17

New York, 1940

He met Mr. Big the night of the racket for Joe Ryan. Standing in the back of the ballroom at the Commodore Hotel, looking as unobtrusive as possible for a man over six feet tall, with the shoulders and chest of a linebacker, a chin like a destroyer’s bow, and a pair of clear blue eyes that promised merry mayhem.

Tom was still in mourning for Peter Panto then. Going back and forth in a daze from his law school classes to his new job clerking for Natie Cohen in his brother’s old firm. Barely able to force himself to the giddy celebration at the Saint George Hotel when Charlie won his race for the district attorney’s office a few days later. Duly nodding his head when his brother took him aside, assuring him that now that he was in charge, things would be different.

Things were too late already, he wanted to say.

The words by then beginning to appear all along the Brooklyn waterfront: DOVE PANTO? WHERE IS PANTO? Chalked and painted along the walls and the dock sheds and the warehouses, on the railroad cars and the loading trucks and inside the dark holds of the ships they worked. This strange appeal, pleading and demanding at the same time. Spreading slowly out from the waterfront and into the daylight city, to baffle the commuters and the housewives and the office workers. Written on subway tiles, and the sides of Manhattan office buildings, and the sidewalks up on the Heights and Park Slope. In leaflets in Italian and English, blowing along with the winter trash in the streets: Where is Panto? Where is Panto? Where is Panto? Still threatening enough that the shlammers, sleek as seals in their overcoats, paused long enough to get their hands dirty and reach down into the gutters for them, balling them up and throwing them into the ashcans before hurrying away.

DOVE PANTO?

But everybody knew where he was. In a quicklime pit somewhere, or a building foundation, or a rusting oil barrel bobbing among the buoys out past Seagate. The strikes were over now, the Rank-and-File Committee shut down. The old halls along the waterfront gathering dust again, as they had for so many years. Tom hadn’t gone back to the docks at all, unable to bear looking at the defeated men in their shabby loose clothing crowding in for the morning shape. Too cowed to tell the cops and the newspaper reporters anything more now than “We are men with families, and want to live.”

 

The last thing he felt like doing was putting on black tie and going to a big can racket for King Joe Ryan, but Charlie had insisted on taking both him and Jimmy, saying he wanted to teach them a lesson in practical politics. When they got there, Tom was astonished by the enormous size of the room, packed as it was to the walls with hundreds of tables, each one topped with an immense, silly floral centerpiece. Red, white, and blue bunting streaming from the balconies as if it were the upper deck of Yankee Stadium during the World Series. Blown-up photos of King Joe Ryan’s pug’s face—a face that always looked as if it were taken unawares—strung up in between.

He turned over the menu card on his plate, his eyes skimming in astonishment over the words there: “Petite marmite Henry IV . . . prime sirloin with mushroom sauce . . . bombe praline . . .” The whole event had a starchy, well-heeled air, more like a society function than a smoker. There were only a few women in attendance, but they were dressed in formal gowns and gloves and being shuttled slowly around the dance floor to the tunes of a somnambular orchestra.

All around him he could make out the faces of some of the worst shlammers from the docks, struggling with their salad forks and their marmite cheek-by-jowl with the most powerful and respected men in the City, business executives and elected officials, civic reformers and financiers. The goons and the statesmen all but indistinguishable from one another once they put on their tuxedoes.

Charlie sat between him and Jimmy, pointing out all the big men in attendance: Al Smith and Jimmy Walker sitting up on the dais, along with Archbishop Spellman, and Monsignor “Taxi Jack” O’Donnell, from Guardian Angel.

“Why do they call him ‘Taxi Jack’?” Jimmy asked with his usual innocence, enjoying himself, pleased to be away from his law studies for an evening.

“Because every year, King Joe Ryan and the waterfront businessmen chip in and put a brand-new, chauffeured limousine at his disposal,” Tom interjected. “They keep him in his little toy parish down by the docks, just so long as he goes along and does as he’s told.”

“Over there is Mr. Hague, the boss of Jersey City, and his boys. Happy Keane, and Connie McKeon, and the Little Man, John Kenny,” Charlie said, smoothing over his words, as if they had never been said. “And over at that next table is George the Fifth—George V. McLaughlin, president of the Brooklyn Trust.”

