361

by Donald E. Westlake

  “No citizens, Irving,” said Kapp. “But hits. Bombs, and you know it. We got no choice.”

  “Quiet hits, maybe,” said Nick. “But not poison in the tea. Lead in the head, huh? Not too quiet, huh, Irving? We want them to know maybe we’re there, huh?”

  “I simply want it made clear that I would not personally appreciate the type of over-enthusiasm which put our lamented friend Lepke in the electric chair.”

  The porch door opened. A chauffeur stuck his head in and said, “There’s a car pulled up. A dinge in the back, he says he wants to talk.”

  In the silence, I moved out from the wall, saying, “I’ll go see what he wants.”

  They watched me go. Nobody talked.

  Twenty-One

  It was a black Chrysler Imperial. Amid the Cadillacs, it looked belligerent. There was a white chauffeur and a black rider. He was no more than thirty, dressed out of Brooks Brothers on an expense account. A gold Speidel band was on his watch, a gold wedding band on the third finger of his left hand. He had a chicken mustache and a small satisfied smile and two watchful eyes.

  When I got there, he pressed a button and the window slid down. The side and back windows had black Venetian blinds. The others were down, the one on this side was up. He looked out at me and said, “I’m from Ed Ganolese. With a proposition for Anthony Kapp.”

  I said, “All right, messenger. Come on down and say your piece.”

  He got gracefully out of the Chrysler. I led the way. Behind me, he said, “Don’t you want to frisk me? What if I were armed?”

  “What if you were?”

  We went down the steps. At the door I turned and said, “What name? I’ll introduce you.”

  “William Cheever.”

  “Princeton?”

  He smiled. “Sorry. Tuskegee.”

  I didn’t smile back. We went in, through the empty room, with chauffeurs showing guns in the kitchen on our right, and on to where the piemen waited. I stopped in the archway and said, “Mister William Cheever. Of Tuskegee. With a message from Ed Ganolese.” Then I went over and stood beside Kapp.

  Cheever’s smile was faint and phony. He nodded at the room, took note of the five standing men, and then looked at the one beside me. “Anthony Kapp?”

  “I’m called Eddie. Not by you.”

  “Mr. Kapp, then. I have been sent, as of course you assume, to discuss terms. My principals—”

  “You mean Ed Ganolese, that two-bit bum.”

  “Ed Ganolese, yes. He sent me with a proposition concer—”

  Kapp said, “No.”

  Nick Rovito said, “Wait a second, Eddie. Let’s hear what he’s got to say.”

  “I don’t care what he’s got to say,” said Kapp. “Ganolese and his sidekicks are in my territory. That’s all I have to know.”

  “You can’t listen to him?”

  “No. I can’t. Look, Nick, they got the pie, am I right? There’s only the one pie, and they got it. If we had it, and this bum came in and said his principals wanted some of it, what would we do?”

  “We don’t have it,” Nick said. “That’s the point.”

  “And they won’t give us any more than we’d give them.”

  Nick spread his hands. “We can talk, can’t we?”

  “We can go to the movies, too, Nick. We can scratch our asses. There’s lots of ways to waste time.”

  “You don’t want to ride me, Eddie.”

  Little Irving Stein piped up, “Ganolese couldn’t of asked for better. Throw one spade on the table and watch everybody fold.”

  Nick said, “Oh, the hell with it. All right, Eddie, you’re right.”

  “Okay, fine.” Kapp looked at Cheever. “What the hell you still doing here? You got your answer. No deal.”

  Little Irving said, “Why don’t we send this buck back with pennies on his eyes? So they’ll know we mean it.”

  Baumheiler said, “No. They already know it.”

  Little Irving said, “Come on. We got ourselves here a little Fort Sumter.”

  Baumheiler said, “It’s just such noisiness as this that I have in mind. I consider it dangerous.”

  Nick said to Cheever, “Go on, little man, you better go home.”

