Deacon King Kong

by James McBride

  He got to his feet slowly, every muscle in his body protesting, and staggered toward the nearby Silver Street subway, leaning on the wall as he went. He felt like he was falling to pieces, but moved faster as he got his wind, keeping one eye out for the giant who had escorted him there that morning. He had to make it to Bed-Stuy to pick up Bunch’s cash before heading back to the boss’s house. The least he could do was to show up with Bunch’s rocks. It might keep the boss from killing him.

  13

  THE COUNTRY GIRL

  Elefante and the Governor sat in the living room of the Governor’s modest two-family brick house in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx, a calm enclave of apartment buildings dotted with a few leafy trees amid coming urban decay, when the door burst open and a mop swept into the room, followed by an attractive woman pulling a wheeled bucket full of soapy water. Her head was down and she mopped at the floor with such speed and intensity that at first she didn’t notice the two men sitting in the room. Elefante was in the rocking chair with his back to the door. The old man was on the couch. The woman swept from left to right and then hit the leg of the rocking chair and saw a foot. She looked up in surprise at Elefante, her face flushed a deep red, and at that moment Elefante saw his future.

  She was a heavyset woman, getting on in years but with a sweet face that could not bridle the shyness that emanated from it, with wide brown eyes that, at the moment, blinked in surprise. Her brown hair was pulled back to a bun, and a long, cute, dimpled chin lived beneath a pleasant mouth. Though heavy, she had the frame of a tall, thin woman, her neck was long, and she hung her head a bit, as if to deemphasize her height. She wore a green dress and her feet were bare.

  “Whoops. I was just coming in to clean.” She backed out of the room quickly and slammed the door. Elefante heard her footsteps retreating to the back of the apartment.

  “Sorry,” the Governor said. “That’s my lass, Melissa. She lives downstairs.”

  Elefante nodded. He had not seen Melissa long but he had seen her long enough. It was the barefoot part, Elefante thought later, that did it. The no shoes. What a beauty. A country beauty. The type he’d always dreamed about. He liked heavy women. And she was deeply shy. He saw that immediately. It was the way she moved, with slight clumsiness, her head down, that long neck swinging that pretty face away from what was happening. In that moment, he felt an inside part of his tightly wound heart loosen, and understood, with certainty, the Governor’s problem. He doubted that shy beauty had the guile to run a bagel shop, much less take care of whatever business the Governor had with this piece that he wanted to dump for dollars, whatever it was. That type ought to be running a country store someplace, he thought dreamily. Running it with me.

  He shook the thought as he saw the Governor watching him, a slight smile on his lined face. They had spent the afternoon together. The old man had been cordial. He’d greeted Elefante like they were old friends. The bagel shop was just two blocks away, and despite the Governor’s wheezing and poor health, he insisted they walk over. He proudly showed Elefante the entire operation, the large eating area, the display cases, the store crowded with customers. He showed him the back garage area where he kept his two delivery trucks, and finally the kitchen, which he saved for last, where the two Puerto Rican cooks were finishing up. “We start at two a.m.,” the Governor explained. “By four thirty the bagels are hot and rolling out the door. By nine we’ve moved eight hundred bagels. Sometimes we move a couple thousand a day,” he said proudly. “Not just for us. We sell to shops all over the Bronx.”

  Elefante was impressed. It wasn’t so much a bagel shop as it was a factory. But now the two men were back in the Governor’s two-family house, in the upper apartment where he stayed, and with the pretty daughter apparently safely down in her apartment below he was eager for the real talk. One look at the daughter told Elefante all he needed to know: if the Governor was telling the truth, he had no real plan.

  “It’s not my business,” Elefante said, “but does your daughter know anything about . . . what I’m here to discuss?”

  “Christ, no.”

  “Don’t you have a son-in-law?”

  The Governor shrugged. “I can’t tell you the ways of the young. In the old days, Irish legend had it that the seals on the beach in Ireland were really dashing young princes who slipped out of their skin to become seals and marry the merry mermaids. I think she’s looking for a seal.”

  Elefante said nothing.