“Who’s the one next to him with the ham for a face?” Jimmy asked.

“That’s O’Malley, his flunky,” Charlie said, his voice amused. “George the Fifth’s got him trying to turn the Dodgers into a paying proposition, if ye can imagine that one. He says O’Malley even counts how many peanuts there are in each bag, poor idjit.”

“Why don’tcha tell him who else is here?” Tom asked him. Surprising himself with how furious he felt.

“What’s that?” Charlie asked amicably, sawing away at his steak.

“Only some of the worst killers on the docks. Cockeye Dunn, who runs another of the pistol locals for King Joe. Socks Lanza from the fish market,” Tom said, jabbing his finger openly about the room. “Mike Clemente from the East Side, Alex DiBrizzi, who’s uncle of the Three D’s over in Staten Island. Men who beat and crush and murder workingmen every day, Jimmy—”

Charlie admonished him mildly, hooking a thumb behind him. “Now, Tommy, everybody’s here tonight.”

Following his gaze to a far corner of the ballroom, Tom could make out Mayor La Guardia at a table with Governor Lehman and Robert Moses, the three of them sitting glumly over their sirloin.

“What’s the mayor doing here?” he asked out loud, truly astonished.

“King Joe Ryan controls the union; the union has the votes,” Charlie told him patiently. “If he wants the votes, he has to come to the union. That’s the way any city is run, Tom. Especially this city, which was the first one ever to be run by the people.”

“And where do the people come in, exactly?” Tom shot back, struggling to keep his voice down—to keep from saying something that would hurt his brother although he felt at this moment he would very much like to. “With King Joe Ryan, president-for-life? The monsignor he pays off in donations and a chauffeured car? The killers and muggers, breaking bread with us as if they were decent men?”

But by then the waiters were removing the red meat and the speeches had begun—the same sorts of speeches that always accompany free dinners, indulgent, witless, and long. After an hour or two they worked their way around to Taxi Jack O’Donnell, who was to introduce King Joe himself. He opened with a prayer and closed with a blessing, performing in between the not inconsiderable feat of looking down his nose and up to heaven at the same time.

At last he brought on King Joe, whom he praised for “bringing the return of a man’s world to our docks.” Unfathomable as his introduction was, it reduced Ryan to real tears, sliding down the long accordion folds of his florid, expressive face. Tom had never seen the man this close before. He had a fighter’s cauliflower ears and high, thick eyebrows, and his hair so dark and tightly plastered on his head that it might have been shoe polish. He had a barrel chest, and thick, flat fingers with jeweled rings that sparkled on both pinkies as he tapped them up and down. Blubbering out the gripping story of how he had risen from nothing in the world, interspersed with the usual one-liners.

“Now, I know many lies have been spoken about how we use union funds, an’ what the boys think of us, but I want to tell you right now—next to meself, the thing I like best is silk underwear!

It got a big laugh from the stewed crowd, the killers and the executives alike now stuffed with marmite and glazed in scotch. One of them yelled out drunkenly, “Behind ya all the way, Joe!” and Tom would have walked out then and there, but Charlie grabbed the end of his jacket.

“I was an orphan boy at nine, but this union has seen fit to make me a leader of men, and to sit in the halls of power. I especially want to thank Monsignor O’Donnell, who I rely upon as my advisor in all things having to do with the spirit, an’ William McCormack, of the Mooremack Lines, who has always looked out for me, and who did so much to organize this event tonight—”

“Bravo! Bravo!”

A paunchy, twinkly old man with a pair of grandfatherly spectacles on his nose was standing and applauding fervently a couple of tables away. Tom had noticed him talking and laughing raucously the whole night, oblivious of the other speakers, and now his bow tie was undone, his tux splattered with large soup stains. He looked down at one of his tablemates while he clapped. The man with those linebacker’s shoulders and chest, and jutting chin, who seemed genuinely embarrassed by all the attention, smiling gently and trying to wave the excited grandfather back into his seat. Instead, the old man grabbed McCormack by his lapels and planted a big kiss on the top of his head—the rest of the room laughing and applauding while King Joe Ryan gestured dramatically from the dais, a last tear running out of one eye.

