Gangster

by Lorenzo Carcaterra

  “Where are we going?” I asked them at the halfway point of the trip.

  Pudge turned around, resting one of his thick forearms across the dark brown leather upholstery. “To pay our respects to an old friend. It’s something we do whenever we can. And we thought now was a good time for you to join us.”

  I nodded, my hand gently rubbing the muscular rib cage of the sleeping pit bull next to me. “That go for Ida, too?” I asked.

  “We don’t even get in the car without Ida,” Pudge said. “If those gangs out there only knew who really runs this crew it would go a long way toward saving them a lot of blood and bullets. A twenty-two-steak rack of beef would seal the deal in less than an hour’s time.”

  “How much longer?” I asked. I was not enjoying the ride. The looming gang war circled us like an unwanted houseguest.

  “An hour,” Pudge said with a shrug. “Maybe less, if Angelo can kick the engine up past sixty.”

  “Speed kills,” Angelo said in his low voice.

  • • •

  “THIS IS IT,” PUDGE said to me, stopping in front of a small headstone in the center of a large clearing. “This is where Ida lived out her last years. Had a cabin right about where we’re standing.”

  I looked over at Angelo, watched him kneel in front of the headstone and bend down to kiss it, one hand gently stroking its side. The markings across the front bore only the words “Ida the Goose” and a chiseled rose. Pudge walked over and stood behind him, Ida following in his steps, her nose to the ground. Pudge reached into a side pocket of his jacket, pulled out a pint of Four Roses and rested it alongside the headstone. I stood off to the right, my hands in my pockets, respectful of their private moment with the woman who had raised them. The area around the grave had been allowed to grow wild in the years since Angelo and Pudge had burned the cabin to the ground, with Ida’s body still inside.

  We wound up sitting around Ida’s headstone eating chicken cutlet sandwiches on fresh Italian bread. I shared one bottle of red wine and one of water with Pudge, while Angelo washed his sandwich down with a quart of milk. Ida the pit bull was content to munch out of a bowl filled with grilled beef and sliced provolone cheese. We didn’t do much talking that afternoon. I understood that they had both chosen to say their good-byes to Ida the Goose before what could easily be their final battle.

  “Ida fought in the first gang war of this century,” Pudge said with a hint of pride. “It was for control of the Bowery. It went on for about two, three years. In those days, a war could last a lifetime.”

  “She made her reputation during that war,” Angelo said, staring at the headstone. “She walked into a bar on Little West Twelfth Street, which was enemy turf to her, and went right up to the gang boss’s table. Told him he had two choices. One was to back down, the other was to die. He looked up from his poker hand and laughed right in her face. She didn’t even blink. Pulled a gun and put three slugs in him, killed him right where he sat. Turned around and walked out as easy as she had walked in.”

  “She always said it was a damn shame he had to die that day,” Pudge said. “She had caught a look at his poker hand. He was sitting there holding three queens and a pair of sevens. I guess when you don’t have the luck, you don’t have a rat’s chance.”

  “It’s really pretty here,” I said, looking around at the massive trees and the hills and mountains that circled them. “Quiet, too. Would you ever think of moving up here, like she did?”

  “This is our cemetery, Gabe,” Angelo said. “Ida’s buried here. So’s Angus, over by that big oak tree facing the mountains. All the dogs we’ve ever had are scattered around here, too. And when the time comes, me and Pudge will be put here. That’s the part that you’ll take care of, making sure we’re buried where we want to be.”

  “I know it’s not something you want to think about, little man,” Pudge said, leaning closer and resting a hand on my shoulder. “But it’s something we want to make sure gets done. We need to be with our own kind.”

  “That goes for the dog, too,” Angelo said. “All her relatives are here, she’ll feel right at home.”

  I looked out across the clearing and saw Ida running wild in the high grass, switching speeds, resting on all fours when tired, free from the confines of the city streets. “How about me?” I asked, my eyes holding on the hard-charging dog.

  “There’s a place for you.” Angelo stood and walked past me, heading down the slope toward the parked Cadillac. “If you want it.”

  “You got a full life to live and plenty of other decisions that’ll come along with it,” Pudge said. “But if the road you take leads you back here, you’d be more than welcome.”

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  And at the time, I meant it.

  • • •

  “THOSE WERE DANGEROUS days,” I said. I was sitting on the edge of Angelo’s bed, my hands resting on my legs, looking across the room at Mary. “I was missing a lot of school, not because they needed me to do anything, but because I felt I should be around in case they did.”

  “I wish you would have had a normal high school life,” Mary said, leaning back in the chair and crossing her legs. “A young man should be worried about pimples and dates, not a gang war planned out in his living room.”

  “The double life never bothered me,” I said. “So I skipped a few dances and didn’t get to go out for the football team. I don’t think I missed all that much. They both wanted me to lead as normal a life as I could, but I found it all so boring when I wasn’t with them.”

  “Were your friends afraid of them?” Mary stood and walked past me and toward the window.

