The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  ‘How’d he hear?’

  ‘I don’t know, Gabby.’

  ‘Was he back working for someone?’

  ‘I said I don’t know. Jesus.’

  He saw she was crying. Teardrops nestled in her lashes, catching the light of the city from the window, holding it tight.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gabby,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you told me. It’s more than Benny did.’

  ‘We didn’t tell you ’cos we didn’t want you doing anything stupid,’ she said.

  He glared at her. Shook his head. Stared at the floor, felt the past churn up his insides, felt long-dead demons resurrecting.

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ he said.

  She looked at him and shrugged.

  ‘I guess it’s time I split,’ he said.

  She nodded.

  He rose, and was surprised to find the room only swayed a little. They headed out of the bloodshot office, through the studio, to the corridor.

  They stopped at the door, looked at each other.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gabby,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be,’ he said.

  He saw the teardrops still caught in her lashes.

  ‘Come by the Copa sometime,’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, although in the years since they’d split up, she’d studiously avoided the place.

  ‘And if you ever want to come back here for a dance lesson,’ she said, ‘let me know. I could improve your footwork.’

  ‘You already have.’

  He turned and headed down to the street.

  Nine days to go, and the man who killed his sister was back in town.

  PART SIX

  DAILY NEWS

  NEW YORK’S PICTURE NEWSPAPER

  City Edition Final Tuesday, November 4th 1947

  NATIONAL NEWS

  ‘SCARFACE’ AL CAPONE DEAD AT 48

  * * *

  UNDERWORLD KINGPIN OF A VANISHED ERA PASSES AWAY AT FLORIDA HOME

  * * *

  Leonard Sears – Chief Crime Correspondent

  Miami Beach, FL, 3rd Nov. – Al Capone, ex-Chicago gangster and Prohibition Era crime leader, died in his home here tonight. ‘Death came very suddenly,’ said Dr. Kenneth S. Phillips, who has been attending Capone since he was stricken with apoplexy on Tuesday. Dr. Phillips said death was caused by heart failure, which in turn was caused by the social disease Capone had suffered from for years.

  * * *

  For more on this story, and a full obituary, turn to page 4.

  14

  Tuesday 4th, 5.30 a.m.

  Winter hadn’t even started and already Frank Costello had a cold. He went to bed fine, woke up at four in the morning gasping, like he couldn’t breathe, like he was drowning in mucus. He spent the next few hours lying in the twilight, hocking up emeralds, summoning the strength to get down to the pharmacy. Every time he inhaled it was like the lining of his nostrils was on fire. There was an acrid lump of something at the top of his throat that no amount of coughing or blowing would dislodge. He tried till his ears popped, till his eyes watered, till Bobbie kicked him out of bed.

  He needed lozenges, tissues, cough syrup, eucalyptus oil, the works.

  On top of the movie producers, and the missing money, and Gabriel acting shaky, and the war with Genovese that was brewing, and the fact that he was in debt to every other mobster in town – and that they would have killed him earlier that year if Luciano hadn’t intervened from his exile overseas. On top of all that, a goddamn cold.

  And what made it worse was it meant he couldn’t smoke.

  So he got up at half five like he normally did, but instead of taking the dogs for a walk through Central Park, he threw on a coat, a silk scarf and a Stetson and headed down to the pharmacy on 70th. Saw it didn’t open till eight. Felt like an idiot. Went back to the apartment.

  He made himself a black coffee and ate a piece of buttered toast – his regular breakfast – even though the toast stuck to the thing in the back of his throat and sent him off into a coughing fit again. He read the paper. Saw the article about Capone dying. Felt a pang of sadness, more at the passing of an era than for the man himself. Capone had been dying for years. Costello had caught wind of it on the prison grapevine back in the thirties. Capone had lost his mind in Alcatraz from the syphilis. People who’d gone down to see him in Florida after he’d been released said he acted like a child, a goofball, wheelchair-bound, dribbling, couldn’t remember his own name. And so had died the last ghost of the twenties.

