“Please, call me Joe.” 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?”
Sandy Silesi turned away, concealing his face, but the tips of his ears, much to Jake’s satisfaction, flamed red.
“My uncle had a trucking company. In the Bronx. I worked there in the summer. I used to move the trailers around the yard.”
“Ya got a license ta drive a semi?”
“Nah.”
“Then take it easy. Real easy.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t mouth off to me.”
“I didn’t mean nothin’.”
“Because if ya mouth off to me, I’ll pull ya baby ass outta this car and send ya back to Joe Faci in pieces.”
The truck stop in Old Bridge turned out to be so big that Jake thought he’d turned into an army base. There must have been forty or fifty rigs parked in the truck lot and another fifty cars on the other side of the restaurant. Unfortunately, none of the tractor-trailers bore the name SpeediFreight, much less the number 114. Which is not to say that Jake was caught off guard. The drive up from Virginia took nine hours under perfect conditions. Which meant Jake had to be in Old Bridge nine hours after the rig was scheduled to leave Richmond. But suppose the driver ran into a bad accident? Or it was raining in Virginia? Or snowing in Pennsylvania?
“Me and Izzy are gonna go inside and get some lunch,” Jake announced. “You wait in the car. If ya spot the rig, come and get us.”
“Whatever you say.”
Jake took his time getting out of the Packard, trying to decide if the kid was being sarcastic. He couldn’t make up his mind, but then he figured it didn’t matter, anyway. Maybe he would have to teach the kid a lesson. That didn’t figure to be a problem. But this wasn’t the time or the place to do it.
When they got inside, Jake asked the lady with the menus for a table close to the door. The lady dropped the menus on the first table she came to and walked away.
“I can see they like us already,” Jake said.
“This kid is a piece of shit,” Izzy replied. “Santo Silesi. He’s gonna screw us first chance he gets.”
“Jesus, Izzy, not again.”
“It’s meshugah, Jake. It’s like carrying a snake in your pocket. Sooner or later, you gotta get bit, nu?”
“Don’t talk that Jew talk, all right? This is 1958. Ya sound like a Lithuanian rabbi. Next thing I know you’ll be growin’ a beard.”
“How I’m talkin’ ain’t the point.”
Jake shook his head in disgust. “The point is that we already talked about this. Three times. Get it through ya head: we got no choice.” Why was it that Jews never knew their place? Why couldn’t they take no for an answer? It was a curse. The curse of the big mouth. “The point is that there’s fifteen thousand cartons of cigarettes in that truck and we’re gettin’ fifteen cents a carton. That comes out to twenty-two fifty, our end. Ya wanna go back to gas stations and liquor stores? I could fix it.”
“That ain’t it, Jake. That ain’t what I’m sayin’. I just don’t wanna be a slave to some wop who can’t write his own name.”
“It ain’t slavery. We give a piece to Steppy Accacio and he gives a piece to someone else and they give to someone else. I figure there’s gotta be a big boss at the top, but I don’t got the faintest idea who it is. Maybe it goes on forever. Maybe it goes in a circle. Whichever way, if ya don’t give up that piece, ya can’t operate. Ya might as well go out and get a job.”
“C’mon, Jake, I ain’t …”
They were interrupted by a tall, middle-aged waitress in a yellow uniform. The wad of gum she was chewing made a huge lump in her right cheek. It looked like she had a toothache. “What’ll it be, folks?”
Santo Silesi appeared in the doorway behind the waitress. He nodded at Jake, then spun on his heel and disappeared. “What it’ll be,” Jake said, “is some sandwiches to go.”
“Take-out is at the counter.”
“You couldn’t get it for us?”
She walked off without bothering to answer. Jake grinned at Izzy, then stood up. “Must be an anti-Semite.”
They found Santo in the parking lot. He nodded toward a SpeediFreight trailer parked off by itself in the back of the lot. “The driver’s inside the restaurant.”
“All right, you and Izzy go back to the car. And when we get movin’, stay close. If I run into a problem with the driver, I want you right behind me.”
He watched them walk away, then turned his attention to the SpeediFreight trailer. The way the driver had parked his rig, it could be seen from anywhere in the truck stop. If this was a set-up (and there was always that possibility—you couldn’t ignore it), he, Jake, would be spotted before he got within fifty feet of the rig. And it might not be the cops, either. A company as big as SpeediFreight had to have its own security. For all Jake knew, the driver had been involved in a dozen heists.
The walk across the asphalt reminded Jake of the first time he’d walked across the yard at Leavenworth. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that everybody was watching him. Just waiting for an opportunity to put a shiv in his back. Well, he’d survived that walk and he’d survive this one, too. He was sure of it, despite the fact that he was sweating, despite the fact that it was twenty-two degrees and windy. By the time he pulled himself into the passenger’s side of the cab, he was breathing heavily, the icy air cutting into his chest like broken glass.
