“So dis is da famous private eye,” he said, shaking my hand. If my fingers were toothpaste tubes, he’d have made a hell of a mess. “Like on the tee-vee, huh?”
“Something like that,” I said, smiling.
We all sat down.
“Now, Nate … or ya prefer Nathan?”
“Nate is fine.”
“Now, me, ah don’t stand on no damn ceremony. Ya can call me Carlos, or Uncle Carlos. We gonna be great frien’s.”
“I hope so, Carlos.”
“You pals wid da Silver Fox, ah hear.”
He meant Johnny Rosselli, a Chicago Outfit guy who traveled in the highest of low circles.
“John and I go back a long way,” I admitted.
Marcello sat forward, leaned on two elbows, cocked the big head, arched one upside-down V. “You go back all de way to Frank Nitti days, dat right?”
“I knew Frank. I was just a kid then. We did each other favors.”
“And now you a regular Jimmy Bond, ain’t ya, son?”
I just smiled.
Was this mere friendly banter? Or was there menace in there? Certainly condescension, since most men my own age don’t call me “son.”
The Little Man leaned back, rocked easily in his high-backed leather swivel chair. “You boys want some refreshments? Ah don’t drink dis time of day, but don’t let dat stop you. Me, ah wouldn’t mind a Coke-Cola.”
“Coke would be fine,” Paul said, as I nodded. My client had a nervous smile. You would, too, if you were about to talk business with Carlos Marcello.
Carlos punched a button on his phone and got Frances on the speaker, and the madam of a four-state call-girl ring said, most pleasantly, that she’d run over and get us some Coke-Colas.
The meeting began and I quickly became a third wheel. Paul explained to Uncle Carlos that he already had the financing for production of the new oil additive, the merits of which he spent two or three minutes on, then emphasized he hoped Marcello could fund distribution of the product. Our host seemed interested and agreeable, and asked many smart questions in that stupid-sounding Cajun drawl.
About halfway through this discussion, Frances arrived with little cold-sweating bottles of Coke. She wore an orange skirt to go with her yellow blouse and had a figure nice enough to work for her own prostie ring.
As the business talk grew more serious, an edge came into Carlos’s voice. “Now, Paulo, you come to me ’cause there ain’t nobody in Louisiana dat could distribute dat oil thing a yours better dan Uncle Carlos. We both know dat. Didn’t ah get slots in every corner of dis state?”
“Yes,” Paul said, nodding. “Louisiana would be a fine place to take the product out for a trial run.”
“But ah wanna have a gar-on-tee dat ah in for de long haul and a nice slice, when dis thing gits rolled out.”
“Well, of course, Uncle Carlos,” Paul said, a quaver in his voice. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Marcello was giving his old friend that classic Mafia stare. I’d seen that same no-nonsense boogey-man whammy delivered by mob bosses from Nitti to Ricca, Accardo to Giancana, and was convinced these guys practiced that glaring glower in the mirror. I almost laughed. Almost.
“You know dat loyalty’s da most impotent thing under da sun to Uncle Carlos. Ah don’t take kin’ly to muthafuckers dat screw my ass over.”
Despite the meat-locker air-conditioning, Paul had beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Uncle Carlos,” he said, and the “uncle” seemed goddamn silly, considering they too were about the same age, “we been friends since we were kids. Surely you can’t doubt—”
Marcello cut the air with the edge of a thick hand. “Frien’s and bidness, dey don’t always go t’gether so good. You and me, Paulo, we ain’t never done no bidness together. So ah don’t mean to sound like no hard-ass muthafucker…”
Like hell he didn’t.
“… but it like when ya crawl in bed wid some broad, and you think, should ah slip on de rubber or not? We ain’t usin’ no rubber here, my frien’. We is bareback all de way. You still wanna do bidness with Uncle Carlos?”
“Very much.”
The stare melted into a big smile, mitigated only by the devilish eyebrows. “Well, dat’s fine den.” He turned his now-friendly gaze on me. “Nate, you min’ if ah steal you away for a spell? You boys stayin’ at the Roosevelt, right?”
Both of these questions struck me as non sequiturs, but Paul said, “Yes, I can drive our rental to the Roosevelt and meet up with Nate later, if you’d like some time with him.”
