La Donna Detroit

by Jon A. Jackson

  She shrugged. “There are usually problems, you know.”

  “Yeah. But not big problems.”

  “And then there is the question of deniability,” she observed. “A cowboy has to be told something. There has to be a plausible story. And if he’s caught, or implicated …” She let it hang.

  “Whereas,” she went on, filling in the blanks unnecessarily for both of them, “Joe Service is on his own. He knows why he’s there, more or less, and if caught, well, he’s a mobster, anyway.”

  “Who deals with the people on the plane?”

  “That was just a scenario,” she said. “A paradigm, if you will. But consider a new scenario. Say you knew when a couple of fellows were going to deliver, oh, fifty grand to another couple of fellows. The money is payment for some heroin, or cocaine, that would be delivered at the same time, somewhere else.”

  “Say a hundred thou,” Joe said, getting into the spirit of this game.

  “Why not?” she agreed. “But that’s not up to us. It could be more. But say we knew. The way it works, these guys meet in, say, a rest stop on an interstate highway. They have cell phones. Not very secure, but then they aren’t communicating anything implicatory. They call a number—the cell phone on the other end could be at a different rest area, or in a warehouse, a thousand miles away—and ask, ‘Okay?’ The other end says ‘Okay,’ the money changes hands, the narcotics change hands, everybody goes their own way.”

  “But I take the money, or the dope. Another agent takes the dope, or the money, depending how it works,” Joe said. “Any more scenarios? This is fun.”

  Dinah Schwind almost smiled. She looked at him with a kind of pleasantness, anyway. She had a couple more scenarios. Like the first two they involved interdicting criminal behavior in what could only be described as extralegal ways.

  “Do your bosses know?” Joe asked. That was a very important point, he felt. First of all, because it implied a kind of intervention that he didn’t believe could be authorized by any accountable government agency, and if it were, how many people in the agency would know about it, what would be the level of security?

  Schwind agreed that he had identified a key factor in the operation, assuming that it could be implemented. So far, she told him, only three people knew about it: herself and two of her colleagues, both of whom she could vouch for. They believed that operations like this could be mounted. They were all for it. They thought that authorization could be restricted to one more individual, but he wouldn’t want to know any details. They were planning to suggest it, but they wanted to know they had the right man in the active role. They had the intelligence for several such scenarios, and had every reason to believe that they would continue to obtain further intelligence. Some of the action they would carry out themselves, but most of the scenarios they envisioned required an unofficial agent, an extralegal operative. If he was interested they would move to the next step of authorization. If it turned out that authorization was not forthcoming, or if it required even another step, another level of official involvement, then they would drop the whole proposal as too unwieldy and that would be the end of it.

  “Nothing risked,” Joe said.

  She nodded.

  “What’s my end?”

  “You get out of here,” she said. “I can’t get Mulheisen off your back, but you’ll be outside those bars. And once you got into the prisoner population, of course, you’d be vulnerable to DiEbola and Echeverria.” She nodded toward the window.

  “How?” he asked. “You got paper? Or do I ‘escape’?” He’d meant it as a joke, but it seemed that her scheme wasn’t so different.

  “I think you’ve already got a plan,” she said. “We’d just see that nothing interfered with it. If we can.”

  “You mean … ?”

  “Deputy Kirk has financial problems,” she said. “I wouldn’t offer him too much. If he gets rich it might attract attention. But if he’s able to pay off some bills, that’s not unjust.”

  This wasn’t what Joe had hoped. Now he would be a fugitive. He’d thought that maybe she would at least get bail.

  “They’ll never give you bail,” she said, saving him the trouble of asking. “There are a lot of charges pending. You’re the world’s worst risk for bail. Lee Bailey couldn’t get bail for you.”

  Especially not now, Joe thought. Maybe Schwind couldn’t get him out, legally, but he had a feeling she could sure keep him in. But he said nothing. Or rather, he said: “I’ll talk to Kirk.”

  “Can you walk?” she asked. “Drive a car?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll talk to my guys.”

