Condemned (25 page)

“Anything you can do … I mean it. Anything. I'm okay right now, but tomorrow, and the next day, what am I going to do until then, you know what I mean?”

“Wait here, I think I can find you something, very little, but something. But remember, Adan, this is all there is until the new flowers arrive.”

“I understand.”

Uri Mojolevsky drove slowly under the elevated train structure on Brighton Beach Avenue in the brand new champagne colored Lexus he had bought two weeks before. It was polished to a high shine. Russian CD's blared out of the moon roof.

“Uri, I love this car,” said Olga, a black haired young woman sitting in the back seat. She was rocking to the music, smoking a cigarette. Anna, Uri's nominal girlfriend, wearing her leather biker's cap, her chin jutting forward and back to the music, sat in the front passenger seat, smoking, watching the people walking on Brighton Beach Avenue.

“It likes you, too,” Uri said, happy, high, bouncing to the music. “Here we are,” he announced as he stopped at the curb in front of a restaurant called “Kot Chorni”. The two girls alighted from the passenger doors. They both wore leather short-shorts and knee length patent leather boots. Uri walked around the car, just as the valet parking attendant came out of the club.

“I'll take it, boss,” said the attendant, taking the car keys from Uri.

“Make sure the roof is closed and everything is locked,” Uri called back just as he stepped into the club.

“Okay, boss.”

“Uri!” smiled the restaurant owner, a little man with a bald head and a beard. They cheek-kissed three times. “Good afternoon, good afternoon,” he greeted each of the women.

“How's it going, Georgi?” said Uri.

“Good, good, now that you're here. I've got your favorite table,” he said, leading the party through a beaded curtain that separated the bar from the restaurant, toward a booth, actually a small alcove, situated in the back, away from the other tables. “You going to eat?”

“I only want soup,” said Anna.

“Me, either,” said her friend.

“Eat whatever you want,” said Uri as he sat back in the booth and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke toward the ceiling. “You see Sascha, yet?” he asked the owner.

“Nyet.”

“If you see him—”

“I'll send him right back, of course.”

The valet parker came into the rear area and walked toward Uri. “You want I should hold the keys?”

“Of course, you hold them. What? You came here to ask me that, or get a tip? You think I'm going to run away or something? You must be playing the lotto?”

“No, no, it's not that—”

“Of course it is. Here.” Uri handed him a ten dollar bill.

“Thank you, boss.”

“Champagne?” the owner asked Uri.

“What else?”

“Not the French stuff. It's too sour,” said Anna.

The owner looked at Uri.

“Whatever the ladies want,” Uri said indifferently. He put his arm around Anna, who was sitting to his left.

“It's too warm,” she frowned, shrugging his hand from her shoulder.

The owner glanced from Anna to Uri, then turned, instructing a waiter what to bring to the table. As it was early afternoon, there were only two or three other tables occupied. The other people looked occasionally at Uri's table when there was a burst of laughter, loud talking, or when the waiter popped another cork from a champagne bottle.

From time to time, Uri's cellular phone would ring, and he would glance at the caller I.D. Sometimes he would answer; most of the time, he did not. Other times, his beeper would sound, and he would check the number, and make a call on the cell phone as the women drank, smoked, and talked loudly beside him. Once in a while, Uri would stop his phone conversation to tell them to be quiet. Then he'd continue, and they would immediately resume being loud.

Sascha Ulanov walked quickly toward the Kot Chorni. He looked as if he had just awakened from a drunken stupor—which he had. When he reached the door, he flipped away his cigarette and plunged into the club. The bartender, polishing glasses behind the bar, said hello. The owner, seated at a small table near the bar with two other men, nodded Sascha toward the back. Sascha pushed aside the beaded strands, looking around. He did not see Uri until he heard Anna's high pitched laughter coming from the small alcove in the back. Uri was on the phone, smoking a cigarette. He waved to Sascha, then pointed toward the front of the restaurant. Sascha turned, but saw nothing. Uri signaled Sascha to wait a moment. When he finished his phone call, Uri stood and squeezed past Anna. “Come, I want to talk to you,” he said to Sascha.

