House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  They followed her through the tiny living room and into the tiny kitchen, where scrambled eggs sat in a skillet that had been taken off the fire and the toast had already popped up. She was a religious girl and her mouth moved in the most ardent prayer of her life, praying that her father wouldn’t turn out to be anything disgusting, like a hit man.

  Wally Schliester looked around. The range and the refrigerator were older than the girl. There was a dishwasher but that was old, too. He knew there was no truth to the saying that crime doesn’t pay because it did. But it sure as hell didn’t pay well for people like Gus Benini. He probably would have done better for himself driving a city bus.

  Schliester thought the girl was taking them to Benini, but he obviously wasn’t in the kitchen. “Where is Mr. Benini, miss?” he asked.

  “He’ll be right down,” she said.

  The two agents exchanged looks. It was possible but not likely that this was some kind of trick. The second agent, the one who hadn’t spoken, took a step backward to the kitchen door, which had swung closed behind him. He inched it back so he’d be able to see anyone coming downstairs, trying to sneak out the front door while they were in back.

  “He’s in the bathroom, for Pete’s sake,” Benini’s daughter said. “Do you have to go up there and drag him off the toilet?” Her voice dripped with contempt. She was a short girl, definitely on the heavy side, but with a pretty face she must have gotten from her mother.

  “You’re his daughter, miss?” Schliester asked.

  “Do I have to answer your questions?”

  “No, you don’t, miss,” Schliester said. “We’re not arresting your father. We’ve just got to ask him some questions.”

  If she was grateful for this information, she didn’t show it. She turned away and yanked the two pieces of toast out of the toaster and dabbed them with margarine from a little plastic tub. She was angry with herself for letting them know what she was thinking and worried that she hadn’t done her father any good practically telling the cops that Gus Benini’s own daughter simply assumed that he would be arrested. She slid the eggs out of the frying pan and onto a plate. Since they weren’t arresting him, she hoped they’d let him eat his breakfast. He hardly ever ate. If he missed breakfast and then didn’t have anything all day, that wasn’t good for his stomach.

  They heard a toilet flush upstairs, then footsteps. The second agent—his name was Matt Thompson—stepped to the side of the door so that he would be behind it when it opened and behind Benini when he came in. Not that Benini would do anything reckless with his daughter in the room, or even without her there for that matter. But it never hurt to be safe.

  Normally, in an undercover operation, the undercover agent doesn’t take part in arrests or interrogations. He doesn’t want to blow his cover. But Schliester wanted to be here. He had to argue the point with Elaine Lester, who was all for leaving him out of this phase of the operation. She thought it was important to avoid tipping their hand as to the nature of the case against Benini. Schliester thought that was ridiculous and said so. “If you want him to roll over,” he said, “then you’ve got to let him know how jammed up he is. He sees me, he knows he’s been doing deals with a federal agent for three months. How do you think that’s going to make him feel?”

  They compromised by holding back Gogarty, who had posed as one of the shakedown victims. This gave them the best of both worlds, high cards showing and a high card in the hole.

  As the door swung inward Benini was already saying, “Is it ready? I’ve got to meet some people in a little—”

  He stopped himself in midsentence the second he saw Fred Linkletter standing in his own kitchen right next to the table.

  Benini was wearing the same suit he had worn the night before. Come to think of it, he only seemed to have two suits.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, momentarily confused. “How did you know where I—”

  For the second time in a row he didn’t get to finish his sentence, this time because Schliester’s hand was coming out of his breast pocket and Gus Benini knew what would be in it. He could see how the whole thing was going to play out.

  Schliester flipped open a police-style shield case that had an ID with his picture on it and something about the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “I’m agent Wally Schliester and this is agent Matt Thompson. We have some questions we’d like to ask you if you can come with us, Mr. Benini,” he said.

  Benini’s daughter said, “Daddy, they’re not arresting you.”

