The late great Frank Costello often said that nobody was ever late for their own funeral. Maybe that’s true, but other than their own funeral, nobody within organized crime regularly follows any type of schedule. It just isn’t that kind of business. Things get done when they need to get done. People show up when they need to be there. The days and nights are pretty fluid. And so finding this Professor G was not exactly a priority for Bobby Blue Eyes or the Freemont Avenue crew.
Bobby had a lot of running around to do the following morning. There was a typical breakfast meeting: A guy Bobby knew from around had asked him to meet a guy who wanted to open a vending machine business in Queens and needed permission to operate. They met at the West Side Diner on 51st Street and the highway. The person Bobby knew spoke for the other guy. That meant he was accepting responsibility for him, so if anything went wrong, it would bounce right back on him. For a small slice of the proceeds, Bobby explained, he would introduce him to the proper people from Queens. He couldn’t guarantee that anything would happen; he didn’t have the right to speak for the people who controlled that territory. The price of setting up that meeting was a thousand dollars. “That’s earnest money,” Bobby explained. “It shows you’re serious about this.”
From the diner Bobby drove down to Canal Street. On weekends Canal Street from Sixth Avenue to the Bowery became one long flea market. Most of the normal stores that had been there for decades had been replaced by discount shops. You could buy just about anything you needed there at a good price. Bobby knew one of the people who owned several of these shops, Solomon Thomas, known to friends and associates as So Solly Tommy, because he had mostly Chinese immigrants fronting for him in these stalls. Due to Solly Thomas’s impressive rap sheet, none of the city licenses were in his name. Bobby figured that with Christmas coming he could dump the whole load of Cabbage Patch Kids on Canal Street and they’d be sold by Saturday night.
Solly bought mostly low-end merchandise. Stuff that fell off cheap trucks. He didn’t buy expensive jewelry, and the only drugs he handled were pills and pot. Nothing hard, ever. Ever. But otherwise he handled whatever it was people needed to get rid of. It didn’t matter to him; he had the outlets and he needed the goods. Particularly just before Christmas.
Solly’s office was in the back of a plumbing supply store, but he wasn’t there, nobody knew where he was, nobody knew how to get hold of him, and nobody knew when he might get back. Bobby shook his head. “Jesus, how the fuck you guys run a business like that?” But when Solly’s secretary asked him how her boss could contact him, Bobby admitted, “He can’t. I’ll call him.”
It was almost noon when he finally got to Pamela Fox’s apartment on Sullivan Street. “What time did ya get in?” he asked. Pam flew international for Pan Am. She had only eight years’ seniority, but this month she’d been able to hold the very desirable twice-weekly New York-Paris line.
“Not too bad,” she said, kissing him easily. “We landed about eight o’clock.” She was wearing the white flannel robe she’d taken from Caesar’s when they were in Vegas the previous July, loosely belted. She went into the kitchen. “Want some coffee?”
“No,” he said, following her. He stood behind her, grasped her shoulders, and gently squeezed. In response she leaned back against him, resting her long black hair against his shoulder. His hands slid down beneath her robe until they cupped her breasts, and he began massaging her nipples with his forefingers. When they hardened, he began pinching them, until she moaned. “Welcome home, baby,” he said.
As far as Bobby was concerned, Pamela’s relationship with him was not exclusive. They’d never discussed it, but as long as she was available whenever he wanted to see her and he knew nothing about anything else she did, she could do whatever she wanted to do. That was pretty much his philosophy: As long as he didn’t know what she was doing, there was no problem. He really believed that was true. But if he had been confronted with the reality of another man, pride and tradition would have forced him to respond.
That was the price he paid for being married and having a child. And he paid it willingly. Pamela was special. After Ronnie and Angela she was the most important woman in his life, but he didn’t waste anybody’s time trying to define their relationship. They’d met when he’d flown down to Miami to check out a club someone wanted to operate. They were in bed an hour off the plane. A week later he found the apartment in the Village for her. He paid enough of the rent so that she didn’t have to share a place with other girls. He wanted to be with her when he wanted to be with her. It would last as long as it lasted. For him relationships worked best that way.
