There was still raucous noise coming from the open door of the private back room, a room still guarded by two hard-faced men who sat at a table near its entrance. They studied Nilo as he entered; he did not even favor them with a glance.
Matteo hurried up to meet him, all waving arms and big smiles.
“Look, Mama, it’s our son-in-law,” he called out to Mrs. Mangini, who looked at Nilo with frank disinterest.
“I’m looking for Luciano. Is he here?” Nilo asked Matteo sharply.
Mangini was taken aback for a moment. He took a deep breath before answering.
“Just go back and tell him I’m here,” Nilo snapped. He walked off to a vacant table in an empty corner of the room, and before Matteo could even move, Luciano came out of the private back room. Trailed by two bodyguards, he approached Nilo’s table, smiled warmly, and shook Nilo’s hand.
“I heard that you were being released,” Luciano said. “When’d you get back?”
“Yesterday.”
Luciano sat down, across from Nilo.
“So?” he said. “How is your baby? Your wife? It’s odd, isn’t it, that we are now sort of relatives, since you married my cousin?”
“A man picks his friends; he is stuck with his relatives,” Nilo said, still smiling. “He also picks his bodyguards, and you ought to get better ones than those two.”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“Because they saw me smiling and they instantly went to sleep. Their hands are out of their pockets, on the table. I could shoot you now and have time to shoot them too before they even got their hands on their guns. And the one with gloves is stupid. He was stupid when you used him as a spy, driving for Maranzano. I don’t think he’s gotten any smarter. You can afford better, Charlie.”
“You seem to have gotten very smart yourself in prison.”
“I learned some things. Someday I’ll tell you about them. Is the linguini here as good as I remember?”
Luciano shook his head. “After you’ve been in the can, nothing is as good as you remember. But it is still very good. Join me for dinner?”
“Thanks, but I haven’t got time,” Nilo said. Luciano, he thought, was growing impatient. He should try prison. It teaches a man to take his time, to wait.
“So did you want to say something to me?”
Nilo nodded. “Back in prison, I thought I would have to kill you. For turning me in, for trying to shoot me down in the street. But I was young then.”
Luciano showed no expression. “And now?”
“I believe you did what you had to do. I find no fault with that.” Nilo stood up to leave. He leaned over to Luciano. “We are on different sides, Charlie. But it’s business. It doesn’t have to be personal.”
“I’m glad you feel that way. And in the meantime, if there’s anything I can do…”
“No hard feelings, Charlie. But I’m owed for three years. Maybe someday, you’ll do me a favor.”
“I do lots of favors.”
“The day may come when you want to do me this favor.”
“Yeah?”
“I want Tina Falcone,” Nilo said. “I thought you might be getting tired of her.”
“You thinking of opening a nightclub?” Luciano asked.
Nilo was surprised that Luciano had misunderstood him. But he answered, “Possibly.”
“It’s a tough buck. I’m thinking of quitting,” Luciano said. “If I do…”
Nilo shook his head. “You don’t have to say anything now. As I said, the day might come.” He turned toward the door. “And please, Charlie, do something about those bodyguards. They’ll get you killed if you’re not careful.”
“I’m always careful,” Luciano said.
* * *
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, toward the end of his shift, the thought of retirement popped into Tony’s head unbidden, as he sat moving papers around in his Italian Squad office.
For a long time, Tony had watched the police winning the battle over the gangs. It had seemed as if crime was on the way out. But then came Prohibition and with that stupid experiment the gangs—like some virulent seed that could lie underground for years without dying—roared back into life, worse than ever.
If the police department thought it was going to wage an all-out war against the organized criminals, he had news for them. The war is over. We lost.
That had become ever clearer in the last few years. When Tony had come to America as a boy in the 1880s, the Black Hand and the Mafia were riding high in the city, preying on the new Italian immigrants, demanding extortion money just to let them live. Tony’s own father, a barber, had had his run-ins with the mobsters early, refusing to pay them anything. For someone else, this might have led to terrorism and an early grave, but the elder Falcone was such a large and powerful man, driven by an unbending sense of right and wrong, that the petty Mafia bosses in the neighborhood did not want to tangle with him, and so they left him alone. He was one of the few so treated, and from him Tony learned the lifelong lesson that evil could be beaten if a man would stand up against it.
“This is America,” his father would tell him. “It should have no place for these vultures.”
For a time, as Tony was growing up and then joining the police force, he thought that his father had been right. Slowly the power of the street gangs and extortionists had waned. When he first came on the police force, it seemed to Tony that sometime during his career the last thug from the last mob would be in jail and that chapter in the Italian immigrants’ life would be over.
But then Prohibition and the gangs roared back into life, worse than ever. There was just too much money to be made, and this time, the bootleggers and the speakeasy operators were not moral outcasts as they had been in the past. Instead, they were accepted into polite society. Nobody in America, it seemed, except a handful of zealots believed at all in Prohibition, and with everybody bellying up to the bar, the idea that rum-running was even a crime at all just simply melted away. It might be time to let others fight the battle.
