“Did you know that Sal’s kid Carmela is going out with a cop?” a man asked John one day. “And he’s a fucking foot cop.”
“Yeah, but it’s okay,” John said. “He’s Italian, that’s the main thing.”
Chris looked closely at John to see whether he was joking, but the man seemed perfectly serious. Not that you could readily tell when John was joking. Chris estimated he’d heard the man laugh less than a half dozen times in two years, and then it wasn’t much of a laugh, sort of a semi-cough that came up from deep in his throat and got stuck somewhere along the line.
Sometimes, when there was a financial dispute, John didn’t negotiate. He just settled it. “Okay, Sal’s paid enough. He doesn’t owe you any more money.” That was the last word, then. The chairman of the board always had the final word.
Not all disputes could be settled, though, not by John or anybody. Screwing somebody’s wife could not be worked out. Stealing money from the pot could not be worked out. If you mess up a lucrative scheme—perhaps by selling narcotics to an undercover—it won’t get worked out. When a guy burglarized an apartment on Mulberry Street, it couldn’t be worked out because within twenty-four hours he fell off the roof. Talking to the law could not be worked out: If you are an informer, you are gone.
Nearly a dozen men whom Chris knew well were assassinated during his time undercover. Chris made sure he always had his weapon with him when he drove with John. It was a sensible precaution, like wearing a seat belt.
Chris tried to gauge the old man’s feelings. He thought that if John sensed danger, he would tell Chris to drive another way to their destinations. But John never changed the route. When Chris, on his own, occasionally varied the route, John never questioned him. Chris thought John must have had the cop’s attitude: Be smart, stay alert, and nothing bad will ever happen to you. Cops had to have that attitude, or they’d never rush into the dangerous situations they often had to rush into. Drivers had to have that attitude, because when an OC figure was hit, in or around his car, he took his chauffeur with him.
As the Sunday dinners and the weekday drives became a habit, Chris came to feel reasonably comfortable with John. John always acted formally—every time they met, they shook hands—but he no longer spoke so sharply. In his own impenetrable way, John seemed to feel comfortable with Chris. Sometimes, Chris thought, they looked like a pair of salesmen, making calls.
John was neither a flashy dresser, nor three-piece gray flannel. He was in between, leaning toward the dull side: white shirt, solid-color tie, navy-blue suit. Once in a while he wore white-on-white, but not in a garish way that screamed MOB! At Sunday dinner, he didn’t wear his jacket, but he kept his tie on, without loosening it. At the christening party, Chris remembered, John had worn suit and tie, not the way some OC guys dressed when they wanted to be dressed up: no tie, with the collar of the shirt worn over the collar of the jacket. John didn’t wear a big diamond ring, but a black onyx in a gold setting—18 karat, Chris assessed. It was big, but the man had big hands, with thick fingers, so the ring looked good on him. It reminded Chris of the big ruby ring Julie Podell at the Copa used to wear.
When Chris was sizing up a guy, in the OC world or anywhere, he looked at the shoes and the tie and the wrist-watch. If a guy wore polyester ties, forget him. Cheap shoes, forget him. A huge watch that looks like a compass, the guy thinks he’s flying a plane, forget him too.
John wore silk ties—he showed Chris the shop on Hester Street where he bought them—and Bruno Magli shoes. A couple of times, he asked Chris to drive down to Allen Street, where he bought three or four pairs of Bruno Maglis at a time. John could have paid uptown prices without noticing any dent in his wallet, but like other OC people he always wanted to make a deal, get the edge.
John’s watch was big and expensive, with a leather strap. It looked like a Timex but it wasn’t. Chris was particularly good at analyzing watches, since he’d bought a couple of watches from a guy in East Harlem, early in this job. Cartier watches, the guy had said, fifty bucks. “On my mother’s eyes,” the hustler vowed, rolling his own eyes, “these are the real thing.”
Then Chris and Frankie took a couple of girls to a birthday dinner at Patsy’s, on 117th Street.
“Hey, happy birthday,” Chris said. “Here’s something from Cartier for you.”