“Who’s that?” It was Tom’s turn to ask, the faces vaguely familiar though he was unable to place them.

“Why, that’s the Holy Trinity over there,” his brother told him. “Subway Sam Rosoff, William McCormack, an’ Generoso Pope—a Jew, a Mick, and a Dago. They must’ve built half the City. Sam alone’s dug out fifty million dollars’ worth of the subway—”

“And three years ago he had the sandhogs’ union rep killed. I remember. Less than twelve hours after he broke off negotiations—”

“That’s just hearsay—”

“And Pope? Who runs that fascist sheet, Il Progresso?” Tom blurted, staring over at the third man—a handsome, fussily coiffed and dressed individual who sat with his arms crossed and his chest stuck out as if he were Il Duce himself.

“Well, now, that’s another country—”

The bombe praline arrived, a perfect tit, complete with a nipple of a cherry on top, and they all dug in enthusiastically. When the brandy and the cigars came out, Tom excused himself to wander at random between the tables, watching all the shmoozing and the glad-handing of the great and the useful.

Nobody has anything against anybody anymore, he thought, marveling, and nothing means anything. Reformers and crooks, bosses and union men. Killers and human beings—it’s all the same in here.

He saw his brother head toward one of the long corridors leading off the grand ballroom and went after him, wanting to get out of this place as soon as possible, but he lost him in the crowd of identical black coats. It was there, searching about, that he found himself face-to-face with William McCormack, standing back by a pillar and still looking for all the world as if he did not want to be seen. But neither one of them was able to move away in the crush, and McCormack nodded politely to him.

“You’re the brother,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s good to have a brother who looks out for you.”

“It is,” Tom said warily, unsure what this man could possibly want from him.

“God knows, my brother did it enough for me. He’s always had the heart of a lion, Harry.”

He nodded toward a man a few yards away who looked like a cruder, rougher version of himself—short and squat, with an even broader chest and shoulders, and hands that looked like paddles and seemed to hang nearly to his knees.

“I remember, there was one time back in the Horseshoe over in Jersey City, when I was gettin’ the worst of it from a couple a teamsters. Harry come after them with a cooperage adz. That was the end a that,” he said in a pleasant voice, a faint smile playing around his lips.

“You seem to know how to make your way around the docks,” Tom said deliberately, but McCormack only gave a soft chuckle.

“Well, let’s just say it’s not for the poor in spirit, or the pure of heart,” McCormack told him. “There used to be some hard lads down there—men like Tanner Smith and Rubber Shaw, who ran with the Hudson Dusters. I remember the night when Shaw shot Tanner, back in July of 1919, just after the Great War.”

He gave another light chuckle, like a man reminiscing over a good hand of pinochle, and looked Tom in the eye.

“The man Shaw really wanted to kill, though, was me. He come into the Avonia Club, where I was playin’ cards. Oh, that was a warm night! The perspiration was already drippin’ off our necks, so he couldn’t see me sweat. He come right up behind me, and I knew he had to have a piece on him.”

“What’d you do?”

“There was nothin’ I could do. He had me if he wanted me. All I could do was keep playin’ cards, an’ hope he wouldn’t have the balls to shoot me in front of ten witnesses.”

“And?”

“And he didn’t. He stood there watchin’ me play poker for a little while. Then he went out without a word, and went over to the Marginals’ clubhouse on Sixteenth Street an’ shot Tanner Smith.” McCormack paused significantly, the merry blue eyes dancing. “Two weeks later, he wound up dead himself over in Hoboken, where he was tryin’ to hole up. Things have a way of comin’ back around.”

“Am I supposed to take that as a message, Mr. McCormack?” Tom asked.

“Take it any way you like!” McCormack told him with a laugh that was almost charming but fell just short.

Tom didn’t know if he’d ever met a man who radiated more aggressive, animal energy—not even the shlammers who had surrounded them like so many wolves back on President Street. It seemed to all but burst from his chest, his jutting chin and jaw.

“I know you were raising hell down on my pier, and I don’t mind,” McCormack told him. “I respect a man who can stand up for himself.”

