The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  In the sideboard was a cigarette tin with a hypodermic in it and some dope. Gabriel put it together with the roaches and again something didn’t add up.

  He tossed the bedroom next. There was a wardrobe there and it was locked shut. Gabriel jimmied the lock easily enough with a switchblade. There was nothing hanging up in the wardrobe, but at the bottom there was a drawer. It was locked too. Again he used the switchblade. Again it was empty.

  Gabriel returned to the living room, looked around. Another dead end. Another day gone and no closer to the money. He put his hands on his hips and tried to think. He lit a cigarette and walked to the windows, sat in the armchair next to them, stared out over the endless rooftops of Harlem, the city lights. He smoked and thought of his dead friend, his own impending disappearance. He blew smoke rings that floated upwards, past the windows, one after the other, a parade of halos drifting towards heaven. Delicate halos, shorn of their saints. As they ascended, they trembled, then disappeared. Like they were never even there.

  It made him think of all the bodies he’d buried. He imagined them rising up, too, from rivers and garbage dumps and evergreen woods that creaked in the wind. He thought of all the millions of dead, floating upwards as well. He thought of the last time he’d ever seen Benny, looking forlorn at the bar of the Copa. Almost like he was grieving. And maybe he was. But who did Benny have to grieve about?

  Then Gabriel thought about the driver, saying he’d taken Benny to a clinic uptown. And then it hit Gabriel all at once and he felt like a fool for not realizing it earlier. The clinic was for Benny. Benny was grieving for himself, because he was dying. From a condition that would require a stay in a clinic and lots of money. Benny had come to set it up. Leaving the money here so he could slip in and pay for his care when the time came. Benny was in New York to check in. For a final blow-out. That explained why he was tossing away money even as he was begging for it, why he seemed so up, even as his life was collapsing all around him. Because none of it mattered. Gabriel shook his head, saddened at how his friend had chosen to deal with his impending demise. It was a lonely, dishonest way to go, but it was typical of Benny’s flamboyance. Gabriel promised himself he’d raise a toast to his old pal.

  He rose and walked to the coffee table, stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray there, and as he was crushing the last of the embers, his eye landed on the sofa-bed. The lumpy, rock-hard sofa-bed. He paused.

  He pushed the coffee table out of the way, took the cushions off the sofa-bed, extended it out, and there, nestled in the empty section underneath the mattress, were two bulky holdalls. He unzipped the one closest to him.

  It was full of hundred-dollar bills, in ten-thousand-dollar straps. A million dollars in each bag. Give or take.

  He closed the holdall. His heart raced. Again he got the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. He thought about schlepping the bags down the stairs, past the superintendent, across the two blocks to where his car was parked, driving back downtown, finding Costello. He thought about calling him, getting some men up there. But Costello’s phones were bugged and he’d have to leave the money unguarded while he found a phone.

  Suddenly he wished he had a gun with him. He checked the front door was locked, he heaved the bags out of the sofa. Each one must have weighed twenty pounds. He lit another cigarette and went to the window to check the street in front. It all looked quiet, normal.

  And then a cop car turned the corner and slow-rolled up the street.

  Gabriel stepped back from the window. Watched. The police car rolled on, seemed to slow down in front of the building. Then it carried on going, heading off down the block.

  Gabriel stayed where he was a moment, then he checked the other windows in the apartment, looking for a fire escape. He found one outside the bathroom window, it descended to the alleyway running along the side of the building. And beyond the fire escape, at the mouth of the alleyway, was the cop car, pulled up, lights off, waiting.

  Gabriel watched it, waited too.

  After a few seconds, a brown Chrysler sedan pulled up behind the cop car, and a bulky man got out and went and spoke to the cops. Gabriel couldn’t see much of him in the shadows, under his hat and coat. He didn’t need to. He knew something was up.

  He gently lifted the window, ran back into the living room, heaved the bags onto the fire escape and crawled out, just as the two cops got out of their car and walked around the corner to the building’s entrance.