  Benini’s mouth was open and he was looking at Schliester the way you might look at a man with two heads. “What did you say your name was? Schliester? Is that German or something?”

  “Benini,” Schliester said. “What’s that? Italian?”

  “Is that what this is about?” Benini demanded shrilly. “You think because I’m Italian you can just come in here with all this shit?” And then he looked at his daughter and said, “I’m sorry, honey. I got upset. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t use language like that in front of his daughter.

  “That’s all right, Daddy,” she said.

  “You’re a rat, you know that, Linkletter,” Benini said. “I stood up for you. You wanted more money, I stood up for you. Whose pocket do you think that came out of?”

  “Sorry about that, Gus,” Schliester said. “Do you mind just raising your hands above your head?”

  Benini glanced to his daughter. This was a humiliating thing for her to see. But she nodded her head, more or less giving her approval, and then turned away, pretending she had something to tend to on the stove. Benini dutifully raised his hands. Schliester patted him down, just a few perfunctory touches. He tapped the man’s armpits and then he ran his hands over the front of the suit, which wasn’t a normal thing to do in a frisk. He cocked his head as though he had found something, reached into the outside breast pocket where he put his business card the night before. It was still there. His lucky day. They not only wired the guy, they were getting their wire back. He took out the card, looked at it, and then showed it to Benini.

  “You need this?” he asked.

  Benini looked at the thing and wanted to spit on it. Frederick Linkletter. Exhibitor Relations. He didn’t remember taking it but he must have. Probably a while ago, he figured. When he first started coming around the office.

  “Get it out of my face, weasel,” he said.

  “You did what you had to do, Gus, I did what I had to do,” Schliester said as he pocketed the card. He didn’t hold out any real hope that he could get this nervous little man who was being frisked by the police in front of his own daughter to see it that way, but he had to try. They were simply two professionals. There was no reason they had to hate each other. “What do you say we go?” he said.

  “I thought you weren’t arresting him,” Benini’s daughter protested.

  “We’re not.”

  “He’s got to have his breakfast,” she said. “It’s important.”

  Schliester nodded. “Most important meal of the day,” he said.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Benini said.

  “She fixed you a breakfast. She worries about you. Eat your breakfast, then we’ll go.”

  Benini wasn’t in the mood for eating. But it didn’t strike him at the moment that he had much of a choice in the matter. As he sat down at the table and pulled the plate of eggs in front of him, Schliester said, “That’s all right, miss. We ate already.”

  It wasn’t that Chet Fiore smelled a rat, but he certainly smelled Mel Gottlieb. Sweat oozed out of the man. His clothing absorbed it, as did his skin, so that his entire person took on the consistency of gummed bread. It would have been better if Fiore could have met him outdoors, but that wasn’t one of the options. Gottlieb simply showed up at the Elizabeth Street restaurant when it opened for business late in the morning and told the first waiter he encountered that he wanted to speak with Chet Fiore.

  The waiter professed not to know what
the fat man was talking about and seated him at a window table, where the morning sun poured in on him so that he came to glisten like softening butter. Half an hour later Jimmy Angelisi entered the restaurant. Gottlieb, whose table commanded a view of the door, saw his waiter conferring with an affable-looking and slightly balding gentleman in a light gray suit. He saw himself being pointed at. Then the gentleman in the gray suit walked to his table and sat down as naturally as if he were joining a friend for lunch. Gottlieb didn’t think this was what Chet Fiore would look like and he was right.

  “What’s this about wanting to see Mr. Fiore?” Jimmy asked without any preamble. There were breadsticks in a basket and he helped himself.

  Gottlieb had a plate of fried calamari in front of him. He had stopped eating when he saw that he was being talked about at the door but he was still holding a flabby length of breaded squid in his sausagelike fingers. “That’s right,” he said. “I’ve got to talk to him.”

  “And why would that be?”

