The Moonlight (15 page)

The stupid fuck tried to screw us down on the price, but I did my righteous hard guy act again and by the time I was finished we had settled on three bucks fifty a bottle.  We never had any trouble with him again.

So we turned a nice profit.  Nine fifty for the cargo, fifty for the truck and, say, another fifty for expenses.  When that came out of thirty-five hundred, we had twenty-four fifty to split.

Suddenly I was a young man with a future.  I had a partner, I had a business, I had the world by the balls.  And I had more money than I had ever seen before in my young life.  I moved out of my room in New York and found a place in Greenley, where I could walk down to the Sound every morning and take a swim.  I even bought a car.

Over the next year George and me made that run to Toronto maybe twelve or fifteen times, carrying sometimes a hundred and fifty or two hundred cases.  George found other customers—that was his great gift, sniffing out buyers—and we did very well.

We never had any problems with the cops, and only one time did anybody try to highjack us.  We rounded a curve on one of those windy little back roads in Vermont and discovered some clown had blocked it off with his car.  Just one guy, all by himself—you talk about stupid.  Well he came out from behind his car, waving a pistol—a pistol, for Christ’s sake—and I stepped down from the truck and blew him in half.  I guess nobody had told him about the shotgun.

As soon as we had unloaded the shipment in Connecticut, I climbed in my car and drove back to Toronto, where our supplier was found two mornings later with a bullet in his ear.  George didn’t much like that, but, hell,
some
body had tipped that highjacker, and you can’t just ignore these things.  In business, people have to respect you.

George never cared for the rough stuff, but that was why I was his partner.  For the most part we did pretty well together.  He had a little wife and the wife had a little baby, and sometimes they would invite me over for dinner and I was expected to hold the baby on my lap while the little creep pissed on my best suit.  George was very big on his family.  Myself I preferred less permanent attachments.

How did I feel about him?  Well, I suppose we were friends, whatever that means.  I wouldn’t have lifted his wallet or fucked his wife, even if she’d asked me—and I didn’t get the impression she thought old George was that hot a number.  I wouldn’t have boosted him to the cops.  As long as he was square with me, I’d be square with him.  George was my partner, and even crooks have to draw the line someplace.

Anyway, for a year or so things were doing fine.  Then one day I met George for coffee and he shows me this newspaper.  The headline read, “DEMS NOMINATE ROOSEVELT.”

“Who are the ‘Dems’ when they’re at home?” I asked.  “And who’s Roosevelt.”

“The ‘Dems’ are the Democrats, Charlie, and they could win the next election running a corpse.  The point is that Roosevelt has promised to end Prohibition.  In six months we’ll be out of business, Charlie.  We have to find a new racket.”

Well, the good people of Connecticut stayed thirsty straight on up to Repeal.  We made our last delivery just before New Year’s Eve, so George and I started 1933 with our pockets full.

But we didn’t have a new racket.  Not that I was worried, mind you.  I knew George would stumble onto something, and in the meantime I had a new dollie who knew how to do the niftiest things with her tongue. . .

At first there was just gambling—poker, mostly.  George knew the players and would handle negotiations with the police.  We didn’t have premises of our own so we would come to an arrangement with, say, the local hardware store, right there on Greenley Avenue, for the use of their basement.  There would be beer and sandwiches, and we would take a percentage of every pot.  I was in charge of security.  It wasn’t much of a living, and I didn’t like standing around all night.

Gradually, though, the pickings got better.  We figured out that some of these guys wouldn’t mind a little pussy between hands, so he would provide a broad who would take them on in a store room or something.  I found the broads—you need a certain type for that kind of work, because gamblers always have to think they’re winning and they like women they can push around a little—and I kept them scared enough that they never made any trouble.  If we had seven or eight players on any given night, the girl might do four of them at fifteen bucks apiece, since gamblers never seemed to mind paying, and we’d send her home with twenty.

Then we discovered cocaine.

Well, maybe “discovered” isn’t the right word.  I had been using the stuff off and on for years, and I got in the habit of bringing a packet or two with me to games, just to fend off the boredom.  Guys started offering to buy some from me, so I started bringing a little extra.  It was a money maker.

That was when I started having trouble with the Dagos.

Because, of course, I wasn’t the only one to see there was money to be made from that nose candy.  Five years before my dealer had been living in a third-floor walkup below Houston Street, but now, when I met him for a buy, he would show up wearing a fifty-dollar suit.  I started buying a quarter of a kilo at a swat, and pretty soon he got that worried look.

“You haven’t gone into business for yourself, have you?” he asked me finally.

“Nah.  I just like the stuff.”

“Nobody likes it that much—at least, nobody that’s still walkin’ around.”

On the way back to Grand Central Station, I got held up by two heavy thugs who smelled of garlic and sounded like the menu at Mamma Leone’s.  They took my wallet, they took my gun, and they took my junk.  They also left me with a broken rib and a face that looked like I’d stuck it in an electric fan.  It was bad.

When they were finished with me, and when I remembered how to walk, I found a phone booth.  At least they had left me a dime.

“Get down here, George.  Bring a couple of hundred bucks and my shotgun.”

George did as he was told and went home on the next train.  I didn’t need him, and he was just as happy about it.  I left the shotgun, wrapped in an overcoat, in a locker at Grand Central and went off to find a doctor who knew how to keep his mouth shut.

I holed up for four days, until I could move around without feeling like I was about to break apart.  Then I went looking for my dealer.

And I found him, the stupid fuck.  All I had to do was to wait until one night he walked out of his fancy apartment building, all by himself.

I fell into step behind him.  “Just turn into the next alley,” I said, the shotgun still wrapped in its overcoat.  “I’m disappointed in you, Joey.  And after all these years.”

