The Angel of Montague Street

by Norman Green

  He woke up on the floor in his apartment over Henry’s garage, doubled over, retching, covered with sweat. It took a long minute for him to remember where he was. He rolled over on his back, looking at the ceiling, and he became conscious of faint scratching noises coming from the kitchen. Mouse, probably, getting an early breakfast. Bastard, he thought. Why couldn’t you wake me up five minutes ago?

  THERE WERE COP CARS parked on the sidewalk in front of Special Ed’s alley, and an ambulance was double-parked in the street nearby, back doors open, lights flashing. Silvano walked on by and went over to the St. Felix, stashed his pistol and ankle holster in the locker he kept there, and then he went back. By the time he got to the alley, someone had shut off the ambulance and killed the lights. A uniform stopped him halfway down the alley.

  “Where you think you’re going?”

  “Looking for a guy I know, lives in a room down in here.”

  The cop regarded him coldly. “Your friend got a name?”

  “Everybody calls him Special Ed.”

  “Cute. Was he a gimp?”

  Was? “Yeah.” Silvano got a cold feeling at the pit of his stomach.

  “Let me see some ID.” The cop took his driver’s license, walked him back out of the alley and deposited him in the backseat of a cruiser. No door handles on the inside, windows don’t roll down, nothing to do but wait. He leaned back, tried to relax, despite the circumstances. They didn’t leave him there long, though, not more than a half an hour. A cop wearing a brown suit and a green tie opened the door and let him out.

  “Sorry to make you wait, Mr. Iurata,” he said. “This your current address?”

  “Yeah, but I’m staying at the Montague for a couple weeks.”

  “What’s your business in Brooklyn, Mr. Iurata?”

  “I got family here. Haven’t seen them in a while.”

  “I see. The patrolman said you were looking for Special Ed?”

  “Yeah. He was a friend of my brother’s. My brother died last year.”

  “Sorry to hear it. You may as well come with me, see if you recognize the guy. You ain’t got a queasy stomach, do you?”

  SPECIAL ED WAS EVEN UGLIER in death than he had been in life. Both of his eyes were open, and he lay in a pool of blood on the concrete floor of his room, his baseball bat on the floor beside him. He had a dinner fork gripped in one hand. He’d been worked over with the bat, whoever had done it had finished him off with a blow to the head, there was a groove in his skull matching the shape of the bat. Ed’s face was frozen in two of his favorite expressions, resentment and outrage.

  “Aaah, Jesus Christ.” Silvano flashed on the dream, the butchered children, the teacher with her throat cut. We died because you had to come here.

  “Hey.” The cop was tapping him on the shoulder. “Hey! This your guy?”

  “Yeah, sorry. Yeah, this is him. I don’t know his real name. Special Ed, that’s what they called him.”

  “All right. Come back outside.”

  They had a short conversation back out in the alley. The detective took a few notes, but the answers Silvano gave him were probably not much help. “No,” Silvano was saying, “he wasn’t into dope, not that I knew of. He’d take a drink. You see what the guy was. All he wanted to do was stay out of trouble.”

  “A worthwhile goal,” the detective said.

  This doesn’t look like Antonio’s doing, Silvano thought. Even if the old buzzard had some reason for it, Silvano couldn’t picture him working on Special Ed with a bat. He’d put a bullet in the man’s skull, if he needed to, but he wouldn’t make a mess like that out of someone already as fucked up as Ed had been. It would have offended his sense of fairness. “Far as I know, he just wanted to be left alone.”

  “Didn’t work out that way. You said you got relatives here local?”

  “Yeah. My sister.”

  “Gimme the number.” The cop put him back into the cruiser while he made the call, came back and let him out ten minutes later. “You’re free to go, Mr. Iurata,” he said, his face a total blank.

  SILVANO DECIDED TO LEAVE the gun in the locker; New York City cops had definite attitude problems when it came to unlicensed firearms. Made him uncomfortable, though, given the events of the last few days. Special Ed had not died easy.

