CHAPTER 8
Eddie Paradise had been up since dawn. He left his waterfront house in Island Park and drove himself to a softball field not far from the docks in Red Hook, even closer to the precinct house where the police captain he was waiting for worked. Nothing on the radio sounded good until he found a station playing rock-and-roll instrumentals—Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Dick Dale & the Del-Tones, Link Wray & the Wraymen, James Brown & the Famous Flames, and his personal favorite Booker T. & the MG’s, with that “Green Onions” number. Eddie Paradise was a good name for a leader, he thought. Eddie Paradise & the…what?
Finally, the captain showed up in a gleaming ’59 Riviera, silver with a black top, and still in his bathrobe. Eddie gave him a Marlboro carton full of money—not a payoff, since the captain was on the payroll already: a gift is all it was, half now, half this time tomorrow, presuming tonight’s Commission meeting reached its peaceful conclusion. Did the captain even say thank you? He did not. Did Eddie need to give him the money personally? No. That went above and beyond. Did this crooked fucknuts give a shit? Eddie shook his head as the cop drove away. No. He did not.
Eddie got back in his car and went by the restaurant on Union Street, where the meeting would be, just to check on things—how fresh the calamari was (very), whether any chairs were tippy (the two that were had been replaced), how well the black roller shade was able to cover the front window (perfectly), the dope on the chefs and all the waiters who’d be working tonight (every one of whom was a member of the owner’s family, though Eddie vetoed a Neapolitan in-law he’d never seen in here before), if the neighbors had taken advantage of their all-expenses-paid getaway weekends to the Jersey shore (they had). Eddie listened to various petty requests—some cousin in jail for getting in a fight, some dishwasher who wanted a loan just until next month so he could bring his grandmother over from Racalmuto, et cetera. The usual. And, as usual, Eddie said he’d see what he could do. He wrote nothing down. He had a mind for remembering shit like this. On his way out, Eddie grabbed a broom and swept the front sidewalk himself, even though it seemed to have already been done.
Having the Commission meeting on Eddie’s turf was an honor, especially for someone who’d just been promoted to capo. If everything went perfectly, Michael Corleone would get the credit. If anything went wrong, it’d be Eddie’s ass. Which suited Eddie fine—that’s how you moved up, you deny credit for anything and heap it onto your boss. But an honor? It was getting harder for Eddie to see it that way. When what’s heaped on you is the level of bullshit that was heaped on Eddie Paradise, it’s hard to see much past the end of your own flat and broken nose.
Eddie commended the restaurant owner on the way things were coming together, then went to his regular bakery, on President Street, where he took his morning espresso and held court. Then he headed to his social club, hoping for a civilized gentleman’s nap, but no such luck. He turned the corner and saw five men from Flatbush Novelties, dressed in work shirts with their names stitched above the pockets, waiting for him in front of the red door of the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club. The fireworks guys.
Why the Roach hadn’t already taken care of whatever they needed, who knows? It was always something. Somebody always wanted some goddamned thing from Eddie Paradise. At home, at the bakery, at his club, sitting down eating lunch, even out on his boat. Like they say, gotta pay the cost to be the boss, but Jesus Geronimo Christ. A whole regime under him now, yet nothing important got done and stayed done unless Eddie saw to it himself. If he did have a group, know what he’d call it? Eddie Paradise & the Worthless Coglioni. Or better yet, Just Eddie. He’d have thought that by now he’d be at a station in life where once in a while he could take the day off from anyone’s needs but his own. One day. Why does Columbus need a day? Fuck Columbus. Merdaiolo’s been dead for centuries.
The two men walking with Eddie asked him if he knew the people in front of the club.
“I’ll take care of it,” Eddie said.
The day hell freezes over’s got a name, and it’s Eddie Day.
Say this for the men in his crew, though: they were well trained—a tradition in this regime since Salvatore Tessio started it up. Without even needing to be told, they positioned themselves between the Flatbush Novelties panel truck and their boss.
The owner of the fireworks company, sitting on the stoop, tried to hand Eddie his morning paper. George, his shirt read. George Spanos.
