“Take her home, Istvan. I won’t need the car until the usual time this evening.”
“Yes, Mr. Blatta.”
“Before then, find Mite and take him wherever he wants to go.”
“Yes, Mr. Blatta.”
“And then tell me where that is.”
“Of course, Mr. Blatta.”
Kockroach pats the woman’s knee and slips out of the Lincoln. On the way to the entrance, he feels something squirm up his sleeve. A small cockroach climbs out and halts on the cuff, its antennae waving gently. Kockroach lets it climb onto his finger, pets its back, drops it through a grate in the street leading to the sewer, the promised land.
“Good morning, Mr. Blatta,” says the doorman in his tall brown hat.
“Busy night, Mr. Blatta?” says the porter standing by the door.
Kockroach slaps green tributes into their hands as he walks through the door into the lobby.
“Your guest is waiting for you, Mr. Blatta,” says the desk clerk.
“Very good,” says Kockroach.
With a ding of the bell the elevator arrives, white gloves slip out and hold the door as Kockroach steps in.
“Going up, Mr. Blatta?” says the operator.
“To the top,” says Kockroach.
Was one more player
you needs to know about, missy, one more piece what moved across the Square like a deranged knight.
I can see him still, swaggering into some Times Square titty shake. His hat is shiny with grease. His cheap suit is rumpled, like he slept in it two nights running, which maybe he did. His tie is loose, his loose jaw unshaven, his socks smell like old socks.
“Shoot the sherbet to me, Herbert,” he says to the barkeep in a voice with more hoarse in it than what’s running at Aqueduct. He leans an elbow on the bar and checks out the merchandise. “Gin, straight up. On the house.”
“On the house?” says the bartender, whose name is not Herbert and who is new on the Square so he ain’t tuned in.
“And put an olive in it.”
“Who the hell are you to be getting a drink on the house?”
This Joe he flips up his fedora with his pinkie and stares at the sap for a moment. Then he grabs the barkeep by his bow tie and jerks his fist down till the bartender’s forehead it slams smack into the bar. He drags the bleeding face an inch from his own. His breath smells of cheap cigars, of raw onions on street-corner dogs, of wanton unwashed women.
“The name’s Fallon, you piece of dick,” he says. “Lieutenant Nick Fallon. Vice.”
He rose from the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen, and he fell back into them streets afore it was over, but whilst he patrolled the Square, collecting his envelopes and pulling in rubes by the truckload, Fallon was a power. He kept his thumb up everyone’s ass, just to be sure of the temperature, and everyone smiled whilst he did it, because he could make things easy for you on the Square, or make them very very hard. And missy, easy was better than hard when it came to Fallon. Manys the poor sap what ended up in the precinct house cage with Lieutenant Nick Fallon’s fists asking the questions and the answers already written down afore ever they let slip a word. But he wasn’t all hardworking cop, he had a sweet tooth of his own. What else could you expect from a man with vice in his very name?
“You ever have yourself a threesome, Mite?” said Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice.
“No, Lieutenant.”
“I had one going on last night. Two girls. One of them had legs up to here, the other had Himalayas out to there, and they both still had all their teeth. Fancy that.”
“Why you telling me, Lieutenant?”
“I’m telling everyone.”
Fallon had yanked me by my collar out to the beach, the thin triangular strip of cement and grate just south of Forty-sixth, and now he was lighting one of his Cuban candles as cars and trucks wheezed by on either side. With the hubbub, the traffic, the backfires and horns, the pall of smoke and noise ris
ing around us, the beach, in the middle of everything, was about the most private place on the Square.
“A threesome’s like eating in a chop suey house. And in between, while you’re waiting to get hungry again, you don’t even have to entertain them, they can entertain themselves. You know how rare it is, a guy looks like me, setting up a threesome with two broads look like that and still got all their teeth.”
“I’m guessing raw.”
“All their teeth.”
“I’m happy for you, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah, well don’t be. Just as it was getting interesting, a call comes in from my captain. The only bite mark I got on my ass was from his chewing me out, Mite. So I am angry, I am blue, and I want to know what the dick is going on.”
“Just the usual, Lieutenant.”
“You think it usual for one of Tartelli’s boys to end up dead in an alley? You think it usual for the Abagados clan to have a powwow just a few hours before the killing? You think it usual for my captain to suddenly take an interest in what goes on in my territory. You think that’s good for any of us? Get smart, Mite. Something’s up and I need to know about it. You owe me.”
“Hell if I owes you anything.”
