by Zev Chafets
“Let’s not rush it, chief,” said Gordon. “First, I want to get all the details set with Sesti. Then we can start conquering the world, OK?”
“I’ve been thinking about Sesti,” Flanagan said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to meet with him from now on. I think I should do that.”
“Why? Don’t give me that Tom Hagan routine, John. Seriously. This isn’t a game anymore.”
“Look, you said yourself that these people are living in the Middle Ages. Spadafore’s supposed to be the Duke of Earl and Sesti’s his spear carrier. OK, we should establish some kind of parity. I’ll deal with Sesti, you deal with the Don—otherwise, you lose status in the old bastard’s eyes.”
“You could be right,” Gordon conceded. “I don’t think Sesti will be anxious to deal with me after last night. All right, set it up with him. But I want to approve the final details.”
“What’s the matter, Don Velvel, don’t you trust me?” Flanagan grinned, but there was a questioning look in his eyes.
“Listen, John, I think we’ve got to get something straight,” said Gordon. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t be bringing you into this. But we’re both getting into something that’s damn serious. Maybe these guys aren’t as dangerous as I thought, but they’re not Boy Scouts, either, and it’s their ball we’re playing with. You and I have to be on the same wavelength and cover each other’s ass, especially in the beginning when we don’t know the rules of the game.” Flanagan nodded and sipped his whiskey, Adam’s apple bobbing and blue eyes fastened on Gordon.
“There’s something else, too,” Gordon continued. “Ever since we’ve known each other, you’ve sort of set the tone. Ever since Saigon. I never minded and I still don’t. But the thing is, John, this is my deal. Max was my uncle, and Spadafore came to me, not you. If it was the other way around, I’d either be in or out, on your terms. But it’s not the other way around, and you’re going to have to do this my way if you want to do it at all. And I want to know, going in, if you have a problem with that.”
Flanagan looked up from his drink. “Let me ask you a question—what do you want to get out of this?”
“Are you kidding?” said Gordon. “We’re talking about millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions.”
“I don’t buy it, kid. You don’t give a shit about money, you never have. Are you trying to prove a point for your old man or what?”
“That might have something to do with it, although I hate to admit it,” said Gordon. “But I don’t think it’s the main reason. I’m sick of being a hack, for one thing. I once tried to make a list of the countries I’ve been in and I got stuck about number fifty-five. It’s like trying to count up all the girls you’ve laid—once you’ve done it, so what? I know more than any living American about the politics of Kuala Lumpur. I had brunch with Pol Pot. I once saw Maggie Thatcher’s underpants—”
“No shit?” said Flanagan. “You never told me that. Where?”
“It was at a state dinner in London. I bent over to pick up my napkin and I got a beaver shot. The point is, so what? I’m ready for a change.”
“In other words, you’re doing this for the challenge,” said Flanagan.
“I wouldn’t put it exactly that way, but OK, for the challenge. The thing is, there’s not going to be any challenge if we wind up dead.”
“Will you relax?” said Flanagan in an exasperated voice. “You think I’m an idiot?”
“No, John. But I know you—everything’s a game. I think you don’t really understand what kind of trouble we could get into if we’re careless.”
“And I think you’re forgetting something. I may screw around, but I’m forty-seven years old, and nobody’s picked my pocket yet. While you were off sniffing Maggie Thatcher’s undies I was here in New York, drinking with humps from the Truckers Union who put cherries in their dry martinis and Mafia goombahs whose idea of a free press is stealing newspapers. You think I didn’t learn something? I learned what you found out last night at Spadafore’s—these guys are retards, dumb fucks—”
“Sesti’s no dumb fuck,” Gordon said.
“Bullshit. You just got done telling me how he sat there while a hundred-year-old pizza-head who thinks he’s Niccolo Machiavelli read him the riot act. What do you call that?”
“What’s your point, John?”
“My point is, I don’t underestimate these guys. But I don’t overestimate them, either. The truth is, both of us are burned out with the newspaper business. It’s for young guys with powerful legs who still don’t know that puppies shit on yesterday’s headlines. But I don’t want to leave the paper if we’re going to spend the whole time running scared. In that case, find yourself another Irish consigliere.”
