Toughs Page 7

  "Okay," Cabo said, though he clearly didn't like it. "So what about the Loretto kid?"

  Bo said, "We know where he lives. Him and Caporinno, they share an apartment."

  Madden said, "I got a better idea," and turned to Dutch. "You say this Dominic and Loretto, they're friends with Coll?"

  "They been runnin' together since they were pipsqueaks," Dutch said. "They're neighborhood kids. I seen 'em around the streets since I was a kid myself."

  Madden said to Cabo, "What if I set up a meeting for you and Dutch with Maranzano? I'll tell him you want his blessing to take care of these two mugs. He won't let anybody touch one of his family, this kid Dominic, but he'll agree to the meeting just so he can tell you that to your face and play the big shot."

  "And what's that gonna do?" Dutch folded his hands and placed them on the table in a gesture that made him look like he was working hard not to punch someone in the face.

  Madden finished off his whiskey. To Dutch he said, "Coll's the object here. You go to this meeting, and let Richie . . ." He opened his hand, searching for a word. "Let Richie express his feelings. He wants to see someone take care of these guys. Maranzano, he's gonna wave his finger in your face and tell you Dominic's his cousin's brother's nephew, or some baloney like that."

  "Probably is his cousin's brother's nephew," Bo said.

  "You say, okay, you'll restrain yourself, you won't touch Dominic.

  You'll do this for the great Don Maranzano," Madden continued, "but the kid, he's got to give up Vince Coll. You see?" Madden waited, pleased with himself.

  To Richie Dutch said, "I get them to give up Coll, you get Loretto, and there's no war with the Castellammarese." He pointed to Madden. "That's why this guy's runnin' the whole fuckin' city."

  "It's a smart plan," Bo said, and he put a hand on Richie's shoulder.

  "All right," Richie said. "As long as I get one of 'em."

  "It's settled." Madden leaned over the table to refill everyone's glass. "Coll," he said to Dutch. "I never in my life thought one kid could cause so much trouble."

  "I don't know why he hates me like this," Dutch said, holding his refilled glass up to Madden in a toast. "You'd think I'd killed his brother or something."

  All four men laughed at that, and Madden said, "Listen, Dutch, I already got a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bounty on Coll's head since after he kidnapped Frenchy. What do you say you double it, add another twenty-five thousand. There's guys'd kill their own firstborn for that money." When Dutch hesitated, Madden snatched up a newspaper and slid it across the table. "This crazy bastard is nothing but trouble. The whole city's gonna be up in arms after this!" He tapped his finger on the headline. "The Mick's sworn to kill you, Dutch, which is your business—but it's making big problems for all of us. You see what I'm saying?"

  "I get it," Dutch said. He slipped the .38 into its holster. "I'll tell Maranzano when we meet, and meanwhile I'll spread the word: fifty grand— twenty-five from you, twenty-five from the Dutchman—for whoever kills the Mick."

  "Good." Madden finished his drink and slammed the empty glass down on the table, signaling that the meeting was over. "Come on," he said. "I got some beautiful girls that wanna meet you mugs."

  4:55 a.m.

  Just a block or so away, Big Owney was probably sleeping like a baby in his penthouse apartment. Big Owney, the Duke, with his brewery on 10th Avenue at 26th Street, the Phoenix Cereal Beverage Company, had every copper in the city in his pocket. But Vince rarely slept through the night anymore. In his second-floor room at the Cornish Arms hotel, with Lottie asleep in bed, he stood at the window in striped boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt watching a sad-looking gray horse pull a bakery wagon lazily along West 23rd Street. He was twenty-two years old and the last of six brothers. Peter, the most long-lived of the lot, had made it all the way to the doddering old age of twenty-four. Across the avenue from the Cornish Arms, in front of a drugstore, a stack of boxes waited at the curb alongside a milk jug. A beat cop walked by with a hand on the hilt of his billy club. Under the light of the drugstore sign, he stopped and looked across the street. Vince stepped back from the window and when he looked again, the cop was moving on. The name of the drugstore—London Chemists—sputtered in neon.

