by Johnny Shaw
Andy’s final escape attempt was an abortion from the word go. He wasn’t even sure why he did it. Something about the principle of the thing. Not being told what to do. Idiocy in the name of controlling one’s destiny.
The plan was simple. At a stoplight, make a run for it. No frills. A classic.
As Kate drove through an odds-defying number of green lights, Andy sweated through his clothes. One arm casually rested on the armrest, fingers poised to grab the door lever. He turned to get a gauge of Rocco’s position behind him. The man stared straight back at him, surprising Andy a little.
“I got a question for you,” Andy said, trying to be casual. “Why tell me now? That you’re my father?”
“I didn’t tell you. Ben did,” Rocco said. “Circumstances led to it.”
“I can understand not showing up when I was a kid. You abandoned me, after all. Might as well stick by your cowardice. But once I was an adult, seems like the worst you could expect was a punch in the jaw. Which I owe you, by the way.”
“Try it, son. I might let you. I might not. I ain’t your average old man,” Rocco said. “You joined the police. That complicated things.”
“I left the force two years ago. As you know. You have a file on me.”
“I sat next to you a few times at the counter of Hartshorn’s. Watched you eat your chicken-fried steak. Never found the right time. Never knew what to say. How to start the conversation. You’re right—I’m a bit of a coward.”
“Until events forced your hand?”
“Something like that,” Rocco said.
“What about my mother?” Andy turned to Kate, examining her profile.
She caught him watching. “Are you suggesting—? No damn way.” She laughed.
“You’re the right age.”
She stopped laughing. “Careful.”
“Champ, then? Is she my mother?”
“Champ is not your biological mother, but she is your mom.”
“Then who is my mother?”
“One parent at a time,” Rocco said. “Get used to having me around first.”
When Kate finally stopped at a yellow light on Jacoby Boulevard, Andy almost forgot his plan to escape. He hesitated and then popped the door open. Before he could swing his legs around, a cab trying to beat the yellow slammed into the open car door, bending it back until it crunched into the front fender. The cab didn’t even slow down.
Andy was too embarrassed to run. He sat and stared at what could have been his death.
“That’s coming out of your first paycheck,” Kate said.
“You people get paid?” Andy asked, looking back at the busted door.
“What do you think this is, an internship?” Rocco said.
Andy attempted to pull the door back, but it came off and crashed onto the boulevard.
“The damn cabbies in this town,” Kate said. “They act like laws don’t mean anything.”
Andy remained compliant for the rest of the drive. He looked out at his beloved Auction City. It looked the same but felt like a piece of bad fruit. From the outside, you couldn’t tell, but once you took a bite, you couldn’t look at it the same way knowing it was rotten inside.
That was disingenuous, a weak attempt to romanticize. The city had spoiled long ago. A better analogy would be that looking at the city was like looking at rotten fruit under a microscope. Seeing it closer and in more detail, one could identify the strange shapes of its disease. Or maybe it wasn’t like fruit. Maybe it was a vegetable. Or a tomato or avocado, which were kind of both. Andy decided that good metaphors were hard to come up with, and he wasn’t the one to do it, but that the city was a metaphor for something. And so was fruit.
“This is where we’re going?” Andy said. “You’re kidding me?”
They pulled in front of 6243 Holt Avenue. The three of them got out of the station wagon and walked to the front door.
“I’ll meet you at Hartshorn’s,” Rocco said. “I got calls to make.”
Kate opened the door for Andy, and they entered the building together. Andy stopped in the foyer, looking at the flowers in the vase. “Were you the whistler the night I came here?”
“Or was it a ghost?” Kate smiled and walked past him down the long hallway, turning into the fifth small room. Andy followed. Even in the day, the place was creepy. Dark and noticeably vacant.
Kate pulled at a bookcase. On a hinge, it opened to reveal a staircase that led down into darkness.
“This is getting a little too Scooby-Doo for my taste,” Andy said.
“Do you ever stop talking?”
