Old Flame

by Ira Berkowitz

“Some. But most of it came from the inventory the dollar stores couldn’t sell. The shit is warehoused and every month the distributor has to pay the storage fees. Money’s going out and nothing’s coming in. So, when I show up and make an offer, these guys are wetting themselves.”

  “So you buy it from them?”

  “On consignment. This way we don’t have to warehouse anything.”

  “And the distributor goes for it?”

  “Like a fat man at an Atlantic City buffet. But here’s the hook. At the site we put up, everything you buy is free.”

  “Free?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “And you make money from this?”

  “Truckloads.”

  Danny had my attention.

  “You can’t imagine the shit people buy on the Web. Candles, stuffed animals that are supposed to be cuddly and cute but look like mongooses, gadgets that no one in his right mind would buy anywhere else. It’s unfuckingbelievable!”

  “Let’s get back to the making money part.”

  “Sure. It’s all about slippage.”

  My head was starting to swim.

  “Slippage?”

  “Absolutely. Here’s how it works. You buy something for a buck and it comes with a fifty-cent rebate, which is the reason you bought it in the first place. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. To get the rebate you have to fill out a certificate and send in a proof of purchase. You put your name, address, and UPC code, and send it with the proof of purchase back to the manufacturer’s redemption center.”

  “OK.”

  “Now, how often do you fill out the fucker and send it back?”

  “Never.”

  “Bingo! You’re no different from anyone else. Depending on the price you paid and the value of the rebate, for everyone who sends the certificate in with the proofs of purchase, two, three, or even four people don’t. Some get hit by a bus. Some don’t fill the receipt out properly. Some lose the receipt, or the proofs. Some just forget about it. And if you get a couple a hundred thousand people visiting your website, and maybe ten percent buy stuff and you hold their money for a couple of months until you send it to them, it adds up pretty quick.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “That’s normally how it’s done. But we added a new wrinkle.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  He reached for the coffee, took a sip, and made a face. “This really is shit,” he said.

  “What did I tell you?”

  Behind the bar, Nick glowered.

  “Like I was saying, instead of charging you a buck for, let’s say, a pen, we charged ten dollars.”

  “Seems pretty steep.”

  “Not when we promise to send you the ten bucks back in three months. Now you got your pen and your money back.”

  It began to make sense.

  “Slippage,” I said.

  “Nail on the head!”

  “It’s brilliant,” I said. “But it smells like a Ponzi scheme. You’re paying three-month-old debt with new money coming in.”

  “Our lawyers said it was legit because we were solvent. We could have paid them anytime.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Everything was going fine when the goods cost a couple of bucks at retail. But then I overreached a bit.”

  “You got greedy.”

  “You might say. I got the company into high-price goods — TVs, sound systems— that I was getting from China, where they manufacture the stuff for pennies. When your minimum wage is a couple of bowls of rice a month, your margins kind of expand. At the end of the day, I’m taking a monster markup for product that I paid shit for. The problem was, instead of a buck or two a rebate, we had to pay out a couple of grand at a shot.”

  “Which you didn’t have.”

  “Oh no, we had it. But our burn rate would have eaten us up in three months. Tops.”

  “So you do what every other business does. Go Chapter Eleven.”

  “We did, but it wasn’t that simple,” Danny said. “Turns out there was a group of people who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on the high-priced spread, waited until they got their money back, and turn around and sell the merch into the Third World.”

  “And this group is?”

  Danny fiddled with a sugar packet.

  “The Israeli mob.”

  “And how did they get involved? Wait, don’t tell me. You dreamed up this little scheme and took it to them for a piece of the action.”

  “Pretty much. These guys don’t fuck around, Steeg. They are truly the scariest people I’ve ever met. Make the Colombians look like fucking Good Samaritans. The guy who runs the operation — Zev Barak — gives me night sweats.”

  It was no wonder. The Israeli mafia had been operating in the U.S. for years. They were into drugs, arms dealing, bootleg gasoline, and anything else that could turn a buck. Even the Russians and the Italians steered clear of them.

  “And what do you want from me, Danny?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “You want my opinion?”

  “Sure.”

  “Go to the feds, agree to testify, and get your ass into witness protection.”

  “I tried that. But they won’t have me. I got nothing tangible on Barak. At least nothing they want. Is there anything you can do?”

  “How about I make a novena for you?”

  CHAPTER

  8

  After Danny left, I called the Minority Opportunities Bureau, the outfit Ferris worked for, and asked for the director. The operator connected me to Lou Torricelli. He wasn’t in. I left a voice-mail message. Said I wanted to see him on a matter of importance. I gave him my cell number. I ran some errands and called him again. Another voice-mail message. The man had a thing about returning calls. Called him a few more times. Same result. I had the feeling Torricelli was ducking me.

  I needed an in. I went looking for my brother.

  I finally caught up with him at Nolan’s Gym.

  Nolan’s, on Ninth and Forty-first, sat atop a Hasidic-owned discount electronics store. An interesting, if incongruous, juxtaposition of commercial enterprises.

