15

Gray and Green

THE THIRD MAN to come from the storefront was the first to hesitate at the threshold and survey the street. Sharp-featured, he wore a Panama hat, white bucks, a white suit, black shirt, and a tie that looked like wallpaper in the bathroom of a lounge where people drank in the daytime. As nervous as a tree frog, he seemed relieved when after a few steps no one had shot him. For three-quarters of an hour, Harry had perched on a low brick wall half a block up Prince Street, reading the Trib and drinking from a bottle of club soda. He never once turned his head completely in the direction of the doorway he was watching, but as his eyes looked left he had counted five men in and out.

They seemed like gangsters, because they were gangsters, but on a sunny morning in June they looked as much like everyone else as they ever do. With the exception of the nervous one, they apparently forgot what kind of world they lived in and who they were. So, papers tucked under their arms, they walked in the newly awakened streets almost like normal people, and when they saw what everyone else saw—children in green plaid with briefcases half as big as they were, moving like a tide into school doors surmounted by Christ on the cross; heavy trucks loading, unloading, purring, and rumbling; shopkeepers in the sun, washing their sidewalks clean; old people perpetually staring, their elbows welded to their windowsills—when they saw these things they forgot for a time what it was they did, and what would come during the rest of the day and at night. For at night, like cats, they found their essence.

He hadn’t planned to observe, but reconnaissance had been burned into him in the war. As a pathfinder, his job was first to see and then to mark the route that others would take. He dropped in darkness, fully outfitted for combat and loaded as well with flares, smoke, and tape for marking arrows and codes on the ground. He was unknown to those who followed, almost always alone, and usually so far ahead that the people who had sent him tended to forget he was there. He was one of the few who fought the war by himself much of the time, until he would halt and rejoin his stick of paratroopers, who could work together nonetheless with coordination that seemed telepathic.

He had come early. While counting and categorizing, he noticed that no one moved cautiously or was alert to being followed, except for the third man, who, as anxious as he may have been, was unaware that he was being watched. On a battlefield, because they didn’t take the trouble, by now they would all be dead.

At eleven he folded his paper, took a last drink from the soda bottle, and rose from his position. As he walked, his clothes uncreased and fell into a comfortable drape. He tossed the paper and the bottle into a trash can and moved faster and with more concentration, until he slowed just before the door. He wanted to go in neither submissively nor aggressively, and at an even, unagitated pace. He was there not to react but to collect information, and would not give whoever it was he was to see the satisfaction of creating in him either fear or defiance. He was concerned, however, that his very lack of common reactions might mark him as someone not to write off, so he began to think of what to feign so they would forget about him after he left.

When no one answered his knock, he turned the knob and slowly opened the door. As his eyes adjusted to lesser light, he entered a sea of luminous gray and green—the gray of a rock dove or a felt hat, with shades darker or lighter depending upon light that came through various windows. And green the dark green of tenement paint half a century old or more, in many shades on a single wall: enamel green, bottle green, seaweed green, verdigris. He had seen it many times, but never had he seen it softened by gray as if in a painting, though he had never seen in a painting such a fusion of otherworldly colors. The men standing within it, as if they were submerged in a lit aquarium, were completely unaware, but Harry was so taken by the color that he almost forgot why he was there.

Two men were settled at the bar, and the bartender, his hands working a towel over a glass, deferred to them. One turned to Harry and said, “This is a private club.” But a man at a table in the back and to the left of the bar signaled with a flick of his head, and the second bar sitter jumped off his stool and turned his very wide front to the interloper. “You got an appointment?”

“Yeh,” Harry answered. He thought they might not understand yes.

“With who?”

“I don’t know. They just said be here at eleven.”

“That’s him,” the man at the table said.

“Okay,” the second bar sitter explained, and moved a step forward for frisking.

“Don’t bother,” the man at the table told him. “Come over here,” he commanded.

Late off the mark, the one who had moved to frisk Harry said, “Mr. Verderamé will see you now.”

