Death Wish

  Bellini sighed. “We were virgins when we found each other. We . . . I will be as pure at the end as we were in the beginning.

  “You must administrate the coloreds with iron muscle.” Bellini’s index finger made a circular motion at the side of his head as he said, “Because the coloreds know none of them will ever really be allowed past the window in this country’s candy store, they have big mental problems . . . problems that will make many of them pigs for dope. Also, they will be happy to get a chance to strike gold playing the numbers and policy with their nickels and dimes.”

  Bellini blew a gust of Havana aroma toward the high ceiling and looked into Collucci’s eyes. “Consider a suggestion?” he asked.

  Collucci smiled. “Sure would, Papa.”

  Bellini’s face was solemn as he leaned forward. “Now is the time to slam down the steel lid . . . before the hatching of so many Willie Poes makes it suicide for white faces to go in and kill them all.”

  Bellini stroked his chin thoughtfully. “To protect our enterprises and to keep the lid on, you must have a dependable colored spy system . . . You will also need a mob of coloreds to guarantee the speedy death of all coloreds with a serious itch for our take and power. We must avoid newspaper stories embarrassing to our stand-up police and political friends. We must not punish with our own hands any except those coloreds that we have given responsibility to, who double-cross us.”

  Collucci said, “Papa, I like the way you see it for them. I must get a line on one of them qualified to help me put it all together . . . Perhaps Mr. Cocio can steer me right.”

  Bellini gravely shook his head. “He had lousy relations with the coloreds. He never found out what they are, how they think . . . He never tried . . . They shuffled for him and walled their stepin’-fetchit eyes from the tops of their heads for him. He never had a Chinaman’s chance to find out what it is really like with them. You need a colored who knows the whole score over there to help you organize.”

  Bellini puffed on his cigar as he threw his head back for a moment and closed his eyes in concentration.

  Finally he looked across the table and said, “There are several, but on proved performance and reliability my vote goes to old Mack Rivers if you can pull him in. Willie Poe tried, and couldn’t get the time of day. Causes, colored or white, don’t move Mack Rivers . . . just the long green, and the power, and the lacy fluffs that go with it.

  “Rivers has been in touch with the streets over there since the twenties. I dug him up for Big Al, to protect our trucks and the alky we peddled to the coloreds. He’s got a gambling joint in the Forties on State Street that the heisters never touch. They are afraid because of his reputation with a rod and his street savvy.”

  Collucci said, “He sounds like what I need over there.”

  Bellini laughed, “Mack Rivers knows when the bedbugs screw on the Southside.”

  At Collucci’s leaving, Bellini stood at the door and said, “Good luck, Giacomo, and remember your Papa Bellini let go before the witch of power could hustle a price on my life or drag my rear end with cancer that can come from the power pressure.”

  They embraced and Collucci got behind the wheel of his limousine to drive himself directly to find and lure Mack Rivers.

  His bodyguard Lollo Stilotti and chauffeur and closest friend Angelo Serelli played out a hand of draw poker for a big pot on the backseat.

  Bellini scowled through the door glass at Collucci’s chumminess with his underlings and his loose security.

  Collucci reeled in Mack Rivers from his drab craps joint on a gaudy hook. Collucci said, “I’m inviting you to become the biggest and richest hustler on the Southside . . . with Mack Rivers flashing on the marquee of a plush cabaret . . . and your own numbers bank . . . clear and free. You start when I take them over . . . Understand?”

  Rivers nodded.

  Collucci stood up and extended his hand. “Mack, you accept my invitation?”

  Mack Rivers stood. He showed his naked blue gums. He leaned his long bony frame across the table and shook Collucci’s hand. “Mr. Collucci, does Mack Rivers want to lay Lena Horne?”

  Mack Rivers’s Green Pastures became the plushest quicksand for suckers in Southside history. Rivers peacocked joyfully in rainbow suits as he bossed the spies and assassins he recruited so that Collucci could slam down the steel lid that Bellini demanded.

  The Green Pastures’s name for the cabaret lasted until the arrival of Larry “Love Bone” Flambert’s sister Mayme from Haiti. Then it became the Voodoo Palace.

