‘As I’ll ever be,’ I replied, and yet in my gut there was a cool sense of something unraveling. It was late evening, a little after nine. Victor was having a sleep-over at Mrs Martinelli’s house, believing perhaps that his old father had already gone to bed with a mug of cocoa, but no – here I was, in a car on the corner of Canal Street with his Uncle Sammy, and me and Uncle Sammy were going to drive across to the Lower East Side and clip some asshole called Benny Wheland. Benny was a smalltime loan-shark, one of those assholes who charged a quarter on the dollar per week. Hit him for a thousand bucks and three weeks later he’d come looking for seventeen hundred and fifty and expect you to be real polite and grateful when you gave it him back. He didn’t carry any muscle to speak of, just a couple of Irish fistfighters who fought bouts in the clubs around Water Street and Vladek Park. Meatpackers they were, nothing much more than that, but they were big enough to intimidate the kind of people Benny Wheland lent money to. The problem with Benny – sweetheart though he was – was a mouth the width of the Williamsburg Bridge, and when he opened it you could have ferried three cars and a tow truck right down his throat. He had laid up a deal with a fight arranger called Mordi Metz, a decidedly dishonest Jewish businessman who was known as Momo. Momo governed the financial matters relating to all fights on the Lower East Side. He had a strong working relationship with our people, and when he needed a little heavy-handing on paybacks we were always happy to oblige. We took a ten percent cut, we handed the cash clean and simple to Momo, and everyone was happy. Benny Wheland had welched on a pay-out to Momo, something in the region of thirty grand, and Momo called in a marker he was owed by the Lucheses. The Lucheses gave the job to Don Calligaris, and Don Calligaris gave it to us.
‘Simple thing really,’ he told me. ‘He’ll have the money, no question about it, and the deal is that whatever we get we keep all but a one-dollar token we give to Momo.’
‘One dollar?’ I asked. ‘What the hell we gotta give him one dollar for?’
Don Calligaris smiled. ‘It’s traditional. It’s a Jewish thing. They gotta get their pound of flesh, you know?’ He laughed, waved my question aside, and went back to business.
‘It’s worth it to us to keep Momo sweet,’ he said. ‘This guy Wheland is a fly in the fucking ointment as far as he’s concerned, about as significant in the grand scheme of things as a heap of dog crap on the sidewalk. It means nothing to us to clip him, and this is what Momo wants. Besides, Benny Wheland has been known to open his mouth a few too many times, and things would be altogether quieter if he was out of the way.’
I sat quiet for some moments.
‘Hell, Ernesto, if I had someone else to send, someone I could trust, I would send them. You know that. This may not seem like a big deal, thirty grand owed to some Jewish guy running the fight circuit, but I got my orders, and orders is orders as you well know. Now, you gonna do this thing or do I gotta get some pimple-faced teenager with an attitude to go fuck it up for me?’
I smiled. ‘Of course I’ll go,’ I said. I would not have questioned Don Calligaris’s request. It was not in my nature to go up against him. He was in a tight spot. He needed someone to do the work. I agreed to take care of it.
And so we sat in that car as New York went on snowing down on us, me and Ten Cent in our overcoats and gloves, and when Ten Cent started the car and I looked at him I realized that he would do these things for ever. Ten Cent was a soldier, he was not a thinker. He was a smart man, no question about it, but he had accepted the fact that he was not a leader. He was a man who made kings, not a king himself, whereas I had always questioned everything. I did not want to be a king, I did not want to sit in a chair someplace and give the orders to have men’s lives ended, but at that point in my life I didn’t want to be the emissary either. What I wanted I didn’t know, but in that moment I had agreed, and once I had agreed there was no going back. That unwillingness to compromise my word had perhaps been the only thing to keep me alive that long.
We drove south towards Chinatown and then headed into the Lower East Side along Broadway. We had been given Benny Wheland’s address, and we knew he lived alone. Apparently Benny had never trusted a woman enough to marry her, and the money that he had he kept beneath the floorboards.
