The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  “Hey,” Bronson said, shaking a new cigarette out of the pack and sticking it in his mouth. “Hey, it’s you. You find out anything?” He flicked his Zippo lighter twice, three times, but it refused to light. There was a small glass jar on the counter, filled with books of matches bearing the hotel’s name. Silvano took one out and lit a match, held it out steady, and let Bronson navigate the dancing end of the butt into the flame. “Thanks,” he said, sucking hungrily.

  “Yeah,” Silvano said, flicking the match at him. “Found out you ratted on me.”

  “Wha . . .” Bronson took a step back, but there was nowhere for him to go. “Who said . . . I never—”

  “Shut up. Don’t make it worse, okay? I know you did it. It’s okay, I can understand it, it was just business. You didn’t know me, right? But now you do, and I know you. From now on, you don’t see nothin’, you don’t know nothin’, you can’t remember what I look like. You got that?”

  Bronson blew out a big cloud of smoke. “All right,” he said. Even his voice was shaking. “All right, listen, I . . .”

  Silvano shook his head. “I don’t wanna hear it. I told you I understand the first one. Do it again, though, and I’ll break one of your knees. Maybe both. Guy as fucked up as you, you’ll never heal right. You won’t be able to work anymore, you’re lucky, you’ll wind up in a wheelchair in some stinking roach palace like this, hanging out in the lobby, wondering what happened.”

  Bronson held up both shaking hands like he was being robbed. “Hey,” he said. “I don’t see nothing. I just went blind.”

  Silvano shot him in the chest with his finger, turned, and left.

  THE DOG CAME NOISELESSLY out of the bushes and stuck his nose into Silvano’s hand. “I’m sorry, I forgot about you,” Silvano whispered to the dog. “Next time I’ll bring you something. I promise.” The dog licked his palm. He forgives you, he thought. How about that.

  He pushed Henry’s door open. It’s so late, he thought, that it’s early. He decided that there was no point in going to bed just to sleep for two hours and then have to get up and go to work down at Black and White. He let himself in as quietly as he could and felt his way into Henry’s kitchen. He sat at the table there in the darkness, listening as the old building seemed to talk to him, creaking and groaning in the night. His imagination peopled the empty kitchen with ghosts out of his past, and risen to haunt him, they complained to him of the unfairness of it all. He shook his head, trying to wake himself up, drive them all away. Keep your head where your ass is, he told himself. The past is the worst neighborhood around.

  Where does Henry keep his coffee? he wondered, and he got up and went looking. The old coffeemaker was there on the stove. In the dark, it was hard to tell if it was clean or not. He decided it didn’t much matter, the thing was empty, at least. He tried to remember how Henry had made coffee with it. Oh, forget it, he told himself. How hard could this be? Water in the bottom, coffee in the top. He found the coffee can on the counter, loaded the thing, set it on the stove and lit a fire under it. A few minutes later it began to boil, filling the kitchen with its comforting smell. He got up and went to look at it. It seemed dangerously close to boiling over, so he turned the heat down partway. He waited a minute longer and then shut the burner off, went back to sit down while the thing resolved itself into separate chambers of coffee and spent grounds.

  Despite his intention to remain where he was, his mind went back, back to the house in Bensonhurst where he’d grown up, empty rooms, black-and-white television sitting on a wooden box, mattresses on the floor. He didn’t know how the old man had gotten the place, had to have been a score of some kind. It was inconceivable that the old bastard would have purchased it, sat down and applied for a mortgage, filling out paperwork like a regular person. Had to have been a scam. They had lived in it without furniture for what had seemed like an eternity, because nobody hijacked furniture trucks except by mistake, there was no money in it, and the stuff was hard to move, in more ways than one. Too much like work.

  Henry must have smelled the coffee too, Silvano heard him rustling around somewhere in the dark recesses of the building, and a few minutes later he came wandering into the kitchen in his boxer shorts, thin white bony sticks holding him up, long white hair still unbraided, hanging down all crazy in the back.

  “Damn,” Silvano said. “You look like who did it and ran.”