He definitely tried it the other way. He’d been married to Veronica Buonaconte San Filippo for almost twelve years. He was twenty-two years old when they married and was as determined as every twenty-two-year-old to be faithful to her. But one morning about two months in he woke up and realized she was still lying there right next to him and would be right there every morning for at least the next forty years. He went out on her for the first time three nights later, when he met an actress-model-hooker and accepted the fact that he was not a man comfortable with commitment. It wasn’t his nature, he’d told Ronnie the first time she’d caught him, so there wasn’t anything he could do to stop it. It wasn’t his fault. He was who he was. From that point on he wouldn’t even buy multiyear magazine subscriptions.
He had no intention of getting divorced. He treated Ronnie with respect, meaning he tried very hard to keep his other relationships secret; he spent all the holidays with her, bought her appropriate gifts on the proper occasions, and always made sure that she had enough money to keep the house nice and buy a few things for herself. After their first couple of years together he accepted the fact that she wasn’t going to have a child, so he was real pleased when she announced she was pregnant and absolutely thrilled when his daughter was born. For a time after Angela was born he’d spent more time at home. Which lasted until changing diapers lost its appeal. Ronnie turned out to be a good wife and a wonderful mother. He probably loved her in that special way men love their wives; what he didn’t like was sex with the same woman night after night. He was an excitement junkie. He loved that feeling of conquest each time he slept with a new woman. Maybe later, when he had some long-term things going, when he had enough money put away, when Angela was a little older, then he’d think about spending more time at home. Truthfully he probably wouldn’t mind having another kid. The first one was working out pretty good. And it did give him a little boost at the club.
Pam never pressed him about his wife. She didn’t ask him a lot of questions; in fact, he wasn’t even completely positive that she knew what he did for a living. But just as important, she didn’t volunteer a lot of information about her own life either.
Having a strong marriage when you’re already married to your family is a very difficult thing to do. The mob is the toughest extended family in existence, and some wives just never accept it.
One thing Bobby knew for certain was that at that moment in his life Pam Fox was the perfect woman for him. She never criticized him, she never asked for too much, she was beautiful and nice and appreciative of everything he did for her, and she liked the sex as much as he did.
Just as important, she never made him listen to that relentless relative bullshit. Bobby had serious problems that he had to deal with every single day; he didn’t want to be rude to anybody, but he couldn’t care less about some Aunt Blossom from Hicktown. Relatives weren’t his thing. He had enough to do just dealing with Ronnie’s family. After they found out he was connected, they constantly hounded him: Can you get me cartons of cigarettes, get me a good price on this watch, get me tickets to the World Series? Get me, get me, get me. The fact was that some of those things he easily could have taken care of, but he didn’t want to encourage them. Get them a VCR and next thing they wanted a cheap two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side to put it in. So he told them they’d been watching too many movies, life wasn’t like that in real life.
Even if a lot of the time it was.
He knew exactly as much as he wanted to know about Pam’s family. Nothing. There was no reason for him to know any more than that. This was only a temporary relationship. Besides everything else, she was too young for him anyway. How old could she be? Twenty-six? Maybe twenty-seven? Whatever, he figured she was easily eight or nine years younger than him. And he was already married. But when they got into the bed? Fugetaboutit. That’s how good she made him feel.
He knew he wasn’t in love with her. At least he didn’t think so. What he felt for her was different than the love he felt for his daughter and Ronnie, the family kind of love. He’d kill anybody who hurt them without even thinking about it. But Pam? That was another kind of feeling. He wasn’t so sure how far he would go for Pam, unless respect was involved, then he would have no choice. He’d go all the way, no question. But he really missed her when she was gone. When she was away for more than a day, the thought of being with her got him all excited. And when he thought about the way she talked and laughed, the scent of her, it all made him feel really good. That had happened to him very rarely. He couldn’t remember the last time just thinking about a girl made him feel so good. Usually he tired of a woman within a few weeks and then it was “adiós, amiga,” but the truth he couldn’t get beyond was that after almost six months together her perfect body thrilled him as much as it had the day they’d met.
