He recovered himself. “Ercole Barone is the master chef of a well-known restaurant in New York whose name I dare not divulge. He plans the menus for a shipping line and four airlines on the side. He works in town nine months out of the year.” Harry looked at Roseboom, saw he was not impressed, and scowled. “The other three, he works for me. The Italian legation and the Italian Mission to the UN drives here once a week, summers, in DPL-licensed cars, to eat Barone’s cooking. I have seen a silver-haired diplomat weeping into a plate of scampi Fra Diavolo, and there is hardly a man among them who is not in tears when he has to leave.
“Then there is the little old lady who comes in every day to make the pasta dough and pizza crusts. She does not speak a word of English. She arrives in a rented limousine. She turns out more starch than the farms of Idaho, finishes at four p.m., walks to the back door, and Barone gives her two twenty-dollar bills I have given him for this purpose. I ask why only forty bucks? Why two twenties? And I always get the same reply: ‘Twenty for pay, twenty for carfare.’ She comes in by private plane from somewhere, is met by a limousine, driven to my doorstep, and then every day at four, driven back to meet her plane at the local airport.
“Then there’s the clientele. And the entertainment. The old days of serving gin and tonics to the beach bums are long gone. Sure, we let the suntanned, windblown crowd in afternoons, but at night, it’s different. If we ever had a fire like poor Telredy’s, the bill for the furs in the checkroom would be bigger than the cost of the whole building, burned flat. We don’t just get the gold-plate trade from the trotting track, and the wanderers from the city! There were plates from nineteen states in that parking lot one night!”
Harry caught himself and lowered his voice. “The entertainment. Yeah. We don’t have any. It’s taxed. But what do we do when a truck rolls up one afternoon, delivers us a very special concert piano, and at nine that night, a certain blind jazz pianist shows up for dinner and then kids on the keys for a few hours afterward? Or when a British rock group comes for fettucine Alredo and gigs until five the next morning? Now, this is not every day. The everyday stuff is Joe the Nuts singing Verdi, or his buddies singing...what they sing. What he sings.”
Roseboom started to speak, and Harry put up his hand wearily. “I’m not naming any names.” He scratched his chest reflectively. “One night he even had his daughter with him. Nobody even thought to turn out the sign that night.
“And then there’s Joe. He’s really pretty good. And he puts his heart into it, it’s as much fun to watch as to listen. You know how he worked as a singing waiter when he was a kid. Do you know one thing that preys on Joe’s mind? That he’s never been able to get Franco Corelli to come in for a few days. Corelli is his idol.”
“A capo don of the Mafia,” said Roseboom, “working as a singing waiter. Dear God, no!”
“We don’t say ‘Mafia,’ “ said Harry. “ ‘Mafia’ is a bad word. Old hat. It’s usually ‘the Family,’ or ‘the Honored Society,’ or—this is Joe talking—’We the People.’ “
Roseboom gave him a hard look. “When were the firm financial arrangements made?”
“Weren’t,” said Harry.
“You keep no records? I think, just speaking off the top of my head, that you people are all in trouble.”
“Records? My taxes are in order. I’m not a vital industry, subject to audits by state or federal governments. As somebody or other once said, as long as the law can’t require me to be a literate, it can’t make me keep records. They tell me I’ve got a pretty good tax lawyer.”
“Don’t you know for sure?”
“I’m in pretty good shape,” said Harry, quietly. “I’m rich, and I’m not in jail. I’m enjoying life for the first time ... in a long time.”
Roseboom was silent for a while. Then he said, “I was going to ask you—I do ask you to testify at some future date, to a grand jury soon to be constituted, against your Mafia connections.”
“Why?” said Harry.
