The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  Every relationship is an entanglement, every emotional attachment is a rope around your fucking neck. Look at this deal with Antonio and the others. Did he need them? No. They needed him, though, and they weren’t going to let him go, either, and he had to drag his ass all the fucking way down here to try to explain Wall Street to these Cro-Magnon assholes all over again.

  Antonio had to deal with some lawyer after he got done with the Jamaicans, and then somebody else when he was done with the lawyer, and someone after that. It was fully dark outside when Antonio finally got to him.

  “So explain to me,” Antonio said belligerently, “about this three-legged fucking horse you put my money on.” It was an oil stock, Domenic had ridden it up into the thirties but not everybody had gotten out in time. The SEC had suspended trading, they’d be lucky if the thing opened at three bucks.

  “Look,” Domenic said. “You work the percentages. You don’t bet your house on every single roll. If you can get, say, a five percent margin on the house, you will make money in the long run, but you still gotta take a hit every now and then. You ain’t gonna win every single hand.”

  They were sitting around a table in the back of the bar, and a lot of Antonio’s cronies were there, and they broke out into a chorus of complaints. Dumb bastards, Domenic thought, you give one of them something, they pass it around like it was somebody’s old girlfriend. Jesus. He listened to it for a while, and then he decided to break it down to something they could understand.

  “Listen,” he said, interrupting. “Let’s say you own some jockeys out at Aqueduct. You don’t try to fix every single goddamned race. You understand me?” He watched comprehension dawn in some of their faces. “Now you’re getting it. You need to have some patience, and you can’t be too greedy. Say you fix two races a week, you’re gonna win, be happy. And even then, there’s no guarantee, for chrissake. Say your horse is out in front by ten lengths, he could still step in a hole and break his goddamned leg, you’re gonna lose once in a while. Sometimes God takes a hand, what’re you gonna do?”

  That got to them, that ancient superstition. Dom watched, vastly amused at the sight of Antonio making the sign of the cross and glancing heavenward. Even Ivan, that angel of fucking death, kissed the crucifix he wore around his neck. Dom gestured at the door with his head, just a slight nod. Antonio took the hint.

  “Let’s take a little walk, you and me,” he said. He got up out of his chair, and Victor and Ivan did likewise. He turned and looked at them. “You two wait here.”

  “We gotta do something about security,” Dom told him when they were safely out of earshot. “I know everybody likes to make money, and they wanna be nice to their brother-in-law and all that, but we can’t have the whole fucking neighborhood jumping in the pool after us, we’re gonna get shut down if this keeps up.”

  Antonio considered that for a few steps. “All right,” he said. “Set up four or five dummy accounts with a broker you can trust. You come up with something, you call the broker yourself, then get word to me later. Don’t call me at the bar, don’t call my house either. Reach me through my daughter. You know a broker you can use, someone smart enough to keep his mouth shut?”

  “Of course.”

  “All right.” He stopped, stood looking at Dom on the sidewalk. “I’m gonna let you go now. I know you got a long ride back.”

  Sticking the knife in one more time, Dom thought. I’m gonna be sitting in traffic while he’s swilling guinea red and eating his dinner, and I got an early morning appointment with a guy in a brokerage house. The house was working on a takeover bid, the guy needed cocaine, and Domenic needed lead time. Capitalism at work. But it was one more obligation, and he was drowning in them.

  Antonio grabbed him in a bear hug. “Next time, gimme a horse with four legs.”

  “Come on, Antonio, add it all up and then tell me you’re not happy.”

  Antonio released him. “Go home,” he said. “Get some sleep. You look like shit.”

  Yeah, sure, Domenic thought, stepping off toward his car. All I have time for is work, every day, every day, every day, and I don’t even know why I do it anymore.

  TWO

  HE WOKE AT FIVE-THIRTY, grouchy, back sore from the too-yielding mattress. He could hear her out in the corridor.

  “Claaark, let me in, I got coffee, Clark . . .”

