The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  ‘You look tired,’ she said.

  ‘Long night,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t they all?’

  They smiled at each other and he suppressed the urge to ruffle her hair. Beautiful girl. Talented, warm, hesitant, modest. He’d led her into danger with his way of life, and now he had to do everything he could to lead her back out. This was who he was doing it all for, his last living relative, the one person in the world he’d happily die for.

  She turned and headed off to the kitchen to get her breakfast.

  Gabriel poured his whisky into his coffee, walked over to the police scanner, kneeled, turned it on, sat on the sofa. He closed his eyes and lights roared around his head. He zoned in on the shrill chatter coming out of the scanner. God knew why, but it soothed him.

  ‘Hit-and-run on 96th and 3rd. One down. Brown ’44 Plymouth. Front-left damage—’

  In knots of static and chirping came the sound of New York waking up, the morning fruit of the night before’s crimes – a hodgepodged stream of traffic accidents, muggings, burglaries, rapes, dead bodies fished out of the river, out of paper-strewn alleys, off benches in the park, the aftermath and residue of drinking sessions and fights, of dreams fulfilled and nightmares come true, the whole morning clean-up after the empire of night had receded once more.

  ‘Mugger fleeing East 73rd into Central Park. Back-up requested—’

  Gabriel had been looking for a way out of the life for years. Over time a feeling had taken root in him that things were closing in. That, like every other mobster, the longer he stayed in the life, the closer he got to a prison cell or a shallow grave. Every day the feeling grew stronger, the cage grew smaller, till it got so he couldn’t even remember a time when he had peace of mind.

  And then, six years ago, during a poker game, he’d won a fifty-percent stake in the Saratoga Racetrack in upstate New York. The other fifty percent was owned by Albert Anastasia, the underboss of the Mangano crime family, unofficial head of the Brooklyn docks, founder member of Murder Inc, a torturer and prolific killer, the embodiment of the Mob’s violence machine.

  When Anastasia heard he was partnered up with Gabriel, he asked Gabriel over for an informal chat, explained how if there were any irregularities, or Gabriel got in the way of the racetrack’s smooth operation, Anastasia would have him disappeared. And Anastasia was probably good for it. Rumor was, his personal body count was in triple-digits. Gabriel sat there and nodded, secretly happy, because in Anastasia’s threat, Gabriel had figured a way to get himself and Sarah out of the trap.

  ‘Canal Street and Allen. Probable Burglary. Chinese interpreter requested—’

  On the following Thursday afternoon, Gabriel would go to the auditor’s office downtown and pick up the books for that summer’s season of the racetrack. In previous years, Gabriel concealed his skim well, but this year he’d done it sloppily, so the auditor would pick up on it. He’d return to the apartment, where it’d just be him and Sarah – Mrs Hirsch had Thursday nights off, spent them with her sister over in Queens. Gabriel had arranged for Anastasia to come over in person to pick up the books around nine p.m.

  Anastasia would take the books and leave.

  Gabriel would turn over furniture, pull up rugs, cut his arm and leave the place drenched in blood. At ten p.m., the concierge would go up to the rooftop to smoke a joint like he always did, at five past ten, Gabriel and Sarah would slip out of the building, walk down to Lexington, catch the subway to Penn Station, from there a bus to Florida, from there to Texas, and from there the fake passports would get them from San Antonio to Monterrey, to Mexico City, to freedom.

  ‘Pier 88. Body found. Officers on scene. Request attendance of Homicide Bureau Detectives—’

  On Friday morning, Mrs Hirsch would return to work, find Gabriel and the girl missing, the apartment ruined, would call the police and scream murder, giving them a half-day’s head start. Cops would investigate, Costello would investigate, a single conclusion would be reached – Anastasia came over to collect the books on Thursday night, saw that Gabriel had been stealing from him, an argument ensued, Anastasia killed Gabriel and Sarah and hid their bodies. Anastasia had done such things in the past. Anastasia flew into blind rages. He’d probably deny it, but everyone would know he was lying; he had a triple-digit body count after all.

