by Justin Scott
“So what’s your problem?”
“I need money. My old man was—died, and everyone thinks I’m a kid. All I’m asking for is the money they agreed to loan him.”
Bunker looked at him for a full and silent thirty seconds. Chris glared back. Couldn’t anybody see what he knew was true?
“Preleased?”
“Fully.”
“Let me find your file.”
Bunker returned with a thick folder which he spread on his desk and read for five minutes. Finally he looked up. “This is a bitch.”
“I don’t owe that much,” Chris protested.
“That’s the bitch. You don’t owe us enough money to have any leverage.”
“What?”
“This morning I told a developer he owed us forty-six million dollars. He said he was aware of that. I asked when he proposed to pay it. He said as soon as the market gets better. I said that’s not good enough. He said, Then take my building. Then he said, Fuck you, and hung up. Because he knows as well as I know that the bank doesn’t have any use for a halfbuilt unleased building.”
“But he will pay you,” Chris said. “If you were ballsy, you’d lend him the money to finish his building.”
“You say ballsy and I think twenty million unused square feet.”
“He’s not a deadbeat, he’s just temporarily in trouble. Like me.”
“Unfortunately for you, Mr. Taglione, you don’t owe anywhere near forty-six million dollars. So your troubles aren’t the bank’s.”
“But I do have leases if I can just get the thing built.”
Bunker tapped the papers with his pencil and poked his calculator again. “The fact is, your father does seem to have minimized the risk. It’s a fairly creative financial structure.”
“Pretty good for a hod carrier.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Something he used to say.”
“It’s obvious he was more interested in completing a building than reaping a large profit.”
“He wanted to get his foot in the door.”
“Yes, I can see that. It’s a good location, too. It’s this goddamned market that worries me Do you mind my asking how
your father died?”
Every instinct screamed that this slick Presbyterian would not lend money to a wop in a Mafia feud.
Bunker looked at him. “You said he died.”
“A construction accident,” Chris murmured, the lie burning in his stomach. “A truck. Never knew what hit him.” Another lie, to lay him to rest. If only that were true, he might not hate so much; but Mike Taglione had known exactly what had hit him and why.
Bunker removed his glasses, covered his face with his hands, and peered between his fingers. “I don’t believe I’m doing this, but provided everything you say checks out, we ll roll your notes another sixty days, and extend the next stage of credit.”
“Just like that?”
“Why not? I’m the entire real estate department, except for my assistant from Wharton, who apparently can’t find the building.”
Chris felt like a door had opened on a sunny room. He reached across the desk. “Thank you. I’ll never forget.”
Bunker shook hands mechanically, as if they had told him at school he was expected to indulge native customs.
3
CHAPTER
The brothers went out for a farewell supper the chilly September night before the day Tony returned to Cambridge for his first year at Harvard Law School. Chris suggested driving into the city, but Tony insisted on his favorite, Abatelli’s, an Italian restaurant on Woodhaven Boulevard. While Tony drove their father’s Lincoln, Chris stared moodily at the sidewalks; children were running home from the neighborhood shops with loaves of bread, milk, and the evening paper. He dreaded living in the empty house without his brother. He knew already that he would sleep most nights on a couch in the office trailer.
“Why do you think Pop did it?” Chris asked. “Why’d he tell Rendini to go fuck himself? After all those years of paying off.”
“I don’t want to talk about Pop.”
“Yeah, but why? I gotta know why.”
Tony sighed. “Why’d he suddenly go from building Queens apartment houses to a Manhattan office tower?”
“I think Pop made a mistake by not paying.”
“No, he didn’t. Will you get off it?”
“You mean that? He didn’t make a mistake?”
“He did the right thing. His only mistake was doing it too late.”
Chris clung silently to his brother’s judgment.
Tony laughed softly. “You know, we’re switching roles at last. Here I am twenty-four years old, starting law school, and I’m finally becoming big brother, and you’re becoming the dumb kid.”
“It took you long enough, runt.”
The restaurant was deep and narrow, with three long rows of tables set with white tablecloths under replica Tiffany lamps. Joe Abatelli greeted them as regulars, for Tony had insisted on eating here two or three times a week, but tonight the expression on Joe’s square, fleshy face seemed guarded, Chris thought, and his greeting an ambivalent-sounding “Back so soon?”
“Tony can’t stay away and my pop always said this was the best guinea meal in the city.”
Joe put them at a table far in the back, Tony facing the door, and Chris the service bar. He beckoned a waiter and hurried away.
“What’s his problem?”
“Knife fight in the kitchen, maybe.”
They drank two fast scotches, as the restaurant filled up, and Chris started to relax. Hunting their waiter for another refill, he happened to be glancing toward the entrance when a sensual, dark-haired girl glided in on the crest of a large family.
His throat tightened and his mouth went dry; for one clear, icy moment he forgot his father, the job, everything. She was very young, in her middle teens, slight, with pretty legs and small, round breasts. Her lips were full, her eyes large and very still. Her dark skin seemed to glow and her hair was like a long, silky drift of black night.
