The Predators

by Harold Robbins

Buddy didn’t get to California. He found a better deal in Harlem. He was running numbers from 110th Street down to 59th Street between Central Park West and the East River. Buddy and I had kept in touch. I knew that he had more than twenty runners and they reported to him at a used car dealership on St. Nicholas Avenue. Buddy and Ulla had a son. When he was baptized, they named him Jerome. I saw pictures of the child; he was fair skinned and good-looking. They didn’t live in Harlem; instead, they had a fairly new apartment on 80th Street and West End Avenue.

  I called him at home. It was the only telephone number I had because Giselle and Ulla kept in touch by phone. New York was six hours behind us and I knew that Buddy always got home late. I called him at six in the morning, which was midnight in New York.

  “I’m coming home, Buddy,” I said loudly into the phone. “The Plescassier company is going to bring their bottled water into the States.”

  “That’s balls,” he said. “Why should anybody in New York pay for French bottled water when they get it free from the tap?”

  I smiled into the phone. “Does Ulla wash her pussy in tap water?”

  “No,” he answered. “She uses plain bottled water from the A & P.”

  “French water is better,” I said. “I bet Ulla would buy it if she could get it.”

  “I don’t know,” Buddy said doubtfully.

  I laughed. “Don’t be a schmuck. Giselle even has got me washing my balls in Plescassier.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So what do you want me to do?”

  “I’ll need a big storage place or warehouse near the Brooklyn docks. Don’t forget I’m moving a lot of bottles of water and I don’t want the breakage to put me out of business.”

  “The only place you can go to is Bush Terminal. But the Brooklyn waterfront is controlled by the Randazzo family. You’d have to make a deal with them.” He laughed. “And they’re tough—they’ll want a piece of the action.”

  “Who do I have to deal with?” I asked.

  “I have a good friend who I met when I was working in the navy yard. Phil Cioffi. They put him in charge of the whole terminal.”

  “How do I get in touch with him?” I asked.

  “You don’t,” Buddy said. “My boss is close with the Randazzo family. Albert Anastasia is the capo down in Brooklyn. They’ll put me in touch with Cioffi. You tell me what you want and I’ll find out how much it’s going to cost you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Nothing really changes, does it, Buddy?”

  Buddy laughed. “Not really. Only your Uncle Harry’s gone up in the world. He and Kitty have two kids. He’s got the franchises for White Tower nickel hamburgers, maybe three hundred stores. He’s also got a bottling contract for Royal Crown Cola-in the East and a bottling plant in New Jersey. And he and Kitty live in a big house in Westchester.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “That son of a bitch!”

  “Fuck him!” Buddy said. “The two of them are yesterday for you. You’re doing okay. Giselle coming in with you?”

  “Of course,” I answered.

  “Married yet?” Buddy asked.

  “We’re waiting for the time,” I answered.

  “Ulla says you shouldn’t wait too long or you’ll lose her.”

  “I’ll think on it,” I said. “Meanwhile, put a rush on it. I have to get Plescassier into the States.”

  4

  There were fifty gallons of Plescassier water in each of the barrels that we shipped to the States, on an old Greek ship leaving from Marseilles that would take about twenty days to arrive in New York. One hundred thousand gallons in all being shipped to the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn.

  Meanwhile, one month before, Giselle and I took the Leonardo da Vinci from Genoa. We landed in New York eight days later. Giselle loved it, but I didn’t care much for the ocean. I spent most of the time being seasick, and I almost kissed the ground on Fifty-first Street when we came off the ship.

  Buddy and Ulla were there waiting for us. They had everything planned for us. We would stay at their apartment until we could find our own place. The two girls would look for an apartment while Buddy was taking me to meet Phil Cioffi at the terminal offices.

  Buddy and I walked into the terminal offices. We were right on time. The secretary asked us to wait a moment. She went inside the office behind her desk. In a moment, both she and a tall man with a mustache came out. Buddy stood up and introduced me.

