The Power Of The Dog (41 page)

No one tries to expropriate any Barrera cash for a long time.

Adán doesn’t get involved with any of this messy stuff. He’s a businessman; it’s an export/import for him—export the drugs, import the cash. Then handle the cash, which is a problem. It’s the sort of problem a businessman wants to have, of course—What do I do with all this money?—but it’s still a problem. Adán can wash a certain amount of it through the restaurants, but five restaurants can’t handle millions of dollars, so he’s on a constant search for laundry facilities.

But it’s all numbers to him.

He hasn’t seen any drugs in years.

And no blood.

Adán Barrera has never killed anybody.

Never as much as thrown a fist in anger. No, all the tough-guy stuff, all the enforcement, goes Raúl’s way. He doesn’t seem to mind; quite the contrary. And this division of labor makes it easier for Adán to deny what really brings the money into the household.

And that’s what he needs to get back to doing, bringing the money in.

Christmastime

And the tuberculosis old men

At the Nelson wheeze and cough

And someone will head south

Until this whole thing cools off …

—Tom Waits,
“Small Change”

New York City
, December 1985

Callan planes a board.

In one long, smooth motion, he runs the plane from one end of the wood to the other, then steps back to examine his work.

It looks good.

He takes a piece of fine sandpaper, wraps it around a block of scrap wood and starts to smooth the edge he just created.

Things are good.

Mostly, Callan reflects, they’re so good because they got so bad.

Take Peaches’ big cocaine score: 0.

Actually, minus zero.

Callan got not one cent from that, seeing as how all the cocaine ended up in a Feebee storage locker before it could be put out on the street. The Feds must have had it up the whole time, because as soon as Peaches brought that coke into the jurisdiction of the Eastern District of New York, Giuliani’s trained Feebees were on it like flies on shit.

And Peaches got indicted for possession with intent to distribute.

Heavy weight.

Peaches is looking at having his mid-life crisis in Ossining, if he lives that long, and he has to come up with Carl Sagan bail money, not to mention lawyer money, not to mention while all this is going on he isn’t earning, so Peaches is like, Ante up, boys, it’s tax time, so not only do Callan and O-Bop lose their coke investment, they got to kick in to the Big Peaches Defense Fund, which takes a chunk out of their kickback money, extortion money and loan-shark money.

But the good news is that they didn’t get indicted on the coke. For all his faults, Peaches is a stand-up guy—so is Little Peaches—and although the Feds got Peaches on tape talking to and/or about every goombah in the Greater New York Metropolitan Area, they don’t have O-Bop or Callan.

Which, Callan thinks, is a major fucking blessing.

That weight of coke puts you in for thirty-to-life, closer to life.

So, that’s good.

That makes the air very sweet, just being able to smell it and know you’re going to keep smelling it.

You’re already ahead on your day.

But Peaches is up a pole, so is Little Peaches, and word is the Feds got Cozzo and Cozzo’s brother and a couple of others and they’re just waiting to try to flip Big Peaches to nail it down.

Yeah, good luck on that, Callan thinks.

Peaches is old-school.

Old-school don’t roll over for nothing.

But hard time is the least of Peaches’ problems, because the Feds have indicted Big Paulie Calabrese.

Not for the coke, but on a boatload of other RICO predicates, and Big Paulie’s really sweating it because it’s only been a few months since that major hard-on Giuliani got four other bosses a century each in the penitentiary, and Big Paulie’s case is coming up next.

That Giuliani is a funny fuck, well aware of the old Italian toast “Cent’ anni”—May you live a hundred years—except what he means is “May you live a hundred years in the hole.” And Giuliani wants to hit for the cycle—he wants to punch out all the heads of the old Five Families, and it looks like Paulie is going down. Understandably, Paulie don’t want to die in the joint, so he’s a little tense.

He’s looking to take a little of his agita out on Big Peaches.

You deal, you die.

Peaches, he’s screaming that he’s innocent, that the Feds set him up, that he wouldn’t dream of defying his boss by dealing dope, but Calabrese keeps hearing rumors about tapes that have Peaches talking about the coke and saying a few inflammatory things about Paul Calabrese himself, but Peaches is like, Tapes? What tapes? And the Feds won’t turn the tapes over to Paulie, because they don’t intend to use them as evidence in Calabrese’s case—yet—but Calabrese knows that they’re sure as hell going to use them against Peaches in his case, so Peaches has them, and Paulie’s demanding that he bring them around to the house at Todt Hill.

