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Somebody said, “Office boys.”

“That’s the word,” said Kapp. “Office boys. Soft easy-living punks. They ain’t in the rackets, they’re a bunch of businessmen. You know what I mean? They live quiet, they send each other inter-office memos. They’re a bunch of accountants. Am I right?”

Most of them nodded or said, “You’re right.”

“Accountants,” repeated Kapp. “Office boys. They’re afraid of muscle, they’re afraid of the noisy hit. A quiet hit is what they like, an old lady’s hit. Arsenic in the five o’clock tea, you know what I mean?”

They laughed.

“Sure,” said Kapp. He was laughing with them. “An old lady’s hit. They’re a bunch of old ladies. They’re
soft.
They hear a loud noise, they think it’s a backfire. On the payroll they don’t have even one good demo man. Huh? Am I right?”

“The only bombs thrown around New York,” said somebody, “are by amateurs.”

“We ought to hire them, that’s what I say,” said Kapp. He got a laugh on that one, too. A bunch of old friends, getting set up together, getting along.

Kapp motioned to the chauffeur in the kitchen doorway. “Time for a round,” he said.

Glasses came around and everybody was noisy for a minute, and then Kapp said, “As I was saying.” Silence. He smiled into it. “As I was saying, these pretty people are soft. They’re
soft.
Do they know we’re coming? Sure they do. Are they scared? So scared, boys, they’ve been using the noisy hit. I swear to God. They’ve been trying for Ray here, for my boy. They gunned his foster father, Will Kelly. You boys remember Will Kelly.”

They all agreed, they remembered Will Kelly.

Kapp said, “They tried to gun me, too, on my way out of D. Ever hear of anybody
try
to gun somebody? They missed! They don’t even know how!”

Nick Rovito said, “We’ve got the point, Eddie.”

“I want to be sure of that,” Kapp told him. “We aren’t up against people like the Gennas or Lepke or any of Albert A’s boys or anybody like that. We’re up against a bunch of bush leaguers. We’re up against a goddamn P.T.A. Okay.” He became suddenly brisker, more businesslike. “Okay,” he said. “They’re in, and we’re out. And we’re not gonna get in
their
way. We’re gonna get in
our
way, or not at all.”

Baumheiler said, “Remember Dewey, Ed. You do not want to stir things up too much.”

“How much does it take, Irving? We want them out. We want us in. How much do we have to stir to get what we want? I promise you, I won’t stir any more than that.”

Baumheiler chewed slowly on his cigar. “I don’t like the idea of too much noise, Eddie,” he said. “Bombs going off, lots of bullets, lots and lots of hits. I don’t like such an idea. And I am not an old lady.”

Nick Rovito said, “What worries you, Irving?”

“Noise, Mr. Rovito. I do not—”

“You can call me Nick, Irving.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rovito. I do not like—”

Kapp said, “Irving, are we going to get along here or aren’t we?”

“We can discuss the situation, Eddie, surely.”

“On a first-name basis, Irving. When we’re back in, you and Nick can hate each other some more. But right now we got to work together.”

“We’ve always been able to work together in the past,” said Baumheiler, with a side glance at Nick, “despite our differences.”

“Stick with first names, Irving. We’re all old friends.”

Baumheiler shrugged heavy shoulders. “If you think best, Eddie, then of course. To answer your question—Nick—I do not like noise. I do not like the idea of the State Crime Commission handing me a subpoena. I do not like the idea of being hauled, like Frank Costello, before a televised Congressional investigation. I do not like the idea of Federal accountants interesting themselves overmuch in my affairs. This is a different time, a different world. Our former associates are not used to noise, I agree. However, the citizenry is equally unused to noise. We would find them perhaps less tolerant than was once the case. I recommend circumspection.”

“No citizens, Irving,” said Kapp. “But hits. Bombs, and you know it. We got no choice.”

“Quiet hits, maybe,” said Nick. “But not poison in the tea. Lead in the head, huh? Not
too
quiet, huh, Irving? We want them to know maybe we’re there, huh?”

“I simply want it made clear that I would not personally appreciate the type of over-enthusiasm which put our lamented friend Lepke in the electric chair.”

The porch door opened. A chauffeur stuck his head in and said, “There’s a car pulled up. A dinge in the back, he says he wants to talk.”

In the silence, I moved out from the wall, saying, “I’ll go see what he wants.”

