by Zev Chafets
“It’s like a Pulitzer for your wardrobe, Peter,” Gordon had told him.
Gordon slid into the seat opposite his father, who looked up from his paper and grunted a greeting. At seventy he still had a head of grizzled gray hair and taut, thick-looking skin that made him seem fifteen years younger. “Pistons against the Knicks tonight,” he said. “This city is the sports capital of the universe.”
“Nice to see you, too, Pop,” he said. “What do you want to eat?”
“Already ordered,” said Grossman. “Try the Irish stew. And the fries here are great.”
“Why don’t you just get an order of straight cholesterol?”
“I’d just as soon die from good food as anything else,” growled the old man. “I see June Allyson, all them old broads on the tube eating prunes and wheat germ, I want to puke. You think I wanna wind up like Art Linkletter? Gimme a break.”
Gordon ordered Irish stew and a draft Guinness, and waited for the food while his father wolfed down his meal. The stew arrived just as Grossman finished, and he belched loudly as his son lowered his tablespoon into the bowl.
“What’s on your mind, Velvel?” he asked, rubbing his hands together impatiently. “I’m not gonna just sit here and watch you eat.”
“You know what’s on my mind, Pop. What Nate talked to me about yesterday, the will. I want to know what you think I ought to do.”
“Do? What’s to do? Max was an old man with a sense of humor, that’s all.”
“It’s a lot of money, Pop,” he said. “Nate was talking about, well, it could be five hundred million.”
“Sure, five hundred million. Why not five hundred trillion while you’re at it? Listen, Velvel, there’s no money there. The legitimate stuff, the department stores and the housing developments, all that went to Ida, who, if she don’t blow it on blackjack and pro wrestling, will someday leave it to you. Personally, I’m planning to spend all mine before I kick off, but you’ll still probably get something there too. Plus, you got a hell of a job. That’s enough for anybody.”
“Pop, what about the business? I mean, the Colombian thing, the docks, the casinos—”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Velvel. There is no business. It belonged to Max and the Spadafores and one or two other greaseballs. Now it belongs to them, period. You think they’re going to let your accountant sit down and audit the books, maybe elect you to the board of directors? No way, Moshe.” He laughed, a short, amused grunt, and waved to the waiter for the bill.
“Hold it a minute, Pop, goddamn it,” Gordon said, his voice rising. “Nate said the money belongs to anyone who does what’s necessary to get it. It belonged to Uncle Max. He left it to me. So, why shouldn’t I try to pick it up, at least some of it?”
“You’re serious,” Grossman said, a note of incredulity in his raspy voice. “You wanna do what’s necessary? OK, here’s what’s necessary. You gotta go out and buy a gun. Then you gotta kill Luigi Spadafore, his two sons, eleven cousins and thirty-seven nephews. Then you gotta kill everybody who came from his fucking village in Sicily, and all their uncles and cousins. Then you get to keep the money. OK? Can I go now, I got a few things to do this afternoon.”
“Well, if they’re so tough, why didn’t they kill Uncle Max? Or you, for that matter? Or Nate Belzer?”
“Nate’s a bookkeeper and I’ve been retired for years,” Grossman said, snapping the check between his fingers. “As far as Max was concerned, well, you ain’t Max. For one thing, Max and Luigi Spadafore go back to the old neighborhood. Max took care of his kids when he was in the joint, handled his dough, the whole shot. Plus, Max knew where the money was—a lot of these deals were in his head, and they went to heaven along with him. So they respected Max and they needed him. You?” He made a flipping gesture with his hand, like a man tossing a pancake into the air. “You, my dear Velvel, they don’t need and, no offense, they don’t respect.”
“Wait a minute, though,” Gordon said. “They don’t know that Max didn’t tell me details about the money. Right?”
Grossman nodded, eyes hooded under his thick brows. “So?” he said.
