firearm in the direction of another living thing, including everyone in my family—even Peter, who’d prefer a fisticuffs over a gun battle any day of the week. On the scale of weapons, the gun is the weakest form of power. After all, how did my father take care of Jimmy “the Rat”? A knife to the man’s gut, a gesture that read not only to Jimmy but to his peers, This was personal, and I was not afraid to take his life with my own hands. When people compare the Mafia to drug gangs, I’m baffled. In the early twentieth century, our types may have killed with great disregard, but when was the last time someone from the Mafia drove into a neighborhood and unloaded a half dozen automatic weapons into the side of a building, killing countless people? We are surgeons picking the particular cancer running through a system and carving it out, disposing of it, allowing life to resume like the disease had never even taken hold.
My first gun had strings. It had a purpose. They could have loaded the thing with just six bullets—two for each McCartney. All that remained was to find the targets.
It never occurred to me, as I’d previously searched the list of psycho killers in our family, running fully through the roster of men in my father’s organization for the sociopath who might be able to level the barrel at a young girl and pull the trigger, that the spinning dial would slow, tick gently in my direction, and come to rest at my name. I was the selected nut job.
FOUR
Years after my father’s elimination of Jimmy “the Rat,” he was still riding the wave of reputation from that hit. And I suppose he managed to go out with quite a bang: The Rat was the last time my father ever took someone out, ever needed to. That hit contained all the components necessary to propel fear and notoriety: It was grisly; it was a power play; it was sloppy—a mess everywhere—yet no one took the fall. It spoke to our community of an authority and immunity reserved for few others. To set another example would not be necessary; my father’s minions would now do the dirtiest work and take the biggest risks. Regardless of the end result, I always suspected that the McCartneys haunted him—not as ghosts like they did with me, but as reminders that we are not gods but merely participants in a world under His command. And I don’t think my father was ever able to shake the warning.
During those years, though, something else changed: the landscape of influence. Through my young life, the most valuable tool we had was the distribution of force and fear. But an evolution was occurring, and it wasn’t long before information became increasingly valuable. Some of our highest-volume debtors, mostly bottom-dwellers, were transformed into agents of utility. Guys working clerk jobs in the city with access to databases we could’ve never imagined suddenly captured our attention—and so did the status of their debts. One of our most consistent losers at betting pro football, Randall Gardner, managed to sustain his day job developing a system for the federal government. In lieu of paying back a debt, he gave Peter and Pop access to a particular database whereby they could see the FBI’s general plans, budgets, and priorities—information that was more interesting than valuable. Our access to this fascinating system lasted a mere twenty-two hours before our login was revoked, but the taste gave Peter a lust for information. To his credit, he began to marginally shift the power of our family to a slightly cleaner though equally illegal level of influence; we started playing more Monopoly and less Sorry.
I managed to keep my Beretta in secluded silence, hoping it would serve as nothing more than a defense weapon. Though I suppose it might be obvious where Peter’s longing for information took us, our family, and ultimately me.
By the time the football season was cresting the playoffs, Randall Gardner was betting his house—almost literally—on the Philadelphia Eagles to beat the Dallas Cowboys and cover the spread. Philadelphia didn’t show up for that game, and by halftime it was clear there was no hope Randall could save his house—or his marriage or the ability to see his kids again. Soon the Bovaros would be arriving at an odd hour with a pair of Louisville Sluggers if he didn’t fork over the five figures owed to us