  Costello made a note to send a wreath to the funeral.

  As he read, the sun rose, sending gold across the lofty spears of Manhattan. He watched the effect, watched the smog coming in from the factories across the river in Jersey.

  At seven-fifty-five, he left the apartment and went down to the pharmacy again. Eight o’clock rolled around and still the place wasn’t open and Costello was standing on the street like a bum. Goddamn he wanted a cigarette. He’d smoked through colds before. He’d even smoked through cancer a couple of times. But he knew it didn’t help. Lay off the smokes and the cold would go away a whole lot quicker.

  Five past eight and he was inside the pharmacy, told the man behind the counter to give him everything he had. Left five minutes later with a paper bag stuffed full.

  He returned to the apartment and loaded up his pockets, left again. He waited on the street while the concierge strode out into the road and flagged him a taxi. Costello palmed the concierge a twenty. Everywhere he went, he did so in a cloud of tips.

  ‘Where to?’ said the cabbie, flipping the flag on the meter down.

  ‘Mulberry,’ said Costello.

  The cabbie merged into traffic. Costello made plans. Another day of keeping the empire intact, keeping himself from being killed or arrested, thinking three steps ahead. He had to drop off money for a widow, then go on to a meeting with Cheesebox Callahan about the movie producers, lunch with Adonis, then he had to go to Duke’s for the weekly strategy meeting, and finally an appointment with Dr Hoffman.

  He stared out of the window and watched the city waking up, kids selling papers on street corners, men loitering by their shoeshine stands, shivering in the cold. He watched the shops flickering past, the clots of traffic at every intersection. As they travelled south, the numbers of the cross-streets ticked down, 60th Street, 59th, 58th, riding Manhattan like an elevator.

  They got snared up in Midtown where the tracks of the street-car that ran crosstown to the 42nd Street ferry were being ripped up. The cabbie had to drive all the way over to 5th before he could get around the roadworks, got stuck behind a double-decker bus.

  ‘I hate these jams,’ said the cabbie. ‘But I ain’t sad to see the street-cars go.’

  Costello nodded, even though he disagreed with the sentiment.

  Everything in the city was changing. The street-cars were being lost, the elevated tracks, the tenements, too, were being pulled down, the slaughter yards of Turtle Bay were being cleared to make way for the United Nations; in Jamaica Bay, Idlewild was being turned into an airport. Old New York had survived the war and now it was being ripped up by reformers.

  When Costello was growing up, men from his slum left their houses each morning to travel to Queens and the Bronx to help lay down bricks for all the tenements that were springing up. Italians were given the worst jobs back then, digging tunnels, sewer work, hauling garbage. It was why so many mobsters still claimed to work in the garbage industry. Now those same tenements built by the vanished men from Costello’s childhood were being pulled down, to be replaced by the solution to New York’s housing shortage – the projects – low in rent, low in crime, high in stories and dreams.

  When Costello was young he loved how New York was always shifting, making room for itself; now he was getting older, he just wished it would stop. The faster things changed, the more the past jostled against the present, the more the friction of the future was felt.

&nb
sp; He watched out of the window as they passed the roadworks, travelled down 5th. Midtown turned into Greenwich Village turned into Lower Manhattan.

  The cab pulled up at the corner of Mulberry and Grand.

  Costello paid and hopped out, crossed to the building where the old woman lived and ascended two flights to her apartment. Her husband was serving ninety years up at Dannemora, a prison so far north, so remote and cold, it had been nicknamed Siberia. Costello knew it well. It was where Luciano had been imprisoned, the head of Costello’s crime family who had since been deported to Italy. It was in the prison when Costello went to meet with Luciano that he found out he had been made acting boss. At the time Costello was already a millionaire, semi-legit, could have made a go of going straight maybe. But out of nowhere, he was put in charge of American organized crime, in charge of a family of nearly five hundred criminals, sucked into the power vacuum against his will.

