DEAD MAN, CORNER POCKET

Richard Sanders
The human mind is less prone to go astray when it gets to know to what extent, and in

how many directions, it is itself liable to err, and we can never devote too much time to

the study of our aberrations.

—Bernard de Fontenelle, 1686

 CHAPTER 1 (THEN)

I’M SURPRISED HE’S DEAD. HE COULD

NEVER MAKE HIS MIND UP ABOUT ANYTHING

PURE TECHNICOLOR PANIC

This wouldn’t count as the worst decision he’d ever make in his life, but it was a bad one.

Fishboy told him don’t stay at the Biltmore this time out. Why not? Democrats. They got

their convention. They’re at the Biltmore same time as you. No, said Tango, you’re

wrong. The convention’s at the Sports Arena, July 11 to 15. He’d looked it up. The

CONVENTION convention, sure, said Fishboy. But all the business is getting done at the

Biltmore. Kennedy, Johnson, Stevenson, they all got their headquarters there. So what?

So you’ll get shitloads a delegates, shitloads a reporters. It’ll be a tumbling mess for you.

“I can live with it.”

Tango Williams wasn’t giving up the Biltmore over any convention. For what? A

bunch of withered old parchesi-playing dusties in their Robert Hall suits, smelling of hair

tonic and pre-war farts? Devoted, long-time Democratic workers, 110% party men,

chain-drinking in the lobby? Or the Cadillac crowd, the big donors who’ve been

contributing to Democratic campaign chests ever since the pilgrims first took a piss on

Plymouth Rock? The only way any of them could bother Tango was if they dropped dead

on the carpet and he had to step over them.

He needed the Biltmore. Whenever he played in or around Los Angeles, that’s

where he stayed. The hotel helped him ease his thoughts and settle into a steady flow of

concentration. He liked the golden block-long lobby, the heavy wood, the Persian carpets,

the old-world hush. He liked the elegance, the sheer swellagance of it all. He liked the

remote privacy of the rooms, the way they were built in three separate 11-story stacks

that jutted out toward South Olive Street. They looked like three prongs of a gigantic fork

about to spear the lush green morsel of Pershing Square.

 Tango would practice at Milton’s Billiards over on West Sixth Street, but

otherwise he’d stay in the hotel, eating room service, maybe call in a girl. The Biltmore

brought him peace. It brought him focus. It brought him luck.

Though not always. Tango had played in the Ventura County Tournament last

year, held in a Simi Valley pool hall that hadn’t been aired out since they invented air.

The top prize was $1,000, not a bad take when most American families were making

$5,600 a year. But the real cash came when most of the crowd left, the door was locked

and the blinds brought down. This was the money game that Fishboy had set up. The

waitresses who’d worked the tourney now stripped down to g-strings. The price of a

Dewars went from 50 cents to $1.50. They started showing porn movies on a bedsheet

somebody hung on a wall while the rollers put down their bets.

There were four players that night, Tango, Willie, Fats and a local shooter named

Deacon Moore. The game was 10-ball, a race to 100 for a total pool of $3,500 and

change. Right from the start it was all Tango and Fats. They were both playing

monstrously sharp games, Willie and Deacon lagging well behind. Then Deacon missed a

long try for the 8 ball, which left the cue ball giving a very sweet kiss to the open 6.

That’s when Willie, fucking Willie Mosconi decided to wake up. He went on one

of his patented 50-ball runs, the kind of thing he could do in his sleep when he wasn’t

sleeping. Willie was a machine that night, setting up brilliant breaks, making

unbelievable long shots and leaving the other three eating his chalk dust.

That wasn’t gonna happen again. Tango was playing the Ventura Tournament

again this year. He needed a healthy dose of the Biltmore touch.

 Unfortunately, the Biltmore touch had gone completely numb with shock. The

deal-making for the 1960 Democratic Convention was unlike anything anyone alive had

ever seen. It was a lunatic parade of protesters, supporters, high school bands and cops

with bullhorns, thousands of people screaming, singing, cheering, jeering, carrying signs,

waving banners and going butt-fuck crazy in the scowling lights of the TV cameras. As

disappointed hookers and club owners discovered, this was a chaste, sober, grimly

serious crowd. This was a grimly insane crowd. It seemed as if every nutjob crank in

California—no, check that, every nutjob crank in America—had loaded his pregnant wife

in their pickup, strapped their five children to the flatbed and headed for the Biltmore.

Fishboy had been right. This was no place to relax your mind.

First of all, the lobby had been turned into a lava sludge of dazed delegates out

candidate shopping and campaign volunteers buttonholing said delegates and plying them

with coffee, buns, taffy and mimeographed fact sheets in a desperate, NoDoz effort to sell

their candidates, while at the same time two rival Puerto Rican delegations tried to march

through the crowd playing steel drums and dancing the bomba.

Then you had the candidates’ supporters out on the sidewalk, holding placards for

John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson or Stuart Symington, joined by

demonstrators for the Negro lobby and the labor lobby. The men, women and children

were waving to the cameras, yelling at the competing groups and exchanging bent-arm,

clenched-fist signals of scorn.

And then, gathered under the polluted haze over Pershing Square, you had the

protesters airing their specialized grievances. Fidel Must Die. Bomb Moscow. We Need a

Christian, Not a Catholic. Vote Vegetarian. Save Lake Michigan. Join the White Fight.
Support Ethical Culture. Bring Back Prohibition. We Love Elvis. Help Us, Jesus. Stamp

Out Surfers. Vote For Nixon.

Forget relaxing. Tango found the whole carnival dangerous and disturbing. It

wasn’t that people were protesting. It was the way they were protesting, like wolf packs

exploding with hostility and spleen. Not just the weirdos—the candidates’ sympathizers

too. They all seemed ready to break out in a stampede. Cops were everywhere and

occasionally they’d pop in the crowds to break up a fight, but if these people decided to

scrimmage it didn’t look like the police could hold them back.

Everyone outside and inside the hotel was acting with real world’s-end frenzy.

Unless their words were heard, they felt, the apocalypse was upon us. Two people had

already tried to jump off the roof of the Biltmore. On average, no more than six or seven

people go for a fatal flight off the roof each year. Doomsday was about to check in.

And why not? Make your way through the lobby and look at the headlines seared

across the papers. Khrushchev Threatens War Over Further U.S. Spy Flights. U-2 Pilot

Will Face Moscow Trial. Whites Flee Congo in Panic. U.S. Cuts Ties with Castro.

Military Warns of Vietnamese Rebel Group. Nuclear Warhead Testing Urged. China

Said to Develop Bomb. Visions of World War III, with hydrogen loads a push button

away from Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. and New York, infected the American heart.

Tango had never given much thought to politics. The Russians were evil—got it.

Then one day in October 1957 he woke up to see a photo on the front page of what

looked like a cue ball studded with long needles. The headline said, Russia Wins Space

Race. Thing was called Sputnik, the first manmade satellite to orbit the Earth. His kids

were terrified. It’s watching us, they said. It can see us in the bathroom.
 His children’s fears hit home. Since then Tango had cultivated strong views on

politics. He just didn’t know which way to go with them. Vote for JFK? The man looked

good, give him that, though Jackie Kennedy looked even better. But as someone who’d

been raised Catholic himself, Tango wasn’t sure he wanted a Catholic in the White

House. Next thing you know, the Pope’s sitting at the door of the Oval Office sprinkling

holy water on everybody who walks in.

Then there’s Tricky Dick Nixon on the other side. A liar, a cheat, an unstable man

filled with toxins. But at least you knew he was a liar, a cheat and filled with toxins. You

knew what you were getting.

Speaking of liars, cheats and unstable personalities, Tango had a meeting with

Fishboy. They were supposed to find each other in the lobby. Good fucking luck with

that, even though Fishboy stood out like a landmark.

The crowd was so thick you could barely move. Tango pushed and dodged until

he passed the Biltmore Tobacco Store. There he was. Frankie Fishboy Ervolino,

nicknamed by his family because he refused to eat anything but seafood when he was

young. Diet must’ve worked. Fishboy was a large man, made larger by the floor-length

fur coat he was wearing despite the July heat, by a pair of cowboy boots and a 10-gallon

hat so big they must’ve stitched two of them together to fit around his fat head. He liked

to show off his Western heritage. Only he was from East New York, Brooklyn and had

never been near cattle country in his life.

Fishboy was buying a handful of Havana Royal panatelas and flirting with the girl

behind the counter. Young girl, Doris Day at like 17, working her way through high
school. Or junior high. He saw Tango through the glass, nodded, lit his cigar on the tiny

gas flame they kept burning on the counter and bid his nymphet farewell.

“I think she likes me,” Fishboy opined.

“Do you.”

“The younger ones tend to. They’re always smiling and laughing with me.”

“They’re just happy you’re not trying to kill them.”

He grunted, took a quick, impatient pull on his smoke. “You hear about Kachka?”

“The big C, I heard.”

“I’m surprised he’s dead. He could never make up his mind about anything.”

“You going back for the funeral?”

“Fuck him.”

We pressed ahead for the front door. It was slow going.

Fishboy sighed, a man much put upon. “Fats here?”

“At the Ambassador. They’ve already cut him off from room service.”

“Fucking pig. Willie?”

“Willie’s not showing. He’s still in New York, making a movie.”

“A movie? Willie’s in a movie?”

“Paul Newman is. Jackie Gleason. It’s about the game—Willie’s a technical

advisor. They’re shooting at Ames Academy.”

“By Times Square? Fucking dump.”

We were hit by a fresh blitz of people. Fishboy tried to plow through, to no avail.

He lost it. “What did I tell you? I told you not to stay here. Even for LA this is out

of hand. This was an ill-begotten choice on your part.”

 “Next time I need shoulda coulda woulda’s, I’ll come to you.”

“You should. There’s no way you can be holding up in this shit. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“You sure?”

“Fine. How’re you?”

“Fine. Just lost three pounds. I’m in the best shape of my life.” He blew a fog of

smoke over the guy in front of him. Didn’t help. “How come you don’t ask about Tray

anymore?”

“How’s Tray?”

“Fine.”

“Give her my best.”

“I will. All three inches of it.”

Fishboy liked his little joke, but he didn’t get much time to relish it. Something

was happening by the door, something rumbling and agitated, some animal swarm that

was pushing the people inside back in panic. Tango heard chanting, a combined roar of

voices saying, We want better pay. We want better pay. No, that wasn’t it. We want

Adlai. We want Adlai. He saw the sweep of signs and paper banners. Stevenson For

President. The candidate’s supporters were staging a demented pep rally, marching in

lockstep and wedging their way into the lobby as the TV cameras swung to capture them.

There must’ve been hundreds of them, a crowd-burst of demonstrators trying to

establish a beachhead in the Biltmore. The inside crowd grappled and fumbled and fought

to hold the perimeter, but they couldn’t stop this massive, swarming press. Bullhorning
cops on the street went to break up the supporters but the human clot just kept moving

forward.

And growing in size. Hundreds of them? Shit, thousands of them, coming out of

nowhere like they’d been created by the light. The mob was overwhelming the lobby

dwellers, riot-trampling those who’d fallen. There was no room to move but the people

inside had to move anyway. This was confusion multiplied by confusion, bodies caught

in high-pressure whirlpools, pebbles swept away in the overflow of a storm-swollen

stream.

Fishboy was white in the face, sweating under his fur coat. “I hope you’re fucking

relaxed now.”

No, but Tango was aware. He spotted a blip on the edge of his vision, a cold blur

by the entrance. A guy wearing a sharkskin sportscoat and a snap-brim fedora was

slipping in the door with the others. He didn’t seem part of the Adlai crowd.

Something else too. Come in on the hatband of the snap-brim. Diagonal stripes of

green and purple. Hideously unique. In fact, Tango had only seen those ugly hatbands a

few times before. They were sold by a store in the city, Emilio’s on West 37th. Right next

to McGurk’s, the bar where the late Johnny Kachka’s crew went drinking.

The guy opened his shiny coat. Tango saw what looked like the butt end of a .38

special nesting in a shoulder holster. Static electricity ran up his back. Even more so

when he saw the guy pull the gun, getting a sudden clear shot at the 10-gallon cowboy hat

across the lobby.

He yanked Fishboy down as a bullet ripped over them.

“What is this shit?”

 “It’s shit,” said Tango.

Most of the lobby population picked up on the out-of-place sound. They paused,

glancing around. Probably kids setting off a cherry bomb outside.

Then more gunshots shook the walls. Everyone, demonstrators included, broke

out in pure Technicolor panic, shoving, shrieking, clawing, crying, fracturing in all four

directions to get away.

“What the fuck?” said Fishboy.

“A Kachka guy.”

“Oh fuck me.”

They were running through what seemed to be a swirling mist of human beings.

Their target was the door at the other end of the long lobby, the South Grand Street

entrance. But that was as jammed up as anything else.

One of the reporters was pressing himself flat against a wall. Scared shitless, but

still frantically scribbling notes on his pad. Tango used Fishboy as a battering ram to

work his way over. He saw the journo’s ID tag: T.H. White, Time Magazine.

“Is there another way out?” Tango said.

“Service corridor.” The reporter pointed with his pencil. “That door there.”

Next article T.H. White wrote, Tango swore he was going to read it.

The service corridor was all cement, concrete compacted out of moon dust. A

deserted underground tunnel, silent except for the frenzied rushing on the floor above.

“Let me up outta this,” Fishboy said. His voice was white with tension. “Just let

me up outta this.”

“Keep moving.”
 Easier said. There was no ventilation down here. The air they were breathing was

thick, still, sweat-shop heavy.

Fishboy probed his ear with his pinky and checked his findings. “I hate Los

Angeles. I hate everything about it. The pollution. Look at the stuff I’m pulling outta my

ears.”

“Forget it. Stay focused.”

“I am focused. On me.”

The corridor started twisting, knotting, narrowing to the width of a back alley. It

was like running through the basement of the pyramids.

“Where’s the Republican Convention?” Tango said.

“Chicago. End of the month I think.”

“Don’t book me in Chicago.”

“I won’t even let you fly over Chicago.”

Another turn and they were catching rotting, acrid burial smells. Garbage.

Dumpsters had to be squatting outside somewhere around here.

There. At the end of a staggered tunnel. Sunlight filtering through the edges of a

steel door.

“I changed my mind,” said Fishboy. “I might go to Kachka’s funeral after all.”

“Why?”

“To piss on his fucking corpse.”

>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 2 (NOW)

THE LAST DANCE

A LOT OF TIME IT’S ALL IN THE TIMING

I was a kid when I first heard about Tango Williams. I don’t remember how. Maybe I

read something about him in Sports Illustrated. Maybe I saw something on TV about the

1950s. I don’t know, but somehow he got inside my head. It wasn’t through the game,

that’s for sure. The only thing I knew about pool was that it was played in the bar where

I’d go to find my father when I needed him—which wasn’t too often. But I always liked

rooting for the underdog, and to my young mind nobody looked more like an underdog

than this guy named Tango.

There were three great pool players in the late 1950s: Willie Mosconi, Rudy

Wanderone (aka New York Fats, later Minnesota Fats) and Tango Williams. Of the three,

you’d never pick Tango as a champion. He was a slender, rawboned country boy, more at

home driving a tractor, it seemed, than doing battle in pockmarked pool halls.

He had none of Mosconi’s cool urban flash. Willie always wore tailored suits and

carried himself with crisp dignity, never breaking a sweat even while dropping a record

526 balls in a row.

He had none of Wanderone’s slick, quick-talking, 300-pound Falstaff appeal.

Rudy was sly. Since he was born in New York he called himself New York Fats. Then

when Paul Newman’s The Hustler came out in 1961, he claimed the Jackie Gleason

character, Minnesota Fats, was based on him. It wasn’t, but Fats knew an opening when

he saw one.

As for Tango, which was his real name, by the way—his mother loved to dance.

Tango looked exactly like what he was, a hick who’d drifted in from the potato farms of
Long Island. His family was poor, he needed money and he found a way to make it that

had nothing to do with pulling tubers.

His field-hand appearance helped at first, getting other players to drop their guard

for this rural simpleton, but then his game took over. Tango was a pure shooter, a natural,

wild in the beginning until he made a day and night study of stroke, draw and placement

and learned to calm himself. By 10 he was routinely beating crusty veterans of the tables.

By 16 he was riding the ‘Hound around the country, playing games that would last from

10 pm to 7 am, sometimes only eating once a day, but competing with the best and the

rest of them.

I wrote about him once in Real Story, trying to explain what made Tango

Williams such a shadow presence in my life. It was part of an unsolved mysteries series.

The mystery in his case: Why had he been gunned down on 125th Street in Harlem in

1960? Who pulled the trigger, or ordered the trigger pulled?

I didn’t think I’d ever find out. Not until the day when someone in reception

committed a mistaken act of surrealist magic.

>>>>>>

I remember I was supposed to be editing a story about the actor Ronnie G. Francois,

who’d been arrested in an LA club for trying to drown himself in a toilet. I wanted to get

this piece of breaking news up online ASAP, but I was tired of it even before I started.

That’s when reception called. Kassata Grimaldi was here for her appointment. Too bad,

because I didn’t know any Kassata Grimaldi and I had no appointment for her on my
schedule. My guess: She was a friend or a friend of a friend, and as a favor I’d invited her

in for a meeting but never put it on my list. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Send her up.

Two minutes later this vision of a whirlwind, this figment of a failed angel flew

into my office at a speed of 300 words per minute.

“Sorry I’m late. I had a night last night. I feel like I’ve got a cold that’s how bad I

feel. I should probably take something for it, maybe like a Vicodin but not a Vicodin.

Know what I like about Vicodin? I don’t like it—that’s why I don’t do it. Otherwise I’d

be looped all the time and I’d always be running late. Which I hate. I hate running—oh

wait, look, I’m not running late. I’m right on time. I’m glad. I’m very glad. A lot of time

it’s all in the timing.”

I don’t know what I was expecting out of Kassata Grimaldi but it sure as shit

wasn’t this. She was a good-looking woman, bodied up, sexy half-closed eyes. But that

mouth. Her brain was running too fast for her tongue or anybody’s tongue for that matter

to keep up.

She took a seat, completely ignoring the paperwork piled on the cushion. “Ask me

anything. I’ll answer any question. But I won’t say anything about the bullshit plagiarism

charge. Don’t even ask about it.”

“Why would I ask about that?”

“Because the last interview I did, like an hour ago, I said the same thing. First

question was about the Nationals Tournament. The second question was did I steal from

Ivana Schmitt. I have never copycatted anybody in my life, and if I did I wouldn’t be

copycatting a giftless bitch like Ivana Schmitt. So don’t ask.”

 “Why would I ask about anything?”

That threw her. “Because you’re supposed to be interviewing me.”

Turns out Kassata Grimaldi was a billiards analyst for ESPN. It all came together

for me. Her megaglow looks were strong enough to withstand the digital cruelties of the

camera. Her running patter was perfect for a television commentator. No dead air.

She was supposed to be meeting with Jim McVane, Real Story’s senior editor for

sports. Good guy, dedicated, walked with a slight limp.

“Then who are you?”

“Quinn McShane.”

“You’re not a senior editor? You don’t do sports?”

“I’m a top editor. I do everything.”

“Well how the hell—oh, Quinn McShane, Jim McVane. They’re so alike. They’re

almost exactly alike. I understand the confusion. This must happen all the time.”

“No, this is the first.”

“I see. All very strange and interesting, I’m sure, but I’d better get going to the

interview. A story in Real Story is important to me. I even put my favorite shoes on for it.

See? Alexander McQueens. When I die I want to be flipped around in the coffin so

people are looking at these shoes.”

Odd, I was thinking about her quietly resting in a coffin myself.

“Jim McVane’s right down the hall, just around the corner.”

“Jim McVane, right.” Kassata stood up. “I don’t want to keep him waiting. Any

more, I mean, than he’s been… Wait, what’s your name?”

“Quinn McShane.”
 She blinked. Two, three times. “I’ll bet I know you. You wrote a story once I

liked.”

One out of hundreds. Could be worse.

“What story?”

“About my grandfather.”

“Who’s your grandfather?”

“Tango Williams.”

I blinked. Two, three times. “You’re kidding.”

“No, why would I do that? It would be mean.”

“I pretty much worshipped your grandfather.”

“So did I, though I never knew him. He was gone before I was born.” She sat

down. “My mother was his daughter. He was a big part of our family, his memory was.

Almost like a ghost in the house.”

“I can imagine.”

“You know, they never found who killed him.”

“I know. That’s kind of what the story was about.”

“Yes, it was. Have you ever thought about—“

“Jim McVane.”

“Who? Right, Jim McVane. The sports editor. Well”—she stood—“up and Adam,

as they say in the Bible. Down the hall, right? Around the corner?”

She was gone. I immediately added a #1 item to my To Do List: Avoid Kassata

Grimaldi like the plague. If she’d stayed here talking for another minute I’d be rushing to

the bathroom to drown myself in the toilet.

 But that would’ve been awkward. Because even after she left it took three minutes

for my erection to die down.

>>>>>>
SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER

She called a few hours later. I was going to hang up and contact the Lunacy Commission

until she said she’d been doing research on me. Research? What kind of research? Well,

she knew I’d been a private investigator at one point. She knew I’d gotten critically

fucked-up on booze and crystal meth. She knew I’d killed a guy. She knew I’d gotten

treatment for addiction and manic depression while doing time for manslaughter. She

knew working at Real Story was my second—and possibly last—chance at a life.

It’s all in the public record, Kassata said.

“I know, but why go to all the trouble?”

There’s something I’d very much like to talk to you about. It’s really, really

important for my peace of mind.

My receptors were tuning in to a very strange wavelength.

>>>>>>

The Vernon Lounge was your typical nuevo-Astoria bar and restaurant. It occupied the

remains of a sea-colored, two-story apartment building that had been expensively

restored to its original Section 8 ugliness. I knocked on an unmarked door. A moody

staffer in a moody uniform informed me that I wasn’t on any list. I was officially listless.

He wouldn’t let me in until word came back confirming me as a guest of a valued patron.

Coincidentally—maybe even ironically—they were going very retro on the music.

The song playing as I walked in was Save the Last Dance for Me, Ben E. King and the

Drifters. A big hit in the year 1960.

 Inside, the Vernon Lounge was as unremarkable as its name. But it did have

fantastic views of the sun going down on Socrates Sculpture Park and the East River.

Kassata was sitting by one of the windows, hair shining in the sky’s light while she

argued with a waiter. He was recommending one of the specials, lamb shank with a

confect of feta and lemongrass. The flavonoids in the lemongrass, he insisted, prevent

breast cancer, heart disease and arthritis.

“Really?” said Kassata. “When they start human experimentation, you let me

know.”

She settled for the ribeye with arugula and roasted peppers. I got something

described as a Cajun spinach salad stuffed in a pita. It was called The Vernon Wrap, one

of their signature dishes, though it could’ve easily been called the Sorrow and the Pita.

“I love this place,” she said. “But one of the things I hate about it is the puny size

of the wine glasses. Look at this thing—they probably fill it with an eyedropper. They

might as well serve wine in those little paper medicine cups.”

Flash forward now, oh, two seconds, and she was talking about her grandfather.

“Ever since I was a little girl and I heard how he died, I’ve wanted an answer. The man

was shot on a public street in broad goddamn daylight. Not only a public street but a busy

street. My own grandfather. It’s an outrage that no one knows who did it after all these

years. Today you spit on the sidewalk, they’ve got cameras, DNA, they know

immediately who you are. I know, I know, Tango was killed a long time ago, though it

still feels to me like yesterday, even though I wasn’t particularly alive at the time. But I

still… I want to express myself more clearly.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

 “I’ve yo-yo’d about this, gone back and forth, but I think I’d feel a lot better if I

knew who it was. I think I’d feel much, much better if I could get some vengeance on the

person, and if he’s not alive any longer, which he probably isn’t, I’d feel really good

taking revenge on his history and reputation. Am I right?”

“There’s some truth to what you say. Not much, but some.”

“I’ll take some. I’ll take some at the drop. Trouble is, how do I do it? How do I

find this fucker who killed my grandfather? I had no idea what to do, then I ran into you

today.”

“Me? Why me? Because I wrote the story?”

“No. I mean yes, but no. Because you were an investigator, because you had the

determination to get your life straight. You have the skill, you have the gut. You’ve got a

lot of dog in you.”

“I didn’t wash after work.”

“Quinn, I’ve been waiting a long time for you, someone like you. My mother’s

been waiting a long time for you. My whole family’s been waiting for you.”

Not to put any burdens on me or anything.

“What do you want?” I said.

“Help me. I don’t believe, I refuse to believe Tango’s death was random. There

has to be some mystery, some obscurity in his past that explains it. Do you know who

Frankie Fishboy Ervolino was?”

“His manager, his booker, along those lines.”

“I figure Fishboy knew him better than anyone.”

“Even your grandmother?”

 Kassata shook her head. “Sore subject. Didn’t work out. But Fishboy had a son,

Danny. Actually he had two sons, but only one survived. I’ve been trying to find Danny

Ervolino. I’ve been trying to find people who knew him. I’ve been trying to find people

who knew Tango.”

“And no luck.”

“Only one.”

His name, she said, was Roscoe Snyder, a decent player in his time, but not

decent enough to stay on the circuit. Roscoe ended up broken and bitter and draining

cesspools for a living. Kassata met him through work a few months ago, but by then he

was dying. Everything was wrong with him—I’m running out of organs to fail, he’d say.

She went to see Roscoe a few times, listened to his stories about the past. In all

his years of playing, for example, he never, ever saw a loose coin on a poolroom floor.

Shooters loved money too much to let a quarter, dime, nickel or penny drop. And if they

did, those quick eyes and fast hands would scoop the metal right up.

He talked about Tango and Fishboy, though whenever she asked about the gun-

down Roscoe’s recall would suddenly go blurry. A lot of stuff from the long ago is

drifting away now. But there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his memory

otherwise. He was still complaining about the time when telephone exchanges—like

Bigelow 5-1212, or BI 5 1212—changed to all numbers. What difference does it make?

she’d say. It’s still the same number. You dial it the same way.

It’s NOT the same, Roscoe would say. There’s no distinction about it. It’s just a

NUMBER number.

“I thought I could keep working on him,” Kassata said, “but he passed last week.”
 “Sorry to hear that. So he was a dead end, so to speak.”

“Not really.” She licked some steak juice off her fingers. “I went to the service. A

church in Elmhurst, only a couple of miles away from here. It was very traditional, very

Shall We Gather at the River. There weren’t many people there, but most of them spoke.

At length. Something about death makes people talk, talk, talk.”

“Have you noticed that?”

“I’m bored, I’m looking around. There were a few arrangements, baskets, sprays.

Then there was this one big wreathe, gorgeous, roses, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums,

carnations. You could hang it around the neck of the Kentucky Derby winner it was so

big. It was right near me, I could lean over and read the card. Rest In Peace, Daniel

Ervolino.”

“Fishboy’s son.

“Saul riding to Damascus? Saul wasn’t anywhere near as stunned as I was. It was

that much of a thing. Danny’s around here.”

“It could’ve been an 800.”

“No—I checked with the florist. The order wasn’t sent in. Somebody walked in

the shop, bought the wreathe in cash, nobody can remember what he looked like, the

security camera hasn’t worked in years. Danny’s around here.”

She leaned across the table, all worked up. I didn’t like the way she was gripping

her serrated knife.

“Danny’s local,” she said. “I don’t know where, but he’s here and he knows

something about Tango or he knows somebody who does.”

“Don’t get carried away with it.”

 “I need a cigarette.”

The Vernon Lounge allowed e-smoking at the bar, but Kassata preferred what she

called the old-fashioned ritual of standing outside. The sun was down now. Tidal

shadows from Manhattan were crossing the river and heading for us.

“I’m trying to tell you how much Tango meant to me,” she said. “I mean, Christ,

look at what I do for a living. I don’t know if you know what it’s like to be so attached to

someone you never knew.”

“I think I’ve got an idea.”

She watched me for a reaction, the plastic tip of her cigarette glowing as she took

a draw.

I studied her, noticed that the folds of her lids gave her eyes that half-closed look.

“Tango was Fishboy’s biggest draw,” she said. “He was his star. His son must

know something about him. I know he must. In my bones, in my heart, I know he must.”

She wiped a tear from those eyes. ”Help me find him. Help me find the answer.”

I wasn’t standing on the ground. I was standing a few inches above it.

“I don’t know,” I said, “where this is gonna take us?”

There it was. I said us.

“It has to take us somewhere,” she said.

Seemed like it already had. Time had left us, gone somewhere far away.

She was a beautiful woman, but I couldn’t stand the way she talked when she got

going. Listening to OCD chatter like that isn’t exactly every young boy’s dream. Face it,

she just wasn’t my type.

Until she smiled at me.

 She leaned in close and gave me a look could see inside the middle of a heartbeat.

“You’ve got spinach in your teeth,” she said.

>>>>>>

What follows is the story of where the search took us, an attempt to understand Tango

Williams’ life and death. It’s based on interviews with people who knew or were related

to him and Fishboy, aided by accounts of the pool world from that era and by public

records. There were times when I couldn’t pin down exactly what was said, what was

threatened, what was promised. In those cases, and there weren’t many, I invented the

details of the conversations. So I apologize in advance. If there are moments when the

story suddenly seems incomprehensible, even insane, that’s the public record.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 3 (THEN)

THE RIVER
GETTING HIGH FOR JESUS

Tango had one serious problem to his game, one fatal flaw. It was called The Wait. No

matter how good or bad a player you are, there comes a time when your competitors are

at the table and all you can do is sit and watch and wait. If your opponents drop a few

balls and then miss, that’s okay. But if they start going on extended runs, of if they’re the

plodding dunces who calculate the angles of every shot like they’re designing a Grand

Prix racer for Maserati, The Wait can run your nerves off the road.

Tango had all the table skills. After years of practicing himself raw, he knew how

to kick the ball off a break, how to make sure the cue ball came to a rest in the middle of

the field, how to move the C-Ball around so that every time he made a shot it was still in

position to run the rack. He played like a chessmaster, planning five, 10 moves ahead.

But The Wait at times would kill him. Pool is a test not only of technical combat

but psychological warfare. Just a shade of emotion can make you or break you, and self-

control isn’t a technique you can learn by watching other players. Tango would

sometimes let his adrenaline build during The Wait, let himself get strung out on his own

jitter juice, and by the time he’d get back to the table he’d be making these helter-skelter

bonehead shots that would turn his whole game to shit.

That’s what happened when he played in Lancaster County, where the

Pennsylvania State Plowing Contest was being held, a game that would change his life.

The promoter, capitalizing on the gathering of gamblers showing up for the plow fest,

had bribed the caretaker of a local church, The United House of Welcome and Worship,

to let him use the basement. Tango was playing here with no-names and some-names, all

of them sweating in the sharp fruity odor from nearby Cocalico Creek.
 By the final round it was him, a Harrisburg shooter named Cicero Lansdale,

Ricky Three Eggs up from Virginia, Pep Hayward down from Harlem. Tango was crazy

good that day. The game was a 9-ball race to 50 and every shot he made sounded like the

crack of a small-caliber weapon. At one point he was leading with 38 to Pep’s 22, Cicero

and Ricky Three Eggs not getting it together at all.

Pep was smoking weed the whole time.

“It helps your game?” said Tango.

“Helps my everything. I’m getting high on the dope for Jesus cause he got so high

on the cross for me.”

Jesus was listening. Pep started sliding through the balls, running 10 and out. 38-

32. Tango pumped himself with impatience while he watched, getting so wired the balls

were clattering inside his head.

He was flash-crashing when he went back to the table, his energy fading fast, but

he still buried two clean shots. 40-32. Next up, unfortunately, was a dicey cut on the 5-

ball. He’d left a real shit shot for himself. The cue ball had to kiss the 5 at an 80-degree

angle, tap it directly between two other balls and nudge it across six feet of felt into the

left corner pocket.

He missed the pocket by 1/16 of an inch.

It was as if the slaughtered elephants whose tusks were used to make the ball were

getting their payback off him.

Pep took over. Maybe it was his pot or his African roots that protected him

against the animals’ wrath, but he easily won the next two racks. He closed in on Tango,

tied him, then passed him. He was ahead, 48-47.

 But two shots away from victory, getting the lead for the first time, Pep began to

feel the pressure. He just managed to sink a wobbly, nervous 12-ball. And he just

managed to get into position for a simple bank shot on the 8-ball. All he had to do was

bounce the cue ball off a cushion and knock the 8 into a middle pocket. He bobbled it.

Pep hit the 8 but all it could do was kind of drift around the neighborhood of the pocket,

as lost and anxious as its shooter.

Tango’s turn. He only had a tiny trace of adrenaline left in his system, but it was

still at a dangerous level. Pure adrenaline can trick you into ignoring your body, your

mind, your limits. He was able to focus enough to drop the 5 and the 11. 49-49. Now he

was looking at 8-ball, sitting in front of him on a direct path to the right corner pocket.

All the laws of physics were on his side. Blowing this shot would be like giving up a

three-run homer when there’s nobody on base. It’s impossible.

He did the impossible. He didn’t hit the cue ball. He battered it, assaulted it,

thrashed it into the 8 like he was trying to rip a hole in the sky. The 8 went scattering

around the table, unsunken, still alive.

He sat down and stared at the table as Pep finished off the 8. The only thing he

could see was the spinning silence of the felt. As he bent forward he realized he’d bitten

his tongue so hard blood was spilling out of his mouth.

>>>>>>

He was still staring at the table when everyone had cleared out. It was just him and the

kid who was packing up the equipment, the kid cleaning the felt with two soft brushes,
sweeping the cloth’s nap like a groom currying a horse. Tango heard heavy, clumping

footsteps heading this way. Somebody had come back in the basement. The promoter, a

man of some size everybody called Fishboy. He was wearing a cowboy hat and walking

with a limp—the result, Tango would learn later, of a bullet he’d taken in the thick of the

thigh.

Word was that besides setting up matches, this Fishboy was also a backer. He’d

sponsor players and get them into big money games. You’d have to give him a hefty

percent of your winnings, people said, but Fishboy could make you some cash.

He took the chair next to Tango, jotting things down in a greasy black notepad.

“You’re a good player,” he said, still writing away, “cept when you start shooting like a

house afire.”

Tango was tired, resigned to anything. “I know.”

“You let your blood get too hot. That’s why you get the yips like that.”

“I know.”

“I was watching your style. Every once in a while I see you can be a brilliant

shooter. Which is favorable, sure. But you learn to control yourself, man, you could be

better than brilliant. You could be a fucking genius.”

Fishboy shut his pad, got up and walked away.

>>>>>>

Tango took the ‘Hound back to Manhattan the next day, walked down from Port

Authority to his rented room on West 18th. Delightful place. Open the door and see the
roaches running for cover across the linoleum floor. Dirty dishes piled in the sink, dirty

laundry piled everywhere else. Shelves had been built into one of the walls. Empty. They

were crying out for photographs. He didn’t have any.

He was in a dark marsh of a mood. Tried to sleep that night, 1-ball, 2-ball, 3-

ball… Didn’t work. Three in the morning Tango was sitting by the window, watching a

plane take off from Idlewild, its starlight skimming along the edge of the Empire State

Building, then disappearing inside the building as it flew straight north.

The night was going gray. Almost 4:30 am, a quiet time to take a walk to the river

through the meat packing district. The transvestite hookers would be breaking up and

heading for home, the Hormel, Armour and Libby trucks wouldn’t be pulling up to the

warehouses yet.

Tango stood at the edge of the Hudson, thinking about yesterday’s game, thinking

about all his games, thinking about the 70 some odd dollars he had left in his pocket,

thinking about what the fat fuck Fishboy said.

What could he do about all this shit? Nothing. He couldn’t fight what he was. It

was out of his hands, as far away from his control as the lonely gray river air. He took a

breath, a slow all-in breath, trying to absorb the thick and cool solitude of the water.

He took another breath, deliberately reaching to the bottom of his lungs, paying

close attention to the arcing of his chest. He’d been breathing—well, shit, most of his life,

right?—but he’d never felt like this before. Detached. Floating away. As if all his

worries, when you come right down to it, didn’t really matter.

The more he breathed in this slow, purposeful way, the more he could feel his

head waking up. It was like returning to the world, like you can’t get a picture on the TV
set until you whack it on the side and there it is, reception is restored. Light is pouring

into your body.

Later that day, after he slept, Tango carried his cue stick up to Ames Billiard

Academy on West 44th. Just practicing, fooling around, playing a few small-bet games,

nothing serious. He was trying to see if he could work the breathing into The Wait. Of

course it sounds stupid. What can be easier than breathing? Except that during a game

you have to concentrate on it, discipline yourself to do it and not give in to the doubts,

irritations and frustrations of pure agitated energy.

Eventually he got the hang of it. A week later he played a money match. Tango

took the lead and—click, click, click—kept it and won. Other matches, same results. He

was downing all opponents. He’d think about the river, breathe and let those calm X-rays

bore into his brain. It was peaceful, yeah, but there was a thrill to it too. It felt like driving

into a controlled skid, going into the pull of a curve that almost spins out of gravitational

rule but you pull out of it just before you flip over.

He was playing with some black magic jazz, some conjuring Zen. He’d learned

the psychology of the game. Learned it so well that four months after the Lancaster

disaster, he got a call from Fishboy.

>>>>>>

YOU’VE BECOME MONEY

His office was on Broadway and 47th, in sight of Madison Square Garden over on Eighth

and 49th. United Sports Enterprises (yeah, USE) nested in a dingy room someone had

tried to brighten up with artificial chrome-plated palm trees. Three men and three women
were sitting at desks and working the phones. Nobody paid attention when Tango walked

in, and nobody went to stop him when he approached the door marked Francis Ervolino.

He knocked.

“Come in.”

Fishboy was lounging on a red Moroccan sofa with his pants down. A hooker was

kneeling in front of him, giving him a blowjob.

Mercifully, he wasn’t wearing the cowboy hat.

Tango stepped back. “Sorry.”

“No, come in, come in.”

“You sure?”

“It’s fine, come in. This is…”

The woman raised her head and smiled—“Nanette. Hi.”—then resumed her

labors.

“Take a seat, make yourself comfortable. You want some?”

“No thanks.”

“It’s on me.”

“Maybe next time.”

Social niceties concluded, Fishboy leaned back on the sofa. “Guess what I just

did.”

“Paid for a blowjob.”

“I did a match out on San Francisco. I took one of them Pan Am jets. Both ways.”
 This was talkworthy. Along with most people, Tango didn’t know anyone who’d

traveled on one of those new swept-wing aircraft, Boeing 707s they were called. Fishboy

described the experience in some detail.

“Best of all,” he said, “it only took seven hours to get out there, instead of the

usual 10. That’s three hours each way. I gained six hours total. I added a whole quarter a

day to my life.”

Nanette looked up at him. “Are you gonna come or what?”

“What’s your problem?”

“We’re going on”—she checked her watch—“20 minutes here.”

He sighed. “Listen, darling—Nanette, is it?—let’s call it a day. Him and I’ve got

business to discuss. There’s too many distractions.”

She stood up. “No refunds, you know that.”

“Just get out.”

Nanette got out. She was now the happiest hooker in all New York.

Fishboy belted his pants, zipped his fly. “I didn’t want to say anything, but she

wasn’t very good. It was very…mealy.”

“That’s never good.”

He sat at his desk and riffled through a few papers, attempting to appear important

even though he was important. “So you took my advice.”

“More or less.”

“I’d say more rather than less. Your recent record, very impressive.”

“You track my record?”

 A modest shrug from Fishboy. “I stay on top of things. That’s one great thing

about this game—nobody minds their own business. In any case, I advise you to improve,

you improve. I like that. You’ve become a sure thing. You’ve become money.”

“Thank you.”

“The question I ask you now is, are you ready to step it up? Are you ready for the

jump? What you’re doing at present, it’s okay, but you could go for bigger and better. I

think I told you that time, you’ve got a brilliant talent. Why put it to dumb fucking

waste?”

“I’m listening.”

“You go in with me, I’ll get you into the best matches in America. I’ll get you

into the biggest money games going. You join up with me, man, it’s let the happy begin.”

“What do I have to do?”

Fishboy was befuddled. “You have to play fucking pool.”

“Do I sign anything?”

“Oh. No, nothing to sign. You’re a volunteer.”

“A volunteer?”

“You volunteer to help me out, I volunteer to help you out. There’s nothing, you

know, contractual about it.”

“And how much am I volunteering for?”

The man smiled, went for a casual, reassuring tone. “Forty percent of whatever

you win.”

“Forty?”

“What did you make on your last match? Five hundred?”

 “Something like that.”

“You’re in with me, you’re making 5,000 a match. Forty percent, you’re walking

away with 3,000. Last I heard, that’s more than 500.”

Who was Tango to argue with such math? “So what do we do, shake on it?”

“If you want.”

They both stood and performed the ritual.

“How much you have on you?” said Fishboy.

“Couple of hundred.”

“You’re so full of shit.” He pulled a roll of bills the size of his fist out of his

pocket. “Take this.”

