“Dad,” I said. I opened the screen door, knocked on the slightly ajar front door. “Dad, are you there?”
“Who’s that?” came my father’s growl, which would have been a marginally acceptable response if I weren’t an only child.
“Dad, it’s me.”
“What do you want?”
“I just came to say hello.”
“Why didn’t you call first?” said my father. “I’m busy.”
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Oh, don’t be unsociable like, Jesse,” came another voice, high and jaunty. “Even a crocodile don’t turn away his own young. Invite the boy inside. This is a fortuitous treat, it is. Might liven up the conversation.”
“I’m coming in,” I said, suddenly apprehensive.
“Boy knows his mind,” said the other voice. “I like that.”
I pushed open the door, stepped into the living room, and there he was, my father, on his La-Z-Boy, beer in hand like every other Sunday, except the television wasn’t on and he wasn’t alone and there was a peculiar worry on his face. Two men sat side by side on the sofa, beers in their hands, both older even than my dad. One was huge, with big hands, a wide jaw, a mop of gray hair cut badly. The other was thin and dark, with a blue captain’s hat cocked on his head. And somehow, in the geometry and atmosphere of the room, I tasted the acrid scent of latent danger.
“Let me guess,” said the thin man with the captain’s hat. “You the tiger cub, right? You that Victor, the one we all been seeing on the television.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And who are you?”
“Old friends of your father,” said the big man in a slow, deep voice.
“I didn’t know my father had old friends,” I said.
“Well, he do,” said the thin man, before he took a swig of his beer. “And we is it.”
“That’s pleasant,” I said, looking once again at my father’s worried face. “Old friends getting together, drinking beer, talking old times. And the cab outside?”
“Mine,” said the thin man.
“It’s quite yellow.”
“It’s a Yellow Cab, fool.”
“You fellows mind if I grab a beer, sit down and join you?”
“If you’re going to the fridge,” said the thin man, raising up his can, “fetch me another. All this reminiscing, it builds up a thirst.”
I stole a look at my father once more before stepping into the kitchen and pulling two beers out of the refrigerator. I wasn’t just then in the mood to drink, but I figured I’d join in. My father didn’t seem so happy to see his old friends, and less happy that I had stopped by at the same time. And I had a strong sense of why. I had never seen the two men before in the entirety of my life, never in the flesh and never in a photograph, but I recognized them all the same.
“So how do you guys all know each other?” I said when I returned with the beers.
“From the old neighborhood,” said the big man.
“Your daddy was younger than we was,” said the thin man. “But we still remember when he went into the army. All spit and polish, with his feathers preened. From the snappy side of town, he was.”
“That’s enough of that,” said my father. “We don’t need no more old stories.”
“Sure we do,” I said. “I love old stories.”
“He wore his hair all swept up and back, shiny black, it was, and a little wavy. That was the Jewish in him. And he always had a tube of grease and comb with him. Always getting that hair just right.”
“And good with the girls,” said the big man.
“Course he was,” said the thin man. “Take a lesson, boy. Never underestimate the power of a good head of hair.”
We all laughed at that, all but my father, whose hair wasn’t anymore black and shiny.
“So what brings you here this afternoon?” I said.
The two men on the couch glanced at each other. “Just visiting,” said the big man.
“Really? Just visiting, out of the blue?”
“Well, Joey did have some business to talk about.”
“We was talking with your father,” said the thin man, “about a moneymaking proposition. Ralph and me was discussing it together, this opportunity, and we thought we’d give our old friend Jesse here a taste.”
“Why, that is so nice of you,” I said. “Isn’t that nice, Dad?”
“I already told them to keep me the hell out of it,” he said.
“Oh, Jesse’s just not seeing the possibilities,” said Joey. “He’s always been like that, so busy looking down at the sidewalk so he won’t trip over those feets of his that he can’t see what’s up there to be grabbed.”
“I see it all right,” he said. “I just don’t want anything to do with it. And neither does Victor.”
“My dad’s a little shortsighted when it comes to money,” I said, which was something I believed all my life but knew now to be untrue. “Though I myself might be interested.”
“What do you say there, Ralph,” said the thin man. “Think we ought to let the kid in?”
“I guess we don’t have a choice, do we?” said Ralph.
“Not no more,” said the thin man. “Being as you showed up when you did, smack in the middle of our discussions.”
“Good for me, huh?” I said, my grin so wide it hurt my cheeks.
Joey took a long drink of his beer, nodded his head. “So this is it, Victor. We have received an offer, a very generous offer. Something that could change all our lives, and let me tell you, speaking for Ralph and myself, our lives could use some changing.”
“Mine, too,” I said.
“It’s an opportunity to take advantage of, don’t you think?”
“He don’t want nothing to do with it,” said my father.
“Let the boy decide for himself,” said thin Joey, tilting back his cap, leaning forward. “We have an offer from a certain party to purchase an object that belongs to us. It’s simple enough, and the terms couldn’t be more generous.”
“Oh, terms could always be more generous. Getting them more generous is my specialty. Tell me who it is you’re talking with, and I’ll give him a ring.”
