Piece of the Action (11 page)

“Andrea grew up in one of those apartments on Queens Boulevard, the kind with the fountains in the lobby. That’s what I liked about her. She was innocent, a child with a woman’s body. In fact, I was so crazy about Andrea that I didn’t give a lotta thought to what was gonna happen after we got married. Which I should’ve, because it turned out she couldn’t take Red Hook. She tried like hell, but it was too much for her. Too rough in every way. Meanwhile, I’m makin’ four thousand dollars a year and there’s no way we can afford to go anywhere else. When Andrea offered to find a job, her parents went through the roof. They couldn’t live with the disgrace of their daughter having to go out to work. They offered to
give
us money.

“I don’t wanna make a long story outta this, but the moral is I should’ve thought things out
before
I got married. Only I was too much in love to think about anything but the wedding night. You? You’re in the same boat. Or, at least, that’s what Pat Cohan believes. You and Kathleen come from two different worlds. Her world is easy to get used to. Yours ain’t.

“You know what a house costs today? Even a little house out in Flushing goes for nineteen thousand. Whatta you make, six thousand five hundred? You’re on the pad for four bills a month. With that kind of money, plus what you’re gonna get from the wedding, you could set yourself up with something nice. You could even afford to give your father-in-law the grandchildren he wants.”

Moodrow took his time answering. He’d calmed considerably by this time. Mainly because most of what Patero was saying had already occurred to him. Most white people on the Lower East Side were either moving out or planning to move out. The Jews, the Italians, the Poles and Russians and Ukrainians—they were all heading for suburbia. “White flight” is what the newspapers called it. Moodrow wasn’t sure whether they were fleeing the tenements and the poverty or the Puerto Ricans who were coming in by the thousands.

The Puerto Ricans didn’t particularly bother Moodrow. He’d known any number of black and Puerto Rican fighters. Some of them were okay and some of them were assholes, just like his white neighbors. The problem was Kathleen. It was all right for a girl to work before she was married, but afterward she was supposed to stay home and take care of the house and kids. Kathleen might be willing to hold onto her job for a few years, but the Church (to say nothing of Pat Cohan) was opposed to any kind of birth control and Kathleen was as religious as they come. Once they were married, she’d want kids.

“Four hundred bucks a month, right?”

“Give or take a few. Plus it goes up if you get promoted or pass the sergeants’ exam.”

“What about being a detective? What about making arrests?”

Patero shook his head. “Ya still ain’t figured it out, Stanley. I’m the precinct whip. My job is to supervise the detective squad, the
whole
squad, and I’m real good at it. The crap we’re doin’ now only happens the first few days of the month. The rest of the time, I do my work like any other cop. As for you, you don’t have to worry about nothin’. You’re gonna get your collars and you’re gonna move up in the job. With Pat Cohan for a rabbi, it’s guaranteed.”

J
AKE LEIBOWTTZ, SITTING IN
the back seat of his mother’s Packard, was already bored with the New Jersey landscape. It was nothing but houses, dirt and trees. How could anybody live in a place like this? Why would they want to? That’s what he’d ask Steppy Accacio if Joe Faci ever got around to introducing them.

Accacio had moved himself and his family out to Montclair more than two years ago.

“Wake up, Jake,” he muttered to himself. “You’re here on
business.
This ain’t the guided tour.”

“You say somethin’, boss?” Izzy Stein asked, without turning his head. Izzy was as down to earth in his driving as he was in everything else, a fact Jake Leibowitz greatly appreciated.

“Nah, I’m just thinkin’ out loud.”

Jake liked sitting in the back seat. True, the move from riding shotgun to perched like a big shot, had been forced on him. Just like the wop who was riding shotgun in his place.

“I got a kid,” Joe Faci had said. “He needs a job. Maybe you could take him with ya.”

The ‘maybe,’ as Jake understood it, had meant ‘do it or get the fuck out of here.’ Well, what cannot be cured, must be endured, right? Life had a way of dumping on you and if you didn’t learn to shovel in a hurry, you’d be buried up to your neck. The kid had turned out to be Santo Silesi, eighteen years old and just out of reform school. Santo seemed eager to please, but Jake understood that the kid’s first loyalty would always be to the guineas. Jake Leibowitz was just a rest stop on the road to becoming a made man.

