26

Brooklyn, 1940

There was something about the man that made you want to hit him in the face the moment you laid eyes on him. Abe Reles, AKA Kid Twist II.

He was a short guy in a loud suit, no more than five-two, but he had arms that hung down to his knees, with huge hands and fingers that could only be described as spatulate. He had a clown’s face, or more precisely the face of a second banana in a cheap burlesque house, with a big nose and big ears, thick red lips, and big, brown doe-like eyes that could turn instantly from mischief to pathos and back again. There was something innately grotesque and corrupt about him, like a six-inch cockroach or a water rat, that made you just want to stomp and smash him out of existence.

He came in towed along by Frank Bals and the Old Man, picked up from the luncheonette where his wife had said he would be waiting. Grinning from ear to ear, as if it were he who had caught them. His eyes fixed triumphantly on Charlie.

“I can make you the biggest man in the country” was the first thing he said.

They took him into the interrogation room on the first floor, where they sat him down, still handcuffed, in a metal chair. There were no outside windows in the room, the blinds drawn over the one-way glass in the hallway. The four of them—Charlie, Burton Turkus, Jack McGrath, and Captain Bals—gathered around him, standing or slinging a leg up on their chairs.

And Tom with them, too. Not because he had any kind of official position, but because Charlie said he wanted him there. So he could witness that he was making good on his pledge to find out what happened to Panto, he knew—something he thought about over and over again, later on, after everything began to come out.

Five men in a semicircle. With Reles smirking back at them.

“I can make you the biggest man in the country,” he repeated, his eyes still focused only on Charlie. “But I gotta walk clean.”

“You’re dreamin’ if—” snapped Captain Bals, but Burt Turkus cut him off.

“That depends. What can you give us?” he asked.

“What can I give you?” Reles smirked some more. “I can give you anything you want. I can give you guys who go all the way to the top. Guys you’ll never get any other way. I can give you any murder you want. Brooklyn, New York, New Jersey, Chicago. California, Florida. Anywhere, all over the country. What can I give you?” He lifted his chin, grinning exultantly. “Just ask me.”

“We can get you a cell in the highest-security prison in the land. Put you out in Leavenworth, maybe Alcatraz, if you prefer. Someplace no one can get to you. Meanwhile, you have my personal promise that we’ll get you the lowest possible sentence—” Burt Turkus said, but Reles waved him away like a man shooing flies from a piece of pie.

“Anywhere you put me—any prison you can name, even in solitary confinement—they’ll find a way in. That’s why once it’s all over, I gotta walk. Or it’s no deal.”

“These days, we have men like you coming in every day to spill their guts, terrified that Lepke and his pals will knock them off,” Turkus tried. “Why would we need you?”

“Because you got no corroboration,” Reles told him calmly, his gaping mouth expanding into a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “According to the laws of the State of New York, you need somebody who’s got firsthand knowledge of a murder but wasn’t involved in it. All you got now is stoolies, tryna rat out their partners before they rat on them. I can tell you how every hit in this city was done, even the ones I didn’t do.”

“Why should you know about all of this?”

“I dunno, people tell me things. I guess it’s because I got a face they can trust.” He directed his grin at Charlie again. “Like I said. I can make you the biggest man in the country.”

Tom caught the look that Turkus shot his brother. Burt had already started toward the door, assuming they would go to confer. But Charlie never budged. Staring back at the prisoner for a long moment, one leg up on a chair, elbow propped on his knee, chin propped in his hand, rocking a little back and forth while he pondered whether or not to become the biggest man in the country. He looked at Turkus, who had stopped halfway to the door, and shook his head.

“Give the little man his deal,” Charlie told him, then turned to Reles. “But if you should tell me one single lie, Mr. Reles—just one little, goddamned white lie, about anything at all . . . so help me God, I’ll send you to the chair and pull the switch myself.”

“Oh, you won’t never hear no lie from me,” Reles said, grinning, then held his cuffed hands up before them, like an organ grinder’s monkey. “So now that we’re all good friends, how’s about takin’ the cuffs off, an’ let’s get started?”

 

It went on and on, deep into the early-morning hours. His voice never flagging, never halting: the little man who wouldn’t stop talking. Filling up notebook after notebook, seventy-five of them before he was finished. Giving them everything in exacting detail—names, addresses, accomplices, eyewitnesses. Descriptions of crimes that would visibly sicken the women stenos and secretaries—Abie grinning lasciviously as they asked to take a break. Reciting the whole epic story of life and death in Brooklyn, New York.

