by Ira Gold
Before I do anything I check if anyone is watching. Of course I can’t tell a thing. Then I go to the back of the garage. Even in the dark after all these years I find the stone that’s not a stone—the piece of wood covered in plaster and painted to look like stone.
The part of my heart not pounding my brain to smithereens gladdens. I push.
Nothing happens. Had Vinnie replaced the fake with the real? Had he known that his system had been compromised? I kneel and get my weight fully into my shove. The hinge must be rotten from disuse. Then I hear a squeak. And then a squeal, long and loud. I stop pushing. It takes all my strength not to run for my life. Enough noise has been made to attract every capo in the tristate area. I imagine that Vinnie has gotten a shotgun and is waiting for me inside the garage. Do I want to die reliving my childhood?
So I die. So what? Suicide by gangster. Annoy a wise guy enough and he’ll pull the trigger almost as quickly as a cop. I push again. The squeaky hatch lifts. Was the opening always this narrow? Could Vinnie Five-Five’s gut get through? Impossible. But he always believed the tunnel would save his life at least once.
Meanwhile I slither into the pitch-black garage. I stand utterly still. I listen carefully for movement, breathing, the cocking of a gun. No. I’m alone.
My eyes adjust. A bit of light filters in from a small window covered in chicken wire. Julius’s Mustang is parked two feet away from the tunnel.
Vinnie must have given up any thought of using his elaborate escape mechanism. Maybe after all those years he started to feel safe. Maybe he got too fat to crawl for his life.
I can go back the way I came and no one will be the wiser. I look at the stone. It has stayed in the up position. They would be the wiser. So I make another stupid decision. I pull up the trap door.
I lower myself into the tunnel. It’s tighter than I remember. I crawl through it. My clothes blacken with grease, my face streaks with grime. I think of the scene in Apocalypse Now when a mud-encrusted Martin Sheen rises out of the swamps. I hum, This is the end / my beautiful friend . . .
A decade of dust rises from the floor like a toxic event. I’m going to sneeze.
Three quick bursts. Tears leak from my eyes. Snot runs from my nose and drool flecks the corners of my lips.
As kids, we had flashlights. Now it is dark as a grave, so I have nothing but memories to light my way. They’re enough to find the metal ladder banged into the dirt and I climb into the basement. (The only time Vinnie used the tunnel was to put Cupcake into the trunk of his car without any chance of the neighbors seeing him carrying a corpse.)
This is the most dangerous point. If Vinnie has an office down here, if he has retreated to plot strategy with his soldiers, I’m dead. There’s nothing I can do about that.
It’s quiet, however. I suspect Vinnie is asleep. Often gangsters gad about most of the night. When things are going well, we party, enjoy the hookers, dine with mistresses. Vinnie Five-Five has a dark-haired, dimpled Pakistani guma, about twenty-two, whom he takes to the finest restaurants where he meets other middle-aged gangsters with other post-pubescent lovers. He goes to meetings at strip clubs all over the city. A gangster’s work is never done.
But tonight, in the middle of the war, in mourning for his son, with the need to psych himself up for the coming bloodbath, he might very well be contemplating his affairs, maybe even talking to his wife, though in the mood I saw her, I doubt she wants to talk to him.
A deep weariness now overcomes me. I want to crawl behind the boiler and go to sleep. I also need to take a dump. I half expected this. Many housebreakers experience loose bowels. The burgled come home and are often more disturbed, horrified, by the pile of poop in the middle of their living room than by the missing silverware. The emptying of bowels is taken as a definitive “fuck you,” a personal level of contempt that does more to violate a victim’s sense of self than the emptying of her entire living room.
In reality, it’s a combination of nerves and adrenaline that makes thieves drop their pants where they stand. It’s nothing personal.
After another minute the pressure dissipates and the need passes.
The basement seems to have fallen into disuse and has become filthy. By now, I have enough grime on my body to apply for a Superfund grant. So what? It makes me invisible in the night.
