I BROUGHT CARLA
and the kids home that night, but I was so nervous that every time the phone rang, I thought the police were going to come through the line, and arrest me in my kitchen for killing Nicky. So I had my heart in my hand when I picked up the receiver the next morning.
It turned out to be Elijah Barton’s brother John B.
“I was talkin’ to the man,” he said, in the usual half-swallowed voice he used when the subject wasn’t his brother the champion.
“Who?”
With John, “the man” could have meant Jesus Christ or the head of the World Boxing Federation.
“Mr. Suarez,” he explained. “He say we better come up with that money soon or somebody else gonna have the chance to fight for the title.”
I remembered the leathery skin and the paisley ascot. Suarez was the guy we’d met at the Doubloon conference a month back. The one who’d asked for the “contribution” in exchange for getting Elijah ranked in the top ten. Scumbag. Without that ranking, we had no shot at talking to Sam Wolkowitz the corporate guy and making our deal to fight on television. I saw my brave new world of spacious boardrooms and designer suits washing away with the nine o’clock tide.
“Tell that greaseball to go fuck himself.” I picked up a bread knife from the kitchen counter.
For a second, I was taken aback. It was Vin’s voice coming out of my mouth. I wondered if I’d become more like him by virtue of killing somebody. But I told myself it was just the pressure. I put down the bread knife and tried to sound more reasonable. “Exactly who does Mr. Suarez think is going to fight their guy, if not Elijah?”
“They been talkin’ about Meldrick Norman,” John B. mumbled. “He’s ranked number four among the light heavyweights.”
“But he’s a nobody! He’s a tomato can! He doesn’t have a fifth the name recognition that Elijah has. How could they give him the shot instead of us?”
“It’s that kind of business.” John B.’s voice cracked mournfully on the line. “You got to give in order to get.”
I hung up on him and started pacing around. My whole world was falling in on me. My marriage was dead. I had a murder on my conscience. And my one chance to pull out of the tailspin and finally pay off that fat bastard Teddy was fading like the fog off the ocean. My mouth was dry. I opened the refrigerator to get something to drink, but all the orange juice was gone. I’d heard Carla go out the door a half hour before, saying she was going shopping. But I needed something now. There was a can of Budweiser on the door, though. Sensuous water beads slid down its side just like they do on a beer commercial.
Without even thinking, I opened it and took a swig. The clock above the sink said it was about nine-thirty in the morning. I’d never had a drink this early in the day before. Drinking when the sun was up was for cretins like Joey Snails, I thought. But the beer felt good going down my throat and cooling my belly. By the time I’d finished it, a kind of peace had settled over me for the first time since I’d killed Nicky. I wondered if this was why people became alcoholics. I closed my eyes and relaxed awhile, listening to the hum of the air conditioner in the living room. A 5400 BTU Carrier my father took off the back of a truck in Mays Landing. Maybe one day I’d be able to buy the family a new one with my own money.
I started to hear a high-pitched squeal. Sort of a piercing sound that went right through your eardrum and into your teeth. At first I thought it was the air conditioner. But then I realized the sound was coming from the back bedroom. Maybe someone had broken in through one of the windows. An F.B.I. man or a friend of Nicky’s. I tried to remember ifI had that gun in the house, the one I’d used on Nicky. But it was still locked away in the glove compartment of my car, waiting to be tossed off the Brigantine Bridge. My only weapon was the empty Budweiser can in my hand. I crushed it and got ready to grind it into someone’s face.
But when I stepped into the bedroom doorway, all I saw was my son, Anthony Jr., sitting in front of the Macintosh computer. Carla must have left him here, figuring I could look after him while she took Rachel shopping. The squealing sound was coming from Anthony’s hearing aid. He had it turned up too loud again, and it was feeding back like a heavy metal guitar player’s amplifier.
He looked up at me with those big brown eyes. “Dad-dee, I DEE-stroyed the world,” he said. “Now I’m sad.”
He was using that game, Sim City. The one where you play God, creating the economy, the environment, and everything else between heaven and earth. Except without his older sister around to control things, little Anthony usually got too excited and would let a rainstorm wash civilization away.
“I’m hun-GRY,” he said with that overemphasis he had because of his hearing problem.
“Come into the kitchen, I’ll get you some breakfast.”
He padded in with me, holding my hand. It was a good feeling, being able to have my family home because Nicky was out of the way. But between the fight and Rosemary, I’d been so preoccupied lately, I’d barely noticed Anthony. So now I felt guilty for being a bad father.