  Vince tapped out a quick beat against his thigh, his fingers twitching as much as tapping. A dream about Pete had awakened him. They'd been out together at the Mad Dot and then after that at some hole-in-the-wall speakeasy in Harlem. It was the night after they got Big Dick Amato and Dominic Bologna, two of Dutch's guys, though they'd been gunning for Richie Cabo and missed him. They knew Dutch'd be steaming, and that was what they were out celebrating—he and Pete and Tuffy and Mike. He'd gotten drunk that night, drunk and coked up, and when the memory of it hit him his gut clenched and it was as though there were a sheet of muscle wrapped around his head that pulled tight, making him squint his eyes and turn his head to undo it, to loosen the pull like a tourniquet around his head. Pete had wanted to call it a night and the boys hadn't, and Vince had sided with the boys. It was crazy the way that memory was always right behind his eyes, like he could close his eyes at any moment day or night and see himself seated on a barstool behind a bar that looked like it was made out of plywood painted black and that bartender with a shaved head that seemed too long and wide to be human, that bartender smiling at the four of them with his hands on the bar—and Pete says, "I'm too feckin' old to be spending the night drinkin' with you boys!" and Vince says, "Go on, then! Go home, y' stick-in-the-mud!" and Pete says, "I will, then," and Tuffy slides him his keys and says, "Take my car, Pete. Mike'll drive me home," and Pete tips his cap to Tuffy, gets up from his stool, wraps an arm around Vince's neck and rubs his face in Vince's hair, laughin' while Vince tries to pull away. Everyone's laughing. Everyone's drunk and high. And then Pete's gone and the next time Vince sees him he's dead, slumped over the wheel of Tuffy's car.

  That was the dream that woke him. He's driving on St. Nicholas Street on his way home and he sees Tuffy's car on the sidewalk, crashed into a wall, which was what actually happened that night, but in the dream Pete's unhurt. He's behind the wheel trying to start the engine, which only sputters and cuts out, again and again. He's glad, Pete's glad, to see Vince. He slides over and Vince gets behind the wheel. He hits the starter and the engine roars. "See," he says to Pete, "it's easy," and Pete laughs and rests his head against the window. "I'm tired," he says in the dream. Vince backs the car into the street and starts for Pete's place on Marion Avenue. Pete says, "Remember Charlie and Thomas, Vince?" and Vince laughs. Why wouldn't he remember his own brothers? "Remember Aunt May?" Pete says, and he screws up his face the way Aunt May used to all the time when she was furious with the both of them. "Are you getting nostalgic now, Pete?" Vince asks—only when he looks to where Pete was relaxing comfortably a second earlier, there's no one there. He stops the car, and now he's on the docks alone by the river, and then the docks turn into a pier that juts out into endless black water and he's running toward the water and the end of the pier—and that was when he woke up with Lottie beside him sleeping. He found his boxers and his undershirt tangled in the sheets. He slipped into them and pulled the sheets up over Lottie and went to look out at the street.

  In the window's reflection, Vince's eyes were dark looking back at him. He raked his fingers through his hair. Women loved the dimple smack in the middle of his chin and when he noticed it himself it brought to mind a moment with his mother when he was little. He could still recall bits and pieces of the place where they'd lived then on Westchester Avenue, he and his brothers and his father, Toaly: the dark hallway up a flight of stairs to the bedroom he shared with Peter, Thomas, and Charlie—Vince and Peter in one bed, Charlie and Thomas in the other. His parents' bedroom on the other side of a thin wall. He couldn't remember much: the stairs, the bedrooms, a hole in the bedroom wall they stuffed with rags to keep the rats out. Their mother crying in the bathroom with the boys around her trying to comfort her, and Cha
rlie, who was already in his teens then and out of school and working—Charlie taking him aside to tell him their father had gone away on business and no one could say when they'd see him again, but it might be a very long time. He remembered a square hole in the kitchen ceiling/bedroom floor, over the coal stove/next to his bed, to help move the heat upstairs. He'd remove the grate over the hole and hang his foot down into the kitchen so his mother could stand on a chair and untie a knot in his shoe. And he remembered a quiet moment, alone with his mother, the boys all out somewhere, Florence married and on her own: it's daylight and he can't really recall what his mother looked like beyond long hair and a skinny body, but he can still almost feel the slight pressure of her forefinger resting in the dimple on his chin as she tells him he's special, that the dimple is a sign he's special—an indentation where God touched his favorites. Those words were etched in memory: This is where God touched you with his finger and marked you as one of his favorites. Her finger resting in his dimple, where it ft perfectly. Her name was Anna. His mother's name.

