The Boy Who Granted Dreams

by Luca Di Fulvio

  Rothstein made his shot. The wooden cue made a flat vibrating sound. The white ball rolled along an uncertain trajectory, collided with the nine ball and stopped, rolling on its own axis in the middle of the table. An unnatural silence fell in the room.

  “What’s that, kid?” said Rothstein, tossing his cue on the table.

  Christmas wasn’t afraid any more. Had he come to a dead end? Maybe. But hadn’t these two years been one long dead end? He looked at Rothstein, not saying anything.

  “Explain anything to him?” said Rothstein, looking over at Lepke.

  Louis Lepke shook his head: No.

  “No …” said Rothstein. “So. Do you know why you’re here, kid?” he asked Christmas.

  Christmas shook his head. His lip and his head hurt. Also his back and his stomach. And his leg, where Gurrah had kicked him.

  “No,” Rothstein repeated. “Is Greenie here?” he asked Lepke.

  Lepke nodded.

  “Greenie knows me,” said Christmas.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Rothstein. “Greenie’s your lawyer. Otherwise you’d be dead already.”

  Christmas gulped down the blood in his mouth.

  “So, kid, I’m still waiting,” said Rothstein. “What was it you said before?”

  Christmas wiped his jacket sleeve across his eyes. He looked at the blood-darkened cloth. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said.

  Rothstein laughed. Joylessly. “Out,” he said in a cold and cutting voice.

  Lepke, Gurrah, and the monkey-faced gunsel left the room. Rothstein picked up a chair and set it in front of Christmas. He inhaled and exhaled deeply. He cleaned the blue chalk off his fingertips. “’I don’t give a fuck,’” he repeated softly. “You don’t give a fuck about what?”

  “Am I supposed to be scared?” asked Christmas, sitting straight up, defiantly.

  “You think I believe you’re not scared?”

  “I’m not scared of you,” said Christmas. He wasn’t so sure about that. But something inside was forcing him to play this game. To take this risk. He realized that he had nothing to lose.

  Rothstein seemed to be studying him. “The Lower East Side, and Brooklyn too — they’re infested with gangs of lowlife kids like you. Yeah, on every street corner. I don’t pay attention; it’d be like starting to count cockroaches and rats. A New York plague.”

  Christmas watched him silently.

  “The first time I heard tell about you and the Diamond Dogs was a few years back,” Rothstein began, “when you were going around saying you were doing business with me. Nothing gets said about me that I don’t know.”

  Christmas stared into his eyes. He didn’t look away. And yet he knew he should be afraid of Rothstein. What the fuck are you doing? He asked himself. What are you trying to prove? He felt something like nostalgia for the fear he’d felt a few minutes ago, now that it had evaporated. The young boy he’d been once upon a time would have been scared shitless at being there, dripping blood, in front of the most powerful boss in New York. Because he remembered what Pep had said, the day he’d banished him from the butcher shop saying that his eyes had gotten cloudy. “You still got time to be man and not guappo.” Because he remembered that he’d seen himself reflected in Joey’s eyes and the eyes of those Lower East Side hoodlums and seen that he was just like them. Dead like they were.

  “Is that why you had ’em beat me up?” he asked. And again, hearing his arrogant tone, he knew that he was like the rest of the boys on the street, without any future. Filled up with anger. With no room for dreams.

  Rothstein smiled. Showing his white teeth. He might as well have been flashing razors in front of Christmas. “Don’t act tough with me, kid,” he said in his calm voice. “You don’t have what it takes. You’re made out of butter.”

  “Now Lepke, he’s tough,” Rothstein went on, getting to his feet. “So’s Gurrah,” he turned his back on Christmas. “Not you.”

  “What do you want me to do?” said Christmas. He stood up.

  “Sit down,” said Rothstein, calm and authoritative, his back still turned.

  Christmas felt his legs obey the order even before his brain did.

  As soon as Rothstein heard the creak of the chair, he turned back, smiling. He took out a handkerchief with his initials embroidered in the corner and held it out to him. “Wipe your face.”

  Christmas held the handkerchief to his forehead, then pressed it against his lip.