  Cheever opened his mouth. Kapp said, “Move!” He shrugged and nodded and went out, gathering the sheepskin folds of his dignity about him as he went. He closed the door and somebody said, disgustedly, “A deuce.”

  “Like I said,” Kapp told them, “they’re all deuces. I believe we were splitting the pie, boys, before the dark cloud blew in.” Sometime, he’d started a new cigar. He clenched it, and talked through it. “I figure to do this democratic,” he said. “What we’re going to need at the outset is enforcers. Lots of them. And trustworthy. Not deuces like that one, that’ll go running back to Ganolese all of a sudden. And the boys that bring in the most arms get the most gravy. You see what I mean?”

  “You mean a redistribution, Eddie?” asked Nick.

  “Not at our level, Nick. We work the same as always. You’ve got Long Island and Brooklyn and Queens, Irving has Jersey and Staten Island, and Little Irving has the Bronx and Westchester. And the four of us operate Manhattan together. Same as we discussed, right?”

  “Then what’s this talk about gravy?”

  “Down in the neighborhoods, Nick. There’s gonna have to be a redistribution in the neighborhoods. There’s a lot of disloyal types we’ve got to replace, you know what I mean?”

  Nick nodded. “All right,” he said. “That sounds like an incentive for the rest of you guys, huh?”

  There was scattered agreement, and Kapp said, “Okay, so let’s talk about arms. How many and where. And how much capital do we need to get rolling.”

  Two or three of them started talking at once, telling about athletic clubs and veteran’s organizations and other things, and Kapp smoked while the three top men argued with their assistants.

  I didn’t care how they sliced their pie. I walked through them to the kitchen and got a bottle of House of Lords and went downstairs and got my folding chair out of my bedroom and brought it down to the dock.

  There was a cold wind ruffling the sea and blowing away the words of the peasant kings upstairs. But the wall of the boathouse protected me from most of it. The sky was dark and the lake darker. I sat and smoked and held the bottle till it was warm and wet in my fingers. Then I drank from it and set it down on the warped white wood beside the chair.

  After a while, the door opened behind me and Kapp came out. I could still hear the voices upstairs. Kapp came over, grinning, trailing gray cigar smoke, and said, “It’s coming along, huh, Ray?”

  “I guess it is,” I said.

  “And all on account of you. Now, we all got together, we got a firm base here, you know what I mean?”

  “Is Ganolese the one?”

  “You figured that, huh? I thought you did. Yeah, if he’s the one making the propositions, then he’s the one ordered the guns.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He walked out to the end of the dock, looked out into the darkness a minute, and then turned and winked at me, grinning. He glanced up at the lighted windows on the top floor, where his staff was readying his army, and then he walked back to me and said, “You bring me luck, Ray. I didn’t figure it to run this smooth. Only a little trouble between Nick and Irving, everybody else coming along nice. We can’t miss, boy.”

  “Nick and Irving don’t like each other, huh?”

  “They hate each other’s guts. Always have. But they work together. It’s the way of the world, you know what I mean?”

  “I know.”

  He walked around the dock some more, and then said, “You figure to go after Ganolese, huh?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “But there’s no hurry, right? You’re better off, you wait a while. You see what I mean?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Pretty soon, Ganolese is gonna have full hands. We’re gonna hit his bunch of b
astards so hard and so often he won’t know which way is Aqueduct. That’s the time for you to slip in at him, right? When he’s too busy to see you coming.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Take it from me. I know the way these things work.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Sure. One more thing. What did you think of the spade?”

  “Cheever? Nothing at all. What should I think?”

  “I wondered if you picked that up,” he said. “But maybe you wouldn’t. You don’t have the background for it.”

  “Pick what up?”

  He stood there and unwrapped a cigar. “It’s this way,” he said. “A mob, an organization like this, it’s in some ways like a business, you know what I mean? Lots of details, lots of executives and vice-presidents, people in charge of this and that and the other thing, you see? No one man running the whole thing.”