  Gabriel and Sarah would get away clean. Gabriel would finally have done right by the girl.

  ‘Spectators at corner of Amsterdam and 134th. Possible knife fight. Officers in the vicinity for crowd control make yourselves known—’

  ‘Bye, Uncle Gabby.’

  He opened his eyes to see Sarah heading out of the door, on her way to school. The door slammed shut, shook his skull. He rubbed his temples and looked around the apartment, imagined the shadow fight with Anastasia once more. He calculated again which pieces of furniture to turn over, where to splatter the blood, he drew parallels with the drip painting on the wall behind him – a performance recorded.

  ‘Multiple shots. Suspect heading north on 5th. All units clear the air—’

  He’d planned it for years, and for every mis-step and hiccup, he’d come up with contingencies, had mapped all the branches of cause and effect. The only thing he hadn’t prepared for was to be asked to find Benny Siegel’s stolen millions ten days before it was all supposed to go down.

  Six years of planning, ten days to save it all.

  ‘I don’t know what I hate more, that painting or that police radio. Why can’t you put nice things in this house?’

  Gabriel turned to see Mrs Hirsch in the hallway, putting her coat on.

  ‘You want anything from the store?’ she asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Thursday,’ he said. ‘You need to cancel your night off.’

  Mrs Hirsch paused, frowned.

  ‘You been given a job?’ she asked warily.

  Gabriel nodded.

  ‘Costello?’

  Gabriel nodded again. She straightened the collar of her coat and shuffled over, perched on the sofa as Gabriel told her about Benny’s missing millions and the task of finding them.

  ‘And if you don’t find the money by the time you’re supposed to leave?’ she asked.

  ‘Then I can’t leave,’ he said. ‘If I leave without finding the money first, everyone’ll think I found the money and ran away. They’ll chase me forever. Till my dying day. So much for a clean break. For all the years I planned it.’

  He looked at her and she nodded, pondering his predicament, taking in its ramifications.

  ‘But if you don’t leave, you’ll have Anastasia to deal with,’ she said. ‘It’ll all have been for nothing.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Gabriel thought about that triple-digit body count again. The danger of having Anastasia come after him. The madness.

  Mrs Hirsch considered. ‘Better get searching, then,’ she said, rising, heading for the door.

  He smiled. She left.

  Mrs Hirsch was one of the only people in New York he’d actually miss when he was gone. He closed his eyes and the darkness relaxed him, but he knew he couldn’t sleep – the passports were burning a hole in his pocket. He had to stash them and get to work.

  8

  Monday 3rd, 9.12 a.m.

  Gabriel stepped out onto the rooftop and walked over to the pigeon coop. He shivered in the cold, but he was glad to be up there. He’d always loved being on rooftops, ever since he was a kid. They had a special kind of serenity, were a wilderness all of their own, in a city where wilderness was hard to come by. This was probably why so many New Yorkers owned coops – as an excuse to get out onto the rooftops, into the stillness, the calming embrace of the sky.

  After his parents had died, when it was just Gabriel and his sister scratching a living on the streets, sometimes in winter they’d climb the fire escapes of apartment buildings like this one, buildings with central heating. They’d sleep in the spaces between the heating vents to save themselves from freezing.
Sometimes they’d wake up covered in soot, with coughs that wouldn’t leave them for weeks, so his sister would have to steal pastilles from pharmacies.

  Sometimes, in the mayfly days of summer, they’d sleep on the roofs just to be under the night sky, to watch the stars wend their way through the darkness. When fall came round and they returned indoors, the rooms always felt like prison cells.

  Gabriel thought of the sister he’d shared so much with. The sister so violently taken from him. He thought of Sarah who looked so much like her and how he couldn’t let the same thing happen to his niece.

  He reached the coop and the pigeons rose up and swirled about behind the wire-mesh. He unlocked the door and stepped inside and everything rattled with their movement.