  Gabriel climbed up two flights to the roof with the weight of the bags pulling him down. When he got to the roof, he hoiked a bag onto each shoulder and ran as best as he could across it. How long would it take the cops to realize he had skipped out through the bathroom window? How long before they caught up with him? They didn’t have a dead weight of two million dollars holding them down. And a rooftop was the perfect place to kill someone, just push them off the edge and claim suicide.

  Gabriel upped his pace, jumped over the low brick walls that divided the buildings, ducked under washing lines. He reached the last building on the block. He looked over the edge. He could see his car parked up in the gloom at the next intersection. He heard a noise behind him, turned to see two silhouettes in the darkness, blurry shapes, moving fast across the black rooftops.

  He found the building’s fire escape, ran all the way down it. He let the fire escape’s street ladder descend, ran down that, jumped into the alleyway below, stumbled, righted himself, bounded towards the corner. He looked over his shoulder. Nothing.

  He ran as best he could to the Delahaye. He threw the bags into the backseat and jumped in the driver’s side. His heart was beating crazily, sweat dripped down his shirt, the cold biting into his skin.

  He looked in the rearview – figures running down the street. He heard car tires squeal. He hit the ignition and the Delahaye swerved off down 3rd. He took the first right onto 120th heading east. He’d just passed the intersection with 2nd when the cop car skidded into the street behind him.

  They hadn’t put their siren on. Bad sign. Rogue cops sign.

  He dodged what traffic there was all the way to the river, cut right onto FDR Drive. Four lanes running next to the river. He barreled it, putting the Delahaye’s engine to good use. He slipped around traffic, but the car stayed close behind. He tried to think of a way out of this. If they called for backup the road would be full of cops in five minutes and he’d be in court explaining a high-speed chase, impersonating a police officer and two million dollars in the backseat. He’d be locked up when Anastasia found out about his stolen money. He’d be as good as dead.

  But the cops hadn’t put their siren on.

  Street lights shot past above. Thomas Jefferson Park up ahead on the right, dark and empty in the freezing night. And just before the park, in a groove on the road, a patch of ice. Gabriel lurched towards it. The cop car right behind him. At the last second, he spun right. Too late, his back wheel caught the ice. The force yanked the Delahaye right, smashed it into the side barrier. Came to a halt.

  Gabriel looked in the rearview, watched the cop car run straight over the ice. He prayed. The cop car veered left, smashed through the median strip, fishtailed into oncoming traffic. Brakes squealed. The cops sideswiped a Plymouth coming the other way. They spiraled, crashed dead into the railings on the thin strip between the road and the river.

  Gabriel stumbled out of the damaged Delahaye. A little further back down the road, on the other side of the four lanes, the cop car was half-destroyed. The impact had pushed the railing outwards over the embankment, so that the car was now hanging precariously above the river, held up only by the railing’s distended ironwork. The car’s windscreen was shattered, blood sprayed all over it. The Plymouth had spun onto the median strip. Steam rose. Smoke rose. Gabriel thought again of smoke rings, halos, ascension.

  He needed to check the Delahaye was still drivable and get the hell out of there, either by car or by foot. But just as he was coming to his senses, the cop car’s pass
enger side door opened and a figure collapsed onto the ground. The figure wasn’t wearing a uniform. It was the big man in the hat and coat from the brown Chrysler.

  It was Faron.

  Gabriel recognized him instantly. Through all the years, through all the trauma. He hadn’t aged a day, hadn’t a scratch on him. He was just as large and imposing as Gabriel remembered, just as strong-looking. Gabriel felt a rush of anger, confusing, dizzying, take-your-breath-away anger.

  Faron pulled himself up from the ground, looked around. Cars had stopped, rubberneckers, helpers gathering. Faron spotted Gabriel across the lanes of the FDR. Their eyes met.

  Through the blur of roaring traffic, through the streaks of headlights and taillights, their gazes maintained a line, held steady.

  Then Faron moved, burst into action, jumped into the traffic, dodged four lanes of it, moved with litheness and agility. He hopped the barrier on Gabriel’s side of the road and pulled a .38 from his pocket, pointed it at Gabriel.

  Gabriel raised his hands, still stunned that the man who’d haunted him for over a decade was standing in front of him, that his gambit with the ice patch hadn’t managed to inflict so much as a scratch on him.