‘You gonna do this?’ Ten Cent asked me as he pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t wanna do this, you know? You got a kid an’ all, and I know that must change the way you think about things. I’m easy come, easy go on this if you don’t actually wanna clip the guy.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘We’ll take it as it comes,’ I said. ‘Let’s go talk to Benny and see what he has to say for himself, eh?’
Ten Cent nodded and opened the door. A freezing gust of wind and snow rushed in to greet us, and Ten Cent swore. He stepped out and slammed the car door shut.
I climbed out on the other side and walked around to where he stood. We looked up and down the street both ways. Smart folks were inside bundled up in blankets watching the tube. Only us – two old men in topcoats and scarves – were dumb enough to be out on a night like this.
Benny opened the door but it was held by two security chains. He peered out at us through the four-inch gap, his face screwed up against the cold wind that hurried in to piss him off.
‘Benny,’ Ten Cent said. ‘How ya doin’ there? You gonna open the freakin’ door and let us in or we gotta stand out here like a coupla schmucks freezin’ our fucking balls off?’
Benny hesitated for a second. It amazed me, never ceased to amaze me, that in situations like this people didn’t realize what was going to happen. Or perhaps they did, and they knew there was an inevitability to it, and thus they consigned themselves to fate. Perhaps they would survive. Perhaps they believed that God might be on their side and see them through. I knew for a fact that God was the greatest welch-artist that ever existed.
‘Whaddya want?’ Benny growled through the narrowing gap between the door and the frame.
‘Aah, come on for Christ’s sake, Benny. We got to talk money with you. We got a means to work out this thing with Momo and it won’t take more than a coupla minutes and then we’ll be on our way.’
I didn’t know what Benny Wheland thought then, but his expression changed. Perhaps he believed that Momo, and whoever else Momo might have been connected with, wouldn’t have sent two old men over to sort him out. Maybe he believed that if he was gonna get clipped it would be some wiseass kids who just muscled their way in and shot him in the face.
He hesitated a moment longer, and then he slammed the door.
I heard the chains releasing, both of them, and then the door opened wide. Ten Cent and I went into Benny Wheland’s house with gratitude and.38s.
There was a lot of talk, much of it from Benny, a little from Ten Cent, and after a while I got real tired of listening and shot Benny in the face.
When I walked over and took a look at him it was difficult to see anything but a whole handful of shit around his eyes and nose.
Ten Cent stood there with his jaw on the floor.
‘Fuck, Ernesto… what the fuck?’
I frowned. ‘Whaddya mean, what the fuck?’
‘Shit, man, you coulda told me you was gonna do that.’
‘What the hell d’you mean I coulda told you? What the hell did we come over here for? A cup of fuckin’ tea and a chat with the asshole?’
Ten Cent shook his head. He lifted his right hand and massaged his ear. ‘No, I don’t mean that. You know I don’t mean that. I mean you coulda told me you was gonna just shoot the guy. I coulda put my fucking hands over my ears or something. Jesus, feels like I ain’t gonna hear right for a fucking week.’
I smiled and Ten Cent started laughing.
‘You didn’t wanna listen to any more of that horseshit, did you?’
Ten Cent shook his head. ‘Guy was a fucking radio station all by himself. Now, let’s find this fucking money, right?’
We went through every room in the house. We prised up the floorboards, ripped open the backs of chairs and sofas. We found food cartons and dirty washing pretty much everywhere we went. We even found the remains of something that had been cooked black in the oven and then just left there because Benny hadn’t been bothered to clean up after himself. The guy had lived like an animal. That said, regardless of his personal hygiene and housecare skills, we collected together something close to a hundred and ten thousand dollars, much of it in fifties and hundreds. It was a good take, better than Don Calligaris had expected, and as a show of good faith he sent a single dollar over to Momo in an envelope, and a further thirty grand in a jiffy bag.
‘Straightforward enough?’ he’d asked me when we’d returned to Mulberry Street.
