LIGHTNING
by
Al Lamanda
Copyright 2012 by Al Lamanda
ONE
As mobsters go, sixty-two year old Victor Grant was the alpha male of organized crime. Diminutive in stature, standing just five foot four inches tall in his custom made, Italian shoes that secretly added one inch to his height, Grant more resembled a hand puppet than the chief executive of all crime families on the eastern seaboard, stretching as far west as Las Vegas.
Grant had thick hair the color of snow and black, bushy eyebrows like a Russian Czar that sat above his eyes like sleeping caterpillars. His nose was the size of a ripe tomato under which rested a pencil thin mustache that served to make the nose appear even larger. With the hands of a heavyweight boxer at the end of skinny arms that belonged on a man a foot taller with size twelve feet, Grant was so disproportionate a man, the sight of him often drew laughter from strangers.
Followed by a quick death if he caught you laughing behind his back or anywhere else for that matter.
The secret to Grant’s rise to command was his iron willpower that allowed him to do what other men could not. When he was five years old, Grant’s father sat the boy on his knee on the first day of school. “You start the school today,” his father said in the broken English he spoke. “You don’t take no shit from nobody,” his father advised. “If some fat kid picks on you, give him this right up the nose,” his father said and produced an ice pick. Young Grant took the ice pick. “Up the nose?” Young Grant said. “Right up the fucking nose,” he father said. “They won’t pick on you no more. Now be a good boy and don’t forget your milk money?”
Grant’s father, Salvatore, called Vito by his friends and family for reasons unknown, was a driver for the Manhattan crime boss during the great depression. While other families went hungry, Victor ate ice cream seven nights a week. As a driver and made man, Salvatore’s primary job was to drive the boss wherever he wanted to go whenever he wanted to go there. Since the boss rarely left his command center at the Little Italy Social Club For Members Only, Salvatore did very little driving. In fact, the most driving Salvatore did was on Sunday after the boss, his wife and their five children attended mass at Saint Carmine’s Church in the Village. After mass, Salvatore would drive the boss to his mistress’s apartment in The Bronx where he would spend a leisurely afternoon in the company of a beautiful black woman who would call him Daddy. Salvatore would wait in the car or go for pizza at Louie’s Restaurant, then drive the boss home to Brooklyn.
When Victor was twelve years old, Salvatore was blown up in a car bombing. The bomb was meant for the boss of course, but Salvatore never knew that or anything else since he was the one blown up by it.
After the funeral, Grant’s mother sat him on her knee for he was the size of a six year old. “Now that your papa is blown up,” she said in broken English, pausing to make the sign of the cross. “You are the man of the house. I got you a job, so you have to quit school to make money for me. That’s the breaks.”
Since the only fun Victor ever had at school was shoving his ice pick up the noses of classmates, quitting was no big deal and a great relief to his teachers, who were sick and tired of mopping up after nose bleeds.
The boss, feeling guilty at having Salvatore blown up at his expense, agreed to employ Victor as his new driver. He struck the agreement with Victor’s mother without seeing the boy first and when she led Victor into the Little Italy Social Club For Members Only the day after the funeral, the boss stared at them in confusion.
“Where’s the boy?” the boss said.
“At the end of my arm,” Victor’s mother said.
“I mean the one going to be my new driver?” the boss said.
“This is he.”
“You said he was twelve.”
“He is.”
“Where’s the rest of him?”
“This is all there is,” Victor’s mother said.
“He can’t drive no car,” the boss said. “He belongs in a highchair.”
“My husband is dead and I have a ten year old daughter at home,” Victor’s mother said. “You gave me your word and if you break it everyone from Carmine Street to the West End will know you don’t keep your word.” To emphasize her disgust, she spat on the floor.
The boss sighed. “Leave the boy.”
“Twice the pay, remember,” Victor’s mother said.
“Yeah, I remember,” the boss said.
Which is how twelve-year-old Victor earned two hundred dollars a week when the average working man’s pay was less than eighty and a new car cost eleven hundred.
“Can you drive a car?” the boss asked Victor.
Victor shook his head.
“It’s easy,” the boss said. “You step on the gas to make it go, the brake to make it stop and in between, you don’t run nobody over unless I tell you to. If you have to run somebody over, make sure he ain’t Italian or at least Sicilian.”
The boss’s personal bodyguard, a man who would throw himself on a hand grenade for the boss pulled the boss aside. “Maybe I should drive,” he said. “Until the boy grows a little bigger.”
“By a little bigger, you mean three more feet?” the boss said. “We’ll all be six feet under by then. Besides, I need you by my side where you can take a bullet for me, not behind the wheel.”
The bodyguard looked at Victor. “Maybe if he sat on some phone books?”
