by Con Lehane
Kelly could hear the sincerity in her voice and, unless his heart had rotted away completely, couldn’t help but recognize goodness when it stared him in the face, flowing from an angelic, blue-eyed blonde with skin as soft as eiderdown.
“If you think we’re trying to trick you, you’re wrong. We came because we believe you’re a person who helps people.”
Kelly considered this for a moment. Betsy was smart enough to clam up and let him. Her earnestness got me. Seemingly, too, it found the two or three percent of Kelly’s heart that hadn’t yet calcified. He gestured with his eyebrows toward the empty chairs at his table. We sat.
“I don’t know what you guys want with this dissident union crap,” he said. “My local’s got the best pay and the best benefits of any hotel and restaurant workers in the country, and you guys bitch about it. You think I need bosses tellin’ me ‘how do we know you can really deliver the union’ when they’re hearin’ this dissident crap?”
“We’re not against you here, Pete. We want to get rid of this guy, Tom Eliot.”
“Yeh. Well, this guy has the local. You being a pain in his ass, what’s he gonna do? You done the same to me.”
“It’s not the same thing.”
Kelly considered this. After some deliberation, he pushed the remains of his lunch away and sat back in his chair. “First off, what you do is your business. I don’t want to know nothin’ about it. Number two, what the local does is their business. I don’t like what happened to Saunders. I ain’t sayin’ I know who did anything, but I don’t like it. I don’t want none of my members gettin’ whacked, even it’s you.”
The waiter took Kelly’s plate away and brought him a small pot of coffee. He didn’t ask if we wanted any. “You got yourself elected to the executive board, right? You must know somethin’. But you bring the feds into this one we’re all gonna get fucked, not just the guys you’re after.”
Somehow, probably because I’d been deciphering the garbled life stories of incoherent drunks most of my adult life, I understood that Kelly was making an offer here. “We’re doing this ourselves,” I told him with some misgivings.
Gazing into the sparkling and twinkling center of the garden room, Kelly shrugged one shoulder in a gesture signifying something known only to him, following this with a sip of coffee, then a vacant glance at me and then toward the door. I stood up. This time, Betsy stood with me. Kelly made no effort to shake hands or bid us farewell. Instead, he stared through the windows at the barren trees in the park.
“Thank you, Mr. Kelly,” Betsy said politely.
He glanced at her appraisingly for a second, though his expression was hard, then began to push the table away, as the waiter and the captain rushed over to help him. When he stood, I realized that although he was stocky, he hadn’t gone to fat. His body was as hard as a boxer’s. For one second, our eyes met again. In that second, I came to believe the rumors I’d heard that Pete Kelly had at some time in the past killed men who got in his way. I’m sure that in that same second he saw in my eyes that I did not kill people who got in my way. So we knew then who we were—and, much as I hated to admit it, knew, too, who had the upper hand.
Without really deciding or either of us mentioning it, Betsy and I began to walk downtown along Central Park West instead of getting on the subway. We didn’t talk until after we’d left the park behind, crossed through Columbus Circle, and headed down Seventh Avenue with the herds of pedestrians. I wondered if Betsy had clocked the miniature standoff between Kelly and me, if she knew about the things that went on between men about who had the killer instinct. Then I remembered her husband and realized she did know about men who let you know up front they were capable of killing.
Somewhere around 56th Street, she broke into my thoughts. “You’re going to have to explain to me what went on back there.”
As we waited to cross a street, I noticed a tall brownstone apartment building, made of some substance only New York City buildings were made out of some time before I was born and never since. I liked the solidity of the building and the designs constructed into the stone and wished they still made buildings like that.
“This is what I think,” I told Betsy. “Kelly isn’t a gangster. He knows the gangsters. Like our guy Eliot, they probably control a couple of locals in the hotel council. He leaves them alone because they deliver him votes when he needs them, and he can count on help from their thugs when he needs to teach someone a lesson, like he tried to muscle me one time. What they do, Pop says, is work out deals with the bosses. The workers get weak contracts that save the boss bundles, so the boss kicks back some of the money to the business agent. The boss saves money, the thugs make money, and the workers get screwed.