“That’s okay.”

“Take it, tide you over to the next match. After that, you’ll be making handouts,

not taking ‘em.”

The happy, Tango realized, had begun.

>>>>>>

Can you judge a book by its table of contents? Because every one of Fishboy’s chapters

described less than legitimate activities. He started his career as an opportunist in the

service, selling fake ration stamps for the PX, forging leave approvals, dealing in stolen

gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes. His buccaneering continued back home. He peddled

phony expense receipts to people who wanted to cheat their employers, and to employers

who wanted to cheat the government. He bought transcripts of secret grand jury hearings
from court stenographers and hawked them to any interested parties involved. He even

dabbled in the arts, hustling bogus shares in a theatrical production, a rewrite of

Shakespeare titled O’Thello, in which the lead character was recast as a jealous Irishman.

He did a little time for that one.

As Tango would discover, Fishboy left his fat thumbprint in many pies. “I always

remember what my teacher said,” he once told Tango. “You’ll end up either running your

own company or sitting in prison. She was right both ways.”

His specialty, though, was staging legal pool matches, then taking a cut of the

backroom gambling on the money games. And, as a broker, siphoning 40% of his

shooters’ earnings. Shady character? Sure, but the man delivered. Months after Tango

started his volunteer work, he was making the money Fishboy had promised. He was

competing with top-seeded veterans whose names he knew. He was contending on tables

that were straight and true, anchored by heavy slate beds and covered with Belgium-made

Simonis felt.

He was drawing hundreds of people to his matches, crowds lining up hours before

the venue opened. “It’s all in the build-up,” Fishboy said. “You make people think it’s

hard to get in, they’ll scramble for the privilege of being there.”

He was becoming known as one of the best stickmen in the country, mostly by

virtue of the many stories about him that ran in the local newspapers. The press process

mystified Tango. “How can these reporters write about me?” he said. “They’ve never

even talked to me.”

“They don’t have to,” said Fishboy. “I tell ‘em what to say.”

“You plant the stories?”

 “You’re dealing with reporters. Give ‘em 10 bucks and they’ll give you their

souls.”

>>>>>>
30 DAYS HATH SEPTEMBER

The first time Fishboy invited Tango to his house, he’d just moved out of his old East

New York neighborhood (“when you can smell rotten eggs, you know you’re near

Pennsylvania Avenue”) and out to Rosedale, right on the border of Nassau County. He’d

bought a nicely pedicured raised ranch, Corvette and Eldorado in the driveway, plenty of

dogshit on the sidewalks and grass. That was a good sign, meant this was a family

neighborhood.

Fishboy was throwing a pool party for his crew out back. The sight of him

relaxing in a wacko-colored bathing suit was not a pretty one. He was a flesh bag pumped

with a digested paste of pepperoni, anchovies, sausage, provolone and other ingredients

of the antipasto plate he held on his lap.

A transistor radio was playing the Everly Brothers’ Bye Bye Love.

If music be the love of food, play on.

The crew, stout, hard-faced men with shoe-shined hair, sat around him on green

and yellow beach chairs, downing their Rheingold beers. They greeted Tango and

communally congratulated him on his last match, then one of them went back to the story

he was telling.

“So Eddie, the numbnuts, he goes up for arraignment. The prosecutor says the

suspect had chipped, brown teeth. Eddie says I can’t afford a dentist—don’t make

fucking fun of me.”

They all laughed. The bonhomie was thick.

“Speaking of numbnuts,” another one said, “I saw Johnny Kachka the other day.”

Fishboy was interested. “What did he say?”

 “I didn’t stop. He looked like shit, I didn’t want to talk to him.”

“I hear he’s sick,” another guy said. “I’m sure he is.”

“How sure?” said Fishboy.

“Pretty sure. Like 51 percent.”

Fishboy shook his head. “I hear he’s running out of money. Well whose fault is

that? Who told him to live so fucking long?”

The crew doubled over. Tango stayed straight, bored with the conversation. He

didn’t know who Johnny Kachka was and he didn’t give a shit. How much time can I

wait before I get out of here?

The back door opened. A long-legged woman in a one-piece bathing suit and a

beach turban came out carrying a serving dish.

Tango felt like he’d fallen asleep at the movies and someone had just shaken him

awake.

She was aloof, taut-lipped, unsmiling. A star for a new ice age. She gave Tango a

glance and looked away, not caring at all who he was. He felt he should apologize for

being here.

The guys muttered hellos, calling her Tray—short, Tango would find out, for

Tracey. She put the dish down on a table. Lipton’s onion soup mix combined with sour

cream to make a dip, a wicker basket of Ritz crackers.

Delivery made, she started back for the house.

“Where you going?” said Fishboy.

“Inside.”

“C’mon, stay.”
 “I’m busy.”

He made several arguments in favor of her joining the party. Tray answered each

one with zero emotion, like she was checking off boxes on a form.

Fishboy gestured to the small bar set up by the side of the pool. “At least have a

drink.”

“One drink.”

As she approached the bar, Tango stood up. “What can I get you?” he said.

Thinking what am I doing, offering to make her a drink in her own backyard?

“Gin and tonic. Three slices of lime.”

“Three?”

“Nutrition.”

The door slammed open. A young boy in swim trunks came out making a rush for

the pool, ready to dive right in.

“Danny, come over here,” said Fishboy.

“No!”

“Get over here.”

The kid stopped. He was maybe 6 but already a man in his mind and shouldn’t be

treated in such a rude manner. “What?”

“Come over here. Tell everybody what I taught you. You remember?”

Oh it’s about me? Different story. Danny smiled and stood in a proud recital pose.

“Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. All the rest have 32. You don’t

believe me? Fuck you.”

The guys all had beer streaming out of their noses.

 Tray stuck her hands on the top of her hips, a sign of someone who wasn’t

amused. “What are you doing,” she said to her husband, “teaching him to talk like that?”

“C’mon,” said Fishboy, “it’s just a joke.”

“You can shove your jokes.”

“Hey, there’s no reason to get so distressed.”

“A boy his age? Learning a word like that?”

“It’s just a word. Don’t be such a pill.”

Tray walked up to him. “Teaching him shit like that just so you can entertain your

friends? What kind of example is that?”

“Don’t worry about it, I set a good example.”

“Doing what? Sitting here stuffing your face with antipasto? Christ, look at this

crap. Anchovies. Sausage. Provolone.” She turned to the crew. “You can guess what his

cum tastes like.”

A few of the guys went to laugh but when they saw the boss’ face they managed

to catch the reflex in their throats.

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Fishboy yelled as she walked away. “You’ll be

sorry for saying that.”

Tango didn’t think so as he watched the X of her backstraps disappear into the

house. The way she walked, the way she held herself, she’d never be sorry about

anything.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 4 (NOW)

LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO DIE

POOL IS JUST A FOUR-LETTER WORD

Thirty days hath September, November, April and June. Looking for Danny Ervolino?

Like going to a knife fight with a spoon. That’s my take on the boy’s poolside speech.

They say it’s easy to trace people these days? There’s no privacy, no one can hide? Taint

necessarily so. Daniel Ervolino’s official existence ended in his mid-20s. The decades

after that are trackless, silent, a digital dead end. I looked, I searched, I scoured for any

molecular hint of the man. If the databases can be believed, the Earth has somehow been

spinning for some time without the ballast of Fishboy’s son.

The last official proof of his life takes you back to Danny at age 24, when he was

busted for heroin possession. What happened to the case? Did he go to trial? Did he cop a

plea? His path ends with his arrest. Poor record-keeping? Maybe, and yet the judicial fate

of a guy he was nabbed with, one Calvin Crane, is fully documented. His court dates, his

sentencing, his amount of time served—it’s all there.

Finding Danny was like trying to regenerate a dinosaur from a tiny lattice of

DNA. If Kassata and I were going to resurrect his tissue, we’d have to harvest the stem

cells from Calvin Crane.

>>>>>>

Unlike his former dopemate, Calvin was living in the out and open. More specifically, he

was living in Hempstead, halfway through Nassau County, in a garage that had been

converted to a workshop and an apartment in the back. Kassata, all charged up for the
experience, was telling me that 75% of garages in America had no room for a car. They

were all filled up with boxes and bins and anything that couldn’t be stored in a house.

Uh huh. Well this garage had a sign in the front.

Portraits Painted

Individuals, Families or Groups

Professional Work Guaranteed

Hell of a thing to see in the middle of a drug and gang-torn neighborhood.

The studio inside was an easy chaos of paint tubes, palette knives, brushes

standing in coffee cans, sponges, stained rags, turpentine. And there were portraits, a

dozen of them in various stages of completion. All policemen and policewomen in full

uniform. They’d all been killed in the line of duty, Calvin said. He’d find their photos in

newspapers or online, recreate them on canvas and send them to their families for free. A

way, he said, of keeping the life force alive.

Calvin Crane’s shaved head looked like a polished black calabash, and his hands

were so hooked with arthritis it was remarkable he could paint at all. But he did, and he

did it well. There were no sloppy appeals to sentimentality in the portraits. They were

calm and clear, painted in sky tones of blue that gave their subjects a sense of serene

dignity.

The only problem, he said, was with so many cops getting gunned down, he was

running way behind.

“But I’ve got the time. People don’t want to sit for portraits anymore. They take

pictures with their iPhones and iPads, they think that’s good enough. So I stay busy

doing this. Making up, I guess, for some of the shit I’ve done in my life.”
 Which brought us to Danny Ervolino. Kassata told him what we were doing,

trying to get information on Tango Williams, trying to talk to Danny about him.”

“I haven’t seen Danny in years, not to speak of. Last time I saw him we were

being arraigned together. Last thing I remember he was so scared he peed in his pants

right there. Water in the court, you know?”

“Do you know what happened to him?” said Kassata. “We know you did time.”

“Of course I did. I’m a black man, of course I got the walls. Him, I have no idea.

Probably his father stepped in.”

“Did you know his father?”

“Fishboy? Shit, yeah, I liked him. He took us once, me and Danny, to a famous

restaurant in New York, met the owner. It was…Toots Shor, that was his name.”

Kassata was impressed. “Nice.”

“What I liked about Fishboy, he was straight out with you. Lots of people do

criminal things here and there, but they don’t think of themselves as criminals. Almost

like they don’t know they’re criminals. Fishboy, he was a criminal and he full well knew

it.”

Me, I full well agreed. “He didn’t hide his virtues,” I said.

Calvin nodded. “A question. What’s your interest in Tango Williams?”

“He was my grandfather,” said Kassata.

“No shit? I knew him a bit in my young, young, younger days. I met him a few. I

used to see him up in the Audubon Poolroom, 121st Street.”

“Were you buying drugs up there?”

“Not back then. No, I used to shoot a little game myself.”

 “You mean on the circuit?”

“Whoopin’ Crane was my name. Not in Tango’s league by any means, but I was

okay. What do you want to know about him?”

“Well,” she said, “why he died.”

Calvin went quiet, thoughtful. “You’ll have to bribe me for that.”

Kassata sighed. “How much?”

“Lunch.”

>>>>>>

Lovey’s Soul was an old-fashioned diner three blocks away from the garage, and despite

the violence of the area it was filled with people. Young couples with their kids, local

workers on their lunch breaks, grayhairs falling asleep in their soup. Everyone waved to

Calvin when he came in, everyone knew him. They should. He’d been coming here every

day for years. “It’s a habit,” he said. “That’s all I got left, the habits.”

The menu reflected the changes in the town. Lovey’s had BBQ, ham hocks,

chitterlings, greens and grits for the older black crowd, mofongo, panades, stew chicken

and gallo pinto for the younger Latino one. “Stay away from the chirmole soup,” Calvin

advised. “It’ll burn your asshole alive.”

He went over to say hello to Lovey herself, a mountain of a woman positioned

behind the register. She was about two feet wide all around, but the belt of her apron,

somehow, squeezed her waist to a mere six inches.

“Having your usual?” she said.

 “Yeah, the chicken crapazini, whatever it’s called. I was telling my friends here

how good your food is. Told ‘em you always scrape the maggots off the meat before you

fry it.”

“That why you keep showing up every breakfast, lunch and dinner?”

“I couldn’t face the day without your cooking, Lovey.”

“Well, that makes my life complete.”

We took a green and pink vinyl booth. Its mini-jukebox played R&B classics and

reggaeton hits, three for a buck.

Kassata brushed a piece of hair off her face. “So?”

Calvin’s eyes searched the table. “Something to understand. Your grandfather was

a well-liked man. Many people admired him, hell, wanted to be like him. But not

everybody liked him. You got to figure, he was one of the stars of Fishboy’s stable. No,

he was the star of Fishboy’s stable. Made some people jealous.”

“Other players?” said Kassata.

“I don’t know which one it was, tell you that right out front. I wasn’t connected

with Tango’s echelon. But when he died, there were a lot of stories going around, a lot of

stories, that another player either pulled the trigger or had it pulled for him.”

Kassata tried to absorb this. “Someone would kill over pool?”

“Damn straight. Pool can churn you up. Maybe it’s different today, but back then

it was doggie-dog. I’ve seen people trying to murder each other over a $2 game. You’ve

never seen so much blood over such an actual small amount.”

“So it would’ve been over money.”

 “Not strictly. There’s cheating too. You got all that down-table trickery for one

thing. Okay, let’s say you have two players, Player A against Player B. Player A is

shooting down-table—he’s shooting in the direction of where Player B is sitting. And

Player B decides he’s got this itch and he has to scratch it. And scratch it. And scratch it.

He’s annoying Player A, throwing him off. Or Player B starts wiping his hands on a

towel, or whispering to someone next to him. It can really tick Player A off.”

“I’ve never seen that in competition.”

“Not on ESPN you don’t. There was a guy once, Yellow John, a Chinese, he was

as bald as I am. He’d lick his hand and start rubbing spit on his head, getting a good shine

on his scalp. One night, the lighting was just right, Yellow John was able to aim the light

reflecting off his head right into his opponent’s eyes. The other guy pulled a gun and shot

him on the spot. In the head.”

Kassata had gone flat. “Someone might’ve hated him, but how can we find out

who? How can we find out who Tango was shooting against at the time? There are no

records. It’s impossible.”

Calvin considered the problem. “No records of the games, no. But there’s one

record you could look at. The investigation of the death. The homicide investigation. You

look at the actual notes of who was there that day, who saw what, who said what, you’ll

get some names. Some of those cats might still be around.”

“But how can we look at those files? We’d need an injunction, something like

that.”

“Wait,” I said. I was thinking, I guess, of pulling some down-table trickery

ourselves. “There might be another way to see them.”

 “There you go,” said Calvin. “That’s talking. You get a look at those names,

however you must, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Pool, I’m telling you, it’s a

beautiful game. I’d never say it wasn’t. But when you get down to the bottom of it, pool’s

just another four-letter word.”

>>>>>>
ZIGZAG

When Fishboy was selling secret grand jury transcripts, he was simply following an old

and ongoing tradition. There’s a woman I know who works in one of New York City’s

many, many bureaucracies, and I’ve used her to get bootlegged copies of documents for

Real Story. That’s how Kassata and I got access to Tango’s homicide files. Got ‘em

cheap, too. An investigation from way back when? Not much demand, no call for

competitive pricing.

We started by thumbing through the records but that quickly turned confusing. So

we cleared a wall of my apartment and covered its length and height with the copies,

trying to hang them in some order or categories of order.

Only there was no order. Or categories thereof. What we had was a jumbled storm

of notes, a dismal orgy of paperwork. We’d come across two or three pages that started to

go somewhere, and then they’d suddenly go nowhere, and no matter how many times we

shifted the copies and reshingled the wall, nothing was making consistent sense.

The trouble was that much of the file was missing. Interviews would abruptly

break off in the middle, witness statements would be referenced but not included. First I

blamed my contact—she’d done a really shoddy job of copying. I’ll never use her again,

until the next time I need her.

Then I realized the gaps weren’t mistakes. There were too many of them to be

accidental. This was deliberate. We could see the black holes in the copies, the •• in the

upper left hand corners where staples had been removed. The result? Witnesses were

mentioned by last names or first names or as Witness E, Witness G but no identifications

were possible. These people might’ve been pool players, they might’ve been local

merchants, they might’ve been aliens who’d just climbed out of their UFO.

Someone, years ago it seemed, had sabotaged the records.

Kassata refused to stop. “All right, pieces are missing—there’s no question about

that. We know pieces are missing, but whoever took the pieces might’ve missed

something themselves. It happens. You know it happens. There’s a whole history of it

happening. People miss pieces all the time, and whatever pieces they missed here are still

here. It’s just, the way we’re looking at it, we’re looking at it the wrong way. We’re

looking at it straight on. We’ve got to look at it on a diagonal. We’ve got to french cut the

thing. We’re looking at zigzag paths. We’ve got to zig with the zigs and zag with the

zags.”

Zig this. Somebody had corrupted the file—in the old, pre-digital sense—and the

only thing here was a mess of paperwork that left no paper trail. Take any trajectory you

want, and we did, all you’ll get are toxic fogs, hidden mountains, tunnels that lead

directly to black holes.

>>>>>>

For sheer, vibrant dullness, nothing matches endless treks through words that tell you

nothing. Eventually Kassata realized that if she kept picking at this scab, she’d bleed to

death. When she finally gave the effort up, I suggested dinner. She didn’t resist.

We went to a place in my neighborhood down on 10th, an old Hell’s Kitchen

bucket o’ blood that was now a modest little American fusion restaurant, whatever that is.
With her first drink Kassata said she was sorry for getting so carried away. She had a

tendency to keep doing things even when she knew they were useless. She had a true

need, she said, for perpetual motion. With the second drink she was relaxed enough to

believe me when I said (with absolutely no foundation) that we’d find another way to

find out who killed her grandfather.

At one point she dropped a piece of fingerling potato on her shirt, scooped it up

and ate it with no embarrassment whatsoever. I liked that. I liked her. I liked the way her

eyes made me keep looking at her even when she wasn’t looking at me.

I thought about what it would be like to let a new person in my life. No past, no

shared baggage. You’re making a fresh start. On the other hand, there’s no past, no

shared memories. You’re starting all over again.

What do you want, everything?

Well, yeah.

She looked in every window as we walked back up 10th. I caught my reflection in

one of them. Strange. It was one of those times where you see an image of yourself and

you know it’s you but it doesn’t seem like you. The reflection resembles everybody else

but you.

I was still looking at the window when I saw a pair of headlights swing out behind

me. I turned and watched an old black Mercedes lurch out of West 46th and blunder

across traffic to our side of 10th. What a fucking awful driver. No wonder the car had a

deep gouge streaking along its side from the front fender to the rear.

Then I saw the passenger window drop and suddenly 10th Avenue was the most

dangerous and electric place to be alive. Bullets were shattering the glass of the pottery
store where we were standing and ripping into the brick façade above. I grabbed Kassata

and ducked in the doorway as the crazed firing continued.

The shooter was as bad with guns as with cars. Every shot was off-level,

sweeping over us.

Terrible work, unless it was on purpose.

We’re huddled right in front of the car and nothing is coming close to us. The

shooter wasn’t out to kill us. The shooter was out to warn us.

The Merc took off and wobbled up 10th. Kassata started yelling “what the fuck

was that? What the fuck was that?” I was screaming the same words inside. Why was

somebody threatening us? What had we done except steal a file and talk to—

Calvin Crane. Big-hearted, charity-minded Calvin Crane. A friend of Danny

Ervolino’s who insisted he hadn’t been in touch with his old smack buddy in decades.

I haven’t seen Danny in years, he’d told us, not to speak of.

Now there’s a telling phrase.

Not to speak of.

>>>>>>

First thing next morning I drove to Hempstead. I had my Glock with me, tucked under

the back of my hoodie. I didn’t need it at Calvin’s garage, though. A new, hand-painted

sign had been nailed to the door. Closed For Renovations.

Not that his studio couldn’t use a little touch-up, but this was one coincidental

piece of timing.
 I went to the diner. No Calvin. His long-standing attendance record had come to

halt and Lovey was in shock.

“He was in last night, said this would be his last meal here for a while. Said he

needed to get away. He needed a break.”

“From what?” I said.

“That’s what I said. All he does is paint his paintings. Not like he’s running a…

Are you Quinn McShane? He said you’d be looking for him. He left something for you.”

Lovey handed over an envelope addressed to me. There was a sheet of paper

inside with one hand-written sentence.

Life is too short to die.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 5 (THEN)

PRIME 8
RAIN AND MUD

To call sunny, suburban Long Island a hotbed of mob activity might sound like a gross

exaggeration, but with these things, exaggeration is usually the way to go. Long Island

was transformed from rural potato and duck farms to a family-filled mecca after World

War II, when vets returned home, fled the old city boroughs with their new brides and set

out to buy houses and start baby-booming in greener pastures. Over a million people

swarmed the island like the beach at Normandy over the next 15 years, making Nassau

County’s population growth the highest in the nation.

But as those who professionally provide for the needs of others know, where

people go, vice follows. The war-weary veterans could be devoted to home and prefab

hearth, but every once in a while they might want to grab a little outside nookie. Or they

might want to let loose by gambling a few extra dollars away. Why should they travel all

the way back to Brooklyn or Queens or Manhattan? Stay on Long Island. Shop locally.

Plenty of choices were available by the 1950s. Take Latham in Nassau County, a

sturdy town of 20,000. Remarkably, you’d find at least one barber shop on every block,

19 in all. How many heads could they cut in a town that size? And in fact the barbers

never looked very busy. They always seemed to be sitting around reading the

newspapers, listening to the radio, nodding out in their hydraulic chairs. Who can make a

living like this?

But if you walked inside—a tiny bell tinkling as you opened the door—strolled

through the shop and went into the back, you’d find a set of stairs leading up to a fully

stocked whorehouse on the second floor. The barbers didn’t need to strop their razors to

make money. They were paid to maintain a front.

 Same thing with the 14 candy stores in Latham. The grumpy old couple who sold

loose cigarettes out of a bell jar for two cents a piece, how did they possibly make ends

meet? Walk past the dusty Snickers and Tootsie Roll pops, slip through a door in the

back and you’ve got a three-man bookmaking operation waiting to take your bet.

The presence of organized crime on Long Island was nothing new. It dates back at

least to the 1920s and 30s, when Robert Moses built Jones Beach along with the

Northern, Southern, Wantagh and Meadowbrook Parkways. There was a lot of

construction work to be done, a lot of money to be made. Handing out contracts to

construction companies, and the payoffs entailed, created a cozy bond between the mob

and the Nassau County government. (Republicans at the time and for decades later,

though the Democrats would eventually prove just as bad.) The relationship between

them was as close as rain and mud, and it would continue to thrive during the post-war

boom. The government found mutual sustenance in many of the mobsters’ principles.

Like their belief that everyone had the right to vote, even the dead.

By the 1950s Nassau was controlled by the Gambino Family out of New York,

operating through old Johnny Kachka and his outfit. Meanwhile, just across the county

line, a fast-riser named Frankie Fishboy Ervolino was making must-see moves. The mob

had always maintained a vested interest in poolhall gambling and Fishboy was delivering

impressive numbers. Over time the Gambinos let him extend his reach to numbers

running, track betting and other forms of wagering, and then to prostitution and

loansharking. Eventually Fishboy and his crew were given their own territory, extending

from East New York in Brooklyn to the Nassau border just past his house in Rosedale.
 No disputes there, no squabbles. The boundary between Kachka and Fishboy was

firmly set. Everybody was content. Everybody was making money. Everything was fine.

Life couldn’t get better.

The Soviet Union surrendered to the United States.

All nuclear weapons were dismantled.

And everybody lived happily ever after.

>>>>>>
A FACE IN THE SHROUD

To respect Johnny Kachka’s long service to the Family, the Gambino grandees decided to

hold a dinner in his honor. The occasion was the 25th anniversary of his legitimate front

business, Prime 8 Distributing. Nobody knew exactly what Prime 8 distributed, but

nobody cared. The dinner took place at Ben’s of Manhasset, a Jewish catering hall. Not

that anybody had any great love for the Jews. (Someone once said to Fishboy that at his

age, shouldn’t he be Fishman by now? What, Fishboy said, I should sound like a hebe?)

But using a Jewish restaurant gave the gathering an air of respectability and legality, as

opposed to holding it in the local Sons of Italy hall.

Fishboy had been selected to give one of the speeches—a symbol of youth paying

tribute to age. In turn, Fishboy invited Tango to the affair. He wanted to show Tango off,

bank on his celebrity status. Tango had just been interviewed on the radio, The Long

John Nebel Show, after he won the National 9-Ball Championship at the Navy Pier in

Chicago. Fishboy wanted everyone to see that he counted a star in his retinue.

Tango stood out from the rest of the crowd. Fat, loutish men wheezing in their

Tony Martin After Six tuxedos, too out of shape to even take a perp walk any more.

Lumpish, unstimulated women fresh from the beauty parlor in their Schiaparelli mink

stoles. Everyone downing food and drink as fast as they could, steeling themselves for the

boring speeches to follow.

Johnny Kachka was sitting up on the dais, a gnome of a man, a dwarf thug, so

pale and sickly thin he looked like he’d been run over by the Queen Mary. Fishboy was

sitting next to him but separated by the podium and microphone. Both men were doing a

successful job of ignoring each other.

 Kachka’s number two guy, Manny de Silva, was sitting directly by his boss’ side.

Grim fellow, oily hair plastered in a backsweep, Manny was one of the few people on the

dais who wasn’t drowsy or trembling with palsy. He’d just been elevated to his right-

hand-man position, a signal, everyone said, that Kachka was seriously ill.

The air in the room was heavy and still, thick with cigarette, cigar and pipe

smoke. Tango wanted air.

Tray was standing outside by the spritzing fountains in a black silk Dior gown.

Gin and tonic in hand, three slices of lime. She was looking the other way at a Chrysler

dealership across Northern Boulevard. Our Hotcakes Are Selling Like Imperials! Nice

twist.

She heard someone coming and turned to him. He could feel a breeze blowing out

here, but it was blowing through his body.

For some reason she reminded him of Patricia Neal in A Face in the Crowd. Not

so much her looks as her eyes, especially in that scene where Patricia Neal secretly turns

Andy Griffith’s microphone on and lets the world hear what an evil shit he really is.

“Has the wake started yet?” she said.

“Soon I think. What’s going on in there? That’s not a jolly group.”

“I guess there’s a little tension in the air.”

“Your husband doesn’t look too thrilled.”

“Why should he? He hates Kachka.”

“Then why’s he giving a speech?”

“He was told to. These people have a very warped sense of humor. They enjoy

seeing other people squirm.”

 “I think I’ll keep my day job.”

“Hold this. Please.” She handed him the drink and pulled a pack of Chesterfields

out of her purse.

“Can I ask why he hates Kachka?” Tango said.

“You want the scorecard? Did you see Kachka in there? Does he look sick to

you?”

“I think I’ve seen slugs with a stronger pulse.”

“Nobody knows what’s wrong with him, but ever since he started looking like

that, he’s been losing touch with the financial facts of life. Apparently.”

Tray worked a matchbook out of her cigarette pack. Tango went to take it and

light it for her but she shrugged him off and lit it herself. The burning match hissed for a

moment as she tossed it in a fountain.

“Kachka’s operation is getting weaker,” she said, taking her glass back. “Profits

are down. He’s getting lax in the slacks when it comes to making money.”

“And Fishboy wants them to fix it.”

“No. He wants to fix it himself.”

“He told you that?”

“He never talks to me about business. He never talks about anything, actually, but

that’s what I hear.”

“He wants to take over? What does that mean?”

“It means he’s going to get himself killed over it.” She glanced at the entrance to

Ben’s. “You’d better go back in. You don’t want to miss the speeches. It’s a good chance

to see what shit looks like before it hits the fan.”

“You coming?”

“Not until I need a refill.”

>>>>>>
ADMISSION RULES FOR HEAVEN

Fishboy looked much more comfortable standing at the podium. He was in charge here.

He was the show. “It’s a great honor,” he said, “for me to speak on behalf of Johnny

Kachka and Prime 8 Distributing. Johnny, I want to congratulate you on the 100th

anniversary of your firm. It takes a lot of— What? It’s only the 25th? Sorry, Johnny, I

didn’t mean to make you older before your time. You’re what now, you’re 80, right?”

Kachka looked like his entire skull was on fire. “No.”

“That’s all right, no matter how old you are, the women in your nursing home still

think of you as young meat.”

Ever sit through one of these tribute speeches? Someone says the honoree has

given me years of invaluable advice. But what he means is, and I’ve never taken a word

of it. Imagine Fishboy’s speech coming with an automatic translation.

“To be honest, I was surprised when they asked me to speak. In fact I was

shocked. It’s like seeing Johnny stand up by himself.”

Nothing personal, Kachka, I’m just trying to make everyone see what a senile

piece of useless shit you are.

“I know, I know, he’s not that old. But I think he might be losing a step or two.

He came to my office the other day with his penis in his hand. He said, what’s this thing

for?”

The crowd was loving it. All the demands of warped humor were being met. Most

of them even knew that what Fishboy was really thinking was, you shove it up your ass,

John. Bend over and I’ll show you how.

 “All kidding aside, Johnny, you’re a nice guy. A wonderful guy. I’ve missed you

ever since you retired.”

“I didn’t retire,” said Katchka, angry phlegm clattering in the back of his throat.

“You mean this is you working?”

No wonder you’re showing the worst profit margin in the recorded history of

crime.

“I’ll tell you something, Johnny, and knowing you, I mean it from the bottom of

my heart. When the time finally comes, you’ll be heading straight for heaven. Unless

they frown on bestiality.”

Or on letting in the scum of the earth. No, the SCUM of the scum of the earth.

“You know, there’s a lot of rumors going around about Johnny’s sex habits. Don’t

believe everything you hear. Somebody came to me the other day. Said, I heard they

caught Kachka screwing a dog. You believe it? I said it depends. What kind of dog?”

We don’t fuck dogs, John, we put them to sleep. You understand? We PUT THEM

TO SLEEP.

The audience was in tears. Fishboy was blowing it up big for them. Why not?

You’re gonna force me to make a speech? Then I’m playing it to my advantage.

“Which brings us to his lovely wife, Irma. Charming, gracious woman.

Unfortunately, she’s Polish. She married Johnny for his debt.”

And if you all knew how big that debt was, you’d be up here strangling him with

your bare hands.

 “Johnny, is she still sleeping with Mann— Oh there he is, right next you. Ladies

and gentlemen, Manny de Silva, Johnny’s number two. You know, there’s a reason they

call him number two.”

And unless you’ve shit for brains, Manny, you won’t get in my way.

Manny wouldn’t even look at Fishboy, too busy viciously picking at a callous on

his hand. He looked as cheery as Hitler during the last days in the bunker.

“I consider Manny a good friend. He’s always been my friend, and once the sex

change operation is finished, he’ll still be my friend.”

And if they forget to cut it off, don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.

“C’mon, Manny, give us a smile. Everything’s gonna be all right. Me, I’m in

favor of the surgery. My only question is, are they changing you into a woman or a

man?”

The woman next to Tango had gone to the ladies’ room a few minutes ago. He

heard her coming back as he listened to the sex change jokes, but he sensed there was

something different about her now. Different rhythm, different smell, different force

field. Tray was sitting in her chair, sucking on a fresh drink.

“How’s he doing?” she said.

“He’s holding his own.”

“Yeah, that’s the one thing he can hold.”

She pulled out the Chesterfields again, the matchbook, working one of the

cigarettes out of the pack.

“So,” she said, “you having a good time?”

 He leaned in close to her so he could whisper. “What you told me before, about

his getting…in trouble. Were you serious?”

“Oh yeah.” She glanced at the dais, eyes shifting between Fishboy and Kachka. “I

think it’s going to be his downfall.”

“Can you talk him out if it?”

Shrug. “He wants to do what he wants to do.”

“You don’t care if he gets…”

“No. I don’t have a dog in this race.”

“Jesus, he’s your husband.”

Tray waved it away. “He loves me as much as I love him. That’s trouble.”

Tango sat back, giving himself a minute, looking at her. She had conjure eyes.

This woman could hypnotize a bowling bowl.

He whispered again. “None of my business, but how did you meet?”

She slowly lit the cigarette, like she was taking the time to calculate how close to

the truth she could go. She went all the way.

“I was a P-girl,” she said.

“Did you say P or B? You got men to drink?”

“Pee-girl. Not Bar-girl, Pickup-girl. I used to—“

“Yeah, I know what a P-girl is.”

“I was sitting one night in the, what, the Ritz-Carlton, that was it. I was

drinking…I think I was drinking daiquiris back then. He came in.”

Their negotiations, she said, followed the usual routine.

Fishboy: I’d like to buy you a drink, but not here.

 Tray: They make a good daiquiri at the St. Regis, but they’re expensive.

Fishboy: How much?

Tray: Seventy-five.

Fishboy: I don’t believe you. That’s pretty steep for a drink.

Tray: What would you pay?

Fishboy: Fifty.

Tray: Sixty.

Fishboy: Yeah, that sounds right.

“And that was it,” she said. “We stayed together for some reason. After he paid

me my 60.” She looked at her Chesterfield burning. “Are you offended?”

“No. My ex was a P-girl too. That’s how we met.”

She took a long, long drag on her cigarette. “I knew there was something I liked

about you.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 6 (NOW)

A KODAK MOMENT
THIS JUST IN

I was flipping through the news on my phone, not looking for anything particular, just

staying on top of things. Staying current as we say on our expense reports to justify some

outrageous bullshit.

• A fight had broken out in a Chucky Cheese between two children’s birthday

parties over some minor dispute or another. The video showed the riot, mothers punching

each other while holding babies in their arms.

• Confronted by a man with a knife who tried to rob her, a woman dropped to her

knees and started praying out loud. The attacker was so disturbed by the words he was

hearing, he left her alone and ran away.

The power of prayer. We could use some of that to track Danny Ervolino down.

Yeah, we’d been warned—the gunshots, life is too short to die, blah-ditty-blah blah. That

wasn’t going to stop us from chasing clues. If, that is, we had any clues to chase.

• A brother and sister were taking each other to court over ownership of what they

claimed was a vial of Michael Jackson’s blood.

• A man who’d been accused of harassing a woman issued a statement swearing

that he didn’t know her, never met her, never dated her, never slept with her, never

waited for her outside her office at 72 Vandam Street and never photographed her in her

Boerum Hill apartment wearing a leather body harness, hand and ankle cuffs and a

bondage collar strung with whole wheat vermicelli. Why he’d be wearing that stuff to

photograph her I have no idea.

 And when I say we could use the power of prayer, I mean mostly me. Kassata was

getting pulled away by work. She was prepping to cover a $500,000 8-Ball tournament in

Grand Rapids and was spending much time in preproduction meetings.

Okay, news. Pay attention to the news.

• Arrest made in Upper West Side robberies.

• Gas leak forces school evacuation.

• Car crash blocks tunnel for hours.

• Protesters march on City—

Wait, wait, wait. Go back to the crash story. Did I see something there?

A driver doing an estimated 90 mph in the Midtown Tunnel grazed a wall, spun

out of control and smashed into the wall on the other side. Eastbound traffic was tied up

over two hours before the vehicle could be reached and towed away.

The story ran with a photo of the car. A black Mercedes, an older model, with a

well-worn gash stretching from the front fender to the rear.

I must’ve been breathing really dry air because I could feel static electricity

running up my windpipe.

I knew he was a terrible driver.

His name was Gary Tripucka. He was charged with reckless driving and

possession of an unlicensed weapon at his bed in Bellevue Hospital.

I did a little groundwork, found his plate number in the police report, and after a

modest bribe for my contact at the DMV, I had an address. Tripucka lived at 211

Woodnut Road in Lakeland, Nassau County.

I kept going back to the photo of the Merc, thinking about how I nearly missed it.
May the gods of the big picture help us see the small details.

>>>>>>
HUSH-HUSH

The sun was going down behind us as we took the LIE out to Lakeland. Kassata had just

gotten back from the ESPN nerve center in Connecticut. Her meetings for the day were

over but their echoes were still vibrating inside.

“All pool players are demented. This is a fact. It’s like the ability to shoot a great

game isn’t enough. They have to have all these…I don’t know, not rocks in the head.

Jewels. Emeralds. Amethyst. All these sparking rubies knocking around in their heads.

Now people can say that’s not true. There are plenty of good shooters who aren’t

demented. And that’s true, no denying, but they aren’t great shooters. They’re good but

they’re not great. There was once a player, I don’t know if you ever heard of him. Ralph

Greenleaf? He drank. A lot. One day he woke up in Okmulgee, Oklahoma after a wicked

binge. He had no money, no ID. He was arrested for vagrancy. When he tried to tell them

he was the famous Ralph Greenleaf, the cops didn’t believe him. He said he could prove

it. They took him to the local pool hall and he ran 87 balls in a row. Even with a

hangover. They let him go.”

She was in outstanding voice today.

Too bad the house couldn’t match her quality. If there was anything outstanding

about 211 Woodnut Road, Lakeland, it was outstandingly dilapidated. On the skids.

Tubercular even. No aluminum siding here—hadn’t been invented yet. No bricks, either

—hadn’t been invented yet. Just wood planks that looked like they’d been cut from the

forest primeval.
 No one who drove a Mercedes, even an old battered Mercedes, would take a step

inside this wreck. Gary Tripucka might have registered the address with the DMV, but he

didn’t live here.

Though somebody else could be. I kept my hand on the Glock as we climbed the

sagging steps of the front porch. I rang the bell. It was broken—the bell didn’t ring. I

knocked. Nothing happened.

We walked around the house, watching the windows, smelling the pines that

surrounded the property. I picked the lock on the back door, though it turned out to be so

loose on the hinges I could’ve sneezed it open.

We couldn’t see a thing inside. The sun was still up but nothing was penetrating

this witch-black world. We were in the kind of darkness where you could let your eyes

adjust for a few minutes and you still wouldn’t be able to see.

I drew the Glock and turned on my flashlight.

Gee-zus. Either someone had gone seriously OCD or was using the house as a

gigantic storage unit. The place was filled with tottering six-foot towers of old

newspapers and magazines, rolls of carpet, deflated basketballs, electric fans, throw

pillows, TVs, stereo equipment, lamps, lamp shades, chaise lounge mattresses, paint-

stained ladders, dust-covered shipping cartons, rusted bicycles, all of it showing years of

oxidation and decay. Someone had turned a garage into a house.

At least no one else was on the premises. Even squatters wouldn’t stay here.

Kassata’s mouth would’ve been gaping open if it weren’t for the dust motes we

could see floating in the flashlight beam. “What do we do?”

“We look.”
 “Where?”

“Everywhere.”

“Look at this. There’s got to be a way to selectivize, narrow it down. I know I

don’t have any investigation experience, I admit that, though I’ve always been interested

in investigation and sometimes I think that if my grandfather hadn’t been what he was I

could’ve been—“

“Listen to me.”

“I am listening to you, I’m just saying—“

“Listen to me. We’re looking for a link.”

“A link.”

“Run it back. We told Calvin Crane we’re looking for Danny Ervolino. Next

thing, this Gary Tripucka is shooting at us. Tripucka is using the house for his legal

address. So we’re looking for a link in this crap between Tripucka and Danny.”

Which is sorta like running a downhill slalom through a severely crowded flea

market. As soon as you’re done searching one pile of hoarder-poop another one is right in

your face. But you quickly learn things. Most of the magazines, for instance, were from

the late 1950s, early 60s. Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Photoplay, True

Confessions, Better Homes, Sport, Confidential, Hush-Hush, Mad. Same thing with the

newspapers. New York Times, Herald Tribune, Daily News, Journal-American, Post,

Daily Mirror, World-Telegram & Sun, Long Island Press.

Someone was holding onto a very specific frame of time.

We kept looking, squinting at the flashlight’s circle, coughing in the dust. We

needed facemasks. A wooden milk crate held a few dozen framed photos. But somewhere
at sometime they’d been exposed to the sun for too long. The faces and backgrounds had

faded away. All that was left was disembodied images of hair, shadows, outlines of dark

clothing.

I found a carton of books. From Here to Eternity. Born Free. Exodus. The Power

of Positive Thinking. They’d all been published during that same period. One of the titles

was None Dare Call It Treason. I picked it up, told Kassata it was a classic of conspiracy

paranoia. The book had managed to convince hundreds of thousands of people that

communist agents had infiltrated every crevice of American culture, politics and

government, and they were covertly working to bring the United States down.

“Things were different back then.”

“Yeah, people were lonely, angry, tired, afraid. Nothing like today.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

One of the books near the bottom had a thin gold binding. I picked it up. The

Poky Little Puppy, a Little Golden book for kids. I opened it to the fly page. Everything

around me turned white and dropped away. There was a name on the page, written in a

child’s blocky, painstaking printing. DANNY.

I had a piece of Ariadne’s thread in my hand and it was leading all the way back.

Weird thing: Knowing that some of this stuff, maybe all of it, once belonged to

the Ervolinos should’ve energized us, ginsenged us up. It had the opposite effect. As we

continued searching the house things seemed to slow down. It was as if moving through

this air was creating a drag, a small lag between what we did and the time we did it.

