The Accidental Pallbearer by Frank Lentricchia Page B

Ralph Norwald? Assuming it was Norwald. Assuming he could kill anybody, even his daughters’ killer.
    Conte is a tribalist of southern Italian background for whom loyalty to one’s family and friends trumps morality and (goes without saying) the law. He needs to be loyal to Antonio Robinson, all the more so because he had not been loyal to his father. Or to Nancy, Rosalind, and Emily. Never mind the disaster of the marriage. Or the self-absolving rationalization that the kids would be psychologically injured growing up in a loveless house. That they would be better off. If he hadn’t left Nancy, wouldn’t the kids still be alive? He’ll help Antonio in his trouble, whatever it is, he doesn’t need to know, but help how? He has no idea what he intended when he told Robinson that he would neutralize Michael C “with prejudice.” He hadn’t used, because he understood the meaning of the CIA euphemism, “terminate with extreme prejudice.” Conte feels certain that he is not capable of killing.
    Nibbles at his sandwich with his laptop open, Google-distracted from himself, in search of a story that surely commanded several days of front-page coverage in the
Observer-Dispatch
, about the event that took place while he was away in Austria, fifteen years ago. He’d been told about the heat wave of that August, but only as an afterthought. Because the major topic of conversation all that fall was the most spectacular – theatrical, really – execution in U.S.Mafia history. The triple assassination of the legendary Albert Aristarco of Staten Island and Frank and Salvatore Barbone, Utica’s double representation in the upper echelon of Cosa Nostra – in Utica’s oldest Catholic cemetery, at the burial site of Aristarco’s godmother, Filomena Santacroce, dead at ninety-six and her nurse thinking, Good riddance to the nastiest bitch I ever attended.
    The archived article in the
O.D
. foregrounds the facts that he’d not forgotten. Who could? The shooter was one of the pallbearers, a last-second replacement for one of the official pallbearers, Filomena Santacroce’s nephew, Raymond DePellaccio, who suffered a paralyzing lower-back spasm just as the casket was about to be lifted from the hearse and up the steps into Saint Anthony, where Father Gustavo awaited to celebrate the Requiem Mass.
    A follow-up account refreshes his memory: heavily enhanced police protection was ordered both for the Mass and the interment. Two police vans, each bearing twenty officers in bulletproof vests and helmets: one for the Church, the other for Calvary Cemetery. The mayor and chief of police at that time, both now dead, presumably of natural causes, were intent on seeing that disaster would not strike in Utica, whose ill repute still lingered from the fifties and sixties – the Sin City of the East, as New York City tabloids had headlined it. The van scheduled for Saint Anthony was in place when the hearse and the cars of the mourners arrived. The van whose officers would form a protective ring at the cemetery around Aristarco and the Barbones – a circle of steel and firepower – never made it because this van, according to three witnesses, had run a red light (a fact vigorously disputed bythe police) and broadsided a city bus. Minor injuries for some of the bus riders and eleven policemen, but not the driver, who alone wore a seat belt. Death the consequence of this accident for the three Mafia heavies, each of whom was shot in the head with a small-caliber hand gun. Small caliber, the streetwise reporter had informed his readers, so the discharged round had sufficient force to rattle about inside the brain – up and down and all around – but not enough power to exit. A search for Raymond DePellaccio, the original pallbearer, turns up his obituary: dead several weeks after the shooting, of natural causes.
    Description of the substitute pallbearer gives Conte a thrill. Several bystanders at the church and cemetery offer accounts to