Harry approached the table. “Si’down,” Verderamé said. “You want something to drink?”

“No thank you,” Harry said. “I just had a whole bottle of club soda.”

“Whad’ja do that for?” He pointed. “The bathroom’s over there. You shouldn’t pee on the street. You don’t want cops to see.” He was amused.

“It’s okay, I don’t pee on the street.”

“Yeah, but why’d you drink a whole bottle? It’s not that hot.”

“I was early, so I bought a paper and sat on the wall up the block. Then I got thirsty. The only size bottle they had was a big one and I didn’t want to waste it.” He was watching Verderamé’s eyes. When he had given away his reconnaissance the irises hadn’t moved a millimeter.

“You shoulda come in here. We’d give it to you by the glass, for free, no waste.”

“Thank you.” Harry hated to be thanking the person who was robbing him. Verderamé enjoyed it.

“No problem. Any time.” In his middle forties, Verderamé was tall, his black hair pushed back on his forehead in a slick as smooth as the smoothest wave in a Hiroshige print. He appeared to be highly alert, intelligent, and trim, with elevated cheekbones, hollow-seeming eyes, a tenor voice, and delicate hands. He spoke in almost a singsong, as if he enjoyed revealing to people miraculous things that they didn’t know. He was dressed conservatively in a dark blue suit of European cut, an oxford shirt, and a blue tie. “I told you. You shoulda come in here. Next time, you come in here.”

The exquisite tension in Verderamé’s manner and presence that turned solicitous comments into orders and threats told Harry that he was one of those people whose reservoirs of anger, though covered with humor, good nature, or curiosity, are so deep that when they erupt nothing can contain them. When people like this work in an office or a factory everyone is afraid of crossing them. If they yoke their anger to ambition, well, then they are Verderamé, someone who when he was younger had had to relieve the pressure on his soul by every now and then beating some other one to death. For him, innocence was insolent provocation, and lack of aggression an indictment that had to be violently suppressed. Verderamé’s eyes sparked. Like so many of the short-fused and explosive, he was often charming, graceful, and captivating. The pit viper betrays how it will strike not in its movements, which are feints, but in its eyes.

Harry saw that Verderamé was looking in his eyes with the same care with which he himself had earlier looked in Verderamé’s. Nor did Harry’s irises move a millimeter, as he had retreated into complete neutrality and suspended his emotions to the point where he felt he could have been in someone else’s body.

In a heavy Sicilian dialect, Verderamé called out to the men at the bar. “Who did we send to this boy?” In the same dialect, they answered that they weren’t sure, that it could have been Marco or Sammy, or John, the new guy.

Harry understood, and kept them from knowing that he did. He had thought that perhaps by speaking in Italian he could make some headway, but now he would not give up the advantage of being privy to conversations they thought secret. And, beyond that, to them his academic Roman dialect would no doubt sound pretentious. “Copeland Leather,” he said.

Verderamé drew his head back and opened his eyes a little wider, quickly restoring his expression, to show that he was familiar with the subject.

“I asked the guys you sent if I could see you. Until last week, we were paying Mickey Gottlieb a fifth of what they told us. It’s not as if business is suddenly good. We’re competing with cheap European labor. What we make is on a par with the best leather goods in the world, but though we’re as good as England or Italy, we can’t do better, and as their product begins to come in cheaply, they’re killing us.”

“What does that have to do with me? What are you telling me this for?” He was already angry, not with reason, but because he could be.

“If . . . we pay that amount every month . . . .”

“Every week, it’s always by the week.”

“Every week. God, every week. We’ll be out of business in six months, and then we won’t be able to pay anything.”

“Do you know how many times a day I hear this?” Verderamé asked, his irritation deliberately exaggerated to shift the ground. “All these guys, these people, who come to me and complain about the price of my services. Nobody I protect has ever been forced out of business because I protect them, but they all whine about how they’re going to go bankrupt. What has that got to do with me except that they wanna Jew me outa what they owe me? Even if they do go bankrupt, what do I care? Someone else is going to take over the space.”