  “Okay, are we through playing games?” said Rothstein, still smiling. He placed a hand on Christmas’ shoulder.

  At that touch, Christmas felt himself deflating as if he were laying down his weapons. “What’d I do, Mister?” he said quietly, no longer aggressive.

  “Ever since you started hanging out with that gonif Joey ‘Sticky’ Fein you’ve been breaking my balls. Some,” said Rothstein, coming back to sit down across from him, with a hand on Christmas’ knee, as if he was talking with a friend. “That pal of yours is a real rotten apple. A born traitor. It’s written all over his sheeny face. Well, that’s your business. But now you’re taking part of my slot machine rents, you’re shaking down some of my protection money, small time stuff, yeah, but hey — it’s mine. And now you’re starting to cut in on my hop deals …”

  “I’m no dealer!” Christmas protested vehemently.

  “What your people do, it’s the same as you doing it yourself, that’s the rule,” Rothstein explained calmly, like any normal businessman.

  Christmas watched him without moving a muscle.

  “But now you’re making trouble for me I don’t need.” And suddenly Rothstein’s voice was sharp. “You’re going around saying it was Dasher who cooled a certain butcher …”

  “It WAS him!”

  “No, he didn’t do it. I asked Happy Maione, when he came to complain to me.”

  “He did it!”

  “Listen, I don’t give a fuck about your chump butcher!” shouted Rothstein. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared. He jabbed a finger at Christmas’ chest and tapped it rhythmically against his breastbone while he continued speaking in a dark voice, made hoarse by shouting. “I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck. What I do give a fuck about is not having trouble with Happy Maione and Frank Abbandando. I can crush ’em like bugs whenever I want — when it suits me, get it? But I don’t want trouble just because some little chump everybody thinks works for me starts breaking balls. Happy Maione came to ask me for permission to take you out. Happy knows the rules, see. I could have told him yes …”

  Christmas looked down.

  “You’re one funny kid. I bet you don’t have a dime, but everybody swears they’ve seen you with a roll big enough to choke a horse,” Rothstein went on. Standing up, turning his back to Christmas again. “They say you give fifty bucks a day to some pimply kid that works in a clothing store.”

  “No, Mister, that only happened one time, and I took it back right away. I was blowin’ smoke in their eyes.”

  Rothstein grinned. He didn’t know why, but he liked this kid. He’d have sworn he was a gambler. “They saw you give a ten dollar tip to the guy who was driving a Silver Ghost everybody thought was mine.”

  “I took that back, too.”

  Rothstein laughed again, looking into his yes. “What? So you know how to do magic tricks? A cardsharp, is that it? Some kind of four-flusher?”

  “No, Mister. But it’s not that hard,” said Christmas. “People see what they want to see.”

  “So what the hell are you?” Rothstein went on, amused. “A con artist?”

  “No, Mister,” said Christmas. Suddenly he remembered what he used to be. He remembered his life before those two years of darkness. He remembered Santo, Pep and Lilliput, and the mange cream. And he remembered Ruth. There in his own hand he found, as if they had never died but only been set aside, his own dreams. “I’m good at makin’ up stories.”

  Rothstein considered him for a moment. ”So, ya go around tellin’ lies.”

  “No,
Mister, I just–”

  “I’m getting’ sick o’ this Mister crap,” Rothstein interrupted impatiently. “So?”

  “I know how to tell stories. It’s the only thing I’m good at,” said Christmas. His smile returned. And he knew that if he were to look in a mirror, he’d find his old gaze there, too, the same one Pep had seen years before. “Stories people believe in. People like to dream.”

  Rothstein sat down again and leaned towards Christmas. The expression on his face was somewhere between disbelief and hilarity. He’d have sworn this kid was a gambler. And he liked gamblers. He himself was a gambler before anything else. “So why are you telling people you work for me?”

  “I never said your name a single time, I swear it,” smiled Christmas. “All I did was let people in the neighborhood think so, and I … well, I never said they were wrong … but they did it all themselves.”

  Rothstein tapped a cigarette out of a gold cigarette case and set it between his lips, unlit. “You slay me, kid. None of my guys would fall for that hooey,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Christmas, quickly leaning toward the sinister boss, with an enthusiasm he’d thought long dead and buried. “But I bet I can make ’em believe anything you want, without ever really sayin’ it.”