  The Governor suddenly appeared tired, and he leaned back into the couch, his head tilted up toward the ceiling. “I’ve no son. She’s my heir, that one. She’d give it the full shilling if I told her about this business, but she’d make bags of it. I want her out of it.”

  He seemed by nature a lighthearted man, but the tone of that statement let Elefante know that the door was open to his taking full charge of the affair and negotiating a better price for himself, if there was indeed anything to the old man’s story at all. The man was exhausted. That small bit of walking to his shop and the tour of it had worn him out completely. “I’m a bit jaded and might have to rest my head on me couch in a while,” he said. “But I can still talk. We can get started now.”

  “Good, ’cause I’m not sure what you’re selling.”

  “You’ll know now.”

  “Talk then. It’s your party. I already asked around. My poppa had some friends who remember you. My mother says my poppa trusted you and that you two did talk. So I know you’re okay. But you have a good operation here. This isn’t a bagel shop. It’s a factory. It’s clean. It makes money. Why get flashy and monkey with trouble when you’re making good guineas now? How much dough do you need?”

  The Governor smiled, then coughed again and grabbed a handkerchief and spat in it. The glob he spat into that handkerchief, Elefante saw, was big enough that the Governor had to fold the handkerchief in half to use it again. This Irish paisan, he thought, is sicker than he’s letting on.

  Instead of answering the question, the old man tilted his head back again and said, “I got this place and the bagel shop in forty-seven. Well, my wife got the shop, actually. I was in jail that year with your father.

  “Here’s how we got it. I had some money put up. How I got that money doesn’t matter, but it was a good amount of chips. I made the mistake of telling my wife where it was while I was in prison. She came to visit one day and said, ‘Guess what? Remember the old Jewish couple on the Grand Concourse with the bagel shop? They sold it to me cheap. They wanted out fast.’ She said she couldn’t reach me to make a decision. She just went for it. Bought the whole fecking building. With my stash.”

  He smiled at the memory. “She told me about it in the visitors’ room. I ate her head off. I blew my top so bad the prison guards had to collar me to keep me from wringing her neck. It was weeks before she even wrote to me. What could I do? I was in the slammer. She burned up every penny we had—on bagels. I was shook. Mad as a box of frogs.”

  He stared at the ceiling, his face wistful.

  “Your father thought that was funny. He said, ‘Is it losing money?’ I said, ‘How the hell would I know? There’s niggers and spics all over.’

  “He said, ‘They eat bagels too. Write to your wife and tell her you’re sorry.’

  “I did, blessed God, and she forgave me. And now I thank her every day for buying that place. Or would. If she was here.”

  “When did she pass away?”

  “Oh, it’s been . . . I don’t keep track.” He sighed, then sang softly,

  Twenty years a-growing,

  Twenty years in blossom,

  Twenty years a-stooping,

  Twenty years declining.

  Elefante found himself softening, the inside part of him, the part that he never let the world see, the part that had loosened when the man’s daughter swept her mop into the room. “Does that mean you have a clear c
onscience on the whole bit? Or just a bad memory?”

  The Governor stared at the ceiling a bit longer. His eyes seemed fixed on something far distant. “She lived long enough to see me come out of prison. She and my Melissa, they built the business while I was in jail. Three years after I came out, my wife took ill, and now I’m a little under the weather myself.”

  A little under the weather? Elefante thought. He looked ready to keel over.

  “Luckily Melissa’s ready to take it over,” the Governor said. “She’s a good lass. She can fly the business. I am lucky she’s so good.”

  “All the more reason to keep her out of trouble.”

  “That’s where you come in, Cecil.”

  The Elephant nodded, uncomfortable. The reference took him by surprise. He hadn’t been called that in years. “Cecil” was a childhood nickname his father had given him. His real name was Tomaso, or Thomas. He bore his father’s name as a middle name. Cecil was his father’s creation. Where it came from, and why his father chose it, he never knew. It was more than a name of adoration; it was a sign between father and son that they needed to talk privately. His poppa was bedridden in his last year, still running the business, and there were often other people about his bedroom, men who worked in the boxcar, in construction, and in the storage house. When Poppa said “Cecil,” there was important business, private business about, and they needed to discuss it when the room cleared. The Governor’s knowledge of the name was a further sign of credibility—and also, Elefante thought glumly, responsibility. He didn’t want to be responsible for this guy. He had enough responsibility.

