The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

‘Gabriel?’ he asked.

  Gabriel nodded.

  ‘Yeah, Albert said you might be coming,’ Impellezzeri said. ‘You’re after Vinnie Ferrara, right?’

  ‘He working today?’

  ‘Nah, he didn’t get picked in the morning shape-up. You can probably catch him at the dog-fights. In the warehouse behind the old Chesterfield factory.’

  Gabriel nodded.

  Impellezzeri eyed him a moment then closed the door.

  ‘Come on,’ Gabriel said, turning to Ida and Michael. ‘I know where he meant. We can walk there.’

  They followed him back the way they’d come, passing by the sorry-looking dockers in the yard.

  ‘Who’s Albert?’ Ida asked.

  Gabriel paused, almost looked embarrassed, as if the question had touched a nerve. Above them a seagull flew by, squawking, arcing through the gray autumnal sky.

  ‘Albert Anastasia,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Of Murder Inc?’

  Gabriel nodded. ‘He’s a business associate. What do you know about the docks?’

  ‘Not much,’ said Ida.

  ‘It’s the biggest Mob operation in the city,’ he said. ‘Manhattan’s waterfronts are run by the Irish gangs, but Brooklyn’s all Anastasia’s territory. He catches a slice of all those kickbacks the workers pay, catches a slice of the union dues, too. And if the men don’t get picked for work, he has his loan sharks lend them money. And when they fall behind on repayments, he has them steal cargoes for him.’

  He took out a cigarette, lit up. Ida sensed again his disapproval of what was going on, but stronger this time; he wasn’t trying to conceal it anymore.

  ‘Anastasia and I have some business dealings together,’ he said. ‘Nothing to do with the docks. I spoke to him yesterday after you called. Got his OK to come down here and ask questions. We couldn’t do it without his say-so.’

  From the look on Gabriel’s face, his sour tone, Ida sensed there was some animosity between him and Anastasia, and she wondered what form their mutual business dealings took.

  They reached the end of the terminal, stepped through the gate back onto the street, turned north and walked along desolate sidewalks, next to a road that was empty except for the occasional truck that rattled past from the docks. On one side of the road were wall-to-wall warehouses, squat, dark, uniform. On the other was a hinterland of empty lots. After a few minutes, they turned and walked across one of these empty lots; a muddy tundra of razor wire and ditches, spotted here and there with patches of cement on which children had scrawled in pastel chalk the boundary markers for the games they played.

  When they reached its far end, Ida could hear angry shouts, snarling and barking, carried on the howling wind. They passed a half-collapsed brick wall, and there, in the emptiness of the adjoining lot, was the dog-pit. A great circular ditch, muddy and frosted and covered in blood. Around the edge of the pit, some forty or fifty men were eagerly watching the dog-fight, money was changing hands, burly mobsters loitered.

  Ida paused to watch what was happening in the pit. The two dogs were of the same breed, both blocky and thick-legged, all muscles and teeth. They were about the same size and age, one had black fur, the other a muddy brown. Both were spotted with blood and cuts.

  She turned to look at Michael, who was also staring into the pit. Gabriel, however, was scanning the crowd. Ida watched him walk over to a bookie who seemed to know him. They chatted and the bookie gestured to a man in the crowd. A young Italian with a five-day stubble, wearing a zipped-up docker’s jacket and a woolen hat, kneeling at the edge of the pit, his eyes focused on the fight below him.

  Gabriel returned to Ida, nodded at the man the bookie had indicated.

  They approached. He felt their presence and turned to look at them.

  ‘Vinnie?’ Gabriel said.

  The man sensed Mob, or maybe police, and shook his head.

  ‘You got the wrong guy, buddy,’ he said, turning his gaze back to the dogs.

  ‘I don’t think I do,’ said Gabriel.

  There was a sickening noise from the pit, and Ida looked down to see the black dog lying dead in the dirt, the brown dog ripping into its neck. Cheers and curses rose up from the crowd. Winners went to their bookies to collect.

  Ferrara waited for the crowd to move. Then he burst into a run. Shoving past people, darting into the wasteland adjoining the pit. They dashed after him, across the empty lot, into a maze of rundown tenements beyond, over ground made slippery by snow and frost. Ida and Gabriel just about managed to keep up, but Michael was left far behind.

