Live by Night Page 0,133

he was, above all else, greedy. And Joe fed that greed. He kept its stomach warm and full. There was no logical reason Maso would risk going hungry again to replace Joe. And why replace Joe? He'd committed no transgressions. He didn't skim off the top. He posed no threat to Maso's power.

Joe turned from the window. "Do whatever you have to do to guarantee my safety at that meeting."

"I can't guarantee your safety at the meeting," Dion said. "That's my problem with it. He's got you walking into a building where he's bought up every room. They're probably sweeping the place right now, so I can't get any soldiers in there, I can't tuck any weapons anywhere, nothing. You're going in blind. And we'll be on the outside just as blind. If they decide you're not walking out of that building?" Dion tapped the desktop with his index finger several times. "Then you are not walking out of that building."

Joe considered his friend for a long time. "What's gotten into you?"

"A feeling."

"A feeling ain't a fact," Joe said. "And the facts are there's no percentage in killing me. It benefits no one."

"As far as you know."

The Romero Hotel was a ten-story redbrick building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. It catered to commercial travelers who weren't quite important enough for their companies to put them up at the Tampa Hotel. It was a perfectly fine hotel - every room had a toilet and washbasin, and the sheets were changed every second day; room service was available in the morning and on Friday and Saturday evenings - but it wasn't palatial by any means.

Joe, Sal, and Lefty were met at the front door by Adamo and Gino Valocco, brothers from Calabria. Joe had known Gino in Charlestown Pen', and they chatted as they walked through the lobby.

"Where you living now?" Joe said.

"Salem," Gino said. "It's not so bad."

"You settled down?"

Gino nodded. "Found a nice Italian girl. Two kids now."

"Two?" Joe said. "You work fast."

"I like a big family. You?"

Joe wasn't telling a fucking gun monkey, pleasant as he could be to chat with, about his impending fatherhood. "Still thinking about it."

"Don't wait too long," Gino said. "You need the energy for when they're young."

It was one of the things about the business Joe always found charming and absurd at the same time - five men walking to an elevator, four of them carrying machine guns, all of them packing handguns, two of them asking each other about the wife and kids.

At the elevator, Joe kept Gino talking about his kids a bit more as he tried to catch a whiff of ambush odor. Once they climbed in that elevator, any illusions they had of an exit route ended.

But that's all they were - illusions. The moment they'd walked through the front door, they'd given up their freedom. Given up their lives if Maso, for some demented motive Joe couldn't fathom, wanted to end them. The elevator was just the smaller box within the bigger box. But the fact that they were in a box was impossible to argue.

Maybe Dion was right.

And maybe Dion was wrong.

Only one way to find out.

They left the Valocco brothers and got in the elevator. The operator was Ilario Nobile, permanently gaunt and yellowed by hep', but a magician with a gun. They said he could put a rifle shot through a flea's ass during a solar eclipse and could sign his name on a windowsill with a Thompson and not chip a pane of glass.

As they rode up to the top floor, Joe chatted with Ilario as easily as he had with Gino Valocco. In Ilario's case, the trick was to talk about the man's dogs. He bred beagles out of his home in Revere and was known to produce dogs of gentle temperament and the softest ears.

But as they rose in the car, Joe wondered again if maybe Dion had been onto something. The Valocco brothers and Ilario Nobile were all known gunners. They weren't muscle and they weren't brains. They were killers.

In the tenth-floor hallway, though, the only other person waiting for them was Fausto Scarfone, another artisan with a weapon to be sure, but it was him and only him, which left an even match to wait in the corridor - two of Maso's guys, two of Joe's.

Maso himself opened the doors to the Gasparilla Suite, the nicest suite in the hotel. He hugged Joe and took both sides