“I didn’t quite see why he had to be dry before going into the water, but here again I didn’t feel like saying anything. So we left Big Bill Sugar in the shed under a tarpaulin, and a day or so later we all came back, and Mike looked at him again in that dreamy way, poked at the concrete, touched it up a little more with hammer and chisel, here and there, and in the end he seemed quite pleased. He straightened up, stepped back, stared at the cast a little longer, and then he said: ‘All right, put the bastard in my car.’
“At first we didn’t know what he meant, and he said again, ‘Put the bastard in my car. Next to the driver.’ We looked at each other, but we weren’t going to argue with Mike.
“We carried Big Bill Sugar to the Cadillac and put him in next to the driver, then we all got in and waited. ‘Okay, let’s go home,’ Mike said. So we got to his house on Park Avenue, stopped the car and looked at Mike. “Take him out.’ We took Big Bill out of the car, and the doorman smiled and took off his cap. ‘Nice piece of statuary you got there, Mr. Sarfatti,’ he said, respectfully. ‘At least you can tell what it is. Not like these modern things that have three heads and seven hands.’ “That’s right,’ Mike said, and he laughed. ‘It’s real classical. Greek, in fact.’
“We stuck Big Bill Sugar in the elevator and rode on up. Mike opened the door and we carried the statue inside. ‘In the living room,’ Mike said. We went into the living room and stood Big Bill up against a wall and waited. Mike looked all around the room, thought it over, and then he pointed. ‘Up there,’ he said, ‘over the mantelpiece.’ We didn’t get it right way, but Mike moved away the painting that was there.
“All right, we decided, no arguments. We put Big Bill Sugar on the mantelpiece, propped him up against the wall, and left him there. With Mike, there was no use trying to understand. Afterwards, of course, the rest of us talked about it a lot, trying to figure out why Mike was so anxious to have Big Bill Sugar on his mantelpiece, right there in his living room. Everyone had his own ideas about that, but no one knew for, sure.
“Of course it was a great victory for us. Big Bill Sugar was a dangerous guy, he wanted to split the movement and keep a piece of the pie for himself, and Spats Marcovitz thought Mike wanted to keep Big Bill for a trophy to remind him of the great victory he’d won. In any case, he kept him like that on his wall for years, until he was sent down for tax fraud, before being deported to Italy. Yes, that was all they could find against him: tax fraud, and even then it was a put-up job by the politicians who tried to infiltrate the movement.
“Before leaving the States, he gave the statue to the Museum of American Folklore in Brooklyn. It’s still there. Mike didn’t get Big Bill Sugar for peanuts—they found his brother’s body in a garbage can on the Oakland docks—but he wasn’t a man to discuss the price when the question of unity was at stake. Yes, he laid the first stone of unity on the docks and he did it all with his own hands, which didn’t keep the government from taking his passport away and deporting him to Italy when he got out of jail. So that’s the man you’re going to see in about an hour, young fellows —a giant. Yes, a giant; there’s no other word for him.”
* * * *
There were three of us. There was Shimmy Kunitz, who was Carlos’ bodyguard, and whose only occupation outside of his physiological functions consisted of target practice with his Colt about five hours a day. That was his way of life. When he wasn’t shooting, he was waiting. I don’t know for what. The day they picked him up dead at Libby’s, maybe, with three bullets in his back.
Then there was Swifty Zavrakos, a little man with greying hair whose face was a kind of permanent exhibition of every known variety of nervous tic; he was our lawyer and a real walking encyclopedia of waterfront history; he could give you from memory the names of all the organizers, the sentences each had served and even the caliber of the guns they used.
As for me, I had been to college, had spent several years on Madison Avenue, and I was mostly there to keep an eye on appearances and take care of the public relations, and I worked hard to try to modify the too often unfavorable image created in the public’s mind by our leaders, largely due to their often more-than-modest social origins, and their lack of interest in questions of philanthropy, education and culture.
We were going to see Sarfatti in Rome for two reasons: first of all, because his deportation decision had just been reversed by the Supreme Court as the result of a legal flaw, and second, because the Syndicate was at another crucial point in its history. We were planning to move out of the harbors and into bigger things. The first decisive step was in the transportation sector—trucks, planes, boats, railroads. It was a big mouthful to swallow. The so-called legitimate unions were fighting us like mad, supported by the politicians and by the federal authorities, who hated the idea of workers’ unity anyway and who cared even less to see it organized by us, or, as they put it, “see it fall into criminal hands.”
We needed Mike more than we ever needed him before.
His name, the news of his return, would scare the hell out of our enemies and would sound an optimistic note of victory. It would create just the necessary psychological effect. After all, he had been the first to understand, perhaps instinctively, that traditional American capitalism was on the wane, and that the true source of wealth and power was no longer management but labor. Mike’s genius had been to realize that the days of the Chicago-type rackets were over, and that protection of the workers offered infinitely bigger possibilities than the kind of protection pioneers like Bugs Moran, Lou Buchalter or old Capone had once imposed on big business.
