Chance walked over and stopped beside Cellini's desk, watching the man as he added columned figmres in his head, snapped his orders to the men at the phones as the balances altered. A single phone call might involve a hundred thousand dollars.
There was no record of these calls, but no one ever welshed on them. To welsh would mean death.
CeUini called his last order and glanced at his watch. It was late. There was only one more race in the whole country that afternoon, the eighth at Santa Anita.
He sighed and, reaching in his desk, fumbled a cigar from the box in the second drawer. It was characteristic of him that he did not offer Chance one.
''Well, what's on your mind?"
Chance looked down at him. Cellini wasn't much older than he was, but aheady good hving had put a thin layer of fat over his rather short body. His hair was blue-black, his beard so heavy that his pudgy cheeks always appeared to need a shave. His fingers were short, his hands plump, and black hair grew heavily across their backs. Chance knew a physical distaste for the man almost as great as his personal disHke.
"Doc said you wanted to see me."
Cellini grunted. He rose, speaking to one of the men at
the side table. "Pete, sit in on the desk. Come on, Elson, let's take a walk."
He led the way out through the steam room, skirted the ordered rows of chairs, which were already beginning to empty now that the afternoon racing was almost finished, and walked the length of the long bar from which the players were suppHed free drinks during the evening hours. He sat down on the last stool, his back to the bar, resting his elbows on the curved raised edge of the polished coimter, his head canted up at Chance, who made no move to take the stool at his side.
"Doc tell you what I want?" "He told me."
Cellini considered Chance. He was too shrewd to underestimate him, too shrewd to show his dislike, for this dislike was mutual.
Raphael Celhni had been bom in a three-room tenement on Mayfield Road, under Murray Hill, not more than ten miles from where they now sat.
But the distance he had traveled from the Little Italy of his birth could not be measured in miles. It was measured in power. His father had been a stonecutter, a Mustache Pete who at the day of his death had not learned to speak proper English.
Cellini had known only contempt for him, and for his mother, who had supported her eleven children after the father's death by serving red wine and spaghetti to the slummers who invaded the district during prohibition in search of thrills.
Cellini had contempt, too, for the well-dressed loudmouths who swilled red wine like so many pigs, who pinched the bottom of his mother or his older sister as they served the heaping bowls of spaghetti on the scrubbed wooden kitchen table.
He had rifled their overcoat pockets for what he could find, and once, when he was twelve, he and two other boys had mugged one of them and taken a watch and three hundred dollars from his pockets.
The police had searched for them, but all Italian kids
look alike, and a blanket of silence had descended over the whole district.
He had not been so lucky the second and third times. He had gone up twice on armed robbery before he smartened up and turned to less dangerous pursuits.
The boys called him The Artist. It was a bad joke, because of his name. He hated his name. He changed it to Ralph almost as soon as he understood what they were talking about.
But he had imagination and ability. He had dreamed of doing in Cleveland what Capone had managed in Chicago. But things were against him. The alcohol racket had never been organized here as it had been in other towns, and then prohibition ended and he, like hundreds of other smalltime gangsters, looked for new interests.
The Mafia had helped. The Mafia had its beginning in the mystic hills of Sicily, running back into feudal times, a secret society based on a blood oath. Once in the Mafia, a man could not leave it and continue to live.
It had come to America in the late eighteen hundreds, brought by the immigrants from southern Italy, breeding on the desperation and poverty of the tightly segregated people.
For two generations Americans had known it as the Black Hand. A terrorist organization, preying mostly on its own countrymen, it had exacted tribute by kidnapings and beatings and murder.
Strangely, prohibition had nearly killed it—that and the tendency of the younger generation of Italians to move out of the Little Italys and mingle in the general population.
The young hoodlums who in the ordinary course of events would have joined it had little use for the fumbling leadership of the old country Mustache Petes still trying to operate in the manner of their bandit grandfathers in Sicily.
They were too busy with their hquor businesses, too occupied with their night clubs and show-girl partners. Cellini had joined almost automatically, viewing, as his friends did, the mumbo jimibo of the blood oath as something to be laughed at.
And no one had been more surprised than he by the
recent revival. At repeal, the gang overlords had needed a way to hold their men together until they could shift their activities to fresh fields.
Someone had thought of the Mafia. And suddenly the old-time leaders had been killed or driven from their posts, and a new generation had taken over, a generation raised on the easy money of the liquor traflBc, searching for something to take its place.
Things had changed rapidly. The big boy from Chicago had taken a federal rap. Lucky was in jail. Rumor had it that he was running the organization from his cell.
But neither of these events had altered the gangland picture of the Mafia. A smart guy from the garment trade had got the wise boys together and laid down the law.
It amused Cellini that it had been a Jew who had organized the country until now you had difficulty telling the Mafia from the Syndicate. For all he knew there were Jews in the Mafia and Irishers too.
Chance wasn't a Jew or a mick or a wop. He was nothing but a Goddamn American. Chance might think himseK tough, but he had soft spots. Take his dictum that the games had to be run on the level for instance. Only a sucker ever gave a sucker a break. All he had to do was push hard enough and Chance would fold like the others.
