He was the only passenger to board. He noticed there were no other passengers on the entire platform. The whole situation seemed odd. Only when the train moved did the two turn away.
* * *
Sister Gee and Soup descended the stairs of the subway platform, then headed down an escalator that reached street level and the tollbooth. When they arrived, Sister Gee noticed a crowd of about fifteen impatient subway riders standing at all three entranceway turnstiles. All three were closed, each with an emergency cone blocking it. She glanced at the tollbooth, and Calvin, the tollbooth worker, quickly emerged and removed the cones without a word, then stepped back inside his booth. The subway riders rushed through the turnstiles and up the escalators.
Sister Gee watched them mount the escalators in a hurry toward the train platform. When they were out of sight, she didn’t turn away but rather said softly to Soup, standing behind her, “Meet me outside, okay?” The big man lumbered toward the street exit as Sister Gee quickly crossed to the tollbooth, where Calvin stood at the counter, his face stoic. “I owe you one, Calvin,” she said softly.
“Forget it. What happened after everybody left?”
“Nothing. We hightailed over here by the backstreets. Bum-Bum hid Joaquin’s numbers in her bra. Miss Izi told the police she and Joaquin had one of their fights. It’s all good. Joaquin’s back in business. The cops are gone. I can’t thank you enough.”
“If you put two dollars on my number today, that’ll square us,” Calvin said.
“What number?”
“One forty-three.”
“That’s a good-sounding number. What’s it mean?”
“Ask Soup,” he said. “That’s Soup’s number.”
She emerged from the Silver Street station and fell in beside Soup for the short walk back to the Cause Houses. “I reckon if your momma was alive, she wouldn’t be pleased I put her son in a spot like this, cleaning up somebody else’s mess. I don’t know that I done right or not. But I couldn’t carry that fella to the train myself.”
Soup shrugged.
“Course he was up to no good,” she said. “I reckon he come here to do wrong to old Sportcoat. What’s this world coming to if common church folk can’t stand up for one of their own?” She thought for a moment. “I reckon I did right. On the other hand, Sportcoat’s in a little too thick for my taste. You can get in deep water quick fooling around with them drug dealers. Don’t you do it, Soup.”
Soup smiled sheepishly. He was so tall, she had to squint to see his face in the afternoon sun. “That ain’t me, Sister Gee,” he said.
“Why is Calvin playing your number? Is he in your new religion too?”
“Nation of Islam? Not at all,” Soup said. “He and my ma was friends. We lived in the same building. He used to come by sometimes and watch my show with me. The number’s from that.”
“What show is that?”
“Mister Rogers.”
“You mean the nice little white man who sings? With the puppets?”
“That’s Mister Rogers’s address. One forty-three. You know what one forty-three means?”
“No, Soup.”
His stoic face folded into a smile. “I would tell you, but I don’t wanna spoil it.”
11
POKEWEED
Four blocks from the Silver Street station, the Elephant sat at his mother’s kitchen table griping about a plant. “Pokeweed,” he said to his mother. “Didn’t you say it was poisonous?”
His mother, a diminutive, olive-complexioned woman, was standing at the countertop, her gray hair in wild tousles about her head, slicing at several plants he had pulled out of her garden that morning: fiddleheads, rootberry blossom, and skunk cabbage.
“It’s not poison,” she said. “Just the root. The shoots are good. They’re good for the blood.”
“Get some blood thinners,” he said.
“Doctor’s medicine is wasted money,” she scoffed. “Pokeweed cleans you out—and it’s free. It grows near the harbor.”
“Don’t plan on me digging around in the mud near the harbor today,” Elefante grumbled. “I gotta go to the Bronx.” He was going to see the Governor.
“Go ahead,” his mother said defiantly. “I got the colored man from the church coming by.”
“What colored man?”
“The Deacon.”
“That old scooch? The way he drinks, solid food makes a splash in his stomach when he eats it. You keep him out of the house.”