  The Governor eyed him a long moment, then gave in to his fatigue. He shifted and pulled his legs on the couch and lay down, stretching out, an arm on his forehead. He raised his other arm and pointed a finger to a desk behind Elefante. “Hand me a pen and paper from that desk, would ya? They’re right on top.”

  Elefante did as he was told. The Governor scratched something on the paper, folded it tightly, and handed the paper to Elefante. “Don’t open it yet,” he said.

  “You want I should stuff ballot boxes for you too?”

  The old man smiled. “That’s not a bad thing to know, considering what happens to old codgers like me in our game. You get tired, y’know. Your father understood that.”

  “Tell me about my poppa,” Elefante said. “What’d he like to talk about?”

  “You’re trying to trick me,” the Irishman said with a low chuckle. “Your father played checkers and said six words a day. But if he said six words, five of them were about you.”

  “He didn’t show me that side much,” Elefante said. “After he came back from prison, he’d already had the stroke. So talking was hard. He was in bed a lot. He was about survival in those days. Keeping the boxcar busy, working for the fami—” He paused. “Working for our customers.”

  The Governor nodded. “I’ve never worked for the Five Families,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “A true Irishman knows the world will one day break your heart.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I like breathing, son. Most people I knew who worked for the families ended up getting dragged across the quit line in pieces. Your father was one of the few who died in bed.”

  “He never trusted them completely,” Elefante said.

  “Why?”

  “Lots of reasons. We’re northern Italian. They’re southern Italian. I was young and stupid. He didn’t think I’d live long when I got made. He kept me busy running that dock. He gave orders. I followed them. That’s how it was. Before he went to jail and after. He was the puppet master, I was the puppet. Work the boxcar, move the stuff, ship it here, there, store this, pay this guy, pay that guy. Pay your men well. Say nothing. That was the gig. But he always kept a foot in other things: construction, a little loan business, even a gardening business for a while. We always had other interests.”

  “You had other interests because your father did not trust.”

  “He did trust. He was just careful about the people he trusted.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because a man who doesn’t trust cannot be trusted.”

  The Governor smiled. “That’s why you’re the right lad for the job.”

  He looked so satisfied Elefante blurted, “If you feel a song coming on, don’t bother. I had Cousin Brucie on the radio in the car all the way over. He played Frankie Valli. Nobody sings better than him.”

  The old man chuckled, then raised a frail hand and pointed at the piece of paper in Elefante’s closed fist. “Read it.”

  Elefante unfolded the paper and read: “A man who does not trust cannot be trusted.”

  “I knew your father well,” the Governor said gravely. “As good as I knew any man in this world.”

  Elefante didn’t know what to say.

  “Now I am gonna sing,” the Governor said brightly. “And it’s gonna be better than Frankie Valli.”

  And he proceeded to talk.

  * * *

  As Elefante drove his Lincoln down the Major Deegan heading home that evening, the note still folded in his shirt pocket, his mind was spinning. He thought not of the story the governor told him, but of the country-looking farm girl who’d come into the room and backed out the door apologizing, excusing herself. A shy, pretty Irish girl. Fresh as spring. She was a little younger than him, thirty-five or so he guessed, which was old not to be married. She seemed so shy, he wondered how someone so meek could run a business. Then again, he thought, I’ve never seen her in action. Maybe she’s like me, he thought. All show business at work, gruff and bitter, but at home, at night, crowing to the stars for love and company.

  Or maybe I’m a moron, he thought bitterly. Just an aching heart—in a city full of them. Geez.

  He gunned onto a ramp that exited to the FDR Drive, then zipped down the east side of Manhattan toward the Brooklyn Bridge. He was glad to be driving. It allowed his mind to roam and the confusion to quell. It was just past four thirty p.m. and traffic was still moving smoothly. He turned on the radio and the music jarred him back to reality. He scanned the East River, checking the line of barges moving along. Some of them he knew. A few were run by honest captains who refused hot items. They wouldn’t move a stolen tire if you paid them a thousand bucks. Others were captained by blithering idiots who would kick their scruples out the window for the price of a cup of coffee. The first type were honest to a fault. They just couldn’t help it. The second type were born crooks.

