A Piece of the Action

have to worry about nothin’. You’re gonna get your collars and you’re gonna move up in the job. With Pat Cohan for a rabbi, it’s guaranteed.”

Seven

January 8

Jake Leibowttz, sitting in the back seat of his mother’s Packard, was already bored with the New Jersey landscape. It was nothing but houses, dirt and trees. How could anybody live in a place like this? Why would they want to? That’s what he’d ask Steppy Accacio if Joe Faci ever got around to introducing them.

Accacio had moved himself and his family out to Montclair more than two years ago.

“Wake up, Jake,” he muttered to himself. “You’re here on business. This ain’t the guided tour.”

“You say somethin’, boss?” Izzy Stein asked, without turning his head. Izzy was as down to earth in his driving as he was in everything else, a fact Jake Leibowitz greatly appreciated.

“Nah, I’m just thinkin’ out loud.”

Jake liked sitting in the back seat. True, the move from riding shotgun to perched like a big shot, had been forced on him. Just like the wop who was riding shotgun in his place.

“I got a kid,” Joe Faci had said. “He needs a job. Maybe you could take him with ya.”

The ‘maybe,’ as Jake understood it, had meant ‘do it or get the fuck out of here.’ Well, what cannot be cured, must be endured, right? Life had a way of dumping on you and if you didn’t learn to shovel in a hurry, you’d be buried up to your neck. The kid had turned out to be Santo Silesi, eighteen years old and just out of reform school. Santo seemed eager to please, but Jake understood that the kid’s first loyalty would always be to the guineas. Jake Leibowitz was just a rest stop on the road to becoming a made man.

What it is, Jake decided, is that I’m never gonna turn my back on Santo Silesi. Because maybe Santo will become a made man by making Jake Leibowitz disappear. Like Jake Leibowitz made Abe Weinberg disappear. Which was most likely part of Joe Faci’s plan for good old Jake, anyway. Faci hadn’t exactly ordered Jake to eliminate his buddy, but he’d made his position perfectly clear. There was no way Steppy Accacio would continue to do business with a man who couldn’t control his employees.

“So, do what ya think is right, Jake,” Faci had said. “Then get back to me.”

They were driving south along the Jersey coast on Route 9, making their way from town to town. Their target was a SpeediFreight tractor-trailer heading up from Virginia tobacco country to a warehouse near Matawan. The driver would be using the turnpike for most of his ride through New Jersey, but at some point he’d have to transfer to smaller, local roads. His final destination was twenty-five miles east of the turnpike.

There were any number of ways for the driver to go. (SpeediFreight encouraged its drivers to mix up their routes, especially when they carried cigarettes.) But in this particular case the driver would exit the turnpike near South Brunswick. He’d take Route 617 to a large truck stop outside of Old Bridge and go to lunch, making sure to leave the doors unlocked. When he came out, Jake would be waiting.

“This ain’t the way I like to do things,” Jake had informed Joe Faci. “I mean I don’t have any control, here. Suppose I gotta get out in a hurry? One wrong turn and I’ll be wanderin’ through Jersey ’til the tires fall off. Or suppose the driver gives me trouble and I gotta do what I gotta do. Where do I dump the body? What do I do with the truck? No disrespect intended, Mr. Faci, but I wanna work as an independent.”

“Please, call me Joe.” Faci, unperturbed, had sipped his espresso, then added more sugar to what was already a cup of black mud.

“Okay, Joe.”

“I could understand ya reluctance, but I need ya ta do me this one favor. Because I’m in a bind. I got a regular crew for the job, but they had an unfortunate problem in Hell’s Kitchen last week and they ain’t available. So what I’m askin’ ya to do is help me out this here one time. If it goes good, which I’m sure it will, I could set you up permanent. I could introduce ya to one of the dispatchers at SpeediFreight. After that, you’re on your own.”

Faci hadn’t bothered to add “as long as we get our piece,” but Jake had gotten the message. What Faci was doing by setting Jake up with the SpeediFreight dispatcher was putting another layer between his boss and the operation. Jake could be trusted to do his time like a man if he got busted, but the dispatcher was probably some greedy citizen with a big family and a bigger mortgage. If the feds grabbed him, he’d roll over before they put on the cuffs.

“So tell me somethin’, Santo,” Jake asked, “where’d ya learn to handle a truck?” The plan was for the kid to drive the rig to a warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons would be counted. Jake’s cut was twenty cents per carton. The first thing he’d thought, when Faci had announced the price, was that he could get a dollar a carton if he sold them to someone else.

“Hey,” Santo replied, “call me Sandy. I ain’t in the ‘Santo’ generation.” He turned to face Jake. “See, no mustache.”

Jake unconsciously touched his own mustache. “You don’t like mustaches? Well, a blond kid like you shouldn’t grow a mustache, anyway. Blonds gotta have thick beards to make a mustache look good. It ain’t for kids. Now why don’t ya tell me where ya learned to drive a truck?”

Sandy Silesi turned away, concealing his face, but the tips of his ears, much to Jake’s satisfaction, flamed red.

“My uncle had a trucking company. In the Bronx. I worked there in the summer. I used to move the trailers around the yard.”

“Ya got a license ta drive a semi?”

“Nah.”

“Then take it easy. Real easy.”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t mouth off to me.”

“I didn’t mean nothin’.”

“Because if ya mouth off to me, I’ll pull ya baby ass outta this car and send ya back to Joe Faci in pieces.”

The truck stop in Old Bridge turned out to be so big that Jake thought he’d turned into an army base. There must have been forty or fifty rigs parked in the truck lot and another fifty cars on the other side of the restaurant. Unfortunately, none of the tractor-trailers bore the name SpeediFreight, much less the number 114. Which is not to say that Jake was caught off guard. The drive up from Virginia took nine hours under perfect conditions. Which meant Jake had to be in Old Bridge nine hours after the rig was scheduled to leave Richmond. But suppose the driver ran into a bad accident? Or it was raining in Virginia? Or snowing in Pennsylvania?

“Me and Izzy are gonna go inside and get some lunch,” Jake announced. “You wait in the car. If ya spot the rig, come and get us.”

“Whatever you say.”

Jake took his time getting out of the Packard, trying to decide if the kid was being sarcastic. He couldn’t make up his mind, but then he figured it didn’t matter, anyway. Maybe he would have to teach the kid a lesson. That didn’t figure to be a problem. But this wasn’t the time or the place to do it.

When they got inside, Jake asked the lady with the menus for a table close to the door. The lady dropped the menus on the first table she came to and walked away.

“I can see they like us already,” Jake said.

“This kid is a piece of shit,” Izzy replied. “Santo Silesi. He’s gonna screw us first chance he gets.”

“Jesus, Izzy, not again.”

“It’s meshugah, Jake. It’s like carrying a snake in your pocket. Sooner or later, you gotta get bit, nu?”

“Don’t talk that Jew talk, all right? This is 1958. Ya sound like a Lithuanian rabbi. Next thing I know you’ll be