  He wanted to lie there but he couldn’t, with every passing moment it seemed his back hurt more, plus the years of conditioning itched at him, got him up and on his feet, doing his morning routine mechanically. Ain’t you something, he told himself silently. You wanna be a bum but you’re too lazy to break your programming. When he was dressed and ready to go, he jerked open his door, startling the woman in the hallway. She looked up at him, her face momentarily radiant, but when she saw it was him and not Clark her mouth went wide in fear.

  “Aaaargh!” She struggled hastily to her feet. She did have two containers of coffee but she spilled one as she went flapping down the corridor. “Aaarh! Aaarh!”

  “Ah, Jesus. You happy now? Scared the poor dimwit half to death.” He watched the stairwell door slam behind her, then turned and locked his door.

  He stopped at the newsstand in front of the hotel. The dark-skinned man he’d seen sleeping the night before was inside the kiosk, awake but looking hung over. Silvano picked up a copy of the Daily News, handed the man a dollar bill. “You know a place around here to get a good cup of coffee?”

  “Dere is a deli right up the block,” he said, rolling his r’s, a singsong cadence in his voice. He counted Silvano’s change from a pile of coins in front of him. “Or you can go farther up the hill, take a right on Court, dere is a specialist in coffee in a small shop, he has coffee beans and teas from all over the vorld. You might find it vorth your extra steps.”

  “You want me to bring you back a cup? You look like you could use it.”

  “Oh no, sahr,” the man said, looking down. “Thank you so veddy much, sahr, no, I never take it, terrible stuff, terrible. Veddy bad for vun’s digestion.”

  Silvano went on up the hill, scanning the paper as he walked. It was all about New York City’s latest fiscal crisis, federal, state, and local politicians feuding about who was going to pay for what, dark clouds over Wall Street, but the Mets pulled it out late, after he’d fallen asleep they rallied to win. They were going to Pittsburgh next, they were three-run dogs for tonight’s game but he didn’t know a bookie, except for his old man. That would be great, call him up after all this time, say, hey Pops, put a C-note on the Mets for me tonight, willya? I’m good for it. He loitered outside the deli up the block, watched the street for a while, then went inside and got a black coffee and a buttered roll served to him by an enormous fat wheezing lady. He made a mental note to come back and try the food, must be good when the cook’s that fat.

  The coffee was bitter. He sipped at it anyway and munched on his roll as he wandered the neighborhood. Nunzio’s last address had been the St. Felix Hotel. The city had housed him there after a lengthy stay at Bellevue. Nunzio had called Annette two years ago, after he’d gotten out, to let her know where he was, and the two of them had spoken regularly over the next nine months. Then the calls had stopped and Ann, unable to contact him, had pestered her husband into hiring some ex-cop friend of his to go look for Nunzio. When the guy had given her his report, she had called the carpenter in Oregon that Silvano had once worked for, and he had given her a phone number in Japan. When she’d finally tracked Silvano down, she read him the report over the phone. He went over it now in his mind as he walked the uneven slate sidewalks past crumbling brownstones and shuttered carriage houses. Last address, the St. Felix, room apparently unoccupied for some time. The usual personal effects left behind, electric razor, toothbrush, clothes, plus a flashlight, one hundred sixty-seven unopened bars of Neutrogena soap, twenty-one bottles of Pert shampoo, six clock-radios, one plugged in, five still in the boxes, a bunch of those strips of paper that come wrapped around s
tacks of bills, stamped in hundred-and thousand-dollar denominations.

  There had been several cursory reports from the welfare department, but nothing in the previous three months, two reports of about the same vintage from the outpatient clinic at Bellevue with careful descriptions of the patient’s condition but with the name misspelled and the age wrong by a decade. No John Does in any of the city’s various loony bins matched his description, ditto the morgue and the holding pens at central booking.

  He was just gone.

  THE LOBBY OF the St. Felix smelled like boiled cabbage. It was a high-ceilinged room with lots of old woodwork but it had none of the ruined grandeur of the Montague, and the man behind the front desk, a young guy with a pointed goatee and a long ponytail, did not remember Nunzio.