  He hauled some of the cages from the storage bench that ran the length of the coop. He unlocked the padlock on the bench, swung open its top to reveal the stash space within. He took out the strongbox, unlocked it, placed the passports inside, nestled them next to the cash and the guns. Took one of the guns out – a Smith & Wesson .38 Special – and cast his eye over it, slipped in some rounds, pocketed it. He locked everything up, returned the coop to how it was, took one last look around and left.

  As he finished locking the door, he looked up at the building across 64th Street which towered over his own building. In one of the windows an ancient woman was scowling at him. Their eyes met. She turned and disappeared. He carried on staring at the empty window, then at the others that surrounded it, like so many boxes piled on top of each other, like the automat the previous night, the glass dispensers with their food going cold, congealing.

  His thoughts were broken by a roaring noise below him – a train passing along the steel ribbon of the Third Avenue El tracks, belching soot, producing an unholy thunder, shaking every joist and strut in the scaffolds that held the tracks fixed three stories above the earth. The locals had been campaigning for years to have it scrapped, thereby allowing the Upper East Side to detach itself even further from the rest of New York. Sooner or later, the campaign would succeed.

  Gabriel watched the old train lurch uptown towards Harlem and the Bronx, a great iron slugger who didn’t know he was beaten yet, as unpopular and out-of-place amongst the grand apartment blocks as Gabriel and his pigeon coop. The neighbors had made countless complaints about his pigeons – rooftop coops were for tenements and slums, for Brooklyn and Queens and other immigrant quarters of the city, not for the Upper East Side, home of the city’s merchant princes and robber-barons.

  Gabriel had only moved to the neighborhood because it was close to the Copa. But he’d found as soon as he’d relocated that he couldn’t walk two yards without encountering a well-cultivated sneer. Maybe he should have stuck to the Upper West Side, with Costello and all the other gangsters.

  He lit a cigarette and stared beyond the El tracks, over the rooftops to the river shimmering in the distance, to Welfare Island, and beyond that, the haze of Queens.

  Mrs Hirsch’s words floated into his head, her warning about the dangers of spending too long staring out over the city, the risk of becoming a gargoyle.

  He turned and trudged back towards the stairwell. He was about halfway there when the door to it opened and the concierge stepped out. He was young, and from Brooklyn too, which made the pair of them feel like they were allies in this building of antique wealth. This was the concierge whose ten o’clock smoke break would unwittingly help Gabriel in his plan to escape.

  The concierge saw him, nodded, held the door open for him, yawned as Gabriel approached. The two men also had in common the fact they worked nights.

  ‘You not clocked off yet?’ asked Gabriel, stopping.

  ‘Pauly’s late,’ said the concierge. ‘Came up to check the heating vents. Mrs Ollson in apartment five’s complaining again.’

  Gabriel smiled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He thought of rich Mrs Ollson in apartment five, indignant over a blocked heating vent. He thought of himself and his sister all those winters ago, covered in soot, chased down the street by pharmacy clerks, hopping onto street-cars, getting away.

  Just then another elevated train roared past, heading downtown this time. They both turned to watch it as it waddled down the tracks, disappeared behind the roof of Bloomingdale’s, where the passing trains made the crockery in the homeware section rattle.

  ‘I know they ain’t no good,’ said the concierge, nodding after it, ‘but I’ll be damned if I won’t miss ’em.’

  Gabriel took a toke on his cigarette. ‘Amen,’ he said.

  He nodded at the concierge, popped his cigarette back in his mouth, headed down the stairs. He’d come up with a plan for finding Benny’s money. He needed to be on the street to execute it. Ten days to go. Becoming a gargoyle wasn’t the only metamorphosis he had to worry about.

  PART FOUR

  ‘There is a feeling throughout the land that the returned veterans have been engaging in crimes to such an extent as to endanger the very foundation of civil life and safety. Indeed, some people have spread before the public a canvas on which the ex-service man is shown bludgeoning all passers-by and after maiming them, robbing them of their possessions.’

  HARRY WILLBACH,

  JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW AND CRIMINOLOGY, 1948

  9

  Monday 3rd, 9.00 a.m.