“Like Peter Panto?”

McCormack’s eyes flicked downward, as if politely ignoring a grave social gaffe. “Ah, I was very sorry to hear about that,” he said. “There’s another man who could raise some hell, and I respected him for it, too. I blame myself for not getting down there an’ makin’ everyone work it out. But there was hotheads on either side.”

“You would’ve settled it?”

“That’s what I believe in. Get right down on the job, talk it over with the men, and work it out face-to-face! That’s how the Holy Father says it should be done. We have a doctrine for it in the church; it’s called subsidiarity. Men of faith settling their differences as equals and Christians, with no one else to interfere.”

“Which is why you’re sitting at table tonight with Generoso Pope? Because you’re a good Christian?”

“Oh, Genny’s a right guy! He’s just what I’m talkin’ about, worked his way up from nothin’, same as me an’ Harry. When he first come over here he got his start haulin’ water for the hod carriers. Now he’s the biggest sand-and-gravel man in New York!”

“He runs a fascist newspaper.”

“That’s about Italy. Here in America, he’s a regular Democrat. As are we all.”

“And Sam Rosoff? He only does his killing over in Jersey?”

“Sam never killed anyone,” McCormack scoffed, “’cept maybe a few people he bored to death talkin’ about his subways. You should see him at his dinner parties! He gets so worked up he drags his guests down to one of his digs in their evenin’ clothes!”

“How about King Joe Ryan? Is it true what they say?” Tom asked.

“What’s that now?”

“That he doesn’t scratch his ass without gettin’ your written permission?”

But McCormack just laughed at him again. “Whattaya think, that I run this whole town myself? Joe’s an old friend; we have lunch sometimes over at Toots Shor’s. Just to share what we know an’ see what we can both do to keep the port runnin’ smoothly.”

McCormack regarded him coolly now, his eyes narrowing.

“We all make our way in this world. Genny, an’ Sam an’ your own brother, and what’s wrong with that?” he asked. “How else would ya have us do it? You know, my old man, he was famine Irish. He worked down the Washington Market haulin’ fruit and vegetables for thirty-nine years. Then he got sick an’ missed a day of work. One day. They gave him the sack, sent him home with half a week’s wages. Thirty-nine years, an’ it’s seven dollars an’ goodbye!”

“So—”

“So you talk about fascism, that’s what fascism is to me! Some big boss, some power nobody ever elected who makes all the rules, and no appeal. What you see here tonight, this is the alternative—all of us together sayin’ what goes. The good and the bad, an’ the strong an’ the clever. Not relyin’ on some big, faceless power like the Port Authority they’re always pushin’ to have take over the harbor. I’d just as soon have Harry with his adz to even things up—”

He stopped talking abruptly as another man joined them, this one about Tom’s age. He slipped a horse’s neck into McCormack’s hand with the obsequiousness of a butler, and Tom noticed that he was holding one himself, the two of them contentedly sipping their ginger ales with lemon slices when nearly every other man in the room had brandy and a cigar in hand. He nodded at Tom but said nothing until McCormack introduced him.

“This is my son, William Junior,” he announced with a pride and a warmth that surprised Tom.

Junior was a little slighter and finer boned than his father, and more serious-looking, his hair still dark and his deep-set eyes studying everything closely. Bill Senior, he noticed, kept his eyes on him the whole time.

“Bill here is taking over our new gas station chain, Morania Gas and Oil. Just two years out of college, and already he’s my right-hand man. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”

William Junior demurred—“You’d do every bit as well as you always do, Da”—but the pride he took at the compliment was evident in his voice. He looked at Tom. “I’m just trying to learn what I can from him.”

“We was just havin’ a bit of a chat about church doctrine an’ the New York waterfront,” his father told him, a note of warning in his voice that Tom decided to ignore.

“And what happens to the likes of Peter Panto in subsidiarity? Where does he fit in? Or does he just fall through the cracks?”

“That was a shame,” McCormack said, his great predator’s jaw snapping shut. “Nothing of that sort should ever happen.”

“How could it not happen? Have you seen the men who run things on your piers, Mr. McCormack?”

