The Moonlight

by Nicholas Guild

  Sometimes I would see Leo Galatina there, sitting at one of the bigger tables with maybe six or seven other bad guys, and I might nod if I felt like it—I wasn’t about to go over and shake his hand or nothing. Leo wasn’t a friend and he wasn’t a fucking king either, and I didn’t need him.

  Enrico I never saw there. Enrico I never saw at all. Enrico was one of those guys you only hear about.

  So life slipped quietly by. I was making more money than I could think how to spend, and nobody hassled me. In all that time I only did one guy, and he wasn’t even a wop.

  Slappy Beal was a favor for a friend.

  Jack Mahoney and I used to rob stores together when we were kids—one of us would distract the owner for a couple of seconds, and then the other one would grab something and run. It was that kind of thing that landed me in reform school, because I got caught and Jack didn’t. When I got out I promised myself I’d always work alone and, except for George, I never had another partner. I should have kept that promise.

  Anyway, Jack set up as a fence and did very well. We stayed friends—why should I hold it against him that he could run faster?—and he knew he owed me one for not selling him to the cops. He was always good for a couple of bucks when my luck was bad.

  So one day he drives up from Greenley and we have dinner together. He has this brother-in-law. His wife made him give the slug a job, but he’s always got his hand in the till and he’s good for nothing. Jack is tired of it. Can I help?

  Let me get this straight, I say, you want him offed?

  That’s about right, says Jack.

  So fine. I’ll do the brother-in-law. Just for old times.

  It’s a big conspiracy, see. There’s this very important envelope that has to be delivered. Slappy is supposed to go to the movie house, sit in the next to last row, and wait.

  Movie houses are great for this sort of thing, because everybody is busy watching the picture or trying to get inside his girlfriend’s blouse—nobody pays attention to anybody else. And the Greenley Theater is even better because the sound is so bad that everybody sits as close to the screen as they can. Plus Wednesday nights are the best because the audience is thin.

  The movie was It happened One Night, a comedy—perfect. Everybody’s hysterical. I went to see it two nights before, just so I’d know what scenes got the biggest laughs.

  On Wednesday I take my seat in the last row, right behind a fat little man with mole fuzz for hair. We’re all alone back there. I wait until Clark Gable and Claudet Colbert are having one of their big fights and the audience is really rocking, and I reach over and put my hand on the guy’s shoulder.

  You Slappy Beal? I ask him.

  Sure, he says.

  So give me the envelope, I say.

  Sure, he says, and hands it back.

  Thanks a lot, I say. Now enjoy the movie.

  Then I reach forward and pull his head back—people don’t fight a lot when you’ve got your fingers in their eye sockets—and with my free hand I take a straight razor from my pocket and cut his throat. The blood is all over the next row of seats, but if Slappy makes a sound even I don’t hear it.

  For a while there he’s pretty busy twitching, so I hang on to him until he figures out he’s dead. Then I wipe the razor clean of prints and drop it in his shirt pocket. Maybe the cops ’ll think he cut himself shaving.

  I get up and leave. I never did like Clark Gable.

  In the lobby I discovered that I had gotten blood on my sleeve, which was a great pity because I had to burn the coat. But there were seven bills in the envelope Slappy had given me and, besides, it made me happy to be able to do a favor for a friend like Jack. Friendship was always very important to me.

  And that was it. That was the only guy I did in over three years. Honest. The rest of the time I just sold my nose candy and was a model citizen.

  Until the dagos got greedy and started moving in again.

  First they tried to take over my dealers, who were suddenly being told to buy from Galatina’s people—or else. They were scared and I couldn’t blame them. I couldn’t hold it against them if they started flirting with the competition. They said they had a right to protection if I wanted to keep my territory, and they had a point. I broke a few thumbs, just to show everybody I hadn’t all at once turned into a Quaker, but I wasn’t mad.

