Teddy shook his head and looked back at P.F. in exhausted dismay. “What can I tell you? You can’t trust anyone under thirty now.”
47
“HOW’S THIS THING WORKING?” said Vin, sitting down in a chair beside Teddy and his hemodialysis machine.
Lying on his couch, Teddy stared up at the ceiling, with bored eyes and a grinding mouth. “It’s all right, unless it goes too slow or too fast. That’s when I start getting tired.”
The four-and-a-half-foot-tall machine hummed along quietly like a BMW. Since the prostate operation last month, Teddy had been having trouble with his kidneys and now he had a needle stuck in each of his lardy purplish yellow thighs. Long clear tubes siphoned the juices out of his body and into the machine for cleansing.
“It must be hard,” Vin said sympathetically.
Teddy grunted. “Fuck it, I ain’t worried. Every day of my life I’ve had some kinda cancer trying to eat me. You know what I’m saying? I don’t mean I had cancer cancer, but there was always something trying to nibble away. You know what I say? Fuck you, you cocksucker! You’ll never get me. You know why? I got too much life force.”
“That’s right.”
The effort of speaking left Teddy temporarily drained. His face went blank as he closed his eyes. After a moment, he clenched himself up inside, ready for another outburst.
“You try to put me down I’ll kick you over, fuck you right in the ass,” he said, struggling to clear his throat. It sounded like he was cooking a goulash in his chest. “That’s the way it is. You don’t like it, I’ll fuck you in the ass too. Because I’m a survivor.”
“Absolutely.”
“So that’s why I got so pissed when I realized you’d lied to me about your boy Anthony getting in the fight game.”
“What?!!” Vin reacted like his old friend had just put jumper cables on his eyelids.
“I heard it with my own ears.” Teddy said calmly. “Some fuckin’ cop has to tell me about it yesterday. Pigeater, whatever the fuck they call him. Paulie Raymond’s old partner. Says your Anthony’s managing a guy who’s gonna fight for ten million dollars. Then I turn on the TV to watch the weigh-in on SportsChannel, I think I see Anthony standing over in the corner.”
Vin’s eyes went back like the pictures of lemons on a slot machine. He stood up quickly and turned on the television in the corner, to drown out any wiretaps.
“You sure it was him?” he asked, returning to Teddy’s side.
“No respect.” Teddy sat up and sighed. “This fuckin’ kid don’t even give me the illusion of respect. It’s right on TV. Practically counting the money in my face. I thought I asked you to see about our end of it. And now I have to hear about this from a cop.”
“But Ted. . .”
“Not even the illusion. He puts it right in my face. Conquering the market under my fucking flag. The only reason Anthony’s getting in there with the casino people is ’cause he’s saying he’s with me. That’s the only reason. He’s in there talking like he’s an amica nostra. And not a penny of tribute to us. And you know what hurts me about this, Vin? You know what really hurts? The fact that you lied to me about it.”
Vin sputtered and pointed to his mouth, as if putting Teddy on notice that something worthwhile was about to come out. “I didn’t know nothin’ about this,” he finally managed to say. “What’s a, what’s a word you use? I was misinformed.”
“I wanna believe that,” Teddy said slowly, putting his head down on the pillow and trying to get back into the rhythm of the dialysis machine. “I wanna believe we mean more to each other than lies. But I already told you, Vin, I’m gonna have to get a piece of that. Didn’t I?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“So where’s my piece? All I’m hearing is lies. Anthony’s gotta be clearing a mil for this fight. What’re they gonna say about this in Philadelphia? In New York? On the Commission? The son of one of my own is giving me the finger.”
Vin put his hand over his heart. “Jeez, Ted, I, I don’t know. The kid must nota told me the truth.”
Teddy’s eyes stared straight up again. “That’s why he’s gotta go,” he said.
“But Ted...”