“Ah, John, come on, you know I wouldn’t do this without you. I just want you to calm down a little, that’s all.”
“Hey, I’m calm, OK? You want me to fix a meeting with Sesti?”
“Yeah, go ahead,” said Gordon. “But do me a favor.”
“Sure, boychik, whatever you want.”
“Be serious for once in your life,” Gordon said. “And be careful.”
Flanagan left Gallagher’s with a nice buzz and walked down Fifth Avenue. The street was filled with yuppie girls in blue business suits and running shoes on their way home from the office. They reminded him of the Chinese women he had seen in Beijing, dressed in drab, clucky gray uniforms. Every revolution, he thought, had its sartorial price.
Flanagan cared little about women, but he had a high regard for proper attire. For years he had been after Gordon about his jeans and corduroy-jacket ensembles. As a boy, he had been subjected to an endless stream of folk wisdom from his mother, a banal woman he had never cared for. The one wise thing she had said, and said repeatedly, was that clothes make the man. Flanagan knew that the first thing that any leader does is to cast about for some accessory that sets him above the crowd—Churchill’s bowler, Ike’s jacket, De Gaulle’s campaign cap, LBJ’s Stetson. You dress the part, he thought to himself, you become the part.
Flanagan stopped in front of Morris the Hatter’s and looked in the display window. He saw a gray Borsalino with a black band and tiny red feather. He pictured himself sitting down with Sesti with that lid on, and maybe a pair of shades. It would give him a great pyschological edge—Sesti wouldn’t know if he was serious or mocking him. He entered the shop and, although he had half a dozen credit cards in his wallet, bought the hat with cash. “Don’t bother wrapping it,” he told the salesman, “I’ll wear it out.” On the street he peered at his reflection in the picture window. “Perfecto, consigliere,” he congratulated himself, and started down Fifth Avenue again at a brisk pace.
As he walked, Flanagan considered his next move. He still couldn’t believe that Gordon was going along with this. He liked Gordon; he was a willing drinker, a good talker with a sense of humor, and he had a basically lazy, cynical outlook on life—all qualities that Flanagan admired. But there was something soft about him. He remembered Gordon’s willingness to hand over his cable scoop. At the time the young reporter had thought he was acting out of loyalty, but Flanagan had recognized it as a reluctance to rock the boat, to get too far ahead of the pack.
It wasn’t that Gordon was a coward; if anything, Flanagan considered his battlefield reporting to be foolhardy. But he lacked the fire that comes from real engagement. Like a lot of reporters, Gordon was basically an observer, not a participant. Whereas he, Flanagan, was born to be a player. For Gordon, journalism had been a step down—with a slight push he could have been a U.S. senator. Flanagan, with a small shove, might well have wound up setting type like his old man. For him, the paper had been a way of getting into the big game.
For a while it worked, but recently—not so recently, in fact, but for the past ten years or more—he had been increasingly conscious of the limitations of being a hack. He spent his time around the movers and shakers of the city, and the social convention was that he was their
equal, but Flanagan knew better. They made decisions, cut deals, caused things to happen. He wound up in front of his computer writing about them.
Flanagan was perceptive enough to realize that his problems were mostly his own fault. He had no wife, no children, no hobbies and no causes. He belonged to no church, gave to no charities, visited no museums, never traveled outside the city. His life was the paper and the bars. Once, he had found a home in both places, but he sensed that the string was running out.
And then Max Grossman kicked, and he suddenly saw daylight. Finally he was being offered a place at the table and some chips to work with, courtesy of his pal Gordon. He understood Gordon’s worries, even sympathized with them, but he didn’t share them. Flanagan had no doubt that he was the equal of Spadafore and Sesti and the rest of the greaseballs; but even if it turned out to be a miscalculation, it didn’t matter all that fucking much. Everybody dies of something, he thought. At the very bottom of his soul he knew that the only precious treasure he had was his sense of fun—it was the one thing that kept him from standing on the corner with a can of Drano, cursing passing pedestrians. As long as he could indulge himself, he was a man with nothing else to lose.
