Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  Kid Sally Palumbo had his eyes half closed while he blew out smoke. “I know what I’m doin’,” he said.

  When the police arrived at Patrissy’s and took Albie to the hospital, there was no way of telling what had happened. Certainly Albie couldn’t tell them. The rope had done so much damage to his neck that when the people in the hospital finally revived him with ammonia capsules he couldn’t talk. His throat was closed. It would be days before he would be able to make a sound. When a detective gave him a pad and pen, Albie wrote down: “I got a bad stiff neck.”

  Chapter 14

  AFTER A WEEK OF working on copying the painting of the naked girl, Mario got off his knees and carried it over to Sidney’s apartment. Right away, it was obvious to Sidney that the ripped face on the picture Mario was copying had caused him to shy away from that part of the body and invest great time and energy on other parts.

  “Here and there it looks like a caveman worked on this thing,” Sidney said. “But over-all, I want to tell you something, you got a lot of long, hard work ahead of you, but you know how to express yourself all right. Oh, I don’t think you can try with this thing yet. You still got a long way to go. For one thing, you're concentrating on this too much.”

  “What?” Mario said.

  “The top of the thing.”

  “Top?” Mario said.

  Sidney shouted. “The top of the tit!”

  “Oh,” Mario said.

  “It gives you away that you’re just beginning. Too much detail, it’s no good. It’s what you suggest and leave out that gives a thing its strength. You paint every eyelash on somebody’s eye? So why do you put down every bump on the top of her thing?”

  When he got back, Angela was standing in front of the house. He started upstairs to put his work away. When she asked to see it, he covered it and ran. Then they walked up to the corner. In the early darkness the brightly lit coffee shop on the corner looked inviting to Mario. He hadn’t eaten since morning.

  “Let’s go some place nicer,” Angela said. “Have you ever had Chinese food?”

  He shook his head no.

  “There’s a place right up there,” she said, pointing up First Avenue.

  They sat in a booth and she ordered. Mario did not inquire what he was eating. He put his head down and swallowed egg rolls, shrimp and lobster sauce, and sweet-and-sour pork without noticing what it was. Angela was comfortable in the place. It was empty and warm and dim and the booths and the white tablecloths and the curtained door closed around her and kept the cold wind of Brooklyn out of her mind. She held a cup of tea up and looked at Mario. She liked his thick hair. She liked his eyes too. He always looked directly at her, as if she were important. When she went to the ladies’ room, she combed her hair carefully. She wondered what it would be like if Mario ever became even a slight success as an artist. She looked at herself in the mirror and shrugged. When she came back to the table, she was eager to take the check from the waiter. After all, Mario had nothing.

  Outside the restaurant, Mario half waited for her to go to the subway, but instead she started walking with him. Well, she said to herself. Well, who knows?

  The flights of stairs to Mario’s apartment left the two of them panting when they reached his door. He opened it and stepped into the darkness with her. Mario shut the door with one hand and pulled her to him with the other. He kissed her with all the great romance of the Italian mountain country. She twisted her head. She couldn’t breathe from the stairs, and now, with his pressing on her, she thought she’d faint.

  Angela pushed him back. “Stop for a minute,” she said. “Give me a second.” She took a deep breath. “Where’s the light?”

  He flicked the switch. One bare bulb in the ceiling came on. Angela’s mouth fell open. On the floor in the center of the room was the pillow. It was covered with a towel Mario had taken from the hotel. Over by the windows were the art supplies and a few smears of paint on the floor. Otherwise, there was nothing in the room.

  “You didn’t even buy a bed?” she said.

  Mario, his eyes glistening, tugged on her arm. Angela went one step toward the pillow and then pulled back. Mario put both hands on her and tried to drag her as if she were a donkey.

  “Are you crazy?” she said.

  He tried to tug her again, but she wouldn’t move. She kept looking at the bare floor. One word kept running through her mind.

  Splinters!

  She twisted away from him and got out into the hallway.

  “What you want?” Big Mama said when she saw Angela in the kitchen the next morning.

  “I’m just looking,” Angela said. She was fishing in the papers on top of the refrigerator. When she felt her bankbook, she waited until her grandmother wasn’t looking, and then she walked out of the kitchen with it. The hell with it, she said to herself. Nobody can live like he is.