In any case, The Poky Little Puppy was the only thing we found with any mark of

ownership. But there was a basement. I shined the flashlight from the top of the stairs,
listening for rat scuttle. Nothing. No vermin. There was nothing here to keep anything

alive.

Or to give us any more clues. We weren’t seeing signs of personal identifiers.

Paint cans. Stacked window screens. Discarded bedroom furniture. A surfboard so old it

might’ve been used by the pharaohs to hang 10 in the Nile. Disappointing.

We approached the furniture—dressers, bureaus, night stands—and checked the

drawers, hoping something had been left behind. Empty, empty, empty. I opened the

drawers of a tall chest, and as I slid the bottom one shut I thought I heard a soft rattle

inside. A small flat box had gotten stuck on a seam of the contact paper that had been

used to line the drawer.

I pried it loose. It was a yellow box of Kodak 8 mm film. A home movie? A key

to the domestic riddles of the Ervolino family?

If so, the riddles were corroding. I unspoiled a few inches of the stock but had to

stop. The film was splitting and fraying, dried and fragile.

Ariadne’s thread just broke.

>>>>>>
THE HOUSE THAT COULD FLY

Kassata knew a digital designer at ESPN with a personal passion for restoring old 8 and

16 mm projectors and film. Tedley Mott, a man of rabid intensity and sweat-stained

shirts, was such a specialist in the field he occasionally made it part of his job. Got a

wobbly home movie of a soccer star making his first header? Choppy footage of a

football star playing his first Pop Warner game? Tedley (do not call him Ted) could raise

it Lazarus-like to broadcast HD quality.

He showed us how. The laser scanner he’d built was in his office. Instead of

slipping the 8 mm perforations into sprockets, which can tear and mangle warped stock,

Tedley used optical pin registration to guide the film through the scanning process.

Nothing mechanical ever touched the plastic strip. And unlike commercial scanners, his

device was equipped with a Fujimora 3D laser to translate each frame of the film to

digital language.

“I can do it,” Tedley said, examining our find. “No question I can do it.

Absolutely I can do it. Just not right now. I’ve got this graphic to finish up. But I can do

it.”

“You’re sure,” said Kassata.

“I’ve seen worse, believe me. Well, this is pretty bad, but I can do it. Just let me

finish the other thing first.”

“Can we wait?”

“Absolutely. The graphic won’t take long. It’s just that it’s work work—they’re

waiting for it. I’ve got, you know, kids to feed, TV to make. But once I’m done, I can do

it.”
 We sleep tonight, Tedley Mott stands guard.

Moments after we left his office Kassata got a phone call. “What do you mean? I

know it’s confirmed. I was just confirming the confirmation… Strugatsky? Have you

gone mental? Take a look at his player profile. You know what he lists as his favorite

activities? Gambling and smoking.”

Discussing the Grand Rapids Tournament, no doubt.

We kept walking as she talked. So this is ESPN. Huge place, taking up 123 acres

of Bristol, Conn., real estate. But except for the Monday Night Football trucks parked

outside, you wouldn’t know this was a sports center. There were no athletes dashing to

interviews or the group discussion shows. The offices looked more like the vast interior

mechanism of an insurance company, staffers maintaining an unwavering dedication to

junk food and sedentary lifestyles.

“Yeah,” said Kassata, “but the problem is, Mazzetti is changing his corporate

sponsorship. That’s what I heard… Don’t get hysterical. You are. Well I’m sorry, but

hysteria is hysteria… Okay, okay, Saturday’s fine. What? No, Saturday, not Wednesday.

You really think Wednesday compares to Saturday? What calendar are you living in?”

She played the alpha female well.

We drifted into the billiards department. Small space, only a few cubicles, but

right in the middle of it was a work of art. A Brunswick Anniversary pool table from the

1940s, a masterpiece of flowing lines, contoured walnut, multi-banded aluminum.

Kassata was off the phone. I could smell her shampoo as she stood next to me.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “One of the great tables ever. Look at it. Perfectly

matched slates, advanced rail construction, one-piece molded pockets. These things were
all new at the time. Look at the legs—oval-shaped pedestals, and each pedestal has its

own supports for superb weight distribution.”

From here Kassata motormouthed into a broader discussion of pool, its origin and

genesis. I’ve taken the liberty of arranging her remarks (which usually started with did

you know that…) in a somewhat chronological order.

• Billiards began as the indoor version of a lawn game similar to croquet. Maybe

to avoid lousy weather, the game moved inside during the 1400s and was played on a

wood table, with green cloth standing in for the grass.

• King Louis XI of France (1461-1483) was the first royal known to own an

indoor game.

• In 1587, when an executioner finally managed to cut off the head of Mary

Queen of Scots (it took two tries), her body was wrapped in her billiards table cover.

• Shakespeare mentioned the game several times, including the famous let’s to

billiards line in Antony and Cleopatra, written in the early 1600s.

• Many of the terms we use today were formed during the game’s early centuries.

To keep the balls from falling to the floor, the first tables were lined with flat walls that

looked like river banks. Today, when you bounce a ball off the cushions at the side,

you’re making a bank shot.

• The game was originally played with wood instruments that resembled golf

clubs. Fair enough, but when a ball was resting against one of those bank walls, the

club’s big head made a decent shot nearly impossible. So the players turned the club

around and used the straight, narrow handle. They were using the club’s tail, or its queue.

Which is why you shoot with a cue stick today.

 • The word pool is strictly an American invention. In the late 1800s, guys would

gather at betting parlors and gamble on the telegraphed results of horse races. To keep

their customers occupied between the races, the parlors installed billiards table. People

started gambling on the games—shocking, I know. The wagered money was put into a

collective pot, or a pool. The game became known simply as pool and the parlors as

poolrooms.

• By the 1920s the word poolrooms had acquired a notorious reputation. They

were places where people not only shot billiards but drank, smoked, gambled and shot

each other. Pool associations tried to spin the image by advertising the game as good for

the brain and stomach fag—referring to belly fat, not to a gay man living inside your

digestive system. But the effort didn’t take. Poolrooms continued to be seen as magnets

for vice, violence and the murky presence of organized crime.

The only thing that stopped Kassata’s march through history was the sight of

Tedley Mott making a giddy trip down the hall. The man was practically skipping.

“I did it!” he said. “I did it! It’s absolutely super duper!”

“Why’re you surprised?” said Kassata.” You said you could do it.”

“That’s what I said, but this is what I did.”

>>>>>>

“The color’s in amazingly good shape,” he said as he screened the footage for us in his

office. He was right. We were looking at the gaudy, flickering, candy-store tones of

1950s 8 mm.
 Our trip down someone else’s memory lane opened with a shot of Fishboy behind

the wheel of a convertible. A big man, Brooklyn tough, proudly charmless and abrasive

and bullying. He mouthed something like is it on?, then waved to the camera with a grin

so large he could’ve been trying to eat the sun.

Looked like he was out for a drive in the country. You could see scrub pine

passing in the background, like the pine barrens at the eastern end of Long Island.

The camera panned to a boy in the back seat. Danny. Sad, moody kid. He seemed

like a child who was walking along some uncertain razor’s edge. His mother, who was

evidently holding the camera, must’ve said something to him. He smiled back at her, but

the expression disappeared after a few seconds.

The film suddenly jumped to I don’t know what. Fishboy and Danny were posing

in front what appeared to be a sandstone slab carved with Egyptian hieroglyphics. It

might’ve been a tourist attraction of some sort, because father and son had these look at

us postures like they were standing near something important.

The next shot showed Danny in the same spot with his mother, Tray. Interesting

woman. You couldn’t tell how old she was but you somehow knew she’d become more

beautiful with age. What you were seeing at this point was a challenging mix of sexual

power, anxiety and boredom.

Now we were traipsing along a path in the woods. I’ve always wondered if the

cinéma vérité style filmmakers adopted in the late 1960s—the quick cuts, the fast zooms,

the handheld jitters—was inspired by the chop-shop esthetic of 1950s home movies.

As the camera kept moving something began to emerge from the trees ahead,

something white and curved and soaring. What the fuck is this? It was a concrete
building, though building seems like the wrong word for something so gliding and

graceful. It looked like a piece of sculpture, an origami bird about to lift off the ground

even as you watched. It looked, in fact, like the stunning TWA Terminal Eero Saarinen

would build a few years later at JFK.

The camera slipped right up to the walls, then focused on a mat by the front door.

Welcome to the Ervolinos.

This really was a home movie.

For the final shot, the camera had been set on a tripod or securely nestled in a

rock. The purpose: To record a formal family snapshot. Or, in Fishboy’s case, a formal

mugshot. Hard sun slanting in their faces, Fishboy, Tray and Danny were lined up in

front of what I assumed was their new summer house. Fishboy’s body language was

saying I’m a wonderful father, a wonderful husband and a wonderful human being, even

if nobody fucking believes me. Tray counted herself among the unbelievers. Danny didn’t

know what to believe. Father, wife, son: Happy, unhappy, not sure which way to go.

After a few seconds of trailer the movie dribbled to an end.

Bubbles were forming at every synaptic gap in my brain.

I wanted to see the house. I wanted to find it. I didn’t know how but I knew

something about the house was crucial. It’s like walking into a dark room and you can’t

see a thing but you know someone’s there.

“Can you run it back?” I said.

“All the way?” said Tedley.

“No, the part where they’re standing with those inscriptions.”

“Yeah,” said Kassata, “what was that?”

 Exactly.

We took another look at the family posing with those strange little symbols. All

right, they’re driving apparently through Suffolk County, out to eastern Long Island.

They stop at this monument or whatever, then they go on to the house. So somewhere in

Suffolk they found this…

Shit, I knew what it was. The Chapman Hill Obelisk. A 70-foot-high column

tapering to a pyramid at the top, standing as a lone sentinel in the middle of a Chapman

Hill field. It had been built at the end of the Civil War by a major in the Union Army,

who believed the obelisk could draw the spirits of ancient Egypt and sanctify the blood

spilled on both sides.

It used to be a big deal but not so much anymore. Now it was just part of the

landscape. I’d driven past it a few times over the years but never stopped for a close-up

look.

I checked the shadows the three were throwing over the hieroglyphics. Just a few

degrees off center. It was either just before or just after noon.

We fast-forwarded to the final scene, the Ervolinos in front of the house. The

shadows against the white walls were only bending a little further to the east.

The house was only a few miles away from Chapman Hill.

>>>>>>
THE GOOD NEWS: YOU ONLY DIE ONCE

There was densely wooded acreage about four miles east of the obelisk. No scrawny

scrub pines here. Richer soil had given root to square miles of scarlet oaks, white cedars,

black gums, green breathing leaves interlocking with each other. Nice to see trees getting

along.

I started exploring the area early the next morning. Kassata would be leaving for

Grand Rapids in a couple of hours. It was just me and the Glock. And whatever goat gods

and nymph goddesses might be haunting the forest.

Jesus, look at the sunrise. You don’t see dawns like that anymore, at least not in

the greater vicinity of New York City. Unpolluted liquid light dripping off the trees like

green butter.

I was feeling good. I was sure the house was out here. No, I don’t know if it was

still standing, but one of a kind architecture like that doesn’t get torn down easily. And if

the house was still with us, what would it hold? Danny Ervolino living in country

seclusion? Portrait painter and world-class bullshitter Calvin Crane hiding out?

But first I had to find it. Not that easy. The woods were a maze of crisscrossing

paths, shadowed tree alleys running on for what felt like miles.

I’d been fumphing around for 20 minutes when I heard footsteps shuffling along

on a dirt path. Not one of the deities of the woodlands, I believe. Too heavy a tread.

A man emerged from the subterranean light to the north. He was wearing, for no

reason anyone on earth can explain to me, a red and blue tartan-patterned shirt and a pair

of wildly unmatching green and yellow tartan-patterned pants. Of more immediate

concern, perhaps, he looked like he could bench press an 18-wheeler.

 “Get out of here,” he yelled.

“Sorry?”

He lumbered toward me. His attitude suggested that if you like chemotherapy,

you’d like him. “Get out of here.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see any private property sign. Am I trespassing?”

“I didn’t say you were trespassing. I said get out.” He stopped right in front of me.

“What do you want here?”

“I’m just out for a walk. I’m just taking in the light, the trees, the clean air. You

know, nature.”

“I don’t want to hear about nature. When people start talking about nature they’re

really talking about something else. They have interior motives.”

“I’m just out for a walk.”

“A walk. Who are you?”

“My names’s Mike Cooper, just over from Chapman Hill?”

“Okay, Mr. Cooper, you turn around and you go back to Chapman Hill.”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t see any property sign. I didn’t see any trespassing sign. I

didn’t climb over any fence to get here. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Yeah,” he said, “the wrong direction.”

I saw a concussive flash of blue and white tartan squares as he took a swing at me.

Quick duck and I caught the punch on my shoulder. Which is better than my head, but it

still left my body with no particular interest in staying straight up. I was knocked to the

ground in a second.

“What the fuck?” I said.

 “I told you to get out. That means you get out. It’s not that hard to understand.

Now get up and get out.”

I got up. “What the fuck is going on here?”

He crashed a jab into my chest that made me think I would never breathe again.

And I went down again.

“You ever come back here,” he said, “you’ll be glad you only die once.”

I got up once more, only this time I was hobbling. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Now what?”

“My foot. It just cramped up on me.”

“I didn’t touch your foot.”

“Give me a hand.”

“What the fuck do I care about your foot?”

“How’m I gonna leave if I can’t fucking walk?”

He glanced down. “Which foot?”

I pulled the Glock from the back of my hoodie and cracked it over his skull.

Anybody else would’ve pancaked on the spot. Him? He just sorta went slack and dropped

to his knees.

He was stunned, but it wouldn’t last. I lit out of there at top speed and ran back to

where I’d left the car. My chest and shoulders were hurting but my head was fine. I now

knew that Danny Ervolino had taken up residence in his family’s old summerhouse. He

was vigilantly protected, sure. But damn the reality, full speed ahead.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 7 (THEN)

IT’S JUST A MATTER OF TIME

HOW TO CLEAN AN OUTHOUSE

Fishboy’s meltdown took place on the corner of Broadway and 47th, right in front of his

office building. He and Tango had eaten lunch at The Grotto, Fishboy dressed for

business in his cowboy hat and boots. They’d been talking about a big match coming up

in Boston and were still talking about it, just about to say goodbye, when Fishboy

glanced down Broadway and went blank with atomic-white surprise. “It’s him.”

Tango searched the crowd but didn’t see anything besides gray street faces.

“Don’t look,” Fishboy snapped. He grabbed Tango and limp-rushed him into the

building’s entrance. His entire nervous system seemed to be popping out of his skin.

“Who is it?”

“The camera guy.”

“Camera guy?”

“The hidden camera guy, what’s his name? Funt.”

“Allen Funt? The Candid Camera guy?”

“Allen fucking Funt.”

“So what?”

“If he’s here,” said Fishboy, frantically eyeballing the parked cars, “there’s a

camera somewhere around here.”

A balding, stocky, oval-faced Jewish man walked past. Fishboy whipped his hat

off his head and used it to hide his face.

“That’s not Allen Funt,” said Tango.

“The fuck it isn’t.”

“He’s Funtish, but he’s not Allen Funt.”

 “You see a van outside? They usually hide it in a van.”

Even if there was a van outside, and there wasn’t, why would Candid Camera be

filming them? All they were doing was walking down the street. They weren’t getting

caught in one of those Candid Camera situations. They weren’t hearing vending

machines talk to them. They weren’t watching someone shoplift cigarette lighters. They

weren’t being asked to fix a car that had no engine.

“What do you think,” said Tango, “Allen Funt’s got you under surveillance?”

Fishboy was jangling as he leaned against a wall. Paranoia had shot down to the

end of his roots. Cue the band: Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.

“I don’t need this right now,” he said. “I don’t need this boggling my mind right

now.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

No answer, not until Fishboy breathed some color back in his face. “You’re a

farmboy, you know anything about outhouses?”

“More than I like.”

“You know how to clean ‘em?”

“Once a month you throw a match down the hole.”

Fishboy nodded and went quiet again, thinking, lost in some thorny introspection.

“Come upstairs,” he said. “Maybe you can help me.”

“With what?”

“I got something going on. I could use some science on it. I could use another pair

of eyes.”

Tango knew he wasn’t talking about pool. “You sure you want me?”
 “Yeah. We get along good. We get along on everything, why not on this? I trust

you. I trust you like a son.”

What a weird thing to say. Tango couldn’t square it with what he knew of the

man. If there were any relations involved, he thought of Fishboy as an older brother. At

best. But a son?

“I’ll come with you,” he said.

“Good, good. It’s…it’s really not that big a deal. I kinda lost it a little there, I

know.”

“A little.”

“Overreaction. It’s not that big a thing, believe me.” He headed toward the

elevators. “It’s like Cecil B. DeMille says, let’s not make a big production out of it.”

>>>>>>

Within a half hour the crew had gathered in the office of United Sports Enterprises,

helping themselves to Fishboy’s liquid hospitality. The street captains were all there,

Eddie Erlanger, Hank Mazzetti, Sid Dallet, Paulie Randazzo, O.P. O’Brien. They were all

men who, out of loyalty to Fishboy, refused to indulge in the luxuries of conscience or

morality.

Back in control of himself, Fishboy basically gave them a recap of the speech

he’d made at Johnny Kachka’s anniversary dinner. Only no translations were needed.

Looking at Long Island, he said, was like looking at a basket of fresh fruit crawling with

fungus. The population of Nassau County was exploding, profits were standing still. He
told them what Tango said about outhouses (a way, maybe, to account for Tango’s

presence in the room). You light a fire in the hole—that’s how you get rid of the waste.

The crew didn’t laugh until Fishboy laughed. That’s how they knew it was funny.

“Say what you want about Kachka,” he said, “and there’s plenty to say, but he’s

had his run. He’s gotten old. His name’s gotten old. Him and those dickbreaths he’s got

working for him, they do just enough to get by. Sometimes even less than that.”

“You can see it with the nigs,” said Eddie Erlanger. “They’re crying out for weed

and smack. He don’t give ‘em shit.”

“If the niggers start complaining,” said Fishboy, “you know things are bad. The

way he’s operating out there, it’s just…preposterous.”

He leaned forward over his desk like he was trying to squeeze the last bubble of

lunch gas out of his intestines.

“Now you got this numbnuts Manny de Silva taking over. You got to ask

yourself, how does a guy with no street bones, a guy who scratches his ass when his

elbow itches”—he laughed, they laughed—“how does a guy like this get to be number

two, eventually number one? Because no one’s paying fucking attention. This is not the

way you do things. This is not the way you run an organization. It’s like politics. You’re

in charge of a party, you either control the politics or the politics control you. There’s no

in-between. You got to grab the reins. You got to grab the power and never let it go.

Kachka’s outfit, I’m saying the same thing. We can’t wait for them to come to their

senses. We got to grab the power, that’s what I’m saying. We got to grab it now. What

I’m thinking, this is the way we have to play it. No, fuck that, this is the way we’re

gonna play it.”

 The crew didn’t know exactly what he meant, but they agreed it was the right

thing to do.

Tango was sitting there feeling like Fishboy had just taken him to a nude beach.

I’m not really here, am I? Tell me I’m not really here.

>>>>>>
A PARTING SHOT

Williston Watches, located in the heart of Williston Park, Long Island, was a mom and

pop repair shop owned by Mr. and Mrs. Heath. Mr. Heath was a soft-spoken old fellow

who wore a hearing aid and always smelled like vegetable soup. Mrs. Heath was a short-

tempered woman of somewhat louder and significantly heavier disposition. Her skirts and

sweater vests often seemed to be bloating and swelling up by themselves. The shop was a

small, sleepy affair, just a counter for customers and a workbench filled with link and

springbar tools, case opener kits, tap and die sets, movement holders, pin pushers and

pliers, case pressers and dies, oil tubes, dust blowers, straight edge and Phillips head

screwdrivers. Signs on the walls testified that Mr. Heath was factory authorized to work

on Omega, Benus, Elgin, Rolex, Breitling, Lord Nelson, Movado, Baldwin, Pilgrim,

Gruen, Bulova, Hamilton, and Enicar watches. In fact, if you needed any timepiece

repaired, Williston Watches was the place to go.

Of course, if you needed money to buy a watch, or pay the car loan, or make the

rent, Williston Watches was also the place to go. The Heaths ran a mom and pop loan

sharking operation. Charging an 18% vig—versus the 4% interest you could get at most

banks, if you qualified—the couple was sitting on a lucrative and steady flow of cash.

It was far down in the afternoon one day when a new customer came in. He

must’ve stood six-six and weighed a shade under 200 pounds, and his cheap suit made

him look even scrawnier. He laid a Timex on the counter for Mr. Heath’s inspection.

“I’m really upset with this watch,” Six-Six said.

“Yes?” said Mr. Heath.

 “What do they say on the TV? It takes a licking but keeps on ticking? I never

licked it once—why would anybody do that?—and it’s already stopped working.”

“Let’s open it up and see what’s wrong.”

A moment later another new face entered the shop. This man was more of a

scrapper—he could’ve been an aging member of the Gashouse Gang—and while his suit

was high quality it did nothing to hide his fat, sloppy ass.

He was carrying a folded-up A&P grocery bag under his arm. As Mrs. Heath

bustled over to wait on him, Fat Ass put the bag on the counter.

“How can I help you?”

“You can fill this with money.”

“Excuse me?”

Fat Ass pulled a revolver out from under his jacket. “Fill the bag with money.”

Mr. Heath turned to him, his hands trembling. “There’s no money here. We fix

watches. We don’t keep much cash on hand.”

Now Six-Six drew a revolver. “We don’t want the watch money. We want the

loan money.”

The old couple exchanged looks.

“You’re in the wrong place,” said Mrs. Heath.

“I don’t think so,” said Fat Ass.

“You know who Johnny Kachka is?” she said. “He’s our partner. We’re under his

protection.”

“We know who Kachka is,” said Fat Ass, “and he can go fuck himself.”

“Don’t you sass-mouth me.”

 Mr. Heath appealed to Six-Six. “You’re making a bad mistake. What can I do to

talk you out of it?”

Six-Six leaned across the counter and sniffed. “Have you tried bathing?”

Mrs. Heath leaned across the counter in Fat Ass’s face. “Get your flabby behind

out of here. Do you know what’s going to happen when Kachka finds you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “That mutt’s too old to chase.”

“Just give us the money,” said Six-Six. “The lock box, the one you keep in the

back.”

Mr. Heath looked at his wife and slowly nodded.

She and Fat Ass went into the back. A minute later he came out with the paper

bag stuffed with bills, Mrs. Heath sourly trailing behind.

“Must be close to nine thousand here,” he beamed.

Satisfied, Six-Six holstered his gun, Fat Ass did the same and they headed for the

door. Neither was paying attention to Mrs. Heath behind them. Neither noticed her pull a

sawed-off shotgun from under her wide skirt. She aimed for the most prominent target

she could see. The fat ass exploded like a blood-filled balloon.

The next moments were filled with shouts, screams, running feet, red blotches

dropping on the sidewalk, tires shredding the road as Fat Ass and Six-Six took off in a

title-stripped car. They got away with the money, though Fat Ass never quite walked the

same again.

>>>>>>
A brazen daylight robbery. Respected merchants victimized. A shootout (one-sided, but

still). The crime should’ve been a big local story, right? But it wasn’t. It was a non-story.

You can search the newspaper archives, the radio and TV transcripts. There’s no mention

of the incident at Williston Watches. It does show up in the Third Precinct’s police

records, but as far as the media of the time was concerned, the robbery never happened.

Life in the 1950s, especially in middle-class suburbs like Long Island, is often

described as the Golden Age of Innocence. There’s a reason for that. Anything to the

contrary was never reported. Sexual assault, child molestation, domestic violence, drug

arrests—stick-ups at watch stores—these things tended to dilute the Chamber of

Commerce image of suburbia as a wholesome, carefree paradise on earth. Local business

and political leaders pressured the press to bury bad news. And the press, dependent on

local advertising, would willingly censor itself.

Say your neighbors are telling you about a rumble that happened at the high

school football field last night. A real West Side Story thing—switchblades, chains,

baseball bats, zip guns, plus hot rods, beer bottles and bags of heroin left on the ground.

You go by the high school and you see that the field is all torn up. Tire tracks have

gouged ruts in the mud. Footsteps have dug divots in the grass. Something happened here.

But nothing ever appears in print. The rumble, apparently, was silent, unattended and

nonexistent.

Not everything on the police blotter was off limits. Certain stories—murders,

kidnappings—were too important to squelch. The public has to know these things.

Everything else, everything that could depress property values—the public doesn’t need

to know these things. Naturally these blank spots held most sway in white areas. But
black communities weren’t immune from the phenomenon. Realtors had houses to sell,

apartments to rent. The truth, at least most of it, had to be segregated from the news.

It would take the twin tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate for that attitude to

change. Both the war and the scandal were prolonged by government evasions and

authorized cover-ups. Reporters began to suspect that going along with official lies,

whether told by Washington or the local village hall, maybe wasn’t such a good idea.

Going back before that, though, you have to rely on people’s stories and

memories, not on the media. You have to listen to the oral testimony to find the hidden

patterns and secret links behind the recorded history.

>>>>>>
COCKS AND CROWS

Tango knew about the hit on the watch shop. He’d heard about it, recognized what it

represented—Fishboy was starting to spread his takeover bacteria into Kachka’s turf.

Tango really hoped they wouldn’t be talking about it today. Fishboy had invited him out

to Rosedale to talk more about the Boston tournament. He’d gotten some info about one

of the other shooters and he wanted to share it with Tango. God, if you have have any

mercy, let that be the only subject of discussion.

Turns out there was nothing to discuss. As soon as Tray answered the door he

sensed Fishboy wasn’t home. You could almost smell his absence. Tray said she didn’t

know where he was or when he was planning to come back, but Tango was welcome to

wait if he wanted.

She wasn’t bearing much resemblance to the pinup star of the anniversary dinner.

She looked more like she’d been stumbling around the house all day and had just come

awake enough to realize how tired she was.

Danny was in the living room, watching Popeye. He said hello to Tango with a

big orange ring around his mouth from the glass of Fizzies he was drinking.

“You can tell his father isn’t around,” said Tray. “If he was, he’d be in here

arguing with Danny about what cartoons to watch.”

Danny half grinned and half grimaced and nodded his head. It’s the truth.

Tray took Tango into the kitchen. “I’m sorry you have to wait. I have no idea

what’s going on with him, what he’s up to at the moment.” She lowered her voice so her
son couldn’t hear. “His mind’s been drifting with this Kachka crap, and it seems to be

staying off shore.”

“I understand.”

“They’re like kids, the bunch of them. I want what you have. What’s yours is

mine. What is this, third grade?”

“I’m not sure it reaches that high.”

Tray nodded at the sad reality. “I could use a drink. You?”

“Long as I’m waiting.”

She didn’t ask what he wanted, just automatically poured two gin and tonics.

“You know about the watch place?” she said, gulping it down.

“Yeah,” he said, sipping his. “Anything else happen?”

All she did was shrug and drink.

“Does that mean you don’t know,” he said, “or don’t care?”

“Both. I don’t care to know. I really don’t want to hear it. He wants to win some

jerking off award, that’s up to him.”

Danny came running in with his empty Fizzies-tinted glass. “Can I wash it? Can I

use the sink?”

They’d just had one of those new Moen single-handled faucets installed. No

separate hot and cold handles on the side, just a lever in the middle you angle to get the

temperature you want. Very Space Age.

“Careful you don’t burn yourself,” said Tray. ”You know how to work it?

“It’s easy.”

“His father loves the faucet. He says the water gets the dishes much cleaner.”
 Danny fitted his glass on a prong in the dish rack. “What are you two talking

about?”

Tray only hesitated for a second. “I was just telling Tango about the crows.”

“Goddamn crows.”

“Danny.”

“They’re everywhere. And they’re loud. I can’t even sleep at night sometimes.”

“Nobody knows why they’re here,” Tray said to Tango. “First there were a few.

Now it’s like hundreds, maybe thousands. They’re building nests in the trees all over

town.”

“They stink,” said Danny. “They stink bad. It’s their, you know, their…”

“Droppings.”

“Their droppings really stink. They’re all over the sidewalk. I can’t play outside

anymore. It smells like shit.”

“Danny.”

The kid reconsidered his position. “Can I go over to Albert’s?”

“To do what?”

“Watch The Three Stooges.”

“No fighting. I don’t want to get a call. If Albert ranks on you, just ignore him.”

“If Albert ranks on me again, I’ll kick him in the technicals.”

“Danny.”

The boy ran through the living room and left with a slam of the door.

“He’s a pisser,” said Tango.

 Tray finished her drink and, as a favor to him, started working on his. “I’m glad

he’s gone. I need your help upstairs.”

Tango tried to think of something funny and defusing to say, but he settled for,

“Upstairs?”

“Don’t get ideas. I need to flip Danny’s mattress. He’s wetting the bed again.

Sounds pretty sexy, doesn’t it?”

“He’s got a problem?”

“He’s confused. His father gives him a pellet gun for his birthday. His mother

says you’re too young to have that and no, you absolutely cannot take it to school. That’s

confusion.”

Tray finished his drink and led him to the stairs. She climbed with a little

hesitation, slowed down a bit by her gin buzz.

The first room they came to upstairs was the master bedroom. The door was open.

Tango saw the red crushed velvet on the furniture, the red satin sheets on the king-size

bed, the red curtains blowing in the breeze of the open windows like blood-angels’ wings.

“There it is,” said Tray. “Welcome to Wop Heaven.”

“I don’t care to know about it.”

“Very funny. Actually, there’s not much to know. Soon as he carried me over the

threshold, so to speak, whatever excitement there was was gone.”

“It happens.”

“You know what he told me once? Sometimes he’d rather masturbate than have

sex. I asked why. It always comes out my way.”

“Don’t tell me this.”

 “Don’t tell you what? What a prick he is? And I use the word loosely.”

“Yeah, don’t tell me that.”

She snuggled her shoulder against the wall. “What else shouldn’t I tell you? What

it’s like to wake up one morning and realize everything you kind of suspected about

someone turns out to be true? What it’s like to wake up and realize everything you are is

suddenly part of the past? It’s hard to put a bandaid on your heart.”

She didn’t say anything else, just leaned against the wall with tears threatening to

fall out of her eyes. But she didn’t cry. She shivered instead. A full down the spine, dead

winter chill shudder. He put his hand on her shoulder to keep her calm.

Tray let it rest there for a few moments, then shook it off. She was staring down at

the carpet, embarrassed, flustered.

“It’s funny,” she said, “for the first time in my life I don’t know what to do with

my eyes.”

“Try looking.”

When she stepped close to him he felt a magnetic field moving in on his body. At

first her kiss was hard, forceful like she was making a statement. Then it became softer,

yielding, an act of surrender rather than defiance.

Then she put her hand on his chest and pushed him away.

“I’m not sleeping with you,” she said. “Definitely not.”

“Okay.”

“It can’t happen. That’s no-shit final.”

Of course it was.
 A moment later they were in the bedroom, kissing, embracing, undressing each

other, curling next to each other on the acid-red sheets. They’d made the change, they’d

taken the leap, without saying a word.

Her face was drawn, haggard, tired-looking, and yet, as he took her clothes off,

her face became amazingly, perfectly, blindingly beautiful.

He never forgot that day. Never forgot the smell and feel of her body, the

shimmer in her crying voice, the lodestone pull of her pussy, the coiled power between

her legs. He never forgot thinking that as long as I’m alive, as long as I can remember my

name, I’ll still remember this day.

>>>>>>

What did Galen the Physician say? All animals are sad after intercourse. Not Tray—she

was in too much of a hurry. When he opened his eyes she was sitting on the edge of the

bed, pulling her panties back on. “Time to leave,” she said. “You’d better go. We can’t

take a chance.”

“Right.” Tango looked around for his BVDs. “How do you feel about—“

“No time to talk. I’ve got to clean up, straighten the bed. Later.”

She marched into the bathroom and shut the door. All business.

He flopped back on the bed, confused by going up so far and coming down so

fast. He was reminded of what Jesus said about Good Friday. God, that was a hell of a

day.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 8 (NOW)

BEING DEAD IS A FULL-TIME JOB

650 MPH AND IT’S STILL TOO SLOW

“This is going to work,” Kassata said as we drove east. “I know it. I have that feeling,

that intuition, you know? It’s like when I was calling a game once in San Francisco, and

all the lights sudd— Wait, was it San Francisco? I think it was, though it might’ve been

San Jose. Same area, right? In any case, Christ, I know it wasn’t San Diego…”

All right, what happened was, I’d Google mapped the woods east of the Chapman

Hill Obelisk. Something seemed to be showing up in the northern part of the area, some

little patch of moonlight. It could’ve been the white aerodynamic roof of the

summerhouse, but there was too much camouflage from the trees to be sure. If it was the

house, then I’d probably been approaching it from the wrong direction. Working down

from the north would be easier than stumbling in from Chapman Hill.

So Kassata comes along and says, okay, why don’t we try to get in that way? We?

It’s dangerous—why we? We’ll make a peace offering, she says—we’ll give Danny a

copy of the home movie. Her plan was to somehow—and I emphasize the somehow—get

the lost movie into Danny’s hands and let him see that our intentions were honorable and

we were only interested in finding out who killed Tango Williams.

“I know it’s chancy,” she was saying. “I’m not that crazy. There’s risk, but I

really think we can pull this off. What’s the old saying? What do people say? Nobody

gives a better haircut than a blind barber.”

“A blind barber? I never heard anyone say that.”

“You haven’t? I’m sure it’s an old saying, though maybe it’s not. Anyway, you

get the point. Sometimes it’s better if you don’t know how things are going to turn out.

That way you can play it out all the way to the end.”
 Tedley Mott at ESPN had put the movie on a memory chip for us. The way he

compressed it, he said, it would play in any format, on any device.

I was sure he was right about the readability. I wasn’t so sure about the delivery.

Given the attitude of the Tartan Man I’d met in the woods, I was having a hard time

seeing us drop a memory chip into his willing hands.

“These things don’t always come off,” I said. “Just be ready for that.”

“It’ll come off. I can do these things. I have a lot of experience.”

“You do?”

“I’ve been doing these things in my head for years.”

We came down, as planned, from the north. The direction in which the dead are

buried. The direction sacrificed animals face. The direction, according to Ezekiel, of

dangerous enemies. The region of death.

But let’s not get into that now.

Above us, the sun was speeding across the earth at 650 mph. It wasn’t fast

enough. The woods were hotter now than they were in the early morning. The air was

thick, heavy, almost hallucinatory. When I saw light shining off a dark slick dome, I

thought it was a polished meteorite. But it was a bald black head. A moment later it was

Calvin fucking Crane, out for a stroll. And just in case you think I think that all bald

black artists who paint portraits of gunned-down cops look alike, there were his gnarled

hands, twisted with arthritis.

We took cover behind a sprawl of bayberry bushes. Calvin drifted past. When

he’d moved on another 20 feet we stepped out on the path. He heard the rustle of leaves
on the ground, glanced into the woods, then continued turning his head until he stopped

right here.

“Oh shit.”

“Case you’re wondering why we’re here,” I said, “we have another question for

you.”

“What?”

“That sign in front of your studio? How come it doesn’t say scumbag?”

Calvin, looking at the Glock, handled himself carefully. “Why should it?”

“Cause you lied to us,” said Kassata. “You told us a big motherfucking whopper.”

He shrugged it off. “You came to see me. I didn’t seek you out.”

“We talked to you in good faith,” I said. “Next thing we know, Gary Tripucka’s

trying to put holes in our heads.”

“I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know any Gary Pitrucka.”

“Tripucka.”

“Whatever.”

“You never took a ride with him?”

“No.”

“That accounts for your good health.”

Calvin was getting anxious standing in the sun. “”What’re you sniffing around

here for?”

We came closer. Kassata showed him the memory chip. “Give this to Danny,” she

said.
 “Like I told you, pretty insistently I thought, I haven’t seen Danny since back in

all those days.”

“Then what’re you doing out here?” I said.

“What, a black man can’t walk around these parts?”

“Except they’re not just parts. They’re right near Danny’s old summer house.”

“Is that so? Small world, man.”

Kassata held the clip out to him. “This is an old home movie. Danny with his

folks, from when he was a kid.”

“Really.” Flat, no question mark.

“Lot of memories here,” she said. “I figured he’d want to see it, get it back.”

“I have nothing to say on that matter.”

Right—but he took it.

“It’s got our contacts in there,” she said, “right after the movie. Plus a note

explaining what we want. I’m just trying to find out about my grandfather.”

Calvin examined the chip. “You still talking that Tango thing?”

“It’s a weakness in my family. My mother was the same way, couldn’t stop

thinking about her father shot down in the middle of 125th Street. She was never able to

think about anything else for more than a little while at a time. She’d start talking about

him right in the middle of something else, she did that a lot, and if other people were

around, non-family people, like new friends, she made friends easily, and they didn’t

know why she was suddenly talking about her father and what happened to him and why

aren’t there any answers, believe me, it could get pretty distracting and confusing.”

Calvin knew the feeling.

 “You should leave your grandfather alone,” he said. “Leave all the dead alone.

Don’t be bothering them. They’re too busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Being dead. It’s a full-time job.”

>>>>>>
KASSATA, WITH A SPLASH

In her eyes, handing the chip off was an unqualified triumph of the human spirit. It was a

clean win, a major step forward, a key to everything to come, and consequently Kassata

was whoopin’ it up as we headed back to the city. My response was a bit more measured.

Sure, considering my low expectations for the venture, we’d far exceeded expectations.

But we still had to hear from Danny, find out how he’d take it. It was way too early, I

pointed out, for unmixed delight.

Kassata, however, was too pleased with herself to spoil it by thinking. This was a

moment to celebrate, not contemplate. “Look at the time,” she said. “It’s wine o’clock

already.”

She made me pull off the expressway in Nassau County so she could buy a taste.

No glasses needed—she drank from the bottle.

“Want some?” she said.

“You know I don’t drink anymore.”

“Just a sip.”

“No.”

“You ever try drinking in moderation?”

“I could never do anything in moderation. Drinking, the only reason I drank was

to get drunk.”

“That’s fucked.”

“All I wanted was to get wrecked, destroyed, obliviated. That nice buzzed head

you get with the first drink or two?”

“Yeah.”
 “Foreplay. Just an appetizer for the main course.”

She took a healthy pull. “Personally, I think drinking’s part of the evolutionary

plan.”

“The evolutionary plan?”

“If people didn’t drink they’d never fuck. The human race would’ve died out

years ago.”

She was quite exuberant and increasingly demonstrative. As we were passing

through Queens she managed with one particularly wild wave of the bottle to splash wine

all over my shirt.

“Oh God I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that. I’m sorry.”

I’m sure she meant it, though her broad grin left some room for doubt.

“I get carried away sometimes when I drink,” she said. “I just get so— Maybe I

get, oh I don’t know, it’s all relative, maybe I get too carried away when I drink.

Sometimes.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Fuck no.”

By the time we got to the city she’d spilled wine on my shirt two more times and

once on my pants.

I drove to my apartment to change.

“I wasn’t expecting company, ” I said as we walked in. “I’m glad I dusted

anyway.”

“You dusted?”

“Don’t start.”
 “It’s all right. This is what we call man clean.”

Kassata put what was left of her bottle on the table, sat down and pulled one of

her ecigs out. “Mind if I drink in here?”

“If I didn’t mind in the car, I’m not gonna start now.”

She was staring at the wall. The first time she was here, we’d covered the space

with the bastardized fragments of Tango’s homicide files.

“I thought it was over that day,” she said. “I thought any chance I had was

crushed and stuffed away. But then what happened?”

“We ate and got shot at.”

“Beyond that, bigger picture. What happened was that hope crawled back. It

staged a return match. It led us, shit, it led us to where we are today. Just goes to show.”

I started for the bedroom. “I’m going to change.”

“You think I drink too much?”

“Yes. Why, you’re not sure?”

“I don’t know, I’m drunk.” She reached up, began twisting her hair in her fingers.

“I know it’s not a great thing to do, I know it’s not a great habit, but I’ve earned the right

to do it.”

“Then do it.”

“Are you going to lecture me?”

“Are you asking me to lecture you?”

“No.”

“Then no.”
 I went inside, took my shirt off and checked the closet for something fairly close

to clean.

“What about the pants?”

I turned and looked at her across the Atlantic of the bedroom. Whatever she was

doing in here—and I had a pretty good guess—I wasn’t going to let her do it.

“I’ll take them off to change,” I said. “I’ve got nothing else in mind.”

“I do.”

“Are you flirting with me because you’re feeling flirty, or are you actually flirting

with me?”

“You’ve been alone with me a lot. You know I’m not the flirty type.”

“But when you’re loaded?”

She sat on the bed, gave it a once-over. It wasn’t made but at least the spread was

pulled over the bedding and the pillows. Housekeeping chez McShane.

“I think you think I’m attractive,” she said. “I’ve seen the signs.”

“That’s not the issue right now.”

