The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  “Economics is a significant factor in the American dream.”

  “The Tintis are going to squeeze the bookies until they collapse, one by one.” I looked at Dick Tinti, then back. “You know they’re greedy.”

  “Other bookmakers will arrive. Americans like to gamble. Now the state is talking about getting into the lottery business. This year you have a referendum in New York City on off-track betting. If it passes—and what do you think, it won’t?—that’s another nail in the coffin of the bookmakers, except there’s other sports, thank Christ, so maybe, maybe not. If you look into the future maybe you want to take a bet on the future of the bookmaking business. That’s not my arena. All I know is I made a deal with Shoeshine and I stand by it. But unfortunately Shoeshine is gone, so I got no deal. And you got no deal either, kid. That’s the fact. I didn’t make no deal with Shoeshine’s heirs or appointees. Only with Shoeshine. You want to argue with the Tintis, be my guest. It’s an open franchise as far as I’m concerned. Now if you’ll excuse me.” A short heavy man in a blue suit and light blue silk tie had come to whisper in Sfangiullo’s ear. While he did so, Sfangiullo nodded like a medical professional hearing of his patient’s progress.

  It came to me there was another reason Shushan may have been killed: with the future of bookmaking in New York so uncertain, Sfangiullo could have decided he wanted more cash now than in the long-term. Maybe there would be no long term. Tinti would certainly be ready to give up more of his take, and would drain the bookies unmercifully on the theory they only have a short time anyway. Maybe the gambit I had devised was academic: economics will out. From the way Sfangiullo looked at me as the blue-suited man walked away, it did not matter. My plan was already in play.

  “I am informed there is an element in the street,” Sfangiullo said, staring hard at me.

  “An element?”

  “Niggers.”

  “Really?”

  “Also chinks.”

  “Also spicks and kikes, if you want to use racial slurs, dottore.”

  “The whole street in front is full of hebes with baseball bats. At the Allen Street corner there’s a gang of chinks. The other corner looks like Harlem there’s so many jigs. Why are they here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably they’re friends of Shushan Cats. Why don’t you invite them in and ask them? I’m sure they’d like a coffee.”

  “How many of these animals you got dirtying up my street?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think a bunch of coloreds and chinks and lampshade people intimidates me?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “But they might intimidate Mr. Tinti here.”

  Tinti laughed.

  I knew I had him. “Frankly they’re nonviolent, like the ones in Birmingham, Alabama.”

  “They got what was coming to them,” Sfangiullo said. “They break the law.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I’m so glad you see eye to eye with the attorney general on that.”

  Sfangiullo drew his hand silently across his throat. Not his finger, his whole hand. This was not a gesture. It was language. “The older one they should kill first,” he said. “Because he’s the president. Then the Bobby one. Both Kennedys, scum.”

  “But duly elected,” I said, pushing it.

  “Elected, they can be dis-elected. They hate the Italians. They hate anybody that isn’t like them. Jimmy Hoffa, a legitimate labor leader, maybe with his hand in the cookie jar, maybe not, as if the Kennedys they’re different, they are hounding him into a grave. Castro, he tried to bring good things to Cuba, they turned him into a Communist. Some Communist—a baseball pitcher. Batista, this son of a bitch we had to pay off every minute just to run a casino, him they protected, but when Castro came in they got scared. Maybe it’s going to look bad for America if this guy, an honest leader, says okay, no more bribes, instead we got to pay taxes for casinos so he can build schools and hospitals and what not. You think anybody in the gambling business would care? You think it’s pleasant to do business in a place where everybody is selling his own sister? Where you can get the clap from eating a ham sandwich? Where nobody can read and write? I’m not kidding with you. You want to run a casino you need people who can read and write and don’t die on you in the middle of their shift because of some mysterious disease. No, John F. Kennedy, he doesn’t like that. Wants to replace Castro with another Batista. Let me tell you something. I’m a crook. All my friends are crooks. Every man I know practically is a crook. Everybody here, here in this room, we’re all crooks. But there isn’t a one of us wouldn’t want to be dealing with Fidel Castro, not that crook Batista, because Batista he was a crooked crook. His word meant nothing. He stole all the money from his people and spent it on whores and drugs and who knows what filthy depravity. You think Castro would close down the casinos if John F. Kennedy he said, ‘Dr. Castro, you’re a democrat. You’re for the people. You got a live-and-let-live attitude. What can we do to help?’” He took out a white handkerchief, hawked up and spat into it. “Excuse me, but that John F. Kennedy, his brother, his other brother, the fat one that drinks too much, the whole family should rot in hell.”