  An hour later, Angela banged on Mario’s door. She stood in the hallway until he got his coat on. They spent the rest of the morning having a cheap kitchen set sent to his place, buying a second-hand easel and carting it back to the apartment, and going uptown to buy a studio couch at a furniture warehouse that was listed in the Village Voice. Mario spent the day staring out windows whenever the price was mentioned. In the furniture warehouse, the price tag on the studio couch read $219. Mario asked the manager if the men’s room was available. When Mario came out, Angela said, “They can't deliver it for three days.”

  Mario put a hand under one end of the couch and lifted. It was light enough. Angela reached down. Her end of it came up easily. They walked out of the warehouse and through the people on the sidewalk and down the subway stairs. Mario stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He timed his move with the subway change clerk. As the clerk’s head went down to make change for someone, Mario rushed ahead, kicking open the gate with the NO ENTRANCE sign. When the downtown train came in, Mario backed into it, swinging the couch around until it was lengthwise in the middle of the aisle. He sat down on the couch, and Angela sat next to him. At 42nd Street, the first swirl of the rush hour came into the car. People fell into each other trying to go around the couch.

  “Are you comfortable?” a man snarled down at Mario.

  “Yes,” Mario said.

  An old lady with a shopping bag turned around and started sitting down. Mario tried to block her with his elbow. The old lady swung her shopping bag into Mario’s face and wedged her way between Mario and Angela. The old lady spread her arms, the elbows coming out like gates. She was ready to hold her position.

  The old lady made a sound like a whippoorwill and flew up from the couch. Angela put a hand over her face.

  Mario was proud of himself.

  Mario and Angela got the studio couch to his building. The superintendent looked out into the hallway to see what the noise was. Angela looked at him. The superintendent swore to himself. He took Angela’s end of the couch. She reached over and grabbed the thick hair on the back of Mario’s neck. She held it for a moment. It was just as well the superintendent had come out. “I’ll see you, get a night’s sleep for once,” she said.

  Joe Quarequio is a cousin of Tony the Indian, and he is a very confident guy. His last name means “happy death” and Joe Quarequio always tells himself, “Nothing bad could happen to me because I’m going to have a happy death.” So Joe Quarequio is not afraid of doing many things. To satisfy a curious parole officer, Joe works at construction. When he is not at work, he is open to any proposition. One day Joe was on a job in Long Island where they were excavating for an office building. The engineer planted dynamite and the workers spread huge steel mesh mats on the ground over the area to be blasted. An engineer blew his whistle and everybody scurried out onto the sidewalk. Joe saw the engineer take what seemed to be a television channel-selector out of his breast pocket. The engineer pressed a button. The dynamite went off. The sound was muffled by the woven mats. The exploding dirt and rock were held down by the mats. The whole thing worked beautifully. Joe strolle
d over to the engineer and asked him about the channel-selector. The engineer said it was an electronic detonator. Instead of the old-fashioned, time-consuming stringing of wires from the dynamite to a plunger-type detonator, the electronic detonator merely has to be pressed and a signal explodes the dynamite.

  “It’s sim-u-lar to changin’ television programs, ain’t it?” Joe Quarequio said to the engineer.

  “With slightly heavier results,” the engineer said.

  “Oh, boy, I seen that,” Joe Quarequio said.

  Joe Quarequio also saw the toolshed where the engineer kept the dynamite sets. And when Joe Quarequio went home from work that night, he sat against the window in the train and whistled little tunes to himself. In Joe’s shirt pocket was the electronic thing. In Joe’s lap, inside a paper bag, was enough dynamite to end the rush hour. Joe Quarequio couldn’t wait to show it to Kid Sally Palumbo.

  “Infuckincredible,” Kid Sally Palumbo said. He looked at the neat stapled pink and blue wires, batteries, brass conductors, and sticks of dynamite inside the paper bag. He fondled the electronic detonator.

  “We change programs for Baccala,” he said. “From livin’ to dead.”

