“See, I kind of had to talk Dave into booking Frank,” Joey said.
“Yeah, the kid’s career’s in a tailspin.”
“Naw, Nate, it’s just a bump in the road.”
I wasn’t going to argue the point. “Well, don’t let me keep you, Joey. I’ll be on my way, and you call my office, and we’ll—”
But, oh fuck, now he was walking me back toward the apartment house. “Don’t be silly,” he was saying, squeezing my shoulder. “Seeing Halper can wait. Frank don’t open till Friday. Let’s go up and see Charley.”
George got the door for us—I didn’t tip him—and Joey and I clip-clopped across the lavish lobby.
“Would you do me a favor, Nate?”
“Name it, Joey.”
We stepped into the elevator, which was attended by a blue-uniformed guy with blue five o’clock shadow, a nose with minimal cartilage, cauliflower ears, and a bulge under his arm that wasn’t a tumor.
Joey said to him, “I’m making a stop at Rocky’s floor.”
“Yes, Mr. Fischetti,” the elevator man marble-mouthed.
To me Joey whispered, “Don’t mention to Charley I just run into you by accident. I wanna tell him I called your office and you come around on purpose.”
“Fine by me, Joey.”
“Sometimes Charley thinks I’m a fuck-up, and it’s nice to show him I got organizational abilities. I’m doing more and more in the entertainment field, you know.”
“Are you managing Frank?”
He grinned, shrugged. “Not exclusive. Several people I know got a piece of Frank.”
This did not surprise me. Since the decline of his career, Sinatra had been working mostly in mob rooms—Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City; Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn in Vegas; Ben Madden’s Riviera in New Jersey; and of course the Chez Paree here in Chicago.
At the seventeenth floor, the uniformed thug deposited us in an entryway about the size of my first apartment. The plaster walls were light gray, and the penthouse door—and another around to the left labeled FIRE STAIRS—a deep charcoal. A few furnishings—a table with cut flowers in a white vase under a mirror, a golden Egyptian settee with a scarlet cushion—hugged the walls, and a sunburst clock opposite the penthouse door matched the sunburst doorbell, which Joey didn’t press—he used a key.
“Hey, Rocky,” Joey called, cracking the unlocked door. “It’s me—Joey! Are you decent?”
Now there was a question.
The only response was a muted railroad whistle—woo! woo!
Joey grinned at my confused expression. He said, like I’d understand, “Sounds like Rocky’s in his own little world again.”
I followed Joey inside. The spacious living room had the same light gray walls and a charcoal slate floor, warmed up by pastel furnishings, including two peach sofas facing each other over a coffee table on a white carpet near a fireplace over which hung a big gilt-framed painting of peasants picnicking in what I’d wager was a Sicilian countryside setting. Past a grand piano, through sheer drapes, I could make out—through the wall of glass doors—the terrace-style balcony with its white wrought iron furniture and millionaire’s lake view.
“Not bad, huh?” Joey said, as I took the place in. Occasional little railroad whistles—“Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!”—punctuated this nickel tour.
“Nice,” I said, thinking it didn’t look like anybody lived here; an adjacent formal dining room looked similarly showroom perfect. Of course I knew the Fischettis only stayed in Chicago about half the year—must have been about time for them to head down to Florida, where they wintered (and supervised their criminal activities in that state).
The ostentation didn’t surprise me, though—one of Rocco’s nicknames was Money Bags, because he liked to flash his dough around.
Joey led me down a hallway off of which were a spotless white modern kitchen and a bathroom. Finally, he knocked on a door, edged it open, stuck his head in, and said, “Hey, Super Chief! We got company.”
“Yeah, yeah,” a gruff voice said.
I followed Joey in—possibly designed to be a master bedroom, the large room’s only furnishings (other than a few scattered movie-set type canvas-and-wood chairs) were tables of various sizes and various heights, the central one a good four feet by six, to accommodate the towns and villages, the valleys and mountains, the tunnels, bridges, loading platforms and stations, of an enormous, sprawling, demented model railroad.
