by Ray Celestin
Costello craved a cigarette.
‘Look at the blob, son. Look at the blob.’
The young man’s crying subsided enough for him to speak. ‘What do you want?’ he stammered.
‘I just want to know why Vito spoke to you and your boss.’
‘I wasn’t there when they spoke,’ said the young man. ‘But … but I spoke to my boss about it after.’
‘What did he say?’
The young man sniffed a couple of times, composed himself, turned to look at Costello. The tear trails running down his cheeks glistened in the gloom.
‘Genovese was trying to get us to vote against blacklisting,’ the young man said.
‘Not to blacklist?’ Costello asked. ‘You sure?’
The young man nodded. ‘We couldn’t understand it,’ he said.
‘You’re not the only ones, kid.’
Why would Genovese be trying to get them to vote that way? Bringing down government heat onto the unions the Mob controlled in LA? Why would he want to sabotage everything?
‘He say anything else, kid?’
‘My boss said it had something to do with Ronnie Reagan.’
‘The b-movie actor?’
‘He’s the president of the Screen Actors Guild,’ the young man said. ‘He got voted in with MCA campaign money. My boss thought it might have something to do with that.’
MCA. The Music Corporation of America. The talent management agency started by a bunch of Chicago mobsters who used to work for Capone. People Costello knew well. People who could help him figure out what the hell was going on.
‘All right, kid,’ Costello said. ‘You did good.’
‘I can go now?’
‘Sure. You can go.’
A strange look crossed the young man’s face and he began to walk away.
Costello tried to play the cards in his head, couldn’t. These were the golden days. And Genovese was trying to rip them all up. Why?
Then he had a thought.
‘Kid,’ he said, just as the young man was stepping out of the room.
The young man turned to look at him, fearing another grilling.
‘You don’t got a spare cigarette on you?’
38
Sunday 9th, 6.02 a.m.
Gabriel and Havemeyer stepped out of the club into an ashy dawn. Havemeyer headed to the subway, Gabriel got into the Cadillac and drove south. When he reached West 14th he parked up a half-block away from Beatrice’s address, on the opposite side of the road.
There were five cars between him and the building’s entrance. Gabriel scanned all of them, spotted three heads crouched down in a Plymouth. Spotted the two bouncers in a Studebaker further up. He assessed angles. Lines of fire. He got out of the car and crossed the street at the worst point for the men in the Plymouth.
As he approached Beatrice’s door he heard a voice behind him.
‘Gabe Leveson?’
Gabriel turned to see a kid standing on the sidewalk. He looked young, a teenager, skinny, pale, trembling in a thin leather jacket.
Just then there was a noise – the two bouncers running up the street, pulling .38s. The kid looked from them to Gabriel, realized what was going on. Then a screeching noise – the Plymouth peeling off. The kid’s partners ditching him.
The kid turned and ran, heading east towards Union Square. Gabriel chased him. The bouncers did too. Gabriel turned to them and shouted.
‘Follow the Plymouth,’ he screamed.
The bouncers turned and headed for their Studebaker. Gabriel looked ahead. The kid might have looked unhealthy, but he was fast. Way faster than Gabriel.
They crossed a block to the square, then just outside Ohrbach’s the kid jumped into the road. There wasn’t much traffic, but enough for a chorus of horns and screeching brakes to smash the peace, causing birds to burst from the trees in the square.
Gabriel jumped through the path the kid had cleared. The kid reached the subway station, jumped down its steps five at a time. Gabriel followed. Through the ticket hall. Hopped the turnstile. Ran along the platform of the Eighth Avenue line. The kid getting further and further away.
Then Gabriel spotted a set of stairs at the end of the platform. The kid was heading towards them. The steps led to a bridge over the tracks. It’d bring the kid out on the opposite platform, where a Bronx-bound train was pulling in.
Gabriel could cut him off.
The kid reached the stairs, disappeared up them.