Andy followed Kate down the steps and through a dimly lit basement that spanned the length of the block. The percussion of their footsteps echoed around them. There didn’t appear to be any outlets, until Kate pulled open a false wall.
“What is this place?” Andy asked.
“We call it the Fortress. It’s the safest place in Auction. A series of interconnected buildings. The only entrance is on Holt Avenue. If you don’t know the layout, the doors, you’ll never reach certain sections. I only know how to get to a few places.”
They climbed three flights of stairs, walked down a narrow hallway, used a foldable ladder to go up one more level, crawled through an oversize duct, and finally down a fire pole to another hallway.
“How long you worked with Rocco?” Andy asked on their journey.
“Twenty years,” she said, “but if you think you’re getting any secrets from me, you’re an idiot. I’m still miffed you thought I was your mother.”
“It wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibility.”
“I won’t forget it,” she said.
“You were the first Floodgater that wasn’t a crook. From a lawyer to this?”
“It suited me. Lawyering isn’t exactly God’s work. I was more interested in justice than law,” she said. “It’s not like it incorporates all criminals in the city. It’s not a union of wife beaters and rapists and child molesters. This is a group of businessmen that choose to work outside legal means. Infighting cuts into their margins. No reason for crime to be uncivil.”
“What about the people they sell drugs to? The poor they exploit? Aren’t they hurt by ‘business’?”
“That’s really a larger discussion about libertarianism. I’m willing to have that conversation, but another time.” Kate stopped in front of a door, knocked three times, and waited. “We’re here.”
Champ sat back in a recliner, thumbing through one of her photo albums. Andy was glad to see that they’d brought them with her. When she looked up and saw Andy, her eyes got teary. She set the album to the side, stood, and went to him. She hugged him for the first time he could remember. Held him close, crushing his ribs. When she released him, she held his face in both hands, staring into his eyes.
“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I wanted to tell you everything. For so long.”
“It’s okay, Champ. I understand,” Andy said. “Are they treating you right?”
“Better than ever,” she said.
Andy glanced over his shoulder. Kate stayed by the door, talking to Russell, the male nurse who opened the door for them. He was a big man who could have easily been a bouncer on his day off.
Champ sat down on the recliner. Andy took a seat across from her on the leather couch. The place was bigger and nicer than the senior living facility. The furniture, as well.
Kate and Russell headed into one of the back rooms.
“So. Rocco. He’s really my father?”
“He is. My late Manny and him, they ran together. Going way back. Before the war. One day soon after Manny passed, Rocco, he came to me, asked me to look after you. For a little while. That little while lasted until now. You saved my life.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Without Manny, I didn’t know what to do. Was completely lost. We had our lives planned together, and then he was gone. I tried to kill myself. Drank even more than what you seen me. I was d
ying alive.
“Maybe Rocco knew it. Knew I needed something—someone—to care for. When he handed you to me. This thing that weighed maybe fifteen pounds. This living thing with eyes and hands and feet. I had a reason to be. Someone that needed me. A reason to be better than I was. I ain’t never called myself your mother, because that’s not what I am. I was your protector. Your Champ. You were my salvation.”
“What about my real mother?”
“Can’t help you there. Rocco never told me. You’ll have to ask him.”
Kate came back in the room twenty minutes later. Champ’s soap operas had started, so their conversation had ended except for brief moments during the commercial breaks.
Andy had more questions for her, but they could wait. He had the gist. Rocco had brought Andy to Champ, and without a second’s hesitation she had taken him in and raised him as her own. How much more did he need to know? Despite the fact that Champ drank too much, was prone to anger, had been in more fights than Larry Holmes, and spent plenty an evening in a jail cell, she had stepped up and been the perfect person to raise him.
Forgiving Champ was the easy part, because she had nothing to apologize for. She had kept a friend’s secret. The hard part was learning how to deal with having a father. There was only one place to start. With pie.