  “Like what?”

  The darkness is gone, thought Christmas. He’d simply forgotten how to play. He didn’t know how or why it had happened. Because Ruth had disappeared from his life? He’d promised her that he’d find her again. But how could he have found her when he himself was getting lost in the streets of New York? He needed to find himself again. Then he’d find Ruth, too. “Want to make a bet?” he said.

  Rothstein’s eyes lit up. For an instant. He had left his comfortable Uptown life and his wealthy family because of his love of betting. He’d known this kid was a gambler. Rothstein was never wrong about people.

  “How much have got for a bet, raggedyass?” said Rothstein.

  “A hundred bucks.”

  “Show me you’ve got it.”

  “You have to loan it to me. That’s what I’ll bet.”

  Rothstein laughed. “You’re nuts, kid,” but he pulled a roll of bills out of his pocket, peeled off a hundred dollars and handed it to Christmas. “So that makes me a bigger nut than you are. Because if I win, what I get back is my own money, and if I lose I’ve got to pay you two C-notes.” He laughed again.

  “Now you’ve gotta help me,” said Christmas.

  “Oh, so now I have to help you win?” Rothstein looked even more amused.

  “I just want you not to make it harder for me. Let it seem like … they could believe what I’m sayin’.”

  Sure, the kid was nuts. Like every other gambler. He liked him even more. The afternoon was getting interesting. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “Nothin’. But I get to call you Arnold, like now we know each other. Like you don’t want to kill me anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t ever have killed you,” smiled Rothstein.

  “But your guys, they’d have killed me, right?”

  “My guys? Yeah, sure they would,” said Rothstein, as if it meant nothing. He got up from the chair, turned towards the door. “Lepke, Greenie, Gurrah, Monkey!” he called.

  The men came in with their usual grim faces and unhesitating walk. But, seeing Christmas, his feet on the chair Rothstein had just vacated, hands crossed behind his neck, they paused and looked at their leader. Rothstein, however, kept his back to them and was shooting pool again.

  “Hey, Greenie,” said Christmas. “Arnold says you been my lawyer. So I owe you a favor that was nice of you. But we’ve already settled everything, between friends, right, Arnold?”

  Rothstein turned around. He was smiling. He didn’t say anything. He kept fingering the eleven ball. That was his favorite number. The winning number at dice.

  “You can relax, too, Lepke,” said Christmas. “You don’t have to bump me off this time.”

  Rothstein laughed.

  The three gangsters didn’t know what to think. Their cold eyes, impassible in front of rivers of blood, darted — bewildered — from Christmas to Rothstein, back and forth.

  “What’s goin’ on, boss?” asked Monkey, the thug with the idiot face.

  Rothstein looked at Christmas.

  “Don’t you know the first rule, Monkey?” asked Christmas. “If you don’t understand right away, you’ll get to understand later. And even if later you still don’t understand, the boss always has a reason.” He looked over at Rothstein. “Am I right, Arnold?”

  “I hear you,” Rothstein answered, lifting one eyebrow. Throw the dice, kid, he thought.

  Christmas smiled at him. Then he turned towards Lepke, Greenie, Gurrah and Monkey, and began to talk generically about the Irish, of how much he hated them, of how rotten they were as cops and how uncouth they were as criminals. Then, as if he were continuing to talk about the same subject, he began to talk about his own blond hair, and how he’d inherited it from the son of a bitch who had raped his mother when she was just a young girl.

  The four gangsters hung on his words, glancing at Rothstein, not understanding.

  “And they say that same lousy bastard … not that it matters now … that bastard always had a watch chain with a rabbit’s foot in his vest pocket,” and Christmas swung his legs off the chair, stood up, walked over to them, and whispered loudly, “a foot he got off a dead rabbit, get what I’m sayin’?” He whirled around and came back to sit down. “A blond shit with a dead rabbit in his pocket,” he said quietly, as if he was talking to himself.

  “He wuz one o’ da Dead Rabbits?” asked Gurrah.

