The Secret (28 page)

“
No, by God!
” Len was a fanatic about it. “The time is past! The time is past when every fuckin’ dockworker can dip his hands into our shipments and help himself to what he wants. Business isn’t being done that way anymore.”

We sat over dinner in Therèse’s and my apartment on Third Avenue. Things were more like they had been when Giselle was alive:
good
wines, good food. Therèse knows the difference. We were four: Vicky and Therèse, Len and I.

My son was taller than I was, lean and muscular, with dark-brown hair and intent blue eyes. His hair was thin. He was going to show male-pattern baldness by his thirties. He was personable and self-confident. He also had a very clear vision of what he wanted his world to be. I was proud of him. I was proud of the part I had played in making him what he was. He was the best thing I ever did.

“What way is it different, Len?” I asked. “What’s changed?”

“Letting ourselves be ripped off by—”

“Longshoremen who pilfer a little out of the shipments,” I said. “How many television sets do they take out of a hundred arriving from Japan? I can tell you—one. Doesn’t a Toyota disappear off the dock occasionally? How many fur coats disappear? How many cases of wine? Len! It’s the way business is done!”

“Not anymore,” he said stubbornly. “It’s changing. The prosecutors are moving against this kind of stuff.”

“Oh. Against the longshoremen who rip us off for less than half of one percent. What do you think we pay to inspectors to overlook all kinds of things? What do you think we pay assessors to undervalue our merchandise? What do we pay cops? Fire inspectors? And so on. How many bottles of booze do we give away every year? My Uncle Harry, a cheap grifter if ever there was one, used to give a box of cigars and a bushel of apples to every cop in his precinct at Christmas.”

“We’re not cheap grifters,” said Len. “We don’t have to do business that way. We’re
big
now, Dad. We don’t have to—”

I don’t remember that he had ever called me Dad before. It caught at me. But I had—for the moment—to continue the argument. “We don’t, huh?” I said. “We’re too big to make payoffs? Len, we don’t own any congressmen. Maybe we should. A company our size ought to own a few. Some companies ought to depreciate senators and representatives on their tax returns—they’re assets, and they own them.”

“Hey! This kind of cynicism—You’re living in the past.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s put bribery out of the discussion. Let’s look at regular daily business. Every time you pay an insurance premium you’re paying off a scam artist. I don’t see any difference between paying our friends the longshoremen a pittance to see that our merchandise makes it across the docks safe and paying an insurance company more than a pittance for guaranteeing the same. Given a choice, I’ll take the longshoremen. Then we pay the Teamsters to see to safe delivery at our stores. And we pay the goddamned insurers for the same thing. I can walk down to the docks and say to the longshoremen guy, ‘Hey, I got a little package comin’ through. See it gets through, okay?’ And he says, ‘Okay, Jerry, you got it.’ At the same time your fuckin’ pious insurance guy will screw me. And, son, business will continue this way. It’s not a thing of the past.”

“You bringing in narcotics?” Len asked me.

“You think that, fuck you!”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

Our two women looked at us in dead silence. They sensed that something was happening, something more than just an angry argument. Father and son …

45

It was tough talk, I suppose. But, goddamn him, during my wedding trip he had made a major decision about my business without consulting me. He could have reached me by phone, but he was so goddamned certain of himself that he didn’t think it necessary.

From that day something became certain: Either Len was going to be a lawyer or he was going to be my heir at Cheeks and take over the business as I, inevitably, would have to give it up. The flesh is heir to a thousand ills, of which life is one. Anyway, there wasn’t room in the business for both of us.

Sal was furious. “We’ve had cooperation from the longshoremen from day one,” he growled at Len. “Now you tell me we’re gonna cut ’em off. No way, little man. No way.”

“It’s
done,
Sal,” Len said, his blue eyes turning to ice.

“Then
un
done it. A man doesn’t screw his friends.”

“Friends don’t steal from each other,” said Len.

“One hand washes the other,” said Sal.

“And picks the other’s pocket while doing it?”

For a moment I thought my seventy-year-old partner was going to take a punch at my thirty-year-old son. And I realized Len would have decked him if he’d tried it.

