The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  The stage manager came in and gave them a five-minute call, and no time seemed to pass at all before he was back again telling them they were on.

  Everyone rose, grabbed their instruments, checked their shirts and ties in the mirrors.

  Louis rose last of all.

  ‘You all good, Louis?’ asked Teagarden.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Louis. ‘All set.’

  And his voice didn’t even sound convincing to himself.

  They filed out. The crowd in the function room outside had already thinned. They walked down the corridor to the wings. Waited.

  Fred Robinson was onstage, compering. He tossed off a few jokes in the patter that had made him one of the most popular jazz DJs on the radio, he got a few laughs. Then he introduced the band to a wall of applause. They stepped out onto the stage. Robinson passed them on his way to the wings, smiled at Louis.

  It was a quarter past eleven. The house was full. The people looked excited. It felt like a homecoming in a way, even though Louis had never gone anywhere. Had people just forgotten? Like old King Oliver with his vegetable stand back in Georgia, Bunk Johnson and his sugar wagon? Was perpetual re-invention the only way to stay constant?

  Everything went silent.

  In the glare of the stage lights, specks of dust floated, shined.

  The first track on the playlist was ‘Cornet Chop Suey’, a song full of knotty, clarinet-like figures Louis had written back in the twenties to show off his virtuosity. He looked at Catlett, who had settled himself behind the drums. At Teagarden, at Hackett, at the others. All of them waiting for him. He felt the silence swirling about the stage. For the first time in his life, Louis had everything on the line.

  Fight it, he thought.

  And raised his trumpet to his lips.

  48

  Wednesday 12th, 11.00 p.m.

  Ida didn’t want to be there. Driving with Gabriel through the snow, out of the city to the airport, to a possible meeting with Faron and whomever else Genovese was sending. But Michael had been right, Gabriel was on a revenge mission, and it was better someone was there to make sure he didn’t ruin everything for them. So Ida had gone, and Michael had stayed behind at Gabriel’s apartment to look after his niece, because Michael had said he was too old to go out and be involved in the ambush. Too frail, too unsteady. That he’d only slow them down. He’d suggested he stay back and look after the girl, because they might be double-crossed after all.

  So it was Ida heading out into the darkness with Gabriel, against her better judgment, weighed down by a heavy sense of foreboding. If Gabriel picked up on her trepidation, her discomfort and doubt, he didn’t show it, but instead kept his eyes fixed on the road in front, the shadowy fields, the bleak, murky backwoods.

  The Cadillac’s radio was on, tuned to a late-night dance music show. At some point the announcer introduced a broadcast from the Copa Lounge. She turned to look at Gabriel. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Why just the two of us?’ Ida asked.

  He shrugged again.

  ‘Because I don’t trust any of my men for this one.’

  ‘They could be bringing an army.’

  ‘Faron’s an army. It’ll be him and a few other guys. One car-load. Tops.’

  She nodded, not wanting to contradict him. Even a single car-load was plenty.

  They continued on. The macadam unreeled in front of them, the cones of the headlights cut a path through the blackness, countless snowflakes careened in the glare.

  ‘Tell me about Faron,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to know what kind of man he is. Michael said you spent years looking for him.’

  Gabriel paused. Then he told her a long tale about his search for the man, how he’d trawled through Faron’s crimes, unearthing a trail of murder victims through the wastelands of America, through the years of the Depression, all the way back to the mountains of Appalachia, in whose mists the trail vanished. He told her how Faron tortured and killed the women, how all of them were drawn from the country’s endless, faceless underclass.

  ‘If there’s broke people out there,’ said Gabriel, ‘vulnerable people, that’s where he is. In amongst them. Killing.’

  Ida nodded and an uncomfortable silence descended on them, needled them. They each stared out at the darkness in front, and thought their own dark thoughts.

