by Al Zuckerman
Pirone had made the pilgrimage up to Riverdale in the cause of coming to an agreement with the importer, but the old bird had refused to yield an inch. Sally then could have had his own boys retire the stiffneck, except that Joe the Boss had forbade such a move—which worried Izzie. Iz had assigned Julie and a handful of Julie’s good-head muscles to keyhole Sally—just in case.
Which two weeks back had seemed like a wise precaution. Now it seemed dumb—idiotic.
The narrow tenement hallway only a block from the East Harlem shul where Izzie a few months before had stood under a wedding canopy was lit with at most a five watt bulb. So at first the apartment door with the B appeared no different from the others nearby. Waiting for an answer to the bell, Izzie let his tense fingers roam across the frame molding. Was he touching metal? He reached for Harry’s flashlight. Gevalt, this wasn’t just tin coating. Thick steel plate, such as armored Mr. Wexler’s Rolls, extended on both sides of the portal and up to the ceiling. The door itself, though painted the same brown as the neighbors’, also was steel. It could have come off a bank vault.
“Maybe,” Harry ventured, “he ain’t home.”
“He’s gotta be.” Izzie’s voice was husky with worry.
“Okay, but then how we gonna get him out, if he don’t answer?”
That simply to get to talk with Pitseleh the Mavin might be a tough proposition Izzie had not anticipated.
Iz, still sticky from the ocean salt, had changed into his clothes, while Kronsky had scorched the roads from Rockaway to West Street. Then Iz had hovered over the phone for three hours. Was Sally alive? And what about Julie? Where the hell was he? Those Arabs, what if they had him now too? Finally the phone rang. It was Wolfie, Julie’s bright boy. First chance he had to call, first time they’d stopped moving: Mr. Pirone had been taken out of the black-curtained Auburn, mouth taped up but still on his own two feet, and hustled into a diamond cutter’s on Canal Street with thick zoo bars all over the place.
So Belcastro was playing for the whole jam pot, putting the screws to Sal to get his hooks on the inventory of horse Pirone already had, plus the stuff he’d contracted ahead for. Which meant there was maybe a little bit of time to spring him. But how? That was when Iz had highballed it uptown for help from Pitseleh the Mavin—Tiny the Expert.
Barely five feet, with an elongated, oversized skull that came to a conelike point at the rear, and an almost matching nose in front, Pitseleh was an underworld enigma, a box blower more skilled with blasting tubes, bang juice, the acetylene torch, picks and hammers and every variety of tunneling tool than anyone in New York. For years he had not worked for or with anyone except Red Gussie, his giantess of a wife. It was she who went out into the market to replenish his jimmy bars, jigglers, nippers and other persuaders, she who met with fences and conducted all his nonprofessional affairs, wearing a profusely flowered or feathered bonnet over her raffia-coarse red hair.
Izzie’s one previous meeting with the man had been odd and unforgettable. The famous Pitseleh, Izzie had been amazed to discover, was a guest at his wedding. Looking out at the congregants while the bearded rabbi lauded the heaven-be-praised piety of Label Minkoff, father of the bride, Izzie was struck by the dome-shaped head of an undersized guest who sat all alone on an empty back pew. Afterwards when the women emerged from their curtained-off area, and Izzie saw the red-headed amazon crowned with a millinery extravaganza sail up to him, he suddenly knew these two had to be Pitseleh and Red Gussie, about whom for years he’d heard tales of stone heists, jug jobs, gold bullion capers. Later Izzie gleaned from his father-in-law that Mr. Shrageh Brick—Pitseleh’s real name—was honored in the congregation for his philanthropy. Were it not for the large-hearted Mr. Brick, the little shul would hardly have been able to afford a rabbi of their own. Brick, Minkoff related, dealt in burglar-catching contraptions for jewelers and banks, and not just small banks either. Good soul, he’d even installed such devices for congregation members who’d prospered, sold their pushcarts, and opened stores.
