by Al Zuckerman
Leo’s mind raced. Could Scott be induced to give up Linda? The boy would struggle, but ultimately he’d understand, let himself be guided. But might Hargett in some way retaliate? Leo felt dizzy, drowning.
“Does Scott know?” he squeaked out.
“Yes.”
“He’s not—involved in this, is he?”
“I’m not going to let him be.”
She spoke as if Linda didn’t exist. Or Izzie.
“Careful, Naomi. Think before we make a big mistake.”
“You ought to be ashamed.” She brimmed with scorn.
Suddenly she was marching over to Izzie.
Frantic, he had to half-run to catch up. “Naomi,” he strove to keep to a whisper, “not now, not when you still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I want you to know the whole thing is over,” she snapped to Hargett, ignoring her husband.
Iz didn’t move a muscle.
“I’m talking about Scott and your daughter,” Naomi railed, “this engagement.”
“Wha’d you say, Mom?” Scott, puzzled, had joined them now, and Linda was a few steps behind.
“You cannot marry into that family,” Naomi snapped. “So rather than shilly-shally, it really is best we have it out, and right now.”
Linda’s jaw sagged. Her eyes became glassy.
Iz turned to his daughter and said very quietly, “I can have this woman be quiet, and she will be. But it’s better you find out now what you’re getting.”
“Who, Pop,” Linda corrected, perking up a little. “No, it’s all right. Let Scott and me handle this.”
Scott gently took his mother’s arm. “You’re upset, scared. We all are, I guess. But this—whatever you want to call it—doesn’t have anything to do with Linda and me.”
“I’m proud of you. You’re gallant, loyal. But you know where that’ll get you? Into a car that explodes with you in it. Son, you’ve got to say good-bye to her now, while you still can.”
Scott slowly shook his head.
“They’re covered with blood,” Naomi pounded on, a little hoarse now. “You marry her, and you will be too. Don’t you see?”
Hargett, pointing his index finger, shaking it admonishingly with the vaguest hint of a threat, slowly thrust it forward, almost touching Naomi’s lips, as if he were exercising mystical power over a firm believer.
Mrs. Kremish, silent, lowered her eyes, as if embarrassed, ashamed.
Leo was agape.
Linda was crying into her handkerchief.
“Mom, we all agree,” Scott softly began pleading with her, “it’s a terrible thing that just happened. But you don’t know who’s to blame. And you have no right to say those hideous things.”
Naomi shook her head. “I brought you into this world.” Then she looked up and faced them all. “I have every right.”
“No, not to hurt Linda, and her father. No, I won’t let you.”
Scott might be making a huge mistake, but Leo felt his heart well up with pride in the boy.
“Your life is more important than her hurt,” Naomi intoned fiercely. “Open your eyes. See what’s happening. You can’t afford to be so sweet any more. It’s his trouble,” she now pointed to Izzie, “not yours.”
Abruptly Scott turned, took Linda’s arm, and led her away.
Leo tensed, half-expecting Naomi to charge after them. She didn’t. He reached for her arm. Maybe she’d go with him now, collect herself.
But she wrenched away and wheeled on Hargett. “You can’t hide from me behind that poker face. You know I’m right. If he were your son, you’d have him out of here so fast we’d all still be blinking.”
“The man who died was my friend. But this sad thing, it won’t have anything to do with Linda and Scott, I’m sure.”
She became a grotesque flurry, a creature with a dozen arms flailing, slapping, thrashing, a keening other worldly being run amuck.
Hargett, two thirds her size and with far shorter arms, was managing nonetheless to parry most of her blows with amazing deftness.
Rescuers, interveners, Leo among them, instantly were all about, but Hargett with a flick of his chin caused them to back off.
Sure enough, the mad assault’s tempo began slackening, and between Naomi’s yelps and curses her labored breathing now could be heard.
Leo was stupefied. His wife, God knows, had a temper, and he’d seen it catch fire a million times, but never like this.
Again Hargett’s strange reproving index finger almost touched her lips.
This time her mouth opened as if to bite him. But she didn’t.
