Bloodline: A Novel

by Warren Murphy

  One night in early October, Tommy sat in a neighborhood speakeasy, sipping a beer, and listened to Birchevsky, who was a little drunk, arguing with a driver a couple of barstools away.

  “You worry too much,” he heard Birchevsky say.

  “Mishkin has been all right with us guys. I ain’t gonna go with nobody else’s union, especially some mob guys. Before you know it, they’ll have us delivering booze.”

  “Hey, one union’s just like another union,” Birchevsky said.

  “The hell it is. Tomorrow I’m gonna see Lev and tell him he’s being sold down the river.”

  Birchevsky lumbered to his feet and tossed some money on the bar. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “These ain’t kid games.”

  “Go to hell.”

  After Birchevsky left the speakeasy, Tommy sidled down the bar to sit next to the angry driver.

  “How you doing?” Tommy said. “Sounded like that guy was busting your chops.”

  “Aaaaah. He’s a double-crossing son of a bitch.”

  “Let me buy you a beer. My name’s Vito.”

  * * *

  THE DRIVER’S NAME WAS EDDIE COLE, and he drove for one of the smaller companies in the garment district. He had been in Mishkin’s union for more than ten years. But as hard as Tommy tried, he could not get the man to tell him the story of Birchevsky’s offer. All he would say, no matter how many beers his new friend Vito bought him, was that there was “a rat bastard scheme going on, but I’m gonna fix it all tomorrow.”

  It was after midnight when Tommy left him in the speakeasy. The next morning, he called the garment company where Cole was employed, but the man had not shown up for work. Two days later, his wife reported him missing. It was time, Tommy thought, to tell the story to Lev Mishkin.

  • On Sunday, October 13, Tina Falcone attended Mass at Mount Carmel Church and received communion from her brother Father Mario just as Sofia Sesta and her two sons were boarding a transatlantic liner for Italy.

  • On Monday, October 14, the stock market continued its relentless downhill slide. Tony Falcone got an envelope in the mail. Inside was another sealed envelope, with no address or name on it. When Tony opened it, he found two pornographic pictures of Tina, and a block-printed note that read: “Dear Tina, Call me sometime. I really miss the fun we used to have. Charlie L.”

  • On Tuesday, October 15 …

  * * *

  AT 10:00 P.M., Luciano stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, waiting for his driver to bring the new touring car around. Luciano had particularly chosen that car this night because he was meeting a new showgirl and he liked to make a good first impression. He was wearing a brown tweed suit, one of a dozen new suits he had bought that day, and all in all, Luciano was feeling on top of the world. He had finally chased everyone else out of the prostitution business in New York City, and the five thousand hookers in town all helped contribute to his million-dollar-a-year tax-free income.

  He had purchased a stable of racehorses and had a hand in dozens of legitimate private businesses in the city. Bootlegging would probably die soon, but Luciano would go on. He had learned early in life never to put all his eggs in one basket.

  The two stupid Mustache Petes Maranzano and Masseria were still trying to kill each other, but the younger members in each gang were listening more and more to Luciano’s talk of peace making them all rich. Since the Atlantic City conference in May, there was no doubt around the rest of the country that the man to see in New York was Charlie Luciano. And with Al Capone still in jail, where he would probably rot and die, New York was the tail that wagged the dog.

  Run New York and you run the country. And I run New York.

  He allowed himself a momentary feeling of satisfaction.

  He was thirty-one years old.

  A car rolled down the street toward him, its high beams blinding him, and Luciano stepped back from the curb. As it pulled abreast of him, the car’s curtained rear door flew open and, before Luciano could move, two men with scarves over their faces had jumped out and tossed him onto the floor in the back of the car. A moment later, he felt adhesive tape being pressed over his eyes and his mouth. He could not see and he could not talk or scream.

  He felt hands passing professionally over his body, frisking him for a weapon. But Luciano rarely carried a gun and he was unarmed this night. He tried to focus. The best he could guess was that there were three men in the backseat of the car facing him. Add in a driver, there were at least four other men in the vehicle.

