THE LITTLE MAN BEHIND the counter was getting to be a rarity in Greektown, an immigrant who didn’t go home to the suburbs after dark. His scalp glittered in the fluorescent light through curly hair gone the pink of his skin and the weight of his moustache seemed to be pulling his flesh away from the bone. His eyes, one of them cataracted, looked a question that through the years he had pared down to no words at all.
“Ouzo,” Rick said.
The Greek glanced at the clock at the end of the counter—two minutes to 2:00 a.m., closing time—seemed to shrug, and bagged a plain bottle off the shelf behind the cash register. He made his only comment as he was handing Rick his change. “Drink a hole in a clear morning.”
Rick drove home, poured two inches of the clear spirits into a tumbler, and added water, watching the liquid cloud up. That part always fascinated him. The first sip tasted like licorice. By the fifth the taste was no longer noticeable.
In high school, when the Model A died finally, he had worked nights pumping gas until he’d saved $150, enough to buy a 1939 white Oldsmobile coupe off a widow in the next block who hadn’t had it out of the garage since her husband died. For weeks he’d haunted every junkyard within reasonable driving distance of his parents’ home, picking up a carburetor here, a set of plugs there, and when he was finished with the Olds he had what he still liked to think of as the first genuine hot rod in Detroit. He’d have framed his first speeding ticket—ninety-two in a twenty-five—if he hadn’t had to send it in with his payment. It had cost him the price of a new set of tires and the use of the car for one whole summer when his father found out.
Sitting there drinking he could smell the Olds’s mohair interior.
He hadn’t had a drink alone since leaving the police department. Not that he had any such problems, but he had seen good officers under hack for some chickenshit complaint drink themselves right out of society, and he hadn’t been about to give those maggots at I.A.D. the satisfaction. He topped off his glass from the bottle.
With his first paycheck from the city he had made a down payment on a 1957 Chevy, red and white with tail fins till hell wouldn’t have them and a speedometer that topped out at 120, although he had found out on the John Lodge that it would do better. Within six months the car was repossessed for missed payments. It was the memory of that, being dropped off at home by his partner at the end of a double shift to find the Chevy gone and a note from the finance company, that had changed his view of department regulations prohibiting the acceptance of gratuities.
He could read the shelf clock that had come with the apartment without turning on a light. Outside the window the night sky was beginning to peel away from a pale horizon.
In between there had been a Buick sedan, black, with a profile like the tortoise leaning forward at the starting line and three silver holes on each side of the hood and an exhaust that sounded like a twin inboard. He had wrapped that one around a telephone pole in rural Oakland County, total wreck and ten days at Receiving with his jaw wired shut and one leg in a cast. A salvage yard had given him forty dollars for what was left of the car, just about what Rick had paid for anesthesia.
Cars were his life, the little bratty fast ones and the big chesty loud ones, the high-strung foreign jobs that spent most of their time on hydraulic lifts and the Norman Rockwell workhorses that idled their way up vertical hills and kept on going miles after their crankcases squeaked dry and all the water had boiled out of their radiators. He would rather spend Sunday under a greasy chassis with particles of rust falling into his eyes than a week in a whorehouse, and what did he have to show for it, this lifelong love affair with the internal combustion engine? A leg that still throbbed every time it rained and a furnished apartment with a bum shower. And a stack of letters just now catching the light on the writing desk by the window.
He poured another two inches, without water. The letters interested him more than the chemical reaction now.
Man Killed in Puerto Rican Coup Attempt
SAN JUAN (UPI)—A 64-year-old man was slain in the crossfire between bodyguards of Governor Roberto Sanchez Vilella and rebels during an attempt to assassinate the governor on the veranda of the Hotel Pinzón late yesterday afternoon.
