The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  On the corner of 38th he saw a liquor store. He yanked the De Soto to the curb, took off his blood-stained coat and rushed out into the snow to get a bottle of vodka from the store.

  He returned to the car and poured some into his mouth, rinsed, spat the vodka out of the car window. He did it again and again, till the bottle was empty, but still his mouth didn’t feel clean. He wondered if he’d ever be able to eat or drink anything again without, somewhere in the back of his mind, thinking of Bova and the blood-splattered nightmare.

  When the bottle was empty he threw it out of the window. He started up the engine, but as he was about to drive off, something caught his eye on the sidewalk – a news-stand, its owner battling against the snow and the wind to board it up before the blizzard really hit. On the hoarding that ran along the roof of the stand were posters displaying the headlines from the evening papers, headlines which formed a ticker-tape of the previous day’s events – Movie Producers Issue Statement, India and Pakistan go to War, Jackie Robinson wins Rookie of The Year. And there in the local news section, given top billing – Shooting Shocks Upper East Side – Victim Taken to Hospital.

  Victim Taken to Hospital. Gabriel jumped out of the car, ran over to the man and grabbed a copy of the paper. Michael had been found alive. Gabriel had assumed he was dead.

  ‘Where’s the nearest phone?’ Gabriel asked the man.

  He pointed to a cigar store halfway up the block.

  Gabriel ran over to it, went in and rang the hospital. Asked if there were any people there with the victim of the shooting, was told the hospital couldn’t give out that kind of information.

  He drove there. Double-parked. Ran through the entrance. He found the corridor, saw the two cops outside the room. They eyed him, pegged him for a mobster as soon as they saw him. He walked past them. Waited. Unsure what to do. He turned around and approached them.

  ‘I’m a friend of the victim’s,’ he said. ‘And his friend, Ida.’

  ‘Sure you are, pal,’ said one of the cops.

  They rose.

  ‘Mind if we frisk you?’

  He froze. The gun he’d used to kill Bova was still in his pocket. In his rush he’d forgotten to leave it in the car. It could see him sent to the electric chair.

  ‘I’ve got a .38 in my coat pocket,’ he said.

  The cops eyed him, pulled guns.

  ‘Raise your hands.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘All I want to know is if Ida was here.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask you again,’ said one of the cops.

  Just then another cop turned the corner of the corridor, saw what was going on and approached with nothing more than a mild look of curiosity on his face. He frowned at Gabriel, as if trying to place him.

  ‘You’re Gabriel Leveson,’ said this new cop.

  Gabriel nodded.

  The new cop gestured to the other two to drop their weapons.

  ‘Lieutenant Detective David Carrasco,’ said the new cop, introducing himself. ‘You’ve got a contract out on your head.’

  Gabriel paused. Even the cops knew. He was as good as dead.

  ‘I’m just looking for Ida,’ he said.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Carrasco replied. ‘Your niece came by this afternoon and Ida took her back to Michael’s apartment. They’re waiting for you there.’

  ‘She’s OK?’ Gabriel asked. Hope rose so quickly inside him it made him dizzy, light-headed.

  Carrasco nodded. ‘She was fine. They’re waiting for you.’

  Gabriel grinned. Relief coursed through him, warmed him, made his eyes water.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Pick her up and get the hell out of town,’ Carrasco said. ‘We won’t tell anyone we saw you.’

  Gabriel frowned, wondered why the cop was being nice to him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘How’s Michael?’

  ‘A bullet to the chest,’ Carrasco said. ‘He got it saving your niece.’

  That was why Carrasco wanted him to get away, to make sure Michael’s sacrifice was worth it.

  ‘Is he gonna be OK?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘He’s through the worst of it.’

  Gabriel took this in. ‘Tell him I said thank you,’ he said.

  Carrasco nodded.

  Gabriel turned and strode down the corridor.

  The first payphone he found was in the hospital’s lobby. He put a call in to Michael’s apartment.

  Ida picked up.

