Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

by Jimmy Breslin

  “That guy is a rat priest hittin’ on your sister!” he snarled.

  Kid Sally Palumbo picked up his head. “Who rat priest?” he said.

  “Me and Tony seen him,” Big Jelly said.

  “Seen him where?” Kid Sally said.

  “Seen him in his priest’s suit,” Tony the Indian said.

  “"By Dominic’s when we was watchin’ that night,” Big Jelly said.

  “I could of touched him …” Tony the Indian said.

  “… same guy …”

  “… rat priest…”

  “… I don’t hafta swear, I got eyes, I could see …”

  “… yeah …”

  Mario, sitting at the kitchen table, picked up a few stray words of the jumbled conversation in the front room. Therefore he knew enough to drop his chin onto his chest when Kid Sally exploded into the kitchen. With the chin down, Kid Sally could not get his hands on Mario’s throat. Big Jelly grabbed Mario by an ear in order to yank the head up so Kid Sally could do some strangling. Big Mama had a bread knife in one hand. With the other hand she tried to flatten out the fingers of Mario’s right hand onto the kitchen table. Big Mama intended to saw off the thumb and forefinger of the hand. These are the fingers which are anointed when a priest is ordained. Mario made a fist so the fingers wouldn’t stick out. Big Mama jabbed the tip of the knife into the fist. Mario yelped. The fingers of his hand jumped out in pain. Big Mama tried to hold them flat so she could begin sawing. Mario pulled the fingers back into a fist. Big Mama jabbed him again with the tip of the knife.

  “The hell with it,” Big Jelly said. He bent over and sank his teeth into Mario’s ear. Mario made a loud noise.

  When Angela heard Mario shriek, she tumbled out of her room. At the kitchen doorway she started to scream, but put her hands to her mouth instead and stood motionless. Centuries of Sicilian blood cause a woman to stay out of a thing like this, even if her greatest love is about to be murdered. Weep for his soul, yes. But never interfere with the necessary rite of his murder.

  Beppo the Dwarf got a hand inside Mario’s jacket and pulled out the picture. He turned it over and saw the writing on the back. He held the picture in front of Kid Sally’s face. He turned it around so Kid Sally could see the writing.

  “What’s it say?” Beppo the Dwarf said.

  Kid Sally’s hands dropped from Mario’s chin. He pushed Big Mama’s knife hand away and slapped Big Jelly on the head to make him stop biting Mario’s ear.

  “Let’s talk a bit,” he said to Mario.

  “I never touch!” Mario said, gesturing to Angela. “On my mother’s grave, I never touch!”

  “That means he touch!” Big Mama shrieked. She waved the knife. “Open his fly, I cut off!”

  Kid Sally held his arm out to keep her away. He sat down across the table from Mario. “You’re on the film with the priest suit?” he said. He held his hand out as if it were a boat rocking. This is the international semaphore for larceny. Mario said yes with his head. With a few more words and several hand signals, Kid Sally got the general flow of Mario’s life in America.

  He held up the picture. “This name on the bottom, are you congeal with him?”

  Mario didn’t understand.

  “Congeal, he means do you know him good?” Big Jelly said.

  “I don’t see him yet,” Mario said.

  “Do you know who he is?” Kid Sally said.

  Mario shook his head no.

  “Dangerous old man, he finds you out, he cuts your whole head off,” Kid Sally said.

  Mario clutched his chest. “Then I cross out his name.”

  “He has money,” Kid Sally said.

  Mario let go of his chest. “How much money?”

  “A whole roomful of money.”

  “Then I keep his name on the fist.”

  “You meet him,” Kid Sally said, “and we’ll snatch him and get his money. I’ll let you count the money while I cut his heart out.” Kid Sally began to giggle. “Unless you’re afraid of kidnaping an old man.”

  Mario closed his eyes to show fear.

  Big Mama had everybody sit down for plates of spaghetti and olive oil. Nobody grumbled. They had prospects now. Angela ate in silence. She said she needed air. She and Mario went down the block to Nunzio’s. An old car with dented fenders was parked a few doors up from Nunzio’s. The car was parked in the wrong direction, facing the docks. Four of Kid Sally’s guys, leather jackets pulled up to their cheekbones, sat in the car. Their job was to shoot at anybody or anything coming onto the street from the dock end. Another car was doing similar guard duty at the other end of the block.