Jake took the .45 out of his waistband, laid it in his lap and immediately felt better. His little jaunt across the parking lot wasn’t going to lead him back to prison. It was the road to Park Avenue. Once he got his hands on the SpeediFreight dispatcher, he’d squeeze the bastard until his toes bled. SpeediFreight was one of the biggest outfits on the East Coast. They hauled everything—TV’s, hi-fi’s, clothing, furniture, appliances.
Six months of good luck. That’s all he was going to need before he put a few goons (Jewish goons, naturally) between himself and the actual heist. Hijackings didn’t really interest him, anyway. At best, they were no more than a means to an end. The end was the drug business, specifically heroin. Dope, horse, skag, doogie—no matter what they called the stuff, it came to the same thing. It came to profit margins that hadn’t been seen in the criminal world since the end of Prohibition. Best o
f all, the industry was just getting off the ground. There was still room for an ambitious ex-con named Jake Leibowitz.
Jake didn’t let himself become so lost in his plans for the future that he failed to keep an eye on the front door of the restaurant. He spotted the driver as soon as he stepped onto the asphalt. The man was tall, middle-aged and nearly bald.
Hatless despite the cold, he walked with his head down, flashing his shiny dome. He came directly to the truck, then hauled himself up and into the cab without looking at Jake.
“Ya know what this is all about, right?” Jake said.
“Yeah.”
“I want ya to make ya way over to Route Nine, then head up toward the city. Any problems?”
“Naw.” He pressed the starter button on the dash and the engine roared to life.
“What’s ya name?” Jake asked as the rig began to move.
“Dayton. Dayton McNeese.”
“You from down south, Dayton?”
“Mississippi.”
“I guess that explains it.”
“Explains it?”
“Explains why ya don’t like hats.”
Jake Leibowitz was so happy at the way things had turned out that he wasn’t even bothered by the fact that he couldn’t see the mustache he was attempting to trim.
“I’m movin’ on dowwwwwwn the road,” he sang in imitation of every colored inmate he’d run across in Leavenworth. “Movin’, movin’ movin on dowwwwwwn the road.”
But the truth, as he saw it, was that he was moving up the road. And it wasn’t a road, either, but a goddamned turnpike. They’d dropped off the SpeediFreight driver a mile from the Bayonne Bridge, then hotfooted it through Staten Island to a trucking warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons had been unloaded and counted. The count had come out exactly as advertised, fifteen thousand cartons straight from the R. J. Reynolds factory. The payoff had been a little tricky, because Jake had told Izzy and the wop he was only getting fifteen cents a carton when he was actually getting twenty. But Joe Faci had been smart enough to hand over the money in the privacy of his office.
“Three grand,” Joe Faci had said, “like I promised. And this here is the name and the phone number of the dispatcher at SpeediFreight who’s been working with us. Call him and arrange a face to face. You should be aware that he sometimes needs a little encouragement.”
Izzy’s cut had been 30% of twenty-two fifty. Silesi had settled for 20%. Which had left Jake with a very satisfying eighteen seventy-five.
“As in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five dollars and no fucking cents,” Jake said, straightening his tie.
The first thing Jake had done was stop off in Mrs. Pearlstein’s Ladies’ Garments on Norfolk Street and pick up the largest rabbits’ fur coat on the rack. Not that he was stupid enough to actually tell his mother it was rabbits’ fur when he handed it over.
“It’s raccoon, mama,” he’d said. Then he’d broken into a sweat when she tried it on. If the goddamned thing hadn’t buttoned over her fat gut, if she’d had to have her raccoon coat altered, if the equally fat woman who ran Mrs. Pearlstein’s had laughed in Mama’s face … But it hadn’t happened. The coat had fit loosely enough and neither his mama nor her old-country girlfriends could tell the difference between mink and cat.
Jake hadn’t forgotten about his own reward, either. He’d gone uptown, to Leighton’s on Broadway, and bought himself a pearl-gray, double-breasted overcoat and a matching homburg. The homburg, with its softly rolled brim, made him look older, more mature. It made him look established. Which was the whole point, really.
“Ya beggin’ days’re over, Jakie-boy,” he said as he dressed. “Time ta show the world where ya comin’ from.”
Fifteen minutes later, he was down on Pitt Street, stepping out of the Packard and walking up to a familiar door. He knocked softly and waited until it opened, until he was face to face with Al O’Neill.
“What could I do for ya, mister?” O’Neill asked.
“Ya don’t remember me?” Jake took off his hat and leaned forward. “I’m insulted.”
“Hey, mister, I see a lotta guys …” Then it hit him and he staggered back. “We’re payin’,” he said. “We’re payin’ everything. We’re payin’ on time.”
“Relax, Al, I ain’t here on business. I’m here on pleasure.”
“Yeah?” O’Neill took another step back, then his face brightened. “Yeah?”
“Everybody gotta get laid, right? If it wasn’t fa that, where would you be?”
O’Neill managed a laugh. “Can’t argue about that one. Now, whatta ya intrested in? Ya got anything special in mind?”
“Young and willin’, Al. That’s all that matters.”