  Henry drew himself up, insulted. “Least I come home last night, went to bed when it got dark, like a human being. Didn’t stay out half the night howling at the moon with the werewolves.”

  Silvano wrapped his hand around his cup, relishing the warmth. “Wasn’t howling,” he said. “I had business.”

  “Yeah?” Henry fished his cup out of the sink and poured coffee into it. “You find out anything?”

  “Hard to say. I went looking for this guy, supposed to be a friend of my brother, but I didn’t find him.”

  “Son, you make a rugged cup of coffee. What was his name?”

  “Special Ed. There was one other guy, they called him the Dutchman. He’s supposed to be dead.”

  “Hmmmph.” Henry sounded disgusted. “I don’t know no Special Ed, but the Dutchman was a guy name of Lenny Deutch. He was the kinda person would steal your wallet and then help you look for it. Every time you run into him, the sonuvabitch is looking you over, trying to see what you got, wants to know where you got it. Dirt bag. Always claimed to be connected, but I never believed him.”

  “Terrific. And you never heard of anybody named Special Ed? Guy’s a dwarf. Lives up off Middagh Street. Pushes a shopping cart around. Might be your competition.”

  “I got no competition.” Henry scratched his chin. “Walks all crooked, hangs on to the cart to keep from falling over?”

  “Sounds like him.”

  “I seen him around, but I don’t know the guy. I hope he ain’t like Lenny Deutch. I think I did hear that Deutch was dead. Last time I saw him, he was blowing smoke out of his ass about some big score he had lined up.” Henry shook his head. “I don’t mean to talk vulgar, but I never liked the guy. He was too stupid to pull off anything big, anyhow. He was the kinda guy, he’d break into your place to rob you, right, but he’d be so drunk he’d fall asleep on your living room sofa with your television in his lap. I figure, whatever he thought he had lined up, it blew up in his face.”

  “World is full of ’em, isn’t it.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said sourly. “And more coming, every day.”

  “I MIGHT HAVE a line on your guy.”

  Domenic stared at Ivan. “What the fuck does that mean? Might? You might have a line? Exactly what is it you think you got?”

  Ivan lit up a cigarette, rolled the driver’s side window of his car halfway down. “The other night,” he said, “after you left, Antonio grilled me pretty good. I think he’s starting to wonder about you. I don’t like that.” He looked pointedly at Domenic. “When he wonders about you, he starts wondering about me.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .”

  “He thinks you’re losing it.”

  Domenic stared up at the ceiling of the car. “You know, I worry about the same thing myself.” It was true, of late, he often wondered if he wasn’t slipping, if some misplaced or malformed protein in his brain might not be altering his consciousness, or if some essential but as yet undiscovered or misunderstood nutrient might not be absent from his diet, thus causing him gradually to lose his mind. Or maybe it was some flaw in the basic design, maybe the old superstitions were right after all, maybe God was amused by insanity, maybe He dreamed up the whole mess just to alleviate His own boredom. Or maybe it was just Time, lapping on the rocks of his being, eroding the civilized superfluities, leaving behind only the primitive skeleton of fear, rage, and the will to survive. “You fucking guys are driving me crazy. You’re not gonna be happy until you see me chained to the fucking wall someplace, talking to myself. Forget Antonio, how many times do I have to tell you that? He’s a hun
dred years old, for Christ’s sake. Tell me what you got on Iurata.”

  Ivan took a deep drag on the cigarette. “It’s easy for you to tell me to forget Antonio, you hardly ever see him. I got him up my ass all day long, and I’m telling you, he’s starting to suspect something. I think he might have heard something.”

  Domenic’s arm flashed out, and he whacked Ivan on the back of the skull with his open hand. “Yeah, from who? If I keep my mouth shut, and you keep your mouth shut, who the fuck else is there? Nobody, that’s who. Nobody but you and me knows shit about this. To Antonio and the rest of them, Black and White ain’t nothing but some ten-cent armored car company across the street from one of his grocery stores. Antonio’s probably picked up on you and your case of the fucking shakes. All you gotta do is keep your trap shut, you hear me? Quit worrying. Tell me what you got on Iurata.”