Flanagan cut across Twenty-third Street to his building, cleaned out the mailbox and opened the door to his apartment. The dingy one-room flat hadn’t been cleaned in weeks, and it smelled like dirty feet. He tossed his raincoat on the gray, lumpy couch but left the Borsalino in place, sat down at his cluttered desk and looked for Sesti’s number on the Rolodex. One night, high on Irish whiskey and bile, he had written a description alongside each letter—A for asshole, B for butt-fucker, C for cocksucker, D for dickhead and so on. He found the consigliere under S for scumbag, sat down and dialed the number.
“Summers, Bravenfield and Sesti,” said a woman’s voice.
“Carlo Sesti, please,” he said.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Yeah, John Flanagan. He’ll know who I am.”
“Just a moment, please,” said the voice, and a moment later it was replaced by a clipped British accent. “Mr. Flanagan, this is Carlo Sesti,” it said.
“Hello, consigliere,” said Flanagan. “You and I need to sit down and talk.”
CHAPTER 9
Jupiter Evans saw the woman as soon as she walked out of her apartment house. She was standing across the street, on the southwest corner of Madison and Sixty-fifth. From that distance she looked almost like Jupiter’s twin sister: five-six or so, thin, long black curly hair. She even had Evans’s posture, a square-shouldered firmness that Jupiter had acquired by dint of her father’s daily hectoring.
This was the third day that the woman was out there, but Evans noted her presence without interest or concern. She had been a star long enough to be used to being dogged by fans and to know how to protect herself. Her approach was simply to ignore them. She signed no autographs, refused to pose for pictures and never encouraged strangers in any way. Occasionally someone cursed her for being a stuck-up bitch, but over the years she had acquired a reputation for aloofness that was now a part of her image, and most people seemed to accept it. Sometimes after a show she would emerge from her dressing room and walk past a knot of people who followed her with their eyes but said nothing. Among the fans it was understood that respectful distance was the appropriate response to Jupiter Evans, just as screaming had been the correct reaction to the Beatles. “Jupiter likes her privacy,” they would tell one another as if it were an intimate secret entrusted only to them, and by honoring it they awarded themselves an imaginary place in her life.
Jupiter had heard other stars discuss fans. Some swapped “can you top this” horror stories of intrusive admirers that she recognized as bragging. Others wondered aloud what caused the fans to stand for hours waiting for a glimpse of celebrity. But Jupiter didn’t brag and she didn’t wonder. She cared nothing at all about the lives of her fans and, for that matter, almost nothing about her fellow stars. She lived within herself, thought about herself, and concentrated her energies on taking care of herself.
Often her detachment was mistaken for arrogance, or for humility, but Jupiter knew it was neither. All her life people had misunderstood her. As a girl in New Haven, her demanding, oppressive father had insisted that she become an intellectual, assigning her reading in the classics and the social sciences and then grilling her at the dinner table each night. Professor Arnold Evans had a sharp tongue and he used it to lash her, demanding perfect evening recitations and mocking any girlish lapses. “Come now, Jupiter,” he would say if she confused Diogenes with Demosthenes or forgot the year of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. “You’ll have to do better. Beautiful girls have the luxury of stupidity but you are not, alas, a beautiful girl.” To this day, the memory of those mealtime flagellations nauseated her. When her father died six years ago, she did not attend the funeral.
As a teenager she had presence, even a sort of charisma, which embarrassed her and which she tried unsuccessfully to hide behind a facade of ordinariness, as another girl might try to hide large breasts under a baggy sweater. But despite her best efforts to fit in, she was never accepted by her classmates. Her brown eyes burned too fiercely and saw too clearly for her to be one of the girls. They gossiped about her, invented stories about her sex life and kept their distance. She retaliated by stealing their boyfriends. Jupiter accepted her father’s evaluation of herself as an ugly duckling, but she was perceptive enough to know that she was attractive to boys. She never thought much about the fact that they were not especially attractive to her.
