Inherit the Mob (6 page)

“That’s Jupiter Evans,” said Flanagan.

“The actress?”

“How many women you think are named Jupiter Evans? Yeah, the actress. She’s supposed to be a dyke.”

“Too bad. She’s great-looking,” Gordon said.

“Wanna meet her?”

“Why, you know her?”

“I’ve met her a couple of times. She used to go around with Lizzie Taylor. That’s how I know she’s a les. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

Flanagan led the way to the actress’s table. “Miss Evans, I’m John Flanagan, deputy editor of the
Tribune,
” he said. “I’m a friend of Lizzie’s.”

She nodded and smiled. When she did, her brown eyes flashed and crinkled around the edges, and Gordon noticed little laugh lines. The smile was a friendly gesture of recognition, nothing more, but it stunned and charmed Gordon completely.

“Jesus, I’ve never seen anybody smile like that,” he said without thinking. She turned her head and looked at him full in the face. He blushed.

“Jupiter, this is my protégé, Velvel Gordon,” said Flanagan. “He’s been away a long time and he’s not used to being around women.”

“Have you been in jail, Mr. Gordon?” she asked in an amused voice.

“Jail?” he said.

Flanagan laughed. “Worse, he’s a foreign correspondent,” he told her.

To Gordon’s surprise, she looked at him closely. “Are you William Gordon?”

“That’s me,” he said. “Velvel is sort of a family nickname. It’s Yiddish.”

“No kidding,” she said, but nicely. “I’ve been reading you for years. I’m a major fan.”

“Most people don’t care much about foreign stories,” Gordon observed, and was immediately sorry. The implication that Jupiter Evans was like most people wasn’t flattering, and she picked it up right away.

“My father taught international relations at Yale,” she said, letting him off the hook. “I was raised on it. What’s the capital of Senegal?”

“Senegal? It’s, ah, Dakar,” he said.

“Right. OK, I guess you must be William Gordon,” she smiled.

“Why don’t you join us.” Flanagan said no at the same time Gordon said yes, and everybody laughed.

“Come on, Flanagan, I’ll buy you a drink,” she said, signaling to the waiter. “You too, Velvel.”

“You’ve got to call me William. And I’m buying,” Gordon said. He wanted to get high in a hurry; it was the only way he was going to be able to get up the courage to ask her to come home with him.

Three bourbon boilermakers later, Gordon felt a warm self-confidence based, he was sure, not only on the liquor but on Jupiter’s encouragement. She was frankly flirting with him, making it plain she found him attractive. Thank God, he thought; Flanagan’s gossip was wrong.

“What are you doing after the show?” he asked in what he hoped was a cool, sophisticated tone.

Jupiter laughed and fixed him with a direct, brown-eyed look. “Is that an innocent question?”

“I dunno. Are you an innocent girl?”

“Mr. Gordon,” she said, “don’t you know I’m supposed to be gay?”

He was startled by her directness. “No, I didn’t know that,” he stammered. “Are you?”

“That’s what it says in the papers,” she said. “Do you believe what you read in the papers?”

“I don’t even believe what I
write
in the papers,” he said. “So, you’re not gay?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. I’m not tonight.”

“Then maybe we ought to take advantage of the timing,” Gordon said.

“Maybe we ought to,” she agreed. “We’ve only got an hour to midnight.”

That was the first time William Gordon made love with Jupiter Evans. In the next three years they went to bed together eight more times. There were single weeks when they had more fights than that.

The fights were always the same. They started out as calm discussions of what she referred to as her “problem,” which, Gordon finally understood after months of pretending, was that she feared and resented men. “I want to love you,” she said. “I’m trying. But I can’t.” Inevitably, Gordon’s efforts at being a sensitive, nurturing male degenerated into angry accusations and a vow never to see her again. Unable to control what he recognized as a self-destructive obsession, these resolutions usually lasted about two weeks.

Naturally, Gordon discussed the situation with Flanagan. Just as naturally, he was unsympathetic. Since Saigon, his attitude toward women had undergone a slow, negative shift from utilitarian disdain to open hostility.

