Tender Is LeVine: A Jack LeVine Mystery

by Andrew Bergman

  “I know that name.” Breen said. “Why was he—”

  “I just told you, I have no idea. But there it is.”

  Breen looked befuddled.

  “This is a mob case, Jack? Some little fiddler gets shot? What the fuck?”

  “Exactly,” I told him. “What the fuck?”

  Breen got up. O’Malley sat for a second, like he was thinking about something, then realized he wasn’t thinking about anything, so he got up, too.

  “We’ll be back,” Breen told me.

  “How did I know you’d say that?” I told him, but he was already out the door.

  EIGHT

  The National Airlines flight to Havana featured a red carpet stretched across the Idlewild tarmac. It was a gray, windy morning when I boarded the DC-6 with about forty other passengers, about half of whom were dressed entirely in white. Some looked to be legitimate businessmen, down for sugar or cigars, but most looked like gamblers, particularly the parties in white. There were maybe six women on the flight, none of them a day over twenty-five, and they were all accompanying the gamblers, none of whom was a day under forty-five. You will probably not be surprised to learn that the women were a great deal thinner than the men and that none of them appeared to be deeply in love.

  The plane was remarkably plush, with navy blue carpeting and thickly padded seats; “We’re in the Money” played through a Muzak system hooked up to speakers recessed in the ceiling. The plane also featured an area dubbed the “Starlight Lounge,” where one could have a drink and read a magazine or just sit and dream of hot roulette numbers. This was like no other airplane I had ever been on and resembled more of a flying cathouse than anything Lucky Lindy had ever imagined while he was winging his way to Paris. I liked it very much.

  My seatmate was a dour Cuban in his sixties who introduced himself as Alfonso Logart, Jr. He told me that he ran a soft drink business outside Havana and was attempting, without much success, to make cream soda a popular beverage among the Cuban people.

  “They know beer, they know Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola. That’s it. And fruit juices, of course. But I had to make this attempt,” he told me, tapping my arm with his chubby fingers, “because I believed in cream soda.”

  “Maybe if the Cubans ate more pastrami, they’d get the hang of cream soda.”

  Logart, Jr., shook his large graying head. He couldn’t have been more than five-foot-three, but more than compensated for his lack of height with his girth, which was well over three hundred pounds. He carried his weight right above the belt, like a large and placid pet.

  “You are a Jew?” he asked, smoothing his tie over his gut.

  “Yes.”

  “So you understand cream soda.”

  “With all my heart.”

  He nodded. “We are a people who love pork. Pastrami, this does not exist in Cuba as you know it. You are quite right, though. Maybe it would be of help.” He sighed and tugged at his pendulous ear-lobe. “What brings you to Cuba? You are in the smoked meat business, by some chance?” He smiled and revealed some fabulous gold bridgework.

  “No. Just going to see the place.”

  “You have been before?”

  “Never. I hear the Nacional is fabulous.”

  Logart shrugged. “It will all end one day.”

  “End? What do you mean?”

  “There is much poverty and much corruption. There are many people looking to line their pockets and then get out. It is not a stable situation.”

  “By ‘not stable’ you mean what, exactly?”

  He looked around the plane, lowered his voice. It was an hour into the flight and we had hit some choppy air.

  “There are forces in Cuba, and individuals, who are not so desirable, if you understand what I mean. Not native Cubans.”

  “Is Luciano still hanging around down there?” I asked him.

  Logart tightened the seat belt around his wondrous gut.

  “Not these days. I understand he is back in Italy. But he is not the only one of his sort, believe me. And Batista, he is still running things from his seat in our senate.”

  “And he’s a flat-out crook.”

  Logart smiled and shrugged, the picture of innocence.

  “So you think, what, the place will go up in smoke?” I asked, somewhat mystified.

