The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  They arranged a meeting. Gabriel caught a cab to 47th and Broadway, entered the Mayfair Theater, bought a ticket and took a seat in the auditorium. The place was empty aside from Gabriel, a gang of boys in the front row, and a couple of teenagers at the back, eating each other’s faces.

  He sat through the tail-end of the newsreels and then the main feature came on, a crime flick staring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. Gabriel chained Luckies and ended up watching most of the film while he waited for Tomasulo to show up. As Hayworth and Welles stalked each other through a hall of mirrors, guns in their hands, jumping at reflections that may have been real, at images of killers multiplied, a man entered at the rear of the auditorium. Tomasulo. Finally. Gabriel raised a hand and Tomasulo peered at him through the blackness and the silver light flooding in off the screen. He walked over and sat next to him. He wore a thick wool overcoat with a fur collar that had caught the rain, making the fabric smell musty and stale, matching the cinema’s own signature scent of moldy carpet.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Tomasulo, regaining his breath. ‘Sorry I’m late. The traffic at the tunnel …’ He shook his head.

  ‘You’ve missed most of the film,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ said Tomasulo, squinting at the screen. In flickering black and white, Orson Welles shot at one of the infinite reflections in a mirror. Glass shattered. Images dismantled.

  ‘Any good?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ said Gabriel. ‘Apart from Welles’ Irish brogue.’

  Tomasulo took off his coat. Gabriel studied him; he was looking as tired and anxious as always.

  ‘What did you want to see me about? We’re not due a check-in for a while.’

  ‘I wanna know if Vito said anything about coming to see me at the Copa.’

  Tomasulo paused, shrugged. ‘He didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘Anyone else say anything?’

  ‘I didn’t hear nothing.’

  There was something pitiful in the way Tomasulo said it. He hadn’t anything worthwhile to give Gabriel because Genovese had smelled a rat and was keeping things from him. Tomasulo knew it, and so knew his own worthlessness.

  ‘Vito say anything about Benny Siegel?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like anything.’

  Tomasulo frowned. ‘I didn’t hear Vito say nothing,’ he said. ‘But I heard some of the other guys. Last summer, after Benny had come to town begging for money.’

  ‘What’d you hear?’

  ‘Just the guys joking about how Vito was the only one of the bosses who didn’t put money into Benny’s casino. How it was a smart move, you know, after Benny got whacked.’

  ‘Benny asked Vito for money to put into the casino?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘I dunno if he asked him for money,’ said Tomasulo. ‘But they met up over the summer, when Benny was here. That’s what the guys were laughing about.’

  Gabriel stared at Tomasulo. It didn’t make sense – Costello had told him Benny and Genovese had fallen out. But they couldn’t have if Benny had gone begging to Genovese for money. With a sense of alarm, Gabriel wondered if Costello had got it wrong, or if he was hiding things from Gabriel.

  ‘You hear anything about a guy called Faron?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘Faron?’ said Tomasulo. ‘Faron?’ He repeated it like he was coughing up a fur-ball. ‘The guy from years back? The one who whacked that diner?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the one. You seen him around at Genovese’s?’

  ‘What’s he look like?’

  ‘Built like a mountain. Brown hair. Dresses kinda hillbilly. Strange accent.’

  ‘Nah, ain’t seen no one like that around. But he’s dead, ain’t he? No one’s heard from him for years.’

  ‘You haven’t heard anyone mention his name?’

  Tomasulo thought, shook his head. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Long story,’ said Gabriel. ‘What about a jazz musician named Cleveland?’

  ‘Jazz musician? What the fuck would Vito want with one of them?’

  Gabriel suppressed a sigh.

  ‘Vito been acting strange recently, doing anything different?’ he asked.

  ‘You mean like taking us all to the Copa?’

  ‘Yeah, things like that.’

  ‘If he had, I would have told you about it,’ he said. ‘It’s just the usual stuff. He’s working on these finocchio bars in the Village. Muscling in on them. Then there’s the dope. That’s it.’

  Tomasulo shrugged, looking pitiful again. Aside from the information about Genovese and Benny meeting up in the summer, Tomasulo had nothing to give Gabriel, and they both knew it. Another lead was puttering out, extinguishing itself.

