Wasted: A Story of Love Gone Toxic, Chapter 18
Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned
Sheila would have creamed herself over Nick Vitello’s drawing room, thought Nate. It had a 20-foot-high, 40-panel mahogany beamed ceiling, massive Cippolino marble fireplaces at each end and four stately Georgian floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a picturesquely hibernating English garden. From the sunny garden wall looking inward across a polished oak floor strewn stylishly with Oriental rugs and mostly Victorian and Edwardian antiquities, one was confronted with an imposing wall-to-wall, ceiling-high display of leather-bound English, American, French, Italian, German, Russian and Classical literature, bisected by an elegantly carved mahogany entrance arch.
The chamber resembled an interior on the A-deck of the Titanic. An ancient grand piano, perched on massive legs with carved claw-and-ball feet, hunkered like a potentate’s funeral bier in one corner, guarded by a pair of life-sized, gold-turbaned blackamoor statues wielding wrought-iron whips. An enormous Victorian gilt-framed mirror hung over each fireplace on the north and south forest-green lacquered walls between recessed alabaster busts of a quartet of laurel-wreathed Roman emperors, making the already vast room seem even larger. The only thing Nate had ever seen that approached it in megalomaniacal, king-of-the-universe grandeur was the Monet, van Gogh and Picasso-bedecked entrance hall of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s East 67th Street townhouse mansion, where as a bike messenger he had once dropped off a package.
With his right hand, Big Nick fondled the joystick of his lilac-purple Jazzy 1103 Mini Power Chair, while his equally knobby, liver-spotted left hand, its emaciated pinky swimming inside a heavy diamond-encrusted gold ring, rested on a gleaming rosewood parquetry-topped Edwardian card table, wrapped around a tall glass of fresh squeezed carrot juice. His hairy nostrils were hooked via a plastic hose to an oxygen tank, jerry-rigged to the back of his hi-tech wheelchair with duct tape and adjustable hose clamps. A voluminous pale green silk bathrobe enveloped his slouching, birdlike frame, and on his feet he wore a pair of fleece-lined crocodile leather slippers.
Nate sat across from Vitello on a thickly upholstered mahogany settee, balancing his notebook and pen on his lap as he test-recorded a new 120-minute videotape in the hoary old Sony VHS video camera he had borrowed from Augie O’Malley. Big Nick had gone for Nate’s suggestion that they videotape the sessions. “I respect your right to edit what I tape before I quote from it,” said Nate. “We can erase anything you don’t want in. It’s just that it’s easier to pick up what you’re saying when I can remember what I’ve seen as much as what I’ve heard. You’re fucking Italian, all right? A lot of what you communicate is visual.”
That was putting it mildly, thought Nate.
***
Nate was not, as he had been urged to, wearing a wire under his bulky wool sweater, courtesy of his new roan G-man buddy Charles Overlook, to whom he had a fortnight before been re-introduced during the course of a drunken all-night brainstorming orgy with the British expatriates Thirsty and Martin, at a tiny back-street pub in downtown Hudson.
It had been a banner evening: a small group of stateless, disenfranchised alcoholics plotting murky deeds against the status quo of the evil empire in which they had found themselves trapped. The drunker he got, the more Nate had relaxed into his new persona as a low-rent international man of mystery: as border-free and devoid of patriotic impulses as any pan-Atlantic USE or BP executive, or Munich-based Al Qaeda cell member. Before the night was over, this fledgling ad hoc committee had sketched out hazy plans for a series of intelligence gathering assaults on three Janssen Movers warehouses and on a suspected illicit chemical export business at the Roosevelt County Airport.
The group was most pleased with the unexpected entrée into Nick Vitello’s fabulous Georgian hilltop fortress, thanks to Nate’s serendipitous invitation into the storied mobster’s world. Thirsty and Overlook had been salivating over the prospect of the information Nate would provide them over the next few months, and were extremely persuasive in trying to get Nate to wear a wire so they could listen in. At one point before passing out, he had even agreed.
