A Piece of the Action

growin’ a beard.”

“How I’m talkin’ ain’t the point.”

Jake shook his head in disgust. “The point is that we already talked about this. Three times. Get it through ya head: we got no choice.” Why was it that Jews never knew their place? Why couldn’t they take no for an answer? It was a curse. The curse of the big mouth. “The point is that there’s fifteen thousand cartons of cigarettes in that truck and we’re gettin’ fifteen cents a carton. That comes out to twenty-two fifty, our end. Ya wanna go back to gas stations and liquor stores? I could fix it.”

“That ain’t it, Jake. That ain’t what I’m sayin’. I just don’t wanna be a slave to some wop who can’t write his own name.”

“It ain’t slavery. We give a piece to Steppy Accacio and he gives a piece to someone else and they give to someone else. I figure there’s gotta be a big boss at the top, but I don’t got the faintest idea who it is. Maybe it goes on forever. Maybe it goes in a circle. Whichever way, if ya don’t give up that piece, ya can’t operate. Ya might as well go out and get a job.”

“C’mon, Jake, I ain’t …”

They were interrupted by a tall, middle-aged waitress in a yellow uniform. The wad of gum she was chewing made a huge lump in her right cheek. It looked like she had a toothache. “What’ll it be, folks?”

Santo Silesi appeared in the doorway behind the waitress. He nodded at Jake, then spun on his heel and disappeared. “What it’ll be,” Jake said, “is some sandwiches to go.”

“Take-out is at the counter.”

“You couldn’t get it for us?”

She walked off without bothering to answer. Jake grinned at Izzy, then stood up. “Must be an anti- Semite.”

They found Santo in the parking lot. He nodded toward a SpeediFreight trailer parked off by itself in the back of the lot. “The driver’s inside the restaurant.”

“All right, you and Izzy go back to the car. And when we get movin’, stay close. If I run into a problem with the driver, I want you right behind me.”

He watched them walk away, then turned his attention to the SpeediFreight trailer. The way the driver had parked his rig, it could be seen from anywhere in the truck stop. If this was a set-up (and there was always that possibility-you couldn’t ignore it), he, Jake, would be spotted before he got within fifty feet of the rig. And it might not be the cops, either. A company as big as SpeediFreight had to have its own security. For all Jake knew, the driver had been involved in a dozen heists.

The walk across the asphalt reminded Jake of the first time he’d walked across the yard at Leavenworth. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that everybody was watching him. Just waiting for an opportunity to put a shiv in his back. Well, he’d survived that walk and he’d survive this one, too. He was sure of it, despite the fact that he was sweating, despite the fact that it was twenty-two degrees and windy. By the time he pulled himself into the passenger’s side of the cab, he was breathing heavily, the icy air cutting into his chest like broken glass.

Jake took the.45 out of his waistband, laid it in his lap and immediately felt better. His little jaunt across the parking lot wasn’t going to lead him back to prison. It was the road to Park Avenue. Once he got his hands on the SpeediFreight dispatcher, he’d squeeze the bastard until his toes bled. SpeediFreight was one of the biggest outfits on the East Coast. They hauled everything-TV’s, hi-fi’s, clothing, furniture, appliances.

Six months of good luck. That’s all he was going to need before he put a few goons (Jewish goons, naturally) between himself and the actual heist. Hijackings didn’t really interest him, anyway. At best, they were no more than a means to an end. The end was the drug business, specifically heroin. Dope, horse, skag, doogie-no matter what they called the stuff, it came to the same thing. It came to profit margins that hadn’t been seen in the criminal world since the end of Prohibition. Best of all, the industry was just getting off the ground. There was still room for an ambitious ex-con named Jake Leibowitz.

Jake didn’t let himself become so lost in his plans for the future that he failed to keep an eye on the front door of the restaurant. He spotted the driver as soon as he stepped onto the asphalt. The man was tall, middle- aged and nearly bald.

Hatless despite the cold, he walked with his head down, flashing his shiny dome. He came directly to the truck, then hauled himself up and into the cab without looking at Jake.

“Ya know what this is all about, right?” Jake said.

“Yeah.”

“I want ya to make ya way over to Route Nine, then head up toward the city. Any problems?”

“Naw.” He pressed the starter button on the dash and the engine roared to life.

“What’s ya name?” Jake asked as the rig began to move.

“Dayton. Dayton McNeese.”

“You from down south, Dayton?”

“Mississippi.”

“I guess that explains it.”

“Explains it?”

“Explains why ya don’t like hats.”

Jake Leibowitz was so happy at the way things had turned out that he wasn’t even bothered by the fact that he couldn’t see the mustache he was attempting to trim.

“I’m movin’ on dowwwwwwn the road,” he sang in imitation of every colored inmate he’d run across in Leavenworth. “Movin’, movin’ movin on dowwwwwwn the road.”

But the truth, as he saw it, was that he was moving up the road. And it wasn’t a road, either, but a goddamned turnpike. They’d dropped off the SpeediFreight driver a mile from the Bayonne Bridge, then hotfooted it through Staten Island to a trucking warehouse in Brooklyn where the cartons had been unloaded and counted. The count had come out exactly as advertised, fifteen thousand cartons straight from the R. J. Reynolds factory. The payoff had been a little tricky, because Jake had told Izzy and the wop he was only getting fifteen cents a carton when he was actually getting twenty. But Joe Faci had been smart enough to hand over the money in the privacy of his office.

“Three grand,” Joe Faci had said, “like I promised. And this here is the name and the phone number of the dispatcher at SpeediFreight who’s been working with us. Call him and arrange a face to face. You should be aware that he sometimes needs a little encouragement.”

Izzy’s cut had been 30 % of twenty-two fifty. Silesi had settled for 20 %. Which had left Jake with a very satisfying eighteen seventy-five.

“As in one thousand eight hundred and seventy-five dollars and no fucking cents,” Jake said, straightening his tie.

The first thing Jake had done was stop off in Mrs. Pearlstein’s Ladies’ Garments on Norfolk Street and pick up the largest rabbits’ fur coat on the rack. Not that he was stupid enough to actually tell his mother it was rabbits’ fur when he handed it over.

“It’s raccoon, mama,” he’d said. Then he’d broken into a sweat when she tried it on. If the goddamned thing hadn’t buttoned over her fat gut, if she’d had to have her raccoon coat altered, if the equally fat woman who ran Mrs. Pearlstein’s had laughed in Mama’s face … But it hadn’t happened. The coat had fit loosely enough and neither his mama nor her old-country girlfriends could tell the difference between mink and cat.

Jake hadn’t forgotten about his own reward, either. He’d gone uptown, to Leighton’s on Broadway, and bought himself a pearl-gray, double-breasted overcoat and a matching homburg. The homburg, with its softly rolled brim, made him look older, more mature. It made him look established. Which was the whole point, really.

“Ya beggin’ days’re over, Jakie-boy,” he said as he dressed. “Time ta show the world where ya comin’ from.”

Fifteen minutes later, he was down on Pitt Street, stepping out of the Packard and walking up to a familiar door. He knocked softly and waited until it opened, until he was face to face with Al O’Neill.

“What could I do for ya, mister?” O’Neill asked.