House of Lords

by Philip Rosenberg

  “In any case, back in the spring the employee I’ve alluded to in exhibitor relations resigned his position and relocated to another state. Very soon after that, I was contacted by some individuals associated with the United States Attorney’s Office. District something, Southern I believe. I don’t know if that matters, I wish I had been paying more attention to that part of it, but these people were very menacing. And very demanding. They wanted me to hire one of their agents to fill the vacancy in exhibitor relations. They didn’t tell me why and I didn’t ask. That’s a principle with me. I don’t like to know things I’m not supposed to know. The long and the short is that I agreed to assist them with this subterfuge because I didn’t think it was my place to question the policies of the United States government.”

  “What kind of trouble were you in, Mr. Gottlieb?” Fiore asked. It was the first sign he gave that he had been listening at all.

  Gottlieb knew that everything depended on this moment. If the guns with silencers were ever to come out, it would be now. He had to be honest. “IRS,” he said.

  No tic of Fiore’s eye or wrinkle of Fiore’s lip measured Gottlieb’s answer or invited him to go on. Chet Fiore, quite obviously, was a man who powerfully combined two of the rarest virtues in common circulation, patience and will. Like an insect he would wait; like an insect he would strike.

  Gottlieb could feel all this simply standing in the man’s presence. He gathered the threads of his story around him and carefully selected the one he would follow. “Suffice it to say,” he began again, “these agents threatened me about things that would happen to me if I ever told anyone about Linkletter’s real identity. I did as I was told and kept silent, but I can’t keep silent anymore, Mr. Fiore. That’s why I’ve come to you.”

  He could feel the sweat dribbling under his collar and down his sides, like a faucet with a drip. Fiore was going to say, Thank you for telling me, Mr. Gottlieb, you did the right thing. Or he was going to say, You set my man up with a federal agent, you cocksucker. And the whole rest of Mel Gottlieb’s life was going to depend on which one he said.

  Actually, he said neither. “Why this morning, Mr. Gottlieb?” he asked. “Why not yesterday? Or tomorrow?”

  “I just…it was eating at me,” Gottlieb stammered, losing his composure completely. And then he closed his eyes and blurted out everything. “They came,” he said. “Two agents I never saw before. They were in Linkletter’s office this morning. They cleaned it out and took everything. They said he wouldn’t be back.”

  Fiore nodded his understanding and made a small gesture with his head in the direction of the door. Gottlieb wasn’t sure. Was he being told to leave? He had hoped he would be thanked but that didn’t seem to be in the cards. He had no way to measure whether in Fiore’s mind his confession canceled his guilt. He hesitated, and then he felt a hand on his arm and he was being guided to the door by the man who had brought him here. Desperate, Gottlieb turned back for one last plea for clemency. But Fiore wasn’t there.

  “Please, Mr. Fiore,” he called out to the cluttered emptiness. “I’m trying to do the right thing, that’s all. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

  He felt the tepid air from the street wash over him. And the next thing he knew he was on the sidewalk.

  The salesman who had been banished from the store hurried back inside, leaving the door open, inviting customers. The world went back to the way it was.

  Mel Gottlieb stepped to the curb and carefully lowered all three hundred and fifty pounds of his unwieldy bulk to the sidewalk. He sat on the pavement, his feet in the gutter, while tears as big as raindrops cascaded down his full-moon face.

  When they pulled off the highway at the exit between LaGuardia Airport and Shea Stadium, the thought hit Gus Benini that these guys weren’t taking him to Manhattan, which is where the U.S. attorney has his offices. They must have had something else in mind.

  They pulled up outside a sorry-looking motel with only three or four cars in front of the rooms. This was bad, Benini thought. People were always kidding him about being so nervous, but no one would be kidding him now because even a boa constrictor would be nervous with a bunch of cold-as-ice assholes dragging him out of his house just after breakfast and taking him god knows where. If they had been cops instead of feds he would have been scared, not just nervous, because cops would do anything they felt like doing. Feds didn’t work like that. At least he couldn’t remember hearing stories about feds working like that. But maybe they did. Maybe they were just better at keeping their own and other people’s mouths shut.

