The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  Despite all the finery and furniture, the room was dominated by its windows; unhindered views of Manhattan in all its pale glory, shimmering in the morning drizzle. The Dakota was next door, the park opposite, beyond it the lofty, old-money towers of the Upper East Side and Gabriel’s own apartment. To the south, the skyscrapers of Midtown rose row after row into the rain-clouds like so many knives.

  Gabriel looked down into the park. The rain had melted most of the frost that had covered the ground earlier.

  ‘Gabby,’ someone said.

  Gabriel turned to see John Bova standing next to him. A low-level pimp in the Luciano crime family, owner of the Brooklyn gym Gabriel’s security goons trained in. Bova had the physique of a boxer gone to seed, and a red, splotchy face made grotesque by a thick scar that ran down its right side.

  ‘Bova,’ said Gabriel. ‘You’re up early.’

  Bova paused, not sure if he was being needled. ‘Here to see the boss?’ he asked, fishing for information.

  ‘Nah,’ said Gabriel. ‘I’m here for the snacks.’

  Again Bova eyed him. Again Gabriel enjoyed the man’s confusion.

  There were two factions in the Luciano family, the one Costello and Gabriel belonged to, and the other one, headed up by Vito Genovese, the family’s underboss out in New Jersey, power-hungry and itching to usurp the throne. Bova was supposed to be in Costello’s clique, but was actually a mole for Genovese. Costello and Gabriel both knew it, but kept Bova around anyways, in case of emergency.

  ‘What about you?’ Gabriel asked.

  Bova shrugged, though Gabriel could see him puff out at being the topic of conversation. The man was everything Gabriel hated about mobsters: violent, self-satisfied, egotistical, nowhere near as sharp as he thought he was.

  ‘Here making contacts,’ said Bova. ‘You know how they say, poor men get up and go to work; rich men get up and make contacts.’

  Gabriel wondered if Bova had been studying self-help business manuals. The man ran a stable of over-the-hill prostitutes from a collection of rat-infested apartments scattered around Columbus Circle. He strung them out on dope, sent them onto the streets in the coldest weather, beat them when profits dropped. Meanwhile, almost everyone else in the room was a civic leader. Gabriel wondered exactly what contacts Bova was hoping to make.

  ‘Any idea who the kike with the leather face is?’ Bova asked, gesturing to a sun-tanned, gray-haired man standing next to the samovar. Bova liked to use Jewish slurs whenever Gabriel was around.

  Gabriel gave him a look. Bova caught it.

  ‘No offense,’ said Bova. He shrugged, then a mean little smile twisted his lips.

  ‘That’s Jack Warner,’ Gabriel said. ‘The movie producer.’

  ‘Warner as in Warner Brothers?’

  Gabriel nodded. Costello and Warner were old friends. Gabriel looked at the man and realized that something was going on. The last couple of nights he’d noticed a few other Los Angeles-based movie producers in the Copa. He made a mental note to ask Costello about it.

  The door on the far side of the room opened up and Bobbie smiled at Gabriel and gestured him over. Gabriel felt a wave of relief to be getting away from the overweight pimp.

  ‘So you are here to see the boss,’ said Bova. ‘What’s cooking?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Gabriel, heading across the room to Costello’s study.

  PART TWO

  ‘In short, the County of New York, island of greatest concentration, greatest wealth, greatest culture, and greatest splendor, in keeping with its superlatives, presents a law enforcement problem of greatest magnitude.’

  REPORT OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY,

  COUNTY OF NEW YORK, 1946–1948

  4

  Monday 3rd, 6.35 a.m.

  The sun rose on the state of New York, and picked out a line of silver glinting south through the Hudson River Valley – The 20th Century Limited, the overnight express train from Chicago – threading itself like a needle through the landscape, past mountains and shimmering lakes and forests ablaze with autumn colors, drawn inexorably to the magnet heart of New York City. The railroad track turned a wide arc on the approach to the Bronx, affording the passengers a view of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, their pinnacles bathed in the fresh, cold light of dawn.