They watched me go. Nobody talked.

It was a black Chrysler Imperial. Amid the Cadillacs, it looked belligerent. There was a white chauffeur and a black rider. He was no more than thirty, dressed out of Brooks Brothers on an expense account. A gold Speidel band was on his watch, a gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand. He had a chicken mustache and a small satisfied smile and two watchful eyes.

When I got there, he pressed a button and the window slid down. The side and back windows had black Venetian blinds. The others were down, the one on this side was up. He looked out at me and said, “I’m from Ed Ganolese. With a proposition for Anthony Kapp.”

I said, “All right, messenger. Come on down and say your piece.”

He got gracefully out of the Chrysler. I led the way. Behind me, he said, “Don’t you want to frisk me? What if I were armed?”

“What if you were?”

We went down the steps. At the door I turned and said, “What name? I’ll introduce you.”

“William Cheever.”

“Princeton?”

He smiled. “Sorry. Tuskegee.”

I didn’t smile back. We went in, through the empty room, with chauffeurs showing guns in the kitchen on our right, and on to where the piemen waited. I stopped in the archway and said, “Mister William Cheever. Of Tuskegee. With a message from Ed Ganolese.” Then I went over and stood beside Kapp.

Cheever’s smile was faint and phony. He nodded at the room, took note of the five standing men, and then looked at the one beside me. “Anthony Kapp?”

“I’m called Eddie. Not by you.”

“Mr. Kapp, then. I have been sent, as of course you assume, to discuss terms. My principals—”

“You mean Ed Ganolese, that two-bit bum.”

“Ed Ganolese, yes. He sent me with a proposition concer—”

Kapp said, “No.”

Nick Rovito said, “Wait a second, Eddie. Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

“I don’t care what he’s got to say,” said Kapp. “Ganolese and his sidekicks are in my territory. That’s all I have to know.”

“You can’t listen to him?”

“No. I can’t. Look, Nick, they got the pie, am I right? There’s only the one pie, and they got it. If we had it, and this bum came in and said his principals wanted some of it, what would we do?”

“We don’t have it,” Nick said. “That’s the point.”

“And they won’t give us any more than we’d give them.”

Nick spread his hands. “We can talk, can’t we?”

“We can go to the movies, too, Nick. We can scratch our asses. There’s lots of ways to waste time.”

“You don’t want to ride me, Eddie.”

Little Irving Stein piped up, “Ganolese couldn’t of asked for better. Throw one spade on the table and watch everybody fold.”

Nick said, “Oh, the hell with it. All right, Eddie, you’re right.”

“Okay, fine.” Kapp looked at Cheever. “What the hell you still doing here? You got your answer. No deal.”

Little Irving said, “Why don’t we send this buck back with pennies on his eyes? So they’ll know we mean it.”

Baumheiler said, “No. They already know it.”

Little Irving said, “Come on. We got ourselves here a little Fort Sumter.”

Baumheiler said, “It’s just such noisiness as this that I have in mind. I consider it dangerous.”

Nick said to Cheever, “Go on, little man, you better go home.”

Cheever opened his mouth. Kapp said, “Move!” He shrugged and nodded and went out, gathering the sheepskin folds of his dignity about him as he went. He closed the door and somebody said, disgustedly, “A deuce.”

“Like I said,” Kapp told them, “they’re all deuces. I believe we were splitting the pie, boys, before the dark cloud blew in.” Sometime, he’d started a new cigar. He clenched it, and talked through it. “I figure to do this democratic,” he said. “What we’re going to need at the outset is enforcers. Lots of them. And trustworthy. Not deuces like that one, that’ll go running back to Ganolese all of a sudden. And the boys that bring in the most arms get the most gravy. You see what I mean?”

“You mean a redistribution, Eddie?” asked Nick.

“Not at our level, Nick. We work the same as always. You’ve got Long Island and Brooklyn and Queens, Irving has Jersey and Staten Island, and Little Irving has the Bronx and Westchester. And the four of us operate Manhattan together. Same as we discussed, right?”

“Then what’s this talk about gravy?”

“Down in the neighborhoods, Nick. There’s gonna have to be a redistribution in the neighborhoods. There’s a lot of disloyal types we’ve got to replace, you know what I mean?”

Nick nodded. “All right,” he said. “That sounds like an incentive for the rest of you guys, huh?”

