I stayed in France after the war with my darling Giselle, and spent months and years learning the ins and outs of the French spring-water business.
Hey! There was a day, once, when if you wanted a bucket of Plescassier water, you just walked over to the spring and dipped it out. I suppose it was the same with Perrier and Evian.
Promotion was what made spring water as pricey as wine. I saw the opportunity to import it into the States. Perrier and Evian would, and Plescassier could.
We tried twice. Once in New York. Once in L.A. Each time we were screwed by … oh, all kinds of things, chiefly union problems, dock theft, and once by straight muscle applied to our vendors, threatening death if they continued to sell Plescassier water.
It took me a little time to figure this out, but the problem was, once more, Uncle Harry. He’d stolen the Kastenbergs’ seltzer-water business, and knew something about selling designer water.
Finally I had a chance to fuck Uncle Harry—and fuck him good. I sold him my company, Plescassier America, for two million dollars. Plescassier America had just one valuable asset: its contract with the Martin family to sell the water to us. I assigned that contract to him.
Only Uncle Harry didn’t understand one thing. Under French law that contract bound the Martins only, not their successors if they sold the company. And they were selling the company. The buyer would not be in the least bound by the Martins’ contract.
Uncle Harry paid me two million dollars for nothing. Worse for him, it wasn’t his money. It was the Carlinos’ money. When the Carlinos figured it out that Uncle Harry had been screwed out of their two mill, they put muscle on him for the money, out of his own pocket. He had it and paid it, but it ruined him.
Uncle Harry never recovered. The Five Families scorned him more than ever after that. They never trusted him again. He was a small-time punk once more, just like he’d been when he stole my inheritance. There is something like justice in this world.
I’d got him good. And the best part of it was, Uncle Harry knew it.
Actually, that was the second-best part. I was not yet forty and had two million dollars. What could I buy with two million dollars? I would have a little problem with that.
I got a summons, one I had expected. I was to meet Frank Costello for lunch, again in the Norse Room at the Waldorf, again at twelve-thirty. People who never met Frank Costello personally remember a raspy-voiced witness taking the Fifth before the Kefauver Committee and think of him as a menacing mafioso, like Lucky Luciano. In fact, Costello disliked violence and was known to Cosa Nostra as a conciliator. He was a rather good-looking man, black hair, a tan.
“Sit down, Jerry,” he said. He was always one who went straight to the point. “Somebody tried to do us dirt,” he said.
“I know. They were gonna do me dirt. I didn’t know it, but they had it all figured. They knew when they sold Plescassier, its contract to sell water to Plescassier America would be null and void. But I swear to you, Mr. Costello, I didn’t know that.”
I’d never lied so skillfully in my life. I’d never had so much at stake in a lie. I didn’t have to wait to hear what he said to know he believed me. I could see he believed me.
“I’ve got a cashier’s check for the two million, made out to you,” I said to him.
Costello shook his head. “We got the two mill off your uncle.” Then he shrugged. “You wanta hand the money to Harry, that’s your business. We don’t need to double up.”
I smiled. “I don’t think I’ll offer it to Uncle Harry. He owes me that much, all things considered.”
Costello laughed. “Didn’t figure you would. Harry’s a small-time grifter from the word go.”
“Exactly.”
“Which you’re not,” said Costello. “That two million ought to set you up in something good. I have an idea you’ll come up with something. When you do, let me know. Partners can do a lot better than a guy working alone.”
There was the problem I’d figured would come. Partners. An affiliation, whether I wanted it or not.
“Uhh … this French guy … Jean Pierre Martin. Was he giving us a screwing all along?”
“Hard to say,” I lied.
Costello fastened on me a look of amused skepticism. “I hear he married your girl.”
I nodded. “He did that.”
“I hear he’s a fairy.”
Again, I nodded.
“A Frog fairy mixed up in a scheme to screw us, who’s already screwed you. I’ll have to pass the word along.”
I didn’t really guess the significance of that. I should have. I was still naive.
4
Having the two million dollars was fine. But it was nothing compared to what I wanted much, much more. Giselle. My darling Giselle. I had to endure for a long time, and then …
Giselle was the mother of my son, Len.
But almost wasn’t.
I arrived in Paris shortly after it was liberated and immediately became involved in the kind of racket that hustlers like me always found. Briefly said, because this is history, the army had scores of thousands of Jeeps in Europe. When a vehicle became too badly damaged to be repaired, the army would authorize its destruction. But if you had enough of these Jeeps, plus skilled mechanics, you could salvage parts from them and build a few serviceable Jeeps. Which you could sell for good money. The French automobile industry was down and would be a long time recovering, and the French wanted cars. Jeeps were perfect for them. They were rugged, dependable, and burned little gas. Europeans thought they were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Well, no, since that was a cliché that Europeans didn’t know and didn’t use.
Because I’d lost an eardrum somewhere along my way, I was disqualified for combat service. That’s why the army made a mechanic out of a dumb New York kid who’d known nothing about machinery. And I, with some others, built a profitable business out of scrounging parts from damaged Jeeps and making condemned Jeeps run. The business involved little risk and very respectable profit.
