Bloodline (20 page)

His regular sexual interludes with Betty—and then with an endless string of other willing girls, available in Maranzano’s speakeasies—helped, but he still champed at the bit, waiting to be given work that he thought was worthy of him. He was impatient, but he knew he had some curious hold on Maranzano.
When I am ready, he will call on me. I am young. I can wait.

Still, there were too many people around. Too many people who came into the office every day and gossiped among themselves about what they had done the night before—Masseria bookies they had robbed, Masseria trucks they had hijacked. Finally, Nilo lost his patience and reminded everyone how he was Don Salvatore’s favorite boy and wanted to know everything—where they were going, what they were doing—and he slowly insinuated himself into every piece of Maranzano’s operation.

He did not try to lead. He was content to follow until he learned how it was all done—about the gambling, the prostitutes, the speakeasies, the merchant shakedowns—and then slowly, without anyone’s clear approval, he put his hand in more and more.

The gangs of toughs who hung around Maranzano’s real estate offices, the other thugs who worked in garages and stills and whorehouses and gambling parlors, all soon came to realize that Nilo was someone especially close to Don Salvatore, and after a while they knew that he had Maranzano’s ear and felt that his word could be accepted as Don Salvatore’s word.

For himself, Don Salvatore had not given Nilo approval for what he was doing, but neither had he told him to stop. And, in the tightly knit organization, there was no doubt that he knew what Nilo was up to. So in the absence of orders to the contrary, Nilo decided he would keep on until told otherwise.

Instead of criticism, though, within a year he had been promoted officially. It became Nilo’s responsibility every Tuesday to make the rounds of all the speakeasies in the city that bought liquor and beer from Maranzano and to collect for the previous week’s shipments. This was considered one of the most sought-after jobs because record keeping was careless and a man with sticky fingers could make an awful lot of money.

But Nilo was meticulous in his duties. He kept careful records of who owed and who paid, and he delivered the cash to Maranzano each Tuesday evening, and even though the collections regularly totaled well over one hundred thousand dollars, never a penny was missing.

Maranzano was very pleased with his protégé’s performance. When he had put Nilo in charge of all bootlegging, he had worried that the young man would run into trouble with other gang members who resented his promotion over other, older men. But Nilo had never reported any trouble, and the operation was working more smoothly than it ever had before. Early in the period of Prohibition, speakeasy owners had been known to complain because Maranzano’s strong-arm men were more efficient than his liquor suppliers, and often the gin mills could not get all the liquor they needed. But since Nilo’s promotion, those complaints had died out.

Having enough sources of supply was a continuing problem, and until it was solved it would always hinder the growth of the Maranzano crime family. In the number of speakeasies that bought liquor from him, Don Salvatore was still Number Two in the city behind Masseria’s gang, but he was a closer Number Two now. Nilo had done well and Maranzano was satisfied. And while he knew about Nilo’s liking for the violent life, he chose to look the other way. He expected that Nilo would grow up one day. In the meantime, his loyalty was unquestionable.

So Maranzano would have been surprised to know that on a cold February Tuesday, Nilo had left his office and instantly turned over the job of making collections to another young member of the gang. Then Nilo had gone downtown to an abandoned commercial garage on the edge of Chinatown, where three other young men waited for him.

Nilo had specially recruited these three. They were all Castellammarese, all lived in New Jersey, where they had relatives, and all were unknown to the New York mob. Around Nilo’s age, they were, like him, unafraid of violence. He paid them well, probably better than he had to, but Nilo thought it a wise investment because if anyone were to reveal that Nilo was Kid Trouble his life would not be worth a nickel.

“Any word?” Nilo asked, as he entered the shabby garage.

“We just got it,” one of the young men said. “My sister’s boyfriend was told to get ready to bring in a big shipment tonight. Two trucks. All imported Scotch whisky sent down from Canada. He’ll take over the driving when it gets to Jersey.”

“Where’s it going?”

“To the Masseria warehouse over near Twelfth Avenue,” the young man said.