“Leave it alone,” she snapped. “He knows more about plants than anybody around here,” she added. “More’n you, that’s for sure.”
“Just keep him outside.”
“Stop worrying. He’s a deacon at the colored church there, the Four Ends or Deep Ends or whatever it’s called.”
“Five Ends.”
“Well, he’s there. A deacon.” She chopped away.
Elefante shrugged. He had no idea what deacons did. He remembered the old guy faintly as one of the coloreds who came and went from the church a block from his boxcar. A drinker. Harmless. The church was on the far side of the street, while the boxcar was on the harbor side. Close as they were, separated by a weeded lot that ran the block’s length, they were strangers to one another. But Elefante considered coloreds perfect neighbors. They minded their own business. Never asked questions. That’s the reason his guys pulled that poor lady from the harbor when she came floating into the dock a few years ago. He’d watched her come and go from the church for years, waving hello to him, and he waved back. That was the extent of their conversation, which in the Cause, where the Italians and blacks lived side by side but rarely connected, was a lot. He never knew or heard the story of how she landed in the harbor—that wasn’t his business—but he had a faint recollection she might be related to one or the other of the coloreds. He left his headman to keep up with details of folks like her, not him. He didn’t have time. He only knew that every Christmas since his guys pulled that lady out of the water, the church coloreds had dropped off two sweet potato pies and a cooked chicken outside his railroad boxcar. Why couldn’t more people get along that way?
He regarded his mother as she chopped. She had on his father’s old construction boots, which meant she planned to go plant digging today too. With the boots, the housedress, the apron, and her wild hair, she looked, he knew, like something from the outer limits. But at eighty-nine, she could do what she wanted. Still, he fretted about her health. He noticed the difficulty she had chopping, her arthritic hands curled and gnarled. Rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, and a leaking heart were taking their toll. She had fallen several times in the past few weeks, and the doctor’s murmurings about heart trouble were no longer murmurings, they were explicit warnings, outlined in red pen on her prescriptions, which she ignored, of course, in favor of the plants she swore fostered good health or simply needed to be had for the sake of having them, the names of which he’d memorized from childhood: black cherry, Hercules’ club, spicebush, and now, pokeweed.
He watched as she struggled with the knife. He suspected the old colored gardener did all the chopping once he left. He could tell by the neat cut of the plants, their stems tied tightly with rubber bands, others with stems and roots cut just so. He was secretly glad she ignored his disapproval of allowing someone inside the house. Someone was better than no one. She was near the end, they both knew it. Three months ago, she’d paid Joe Peck, whose family ran the last Italian funeral home in the Cause District, to send a man to disinter his dad’s body over at Woodlawn Cemetery and bury it deeper. The overcrowded cemetery had no more space for new graves, so her plan was to be buried atop his father in the same plot. That required his father’s casket be reburied eight feet down instead of the usual six. Peck had assured her he had done the job himself. But the Elephant was suspicious. Anything Joe Peck said could be a lie.
“Did you get som
eone to sound that plot Joe Peck said he dug out?” he asked.
“I told you already. I can take care of my business,” she said.
“You know Joe says one thing and does another.”
“I’ll get my colored man to check it.”
“He can’t poke around the cemetery. He’ll get arrested.”
“He knows what to do.”
Elefante gave up. At least there would be a set of eyes in the house while he ran up to the Bronx to check out the Governor’s tip.
He sighed, rose from the kitchen table, reached for his tie on a nearby doorknob, placed it around his neck, and then stepped to the parlor mirror to tie it, feeling a blend of relief and, despite himself, a small bit of excitement. He’d already decided that the Governor’s story about this so-called hidden loot, this great treasure that his father had somehow hidden someplace in his boxcar or in his storage warehouse, was a fable. Yet a few discreet phone calls and a query to his mother proved that the Governor’s story was, at least, partly true. Elefante had confirmed that the Governor had been his dad’s sole friend and cellmate for two years in Sing Sing. His dad had also mentioned the Governor to his mother several times as he drifted toward death, but she swore she’d paid little attention. “He said he was holding something for a friend and it was in God’s hands,” she told him. “I paid it no mind.”