  They turned a corner and Ferrara slipped into an alleyway between two derelict buildings. They followed him, came out into a courtyard filled with wagons, drays, coal carts. Ferrara darted through them all, came to a stables at the end of the courtyard, where horses were lined up, eating hay from bags hooked to the walls. He scurried in amongst them, disappeared into the shadows.

  Ida and Gabriel ran in after him, looked around. The horses were glistening with sweat, releasing steam into the air. Everything was quiet, the sound of gulls in the distance. Then Ida heard scrabbling at the end of the stables. Just as she was getting her .38 from her holster, Ferrara appeared in front of them, a shotgun in his hand, pointed right at them.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said to Ida.

  She moved her hands away from her holster, raised them in the air. Ferrara gestured for Gabriel to do likewise and he did. Ida wondered where Ferrara had gotten the shotgun from. If he used the stables as a stash spot.

  ‘You got the wrong guy,’ he said.

  ‘We just wanted to talk to you,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Well, I don’t wanna talk to you. Now I’m gonna leave, and if you follow me, things’ll get ugly.’

  He gestured with his gun for them to move up against the wall, so he could leave the stables from where they’d entered. They did so and he took a few steps backwards in the direction of the entrance, his gun trained on them. As he stepped past the last of the horses and out into the courtyard, Michael appeared behind him, gasping from the run, sweating. He raised his own gun to the back of Ferrara’s head.

  ‘Drop the gun, kid,’ he said, between breaths. ‘I’d hate to startle all these horses with a gunshot.’

  Ferrara hesitated, then dropped the shotgun into the mire at his feet. Ida picked it up.

  ‘Turn around,’ said Michael.

  Ferrara did so. Michael sized him up, waited a few moments for his breathing to steady.

  ‘Now we don’t mean you no harm,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re not with the people who killed your brother-in-law. We’re not with the police. We just want to ask some questions. And we’ll pay you to do that. Pay you enough so you don’t have to go betting the wages you don’t have on fixed dog-fights you’re always going to lose. Now how about we go somewhere and talk?’

  45

  Tuesday 11th, 2.19 p.m.

  Ten minutes later they were on the roof of a tenement, just a couple of blocks from the stables. Snow was falling on the clotheslines which cross-crossed the roof, on the chimney stacks, the rickety old chairs scattered about. Ida wondered why Ferrara hadn’t taken them inside, to his apartment. Wondered if there was perhaps a wife, a family, he wanted to keep in the dark.

  Ferrara walked to the roof’s edge, wiped the snow-melt from one of the chairs and sat. Ida, Michael and Gabriel did likewise. Below them was a view of the empty lots, and beyond, the rooftops of Brooklyn, the docks, the river in the distance, the bridge, the giant cranes of the Naval Yard. Here and there the icy landscape was dotted with the orange specks of barrel-fires lit by hobos.

  Gabriel took his wallet out, peeled five twenty-dollar bills from it, and held them out for Ferrara to take. Gabriel told Ferrara how the man who probably killed his brother-in-law was the same man who had killed Gabriel’s sister. That they wanted the information to try and find him before he killed anyone else. As Gabriel spoke, Ferrara took a tobacco pouch and a pipe from his pocket, packed the pipe.<
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  When Gabriel had finished speaking, Ferrara sighed.

  ‘What do you want to know exactly?’ he asked.

  ‘Why John died,’ Gabriel said.

  Ida had decided beforehand to let Gabriel ask the questions, figuring Ferrara would relate to him best. It also meant she could watch Ferrara for signs he was lying.

  ‘John was killed by Vito Genovese’s boys,’ said Ferrara.

  Ida wondered if he meant Faron in particular.

  ‘You sure of that?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘I mean, I didn’t see them do it, but it must’ve been them.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He never finished his shift is what happened. When the quitting bell rang he never turned up. I went home, went to his house. I asked around. Some of the guys on the pier saw some Genovese goons hanging around. Two days later Johnny’s body turned up in the river. What do you want me to think?’