  He walked past the St. Felix. A dark blue Plymouth Fury that had been parked in the no-standing zone in front of the hotel followed him up the street. He began to feel naked, thinking about the Beretta sitting in the locker back in the St. Felix, not a hundred and fifty feet away. He didn’t turn to look at the car, but whoever was driving it was not being careful. The hell with this, he thought, and he stopped on the next corner and turned to look. It was Roland behind the wheel, the driver from Black and White, and he was dressed in street clothes. The car drifted up to him and pulled in at the curb. Roland leaned over and unlocked the door. It was the car that bothered Silvano, though, and it took him another minute to figure out why: it was the same car the feebies had arrived in yesterday morning. He sighed, not sure whether to be irritated or relieved, opened the passenger door, and got in.

  “You know, I had a feeling, when I met you.”

  “Do I still call you Roland?”

  “Why not. I gotta tell you, man, you got a gift for stirring up shit. I worked on this case for a year and a half, this was the one was gonna make my career, and you had to come along and fuck it up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Goddammit, you know what I’m talking about. I had a major organized crime bust about to go down, and now all I got is two dead guys and one old guinea cocksucker, maybe, if we can find him, for attempted extortion.”

  “You with the feebs?”

  “What did you do, eat stupid flakes for breakfast? What were you doing down at Black and White?”

  “Damn, I thought all the brothers on J. Edgar’s payroll worked in the dining room. Who are the dead guys?”

  “Most of them do. One guy is a soldier named Ivan Bonifacio.”

  “Fuck!” Silvano gritted his teeth. “What happened to him?”

  Roland shrugged. “Pissed off the wrong man. They found him behind the wheel of his car, early this morning, couple bullets in him. It’s usually a message, you know, when they do that.”

  “Damn.” Could it have been Antonio? But the old man did work fast.

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “Maybe I am. Who’s the other guy?”

  “You ain’t heard?”

  Silvano shook his head. “Heard what?”

  Roland eyed him speculatively. “Guess it don’t much matter now, I can’t see what difference telling you makes. Joseph O’Brian fell asleep behind the wheel of his car last night. Trouble was, the engine was running and the garage door was closed.”

  Silvano shook his head. “He leave a note?”

  Roland thought about it. “Yeah. But first I gotta know what you were after. I know you ain’t no motherfucking carpenter, so if you don’t want me holding your ass as a material witness for the next six months, baby, you better start talking.”

  Silvano still had Noonie’s picture in his shirt pocket. He pulled it out, handed it to Roland. “You were lying, when I asked you about him. Right?”

  Roland’s shoulders sagged when he looked at the picture. He shook his head. “Shit. Who was he to you?”

  “My brother.”

  Roland slumped behind the wheel, looking out the window, not at the picture in his hand. “Sorry,” he said, handing the picture back.

  “Sorry don’t cut it.”

  “I know. We had that guy Bonifacio dead to rights for doing your brother. Powers that be figured there was no hurry on it, we could pick him up for that any time. See, this thing running at Black and White is conspiracy, and we wanted to go further up the ladder than Bonifacio. There had to be some heavier players than him in on this.”

  “Just one. That’s why they whacked him, him and his buddy were doing this on their
own.”

  Roland regarded him with suspicion. “Who was the other guy?”

  “What was in the note? And what do you know about my brother?”

  Roland scowled at him, dropped the gearshift lever into drive and jerked the car away from the curb. “This is the kind of shit keeps knocking me back down the ladder,” he said.

  “You’re in the wrong agency,” Silvano told him. “You wanna play with the big dogs, I can give you a name. Guy I know in Defense. You’re never gonna look enough like a Boy Scout to make it with the feebs, anyhow. What was in the note?”

  “Note was to his priest,” Roland said, a sour expression on his face. “Asking for absolution. Apparently, O’Brian thought he was gonna get off the hook, but last night some guy named Victor paid him a visit. Told him the original deal was still on, except the names had been changed. O’Brian said it was more than he could take.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Roland blipped the siren a few times and swung out around the cars waiting for the light on the corner of Atlantic, swung left and headed east.