  The car drove slowly around Manhattan. Luciano tried to concentrate, to figure where they might be going, but he was disoriented and soon lost all sense of direction.

  The men had not said a word. And then the beating started. They began kicking him in the ribs while he lay on the floor. When he tried to curl into a fetal position to protect himself, he felt his face and head being thumped with fists and blackjacks and gun butts.

  After a while of that, he passed out and awoke when he was slapped repeatedly in the face.

  That pain was just a prelude. He felt sharp pains in his back and realized he was being stabbed, probably with an ice pick. Oddly, he wondered if his suit was ruined. He could feel blood seeping down his back.

  The beating went on for more than an hour. He felt the car go up a long incline and then down another long incline, and he was sure they had passed over a bridge.

  The traffic was lighter now; he heard fewer noises.

  Jersey. Maybe I’m in New Jersey.

  Now there was no traffic sound at all. And then there was a crunch under the car.

  We’re driving over sand, he thought—his last thought before he was smashed hard between the eyes and blacked out.

  When Luciano woke, he was careful not to groan or to move. He heard voices nearby, the first time he had heard them speak since he was abducted.

  “Shoot the bastard and let’s go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not? This was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “If I kill him, I’m as bad as he is.”

  The voices were muffled, as if coming from far away, and Luciano could not recognize them. And he did not understand what they were saying.

  As bad as me? he wanted to shout. You’re all as bad as me. It’s how we survive.

  He thought for a moment of trying to scramble to his feet and run but realized he would not get more than a few feet. The pain in his back and head was intense.

  “Well, if you won’t, I will.”

  The voice was a little clearer now. It sounded Irish.

  Luciano felt a big hand on him, spinning him over. And then, like a hot poker, he felt a knife slashing his face; he felt it slit his throat. He wanted to scream, but no sound would escape the tape. He was going to lie here and vomit in his pain and then choke on his own puke. He could feel the blood pulsing from his throat with each beat of his heart.

  And then he heard a scuffle above him. His eyes were open but saw only the tape that covered them.

  “No, I said.” He heard a voice. It sounded like a voice he knew, but in the delirium of his pain, he could not place it.

  “The world’s better off if he’s dead,” the Irish voice growled.

  “And we’re worse for it. Come on. We’ll leave him here.”

  Luciano felt the man release him and then heard footsteps scuffing through the sand. He heard four car doors slam in rapid succession.

  There were four of them. At least four, he thought. He heard the car’s engine start. The last thing he heard before he passed out was the sound of the car, crunching away across the sand.

  When he awoke, his body felt as if it were on fire.

  And I’m blind! I can’t see!

  He remembered then that his eyes had been taped shut. He tried to feel his hands. Then he moved them. He had not been tied up. As he raised his hands to his face, he heard waves sloshing nearby.

  Carefully, he peeled the tape from his eyes. It w
as morning and he could see, and the sun was rising in the east. He peeled the tape from his mouth and struggled to a sitting position. When he looked down, he saw that the front of his suit was covered with blood. He remembered being cut and was afraid to touch his face and head but reached for it anyway and felt warm blood still pulsing from his throat wound.

  As he was getting to his feet, he saw a sign stuck in the sand. It read HUGUENOT BEACH. He had never heard of the place.

  The street was only a few dozen paces away and he struggled to walk to it. There was no traffic this early in the morning, and he limped heavily down the middle of the roadway.

  After not more than fifty yards, he saw a policeman come running toward him. Luciano fell into the officer’s arms.

  “Call me a cab, will you?” he croaked weakly.

  “I’ll call you an ambulance.”

  “Just call me a cab. There’s fifty bucks in it for you,” Luciano gasped, still unable to stand upright without help.

  “Come over here and sit on the curb,” the policeman said.

  He led Luciano to the sidewalk.

  “Where am I anyway?”

