A Twist of the Knife

by Stephen Solomita

  Naturally, the sad history of the Robert Wagner Homes had gotten plenty of attention in the local papers over the years and, just as naturally, had not escaped the attention of the radical community, including the American Red Army. Several of the more public organizations, such as the Communist Proletarian Party had sent field operatives to assist the downtrodden minority in their battles with the Jewish community. Muzzafer, on the other hand, preferred to work more quietly. He had been so impressed with estimates of the size of the crowd, that he’d gone to the trouble to prepare a surprise for them.

  The surprise involved a trip to New Jersey for supplies. Muzzafer led the foray, accompanied by Effie Bloom and Johnny Katanos. The three drove to the Vince Lombardi truckstop on the New Jersey Turnpike where, after a two-hour wait, they found what they were after. John Dalkey, truckdriver for Fairbanks Galvanized Pipe, Inc., returned to his eighteen-inch flatbed truck after lunch, prepared to make a small delivery of twenty-two pieces of inch-and-a-half by twelve-foot pipe, only to find a heavily rouged Effie Bloom, black bouffant wig rising grandly over dark, aviator sunglasses, waiting in the unlocked cab of his truck. She, with the help of a 9mm automatic, persuaded him to take a short drive into a swamp near the Bayonne Bridge. By the time he’d hoofed it to the nearest phone, Effie Bloom was well into Staten Island and about to cross the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She was not followed. Two hundred and fifty dollars worth of galvanized pipe does not excite local policemen, though the information was recorded and, within twenty-four hours, the plate number had appeared on local hot sheets and the vehicle described as “stolen.”

  Of course, by this time, the truck had disappeared into a garage in Brooklyn and the plates had been changed. Because of her delicate touch, Jane Mathews handled most of the explosives. First, the ends of the pipe resting against the back of the cab were plugged with six inches of concrete. Then, after drilling holes in the pipe for the insertion of lead wires, small amounts of plastic explosives were placed against the concrete. Wires were run from the pipe through the back of the cab to a clock-timing device set under the driver’s seat. Finally, thirty pounds of three-penny nails were pushed gently against the explosive, making the truck one, large antipersonnel device.

  At 8 AM, the day before the opening of the Robert Wagner Homes, Johnny Katanos drove the truck into Brooklyn. It was the Jewish Sabbath and the streets were nearly empty. Just on the corner of Ross, across from what would become 148 Wythe Avenue, he flipped a switch beneath the dash, cutting out the ignition. No amount of effort restarted the truck, though Johnny kept turning the key until the battery died down to series of pathetic clicks. Then, cursing, kicking the ground in disgust, he walked four blocks to where Theresa Aviles waited with the van. Exulting in their success, they jumped onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and left Williamsburg behind them.

  But their celebration was premature. By midnight, it was raining in New York, a cold, spring rain still catching the edge of winter, the kind that rips up cheap umbrellas and has pet owners cursing dogs who have to be dragged into the street. By 8:30 it was pouring hard enough to flood every highway in the city, and the politicians, after a hasty conference with all interested parties, decided to put the official dedication off for one week, though the new tenants would be allowed to begin moving into their homes.

  Just as well. For at 10:00 AM, the American Red Army’s bomb exploded, right on time, utterly destroying the facade and lobby of 148 Wythe Avenue. There were only two casualties. Patrolmen David Stein and Louis Hochberg took the full force of the explosion. After viewing the bodies, the medical examiner remarked that they looked like some giant had forced them through a paper shredder.

  Rita Melengic had been playing the numbers—50 cents per day—since she’d gotten her first job at age seventeen. She’d won occasionally over the twenty years following, won $250 each time. She played 118, the date of her mother’s death and each morning she bought a Daily News and checked the last three numbers of the previous day’s take at whatever local racetrack happened to be operating. In her twenties, she’d added bingo at St. Joseph’s and, after it became legal, an occasional lottery ticket, though she’d never won more than five dollars at the lottery. Yet, although she saw herself as a woman who gambled, none of her previous activities had prepared her for the experience of making twelve straight points at a Golden Palace craps table in Atlantic City, of turning two dollars into $9,192.

