A Well-Known Secret

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “My old man wrote a lot of tickets in his twenty years, Terry.”

  “Maybe that’s all it is.” I nodded.

  “I always said you were smart, Terry. I always said that.”

  I looked past Mango to his old man. He was muttering to himself, muttering into a glass of dark brown liquor as his eyes slowly closed, slowly opened again. He needed a shave.

  Either that guy ran recklessly through his cut of the 600K long ago or he never collected a dime.

  “I guess I don’t have to ask you to tell Tommy I was here,” I said.

  Mango shook his head. “He already knows, Terry, you know what I mean?”

  “Figlio,” the old man mumbled. Son.

  “He talking to you or Tommy?” I asked.

  “Who the fuck knows? Only time he talks Italian is when he’s stewed.”

  “Probably has a lot on his mind.”

  “The back door ain’t open either, Four,” he smiled. “Drop it.”

  I stepped away from the bar. “You want a hand getting him home?” I asked.

  Jimmy said no. “Lil’ M, he’s done this before.”

  “All right,” I said as I turned up my collar.

  Which meant that Jimmy was going to walk away from his old man before the bar shut down for the night. And that meant Lil’ Marco was only going to take Ernest Mangionella as far as his front door. A bartender usually doesn’t undress a drunk, tuck him in, kiss him on the forehead. Even if the drunk is Tommy the Cop’s father.

  That’s Jimmy, I told myself. Doing a half-assed job even when it’s his own father.

  Stepping out of the cold rain, I stationed myself in the shadows of the tenements on the west side of Elizabeth, finding a spot under a cornice in an unlit doorway.

  The Empire State Building wore a crown of blue and orange lights. Airplanes headed to LaGuardia grew larger as they descended.

  I blew into my hands, rubbed them together.

  I was in place for more than a half-hour when the first car passed, raindrops glittering in its headlights. If the driver saw me, she didn’t let on. A few seconds later, she slid to a stop in front of Marco’s and tapped the horn. Jimmy came out of the bar, jumped in and the young woman with dark pulled-back hair and the twirling CD tied to her rearview eased out to head uptown.

  In case she’d spotted me, I went south, looking for another place to hide. As I reached the end of the block, the warehouse dog started up again: This time he leapt and crashed against the front doors, stressing the heavy chain, the padlock. Then he did it again, growling and snarling.

  Hands in my pockets, I went back up the street, the rattling of the doors following me. I stopped at the chic boutique, with the thought that the woman in pink Pashmina wasn’t going to return until tomorrow at noon.

  About the hour the damned dog would stop barking.

  There was a time when you would’ve found a goddamned dog that could wake up this neighborhood with a slug from a .25 between its eyes, permanently shut down.

  Unless the dog was protected.

  Christ, a mobbed-up dog. Why not?

  I was still thinking about it when I noticed the silence.

  If Jimmy’s girl had seen me, she hadn’t told him. I knew him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t hang back and let Tommy step in. Or even tip off Lil’ Marco. Jimmy would’ve had to make like a tough guy in front of his woman. It was in his DNA, on the double helix of all cocky guys his size: Never pass up a chance to go hard against a big guy, to take a big guy down. Especially if shouting out a few words in Italian might bring three guys with Glocks out of the building behind me.

  I stepped back against the shop’s door. Maybe Pashmina had left the heat on.

  No, but I was out of the wind.

  “For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold.”

  Francisco or Marcellus. Bernardo? One of the sentries.

  I looked to my left, through the glass. Lil’ M was walking a wobbling Ernie Mango along Elizabeth.

  The UPS man was heading the other way.

  I moved away from the shop and slid to where I had been: under the shelter of the cornice, directly across from old man Mango’s front door.

  He stopped and seemed to want to argue with the dull-eyed bartender, who gestured as Mango began to shout incoherently. Lil’ M’s good deed wasn’t about to go unpunished.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but old Mango suddenly pushed the young man. The ex-cop came off the curb and tottered across the side street.

  Lil’ M hung back. The old man went a few, uncertain steps forward. And then I understood what he and the bartender had scuffled about: Ernie Mango reached down, whipped out his sorry old cock and started pissing on Elizabeth Street.