  “Staten Island.”

  “Oh. I thought I was in Jersey.”

  The policeman left Luciano sitting on the curb and ran to the corner to call for help. Within an hour, Luciano was in a Staten Island hospital. After doctors patched him up and called his wounds “serious but not life-threatening,” a detective named Charles Schley questioned him at his bedside.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Charlie Luciano.”

  “What happened?”

  “An accident.”

  “You’re a gangster, right?”

  “I’m a gambler.”

  “You’re a pimp. What the hell happened?”

  “I’m standing on the corner in New York. This car pulls up. I can’t see nothing in the windows. Two guys hop out and drag me inside. They tape me up, beat me, drive me around, and dump me.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I don’t know who, where, what—nothing.”

  “You must have known at least one of them. Or seen him around. Or something.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t know them.”

  “Somebody you messed with, right? ‘Gamblers’ like you have enemies.”

  “Look. I’m pals with everybody. Nobody’s after me. Everybody likes me. Now don’t go losing any sleep over this. I can attend to it myself.”

  Schley and then another detective questioned Luciano for two hours but got no more out of him and finally left in disgust.

  In the morning, Meyer Lansky showed up at the hospital and skeptically listened to Luciano say that he did not know who his assailants were. When he realized his longtime partner was not going to reveal any more, Lansky said, “It doesn’t matter. You’re lucky to be alive. You’ve always been lucky.”

  “That’s me. Lucky … Lucky Luciano.”

  Later that day, the police took Luciano to a lineup at headquarters, but no one identified him as a suspect in any crime. Anxious nevertheless to arrest him for something, police dusted off an old stolen-car charge and booked him, but Lansky paid twenty-five thousand dollars in cash to free him on bail. The charges would later be dropped.

  * * *

  WHEN HE LEFT HIS OFFICE that afternoon, Lt. Tony Falcone filed his papers retiring from the New York City Police Department. He told himself that the time had come. I have become as corrupt and lawless as the ones I spent my life fighting.

  * * *

  WHEN NILO ANSWERED the telephone, Birchevsky was on the line.

  “Listen. I’m out of the office. But Lev wanted me to find you and ask you to a meeting.”

  “What for?” Nilo asked, looking at his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door.

  “Who knows? He told me to find you. He’s getting cranky because we’re not signing up new members, and when he gets cranky, he calls meetings.”

  “All right. Did you get that mess cleaned up the other night?”

  “Yes. The trouble is in the river,” Birchevsky said.

  “I hope so. This is too big an operation to let anybody mess up.”

  “I told you. Fish don’t talk.”

  Later, in the union office, Nilo was not surprised to see Tommy Falcone, who had married Mishkin’s daughter.

  Giving the father-in-law a hand, he thought. Too bad he backed a loser. They’re all losers.

  Mishkin walked to the door and called for Birchevsky to come inside, then gestured to both men to sit down. Birchevsky looked inquisitively at Tommy standing alongside Mishkin’s desk, as if he had seen him before but could not place the face.

  “What can I do for you?” Nilo asked.

  “You might drop dead,” Mishkin said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You and your damned Judas goat there…” Mishkin nodded toward Birchevsky. “I’d be happy if you both got the hell out of my life.”

  Birchevsky’s face paled. Nilo forced himself to smile until he could feel the skin stretching at the corners of his mouth.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “I do something to offend you?”

  “You wop bastard, you offend me by breathing the same air as I do. I’m through with you. Does Maranzano know what you’ve been up to?”

  Nilo said, “He knows everything I do.”

  “Then he’s as big a douche bag as you are and your friend there. Go fuck yourselves.” He half-rose from the chair as he shouted at Nilo.

  Nilo reacted without thinking. He lunged forward and slapped Mishkin’s face. Mishkin fell back onto his seat and Nilo reached back to throw a punch, but Tommy’s hand locked around his wrist. Nilo tried to twist free but could not.