“The problem with you is that you’re still an SAT at heart,” he said. “You like being Jake Barnes, or Lady Brett or whoever. You want to get laid, find a girl that likes guys—there must be a few of them left.”

“You sound like my father,” Gordon said.

“You told him about this?” asked Flanagan in disbelief.

“ ’Fraid so. Christ, that was a mistake. You have the same fucking categorical tone.”

“Categorical, am I?” said Flanagan. “Does that mean, like, logical, Professor?”

“It means like asshole, asshole,” Gordon said, and changed the topic to the piracy of a group of building contractors who were repairing a municipal bridge with papier-mâché. Jupiter Evans was a problem that even the chief couldn’t solve.

G
ordon put down the file and looked at Belzer. “Jesus, Nate,” he said. “Jesus H. Christ. What are we talking about? In dollars?”

“Probably between three and five,” he said. “It’s not exactly the kind of thing you get a Merrill Lynch statement on, you know?”

“Come on, Nate, there’s a hell of a lot more than five million there. Even I can see that.”

Belzer looked amused. “That’s five
hundred
million, Velvel,” he said. “One half of one billion. You speak Jewish?”

“I can understand a little,” he said. He felt as if his lips were frozen.

“A sach gelt,”
said Belzer softly. “A lot of money. That’s what your uncle had—a sach gelt.”

“Why me, Nate?” Gordon asked. His reporter’s training was taking over, trying to organize the chaos in his brain.

“Who else, Velvel? Who else? Ida’s an old woman. Your father’s
no spring chicken either. Neither one of them needs the money, and besides, they couldn’t do what’s necessary to get it.”

“What do you mean, what’s necessary? The money’s mine, according to this.”

Belzer sighed, a slow, wheezing sound. It occurred to Gordon that he must be close to eighty. Like his father and Uncle Max, Belzer had lived his life among men with guns, but there was a gentle quality about him, quite different from Max’s taciturn coldness or Al Grossman’s hard-eyed machismo. He would have made a good lawyer, Gordon thought; the phrase “loyal fiduciary” came to mind.

“It’s yours but it’s not yours, Velvel,” he said. “It’s there, but nobody’s handing it to you. You can see for yourself that it’s not the kind of thing you put through a probate court. Fifteen percent of the action on the Brooklyn docks, a third of the union operation, the Colombian business, the lottery tickets.… Even a lot of the legitimate stuff isn’t written down anyplace. For example, Max had half the Grace Hotel in Vegas with Luigi Spadafore, OK. But where is Max’s name? No place. That’s what I mean. It’s all there, but it’s not there. Max had it because he was Max. The lokshen didn’t fool with him because he knew where the bodies were buried. But you’re not Max. You want it, you gotta take it.”

Gordon laughed. “Take it? You mean go to the mattresses? Bring in the hit men? Shoot it out with Luigi Spadafore and the Mafia? Jesus, Nate, you kidding or what? That kind of stuff doesn’t happen anymore—this is 1982. I’m a journalist, for Christ’s sake. I’ve got two Pulitzers. I had dinner last week with Arthur Schlesinger.”

Belzer frowned, trying to place the name. “Arthur Schlesinger? I saw him on PBS. Little fellow with a bow tie. Listen, Velvel, you think the lokshen will hand over five hundred million bucks because you’ve been on
Meet the Press
? I want you to think about this. You don’t have to take the money. You make a good living right now, and when your father passes on you’ll get a few million. That’s plenty. Max knew that. He said to tell you he wouldn’t mind if you passed on the whole deal. It’s up to you.”

“And what if I pass? What happens to the money then?”

Belzer sighed again, and shrugged eloquently. “If you pass, there
is no money,” he said. “It goes to Max’s partner, Luigi Spadafore. Some goes to the other Families. It goes to anyone willing to do what’s necessary to pick it up.”

“How about Max’s own people?” asked Gordon. “I mean, some of them must be able to take it, or some of it.”

Belzer laughed, a hollow sound. “Max’s people? You mean the alter kockers out there in the other room? You gotta be kidding. Most of them make pee-pee into bags these days. Half of them are in Florida, drooling over their gin-rummy hands. We got no people left, Velvel. Just Max, your father and me, and some bookkeepers. And a few dozen safety deposit boxes with a lot of insurance-type information.”