McCormack nodded grimly, still looking at his son more than Tom.

“It’s true, there’s too many of these boy-oes gettin’ beyond themselves just now. That’s the trouble after all these years of labor an’ management fightin’ one another. Each side bringin’ in their gangsters. We’re goin’ to clean ’em all out now that we’ve elected an honest, decent man like your brother district attorney. You have my word on that.”

He said this last with such gravity and sincerity that Tom could almost believe he meant it. Before he could think of how to respond, McCormack thrust a hand out, and Tom grasped it despite himself, feeling the power of his grip, the rough, horned palm and gnarled fingers of the old teamster. McCormack staring him straight in the eyes as he did so, his gaze steady and riveting.

Bill Junior spoke up then, breaking the spell. “Mr. O’Kane, I believe I saw your brother just down the hall. He was talking with the governor.”

McCormack dropped his hand and clapped him on both shoulders, grinning a wide, lupine grin at him. “That’s what I mean! Man to man. Don’t worry, lad, you’ll see things change!”

At that moment Charlie reappeared, his brow furrowed. Governor Lehman veering off behind him looking, as always, as serene as an Italian cardinal.

“He’s gonna name a special prosecutor,” Charlie said, walking up and talking to them at once. “That goddamned Lehman! He’s going to appoint someone to look into Panto, and all the waterfront locals.”

“Who, Charlie?” asked McCormack right away.

“John Harlan Amen.”

“He’s a good man. Completely incorruptible,” McCormack answered, making each word sound like an indictment. Tom could only look on—stunned by just what good terms his brother seemed to be on with McCormack, how intimate they were with each other. He noticed as well that Bill Junior had already receded somewhere into the crowd.

“He can’t do this to me!” Charlie said, turning to Tom, his face red with anger. “I just got in, and now he wants to take my biggest case away from me!”

“Maybe it’s for the best, Charlie—”

“The hell it is! It’s cutting my balls off. It’s caving in to that goddamned Dewey because Lehman’s scared the man’ll beat him the next time out!”

“He can’t just appoint some uptown reformer like Amen,” McCormack put in. “He doesn’t know Brooklyn; he doesn’t know the docks the way you do. They’ll screw the whole case.”

Charlie pulled himself up straighter, tugging down the lapels of his tux jacket.

“We’ve got to head him off,” he announced to Tom. “We’ve got to find a way around him.”

“Whatever you need, Charlie,” Bill McCormack said, quietly as a prayer, before Charlie nodded a terse goodbye, pulling Tom away with him.

There was a sudden swelling in conversation around them, and Tom had the distinct impression that he had been subjected to some kind of performance, though what and why, he could not for the life of him imagine. But before they could leave, a familiar, frog-like figure with slits for eyes brushed hard past Tom. Emil Camarda. Pausing only long enough to pump his distracted brother’s hand and bestow on Tom a knowing, gold-flecked smile.

“See?” he said. “I told you I’d be glad he was elected!” And then he was lost again in the world of men.

 

The following night they made the raid. Tom had just reached the DA’s office when the black, armor-plated sedan sped up out of the garage and jerked to a stop at the curb beside him. The back door popping open, and a voice commanding tersely from within: “Get in.”

Tom bent down to see his brother in the back seat, Captain Frank Bals, in full dress uniform and regalia, there beside him.

“What, you were going to leave without me?” he said, trying to joke, but both men’s faces were rigid. He saw then that the police captain was holding something by his side, pointed at the floor.

“Jesus, Frank, is that a Tommy gun?”

“Just get in the damned car. Now!” Charlie barked, and Tom did as he was told and slid himself in.

“Why all the mystery, Charlie?” he said, trying to joke again, but one look at Charlie’s unsmiling face told him not to.

Just then more long, dark official police cars began to speed out of the underground garage like bats startled from under a bridge. They poured out over the hump of the driveway, then gunned their motors, accelerating noisily away. On many of them, he noticed, still more cops resplendent in full-dress uniforms were clutching tightly to the running boards. After them came the white, red-crossed ambulances, and the boxy black Mariahs, the whole scene reminding him of nothing so much as a gangster movie about Chicago.