  I nodded. “All right.”

  “Now Ganolese,” he said, “he’s the one pointed the finger at you, and Will Kelly, and your brother, and your sister-in-law. But he wouldn’t have thought it up all by himself. The word would come in, Eddie Kapp’s planning a move and thus and so, and somebody would go up to Ganolese and tell him the situation and make a suggestion. Do this or that, boss, and the whole thing is clear.”

  “Cheever?”

  He paused, looking out at the lake while he lit his cigar. Still looking out that way, he said, “And when an operation falls apart, it’s the guy who suggested that operation in the first place who gets any dirty jobs that might come up because of the failure. Like carrying messages to the enemy. Things like that.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought you might want to know,” he said. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t pick it up.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He chewed on the cigar, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. After a minute, he said, “You remember what we were talking about in Plattsburg, family and respectability?”

  “I remember.”

  “This is about Cheever again. The Negro. He wants to be respectable, too, same as everybody else. But he can’t be, and it don’t matter how many generations he’s been here, you see what I mean? So he’s liable to wind up in the organization. If he’s smart and he’s got a good education and he’s tough, he’s liable to get himself a good position in the organization. Better than he could get outside.”

  “Us minorities got to stick together,” I said.

  He laughed. “Yeah, boy, I like you. But I was making a point. About family. The Negro, see, he’s got the respectability itch, same as the Italian or the Jew or the Irishman or the Greek, but he don’t have the same itch about family, you know what I mean? He’s had that part sold out of him. Brought over here as slaves, Papa sold here, Mama sold there, kids sold up and down the river. And it wasn’t so long ago the selling stopped.”

  “A hundred years,” I said.

  “That ain’t long. He still ain’t gonna get dewy-eyed over somebody else’s family. That’s another point to consider.”

  “Yeah, I see that.”

  “It’s nice up here,” he said suddenly. He inhaled noisily, blew breath out at the lake. “I figure to stick around a while, a week or so, till things get moving. You ought to wait till then, anyway. Why not stay here?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

  “We get to know each other,” he said. “Father and son. What do you say?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

  He patted my shoulder. “You do that. We can talk about it tomorrow. You coming back up?”

  “You need me?”

  “Not unless you want to come. This is just the business meeting now.”

  “I’ll stay here a while.”

  “Okay. See you in the morning.”

  “Sure.”

  He went inside. I heard him going up the stairs. I sat a while longer, looking out at the lake. After a while, I tossed the bottle off the end of the dock and went back up to my room. I packed the suitcase and went out the side door and up the slope toward the road. They were all still talking back there in the throne room.

  I told a chauffeur, “You’re supposed to drive me into town.”

  He did, and I found the Greyhound station. I waited in the diner across the street until the New York bus came. Then I got aboard and went to sleep.

  Twenty-Two

  I awoke at Hudson, with the dim gray of pre-dawn on the bus windows. It was sprinkling, and the long wipers smacked back and forth across the windshield. I sat midway down the aisle, on the right side. There were only about four other passengers. I had both seats all the way back and I was sprawled at an angle on them, head against the windowpane and shoeless feet in the aisle. I was cramped and muggy. I’d been in that position too long. I felt like wet wool.

  What woke me up, the bus had stopped. A man came running across the sidewalk from the store-front bus depot. He had a slick black raincoat draped over his head. The driver pushed the door open and the other man stood in the gutter, and they shouted back and forth over the sound of the rain. Then the man turned and ran back in, and the driver closed the door, and we started out of Hudson. They always do that, whenever it rains. I don’t know what they say to one another.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was sitting on the wrong side to see the dawn, so I looked out at the darkness and wished the bus were going to Binghamton.

  It got lighter and lighter outside the window. The towns passed by. Red Hook and Rhineland and back across the river to Kingston. Then West Park and Highland and across the river again to Poughkeepsie. Then Wappingers Falls and Fishkill and Beacon, Peekskill and Ossining and Tarrytown, White Plains and Yonkers and New York.