  If these guys were feds, that is. He was sorry all of a sudden that he didn’t take a better look at that badge Linkletter flashed at him. What if this whole thing was some kind of setup for someone who had a score to settle with Chet Fiore or Gaetano Falcone? What if someone was planning to FedEx Mr. Fiore Gus Benini’s dick?

  They pulled up a long way from the motel office, right in front of a room at the end of the row. It was one of those motels like you see on highways, way out in nowhere, the kind he used to stop at with Lucy and Theresa on their trips. They would get a cot for the girl. He hadn’t known there were motels like this in Queens.

  Linkletter opened the door to the room. Inside there was a little table that was supposed to be next to the window with a lamp on it, except the lamp was on the floor and the table had been moved over into the middle of the room near the foot of the bed. The carpet, which was dirty, was clean in a little square where the table used to be. That’s how Gus knew they moved it. He was pleased with himself for taking in all these details. It meant he wasn’t missing a thing.

  A lady was sitting at the table but she stood up when the door opened. She was very tall, on the skinny side, and her hands did something to her skirt, kind of smoothing it across her hips. She had the kind of body that was very popular with young people these days. Benini guessed she was around thirty, give or take a couple. He was glad to see her because the people he was really scared about didn’t use ladies to do any of their dirty work.

  There were two tape recorders on the table, a big one with reels and one of those little ones you can put in your pocket.

  “Sit down, Mr. Benini,” the lady said. “Don’t trip over the cord.”

  Right, Benini thought. He’d fall on his face and chip a tooth and then he’d sue them. He’d be rich.

  In a fucking dream.

  “I’m Assistant U.S. Attorney Elaine Lester,” she said. “You’ve already met agents Schliester and Thompson.”

  Benini stepped over the cord from the tape recorder and sat down like she told him to.

  “Are you comfortable?” she asked.

  “Am I comfortable? No, I’m not comfortable. Why would I be comfortable?”

  “Well, you’re going to be here a little while, Mr. Benini,” she said. “Can we get you something? A cup of coffee or a soft drink?”

  “You can tell me what the fuck this is about,” he said. “You’ll pardon my French.”

  Gus Benini never swore in front of ladies. But this was different.

  “I think you already know what the fuck this is about,” she said, showing off that she could say any word he could say. “We want to talk to you about the Javits Center.”

  “It’s on Eleventh Avenue,” Benini offered helpfully.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. Not a friendly hand. The fingers bit right through to the bone like they were trying to find out where the tendons and the muscles and the other stuff in there were all located. It hurt like a son of a bitch. Linkletter’s voice said, “We know it’s on Eleventh Avenue, Gus.”

  The lady said, “We know that you’re operating a shakedown operation at the Javits Center, Mr. Benini. And you know we know it. Let’s not play games.”

  “What are you asking me questions for if you know all the answers,” Benini said. “It sounds like you’re the ones playing games.”

  “We want your cooperation,” Elaine Lester said.

&
nbsp; She put something in her voice that made her sound like a lady who needed help getting her suitcase to the train. She had these two galoots standing over him and one of them was taking his bones apart, and she had the gall to come on like she was helpless. It was sickening, but maybe she didn’t do it on purpose. There were some women that just sounded that way, every word that came out of their mouths.

  “How about I work that out with my lawyer,” he suggested. “I talk to him, you talk to him, that way there’s no hard feelings.”

  The fingers moved a tendon aside to see what was underneath. Benini’s eyes watered and he said, “And tell him to get his goddamned hands off me.”