  Faron approached, walked past him to the Delahaye, gun still trained at Gabriel, and looked at the car, surveyed the damage. He saw the two bags, pulled them out and tossed them onto one shoulder, both of them at once, like they weighed nothing.

  He turned his gaze to Gabriel once more. He steadied his gun arm, getting ready to shoot. Then, at the intersection, cop cars. Flashing reds and blues. Close enough to hear a gunshot. Faron turned, saw the entrance to the park behind him. Bolted towards it, disappeared over the railing into its shadows.

  Gabriel ran after him. Even though Faron was a killer and was the one who had the gun. He jumped the railing, was enveloped by darkness, but he spotted a figure in the distance, heading towards the park’s swimming pool. Gabriel followed. The ground was uneven from the Victory Gardens planted during the war, he had to hop over ruts and grooves in the grass, the outlines of one-time allotment plots now cradling ice.

  Faron entered the swimming pool grounds. It was an open-air pool – drained for winter, nothing but a huge oblong of cement and tiles, filled for some reason with pigeons. Thousands of them. Churning like a gray foam. Faron hopped into the pool – the fastest route to the far side of the park. He disappeared from view. The pigeons burst into the air, as if they were one, in a sweeping blast of flapping wings. Pell-mell they scattered into the clouds, over Gabriel’s head, across the park.

  Gabriel reached the pool, hopped down into it, slipped on something, crashed to the ground, onto his knee, smacking his head, pain exploding, vision blurring, concussing, passing out, rolling onto his back. Blood from his nose slid through his sinuses, down the back of his throat. He burst into a choking fit. Realized that Faron would see him prostrate and return to finish him off. That this was it.

  Through the pain he opened his eyes, looked up into the clear night sky. As he waited for Faron to return he watched the stars skate across the blackness like it was ice, the moon ferrying itself across the firmament, pulling vast oceans towards it. He thought again of halos and ascension.

  He waited, but all was quiet. Where was Faron? The only noise Gabriel could hear was the rustling of the pigeons as they resettled themselves in the pool. He put a hand to his face, it was covered in blood. It didn’t make sense, he’d hit the back of his head when he’d fallen, not his nose. And then he realized. The crash, he must have hit his face on the steering wheel.

  He turned his head – saw the pool was teeming with pigeons once more. He rolled onto his side, blood poured out of his mouth onto the icy tiles. He tried to sit up, managed it. He was alone in the great, black emptiness of the park.

  Wooziness and nausea from the concussion swirled about his head. He tried to get to his feet, stumbled, managed it. He pulled himself out of the pool, hobbled back to the FDR. Before he even got close he could see the lights from the cop cars and ambulances carpeting the grass in red and blue.

  His head and knee pounded. His heart raced. He tried to think of a cover story.

  He exited the park, reached the FDR. All along the roadside were emergency vehicles, black and whites, a meat wagon, cops milling about. He headed to the abandoned Delahaye. Reached it and checked the damage. It was undriveable. Cops were approaching.

  ‘Hey, fella? This your car?’ shouted a uniform.

  No way of getting out of this now, he was linked to the crash.

  Gabriel nodded.

  ‘You in the crash with the other cars?’

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘They were behind me,’ he said. ‘I hit the ice and veered one way, then I saw them behind go the other way.’

  ‘You need help? You’re bleeding pretty bad.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sit down, pal.’

  Gabriel sat on the side of the road. Someone brought a towel for his head.

  ‘Where’d you go after the crash?’ the officer asked. ‘You weren’t by your car.’

  ‘I went to throw up, guess I passed out.’

  ‘All right,’ said the officer. ‘We’ll get a statement off you and send you to the hospital with the others.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gabriel, hoping the others weren’t either of the two rogue cops.

  The officer went off to his car. Gabriel looked around. On the other side of the road, the crowd around the crash site had swelled with emergency crews. It was only then Gabriel noticed that the railing stopping the cop car from falling into the river had broken through and the cop car was no longer there. People were standing on the edge of the embankment, looking down into the river. A police launch was approaching over the waves.