“Well, ah surely would,” Carlos said. “Ah wanna ask him about dem investors of yours he been lookin’ into—always like to know who ah’m gettin’ in bed wid.”
Rubbers again.
“’Sides which, we got mutual frien’s, Nate and me. We might wanna discuss about dis-and-dat, Paulo, dat might not be somethin’ a fella like you need to hear.”
Paul considered me mobbed up, so he understood that. I didn’t consider myself mobbed up, despite all the gangsters I’d known and even consorted with over the years, but I always let clients like Paul think I was. Good for business. But occasionally it put me in an awkward position. Like now.
Paul took off, and then it was just me and Carlos in the bank-president office. That wasn’t scary. I could handle that. I did wish I’d brought the nine millimeter, though, even if I wasn’t licensed to carry it in Louisiana.
“Listen, son,” Carlos said, leaning forward, “dis is no place for you and me to shoot da shit.”
“It isn’t?”
“Naw, and anyway, ah wanna take ya out to Churchill Farms. On da West Bank. Got sixty-four hunnerd acres out dere, man. Like to show you around de property, some. Ah got plans out dere, an’ we can talk real good, over dere.”
I had heard of Churchill Farms. It was said to be a remote farmhouse on the bayou where Carlos often took business associates and guests for private talks. Some of those business associates and guests didn’t come back. Yankee Gumbo, anyone?
“I’m fine talking here,” I said with a shrug.
“Naw, naw,” Marcello said. He was reaching for the phone again. “We get us some privacy, Nate.” Into the phone, he said, “Jack, bring de car aroun’.”
When he hung up, he said, “Dat’s Jack. He my personal barber and driver like. You gonna love Jack.”
Jack was a big guy, six two easy, the Frankenstein monster in a suit and tie, with a nice slicked-back haircut. He was waiting at the end of the hall for us, and opened the door onto bright sunshine. That sunshine did not keep me from seeing the message posted on the inside of the door, for all of Uncle Carlos’s guests to read on their way out:
THREE CAN KEEP
A SECRET
IF TWO ARE DEAD.
We rode in back of a bronze Caddy with hulking, well-groomed Jack—clearly as much bodyguard as barber or driver—up front at the wheel. Carlos and I actually did talk about the investigations that I—or anyway, my agents—had done into the various investors Paul Fudala had assembled to back his new product.
“Dese is good folk?” Marcello asked, frowning earnestly. “Good bidness-type people? Rely-upon-type people? No crooks in de woodpile?”
“No, they’re upstanding citizens. Solid investors.” Hilarious, wasn’t it, that the boss of the mob in Louisiana was so careful about who he got in “bidness” with?
Moving off the main highway onto Marcello’s property, the Caddy navigated a narrow strip of bumpy dirt road that seemed to go on and on. This wasn’t a private drive—we passed a shrimp-packing plant that Marcello said was his—but if we had met another car, passage for both would have made a tricky dance.
As we rumbled along the rutted dirt road, a white egret here or a blue heron there would swoop skyward from the bordering marshes. If this represented Marcello’s six-thousand-some acres, what he owned was a swamp, a vast one with mud-brown ponds, Spanish-moss-hung gray cypress, and emerald-green palmettos.
&
nbsp; Our conversation trailed off and, after a few minutes of silence, Marcello noticed me watching out the window as the eerie landscape glided by.
“Dere’s where we get rid of de bodies,” Marcello said, pointing past me out the window, then laughed, hee-hee-hee.
Big joke. Once, a long time ago, I had run into that swamp, away from underlings of the teenaged Marcello’s boss.
“Hey, Heller, you a Jew?”
“I’m half a Jew.”
“How da hell kin a man be half a goddamn Hebe?”
“My mother was Catholic. My pop was an apostate Jew.”
“A pos what? What dat?”
“It’s a Jew who doesn’t believe in the faith.”
“You one?”
“I’m nothing.”
“You don’t believe in nuttin’?”
“I believe in money.”
“We got dat much in common. Anyway, good thing ya ain’t a full-on Hebe, ’cause ya know what we do with dem, in dese parts, don’t ya, Nate?”
“No, what’s that, Carlos?”
“Why, we jes’ roll ’em outta de car into de ol’ swamp. Dey plenty a snakes in dere.”