Gabriel inhaled, jumped off the platform, onto the tracks. People screamed. He stumbled, the third rail loomed. He put out a hand and grabbed a sleeper. He stopped himself falling less than an inch from the electrified rail.
On the platform people were calling him a madman, others were shouting for the police.
Gabriel righted himself. Saw the train approaching, hopped over the remaining rails and pulled himself onto the platform to see the kid running down it towards him, looking over his shoulder at the stairs behind him, where he thought Gabriel would emerge. Gabriel ran towards him. The kid turned. Gabriel swung his fist at the kid’s face. Connected sweetly. Bone to bone.
The kid went flying, landed hard, smacked the back of his head. More screams. The train rushed into the station. The kid sprawled, rolled about, dazed, concussed. Gabriel kneeled and frisked him. Plucked a .38 Smith & Wesson from one pocket, the kid’s wallet from another, a stiletto strapped to the inside of his boot.
The kid came to, looked at Gabriel, patted himself, realized he’d been fished.
‘Head for the exit,’ Gabriel said. ‘Or I kill you here. With your own .38.’
The kid stumbled to his feet.
They made it out of the station before the cops arrived. Gabriel walked the kid through the square, putting distance between them and the scene of the fight. He threw the kid onto a bench, stood in front of him.
‘Talk,’ he said.
The kid looked at him blankly, woozily.
Gabriel took the kid’s wallet from his pocket. Found a driver’s license.
‘John Stanley Jones,’ he read. ‘Start talking, kid, or I’ll take you to the address you’ve got in here and make it look like suicide.’
The kid considered his options. ‘What do you want to know?’ he said, his voice dripping with feigned menace.
‘Who sent you?’ he asked.
‘Al Rocca.’
Gabriel knew the name. A middle-man who farmed out muscle-work for Genovese. Not for the Gaglianos.
‘Who’d Rocca get the job from?’
The kid leaned forward, tested the bruise on his face with his fingertips.
‘Genovese,’ he said. ‘Who’d you think?’
‘Why’d he send you after me?’
‘I don’t know.’
The kid looked up at Gabriel, blood dripped out of his nose, onto his fingers. Gabriel tossed him a handkerchief.
‘Don’t lie to me, kid,’ he said.
He lit a smoke and looked about the square. It was empty on account of the early hour, the benches and lawns were covered in dew. Even the giant Coca-Cola sign above Beatrice’s dance studio, switched off now, was covered in it, its bulbs and iron scaffolds glistening and dripping.
Gabriel looked back at the kid. He had the handkerchief pressed up to his nose.
‘It’s something to do with this pusher called Cleveland,’ he said. ‘Genovese’s been looking for him. Then he heard you were looking for him, too. That’s all I know.’
Gabriel frowned. He knew the kid was telling the truth, but what he was saying didn’t fit. Gabriel imagined Genovese coming after him over the missing money, over Faron, over the rejected job offer. Instead he tried to whack Gabriel because he’d been asking after Cleveland?
‘Why’s he looking for Cleveland?’
‘I told you all I know.’
‘What do you know about the two cops who got killed yesterday?’
‘The ones that drowned? They were working for Genovese. He asked them to look for Cleveland.’
> There was the link again. The cops, Faron, Genovese. Beatrice had said the men visited her the previous night, just hours after the crash. Genovese had wasted no time in coming after him. It was just a matter of time now before he came again. Sunday morning now. Gabriel’s escape was planned for Thursday night. Would he even be able to survive till then? Especially as he only had one lead left now – the two detectives from Chicago. He had to track them down, follow them maybe, break into their office to see what information they’d gathered.
He stared at the kid. He had to kill him. Every shred of logic said he had to. But in the open light of the park, the kid looked even younger than he had on the street. Gabriel checked the date of birth on the driver’s license. Seventeen. Four years older than Sarah. Gabriel looked at him again.
‘I’m going to let you go,’ said Gabriel. ‘You tell your boss you got away from me. We never spoke. Got it?’
