The Hollow Man

Where the Deadmen Left Their Bones

Vanni Fucci led Bremen from the skiff to the shore, from the shore through the screen of trees, and from the trees to the roadside where a white Cadillac was parked. The man kept the revolver down at his side, but visible, as he opened the car door on the passenger side and waved Bremen in. Bremen did not protest or speak. Through the shield of cypress he could see the small store where Norm Sr. was drinking his second cup of coffee and where Verge was sitting and smoking his pipe.

Fucci slid into the driver’s seat, started the Caddy with a roar, and peeled onto the tarmac, leaving a cloud of dust and a pattering of gravel on foliage behind them. There was no other traffic. The low morning light touched treetops and telephone poles. Sunlight glinted on water to their right. The gangster set the pistol near his left leg on the plush leather seat. “You say one fucking word,” he said in an urgent whisper, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off right here.”

Bremen had no urge to say anything. As they continued to drive west, the Cadillac idling along at an easy fifty-five, he settled back into the cushions and watched the scenery go by to his right. They left the swamp and forest behind and entered an open area of saw grass and scrub pine. Weathered farmhouses sat back in the fields and, closer to the highway, perched the occasional roadside stands, empty of produce and people. Vanni Fucci muttered something and turned on the radio, punching buttons until he found a station with the right blend of rock and roll.

Bremen’s problem was that he hated melodrama. He did not believe in it. Gail had been the one to enjoy books and television and movies; Bremen always found the situations unlikely to the point of absurdity, the action and characters’ reactions unbelievable, and the melodrama banal in the extreme. Occasionally Bremen would argue that human beings’ lives revolved around carrying out the garbage, or setting the table, or watching TV—not around car chases and threatening others with guns. Gail would nod, smile, and say for the hundredth time, “Jerry, you’ve got the imagination of a doorknob.”

Bremen had imagination, but he disliked melodrama and did not believe in the fictional worlds that depended upon it. He did not believe all that much in Vanni Fucci, although the gangster’s thoughts were clear enough. Unstructured and frenzied, but clear.

It was a shame, Bremen thought, that people’s minds were not like a computer, that one could not call up information at will. “Reading people’s minds” was more analogous to trying to read hasty scrawls on scraps of paper scattered on a bobbing sea than calling up clean lines of information on a VDT. People did not go around thinking about themselves in neat flashbacks for the benefit of any telepath who might encounter their thoughts; at least the people whom Bremen had met did not.

Nor did Vanni Fucci, although Bremen had learned the man’s name easily enough. Fucci did think of himself in the third person, in a totally self-absorbed but strangely removed way, as if the petty gangster’s life were a movie that only he was watching. Well, Vanni Fucci got rid of that miserable fuck had been the gist of the first thought Bremen had encountered on the island. The clothes and hair of Chico Tartugian had still been sending bubbles of trapped air to the surface.

Bremen closed his eyes and concentrated as they drove west, then north, then west again. It seemed an important thing to do, concentrate, although Bremen’s heart was not in it. He disliked melodrama.

Vanni Fucci’s thoughts jumped around like an insect on a hot griddle. He was in some turmoil, although his emotions were not touched by the dumping of Chico’s body or the probability that this stranger would have to be killed as well. It was just that he, Vanni Fucci, did not want to have to do the killing.

Fucci was a thief. Bremen caught enough images and shreds of images to glean the difference. In what seemed to be a long career as a thief—Bremen caught an image of Fucci in a mirror with long sideburns and the polyester leisure suit of the seventies—Vanni Fucci had never fired his gun at a person except for that time when Donni Capaletto, his so-called partner, had tried to rip him off after the Glendale Jeweler job and Fucci had taken away the punk’s .45 automatic and shot him in the kneecap with it. His own gun. But Fucci had been angry. That wasn’t a professional thing to do. And Vanni Fucci prided himself on being a professional.

Bremen blinked, fought back nausea at trying to read these flittering shards on the sea of Fucci’s turbulent thoughts, and closed his eyes again.