  “No, man, I only been here six months,” he said. “You a cop or something?”

  “Military Intelligence,” Silvano told him.

  “Oh, shit. I didn’t even know there was such a thing,” he said, suddenly nervous. “I think you’d have to come back when the general manager is here, because I don’t even know where we keep records like that.”

  “When will he be in?”

  He didn’t know. Silvano shrugged, turned away, looking around the room. He recognized the woman sitting in a chair in the far corner of the lobby, she was the old lady with Errol Flynn’s cane, and she’d been watching him. When she caught his eye, she winked at him.

  Story of my life, he thought. The old ones and the crazy ones always love me, and this one looks to be both. He turned to go.

  “Hsssst!”

  It was her. He shook his head ruefully. Too proud to run away, ain’tcha, he told himself, and he walked on over, stopped just out of range of the cane. “Howdy,” he said.

  She leaned forward and whispered. “You don’t wanna talk to him, he don’t know shit.”

  “I think I got that part figured out.”

  “He’s a doper,” she hissed, still whispering. “You need to know something, you gotta come back when Bronson’s here, ten at night to six in the morning. Give him a ten spot and he’ll sell out the whole lot of us.” She found that enormously funny and began to cackle loudly and wave her cane around.

  Silvano took a step back. “Thanks,” he said, backing away. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Sell us all out,” she said, louder this time. “Every one.”

  “WHAT DID YOU say your name was, sir?”

  “I didn’t.” Silvano leaned on the small counter and tried to look as unthreatening as he could. “Mr. Johansen is expecting me.”

  She regarded him briefly, shrugged, reached up, and slid the window shut. He stood there and watched as she picked up her telephone and had a brief conversation before hanging up. She slid the window open again. “Have a seat, sir,” she said. “Mr. Johansen will be with you shortly.”

  “Thank you,” he started to say, but she was already sliding the window shut. He sat in one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room and looked around. It was generic office space decor, fluorescent lights in a suspended ceiling made of white panels, cheap paneling on the walls, thin gray carpet. No magazines. After some time the metal door next to the sliding window opened, and a guy stuck his head out. He was tall and beefy, red face and sparse yellow hair. He didn’t fit Silvano’s image of a private detective. He looked more like the kind of guy would knock on your door selling pots and pans.

  “Vinnie’s brother-in-law?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right,” the guy said, staring across the room at a spot three feet to Silvano’s right. “C’mon in.” He stood back, held the door open. Silvano followed him to an inner office. Johansen waved him to a client chair and went to sit behind the desk. He glanced at Silvano, then began riffling through a stack of manila folders. “So,” he said. “You’re the missing brother.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Ain’t they all,” the guy said. He found the folder he was looking for, opened it up, fanned through the few pages it contained. “That Vinnie is a piece of work,” he said, reading. “You in business with him?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s not much here.” He closed the folder and handed it across the desk. “You’re welcome to look it over, but we didn’t have a hell of a lot to go on. The only people really knew your brother was a bunch of street rats, you don’t get much out of people like that. Can’t believe what you do get.”

  “Yeah.” Silvano opened the folder. He looked briefly at the picture of his brother, turned it face down, and began to read. “You guys do much of this kind of thing?”

  Johansen puffed his chest out, looked insulted. “We did a good job, we looked under every rock we could find. I always go the extra mile for Vinnie.”

  “I ain’t saying anything, I just want to know where I stand.”

  Johansen subsided in his chair. “The guy I used for this is NYPD, retired. Guy is top notch, very smart. Just a little bit too Catholic school.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know, by the book, by the numbers, cross every tee, alla that. You know what I’m sayin’? You gotta know when to look the other way, sometimes. Friggin’ guy, would arrest his own mother, he caught her lifting a pack of gum. Smart bastard, though, like I said. There was something to find, I would bet on him finding it.”