  Something apparently reminded Gottlieb that he was holding a piece of food in his right hand. He popped it into his mouth, licked his fingers clean, and dried them on a napkin. “I’m Mel Gottlieb,” he said. “I work at the Javits Center.”

  The food rolled around in his mouth and then disappeared like a golf ball rimming the cup before falling in.

  “You’re gonna have to help me out a little on this one, mister,” Jimmy said, but Gottlieb only shook his head.

  “I wish that were possible,” he said. “But I really can’t talk to anyone except Mr. Fiore about this. He will want to talk to me, I can assure you of that. You’d be doing him a disservice if you didn’t let that happen.”

  Jimmy figured the fat man was probably telling the truth. He reminded Jimmy of the fat guy in those Humphrey Bogart movies, maybe because he talked in the same fancy way. That probably meant he was on the level, because you don’t try to con anyone talking like a movie. “Let’s you and me take a little walk,” Jimmy said, getting to his feet.

  Gottlieb looked down at the plate of calamari as though it were a friend he was reluctant to leave. But he did the right thing, pushing himself up from the table and following Angelisi toward the back of the restaurant. Jimmy pushed open the door to the men’s room and held it open, turning back to invite Gottlieb to go first. Their eyes met. Gottlieb had big brown cow eyes. Jimmy waited, holding the door until Gottlieb waddled past him.

  “Okay, turn around, please,” Jimmy said when they were alone in the tiny men’s room, which had one urinal, one stall, and a sink. The place had the pink sweet smell of the disinfectant tablets they put in the urinals. And now it also had the smell of Mel Gottlieb, who dutifully turned his back to Angelisi. “Raise your arms,” Jimmy said.

  He performed a frisk that was as unpleasant as it was thorough. On a man with that many bulges, there were a lot of places to hide a piece and a lot of places to hide a wire. Jimmy wasn’t taking chances. He probed Gottlieb’s armpits and his groin and up and down his legs and across the vast expanse of his butt, like the ass end of a horse, or even two horses. The man was clean. “Awright,” Jimmy conceded, “c’mon.”

  They went back out to the restaurant. When they got to Gottlieb’s table, Jimmy said, “Sit down. And don’t go anywhere I can’t see you.”

  He walked away. Gottlieb would have had to turn around to see where he went, which he assumed he wasn’t supposed to do. It seemed to him he had passed the test, so he settled in to wait until the next thing to happen happened. He needed the time to unwind anyway. That deal he made with the feds got the IRS off his back, but at what price? He was setting up a mobster. He, Mel Gottlieb, introduced a federal undercover agent to a member of an organized crime family. It was the most idiotic thing he had ever done in his life.

  Or ever would, if he didn’t do something to fix it before it became unfixable.

  He had been thinking the same thing every night before he fell asleep and every morning as soon as he woke up for at least a month and a half. It was like thinking you have cancer and being afraid to go to the doctor to find out. Every day convinces you that the symptoms are getting worse, until finally it doesn’t make sense to go because it’s too late anyway. He woke up with his sheets soaking wet from dreams straight out of gangster movies.

  He woke up one morning feeling like he was going to be sick, like his bladder was going to burst, like his eyes were going to roll back in his head and he was going to fall into a dead swoon on his bedroom floor the way girls used to do. If he didn’t do something soon, he was as good as dead. He grabbed for the phone and started calling everyone he knew who might be even the least bit crooked. He didn’t go into work. He spent the whole day on the phone. He talked to bookies, ticket scalpers, union bosses, and pimps. He wanted to know who he had to talk to to save himself.

  A scalper by the name of Lionel was the first one to suggest that the West Side rackets, which would include hustles at the Javits Center, were probably operated one way or another by Chet Fiore. Who in turn worked for Gaetano Falcone.

  That was the first time Gottlieb heard those names in connection with his problem. He got the shakes so bad he could hardly hang up the phone. He remembered Falcone’s name from those gang wars a long time ago. He didn’t remember the details, just that a lot of people got killed. Gaetano Falcone wouldn’t have to think twice about killing the man who set up his man’s man with a federal undercover agent.

