A Piece of the Action

a thick cloud of feathers that veiled her bulk.

Maybe she’ll disappear, Santo thought. Maybe she’ll pull a Houdini and vanish.

The chickens were squawking in near panic, but nobody in the market appeared to notice. It was everyday stuff to the shoppers and the shopkeepers. The chaos. The gossip. The dirty concrete floor and the ill-kept stalls piled with shoddy merchandise. All perfectly natural in this universe of sheenys and spics.

Well, the hell with it. The fat bitch didn’t know him from Adam. Santo walked right past her to the hot dog wagon near the Delancey Street entrance to the market and ordered two franks and a beer. Naturally, he didn’t get to finish the first frank, before she up and walked right past him. Without the chicken.

What I’m gonna do, Santo thought, as he imitated her slow-motion walk through the neighborhood, is make sure Jake looks me right in the eye before I kill him. He’s gotta know who’s pulling the trigger. Maybe I’ll gut-shoot him first. So I could watch him flop around until he begs me to finish him off.

Mama Leibowitz seemed to know everybody on the Lower East Side, calling out greetings to passersby as she waddled the four blocks to her apartment. It’d finally stopped raining and the housewives were out in force, so she had plenty of company. The five-minute stroll took almost an hour. She’d shuffle forward a few yards, her body swaying like a metronome as she tried to pick her feet off the sidewalk, then it would begin: “Sadie, how’s by you? Your husband’s arthritis, it’s better, maybe?” Santo thought he was going to go off his rocker.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Despite the stops and starts, Mama Leibowitz never turned around, not once, not even when Santo followed her through the entrance to her building, when he practically clipped her heels as she hauled herself up three flights of stairs. Not even when he yanked out his.44 and came up directly behind her as she turned the key in the lock.

Santo slammed the revolver into Mama Leibowitz’s head with all the force at his command. He was trying to kill her. Actually trying. Not that there was time to check her out. He pushed her body through the door, then stepped across her blubbery butt as he swept the open space in front of him. He was standing in the living room. The kitchen was on his right. He could see most, but not all of it. On his left, a hallway led to the bedrooms.

He stepped out into the center of the living room, extending the revolver, holding it with both hands. The bitch fell without a sound, he reminded himself. There’s no rush. Jake can’t know you’re here. Do it slow and do it right. Because the very worst thing that could happen is to die knowing you let the Jew off the hook.

The kitchen was empty. Santo crossed the living room, keeping his body close to the wall. The bathroom door at the far end of the apartment was open. It, too, was empty. Unless Jake was hiding in the tub. But Santo couldn’t worry about that. You couldn’t look in the closets until you covered the obvious places. Which meant the bedrooms, two closed doors on the left side of the hallway.

If I’m not afraid to die, Santo asked himself, then why am I sweating? Why’s my hand shaking? This isn’t the way it happens in the movies. It isn’t the way it happened with Izzy Stein, either. Izzy went out like a man. He was tough and he made it easy. What if Jake was behind one of those doors? What if he was kneeling behind the bed with a.45 aimed at the very space Santo Silesi was sure to occupy?

A moment followed in which there were no thoughts. A dead space, a lost chunk of time when the world simply didn’t exist. Wasn’t there a thing in the Bible about time standing still? Or the sun standing still? There were objects in front of Santo’s eyes, but he couldn’t see them, couldn’t focus. They were there and they weren’t there. Like ghosts in a movie.

I’m not cut out for this, Santo thought. I’m not a pro. And if I don’t get my act together, I never will be.

What he wanted to do was run from room to room, throwing open doors and closets, to scream Jake’s name, calling him out to a fair fight. There’s only room for one of us in this town, pardner. Come tomorrow at noon, that one is gonna be me.

In the end, when the world was solid again, when chairs and tables were chairs and tables, when the sofa didn’t shimmer like a desert mirage, Santo took it very slowly. He tiptoed over to the first door and put his ear against the wood, reminding himself that Jake couldn’t know there was anyone else in the apartment. The fact that all he, Santo, could hear was dead silence, didn’t mean that Jake was inside with a.45 trained on the door.

Santo turned the knob carefully, almost rejoicing in its smooth motion, then pushed it open, careful to keep most of his body behind the frame. Still, his heart beat wildly as his eyes surveyed the empty room.

What I should’ve done, he thought, is wait somewhere for Jake to come to me. Because I can’t control this shit.

He scanned the room quickly. It was a woman’s room, Mama Leibowitz’s most likely. There was no one under the neatly made bed, he could see that much, but the closet door was closed. Jake could be in that closet, squatting down, a shotgun cradled in his arms. He could be just about to kick it open, to come out blasting …

Santo closed the bedroom door. He had to close it. To get to that other room before he drowned in fear. Quickly and quietly, he moved to the next door, laying his ear against it as he had with the first. The cool wood felt somehow comforting and his first thought was to leave his face there, to rest it against the door as he would against a woman’s breast. There was no sound on the other side.

Finally, as though he were under water and pushing against a tidal wave, Santo managed to turn the knob and shove the door open. The room was deserted.

He stepped inside, already beginning to feel like a cowardly fool. The closet door was mercifully open. A few suits and jackets hung inside, far too few to conceal Jake Leibowitz or anybody else. The truth, despite Santo’s racing pulse, was that Jake Leibowitz had flown the coop. He’d taken it on the lam, which, under the circumstances, was the only thing he could have done.

You’re a punk, Santo told himself, a miserable punk. And this don’t mean you’re off the hook, either. You still have to find the Jew and take care of him. Because if you don’t revenge Steppy, you’ll never be able to hold up your head in this town again. You might as well go out and buy yourself a lunchpail. You might as well get a job.

Santo shoved the.44 down into the waistband of his trousers. A few minutes ago, he’d been hoping that Mama Leibowitz was dead. Now, he saw her as his ticket to Jake. Of course, he couldn’t be sure that she knew where Jake was hiding, but if she did, he, Santo Silesi, would find out.

“You’re maybe looking for somebody?”

Santo spun on his heel to find a bloody Mama Leibowitz standing right behind him. She was holding the biggest handgun Santo had ever seen, holding it right up to his face. It was a vision beyond even his worst nightmare. The blood streamed down over her bloated face. It dripped onto her ratty fur coat, matting the long hairs.

“Where’s your sword, you Cossack bastard? Where’s your horse?”

“Wha, wha, wha …”

“Ha, so you’re plotzing, already.” She grinned, showing a full set of small bloody teeth. “You brought, maybe, a change of underwear?”

“I, I, I … I don’t get it? I don’t …”

“Don’t worry about nothing, sonny. This you’re gonna get.”

The force of the slug blew Santo Silesi halfway across the room. It picked him up and tossed him backwards as carelessly as a superstitious housewife tossing spilled salt over her shoulder. Mama Leibowitz walked after him, holding the revolver in front of her, looking for any sign of life. She needn’t have bothered. The hole in Santo’s forehead was small and neat, but the back of his head was missing altogether.

“Oy,” Mama Leibowitz groaned, “what a mess.” She stepped over a small lump of wet gray brain and squatted next to Santo. Using just the tips of two fingers, she tugged at his.44 until it came free, then dropped it on the carpet next to his right hand. Finally satisfied, she walked back into the kitchen and called the police.

Twenty-eight

“Patience, Stanley,” Allen Epstein said, “like I taught you in the ring.”