The kid nodded. Gabriel threw him back his wallet.
‘If you do say anything, and I find out,’ said Gabriel. ‘I’ll hunt you down. Got it?’
The kid nodded again, got off the bench and ran through the square. Gabriel watched him go, stared a moment at the cold sunrise. Then he headed south, to Beatrice’s apartment.
He rang her bell and she buzzed him in. He caught an elevator up twenty-four stories, knocked on her door. She opened up looking tired and concerned, dressed in trousers and a baggy wool sweater.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘I took care of it.’
She walked him down a hallway into a spacious lounge with windows looking north. The place was crammed with pot plants and paperwork from Beatrice’s agency.
‘Nice place,’ he said.
‘It’s overpriced,’ she replied. ‘But it’s close to the studio. You want a drink?’
He nodded.
She crossed to a drinks cabinet and poured him a rye.
They sat on the sofa and Gabriel told her what had happened with the kid, told her to expect a call from the two bouncers maybe.
She rose and put the radio on, tuned it to a station playing ballads. They drank more, waited for the bouncers to call. They stared out of the windows, watched New York waking up to a cold, bright Sunday morning. From the windows they could see Broadway snaking up through Union Square and onwards towards 42nd Street and Midtown.
‘You got a nice view here,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said, taking a sip of her drink. ‘I like looking out over Broadway. I like how it cuts through everything.’
Gabriel looked at the rigid grid of streets laid out below them, noted how Broadway sliced across it diagonally, haphazardly, intersecting the framework that covered most of the island, a single line of chaos through the order.
‘What’s so great about that?’ he asked.
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘It used to be an Indian trail, runs along a natural ridge. That’s why it’s got the shape it has. Why it messes up the grid we tried to put in place. There’s something nice about that. One last fuck-you from the Indians who used to live here.’
She smiled. The phone rang.
She picked it up and passed it to Gabriel. He listened to what the bouncers had to say, hung up.
‘They chased the Plymouth for a bit,’ Gabriel said. ‘Then they lost it.’
He returned to the sofa. Tried to think, but couldn’t make much headway. Not just now. So he returned to drinking and smoking. And the time slipped by.
‘You know,’ Beatrice said at one point, ‘even if those men hadn’t visited me, I still would have come to see you.’
He gave her a look.
‘Don’t get the wrong idea,’ she said. ‘I know we’d never make it. There’s no happy endings when two people are in love. And we do love each other, Gabriel.’
‘We had to split up,’ he said.
‘To protect me from the world you live in?’ she said. ‘You still believe that?’
‘Sure.’
‘You split up with me because you wanted to maintain control, Gabby. And you know it. But the more you do that, the lonelier you get. I thought you’d have realized that by now.’
Something stirred inside of him and he looked away from her. He thought of Mrs Hirsch and the Doc and all their warnings.
‘I would have come because I was worried,’ she said. ‘When you turned up at the studio, you looked like my brother did before he disappeared. Haunted, pale, anxious. What the hell’s going on with you?’
Something about what she’d said panicked him. Did he really look haunted? Was that why Sarah gave him that hug out of nowhere? Was there really such a big disconnect between his self-image and how others perceived him? And if he was so wrong about something so basic, what other things was he wrong about? How deep did the self-delusion run?
He swallowed and stared at the city outside. Eight million souls in it and who could he trust?
He told her everything.
About the Saratoga racetrack and the cooked books and stealing the money. About running away to Mexico. About Bennie’s missing millions, about Genovese and Cleveland. And in telling her it was like all the weight he’d been living under the last few months lifted, the stress and the anxiety poured out, like a valve had been opened.
She didn’t offer solutions because there were none to give. She didn’t offer sympathy either, because she knew it was no good. She just listened, tears in her eyes. They drank more. They melted into the sofa, listened to the ballads on the radio, watched the specks of traffic move about the streets far below them.
‘You gonna miss it?’ she asked. ‘New York?’