“What do you want to eat?” I threw away my can and lifted him up to the cupboard. “Count Chocula or Trix?”
“The COUNT!”
“All right, the Count.” I pushed aside the Trix box with the white rabbit on it. “Forget the rabbit.”
“Screw the rab-BIT!”
I just looked at him for a second, realizing he must’ve heard talk like that from my wife or me. I decided it would be better not to say anything.
I put him down and mussed his hair. I had a feeling he actually wasn’t that hungry; he probably just wanted to be with me. I put some milk in a bowl and gave him a spoon.“Pour your own poison.” I sat him down at the breakfast table and handed him the cereal box.
He filled the bowl to the brim with little brown balls and smiled at me gratefully. “Sugar puh-lease?”
“That’s good,” I said. “You say please and thanks. You get farther in this world being polite than you do being rude.”
I saw him put his tablespoon in the sugar bowl and swing the heap unsteadily toward his cereal. His tongue was sticking out a little because he was concentrating so hard. He really was my son, I thought. Not just the way he looked like me, but the way he was so determined.
“D-ad,” he said. “Why you sleep in a di-fferent room from Mommy now?”
“She snores too much.”
He ate a couple of spoonfuls of his cereal and thought about it.
“There was some-THING else I wanted to ask you.” He tilted his head a little to the side, like he was trying to figure out the right way to get the next question out. “Why are all Ninja Tur-TLES green?”
I reached over with a napkin and dabbed his mouth where the milk was leaking out. “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t ask too many questions. It might not be good for you.”
The phone rang again but there was no one on the other end. I hung it up quickly, feeling a cold finger on the back of my neck. Anthony Jr. put a little more sugar on his cereal and ate a couple more spoonfuls, without taking his eyes off me.
“You know, I shouldn’t have said that before,” I told him. “Ask me anything you want. It’s good to be curious.”
“O-KAY.” He chomped loudly on his cereal. “Then why, why, why do we have to have egg-onomics?”
“You mean economics?”
He nodded slowly, giving me that wide-eyed expectant look. He was so smart sometimes. The only thing holding him back was that hearing problem. I wondered if there was some renegade gene in Teddy’s family. Between his daughter Kathy being retarded and his son Charlie committing suicide, I thought there might be something wrong that Carla, as his niece, passed on to our Anthony.
My little boy carefully put his spoon down on the table and leaned forward so he could hear exactly what I was going to tell him. I loved him so much that it killed me to think he was going to have a hard time later in life. I knew we were going to have to send him to some kind of special school. And that would cost money. Money that I didn’t have now. I had to keep going with this boxing business. I didn’t want my Anthony to grow up thinking his old man was a failure, who couldn’t provide for him.
“Economics is just a way of keeping score of who’s up and who’s down,” I told him. “It changes all the time.”
“Oh.”
He watched his cereal and didn’t say anything for a long time. I was sure he was going to ask me whether I was up or down. But instead he picked up his spoon and began eating again.
After three mouthfuls he stopped and looked me right in the eye. “Da-DDD, I just thought of something.”
I knew he was about to give me a live report right from the bottom of his heart. There was no faking with this kid. He could devastate you with an innocent question or a frown. Maybe he was about to ask me if I was going to leave his mother. I got ready for him to let me have it with both barrels.
“What?” I asked.
He took a deep breath. “Maybe all Nin-ja Tur-TLES are green because they all want to be the same.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, feeling a bubble of relief rising in my stomach. “Probably makes life easier that way.”
“CAN I ASK
you-all something, Rich?” asked the tall F.B.I agent named Wayne Sadowsky. “You a homosexual?”
“No, I’m, you know, I’m not like that.” Richie Amato looked puzzled and hurt. “Why you say that?”
“Because we’ve been meeting in this here hotel room and jerking each other off for three weeks now. Right? That’s what homosexuals do, ain’t it?”
“I don’t know,” said Richie, kneading the thick pink bedspread with his fingers and sticking out his lower lip.
They were on the third floor of a Howard Johnson’s motel in Absecon. Since getting arrested, Richie had been laying off the steroids and his body was beginning to steadily deflate like a great balloon losing air. He must have pissed away twelve pounds in the last week and a half. Folds of skin were hanging off his arms in places and there were touches of gray in his hair.