  “I never said that,” said Christmas, pointing a finger at him. “I didn’t say that, Arnold,” he told Rothstein. He turned back and looked Gurrah in the eyes. “Did I say that?” he asked him.

  “Naw,” said Gurrah.

  “Did I say that?” he asked Monkey.

  “No, but–”

  “But, but, but,” Christmas snorted. “Look out, you’re puttin’ words in my mouth I never said. I got nothin’ to do with certain folks, get that straight. The one thing I know for sure is that fucker my father … well … let me be struck down dead if he wasn’t the boss’ best friend.”

  “So your father was the right-hand man of-” Greenie began.

  But he too was interrupted by a quick chopping gesture from Christmas. “Hey, I don’t even wanna know their names, Greenie. Those pieces of shit! All I know is he left me a head of blond hair that makes me look like a lousy mick. And I got his blood in my veins, whether I like it or not!” Christmas spoke with great conviction, spitting disgustedly on the floor.

  An embarrassed silence followed. Lepke looked first at Rothstein then at Christmas, and said, “Your father was a Irish piece a shit, you got that right. And the Dead Rabbits was pieces of shit like all them other Irish micks. But they was tough customers. People still talk about ’em all over Manhattan.” He came over to Christmas and gave him a comradely thwack on the shoulder.

  “I heard you was a limp dick, kid,” said Gurrah with a glance at Greenie. “But as soon as you come in here, I could tell you had balls.”

  “Aw, go fuck yourself, Gurrah,” laughed Greenie.

  “Naw, I could tell,” Gurrah insisted.

  “Sure you could,” Greenie nodded, lips twitching. He looked over at Christmas. “I’m glad, kid.”

  “Sorry I had to hit you inna head,” said Gurrah. “Nothin’ personal.”

  “No problem,” said Christmas. Then he looked at Rothstein, playing with the hundred dollars. “Should we finish our chat, Arnold?”

  Rothstein jerked his head at the four thugs and they quickly left the room.

  “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, Mister,” said Christmas once they were alone. “Except about Irish guys, ‘cause I got nothin’ against them. But everything else I said was true. My mother was thirteen when she got raped by a blond guy, a friend of the owner of the farm where she
lived in Italy. He wasn’t Irish, just blond, like I said. And whoever he was, he had a rabbit’s foot hangin’ out of his vest pocket. In Italy a rabbit’s foot is good luck. And that rabbit’s gotta be dead, right? But now they think I’m the son of one of the Dead Rabbit gang. Even if the dates don’t make sense ‘cause that would have had to happen a hundred years ago. But they like to believe it, ‘cause they’re gangsters …”

  Rothstein laughed and sat down across from him again.

  “Did I win the bet, mister?” asked Christmas.

  “Give me my hundred bucks back,” said Rothstein.

  Christmas stiffened, but handed over the money.

  Rothstein took it and then handed it back to him. “You’ve got a talent for slinging bull, all right. Yeah, you won. So here’s your C-note,” and he laughed.

  “I thought you said if you lost, you’d lose double,” said Christmas, the hundred dollars in his hand.

  “Better take it easy, kid. You dealt yourself a good hand. Enjoy. I don’t like to lose.”

  Christmas smiled, then grimaced. His lip started bleeding again.

  Rothstein laughed again, as if that evidence of pain was a slight payback. “So what does somebody do when he’s got the gift of making up stories?” he asked.

  Christmas looked at him, his mouth barely open. As if he were blocked from speaking by something he saw. A package. A package Fred had just opened, and out of which a radio appeared, in Bakelite. Black. Voices and sounds came back to him. “You have to wait for the tubes to warm up,” and then a rustling. And then the music. And then old Saul Isaacson’s cane tapping on the pavement. “If you know what you can be in life, you’ll make the right choice.” And then she, Ruth, with her bandaged hand and a tiny bloodstain on the bandages, where her ring finger should have been. Her glossy black hair. Like Bakelite. And her voice. “I like the programs where they talk.”

  “Hey, kid, cat got your tongue?” said Rothstein. “What the fuck can you do with a bunch of stories?”

  “I want to tell them over the radio,” said Christmas.

  Rothstein grimaced, tilting his head to one side, as if he didn’t understand. “How come?”