  Nunzio stood behind the counter, picking his silver teeth with a hunting knife. The jukebox was playing his favorite record, “Mala Femmina.” The title means “Bad Woman.” Nunzio always plays the record and thinks of the girl who once robbed him. While the coffee dripped from the espresso machine, Nunzio hummed and muttered his own special words to the song.

  “… whore-a basset …” Nunzio sang softly. As the music rose, the image of the girl who had done him wrong grew clearer in his mind. Nunzio’s hand slapped down on the counter. “Rat-a whore!”

  They looked out the window and did not talk. The pier was across the street from the store. The water in the slip alongside the pier was black and motionless. At the end of the pier, out in the channel, the strong night tide created ripples. Light from a slim moon splashed over the black water, and the ripples turned the light into a corrugated tray of diamonds. A tug, the running lights rigged like a necklace, moved against the tide, its snub bow throwing white water into the moonlight.

  “My greenhorn,” Angela said. “God knows what you really know.” He was surprised at the tone of her voice.

  “Did you bring the priest’s clothes with you from Italy?” she said.

  He shook his head no.

  “At least,” she said.

  “I came here for a race and there is no race,” he said. “What do I do? You know all I want to do. The painting.”

  “Well, that’s one thing,” she said.

  She started to pick up the cup and stopped. The car must have been three blocks away, but it was coming so quickly its noise was clear. The car was coming from the left, racing along the deserted street in front of the piers. Nunzio stepped behind the pizza oven. Angela pulled Mario by the arm. They crouched. The car, twin exhausts booming, swept down the street along the docks and crossed Marshall Street without stopping. The four hoodlums ran from the parked car to the bundle of clothes that had been thrown from the speeding car. The bundle comprised Ezmo the Driver’s new sports jacket and his slacks. Ezmo’s tie was knotted around the bundle. One of the four hoodlums pulled the bundle loose. The neon from Nunzio’s sign fell on the white belly of a fluke.

  “They put Ezmo under the top of the water,” one of the hoodlums from the car yelled.

  Angela turned her head and started walking quickly. Mario caught up with her and they went along in silence. She paused for a moment in front of the house, looked up, and put her arm through his and made him keep going.

  Detective Donald Jenkins, dressed in a milk-delivery uniform, sauntered out of a doorway on Columbia Avenue and followed them to the subway. As the train swayed to Manhattan, Jenkins noticed Angela taking Mario’s hand and holding it tightly. He hoped they were going to a hotel. It would make surveillance easy. Twenty minutes later, when Angela and Mario went into the building on 11th Street, Jenkins watched from the corner. “I don’t even know the name of the bum with her,” he muttered.

  In bed, Angela buried her face in Mario’s chest. She shivered and tried to get the picture of the fish out of her mind. Her bare legs rubbed against Mario’s. In the emptiness of the hours of the days since she had stopped going to school and begun living with slurred curses and funerals and fish in the street, Mario, simply being there, had become the only real thing in Angela’s life.

  Mario did not notice the softness against him. He was thinking of
what it would be like to drown: thrashing in the black water, his eyes rolling wildly, his body trying to move in the chains wrapped around it, going down, down, down, realizing that he would not come up, opening his mouth to scream and immediately choking on water.

  “Wa.” The noise came from the bottom of Mario’s throat.

  “What’s the matter?” Angela said. She was looking into his face.

  Mario closed his eyes. Slowly, gracefully, another thought slipped into his mind. A roomful of money. The fear went away and he opened his eyes and smiled at her. His hands pressed on her shoulderblades and he began to come onto his side against her.

  “Just remember to say that we went to an all-night movie,” she whispered.

  Chapter 17

  SHE SLEPT LATE IN the morning. He was up early and went right to the painting, which he kept carefully covered when Angela was around. He moved the covers from her face so he could follow the cheekbone. At 10:30 the sounds he made getting dressed woke her up. He pointed to the work under his arm. “I’ll be back in one hour, two hours,” he said.

  She sat up. “Oh, let me look at it,” she said.