  The old woman opened the door. Costello stepped inside. Like most cold-water tenements the front door opened into the kitchen. It was a dim and dreary place, the only light coming in from a tiny window that was obscured by a fire escape. Costello handed her the monthly packet.

  Her husband could have squealed, could have landed Costello and Luciano and Adonis with electric-chair convictions. But he hadn’t. He chose to spend the rest of his life in Siberia, and this was why, so his family could eat. There was enough money in the packet to see the woman into a much nicer apartment; Costello couldn’t fathom why she stayed where she was.

  She took the packet with a bowed head and moans of thanks, like she’d received a benediction. He didn’t have to deliver the packets personally, but he did. He liked doing it. Liked staying in touch. And it wasn’t all altruism. Word got around. Others in the family knew that if they kept their mouths shut, their people would be looked after like this.

  When she heard Costello had a cold, she dragged him to the kitchen table for some chicken soup she happened to have made the day before. He tried his best to get out of it – he was supposed to be having lunch at the Astoria, like he always did, where the best chefs in New York prepared his food. He didn’t want to eat here, with this old crone, in this hovel, but she assured him her soup would make him feel a million bucks.

  So he sat in her cramped kitchen for politeness’s sake and they chatted while she heated up the soup in an ancient pot on a two-ring gas burner. As they batted the breeze he noticed a crucifix in the gloom, high up on the wall. A cheap plastic thing dipped in phosphorescent paint to make the savior’s body glow a sickly green. Costello thought of the garish billboards that floated over Times Square in the night.

  The woman laid the bowl on the oil-cloth-covered table in front of him.

  Within a few spoonfuls his sinuses cleared, he could actually taste the soup, he could smell again. The aroma coming off the bowl, the faint scent of mold in the room, the wax she’d used on the linoleum floor. The woman was right; he actually felt OK.

  Before he left she handed him a brown paper bag of oranges, from a grocer who got them from Italy, just like they were back home. She assured him they too would help the cold.

  He thanked her and left.

  Next.

  He had to walk all the way to Broadway to find a cab.

  ‘Where to, pal?’

  ‘The Astoria.’

  He broke open one of the oranges on the way back uptown, and it did taste good, just like the ones he’d eaten on his only visit to Italy.

  When he got out of the cab he walked past the Astoria, crossed the street, kept going, to a nondescript office building just opposite. He spoke to the receptionist and caught the elevator up four floors. He knocked on a door and was let in to a shady, stuffy room with a window that looked out onto the hotel opposite. The room was filled with telephony equipment, wires everywhere, magnetic tapes, recorders. There were four kids in there, sitting at a table with headphones on, listening, writing down notes. And in the middle of it all sat Gerard ‘Cheesebox’ Callahan, Costello’s telephony expert, a New York Telephone Company employee who’d gone rogue. Costello had met him in the thirties when Cheesebox used to gaff his slot machines for him. Since then, Costello had been using the Irishman to sweep his own phones for government bugs, to put bugs in other people’s phones, to interfere with race-wires so Costello and his pals could bet their lungs out on races they already knew the results of.

  Like the kids in the room, Cheesebox had headphones on, was listening to something. When he saw Costello he held up a finger – signaling for him to wait. Costello nodded, walked over to the window, stared down into the street below. He could see the Astoria opposite, its granite walls with their art deco gold trim and grid of windows.

  Somewhere inside the hotel, over two days the following week, representatives of all the studios in Hollywood would meet, forty of them in total, to decide the fate of the Hollywood Ten, the movie-men who’d refused to testify to HUAC, The House Un-American Activities Committee. The Hollywood Ten had been cited for contempt of Congress and the movie industry needed to formulate a response. Some of the studios wanted to blacklist the men, kick them out of the industry, side with the government in its anti-communist crusade. Others wanted to defend the men, stand by their rights, were spoiling for a fight with the authorities. Their final decision would affect the Mob, so their business was Costello’s business, and with the meeting in New York, he could influence the decision. Costello had no clue why they had chosen New York as the venue for the hastily convened conference, a city right on the other side of the country from Los Angeles.

