by Al Zuckerman
“Right outside with Ernie.”
“Oi oi oi,” he crooned. “Well, lucky you didn’t go in and help him pack.”
Julie flung himself into a chair. “Iz, I owe Scapellatti from way back. I’m going to pay him back now, personally.”
“You’re talking childishness.”
“You know I don’t take this shit. Never have. And I’m not starting now.”
“You got proof this was Carmen? Besides, whoever it is, he’s after me. I’ll handle it.”
“I got wrecked walls, fixtures, furniture. My hotel.”
“Ours, Julie, ours. Which you’ve got to stay here and keep running, which is not going to be easy, after the word of this spreads around.”
“Which it won’t.”
“You kept it that quiet?”
“Lucky. At the time, there wasn’t a guest on that whole floor.”
“No firemen, newspaper guys?”
“Chambermaids, desk clerks, switchboard girl; but none of them won’t say anything to anyone.”
“So how’s this bomb planter going to know that he’s knocked me off?”
Julie’s face crinkled up, worried. An angle he hadn’t thought of. “I guess we can spread the word.”
“Yeah, but then you’d have to let out about the bomb, and scare away the customers. Nah, you handled it just right.”
Julie smiled, relieved. “What time’s your flight?”
“Early. Eight o’clock.”
“Too soon for me, but I’ll see you in New York.”
“No, Julie.”
“Izzie, I work with you, not for you.” And The Nut left.
Three days later a white male body found hanging from a meat hook in a packing plant on West Fourteenth Street near the Hudson River was identified through police department fingerprint files as that of Julius “Nutsy” Dubrowsky, for the last fifteen or so years a resident of Los Angeles, and, at latest report, the promoter and managing director of a new luxury-class hotel and casino, just outside Las Vegas, Nevada, called The Paradise.
CHAPTER 17
The door clicked shut. Scott listened for the turning of a lock. He heard none. But they didn’t need one, Scapellatti and the two gun-carrying goons the other side of that door, against only him.
Numbly Scott gravitated toward the dirt-streaked window, looked out at the oblong, coffinlike piers, the booms of tied-up lifeless freighters, the murky, frigid water. The old double-hung wood-frame window, he could probably open. And certainly he could smash the thin-looking glass. But falling four stories from the longshore union office would finish him.
Terror suddenly ripped through him, stopping his breath; then a wave of dizziness, nausea, a melting of the Red Hook waterfront below to a blur, heaving along with his sick stomach into a ballooning, enveloping darkness. The trauma of the last few minutes had partially anesthetized him; but now no more. Now he knew, sure as these cruddy cracked walls, as this hissing, rusty radiator, knew from the crown of his skull down to his toenails, that he was going to die. Die, die, die, die. …
The floor came rushing up at him, turning soupy black. He caught his fingers on the window sill somehow for a moment, softening his fall to the grainy hardness. He lay in a heap, a knee painfully throbbing, head unfogging slowly, trying to think, to comprehend. But it made no sense. How could Scott Kremish, all-Ivy League quarterback, Chairman of the Debating Society, heir to Dynamic Industries if he wanted to be, soon not exist, not ever kiss Linda again or eat meat or sing or run gulping down air. And soon too. Goddamn soon. He wrenched an arm from under him, so he could see his watch, which ticked on as if nothing had happened. Five minutes, give or take, if they didn’t take him somewhere else first, and if he kept quiet. …
No, no, NO, he could not bear simply to end, disappear.
What if—his heart began pounding—what if he this second got up and went through the door, and told Scapellatti? Saved the man’s life? Even the lowest of brutes would have to be grateful, wouldn’t he?
But that face! Scott saw it in his mind’s eye: the chiseled lips set, the coolly appraising dark eyes gleaming with malice, the foxlike nose, pointed teeth, even the olive skin seemed fraught with menace. Twice The Hook’s eyes had twinkled, but as if they were electronic controls of a machine. So could he hold out real hope that such a creature would do the normal, human thing, if it were to mean problems for him later, which letting Scott go would?
A cramp tore through Scott’s bowels. For a moment he thought he’d be filling his pants.
