For at least a minute after I stopped in front of the table he made no indication that he was aware of me. He stood Napoleon-like with his feet apart, supporting his weight on his hands, but the object he was staring at was no map of Austerlitz. It was a large-scale color photograph of a woman’s spread thighs and open glistening vagina with a sheaf of three-by-five calendar pages attached just below her clitoris. But for the true flesh tones—it was clearly the work of a better photographer than its subject usually attracted—I might have mistaken it for a scenic shot of Carlsbad Cavern.
“What do you think?” he said at last, without raising his eyes from the picture. He had a deep voice for a man no larger than I and twenty pounds lighter. Comically deep, in fact. It made me want to look around for the ventriloquist.
I said, “I hope it’s larger than life. I don’t know of a man with the equipment who can make her happy.”
“I do. Or I did. Joey Machine cut it off him in thirty-two and stuck it down his throat for shooting his mouth off to the Treasury Department. I’m talking about the calendar. Think it’ll sell?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why not? My brother and me sold dirty pictures on the street to keep our mother from getting evicted. After a couple of years we bought her a house.”
“Girly magazines were hard to come by then. The Secret Service shut down all the presses and Customs seized foreign material at the borders. Then came Hugh Hefner. Now the customers want their naked women as pink as balloons without moles or scars. No garage man’s going to hang a gynecologist’s chart on his wall when he can get Marilyn Monroe on red satin.”
“You’re right. Shit. You can’t count on nothing no more.” He rolled up the calendar and stood holding it in both hands like a headmaster’s baton. “You’re Minor, right? I used to hear your name. Never read you, though. Tony and me, we was too busy to read newspapers. Old Frankie kept us hopping. You hear he’s coming back?”
I made a noncommittal sound. Every few months since his deportation, rumors had flown of a deal brewing between Frankie Orr and the United States Attorney General’s office that would allow him to return to his adopted country. But the feds never made deals unless you had something they wanted, and when last I’d checked there had been no mad demand on Pennsylvania Avenue for olive trees from Frankie’s private grove outside Palermo.
“We won’t need this porno shit when the Conductor gets back. It’ll be like the old days then, only better. No more of this bumping each other off.”
“That’s what kept you and Tony hopping,” I said. “If memory serves.”
He scowled—a man with lips like cold cuts can really do you a scowl—and javelined the tube calendar up and over a heap of cartons. “None of that shit never stuck to neither of us. When they couldn’t get Frankie no other way they tried to trump us up with every kill since little Lindbergh to yellow us into talking, but we kept our cake-holes shut and they went away.”
“The way I heard it, every time one of you was seen running away from someplace with blood on his shoe, the other one was out clubbing in front of a couple of college deans and a Presbyterian minister. Nobody could tell one twin from his brother under oath.”
“It ain’t that way now. Tony let himself go all to hell.” He sucked in his gut.
“Where is Tony, by the way? The two of you are apart as often as a set of salt and pepper shakers. Or am I your alibi for whatever he’s up to?”
“Tony caught cancer. Croakers give him three months.”
“Oh.” I’d been enjoying so much dealing with him the way I used to with his kind, a way I’d forgotten until I came face to face with one, that the tragedy in that ugly-ordinary face got to me. I was genuinely saddened that mortality should find its way to such a homely and constant part of the landscape as a Ballista. Or maybe it was just another variation on the way I felt whenever a stranger my age showed up in the obituaries.
“Ain’t your fault,” he said, disregarding the fact that I hadn’t said I was sorry. “Life puts you on the spot when nobody else can, and that’s the shits. I’m sure as hell going to miss him. He keeps the books.”
“Did Anthony Battle tell you why I’m here?”
“I like that boy. I sure hope he beats this pinko rap. I get on with him better than some white men I’ve known and that’s the Lord’s truth. He said you had a question.” He opened his face, which was what I’d been dreading. When a gangster does that it’s like a glimpse into the filthy kitchen of a restaurant you didn’t want to eat in to begin with.