  “A few were. They didn’t say so in words, but you could tell from the way they acted. Then there were the ones who wanted to be my friends just so they could meet Angelo or Pudge. Wanna-bes, I guess. I pretty much steered clear of them.”

  “What about girlfriends?” Mary turned to look at me over her shoulder, her eyes arched. “Were there any?”

  “I was more like Angelo than Pudge in that department,” I said with a shy shrug. “There were girls I liked and wanted to ask out, but I never did. Maybe it was because of the one time I got burned and didn’t want it to happen again. Or maybe I just wasn’t any good at it.”

  “Did you ever talk to either one of them about it?” Mary said. “Ask for some advice?”

  I leaned over and poured myself a cup of water. “There were a lot of things we never talked about. Angelo’s family, my life before I met them, other people in their lives. We only discussed what they felt was important for me to know. The rest of it was kept separate. It was as if all that mattered was the three of us being together.”

  “Did either one of them ever mention me?” Mary asked. She was standing above me now.

  I shook my head. “No, they never did. But you must have been around. You know too much about this gang war, things I had never even heard before, not to have been.”

  “I was around.” There was a new hardness in her voice. “I was there for all of it.”

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “Making sure you were safe,” Mary said.

  • • •

  THE DARK BLUE Mercedes-Benz made a sharp turn around the corner of 111th Street and First Avenue, its four doors swinging open as soon as the car came to a hard stop in front of a crowded pizzeria. Three young black men in long rider coats stepped out, each with a gun in his hand, and stood next to the open doors, waiting for the final passenger to emerge. Little Ricky Carson, short and muscular, eased himself out of the backseat, lowered the collar of his long rider, shot his cuffs and, his head up, walking with a slight limp, stepped through the small entrance. He went in alone, his three men holding their guns at their sides, their backs against the pizzeria glass, staring at the passing faces on the street. He waited for the two burly men blocking his way to step aside, offering them nothing more menacing than a smile.

  “Let him in,” said the owner, who stood next to
a stainless-steel oven.

  Little Ricky Carson nodded as the burly men reluctantly cleared a path and walked up to the man by the oven. The pizza chef was tall and overweight, but carried the extra girth well, dressed in catalog slacks and a black button-down shirt. His head was shaved bald and glowed off the overhead lights. Up close he smelled of imported cologne. His name was John Rumanelli and on the streets outside his pizzeria, he was a man to be feared. He was a ranking member of Angelo and Pudge’s crew and controlled the East Harlem neighborhood where he was born forty-two years before and where he still made his home. He never carried a gun and, other than a short juvenile turn when he was seventeen, had a clean yellow sheet.

  Rumanelli watched Carson walk up to him and stand alongside the counter. “You come a long way for pizza,” Rumanelli said. “The place in your end of town burn down?”

  “We’re hip to a lot of things, but, truth is, black people know close to nothing about making pizza,” Carson said, locking eyes with Rumanelli. “We think pepperoni plays first base for the Yankees.”

  “It all has a way of evening out,” Rumanelli said, his body language tense and on alert. “I don’t have any dancing trophies on my dining-room shelves, if you know what I mean.”

  Rumanelli nodded to a thin, balding man on the other side of the counter, who grabbed a plain slice from a tray next to a row of stacked boxes and tossed it into the top tier of the triple-deck oven. “Have one ready for you in less than a minute,” he said to Carson. “You want a drink to wash it down with?”

  “Not right now,” Carson said, keeping his eyes on Rumanelli.

  “What about the boys on your crew?” Rumanelli looked past Carson to the three gunmen in front of his shop. “They might want to eat something before they start putting a finger to those triggers.”

  Carson ignored the question, lifted his hands as the bald man slid a hot slice of pizza on a paper plate across the countertop. “I hear you’re pulling down a little over ten large a week out of here,” he said, “and none of it comes from selling anything with sauce on it.”

  “You and my accountant on a first-name basis now?” Rumanelli asked.

  “How much of that do you kick back to Vestieri?” Carson asked. He folded the slice of pie and took a large bite, small puffs of steam coming out of his mouth like cigar smoke.

  “Enjoy your slice.” Rumanelli turned away from Carson. “Have as many as you want. It’s my treat. Then, when you’re done, take your three paisans, get in your Benz and drive back to the minor leagues. Never show your face here again. If you do, your next slice of pizza will be delivered to the morgue.”

  Little Ricky Carson flashed a ghetto smile and let the slice of pizza fall from his hands. He pulled a revolver from the side pocket of his long rider leather coat and aimed it at Rumanelli’s back. “You might be right,” Carson said. “But it won’t be any pie coming out of this shit hole.”

  Rumanelli turned his head back toward Carson and caught the first bullet in his right shoulder. The next two caught him in the chest and sent him sprawling on his back, two chairs and a table knocked aside as he fell. The three gunmen were now standing in the pizzeria doorway, each one aiming a gun at the crowd standing around Carson. Little Ricky stood above the fallen Rumanelli and barely bothering to glance down at him, pumped a final bullet into his chest. Carson then lifted his smoking gun and aimed it at the bald man standing frozen behind the counter. “You know Bones Vestieri well enough to talk to him?” Carson asked.

