The Secret

by Harold Robbins

  MR. JULIUS: A family business, you say. Where are the other members of the Alexander family?

  MR. HAN: I never met any of them but George.

  MR. JULIUS: They are all missing, disappeared.

  MR. HAN: If they were running an illegal sweatshop, I am not surprised.

  That was Charlie Han. He had covered his tracks extremely well. He always did. And he carefully kept my name out of the case. How could I be anything but grateful?

  The crotchless panties handled by the prosecutor as if they were dirty and would soil his hands drew a lot of media attention. The publicity didn’t hurt us.

  George Alexander was like Murray. He was insulation between Charlie and his businesses. We would encounter him again later, in a surprising way.

  Melissa waited two months after Giselle died before she made it plain to me that she would not mind doing what she could to relieve my horniness. My God! What a piece of luck! To have lost Giselle and then so soon to be able to form a relationship with a woman like Melissa.…

  Melissa had been around in one capacity and another since that day when, as a twenty-year-old model, she had offered to trim her pubic hair so it wouldn’t show over the top of one of our bikinis. She was the one who had recommended Larkin Albert as a designer. We had used her as a model often.

  She had married. She had divorced. She had no children.

  For a short time she was in tough circumstances, and we made work for her. One year I sent her to Paris to tour the shops that supplied what we imported, to identify what she thought would sell in the States. She turned out to be good at it. She had a very good sense of what American women would wear.

  She was never a top model. There was too much of her for that. But she appeared in hundreds of department-store ads for bras and panties. Twice she appeared in ads in The New York Times Magazine, once in Vanity Fair, and then in catalogs, modeling very ordinary American-style white undies. Her name remained unknown. Her face and figure were familiar to people who had no idea who she might be.

  Sal tried to put the make on her. She rejected him gently but emphatically.

  Okay. I recognized her subtle suggestion for what it was and took her up on it, gladly. She spent the night in my apartment. Then some more nights.

  Winter settled things for Melissa and me. One morning we left the apartment and went down to try for a cab. New York can be a terrible place when the weather is bad. Snow had fallen overnight, leaving the streets curb-full with slush and filthy water. Sleet was falling now. New Yorkers, taking their quirky, surly pride in the myth that they can’t be defeated, were fighting each other for cabs and scrambling along the slippery sidewalks toward the subway entrances.

  Melissa and I stood in the foyer of our building, looking at the challenge.

  “What the hell are we doing?” I asked her.

  She shook her head and shrugged. “Damned’f I know,” she said. “I’m really damned if I know.”

  I remember how she looked. She was wearing a leopard hat and coat that had Dupont, not Africa, in their ancestry, plus vinyl boots against the slush. Her brown hair turned under her chin. Her skin already glowed from the harsh, cold wind. She was thirty-five years old.

  “Let’s go back upstairs,” I said. “Make a pot of coffee. Scramble some eggs. Eat and go back to bed.”

  She shook her head. “I have to be at—”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do if I expect to make a living.”

  “You don’t have to make a living, Melissa. Or you can make one in my business. And it’s silly, isn’t it, for you to keep a separate apartment?”

  We went back upstairs. She called the photographer—who thought she was twenty-seven, not thirty-five—and said she could not come in to model underwear because of the weather. I called my office and said I was not coming in because of the weather. That was it. From that day, we lived together.

  We slept in the guest bedroom. She understood why and one night suggested I should replace the furniture in the master bedroom. We did, together, and after that slept in a room that was ours—until we moved into a new apartment with decor done for us by a designer.

  That place—Ha! I owned art done by guys I’d never heard of. Hey! By me an artist was Norman Rockwell. Him I knew. His stuff I liked. In the new place I lived with things that dangled from the ceiling and made no sense at all.

  Melissa was thirty-five. Hell. I was fifty-six. I was robbing the cradle, and I was like the cat who swallowed the canary.

  Melissa was not just an easy piece of ass. That had been Sal’s mistake: to imagine she was. I mean, Melissa sometimes said no. She didn’t lie back and spread her legs just because I said I wanted it, any more than Giselle had.

