The Force

by Don Winslow

  So Malone has vetoed it. He doesn’t want to rub it in IAB’s faces, and besides, it’s a good chance for the men to talk. The restaurant is noisy, the chance of getting a wire in remote, and even if IAB did, the sound would be so murky and confused that you could deny it was even you. The tape would never make it through the evidentiary hearing.

  Now he and his team watch Levin approach Savino. “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Yeah, what?” Savino doesn’t look too happy to be interrupted, especially by someone he doesn’t know.

  Levin shows his badge. “You have a warrant. I’m afraid I’ll have to place you under arrest, sir.”

  Savino looks around at his crew and shrugs, like What the fuck is this bullshit? He turns back to Levin and says, “I don’t have no warrant.”

  “I’m afraid you do, sir.”

  “Don’t be afraid, kid,” Savino says. “Either I have a warrant or I don’t, and I don’t, so you don’t got to be afraid of nothing.”

  He turns his back on Levin and signals the bartender for another round.

  “This is a thing of beauty,” Monty says. “A beautiful thing.”

  Levin reaches behind him for his cuffs. “Sir, we can do this like gentlemen, or—”

  Savino whirls on him. “If we were gonna do this like gentlemen, you wouldn’t be interrupting my social evening in front of my associates and my lady friends, you . . . what are you, Italian? Jewish?”

  “I’m Jewish, but I don’t see what—”

  “—you kike, hebe, Christ killer motherfucker, you—” Savino looks over his shoulder, sees Malone and yells, “Ball buster! You ballbuster!”

  Levin turns around to see Malone and Russo practically falling out of their chairs and Monty’s shoulders heaving up and down in laughter.

  Savino slaps Levin on the shoulder. “They’re goofing you, kid! What is this, fucking Bowling Night, right? You got some coglioni on you, though, coming up on me like that. ‘Excuse me, sir’ . . .”

  Levin walks back to the table. “Okay, that was embarrassing.”

  Malone notices he takes it well, though, he’s laughing at himself. And the kid went—three mob guys in front of their women, and the kid went. It says something.

  Russo raises his glass. “Here’s to you, Levin.”

  “Was that really Lou Savino?” Levin asks.

  “What, you think we hired actors?” Russo says. “No, that’s him.”

  “You know him?”

  “We know him,” Malone says. “He knows us. We’re in the same business, only on different sides of the counter.”

  The steaks arrive.

  Another rule of Bowling Night—you order steak.

  A big red juicy New York Strip, a Delmonico, a Chateaubriand. Because it’s good, it’s what you should have, and if you’re in the same restaurant as wiseguys you want to be seen eating meat.

  Cops fall into two categories—grass eaters and meat eaters. The grass eaters are the small-timers—they take a cut from the car-towing companies, they get a free coffee, a sandwich. They take what comes, they’re not aggressive. The meat eaters are the predators, they go after what they want—the drug rips, the mob payoffs, the cash. They go out and hunt and bring it down, so it’s important that when the unit is out as the Unit, it dresses tight and eats steak.

  It sends a message.

  You think it’s a joke, but it’s not—they’re literally looking to see what’s on your plate. If it’s a cheeseburger, guys are talking about it the next day. “I saw Denny Malone at Gallaghers the other night and he was eating, are you ready for this? Hamburger.”

  The wiseguys will think you’re cheap or broke or both, and either one sends a message to their reptilian brains that you’re weak, and the next thing you know, they’re trying to take advantage of that. They’re predators, too; they cut the weak out of the herd and go after him.

  Malone’s steak is great, though, a beautiful New York Strip cooked rare with a cold red center. Instead of the baked potato, he went with big cottage fries and a pile of green beans.

  It feels good to cut into the steak, to chew it.

  Substantial.

  Solid.

  Real.

  It was the right decision to call Bowling Night.