A group calling itself the People’s Army for the Liberation of Puerto Rico (PALP) is believed responsible for the assault by four men with revolvers on the governor while he was having tea with friends and associates in the open-air café. Vilella, uninjured, was rushed from the hotel by members of his bodyguard while the others exchanged gunfire with the rebels, all of whom escaped. The victim, whose name is being withheld pending notification of his family, died instantly when bullets struck him in the head and chest …
“I’ll take a wild guess.” Lew Canada leaned forward in his chair and laid the long sheet of newsprint on the desk. “The victim’s name was Francis Xavier Oro. Frankie Orr for short.” The man behind the desk put aside the sheet. “He was traveling under a Brazilian passport in the name of José Antonio Pérez. That’s the name we’re releasing. The story’s just going out over the wires now. It’ll be in the afternoon papers and on the Six O’Clock News.”
“Who fucked up?”
Randall S. Burlingame stuffed an ugly black pipe from a leather pouch with a history. He was tall even when sitting, broad-shouldered, and built, like most of the FBI bureau chiefs Canada had known, along the lines of J. Edgar Hoover; thick through the middle and short in the neck. He had an impressive head of thick red hair graying at the roots and a granite cast to his features from years of Washington infighting.
“Officially, of course, there were no fuck-ups,” he said. “Some nut group tried to take out the head of government and nailed a citizen in the confusion. Just between you and me and Dean Rusk, the State Department bobbled the ball. Standard procedure in a deportation violation is to make a simple arrest using Justice Department personnel; us. But that thing in Santo Domingo last year made State nervous, so they handed it to the San Juan city police with instructions to transfer Orr to federal custody later. The bonehead play was in failing to find out who the collar was having tea with.”
He lit the pipe and got it drawing. “We don’t know who made the first wrong move, Orr’s personal bodyguard or one of Governor Vilella’s men or some green cop. We’re still investigating, not that it will change anything or that anyone will read the report outside of Hoover and a few staple-counters at State. You can bury a lot of corpses in a file drawer.”
“How long do you think this one will stay buried?”
“As long as it counts. Vilella’s happy; he stands to gain a couple of million in federal highway funds if he and his people can keep their mouths shut. That isn’t easy for a Latin, but politicians are the same all over. He’ll clam.”
“What about this People’s Army for the Liberation of Puerto Rico?”
He smiled around the pipestem. “I understand some grunt in media liaison suggested adding the Liberation part just before the release went out. Calling it PAP would have been asking for trouble.”
“So Frankie goes out without even a whimper,” Canada said.
“Oh, in a couple of years some journalist or other will throw his curiosity into gear and track him as far as San Juan, maybe even make the connection between Orr and the poor stiff who stopped lead for el excelencio. There’ll be a stink, but nobody really cares how a gangster gets it, especially not in a place like that. Thirty percent of Americans surveyed think Puerto Rico is the capital of Peru.”
Canada stood. “Thanks for calling me, Mr. Burlingame.”
“Call me Red.” He put down his pipe and got up to grip the inspector’s hand. “I’ve got my orders not to share any of this with you, but Hoover doesn’t have to work with the local authorities. I do.”
“Of course, there’s one possibility we haven’t considered.”
“Maybe nobody fucked up after all,” Burlingame supplied. “The Commission has contacts there like everywhere else. Maybe one of those cops got the nod.”
“You have considered it.”
“I got hung up on why. Unless they just didn’t want him in this country, I couldn’t figure out where they stood to gain by dealing Orr out.”
“It wasn’t that,” Canada said. “It’s what they stood to lose if they didn’t.”
Patsy’s idea was to subdivide the city into districts with one man in charge of each, answering only to Patsy, after the fashion of Roman legions and their emperor. From the time he was old enough to understand, Patsy’s father had drilled him in Plutarch and Gibbon and Caesar’s Conquests, and it was the one lesson that had penetrated the imagination of a sickly youth terrified by his parent’s energies and reputation and taken hold. But Mike Gallante, with the tact of a born courtier, had gently steered Patsy away from that tentacled structure toward a more flexible system based on corporate industry. Once the merits of the plan were explained to him, the crimelord couldn’t veto it without looking like some kind of dinosaur, but inside he was bitterly disappointed. For most of his adult life he had seen himself as Augustus to his father’s Caesar, needing only an empire of his own to prove himself greater than his predecessor. Now that he had it he would have to settle for Henry Ford II.