But after a spate of drunken nightmares in which he was either swimming naked across a lake stocked with carnivorous predators or hovering in flight just out of reach of the angry, outstretched arms of his dead father, Nate had awakened the next morning with mixed allegiances. He was not in the business of martyring himself for someone else’s cause. Fuck them, he thought, this is my fucking neck. Besides, I like Big Nick. And he likes me; that much is obvious. I need to be straight up with him if I’m going to get the real story. He’ll be able to sense if I’m being duplicitous and wearing a wire. As I promised—and failed—to do with Rico, I will dedicate myself to this man for the short period he has left, and hope he trusts me enough to tell me what I need to know between the lines. There’ll be plenty of time for betrayal, should it ever come to that.
***
Here I sit, thought Nate, in the belly of the beast; or one of a growing number of beasts, anyway. Yesterday, sitting on the same settee during what was supposed to have been an air-clearing and negotiating session, he hadn’t been so sure he’d be at this point 24 hours later, much less alive. He was relieved he hadn’t been wearing a wire. The distraction of worrying about it might have gotten him killed.
“Look, you know what I am. I run some rackets: some good, some bad. I’m not proud of everything I do, but I take care of my family,” Nick had begun, gesticulating with his left hand while holding Nate’s writing, eating and bishop-flogging appendage in his spindly right paw and looking him squarely in the eyes. “You and me, we don’t need a contract. My word is good. If I die before you’re through, I’ve already left you a grand for every day this takes.”
Nick then had tightened his grip gently, almost imperceptibly, and leaned closer. “But what I need to know is, who the fuck are you? This is my fucking life we’re talking about. I want you to come clean with me. Trust is the thing. I know some things about you that you don’t know I know. Tell me the rest, or we’re done right here.”
Vitello’s kindly uncle visage had dissolved into an icy stare Nate had no desire to ever see again. Nate tried to sense whether there was someone standing behind him with a gun pointed at his head. “What do you mean, ‘done,’ Nick?”
“I don’t mean that I’m going to hurt you. I just will not trust you with my legacy here, and you’ll go home to the paper and shut the fuck up forever about me and my business. Capeesh?”
“Capeesh.” Nate took a deep breath and let go of all trepidation. The precipice toward which he had been sliding had arrived. The only way out was straight down, and Big Nick was holding the parachute.
Something else in the man’s eyes told him he’d be all right; not that it really mattered at this point.
“My name is not Jim Olsen.”
Nick smiled and released his grip. The sparkle returned to his eyes. “Now we’re talkin’. Continue.”
“My name is Nate Randall. My parents were killed in a plane crash when I was 16. My father was a contractor. My great-great-great-great-grandfather on my father’s side came over on the Mayflower. My mother was three-quarters Italian and a quarter Welsh.”
“Siciliano?”
“Napolitan. She was beautiful, like Sophia Loren. I’m inbred, because her great-great-great-grandfather on her mother’s side was the same fucking Pilgrim as my papa’s ancestor. He wasn’t a Pilgrim, actually. He was a grifter on the run from the law in London, and he started a mutiny on the ship because the fucking Puritans were hoarding all the beer and he was thirsty. He threatened to turn the ship back around. He extorted the Mayflower Compact out of them, bartering their religious freedom for beer and pretzels.”
“Madon.”
“For the rest of it, after my folks died, I was raised by Italians; my best friend’s parents. Mr. DiSalvo was all right. Tough and fair. Reminded me of you.”
Nick nodded and began to smile, encouraging him to go on. Nate felt as if he had scored a go-ahead touchdown. He kept his story as personal and heartfelt as possible. The experience was transcendently liberating, like going to confession at the Vatican with the Pope himself … or maybe the AntiPope.
“My best friend Anthony died in a car accident, and Mr. DiSalvo died of a heart attack a week later. Mrs. DiSalvo’s in a home. That’s my family. I’ve kicked around a lot. Social worker, computer programmer, messenger, whatever; but I always played guitar and sang in bands on the side.”
“Those are fag jobs. You’re not a fag, are you?”
“Yeah, right. No, actually, I’m in mourning. I’ll get to that in a minute.”
Nick chuckled. “OK, che grande. Go on.”
“Anyway, I just became a reporter in October. I never wrote before; just read the papers every day, cover to cover, and a lot of books. Encyclopedias, literature, philosophy, history, whatever. Did crossword puzzles. That’s my education. Before coming here I was in a rock band in New York for ten years. We had a contract with Arista. We were good. I came up here after my girlfriend died in the trade center. Sheila McNally. You know her father, Bill McNally.”