“How did you get into this? You came from a decent home,” Burt Turkus asked first, trying to elicit the thread of his life from him. Already planning how it would go in court, the story of the witness as important as the story he would tell.

“My old man used to go sell neckties from a pushcart on Shlamazel Avenue,” he said with a shrug, and grinned again. “That wasn’t for me. Me an’ Buggsy Goldstein, we wanted somethin’ a little more outta life.”

“What was that?”

“I dunno.” Another shrug. “A little money in our pockets. Broads, good food. Maybe a nice car. We were kids, we didn’t know from nothin’.”

“How did you go about it?”

“We left school, we did a little shylocking, cigarette machines, pinball. Some stink bombs, nothin’ serious—”

“Running whores. Breaking strikes,” Turkus added, but Reles only grinned some more.

“I lost count,” he said.

“You did two years for assault and battery, up at Elmira.”

“Yeah, that was nothin’. That was useful, it was only after that we knew enough to get our troop together. Me an’ Buggsy. Dukey Maffetore, George Defeo, Blue Jaw Magoon. That little punk, Tick-Tock Tannenbaum. We brought over Dasher Abbandando an’ Happy Maione from the Ocean Hill Hooligans. But when Pittsburgh Phil come on, that was like adding a whole other troop, just by himself!”

“You did another stretch,” Turkus said coolly, still leafing through his files. “One Charles Battle, a colored attendant at a midtown parking garage in Manhattan. Told you an’ your pals to pipe down when you wouldn’t stop honking for service.”

“Well, we had a little altercation. He gets on his high horse—”

“You beat him half to death with a bottle. Next day, they found another attendant, a man named Snider, who looked an awful lot like Charlie Battle, stabbed to death behind the garage.”

“Yeah, well,” said Reles with a weak smile, spreading his hands out before him. “You go tell spooks apart.”

“But Battle testified anyway. Got you two more years, this time up in Sing Sing,” Turkus said, putting the file aside and directing a level stare at Reles. “Is that what this is really all about, Abe? Too old? Afraid to do any more time?”

Reles hesitated, surprised, a shadow of uncertainty flicking across his face for the first time. “I ain’t afraid,” he said. “You go ahead an’ ask me anything you want.”

“How many men have you killed? I mean personally?”

Reles’s face brightened.

“There was Irving Shapiro, back when we was chasin’ the Shapiros outta Brownsville,” he began. “Me an’ Goldstein shot that son of a bitch eighteen times in a hallway, then dragged him out on the sidewalk an’ shot him again in the face. I did Willie Shapiro with a wire, an’ dumped him by the beach. Meyer Shapiro I shot through the ear. He looked fine, except for the blood. Then Joey Silver, I blew his head off against a tree with a shotgun. Then there was Rocco, Jack Paley, Ruben Smith. Somebody by the name a Mummy. Moe Greenblatt, an’ Jake the Painter. How many is that, ten? Oh, yeah, Whitey Rudnick, that junkie floater . . . ”

The voice was almost mesmerizing as he gladly recalled his crimes. Not flat, or dulled, but animated, almost jubilant, like that of someone remembering well-loved friends and family.

“Did it ever bother you to kill all these men? Did you feel anything?” Turkus asked.

“How did you feel when you tried your first case?” Reles grinned back at him.

“I was rather nervous.”

“An’ how ’bout your second case?”

“It wasn’t so bad, but I was still a little nervous.”

“Still a little nervous . . .”

You could almost see it in his eyes. The little man thinking, What a schvantz! This fucking guy still nervous over his second trial. But willing to go on, to work with him. A natural from the beginning . . .

“And after that?” he asked the prosecutor.

“Oh, after that I was all right. I was used to it.”

“You answered your own question. It’s the same with murder. I got used to it.”

The rest of them standing around, impressed despite themselves. Thinking how well he was going to do on the stand.

“How did you plan these killings?”

“We didn’t need any plan. We are experts,” he retorted. “You just get some kid like Sholem Bernstein to ghost you a car, change the plates on it. Then ya do the job, stash the stiff in the car, an’ leave it in some vacant lot. Maybe take it out someplace like the wood shacks in Neponsit. Canarsie or Plumb Beach, if it ain’t summer. Bury the body, or torch it in the tall grass, if you don’t got time.”

Listening to it, Tom couldn’t help thinking: Is that where Panto ended up, too?

