Two Trains Running

by Andrew Vachss

  “Cugliuna di ferro!” Gino said, as if taking an oath.

  “And the brains of a parakeet, right?”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “No?”

  “What do you want me to say, Sally? That you’re no Luciano? Who is?”

  “You think I’m smart, G.?”

  “Kind of question is that? Ever since you were a little kid, I knew you could be—”

  “—a boss, with my own crew? Sure. But not the kind of man they ever ask to sit on the Commission.”

  “What do you care about that, Sally? You sit down with those people, you’re in the room with the most crafty, devious, back-stabbing collection of men in the whole world. Like putting your hand in a basket of fucking rattlesnakes.”

  “I can handle—”

  “You know what made Lucky what he was?” Gino interrupted his boss, gently steering him away from danger as he had so many times in the past. “Lucky wasn’t like the rest of us. He was a prince,” the scar-faced man said, worshipfully. “And a prince, he’s not with one little group or another. He’s with everyone.”

  “No tribes,” Dioguardi said, listening.

  “You got it! With a real leader, it don’t matter who’s your cousin. This thing of ours, it started with blood. Close blood. Maybe it should have stayed that way. Now you got ‘families’ what ain’t families for real. And the bosses, they spend more time plotting against each other than they do thinking of ways to take care of their soldiers.”

  Dioguardi leaned back in his chair, cast his eyes at the ceiling, and recited, as if reading from a report. “Sal Dioguardi, that is one vicious motherfucker. Rip the eyeballs out of your head and eat them for appetizers. Kill you, your father, and your sons if you cross him. How many men did he kill before he even got a little crew of his own? A dozen? More? A stone animale. About as subtle as a sledgehammer. You got a problem with Sally D., he’d rather hit you in your fucking head than sit down and talk with you.” He shifted position, pinned the man across from him with his eyes. “That sound about right, G.?”

  “I heard people say that, yeah. All of it.”

  “And, see, G., that’s all true. I made all that true. A rep like mine, it buys you some distance. One time, when I was just a young guy, back home, I made this nice score, and I was flush. I heard about this girl, Angel. Three hundred bucks a night, but she was supposed to be worth it. The best piece of ass in the whole city, what people said. I didn’t have my button yet, but I was a comer. A sure thing. I wasn’t ready for a Caddy—not in my position, not then—but I could have the best of something. Treat myself, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I go see this girl. I mean, I called her, made an appointment, like she was a doctor or something. And she was gorgeous. Long black hair, boobs out to here,” he said, gesturing, “an ass like a perfect ripe peach, a face like you could see what they named her after, everything.

  “Now, all night means all night. After the first time, I was just laying back on her bed—silk sheets she had, G., black silk—and we’re talking. Mostly her, the talking, I mean. I’m kind of half-listening—that broad almost put me in a coma—and I realize she’s talking about a job. A job she wants done.”

  “On her pimp?”

  “No. No, nothing like that. A woman like her, she never had no pimp, I bet. What she was talking about was one of her . . . clients, she called them. A guy who worked with diamonds. One of those Jews with the beards and the long black coats? What she told me was, they carry the ice around with them. And they deal all in cash. You understand where I’m going?”

  “She had a plan to take this guy off?”

  “Right. A complicated plan, G. But, listening to her, I could see how it could work. I remember, I sat up in the bed, and just . . . just stared at her. And you know what she said?”

  “What?”

  “She said, and I never forgot it, ‘I just look like this. It’s not all I am.’ You see what I learned right there, G.? You look at this broad, you never think she could be some kind of mastermind. Only she was. And, right that minute, I swore to myself that I’d be just like her. It’s the perfect camouflage. You look at her, all you see is a piece of ass. You’d never see how dangerous she is, because you wouldn’t be thinking of her that way.”

  “Did you ever do that job? The one she wanted you for?”

