Button Man

by Andrew Gross

  “It ain’t good for who, Morty?”

  “Ain’t good for anybody, Morris. The union. The rest of us. It ain’t good for business. It just agitates everything. Things need to quiet down.”

  “I’ll watch out for myself, Morty, thanks,” Morris said. “So tell me, Cy Haddad put you up to tell me this?”

  The coat man blinked and the guilty hunch of his shoulders implied that he had. “Look, I’m just being a good citizen, Morris, that’s all. No one would want to see anything bad happen to you.”

  “Thanks for that, Morty.” Morris moved his fork to the side of his plate. “So tell me, how’re things going for you? Since you became such a good citizen?”

  “You know well as I do things ain’t what they used to be. I try to be a good soldier. You know me, you cut your deal and then you make the best of it, right? Those companies the union controls, they’re making a go of it. The rest … Margins are thin. How’s it going with you, Morris?”

  “It’s going fine, Morty,” Morris looked at him more closely and saw how uncomfortable he was. “Just fine.”

  Morty spotted Larry coming back across the room. On his way, he stopped at another table to shake hands with someone. Morty got up. “Cy said, if you want, you could give him a call. He might be able to work something out.”

  “He did, huh?”

  “All I’m saying, Morris, is, if I were you, I’d give it a bit of thought. You know you can’t beat them. You may make this big show of standing up to them. Maybe you’re just a tougher guy than the rest of us.… But you won’t win.”

  Morris looked at Morty and nodded.

  “Maybe think about that call. I’m pretty sure Cy could help smooth things over for you. Here, here’s his number.” He passed Morris a card. Morris looked at it. Amalgamated Needle Trade Workers and Fur Dressers Union.

  “I already got his card, Morty, but thanks.”

  “We all like you, Morris. No one wants to see anyone get hurt. We’re all in this together, right?”

  “I appreciate hearing that. Pass on a message for me?”

  “Sure, Morris.” A ray of hopefulness lit up Morty’s eyes, maybe thinking his intercession had done some good.

  “Tell him not to wait by the phone. Know what I mean?”

  “Oh.” Morty flattened his mouth in disappointment. “He ain’t gonna like hearing that, Morris. My guess is, no one will.”

  “You’re right; let me see if I can say it differently then.…” Morris pushed back his chair. “Tell him to go fuck himself. Will he like that better?”

  “Take care of yourself, Morris,” Morty said, in the way you might say it to a dying friend in the final phases of a disease and who you might never see again. “I was only trying to be a good friend.”

  Morris said, “You take care too, Morty,” but for the first time, he knew things had changed. And he should take it seriously.

  The following night he knew why.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  That night, we had a big delivery scheduled. To B. Altman in the city and Bamberger’s in Newark, New Jersey.

  1,250 coats. Thirty grand tied up in it. The truck backed into our loading bay, but before we brought any inventory out, I stood in the cold in my black bowler and long vicuña coat, an eye peeled to both ends of the street, because if Morty was right, I figured this was where it would happen.

  The street was dark, almost empty. The sewers, salesmen, and warehouse men rolling their racks, who during the day made the place buzz with activity, had long gone home for the night. Across the street, a lone push-boy guided a trolley of fabric, the wheels clattering on the pavement. It all looked calm. When my lookout on the corner of Seventh and Thirty-sixth gave me the all clear, I flung open the truck’s cargo door and waved my warehouse team into action.

  “Let’s get her loaded up fast. We have a delivery to make.”

  Six workers in beige smocks and flat wool caps hurried out, wheeling the metal racks crammed thick with garments. Inside the truck, a double row of steel bars lined each side. They loaded the coats, each of them squeezing ten at a time right below the collars and transferring them onto the bars. I kept my eyes on the street, expecting at any second the sudden rumble of a sedan accelerating from around the corner or the sight of men in dark coats slinking out of the alley across the street. I knew the people we’d pissed off weren’t exactly the types to let such a warning go by without acting on it. But in minutes we got the truck loaded up. Nothing out of the ordinary, so far. Like any delivery, on any other night.