“This will break the back of my business and put fifty good men out on the street.” Harry’s neutrality was ebbing. He stared at the table.

“Well,” said Verderamé, “you’re young. Did you just get back from the service?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you do?”

“I was a clerk, in Washington. Supply,” Harry said. “It wasn’t exactly . . . .”

“But you served, right?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m gonna cut you some slack.”

Harry stiffened against expecting too much.

“I’m gonna drop it to two thousand.”

“It already is two thousand.”

“Twenty-five hundred.”

This hurt. “They said two thousand.”

“They made a mistake. Whata they know?”

“Two thousand is what I was talking about. Two thousand is what will kill us.”

“I did you a favor. I cut what you owe by twenty percent. Where else can you just walk in and get twenty percent off? You wanna be greedy?”

“I still don’t understand. Gottlieb charged so much less.”

“Okay,” Verderamé said. “Someone did us a favor, and now we’re doing them a favor. That’s all.”

“You mean you’re making me do the favor for you.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean.”

It was too dangerous for Harry to follow this line, so he became silent, not knowing what to say next. In the pause, Verderamé’s right hand, which in perhaps a conscious effort had been kept either beneath the table, under his lapel, or clenched in a cloth napkin, emerged for a second or two. Verderamé saw Harry’s eyes settle upon it and follow for the brief time it was in the open. His right thumbnail, and just his thumbnail, was dark yellow, and extended at least an inch beyond his thumb. That Harry had seen it was mysteriously embarrassing to Verderamé, and Harry knew immediately that nothing further would be accomplished.

“Two thousand?”

“Two thousand.”

“My father paid four hundred.”

“I collected for Gottlieb then. Your father and the nigger paid six hundred. Maybe it went down in the war. Your father begged like a fuckin’ dog.”

“My father did what?” Harry didn’t seem so weak when he said this.

“Your father, kid, begged like a dog. But he still paid the maximum.”

“I don’t think he did that,” Harry said.

“I think he did. Where’d you bury him, in a pet cemetery?”

Then came the sound of the creaking and scraping of chair legs as the heavy men at the bar dismounted. Expressionless, Harry whitened, which seemed to them to be the most dangerous of all signs.

“You just got back from the war,” Verderamé said, “where you fought at a desk. Lemme tell you something. I’m still in a war that I’ve been fighting since I was ten years old. It’s all I know. I can’t do anything else. I don’t want to do anything else. And I won’t pretend to you that I don’t love it in the same way that, no matter what he says, a cop loves what he does. I don’t know you. I don’t care about you. You don’t mean anything to me. But you just entered a game that I’ve been playing since before you were born. How you play is up to you, but you have no fuckin’ idea—I guarantee it—of what it took for me to get to this table. You just keep in mind that I’ve got the wall at my back and you’ve got the door.”

His anger rose again, inexhaustibly. “So I wanna know, who the hell are you? Some fuckin’ guy, some fuckin’ guy walks in off the street, you walk in here looking for a break from me, based on what? I’ll tell you, because I know. Because you think I might feel bad about what I do. You think so? You wanna ride a white horse? Look around you. You think the mayor doesn’t get a piece of both of us? The commissioner? Everybody is fucking everybody else. It’s what they call a circle jerk. If you stop, you die, but it keeps on going. The war’s not over, kid. It was never over, even before it started. And it’s right here, every day. You see?”

“There’s a difference,” Harry said, crossing the line, “between starting something . . . and finishing it.”

“I don’t like what I hear,” Verderamé told him tensely.

With no more than a second to react, Harry said, “We made the first payment. We’ll make the rest.”

“You were five hundred short.”

Harry was stunned. “I’ll have five hundred on Friday.”

“Then you can go back to two thousand,” Verderamé said. “Merry Christmas.”