  After she left, Joe had a great new idea. How about if he just died? They could fake his death and somewhere between the hospital and the morgue he could be switched with another body. He was delighted with this scheme. He’d be free, not have to worry about Mulheisen, about the mob, about Echeverria and his gang. And he’d soon shake Agent Schwind. It was perfect. He was dying to get out!

  7

  Ex-Capo

  The secret plan, known only to Humphrey, was to get out. It was the one thing he couldn’t talk about. So he talked about everything else. Mainly, he talked about himself.

  Helen observed that he was an erudite man (she used the phrase “well read”) and yet he pretended to be not too bright. “I don’t mean it quite that way,” she said. “You don’t act stupid, but you have this kind of dumb manner, most of the time. But I know it’s just a facade.”

  “Nobody likes a brain,” Humphrey said. “People say ‘pointy-headed,’ or something like that. Crazy, ain’t it? Everybody wants to be smart, they don’t want to be dumb, theirselves, but they don’t like it if you’re too smart. Sure, I read books. I like to read, always did. But I never went to college, I never even graduated from high school. Nobody ever called me dumb, though. What it is, you gotta act like an ordinary guy, a little dumb, and I guess that reassures people—you ain’t too smart. But at the same time you gotta make sure that the people who need you, who rely on you, understand that you’re not really dumb, that maybe you’re pretty sharp.

  “Everybody does that, to a degree,” he went on. “You’re a woman, you know about that—women do it all the time. There’s some things you aren’t supposed to be a genius about. Guy things. You don’t know nothing about football, say. But you probably know quite a bit.”

  “I don’t know nothing about football,” Helen said, affecting a dull tone.

  “Okay,” he said, smiling, “so maybe it’s cars, or guns, or something else that you aren’t supposed to be interested in—because you’re a woman. Me, I’m in the business, as we say. I’m not supposed to know about books. That’s for pointy-headed intellectuals. But … I read. Machiavelli, for instance.”

  “Machiavelli,” she said, and sighed. “What is it with you and him?”

  The Machiavelli thing, he explained at length, came about for two reasons. He had noticed that people frequently invoked Machiavelli’s name, generally as a byword for deceit or cunning, but if one inquired more closely, they didn’t seem to know much, if anything, about him. He was supposed to be bad, almost the Devil himself, or a close associate. But few even knew when he had lived.

  “Oh, they heard of The Prince, maybe,” Humphrey said, “but that’s about it. When I was a kid I heard grown-ups talking about Machiavelli and I thought he was some Italian guy, somebody they knew. And later, I heard him used in that way so much, to me he was like the original Italian. And I had this thing for wanting to be Italian.”

  “You are Italian,” she said.

  “You’re Italian if your mama is Italian,” Humphrey said. “It’s like being a Jew. Everybody knows Sammy Davis Jr. is a Jew, but they also know he ain’t a real Jew. That’s the way it is with me. Everybody knows I’m Italian, but they know it like they know Machiavelli is Italian. Me, I don’t know. I never knew my old man … well, I knew him, but at the time I didn’t know he
was my old man. And now I’m not so sure, again.

  “My mother, I never knew her or even anything about her. I was raised by my ‘aunt’ Sophie, Carmine’s mother, except she wasn’t my real aunt, I think. She tried to be good to me, but she already had a kid—Carmine. I always understood that I was like a charity, or something. And Aunt Sophie would never talk about my mother. Nobody would ever say anything about her when I was a kid. Maybe they thought they were being kind. For a long time I dreamed she was an angel, or a kind of princess, like in a fairy tale.

  “When I got older, I was on the street. I was caught up in that. The Life. You know? It’s exciting. You learn something new three times a day. By then I didn’t want to hear anything about my folks. I didn’t want to think about them.

  “A little later, now I know a little bit, I’m a little calmer, but still so young. I’m your basic Detroit guy, you know? Tough guy, a cynic. If I thought about my mother at all, I thought she was probably a whore that my old man—by now, at least, I knew who he was, but he’s dead—that he knocked up and for some reason he got stuck with the kid and he managed to shuffle me off on Carmine’s old lady, Aunt Sophie, who was a sucker for this kind of stuff.