Alligators, too.
He gave me a playful shrug. “Aw, hell, son, I’m just funnin’ ya. Think ah’d kill me a Jew jes’ for shits and grins?”
I didn’t reply. My eyes caught the driver’s in the rearview mirror, and he gave me a little eyebrow shrug. I guess Jack wasn’t so sure. Not that it mattered to him—he was pure Italian.
“What de hell, Nate, snakes ain’t no never mind to no mongoose.”
Was he referring to what I thought he was referring to? Was that what this visit was about?
A clearing emerged from the marshy landscape and two rustic buildings appeared before us: a small, remodeled barn, painted white, with the kind of narrow first-floor windows a pioneer shot at Indians out of, and a shed around which milled goats and chickens. Dive-bombing swallows and green-bottle flies were swimming out there through the humidity.
Jack pulled around on the gravel apron near the former barn’s front door, and we got out of the Caddy. But apparently we weren’t going in right away—Marcello was wandering toward where the swamp edged the clearing. I followed him. Jack stayed behind, sitting on a small cement front stoop, smoking a cigarette, looking bored.
I stood beside Marcello. Shit, he was short—I felt like Wilt Chamberlain. He had his suit coat folded neatly over an arm as he gestured toward the swamp. The afternoon was starting to die and sunlight lanced through the ghostly trees, making a blur of a panorama that he seemed to be repainting with a thick, gesturing hand.
“First thing ah gonna do, ah gonna put one of dem marina deals in dere. For boats and shit. Ah already got a hunting camp down over dere, dat direction—duck blinds and dat. But dat jus’ the start of it.”
He walked to another position and I followed him. The view was the same, blinding with sun, but he began painting with his hand again.
“We gon’ drain out mos’ a dis shit. We gon’ have shoppin’ centers and a big-ass airport and a sports stadium and housing, you know, dem condom minimums.”
Fucking rubbers again.
“Ah gon’ turn some of dis dicey shit o’ mine over to my brothers, give dem a shot. Me? ’Fore ya know it, ah’m gon’ be strict legit. Ah done what it took ta ride out the damn Depression, an’ never let it stand in my way, da kinda shit dey give guys like us, Nate, wops and micks.”
I had apparently been promoted to a full-fledged mick.
“I’m sure you’ll be a very rich man,” I said, squinting into the sun.
“Ah’m already a very rich man. But dis way dey can’t fuck wid me so much. Ah’ll be fuckin’ respectable, son. So why does some people wanna give me shit, is what ah wanna know!”
What the hell was he talking about?
Finally our tour moved indoors. The barn-turned-farmhouse was straightforward and plain … although the upstairs was a handsomely furnished meeting room with a long conference table, lush carpeting, and wood-paneled walls, again adorned with framed aerial photographs of his properties. Downstairs was simple, the furnishings straight from the Montgomery Ward showroom—a small bedroom with one dresser, a dining room, a modern if spartan kitchen.
That was where we wound up, seated at the kitchen table. Jack the barber remained outside with the darting swallows and green-bottle flies. There were no countertop appliances, unless you counted the little hi-fi, like a teenage kid would have in his room. Immediately my host put on an LP—Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites. Then he went to the refrigerator and took out a platter of sliced cheese and salami, which he brought over to the gray-topped Formica table and set down.
“Scotch all right?” he asked.
Rum was my preference, but I said, “Scotch is fine.”
He got a bottle out of the cupboard, poured several inches each into a couple glasses, and left the bottle on the table as he sat back down.
He nibbled some provolone. I nibbled some salami.
He said, “So, how often you see dat rat bastard Bobby dese days?”
I didn’t think he meant Darin or Rydell or Vee, even though they were all Italian. Connie was no help—she was busy singing “Arrivederci Roma.”
“Not in a long time,” I said.
Which was a lie, but not one Marcello was likely to see through.
Gingerly filling the silence, I ventured, “That was a shame what he put you through last year. I read about it in the papers.”
Bobby Kennedy had been attorney general only three months when he made perhaps his most audacious move against organized crime. He arranged for Marcello, reporting in for a routine quarterly meeting at the New Orleans immigration office, to be grabbed by INS agents, handcuffed, and hauled off for immediate deportation. Marcello was actually born in Tunisia, but Kennedy pretended that a forged birth certificate, once used by Marcello to obtain a Guatemalan passport, was real.