  He stepped away from her. “When it’s finished,” he said. He certainly didn’t want her to see he had copied somebody else’s work and tossed in only her face, or at least her cheekbones. He checked to make sure the torn original he’d been copying was under his arm too. He didn’t want to leave anything around for her to see.

  “I’m going to go out and get some coffee,” she said.

  “Uhuh.”

  “But I’ll come right back. I don’t want to be out some place and have you back here looking for me.”

  He walked down the staircase wondering if he wanted all this strange dependence and compliance she was showing.

  He woke up Sidney again. Sidney rubbed his hands over his face to get rid of the sleep. He looked at Mario’s work and let out a deep breath.

  “I guess so,” Sidney said.

  “Yes?” Mario said. His hands were waving over Sidney’s shoulder.

  “I told you I guess so,” Sidney said. “I don’t know how the hell you did it. You got it looking like a face, not a sketch of a face.”

  “What should I do now?” Mario said.

  “Stop breathing in my ear,” Sidney said. “See Grant for anything else. The next one you do should be fast. Do ten of this thing, unload them on ten people, you’ll have some sort of a living. Anyway, get the hell out of my life.”

  Mario was fumbling with excitement when he got to the luncheonette on his corner and dialed Dominic Laviano’s number.

  “Don Mario?” Laviano said. “It’s good you call me. I spoke to my friend. Do you have a paper to write something down?”

  Mario ripped a page out of the front of the phone book and scribbled in the white space while Dominic talked.

  “Tomorrow is Wednesday. Then come Thursday. On Thursday afternoon, we see my friend. Now I have to be at the market in the Bronx. So I give you the address and you ask and get to the place yourself. I be there at three o’clock. My friend, he be there at three o’clock. So maybe you be there at three o’clock too, Don Mario?”

  Dominic read off the address of a restaurant called the Della Palma on Queens Boulevard in Queens. “God bless till Thursday,” Dominic said and he hung up. Mario knew he was close to money. And his art would work. Someday he would be a painter of his own. All that was in his way was a little danger.

  Mario was thinking of Catanzia in the morning while he walked back to the apartment. The smell of cow and goat urine, which hangs in every house, came into his nostrils. He thought of the white belly of the fluke in the clothes on Marshall Street. He thought of the urine smell again. It hung in his nose. He was more afraid of going back to the urine smell than he was of the fluke in the clothes.

  At seven p.m. Mario took a pear from the tray on the kitchen table at Marshall Street. Casually, he took the piece of phone-book paper out of his pocket. He read out the restaurant address.

  “And what time on Thursday do you meet this-a certain party?” Big Mama said.

  “Three o’clock,” Mario said.

  Angela got up and walked out of the kitchen. She didn’t want to hear. Mario put the slip of paper back into his pocket He picked up the pear and took a deep bite.

  All the years on all the streets kept running through Kid Sally’s mind. He sat in the vending-machine office, rubbing his fist across his forehead, thinking slowly, step by step, of how the kidnaping and torture-death of Baccala should be done. The mistakes and missed shots and the funerals, they would all be made meaningless by one pull of a trigger. People now taking oaths on their mothers’ graves to kill Kid Sally on sight would get down on one knee and kiss Kid Sally’s hand if he ever got Baccala. The police would not knock on the door and bring everybody to a precinct house for questioning. Instead, they would make appointments through Kid Sally’s lawyer. There would be pressure from nobody and money from everywhere.

  “The truck,” Kid Sally said.

  “What of the truck?” Beppo the Dwarf said.

  “Put a sign on it that says FISH.”

  A fish truck near a restaurant would seem normal.

  “We need a strange car, too,” Kid Sally said.

  Beppo nodded. “I’ll get one.”

  Big Mama held up her hand. “Make-a sure you throw the license plate away.”

  Beppo the Dwarf nodded. The art of stealing cars for purposes of murder requires, besides a stolen car, that a set of license plates must be stolen from still another car. The stolen license plates are put on the stolen car. The stolen car’s plates are scaled into the river. This is because the police looking for stolen cars check license-plate numbers. And people whose license plates have been stolen never report this. They blame it on kids and go stand on line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau to get new plates. So the police are unlikely to look for any car which travels with stolen license plates. It takes at least six months for the Motor Vehicle Bureau to circulate stolen-license-plate numbers. In six months a good murderer using a stolen car in reasonable condition can cause overcrowding at a cemetery.