I stared right at it and took a bite. “Who put the hit on Walter Reuther?”
19
I’D FORGOTTEN HOW SICILIANS worked. Histrionics were their stock in trade; whenever someone close to them died they stopped shaving, barked their knees praying to the Holy Virgin, and pounded the coffin with both fists, wailing at the top of their considerable lungs. But when it came to something that really mattered, business and staying out of jail, they stoned over like the forty thieves’ den. I’d said what I said looking for some reaction that would tell me more than his words. I got zero. The yellow eyes were the only things living in a face carved out of Carrara marble.
“I didn’t know he was hit,” Charlie Balls said. “I seen him on TV just this morning.”
“This happened in forty-eight. It didn’t take.”
“I remember. I was getting my kidneys rearranged in the First Precinct basement when it happened. They said I sapped a shylock till his brains showed.”
“Where was Tony?”
“Getting a writ, I guess. Ask him.”
“Where were you in forty-nine when someone shot Victor Reuther?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Probably pissing blood in some other basement. I don’t know where Tony was neither. Same place, probably. The feds was coming down on Frankie with both feet by then and the local coppers suddenly found their balls.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“Oh, I heard plenty. Them Reuther boys got plenty of enemies. I heard it was their own union wanted them out. You ought to be talking to the rank-and-file. What’s your stake in this, anyhow? I heard you quit scribbling for the papers.”
“I need a favor for a favor. You know the song.”
“Tell me about it, I could sing it in the dark. I’m stuck with five hundred TV sets that don’t work for shit because I need a favor from this Jew bastard in Vegas. You got a TV? I can make you a good price.”
As he waved his hand around the inventory in the room I remembered where I’d seen the name Tele King recently. My mind flashed on a beefy bartender pounding the side of a set on the shelf in the Shamrock Bar. “You’re in the television business?”
“Oh, Tony and me got the whole territory. That was Vegas’ big brainstorm. I get a call. ‘Hey, Charlie, you remember how we cleaned up on the jukebox racket? Well, that’s day-old bread. TV, that’s where the future is. Every schmoe on his way home from the plant stops off for a beer, he wants to watch the fights too, see Jake LaMotta give some nigger a nosebleed. We already got the routes and the procedure’s the same. Easiest money we’ve made since the Eighteenth Amendment.’ Only we owned all the distribution rights to the jukes, while anybody with cash in his till can walk into the RCA store and come out with a set and pop it up on the shelf and forget about it. Plus when we owned the juke routes we supplied the records too, and our customers had to keep replacing them at our price. Plus the jukes worked. TV repair, that’s the racket we should of muscled in on. Meanwhile somebody else buys all the juke routes out from under us, every soda shop between here and Timbukfuckingtu puts one in to play that jungle-bunny rag the kids get all wet over, and I’m stuck with five hundred clothes hampers with windows. The old lady was right. Tony and me should of went to the seminary. You never see no priest in no soup line.”
“About Reuther.” I must have had one of those faces. Everyone with something to confide sought me out. In the old days I’d thought it was my reportorial s
avvy.
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” He ran a hand over where his hair would have been had anything been able to take root on that bony scalp. “You’re barking down the wrong hole here. Frankie come in on the side of labor when everybody else was still bashing heads for the companies. He seen where things was going before they went. Reuther don’t play ball the way Brock does over at the Steelhaulers, but he’s got most of the checkers in the UAW and hitting him is just plain bad for business. You want to talk to somebody about that, talk to Henry Deuce. He’s got a lot more to gain from a world without Walter P. Reuther.”
“Why Henry Deuce? Why not GM or Chrysler or DeSoto or Studebaker?”
“Well, to name one. Look, I’m clean out of jawing time. These carpet joints don’t run themselves.”
