The Lucifer Messiah Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Book I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Book II

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Book III

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Book IV

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Published 2006 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO

  is a registered tradmark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2006 by Frank Cavallo

  Cover Illustration by Adam Mock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Thanks first to my parents, for everything. And to the rest of my family, who supplied me with many of the anecdotes herein, as well as lots of little details about old New York that aren’t in any book. Thanks to the folks at Medallion, who gave my weird little idea a home; to my agent Rebecca, who took me on blind; and to Haewon Yom, who spent many hours of her time with my imaginary friends.

  Finally, a nod each to the gang from Marguerite Street, the boys in the Corporation, and to all the former residents of Snaithville, about whom I need say nothing more.

  BOOK 1

  “Old Friends”

  ONE

  NEW YORK CITY

  NOVEMBER 19, 1946

  SEAN STAGGERED.

  A stench crawled into his nostrils. Garbage. Rotten food. Shit. Even the shadows stank.

  They were still out there. Somewhere. Stalking him.

  He forced himself to move, creeping through the filth and the darkness. His gut ached. He felt the blood drooling out of him. It trickled into his pants, ran down his leg. It was sticky and wet.

  He had to keep going.

  He recognized the street ahead. Ninth Avenue and the corner of West Thirty-Sixth Street. The edge of Hell’s Kitchen.

  Street lamps buzzed overhead; an electric swarm of pale, flickering light. Across the way, the minute hand of an old gothic clock moved one click. That made it 1:13 AM.

  Sean didn’t care.

  Steam exhaled from a sewer vent. Sulfurous ghosts washed over him. For a moment he welcomed the warmth. But he couldn’t linger. He only bathed in the hot odor for a moment.

  He fell, toppling a half-filled trashcan. Noise was the last thing he needed. He didn’t get up, not right away. First he grabbed his dented felt hat from a puddle. His overcoat was already ruined, but that hat meant a lot to him—sweat stains and mildew notwithstanding.

  A sedan turned from around the far corner. Headlights skimmed the street. Tires squeaked on blacktop.

  Sean scrambled to his feet. He stumbled backward, hoping to reach the safety of the reeking dark.

  His chin dripping sweat, he watched as the car drove by. It was motoring slowly, agonizingly so as it rolled past his little alley-hovel, then beyond him, and finally around the next block.

  He counted in his head.

  One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three …

  After what he figured was enough of a pause, he chanced an appearance. Hobbling out into the dangerous light, he gasped for air and hurried across the street.

  He only made it halfway.

  A pair of shots ricocheted. The sedan screeched from around the corner. It roared like a mechanical predator. Lead and fire and noise spewed from two Thompson submachine guns.

  Sean faltered. He dragged his feet with an urgency that was nothing short of panic, across the bullet-marked street and into a second alcove.

  The grinding steel-on-steel whine raced behind. He made it into the narrow passage between a bakery and a shoe store. His feet crushed broken glass. He slipped as he ran. Before he could gain much distance, with the sedan plowing toward him through the debris, he came face to face with frustration.

  A ten-foot iron fence blocked his way, mocking his flight in rusted silence. Razor wire ringed the top, though the barbs were barely visible through the shadows and the steam. The headlights were on him.

  Gunfire clanged at his feet.

  He winced. The bullets were close, but there was something else. He shivered, though not from the cold, closed his eyes tight and fell backward.

  The gloom swallowed him.

  A moment later, the sedan skidded to a halt inches from the fence. Rocco Gallucci heaved the passenger-side door open. He bounded out with a Tommy gun braced in his arms. The barrel was dripping smoke.

  “We know you’re out there Mulcahy. The boss wants a word with you. He ain’t gonna shed no tears if we bring you back in pieces,” the fat man shouted.

  Two others joined him from within the massive automobile.

  “He ain’t back here,” one whispered.

  “He’s here. He ain’t got no way outta here,” Rocco said.

  A rustle stirred behind a dumpster. Jolted, the third gunman squeezed his trigger, firing off a pair of rounds. His comrade was quick to grab him. Rocco rebuked him just as fast.

  “It’s just rats Gino!”

  The smoke from the shots took a moment to clear. When it did, they saw a brood of rodents, nine or ten strong, squealing and crawling over one another. The pests scurried in a half-dozen directions, a mess of whiskers and scaly tails burrowing through a pile of old clothes—a dented felt hat and a once-fancy overcoat among them.

  “Looks like they ate some bum,” Gino said.

  The men continued their search. They rifled through every inch of the trash in the alley, but of the fugitive they had cornered, there was nothing. Just some blood smeared on the lower links of the fence.

  “He’s gone. There ain’t no two ways around it,” Gino said.