“So that gives us leverage. It gives us a chance to deal, a part of the money in return for whatever information Belzer has. We might at least come out of this with a big chunk of—”
“Goddammit, who is this we and us?” Gordon’s father exploded. “I’m not a part of this mishegoss. You want to blackmail the Mafia? You got shit for brains or what? These guys are smart, Velvel—maybe not smart enough to give lectures at the Ninety-second Street Y, but smart enough to figure out that if you give them the stuff we got, they don’t need you around anymore.”
Suddenly his voice softened and Gordon saw something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before—alarm. “Listen, Velvel, this is your old man talking. I’m not gonna say that maybe I haven’t been such a good father because we both know I been a great fucking father. I took you to ball games as a kid. I saw to it you went to the best schools. I always had time, you wanted to talk something over. When you went away to college I bought you a sports car, remember? The Vette with the leather interior. Even after you left home, did I stop taking care of you? Hell, no. I got you that prize—”
“What? What prize did you get me?” For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time in his life, Gordon saw his father blush.
“Ah, skip it,” he said.
“No, I won’t skip it. What prize did you get me?”
“I’m sorry, I thought you figured it out yesterday when you saw Henderson’s name in the stuff Nate showed you—”
“Henderson?”
“Yeah, that Yankee yutz, used to be with the CIA over there. You didn’t see his name on the shnorrers list?”
Gordon recalled that there had been a list among the papers he had seen the day before—names of politicians, judges, senior government officials. He might have seen a Henderson, but he had been too much in shock for it to register.
“You mean the cables I got—”
“Yeah, from Henderson,” Grossman said softly. “Funny thing, too, we wound up making a bundle with that guy. Arms in Latin America. Anyway, the point is, I did all these things for only one reason. Because I love you. You’re the only son I got. And I don’t want to see you get mixed up in something you can’t handle.”
Gordon felt nauseated and numb. The two Pulitzers were as much a part of his identity as his nose or his name—more, because he had earned them. They defined his profession and certified his excellence: William Gordon, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. “What about the other one?” he asked thickly.
“The other prize? That one was Max’s idea. He was tight with the Israelis ever since the war in 1948. Sold them weapons. Sold some to the Arabs, too, but he made sure to send them the wrong-size bullets. Yeah, Max worked it out with some general, Bar Dror, I think was his name. I think Max was jealous after the Vietnam business, wanted to fix the Pulitzer himself. Speaking of which, sometime I’ll tell you about the ’38 World Series—”
“Goddamn you,” Gordon said. To his horror, he felt tears in his eyes and the start of a sob in his throat. “You rotten bastard, you dirty rotten bastard—”
“You think Luigi Spadafore cries when he gets bad news,” demanded Grossman harshly. “ ‘You dirty bastard,’ ” he imitated in a whiny tone, “ ‘you dirty rotten bastard.’ Why? Because I gave you a hand? I fix a prize for the opposition, then you can get pissed. But don’t blame me for doing what any father would do if he got the chance, OK? Look,” he said in an appeasing voice, “you’re a top kid, Velvel. You think if you weren’t a great reporter they wouldn’t have found out about it by now? So you got a little help, so what? The next one, you win on your own.” He extended his hand. “Deal?”
The speech gave Gordon time to regain his composure. “You can take that hand and shove it up your ass,” he said, rising. “You think that you and Luigi Spadafore and all the rest of your crooked buddies are so smart? W
e’ll see, Pop.”
“Velvel, don’t do this,” he said. “I’m warning you, don’t do it.”
“Kiss my ass, you broken-down old greaser,” Gordon said, turning toward the door. “Goddammit, Pop, kiss my fucking ass.”
Flanagan sat at his desk peering into the screen of his computer terminal. As he read he moved his lips, and his normally cynical face had an innocent, almost childish look, like an altar boy in silent devotion. Gordon came around in back of him and read over his shoulder; it was a story about a state senator from Queens who had been caught using his office in Albany as the set for porno movies.
“No wonder the Polacks want democracy,” said Flanagan happily.
Gordon grunted, and Flanagan swiveled around in his chair. “You look like shit, kid. What’s the matter?” he said.
“Remember Arthur Henderson?” he asked.
“Yeah, that perfidious hard-on. Where did you come up with him?”