Izzie had found himself keeping an eye on The Mavin. Pitseleh and Gussie didn’t laugh or bend; a curious formality separated them from all the others; and Izzie sensed that of all those present he alone knew why—just as the Bricks were the only ones aware that this bridegroom was the conqueror of Vannie Higgins and the slaughterer of Little Nathan Beckstein. As people drifted off toward the whiskey and sponge cake, Izzie broke free to pay his respects to the celebrated pineapple maker. Pitseleh, his cavernous eyes two blank pools, smiled faintly, half extended his arm and shook Izzie’s hand, limply wished him mazel tov, a potful of silver and a houseful of sons, nodded and turned away, his huge wife not moving a muscle, totally stone-faced. The reknowned safecracker plainly had no wish for their relationship to extend beyond this chance encounter.
“Tell me, Mr. Hargett, do you piss water like the rest of us ordinary mortals, or only the purest of vegetable oil?”
“Such lusty words, Mrs. Brick. A delight—truly. They roll from your tongue like the Song Of Songs.”
“Feh. I’d sooner have a pig admire me.”
But beneath her raillery, he’d sensed a tremor of pleasure.
“Gusseleh, let me talk to him. I’m pleading with you—as with death.”
“A turd I’ll give you. So save your breath.”
“Honored lady, if I mean to offend you, my tongue—you cut it off.”
“My husband and me,” she grew shriller, “we work like horses, and we stink from our own sweat, not yours, and not some pork-loving Italianer’s.”
Izzie’s mind raced. She might hang up, and he had yet to get Pitseleh on the phone, let alone to Canal Street.
Minutes ago, stymied outside the armored door, Kayo had been for trying to blast it with the Chicago chopper. Harry was all for assing out. Izzie, though, had thought of the rabbi. He would have the safecracker’s hush-hush phone number.
“The rabbis tell us, Mrs. Brick,” he was inventing, “that sometimes a goy, despite the filth he eats, knows more of holiness than a Jew.”
He heard her chuckle.
“Seriously, Mrs. Brick, I’m not a tiny ant climbing a mountain. A whole month I don’t have. So what would you and the Mavin say to five big ones, plus naturally the damage for your materials?”
“Boychik, your tongue is so smooth, like it rolls on casters.”
Nasty. Or was it? He’d play innocent. “Thank you, cultured lady.”
“But what fills up your head,” she bellowed gleefully, “is plaster!”
If he could see her face to face, he’d have at least a feel. … “Honored lady—the truth. I’ll admit I was tempted to offer you more. But to a person of your—your spirituality, how much would that mean? Because what we are talking is bigger. High. Way higher than any amount of money. It’s dear—the most precious gift on God’s earth, a human life.”
He heard her laughing, cackling even.
“You?” her whole cow voice was outraged incredulity. “You, you head of filth, you tell me this?”
He fought down his urge to snarl and spoke gently. “Mrs. Brick, let’s never mind me. Just you listen. Rule number one—Thou shalt not kill. You hear? Thou. And if you and your mann refuse to open your door and reach your hands out to save a fellow creature, well, I won’t say, may a trolley car crack your bones. Only,”—and his tone grew tender and a bit wistful—“the Holy One, may He be with you.”
“Again,” the Mavin muttered.
“Dat what you want, boss?” Kayo, impatient, growled from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah.” Izzie, his gut aching, realized that he too had begun speaking in one word sentences—like The Mavin.
This would be the sixth time circling this farcockte block. What could those bottomless eyes of Pitseleh’s still be studying, searching for? Twice Iz could understand—three times even. But now? A hundred times, and it would still be the same blackened-with-grime granite facade: two wide, barred windows on the ground floor with the massive iron
door between them, and more latticed windows above. Nothing else. No fire escape, no alleyway, a closed-for-Sunday, locked-with-metal-grates retail jeweler flush up against one side and a similarly sealed-up pawn broker on the other. Izzie in the back seat corner, with Red Gussie planted between him and The Mavin like a thorny hedge, leaned forward. He needed to see the expert’s face, to reassure himself they weren’t just pissing away precious time. Brick, positioned outward toward the window, showed only his back. And every second Sally had to be hurting. Or worse.
Izzie couldn’t help wondering if he should still keep with this queer duck?