  19

  And now Collucci came out of reverie on his way from the meeting with Spino. He noticed that Angelo, driving on Roosevelt Road, was approaching Halsted Street.

  He suddenly said, “Turn south on Halsted and go to the Palace.”

  Angelo made the turn and darted a look of apprehension at Collucci that they were risking the Southside alone.

  Collucci caught it and said, “You’re jittery as a cunt. Fuck Taylor and his jigaboos . . . You got that, Angelo?”

  Angelo grunted, “Uh-huh,” and stomped the gas pedal.

  Twelve minutes later, he parked in the no parking zone in front of the cabaret. A grinning tank draped in dazzling purple hurried across the sidewalk and opened the car door for Collucci. Then the doorman opened the padded front door covered with orchid leather. Angelo followed Collucci into the mirrored bar section.

  Collucci felt a twanging sensation at the root of his testicles as he gazed at Mayme’s reflected image.

  The dollish dancer’s pinch-bottle curves gleamed like sealskin in a blue spot. She quivered her black cherry melon tips in synch with a funky drumbeat, and her G-stringed dimpled rear end tossed airily in the pool of light.

  Angelo remembered he had tricked Bone to slaughter. He averted his eyes from the sight of Love Bone’s face re-created in living ebonic color. He whispered hoarsely, “Jimmy, I got a feeling I better wait in the car so nobody fucks with it . . . And I can keep an eye on the street.”

  Collucci gave Angelo an intense look before nodding him away.

  Mack Rivers saw Collucci, and he leaped from his supper of chitlins in the dining area at the rear of the barroom. His death’s head beamed as he shimmered toward Collucci wearing a pink satin suit that hung on his cadaverous frame like a shroud.

  They greeted each other and shook hands.

  Mack Rivers looked about the crowded bar. He bared the diamond inset at the front of his gold upper choppers and said, “Mr. C, if you don’t want your table, I’ll pull one of these chumps off a stool so you can have a taste . . . or you can have one with me at the back.”

  Collucci said, “I’ll have one at my table and catch the finale.”

  After checking Collucci’s hat and coat, the headwaiter seated Collucci with an unopened fifth of Courvoisier at his permanently reserved table at ringside.

  Rivers winked at two gunmen seated at the bar to cover Collucci and slewfooted back to his soul supper.

  Collucci watched as the dozen men and women members of the show crept on stage, costumed as African leopard cultists. Their bright eyes gave the cat masks eerie life as they felined toward Mayme with claws arcing whitely in the gloom.

  Mayme belly danced furiously as the drummer went berserk. She jackknifed her legs and bared her teeth in mock orgasm as the creatures made spitting erotic sounds and descended upon her. She flopped her hair like a blue-black curtain across her face and glared hatred through it at Collucci.

  As she lay supine, with satiny thighs agape and chest heaving, the cats, daubed bloodily with paint, hissed and clawed above her in a spot. She oozed sensuously from the tangle to her feet.

  The sextet broke into a Haitian death dirge as the victims of sexual greed twitched in a gory heap. Mayme looked back over her shoulder with glowing black eyes every several steps as she bumped and humped through a curtained doorway.

  She went down a short hallway to her dressing room where she phoned Taylor to tip off Collucci’s presen
ce. Then she stood before a dressing table mirror blotting perspiration from her body with a Turkish towel.

  She was certain Collucci would come to hit on her for sex as he had done a half-dozen times in the past. Now she would pretend to open herself to him, play on him to set him up for Taylor.

  She slipped off the shoulder-length mane of hair and hung it on the side of the mirror where it gleamed blue-black like the carcass of a raven. She dabbed tissues at the pox of sweat on her brow and blotted her skull, shining and stripped naked and black as an eight ball by a childhood scalp disease.

  A thin line of surgical scars ran from her temples inside her dead hairline around and down past her ears to the sides of her neck. Ten years before, when she had been the toast of Paris, she had taken her fifty-year-old face to a European wizard of plastic surgery.