  It wasn’t just the money. She held the dice for fifty-three minutes, never diverting a single chip from the pass line to the more exotic wagering in the middle of the board. The other gamblers at the table kept offering advice, urging her to bet the six or the nine or the hard ways, but though the action swirled about her, she remained above it and they finally came around to her, cheering each successful point. After the eighth pass, the dice went off the table and the pit boss tossed them out without even looking at them. The other gamblers screamed their resentment, but Rita simply chose two new dice and resumed shooting. She felt strangely serene, though her whole body trembled with excitement. She was suddenly aware of the rows and rows of tables, each surrounded by gamblers and bathed in its own pool of light, small green islands tended by the caretakers, the stickman and his assistants. They wore plaid vests and dark green pants and their hair was cut, each one, just above the ear. She felt that she could see the whole city, all at once, as if she surrounded it while the dice threw themselves, making consecutive points of ten; ten, five and nine. Then, as she raised her hand one more time, she found it covered by Moodrow’s huge paw. He pointed to the chips piled on the pass line.

  “There’s nine thousand dollars there,” he said quietly, and she realized, with a start, that of all the voices raised to give her this or that piece of advice, she had never heard his, not once. He was just happy for her and she knew it.

  “Should we keep it?” she asked, already sweeping the chips into her purse. “Are you sure it’s nine thousand dollars?” But she had not doubt about it and no doubts about Moodrow when he removed four fifty-dollar chips and handed them to the young men in their plaid vests.

  Later that night, as she sat astride his great body, her lust fully spent though she still held him inside her, she looked down and saw the same smile on his face. Suddenly, she slapped her palms down on his chest and the crack echoed in the small room. “It’s perfect, you stupid cop,” she said, the tears already running down her cheeks. “No matter what happens later, it’s perfect tonight.”

  They didn’t go back to the tables. Instead, they let Reggie Reynolds, night manager of the Golden Palace, treat them to everything from parking to dinner. Reggie, who’d been born Morris Stern and raised in a four-room apartment at Clinton and Grand, had gone to high school with Moodrow, and though he’d left the Lower East Side right after graduating, he’d returned years later to ask Moodrow to remove an especially aggressive loan shark from the back of one of Reggie’s uncles, his mother’s favorite brother. The sergeant had turned the trick after a week of surveillance and apprehended the loan shark and two companions in the act of breaking a Puerto Rican truckdriver’s thumbs. Several ounces of cocaine had been discovered in the trunk of the car they drove and what with possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to sell, assault with a deadly weapon, atrocious assault, assault with intent to kill and weapons possession (a .45 automatic), Reggie Reynolds’ uncle had faded from the consciousness of that particular loan shark.

  Now Reggie was paying back and he saw to it that round after round of Chivas Regal appeared, as if by magic, at Moodrow’s right hand. And Moodrow, anxious to oblige, put them away, three to Rita’s one. Reggie kept bringing celebrities over to the table, fighters and baseball players and even the star of the Golden Palace, Kenny Brighton, a country singer from Alabama who was the current favorite on the Las Vegas/Atlantic City circuit.

  Rita, watching Moodrow intently, as a woman always watches a lover about whom she is perpetually unsure,
could not quite make out how drunk he was. The conversation at the table rambled back and forth, mostly gossip about various celebrities, until they were joined by Cedric Kingman, a lightweight prizefighter. Kingman’s brother, an innocent bystander, had been shot dead on a Detroit street during a gun battle between two drug dealers. Condolences were offered and the conversation naturally turned to crime. All, except for Moodrow, expressed ritual indignation at a court system which plea-bargained major felonies into misdemeanors.

  “C’mon, Stanley,” Reggie said. “You must have some opinion. You just sit there like the great stone sage, like a Buddha in some museum. Let’s hear what an expert has to say.”