"Look," said Cellini. He took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at it. "There's no point you and me fighting. Fighting is for chumps."
"So?"
"So don't stir me up. We've got a nice thing here. Let's keep it this way, only I should get a cut of the whole deal. My book brings a lot of play into this place. No one ever heard of you in this town until you opened. Some of my customers have been with me two years. They come out in the afternoon, they stay to dinner, and then they lose at your lousy tables."
"You knew that when you made the deal."
"I didn't see it," said Cellini. "I see it now."
Chance was trying to be reasonable. He had learned a long
time ago not to hunt trouble just for the fun of having trouble.
"You're doing all right. That book must be a gold mine. I watched the play for an hour this afternoon. What the hell, do you want everything? We all have to live."
Cellini knew something which Chance did not know. The book did not belong to him. It belonged to the Syndicate. He had a piece, and a percentage, but this was 1937, not 1920, and there were few lone-wolf operators left anywhere in the coimtry.
He wanted the part of the club for himself. Once he got in, he'd gradually take the whole thing over.
He said calmly, "And the fix is mine. How long do you think you'd stay open if I pulled the rug from under you?"
"Because your brother-in-law is in the sheriff's oflBce?"
**That and other things. I was bom in this town."
"It's no credit to the town." Chance didn't smile and his eyes looked almost glassy. "Now hsten to me, you gangster son of a bitch. I don't hke you. I never liked you. I don't like your kind. I didn't hke the setup when Doc brought you in. You're getting out. I'll give you two days to find a place for your junk, a
nd you don't get your ten G's back until I'm ready to give them to you, which may be never."
Cellini was boihng inside. But he never let rage interfere. "You're asking for it," he said. "Keep asking and you'll get it."
Chance's anger was deeper than CeUini's. He reached out, took hold of the lapels of Cellini's expensive coat. He hoisted the shorter man to his feet, held him so that Cellini was forced to stand on tiptoe. But his voice was calm, low, studied.
"Keep yoiu" racket boys oflF my back. I know you can have me killed for a fifty-dollar bill. Don't do it. If you do, friends of mine are going to sick killers onto you. I don't think you're ready to die yet, and you will, if anything happens to me."
Chance let go his hold suddenly. Cellini sat down on the bar stool hard. Chance made a right about-face and marched across the room past the cashier's cage, into his own office.
He sat down at the desk, got a bottle from the lower drawer. He seldom drank when he was working, but he felt the need of whisky now.
He sat still, let the warm glow of the hquor loosen his knotted stomach muscles. It was a mistake to get as angry as he had with Cellini. But Christ, the Club meant everything to him, everything. And to have that greasy punk try to cut in was more than he could stand.
When he was calmer, he picked up the phone and called Doc's friend in the sheriff's office. He did not mince words. He told him exactly what had happened.
"What I want to know is, how much weight the wop has with you people. He has a brother-in-law down there I understand."
"Who, Ed Crouse?" The man's tone was oily. "Don't give it a thought. Ed likes to make like a big shot, but hell, no one pays much attention to him."
"You're not kidding me? New Year's is coming up."
"Why should I kid you? We like money too."
Chance wasn't satisfied. That was the hell of buying protection. A man sold out to you and he might sell out to someone else. Chance had very httle use for grafting cops and politicians. In his book they weren't much better than hoodlums. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly seven thirty. He'd have to go upstairs and grab a sandwich. It was only an hour until they opened.
He climbed the private stairs which led from his office to the pantry behind the kitchen. That had been Dutch's idea, a back way out in case of trouble. Chance had humored him. Dutch said it was better to slap on an apron and play at being a bus boy than to ride downtown in a squad car.
If they got raided. Chance thought, it wouldn't matter much what happened to them. The Club would be gone. The Club was all he hved for. He'd dreamed of owning a place like this ever since that morning in the blonde's apartment.
In the kitchen, Leon was at the stove. Leon turned and smiled at him. Leon was a third-generation restaurateur whose family had operated one of the world-famous places
in the French Quarter before the depression and prohibition combined had put them out of business.
Dutch had known him in New Orleans. Dutch had written him when they decided to open the Club, and the kitchen and dining room had been rebuilt to his direction,
"Have a good Christmas?"
Chance said, "Sure." He walked across and peered through the door into the big dining room. There were thirty or forty parties already there.
Harvey, the headwaiter, came into the kitchen, his usually impassive face creased in a smile. "Big stuff for New Year's," he said. "We've got two hundred reservations already and more coming in all the time."
Chance went back and sat down at the table. "Let me have a beef sandwich," he told one of the assistant cooks, "and a cup of coffee." Leon and Harvey had followed him. Leon's face expressed disapproval.
"A sandwich. He owns a fine restaurant and he eats sandwiches."
Chance said, "I'm in a hurry."
As soon as Doc arrived. Chance told him about Cellini. He wasn't trying to worry him, or to put the blame on Doc, but he thought he ought to know.
"I threw the bastard out," he said. "He's nothing but trouble."
Doc looked very handsome in his dinner jacket. Chance wished he could wear clothes the way Doc did. Doc could give class to a burlap sack.