Miniature freight elevators unloaded grain, water tanks filled the steam engines of locomotives, and a coal mine provided chips of real coal. Tiny conductors, engineers, railroad workers, and passengers inhabited this landscape, as did billboards, farmhouses (with livestock), and much else. On shelves were model trains of every conceivable sort: steam, electric, freight, military, passenger, one of which was on the tracks now, taking the incredibly elaborate journey through the world Rocco Fischetti had created.
The Almighty God of this mini-universe was a homely, pale, pockmarked, shovel-headed hood with a wide yet sharp chin, a long knobby nose, and dark close-set eyes under slashes of black eyebrow; his hair was black with skunk streaks of white. Five-ten, sturdy-looking, he sat mesmerized before a control panel of switches—watching his train take its circuitous, even dangerous, route—wearing a maroon silk house robe and slippers—and a railroad engineer’s cap.
He wasn’t alone: seated across from him, bored senseless, was a cute shapely twentyish blonde (I thought I recognized her from the Chez Paree chorus line) in a silver silk robe and her own engineer’s cap. Also, a black eye.
“Sorry to bother you, Rock,” Joey said.
The train said, “Woo woo! Woo woo!”
Rocco’s back was partly to me—he had not seen me yet, or anyway not acknowledged in any way that he had. “I’m busy,” he said. “Don’t I look busy?”
“You look busy, but I got Nate Heller here with me.”
After a tough day beating up his girl friends, or a hard night torturing an informer, a guy needed to let his hair down. And Rocco had found a way to unwind while expressing his creativity, fashioning this intricate model railroad complex.
He threw a few switches and his train slowed to a halt, its last “woo woo” sounding a little weak, even sad.
He looked at me, and said, “So how’s the dick?”
“Swell,” I said. “And you mean that in a good way, right, Rocky?”
He smirked; we knew each other a little—though I now knew him better, having glimpsed Model Train Land—and we always spoke, even kidded some. He was the kind of guy who expected respect but liked being treated like a regular joe.
“We been wanting to talk to you,” Rocco said, “Charley and me.” Rather resignedly, he plucked the railroad cap from his head and tossed it on the control panel. To his brother, he said, “Go on up and see Charley…I’ll get dressed and join you.”
The girl said, “Should I get dressed, too, Rock? Are we going out for dinner?”
He glared at her. “Did I ask you anything?”
“No.”
The flatness of their voices in the room was almost a surprise: yelling across the mountainous landscape between them, you’d expect an echo.
“Did I fucking ask you anything?”
“No.”
“That’s right. Go on and get dressed. Put something on that eye—it’s ugly.”
“Yes, Rock.”
“And call Augustino’s and get us the regular table.”
“Yes, Rock.”
But she hadn’t moved from her perch. She was waiting, respectfully, for us to leave. I guessed.
Rocco ushered me out of the railroad yard, putting a hand on my arm, giving it a gentle, friendly squeeze. He too smelled of Vitalis and Old Spice, though less potently than Joey, who trailed down the hallway behind us.
“You gotta be tough on these dames,” Rocco said. “Gotta know how to handle ’em.”
“You’ve certainly got a touch.”
He knew I was
kidding him, and he liked it. “You’re a card, Heller.”
“Yeah, a joker!” Joey chimed in, grinning, pleased with his wit.
Rocco gave me a look that admitted his baby brother’s idiocy, but fondness was in there, too. And before we left, he patted Joey’s cheek and said, “Ask Charley to wait for me, before you talk business.”
So we were going to talk business. Wasn’t that a delightful notion.
We summoned the elevator and its cauliflower-eared guardian, who delivered us to the eighteenth floor. The entryway was identical to the floor below’s, only this time Joey pressed the sunburst doorbell.
“I don’t ever just bust in on Charley,” Joey said. “He don’t like it.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t bother him,” I said. “We can do this some other time….”
But Joey rang the bell again, and before long, Charley—presumably after checking the peephole—revealed himself in the doorway.