  “That’s impossible,” Rocco answered.

  “Unless he climbed the fence.”

  “Climbed the fuckin’ fence, my ass. You wanna be the one to tell Mr
. Calabrese that we lost ’em? After what that son of a bitch did to the new guy?”

  “We gotta tell him something. And I don’t see nobody back here,” Gino said.

  Rocco spit. He cursed again, this time in his native Sicilian dialect. Within a few moments, they were back in the sedan, and gone from the alley.

  A short while later, after the block had settled back into the slumber from which it had been so rudely awakened, Sean Mulcahy limped out of the alley. He was still dressed in the tattered overcoat and the beat-up felt hat.

  A rat scampered across his shoe. It climbed up and disappeared under the leg of his pants.

  He was finally home.

  TWO

  THOUGH LATE INTO THE NIGHT, THE DOORS WERE STILL open at the Catanzaro Sunset Cafe and Social Club. None of the patrons, all regulars who were mostly arguing and conversing along the bar, ever called it that. Most of the locals on Mulberry Street knew it simply as The Sunset. And most knew that despite its congenial name, it was not an establishment that welcomed outsiders.

  When Rocco and his men came in through the entrance on Hester, all the talking stopped. It didn’t take long for the guys at the bar, or the ones seated at the back table to recognize them. Their chatter soon picked up unabated.

  Rocco clapped his hands in the direction of the barkeeper, who looked much older than the place’s aging turn-of-the-century décor.

  “Hey, Mikey, is he in?” he asked.

  The bartender nodded. A second later he shifted from his nearly incomprehensible Campania dialect into only barely comprehensible English.

  “He’s upstairs, been askin’ about you all night,” the olive-skinned Napolitano answered.

  Rocco had only one word, which everyone in the joint understood.

  “Shit.”

  Salvatore “Sam” Calabrese’s lips curled in a grin that stretched between bloated cheeks. His fingers twisted over the naked breasts of a dancer. His breaths came in short, excited huffs. Though he did not at first notice it, the door to his office slowly opened. Rocco Gallucci entered quietly, his cronies in tow.

  “Jeez, boss, I’m sorry. The guys outside, they didn’t tell me nothin’,” he said.

  Calabrese shook his head.

  “Relax Rocco. If I didn’t want to be disturbed I’d have left word,” he answered.

  He extended one of his plump hands, and the three men stepped into the room. They closed the door behind them.

  Calabrese’s private hold, a converted loft above the Sunset Club, was an oasis of luxury amid dingy surroundings. Once merely an office, a recent swing of his fickle mood had spurred a remodeling of the entire place.

  Seven hundred dollars and three missing workmen later, it resembled something of a harem. Plush-cushioned furniture lined every wall. Oriental rugs lay spread across the floor and silk tapestries dangled dangerously close to rows of black candles. Aside from the occasional intrusion of headlights through the windows, the golden whispering tapers provided the only light in the room.

  Like some regent on a barbarian throne, Lower Manhattan’s most despised loan shark reclined in a silk robe, his girth spilling out everywhere. The three men approached with caution. They did not have good news.

  “Well gentlemen? Shall I assume from your less-than-joyous demeanor that you have returned from the night’s errand with my wishes unfulfilled?” he asked.

  His words were spoken with uncommonly perfect enunciation, distinctly more refined than any other local hood, or even his own usual diction. The three of them, two the illiterate sons of Italian immigrants, and the third a native of Palermo, stared back at him in silence. It was a reaction that Calabrese had produced often among his associates, as of late.

  “C’mon, spit it out, Rocco, before I have ta smack ya. Is he alive? Is he dead? What?” the sprawling man demanded, his grammar shifting completely in an instant.

  The three ignored the sudden change in syntax. Rocco responded accordingly.

  “He got away. We hit ’em, I think. There was blood on the fence. I don’t think he coulda got too far.”

  Calabrese sighed, wiping tiny beads of sweat from his forehead. With a delicate manner, he let his other hand slip from the dancer’s shoulder. A vaguely effeminate wave informed her that she was dismissed. Then, his eyes bulging, he turned to the other men. He spoke as if reading off a roster.

  “Rocco. Gino. Vig. Where is the other I sent with you, Michael?”

  There was a long, desperate pause before the large man called the Vig mustered the courage to speak.

  “Mulcahy. He got loose. The new guy, he tried to stop ’em. The mick bastard killed him.”

  Calabrese nodded.

  “Would the two of you give us a few moments, please?” he asked, his tone clearly directed at the two men beside Rocco.

  Rocco, as though he knew what such a suggestion meant, wasted no time in pleading.

  Calabrese ignored him. His voice fell into a whisper, an almost reptilian hiss. Every sibilant syllable prickled Rocco’s ears.

