“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just natural. In times of crisis, you always look to the people you know you can count on. And talking about how far back you go with them, it’s kind of a comfort, I suppose.”
“Crisis? Come on, Roy. I know Dioguardi’s been nibbling and all, but that’s happened before. We always come out on top.”
“It’s the top that’s the problem. The top over us.”
“Us? We’re not part of—”
“Everybody’s part of something, Lymon. Look, who’s the mayor of this town?”
“Bobby Wyeth. He’s been the—”
“Uh-huh. And who’s the boss of this town?”
“Well, you, Roy. Who else?”
“Yeah. But if you were an outsider, you wouldn’t know that, would you? If you wanted something, I don’t know, a permit to put up a building, or a license to open a club, you’d go on down to City Hall, right?”
“I guess. . . .”
“And Bobby—not that you could get to see Bobby yourself, right off—he could take care of that for you. Everyone knows how that works—you have to take care of the person who takes care of you. If the job is big enough, the pie gets cut up right in Bobby’s office, and he passes out the little slices. Passes them down, okay? But if it’s a small-potatoes job, the cut travels up, from the building inspector or whoever, until it finally gets to Bobby.”
“Sure.”
“Well, we don’t get a taste of that pie, Lymon. We’re not supposed to; that’s not the deal. But all of what we do get, it comes from the same place, like a lot of wires plugged into the same socket.”
“Well, sure, Roy. I mean, I guess so.”
“You know what they call the vote, Lymon?”
“The . . . what?”
“The vote. The right to vote, actually. What they call it is the ‘franchise.’ ”
“You mean, like a Howard Johnsons?”
“I don’t think that’s what they were thinking of when they named it, but that’s what it comes down to. See, it costs money to be elected. Money and muscle. The money and muscle, that’s what buys votes. And once you control enough of those, you get to make money. Like Bobby Wyeth does. Like we do.”
“So in every town . . . ?”
“In every town, every village, every city, every state—hell, in every country—”
“—Whoever runs the show, he gets a franchise to make money,” Lymon said, like a schoolboy reciting out loud, to reinforce the lesson.
“Right,” Beaumont said. “But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Without us, Bobby Wyeth isn’t the boss of anything. His whole operation, it’s like a damn army tank. Once it gets rolling, it doesn’t matter who the driver is, what’s going to stand in its way? But a tank’s still a machine. And machines, they don’t run on air. They need gas. They need oil. They need maintenance.”
Beaumont paused a beat, then went on: “And that’s us, Lymon. We’re the only place the machine can get what it needs.”
“Maybe that was so, once,” Lymon said, thoughtfully. “But now, any election day, Bobby Wyeth can put a hundred precinct captains out in the street.”
“He can,” Beaumont conceded. “And if they want to keep their city jobs, they’ll be out there, bringing in the voters. That’s the way Bobby pays: with jobs, mostly. And I don’t mean just cleaning the streets, or driving a bus, either. Being a judge, that’s a job, too.”
“So you’re saying Bobby doesn’t need us anymore?”
“No. No, I’m not saying that at all. We need each other. That’s the way it works. The way it works everywhere. Real power is never public. You can’t rub folks’ noses in it; they won’t stand for it. We’ve got enough on Bobby Wyeth to put him under the jail, we wanted to do that. The first nickel he ever took, you handed it to him yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. And that was before he ever got elected, too.”
“So we could put a lot of dirt on him, so what? There may be some rubes out there who actually think politicians aren’t all crooks, but there aren’t enough of them to elect the town dogcatcher. The newspapers make a big deal out of political corruption, but the average guy, he expects a man in office to make something for himself. Bobby’s got a house that had to cost him ten, fifteen years’ salary . . . and there’s no mortgage on it. He drives a new Cadillac every year, dresses like a movie star. And nobody cares. Or, if they do, they don’t make a lot of noise about it.”
“I don’t think that’s true, Roy. There’s plenty of legit ways for a man who’s mayor to make money. People don’t know Bobby’s got his hand in the till. Not for sure, anyway. If the papers ever got hold of—”
“You know what people actually hate about political corruption?” Beaumont said, slicing the air with his right hand to silence the other man. “They hate that they don’t have it going for them. Who doesn’t wish he could get a parking ticket fixed? Or get his son a good job, just by making a phone call?
“See, the people everyone thinks are running the show, they’re really not. None of them, Lymon. That’s the way it is, everywhere. There’s always men like us. We’re the power. Not because of what we know; because of what we do. What we’re willing to do. Because, no matter how high the hill any of them stand on, it never takes anything more than a good rifle shot to bring them down.”
“Christ, Roy! What did Bobby—?”
“Bobby didn’t do anything,” Beaumont said, sighing. “I’m just trying to explain some things to you, old friend.”
“The . . . crisis?”
“Yeah. Exactly. Bobby was here yesterday. Asking for money.”
“What does he need money for? The election’s not for another year. And who’s going to run against him, anyway?”
“He needs money to get out the vote,” Beaumont said. “Not for him, for the ticket. The national ticket. The governor himself put out the word. Come 1960, this country’s supposed to change hands, Lymon. And what Bobby was told is, he has to deliver double the vote from the last election. And it better all be going to the right place.”