She bit her teeth into her lower lip for a moment. “You know why I want you?”

“And I don’t want to know.”

“I want to have you to talk to. I want to have you to confide in, to share things

with. What good is having someone in your life if you can’t talk to them, explain things

to them?”

“Like what?”

“Everything. I want to explain it all to you, every bit of it, the whole thing. I want

to explain everything to you.”

 She lunged at me, grabbed my belt and yanked me down to the bed, and as she

twined her legs around mine my body bent like the blues note on a steel string guitar. All

my lofty objections? Melted like Icarus wings in the sun. I wanted her. I wanted her with

a desire so powerful it took me by surprise, a desire torn from deep inside. I wanted the

soft darkness of her body with a desire that felt beyond me, felt more than my own…

I’m always hooking up with the wrong women for the wrong reasons. I don’t

know why, it just feels right to me.

>>>>>>
SAFETY PLAY

Kassata’s next assignment was an easy one. She was covering a tournament at a club in

Rockaway Beach, nearby in Queens. She could calculate her travel time in minutes, not

hours. I was going to watch the match, if I could find which ESPN channel it was on, but

she called before it started.

There’s somebody here, he’s been stalking around me. We’re setting up and I

notice he’s following, showing up everywhere I go. I wasn’t concerned at first. I’m from

ESPN—no one’s going to hurt me.

Right. “So what happened?”

I went outside for some air. I see him walking up to me. Radically skinny. Like

even his face is a rib cage. The look in his eyes, I knew he wasn’t going to ask for an

autograph. I really thought he was going to, I don’t know, snatch me? Kill me? But two

guys from the crew came out just then and he made a quick-walk away.

“Is he still there?”

I think so.

“I’m on my way.”

Forty-five minutes later I was pulling up to Casa del Océano. The location had

once housed an establishment that billed itself as The Best Vegan Strip Club in America.

How popular it was I don’t know, but the building was scuttled during Superstorm Sandy.

Now, years later, it had been revived as a presumably all-cuisine dance club. Four DJs

worked different rooms. Customers glided over jumpy, day-glo carpeting that refused to

let you rest your eyes or body. Tables had been set up on the beach where, for a five-
bottle minimum, with bottles of wine or liquor starting at $300, you could enjoy an

expensive view of the ocean.

The tournament, a women’s match, was taking place in one of the club’s catering

rooms. ESPN’s mobile production pod took up the space of an entire wall. Kassata was

sitting at a mic, dozens of frantic Munchkins running around her.

One of the players was circling the table, obsessively chalking her cue stick. The

other players sat on the opposite side, all of them contractually obligated to wear the team

jackets of their sponsors—Budweiser, Little Caesars, Meineke, Capitol One, etc.—while

they waited.

“If you’re not used to seeing this game,” Kassata was telling her audience, “this is

straight pool. You’re probably used to watching 9-ball or even 8-ball, but this was the

classic competition game. The great shooters of the past, most of them, were masters of

straight pool.”

The player leaned over the table. The overhead camera showed her hand forming

a closed bridge and her stick leveling for a shot. But then she changed her mind and kept

orbiting the table. Two ESPNers with Sony Handycams captured every angle of her

peregrinations.

“Krauss has two possible calls here I think,” said Kassata, “the 4 and the 11.

Remember, straight pool is a call-pocket game. She can play any ball on the table, but she

has to call the ball and the pocket. She makes the shot, she wins a point. She misses, she

loses a point.”
 The crowd, a full house, was sitting stadium-style on stepped floors, the chairs

rising row by row to the top. I scanned the faces, didn’t see any manorexics. Quite the

opposite, in fact.

“You have to consider Krauss the headliner in the competition. She’s taken three

titles this year, and a win here will cement her ranking.”

“Four ball, side pocket,” Krauss called, and as if inspired by Kassata’s

commentary she drove the shot home with a gunshot crack that rattled the sound system

in the room.

“Nice call, very nice call, but look at what she’s left herself. From what I can see,

it’s 7 in the far corner, and she’ll have to make an ultra-thin cut on the 7 to sink the ball.”

Kassata was a good pool talker. Spot-on analysis, and she wasn’t getting all

verbose and tonguey like she did in the real world. She was controlling herself just

enough to keep the patter going.

Commercial break. She rushed over to me. “Anything?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ve gotta do a quick interview. They’ll tape it and interstitch it with the live

feed. But I’ve gotta go out on the floor to do it.”

“I’m here, I’m watching.”

“Okay.” She took a deep, deep breath.

“Nerves?”

“Bundle of.”

You couldn’t tell. She left the pod and walked past the table with a full cache of

panache.
 Krauss was putting on her Buffalo Wild Wings jacket when Kassata,

accompanied by a Handycam, approached with a prominently labeled ESPN mic.

“You’re holding up really well, Amy,” she said. “That shot on the 7-ball was

incredible. How are you feeling?”

“I’m doing all right, Kassata. These TV rounds can be tough. All the lights, the

cameras. Sometimes I can choke, but I’ve been training for them.”

“What kind of training?”

“Videos. I watch matches where I’ve pulled through, or even better, where other

plays have really fallen apart.”

“That helps?”

Krauss nodded. “I believe you can do unexpected things when you put your mind

to it.”

“Thanks, Amy. Good luck the rest of the way.”

I still hadn’t seen anyone in the crowd who looked like he was trying to scare

Kassata out. A thought occurred: Was she wigging on me? Did the guy really exist?

The game resumed. Another player had the table while Amy Krauss sat with her

teammates.

“Parker has her weaknesses,” Kassata was saying, “but her safety play isn’t one of

them.”

The overhead beauty shot showed Parker’s cue ball gently caroming off the side

and coming to rest in a thorny cluster of balls. She’d left Krauss nothing to pocket.

Another thought occurred: Maybe Kassata’s alleged stalker had retreated to

another part of the club. I left the tournament room and sailed through Casa del Océano.
Hundreds of people were dancing in all four DJ areas. No one stood out, though the guy

in question probably wasn’t the type to be boogying his ass off.

I checked the beach tables. I didn’t see any skeletal, latent nightmare of a man.

I found a service corridor near the tournament room. It was all infrastructure:

cement walls, insulated pipes, ventilation moans. And voices. Three women were

standing in the middle. The third, an older woman, might’ve been their coach. One of the

players was crying, the other was pissed.

“She can’t do this,” the latter was saying. “Amy can’t talk to us like that.”

“I know,” said the coach, “but…”

The crier continued crying.

“It’s too hot in here,” said the pissed player. “I’m all sweaty.” She took off her

Buffalo Wild Wings jacket and tossed it on the floor.

“Me too,” said the crier, who followed suit.

They stopped talking when they noticed me. “Sorry,” I said as I brushed past and

kept on walking.

“This crying,” said the coach, “how long do you expect it to last?”

The moment I went back to the match something in the crowd grabbed my

attention. A rank clash of multi-colored, crisscrossing horizontal bands violently battling

with vertical stripes. The Tartan Man from Danny’s property. What DSM number do they

give you when you wear clothes like that?

A bunch of ESPN caps were piled in the production pod. I took one and pulled it

over my eyes so he wouldn’t recognize me.

 I stared at him under the bill. He wasn’t watching the game, he was only watching

Kassata. He was watching her good.

>>>>>>

The Tartan Man slipped out a few minutes before Krauss took the match. Shoulders

hunched, body bent, trying to be inconspicuous. He looked like a flamboyant Scottish

priest creeping around in the back of a church.

It took another 30 minutes for Kassata to do her post-tournament interviews and

wrap-up analysis and to finish business with her producer. We left through the front door

of the club with a few ESPN crew members—safety in numbers. I was going to follow

Kassata’s car back to her apartment in Brooklyn. I kept my right hand low and loose as

we walked, ready to go for the Glock.

Ever been listening to music when you hear a sudden change in the tones?

Whatever device your using—your digital phone, your hand-cranked Victrola—it’s

starting to get fritzy and the pitch is going flat? That’s what I heard as we peeled off from

the crew. Muffled, hollow, out-of-synch steps behind us. People running but trying to

sound like they weren’t.

I turned and saw a Christmas smear of patterns. Tartan Man was chasing us. And

next to him was Jesus will you look at this guy. A pulpless, desiccated shell of a body. A

sprinting anatomy lesson. He could’ve been a disciple of Gandhi, except for the non-

violent part.
 We started running but we weren’t going to make the cars. Glock? Not with all

these people still around. I saw a door on the side of the club.

It took us into a garbage room. Ninety-five-gallon trash cans, waiting to be carted

out to the dumpsters. Coffee grinds had spilled on the floor and roaches were making a

meal of the mess.

We nipped through another door that somehow, for some badly designed reason

I’m sure, led us into the service corridor where I’d seen the three women. The Buffalo

Wild Wings jackets were still on the floor. We grabbed them as we ran, grabbed them

like sick people grasping for voodoo charms. Kassata’s fit nicely. Mine made me look

like a kid wearing his little sister’s clothes.

The Buffalo Wild Wings team van was parked outside. We joined the end of the

line, but it wasn’t moving. Krauss was standing ahead of us, arguing with the coach.

“Why do we have to wait for those two bitches?”

Tartan Man and Bone Man burst out of the club. They were staring around the lot

like hungry animals smelling prey. But they weren’t interested in Buffalo Wild Wings.

Kassata and I stepped away from the line, began walking and then running for the beach.

We dashed through the tables and their $300-plus bottles of booze and disappeared into

the darkness of the night.

We’d sent our pursuers a pretty clear message: There are no vacancies in the

cemetery for us. And they’d delivered a message as well. We’d gotten our answer from

Danny.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 9 (THEN)

THE FIVE EYES

IF YOU CAN’T STAND THE HEAT, BURN DOWN THE KITCHEN

Acting on the principle of not eating where you shit, Johnny Kachka ran Long Island

from a club in East Harlem, just as Fishboy ran southeast Brooklyn from midtown

Manhattan. Kachka’s home base was the Mount Carmel Social Club on 116th Street, just

off Lexington Avenue. The place was considered a swish venue, back when swish meant

fancy and luxurious, not gay. It was here that Kachka and Manny da Silva contemplated

the consequences of the hit on Williston Watches. Not a soul on earth doubted that

Fishboy was trying to extend his fiefdom into forbidden territory.

“He wants a war of attrition,” said Kachka, cooling the back of his neck off with

witch hazel. “He wants to shut us down one by one.”

Sullen Manny, who looked like he made a living explaining jokes, took it further.

“What do you do when somebody gives you the devil’s kiss? You give him the devil’s

dick up his ass.”

With those stirring words, the battle began.

• Shanker’s Washateria, on Pitkin Avenue, was one of East New York’s prime

places to play the numbers while pretending to do the laundry. One day two men walked

in carrying sledge hammers instead of clothes bags. They proceeded to smash every

washing machine and dryer in sight, give the manager a beating and leave with a

considerable amount of Fishboy’s numbers money.

• Nassau County had recently initiated a crackdown on pornography, shuttering

stores that sold under-the-counter smut. The motive was less moral than monetary. When

they stores reopened, they were still carrying porn, but it was Johnny Kachka’s porn.

Much of his inventory was distributed from a warehouse in Carle Place. One night an
unknown number of perpetrators broke in and destroyed all the magazines, books and 16

mm films stored therein. The smell of Fishboy revenge was unmistable.

• Fishboy’s most exclusive bordello was located in an apartment building

overlooking Highland Park. Four men wearing dandruffy NYPD uniforms raided the

address late one evening, arresting the girls, the madam and the Rolls-Royce clientele.

The lot of them—including a judge, a city councilman and two state senators—were

roughed up and hauled into a paddy wagon (stolen just for the occasion), driven across

the length of Brooklyn and forced to jump into the Gowanus Canal.

• Tony Eterno manufactured auto parts out of a factory in Smithville, Suffolk

County, but his most lucrative source of income, done for clients sent to him by Johnny

Kachka, was burning down buildings for insurance money. The fire that broke out in his

own factory was a spectacular piece of arson, immediately engulfing the building in

leaping towers of yellow flash. All the American LaFrance pumpers local volunteer fire

departments could call up couldn’t extinguish the flames.

The building wasn’t insured.

As usual, the press had no problems ignoring the Pitkin Avenue, Carle Place and

Highland Park incidents. The stunning Smithville fire, however, was impossible to pass

by. The only thing the stories said was that the factory had gone up in a suspicious fire.

But for anyone who knew who Tony Eterno was or what he really did, reading the papers

the next day was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.

>>>>>>
There was never a good time to be a gangster in America, but some times were better

than others. It all depended on how much cooperation the mob could wrest from the

government. During World War II, for example, the bond between the two entities could

almost be called brotherly. The 1942 arrest of Nazi saboteurs, who’d slipped into the

country to blow up railroads, chemical plants and Jewish-owned department stores, was

set in motion by mob informants controlled by Meyer Lansky. That same year, the USS

Lafayette was wasted by fire in Manhattan’s Pier 88. Soon after, U.S. Naval Intelligence

struck a deal with Lucky Luciano to protect the New York waterfront from German

terrorists by any means possible.

But the tide turned a few years later when Senator Estes Kefauver held a series of

congressional hearings to focus attention of the fungal blight of organized crime.

Broadcast on TV and seen by millions, the 1950-51 Kefauver hearings brought the words

and faces of Frank Costello, Mickey Cohen and even former government pal Meyer

Lansky to national scrutiny.

Once the outcry died down, however, the mob and the government were back in

business. This time the target was communist agitators. Leftists who tried to infiltrate and

radicalize the unions were discouraged with bats, knives, guns and other tools of thuggish

persuasion. Criminal extremism in defense of liberty was no vice. The mob’s patriotism

was an adjunct to the actions of the Mafia in Sicily, where Communist and Socialist

candidates had a way of disappearing or dying just before Election Day.

The cycle took another turn in 1957, when New York State Police raided a

meeting in the small town of Apalachin. What they found was a Cosa Nostra convention

—over 60 major mobsters who’d come in from around the country to discuss criminal
culture and its discontents. From around the country. They were all in it together. Proof

of a national organization devoted to racketeering prompted new calls for justice and a

new promise from the government: The septic festerings of organized crime would be

wiped out.

The climate changed. Things that could be said and done weren’t the same. If

paranoia were an Olympic event, the mob would be going home with the gold. This was a

time when even an innocent little offense like rigging TV game shows resulted in

congressional hearings. Payola was regarded as the top scandal of 1959. The

government’s atomic warheads were now coded for corruption.

It was in this fragile atmosphere of suspicion that stories about the Smithville fire

appeared. For those who knew what Tony Eterno was, it meant that one mob faction was

attacking another. Which meant in turn that the government and its miles of electronic

surveillance tape would be tuned even further to the New York area. It was enough to

make people cringe and scramble. It was enough to create severe cases of terminal agita.

>>>>>>
TWO GRAVES

Fishboy got a taste of the digestive flux a few days after the Smithville burn, when a call

came in from Caesar Abbatelli. He took it right away. The tone was light and casual,

Caesar saying it’s been too long, we should get together, catch up on old times and so on

and so forth. The underlying meaning, however, was heavy and somber. Caesar was one

of the ancient farts who made up The Five Eyes. Each of the five New York families had

a member sitting on what was basically a Conflicts Board, charged with settling

squabbles and disagreements. Caesar was the Gambino’s rep.

They met on the take-out line of a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue and 43rd. Caesar

was a little human sparrow, and either his shoulders had shriveled or his double-breasted

suit had grown by itself. He’d bought his first cigarette from Sir Walter Raleigh, just to

give you an idea of his age. Three deep kneebends and he’s dead.

They traded compliments while Caesar ordered a Sanka to go. How’s the family?

How’s yours? “My youngest grandson just turned 18,” said Caesar, “off to Princeton.”

“You’re shitting me. Last time I saw him was First Communion.”

“These fucking kids, they never stop growing. Where does it end?”

They walked down to 42nd Street, Caesar stirring his weak coffee with a wooden

spoon the whole time, telling Fishboy he’d seen somebody on TV, might’ve been Bishop

Sheen, “he was warning about the perils of self-pollution. He says, remember, the final

decision is in your hands.”

By the time they stopped laughing they were standing under the steel-riveted

trusswork of a pinball arcade’s marquee. The sounds were beyond loud—balls

hammering down the wood boards, flippers flapping, kids grunting with body-English
contortions, bells going off like a hundred cash registers. Fishboy understood why. No

prying government microphones could cut through this noise.

Caesar took out one of his Melachrino cigarettes. Jesus, where does he still find

those things? Fishboy responded by lighting up a Havana Royal panatela.

The old man took a drag and got down to angry business. “What the fuck’s with

you and Kachka?”

“He’s a fucking slutbag, that’s what. He’s a splooch—a failure.”

“Yeah? Some people think he runs a tight ship.”

“He does, only the ship’s made a rubber and it floats in the bathtub. I’ve never

seen anybody do so little in so long amount of time. He’s oblivious. He hasn’t cleaned his

ears since back in ’52.”

“And these disgruntlements bother you why? For our sake? Or for yours?”

“For ours.”

“Bullshit.”

“Not always.”

Caesar checked the bleating cars in the Times Square traffic. “You know what

Confucius said?”

“A lot of things.”

“One of them was this. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two

graves.”

Fishboy laughed. “You think he’s gonna kill me? Him or that junior sidekick of

his?”

“Manny da Silva.”
 “There’s a brilliant man. Every time it rains he gets up and closes the window.

You don’t find people like that everyday.”

He rubbed his hands on his pants, as if just talking about Manny and Kachka

made him feel dirty.

“Listen to me, Hoss.” (Caesar was always calling him by that Bonanza name.) “I

don’t mind a little roughhousing here and there. Boys’ll be boys. But this is not the time

for it. These are bad days. You know what I mean. These are very bad days. All my

years, these are the worst days I’ve ever seen. You have to be careful how you comport

yourself. You have to put a limit on these extra-curricular activities.”

A kid came running out of the pinball arcade, went over to the curb and threw up.

No one on the street paid attention to him.

“We’re trying to turn things around,” said Caesar. “We’re trying to reach out to

certain members of the press—you know, in an unofficial capacity—trying to get them to

see there’s more than one way to tell a story. But it’s a delicate process, it takes time. One

thing we don’t need is reports about Tony Eterno’s place getting torched.”

Fishboy felt slighted. “You’re taking Kachka’s side over me? That’s what you’re

saying?”

“I use a basic guiding principle for these situations. You’re both fuck-ups. You’re

both equal. You both pull down your pants to take a squat. You’re both guilty.”

“That’s not fair.”

“What’s fair is that we don’t spill blood. What’s fair is that we avoid all and any

bloodshed that isn’t strictly necessary. No one wants to get caught with that noose around
their necks. So you two better find a way to get straight on this and knock your little

habits off.”

“I’m not making any deals with that lowlife cunt.”

Caesar flicked his cigarette into the curbside pool of vomit. “You’re coming up to

the Rubicon, Hoss. Don’t cross it. Don’t even get your feet wet. You do, I’ll call a

meeting.”

“The Five Eyes, you mean.”

“You don’t want me to do that. Believe me you don’t. You don’t want to be

sitting across the table from us. And if that sounds like a threat, it is.”

On the dying notes of those cheerful words, Caesar joined the parade of 42nd

Street pedestrians. Fishboy watched him disappear, watched a bleak haze forming over

the west. What he really wanted to do was look inside his pants and see if he had at least

one testicle left.

>>>>>>
YOU’VE GOT TO DECIDE

Taking home 60% of his winnings had put solid money in Tango’s pocket for the first

time in his life. He’d been able to swap his roach-ridden room on West 18th for a

apartment on East 55th. The digs offered a good view of the city, especially on an

afternoon like this. A light, crisp rain coming down, everything feeling clean and fresh.

The weather made him hungry. He’d finished practicing for the day, why not eat? Pop a

Swanson’s in the oven. You can eat a TV dinner when you’re not watching TV, right? Or

when it’s not dinnertime?

Somebody knocked on the door. He wasn’t expecting company. Friend?

Neighbor? How about a sorceress?

A dark-browed sorceress in a black shiny raincoat, hair snarled by moisture,

wearing a pair of sunglasses in the rain.

He hadn’t seen or heard from her since the time at the house and he didn’t think

he ever would. That was dangerous—they’d come too close to setting off a tripwire. He’d

accepted that it was a one-time thing, to only be repeated in his dreams.

Now Tray was standing in his apartment, taking off her shades and coat, fixing

her hair. The whole building was humming.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Shopping,” she said.

“For?”

“I told him I’m going shopping in the city. I got a sitter for Danny.” She looked

around the place. “You have anything to drink?”

“No gin. I think some vodka.”

 “Fine.”

“Water? Ice?”

“Nothing.”

She took her drink and stepped out on his miniature balcony, not bothered by the

sprinkling asterisks of rain. “Nice.”

Tango tried to think of something genius to say and ended up saying nothing.

Ten seconds of silence went by. She didn’t turn to him, just kept staring at the

cityscape. The look on her face: She knew something was broken but she didn’t know

how to fix it.

A glob of rain landed in her glass. At least she was getting some water.

Jesus Christ, say something.

“I’m glad to see you, but you don’t seem all that happy to be here.”

Tray thought about it. “I had a job once as a waitress.”

“Before the P-girl phase?”

“I was more successful at that. I got fired from the waitress job. They said I didn’t

smile enough.”

“Smiling on demand isn’t easy.”

“Especially when you’ve been bought and sold and resold by the world, when

you’ve been beaten down and corrupted.” She smiled at him. “I talk about my marriage

too much.”

They went back inside, out of the rain. The gray light followed them and put

everything in sharp, clear focus.

 Tray sipped her vodka. “I hope you understand how strange it is for me to be

here.”

“About as strange as it is to have you here.”

“Good, because if you or I can’t understand how strange it all is, then there’s no

sense in being here. Or in talking, Or in anything.”

He stood next to her. “You want to talk?”

“I want to talk.”

“About your marriage?”

“Draw any conclusion you can get to. Though, my marriage, I try not to let myself

think too much about it. Once those questions start…”

She finished the drink.

“Another?”

“I think you once said you were married.”

“I once was.”

“What happened?”

“I was on the road a lot, playing the circuit. Playing the field too, fucking around

on her.”

“Kids?”

“Boy and a girl.”

“You see them?”

“Not enough. She makes it hard.”

“This is the P-girl? My colleague?”

 Tango nodded. “There’s nothing new to the story. Two people get together, no

matter who they are, there’s always gaps between them, differences. Nobody’s ever a

perfect fit. You want to stay together, you work on closing the gaps.”

“And what if somebody doesn’t want to close them? What if somebody does

everything possible to drive them apart? What do you do?”

“You’ve got to make up your mind. Can it be changed? Is it worth it? You’ve got

to decide. You’ve got to make a—“

“Make a choice, I know. I’ve made my choice.”

She reached for the back of his head and he reached behind hers and his heart

blew out of control as their lips crushed each other and the glass smashed on the floor.

>>>>>>

Making love to her was like nothing else on earth. There was a power, a magic to

everything—the taste of her swollen nipples, the goose bumps on her belly as his mouth

worked down, the sun-warmth he felt as he put his tongue inside her pussy, the flutter of

her body, the sheer fucking onrushing joy, as he put his cock inside her, of being alive.

There was still danger here—even in his apartment, in his bed. Tripwires were

still stretched across the ground. But he didn’t care. There was an angel’s message in her

body, there was a devil’s message in her body, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

>>>>>>
UPTEMPO IT

The call came at 4 am. Fishboy, mumbling that he and Tango had to talk, he had to see

him, and it had to be now. Shit, he already knew about Tray? Only 12 hours had passed

and they’d been busted already? But what Fishboy was saying wasn’t that simple. It was,

in fact, about as murky and convoluted as a swamp map. He was upset, in a hurry and

drunk—not ideal conditions for clear communication.

“Where are you?”

Use. Use. Use.

Oh, USE. He was at the office. United Sports Enterprises.

Tango found a lobster-shift cab and took it across town. The predawn sky was

dank with rain and rough-grained clouds. Only a spattering of midtown lights were on.

Great morning, New York.

Fishboy wasn’t drunk. He was severely drunk. He was sick drunk. He was on a

drunk’s drunk. The man was watching The Farm Report on TV and eating breakfast at

his desk. A bowl of milk and Cheerios, which he ate with his fingers, and a bottle of

schnapps.

Tango felt like he’d been summoned to a secret council of one.

“You’re up at the crack,” he said.

“You got my message?” said Fishboy.

“Message? We just talked.”

“What did I say?”

 “Not sure. You were talking a whole lot of mess.”

Fishboy shook his head and wiped his hands on his shirt. “I’m tired. I’m tired

something terrible.”

“You been up all night?”

“I’m too tired to shit. Literally. I know I’ve got to go but I just don’t have the

strength.”

“Are you drinking any water?”

“Yeah, I had some yesterday. Which was, I don’t even know what day it was.

Last night somebody told me have a good weekend. That’s how I knew it was Friday.”

“So what am I doing here on Saturday?”

A taste of the schnapps helped Fishboy’s memory. “I need help.”

“Obviously.”

“No, I need your help.”

“With?”

“The old guys. The fucking old ones. They’re always holding me back. You think

you can count on them but you can’t.”

“You talking about Kachka?”

“Him too. Fucking incompetent. He couldn’t get laid in a women’s prison. None

of them could, that’s why they stick together.”

“Exactly what do you want me to do?”

“I need an edge. I need to uptempo this Kachka thing. I need a set of eyes inside

his outfit.”

“And that’s me?”

 “No, that wouldn’t work. Everybody knows you’re in my camp. No, what I’m

asking you to do is be a kind of go-between. A kind of liaison between me and this so-

called set of eyes.”

“What do I have to do?”

“Nothing. Not a thing. Every once in a while somebody will come to you. He’ll

tell you something and you’ll tell it to me. That’s it.”

“He’ll come to me. Where? My apartment?”

“No, no, no. That wouldn’t work.” Fishboy fumbled through the crap on his desk.

“Remember Pep Hayward?”

Of course he remembered Pep Hayward. The shooter who smoked weed to get

high for Jesus. The guy who beat him by one 9-ball point in a basement church in

Lancaster County. The loss was the reason Tango took that walk by the river one

morning, where he learned to breathe, where he found the light.

“He hangs in this place,” said Fishboy, “it’s in the vicinity of Kachka’s social

club. But not too close. It’s near 125th, just a coupla blocks down.” He found a piece of

paper. “Here it is. The Audubon Poolroom, 121st. I want you to start practicing there.

Pep’ll set you up, introduce you around. That’s where the guy will get in touch.”

This was interesting. You’re sleeping with his wife and you’re gonna help him

spy at the same time?

“If I do it,” said Tango, “how big of a gold star do I get?”

Fishboy stared at him, smiling and serious in dead equal measure. “You’ll get a

gold star so big you can sell it as the sun.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 10 (NOW)

THE HONEY AND THE FLIES

AN EXPENSIVE CONDOM

I can see a honeylocust tree growing outside my apartment, and based on its health and

age it’s probably sprouting somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 leaves. Which is

ironic, because that’s exactly the number of conversations Kassata and I were having

about Oh Danny Boy. We’d gotten away, we were safe for the moment, but he’d be

coming after us like electrons looking for protons. What’s our next step? Trying to

answer the question involved raising suggestions, knocking them down, breaking them

up, putting them back together, jittery outbursts, exhausted mumblings and rambling

tangents, in Kassata’s case, into topics remarkable for having nothing whatsoever to do

with the subject on hand.

“We’re looking for absolutes here, certainties, sure things,” she said, taking a pee

with the bathroom door open. “But there are no absolutes here. There are no diamond

certainties in this case. This case is anti-absolutes, anti-certainties, because there’s more

to this thing than we can see.”

While I waited for her remarks to lead somewhere, if ever, I persued the news on

my phone.

“I’ve often said—and I don’t know if I’ve said it to you, but I’ve often said it—

it’s the most natural thing in the world to want a sure thing. There’s a great comfort to it,

and there’s no doubt about that. None. Not the least in the world.”

“You know,” I said, “sometimes I pretend I’m deaf when you’re talking to me.”

“Why do you do that?”

“I said sometimes I pretend I’m deaf when—“

 Holy shit. There was the car again, the photo of the old black side-gashed

Mercedes cracked up in the Midtown Tunnel. It had been posted with a tiny item, more of

an update really, noting that Gary Tripucka, the driver who’d recently tied up traffic in

the tunnel for more than two hours, had made bail on his reckless operation and

unlicensed weapon charges and we being released from Bellevue today.

I called the hospital, and after a series of only eight connections I got through to

the nurses’ station on Tripucka‘s floor. I’m supposed to be picking him up, I said. Any

idea when he’s getting discharged? Around 4 pm.

“What’re you doing?” said Kassata.

“We’re bumping this game up.”

>>>>>>

It was only two and a half miles from the apartment to Bellevue, 15, 20 minutes. It

seemed like a lifetime. Kassata drove her car at top speed all the way, screeching into a

left on 42nd that took us up on part of the sidewalk, then tearing east as if pedestrians and

other cars had become invisible.

“My friends used to say I drove like a drunken teenager in a stolen car,” she

laughed. “Only my father thought I was a good driver.”

Parenthood is no excuse for this.

Right on Second Avenue, left on E. 26th, left on First Avenue—she made them

all hairpin turns.

 We pulled up to Bellevue at 3:55 and joined the other cars parked by the

discharge exit. I said every prayer of thanks I could think of. Waiting…waiting… At 4:20

a grizzled man who looked like a killer rhino came out. A classic thug, an enforcer, a

hatchet man, a baltagiya. He seemed naked without shrunken heads strung around his

neck.

If he wasn’t Gary Tripucka then Gary Tripucka didn’t exist.

He got into a black town car. He was taking a car service to, my guess, Suffolk

County. They left and turned north on the FDR.

“No need for speed,” I said as we followed. “Just stay behind them. Let them run

us down the road.”

The town car got off for the Midtown Tunnel, the scene of the crime. The

underwater travel was smooth until it ended in sunlight and the LIE. Traffic began to

build up, growing blocky and cloggy. After a few minutes we were all in a standstill, blue

engine heat rippling over our heads.

Just what I expected. Life simply isn’t long enough to get on the LIE at this time

of day.

We were inching toward the Borden Avenue exit. The town car, seven vehicles

ahead, had already passed it. I told Kassata to pull over and park on the exit’s shoulder. I

took off my hoodie, wrapped it around the Glock, got out and started walking.

Tripucka was sitting in the back of the town car. Up close, he looked just like a

Brahman bull who’d taken a shower with olive oil. He wasn’t paying attention to

anything going on outside the car, engaged as he was in earnestly deboogering his nose.

I yanked the door open and showed him the barrel of the Glock. “Get out.”
 He didn’t say anything. He just gave me a cold look of surprise, not unmixed with

shock, that suggested I’d be getting a string of complaints from the Thugs Guild.

The driver—Mahmood Anwar, according to his license—was less composed.

“What are you doing? Are you going to jack me?”

“No, I’m here for him.”

“Are you going to rob me?”

“I’m here for him.”

“What kind of person are you? You attack me while I lavish in traffic?”

“I’m not attacking you. I’m here for him.”

“You got the wrong party,” said Tripucka. His voice was a low, deep, larynx-

frying growl, very similar to Tuval throat singing. “I never did nothing to you.”

“You shot at us.”

“It was a warning is all.”

“What if your hand slipped?”

“God, everybody’s a fucking critic.”

Tripucka shoved himself out of the car, hitched up his pants and started walking

back with me. “There’s too much shit happening in the streets these days,” he said.

“Wait.” Mahmood had stepped out of the town car and was running toward us.

“My money. I am consume with bills. I need my money.”

“Where were you taking him, Suffolk County?”

“Yes.” Mahmood checked his phone. “Near Chapman Hill, long ride, big bill. I

have expensive condom in Jersey. He must pay.”

I gave Mahmood two 20s. “That should cover the distance so far.”
 “Yes, that will do. You need a receipt?”

“I’m fine.”

Tripucka and I continued back to Kassata’s car. “What’re you doing with me?” he

said.

“You’re honey to catch the flies.”

“That means what?”

“Call Danny. Tell him you’re being held for ransom.”

“Ransom? How much ransom?”

“A meeting.”

Tripucka shook his head. “This won’t be forgotten. I mean it. Look at me.”

Jesus Christ he had his eyes closed, showing me the eyeballs he had tattooed on

his lids. “I’ll always be watching you,” he said.

Of course the tats were just inked-in braggadocio, cosmetic bullshit, but they

pushed an ice-stream up my spine.

Kassata should’ve been starting the car, ready to take the Borden Avenue exit out

of here. Instead she was getting out and staring at her phone.

“I just got a text,” she said. “They want me in Bristol. ASAP. Emergency

meeting.” She lowered the phone. “I don’t know what to do.”

I turned to Tripucka. “You like sports?”

>>>>>>
THE SEX LIFE OF THE 8-BALL

You call this an emergency? Something that absolutely cannot wait? Kassata had been

summarily summoned to a fucking strategy meeting, one of those deathless future-think

sessions too, too many of us are forced to endure. The victims here included her and her

producers, tormented by a couple of ESPN marketing drones. It was a closed-door

meeting, though we could occasionally hear raised voices from inside.

We’re talking about a bigger, much bigger contribution from your department.

We want billiards to leave a much bigger cultural footprint.

We want to reach out to the tastemakers, the branding ambassadors.

We want to see more joy on the air.

Tripucka and I were sitting in the cubicle outside the office, me with the hoodie-

wrapped Glock still pointing at him. He seemed as out of place as a polar bear in a

tanning booth. A few people looked him over as they passed by. With his heft and size,

he could’ve been a famous ex-jock. But otherwise we were unmolested.

He was wearing his bitterness like a big badge on his big sleeve. “You’re gonna

be sorry you’re doing this. Danny believes in payback, and for this for sure.”

“All we want is some information about the past. It’s not the worst sin in the

world.”

“God forgives, Danny don’t.”

There’s got to be more sensuality to the game, more sexuality. That’ll be the

untold marketing story behind ESPN billiards. It’s seductive, it’s voluptuous.

We heard Kassata’s voice. You know we’re talking about POOL.

Tripucka gestured to the door. “This doesn’t speak to me. I’m bored.”
 “So am I, I’m not complaining.”

“What you’re doing is a crime, you know that? Holding me hostage? You’re

denigrating my rights. You’re not respecting me as a human being.”

“Why should I?”

“Because we’re all human. All of us, even me, we’re only human.”

“Where are you getting this from? The internet?”

Erotic is mass market. Like, what? Like Shakespeare. Shakespeare was erotic and

he was mass market. Billiards should be the Shakespeare of sports.

“I don’t like Shakespeare,” said Tripucka. “It seems dated to me. I was watching

this movie, they were—“

His phone dinged. Text message.

“Read it,” I said.

“It’s him. Your meeting’s tonight. The Club Trocadero.”

“Where’s that?”

“Out on Sunnyvale, 11 o’clock.”

“They should be done in there by then.”

Tripucka blinked as he continued reading the screen, sending out flashes of his lid

tattoos. “He says come and enjoy the music.”

“Do me a favor? Keep your eyes open.”

>>>>>>
EIGHT POUNDS

There was no music to enjoy at the Club Trocadero. There hadn’t been music to enjoy in

years, decades, centuries. It was a dark, grimy, uriney brick sprawl, ready more for a

demolition crew than a DJ and dancers. The club was located in the heart of Sunnyvale,

not exactly the hub of the universe, on a long, silent block with only one streetlight.

Tough neighborhood—you couldn’t get a crème brulee anywhere.

“This is really the place?”

Tripucka shrugged. “What he said.”

“If it’s a set up, the Glock’s on you.”

“This is Long Island. There’s no guarantee of anything.”

Kassata told us both to shut up and wait.

Five nervous minutes later we heard a car door slam with a trailing echo. Calvin

Crane and the Tartan Man came around the corner, helping some ancient, dusty Dracula,

a flickering ghost with sleep-deprived eyes and an old ex-junkie’s wasted flesh. He was

wearing a shapeless suit, a pair of carpet slippers and an overcoat slung over his shoulder

à la Espagnol.

He slowly walked up to us. “I think you know who I am.” The voice was a special

blend of cynicism, suspicion and general indifference, and it was about 10 times louder

than you’d expect out of a body so frail.

Tripucka started right in. “I almost got seriously hurt by these people.”

“I’ll hear about it later,” said Danny. “If I have to.”

Calvin pulled out a set of keys and unlocked the club’s door. The place had been

gutted. Nothing inside but chips of plaster, trash, fibrous dust, the smell of spider webs. It
felt like the dead of winter in here. Calvin, Tripucka and the Tartan Man checked the

three-dimensional shadows in the corners, making sure no one else was around.

“There should be some lawn chairs in the back,” said Danny. “Bring ‘em out here

so we can talk.” He looked at us. “Know what this place used to be? Before the

Trocadero? A pretzel factory. Gerstner’s Homemade Pretzels.”

“That’s interesting,” I said politely.

“No, it is interesting. Back in the old days every saloon in America served

pretzels. You couldn’t even think about beer or booze without thinking about pretzels.

Which is why, prohibition came along, a lot of pretzel bakers went out of business. But

Gerstner’s, they kept the tradition going. They sold booze out of the back. That’s how

they survived those years.” He glanced around at the bare walls. “It was still here when I

was a kid. Used to come in for pretzels and ice cream, that was a big favorite. Pretzel

soup, too.”

Three lawn chairs had been set up in the middle of the room. Danny let himself

down into one with shaky hands, then used the overcoat to cover his lap like a blanket.

Calvin leaned in to help but Danny brushed his hands away.

“Let me tell you something about myself,” he said, “just to avoid any

misconceptions. I’m not involved in the kinds of businesses people think I am”—said in a

modest tone that intimated he was very involved. “I run a few umbrella organizations, I

keep some skin in the game, but that’s it. This is off the record, right?”

“Off the record,” I said.

“My health, frankly, is not so good. I’ve got all kinds of shit wrong with me—

twisted insides, I guess you could say. But I feel good, I feel okay, which I credit to a
strict avoidance of soup. What I don’t need, though, what I really don’t need is people

coming around busting my balls. I don’t need people accusing me of things—I don’t need

blamists. I just want to be left alone and take what small pleasures may come.”

“Understood,” I said.

“Was the movie one of those pleasures?” said Kassata. “Did you watch it?”

Danny smiled. Broadly. “That was amazing. That was completely amazing. I’d

forgotten all about it. How did you get it?”

“We found it,” she said.

“On the internet or something? What do they call that, BluTube?”

“We physically found it. We found the original. At that house in Lakeland.”

“Lakeland?” He looked at Tripucka. “I get it, I think I understand. You read about

Gary’s crackup in the tunnel, you traced his license to the house, you went there looking

for him.”

“Exactly.”

“Everything there,” I said, “seemed to be about the same age. Like it was holding

on to the same specific frame of time.”

Danny nodded. “From my childhood, before my parents split up. I guess that was

the happiest time of my life. By the way, stay away from that fucking house. Don’t ever

go back there again.”

“We’re not trying to give you trouble,” said Kassata. “No ball busting. It’s all

about my grandfather.”
 “Your grandfather. I liked him, I liked old Tango. He was over all the time, he

was like an uncle to me. Did you know, when he played a big match, a big tournament,

he’d drop about eight pounds each time?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“That’s how intense he was. He was a demon at what he did.”

“What did he do to get himself killed?”

“So we’re finally getting there, huh? The cards are on the table? There’s, what, a

big fat secret out there, and you won’t take no ‘til you get an answer. Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe there is a big fat secret out there, but I don’t know what it is. I’m sorry, I

know I’m disappointing you, but I was young at the time. All I can say—and I’m not

saying this had anything to do with it, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. All I can say is that

my father was losing his mind at the time.”

“Losing how?” said Kassata.

Danny slumped a bit in the chair. “It wasn’t just one thing, it was everything. I’d

get up sometimes at night, I’d find him walking through the house with his gun, checking

the doors and windows. I’d ask him what’s wrong, he’d say he could hear voices outside.

I always listened—I never heard a thing. One time I heard him talking to somebody in the

living room. I went in—he was all by himself. He was talking back to the TV. He thought

the voices were people in the room. The worst time, one of the worst, somebody named

Diebenkorn or Diekenborn died. My father didn’t really know him, I don’t think he’d

even met him, but he went crazy with crying. Hysterical sobbing. I’d never seen him like

that. It made me so fucking scared.”

 “All this behavior,” said Kassata, “did you know why it was happening?”

“I thought it had something to do with my mother.”

“Things were bad?”

“I kept hoping they’d call in carpenters and have the house partitioned off, his and

hers. My mother, I loved my mother, but something was always going in with her. I

didn’t know what to think about her when I was growing up, I still don’t. It makes me

cold just thinking about it.”

Danny pulled the overcoat tighter on his lap. Again, he waved off Calvin’s help.

“Sorry, enough of this. I’m getting tired. I’d tell you a lot more about Tango if

only I knew. But I don’t, and that’s all I’ve got to say. Final word. Which means this ends

it—no more lurking around and fussing with me. I just want you to understand your

position, and mine. I don’t like coming out and talking to people. I prefer laying low. It’s

somewhat akin, I guess, to John Lennon, you know? Spends years hiding away from the

world, then he tries taking a step outside. And what happened?”