“Did he say in God’s hand, or the palm of His hand?” Elefante asked, remembering the poem the Governor cited.
“You were there!” she snapped. “Don’t you remember?”
But Elefante did not. He had been nineteen, about to inherit a business that was beholden to the Gorvino family. His father was dying. He had to take over. There was a lot to think about. He was drowning in his own confused, bottled-up emotions at the time. God was the last thing on his mind.
“No I don’t,” he said.
“He was talking out of his head at the end there,” his mother said. “Poppa hadn’t been in church since he was out of prison, so I paid it no mind.”
Elefante had checked all his storage places—the ones he had access to, which was more than he cared to let his customers know about—and come up empty. He raked through his own memories as well, but they played tricks on him. As a boy, he remembered his father saying to him several times . . . Look out for the Governor. He’s got that crazy poem! Pay attention. But what teenager paid attention to his dad? His father didn’t speak in detail anyway. He spoke in nods and grunts. Giving words to ideas was too dangerous in their world. When Poppa did give words to something, though, it was for a reason. It had weight. So Poppa must have been giving him a message. But what? The more Elefante considered the matter, the more confused he became. Driscoll Sturgess, he decided, the Governor himself, might have the answer—if there was one at all. So he’d called and made arrangements to see him, to maybe get some peace on the question.
Elefante grabbed his jacket and car keys, feeling anxious and a little excited. The trip to the Bronx was more of a break for him than anything else. He paused one last time at the mirror in the front hall to straighten his tie and unrumple his suit, checking himself out sideways. He still looked good. A little heavy maybe, but his face was still tight, no wrinkles, no crow’s-feet around the eyes, no kids, no cousins he trusted, no wife who cared for him, no one to take care of his mother either, he thought bitterly. At forty, Elefante was lonely. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, as he straightened his tie one last time, if there was a real big score in it. Just once, something that would get him off that pier, out of that hot boxcar, out of the squeeze between Joe Peck and the Gorvinos, who controlled every dock in Brooklyn, and get him to an island in the Bahamas where he could spend the rest of his life sipping grape and watching the ocean. The stress of the job was beginning to wear at him. The Gorvinos were losing faith in him. He knew it. He could tell they were increasingly irritated by his resistance to drugs, a prejudice he’d inherited from his father. But that had been a different time, and they were different men. The old man had kept the Gorvinos satisfied by renting them cheap storage space, doing quick under-the-table construction jobs for them, and moving anything they wanted outside of dope. But that was before, in the age of graft, numbers, smuggling, and booze. Dope was the thing now. Big money, and Joe Peck, the only other made member of the Gorvino family in the Cause District, had jumped into the dope game with both feet, becoming a major distributor, pulling Elefante in by the nose. There were plenty of docking points in Brooklyn, but Elefante was under constant pressure to keep his dock active because Peck was in his area, and Joe moved dope from water to shore in whatever stupid form he could dream up: in cement bags, in gasoline tanks, in the back of refrigerators, stuffed into TV sets, even in car parts. It was risky. He hated the whole tuna. Drugs were a damn stinking fish, the smell of it taking over everything. Gambling, construction, cigarettes, booze were all second-rate now. Ironically, the Gorvinos weren’t wild about dope or Joe Peck either—they knew how stupid and impulsive Peck was—but they lived in Bensonhurst and not in the Cause. That might as well have been the moon as far as Elefante was concerned. They never got to see Joe’s stupidity up close, which always complicated matters. Peck had his head so far up his ass he couldn’t see the order of things. He made deals with the colored, the Spanish, and every two-bit crooked cop who could put two nickels together—without one bit of trust between them. That was a recipe for disaster and a ten-year stretch in the workhouse. To make it worse, Victor Gorvino, head of the Gorvino family, was old as the hills and half-demented, fucked up in his head. Gorvino was under a lot of heat from the cops now. Getting in to see him to explain Joe Peck’s stupidity was difficult. To top it off, Gorvino and Peck were Sicilian. The Elefantes were from Genoa, northern Italy, which fell right into his father’s admonition. “Remember,” he’d remind his son, “we’re just a bunch of Genoans.” They were always on the outside.