“Anything good in there, George?”
The men behind Eddie shot one another a look.
“What do you mean?”
Unfolding his morning paper, reading it fresh, was one of Eddie’s pleasures. Once it’d been around awhile—into the can and who knows where—he wouldn’t touch it.
“You read my newspaper,” Eddie said, “and I’m asking you what you got out of it.”
Spanos started to say something and stopped himself. “Rained out the Series again yesterday. Supposed to rain again today. It’s what the Giants get for moving out west.”
The thing Spanos thought better of saying was probably something about Eddie or his associates. Spanos was such a lousy gambler, Eddie’s little girl could have read his tells. Eddie glanced at what he could see of the headlines and didn’t see anything earthshaking.
“The World Series can kiss my hairy ass,” Eddie said. “All I follow is the Mets.”
The fireworks people snickered.
There was a day when Eddie Paradise would have snapped right there, but watching Nick Geraci had taught him things. Even if the guy had gone bad, he’d been a good teacher.
“Laugh.” Eddie shrugged. “But I got news for you, the Dodgers and Giants ain’t comin’ back. I live in the present, y’know? I got season tickets and everything.”
Spanos stood, still proffering the newspaper. “You got season tickets for the present?”
“For the Mets, you fat Greek fuck.” Eddie was also the sole provider of all cement poured for the team’s new ballpark and all the construction trash hauled away from the site. “What made you think you could read my paper?”
Eddie went up a step, so he’d be eye to eye with Spanos. Eddie also had a thing about his height (he was five-one), though he prided himself on not having a short man’s personality.
“I put it back in order,” Spanos practically pleaded. “Perfect order.”
“Keep it,” Eddie said.
Spanos, like most degenerate gamblers, had a tendency to push his luck. “Really, take it,” he said. “I’m done with it.”
On the other hand, that tendency was what led to Eddie taking over the man’s business. Eddie smiled his menacing smile. “Then shove it up your ass.”
Eddie had practiced that smile in the mirror. He’d worked up a lot of different looks.
He glanced up, at the window of his office, and saw Momo the Roach looking down on him. Momo had come back from Acapulco so tanned he could have joined the Harlem Globetrotters. He’d been back awhile now, but he was using a sunlamp to make the tan linger, like some Hollywood finocch’.
“Is there anything you gentlemen actually need,” Eddie said, “or are you going to block my path for the rest of this beautiful fall morning?”
“They wanted to see permits,” Spanos said.
“Who wanted to see permits?”
“The city.”
“The whole fuckin’ city wanted to see permits? Who’d you talk to?”
“We’re down at the waterfront there, setting up.” Spanos fished a business card from his shirt pocket and gave it to Eddie. “And this guy here told us we needed permits. We showed him what we had, and he said no, those are the wrong kind.”
“It was this guy here?” Eddie said, flicking the business card with his middle finger. It belonged to a councilman. “Or somebody who works for this guy?”
“That guy there. He had a detective with him, Chesbro, and a uniformed cop, too.”
Greedy double-dipping stronzoni. Chesbro was already on the payroll.
As was the councilman, who’d apparently stopped to wet his beak on his way to the Columbus Day Parade. Eddie had just taken over as capo. This was part of a bigger pattern these days: men who won’t stay bought. Happened more and more all the time. At every turn, even when all Eddie Paradise was trying to do was something nice for the good people of New York, hard-ons like this were testing him.
Let ’em. There was power in being underestimated. That was the Corleone way.
“And it took five of you to come here and tell me this?”
“What else could we do? They made us stop working.”
“Did you tell ’em who you was working for?”
Spanos shook his head. “He knew, though. He mentioned you by name.”
Eddie nodded to the men standing by the panel truck, took another step up, and reached down to put his hand on the taller man’s shoulder. “Go back down to the pier. My associates here will follow you. When our friends show up, they’ll reason with them.”
