The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  He watched the square, its oblong of grass and trees, the ring of roads that ran round its edges, the fringe of skyscrapers beyond. Up near 15th Street was an empty lot where hydraulic cranes were spinning the skeleton of a new building into being. Gabriel thought about the Doc and adaptability. Stone or clay. Gargoyle or man. He thought about New York, changing daily, always shifting, rearranging, adapting itself to fit its own needs, buildings torn down, roads ripped up, bridges raised, land reclaimed, tunnels dug. To leave New York was to miss out on its great tango of destruction and regeneration, danced with steel girders and granite slabs and cranes that pierced the sky. The Doc was right – metamorphosis was the only thing on which you could rely. Adaptability was key.

  Night descended. The lights above Orhbach’s and S. Klein were switched on, the giant Coca-Cola sign above the building on the corner of 16th Street commenced flashing a bright electric red. The light flooded the sidewalks and the greenery of the square for the few seconds it was on, before returning them to blackness once more. The on-off flashing seemed to make the world vibrate.

  Gabriel got out of the Delahaye, popped on his hat, pulled his trench-coat collar up against the wind and dodged traffic to get to the square, cut across it, then crossed traffic once more to get to the building with the giant Coca-Cola sign bolted to its roof. He reached the door and scanned the buzzer labels, found the one for the Beatrice Iverson Dance School and pressed the buzzer. Waited.

  It buzzed back and he caught an elevator up nine flights, came out in a cramped corridor and followed signs till he reached the dance studio. The top of the wall between it and the corridor was made of glass, so he could see inside. It was a larger space than he was expecting, a rectangle with a parquet floor, mirrors and ballet rails framing the edges.

  A dozen or so girls dressed in leotards were running through a routine while an old fruit in the corner rolled through a polka on a battered, upright piano. At the head of the class stood Beatrice, looking poised and graceful, even though she was only dressed in dancer’s leggings and a loose blue shirt. Her hair was pulled up in a bun, and still blonde as hell.

  He watched her as she watched the girls, eagle-eyed, gave instructions to the ones that weren’t quite doing it right. Even in the slightest movements she exuded athleticism, litheness, that mix of strength and elegance all the best dancers possessed.

  She turned and their eyes met through the glass. She recognized him. She frowned. She smiled. And he could see she was swallowing sadness with it. Gabriel’s heart raced with equal parts excitement and dread. And the girls continued to polka.

  He turned to watch them from the corridor, and Beatrice got back to giving instruction. The pianist finished the song dead on six o’clock and Beatrice wound up the class, and the girls relaxed. Some did stretches, some went straight for their bags and the exit. Beatrice waved him in.

  He squeezed through the door as the girls were going the other way, stepped into the studio. The pianist looked at him, then at Beatrice.

  She gave him an it’s OK look and he started gathering up his sheet music.

  Beatrice crossed the room towards Gabriel and he saw she was barefoot. They met in the middle and he looked into her eyes, was glad to see they hadn’t changed in the chasm of years, still gray flecked with gold, still incomparable.

  They stared at each other some more. Gabriel lost.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s going,’ she said.

  Around them, the dancing girls continued to depart, skittering past while throwing on thick winter coats, chatting, lighting cigarettes.

  ‘You should thank me,’ Beatrice said, nodding at the last of them. ‘If I’d told them you were the manager of the Copa, there would have been a stampede.’

  Gabriel smiled. ‘We’re well-stocked for dancing girls,’ he said.

  ‘Try telling them that.’

  ‘Bea,’ shouted the pianist. ‘I’ll be in Dillon’s till eight if you need me.’

  ‘Sure thing, Herb,’ she said, shooting him a smile, before turning back to Gabriel.

  ‘C’mon,’ she said. ‘I need a cigarette.’

  She turned and crossed the parquet and Gabriel followed. As she walked, she reached back and pulled a bobby pin from her hair, then another, then again, then her hair came loose in a blonde cascade that swept down her back, swayed this way and that, glittered, glowed, left Gabriel mesmerized. She’d done it when he was just behind her. A signature move. Showing him what he’d lost. The fool.