  “Mr. Cioffi, this is my friend, Jerry Cooper,” he said. I had never seen Buddy so formal.

  Mr. Cioffi stretched out his hand. “How you doing, Jerry?”

  “Just fine,” I answered. He seemed like a nice enough man.

  We went inside the office and started talking about what I needed. After a while, Mr. Cioffi stood up and said he would need to bring Mr. Albert Anastasia into the meeting. He said that Anastasia was the only one who could approve this kind of deal.

  Buddy and I looked at each other.

  Soon enough, Cioffi came back in the room with a man that was about five feet ten and very heavy, and had thin strands of hair crossing his bald head. He had a long cigar that he always kept in his mouth when he was talking.

  After we all sat down, I spoke first. “Mr. Anastasia, I’m bringing in Plescassier water from France. I’ve got one hundred thousand gallons in fifty-gallon barrels.”

  He puffed away on his cigar. “That’s a hell of a lot of water!” He paused for a minute. “That’s about thirty thousand square feet of storage. Jesus! That’s stacking them four barrels high. Hell of a lot of space!”

  It was a lot of space. I nodded in agreement.

  “What the hell do I need this for? I’d have to charge you ten thousand dollars a month.”

  “Mr. Anastasia,” I said politely. “You know I’ll never be able to pay that kind of rent. We’re just starting out.”

  “You from New York?” Anastasia asked me.

  “Originally. I served in the army in France and I just got back,” I answered.

  “Those frogs think their water is pretty good?”

  “It sells good in France,” I answered.

  “Okay, Cooper, I’ll take three thousand dollars a month for the first six months. Later, we’ll renegotiate,” he said gruffly, and puffed proudly on his cigar. “Only because you served our country. And I’m a very patriotic man.”

  “That includes heat enough to keep the water from freezing?” I asked.

  Phil Cioffi nodded.

  “How you going to bottle this water?” Anastasia asked.

  “I owned a seltzer bottling company before the war. I’m going to try and see if it’s still in business.”

  Anastasia leaned back in his chair. “What do you Jews know about bottling soda? There’s only one or two seltzer companies still in business and they are only selling two or three hundred bottles a week. Now, we have a bottling plant in Long Island. We can bottle anything. We already bottle American Cola and all the fruit-flavored sodas. We can do it in any kind of bottle that you want and it’s a lot cheaper than you can do it yourself.”

  I looked at him. His cigar was stinking up the room. “That sounds good, but how much will that cost? My people in France really have control of all the money.”

  Anastasia waved his cigar. “We’re reasonable. Not only do we do the bottling, we can also set you up with salesmen to reach the stores and make a deal with the Teamsters union to deliver.”

  “Okay,” I said. “How much?”

  Anastasia looked down at the desk. He scribbled some numbers on a notepad. He looked at it for a few minutes. Then he threw his pencil onto the desk. “Fuck it!” he said. “This is nothing but a pain in the ass. Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll give you the best goddamn deal of your lifetime. You set up a company and give us fifty percent of it and then all you have to do is rake in the money.”

  “I’ll still have to clear it with the French,” I said. “But thank you, Mr. Anastasia.”

  He smiled broadly and offered me one of his ciga
rs. “Just call me Al,” he said.

  5

  J. P. was angry. “Everything in the United States is Mafia. The warehouse is controlled by the Mafia. The bottling is controlled by the Mafia, the selling and distributing is Mafia. And they take fifty percent of everything! And what do we have? We pay for the shipping, we pay for the barrels, and for one month of personnel at the springs for the water. Then we have nothing left but one sou a liter.”

  “We still need advertising if we’re going to sell to the stores. I’ve already talked to some of the big grocery markets. They want advertising if they use space for the bottles. Wholesalers won’t sell to the restaurants unless they get one hundred percent markup on each bottle,” I said. “Other European businesses are making money in the States. Cosmetics, perfumes, many canned foods. We can sell Plescassier here, but we have to invest to make it happen.”