Bremen learned more than he wanted to know about being a gangster in this last decade of the century. He glimpsed Vanni Fucci’s deep and burning desire to be made, gleaned what “to be made” meant to a petty Italian gangster, and then Bremen shook his head at the mean lowness of it all. The teenage years running messages for Hesso and selling cigarettes out of the back of Big Ernie’s hijacked trucks; the first job—that liquor mart on the south side of Newark—and the slow acceptance into the circle of tough, shrewd, but poorly educated men. Bremen caught glimpses of Fucci’s deep satisfaction at that acceptance by these men, these stupid, mean, violent, selfish, and arrogant men, and Bremen caught deeper glimpses of Vanni Fucci’s ultimate loyalty to himself. In the end, Bremen saw, Fucci was loyal only to himself. All the others—Hesso, Carpezzi, Tutti, Schwarz, Don Leoni, Sal, even Fucci’s live-in girlfriend Cheryl—they all were expendable. As expendable in Fucci’s mind as Chico Tartugian, a Miami nightclub owner and petty thug whom Fucci had met only once at Don Leoni’s supper club in Brooklyn. It had been a favor to Don Leoni that had brought Fucci south; he hated Miami and hated to fly.

It had not been Fucci who pulled the trigger, but Don Leoni’s son-in-law, Bert Cappi, a twenty-six-year-old punk who thought of himself as the next incarnation of Frank Sinatra. Cappi had been hired as a singer by Tartugian as a favor to Don Leoni, and even though the patrons booed and even the bartenders objected, Tartugian kept the kid on, knowing that Cappi was a spy even while Tartugian continued to rake off the top of the south-side numbers collections, trusting Cappi to place his musical career above his loyalty to his uncle.

Cappi hadn’t done that. Bremen caught a glimpse of Vanni Fucci waiting in the alley while Cappi went in to talk to Chico Tartugian after the last show. The three .22 shots had been short and flat, leaving no echo. Fucci had lighted a cigarette and waited another minute before going in with the shower curtain and the chains. The kid had made Tartugian kneel in the shower stall in his private bathroom, just as Don Leoni had instructed. There was no mess that thirty seconds of running the water wouldn’t clean up.

“What the fuck were you doing there, huh? What the fuck were you doing out in that fucking swamp at fucking sunrise, huh?” Fucci asked.

Bremen looked at him. “Fishing,” he said … or thought he said.

Vanni Fucci just shook his head in disgust and turned the music up. “Fucking civilian.”

They were passing through a town now, something larger than the few villages in the Everglades that they had passed through before, and Bremen had to shut his eyes at the onslaught of neurobabble. It was especially bad passing the trailer parks, the mobile-home villages, the retirement condominiums. There, the rasp of the thoughts of the elderly struck Bremen’s scoured consciousness with the unpleasant force of listening to an old person next door hawk up his morning’s chestful of phlegm.

No letter, no phone call. Shawnee just isn’t gonna call till I’m dead.…

Just a little lump, Marge said. Just last month she said that. Just a little lump. Now she’s dead, gone. Just a little lump, she said. And now who am I gonna play mah-jongg with?

Thursday. It’s Thursday. Thursday is pinochle night at the community center.

Not always in words, frequently not in words, the anxieties and sadnesses and surlinesses of old age and frailty and abandonment struck Bremen as the Cadillac moved slowly down the now widened highway. Thursday, he discovered, was pinochle night in most of the trailer parks and condominiums, in this town and the next they traveled through. But hours of daylight and pain and heavy Florida heat lay ahead for so many of these people before the humid coolness of the evening and the safety of the community center. Televisions flickered in a thousand thousand mobile homes and condos, air conditioners hummed, as the retired and discarded rested their bones and waited out the day’s heat in the hopes of another evening with a dwindling circle of friends.

Bremen saw in a sudden, out-of-context flash of Vanni Fucci’s choppy musings that the thief was angry at God. Terribly angry at God.

Same fucking day that Nicco …

His younger brother, Bremen saw, with the same dark hair and dark eyes, but more handsome in a quiet way.

Same fucking day that Nicco takes his vows, I broke into fucking St. Mary’s and stole the fucking chalice. Same fucking chalice I useta hand Father Damiano when I was a fucking altar boy. Same fucking chalice. Nobody wanted the fucking thing. No fence would touch the fucking thing. Fucking crazy, man … Nicco taking his fucking vows and me wandering the fucking streets of Atlantic City with that fucking chalice in my gym bag. Nobody wanted the fucking thing. Images of a weeping Vanni Fucci burying the silver cup in a tidal marsh north of the casino strip. Images of Fucci’s arms rising toward the sky, fists clenching, of his thumb between first and middle fingers on both hands. The fig … fica … Bremen understood. Vanni Fucci giving God the fig, the most obscene gesture the young thief knew at the time.

Fuck you, God. Fuck you up the ass, old man.