  “We need a few moments alone Rocco,” he said.

  The door closed with a thud.

  Outside the office, Gino and the Vig shuffled toward the stairwell. But the hall was blocked. A tall man stood in their way. A stone-faced giant with reddish-brown skin and sharp features. They recognized him. Indian Joe was his name. He was the only Indian either man had ever seen, aside from the matinee. But his sight would have been striking to any men, if not for his height and his broad frame then for his hair alone. Black as pitch and board straight, it hung long to his waist, a natural contrast to his double-breasted silk suit.

  That peculiarity might otherwise have made for an amusing novelty, if not for the man’s entirely morbid reputation.

  “Mr. Joseph. We was just leavin’,” the Vig said, careful not to actually call him Indian Joe.

  The Native-American nodded, though he remained silent as the two men cowered beneath him. The stories about Indian Joe well preceded him, both among those who worked for Salvatore Calabrese and among the rest of the local underworld denizens.

  He had appeared at the big man’s side three months back, without the benefit of anything resembling an explanation. Since that time, he was said to have cut the scalps from seven debtors of his employer, all left alive save for the last, whose heart the longhaired man was reputed to have eaten.

  Gino and the Vig had no more than a moment to consider those gruesome rumors.

  A scream peeled from behind the office door. Shrieking in deep, foul tones followed. Both men shuddered. Neither could manage a word from their lips. They stood paralyzed for several long minutes. They heard horrible sounds.

  Howls. Cries. Pleas.

  When it was done, and the screams had faded into whimpers and the whimpers into silence, Indian Joe motioned toward the stairs. All through the terrible moments, he had remained stoic, as though the savage sounds were of no concern. The two thugs quickly hustled away.

  The Native-American entered the office without knocking. Calabrese greeted him warmly.

  “Lycaon. Come in, I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Rocco?” the Indian asked.

  The gangster shook his head, nothing more than the hint of smirk to suggest anything out of the ordinary. There was no sign of a struggle, or of a body. Indian Joe didn’t seem to mind.

  THREE

  VINCE SIOARIO DID NOT HEAR THE STATIC CRACKLING from his radio. He was asleep, after a fashion. An empty whiskey bottle rested on his slowly heaving chest. Spread out across his dirty couch, in his dirty apartment, he only moved occasionally. Usually to settle his head or to scratch himself, which he did with his good arm, his right one, stained inky blue-black across the bicep. It was all that remained now of what had been, in his younger days, a tattoo of a woman poised over an anchor.

  A crumpled mess of yesterday’s New York Herald-Tribune lay scattered on his floor. He didn’t even budge when a shrill ring echoed through the apartment.

 
; A second ring followed. It lasted only half as long as the first. Eventually, the noise roused him, but only a little. He moved his head forward, just enough for his greasy bangs to slide down over his eyes.

  Some minutes passed before the sounds of scratching and a knock emanated from the door. While the sound was louder, it had no more effect than the doorbell.

  Then, the ringing began once more. Vince wriggled on his couch to ignore it. This time it did not cease so quickly. The noise continued, on and on, as though the bell had been stuck in place.

  Finally, with a groan that was not unlike a sickly wheeze, he shook from sleep. His thick arms stretched upward and then outward as he got up from the sofa, tenuously at first. Barely balanced, one hand waving in front of him, he dragged himself across the room.

  “Jesus!” he muttered, unfastening the chain lock. “I’m comin’, I’m comin’. What do you think … ?”

  His words ended as abruptly as the buzzing when he opened the door. Sean collapsed into his arms then and there, dropping his dented fedora and smearing warm blood across his chest.

  Sean was bandaged and wrapped in a blanket, but his face was pale as he lay on Vince’s couch. The apartment was dark now, shades drawn closed and only one lamp lit in the whole of the place. A glass of water in his hand, Vince knelt down beside his guest. As he did, the youth stirred. He winced and opened his eyes.

  “Didn’t expect you to wake up so fast. Have a sip,” Vince said, offering the glass.

  Hands trembling slightly, Sean took a long drink. He finished and exhaled a deep, but clearly painful sigh. Still he said nothing.

  “What? Do I gotta say something now? How’s about a ‘thanks,’ huh?” Vince said with a sneer as he got up from his knee.

  Sean smiled.

  “Thanks.”

  Vince paced, his hands clasped behind his back. Though the whiskey still stung his temples, concern tensed his face. When he spoke, his words were direct, and as clear as if he were sober.

  “That’s it? No Hey Vince, thanks for fixin’ me up or Hey, Vince ol’ buddy, sorry for bargin’ in on you and spillin’ my guts all over the place?”