  “You have any idea who Victor is?”

  “Muscle. Works for Antonio Malatesta, same guy Bonifacio used to work for. You might be able to put him away for a while, but you won’t get anything out of him. Victor is old school. Anything else in the note?”

  Roland glanced over at him. “As in, where’s the money? No, but don’t worry, we’ll find it. So they whacked Bonifacio for freelancing, who was his buddy? Who was he working with?”

  Fair enough, Silvano thought, and maybe a bargain at that . . . They turned south on Flatbush. “Domenic Scalia, alias Little Dom. Where we going?”

  “Heard the name,” Roland said. “We’re going to the beach. I hear white boys love the beach.” He looked over at Silvano. “You know how to keep your mouth shut, I’ll show you what I know about your brother.”

  Silvano sat with that for a couple of minutes. “You want Scalia,” he said finally, “you’re going to have to move your ass. I would guess, same guys did Bonifacio are looking for him right now.”

  Roland picked up the radio mike from its hook on the dashboard, reconsidered, put it back. “Fuck it,” he said. “Let them have him.”

  “You wouldn’t prosecute anyhow,” Silvano told him. “You guys would kiss his ass to get at the stuff he knows.”

  Roland perked up. “That right? You telling me this isn’t a total loss after all?”

  “Maybe not.”

  Brooklyn stretches a long way from what most people think about as “the city,” by which they mean the southern half of Manhattan. The subway ride from “the city” to the neighborhoods along Brooklyn’s southern shore can be murderous. During rush hour you are crushed among the herd for a trip that seems interminable, and at other times, trains that go to Starrett City or Sheepshead Bay come along about as often as an ice age. And yet, there is little empty space in those places, they are filled to bursting. Silvano looked out the passenger side window as Roland blipped the siren and bulled his way through traffic. What do they think when they get here, he wondered, those lucky souls who survive the trip from China or Haiti or Eastern Europe, do they think it’s worth their sacrifice? Every block, every square yard is filled with people fighting to hang on to their piece of the dream, fighting to keep their places in line. And still, the rest of the world overflows with malcontents who want to come and live here, in every foreign port he had seen he’d met them, dreamers blind to the costs of Paradise. If Brooklyn pushed another ten miles out into the Atlantic Ocean tonight, we would fill it up tomorrow.

  He looked over at Roland. “Gimme a clue.”

  Roland glanced at him. “Rockaway.”

  “Brooklyn-by-the-Sea.”

  That got a short laugh. “God’s country.”

  Silvano looked back out his window. Why isn’t it? he wondered.

  There is a green ribbon of grass and trees near the Belt Parkway, the highway that runs along Brooklyn’s southern shore. They emerged from the traffic and rode across the overpass, and then, south of the highway, they came to the overgrown runways and boarded-up buildings of Floyd Bennett Field.

  “You serious, you really know a guy in DIA?”

  “Always looking for talent, and they love poaching on J. Edgar.”

  Roland pulled into a marina parking lot across the street from the southern extremity of Floyd Bennett Field. He got out of the car, waited for Silvano to do likewise.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing at the chain-link fence that surrounded the unused airfield. “Follow the fence line down to the water. You’ll come to an old wooden lobster boat beached on the inlet. Bonifacio buried your brother right next to the boat.”

  “You bastards knew all about this?”

  Roland grimaced. “We were gonna get to it, I told you.” He looked at his watch. “Get going,” he said. “I’ll give you half an hour.”

  “You gonna wait here?”

  “I’m gonna go over to that pay phone over there and have a private conversation about a certain Domenic Scalia, who I heard about from an unnamed source.”

