“You don’t need a bodyguard?”
“Strega? He’s my friend, baby. He was infantry, too, in Korea. We’re a team, only I can handle myself. I hit the bull six out of seven with an automatic at fifty yards. I can take any man with my hands, short of a bigger professional and Strega. With me and Strega it’s a draw. Right, Strega?”
Strega leaned in the corner, his eyes blank. “I’ll take you sixty-forty, Sarge. With an automatic, you got the edge.”
Costa laughed. Strega was serious. The quick brains were probably with Costa, he was the boss, but I’d rather have met him in an alley than Strega. Beyond that they were two of a kind: self-contained and self-sufficient. Proud. They bowed to no man. It was almost refreshing in our organization world.
Costa said, “What do you want to know about Radford?”
“What can you tell me?”
“You want to know if I knocked him off? Because he closed me down over in North Chester?”
“It’s a reason,” I said.
“No it isn’t, baby. It’s all in the game. I shut the nephew off cold and opened here. No sweat.” He leaned back again, fixed those dark eyes on me. “We don’t kill people anymore, not outside the club. Sure, inside the boys still hit each other sometimes, but not outside. Too much pressure now. Anastasia gets it, the cops cheer. Knock off a citizen, and you got trouble. If the citizen was a big wheel, the trouble is so bad no fix works, and that’s bad for business.”
“And Radford was important?”
“You know it. Talk about Mafia, but, baby, they’re nothing compared to a guy like Jonathan Radford. He was real power. The connections, the influence, the real muscle. If he looks sideways at the cops, no fix could stick. He calls the Governor, he gets troopers and maybe the national guard. Congress listens to him. The President talks to him. He was a corporation, baby, with a reach went everywhere. I did what he didn’t like. He made a phone call and I was out of business. No threats, no guns, no muscle. That’s power, baby. He closed me to show he wanted the kid shut off. I shut the kid off. He let me open here.”
“Sometimes a man gets squeezed so hard he just has to stand up and fight no matter how bad the odds,” I said.
Costa scowled now. “Listen, baby. He wanted me out of North Chester, and I got out. He didn’t even talk to me. Guys like him think guys like me and you ain’t even human. If they need us, they use us like they’d use a dog. If they don’t need us, they don’t even see us as long as we keep out of their way. I stay open, baby, only because guys like Radford are too busy to worry about me, and the good citizens don’t care.”
“Probably true and logical,” I said, “but you don’t strike me as a man who’s always logical.”
He grinned. “Anyway, baby, I’ve got me an alibi. Soon as I heard, I knew the cops’d be around. They came. I told them what I’m telling you: me and Strega was in the city early Monday, sure, but we was back here by one o’clock. We got proof. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “Did you hear about Jonathan being mixed up in anything?”
“No, but what would I hear about what he did?”
“Do you know a man named Paul Baron?”
“I heard of him, but I never met the man. We work different streets. He’s a con artist, a sharpie. I’m a businessman. Him and his women work badger games; play the ships, the resorts. His kind’ll try to take a casino as fast as any private mark. I’d throw him out.”
“Walter Radford lost $25,000 to Baron at poker.”
Costa whistled. “Walter can’t play, but Baron probably cold-decked him, too. Only $25,000 is damned high for a loner like Baron to let the tab go.”
“I was thinking that myself,” I agreed. “Maybe Baron sort of knew Walter was going to be rich soon. I notice Walter isn’t shut off here anymore.”
“The old man’s dead. No worries now,” Costa said. “Walter’s loaded, if the Fallon doesn’t queer the deal when she marries him. Except I don’t give that two years before she wants out, or maybe he does. She’s got too much class for him.”
“You like her?”
“There’s something in her, baby. Only you saw she won’t give me the time of day. Not now. Maybe later.”
“Keep hoping,” I said, and stood up.
“I will, baby.”
I left Costa with a faraway look in his black eyes. Strega still leaned in his corner, a statue. But just as I reached the door, the blond man’s gray eyes turned to look at me. Intense gray eyes, as if Strega wanted to be sure to remember my face.
Outside the casino in the cold I lighted a cigarette. The stars were clear and hard. It had been a day of the wild goose, and no help to Sammy Weiss. I decided to have one more go at finding Weiss, and maybe Paul Baron. The cops should have given up on Weiss’s room by now. Maybe I could find some lead they had missed.
9
St. Marks place is one of those streets that make New York what it is. It is in what was once called the Ghetto, where the great Yiddish culture flourished. The Jews still live in the area, but now the Poles are there, the Ukrainians, the Italians, and a host of other peoples. The bums are there because the Bowery is near. The artists are there because it is also the East Village, the present cheap Bohemia. The alienated are there, and the grotesque. Old and young; middle-class and far out; bearded hippie and bearded Chassidim; black, white, yellow and brown. All walk in relative peace.
On any given block between Third Avenue and Avenue A there may be a Polish Hall, a Slovenian Roman Catholic Church, an Italian cafe, a Bodega-Carniceria, and a Jewish restaurant. There are lower-middle-class tenements, flophouse hotels, apartments with doormen, and some of the lowest rooming houses anywhere. There are spit-and-sawdust workmen’s bars, psychedelic coffee houses, and three places where you can buy marijuana over the counter.
At the moment, St. Marks Place itself is a hippie heaven, a far-out Coney Island of the flower-children and the LSD-trippers. Every night is Mardi Gras on this year’s St. Marks Place. It will not always be this. It will change again with the city and life itself, and no one can say what it will be tomorrow.
And underneath the surface carnival of today, the old Ghetto, Bowery, and melting pot still holds firm, offering a home to men like Sammy Weiss, who have never known peace and who love only the dollar made without work.
Weiss’s room was on the third floor rear, and it was not locked. I went in with caution. The room was empty. With its nameless furniture, greasy stove, and sagging bed, it looked like it had always been empty. The single closet held one suit, one pair of slacks, and one worn pair of shoes. In the bureau there was underwear, socks, and a strange article that seemed to be an old male corset. There were two clean shirts with turned collars.
All men, petty gambler or king, are much the same day to day. I could picture Weiss, of the fur collar and big bluff, alone in this room turning his shirt collars and hoping that a corset would make him slim and young again before he gave up and let his pot sag.
I found nothing. Only the evidence of a small and empty life. There were only some twenty-seven miles between this room and North Chester, but it was hard to believe that the two places held members of the same species.
I heard the door open. I looked up to see a man come in and lean against the door. A gray man, tall and slender.
“Hello, Fortune.”
He wore a gray cashmere overcoat, pale gray gloves, and his gray trousers draped perfectly to shined black shoes. He wore his gray Homburg at too much angle, and his handsome face had an edge of anxiety he would never completely hide. It added up to only one conclusion-a man who lived by wits and guile, and for whom clothes, pleasures and the best places were not by-products of life but ends in themselves. A con man.