So if he himself was going to be murdered anyway, well . . . take that ghoul along with him . . . might as well, no?
But it shouldn’t ever have happened. EVER! The coincidence was impossible, absurd; it was a chance in a million that he’d be recognized. And the irony was he’d come so close. The whole plan had come off so perfectly—almost. The wiring all connected, the detonator armed, a little make-believe fiddling with the phone switchboard relays done, he was already repacking the Phone Company tool kit when Scott had recognized the ferretlike mug. He’d been at Princeton, at the edges of the engagement party, one of the handful of guests who’d looked as if they’d come from an alien planet almost, and Scott had later learned who those deadpan types were: bodyguards for Mr. Maffetore, the trucker. Since then, three months ago, this hood must have changed employers. But before Scott could get the tool box snapped shut the torpedo, who had obviously recognized him, had crossed to the far corner of the seedy office and was whispering to Scapellatti.
But his having been found out, trapped, was that any more absurd than his having gone charging into this in the first place? He thought back: Linda, New Year’s day, over at her apartment, just the two of them (her mom had gone to Miami) sprawled on the living room rug playing Scrabble when Mr. Hargett abruptly had appeared, kibitzed a while, taken them out to the Tip Toe for dinner, and then, after dropping off Linda, given Scott a ride back home. Mr. Hargett, it was plain, was not at all his usual robust, well-massaged-looking self.
“You been under the weather, a little sick lately?” Scott had ventured to ask while they traversed Central Park.
His father-in-law-to-be had acknowledged that these last few weeks had not exactly been the greatest of his life; and when Scott, curious, had pressed as to why, the older man had demurred.
Scott had thought he already knew the important things about Mr. Hargett, ever since, the evening after Mr. Hargett’s appearance before the Kefauver Committee, Linda’s father had taken him out to dinner and related his fantastic history, and then pointed up the obstacles which could lie ahead for Scott, which obstacles Scott could avoid by breaking off with Linda. Scott, true, had felt a touch of fear, but mostly awe; and after that evening he’d felt a new closeness to Izzie; so that New Year’s in the cab, Scott had felt disheartened by what seemed Mr. Hargett’s lack of trust.
Scott then had pressed, promising to keep whatever it might be secret even from Linda. Izzie had nodded, and begun telling him about the squeeze by Saccardo, Anselmi, and the other Sicilians; the bombing of what was supposed to have been his room at The Paradise; his old buddy and partner, Julie Dubrowsky, slaughtered right here in New York like a beef cow; and now, this last week, Mr. Hargett’s personally-backed drive to get someone decent elected president of the Brooklyn longshore local, gone flooey, and in spades. Three bona fide union organizers yesterday had been dredged out of the East River off the Navy Yard, tied arm-to-arm, one to the next, with the third man’s feet imbedded in fresh-cast cement.
Scott had been horrified, chilled to the marrow, yet at the same time somehow exhilarated—that in this superregulated Twentieth Century America, with its battalions and armies of law enforcers, such primal confrontations could still take place—as if alongside the known world there really did exist a parallel secret one.
Scott, shaken still and lost in his own musings, had said good-night and gotten out of the car. Mr. Hargett had uttered not a word to suggest or intimate that Scott become i
nvolved in this; nor had Scott expressed the slightest interest in doing so. If he had, Mr. Hargett no doubt would have insisted the young man be locked up.
No, this Frank Merriwell-to-the-rescue lunacy had come all from Scott, him alone. (The rescue of Sally Pirone by Iz dressed up as a Con Ed man was one tale Scott had not heard.) The pieces of the scheme had seemed to fall together naturally. His freshman-year roomate’s father was the New York Telephone Company’s vice president for Brooklyn, of all places. This had led Scott to two summers of jobs as a phone installer and repairman. And a phone man, Scott had come to learn, could get in just about anywhere, if he arrived in a dark green carry-all with Ma Bell’s bell on it, wore the matching green visored cap, and if at the local crossbar switching system, a screw or two had been loosened to conk out a particular line or multiple unit coaxial cable.