There was scattered agreement, and Kapp said, “Okay, so let’s talk about arms. How many and where. And how much capital do we need to get rolling.”

Two or three of them started talking at once, telling about athletic clubs and veteran’s organizations and other things, and Kapp smoked while the three top men argued with their assistants.

I didn’t care how they sliced their pie. I walked through them to the kitchen and got a bottle of House of Lords and went downstairs and got my folding chair out of my bedroom and brought it down to the dock.

There was a cold wind ruffling the sea and blowing away the words of the peasant kings upstairs. But the wall of the boathouse protected me from most of it. The sky was dark and the lake darker. I sat and smoked and held the bottle till it was warm and wet in my fingers. Then I drank from it and set it down on the warped white wood beside the chair.

After a while, the door opened behind me and Kapp came out. I could still hear the voices upstairs. Kapp came over, grinning, trailing gray cigar smoke, and said, “It’s coming along, huh, Ray?”

“I guess it is,” I said.

“And all on account of you. Now, we all got together, we got a firm base here, you know what I mean?”

“Is Ganolese the one?”

“You figured that, huh? I thought you did. Yeah, if he’s the one making the propositions, then he’s the one ordered the guns.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He walked out to the end of the dock, looked out into the darkness a minute, and then turned and winked at me, grinning. He glanced up at the lighted windows on the top floor, where his staff was readying his army, and then he walked back to me and said, “You bring me luck, Ray. I didn’t figure it to run this smooth. Only a little trouble between Nick and Irving, everybody else coming along nice. We can’t miss, boy.”

“Nick and Irving don’t like each other, huh?”

“They hate each other’s guts. Always have. But they work together. It’s the way of the world, you know what I mean?”

“I know.”

He walked around the dock some more, and then said, “You figure to go after Ganolese, huh?”

“Uh huh.”

“But there’s no hurry, right? You’re better off, you wait a while. You see what I mean?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Pretty soon, Ganolese is gonna have full hands. We’re gonna hit his bunch of bastards so hard and so often he won’t know which way is Aqueduct. That’s the time for you to slip in at him, right? When he’s too busy to see you coming.”

“I guess so.”

“Take it from me. I know the way these things work.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Sure. One more thing. What did you think of the spade?”

“Cheever? Nothing at all. What should I think?”

“I wondered if you picked that up,” he said. “But maybe you wouldn’t. You don’t have the background for it.”

“Pick what up?”

He stood there and unwrapped a cigar. “It’s this way,” he said. “A mob, an organization like this, it’s in some ways like a business, you know what I mean? Lots of details, lots of executives and vice-presidents, people in charge of this and that and the other thing, you see? No one man running the whole thing.”

I nodded. “All right.”

“Now Ganolese,” he said, “he’s the one pointed the finger at you, and Will Kelly, and your brother, and your sister-in-law. But he wouldn’t have thought it up all by himself. The word would come in, Eddie Kapp’s planning a move and thus and so, and somebody would go up to Ganolese and tell him the situation and make a suggestion. Do this or that, boss, and the whole thing is clear.”

“Cheever?”

He paused, looking out at the lake while he lit his cigar. Still looking out that way, he said, “And when an operation falls apart, it’s the guy who suggested that operation in the first place who gets any dirty jobs that might come up because of the failure. Like carrying messages to the enemy. Things like that.”

“I see.”

“I thought you might want to know,” he said. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t pick it up.”

“I didn’t.”

He chewed on the cigar, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. After a minute, he said, “You remember what we were talking about in Plattsburg, family and respectability?”

“I remember.”

“This is about Cheever again. The Negro. He wants to be respectable, too, same as everybody else. But he can’t be, and it don’t matter how many generations he’s been here, you see what I mean? So he’s liable to wind up in the organization. If he’s smart and he’s got a good education and he’s tough, he’s liable to get himself a good position in the organization. Better than he could get outside.”

“Us minorities got to stick together,” I said.

He laughed. “Yeah, boy, I like you. But I was making a point. About family. The Negro, see, he’s got the respectability itch, same as the Italian or the Jew or the Irishman or the Greek, but he don’t have the same itch about family, you know what I mean? He’s had that part sold out of him. Brought over here as slaves, Papa sold here, Mama sold there, kids sold up and down the river. And it wasn’t so long ago the selling stopped.”