  At some point Ida saw lights in the distance, a whole field of them – the airport, glittering in the black. It had been her idea to pick the airport at that hour for the ambush. It was an easy buy to think Cleveland might be leaving town, in the dead of night. She also guessed the place would be quiet. But she hadn’t figured on just how isolated and desolate it was.

  Gabriel pulled into the lot in front of the airport building. It was empty save for five or six cars, a short line of cabs, a couple of limousines. They parked as close as possible to the airport’s entrance, front of the car pointed out. Ida checked the clock on the dash – they were a couple of hours early.

  They got out. Ida looked up at the building. It was a small, oval-shaped, two-story affair. Its facade was made of bulging glass, through which bright, white light spilled out onto the asphalt of the parking lot. Behind the building was the runway and the hangars.

  They walked inside. Made a circuit. Didn’t see Faron, didn’t see anyone they pegged as a mobster. They went to the cafeteria upstairs. They ordered coffees. They sat by the windows that looked onto the parking lot in front. They waited.

  Every half an hour or so a plane flew overhead, disappeared behind the roof of the building. Just as often buses arrived from the city, dropping off and picking up tired-looking travelers. Other than that the only movement outside was the wind heaving great sheets of snow and ice across the fields and the parking lot.

  They carried on smoking and waiting. The radio played a selection of Brazilian songs. Ida tried to put the danger they were in out of her mind, tried to think of California, the Pacific, golden beaches.

  About an hour later, a passenger bus came into the parking lot, stopped near the entrance to the airport and started unloading half-asleep travelers. Ida guessed most of them were booked in on the same flight they’d bought Cleveland a ticket for.

  Porters moved luggage from the bowels of the bus onto trolleys. Ida peered at the bus passengers, checking for gun bulges, other signs they might be in Faron’s group. One of them, a tall man in a camel-hair coat, wasn’t looking at the airport building, or at the luggage being unloaded, but was instead staring at the cars parked in the lot, scanning them.

  A few moments later, a car appeared on the approach road to the airport. Ida turned her attention to it, watched as it entered the lot, slow-rolling. It crept past countless empty spaces. The man in the camel-hair coat nodded at the driver of the car.

  The slow-roller came past, its headlights sweeping as it turned.

  ‘This is it,’ said Gabriel. ‘They followed the bus.’

  ‘Or they’re using it as cover.’

  The car stopped and idled. The man in the camel-hair coat turned and walked into the airport building, no suitcase.

  ‘That wasn’t Faron, was it?’ Ida asked.

  Gabriel shook his head.

  Two men got out of the car, waited around in the snow.

  ‘What about those two?’ she asked.

  Again Gabriel shook his head. ‘He’s not driving the car either.’

  She followed Gabriel’s gaze to the car below them, through the windshield to the two front seats, where a burly driver sat behind the wheel.

  The car started up again, commencing another lap of the lot.

  ‘They’re not checking the bus passengers,’ said Gabriel. ‘They’re checking the parking lot.’

  ‘They know we’re here,’ said Ida.

  She turned to look at Gabriel.

  ‘Let’s grab the one who came inside,’ he said. ‘Before his buddies catch up with him.’

  He rose and turned, rushed o
ff. Ida dashed after him. They clattered down the stairs, came out onto the first floor by a long row of unmanned check-in desks. Behind the stairs was a waiting area. They looked in it for the man, but he wasn’t there.

  They checked the concourse adjoining it; people from the bus were milling about, filing in through the entrance. Beyond them was a concession selling travel goods, an information booth, and a diner counter, where a grill cook and a waiter were serving food to a clutch of customers.

  Then they spotted him, the man in the camel-hair coat, walking over to the concession. They headed over, falling in behind him. He walked into the concession, peered around one of the aisles. Gabriel moved his gun into his coat pocket, lifted it, pressed it against the man’s back.

  ‘Where’s Faron?’ Gabriel asked.

  The man paused. Gabriel shoved the gun further into the man’s back, causing him to stumble forwards a half-step.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said the man. ‘It’s just us.’