  His father he'd never seen again, and that night, with Lottie making a

  slight whistling noise in her sleep and stirring as if she might be dreaming something bad, Vince wondered if his father had seen him in the headlines. He often wondered about that. He thought he might have, Toaly might have, shown up for Peter's funeral. He'd watched for a man of about the right age, anyone he didn't recognize, at the funeral home and again at Saint Raymond's Cemetery. He'd known exactly what he'd do. He'd walk up to him solemnly, call him Da', and if he acknowledged that he was Toaly Coll, then he'd beat him till he was near dead, spit in his bloody face, and leave him where he lay. He'd say, "That's for Ma, who you left to wear herself out trying to raise us boys alone." But no one unknown showed up for the funeral or the burial at Saint Raymond's, where Vince had bought a grave site big enough for what remained of the family. At the top it said,

  In Memory Of

  My Beloved Brother

  Peter

  Died May 30. 1931

  Age 24. Years

  On the bottom it said,

  Rest In Peace

  Coll

  In between on the headstone there was room for him and Florence.

  Vince pulled the shade down over the window, and the shadows in the room deepened. He sat on the bed next to Lottie and put his hand on her bare shoulder. At his touch, she settled down and the whistling and fidgeting stopped. Across the room, her red dress was suspended from a chandelier, and beside the dress, on the blue stuffed chair where he had watched her peel off her clothes for him, her undergarments were neatly laid out, stockings over the back of the chair, the parallel black seams like dark trolley tracks climbing toward the ceiling. At the foot of the chair, a beaded handbag lay crumpled on the floor. Vince retrieved the handbag and returned to the bed, where he folded his legs under him and rummaged through its contents until he located what he was looking for: two pieces of stiff cardboard secured with rubber bands. He removed the rubber bands and found pressed between the cardboard, as he knew he would, a picture of him and Lottie beside Pete and Paulie Cirincione, a friend from the neighborhood. It had been taken at Coney Island, back when he and Pete were working for Dutch, making a hundred and fifty a week and feeling rich.

  He went to the window again and lifted the shade enough to let in light from the street so he could see the picture more clearly. A drop of sweat fell from his chin onto the photograph. He shook it off, blotted the stiff paper against his boxers, and then opened the window, hoping for a breeze, before he sat on the floor with the back of his head against the window sash. In the picture, all that was visible of Pete was his head in the notch between Paulie's and Lottie's shoulders. Lottie had her arm around Vince, and Pete had ducked down and pressed his cheek into Lottie's shoulder just as the photographer shouted, "Hold!" Of the four of them, Pete was the only one not smiling. He looked serious, staring at the camera, his dark hair parted in the middle and slicked back. They were all four leaning into a railing, in front of a fake caboose, so it looked like they were on a train, going away somewhere.

  Vince laid the picture down on the floor beside him and closed his eyes. From the street, through the open window, he heard metal grating against concrete and figured someone was dragging in a milk jug or a trash can. A moment later, someone walked by whistling "Dancing in the Dark," and Vince figured whoever it was that was whistling must have just seen The Band Wagon, and then it gave him goose bumps when he remembered that he had seen that show on Broadway with Lottie and Pete, and Pete had left the theater whistling the same tune. He looked out the window in time to catch the figure of a man as he turned the corner and disappeared. He had no idea of the time, but he figured it was closer to morning than midnight. He went back to the bed and sat at Lottie's feet before lying down beside her, fitting his body into the curve of her body, lifting her arm and placing it over his chest. Air was circulating through the room more now that he had opened the window. He could feel the flow of it coming in through the front window and exiting the open side window behind him. Lottie's red dress, the dark shape of it hanging from the ceiling, swayed and wavered slightly in the breeze.