  Another man in blue now came up to the table and whispered into Tinti’s ear. Apparently there was something to the blue suits, like a uniform perhaps that denoted service; I was briefly saddened that I hadn’t brought such a person along. The second blue suit went away.

  Tinti spoke so softly I could barely pick it up. The sound of singing was drifting in from the streets. A Yiddish melody. “My guy says the whole street is blocked,” Tinti said. “They got cars parked in the middle. Cars parked with nobody in them, and locked. What the fuck is that they’re singing?”

  “Your Yiddish a bit weak?” I said.

  “What do they sing, kid?” Sfangiullo asked.

  What could I do but sing it along with the people in the street, my people?

  Zog nit kaynmol az du gayst dem letstn veg,

  Chutch himlen bloyene farshteln bloye teg.

  Kumen vet noch undzer oysgebenkte shoh,

  S’vet a poyk ton undzer trut—mir zynen doh!

  Kumen vet noch undzer oysgebenkte shoh,

  S’vet a poyk ton undzer trut—mir zynen doh!

  “Very pretty,” Tinti said. “What does it mean in human?”

  “It’s the song of the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” I said.

  Never say that you are going your last way.

  Though lead-filled skies above blot out the blue of day.

  The hour for which we long will certainly appear.

  The earth shall thunder beneath our tread—We are here!

  The hour for which we long will certainly appear.

  The earth shall thunder beneath our tread—We are here!

  “So what does that mean?” Tinti said. “Are we supposed to be afraid?”

  “Feccia di culo,” I said with an even smile. “Pisciarsi addosso dalla paura. Ass-face, why shouldn’t you piss yourself from fear? I got three hundred men out there with baseball bats, and the colored guys and the Chinese are packing. If I want to I can keep you here until your stugots, which is your prick, turns into a sticchio, which is a cunt.”

  “Maestro, your guest is calling me ass-face? Do you mind if I handle this inside your place?”

  “Yes, Dickie,” Sfangiullo said. “I do mind. You want to have at him, go outside.” So the old man could smile with both sides of his mouth. “Ah, you don’t want to go outside, is that it?”

  “They got hundreds,” Dickie said. “What do I got, four or five here? It’s a dirty trick.”

  “Troiata, a dirty trick,” Sgfangiullo said, translating. “Dickie, my heart bleeds marinara for you. You’re an idiot, and you don’t even know Italian.” The doctor turned to me. “Tell me, kid. Where’d you learn to speak the beautiful tongue? I thought you was a Jewboy.”

  “Cette cacasenno vomitare l’anima vene finire in merda,” I said.

  Tinti’s voice went up a co
uple of octaves. “Speak English!”

  “Some fucking Italian you are,” I said. “Let me translate. ‘This shit-for-brains, who throws up his own guts, is going to end badly.’ Now you got it, Dickie?”

  “Maestro, you going to let this Jew talk to me that way.”

  “What way, you feccia di stronzo? Lecceculo, you come in here with big plans, big promises. You’re going to take over the bookies, and then the fish market, and there’s going to be a fortune in it, and suddenly this kid comes in and makes you como un bello sticchio.”

  “That means, Dickie,” I said. “Turdface, ass-licker, etcetera, etcetera, followed by ‘makes you look like a beautiful cunt.’”

  “Maestro, please, this is not right.”

  “Ruffiano siccii—”

  “Servile bootlicker,” I explained.

  “Servile,” Sfangiullo said. “That’s a good translation. A good word.”

  “English has a few,” I said.

  “You’re Italian? Where you from?”