And so it was almost four o’clock by the time he picked up Little Eddie and got up to Columbia. He parked at a meter, put in four quarters, and left his PBA card on the dashboard for the brownies to see. With that police union card he didn’t really need to bother with the quarters, since when they spotted it, they’d extend him the necessary professional courtesy, but he liked to do things the easy way. Besides, the city needed the money and he was a loyal New Yorker.
As they walked across the busy campus, Little Eddie’s head could have been on a swivel. “Fuck, look at that broad.” Or “Holy shit, check out the knockers on that one.” Or “Jesus fucking Christ, I shoulda gone to college.”
Bobby reminded him that he’d dropped out of high school in tenth grade.
“So? What does that have to do with the price of tomatoes?”
Bobby stopped a heavyset coed and asked her where the Russian school was located. She didn’t know exactly but suggested he ask in the administration office, in Hamilton Hall. Eddie watched with pure joy as she walked away. That was his type of woman. “Man,” he sighed, “they even come in my size.”
Eventually they found their way to the Slavic Studies office on the seventh floor. Sitting sternly behind the desk was an older woman with what looked a bit like a haystack of bright red hair sitting on top of her head. Bobby decided that if something died in there, it wouldn’t be found for weeks. “Excuse me, darling,” he said, politely taking off his hat, “I was wondering if you could help me out here.”
The woman put down her cigarette. “What can I do you for?”
“Call me Bobby. This is my friend Eddie. And your name is . . .”
“Ms. Simon.”
“Well, Ms. Simon, we’re looking for a guy, Professor . . .”
She said it with them. “G.”
“Gees,” Bobby said, surprised, “how’d you know that?”
She snapped a phony smile at him. “Maybe I can read minds,” she said. “Or maybe the fact that two of your people were here yesterday asking exactly the same question gave it away.”
Eddie took a step forward. “Who was here?”
“A couple of other agents.” She paused. “You guys are FBI, right?”
Bobby glanced at Eddie. The FBI was also looking for this Professor G? That definitely was bad news. Whatever it was that this guy had done, obviously it was important enough for the feds to be looking for him too. No wonder the bosses wanted him found so quickly. “Yeah, sure,” Bobby responded, forcing a little laugh. “That’s us, G-men. I mean, what do we look like?”
Using his most official FBI voice, Eddie asked Ms. Simon as casually as possible, “So, um, like what did these guys look like? I mean, you know, maybe they’re friends of ours.”
Simon tapped her cigarette on the brim of her cheap ceramic sombrero ashtray. “It was a man and a woman. The girl was nice-looking. He looked grumpy, like Walter Matthau when he was a lot younger. Like in The Odd Couple. Did you see that one?”
“You kidding,” Eddie said enthusiastically. “I loved that pitcher. Like when he threw that spaghetti against the wall . . .”
Bobby shut him up with one look, then turned back to Simon. “Did you get their names?”
“Sure.” She searched through the tray on her desk until she found the card. “Here it is. Her name was Russo. Special Agent L. Russo.” She shook her head and sniffled. “The other one’s name I can’t remember. How about you guys, you got your cards?”
“Sounds like you got a little cold going there,” Bobby said, making an elaborate display of searching his jacket pockets for his card.
“Sinuses,” she explained.
“Ah, sh . . . shoot,” Bobby said, snapping his fingers. “I left them in my other jacket. But lemme ask you this, Ms. Simon. What’d you tell ’em?”
When she hesitated, Eddie said, “We’d hate for them to find him first. That’d be bad for us.”
“Inside the bureau, he means,” Bobby picked up quickly. “There’s a lot of competition goes on between agents.”
“They give us big bonuses,” Eddie lied, enjoying it.
Simon nodded, although not one hair moved. “I’m sure.” She hesitated for just a few seconds, as if trying to figure out a complex problem. Finally she looked directly at Bobby in a no-nonsense way and asked with a plea in her voice, “I want you to tell me the truth, please. Those other two, they wouldn’t tell me anything. Has he done something wrong?”