I pull the gun from my waistband. This action and the solidness of the weapon calm me. Afterward these sentences somehow assemble themselves: My decision to hit Vinnie is both stupid and suicidal. Thus, it is the only ethical course. I try to think more profoundly but those words lie at the bottom of my brain as if they are a desert carcass and my consciousness a circling vulture. Ethical, stupid, suicide, justified, light up in neon and then fade like the phosphorescence in a firefly’s ass. At one point I fall against the back wall. But in seconds my eyes open and I’m floating in a tranquil sea. My chest rises and falls in lightly heaving waves.
Why am I doing something so risky? The days of individual heroism ended in the eleventh century with the “Song of Roland.” Why buck a thousand-year tradition of cowardice?
Even this thought doesn’t stop me. The third stair is warped and I step over it. I have so much experience sneaking into and out of basements that it seems I do nothing else.
At the head of the stairs, I hear nothing. I enter the kitchen and push through the swinging doors into the living room. I see that Mrs. Five-Five has kept all the plastic slipcovers on the furniture. They gleam evilly, reflecting ambient light and bad taste.
I go into the den: large-screen TV, La-z-Boy armchairs with attached cup holders. Here is a narrow spiral staircase, metal, that Vinnie installed years ago so he could get directly to his bedroom. It will not creak as I climb it.
I listen. Vinnie snores the snore of fat men. I assume his wife is also asleep. I hold the gun, its safety off.
Even if Vinnie awakens, the story will be over.
The key to a successful hit is the willingness to pull the trigger. Once the hurdle of conscience is overcome, you could murder one or a dozen or a million. Just weaponry limits you.
The bedroom door is open. Vinnie and his wife lie in separate double beds. I’m not surprised. Even in his sleep, Vinnie probably throws his weight around.
If the night had been dreamlike before, it turns positively hallucinatory. I’m me but not me. I’m acting and also hovering on the ceiling watching the action. Events that take forever to unfold then occur quickly. I grab the pillow out from under Vinnie’s head and just as his eyes record a second of recognition, I cover his face, press the barrel of the gun into the pillow, and pop him three times.
Though the pillow muffles the noise, Mrs. Five-Five bolts up in her bed. She doesn’t recognize me right away, blackened as I am, and she shrieks, her hand coming up to her face just as in the Munch painting.
Must I pop her too?
My hand is still pressing the pillow into Vinnie’s face. Blood seeps through the pillowcase. Mrs. Five-Five sees this too.
“Howie?”
She has made me. Not that surprising since she’s known me all my life.
I point the gun at her head while I nod in greeting.
“What did you do, Howie?” she asks with only a trace of hysteria in her voice.
I let go of the pillow. She knows exactly what I’ve done.
“You should leave this house, Howie. You should leave immediately.”
I keep the gun pointed at her head. She now gazes at me frankly, not the least bit frightened.
“Howie, where are your shoes?”
Without even realizing it, I left them in the basement.
“You should have taken my advice and run before all this.”
My head hangs. I’m embarrassed by my stupid miscalculations. “I should have done a lot of things.”
“That’s right.” Mrs. Spoleto gets out of the bed and puts on a bathrobe that’s thrown over a chair by her toilette table.
The gun taps my leg. I don’t know if I need to kill her.<
br />
“Howie, you have a cigarette?”
This surprises me. I never saw Mrs. Spoleto smoke. But from my pocket I pull out a plastic bag. “Nothing. Just some pot.”
“All right.” The old middle-aged lady opens the table’s drawer and removes a bone-stemmed pipe with a purple glass bowl. Her hands shake as she takes a pinch of cannabis out of the bag and stuffs it into the bowl. “Do you have a light, Howie?”
I pat my pocket. Horrified, I realize that I have lost my lighter.
“Go into the cabinet above the stove and bring the matches.”
When I get back from the kitchen, Mrs. Spoleto has applied some lipstick and is examining her face in the mirror. She must have concluded that at fifty-eight she looks seventy because she frowns and shakes her head in disbelief. She lights up. “I’d offer you the pipe, but even your lips are covered in crap.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Mrs. Spoleto holds the match to the bowl and inhales. She takes close to thirty seconds to exhale. “That’s very good, Howie. Thank you. You got in through the garage tunnel.”