CHAPTER 17
I don’t forgive. I don’t forget. I hold a grudge. I remember everything. Hell, I took notes. The bastards might get angry, but they’re bastards. They don’t get to win.
—From the introduction to the memoir Assistant to the Mayor’s Assistant by former Auction City politico Erica “Boop” Neubauer (1985)
Rocco and Andy sat at the counter in Hartshorn’s Diner, each with a cup of coffee and a piece of pie in front of them. Rocco got apple with melted cheese. Andy went with lemon meringue. The awkwardness didn’t stop either of them from eating. Max Hartshorn made good pie. Kate smoked on the sidewalk, leaving the two of them on their own.
“You seem a little old to be running around crime fighting,” Andy said.
“Probably,” Rocco said. “I’m seventy-two, but I don’t feel a day over seventy-one.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get hurt?”
“Old people aren’t the only ones that can get hurt. I hold my own,” Rocco said.
Andy filled his mouth with delicious pie.
“Champ is like a sister to me. I couldn’t go up. See her like that.” Rocco shook his head. “When I picked her up last night. She knew who I was. Then she didn’t. It’s hard to see.”
“But that’s what real people do,” Andy said. “They stay. Even when it gets hard.”
Rocco took a sip of his coffee and wiped his mustache with a napkin. “It isn’t always the things we do that damn us. Sometimes it’s the things we don’t do. The fights we walk away from. The words left unsaid. The people we leave behind.”
“You said you came here,” Andy said, “sat next to me. How many times without saying anything?”
“Couple dozen,” Rocco said.
“What do you want from me? Expect from me?”
“Nothing. You’re not the one in debt,” Rocco said. “When you went after Gray, the flyers, all that, there was going to be a day that he’d get tired of it. Do something bad. I thought I could warn you off, protect you by threatening you.”
“How did that work out?”
“Dumb plan,” Rocco laughed. “But I’m a half-full kind of guy.”
“I ended up killing the deputy police commissioner,” Andy whispered.
“Didn’t see that coming, to be sure,” Rocco said. “But I probably wouldn’t have spoken to you if you hadn’t. I’d still just be an idea, a dead man to you.”
Max refilled their coffee cups, shutting up Rocco for the moment. He picked at the melted cheese on the plate. When Max was at the other end of the counter, Andy spoke up.
“Floodgate the reason you left me with Champ?”
“Part of it.” Rocco stroked the veins on the back of his hand. “I wish I could tell you that I left out of a sense of duty. Or they forced me. That it was beyond my control. But if I’m going to talk with you, I’m going to talk straight. I left because I was better at the job than I’d ever be at being a father. Mostly, I left because I could.”
“You’re not exactly endearing yourself,” Andy said.
“I’d been back from my time in the army for two, three years. I worked for Fat Jimmy Furgele before the war. After, I worked for his son. His old man gave him the nickname Tony Cajones, but it was forced. Tony’s nothing like Fat Jimmy, different generation, runs the operation like a Fortune 500. Calls himself Anthony. Which is his name, but that’s not the point. Bottom-line thinking. Political power, media control, beyond making a buck.
“Not the Trust I knew. Speaking another language. I understood the rackets. Loyalty still had meaning, though. They found a place for me. They called me a liaison, but I was a fixer. I kept the peace. I settled scores. I refereed street business. I knew everyone and everything that was going on in the city, but I quickly learned I didn’t know a goddamn thing.”
“I know the feeling,” Andy said.
“I held court in Stogie’s. One day, three men walked into the bar. A Chinese, a Negro, and a priest. I expected Stogie to hop the bar, toss them. He never cottoned to Negroes in his joint. Didn’t know where he stood with Chinamen. Never seen one brave enough to walk north of Quarry Road.
“Stogie didn’t do nothing. As much nothing as he could muster. Never saw no one exert so much effort to not doing a thing. Acted like they weren’t there. Cleaned clean glasses. Scraped at an imaginary stain with his thumbnail. I thought maybe I was hallucinating. Either way, the mirage drifted toward me. When the Negro spoke, he told me that Sal Carrelli wanted to talk to me. It didn’t get more real than that.”