“Okay, but why is that such a big deal for us?”
“Because they didn’t come to us, Lymon. If that greedy little bastard Bobby wasn’t too cheap to spend his own money, like he was supposed to, like they expected him to, we never even would have known.”
“But so what, Roy? What does it mean?”
“It means we’re not sitting at the table,” Beaumont said, his iron eyes darkening to the color of wet slate. “And in this game, if you’re not sitting down at the table, sooner or later, you get to be the meal.”
* * *
1959 October 04 Sunday 12:02
* * *
“Beau, I think—”
“Wait till Luther gets back, honey.”
“Where did he go?”
“He’s just making sure Lymon gets out okay, like he always does.”
“I don’t see how people can be so cruel.”
“What do you mean?”
“Every time you have a meeting, Luther’s in the room. He stands right over there,” she said, pointing to an unlit corner of the office. “But, for all the notice anyone takes of him, he might as well be a stick of furniture.”
“They don’t mean anything by it, girl.”
“Maybe they don’t. But it’s still a rotten thing to do. Remember how the kids always made fun of him when we were in school?”
“I stopped that soon enough, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Cynthia said, a smile suddenly transforming her into the pretty girl she had been in her youth. “You, Sammy, Faron, and . . .”
“That’s right, honey. And Lymon. He was with us back then. With us all the way.”
“Beau, are you really so sure he—?”
“Wait till Luther gets back,” the man in the wheelchair said.
* * *
1959 October 04 Sunday 12:11
* * *
“We can’t have this now,” Salvatore Diog
uardi said, an emperor issuing a command. The gangster’s facial features were dominated by thick, fleshy lips and a wide forehead notched by a widow’s peak of tight, raven-black curls, mismatching the chiseled hardness of his carefully cultivated body. His custom-cut suit was the color of ground fog, making his upper body appear even more imposing. He wore a white-on-white shirt with the top two buttons unfastened, and sported a matching silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. On his feet were buttery black slip-ons whose simplicity drew the eye to the craftsmanship of the shoemaker. A diamond pinky ring blazed on his right hand. At his elbow was a saucer covered with multi-colored tablets and capsules. Each time he paused, he put some of the pills into his mouth, and swallowed them with a few gulps from a tall glass of tomato juice.
“We? Who’s ‘we,’ Sal?” the man seated across from him asked, his voice a semi-challenge. He was a decade older than his boss, his dark complexion a stark contrast to the white scar tissue that covered most of the left side of his face. His suit would have been at home on a mortician.
“What’re you saying, Gino?” the bodybuilder half-snarled, drumming his fingers on the snow-white linen that covered the table. The two men were seated in a shielded corner of Dioguardi’s restaurant. The wall beside them housed a hundred-gallon aquarium overstocked with brightly colored fish. In the too-early-for-customers gloom, it looked like a miniature cave in a vast ocean.
“What I’m saying is, how’re we supposed to do what they want?” the scar-faced man said. “It wasn’t us who put Little Nicky in a fucking coma. It wasn’t us who clipped Tony and Lorenzo. They call us all the way up to Chicago for this big meeting, give us the word, we have to keep things quiet. Everything goes on hold. Okay. Only, how’re we supposed to do that, with that fucking cripple picking us off?”
“We don’t know it was Beaumont.”
“Who else? It wasn’t Shalare. What would be in it for that Irish fuck to make trouble now? He’s got nothing we want.”
“Right, it’s not Shalare,” Dioguardi agreed. “Because, the way I was told, he got the same word we did. Through his own people.”
“So who does that leave? When it was just Nicky, it could have been anyone. He’s got a mouth on him, that kid. No finesse. But Tony and Lorenzo?”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t Beaumont, okay?” Dioguardi said, clenching his fists.
“Let’s say it was. What’re we supposed to do about it?” the scar-faced man said, reasonably. “One, it’s not like the guy’s walking around, where we could maybe get to him. Two, even if we could, I don’t know, drop a bomb on that fucking fortress he lives in, that’s just what we was told not to do. We’re supposed to make something stop, but the only way we could do that, we can’t do. So?”
“Don’t forget those phone calls,” Dioguardi said.
“The guy who sent us Nicky’s license?”
“Yeah. Him.”
“What about him? It’s probably just one of Beaumont’s—”
“There’s one way to find out.”
“You’re not going to meet with—?”
“I only wish I could,” Dioguardi said, cracking his knuckles. “Nicky was an asshole. And Lorenzo wasn’t any big loss. But Tony, he was a man. Anyway, whoever it is, I can’t see him walking in here, could you?”
“So what’s our move, Sal?”
“I want you to tell everybody to pull back. Let this burg go back to being Beaumont’s town. For now.”
“How are we going to—?”
“What? Feed our families? That’s what a war chest is for, Gino. Like a union’s strike fund. We’ve still got a good cash flow from back home.”
“Pull out, then?”
“No. They said not to do that. Not. When this is over, the whole thing, this territory, it’s ours. The Commission said so. But we have to wait our turn, like always. So, what we’re going to do, we’re going to do nothing. If it was Beaumont, and he doesn’t see any of our people in his spots, if we stop all the collections, he’ll think we got the message.”