He reached into his pocket and made a grand gesture of bringing out the watch and handing it to her across the table. She smiled in delight at the beautiful, rectangular watch with a gold band. Her hand reached out as Chris’s went out, but their hands didn’t quite meet. The watch dropped onto the tablecloth and fell apart. All the insides scattered over the cloth.
“What the hell,” Chris mumbled. “I gotta take this back to Cartier.”
He gathered up the tiny bits and wrapped them in a napkin. At home, he painstakingly put it back together, using tweezers and Krazy Glue—after all, fifty bucks was fifty bucks. He gave it to the girl next time he saw her, but this time he’d wrapped it and put it in a box.
Other than driving him, the only work Chris did for John was to pick up envelopes, from time to time. Chris didn’t try to look inside the sealed envelopes, but he assumed they were thick with cash. Chris thought that John’s keeping him uninvolved was the man’s way of protecting his daughter. He wouldn’t want her boyfriend to get into serious trouble. Although Chris knew, from conversations he overheard, and from Harry’s information, that John was involved in some risky ventures, Chris never felt threatened. Sometimes he even felt like an insider, especially when John met Solly to talk about what got delivered, what got slowed down, and what was left to sit around, rotting.
Chris came close to violence just once. At a pizza place where John told him to stop, the old man said, “Wait for me.” Minutes after John had gone inside, Chris heard shouts and yells. A chair, then a table came crashing through the plate-glass window. Some pots and pans came flying out onto the sidewalk. John stormed out, then turned back toward the building, his arms raised.
Chris jumped out of the car, but John waved him away. “Stay in the car!” John called. Chris obeyed, as John picked up a pot from the sidewalk and hurled it back through the broken window.
“Now nobody has a job!” John yelled.
John got back in the car. “Let’s go,” he said.
“I thought you might need me,” Chris ventured, as he pulled away from the curb. “If something happened in there.”
“Zips!” John said angrily. “A bunch of zips! Greenhorns from the other side! They’re only here a couple weeks and already they want more money.”
The episode reminded Chris that guys like John were not as ordinary as they seemed. As Joe Valachi had put it, philosophically, “You live by the gun and the knife, you die by the gun and the knife.” In fact, though, more mobsters died in bed—their own, the hospital’s, the prison’s—than were mowed down in the street or in a barber’s chair. In one ten-year span, five well-known OC men—Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Three-Finger Brown, Lucky Luciano, and Joe Valachi himself—had died normal deaths, all because of their bad hearts. And so Chris found he was becoming less edgy with John, as the old man loosened up, too.
“You like baseball?” he asked Chris one day, in the car.
“Baseball, sure,” Chris said. “I don’t get to many games, though.”
“The Redbirds,” John said. “Now that’s a team. Maybe not like the old days, but good.” Chris listened in surprise as John reminisced about the St. Louis Cardinals and their players: Joe Garagiola, Stan Musial. “Stan the Man,” John said heartily. “A powerhouse.”
Chris parked the car near a restaurant in the Corona section of Queens and leaned back, to wait for John as usual. But John laughed in his gravelly, semicoughing way. “C’mon in, have some lunch,” he said.
Chris followed John into the restaurant. It was a fairly big place, but it had a cozy feeling, with red-checked tablecloths. A plump woman came forward to greet John, wiping her floury hands on
her apron. A man approached John with outstretched arms, smiling broadly.
John sat at a table in the back, facing the door, and motioned Chris to sit at his right. “Good people,” John said briefly. “Mama and I always came here.”
There was no menu. The plump woman brought a platter of antipasto, with lots of red peppers, and a bowl of bocconcini, little balls of mozzarella marinated and dusted with spices. The man who had greeted John brought a jug of red wine and sat with them for a while.