Tony looked up from his menu. “Check it out!”
“I saw her first—she’s mine!”
Tony gave his sharp tone a look. Then he smiled and said, “We’ll see.”
“I’m not kidding, Bro. This is one time you keep your hands off or I’ll break your head.”
“Oh yeah?” Tony said with another teasing smile. “You might have to get on line. Catch her big brother. He looks like an ape somebody shaved. Christ, she has two of them. And look at her old man!”
Her father was shorter than his sons, but easily as broad, and despite his fear that Tony would move in on him, Chris laughed. “Alphonse could lease those guys to chew rocks. Hey, her mom’s cute.”
“Kind of like Sylvia.” She had Sylvia’s carefully made up and dressed look, as if she too had been in show business, but she was petite like her daughter.
“Mom must have some genes to hold off daddy’s. That has got to be the most beautiful girl in Queens. Let’s trade seats.”
“I wouldn’t give you this seat for three hundred dollars. Turn around and stop staring.”
Joe Abatelli sat the family near the front. The parents placed the girl between them, while the brothers sat with their backs to Chris and Tony.
Tony flashed his best smile.
“What was that for?”
“She looked at me.”
Chris glanced over his shoulder. Her enormous eyes were violet. “I am definitely in love.”
“She’s only about fifteen.”
“I will sleep in her garage for three years.” He stopped Joe as the owner went by calling orders to his bartender. “Hey, Joe, you got a line on those people?”
“What people?”
“The far-out girl with the huge ugly guys.”
Joe pulled away. “I hear he owns the Blue Bus Line,” he said coolly.
“She’s his daughter?”
“I don’t know ’em. They’re fro
m Brooklyn.”
“What are they doing here?”
“What are you, a detective? They came to my restaurant. I’m very complimented. I hear they own restaurants, too. In Canarsie.”
Chris grinned. He felt spacey, high on the scotch, and abruptly happy, as if a weight had lifted and he could be twenty-one for a night instead of businessman of the year. “I’ll pay you eight hundred bucks for her phone number.”
“I’m busy.” Joe hurried off.
“What’s with him?”
Tony shrugged.
“How about another drink?”
“Is she looking?”
“At me. What are you gonna eat?”
“Cheesecake on her breasts.”
Tony waved for the waiter. “How you doin’? Veal chop for Chris. Steak for me. Split a caesar salad?”
“Big one. And clams. Want to have clams first?”
Tony said, “We’ll start with clams. And we’ll have another drink.”
“Doubles.”
The waiter wrote it down and left.
“What’s she doing?”
“They just got company.”
“Who?” Chris didn’t want to waste a turn around when she was distracted. “Who came in?”
“I’m not sure.” Tony looked tense, alert, like a hunter sniffing the wind.
“What’s going on?”
“I said I’m not sure.”
“I’m checking this out. I’ll get some cigarettes.”
“No! Stay there. Have one of mine. I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
“Who came in?”
“Another family. I’ll tell you when to look. Papa, Mama, and a guy about our age. Joe’s pulled the tables together. Everybody’s up, shaking hands. Now!”
Chris pretended to wave for a waiter. The new arrivals were Italian, too, but looked like out-of-towners. The father was wearing a pastel leisure suit with a lot of gold, and the woman, suntanned to a mahogany brown, bulged in pink slacks and a flowered blouse. The son, a quiet-looking kid with troubled eyes, said hello shyly to the beautiful girl, who replied without a smile.
Their waiter came back with the scotch. Tony asked, “Who just came in?”
“I don’t know ’em.”
“Joe knew they were coming. What’d the reservation say?”
“I don’t know, man,” he replied, hurrying away.
“What’s Miss Universe doing?” Chris asked.
“Reading her menu.”
“You think they’d sell us their daughter?”
“Lease her.”
“We could say we’re orphans starting a new family. We need a sister.”
“Funny.”
Their waiter returned with raw cherrystone clams and hot bread. Chris started to turn around again. Tony said, “I’ll watch, you tell me how the job’s going.”
Chris filled Tony in briefly on his loans from Bunker and the latest scheduling victories achieved by the managers he had hired for credibility. Tony’s dark eyes kept flickering toward the front of the restaurant. “It sounds like you know what you’re doing.”
“No. But no one else seems to, either. So I keep moving and they keep running after me. Funny thing is, I know now that’s how Pop operated. He always seemed to know what he was doing, but he couldn’t. Nobody could. It’s all a moving target. Sure you won’t join me?”
“I told you, I’m going to be a prosecutor.”
Chris glanced over his shoulder. She was looking down at her precisely folded small hands, her face shielded by her long, shiny hair. The second time he looked she was nibbling like a cat from a plate of antipasto. There were several big platters of the hot antipasto on the table and the group seemed to be prolonging it as an icebreaker. When he looked a third time, her father said something, and her brothers turned around and gave him a hard look. Their waiter rescued him with a thick veal chop that covered most of the plate.