Just half an hour ago Iz had felt his heart lift up, watching Mrs. Brick emerge from the tenement proudly bearing those suitcases, one by one, three of them, strangely impressive, gray canvas with no corners or edges, and plainly very heavy. She’d kicked the goggle-eyed Kayo when he’d reached to give her a hand. “A black year befall you,” she yowled, “if you momzers even dare touch!” Caressingly she’d stowed each in the Packard’s trunk—soundlessly. They were obviously lined with something to keep them quiet as death.
The Mavin himself, treading silently, wearing shoes with double-thick rubber soles, moving his compact body with a suppleness the very opposite of his wife’s stiff majesty, carried nothing. His odd physiognomy was made the more odd by his dress: a dark silk scarf about his neck despite the late afternoon’s oppressive heat as well as white cotton gloves on his hands.
Uttering no greeting, no sound, he gave Izzie a long once-over, peering at the recent bridegroom as if he were some sort of bug in the older man’s soup. Gussie now pressed shut her lips. Her eyes hardly seemed to leave her near-midget husband, and she hung on his every breath as if he were her sole reason for living.
All the way downtown, Brick had hardly stirred, or spoken, or responded. “Nu. Aha. Slower. Again. Too early. Pass again,” were about as much as he’d said. He hadn’t joined his wife in her muttered curses at Izzie, but he hadn’t had to. Iz had sensed his seething hostility.
“The corner.”
Could it be—finally? Iz waited breathlessly for more. Nothing came. “Yeah, so?” he snapped.
“Stop the car,” Gussie interpreted. “Turn. Then there”—she leaned forward and pointed for Kayo’s benefit—“on the other side.”
“Okay by you, boss?”
“Yeah, do it.”
The big car smoothly swung around to the right into Mott Street and glided to a swift halt behind an empty pushcart.
The Mavin, apparently preparing to speak, moistened his lips, licking them, pressing them together.
Izzie felt he might burst. “Nu?” he flared.
Pitseleh was abstracted, reflective, oblivious to Izzie’s anger. “I don’t like too much, but. …”
“But what?” Izzie snarled. “Like what too much?”
Brick, staring straight ahead, nodding his head as if reciting a ritual prayer, droned on, “I seen a lotta tight wringers, believe you me, but this one, you need it like you need yourself a third head.” He bent forward and for the first time since they’d left Harlem he looked at Izzie. “Boychik, you sure you got to go ahead with this?”
“Mr. Brick,” Izzie answered quietly, but diamond-hard, “how you gonna help get my pal outta there?”
“This proposition, it’s strictly sudden death.”
“Come on already.”
“Gas.”
“How? What? Cooking gas?”
“Nah. Poison.”
A light and a maelstrom of questions at once flooded into Izzie’s head—and one harrowing fear. “What about—my friend?”
“Don’ worry. Sneeze gas. Twelve hours he’s sick. Then finished, over, one hunnert percent.”
He made it sound simple, which it couldn’t be. But possible—maybe. “How do we get the stuff in there?”
“First, the sewer.”
Crazy! “We bring in poison gas through a sewer pipe?”
“Nah. Down there by the sewer is the electric. We cut the electric.”
Crazier and crazier. “So how does that …?”
“No lights, they call the Edison Company, no? Only first we come. A smart muscle boy, inside his work satchel, we put the gas.”
Suddenly it seemed so beautiful and simple, except. … “That gas doesn’t knock our boy out too?”
“With a gas mask?”
Brick’s weird dome—Izzie shook his head admiringly—maybe did have the stuff in it. Poison gas—who else even knew where to get it, much less how to use it! But who was to be that muscle boy? Kayo? Harry? Julie? Julie’s three-man crew posted on rooftops across the street? Izzie raced the weaknesses and strengths of each of them through his mind. To play in this league—the roughest around—there was only one guy he could chance this one on. Himself.
“Boss, don’t.”
“You rather it should be you?”
Harry the Doctor hunched his shoulders in a half shrug. Though all but quaking with fright, he’d go, that was plain—if he was told.
“It ain’t worth it, boss.” Kayo swung around. Even the pea-brain gunsel was joining in, pleading, “This thing’s got more bugs than a nuthatch. It’s rigged against ya. So what good you doin Pirone, if they get hooks into you too?”
It had never happened, this kind of objecting to a decision of his—by Harry, much less Kronsky.
Izzie shot a glance at the Mavin, who just sucked his teeth, disapproving.
