by Justin Scott
Bumpy rounded a corner and said, “Oh, shit.”
Three kids from a gang called the Spanish Main were leaning on a storefront. They straightened up when they saw him, as if they’d been waiting. They rarely ventured up to this side of Third Avenue, because it was Devils’ territory and the Devils had a protection agreement with the Cirillos. Trouble was, Bumpy thought, the Devils had been getting their asses kicked lately and there wasn’t a Devil in sight. Then he realized there were more Spanish Main waiting up the block. He turned back, figuring to head for the more populated Morris Avenue, but two more kids were rounding the corner behind him, at which point he stopped worrying about the money and the slips because his real problem was going to be getting out of this alive. At twenty-eight and nursing a tubercular leg, he was too old to run and too tired to fight. God, send me a cop, he thought. But there were none. He looked for the van which had been following him, but there was suddenly no one on the burned-out block but him and them, and they were walking his way.
Bumpy stepped to a parked car, reached carefully into his pockets, and started piling dollar bills on the hood. The wind caught them and he lunged, crumpling them in his fists. The kids formed a half-circle on the sidewalk around the car, watching with dead eyes, and Bumpy felt an anger he seldom indulged begin to well up inside him, a boiling frustration. All he was trying to do was make a small living and these little bastards half his age made him walk in fear. He was not a violent man, though he had seen as much violence as anyone who had grown up in a poor city, but suddenly, if he could, he would shoot them all like Bernie Goetz, the subway vigilante. Not that he could shoot them—he had no gun, just a knife, which he really could not use well enough to defend himself one on one, much less against the six guys now circling him and watching him try to keep his money from blowing away.
“Here. Take it.”
He had made the worst possible mistake—not that he had any choice—by admitting he was defenseless. Their leader, a kid with a three-whisker mustache, said, “Somebody pop him.”
Two of them pulled guns, huge, rusty forty-fives with barrels big around as sewer pipes. Forget a flesh wound. They were going to tear holes through his body. He felt like screaming, Go away, leave me alone! “Here’s the money,” he repeated softly.
“Pop him.”
Bumpy closed his eyes.
“Whoa! Who be that?”
An engine raced close by and Bumpy opened his eyes. The van was coming. It stopped short beside the car and two black guys in suits and raincoats got out quickly. He thought they were cops, canceled that, and thought again; maybe, by their business suits and cold faces, they were Black Muslims. But maybe not; maybe something else. They gave the street a quick look and one pulled out a big plastic garbage bag, the other a sawed-off shotgun.
“Pieces in here. You first.”
The thirteen-year-old with the forty-five looked at the sawed-off double barrels and gingerly dropped his gun into the sack.
“Now you. Don’t drop it. Just lay it in gentle.” His partner turned the shotgun on the leader. “Tell your men to open their colors. The rest of the guns. Then the knives.”
“Hey, man, who the fuck—?”
“Who the fuck? What do you mean, who the fuck?”
Bumpy saw the dude’s polished shoe blur up from the sidewalk high as his shoulder. The steel toe cracked the kid’s jawbone and he fell hard and silent to the cement. The dude wiped the blood off his shoe on the Spanish Main leader’s pants. “Anybody else say who the fuck?”
He collected the rest of their weapons and told them to pick up their leader. Then he pointed at Bumpy. “You mark this man? You remember him. If he ever has a problem—any kind of problem at all—we’ll come back and cut your balls off.” He looked at each kid, straight in the face. “So that means if you see anybody else giving him a problem, you look out for him. Right? He’s your friend. Got that? Okay, go on now—git!” When they had gone, he turned to Bumpy. “There’s been some changes made.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll be delivering your bets to someone else.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Mikey, we got trouble.”
Crazy Mikey waited, working his coke spoon with his fingers, repeatedly opening and shutting the miniature breech. Had the bearer of more bad news been anyone but Sally Smarts Ponte, he might have thrown him down the stairs of the Jackson Heights videogame warehouse he used for meetings. But although troubles were multiplying faster than he could keep up, he still couldn’t yell at Consigliere Ponte. As far back as his childhood, the consigliere had been there, his father’s closest adviser and his own godfather, a firm, quiet man whose advice always cut to the heart of a problem.