  And just then the movie ended, on a shot of a troubled man walking through a San Francisco sunrise. Fresh and clear and full of light. The credits came up. The boys at the front started jabbering, the teenagers paid no notice.

  ‘Nick, I want you to ask around,’ said Gabriel. ‘About Vito and Benny. Find out what happened between them. And ask around about Faron and Cleveland. Subtle-like. I need to know what’s been going on.’

  Tomasulo pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know, Gabby,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

  The lights came up. The boys headed to the exit. The teenagers stayed put. A listless attendant came in and looked about the place, making sure no one had died. She looked at the two teenagers like they’d been there all day, then she glanced at Gabriel and Tomasulo.

  ‘Ten-minute interval before the next showing,’ she said.

  Tomasulo waited for her to leave before speaking. Gabriel looked about the place. In full light it was even more rundown. The walls were coated in a layer of nicotine stains, the armrests were worn, the seat covers ripped and oozing white cotton stuffing, popcorn seemed to be strewn uniformly over every inch of the carpet. Nick Tomasulo, too, looked the worse for it in the unforgiving light, harried, agitated, old.

  When the attendant had gone, he took a puff on his cigarette and looked at Gabriel, and Gabriel could see the man’s eyes watering.

  ‘I want out, Gabby,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They know. I’m sure. They’re freezing me out. They don’t tell me nothing. Sometimes I walk in the room and everything goes quiet.’

  Gabriel could see the fear in his face, hear it in the trembling of his voice.

  ‘You know what happens to rats,’ Tomasulo said.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Gabriel, feeling sorry for the man. ‘But you’ve got Costello behind you. They won’t do anything. But, please, I need you to ask around.’

  ‘They already know,’ Tomasulo said. ‘If I ask around, it’s just going to look even more suspicious.’

  ‘There must be someone there you can talk to,’ Gabriel said. ‘Look, I’ll talk to Costello. See if we can do something, send a lump sum your way, but first you need to ask around for me. Please.’

  Tomasulo looked at him, hesitated, turned to stare at the empty screen in front of them. Then he sighed and nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘But you gotta talk to Costello. I want out, Gabby. I mean it.’

  The attendant came back hoiking a tray laden with smokes, ice creams, orange squeeze.

  Tomasulo stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray in the arm-rest of his seat.

  ‘I gotta get back to Jersey. Take care, Gabby.’

  Gabriel nodded at him. Tomasulo rose and left. Gabriel stayed where he was. He felt sorry for the man. Tomasulo still hadn’t realized there was no way out. Not for him, not for any of them. The only thing to do was run away, like Gabriel had planned, and hope they didn’t catch you.

  He tried to put it out of his mind, struggled to think everything through, figure out what his next move would be. As he tried to plan, the lights went down, the screen went bright, the newsreels came on again, and then the Columbia Pictures logo appeared, the movie started once more. Welles and Hayworth riding through Central Park, sailing to Aca
pulco, running through its streets, arguing in the hills above it. Gabriel wanted to watch those scenes again, to remind himself that Mexico was real, that there truly was somewhere he could escape to outside the nightmarish streets of New York; that it wasn’t all just a mirage he was carrying around inside him, a mirage that was steadily dissolving.

  Hayworth’s figure, her sculpted looks, her blonde hair, put Gabriel in mind of Beatrice. He saw her standing in the center of her dance studio, leaning back in the chair of her office, telling him the sad, sorry tale of Benny’s last days in Las Vegas, lamenting the man and his dream. And Gabriel struggled not to imagine it was Beatrice and himself atop those Mexican hills.

  As he carried on watching, the plot thickened, the characters double- and triple-crossed each other, summoned up reflections of themselves to confuse and disorientate, and a new theory presented itself to Gabriel – Genovese and Benny had stolen the money together. That was why Genovese didn’t put any money into the casino – he knew it was a scam. It wasn’t one of the other families that had helped steal the money, it was someone within the family, Genovese. It had to be. Genovese and Benny couldn’t have hated each other, they’d met up over the summer, worked it together. Maybe Genovese was responsible for Benny’s death. Killed him so he could keep the two mill.

