“He doesn’t talk to cops. He hates cops and priests. He learned that in the old country and never forgot it. Scarpino is here.”
We went into a messy little bedroom. Scarpino was sleeping under a thin blanket. He woke up, blinked and started to open a drawer in the bedside table. Moscato closed it on his hand. Scarpino didn’t yell. He lay down in bed again and put his bruised fingers to his mouth.
Tony said, “Get up and get dressed, Scarpino.”
“Why?”
There were three guns pointed at him. He looked at each gun in turn. Then he focused on Tony.
“Why me, Tony? We get along. We been friends for—”
“Cut it. You and I hated each other since ’forty-eight. Get up and get dressed.”
Scarpino got out of the bed and into his clothes. He took a tie off a hook in his closet and started to put it on. Tony took it away from him.
“Forget it,” he said. “You don’t need a tie.”
“You want to be Number One, huh, Tony? Want to push Lou out?”
“You’re smart today.”
“You’ll never make it. You know why? You ain’t got the guts it takes. You’re soft inside.”
Tony turned the pistol around and held it by the barrel. He laid the gun butt along the side of Scarpino’s cheek. He hit him with it on the other side of the face. A trickle of blood came from Scarpino’s mouth. Scarpino wiped it away with his shirt sleeve.
The old man was waiting downstairs. Scarpino was made of wood now. He didn’t talk, didn’t make extra moves. He went to his father and began speaking slowly in Italian. I asked Tony what he was saying.
“Telling him he’s going on a trip, Nat. He’ll be gone a long while and the old man shouldn’t worry.”
We left the house and walked down the skinny driveway to the car. Angie got behind the wheel. Scarpino didn’t want to get in—he stood next to the car without moving until Tony poked him in the ribs with the gun. Then Scarpino climbed in. Tony sat next to him and I got in back. Angie started the car.
“Where now, Tony?” Scarpino’s voice had lost the toughness. He wasn’t whining yet, but it was close.
“Angie knows where.” Quince turned and grinned at me. “This is cute, Nat. You’ll like this. And it’s still early enough.”
“Tony—”
Scarpino got the pistol butt over the jaw again. He didn’t ask any more questions after that. Angie gunned the car and then headed north. It wasn’t long before he whipped into the entrance of the cemetery where Tony Quince and I had had our little talk.
Tony was laughing now. “You get it, Nat? I told you I like this place—it’s peaceful, quiet. I set this up earlier, sent a few boys over with shovels. It’s cute, Nat.”
Angie knew the way. He drove over a variety of little roads, pulled over and stopped. A fresh grave yawned at the sky, a raw brown mouth in the earth. Scarpino saw it and went dead white. It was all real for him now.
It was tough getting Scarpino out of the car. He didn’t want to go. A pair of guys stood beside the grave and leaned on shovels. They smiled at Tony and he waved a hand at them. They watched as we dragged Scarpino over to the open grave.
Angie Moscato shot him. He wrapped his pistol in a car blanket to muffle the noise and then put the muzzle about six inches from Scarpino’s face. He squeezed the trigger and there was a soft wet popping sound. Scarpino fell down dead and Tony kicked him over into the grave. We all walked to the edge to look at him. Most of his face was missing. My stomach was a huge hard knot.
The pair with the shovels looked at Tony. He looked back at them for a second and then gave them a nod. They put the shovels to work on the mound of earth alongside the grave. The first shovelful landed on Scarpino’s chest. The three of us turned together and walked away from the grave. I could hear the rhythm of the shovels, and the sound of dirt covering Scarpino.
“Five years,” Tony said. I looked at him, “Five years ago I bought the plot, the cemetery plot. I bought it under another name, paid cash for it. You do that and the plot’s yours forever. Whether you use it or not, it’s yours. A handy deal. Pay now, die later.”
He laughed at his own joke. Moscato and I did not laugh. Tony stopped suddenly. He reached out one hand and I gave him a cigarette. I cupped my hands, scratched a match and gave him a light. He inhaled deeply.