  “No. And I never went back to see her again, either. ’Cause even as I snapped to what she was telling me, I realized I was already playing the role I do now. I mean, if she hadn’t thought I was a little slow, she wouldn’t have picked me. I ever did that job with her, she’d own me, the cunt. Probably turn right around and sell me to the Jew she wanted me to rob.”

  “You got a plan, Sal? Is that what all this—?”

  “I got a lot of plans, G. That’s what makes me different from the others. They all got plans, but they’re like a flock of pigeons on the ground, so busy pecking at the garbage that they never look up, see where it came from.”

  “You mean . . . what, Sal?”

  “I mean the people who run the whole show, G. Not the Commission, the government.”

  “The feds?”

  “Not them. They’re just soldiers, too. They got bosses, they do what they’re told. A boss—a boss by us—he gets clipped, what happens to his people? When I was in Japan—oh, the money you could make there after the war!—I made friends with this guy, Yasui. He told me the Japs had a thing like ours thousands of years before we did. Believe that! They had families, bosses, soldiers, territories, rackets . . . everything.

  “So, anyway, my point, when one of their bosses got killed, his soldiers—’samurai,’ they called them—they were just cut loose. After that, they were ‘ronin,’ which means, like, a man without a family. A bad thing to be. Like a mercenary. Take the money and do the job, but they got no . . . connection. You can never trust a man like that, because he’s not tied to you: not by blood, not by honor.

  “Our people, we do things different. Our way is better. With us, your boss gets taken down, you can catch on with another family. Not the one you was at war with, maybe—although even that happens—but you’re still . . . connected. Still a part of something.”

  “Sure, Sal. But what does that have to do with—?”

  “The president, he’s just like a boss, G. And the feds, they’re his soldiers. When the president’s gone, the next guy who takes over, he gets all the soldiers, too. Now they’re his soldiers.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe? What’re you talking about, G.? How else could it be?”

  “If the feds are soldiers, their boss, it’s not the president, it’s that fucking Hoover. We changed presidents how many times? But it’s still Hoover. It’s like he’s the boss-for-life.”

  “Batista,” Dioguardi blurted out.

  “What?”

  “He was boss-for-life, too, right, G.? Down in Cuba. We had all kinds of things working there. It was perfect. Our own country. Then this guy comes out of the mountains and—bam!—before you can look up, everything’s turned upside down.”

  “Sally, I’m not following you.”

  “The smart boys—the ones think they’re smart—they’ve been looking over their shoulders so long, make sure one of the others isn’t sneaking up on them, they forget how to look forward. The things we make our money from, they could disappear in a second, just like Cuba.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “Like liquor, G. Remember when that was our gold mine? Every family in America today, that’s where it got its stake. Everything started with booze. That’s what took us to the big time.

  “But what kind of money is there in liquor now? You got hill-billies running moonshine into dry counties, but that’s a mug’s game. The government saw how strong we were getting off the booze money. So what did it do? They cut us off at the knees. You make something legal, how do we make a profit off it? That’s why the smart boys think drugs are the way to go.”


  “They’re right,” the scar-faced man said, flatly. “No way they’re ever going to make dope legit. It’ll be good for—”

  “Don’t say ‘forever,’ G. Because dope’s not like booze. There was always outlaws in the booze racket, but they were small-timers. It wasn’t even worth shutting them down. Drugs, that’s different. Ten years from now, maybe less, you’ll have niggers and spics and—who knows?—maybe the fucking Chinese in on the action. It’s their neighborhoods where it gets sold, what’s to stop them from dealing themselves in?”

  “They don’t have the organization for anything like that.”

  “Yeah? How many niggers do you talk to?”

  “Me? I don’t talk to moolingan.”

  “I do.”

  “Huh?”

  “I got a boy on the payroll. My personal payroll, out of my own pocket. Smart boy, too. He’s like me, in a way. You see him working—he’s a bellhop, down to the Claremont—you think, There’s another mush-mouthed jungle bunny. But this one, he’s slick. And he likes money. That’s how I know about this man Beaumont’s brought in. I got a watch on him like he’s a fish in that aquarium over there.”