“It sounds like something everyone’s afraid to tell me, so they sent you.”
Ponte, a darkly handsome lawyer in his fifties, gave him a smile. He wasn’t a warm man; were he, Mikey couldn’t have trusted him. But he was a man who lent his full attention to whomever he served. “You’re right. They’re afraid.”
Mikey thought that it was incredible that just when the dope business was going so well, everything else started falling apart. First they had lost Brooklyn books and numbers to the Rizzolos. Now the bastards were moving into the Bronx. But the other families accused the Cirillos of moving in on them. Everybody thought he had bombed Joe Reina in retaliation for the Caffe di Tullio shooting. Vito Imperiale was barely talking to him, and the Bonos and Confortis had announced that Cirillos were not welcome on their streets—which put all of them one angry Sicilian from open warfare.
“Now what?” he asked Ponte.
“They hit the Chelsea club. Robbed the customers and the take.”
“Who?”
“Looks like freelances.”
“Find out who and get them.”
“That’s not the problem. After they left and the customers were leaving, some people came up to the high rollers and said they had caught the guys and had their stuff. They brought the high rollers to another club in the next block and helped them sort out coats and jewelry and even some cash.”
“What other club?”
“A new joint opened during the summer down the street from Limelight. Tommy Lucia’s friends had it ready to go. Wheels, booze, broads dealing blackjack—the whole thing. Most of our best customers stayed the rest of the night.”
“In other words, the Rizzolos have moved into Chelsea.” Mikey started playing with the little shotgun model again; Ponte watched anxiously, but Mikey, he was relieved to see, never went near the coke. At last, he said, “It’s time to hit back.”
“I wouldn’t rush into anything, Mikey.”
“I ain’t rushing. I been thinking about this for weeks.”
“Tommy’s just a dumb guinea in the middle.”
Crazy Mikey said, “Yeah. He’s in the middle of Frank and Eddie Rizzolo.”
“We can’t afford a war with the Strikeforce on our backs,” Consigliere Ponte protested.
“It’ll be a short one,” Mikey promised grimly.
“What if it’s not the Rizzolos?”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know. I think something’s going on.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“Here’s what I know: Memorial Day, somebody turned Vetere in to the Strikeforce and Vetere ratted on Nicky, so my father told me to take over. Everybody thought I couldn’t handle the family past Fourth of July, but by the end of the summer I got the dope flowing again. But while I’m busy doing that, three guys walked into the Caffe di Tullio and blasted our Brooklyn underboss, and pretty soon we lost most of his books. By Labor Day they were hitting us in the Bronx. Now, it isn’t even Halloween and Tommy Lucia is holding hands in Manhattan with Frank and Eddie Rizzolo. We’re going to be dead by Christmas if we don’t do something about the Rizzolos.”
“Warn Helen and have your people watch her club,” Taggart ordered when Reggie reported what his spies were p
icking up in the Cirillo camp. “Follow her when she goes to the restaurants.”
“First of all, they’re not likely to attack a woman, especially when they don’t know she’s the real brains of her family. Secondly, the Rizzolos were defending their enterprises when your father was pushing a wheelbarrow.”
“I’m not taking chances. I don’t want her hurt.”
15
CHAPTER
The Rizzolos’ Blue Line bus bam was a steep-gabled wooden structure built in 1893 to house trolleys. It sheltered an area of Long Island City two blocks long and three wide. Skylights dimpled its vast roofs like mountain villages of little houses clinging to their slopes. Inside it resounded with idling engines, shrieking air guns, and low-gear whine as drivers jockeyed the buses into the maintenance bays. The air reeked of diesel exhaust.
Helen Rizzolo had always loved the smell. The sharp bite reminded her of rare visits as a little girl to see her father at work in his white shirtsleeves rolled up his thick forearms, a dark vest, and a loosened tie. Once, to her brothers’ dismay, he had let her steer a bus while seated on his lap. It was a place that made her happy, and when she came to do the payroll, she always entered through the wooden gingerbread embellishments around the front door. She turned on her headlights and beeped the horn to warn the hustling mechanics, and her Fiat skittered past the bays, dodging the buses like a busy, brighteyed red bug.