Sascha followed Uri to the men's room. Uri checked the room, opened the door of the toilet, then zipped down his fly in front of the urinal.

“Listen, it's time for you to do something, go somewhere again, you know what I mean?” Uri motioned Sascha closer. “This time, the trip is for us. We are going into the business for ourselves with the black people. We're moving up in the world.”

“Romania, again?” Sascha whispered. “Why don't you go?”

“You know I got no papers,” Uri whispered back, his words slurred a bit by champagne. “Otherwise, I'd go. You got a travel permit. Me, I got nothing. We need something. We're out—which, of course, is very good.”

“Fucking Romania. It's a pain in the ass,” said Sascha.

“Shhh.” Uri looked toward the doorway.

“I make the three thousand extra, just to go and come back?”

“Of course,” said Uri. “But this time you're going to be part of the deal.”

“Meanwhile, I need spending money.”

“That, too. Expenses, tickets, and everything.”

“When do I have to go?” asked Sascha.

“As soon as I get you a ticket. They will meet you at the airport when you get there.”

“I know. What, this is my first time?”

“I'm just making sure you remember, you fuck,” said Uri. “You drink—you do too much of everything. I don't know what you remember.”

“I remember what I have to remember. Don't worry.”

“If I was worried, I wouldn't have you go,” said Uri.

“Same set-up. I give them my luggage? They give it back to me the next day? I come home?”

“That's it.”

“I can use the three-thousand?” said Sascha. “I'm broke.”

“You're sticking too much of that shit up your nose.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“I told you, I'm not worried.”

“Okay, then,” said Sascha. “You got some money for me now?”

Uri frowned. “One-thousand now,” he put his hand in his pocket, then thought the better of it. “when I drive you to the plane. Otherwise, you might be too fucked up to go. The other two thousand, the minute you get back. Right at the airport, when I pick you up.”

“Give me a couple of hundred now.”

Uri pulled out a roll of bills and gave Sascha two-hundred. “Anna is going with you,” Uri added, glancing at Sascha's face.

“Anna? What the fuck for? You think I need a watch-dog? Especially Anna! I don't know how you can stand that bitch. The trip all by itself is bad enough. But with Anna—”

“Don't worry. When you get there, she's going by herself to meet her girlfriend for a couple days. She's a good cover, makes you look like honeymoon people.”

“Honeymoon? With that crazy—all respects, but your girlfriend is fucking crazy.”

“She fucks like crazy too.”

“I can fuck her? You don't mind.”

“If she let's you near her. Just don't go to sleep. She'll cut your thing off.” Uri laughed.

Semanon's : July 22, 1929 : 2:30 P.M.

“What did this guy say?” Greg Diamond said in his native Sicilian dialect to Charlie Jones. Diamond's true name was Gregorio Biondi, but, except for very few people, he was known in the street only as “Greg Diamond ”. They were seated at a table in the back of Semanon's. Except for a commissioner and his secretary nursing coffee cups at a table near the front, and a couple of other people standing at the bar, the restaurant was empty.

“He said he could get me whatever I served in the joint at better prices than I was paying,” Charlie Jones also spoke in Sicilian dialect. Charlie's true name was Carlo Luca, born in America to a family that immigrated from Altavila Silentina, south of Salerno, Italy. His family's native dialect was Neapolitan, but Charlie had learned Sicilian, along with his older brothers Antonio and Giuseppe, hanging out with Sicilian friends in New York's Little Italy.

“What did you say to him?” Diamond was small, slim, olive-skinned, with slick, dark hair now hidden under a wide brimmed fedora that was cocked down on one side. He was dressed in an expensive suit and tie.

“I played stupid, like John the Gomb, just listening.” Diamond nodded, winking one eye softly. “He said I should think about it,” Charlie continued. “In addition to good booze and good prices, he said I'd also have good friends. I said to him, like a ‘strunz', really? That sounds good. I like good friends.”

“Good. Good,” said Diamond slowly, his eyes narrowing, his mouth an angry slit. “Sons of whores. Trying to muscle in on us. You told him to come back, no?”