I nod.
“I told Vinnie to blow it up. I told him that someone would find it. He said only the contractor and he knew about it. And the contractor got whacked years ago.”
“We found it when we were kids.”
“Really? I told Vinnie . . . it doesn’t matter what I told Vinnie now, does it?” She points to the bag of pot. “Do you mind?”
“Please. Go ahead.” I still don’t know if I’m going to shoot her.
Mrs. Spoleto stuffs the pipe again. “In college, you know I went to college?”
“No.”
“Brooklyn College. I tried to go to Tulane where my friend Mary went, but my parents wanted me close to home. They worried I’d marry a black guy. Kids back then did those things.”
She’s babbling.
“I should never have let Vinnie into my life. But my parents liked him.”
“Vinnie had his good points.”
We both looked at the bed. By now a large brown stain spread from under his pillow.
“I shouldn’t speak badly about the recently dead.” And her nose reddens and she starts whimpering. But she quickly gains control of herself by sucking in as much weed as one could in a single breath. “Thank you for this, Howie. I used to smoke a lot. Maybe too much. It calmed me down enough to stay with Vinnie. And now everything’s turned to shit. You know he was smart and handsome. Everyone knew he would be a captain. I came from a family that believed working your way up in the Cosa Nostra was a decent career path. There were risks, of course, but every business has risks. Joe Bananas was my mother’s cousin. He lived until ninety.”
“He was the exception.”
“Everyone thinks they’re the exception. Do you think you’re an exception, Howie?”
“To what?”
“To the run of the mill. To the inevitable consequences of your actions.”
“Who knows?” A murdered husband brings out the philosopher in everyone.
Our eyes again drift over to Vinnie’s body. Fifteen minutes ago he was the kingmaker in south Brooklyn. He commanded a private army and had the power of life and death over his subjects. Now he is a piece of meat, as defenseless against his wife’s criticism as he is to the maggots that will pick his bones clean.
“I would have left him when the kids were young but he would have killed me,” Mrs. Five-Five says. “‘The Spoletos,’ Vinnie told me, ‘do not believe in divorce.’”
33
The Carpet
All her life she fought him. She had nearly pulled Julius from the pit. She got him out of high school and accepted into Fordham. (Gus’s achievements would have been limited no matter what.) In the end, Julius never made it past his first semester. Vinnie won because he offered the quickest route to a powerful identity. A lot of people think they’re tough guys. However, knowing yourself to be genuinely fearless—above the dread of pain, beyond the terror of death—is a rush. Taking the safest route to contentment is too full of risk to be worth it.
“I tried,” Mrs. Spoleto continues to insist. “You remember how I used to make them do homework. Vinnie wanted them to clip that hoodlum Rocky Monk.” She sighs at the memory. “Vinnie and I, we were never on the same page about those kids.”
This leads to a longish, meditative silence in which Mrs. Five-Five slowly packs another bowl. After taking a hit, she asks, “Are you going to kill me?”
“No.”
“Too bad.”
“I just wanted to stop the war. I also think Vinnie planned to whack me.”
“He certainly did,” Mrs. Spoleto confirms with sickening certainty. “You’re a good boy, Howie, even if you aren’t all that . . . even if you don’t thoroughly think things out. Killing one man doesn’t always do the trick once the wheels are in motion.”
Mrs. Spoleto speaks with the confidence of one with inside information. First she knows that Vinnie had enough of me. Had Vinnie already made the arrangements? With whom? Gus? I understand now what murderers of every rank know. Once you start, the killing never ends.
“What do you plan on doing with Vinnie?”
“I did it!” What the hell more can I do to the poor fool?
“Relax, Howie. All your life in the rackets and you still don’t realize that the hardest job is getting rid of the body. You have to clean up after yourself. On that Vinnie and I were in agreement.”
I stare blankly at Mrs. Spoleto. If I hadn’t whacked her husband I would never have guessed what a wit she is. “I was going to kill you both and then wait until Gus found you. He’d think that Vlad got you.”
“I’m still here.”