  The bald man nodded. “I can talk to him.”

  “When you see him again, tell him I kicked off to get the game started,” Carson said. “It’s his ball now.”

  Little Ricky Carson looked around at the faces staring at him and dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the countertop. “See to it that anybody wants a slice gets one before they leave,” he said. “On me.”

  He lowered his head, gun resting at his side, and walked out of the pizzeria, his three gunmen moving backwards and following him out. They got into their car, the engine running in idle, slammed the open doors shut, put it in gear and drove away. The rear tires left smoke and rubber in their wake. Inside the car, sitting deep in the thick leather of his new Mercedes, Little Ricky Carson shook his head and laughed, a young gangster filled with a sense of power. “That son of a bitch deserved to die just for having the balls to call that shit he served pizza,” he said. “The people in there, if they think about it for a while, they’ll realize I did them a big favor. Saved them all from an ulcer.”

  The laughter of the four was drowned out by the music from a Sly and the Family Stone eight-track blasting out of the four speakers as the car disappeared into the heavy traffic heading onto the Willis Avenue Bridge.

  • • •

  I SAT IN an Italian restaurant on West Fifty-fourth Street, just a few blocks north of the hospital, waiting for Mary. The long nights by Angelo’s bedside were starting to take their toll. I wasn’t spending as many hours at my advertising firm as I should have been, leaving the bulk of the work in the hands of the young staff I had assembled. My family life was suffering as well. I would rush through a meal with my wife and kids, always with an eye on the dining-room clock, afraid that I wouldn’t be there for Angelo’s final moment. After so many long years, I was allowing him to once again consume my days and nights.

  I initially feared that his illness, combined with our years of separation, had robbed me of the opportunity to show him what I had made of my life. I wanted to tell him of my business and how successful it had become. I had started my advertising agency with nothing but a phone, a legal pad and a cheap, small rented office on the Upper West Side. I had worked it hard, putting in countless hours and a determined effort, until it had grown to a multimillion-dollar business that was now spread across two floors on Madison Avenue with a partner office in Los Angeles. I also needed him to know that I was a good husband in love with a woman who was both my wife and my best friend. A woman I needed to talk to every day and to see every night. I wanted him to know what an even better father I had been to my two children, who would soon be old enough to embark on lives of their own. I wished he had been there when we had laughed and played in the park or when they celebrated their birthdays, faces smeared with cake, or when they had made it through yet another middle-of-the-night emergency room run. But then, reality would grab hold of the moment, and I felt that maybe he didn’t need to see any of it and that he didn’t need to hear any words from me. He already knew it all.

  I would expect nothing less from Angelo Vestieri.

  I had taken the lessons Angelo and Pudge taught me and made use of them in the civilian world that now claimed me. I admit there were a number of occasions when I desperately wished to be back in the life, if only for one brief moment. There I could easily reach out and squash an enemy, or get my revenge against a business betrayal, or eliminate a friend who had broken a trust. But those were only moments of fantasy, played out in the silent corners of my mind, for no one but me to see and hear. Instead, I took the cunning and guile of the mob life and utilized it to my advantage, playing the political games and maneuvers of the modern business world with a skill I would not otherwise possess. I would often pause and hear Angelo and Pudge’s voices whisper to me, their words of purpose pointing me toward yet another in a string of victories. In that sense, I would never be free of them. They were too much a part of my life. And I held on to them as tightly as I could.

  I sat at a center table in the warmth and comfort of the restaurant, nursing a cold glass of mineral water, waiting for Mary. I was forty-two years old and had turned my back on a place that had embraced me from my earliest years and chose instead to live in one that I had entered as an outsider. In all my time spent in Angelo and Pudge’s company, there was never a moment when I didn’t know where I stood in their eyes. Their emotions and motives were clear and out in the open, the days free from hidden agendas and deceits. With the exception of my family, I knew I could never
allow myself to feel that way with anyone else. I would never find the civilian world to be as trusting as the criminal one. I had been schooled and loved in the company of killers, but had chosen to make my way inside a more treacherous arena. But I believed that what I had achieved had been silently guided by Angelo and Pudge’s strong and willful hands. They had been the ones to lead the way and clear my path.

  17

  * * *

  Fall, 1970

  ANGELO WAITED THREE months before he made his first move in the war.

  In that span of time, his crew took heavy hits, attacked from all sides by the combined forces of Little Ricky Carson, Pablito Munestro and, to a lesser extent, Richie Scarafino and the Red Barons. The initial meetings mutually agreed upon by all parties had resolved nothing and only further heightened the tensions that existed between the crews.

  The three attacking gangs were wreaking havoc on Angelo and Pudge’s profit margins. Weekly earnings were down by half and the younger members of the gang were starting to panic, listening with eager ears to outside overtures. While his rivals slammed his business with a gleeful and fearless abandon, Angelo went about his daily routine, never straying far from the bar and his long afternoon walks with both me and Ida trailing close behind, defiantly daring anyone to attack in the open.