  “So I get a little older, not quite so dumb. I even went to Italy by now. Actually, I’d been once before, after the war, with Aunt Sophie and Uncle Dom, but I didn’t remember too much about it, I was just a kid. To me they were my real folks. When Uncle Dom died, as a favor to my stepmother, I took the body back to be buried. I also took a little trip to Eboli, to look up some relatives. It’s inland a little ways from Salerno, in Campania.”

  “Eboli?” Helen said. “What’s in Eboli?”

  “I was born a Gagliano but Aunt Sophie used to say my folks were from Eboli, so when I turned twenty-one I took the name DiEbola. Anyway, I had some time to kill. I was in no hurry to get back to Detroit.”

  “You were cooling off?” Helen said. “A little trouble?”

  “Well, I escorted Uncle Dom’s body, but yeah,” Humphrey said. “And I was looking up my roots, you know.”

  “I thought of going to the Old Country,” Helen said, “but I wasn’t sure where I would go.”

  “Well, your ma’s right here,” Humphrey said. “Didn’t you ever ask her?”

  “Mama likes to talk about her home,” Helen said. “You’ve heard her. When she was here the other day, she talked about Belgrade. But whenever I ask her about Papa, she just shrugs.”

  “Roman would know,” Humphrey said. “Ask him.”

  “Roman!” She laughed. “They don’t call him the Yak for nothing. Talk about playing dumb. He’s the original dummy.”

  “Yeah, Roman plays it close to the vest,” Humphrey said. “One of these days I’ll find out if he’s really so dumb. Well, anyway, I went to Eboli after I got Uncle Dom buried, but I didn’t find out anything. I don’t know what I expected, but over there, you ain’t Italian. To them, you’re American. I had a few names, people to look up, but they treat you funny. They’re suspicious, they don’t tell you shit. You sit around in some hotel, you don’t know the language, everything’s so strange. Finally I went to a church and talked to a priest. He laughed when I said my name was DiEbola. He knew it was made up. So I give him the old man’s name, Gagliano, thinking there maybe was a record of the marriage. He rolls his eyes, makes this little hand gesture to ward off the Devil. He said Gagliano was a village way over the mountains, in Lucania. A bad place, he said. ‘Don’t go there. They eat Christians,’ he said. He was half serious. ‘Bad people. They won’t tell you anything.’ Guys leave Gagliano, they take that name, sort of like I did with DiEbola. I gave up on it.”

  “So you never found your Italian connection,” Helen said.

  “No, and I never said nothing to Aunt Sophie. I think she meant well. It’s like my folks were hillbillies, or something, so it was better to say they were from a nice town like Eboli than from some shithole in the sticks like Gagliano, which I guess is why she’d encouraged me to change my name.

  “Anyway, I settled on Machiavelli. He was my Italian connection. Some people, they think Italian, if they don’t immediately think of DiMaggio or Sinatra, they think of Dante, or maybe da Vinci, somebody like that. But I started reading Machiavelli, and you know what? He wasn’t hard, at all. Right off the bat I understood what he was saying. And he didn’t bullshit. It all made sense to me.”

  Helen supposed a person could make that kind of indentification, but it seemed artificial. Still, if it worked for Humphrey … well, she guessed it worked for him.

  “Mac—I think of him as Mac, for short,” Humphrey said. “Mac talks about things like success, power, glory. Those are the big things. Success is survival, getting power, getting glory. The truth is, I never worried about glory much. Maybe it meant more in Mac’s time. To me it’s fame and notoriety. Today, everybody and anybody gets famous, at least for a little while. I don’t care about that. In the business, which I like to think is a little like Mac’s princedom, but after all, ain’t exactly like it … glory is not in the cards. You get known among the powerful, that’s the glory. I think I can claim a little of that.”

  “So, you are interested in glory after all,” Helen said slyly.

  “A little. But only a little. Power, though … that’s the number. I followed Mac as closely as I could in getting to power, but I never lost sight of the fact that I was operating in a different field than Borgia and them guys Mac talked about … although, there are plenty of comparisons.