  ‘You know why Genovese wanted to kill him?’ Gabriel asked.

  Ferrara took a puff on his pipe.

  ‘It was that stupid nigger from Harlem,’ he said. ‘I told ’em not to listen to no nigger.’

  Ida said nothing. She’d been dealing with it all her life, had spent much of her career turning it to her advantage – white people thinking she was one of them, assuming they could talk freely in front of her. And even though she’d learned to expect it, knew how casual and ubiquitous it was, it still stung when it came.

  ‘Listen to them about what?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘Blackmailing that congressman. Helms,’ said Ferrara.

  Gabriel frowned, turned to look at Ida and Michael. She nodded at him, suggesting she already knew about this. The one piece of information they’d hidden from Gabriel was out, and it was clear from his surprise that he hadn’t known it. If he was offended by their having hidden it, he didn’t show it. He turned back around to Ferrara.

  ‘I told ’em not to do it,’ Ferrara said. ‘I told ’em it was a stupid idea, that someone like that would have mobsters behind him. But they wouldn’t listen. They said it was worth a shot. They said he might not have Mob backing any more, and even if he did, it was worth a shot. That’s how desperate they were.’

  He raised his hands into the air, shrugged.

  ‘You know what happened out in Naples?’ Gabriel asked. ‘How Cleveland and Bucek and your Johnny all met?’

  ‘Sure. I was there,’ Ferrara said. ‘Eighth army. Operation Husky. We invaded Sicily, moved up to Naples, set up base. Was there for four months before I got moved north. Bucek and Johnny got a gig driving trucks of stolen supplies for Genovese – food, clothes, medicine, all these emergency packages that were supposed to rebuild the country. They’d pick ’em up from Cleveland and the rest of the shines in the quartermasters on the docks, drive ’em out to the hills. They did good off it, but they weren’t that smart – made money one week, lost it in card games and whorehouses the next.

  ‘Then the war finishes and we come home. Me and Johnny get jobs back in the docks. Bucek goes back to Queens. Everything’s fine. We were even looking to get some of those free college courses through the GI Bill. And then Cleveland turns up. He says he’s seen Helms in Manhattan and he’s a congressman now, and he thinks he can put the squeeze on him, get him to cough up some dough. But Cleveland doesn’t want to do it alone, reckons he wouldn’t get taken seriously ’cos he’s just a nigger and a junkie to boot. He wants some white boys to help him out with it.’

  ‘I told ’em not to do it. I told ’em Genovese was back in town and chances were Helms would go to him for protection and that’s what’s happened. First Johnny got bumped off on the docks, then they tried to take out Bucek, he ran away to hide with Cleveland in Harlem, but they got him there. Only Cleveland got away. The one who started it all. Where’s the justice in that?’

  Ferrara took a puff on his pipe, saw it had gone out while he’d been talking and relit it. Gabriel turned to look at Ida, she gave him a slight nod of the head. It made sense with what she knew.

  ‘They’ll find Cleveland if they haven’t already,’ Ferrara said. ‘And that’ll be that. Helms’ll move on up through congress and Genovese’ll have his claws in him. Meanwhile, Johnny’s widow and two kids are going hungry, and Bucek’s parents are sitting around wondering how the hell their kid ended up getting slaughtered in Harlem.’

  He shrugged, stared at them indignantly. In the wasteland below, a cold wind howled, swirled about, made the flames of the barrel-fires flutter.

  ‘When you were out in Italy,’ said Gabriel, ‘you hear of a man named Faron working for Genovese?’

  Ferrara thought about it and shook his head.

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure.’

  Ida wondered how Cleveland had hoped to work the scam, how he would have been so sure he could pressure Helms into handing over money, how he could have roped Bucek and Marino into it.

  ‘Did any of them have any evidence that Helms was involved in the black-market operation?’ she asked. ‘Beyond their eyewitness accounts, I mean. Did they have paperwork or anything to prove Helms had done something wrong?’

  Ferrara looked at her, confused.

  ‘Helms wasn’t involved in the black-market operation,’ he said.

  Ida frowned. She and Gabriel shared a confused look.

