Vengeance(20)

Angie narrowed his eyes and sat back in the orange booth.

Silence hung heavy. Soon Turnip wondered if his friend could kill him with a plastic spoon covered with chicken liver.

“I’m saying, that’s all.”

Angie tapped his fingers, one after the next, and Turnip began to squirm.

“Ang,” he said finally, palms up. “What the fuck . . .”

Angie adjusted his eyeglasses. The color began to return to his face.

“Let me guess your plan,” Turnip said. “You let me guess?”

“Yeah. Go guess,” he replied, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He’d noticed the knockout behind the counter. A schnoz on her, but those dark curls and like an hourglass under the Bagel Nosh uniform. A streak of mischief too: He could tell she liked that he wouldn’t return when they were done.

He had to ask if she had a friend. A friend with a car didn’t mind driving Turnip down to Narrows Gate after.

“You want to find out where they got another ’69 Camaro,” Turnip said, sucking on a lemon slice.

Angie stood. “No. Jesus . . .”

Looking up, Turnip frowned. “What then?”

“When I come back, you tell me how Soldato’s connected,” he said. “Let me know if there’s somebody maybe who wouldn’t want to, you know, make a move, given his misstep.”



THOUGH IT WAS a short ride under the Hudson from Little Italy, Narrows Gate no longer drew much attention from the Five Families. The Gigentis still had a slice via the creaking waterfront, but the shipyards had closed, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company moved, Venus Pencil too, and now the city’s population, once as high as sixty thousand, was down to less than half that. And half of those left were melanzane who’d turned the projects into Little Harlem.

Seeing the Mob now thought the place an ass pimple, Soldato had moved in and set up his own operation, running a numbers racket that catered to the old-time Italians, the coloreds, and the Irlandese. Soon, come eight thirty at night and almost everybody left in Narrows Gate was throwing elbows, grabbing the bulldog edition of the Daily News for the total mutual handle at the track to see if the last three numbers matched their bet.

Given it’s a thousand-to-one shot to hit on the nose, Soldato needed a rake to collect, taking in maybe two large a week in small change and paying out less than 7 percent. Most of that went to his army of bookies, all blue-haired grandmothers who knew everybody on the block who wanted in. Somebody gave him shit he’d send Pinhead to bruise her sensible. Grandma in ShopRite with a fat lip and a shiner, and soon everybody’s back in line, the thing almost running itself.

Angie knew the donnaccia with the Ping-Pong ball at Muzzie’s was a sign that Soldato wanted to expand. But the Gigentis sent hookers through the Lincoln Tunnel for action all over the county: One Saturday 4:15 a.m., Angie and Turnip counted sixteen zoccolas waiting for a New York–bound bus outside a motel only a mile from Muzzie’s platform.

Clear, Soldato asked nobody what he could do.

Angie got his meet at two thirty in the morning at Sal Rossi’s on Houston Street with six feet of poured concrete named Bobo. Him and his giant melon coming out of the kitchen and Angie wondered if he’d made the right play.

Adjusting his sunglasses, Bobo passed on the handshake and said, “What?”

Angie was no pigeon. “It’s about propriety,” he said.

Bobo went, “Uh?”

“He put the puttana two blocks from a school. Muzzie’s is the place. It used to be a nice restaurant. Long row of brownstones around the corner. Two, three generations in the same building.”

“Muzzie’s.”

“Now you got mothers going by with their little kids, teenagers hanging around . . . It’s not a class move and people are thinking it’s you.”

“Me?”

“The family.” Jesus.

“Yeah, right, and . . .”

“And the cops come, and the newspapers,” Angie said, “and soon they’re closing down the York Motel and half the whorehouses on Tonnelle Avenue. In time, it blows over and he moves in on your territory.”

Bobo thought. Then he said, “Who is this guy?”

“Soldato. Right now he’s under the protection of nobody. But after he makes his move, he seeks an accommodation . . .”

“And you got a hard-on for this guy why?”

Angie sat back and lifted his palms. “Why?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Because he figured this. You and me. So he tells some guy he doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

“Maybe you hop a Greyhound or something.”

“No good. Not for the long run.”