  The wooden floors were bowed and scraped of finish. Yellowed fight posters dating back to the 1940s hung on the peeling walls. A ring with very tight ropes sat in the center of the floor. Two munchkins in headgear, looking remarkably like Mayan temple pictographs, pounded the shit out of each other with great verve.

  Nolan’s counted several Golden Gloves champions, including me, among its alumni. On my big night at the Garden, I won in a walkover when my opponent, a tall, beefy black guy with diamonds in his teeth and the disposition of a reef shark, failed to appear. I eventually learned that just before the bout he was arrested and charged with a series of drive-by shootings.

  Lucky me.

  Nolan’s other distinction was that there were no showers, making it arguably the most odoriferous spot in Hell’s Kitchen. The sour aroma of fifty years of accumulated sweat hung in the air like swamp gas.

  Dave was working the speed bag with metronomic precision. Small, pawing, rhythmic strokes performed with an economy of motion. His gray T-shirt was blotched with sweat. He had been at it for a while and was breathing hard.

  “I heard you had a problem the other night,” he said.

  “The other three guys had the problem. I saw it as an opportunity.”

  That brought a resigned shake of his head.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got two things I need your advice on,” I said.

  “I don’t see you anymore . . . Franny and the kids miss you . . . and you want my help,” he said as the tiny bag thrummed under his fists.

  I reached over and stopped the bag in mid-thrum.

  “Very impressive for a man your age,” I said. “But you’ve got to concentrate here.”

  He flashed a lopsided grin and motioned to one of his minions —a b
ullet-headed guy with a thick body and dull, tiny eyes — to fetch a towel. The towel came. Dave mopped his face and draped it around his neck.

  “OK,” he said, reaching for a bottle of water. “What’s so important?”

  I told him about Ginny and Tony Ferris.

  “So, Ferris is black. That’s got to be a thorn in Ollie Doyle’s dick. And I’m sure the lovely Jeanmarie isn’t too thrilled about it either.”

  “That would be my guess,” I agreed.

  “Both of them are open sores.”

  “Here’s the problem, Dave. Ferris worked for the Minority Opportunities Bureau, a city agency.”

  Dave gave his thick gray hair a vigorous rub with the towel. “The M-O-B. Interesting acronym,” he said. “Could be a clue.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “So, all of Ginny’s husbands worked for the city. Maybe she’s a pension-digger.” He smiled at his little joke.

  “Anyway, I called Ferris’s boss, a guy named Torricelli, and he’s never around. I get the feeling I’m being avoided.”

  “You do have that way about you.”

  “It runs in the family. I could perch in his office until he’s willing to see me, but it’ll just piss him off even more.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “Why don’t you go see Terry? He could set it up.”

  The mention of Terry Sloan’s name made me wince. Sloan was Dave’s buddy, and our local city councilman. That exalted position gave him more connections than a fuse box. The last time I was involved with Sloan was when he tried to make a quick buck from the 9/11 disaster.

  “I would, but I’d need to be hosed off afterward,” I said.

  In the ring, one of the Mayans connected with a roundhouse right, knocking the mouthpiece of his opponent across the canvas and sending him into the ropes. A pink mist of blood sprayed from his mouth.

  Dave pulled the towel from his neck, neatly folded it, and laid it on the back of a folding chair.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to dance with the devil,” he said.

  “Sometimes,” I agreed.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Getting involved with Ginny and a bunch of shit that you’re not physically up to, and that’s not your business.”

  “I’ve thought about that a lot lately.”

  “Come up with anything?”

  “I think so. At first, I thought it would be great to be back on the hunt, doing something that I used to be pretty good at. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was bullshitting myself.”

  “There’s another reason.”

  “Yep. Once, a long time ago, she loved me. It’s got to count for something.”

  Dave nodded.

  “What’s your other problem?” he said.

  I told him about Danny Reno’s predicament.

  “I heard about Barak. The guy’s got razor wire in his head. What did you tell Reno?” he asked.

  “I’d make a novena for him.”

  “Good advice.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  Like Hell’s Kitchen, the Hudson Democratic Club is an anachronism. With roots firmly planted in Tammany Hall, the club had deftly camouflaged itself in the pretty green foliage of Reform. But nothing had changed. There was still a Boss, and it was Terry Sloan. Terry had a piece of every deal in the Kitchen. Mayors came and went, but Terry hummed along, merrily plying his trade in the political bazaar, and fattening his bank account. Higher office held no interest for him simply because it didn’t pay as well.

  The club occupied a room on the ground floor of an unremarkable building near the Hudson River that Terry happened to own. The rent went from one pocket to the other. It was a large, bare-bones room with several offices around its perimeter. The precinct captains and other hangers-on who relied on Sloan for their no-show daily bread were dozing or playing cards.

  My tax dollars at work.

  Albert Mallus, Sloan’s majordomo, bagman, and the éminence grise of the operation, intercepted me at Sloan’s closed office door.

  Mallus and I had a history. The long and short of it was we didn’t like each other. At all.

  “He’s busy, Steeg,” Mallus said.

  “Fuck you, Albert,” I said, brushing past him.

