“Would you do me a favor, Nate?”
“Name it, Joey.”
We stepped into the elevator, which was attended by a blue-uniformed guy with blue five o’clock shadow, a nose with minimal cartilage, cauliflower ears, and a bulge under his arm that wasn’t a tumor.
Joey said to him, “I’m making a stop at Rocky’s floor.”
“Yes, Mr. Fischetti,” the elevator man marble-mouthed.
To me Joey whispered, “Don’t mention to Charley I just run into you by accident. I wanna tell him I called your office and you come around on purpose.”
“Fine by me, Joey.”
“Sometimes Charley thinks I’m a fuck-up, and it’s nice to show him I got organizational abilities. I’m doing more and more in the entertainment field, you know.”
“Are you managing Frank?”
He grinned, shrugged. “Not exclusive. Several people I know got a piece of Frank.”
This did not surprise me. Since the decline of his career, Sinatra had been working mostly in mob rooms— Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City; Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn in Vegas; Ben Madden’s Riviera in New Jersey; and of course the Chez Paree here in Chicago.
At the seventeenth floor, the uniformed thug deposited us in an entryway about the size of my first apartment. The plaster walls were light gray, and the penthouse door—and another around to the left labeled FIRE STAIRS—a deep charcoal. A few furnishings—a table with cut flowers in a white vase under a mirror, a golden Egyptian settee with a scarlet cushion—hugged the walls, and a sunburst clock opposite the penthouse door matched the sunburst doorbell, which Joey didn’t press—he used a key.
“Hey, Rocky,” Joey called, cracking the unlocked door. “It’s me—Joey! Are you decent?”
Now there was a question.
The only response was a muted railroad whistle—
Joey grinned at my confused expression. He said, like I’d understand, “Sounds like Rocky’s in his own little world again.”
I followed Joey inside. The spacious living room had the same light gray walls and a charcoal slate floor, warmed up by pastel furnishings, including two peach sofas facing each other over a coffee table on a white carpet near a fireplace over which hung a big gilt-framed painting of peasants picnicking in what I’d wager was a Sicilian countryside setting. Past a grand piano, through sheer drapes, I could make out—through the wall of glass doors— the terrace-style balcony with its white wrought iron furniture and millionaire’s lake view.
“Not bad, huh?” Joey said, as I took the place in. Occasional little railroad whistles—“Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!”—punctuated this nickel tour.
“Nice,” I said, thinking it didn’t look like anybody lived here; an adjacent formal dining room looked similarly showroom perfect. Of course I knew the Fischettis only stayed in Chicago about half the year—must have been about time for them to head down to Florida, where they wintered (and supervised their criminal activities in that state).
The ostentation didn’t surprise me, though—one of Rocco’s nicknames was Money Bags, because he liked to flash his dough around.
Joey led me down a hallway off of which were a spotless white modern kitchen and a bathroom. Finally, he knocked on a door, edged it open, stuck his head in, and said, “Hey, Super Chief! We got company.”
“Yeah, yeah,” a gruff voice said.
I followed Joey in—possibly designed to be a master bedroom, the large room’s only furnishings (other than a few scattered movie-set type canvas-and-wood chairs) were tables of various sizes and various heights, the central one a good four feet by six, to accommodate the towns and villages, the valleys and mountains, the tunnels, bridges, loading platforms and stations, of an enormous, sprawling, demented model railroad.
Miniature freight elevators unloaded grain, water tanks filled the steam engines of locomotives, and a coal mine provided chips of real coal. Tiny conductors, engineers, railroad workers, and passengers inhabited this landscape, as did billboards, farmhouses (with livestock), and much else. On shelves were model trains of every conceivable sort: steam, electric, freight, military, passenger, one of which was on the tracks now, taking the incredibly elaborate journey through the world Rocco Fischetti had created.
The Almighty God of this mini-universe was a homely, pale, pockmarked, shovel-headed hood with a wide yet sharp chin, a long knobby nose, and dark close-set eyes under slashes of black eyebrow; his hair was black with skunk streaks of white. Five-ten, sturdy-looking, he sat mesmerized before a control panel of switches—watching his train take its circuitous, even dangerous, route—wearing a maroon silk house robe and slippers—and a railroad engineer’s cap.
He wasn’t alone: seated across from him, bored senseless, was a cute shapely twentyish blonde (I thought I recognized her from the Chez Paree chorus line) in a silver silk robe and her own engineer’s cap. Also, a black eye.
“Sorry to bother you, Rock,” Joey said.
The train said, “Woo woo! Woo woo!”
Rocco’s back was partly to me—he had not seen me yet, or anyway not acknowledged in any way that he had. “I’m busy,” he said. “Don’t I look busy?”
“You look busy, but I got Nate Heller here with me.”
After a tough day beating up his girl friends, or a hard night torturing an informer, a guy needed to let his hair down. And Rocco had found a way to unwind while expressing his creativity, fashioning this intricate model railroad complex.
He threw a few switches and his train slowed to a halt, its last “woo woo” sounding a little weak, even