“Naomi, you’re carrying on very silly,” Hargett had begun cooing at her, “like a baby, a three year old, a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum. And it’s not helping you any, or Scott, or anyone. Just making you look like some kind of nut. Is that what you want?”
Naomi crumpled into a chair and began to whimper.
Leo, agog, couldn’t think what to do or say.
Just then Scott returned, alone.
Iz turned to the young man. “No poses,” he spoke very quietly, “no proving to yourself or Linda what a great guy you are. If you feel the way your momma does, even partially, well then I suggest you pack up and clear out, now. And forget about today, about Linda, that you ever met us. Clear enough?”
“Why this hurry?” Leo was almost surprised to hear himself interject. “He should decide a lifetime in one second? Is that to you a smart way?”
“The only way.”
Leo felt a chill at such total command.
All eyes fixed on Scott. “It could be mother’s right and I’m wrong.” His tone was measured, not unlike Izzie’s. “But I’m staying.”
“It could be she is right,” Hargett reiterated almost monotonously, either testing Scott or trying to get rid of him.
“Leo,” Naomi moaned, “what are you here, a spectator? You know I’m right.”
“I’ll stand along with you, Scott,” Leo muttered, “whatever—”
“Take Mom home,” Scott interrupted, “I’ve got to go look after Linda,” and he turned to go.
Leo felt filled with love and worry and a little hate.
CHAPTER 8
Leroy peered out through the thick glass, tense, but a different tenseness from that morning at Harry Klauber’s funeral. There he’d been uneasy, and not just from being the only black face at the Jewish rituals: those pall bearers bumping that coffin to the ground, lifting it up, lowering it again, at least three times in the less than twenty feet between where the hearse parked and the clay-yellow grave; those people crooning-praying in mumbo-jumbo Hebrew; the mourners actually tossing grass and dirt back over their shoulders as they left. He’d felt guilty sort of. Everyone there knew it was Leroy who usually drove. He had had the luck. Well, sure as hell so had Mr. H.! But would the boss keep on having such luck? Leroy felt jumpy.
Posted just behind the polished brass doors in the lobby of the East Fortieth Street skyscraper where Mr. Silverberg’s firm had its law offices, Leroy was on the lookout for Mr. Okun, Mr. Nathanson and Scott Kremish. Since it was Sunday and the building was locked up, he was on watch to let them in. Lord knows, he’d been to this place often enough with contracts, letters of credit, deeds, consents, transfers, the big manilla envelopes too precious to go in the mail. But always he’d been here on week days when there was traffic, streams of people. Now was the first time he’d ever looked closely at the place itself. The entrance hall walls and floors were mosaics of varying shades of marble, the ceilings vaulted arrays of filigreed-looking stamped brass, the elevator doors of bronze fit to be church entrances. And who noticed?
He looked over at the wall directory, column after column of names: Baschnagel Brothers; Baum, Hyman; Baumann, Ludwig; Baumgold Insurance; Bernstein, Emanuel—Exporters. Only one mattered: Hargett, Isadore, and he wasn’t even up there.
Leroy thought about his awe of the boss. It went back a ways. In high school when through Mr. H.’
s influence, Leroy had been put into good summer jobs, cabana boy, desk clerk even, Mr. H. those days was just about the only white man who recognized Leroy, knew his name, sometimes took a minute to tune in on Leroy. And man, guys shitting on Leroy because of his color had got straightened out fast. Now after six years of working into a right hand, Leroy knew all about Mr. H.: that he didn’t brush his teeth enough and his breath often stank; that he was totally, painfully indifferent to any kind of music; that he was intolerant about crapping out, laziness, men with less energy than himself. But these things Leroy hardly noticed any more. Just straining to keep up with Mr. H.’s thought processes usually kept Leroy out of breath and dazzled. Not today though. Today he felt the one big mistake he might have made was letting that executive trainee offer at Macy’s go by. Leroy felt scared.