The office was a hut in the back, partitioned by thin plywood walls that barely muffled the noise. She could tell by the quiet when the mechanics were on lunch or coffee break. The office had a much lower ceiling than the rest of the barn, windows that looked out on a junk-filled yard, and a back door. Eddie and Frank hung out here, since the company was their legitimate employer; Eddie was president, Frank vice-president, and she the treasurer.
She kissed them, took her desk, and opened a container of tea she had bought at the deli. Eddie, head in hands, was staring at a sheaf of papers from the city. “Why the fuck did Pop make us a bus business in Long Island?”
“Now what’s wrong?”
“We can’t go interstate. The buses in Westchester, they run the route through two inches of Connecticut so they can tell the city to go fuck itself ’cause crossing the state line makes ’em interstate commerce. But we gotta obey every local law the city makes up. Can’t use this street, can’t use that, no noise, no idling.”
While talking, Eddie was writing a note; they had installed a new telephone line in response to Taggart’s warning about the Strikeforce tap, but with the buses coming and going they couldn’t count on sweeping every bug. He slipped the note to her: “Three more Cirillo books came our way last night. We got Brooklyn numbers wrapped up and a lot of the Bronx.”
Helen smiled and Eddie returned a grin which seemed, she thought, almost deferential. Thanks to her deal with Taggart, Eddie and Frank were giving her credit for their new prosperity.
“Why don’t we go through Jersey?” she asked aloud, writing back, “Any word on how Mikey’s taking it?”
Eddie showed it to Frank, then touched a match to the paper. It burned in his ashtray.
“Well?”
He shrugged. Helen looked at Frank. He shrugged, too, and she realized her brothers were embarrassed to admit that whatever spies they had managed to infiltrate among the Cirillos didn’t know. She reminded herself that her new power was a two-edged sword. She had to be careful not to undercut their pride. They would do something foolish to get it back.
She started in on the computer, but her mind stayed on Christopher Taggart and his scheme. It was going almost too well. Between the Strikeforce tearing pieces out of the Cirillos on the legal side and Taggart gnawing away from inside, the huge, powerful family seemed almost paralyzed.
The telephone rang. Eddie picked it up, listened a moment, and glanced her way. Helen pretended she didn’t notice when he nodded to Frank and said into the phone. “I’ll be here.”
“Who was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you guys dealing again?”
“Shhhh! Jesus, Helen. What if—?”
“’Cause if you are, I want you to stop it. I told you no dope.”
Eddie scrabbled about his desk for a piece of paper and wrote, “Shut up! It’s just a little coke deal on the side. Guy’s been talking it up for months.”
“I don’t believe you,” she protested, thinking, How could they risk blowing everything for a stupid dope deal? But she blamed herself; she had pushed them too hard. It was like they had to prove something to themselves, like they didn’t really need her. Godammit, they did. And she needed them.
Eddie wrote, “We’re just going to set up a meeting,” folded his arms, and stared obstinately at his desk top. Even Frank wouldn’t meet her eye. Seething, as angry at herself as she was at them, Helen pounded the computer keys like an old-fashioned typewriter.
Twenty minutes passed and the phone rang again. Eddie snatched it up. His eyes widened and he motioned to Frank to pick up too. Helen grabbed her extension and covered the mouthpiece as the caller repeated, “I said, You recognize my voice?”
It was Crazy Mikey Cirillo.
“Yeah, I know you. What’s up?”
“I just want you to know who this is coming from.”
“What’s coming?”
“This.”
Helen looked at Frank, who sprang to his feet like a panther, reaching into the locker where he kept a brace of legally owned hunting rifles. Then the wall seemed to get suddenly very big as it flew at her. An explosion thundered through the barn.
She found herself on the floor, pinned under the wall, which was propped up by her desk. The computer lay beside her; the winking green cursor blanketed the screen with squiggly shapes
she had never seen before. The mechanics were yelling in the bam and something was roaring. A liquid—her own blood, she realized when she touched it—was running down her face.
“Frank! Eddie!”