  He had made incisions, and then employed retractors to pull the flabby skin taut across her high cheekboned face and neck. He secured it all with sutures in her scalp before he snipped off the excess, leaving her a face and neck ageless and velvety free of wrinkles and wattles.

  Now she heard Collucci’s knock as she was about to slip into a robe. She smiled wickedly at herself in the mirror, quickly slipped the wig on, and then half-reached for the robe, but instead, moved voluptuously to the door in only the G-string of sequins.

  She would hold him for Taylor, she thought as she asked who.

  He said, “Jimmy Collucci.”

  She heard the urgency in his testicles and called him a murdering motherfucker in French-Haitian patois under her breath.

  She looked up at him with dark eyes wide and vivid with girlish heat, and voodoo con, to be in the presence of such an ungodly handsome charmer. For the mini-instant his eyes were trapped by the bulge of fat bush against the G-string, her eyes glared lunatic hatred.

  She noticed his erection as he said, “I had to come back here to tell you, you’ve got to be the sexiest dancer, pound for pound, anywhere.”

  She opened the door wide and stepped aside and her black cherry bow of a mouth pouted. “It sounds like a fight game compliment . . . but thank you anyway, Mr. Collucci.”

  She smiled to see his eyes narrow just the slightest as he searched her face for a clue in her boxing reference that she suspected him of Love Bone’s murder.

  He said, “Mayme, have I got to ask a dozen times before you’ll call me Jimmy . . . ? Baby, don’t run that modesty game on me. You know even a blind man, working with just your voice and vibes, couldn’t feel a fight game connection.”

  She sat down at the mirror where she dabbed on cleansing cream and watched him sit on the arm of an overstuffed chair behind her. His smug expression, she was sure, blossomed from the soul shit he was proud to put together and toss at her.

  She tissued off the cream around her eyes as she thought, Well, here’s some hot grease for your hard-on.

  She said softly, “Jimmy, your flowers for Larry were lovely . . . the most extravagant of all . . . that day at the chapel.”

  She watched his eyes harden and his mouth toughen in the silence. He dropped his eyes to the carpet for an instant. She watched him take a deep breath and put his wary eyes in the mirror again with a pious grimace.

  “I was fond of Bone,” he said. “I miss him.”

  He lit a cigarette and suddenly the room keened with the presence of the Loas, the voodoo spirits. There was something about the cast of his face in the lighter flame that stroked her memory. She remembered an insane witch doctor in Haiti long ago. She had presided at his trial and death by fire for the mutilation murder of several female children.

  Mayme smiled into the mirror as she thought, Too bad it can’t be the fire for you.

  To slow him down she said, “How is your family?” as he rose from the chair and stood.

  He said, “I suppose your asking about my family means you’re dangling me again.”

  She stiffened at the look on his face. He came and pressed himself against the back of her chair.

  She fought for control and said in a voice ragged with hatred, “I’ve never encouraged you, Jimmy, so how can I dangle you?”

  He smiled to hear the break in her voice, and he erected fully with the thought that he had cornered and was exciting the hot nigger bitch, and she had been in heat for him all along.

  “Don’t shuck me, baby doll. You did everything but put it on my table a few minutes ago. I swat teasers’ rear ends raw,” he said as he nuzzled her peeking earlobe.

  He gazed at the blue jet swell of crossed thighs and greedily inhaled the raw meld of Paris perfume spiced with vaginal slime that she smeared on herself. He caped the dressing gown across her shoulders.

  She glanced down at the scissors on the tabletop. She visualized his neck gouting gore. For an instant her hands shook uncontrollably with the urge to strike over her shoulder and stab the scissors to the hilt, up into the soft spot under his ear.

  She saw by her watch only ten minutes had passed since her call. Taylor needed another thirty-five.

  She stared at the dazzle of scissors and willed herself into light trance to make him believe she was relaxed.

  “I need more time. I’m afraid to be sweet on you . . . Suppose I got really hung up on you and then you . . . ?” she said with sugar on it.

  He freed his long hard organ from his trousers and vised his powerful hands on her shoulders. Then he leaned down and pressed his cheek against her face. He stared into her eyes in the mirror as he rolled the muscles at the sides of her neck in a crushing massage.