Broad-shouldered, kind of stocky, Charles Fischetti was around fifty, an almost-handsome guy with an oval face, bumpy nose, knife-scarred jaw and small mouth that could flash in a surprisingly mischievous smile. Under black slashes of eyebrow that reminded you he was Rocco’s brother, Charley’s hazel eyes beamed an icy, unblinking intelligence. Charley dyed his gray hair platinum and combed it back in traditional George Raft gangster style; he seemed taller than his brothers, but that was the elevator shoes.
“Sorry to drop in on you, Charley,” Joey said.
No dressing robe for Charley Fischetti: his pin-striped single-breasted Botany 500 was so dark a gray, it looked black; his shirt was a light blue and his tie a slip-stitched gray with dots of red, like precision splashes of blood.
“Joey,” Charley said, in a mellow, mildly scolding baritone, “I told you bring Heller around, but I didn’t say just pop by with him.”
Joey had a panicky look, so I jumped in with, “It’s my fault, Mr. Fischetti.” I didn’t know Charley very well, and couldn’t take the same liberties as with Rocco. “I got the date wrong, but Joey said I might as well come on up, anyway.”
Charley smiled at his forty-year-old baby brother, and patted his cheek, much as middle-brother Rocco had. “You’re a good boy, Joey. I shouldn’ta doubted you.”
I said, “If you have another appointment…”
“I do have somebody coming around…” He checked his watch. “…but that’s not for almost an hour.”
Joey explained that Rocco would be joining us.
“Well that’s fine,” he said to his brother. Then, as he gestured for me to step inside, he said, “And let’s make it ‘Charley’ and ‘Nate.’”
“Thank you, Charley.”
“Hey—any friend of Frank Nitti’s is a friend of mine.”
We had stepped into the living room when I replied: “Frank was a fine man. He was almost a father to me.”
That was overstating it, but I wanted to be welcome in these circles, and of course Nitti had been the successor to their beloved cousin Capone.
“Do you like modernist?” Charley asked. “I like modernist.”
Charley liked modernist, all right. The penthouse had the same layout as Rocco’s, with the same light gray walls and charcoal slate floor, but offset by the turquoise of a biomorphic-shaped sofa, the forest green of a sculpted plywood lounge chair’s webbed upholstery, and the salmon pink throw rug (with black geometric squiggles) on which this stuff sat in front of the out-of-place traditional fireplace, over which a huge metal-framed Picasso lithograph squinted with its various eyes.
“Oh yeah,” I said, amazed and appalled by the array of atomic age nonsense: kidney-shaped glass on a claw hand of sculptured walnut serving as a coffee table, green Fiberglas chairs with black wire legs, black metal floor lamp that looked like a praying mantis.
“Most of this,” he said, gesturing expansively, “I buy overseas. The Scandinavians get all the credit, but the best modern design is Italian. Carlo Mollino, Gio Ponti, Gian-franco Frattini….”
“No kidding.”
“Take a look at this,” Charley said, waving me over to several framed paintings on the wall (Joey had taken a three-legged Fiberglas chair, proving it could be sat in). The canvases were abstractions, doodlings in color and geometry.
At his side, I regarded these masterpieces, wondering if Drury’s microphone was snugged behind one of them.
“You know, the great artists, they all had patrons,” Charley said. “In the Renaissance. Guys like Da Vinci, Michelangelo. It was an Italian thing.”
“So I heard.”
“See, I have a lot of fine pieces in my collection. I have three Dalis. That’s a Picasso over the fire. I got a Miro, and a Klee. Worth a goddamn fortune. But these, these mean more to me.”
“I take it these are new painters.”
The tiny mouth curved in a slice of a smile. “You know, Nate, you impress me, your sensitivity. Your insight.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’m tight with Ric Riccardo. He’s my artistic advisor.”
An accomplished artist himself, Riccardo ran a popular, artsy cafe on Rush Street out of a converted warehouse, where he had single-handedly started the local craze of restaurants and merchants exhibiting artists and sculptors.
Charley was saying, “Ric only recommends the best of the new young talent.”
What, as compared to the old young talent?
“You see, Nate, I’m not just a collector—I’m a patron.”