Wearing a suit he mother picked out for him in the children’s department of Macy’s, seated on two Manhattan Yellow Pages, Victor proudly stepped on the two wood blocks taped to the gas pedal and drove the boss to visit his black mistress in the Bronx. The drive went well, Victor didn’t hit anything except for some chickens running loose in the Bronx Market on 149th Street , and since chickens weren’t people, he didn’t count them as anything.
After the boss went up to the fourth floor apartment of his mistress, Victor and the bodyguard were alone in the car. “You did good, kid,” the bodyguard said. “Except for them chickens and a little blood and feathers on the headlights, you did real good.”
“They popped,” Victor said.
“What?”
“When I ran them over, they popped.”
The bodyguard laughed as he lit an unfiltered cigarette. “Yeah, I guess they did.”
Victor watched the bodyguard blow a smoke ring and he thought it the neatest thing ever. “That’s really cool,” Victor said.
“Only cool people smoke, kid,” the bodyguard said.
“My teachers said smoking is bad for you,” Victors said.
“Are your teachers cool?”
“No.”
“That’s what I mean,” the bodyguard said. “If you want to look cool, you gotta smoke and only unfiltered. Filters are for women and dandies.”
“What’s a dandy?” Victor said.
“Do you know what a woman is?”
“Sure.”
Same thing.”
“Can I try one?”
The bodyguard tossed his pack to Victor. “Get the hang of that and I’ll teach you how to piss over your head standing up,” the bodyguard said.
“Cool,” Victor said.
“Let’s go for Pizza,” the bodyguard said. “The boss is gonna be a while.”
“What’s he doing up there?” Victor said.
“Greasing his pole, kid,” the bodyguard said. “Greasing his pole.”
Two years later, on his fourteenth birthday, the boss took Victor with him to his mistress’s apartment as a gift. “Kid, the boss said. “Today you become a man.”
“What’s that mean?” Victor said.
“Means you’re gonna get your pole greased,” the boss said.
The mistress, fourteen inches taller than Victor took him by the hand. “I hope the rest of you isn’t this small,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Victor said.
The boss cracked up laughing. “Go in the bedroom and find out.”
A year later, when Victor was fifteen, he made his bones. A rival Don in Brooklyn decided to move on the boss and on a Sunday afternoon, when the boss left his mistress, a car suddenly pulled up and two men started blasting. The boss threw himself to the curb behind his car as the bodyguard jumped out with a .45 pistol and returned fire. In the ensuing chaos, both rival shooters ignored Victor, who looked like a little kid to them and Victor calmly exited the car with his ice pick in his hand. Equally as calmly, Victor walked to the car and shoved the ice pick into the nose of one of the shooters with so much force, the ice pick reached the shooters brain. Distracted by his partner having an ice pick jutting from his left nostril, the second shooter was promptly gunned down by the boss’s bodyguard.
That night, the boss threw a Bones Party at the Social Club. Victor’s mother wept openly she was so proud of her son. Even Victor’s kid sister Sophia seemed pleased at her brother’s heroics and for once didn’t make fun of his small stature.
Four decades later, Victor Grant was the most powerful and wealthiest member of Italian organized crime. On every FBI wanted list, on every crime task force list, on every President’s watch list, Victor Grant seemed only to grow stronger as he thumbed his ample nose at them.
Married at twenty two, a father two years later, Grant rose through the ranks quickly and moved his family to a large home on Staten Island where they lived happily for ten years until tragedy struck. On a bright, beautiful Sunday morning, Grant’s wife went to the garage to start the car. The bomb planted under the driver’s seat promptly exploded and Grant found himself a widower with a ten-year-old son at home.
Grant did the right thing and didn’t remarry until his son had grown into manhood so as not to tarnish the memory of his blessed mother. At the age of forty-eight, Grant married his mistress Rita, a woman two years younger than his son. A year after that, she presented him with his second son, Victor Junior.
Now thirteen, Victor Jr. stood two inches taller than his father. He hoped to reach the height of his older brother, which was six feet tall. Rita, at five foot ten towered over his father, so Victor Jr. figured he got the height from her and prayed he didn’t get the nose from him.
As Victor Grant sipped his morning brandy, a custom after breakfast he deemed good for the digestion, he looked out the massive bay window of his Long Island mansion that overlooked the one square acre front yard. The flowers and trees were in full summer bloom, the lawn was lush and green, but for what it cost him to maintain a full time gardener, they should water themselves.
“Victor, are you packed?” Rita said from another room. What room, he wasn’t sure because there were so many that voices carried and echoed. “Victor?” Rita called again.
Grant took a sip from his brandy snifter. “I packed a week ago,” he said.