Charlie nodded. “He said he would bring back some of his friends, so I could be friends with his friends.”

“Let the pieces of shit come around, you hear? We'll let the sons of whores make friends. Make nice nice with the bastard, Charlie. Play along. Let him think you're a dunce, that you're not with anybody. Buy some stuff from him. This way we'll watch the bastard when he comes here to deliver, follow the truck, and then we'll hit him and all his friends in the head.”

“Not in here?”

“Charlie—”

“We're having such a nice run. We don't want to spoil anything, right?” Diamond assured Charlie with a calm look. “By the way,” said Charlie, “here's a little something.” Charlie took an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and handed it under the table to Diamond.

“Not too little, Charlie,” Diamond laughed, slipping the envelope into an inside pocket of his own jacket. “You know how the big guy and Charlie Lucky are?”

Greg Diamond was a Capo in the gang of Don Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss' Masseria. Charlie Lucky Luciano, the Under Boss, had sent Diamond to make the rounds of the various joints under their protection to take up the weekly collection that would be divided up amongst the friends Charlie already had.

“No, a good size envelope, Greg, as usual. That's what I'm talkin' about when I say we don't want to spoil a good thing.”

“Don't worry about these pieces of shit, Charlie. They're probably some grease balls from uptown or Jersey or some shit like that, trying to horn in on a good thing. They can't befriends of ours, Charlie, otherwise they'd know you're with us. We'll teach them a lesson they won't forget.” Diamond paused at an inner thought momentarily. “When we're finished, they won't be able to remember nothing. “He laughed grimly. “But that's something else, Charlie. And it won't be around here, okay?”

“You want a little something to drink, eat? I made a nice pasta fagioli for myself in the back.”

“Pasta fazool, Charlie. You gotta say it like those other stupid piece of shit Neapolitans, who walk around talking like monkeys. I'd love to, but I gotta make a couple more stops.” Diamond stood, smoothing the outside of his jacket where he had put the envelope. “Remember, Charlie, make nice nice. Just let me know when this piece of shit is going to show up, and then forget about it. Okay?”

“Ci. Ci.”

Newsroom, New York Post: June 20, 1996 : 10:50 A.M.

The newsroom at the New York Post was in the midst of its usual controlled chaos. Myriad paper strewn desks were oriented toward the Managing Editor's horseshoe desk on the far side of the huge newsroom. The Managing Editor sat on the inner curve of the horseshoe, with five associate editors in charge of the various news bureaus that would make up the emerging edition, facing him from the outer side of the horseshoe. On top of all this activity was a cacophony of voices, ringing telephones, television monitors, wire service consoles constantly clacking out the latest news from points everywhere.

“You want to go with the same photo of this Hettie Rouse we had on the front page yesterday morning?” one of the Associate Editors asked Ed Barquette, the Managing Editor. Having endured their peripatetic Chief over the years, to the minions of the newsroom, and to all points west, Barquette's French Canadian name had devolved into the sobriquet, Ed Bark It.

Barquette—bald, wearing his trademark blue button-down Oxford shirt with sleeves rolled back to his forearms, tie pulled down from his neck—glanced at the front page of yesterday's first edition which lay on the desk to his left.

“Haven't we got something that makes her look uglier than this? Rotten bitch, even if it was only a little pickaninny, her own, that she killed. Lets her boyfriend fuck the kid first. Christ! I hate stories like this. You got pictures that show how truly ugly this cunt is?”

“She's in handcuffs, her eyes rolling half out of her head, high on drugs. She looks like a piece of shit. You saying she looks nice?” said Seymour Tucker, the Photo Editor. He studied a copy of the previous day's front page.

“What the fuck do I know,” rasped Barquette, not looking up from the typed copy of the Bosnia story that was to run on page five. As he read, he circled words, phrases. Sometimes he winced and slashed, muttering epithets. As he finished reading each page, he tossed it to his right, ostensibly to a copy box, but mostly to the floor where a copy boy—or, in this case, a young woman—retrieved them for re-write. “She looks too nice there,” he grumbled without looking at Tucker. “Get another shot, something with her face gnarled up, more ugliness, you know what I mean?”