  The ferry ploughed its way through the gray water towards Rikers Island, a stretch of land shaped like a teardrop that lay in the middle of the East River, halfway between Queens and the Bronx. Ida sat near the boat’s prow, reading the case jacket, looking up occasionally at the shoreline in the distance, pale and misty in the morning light, rising out of the water indistinctly. Around them the river was a floating traffic jam – ferries, freighters, carfloats, barges, even fishing boats – their green and red lights glittering like jewels in the otherwise gloomy landscape, funnels emitting sooty black smoke which was lifted by the wind into the gunmetal sky.

  Michael leaned on the railing next to her, staring instead across the boat at the other passengers sitting on the benches that lined the deck – wives and children of inmates paying visits, lawyers, prison workers. All of them were wrapped up in heavy winter coats to shield them against the bitter winds that swept across the river. Many of the wives seemed to know each other and sat in groups chatting. Their children sullenly watched the boats, or raced around the slippery deck chasing seagulls, shrieking as much as the birds they were pursuing.

  As the ferry approached the island, Ida closed the case jacket and inspected their destination, watched as its features became steadily more distinct – treeless scrubland, a rocky shoreline, low, red-brick buildings, all of them surrounded by razor-wire and security walls. The island had a strange, lumpy quality to it, grassy mounds rose up out of the scrub, whole sections were at an angle to the water.

  When they reached the island, the ferry bumped against the jetty, was tied up, and they all descended. They made their way over a rickety wooden walkway above the marshy ground. At the end of the walkway were a pair of metal gates set in a long, brick wall, behind which was the sprawling complex of Victorian buildings that made up the prison. The visitors formed a line at the gates and as they waited for the guards to open them up, Ida surveyed the landscape they had just crossed. Frost lay all across the marsh, making the foliage and black earth sparkle like some Arctic tundra, as if the boat had come ashore in Iceland or Greenland, rather than New York.

  Then she spotted something odd in the distance; smoke rising up from the black soil, and here and there, in amongst the reeds, the frost seemed to be glowing, and deep underneath it, orange lights bloomed and faded, like jellyfish coming to surface and diving once more. Ida was reminded of the eerie blue lights of the will-o’-the-wisps that darted across the swamps back home in Louisiana.

  ‘This whole island used to be a dump,’ said Michael, following her gaze. ‘The garbage is still there under the ground and it catches f
ire sometimes, comes up through the soil. It’s on account of all this being built on garbage mounds that the buildings are crumbling.’

  He nodded to the building in front of them; the imposing facade was riven with cracks that darted down the mortar between its bricks. A whole wing seemed to have settled below the rest of the building, subsiding into the marsh. This was the cause of the island’s slanting, uneven quality that Ida had noticed on their approach. She thought of the city using the place to discard its unwanted refuse, then its unwanted humans, and the place seemed even more mournful.

  The guards opened the gates. The line moved forward and they were instructed to head inside. They stepped through into a muddy courtyard, entered a barn-like reception hall that was subdivided by ropes and poles. They were directed to a desk where their IDs were checked and noted down, then they were told to wait once more.

  ‘How long’s visiting time?’ Ida asked Michael.

  ‘Half an hour,’ he replied.

  ‘Barely enough time to get started.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the point.’

  After fifteen minutes, guards entered and shouted out names, and they were led in groups through a door into a hall filled with rows of numbered tables. Behind each one sat a prisoner in chains. The hall was gloomy and windowless apart from a row of thin skylights high up in the ceiling which were covered in a thick layer of grime that made the anemic morning light even more so.

  Michael and Ida were led to table eighteen, where Thomas James Talbot waited.

  Ida struggled not to show her shock. She hadn’t seen him since before the war and he had changed dramatically. He was chubbier than she remembered, though he still had his father’s physique in there somewhere. His hair was going gray and receding. Even more alarmingly, he had a great bruise on his left cheek, lumpy and topped with a scab. But beyond even that, it was his eyes that startled her. They had lost their shine, their joy, there was something haunted to them, traumatized. The same deterioration she’d seen on Michael was apparent on his son, but writ greater, stronger, more heart-wrenching.