  “This I do not know. I am just saying that it is not a place that should be taken for granted. Is not like the movies, just mambo and rum. Lot of poor people down there.” He yawned prodigiously. “And now, if you do not mind, I will take a little nap.” Logart plumped a pillow behind his head, turned with no little difficulty on his side, and within two minutes was fast asleep, snoring like he had a rack of pool balls rolling around his sinuses. I yawned and opened my Daily News. Governor Dewey was getting involved in the Harry Gross bookie probe, that was the front page; Sinatra was getting divorced on page three. Mrs. Sinatra was entitled to three hundred and fifty grand a year, so she was smiling through her pain, but Frankie looked pleased also, a feeling much enhanced by having Ava Gardner clinging to his bony right arm. Down the page, a small item informed me that Al Jolson had returned from Korea, declaring that “this is a much tougher war than the last one, believe me.” I turned the page and found what I was looking for:

  BUS ACCIDENT KILLS MOBSTER

  It was a one-column headline in the middle of the page. The three-paragraph story informed me that Vincent Galliano was now fully conscious and expected to recover. Both he and the deceased Michael “Mikey Blond” Carbone were identified as members of the Anastasia clan, but the story was otherwise sparing on details. Police were said to “believe this was simply an accident.” Eyewitnesses told the News that the two men appeared to be pursuing a “stocky man in a brown suit.” I resented being called stocky and the suit was glen plaid, but I considered myself lucky that no one had gotten a decent peep at me. There was nothing in the article to indicate that the cops thought this was anything worth investigating, which meant that Breen and O’Malley were keeping it buttoned up, and that was just fine with me.

  Much more importantly, the Yankees had clinched a tie for the pennant, and the Dodgers had fallen three games behind the Phillies, which made me feel warm all over; you just couldn’t inflict enough pain on the Dodgers to suit me. I was halfway through a sidebar item about Phil Rizzuto when the words began to blur, so I shut my eyes. The next thing I knew the captain was speaking over the PA system and I learned that we were one hour and five minutes from the island of Cuba.

  Stepping off the plane in Havana was like walking fully dressed into the St. Marks Place baths. The temperature was close to ninety and the humidity wasn’t far behind. I took my suit jacket off the instant I reached the terminal, but by the time I saw my black leather suitcase come rolling corpselike into view, my shirt had turned from white to sopping gray. The taxi ride from the airport didn’t help matters at all—my driver kept his radio tuned at high volume to an all-mambo station (“El Voce de Mambo!”) and puffed on a pungent cigar not much smaller than a Louisville Slugger. Between the smoke and the heat, the music and the gas fumes, by the time the taxi rolled up to the chandeliered porte cochere of the Nacional, I had a blinding headache and my stomach felt like I had swallowed the contents of a guppy tank.

  I stumbled into the long and narrow lobby, following a white-jacketed bellman to the front desk. Palms abounded inside and out; a set of double doors were opened to a pillared veranda facing the ocean and a grassy expanse that rolled down to the seawall they call the Malecón. There was a steady breeze, but the thick tropical air, scented by a mixture of gas fumes and sewage, only made me queasier.

  The bellman waited for me at the front desk, a toothsome grin on his face; the sicker I felt, the more he smiled. He gestured toward a beaming and pomaded gentleman behind the desk.

  “Welcome to the Nacional,” the man behind the desk said brightly. “I am Rolando. At your service.” Rolando at my service wore his hair slicked back and sported a dapper little mustache
that appeared to have been purchased from a novelty shop.

  “You have had a pleasant journey?” he asked in all sincerity.

  I just nodded in reply, fearful of barfing on his lovely marble countertop.

  “I speak the full English,” the deskman said happily. “So there is no the need for be shy with me.”

  “Great,” I belched. Rolando reeked of bay rum, which wasn’t helping my nausea one little bit. “The name is LeVine, capital V.” When Rolando lowered his head to find my reservation, I checked myself out in the mirror behind the desk. What I saw wasn’t pretty: a green-complexioned spook wearing a wet shirt and a crumpled seersucker suit.

  “Mr. Levine—”

  “LeVine.”

  “Of course … You are in a beautiful room, 804, that will face the ocean.” He rang the bell on the desk, even though the bellman was standing two feet away. “Edgardo will take you, have a pleasant stay at the Nacional, and there is …”—he stuck his hand into the cubbyhole for room 804 and extracted not only a gold key, but an envelope—“there is for you, yes, an envelope. Again welcome.”