  “From Brooklyn.”

  “What part?”

  “Brownsville.”

  “That’s not an Italian neighborhood. Maybe a few. You sure you’re not a Jewboy? I don’t mind. Shushan, he’s Ebreo too, and he’s close to my soul.”

  “A moment ago you said he was dead. Now you’re speaking nel presente teso.”

  “Newhouse. That’s not an Italian name.”

  “Newhouse,” I said. “Casa, nova.”

  “Casanova?”

  “Sure.”

  “Casanova, where your people come from? Before Brooklyn?”

  “Maestro!”

  “Uccello, tirar!”

  Poor Tinti had to turn to me.

  “Penis, go have an erection.”

  “A un altro da tavola.”

  “At another table.”

  Dick Tinti was just rising to his feet when Sfangiullo’s blue-suit returned, and without so much as a pause bent to speak in the old man’s hairy ear. I knew instinctively something had happened, because a moment before the singing outside—it was now “We Shall Overcome”—slowed, faltered, stopped, voices dropping out one by one as if each had been the recipient of bad news. In the silence I understood the whispered Italian before Sfangiullo was able to repeat what he had heard. “Il Presidente ha stato assassinato,” he muttered, as if to himself. “They just shot John F. Kennedy.”

  35.

  By the time I got back to the Westbury it was clear the president was dead. The newscasters working live from totally unedited reports were understandably cautious: no one wanted to speak the unspeakable. But the indications were unrelenting. Within minutes after Justo, Ira and I got back to the suite the White House made official what America feared: Kennedy was history, Lyndon Johnson having been sworn in on Air Force One as it returned to Washington as if merely being in Texas were perilous, which perhaps it was.

  As the afternoon wore on the world seemed to slow down, and by evening came entirely to rest. In two years Martin Luther King would be gunned down, in seven it would be Bobby Kennedy’s turn. By 1980, when a deranged Beatles fan had taken the life of John Lennon, America had become so inured to assassination that no one even thought to reflect on the obvious: a society that had sought to suppress organized crime was now functioning like organized crime writ large.

  Whoever had killed John F. Kennedy—the idea that it was a lone gunman remains laughable to this day—had a political agenda that could have been cooked up in eighteenth-century Sicily. The man arrested for the crime may or may not have been one of the shooters, but he could hardly have been all of them. Most likely he was the intended perpetrator, the designated assassin, the bad guy. While speculation exploded about Lee Harvey Oswald’s connections with Cuba, the Soviet Union, right-wing fanatics, in that suite at the Westbury, with a tearful Walter Cronkite on the television screen and special editions of the New York papers on the coffee table, Justo and I dissected the hit from the perspective of an Auro Sfangiullo, a Royce Wilmington, a Jimmy Wing, a Shushan Cats.

  “I’ve seen this so many times,” Justo said, pulling on a joint, its pungent fragrance filling the room like funerary incense. “Somebody gets seriously pissed off at something someone did or is doing or maybe even intends to do. He can’t do the hit himself, because number one it’s dangerous, number two it’s a specialist job, number three the last thing he wants to do is start a Chinga war among the families. So he calls in a specialist.”

  “Like...”

  “Like it could be anybody. Ten, twenty years ago you had your Murder Incorporated people, Jewish hard guys from Brooklyn. They would sit by the phone, on retainer, just waiting for the call to hit somebody. I mean, this was their profession.”

  It was Shushan’s for a while as well, at least according to the newspapers. But I didn’t point this out. To do so would be to besmirch the name of the dead. If anyone ever found Shushan’s body and put up a stone, would it say: BELOVED SON AND BROTHER, BENEFACTOR OF CHARITIES, PROTECTOR OF THE WEAK? Maybe all that. But there would be no footnote, no asterisk leading to fine print below—AND RETIRED HITMAN. Another reason I didn’t mention it: I doubted it was true. The same newspapers that painted Shushan as an former contract-killer had called me Kid Yid Jr, to say nothing of Joe (Mob) College, Shoeshine Heir and, in the Daily Mirror’s immortal words, Brainiac Maniac, replete with a list of criminal schemes some overheated flack at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had fed them as truth: Had I really put together a gang of anonymous tough-guy English-majors who for a price would threaten professors at all the city colleges to raise a specific student’s grades or else? At Thomas Jefferson High School had I really bought the votes I needed to become student-body president? Was I really in charge of all the pot sold in nickel bags on all the college campuses in the Northeast? Was I really able to get a chimpanzee admitted to any medical school in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut simply by making a single whispered phone call? If the papers were so wrong about me, how much more so about Shushan?