  Then the train completed its turn and roared into the city, snaking between tenement roofs and pigeon lofts and giant billboards bolted onto scaffolds. It soared over the Harlem River, dipped down onto Manhattan, the buildings either side rattling past like marching soldiers. It reached 97th Street and plunged into the Park Avenue tunnel and all turned black for the final approach to Grand Central Terminus, where the train pulled into platform thirteen, came to a stop, and the great hustle of people shouldered its way out into the station.

  Ida alone remained in her seat. She watched the others leave as if witnessing some unfathomable migration of beasts – the businessmen, the families, the tourists – bedraggled and bleary-eyed, many of them regretting their choice of an overnight train which disgorged its passengers so unceremoniously into New York’s unforgiving rush hour.

  When the passageways were empty, she rose, plucked her suitcase from the overhead compartment, and found her way through the debris to the restroom. It was cramped and unheated, so the cold bit at her skin, but there was a sink with a mirror above it, which was all she needed. From outside she could hear the porters unloading the train, the bustle of the station, the dull roar of thousands of hard soles against marble, and in the distance, the rumble of the world’s greatest city, eight million people rising to make another day.

  She brushed her teeth, washed her face, fixed her hair, reapplied makeup, washed her hands. She stared at herself, checking to see if recent traumas had left their mark. A little gray at the temples, a few wrinkles at the eyes, a softness to her features. She looked younger than her forty-seven years, and what she’d lost in youth, she’d gained in self-assurance and poise. Or so she liked to tell herself.

  Ida stepped off the train, reached the end of the platform and caught her first glimpse of Grand Central in full flow. Torrents of black suits cascaded through the station’s honeycomb of passages, up and down its marble stairs, out of exits, onto platforms, across the giant expanse of the main concourse, a cavernous space split by razor-sharp sunbeams that burst in from the skylights above.

  The rush and noise contained something of the buzz Ida had always associated with New York; the itchy, excited energy of people on the move, tackling overstuffed schedules at breakneck speed. Just as Manhattan’s skyscrapers allowed ever more real estate onto the island, so too did the city condense people’s days, concentrating time, intensifying, thickening, compacting it. Ida wondered if it wouldn’t fray her nerves, if she wouldn’t break down through sheer claustrophobia.

  She slipped through the torrents as the tannoy system boomed, reached the benches where she was supposed to meet Michael. She looked up at the brass clock above the information booth. The hands atop its milk-glass face told her she was still a little early. She waited, looked around, at the rush, at the sunbeams, at the fug, at the station’s ceiling miles above her, the paintings that covered it obscured by years of grime and cigarette tar.

  Eventually, she could make out what the paintings depicted – the constellations, in gold lines on a deep-blue background, both the stars themselves, and, superimposed on the universe, the ancient Greek mythical figures that represented them. Amidst the golden dust of the Milky Way, she made out Orion, Taurus, Aries, Pisces. Her eye settled on Gemini for some reason, the twins clinging to each other as they careened through the sky, one holding a sickle, the other a lyre. Something about the figures’ movement, the way it echoed the rush on the concourse beneath them, made her uneasy.

  As she deliberated on why that could be, she noticed someone approaching through the crowds. Michael, a hand raised, waving. He stepped through one of the sunbeams streaming in from the skylights, and his figure flashed and glowed, dust swirl
ed. Then, just as quickly, he exited the beam, and the flash evaporated, and Ida’s eyes adjusted.

  He reached her and they hugged and clung onto each other as tightly as the Gemini twins tumbling through the Milky Way above.

  ‘Michael,’ she said.

  ‘Ida. Welcome to New York.’

  They disengaged from the hug and Ida looked at her friend. Michael was in his early seventies, although it was hard to tell because of the smallpox scars that covered his face, obscuring wrinkles and softness. Despite his age, he still had a straight back, still retained his tall, gaunt appearance. But he had changed in the months since Ida had last seen him. He looked weary, shaken by the disaster that had smashed into his life, trailing upheaval and trauma in its wake. She should have been happy to see him, a familiar face in an unfamiliar city. Instead she was concerned. She tried to think what she could say that wouldn’t sound trite, wondered if her voice would betray how concerned she was.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Battling on. You?’