“He was killed,” said Kassata.

“He got his head blown off. So let’s avoid those situations. I’m not letting

anybody pull a Lennon on me, so please, don’t make me do something I don’t want to do.

I’m what you might call a militant pacifist. I don’t like waging war, I don’t like violence,

I don’t like street drama anymore.”

“What about those warning shots?” I said. “That’s not street drama?”

Danny smiled. Sort of. “I allow myself a little hypocrisy here and there. Just

remember, next time, it won’t be a warning.”

 >>>>>>

Kassata and I left feeling the same way. We’d just seen an intriguing and fairly

accomplished performance at the Club Trocadero. Parts of what Danny said felt true,

some less so. The stuff about his parents—very convincing. But Tango? He said he liked

Tango. He said the man was like an uncle to him. He knew how much weight Tango lost

during a match. But he knows nothing about his death?

This chapter of the story had been left unfinished.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 11 (THEN)

RUSSIAN ROULETTE
THE ALPHA AND OMEGA

According to the sign on its door, the Audubon Poolroom was open from 10 am to 10 pm

and closed on Sundays. That was a lie. To get a true idea of its operating hours, multiply

the official 12 by two and keep ‘em going seven days a week, Sundays be damned.

Technically, the Audubon was a poolroom, but it functioned more as a juke joint that just

happened to have 20 Brunswick tables on the floor and where the juking never stopped. It

was ideal for a community where many people worked overnight shifts or held more than

one job. Get off at 2 am, or get off at 8 am, you could always go to the Audubon to see

friends, find out what was going on or listen to heavy wooden radios tuned to WOV or

WADO, especially to Jocko Henderson’s Rocket Ship show. In a place where the thick

green paint covering the windows never let the sunlight in, time no longer existed.

For the regulars, though, there was a definite rhythm to the typical Audubon day.

You could start drinking in the morning, since the establishment sold under the counter

alcohol, served in Lily cups whose cone shapes rested in chrome cup holders. It looked

like you might be sipping egg creams from a nearby soda fountain. You could keep

drinking and talking and shooting pool until the afternoon, when full inebriation began

setting in. At that point you could easily buy a few black beauties or other forms of

amphetamines and stay awake through the evening hours, then once you were crashing

you could go back to drinking until it was morning again. If you wanted.

Basically you never had to leave the premises. You could go down to the

Audubon any time of day and buy booze, speed, weed, smack, Ring Dings, Twinkies,

Slim Jims, Cheetos, Wise Potato Chips, hot jewelry, fake IDs or a blow job from the

hookers who worked the stairwell in the back.

 If it sounds sleazy, it didn’t feel that way. Not when you were standing under the

two lights above one of the pool tables. As you leaned out of the darkness and into those

shafts of dramatic illumination, balancing the cue stick, bracing and steadying yourself,

you felt like the curtain had just gone up in Radio City Music Hall and you were standing

at center stage. Sure, the place stank of sweat and food and funk and stale tobacco and

cannabis smoke. But even when the seediest hustler bent over a table, he looked like a

leading actor bathed in the brightest light Hollywood could ever muster.

Tango loved the Audubon, took to it right away. He loved the lights and the tables

and the players. He loved the crowd that congregated there, the musicians and night owls

and third-rate pool sharks. He loved the conversations going on around him, people

discussing their affairs or pondering the great philosophical questions. If your own

mother calls you a motherfucker, how are you supposed to take that?

He wasn’t the only white person inhabiting the pool hall. Other honky shooters

dropped by every once in a while, and plenty of famous caucasians journeyed up to 121st

Street, especially after the Audubon’s main rival, the Lennox Game Room, shut down

when its owner found God. Mickey Mantle, Lenny Bruce, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur

Miller had been spotted at the tables, as had Burt Lancaster, Rocky Graziano, Liz Taylor

and Eddie Fisher and the gambler Jimmy the Greek.

But Tango was the only white guy who showed up to practice every day. His

celebrity status in the world of pool helped him gain acceptance, but not as much as his

vouch from Pep Hayward.

 Pep hadn’t much changed since they’d clashed sticks together at the Pennsylvania

State Plowing Contest. He was still lean all over his six-foot frame. He was still devoted

to Jesus. He was still smoking weed and would until the day he died.

“The herb dates back to mythical times,” he’d say. “It’s the alpha and omega, the

root where the meaning and mystery of Christ come together. You should try a taste some

time—it’ll clean out your soul. It’s like Brylcreem. A little dab’ll do ya.”

Bringing Tango around the Audubon was no problem, if that’s what Fishboy

wanted. Pep held Fishboy in good stead, mostly because his matches were always

integrated. Even the ones he organized down south, always black and white. Pep

appreciated the risks Fishboy was taking, financial and otherwise. In Alabama, stores

were refusing to sell Marlboros because the company had allegedly donated to the

N.A.A.C.P. This was the same state where children were getting shocked with cattle

prods, where a black man who was convicted of stealing $1.95 from a white woman had

been sentenced to death. “There are voices down there,” he said, “but not one prayer that

works.”

He also admired Fishboy’s generosity. “There’s a woman over on 118th, her son

came down with that Jerry Lewis disease, muscular dystrophy. Fishboy’s paying all her

boy’s medical bills, which are considerable, and she only had to blow him once.”

“The man’s a saint,” said Tango.

“About as close as we come these days.”

>>>>>>
Tango managed to avoid the temptations of the Audubon. He’d tried speed once before

but it threw his game off, made him lose his touch, and he stayed away from all drugs

thereafter. But there was one local lure he had no power to resist.

A kid named Calvin Crane used to wander into the poolroom on occasion, not a

bad shooter, called himself the Whoopin’ Crane. One day Calvin’s standing there in his

brand new Keds, he’s eating this miniature round of dark brown pie. Looked good.

Tango asked what it was. Calvin said bean pie, he’d bought it off a Black Muslim

up on 125th. He broke a piece off and handed it over. It was as good as it looked. It

reminded Tango of a sweet pie his mother used to bake, only that was made with white

kidney beans.

Later that day Tango took a walk up to 125th. The street was a frenetic, crowd-

clogged Alhambra bazaar of beauty parlors, barbershops, fried chicken and fried fish

stores, a Woolworth’s, clothing stores, wig stores, record stores. Down the block he could

see a big sign for Blumstein’s Department Store, and across the street the Apollo Theater.

There were hundreds of people on the street and he didn’t know where to go.

An old blind street singer was sitting on the corner of 125th and Seventh Avenue,

right across from the Hotel Theresa. He was playing gospel on the guitar, surrounded by

listeners lounging on lawn chairs. They were shouting out and talking to him, calling him

either Rev. Davis or Rev. Gary.

“I’m sick, Rev. Davis,” one man said. “How many birthdays have I got left?”

“You been saying that,” the reverend said, “for 16 years.”

Tango asked the group if anyone knew where he could buy bean pie. The blind

singer pointed his White Owl cigar to a spot 30 feet away.

 Tango saw him now. A guy wearing a tight-cut gray suit and a tiny bow tie, the

prescribed Black Muslim uniform. He was selling copies of Muhammad Speaks, the

Nation of Islam newspaper, and he had a cardboard box of pies at his feet.

His name, Tango would learn, was Larry X, and to raise funds for the movement

he sold the papers and the bean pies—25 cents for an individual, plastic wrapped pie,

baked fresh daily (said the wrapper) by the Shabazz Bakery in the Bronx.

The pie had a flaky crust and a custard filling made from mashed navy beans,

sugar, butter, milk, cinnamon and nutmeg. It was just like his mother’s pies, except for

the darker beans and the absence of the alcohol in her vanilla extract.

He was hooked. Every day, unless he was away for tournaments, he bought a

bean pie from Larry X. Always at the same place, on the corner of 125th and Seventh,

near the old blind gospel singer, right across from the Hotel Theresa.

>>>>>>
EVEN GOD MAKES MISTAKES

The only thing Tango didn’t like about the Audubon was the reason he was there in the

first place—to help Fishboy drop an ear on Johnny Kachka. He was supposed to be

contacted by someone named Diebenkorn or Diekenborn, Fishboy could never get the

name straight. Turns out it was Diekenborn. Spider Diekenborn worked as a do-anything

at the Mount Carmel Social Club over on 116th and Lex. He’d been working as Kachka’s

do-anything for some time and he thought he deserved better.

Spider thought a lot of things. He didn’t look like John Kennedy but he thought he

did. In fact he did have a kind of clean cut, Ivy League, Boy Scout look to him, which he

cultivated with Brooks Brothers suits, wingtip shoes, a snap-brim fedora with an ugly,

school-tie green and purple striped hatband. But Spider was no John Kennedy. His eyes

were too small for his head was the main thing. He’d gotten cheated on the volume at

birth, and the result was a freakish, criminal, not-enough-there expression. His eyes

looked more like gun barrels than human organs.

The first time Tango met Spider at the Audubon—a short, convenient walk over

from the social club—he didn’t like him. The guy was smiling but it was a habitual smile,

a crap-mouthed grin held together by a need to impress and control. Spider seemed

relentlessly ready for any kind of action, no matter what it was and what it cost. He

looked the way Tango felt the one time he tried speed.

Spider walked into the poolroom that day and swanked right up to Tango’s table,

acting like they were the oldest and bestest of friends. He started talking about women,

bragging on the subject.

“If my breath doesn’t smell like pussy,” he confided, “I’m not a happy man.”
 The closest his breath would ever come to pussy was cat food.

The guy talk went on for a minute or two, then Spider leaned into him and

whispered like he was auditioning for a role in a low-budget spy movie.

“Little sun,” he said. “Six to 10.”

What was this, a track tip? Tango nodded with gravity, thus fostering the illusion

that he knew exactly what the fuck was going on.

>>>>>>

Pete Hohensalza was one of Kachka’s street captains, a man so used to mug shots he

instinctively turned to the left when anyone took his photo. That night he and his wife

attended a fund-raising dinner for the Little Sunshine Teaching and Relief Society. The

group’s proceeds all went to educating the children of the local Shinnecock Indians—and

if any money was left over, to mounting a legal push to build a gambling casino. It was a

cause near and dear to Kachka’s heart, so to Hohensalza’s.

The dinner was held at the VFW Hall in St. John’s Place, a town in Suffolk

known for its chemical plants and terrible water. At roughly 9 pm, after three hours of

earnest tedium, Hohensalza decided he couldn’t wait another hour for this thing to end.

Outside, he was peeved to discover that none of the parking valets seemed to be around.

He found the keys to his Plymouth Fury hanging on the board, and while his wife waited

by the entrance, he ventured out to the lot to get his own car.

As soon as he peeled out of the space he realized he had no brakes. The Fury

barely missed a few other parked cars and picked up speed as it took the hill down to the
VFW Hall. Swerving away from the front door, and his wife, Hohensalza pounded the

car into the dead center of a cement pillar, the impact crashing his head against the

steering wheel.

“Are you dead?” his wife screamed.

“I’m hurt,” he moaned.

“Just tell me you’re not dead.”

“I’m not dead, I’m fucking hurt.”

Hohensalza told everyone that only the intervention of God had saved his life.

On the other hand, as Fishboy noted the next day, “Even God makes mistakes.”

>>>>>>

By the time Spike Diekenborn came sidewinding into the Audubon again, Tango knew

all about the car crash and what little sun, 6-10 meant. He couldn’t say for sure if they’d

tried to kill Hohensalza by cutting his brakes or were just trying to fuck him up. Either

way, it was shitty business.

Spider wasn’t troubled about the incident. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said,

“it’s so minor a thing it doesn’t exist.”

Tango took him over to the chairs on the side, away from the tables. Spider sat

with his legs crossed, arm casually thrown over the backrest, like he was chatting it up at

the Harvard Club.

“How can you do this?” said Tango.

“Do what?”
 “Sell out people you know.”

“How? For the money, how do you think how? Just like the rest of ‘em, they’re

all in it for the money. Fishboy’s paying me crazy green, so why not?”

“Is he paying you on a sliding scale? Somebody dies, you go to the top of the

curve?”

“I’m just seeking advantage, that’s all. Everybody I know is seeking some kind of

advantage one way or another. Why not me?”

Tango wanted to tell him that was bullshit, but it wasn’t. What was the original

reason he’d come up here? Money. The big gold star Fishboy promised translated as a

bigger cut of his own money. Fishboy offered to reduce his take from 40 to 35%. Tango

countered with 30. He got 30. Seventy percent of his winnings wasn’t as big as the sun,

but it was big enough. He was just as mercenary as anybody else.

>>>>>>

Fishboy always described Frank Falcovski as my fat, friendly Jew. Falcovski was one of

his bankrollers—whenever large cash was needed to finance some new enterprise.

Falcovski came through. He’d recently developed the practice of taking a walk after

dinner to lessen his weight. One evening, as he was passing by a construction site, three

men rushed out and grabbed him. They dragged him into the site, gave him a beating and

locked him overnight in a sweltering Porta-Potty.

The next day, Spider delivered a new message to Tango. Brother-in-law, around

9.
 >>>>>>

When Johnny Kachka was at the peak of his powers, he let his guys hang out at the social

club and drink for free. That changed when tight-assed Manny da Silva started taking

over. An open bar was an extravagance they couldn’t afford, he said. He also complained

about the guys eating herring sandwiches and stinking the place up. And he accused a

few of them of stealing toilet paper from the men’s room.

Consequently, the crew began frequenting McGurk’s, a bar on West 37th owned

by one of the guys’ brother-in-law. The night after Falcovski’s beat down, they gathered

at the bar to celebrate one of their birthdays. Kachka people started showing up at 8, and

by 9 the place was SRO. That’s when a fire broke out next door, in Emilio’s, the men’s

hat store. The flames quickly spread to McGurk’s, and while no one was critically

injured, the clawing and screaming stampede for the door resulted in numerous

contusions and broken bones.

>>>>>>

Every day, it seemed, new details and rumors would come shooting out of nowhere and

stay lodged in your ear. Nerves were jangled, smelling-salts were in hot demand. Despite

Caesar Abbatelli’s warning, despite the threat of a Five Eyes meeting, a new front had

opened up in the war.

>>>>>>
ALL THE WAY TO BLOOD

Tray wasn’t happy with Tango’s new role in the Fishboy universe. “You’re dipping your

toes in that sewer?” she said as soon as she came in. How did she know? “He talks in

front of me all the time when his friends are over. He talks around me like I don’t exist.

Which I hate, but at least I learn things.”

“Well, yeah, it’s true.”

“Be careful. Be careful of him.”

“Why?”

“You can’t trust him.”

“What does that mean?”

She gave him one of those looks that said I’m telling you the truth, but I’m

keeping part of it hidden. “Trust me, I know what I’m talking about, you can’t trust him.”

Tray was making two or three shopping trips to the city each week now. In fact,

she wasn’t calling them shopping trips anymore. She wasn’t calling them anything. She’d

just get a sitter for Danny and go. Fishboy was never around enough to notice or care.

Tango was keeping a full stock of gin and tonic in the apartment.

They made love that day even before she made a drink. It was satisfying but over

with quickly, the fastest time they’d clocked. He fell into a dreamy water-sleep for a few

minutes. When he woke up she was pouring gin at the bar. He could see her face in the

mirror—hurt, sad, like she was wandering through the dawn of a regretful Sunday.

“What’s wrong?”
 She didn’t say, but moments later she asked if he’d seen Fishboy’s latest fashion

accessory. He’d taken to wearing a full-length fur coat with his cowboy hat and boots.

“He looks like King Kong at the O.K. Corral.”

They started talking about the damages, Hohensalza, Falcovski, the fire at

McGurk’s.

“It’s going to get worse,” she said, “you know that.”

“I don’t know that, but I know.”

“It’ll go all the way to blood.” She stared at the glass but didn’t drink. “I hope he

gets himself killed.”

“Jesus, hard judgment. I know it’s a bad marriage, but…”

“No, it started as a bad marriage, then it got worse.”

“How much worse?”

She turned back to the bar and poured more gin. A double. Make that a double

double. “He killed my brother.”

She didn’t say that. The words had stayed trapped in her mouth.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying he killed my brother.”

>>>>>>

It happened when they were still living in East New York. She’d invited Bobby over for

dinner. At 17 he was everything she wasn’t and she loved him for it. Bobby was a good,
no, great student with outstanding marks, a scholarship candidate who’d kept himself out

of trouble. He was her opposite, her shining antidote.

They had a great time at dinner—Tray always had a great time when Bobby was

around. Even Fishboy liked her brother. He respected his intelligence, his academic

achievements, his future. The three of them laughed and talked and ate and drank—

probably drank too much—and kept chatting at the table long after dessert had been

served.

Fishboy was way, way loaded by then. He asked Bobby if he’d ever smoked a

Cuban cigar. A real Cuban cigar. No? Then let’s, as they say, repair to the study and light

‘em up.

Fishboy sat at his desk and while he clipped two of the fat brown smokes, he

asked Bobby to go to the bar and pour a couple of Scotches. As Bobby came back he saw

that Fishboy had placed a revolver on the desk. Ever play Russian Roulette?

It was supposed to be a big hysterical drunken joke. While Bobby’s back was

turned at the bar, Fishboy had removed the shells. Bobby wouldn’t know it, but they’d be

playing—if the kid had the balls to play—with an empty gun. Only it wasn’t empty. In

his sloshed stupor, Fishboy had neglected to count the cartridges. He’d accidentally left a

bullet in the chamber.

Tray was doing the dishes when she heard the gunshot. She ran to the study. The

side of her brother’s head was a webbed crater of blood, but all she could see was the

cold whiteness of his face, as if he’d been deep-frozen for years. Fishboy was still at the

desk, drunk and stunned, barely able to register what happened.

 She held Bobby in her arms until the ambulance came. She felt as if her soul had

died and removed itself from her body.

Two days later, as they were waking the body, her family received a letter. It was

from Princeton. Bobby had been accepted on a full scholarship.

>>>>>>

“I’ve never gotten over it,” she said. “Can’t. Impossible. I’ve never recovered from it,

and I’ve never forgiven him for it. I would’ve left him if Danny hadn’t come along.”

“I understand, but…he didn’t mean to do it.”

She flashed. “He didn’t mean to do it—what does that mean? He did it. If he

hadn’t been so fucked up and stupid it never would’ve happened. He got loaded and

sloppy and careless and he did it. He murdered my brother.”

This was the first time, Tango realized, she’d ever gotten angry with him.

Now he knew her. After all this time, going back to when they first met by the

backyard pool, he finally understood the fury and gall behind her contempt for her

husband. He finally understood the coiled logic behind her hatred.

She was staring at the squares of sun on the parquet floor. “That’s why I’m telling

you, be careful with him. He thinks he never makes mistakes, but he does. He’ll get

careless and carried away. He’ll come apart on you.”

“Got it.”

She shook her head, almost laughed. “What is this thing about life? You have to

watch the people you love die, then the people you love have to watch you die.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 12 (NOW)

UP A TREE
THANKS, DAD

By the way, stay away from that fucking house. Don’t ever go back there again. If

Danny’s words weren’t an invitation, I don’t know what is. Of course he might’ve been

protecting his privacy, not wanting scavengers like Kassata and myself rummaging

around the dusty mementos of his childhood. But we’d already done our rummaging

around, and except for the home movie we hadn’t found anything except for a bunch of

decaying crap. So why the warning?

The question kept hacking into our minds. Especially since he claimed he knew

nothing about Tango’s death. We’d scoured 211 Woodnut Road, Lakeland, but one thing

we hadn’t done is look beneath the surface. We hadn’t thought about spaces behind walls,

or hollows beneath the floors. How often do you hear about people renovating an old

house and stumbling across a hidden treasure, or discovering the skeletal remains of

someone who’s been missing for years? Often enough to wonder.

Ever since Danny told us to stay away, weird little itch-bugs had been infesting

our brains.

Kassata was talking about talking as we drove out to Lakeland. Specifically, she

was talking about the importance of your voice. Or her voice. “Did you know that

Margaret Thatcher’s voice was totally manufactured? She had a much higher pitch when

she started out, kind of screechy. Not very commanding. But they gave her voice therapy,

taught her to go for deeper, statelier tones. You have to do that when you’re a public

figure, when you’re talking to large numbers of people. It’s as critical as how you look.

Your voice is your auditory face.”

 The only face I was thinking about at the moment—and I found this incredibly

strange—was my father’s.

At a certain point in life you come to believe you’ve figured out your past, you

can look back with a certain amount of clarity, but there’s always something new to

learn. When I was a kid I’d hero-worshipped Tango Williams from the moment I heard

about him. I consumed every fragment of information about him I could find. I troubled

myself about his unsolved murder. Now I realized why. I’d finally made the connection.

This brilliant, dark-horse pool shooter was the father I’d never had.

Of course, Vlad the Impaler could’ve been the father I never had.

My real progenitor was the most violent, noxious, self-pitying drunk I’d ever had

the pleasure to meet. When he was around, he made a habit of beating me and beating my

mother. He’d beat us as often as he got plastered, which was all the time. Fortunately, he

wasn’t around all that much. He’d disappear for weeks, months—going where, doing

what, who the hell knows? Take a guess and you’re probably right.

What did I ever do, outside of being born, to deserve such punishment? But that

was it—I’d been born. That was my indelible original sin.

To be fair, his presence in the house wasn’t always a complete reign of terror.

Sometimes he’d sit around belching beer and dispensing fatherly wisdom to me. Like

describing in exact detail why he was convinced White Castle hamburgers had given him

hemorrhoids.

Next time I go looking for a father, I’m not gonna use Angie’s List.

What he did to me was bad. What he did to my mother was worse. Unlike me, she

was someone else before she met him. But his punches and curses had turned her into a
hushed, hesitant, closed-off woman, always in retreat. She was so afraid of spending his

money she’d wash and reuse three pieces of paper towels and make them last all day. She

was so afraid of his fists she’d only talk to me about him when she was doing the dishes,

the hiss of the steaming water and the clatter of the plates cocooning the sound of her

voice.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted to kill him so much I’d become afraid of my own

hatred and I‘d try to hide in some lonely place and pray to be spared from the burden. It

never worked. I’d fever-dream about killing him so much that at times I’d hallucinate.

I wanted to kill him as a kid. Later, after I’d left home, I wanted to kill him as an

adult. That shit never burns out of your system. When I was shooting speed and getting

drunk on a daily basis I’d think about him and feel parts of my brain going dark, reverting

to pure chemical rage. I’d think about tracking him down and killing him or killing

myself. Or both, though that seemed overly dramatic.

Happily, he saved me the trouble. One day he jumped from a ninth-story window

of a flophouse on Houston Street and spread himself wide on the pavement. I didn’t have

to kill him. True, I ended up killing someone else instead—sorry, manslaughtering him—

but still.

In retrospect, my father committing suicide was the nicest thing he ever did for

me.

>>>>>>
I THINK THAT I SHALL NEVER FIND

A POEM AS LOVELY AS A PINE

Thinking about dead old Dad made me cautious. One might even say paranoid, mightn’t

one? I didn’t want us to go barging right up to the house. My level of trust in Danny

wouldn’t cover the soles of my shoes. The property was folded in pines, and the one

across from the car was ripe for climbing. Regularly spaced branches, smooth bark, not

much dead, brittle wood. Kassata waited in the car while I laddered up. I scaled it until I

was as high as noon. There was nothing moving in the windows of the house, no signs of

occupancy, just networks of cracks in the old wood.

But there was movement of some sort in the back yard, under the shadows of the

pines. It was like seeing a bison in a cave painting suddenly come to life. I shifted

position on the branch.

Look at this, the lovely and talented Gary Tripucka, rousing his butt off a chair

concealed in the trees. Gary Tripucka, human ass-cheese carrying a good old dependable

Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun.

The tattoos on his eyelids were holding true. I’ll always be watching you.

The big man started walking toward the front, toward the car, lumbering like

something that dug its food out of the ground. How many Toledo scales did he break

when he was born? I watched as he approached the tree, gauging the size of his

construction-crew biceps. I could never take him. I had no edge here.

Except I was standing on a branch.

I waited until he was passing me by and jumped. It was like landing on the back

of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Tripucka whirled and tried to shake me off and went to bat at
me with the Mossberg. I wrapped my arm around his neck and grabbed the Glock. One

savage strike at his head was enough to make him sway and fumble to the ground.

I hit him again with the gun. Hard. And again. He let out a deep, choked wail.

Tuval throat screaming.

“You’re waiting for us to show?” I said. “Here we are.”

He fell on the ground and went fetal but I kept beating on him. I was in a tidal

trance, a vicious lava flow. I struck every part of the thick body at my feet but mostly the

bloody head. I was going to pound on it until I could see the gray bone of his skull plate.

Somebody was grabbing my arm

“That’s enough. He’s had enough.”

I looked at Kassata holding onto to me, I looked around the property. The house

was still here but the trees had all flattened out, squashed themselves into a circular

scrim, a one-dimensional piece of scenery.

Tripucka’s body was jerking on the ground. I hit him again.

I didn’t know if I was losing it or if I’d lost it.

“Stop it,” she said. “Just stop.”

I stopped. I turned away and walked back to the car. I was shivering. I was

shivering like it was 20 degrees below freezing. I was shivering so much I had to put the

hoodie over my head and wrap my arms around each other. It was the only way I could

stay warm.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 13 (THEN)

CRIMINAL NEGLECT
THE SINS OF THE FATHERS

There once was a time, way back when, when Italian-Americans who wanted

professional careers felt compelled to change their names. The musicality of such

surnames as Genovese or Luciano could invite discrimination and association with

killers, extortionists and other oily descendants of the Black Hand. You had your

entertainers, of course: Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti), Sophia Loren (Sofia Villani

Scicoloni), Bobby Darin (Walden Robert Cassato), Anne Bancroft (Anne Maria Louisa

Italiano). But Anglized disguise wasn’t restricted to show biz. The law, medicine, Wall

Street, Madison Avenue—in any profession depending on instant trust and ease of

pronunciation, Giovanni Tambasco might become John Thompson, Vincenzo Addonzio

might become Vincent Adams.

Things began to change in the 1970s, when in the aftermath of the Civil Rights

movement tolerance for other social and ethnic groups started to expand. For most

Americans, though, the pro-Italian turning point was the release of The Godfather in

1972. In the long history of cautionary American movies about the mob, The Godfather

was the first to treat Italian mobsters as sympathetic heroes. The Corleone brothers were

men who were loyal to each other, boys who loved their mother and honored their father,

crime family members who—in a radical break with Hollywood’s past—ended up in

triumph. You could root for these guys.

Besides the plot, The Godfather was made by a new generation of Italian-

Americans who celebrated their ethnic pride and left their names intact. Francis Ford

Coppola. Al Pacino. John Cazale. Robert De Niro in Part II. (And James Caan, who was

Jewish, but Jewish-American identity dilemmas are another story.)

 Outside of Hollywood, gangsters rarely bothered to conceal their backgrounds. Al

Capone, Carlo Gambino, Joe Bonanno, Paul Castellano never needed such niceties. One

exception was Tony the Weasel D’Antonguolla. His longtime neighbors knew him as

Anthony Daniels, a friendly man who’d done very well for himself in the beauty supply

trade. They were stunned to learn, after he died, that Mr. Daniels had been involved in

illegal enterprises. That back in the 1930s, according to the feds, he’d founded a criminal

organization controlling Long Island, and that his outfit was now allegedly run by his

protégé, one John Kachka.

The neighbors were shocked. Just as the Kachka crew was later shocked when a

groundkeeper discovered one morning in 1960 that Tony the Weasel’s grave had been

paved over with cement. During the night someone had taken the trouble to knock the

tombstone down, build formwork around the plot, mix an 80-pound bag of concrete in a

wheelbarrow and pour a thick slab of the stuff over Tony the Weasel’s resting place.

It was a clear, hostile affront to the memory of Johnny Kachka’s mentor. Instead

of wearing cement shoes, he was wearing a cement shroud.

>>>>>>

You wouldn’t think the Brooklyn Academy for Dickens Studies would draw much of a

crowd. But every Friday and Saturday night it certainly did. That’s because deep inside

the building’s bowels, Fishboy would set up a private, fabulously vulgar gambling

casino. So far so good. To describe, however, what happened one Saturday night would

be impossible. To talk in detail about the sudden invasion of underdressed strangers, the
shots they fired in the ceiling, the panic and confusion that ensued, the chairs scraping,

the glass breaking, the blackjack, craps and roulette tables overturned, the patrons

screaming the white off their faces and dropping to the floor—all this would be as

difficult to capture as the brutal pistol whipping the customers received before they were

tossed out and told never to come back.

>>>>>>

The call came in to Manny da Silva at 3 am on a night of sideswiping rain. Mr. da Silva?

Sorry to bother you. My name is Peter Miliband. I’m an assistant manager at the Bonne

Nuit Hotel.

“And…?”

We have a Mr. Kachka here. He collapsed in his room.

“He did what?”

He collapsed. We tried to call for an ambulance, but he insists on seeing you.

We’re sending a car.

“What was he doing there?”

I’d rather not say, sir.

Jesus Christ and his whole fucking family.

They sent a new Chrysler 300 to pick him up. Manny cursed the old man as the

car sped through wet and windy Manhattan. The Bonne Nuit Hotel was a small, exclusive

place on East 84th, a nice, discreet location to take a high-priced hooker. But Kachka
shouldn’t be fooling around at his age and in his condition. How many fucking times had

he told him that?

The Chrysler pulled up to the entrance. As Manny was getting out he fumbled in

his wallet for a dollar.

“No tipping allowed, sir,” said the driver. “Not necessary. It’s part of the service.”

The car took out of there like it had another emergency call somewhere else in the

city.

The Bonne Nuit door was locked. Manny knocked. No response. He banged.

“I’m looking for Peter Miliband,” he yelled. “I’m looking for the assistant

manager.”

Finally someone answered from inside. “There’s nobody here.”

Manny was in the middle of saying what the fuck to himself when he heard a car

proceeding slowly down East 84th. A black Chevy Biscayne, filled with men. He could

see the white collars of their dress shirts behind the wet window glass.

This was like taking a shit and then realizing there’s no toilet paper.

He ran for a cement planter squatting on the hotel sidewalk.

Electric lines of gunfire vibrated all around him, pounding the planter, rooster-

tailing the puddles on the ground, ringing with the echo effect of the rain. He was gasping

for breath and soaking his clothes as he wedged his body against the cement.

The five eternal seconds of gunshots eased off as the car moved away from the

hotel. Manny drew, raised his head and fired back. The Biscayne took off, but not before

someone pulled a trigger one last time. The bullet nicked the top of the planter and

ricocheted along Manny’s cheek.

 Days later, when he was summoned to the meeting, the gash on his face still

looked as dried and bloody as winter snot.

>>>>>>
HE’S GOT THE SEA

Enough is enough is enough is enough. The madcap antics of Fishboy and Manny had

reached their burlesque limits. The non-stop rush of violence and reprisal was

multiplying every day. The Five Eyes, consequently, were forced to act—which meant

sitting on their asses and compel Fishboy and Manny to testify and render their

consciences clean. Or at least less dirty.

Refusing to appear was not an option. The five crime barons had the power to

make their wishes fact. In a few instances they’d ordered hits on the offending parties. As

Caesar Abbatelli said, When the gangrene sets in, chop off the limb. More typically the

Five Eyes would get Scroogey and take parts of your territory away. Or they could strip

you of the whole thing. Leaving you to ponder the question, how do you make a living as

an unemployed mobster?

The meeting was held at Morgan & Sons, a warehouse on West 56th. Morgans

furnished storage facilities for wealthy New Yorkers. Its comprehensive security, backup

generators, light, humidity and temperature controls provided a safe environment for

stashing priceless

artwork, antique furniture, historical documents, rare rifles and swords, vintage cars,

cases of collectible wine.

Fishboy was feeling wounded as he walked into Morgans’ central air. Okay,

maybe he’d gone a wee bit too far in his bone pursuit of Kachka’s turf. But he didn’t

think he deserved getting questioned, lectured, undermined and overruled by the Five

Eyes. That Coasters song, Charlie Brown, kept roaming through his head. Why’s

everybody always pickin’ on me?

 A security guard patted him down (he’d been told to leave all weapons at home),

consented to his admission and went back to reading the Daily News. The headline:

Kennedy and Nixon Make Gains.

Everybody said it would come down to those two, and Fishboy hoped it would.

He could understand that kind of face-off. It was the new wave, he thought as he took the

elevator, versus the old guard. Kennedy’s men were all World War II veterans. They’d

learned to think on their feet, question authority when needed and act on their own. He’d

been there, too—scamming the system with forged papers and stolen goods, true, but

he’d learned to think fast and act faster.

In the opposite corner you had Nixon’s mothball crew, always sticking to the tried

and true. These were old-thinking guys who followed the rules, guys whose ideas were

wrapped around faded flags and whistling teapots. Nixon couldn’t do anything new, not

when he had to genuflect before our grandpa president Eisenhower and other stodgy

Republicans. Thick-headed old farts. Old men as out of touch as Kachka. As antiquated

as the Five Eyes.

Fishboy saw the roles clearly: He was Kennedy, Kachka was Eisenhower, Manny

was Nixon.

He walked into a nicotine den at the back of the building. Will you look at the five

of them there, gathering dust as they sat at a long table? Average age between them: 318

years old. This is what Kennedy would feel like addressing the social committee at a

GOP nursing home.

You had Caesar Abbatelli with his Sanka and Melachrino cigarettes, the man

rivaled in popularity only by Nikita Kruschev.

 You had Henry Korshack, an iron-eyed beast who spoke with some nasty Eastern

European accent.

You had Carmine DaVillo, whose large ears and large nose made him so ugly his

wife had to keep his photo face down so it wouldn’t scare the dog.

You had Jerry Silver, smoking a Dunhill pipe and looking like a failed lesbian,

not Jewish but Jewish enough.

You had Spoony Mascolo with the blue-white skin, always huddling in his

overcoat like being cold was his hobby.

You had Manny da Silva, held prisoner in a stiff new coat he’d probably bought

for the occasion. He couldn’t smile with that sliced-up cheek but that’s okay. Manny

never smiled anyway unless it was to his benefit.

Kachka wasn’t here. Too sick to attend.

Fishboy and Manny stood in front of the table like they were arguing before the

Supreme Court.

“When I was a kid,” said Caesar, kicking things off with all the giddy excitement

of a burned-out social worker, “I always wanted to join the circus. Now, thanks to you

two, I’m finally getting my wish.”

Caesar restated his familiar reflections about government surveillance, how the

climate had never been so dangerous and hair-trigger volatile. “It’s like the French say,

c'est la maladie du temps. The sickness of the times. The feds are watching us like

pornography, and what do you two fucknuts do? You’re parading your asses around for

any Peeping Tom in the government to see. I told you both, I personally told you both,

don’t cross the Rubicon. And what happens? You’re up to your fucking ears in water.”
 Fishboy and Manny started raising objections at the same time but Caesar

silenced them.

“I’ve told you how many times,” he said, “you got grievances, you bring them to

us.”

“Yeah, but sometimes,” said Fishboy, “you got to make a decision on the spot.

There’s no time to take it up to you.”

“So shooting at me,” said Manny, “that was a spur of the moment thing?”

“I never shot at you.”

“Your guys did. They tried to kill me.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“They came at me with extreme violence.”

“Like there’s another kind?”

“Both of you, shut up,” said Caesar. “Hoss, let’s get right to it. Did you set your

guys on Manny?”

“Nuh-uh. I’ll take my Bible oath on that.”

“I know it was you,” said Manny.

“You don’t know it was me.”

“I’ve got an ear to the ground.”

“You don’t have a fucking ear much less one to the ground.”

“Shut up,” said Caesar.

“I got a question,” said ugly Carmine DaVillo. “Fishboy, what the fuck did you

do to Tony the Weasel’s grave? It’s a desecration to who he was.”

 “I have never, ever, ever desecrated Tony the Weasel. I would never do a thing

like that. And if I ever did, it was an accident.”

“I don’t know who to believe,” said Carmine, “you or the facts.”

“That’s a problem we all have,” said Caesar. “We hear a lot of I didn’t do this, I

didn’t do that, but we know all this shit started with you.”

Henry Korshack said something that Fishboy didn’t understand, but somewhere in

the accent he caught greedy, back-stabbing and no right to invade.

“That’s right,” said Caesar. “We never okayed any ambitions or expansions for

you. You got a lot of talking to do.”

Well, no problem there. Fishboy dredged up his old anti-Kachka arguments. The

man was letting his territory go to seed. He’d gotten soft, weak and tired and wasn’t

producing income or chasing opportunities the way he should. “And you can say it’s just

him, it’s his problem. But it’s not. It’s everybody’s problem. What he’s doing or not

doing is gonna have considerable impact on the future of this organization. He’s leaving

the door open to outsiders. We can’t let him do that. It’s a shame, it’s a waste. It amounts

to criminal neglect.”

“You say he’s not pursuing opportunities,” said Jerry Silver. “Like what?”

“The niggers, for one. They’re a built-in market for smoke and powder. The

coloreds are a prime investment opening and he’s ignoring them. And I say that, I’m not

a racist. I like the niggers. I would never shoot a nigger unless I had to.”

“We’re aware of your sympathies,” Caesar dryly noted.

“There’s been mistakes,” Manny said in defense. “There’s been lapses, I’m not

denying that, but I’m trying to fix it.”

 “At your rate,” said Fishboy, “30 years we should be seeing some real money.”

“Stuff it,” said Manny. “I’m just asking for a chance.”

“See that’s another thing Kachka’s done,” said Fishboy. “He’s let everybody who

works for him turn into a nitwit.”

“Stop it,” said Caesar. “Don’t get cunty on me.”

“I’m just saying Kachka’s done some true damage. Anything any of his own

people do is gonna be incompletional. It’s gonna be the last fart from a dying corpse.”

The room went silent. The Five Eyes exchanged glances, then looked down at the

table. Spoony Mascolo even stopped shivering for a moment.

“Hoss,” said Caesar, “Johnny’s got the sea.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’s got the sea, you know?”

“Like he’s got the ocean? I don’t get it.”

“No, the letter C. He’s got the C.”

“You mean the Big C? Cancer?”

“It’s bad. It’s just…really, really bad.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“It’s all right, you didn’t know.”

“I wish I spoke another language, like French or something, so I could say how

sorry I was.”

“Can I ask a question?” said Manny. “How does a fucking idiot like Fishboy get

to be where he is? How does a fucking frigging idiot like this get to have power?”

“It’s perfectly easy for an idiot to have power,” said Caesar. “Look at politics.”
 “He’s a demented idiot,” said Manny. “Look at my face. He’s a lowdown,

bullshitting, scumsucking, motherfucking, out of control lunatic.”

“Sounds like a job recommendation to me,” said Fishboy.

“Manny,” said Caesar, “for all his obvious faults, Fishboy’s got a basic point

about your territory.”

“I know,” said Manny. “It’s not doing well.”

“We’ve gotta agree with you. It’s doing badly.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more, but let me say something.” Manny spoke with

passion and flared nostrils. He pointed out that before he got sick, Kachka had been a

good performer. Better than many. Things had slipped, yeah, but they could be turned

around and he, Manny da Silva, was just the man to grab the wheel. He’d gone through

many pains and troubles and heavy nights trying to keep things together, and he believed

he’d earned a shot at getting it all the way fixed.

It sounded to Fishboy like a speech he’d rehearsed in the bathroom.

“I’m not a shithead,” Manny said with eloquence, “and neither is Johnny. He

doesn’t deserve to have indignities heaped on his head. If he made errors, he’s just a

person. Like all of us. We’re not shitheads, we’re just people. That’s all.”

“That’s true,” said Caesar. “But that’s what shitheads always say. Point is, the

both of you are at fault here. I tell each of you to lay things low, and this is how you

answer me? You’re both grown-ups still using training wheels. You both go around

vigilantying each other and that’s no good. It builds its own momentum. It creates its own

need. It’s like what’s going on in China. They got a rat problem, so they tell the people

you got to kill so-and-so many rats each month and bring us the tails as proof. So the
people clean up the rats, only now they don’t have enough tails to meet the quota. So they

start breeding rats in order to make the monthly count. Now we got a rat problem.

Somebody’s got to put the brakes on this thing. My colleagues and I are going to confer.

Behave yourselves.”

The Five Eyes retreated to a spot well behind the table. They talked quietly

among themselves, sloshing through the gray matter. Each man held his hands behind his

back, head bent forward, body slightly stooped in concentration. They looked like five

Groucho Marxes.

Fishboy and Manny went to opposite ends of the room, pacing with canine

impatience, never looking at each other. Fishboy noticed black scuff marks on the floor,

probably from Manny’s cheap shoes.

It felt like the ice age was moving in.

The Five Eyes returned to their seats. Fishboy and Manny took their penitent

positions.

“We’ve all been around,” said Caesar. “We’re all men of the world. We know

how things work. You want a clean house? Then you dump yesterday’s garbage. We’re

giving you two a rare opportunity. We’re telling you to work this out between yourselves.