'1 don't like it," said Doc. He was choosing his words carefully. He always did when he argued with Chance. He could never be quite certain how Chance would take things. ^'What if he gets rough?"
"I told him if anything happened to me, there would be a half-dozen killers on his tail. He's dirty yellow. His land fights by hiring it done. If he figures he'll catch it, he'll hesitate before he starts anything."
**What about the sheriff's office?"
"I called and told them what had happened. You might check with Sullivan. You know him better than I do."
Doc nodded and returned to the gambling room. The play had already started, but it was slow. There were more shills at the tables than there were players.
At eleven Chance went out into the big room and motioned to Doc in the pit. "I'm going home. It's slow tonight and I've got the jumps."
Doc looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. Chance got his coat and called a cab. Then he walked up the steps into the kitchen and took Leon's arm.
"I threw Cellini out tonight. HeTl be moving his junk in a day or two. Tell Floyd and the other janitors, will you?"
Leon was small, about forty, with gray eyes and a shock of grayish hair. "I'm glad. That dago acts like he owns the . place."
At the apartment Chance paid oflF the driver, kicked the snow from his shoes in the tiled entrance and walked to^ the automatic elevator.
He did not expect Judy to be up, but she was reading the newspaper to Joe. Joe's eyes weren't so good. They had had too much rosin rubbed in them. Neither heard him come in and he stood there, watching them.
Joe had gone shopping that morning. The girl wore a pleated skirt and a pull-over white sweater. A barber had evened the rough edges of her bob where Joe's scissors had nicked it badly, and her hair was combed back like a boy's, accentuating the thin pointedness of her face.
But there was a little color in her cheeks as she looked up ^ and saw him. "Hi."
He said, "Hi," automatically.
He shucked out of his coat and put it in the closet, adding his overshoes. When he came back, she had laid the paper aside and Joe was on his feet. "I'll get you a drink." "Later."
Joe took no notice. He was never as happy as when waiting on Chance. Chance came in and dropped on the couch. Judy sat cross-legged before the tree. The tree was lighted and the goldfish swam in a new glass bowl on the end table. It looked quiet, calm, homelike.
Funny, he had never thought about it as home before. It had been merely a convenience, a place to sleep, to leave his clothes. Maybe it was the kid who made the di£Ference.
He'd never had a home. It was something he had not cared about, but he found that it was pleasant just being there.
"Is it much fun to be a gambler?"
"Huh?" He came to with a start, her yoimg voice bringing him back to reality. He must have nearly dozed off. "Fun? It's a way of making money."
"Is that all?" She sounded disappointed. "IVe read stories about gamblers. I figured they had it, like movie stars."
He looked at her a httle blankly.
"Don't you ever smile?"
"What? Oh, sure."
"But not often. I've only seen you smile once or twice. It makes it hard to know what you're thinking about."
His hps twisted. "Maybe I'm not thinking about much of anything."
"Sure you are. People always think. It's a kind of habit you get." She was very serious, as if the problem held deep importance.
"What do you think about?"
"Well, lots of things, like what I'll be when I grow up."
"What will you be?"
"An actress, and I'll have pretty clothes and a httle white dog."
Joe came in with the drink. "What about a dog? You ain't going to keep no mangy dog in this apartment."
"Not in this apartment. Just when I get to HoUywood.**
>
The conversation had gotten away from Joe. He looked at Chance helplessly.
"She's going to be an actress," Chance said.
"Well, why shouldn't she be?"
"It takes some abihty," Chance told him.
"HeU," said Joe. "She's got abihty. You should hear her talk. She talked my ear off all day long."
^Aa^iten. 3
Ralph Cellini was having a drink with his brother-in-law, who he thought was a jerk, a fat slob. Ed Grouse was an oJfficeholder, a bom cop. He was bullying and offensive to those he considered beneath him, obsequious to those above him. He was afraid of Cellini and seldom attempted to hide it.
"For Christ sake, Ralph, you know what you're asking me to do? Sullivan's behind them, and you know how SuUivan stands with the old man and the county attorney."
"You can pull a raid without SulHvan knowing about it until later, can't you?"
"Well, sure," Crouse began to sweat although it was chilly in the bar. "But-"
"And after it's over and the papers run the story, is the old man going to take the credit, or is he going to boot your -ass? Use your head. He won't dare admit that one of his deputies raided a gambhng joint in county territory that he didn't know was there. Then later, after the noise is all blown down, I'll move in and take over. Don't wreck the place too much."
"What if the bank won't rent to you?"
"I got connections out East that will buy the joint."
"Jeese, Ralph, I don't blame you for being burned at Elson, but there's got to be another way."
"Sure," said Cellini, "I can get on the phone and in an hour there'll be a guy on his way west to take care of him, but that just leads to trouble. Besides, I don't want the Syndicate boys to think I can't handle things without help. They got their eyes out for smart operators. They're going legitimate fast and there ain't no end to what you and I can do in this territory once I get really rolling. Do you want me to have to tell Maria you've got no guts?"
Ed Crouse drew a deep, slow breath. He was afraid of
his wife and he knew that she would always listen to her brother in preference to him.
Chance Elson Page 4