  I took the envelope and shoved it in my pocket, then followed the happy Edgardo down the hall to the elevator. He gestured for me to get on board, which I did, stifling a bile-filled belch. Edgardo smiled at the tall and very broad elevator jockey, who slammed the gate shut and rocketed us up to eight.

  The elevator stopped with a shudder. I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer. Edgardo beamed. “Señor?”

  The bellman gestured for me to exit the elevator then I tailed him down the air-cooled corridor to my room, which was near the fire exit at the end of the floor. There was a lingering scent of disinfectant in the air, which further roiled my unhappy stomach. I followed Edgardo inside the room, slipped him a buck, for which I earned many more exclamations of “gracias” than I needed to hear, and watched gratefully as he exited, so I could run to the bathroom and toss my cookies into my very first Cuban toilet. I’m sure I’d been sicker in my life, but off the top of my bare head I couldn’t remember when. I peeled off my clothes, washed my face, and, feeling too weak in the pins for a shower, lay down on the king-sized bed and was asleep before I could say Giuseppe Verdi.

  I awoke about an hour later, groggy and disoriented. I felt chilled from the air-conditioning, so I arose and opened a window and welcomed the warm late afternoon breezes blowing in off Havana Bay. I took my first deep breath, then checked my watch—it was a quarter past five. My stomach had settled, although my mouth still tasted like I’d gargled with battery acid. I decided that a shower would do me all the good in the world, so I pulled off my socks and underpants and was parading to the bathroom in all my natural splendor when it occurred to me that I had never opened the envelope given to me by the deskman.

  I picked my still-damp seersucker jacket up off the chair I had draped it across and extracted the envelope from the side pocket: It was hotel stationery. I tore open the envelope and removed an elegant cream-colored card, likewise bearing the Nacional’s insignia and address. There was a note written on the card in a hurried scrawl. The message was brief, but it had the approximate impact of an atomic bomb:

  LeVine—

  Meet me in the hotel bar at 6:30.

  Meyer Lansky

  I took a very long shower.

  And then a very long shave.

  At six o’clock I started laying out my clothes.

  I’d heard about Meyer Lansky my entire adult life, my entire youth for that matter, even though he was only four years my senior. He was the Henry Ford, the J. P. Morgan, the George Washington Carver of the Syndicate, the man who had put the “organized” in “organized crime.” He’d been helping run Havana for a good long time, carefully working its casinos like a plantation owner working a sugar field. He was meticulous and ruthless, which both impressed and unnerved me; sitting down with Lansky to discuss a shakedown was like going to the park to have a catch with DiMaggio. My heart raced with anticipation.

  How he had known I was coming to Cuba was a question that barely occurred to me. Lansky knew everything about everything—he could have found out via Sidney Aaron, via the homicide dicks, via Joey Blinks via Sidney Aaron or Joey Blinks via somebody else in the know. Astounded as I was to receive this card from Lansky, I was far from surprised. I was dealing with a high order of criminal mind here, one eminently capable of engineering a snatch of Toscanini or the President of the United States or anyone else he cared to grab.

  I got down to the bar at six thirty-five, stalling five minutes so as not to look like the eager chump; he was already there, seated in a corner banquette, sipping a glass of soda water and picking at a bowl of nuts. He didn’t rise when I approached the table; he just raised his eyebrows and flashed a sour half grin.

  “You’re LeVine?” His voice was higher than I had expected.

  “Yes. You’re Lansky.”

  “We should start a law firm together,” he said, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “Has a nice ring to it.”

  The second my ass hit the chair, a waiter was at my side.

  “What do you want?” Lansky asked me.

  “Same as you,” I told him. “Glass of seltzer.”

  “Aqua mineral,” Lansky told the waiter, who at once sped off to the bar. “They don’t know from seltzer down here, the dumb fucks. They need educating.”

  “Well, you’re the guy to do it,” I told him.