“Well, the way I see it, a real man wouldn’t do what you’re doing,” said the agent. “A real man would make an agreement and stick to it. He wouldn’t agree to cooperate and then try jerkin’ another man off.”
“I’m not jerking you off.”
“Well you sure ain’t telling me nothin’ I don’t already know,” Sadowsky said sharply.
He leaned on a pillow at the foot of the bed and his pant cuff lifted, revealing a pale hairy calf and an elastic garter holding up his sock. The two large men were only about a yard apart but they were barely looking at each other. Something about the intimacy and silence of the room was embarrassing to Richie.
“You know,” Sadowsky said. “It’s just gonna get to the point where we’ll say, ‘Hey, man, this ol’ dog won’t hunt. This man said he would cooperate and now he ain’t giving us anything. So forget the deal. Let’s just go charge him and see what happens.’ Is that what you want?”
“No.” Richie crossed his legs and hung his head like a sullen teenager.
“You know the lab result came back and said that was Larry’s blood on the clothes in the back of your car,” Sadowsky reminded him.
Richie said nothing and hugged himself, rocking slightly back and forth on the bed.
“Let me tell you, Rich, I am not without compassion,” said Sadowsky. “I understand how tough it can be for a bright young fella such as yourself. You-all grow up around wiseguys like Teddy and Vin all your life, and all you want to be is a made guy. I want to tell you, I know what it’s like to have to give up on a dream. I wanted to be an all-state linebacker when I was growing up and then I got polio. They thought they’d wiped it out but somehow I done went and got it anyway. And I used to dream every night about gettin’ on out of that wheelchair and kickin’ the shit out of some skinny-ass quarterback in the end zone. Joe Montana. I’d sit on his face. Who-haa!!”
He clapped his hands and grinned as he made the sound of impact. Richie almost jumped in surprise. But then the smile began to melt from Sadowsky’s face. “Yeah,” said the agent. “That was my dream. But when I woke up in the morning and saw I was still a gimp, it broke my heart all over again. So don’t think I don’t understand. I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t have any power to control what’s going to happen.”
Richie slowly raised his head and looked at him. “Well, if you know what I’m going through, why don’t you just let me go?”
Sadowsky laughed and laughed. “Come on, Richard. Let’s get serious,” he said, slapping his knee. “Tell me what you-all know about who whacked Larry and his son Nicky.”
IN THE TWO YEARS
I had at Temple University, I learned that everything comes in stages. There’s death, with rage, denial, acceptance, and all that. Then there’s wisdom, with satori and nirvana. But now I was finding there were different stages to desperation. Like hysteria, numbness, and oh-God-I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-deal-with-this-asshole.
The asshole in this case was a loan shark named Danny Klein. A cruddy little guy in a blue running suit and glasses, who always smelled like the bottom of a birdcage. I’d arranged to meet him in a lounge just off the Golden Doubloon’s casino floor.
He was reading a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
when I walked in, and he barely bothered lowering it as I sat down across the table from him.
“Y’know, they tell me there was a war going on a while back,” he said. “Something about oil in the Middle East. The fuck do I care? I’m already fighting the war in here.”
“What war is that, Danny?”
“The war for survival.” He folded the paper in half and put it on the table. “I’m a degenerate compulsive gambler with a severe bipolar personality disorder and a drinking problem and here I’m lending money to people in the middle of a recession. So don’t talk to me about war. I know war.”
I noticed there was a white strip of adhesive tape holding together the center nosepiece of his broken glasses. He looked like a demented college professor who’d been thrown down the stairs a couple of times too many.
“What can I do you for?” he asked with a sniff and poke at the adhesive tape.
“I’m looking to borrow some money.”
I didn’t know any other way to begin. I’d stayed awayfrom people like Danny Klein for most of my life. With the money I already owed Teddy, I had no business with loan sharks. But I was at that third stage of desperation.
“How much?” he asked.
“Sixty large.”
He whistled and I could see his eyes swimming behind his glasses. “What’re you gonna do with it? Run off and start a circus?”
“Never mind what I need it for. You’ll get it back with your interest.”
Danny’s eyes narrowed. “See, I have a problem with anxiety management, and it gets worse when I hear ‘don’t worry about it, Danny. I’ll get it back to you.’ I already have a very strict regimen of pills I’m taking. Prozac, Valium, Lithium.” He began taking out little orange prescription bottles and lining them up on the round table. “I’m trying to balance them out with my alcohol intake. And now you sit down and announce you want sixty thousand from me and won’t tell me what it’s for. Does that seem fair?”