You’ll meet, you’ll come to a compromise, you’ll act like fucking adults. If you don’t,

your territories will be awarded to other people. Ipso facto.” He let the words hang in the

air for a moment. “Any questions?”

None.

“Personally,” said ugly Carmine, “just so you know, I don’t hold much hope for

this. You guys don’t have the maturity. I think it’ll take some amazing occurrence to
make this work. It’ll have to be like that movie, what’s it called? Miracle on 42nd

Street.”

“I always try to be an optimist,” said Caesar. “I think if you boys can relax, take

your time, clear your heads, you’ll find a way. If you want to survive. I suggest you sit

back somewhere, get some coochies, some painted women, and do nothing but take it

easy. Dolce far niente—live the sweet life. Then get together and meet and sweep this

shit off our table. It’s what you have to do. I always believe if you can’t get along with

other people in this line of work, you might as well get a fucking job.”

>>>>>>

Fishboy went to an employees’ bathroom at Morgans, trying to recover from the setback.

Grimy light bulbs, clouded mirrors, soap scum dating back to the Civil War. A fittingly

grim setting.

He felt like a blind child scraping the bottom of a bowl with her fingers, hoping to

find more food.

He was supposed to make nice? Come to an understanding? Let bygones be

bygones?

He saw a flash of gold in his imagination, a relic slipping away. It was the Holy

Grail flushing down the toilet.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 14 (NOW)

BLOOD DEMANDS BLOOD, AND IF IT

CAN’T GET BLOOD IT TAKES THE MIND

SELF-REFLECTION IN A SHATTERED MIRROR

I work for Real Story. I’m a writer and editor. I’m a professional journalist—it says so on

my corporate ID card. And yet I couldn’t describe to Kassata what manic-depression

feels like. I couldn’t tell her how you’re lost in a city that’s never been mapped, looking

for an address that no longer exists. How you feel like a godless, unconsecrated freak,

visionless and unredemptive. How the mosaic of your brain produced electrical storms

that rip across the ground from zero to north and batter the skies of a larger Earth. How

confusion brings on confusion, rage begets rage, how your anxiety makes you anxious,

how your sorrow makes you sad, how you grow to hate your own hatred. I tried to tell her

all that. My words were as clear as ice but their meaning never came through. My streams

of unconsciousness didn’t come trippingly off the tongue.

I told her about the diagnosis I’d gotten in prison. I told her about my father. I told

her about the time when I was young and stoned and madly in love with death—until I

came close to death and decided, man, this is not for me. When the prison psychs told me

I was manic-depressive, it made sense to me. If you shuffled my story the right way, you

could see the shadow history running underneath. The symptoms of manic-depression all

sounded familiar. They were things I’d tried not to think about for as long as I could

remember—a sure sign of the truth. I was manic. I was depressed. I was the hyphen in

between.

But those are just facts. All that psychiatric smegma can’t capture what it’s like

when every color hurts your eye, when every light blazes like the sun on an artic plain.

When every thought you have crisscrosses and contradicts every other thought in some
yes, I mean no—no, I mean yes chaos and you’re left with two unshakable beliefs: This

disease will go on forever and I’ll bring it to an end.

Words can’t snare what it’s like when backward parallels and retrograde

symmetries carry you back to childhood and its first revelation: Blood demands blood,

and if it can’t get blood it takes the mind.

I tried to tell this to Kassata but the message got lost in transit. All my ice-clear

language? It frosted over.

But she’d seen me in demented action, she’d stopped me from crushing

Tripucka’s skull. Now she knew I had a deathwish, which always includes in competing

degrees a need to kill and a need to kill yourself. What can I say? So I won’t be around to

brighten the lives of future generations. Shame, maybe, but as Groucho Marx said, What

have future generations ever done for me?

Kassata was sitting on my couch, one leg tucked under the other. Her voice was

hoarse and teary. She was doing her diligent desperation, trying to keep herself from

tearing apart.

“You scared me,” she said.

“I scared myself.”

“Why did you want to kill him?”

“He had a gun, he was walking your way. That’s all I could see and it was good

enough for me.”

“But what you did, it wasn’t human. It was inhuman.”

“It wasn’t inhuman. It was unhuman.”

 Everything in the apartment was lit with this Museum of Natural History lighting,

like very object was supposed to be gleaming with talismanic meaning.

“I’m sorry I can’t explain it to you,” I said. “Whatever comes out of my mouth is

corrupted. I’m mystifying it, then demystifying it, then remystifying it.”

“The important thing is to keep this all in perspective.”

“When people say that, it’s never good.”

“But you have to. You have to stand back from it and look at it objectively,

proportionally.”

“Just keep repeating that to yourself. I’m sure it’ll solve everything.”

Kassata was so upset she wasn’t even drinking. Instead she was eating peanut

butter from the jar with a spoon. She offered me a bite.

The smell of the stuff was making me sick.

The lighting in the living room was bothering me. It was very pungent.

I couldn’t decide if I was hot or cold.

“Maybe this was a mistake,” she said.

“The peanut butter?”

“Trying to find an answer. Maybe there’s a reason my family never knew, no one

ever knew. Maybe it’s the biggest mistake of my life.”

“Second biggest.”

“What’s the first?”

“Hooking up with me.”

She stared. “You want to end it? Break up?”

 “Maybe we’d be better under different circumstances. Without all the insanity, the

pressure. Maybe we’d be better when life hadn’t been repeated and the moon was rising

over Jerusalem. I have no idea what that means.”

She put the peanut butter down but pointed the spoon at me. “I don’t know much

about manic–depression or bipolar disorder or whatever words you use for the name. And

when I say what I’m about to say I’m not saying it to judge you. It’s your mind.”

“Bet your ass.”

“But it seems to me—and again, my knowledge of these things is gappy—but it

seems to me you could really use some professional help. I know, professional help, it

covers a multitude of sins. But sometimes you just have to do something about these

things. Things like this. And Quinn, I mean, seriously, you know this better than anyone

else. You nearly killed that man if I hadn’t pulled you off. You know that. At least I hope

you know that. Cause if you don’t I don’t know what to think.”

Here we go. She was kicking into one of her panicky word-swarms, her thoughts

scattering in frayed material and loose threads. It was like she was trying to redeem every

silence she’d ever encountered.

“I work with someone, he was having problems, I told him you’ve got to get

professional help. I told him that once, twice, three times a day. Tedley Mott, I know you

won’t say anything. But he found a good doctor, a psychiatrist. The man really helped. I

remember he had a funny walk, I won’t do it for you but honestly it was a riot. But he

helped. That’s the point. He helped. I can give you his name. Tedley won’t mind. I don’t

know what he can do for you but he did a lot for him.”
 Kassata was speaking at normal volume but it sounded to me like she was

shouting at the stratosphere.

“Shut up,” I said.

Yeah, I did say that but it didn’t feel like I said it. The two blunt words were more

like a line I’d read in a prepared script. I was just following my cue. The words didn’t

come from me. Or they came from a not-me me.

“Wait,” she said, ignoring me. “Wait. I can’t give you the doctor’s name. He’s

dead. I just remembered. Heart attack. Not even 50. Tedley had a fit. But there are other

doctors, I’m sure there are. I’ll ask around. There are plenty of people at ESPN who’ve

seen psychiatrists.”

“Will you shut up?”

“I’m not going to shut up when there are God knows how many qualified

professionals in town. There have to be. Who cares how they walk? It’s what they can do

for you that matters.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

I got to my feet and turned for the door.

“What’re you doing?”

“Walking out.”

I couldn’t take her pitchforking tongue. Couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t put up with it.

The flesh is weak and the mind is weaker.

“You can’t leave,” she said. “You live here.”

>>>>>>
On the loose in Hell’s Kitchen. Yee-hah! A fine opportunity to take a carefree stroll

around town, go on a jaunty nighttime rampage. The skies were hazed with a fog the

color and texture of pipe smoke. It made the darkness trapped behind it kinetic and wild.

I’m walking, moseying along, happy as a dying lark. I see my face warp and pass

me by in a broken window. Self-reflection in a shattered mirror. That’s a pretty good

definition of manic-depression.

I was pissed but it had nothing to do with Kassata, nothing to do with Tripucka,

nothing to do with my father. Nothing to do with nothing. It was just free-floating rage

that couldn’t attach itself to any one thing and it made me even angrier.

Maybe Kassata was right. Maybe I need help. Maybe I’m not facing reality. But

reality, I don’t know, it seems to be missing something. I just don’t find reality

convincing.

So my response to Kassata would be the same as Tyrone McAdams’. We were

both 7 years old when Tyrone decided to protest his folks’ refusal to let him play Little

League by refusing to move his bowels. By the fourth or fifth day all he could say was,

Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make me laugh.

I’d traveled three blocks to—actually, I don’t know, three blocks somewhere,

when I realized I’d left the Glock in the apartment. Do I really need it? Yes—the way I’m

feeling I might need to shoot myself.

I turned back. It was 1:08 am. Three seconds later the night turned to blinding,

paralyzing, noontime white light and my head lit up with hydroelectric pain and flaming

jets of Alamogordo fire that could be seen on other planets.

 It was like something out of Genesis. Only instead if let there be light—which

would’ve made sense under the circumstances—God’s voice was saying we’re fading

back to darkness, pal.

>>>>>>
ILL WILL

The pain was coming in waves, bursts, pulsing down from the heavens and straight into

my head. The atmosphere was so thick with it you could reach out, rub your hands and

find your skin stained with pain. I was lying on a planked wood floor. In a basement. An

unfinished basement. That’s nice. I spent a lot of time as a kid hiding out in the cellar.

Unfinished basements are good places to dream.

I could see pipes fat with insulation running overhead. Then dressers, bureaus,

night stands. Window screens diagonally stacked against a wall. King Tut’s surfboard. I

saw the tall chest where we’d found the home movie. I was in 211 Woodnut Road,

Lakeland. A.k.a. 211 Main Street, Hell.

A lumpy white ghost’s head was materializing in front of me, a head thickened by

bandages. Tripucka, idly picking his nose. Rolling the booger in his fingers until it

formed a ball he could flick away.

He noticed me coming to. “You wanted to get inside again?” he said. “Here you

go.”

Dig him, larging it up, putting on a show. He was taking great comfort in the

suffering he’d laid on me.

“This is the third time I’ve had to tangle with you,” he said. “That’s just about

three times too many.”

“Thank God for your Christian sense of forgiveness.”

“I’ve got a lot of ill will about you jumping me, as you can imagine. It was pretty

ferocious. It took my breath away.”

“If only.”
 “It caused me a lot of agitation, a lot of consternation.”

“So we’re even?”

“Don’t get stupid on me.”

“Little too late for that, isn’t it?”

Tripucka leaned into me. “You know what you do when you pull the shit you

pulled? You give me grief, which gives Danny grief, which gives grief back to you,

which gets everybody caught up in a whirlpool of grief.”

So let the grand jury indict me. I tried shifting to relieve some of the pain, but no

matter how I moved my body still hurt.

“I’ve got a hunch,” I said, “and it’s just an uneducated guess, but I’ll bet Danny’s

not happy.”

“What did he tell you? You try to come back here, that’s it.”

“No more warnings.”

“No more warnings.”

“Should I assume he was serious?”

“You’ll get a chance to see how serious. I’m gonna go see him right now, see how

we proceed. I’m locking you down here. Pace yourself—don’t move.”

Tripucka turned to go, but stopped and picked up a paper bag.

“I forgot,” he said. “Danny’s been reading up on you. You used to be an addict,

an alcoholic.”

“Still am, technically.”

“This is for you.”

 He took something out of the bag and placed it on the floor. A six-pack of Sam

Adams and a bottle opener.

“Knock yourself out,” he said.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 15 (THEN)

I COULDN’T HAVE NOT DONE THAT ANY BETTER MYSELF

SNIP, SNIP

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to eat shit to stay alive, you

swallow your pride along with the feces. That’s the conclusion Fishboy and Manny da

Silva came to when they realized there was no way out of the meeting mandated by the

Five Eyes. Calls were made, proposals discussed, neutral ground explored. They agreed

to meet at Colombera’s, one of the oldest and least respected restaurants in Little Italy.

Everything was set. Peace was at hand.

The day before the summit, however, the tiny-eyed prick Spider Diekenborn came

strolling into the Audubon Poolroom. The Belvedere Barbershop, he whispered to Tango.

Somebody in there.

The message hit Fishboy like a telegram from God telling him the world was

about to end. The barbershop was located in the lobby of the Belvedere Hotel, just around

the corner from United Sports Enterprises. A lot of his guys—Eddie Erlanger, Hank

Mazzetti, et. al.—would stop in for a shave and a trim. Fishboy called each of his

captains. Have you noticed anything suspicious about the Belvedere? Not a thing, they all

said. Their only complaint about the shop was the new barber they’d gotten in. Guy was

awful. He’d trim on a crooked line. He’d take off too much, or not enough. He’d leave

hair sticking up at the crown. They should revoke his license.

Eddie Erlanger was tasked with picking him up. After some persuasive

questioning, the new barber admitted he was no barber at all. He’d been using a forged

license. The tearful truth was, Manny da Silva had sent him in to spy on Fishboy’s crew.

He was what Kachka’s guys called a fish crawler—someone who goes undercover on

Fishboy.
 “You see what I’m dealing with?” Fishboy said. “You see the no fucking good

shit he throws in my face?”

“You got every right to get browned-off,” Caesar Abbatelli said as they stood in

front of the pinball arcade on 42nd. “You got every right to put the meeting off. But not

forever.”

The Five Eyes, said Caesar, were giving them a grace period to clear things up.

But if history had taught the old men anything, besides the persistence of head lice, it was

that people like Fishboy and Manny couldn’t go staggering and weaving through the

streets without coming to an understanding.

“What’s to understand?” said Fishboy. “He’s a devious little shit.”

“You said he didn’t have an ear to the ground. So he’s got an ear to the ground.

Like you don’t.”

“I’m gonna give him a beating.”

“That won’t do any good.”

“It will for me.”

“Hoss, it’s all up to the two of you. In the fullness of time we expect you two to

make the peace. Do it—pay us some respect. If you don’t, there’ll be shit to pay.”

>>>>>>
MY HEART HURTS

Lately Tray had been wearing a new perfume. Tango liked the light, haunting fragrance

of it but he wasn’t so sure about the name. Plus Que La Vie—More Than Life. It seemed

darkly appropriate for her, for someone who was trying to grab more than life could give.

He couldn’t say exactly when she’d changed. It might have started with the story about

her brother, or maybe there was no single transition point, but Tray was getting more

anxious and angry and not only afraid but afraid of being afraid each time he saw her.

Today she was acting like a dawn that didn’t want to turn into day. He almost

didn’t want to tell her but he had to: “I’ll be away for a few days. I’m playing in New

Orleans.”

“I know,” she said, voice throaty. “He told me he’s going with you. He wants to

get out of New York for a while.”

One drink down and she begins blaming herself for everything, linking together

some strange causes and effects. If she hadn’t been tramping around as a P-girl she never

would’ve met Fishboy. If she hadn’t met Fishboy her brother would still be alive. If her

brother were still alive she wouldn’t hate Fishboy. If she didn’t hate Fishboy she

wouldn’t have gotten involved with Tango. If she hadn’t gotten involved with Tango they

wouldn’t have to be sneaking around like rats in the sunshine and he wouldn’t have to be

doing dirty work for Fishboy.

“Quite an accomplishment,” he said. “You really think you did all that?”

“It’s all my fault. I’m the reason my heart hurts.”

After some rank foreplay she decided she wanted it rough. She wanted to be

spanked, she wanted to be tied to the bed, she wanted to be forced to fuck him. When she
came her body shook apart like the separate flakes in a snow globe. He gave her what she

wanted, but it wasn’t what he really felt.

>>>>>>
UP IN THE AIR

The conversation started pleasantly enough. What would happen if the atomic bomb

struck New York City? “It would be a catastrophe for business,” said Fishboy, sitting

next to Tango on the plane. “Gambling would drop to unsustainable levels. Loans, drug

distribution, kickbacks too. Prostitution might hold its own, but the rest?”

It was a fine topic, and one, Tango thought, his seatmate should’ve kept

exploring. But it was not to be. The catacylsmic collapse of crime networks faded as

Fishboy kept guzzling the little airline bottles. (At least he wasn’t drinking to excess on

an empty stomach. He’d bought and sucked down a Dole fruit cocktail—the stuff was

being served for dessert—straight from the can.) Nuclear disaster was too happy a subject

to engage his increasingly morose and introspective mood. Not a great development for

Tango. Fishboy, who rarely talked about his home life, had decided to commiserate with

Tango on the long flight from LaGuardia to New Orleans.

It probably meant something that he couldn’t pronounce the simple, four-letter,

one-syllable name Tray without slurring. Tshray was his most common variation. She

didn’t love him. Or if she did, and at one point early on she must have, she was only

going through the motions. She loved without any real affection.

He never addressed the question of whether he loved her.

Tango had to push himself to show some interest. “If memory serves, isn’t that

about average for a marriage?”

“This isn’t your average average. This is, I don’t know, something inside her,

something that has nothing to do with me. It’s like hell frozen over. It’s cold but it’s still

hell.”
 “Ever think about leaving her?”

“Trade in for a younger model? Nah, the new warranties suck.”

Fishboy paused while a chunk of America passed by below. When he spoke

again, he almost sounded sober. “I think she’s fucking around on me.”

Tango managed not to jump out of the plane. “What makes you think so?”

“A lot of times she’s not at home lately. She thinks I don’t notice but I do.”

“Have you asked her where she goes?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I probably wouldn’t believe her.”

>>>>>>
BACK AT THE RIVER

The tournament was taking place at Sumnmy’s, a poolroom located above a bucket o’

blood in the French Quarter owned by the local organization guy, Carlos Marcello. A

greasy and gloomy spot, Summy’s was the kind of place where smoke hung thick and

swirling even when nobody was around. At the moment it held the thick and swirling

form of Fishboy as he supervised the preparations. Everything was coming together.

Willie Mosconi had checked in. Earlier Fishboy had seen New York Fats and his wife

arriving at the hotel, his wife carrying their luggage as usual. Fats had a terrible dislike of

manual labor, outside of cracking a rack. If their car got a flat, it was Mrs. Fats who had

to work the jack. Change tires? Fats always said. I’d rather change cars.

One of Marcello’s guys came up the stairs and told Fishboy he was supposed to

introduce someone to him. The someone turned out to be some weasely, licorice-eyed

hustler who looked like he sold Spanish Fly on the side.

Marcello’s guy introduced the weasel as Jack Rubenstein.

The weasel corrected him. “No, not Jack Rubenstein. Ruby.”

“Ruby Rubenstein?” said Fishboy.

“No, Jack Ruby. Ruby for Rubenstein.”

Ruby said he was an old friend of Carlos’, meaning he’d probably met him once

in 1948. “I went to your hotel first but they said you weren’t there.”

“No, I’m here.”

“Okay, you’re here, I’m here in town with people from Dallas, I own a club there.

They’re oil people and their wives. They’re high rollers. Very high rollers.”
 Ruby said this like their rolling ability had been in dispute and he’d just produced

the winning argument.

“You’re like their tour guide?” said Fishboy.

“Very much. They’re looking for a taste, you know, some big-name excitement.

They’d appreciate it very much, and I’d appreciate it too, if I could bring them to the

match as my guests.”

“But you’re not invited.”

“You know what I mean.”

“These people of yours, you guarantee they’ll spend money?”

“They’re dying to spend money. They’ll spend any amount anybody could want.

They’ll spend money like, if you’re gonna do something? You have to do it all the way.”

>>>>>>

The bleachers set up in the poolroom were quickly filled by the most serious degenerates

in New Orleans, everybody coming out to see Willie Mosconi, New York Fats, Tango

Williams and the hometown favorite, Herbert Summy. The room, in fact, had been

named for him, though Summy was frequently barred from the premises for various

offenses. The crowd was served by girls in black leather shorts and black velvet tops,

loosely worn to ensure the requisite number of tit slips. A contingent of homosexuals sat

in one corner. They were tolerated by the townsfolk and especially by Carlos Marcello,

who counted on them to patronize his specialty bars and leave much cash behind.
 Minutes before the match began the crowd was standing room only, and that

wasn’t counting the rowdy conga line of high-rolling Texans. The gentlemen cowboys all

wore hats and boots just like Fishboy’s, though none of them was Italian or wore a full-

length fur coat. The oil women all wore permed hair and pastel dresses and more pearls

than Audrey Hepburn would ever dream about in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Their chaperone

was Jack Ruby (Fishboy still insisted on calling his Ruby Rubenstein) who was trying to

act as cool as a 77 Sunset Strip character. His main job, however, was to make sure their

liquor orders were expedited. These people might be from Dallas but they drank like

Russians.

In the middle of the room Willie and Fats were warming up. They hated each

other. Willie saw pool as a patrician sport, a form of sublime art.

He didn’t play common pool—he played refined billiards. And he dressed the part.

Willie never competed without an impeccable blazer and pocket square, freshly pressed

pants and spit-shined black shoes. He was so outstandingly genteel he could drive into a

new town at dawn and be elected mayor by dusk.

Fats would get thrown out by noon. His dislike of physical exertion was matched

by his aversion to decorous grooming. Fats took pride in his slovenly appearance, his

rough and tumble personality, his gluttonous eating habits. To him, pool was pool.

“What’re you sniffing at?” he said as they practiced.

“It might be time to burn your underwear again,” said Willie.

If Willie was champagne and Fats was beer, then Herbert Summy was that unique

combination of wine and rubbing alcohol known as Sneaky Pete. He looked like a

homeless bum (which he often was) who’d been in an auto accident and gotten stitched
up by some shaky-handed surgeon. You’d think his clothes would have to be sprayed

with Glade (which they often were) to make him presentable, and that included the

tasseled red tube he always wore on his head—a Shriner’s hat he’d once stolen from a

conventioneer. He’d say things like I feel like a monkey left to drift at sea. Code? No, it’s

just Summy.

The locals loved him.

Some of them even bet on him to win the 9-ball race to 100. Less sentimental

New Orleanians spread their wagers among Willie, Fats and Tango. Either way, there

was a lot of money on the room—even more than Fishboy had anticipated. For that we

can thank the visitors from Dallas. They weren’t just gambling on the match. They were

gambling on every shot. The men, jabbing at the air, would put hundreds of dollars on

Fats’ break. The women, with that northeast Texas lilt in their voices, would bet hundreds

of dollars on Summy missing the 3-ball. And after every shot they’d all award the players

with a raucous round of hootin’ and hollerin’.

Bit of a distraction, especially when Fishboy’s suspicions about Tray have been

running tremors through your earth. Tango’s head had been rumbling ever since the

flight. Now he was going too hypo to keep his concentration steady. He was restless at

the table, indecisive. He scratched his first shot, coming nowhere near the 5-ball. It was

like he couldn’t control his cue, his hands, his body. Next time up he sank two balls but

blew an easy shot on the 10-ball, the thing missing the side pocket and coming to rest

aimlessly on the rail.

“I couldn’t have not done that any better myself,” said Summy.

“Tango’s not taking his One A Days,” said Fats.

 Willie had. He was circling the table with the grace and mastery of a ballet

dancer, getting off rapid-fire shots, as he always did, with complete finesse. The oil-

money shouting had no effect on him. Before Tango knew it, Willie had jumped to the

lead with 18 points, Fats trailing with 12, Tango and Summy lagging behind with 4 each.

“I can’t take these gizzard-sucking Texans,” said Summy. “They’re putting me

beside myself.”

“Then you’re in bad company,” said Willie.

“Willie’s always cool,” said Fats. “He’s got ice for balls. Comes in handy if your

beer’s getting warm.”

By the time Willie was closing in on 40 points the betting had swaggered up to

$1,000 a shot. Of course the howling drunks weren’t going to let it stop there.

“When I said make it interesting,” one cowpoke drawled, “I meant make it

interesting.”

So the bets went up to $2-3,000 per, each call setting off maniacal cackles and

hectoring jeers.

Who would ever guess that New Orleans’ rummies, lowlifes and waste products

would be the best-behaved group in the house?

Every Dallas scream landed like an electric devil in Tango’s brain. He couldn’t

play a thing out. Something had gone wrong with his game, something had gone wrong

with him. He was showing a real gift for turning wine into water.

Then the humidity began percolating in. Carlos Marcello didn’t believe in air-

conditioning his bars. His theory: Warm people drank more. Even a fan wouldn’t have
helped the poolroom. The place was so packed no breeze could ever make its way from

one end to the other.

The swampy, below-sea-level dampness heightened the tensions at the table and

lowered the level of playing. The shooters started short-arming their strokes, botching

shots, committing fouls.

Except for Willie. He was as smooth, accurate and unruffled as ever.

“Can’t you even fucking sweat?” Fats said peevishly.

“No need,” said Willie. “It’s all in the cue stick. The stick is the only thing

between you and the white ball. As long as you believe in the stick, you can overcome

anything.”

Yeah? Well Tango had his favorite cue—a Panamanian Tiger model, with a

maple grip and a shaft made of dark red cocobolo wood. But he still couldn’t find the

touch to his game. Okay, not strictly true. He did go on a seven-ball run, but that was just

a temporary lapse into confidence. His missed the next shot and crapped out on his next

two turns after that.

He was so empty he felt like he’d lost his shadow.

The humidity had a mixed effect on the Texans. The betting had leveled off in the

$3,500 range, but the sticky air had riled them up and raised their voices to a numbing,

shrieking roar. They sounded like a chorus of mules who’d been set on fire. It was an

exhausting noise to hear and hear and hear. Tango felt like someone was pouring warm

pea soup into his skull.

 Even Willie was starting to wilt. He was showing effort and strain as perspiration

stains bled through his collar. He went on an unconvincing four-ball run before missing,

then came up empty on his next break.

“That’s not very flattering,” Fats taunted.

“You’re losing your magic,” Summy said after a gross burp.

Willie wheeled on Summy, looking into his eyes. “You promised you wouldn’t

drink for this match.”

“I never promised that,” said Summy. “If I did, I’d be lying about it to you right

now.”

One of the waitresses shouted at Jack Ruby, accusing him of groping her.

“What groping?” Ruby said. “I’m just trying to squeeze your tits.”

There was no way out of this for Tango. The table, the crowd, the room—

everything was hot and fogged and crawling with worms. Thousands of wriggling

worms, waiting to feed on the dead.

He was pinned here, caught, snared in a net. Here it is, all around him, the strands

sticking to every part of his body. Here’s the web that’s trapping him.

But where’s the spider?

How do you explain these things? How does a simple, basically metaphorical

question like where’s the spider pry your eyes loose from what you’re seeing and allow

you to see the same things in a shining new light? How does the punctuation of your

words suddenly turn into a series of !!!?

 He was back at the river, thinking about the lonely gray dawn light, breathing it

in, slowly, deeply filling himself with that lost and silent air. He was tapping into the

meridian, the pathway, the bloodline to self-hypnotic concentration.

He had a shot—the 7-ball across the length of the table to the 3-ball at the other

end, aiming for the far left pocket. His stick hit the cue ball with a good, solid, controlled

sound. The cue ball smacked the 7, the 7 traveled to the 3, the 3 shuttered between the

edges of the pocket and fell in.

Tango cleared the table and won the next rack. The betting picked up again,

creeping to the $4,000 mark and hopping right over it. Willie still held the lead with 72,

Fats with 58, but Tango had worked up to 47 points, leaving Summy at 36.

He turned on Tango. “You been laying back on us,” said Summy. “You’ve been

goddamn snookering us.”

“He just started cold is all,” said Fats.

“I think he likes playing from behind,” said Summy. “I think it’s dirty pool.”

Fuck you, Summy. Tango was rolling. His break shots were as clean and powerful

as the swing of a wrecking ball. He went on a seven-ball run, fouled out on a shot—focus

on what you’re doing, not on what you’re not doing—then sank eight straight balls and

pushed past Fats, 71-69.

“He’s putting me in the boneyard,” Fats moaned.

“He’s suckering us,” said Summy. “I swear it on my mother’s memory, may she

rest in peace. Which she will soon as I get her body out of the basement.”
 Willie wasn’t letting the target slip away. He drilled down despite the sweat in his

eyes and ran his lead up to 86 points. Tango pulled to 79 before he choked on a 5-6

combination. The wagers shot to $5,000 a ball.

Laying it all on the line, Willie swiveled into one of his trademark drop-drop-drop

runs. He made 13 balls in a row, psychically guiding each shot with little half-squats until

the ball landed in a pocket. He had 99 points, one shot to go. All Willie had to do for the

win was bounce the cue ball off a rail, kiss the 9-ball and nudge it into the far right

pocket. It was an angle and trajectory he’d handled thousands of times in his life.

But not this time. He touched the 9-ball exactly where he wanted, but in the four

measly inches it had to travel to the pocket the 9 just died in the middle. It seemed to lose

its momentum in the soaking air. Willie banged the butt of his cue stick on the floor in

frustration.

Tango took over. He heard someone put up $10,000 that he couldn’t overcome a

20-point deficit. Mosconi would win. Probably a good bet, except Tango was shooting

like a sniper in a dream. He went on a Willie-worthy run—pocket, pocket, pocket, seven

points, nine points, 11 points.

The room went silent as he dispatched the next nine balls. He and Willie were

deadlocked at 99. Now other people were wagering 10 grand on Willie. Good reason.

Tango was facing a tough backcut shot. The cue ball was right in front of him near a side

pocket. The 9-ball was on the opposite side of the table. His only shot was to bank the 9

off the rail at just the right angle to send it spinning back across the table and into the

pocket. Just the right angle was the problem. Because you’re not facing the pocket, your
visual judgment can be thrown off. The angle you think you need can be a lot larger than

the angle you really need.

As Tango raised his stick the moment went white. He heard the cue ball strike the

9, heard the 9 bump off the rail, heard the 9 skidder over felt and rattle around the pocket

before it fell in the hole, heard his stick clatter on the table as he dropped it in winner’s

disbelief.

A raucous opera rocked the room. The oil people immediately pulled out their

bankrolls and started paying off or collecting their bets. Win or lose, what’s a little cash?

The entertainment value was worth it.

Willie whacked his favorite cue stick against a leg of the table, shattering it to

splinters. Fats grabbed a drink, sat in a corner and didn’t speak for another 27 minutes.

Summy burst into a state of highly personal protest and began hurling balls and smashing

the overhead lights—a display that got him barred once again from the premises.

The Texans began filing out. They’d all had a good time. What’s next, Ruby?

Still not believing what he’d pulled off, Tango was thinking that maybe there was

a way out of this. Sleeping with Fishboy’s wife, spying on Fishboy’s enemy—maybe

there was a way he could come out of this alive.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 16 (NOW)

NO, THIS CAN’T BE CHAPTER 16

A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

There was no mirror in the basement, and not much light to see one even if there were.

But if there had been some kind of reflective surface, what would I look like? A heroin

addict in dazed withdrawal? A psychiatric patient coming out of his latest round of

electrotherapy? A death-warmed-overish bum on the skids? A human open wound? A

pathetic recovering alcoholic staring at a six-pack of beer?

I couldn’t take my eyes off the bottles of Sam Adams Tripucka left behind.

Interesting approach he was taking. Let me get myself drunk and humiliated and easy to

handle before he came back to kill me or take me where I was going to be killed. Let me

embalm myself before death, save the mortician time. But why bother with beer? I was

already messed up on my own. I was a minute away from dementia. Letting me drink was

as unnecessary as giving an enema to a goose.

What did I do to deserve such treatment? Outside of fame, riches and immortality,

my goals were modest. Why was this happening to me?

You know, excuse my devil may care attitude, but maybe I should open the beer.

Maybe I do deserve to die drunk. I never listened to warnings. I never paid attention to

sage advice. People were always trying to teach me to avoid mistakes. But I preferred to

learn by suffering. So now I’m going to suffer to the ultimate degree. Maybe it’ll be good

for me. Maybe I can learn and profit by my death.

Am I making any sort of sense? Does this sound logical? No? That’s okay, my

whole life has been an argument against logic.

Stuck in the basement. Stuck in this friggin’ shithouse of a basement in this

friggin’ shithouse of a house. Who was it I talked to about the basement. That’s right,
myself. I was wondering if I could get out of here before Tripucka came back to dust me.

I never got an answer. Well, now’s as good a time as any.

I managed to get off the floor and stand myself up. My body felt like a gigantic,

swollen, oozing toxic mushroom. The places where he beat on me hurt. The places where

he didn’t hurt.

The basement could’ve been a glen in a night forest, moonlight streaming through

the high windows. Cold, still, eerily lit—this is where the souls of the dead are taken.

I climbed the stairs like an arthritic sleepwalker and grabbed the door handle. Of

course I knew it would be locked, but if you keep your expectations low—sometimes

very low—you never can tell what might give. I jiggled the handle, I yanked, I pushed, I

pulled. In this case, even no expectations would’ve been too high.

How about those lovely spectral windows? I dragged one of the discarded

dressers over to the wall and climbed on top. No, the windows were all jammed from

years of rust and corrosion and layers of paint so thick they looked like icicles frozen

down the sides.

I was so depressed I couldn’t even enjoy my depression.

I sat back on the wood planks of the floor. Just me and the six-pack. Stuff looked

good, loaded with soothing benefits. The beer was putting a hold on me. I felt as drawn to

it as the earth and sun to the solstice. I could feel the electric trembling in my temples, the

epileptic vibration, anticipating the soft and sickening moment when I decide to give in.

And there’s always a moment of decision involved, no matter what your addiction. The

urges might feel overwhelming—it’s a disease, it’s genetic predisposition, whatever—but

there’s always a moment, however millisecond brief, when you consciously decide I’m

going to do it.

But why worry about drinking? Too complicated. Just kill yourself instead.

Follow in your father’s flying footsteps.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to commit suicide by jumping out of a basement

window. Especially when the windows won’t open.

Forget jumping. You’ve got six glass bottles sitting in front of you. Break one and

slash your wrists.

I kept looking, staring. My head was pinned in that direction. But I wasn’t looking

at the beer or the bottles. I was looking at the opener Tripucka had thoughtfully tossed in.

It was a church key opener—you use one end to pop a bottle cap and the other to punch a

hole in a can. There was a metal triangle at the tip of the can end with a sharp point for

puncturing tinplate tops.

Or for scraping away layers of paint as thick as icicles.

>>>>>>

It must’ve been around four in the morning when I climbed out of the window. I was

quite pleased with myself. I’d completely borked Tripucka and Danny’s plans to do me.

On the other hand, what do I do now? Call Kassata, explain what happened, tell her

where I am. But as I discovered, I’d not only left my Glock back at the apartment but also

my phone.
 Much as I hate to come late and leave early, I walked away from 211 Woodnut

Road. I hobbled along roads on my aching legs. In the dark, the trees all looked like they

were sheathed in scrap iron.

I’d walked for a Biblical seven years, though it was probably closer to 15 minutes,

when I came to downtown Lakeland, a dull and senile village. Nothing was happening at

this hour except for the buzz of the traffic light transformers. Lakeland didn’t hold much

curb appeal for me until I found a LIRR station and what must’ve been the last remaining

phone booth on Long Island.

As I dropped coins and dialed Kassata’s number, I rested my other hand on the

glass. I saw something I’d never noticed before. My hand—the veins, the tendons, the

texture of the skin. It looked just like my father’s hand.

>>>>>>
GETTING IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR

I tried my best to reassure Kassata. “It’s not as big deal, really, nothing to worry about.

I’m just losing my mind.”

She was baffled and strained as she drove. She looked like someone who’d been

circling calendar dates for a day that would never come. “That’s really good to hear. I

always needed a fucking irresponsible out of control nutjob asshole. I just didn’t know it

until now.”

“You knew what I was. You researched me. You knew I was manic-depressive

when you first called.”

“I thought it was over.”

“It’s never over.”

“I thought it was in remission.”

“Well, not that I’m a licensed professional or anything like that, but I think it’s

back.”

“Don’t get stupid on me.”

“Too late for that.”

We argued the length and breadth of the LIE. Did I have any idea how worried

she’d been tonight? Yes, considering that I’d been trapped in a basement and waiting to

die, I could see how a person might worry. After bickering for another 20 minutes we

reached the point where we both were saying the same things, they just sounded different.

Or was it the other way around?

Eventually we exhausted each other out. We went quiet for a few moments. I still

had things to say but I’ll be damned if I could remember what they were.
 “Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“At least you got back in the house. You were there. Did you find anything else in

the basement?”

“No I didn’t find anything else in the basement. I was too busy trying to…”

That’s when it came to me. Exactly when nobody was expecting any fresh

insights, especially from me, one quietly arrived. It was the floor, all those wood planks

on the floor. The floor made no sense. The basement was unfinished, used only for

storage, for memories. No upgrades or improvements had been made since the Great

Wall of China’s official grand opening. So who would go to the time, trouble and

expense of laying down a planked wood floor in a place where nobody ever goes?

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 17 (THEN)

HE’S AS GOOD AS DEAD. EVEN BETTER

THE VIEW FROM BELOW AND ABOVE

Eddie Erlanger, the street captain who’d gotten rid of the fake barber at the Belvedere

Hotel, was looking forward to an evening of peace and stimulating conversation. He

found plenty of the latter at Desmond’s on West 51st. Everybody in the bar was talking

about what everybody else had been talking about all day. An air traffic controller at

Idewild had spotted seven unknown objects on his radar last night following an unusual

flight pattern. Thinking he was seeing a Soviet sneak attack, he was about to call the Air

Force emergency number when he made a visual sighting of the aircraft flying over the

swamps of Jamaica Bay. Each one of the seven was giving off an incredibly bright

orange light, as bright as 10 Venuses, and they were all darting and mosquitoing around

the sky in a way conventional planes never could. It was all over the news.

The U.S. Weather Bureau said the sightings were probably the result of

temperature inversions, whatever the fuck they were, but most people in Desmond’s and

the city at large believed they were UFOs.

Asked his opinion, Eddie Erlanger disagreed.

“It’s a government conspiracy,” he said, sipping his Dewar’s. “They’re doing

secret tests on advanced types of military rockets. Whenever anybody happens to see the

evidence, they subliminally encourage people to think it was something from outer space.

It’s good cover. They say things like temperature inversions, which everybody knows is

bullshit and they know everybody knows it’s bullshit. They don’t come out and say so,

but they want people to believe in UFOs.”

 Eddie’s remarks prompted a variety of responses, all of which were cut short

when two cops walked in. At least they were dressed as cops. They looked more like a

pair of characters out of Dick Tracy, Sunday-comix tough guys masquerading in uniform.

“Eddie Erlanger?” one of them said as they approached him at the bar. “Please

come with us.”

“What do you turdbirds want?”

“You’re under arrest.”

“Suck ween.”

They each grabbed one of his arms. “Just come with us, no problems.”

“You’re taking me in? On what charge?”

One of the cops picked up his Dewar’s, dropped the glass and let it smash on the

floor. “Disorderly conduct.”

That was the last time anyone saw Eddie Erlanger.

>>>>>>

Ten hours later, Fishboy seemed to be watching himself worrying in his own office. He

was there but he wasn’t there. He was looking down at himself, watching this solitary

figure go through some molar-grinding pacing, watching himself wonder what happened

to Eddie Erlanger. This somewhere-else feeling, Fishboy reasoned, was the blast effect of

Eddie’s disappearance. He’d been AWOL for almost half a day now. If Eddie was being

held somewhere, someone should’ve made contact and stated demands. But nothing had
happened. Except the hours passing by and stalling into forever. Fishboy could only

come to one conclusion: Eddie Erlanger was sailing across the river Styx.

At the same time he was watching himself, he could hear FDR’s voice in his

head. FDR standing at the microphones during his first inaugural address, telling the

nation and the world, We have nothing to fear but Manny da Silva.

He had calls to make. He had to get a hold of Tango, tell him when you’re going

out to LA this time, do not stay at the Biltmore. Fishboy had just realized the Democrats

were holding their convention at the same time. The Biltmore would be total

hellzapoppin’ confusion. Tango wouldn’t be able to prep for the Ventura County

Tournament.

But first he had to call Caesar, tell him and the other Five Eyes that Eddie’s

disappearance and probable death could not go unanswered. It’s a matter of honor, pride,

moral necessity. Manny da Silva and whatever was left of Johnny Kachka were going to

get scrummed.

He dialed Caesar’s number. After three rings the operator came on. This number

is no longer in service.

Sons of motherfucking bitches. He knew exactly what this meant. The Five Eyes

had gone to ground. With the government watching them—much in the same way he was

watching himself—they’d been driven into hiding by Eddie’s fate. They knew a captain’s

blood had been spilled and they were washing their hands of it. There were huddled

together in the toilet, and they’d stay there while the two scavenging savages, meaning

him and Manny, fought it out by themselves.

 Well fuck them. What do you say to such abandonment? What do you say to such

wholesale cowardice? What’s that thing Ralph Kramden is always saying on The

Honeymooners? You’re a regular RIOT, Norton.