  “Calm down,” Tommy said quietly. He waited until Nilo nodded before releasing his wrist.

  “Lev, Lev,” Birchevsky said. “What is the matter?”

  “What is the matter is that you and your friend here aren’t going to take over this union. You’re finished with this union.” He turned and glared at Nilo. “And I’ll see you dead before you organize any drivers or anybody else in this industry.”

  “Big talk,” Nilo said.

  “More than talk. When Stupid there killed a driver the other night, there was a witness. He’ll testify. Your power grab is over.”

  Birchevsky laughed. “Nobody testifies in this city. Nobody lives to.”

  “This witness will,” Tommy said, bluffing, watching Birchevsky’s reaction carefully.

  “Nobody lives forever,” Birchevsky said.

  He did kill the driver, Tommy thought. I can’t prove it, but he did it.

  “Easy, easy,” Nilo said. “Look. Why don’t we just talk this out? You don’t like that we’re organizing the drivers. Well, that’s too bad. But the fact is we’re going to control the industry. If you don’t get in our way, Mishkin, we’ll let you keep one of the locals for yourself. If you insist on giving us trouble, you won’t get a thing.”

  Mishkin steepled his fingers in front of his face, as if he were weighing the proposal.

  “Be reasonable,” Nilo said. “By next week, you might not be able to make this good a deal. Tell him, Tommy.”

  Birchevsky said suddenly, “He ain’t Tommy. That’s Vito. I seen him around.” Nilo looked shocked.

  “You’re Vito,” Nilo said. “You’ve caused me a lot of trouble.”

  “I haven’t even started yet,” Tommy said.

  Mishkin reached under his desk and pushed a button.

  A few seconds later, the office door opened and four burly men came in.

  Mishkin stood and pointed to Birchevsky and Nilo.

  “They’re leaving. Escort them out. And I don’t really care if they slip and fall on the stairs on the way.”

  Nilo stood and stared at Mishkin.

  “We can find our own way out,” he said.

  The muscle squad hesitated.

  “You heard me,” Mishkin said.
“Throw them out.”

  * * *

  “IT’S OVER,” TOMMY SAID. “They know who I am.”

  There was a long silence on Captain Cochran’s end of the phone. Finally, the police officer said, “Come in tomorrow. In the meantime, watch your back.”

  * * *

  IT WAS TIME TO TELL RACHEL, before she heard about it anywhere else. Tommy came home early and made a big production out of cooking his wife an Italian dinner.

  “I bet you didn’t know I was this good in the kitchen,” he said.

  “I thought you specialized in the bedroom,” she said.

  “You’re an animal. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “About your still being a cop?”

  “What?” Tommy was taken aback by what she had said.

  “Lev told me. A couple of months ago. He figured it out. Was I supposed to be upset?”

  “I didn’t … I wasn’t … I didn’t know how you’d feel,” Tommy stammered.

  “All this while I thought you were a bookie,” she said. “Trust me. I like that you’ve been a cop.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Maybe say, ‘No more secrets.’”

  “What did I ever do to deserve you?” Tommy asked.

  “Raw Sicilian sex appeal,” Rachel said. “You’ve made me the animal I am.”

  * * *

  EVERYONE DENIED RESPONSIBILITY later, but someone tipped off John F. X. Kinnair, and the Daily News the next morning ran a story under his byline which read:

  A decorated war-hero New York City cop has risked his life for the past two years, working as a spy in the New York underworld. Police officials would not comment, but, privately, top brass admit that the undercover work of Patrolman Tommy Falcone has been responsible for many of the major arrests made by the renowned Flying Squad in the past eighteen months.

  Tommy groaned when he read the story and immediately set out for his family’s apartment on Crosby Street to see Tony and try to explain.

  When he entered the flat, his father was sitting on the sofa, reading the Daily News. A radio played classical music softly in the background.

  Tony looked up and said, “Well, well, well,” and called out to the kitchen, “Hey, Mama. Vito has come to see us.”