It was a long lunch, over two hours, and as far as Chris could tell, it was just a lunch for John. Even a homecoming of sorts: People kept coming over to the table, sometimes just to shake hands with John, sometimes to sit and chat. Chris said almost nothing. He had spaghetti with clam sauce and a salad and enjoyed it, although a bouncy young waitress made him uneasy. She seemed to be trying to catch his eye, flirting, and Chris wondered, am I being eyeballed? Is this some kind of test? Did John bring me here so somebody can look me over? Nobody asked Chris anything, though, so when someone came to speak to John, Chris just nodded and kept eating. Only once, when two men came to the table, and one man put his hand on John’s shoulder, John motioned toward Chris.
“This is Chris. He’s with me now,” John said.
They had coffee and sambuca and cannoli. “All fresh, I made this morning,” the plump woman said. Finally John gave a satisfied grunt, patted his stomach, leaned back in his chair, and motioned for the check. Chris reached down toward his pocket, as John lurched toward him and clenched his arm.
“Never put your hand in your pocket when you’re with me,” John said.
“Well, okay, thanks,” Chris said, a little shakily. “Thanks for the lunch.”
Chris drove John home, then went on his way, with two new things to think about. “Never put your hand in your pocket when you’re with me.” That was clear enough. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure that out.
“He’s with me now” was harder to decode. On the surface, the statement was clear enough, too. John had turned away questions about Chris by vouching for him, and vouching for someone, in John’s world, was a kind of sinister blessing. But why John had done that was puzzling. Chris thought it was probably John’s way of saying to him, watch your step, I’m keeping tabs on you.
Chris didn’t know whether to be pleased by that, or worried. In a way, it was good, because it helped his image, improved his status and credibility. But in another way, it seemed a handicap, because it indicated that John expected a certain loyalty from Chris. It put John in a supervisory position that, in a way, summarized for Chris the dimensions of their relationship, an eerie version of Father Knows Best.
Women never came to the Sunday dinners, which didn’t surprise Chris. In the world of organized crime, women knew their place, and it was not at the conference table, nor at the corner table at the Kew. When the girlfriend of a man Chris was sitting with there had come over to the table, the man had screamed at her. “This is business, don’t you EVER come over while I’m doing business, you go wait for me at the bar and stay there till I tell you to move.” Women never crossed the threshold of a social club; sometimes when Chris left the Prince Street Club, he saw a woman sitting in a car, waiting for a man who was inside drinking, playing cards, taking his own sweet time.
John treated his wife and his daughter with respect, but with a clear sense of authority. Neither Marty nor Anna was a mouse, and they expressed their opinions on general topics. But they seemed detached from John’s activities, as mobsters’ women usually were. You hardly ever saw a mob wife hauled into court. A girlfriend, maybe, but not the wife.
Anna and John would have been married sometime in the 1940s. Maybe she didn’t know what he was doing, then. Maybe she didn’t want to know. She wasn’t a stereotypical Italian housewife in the sense that she didn’t stand in the kitchen all day, stirring the sauce, but Chris felt she was typical in her hear-no-evil, see-no-evil attitude. She was clearly devoted to her husband. Sometimes she stood by his chair, with her hand on his shoulder, waiting to see if he wanted something. Chris saw John soften then, almost imperceptibly, and sometimes he put his own hand up, laid it on hers, and left it there for a moment. Anna always stood in the doorway when John left the house to drive with Chris, and watched as they drove off. Wives of men like John could never be sure when or if their husbands would be getting home from work.
Chris came to feel that maybe Marty didn’t have the big picture about her father. Or maybe she’d blocked it out, which a person could easily do. As he had done with his father’s death. Chris had been to Maple Grove Cemetery just once, in the limousine on the day of the funeral. Katrina and his sisters went often, but Chris had never gone back to visit the grave.
When Marty fell back on the phrase, “As long as I can remember,” Chris felt she was being truthful. She was born in 1952; assuming that she would have noticed things about her father and remembered from, say, the age of ten, she would not have remembered anything violent or flagrantly criminal. She called many of the men who came to the house “Uncle,” when Chris knew for a fact they were not her uncles. When he quizzed her about that, she just said she’d known them since she was little, they’d been coming around and she’d been calling them Uncle “as long as I can remember.” Chris thought maybe she really didn’t know what was going on.