  ‘She’s safe,’ said Ida. ‘She’s with me. You need to get around here as soon as you can.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gabriel, tears of relief streaming down his face.

  There was silence a moment, then Ida spoke.

  ‘They attacked Michael’s son in Rikers,’ she said. ‘He’s going to plead guilty. It’s all over. We’ve failed.’

  ‘No,’ Gabriel said. ‘They failed. They tried to kill us all at the same time and they didn’t manage to get even one of us.’

  She paused a long while before answering.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, unconvinced.

  Gabriel stopped, realizing something. If Sarah was safe, then what was the job Faron had on that night? Suddenly he knew.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I spoke to someone who worked with Faron. He said Faron was on a job tonight for Genovese and he was leaving town right after. At first, I thought he was talking about Sarah, but now I’m thinking it’s Cleveland. Cleveland’s the only job that’s still outstanding.’

  There was silence on the line.

  ‘Makes sense,’ said Ida. ‘He’s only been sticking around in New York to finish the job. If they kill Cleveland tonight and he leaves, it really is all over.’

  ‘Maybe for Michael’s son, and for me,’ said Gabriel. ‘But I think there’s a way out of this for Sarah. I know where Faron’s holed up.’

  It was only now that he knew Sarah was safe he realized it. Bova had said Gabriel was too late, but maybe Bova was lying, or just plain wrong. Gabriel had Faron’s address and if Faron had stashed the two million there, maybe Gabriel could turn that to his advantage. He’d been dealt a bum hand, a useless hand, but maybe he could bluff his way to some kind of victory, like Costello and his endless games of solitaire, maybe he could rearrange the structure to turn fate to advantage. Maybe he could ride the chain from Bova to Faron to the missing money to safety for Sarah. He was as good as dead himself, but maybe he could save his niece.

  ‘If you can hold tight at Michael’s for a couple of hours, I might be able to fix things.’

  Static rustled down the line.

  ‘Gabriel,’ said Ida, ‘you’ve got a contract out on you. You’ve got at least two Mafia families after you, maybe the police too. You need to get here and get the hell out of New York as fast as possible.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you heard the weather reports? Everything’s shutting down for the blizzard. The roads are closed. No buses, no trains. No way out.’

  And then he realized something else; the blizzard wouldn’t just have an effect on his own escape plans.

  ‘No way out for me,’ he said. ‘No way out for Faron.’

  ‘Then you need to lay low.’

  ‘No. I need to use this time to try and put things right. I can’t just hole up in a hotel room while there’s still a chance. I need to put things right, Ida. Two hours.’

  ‘And what if you …’ Ida trailed off, resumed in a whisper. ‘What if you don’t make it back here?’

  ‘Then tell Sarah I love her. She knows where all the money is. Tell her to take it and go and see Mrs Hirsch.’

  Again there was silence. ‘You better come back here, Gabriel.’

  ‘I will.’

  He stepped out of the hospital, back into the snow. He saw a Rexall’s over the road. Ran over, bought three Benzedrine inhalers and returned to the De Soto.

  He sat in the car and checked his watch. He ripped open two of the inhalers with the help of his car keys, took out the paper strips
in the center, the strips soaked with the drug. He rolled them into balls, swallowed them dry.

  He hit the accelerator, headed across town to Faron’s hideout.

  57

  Thursday 13th, 7.04 p.m.

  Ida put down the phone and walked over to Sarah, who was sitting on the sofa, looking up at her.

  ‘That was Gabriel,’ she said. ‘He’s fine. He’s got some business to take care of and he’ll be here soon.’

  Sarah smiled, laid her head down.

  Ida went over to the kitchenette and poured herself a whiskey, thought about what Gabriel had told her. Faron was killing Cleveland that night, probably dumping his body somewhere it would never be found. Their witness would be dead, and their alternate suspect would flee the city as soon as the weather cleared and never be caught. Tom would either fry or spend the rest of his life behind bars.