“Why Kelly lets them do this is more complicated. The gangsters divvy things up and try to keep their unique version of order. As I understand it, from my years of reading the Daily News, there are different crime families. I don’t remember their names, but they have Italian last names like the kids from Bensonhurst I played baseball with. So say Pete Kelly’s got some loose connection to the Banana family, and they’ve helped him when he’s needed help. And say Eliot’s hooked up with the Bonono family. Somewhere in the past the Bonono family boss and the Banana family boss sat down—that’s what gangsters do, they have sit-downs—and they agreed that they’d help Kelly with this and that but he’d have to let this jerk Eliot have the Savoy Hotel. They don’t say, ‘Hey, Kelly. Stay away from the Savoy or we’ll kill you.’ They talk in euphemisms and make oblique references. Kelly comes to understand he’s been asked to do a favor for a guy who has a good friend whose cousin needs to have Local 909 and the Savoy so he can skim enough money to put his kid through reform school or something.”
Betsy stopped stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk, disrupting the throng of hustling New Yorkers headed downtown. For some reason, when it gets close to Christmas, traffic in Manhattan—in the streets and on the sidewalks—increases in volume and intensifies in determination. Since she stopped, I had to also, getting myself bumped and shoved by the hurrying herd.
“That’s the dumbest explanation of anything I’ve ever heard, Brian. What the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, to put it another way,” I said, grabbing her elbow to get her moving again before we were trampled. “Kelly will check to see how important Local 909’s hold on the Savoy is to his associates. If it’s relatively unimportant to the Banana family and not a life-or-death thing to the Bonono family, Kelly will let us duke it out with Eliot. If we win, we get the local and he gets loyalty from us now, since he’s kept us alive to enjoy our victory. If we lose, he’ll live with that, too, and no one can say it was him who tried to grab the local. If, on the other hand, his principals tell him the local is important to them, Pete will let them know we are relatively unimportant to him. He’ll then get word to us that it will be dangerous to continue our efforts. But that’s all he’ll do.”
Betsy thought this over as we walked. “So what do we need him for if that’s all he’s going to do?”
“These crime families are said to hold crime to a higher standard than the run-of-the-mill criminal. That’s why everyone likes them so much.”
“So Kelly will tell the gangsters not to kill us?”
“The way I understand it, the thugs are supposed to get permission from the higher-ups before they kill someone.”
“Do they really do that?”
“I wouldn’t bet on it. They didn’t get to where they are today because they played by the rules.”
“That’s encouraging,” said Betsy.
chapter four
That evening when I went to visit Barney at the hospital, he wasn’t as doped up as he had been.
“The whoores,” he said, waving around his bandaged hand. “I would’ve beaten the pair of them bloody in a fair fight.”
What had happened, Barney told me, was that he was jumped on his way to work; two guys dragged him into an alley, worked him ov
er, then taped his right hand to a loading dock and lopped off the tops of four fingers on his right hand with a cleaver.
“I got the best of them, though,” Barney said, holding up his good left hand. “Ciotóg. They cut the wrong one. I’m left-handed.” He sounded triumphant, as if there had been a victory there.
“I was careless,” Barney said. “There was an envelope for Eliot at the front desk. I made up a story about being on the way to see Eliot and wouldn’t I take the envelope along to him. The desk clerk got suspicious and wouldn’t give it to me. And so didn’t the eejit tell MacAlister the very same day that I wanted the envelope?”
Barney grew tired quickly from the effort at talking. His usually ruddy face was ashen and a cloudy film dulled what were usually sparkling blue eyes. I hesitated to ask about the reattached fingers.
Barney called things as he saw them, though. He held the bandaged hand in front of him, pointed toward me. “I’ve got black and blue sticks at the end of me hand that may never be good for anything again.”