Crime is Main Street now, and almost everybody in America is a partner in it. Even the kids growing up see where the money is to be made and they’re joining the gangs again, the same kind of gangs my father and people like him worked to destroy.
These things were on Tony’s mind as he closed up his rolltop desk and put on his jacket to go home. It had all been a waste of time, a whole career frittered away chasing bad guys whom the public did not want to have caught.
The telephone rang as he walked toward the door. He thought for a moment of ignoring it, but habit won out and he picked it up.
A voice he did not recognize spoke to him in a thick Sicilian accent.
“Charlie Luciano is in Mangini’s Restaurant. He’s been waving guns around in there. I thought you’d want to know.” Click.
To hell with it, Tony thought. Who cares? He walked outside the precinct building. Oh, well. It’s right across the street from my house.
* * *
WHEN LUCIANO, FLANKED by his two bodyguards, strolled out of Mangini’s toward his parked car, Tony was waiting.
“All right, Luciano,” he barked. “Up against the car.”
The two bodyguards reached inside their jackets, but Luciano said quickly, “It’s all right, boys. This is our neighborhood policeman.”
“Forget the talk and get up against the car, I said.”
Luciano casually moved toward the waiting roadster. “Mind if I ask why?”
“I want to see if you’re carrying a gun,” Tony said.
“I never carry a gun.”
“Let’s see.”
Tony could see that people were leaning out the windows of the apartments up and down the block to watch this little drama.
He forced Luciano to spread his legs and lean against the car. Then he frisked him up and down his body but could find no gun.
“I told you, I never carry a gun.”
“That’s right,” said one of the bodyguards, the one
whom Tony noticed always wore gloves. “He don’t need no gun.”
“Shut up, stupid. Who’s talking to you?” Tony snapped. He turned back to Luciano. “All right, pimp. You can go.”
“When are you going to stop harassing law-abiding citizens?” Luciano asked.
“You? Never. The rest of your life, every time you look around, look hard. You’ll see me. Someday you’ll make a mistake, and I’ll be there, waiting.”
“Waste your time if you want,” Luciano said. He too noticed the people watching from apartment windows. He glared at them as if taking names, and some of the heads vanished back inside.
One of the bodyguards came forward to open the back door of the big touring car, and as Luciano began to move inside he turned to Tony with a smile. “I’ll have to tell Tina I saw you tonight. I guess she doesn’t come around to visit.…”
Before he could finish his remark, Tony Falcone had moved close to him, slid his hand under Luciano’s unbuttoned suit jacket, and grabbed a big chunk of flesh just above the mobster’s belt. He squeezed it in his powerful hand and Luciano grimaced in pain.
“Don’t say another word,” Tony said. “Or you’ll regret it.”
Luciano squirmed free and soundlessly got in the car. A moment later, it roared away from the curb.
In the backseat, Luciano mumbled, “No. You’re going to regret it.”
* * *
NILO SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT in a brothel on Park Avenue. When he got home, Sofia and the baby were asleep, but she had left him a note.
“Charlie called. He said he’ll do you that favor anytime you want.”
Nilo thought, It’s time to start paying back the Falcones for all the years I spent in prison.
* * *
IT WAS NOT YET NOON on a cool fall day and Tina was no longer used to being up so early. Her last show had ended not nine hours before, and she stifled a yawn as she walked across Broadway and turned left down Fifty-second Street to Luciano’s club. Outside the club, she inspected the life-size wooden portrait of herself. It was beginning to look a little faded, just the way she felt.
Tina had never thought it could happen, but she was starting to get tired of singing for a living. For a long time, she had taken strength from the audiences, but that had begun to pale. More and more nights now, she found herself just going through her routine from memory, not really concentrating, not really caring what she was giving the audience or what they felt about it. And her relationship with Luciano had definitely cooled. He had not been to her apartment in a couple of months; when they talked, it was business. She went by herself now to the opium parlors on Pell Street.
She was beginning to think it was time to move on. A new movie, The Jazz Singer, had been packing in audiences. It featured Al Jolson singing. Everybody was scrambling now to make new talking and singing movies, and the word was that Hollywood was looking for people with voices to star in them. And then last night, in the club, a young man had come to her table and introduced himself as a motion picture agent and she had agreed to meet with him today.
Why not me in movies? I’m young enough and I can sing, and if I’m not as pretty as I used to be, I still won’t scare anybody away.
The watchman let Tina in and she went back to her office to wait. The club belonged to Luciano, but for the last year or two—there had never been a definite time when it had happened—she had been running the place for him.
She ran it the way she wanted the place to be, as a hangout for interesting people, almost a clubhouse. She served her regular customers at cost and soaked the tourists, and nobody seemed to mind. It was true that business had started to tail off, especially since Tina missed many shows now because of a liquor or drug hangover, but Charlie had never complained, and the police—thanks to exorbitant bribes—had never bothered her.