  Big Montague digs into a sixteen-ounce Delmonico, his concentration thorough. In a rare revelation, he once told Malone that he grew up in a household where meat was a rare treat; as a kid he ate his breakfast cereal with water instead of milk. And he was a big kid, always hungry. Monty should have been a street thug; his size made him the perfect bodyguard and enforcer for some mid- to high-level dealer. But he was too smart for that, Malone thinks. Monty’s always had the ability to see around the next corner, know what’s coming, and even as a young teenager he saw that the dope-slinging life led to a cell or a coffin, that only the guys at the top of the pyramid made the real money.

  But he observed that police always ate.

  He never saw a hungry cop.

  So he went the other way with it.

  Those days, the Job sucked down black candidates like salt peanuts. You were AA, had two legs and could see beyond your thumbs, you were in. They didn’t expect a black candidate to have an IQ of 126, though, which is what Monty tested. Big, brilliant, black, he had “detective” written all over him from day one.

  Even the cops who hate blacks give him his props.

  He’s one of the most highly respected cops on the Job.

  Now he looks tight in a midnight-blue tailored Joseph Abboud suit, powder-blue shirt, his red tie obscured by the linen napkin tucked in at his neck. Monty ain’t gonna take a chance on staining a hundred-dollar shirt, he don’t care what it looks like.

  “What you looking at?” he asks Malone.

  “You.”

  “What about me?”

  “Love you, man.”

  Monty knows this. He and Malone don’t do that jive brothers-from-another-mother, ebony-and-ivory bullshit, but they are brothers. He has a brother who’s an accountant in Albany, another doing a fifteen-to-thirty in Elmira, but he’s closest to Malone.

  Only makes sense—they spend at least twelve hours a day together, five or six days a week, and they depend on each other for their lives. It’s no cliché—you go through that door, you never know. You want your brothers with you.

  Just as there’s no question that being a black cop is different, it just is, that’s all. Other cops, except his brothers here, look at him a little different, and the “community”—as the social activists, bigmouthed ministers and local politicians laughably call the ghetto—see him either as a potential ally who should help them out, or as a traitor. An Uncle Tom, an Oreo.

  Monty don’t care.

  He knows who he is: he’s a man trying to raise a family and get his kids the fuck out of the “community”—that community who’ll rob each other, cheat each other and kill each other for a nickel bag.

  While his brothers at this table would die for each other.

  Malone once said that you should never partner with anyone you wouldn’t leave alone with your family and all your money. You did that with any of these men, when you came back, your family would be laughing and there’d be more money.

  They order dessert—mud pie, apple pie with big wedges of cheddar cheese, cheesecake with cherries.

  After that, coffee with brandy or sambuca, and Malone, he decides he needs to even things up a little for Levin, so he says, “Never Say Die Harry was great, but you want to talk dead bodies, though . . .”

  “Don’t do it,” Russo says. But he starts laughing.

  “What?” Levin asks.

  Monty’s laughing, too, so he knows the story.

  “No,” Malone says.

  “Come on.”

  Malone looks at Russo, who nods, and then says, “This was back when Russo and me were still in bags down in the Six. We had this sergeant—”

  “Brady.”

  “Brady, who liked me,” Malone says, “but for
some reason hated Russo. Anyway, this Brady, he liked to drink, and he used to have me drop him off at the White Horse so he could get a load on and then pick him up later, bring him back to the house, he could sleep it off.

  “So this one night, we get a DOA call, and in those days, a uniform had to stay with the body until the ME came in to call it. It’s a bitter cold night, subzero, and Brady he asks me, ‘Where’s Russo?’ I says, ‘On his post.’ He says, ‘Get him over there on the DOA.’ It sounds nice, right? Get Russo out of the cold, indoors, but Brady knows that Phil here . . .”

  Malone starts laughing again. “Back then, Russo was terrified of dead bodies.”

  “Scared stiff, so to speak,” Monty says.

  “Fuck the both of you.”

  “So I try to talk Brady out of it,” Malone says, “because I know Russo’s a total pussy about this and might faint or something, but Brady ain’t havin’ it. Has to be Russo. ‘You tell him to get his fuckin’ ass over there and stay with the body.’