And from his closest friend at Dartmouth, a curlyheaded, wiry little clown of an Israeli who’d been in the extremist Irgun, participating in guerrilla attacks against the British and then the Arabs, he’d heard endlessly about explosives: how, where, and by whom most of them were made, and how to concoct and build them yourself; there was no subject Shlomo liked lecturing on more.
So Scott had decided without too much soul-searching that he could rid the world of a scourge like Scapellatti, put an end to these grisly killings, help Mr. Hargett, and win a place for himself truly close to this man toward whom he felt so drawn. And the longshoremen would be free of their tyrant, humanity in general would be benefited, and the whole business would be no more dangerous than going into a rough football game. He hadn’t calculated that this might be a game he could not afford to lose.
Scott let his head flop backward. He looked up, wondered about the ceiling. No way of climbing up to it, even if it had a trap door—which it didn’t.
So what next? Only minutes now, a measly few and that would be all. He wanted to look at his watch, but he pulled his shirtsleeve over it. Better not to know.
Scapellatti intended no doubt to question him personally. But by the time The Hook finished whatever he was doing these walls would be blasted to rubble and Scott himself too.
Choking, he gasped for air. He yearned to cry out, plead that they forgive him. He’d learned his lesson, honest! He’d be good, from now on, forever, not try and hurt them, or anybody, ever, if only they’d please, for God’s sake, let him go. …
Life was not absurd! That had been a favorite argument of his with Linda. He’d never gone along with that absurdist Ionesco she was so passionate about. And yet his mother, who’d been behaving absurdly, had proved to be hellishly right. Poor woman, God, how desperate she’d been to warn him. And he? He’d mocked her—even to her face.
God, God, GOD, he wished he’d never seen Linda Hargett. …
Too late. A noise and pain and darkness. …
Iz hearing the radio report about Scapellatti, felt soaringly elated and then troubled. How had it happened? He had no idea, nor had the newscasters, the police, nor, he soon discovered, anyone he knew.
Five days later, a letter Scott had left with his Israeli friend to be given to Mr. Isadore Hargett care of Mr. Reuben Silverberg Esq. in the event that Scott did not return to Dartmouth on the first day of classes after midsemester, was delivered to Iz. Reading it was a shock as shattering as waking up and finding his mother in bed next to him, dead.
Just contemplating telling Linda tore him with pain.
Her moan when he did tell her seemed to emanate from a pain so deep, it was as if her body was rooted to some primal agony within the earth itself. “Why, Poppa?” she rasped. “Why why why why?” she begged, pleaded, softly demanded through her tears.
He told her of the death, but not the circumstances. That he could not do.
Her agony could, and even should, be blamed on him. Not, God knows, that he himself had caused it, but in a way it did come from how he’d lived, his business, partners, so-called friends. And of course if he’d had the sense to keep from shooting his mouth off, actually telling the kid about Scapellatti, then Scott Kremish would not have become filling for a casket. Iz felt sorry and so helpless.
“Why?” she kept moaning, “why?”
“Sweetheart,” he was racking his head for how to comfort her, “I don’t know.”
“He was,” she whimpered, “too good, you know. And his mother was right. Vicious, cruel, that’s what I thought. But she wasn’t. She was trying to protect her child. And I wouldn’t let her. So—I helped kill him.” Her already lobster-red face contorted into a spring of tears.
“No, sweetheart, no.” Iz held the sobbing girl.
“What was Scott doing with—that man? Why was he there?”
Iz felt torn apart. He rocked her. “Does it matter now?”
“Yes, it does!”
“No, darling, no.”
Linda suddenly wrenched herself free of him, and threw herself down on the rug, face pressed to the floor.
Iz deliberated a second, then knelt beside her.
She writhed away from his touch.
“Lindeleh, what is it?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled.
“Me, hunh? You hate me now, don’t you?”
“No. Yes. Poppa, I can’t help it.” Her cheeks were furrowed with tears. “Explosions, deaths, they don’t happen to other people like this.”
Iz’s heart hurt for her. Then less. An idea had begun flickering. With Scapellatti gone, the trouble might be over—or it might not. So not just Iz’s hide, his goods, but Linda herself, if this madness continued, could be in danger. “Darling, what you kept asking me before was, why, right?”