  ‘Itching to get started.’

  He nodded, acknowledging the sentiment. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said flatly.

  ‘You think I’d stay home?’

  She smiled, and a second later he echoed it, and they stood there awkwardly, and the question that had been bugging Ida the last few weeks nagged at her again – why hadn’t he called her earlier? In the twenty years she’d been running her agency, she’d become an expert in miscarriages of justice. She was the first person he should have called.

  ‘You want to go by your hotel?’ he asked. ‘Drop your things off? We’ve got the crime scene to go to and then the island.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’ve only got that,’ she said, gesturing to the thin suitcase at her feet. ‘Let’s get started. I’ll check in later on.’

  They turned and headed for the subway entrance, and she looked again at her downtrodden friend.

  ‘We’ll get through this, Michael,’ she said. ‘We’ll see him set free.’

  And even as she spoke, she realized she’d already failed at not saying anything trite.

  ‘Sure we will,’ Michael replied.

  But she could sense his disquiet, an uncertainty echoed in her own emotions. She realized the same misgiving was gnawing away at them both, a fear that this, the most important case they’d ever had, might just be the one they couldn’t win.

  5

  Monday 3rd, 7.25 a.m.

  When they emerged from the subway station Ida saw that the sunny spell had come to an end, the skies had marbled and a freezing wind was blowing in from the river.

  ‘Welcome to Harlem,’ said Michael.

  Ida smiled and pulled her collar tight and they headed south down Lennox Avenue, a wide tree-lined thoroughfare of brownstones and apartment blocks dotted with restaurants, bars and stores. On the sidewalks people were bustling towards the subway station and the bus stops; Negro women on their way downtown to white people’s houses, clutching brown paper packages that contained their maid’s dresses, folded up tight; men dressed in peacoats and flat-caps heading to warehouses and factories; gangs of children dragged down by school books.

  Ida caught the voices of these people as they passed – many of them spoke like she did, with Southern accents. In New York, as in Chicago, the city’s Negroes were mostly from the Cotton Belt, refugees from its race hate and grinding poverty.

  As they walked, Ida noticed the people staring at Michael – a tall, thin, white man so far uptown. He didn’t seem to be bothered by it. He’d married a colored woman back in New Orleans, raised two colored children, moved to Chicago, lived for years on the Southside. He was used to society at large casting him looks. Now one of those children had moved to New York and had been accused of a multiple homicide. Hostile locals was the last thing he was worried about.

  A drizzle picked up, floated down from the sky onto the sidewalks and curbs, where Halloween decorations from the previous weekend had been left out for the garbage vans – cut-paper skulls and skeletons and witches, pumpkin heads in piles, rotting, half-collapsed, their jagged smiles sinister.

  Ida pulled her collar tighter against the rain, Michael pushed his hat down low. They cut onto 141st Street, over Seventh Avenue, and here, in the smaller streets, things were more rundown, and Ida saw again that Harlem was much like Chicago’s Southside – pawn shops, dope pads, shuttered-up gin mills. Once-grand houses were crumbling now, tarnished by broken cornices, rusted railings, boarded-up windows. The streets were smattered with discarded furniture, overflowing trash cans, other universal signs of decay. Different cities, same slum.

  They arrived at a row of dilapidated brownstones. Michael pointed to a building opposite a root doctor’s shop.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘The scene of the crime.’

  They crossed the street and approached the building, a corner brownstone with a long sign running up its brickwork – The Palmer Hotel – umber letters on a background which at some point had probably been yellow ochre, but years of smog had turned to a shade somewhere between jaundice and bile. The building was broad and foreboding, seemed to loom down at them from the sky, as if its masonry might rear up and crash onto them at any moment. It wasn’t the kind of place you moved to, it was the kind of place you ended up. What the hell was Michael’s son doing there? The boy had graduated from Northwestern, medical school, had practiced as a hospital doctor before the war.

  Ida looked at Michael. ‘What’s the plan?’ she asked.

  ‘Remember Dave Carrasco?’

  ‘From West Town?’