“So I bought it five years ago,” Tony said. “For Scarpino, for whenever the time came. Now he’s in it. Now they cover him up and put the sod back on top. He’s gone, all gone. Just one more fresh grave and the only way anybody knows something’s wrong is checking the map. How many people sit around reading graveyard maps?”
I lit a cigarette of my own. It was getting brighter now and there was no time to listen to eulogies for Scarpino. There were three to go, Baron last.
“A fresh grave without a marker,” Tony Quince went on. “You know what I’m going to do? In a month, two months, three months, some guys are going to come in here in the middle of the night and put up a stone. Scarpino, with his name and when he was born and when he kicked. To make it official.”
I watched Tony’s face. He wanted to laugh out loud but he just couldn’t bring it off. He’d been planning this, setting it up, but now he couldn’t laugh over it. Later, maybe. Not yet.
One at a time we walked over to the car and got in. Nobody said anything. It was real now, real all the way. This wasn’t a movie, and there was no turning back, not with Scarpino in the hole and the dirt falling on him.
That was part of it.
The rest was identification. An obvious identification, one our minds couldn’t miss. A strong identification with Scarpino, and a fairly good understanding of what it was like to face a gun and know it was going to blow your head off in a minute or two. A picture of Scarpino in his grave and a far more frightening picture of ourselves in graves of our own.
Angie started the car and headed for the rooming house where Johnny Carr and Leon Spiro lived.
* * *
We left the car around the corner. We walked to an old rooming house with rocking chairs on the porch. Once it had been a private home, somebody’s mansion. I don’t think they had painted it since then and that had been a long time ago. The front door was locked. Angie took a long-bladed knife from his pocket and opened the door. We trooped inside.
Somewhere somebody was taking a shower. The sounds of the plumbing carried through the large old house. Someone somewhere else was cooking something and the smells got around as well as the plumbing noises. Tony said, “Two flights up.” We followed him.
There was a threadbare carpet on the stairs for one flight, then just bare wood. Both sets of stairs creaked magnificently. On the second floor a door opened and a haggard woman shuffled down the hall to the community bathroom. She looked like a superannuated whore. The third floor was empty and silent. Tony paused for a minute to find his bearings. Then he pointed to one of four identical wooden doors.
We walked to it. Angie had his knife out. He tried the door. It wasn’t locked and he eased it open slowly, gently. It whined at us but quietly.
We stepped inside. Tony was the last in and he closed the door. This time it didn’t make a sound. The room was dark, all the shades drawn and no lights on. It took my eyes a while to get used to the darkness. Then I could see—for what it was worth.
There was one big double bed in the room with all three of them in it. The bedclothing was in a heap on the floor at the foot of the bed. The girl was in the middle, sprawled on her back, her dirty blond hair spread over a pillow. Mustache lay on her right with his face buried in the crook of her neck and his arm draped across her just below her large breasts. Johnny was curled up on the other side of the girl with his feet alongside her face and his head resting upon her thigh.
I looked at the three of them and felt my stomach go tight. I pictured the three of them, two cheap punks and their girl, spending every night finding new ways for three people to turn each other on. The room was filled w
ith the overpowering odor of stale sex and pot.
“Pigs,” Angie said. “A bunch of pigs that stink.”
The girl shifted slightly in her sleep. Her red mouth was puffy from sleep and sex. Her waist was thick and in repose her flesh looked soft and flabby. She had prominent veins in her legs and a dark bluish bruise high on one thigh.
Tony had a gun in his hand. I wondered how he could use it in a rooming house full of people. Then I looked at Angie and saw the long sharp knife.
Angie was very good with the knife. He took Johnny first, slipping the thin blade into his back between the ribs and into the heart. Johnny died without opening his eyes, without moving his head from the girl’s thigh. When Angie withdrew the knife there was hardly any blood at all.
He got Mustache the same way but when the blade sank home Mustache went just a little tense and his face moved against the girl’s throat.
Just enough to wake her.