“Stay there, baby. You okay?”
“Frank!”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Don’t move, hon. They might be shooting.”
She heard Eddie crawl past in the dark and yell, “There’s a fire!”
Helen saw the flickering of the flames. The mechanics and drivers were yelling; somewhere a man was screaming. She found the telephone wire on the floor, reeled in the phone, and dialed the lighted dial. When 911 answered she said, “Fire and explosion. Blue Line bus barn. Ambulance.”
She freed her leg and crawled out of the shelter formed by the wall and her desk. She was surprised to see daylight pouring in the skylights brighter than ever because the glass had been broken. The far end of the barn, the front, was filled with black smoke. The dense, greasy smoke had trapped some forty buses inside. She tried to stand and found she could. Frank grabbed her, his face horrified. “You’re bleeding.”
She wiped at it with her hand. Her head hurt. “I’m okay.”
Eddie came back with a gun in his hand. “They’re gone.”
Frank yelled, “I’ll drive a bus through the wall there to make a hole for the others.”
“No,” said Helen. “Help the men out! Leave the buses.” Frank was wild-eyed. “But I can save ’em!”
“We’ll do better on the insurance.”
Her legs started to collapse under her own weight and Frank scooped her into his huge arms. A million sirens seemed to scream at once. Eddie led Frank through the office door. Cradled in his arms, she saw the first plumes of water cascading into the flames. Frank carried her to the paramedics, who swabbed a gash in her scalp. She sat on the back of the ambulance watching the flames disintegrate the gingerbread front of the barn. By then the police were there, plainclothesmen and uniformed cops, and they were questioning Eddie and Frank, who were shrugging a lot.
“Okay, lie down, dear,” a paramedic said. “We’re going to take you to the hospital.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You might have a concussion.
”
She tried to argue, but her hands were shaking and she had the weirdest urge to cry.
She passed out in the ambulance and awakened in bed to hear a doctor saying, “Even a slight concussion is a helluva lot worse than no concussion.... Hello there! Follow my finger, please.”
He held it a foot from her face, moved it slowly above her forehead and down to her chin. “Good. Nauseous?”
“No.”
“Good. Now this way, left to right.” She focused and followed his finger to the right, saw it cross his middle-aged face. Behind him were a nurse, a television hanging from the ceiling, an IV rack at the corner of her bed, the bathroom door and wardrobe, a hundred red roses on a table—and Taggart standing in the doorway.
His face was working. He brushed past the doctor, took her hand, and knelt beside the bed so they were face to face, inches apart. He seemed barely able to speak. “Are you okay?”
“Mr. Taggart,” the doctor interrupted. “If I could finish—”
“Is she okay?” He was holding her hand as gently as a kitten.
“I’m not making any promises. But the CAT scan shows no bleeding.”
Helen tugged him closer and whispered, “What are you doing here?”
“I was driving around my jobs; heard it on the radio.”
“You’re taking chances.”
“Don’t worry about it. How do you feel?”
“Okay. Where’s my brothers?”
“Answering cops’ questions.”
“My mother?”
“They didn’t want to tell her till they knew how you were. Shall I get her?”
She still felt like crying. “I want to see my mother.”
Taggart signaled someone she couldn’t see and turned back to her again and whispered, “I’m really sorry. I told Reggie to watch out for you.”
“We can take care of ourselves. Isn’t that what you’re using me for?”
“I figured the fighting would stay at street level.”
“You figured wrong—but we got hurt.”
Her head hurt and it was hard to think while the room made circles, but it seemed important to make him understand what was going on in the rackets. She closed her eyes and pretended to cry. The ruse worked. Taggart leaned closer and the doctor backed away to let him comfort her. “Why are you surprised?” she whispered. “Crazy Mikey knows he didn’t bomb Joe Reina or shoot A1 Conforti, or burn down that fortress Harry Bono had in Westchester. He knows he didn’t sell Vito Imperiale’s underbosses to the Strikeforce; he knows he didn’t chase the other families out of Kennedy Airport. And he knows he didn’t attack his own enforcers. We’ve always been enemies and now he sees us getting stronger at his expense. What would you do if you were Mikey?”