  But why had Costello told him Genovese had nothing to do with it? Was Gabriel being set up somehow? And where did Faron fit in? And what did it all have to do with a down-and-out jazz musician?

  28

  Friday 7th, 10.28 a.m.

  After the cinema, Gabriel had headed straight to the Copa, had worked all night, had gone home and tried once more to get a few hours’ sleep, but once more they wouldn’t come. Instead he sifted possibilities, angles to a breakthrough. None came. Theories were good, but he was running out of time. He tried to construct elaborate game plans but some contradiction would dismantle them, some missing piece would send them crashing to the ground.

  And then he caught a break.

  A phone call. Orville Hayes, the house detective at the Savoy-Plaza, the hotel Benny stayed in over the summer, telling Gabriel he’d managed to pull the call records from Benny’s room like Gabriel had asked.

  Gabriel hopped in the Delahaye, rushed over. In the hotel’s bar, Hayes handed Gabriel four sheets of thin paper detailing all the phone calls Benny had made and received in his room during his stay in New York. Gabriel thanked Orville, paid him, returned to the Delahaye and went through them. No numbers Gabriel recognized.

  He got out of the car, found a cigar store, made change from five dollars and used the payphone there to call the numbers. He started at the top of the list, the first calls made after Benny had arrived, figuring if Benny had called a car service, he would have done it close to his arrival. And there it was, the fifth call on the list to the Manhattan Cab Company. Gabriel got the address, ran back to the Delahaye, drove.

  The company was headquartered in a giant taxi-garage underneath the tracks of the Third Avenue El, the same train line that passed by Gabriel’s apartment, but at its faraway, downtown end, an entirely different world – a dreary district of warehouses, machine shops and saloons.

  Gabriel parked the Delahaye just down the road from the entrance, and walked over to it through the shadow slats cast onto the street from the stanchions of the railroad above. He spoke to the manager, explained he wanted to talk to the driver who drove Benny Siegel around the previous summer. The manager claimed he didn’t know what Gabriel was talking about. Gabriel told the man that he was an associate of Benny’s. The man wised up, told Gabriel the driver was a kid called Aaron Morgenstern, and his shift finished at one.

  Gabriel went back to the Delahaye and waited. He still hadn’t slept, so he took the opportunity. He opened up the Doc’s package, took out a couple of Seconals and Nembutals and dry swallowed them. When used in combination, the two drugs amplified one another’s effects. He prayed they’d actually make him sleep. He tipped the seat down all the way. Through the windscreen he could see the tops of the warehouses, the underside of the elevated tracks, the buildings below them covered in soot. In the shadows a bar’s neon light flashed blue through the gloom, on its brickwork, faded posters for war bonds rotted and flapped in the wind.

  A light snow began falling, waltzing onto the sidewalk. Gabriel watched it a few moments, then he closed his eyes. Listened to the wind gusting down the street, making the sheet metal of the machine shops rattle, whining as it passed through telephone wires. He fell into a weary, chemical sleep. He dreamed of his parents, who’d died when he was a child – his mother in the Spanish Flu pandemic, his father of the drink not long after. He dreamed of the rattletrap tenement they’d lived in at the time, how with their parents dead, he and his sister had no hope of paying the rent, how they did what they could, how Gabriel’s sister was left to look after him, much as Gabriel looked after Sarah now.

  They slept rough when they had to, rented when they could. They survived. They made it till Gabriel was eighteen years old and his sister twenty-four. Then she was murdered. Sarah’s father had disappeared months before so Gabriel was left with the baby, and a burning desire for revenge.

  They were living on the Lower East Side at the time, in a dumbbell apartment lined with moaning pipes and ancient radiators that hissed steam. They made extra money letting Mob men on the lam sleep on the studio couch in the living room, a safe house of sorts. The men came courtesy of a friend of his sister’s to whom Gabriel was never introduced. They would arrive, hide out while arrangements were made for passports, berths on ships, or till the heat died down on whatever crime they had committed.