Bobby got the message. Whoever this professor was, he meant something special to this woman. The last thing she wanted to do was get him hurt. So he shook his head firmly. “Absolutely not.” For emphasis he waved his hands palm-down away from his body, sort of like a football official indicating no catch. “This doesn’t really even have anything to do with him. We just want to find him to ask him a few questions, that’s all it is.”
She took a long, contemplative drag on her cigarette and exhaled deliberately, watching the swirling smoke trail slowly dissolve. “They don’t like me smoking in here, you know. But I’ve been here longer than the paint, so there isn’t much they can do about it.” She made her decision. “His name is Peter Gradinsky,” she said as she reached for the yearbook, which was still on her desk, “and he’s been missing for almost a week. Here, this is him . . .”
As they got ready to leave several minutes later, Geri Simon asked Bobby, “When you find him would you tell him to call me, okay? I just want to know he’s okay.”
“Oh, he’s fine,” Bobby said, dismissing her fears, “don’t worry about it. We do this kind of thing every day. It always turns out good. But I’ll remember to tell him. Thanks.”
And just before they walked out, Little Eddie took an unopened pack of Salem out of his pocket, literally straight off the truck, and put it down on her desk. “Compliments of the FBI,” he said.
Bobby had known Eddie since the day he’d walked into the club laughing about being soaked by the dripping air conditioner. And that was pretty much the nicest thing he had ever seen him do.
But in the car heading back to the social club Little Eddie was furious. “Fuck those no-good fucking bastards,” he screamed, slamming his palm against the leather dashboard. “Who the fuck do they think they are, fucking with us like that? Jesus fucking Christ, that pisses me off.” He leaned back and glanced at Bobby, who was calmly driving. “That ain’t right, Bobby, and you know it.”
“You’re right, Eddie,” he agreed. “It’s not right.” Bobby liked to keep his anger contained. When it got loose, he knew from experience, real bad things happened. When he lost control, he did stupid things, he didn’t think things through. The last time he’d really lost it, when some motherfucking rope jockey at Xenon tried to make him and Pam wait outside, it had cost him almost $5,000 to square it. Losing his temper was a luxury he couldn’t afford at the current prices.
But he definitely was angry. Here he was being a nice guy, doing a small favor for people he didn’t know, and all of a sudden he was butting heads with the Federal Bureau of Investigation? The FBI? Where the fuck did that nuclear bomb come from? That was a problem he had not earned on his own. Franzone should have warned him that there was more to this than finding a name. That wasn’t right, what they did. They should have told him the truth, given him all the information. Then let him make his own decision about whether to get involved or take a hike.
Now whatever it was that was going down, he was connected to it. For example, if this professor’s body floated up onto the shore one day without a head, or if he turned up missing for good, both of which were reasonable possibilities, those agents might decide to have another conversation with the redhead. And where was that going to end up? Bobby licked his lips and told Eddie, “Anyway, there’s nothing we can do about it now. They wanted a name, we got the name for them. Now we’re out of it.” He said it again, this time with finality. “We’re out of it.”
They drove in angry silence for a few more minutes, until Little Eddie asked, “What do you think this is all about?”
“Who gives a flying fuck?” Bobby snapped. “Let’s just drop it, that all right with you? They want us to know, they would’ve told us.”
In the world of organized crime curiosity can end up costing a lot more than a lost temper. In that sense it’s like a military organization. Sometimes you do what you’re told to do without asking questions. You be the good soldier. You do what you’re told based on your strong belief that the larger organization exists for the common welfare, and you as an individual are not considered an expendable part. That the people who ask you to do certain things are going to protect you, whatever that takes. Things can get a little nasty . . . actually a lot nasty when somebody tries to stick out your neck for their business. So Bobby decided to pass along the information he’d learned, keep his mouth shut, pay attention, and see what developed.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious. He was. Surprisingly, in a world in which actions were based entirely on the reality of money—the bottom line is always the bottom line—there were a lot of people who still relied on faith, superstition, and gut feelings. Gangster intuition. Members of organized crime might not go to Mass every Sunday, for example, but religion plays an important role in their lives. They pray, they give the sign of the cross at appropriate times, a lot of people wear the crosses they’ve carried most of their lives—and will even kiss them for luck. They contribute regularly to their parish and invoke the help of the Blessed Virgin. Also, some of these people are superstitious. Maybe their things need to be put in exactly the same place every day or they knock three times on wood before leaving for a meeting or maybe they don’t gamble on Friday the 13th. One guy, for example, was so superstitious that for luck every morning before he started his car he’d get down on his hands and knees and look underneath it.