  Now Gabriel paused, thought.

  ‘We’re gonna walk to the restrooms,’ he said. ‘Move.’

  The man deliberated for a few seconds, then did as Gabriel commanded. They walked down the aisle, out of the concession and back onto the main concourse, through its people-filled expanse to the restrooms on the other side.

  When they were about halfway across, the two men from the car entered from the parking lot.

  Gabriel and Ida both saw them, Gabriel pushed the first man, trying to get him to move faster. The man turned, saw his colleagues. He spun, side-stepped Gabriel, screamed at his friends.

  The two men from the car saw what was happening. Everything slowed. The two men pulled guns from their coats, lifted them towards Ida and Gabriel. The airport came alive in an eruption of gunfire. The shelves of the concession crumpled, glass exploded. A hellish chorus of screams rose up.

  Ida ran for cover, rushing to the waiting room behind the stairs. She made it. Dropped to the floor, spread flat. Got her gun from her holster. She raised it and looked along the floor to the concourse in front of her, where the gunfire still filled the air, the bullets still roared into the concession, into the walls either side of it, all down the diner counter and the information booth.

  She saw a puddle of blood in the middle of the concourse, streaks disappearing behind the opposite side of the stairs. Someone had been hit, had been dragged away.

  And then the gunfire stopped. And all was quiet.

  Ida looked back across the hall. There were people cowering behind seats, terrified, pressing themselves into corners. The concession was half-destroyed, in the racks, the newspapers and magazines had been turned to pulp by the bullets. The diner counter was empty. The sound of meat and eggs sizzling on the un-manned grill, the howl of the wind outside, people sobbing, filled the air. Somewhere near the entrance, broken glass clinked to the floor.

  Ida spotted the sleeve of a camel-hair coat poking out from behind the check-in booths further inside the building, the first man. Then she saw Gabriel, crouched behind the till of the concession.

  Where were the two gunmen?

  She turned in the direction she’d heard the glass smash. There they were, standing by the entrance. If the man in the camel-hair coat wanted to get back to his friends, he’d have to run right through Gabriel’s and Ida’s line of fire.

  A stand-off.

  Ida shared a look with Gabriel, a nod indicating they were both OK. Neither of them knew what to do. She glanced at the man in the camel-hair coat, saw him lean forward, make eye-contact with the two gunmen. A look passed between them. Then the man was up and running, not towards Ida and Gabriel and his friends at the entrance, but the other way, into the depths of the airport.

  Gabriel jumped up and ran after him. The two gunmen saw him and sent bullets after him and the hall filled once more with the sound of gunfire. People screamed again. Gabriel and the man disappeared down a corridor. The gunmen by the entrance stopped firing. Ida turned to look at them. One of them ran outside, another ran off after Gabriel.

  She heard the sound of a car peeling out of the parking lot. Then a gunshot, from the direction Gabriel had run off in. She got up and ran down the side of the check-in desks, down the corridor. She saw the gunman running through a staff-only door at the far end of the corridor, and before it, a retirement-age security guard lying on the floor, clutching a bloody shoulder.

  She reached the security guard, stopped. He was lucid, wincing with pain, his fingers clamped tight over the gunshot wound on the top of his opposite shoulder. Ida leaned down, assessed his injury. He’d live. She rose.

  ‘You’re going after them?’ he said to her, incredulous.

  She ran.

  ‘Ma’am!’ he shouted after her. ‘Ma’am!’

  She pushed through the door at the end of the corridor into howling wind and snow. In front of her was the great asphalt airfield. She scanned the space, fanned it with her gun, the dark, gaping entrances to the hangars, the row of planes, the refueling trucks, the mobile stairways.

  Gunshots. To her left. In the distance, where a high-wire fence ran the length of the airport’s perimeter, two figures moved. An orange bloom of muzzle-fire in the blackness and then the sound of gunshots again.

