“Understood,” John Craig van der Ploeg said, his voice sounding genuinely tired. He yawned. “And agreed. I’m exhausted.”
Exhausted and he looks like shit, Canidy thought as he pulled a fat cigar from his pocket, unwrapped it, bit a hole in its closed end, and then lit it.
Small wonder. He’s been throwing up since we went wheels-up. He got smacked around really good landing in that tree. And now he can barely stand—never mind walk—on that busted ankle.
But . . . whoopee! Lucky me . . . I’m stuck with him for the duration.
John Craig was sitting on the floor by the window. Canidy had taken parts of one of the busted beds and with them fashioned short legs for the wooden bedside table that also had been broken. The result was a bit wobbly, but the lower height was close to perfect for John Craig to get his hurt foot under and be able to comfortably work the SSTR-1 wireless telegraphy set.
What would have been better was the location.
John Craig sat an inch from where the pool of blood and brain matter from Mariano’s head wound had dried on the wooden floor. It had a distinctive foul odor, and John Craig’s stomach, though absolutely empty after the last series of dry heaves, still was sensitive.
Canidy saw that John Craig regularly looked to see that he was not in fact sitting on the dried blood.
Still, Canidy knew nothing could be done; there was only the one window, and the W/T antenna went out it.
And I really tried to make it right. . . .
* * *
After Canidy, with some effort, had turned the chair and Mariano upright, then slid him over by the stairwell, he had taken one of the torn bedsheets and covered the dead man. Then he had taken another bedsheet and scrubbed at the dried pool. All that that had accomplished, however, was to break up the caked blood and tissue—and stir up the fetid odor. The room smelled worse.
Frustrated, he threw open the window. As a warm breeze floated in, he walked over to the broken beds.
“The SS think they’re tough, huh?” John Craig said as he watched Canidy work.
Canidy, puffing heavily on his cigar, grunted.
“With an organization as large as the SS,” he said, “headed by the sonofabitch Himmler and charged by Hitler to protect the Nazi state at any cost whatever, they are tough. And the sense of invincibility they get from that machine makes them more dangerous. Makes them damn mean”—he gestured with a piece of wood at Mariano—“sadistic even. But separate the man from the machine, and he discovers he’s not the tough guy he thought.”
Canidy began sorting through the wooden pieces, and said, “General George Washington said that to be a good leader, an effective one, people don’t need to love you, or even like you, but they need to respect you. And that’s the chink in the SS’s armor. Being feared is not the same as being respected.”
He looked at John Craig, and added, “Eventually people choose not to take counsel of their fears and rise up.”
“Like the resistance fighters training at your throat-cutting academy,” John Craig said.
“And the Polish underground I told you about. They are tough and determined, even if they have to fight alone,” Canidy said, still looking at him. He glanced at Mariano. “And he was tough to the end. And Charley Lucky is one tough sonofabitch.”
“Who?”
r /> “Luciano. He’s the New York Mafia boss I was going to tell you about. He’s currently serving thirty-plus years—and remarkably still running his gang, and helping us—at New York’s Great Meadow prison.”
“Running the mob from prison? And helping us how?”
“I’ll get into that in a minute. You know what omertà is?”
“Sure. The Mafia’s code of silence.”
“If you never heard of Charley Lucky then you probably never heard of how he, when left to die, took omertà to a remarkable level.”
John Craig shook his head.
Canidy found four more or less even lengths of wood. As he carried them over to the window, he began, “Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria—a ruthless guinea gangster who was born on the coast about forty miles from here—we damn-near flew over Menfi tonight—fled Sicily to avoid murder charges. He wound up in New York, and eventually became a Mafia don, the capo di tutti capi—”
“Boss of all bosses.”
“—Yeah. And Masseria’s mob made a lot of money. Then a hotshot named Charley Lucky became his number two, and he made Masseria even more. Luciano had a lot of ideas and smart connections—his most trusted friend going back to childhood is Meyer Lansky—and suggested to Masseria that they diversify, do business with gangs that weren’t Italian.” He paused, then added, “Now that I think about it, Lansky is another tough Polish Jew, so that had to influence Luciano’s thoughts.”