“They’re still there, though, eh?” I said tentatively.
“What good are they to me?” The pain in his voice went to my heart. “You don’t know the fierce rage I feel, Brian.” Those sincere blue eyes burned through the fog into mine. “The fookers have stolen the heart right out of me.”
“The fingers are still there, Barney. There’s hope.”
“Ah, hope,” said Barney. “I don’t know how we don’t lose hope altogether with all the cruelty in the world.”
Barney’s despair tore at me. Mine was never far below the surface. I tried to sound encouraging, though I wasn’t much good at stiff-upper-lip pep talks. Why shouldn’t poor Barney dwell on his misery? I should give him a hand whining about the injustice of it. I had to be nuts complaining about the guy feeling a bit down when someone chopped off his fingers. Instead, I’m there looking for help with my problem because I’m not sure what to do next. So I brush off Barney’s troubles and bend his ear with mine. Hey pal, sorry about your fingers there. I hope they don’t rot off. But I have a situation here we need to take care of.
I told Barney about our meeting at the hotel a couple of nights before and my talk with Kelly—and Barney being Barney is like Ruffian, a heart so gallant she runs the last half of the race on a broken leg because she knows her job is to beat the horse running beside her. Doped up, the pain causing his eyes to cross, his future with a maimed and crippled hand staring him in the face, Barney sat up, as if the strains of the “Internationale” called to him across his dreams.
“So God bless them,” says Barney. “I knew the fookers wouldn’t scare the workers off. And Betsy … with so much to bear already. She went with you?”
This reference to Betsy gave me a start because I didn’t want to let on I knew about her triangle of troubles, nor about Barney’s role in this triangle that could easily bring disaster on both of them.
“She came with me to see Kelly. We’re ready to go. But I’m not sure if it might not be better to let things cool down first.”
Barney regarded me as if I were an errant child. “Ah, what good would it do to wait, Brian? What’s going to change for the better? Much as we’d like to go our own way and let the world become a better place for us, what’s ever happened to the benefit of the working man he hasn’t made happen himself?”
He warmed to his plan. “For the time being, we need to keep things to ourselves. You’ll be doing the work now, Brian, until I’m back on me feet. You’ll need to expand the committee one person at a time, not letting on to anyone what we’re about until you’re sure they can be trusted. You’ll meet in secret and talk only to those you trust.” Beyond the clouds that veiled his eyes, I’d swear I saw a twinkle. “Just like in the old country, Brian McNulty. Your grandfather would have known well the approach we’re taking.”
Maybe I looked uncertain. I certainly felt that way, unnerved, too, by the hoses in Barney’s arm, the blinking and beeping of monitors, and the man in the next bed with tubes in both his nostrils who hadn’t moved or opened his eyes since I’d gotten there, only snorted now and again, making a desperate sound that each time I heard I thought was his final breath.
Barney ignored the accoutrements of misery that surrounded him. He waved his bandaged paw at me again. “If they don’t know who we are or what we’re about, they can’t get us.” He began to lose his concentration then. The nurse had adjusted his IV and whatever painkiller was dripping into his system, so his eyes lost their focus, his face lost even more of its color, and he began to drift away.
“Okay, old pal,” I said as I got up to leave. “Mum’s the word.”
It was a New York City winter, deep-freeze night, the kind that comes rarely, but often enough to notice, when the temperature dips near zero as night deepens and the frozen wind blows in from New Jersey across the Hudson and howls along the crosstown streets toward the East River. This night, it came straight at me as I walked west across 23rd Street toward the subway. It wasn’t that long a walk, but before I’d gone a block I felt like Dr. Zhivago crossing the tundra. You can’t get a cab in New York when it’s cold like this, and the bus limps along like an old lady with a shopping cart—actually, getting close to Christmas, it’s filled with old ladies with shopping carts.