“Leave me alone,” she spoke feebly now, despairingly, “What’s the use?”
“The use is, it’ll become easier maybe, once you understand a little.”
“I don’t know what you mean. And I don’t think I want to know.”
“Lindeleh, it’s a long story, how I got to be, well, the man I am. And that story, it’s all mixed into you, part of you, your inheritance so to speak. You might wish it weren’t, and I might wish it too. But I got no choice. I have to live with it. And now you’re going to have to live with it too. But, once you know how it all happened, well, listen, and then you’ll make your own judgments. …”
BOOK 3
CHAPTER 1
Linda, hearing how her father a boy of twelve had killed a man—no matter that it had been a German, and one who’d raped thirteen-year-old Aunt Marilyn—began howling. The grief Linda had managed to bring under control poured forth with redoubled intensity. Tears streamed down her face; and her heaving, shuddering moans possessed her so, she could not make a move to dry her eyes.
Iz considered stopping, waiting for perhaps another time. But such a time might never come. He might not return. And Linda then might never understand. Her sobs tore into him like a dentist’s drill on a raw nerve, but he kept silent, and waited.
The rest was less hard. Linda again cried out at the tale of Uncle Morris being set afire by Little Nathan Beckstein, but only for a long minute. Then her sadness grew quiet, while at the same time seeming to deepen. She seemed gradually to grasp that the catastrophic events of her poppa’s life combined with his assertive nature had produced the terrifying (to her) way of life to which even as a young man he had become irrevocably bound.
Her sorrow remained but her anger with her father softened, especially as from time to time her mind wandered, and she remembered him as her father. She only half-listened as he explained to her as best he could about the unusual danger he felt he might still be in, and why for her safety and David’s, as well as his own, he’d be going away. Then he vanished. Rumors were that he’d highballed it to a health farm in the Catskills, a kibbutz in Israel, a Buddhist retreat in the New Mexico or Arizona desert; but no one knew. Matters requiring his say-so waited until he phoned the Silverberg office, usually in the late afternoon, not saying where from. Actually, Iz was at a sunlit cottage in the Ouachitas outside Hot Sprin
gs, a spot he’d always taken pleasure in. Days he spent outdoors, on foot, sometimes on horseback, ambling up and down wooded trails, his mind roaming too, searching.
Conjuring up his past, he relived crucial moments, the making of his now irreversible choices. And he spun daydreams of other lives, other routes he might have traveled. But the more he dug down, sifted dusty recollections, reexamined his hungers of those days, and fantasized the other lives he might have opted for, the fewer were his regrets—about himself anyway. Coming to feel at peace with Scott’s death and Harry the Doctor’s and the schlemiel actor’s in Vegas—that was harder. Even in the fastness of sleep he couldn’t escape their faces and shredded bodies. Gore dominated his dreams. Soft, he berated himself, he’d let himself grow too soft. But he knew he had no real wish to change.
Look, he’d rail at himself, look at the greenhorn punk he’d been. No money, no connections, nothing but hungers, boundless cravings. President of General Motors or a General of the U.S. Army in a million years he could never have become. Yet hadn’t he soared to just such power? No automobile dealership, even one with Cadillacs rolling out like soda bottles on a conveyor belt, no sand and gravel business, no other things he could imagine could have given him as much.
But now he’d already endured and tasted everything there was to taste about being up on the pinnacle, except being knocked off it. So maybe it was time to think about . . . but so much was still unclear. Scapellatti was out of the way, but two more like him could spring right up in his place. And could Iz be sure that The Hook had been the one? And even if the finger were nailed onto Scapellatti positively a hundred percent, so Iz could stop watching out for his neck, going back to New York would still never be the same. He’d changed. His heart might have swollen, but his stature had shrunk. His kids, for one thing, now knew he had no monopoly on doing smart things, and his stupid acts had consequences out of horror stories. And he saw himself smaller now too. But he fought that. Otherwise there’d be no regaining even partial control of what future he might have left.