Bremen blinked and shook his head to escape the neurobabble of the trailer park they were passing. He did not think Vanni Fucci was going to kill him. Not yet. Fucci did not want the aggravation, was already wishing that he’d left this dazed fuck behind on the island. Or had brought Roachclip along. Roachclip woulda whacked this crazy fuck right from the skiff and never looked back.

Bremen thought of clever strategies. Using what he’d gleaned already, he could start talking to Vanni Fucci, say that he—Bremen—had also been sent south by Don Leoni, that he knew Bert Cappi had whacked Chico Tartugian and—hey!—it was all right with him. Don Leoni just wanted a confirmation, that was all. Bremen imagined himself answering questions. Roachclip? Yeah, sure, he knew the crazy little Puerto Rican fuck. He remembered the night Roachclip had taken out the two Armansi brothers—the big one with the plastic leg left over from World War II and the skinny younger one with his sharkskin suit. Roachclip hadn’t used a gun or a knife, just that fucking lead pipe he carried around in the trunk, coming up behind the Armansi brothers after driving them to the meeting place in the Bronx and then bashing their skulls in right there on the street, right in front of that Polish babushka with her fat white face and black scarf, her little plastic shopping bag from the fucking old country spilling oranges onto the slushy pavement.…

Bremen shook his head. He would not do that.

They had passed through lake country and into ranch-land where egrets followed cattle, watching for insects stirred up by bovine hooves, when suddenly Vanni Fucci pulled over by a roadside phone, lifted the pistol until the muzzle was inches from Bremen’s eyes, and said softly, “You fucking move outta the fucking car, and I swear to Christ I’ll kill you here. You unnerstand?”

Bremen nodded.

The phone conversation, while not audible, was easy to overhear. People tended to concentrate heavily on language while on the phone.

Look, I’m not gonna whack the miserable fuck here. It ain’t my goddamn business to …

Yeah, I know he saw me, but it’s not my fucking business. It’s Cappi’s and Leoni’s fucking problem and I’m not going to let some fuck out fishing set me up for a …

Yeah … no … no, he’s no fucking problem. Goddamn geek. I think he’s fucking retarded or something. Wearing these fucking pants that are too short and a fucking safari-shirt thing and fucking Florsheims, like a retardo dressed by another retardo.

Bremen blinked and looked down at his clothes. He was wearing the work pants and khaki shirt he’d bought three days ago in Norm Sr.’s store. The pants were short and his dress shoes were caked with dust and mud. Suddenly Bremen patted his pockets, but the roll of cash—most of the $3,865 he’d taken out of the savings account—was still in his suitcoat pocket draped over the chair in the tiny bedroom in the fishing shack. Bremen remembered transferring a few twenties and maybe a fifty or two to his billfold when buying provisions, but he did not check now to see how much was there. He felt the lump of his wallet against his buttock, and that was enough for now.

Yeah, I’ll make the fucking meeting on time, but I’ll be dragging retardo along. Just as long as … hey, don’t interrupt me, goddamn it … just as long as Sal knows that this fuck is their fucking responsibility. Got it?… No, wait, I said fucking got it? Okay. Okay. I’ll see you in an hour to two then. Yeah.

Vanni Fucci slammed the receiver down and walked to the edge of the highway, kicking gravel into the grass and clenching his fists. His white coat was getting dusty now. Fucci spun around and glared at Bremen through the windshield, the sunlight gleaming on the black silk of his shirt and the oil in his black hair.

Do him now. Now. No fucking traffic. No fucking houses. Just whack him here and get on with it.

Bremen glanced at the ignition, knowing without looking that Fucci had taken the keys. He could roll out the door and take off across the fields, weaving, hoping that he could outdistance Fucci and the range of the short-barreled .38 … hoping that another car would come along, that Fucci would give up the chase. Fucci was a smoker and Bremen wasn’t. Bremen set his hand on the car door and took a breath.

Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. Vanni Fucci had decided. He came around the driver’s side, got in, set his hand on the grip of his pistol in his waistband, and glared at Bremen. “You do anything cute, say anything to anybody where we’re goin’, and I swear I’ll whack you in front of a crowd. Got it?”

Bremen only stared. His hand left the door handle.

Vanni Fucci started the Cadillac and screeched out onto the road. A truck passed with a blare of air horns. Fucci gave the driver the fig with his left hand.

They drove north another ten miles on Highway 27 and then accelerated up a ramp onto Interstate 4, heading northeast now.

Bremen caught a glimpse of their destination in the churn of Vanni Fucci’s thoughts, and he smiled despite himself.