  I never compared Melissa to Giselle. In my mind, they occupied two separate compartments. They were the ornaments and the comforts—no, more than that; they were my help and support—in two different times in my life.

  If I have been a success in this life, I owe a lot of it to a pair of fine women: Giselle and Melissa.

  33

  By the time my son married Sue Ellen, I had forty-seven stores. Twelve of them were in the five boroughs. I had a store in Scarsdale and one in White Plains, one in Greenwich, Connecticut, and one in Stamford. I had one in Westport, one in Bridgeport, and two in Hartford. Two in Providence, one at Newport, four in Boston, and one in Springfield. We had stores on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket that were open only in the summer. In New Jersey, I had two stores in Jersey City, and one each in Trenton, Camden, and Atlantic City. There were five Cheeks stores in Philadelphia and its suburbs. We had two stores in Baltimore, one in Wilmington, Delaware, and four stores in Washington.

  Look at a map, and you will see that not one of our stores was more than a hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean. None was as much as three hundred miles from New York. We weren’t even regional. We were provincial.

  The reason was that I insisted on dropping in on any one of the stores unannounced, anytime. I now know the term for the way I ran my business. It is called hands-on management. I did not choose to be a hands-on manager. I simply didn’t know any other way. Len would know a better way, but I didn’t know it.

  I’ve heard that managers of Howard Johnson’s restaurants sometimes discovered that the inconspicuous old man sitting in a booth eating a platter of fried clams was Howard Johnson himself, who would afterward sit down with the manager and deliver a quiet appraisal of the franchise. I’m sure that was effective management, whether the Harvard MBAs thought it was or not.

  The limits of our province were defined, essentially, by the range and speed of our Beech airplane. We kept it at Teterboro initially, then at Westchester County Airport. I would call the airport. One or more qualified pilots was always hanging around, waiting for a call, and he—occasionally she—would fly me where I wanted to go. While I was on my way to the airport, the pilot would plot the navigation and check out the airplane. Word got around that I would pay a pilot $50 just for discovering and telling me that the weather was not suitable for the flight. I accepted their word for that: the word of the pros. So I took no chances and had no trouble.

  In the air.

  “It can be a very different game in Philadelphia,” Sal warned me. “They play by their own rules in Philly. Very different rules. Not what we’re used to.”

  “Like?”

  “Well … here in New York we sort of put the quiet on things. I know some guys have been whacked out, even recently, but you do that regularly here you’re gonna come up against the Council. In Philly…” He shook his head. “They still do things the old way. Like—The chief family in Philadelphia is the Boiardo Family Sicilians. Old-timey Sicilians, from a town called Partanna, where they were members of the Honored Society. They came over here in the 1890s, first to New York and then moved on to Philly.”

  “Right. I know the name.”

  “Don Enrico Boiardo is called the Chef, because the name sounds like the name on Che
f Boyardee Italian food packages. Don Enrico is an old Mustache Pete. He’s a grandson of Don Vittorio Boiardo, the original one that came on the boat.”

  “So…?”

  “The problem is that the Boiardos don’t have internal peace. The don’s heir apparent was called Chef, Junior. He was killed by his uncle, Plato Boiardo, the Chef’s brother, ’cause he wanted to be the heir. When the Chef found about that, he had Plato whacked out and also Plato’s wife and two sons, plus the son’s wives. I mean, that kinda stuff doesn’t come down in New York. The old Sicilian tradition is that you can go after guys but you leave their wives and kids alone. Plato’s whole family!”

  “Jesus!”

  “Jesus is right. That kind of stuff don’t come down in New York. The Families respect wives and kids and never come after them. The only guys I know who do stuff like that are the Dominicans in Washington Heights. Man, they’re vicious. When they go after a guy, they go after him and his whole family and anybody who’s got a rep for bein’ a friend of his.”

  “In Philadelphia—”

  “It brought down a war. For a while it looked like all the Boiardos would die. It got so bad that the Boiardos of Partanna sent a don over here to settle things down. That was in the late ’twenties. There’s supposed to be peace, but it’s been a blood feud, and some Boiardos still hate other Boiardos, so who knows how long any peace is gonna last? A nephew of the Chef was whacked out only a couple of years ago. Somethin’ about turf.”