What it is, Jake decided, is that I’m never gonna turn my back on Santo Silesi. Because maybe Santo will become a made man by making Jake Leibowitz disappear. Like Jake Leibowitz made Abe Weinberg disappear. Which was most likely part of Joe Faci’s plan for good old Jake, anyway. Faci hadn’t exactly
ordered
Jake to eliminate his buddy, but he’d made his position perfectly clear. There was no way Steppy Accacio would continue to do business with a man who couldn’t control his employees.

“So, do what ya think is right, Jake,” Faci had said. “Then get back to me.”

They were driving south along the Jersey coast on Route 9, making their way from town to town. Their target was a SpeediFreight tractor-trailer heading up from Virginia tobacco country to a warehouse near Matawan. The driver would be using the turnpike for most of his ride through New Jersey, but at some point he’d have to transfer to smaller, local roads. His final destination was twenty-five miles east of the turnpike.

There were any number of ways for the driver to go. (SpeediFreight encouraged its drivers to mix up their routes, especially when they carried cigarettes.) But in this particular case the driver would exit the turnpike near South Brunswick. He’d take Route 617 to a large truck stop outside of Old Bridge and go to lunch, making sure to leave the doors unlocked. When he came out, Jake would be waiting.

“This ain’t the way I like to do things,” Jake had informed Joe Faci. “I mean I don’t have any
control,
here. Suppose I gotta get out in a hurry? One wrong turn and I’ll be wanderin’ through Jersey ’til the tires fall off. Or suppose the driver gives me trouble and I gotta do what I gotta do. Where do I dump the body? What do I do with the truck? No disrespect intended, Mr. Faci, but I wanna work as an
independent.
”

“Please, call me Joe.” Faci, unperturbed, had sipped his espresso, then added more sugar to what was already a cup of black mud.

“Okay, Joe.”

“I could understand ya reluctance, but I need ya ta do me this one favor. Because I’m in a bind. I got a regular crew for the job, but they had an unfortunate problem in Hell’s Kitchen last week and they ain’t available. So what I’m askin’ ya to do is help me out this here one time. If it goes good, which I’m sure it will, I could set you up permanent. I could introduce ya to one of the dispatchers at SpeediFreight. After that, you’re on your own.”

Faci hadn’t bothered to add “as long as we get our piece,” but Jake had gotten the message. What Faci was doing by setting Jake up with the SpeediFreight dispatcher was putting another layer between his boss and the operation. Jake could be trusted to do his time like a man if he got busted, but the dispatcher was probably some greedy citizen with a big family and a bigger mortgage. If the feds grabbed him, he’d roll over before they put on the cuffs.

“So tell me somethin’, Santo,” Jake asked, “where’d ya learn to handle a truck?” The plan was for the kid to drive the rig to a warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons would be counted. Jake’s cut was twenty cents per carton. The first thing he’d thought, when Faci had announced the price, was that he could get a dollar a carton if he sold them to someone else.

“Hey,” Santo replied, “call me Sandy. I ain’t in the ‘Santo’ generation.” He turned to face Jake. “See, no mustache.”

Jake unconsciously touched his own mustache. “You don’t like mustaches? Well, a
blond
kid like you shouldn’t grow a mustache, anyway.
Blonds
gotta have thick beards to make a mustache look good. It ain’t for kids. Now why don’t ya tell me where ya learned to drive a truck?”

Sandy Silesi turned away, concealing his face, but the tips of his ears, much to Jake’s satisfaction, flamed red.

“My uncle had a trucking company. In the Bronx. I worked there in the summer. I used to move the trailers around the yard.”

“Ya got a license ta drive a semi?”

“Nah.”

“Then take it easy.
Real
easy.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t mouth off to me.”

“I didn’t mean nothin’.”

“Because if ya mouth off to me, I’ll pull ya baby ass outta this car and send ya back to Joe Faci in pieces.”

The truck stop in Old Bridge turned out to be so big that Jake thought he’d turned into an army base. There must have been forty or fifty rigs parked in the truck lot and another fifty cars on the other side of the restaurant. Unfortunately, none of the tractor-trailers bore the name SpeediFreight, much less the number 114. Which is not to say that Jake was caught off guard. The drive up from Virginia took nine hours under perfect conditions. Which meant Jake had to be in Old Bridge nine hours after the rig was scheduled to leave Richmond. But suppose the driver ran into a bad accident? Or it was raining in Virginia? Or snowing in Pennsylvania?

“Me and Izzy are gonna go inside and get some lunch,” Jake announced. “You wait in the car. If ya spot the rig, come and get us.”

“Whatever you say.”