I suppose I should have realized that my son was my son. What else should I have expected?

*   *   *

How should I define myself? I’m the kid of a royal fucking. I loved my parents, but I came from
nothing.
I shoved my way into every opportunity I could find, and I made the best of it. I got lucky in the end and took my larcenous, heartless Uncle Harry for two million. I turned the tables. Still, who can guess what other ways Harry fucked me, that I didn’t even know?

With only one or two exceptions, I suppose I’ve never done anything I’m really ashamed of. And I’ve done only one or two things that I’ve regretted. Like the way I fell for Filly and cheated on Melissa.

But, Christ, am I going to let my son take over from me, just like that?

He had a powerful ally in Vittoria Castellano Lucchese Cooper. To start with, she was his fuck-off money. He could walk away from his law firm or walk away from me. With Vicky he had a comfortable living available to him. And he had connections—connections independent of me, independent of his law firm, and independent of Sal.

I understood that he had not fucked the longshoremen without Vicky’s advice and approval.

“It’s not the same anymore,” she said to me quietly one night over an after-dinner cognac and coffee. Len was still at his law office, deeply involved in the immense amount of paperwork necessary to register a new issue of corporate securities. Therèse listened but could not understand the talk.

“Nobody is afraid anymore,” Vicky went on. “I mean, not in a big way. It’s just street-corner stuff now. The day has passed when Meyer Lansky could say ‘We’re as big as United States Steel.’ Oh, billions go through the rackets, but it’s a few thousand here, a few thousand there, selling coke and crack. The sellers use the stuff, too, and are not usually victims of their own product. Only the small boys are. The day of the really big boys is over. Where would you find an Arnold Rothstein now? A Lucky Luciano? A Carlo Gambino?”

“Gotti?” I suggested.

Vicky sniffed. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“Why?”

I knew she was aware of my attention on her sleek legs, crossed under a Cheeks black vinyl miniskirt. She wore things like that at home but never on the streets of Greenwich.

“It all depended on the
omertà.
Where would you find today a man who’d die before he’d tell the secrets? They testify and go into the witness protection program. They write books! The
omertà
meant trust. When nobody trusts anybody, there is no honored society, no men of respect.”

“The longshoremen…”

“The longshoremen can strike. And they will, too, against container shipping. But where do they stand? They’ll be saying, ‘We’re striking for the right to steal off the docks.’ What kind of sympathy is that going to get?”

“And … you so advised Len.”

“Len has to function in the real world. And the new real world is different from the old real world.”

“Sal?”

“Sal’s an antique. He always reminded me of Bugsy Siegel. He’s an artifact of a gone world.”

“Am I?”

She frowned at me. “No, Jerry, you’re not. Unless you choose to be.”

*   *   *

She was right about container shipping. There were strikes, but the longshoremen and Teamsters lacked an appealing case.

Residence in Greenwich carried with it access to beaches on Long Island Sound. Therèse and I could go to the beach as guests. Neither of us could swim, but Therèse loved the beach and the gentle surf that the Sound offered.

We made a domestic scene. Little Catherine would toddle in the edge of the surf, thinking she was chasing seagulls. My grandson, Jerry, was still an infant. Vicky pretty much stayed on the blanket with the baby. Therèse wandered along the beach, staying close to Catherine. Vicky and Therèse wore our international-orange swimsuits that had seemed so scandalous when they first exposed women’s hips and butts on the beaches and at pools—a cut that was now so common. Those suits had been the sensation of our business at the beginning. When we went to the Greenwich beaches, our wives weren’t the only women on the beach so outfitted. That damned swimsuit was our impact on the world.

Len and I would go walking. He had discovered a tiny rocky promontory that was submerged at high tide and was left with clear tidal pools when the tide was out. Saw grass grew thick on the whole area; it, too, was submerged twice a day by the tide. Len enjoyed looking at the tiny shrimps and crabs that lived in the tidal pools, protected there against fish large enough to eat them—though not protected against gulls and nasty little boys with nets.

We talked.

I said to him one day, “You were right about the unions and container shipping. We don’t lose merchandise to pilfering anymore. But did you ever think of the other side of that?”