“We don’t need you negotiating for us, fool,” said Joey. “I didn’t spend thirty years driving a cab without learning how to negotiate the fare.”
“But if you like the deal as it is, then sell the damn thing by yourselves and be done with it. You don’t need me or my dad. That’s capitalism.”
“Yes, yes it is. Precisely put.”
“But there’s a problem,” said the big man.
“There always is, isn’t there, Ralph? Let me guess.” I closed my eyes, rubbed my hands over my face as if trying to pull an idea out of the air. “Something makes me think you don’t know where this object is.”
“Jesse, why didn’t you tell us your boy here was an Einstein?” said Joey. “Why didn’t you brag on him? I had a boy like that, I’d tell the world.”
“He’s not as smart as he thinks,” grumbled my father.
“Actually, Joey, since my father isn’t really interested, we don’t need to involve him in these discussions any further, do we?”
“This is the deal of a lifetime, and you want to cut out your own dear dad?” said Joey. “I admire the hell out of that.”
“My father and I have learned never to mix business with blood. Why don’t we go someplace to talk?”
“How about a bar?” said Joey, smacking his lips. “All this talk about money builds up a thirst.”
“I bet a lot of things build up a thirst for you, Joey.”
“Don’t never trust a man who don’t drink or don’t laugh,” said Joey. “That’s what my daddy taught me. That and not to trust nobody named Earl.” He swallowed the rest of his beer. “Which was, unfortunately, my daddy’s name.”
“Then let’s go,” I said. “The drinks are on me when we get wh
ere we’re going.”
“Why, that is most generous of you, squire. Most generous. Let’s be on our way, then. I’m sure your dad’s got better things to do than waste his time talking to old friends.”
“I’m sure he does. Just give me a minute with him, won’t you, for some family stuff?”
As soon as they left to wait for me outside in the taxicab, I sidled over to my father, still in his chair. He roughly grabbed my sleeve. “Do you know who they are?” he said.
“Yeah, I know. They’re two of the guys who used to hang out with Charlie the Greek thirty years ago.”
“Then why are you getting involved with them?”
“To remove them from your house, for one thing. They only came to you to get to me, and you didn’t seem so happy to have them here.”
“It’s Sunday. The Phils are on.”
“And you wouldn’t want to miss that.”
“What are you doing here anyways?”
“I wanted to see how you are. And maybe also to ask a few questions. Like why you owe that old witch Kalakos a favor.”
He turned away. “None of your business.”
“It is now, since she’s using it to rope me deeper into her son’s cesspool. You’re going to have to tell me sometime before I get submerged. But not now. Now I have to share a pitcher with Big Ralph and Little Joey.”
“Be careful.”
“Oh, I think I can handle a pair of sweet old guys like that.”
“They’re not that old, and they’re not that sweet.”
I looked at the still-open front door and the Yellow Cab waiting outside for me.
“When they were boys, they roamed the neighborhood like wolves,” said my father. “They beat some kid to near death with a baseball bat.”
“You got me into this.”
“I made a mistake.”
“I don’t think they’d let me ditch them now, do you? Besides, I have a question they might be able to answer.”
“Like what?”
“Like who the hell knew enough to make those two old crooks an offer.”
23
“So we saw on the TV you’re representing that Charlie Kalakos,” said Joey Pride, the froth of a beer on his upper lip.
We were sitting in the back booth in the Hollywood Tavern, just down the road from my father’s house. There was a half-filled pitcher of beer between us, rough-hewn glass mugs, a bowl of little pretzels. I took a handful of pretzels from the basket on the table, shook them like dice, popped one into my mouth. “Yes, I do.”
“And there was something about some painting by some dead guy that was stolen from some museum,” said Joey.
“Yes, there was.”
“So we was just wondering”—he glanced at Ralph—“the way guys, they wonder about things, what this Charlie was planning to do with the painting?”
“Give it back,” I said.
“Give it back, huh?” said Joey. “Aw, that’s nice. Isn’t that nice, Ralph?”
Ralph nodded, his huge face devoid of any appreciation of Charlie’s selfless gesture. “Nice,” said Ralph.
“It’s an underrated virtue, don’t you think?” said Joey Pride. “Everyone wants to be tough or ruthless, everyone wants to be king of the world, don’t they? But nice is, well, nice. And that Charlie is a hell of a nice guy.”
“You guys know Charlie?” I said with unbridled disingenuousness.
“Who, Charlie Kalakos?” said Joey. “Sure we know Charlie. We grew up with the boy. Little Charlie, nice Charlie, dumb-ass Charlie Kalakos, trying to rip off his oldest and dearest friends.”
“What do you mean by rip off?”
“Well, that painting, it don’t just belong to Charlie, now, does it?”
“You’re right. Legally, it still belongs to the museum.”