  In a deadly whisper, he said, “You can’t feed me that ingenue shit anymore. Our time has come to fuck . . . And what the hell, I can make you queen of the Southside if you take it deep and pretty for Jimmy Collucci.”

  She said, “I can’t tonight. I’ve got the girlie whirlies.”

  He tightened his hands around the base of her throat. “The what?” he said.

  She enjoyed an interior guffaw that she hadn’t menstruated in two decades as she said, “Another month has whirled away again, and I’m wounded again . . . until day after tomorrow.”

  He said, “You’re full of shit,” as he lifted his bloated organ and stroked it across the top of her shoulder.

  Her face ashened with rage at the violation. Mayme scooped up the jar of cleansing cream and cracked it violently down on her shoulder blade as he leaped back an instant in time. She did a jack-in-the-box, and her chair toppled to the floor between them like a crashing counterpoint to the blare of the band’s final dance number.

  “You crazy jigaboo! You think Jimmy Collucci has to tear his asshole loose to lay a spook?” he screamed in a whisper.

  She curled her lip and pointed to his exposed organ and taunted, “Look, trick, take your pitiful white pecker out of my face and stick it in that dago cunt you put on that throne in River Forest!”

  He moved toward her.

  She backed against the table, and her eardrums vibrated with the gabble of the Loas. “Fly the scissors! Fly the scissors!”

  He said, “I’ll kill you! I’ll fuck you or kill you!”

  Her hand blurred through the air, and he saw a laser of silver fire streaking for the center of his right eye. A spastic muscle in his neck jerked his head a fraction. He felt a gentle zephyr against his eyelash at almost the same instant that he felt the scissors gouge a stinging rill across the tip of his ear.

  Jimmy lunged and his fist skidded off her heavily creamed jaw. She went down and lay stunned on the carpet. He dragged her to a small adjoining room and threw her onto a daybed, then he shucked out of his clothes and patted a handkerchief against the dribbles of blood at his ear tip.

  Mayme stole a glance at her wristwatch. Twenty more minutes! She looked up at him with slumberous eyes. He stooped and placed his luger on the carpet beside the bed. Then he lay down beside her. She was rigid with rage. She quivered as she fought the impulse to leap over him and try for the luger. As he pried at her thighs, he heard the grit of her teeth in defianc
e. Quickly he backhanded the side of her face.

  The voodoo spirits chorused so piercingly she clapped her hands over her ears. “Trance away! Trap away! Trance away!”

  She went into trance. She relaxed and opened her benumbed cave to his steely stabbing.

  With a groan he jabbed his tongue into her half-opened mouth. He seized hers and sucked brutally as if to tear her tongue from its roots. His scrotum sparkled excruciatingly as he exploded seed to spawn a million Mafiosi.

  But even as his joy spewed, it soured in the realization of her powerful pull, of the danger, her threat to his self-image of power, of complete control, his immunity to sexual entrapment.

  This freak would have to go away, right away, out of his sight and temptation, he thought as he spat and scrubbed his mouth with a corner of sheet. She would go away, or he would put her away in the mob’s cemetery on the rise behind his Sweet Dream Roadhouse.

  He scooped up the luger as he rolled off the bed and got to his feet, then looked down and was fascinated at her dreamy eyes that seemed to be staring through him, and at the odd smile lifting the corners of her mouth. He shook her. She lay still as death. He slapped his palm against her cheek. She trembled a bit and came to.

  Slowly, she rubbed the back of her hand across her eyes to cover the glance at her wristwatch. She had done it! Taylor would be out there waiting for him!

  His voice was harsh. “Mayme, I . . . What the hell is your real name?”

  She said, “It’s always been Mayme Flambert.”

  He stuck the snout of the luger between her eyes and said shakily, “Nigger, I won’t be seeing you again.”

  She said, “I know . . . I can’t say I’m sorry.”

  He pecked her forehead with the luger barrel. “I mean I don’t want you in my sight! I mean leave the city quick as you can haul out your freakish black ass. Understand?”