  “Yeah, you wanna hear what I got? I got a fucking speech from the old man, that’s one thing I fucking got. He told me to make sure you stayed out of this. I think he wants to use this thing to find out if I’m in your back pocket. If he even knew that I was sitting here having this conversation with you . . .” He looked around, checked his rearview mirror reflexively. “It wouldn’t even matter what we said, all right, we could be talking about pussy, okay, but you and me, in this fucking car, that would be enough for him. He would put me in the fucking ground, you understand? You know what he told those Jamaicans the other night? He told them he don’t always learn from his mistakes, but he does always bury them.”

  “So what are you telling me? You’re telling me you’re gonna do Silvano without me, and then we’re both gonna walk away from Black and White and leave all that money sitting there, after all the time we put in setting this thing up. Is that what you’re telling me? Because of Antonio? You’re telling me your balls have shriveled up to the size of fucking raisins, is that what you’re fucking telling me?”

  “Dom, this is not what I wanted.”

  Domenic was laughing in disgust. “Not what you wanted? Not what you wanted?” He slid over next to Ivan on the seat. “You listen to me,” he said, lowering his voice. “The day you brought Black and White to me, you sold out. You understand? You sold Antonio down the fucking river. Now, there is no fucking way to back out of this without taking a bullet in the fucking head. Do you hear what I’m telling you? We do this right, we both walk away from Brooklyn with everything. Do you even know what that means? That’s what it comes down to. Those are your only two choices, you can take two rounds in the skull or you can have the whole fucking world. There’s no third option. Now, we both know you’re smart enough, and we both know you’ve got the fucking opportunity. Here’s what I want to know: Do you have the fucking balls?”

  Ivan stared straight ahead, out through his windshield. “You don’t need to worry about me. I just want to keep him off my back until the time comes.”

  Domenic slid back over to his side again. “Fine,” he said. “You grab Iurata, make Antonio happy. Just don’t kill him. I’ll stay away until you’ve got him. Now tell me what you got.”

  Ivan looked at him for a long count. “All right,” he said, finally.

  DOMENIC STOOD ON the sidewalk and watched the car pull away and turn the corner. Ivan would not be human if he didn’t have second thoughts, he told himself. It’s always easier to get into shit than it is to get out of it. Hell, if he had only known how things would work out, he’d have walked away when his grandfather died, shit, man, he would have run. Gina was right, he hated to admit it, but she’d been right on the money. He just wished she hadn’t shoved it down his throat, but that’s when you sold out, he told himself, back when you took the easy way out, when you took the money, when you turned your back on what you really wanted. Now your obligations keep pushing all the good things in life back just out of reach. Give yourself the same speech, he thought, the one you just gave Ivan. You can pull this off, you can get Iurata, and you can suck the money out of Black and White. If you have the balls, you can walk away from here with enough money to do whatever you want. He turned and walked down the sidewalk. Better days coming, he told himself. Iurata first, then Black and White.

  SIX

  “WE OUGHTA HAVE A GUN.”

  I got one, Silvano thought, feeling lucky that no one had made him for it. Thank God for bell bottoms, this would never fly with those peg leg jeans he’d grown up wearing, and still, the gun made a bigger bulge under his pant leg than he wanted it to. It was not the kind of gun the carpenter was talking about.

  “A nailer,” the guy continued. “You know, pneumatic. We’d be done in no time.” They were installing subflooring made of four-by-eight sheets of compressed wood shavings and glue. They’d spent the first two hours laying it out, cutting and fitting pieces to fit the odd shapes of the room, securing each one with two or three nails, and now it was time to finish the job. “You want the nails on a six-inch square.” The guy was on his knees with a nail bag around his waist and a heavy framer’s hammer in his hand, and he kept up a steady rhythm with the hammer while he talked. He hit each nail three times, no more, no less, one whack to set the nail in place, one to drive it most of the way in, one to send it home. Silvano watched his hands, particularly the left one. The guy had a handful of flooring nails in it, and he would finger out the nails one at a time, spin the pointed end down, and position the nail on the wood, all without looking, without varying the steady pace of the hammer unless he had to shift to a new spot or grab another handful of nails.