They roared off with the rest, a motorcycle escort falling in around them. Neddy Moran, phlegmatic and morose as ever, was behind the wheel. A pair of assistant DAs up there beside him, leafing hastily through thick piles of warrants on their knees. They didn’t have far to go, just a slight hitch from the courts down through North Gowanus to the docks, but through all their urgent rides together over the years—all their adventures—Tom had never seen his brother look so agitated and fidgety. He was dressed as splendidly as the cops, Tom noticed—new, dark-gray alpaca coat, a Borsalino with a gray silk band on his head—but he couldn’t seem to keep from rubbing his hands together, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

“We just got word—Governor Lehman’s special investigator is about to make his move. We put this little flying squad together on the fly,” Charlie told him.

“What? You were serious about that?”

“Of course!”

“But shouldn’t we let them have it? They’re the state, after all. John Harlan Amen, he’s always been on the up-an’-up. Why—”

“Because it’s mine, don’tcha know it, Tommy!” his brother snapped at him, so vehemently it made the heads of Frank Bals and the two ADAs swivel about—Neddy Moran even checking in the rearview mirror. “Because it’s my territory, my jurisdiction, my case! How else d’ya think a DA makes his way in the world—by letting other men make his cases for him?”

“Is that what this is about? Territory?” Tom asked, his voice soft with disappointment.

“No, of course not,” Charlie said, less harshly, in a low, urgent, confidential voice that made the other heads in the car swivel away again. “It is about me bein’ able to do my job. Jesus, Tommy, don’tcha see it? If Dewey can get Lehman to supersede me with some special prosecutor, if he makes me look like I’m one more machine hack, I’m finished.”

“I see that,” Tom admitted glumly.

“We can’t afford to let ’em louse it up,” Charlie continued. “A buncha special cops an’ special lawyers from Albany! If they blow it, the Camardas can do as they please.”

“The Camardas? We’re raiding the Camardas?” Tom asked, his head reeling. Charlie grinned at him.

“Now will you trust your big brother?”

They drove into Red Hook and pulled up by the Atlantic Basin, making only about the noise a small mechanized army would make. But to Tom’s surprise there was no sign of any activity from the docks or the pier sheds before them—the Camarda headquarters where he had gone with Peter Panto just months before.

There was instead a silence so sudden and complete, he could hear the water lapping at the pilings, the way he used to love to hear it early in the morning. Then, all of a sudden, a great bank of white klieg lights snapped on, as if someone had shouted Action! on a movie set. Just as abruptly, there was the noise of car doors opening and slamming shut, men running past them and shouting orders, toting shotguns and rifles and Tommy guns.

The Old Man was on them then, rushing up to the door before Frank Bals even had it opened, and Tom felt a rush of relief. He, too, was in his best dress uniform, but all business, speaking quickly and succinctly to Charlie.

“Nothin’ moves in or out of Red Hook tonight! We got roadblocks up all along Hamilton Avenue. We even got the harbor patrol out in the channel!”

As if on command, a new bank of dazzling white lights opened up on a row of little police boats, out over the water.

“‘One if by land, and two if by sea,’eh, Jack?” Charlie crowed. “But then, I can’t imagine the Camardas travelin’ by sea! What about the state’s men?”

“They’re holed up in some warehouses over on the Bush Terminal. Just waiting for the word,” the Old Man said with a smirk.

Charlie turned back to Tom, giving him a dazzling grin. “Just make sure to smile for the cameras!”

Even as he spoke, a herd of reporters and news photographers were leaping out of their cars and racing after the cops, flashes already popping brittlely in the cold, late-March night.

“Is that why all the dress uniforms, Charlie? And the new clothes?”

His brother shrugged, gave a mischievous boy’s smile. “Well, you have to give them a little of the show business, Tommy!”

He turned and walked toward the docks, where literally hundreds of cops were swarming about the piers and the Camarda locals. The Old Man had already taken charge, leaping up on a customs shed with a bullhorn, loudly directing his squads of cops as they hauled in anyone in sight for questioning. The uniforms striking dramatic poses with their big guns, dropping down to one knee or even their bellies and aiming, like doughboys firing on a German trench. Special detectives emerging from the Camarda sheds with armloads of fat ledger books they hauled ostentatiously past the news photographers, depositing them with a flourish in the armored cars Charlie had ordered up for that purpose. The assistant DAs trotting around waving their warrants like priests sprinkling holy water at anyone who seemed likely to resist arrest.