Jupiter spent the summer before her senior year in high school as a counselor-in-training at a camp in Maine. She knew no one there, and for the first few days she was even more reserved and aloof than usual. One night after dinner, she went down to the lake to smoke a cigarette. A girl named Claudette Lawton followed her. She walked up to Jupiter, took her by the shoulders, gazed into her eyes and in a gentle voice said, “I know about you. I know who you are. It’s all right.” The words gave Jupiter a burning feeling in her stomach. Claudette stroked her cheek and walked away.
The next night they met again at the lake. This time Claudette kissed her on the mouth and stroked her body, pulled up her T-shirt and sucked her aroused nipples with a gentle hunger. Jupiter felt overwhelmed by lust and intimacy. She lay on her back and arched herself as Claudette licked and kissed her between the legs until she heard a roaring in her ears and experienced the first orgasm of her life. Then they lay close together in the grass and Claudette kissed her neck. “I know about you,” she said. “I love you.”
In the morning Jupiter awoke with a start. I’m a lesbian, she thought, and began to cry. She had been sentenced to life imprisonment as a pervert. She would never have a normal life, children, a family of her own. She dreaded what would happen if her father found out; she wouldn’t be able to bear the torture of his ridicule. Maybe he already knew. Claudette had seen it, why not others? Perhaps everyone already knew she was sick.
Jupiter climbed out of her bunk in the cabin and put on her bathing suit. It was barely dawn, and the entire camp was still asleep. She walked down to the lake, waded into the water and began to swim. She intended to swim until she drowned.
It took her two hours to cross the lake, and when she crawled out on the other shore, exhausted, she took it as a sign. She had conquered the lake and she would conquer her perversion. Claudette, she decided, was an aberration. She would escape and cleanse herself. That afternoon, while the kids were in an Indian lore workshop, she walked out of camp, hitched a ride to town and caught a Greyhound heading south.
Like thousands of other runaway girls of her generation, Jupiter disembarked at the New York Port Authority terminal. But unlike most of those girls, Jupiter Evans was not out of control. On the lake she had learned that her strongest impulse was self-preservation, and she had no intention of wandering the streets aimlessly, screwing for drugs. She was too strong for that, too proud and too scared.
Instead she borrowed five hundred dollars from her aunt Barbara, her mother’s sister, who lived in a large duplex apartment on Third Avenue. She checked into the Taft Hotel, near Times Square, and wrote her father that she was pregnant and had no desire to come back to New Haven. She asked him to send her five thousand dollars for an abortion and to pay her living expenses in New York during her last year in high school. Her father sent the money along with a curt note saying that she was welcome to come home at any time, but that he had no intention of going all the way down to Manhattan to drag her back.
Jupiter rented an apartment on the Upper West Side and charmed her way into the High School for the Performing Arts. There she met girls who openly liked other girls, and discovered that she had a gift for acting. Her drama teacher, an elderly woman with a German accent and an armload of gold-plated bracelets, took her to the Russian Tea Room and introduced her to a feminist playwright named Tamara Rothenberg, who gave her a part in a topical cabaret in the Village. She spent her eighteenth birthday onstage, wearing a bikini made from the flag and telling an appreciative audience that President Nixon was the biggest dick in America. After the show, Tamara gave her a gram of cocaine as a present and took her to bed.
Jupiter Evans’s talent was so obvious, and her presence so dominating, that she soon became the envy of her generation of aspiring actresses. She was never forced to work as a waitress in trendy bistros or to make discouraging rounds of casting offices. Producers and directors came to her with offers—leads in small theater productions, supporting roles in serious-minded films, even a part in a socially conscious television soap opera. By the time she was twenty-one, Jupiter Evans was a well-known name.
Two years later, she was offered the starring role in Sisterhood, a play about a lesbian love affair. At the time she was in therapy three days a week. Her analyst, Dr. Fried, strongly encouraged her to take the role. “It will help you work through your sexual identity on your own terms,” he told her.