  Vince tried to sleep but an instant later he was thinking about the shooting and the bloody kid on the sidewalk and another couple of kids in the street and the girl who screamed when she was hit and spun around before running off, and then seeing that it was a baby she was holding in her arms. He'd stopped shooting then. He wondered at the sight of all those kids running every which way, and it was as if he hadn't even seen them until he'd noticed the baby in that girl's arms. He'd tilted his hat down over his eyes and slumped back in his seat. All he'd seen was that miserable bastard Richie Cabo standing on the sidewalk like a feckin' target before he'd started shooting. Just Richie Cabo standing there like there was no one else in the world, that was all he'd seen. He figured he must have been blind to have missed him, and then he thought maybe it was the will of God because it was the second time he'd missed him and the stupid fat runt was a car length off and still managed to dive and tumble out of harm's way.

  Vince imagined Pete driving along St. Nicholas Street in Tuffy's car when he must have been surprised to see another car draw up alongside him and someone must have leaned out the window close to him and fred four shots through the window glass. Four shots between moving cars and through glass and all four hit Pete—and Vince couldn't hit Cabo, who was standing still as a mannequin in broad daylight. Charlie said, Dad's gone away on business and we don't know when we'll see him again. Never was the truth, though Charlie hadn't known it then. Vince thought maybe still he might see his name in the papers. Charlie and Tom. Pete rubbed his face in Vince's hair and then disappeared into the ground never to come back, and Vince put a nice headstone there, with room for him and Florence. He never meant to shoot any kids. He had to be the toughest bastard in the city, that's the only way or else you're doing all the rough stuff and Dutch is getting rich. He had no choice anymore anyway. There were too many bodies. He had to go to the top or to the grave. He had told Lottie that in exactly those words: the top or the grave. But he never meant to shoot any kids, and then he said it out loud in a whisper, "I never meant to shoot any kids," and it was like the sound of his own voice woke him from a dream because he opened his eyes and didn't know where he was for a minute until a car drove by on the street and its headlights came through the window and lit up Lottie's red dress that looked like it was hovering in the air, a quick bright shock of red swaying over the bed before it fell back into shadow.

  Vince pulled Lottie's arm tighter around him. "Baby," she said and kissed him on the back of the neck and didn't say anything more before she was still and silent again, and he lay there in her arms and tried to sleep.

  7:25 a.m.

  Gina smacked Augie on the back of the head hard enough to surprisehim. Augie was at the kitchen table next to Gina and across from Loretto and Freddie. Everyone was seated behind a full coffee cup
and an empty plate, with a knife and fork resting on a triangulated paper napkin. At the center of the table, fat brown pancakes were stacked on a red plate next to a jar of maple syrup. Gina had hit Augie when he'd stuck a fork into a pancake the moment Mama dropped the plates on the table. "Guests first!" she shouted, and she smacked him. Augie yelled, "Hey!" but when Gina proceeded to serve herself, as though she were the guest and not Loretto, everyone laughed, even Freddie. Augie cocked his fist at Gina like he might give her a good punch and she said, "Sure, go on." She tightened the belt around her yellow robe and poured syrup on her pancake. It was hot already at seven in the morning and Freddie and Augie were still in their boxers and undershirts. Loretto too was in his undershirt, though he had put on his pants. Mama turned away from the batter she was pouring into a skillet and gestured toward Loretto's empty plate. "Mangia!" she yelled as if she was angry at him for not yet filling his plate.

  "Hey, Ma," Gina said in between bites of pancake. She sniffed in Augie's direction. "These boys stink. How do you put up with it?"

  "Eat your breakfast!" Mama ordered without looking away from the bubbling pancake batter.

  "Freddie," Gina said, "you looking for a job today?" She lifted her coffee cup to her nose before sipping the dark brew, savoring the taste of it. Gina, like all the Barontis, drank her coffee black.