But he’d changed the subject too quickly. I leaned forward on my hands. The top of the table was sticky from an old spill. I hoped it was a beverage. “Let’s just for the sake of saying something say it was Henry Deuce or one of his people, Jack Bugas or Israel Zed. When they want to make a car they don’t go down to Rouge and pick up a welding torch. When they want to kill a man they don’t chip their manicures skulking through bushes waiting for a clear shot through a lighted window. They hire it out. Question is, who do they hire?”
“Take your pick. I know some kids’d do their own mothers for a case of Black Label and a new battery for a forty-nine Merc.”
“I’m talking about professionals. You don’t live in an Airstream when you can afford a house on Lake St. Clair.”
“I see what you’re getting at. You’re still barking down the wrong hole. This idea that Tony and I iced guys, it comes from reading too many comic books. Oh, we roughed some guys around when we was kids and didn’t know no better— guys like us, mind; the squares don’t have nothing to be afraid of from the Ballistas. It’s a long hop from there to the box garden. Swear it on a stack of Bibles.”
“The only way I’d believe you didn’t make a run at Reuther is if you swore you did. You and your brother would be a lot more than saloonkeepers by now if you knew enough to tell the truth when it counted. You’d lie about your shoe size to screw the clerk out of two extra inches.”
His face went liverish. He reached behind his back and swung out a black .45 Army automatic, jacking a shell into the chamber in the same motion. “Brother, you wore it out but good. Go through the door or be blasted through it.”
“I was wondering what it would take to make you revert to type.” The words tasted like metal. I backed away slowly. When a pile of cartons stopped me I turned and went around it. My skin prickled from the nape of my neck to the base of my testicles. A trickle of cold water wandered down between my buttocks.
“And to think I was going to give you a bargain on a brand new TV.”
Anthony Battle was leaning on the same section of bar when I came out into the light. Someone had plugged the jukebox back in: one of those bouncy, hiccoughing tunes sung by some kid from Texas. A few of the younger couples were out on the dance floor, skirts twirling straight out from trim waists like helicopter rotors. Yellow panties seemed to be in fashion that season.
“Talk to the man?” Battle asked.
“Mostly I got talked at.” I rested my forearms on the bar next to him. All the stools were taken. The bartender looked a question at me over the glass he was polishing. I shook my head. I only got their attention when I didn’t want anything.
“Say anything about me?”
“He said you were a good boy for a Communist.”
“That ain’t funny.”
“Nothing much is these days.” A sharp ache had begun to flicker behind my eyes like a loose connection.
“He answer your question?”
“He pulled a gun on me for asking it.”
“Mr. Carlo he comes to the point.” He drank. Something about the way he lifted his glass, slopping the gin around inside, told me a couple of generations had passed since I’d left him.
“Could be Leadbeater is doing you a favor,” I said. “There are better bosses.”
“I know. I carried a hod for one for fifty cents a hour. My brother’s kid won’t carry no hod. That means college and I can’t swing that on no fifty cents a hour.”
The song slammed to a finish. The next one was all about tutti-frutti. The lyric-writing business was one to consider when I lost too many faculties to continue in advertising. I shifted onto my left elbow, facing the wrestler. His profile had been hacked out of ironstone. “You said you’ve seen a lot of men come and go in back of this place. Do you know any of them by name?”
“No. They don’t talk to me. They don’t talk to no one but Mr. Carlo.”
“Do they drive here or do they take cabs?”
“Drive I guess. Nobody takes cabs in Detroit.”
“Are you any good at memorizing numbers? License numbers?”
He drank. “If I was I wouldn’t tell you.”
“I guess not.” I pushed away from the bar. “Thanks for setting this up. It’s not your fault nothing came of it. I don’t know what I expected. Information never came that easy, not even when I was young and knew how to get it. I’ll talk to Leadbeater.”
