Present Day Friday, November 3
A thin, cold mist descended on downtown Chelsea, the tiny droplets balling up on my coat and in my hair, leaving a sheen on the potholed street so that the gaudy yellow neon lights of the Wall Street Check Cashing store reflected every which way I looked.
Grown men, mostly Asians and a few Hispanics, gathered aimlessly on street corners, some of them talking loudly, others just staring straight ahead. In front of the Goodwill store, one of the only successful businesses on this strip of Broadway, a man with a makeshift bullhorn read from the Bible, emphasizing the word Christ whenever he got the chance, almost singing it. No one seemed to notice him. On the street a few feet away, an ambulance slowly rode by, its siren blasting at full throttle. The man with the bullhorn yelled above the din.
With this as my backdrop, I pushed against the heavy wooden door into the dark haze of the Pigpen, which looked and smelled just as I had remembered it from a few years before, which is to say dirty and of stale beer. There was a fog from cigarette smoke both fresh and old.
Wan daylight filtered through tiny, yellow Plexiglas windows. Outside, the sound of the siren faded as the ambulance rolled down the street.
Inside, the bartender looked me up and down and said, 'You need something?'
'Sammy around?' I asked, quickly figuring that small talk wouldn't get me very far in this establishment. A couple of barflies, middle-aged men with stubble on their faces and defeat in their eyes, looked my way. Across the room, I saw Sammy Markowitz sitting at his usual booth in the back, smoking a cigarette, flipping through a sheaf of papers that I assumed were the prior day's bookmaking profits. A banker's lamp glowed on his table.
'Not here,' the bartender said.
I said, 'You must have missed him come in, because he's sitting right over there.' I began walking in Markowitz's direction when a sizable gentleman in an ill-fitting black sport jacket and a T-shirt stood up from a bar stool and blocked my path.
'Like the man says,' he told me, 'Mr. Markowitz's not here right now.'
It's never easy, this thing called life. Or maybe it's just the journalism part that always seems so tough. I was face-to-face with this goon, so close I could smell the beer and beef jerky on his breath. I was too short of time to be nice and too smart to be rude.
So I said to him, 'Perhaps you could go tell Mr. Markowitz that his friend Jack Flynn is here. We talked on the telephone yesterday, and he invited me to stop in.'
The man, who bore a remarkable resemblance to an ape, if it would ever occur to an ape to dress this bad and hang out at a bar all day, looked me up and down. The synapses in his tiny brain was firing so hard that his whole head looked like it might well explode, all in an attempt to calculate what awful things might happen to him if he approached Sammy Markowitz and announced the presence of a visitor named Jack Flynn.
Finally the bartender said, 'You stay with him, Sal. I'll see if the boss is here.'
A minute later, common sense and patience prevailed as I was led toward the back of the restaurant, where Sammy Markowitz stood to greet me, clasped my hand, and said, 'To think, a few years ago I almost had you killed. You've turned out so handsome.'
Understand that this man was a known murderer, someone who, as mob legend had it, once broke an adversary's neck with his bare hands in the middle of a game of bocce, mostly because of one bad roll. He recruited teenagers to a life of crime and suffering. He wrought havoc with his illegal bookmaking, destroying entire families, leading supposed friends to bankruptcy, making them virtual slaves to his organization with high- interest loans.
And yet, I'll admit, there was something terribly winning about him.
Perhaps it was his appearance, which, as I've said, was Rickles-like.
He seemed oddly meek for a guy who struck such fear. He could be self-deprecating. And most of all, he could just be funny, as if he was playing the role of a mob chief in a situation comedy, understanding all the ironies, knowing his own faults, not taking any of it, or himself, all that seriously.
'My dog thanks you for rethinking your plan,' I said. 'And so do I.'
We engaged in the typical small talk, about the Celtics and the new Boston mayor and a few reporters who were covering the organized crime beat. He extended sympathies over Katherine's death. His own wife had died of cancer in recent months, and I expressed regret over that.
Then he said to me, rather unceremoniously, 'So what do you want?'
'Curtis Black,' I said, examining his face carefully while I spoke the name. His eyes shifted a little bit, but I couldn't be sure if that counted as a reaction. 'I need to find Curtis Black.' I paused for half a beat, then added. 'This one's important to me.'
He looked at me for a moment, matching my stare, an unlit cigarette dangling on his lower lip. He picked up his lighter off the table, a heavy, gold-plated thing, monogrammed with the letters SG, and lit it, watching the smoke from his first exhale float aimlessly toward the ceiling. Finally, he said to me, in no particular tone of voice,
'Don't know him.'
'Bullshit,' I said, and was about to continue, but he cut me off.
'Hey, hey, keep that down,' he said, a small smile forming at the edges of his lips. 'People don't talk to me like that, especially in here.'
'You know him,' I said. 'And like I said, I don't ask a whole lot from you. You haven't heard from me in three years. But I need you right now. I'm asking for your help.'
I made a mental note that should I keep experiencing this ascending fame, and should I someday have the occasion to write my memoirs for some sort of seven-figure advance, I might well leave this scene out, this pathetic groveling before a known killer.
Markowitz put one finger up in the air, and one of his goons shot over to the table about a second later. Without ever looking at him, Markowitz said, 'Bring me another split.' To me: 'Why are you asking about him?'
Truth be known, I couldn't really say, mostly because I didn't quite know yet. In fact, I was hoping he could tell me.
I said, 'He's into something. I'm not 100 percent sure what it is yet, but I know it's something of consequence.'
The man in black returned with a thin bottle of sparkling wine, Best Western, and emptied it into a lowball glass that was sitting in front of Markowitz. He walked away without offering anything to me.
Markowitz looked unimpressed by the whole scene, his vacant eyes just kind of gazing back at mine. He asked, flat, 'What do you know about him already?'
'Very little.'
And that was the truth. Before I got on the airplane, I had called Dorothy at the Record library and asked her to pull up anything and everything she could find on Curtis Black. She left me a voice mail saying she had only found two short news briefs, both of them from the Record. The first one was about the arrest of Curtis Black and several other men from Boston's North Shore for a 1979 armored car heist in Boston's North End in which a guard was shot and killed. The second one was about their arraignment in U.s. district court. She shipped the stories to my computer file, but I hadn't logged in yet from my laptop.
I added, 'I know he's into armored car robberies, or he was. Beyond that, I don't know much of anything. I wish I knew more, which is why I'm sitting here with you.'
Markowitz simply looked at me, dragging on his cigarette, knocking his knuckles absently, softly, on the scratched surface of the wooden table.
He said, after what seemed like a forever pause, 'He's not around here anymore. I don't know what I can tell you.' As I stared at him, Markowitz added, 'And you're asking the wrong guy.'
'What do you mean?'
'You want to know about Curtis Black, you should go ask our federal government. They're the ones who know about him.'
'Because of the charges?' I said, in a half question, half answer, hoping to lead him somewhere, though I'll be damned if I knew where.