On the way to get their car, one of the men whispered to Eddie that he needed money. That figured. Eddie jerked his thumb toward upstairs. Get it from the Roach. Carroll Gardens was home-field advantage, but Eddie wasn’t about to stand on the street and pull out cash.
He watched them drive away. Then he met the eye of a neighborhood kid. They were always around, the way seagulls trail tourist boats. “Newspaper,” Eddie said.
“Which one?”
He waved dismissively. “All of ’em. Make sure they’re today’s.”
The boy sprinted off. He knew not to ask Eddie for money. Whatever the kid spent, he’d get it back tenfold.
Eddie Paradise stepped over the sullied newspaper, then walked around back and entered the Carroll Gardens Hunt Club through the basement door.
He and Momo had grown up in this neighborhood, and they’d bought the place together. It was tucked on a residential street, all brownstones, on a block that was still a hundred percent Italian. It had once been a real hunt club, and it came with a built-in pistol range down in the basement. Also down here was an empty cage made with iron bars supposedly pinched during the construction of the Bronx Zoo. The guess was that the cage was originally used for dogs. It was Eddie’s dream to get a lion—a real lion—and keep it down there. He’d made inquiries. It could be done.
The ground floor had a kitchen and a lounge—sofas, card tables, a pool table, and an ornately carved bar. On the walls—Eddie’s personal collection—were dozens of old World War II posters. HE’S WATCHING YOU. WHO WANTS TO KNOW? IF YOU TALK TOO MUCH, THIS MAN DIES. THE ENEMY IS LISTENING/HE WANTS TO KNOW WHAT YOU KNOW. The popular favorite was a fabulous pouty-lipped dame, hunched over a table toward the camera so you could see the great dark valley of her cleavage, pointing at a red pair of dice. PLEASE DON’T GAMBLE WITH YOUR LIFE! it read. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY. Personally, Eddie loved the one with two gunners drawn in profile, a tough Italian-looking guy with a rivet gun that looked like a lupara and, below him, a helmeted soldier with a tommy gun. GIVE ’EM BOTH BARRELS. Every time he looked at it, it made him smile.
On the second floor were storage rooms, crash apartments, and the business office. The desk sat on a six-inch platform (Eddie’s idea), so that the person behind the desk looked down on anybody sitting across from him. The whole top floor was a banquet hall with a kitchenette and a spiral staircase to a small rooftop terrace.
He closed his office door. “Downstairs still looks like a pigpen.”
“The way you are with the having to have your new soap,” Momo said, “or your new socks, all that bit, those are things you can pass off as you wanting to be classy. But friend to friend? Your newspaper thing has gotten fucking calabrese.”
Eddie didn’t wear socks more than once. He also threw away bars of soap once the lettering disappeared. As if he hadn’t earned some of the finer things in life.
“Yeah, well, we all got our little eccentricities,” Eddie said, feinting as if he was going to muss the Roach’s shellacked hair, which really was about as hard as a cockroach’s exoskeleton. Momo’s given name was Cosimo Barone. He’d hoped to get tabbed as capo, which if it had happened wouldn’t have surprised Eddie or pissed him off, either. Momo was a good man who’d earned what he’d gotten. There were rumors that the Roach was considered too close to Nick Geraci to take over as capo, but he wasn’t all that much closer to Geraci than Eddie had been. When the shake-up happened, Momo had been in the joint, sent upstate on a fluke bust at a Family-owned chop shop. He’d done his time and kept his mouth shut, which, on the one hand, was a reason to reward him but on the other made him, first, maybe too hot to tab as capo and, second, definitely out of the swing of things. So Eddie Paradise got promoted, and Momo the Roach got paroled and was rewarded with a month at a resort in Acapulco, all expenses paid, including women. Fair or not, that needed to be the end of it. Unless the Roach wanted to go the way of Nick Geraci or Momo’s own uncle Sally, the guy needed to live in the present. Eddie prided himself on living in the present.
“It was real nice of you to leave those guys waitin’, by the way,” Eddie said. “I’d have hated like hell to miss out on the chance to solve even more of the world’s fucking problems.”
“I been on the phone.”