“But we’re not talking legally here, are we, Victor? Legally is only for when lawyers and cops gather around to sniff each other’s butts, like dogs at the hydrant. We’re talking now about what’s right. And what’s right is that those that did the job with Charlie all those years ago, they should get their fair share.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But that’s going to be hard to work out, because Charlie refuses to talk about the heist and who was involved in it with him.”
“See what I told you, Ralph? The boy wants to keep it all to himself.”
“So it appears,” said Ralph.
“It’s not that simple,” I said. “There’s a federal prosecutor very keen on finding out who else was involved with Charlie in that robbery thirty years ago. She wants Charlie to spill to her all the details, and he’s refusing.”
“There’s a fed still hunting them what pulled that job?” said Ralph. “That don’t make no sense.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t, since the statute of limitations has already run. But still, she’s hunting. I thought she was simply looking for the painting, but it’s not that. She’s got some other reason to be looking hard into that robbery.”
The two men glanced at each other as if they knew exactly what Jenna Hathaway was looking for. Interesting.
“I want you boys to understand that Charlie, by keeping his mouth shut, is not trying to stiff his fellow thieves, he’s trying to protect them.”
“Protect them out of their money,” said Ralph morosely.
I leaned forward, looked first at one and then the other. “Let’s cut to the chase. Them is you, right?”
Joey gave the bar a quick scan before leaning forward and lowering his voice. “Them is us.”
“Damn, I knew it,” I said. “It must have been a hell of a thing to be in on that.”
“Greatest thing we ever done,” said Joey, and from the self-satisfied smirks that slipped onto his and Ralph’s faces, I knew they were bursting to talk about it.
“But I’m confused, guys. I heard it was pulled by a bunch of professionals.”
“That’s what we wanted them to think,” said Joey.
“But it was just us,” said Ralph.
“So how did five guys from the neighborhood fall into the biggest heist in the city’s history?”
Joey picked up his beer, downed it, poured himself another mugful from the pitcher. He glanced at Ralph, Ralph nodded back.
“You can’t tell nobody.”
“I’m a lawyer, Joey. If you can’t trust a lawyer, who can you trust?”
“Like everything else in the city,” said Joey, “it started in a bar.”
THERE THEY were the four of them, sitting in a bar, Joey Pride told me, not this bar but one just like it. Ralph, with his hands still black from the metal at the shop. And Hugo Farr, splatters of concrete on the legs of his jeans and work boots, something haunted and thirsty in his eyes. And Charlie Kalakos, whining away about his mother. And Joey Pride, on his second pitcher already when the others came in, just starting to feel the sweetness of oblivion that he fled to every evening after running his shift in the cab. They were no longer youths, they were at that stage in life when things should be happening. But things for them had stalled.
There’s a line that you pass, Joey told me, it’s hard to see, a bit blurry, but there for sure. On one side of the line, all the dreams in your life are still possible. On the other side they’ve become fantasies you only pretend to believe, because having nothing to believe is too close to death. Fool’s dreams, Joey called them, sad little lies. There’s that line, and the four of them, they had blown past that line years before, never looking back.
Ralph was then bending metal for Karlov, that Russian son of a bitch. What he wanted was his own shop, nothing much, not Standard Press Steel or anything, just something of his own. But Ralph was a fool for love, there was always a pair of tits to throw his money at, and the dream of his own shop, being his own boss, was now as empty as his bank account.
Same with Hugo, who was always talking about college and business school. Wanted to be a mogul. He had started at Temple but took a semester off when his dad got sick. Thou
ght he’d earn some cash to help his mother before getting back to it, but for some reason he never got back to it. He ended up working construction, laying cement, taking the up-front payoff and drinking beer late into the night to forget where he wasn’t headed.
All Charlie wanted was to get away from that mother of his, to find a girl and buy a house and live a life on his own. That was his fool’s dream, a pallid little thing, but to Charlie it was such a grand idea it was painful for him to even imagine it. So at nights he sat with the rest of them and drank and watched the years tick, tick away.
Truth was, Joey was the sanest of them all, and he was the one officially certified as crazy. He was sent away twice. Once for stealing a car and then a few years later when they found him wandering the streets in a daze with a gun and a huge wooden cross, spouting off about Jimi Hendrix being crucified for our sins. He had always loved cars, wanted to build hot rods and race along the boulevards, but when they finally released him from the state mental hospital high up on that suburban hill, the only work he could find was driving a cab. A short-term job to get him back on his feet, but the term was already longer than the one he had served in prison, and the time felt just as dead.
So there they were, the four of them, in that bar, cursing their luck and settling into failure like it was their most comfortable pair of ratty jeans, watching the pathetic embers of their fool’s dreams grow dimmer each day, when they got the word. Teddy Pravitz was back in town.
Teddy was the slick one who got out from under it all, who left Philly for the far coast and was making his life happen. He had become something of a legend among them, less flesh and blood, more avatar of the success that had eluded them. They never had gone west to find him, never were certain exactly what he was up to, but they all were sure he had done better than had they. And now he was back. They figured he had come home to toss off a quick hello, for old times’ sake, had only returned for a shot and a beer and a howdy doody, glad we knew you. But they were wrong.
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