“Why?” yelled Roseboom. “They’ve taken over your business, they’ve put you under their thumb—”
“How’s that? I run my business. And I do a good job. What they’re doing is throwing business my way and helping me keep on top. And, mister, it’s pure cream.” He paused reflectively. “Now, it is true that Joe put a safe in my office that only he and Christmas Angel know the combination to, and that the Angel handles the receipts. But the Angel is Joe’s employee, and Joe is my friend. My own take has gone up every year, and I can’t see anything significant being drained off.”
“ ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox, when that he treadeth out the grain,’ “ said Roseboom, through his teeth. “What do you mean by ‘significant’?”
“I mean that two places have changed hands on that strip this year. Nothing to do with the Family. They just couldn’t hack it. If I was being milked the way you seem to think I am, I’d be in the street myself. As it is, I was asked to bid on one of them. By the owner’s lawyer, not by the Family. And as far as being under any thumbs,” Harry continued, “I went to Martinique last spring to visit my son’s grave. To Miami to visit my wife’s. I visited my uncle in Chicago, he’s a surgeon. I went to St. Petersburg to look into some real estate stuff I got into in the fifties. I could’ve run out any time, if I wanted to. Your point eludes me.”
“Listen to me,” said Roseboom. “Joe the Nuts, born Giuseppe Nucci, known as Joseph Nucci, is a capo don. He is a big, big gangster, if I may use an old-hat word.” He sneered just the slightest bit. “He has operated all over the country as a special representative of the Mafia, gouging small businessmen into signing over their livelihoods to his...organization.”
“Did you ever hear of the Supreme Protective Agency in New York?” asked Harry. “They go around hitting shopkeepers for ten bucks a month, for ‘protection.’ Now, that is really old hat. And all they do for that ten is to string tape around the edges of the shopwindows, you know, like a burglar alarm, but without alarm wires in it.”
“Well?” said Roseboom.
“But it works,” said Harry. “That green tape is like a danger signal. Joe described it to me once in very memorable terms. He said, ‘Those storefronts are Territory.’“ He paused. “Maybe what you’re saying is that I’m Territory, too.”
“Yes,” said Roseboom, between his teeth, “I guess you are.”
“And there’s another thing,” said Harry. “Joe Nucci is my friend. Now, I’ve had friends who were drunks. Queers.Cruel people, both men and women, and that’s the worst of all. Joe is just a nice little guy who loves singing and booze and screwing and who takes pleasure keeping his house in order. That could be me, except I can’t sing. When I compare him to some of the other friends I’ve had, he comes out pretty good.
“And now you come in here and tell me that I’ve got to chuck away my livelihood, my friend, and put myself in criminal suspicion, just because somebody sent you a report or a memo or what the hell to that effect. ‘Casino owner’—these places like mine are always ‘casinos’ in your language—’with Mafia connections,’ that’s what I’ll be for the rest of my life.”
“Wait a minute,” said Roseboom.
“No. Let me finish with the most cogent argument I’ve got, again, so as not to stretch this interview out unduly. Now, suppose I am a Mafia patsy. What happens? I’m caught between them and you, remember. They come to me and they threaten to cut off my balls, pull out my tongue, kill me, sink me in a block of cement into the bottom of New York Harbor. Kill a few of my friends, burn my house—and my business, they’re in the same building—poison my cats, sink my boat...and so on.
“Now, what do you threaten? You threaten to put me in jail.” Harry looked at Roseboom for a long time. Roseboom was looking at the floor. “I’m afraid, Mr. Roseboom, that the Mafia is leading in the bidding for my ass.”
“Don’t you know we can protect you?” asked Roseboom, but Harry could see that he was tired, and he himself knew that he spoke without co
nviction.
“Thirty years?” asked Harry. “I might live thirty years. But the chances are against it if I listen to you.”
Roseboom stood up and automatically brushed a cloud of cement dust off the seat of his pants. He moved toward the doorway, turned and faced Harry, then stepped gingerly down onto the ladder.
Harry took one-last look at the sea, sighed deeply, and followed him down.