“Do me a favor and check your passport and other things we need to board the ship,” Rita said.
Grant sighed. “It’s all in my wallet, Rita,” he said.
“Our tickets?”
“In the folder on the table.”
“Oh, Victor, this is so exciting.”
“It will be more exciting if you’d hurry up so we can get there,” Grant said as he continued to stare out the window. Down by the gates, he could see two of his men talking in the guard shack. He kept a staff bodyguards and a driver on duty round the clock all year including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.
“Victor?” Rita said.
“Yeah.”
“Tell your driver to come get my bags.”
Grant turned away from the window and picked up the wall phone mounted by the front door. He lifted the phone off the receiver and a gruff voice on the other end said, “Yeah, Mr. Grant?”
“Have Agosto come get my wife’s bags,” Grant said.
“Should I send the Town Car, Mr. Grant?”
“She’s got a lot of shit,” Grant said. “Better use the mini van.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Grant.”
“Are they still out there?”
“Across the street.”
“What’s it say this week?”
“ACME Pest Control.”
Grant snorted. “Only pests around here are them.”
“Want I should talk to them?”
“Naw, the hell with them.”
Grant hung up the phone just as his son entered the front room. “The hell with who, Pop? Victor Jr. said.
“Never you mind,” Grant said. “Now listen, you mother and I will be gone for seven days and eight nights or the other way around, I’m not sure. We need you to listen to Elizabeth
“Aw, Pop,” Victor Jr. said.
Grant had to look up to his son to make eye contact. “Don’t aw Pop me,” he said with pride. “I can still bend your ears back for you but good. Now, where’s Elizabeth
“Doing housework like always,” Victor Jr. said.
“Go tell her I want to see her.”
Victor Jr. nodded and walked away. Grant returned to the window. Today was Thursday. He always spent Thursday afternoons with his twenty-two year old mistress in the Manhattan apartment he kept for her. Not that Rita wasn’t still a beautiful woman, she was, but at thirty-eight, she no longer had twenty two year old breasts and there was no mistaking the difference between a twenty two year old breast and a thirty eight year old one. It’s like taking the Pepsi challenge. You can always taste the Coke by just one sip even though you still like the Pepsi.
“You wanted to see me, Mr. Grant?” Elizabeth Stanton said in her British accent from behind Grant.
Grant turned around and looked up at the five foot ten inches tall blue-eyed brunette. At thirty-five, Elizabeth
“Yeah,” Grant said. “You remember we’re going away today?”
“I helped Mrs. Grant pack,” Elizabeth
“Good, good,” Grant said. “I told Victor he has to listen to you while we’re away and do his school work and not cause you no trouble.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Grant,” Elizabeth
“You have all the emergency numbers?”
“I’m a nurse,” Elizabeth
Grant looked at Elizabeth
“Like what, Mr. Grant?” Elizabeth
“You know,” Grant said. “Like that.”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Grant,” Elizabeth
Grant nodded. “We’re going to those islands.”
“What islands?”
“Those ones,” Grant said. “Victor wants me to bring him something back. I was thinking maybe you would like a little something, too. So, what would you like?”
“I could use a million dollars,” Elizabeth
“I’ll see what I can do,” Grant said. “About the hat I mean.”
Rita and Victor Jr. walked into the front room. “We’ll miss our flight, Victor,” Rita said.
“No we won’t,” Grant said. “Kiss your mother goodbye,” he said to Victor Jr.
A few minutes later, after Agosto loaded Rita’s eight bags into the white mini van, Elizabeth and Victor Jr. waved goodbye from the front lawn. Grant and Rita sat in back while the driver and a bodyguard occupied the front seats. As the bodyguard at the gate opened it for the mini van to pass, Grant tapped Rita on the shoulder. “See that van there with the giant roach on the side?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Wave hi to the FBI,” Grant said.
Rita turned, smiled and waved to the dark van with the giant roach on the side. “What do they want, Victor?” Rita said.
“My blood, Rita,” Grant said. “My blood.”
“Kennedy Airport
“That’s where we’re going,” Grant said.
“Oh, Victor, this was so nice of you to give us a cruise for our wedding anniversary,” Rita said and hugged Grant’s arm. “Eight days in the Caribbean .”
Grant patted Rita’s arm. “You deserve it,” he said.
“Oh, wait a minute,” Rita said. “What if something happens? How would we know? Something could happen to our boy and we’d never know until we came back.”
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Grant said. “Elizabeth
“Call the ship? You mean while we’re in the ocean? How does that work?”
“You call the ship and somebody answers the phone,” Grant said. “Now relax. Absolutely nothing will go wrong. Nothing.”
“Promise?” Rita said.
“Promise,” Grant said and patted Rita’s arm.
