about assassinations. Hell, they had a code about everything—probably even bowel
movements—and they took their codes seriously, but the code of assassination was
maybe taken a little more seriously than others. The first rule of that code
was: You don’t hit a man in the company of his family unless he’s gone to ground
and you just can’t reach him any other way. Vince felt fairly safe on that
score. But another rule was that you never shot a man’s wife or kids or his
grandmother in order to get at him. Any hit man who did such a thing would
probably wind up dead himself, wasted by the very people who had hired him.
Vince hoped to convince Frank Dicenziano that Velazquez was a special case—no
other target had ever eluded Vince for a month—and that what had happened in
Oakland on Christmas Day was regrettable but unavoidable.
Just in case Dicenziano—and by extension, the don—was too furious to listen to
reason, Vince went prepared with more than a gun. He knew that, if they wanted
him dead, they would crowd him and take the gun away from him before he could
use it, as soon as he walked into the restaurant and before he knew the score.
So he wired himself with plastic explosives and was prepared to detonate them,
wiping out the entire restaurant, if they tried to fit him for a coffin.
Vince was not sure if he would survive the explosion. He had absorbed the life
energies of so many people recently that he thought he must be getting close to
the immortality he had been seeking—or was already there—but he could not know
how strong he was until he put himself to the test. If his choice was standing
at the heart of an explosion . . . or letting a couple of Wiseguys pump a
hundred rounds into him and encase him in concrete for a dunk in the bay . . .
he decided the former was more appealing and, perhaps, offered him a marginally
better chance of survival.
To his surprise, Dicenziano—who resembled a squirrel with meatballs in his
cheeks—was delighted with how the Velazquez contract had been fulfilled. He said
the don had the highest praise for Vince. No one searched Vince when he entered
the restaurant. At a corner booth, as the first men in the room, he and Frank
were served a special lunch of dishes not on the menu. They drank
three-hundred-dollar Cabernet Sauvignon, a gift from Mario Tetragna.
When Vince cautiously raised the issue of the dead wife and grandmother,
Dicenziano said, “Listen, my friend, we knew this was going to be a hard hit, a
demanding job, and that rules might have to be broken. Besides, these people
were not our kind of people. They were just a bunch of wetback spics. They don’t
belong in this business. If they try to force their way into it, they can’t
expect us to play by the rules.”
Relieved, Vince went to the men’s room halfway through lunch and disconnected
the detonator. He didn’t want to set the Plastique off accidentally now that the
crisis was past.
At the end of lunch, Frank gave Vince the list. Nine names. “These people— who
are not all Family people, by the way—pay the don for the right to operate their
ID businesses in his territory. Back in November, in anticipation of your
success with Velazquez, I spoke to these nine, and they’ll remember that the don
wants them to cooperate with you in any way they can.”
Vince set out the same afternoon, looking for someone who would remember Travis
Cornell.
Initially, he was frustrated. Two of the first four people on the list could not
be reached. They had closed up shop and gone away for the holidays. To Vince, it
seemed wrong that the criminal underworld would take off for Christmas and New
Year’s as if they were schoolteachers.
But the fifth man, Anson Van Dyne, was at work in the basement beneath his
topless club, Hot Tips, and at five-thirty, December 26, Vince found what he was
after. Van Dyne looked at the photograph of Travis Cornell, which Vince had