  I opened the door to Sloan’s office and walked in. Mallus was right behind me.

  A photo display of Sloan’s long reign graced his properly spacious, serious-looking office. There was the obligatory set of flags, and all around the room mayors, cardinals, congressmen, and senators smiled down from the walls. It made me want to gag.

  Sloan was at his desk, his head lolling back in the chair, a dreamy look in his eyes. Kneeling in front of him was a woman with a long ponytail. Her head bobbed up and down.

  “Hi, Terry,” I said.

  Her head stopped in the middle of a downstroke. She scrambled to her feet, shielded her face with her hands, and beat it the hell out of there.

  “I guess this is what’s called servicing the base, or is it the other way around?” I said.

  He swiveled his chair around and I heard the rasp of a zipper. With that accomplished, he swiveled the chair back to me.

  “Hey, Jake, good to see you,” Sloan said, as if this were just an ordinary occurrence in the life of a public servant.

  “Taking a break from the pressures of office?” I said.

  He grinned broadly. “What can I tell you? They’re drawn to power like a moth to a flame. You know how it is.”

  “Actually, I don’t. Put on a few pounds, Terry?”

  That bothered him. Getting caught in a Bill Clinton moment was nothing compared to having his weight become the subject of comment. He quickly buttoned the jacket of his banker-gray suit. Truth be told, Terry had put on a few pounds. His once boyish face had fleshed out, and his jowls had succumbed to gravity and begun the inexorable cascade over the collar of his starched white shirt.

  “After a while, those rubber chickens add up,” he said, giggling nervously.

  “Doing the people’s business requires sacrifices the average voter can’t even begin to comprehend. Must be a bitch.”

  Sloan smirked. “What brings you here?” he said.

  “Ever hear of the Minority Opportunities Bureau?”

  His face pinched up in a fair approximation of deep thought, but I knew that couldn’t be it, since it would be a first.

  After a few long moments of coming up empty, he looked past me to Mallus.

  “Albert, you familiar with them?”

  “Yeah. They make sure the niggers and spics get a piece of the action.”

  Nicely put!

  “We are talking about your constituents here, Albert, aren’t we?” I said.

  He jerked a thumb in Terry’s direction. “His maybe,” he said. “Me? I don’t give a shit.”

  It was a short right. Probably didn’t travel more than six inches, but I made a quick pivot and got my shoulders and hips into it. It was more than enough to send Mallus crashing to the floor.

  Terry sprang from behind his desk and grabbed me. For a seriously overweight man, he moved pretty well.

  “Come on, Steeg,” he said. “It’s just talk. You know how it goes.”

  “How does it go, Terry? Tell me.”

  “He doesn’t know you like I know you. It was a mistake. Won’t happen again.”

  Mallus tried to sit up and get his eyes to focus, but his senses were not where he thought he had left them.

  Terry ignored him.

  “Why are you interested in the Minority Opportunities Bureau?” he said.

  I told him, then added, “I’m just poking around until a lead shows up.”

  Mallus had managed to climb into a chair. Surprising. I thought it would take him longer. No question about it, I was out of shape.

  “Funny how everything that goes around comes around. Every guy in the neighborhood to
ok a shot at Ginny, and she wound up with you. Then she dumps you, and now she needs you again. Go figure.”

  “The vagaries of the human heart are profoundly mysterious.”

  “Whatever. Now that you mention it, I have heard about the bureau,” Terry said. “Run by a guy named Torricelli. The guy’s an asshole.”

  I took that as high praise.

  “Too honest for you?”

  “Why do you have to be such a fucking pain in the ass, Steeg?”

  “Family tradition. What’s your problem with Torricelli?”

  “OK, you’re right. Too much of a fucking straight arrow, if you know what I mean.”

  I did indeed. Terry was intimating that Torricelli didn’t play his brand of ball. Even though he didn’t return my calls, I was warming to Mr. Torricelli.

  “How so?” I said.

  “We’ve had a couple of run-ins in the past. I don’t want to go into details.”

  I smiled sweetly. “Please do,” I said.

  Sloan looked over at Mallus sitting very quietly with his head cradled in his hands. His gaze lingered a moment, and then moved back to me.

  “Gideon El had this construction company — all on the up and up — ”

  “Of course.”

  “And fucking Torricelli buried him in so much paperwork that Gideon couldn’t get the thing off the ground.”

  Gideon El, né Randall Carver, the noted civil rights activist cum lowlife, had traded in his megaphone for an opportunity to bid on city contracts.

  “What happened? The protesting business isn’t paying like it used to, or was Randall just looking to expand?”

  “Is there anyone you do like?”

  “With each passing day, the list grows ever shorter.”

  “Look, I got a lot of shit to do. What do you want?”

  “I want to see Torricelli, but he doesn’t want to see me.”

  “What a shock.”

  “I need you to set it up. Dave figured you would help.”

  “Does that mean if I do it you’ll leave?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Consider it done.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  Terry Sloan called. My meeting with Torricelli was on.

  In twenty years of public service, Terry had yet to introduce a bill in the city council, but he sure knew how to grease the wheels of government.