  “Shit,” Lil’ M spit. “Ernie …” He skidded, came up behind the old man, took him by the elbows and steered him toward a building until the arching flow hit brick instead of concrete.

  As Lil’ M steadied Mango, trying to give the ex-cop at least a shred of dignity, I cut across the narrow street and crouched behind a car in front of the old man’s tenement.

  Mango crammed his cock back in his pants, but didn’t bother to zip up. As Lil’ M avoided the piss puddle and wiped the rain from his face, the old man went ahead and stumbled to his building.

  I shifted behind the parked car and watched as the bartender found the old man’s keys and opened the inside door. As he held back the door and nudged old Mango in, I rose up and saw I’d get my chance.

  As Lil’ M steered the old man to the stairs, the inside door stayed open.

  I waited until they were out of view, then came around the parked car and dashed into the building. Once inside, I went easy, careful not to let my wet shoes squeak on the floor. I walked slowly, noiselessly, to the back of the first floor and found a niche under the stairs. I turned, squatted and fit in nicely.

  After about 10 minutes, I began to wonder if Lil’ M was tucking him in. Or maybe Jimmy had asked the kid to stay with the old man.

  But then I heard a door right above me open, then close.

  Lil’ M pounded down the stairs and he pulled the inside door shut as he went out into the cold mist.

  I waited, then eased myself from the darkness and shook the stiffness out of my knees.

  I came around and went up the stairs.

  I knocked once. The old man came to the door.

  I saw he thought Lil’ M had returned. I could see he didn’t recognize me.

  The bartender had helped him undress. Ernie Mangionella was in a sleeveless undershirt and his suspenders hung limply on the legs of his damp slacks. His feet were bare.

  Though he was drunk, he knew something wasn’t right, and he stood in the door frame, drawing himself up the best he could.

  “Tell me about Sonia Salgado,” I said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he slurred.

  “McDowell. I work with Tommy.”

  He cocked an eyebrow and glared at me.

  “You’re full of shit,” he said finally, as his eyelids bobbed.

  Then the old man looked up at me and with as much defiance as he could muster, tried to stare me down.

  So that’s where they get it from, I thought.

  “You ain’t coming in my house,” he added. “Nobody comes—”

  “Sonia Salgado,” I said.

  He stopped.

  I repeated her name. “Sonia Salgado.”

  “Listen, you, McDonald—”

  “McDowell.”

  “You, you fuckin’ Mick fuck, you Irlandese …” He came closer. His chin was at my chest.

  I could smell the bourbon. I could see the gray stubble on his drooping cheeks.

  “I got nothin’, you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Never did.” He jabbed me with his finger. “Never.”

  He started to totter again. I grabbed him by his shoulders. He went to push me off, but it got worse and he went backward. Luckily, he hit the door fram
e. Otherwise he would’ve crashed to the floor.

  “OK,” I said softly, “steady.”

  He looked at me, frowning harshly.

  “You work with my Tommy?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “McDowell. You tell him I was here.”

  I said it loud enough for the neighbors to hear over the 10 o’clock news.

  “Yeah and you tell him …” He inched forward again. “You …”

  Then he took a deep breath and his shoulders sagged.

  There’d be no confrontation now. Ernie Mango, bourbon in his blood, wanted to confide.

  “I’m asking you,” he said. “Listen, I’m asking you: A man with scratch, what? He lives here? He don’t take his family to Florida, over to Jersey, some place? He don’t take his wife some place nice, Miami Beach, the mountains? Give her what she wants …”

  His heavy eyelids drooped as his head sank toward his chest.

  Then he looked up at me. “I told Tommy. I got nothing.” Gesturing with the back of his hand, he repeated, “Nothing. You got me?”

  I had what I needed now. When you ask a man about murder and he answers by talking about money, about a big prize he never got, he’s telling you more than he ought to.

  “A cruise,” he continued, slurring. “All Rosa wanted: Go on a cruise.”

  “OK, Mr. Mango,” I said. “You’d better go in. You get some sleep.”