Which Peaches is desperate not to do, because he might as well just stick a grenade up his ass, reach around and pull the pin. Because he’s on them tapes saying shit like, Hey, you know that maid the Godmother is pronging? You ready for this? I hear he’s got this pump-up dick he uses …

And other choice tidbits about the Godmother and what a cheap, mean, limp-dick asshole he is, not to mention a verbal rundown of the whole Cimino batting order, so Peaches does not want Paulie getting an earful of them tapes.

What makes it even more tense is that the cancer is finally taking Neill Demonte, the old-school Cimino underboss and the only thing keeping the Cozzo wing of the family from open rebellion. So not only is that restraining influence gone, but the underboss position is going to be vacant, and the Cozzo wing has expectations.

That Johnny Boy, and not Tommy Bellavia, better be made the new underboss.

“I ain’t reporting to no fucking chauffeur,” Peaches grumbles like he isn’t already skating on skinny ice. Like he’s going to have a fucking chance to report to anybody other than the warden or Saint Peter.

Callan gets all this gossip from O-Bop, who just refuses to believe that Callan’s getting out.

“You can’t get out,” O-Bop says.

“Why not?”

“What, you think you just walk away?” O-Bop asks. “You think there’s an exit door?”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Callan says. “Why, are you gonna stand in it?”

“No,” O-Bop says quickly, “but there are people out there who have, you know, resentments. You don’t want to be out there alone.”

“That’s what I want.”

Well, not exactly.

The truth is, Callan’s in love.

He finishes planing the board and walks home, thinking about Siobhan.

He met her at the Glocca Mora pub on Twenty-sixth and Third. He is sitting at the bar having a beer, listening to Joe Burke play his Irish flute, and he sees her with a group of friends at a table in the front. It’s her long black hair he notices first. Then she turns around and he sees her face and those gray eyes and he’s done for.

He goes over to the table and sits down.

Turns out her name is Siobhan and she’s just over from Belfast—grew up on Kashmir Road.

“My dad was from Clonnard,” Callan says. “Kevin Callan.”

“I heard of him,” she says, then turns away.

“What?”

“I came here to get away from all that.”

“Then why are you in here?” he asks. Shit, every other song they sing in the place is about all that—about the Troubles, past, present or future. Even now, Joe Burke puts down the flute, picks up the banjo and the band launches into “The Men Behind the Wire”:

“Armoured cars and tanks and guns

Came to take away our sons

But every man will stand behind

The men behind the wire.”

She says, “I don’t know—it’s where the Irish go, isn’t it?”

“There are other places,” he says. “Have you had dinner?”

“I’m here with friends.”

“It’d be okay with them.”

“But not with me.”

Shot down in flames.

Then she says, “Another time, though.”

“Is that ‘another time,’ like a polite blow-off?” Callan asks. “Or another time, we make a date?”

“I’m off Thursday night.”

He takes her to an expensive place on Restaurant Row, just outside the Kitchen but well within his and O-Bop’s sphere of influence. Not a piece of clean linen arrives in this place without him and O-Bop give it the pass, the fire inspector don’t notice that the back door stays locked, a beat cop always finds it convenient to stroll past the place and show the colors, and sometimes a few cases of whiskey come straight off the truck without the hassle of an invoice, so Callan gets a prime table and attentive service.

“Jesus,” Siobhan asks as she scans the menu. “Can you afford this?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you do?” she asks. “For work?”

Which is an awkward question.

“This and that.”

“This” being labor racketeering, loan-sharking and contract murder; “that” being dope.

“It must be lucrative,” she says, “this and that.”

He thinks she’s maybe going to get up and walk out right then, but instead she orders the fillet of sole. Callan don’t know shit about wine, but he stopped by the restaurant that afternoon and let it be known that whatever the girl orders, the wine steward should bring the right bottle.

He does.

Compliments of the house.

Siobhan gives Callan a funny look.

“I do some work for them,” Callan explains.

“This and that.”

“Yeah.”

He gets up a few minutes later to go to the bathroom, finds the manager and says, “Look, I want the check, okay?”

“Sean, the owner would fucking kill me if I gave you a check.”

Because this isn’t the deal. The deal is, whenever Sean Callan and Stevie O’Leary come in they eat and no check appears and they leave a heavy cash tip for the waiter. That is just understood, just like it’s understood that they don’t come in too often, but spread their visits around the places on Restaurant Row.

He’s nervous—he don’t go out on a lot of dates, and when he does usually it’s to the Gloc or the Liffey and if they eat at all it’s a burger or maybe some lamb stew and they usually just get shit-faced and stagger back and screw and don’t hardly remember it. He only comes into a place like this on business, to—as O-Bop puts it—show the flag.