She yawned and stretched. Her puffed lips curled in a sensual smile. She yawned again and rolled over onto her side toward Johnny. Her thighs fastened around his head and her mouth sought him in greedy hunger.
Then she opened her eyes.
And saw us.
She said, “Angie? Tony? I don’t—”
“You had to wake up,” Angie said. “You dumb horny pig of a broad, you slut, you never get enough, you had to wake up ready for more. You couldn’t sleep just a minute more, no. You had to wake up.”
When she saw the knife her eyes went wide in terror and her mouth opened for a scream. She never got it out. Angie clapped a hand over her mouth and drew the knife across her throat, slashing it all the way open. The blood bubbled out of her like water from a broken sewer main. When it stopped he took his hand from her mouth and wiped blood and prints from the knife with one of the bedsheets. His face was a blend of green and gray. He stuck the knife between the girl’s legs and left it there.
“That stupid pig,” he kept saying. “That stupid, stupid pig.”
* * *
We got out at Tony’s house, sent Angie home and switched to Tony’s car. We sat in the front seat and smoked cigarettes. I tried to guess how long I had been without sleep. A long time and it felt longer. Too many people had died.
And one was left.
“The tough one,” Tony said. “The big one, Nat. The others were practice, something that had to happen. Lou Baron is different. If we don’t get him and get him right, then the rest was a mistake. This is the big one.”
I asked him if we could stop for coffee. Lou couldn’t know anything yet, not this early, not from Scarpino, not from Johnny and Mustache, not from Philly. Tony found a diner and we sat at the counter. A waitress who looked as tired as I felt served us very hot coffee in heavy china mugs. It was bitter but I didn’t complain.
“There’s somebody that lives with Lou, You know who?”
“Porky.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “So he’s on the list too. Porky looks slow but isn’t, Nat. Lou makes him look like a servant. Porky’s more than that. He can play with a knife or a gun or those big hands he’s got. He was on a chain gang in Georgia, got in a fight with another con and broke the other guy’s back over his knee. He has a gun on all the time.”
I finished my coffee and motioned for more. By the time she brought me a fresh cup Tony was ready for a refill. The coffee helped a lot. The tiredness had made me numb and slowed me down. The coffee was taking the edge of fatigue away.
“I’m not afraid of a gunshot,” Tony said. “His house is pretty quiet. A gun goes off in there, nobody hears it. In that neighborhood they don’t run for the cops anyway.”
“Anybody else live there? Aside from Baron and Porky?”
“Just the two of them.”
“Then I’ll go alone.”
He stared at me. “You nuts?”
“I’m serious. He’s expecting me. I’m back from a job in Philly and I had something to tell him. There was more there than he told me about, remember? He gave me a wrong make on the job. So maybe there was some kind of a snag and I have to tell him about it.”
Tony was interested.
I said, “It makes sense, Tony. If he sees you it’s a battle because he must know you’re thinking about a move. If I come, all alone…”
“Yeah.”
“You like it?”
“I like it, Nat. You got nerve, you know?”
I let that one go by. “All alone,” I said. “You can take me back to the Stennett. I’ll pick up my car and go it alone. He’ll see nothing but me in my car coming to report to him.”
“It’s pretty, Nat. I like it.”
“Hell,” I said. “I think I’ll call Baron. Then we’ll see how he feels about it.”
13
I called Lou Baron from a diner. The phone was on the wall in the rear and I leaned against the wall while I dialed his number. It rang for a while. Then Baron answered it.
“Nat, Lou.”
“You in town?”
“I just got in.”
“Something go wrong?” Baron asked.
I made myself hesitate. “It’s hard to say,” I said finally. “A long story. Can I come over?”
“Now?”
“If it’s okay.”
“Sure,” he said. “Come on over, Nat. I’ll be waiting for you.”
The last line bothered me a little. I put the receiver on the hook and got a new cigarette going. My lungs were smoke-stale and my eyes weren’t focusing just right. I went back to the counter to swallow more coffee. Then Tony dropped me off at the Stennett and I picked up my car.
