The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  I felt great. For the moment, I had no worries. There were a lot of kids around, running up and down the beach and yelling their heads off. I like to watch kids playing. I’ve always found the noise kids make to be very comforting, although I’d probably feel different if they were my own kids.

  It had already been a long day, and the food made me drowsy. I found a shady spot and rolled my jacket up to put under my head—and also to make sure nobody made off with my wallet or gun—and I lay down for a snooze.

  I don’t know how long I was asleep. I woke up when I felt a shadow cross my face.

  Some guy was standing over me. He was short and broad, the kind to make a good shadow, and he wore a checked cloth cap. He hadn’t shaved that morning.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said.

  Chapter 12

  Two minutes later we were walking back towards where his car was parked. I didn’t know what he wanted and I didn’t know whether I would let him live, but, whichever way it happened, the beach was too public. He said, “come on,” and I did. It was his funeral.

  “I’m the boatman at the pier in Greenley,” he said. “I was down there early because one of the owners wanted to take his boat out for the day and I had to get it ready. I saw the girl leave, and then I saw you leave. And then I went to check that everything was all right.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat.” I grinned at him, just to make him understand how much trouble he was in.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t owe Mr. Greyson anything.”

  “Was that his name?”

  “Yeah. He lives in New York, but he keeps a place out here. You know, in five years he’s never taken that boat out—it’s just his fuck hutch. I sold him the champagne. What with tips, he was worth a good two bills a year to me. Don’t worry, I didn’t touch anything.”

  I shot him a quick glance, wondering how much he had figured out. If he wanted a split of Greyson’s money, he was a dead man.

  “I saw the blackjack,” he said. “You have it set up for the girl to take the fall?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pity—she’s a looker.” He smiled comfortably. “I’m a married man myself, so I don’t care anything for whores. Still, she’s a knockout.

  “I know Greyson always carried a heavy wad. How much did you score off him?”

  By this time we had reached the parking lot, and there was no one around. I had no objections to dropping him right here. I reached into my jacket pocket, where I kept my gun.

  “Relax,” he said, as if he could read my mind. “I’m not dumb enough to try shaking you down, and if I’d wanted to tell the cops you’d be talking to them now instead of me.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Maybe just to do a little business. I can use someone like you, someone with guts. Someone who can handle the rough stuff—I’m no good at that myself. Besides, you just came into a little money. I figure maybe we could be partners.”

  Then he stuck out his hand to me, just like we’d met at the Bankers’ Club.

  “By the way, the name is Patchmore. George Patchmore.”

  . . . . .

  You see, the deal was this: George knew a guy in Toronto who would sell him all the blended scotch he could use—the genuine article, with the label and everything, not some shit cooked up in somebody’s basement the day before yesterday. The price was a dollar a bottle, with a dollar discount per case on orders over a hundred. And he knew a guy here who would buy it for three dollars a bottle, and no discount. All we had to do was hire a truck and drive the stuff over the border from Canada.

  “I’m thinking of a big score,” he told me over beers at a place in Old Greenley I’d walked right by and never noticed—so you see, I got my beer after all. “We each put in five hundred and buy fifty cases. The discount will cover the truck. Total profit for three days’ work: a thousand each.”

  “So why me? Lots of guys can swing five hundred for something like this.”

  “Because there are risks, and because the people we would be dealing with on a thing like this scare me and it probably shows. I don’t want to end up sold to the cops, I don’t want to have my stuff highjacked, and I don’t want to be anybody’s patsy. So I’m hoping they won’t scare you. You’re my insurance policy, okay?”

  “You try a thing like this in New York, the Dagos ’ll blow your head off. They think they have a monopoly.”

  “It’s easier out here,” George said, putting his hand on my arm and smiling like a car salesman. “Things aren’t so organized. There’s still room for the little guy. You interested?”

  Sure, I was interested. Besides, if I said no I couldn’t trust this guy not to pitch me to the cops—which meant either I said yes or I killed him. It was easier, and probably less dangerous, to say yes. I figured I could always kill him later.

  So that was how George and I got started together in the bootlegging business. We hired a truck in Stamford and we were on our way.

  When he got to Toronto, George introduced me to his source there and I had a little word with the guy. When the truck was loaded with our fifty cases, I backed the slob up against a wall and pushed the muzzle of my gun into his face.

  “Listen, pal,” I told him, “this can go three ways: we arrive home safely and collect our money, in which case everyone is happy, or we get stopped along the way—the cops or the competition, it don’t make no difference—or we drive all that way and our buyer tells us we’re trying to sell him fifty cases of strong tea. Now if it’s either one of the last two you better hope they kill me, because if they don’t I’m comin’ back here to put a bullet through your face. You understand? You got anything you want to say before we leave?”

  It’s a funny thing, but people generally believe me when I say things like that. There’s something very persuasive about looking down the business end of a .38 police special.

  But we didn’t take any chances. I got a map and figured out a route over back roads, and while George drove I rode next to him with a sawed-off shotgun across my knees. We had no trouble, all the way back to Greenley.