But almost everybody pays attention to their intuition. If something doesn’t feel right, there probably is a good reason it doesn’t. The people in this business are all professionals. Experienced. Organized crime is one industry in which you don’t survive and move up without being knowledgeable. This is a world replete with danger, so you have to pay close attention to what’s going on around you all the time. You get to notice every ripple in the breeze. Or maybe you detect a slightly different tone in a familiar voice. Or somebody does something just a little bit out of their ordinary behavior. Noticing the little things, and responding to the slightest change, can be a matter of life and ending up in a trunk under the Williamsburg Bridge.
So Bobby paid attention to the uneasiness he was feeling. It was pretty much impossible to pinpoint the exact cause. It might have been the unexpected presence of the FBI, but it also might have been the body they found. He asked Eddie the question being asked in every club in the city: “What do you make of this thing they did to that crazy fucker, that what’s-his-name, Skinny D’Angelo?”
At that moment in the office of the New York City coroner an assistant medical examiner was working up a sweat trying to saw through the breastplate of 320-pound Alphonse “Skinny Al” D’Angelo. A day earlier an anonymous telephone caller had informed the NYPD that they would find a “big surprise” in the trunk of a 1982 Ford Granada parked beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. After receiving that call, finding the body really wasn’t much of a surprise.
D’Angelo had been shot several times at close range with a small-caliber weapon, although none of the wounds were of themselves fatal. But no effort had been made to stem the flow of blood, so D’Angelo died slowly, possibly conscious as his life drained out of him. But before he died, presumably he had been tortured. The killers, again presumably more than one, had stuck lit cigarettes in his ears, which burned through his eardrums, on his testicles and penis. Also, both his arms and one leg and foot had been crushed practically flat by some unknown method. The assistant medical examiner had never seen anything quite like this and could not even begin to speculate on the way this was done. The bones in the victim’s arms and leg had splintered into flat fragments. The only detail released to the news media was that Alphonse D’Angelo, a reputed member of the Genovese crime family, had died of four gunshot wounds to his body.
What the coroner’s office released to the media or tried to keep private didn’t matter. As it turned out, the assistant medical examiner had a sister-in-law who sold inside information to certain city journalists. Everybody denied this kind of thing happened, but they also knew it was absolutely true. Reporters paid people for information. And it wasn’t just those crazy weekly scandal sheets, but reporters for the mainstream city tabloids. The reporters, in turn, shared the purchased information with other sources, looking for a headline. So within hours every connected person in New York knew the details of the murder. It was obvious that this wasn’t a sanctioned mob hit, this was somebody else sending a message. But only those few people for whom that message was intended knew what it meant. Or could guess who sent it.
“D’you know him?” Little Eddie wondered.
Bobby shook his head. “Heard of him. He was with Two-Gun Tony, over on Bath Street. You know him?”
“A little. He was around. I used to see him at the Oasis. Big fucking guy, I remember that. I swear to God, Bobby, this guy was so fucking fat that after he took a shower he’d work up a sweat drying off. Shit, a guy like that I woulda bet on him popping his ticker. See, the thing I can’t figure out is how they fit him into that trunk. Even with the little guys that’s tough sometimes, but with a guy that big . . .” Eddie was obviously impressed by the killer’s persistence. “I’ll tell you what, though,” he added, “he must’ve pissed somebody off pretty good. They burned holes in his eardrums and pecker. That’s a tough way to go.”