  ‘So what were they blackmailing him over?’ Gabriel asked.

  Ferrara shrugged.

  ‘Johnny never told me what dirt they had over Helms. Just they’d found out something out about him while they were driving those vans through the countryside to Genovese. Whatever it was happened after I’d already left Naples.’

  ‘I thought this was about the black-market operation,’ Ida said.

  Ferrara shook his head.

  Gabriel turned to look at her and Michael, raised his eyebrows. Ida nodded in response – they’d got what they’d come for. Gabriel turned back around to Ferrara.

  ‘Thanks for telling us all this,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for the money.’

  They all rose and Gabriel took more money out of his wallet, held it out.

  ‘That’s for Johnny’s wife and kids.’

  Ferrara took the money. Ida cast a last look at Manhattan in the distance, the river, the shipyards, the tumbledown buildings of Brooklyn, the people living their hinterland lives in the empty lots below.

  They headed back inside. Walked down the stairs. When they got to the second floor, Ferrara stopped at one of the doors, indicated this was his apartment. They said their goodbyes, but just as he was opening the door, he paused, turned back around.

  ‘Say,’ he said, addressing Michael, ‘why’d you say the dog-fight was fixed?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘One of the dogs was juiced up,’ he said. ‘You could see it in his eyes. Dilated.’

  Ferrara paused to contemplate this, then he exhaled, shook his head, and disappeared into his apartment.

  They walked through the snow back to Bedford Avenue.

  ‘Thanks for saving me in the stables back there,’ Gabriel said, turning to look at Michael.

  ‘You would have done just fine without me.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Gabriel. ‘You both knew about Helms?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Ida.

  Gabriel stared at them, his eyes ever so slightly narrowed, suppressing any annoyance he might have felt at them for having hidden information from him.

  Ida gave him a rundown on their investigation into Helms, told him why they’d kept it from him, hoped her honesty might rebuild his trust. Gabriel listened and rubbed his eyes and Ida saw that weariness that she’d noticed before was dogging him once again, a sense he was under pressure.

  ‘While you were looking into all this,’ Gabriel said, ‘did Benny Siegel’s name crop up?’

  Ida frowned, shook her head.

  ‘No. Why?’

  Gabriel paused. ‘Because I heard Siegel was looking for Cleveland too.’

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nbsp; ‘Siegel died last summer,’ said Ida. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure. Before Siegel died he came to New York. And while he was here he was looking for Cleveland.’

  Ida tried to process the information. Was Siegel working with Genovese? Had he been involved somehow in covering up the blackmail too? She wanted to ask Gabriel more about it, but when she looked at him she saw from his expression that he was as perplexed as she was.

  They walked on in silence for a while. An icy wind whipped down the street, picking up trash and snow, sending it tumbling down the sidewalk.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Michael asked. ‘We’re still no closer to finding Faron.’

  ‘You can’t use your contacts to look for Faron?’ Ida asked Gabriel.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been doing since I learned he was back in town,’ he said. ‘No one’s talking. No one knows where he is. Half the people I talk to think he’s a myth.’

  ‘You can’t go straight to Genovese?’ she asked.

  ‘Not without starting a war.’

  They turned the corner onto Bedford Avenue and when they reached the subway station, they stopped, looked at each other.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ Gabriel said. ‘How about instead of chasing them, we let them chase us.’

  ‘How are we going to do that?’ asked Ida.

  ‘They’re still looking for Cleveland. We put the word out Cleveland’s going to be at a certain place, at a certain time, and we lie in wait. For Faron or whoever the hell else comes after him.’

  ‘That’s a risky plan,’ said Ida. ‘Not a minute ago you were talking about not starting a war.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean a war,’ said Gabriel. ‘Not if we do it right.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ida. ‘Let’s say you do smoke out Faron. That doesn’t help us get the evidence we need.’

  ‘No, but you’ll have a suspect to question.’

  ‘If you catch him alive,’ said Ida. ‘That’s a big if.’

  Gabriel rubbed his eyes again, sighed.

  ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘But I don’t have much time. I need a solution quick and this is the best one.’

  ‘Why don’t you have much time?’ Ida asked. ‘What’s the rush?’