Nate sensed a glint of enmity for McNally in Nick’s eyes, and gambled with a truth he could easily have withheld: “Sorry if it bothers you, Nick, but I hate Bill McNally. I can’t help it. It’s personal. It comes from Sheila, who hated him because he fucked her virgin pussy twice a week until she went to prep school. She was working for USE when she died, and she was gathering inside information on the toxic waste dumping business of her old man. She tipped me off about it all just before she went down. I saw her die from her apartment up the street, while I was talking to her on the phone.”
“Sorry, kid. Things happen.” Nate thought he saw dampness forming in the corner of Nick’s left eye.
“Yeah, they do. I read her files and got excited, and decided to come up here and bust heads for her. Carry on her work, so to speak. And while I was packing up to leave, somebody punched my eye out, firebombed my stuff and all Sheila’s files, and left me for dead. I think it was one of McNally’s guys. I hope it wasn’t one of yours.”
“How could you even think that? Kid, come on,” Nick shrugged, palms up, and screwed his mug into a hurt frown. “I’m old school. We don’t work like that. If we did, every reporter, cop and prosecutor in the country would be dead already. We only fuck with actual witnesses, scumbags and rats. It’s bad business to hurt a civilian, unless absolutely necessary, in a kill-or-be-killed kind of way. It’s in the code, which those fucking potato-eaters don’t know from. We should never have allowed them in here.”
“So you and McNally aren’t friends, I take it?”
“Not so fast, kid,” snapped Nick. “We were talkin’ about you, here.” Any shred of coldness was gone from his manner, however. If anything, Nate had begun to sense a cocoon of warmth enveloping him, emanating from the man’s benign, smiling countenance.
Nate finished his story, telling Nick about nearly everything, including what he thought he knew about the mobster. He left out only that he had a girlfriend and that he was working with Thirsty and Martin and had been considering wearing a wire provided by a loose-cannon FBI agent.
“I don’t blame you for your life,” said Nate, courting disaster one last time in the name of full disclosure. “I’m nobody to judge. But I do know that some of what you do, with toxic waste particularly, is giving people cancer, including yourself, and probably me, someday. It pisses me off. This is what I came up here to fight against.”
Nick did not flinch. His face retained its warmth.
“So now I have all this information about what a fucking clusterfuck we’re living in here, and I don’t know what to do with it,” said Nate. “I feel like the only thing to do is write about it. Not in a fucking newspaper or magazine somebody will toss in the garbage and forget. In a book. I don’t want to change the fucking world. I just want people to hurt as bad as I do about what kind of a fucked up place this world is.”
“All right, you can shut up now. We’re good. We’re on the same fucking page, kid, believe it or not. I’m not proud of everything I’ve done, like I said. I don’t have much time to make it right, but I’m tryin’. I’m glad you came down here, whoever the fuck you are.”
“Nate.”
“Yeah, Nate. I think I’ll call you Jimmy anyway.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know if you noticed in here, but I love books.”
“Yeah, I did. That’s some collection.”
“What you don’t know is I have read most of them. I taught myself, like you.”
“That’s something.”
“Yeah. And the books I’ve been attracted to lately, I gotta wonder if I’ve gone soft. Ethical philosophy. Plato. Aristotle. About waking up and starting to do good, no matter that it took a world of shit to get you to where you were able to think about it. This guy George Soros. I just read a biography of him, hot off the press. He’s like a fucking billionaire, already, more dough than God, and he’s out there spending millions on building a fucking water district in the middle of a fucking war zone so snipers won’t be able to shoot women trying to fill their fucking jars in the town square. Now that’s a life well lived, right? That kind of shit inspires me.
“But I’m old and sick. I’m almost out of gas. Like I said, I’ve done a lot of good things; and some not so good. I feel like if I could get some of this off my chest and into a book… Not just about me, but about where I fit in the proper con… con…”
“Context?”
“You’re a smart kid. You got a gift. Context. If I could do that, write a book, teach some things, I would feel a lot better about dying.”
“Why did you choose me? I never wrote anything bigger than 5,000 words in a newspaper.”