  He hung his head. “My little Rose,” he mumbled.

  What a sorry old man.

  He looked at me and he wanted to tell me something to clinch it, in case I hadn’t understood that he never had a slice of the 600K cache.

  But all he came up with was a lazy, looping wave of the hand.

  “Bah,” he said.

  I watched as he turned slowly, steadied himself and went inside.

  I reached and pulled the door toward me until it clicked.

  TEN

  The rain clouds had moved on by the time I woke up and went out for a morning run. I’d intended to take it north past Point Thank You and soon-to-rattle-and-quake construction on Canal up to the lip of the Joltin’ Joe before coming back along Ninth to Greenwich. But with the numbing wind off the Hudson stinging and slapping me, I couldn’t get my knee loose and I cut the run short, looping back at 14th. It was a good call: In the shower, I saw that the knot of skin from when I’d had my right knee scoped had gone bright red. Probably didn’t mean much to an orthopedic surgeon, but to me it meant I pushed it too hard. Running too frequently on blacktop, on unyielding concrete. Standing in the rain, the winterlike chill. Or crouching under old Mango’s stairs.

  Walking never bothered me. “The best medicine, man. Natural mystic,” said Diddio, who walked nowhere. I’d walked once from the Cloisters to Battery Park and my knee felt fine.

  So I couldn’t blame it on last night’s short hike back from Elizabeth Street. I’d kept it simple: Dodging Mulberry, I carried my thoughts along Centre and, with a quiet Criminal Court Building, site of the original Tombs, to my left, fought the night wind off the East River as I moved across town on Franklin. By the time I reached Finn Square, I had it sorted out. It all started with that ticket Ernie Mangionella had hung on Luis Sixto. That was the night they met: No cop cites someone he knows for running a red—a moving violation, points.

  “And now you have a cold,” Bella said as we stood on the sidewalk, the morning sun not yet above the buildings on the east side. “Because you never dress right.”

  This is an old song. When the temperature dropped below freezing, Bella dressed as if she expected Peary and Henson to ask her to fetch the huskies for a side trip across the Nares to Greenland.

  “I don’t—”

  “And you still have a tendency toward melodrama, Dad,” Bella said.

  She hates it when we leave the house at the same time. Someone might think I was walking her to school, the pink handle of her Barbie lunchbox in my big hand.

  I’d simply pointed to the patch of ice on the front steps. Maybe “fall and break your neck” was a bit over the top. But “slip and skin your knee” didn’t seem like much to fear.

  She had a royal-blue beret pulled down to her eyebrows, and a red scarf covered everything to her bottom eyelashes. My daughter, whose head had become the flag of France.

  “They say it’s going to hit forty today,” I smiled. If only there were a graceful way to go back in and throw on a sweater. …

  “‘They.’ Ha.”

  Glo-Bug had nodded off last night, her head on a throw pillow as she lay on the sofa, but Daniel Wu, Grumpy E and Bella were in front of the TV as Branagh glowered.

  “Hello, Mr. Orr,” said Daniel Wu, who was sitting against the sofa, his sneakers tucked under the coffee table.

  The popcorn bowl was empty except for a few plump kernels at the bottom.

  Bella and Eleanor were stretched out on the floor: Grumpy E rested on Daniel’s down coat while my daughter used her laptop as a pillow.

  Bella pointed to the TV. “T. S. Eliot says this is an artistic failure.”

  “He’s right,” grumped E, a frown reducing her dark eyebrows to a single line.

  “Yes,” I replied. “But Goethe and Coleridge—”

  “Shhh,” Bella said gently, with a nod toward the screen. “More swords.”

  I wonder what happened to that Barbie lunchbox.

  On the first day of school, Bella charged confidently into the kindergarten classroom, took the desk squarely in front of the teacher’s, whipped out a marble notebook and a fat pencil. By her fourth birthday, she could read the Times editorial page. A year earlier, while watching Pinky and the Brain, she turned to me and said, “Brain sounds like Orson Welles.” And, to prepare for the first day of school, she spent the summer memorizing the multiplication table, not to 12, but to 13. Why? “To see if I could. That’s all. I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

  I wonder if Davy would’ve been as clever as Bella. He had bright eyes and he seemed alert as he watched the mobile his sister made turn above his crib, groping at the air with little fists, kicking his feet to his own rhythm.