  Some creep named Gela was running coke out of a liquor warehouse in Kos Koba, about four miles down the road. It was a big barn of a place and he had a little office in the back, with glass on three sides so he could keep track of things. They left the double doors open during business hours, which in the cocaine trade ain’t from nine to five, and Alphonso Gela was always behind his desk, counting money.

  The dumb wops, didn’t they know the world was full of terrible people?

  I lifted a car, a beat-up old Chrysler that nobody was gonna miss, and stashed it in an alley about two blocks away. Then, about three in the morning, I took the Lincoln down to Kos Koba and switched cars. Then I drove over to the warehouse and gunned the Chrysler straight through those double doors at about forty miles an hour. I’ll never forget the look on Gela’s face when he saw I was gonna crash his office—he was so surprised he never even thought to stand up.

  The car hit the desk, the desk slammed into the wall, and Gela, who was in between, sitting on his swivel chair, had a big dent in him right below the breastbone. He had his head down on the desk and his tongue was sticking out as blood poured out of his mouth. Dead. As Sonny would have put it, morto.

  I was expecting no end of trouble when I kicked open that car door, but Alphonso’s men must all have been married with children, because the first blast from my shotgun and they ran like fucking rabbits. I’m telling you, I just walked out of there.

  I had Leo Galatina’s home phone number, and I wanted him to hear about this from me first. I don’t think he much liked getting a call at a quarter to four in the morning, but too god damned bad.

  “They’ll be picking Alphonso out of the stonework for weeks,” I told him. “You want a war, you got it.”

  The dagos like to think things over before they move, and they hate a mess in public. Also, it’s part of their code that they don’t do somebody where he lives because they like to leave the women and children out of that kind of stuff. So I figured I was safe enough. I went home and woke up Lenore.

  “I never left the house—all night,” I told her.

  “Sure, honey.” And I could see from the look in her eyes that she knew I’d been up to something. And she liked it. Well, I was still a little excited, so I jumped her. And, believe me, she came like a train whistle.

  After that things got a little dicey.

  I tried to stay in crowds. I stopped driving the Lincoln, because everyone recognized it. I was very careful. But these guys have to know who’s boss, so I let them think they were safe for a while and then I came back hard.

  About two hours into the new year, 1940, Salvatori Molto, Leo Galatina’s capo regime, was bleeding his life away into the snow in the parking lot across the street from Dink’s. His driver was also hit—I’ve always been sorry I didn’t kill the bastard—and his bodyguard, the only man left standing, decided not to give chase.

  I would have liked to make a try for Leo, but he and Enrico had both gone to ground.

  By this time I was in negotiations with Frank Marcello, who, after all, had set up this arrangement in the first place. I had to do something, because it was only a matter of time before the Galatina brothers found a way to reach me. Besides, the guinea bastards had stopped my supply and put me out of business.

  “You want these jokers to own everything right up to the New York line, or what?”

  “No, we don’t want that, Charlie. We want the Galatinas contained.”

  “Then find a way to get them to call a truce.”

  “It won’t be easy, Charlie—Alphonso Gela was a cousin. It isn’t just business.”

  “Then maybe they all need t
o learn they’re not immortal.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Charlie. Sit tight.”

  Sit tight, my ass. I just picked up my shotgun and went back to hunting dagos.

  But they were hunting me too, so I had to pull out of Lenore’s place and keep moving. I slept where I could and showed up at the YMCA every once in a while for a shower. It was a nerve racking way to live, but it was better than being dead.

  Bang bang bang, they were so careless it was like shooting clay pigeons. I did one guy while he was buying a newspaper down at the foot of Greenley Avenue—hell, I didn’t even know those bastards could read—and I got two more as they were coming out of the funeral home after paying their last respects. I thought that was a nice touch.

  And then, suddenly, in April Marcello negotiated a truce. I was safe. The New York Families guaranteed my life, and I could go back to Lenore’s place. But I was still out of business.

  “Relax,” Marcello says. “They’re too afraid of you not to cut some kind of a deal. You’ll be making money again by the summer.”