“On the phone lining up someone to clean up this dump, I hope. Or do I have to do every goddamned thing myself?”
“The guys can do it.”
“If the guys could do it, they’d have done it. The guys ain’t here.” It was a Saturday, Columbus Day on top of that.
Momo laughed. “You may have noticed this ain’t exactly a report-to-work-early line of work.”
“It’s a do-what-you’re-fucking-told line of work,” Eddie said. “Get a cleaning lady, a service, whatever.”
“Don’t look at me like I ain’t doin’ my share,” Momo said. “I been runnin’ around all morning, entertaining the yats.”
“The yats?”
“Our New Orleans friends.” Meaning Carlo Tramonti, and some of his associates. Tramonti was in town to address the Commission tonight. The job of squiring them around had fallen to Eddie Paradise and his crew, on top of everything else. “Yats. As in where y’at? It’s a common term down there.”
“Fuck do you know that?” said Eddie.
“I get out.”
“You get out? You barely get out of Brooklyn.”
“What the fuck do you call Mexico?” Momo held out his tanned arms as Exhibit A.
Eddie was going to say something about the faggot sunlamp, but let it go. “I call Mexico,” Eddie said, “the exception that proves the rule.”
Momo shook his head.
“What?” Eddie said. “C’mon. Say it. Just say it.”
Because Eddie Paradise figured that what Momo would call Mexico was the consolation prize, the vacation he got instead of the promotion he deserved. The sooner they got it out between them, the better.
“Say it,” Eddie said. Because he sure as hell wasn’t going to.
“Say what?” Momo said.
“Mexico,” Eddie said. “Just fucking say it.”
Momo held up his hands in mock surrender. “I don’t have the first goddamned idea what you’re talking about.”
Eddie Paradise knew that in a situation like this, Michael Corleone would smoke a man out with silence. He tried counting up to his age, which was a tip Geraci had taught him. If you maintain eye contact, people will give you a second for every year you’ve lived.
“I don’t know what you’re drivin’ at,” Momo said (as Eddie got to thirteen). “But for your information, I was out of Brooklyn last night, picking up the yats at the airport.”
Eddie decided to let it go.
“I was thinking, you like that nigger rock and roll so much,” Momo said, “I can’t believe you never heard of the word yat.”
Eddie didn’t have to ask what one thing had to do with the other. Music was an ongoing topic of affectionate bickering between them. The Roach meant only that he was incredulou
s on both fronts. The running joke successfully lightened the tone of things.
“So,” Eddie said, “is that something you can call a man to his face? Yat?”
“Everybody calls me Roach, and I got a sense of humor about that there.”
“Yeah, but you take offense at dago, guinea, wop, et cetera and so forth.”
“That’s when it comes from people who ain’t like us.”
“You ain’t exactly like Tramonti and them,” Eddie pointed out.
“Maybe not, but, no offense, I see some resemblance between you and what’s his face.”
“Funny,” Eddie said, but again he was able to translate effortlessly. Tramonti had five younger brothers. The one Momo meant was Augie the Midget, his consigliere, who wasn’t a true-blue midget but was even shorter than Eddie. “So where are they?”
“The yats? I got ’em a driver and a Cadillac, got ’em a charter tour of the harbor. After that, they take a late lunch at Manny Wolf’s Chop House. Best table in the house, and no matter how hard they try, the tab comes to us.”
Eddie nodded in approval.
“Manny’s, also, is out of Brooklyn, for your information.”
“I hit a nerve, eh?” Eddie grinned, the extra-large one he’d practiced so it looked like he was both joking around and not to be fucked with.
“I’m just making a point.”
“You don’t have to actually go to Manny Wolf’s to make a reservation,” Eddie said.
“You have to go there to know it’s good.”
“Every wiseguy in New York knows it’s good.”
“Goddamn. You know goddamned well I been out of Brooklyn.”
The Roach was a literal-minded man, or pretended to be. All in the game. “Maybe you’re right,” Eddie conceded. “Come to think of it, the state pen is also out of Brooklyn.”
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