Like the Borgias, I thought.
“Take this one here,” he said, pointing to a canvas that appeared randomly splattered with green, brown, and black. “Ric says this fella is going to be the next Jackson Pollock.”
I didn’t burst Charley’s bubble and point out there already was a Jackson Pollock; I merely nodded and murmured appreciatively if nonverbally.
He slipped his arm around me. He smelled like Vitalis, too, but the cologne was something more expensive than Old Spice—something more expensive than I could recognize.
“Nate,” he said, “I feel comfortable with you. I really do. I am so used to uncouth company.”
“Yeah, I hate that.”
“I hope you feel comfortable with me. A lot of people get the wrong idea about me, you know.”
“I know what you mean.”
“People like us—you’re from the West Side, right?”
“Right.”
“Maxwell Street?”
I nodded.
Stepping away, he shrugged elaborately. “You know about coming up from the streets. Rough beginnings.” He leaned near again and put a hand on my shoulder and whispered: “That’s the trouble with Joey. We pampered him. He come to be a man when we already had our family position, our fortune.”
“That can be hard on a kid.” Even a forty-year-old one.
“What I mean is, coming up, we all make youthful indiscretions. Now, I’m a respectable businessman—and a connoisseur of the finer things.”
“Obviously.”
“I’m not gonna kid you, Nate—you swim in the same Chicago sewers I do….”
From connoisseurs to Chicago sewers, in one leap.
“…and you know I have to keep my hand in certain areas of…we’ll call it entertainment. Servicing public needs. You were Frank Nitti’s friend, and you know that it was his dream to be entirely legitimate.”
“Problem is,” I said, “these days, legitimate business isn’t entirely legitimate.”
He patted my shoulder, twice. “Excellent point. Excellent point. And politics…which is an area of expertise of mine…it’s no better. The reality of business is compromise. Only in the arts can a person be truly uncompromising.”
He continued showing me around his sky nest—spent a good fifteen minutes showing off his collection, about a third of which was valuable stuff by name artists, the rest junk by “up and coming” new “talents.” Charley spoke well for a mob guy, but he wasn’t fooling me.
For all his
posturing and pretension, and his man-of-the-world airs, this was still the same Charley Fischetti who’d been his uncle Al Capone’s bodyguard/chauffeur, and nicknamed Trigger Happy.
This was the same Charley Fischetti who started as an alky cooker and rose to be Capone’s top lieutenant, who had been implicated in several murders though arrested only once—by Bill Drury—with a conviction for carrying a concealed weapon (reversed in the higher courts).
And this was the same Charley Fischetti who was the Outfit’s top political fixer, tunneling endless money into local and national campaigns, whose criminal business interests extended to St. Louis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Miami.
Gambling. Prostitution. Narcotics. Extortion. Usury. Bribery. Murder. Those were the arts Charley Fischetti was a patron of.
“Hey, I don’t want you thinking I’m a goddamn snob,” Charley said. “Let me show you my TV room—we’ll talk there…. Joey, wait out here and bring Rocky in, when he shows.”
My host took me by the elbow—he had a barely perceptible limp, from a long-ago gun battle—and soon we were in a more casual room, with cork-paneled walls and windows with closed Venetian blinds and geometric-design drapes. A pair of boxy pink foam-cushion couches hugged two walls to form a V, with a couple chairs of the same ilk, only light blue, forward of the douches at left and right, all squatting on fuzzy white wall-to-wall carpet, sharing space with light-blond oak tables. The seating faced a blond console—as wide as the couches—with a TV in the middle with a huge screen…twenty-one inch, easy…and built-in radio and record player and album storage bins, with a cloth-covered speaker as big as the picture tube.
“Yeah, I’m a TV fan,” Charley said, man of the people that he was, slipping behind the blond oak bar along the side wall. “Care for something?”
“Rum and Coke, ice.”
“I got martinis made.”
“That’s fine.”
He poured from a pitcher. “I’m addicted to that damn tube…Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and this Studio One—now that’s serious drama.”
“So is watching Jake La Motta catch Dauthille with a right.”
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