“And half a billion bucks,” Gordon said.

Belzer nodded slowly. “Yeah, and half a billion bucks.”

“Listen, Nate, supposing I decide I want the money. What do I have to do? I mean, specifically?”

The old man raised his hands in a palms-up gesture. “If you want me to say specifically, I have a few ideas,” he said. “You’d need to meet with Luigi Spadafore, and discuss things, try to come to an agreement. Basically you’d have to convince them that they need you, or that it would be dangerous for them to fight you. Either way, it won’t be easy, I promise you that.”

For a moment, Gordon tried to imagine himself frightening a group of mafiosi. “I wouldn’t know how to begin, even—”

“I know, I know,” said Belzer. “Look, Velvel, you remember that
Godfather
movie? First, Don Corleone had his oldest son in the business. Then he gets killed, and they bring in the young one, what’s-his-name—”

“Michael,” Gordon said automatically.

Suddenly Belzer’s voice became a hoarse whisper, an uncanny imitation of Marlon Brando. “Listen, Michael, after I’m gone, one of the captains is going to try to set up a meet. And that’ll be the traitor.” His voice returned to normal. “You think that’s Hollywood, but it’s real life. For them it’s a family business, the father passes it on to the son. They grow up knowing how to operate. But for us, it was a whole different thing. Our fathers were tailors, pushcart immigrants. Our kids are doctors, lawyers, journalists like you. For
us, it was never a way of life, just a way to make a good living, maybe get a few of the finer things. You think Max ever dreamed he’d end up with five hundred million bucks? Who knew? Who prepared?”

“Nate, I’m going to need some time to think about this,” Gordon said. “Who can I talk to about it?”

“Talk? You can talk to anybody you want. We don’t have a code of silence or blood oaths or any of that goyim naches. But remember this—you talk to someone, he’s been talked to. He knows. And you can’t make him un-know, if you see what I mean. So I’d be careful.”

“I still don’t understand why my father isn’t here,” Gordon said. “Doesn’t he know about Max’s will?”

“He knows,” said Belzer, “and I gotta tell you, he doesn’t approve. He didn’t want to be here, I told you that.”

“Why not?” asked Gordon. It occurred to him that his father might be jealous.

“I can’t speak for your father, Velvel. You should talk to him yourself.” Belzer reached across the desk and gathered up the folder, sliding it into a drawer and locking it in one practiced motion. Clearly the meeting was over.

“Nate, one more question. Supposing I decide to take the money, or some of it. Will you be there to help me? I wouldn’t even know how to find Spadafore, or what to say. And I still don’t have a real idea of how the money is tied up, or where.”

Belzer put his hands flat on the desk and pushed himself out of the seat with a perceptible effort. Gordon stood too, and noticed that, despite the air conditioning, the seat of his pants was damp. “I’ll be around for a while,” he said, walking around the desk and taking Gordon’s elbow. “I’ll do what I can. But I’m an old man, Velvel; and this isn’t an old man’s game.”

That night, almost exactly at nine, the buzzer rang and Jimmy, the night doorman, announced that Jupiter was in the lobby. Promptness was one of Jupiter’s virtues, formality one of her defenses. Although she had been to Gordon’s apartment a hundred times, she always insisted on being announced. It was, he knew, one of the many ways she had of keeping a small, hard distance between them.

“Jupiter Evans?” he said to Jimmy. “Never heard of her.”

The doorman laughed, as he always did. Once, after a rare visit from his father, a friend in the next building had told Gordon that he overheard Jimmy bragging to the neighboring doorman that Gordon was a connected guy. Since then, Gordon had made a point of exchanging Cagney-type wisecracks with the doorman.

“She looks all right to me,” he said. “Should I send her up, boss?”

Jupiter came in wearing a Yale sweatshirt, a pair of tight faded jeans and red high-top Converse All-Stars. And a thirty-five-thousand-dollar full-length mink. At the door she posed for a brief moment like a fashion model, one hip thrown out and lips puckered. Then, when she saw the hungry look on Gordon’s face, she gave him a chaste kiss on the lips, tossed her coat over a chair and plopped down on the couch.