“I never thought you would be okay with . . . I thought you would be upset about Vinnie.”
“You did? Even after our conversation at the viewing?”
“I knew you were angry, but I didn’t know that you and Vinnie were . . .”
“Bitter enemies?”
“I didn’t know how deep the hatred ran.”
Mrs. Five-Five murmurs, “Deep. I never found the bottom.” She looks into the mirror. “Was I really that invisible? I see myself in the glass. How come no one else does?”
It becomes hard to imagine how a woman with character this strong had all the impact of a benign ghost on her family’s destiny.
She snaps her head away from the mirror. “Since you left me alive, it would be better for both of us if Vinnie vanished.”
I wait for Mrs. Five-Five to finish. I’m tired of thinking.
“You can take him to the usual place.”
“You know—”
“Howie, I know everything. I’m a human wiretap. That’s what happens when your husband thinks you’re deaf and dumb.”
“You know about Loch Sheldrake?”
“Exit 21 off 17. There’s an old carpet in the basement. Roll him up in it and get him to the car through the tunnel. Take the same trip as Cupcakes.”
“You know about—”
“HE WHACKED HIM IN MY HOUSE. The son of a bitch. Go now. Then I’ll call Gus and tell him that his father never came home. That might put off the raid on Vlad’s headquarters. I can’t see Gus leading the charge. Or I can’t see anyone following him.”
I can’t stop myself. “How in hell did you know about—”
“Get the carpet. It’s in the rec room.”
I run down the stairs. Before I even hit the lights I recognize the place from its sour, smoky odor. Here the twins and I whiffed on anything that could be rolled. When Mrs. Five-Five came down to stop us, we laughed in her face. Yeah, we were real tough guys.
I search the room for the rug. The pool table stands where it always had, the felt worn away in the same places. Gus got good enough to hustle all over Brooklyn. It was the one thing in which he surpassed Julius. Julius got so aggravated at Gus’s skill that he stopped going to bars with us. Then Gus, who played pool only to annoy Julius, stopped hustling too.
> There is the TV with an old Nintendo, the one we had as teenagers. The heavy punching bag still hangs from the ceiling, as does the speed bag. This is a museum to my childhood. I see Julius sitting on the ratty couch, no rattier today, rolling a joint. Gus practices a bank shot. And what am I doing? I’m quiet. By then I had learned enough to keep my mouth shut and channel surf.
But I’m happy. I’m with my brothers. Even before pubescence, we had the sense that we were special, that people would not fuck with us. To a boy, this is as intoxicating as the sweetest weed, as the purest blow. It changes one’s brain pattern. It allows one to step into a lion’s den with a pair of night vision goggles to hit the deadliest animals in the world. It gives one a heady sense of power, significance, and invulnerability. It allows us to savor the present. Like soldiers off to the front, gangsters live for the moment, relish food, pussy, and soft fabrics more deeply than the most heedless, straight epicurean.
I can’t help myself. I plop down on the couch. I never want to leave this room, never mind the neighborhood. Here in this half-finished basement I had reached the apogee of human communion. Our youthful plots to conquer the world achieved a specificity far more satisfying than any reality. The shadows and I can live here in peace for the rest of time. Reading the old masters is useful for when you find yourself disgraced in fortune and men’s eyes. But it is not human communion or even the memory of it.
But time puts an end to love as surely as the bullet put an end to Vinnie Five-Five.
“HOWIE, what’s going on down there? Did you find it?”
Ah, shit. You can go home again, but just for a minute, long enough for you to mourn the inability to recapture the best times of your life.
My eyes scan the room. In the corner, leaning up against a folded Ping-Pong table is a carpet tied with string, heavy and stinky with mold. More dirt attaches itself to my face. I’ve been tarred and feathered.
The carpet weighs a ton. I can’t imagine how we’re going to roll Vinnie’s 250 dead pounds into it and then schlep it to the car.
I lug the carpet up the stairs. Mrs. Five-Five still sits smoking at her table.
“Good boy,” she says as I push the rug into the room. She throws me a pair of nail scissors. “Cut the string. I’ll help you move the body.”