Although the possibility of a sudden and violent death was a fact of life for everyone in the business, I never knew anyone who wasted time worrying about it. What could be prevented was prevented. But what is, is. People rarely talked about others being the victim of a hit, except as a matter of professional curiosity. Like the way stockbrokers might talk about ripping off investors. But this hit got their attention because it was so unusual. It wasn’t a mob hit; the families didn’t conduct business this way. They could be brutal when it was necessary, but this was a special kind of torture. It had to come from the outside. So the question became, who on the outside had balls big enough to take on the New York families?
“Colombians, you think?” Bobby asked.
“Who knows? They definitely got the cojones. You get in their business, they let you know.” Little Eddie shook his head in wonder and laughed out loud at something only he found amusing. “There’s a lot of crazy motherfucking people walking around out there.”
As soon as Duke saw them walk through the door, he began steaming milk for the cappuccino. Bobby and the Duke had always had a pretty good relationship. For whatever reasons, Bobby had always watched out for him. Unlike a lot of the other guys, he never made fun of him, and he tipped him a few bucks extra on all the holidays. In the summer he made sure the Duke had a good fan for his closet, and in the winter he got him one of those compact space heaters. In return the Duke tried to do little extra things for Bobby.
“So, bubelehs,” Tony Cupcakes asked when they sat down at the card table, “you find that professor guy?”
Eddie answered, “What are you all of a sudden, Charlie fucking Chan?” His eyes settled on the full box of Hostess chocolate cupcakes directly in front of Cupcakes. “Gimme one of those,” he said, reaching long across the table and grabbing at one of them.
Cupcakes pulled the box out of Little Eddie’s range. “What is it, a big fucking secret? You either did or you didn’t.”
Eddie answered with his mouth full. “It’s complicated is all. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
Bobby agreed. “Hey, Cakes, trust me, the man’s doing you a favor. If he told you, he’d have to whack you. Then where would you be?” Knowing that the FBI was involved, Bobby and Little Eddie had no intention of sharing their information with anyone except a boss. It probably was a wiseguy who once said you could know somebody forever, but you never really know them.
Bobby and Little Eddie were both connected guys, meaning they were involved in the family business but had not yet been made, or literally inducted into the Mafia. There is a formal ceremony, a very secret ceremony, in which the chosen man is made. The day I was made was one of the most fulfilling days of my life. For me, in addition to the responsibilities it carried with it, being made meant that I had earned the respect of my father. It wouldn’t have happened without his approval. He believed I was capable of carrying on the family name. Personally and professionally.
It was pretty well accepted that Bobby was going to get his badge the next time the books opened up, which is what it’s called when the heads of the families agree to induct new members. It’s also known as being made or “straightened out.” Maybe Eddie too. But as connected guys they were still subject to all the rules and had to pay a percentage of every dollar they earned to their family—although they were not entitled to share in the family profits and didn’t receive the full respect or protection guaranteed to made guys.
Bobby had decided that the only person he would talk to was Henry the Hammer, Henry Franzone. Franzone generally came into the club to take care of business early in the afternoon and stayed as long as necessary. It wasn’t like the old days, when the boss would sit at a smaller table in a corner of the room and one by one each member of his crew who had business with him would join him. They would share pleasantries, then discuss whatever they had to talk about. Anybody who was planning a job had to go through the details with Franzone, who would then—almost always—grant permission. There was no work done by a member of his crew that Franzone had not personally approved. And when the job was done, Franzone was paid his piece of it.
In a world where respect has to be earned, Henry Franzone was one of the most respected individuals. He had been around for a long time, ever since coming out of the army after World War II. He had volunteered in 1940 after emigrating to New York from Sicily and fought his way through the entire Italian campaign. He’d won a Silver Star on Monte Cassino but never talked about the details.
He was easily one of the oldest capos still working actively. As he liked to say in his Italian accent, most people his age were already dead, or at least permanently retired. Henry had survived all those years by keeping his mouth closed, treating people decently, staying clear of family politics, and being just a little tougher than his enemies. Some people said he was the living proof that the good die young.