He had even cut himself off completely from the drug traffic, prostitution and slot machines, in order to concentrate all his energy on the labor movement, despite the opposition of the more conservative elements in the Syndicate, incapable of adapting themselves to the new historical conditions. Traditional unions, fighting for life, and with the complicity of federal authorities, had temporarily succeeded in slowing the march of progress by getting Mike deported; now his return to the front lines of the battle for control would panic the ranks of our competitors.
We reached Rome around the end of the afternoon. A Cadillac was waiting for us at the airport with a uniformed chauffeur at the wheel and an excited old trout of an Italian secretary who spoke of Mike with throbs in her voice. Mr. Sarfatti was sorry, but he hadn’t left his villa in over six weeks. Carlos approved with a brief nod.
“You can’t be too careful,” he said. “He’s well guarded here?”
“Oh, absolutely,” the secretary assured him. “I see to that myself. No one disturbs him. He thought he’d have more time, but New York is very eager to have him return immediately, and he’s having to work twice as hard. It’s a great event in his life, of course. But he’s very happy you’re here. He’s often spoken of you to me. You knew him when he was still doing figurative work, I believe. Yes, Mr. Sarfatti enjoys talking about his artistic beginnings,” the secretary chatted on. “Apparently one of his works is in the collection of the American Folklore Museum, in Brooklyn. A statue called ‘Big Bill Sugar.’ “
Carlos caught his cigar just in time. Swiftly Zavrakos’ face blurred into a series of alarming twitches. I must have looked pretty funny myself! Only Shimmy Kunitz didn’t show the slightest emotion; he was so full of dope he didn’t seem to know he was there. He always looked so blank you ended up not seeing him.
“He told you about that?” Carlos asked slowly.
“Yes, certainly!” the woman exclaimed with a broad smile. “He often makes fun of his early efforts. Actually, he doesn’t disown them; he even thinks they’re rather amusing. ‘Contessa,’ he told me—he always calls me Contessa, I don’t really know why—’Contessa, when I first started I was very figurative—a kind of American primitive, like Grandma Moses, really naive, you know? Big Bill Sugar was probably the best thing I did along those lines—a nice example of what we call Americana—a gangster type bent over, clutching his stomach where the bullet went
in, with his hat beginning to slip down over his eyes— but it wasn’t much. I hadn’t found myself yet, of course, I was only feeling my way. But if you ever go through Brooklyn, you should stop and see it all the same. Kids love it, I’m told. And you’ll find but how far I’ve come since.’ But I suppose you know Mr. Sarfatti’s work much better than I do____”
Carlos had got over his surprise. He was grinning. Old Mike knew how to put over a good joke.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said emphatically. “We sure know the work Mike’s done and we know he’ll do even bigger things now. Let me tell you, you’re working for a great man, a great man whose return all America is waiting for. Someday his name will be known all over the world. . . .”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it for a minute!” the secretary exclaimed. “Already Alto in Milan has devoted a most enthusiastic Article to him. And I can assure you that for two years he’s done nothing but prepare himself for this moment, so that he now really feels ready to return to the United States.”
Carlos nodded again and said nothing. It was never easy to know just what Swifty Zavrakos’ eyes were doing, with all his tics, but I had the feeling that he kept glancing at me. And I must say I wasn’t reassured—something wasn’t right, there was a misunderstanding somewhere—I felt a vague apprehension, a kind of foreboding.
The Cadillac was streaking across the Roman campagna with its ruined aqueducts and cypress trees. Then it turned into a park, drove for a moment down a tunnel of oleanders and stopped in front of a villa that seemed made out of nothing but glass and a strange, asymmetrical shape, a kind of screwy triangle. I had paid a few visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but I must confess that when I got inside, it was a shock all the same; it was hard to imagine that one of the greatest leaders in the history of American organized crime lived here.
All the photos of Mike Sarfatti I had seen showed him standing on the Hoboken dock, in a bold landscape of cranes, chains, bulldozers, crates and steel, which were his real element. Now I found myself in a kind of hothouse, among furniture with twisted shapes that looked as if they came out of a nightmare, under a luminous ceiling whose colors kept changing and from which hung iron objects that turned and swayed continuously while lumps of cement, with tubes, pipes and steel strips sticking out, loomed up menacingly in every corner, and on the walls, paintings—at least I suppose they were paintings, they had frames—tossed their blobs of sinister smears and their snaky lines at you until you felt like screaming.
I turned to Carlos. He was standing with his mouth hanging open, his eyes popping, his hat on the back of his head. I think he was scared.
As for Swifty Zavrakos, he must have gotten such a shock that his twitches had stopped; his face was frozen and you could see every feature; I had the feeling I was meeting him for the first time. Even Shimmy Kunitz had come out of his stupor, glancing around in every direction, his hand in his pocket, as if he expected someone to fire at him.
“What’s that?” Carlos rasped.
He was pointing at a kind of steel octopus that seemed to be opening its tentacles to trap us.
“That’s a Buzzoni chair,” a voice said.