  She ignored that part of it and said, “You don’t want to call a lawyer, Mr. Benini.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  The guy who hadn’t said anything said, “Don’t contradict her, pal,” and the fingers bit even harder. So they were his fingers. That was kind of what Benini figured. Linkletter didn’t have fingers like that. He didn’t look like a particularly strong guy. This one, who wasn’t very big either, probably worked out squeezing things in his spare time about a hundred times a day.

  Benini said, “I can’t even think with you doing that. I know my goddamned rights.”

  “Matt, please,” she said in that same helpless-lady voice. But it worked. The fingers let go. In another minute blood would start circulating again.

  She leaned across the table and crooked a finger, inviting Benini to lean close to her. He realized they hadn’t turned on either of the tape recorders, so this was a part of their little party they didn’t want recorded.

  “Mr. Benini,” the lady said so softly that there was something almost sexy about the way he had to stare at her lips just to make out what she was saying. “We have tapes of you conspiring with a federal agent to extort money from exhibitors at the Javits Center. We have every dollar you paid the agent for his services, and you know we’ve got these things because that federal agent is right here in this room with us. Are you with me so far, Mr. Benini?”

  “I’m not with you, I’m not against you,” he said.

  “Fine. We also have statements from some of the people from whom you extorted money. Right now we believe we have six very good extortion cases and conspiracy to commit extortion. That number could go up and it most certainly will not come down. If you did get a lawyer he would look at the evidence and he would tell you to take a plea, but the way it stands right now, the most we would offer in return is a recommendation that the sentences run concurrently. How old are you, Mr. Benini?”

  He didn’t answer. He knew that everything she said was true, so he just concentrated on her lips to hear the rest of it.

  “You’d certainly be under seventy when you got out, Mr. Benini,” she said. She smiled a little, so that those lips parted around her teeth. Nice teeth, too. She was pretty, no two ways about it. “I’ll be honest with you,” she went on, her voice even softer, taking him into her confidence, “the way they let people out of prison these days, you might even be as young as sixty. Sixty or sixty-five.”

  Gus Benini was fifty-three years old. Sixty-five sounded like it might as well be the rest of his life. He ran his tongue over his lips, and she looked up, taking her eyes off him, and said, “Matt, I think Mr. Benini wants that drink now. Coffee or something cold?”

  Benini said, “Cold.”

  “Pepsi? Something like that?” she asked. “It’s just a machine.”

  “Whatever they got,” he said. “Pepsi, yeah, that’s fine.”

  He heard the door open. “Diet Pepsi if they got it,” he said.

  The door closed and he knew that the guy with the fingers was gone. He was convinced without even thinking about it that if he turned around to look, Linkletter would hit him on the top of his head, so he didn’t do it.

  Linkletter came around where Benini could see him and pulled up a chair to the third side of the table between them. He sat down.

  “I was at your house, Gus,” he said. “I’ll be honest with you.” Everyone was being honest with him this morning, Benini thought. How often do you run into that? “It’s not much of a house. I’ve got a better place and I’m half your age on government pay.”

  Benini’s face flushed red all the way to his ears. Schliester knew it wasn’t just anger. It was anger mixed in with shame, and he was sorry he had to say what he just said. But there was an important point to be made.

  “I’ve got news for you, wiseass,” Benini snapped. “I brought up three kids in that house, sent them all to college.”

  “Yeah, but what’s that?” Linkletter said. “I mean, what, City College, right? How much was that? You see what I’m getting at? The people you work for don’t take very good care of you. You make them money, you don’t get to see a whole hell of a lot of it. You don’t owe them shit.”

  Benini didn’t say anything. He didn’t like the direction this was taking.

  “Was that true what you told me at the house?” Linkletter asked. “When I needed more money, it came out of your pocket?”

  Again Benini didn’t answer. Fucking A it came out of his pocket. That still galled him. And Linkletter just said, “Jesus, Gus. Isn’t it about time you did yourself some good for a change?”

  He got up and walked away from the table, as though he had said everything he had to say.

  The door opened again and Fingers came back with a couple cans of diet Pepsi. “They didn’t have glasses,” he said. “Is the can okay?”