  Michael nodded. ‘He moved out here about ten years ago. He’s a detective now with the DA’s Homicide Bureau. Technically he’s working for the prosecution, but he owes me a favor, so he’s been helping me out. He let me have a look at the case jacket, come by the crime scene. He’ll be here soon. Come on, let’s get out of the rain.’

  They walked over to the doorway of the root doctor’s shop, stepped under the awning. Ida looked at its windows. They were covered by white net curtains and above them hung a sign – Prince Moses – Authentic New Orleans Root Doctor. Offers Voodoo Spell-casting, Love Potions, Curse Removal & Exorcisms, Magic Candles & Oils. On the windowsill was a row of brown jars, a label pasted on each – Follow Me, Boy – Evil Be Gone – Protection – Wealth.

  Ida stared at the curlicues of the letters.

  ‘Smoke?’

  She looked up to see Michael had gotten a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. She took one. They lit up and watched the hotel through the rain, Ida wondering again how Tom had ended up there. She remembered reading the news report back in her office in Chicago – The Harlem House of Horrors Slayings. She remembered the shock at seeing Tom’s name. She’d called up Michael’s house and Annette, Michael’s wife, had picked up the phone, told her Michael was already on his way to New York.

  The shock had faded over the intervening weeks, but the confusion hadn’t. Ida had known the boy since he was a child, had seen him grow up, felt he was something like a nephew to her. Tom had always had a gentle manner to him, had wanted to be a doctor so he could help people. The idea that he could hurt anyone made no sense to her. It was completely against his nature, against everything he stood for.

  She turned to look at Michael. She wanted to talk to him about the situation, how he felt. He’d stopped working ten years ago, then out of the blue, a call from Rikers Island, and now instead of enjoying his retirement, he was standing on a street corner in Harlem in the rain. The strain of it was clear in his demeanor, how sullen he was, how withdrawn.

  ‘Who’s your lawyer?’ she asked.

  ‘Len Rutherford. He was probably our sixth choice. The first five wouldn’t take the case unless Tom pleaded guilty, and now Rutherford’s seen the evidence he’s pressuring us to do the same. The consensus is Tom should admit it, go for a plea deal, then maybe he’ll get out when he’s my age.’

  Michael took a toke on his cigarette, didn’t look
at Ida, didn’t take his eyes off the crumbling facade of the Palmer Hotel.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d ever have to do this kind of work again,’ he said bitterly. ‘What was the last case we worked together? I can’t even remember.’

  She thought quickly, running through their adventures in her mind, trying to place the most recent one. They’d worked together at the Pinkertons’ Chicago Bureau for nearly a decade, but even after that – when Ida had set up her own agency and Michael had gotten a job at the Treasury Department – they still teamed up for the occasional case, when Ida needed Michael’s help, or he needed hers.

  ‘That Chinese bookie who went missing,’ Ida said. ‘Back around the time of the Steel Mill riot.’

  Michael remembered, nodded. The rain pattered on.

  A Plymouth pulled up outside the hotel, and Michael gestured to it, and they crossed the road. A man got out of the driver’s side. He was middle-aged, chubby, sported a bushy moustache and a Chesterfield coat in a houndstooth weave.

  ‘Detective Carrasco,’ said Michael. ‘You remember Ida?’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Carrasco, holding out his hand. ‘How are you doing, Miss Davis?’

  ‘Good, Carrasco,’ Ida said. ‘Although it’s Mrs Young these days.’

  Even two years after he’d died it felt strange using Nathan’s surname, as if his death meant she no longer had a right to it.

  ‘Apologies,’ Carrasco said. ‘Here.’

  He had a thick paper binder in his hand, which he passed over to Michael.

  ‘It’s the case jacket,’ he said. ‘You can keep that one. Got a secretary who’s sweet on me to make a duplicate.’

  ‘Thanks, buddy,’ said Michael, taking the binder.

  ‘Shall we?’ Carrasco said, gesturing to the hotel.

  They walked up the front steps and into the building. The reception area was dingy and close. On one side was the reception desk, separated from the rest of the room by a partition inset with a wire-mesh window. Beyond it there was a staircase leading to the upper floors, a corridor going into the depths of the building.