Or maybe he just wanted to think that. Maybe he didn’t want to know what she knew. His goal had been to get her to trust him, so that she would then talk about her father. Now that she trusted him, he didn’t want her to talk about her father. That would have been a betrayal of her trust.
In fact, Marty didn’t seem to want to know much about what was going on.
“Where did you and Daddy go today?” she asked him one evening.
Chris just shrugged. “Oh, here and there, no big deal,” he said. “What do you want to know for?”
“Oh nothing, I just wondered,” she said.
Chris thought maybe John had put her up to it, and had asked her to ask Chris that question, to see whether Chris was a talker. Then he dismissed that thought as unworthy—not of him, not of John, but of her.
Chris could tell that Anna was pleased when he stayed on Sundays until all the others had gone. Marty must have thought so, too.
“Let’s not go out tonight,” she said, one Sunday after dinner. “Let’s play cards.”
She and Anna cleared the dishes, then Marty brought cards and they took places on opposite sides of the dining table. John stayed seated at the head of the table, skimming through the Sunday News, while Anna sat at the other end, watching. Chris and Marty played War, just throwing down cards and high card takes them, a game that goes on forever. John was watching as he read through the paper, talking to Anna, nothing much, regular husband-and-wife small talk. Then he interrupted.
“You play gin rummy?” he asked Chris.
“Yes, I do,” Chris said.
“I’ll play you, penny a point,” John said.
Chris was a very good player because of his splendid memory, but John was better. John won every time, one hundred points. He seemed to enjoy winning.
It was a very pleasant evening. Although Anna wasn’t doing any mending, Chris was reminded of his mother, on Sunday evenings when he was a kid. People didn’t watch TV then; they played cards and checkers at the table. Finally, reluctantly, Chris looked at his watch.
“I’d better be going,” he said.
But Marty stopped him. “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “This is family night. Do you play pool?”
“Sure I play pool,” Chris said. “I used to cut school and go to a poolhall at Sixty-third and Third. But not very often,” he added hastily, glancing at Anna, who laughed.
“You mean you want to go play pool?” Chris asked. “Now?”
“Not far,” Marty said. “Just downstairs.”
When Chris looked doubtful, Anna spoke.
“We’d like for you to stay, Chris, if you can.”
“Oh yes, I can stay,” Chris said.
He followed Marty down the stairs to a huge recreation room that looked like a clubhouse, with a pool table, a player piano, a croquet set, and stacks of games in boxes. The minute Marry picked up the cue, Chris knew he was in trouble, from the way she handled it and from the way she grinned at him. “You’re a poolshark,” he moaned. She proceeded to run the rack; she didn’t miss a shot.
When they got upstairs, John wasn’t around. But Anna was sitting in the living room, reading. With the lights on, and with Anna in the room, the living room didn’t seem so stiff and formal. Chris walked over to her to say goodnight. She reached up and drew him near her, with her hands on the sides of his face.
“I’m very glad you stayed,” she said softly. “We like having you with us. I hope you had a good time.”
“I sure did,” Chris said. “Thank you.”
As he drove away, Chris felt great, for a minute or two. Then, as he pulled out onto the road, he tensed. He looked into his rearview mirror. Was anybody behind him? What about the van? He’d seen a van parked in the neighborhood, a long job with grayish windows that you couldn’t see into. The lettering said GREENTHUMB LAWNKEEPERS, but Chris knew a police van when he saw one. He knew there were cameras behind those windows, maybe forty thousand dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment.
He didn’t want to think about the van. He just wanted to feel the way he’d felt briefly, that first night, that he was just a regular guy having dinner at his girl’s house.
Now it was a full-blown feeling.
He didn’t feel like a wiseguy when he was with Marty and her parents, and he didn’t feel like an undercover cop, either. He felt like himself. Anna was a wonderful lady. She was devoted to her husband; she’d been married to the man for thirty years. If John got hurt, Anna would be hurt too. Chris didn’t want to be the one to hurt her. He didn’t want her name, or Marty’s name, in the Intel files; he didn’t want their house targeted.
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