money at exorbitant rates. And who knew what other scams and shakedowns the Heaven’s Philosophers guys carried on.

“Any of the other names on my list mean anything to you?” I asked Jackie.

“Ring no bells with me,” Jackie said. “But I’ll tell you an educated guess I can make.”

“What’s that?”

“At least one of the guys on the list is gonna be an enforcer. Maybe two.”

“I assume that’s like in hockey?” I said. “The enforcer’s the guy who scores no goals but runs up an hour in penalties every game.”

“Close to the same thing,” Jackie said. “Heaven’s Philosophers need at least one or two guys in charge of collecting money from people who’re slow payin’ what they owe the group. These enforcer guys keep the customers straight, making them toe the line. You see what I mean?”

“Got you, Jackie,” I said. “One or two goons.”

“They’re the guys you need to worry about most of all.”

“Because they’re tough?” I said.

“No,” Jackie said. “Because sometimes they need to kill people.”