“He’s dying of ambition, your boy. See, I know he thinks I’m dying, because everyone’s talking about it, but he’s wrong. See, I still got the life force going inside me. But him, he’s the one that’s dying. You got no respect, it’s like a malignancy. It eats away inside you, a little bit at a time. You gotta cut it out or it’s gonna kill the whole body. You understand what I’m saying, Vin? Sometimes you gotta sacrifice a vital organ to save the rest.”
“Teddy, what’re you telling me? Now I gotta whack my own kid?”
Six more angry coughs racked Teddy and then a kind of serenity settled over him.
“Come on, Ted, you don’t mean that,” Vin beseeched him with clasped hands. “Lemme try and straighten him out. He’s a little confused, is all.”
A volcanic tremor came from somewhere deep inside Teddy. “What’re you, turning into a frail on me, Vin?”
Vin pushed himself up against the back of his chair. “Nah, I’m just saying, you give him an opportunity to stretch his wings and he’ll prove his loyalty,” he said with his voice cracking. “It’s like a little bird leaving his nest and coming back with twice as many twigs.”
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you understand I want this fuckin’ kid clipped in the ass?”
“Let me talk to him one more time. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm.”
Teddy just looked at him.
“Look at all the things I done in my life,” Vin went on. “Sometimes I look back and I think raising that boy was the only one that meant anything. After his mother died, it was just him and me. I brought him up like he was my own.”
Teddy kept glaring. There was a slightly jaundiced, yellowish tinge in his eyes.
Vin was almost off the couch and on his knees. “On my life, Ted. I’ll work this out. From now on, it’s my responsibility.”
“That’s what I’m telling you!” Teddy flared like old embers in a fireplace coming back to life. “It’s your responsibility to whack him.”
“But if I whack him, how are we ever gonna see any money out of this? See what I’m saying, Ted? Leave it to me. If I don’t turn Anthony around and make him work for you, you can give me all the blame. I’ll take whatever I got coming.”
Teddy touched his ear and the crease along his brow began to soften. With great effort, he leaned forward and slapped Vin’s knee with a pudgy, liver-spotted hand.
“All right,” he said with another cough. “You talk to him. Tell him I want sixty-five percent of whatever he’s making. And don’t take no for an answer. No more lies. That’s the end of it.”
“He’ll do the right thing.”
“Good, because otherwise he’s gonna get this.” Teddy made the sign of a gun with his hand.
The dialysis machine began to make a sputtering noise. Teddy slapped it a couple of times, but it didn’t help. Nothing was going through the tubes. Finally he turned a dial on the machine and some of the fluid began to flush through again.
“Life force, Vin, it’s a remarkable thing.” Teddy tried to roll onto his side without pulling one of the needles out of his thighs. “There’s days I think I’m gonna live forever.”
He coughed five times in a row. Vin leaned over and touched his hand. “You are, Ted. You are.”
“Yeah.” The machine seemed to shake. “But now I gotta go for my radiation three, four times a week and take this fuckin’ female hormone.”
“You’re still more a man than anyone I know,” Vin gripped his hand and kissed it.
Teddy looked up at the saline solution in the clear plastic bag over his head. “You know, Vin, the only part I’m sorry about is I don’t have a son of my own to pass things on to no more.”
“No one could blame you for that,” Vin assured him.
Teddy fell into another one of his lon
g brooding silences, as his eyes followed the path of one single bubble in the clear tube, trying to make its way from his thigh to the humming machine.
48
THE DAY BEFORE THE fight, my father asked me to meet him out on the Boardwalk at six o’clock in the morning. A chill wind strafed in from the Atlantic and a lazy sun was just beginning to climb out of the water. The sky was the color of a bruise.
“You remember when you were a kid and I used to take you for walks along here?” he began.
“Yeah, sure.”
How could I forget the way he took me by the hand after my real father died?
“You remember the stories I’d tell about the way Atlantic City used to be?” He handed me a cup of coffee.
“I’m not sure.”
