Five minutes later they were seated at a small table in the Castellemare Cafe. The restaurant, in the heart of Little Italy, was decorated in the best tourist trap tradition. Gondolas made their way along the walls and the bar was dominated by a highly polished cappucino machine. All the waiters wore white aprons and the tables were covered with red-and-white checked tablecloths. The neighborhood had been solid Italian before the war. Now, the sons and daughters of the immigrants who’d founded Little Italy were leaving as fast as the moving industry could supply the trucks. On the other hand, the tourists, pie-fed Midwesterners mostly, couldn’t seem to get enough calamare fra diavolo. They were thicker than ever.
“I gotta use the toilet, Stanley. Order me a Rheingold and get whatever you want for yourself.”
Patero left without waiting for his assistant to answer. He made his way to the bathrooms in the rear, but instead of entering the door marked “KINGS,” he knocked on an unmarked door, then quickly pushed it open.
“How come ya don’t wait for someone to say, ‘Come in’?” Joe Faci’s tone was mild, his face expressionless.
“Because you already knew I was comin’. You knew I was here before I got to my table. Ain’t that right?”
Faci shrugged. “It don’t make a difference anyway.” He opened a desk drawer and removed an envelope. “Mr. Accacio wants to know how things worked out. With the Puerto Rican.”
“I’ll bet he does.” Patero put the envelope in the inner pocket of his jacket. Stanley, he reflected, wouldn’t be seeing this one. “I’ll bet it’s real important to Mister Accacio. That’s why I wanna deliver the message personally.”
“I could take it to him. I got Mr. Accacio’s complete confidence.”
In Sal Patero’s opinion, Joe Faci was an amazing guy. You couldn’t make him mad-at least not so it showed-but it was fun trying. “Cut the crap, Joey. Stop makin’ out like you got Lucky Luciano in the back room.” He gestured to a door in the far wall. “Steppy’s a neighborhood punk who’s tryin’ to make his way up. He ain’t the fucking capo di tutti capi or whatever you’re callin’ the big boss these days. I got a message to deliver and I wanna deliver it personal.”
Patero’s message was simple enough: the situation had been contained, but don’t let it happen again. Don’t kill civilians. Except for the smell, nobody cares about dead gangsters in the trunks of cars. But if you start blowing away citizens, sooner or later you’re gonna kill someone who matters.
The intercom on Faci’s desk emitted a sharp buzz. “Send him in, Joey.” The voice belonged to Steppy Accacio. “So I could hear his message personal.”
Moodrow sat quietly at his table, sipping at a Schaefer. He was monumentally pissed off. Not that he was surprised by what Patero and he had been doing all morning. He wasn’t even opposed to it. Not really. Cops referred to it as ‘the pad’ and it had been going on for a long time. Moodrow’s Uncle Pavlov had explained it before Moodrow took the entrance exam.
“If you become a cop, Stanley, sooner or later people are gonna offer you money. What you gotta understand is that, as far as the Department is concerned, there’s clean money and dirty money. The boss in the coffee shop won’t let you pay for lunch? That’s clean. That’s expected. Likewise for the mechanic who tunes up your car for half-price. But don’t take money from a burglar. Or a dope addict. Or, God forbid, a rapist. That’s as dirty as it gets. You know about the pad?”
“No.”
Uncle Pavlov had gone on to explain the setup. Every precinct had a bagman who collected from the bookies and the pimps. The captain took the biggest piece, then the lieutenants got theirs, then the sergeants, then a few detectives.
“Beat cops like me get nothing,” he concluded.
“You’re saying that the money just comes along like your paycheck?”
“See, that’s the thing, Stanley. Is the pad clean or is it dirty? Not everybody participates. In fact, if the captain’s clean, there ain’t no pad. If the captain’s clean, then it’s every cop for himself. By the way, I’m sure you heard that gettin’ transferred out to Staten Island is a horrible punishment for a cop. Ask yourself why that should be? A lotta cops live on Staten Island. There’s no violence out there. You could do your tour without worrying that someone’s gonna toss a brick off a roof. So I ask ya, Stanley, why is gettin’ transferred out to the boondocks a punishment?”