  She reached a door at the end of the studio, opened it and they stepped into darkness. He heard a switch being flicked and a weak orange light appeared from a reading lamp on top of a sideboard. He saw they were in a corner office, messy and cramped, strewn with folders and paperwork. There was a desk and a chair and a few filing cabinets and a window that looked out onto the darkness of the square below.

  She headed for the desk, sat in the leather chair behind it and stared at him.

  Everything flashed red for three seconds. The Coca-Cola sign outside. Gabriel realized they must be right below it.

  ‘You get used to it,’ she said.

  Gabriel looked around, saw stacks of photos – head shots and publicity shots of dancing girls – scraps of yellow paper clipped to them with contact details. Beatrice was a dancer, with brains enough to realize as thirty was approaching that she didn’t have much of a career left, so opted to open a dance school come talent agency. Gabriel had heard she’d been doing pretty well for herself. She’d always had business sense.

  She picked up a pack of cigarettes from the desktop, took one.

  ‘Still smoke Luckies?’ she asked, tossing him the pack.

  Gabriel nodded, took one. Wondered if he was still under the effects of the Benzedrine, and if she could tell.

  ‘I heard the business is going good,’ he said.

  ‘Sure. If the talent agency keeps going like it is, I can quit taking classes altogether.’

  ‘You don’t like teaching?’

  ‘I like teaching,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the hours. The night-classes. I got another one tonight – eight till ten-thirty. Do that five nights a week plus the day job and pretty soon something feels like it’s got to give.’

  ‘Yeah, I know the feeling,’ Gabriel said.

  They looked at each other again, acknowledging their mutual weariness.

  ‘How’s Sarah?’ Beatrice asked finally.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘She’ll be fourteen next year.’

  Beatrice nodded, coming over all sullen, maybe at being made aware of time lost.

  ‘Send her my love,’ she said.

  Beatrice and Sarah had got on like sisters. The hardest part of calling off the engagement had been telling Sarah it was over. She’d cried for days. This was what he’d been dreading. Going over the past. Beatrice and Sarah was the family he should have had, the life he could have led. He could see the loss of it pained Beatrice just as much as it did him.

  ‘So,’ she asked. ‘You here for rhumba lessons?’

  Gabriel smiled, lit up, leaned against a sideboard opposite the desk. ‘I’m looking into Benny’s affairs,’ he said.

  ‘Little late for that, Gabby.’

  ‘So everyone’s telling me.’

  ‘Well, you must be getting desperate coming here,’ she said, hitting the nail on the head, as always.

  ‘You see him when he was here in the summer?’ he asked.

  She frowned. ‘What’s this all about?’ she asked.

  Gabriel shrugged, communicating it was a question he couldn’t answer. She understood, but carried on giving him that look.

  ‘Humor me,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ she said eventually. ‘I saw him. He called me up. Said he was in town. We met up. Went out for drinks.’

  ‘He seem himself?’

  She paused. ‘He was whining a fair bit,’ she said. ‘So, no.’

  ‘What was he whining about?’

&n
bsp; ‘The Flamingo, what else? How the whole thing was going wrong, how he was in hock to everyone, how he was in town putting the bite on, how he’d had to beg Costello to ask the other families for money. But you know Benny, we had a few drinks, got stoned, and he was back to being happy as a lamb.’

  Gabriel nodded. So Beatrice was the only one Benny dropped the happy-go-lucky act for. If only temporarily.

  ‘Where’d you meet him?’ he asked.

  Again she gave him that look. ‘If you tell me what you want to know, I might be able to help,’ she said.

  Gabriel thought about telling her the truth. He thought about their shared past, the days of youthful fun. Of the eight million souls in the city, she was one of the few he might consider trusting. Despite what he’d done to her.

  He shrugged. She sighed.

  ‘Jesus, Gabriel,’ she said. ‘It was six months ago.’

  She paused again, sifted through her memories. Her eyes narrowed.