The stories Vin told had a different flavor from the ones I heard from Mike. My real father liked to talk about the old hotel palaces, and Sinatra, and the diving horse on the Steel Pier. With Vin, it was another world.
“You know, they made history here once,” he said. “The old-timers. Capone, Luciano, Lansky, Siegel, Dutch Schultz, Maxie Hoff from Philadelphia. They all came into town one weekend in 1929 and decided to get rid of all the Mustache Petes from the old country who’d been running things. They wanted to make it more of an American business and not just a bunch of animals killing each other. They were supposed to be staying right down there at the Breakers.”
He waved his hand at the row of casinos and cut-rate hotels down toward the south end of the Boardwalk.
“I told you that story, right?” He took a sip from his coffee and smiled when it seemed to burn his tongue. “How they tried to check in all at once under assumed names, but the guy at the desk got wise and tried to throw them out?Lansky had to intervene just to keep them from shooting the place up. Instead they packed up their violin cases and moved on down to the Traymore.”
Steam rose off his coffee and evaporated in the salty air. Now that he’d brought it up, I realized he had told me the story about a million times before. But I had a feeling he was trying to make a different point this time.
“It’s all gone now,” he said, putting his coffee down on a green bench. “Back then, there was ...” He put his hands together, trying to think of a word.
“Cohesion?”
“Cooperation. They knew how to work together. They even helped each other move their bags to the other hotel when the Breakers wouldn’t take them in. And they had the greatest sit-down in the history of man. Divided up the whole country. That was the way they did it back then. They worked for a common goal. It all goes back to the old country. I ever tell you how they started this thing of ours?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some French soldier raped a Sicilian girl on the day of her wedding and her mother cried “Mia figlia, mia figlia” and that night all the peasants sneaked out and killed the French soldiers. That story’s engraved on my cranium too. I still wasn’t sure what he was driving at.
“But that was the old country,” my father said with a sigh, briefly working over his hair again with the Ace comb. “Here, it’s different. It’s every man for himself. Like the way you live.”
Before I could defend myself, he put up a hand to cut me off.
“I’m not blaming anybody,” he said. “If I was starting off now, maybe I’d be the same as you. But that wasn’t the way I was brought up. I was brought up the old way, to think of the good of the whole borgata when I did something. Maybe if I was brought up your way, I could’ve learned to be more independent...”
I brought him up short. “So what’s the problem, Dad?”
He just looked out at the whitecaps rolling in and crashing on the beach. “Teddy found out that you still got a piece of this fight. And he wants to know when he’s getting his cut.”
“Tell him he’s got a long wait.”
“He ain’t gonna wanna hear that.”
“Then fuck him! What’s he going to do about it?”
Without a word, my father pulled up his shirttail and showed me the nine-millimeter tucked in his waistband. That knot tightened at the back of my skull.
“What are you saying? He was going to have you shoot me if I didn’t come across?”
The sun was rising higher, but my father still looked cold. The Boardwalk was empty at this hour, except for a couple of old bums rolled up in sleeping bags on the green wooden benches by the bathhouse.
“Look, I’m in a tough spot,” my father said, dropping the shirttail over his gun and looking embarrassed. “All my life I been a loyal soldier to Teddy. We came up in reform school together. I known him a helluva lot longer than I know you. Just throw him seventy, seventy-five thousand on top of what you already owe him. Show him some respect. You’ll make a sick man happy.”
“No!” I told him. “This was my deal all the way. I raised all the revenue, I took all the risks. Why should he be able to come in at the last minute and take a cut?”
“Because the man is dying. He feels like everything in his life’s been taken away from him. First he lost his son. Then Jackie from New York stole the unions. Now his health is going.” Vin gestured at the darkened casinos that sat like still white elephants along the Boardwalk. “Twenty years ago, he could walk around and feel like he owned this town. But then all these casino corporations and lawyers pushed him out. You don’t know what’s been taken from him
“What’s been taken from him?!” I exploded. “What’s been taken from him?!! What about what he took from me? He took my fucking childhood!! He took my fucking father from me!!”