  “It’s a brownstone over off Washington Square, the body’s in bed on the second floor and it’s clearly natural causes.”

  “This old gay guy,” Russo says. “Owned the whole brownstone, lived alone, had a heart attack in bed.”

  Malone says, “I leave Russo there and go back to sit outside the White Horse. Brady comes out, he’s half in the bag, he tells me drive him over to the DOA’s house. He’s been out of the bar, what, five seconds, and he’s in the car hitting a flute—”

  “What’s a flute?” Levin asks.

  “A Coke bottle filled with booze,” Monty says.

  “We drive by,” Malone says, “Russo’s standing on the stoop, freezing his balls off. Brady goes ape-shit, screaming at Phil, ‘I told you to stay with the body, asshole! You march your ass inside, upstairs and stay there, or I’ll write you up.’ Russo goes back in, we go back to the bar.

  “I’m sitting out there, a call comes over the radio, a 10-10, shots fired, and I hear the address. It’s the same address as the DOA residence!”

  “What the fuck,” Levin says, delighted.

  “What I’m thinking,” Malone says. “I run into the bar, find Brady and say, ‘We got a problem.’ We go racing over there, run up the freakin’ stairs, and there’s Russo, with his gun drawn, the DOA is sitting bolt upright in the bed, and Phil here has put two rounds into his chest.”

  Malone’s laughing so hard now he can barely get the words out. “What happened is . . . gas starts moving around inside the body . . . and they do weird things . . . this one sat straight up . . . scared Russo . . . so bad . . . he puts two in the guy’s chest . . .”

  “I’m looking at the freaking undead!” Russo says. “The fuck am I supposed to do?!”

  “So now we got a real problem,” Malone says, “because if that guy wasn’t dead, Russo has not only discharged his firearm, he’s looking at a homicide charge.”

  “I’m scared shitless,” Russo says.

  Monty’s shoulders are shaking as he chuckles, tears running down his cheeks.

  Malone says, “Brady asks me, ‘You sure this guy was dead?’ ‘Pretty sure,’ I say. He says, ‘Pretty sure? What the fuck is that?!’ I say, ‘I dunno, he had no pulse.’ And he sure as shit didn’t have a pulse after Russo put two in his heart.”

  “So what did you do?” Levin asks.

  Malone says, “The duty ME is Brennan, the laziest fuck ever to occupy the position. I mean, they gave him the job so he couldn’t work on live people. He comes over, takes in the situation, looks at Russo and says, ‘You shot a dead guy?’

  “Phil’s shaking. He says, ‘So the guy was dead?’ ‘You kidding me?’ Brennan says. ‘He croaked three hours before you shot him, but how the fuck am I going to explain two rounds in his chest?’”

  Monty dabs at his cheek with his napkin.

  “This is where, I have to say, Brady earns his stripes,” Malone says. “He says to Brennan, ‘That’s going to involve a lot of work on your part. Reports, an investigation, you might have to testify . . .’

  “Brennan says, ‘How about we just call it even?’ The wagon comes, we bag the guy up, I deem it natural causes, Russo here gets new underwear.”

  “Amazing,” Levin says.

  Lou Savino and his party get up to leave. Savino nods to Malone, who nods back.

  Fuck IAB.

  If the mobsters don’t know who we are, don’t show us respect, we’re not doing our jobs.

  The bill comes to over five bills, or would if they were charged.

  The waitress, she delivers the check, it comes to zero. But she delivers a check in case they’re being watched. Malone lays a credit card down, she takes it back, he pretends to sign it.

  They leave two hundred in cash on the table.

  You never, ever stiff a server.

  For one thing, it’s not right. For the other, once again, the word gets around that you’re cheap. What you want, you walk into a place, a server sees you and says, “Give me that party.”

  That way you always get a table.

  And if you’re not with your wife, no one is going to notice or remember.

  You never stiff a server or take change for a twenty whether you’re at a bar or a bodega.

  That’s for grass eaters, not Force detectives.

  It’s just the cost of doing business.

