Vengeance: Mystery Writers of America Presents

turnip, that big fat ass you got.”

Later, Angie told Turnip his old man must’ve been thinking of a butternut squash or an eggplant, a turnip being more or less round. Either way, Turnip was displeased and he took to weight lifting to change his body shape. It worked, even if the name stuck, and now he looked like he didn’t need Angie knocking the Webers of the world off his back.

At about the same time, Angie realized that he wasn’t going to be much bigger than his old man, who went about five and a half feet in work boots. Also, he’d have to wear eyeglasses. But by then, he’d been discovered to have an IQ of 154 and was in a class for the advanced. Soon, it was common knowledge that Angie, the toughest kid in Narrows Gate, was also the smartest.

About fifteen years later, it dawned on Silvio Soldato that Angie and Turnip were a dangerous duo. Very dangerous, these two, he mused. Brains and brawn. Mind and muscle. Hmmm.

The problem in this case, he noted, was that usually when you had a Hercules and an Einstein, at the same time you had a moron and a weakling. Not so with these two. Turnip had a fresh head, especially with numbers and mechanics, and little Angie was pazzo times three — everybody in town knew he’d crammed those turnips down the ice cream man’s throat when he was ten years old. Each time a guy turned up on the waterfront with his shins shattered or his ears pinned to his cheeks, Soldato made Angie for it, wondering how he always walked away clean.

Soldato wanted them broke up, now and forever, and for six weeks he thought about how to do it. Killing them both would look desperate, he reasoned, and killing one would send the other one seething toward revenge. He considered having the brakes go on the Camaro as Turnip and Angie headed down the viaduct, careening them to a fiery death at the Getty station. But then he started thinking maybe Turnip could figure some way out of the crash, twisting and maneuvering, tires squealing. Kid drives like he was born behind the wheel, that son of a bitch, him and his Camaro.

Then he decided, the lightbulb going bright.

Now Soldato was sitting in his booth at the Grotto, enjoying a late-afternoon meal of zuppa di vongole over linguine, and here comes Turnip. Alone and more or less right after Big Muzz said. A good sign, he thought as he watched Pinhead frisk him, concluding by giving his nuts a threatening tug.

Turnip shivered as he shook off the September chill.

“Mr. Rapa,” Soldato began. “How’s the Camaro? And Angie?”

“TWO QUESTIONS, AND there was the entire plan,” Turnip said.

“The shit heap gave it up before I had my ass in the seat. What a fuckin’ babbo.”

“So he said that? Just like that?” Angie asked.

“Not in so many words, no. Different words.”

“What words?”

“Ang, how the fuck do I know? I got the gist of it, all right?”

They decided to play it safe, leaving the Camaro in Turnip’s garage. Angie had a beat-up burgundy Impala, one of about three thousand in Hudson County. He drove it north on Boulevard East while Turnip took the 22 bus up to Cliffside. Now they were in the Bagel Nosh in Fort Lee, figuring nobody was eyeing the joint.

“The one sentence,” Angie insisted. “Repeat that one —”

“He said, ‘I don’t want to see him no more.’ ”

“Meaning what?”

“Well, I don’t think he wants you to move, Ang,” Turnip chuckled.

“And you don’t take me out, he’ll blow up the Camaro. What’s wrong with this guy? Did you tell him they made a lot of Camaros?”

You had to be half a fag to drink Tab, but Turnip liked the taste. “In fact, Ang, they ain’t made that many Super Yenkos.”

Angie narrowed his eyes and sat back in the orange booth.

Silence hung heavy. Soon Turnip wondered if his friend could kill him with a plastic spoon covered with chicken liver.

“I’m saying, that’s all.”

Angie tapped his fingers, one after the next, and Turnip began to squirm.

“Ang,” he said finally, palms up. “What the fuck . . .”

Angie adjusted his eyeglasses. The color began to return to his face.

“Let me guess your plan,” Turnip said. “You let me guess?”

“Yeah. Go guess,” he replied, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He’d noticed the knockout behind the counter. A schnoz on her, but those dark curls and like an hourglass under the Bagel Nosh uniform. A streak of mischief too: He could tell she liked that he wouldn’t return when they were done.

He had to ask if she had a friend. A friend with a car didn’t mind driving Turnip down to Narrows Gate after.

“You want to find out where they got another ’69 Camaro,” Turnip said, sucking on a lemon slice.

Angie stood. “No. Jesus . . .”

Looking up, Turnip frowned. “What then?”

“When I come back, you tell me how Soldato’s connected,” he said. “Let me know if there’s somebody maybe who wouldn’t want to, you know, make a move, given his misstep.”

THOUGH IT WAS a short ride under the Hudson from Little Italy, Narrows Gate no longer drew much attention from the Five Families. The Gigentis still had a slice via the creaking waterfront, but the shipyards had closed, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company moved, Venus Pencil too, and now the city’s population, once as high as sixty thousand, was down to less than half that. And half of those left were melanzane who’d turned the projects into Little Harlem.

Seeing the Mob now thought the place an ass pimple, Soldato had moved in and set up his own operation, running a numbers racket that catered to the old-time Italians, the coloreds, and the Irlandese. Soon, come eight thirty at night and almost everybody left in Narrows Gate was throwing elbows, grabbing the bulldog edition of the Daily News for the total mutual handle at the track to see if the last three numbers matched their bet.

Given it’s a thousand-to-one shot to hit on the nose, Soldato needed a rake to collect, taking in maybe two large a week in small change and paying out less than 7 percent. Most of that went to his army of bookies, all blue-haired grandmothers who knew everybody on the block who wanted in. Somebody gave him shit he’d send Pinhead to bruise her sensible. Grandma in ShopRite with a fat lip and a shiner, and soon everybody’s back in line, the thing almost running itself.

Angie knew the donnaccia with the Ping-Pong ball at Muzzie’s was a sign that Soldato wanted to expand. But the Gigentis sent hookers through the Lincoln Tunnel for action all over the county: One Saturday 4:15 a.m., Angie and Turnip counted sixteen zoccolas waiting for a New York–bound bus outside a motel only a mile from Muzzie’s platform.

Clear, Soldato asked nobody what he could do.

Angie got his meet at two thirty in the morning at Sal Rossi’s on Houston Street with six feet of poured concrete named Bobo. Him and his giant melon coming out of the kitchen and Angie wondered if he’d made the right play.

Adjusting his sunglasses, Bobo passed on the handshake and said, “What?”

Angie was no pigeon. “It’s about propriety,” he said.

Bobo went, “Uh?”

“He put the puttana two blocks from a school. Muzzie’s is the place. It used to be a nice restaurant. Long row of brownstones around the corner. Two, three generations in the same building.”

“Muzzie’s.”

“Now you got mothers going by with their little kids, teenagers hanging around . . . It’s not a class move and people are thinking it’s you.”

“Me?”