  Faron was one of their guests. A mountain of a man. A six-footer with lank brown hair and crystal-clear blue eyes. He’d been staying with them a few days, waiting to travel on a ship bound for Italy, fleeing a multiple murder in a diner. When Gabriel had left that morning it was just Faron and his sister in the flat. When he returned he found his sister lying in her bed, her face unrecognizable, the sheets sopping wet with blood. She’d been raped. Sadistically. Cut up. Sliced. Left to die alone, in pain. Faron was gone.

  But by some miracle, she was still alive. Gabriel got her to the hospital, where she languished, marooned in her bed. She never recovered. After months of constant pain, with a disfigured face, infections, bedsores, knowing she’d never be whole again, she managed to get to her feet one night, cross the ward to the nearest window, and throw herself out. Fourteen stories. She landed on East 17th Street, and her death sparked in Gabriel a life-long fascination with what it would feel like to jump from a tall building. Those last moments, flying through the air without wings.

  Even before it happened Gabriel had set about tracking Faron down. He spoke to Benny Siegel, a friend of his from the neighborhood, older than Gabriel by a few years but the only person he knew who had Mob connections. Benny made enquiries.

  What Gabriel learned was that Faron had arrived in New York from Philadelphia a few months earlier, muscle for hire, a gunman with a reputation for efficiency and recommendations from Philly’s gangsters. He’d been hired by Luciano’s Mob to kill a couple of crooked cops and had done so by entering a cafe at close to midnight and spraying it with bullets, killing the two cops, three customers, and an employee. Later the next day he’d turned up at Gabriel’s and his sister’s asking to hide out, and Gabriel had let him through the door.

  Gabriel bribed someone at the Port Authority but couldn’t find any ships with passenger lists that contained the name Faron. He guessed at false papers. He contacted forgers, but none of them could help him. All Gabriel had to go on was the link to the Luciano family and the link back to Philadelphia.

  He asked Benny to get him a job in the family, so he might pick up any information that could help in his hunt. Benny got him a job with a night undertaker, a man who disposed of bodies for the family, bottom-of-the-ladder work. Night undertakers were looked down upon by other mobsters – it was a dirty profession, tainted,
and dangerous, too.

  The night undertaker Gabriel was apprenticed to was an old Neapolitan, silent and inscrutable. The old man knew the power of dissolving acid, of lime, of saws. He knew the owners of farms and garbage dumps and junkyards. He knew the backwoods and fields and lakes of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. This was during the days of Murder Inc, of the Depression – the work came frequently and in high volume. Men were killed often, for business and for other reasons too – killed over card games, over women, over back chat, for fun, because of rumors, misunderstandings, because people were drunk and there happened to be guns close by, because people were mad, and even, on occasion, simply because people were bored.

  Gabriel never killed a soul, but he helped make sure the light of justice never shone on these people, he became a guardian of the darkness. He and the old man sowed the northeast with bodies. And on nights when they didn’t have a body, the old man would disappear in the van. Return in the morning with mud on the wheels.

  In the meantime, Gabriel continued his search for Faron. He went to Philadelphia, and from there he traced him backwards down the coast to Atlantic City, Baltimore, Washington. A pattern emerged. Faron would spend a few weeks or months in a city as muscle for hire, then go a step too far, do something too violent, too sickening, and move on to the next city. Rumors dogged him, of women killed savagely, raped and knifed like Gabriel’s sister. Gabriel crosschecked the rumors with newspaper reports of unsolved murders and guessed them to be true. Faron spent the Depression travelling the country killing men for money and women for pleasure.

  In Washington Gabriel heard Faron had come from Pittsburgh, and there the trail grew cold in a weight of rumors; that Faron was originally from somewhere in the Appalachians; that he’d run liquor through the mountains during Prohibition; that his father was a preacher and Faron had killed him when he was still just a boy. In some stories the father was a Catholic preacher. In others he was Lutheran. In some stories he had no parents and was a foundling. The name varied too; Feron, Farrone, O’Faron. He spoke with a German accent, with a Cajun accent, with an Italian accent. Gabriel knew he spoke broken Italian, had heard him speak it when he was hiding out at their apartment. Everyone who met him said the same thing – the man was otherworldly, distant, powerful, aloof. The man unsettled them all.