  You can’t deal with it, go back on patrol.

  Malone calls for the car.

  Bowling Night they always get a town car and a driver.

  Because they know they’re going to get shit-faced and no one wants to blow their gig on a DUI if some rookie patrolman writes it up or calls it in before knowing what’s what.

  Half the wiseguys in New York own car services because it’s easy to launder money through them, so they have no problem getting one comped. Of course the driver is going to tell his boss every place they went and what they did, but they don’t care. That’s as far as it’s going to go—no driver is ever going to rat them to IAB or even admit they were in his car. And who gives a shit some mobster knows they get drunk and laid—they know that already.

  And the car service knows better than to send them some Russian or Ukrainian or Ethiopian—it’s always a goombah who knows the score, knows to keep his ears open and his mouth shut.

  Tonight’s driver is Dominic, a fiftysomething mob “associate” who’s had them before and knows he’s going to get tipped out big, likes having guys in Armani, Boss and Abboud get in and out of his car. Is going to get right next to the curb so his clients’ Guccis, Ferragamos and Maglis don’t get wet. Gentlemen who treat his car with respect, aren’t going to puke in it, eat smelly fast food, fill it with dope smoke, get into fights with their women.

  He drives them up to Madeleine’s on Ninety-Eighth and Riverside.

  “We’re going to be a couple of hours at least,” Malone tells him, slipping him a fifty, “you want to get dinner.”

  “Just call me,” Dominic says.

  “What is this place?” Levin asks.

  “You heard us talk about Madeleine’s,” Malone says. “This is Madeleine’s.”

  “A brothel?”

  “You could call it that,” Malone says.

  “I don’t know,” Levin says. “Amy and I are, you know, exclusive.”

  “You put a ring on her finger?” Russo asks.

  “No.”

  “So?” Russo says.

  “Look, I think I’ll just go home,” Levin says.

  “It’s called Bowling Night,” Monty says. “Not Bowling Dinner. You’re coming in.”

  “Come upstairs,” Malone says. “And hang out. You don’t want to get laid, okay, you don’t want to get laid. But you’re coming with us.”

  Madeleine owns the whole brownstone but is very discreet about what goes on in there so the neighbors don’t get their noses out of joint. Most of her business these days is off-location anyway; the house is just for small parties and special guests. She doesn’t do the old “lineup�
�� anymore; the men preselect online.

  She greets Malone personally at the door with a kiss on the cheek.

  They came up together; she was still taking dates when he was in uniform. She was walking home through Straus Park one night, some asshole decided to hassle her and this uniformed cop shall we say, “intervened,” brought his nightstick down on the jerk’s head and then gave him a few shots to the kidneys to emphasize his point.

  “Do you want to press charges?” Malone asked her.

  “I think you just did,” Madeleine answered.

  They’ve been friends and business associates ever since. He protects her and sends business her way; in return she comps him and his team and lets him look at her black book to see if she has any clients who might be useful. Madeleine Howe’s house is never raided, her girls never threatened or harassed—at least not for long and never twice—and never stiffed.

  And on the rare occasion when a girl goes rogue and tries to blackmail one or more of the clients, Malone takes care of that, too. He pays her a visit, explains the legal ramifications of what she’s trying to do, and then describes what the women’s jail is like for a very attractive, spoiled girl like herself and explains that if he has to handcuff her it is likely the last bracelet she will ever receive from a man. She usually takes the proffered airline ticket instead.

  So the men in Madeleine’s black book—the high-roller businessmen, the politicians, the judges—whether they’re aware of it or not, also get protection from Da Force. They don’t see their names splashed across the front page of the Daily News and they also don’t get stupid. More than once, Malone and Russo have had to go talk to some hedge fund manager or rising political star who’s fallen in love with one of Madeleine’s escorts and tell him that’s just not the way it works.

  “But I love her,” one would-be gubernatorial candidate told them. “And she loves me.”

  He was going to leave his wife and kids—and career—to start a coffee roasting business in Costa Rica with a woman whose name he thought was Brooke.