“Because you got a spark, kid. What I see in all those books on the wall there. That bird story, for starters. You didn’t just cut that farmer a new pussy, you saw what he went through and told his side. People cried for him, even though they wanted to wring his skinny neck. That’s fucking art. Put all your newspaper stories together and that’s a book already—in what, five months you been at it?”
“A year,” corrected Nate.
“Whatever the fuck it is. You’ll be all right. I don’t know if you notice, but I’m not surrounded by rocket scientists around here. Angie and Fiona are good girls, with hearts of gold like their mother, but they’re dumb as rocks. My son Sammy was smart like you; he was tops in his class at Dutch Hollow Prep School and had a scholarship to Harvard already, but he’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Dead. Sixteen years old, of a heart attack.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“Like I said, things happen. I could have gone outside, but I’d lose control. I don’t like any of these so-called writers today. Hemingway’s dead. The book business is run by PC dicksuckers and women, and accountants with no balls. When we do this, I’m gonna publish myself, through my own network. Fuck Oprah. Barnes & Noble’s will put my book in the window, or face the consequences.”
Nate imagined the consequences.
“By the way, if you do this, I can’t have you workin’ at no newspaper no more. I’ll be buyin’ out your contract, like George Steinbrenner. You’ll be mine for a year: eight hours a day, five days a week, five grand a week. That’s over a quarter mil for sittin’ in that chair there, listenin’ to me talk and makin’ me sound as articulate as I feel inside my head. You want to do this or what?”
Nate didn’t have to think twice. This was what he had dreamed of; to gain the confidence of the one man who knew everything. Sheila had given him the map to the Holy Grail; this motherfucker was the Holy Grail. He had learned all he could from the outside looking in; he now had the considerable resources of a veteran congressional gumshoe and a disgruntled FBI agent to draw upon on the investigative front. What did he need the newspaper job for now, except more useless ego massage?
“Yes, Nick. It would be an honor. You know I’d do it for nothing. Can you give me a month to give notice and tie a few things up? We can start part-time until then.”
“Sure thing, kid. Just one more thing.” Nick was throwing out another line, now, fishing for something else. “I’m gonna have a man on you, for protection. McNally knows about you by now. I don’t trust what that fucking Mick scumbag might try to do to you on your way home. You know that if his daughter hadn’t gotten crushed in the trade center, he was ready to fucking kill her? Kill his own flesh and blood, who he had already raped and deflowered?”
Nate’s blood, which was already running hot, literally began to boil.
“He said she was out of control,” continued Nick, hooking his prey like the professional he was. Of all the emotions, the desire for revenge was the most malleable. Sure this kid was just a writer, but he had something else going, he could tell. First of all, he was fearless. Something violent was lurking in his gut, waiting to explode. Even if the book didn’t work out, he would be useful in other ways.
“He told me he’d had his boys watching her 24/7 and was moving in ‘any day now,’“ continued Nick. “He was pissed because he heard she tried to sell her story to 90 Minutes and the fucking Times. Who knows, he might have even paid for the towelheads’ flying lessons and plane tickets, whaddya think about that?”
In his paranoid state, Nate had already thought about that. Until now the idea had been too ridiculous to contemplate.
“So you might even think about moving in here for a while, for your own good. I got a spare bedroom.”
The offer of protection was unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome. Sure it would put a crimp in his lifestyle, but what good was personal freedom when you were using it to destroy yourself? Nate imagined himself relaxing into the bosom of Nick Vitello’s paternal embrace, free from fear and free to pursue the knowledge that he would later use to save the world from itself. The only problem, and it was a big one, was what he was going to tell Nicole about all this.
“And by the way,” said Nick. “I’ll know if you’re fucking with me. If you are loyal and show me respect, I’ll treat you like the son I lost, I promise on my mother’s grave. But if you fuck with me, I will make you regret it before you die. Capeesh?”
Nate’s head began to hurt.
“Capeesh.”
"This novel is fiction, but it contains more truth about what is really happening and who is really in charge than any news story. The reason you feel like mobsters are running the world ... is because they are.”
https://www.amazon.com/Wasted-Story-Love-Gone-Toxic/dp/1948796309