Damaged Goods

by Stephen Solomita

  For the next several months, Tighe made his nut by selling off architectural details to an interior decorator on East Seventy-fifth Street. Everything of value went—the sliding oak doors and the mahogany shutters, three rococo mantels carved from the purest white marble, a finely wrought chandelier dating back to 1843, seventy feet of black walnut molding, even the parquet floors. When the contractor was finished, when rooms originally running half the length of the building had been reduced to eleven-by-twenty-foot boxes, Tighe had his name put on New York University’s approved list for student housing, filling his boxes at a stroke while, at the same time, avoiding cumbersome leases that would have bound him to the same rent-control laws Octavia Shankman had avoided by cooking for her tenants.

  The following fifteen years were reasonably good to Martin Tighe. His properties, including 671 East Tenth Street, chugged out profits with the relentless determination of the Little Engine That Could. Enough profits to support two ex-wives, six children, and a sizable gambling habit that finally exploded in 1962 when Tighe’s main bookie, Johnny Bono (with ex-wives of his own to worry about) sold Tighe’s hundred-thousand-dollar debt to Carmine Stettecase.

  It might have gone badly for Martin Tighe. Carmine, not especially noted for his patience, might, for instance, have sent Jilly Sappone to collect the debt. But Carmine was beset with an obsession all his own, an obsession inspired by two prominent politicians, Estes Kefauver and Robert Kennedy, and by a series of connected mobsters (mobsters formally sworn to the law of omertà) willing to testify in front of television cameras.

  Carmine was living in a tenement on Elizabeth Street at the time, the walls of which were thin enough to let in the sounds of newly-wed love from an adjoining apartment. As he listened to the shrieking bedsprings late at night (as he reconstructed the day-to-day conspiracies hatched in his own kitchen), Carmine imagined FBI microphones in the walls, the ceilings, the light fixtures, the television set. He imagined himself surrounded by spinning reel-to-reel tape recorders, IRS agents in glen-plaid suits, imagined a dismal future in a cold, damp cell up near the Canadian border.

  A lesser man would have collapsed under the weight of his fears, but Carmine Stettecase hadn’t clawed his way up from the bottom by refusing to meet his problems head-on. The smart move, he reasoned, was to insulate himself from attack in the hope that his pursuers—if pursuers there be—would veer off in search of easier targets. The way experienced b&e artists avoided houses with big dogs, barred windows, and burglar alarms.

  One solution, already taken by many of his colleagues (and by tens of thousands of other New Yorkers, it being the era of white flight), was to buy a house in New Jersey or out on Long Island or up in Westchester, a house that sat on its own lot. There were three things wrong with that idea as far as Carmine was concerned. First, he had a sentimental attachment to Manhattan in general, and to his old neighborhood in particular. Second, he hated the idea of running away. Third, he was afraid of the wide-open spaces surrounding most private homes. There were just too many potential bad guys out there, too many cops, too many jealous rivals. It was hard enough defending a single apartment front door, maybe the window leading out to the fire escape. How could you protect an entire house? They might come at you from anywhere.

  Now, more than twenty years later, Carmine sat on a leather recliner in his five-hundred-square-foot living room and sipped at a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. As he watched his wife and his son’s mother-in-law prepare the breakfast table, he realized just how lucky he’d been to run into Johnny Bono on that long-ago night.

  “The worst thing about it, what’s really bustin’ my balls,” Johnny had explained after a long preamble, “is I know this scumbag could raise the bread to pay me off. All he gotta do is sell some of that property.” They were sitting inside Carmine’s restaurant, Bono chugging down 7&7s like there was no tomorrow. “But he won’t do it, Carmine. Says the properties are mortgaged out, the real-estate market’s depressed, he’s got partners to worry about. I mean the prick has a different excuse every time I talk to him, which I ain’t doin’ too often because he’s makin’ himself scarce.”

  Carmine nodded thoughtfully, figuring Johnny was going to ask him to collect the debt, which he was willing to do, for a price.

  “Meanwhile,” Bono resumed after draining his glass, “I know the guy’s lyin’ to me. This afternoon I went down to City Hall, looked up this brownstone Tighe owns on Tenth Street. Guess what, Carmine—no partners, no mortgage. The man is a deadbeat.”