Henry was a small man, almost frail-looking, but no one who knew his reputation was fooled by his appearance. Franzone was a stone-cold killer. It was said about him that he could open up a skull with one solid smack. No one really knew how much heavyweight work he had done in his career, but for a time in the 1950s he was considered one of the most ruthless killers in the city. There was nothing that bothered him; he was just as cool walking into a crowded restaurant and putting three slugs into a guy’s head as he was standing out in the middle of a field looking a guy right in the eyes as he smashed his skull with one blow, then pulling out his brains with the claw end of a good Stanley. Around 1968 he pleaded to a trumped-up attempted-murder charge, mostly to avoid a trial that might have implicated an NYPD lieutenant, and did a quiet twelve years. When he came out, he was given control of the Freemont Avenue crew as his reward.
Most people in the crew respected Henry because he usually found a way to say yes to whatever jobs they were planning. And he had enough experience in the business to be able to offer sensible advice. In a world that was changing rapidly, Henry was a living reminder of the tradition that had brought them all together.
“I got the name of that professor and where he lives,” Bobby explained when he sat down with Franzone.
“Dat’s good,” Franzone mumbled in a raspy voice vaguely reminiscent of Brando playing Don Corleone, but actually the result of a lifetime of smoking. “Here. You want some of this calzone? ’T’s good for yas.”
“No, that’s all right. The guy’s name is Peter Gradinsky. He lives with his wife on West End between 73rd and 74th. He teaches Russian grammar.” He waited for Franzone to respond, but the old man didn’t say a word. “There’s one more thing,” Bobby said finally. “Turns out the FBI’s also looking for this guy. They were all over the place yesterday asking questions.”
Franzone rested his elbows on the table, entwined his fingers, and took one very long breath. “Pay attention ’cause I’m gonna tell you something here,” he said. “But this don’t go no further. Right?”
Bobby nodded his agreement.
“See, Bobby, there’s some things going down that nobody needs to know about the details right now, you unnerstan’ what I mean? Big things.”
Trust me is what he meant. Again Bobby nodded.
“Sos when I ask you do me something, you do it no questions. Now, I want you should do this for me. I want you to go to this guy’s place and talk to his people. If he got a wife, you talk to his wife. Talk to the neighbors. See what you see. But you be nice now, you be good, because we don’t need nobody making no problems for us. Maybe you find out what happened to him. You need to spend on this, that’s all right, we got it covered. Just you be careful what you do. Bobby, listen to me now, this is an important thing I’m asking you. I’m asking you because I trust you. Don’t go fucking up. Capisce?”
“It’s done.”
Franzone would never admit it, but the presence of FBI agents, while troubling, did not surprise him. When he first started working in the 1940s, it had been possible to keep the matters of the families private. Omerta. This code of silence was honored by everyone. Absolutely everyone. Betraying the family was the worst sin that could be committed, and for that there was no forgiveness. There weren’t enough Hail Marys in the universe to make it right. You talked, you died. That simple. No appeals. Those were stand-up men, men who accepted responsibility for their actions, who did their time honorably. Now? Fugetaboutit. People get a hangnail they talk. You can’t turn around without bumping into some ambitious prosecutor looking to make his name licking the bones of the families.
For Franzone the questions to be answered were, how did the FBI find out that this professor was missing and how deep was their interest in him? Admittedly there were several people looking for him, so the information was around. It could have come from anywhere. But for his own safety he would have to assume that it had come out of his club. Either somebody had a big mouth or the government picked up something on a bug. Maybe, he decided, this was a good time to talk to some old friends of the friends who worked downtown.
But most troubling was the fact that the bureau was interested in this guy. Tony Cosentino, the boss who had asked this favor of him, had offered few details. A favor, that’s all. A business deal that wasn’t going too good, that was what he’d said. The implication was that the guy owed and skipped. That kind of thing happens all the time. But ordinarily the FBI didn’t get involved in those situations. Maybe they would bust a hijacking once in a while for the public relations value, but they really didn’t waste time chasing bullshit. So the presence of the bureau got Franzone real interested in learning a lot more about what was going on. Henry the Hammer was a careful man. In his career he had put away a few dollars, but those years in prison had cost him a lot of money that could never be recovered. He wasn’t that young anymore, and as you get older, you never know how much you’re going to need. You just never know.
