The Moonlight (27 page)

And that was it.  That was the only guy I did in over three years.  Honest.  The rest of the time I just sold my nose candy and was a model citizen.

Until the dagos got greedy and started moving in again.

First they tried to take over my dealers, who were suddenly being told to buy from Galatina’s people—or else.  They were scared and I couldn’t blame them.  I couldn’t hold it against them if they started flirting with the competition.  They said they had a right to protection if I wanted to keep my territory, and they had a point.  I broke a few thumbs, just to show everybody I hadn’t all at once turned into a Quaker, but I wasn’t mad.

Some creep named Gela was running coke out of a liquor warehouse in Kos Koba, about four miles down the road.  It was a big barn of a place and he had a little office in the back, with glass on three sides so he could keep track of things.  They left the double doors open during business hours, which in the cocaine trade ain’t from nine to five, and Alphonso Gela was always behind his desk, counting money.

The dumb wops, didn’t they know the world was full of terrible people?

I lifted a car, a beat-up old Chrysler that nobody was gonna miss, and stashed it in an alley about two blocks away.  Then, about three in the morning, I took the Lincoln down to Kos Koba and switched cars.  Then I drove over to the warehouse and gunned the Chrysler straight through those double doors at about forty miles an hour.  I’ll never forget the look on Gela’s face when he saw I was gonna crash his office—he was so surprised he never even thought to stand up.

The car hit the desk, the desk slammed into the wall, and Gela, who was in between, sitting on his swivel chair, had a big dent in him right below the breastbone.  He had his head down on the desk and his tongue was sticking out as blood poured out of his mouth.  Dead.  As Sonny would have put it,
morto
.

I was expecting no end of trouble when I kicked open that car door, but Alphonso’s men must all have been married with children, because the first blast from my shotgun and they ran like fucking rabbits.  I’m telling you, I just walked out of there.

I had Leo Galatina’s home phone number, and I wanted him to hear about this from me first.  I don’t think he much liked getting a call at a quarter to four in the morning, but too god damned bad.

“They’ll be picking Alphonso out of the stonework for weeks,” I told him.  “You want a war, you got it.”

The dagos like to think things over before they move, and they hate a mess in public.  Also, it’s part of their code that they don’t do somebody where he lives because they like to leave the women and children out of that kind of stuff.  So I figured I was safe enough.  I went home and woke up Lenore.

“I never left the house—all night,” I told her.

“Sure, honey.”  And I could see from the look in her eyes that she knew I’d been up to something.  And she liked it.  Well, I was still a little excited, so I jumped her.  And, believe me, she came like a train whistle.

After that things got a little dicey.

I tried to stay in crowds.  I stopped driving the Lincoln, because everyone recognized it.  I was very careful.  But these guys have to know who’s boss, so I let them think they were safe for a while and then I came back hard.

About two hours into the new year, 1940, Salvatori Molto, Leo Galatina’s
capo regime
, was bleeding his life away into the snow in the parking lot across the street from Dink’s.  His driver was also hit—I’ve always been sorry I didn’t kill the bastard—and his bodyguard, the only man left standing, decided not to give chase.

I would have liked to make a try for Leo, but he and Enrico had both gone to ground.

By this time I was in negotiations with Frank Marcello, who, after all, had set up this arrangement in the first place.  I had to do something, because it was only a matter of time before the Galatina brothers found a way to reach me.  Besides, the guinea bastards had stopped my supply and put me out of business.

“You want these jokers to own everything right up to the New York line, or what?”

“No, we don’t want that, Charlie.  We want the Galatinas contained.”

“Then find a way to get them to call a truce.”

“It won’t be easy, Charlie—Alphonso Gela was a cousin.  It isn’t just business.”

“Then maybe they all need to learn they’re not immortal.”

“I’ll do what I can, Charlie.  Sit tight.”

Sit tight, my ass.  I just picked up my shotgun and went back to hunting dagos.

But they were hunting me too, so I had to pull out of Lenore’s place and keep moving.  I slept where I could and showed up at the YMCA every once in a while for a shower.  It was a nerve racking way to live, but it was better than being dead.

Bang bang bang, they were so careless it was like shooting clay pigeons.  I did one guy while he was buying a newspaper down at the foot of Greenley Avenue—hell, I didn’t even know those bastards could read—and I got two more as they were coming out of the funeral home after paying their last respects.  I thought that was a nice touch.

And then, suddenly, in April Marcello negotiated a truce.  I was safe.  The New York Families guaranteed my life, and I could go back to Lenore’s place.  But I was still out of business.

“Relax,” Marcello says.  “They’re too afraid of you not to cut some kind of a deal.  You’ll be making money again by the summer.”

And, sure enough, toward the end of June I get a call from George.  The Galatinas want to talk.  We’ll have a meeting at his place, just Enrico and Leo and me.  Everything can be worked out.  There’s plenty of room for everybody in this business.

And there will be absolutely no funny stuff—I don’t have to worry about a thing.  I’ll be safe.

And I agree to it, because George is my friend and I trust him.  I wonder how I could have been so stupid.

“Are your folks alive?”

“Sure.  I guess.  I sort of misplaced them. Yours?”

“Both dead.”

Both dead.  Phil kept thinking about what he had meant by that simple little declaration.  It was literally true and had been for the five years since his mother died of some particularly potent strain of pneumonia.  A heart attack had killed his father while Phil was in the Navy.  They were both gone.  And yet even as a child he had always thought of his parents in the past tense.  If they were in front of him they seemed alive; otherwise, they seemed to fade into ghosts.

They had not been young when he was born—perhaps his mother had wanted him, he wasn’t sure, but they had their lives already and he was an intruder.  Perhaps he was the ghost.

