have to be made. Pop’s death wouldn’t be the end, and I couldn’t foresee the end. Or even the next step.
Sal said he would take care of everything, but I didn’t know what that meant. Did it mean he would take care of the man who killed Pop? That man was dead, though he’d only been a hire. Nobody ever sent someone within their circle; nobody ever knew who ordered a hit. The layers between the boss and the crime were substantial. An order was passed down through the network, a few guys were given the job, and it was done. If politics was like the mob, and I was guessing it was, nobody would ever be able to prove anything.
On Monday, the medical examiner released the body to the funeral home that Sal had already booked. I picked out a casket and ordered a stone—a simple one that matched my mother’s. They would lie side by side in Woodlawn next to Salvatore Vitale Sr. and a smattering of other Vitale relatives. I boxed his clothes and stowed the treasures I wanted to keep. I removed the stacks of cash from his mattress—there was more than fifty thousand dollars—and put it in a suitcase. I wanted it ready if I had to run.
Pop didn’t have any bills. He had a few statements and a treatment plan from a cancer specialist in Brooklyn, but everything had been paid in full. He’d signed a release, opting out of chemotherapy and radiation, but he’d looked into medicine for his pain. That seemed to be all. I didn’t know if the doctor would talk to me, but I made a note to call anyway.
On Wednesday we had the wake. I played every song I could think of, sitting there by his open casket as people trundled by, crossing themselves and saying words that didn’t penetrate the wall of music I was creating. Sal had wanted to have the wake at his house on Long Island, but that wouldn’t do. It needed to be in our neighborhood. If we did it at Sal’s, no one from the neighborhood would come; no one but mobsters and associates and the immediate family. I wanted something else for Pop, and we had it at Nonna’s where we’d had my mother’s wake more than twenty years before.
Nonna hid upstairs in her bedroom and refused to come out, even when Sal pleaded at her door. Pop had looked after her, and she’d outlived him. Just as she’d outlived her other protectors. I understood the desire to hide; it was the reason I played. People patted me as they walked past the piano, and all I had to do was nod and keep playing. There wasn’t anything to say anyway. I left that up to Theresa and her daughters, who had come home for the wake with their husbands and Francesca’s new baby. Theresa’s relatives came from Chicago; it had been years since I’d seen them. Theresa’s brother Frank had risen through the ranks and ran his father’s operation, and he and Sal were tucked away for much of the day, talking of things I didn’t want to hear. The house overflowed with family, and I had never felt more alone.
We kept the doors of the house open, front and back, even though it was cold, and we brought the line through the foyer, past the casket in the living room, and out the kitchen. By the time it was all done, the counters were brimming with food.
It was all anyone could do; feed the living and mourn the dead. The two went hand in hand. There were envelopes filled with cash too. Lots of those. Weddings and funerals meant cash payments from the bosses. Costello, Genovese, Bonanno, Gambino, and Profaci. They didn’t come but they all sent money, delivered by an underboss or a soldier with a mournful expression and clasped hands. I shoved them into my breast pocket and vowed to burn them.
It was a stupid thought. I wouldn’t right wrongs or avenge deaths with a pile of ash. And who was I kidding? I would put the money in the suitcase with all the other cash. Sal said he would take care of everything, and I was going to let him, whatever that entailed. So what did that make me?
The resounding answer was I was an orphan. It didn’t matter that I was a grown man, I was an orphan. It was my mother’s wake all over again.