Turnip frowned as he faced the red-velvet curtain.
“Muzz? Now? I ain’t here for three months,” he said. “What’s ‘now’?”
Little Muzz spoke soft. “Maybe he seen the car.”
Turnip drove a ’69 canary-yellow Super Yenko Camaro 427 with a V8, an M-22 four-speed manual transmission, and custom-made spoilers front and back. Zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds on the ramp to the turnpike. Now it was parked in the bus stop on the sunny side of Polk Street.
“Soldato wants me?” Turnip whispered. Without thinking, he tapped the .45 in his jacket pocket.
“Apparently,” Angie replied, knowing full well the car had nothing to do with it. Big Muzz made a call. Which meant Soldato had an eye out for Turnip. For what, who knows?
TURNIP GOT HIS handle when some roly-poly ice cream man translated his surname to impress the other kids on line. That evening over dinner, he asked his father why the wiseass threw him a new hook. His father, who knew damned well rapa was Italian for “turnip,” said, “Because you look like a fuckin’ turnip, that big fat ass you got.”
Later, Angie told Turnip his old man must’ve been thinking of a butternut squash or an eggplant, a turnip being more or less round. Either way, Turnip was displeased and he took to weight lifting to change his body shape. It worked, even if the name stuck, and now he looked like he didn’t need Angie knocking the Webers of the world off his back.
At about the same time, Angie realized that he wasn’t going to be much bigger than his old man, who went about five and a half feet in work boots. Also, he’d have to wear eyeglasses. But by then, he’d been discovered to have an IQ of 154 and was in a class for the advanced. Soon, it was common knowledge that Angie, the toughest kid in Narrows Gate, was also the smartest.
About fifteen years later, it dawned on Silvio Soldato that Angie and Turnip were a dangerous duo. Very dangerous, these two, he mused. Brains and brawn. Mind and muscle. Hmmm.
The problem in this case, he noted, was that usually when you had a Hercules and an Einstein, at the same time you had a moron and a weakling. Not so with these two. Turnip had a fresh head, especially with numbers and mechanics, and little Angie was pazzo times three — everybody in town knew he’d crammed those turnips down the ice cream man’s throat when he was ten years old. Each time a guy turned up on the waterfront with his shins shattered or his ears pinned to his cheeks, Soldato made Angie for it, wondering how he always walked away clean.
Soldato wanted them broke up, now and forever, and for six weeks he thought about how to do it. Killing them both would look desperate, he reasoned, and killing one would send the other one seething toward revenge. He considered having the brakes go on the Camaro as Turnip and Angie headed down the viaduct, careening them to a fiery death at the Getty station. But then he started thinking maybe Turnip could figure some way out of the crash, twisting and maneuvering, tires squealing. Kid drives like he was born behind the wheel, that son of a bitch, him and his Camaro.
Then he decided, the lightbulb going bright.
Now Soldato was sitting in his booth at the Grotto, enjoying a late-afternoon meal of zuppa di vongole over linguine, and here comes Turnip. Alone and more or less right after Big Muzz said. A good sign, he thought as he watched Pinhead frisk him, concluding by giving his nuts a threatening tug.
Turnip shivered as he shook off the September chill.
“Mr. Rapa,” Soldato began. “How’s the Camaro? And Angie?”
“TWO QUESTIONS, AND there was the entire plan,” Turnip said.
“The shit heap gave it up before I had my ass in the seat. What a fuckin’ babbo.”
“So he said that? Just like that?” Angie asked.
“Not in so many words, no. Different words.”
“What words?”
“Ang, how the fuck do I know? I got the gist of it, all right?”
They decided to play it safe, leaving the Camaro in Turnip’s garage. Angie had a beat-up burgundy Impala, one of about three thousand in Hudson County. He drove it north on Boulevard East while Turnip took the 22 bus up to Cliffside. Now they were in the Bagel Nosh in Fort Lee, figuring nobody was eyeing the joint.
“The one sentence,” Angie insisted. “Repeat that one —”
“He said, ‘I don’t want to see him no more.’ ”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, I don’t think he wants you to move, Ang,” Turnip chuckled.
“And you don’t take me out, he’ll blow up the Camaro. What’s wrong with this guy? Did you tell him they made a lot of Camaros?”
You had to be half a fag to drink Tab, but Turnip liked the taste. “In fact, Ang, they ain’t made that many Super Yenkos.”