  “And this guy, the nigger, I mean, he’s going to be dealing dope someday?”

  “I don’t know what he’s going to be doing. Maybe saving the money I give him to buy a red convertible with leopard-skin seat covers, all I know. But we’re not going to be in the dope game, G. Not us. I got something better.”

  “Yeah?” the scar-faced man said, tilting his head slightly, to show he was fully focused.

  “You know the stag films, the ones we get made up in Calumet City?”

  “Sure. But they don’t bring in the kind of—”

  “Not yet they don’t. But they will. Someday, those are going to be a better racket than booze ever was.”

  “Come on, Sally. How much can we make on a stag film?”

  “How much can we make on a load of dope?”

  “Huh? That depends, right? On how much you got to sell in the first place.”

  “Right!” Dioguardi said, rapping the tabletop twice with his knuckles. “That’s it, exactly, Gino! See, what they sell on the streets—I’m talking real dope now, heroin—it has to go through a lot of hands before it ever gets here. The poppy don’t grow in America. Where they grow it, it starts out as opium. People, people who know what they’re doing, they have to change it into heroin. And once the heroin’s made, pure, it has to be cut, right?”

  “Sure. So?”

  “So how many times can you step on it before you got nothing? You cut it too much, it’s worthless. And once you sell it, it’s gone forever. You with me?”

  “Yeah. But . . .”

  “Gino,” Dioguardi said, unconsciously flexing his biceps under his suit jacket, “listen. We put up the money for a stag film—not just some stripper playing with herself—the whole nine yards, fucking, sucking, anything goes. Let’s say we ante, I don’t know, five large into the whole production, okay? Do a real professional job, lights and cameras, everything. Maybe even in color. Now we sell copies for—what?—ten bucks? And even with everybody dipping their beak along the way, we net, say, five bucks a pop. So we need to sell—what?—a lousy thousand copies, and we’re in gravy from then on. Because, and this is the beauty part, we never really sell it, see? We’re selling copies. And we can make a million copies, we want to. Sell the same thing, over and over again.”

  “It would take a whole—”

  “Network? Sure. But look how easy it would be to put one together, G. What are they going to hit you with for selling fuck-films? A fine? It’s not like the way it is with dope—nobody’s really taking a risk. And, for product, there’s girls everywhere. I know a guy, out in L.A., he says he could get us a different girl, a gorgeous fucking girl, every day, we wanted. Get them to do anything, even the weirdo stuff.

  “Let the feds go chase the dope, Gino. We’ll be sitting on a gold mine, because all we’re going to be selling will be copies of the gold.”

  “You really think it could work like that, Sal?”

  “How could it not? There’ll always be guys want that stuff. Just like there’ll always be whores. But films, films like I’m talking about, that’s the future.

  “Look, the government, they’re just another mob. A greedy fuck-ing mob, at that. So, you have to figure, they see us making money, they want to get in on it themselves. How long you think it’s going to be before they got legal casinos in places besides fucking Vegas? They legalized booze, they could do the same thing with the numbers too, they wanted. But fuck-films? No way the government ever makes that legal, right?”

  “Right, Sally. Any senator voted for something like that, it’d be Kaddish for him.”

  “See?” Dioguardi said, triumphantly. “Things are happening now, G. All around us. This whole truce thing, the election, everything. I don’t know how it shakes out when it’s done. I don’t know if they’re going to be able to get to Beaumont, even. But I know this. If we get into this film thing on the ground floor, we can build ourselves a mountain of cash, G. And cash, that’s the locomotive that pulls the whole train.”

  “It’s worth a try, Sal. The way you got it all doped out, it’s no big risk.”

  “And no big-money investment, either. That’s why I want you to go out to L.A., meet with this guy I just told you about, get things set up.”