  The funny thing was that George’s buyer owned the Moonlight Roadhouse. In those days it was a restaurant downstairs and didn’t serve anything stronger than seltzer, but the guy ran a kind of private service for the big houses around there. If the Rockefellers were having a party and needed a little something to flavor the punch, they’d send a servant over in the estate wagon. The restaurant lost money—I ate there once, and I can understand why—but he made a nice penny off the booze.

  The stupid fuck tried to screw us down on the price, but I did my righteous hard guy act again and by the time I was finished we had settled on three bucks fifty a bottle. We never had any trouble with him again.

  So we turned a nice profit. Nine fifty for the cargo, fifty for the truck and, say, another fifty for expenses. When that came out of thirty-five hundred, we had twenty-four fifty to split.

  Suddenly I was a young man with a future. I had a partner, I had a business, I had the world by the balls. And I had more money than I had ever seen before in my young life. I moved out of my room in New York and found a place in Greenley, where I could walk down to the Sound every morning and take a swim. I even bought a car.

  Over the next year George and me made that run to Toronto maybe twelve or fifteen times, carrying sometimes a hundred and fifty or two hundred cases. George found other customers—that was his great gift, sniffing out buyers—and we did very well.

  We never had any problems with the cops, and only one time did anybody try to highjack us. We rounded a curve on one of those windy little back roads in Vermont and discovered some clown had blocked it off with his car. Just one guy, all by himself—you talk about stupid. Well he came out from behind his car, waving a pistol—a pistol, for Christ’s sake—and I stepped down from the truck and blew him in half. I guess nobody had told him about the shotgun.

  As soon as we had unloaded the shipment in Connec
ticut, I climbed in my car and drove back to Toronto, where our supplier was found two mornings later with a bullet in his ear. George didn’t much like that, but, hell, somebody had tipped that highjacker, and you can’t just ignore these things. In business, people have to respect you.

  George never cared for the rough stuff, but that was why I was his partner. For the most part we did pretty well together. He had a little wife and the wife had a little baby, and sometimes they would invite me over for dinner and I was expected to hold the baby on my lap while the little creep pissed on my best suit. George was very big on his family. Myself I preferred less permanent attachments.

  How did I feel about him? Well, I suppose we were friends, whatever that means. I wouldn’t have lifted his wallet or fucked his wife, even if she’d asked me—and I didn’t get the impression she thought old George was that hot a number. I wouldn’t have boosted him to the cops. As long as he was square with me, I’d be square with him. George was my partner, and even crooks have to draw the line someplace.

  Anyway, for a year or so things were doing fine. Then one day I met George for coffee and he shows me this newspaper. The headline read, “DEMS NOMINATE ROOSEVELT.”

  “Who are the ‘Dems’ when they’re at home?” I asked. “And who’s Roosevelt.”

  “The ‘Dems’ are the Democrats, Charlie, and they could win the next election running a corpse. The point is that Roosevelt has promised to end Prohibition. In six months we’ll be out of business, Charlie. We have to find a new racket.”

  Well, the good people of Connecticut stayed thirsty straight on up to Repeal. We made our last delivery just before New Year’s Eve, so George and I started 1933 with our pockets full.

  But we didn’t have a new racket. Not that I was worried, mind you. I knew George would stumble onto something, and in the meantime I had a new dollie who knew how to do the niftiest things with her tongue. . .

  At first there was just gambling—poker, mostly. George knew the players and would handle negotiations with the police. We didn’t have premises of our own so we would come to an arrangement with, say, the local hardware store, right there on Greenley Avenue, for the use of their basement. There would be beer and sandwiches, and we would take a percentage of every pot. I was in charge of security. It wasn’t much of a living, and I didn’t like standing around all night.

  Gradually, though, the pickings got better. We figured out that some of these guys wouldn’t mind a little pussy between hands, so he would provide a broad who would take them on in a store room or something. I found the broads—you need a certain type for that kind of work, because gamblers always have to think they’re winning and they like women they can push around a little—and I kept them scared enough that they never made any trouble. If we had seven or eight players on any given night, the girl might do four of them at fifteen bucks apiece, since gamblers never seemed to mind paying, and we’d send her home with twenty.

  Then we discovered cocaine.

  Well, maybe “discovered” isn’t the right word. I had been using the stuff off and on for years, and I got in the habit of bringing a packet or two with me to games, just to fend off the boredom. Guys started offering to buy some from me, so I started bringing a little extra. It was a money maker.

  That was when I started having trouble with the Dagos.

  Because, of course, I wasn’t the only one to see there was money to be made from that nose candy. Five years before my dealer had been living in a third-floor walkup below Houston Street, but now, when I met him for a buy, he would show up wearing a fifty-dollar suit. I started buying a quarter of a kilo at a swat, and pretty soon he got that worried look.

  “You haven’t gone into business for yourself, have you?” he asked me finally.

  “Nah. I just like the stuff.”

  “Nobody likes it that much—at least, nobody that’s still walkin’ around.”