  “We better get a couple of pieces of iron, too,” Kid Sally said.

  A kid named Junior and his friend, Jerry the Booster, got up and stretched. Stealing guns was their department. All shooting requires a gun that can’t be traced. If you happen to shoot somebody with a gun that can be traced to your hand, jurors might happen to vote for conviction. Therefore, stolen guns are necessary.

  The meeting broke up. Kid Sally, Big Jelly, Tony the Indian, and Big Lollipop went out to the car. “I got to relax a little bit so I could think clear,” Kid Sally said.

  The car drove off. Beppo the Dwarf went out to steal a car and license plates. And Junior and Jerry the Booster went down to the docks to steal guns and ammunition. This was one of the hardest jobs of all. Not that Junior and Jerry the Booster couldn’t get onto the docks. This was easy for two tested thieves. The problem was finding the right guns and ammunition for the gang to use. The largest area of the South Brooklyn waterfront is the Brooklyn Army Terminal, a complex of gloomy gray government warehouse buildings with many piers jutting into the oily water. Large freighters load at the piers and slump through the water on the outgoing tide. They carry the basic American export. Which is why Junior and Jerry the Booster had trouble. The first pier they tried was stacked with cases of 122-mm. rockets for shipment to Haifa, Israel. On the second pier there were tarpaulin-wrapped 105-mm. howitzers addressed for shipment to Beirut, Lebanon. Junior and Jerry the Booster couldn’t see how they could catch Baccala by surprise with any of this equipment. They spent the night working through crates of napalm for India and mortars for Pakistan. Finally, in an area marked for use by a United Fruit Company ship, Jerry the Booster found crates of .32 Smith and Wesson revolvers marked for Guatemala. Junior found crates of ammunition, the stencil saying it was for .32 Savage automatics.

  Junior looked at the number. Aah, .32
is .32. “You got .32s?” he asked Jerry.

  “Yop.”

  “I got .32s too,” Junior said. He broke into the crate and began stuffing boxes of bullets into the canvas bag he was carrying.

  Kid Sally and his group were taking a risk by going out. If Baccala knew about it, he would send all four hundred of his people after them. But Kid Sally was going to a place where nobody would expect him, a loud, dark discothèque named the Dream Lounge, on Bedford Avenue. To reduce the risk further, three shotguns were in the car. Kid Sally began to rock back and forth in the seat when the car pulled in front of the Dream Lounge. “This is just what I need, I need a place to think,” he was saying.

  Tony the Indian and Big Lollipop got out of the car first, with shotguns under their coats, and they walked into the place. Tony the Indian looked out the door and waved. Kid Sally got out of the car and smoothed his jacket. He craned his neck and fixed his tie. He put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it slowly. He hadn’t felt this good in weeks. He knew that anybody looking through the door at him was looking at a real gangster. A big-league gangster. Kid Sally’s shoulders swung while he walked into the place.

  Big Jelly did not go directly into the Dream Lounge. He went to a drugstore on the corner. A little dark-haired man with thick glasses was behind the counter. He knew who Big Jelly was.

  “Hello, baby,” Big Jelly said. “How about a little something to step me up?”

  “Like what,” the druggist said.

  “Like a fistful of red birds,” Big Jelly said.

  The druggist filled a small envelope with triangular-shaped red pills. He handed them to Big Jelly and then turned away to other business. He knew there was no sense in waiting to be paid even for an illegal prescription. Big Jelly ambled out and went down to the Dream Lounge. Inside, he blinked in the darkness and smoke. Tony the Indian and Big Lollipop were standing alongside the checkroom door, the shotguns bulging against their coats. They could see the street clearly. Kid Sally was on the other side of the bar. Big Jelly put two barstools together and heaved himself up on them. “One for each cheek, baby,” he said to the bartender. “Now give us two glasses of water, sweetheart.” Big Jelly spilled the red pills on the bar. He took three of them and swallowed them with water. Kid Sally blew smoke at the pills on the bar. He giggled and picked up three of the pills and shook them through his hand and into his mouth like peanuts.