  ‘We met at mine,’ she said. ‘He picked me up. We drove to the Astor Hotel. We stayed there drinking. Then we went to Casa Mañana, La Cona, maybe. We stopped off at Kellogg’s Cafeteria. Didn’t make it to the Copa that night. Sorry.’

  She said the last with a wry grin.

  ‘You two see anyone that night?’ he asked.

  ‘We were out on the town. We saw most of New York, and much of New Jersey.’

  ‘You talk to his driver?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘See what he looked like?’

  ‘Just some kid. Gawky. Jewish maybe. Not the usual kind of driver he hired.’

  ‘Benny do anything strange that night?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like say anything strange? Talk to anyone he wouldn’t normally. Anything.’

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head.

  But the look in her eyes made a liar of her.

  ‘You sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Do me a favor, will you?’ she said, ‘and sit down. You’re giving me the jitters perched up there.’

  Gabriel smiled. He pushed off the sideboard he’d been leaning against and sat at the desk opposite her. The red lights outside flashed on and off once more, as if he needed any more warning of the danger.

  ‘What is it, Bea?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me. Maybe I can use it.’

  ‘Remember Jasper?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘He’s opened a bar down in the Village. A fruit place. We made a detour there on the way to La Cona. Benny went in, left me in the car. Five minutes later he came out, told me not to tell anyone we’d been down there. You know, real serious like.’

  Gabriel thought. Benny at a fruit bar in the Village. Benny trying to keep it secret. It didn’t add up. Even if it was Jasper running the bar.

  ‘Thanks, Bea,’ he said. ‘You tell anyone about it?’

  ‘Who would I tell?’ she said.

  Then she smiled and they fell silent. She took a drag on her cigarette, the smoke curling languidly through the red beam coming in from the window.

  ‘Remember Mexico?’ she said.

  The mention of Mexico startled him, but then he got it. The trip they’d all taken to Mexico back in ’42. The war had cut off the Mob’s dope-supply routes from Asia. Someone had the idea to get dope from Mexico instead. Mexican poppies weren’t as strong, but they’d do till the war was over, plus Benny could oversee the imports from Los Angeles.

  Gabriel, Beatrice and Benny headed down there. Gabriel and Beatrice were still engaged back then. Beatrice brought along her brother. They cruised towns along the border, contacted names they’d been given, set up deals. Gabriel heard about some growers further in. Beatrice and her brother headed back to New York, Benny to LA. Gabriel headed down to Mexico City on his own. Met the growers, arranged a deal. Then he heard about the Yucatan. Headed to Cancun. It was there he’d seen the flamingos, the mud flats, the beaches, the sunsets. It was there he dreamed about when he returned to New York, the waves lapping in his head ever since. It was there the escape plan really hatched.

  ‘Sure, I remember Mexico,’ he said.

  They both smiled and he realized here was another New Yorker he’d miss when he was gone, even though he hadn’t seen her in years. The closer he got to leaving, the more he realized how much there was to lament.

  ‘How’s your brother?’ he asked.

  At the question, Beatrice squirmed, looked uncomfortable for the first time since they’d stood in the dance studio gawking at each other like a pair of teenagers.

  Beatrice’s brother was a low-level dope runner for the Gaglianos, hence why they asked him to come along on the trip. At some point he’d started getting high on his own supply. Ended up in hock to the Gaglianos and had gone on the lam. Last Gabriel had heard, the Gaglianos had put a hit out on him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He disappeared months ago, haven’t heard from him since. And even before that, the only time I’d see him was when he’d turn up here or at my apartment, dressed in rags, begging for money. I heard he was robbing grannies in East Harlem before he skipped town.’

  She looked up at him through the gloom. They stayed silent a while.

  ‘Benny tell you much about the Flamingo?’ Gabriel asked.

  Beatrice shrugged. ‘Just that the whole thing had been a disaster. That he’d borrowed money and was pissing it away. He had real flamingos out there, you know that? On the forecourt. They’re not desert birds. Every morning they were scooping up the dead ones and trucking in replacements.’

  She paused. ‘He named it after her,’ she said softly.

  ‘I know,’ said Gabriel. Virginia Hill, who Benny called Flamingo on account of her pins.