They were using the conference room off Patsy’s office. Patsy sat at the end of the long walnut table with a map of Detroit spread before him, marked all over with lines and circles in red ballpoint. Gallante stood over it in his shirtsleeves, making fresh marks and illustrating his theories of organization with sweeping gestures of the hand holding the pen. Patsy only half followed what he was saying. He felt as he had the summer he was nineteen and he sat in on a poker game with members of his father’s troop, older men mostly with spaghetti bellies and salty stains on their underarm holsters. None of the games was familiar to him. Losing the money hadn’t upset him half as much as not knowing why he was losing it.
“We’ll want to hire coloreds for the menial jobs,” Gallante said. “Runners and bag men and collectors. That leaves our people free to administrate and gives the neighborhood coloreds the impression they’re still participating.”
“No colored bag men.” Devlin, seated bearlike in a wallow of his own fat across the corner of the table from Patsy, showed interest for the first time. Despite the air conditioning he had sweated through his polyester sport shirt. Even his necktie was sopping. “Springfield’s courier ran off with fifteen hundred dollars.”
“No colored strongarms either;” Patsy said. “When they forget to pay I want everyone in the neighborhood to know who they owe and who collects.”
“They might not be as eager to play if they suspect the operation’s all white.”
“They can’t stay away. That’s what made the policy business beautiful from the start.”
“Things were different in those days. Coloreds stepped off the sidewalks when they saw a white man coming. Now they’d cut you as soon as look at you.”
Patsy slapped the table hard enough to sting. “No nigger lays a hand on any of my people. They like cutting so much we’ll cut the balls off the first buck that tries it.”
“You’re the boss, Patsy.”
“I am. And Twelfth Street’s going to know it.” Patsy fumbled for the button under the edge of the table. Sweets came in, dry as cut paper in his sack suit and old-fashioned tie. “We’re leaving.” Patsy adjusted his knee braces.
Gallante folded the map. “We’ll ride down with you.”
Sweets helped with the canes and when Patsy was standing went out ahead of them to ring for the elevator. It was an express, a new feature that added five hundred dollars to the monthly rent.
The bullet-shaped accountant heaved himself to his feet and he and Gallante followed Patsy out of the room, hanging back to avoid stepping on his heels. Slowing other people down was the only good thing about his affliction; it reinforced his leadership.
Gallante had overstayed his welcome, Patsy thought. He had hoped the Princeton prick would return to New York after Springfield cut and ran, but the Commission refused to recall him, explaining to Patsy in the infuriatingly pedantic droning way of that East Coast cabal that he needed a good administrator to smooth the transition in the Detroit policy business. He wondered where the Commission had been when his father tore the racket out of Joey Machine’s dead bloody grasp. No smooth transitions there.
The elevator doors opened just as he got to them and he went in ahead of Gallante and Devlin and Sweets, who pressed the button for the ground floor. From the back, the bodyguard’s pointed head looked just like an onion.
Nothing changed, Patsy thought. It was almost as if the war had ended in a draw instead of the victory he knew it was. And nothing ever would change if somebody with balls didn’t take them in his hands and show Gallante’s corporate structure what the Orrs were made of. It struck him then, leaning on the handrail to take the weight off his crippled legs, that he was glad Harry DiJesus hadn’t gone back to Las Vegas after all. Gallante was an easy kill. He thought pleasantly about the words he would use to break the news to his father the next time he called.
The car stopped with a hydraulic sigh and the doors knifed open. Patsy felt a flash of irritation when their exit into the crowded lobby was blocked by three black men waiting to board, one of them a tubercular-looking Dizzy Gillespie type with a black beret and a ratty goatee beard; it was the guard’s responsibility to inform people the elevator was private. He just had time to wonder why the three were wearing heavy raincoats on a blistering August day when the coats flew open like wings and the car filled with noise and stinging heat.