It was a nice, dark alley, which we had all to ourselves.  I let him see the shotgun, and I thought he was gonna throw up right there.

“Who sent the goons, Joey, you or your supplier?”

“Now, listen—Charlie, you have to understand. . .”

“Who?  I won’t ask again.”

I screwed the shotgun barrel right into his groin, and after that he couldn’t talk fast enough.

“Frank Marcello, Charlie.  But he’s one of Luciano’s boys—you can’t. . .”

I’d heard enough.  I started to walk away, letting the little shit see my back.  After about three steps I turned around and gave him the full load, right in the face.  It’s amazing the mess a load of birdshot can make—I really enjoyed it.  It made me feel fine.

He died with his hand under his coat, trying to fish out the German luger I knew he carried everywhere.  That made me feel even better.

I took the luger and left the shotgun for the cops to add to their collection.

There was a phone booth two blocks away, so I put in a call to the Mott Street Social Club, which was where you could expect to find Frank Marcello on a weekday night.  Hell, was there anybody in New York who didn’t know that?

“Yeah?”

“Let me talk to Mr. Marcello.”

“Nobody here by that name.”

“No?  Well you tell him anyway that somebody just made an awful mess in Joe Gotti’s neighborhood.  You ask him if he wants to talk when I call back in half an hour, or if he’d rather I came looking for him.  I’m what you’d call a dissatisfied customer.”

I hung up and got out of there—you never know who they might send to look—and half an hour later I found another phone booth.

“This is Marcello,” the man answered, right away, right after the first ring.  That made me feel better.

So I told him what I wanted:  a reliable supply at wholesale prices.  I told him I would stay out of his New York territories.  I made no threats.  I didn’t have to.  As far as the rough stuff was concerned, we were square.

“There’s a fish place across the street from Grand Central Station,” I told him.  “I’ll have dinner there and then I’ll get on a train and go home.”

“You’ll have your answer by then.”

I took a table in the back, where I could watch the front door and the entrance to the kitchen.  I wasn’t worried they would make a try for me there, because there were too many people around at that hour and massacres are bad for business.  If they wanted to kill me, they could do that anytime.

But I didn’t think they would want to kill me.  I had killed Joe Gotti, but they could hardly expect me to stand still for what they had tried to pull on me.  If I hadn’t killed him they would have lost all respect for me, and you don’t do business with people you don’t respect.

Besides, I was offering them a good deal—they made money and they surrendered nothing.  And the Dagos are very practical people.  They yap a lot about honor and manhood and the rest of that shit, but they are very practical.  They beat out the Irish and the Jews and the Germans and all the rest of the New York gangs not because they were tougher but because they were better organized and paid more attention to business.  I was counting on that.

Still, I kept Joe Gotti’s luger on the seat next to me.

I was nearly finished with my salad when a guy in a blue suit with broad white stripes came in.  He looked around, and we made each other at once.  I was very well acquainted with his fists.

He came and sat down at my table, just as nice as you please.  Then he gave me a manila envelope.  I looked inside and found my gun, my wallet, and my junk.  I took the wallet out and counted the money, just to show I wasn’t rattled—there was an extra thousand in new hundred-dollar bills.

“Mr. Marcello accepts,” he said, like he’d just approved my bank loan.  “He says you should be in touch with his cousin, a Mr. Enrico Galatina.”

 I just nodded.  Under the table I had the luger lined up on his belt buckle, and he probably knew it.

“And about the other thing—you know. . .”  He actually looked embarrassed.  “It was strictly business.  You understand.”

“Sure.  You do nice work.  If I ever want somebody worked over I’ll call you.”

I had the impression he was pleased.

“Well—good night.  Enjoy your dinner.”

When I got home and told George, he damn near wet himself.

So all in all we had a lot to offer our customers.  But even success comes with its problems.  After a while our games acquired a certain reputation, and we’d have nights when everybody seemed more interested in getting high and getting boffed than in playing cards.  We had some pretty rowdy times, and people started to notice.  This made the cops so unhappy they began making noises about closing us down.  Also, these little parties were sometimes a trifle on the messy side.  It was getting harder and harder to find shopkeepers willing to let us have their back room.

George decided we had to have our own place.

Beth couldn’t get used to the bathroom.

Although it wasn’t really so much the bathroom as the getting there—they were all by themselves in the house so it seemed silly to wrap herself up in a towel every time she wanted to take a shower, but she couldn’t step out into that long hallway without feeling as if she were on stage at the Follies, stark naked and expected to dance.  It was all those damn bedroom doors.

She and Phil couldn’t have been more alone together, and yet she never seemed able to overcome the sense that they were not alone.  Maybe a place like the Moonlight is never completely abandoned by the crowds of people who have moved through it over the years.  Or maybe she had just listened a bit more attentively than she thought to Millie’s horror stories.

The weekend had been both marvelous and strange.  Phil with his new car was like a different person, more confident, almost cocky.  The stranger she had seen through the windshield was really him.

“How do you like the wheels, Doll?”

For a second or two, she thought he was doing a Humphrey Bogart imitation.  Except that he wasn’t imitating anyone.  He was just himself.  Except that he couldn’t seem to make up his mind which self to be.

And then the long, slow drive to the Moonlight, as if they were on a parade float.

“It’s great, isn’t it,” he said, and then, without even waiting for her confirmation, almost as if he were talking to himself.  “I’ve always liked this color—burgundy, wine red, claret, what the hell.  At night it just looks black, but in the daylight . . .”

It wasn’t until the car was in the garage, and they were walking toward the house, that she noticed the shattered headlamp.  She didn’t say anything.