  “Are you saying we should stay out of Philadelphia?” I asked him.

  Sal shrugged. “Maybe. I’d think about it. Philly’s a tough damned town.”

  “Then what other towns do we get scared out of? I hear they got a pretty rough gang in Cleveland. What about Chicago? L.A.? We gonna be toughed out? Hey! All we wanta do is sell scanties. The families haven’t shown any interest in that in our other cities.”

  He shrugged again. “They show interest in who does our hauling,” he said.

  We were sitting over steaks at Sparks. Sal loved Sparks. He didn’t like Four Seasons, for example. Sparks wasn’t the very best steakhouse in the city, but it was close. Sal was a meat-and-potatoes man. And he loved red wine, lots of it—which was how Sparks served it: in eight-ounce water glasses.

  “I guess I could talk to Jimmy Lead Eyes,” he said. “He might have an idea or two.”

  Jimmy “Lead Eyes” Francione was now the head of the Carlino family. He told Sal we should make our peace with Don Enrico Boiardo, who wasn’t going to take much interest in whether or not Cheeks opened stores in his city.

  Quoting him—“Selling ladies’ undies isn’t exactly a business guys want to get into. You guys keep your noses clean, and nobody’s gonna take any notice of you.”

  * * *

  I met with Don Enrico Boiardo in an Italian restaurant in King of Prussia, where they served the best Italian food I have ever tasted.

  He was an elderly man, attended by two thugs who served as bodyguards and personal servants. He was wearing a handsome gray overcoat, though it was not overcoat weather; they helped him out of it and took his hat and scarf. They sat down at a table nearby and glared at me for a full ten minutes before they decided I was not about to draw a gun.

  Don Enrico did not have a mustache, but he had great, gray eyebrows. His hair was gray. His face was lined. His watery eyes were blue. His voice was thin and tended to crack. It was impossible to believe that this man had ordered the murder of his brother and his brother’s sons and their wives.

  “I hear from Jimmy Lead Eyes that you want to establish a new business in Philadelphia,” he said.

  “A small business, Don Enrico,” I said. “I am honored that you would meet me on so small a matter.”

  He turned up the palms of his hands and turned down the corners of his mouth. “I like to know what is going on,” he said. “It is a key to success in business.”

  I explained to him what Cheeks was and presented to him a box containing an assortment of Cheeks merchandise. Tucked among the panties and bras, nighties and corselets were hundred-dollar bills: a hundred of them.

  “I am afraid my wife is beyond wearing these,” he said with a wanful smile.

  “Daughters, then, Don Enrico. Or—”

  “Yes. Of course. I will find someone who will appreciate them. Oh, yes.”

  Over lunch and red wine we talked about all kinds of things. He expressed admiration for Ronald Reagan, particularly for how he had handled the air-controller strike.

  “Do you have a wife and children, Jerry?” he asked. He had begun calling me Jerry.

  “My wife died four years ago. I have a son. He’s at Amherst and will start law school next year, at Yale.”

  “I am sorry about your wife. But you have a son who is going into an honorable profession. You must be very proud.”

  “I am, Don Enrico.”

  “I had a son many, many years ago, who was murdered by my brother. Can you imagine such a thing? How is a man supposed to forgive such a thing?”

  He did not mention the revenge he had taken, though I suspect he knew I had heard about it.

  “You brought me presents for my”—he paused to smile slyly—“daughters. I will send something nice for your son.”

  He did, in fact. He sent a gift certificate for $1,000, redeemable at Gucci. That is the origin of Len’s habit, sustained ever since, of wearing Gucci loafers.

  When we had finished our lunch, he nodded to his thugs, who brought his coat and hat. We stood facing each other. I extended my hand to shake, and to my surprise the old man embraced me and kissed me on each cheek. I supposed the kiss was a quaint, old-world Italian custom and had no idea it had any great significance. I returned the kisses. I did not guess I had exchanged the ritual abbraccio, the kiss of peace with the don of the Boiardo family.