  “Mac says that it’s better to be feared than loved,” he observed, thoughtfully. “People are fickle. When you’re good, when you treat everybody good, they love you. They’ll do anything for you, praise you, offer their children to you. But you can’t always be a sweetheart to everybody. Right? The minute you turn somebody down, you’re a bastard. So it’s better to be feared than loved, he says. You don’t go out of your way to piss people off, you treat ’em right, but when the deal comes down, you can’t think about how much they like you.”

  Helen wondered if it wasn’t a bit like being dumb and smart at the same time. Humphrey conceded the point. But he came back with the notion that sometimes, after an act of brutality, even just not being a hard-ass looks like kindness. That was from Mac, he said.

  “When I was just the Fat Man, it was no problem,” he said. “Carmine was the boss, but he never took the rap for the hard stuff—he said it was me.” He laughed. “He’d tell ’em, whoever was bitching, that he’d see what he could do, but it was the Fat Man who was grinding them. And when they came to me, I’d say, ‘See the man.’ And, of course, being a Fat Man … everybody likes a fat man, they think you aren’t tough. Only now, not only am I not fat, I don’t have no Fat Man to lay it off on.” He sighed and shook his head.

  “The main thing, though,” he observed, “is that Mac taught me that a man is what he makes of himself. You got governments, society, religion … none of it means shit, if you only got the guts to be your own man. And, of course, if you got the power.

  “Everything comes from power,” he said, after a moment’s thought. “Money, pleasure, and survival. Only, it looks like it’s easier to get, maybe, than to keep. Especially when you start getting on. That’s why I’m glad you’re here. I can use some help. Somebody has to run this business when I’m gone.”

  “You’re not getting on,” Helen hastened to assure him. “And I’m no Fat Man. Anyway, I don’t know anything about running the business, but if I can help …”

  “Forget the Fat Man stuff,” he said, smiling his amusement. “That was yesterday. Maybe you could be the Bitch. That would help. Then I could be the Fat Man, again. I’ll be the kindly old grampa.”

  “The Bitch!”

  “Hey, I’m joking,” he said. “But it’s a thought. You don’t have to be a bitch … some days I was the Evil Fat Man and the next day the Jolly Fat Man. What have you got goin’ for you? You’re smart, you’re young, educated, you look like a million bucks, and you
got connections from your old man—”

  “I’m not sure that’s a help,” she interjected.

  “It’s a help. It don’t matter what he did, how he screwed up. He was in the business. He was well known, and people liked him. The funny thing about something like that is, they don’t blame you for his screwups, they just notice that you were born into the business.”

  “But when it comes to power,” Helen observed, “they aren’t ever going to give a woman any real power in this business.”

  “That’s the tradition,” Humphrey agreed, “and it’ll probably go on that way for a long time, but that don’t mean there aren’t exceptions. You can be an exception. I was reading a while back about this Egyptian queen, Hashaput.”

  “You’ve been reading again, you cryptoscholar,” she teased. “Who is this? Hasha—?”

  “Hashaput, or Hatchep— Oh, I don’t know how they pronounce it. Maybe it’s Hotchapuss.” They both laughed.

  “Listen!” he said. “It’s you. I saw it right away. In something like three thousand years of pharaohs, there’s only one Hotchapuss. But she pulled it off. As far as anyone can tell she was a pretty good pharaoh. It’s a long shot, sure, but there oughtta be one. Your odds are better today, ’cause we’re in America. A woman’s got a much better shot today.”

  “Maybe it’s Hatchetpuss,” she joked. “She’s the Bitch. Hotchapuss is the Honey.”

  They bantered this way for a while, but eventually they turned to a serious analysis of the present situation. The way Humphrey saw it, the traditional mob business of the past was in serious decline. The mob had been successful in the U.S., maybe too successful. They had forgotten how they got here. But that was all right. Things inevitably change. The mob had gotten into legitimate business so thoroughly that legitimate business had taken on some of the characteristics of the mob. Maybe it was always so, he wasn’t confident of his economic history, no one was, really. There were a lot of theorists out there, but who was right?