  “My father doesn’t want to invest that kind of money. Period,” J. P. said. “You’ll have to find a way to get us out.”

  “Five-liter bottles,” I answered. “That’s what your father wanted, and that’s what we’re going to have to do. But it will not make any money and it certainly won’t add to the Plescassier name.”

  “I don’t have the choice,” J. P. said. “Do what you can.” And he hung up the phone.

  Giselle looked at me. “You don’t look very happy.”

  We had been in our little furnished apartment on East 64th Street for almost a month. “I’m not happy. In two days the water arrives in Bush Terminal and I haven’t got a deal with anyone to buy Plescassier. J. P. thinks the Mafia is too expensive, his father won’t invest money to advertise, and at the end of it, I’m the one who is fucked.”

  She crossed the room and sat on the couch next to me. “If it doesn’t work,” she said, “we can always go back to France.”

  “And what is that for me? A shitty job for no real money and no future,” I said. Hooked at her. “I’m sorry, darling, but I’m American and this is where I should be. In France, I’m still a foreigner.”

  “I am a foreigner here,” she said. “But I am happy to be with you.”

  “I am happy to be with you, too, dear,” I said. “But I’m a man. I want to take care of you. I don’t know how long J. P. will want me once I go back. Then I’m just a gigolo living on your back.”

  She took my hand. “Jerree, just give yourself time. We’ll find a way out.”

  I kissed her. “You’re wonderful. You always believe in me.”

  She laughed and got to her feet. “Take a shower. I’ll wash you. Then we can go to bed and make love. You’ll forget all about your problems.”

  “You forgot about dinner,” I said.

  “After,” she said.

  * * *

  In the morning Buddy woke me up. “I got a hot deal for you,” he said.

  I groaned. “I’ve not been lucky with good deals,” I said.

  “Don’t be a schmuck,” he said. “This is really hot.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “A Roadmaster right off the line,” he said. “And you can get it for peanuts.”

  “It’s hot?” I said.

  “So?” he answered. “We get it from the used-car dealer. Everything’s been taken care of. You even get legitimate papers.”

  “My business is going into the shithouse and you want to talk to me about hot deals,” I said.

  “You pay a grand,” he said. “It’s forty-five hundred off the showroom floor. Keep it a couple of months and you can get twenty-five hundred for it.”

  “I’m not in the car business,” I said.

  “You need a car,” he said. “Your taxicabs cost that much in a month. Besides, Giselle needs a car. Subways and buses are not her style.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where do you want me to go to get it?”

  “I’ll pick you up about noon,” he said. “It’s at a Buick dealership up on St. Nicholas Avenue.”

  I took Giselle with me to get the car. She stared at it. “Mon Dieu,” she said. “It’s a giant.”

  Buddy and I laughed. “It’s a great car,” I said. “This is the first year they came in with air-conditioning.”

  “Why do you need an air conditioner in an automobile?” she asked. “Just open the windows and you get all the air you need.”

  “Wait until the heat of summer,” I said.

  “The windows are electric, too,” Buddy said. “You don’t have to crank them up.”

  “It’s too big,” Giselle said. “I would like a small car.”

  “You get used to it and you’ll love it,” Buddy said. “Ulla felt the same way when we came here.”

  Buddy and I took Giselle home and then we went over the Brooklyn Bridge to the terminal. On the way I told Buddy the deal. He sympathized with me, but he had no answers for me. I drove to the terminal offices and walked into Cioffi’s office.

  He was smiling. “Everything okay?”

  “No,” I said. “Can you get me a meeting with Al?”

  “I’ll call him,” Cioffi said, picking up the phone. “He did say he would be down here sometime this afternoon.”

  “If it’s okay with you, then, I’ll wait here for him.” I turned to Buddy. “You take the car and go home,” I told him. “We’ll see you both for dinner.”

  * * *

  I waited in the office until it was almost six o’clock before Anastasia showed up. I looked out the window and saw his Cadillac and two bodyguards waiting for him.