  That very morning Mel Gottlieb took the subway all the way down to Canal Street and walked over to Little Italy and found the restaurant on Elizabeth Street Lionel told him about. But he was afraid to go in. He was afraid if he went in he’d never come out.

  This went on for a couple weeks. He didn’t go every morning, but he told himself every morning he would go. And then he figured out some reason why tomorrow would be better. He never got closer to the inside of that restaurant than the sidewalk across the street.

  And then, on this very morning, he went into the office and found that federal agents were packing up all of the undercover agent’s things. They said he wouldn’t be back.

  The first thing Mel Gottlieb did was go to the bathroom. He had the worst diarrhea he’d ever had. He sat on the toilet with his head in his hands, crying and cursing himself for not having done something about this sooner. Now the investigation was over. Now the federal agents were going to do whatever they were going to do.

  He went outside and grabbed a cab and had it take him to Elizabeth Street. Maybe the agents hadn’t done anything yet. Maybe it wasn’t too late to come across as a good guy who was trying to do the right thing, as these people said.

  So now he was inside the restaurant waiting. The sunlight that had been assaulting him through the window gave up and moved across the street. It became cooler and more comfortable, but that didn’t help. He felt like a turkey being looked at through the window in the oven door whenever people passing on the sidewalk looked at him.

  The next thing he knew, the man in the gray suit was at his table again. This time he took him outside and down the street a few doors to a cluttered appliance store with refrigerators ranked along one wall, washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers packed so close together it was almost impossible to navigate the narrow aisles between them. A woman wearing a baby in a carrier strapped to her chest was browsing among the washing machines. The only employee seemed to be a salesman in shirtsleeves, who stood at the woman’s shoulder, pointing out features of each of the machines. There was one other customer, a well-dressed man who seemed to be inspecting the refrigerators, pacing back and forth in front of them, his hands clasped behind his back.

  And then the oddest thing happened. The salesman looked over to the man in the gray suit and the man in the gray suit nodded his head. The salesman took his customer’s arm and Gottlieb heard him say, “Why don’t we go outside and talk about our payment options?” In a moment they were gone, pulling the door closed behind them.

  Mel Gottlieb
knew for an absolute fact that he was about to be murdered. The well-dressed man among the refrigerators turned around. There was no gun in his hand, no silencer. “I’m Chet Fiore, Mr. Gottlieb,” he said, offering his hand. “I believe you wanted to talk to me.”

  Gottlieb swallowed hard, making a sound like the last water sucked down a drain. “Here?” he gasped.

  “You’re here, I’m here,” Fiore said. “Why don’t you tell me what this is about?”

  Gottlieb saw that the man in the gray suit was standing by the door, presumably to keep strangers from coming in. “I don’t know if this concerns you, Mr. Fiore,” Gottlieb began. “That’s none of my business, so I’m not going to ask. I suggest that you hear me out, and when I’m finished I’ll leave and you make up your mind what you do about this. If it’s got anything to do with you, that is. And I’m not saying that it does.”

  He paused for a moment and wiped his sweaty face with a meaty hand. He wanted Fiore to give him some sign to continue, but he could read nothing at all in the man’s face. Christ, it was chilling. But he was in this far already, so he kept going.

  “As your associate may have told you,” he resumed, “I work at the Javits Center. I’m the personnel director. I hire people. There was a man in exhibitor relations who would, on a regular basis, provide an associate of yours, if that’s what he was, with contact information about our exhibitors. No one ever told me which names he gave him, which ones were contacted, what happened, but look, I’m not stupid. On the other hand, the less someone in my position knows, the better off he is. I don’t draw conclusions. I’m just telling you what the arrangement was so you know that I know what I’m talking about.”

  So far so good. This was all coming out pretty much the way Gottlieb hoped it would. He would have liked it better if Fiore said something, but he didn’t.