  Carmine refilled the bookie’s glass, shrugged his shoulders, grunted his acceptance of Martin Tighe’s infamy. “What kinda brownstone?” he asked.

  “It’s like apartments, now. For college kids. Between Second and Third Avenue. A nice neighborhood, Carmine. There ain’t a fuckin’ spic for miles around.”

  Carmine was proud of the way it finally went down. First, once it became clear that Johnny Bono didn’t have the balls to collect on his own, Carmine bought up the debt for seventy-five cents on a dollar. Then, all by himself, he convinced Martin Tighe that his life depended on the prompt payment of this honorably assumed obligation. It wasn’t all that difficult.

  “What it is,” Carmine explained, “is if ya don’t pay me the way I wanna get paid, I’m gonna kill ya.”

  The trick, of course, the important thing, was that he meant what he said, a reality Martin Tighe was quick to recognize. Tighe’s hand dipped into his back pocket, fished out a thick wallet.

  “I need a little time,” he explained, “but meanwhile I got a week’s vig right here.”

  Carmine, his face a mask of cold determination, shook his head. “No, forget the fuckin’ money. It’s too late for money. What I want you should do is sign over that house on Tenth Street to my mother. She’s sick and she needs a decent place to live.” He left out the fact that his mother was, at that moment, lying in a nursing-home bed.

  Once Carmine got rid of the college kids (most of them left in June of that year, the rest vacated after a little encouragement), he went to work on his “brownstone” with all the vigor Martin Tighe had demonstrated fifteen years before. He began by installing two steel doors, one at the outer entrance to the building, the second on the inside of a little vestibule. Then he’d transformed Martin Tighe’s tiny studios, dividing the building into three apartments, two duplexes with a floor-through on top. Along the way, he soundproofed the walls, covered all the windows with heavy drapes, barred every piece of glass on the first two floors.

  Satisfied at last, Carmine moved his family (he couldn’t bring himself to trust an outsider, neither tenant nor servant) inside. He and his wife, Rosa, took the lower duplex, installing their son, Tommaso, Tommaso’s wife, Mary, and the grandchildren to come (who never came) directly above them. Tommaso’s mother-in-law, Josie Rizzo, had gotten the top floor, a condition, supposedly temporary, that had grown to be the permanent thorn in Carmine Stettecase’s life. A thorn already more deeply buried in his flesh than he could possibly imagine.

  “Hey, Pop?”

  Carmine jumped awake, then silently cursed himself. Remembering a time when nobody snuck up on him, when he’d watched the world around him with the nonchalant paranoia of a homeless cat.

  But that was then, he said to himself, and this is now, and there’s no goin’ back.

  Out loud, he said, “You ready?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Carmine figured his son’s wet smirk was meant to be friendly. That was because the kid—the punk—didn’t have the nerve to make fun of him.

  “Just get to work, Tommy. The boys’ll be here soon.”

  “Sorry, Pop, I guess I got up late again.”

  Carmine looked at his only male child and shook his head. Tommy Stettecase, at age thirty-eight, was rail-thin and as bald on top as an egg. His face was the color of a peeled cucumber (except for the black pouches beneath his eyes) and his chin merged smoothly into the wrinkled skin of his nec
k. He would never take over his father’s business, never be the Don, which was perfectly okay with him. Tommy loved his father, but had long abandoned any hope of living up to his father’s expectations. Or that his father would ever come to appreciate Tommy’s own accomplishments.

  But there was one accomplishment Carmine definitely did appreciate, an accomplishment that dovetailed nicely into Carmine’s ever-blossoming paranoia. Tommy’s job, performed before every business meeting, was to sweep the dining room for bugs. Never mind the fact that he’d been doing it for over a decade without finding any device more threatening than a percolator with an electrical short. Never mind the fact that Carmine hadn’t been arrested in thirty-five years. Carmine had been in the courtroom when John Gotti went down, had listened to Sammy the Bull’s testimony, heard the FBI tapes that sealed Gotti’s fate. On the day the jury came in, he’d taken his wife aside and told her the bad news.