“Sometimes they’d put up a fight,” Reles conceded. “With Whitey Rudnick, that junkie, Pep strangled him some, then he stabbed ’im with an ice pick. We wrapped ’im in a rug, but when we was gettin’ him in the car it looked like he moved a little bit. Who knows, but Happy Maione says, ‘Here, lemme hit him once for luck!’ an’ he picks up a meat clever an’ beats his head in with it. Then we had to break his legs to get him to fit in the trunk—”

The metal legs of a chair squealed as the stenographer leaped up, asking to be excused for a minute. Reles followed her rigid form avidly as she hurried out of the room and wheezed with laughter.

“Boy, did she ever look green! You never know with women, how they’re gonna take it. Did I tell you yet about Ladies’ Night?”

They shook their heads and leaned in closer, looking almost conspiratorial. Six men in a room for the moment, their jackets off, shirtsleeves rolled up. Sitting close together, the air thick with their cigarette smoke and the smell of stale coffee, to hear the story of a murder.

“It was when we hit the Ambergs for killin’ Hy Kazner. Mendy Weiss got Pretty Amberg, who he was friends with, to meet him up at Yiddel Lorber’s. You know—that joint by the on-ramp for the Williamsburg Bridge?”

“We’re familiar with Mr. Lorber.”

“He gave Pretty Amberg over to us, an’ we took him into the back room an’ cut him up with little knives, until he wasn’t so pretty anymore. Then we put him in the back of his car, an’ left it in some empty lot over in East New York.

“We was all goin’ out that night, an’ the girls was always on us about wantin’ to know what we did, what we was up to when we wasn’t spendin’ all our money on them, all that hoo-ha. So we decided to drive ’em out to that lot an’ let ’em take a look.”

He shook his head, laughing.

“We thought they’d scream, or get sick or somethin’, once they got a load of Pretty Amberg cut up like that in the back seat a that car. But they couldn’t keep their eyes off him! Starin’ an’ starin’ into that window, like they was at the freak show on Coney Island. They even drew straws, see who would burn him up. Pep’s girl, Evelyn, she won an’ got to drop the match inside the car, once we doused it with gas. We never got such tail like we did that night—”

“Enough of that!” Burt Turkus cut him off at last, as the steno came back into the room, a young, slender woman with her brown hair pinned up tightly on her head, looking pale but determined.

“You’ll keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk to us, especially when there’s a lady present. Now, we need to know why. What made you decide to kill these men?”

Reles shrugged again, looking baffled. “What made us decide? Mostly, we’d just hang on the corner outside Midnight Rose’s, an’ wait for a call.”

“Rose’s?”

“You know, the candy store. On the corner a Saratoga and Livonia, just under the No. 2 tracks.”

“A fetid little hole in the wall,” the Old Man said with a snort. “Rose Gold’s shop. Nasty old hag, claims she can’t read or write a word of English. She bails out these mutts, takes their phone calls for them.”

“We had her up before the magistrate’s bench, for a public nuisance,” Charlie said, smiling faintly. “I asked her, ‘Why do you let so many criminals frequent your store?’ An’ she told me, ‘Why don’t the police keep ’em out?’ Pretty good comeback, I have to give her that.”

“It’s open twenty-four hours, only place in the neighborhood,” Reles told them. “She let us use the back room, leave rods in the toilet for fellas to pick up. She would take phone calls for us, so’s we’d get our assignments.”

“Your assignments?”

“Sure. When somebody in some other gang wants us to knock off somebody? We didn’t have no phones. We used Midnight Rose’s.”

“A city of a million schemes, most of them formulated around lunch counters and newspaper stands,” Charlie said softly.

The grimy little corner store tucked under the long black line of elevated rail track. The yellow light out its door and its grimy windows the only thing visible for blocks in the late-night Brownsville darkness.

The gaunt, rigid-mouthed madwoman standing behind the cash register, lank hair the color of a rat’s coat. After dark would come the older men, shuffling down to get copies of the Racing Form and the early editions, to read about the Dodgers, or the war, or whatever else might distract them through the Brooklyn night of longing and trepidation. Watching the gangsters come and go, listening to the trains rushing by up above. Waiting for something, anything to happen . . .

“What assignments?” Turkus asked—most of them still not quite understanding it yet.

“You know—as-sign-ments,” Reles told them, carefully enunciating each syllable. “Somebody’d call. Usually Lepke, or Albert, but sometimes it was somebody from Luciano’s troop, or from Frankie Costello, or Longy Zwillman, over in Jersey. They’d tell us who it was they wanted taken care of. An’ we’d do it for ’em.”

“So anyone—anyone high enough in the New York mob could call you and order up a murder,” Turkus said, almost in disbelief.

“Not just New York! Anywhere,” Reles told him. “Anywhere around the country. Someone wants someone dead, they call up an’ clear it with one a the big boys. Then they pass it on to us.”