There were precious few of them. Plenty of likely-looking shlammers came staggering out of the pier sheds, all right, blinking and squinting into the harsh lights. The papers reported more than a hundred arrests before the night was over. But none of them the Camardas themselves, or the Anastasias. The men they did find strangely passive, none of them giving the cops even the usual lip on an arrest.

“That’s the way, spare us the kid gloves!” Charlie was exulting anyway as they were wrestled roughly into cuffs and hauled away.

All of it still reminding him of a movie he had seen once, or maybe a movie about a movie—the blinding klieg lights, giving everything an otherworldly glow. The photographers running here and there, flashing their pictures, the cops bustling about striking poses and barking orders to no one. Everybody moving, everybody shouting, and the car doors slamming and the sirens blaring, and all of it so coordinated that he was tempted to look around for the director.

Instead, he turned his gaze back toward the shabby streets that butted up against the docks, where the people of Red Hook had come out to see the show. The longshoremen who lived in the worn brick tenements and the sagging wooden boardinghouses just off the docks. Standing with their wives and children, old coats and robes wrapped around their pajamas against the March-night chill. All of them watching the scene silently, hands shoved into their pockets or up in their armpits, faces unreadable as the water before them.

 

The raid went on all through the rest of the night and well into the next day. The whole drill just as loud and contrived back at the DA’s office. Lawyers and secretaries striding purposefully up and down the halls. Shouting out instructions to prepare indictments, pulling rap sheets and mug shots, while the reporters and photographers scrambled after them, scribbling notes and popping still more pictures.

Tom all but giving in to it himself, he knew. Unable to keep from grinning as he watched all the shlammers and the Camarda thugs being hauled in—thrown into cells, dragged downstairs to be given the third degree. And Charlie—Charlie moving tirelessly back and forth between his assistant DAs and the reporters, issuing statements and squelching rumors. A squad of huge cops under the Old Man’s direct supervision carrying in the union books at one point, where he had them locked away in the office vault for the photographers. Frowning as sternly at the ledger books as if they had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby.

Tom walked among it all in a near daze, wanting to believe, but not quite able, somehow. The whole moment like a dim newspaper cliché, by way of the funny pages and Dick Tracy: CAMARDAS’ EMPIRE BROKEN IN A NIGHT!

“I halfway expect Flat-Top to surrender himself next,” he joked to his brother.

Charlie didn’t laugh, and Tom supposed he couldn’t afford to do so, with the flashing cameras all around him. And the next day, sure enough, there were the pictures, along with the headlines three inches high, blotting out even the news of the war. Before the week was out, Charlie was in charge of the whole case. Governor Lehman and John Harlan Amen, the special prosecutor from Albany, confident enough in his work to hand over all the files, and that was almost enough to make him believe, too. The idea that such high and mighty individuals would trust in his brother, even if the people of Red Hook reserved judgment.

But then . . . nothing. Little by little, week by week, month by month, it all fell apart. No indictments passed down, no trials held. All the petty goons from the docks quickly and quietly released.

“The books were fakes, phonies,” Charlie told him when he couldn’t comprehend it. Just shaking his head when Tom still refused to believe it. “To look at ’em, you’d think they were running the ladies’ junior league.”

“What? How?”

“Those feckin’ Camardas set us up, that’s how. They had a dummy set of books ready an’ waitin’ for us. I should’ve seen it coming, but I was in such a hurry to keep the state from lousing it all up.”

“I don’t understand. What about the witnesses, all those arrests?” Tom said helplessly. “Didn’t anyone tell us anything?”

“They all dummied up, every last one of ’em. Most of ’em were small fry anyway, hangers-on. Maybe they were a setup, too,” Charlie said, red-faced, and gave him a small, embarrassed shrug. “This is the waterfront. I warned you: it’s a different world.”

“So what now? What do we do?”

His brother shrugged again.

“I dunno. Whattaya got?”