“I didn’t. My father did. He paid Henderson off in Nam to give me the cables. How about that, sports fans?”
“Henderson? Your father and Henderson? I don’t get it.”
“It’s been a day of surprises,” Gordon said. “If you’re done getting your rocks off, let’s go over to Gallagher’s and I’ll tell you a story that won’t be in the paper tomorrow.”
Flanagan sat with a gin and tonic in front of him, so absorbed in Gordon’s account of the events of the past twenty-four hours that he forgot to drink. It was an edited version—Gordon omitted Jupiter’s big boat and the magic words and, out of habit, some of his father’s more incriminating admissions. Even in its censored form, however, the story had a powerful effect on Flanagan, who looked at Gordon with something like awe.
“Each man has but one destiny,” he intoned when Gordon finished.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“The Godfather,” he said. “It’s what Don Corleone says when he finds out that Michael offed the police captain.”
“Christ on a crutch, everybody keeps quoting The Godfather,” Gordon said. “Can’t you come up with something original at least?”
“Look, let’s say your uncle murdered your father and married your mother—”
“My mother’s dead,” he said. “So’s my uncle, in case you’ve forgotten—”
“Yeah, OK, but let’s say that he did. Don’t you think people would quote you Hamlet? Mario Puzo wrote the book on this kind of thing. There’s even an Irish consigliere, don’t forget.”
For the first time since lunch Gordon laughed. “Who, you?”
“Da da da da, da da da da, da da da da,” Flanagan hummed the theme from The Godfather. “I will serve you, Don Velvel, as faithfully as if I were your own son.” He reached over and took Gordon’s hand, bent his head and kissed the third finger of his left hand. “First thing we do is get you a ring,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
Gordon got home from Gallagher’s a little after six, feeling spent and out of focus. He poured himself a bourbon, lit up a Winston and sat on his small terrace, overlooking the Museum of Natural History, to consider what to do next. For twenty years he had been making his living by sorting out reality from illusion and putting chaotic events into eight-hundred-word capsules. Now he groped to make sense of his own situation.
First: All day long he had been thinking seriously about making a grab for the money. What were his real motives? Lust for Jupiter. Greed. The sheer romance of the thing. OK, he conceded, and a desire (probably childish) to prove to his father that he could do it.
Second: What problems were involved? Number one, getting the money would involve a fight with Luigi Spadafore. And, number two, even supposing he had the balls to do it, keeping the money would mean becoming a gangster. What else could he do—hire a management firm to handle his investments?
The more he thought about it, the more impossible it seemed, and the more ridiculous. Max had left him a fortune in Confederate money; there was no other way to look at it. Maybe, he thought, I could turn this into a short story sometime, “The Secret Life of William Gordon.” He wondered how much The New Yorker paid for short stories.…
The phone rang and he picked it up on the first ring.
“May I please speak to Mr. Gordon?” said a man’s voice he didn’t recognize.
“Speaking.”
“Mr. Gordon, this is Carlo Sesti.” The voice was a cultivated, quasi-British tenor. For a moment Gordon thought it was Bill Buckley, playing a joke. A few months before, a Harlem congressman had threatened to sue Gordon for defamation of character after he had reported that the congressman represented South African firms in arms deals. The threat made the papers, and Buckley had called in a disguised voice, offering to sell Gordon libel insurance. Like a jerk, he had asked about premiums, and the story made the rounds for several days.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Sesti?” Gordon asked, giving the last name a slight ironic emphasis, just in case.
“We don’t know one another, but I was a business associate of your late uncle’s,” he said. “I’m calling to express my condolences. I was at the funeral, of course, but I didn’t want to intrude on your privacy.”
“Very thoughtful of you.”
“Your uncle was a unique figure, Mr. Gordon, as I’m sure you know better than I. It was an honor to have done business with him.”
“I guess that depends on what kind of business you did,” Gordon said, keeping his voice neutral.
“That is the other reason for this phone call,” said Sesti. “Your uncle left several outstanding matters that need to be discussed. I understand that you are his beneficiary?”