  Which one am I? he wondered.

  Am I good or bad? he thought as he maneuvered the Lincoln through traffic. He thought about getting out of the game altogether. It was an old dream. He had plenty saved up. He’d made enough to live. That’s what Poppa wanted, right? He could sell his two rental houses in Bensonhurst, sell the boxcar to Ray out in Coney Island, and step out once and for all. To do what? Work in a bagel shop? He couldn’t believe the thought entered his mind. The Governor’s daughter didn’t even know who he was and he was already putting himself in her kitchen. He pictured himself ten years from now, a fat husband in a cook’s outfit, slinging dough and slamming it into an oven at three a.m.

  On the other hand, what was life all about? Family. Love. That woman was concerned about her father. She was loyal to family. He understood that feeling. It said a lot about her.

  He’d talked to her briefly before he left. The Governor had fallen asleep on his couch after their conversation, and Elefante went to the door to let himself out. She was coming up the stairs to check on her father and caught him. He’d guessed she heard him leaving and wanted to make sure her father was okay. That’s what he would have done. Check that her father was breathing, maybe make sure the stranger wasn’t some goombah from years past who showed up wanting to even things. That said a lot about her too. She was shy, but clearly not that shy, and
not stupid. And not afraid.

  They’d met in the hallway by the front door. They’d talked maybe twenty minutes. She was immediately open and candid. He was someone her father trusted. So she trusted him.

  “I can handle things,” she said when he asked her about running the bagel shop on her own. He had joked about her tearing into the room, mop first, holding the bucket and using the mop as a spear. She laughed and said, “Oh, that. My poppa cleans like a kindergartner.”

  “Well, he’s worked hard enough.”

  “Yes, but he leaves his place a mess, and he falls asleep so easily.”

  “My feet fall asleep when I’m running for the bus.”

  She laughed again, and opened up more, and in the ensuing chat showed that behind the gentle veneer lay qualities more like those of her father, lighthearted, funny, but with a firmness and cleverness he found alluring. They chatted easily together. She knew he was there for important business. She knew their fathers had been close friends. Yet he still sensed a tentativeness. He probed her gently. That was his job, he thought bitterly, as a goddamned smuggler working with lowlife drug dealers like Joe Peck and murderers like Vic Gorvino: to sense weakness in others. Standing there, he felt her probing him as well. He felt her size him up and squeeze him—gently—for information. Try as he might, he couldn’t block it, couldn’t prevent her from seeing the part that most never saw, that while he was firm and tight on the surface, all business, maybe a little too Italian in his manner and speech, beneath it he bore the heavy sense of responsibility for his mother and those he cared about with kindness that was safer to hide. He was the man her father trusted. But why him? Why not a cousin or an uncle? Or at least a fellow Irishman? Why an Italian? In those twenty minutes the war between the races, the Italians versus the Irish, was waged, the two representatives of the black souls of Europe, left in the dust by the English, the French, the Germans, and later in America by the big boys in Manhattan, the Jews who forgot they were Jews, the Irish who forgot they were Irish, the Anglos who forgot they were human, who got together to make money in their big power meetings about the future, paving over the nobodies in the Bronx and Brooklyn by building highways that gutted their neighborhoods, leaving them to suffer at the hands of whoever came along, the big boys who forgot the war and the pogroms and the lives of the people who survived World War I and World War II sacrificing blood and guts for their America, so they could work with the banks and the city and state to slap expressways in the middle of thriving neighborhoods and send the powerless suckers who believed in the American dream scrambling to the suburbs because they, the big boys, wanted a bigger percentage. He felt it, or thought he felt it, as they stood by the front door. There was a connection: a man whose father was dead and a woman whose father was about to die, a sense of wanting to belong, standing in the warm vestibule, she in her farm-girl dress, with a job that paid taxes and drew no cops, no Joe Pecks, no complicated phone calls from complicated people trying to pick your pocket with one hand while saluting the flag with the other, and he feeling a sense of belonging he hadn’t felt in years.