  Kid Sally giggled. Big Jelly slapped the desk. Joe Quarequio was very proud. He had done a very good thing. The bomb would give them a great chance at Baccala. There would be none of this work under the car hood, wiring dynamite to the ignition system. It was slow and therefore quite dangerous. Anybody caught toying with Baccala’s car would be immeasurably better off convicted of a major crime in the Orient. The new bomb merely required somebody to slip it onto the floor in the back of Baccala’s car, where it would not be noticed, and then stand a block away with the electronic detonator and wait for Baccala to get into the car. A mere press of the thumb would handle the rest of it.

  Big Jelly patted the dynamite sticks. “Beautiful,” he said. He looked at a small dial. His fat fingers touched it. “What’s this for?” he said. Big Jelly twisted the dial. “It goes around in a circle,” he said.

  “Geez, don’t freak with nothin’,” Kid Sally said.

  “Yeah, I better not,” Big Jelly said. He twisted the dial back to where he remembered it had been.

  Kid Sally and Joe Quarequio left the office and got into a car with Ezmo the Driver at the wheel. For three days and nights they tried to find Baccala’s car. They caught a glimpse of it one night, and Ezmo was about to step on the gas and catch up when he saw a second car slip in behind Baccala’s. Ezmo knew the second car was a gun ship. He slowed down. On the fourth day, tired of looking, Kid Sally said he felt like something to eat at a place called the Lercarafriddi on Sackman Street. When Ezmo the Driver came onto Sackman Street he hit the brakes and put the car in reverse. Baccala’s Cadillac, with the Water Buffalo riding shotgun, was pulling up in front of the Lercarafriddi. Baccala and the Water Buffalo got out. They went inside the restaurant. A black suit got out of the back seat and took up guard duty in front of the entrance.

  Kid Sally peered around the corner. Any experienced thief, he figured, should be able to sneak up to the car on the street side, slip the paper bag with the bomb under the car, and then sneak away without being noticed. After that, all that remained to be done was to wait for Baccala to get into the car. A press on the electronic detonator would make the dynamite blow through the bottom of the car. The bottom of a car made in Detroit is not quite as sturdy as the woven mats used on construction jobs. The bottom of Baccala’s car not only would not muffle the sound of the dynamite going off, but it also would not do much to prevent Baccala from riding in the lead funeral car.

  “I tell you what,” Kid Sally said. “There’s been so freakin’ much gone wrong, this one I wanna do personal.”

  “Hey,” Joe Quarequio said, “what about me? Who brung you the bomb?”

  Kid Sally fingered the detonator. “All right, Joe, you go put the bomb under the car.”

  Joe Quarequio held the paper bag in front of him as if it were being presented to the queen. Walking in a crouch, so he would be hidden by parked cars, Joe Quarequio slipped down the opposite side of the street from the restaurant. He took a deep breath and began to duck-waddle across the street to Baccala’s car.

  Inside the restaurant, Baccala had his head inside a big menu. The Water Buffalo watched the sidewalk to make sure the black suit was patrolling properly. The black suit looked up and down the street. He nodded to the Water Buffalo. Everything was all right. By now, Joe Quarequio was in the middle of the street, duck-waddling with his head so low it was impossible to see him as he came at Baccala’s car.

  Kid Sally leaned against the wall of the building up at the corner. He shook with excitement. It was unbelievable that he was getting this clear a shot at Baccala. He had imagined the death of Baccala would come after a pitched battle which would claim half of Brooklyn. He saw it with guns and ropes and curses and screams. But here in his hand was just a simple, innocuous plastic thing with a button on it. Just press it. “Inventions is unbelievable,” he said to Ezmo. Kid Sally fondled the detonator. All the James Bond movies and the television spy shows, things Kid Sally had maintained were jerkoff shows, seemed like the Bible to him now.

  A mile away, at the Bergen Street police station house, the desk lieutenant wanted to speak to Patrolman George Cusack, who was on traffic duty. In order to speak to Cusack, the desk lieutenant, under a system installed that day, was to push a button on a monitor board. This would activate a pocket beeper in Patrolman Cusack’s pocket, and he would go to a telephone and call in. Patrolman Cusack’s beeper was on wavelength 151.190.

  When the desk lieutenant pressed the beeper, two things happened. A high-pitched but soft noise began in the beeper in Patrolman Cusack’s breast pocket. And on Sackman Street, Joe Quarequio disappeared in the middle of a waddle.