  “Hi ya, Jerry.” Anastasia smiled. “You talk to the frogs yet?”

  “I spoke to them, Al,” I replied. “They’re not ready to do a big setup yet. They said they haven’t the money to support it.”

  He looked at me. “You got a fuckin’ lot of water,” he said. “What are you goin’ to do with it? Stick it up your ass like a giant enema?”

  I laughed. “I checked out a few supermarket operators. They said they could use three-gallon and five-gallon bottles of pure French water. Of course, they won’t pay much for it, and they don’t care about the name. They only want it because it’s cheap.”

  “What do you think you can get for it?” he asked.

  “Two dollars for the three-gallon, and three dollars for the five-gallon bottles,” I said.

  “That won’t give us very much,” he said. “It’ll cost us seventy cents a bottle to service it. Well, this changes things. We’ll have to get more than fifty-fifty.”

  “It’s your ball game, Al,” I said. “You tell me. Just remember, I get nothing out of this. All the money goes to the French.”

  “I don’t care,” Anastasia said. “Fuck the French. You keep what you want and they won’t know the difference.”

  “That wasn’t my deal with them,” I said. “They’ll get all their money.”

  6

  It was six months before I got rid of all the water. That made it late April 1956 before I could send all the money to France. Twenty thousand dollars. That meant that I got nothing for the work I had done. On top of that, I used up almost nine grand of my own money to live on. I really felt stupid. I did my best to promote the goddamn Plescassier and they gave me nothing. They didn’t help me and they didn’t help themselves.

  I stared at the account books on the table I had set up in the apartment. I looked across the room at Giselle. “They really fucked me, my French friends,” I said sarcastically.

  “Why do you say that?” she asked. “They tried to give you a chance.”

  “They gave me a chance,” I snapped. “But they kept a leash around my neck so that I couldn’t go too far.”

  “They put up a lot of money to ship the water into the States,” she said.

  I looked at her. “Not that much,” I said. “Don’t forget I worked a long time inside Plescassier and I know all their costs. I know how much it cost to barrel and ship the water. The twenty grand I sent back to them pays for all their costs and a little more.”

  She didn’t say anything to me.

&
nbsp; I slammed the account books on the floor. “Fuck them! I know they have a two-million-dollar advertising program for their water in France. Why in the hell did they think it wouldn’t cost at least that much money here? The Americans weren’t waiting with open arms to embrace Plescassier!”

  “Why don’t you talk to J. P. about it again?” she asked. “He’s not stupid.”

  “Maybe he’s not,” I answered. “But his father is. Besides, talking to J. P. on the phone won’t do a damn thing. Over the phone, neither of us understands the other’s accent.”

  “Then why don’t you go to France and see him?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t take another eight days of seasickness,” I said.

  “There are already three airlines flying jets between Europe and the States. You will be there in one day.” She smiled.

  I looked at her. “Will you fly with me?”

  She was still smiling. “Anywhere with you.”

  * * *

  “You’re crazy!” Buddy said. “You go back to France, you’re fucked!”

  “What am I goin’ to do here?” I asked. “I’ve never done anything but work in Uncle Harry’s fountain and learn a little about the seltzer business from Rita and Eddie. And I wasn’t very smart about that—the minute I went into the army, my fuckin’ uncle and girlfriend screwed me out of it.”

  “But in the army you learned about running an auto repair and service factory. There’s a lot of car dealers looking for a man to run their service department. There’s been a lot of schmucks out there who know nothing about the work they do and they’re doin’ all right.”

  I looked at him. “What do you mean they’re doing well, Buddy?” I asked. “They make nine or ten grand a year. That’s shit. You’re booking forty grand a year with what you do. I can’t even keep the cheap apartment that I live in on that kind of money.”

  “You gonna do better in France?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Better living there is cheaper than here. I’ll make more money with Plescassier than I would working in a service department at an automobile dealer’s showroom.”

  “Giselle talk you into it?” he asked. “I know she wants to go home.”