“And if it wasn’t?”
“Then this guy, this guy that likes to send things in the mail, he’s the one we got to fix.”
“You think he’s going to do more—”
“Nah, G. He’s already made his point. Nicky, that was a message. If I’d talked to him then, Lorenzo and Tony would never have happened. Whatever he wants, he wants it from us. Otherwise, what’s he calling for? So we’ll hear from him again. And that’s when we’ll know.”
* * *
1959 October 04 Sunday 12:20
* * *
“Wouldn’t you like to get another suit, Luther?” Cynthia said. She was walking beside the marble-eyed man, her hand on his forearm.
“This is the one Roy bought for me,” Luther said, tenaciously. “He bought it with his own money.”
“He’d buy you another one, Luther. Or a whole bunch of them, if you wanted.”
“This is a very good suit,” Luther said, stubbornly. “Roy picked this out for me himself. Right in the store. When he was still . . . when he was still going out.”
“I know, Luther. But that was a long time ago. Your suit’s pretty old now. It doesn’t fit as good as—”
“It fits good,” the slack-mouthed man answered, his voice growing even more mulish.
“All right, Luther,” Cynthia said, patting his forearm. “You know best. Come on, let’s go talk to Royal.”
They entered the office together. Beaumont was slumped back in his wheelchair, eyes closed. As they crossed the threshold, he sat up straighter, reached for his cigarette case.
“What do you think?” he asked Luther.
“Huh?”
“Remember when Lymon was here? Just now?”
“Sure, Roy. I remember.”
“Good. And you remember that game we play? The special one we made up?”
“Oh! Okay, he had a gun, Roy. I didn’t see it, but I—”
“Not that game, Luther,” the man in the wheelchair said, the calming gentleness of his voice reaching out to his lifelong friend. “The other one.”
“I think . . . I think I do.”
“Sure you do,” Beaumont said, encouragingly. “You’ve got a sharp mind, Luther. You just have to remember to . . . what?”
The marble-eyed man stood rigidly, his brow furrowed, the slackness of his mouth even more pronounced than usual.
“Concentrate!” he suddenly said.
“That’s the ticket! Just let it come. . . .”
Luther went silent. Beaumont and his sister watched the slack-mouthed man’s face writhe as he struggled with his task.
“He was, Roy,” Luther said, suddenly. “But I can’t say . . . I mean, you didn’t ask him no questions, so I don’t know . . . I don’t know when, exactly. But he was lying about something. I know he was.”
“You never miss, Luther,” the man in the wheelchair said, nodding his head like a man accepting his fate.
* * *
1959 October 04 Sunday 12:33
* * *
“Which is better for you, the white rice, or the brown rice?”
“Rufus, what are you talking about? You call me back down here on my day off—”
“I’m talking about some truth, Rosa Mae. Truth a girl as smart as you ought to be knowing.”
“I didn’t know you were a race man, Rufus.”
“You see a colored man that’s not a race man today, I know his name.”
“His name?”
“Tom. That would be his name. Uncle Tom.”
“You know that’s not . . . I mean, look at you, in this hotel. The way you talk to the guests, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. Is it Tomming when you do that, Rufus?”
Rufus tilted his chin up, as if regarding the young woman before him from a new perspective. A smile no hotel guest had ever seen softened his eyes.
“No, baby,” he said. “That’s called putting the dogs to sleep.”
“Rufus,” the young wo
man said, as she stepped very close to him, “if you be so two-faced, why do you want to show me the secret one?”
“Because a woman like you, a fine, strong woman, an African woman, she doesn’t want a clown for her man.”
“You’re not my—”
“Not now, I’m not,” Rufus said. “But, one day, I’m going to be.”
Rosa Mae’s amber eyes widened in surprise. “Just like that, you say it.”
“Just like that, I mean it.”
“I know what you want, Rufus Hightower. Tom or no, a man’s a man.”
“A Tom’s no man, honeygirl. Anyway, you can’t be lumping us all together in your mind. That’s the way Whitey thinks about us, right? Niggers, all they want to do is dance, eat watermelon, get drunk, and make babies.”
“I don’t like that kind of—”
“That’s what they call us, girl. And they don’t care if you like it.”
Rosa Mae put her hands on her hips. “What does that have to do with—?”
“It’s the same kind of being dumb, Rosa Mae, no matter what you call it. Just ’cause you know some men, that don’t mean you know all men. You think what I want from you is under that skirt, you’re wrong.”
“You mean you’re like Mister Carl?” she said, grinning, trying to move the conversation to a safer place.
“I mean what I say, girl. I want you to be my woman. And not for one night, or one week.”
“We never even been—”
“What? On a date, like kids? I’m not a kid, I’m a man. A full-grown man. But I’ll take you anyplace you want to go, little Rose. Do anything you like to do.”
“You know what I really like to do?”
“Yeah,” he said, holding her eyes. “You like to read.”
“How did you—?”
“Because I know you,” Rufus said. “I really know you, Rosa Mae. And all I want is for you to know me.”
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