  HE FELT THE WEIGHT of every incident he’d survived, every year he’d lived. He crossed the road and followed the path along the fence. The path stuck to the high ground, up near the fence, out of the mud. About a hundred and fifty yards in, the fence turned left, away from the water, toward the city. He stood there at the corner and looked at it, two widely separated clumps of tall buildings looking small and insignificant on the far side of the low rubble of Queens. The southern group of buildings was dominated by the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The northern group was midtown, more uniform, but he could pick out the pointed spires of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. In the near distance a jet roared down the runway at Kennedy and clawed its way through the brownish haze at ground level up into the dirty blue. This city needs wind, he thought. No wind and she’d choke.

  He turned his back on the city and looked at the narrow trail leading down through tall reeds and clumps of spartina grass. Leave it alone, he thought, God, why do I have to go look at this? What the hell difference does it make? But after a minute, he went off down the trail to where the vegetation petered out.

  He stood on the muddy bank of Rockaway Inlet. On the far side of the inlet stood the narrow sand bar known as Far Rockaway. The neighborhoods there still look like Brooklyn, for the most part, but blue water calls to you from between the buildings, and you can catch the faint smell of the ocean, just a hint of clean salt air over the stale, twice-breathed smell of the city.

  To his left, a hundred feet away, the rotting wooden hull of a fishing boat was mired in the marsh. The sun’s fractured reflection winked off the incoming tide moving sluggishly up the inlet into the vast uninhabited marsh. A pair of snowy egrets worked the margins of the shore, stepping delicately through the shallows on spindly legs, long beaks and sharp eyes, white feathers, instinct and reflexes. A blue heron, taller, darker, uglier, stood motionless on the far side watching him through an eye that comprehended neither love nor mercy. Why would you guys come here, he wondered, thinking of the birds, wishing he could ask and they answer, why come here, why not fly down to the Chesapeake, or stay up in Labrador, where men never go? Then again, maybe the city had cast her spell on them, too. Maybe they liked the view.

  It was just avoidance, he knew it, just a way to keep from thinking about Noonie sleeping out in the lee of that wooden boat, with no one to visit him but fiddler crabs. I’m sorry, Noonie, he wanted to say it but the words caught in his throat, I’m sorry, not just for this but for the whole stinking trip, sorry for whatever happened to you being born, sorry for the fights, sorry for the doctors, the institutions, sorry for the Thorazine, sorry I had to go, run away, and leave you to fend for yourself.

  Not that Noonie would give a shit. He’d never had much capacity for sorrow and none for introspection, if he were standing, alive, next to Silvano he would have taken a pure, unalloyed joy
in the moment, he would have reveled in the sight, the water, the wading birds, the jets, the mud, the laughing gulls wheeling overhead, fighting over some scrap of food one of them had found. The Buddhists had a saying, Silvano had heard it years before and it stuck in his mind. The words came to him now: joyful participation in the sorrows of life. He himself had never managed it, he had participated, all right, he’d waded in up to his ears, but he’d done it in anger or in fear or in lust, never in joy. He would never have known such a thing to be possible, would have dismissed the whole idea as another example of soft-brained uncritical religious thinking, had he not grown up watching Noonie do it. He might never have been able to explain it to you, but, baby, he had lived it.

  Whassamatter, Sil, that’s what Noonie would say if he were standing here, whassamatter, Sil, why ya cryin’? He would tug on your arm, you okay? Can we go swimmin’? Is that water too cold for swimmin’? He’d feel sorry for me and I’d feel sorry for him, both of us would stand here thinking the other guy had gotten a raw deal.

  The blue heron spread his wings and leaped into the air, transformed by the act of flight into a creature of grace and beauty, a being of wonder and light. He soared farther up the marsh, seeking, perhaps, some more inaccessible shoreline unspoiled by ruined wooden boats or grieving men. You sorry motherfucker, he thought, you couldn’t do anything for him when he was alive and you can’t do anything for him now, he’s gone on ahead, and who knows if you’ll ever see him again. I can’t even get the guy for you, Noonie, he thought, some other son of a bitch beat me to it. Noonie wouldn’t care about that, either, he’d never liked fighting, never liked being mad. He had always been ready to forgive you, forget what you’d done to him.