  * * *

  We opened two stores before the trouble began. Flying down from Westchester, we landed at a small airport outside Philadelphia—the name of which I don’t remember. A car picked me up and drove me to whichever store I wanted to visit. Routine. I only flew in good weather. It was all routine. Sometimes Melissa went with me, and we pulled a curtain between us and the pilot and made out, sort of.

  It was a joke between Melissa and me, as it had been between Giselle and me, to wonder what that pilot thought he was hearing. You know, you really can’t do it in those small plane seats. Armrests are only a part of the problem. Seats don’t recline all that much, either. Of course, you can find some fun things to do. You can vary the routine. Flying doesn’t have to be boring.

  This time it was not routine. I was alone, but my driver was not alone. He had with him an oily little man who looked vaguely like Michael Corleone’s brother Fredo in The Godfather. “Fredo” waited until we were just outside the airport before he turned around and shoved the point of a switchblade knife to my throat.

  “What the shit?”

  “Lou Chieppa,” he said. “We hear you traded the kiss of peace with the Chef.”

  “Don Enrico Boiardi,” I agreed as calmly as I could.

  “You think he runs this town? He don’t.”

  I shook my head. “Okay. I’m from New York. I don’t know from Philly.”

  “Well, you better learn before you come here. We run it here.”

  “’Kay,” I said. I was in their car, with the point of Chieppa’s knife within an inch of my throat. “So, how was I supposed to know who runs what?”

  “Well, you knew enough to go see the Chef,” said Chieppa with indignation that may have been genuine. “How’d you know enough to do that?”

  “That’s who I was told to see.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Jimmy Lead Eyes.”

  The name effected a pause. Obviously, Chieppa had heard of Jimmy. “Well … Jimmy Lead Eyes ain’t up to date. The Chef’s days are over. You tell Jimmy that Ice Cream is the man now.”

  “Ice Cream…?”

  “Napolitano Boiardo. He�
��s a cousin. You tell Jimmy Lead Eyes that Ice Cream is the man to see now. The Chef is history. Ice Cream has taken over.”

  “Okay. So what am I supposed to do? Does Ice Cream want me to get out of Philly?”

  “You’re gonna get out if you’re the Chef’s man.”

  “I’m not anybody’s man.”

  “Then why’d you trade the kiss with the Chef?”

  “I didn’t know what it meant. I’m not a made guy.”

  “Then why’d you ask Jimmy Lead Eyes who to see?”

  “My partner’s a Carlino. Sal Nero. He’s a made man. He’s made his bones, too.”

  My oily little hood frowned. Here was another name he’d heard. “We’ll want you to meet with Ice Cream,” he said. “He’s gotta be satisfied you ain’t the Chef’s man. If you’re not, nobody cares who sells underwear in Philadelphia.”

  34

  Sal was upset. “Goddamned Boiardos! Jesus Christ, man! Why’d you exchange the kiss of peace with the Chef? How goddamned stupid can you get?”

  “In the first place, I didn’t see what was coming. He shook my hand, pulled me close, and embraced me. Then he kissed me on each cheek. What was I supposed to do, pull away and offend him? How good a judgment would that have been?”

  “You pledged your goddamned loyalty to him, is what you did. You pledged your loyalty to one don in a family that isn’t loyal to just one don at a time.”

  “You didn’t tell me that. You told me to go meet the Chef and take him a present.”

  “I shoulda gone with you.”

  “You should come with me to meet Ice Cream.”

  “That, my friend, I’m gonna do. For sure. I mean, you couldn’t keep me away.”

  He explained to me the twisted logic behind the nickname Ice Cream. That man’s name was Napolitano Boiardo. A popular ice cream flavor was Neapolitan. So … Ice Cream.

  We met Ice Cream in a steakhouse on the outskirts of Camden, New Jersey, which I should have found ominous. But Sal didn’t—or if he did, he said nothing. The place was about as uninteresting a restaurant as I ever entered. The clientele were interesting. They seemed to be divided into two armies, each glaring at the other. I wondered if ordinary people ate there at all.