Of course, it did involve certain problems, chiefly officers. I learned a new level of corruption. Officers, when they found out about this illegal racket, did not want to prosecute; what they wanted was a share. Pretty soon I was sharing too much, but it kept me in business. I made less and less but still did all right.
I learned, too, that the Corsicans were the most dangerous mob in the world. Even the Mafia was afraid of them. And still is.
Other guys ran crap games, smuggled, forged orders, and did a whole lot of other things. Some guys actually fought the war.
In connection with my business I met a man named Paul Renard, a Corsican hustler, who was the proprietor of a sex club on Montmartre. Giselle was a stripper there. She was not involved in the S-M things that went on in that club, and she was not for sale. She just stripped and danced nude.
As an American I was naive about these things. When I say Giselle danced nude, I mean she danced naked, one hundred percent, stark, staring naked, without even shoes. It was not so much a strip—she came out wearing a little but soon rid herself of that little—as it was simply a nude dance. Not under dim lights. Not under colored lights. Her dance was so completely naked and so completely bold that it was innocent.
And she was an angel! She was beautiful! God, I had never seen such beauty. And—I had never before been, and would never again be, so fascinated with a woman, so drawn to her.
Well … My good fortune. I was working with Renard in the Jeeps business. He owned the club. He introduced me to Giselle. More than introduced. He suggested we should become a pair. He owned an apartment we could share, for rent a little high for either of us but not high at all for us together.
We shared that homey apartment, simply as a practical matter at first; then, shortly, we were in love. I couldn’t help myself about that. The French are an eminently practical people, and maybe she could have stayed out of love. But she didn’t.
Through Renard I also met the Martin family, who
se fortune was the mineral-water spring that produced Plescassier water. Generation after generation, the Martin men were homosexual. They married women only as much as needed to generate the heirs that were necessary to keep the family going. Otherwise, they were strictly homo. The Martins loved their boyfriends and made babies with their women. It was a practical arrangement, typically French.
What happened is difficult to understand. It was difficult for me to understand, and I lived it. The French are different from us. They have their ways.
Under the French law of inheritance, seventy-five percent of the stock in Plescassier would go to the government if Jean Pierre Martin did not father an heir. When his father died, that made the matter absolutely urgent.
Jean Pierre solved his problem in a very direct, very French style. He married Giselle. That I loved her made no great difference. That she loved me made no difference at all. It was business. We would enter into a highly practicable, reasonable arrangement that would satisfy everybody.
It would all be very cozy. She would continue to love me. Jean Pierre would continue to love his boyfriend, Jack. And we would be four good friends.
It was okay if you were French, I suppose. It was not okay with me. We didn’t have a screaming confrontation. I was not so much angry as sad. I left France, settled in the United States, and tried to introduce Plescassier water on the American market—with the difficulties I have already mentioned.
Which is where things stood when the Carlinos funded dear Uncle Harry in buying Plescassier America.
About a month passed after Frank Costello’s comment that he’d have to pass along the word about the Frog fairy, during which time I didn’t think about it much. Then word came from Paul Renard in Paris. Jean Pierre Martin was dead!
The news came in the form of a wire from Turin. It read—
JPM EST MORT. IMPORTANTE! NE VENISSEZ PAS VOUS À FRANCE. J’APPORTEREZ G ET LES ENFANTS À NEW YORK. RESTEZ VOUS LÀ. PAUL.
It meant: Jean Pierre Martin is dead. Important! Do not come to France. I will bring Giselle and the children to New York. Stay there. Paul.
I didn’t see that I had any alternative.
5
LEN
I went from the Lodge School to Amherst, remaining always a dormitory student. I met more than a few guys who didn’t know who their fathers were. I was odd, in that I always knew full well who my father was—indeed, as in the matter of Brad, well enough to use his name as a threat—but I never had the remotest idea what my father did for a living.
I did not press the question. My father was to me too formidable a figure to be questioned. When I had asked my mother, she told me my father was an honest man in an honest business—and when he wanted me to know more, he’d tell me.
My first memory of a home was a brick house in Scarsdale, in Westchester County, some fifteen miles out of New York City. Five of us lived there—father and mother, my half-sister Jacqueline, and half-sister Jeanne. The girls were three and two years older than I was. They were the daughters of Jean Pierre Martin, mother’s first husband. When he died suddenly, not having reached his sixtieth year, my mother and father married, and my birth followed a year or so later.
I was not easy for my mother. She was nearly forty when I was born. The ordeal was so dangerous that she and my father decided I would be their only child.
I remember her as a stunning beauty. Everyone who knew her remembered her as a stunning beauty. In spite of the sudden, tragic death of her first husband, she was a bright, optimistic personality. And a loving mother.
She loved me, and I never doubted it for an instant. But she loved Jacqueline and Jeanne, too. Embraces and caresses were a big part of our lives. People wondered about us, always embracing and kissing one another. I don’t know if that was a French characteristic or just a family characteristic. My father probably would have called it French, since to him “the French they are a funny race.”