“Because there’s no money out there. No pad.”
“Congratulations, my boy, you’ve just won a free trip to the real world.”
What had stuck in Moodrow’s mind was the part about “not everybody participates.” He’d never given it much thought while he was fighting his way into the detectives, but he’d expected to have a choice, to think about it before it was shoved into his face. Sure, people wanted to make bets. They wanted to get laid, too. But when these same people got in over their heads, the bookies sent guys with baseball bats to do the collecting. And the pimps weren’t any better. They controlled their stables with anything that came to hand. Fists, chairs, lit cigarettes, razors, knives. Anything.
Moodrow had seen it close up. It was always a beat cop who arrived first when the bookies got through collecting. A beat cop who picked up the pieces and loaded them into an ambulance. Besides, the story Moodrow kept hearing was that the bookies and pimps were employees. They worked for bosses who also distributed the heroin that’d hit the Lower East Side like a biblical plague.
What it needed was sorting out. No matter what the cops did, even if they never took a dime from anybody, the gambling and the whores would still be there. You couldn’t stop it and the politicians would never legalize it. The cops were the regulators, the only regulators. It wasn’t what they were set up to do, but if they didn’t do it, the situation would be a lot worse.
“You in dreamland, Stanley?”
Sal Patero was smiling. He had no inkling of what was going on behind the swelling and the bruises on Moodrow’s face. Fighters are trained not to show an opponent what they’re feeling. A triumphant grin might inspire a beaten fighter to give it one more try. Showing fear or pain, on the other hand, encourages an even greater beating. If you were smart, you learned to show nothing. You learned, for instance, to hold yourself erect after a left hook just turned your liver to jelly.
“No, no. I’m here. I was just thinking.”
“Have something to eat. It helps prevent that condition.”
The waiter was already standing by the table. He took their order, veal for Patero and the shrimps in hot sauce for Moodrow, then disappeared into the kitchen.
“I was thinking about what we’ve been doing all morning,” Moodrow said.
“I was afraid you were gonna say that.”
“The thing of it is that if you’d given me a choice, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Whether I would’ve gone into it or not. But now that I’m already in the soup, I wanna try to understand what I’m eatin’. So’s I don’t get indigestion.”
“Keep goin’, Stanley.”
Patero was obviously irritated, but Moodrow wasn’t really concerned about Patero. Pat Cohan had set this up and unless Pat Cohan decreed otherwise, they were stuck with each other.
“This is the pad we’re doing, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re the precinct bagman, right?”
“Don’t make this into a cross-examination, Stanley. I don’t feature being interrogated. Especially by you.” Patero’s ears were red, the veins along his temples swollen.
“How often do we have to do this?”
“Whenever I say so.”
“C’mon, Sal. I got a right to know. Is this it? Eight hours a day, five days a week until I earn my pension?”
“You want out? There’s ten thousand cops who’d give their right arms to be in your position. You want out, just say the word.”
“That’s not what you told me this morning. This morning you told me if I had a problem, I should take it to Pat Cohan.”
> “Fuck Pat Cohan.”
“Ya know, Sal, you should try to put yourself in my position. Five years I’m a cop and the most I ever got out of it was a free hamburger. I’m a detective for five hours and I’ve committed five felonies. Five counts of bribery, if not outright extortion. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming you. But I think I got a right to know what’s going on. You haven’t even told me what my piece is.”
Patero stared into Moodrow’s eyes for a moment. “You tryin’ to tell me that Pat Cohan didn’t spell this out for you? That’s impossible.”
Moodrow leaned over the table. “He didn’t tell me shit.”
Instinctively, Patero sat back in his chair. There was something unpredictable about Stanley Moodrow, something he didn’t care for at all. “Pat Cohan is a prick.”
“This I already know.”
“He wants to see what you’ll do. Before you marry his daughter. In a way, you can’t blame him.”
“But what does the pad have to do with it?”