  Moodrow cleared his throat and Rita knew, then, that he was quite drunk, though in control, and that he was about to launch into one of his special talks about crime. She waited for him to begin, gave him two sentences, then, leaning over to rest her head on his shoulder, she slid her hand down into his lap and began a gentle, determined massage.

  Moodrow giggled, but an inappropriate giggle goes unnoticed at a table full of drinkers and no one changed expression as the sergeant continued doggedly on.

  “You guys are amateurs. You read the paper and think you’re getting the truth.” He was slurring just a little bit, but, again, nobody picked it up. “Shit, you probably think it’s like all clues, like that asshole with the funny hat, Surelick Combs or whatever his fucking name is.” He stopped suddenly as Rita grazed him with the tip of a sharpened fingernail. “Jesus Christ.” He looked around the table, giggled again. “But it ain’t like that at all. There’s only two ways you solve crimes, and that’s either you catch them with the goddamn gun still smoking or you make somebody rat out.” He paused momentarily to plant a kiss on Rita’s cheek, then collected his thoughts and continued. “I don’t wanna hurt you, Cedric, but let’s say I catch one of the assholes that shot your brother. Now I know the guy is a middle-level dealer and I gotta get two things from him. First, I want the other guys responsible for the shooting and then I want the scumbag’s boss. You know, you can’t beat it out of them anymore. They’re too goddamn tough. I mean, sometimes you could persuade a guy, but for the most part, you gotta make a deal, because if you don’t, you never get them until they’re on the street, shooting. Say for a second everyone at this table decides to smuggle in five pounds of coke. How do we get caught? Nobody knows who we are or what we’re going, but let’s say the courier gets popped coming through customs. Just by accident in a random search. If the agent that busts him don’t make some kind of a deal, we’re back in business tomorrow, but if he does make a deal, we all get busted.

  “I swear it must be a hundred times I went up to a guy and said. ‘Hey, listen, you’re looking at ten to twenty, but I could make it three to five if you give me this name and this name.’ Eventually I get it all and sometimes I put him back on the street and let him go work for me. And I mean work. I stay on the cocksucker’s case every minute. If I didn’t do it, I’d never bust anyone above street level. The guy who really gets fucked is the poor schmuck who loses his cool in a bar and plants a knife in his neighbor’s ribs, ’cause ninety percent of the time that guy doesn’t have anything he can trade and he gets the full dose.”

  Moodrow paused once again. The rest of the table was silent, held there by the obvious conviction in his voice. Finally, he looked around the table. “You wanna stop crime? Then make drugs legal. Forget tougher sentences. Let the ones who can’t make it any other way get high or give ’em fucking jobs.” He stood up suddenly, holding his jacket closed. “Now you gotta excuse us. Me and Rita ain’t used to being up so late. We gotta get some rest.”

  “Yeah,” Rita said, following innocently. “He’s real tired.”

  9

  THE UNEXPECTED SPRING RAIN responsible for ruining the American Red Army’s surprise party in Williamsburg, continued through Sunday and Sunday night, an unremitting downpour which did not die out until late on Monday morning. By that time the highways in New York City, as well as thousands of basements in the outer boroughs, had been turned into a series of muddy-brown lakes.

  FDR Drive went first. By 9 AM on Sunday, the underpass below Carl Schurz Park was flooded with more than two-and-a-half feet of water and the Drive was closed in both directions. A half dozen roads followed—the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; the Whitestone Expressway at the fork to the Whitestone Bridge; the Grand Central Parkway in Kew Gardens and again at Hoyt Avenue; the Cross Island Parkway and the Interboro at Metropolitan Avenue. The Belt Parkway, which runs along the Atlantic Ocean in southern Brooklyn and floods in a heavy fog, was impassable. The ocean, in several places, had reached out an arm to cover the roadbed.