“That’s where we’ll hit the shipment then,” Nilo said.

One of the other men looked surprised. “You don’t want to take it in Jersey?”

Nilo shook his head. “No. Let Masseria go to all the trouble of driving it through Jersey, past the cops, get it over the river. He can do the work and take the risks. Then we’ll just nail the two trucks and bring them over here.” He looked back at the first young man. “Good work,” Nilo said, then smiled. “How close is your sister to this truck driver?”

“He’s a roll in the hay, is all.”

“No wedding plans?”

The man shook his head. “Good,” Nilo said. “I wouldn’t want to be making her a widow before her time. There’s a thousand dollars in it for her. Tell her to give him a little nookie and spend the day with him. Find out when and where he picks up the truck. Then we’ll be ready. Any questions?”

No one spoke.

“All right,” Nilo said. “Hang around. Go to a movie or something. We’ll meet back here at five o’clock. And—”

The three men laughed at once. “We know, Kid. Keep our mouths shut.”

*   *   *

T
OMMY HAD WOUND UP
in the bed of Mabel Fay because of his simple good manners. One of his call boxes was on the corner near the all-night diner on Cornelia Street, and one evening in 1920 he had been reporting in to the precinct when he saw the waitress leave the restaurant at the end of her shift.

Tommy called out, then walked along with her to make sure she got home safely to her apartment, which was near the river, only a block away from his regular patrol path. He had not made a pass at the tall, buxom blonde, and when he left he politely wished her good night and thought no more of it. It soon became a habit for Tommy to walk her home. The walk was a pleasant respite from the normal lonely monotony of his job.

They talked about his college work and the long path to law school that was still ahead of him. For her part, Mabel occasionally talked about her unhappy life in Atlantic City, where she’d met her husband, who seemed to have devoted the years before their divorce to unwanted rape and undeserved assault. But what Mabel Fay really liked to talk about was the movies. Apparently, she never missed seeing one, and she confided in Tommy on one walk home that she was saving her money to go to Hollywood.

“Where’s Hollywood?” Tommy asked.

“In California.”

“Why go to California?”

“To be in the movies,” she said. “I seen all those movies, and I don’t want to be blowing my own horn, but those girls don’t have any more than I got.”

“I thought they made movies over in Jersey.”

“They do. I still go over to Fort Lee and watch them. A couple of times they let me be in a crowd scene. But the weather is better in California. They don’t even have a winter there, I hear.”

“That must make it tough to make movies about Eskimos,” Tommy said.

“Oh, Tommy, you’re such a joker.”

“Well, I’m not joking now,” he said. “You go to California and you’re going to be a big star.”

“You think so?”

“You can’t miss,” said Tommy, who rarely went to the movies because he spent all his free time studying his college work.

Mabel’s apartment building was just up ahead. He stopped with her in front of the flight of steps leading to the main entrance of the three-story walk-up and squeezed her hand, in a brotherly fashion, as he did every night.

This time she had a key in her hand and she transferred it to his.

“What’s this?”

“That’s my key. Why don’t you come up when you’re done?” Mabel said. “Two-B. Second floor, on the right.”

Without waiting for an answer, Mabel walked up the steps into her house. Tommy slipped the key into his trouser pocket and went back to his regular patrol rounds.

When his tour ended at 5:00
A.M.
, he walked back to Mabel’s apartment. He planned to tell her that she owed him nothing for walking her home and then he would have a cup of coffee and leave. Feeling very noble, he used the key to let himself into Mabel’s apartment.

It was dark inside when he closed the door behind him, and he softly called, “Mabel?”

“In here,” she answered. A dim light came on down at the other end of the railroad rooms. He picked his way through an amazing clutter of furniture and found himself at the open door of her bedroom.

A small lamp burned on an end table. Mabel lay on the bed naked, the covers clustered in a lump at the foot of the mattress. Two kerosene heaters glowing cherry red in the room made it summer warm. Mabel’s body glistened in the faint light, as if she had oiled her skin. Her breasts were even larger than he had imagined them to be. Tommy gulped and Mabel said, “I’ve been waiting for you. I hoped you’d come.”