Izzie resumed rechecking the unfamiliar equipment. Best to ignore them, save his energy.
“You got a new bride.” Red Gussie’s tone was flat, as if her whole weight were sitting down hard on some inner strife.
Izzie, struggling to concentrate on the odd-shaped implements, the acetylene stuff, the gas mask, didn’t answer.
“You’ll end up lame as a Turk—if you live.”
“Enough,” he growled, “Quiet.”
“Your gorgeous Hanneleh, did you ever think maybe—a baby? Is your head full of turds?”
“Shut up!” he snapped. No talking of women, babies, now. …
She snorted, then eased her bulk back in the seat. “Go, snarl up your wits. You’ll come out with a back as crooked as your soul.”
Izzie pressed his moist forefinger against the doorbell button. No sound. Again. Not even a faint buzz. Shmuck, of course! How could that bell ring—since Pitseleh nipped the electric line with that arm-length rod cutter. Izzie felt as if his flesh were threaded by high-tension wires. He was sweating like a horse. Still his lips flickered in an ironic smile. The Mavin had instructed him endlessly, it had seemed, and in the most fastidious detail: how to spring open the carpenter box’s concealed compartment and slip out the canisters, how to unseal them to fan out the maximum gas in the quickest time, how to fit the gas mask snugly and keep the goggles from fogging. But that this cockamamie doorbell wouldn’t—couldn’t ring, that he hadn’t thought to mention. Iz banged its wrought iron with the smaller of his two steel tool cases. He waited.
A clanging-unbolting, a squealing-creaking, and a black sliver opened. A voice snarled, “Yeah?”
“New York Edison.”
The pickup truck parked at the curb was authentic, as was Iz’s dark green uniform, complete with visored cap and bow tie.
“Yeah, so?”
“You people didn’t call,” he asked as though perplexed at this less than immediate welcome, “about losing your electric power?”
“No.”
They might not have. Pitseleh had pointed that out as a possibility. But it was getting dusky. Sooner or later they would have to need some light, wouldn’t they?
“Sorry, Mister.” Iz curled his lips into a servilely apologetic smile. “The office musta got me fouled up. Or maybe I got the address mixed.” He leaned his head back and peered to the right at the adjacent building. “Maybe next door’s the one.” Sighing, he heaved up his cases and turned to descend the two-step stoop. This bluff was the one hope.
“Wait a second.”
“You alone?” the voice growled.
Slowly, feigning more bewilderment, Izzie swung his head around. “Hunh? Whadda ya mean?” Then he glanced back toward his truck’s empty cab as if to verify which of them might be nuts. “Say,” angry now, “you want your electric fixed, or dontcha?”
“Yeah, yeah. Come on in.” The black sliver widened.
Izzie hesitated, then shrugged—indicating he’d do it, but not so damn eagerly—and he stepped in.
Manaclelike hands suddenly pinioned his arms, legs, neck. In darkness he couldn’t see how many hands. Other hands prodded his chest, under his arms, between his legs.
“Hey,” he screeched. “What the hell is this?”
“Shut up, you,” a quiet, almost high-pitched voice ordered.
“Why?” he yelled back. “You can’t peel at me like I’m some kind of banana! You don’ want your lights fixed? Fine. Just lemme the hell outta here.”
“Whatja find?” the quiet voice, oblivious to Iz’s protests, inquired of his probers.
“Nuthin.”
“Looks pretty clean, Rash.”
“Check the tool case. Both them cases.”
Izzie, his eyes gradually grown accustomed to the hallway’s windowless gloom, now could pick out four men—a skinny one standing a bit apart, while three burlier shapes bustled about—two holding him, while the third jangled through the wrenches and pliers in the mechanics’ boxes.
“Nuthin here, Rash,” the crouching checker reported, “just tools.”
“What did you apes,” Iz whined sarcastically, “expect to find in there?”
Whaaaap!
The whole side of Iz’s face burned. But he smiled to himself. Now he could act cowed, totally terrified. They’d start to think they had him really crawling. They might give him some elbow room—not sit right on top every second. He began to feel almost gleeful. It could work.
“No more gettin wise, you.”
“Okay, Mister, okay,” he all but bleated. “You’re the boss. You’re the customer.”