Goddamn that Flanagan and his big Irish mouth, Gordon thought; this must be his idea of a practical joke. “Mr. Sesti,” he said, “no offense, but I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about. My uncle’s beneficiary is his wife.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Gordon, but there are one or two matters on which he was working with me and my associates that may not come within the competence of his widow.”
“One of those associates wouldn’t be Bill Buckley, would it?” Gordon asked.
“Buckley? Do you mean William Buckley, the commentator? No, indeed.” Sesti laughed, obviously amused by the notion. “I represent Luigi Spadafore. I assume you’ve heard your uncle mention him?”
Gordon felt a small shock. It’s starting, he thought. This is the way it starts.
“Ah, Mr. Gordon, I wonder if it would be possible for us to meet in the next few days. At your convenience, of course.”
“Meet where? A pizzeria in the Bronx?”
“The Bronx?” repeated Sesti in a frosty tone. “I was thinking more along the lines of lunch at the Harvard Club. Or at my office, if you prefer. I’m at Fifty-seventh between Madison and Fifth. That’s not far from you, I believe.”
“How do you know where I live?”
“I don’t, actually. I meant not far from the Tribune offices.”
“What do you want to talk about, Mr. Sesti? I mean, specifically.”
“I’d rather save that for lunch, if you don’t mind. Are you free tomorrow by any chance? Say, one o’clock?”
“All right, one o’clock. But not at the Harvard Club—they make you wear a tie. Let’s meet at Clarke’s.”
“P. J. Clarke’s it is,” he said.
“Will you be alone, or is Spadafore coming too?”
“Quite alone, Mr. Gordon,” said Sesti in his snooty British accent. “Mr. Spadafore rarely comes into Manhattan these days. I’ll look for you tomorrow, then?”
“How will we recognize each other?” asked Gordon, repressing an urge to ask Sesti if he’d be the Catholic wearing a rubber.
“Oh, I’ll recognize you, Mr. Gordon. You’re a public figure, you know. In fact, I believe I’ve seen you on Mr. Buckley’s television program.”
“Listen, Sesti, I just want you to know in advance, I don’t have anything to do with my uncle’s business.”
“In that case, ours will be a short meeting and, I trust, a pleasant lunch,” said Sesti. “Good-bye, Mr. Gordon. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Gordon dialed Flanagan’s number at the paper.
“John?”
“Yes, Godfather,” he said.
“Come on, cut the shit. Who’s Carlo Sesti?”
Flanagan gave a low whistle. “You met Sesti already?”
“Tomorrow. He just called. What do you know about him?”
“He’s a colleague of mine,” said Flanagan. “Consigliere for Spadafore. Lawyer, got his own firm in midtown. Very smooth operator. Not as smooth as me, you understand, but right up there.”
“Jesus, will you stop fucking around? Do you know him or what?”
“I’ve met him a couple of times, just to say hello to. Once, a few years ago, I talked to him about a Teamsters pension fund story, but he didn’t give me anything. I doubt he’d remember.”
“Where’d he get that Brit accent?”
“Comes by it naturally. His father was Bruno Sesti, big deal in the Spadafore Family, ran their casinos in London for years. Young Carlo was educated at Downside and Cambridge, don’t you know.”
“And Harvard law,” Gordon said. “What else you got?”
“Nothing, really. I could call up his file, but I doubt there’s anything in it. He’s never been in any trouble, as far as I know. Do you want me to come with you tomorrow?”
“That’s all I need,” Gordon said. “Listen, get this Godfather shit out of your head, John. It was good for a grunt, but it’s not real, all right? I’m telling Sesti that I’m not playing and that will be that.”
Gordon spent the next morning working on his column, a piece about NATO and Reagan’s Falkland diplomacy. “The President, who made a career of portraying bashful heroes, seems at a loss to cope with the imperious Mrs. Thatcher,” he wrote. “President Reagan can no more contend with the British prime minister than actor Reagan could have handled Bette Davis—which is not at all. What she needs are not soft words about the Atlantic alliance but a grape-fruit in the face, à la Bogart.” Gordon chuckled; he would be hearing from the White House in the morning.