  Gabriel looked down, stared at the asphalt in front of him.

  He’d had the money, briefly, and he’d lost it. Six days to go and he’d lost it. And now it was no longer just a case of finding it again and getting out of New York, because now it was Faron who had the money. Which meant Faron would be coming back to kill Gabriel to keep him quiet. Which meant Gabriel had to hunt down Faron first.

  PART TWELVE

  ‘The New York manipulator for Lucky Luciano, who visited him while he was held at Ellis Island for deportation, is Frank Costello. He is now the mightiest of the syndicate personnel, with an uncanny genius for mixing into highly important affairs with bigwigs in various spheres.’

  JACK LAIT AND LEE MORTIMER,

  NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL, 1948

  30

  Friday 7th November, 12.05 a.m.

  Costello stepped out of Dr Hoffman’s office feeling that odd mix of deflation and hope he always experienced after a session. He looked up and down 5th Avenue. A light snow was falling. On the other side of the road, outside the offices of a company that ran sightseeing tours, an old man was selling baked sweet potatoes from a pushcart, steam rising from it into the air. Costello walked over and bought one. The man wrapped the sweet potato in grease paper and handed it over. Costello paid him, told him to keep the change. The man gawped.

  Costello hailed a cab. Got in and told the cabbie to take him to the address in Hell’s Kitchen where the kid was being held, the kid they were going to try and turn. As the cab pulled away Costello stared at the offices of the sightseeing company. In the windows was a giant photograph of the Statue of Liberty, the green lady standing on her island, staring across the waves, to the destroyed old world. Her classical face, her austere features, lent her a feeling of reliability, permanence, nobility. In all his decades living in the city, Costello had never once been to Liberty Island.

  The cab headed south. Costello unwrapped the grease paper from the sweet potato, peeled back its skin, took a bite, felt the warmth in his mouth, but could taste none of its flavor on account of his cold. He sighed and chewed and swallowed. He thought about what Dr Hoffman had told him in their session, the same advice about how the solution to his depression lay in improving his sense of sel
f-worth, and one way of doing that was to consort with better types, to broaden his social circle.

  But Costello was already doing that. He’d made friends with writers, journalists, actors and painters, bohemians. He commissioned fine art. He went to cocktail parties in artists’ lofts in Greenwich Village, and in glittering apartments on Park Avenue, where the other guests treated him as a curiosity, a streak of danger, a source of anecdotes, a novelty act. Would it really work under those circumstances? Didn’t exposure to those kinds of people just highlight the gulf between them?

  ‘Everyone started out a criminal,’ Lansky used to say. ‘All those big names who look down on us. All criminals. Rockefeller’s father was a conman, he hired thugs to break strikes. Astor cheated Indians and got rich building slums. Vanderbilt used gunmen to strong-arm railroad contracts. Don’t get me started on J. P. Morgan. Behind every great fortune there’s always a crime,’ he’d said. ‘Give it time, Frank. All it takes is time. The crime fades away and all people remember is the money.’

  Costello was the first of the mobsters to move uptown, to get an apartment on the Upper West Side. Luciano, Lansky, Siegel, all followed him. Costello was the first to get in with the politicians, renounced violence where possible, stayed clear of drugs and prostitution. But still that legitimacy eluded him. Costello thought on Joe Kennedy. They’d worked together running booze during Prohibition, but the moment repeal came along, the man wouldn’t answer his calls. What if Lansky was right and all it took was time, but that time was so long, Costello wouldn’t be around to see it?

  The cab turned west when they’d cleared 59th, slipped through Midtown, heading towards Hell’s Kitchen. Costello took more bites of the sweet potato, still tasteless, and losing its warmth. He thought of Luciano, the supposed head of the family, locked up in Siberia all those years, then double-crossed by the government, deported to Italy. That was another sign of how they were viewed. When the war came, American boats kept getting torpedoed by German submarines as soon as they’d left the New York docks. A troop carrier berthed on the Hudson mysteriously caught fire. It was only then the Navy realized they had an enemy within – the New York docks, the largest in the country, were run almost entirely by Italians. Who was to say these dockers weren’t Mussolini supporters?