“You grew up here, on the Lower East Side, right?”
“So?”
“Me, I grew up in Red Hook, near the docks. My father was a longshoreman. When I was ten years old, someone put a hook through his head. Left him in the hold of a banana boat. I never found out who did it. I never even found out why it was done. That’s the way life was in those neighborhoods. Still is, for that matter. Anyway, right after I came into the job, I married a Jewish girl from Forest Hills, Andrea Stern. I loved the hell out of her, but our marriage didn’t work out.
“Andrea grew up in one of those apartments on Queens Boulevard, the kind with the fountains in the lobby. That’s what I liked about her. She was innocent, a child with a woman’s body. In fact, I was so crazy about Andrea that I didn’t give a lotta thought to what was gonna happen after we got married. Which I should’ve, because it turned out she couldn’t take Red Hook. She tried like hell, but it was too much for her. Too rough in every way. Meanwhile, I’m makin’ four thousand dollars a year and there’s no way we can afford to go anywhere else. When Andrea offered to find a job, her parents went through the roof. They couldn’t live with the disgrace of their daughter having to go out to work. They offered to give us money.
“I don’t wanna make a long story outta this, but the moral is I should’ve thought things out before I got married. Only I was too much in love to think about anything but the wedding night. You? You’re in the same boat. Or, at least, that’s what Pat Cohan believes. You and Kathleen come from two different worlds. Her world is easy to get used to. Yours ain’t.
“You know what a house costs today? Even a little house out in Flushing goes for nineteen thousand. Whatta you make, six thousand five hundred? You’re on the pad for four bills a month. With that kind of money, plus what you’re gonna get from the wedding, you could set yourself up with something nice. You could even afford to give your father-in-law the grandchildren he wants.”
Moodrow took his time answering. He’d calmed considerably by this time. Mainly because most of what Patero was saying had already occurred to him. Most white people on the Lower East Side were either moving out or planning to move out. The Jews, the Italians, the Poles and Russians and Ukrainians-they were all heading for suburbia. “White flight” is what the newspapers called it. Moodrow wasn’t sure whether they were fleeing the tenements and the poverty or the Puerto Ricans who were coming in by the thousands.
The Puerto Ricans didn’t particularly bother Moodrow. He’d known any number of black and Puerto Rican fighters. Some of them were okay and some of them were assholes, just like his white neighbors. The problem was Kathleen. It was all right for a girl to work before she was married, but afterward she was supposed to stay home and take care of the house and kids. Kathleen might be willing to hold onto her job for a few years, but the Church (to say nothing of Pat Cohan) was opposed to any kind of birth control and Kathleen was as religious as they come. Once they were married, she’d want kids.
“Four hundred bucks a month, right?”
“Give or take a few. Plus it goes up if you get promoted or pass the sergeants’ exam.”
“What about being a detective? What about making arrests?”
Patero shook his head. “Ya still ain’t figured it out, Stanley. I’m the precinct whip. My job is to supervise the detective squad, the whole squad, and I’m real good at it. The crap we’re doin’ now only happens the first few days of the month. The rest of the time, I do my work like any other cop. As for you, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. You’re gonna get your collars and you’re gonna move up in the job. With Pat Cohan for a rabbi, it’s guaranteed.”
Seven
January 8
Jake Leibowttz, sitting in the back seat of his mother’s Packard, was already bored with the New Jersey landscape. It was nothing but houses, dirt and trees. How could anybody live in a place like this? Why would they want to? That’s what he’d ask Steppy Accacio if Joe Faci ever got around to introducing them.
Accacio had moved himself and his family out to Montclair more than two years ago.
“Wake up, Jake,” he muttered to himself. “You’re here on business. This ain’t the guided tour.”
“You say somethin’, boss?” Izzy Stein asked, without turning his head. Izzy was as down to earth in his driving as he was in everything else, a fact Jake Leibowitz greatly appreciated.
“Nah, I’m just thinkin’ out loud.”