  It was a rare stroke of good luck. Movie-men would be pouring into the city over the next few days, hence all the equipment in the room, the feverish activity.

  ‘Been grocery shopping?’ said Cheesebox, taking his headphones off, pointing at the paper bag of oranges in Costello’s hand.

  Costello tossed him one.

  Cheesebox was named after a gadget he’d invented; a wooden cream-cheese crate filled with telephonic equipment that could be connected to New York Telephone Company phone lines. The box was an exchange in miniature, relaying incoming calls to a different address. Bookies would give their customers a number to call – the number of the address where the cheese box was installed, and it pinged their calls on to an address in a whole other part of town. Government agents tracking illegal bookmaking operations would spend months tracing a bookie’s line, then bust the number’s address, only to find an empty room with a cheese box in it. Since then, Costello had bankrolled him to expand his operations.

  ‘Been a few marks coming in early,’ Cheesebox said. ‘We’ve already been listening in on them.’

  He put the orange on the table, handed Costello a bunch of spiral-bound pads filled with pencil scrawls – the notes the kids had made from the wires they were sitting on.

  ‘Good work,’ said Costello. He slipped the pads into his pocket, nestling them against his pharmacy supplies.

  ‘Over the weekend we’re going to get bugs into the function room they’re holding the meeting in,’ said Cheesebox. ‘The restrooms next to it, too. In the meanwhile, we’ll work on the remaining rooms.’

  It was Costello’s pal Jack Warner who’d tipped him off about the meeting, had told him which producers were likely to vote for blacklisting, which wouldn’t, which he wasn’t sure about. Of the dozen or so who definitely weren’t, Costello had already arranged female company for six of them, would have photos taken, just in case. He didn’t like the blackmail angle, it was a last resort. Always best to talk to people first.

  It left another six producers. Cheesebox had bugged the hotel rooms they’d be staying in. Costello had experience of swinging elections. He’d done it countless times with City Hall and New York’s judges. He and Luciano had even swung the presidential candidate for the Democrats back in ’32 at the convention in Chicago, swung it Roosevelt’s way.

  ‘There’s, uh, something else I need to tell you about,’ said Cheesebox.


  ‘Go on.’

  ‘These two producers who turned up early. Rosberg and Jackson. They had a lunch date with someone you might be interested in.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your old pal Vito Genovese.’

  Costello felt his spirits sink at the mention of the name. What was Genovese doing interfering in the Waldorf meeting? Genovese’s interests lay on the East Coast and in Europe. In the transcontinental dope line he’d set up, moving heroin from Asia to Europe to New York, where it was distributed around the country. Genovese wasn’t involved with the movie-men out in LA. Or at least, he shouldn’t be.

  ‘You catch it on the wires?’ Costello asked.

  Cheesebox shook his head.

  ‘The two of them went out for lunch,’ he said. ‘When they came back, we caught them talking about the meeting they just had with Vito. Apparently, he made them some kind of offer. They were mulling over whether to accept it or not. It’s all in there.’

  He pointed to the notebooks poking out of Costello’s coat pocket.

  ‘Thanks, pal,’ said Costello. ‘Keep listening in on them, they might let something slip. Anything else big comes down the wire, you let me know straight away.’

  ‘Will do,’ said Cheesebox.

  They nodded at each other. Costello popped his hat on and headed out the door.

  Next.

  The Astoria’s Starlight Roof for lunch with Adonis. The top floor of the same hotel Cheesebox was bugging. A short walk back through the mid-day bustle of 49th Street, the cabs gleaming yellow in the wintry sun.

  Adonis was waiting for him in their usual booth.

  ‘You brought your groceries to lunch?’ he asked on seeing Costello’s bag of oranges.

  Costello ignored him, sat. ‘You hear about Capone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, poor bastard. Who’re we sending to the funeral?’

  ‘Who can we spare?’

  Adonis thought. ‘Petrelli?’