Vin looked crestfallen. “I been a good father to you.”
But I wasn’t going to be put off any longer. This had been a long time coming, like rain after a humid spell. “I’m not talking about that,” I ripped into him. “I’m talking about Mike. The man whose blood runs in my veins. I want to know what happened to him.”
“Why, wha, I told you none of us know.” Vin couldn’t look me in the eye.
“All right, that’s enough,” I told him harshly. “That’s enough of the lies. Now I want to know the truth. I waited all my life. I already know Teddy killed Mike. Now I wanna know why and I want to know what you had to do with it.”
The tide flowed in and rolled out the way it had for five million years, but the breath my father exhaled sounded even older than that. A sandpiper ran along the shore with a clam in its mouth.
“Come on.” I stared at him. “You owe it to me.”
He ignored me for a few seconds and tried to light a cigarette. He flicked his lighter three times without producing a flame and then threw it across the beach. He stared after it for a long time before he spoke again.
“Well,” he said finally. “I guess you gotta be told sometime.”
I realized I was shaking, the way I did before I killed Nicky. “Tell the story.”
“Mike, yeah, Mike,” he mumbled, like he was trying to find the right place to begin. “He was a lifeguard, from over Margate. Good-lookin’, smoothtalker. He looked like that guy on television. What was his name? Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes.”
77 Sunset Strip. I remembered the song Mike used to sing.
“Yeah, Mike did the whole California bit with the blonde girl and the red Corvette convertible. But what he really wanted to be was like Hugh Hefner and Howard Hughes rolled into one. A millionaire and a playboy. He was a dreamer, you know. Except he didn’t know how to do any of the things that got those guys where they were. He didn’t have any fuckin’ money. So that’s why he had to hook up with a couple of mugs like Teddy and me. He needed the muscle. And we needed somebody presentable-like like him to go in and talk to people in banks and such, because me and Teddy, we’d get thrown out before we got through the fuckin’ lobby.”
So that was Mike. I wondered if I would’ve gotten along with him as an adult.
“Anyway,” said Vin, looking down at the gray Boardwalk railing. “The three of us got involved in a real estate deal. We bought this hot dog place on the Boardwa
lk called Manny’s on the Boardwalk. I used to go in there once a week and slam the guy’s hand in the cash register. Eventually, they decided to just give us the deed instead of paying the protection money. So then about six months later, this hotshot lawyer from New York has a sit-down with us and wants to buy the property for a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. Mike says fuck you, because he’s a dreamer.”
“What do you mean?” I strained to remember Mike’s face, but all I could picture at the moment was the back of his head and the shine on his shoes.
“You know,” said Vin. “He wanted to build one of these golden palace hotels like they used to have in the old days in Atlantic City. So he was holding out for more money. Which made Teddy nuts. He never liked Mike. Was always jealous, because Mike was so handsome and Teddy, he was kinda on the weighty side. And the two of them had a disagreement. Botta beep, botta bing, who remembers all the details? Mike wound up dead.”
“No botta beep. I want the real story. Tell me exactly what happened. Did Teddy get somebody to stick an ice pick in him?” I was in a rage. I wanted to tear the truth out of Vin.
He was already holding his sides like he was in pain. “Ah, shit. It was nothing. We were sitting around the living room, having some drinks, discussing things, and Mike went to the kitchen to get Teddy some pretzels. And when he came back in, Ted took a gun from behind one of the sofa cushions and shot him once.”
“Where?”
Vin’s mouth opened in disbelief. “What, do you gotta know everything?”
“Where did he shoot him?” I said louder.
“In the face. All right? Teddy shot him in the face. He never liked the way Mike looked. It was over in two seconds.”
A brief wind shifted the sands and another wave crashed onthebeach,breakingintoamillionfragments.But something inside me had turned to stone. “Then what happened?”
“Please,” Vin said in a quiet voice. “Don’t do this to me. I’m your father. I love you ...”
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