Jake liked sitting in the back seat. True, the move from riding shotgun to perched like a big shot, had been forced on him. Just like the wop who was riding shotgun in his place.
“I got a kid,” Joe Faci had said. “He needs a job. Maybe you could take him with ya.”
The ‘maybe,’ as Jake understood it, had meant ‘do it or get the fuck out of here.’ Well, what cannot be cured, must be endured, right? Life had a way of dumping on you and if you didn’t learn to shovel in a hurry, you’d be buried up to your neck. The kid had turned out to be Santo Silesi, eighteen years old and just out of reform school. Santo seemed eager to please, but Jake understood that the kid’s first loyalty would always be to the guineas. Jake Leibowitz was just a rest stop on the road to becoming a made man.
What it is, Jake decided, is that I’m never gonna turn my back on Santo Silesi. Because maybe Santo will become a made man by making Jake Leibowitz disappear. Like Jake Leibowitz made Abe Weinberg disappear. Which was most likely part of Joe Faci’s plan for good old Jake, anyway. Faci hadn’t exactly ordered Jake to eliminate his buddy, but he’d made his position perfectly clear. There was no way Steppy Accacio would continue to do business with a man who couldn’t control his employees.
“So, do what ya think is right, Jake,” Faci had said. “Then get back to me.”
They were driving south along the Jersey coast on Route 9, making their way from town to town. Their target was a SpeediFreight tractor-trailer heading up from Virginia tobacco country to a warehouse near Matawan. The driver would be using the turnpike for most of his ride through New Jersey, but at some point he’d have to transfer to smaller, local roads. His final destination was twenty-five miles east of the turnpike.
There were any number of ways for the driver to go. (SpeediFreight encouraged its drivers to mix up their routes, especially when they carried cigarettes.) But in this particular case the driver would exit the turnpike near South Brunswick. He’d take Route 617 to a large truck stop outside of Old Bridge and go to lunch, making sure to leave the doors unlocked. When he came out, Jake would be waiting.
“This ain’t the way I like to do things,” Jake had informed Joe Faci. “I mean I don’t have any control, here. Suppose I gotta get out in a hurry? One wrong turn and I’ll be wanderin’ through Jersey ’til the tires fall off. Or suppose the driver gives me trouble and I gotta do what I gotta do. Where do I dump the body? What do I do with the truck? No disrespect intended, Mr. Faci, but I wanna work as an independent.”
“Please, call me Jo
e.” Faci, unperturbed, had sipped his espresso, then added more sugar to what was already a cup of black mud.
“Okay, Joe.”
“I could understand ya reluctance, but I need ya ta do me this one favor. Because I’m in a bind. I got a regular crew for the job, but they had an unfortunate problem in Hell’s Kitchen last week and they ain’t available. So what I’m askin’ ya to do is help me out this here one time. If it goes good, which I’m sure it will, I could set you up permanent. I could introduce ya to one of the dispatchers at SpeediFreight. After that, you’re on your own.”
Faci hadn’t bothered to add “as long as we get our piece,” but Jake had gotten the message. What Faci was doing by setting Jake up with the SpeediFreight dispatcher was putting another layer between his boss and the operation. Jake could be trusted to do his time like a man if he got busted, but the dispatcher was probably some greedy citizen with a big family and a bigger mortgage. If the feds grabbed him, he’d roll over before they put on the cuffs.
“So tell me somethin’, Santo,” Jake asked, “where’d ya learn to handle a truck?” The plan was for the kid to drive the rig to a warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons would be counted. Jake’s cut was twenty cents per carton. The first thing he’d thought, when Faci had announced the price, was that he could get a dollar a carton if he sold them to someone else.
“Hey,” Santo replied, “call me Sandy. I ain’t in the ‘Santo’ generation.” He turned to face Jake. “See, no mustache.”
Jake unconsciously touched his own mustache. “You don’t like mustaches? Well, a blond kid like you shouldn’t grow a mustache, anyway. Blonds gotta have thick beards to make a mustache look good. It ain’t for kids. Now why don’t ya tell me where ya learned to drive a truck?”
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