“I know that name. He was one of the original Floodgate members. I thought the kid’s book just made up names. He’s real?”
Rocco nodded. “They took me to him. Back of a plumbing supply warehouse. He didn’t look good. That’s what a gut shot does to a man. Tough got you far, but it couldn’t make a bullet not kill you. I didn’t ask why we weren’t in a hospital.
“The same doc had taken a slug out of my leg the year before. Doctor .45, we called him. A whiz at backroom surgery and pharmaceutical relaxation. When he said he couldn’t do anything for Sal, nobody needed a second opinion. The only thing the doc needed to know was whether Sal preferred laudanum or poppy tea, and what song he wanted played at his funeral.
“Dying, Sal asked me to do two things. Punish the person who killed him. And take his place in Floodgate. At the time, I didn’t know what that meant, but I agreed to both. Those two requests amounted to Sal’s last words.”
Andy glanced outside at Kate, who threw her cigarette onto the sidewalk and crushed it. She pulled out a pager, looked at it, and crossed the street to a payphone.
“He’d been in the group since the Flood?”
“All the way back. Like you, I thought Floodgate had dissolved,” Rocco said. “The work suited me. I missed the action, the war. Nothing worse than a bored thug. Floodgate gave me the chance to bust some heads and feel good about it. I kept my promise to Sal.”
“What about the man who shot him?”
“You want anything else to eat, Andrea?” Rocco said.
“Was it your choice to give me a girl’s name?”
“A man’s name in Italy. You said it yourself.”
“Do you see the Pantheon outside?” Andy said. “You know how much hell I caught in school?”
“It was your grandfather’s name,” Rocco said. “Tradition is important.”
“It’s traditional to not abandon your son.”
Across the street, Kate hung up the phone, threw some more change into the machine, and made another call. The speed with which she dialed told Andy that it wasn’t good news.
“Al Gray’s death was a long time coming,” Rocco said, a
fter making sure Max was out of earshot.
“I’m starting to get that sense, but it don’t make the medicine go down any easier.”
“Gray made Stalin look like Jimmy Carter. A lot of bodies on him. Ruined what the police could be. The few good cops, like you were, can’t pick up that slack. End up getting done by the bad ones.”
“I can’t see you wanting to clean up the ACPD. Keeping it corrupt would be to your advantage.”
“It’s not about what we want. The ACPD is going to be corrupt no matter what we do,” Rocco said. “It just needs to be the right kind of corrupt.”
“There are plenty of uncorrupted police departments,” Andy said.
When Rocco stopped laughing, he said, “If dogs could talk, they’d still eat their own vomit.”
“How do I fit in to all this? To Floodgate?” Andy asked. “I literally have no idea what I’m going to be doing an hour from now, let alone tomorrow or in a month.”
“I’m developing a loose plan for you. The whole concept is about twelve hours old. Seat of my pants here.”
“That makes me feel better.”
“Your skills have use,” Rocco said. “I grew up a hood. I killed in the Flood, in the war, and before and after. Everyone’s a soldier for something, even if it’s themselves. And every day is a war. I killed soldiers on the other side, just as they would’ve killed me.”
“We’re talking about criminal mobs, not soldiers.”
“Grow up, son,” Rocco said. “You’re looking for good guys and bad guys. We’re the effective guys. If there’s a problem, Floodgate has the power to fix it. You want to stop tourist muggings on Exposition? Of course you do, because if tourists are afraid to go there, businesses both legal and otherwise are hurt. The police can’t stop it. Instead, Floodgate coordinates with Consolidated to spread the word and punish the morons who break the rules. Hospital time instead of jail time. Shift the more talented strong-arm men to a more suitable job. No reason to put someone out of work. Let the pickpockets know that tourists are still fair game, so long as no one gets hurt.”