* * * *
Sleet and snow were racketing at the front windows of Decline And Fall, and Harry looked up, and then curled closer to the blaze in the new fireplace in the empty cocktail lounge. He guessed that he had another hour before the first of the wintertime regulars pulled in—if they came out at all on a night like this. The floodlit pillar Joe the Nuts had sent from Leptis Magna was sheathed in ice. Harry looked out at it and grinned to himself. “Good for the image,” Joe had said. God knew it was phallic and classic and Roman enough for anybody. Harry had his sixth gin-gin of the evening at hand and was feeling no pain, literally. The small of his back had begun to bother him late in the fall. He pulled out the letter that had arrived with the pillar and read it again.
Dear Harry:
Thanks for the news about Uncle Freddie once again. Everybody needs a vacation. But you know them bastards wouldnt even let me in to SICILY? Then when I left Palermo I couldnt get into Rome. Anyway I got the pillar for you then, dont ask me how, you keep your nose clean like always. Beirut was nice but I like Spain much better. This is just a little fishing village Harry the name of which I will divulge when you call at Wagon-Lits Internationales, Barcelona. There are lots of Swede college girls here, made me think of my man the DUTCHMAN. Im making out OK with the wife of the local boss of guardia civil, thats state cops. Harry the wine here is as good as real Vino Rosso and is thirtyfive cents a quart. Oops thats a leter here in the old country. I never was as happy traveling for the family as I am here. To tell you the truth Harry I think them bastards are just as happy if I stay over here indefinitely. I didnt mention I get to sing in the local bar, what they call a bodega! And for money! Its’ the greatest moment of my life, more fun than when I was a kid. You know I love to sing. All I really need to die happy is to get paid to sing in your place Harry with Corelli beside me. But its real good here too. When are you coming over Harry? It isnt going to be too cool for you now that theres been all that noise around there. Frankie Buttons was pulled in to a special grand jury they convened just for him. You remember Frank. Come over here Harry, well have a ball. Between the two of us theres nothing we cant do.
Joe (The Nuts)
Harry refolded the letter and put it back in his breast pocket. He was glad Joe had gotten out. Of course, he thought, it would be easy anywhere for Joe. He was like a cat, always landed on his feet. Now, he, Harry...But that was water under the bridge. Harry drained the gin-gin. He got up—it took him a distressingly long time—and walked to the bar. The barman came to him, but he continued around behind it. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll build my own.”
He sat oil the high stool—his high stool—as he worked. He could not feel the rung of the stool under his feet, and knew that his ankles and feet must be swelling again. Sitting there reminded him of the previous summer, when Inspector Roseboom had finally appeared, as Harry had known he, or some other, would.
Roseboom had been blown to tatters by the bomb under the floorboards of his car two days after the interview with Harry. Then an anonymous call had sent FBI men from the local office after one Angelo Christofori, known as Christmas Angel, who was suspected of killing an agent. The Angel might have gotten clear if he hadn’t locked his car. As he stood there, panting, trying to work the lock on his Lincoln Continental, two agents had come up on him and shot him eleven times, as he attempted to escape and/or resist arrest. The coroner noted that no single one of these bullets lodged in a vital spot.
After that, it had gone back and forth, for five months or more. An agent here, two or three torpedoes there, killed, bombed, wounded, taken into custody. A file of documents confiscated. An informer made to disappear. A little war, up and down the Jersey coast from the storm center at Decline And Fall. Harry thought that what he had done was better than what Roseboom had wanted him to do. First Harry had warned the Family, through Joe, that the FBI was interested in Decline And Fall. Joe had escaped, Roseboom was murdered, and Harry had blown the whistle on Christmas Angel. By then both sides were at each other, and Harry saw in each day’s papers how the battle raged around him. Each morning’s edition was delivered by special courier to Decline And Fall at eleven fifteen the previous night. Harry liked a head start on the news.