For the first half hour he’d spent in the stately conference room, Leroy had burned about Louie Okun. Mr. Okun, who oversaw the twelve-hundred-room Xanadu in Miami Beach, the moveable casino outside Palm Beach, the Dade and Broward County tracks, wire services and bookmaking operations, looked like a jerk out of an old time comedy: pencil-line mustache, clip-on black bow tie, boater straw hat, whitish hair parted straight down the middle, a left eye that twitched, and a tendency to hiccups. But people generally looked the other way about that stuff. Mr. O. was solid in his spot. Downstairs in the lobby though, the motherfucker had stood out there with a totally blank face while Leroy had opened up, and then when he’d stepped through the door, he’d given not a hello, not even a goddamn nod, as if Leroy were a turnstile, a dinge choke-a-broom. And yet only last week Leroy had sat in the man’s Bay Harbor Island penthouse overlooking Biscayne Bay and gone through forty-three pages of real estate transfers with him. Greasetail ofay bastard!
But then Leroy gradually forgot about Okun in his amazement at the underground apparatus Mr. H. was setting into motion.
“. . . so if we view this exclusively as a business problem, which in essence—and disregarding the horror for a moment—is what I believe it is, there’d be two directions, I think, worth our really exploring, your old buddy, Domingo Guzman, and your even older enemy, Scapellatti,” the tall, silver-haired Silverberg, the boss’s cousin, lawyer, and probably number one advisor concluded as simply as if weighing the merits of two brands of chewing gum.
“Anybody else got ideas they want to put out on the table?” Mr. H., taking over, drily asked.
The high-polished conference table had sixteen chairs around it. Leroy counted six plus his own filled: Mr. H.; Mr. S.; Mr. H.’s older brother Morris, grandpa over the New York real estate, mostly Manhattan loft and office buildings; Louie Okun, the human mistake; Blinkie Nathanson who that morning had flown in from Havana, where he was storekeeper; Mr. H.’s boy David, which was a surprise; and last, young Kremish, a vastly bigger surprise.
“This whole meeting. …” David wore a troubled frown. “It’s as if the police are helpless, so we’re the ones who have to do all this detective stuff. But isn’t there at least a chance that they can maybe handle all this?”
“And if they can’t?” Mr. H., low-voiced, asked.
David lowered his head and admitted, “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
Leroy was unsure how much the kid knew about his old man’s business. So it looked like today was meant to be a lesson, a whole education maybe.
“The cops come up with anything yet, Rube, far as you know?” Mr. H. diverted the attention from his son’s embarrassment while driving the point home harder yet.
“That explosion,” Silverberg answered, “I’m afraid didn’t leave them much to investigate.”
Leroy had seen a lot of bombed-out tanks, halftracks on Okinawa, some with direct hits, but nothing as pulverized as what had been that Buick and Harry the Doctor.
“I was twelve when my mother died, David,” Mr. H. was hitting the lesson to both young men. “Me and my two sisters, crying something awful, refugees in a village where we don’t know anybody. No bread, bellies aching all the time, eating soup made out of grass. We lived in a tiny cowshed, and if I hadn’t helped myself to a pistol I found on a dead German officer, all three of us would have been pushed out to freeze and be a meal for the wolves. So I learned something, and since then it’s been true a million times over. God really does help those who help themselves.”
David nodded, acknowledging his father’s—was it correctness, wisdom, authority? Scott too, Leroy saw, shook his head impressed.
“Blinkie,” Silverberg was getting back to the matter at hand, “anything seem to be new in Havana?”
“What?” the fat man shot back querulously. “Nah, nah, nah. Nah, I’m not buying. Not Guzman.”
“What makes you so sure, Blink?”
“My gut, my hunches, I dunno. But that don’t figure, don’t balance out. Hits me queer, all wrong.”
“Have you seen General Guzman, spoken with him lately?” Silverberg persisted.
“Nah, not the last coupla weeks. But if there was,” and having trouble making up his mind which awful word to use, the blubbery casino manager shrugged instead, “something like that cooking, it’d leak through to me. You know the payroll I got, spotters under every yucca bush.”
“Last summer’s bum sugar crop”—for the first time Okun was joining in—“doesn’t that put the Spic into money trouble?”
“No question,” Nathanson’s many chins creased and uncreased in a nod, “all kinds of trouble. But he did go to London, and he did pull himself out a loan.”
“How much?” Okun demanded.