“Just like that—you order up a murder the way you would a hamburger!” Turkus said in wonderment.

“It’s better that way. You don’t have no hard feelings in your own backyard. An’ if you’re from outta town, they don’t see you comin’,” Reles explained, his eyes gleaming. “Pep loves goin’ on the road. He says it all the time: ‘Like a ballplayer, that’s me. I figure I get seasoning doing these jobs, then somebody from one a the big mobs spots me. Then, up to the big leagues I go!’”

“Pep?” Charlie asked, consulting Turkus’s notes. “That’s Pittsburgh Phil Strauss.”

“Sure. He got it down to a science. He got this leather kit bag—just enough room for a pair a pants, his silk underwear, an’ a fresh white shirt. Underneath, he’s got his gat, a rope, an’ a ice pick. Oh, he’s a genius with a rope, Pep Strauss! Even so, he ended up havin’ to kill this one schmohole in a Jacksonville movie house with a fire axe,” Reles said, laughing. “You gotta learn to roll with the punches!”

The hard stranger who brushed past you on the platform at Grand Central, or Penn Station. Anonymous as every other passenger. Neatly dressed in a suit and tie—his little leather kit under one arm. A junior executive, off on an overnight. Arriving in a strange town, unknown and unnoticed, vanishing into the station crowds. Running into him on the way back. Nodding to you in the smoker or the observation car, the same cunning leather kit in tow. His job completed. Quiet and uncommunicative, nursing a highball while he looked out the window, watching the miles of telephone poles flash by. Maybe flicking you a quick, penetrating stare when you weren’t looking, just to make sure you weren’t some kind of cop, or someone from another mob. Then returning to his magazine before you even noticed . . .

“And for this you got money?”

“Sure. Few hundred bucks, plus expenses. It added up. More’n that, though, it kept the big boys happy,” Reles explained. “They’d throw a few more rackets our way, made sure everybody left us alone. We was like an exterminator service for ’em, keepin’ down the vermin.”

They took a break, to order in more coffee and sandwiches and let the uniforms haul Reles out to the bathroom. None of them even sure what time it was anymore, but too het up to go to sleep yet, still absorbing the ramifications of what they had just heard.

“A murder business, pure an’ simple,” Charlie said, marveling. “Putting men you’ve never even met down like goddamned dogs. I knew these guys were punks, but—”

“Sure, but it’s the way of the world now,” the Old Man told him.

“This is going to be big,” Turkus said, already anticipating the headlines. “If he’s telling the truth, we can crack open every mob in this country. Lepke, Luciano’s guys—everybody.”

“None of this gets out to the papers just yet,” Charlie ordered, smoothing his hair back with his hands. “We have got to make sure he’s on the up-and-up, haul in some more corroborating witnesses if we can.”

“We have to find a place to put him,” Frank Bals added, shaking his head. “My God, he’s right—there won’t be a prison in the world where he’s safe!”

“But think of it! Any case we want, anywhere in the nation! He’s right, you will be the biggest man in the country,” Turkus told his brother.

“First things first, gentlemen! Let’s find out exactly what he really knows.”

Tom moving close to him then, as more cops brought in the cardboard boxes stuffed with cups of coffee and sandwiches in wax paper. Saying it to him alone, almost in a whisper, but making sure he caught his eye as he said it.

“You know what’s first, Charlie.”

“We’ll get to it all, Tommy.”

His face, Tom noticed up close, looking more tired than he had thought, even haggard. Looking down now, as if he were trying to avoid his eyes. Still he persisted.

“You know what we have to ask, Charlie.”

“All right, Tom. All right, then.”

The uniforms brought Reles back into the room, and it was then, when he was in the middle of his tuna salad sandwich, that Charlie asked him about Peter Panto.

“Panto? The guy makin’ all the trouble on the docks? Yeah, I know all about him,” Reles sneered, as jubilant as ever.

“Do ya now—” Tom started, leaning in over the man, but he felt his brother’s hand on one shoulder, holding him in place.

“Sure! Mendy Weiss told me all about it.”

“What did he say?” Charlie asked this time.

Reles leered up at their faces, still chewing his way through his sandwich as he answered, bits of bread and mayonnaise sticking to his stubbled face, mulched into thick white gobs in his open mouth.

“I met Mendy out in Prospect Park just after. He liked to go there, walk around the lake where no one could hear his business. This time, I notice he’s got scratches an’ bite marks all over his hands.

“I asked him, ‘What happened to you, wha’d you do, get in a fight with some frail?’