He had known for fourteen months that he was dying. The back pains had been cancer of both kidneys. It was a while before he could handle his gin-gins altogether comfortably. But Harry persevered. He had been a dentist, and a good one, all his life, except for a few timid and colorless childhood years. His student days were a blank to him once they had passed. He had never been able to get close to any woman but his dead wife. The passing of the boy who had been partly his wife and partly himself had burned something out of him. He reflected that he had not lied completely to Roseboom when he laid his sickness to a plate of pickled fish on a hot night in Martinique. Then he had bought Decline And Fall; he had discovered that his only pleasure was in making, rather than merely doing. He had made Decline And Fall well, and it would be his monument. With Joe’s help, he had made it good beyond his dreams. Then came the thing that would unmake him and his creation, and he had done a bit of unmaking himself. Except for Joe, they were all expendable; and he would live—he would—to see the outcome of the battle that he had posed between his enemies as it raged around his house.
He finished the mixing and laid the long spoon down carefully, took up the fresh gin-gin and walked slowly back to his chair by the fire. The paper boy was on his way out but came back for his tip. Harry sat down gently and opened the paper, flipping it so that the pages stood by themselves, the headline boldly exposed. He could hardly wait to see what he had done tonight.
<
* * * *
R. A . LAFFERTY
ALL PIECES OF A RIVER SHORE
It had been a very long and ragged and incredibly interlocked and detailed river shore. Then a funny thing had happened to it. It had been broken up, sliced up into pieces. Some of the pieces had been folded and compressed into bales. Some of them had been rolled up on rollers. Some of them had been cut into still smaller pieces and used for ornaments and as Indian medicine. Rolled and baled pieces of the shore came to rest in barns and old warehouses, in attics, in caves. Some were buried in the ground.
And yet the river itself still exists physically, as do its shores, and you may go and examine them. But the shore you will see along tine river now is not quite the same as that old shore that was broken up and baled into bales and rolled onto rollers, not quite the same as the pieces you will find in attics and caves.
* * * *
His name was Leo Nation and he was known as a rich Indian. But such wealth as he had now was in his collections, for he was an examining and acquiring man. He had cattle, he had wheat, he had a little oil, and he spent everything that came in. Had he had more income he would have collected even more.
He collected old pistols, old ball shot, grindstones, early windmills, walking-horse threshing machines, flax combs, Conestoga wagons, brass-bound barrels, buffalo robes, Mexican saddles, slick horn saddles, anvils, Argand lamps, rush holders, hay-burning stoves, hackamores, branding irons, chuck wagons, longhorn horns, beaded serapes, Mexican and Indian leatherwork, buckskins, beads, feathers, squirrel-tail anklets, arrowheads, deerskin shirts, locomotives, streetcars, mill wheels, keelboats, buggies, ox yokes, old parlor organs, blood-and-thunder novels, old circus posters, harness bells, Mexican oxcarts, wooden cigar-store Indians, cable-twist tobacco a hundred years old and mighty strong, cuspidors (four hundred of them), Ferris wheels, carnival wagons, carnival props of various sorts, car
nival proclamations painted big on canvas. Now he was going to collect something else. He was talking about it to one of his friends, Charles Longbank who knew everything.
“Charley,” he said, “do you know anything about ‘The Longest Pictures in the World’ which used to be shown by carnivals and in hippodromes?”
“Yes, I know a little about them, Leo. They are an interesting bit of Americana: a bit of nineteenth-century back country mania. They were supposed to be pictures of the Mississippi River shore. They were advertised as one mile long, five miles long, nine miles long. One of them, I believe, was actually over a hundred yards long. They were badly painted on bad canvas, crude trees and mud-bank and water ripples, simplistic figures and all as repetitious as wallpaper. A strong-armed man with a big brush and plenty of barn paint of three colors could have painted quite a few yards of such in one day. Yet they are truly Americana. Are you going to collect them, Leo?”
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 7