  Gus popped the top and took a long drink. Is the can okay? Was he comfortable? for Christ’s sake. They were falling all over themselves being nice to him. They must have thought he was stupid or something but he wasn’t. It was a con and he knew it. They weren’t going to buy Gus Benini with a kind word and a freaking can of soda.

  On the other hand, he also knew that everything the Linkletter guy who really had a German name said was true. Gus Benini never got something for nothing. Never. Not once in his life. Which meant it was true that he didn’t owe anyone shit.

  “What Agent Schliester is trying to tell you, Mr. Benini,” the lady said, “is that you don’t matter to Chet Fiore.”

  “Who?” Benini deadpanned. But his heart wasn’t in it.

  “We’ll get back to that in a minute,” she said. “What I want you to know right now is that you don’t matter to us either. We’ll lock you up if you don’t give us a choice but we don’t need to do that and we really have no interest in doing it. We’d rather work things out. I’m sure you understand that, so let’s get back to that other thing. You’re not telling us you don’t know a man named Chet Fiore, are you?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” Benini said.

  She hit a button on the little tape recorder and the next thing Benini knew he was listening to himself telling Fiore that the kid at the Javits Center was getting nervous and Fiore telling him to shut it down and not to worry.

  They played him a lot of tapes, and Linkletter even talked to him about his kids and the daughter he met at the house and where she went to college and what she was doing now. They ordered lunch, which was sandwiches Fingers brought back from a deli that must have been pretty close because he made it back in a couple minutes. Benini didn’t really want anything but he asked for a sandwich because they offered and he didn’t want to get into a whole discussion. He couldn’t remember the last time he sat in one place so long, and if you had asked him this morning he would have said that it would drive him crazy, being stuck in one chair for hours. But for some reason it wasn’t driving him crazy. He sat there and listened to what they had to say like he was in church or something.

  The part that really got to him was when they explained, both of them, Linkletter and the lady, kind of taking turns, that if they went ahead with the Javits Center case against Fiore, they would have to play the tape from the restaurant when Fiore says to shut it down, and then Fiore would think that maybe Benini had been wearing a wire because he had the place ch
ecked all the time for bugs. But on the other hand, if they had other information about Fiore, stuff that didn’t concern the Javits Center, then they could go in a different direction and maybe even leave the Javits Center out of it, so Fiore wouldn’t ever have to hear this tape, would he?

  That was when the sandwiches came. Gus had egg salad. He ate about half of it. “You had eggs for breakfast and you’re having eggs for lunch,” Linkletter said. “You’re not worried about cholesterol?”

  “You worry about cholesterol,” Benini said. “I’m more worried about someone putting an ice pick in my neck.”

  They all laughed, even Benini, and then they got serious again because Linkletter said, “Gus, we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  The lady offered him some time to think it over and come back to them with things he could tell them about Chet Fiore where he wasn’t involved, so it wouldn’t come back to him.

  He looked at the rest of the sandwich and he looked at her, and he started to talk. Which is when the second tape recorder was turned on.

  One of the things he said, just in passing because he didn’t know much about it, was that there was something about a banker and a new way to clean up money but he didn’t know any of the names.

  The lady said, “Well, let’s move on to something you do know something about.”

  Which is when Linkletter got up from the table and went for a little walk around the room. He was pissed off at something, but Gus couldn’t figure out what he had done to piss the guy off. Actually, it seemed more like he was pissed off at the lady, but what sense did that make?

  None.

  Besides, Gus had other things to worry about.

  The mood in the car on the drive out to Queens was tense. Fiore didn’t say a word and Jimmy didn’t either. “Do you want me to come in?” Jimmy asked after he braked to a stop in front of Gus Benini’s house.

  He said it as though he expected trouble.

  Fiore laughed it off. “Come on, Jimmy,” he said. “I just want to talk to the guy, that’s all.”