  “Damn,” Silvano said. “I feel like I oughta just stay the hell out of your way.”

  “Ain’t nothing to it. Why don’t you start over there in the closet. You gotta go slower in the closet, anyhow. On six-inch squares. Get it?”

  “Yeah,” Silvano said. “I get it.” His mind had been occupied with fruitless speculations about Noonie, Special Ed, and the Dutchman. He found now, however, that he needed to concentrate, because whenever his mind wandered, he would hit his left hand with the hammer.

  “Ow! Shit!”

  The carpenter got up and came over to watch. “Don’t choke up on the hammer,” he said, looking over Silvano’s shoulder. “Hold it down at the end. Yeah, like that. Okay, now just tap the nail in so that it’s set in place. Now move your hand out the way. Okay, now hit the fucking thing, no, don’t look at the hammer, keep your eye on the head of the nail, and just whack it. There you go, that’s better. Don’t try to kill it, just let the hammer drive the nail. Yeah, there. That’s more like it.”

  He improved, somewhat, with practice. After a couple more whacks on his left hand, he managed to put all thoughts about Noonie, Special Ed, and the rest of it out of his mind and did what the guy told him, set the nail, feel for the next one as you watch the nail head, swing the hammer three or four more times, put the next one into position, and after a while he found his head as empty as the room, nothing in it but the nailing.

  Some time later Silvano noticed Lee standing in the doorway of the room they were working in, watching the two of them. Lee took up most of the space in the doorway. Silvano, figuring his attention was now compromised, did not want to hit his hand in front of the foreman, so he stopped what he was doing and turned to look. “Hey,” he said.

  “You know,” Lee said, “we could avoid all these interruptions from next door, we might actually be able to make a carpenter out of you.”

  Silvano shrugged. “Tell them I don’t want to do it.”

  Lee shook his head. “Black and White is a nice account,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “Nice, nice. We get time and materials for every man-hour on this job, including whatever time you spend helping Sean. I want the O’Brians to have a warm fuzzy feeling whenever they think of us. The little turd’s got some errand to run, says he needs a hand.” He looked at Silvano. “You don’t mind, being a gofer?”

  Silvano laid his hammer on the floor and stood up. “Pay’s the same,” he said. “Why would I care?”

  SEAN O’
BRIAN STOOD in the middle of the floor, distracted. “Thanks, Lee,” he said, his mind obviously elsewhere. “Uhh . . .”

  “Silvano.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Silvano. Why don’t you have a seat somewhere, I got to get a check for my uncle.” He turned, headed for his uncle’s office, stopped by Elia’s desk. “God, I hate this.”

  She did not look up from what she was doing. “Well, he’s only your uncle, Sean, he doesn’t own you. You can leave if you want to.”

  “Easy for you to say,” he said, walking away. “It isn’t that simple.”

  When the door to Joseph O’Brian’s office closed, she looked up at Silvano and smiled. “Hey,” she said. She pointed at the chair next to her desk. “Come, sit. You miss me?”

  He complied. “Oh, man, you better believe it. I been thinking about you all day.”

  “Good,” she said. “When am I going to see you again?”

  “Watch for me,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you.”

  She reached out, brushed his hand with her fingertips. “Little Domenic didn’t find you yet.”

  “No,” he said. “Everything okay in here?”

  “Well . . .” She shrugged. “Mr. O’Brian has been helping the Brothers of the Immaculate Reception.” She smiled again. “It’s some old empty seminary, way down the other end of Brooklyn. The fathers there have some sort of reconstruction going on, and Mr. O’Brian is working with them.”

  “O’Brian know anything about construction?”

  “What he knows about is money. How to get it, how to keep it, how to squeeze it out of your suppliers, how to spend it. He says people don’t know how to spend money. They do it, but they don’t do it right. That’s what he says.”

  “He might be right about that. Is that what he’s doing? Helping the fathers spend their money?”