Mike Sarfatti was standing on the doorstep. The image of 30 years of social struggle on the New York waterfront exploded before my eyes: 2,000 tons of rotting meat, in the sabotaged deep freezers on the docks, raising their stench higher than the Empire State Building; the bodies of Frankie Shore, Benny Stigman, Rocky Fish and other traitors who had tried to organize the infiltration of the longshoremen’s union by political elements, hanging from meat hooks at the door of the slaughterhouses; Sam Berg’s face burned by sulphuric acid the day after his article appeared denouncing what he called “the crime syndicate’s take-over of the labor movement”; the machine-gun attacks against Walter Reuther and Meany—all came back to me in a few lightning flashes of memory, while I stared at the hero of this victorious epic who was now standing in front of me.
He was wearing worker’s overalls and looked as if he had just come out of the yards. I had thought he was older; he couldn’t have been more than fifty. Powerful hands, a wrestler’s shoulders, and a face of brutal splendor whose features seemed to have been chopped out with an axe. But I was immediately struck by the haunted, tortured expression of his eyes. He seemed not only preoccupied but actually obsessed. You saw on his face a real stupor, a kind of astonishment that touched that fine Roman mask of his with a strangely lost, bewildered expression. You could tell, while he was talking to us, that he had something else on his mind, and something much more important to him. But he seemed glad to see Carlos all the same. As for Carlos, he had tears in his eyes. They stood embraced for a minute, gazing at each other affectionately and patting each other on the shoulders. The butler came in with a tray of drinks, and set it down on a table. Carlos drank down his martini, looking around him with obvious disgust.
“That’s a funny place you’ve got here,” he said.
Mike smiled.
“What ‘s that?” Carlos asked, pointing accusingly at the wall.
“That’s a Wols,” Mike said.
“What’s it supposed to be?”
“He’s an abstract expressionist.”
“A what?”
“An abstract expressionist.”
Carlos sneered. His lips closed around his cigar and he began looking offended, even nasty.
“I’ll give a thousand bucks to the first guy who can tell me what that’s supposed to be,” he said.
Mike seemed annoyed.
“You aren’t used to it.”
Carlos was sitting heavily in his chair, looking around him with hostility. Sarfatti followed his eyes.
“That’s a Miro.”
“A kid of five could do that,” Carlos said. “And what’s that one?”
“A Soulages.”
Carlos chewed on his cigar a minute.
“Yes, well, I’m going to tell you what it is,” he announced finally. “There’s a name for that . . . It’s called decadence.”
He stared at us triumphantly.
“Decadence. They’re all rotten in Europe. Everyone knows that. Completely degenerate. All the Communists have to do is give it a push and the whole Continent will collapse. I tell you, they don’t have any moral fiber left. Rotten, all of them. We shouldn’t leave our troops stationed here; it’s probably catching. And that . . . what’s that piece of garbage?”
He aimed his cigar at a piece of shapeless concrete bristling with huge, twisted needles and rusty nails that occupied the center of the room. Mike didn’t say a word. His nostrils were pinched and he stared hard at Carlos. He had steely grey eyes and it wasn’t pleasant to be on the receiving end of that stare. I noticed that he was clenching his fists. Suddenly I was looking at the Mike Sarfatti of the legend, the king of the Hoboken docks, the man who had outsmarted Guppo, Fazziola, Luciano, Kutzakis, the five Anastasia brothers and even Dirty Spivak, the man who for 15 years had been the only master after God on the New York waterfront.
“The guy who made that’s completely nuts, Carlos declared assertively. “They should put him away.”
“It’s one of my latest works,” Mike said. “I made it.”
There was a deathly silence. Carlos’ eyes were bulging out of his head. Swifty Zavrakos’ face was twitching as if he had received a thousand electric shocks; it looked as if his features were trying to get away from him.
“I made that,” Mike repeated.
He looked really furious now. He stared at Carlos with the attention of a beast of prey. Carlos seemed to hesitate. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, but the instinct of self-preservation was strongest.
“Oh, well,” he said. “If you made it. . . . Well, then I suppose it’s all right.”
He glanced in disgust at the sculpture, then, evidently, decided to forget it.
“We came to talk business, Mike,” he said.
Mike wasn’t listening to him. He was staring proudly at the
mass of concrete bristling with nails and needles, and when he began talking it was with a strange gentleness— a kind of awe—in his voice, and again that expression of astonishment, almost of naïveté, passed over his features.
“They reproduced it in Alto,” he said. “On the cover. It’s the best art magazine over here. They say I succeeded in suggesting the fourth dimension—the space-time dimension. Einstein, you know. I hadn’t thought of that, of course; you never know exactly what it is you’re doing; they say there’s always an element of mystery in it. The subconscious, of course. ... It made quite a stir. Since I finance the magazine, there were all kinds of stupid remarks. But those guys are incorruptible. You can’t buy them. They have principles. It’s the most advanced thing I’ve done, but I have other pieces out in the studio. Come, I’ll show you.”
“We’re here to talk business, Mike,” Carlos repeated, in a choked voice.
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