Later, halfway through his steak, Tony said, “I can’t figure it out.”
“What?”
“That’s a meet of some sort.”
Chris turned around again. She looked up, straight at him, her violet eyes blazing defiance. Then she surprised him with a small, private smile, and he smiled back. Her brother noticed and Chris turned away before he caused her problems. Tony was smiling too, and Chris suddenly realized he didn’t know which of them she had smiled at.
“It’s about her,” he said. “They’re marrying her off.”
“What?”
“And she’s fighting it.”
“Nobody does that shit anymore. Order some wine. I gotta make a call.”
Tony was gone a long time. Chris buttered breadsticks, picked at his salad, and stole glances at the girl. She got up as if to go to the ladies’ room. The same direction, he thought enviously, that Tony had gone. She was gone awhile, and when she came back, she gave Chris a stoned smile and he realized she had escaped to smoke a joint. Tony returned and Chris asked, “She come by the phone?”
“Yeah, she’s going to spend the weekend with me at the cabin. After I teach her what to do with it, she’ll marry you.”
“You didn’t even say hello.”
“Actually, I was too busy talking to the guys at the office.”
He clinked his glass to Chris’s and said through his smile, “There is a meet going on at that table. They’re connected.”
“Bullshit. Racket guys don’t meet with their wives.”
“I thought the Blue Line Bus sounded familiar. Miss Universe’s father is Eddie Rizzolo. He runs South Brooklyn and chunks of Queens. Gambling mostly, books and numbers, and he’s got his paws in freight forwarding at Kennedy and La-Guardia. A little hijacking on the side. He’s got a kind of loose partnership with the Cirillos. I keep hearing that this is a mob joint. Now we get to see the bastards.”
“Fuck,” Chris blurted, his emotions flip-flopping as they had all summer. “What are you taking us to a mob place for?”
“I want to see these fuckers with my own eyes—hey, who’s this?”
A little man in his sixties scuttled in the door and made for the joined tables, apologizing profusely in a voice that carried. “I’m so sorry. Business. I couldn’t get away.”
His thin ginger hair looked dyed. His suit was too large and his face sagged as if he had lost weight recently; his movements, however, were quick with nervous energy. Chris thought of a tiny shrew he had seen in the country, flinging itself on giant beetles, which it ripped apart with teeth and claws.
The fathers and the brothers shot to their feet, protesting that they themselves had just arrived. The mothers bobbed their heads with confirming smiles. The girl watched gravely, still as granite. Joe came running and solicitously guided the newcomer to the head of the table.
“Sit, sit.” The little man smiled, and they dropped like stones.
“Somebody big,” Tony said needlessly, and then, more to the point, “Turn around, Chris.”
He did, his heart pounding. “Hey, Joe!” Joe was hurrying toward the bar again, calling for another Pinot Grigio. “Who’s that came in?”
“I don’t know.” He passed by again, the wine bottle in his hand. While he was fumbling with the foil and cork, the waiter dropped a check on Chris and Tony’s table.
“What’s this? We haven’t even finished. We’re going to have dessert.”
“Joe wants you to pay.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re bugging him with all your questions. He’s got a big night going and he doesn’t have time for it. The drinks were on the house.”
“What is this? All I’m asking is about a girl—”
The waiter leaned closer. “You ought to shut up, Chris. Do you know who just came in? You ever hear of Don Richard Cirillo?”
“Bullshit,” said Tony. “He never comes out.”
“He’s out now, man. Sitting right there. So why don’t you both shut up.”
Chris turned completely around and star
ed at the man who controlled the biggest single piece of the rackets in New York: narcotics, gambling, extortion, and a number of union locals that his father—and now he—had to deal with. And one Teamsters local in particular, run by Joey Rendini.
Tony pinned his arm to the table. “No.”
“I’ll kill that fucker.”
The waiter backed away—“Jesus, what did I say?”—and Joe Abatelli raced to their table. “Please, Chris. I don’t need this kind of trouble.”
Chris started to stand up. Tony wrestled his arm with both hands and muttered through his teeth to Joe, “You know what happened to my father. Why the hell didn’t you say something when we came in?”
The restaurateur looked wild with panic. “I didn’t know. I just knew these people were meeting. Neutral territory or some fucking thing. I didn’t know he’d set it up. Gimme a break, Chris. Let me get through the night. Don’t start trouble.”
“We’re leaving,” Tony said. “I don’t want to be in the same room with those creeps.”
“Thank you, Tony. Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m sorry about this, Chris.”
“What’s the meeting about?” Chris asked.
“Hey, come on.”
Tony turned on him harshly, “Joe, a second ago you’re thanking me. You owe me. Answer Chris. What’s it about?” Their father’s credo: Take nothing for nothing. Give nothing for nothing.
Joe whispered, “I think it’s two families been fighting. Don Richard brought ’em together. I appreciate your leaving now.”