The office held a lot of memories for her. She used to be able to count on it: when Charlie came into the club late to see how things were going, they would usually wind up in the office, making passionate love on the couch or on top of the desk or on the floor, sometimes all three places, and she’d often time it so that she would go out on stage right afterward to sing her last set, with the feel of Charlie still on her body. But those days clearly had ended.
Twenty minutes later, the watchman led a young man into Tina’s office. He was blond with wire-framed glasses and a bookkeeper’s expression, but he moved with the wiry grace of an athlete. The name on his business card was Bill Congreve.
“I’m glad you were able to meet me, Miss Falcone,” he said, and shook her hand when she offered it.
“Please. It’s Tina.” She offered him a drink, but Congreve seemed intent on business, so she asked him to describe his project.
“I’m working with a studio—I can’t tell you which one—and we’re thinking of filming Aida,” he said. “I thought you’d be perfect.”
“Aida’s for a soprano,” Tina said. “I haven’t been a soprano in a long time.”
“This would be more modern,” Congreve said. “With popular music instead of operatic arias. It’s made for you.”
Tina smiled at him, projecting all her sexuality. He seemed almost to blush.
“It’s nice of you to say.”
“There’s a small problem, though,” he said, then stammered, “I don’t know quite how to say this.”
“Why not just spit it out?”
“All right. Sometimes people, really beautiful like you, they, well, they just don’t photograph well. We’d have to do a screen test so I can show it to the studio.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Tina said. He was a very presentable young man, she thought. Actually handsome, if he’d just get rid of those silly eyeglasses.
“We’re kind of desperate for time. And I was wondering if it’d be possible for you to do the test today. It wouldn’t be far from here. Just up in the Bronx.”
“When?”
“Right now?” Congreve said.
She smiled. “Sure. Let’s do it.”
She drove with Congreve out of Manhattan, talking of classical music and opera, things Tina had not spoken to anyone about for many months. He stayed vague about which studio he might be working for—he called that “a state secret”—and the car finally stopped in a run-down area of the Bronx, an industrial section built up with only warehouses and factories.
“Not much to look at,” Congreve said, “but the space was cheap.”
He came around and opened the door for Tina, and she took his hand to step down from the car. She touched his arm gently with her own hand and smiled into his eyes.
“I have a good feeling about this day,” she said. “I’ve already spoken more to you than I have to anybody else in months.”
“Well, maybe we’ll see more of each other,” Congreve said. Impulsively, Tina kissed him on the cheek, and she saw him blush again. She laughed merrily, took his arm, and followed him inside the nearest building.
It seemed like a warehouse. Congreve hustled Tina off to a seedy little dressing room.
“Put on your makeup real theatrical, okay? It films better that way,” he said. “And here’s your costume.”
As Tina sat in front of the mirror, intensifying her eye makeup and lipstick, Congreve said, “The idea is that you’re a slave girl being brought to the pharaoh’s throne. You’re scared of him, but you have to please him if you want to go on living. Okay?”
“I understand,” Tina said.
“Nervous?” Congreve asked.
“Maybe a little.”
He poured her a glass of wine from a bottle on a nearby table. “This’ll calm you down,” he said.
She sipped the wine as she finished doing her makeup, then stepped behind a screen and put on the costume. It looked vaguely Egyptian, with a long diaphanous skirt of nearly white gauze and a short halter top that barely covered her breasts.
With a grin, Congreve passed the glass of wine to her over the top of the dressing screen.
“This costume’s a little risqué,” she complained lightly.
“We want to be sure to show you off to your best advantage.”
She sipped the rest of the wine, stepped out from behind the screen, was rewarded by Congreve’s open look of admiration, and then felt herself becoming dizzy and she collapsed to the floor. She heard Congreve laugh.
She passed in and out of consciousness over the next several hours. Only bits of what happened registered on her mind.
She remembered being placed on a felt-covered table. She saw Congreve standing between her legs. He ripped off her clothing, and then she remembered he leaned forward and took her. He was big and it hurt. She remembered trying to yell but having her mouth covered by someone’s hand.
Across the big room, she saw two men running a movie camera. She struggled and then passed out again.
The next thing she remembered was Congreve backing away from her, with a smile on his face.
“Who’s next?” he called out. When one of the cameramen moved forward, she tried again to scream, but no sound came out.
* * *
TOMMY HAD PROMISED not to talk to his father about Captain Cochran’s offer, but he had not said anything about not asking Mario’s advice. He met his brother in the small study, but before they could talk, the telephone rang.
Mario answered it, listened for a moment, then scribbled something on a sheet of paper. He looked at Tommy with alarm on his face.
“What is it?”
“Somebody said Tina’s in trouble.”
Tommy jumped to his feet. “What kind of trouble?”
“I don’t know. Just trouble. At this address.”
Tommy scooped up the note. “That’s in the Bronx,” he said.
“The church car’s out front. Let’s go.”
Tommy drove as if he were on a racecourse, and it was not many minutes before they pulled up beside the big warehouse building in the Bronx.
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