Jake took his time getting out of the Packard, trying to decide if the kid was being sarcastic. He couldn’t make up his mind, but then he figured it didn’t matter, anyway. Maybe he
would
have to teach the kid a lesson. That didn’t figure to be a problem. But this wasn’t the time or the place to do it.

When they got inside, Jake asked the lady with the menus for a table close to the door. The lady dropped the menus on the first table she came to and walked away.

“I can see they like us already,” Jake said.

“This kid is a piece of shit,” Izzy replied. “Santo Silesi. He’s gonna screw us first chance he gets.”

“Jesus, Izzy, not again.”

“It’s
meshugah,
Jake. It’s like carrying a snake in your pocket. Sooner or later, you gotta get bit,
nu
?”

“Don’t talk that Jew talk, all right? This is 1958. Ya sound like a Lithuanian rabbi. Next thing I know you’ll be growin’ a beard.”

“How I’m talkin’ ain’t the point.”

Jake shook his head in disgust. “The point is that we
already
talked about this. Three
times.
Get it through ya head: we got
no
choice.” Why was it that Jews never knew their place? Why couldn’t they take no for an answer? It was a curse. The curse of the big mouth. “The point is that there’s fifteen thousand cartons of cigarettes in that truck and we’re gettin’ fifteen cents a carton. That comes out to twenty-two fifty, our end. Ya wanna go back to gas stations and liquor stores? I could fix it.”

“That ain’t it, Jake. That ain’t what I’m sayin’. I just don’t wanna be a slave to some wop who can’t write his own name.”

“It ain’t slavery. We give a piece to Steppy Accacio and he gives a piece to someone else and they give to someone else. I figure there’s gotta be a big boss at the top, but I don’t got the faintest idea who it is. Maybe it goes on forever. Maybe it goes in a circle. Whichever way, if ya don’t give up that piece, ya can’t operate. Ya might as well go out and get a job.”

“C’mon, Jake, I ain’t …”

They were interrupted by a tall, middle-aged waitress in a yellow uniform. The wad of gum she was chewing made a huge lump in her right cheek. It looked like she had a toothache. “What’ll it be, folks?”

Santo Silesi appeared in the doorway behind the waitress. He nodded at Jake, then spun on his heel and disappeared. “What it’ll be,” Jake said, “is some sandwiches to go.”

“Take-out is at the counter.”

“You couldn’t get it for us?”

She walked off without bothering to answer. Jake grinned at Izzy, then stood up. “Must be an anti-Semite.”

They found Santo in the parking lot. He nodded toward a SpeediFreight trailer parked off by itself in the back of the lot. “The driver’s inside the restaurant.”

“All right, you and Izzy go back to the car. And when we get movin’, stay close. If I run into a problem with the driver, I want you right behind me.”

He watched them walk away, then turned his attention to the SpeediFreight trailer. The way the driver had parked his rig, it could be seen from anywhere in the truck stop. If this was a set-up (and there was
always
that possibility—you couldn’t ignore it), he, Jake, would be spotted before he got within fifty feet of the rig. And it might not be the cops, either. A company as big as SpeediFreight had to have its own security. For all Jake knew, the driver had been involved in a dozen heists.

The walk across the asphalt reminded Jake of the first time he’d walked across the yard at Leavenworth. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that
everybody
was watching him. Just waiting for an opportunity to put a shiv in his back. Well, he’d survived that walk and he’d survive this one, too. He was sure of it, despite the fact that he was sweating, despite the fact that it was twenty-two degrees and windy. By the time he pulled himself into the passenger’s side of the cab, he was breathing heavily, the icy air cutting into his chest like broken glass.

Jake took the .45 out of his waistband, laid it in his lap and immediately felt better. His little jaunt across the parking lot wasn’t going to lead him back to prison. It was the road to Park Avenue. Once he got his hands on the SpeediFreight dispatcher, he’d squeeze the bastard until his toes bled. SpeediFreight was one of the biggest outfits on the East Coast. They hauled everything—TV’s, hi-fi’s, clothing, furniture, appliances.

Six months of good luck. That’s all he was going to need before he put a few goons
(Jewish
goons, naturally) between himself and the actual heist. Hijackings didn’t really interest him, anyway. At best, they were no more than a means to an end. The end was the drug business, specifically heroin. Dope, horse, skag, doogie—no matter what they called the stuff, it came to the same thing. It came to profit margins that hadn’t been seen in the criminal world since the end of Prohibition. Best of all, the industry was just getting off the ground. There was still room for an ambitious ex-con named Jake Leibowitz.