  “Our day is done, our thing, our cosa nostra. The spics and the Chinks are comin’ up, the niggers, too. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, maybe everything in life eventually gets finished with. Meanwhile, the cops and the politicians keep comin’ after us, like old dogs who can’t learn new tricks. Anyone who’s been around long enough to pick up an FBI file’s gotta figure to die in a cell. Rose, you know I backed off the drug business a long time ago, but now I got an ace in the hole. So what I’m gonna do is look for a big score.”

  Carmine’s ace in the hole was a factory named Paradise Fashion Designs, a pure money loser whose sole attractions (for Carmine Stettecase) were its location in the village of Tangail in the country of Bangladesh, and the desperation of its owner, Sanjay Gupta. Carmine, acting through a broker, had convinced Gupta (for a price, of course) to open a Paradise Fashion bank account on Grand Cayman Island in the Bahamas. Every six weeks or so, Carmine had his son, Tommaso, fly into Grand Cayman via private jet and make a large deposit. A month later, the money, in the guise of profit distributions (and as clean as mob money could get) was wire-transferred to Carmine’s personal account in Panama. From there it went to numbered accounts in Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong.

  “What would you say to a triplex in Rome?” Carmine had put his arm around his wife, looked into her still-handsome face, wondered just where the hell Tommy came from. If the kid had a little more balls, Carmine would’ve turned the family business over to him on the spot, let the punk take the fall.

  Rosa had leaned her narrow frame into her husband’s bulk. “With servants?”

  “Definitely.”

  “And a villa in Switzerland? Just in case the summers in Rome are too hot?”

  “Sure.”

  “And Josie Rizzo dead in her grave?”

  “Without a fucking doubt.”

  Josefina Rizzo, née Sappone, took four Wedgwood cups and four matching saucers out of an enormous china cabinet, pausing momentarily to admire the delicate gold rims, the tiny hand-painted roses that seemed to dance across the milky porcelain. The cups and saucers were part of a service for twenty-four and much too fine, in her opinion, for Carmine Stettecase and the three cafones he called “my aides.” But that was Carmine, that was the way he was, a fat guinea stuffing pastry into his mouth while he imagined himself a British lord. And why not? There was no one to contradict him, no one to hold up the mirror. No one to say, “Hey Carmine, putting on a tutu don’t make a ballerina out of a dancing bear.”

  Josie set the cups and the saucers on the table, then went back to the china cabinet in search of plates and bowls. She had to move around Tommy Stettecase who was making a quick physical search of the room before beginning an electronic sweep. Josie liked Tommy, the way a soldier might be fond of a stray dog trapped inside a battle zone. In Josie’s narrow world, innocence was the rarest commodity, to be wondered at, to be tossed a scrap of food now and again, but never to be taken seriously.

  “Good morning, Mama-Josie.”

  She didn’t bother to answer and he didn’t pursue it. In truth, she rarely spoke to any of them, not even to her daughter. What was the point? The play had been written a long time ago, the actors chosen for each part. Besides, she had to save all her strength to nurse the spirit within her, to keep it strong. The obligation was absolute; it demanded that she conserve her energies, keep her own counsel.

  Once the plates and bowls were laid out, Josie placed the sugar bowl, the creamer, and a large tureen for the fruit salad on a silver tray and went into the kitchen. There she found Carmine’s wife, Rosa, dropping eggs into a steel bowl. Rosa, at her husband’s instruction, was preparing omelettes aux fine herbs, just as if the boys in Carmine’s band wouldn’t prefer eggs and peppers deep-fried in olive oil. Just as if Carmine himself hadn’t grown up on breakfasts of sour milk and two-day-old bread, suppers of pasta fazool and water.

  Josie opened the refrigerator, took out the fruit salad and the heavy cream. Quickly, her large raw-knuckled hands driven by years of practice, she filled the tureen and the creamer, then topped off the sugar bowl before returning to the dining room. She was a strong woman, nearly six feet in height with a massive forehead and heavy, prominent cheekbones that squeezed her sharp black eyes into permanent shadow. The net effect was more than an accident of birth. Josie Rizzo didn’t want anyone looking into her eyes. She went through life with her features turned defiantly down, had been doing it for so long that her neck jutted forward at an odd angle, even when she was alone.