  Not what might well be the last night of my life, a voice inside me said.

  “That’s all there is, Mr. Raab,” Leo, my warehouse foreman, said, as the last of the racks was loaded on. Two of his guys tightened a cord around the garments to secure them on the ride. Then they took the empty racks and wheeled them back up the loading ramp into the building.

  I got set to hop up into the truck.

  From inside the dock, Sol stepped out. He had on a vest and tie, like he usually did, a banker’s cuff around his sleeves. He wiped his hands clean. “That’s the lot of them, Morris.”

  “All right, let’s start her up,” I called. “Vito, Louis, you’re in front. First stop is Altman’s. Let’s go.” Their receiving dock was on Thirty-fifth between Fifth and Sixth, only a few blocks away.

  The two hopped into the cab, Vito behind the wheel. He started the ignition.

  “You know you don’t have to do this,” Sol said. “There are other ways.”

  “We’ve got thirty grand tied up in this shipment. That’s a month’s payroll, Sol. What other ways.”

  “Other ways that say losing thirty grand makes a whole lot more sense to me than losing your life,” Sol answered. “You’ve got a family now, Morris. A kid. Another on the way. There’s no harm in just hearing them out.”

  “We’ve already heard ’em out, Sol. And we’ve seen what happens next. Don’t be so worried. We’ve been warned before.”

  “We have.” He looked at me warningly. “But one of these times, they’re going to be right.”

  I beckoned him with my fingers. “C’mon, give it here.”

  “I got an uneasy feeling on this one, Morris.”

  “C’mon, Sol, give it here.”

  He blew out his cheeks acquiescently and went back inside for a moment, and came back with the Remington double-barreled shotgun, which would take out anything within ten feet wide of the blast. He handed it over with a dubious shake of his head. “You know you’re a fool, don’t you? I ever tell you that?”

  “Only since I was about fifteen.” I rested the gun on the floor of the truck’s cargo bay and hoisted myself into the back.

  “Yeah, well, it still applies.”

  I wrapped my hand around the handle of the truck’s cargo door and gave him a final nod. “All goes well, I should be back about eleven.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Sol looked up at me with a kind of finality in his eyes. “Go so well…”

  I gave him a grin. “Then you better find yourself another partner, big brother. Unless you’ve finally found the knack of how to sell these things.”

  With a rattle, I flung the metal cargo door down, but Sol put out his hand, stopping it from shutting.

  We gave each other a long look. In it was Cherry Street and the rugged road out we had traveled. Harry and Shemuel. Sol’s dreams, where he thought life would take him, all collapsed into mine. We were as different as two people could be and still come out of the same womb.

  He merely glanced down to the truck’s floor. “Your coat,” he said, bringing my attention there. “You paid an arm and a leg for it. Who knows what’s been in there. Watch out it doesn’t drag on the floor.”

  I gave him a quick smile back. “Thanks.” Then I brought the cargo door down the rest of the way.

  I stood there, a wall of darkness and silence separating us. I thought about throwing the door back open, like there was something between us that was left unsaid
. That needed to be said.

  Instead, I heard him close the latch and give the truck a hard slap. “C’mon, what are we waiting for, paint to dry? Let’s get this thing going.”

  Up front, Vito threw the truck in gear and I felt it lurch out of the loading bay onto Thirty-sixth Street.

  I bent down, picked up the wooden stool there. Put it underneath me and sat down. Then I noticed my coat. It was dragging, just like Sol had said. I lifted the hem and brushed off the dust. Who knows what’s been in here.

  Then the truck lurched forward and I rested the shotgun across my knees.

  * * *

  The first stop took only minutes. The truck’s doors opened at Altman’s and we dropped off a hundred and twenty-three fur-trimmed coats. The rest we had to get to Bamberger’s across the river in Newark, which meant heading downtown on Twelfth Avenue all the way to Canal and the Holland Tunnel, which now cut a good three hours off the trip there and back.