Still on her back, she extended her arms toward him. “Come here, Tommy,” she said in a throaty voice. “And get out of those clothes.” A minute later, Tommy was in her bed.

Tommy’s sexual experience had consisted of a couple of visits to French whorehouses while he was overseas. He had always assumed that being with Parisian prostitutes had made him a man of the world, but in the hands and other parts of the experienced Mabel Fay he quickly found out how wrong he was. Mabel did things to him that Tommy had only heard of in barracks and locker rooms.

When they were done, he rolled onto his back and lay there breathing heavily. Mabel instantly reached for a cigarette on the night table, casually lit one, and smoked quietly in the semidark room.

Tommy felt he should say something, but when he tried to speak she shushed him by putting an index finger across his lips and pursed her own lips.

He lay in the dark, vaguely annoyed, somehow convinced that some words should follow their act. She did not have to say that she loved him; he was not going to say he loved her. But he felt they should say something, just to prove that they were there together.

Her silence left him with a curious sense of dissatisfaction and just reignited the confusion he had always felt when trying to understand women’s ways.

It was still dark outside when Tommy got up to go; Mabel did not protest; she did not ask him to stay, and when he went out Tommy left the apartment key she had given him on the kitchen table near the front door.

That was the first time with Mabel. He did not see her again until the following week, when she told him that the boss had just changed her hours at the restaurant. She now worked late each Tuesday night, getting off just around Tommy’s quitting time of 5:00
A.M.

“Walk me home?” she asked.

“Sure,” Tommy answered, and wound up in her bed again. And so for almost two years, it had been a regular Tuesday event for Tommy, spending a few hours after work rolling around on the sheets with Mabel.

She still did not talk much after they made love, but Tommy came to accept that. It was enough that on that one night a week they needed each other and they had each other. If it made the rest of the week better for both of them, who could complain about that? Except for his brother, Mario, and what he did not know wouldn’t hurt him.

One thing Tommy learned was that he was able to talk to women much more easily now than he had before. The great tongue-tying mystery of sex was not such a puzzle anymore, and with the mystery gone, the awe had gone, too.

It was deep into the early morning hours near Washington’s Birthday in 1922 when Tommy left Mabel’s apartment. He was outside only a few minutes before he shivered and cursed. He should have stayed with her; it was just too damned cold to be outside on a night like this. The thermometer had been in the single digits for seventy-two straight hours and everything was frozen. Underfoot, the snow was so cold that it squeaked and moaned as he walked on it, and in the moonless pitch of the night he felt as if he were walking through a graveyard.

All he wanted to do was to get home quickly, and he turned off the main street and into a long commercial alley that ran for two blocks between banks of small factories and warehouses.

The wind whipped through the alley as if it were a mountaintop. There was not even a welcoming doorway to step into to get out of the wind. He walked faster. He never should have had that good-night cup of coffee with Mabel ten minutes earlier. It had tasted good, warmed his insides, but he had not reckoned on the consequences. Everything that went in had to come out, and in cold weather it seemed to have to come out that much faster.

He hesitated at just urinating in the broad alley. He was no longer a rookie policeman, but he still took the job seriously enough to worry that if someone drove through the alley he would not be setting a very good example by being seen urinating against a wall. He had arrested people for things like that.

He saw to his right another half alley leading back between two old brick warehouses. He walked down there, then could not wait anymore, and, turning his back to the main alley and the wind, partly from modesty, partly to keep from spattering himself, he let loose a long steaming torrent. He sighed with relief, rebuttoned his pants, and turned to go back to the main street.

Then he stopped to listen. The cold night air carried sounds that at other times might have been lost. Some sound was coming from farther back in the small alley.

His first thought was that a burglary was taking place, and he cursed under his breath. All he wanted to do was to go home and get warm.

He considered walking away, for only a split second, then unholstered his revolver and moved over toward the darker side of the alley and slowly began moving forward, trying to be silent, all senses alert for trouble.