  But in a greater sense perhaps they weren’t wrong about me at all. Between the tabloids, the television news reports, and the subtle but pervasive word on the street, in certain circles I really was an up-and-comer. Even Auro Sfangiullo believed the hype, or pretended to. Being named heir to Shushan Cats might mean death at the hands of an angry Dick Tinti, but in quotidian terms it was nothing to be sneered at. Without even thinking about it I knew I could get a table at any restaurant in New York, the best hotel rooms, and a free pass to park on the sidewalk anywhere in town. My certainty in these matters was so great I had no need to confirm it: deference breeds confidence and that confidence inspires further deference. I now understood the meaning of Shushans leaving his Cadillac convertible totally open, vulnerable and blatantly illegally parked opposite a police precinct house in Chinatown—the twenty clipped to the windshield merely underscored Shushan’s position in the hierarchy of power and influence in the city that was its capital. No one would dare take it. That’s why it was there.

  So it hardly surprised me the next afternoon when the three Callinan brothers arrived that I was treated like a cardinal or a fire chief or a police commissioner. What did surprise me was that I was addressed with similar deference by their sister.

  36.

  Celeste had never looked more fetching, probably because she had never looked fetching before. Something of a lace-curtain bohemian, she had never bothered when she was with me to apply makeup—excluding eye shadow—or dress to please: her appeal was direct. She offered the use of her body in exchange for her use of mine. This was a precursor to the more radical feminism that would so dominate both coasts—for reasons unknown the south and midwest remained immune to the blandishments of no blandishments. In 1963 every woman in New York and San Francisco under twenty-five with a patina of sophistication saw herself as earthy, primal, elemental. They wore pants, or dresses that showed thigh, and leather and suede. If they added jewelry—Celeste never did, not
with me—it was or pretended to be African: large beads, shells, earrings that hung perilously low. Pearls didn’t happen, diamonds did not make their appearance until an engagement ring changed the stakes; otherwise Mexican silver replaced the traditional delicacy of yellow and pink gold. Legs were shaved, but armpits escaped the razor. Deodorant was not abandoned, but perfume was all but unknown. Which is why my nose had not recognized Celeste even as my brain registered her presence. The smell of bergamot was not something I had ever associated with Miss Bangalot.

  The woman now before me was a vision of glamour-magazine glamour: A short tan-suede coat over a tangerine sheath so richly textured it seemed burnished—I had never seen raw silk before—topped by a three-strand necklace of seed pearls, matching earrings and hair that had been worked on by someone wielding more than a rubber band. She wore heels, not clogs, and the watch on her wrist was so delicate its face may not have been readable. Hers, alight with respect, was.

  “You didn’t have to dress for me,” I said as she kissed me chastely on the cheek.

  “No like?”

  “No,” I said. “Like. But I never thought you looked better in clothes.” Given the company, perhaps I could have worded this differently, but then again it might not have mattered.

  If this disclosure pained them, or angered them, or merely embarrassed, the Callinan brothers disguised this with hearty handshakes, not least Father Bill, who grasped my hand in both of his long enough for the silent but heartfelt recitation of a Hail Mary. Maybe I had been sensitized to the features of our recently assassinated president, but as I looked upon the three Callinans all I could think of was loss. The Callinans were Kennedys without money, too little exercise, bad food and maybe an extra tipple with a regularity suggesting dependence. Each had the same brush-thick auburn hair, green eyes, and—especially the good padre—the tell-tale tiny explosions of burst blood vessels on the nose that speak of a natural inclination to tank up. He spoke first.