“Hell you do. Take a gander,” he said, spinning around to view the whole of Times Square. “Everyone your eye can spy owes me. I keep it safe, I keep it running, I keep everyone in business. You want they replace me with another Johnny Broderick, the cop who handled the Square before I did?
Johnny Broderick, tapping you on the shoulder with a newspaper wrapped around a lead pipe. He stuffed Legs Diamond headfirst into a garbage can one block down from here, stuffed him into that can and good as finished him off right there. You want another Broderick running the Square?”
When he talked of that Johnny Broderick, something fierce and hard glazed Fallon’s bloodshot eyes, and looking at him then, and his thick lips wrapped around that cigar, I saw a touch of froth flit around the corner of his mouth. Just a touch, but it was enough to roil my stomach.
It was going to end up bad, the whole thing, I could see it in his eyes, in the froth at his mouth, the way his hand rolled into a fist for emphasis. It was like a curtain was dropped and I could suddenly see he was made of the same cement and asphalt what we was standing on, what ran from our feets east and west, north and south, off the beach, through the streets, in a great stinking sea of stuff what died at both rivers, made of the same grist as was all the raw matter of the city. He was a cop, but that was a lie, because it made him sound like he was something different from the rest of it when he was the same as everything else of it, all of it, even me, all of it. And his lips they was foaming and his eyes they was glazed and he spun around to make a point and it wasn’t no more a cop before me or even a man but a piece of the world what was animated only by Hubert.
I held my stomach and looked down Broadway and tried to blink the sickness away and I did, this time I did, and when I turned back it wasn’t this nameless piece of matter facing off
with me no more but a cop, and not just any cop but Lieutenant Nick Fallon, Vice. And I had blinked it away and could go on like it never happened, play it tough and cool like it never happened, but it did and I felt it in my bones, along with the certainty that it was all, the whole thing, going to end up bad.
“So what do you know, Mite?” he said.
“I don’t know nothing.”
“A midnight meeting at the Acropolis. Every big dick from Abagados down. I even heard Blatta was there.”
“Who?”
“Don’t be coy with me, you son of a dick. Start motivating your mouth. What did you boys talk about?”
“Moussaka.”
“Is that a fact? So tell me,” elbow in the ribs, ready for the coded clue, “what was decided?”
“The key is salting the eggplant. Kosher salt works best.”
“Kosher salt, huh? Is that why Zwillman he dicked Stanzi? Not enough
kosher
salt?”
“Zwillman? Is that what happened? I heard Stanzi, he choked on a knish. That Stanzi, he always liked a good knish.”
Fallon looked at me, licked the froth off his lips, filled his mouth with smoke, blew it in my face. “We got a good thing going here, Mite. Don’t let them ruin it for us.”
“Them? Who them?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? The coroner says you can’t swallow dick if your throat’s crushed, as you could find out firsthand. I won’t let a war break out on my turf unless it’s my war, understand? I find out who is starting up I’ll get an army
in here to finish it, understand? I’ll be back, and when I do, don’t dick with me, Mite. I want answers.”
Didn’t we all, just then, didn’t we all.
What that iceberg it was to the Titanic, the knish sticking out of Rocco Stanzi’s mouth, the most famous potato knish in the history of gang warfare, was to our peace. The whole delicate arrangement forged between Abagados and Zwillman and Tartelli, the whole beautiful alliance against J. Jackie Moonstone, was shot to hell. Tartelli, he immediately blamed Zwillman for the Stanzi hit, using as his proof the Yonah Schimmel knish, what was baked in the Lower East Side, Zwillman’s territory. And with that accusation Zwillman, slipping into his normal state of apoplectic paranoia, pointed his thick finger at Abagados, what had had his troubles with Stanzi in the past. And Abagados, an old man who had fought too many battles, who had actually lost his fingers as a young Greek soldier in the century afore this one, Abagados struggled with all his powers, political, physical, and persuasive, to bring back the peace. But his efforts were stymied by a series of hit-and-run massacres on the border territories that kept the general uproar uproarious. And nobody knew nothing, nobody, including me, especially me, nobody except those what did, who weren’t saying.
“Same as it always was,
Nonos,
” I said, alone with Abagados in the back room of the Acropolis. “Everything’s the same with him. I been looking like you asked and I ain’t found nothing.”
“Look harder,” said Abagados.
“I don’t know what it is I’m looking for.”
“Anything that is different, anything that is wrong. Find it and bring me.”
“I’m trying.”
“Trying? I spit on trying and stamp into dirt. Look at what is happening. Only one man strong enough, treacherous enough, only one man won’t let you look him in the eyes.”