  ‘I guess Benny was a legs man,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Word is she was stealing money from him,’ said Gabriel. ‘She had a Swiss bank account set up.’

  Beatrice nodded.

  ‘I was there for opening night,’ she said. ‘I was in LA, had a meeting with a booking agency. Benny heard I was in town, called me up and invited me along. I turned up a few days early, that’s how I managed to make it. You ever been to Vegas?’

  Gabriel shook his head.

  ‘It’s a hole,’ she said. ‘There’s an airport and a strip of highway connecting it to the city and it’s all lined with saloons and whorehouses like it’s still the wild west. And that’s it. I mean, that’s really it. An airport and bunch of shitty bars. But you get to the end of it and there’s Benny’s hotel. It looks like someone ripped a building out of Monte Carlo and dumped it into the middle of the set for Stagecoach.’

  Gabriel grinned. Beatrice continued.

  ‘On the way back from the airport, he stops and puts his hand on my shoulder and points at all these rundown bars and says, “Imagine this the entertainment capital of America”.’

  She stubbed out her cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on her desk. ‘Then on the opening night the hotel’s still not ready, and he’s saying we’ll have to keep everyone in the casino all night. And then comes the kicker – all his celebrity friends from Hollywood he’s paid to come up, all the “fine people” he’s been cultivating all these years, they all get stuck in LA at the airport ’cos of a fog. It was the worst opening night in history. You could have cut the atmosphere with a spoon. I’ve never seen Benny looking so depressed, like he wanted to slit his wrists.

  ‘As soon as the weather cleared up I went back to LA and caught the plane back here. Then he pops up a few months later telling me he’s begging for change to keep the place going.’

  Gabriel nodded, thought of the missing two million dollars.

  ‘I saw Benny at the Copa,’ he said. ‘When he was over that last time. There was something up with him. Something he wanted to tell me. Something he was holding back.’

  Beatrice couldn’t meet his gaze. She turned to look at the blackness the other side of the window. The blackness turned red. Her ey
es glinted in the gloom. And maybe Gabriel’s did too.

  ‘There’s something you’re not telling me,’ he said.

  She didn’t turn to look at him, just carried on staring at the blackness.

  ‘Benny was holding back on me when he came to the Copa,’ he said. ‘Now you are, too.’

  She paused. Then something seemed to shift. She turned to look at him. Her eyes darkened.

  ‘How many years has it been, Gabby?’ she said.

  He shrugged, even though he knew the number of years and months.

  ‘You sure you want to know?’ she said.

  He nodded.

  She sighed.

  ‘Benny said he’d heard about someone,’ she said. ‘Someone from the past was back in town. He wasn’t sure if he should tell you or not. He asked me what I thought. I told him not to say anything.’

  ‘Who’d he see?’ Gabriel asked, a sickness rising up in him. A woozy dread.

  ‘Faron,’ she said.

  The feeling was like being stabbed. His breath caught, the room seemed to lurch around him, right itself, lurch once more. An aftershock of Benzedrine sent an atomic rumble through his chest. He wasn’t sure what to say. A million questions and none of them would come out.

  Bea filled the silence.

  ‘He wanted to tell you, Gabby,’ she said. ‘I begged him not to. I knew what it’d do to you.’

  Gabriel tried to think but his thoughts were spinning and he couldn’t catch hold of them. He suddenly felt hot, sweaty, faint. He suddenly wanted to get out of there, into the refreshing cold of the street, but he didn’t know if he had the energy, it was like the wooziness had exploded inside of him and incinerated all his strength.

  ‘I’ve got a right to know,’ he managed to say.

  She paused, softened, nodded.

  ‘You do,’ she said. ‘But your friends have got a duty to keep you from pain.’

  ‘Where did Benny say he saw him?’ he asked. ‘In New York?’

  She shook her head. ‘All he said was he’d heard Faron was back in town,’ she said. ‘That he’d come back.’

  ‘But he hadn’t actually seen him?’

  Bea shook her head. ‘Just said he’d heard.’