  She thought about him in his cell in Rikers, Michael in his hospital bed. She thought of Annette, rushing from Chicago to New York and how her train had probably been stranded en route somewhere by the storm. Ida added her to the list of people hurt by all that had happened. She thought about how she’d failed so completely. She wondered if Boston Blackie or Dick Tracy would have fared any better.

  She sat on the windowsill, saw that the snow was accumulating in banks on the sidewalks, that an Arctic whiteness was descending on the city.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said to Sarah, ‘but while you were asleep, I was checking the place for guns, stashes, to see what we had. I looked in your bag. You said you’d gone to a stash spot, so I thought maybe you’d picked up a gun. Anyway, I just wanted to say sorry for looking in your bag, but I had to.’

  Sarah looked alarmed, then nodded. ‘That’s fine,’ she said.

  ‘I saw your sketch pad,’ Ida said. ‘You’re talented.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We’ve got skeletons in New Orleans like those ones you drew,’ Ida said. ‘I liked them.’

  Sarah smiled and that dismayed look came over her again.

  ‘They were for a school project,’ she said. ‘The skeletons. Mexican Day of the Dead.’

  She spoke abruptly and Ida could tell she was lying. She frowned and wondered why. She thought about the clothes and money in the girl’s bag. Was the sketchbook the reason she had gone back to Gabriel’s apartment? Was she really so attached to it she’d risk going back there?

  They fell silent. Ida looked out of the window, watching the snow, drinking Michael’s rye. Sarah lay on the sofa, listening to the radio. At some point she drifted off into a sleep and Ida covered her with a blanket.

  She went over to the radio and lowered the volume, then turned the dial, flicking through the frequencies. She stopped on a station playing modern jazz, the same kind she’d heard in the club on 52nd Street. She paused, thinking it strange to hear that kind of music on the radio. She left the dial where it was, rose, poured herself another drink and sat on the windowsill again.

  The song came to an end and the disc jockey came on, a deep, white voice speaking in an affected cool patter. ‘This is “Symphony” Sid Torin, your all-night, all-frantic one. Broadcasting live on WMCA. Playing all the latest and greatest bop, like this fresh-pressed number from the Charlie Parker Quintet. Out on the ever brilliant Savoy Records label. Let’s give this a go …’

  Ida heard the scratchy static of a vinyl record, then a song came on the air, all dissonance and knotty chords, solos plunging from high registers to low and back again with breakneck agility. She smiled. She thought back to the jazz club, the band, the conversation with Shelton. She thought about the song she had heard, ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’.

  ‘Camarillo,’ she whispered to herself, unsure why. She thought about the tale of Charlie Parker going mad in LA, being confined to the mental hospital. She thought about Billie Holiday, all the down-and-outs she’d encountered during her time in New York. A whole generation gone mad, dragged down by the undertow of addiction. She thought about mental hospitals, rehab centers for jazz musicians. The place Louis mentioned Holiday might go to when she got out from behind bars. What Shelton had said about having no choice in what notes came out, but having instead the choice of how to play them. Rather than fearing the void, these musicians, this mad generation, were sculpting it.

  ‘Camarillo,’ she said again, and in the roll of the syllables, she heard the shush of the blue Pacific. A tremor of a memory. Camarillo. And in that moment, it flashed through her mind.

  She knew where Cleveland was.

  Thoughts streaked, exploding like fireworks. An energy built up in her heart, both heavy and light.

  She knew where Cleveland was.

  And Faron was hitting him tonight.

  Maybe there was still hope.

  58

  Thursday 13th, 7.12 p.m.

  The snow was coming down in sheets by the time Gabriel got to Faron’s address. He saw the garment factory looming over the corner, all its lights off. He saw a thin row of windows at the top, unlit too.

  He looked around. Across the road from the factory were the piers, dark and silent, stretching out over the black river like fingers of snow. To the side of the piers was a giant gas silo with the words Welcome Home, Boys painted across it in huge letters. Presumably for the soldiers returning from the war via the piers.