  A double blessing is a double grace.

  I looked at Bella, barely visible now under layers of winter clothing, yellow galoshes over shoes, flannel-lined jeans over long johns, big Michelin-man coat. And still I can feel the light that radiates from within her.

  Under that blob of clothes is our very good kid. No need for Polonius’s double-edged speech to Laertes: Here is a child who by instinct is true.

  Marina, I know, would be proud. (Eighteen months ago, I might’ve said “is proud.” I don’t do that anymore.)

  “Dad, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “You’re, like, kind of creeping me out.” I got a kiss on the cheek last night.

  It looked like I’d made it to 89th before Villa. The blinds of his storefront office were down and The New York Times in a blue plastic sack was jammed into the ornate door handle. As I stepped out of the warm cab, I looked at my watch. Nice life, being a community leader, an ethnic activist at $350 an hour. I’d have to wait a while to learn what he’d heard about Sonia’s murder, to probe him on what else he knew about Sixto, Bascomb and the man who now was Safi Majorelle.

  I dodged shallow puddles and walked up the block to the Stargate Diner to kill 15 minutes over a cup of black coffee. I kept my jacket on as I sat at the end of the counter near the glass door. Staring at the revolving coconut cakes, meringue mountains and bear claws, I wondered how long it was taking McDowell to convince Tommy the Cop he’d never left Queens last night. Might be amusing; probably not. Once he knew it hadn’t been the young cop at his father’s door, Tommy would know it was me and he’d start wondering what the drunken old man had said.

  And, I asked myself as I sipped the hot coffee, how slick was young Sixto back then? Not yet 30 years ago, he takes a ticket from a cop and turns it into a partnership that brings him a good portion of 600K in diamonds.

  Or maybe the operator was old man Mango, back when he
was young, before he started leaning on the sauce. He gets his hooks into an eager kid and builds a scheme around that ambition, around his willingness to do bad.

  Did he have to work to turn Sixto’s eagerness to ruthlessness?

  What did Villa say about Sixto? “Very clever, very bold.”

  I saw it playing like this: Ernie Mangionella’s beat includes the Bowery. He knows Asher Glatzer carries gems between stores. He tells Sixto, who rips off the old man.

  But the armed robbery goes wrong as Asher Glatzer is killed, savagely. The merchant’s political connections bring heat down in waves on Police Plaza. It gets crazy on the Bowery: protests; shop owners demanding protection; Beame and Koch in the neighborhood. Media, the icy glow of TV lights. And Mango, a blue who is working the beat and can’t peel off to find Sixto and finish their business together.

  And Luis Sixto, opportunist and maybe the smarter of the two, takes off with the diamonds.

  “A man with scratch, what? He lives here?”

  Ernie Mango didn’t get his slice. Maybe he used to look like Tommy does now, square, compact and strong, but maybe his head was like Jimmy’s, a head that would make him capable of seeing only what benefits him, regardless of what it did to the people around him, including family. Maybe Sixto knew the Bowery cop could be played, that he wouldn’t have thought it through, that he’d carelessly leave a gaping crack in his plan.

  Bitter, outmaneuvered by a kid, does Ernie Mango set up Sixto’s girlfriend?

  Or does Sixto kill Glatzer so Mango can’t make a move on the diamonds? Does he set up Sonia himself so he can disappear?

  Even if Sonia manages to find a lawyer who can shake her out of the frame, the time it takes gives Sixto a chance to flee to—Where did Villa say? Anywhere in Central or South America where his native language was spoken. Or did he vanish into the discouraging, city-run projects in Spanish Harlem, lying low in one of thousands of apartments that seem to run together north of 116th? Villa was right when he said $600,000 could make a man disappear. Especially a daring young man, clever and bold.

  I looked up at the waitress. She had tired green eyes and a tracheotomy scar across her throat.

  I put my hand over the cup.