He had grown up in a Jewish family in New York City, but their ways of expressing their love were not as exuberant as my mother’s.
My father never spoke much about his parents. They were killed in an automobile accident when he was in high school. He talked a little about his Uncle Harry, who was apparently a cheap little crook who stole everything he could lay hands on, including my father’s modest inheritance.
“One thing I learned from Uncle Harry,” he said more than once. “It’s always better to be the fucker than the fuckee.”
He struggled not to show me more affection than he showed M. Martin’s daughters, but he not could help favoring me. Even with me, though, something was always held in reserve. He was more likely to shake hands than hug, and remains that way to this day. I had to study him for a while before I came to understand that he had loved me as much as my mother did but had a different way of expressing it. I suppose I was in college, or maybe out of college, before I got that straight in my head.
French was my first language. The Martin girls spoke French almost exclusively. They had begun their English studies, but they struggled to say anything more than “No, thank you,” or “Well, maybe a bit more.”
When they were eight and seven, the decision was made to send them back to France for their education. The extended Martin family accepted that with enthusiasm. I have to wonder if the two girls did not leave the States with a sense of relief. I have rarely seen them since.
Mother wanted me to continue to speak French. I worked with her on it. I do speak French.
With only three of us now, my father sold the house in Scarsdale and we moved into an apartment on East Seventy-second Street. The apartment was comfortable. It was, in fact, luxurious.
* * *
“Seet down here, Lennie, on the edge of the bed.” She took my hand in hers. “Now your daddy is going to go on with what he was doing. You will see it does not hurt me. It is how your father shows me he loves me.”
When I was old enough, I was enrolled in The Friends School, which was a distinguished secondary school, one of the best in New York, if not the best.
I was an urban child. I knew the streets, though they were very different streets from the ones my father had known. There was another lesson I had to learn. When I was at Friends, I didn’t know the meaning of the term “mean streets,” and I never guessed that my father had grown up on them.
My father—Let’s start with this: When the time came to send me to a boarding school, my father adamantly rejected the New England prep schools, though my mother thought they would be good for me. He consented to a boarding school, not to a prep school. Why? He grew up on the streets. To him, preppies were nauseating snobs. I think if he’d had his way absolutely, he would have wanted me to serve an apprenticeship with him and learn life as he had learned it. He had a sense that he knew more of life than one could ever learn in any school.
My mother said school. And a good school.
Hey! I don’t speak of my father in the past tense. He’s very much alive. He’s one shrewd, tough son of a …
The more I know of him, the more I respect him.
It’s been my ambition to be a son he can respect.
I wonder if my mother would not have demanded of me a better ambition.
6
I could write memoirs about the people I saw in our apartment in those all-too-few years before I went off to boarding school. They were lessons in life.
To begin with, there was a black guy named Buddy. If he has a last name, I never heard it. His wife was named Ulla, and she was Norwegian.
Buddy may be my father’s best friend. They go back a long way. Buddy’s weapon of choice was a razor, and he taught my father to use one, though I don’t believe my father ever did. Buddy might have done a lot of things with his life, but he chose to stay close to his roots in Harlem, where he was a bookmaker, a numbers book, and so on. He was a skilled player of the main chance who knew the streets as well as any man ever did. He was also smoothly handsome and appealing to women. In c
ertain senses he was my father’s mentor.
I was wholly unable to understand the relationship between my father and Buddy. Two men could hardly have been more different. But something between them drew them close. Some secret I would work to penetrate for a long time.
I remember being introduced to other visitors, the meaning of whose names I would learn later.
“Len, say hello to the Prime Minister.” It was, of course, Frank Costello. In Cosa Nostra he was known as “the prime minister,” meaning he used brains, not muscle and smoothly accomplished what others failed to accomplish. Remembering him later, I was surprised to know that my father had a friend in Frank Costello.
“Len, say hello to the Little Man.” Meyer Lansky, known as “Little Man” and “Chairman of the Board,” was the mob’s banker and strategist. I remember an appealing, even charismatic man who always had time to say a cordial hello to a little boy and sometimes produced a paper bag of candies from his overcoat pocket.
“Len, say hello to Mr. Hoffa.” Costello and Lansky had manners and pretended for a moment to take an interest in a little boy. But even as a child I detected in Jimmy Hoffa a crude bully, a menacing man I hoped I would not meet again.
I knew nothing of these men but those impressions I gathered. It would be years before I identified them and began to wonder what connection they had with my father.
I didn’t worry about it much. I relied on my mother’s assurance that my father was an honest man in an honest business. Her word was all I needed to settle any unease I later felt about my father’s association with these men. And I must say, even now, that not everyone who befriended men like Costello and Lansky were criminals.
When I was nine and home from school for summer vacation, my mother’s family came to visit. Her father was old, fragile, and very French. When he sat down, his suit only reluctantly sat down with him. It was of stiff fabric and seemed to have been built around him like a cardboard box, to pack him in.
The Secret Page 2