“And Mendy said him an’ Albert’s brother, Tough Tony, was waitin’ out at the house at Jimmy Ferraco’s chicken farm in Lyndhurst the night before. Somebody s’pposed to bring some wop out there they was gonna take care of. He said, ‘The guy just stepped through the door, an’ he musta realized what it was about, an’ he tried to get out—’”

“Repeat that!” Tom cried out before he knew he was saying anything. Lurching over the chair toward the little man, his whole body trembling. Charlie and the Old Man holding him back. Reles looking up at him, startled but amused. Still chewing the tuna into blobs of white in his fat face, until Tom wanted to pick up the chair and crush his skull with it.

“I said, Mendy told me they was waitin’ half the night out at the chicken farm for somebody to bring this wop they was supposed to kill. An’ when he got there, an’ got in the door, he knew what was up an’ tried to get out.”

He could see Panto’s friendly, smiling face, trying to appear as brave as ever as they drove and drove. Through half of Brooklyn, and into Manhattan, and then through the tunnel and across the Jersey flatlands. The conviction growing steadily—how could it not have?—that this was all wrong. The men beside him and up front growing quieter and colder after their earlier, forced jollity, as the houses and the possibilities of escape fell away. Their presence as large and unyielding as boulders around him. No fool, knowing somewhere deep down that he had made a mistake but still hoping somehow it wasn’t so—trying to tell himself they were just trying to frighten him, soften him up for negotiations.

Relying, still, on that absolute guarantee someone had given him. Someone big enough to get him into that car in the first place . . .

Then they would have been out past where the streets and the sidewalks ended altogether, moving through another desolate industrial wasteland. Hearing the wail of a freight train passing, the only other sound of man deep in the Jersey night. Relieved, at last, to see them come to a stop before a lonely farmhouse, a light on in an upper window. Not quite the middle of nowhere, where there could be no doubt: a gravel pit or an old construction site, with a hole in the ground dug and waiting.

At least they are sparing me that—did such an awful thought cross his mind? Banishing it immediately for a remaining, furtive hope. The big men in the car letting him out, suddenly talkative and smiling again. Telling him politely enough that they were right upstairs—whomever he was supposed to meet. The sound of the car speeding off, his hand on the railing in the dark stairway.

Surely it would all be right now, he must have thought, legs wobbly with relief. Giving him another last, lethal shot of hope, to carry him over to his death. Adjusting his tie, composing himself before he went any farther after putting that one hand on the crude wooden banister. Anxious to show them they hadn’t intimidated him.

The fear rising again in him. All the worse because, Tom knew, he had been through it before already—been trapped there, on President Street, by the Camardas’ thugs, thinking surely he was going to die.

All the worse, knowing that fear before. Thinking he should flee, he should just run out into the darkness. Hide himself down along the railbed, from where he’d heard the wail of the freight train rise. Run down into the swamps, and the dumps of scrap metal and junked cars they had passed a few miles back. Grab onto the back of a freight, or just jump into a ditch and stay there until the danger had all passed, until no one could get him anymore. Flee, hide, live.

And why not? Did he just delude himself till the end? Or was he unwilling to flee from them? To be caught at the end gaping up in terror into their faces, their flashlights?

Was that it? What led him into that house and up those steps, after the car sped off? His hope, his pride, his dignity? Or couldn’t he believe that he was really betrayed. Was it self-delusion after all? His inability to finally accept that one man—a man he must have known and trusted—would do this to another? Would leave him out here like this.

It must have seemed impossible. But at the end, he knew. When he opened the door with the light behind it and saw the men inside, he must have known right away. One look, and he must have known that his worst fear was right, shocking him into action at last . . .

“Mendy told me, ‘If I wasn’t there, he woulda got away. I grabbed him an’ mugged him.’ He said, ‘I mugged him, got my arm around his neck, and he tried to break the mug an’ get away, an’ that’s when he scratched me, an’ bit my hand real bad.’ He said he fought like a real man. He fought with the heart of a lion, with everything he had. Right to the end.”

“I guess he would’ve,” Charlie said in a low voice. All of them looking down, hands in their pockets. Save for the little man, who kept merrily eating and talking away.

“Mendy said, ‘I hated to take that kid. But Albert asked me to do it, an’ Albert’s been a good friend to me.’ He said he hated to take him, he fought so hard. He almost made it outta there—”

Reles gobbled down the last bite of his sandwich with relish, then wiped his hands of it and looked up at them all again, oblivious, his imp’s grin spreading across his face. Full of an animal contentment.

“Almost.”