Head down, bundled into my pea coat, hands shoved deep into my pockets, body bent, I trudged into the wind. At the corner of Third Avenue, I stopped for traffic before crossing. The sidewalks were deserted. The cars jostled one another through the intersection. Waiting to cross, I stomped my feet and hugged my arms against my body. Then I heard something.
Next to me was what might have once been a food store, a Gristede’s or Sloan’s. It had burned out or been gutted for some other reason and was in the early stages of being rebuilt. The sound came from behind a chain-link fence. It took a moment to recognize that it was mewing that I heard. A cat. The light changed. I started to cross the street. A cat in the freezing cold, on probably the only night of the year the temperature in New York City might dip below zero. I remembered something Nelson Algren had written about the Chicago winter, an image that stuck in my memory of “a night so cold that cats froze to death on fire escapes.”
The image rose up in front of me again like a billboard. I couldn’t cross the street. I went back to the chain-link fence and after a few moments saw the kitten. I bent down and touched its nose through the fence; then, mewing all the while, it followed me along the fence until we came to a gate with a large enough gap for me to reach through. I picked the cat up and stuck it into the pocket of my pea coat, telling myself I would take the cat home, keep it until the temperature warmed up enough for cats to stop freezing to death on fire escapes, and let it go again.
The trip uptown was uneventful, except the cat wouldn’t shut up. On the subway, the kindhearted Christmas shoppers with their shopping bags loaded with brightly colored packages looked at me and smiled, while the distrusting and suspicious grinches looked like they suspected a catnapping. I picked up some cat food and litter at the West Side Market and threw the cat and his paraphernalia into my apartment, telling him to make himself at home until the weather got warmer.
I found Ntango, a cabdriver friend of mine, at La Rosita at 106th and hitched a ride down to the Savoy. Because of the damn cat, I was late for work, too late once more to eat dinner before my shift, going behind the bar as soon as I got there, a disruption of my evening work ritual that soured my mood. Ntango came in for a drink since he saw a parking space in the same block as the hotel, too good an opportunity to pass up. He drank a Beck’s while I checked the fruit, juices, and beer stock. The day bartender, Sam Jones, had covered for me. A journeyman bartender, he took things in stride, so everything was usually in order, even when I didn’t deserve it. We worked without a barback at the Savoy, so it was easy to forget some of the pain-in-the-ass stuff like refilling the beer cooler or cutting extra fruit, but Sam remembered.
He put on his civilian clothes
and came back to sit down at the bar to have a beer with Ntango. They were talking about Patrick Ewing and the Knicks when a guy in a black overcoat that even I recognized as cashmere came in and parked himself at the middle of the bar, a few stools away from them. He took off his fedora and overcoat, folding the coat carefully and placing it on the stool next to him with the hat on top of it. He had slicked-back gray hair and a broad face that was almost square.
When I placed the bar napkin in front of him and waited for his order, he looked at me with a slight smile and what I’m sure he thought was a kindly and avuncular expression, but looked to me like the unctuous smile of a door-to-door Bible salesman.
Turned out the man was none other than Tom Eliot, business manager of Local 909. My heart went cold when he introduced himself and held out a flabby hand for me to shake. Since this was the guy I suspected had ordered his thugs to cut off four of Barney’s fingers, I looked at his hand, then at the razor-sharp paring knife on the fruit-cutting board. Sam, who’d been exiled to the Savoy years before either Barney or me, clocked this exchange and followed my eyes with his when they went to the knife on the cutting board. He stood up, a wiry, muscular, black man, as energetic as Barney, if not as cheerful, his tightly curled black hair graying at the temples.
“Mr. Eliot,” he said in a booming voice as he stood, moving in the same motion to cover the distance between them and taking Eliot’s hand in his own catcher’s-mitt-sized paw. “Sam Jones.” He pumped the startled man’s hand a couple of times. “Good to see you here at the old hotel. I thought you union guys had forgot all about us. You don’t hardly ever make your way this far west no more. There’s no union election coming up, is there?” Sam laughed heartily, and Eliot joined in with an anemic chuckle.