“He’s always been loyal to you,
Nonos
.”
“You know why he wears dark glasses? So I can’t see into his soul. But when I shake his hand I feel it. It is my talent, I could always feel it. His is cold, hard, ruthless, it is like something dark and small, like something that crawls across your skin in the night. It is why I liked him at the start, a valuable friend he can be. Also a deadly enemy. But so am I, Mickey, so am I.”
“I’ll keep looking.”
“You will find, you will bring me proof of his deceit. And this proof, it bind together once again all the families. And together we will destroy him and dance the dance of wolves on his carcass.”
“Add some dip and a swing band and it sounds like a party, Mr. Abagados. But what about me? Blatta and me, we came in together.”
“Mickey, my friend, Mickey.” He lifted his big mangled hand and slapped the side of my face gently afore clasping his claw onto my cheek. “Find. Bring. They tell me there is no winter in California, just sun. Do you know how to swim?”
“No,
Nonos
.”
“You will learn.”
“Or die trying?”
He didn’t smile, he didn’t nothing. Whatever reassurance I was hoping to see in his bitter old eyes, all I saw was a vacancy as dark as Blatta’s dark glasses.
So nows you know, missy. Me sitting here, spilling out the whole story for your snitch-sheet exposé, this ain’t the first time I betrayed the Boss. Mr. Abagados, what he had wanted that long-ago night at the Acropolis when he rolled me the lemon was for me to spy on Blatta. And I had agreed. Playing Judas, I suppose, is simply my natural role in the Boss’s little passion play.
But this I knew with a searing certainty. That thing what happened with Fallon on the beach, that lowering of the curtain and seeing all the city and the fools within it as nothing but the grist of the world? It was happening. Again and again. It was filling me like a fever. It was only a matter of time afore I started spinning and foaming myself. I needed to make something happen, fast. I needed to get on the train west with Celia, fast. I needed to take hold of her love and clutch it like a sword and swing with all my might and separate old Hubert from his head, and I had to do it fast. Because I was losing it, losing it, I was losing it.
“Anything that is different,” had said the
Nonos,
“anything that is wrong.” I crisscrossed the Square looking for something what didn’t make no sense to me, I asked whoever would stand still for the asking, and then the something, it hit me like a punch in the face.
I didn’t let Istvan take me. He had been showing up every afternoon at my hotel waiting to whisk me to wherever it was I wanted to whisk, but I didn’t want to go where I had to go with him. I let him take me on my rounds and then, with him waiting in the street, it was in the front of Toots’s joint, around the big round bar, out through the kitchen, into a taxi afore being let off in the middle of a wide deserted street smelling of blood.
A fog was rolling off the Hudson, a sickly mist. And I walked right into it, turning right then left, crossing a wide cobbled street.
It took me a while to find her, them piers they was one just like the next, hard to tell apart, and telling apart the girls what inhabited them was even harder, each a scabrous spider, clinging precariously to her collapsing web. In the cloaking mist I wrongly approached two strange creatures what grabbed at me like I was a last pitiful hope until I broke away.
But eventually I found the right pier. I stood under the single light and observed a peculiar shadow at the river’s edge. An irregular shadow, moving about in slow motion with a steady skritch heard just over the lapping of the water, an inhuman skritch skritch, evidence of some readjustment of finances and fluids.
“Come to check on me, Mite?” she said after half the shadow had scuffled off and she had slipped back into the dim cone of light. “Come to make sure I’m not taking too many coffee breaks?”
“How you doing there, Sylvie?” I said, but I didn’t need no answer from her.
She seemed as if she was in the middle of some great fever, bone skinny, shivering and sweating both, her swollen hands shaking at her sides. Her skirt was ragged and filthy, her blouse torn, a long scab darted across her neck. Dirt was streaked on her leg, her forehead, so that she blended into them shadows like a ghost.
“Spend a night here,” she said, “in this fog that soaks through to the bone, and see how you hold up. Got a cigarette?”
“Sorry. Gum?”
“Thanks for nothing. What, did Jerry send you to tell me something? Does he even still know I’m alive? Does he care?”
“Sure he does.”
“Tell the creep if he wants to send a message he knows where to find me. All right, let me have a stick.”
I reached into my pocket, pulled out a Doublemint, watched her unwrap the foil. The boards creaked beneath our feets, some ship offshore, hidden in the fog, belched its horn.
“And this, after all I did for him,” she said. “I was the one who spread the word about him to the other girls. I taught him to dance.”