  He smiled and popped a cashew into his mouth. Lansky chewed with his mouth closed, like his mother had taught him; he was a compact, dark-haired man of forty-eight with a prominent nose and the impassive, wary expression of a certified public accountant. Except for the eyes, his was a most ordinary face. But the eyes gave him away; they were piercing, evaluating, and beyond all mercy.

  “Aqua mineral,” he said again. “I feel like a schmuck every time I say it.” He grimaced, suppressed a belch. “Obviously you got my note.”

  “Obviously.”

  “What, you take the National flight this morning, with the lounge and the music and all that fancy shit?”

  “Yes. It was a lot more relaxing than the cab ride in from the airport.”

  “Should’ve told me you were coming; would’ve had you met. The cabs down here are from hunger.”

  “If I knew you were here I would have written weeks ago. Just to say hello, wish you a happy new year—”

  “You didn’t know I was here?” Lansky asked. He seemed genuinely surprised.

  “No. I don’t even know you. You’re not confusing me with someone else, are you?”

  He popped an almond into his yap and shook his head. “No. You’re the guy I want. You’re looking for the missing Maestro, right?”

  My aqua mineral arrived. I took a sip—it was almost like seltzer, but without the enthusiasm.

  “Am I right?” Lansky repeated. “You’re down here to find the old man?”

  “Yes, I’m down here to find the old man. Now let me ask you what might appear to be an extremely naive question.”

  Lansky raised his eyebrows and munched placidly on his nut.

  “What’s your involvement in this?” I asked.

  Lansky nodded, stopped chewing. He waved at someone crossing the room. I turned around to see who it was and found myself staring at Tyrone Power. Power walked over to Lansky and shook his hand.

  “How are you, Meyer?” he said in a resonant actor’s voice.

  “Fabulous,” Lansky said. “And you?”

  “Having a helluva time down here,” he said. Power smiled at me with blank sincerity. “Tyrone Power,” he said, sticking out his paw. He was extremely handsome but appeared somewhat less than manly.

  “Jack LeVine,” I told him.

  “Great to meet you, Jack.” Lansky just stared at Power, without asking him to sit, so the movie star got a little jittery and started backing off. “See you later in the casino, Meyer?”

  “Me?” Lansky said with a sour laugh. “I don’t gamble.”
Power chuckled and walked backward for about three yards before having the nerve to turn and walk away.

  Lansky shrugged. “I think he’s a fag, but he doesn’t know it yet.”

  “Really.”

  “It’s his business. Nice kid, though. Dresses the place up, having him around.” Lansky rubbed his nose. “You asked me something.”

  “About your involvement with Toscanini.”

  “Involvement,” Lansky said. “That’s a good word, ‘involvement.’ Not too specific.” He sipped some more aqua. “I’m an interested observer. You buy that?”

  “Maybe. What’s it going to cost?”

  “That might be negotiable.” He smiled, but it was strictly a ten-watt smile—his mouth twitched, but his eyes didn’t play along. “We both like to banter, am I right? I can see between us a whole lot of witty fucking banter.”

  “That’s very likely. You live down here now?”

  Lansky shrugged. “I live here, I live in Miami, I live in New York. I’m semi-retired, in a fashion.”

  “How semi?”

  “Semi-semi. Sometimes I work, sometimes I sleep late. It’s too much strain to work all the time, and what’s the point, really? Monetary gain?” He shook his head. “Hardly worth it anymore. Taxes have taken all the fun out of it, am I right, Jack?”

  “I was never in your tax bracket. Doesn’t affect me all that much.”

  “Taxes go against everything that made America great—enterprise, intelligence, business savvy. The politicians have turned all those virtues into shit.” Now his eyes shifted and he looked past me, over my shoulder toward the entrance to the bar.

  “Here she is,” he said quietly, almost to himself. Then he raised his hand and snapped his fingers. “Sweetheart!” he called out.

  I turned around and you could have knocked me over with a bubble of aqua mineral.

  Standing at the entrance to the bar, looking quizzically around the room, was Barbara Stern.

  I turned back to Lansky, my mouth dry. There was no little merriment on his features. “You know this girl, am I right?”