  So far so good. I relaxed, taking a seat back on the stool.

  On the ride down, thoughts flooded through me over whether what I was doing was right. Since I was a kid I was always standing up to people stronger than me. And it had always gotten me by. But Sol was right, thirty grand wasn’t enough to get a bullet in the head. But he could be right a hundred times, I thought, and still not quite see. It wasn’t about the money any longer. They’d never be happy until they bled us dry. Half my friends had already closed shop and were out of business. Or had landed in the hospital with cracked heads or broken ribs, or like Manny, a lot worse. It may be called a “union,” but all it was was just another racket. Once you paid, you paid again and again. You didn’t stop paying. Sometimes you simply had to hold your ground, I resolved, otherwise they’d be moving you an inch at a time and taking another piece of you that was rightfully yours. I looked at my hands. The hands of a pugilist past. They’d never been the hands of someone who’d given up that inch.

  Not ever.

  Surely not now.

  The truck rumbled onto Canal, only blocks from the tunnel. The end-of-the-day traffic was all backed up as honking cars and trucks funneled into the entrance.

  “So far so good, huh, Mr. Raab?” Vito called back. There was a narrow window to the front, for the driver to look in the rear, which I could see through.

  “So far, so good.” I had to agree.

  We stopped at a light only a few car-lengths from the tunnel, and I began to think, maybe Morty was only blowing smoke after all. We’d had threats before; and up to now they’d left us be. Maybe it was easier to put the screws to some other small operator. Who didn’t have the spine to stand up to them. Someone who buckled when the heat was turned up. Who—

  The light turned, but the car in front of us stayed put. Vito hit the horn. “This idiot in front of us don’t know how to drive, Mr. Raab. He’s just sitting there. What’s with you, buddy, you asleep…?” He honked one more time. Someone behind us did too. “This crazy bastard doesn’t want to move.”

  I got off the stool and reached in my coat pocket. I pulled out two double-ought rounds and inserted them into the twin barrels of the gun. “Just do whatever they tell you, Vito.”

  Through the small window I could see the car doors open and two men leap out of the car in front of us and rush the truck’s cab from each side. One pulled open the driver’s door and put a gun to Vito’s face. “Get out of the truck, buddy. Open the cargo door!” The other dragged Louis roughly from the cab.

  “Listen—” Vito stammered back. “We don’t have the keys for back there. They’re—”

  The man put the barrel of his revolver between Vito’s eyes. “You got a family, fella?”

  “Yeah, I got a family,” Vito said. “A wife and two kids.”

  “So if you want to go home to them tonight, you’ll get out from behind that wheel and open the fucking door.”

  The man dragged him out of the cab and pushed him around back, following him.

  My heart started to beat, hard. I heard the sound of the outside lock being opened. I shut the gun’s barrels and pulled back the hammers with a firm double-click. You don’t have to do this, a voice inside me intoned. These are killers. Just put down the gun. You can make everything just go away, just like Sol said.

  A second voice insisted that this was the one thing I had to do.

  The cargo door flung open.

  Three men in fedoras and dark coats looked up at me with surprise.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Raab,” Vito said as they threw him to the pavement.

  “That’s all right, Vito,” I said, leveling the shotgun at them. “These men were about to take a step back.”

  The thugs on each end had handguns; the one in the middle held a satchel with a stream of smoke coming out of it, which he had been about to lob into the truck. But as he spotted the shotgun aimed at his chest, the man’s eyes widened and he lowered the satchel to his side.

  I knew what was inside.

  Not explosives, but something called ammonium sulfide. Once it made contact with the atmosphere, in seconds everything inside the truck would take on the stench of rotten eggs. It could ruin a warehouse full of merchandise just as effectively as if it were a real bomb that blew the entire place apart.

  The men on each side of him brought up their guns.

  “I said take a step back,” I said again.

  I kept the shotgun barrels aimed directly at the man with the stink bomb, who had dark eyes, thick, bushy brows, and the kind of steely coolness that barely even acknowledged I had a weapon pointed at him.