“Livarsi ‘na pietra di la scarpa!” Marcello blurted, his dark eyes bulging and bloodshot, his hand gripping the glass of Scotch so tight I thought it might crack. “Dat’s an old Sicilian saying, man.”
“Is it?”
“Ya wanna know what it mean, man?”
“Naw, that’s okay.”
“It mean, ‘Take the stone out of my shoe!’ Don’t you worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch. He gon’ be took care of.”
“You don’t want to do that, Carlos,” I said gently. “That could get you in one hell of a lot of trouble.”
But he wasn’t listening. His eyes weren’t bulging now, they were looking inward, and his mushy mouth let the words out softly.
“Dey jus’ snatch me, man, dem damn feds, dey grab my ass and don’ let me call home or nuttin’, don’t lemme get my fuckin’ toothbrush, man. Dat fuckin’ Bobby, he jus’ dump my ass in Guatemala City wid no money, no clothes, no nuttin’.”
We sat and drank. I took it easy, but he was putting it away. The more he drank, the more mush-mouthed his speech became, not surprisingly. The farmhouse was cool, window air conditioners going, but his forehead was sweat-beaded. When he got up to turn the Connie Francis record over, he seemed a little unsteady.
He sat back down hard and talked a little bit about Paul Fudala and the fun they’d had in the French Quarter as kids, getting laid young and often.
“All de boobies back den was big, and all de pussies was tight.”
Dose were da days.
He talked about legit business deals and repeated his plans for draining Churchill Farms and creating housing and commerce where snakes and alligators now thrived. Then he got up and put on Connie Francis—More Italian Favorites. She was singing “That’s Amore” when he brought up Bobby Kennedy again.
“You still got dat Bobby bastard fooled, Nate?”
“Not sure I follow, Carlos.”
“Back in dem racket committee days, when you was workin’ for Bobby? Little bastard never knew you was really workin’
for Jimmy, did he?”
That was Jimmy as in Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters president the McClellan Committee had been investigating; but actually Hoffa was the bastard I still had fooled. I’d been Robert Kennedy’s double agent—an old secret that could still get me newly killed.
Marcello leaned forward, gestured with his glass of Scotch, amber liquid sloshing around. The redness of his eyes was like Christopher Lee in a Dracula picture.
“Lemme tell ya somethin’, Nate. Dis Bobby done me and my family wrong. We went through two months of hell, me and Jackie.”
Like JFK, Carlos Marcello had a long-suffering wife named Jacqueline.
“Ah got my ass bounced aroun’ Guatemala like a fuckin’ rubber ball, man, stuck in dis jail, stuck in dat hotel. Den dey say dey is sendin’ me home, and dey drive me to da Honduras border and what da fuck, dey dump my ass again. Dis time ah got my lawyer wid me. Fuck lotta good he done, middle of de goddamn jungle wid mountains and shit all aroun’. We walk seventeen miles, Nate, we walk eight hours in de wilderness like some fucker in da Bible. An’ here ah is in a bidness suit and tie, hikin’ like a fuckin’ Boy Scout under de tropical sun. Ah pass out three times in de dirt, and one time ah look up and tell Mike, my lawyer, ah tell him, if ah don’t make it, you tell my brothers what dat goddamn rich-kid Bobby Kennedy done to me. Tell ’em to do what they got to do.”
I sipped Scotch.
Connie sang, “Return to Me.”
Quietly I said, “You can’t hit the attorney general of the United States, Carlos. You’re not in the jungle now.”
“Ah know dat,” he said, shrugged, and finished his latest glass. He poured some more. “Wouldn’t do no good, nohow. His brother Jack, dat bastard gonna hit us wid everything he got.”
“Right.”
“But ya know what dey say in Sicily, man.”
“I don’t know.”
“You wanna kill de dog, don’t cut off de tail, man, cut off de head.”
“What’s that mean, Carlos?” Though I thought I knew.
He frowned. “It mean de dog, he keep bitin’ you, you only cut off his tail. But you cut de damn dog’s head off, de whole damn dog gonna die … tail and all.”
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