  I got off at 50th Street. I walked a ways and went into the Cuttington Hotel on 52nd Street.

  They would all be looking for me now, so I’d have to register under a phony name. Walking up from the bus terminal, I chose Matthew Allen. A reasonable but forgettable name, and it didn’t use my initials.

  Stupid things happen. I got terrified when the register was turned toward me. I’d never given a false name before. My hand shook as I wrote the name, so bad it wasn’t my writing at all. And I couldn’t look the woman desk clerk in the eye. She spent a lot of time explaining to me that I was signing in at an unusual hour and she would have to charge me for last night because the day ended at three p.m. I told her it was all right, and got away from her as soon as I could, following the bellboy.

  Once in the room, alone, it struck me funny. After all that had happened, to practically faint when I had to write a phony name. I lay down on the bed and laughed, and the laughter got out of control. Down in a corner of my mind the laughing frightened me. Then the laughter got mixed around and turned upside down and I was crying. Then I laughed because it was funny to be crying, and cried because it was sad to be laughing. When I was empty, I fell asleep.

  I woke up at one with smarting feet. I hadn’t taken my shoes off. I stripped and showered, and walked around the room naked while the last of the stiffness went away. Then I got dressed, and sat down at the writing table, and wrote a little letter to my Uncle Henry, telling him to write me as Matthew Allen at this hotel. Not in care of Matthew Allen, but as Matthew Allen. Then I left the room.

  I made it to the bank on time, where a little more than half of Bill’s three thousand dollars still waited in our joint account to be spent. I took out two hundred, and went to a luncheonette and had breakfast, surrounded by people eating a late lunch. And then I had nothing in the world to do. I bought four paperback books and a deck of cards and went back to the room.

  I knew that Kapp was right, that I should wait before going after Ganolese. If I were to get to him, without myself being killed, it would be better to wait till his attention was distracted. Kapp and his junta would make a fine distraction. Once they had made their move, I could make mine.

  The thing was, it wouldn’t be sufficient f
or me to be killed attempting my revenge. I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself. I wanted to come out alive on the other side. So it was best to wait.

  But I’m not good at waiting. That first afternoon, I read a while and then I ripped up all four of the books. They were action mysteries, and they were supposed to help me stop thinking about myself. But all they managed to do was keep prodding the open wound I’d been trying to ignore. All they did was remind me that, if all went well, I would be alive when this was over. That was the part, most of all, that I didn’t want to think about.

  Life uses people up. When I was finished with what I had to do, I could hardly be the same person I’d been the day the Air Force had made me a civilian and I had re-met Dad. Who I would be, what use or purpose I might find—I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. Yet I had to live, or it would be their triumph after all, and my defeat, even if I were to kill them all and then be killed myself, by my hand or theirs.

  It was simpler for the lead characters in the books. They suffered, they involved themselves with tense and driven people, they handled sudden death like a commodity in a secondary market. But when it was all finished, they were unchanged. What they had walked through had left no mark at all on them.

  It would be nice to believe that. But the writers were blandly lying. They weren’t using up their lead character, because they needed him in the next book in the series.

  So I went out and bought a bottle of Old Mr. Boston, and on Friday I went to the newspaper library and wasted the day reading about Ed Ganolese. Every once in a while, it seemed, he was served a subpoena and he answered questions before an investigating body of some sort or another. The investigators were always after someone else and usually they asked Ganolese about his relationship with that someone else as of twenty years before. His answers were never informative, but he always managed to be just barely cooperative enough to avoid the legal wrath of the investigators.

  Once, there was a photograph. It showed a man somewhat older than fifty, well fed but still strong-looking. He had a kind of brutal handsomeness, softened by time and weight, and the waist-up dignity of the nouveau riche. He sat before a microphone shaped like a hooded snake, and he brooded at his inquisitors.