Fishboy was watching himself thinking now. Thinking maybe it’s time to get out

of town again. Go to LA with Tango, follow the ox carts west. Form a plan, figure out a

way to strike back at Manny, then come back to New York and walk the streets once

more with your dick held high. He could see himself doing that. Easy.

>>>>>>
THE BEST TIMES TO DIE

Tray didn’t want to make love. She didn’t have to say so—Tango could tell by the

floating, detached, end of the world look in her eyes. Her whole body was a semaphore

for no. Even when he went to kiss her, just to say hello, she pushed away from him.

She didn’t want to make love. She wanted to drink, and she wanted to talk. About

her husband.

“He’s just going off the edge,” she said. “Past few days, past week, ever since you

came back from New Orleans. He’s really locked in on insanity.”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s talking to me.”

Strange enough, but there were other, more disturbing symptoms.

• The other day he came running out of the bathroom with his dick hanging out of

his fly. He said the gardeners working outside were hitmen in camouflage. They’re trying

to take me, he said. He was in such a panic he didn’t even have time to zip up.

• Fishboy was convinced the stairs in the house were crooked. The steps weren't

plumb. There was an angle, a weird tilt to them. He measured each one with a level,

rulers. Then he did it all over again, certain there was a mistake that had to be corrected.

• He’d bought an outdoor water fountain. Carved granite, multiple spouts, very

classic. But he wanted to install it in the garage. Tray asked him why—no one can see it.

I know, he said. That’s the beauty of it. It’s all mine.

• Danny found him in the backyard early one morning, staring at the sky. He said

to Danny, You see where the sun’s coming up? Where it looks like blood spreading over
the horizon? That point, right there, that’s where the true east begins. He scared the hell

out of his son.

• Yesterday he told Tray that, after giving the matter some considerable thought,

he’d decided that summer and fall were the best times to die. That’s when the people who

love you are most touched by your death. That’s when they’re most emotional.

Was he including Tray in that category? Because she was cataloguing his

breakdown in a cool, aloof voice. Like she was breathing her words through ice.

“There’s a lot happening with him,” Tango said. “Eddie Erlanger, Manny da

Silva, the Five Eyes.”

“I know.”

“We might be part of it too. He thinks you’re seeing somebody.”

“He doesn’t care.”

“I’m not so sure about that. We’ve really been walking on fire.”

She stepped toward him, grabbed his chin. “Let me look at you. Don’t turn away.

Let me look.”

“Why?”

“It’s not us. It’s something else.”

“Like?”

The expression in her eyes was as targeted and inescapable as a depth charge.

“It’s my brother. It’s revenge for what he did to my brother. Fate is punishing him for my

brother’s death. I know it is, I’m sure of it. Every night, fate is slowly strangling him in

his sleep.”
 >>>>>>

WELCOME HOME ADMIRAL DEWEY, HERO OF MANILA

Credit where credit’s due, Fishboy had been right about the Biltmore. Why else would he

and Tango be running in a stumbling clump through an underground service corridor of

the hotel? He’d been right about all the frenzy and politicking—not exactly relaxing.

What he hadn’t quite predicted was that Adlai Stevenson’s supporters would suddenly

turn into the mob at Frankenstein’s castle. And that in the middle of the riot a guy

wearing one of those ugly Emilio’s hatbands would pull a gun and start shooting at

Fishboy and set off a shrieking, shoving, centrifugal explosion of panicked people.

“He finally did it,” said Fishboy. “He finally did it.” If his eyes were dilated any

wider you could fire bullets out of them. “He finally came after me. Well not no more. I

can tell you that. This will never happen no more.”

They’d been scrambling toward the garbage smells of the outside Dumpsters and

could see sunlight seeping through the cracks of a steel door. A workman had left a

toolbox by the exit, probably taking off when he heard the gunshots.

“How did you get here?” said Tango.

“What difference does it make?”

 “How did you get here?”

“A cab.”

Tango picked up a screwdriver and a pair of pliers and swung the steel door open.

Silver-white sunlight came sheeting down on them. Everything outside was

sparkling with pain.

Fishboy shielded his eyes. “I hate this town. I hate the fucking light of this town.

That’s why they started Hollywood out here. Old film stock, they needed light a hundred

times brighter than anywhere else.”

“Keep going.”

They hustled through the parking lot, looking behind to see if the shooter was

following. People were bolting from the Biltmore all around them, scattering with their

Kennedy, Johnson. Stevenson and Help Us, Jesus signs.

“It was coming out in dribs and drabs before,” said Fishboy. “Now he puts a hit

on me? People don’t like to die.”

“I noticed.”

Tango found what he was looking for. An old Chrysler wood-paneled station

wagon, the windows left open to fight heat build-up.

“Get in,” he said.

Using the screwdriver, he began prying out the pot-metal socket for the ignition

key.

“What Manny’s doing?” said Fishboy, completely oblivious to what Tango was

doing. “It’s gonna backfire on him. It’s like something I heard about in the service. When

they liberated the concentration camps? All the Jews? They gave ‘em as much food as
they could find. But the Jews weren’t used to it. Their intestines had all shriveled up.

Thousands of ‘em died because the Army gave them too much to eat. You could look it

up to when it happened.”

With the socket finally cleared, Tango shoved the pliers inside and yanked on the

starter. The engine turned over.

“He can send all the little helpers after me he wants,” Fishboy said as the woodie

pulled out of the lot. “Doesn’t matter. He’s as good as dead. Even better.”

>>>>>>

For reasons known to no one, least of all him, Fishboy felt he could find some sabbath-

quality peace at the poolhall in Semi Valley where the tournament was going to be held.

“Where does he get off thinking he can take me out like that?” he pondered as

they drove up the 405. “He must be schizo. Demented. Totally deranged.”

“Probably is.”

“Of course he is. No doubt about it. Totally bughouse. There’s no use even

talking about it.”

“Right.”

Which didn’t stop Fishboy from talking about it.

The poolhall was located in a neighborhood of bingo halls, check cashers and

auto-repair shops. Fishboy decided to forego the billiards parlor when they passed a bar.

He needed a good few stiff ones, he said, to settle himself down. The bar looked right to

him.
 Why this should be was another mystery. The place was a greased-fogged dump,

an outhouse for lost souls. Mostly male, one would gather. A sign on the door said No

Women In Pants Allowed.

It was called the London Tavern, a sister establishment, no doubt, of the Semi

Valley Tavern in London.

They parked the stolen woodie around back and entered the dim lighting and

restroom vapors of the bar. Fishboy, limping in with his fur coat, cowboy hat and boots,

didn’t elicit much reaction from the few shadow-mouthed patrons. They gave him a

glance and resumed the slouches that marked them as loners.

A banner over the bar, apparently an original, said Welcome Home Admiral

Dewey, Hero of Manila.

The bartender looked like a bulldog wearing a blond hairpiece. He was reading a

newspaper spread out on the counter, and he managed to pour two Vat 69s without taking

his eyes off current events.

Sitting at a table, Fishboy wondered if he should use the long-distance phone and

call New York, talk to Hank Mazzetti or Sid Dallet, see if any other attacks were taking

place. But when he realized the cord on the pay phone wouldn’t reach over here, he

dropped the idea.

“Someone standing outside me,” he said, “might think I’m getting what I

deserve.”

“Maybe,” said Tango, adjusting the pennies under the legs that held the table

steady.
 “I’m not a nice guy. I’ll be the first to admit the thing. I think like my organ of

niceness never fully developed. But I’m not the worst either.”

“No.”

As the Vat 69 and the ones that quickly followed began forming waves inside his

skull, Fishboy took a heavy dip into nostalgia. He started talking about Johnny Kachka.

Now that the old bastard was dead, he could say a few nice things about him.

When they first met, this was way back in the days when Fishboy was breaking

into the biz, he kind of liked Kachka. “I recognized something about him. His bullshit

was good. It was almost as good as mine.”

And Kachka’s organization, when you think about it, wasn’t always so

incompetent. “Back when he could still make his nut? He was doing an okay job.

There’re some say the highlights of his operation were the best 20 minutes anybody ever

spent.”

Fishboy remembered that Kachka had this habit. He’d always comb his hair

before going to the bathroom. This, of course, was when he had hair. “I asked him once

why do you keep doing that? He said, what if I die on the bowl? I wanna look

presentable.”

One day they were at some sort of dinner with a bunch of the older guys, all

withered-up old men. Drooping bodies, worn-out faces, sick-looking skin. “I said I don’t

want to end up looking like those fuckers. He said, how do you think they got that way?”

Eventually the fond memories faded off. Tango wanted to ask about the things

Tray had mentioned, the crooked stairs, the water fountain in the garage, the gardeners

disguised as hitmen. But you don’t know any of that, remember?

 “What’s been going on with you?”

Fishboy stared at him. “Besides somebody trying to kill me?”

“Before that. Lately.”

It took a long time, and several more sips of scotch, to get an answer. “Sometimes

you get caught up in things, things you don’t particularly want to happen, but along they

come and there you go. You can’t stop them, you can’t put up any resistance, you’re just

rolling along in the sweep of the shit.”

Fishboy expounded on the theme for a number of minutes and during that time

didn’t give any indication of what he was talking about. He was gone drunk.

Tango thought a rousing cup of caffeine might help. He asked the bartender if

they had any coffee for his friend. The bartender went in the back and returned. They

were out of coffee. All they had was tea.

“Tea?” Fishboy yelled from the table. “What the fuck do I look like? Tea?”

He ordered another Vat 69 instead.

“What I’m saying,” he said, “it’s like sometimes you walk through a door and

you’re in this hallway you didn’t even know was there. Where am I going? You don’t

know but you keep on going because you can’t help it, you can’t stop. You’re just caught

up in it and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just what is. It’s like somebody you

love dies. What’re you gonna do about it? There’s nothing you can do. The pain is so

deep, it’s so there, there’s no way to resist it. It just becomes part of your life.”

His voice had gone down to a near-whisper. There was none of the usual bluster

and braggadocio about it.

“Sounds like you’re being very specific,” said Tango.

 “I am.”

“Who’re you talking about?”

“My son.”

“Danny? Danny’s not dead.”

“Davy. I’m talking about Davy.”

Tango didn’t say anything at first, as if asking a question would make the whole

thing vanish. But he had to.

“Davy?”

“Davy, David. I never talk about him, but I’ve never stopped thinking about him.”

“What happened?”

Fishboy was paying unusual attention to his glass. He seemed to be going through

some severe internal struggle.

“I was 14 years old,” he said, “a real fuck up. Literally, I guess. I got a girl

pregnant. She had the baby, named him David. She never asked me about the name. She

wanted nothing to do with me, but fuck her. Again. He was my son—no one’s gonna

keep me from my son. I put myself in there. I saw him every chance I could. I gave her

money all the time for him. That’s when I started stealing shit, scamming people. That’s

when I started washing my hands in muddy water, to get money for him. To make sure he

grew up okay.”

He took a drink. When he put the glass down he’d jumped a decade away.

“He joined the Army when he was 18, probably to get away from his mother.

Didn’t matter, I was proud of him. I was hoping Davy’d do better in the service than I

did, stay away from ripping things off. Which he did, he stayed away. They sent him to
Korea, Kumsong. Patrolling the Kumsong River. The Chinese attacked. They were using

these Soviet tanks, T-34-85s. He got hit by one of the 76 millimeter guns. They said he

died right away. A few hours later, that same day, the U.S. signed the armistice. The war

was over. He was 19.”

Tango tried to breathe. “When was this?”

“July 27, 1953.”

It was like he’d told Tray, the summer and fall are the best times to die. That’s

when the people who love you are most touched by your death.

“Does Tray know?”

“She thinks he’s the reason I spoil Danny. To make up for Davy, to make amends

for his life. I’m prone to think she’s wrong. I’m doing with Danny what any father would

do. I want him to grow up strong and happy. I want him to learn things, I want him to be

broad. Do I want him to grow up to be like Davy? Yeah. Davy was a good kid, a good

man. He was one of the few people I could ever trust. Why wouldn’t I want Danny to

grow up like that?”

Tango finally understood something. That day when Fishboy thought he saw

Allen Funt and started flipping out about hidden cameras, that day when Fishboy first got

him involved in his business, he’d said a strange thing. I trust you like a son. Now Tango

knew what he’d meant. He hadn’t been talking about an abstraction and he hadn’t been

talking about Danny. He’d been talking about a real person. He was talking about Davy.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 18 (NOW)

I LOVE LIFE. I’M JUST SICK TO DEATH OF IT

I WANT TO REGISTER A COMPLAINT WITH GOD

I might be going out on a limb here, and scratching my ass on the leaves, but I was sure

something was buried under the basement boards. Something or someone, a person living

in the Lakeland house well after death. We had to find a way to get back to the crypt and

start digging. Meanwhile we had minor matters to attend to, like avoiding Tripucka. I had

a feeling he’d notice my absence in the house and come looking for me. We were going

to make a quick stop by my apartment, grab our necessities and go somewhere where

Tripucka’s GPS wouldn’t find us.

“There’s my place,” said Kassata, negotiating the Midtown Tunnel exit.

“He could get your address—not safe. I’d say a hotel in the city or a hotel on the

island.”

“You decide, I don’t care.”

“A hotel on the island.”

“You made the right choice.”

It was almost dawn by the time we parked on my street. A rumor of the moon was

still hanging in the west. I was back home after a manic-depressive hiatus. Top item on

my To Do List: Do something about myself. Either I was gonna get better or I was gonna

die, but I wasn’t gonna stay this way.

I thought it was odd to find my apartment door open. Not wide, only by a few

inches, but still.

“Did you forget to lock it?” I said.

“I thought I did. I pressed the button.”

“You’ve gotta turn the latch on the handle too.”

 “Next time you walk out on me you can lock it yourself.”

In the street light everything inside looked all right, except for the man facing

away from us and teetering on the outer half of the window ledge. I know he wasn’t there

when I left.

I turned a light on. Holding the frame of the open window, he worked himself

around to look at us. He was a young, skinny guy with 10-push-up arms, sweat-plastered

hair and blended eye makeup.

I’d never seen him before.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“Sorry, is this your apartment?”

“It is.”

“You’ve got a nice place. Little dusty, but…”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of Janice Garodnick’s. She lives down the hall?”

I think I knew her. Wore a lot of faded jeans and sweaters.

“How come you’re not jumping out of her window?”

“I didn’t want to be a bother. I was leaving her place, walking to the elevator, I

saw your door open, nobody home. It was like an opportunity.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tito.”

“I’m Quinn, and this is Kassata.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “Hi.”

I edged a step closer. “Tito, are you suicidal a lot?”

 “I’ve thought about it on several occasions.”

Kassata also took a step. “Are you depressed?”

“I don’t think so. I love life. I’m just sick to death of it.”

“Why don’t you come down,” I said, “we can talk about it. I’ll make some

coffee.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather jump. I want to talk to God.”

“And say what?”

“Register a complaint. See if I can get a refund or something. There’s just so

much…emptiness in the world. Everything is so empty. I mean not me, but everything

else. You’ve got all these conspiracy theories, browser crashes, bad movies, mixed

martial arts, Barbie dolls, Satantic symbols, 1970s wrestlers, network outages, subway

smut, testicle-eating fish. It’s like where’s the culture at?”

Tito and I belonged to the same club.

“You’re right,” I said, “there’s a lot of emptiness. There’s not much to hang onto.

We’ve killed off a lot of gods with modern life. But we haven’t killed them all.”

“I don’t know,” said Tito, “maybe it’s not the gods. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’ve

been walking around too naked.”

“That’s a metaphor,” I said, “right?”

Kassata moved in some more. “We can help you. What you’re doing, what you’re

trying to do, this isn’t something we’re not used to. We know there’s hope for you.”

“It’s very kind of you to lie to me, but I’ve heard it all before. If I’ve heard it a

hundred times I’m low.”

 “But you haven’t heard it from us. You haven’t heard it from me.” She went right

up to the window and pointed past him. “Look at that view. Isn’t that spectacular?”

Tito glanced at the Manhattan skyline. “I have no complaints.”

“Of course you don’t, but you have to ask yourself, do you never want to see a

view like that again? Because when you say you’ve heard it all, I know what you mean.

It’s true. Everyone’s got a diagnosis. But what about a cure? Right? Where’s the cure?

Believe me, there are a lot of us who think we just can’t go on. We just can’t make it. We

remember the old days when things were better, when we all ate cereal and everyone was

happy. At least we should remember it. People these days, their memories don’t go past

breakfast. But there are a lot of people out there who feel like this. Look at them. Bakers,

musicians, clothing designers, investment bankers, TV producers, auto mechanics,

software engineers—even real-estate brokers, there’s no accounting for it. They all feel

like they can’t go on, and I can prove it. I definitely can prove it. Whether I can prove it

to you is another story, but I’m hoping you’ll give me the chance.”

Tito stood up there listening to this word tsunami with his mouth formed in a

perfect, completely befuddled O. He looked at her, then he looked past her and said, “Oh

my God.”

>>>>>>
SAY YOU DIDN’T SAY IT

Most of us, no doubt, would make the same remark if a large man with a turban of

bandages and a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun walked through the open door. Gary

Tripucka can have that effect on people.

I looked for my Glock. It was over on the other side of the room, next to my

phone, exactly where I’d forgotten them.

Tripucka couldn’t help but noticing the man perched in the window. “What’s

this?”

“His name’s Tito,” I said.

“Who is he?”

“I really don’t know.”

Tripucka sadly shook his head. “The life you lead.” He closed the door behind

him. “I hate interrupting the inmates, but business calls. Danny’s made up his mind. He

wants it done.”

“Done as in…”

“Done.”

“What’re you gonna do, kill all three of us?”

“Looks like one of you’s almost there.”

“That’s the thing,” said Kassata. “We can’t stand here and let him jump. We have

to talk him down.”

“Why? Suicide’s not the worst crime in the world. Or is it?”

“I’d rather he didn’t,” she said.

 “Well why not? I was watching this news anchor the other night, the one with the

hair? There’s a new study out. Most people are gonna die long before they think.”

“Don’t tell him that,” she said.

“It’s the truth.”

“I know, but don’t tell him that.”

Tripucka shook his head. Disbelief. “What do I care what I tell him?”

“I care.”

“Then why’re you conning the man? There’s a lot of angry sickness going around,

you know that. It can wear you out complete. So why wait? I say jump.”

Too much for Kassata. “Say you didn’t say that.”

“I said it.”

“Say you didn’t.” She took a step toward him. “Say you didn’t say it.”

Tripucka pointed the shotgun at her. “Worry about your own ass.”

“Just say it. Say you didn’t say it. Say it.”

Tito, largely silent up to now, broke out in hyena laughter. It sounded like

something he’d been nervously trying to suppress, and the result of the attempted

suppression was sudden, scary hysteria.

Tripucka swung the gun at the window.

I grabbed what I could. A lamp, smoked glass with a heavy metal base, that I’d

bought at Lampedooza. I never liked the thing anyway.

Pieces of glass and dust jumped in the air as I drove the lamp into the back of his

head. He wobbled, stunned and staggered. Two more shots at his bandages and all I had
left in my hand was the metal base. They don’t make lighting fixtures for combat

anymore.

I went to take another swing—there had to be a skull somewhere under the

wrapping—when Tripucka whirled around and knocked the base away from me with the

gun. The clack of metal on metal sounded like fuck. The base fell and went spinning on

the floor.

I grabbed the Mossberg barrel with both hands. So did he. We forced each other

to circle around as we grappled with the gun. We were doing a hiss-breathed dance, a

flatfooted carola.

He won the contest. He was bigger, stronger, and when he suddenly shoved the

Mossberg straight into me I lost my balance. We landed in a pile together, him on top

pinning me down, pressing the gun into my chest with his. Tripucka let the barrel go and

gripped my throat with both hands. I started to choke but he killed the reflex by

squeezing tighter and cutting off my air. I could feel the blood clustering in my head,

trapped. I could feel my face going purple.

I pulled my hands away, trying to use the floor as leverage. My fingers brushed

against something hard. The metal lamp base.

I couldn’t get a full swing in this position but I got enough momentum to draw

blood on the bandages. I hit the white target again and again and again, my arm moving

with sick angry speed. I felt his hands go numb around my throat but I kept hitting him,

like something inside me was fighting to get out.

“Wait,” Kassata yelled. “Quinn, wait.”

 Wait for what? Tripucka was kneading on my throat now, frantically rubbing like

he was trying to scrub a shadow away. I kept beating on him until the bandages were

soaked with pornographic blood.

“Will you wait the fuck?” said Kassata. “You’re going to kill him.”

“So the fuck what?”

I wasn’t trying to kill him. That would be too good for him. I was trying to

destroy him. I was going midnight crazy on him. I was going deliberately, methodically

insane.

Tripucka’s hands suddenly went weak and he started breathing rapidly,

uncontrollably. He was hyperventilating, Tears began to form in his eyes but he closed

his lids before they had a chance to fall. He collapsed on top of me. It was over.

I rolled him off me and felt for a pulse. There was nothing to feel. He was gone,

exactly the way nobody drew it up.

I realize that killing someone in front of someone who’s trying to kill himself isn’t

usually the recommended therapy, but it seemed to work. Tito climbed down from the

ledge, slowly, like his body had been transmuted into ghostly ether. There was no

romantic wish-fulfillment in the corpse on the floor.

He stared at Tripucka, stared at me, stared at Kassata. “You were right,” he said to

her. “People don’t remember anything these days. They can’t remember past breakfast.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 19 (THEN)

ANYTHING CAN BE REDEEMED

CRY ME A RIVER

Spider Diekenborn, the Judas Iscariot of the Mount Carmel Social Club, had provided

Fishboy with some excellent information. No, very excellent information. Via Tango,

he’d passed along the name of Manny da Silva’s latest inamorata. The unfortunate

woman was Leonia Bradley, a hooker who lived in a crummy apartment on West 65th.

Manny would make a poon run almost every night, and although the shitdrawers was

always accompanied by his bodyguards, he was keeping a fairly regular schedule.

Fishboy was floating on waves of vengeful joy.

He’d had Hank Mazzetti’s people watching the apartment, the visits and Leonia.

“You won’t believe how big a girl she is,” said Mazzetti. “He likes some meat on

the bone.”

“Doesn’t matter how fat she is,” said Fishboy. “Her pussy still works.”

“You know why I bet he likes her? I hear he likes getting his balls licked.”

Fishboy grimaced. “Both of them?”

Despite such unsavory details, nothing could flatten Fishboy’s carbonated mood.

He had a surefire, knockout way to get to Manny. He was planning it like a military

operation.

The details:

Leonia’s neighborhood was not the best in the city. In fact, parts of it were

already being torn down by the Rockefellers to build some enormous performing arts

complex. Whatever, a number of empty stores were blighting West 65th, including one

diagonally across the street from the love nest. Mazzetti’s people could easily break into

the place, hide themselves inside and watch as Manny and his armed entourage arrived.
Once they were inside the tenement, someone would set off a fire in the back. Manny’s

guys would come running out, choking on smoke and confusion. As Manny followed,

he’d be gunned down like a dog in the street.

It would be a just retaliation, Fishboy thought, for Manny trying to pop him in

LA.

Hip fucking hip hooray.

Fishboy could hear the pending applause in his head. This was a splendid idea,

conceived by a splendid individual (him) and carried out by splendid men. Somewhere,

an orchestra was playing the music from West Side Story.

Everything was royally ready, except for one element. Who was gonna start the

fire? Fishboy wanted the matchmaker who’d torched Tony Eterno’s auto parts factory.

The arsonist, who preferred to go nameless but whose name was Lyle Jackson, had done

a fantastic job. The factory had gone up in instant flames, teaching Tony Eterno, who was

actually Johnny Kachka’s go-to arsonist, a thing or two about arson.

Unfortunately, Lyle had fled the state to escape the headlines, and his contact had

been Eddie Erlanger, still missing and still presumed dead. Hank Mazzetti tracked down

a temporary number for Lyle. The man said he wasn’t willing to come back to New York

for anything at this time, but his cousin, Verne Crosby, could handle the work. Verne was

also a arsonist, and some people said he was the family’s best.

Verne was willing to enter the lists, for a price.

“The standard offer is three,” said Mazzetti. “I’m offering you five.”

“I’m taking six,” said Verne.

 Six it was. Everything was in place. The train was about to leave the station and

the conductor was crying all aboard. Operation Wet Balls, as Fishboy was now calling it,

was ready to roll.

>>>>>>

They even had walkie-talkies and code names—that’s how organized the thing was. A

guy stationed on 116th Street radioed Mazzetti at 9:15 pm, saying Manny was leaving the

social club. Wet Balls is climbing in a car. He should be getting to The Tongue in about

15 minutes.

The West 65th Street area was still, quietly attending to its own vices. A

communal voice seemed to be saying, Let’s keep it down—I’m trying to inject myself

here.

Inside the dark store, Mazzetti saw a car pull up at 9:22. Two of Manny’s hoods

got out. They were early. They lit cigarettes while waiting and at one point wandered

over to the storefront. Mazzetti and his guys could hear their voices.

“What happened to those movie nights we used to have? We’d all go out.”

“They don’t have ‘em anymore. Manny thinks they’re a waste. There’s nothing to

go to anymore.”

No movie nights? Cry me a river.

Another car arrived. Manny disembarked with two more gunslingers. Mazzetti

wished he had a camera so he could take before and after shots. Manny laying in a pool

of blood—man, that would make a picture.

 Manny and his four friends went inside Leonia’s building. Mazzeretti radioed

Verne Crosby. “Wet Balls is in the hole.”

Okay, now they wait for the fire. Some of his guys were getting antsy. Mazzetti

talked to keep them calm. “I used to tell this story about Johnny Kachka. I don’t… Wait,

I’ll tell you the story, then I’ll tell you why I don’t tell it anymore.”

No need. They could see smoke and a flame billowing from the back. In a minute

it should rip loose and be burning high.

But it didn’t. Something seemed to be going wrong. Two minutes passed—the

flames should be picking up by now, getting pacier. Instead, the fire looked more like a

votive candle burning in church.

Mazzetti radioed Verne. The man finally came on, full of apologies and excuses.

Rather than simply striking a match like his ancestors did when burning down log cabins,

he’d been trying to use one of those new piezoelectric igniters. A small, spring-loaded

hammer should strike a piece of quartz and create a nice spark, if you know what you’re

doing. I’m still not so used to the thing, said Verne. Plus, when he opened his can of

kerosene he realized he hadn’t brought enough along. Plus, he’d been counting on the

wind to help the conflagration along. The air was dead calm tonight.

The original pair of Manny’s bodyguards were coming out of the building,

sniffing the air. A few curious residents followed, doing the same. Moments later Manny

appeared with the other two thugs. His shirt was unbuttoned and his suspenders were

hanging from his belt.

 It wasn’t exactly as picture-perfect as Mazzetti had anticipated, but there he was.

“Get him!” he ordered. The store window shattered apart as his guys opened fire, sheets

of glass splintering on the sidewalk as planned.

But Manny’s guys weren’t choking on smoke and confusion as planned. They

scattered with the residents and hit the deck or ducked behind parked cars or, like Manny,

slipped and fell on their asses. The four gunmen returned shots. Bullets blew holes in

every solid object on both sides of the street.

Sloppy anger and delusions of competence could be witnessed in either party.

They all made a lot of noise, but except for a dislocated shoulder suffered by one of

Mazzetti’s guys when they finally gave up and ran out the store’s back door, no human

damage was done.

Meanwhile, the gods glanced at the mangled farce below, muttered the word

idiots to themselves and went back to buffing their nails.

>>>>>>
HEALING THE SOULS

Westside Gang Wars the morning papers blared the next day. Yeah, thought Fishboy, if

only. After all the plans and preps the would-be warlord had made, after the odds must’ve

been running 3-1 in his favor on form alone, it all goes wrong because of Verne Crosby.

Using him was like getting your eyes checked by a blind optometrist. Well, crimes can be

forgiven, mediocrity never. Verne was now resting comfortably under a new bed of

rosebushes in Mazzetti’s backyard. As an arsonist, he was a warm-up comic. Now he was

a worm-up comic.

So much for the immediate past. Time to deal with the immediate future. When

Fishboy got up this morning he noticed a crew working on the phone lines up the street

from the house. Strange, he’d never had any problems making calls. Or getting them, like

Sid Dallet ringing up and saying there was an unmarked van parked near his place. Or

O.P. O’Brien getting suspicious about the lowered blinds in the house across from his. Or

Hank Mazzetti, just two hours after his rosebushes had been planted, suddenly hearing

weird clicks on his phone.

Interesting. Only a few hours after last night’s abortion the signs of surveillance

were everywhere. Fishboy wouldn’t be surprised if Caesar Abbatelli or some other

dipshit royale in the Five Eyes had tipped the feds off, trying to get rid of him.

Clearly this was the moment for a strategic retreat. Only people who don’t know

what they’re doing think the feds don’t know what they’re doing. Fishboy decided to

pack things up and move to the house he’d built near Chapman Hill. The woods, the

isolation—it would be easier to protect than the house here in Rosedale or the office on

47th and Broadway. He’d set up base out there, regroup and recompute, figure out
another way to make a grab for the wishbone. He’d had a setback, yeah, but so what? All

great enterprises go through their share of shit. He reminded himself of the time when

FDR introduced Social Security. You think that was a piece of cake? There were plenty

of critics opposed to the program, people afraid their names would be wiped out and

replaced with numbers. And where were those critics today? Sitting on their withered old

asses collecting their benefits.

Anything can be redeemed.

>>>>>>

Tango had never been to the house out east. He’d heard plenty about it but was never

invited. Then Fishboy said come pay a visit. We need to talk. It’s all country out here, but

don’t worry. The horses are in stable condition. Ha ha ha.

He hadn’t seen Fishboy since they’d gotten back from LA. Hadn’t talked to him

since passing along the ill-fated information about Manny da Silva’s girlfriend. He hadn’t

seen or talked to Tray. Her trips to the city were impossible now.

Following Fishboy’s directions, he passed a gigantic stone column, 70 feet tall

and narrowing to a pyramid on top. Tango knew what it was. The Chapman Hill Obelisk.

He’d grown up maybe 30 miles from here but had never actually seen the thing. A blood-

shocked Civil War veteran had built the tower, believing it could channel ancient

Egyptian spirits and heal the souls of those who’d died in battle.

Four miles on the land abruptly changed. The sandy soil and scrub pines of his

childhood surrendered to richer alluvial soil and acres of scarlet oaks, white cedars and
black gum. The house, he guessed, was going to be here, hidden somewhere in this

green-wave world.

Yeah, here’s the barely noticeable turn-off Fishboy described, unmarked by any

road sign. Tango remembered a recurring nightmare he used to have when he was a kid.

He’d be trying to find his way around a neighborhood that looked like his, but there were

no street signs, no houses with numbers and no one in the homes. He’d be lost in a land

with no directions, no guide posts.

Unlike the dreams, though, he wasn’t alone out here. Every quarter mile or so

he’d see a rifle branching out from the trees. Some guy he’d never seen before would step

out, ask who he was and then shrug him along. The path through the woods was a series

of checkpoints.

Then he saw something emerging from the forest scrim, something that was all

white, all curves, all contours. Something that was weightless and aerodynamic. My God,

this isn’t a house. It’s an angel’s song cast in concrete.

One of the street captains, Paulie Randazzo, was waiting for him by the door.

Tango got out of his car still staring at the structure. “Who put this together?”

“Some Finland guy,” said Paulie. “It’s something, very modern,” which he

pronounced as modren.

Walk inside and you felt like you were floating in air. Everything was rising and

lifting and gravity-free, like the concrete had remained in liquid form. It seemed as if you

were already floating up the flowing staircase and gliding along the rounded balcony.

For all its pure white abstraction, the place felt comfortable. This was a house that

liked having people in it—though maybe not these people. Fishboy’s crew were all
talking in hushed, worried voices and stumbling around in low-grade confusion. Tango

spotted Hank Mazzetti and Sid Dallet, but most of the guys he didn’t know. Despite the

brightness of the space and light, they looked like people who couldn’t shed their

shadows.

Danny was here. He ran up to Tango and gave him a hug, then pointed the way to

his father’s office upstairs.

Fishboy was on his knees, nestled between filled trash bags and rummaging

through old cardboard file cartons. He was wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with half-

moons of sweat under the armpits. Tango hadn’t seen this much of Fishboy’s perfectly

unsculpted body since the pool party he’d thrown when he first moved to Rosedale.

When Tango first met Tray.

“Excuse me,” said Fishboy. “I’m just cleaning house.” He tossed some pieces of

yellowed paper in a bag, stood up and hefted the bag to show Tango how heavy it was.

“You remember my wife, don’t you?”

“Jesus.”

“I’m kidding. I’m just kidding. I’m so fucking kidding it’s not even funny.”

“Agreed.”

Fishboy flopped down at a desk, defiantly contemplating the clutter of manila

folders and empty liquor glasses on its surface. “As you can see, I’ve had to reverse my

field, hole up here for a while. It sucks. It’s the suckiest situation in the history of the

world.”

“I know you’ve completely studied the history of the world, so you should know.”
 Fishboy proceeded to fill him in on any details of his persecution that Tango

might’ve missed. At times he clenched his fists and flailed at the air. At times he slurred

his words. At times he dropped his voice to a confidential whisper.

“Between you and me?” he said. “I’m not holding up that good. Least once a

night I wake up with my heart hammering out of my mouth. First thing I do is look for

the bedroom door, the little slit of light coming in from the hall. That’s when I know, I’m

still here, they haven’t gotten to me yet.”

“How’s the family holding up? Tray.”

“Maybe she’s not happy being stuck out here, but that’s the way it is right now. I

mean I’m sorry, but happy or unhappy is not her job.”

“What is?”

“Attending to me in my hour of need.”

“It’s more than an hour.”

“That’s why I need another way out, a whole ‘nother plan. That’s why I wanted to

see you. I think we have a tool at our disposal we’re not really using.”

“What tool?”

“Spider Diebenkorn.”

“Diekenborn.”

“We’ve only been using him to do one thing. He’s like a hammer—we’re only

using him to bang in nails. But the claw in the back? We’re not using him to pry things

loose.”

“What’s to pry?”
 “I’m not sure yet. Spider feeds us stuff about Manny—what if we turn it into a

two-way street? What if we give him something to give to Manny? What we give him, I

don’t know, that’s what I’m thinking about. But if it involves Spider, it’s gonna involve

you.”

“Whatever you need.”

“Good. I know you don’t like him—I didn’t want to surprise you with any shit. I

just wanted to let you know. And I’ll let you know when I know. Meanwhile”—he spread

his arms over the mess on the desk—“here I am.”

“Well,” Tango reflected, “if you’ve gotta stay here, at least you have security.”

“Things ‘re tight, they could be tighter. You know what I’d like? One of those

Burns and Allen TVs. You know? George Burns goes up to his study, turns on the TV, he

can see everything that’s happening in the house. I had one of those, I’d feel…”

Some commotion was going on downstairs, voices yelling. Fishboy toddled down

the stairs. Hank Mazzetti and Sid Dallet were going at each other. The complaint, as far

as Tango could make out, was that Dallet’s guys were being sent to the city to make his

and Mazzetti’s collections while Mazzetti’s guys stayed here to keep guard. Only

Mazzetti was saying that the last time it went this way, Dallet’s guys had shorted him on

his money due.

“That’s bullshit,” said Dallet.

“I’m seeing it 20/20,” said Mazzetti.

“You couldn’t see your dick 20/20.”

Fishboy interceded. “Wait, wait, wait. Who said to send Dallet’s guys?”

“You did,” said Dallet. He pulled a note out of his pocket. “You gave me this.”
 “Me?” Fishboy scanned it. “I don’t remember writing this.”

“It’s your handwriting,” said Dallet.

“Well somebody wrote it, sure, but I don’t know who.”

Tango sensed an energy field vibrating outside the frame of his attention. Tray

was standing across the room. She was so good looking he could hardly stand to look at

her.

She seemed to be watching the argument, but her eyes were on a 45-degree angle

aimed at him. Their message was clear. I’m glad you’re here. You see the shit I have to

live with?

“If he hadn’t fucked up on 65th Street,” Dallet was saying, “we wouldn’t be here.

You said so yourself.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Fishboy. “That’s not at all what I meant.”

“That’s what you said. I don’t get it.”

“I’ll tell you what you get and what you don’t.”

Tray made a small move with her head. You wouldn’t notice it if you weren’t

staring at her, the way Tango was. She slightly tilted her head to the north part of the

house.

If Tango had been standing a hundred miles away he would’ve been able to read

that signal.

“I don’t need all this back and forth,” Fishboy was shouting. “I don’t need all this

badinage. I want the two of you to shut the fuck up. I’ll bet I’d like that. I’ll bet I’d like

that very much.”

>>>>>>
THERE ARE NO PRAYERS

Tango drove off and took the main road west, but then pulled over and parked his car

under the last of the scarlet oaks. He got out and started walking along the outer border of

the trees, looking to circle around the house and make an approach from the north. The

guards were all posted on the south side, watching for cars coming off the road. That’s

Long Island for you—no consideration for pedestrians.

When he felt he’d gone past the house he turned into the trees and started working

his way down. The woods were soundless, the leaves giving off the greens of stained

glass. He’d walked about a quarter-mile when he saw her. It was like a moment out of a

tale of medieval bewitchery. She was waiting in a spot where the house couldn’t be seen,

where the house didn’t exist. She was standing in a clearing as lost and still as Atlantis.

They grabbed for each other with seismic gropes and kisses. “We’re crazy for

doing this,” Tray said. “We’re out of our minds.”

He told her how much he missed her. She told him the same. “I wish you were a

movie,” she said. “I could watch you over and over.”

“Where are you?”

“Out for a walk.”

“Is that suspicious?”

“No, I do it all the time. I have to get away. You saw what it’s like in there. You

heard. He’s losing control.”

Once again, she was talking about Fishboy. She told him how brain-bent Fishboy

had been getting. How he’d suddenly break out singing, or break out crying. How she’d
find him walking around the house and examining every wall, every piece of furniture.

Why? So he wouldn’t forget, he said, where he was.

Overhead, distinct, perfectly outlined clouds were drifting to the Long Island

Sound.

“He told me about Davey.”

She stared at him. She was shocked. “When?”

“In LA. He was very drunk.”

“He must’ve been. You’re the only person he’s ever told besides me.”

“A son dying like that, it’s a lot to carry around for the rest of your life.”

“It’s a terrible thing. Losing someone you love is a terrible thing. We’ve both had

our losses. But that doesn’t make us even.”

“How can you measure something like that?”

“Davey was a soldier. He was in a war. He was doing his duty, God bless him.

My brother wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t in a war. He was a student, and the only war he

was involved in was getting drunk, sitting in that bastard’s study and opening his hand

when the bastard gave him a gun.”

She started breaking up, she started crying. She turned away from him and put her

hands to her eyes. “I can’t… There’s no memorial for him. There are no prayers.”

He put his arms around her. Her whole body was trembling.

“He owes,” she said. “He owes for my brother’s life.”

She kissed him so hard he thought she was trying to crack his skull.

Sunlight was falling on a patch of grass in the clearing. They laid down there,

hearts shuddering out of control, pulling their pants off. Her body quivered when she took
him inside her and kept quivering in an animal fuck, and as she was coming she put her

mouth to his ear and said, “Kill him for me. Please.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 20 (NOW)

THE MILES AROUND HERE ARE SHORTER THAN ANYWHERE ELSE

HARD HOPE

At least Gary Tripucka wasn’t lonely. He was keeping company with dozens of other

bodies hidden in the marshes of Gilgo Beach. Kassata didn’t say anything when I got

back in my car. I was used to it—she hadn’t said anything since we’d left the apartment.

What we needed, I figured, was a massive onslaught of caffeine. I stopped off at a 7-

Eleven in Wantagh, came back with two 24-ounce coffees.

They say that if you sit long enough in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven on Park

Avenue in Wantagh, the whole world will pass you by. It’s not true.

Kassata was stirring her coffee with as much careful attention as she’d need to

cook risotto. “How are you feeling now?” she finally said.

“I’m not 100%. I think I’m at 41%.”

“You have enough left to kill somebody else?”

“That’s your question? Nice.”

“Excuse me for being a little out of sorts. I’ve never seen anyone killed in front of

me before.”

“He was trying to kill us. He came to kill me and he was going to kill you and

Tito.”

“You couldn’t just knock him out? You had him down. You had him out. You

had to beat him to death with a metal lamp base?”

“I promise I’ll never kill him again.”

She turned to me full face. “This is just like the junkie, isn’t it? The one you killed

all those years ago.”

 I wiped my mouth. The sweat dripping off my lip was watering the coffee down.

“In a way. My blood was shouting at me. My head was pushing me past the red lines,

yeah. But there’s one difference. Tripucka was there to kill me. One of us had to go. If

you had that choice, what would you do?”

“I hope I’d have enough compassion to never kill another human being.”

“Well, we all have our faults.”

She turned away from me, disgusted. “This whole thing has lost any meaning for

me. I’m sorry I got involved.”