  QUAREQUIO—Joseph. Very, very suddenly. Son of Thomas and Donnette Quarequio. Beloved brother of George, Frank, Peter, Louise, and the honored Todo (Tommy Scratch) Quarequio. “Fire and brimstone shall descend on our enemies!” Family receiving mourners at CAMPION’S Funeral Home, Inc., 56 Lockman Street, Brooklyn. No interment.

  Kid Sally Palumbo was rubbing his fist across his forehead so hard that the skin was peeling. Upstairs, his grandmother was sitting with her hands out while the water boiled in two big pots for the day’s number-10 macaroni. There would be a little oil and garlic with it, and that would do it. The lobster fra diavolo and chicken cacciatore and veal rollatini were of the past. The organization not only was having trouble keeping its members alive, but also was having supply trouble.

  There were two reasons for this. First were the supply routes. One morning Ezmo the Driver and Tony the Indian decided that at ten a.m. nothing could happen to them. They walked down to Columbia Avenue to buy some meat and a few cans of paint. They thought that fresh paint on the office walls would overcome the lion’s smell coming up from the basement. They were two doors down from the paint store, hugging the building line so the people on the crowded sidewalk would be between them and the street. This gave them great natural protection, they felt. The trouble with this was that the Water Buffalo uses the same type of defense every morning and he understands its basic weakness. The basic weakness is that the people standing between you and the danger have a marked tendency to flee, leaving you alone with the danger. This is not good.

  The Water Buffalo was driving slowly along Columbia Avenue just to see if he could get lucky. The Water Buffalo saw Ezmo and Tony and he rushed his car to the curb. He came bounding out with a gun in his hand. All the people on the sidewalk ran. This left Tony the Indian, Ezmo the Driver, and the Water Buffalo alone with each other. When the Water Buffalo got back in his car and began speeding away, he was swearing to himself. He had hit Tony the Indian only two out of three times. And all he had done to Ezmo the Driver was shoot him in the ankle. But after this everybody on Marshall Street was afraid to go off the block except in an armed caravan.

  The other reason for the lack
of food was the lack of money in the Palumbo organization. The subsistence payments—they amounted to little more than welfare—which Baccala paid to the Palumbo organization had been shut off. The few gambling and shylocking accounts which Kid Sally had kept for himself had displayed coolness to Kid Sally since the start of the revolt.

  “What’s doin’, pal?” Kid Sally said to Norton the Gambler on the phone.

  “Gee, I’m glad to hear from you,” Norton the Gambler said.

  “Don’t you want to see me with somethin’?” Kid Sally said.

  “Gee, I wouldn’t like to get killed just now,” Norton the Gambler said.

  “Never mind that, what about what you’re supposed to see me with?” Kid Sally said. Norton owed Kid Sally $500 interest on a shylock loan.

  “Oh, that? Oh, I give that to Jamesy,” Norton said. Jamesy was one of Baccala’s finest black suits.

  “You give it to who?”

  “You see Jamesy,” Norton the Gambler said. “And if he’s not there, just ask for Baccala. I’m sure he’d be glad to talk to you and tell you.”

  Norton the Gambler hung up. Kid Sally began banging his head against the side of the outdoor phone booth he was using.

  He walked back down the block to the office and sat down. The fist started rubbing across the forehead. He took a deep breath. The ammonia smell from the lion caused his eyes to tear. “Geez.” He took another deep breath. “Murder.”

  He put his hand over his mouth and opened the door. The lion slipped past Kid Sally’s legs and came into the office. The guys in the office threw themselves at the front door. Big Jelly jumped up on the desk. After six weeks in Kid Sally’s cellar, the lion had grown a full foot longer and gained about a hundred pounds, much of it in his head, which made him look frightening.

  “He’ll fuckin’ eat me!” Big Jelly yelled.

  Inspiration flooded through Kid Sally’s head. He grabbed a rope and reached for the lion. “C’mere, you!” The lion ducked his head. He was still just a trifle young. But strangers to the lion would not know this. “He’ll give out heart attacks,” Kid Sally said, roughing the lion’s mane. Kid Sally sniffed. “He needs a bath,” he said.