When his father was alive, that difference between the northern and southern Italians didn’t matter as much. His father and Gorvino were old-school. They went back to the days of Murder, Inc., Brooklyn’s enforcement arm of the Mafia, where silence was the golden rule and cooperation was the key to a long life. But as far as Gorvino was concerned, the son was not the father, and now that Gorvino was half-cocked and not able to pull up his pants without help from his lieutenant Vinny Tognerelli—a Gorvino underling Elefante didn’t know well—the tight space that Elefante lived in had gotten even tighter.
At the front door, he turned to his mother, who was still busy whacking away at the plants on her countertop, and said in Italian, “What time is the colored coming?”
“He’ll be here. He’s always late.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Deacon something or other. They call him something else too. Suit Jacket, or something.”
Elefante nodded. “What does a deacon do?” he asked.
“How should I know?” she said. “They’re probably like priests, but make less money.”
* * *
Elefante exited the wrought-iron fence surrounding his yard, stepped to his Lincoln at the curb, and had placed his key in the door when he heard the sound of Joe Peck’s GTO turn the corner and roar up the street toward him. Elefante frowned as the GTO slowed and stopped as the passenger window rolled down.
“Take me with you, Tommy,” Peck said.
Peck, seated in the driver’s seat, was clad in his usual dark open-collared shirt and cleanly pressed pants, his handsome blond features curled into his usual queer smile. The crazy pretty boy. Elefante ducked his head inside the car so the two couldn’t be heard from the street.
“I’m going to mix business with business, Joe. No pleasure in it. You don’t wanna come.”
“Wherever you go, there’s money in it.”
“See ya, Joe.” Elefante turned away and Peck called out, “Gimme a minute, will ya, Tommy? It’s important.”
<
br /> Elefante frowned and stuck his head inside the cab again, the two men’s faces close together as the GTO rumbled. “What?” he said.
“Change of plans,” Peck said.
“What plans? We going to the prom? We got no plans.”
“About that shipment from Lebanon,” Peck said.
Elefante felt the blood rush to his face. “I already told you. I ain’t doing that.”
“C’mon, Tommy!” Peck pleaded. “I need you on this one. Just this one.”
“Get Herbie over in the Watch Houses. Or Ray out in Coney Island. Ray’s got a whole crew now. He’s got new trucks and everything. He’ll take care of it for you.”
“I can’t use them. I don’t like those guys.”
“Why not? That’s two guys. If you put ’em together, they’d make one man.”
Peck’s temple’s bulged and he grimaced, a look that Elefante knew spelled anger. That was Joe’s problem. His temper. He’d known Joe Peck since high school. Three thousand kids at Bay Ridge High and the only one stupid enough to pull out an X-Acto knife in auto shop and use it over a lost wrench was Joe Peck, the small, scrappy kid from the Cause District with a girly face and a brain the size of a full-grown pea. Elefante had been forced to beat Joe down himself four or five times at Bay Ridge High, but Peck had an amazingly short memory for losses. When he blew his top he didn’t care what happened, who was involved, or why. It made him a bold gangster but a prime candidate to land in an urn in his own family’s funeral parlor one day, Elefante was certain. Amazingly, the years had not mellowed him.
“The niggers at the Cause Houses are crapping on my business,” Peck said. “They shot a kid. Great kid. Negro. He turned over a lot of stuff for one of my customers. They say he’s a real whiz kid, just a great kid. Doing great, till he got shot.”
“If he’s so great, why not give him one of those Negro scholarships, Joe?”
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