Eight
January 9
STANLEY MOODROW, SITTING AT his kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand and the Daily News in the other, was more than annoyed. It wasn’t the events of the last few days that had him going. He’d become reconciled to making the rounds with Salvatore Patero. Not that he actually approved (or even that he was committed to the money), but there was nothing he could do about it. Not in the short term, at least. The cards had been dealt and now he had to play them. It was like the sky falling on Chicken Little. The smart thing was examine the pieces, then do what you had to do.
He’d learned that lesson the hard way. He’d been fifteen when his father died quickly, twenty-three when his mother died slowly. Whatever he’d meant to say to his father or been afraid to say to his mother was going to go forever unsaid. For a few minutes, at his mother’s wake, he’d thought he might die himself. Just stop where he was.
“If you can get through this, you can get through anything.” That’s what he told himself. And the truth was that compared to sitting on that folding chair by the coffin while friends and relatives murmured their condolences, his problems with Sal Patero and Pat Cohan were less than two piles of dogshit on the sidewalk. No, what bothered Stanley Moodrow as he dawdled over his breakfast was the weather.
It was cold and windy. Again. Looking out of his bedroom window as he’d dressed, Moodrow had followed the hunched backs of workingmen as they made their way to buses and subways. Checking the weather was a habit he’d picked up as a patrolman. It was funny, in a way. The newspapers wrote about cops all the time. Likewise the novelists. And while the reporters were mostly critical and the novelists full of bull, neither of them seemed to understand the physical aspects of the job.
On cold days, if you managed to keep moving, you’d stay warm from your neck to your ankles. Above and below, you froze no matter what you did. Your ears and feet would hurt for the first hour, then go numb and stay that way until you finished your tour. Which wasn’t so bad until you came back to the station house and thawed out. On really cold days, the pins and needles would have more than one cop dancing in front of his locker.
The summer wasn’t much better—you sweated all day and tended your rashes at night. By the time the dog days hit, your feet and armpits were permanently inflamed, the powder you put on in the morning was white greasy mud by noon, your balls were floating in a lake of sweat by ten o’clock. What got you through the discomfort was nothing more than dogged persistence. You learned to accept the discomfort like an ox accepting the yoke.
The telephone interrupted Moodrow’s daydreams and he left the kitchen to pick it up. He was expecting to hear Sal Patero’s voice, but found his fiancée on the line instead.
“Stanley,” she said, almost whispering, “I only have a minute, but I have to talk to you.”
“Are you at home?”
“No, I’m at Sacred Heart. I just went to confession.”
“And?” The next part wasn’t going to be any better than the weather and Moodrow knew it.
“What we did the other day, Stanley? It was beautiful, even if it was technically a sin.”
“Did you tell that to Father Grogan?”
“It was Father Ryan. And no, I didn’t. I told him that I knew I�
�d hurt Jesus and I was sorry for that. Which I am, Stanley. But the important thing is I had to promise not to do it again. You know that I had to.”
Moodrow did know it. In order to make a true confession, in order to receive forgiveness, you had to do two things. You had to be truly repentant and you had to believe that you wouldn’t go out and sin again. Moodrow had been all of fourteen when he’d realized that he was going to do certain things over and over again. No matter how many oaths he took in the confessional. He’d handled this insight by avoiding confession. Compounding the felony was what the lawyers called it.
“All right,” he muttered. “I admit it. But you’re also expected to avoid ‘the near occasions of sin.’ Does that mean we can’t see each other until the wedding?”
“You don’t have to be cruel, Stanley. You’re a Catholic, too.”
“I’m a phony Catholic, like ninety-nine percent of all the Catholics in the world.” He hesitated a moment. “Look, I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t want to attack your faith. The other day … well, if I gotta wait another six months, I’ll wait. That’s all there is to it.”
“Actually, there’s something else, Stanley. I probably shouldn’t have gone to Father Ryan. I should have gone to Father Grogan, because he’s a lot easier. Maybe I felt guilty. I don’t know, but it’s done now. Father Ryan wants me to tell my father. As part of the penance.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name, Stanley.”
As he made his way to the 7th Precinct, Moodrow was hoping against hope. He knew he was dealing with a fifty-fifty proposition at best. Maybe Kathleen wasn’t a religious fanatic, but she did believe in sin and the ritual of forgiveness. Which always included a penance. Most penances consisted of saying a rosary or lighting a candle, but apparently Father Ryan had considered Kate’s sin to be especially evil.
What Moodrow had managed to do, after much persuasion, was to make Kathleen agree to go back to Father Ryan and beg for mercy. At least that postponed the confrontation. Maybe, if he had a few days to think about it, he’d come up with a better plan. One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to take a lot of shit from Pat Cohan. A rabbi was one thing—every up-and-comer in the Department had a rabbi—but Moodrow didn’t figure he needed a master. He had no intention of playing the monster to Pat Cohan’s Doctor Frankenstein.
A Piece of the Action Page 9