He made no response. I wasn’t sure if he was in a condition to hear what I’d said. I put five dollars on the bar next to him and threaded my way out between flying elbows and whirling feet. The crisp air in the parking lot flash-froze the pain in my skull. The stars were hard points of steel in a sky like black shale. Quick footsteps padded the bare earth behind me as I inserted the key in the door of the Mercury. I spun around, squaring off to defend myself. Anthony Battle’s shadowy bulk blocked out the Highwayman’s Rest. He was breathing hard, swaying on his big feet.
“One thing I’m good at is numbers,” he said. “My old man said if I was white I’d make a good accountant.”
I sagged against the car. Ever since the Woolworth’s beating, any noise behind me hurled my heart into my throat “You’ve done enough. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“You means, worse’n I am now?”
I grinned back.
20
THAT SATURDAY NIGHT I took Agnes to the Bel-Air Drive-In on Eight Mile Road. There had been the usual discussion of where to go, but when you have a new car whose interior is nicer than your living room you want to spend as much time in it as possible, at least until the novelty wears off. The feature was Bad Day at Black Rock. About a third of the way through, Agnes reached across me and dialed down the speaker attached to the window on the driver’s side. She had on a green dress with a square neck that showed her collarbone—a part of the female anatomy I had always admired—and a hat that clung to her head like a starfish gripping a stubborn clam.
“What are you grumbling about?” she asked.
“I thought it was a western. It sounded like a western. That’s what I was in the mood for.”
“It is a western.”
“The hero wears a fedora and the villain drives a pickup truck.”
“There are horses.”
“There were neckties in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, but that didn’t make it a gangster picture.”
“Well, I like it. Spencer Tracy is looking old, though. It’s kind of sad.”
“We’re the same age.”
“Ah. That’s why we’re grumpy.”
“We’re grumpy because there ought to be a law against advertising a movie as a western that isn’t a western.”
“There is, as a matter of fact. The memo’s still on the bulletin board at Slauson and Nichols. I think. There are about eleven months’ worth of newspaper cartoons tacked on top of it.”
“That’s the government for you. Do anything to protect its monopoly on lying.”
“Now you’re contradicting yourself,” she said. “What’s wrong, Connie? I wasn’t this hard to get along with when I went through menopause.”
“Yes, you were.”
She shifted on the seat, supporting her chin on her elbow on
the back. “Really, what’s wrong? Ford getting you down?”
“It’s a different world up there. Everyone’s writing his autobiography on company time. Whenever the conversation lags during a meeting you can hear ballpoint pens scratching on notepads under the table. They say Henry asked his secretary to hire an exterminator. He thought there were mice in the walls of the boardroom.”
“Henry, is it?”
“Kings and emperors go by their first names. He’s got a genealogist working around the clock trying to trace the Ford family back to William the Conqueror.”
“His grandfather was a nut. I guess some of it was bound to rub off.”
“These days it takes a nut to be normal. A couple of weeks ago some joker in Long Island sold a painting for fifty thousand dollars that looked just like my kitchen floor after I finished painting the ceiling. Yesterday I paid a guy in coveralls forty bucks to replace a tube in my TV set and spent the rest of the evening watching a middle-aged comedian parading around in a chiffon dress. And every time Spencer Tracy turns his back I can see the outline of his arm tied behind him to make it look like he has only one. He didn’t lose it at all; he just misplaced it. Meanwhile I’m out sixty cents and it’s been so long since I’ve seen a real western I’m about to break out in little red saddles all over my body.”
“Crackerjacks.”
I looked at her. “Say again?”
“I’m hungry. I want Crackerjacks.”
“You ate the biggest pile of spaghetti I’ve ever seen an hour ago at Dondero’s.”
“Then I wanted spaghetti. Now I want something sweet and sticky that crunches.”
I turned my watch to catch the light from the screen. “Wait ten minutes.”
“Why? The concession kid’s right there.”
“Ernest Borgnine’s about to beat the hell out of Tracy. I don’t want to miss any of it while I’m waiting for the kid to make change.”
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