  Gabriel sat and waited to see if there’d be any movement on the top floor of the factory. After five minutes nothing had happened. He got the last of the Benzedrine inhalers from his pocket, broke into it, swallowed the strip.

  He stepped out into the snow, crossed the street, walked around the building, casing it. He was leaving footprints all over the place, but the snow was coming in so thick it didn’t matter. Round the back he found the fire escapes, and a corrugated iron lean-to in the alley adjoining, in which a couple of cars were parked up.

  It looked like the apartments above the factory had their own entrance via a stairway bolted onto the side of the building, that rose up all the way to the top story. Gabriel checked the door to the stairway, figured he could shoulder it. It took six attempts. By the time he was done his shoulder was bruised to high hell, and he was wondering if he hadn’t broken something.

  If anyone was in, they’d know he was coming.

  He checked his gun, stepped through into a cramped entry space. Above him the staircase towered. He ascended five or six stories to the top floor. Came out onto a doorway which was covered by a metal roll shutter, padlocked into an iron bar which was bolted to the floor.

  He went back down the stairs, searched the De Soto’s repair box. Found a wheel jack. Took it back up the stairs. He spent fifteen minutes bashing the corner of the jack into the padlock, heaving it down with all his might, over and over, powered by the dizzying rush of the Benzedrine. By the time the padlock broke he was dripping in sweat, breathless, woozy.

  He took a moment to regain his breath, rolled up the shutter, stepped into an open space that took up the building’s entire floor plan. Long rows of windows on all sides showed nothing but night sky and falling snow. Through what little light shone into the space he could make out rows of cement columns, a dusty, bare cement floor. Empty. Except for one corner, where partition walls enclosed a rectangular space.

  Gabriel raised his gun to the partitions, stepped towards them. There were two doorways in the partitions. He reached the first, fanned his gun towards it, stepped inside.

  A make-shift bedroom. A mattress on the floor, a blanket, a sheet, a pillow. All rolled up, neat and tidy. Military style. Next to the bed was an electric lamp, a chair, a chest. And that was it.

  Gabriel kneeled, opened up the chest.

  Empty.

  He left the room, stepped into the next one, a bathroom of sorts. Tiles on the floor, a toilet and a sink, and a tap high up in the wall that someone had been using as a shower. Then Gabriel noticed something else – iron rings. Cemented into the wall above his head, cemented into the floor. Four of them forming a square. He
kneeled, studied the tiles. They’d been wiped clean, unlike the dusty cement floor everywhere else. But in the spaces between the tiles, dried blood.

  He rose. He stepped out into the main section. Looked again across the floor. This time he noticed brown stains streaking across the cement. From the bathroom to the entrance. Gabriel thought of Pearl, the girl Bova had sent to Faron, her body sliced up and dumped in a breaker’s yard.

  He stood in the silent gloom, felt the Benzedrine kicking through his system. He’d come there to toss the place, to search for stash spots, to rip up floorboards, slash furniture, pull down wall panels. Check all the places where a man might hide two million dollars.

  But there was nothing to toss. Faron lived in a cement box. With a square for sleeping and a square for chaining people up and that was it. No clues, no personal effects, no hints as to where Faron might be, might have come from, might be going to.

  No money. No humanity.

  Faron had come and would be leaving, and he hadn’t left a trace.

  This was it. This was defeat. Final and irrevocable.

  He tried as hard as he could not to start sobbing. He let out a wail. Then he shook his head, turned and left, knowing the longer he spent there, the less likely he was to get out of New York alive.

  He walked down the stairs, stepped out into the street.

  As he was heading towards his car, he thought of something, paused.

  The lean-to.

  He turned around and went back over to the mouth of the alley where he’d seen the cars. Over the entrance was a chain-link fence with a swing-gate set into it, padlocked shut. The two cars were parked behind it. The second car. A brown Chrysler sedan. The same sedan that had been there when he’d found the money in East Harlem. The sedan Faron had gotten out of when he went to speak to the two cops whose car had ended up in the river.