Bobby wasn’t particularly unhappy that he was still involved. Now that he knew that the feds were on the trail, he’d have to be a lot more careful, but if his feelings were right, if this was a serious opportunity, it could turn out to be a very good thing for him.
When once again he took his place at the card table, the Duke put down a hot cup and smiled at him. But before he could take a sip, Fast Lenny said to him, “Take a walk with me.”
Few people dared talk about their plans inside a social club. Those days were done. When the cops started planting electronic listening devices in social clubs, a lot of people treated it as a joke. Those were the talk-into-the-sugar-bowl years. Nobody took it very seriously until gleeful prosecutors at trial began playing the “best of ” tapes of private conversations held inside the social clubs. That was the end of the joke, and a lot of time and money was spent protecting clubs against surveillance. But due to the extremely sensitive nature of their plans, a lot of people absolutely refused to talk business indoors. Fast Lenny, for example, was convinced that the walls really did have ears. On occasion he could still get a laugh by shouting at the wall, “You hear that? You no-good fuck.”
So when Lenny had a proposition to make, he insisted on walking with it. “That’s the way the Romans used to do it,” he’d explained. “They were always walking around making plans.”
To that, Mickey Fists had sighed and pointed out, “Of course they were—they didn’t have no cars.”
Lenny would walk up and down the block with the person he wanted to speak to, always walking on the outside and talking toward the buildings, so if the parking meters, pay telephones, fire hydrants, or lampposts by the curb were bugged, they wouldn’t be able to pick up his voice. There weren’t going to be any Best of Fast Lenny tapes played at some trial. “Listen up, Bobby, I got this guy, see, who’s got this electronics store in the Garment District and he ain’t doing so good. He’s got a whole fucking truckload of TVs and VCRs being delivered tonight and he don’t want ’em. You know what I’m talking, right?”
“Yeah, sure.” Bobby seemed to be looking at something in the distance. He pointed to a building way down the block. “Hey, smile, Lenny, you’re on FBI Camera.”
Lenny tried to spot whatever it was that Bobby had seen. “Where? Where?” All he saw was a large building with hundreds of windows. “What the fuck are you looking at?”
Bobby checked him with his elbow and laughed. “Come on, I’m just shitting you.”
While both Bobby and Lenny believed—correctly—that they were being watched, which was an occupational hazard, the truth was that Bobby had absolutely no idea where the camera was situated. “Don’t fuck with me like that, Bobby,” Lenny warned, “it ain’t funny.” In disgust Lenny shook his head and muttered, “I swear to God, Bobby, sometimes I wonder where your fucking head is.”
“It’s a joke, Lenny, that’s all.”
“No, no, it ain’t. A joke is something that’s funny, and there’s nothing funny about that, so it can’t be a joke. So from now on, when you tell a joke, make it a funny one, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Bobby agreed dismissively, coming close enough to an apology to satisfy Lenny.
“Now, where the fuck was I?” Lenny took a few seconds to find his place. “Oh yeah. So this mook wants us to take the truck. We get the swag and he gets the insurance and everybody’s happy. You want a piece?”
“You telling me the guy’s got the thing set up?”
“Pretty much. Only the driver don’t know shit. All he knows he’s gotta be at the store at like nine o’clock. By then it’s pretty quiet around there, ’specially if there’s nothing going on at the Garden. When the driver gets to the store, he’s gotta go inside and get all the forms and crap. We’re gonna be waiting right there. That shit has gotta be worth fifty, sixty grand easy. So? You in?”
“Fuck yes, I’m in.”
Franzone was gone by the time Bobby and Fast Lenny returned to the social club. He had gotten into his car and driven to a bank of pay phones by the basketball courts on Sixth Avenue and West 4th Street. The rumor was that every public phone in Little Italy was tapped. That was probably an exaggeration, but it was based on reality. The federal government does tap pay phones near government buildings and outside known mob hangouts. So Franzone wasn’t about to play pay phone bingo. Instead, he used one of the phones in the Village to call his old friend.