“That’s right,” Silverberg piled in too. “Maybe he couldn’t get himself enough to tide him over.”
“No argument, guys,” Blinkie answered quickly. “But you gotta hit me with a lot more before I start to buy this other thing.”
“Considering you give him a pretty straight count, and his take is forty-nine percent,” Silverberg drilled on doggedly, patiently, “he doesn’t have to be a mathematician to figure out how much we’re taking out, or how much more he’d have for himself if we weren’t there.”
“Yeah, I suppose. But, well, if you’re askin me, I still can’t buy it. And besides, you ain’t giving me even one little birdie to go on.”
“What about Castilan at Princeton yesterday? You talked to him at some length, didn’t you, Iz?”
Now that the boss had been personally addressed, everyone fell silent.
“Forget Guzman,” he softly said.
“You’re sure, Iz?”
Leroy felt a pang of jealousy, envying Silverberg his calm, his temerity to question Mr. H.
“Guzman used to run those casinos himself, remember?” And the boss smiled the tiniest bit.
“So couldn’t he do it again?”
“He wasn’t making enough to feed the cat.”
“Studying you all these years, shouldn’t he feel now he’s learned how?”
“Einstein he’s not—” Hargett slowly shook his head—“but smarter than that he is.”
“Maybe I’m the thickhead at this table”—now Silverberg smiled—“but could you explain?”
“Without our New York and Miami steerers, would players go there, any real stabbers? From the Cuban people alone, he’d starve. He’d be lucky to set his table with black beans. And as much as we skim off, his own chile eaters running those stores would walk off with everything and the kitchen sink too, plus clip the high rollers so bad they’d never come back. Guzman’d be peeing right into the wind.”
Silverberg mulled this, then said, “And you feel pretty sure that’s how he sees it.”
“Domingo and I go back twelve, thirteen years. Up-and-up the whole time. We’ve both done each other good, and nothing but good. So suppose now he gets a bug in his head all of a sudden and wants me out? He just tells me, and what else can I do? I gotta go, and he knows it. No, Rube, it does not add up. That wasn’t Guzman.”
The men around the table accepted Izzie’s judgment as powerfully reasoned, and showed
their awe with small headshakings, sharp inhalations.
Leroy felt torn, on the one hand itching to know who Mr. H. would fix as the weasel assassin, and, on the other hand, shrinking from hearing, sensing that events could grow terrifying.
Morris, his red wool shirt buttoned to the neck, cleared his throat, gave a tiny shrug, and softly creaked, “So I guess that leaves. …” And his lips stilled, then pressed shut.
“Yeah, Scapellatti,” Okun muttered.
Leroy was aware that the boss’s enmity with Scapellatti went way back, that the men here all despised the Brooklyn labor leader and seemed a little frightened of him too. His nickname, after all, was The Hook. He was absolute despot over the world’s busiest port. Not a crate, not a can of sardines or an ounce of perfume got loaded onto a ship or off-loaded onto the piers unless The Hook got his piece. A problem Mr. H. disposed of by having his seagoing supplies ship out of Philly and sometimes Baltimore. But tougher to get rid of, impossible really, was Scapellatti’s contempt for Jews, and in particular for Izzie Hargett.
Harry the Doctor had once begun explaining to Leroy, you can’t do business with cockeyed nuts, which is how come we steer clear of Scapellatti. It had started with a fight when The Hook and the boss were kids, over a crap game. Sally Pirone had taken Iz’s side, so Scapellatti had had to back off, and it had rankled the Ginny ever since. So now, with a head swelled bigger than the Pope, and that mixed in with jealousy that someone could be bigger than him, and worse yet that that someone should be a Yidl, that had The Hook choking in his own gall, according to Harry.
“The individual did turn down the piece of the Las Vegas deal,” Silverberg said, almost as if that proved responsibility for the bombing, “and he was the only one you offered it to who did.”
“Which proves only that he doesn’t like to do business with me.”
This was the first Leroy had heard about propositions to The Hook, and he was amazed. But that was the boss’s genius, after all, always putting business first, ahead of hatred even.
“Come on, Iz,” Morris deprecated gently, “he hates you like a cancer, and you know it.”