  On the way back to Grand Central Station, I got held up by two heavy thugs who smelled of garlic and sounded like the menu at Mamma Leone’s. They took my wallet, they took my gun, and they took my junk. They also left me with a broken rib and a face that looked like I’d stuck it in an electric fan. It was bad.

  When they were finished with me, and when I remembered how to walk, I found a phone booth. At least they had left me a dime.

  “Get down here, George. Bring a couple of hundred bucks and my shotgun.”

  George did as he was told and went home on the next train. I didn’t need him, and he was just as happy about it. I left the shotgun, wrapped in an overcoat, in a locker at Grand Central and went off to find a doctor who knew how to keep his mouth shut.

  I holed up for four days, until I could move around without feeling like I was about to break apart. Then I went looking for my dealer.

  And I found him, the stupid fuck. All I had to do was to wait until one night he walked out of his fancy apartment building, all by himself.

  I fell into step behind him. “Just turn into the next alley,” I said, the shotgun still wrapped in its overcoat. “I’m disappointed in you, Joey. And after all these years.”

  It was a nice, dark alley, which we had all to ourselves. I let him see the shotgun, and I thought he was gonna throw up right there.

  “Who sent the goons, Joey, you or your supplier?”

  “Now, listen—Charlie, you have to understand. . .”

  “Who? I won’t ask again.”

  I screwed the shotgun barrel right into his groin, and after that he couldn’t talk fast enough.

  “Frank Marcello, Charlie. But he’s one of Luciano’s boys—you can’t. . .”

  I’d heard enough. I started to walk away, letting the little shit see my back. After about three steps I turned around and gave him the full load, right in the face. It’s amazing the mess a load of birdshot can make—I really enjoyed it. It made me feel fine.

  He died with his hand under his coat, trying to fish out the German luger I knew he carried everywhere. That made me feel even better.

  I took the luger and left the shotgun for the cops to add to their collection.

  There was a phone booth two blocks away, so I put in a call to the Mott Street Social Club, which was where you could expect to find Frank Marcello on a weekday night. Hell, was there anybody in New York who didn’t know that?

  “Yeah?”

  “Let me talk to Mr. Marcello.”

  “Nobody here by that name.”

  “No? Well you tell him anyway that somebody just made an awful mess in Joe Gotti’s neighborhood. You ask him if he wants to talk when I call back in half an hour, or if he’d rather I came looking for him. I’m what you’d call a dissatisfied customer.”

  I hung up and got out of there—you never know who they might send to look—and half an hour later I found another phone booth.

  “This is Marcello,” the man answered, right away, right after the first ring. That made me feel better.

  So I told him what I wanted: a reliable supply at wholesale prices. I told him I would stay out of his New York territories. I made no threats. I didn’t have to. As far as the rough stuff was concerned, we were square.

  “There’s a fish place across the street from Grand Central Station,” I told him. “I’ll have dinner there and then I’ll get on a train and go home.”

  “You’ll have your answer by then.”

  I took a table in the back, where I could watch the front door and the entrance to the kitchen. I wasn’t worried they would make a try for me there, because there were too many people around at that hour and massacres are bad for business. If they wanted to kill me, they could do that anytime.

  But I didn’t think they would want to kill me. I had killed Joe Gotti, but they could hardly expect me to stand still for what they had tried to pull on me. If I hadn’t killed him they would have lost all respect for me, and you don’t do business with people you don’t respect.

  Besides, I was offering them a good deal—they made money and they surre
ndered nothing. And the Dagos are very practical people. They yap a lot about honor and manhood and the rest of that shit, but they are very practical. They beat out the Irish and the Jews and the Germans and all the rest of the New York gangs not because they were tougher but because they were better organized and paid more attention to business. I was counting on that.

  Still, I kept Joe Gotti’s luger on the seat next to me.

  I was nearly finished with my salad when a guy in a blue suit with broad white stripes came in. He looked around, and we made each other at once. I was very well acquainted with his fists.

  He came and sat down at my table, just as nice as you please. Then he gave me a manila envelope. I looked inside and found my gun, my wallet, and my junk. I took the wallet out and counted the money, just to show I wasn’t rattled—there was an extra thousand in new hundred-dollar bills.

  “Mr. Marcello accepts,” he said, like he’d just approved my bank loan. “He says you should be in touch with his cousin, a Mr. Enrico Galatina.”

  I just nodded. Under the table I had the luger lined up on his belt buckle, and he probably knew it.

  “And about the other thing—you know. . .” He actually looked embarrassed. “It was strictly business. You understand.”

  “Sure. You do nice work. If I ever want somebody worked over I’ll call you.”

  I had the impression he was pleased.

  “Well—good night. Enjoy your dinner.”

  When I got home and told George, he damn near wet himself.

  So all in all we had a lot to offer our customers. But even success comes with its problems. After a while our games acquired a certain reputation, and we’d have nights when everybody seemed more interested in getting high and getting boffed than in playing cards. We had some pretty rowdy times, and people started to notice. This made the cops so unhappy they began making noises about closing us down. Also, these little parties were sometimes a trifle on the messy side. It was getting harder and harder to find shopkeepers willing to let us have their back room.