  “I know you,” I said, recalling him from my visit to Buchalter’s office. “You’re Workman.”

  He was a part of what the papers called Murder, Incorporated, and was reputed to be with Buchalter and Gurrah the night Jacob Orgen was gunned down. A true killer.

  “Well, if you know me,” he said, “you’ll do what’s smart and step down from there. Before things start to get messy.”

  “Seems to me they are already a bit messy,” I replied. “At least, in my book.”

  “Not that messy.” Charles Workman curled a smile. “At least, not yet.”

  The truth was, I’d never even pointed a weapon at anyone before, much less pulled the trigger. And now here I was aiming at three button men who I knew wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking on it if they had the chance to do the same to me. My mouth was as dry as cotton and I could feel my heart bouncing rat-tat-tat against my ribs. “Your call, Mr. Workman.” I kept my gun steady. “But I did ask you to step back.”

  “We got two guns, you only got one.” One of the thugs smirked, steadying his revolver at me.

  “And your aim’s likely better than mine as well,” I acknowledged, “being professionals. Still, I figure you never know how these things go.” Even the spray from this close in could take a head off without much fuss. Maybe all three.

  Grudgingly, they looked at each other and complied as one, taking a step back.

  “You know you ain’t gonna stop this.” Workman glared up at me. “What’s ordered is ordered. And you know by whom.” He glanced at the satchel in his hand. “If I have to take this back with me, I can promise no one’ll be very happy. It’ll take a lot of explaining.”

  “In that case, feel free to put it down right over there,” I said, dipping the Remington toward the sidewalk and giving him a slight smile. “But I’m pretty certain if your men there decide to take things into their own hands, you won’t be the one making that argument.”

  Workman inched into a thin smile himself and nodded back. “Yes, on that I would have to agree.”

  Suddenly car horns sounded. A couple of nearby drivers rolled down their windows, not aware of what was happening. “C’mon, what the hell’s going on? Move! We don’t have all night.” My impression was that the two with the pistols were likely giving thought to which was the better choice: to be blown halfway back to Houston Street, a foot-wide hole in their chests, or to go back and tell Louis Buch
alter they were unable to carry out his orders.

  Seconds ticked by. A thought wormed through me that depending on what their answer was, that was how much longer I had to live.

  Finally Workman seemed to think the better of it and lowered the satchel. He shook his head disgustedly. “You don’t have any idea what you’ve just done.”

  “My lucky day, I guess?” I said, taking in a breath.

  “Lucky day, huh…?” Workman chuckled. He sniffed back with the disbelieving look of a hunter who was sure he had shot something dead, but yet still the thing continued to hop around as if nothing had happened. “More like you just signed your own death warrant, Morris. Over a bunch of fucking coats.”

  Suddenly the sound of a siren could be heard, a few blocks behind us.

  Someone in the car in front jumped out and said to them, “Charlie, Otto, c’mon, we gotta get out of here.”

  Workman just continued to stare at me, the siren growing louder.

  “Charlie!” One of the goons on the end grabbed the killer’s arm. “We gotta go. Now.”

  With irritation, Workman wrestled his arm away and tossed the smoking satchel harmlessly onto the street. An odor like rancid eggs began to emerge.

  “Lucky day?” He flashed me a baleful glare. “A mentsh on glik is a toyter mentsh,” he said. “Feshtayst?”

  “Ich feshtayn.” I nodded, looking down at him.

  He gave me a final shake of his head and then the three jumped back into the sedan in front of us. It started up and bounced onto the pavement through the light, screeched at the corner, and disappeared.

  Only then did I let out a deep breath and felt just how fast my heart was racing. My shirt was damp with sweat.

  I lowered the gun.

  “Mary Mother of God, Mr. Raab.” Vito jumped up and dusted himself off. “That was the bravest thing I ever saw.” He stood there in awe. “I was sure they were gonna … What was it he just said to you?”

  “Said to me?”