  “Well, you’re right, there’s not much here. This guy still work for you?”

  “He’s doing something for me right now. I’m thinking you wanna talk to him.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Well, you wanna hang around, I can get the guy back here in a hour or two. I’ll pull him right off what he’s doing, okay, but you gotta tell Vinnie we cooperated like a bastard.”

  “I’ll tell Vinnie you were a peach. You mind if I take this picture, go have some copies made?”

  “Go right ahead, there’s a picture joint right up the block. Time you get done with that, my guy should be back here.”

  “Thanks.” He stood up to go. “What is it you guys really do, anyway?”

  The guy shrugged. “We do a lotta security, lotta divorce, you know, follow the wandering spouse, take pictures, we do insurance fraud, catch the disabled guy water skiing, and so on.”

  “Don’t sound like a bad gig.”

  “There’s worse. Listen, this guy I used is black, I hope you don’t mind, but I’m telling ya, he’s as good as they get.”

  WHEN SILVANO GOT BACK, Johansen ushered him into a small conference room. His guy was already in there, waiting, leaning both elbows on the table. He made no move to get up or introduce himself. Silvano pulled out a chair and sat down. “My name is . . .”

  “I know who you are,” the guy said. He leaned back in his chair and regarded Silvano coldly. “Silvano Iurata. Let’s see. Brother of Nunzio, commonly known as Noonie. One of my failures. Father, Giovanni, bookie, numbers, loansharking, suspect in the occasional murder, lived down in Bensonhurst. Mother, Rachel, daughter of one Domenic Scalia, capo in one of the five families, I disremember which one. Bastard died in his sleep, six or eight years ago. Rachel went missing in the forties, body never found. Before my time, but I understand our side thought Giovanni did it, I couldn’t find out why. Married wife number two when Rachel was declared dead seven years after her disappearance. Two more kids, Nunzio and Annette, your half-brother and -sister. Nunzio had some mental problems, in and out of institutions. Angelo Scalia, your uncle, followed his father’s footsteps until sometime in the late fifties, when they found him floating in a marina down by Coney Island someplace, would have been face down in the water but wasn’t, technically, because his head was missing.” He shook his head. “Am I getting all of this right?”

  “You must keep a lot of shit up in your head.”

  “You should never write anything down unless you’re willing to answer questions about it in open court. Tell me if I miss anything.”

  “Finish your story.”

  “All right.
So you, your brother and sister, your cousin Domenic, Angelo’s son, aka Little Dom, aka the Fish, and his sister Jeannette are all growing up in Italian-American paradise. Everybody’s happy, except you. You, you got all kind of behavior problems, you’re always in trouble, you get tossed out of Catholic school, then public school. Your old man finally wakes up, he signs you up in some boxing gym, I guess he figures, let them straighten you out. You go twelve and two, something like that, not bad, but both losses were DQs, you can’t even do that straight up. Okay, now out of nowhere Jeannette up and joins a convent, one of the medieval situations, they lock you in a closet for the rest of your life. Angelo does his headless doggie paddle routine, and in the confusion, you run off and join the circus. Little Dom goes ape shit, word is you and his sister Jeannette were doing the horizontal two-step, and that’s why she’s gonna spend the rest of her life wearing a black robe. He figures you popped his old man when he found out. Made your bones at seventeen, not bad.”

  “You believe everything you hear?”

  “You saying it wasn’t you? Well, we never made you for it. Never made anybody for it. Anyhow, Little Dom, he goes into the family business, no surprise there, he runs with a crew out of some social club, same neighborhood you grew up in. He worked the garment district, broke a few heads, hijacked a few trucks, four arrests, no convictions. Then, maybe eight years ago, he gets his act together, now he’s some kind of investment counselor down on Wall Street. Separated from his wife, lives in the Village.”

  “You did a lot of digging, looking for one missing nut bag.”

  “Johansen offered serious money if I could turn up your brother. But the point of all this is, I am not about to help some middle-aged thug looking to settle old scores.”