* * *
I left the top up on the Lincoln. I drove slowly, my hands easy on the wheel, the gun tucked comfortably under the waistband of my trousers. I was the angel of death with chrome wings and no halo. I was hell in a short-brimmed hat.
Sunlight kept getting in my eyes. I found Baron’s house and parked my car in front of it. I looked at my watch but I didn’t even notice the time. Just looking at the watch was enough. A present, To Nat from Lou Baron.
Ah, the hell with it. Baron wasn’t my brother. We didn’t go to school together. Two months ago I didn’t even know he was alive. The watch was payment for a competent job of professional beating, not a token of love and friendship. He was a hood and I was a hood and you can’t make high drama out of one hood blowing the head off of another hood. Shakespeare managed it but that was another story. And Brutus wasn’t exactly a hood anyway. More a misguided nut.
So the hell with it.
Porky answered the door. “Crowley,” I said. “I think he’s expecting me.”
Porky didn’t say anything. He never did—maybe he didn’t know how to talk. I looked at him more closely than usual and noticed the way his jacket bulged a little in front on the left side. Tony was right. Porky still packed a gun.
We made the usual promenade together—through the hallway to the living room. Baron was sitting in his chair. He was wearing a bathrobe this time around, a rich maroon affair. He had deerskin slippers on his feet and a cup of coffee in one hand.
Porky crossed the room and disappeared. I didn’t sit down. I looked at Baron—he must have been sleeping when I called and he was still in the process of waking up. “Trouble, Nat?”
“Not exactly. I made the flight, met the finger. A tub of lard named Jack Garstein.”
“I don’t know him.”
The power was still there. The eyes were calm, the hands steady. He was waiting to hear what I had to say. But first I had to get Porky into the room. I asked Baron if I could get myself a cup of coffee.
“Stay here,” he said. “Porky’ll get it.” He yelled for Porky, told him to bring me a cup of coffee. While we waited I killed time playing with a cigarette. I shook out the match and found an ashtray to put it into. Then Porky came back.
Porky had a saucer in one hand with a china cup balanced on it. Steam came up from the brim of the cup. In his other hand he had a silver tray ho
lding a creamer and a sugar bowl. There was a gun under his jacket but he never had a chance to move near it.
My gun was tucked under my belt. I took it out, aimed, squeezed the trigger. I shot Porky in the chest, maybe an inch or two north of the heart. He took two steps and died. The coffee went all over the rug. So did the cream and sugar. But by then the gun was pointed at Baron.
“Why, Nat?”
I didn’t have an answer handy. I stood there, the gun pointed at him, and he sat where he was, his eyes on me, not the gun. He didn’t move at all. He may have been nervous but none of it showed. His question was a real one. He wanted to know why.
“Because you’re through,” I said.
“Who’s behind it?”
“Tony Quince.”
Baron nodded thoughtfully. “All right,” he said. “It figures. He’s well connected, he’s hungry. I suppose I should have been ready for it—and from him. But not this soon. You didn’t go to Philly, Nat, did you?”
“I went. I shot the finger and came home.”
“And now you shoot me.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He thought it over for a few seconds. He still wasn’t nervous. He was a fast hard man looking for an opening.
“Don’t kill me, Nat.”
He didn’t whimper it. He said it calmly, sensibly. He made me want to put the gun away, sit down, have a drink. I told him I had no choice.
“Don’t shoot me,” Baron said again. “Do a turn, change sides. We’ll clean up Tony and a few boys in no time and you’ll be on the right team.”
Everybody was telling me which side to play. “Your team’s gone,” I said. “Dead.”
“How many?”
“Scarpino and Spiro and Carr. And Porky here.”
“Four,” he said. “Four I never needed in the first place. Let me live, Nat.”
“No.”
I should have shot him then and saved time. For some reason I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why. I held the gun and kept it on him. He stayed where he was and looked at me.
He said, “I made a mistake. I guessed wrong. I thought you were just looking for a couple of yards a week, an inside track, a soft touch. I didn’t know how much you wanted.”