“What other side?”

“In the old days, thousands of men went down to the waterfront every morning and got day-jobs wrestling crates across the docks by the sheer force of their muscles. Now, the containers are moved by machinery. What do you suppose happened to all those men? What happened to them and their families?”

My son looked at me as though I were insane. “Have you developed a social conscience?” he asked, almost scornfully; and I recognized then that he shared the genes that had produced me—the genes, indeed, that had produced Uncle Harry.

My father was a small-timer, and he always would have been, kept that way by Harry if not by his own limitations. Harry was a grifter, never big; he never could have been; he didn’t have the guts or the brains. That I had built a billion-dollar business had been—luck? I couldn’t think of myself as cold, unfeeling ruthless. Luck had to have had something to do with it.

The kid had had luck, the luck to be born to parents who loved him—though I’d had that luck, too—and who had the resources to get him a first-class education. But I could see now that he was also a hard, self-focused man.

*   *   *

“Fool!” Buddy said when I talked to him about it. “You’ve always been
shrewd,
man. You’ve always seen where the main chance was. Me, I couldn’t see it. But you did. It’s smarts that got you where you are. So don’t be surprised if the kid’s got smarts and is ruthless enough to use ’em.”

“The kid’s as cold as a whore’s tit,” Sal said to me. “They always are, when everything’s been handed to them on a plate. He’s a spoiled brat, Jerry. He never had to work for anything, never had to take a chance. He’ll never cut some asshole’s throat and dump him to the sharks. ’Cause he hasn’t got guts, either.”

“He’s a different sort of guy from what we are, Sal,” I said. “I’ve talked with Vicky about the different way things are. Maybe it’s a better way. Guys with smarts, guys with education—”

Sal shrugged. “Yeah. Educated greed.”

46

I was seventy years old. I didn’t feel seventy. I’d quit smoking a long time ago. I drank, but not all that much. I’d never had a physical. I didn’t want to know what a doctor might find.

Maybe it was time to start taking it a little easier, though.

Len pushed me. “Look,” he said. “You’ve got no second-level management. There’s just you and then employees. Personal, hands-on management is great for small business. It doesn’t work for a billion-dollar business like Cheeks.”

“We’ve got lawyers and accountants, designers and—”

He nodded impatiently. “And artists. And store managers—”

“And regional managers,” I added.

“Uh-huh. Suppose you have a heart attack tomorrow. Who runs the business while you’re in the hospital?”

There was no point in arguing with him. He was right, of course. And he anticipated what I was going to say. It was inevitable. “You do, I guess.”

“Until you’re out of the hospital. And then?”

I had to make the concession. “I can’t ask you to leave your law practice and come into the business anything like full-time … unless I’m willing to … to give you control.”

“And I can’t afford to do it,” he said bluntly. “You’re the head man. You could change your mind any time and shove me out in the cold.”

“You think I’d do that?”

“No, I don’t think you would. But you
could.
Did you ever put your entire life in the hands of one man? No matter how much I trust you, I’d still be putting myself in the hands of one man.”

“We’ll talk about it some other time,” I said.

*   *   *

We reorganized. I stepped down as president of Gazelle, Incorporated, and took the title chairman of the board of directors and chief executive officer. Len became president and chief operating officer. Sal continued to be a vice president, though with no specific duties, as it had always been. Roger Middleton left his bank and became vice president of finance. Len contracted with a headhunter and hired away from another company a man named Richard Pincus to be vice president of the mail-order division; Len also persuaded the lawyer he most admired, Hugh Scheck, to leave their firm and become general counsel. Since the loss of Len and Hugh all but ruined Gottsman, Scheck & Shapiro, Len retained the firm as our outside lawyers, which turned out to be a good deal for all concerned.

Len was a shrewd and sometimes ruthless executive. I remember an incident that happened only a few months after he became president:

Roger Middleton had persuaded Len to contract with his wife, Ariana, as a consultant on sweatshops. I suspect Vicky had something to do with it, too, since the two women had become friends in Greenwich. Len put her on with small compensation.