  She ran over there, her eyes fixed on the figures and the fence beyond them, on whose far side were empty, frozen fields.

  ‘Here,’ she heard Gabriel shout.

  She saw him a few yards ahead. He’d taken up a position behind a luggage truck.

  She ran over to him.

  ‘They’re over by the fence,’ he said, gesturing to where she’d seen the figures.

  ‘They’ve got an escape plan,’ she said. ‘I heard their car driving off just when you ran after him.’

  In the darkness beyond the fence they saw headlights moving at speed. The gunmen’s driver going to meet his accomplices, to pick them up, get them to safety. The two men seemed to have reached the fence separating the airport from the fields, were climbing over it.

  ‘They’re gonna get away,’ Gabriel said.

  The look on his face was unsettling, ugly emotions contorted his features.

  He rose and ran towards the fence. Ida followed.

  The two men were already in the field on the other side, disappearing into its shadows.

  Ida and Gabriel reached the fence, pulled themselves over it, headed off into the darkness, running, slipping and falling on the icy, uneven ground. In the blackness, Ida could barely make out the horizon line, let alone the figures getting away somewhere in the distance.

  Then there was a noise over the howl of the wind – an airplane. Coming in to land. Ida looked up at it through the clouds and snow. It was in front of them, and it was coming in low, its lights shining through the snowfall, beaming onto the fields. It would be passing over them in just a few seconds.

  ‘Gabriel,’ she shouted, reaching out a hand, grabbing him.

  He turned to look at her, frowning, confused.

  ‘The plane,’ she said. ‘Get down.’

  It took him a moment, but he realized what she had in mind.

  They both dropped to the freezing ground, aimed their guns on the blackness in front of them. The roaring light of the plane approached, swept over the ground, illuminating it, yard by yard, like a prison spotlight. Eventually, it picked out the silhouettes of the two men in front, making them emerge, materialize, out of the darkness. They were almost at the end of the field, where the tree-line started, where the car was waiting for them. Ida and Gabriel both fired. One of the men went down.

  Then the plane had passed over the men and they were subsumed by blackness. Then the plane reached Ida and Gabriel, burning their eyes. Then it was over the runway and its light was gone and they were plunged into darkness once more.

  A few seconds later they saw the car lights moving off, disappearing up the road.

  ‘Fuck,’ Gabriel shouted.

  They stood. The wind roared around them. Ida tried to steady her
breathing, calm herself, think.

  ‘When we fired off,’ she said, ‘did you see one of the men drop?’

  She wanted to be certain. Gabriel nodded.

  ‘You see him get back up?’ she asked.

  ‘No. The light hit my eyes.’

  ‘Maybe his body’s still down there,’ she said, nodding to the corner of the field where they’d shot the man.

  ‘Or more likely his buddies helped him into the car and he got away,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Not if he was dead,’ said Ida. ‘Not if they were panicking and it was dark and they wanted to get the hell away. They might have left him there. With evidence on him.’

  He stared at her, then looked at the blackness where they’d shot the man.

  ‘We can’t go looking for him now,’ he said. ‘In the dark, with the police on their way.’

  He gestured behind her. She turned to look at the airport in the distance. On the road leading up to it a line of red-and-blue flashing lights was approaching through the gloom. More red-and-blues were heading towards the airport from the road the men had escaped down.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘We can come back and look for the body when it’s light.’

  ‘We can’t go back to the parking lot,’ she said. ‘We’d never make it in time.’

  ‘Come on. There’s a commuter town a couple of miles from here.’

  ‘You know which direction?’ she asked.

  He turned around, got his bearings, and they stalked off across the field. As they walked, Ida looked at the tree-line where the car had driven off; beyond it, far above, the lights of Manhattan were reflected in the sky, making the clouds shine eerily, like some spectral presence was hanging over the city.

  They reached the end of the field and turned onto a narrow road that led up a hill.