  And, sure enough, toward the end of June I get a call from George. The Galatinas want to talk. We’ll have a meeting at his place, just Enrico and Leo and me. Everything can be worked out. There’s plenty of room for everybody in this business.

  And there will be absolutely no funny stuff—I don’t have to worry about a thing. I’ll be safe.

  And I agree to it, because George is my friend and I trust him. I wonder how I could have been so stupid.

  Chapter 22

  “Are your folks alive?”

  “Sure. I guess. I sort of misplaced them. Yours?”

  “Both dead.”

  Both dead. Phil kept thinking about what he had meant by that simple little declaration. It was literally true and had been for the five years since his mother died of some particularly potent strain of pneumonia. A heart attack had killed his father while Phil was in the Navy. They were both gone. And yet even as a child he had always thought of his parents in the past tense. If they were in front of him they seemed alive; otherwise, they seemed to fade into ghosts.

  They had not been young when he was born—perhaps his mother had wanted him, he wasn’t sure, but they had their lives already and he was an intruder. Perhaps he was the ghost.

  The bond between parent and child isn’t necessarily broken by death. Memory survives. Sometimes the past is simply a curse, a poison that seeps forward in time to make life unbearable, but most people, probably, have a skein of comforting recollections they can draw up around their shoulders to keep off the cold. All those magic words—home, mother, father—can still soften the heart and make it bleed with a kind of agonized pleasure, recalling to us the fact that once we were loved, and filling us with hope that this inheritance, at least, might not have grown debased.

  But it wasn’t that way with Phil. Whenever those memories rose up before him he would flinch away, with the guilty sense that he was intruding on someone else’s privacy. That house did not belong to him. He had merely lived in it. Those people did not want him there. They had merely endured his presence with silent forbearing. That was how he felt. That was how he had been made to feel.

  So the Moonlight was his refuge—his, at last. It had its own fund of memories, of which he knew almost nothing, and its past, for all its terrible darkness, seemed to welcome him. He could not surrender it, not the house, not the burden of its history, because there was nothing else. He expected to die here, expected it with a conviction that was almost serene. This was the last stop.

  And he was sure that death was not far away.

  “I sort of misplaced them.” She had said it with such marvelous indifference. Beth was lucky.

  Well, perhaps she would get even luckier.

  “I have to go into town,” he told her.

  It was ten a.m. Monday. After his visitation—he didn’t know how else to describe the man in the brown suit, sitting out on his patio—he had gone back to bed but not to sleep. Sleep, of course, was impossible. Last night he had killed a man, and in the small hours of the morning he had had an encounter with a ghost. Things were moving toward some kind of crisis. He had to be prepared.

  The law firm of Pearl & Karskadon had offices at 2 Railroad Plaza. Phil chose them out of the phone book because he knew where to find the building and was confident of a parking space. Their lobby was dark, large, and elegantly furnished. The receptionist was a blond lady of about forty. She smiled.

  “May I help you?”

  “I need to talk to a lawyer,” Phil answered.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No.”

  “Well then, whom did you wish to see?”

  “It doesn’t matter. One’s as good as another.” He smiled back at her, so she wouldn’t decide he was a nut case. “I just need to have a will drawn up.”

  “Could you give me your name, please?”

  He did.

  “Will you please take a seat?”

  He sat down on a sofa and looked around for something to read. There were copies of Barron’s and The New York Times on the coffee table, along with a stack of National Geographic. National Geographic made him think of Uncle George’s apartment up on the third floor and Barron’s was simply unintelligible, so he picked up the Times and tried to make sense out of a story about politics in the Soviet Union. It sounded almost as intricate as his own life.

  After about twenty minutes a man came out to the lobby. He held out his hand. He wore a perfect gray suit, was very blond and looked about twenty-five years old.

  “Mr. Owings?”

  Phil stood up and took the offered hand.