  “But what about the wild card, Sally? This guy who knocked off Tony and Lorenzo? Don’t you need me around for him?”

  “Maybe down the road, but not now. I think this guy, whoever he is, he’s about to make the same mistake about me everybody else does.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 17:38

  * * *

  “You got it?”

  “Right here,” Ace said, patting his gang jacket.

  “Let’s see it, man,” a sixteen-year-old with an acne-ravaged complexion said, eagerly.

  “At the clubhouse,” Ace said. “Tonight. Call everyone in.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 17:41

  * * *

  “Hello . . .” The woman’s private-line voice was lush with secrets, revealing nothing, promising everything.

  “It’s me,” Sherman Layne said.

  “Yes. When will you be—?”

  “After it gets dark.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 20:46

  * * *

  “We came a long way for these, brother,” the neatly dressed, dark-skinned young man said. “We thought there would be more.”

  “Omar says we have to divide up what we have,” Darryl told him.

  “Yes, I understand all that,” the young man said. “But we were told to expect five. And we came with the money for five.”

  “It’s your decision to make, my brother,” Darryl said.

  “What decision is that?”

  “You have to decide: Are we calling each other ‘brother’ to mean something? Or do you think we’re just a bunch of gun dealers?”

  “I wasn’t saying anything like—”

  “This is what happened,” Darryl said, his cadaverous face spectral in the afternoon sunlight. “We made a deal for fifty weapons. We agreed to pay a certain price. When the man—the white man—came here, what he had, instead, was twenty-four. He said they were better than the ones we were supposed to buy. And Kendall, that’s our armorer, he said that was true. The ones we ended up with, they’re not semi-autos like we expected. These ones, you can switch them to full auto, like machine guns.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “—but that still means less men with a gun in their hand,” Darryl finished the sentence for the other man. “We know this. The man—the white man—he said he took what he could get, and twenty-four was what he could get. What he said was, it’s the same time in prison for twenty-four as it would have been for fifty. And he wanted the same money for the load he did bring.”

  “And
you paid him?”

  “We paid him.”

  “So what are we supposed to do now?”

  “You were supposed to get ten percent of the shipment,” Darryl said. “You still can, if you want it.”

  “Ten percent of twenty-four is—”

  “—two point four. Which rounds out to two.”

  “Two? Why doesn’t it round out to three?”

  “Because the units who took twenty percent, they expected ten. Now they’re going to get five. We take their four point eight up to five, it means your two point four has to drop to two.”

  “So they get half of what they expected, but we get less than that,” the young man said, his voice classroom-argumentative, reflecting his other life, a college student.

  “These are guns, brother. Not poker chips. There’s no way to divide them more fairly than what I just said.”

  “The man talks sense.” The young man’s companion spoke for the first time. “He talks sense about the whole thing.”

  “You could of told us about this,” the young man said to Darryl. “Before we made the drive, I mean.”

  “You know how it works,” Darryl replied. “We do not talk our business on the telephone, brother. That’s the rules we were given; that’s the rules we live by. Like I said, it’s your decision.”

  * * *

  1959 October 04 Sunday 20:59

  * * *

  “It’s a beauty!”

  “Brand-new,” Ace said smugly to the lanky, red-haired youth. “The only way any of those niggers ever saw anything like this before was in a cop’s hand.”

  Seven young men, ranging from mid- to late teens, were clustered tightly around a table made from pine planks set across a pair of half-barrels. The pistol lay on the bare wood surface before them: a rare jewel, amateurishly appraised.

  The basement was divided into four rooms. Two had long, narrow, street-level windows, another housed an oil-burning furnace. The last, all the way to the back, was furnished with street-salvage: a couch so rotted that its exposed springs had been cut off at their base, with the jagged tips wrapped in black electrical tape; two kitchen chairs with no backs; a once-blue armchair now stained into virtual blackness; a child-sized desk; an army cot; two portable radios; and an assortment of ragged couch pillows strewn randomly on the floor.