done before in all these years, had a visible effect. “You got your money back. Be content.”
“It’s not about the money-”
“-it’s about the principle. Right… So you’re gonna do what? Write op-ed columns for the New York Times? Dispatch more of your amateurs?”
“They wouldn’t be amateurs.”
“They’re all amateurs nowadays. All of ’em. Carbon-copy Juniors with their goddamn tattoos and cute little ear rings. But it’s your call, do what you have to.”
“I always do.”
“Two things.”
“I’m counting.”
“You send people after me, anyone up the line sends people after me, best keep the loading docks open for regular deliveries.”
“This the same Bernie Rose that said ‘I don’t ever threaten’?”
“It’s not a threat. Neither is this.”
“What?” Nino’s eyes met his.
“You don’t get a free ride for old time’s sake. I look in the mirror and see someone in the back seat, next thing I see-once I’ve taken care of that-is you.”
“Bernie, Bernie. We’re friends.”
“No. We’re not.”
What to make of this? Every time you thought you had a take on it, the world thumbed its nose and shifted back to its own track, becoming again-still-unreadable. Driver found himself wishing he had Manny Gilden’s opinion. Manny understood at a glance things others spent weeks puzzling out. “Intuition,” he said, “it’s all intuition, just a knack I have. Everyone thinks I’m smart, but I’m not. Something in me makes these connections.” Driver wondered if Manny’d ever made it to New York or if, as usual, six or seven times in as many years, he’d backed out.
Wine Man came out to look at Espresso, no expression showing on his face, and went back inside. Half an hour later he floated out the door again and saddled up. A sky-blue Lexus.
Driver thought about the way he’d stood looking down, wineglass in his hand, and how he’d looked getting into the Lexus, almost weightless, and understood for the first time what Manny had been talking about.
The guy who went in and the one who came out were different people. Something happened in there to change things.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Bernie Rose and Isaiah Paolozzi grew up in Brooklyn, the old Italian section centering around Henry Street. From the roof where Bernie had spent a good portion of his teen years you could look left to the Statue of Liberty and, right, to the bridge like a huge elastic band holding two distinct worlds together. In Bernie’s time, those worlds had become ever less distinct as skyrocketing rents in Manhattan drove young people across the river, and Brooklyn rents, on the teeter-totter, rose to meet the demand. Manhattan, after all, was still but minutes away by F train. In Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill and lower Park Slope, trendy restaurants catering to the new residents sat jarringly among cluttered used-furniture stores and ancient, flyblown, hole-in-the-wall bodegas.
It was a part of town where stories about the mob circulated like the latest jokes.
One of the new residents, out walking her dog, had let it crap on the sidewalk and, in a hurry to meet her date, failed to clean up after it. Unfortunately the sidewalk fronted the home of a mobster’s mother. Days later the young woman came back across the river to find the dog gutted in her bathtub.
Another, circling block after block seeking a parking place, had pulled into one just vacated. “Hey, you can’t park there, that’s a private spot,” a kid on the stoop shouted to him. “No such thing,” he’d said. Next day when he hiked the eight blocks to pull his car to the other side to make room for street cleaning and so avoid a ticket, it was gone. He never saw it again.
Back around 1990, Nino’d got fed up. “This ain’t my town anymore,” he told Bernie. “How’s California sound?” Sounded pretty good. Not much for Bernie to do here; the business ran itself. He was bone tired of old men waving him over to their dinner and domino tables to complain, tired of the slew of cousins and nephews and nieces that comprised most of Brooklyn. And he’d drunk enough espresso to last him a lifetime. Had his last cup, in fact, the day they left. Never touched it again.
Hadn’t taken Nino long to pull up ties. Sold the restaurant with its red-flocked wallpaper and big-hair waitresses to one of the newcomers with plans to make it a “sushi palace.” Laid off the news stand and new chi- chi coffee houses to a couple of nephews. Uncle Lucius, urged on by wife Louise, who wanted him out of the house whatever the cost, took over the bar.
They drove cross-country in Nino’s cherry and cherry-red Cadillac, pulling into truck stops a couple times a day for hamburgers and steaks, making do the rest of the time with chips, Vienna sausages, sardines, Fritos. Before this, those few times they had reason to venture into it, even Manhattan seemed a foreign country. Brooklyn was the world. Now here they were, coursing through the wilderness of America, traversing its back lots.
“Hell of a country,” Nino said, “hell of a country. Anything’s possible, anything at all.”
Well, yeah. You had family, connections, money, sure it was. Little difference between this and the political machines that spat out all those Kennedys and kept the like of Mayor Daley in office. Or the ones that chocked Reagan and a couple of Bushes under the wheels of the republic while tires got changed.
“Even if it does look,” Nino added-they were in Arizona by then-“like God squatted down here, farted, and lit a match to it.”
Nino stole home in their new world as though he’d always been here, taking command of an array of pizza parlors, mall-based fast food concessions, bookie action, enforcement. It was just like they’d never left, Bernie thought, only now when they looked out they didn’t see elevated train tracks and painted ads for restaurants on the side of buildings, they saw blue sky and palm trees.
Bernie Rose hated it all. Hated the procession of beautiful days, hated giving up seasons and rain, hated the clotted streets and highways, hated all these so-called communities, Bel Air, Brentwood, Santa Monica, insisting on sovereignty even as they drained away L.A.’s resources.
He’d never thought of himself as a political person, but hey.
Thing was, it made him a kinder man. He went out on a collection to a doublewide or a co-op some idiot had paid two mill for, that kindness went with him. He tried to understand, tried to put himself in the others’ shoes. “You’re going soft, boy,” Uncle Ivan said-the only person back east he kept in touch with. But he wasn’t. He was just seeing how some people never had half a fucking chance and never would have.
In China Belle, well into his third cup of green tea, nibbling at the edges of an egg roll too hot to eat, Bernie sat thinking about the guy who’d set sights on Nino.
“Everything all right, Mr. Rose?” his favorite waitress, Mai June, asked. (“My father owned little aside from his sense of humor, of which he was inordinately proud,” she’d told him when he asked about her name.) Like everything she said, even so phatic a statement, with its lilt and rising tones, sounded like a poem or a piece of music. He assured her the food was exemplary as always. Moments later, she brought his entree, five-flavor shrimp.
Okay. Run it down, then.
Nino out here in Wonderland had begun fancying himself some kind of goddamn producer, no longer just a good maintenance man (and he’d been one of the best), but a mover and shaker. Such unwarranted ambition was in the very water and air, and in this pounding sunlight. Like a virus, it got into you and wouldn’t let go, dog of the American Dream gone dingo. So Nino’d set up the grab, or more likely had it foisted on him, then farmed it out, probably to the foister. Director put a team together, a package. Brought in the driver.
Shouldn’t be too hard to step in those footprints. Not that he knew offhand who to call, but there’d be no problem getting numbers. He’d put it out that he was a mover and shaker himself, of course, one with a heavy job waiting on the runway, only before takeoff he needed the best driver to be had.