  In the neighborhood, she was, she knew, an object of pity, if not out-and-out ridicule. She shopped every day, no matter what the weather, striding along, eyes glued to the sidewalk, in the widow’s weeds she’d donned more than three decades before when her brother was murdered. That was five years before her own husband died.

  “Mama-Josie, would you put on the radio?”

  Josie flipped the switch, turned the volume up, tried to hide her inner laughter. Tommy used the sound to activate hidden bugs before he started looking for them with his electrical gadgets. His father, Carmine, always watched this part, standing just inside the doorway with his hand on his hips. Josie had no idea what Tommy was actually doing; all she really knew was that once it was over, once Tommy pronounced the room safe, Carmine relaxed. As if that was all there was to it.

  She set the tureen, the creamer, and the sugar bowl on the table, then carried the tray across the room to a large buffet. Her path took her within a few feet of Carmine, who tossed her the most ferocious glare in his repertoire. The one that said, “I’m gonna kill you and I’m gonna do it soon.”

  At least that’s the way Josie read it. Carmine Stettecase was going to have her killed, just as her father, husband, and brother had been killed before her. The decision had already been made.

  Josie Rizzo was not afraid of death. Physical fear was an emotion entirely unknown to her. She had no regrets, not for anything she’d done, or anything she was about to do. As far as she was concerned, it was all fate, anyway, the only tragedy being that you couldn’t know in advance, couldn’t see the blows coming. Josie hadn’t been inside a Catholic church, not even for wedding or funerals, in twenty years. Not since Father Murtagh (an Irishman, naturally) preached a sermon on the doctrine of free will.

  “You done yet, Tommy? The boys’re here.”

  “Couple minutes, Pop.”

  As Carmine walked off, Josie returned to her chores, setting out the silverware and the linen napkins before returning the tray to its place in the china cabinet. Then she hurried off to the kitchen to find Rosa standing in front of the stove.

  “The rolls,” Josie said. “In the oven.”

  Rosa shifted over a few feet. “Croissants, Josie. They’re called croissants.”

  Josie snatched a large warming tray off the kitchen table, carried it over to the stove, and began to arrange the steaming croissants on its smooth surface. She took her time, folding the pastries into each other, making three even rows. This was the critical point in a particularly important morning, the morning she sa
ved her boy, Gildo, again.

  “Tommy, for Christ’s sake, how long is this gonna take?”

  “Another minute, pop.”

  Josie carried the loaded tray back to the kitchen table and set it down. She opened the refrigerator, took out three small dishes, each with a ball of whipped butter in its center, and carried them into the dining room. Tommy was at the far end of the room, on his knees with his ass in the air. He was running one of his gadgets along the baseboard, looking exactly like the servant he was.

  “Done, Pop.”

  Josie watched Tommy clamber to his feet, gather his instruments, and flee to his own apartment, the innocent civilian deserting the battlefield. Carmine stepped aside to let him pass, then entered the dining room, followed by the boys, Vinnie Trentacosta, Guido Palanzo, and Little-Dominick (Big-Dominick being, of course, the now deceased Dominick Favara) Guarino. All three men were in their early sixties. They’d grown up with Carmine, had served alongside him under Big-Dominick’s leadership. Nevertheless, Carmine searched each of them from time to time, searched them personally and in private. After Sammy the Bull, he trusted no one outside the family.

  “Get the goddamned rolls, Josie,” Carmine growled. “Can’t ya see I’m in a hurry here?”

  “Croissants,” Josie muttered as she went back to the kitchen. “They’re called croissants.”

  By the time she picked up the warming tray and returned to the dining room, Carmine and his three flunkies were seated around one end of the table. Josie like to think of them as the three blind mice. The image fit nicely with the fate she had in store for them.

  “Hey, Josie,” Carmine said. His fat mouth was already twisted into a smirk. “I heard that Jilly’s gonna be a fuckin’ poster boy.” He stopped, looked at the other men, winked broadly. “I mean, why not? Now that his mug’s all over the TV and the papers, maybe they’ll even make a movie of his life. Whatta ya think, Josie? You think Hollywood’ll turn ya head? Ya won’t forget us, will ya?”