“I’m sorry, Danny. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
But I wasn’t going to tell him about the boxing promotion either. A lot of Danny’s money came from people like Teddy and my father, and I didn’t want Danny telling them what I needed it for. It was bad enough having to sink to these depths. But I didn’t see any other way.
Danny rattled a highball glass with ice cubes in it and asked the waitress for a drink called Sex on the Beach. I just had a beer to settle my nerves. Another bad habit I was falling into.
“Anthony, let me tell you a little story,” said Danny, suddenly sitting upright. “Did you know I used to be a millionaire?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I used to be one of the top bookmakers in Philadelphia,” he said, taking a pill at random from one of the bottles and gulping it down with the drink the waitress brought him. “Every Saturday, I had forty phones ringing with schmucks trying to bet on college football. It was like a disco, everybody mumbling, ‘I gotta get down, gotta get down.’ I hadda start working with another bookie, just so I could lay offsome of the action. Ever see a job opening for a bookmaker? No. Because it’s a great goddamn business, that’s what it is.”
“Look Danny,” I started to say. “All that’s very interesting, but I promise you’ll get your points ...”
He chopped me off with his hand. “Listen, shmendrick, I’m trying to teach you something.” He paused, making sure he had my full attention. “I used to get into these manic phases where I would come down here to Atlantic City and gamble my brains out. I’d play blackjack, roulette, and baccarat, screw fifteen hookers, and then get so drunk I wouldn’t remember any of it.”
“I’m not borrowing money to gamble, Danny.” I smiled.
“Wipe that goddamned smile off your face,” he hissed. For a little guy Danny could be fierce. “I’m trying to tell you how I lost every cent I had and had to go borrow money from your father Vin and Teddy. Do you know what happened when I couldn’t pay it off?”
The question hung in the air between us for a second, and I became aware of the bells ringing and change spilling on the casino floor.
“Your father held me down on the floor by the arms,” said Danny, “and Larry DiGregorio spread my legs. And then Teddy came up and stomped up on my balls.”
I felt my scrotum shrivel.
“Yeah, you don’t know the half of it,” Danny said bitterly. “I was in the hospital a month. They hadda amputate one of my balls because it got gangrenous.” He leaned across the table and blew that parakeet breath of his right in my face. “So I wouldn’t expect much in the way of mercy if I were you, Anthony. Not if you’re thinking about missing a payment. Like I said, it’s a war in here. And in a war people get hurt. Just ask Larry.”
I started to stand up. “So are you going to lend me the money or what?”
“Yeah, I’ll probably spot you some, seeing as you got a house and a cement truck as collateral,” Danny said, scratching the back of his head furiously, like he had fleas. “But it’s a large sum you’re asking for. I wouldn’t just go to one source to get it, like Teddy. I’m learning to diversify. Like in banking. It’s an interesting parallel. The emphasis on paying off interest before the principal. I’ll discuss it with you sometime.”
“Well don’t go telling Teddy or any of the others that I’m looking to borrow all this money.”
If Teddy found out, he’d flatten my head the way he flattened Danny Klein’s ball.
Danny smiled enigmatically. “I know the value of discretion, provided you hold up your end of the bargain.”
“I will.”
“That’s good. Because I’d hate to tell Ted what you’re up to.” His smile faded.
I understood the consequences. I raised my glass for a toast and he clinked it with one of his orange pill bottles.
“By the way,” he said. “I knew your real father.”
“Mike?”
“He was one of my best customers. Never bet with his head when he could bet over it.”
“What do you mean?” I gripped the arm of the bamboo chair.
“I mean, he took a lot of chances,” Danny explained. “He was always overextending himself. Driving a car he couldn’t afford. Living in a house that was too big. Wearing clothes that put him in debt. Mind you, he was never late in paying me. That’s the only
reason
I’d consider lending you the money.”
I felt like Danny was fooling around with the cords to my heart. “So he was a good guy?”
“He was all right.” Danny shrugged. At that moment, he looked like he could’ve been born shrugging. Like he came out and said, I’m here, Mom, now what am I supposed to do?
“You have any idea what happened to Mike?” I asked.
“Should I know?” Danny shrugged once more. “He was in the war and he got hurt. That happens sometimes when you take too many chances.”