  “Would you come this way? My name is Doug Palmer.”

  They threaded their way through a maze of corridors to a tiny office, and Phil managed to keep himself from asking Palmer if he was a lawyer—he didn’t look old enough, but if he had his own office he must be. Palmer offered him a seat and sat down himself behind a desk the size of an aircraft carrier.

  “It was a matter of a will, Mr. Owings?” he said, raising his pale eyebrows and smiling hopefully.

  “Right. I’ve come into some property lately.”

  “Best to have everything in order, yes.” Palmer nodded with approval. “Have you ever had a will drawn up before?”

  “No.”

  He fished around in his jacket pocket and came up with a slip of paper. He slid it across the desk to Palmer.

  “That’s my name and address at the top, and then the name and address of the person to whom I want to leave everything.”

  “A relative perhaps?”

  “No.” It wasn’t a question Phil liked very much, and maybe Palmer sensed as much.

  “Well, Mr. Owings, in cases where the sole beneficiary is not a relative, sometimes, just to avoid the threat of litigation, it’s best to make specific exclusions . . .”

  “You mean, spell out who I don’t want to get anything?”

  Palmer made an equivocal gesture with his right hand.

  “More or less.”

  “There is no one—that is, I have no family. No one has a claim against me.”

  There was a momentary silence, in which Phil decided that his little declaration had probably sounded rather pathetic, as if he were asking for sympathy.

  “Well then, Mr. Owings,” Palmer answered, folding his hands together and looking pleased, “this seems a straightforward matter. . .”

  Half an hour later, his will was drawn up, signed and witnessed. Phil took it with him, and paid his bill in cash.

  “If we can ever be of any further service, Mr. Owings. . .”

  Phil made no answer.

  For convenience, he kept his checking account at the Brookville branch of the Union Trust. He also rented a safety deposit box. He left the will there on his way home.

  Since it was Beth’s day off, they went to the amusement park in Rye, which was only about ten minutes away, and stopped at a pizza place to pick up a coup
le of slices for lunch. They took them back to the car, because Beth’s aversion to eating in restaurants did not draw any fine distinctions.

  It was a hot day, and very humid, so it really wasn’t much of a pleasure to be out of doors. They took a couple of rides, decided the place wasn’t exactly Coney Island and left.

  “You feel like going swimming?” he asked.

  “Sure—if you do. I don’t mind.”

  That was what was nice about Beth. She never minded.

  Phil almost hated to admit it to himself, but he seemed to enjoy being with her more when they were away from the house. Of course, he enjoyed being with himself more when he was away from the house.

  The ferry out to the island was crowded with teenagers and college kids. Most of them seemed to be as naked as savages, and some were carrying ice chests the size of coffins. There was lots of shouting and excited laughter and music from twenty or thirty different portable radios. Somehow it was profoundly depressing.

  “Do you ever wish you were that age again?” Beth asked.

  “No. You’d have to be nuts to want to be that age again.”

  She smiled, as if that was the answer she had hoped for.

  All the way out, pictures kept flashing across his eyes—pictures of the odd shapes blood made spattering against a wall. His ears were full of terror-stricken screams and the echoing concussion of shotgun blasts. The screams were louder even than the kids with their radios, because they were just for him.

  They spread their beach towels out on the sand, and Beth promptly fell asleep. She was like that. All she had to do was feel the sun on her face and she was out. Every fifteen or twenty minutes she would wake up for a few seconds and turn over, but for the most part she never stirred.

  Phil sat watching people throw frisbees around and considered, with a detachment that astonished him, the idea of death. He could feel its presence, somewhere just beyond his awareness.

  During his one and only year as a college student he had seen a foreign movie put on by the campus film club, all about a medieval knight who returns from the crusades and spends the last part of his journey home playing chess for his life with a man who has a white face and wears a black cloak. The man is Death, and his victory is inevitable. No one appears to mind. Phil hadn’t been able to understand the knight’s seeming indifference to his own fate.