Gabriel thought. He wouldn’t miss the claustrophobia of it, things always pressing down on him. New York was a city without oases. Maybe that was why he dreamed of jumping off buildings, the need for wings, a way of reclaiming power over the environment. But still he’d miss it.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘These last few months I’ve been walking around. I’ve been making a list in my head, of all the things I’m going to miss. And it seems like I’m adding something new every day.’
‘What are you gonna miss?’
‘Mainly, the buzz,’ he said. ‘That feeling there’s always something going on, that you’re living somewhere big. How the city’s big and it makes you feel big. How everyone walks fast and talks fast. How every cab driver and bellboy and kid running an elevator’s got an angle, a story to tell. How when a train leaves Grand Central the sidewalk on Park Avenue shakes. How when the wind blows west the smoke drifts over Jersey and it makes the sunsets red. How you can tell how the Yankees did just by looking on the faces of the old-timers catching the Eighth Avenue Line back from the game. How when it’s foggy the skyscrapers disappear and all you can see are the windows glowing in the sky. How when they fill the swimming pools at the start of summer all the neighborhood kids run to the parks, like they know, like there’s a siren only they can hear.’
He turned to see her smiling. He really would miss it all. Lament it. The shadows and the gleam. Most of all, though, he would miss walking the streets he walked with his sister, all those years ago. Seeing the sights she saw, living in the city she called home.
‘Remember when we used to take Sarah to the skating rink at the Rockefeller?’ Beatrice said.
They both smiled.
Remember when.
They talked about old times. Awkwardness gave way to tenderness. They fell asleep. In their clothes, in the sunlight, in front of the window.
At one point Gabriel stirred, his mind emerged briefly from the waters of sleep, bobbed along the surface unsteadily. He thought about Beatrice and Benny and all the other people who had passed out of his life, and all the people who would pass out of it when he ran away. He mused on what Beatrice had said, how it echoed the advice of everyone else in his life. His inability to change was costing him relationships. By imposing himself on the world around him, he might have maintained his identity, but he’d lost something more important.
&
nbsp; He realized the weight of the revelation, felt if he could remember it when he woke, all his problems would be fixed. He tried to hold onto the thought, but his mind was too battered, too fuzzy, too ragged, too close to unconsciousness. Before he could really tighten his grip on it, he submerged into sleep once more.
PART FIFTEEN
‘I don’t know how I made it through those years. I became bitter, hard, cold. I was always on a panic – couldn’t buy clothes or a good place to live … The mental strain was getting worse all the time. What made it worst of all was that nobody understood our kind of music out on the Coast. I can’t begin to tell you how I yearned for New York.’
CHARLIE PARKER, METRONOME, 1947
39
Sunday 9th, 3.30 p.m.
Michael exited his apartment building into a bitterly cold wind. He stood on the front step, buttoned up his coat and headed towards the subway stop. The streets were quieter than they were on weekdays, giving the surroundings an emptiness that Michael found un-nerving. A block or so from his apartment, he got the feeling someone was following him. He paused to look in a shop window, and in the corner of his eye, he saw a man stop at a window a few stores down. Amateurish.
Michael had his Browning in his pocket. He came up with a plan.
He carried on walking down the block, found an alleyway and stepped into it, took the gun from his pocket. About halfway down the alleyway was the service entrance to one of the stores on the street. He ducked into the alcove of the entrance and waited.
A half-minute later, the man walked past.
Michael stepped out from the alcove when the man was a few feet past him and raised the gun.
‘You flat-footing me, son?’ he asked.
The man stopped, turned round to see Michael holding the gun, raised his hands. He was tall, good-looking, had that gangster cockiness. But there was tiredness around the man’s eyes, a bruised face, a slight tremor, a haunted quality.
‘I’m just on my way to meet a pal. This a stick-up?’ the man asked.
‘You’re following me. You’ve been following me since I left my apartment. How about you tell me what you’re up to and no more lies.’