The bond between parent and child isn’t necessarily broken by death.  Memory survives.  Sometimes the past is simply a curse, a poison that seeps forward in time to make life unbearable, but most people, probably, have a skein of comforting recollections they can draw up around their shoulders to keep off the cold.  All those magic words—home, mother, father—can still soften the heart and make it bleed with a kind of agonized pleasure, recalling to us the fact that once we were loved, and filling us with hope that this inheritance, at least, might not have grown debased.

But it wasn’t that way with Phil.  Whenever those memories rose up before him he would flinch away, with the guilty sense that he was intruding on someone else’s privacy.  That house did not belong to him.  He had merely lived in it.  Those people did not want him there.  They had merely endured his presence with silent forbearing.  That was how he felt.  That was how he had been made to feel.

So the Moonlight was his refuge—
his
, at last.  It had its own fund of memories, of which he knew almost nothing, and its past, for all its terrible darkness, seemed to welcome him.  He could not surrender it, not the house, not the burden of its history, because there was nothing else.  He expected to die here, expected it with a conviction that was almost serene.  This was the last stop.

And he was sure that death was not far away.

“
I sort of misplaced them
.”  She had said it with such marvelous indifference.  Beth was lucky.

Well, perhaps she would get even luckier.

“I have to go into town,” he told her.

It was ten a.m. Monday.  After his visitation—he didn’t know how else to describe the man in the brown suit, sitting out on his patio—he had gone back to bed but not to sleep.  Sleep, of course, was impossible.  Last night he had killed a man, and in the small hours of the morning he had had an encounter with a ghost.  Things were moving toward some kind of crisis.  He had to be prepared.

The law firm of Pearl & Karskadon had offices at 2 Railroad Plaza.  Phil chose them out of the phone book because he knew where to find the building and was confident of a parking space.  Their lobby was dark, large, and elegantly furnished.  The receptionist was a blond lady of about forty.  She smiled.

“May I help you?”

“I need to talk to a lawyer,” Phil answered.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“No.”

“Well then, whom did you wish to see?”

“It doesn’t matter.  One’s as good as another.”  He smiled back at her, so she wouldn’t decide he was a nut case.  “I just need to have a will drawn up.”

“Could you give me your name, please?”

He did.

“Will you please take a seat?”

He sat down on a sofa and looked around for something to read.  There were copies of
Barron’s
and
The New York Times
on the coffee table, along with a stack of
National Geographic
. 
National Geographic
made him think of Uncle George’s apartment up on the third floor and
Barron’s
was simply unintelligible, so he picked up the
Times
and tried to make sense out of a story about politics in the Soviet Union.  It sounded almost as intricate as his own life.

After about twenty minutes a man came out to the lobby.  He held out his hand.  He wore a perfect gray suit, was very blond and looked about twenty-five years old.

“Mr. Owings?”

Phil stood up and took the offered hand.

“Would you come this way?  My name is Doug Palmer.”

They threaded their way through a maze of corridors to a tiny office, and Phil managed to keep himself from asking Palmer if he was a lawyer—he didn’t look old enough, but if he had his own office he must be.  Palmer offered him a seat and sat down himself behind a desk the size of an aircraft carrier.

“It was a matter of a will, Mr. Owings?” he said, raising his pale eyebrows and smiling hopefully.

“Right.  I’ve come into some property lately.”

“Best to have everything in order, yes.”  Palmer nodded with approval.  “Have you ever had a will drawn up before?”

“No.”

He fished around in his jacket pocket and came up with a slip of paper.  He slid it across the desk to Palmer.

“That’s my name and address at the top, and then the name and address of the person to whom I want to leave everything.”

“A relative perhaps?”

“No.”  It wasn’t a question Phil liked very much, and maybe Palmer sensed as much.

“Well, Mr. Owings, in cases where the sole beneficiary is not a relative, sometimes, just to avoid the threat of litigation, it’s best to make specific exclusions . . .”

“You mean, spell out who I
don’t
want to get anything?”

Palmer made an equivocal gesture with his right hand.

“More or less.”

“There is no one—that is, I have no family.  No one has a claim against me.”

There was a momentary silence, in which Phil decided that his little declaration had probably sounded rather pathetic, as if he were asking for sympathy.

“Well then, Mr. Owings,” Palmer answered, folding his hands together and looking pleased, “this seems a straightforward matter. . .”

Half an hour later, his will was drawn up, signed and witnessed.  Phil took it with him, and paid his bill in cash.

“If we can ever be of any further service, Mr. Owings. . .”

Phil made no answer.

For convenience, he kept his checking account at the Brookville branch of the Union Trust.  He also rented a safety deposit box.  He left the will there on his way home.

Since it was Beth’s day off, they went to the amusement park in Rye, which was only about ten minutes away, and stopped at a pizza place to pick up a couple of slices for lunch.  They took them back to the car, because Beth’s aversion to eating in restaurants did not draw any fine distinctions.

It was a hot day, and very humid, so it really wasn’t much of a pleasure to be out of doors.  They took a couple of rides, decided the place wasn’t exactly Coney Island and left.

“You feel like going swimming?” he asked.

“Sure—if you do.  I don’t mind.”

That was what was nice about Beth.  She never minded.

Phil almost hated to admit it to himself, but he seemed to enjoy being with her more when they were away from the house.  Of course, he enjoyed being with himself more when he was away from the house.

The ferry out to the island was crowded with teenagers and college kids. Most of them seemed to be as naked as savages, and some were carrying ice chests the size of coffins.  There was lots of shouting and excited laughter and music from twenty or thirty different portable radios.  Somehow it was profoundly depressing.