  Monday morning was a commuter’s nightmare and switchboards were jammed all morning with the excuses of those unable to face the traffic. Some abandoned the roads, deciding to approach the island of Manhattan by subway. They forced their way into trains that simply remained, doors open, in the stations. The tunnels below were as flooded as the streets above: Signals were jammed, switches stuck and third rails shorted throughout the system.

  The majority arrived at their jobs about noon, wet and disheveled, harassed even beyond a New Yorker’s ability to cope. Then, as they scurried about, trying somehow to catch up, the temperature outside began to drop. It had been fifty-three degrees when the rain began. By Monday evening, it was twenty-six and falling. By Tuesday morning, it was sixteen degrees and what before had been merely wet, was now ice. The subways were barely running and all those commuters who’d been bitten on Monday, took back to the roads just as those who’d taken Monday off pulled out of their driveways. The backup at the bridges and tunnels began before 7 AM. By eight o’clock, traffic on the entryways to the great island was frozen as solid as the puddles on the street.

  Even within Manhattan, patches of ice, untouched by an armada of orange saltspreaders, slowed traffic to a standstill. Fifth Avenue became a sea of buses surrounded by bright yellow taxis, as packs of dogs might surround buffalo. Passengers complained to harassed cabbies who could think of nothing except how slowly their meters ran when they moved along at a rate of four red lights to a block. Of course, the horns would not stop, not even when the traffic officers, huddled down in their heavy brown coats, waved ticket books threateningly.

  And these New Yorkers had been waiting for spring since the end of the holiday season. In January, all along the northeast coast of America, the cold moves in, soaked through with humidity, driving those who can afford them into ankle-length mink or down coats. The good citizens run from office to cab to home, glancing up into the sky in search of the warm days to come. By March, they are already impatient; by April they are desperate for the few seventy-degree days that mark the boundary between unbearably cold and unbearably hot. These days rarely arrive before the very end of April, yet eyes persist in flickering skyward, hoping for the best and, failing that, filling the cabs and subways and buses with their lament: “Man, it is fucking cold out there.”

  But for Rita Melengic and Stanley Moodrow, the weather went virtually unnoticed, even though it took them nearly ten hours to drive from Atlantic City to Rita’s apartment on First Avenue. The Garden State Parkway was awash, with visibility down to near zero. They joked about it for awhile and then Rita fell asleep, her purse, stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, cradled in both arms. At times, in her sleep, she slumped against the door and Moodrow patiently tugged her across until her head pressed against his shoulder. Then he plodded on, slowly, persistently.

  Rita woke at 6 AM, as they were rolling through Perth Amboy toward the Outerbridge Crossing into State Island. At her request, they stopped for breakfast in a small diner off the main road. At first, tired and silent, they simply stared at each other through critical, puffy eyes, but by the time they reached Staten Island, the coffee had made them more or less alert. Rita, somehow, managed to fix her hair without looking in the mirror, then elbowed Moodrow in the ribs.

  “Say something, you fart.
”

  “Me, a fart? Rita, I been constipated for twenty-two years.” He waited for her come back, but she was too tired and so, impulsively, he blundered on. “How old are you, Rita?”

  “You know how old I am.”

  “Tell me.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Forty-one.”

  “That’s interesting,” Moodrow responded, eyes glued to the road. “Let’s live together.”

  Rita gave him a sharp look and he grinned, but refused to turn his head. “It sounds stupid to me, too,” he said, finally.

  There was a silence, in its proper place, but after a few seconds, it frightened Rita and she had to break it. “So how old are you?” she asked, just reaching over to gently stroke his arm.

  “You know how old I am,” he said. He was already sorry he’d opened his mouth. He recognized that he was supposed to ask the lady to marry him, given his feelings for her, not live with him.

  “You’re fifty,” she said.

  “We’re too old to get married. It’s ridiculous. It’ll make us look like a couple of fucking clowns.”

  Another silence, while they listened to the hiss of tires on wet pavement. Until Moodrow put it on the line. “What if I said I loved you?” he asked.