“You wanted an answer. You wanted to know who killed your grandfather. You

wanted to chase the grail. Now that we’re getting close to something, you really want to

stop?”

It took Kassata a while to answer. “I guess I thought if I found it, everything

would be different, more complete. I guess I thought my life would change.”

“That’s why people do drugs, we want our lives to change. We all start out

looking for a new world. We all end up the same way, fighting to stay alive in the old

world. It takes some hard hope to make it.”

Another pause. “If you could go back and do it over, would you still shoot meth?”

“Probably. It’s what I needed to do at the time. I’m sure there were better ways to

stay alive, but I didn’t know any of them. So yeah, better to die now than to kill myself

back then.”

She put the lid back on her coffee. “Let’s get to the house, look at those

floorboards. I’m sure you’re right, there’s something there. I’m sure you’ll pull us

through.”
 “Thanks for the encouragement.”

“You know what’s sad? There was a time when I’d say things like that, I actually

meant them.”

>>>>>>
FOR POSTERITY

The trip to Lakeland seemed to take almost no time at all. I think it’s because the miles

around here are shorter than anywhere else. I took a crowbar from the trunk and circled

the house, which by this point felt like my own home. The Tartan Man wasn’t here.

Neither was Calvin Crane. They didn’t know that Tripucka was gone yet.

The window I’d unjammed was still open, but the basement air was stagnant and

lifeless. Left a metallic taste in the mouth. Kassata was shivering even though the

temperature wasn’t nearly as low as last night.

I tapped the floorboards with the crowbar, starting at the end near the stairs.

Eventually we heard a hollow sound, not even six feet away from where I’d been sitting

during the night. Kassata moved the Sam Adams away, popped a warm bottle for herself.

I kept tapping—the hollowness extended a good few feet under the floor. There was a

biggish hole down there.

I could hear Chris Berman of ESPN calling a home run: IT…COULD…GO…

absolutely nowhere. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Do the work.

I wedged the flat points of the bar between two boards and pried one of the

planks up. Yeah, definitely a cavity underneath. A two-foot-deep hole had been gouged

out of the cement.

Something was shimmering off to the side. Kassata held the flashlight over the

opening without looking in. It was a long trash bag, the kind you stuff with a yard-full of

leaves.

I tore up two more boards, exposing more of the plastic.

“Hand me the bottle opener?”

 Using the sharp triangle, the end that scraped the paint off the window, I cut a slit

in the bag. A musty, broken-stalk smell came out, but it wasn’t bad.

The flashlight picked up dark ivory colors. A ribcage. And below that a spinal

column.

Whatever the story behind it, the body had been here so long there was hardly

any stink left to it.

I continued slicing the bag until I could see the bone-naked face and the patina of

the skull. You could almost hear the scream of the mouth, a muffled cry from far away.

The bottom of the bag was layered with lumpy sawdust. That’s what happens

when the flesh dries and crumbles away.

Kassata was looking now. “Who is that?”

“I have no idea.”

You know how the gravity of a black hole is so intense even light can’t escape?

That’s how our eyes felt.

“Can I use your phone?” I said. “I never charged mine.”

“What for?”

“I want to make a video, record this for posterity.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 21 (THEN)

BEING TOO SERIOUS IS NOT BEING SERIOUS ENOUGH

SIGNS AND OMENS

Fishboy wanted to watch Walter Cronkite, see what gloom and doom awaits the nation

and the world. But the TV set in his office wasn’t doing anything but spitting static.

Broadcast signals from New York didn’t reach this far east—locals had to rely on

transmissions across the Sound from Connecticut. This often required strenuous

adjustments of the rabbit ears and sometimes wrapping tinfoil around the antennae to get

a picture. Today, though, none of these manipulations was working. The universe was

turning against him.

He stomped downstairs and demanded help. With all the stuff he had, he told Tray

(and he was often amazed by how much stuff he’d accumulated in his life), how come he

couldn’t get a TV that worked? The thing was brand new for shit’s sakes. No, said Tray,

it’s not brand new. It’s not even a year old, he said. It’s eight years old, she said. We

brought it with us from Brooklyn. Look at it—it’s a fucking Dumont.

Dragging his ass back to the office, Fishboy resigned himself to reading the Daily

News. One of the guys always picked him up the morning edition in Riverhead. True, it

was now 6 o’clock at night, but lately Fishboy couldn’t stand to read the morning news

until the evening. That’s the way things were going around here. Every day in this house

was like 10 days in the city. The agitation was affecting his whole system. If he could

squeeze out a turd that was visible to the naked eye these days, he considered himself

lucky.

He flipped through the pages. Fidel Castro, Liz Taylor, Mayor Wagner. Nothing

interested him until he came to a story about a shooting in Mount Morris Park. The
location was delivering a strange little punch to his eyes—E. 120th Street, not far from

the Mount Carmel Social Club.

He read the story. A couple of schwartzes had gunned each other down in a part

of the park known as the Acropolis, a hilly plateau standing 71 feet above the

surrounding Harlem streets. Cops were saying that with its rocky nooks and crannies, the

Acropolis was becoming a magnet for drug deals, muggings and other varieties of

criminal activity.

Fishboy kept reading and rereading the story. The more he read, the more he

could feel a giant skyhook yanking him into the stratosphere.

>>>>>>

The day Tango made his return trip to the house, an approaching thunderstorm had turned

the air muggy and unbearable. Hot? The food in the freezer was spoiling. Fishboy had

coped with the temperature by taking his shirt off. Sitting at his desk he looked like a

landslide of white mud. Tango noticed he was drunk at 2 pm—running a little behind

schedule.

The office had been cleaned up. Only a few boxes and trash bags remained. The

folders and glasses were gone from the desk. Fishboy had the surface covered with

photos—8x10 black and whites.

“You might’ve seen this park before,” he said. “Or maybe you haven’t—there’s a

lot of things to see these days. Mount Morris Park, that’s what this is. I hired a

photographer to take these. Look at this. It’s called the Acropolis. You stand up there on
a clear day, you can see Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, the GW Bridge, Grant’s

Tomb, the Empire State Building. That’s how far up you are. You’re like in the nose and

ear-bleed section.”

“Why’re you telling me this?” said Tango.

“That’s where I’ll be tomorrow night. No, the night after—I need time. That’s

where I’ll be two nights from now, having a secret meeting with Spider. Only he doesn’t

know it yet.”

“You want me to tell him.”

“Yeah. Tell Spider to tell Manny I’ll be meeting with Spider in Mount Morris

Park. Only a few blocks from the club. I’ll be trying to get Spider to spy on Manny for

me. A confidential matter— I’ll be alone. If Manny wants to get at me, he’ll never have a

better chance than this.”

“But you won’t be alone.”

“No, I’ll have guys hidden. No one’ll be able to spot ‘em. Manny’s gonna get a

boo-boo, thanks to Spider. Manny’s gonna get hoisted by his own retard. That’s a joke—

you get it?”

“No, but I’m sure it’s funny.”

“You know what I been doing lately? Keeping my gun under my pillow. They

come for me in the middle of the night, I don’t want to go through their shit.”

Tango guided him back to the photos. “Where are your guys gonna be?”

“Good question. I’ve put thought into this.” He pointed to pictures of a cast-iron

tower rising over the Acropolis. “This is a fire lookout from the last century. This was

before there were alarm boxes on the streets. People would stand up there and look for
smoke. They call it the Watchtower. I was thinking of putting snipers up there. Easy shot.

Then I thought, once they do Manny, they gotta get out of there fast. They can’t be

climbing down a tower before they start to run. This is the kind of calculus you have to

consider.”

“I understand.”

“But Robert Moses came to the rescue.”

“Robert Moses. Jones Beach Robert Moses?”

“The park’s over a hundred years old. But in the 1930s Robert Moses upgraded it.

Look at what he put in, all these stone walls and crevices and footpaths and stairways

with landings. There’s a million places to hide out. Two nights from now, Manny da

Silva will have no more history. Maybe they’ll build a statue for him in the park. They

can call it the statue of limitations.”

Fishboy was full of the jokes today.

He sat back in his chair, kind of squeezing his ass against the cushion like he was

slipping a hemorrhoid back up his butt.

“You know what I been doing lately?” he said.

“You told me.”

“I been having a lot of dreams. Nightmares, I should say.”

“About what?”

“Lawyers and bathrooms, mostly. But the other night I dreamt Marilyn Monroe

was dancing for me. She was doing that ballet spin, the pirouette. We were standing up

high somewhere, we could see the whole city around us. Panoramic view. When I saw

these photos I realized, I was dreaming about Mount Morris Park. Not only that but MM,
Marilyn Monroe? MM, Mount Morris? That’s a sign, my friend. That’s a motherfucking

omen.”

>>>>>>

As Fishboy limped down the stairs with Tango, he found a bunch of the guys—Sid

Dallet, O.P. O’Brien, et. al.—perusing a poster for the Miss Rheingold contest. Each year

the hops-drinking public would be given a chance to vote and decide which one of six

contestants best personified the fresh, clean, All-American qualities of a beer named after

a German opera. Miss Rheingold was supposed to represent a lovely, friendly girl next

door, though the guys were using some rather rude remarks to evaluate their imaginary

neighbor.

Sid Dallet asked Fishboy which girl he’d vote for.

Fishboy, who’d been in such a triumphantly prophetic mood a moment ago, went

sour fast. “You’re assuming I give a fuck. You got nothing else to do than sit around

here in a circle jerk?”

“We’re just trying to goose things up,” said Sid. “The atmosphere around here,

you could use this place for a funeral parlor.”

“You need a break from it all? Suck on a bag of glue. We’re in the middle of a

fucking inferno, and all you cunts can do is sit here judging beauty contests?” Fishboy

was in a fury—he was paying for military-grade security, he said, and what he was

getting was a troupe of horny boy scouts. “This is weakness. This shows a fatal, flawed

weakness. This is why we gotta take this terrible refuge out here.”
 Tray came in the room, saw what was happening. “Leave them alone,” she said.

“They’re all cooped up here, give them a break.”

Fishboy wheeled to her. “What the fuck business is it of yours?”

“I live here. We all live here now.”

“You don’t like the way I treat my own people? You got something to say to

me?”

“I just said it.”

“Anything else you want to say to me? Any other tips and advice?”

“Anything I had to say to you I said a long time ago.”

He walked over to her. “You complain about me? Who’re you to talk? You can’t

even keep this fucking house clean. Look at this place. There’s always food all over the

floor.”

“The guys eat. Food falls. What the fuck?”

He backhanded her across the face.

He hit her so fast the room could do nothing but go silent.

“Watch the mouth,” he said. “What kind of example you set for Danny he hears

his mother talking like that?”

“Fuck you,” she said. Tray turned away and left. She never looked once at Tango.

He noticed, but now he was staring at Fishboy. All he could see was a vacuum, a

void. All he could see was an invisible Chinese box—nothing on the outside, layers and

layers of nothing on the inside.

>>>>>>
SPEAKING IN TONGUES

He went through the same maneuver as last time, parking his car under the trees, making

his way north along the edge of the woods. Only this time he was running, thinking about

her face as she was struck, Tray taking the sting of the knuckle slap with only a small,

involuntary change of expression. Thousands of feet overhead, clouds were covering the

ground with supernatural storm light.

He found her in the clearing again, smoking a cigarette in a cupped hand, her head

turning as she heard his steps. The rain was coming down now. Thick pearl-shaped drops

were splattering on the trees. His eyes were blurred by the downpour. She was only few

feet away but she seemed to be standing on the other side of a galaxy.

“What are you doing here?” she said. “I don’t understand why you’re here.”

“You know why I’m here.”

“Don’t. Don’t ever come back here. Please.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Stay away from the house, stay away from me.”

“I’m not giving you up.”

She dropped the cigarette on the wet ground and crushed it with her foot. “What

the hell have I done? I don’t understand.”

“I’ll take care of it. What you said, the last time. I’ll do it. I’ll kill him.”

She started to cry. He could tell the difference between the tears and the rain.

“I was screwed up when I met him. I was living a life I shouldn’t have been

living. But I wasn’t unhappy. I wasn’t unhappy with life. Not until my brother died. That
was the last time I felt the sun on my face. Nothing, nothing, can wipe away the curse of

what he did to my brother.”

“I’ll take care of it. It’s done.”

“All I want is somebody to save me from falling through space.”

He swung his arms around her and swarmed her mouth, face and neck with kisses.

He took her to the path of wet, shelterless grass, laid down and pulled her on top of him.

She kept gasping and groaning and throwing her head back. The trees around them were

glistening and greener than ever. Lightning streaked in the sky, but there was no thunder.

None at all. The lightning was flashing silently in the sky.

>>>>>>

He was walking around the house in a migrained madness. He’d gone too far, way too

far, and he knew it. He should never have hit her. Especially in front of other people. He

had to talk to Tray, make it right, tell her he was sorry.

He went to Danny’s room. The kid was reading The Poky Little Puppy, his

favorite book. Fishboy thought he was too old to still be looking at it, but Tray said it was

okay. When he’s ready to let go he’ll let go.

“You seen your mother?”

“She went out for a walk.”

“Another fucking walk? In this weather?”

Tray thought the woods out back were beautiful. To Fishboy they looked like a

cheap painting.
 Danny asked how long they’d have to stay out here. He was worried about

missing school.

Fishboy told him he’d be back there soon. “It’s all right to miss a few classes.

There’re some things school can’t teach you. How to live each day, how to fight to stay

alive—you have to learn that for yourself.”

Downstairs the storm was rattling the windows like ghosts trying to break in. He

went out through the back door, getting instantly soaked in God’s urinal. He moved past

muddy tulips, trees blackened by the rain. He was starting to worry about her wandering

around out here. The thunder and the lightning and the thick gray sky were terrifying and

thrilling.

Through the trees he could see some kind of opening up ahead, a clearing. The

light seemed to be grasping at a patch of grass at the other end, almost arresting the spot.

What the fuck? Two idiots were bone-jumping out here in the middle of a thunderstorm.

But not any two idiots. He saw Tray on the top. He saw his wife, the fastest pants

in the east, caught in a spermy swoon of cock, cunt and death. He couldn’t believe it. The

whole thing was too gross and ridiculous and cruel and obscene to be real.

Then he saw who was underneath her. He felt like he was driving a car through

the rain at Christmastime and the colored lights were smearing on the windshield.

He turned around, walked back to the house. It was the loneliest walk he’d ever

taken. He was numb, afraid he was about to collapse, not even sure his eyes were still

open.

The trees were speaking in tongues.

Sid Dallet was waiting by the back door. “You’re all wet,” he said.
 “What do you want?”

Sid said he had a delicate matter to discuss. He’d found out that one of his guys

was, in fact, skimming money off Hank Mazzetti’s collections. Guilty as charged. How

should he handle it? What should he do?

Fishboy felt like he’d just woken up and a hundred people were talking to him at

he same time.

“Who’re we talking about?” he said.

“Larry.”

“Who?”

“Larry Hodgkins.”

“Who’s Larry Hodgkins?”

“The guy we’re talking about. You know him. The guy from…”

Sid either said Saratoga or South Dakota, Fishboy wasn’t sure.

Tango was his friend. Tango had saved his life at the Biltmore in LA. How could

he pull a betrayal like this?

“…so with Larry, what do I do?”

“Watch him,” said Fishboy. “All times. Watch his looks. He won’t like it. Fuck

him—gotta be done. People don’t pay attention. People’re too uncrimeconscious.”

He always knew the world was out to destroy him. He’d always believed he was

the victim of everything, of some vast, hidden, horrible secret plot. Now he had proof.

Ultimate, undeniable, brutally conclusive proof.

 “Take care of him. That’s what you gotta do. Utterly fucking take care of him.

There are too many assassins around, faith destroyers, angel grinders. We’re not in that

business.”

Tango would get his payback. But not until Manny da Silva was finished. Don’t

fuck with that—the sandbags were already stacked, everything was ready for the flood.

After that…

“Teach him a lesson. Pull him back. What’s his name? Larry, pull him back. We

can’t have this going on among us. This shit is crap, you know that. You know what I’m

talking about.”

“Usually, but sometimes I wonder.”

They walked into the kitchen, Fishboy nearly stumbling over a chair that had been

insanely placed near the table.

“Sid, you’ve done people before.”

“You want me to kill him?”

“Who?”

“Larry.”

“No, I’m just saying. You’ve pulled the trigger.”

“Yeah, but I don’t like it. I find it unpleasant.”

“But if you have to you have to.”

“I think about baseball scores when I’m doing it. It helps.”

>>>>>>
REMOVED BY THE NIGHT

There was a disturbed woman in the Audubon Poolroom. She’d come in selling

individual white roses, and when there were no takers, she sat on a crate near the table

Pep Hayward and Tango were using. She was trembling and talking, saying that

President Eisenhower had her under surveillance by the CIA.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “Me and Ike had our tiffs, yes, but I’m not mad at

him anymore and he’s not mad at me. So why’s he keep dogging me?”

She was a well-dressed woman and might even have been a looker if she’d

remembered to wear her teeth.

Pep extended the joint he was smoking. “Try some of this. Might put you in a

high jubilee praise mood.”

She refused. “I’ve tried everything. Herbs, powders, liquids. Homeopathy,

allopathy. Ice, heat. Ups, downs, all-arounds. Nothing works.” She shook her roses for

emphasis. “The President’ll be sorry when I’m gone.”

One disturbed woman on hand, one disturbed man. Tango was a mess. He was

playing with his favorite cue, the Panamanian Tiger, but he couldn’t do catshit with the

multi-humped triangle of balls on the table.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Pep. “You look like a man who makes a living

explaining jokes.”

“Things on my mind. The President won’t be sorry when I’m gone.”

“You’re too serious tonight. There’s an old saying—being too serious is not being

serious enough.”
 Seriously, Tango knew why he made a living playing pool. He could deal with

people made of ivory who lived on a felt-lined lawn. It was real people, people made of

flesh and blood, who gave him trouble.

Real people even including Spider Diekenborn. The four-star suck up had just

added himself to the poolroom’s population. He looked like a prep school grad who

schooled himself in the back-stabbing arts.

He approached the table but Tango waved him off. “Let’s go outside.”

Spider was thrown a bit. They’d always found a dark corner to talk in before. His

rat eyes grew slightly rattier as Tango unscrewed his cue and put it in his case.

“You ever smoke any of that stuff?” Spider said, making conversation as they

walked to the door. “Weed? Don’t bother. It has no effect on white people.”

Winds leftover from the rainstorm were blowing hard down 117th Street.

Cardboard cartons and empty cigarette packs tumbled along the pavement.

“Well?”

Spider struck a confident, confidential tone. “Caesar. Sit-down. Tomorrow night.”

Tango knew the shorthand. “Caesar Abbatelli’s meeting Manny tomorrow.

They’re probably cutting a side-deal to force Fishboy out.”

Spider was a little crestfallen. “That’s it, yeah.”

“I”ve got a message for you. You tell this to Manny.”

“Fishboy told you to do this?”

“It’s from Fishboy.”

“But he told you to tell me?”

 “He told me. You tell Manny that Fishboy will be alone in Mount Morris Park

two nights from now. He’ll be meeting with someone.”

“Who?”

“You.”

Spider shook his head. “I can’t be involved. I can’t expose myself to Manny.”

“Manny’ll be dead by the time it’s over. You won’t have to worry about him.”

Spider huddled inside himself. “What do I say, exactly?”

“You tell Manny that Hank Mazzetti reached out to you, he set the meeting up.

Fishboy wants to talk to you about spying on Manny for him. You know the park? The

Acropolis?”

“Yeah.”

“He’ll meet you there, by the Watchtower.”

“And how does Manny get dead?”

“Those stone walls around there? All those rocks? Fishboy’s guys will be hiding

behind those. Manny’ll come to kill Fishboy. Fishboy’s guys will kill him.”

Spider looked like he’d just entered a staring contest. “That’s no good for me.

Fishboy pays me to spy on Manny. If Manny’s dead, what happens to me?”

“Fishboy’s got a job waiting for you.”

“Really?” Spider was warming to the idea. He was a man who was desperate to be

remembered.

A piece of wind-blown newspaper latched onto Tango’s foot. He couldn’t read it,

but he couldn’t stop staring at it. His eyes were pinned.

 For a moment he thought he’d already told Spider the rest of what he had to say.

It was already done. He didn’t have to go through it again.

But the illusion only lasted for the moment.

“You got it, right?” he said. “The guys’ll be hidden behind the walls and rocks.

Make sure you tell that to Manny.”

Spider checked his listening. “You want me to tell him that?”

“Tell him.”

“Is there something I’m missing here?”

“So far.”

“Then what? Why would I tell him that?”

“Because those guys are just decoys. Fishboy’ll have snipers stationed in the

Watchtower. Manny’ll come in with an army. They’ll get caught between the walls and

the Watchtower. Fishboy wants to take out as many of Manny’s men as possible,

especially those bodyguards from 65th Street. They’ll all be wiped out.”

“Shit.”

Now it was done. The trap was set. Fishboy would be outnumbered. He’d be

removed by the night.

“Man,” said Spider, “that’s a lot of gunfire. I’ll be in the middle of a massacre.”

“Fishboy’ll be standing right next to you. Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”

“You know, I’ve known a lot of people in my life. That’s a rich variety of people

not to trust.”
 “You can trust this. Just tell Manny if he wants to cut this shit short, show up in

the park. And don’t worry. Fishboy’ll protect you. He’ll hide you under his body if he has

to.”

Or fall on you as he makes his swan dive into hell.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 22 (NOW)

IT’S FREE. IT’S VERY FREE

STRAIGHT INTO THE SUN

It wasn’t much of a video, but it was grisly enough to draw a crowd. The skeleton in the

trash bag got nearly 10,000 hits in its first hour on YouTube. I guess there was a kind of

tomb-raider fascination to it, a sense of trespassing in a grave. Especially when we’d

panned around the basement, showed that the body had been hidden under floorboards.

The images gave the definite impression of a long-buried crime.

Whatever cry might be rising from that hole in the ground, it was heard in the

right places. I got a text from Calvin Crane. Meet me at my studio.

>>>>>>

Kassata was excited about going back to the garage in Hempstead—it represented some

sort of break—but she mostly kept it to herself. There wasn’t a lot of warmth between us.

Or between us and Calvin. He was packing some of his tools—paint tubes, brushes,

palette knives—in a liquor store box when we got there.

“You post some nasty shit,” he said. “I guess somebody should congratulate you

for truffling it out.”

“Is that a compliment?” I said. “I’m not used to praise.”

“Now take the thing down. Kaput it.”

“Why should we?”

“You take it down and he’ll talk to you. He’ll put the whole story in front of you.”

“Why didn’t he do that before?” said Kassata. “He couldn’t be bothered? If he’d

told us the whole truth to begin with, he’d saved us all a lot of bloodshed and grief.”
 Calvin extended an arthritic hand toward me. “Pass me that turpentine?”

“You leaving?”

“I thought you only painted the dead.”

“He’s close enough. Hearse is practically parked outside his door. He wants to

talk to you two before he goes. He wants peace.”

“I’m sorry he’s that sick,” said Kassata. “I remember he didn’t look so good at the

Club Trocadero.”

Calvin turned to her, shaved scalp gleaming under the overhead lights. “I don’t

think the aggravation you brought on helped. Why couldn’t you just stay away from that

fucking house? Stead of picking through trash like a couple of mungos.”

“If I have to pick through trash to get the truth about my grandfather, that’s what

I’ll do. He can’t ramrod me away.”

He looked at me. “Where’s Tripucka?”

“Gilgo Beach.”

“Not surfing, I assume.”

“No.”

“I’m sure somebody’ll miss him. But nobody I know.”

“Is Danny gonna shit on me anyway?”

“He’s done shitting. The war’s over. Just take the video down and go see him. I’m

asking you please. He’s the oldest friend I have, and he’s desperate for the peace of

God.”

“Okay on the video. What other price do we have to pay?”

 “Nothing. The invitation’s free. It’s very free. Except you have to buy me a lunch

at Lovey’s Soul. I miss that big bitch’s cooking.”

>>>>>>

Danny wasn’t the only one desperate for the peace of God. Count me in that number. I’d

had it with my tumultuous cranium, with the manic-depressive mandalas flowering in my

head. By the time we posted the video I hadn’t slept since the founding of the Jamestown

Colony in 1607. Felt like it. Shadows were everywhere. They were moving, scurrying,

shape-shifting and they were incredibly beautiful. Shadows on sidewalks, under buses,

flickering across Kassata’s face. Shadows living inside water, waiting under thoughts,

bleeding behind my eyeballs. If I’d stared straight into the sun I would’ve seen shadows.

I was stoned on them, high out of my mind on shadows, and it felt great. Except

there was some kind of imbalance to them, an electrical out of whackness that threatened

to short-circuit at any time.

The hallucinations were a tip-ff.

They had nothing to do with the shadows. Nothing to do with anything I could

see. Everything to do with something I could hear. Like a voice in the air—deep,

sonorous, priestly. No, not a voice, a dozen voices, three dozen voices. No, 100 voices,

200, 320. I was hallucinating the sound of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and

everywhere I went they were chanting no pantaloons, no pantaloons, you have no

pantaloons.
 This was too much. Way, way, way too much. Way multiplied 320 times too

much. It didn’t feel so great anymore. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In the Middle Ages, depression was considered a sin. It was called acedia,

spiritual torpor or gloom. People were intended to delight in God’s world and take the

pleasures of the earth and the flesh as manifestations of divine love. Joy—yes, even

sexual joy—was seen as a moral virtue.

I was tired of being a sinner.

Depression or manic-depression engulfs the world. It feels like a revelation of

life’s secret, hopeless structure. But it isn’t. It’s not a universal condition, just a reflection

of your secret, hopeless universe, a glimpse of the dust clouds swirling inside the galaxy

of your own head.

I was a broken man—I am a broken man—and the only way to live with it is to

acknowledge the fractures, accept them in spiritual surrender. If you choose instead to

fight your shattered nature, to resist and rage against it, you only drive the broken ends

further apart.

My father was already dead. No sense in trying kill him all over again.

>>>>>>
LAST WORDS

So this, finally, was the house. It was pretty glorious, gotta say, with its endless curves

and aerodynamic swoop. In some ecstatic defiance of gravity, its white concrete seemed

to have been poured up instead of down. But Danny’s tribal home was showing its

sepulchral signs. The place was clammy with the smells of bleach, humidity and ancient

pot roasts. The white walls were turning yellow and in some spots brown, like a window

shade that had been baking in the sun. It was as if the images of Fishboy and Tray and

Hank Mazzetti and Sid Dallet had ingrained themselves into the surface Shroud of Turin

style.

And soon, no doubt, the face of Tartan Man would be joining them. He was

wearing purple, blue and pink plaids today and a handgun prominently displayed in his

waistband. It was a shock to cross his path and not have him attack me. Almost as much

of a shock as if he’d been reading a book.

Bone Man, whose acquaintance we’d made at Casa del Océano, was also here.

Cheerfully beaming with suspicion and hatred, he patted me down and took my Glock.

Calvin brought us upstairs. Fishboy’s old office had been converted into Danny’s

hospice room. His father’s desk had been shoved aside and a hospital bed—head and foot

controls, air-pumped mattress, self-adjusting gel pockets—had been set up by the

windows. The light was low. I couldn’t tell if Danny was sleeping with his head on his

chest or counting the checks on his pajamas.

He’d looked like death when we met him at the Club Trocadero—a wasted-away,

sleep-deprived poltergeist. Now he looked beyond death. Just lying there, not moving,

with that telltale, futureless shadow around his mouth.

 His sell-by date was coming up fast.

Calvin nudged him. “They’re here.”

Danny slowly opened his eyes. Even laying down he was tottering.

“So you’re here,” he said. “Goody, goody.” His voice was gravelly and breathy

but still had much more volume than you’d expect. “I was expecting you. I even put fresh

underwear on in your honor. Remember the old Polak joke? How do you tell the bride at

a Polish wedding? She’s the one with the clean undershirt.”

“How are you?” I said.

“How do I fucking look? This stupid, stupid body of mine is completely

befucked. My doctor wept when she saw my last numbers. But enough—I could go on.

I’m glad you came. I want to talk. Nobody ever knows what their last words are gonna

be. You don’t want it to be something like, was it me who cut that fart?

Danny tried to raise himself up. Calvin bent him forward a bit and adjusted the

pillows.

“Ow,” said Danny. “I think you injured an organ.”

“Yeah,” said Calvin, “sure I did.”

Danny settled himself in his new position. “Calvin told me about Tripucka.”

“And he told me you wouldn’t shit on me for it.”

“Why should I? Why should I dig me another grave? Gary was a shooter, that’s

all. My shooter, yeah, but still. I don’t know if you know, but when firearms were

invented, the nobles objected to them. They thought muskets were a cheat, a blow to the

glory of warfare. It wasn’t right that a trained knight could be cut down from a distance
by some common, low-class foot soldier. So whenever a gunman was captured, the

nobles cut off his hands and tore out his eyes. Shooters weren’t held in high esteem.”

He coughed. The expectoration wasn’t strong enough to vibrate a single molecule

of air.

“Still,” he said, “Tripucka aside, where do you get the fucking balls going back to

that house?”

Kassata heard her cue. “Where do you get the fucking balls to stonewall us?”

“Don’t get pissy on me, missy. The last thing I need in my condition is more of

your constant, petty, malicious interference.”

“Can we get more light in here? I can’t see you not listening to me.”

Calvin upped the lighting.

Kassata stepped closer to the bed. “You’re one of the most assful people I’ve ever

met. I’m sorry you’re sick—“

“Dying,” Danny corrected.

“—but you had no right to treat us the way you did.”

“I’m trying to make it up to, you dumb shit.”

“Try taking a flying fuck.”

Calvin defused things. “Let’s all ease off and stick to the fucking point. You want

to hear something and he wants to tell you something. It shouldn’t be this hard.”

“You’re right,” said Danny, “we’re wasting time. We’re wearing out the clock.

Little while from now I’ve got to take my painkiller, along with my other meds and vites.

Once that gets in my system, my concentration tends to get a little, I don’t know, stray. A

little…fugitive.”
“So what happened?” said Kassata.

“If you shut the fuck up, I’ll tell you.”

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 23 (THEN)

THE WORDS OF THE DEAD

ON ICE

Tango didn’t practice the day after he’d met with Spider. He went to the Audubon but

never even took his cue out of the case. Instead he sat by the wall near Pep’s table,

intently watching the action as if he could control the movement of the balls with his

eyes. Pep left him alone, except to say, “You got some mind freight you’re carrying

around.”

He did. Everything had been set in motion. He was riding a wavefront, rolling in

fixed and steady cycles to the breakpoint on the beach. You’d expect him to be thinking

about Fishboy and Manny and Mount Morris Park, and above all about Tray. But he

wasn’t. He kept thinking about the lost son, Davy. Thinking about the Kumsong River,

Soviet tanks, hours before the armistice, 19 years old. Thinking about the drunken

confession in the London Tavern. I never talk about him, but I’ve never stopped thinking

about him.

Summer and fall are the best times to die.

The way Tango was seeing it now, if you weigh everything Fishboy did for him

and what he did to Tray and her brother, it all evens out. He killed her brother? But it was

an accident—a stupid, shit-faced accident, but still an accident. So the two sides, in

Tango’s freighted mind, were balanced. And when you factor in Davy, the scales tip in

Fishboy’s favor.

I trust you like a son.

It felt strange to Tango to be thinking so much about someone he’d never met.

But maybe the things we can’t see—like ideals, like beliefs, like God—hold more power

than the things we can.

 You have to play the patterns in the balls on the table. Well, this was a pattern.

Tango looked at his watch, amazed that it was already past 7 pm. He couldn’t say

the earlier hours had passed. It was more like they’d withdrawn and disappeared.

He carried his case to the men’s room, took a quick piss with a hurried zip-up and

left the Audubon with cold pee drops trickling down his leg.

It was getting dark as he walked across town. He could see women cooking in the

windows, men leaning out on the sills and smoking. A clothesline stretching between two

buildings still held wash hanging to dry. Children were running up and down the Harlem

streets.

He’d never felt so alone in the city.

He was thinking about the river, the dawn walk, breathing deeply and slowly until

his body became as still as the air.

There was a phone booth a block away from the Mount Carmel Social Club.

Trying to talk to Spider Diekenborn was like placing a call to the Kremlin. Tango had to

go through layers and layers of guarded voices.

Spider finally answered in a shouted whisper. What’re you doing? You can’t call

here. You can’t ask for me.

“I have to talk to you.”

No, are you crazy? Too risky.

“Big change of plans. We need to talk.”

Spider sensed the gravity of the call. Okay. Later.

“Now. I’m right up the street.”

Not HERE. People’re watching all the time.

 “Then where?”

The park. The Acropolis. Same place.

Tango knew as he walked up to Mount Morris Park that what he was about to do

would end things with Tray forever. He could see himself walking solitary streets for the

rest of his life.

As he climbed the steps to the Acropolis a plane was traveling through the last

slash of sun. It was heading east, maybe continuing over the place where, at this same

moment, Tray was living and breathing and waiting.

How did life get so fucking sloppy?

He stood by the Watchtower, surrounded 360 by distant civilization. Lit

skyscrapers, blinking towers, the sweep of car lights below. Spider, that human slice of

white bread, showed up five minutes later, anxiously swigging on a bottle of Champale.

He took the news as if Tango had presented him with a bloody finger on a china

plate. “It’s off? What’re you talking about? How can it be off?”

“Because it’s off.”

“Why? Why is it off?”

“I told Fishboy about Manny meeting with Caesar Abbatelli. He got cold feet.”

“That’s impossible. Can’t be. Manny’s all set. Everything’s almost ready.”

“I don’t know what to say to you. Tell him Hank Mazzetti got back in touch, said

it’s not happening.”

“Fuck.” Spider drank his Champale, trying to digest the idea that Manny’s death

wasn’t guaranteed in the immediate future. Then the full tragedy of the situation hit him.
“What about me? What happens? I’m a fingertip away from the job he promised. What

happens to that?”

“The plan’s just on ice. He could thaw it out later.”

“You’re giving me a headache with this shit. I would’ve been good working for

Fishboy.”

“We’ll never know. Not for a while at least.”

“This always happens to me. I got something going, just when I least expect it it’s

pulled out from under me.”

“Shame. You would’ve been a masterpiece.”

Spider went to drown his sorrow again but stopped the bottle in mid-lift. He

stepped in and took a closer look at Tango. “Is something wrong with you? You’re not

your usual.”

“Who is these days?”

“No, there’s something wrong with you. I can see it.”

“There’s plenty wrong with me. So what?”

“No, there’s something wrong with what you’re telling me. What’s going on?”

“There’s nothing going on—that’s what I’m telling you.”

Spider kept examining him. “I don’t believe you. There’s something bullshitish

about this whole thing.”

“It’s bad news, but it’s not bullshit.”

“No, it’s bullshit. You’re lying to me. I can tell.”

“I’m not.”

“Why’re you lying to me?”

 “How can I tell you why I’m lying to you if I’m not?”

“I know why. You’re crapping out. You’re having second thoughts. You don’t

want a little blood on your hands.”

“Did you hear anything I said to you?”

“You didn’t say anything. I know it’s still on. You’re the only one trying to call it

off. It’s pitiful.”

“You’ll look like an idiot if you show up here with Manny.”

“Better looking like an idiot than sounding like a liar.”

Spider turned and started walking away.

“Listen to me,” said Tango.

“I’m not listening to you. All you’re doing is punking out.”

Tango followed him. “Listen to me, it’s off.”

“Stop jiving me.”

“I’m telling you, it’s off.”

Spider swung around to face him. “It’s chicken-shit people like you that cause

problems for the rest of us. Divorces, drug addiction, social unrest. It’s all because of

candy-ass backtracking.”

He drained his Champale and went to toss it in a trash basket until Tango came

right up to him. “It’s off.”

Spider smashed the neck of the bottle on the basket’s metal rim. He pointed the

jagged edges at Tango. “Stay the fuck away from me.”

Tango backed off, seeing everything in front of him through white tunneled light.

He pulled the handle of his favorite cue out of the case.

 Spider tried to chop at his face with the broken bottle. Tango swung the handle

and crushed the glass in the man’s hand. Splinters of dark red cocobolo wood flew into

the darkness.

Spider showed surprise for about 0.3 seconds. He lunged at Tango and grabbed

the handle. They pushed against each other, driving each other around in wrestlers’

circles, breaths smoking in the cool air.

Tango suddenly took a step backward. As Spider’s momentum carried him

forward, Tango swung him around until Spider lost his hold and stumbled down. Tango

got behind him and wedged the maple grip of the cue against his neck. All the currents in

his body were coiled. He pressed the handle into Spider’s throat like he was curling a

barbell. Spider struggled, trying to yank and kick himself free. Tango felt the efforts

vibrating in the cue and through his bones, lasting for minutes, hours, until he felt the

wood cracking in his hands. The fighting stopped. Spider’s body sagged, fell facedown

and landed on the ground with a dull meat thud.

The park was quiet. It wasn’t silence as much as a retreat of sound, a draining

away of all noise. The handle was barely hanging together as Tango slipped it away from

Spider’s throat. He leaned over and felt for a pulse. Anything Spider had to say from now

on would be spoken in the words of the dead.

>>>>>>
ONLY YOU CAN DECIDE

Fishboy hadn’t eaten much dinner, just picked at it mostly, and as he walked up to his

office with the morning edition of the Daily News he realized he was still hungry. He

could go for a nice mountainous bowl of Cheerios right now. But lately he’d developed

the habit of rinsing his cereal with water before eating it—as a precaution only—and he

couldn’t be bothered with the ritual tonight. He’d relax instead with the paper and a half-

hour of the Andy Griffith Show. Maybe the downhome glow and simple pleasures of

Mayberry would relieve him of this feeling that he was about to be attacked from behind.

He turned the TV on, saw a commercial for Liggett and Meyers cigarettes slowly

materialize out of the black-and-white ether. Reception was pretty decent tonight.

Satisfied, Fishboy sat at his desk and began thumbing through the pages. A photo of a

murder on the Lower East Side gave him pause. Jesus, it was horrible. Blood from a

woman’s head (gunshot, domestic dispute) was splattered all over the sidewalk, and her

collapse (or her photographer) had yanked her skirt up enough to reveal a bit of thigh.

That’s the Daily News for you. Death and cheesecake combined in one photo.

Through a tremendous effort of will Fishboy managed to turn the page.

A voice from another commercial informed him of the velvety soft and smooth

qualities of Maybelline mascara. Then another voice—deeper, authoritative, definitely

non-commercial—announced that Andy Griffith wouldn’t be seen tonight. He looked up

and saw three men on the screen. Kennedy, Nixon and the news guy Howard K. Smith in

the middle. Good evening, said Smith. The television and radio stations of the United

States and their affiliated stations are proud to provide facilities for a discussion of

issues…
 Ah shit, it was some kind of debate. Are they allowed to do this? Interrupt the

Andy Griffith Show? Is it covered by the Constitution?

Fishboy was about to get up and change the channel when a story in the paper

caught him by the throat. Another killing in Mount Morris Park. God the place was a

high-crime area. He scanned the story and the words he saw exploded his eyes. The

victim had been identified as Harold “Spider” Diekenborn. They’d gotten his last name

wrong but the rest of the details were right. An employee of the nearby Mount Carmel

Social Club, a location with reputed underworld ties.

Stunned, Fishboy leaned back, his eyes wandering to the image of Nixon. God

help me that’s exactly what I must look like right now—tense, haggard, vilely ill, a face

dragged down by Lazy Shave makeup and fear.

You need more details. Keep reading.

The police believed Diekenborn had been strangled, but not with bare hands.

Based on fragments found at the scene and the bruises and indentations on the victim’s

neck, they were speculating that the murder had been committed with a long, narrow,

cylindrical wooden object. Possibly a broomstick, one detective said off the record, or a

pool cue.

Nixon was speaking. This is something I think many of us can agree with. There

is no question that Tango Williams has committed a grave act of betrayal. The pool cue

—and this, Senator, is a point I’m very glad to make. The pool cue, to my way of

thinking, is a very telling indicator.

Kennedy was quick to respond. I don’t want to give any implication that Tango

Williams wasn’t directly involved. The larger question, however, is whether the nation
can exist with such treachery. I have to concur with the Vice President on this topic.

Fucking a man’s wife is one thing. Fucking with his business is quite another.

Nixon: I go along with the Senator’s appraisal generally in this respect. We have

to move, and move quickly, against this sort of injustice.

Fishboy listened in amazement. Here, finally, was a pair of politicians he could

understand.

Kennedy: The question before the American public is this, are we doing as much

as we can? Are we as strong as we should be? I don’t want historians, 10 years from

now, to say these were the years when the tide ran out.

Nixon: The question is the means. I think the means that I advocate will reach the

goal of protecting our security and helping the cause of freedom. There is no doubt in my

mind that Tango Williams can no longer be excluded by death.

Kennedy: There are two kinds of people in the world—as you well know, Mr. Vice

President. Those who are waiting for freedom, and those who are waiting for death.

Without question, Tango Williams belongs in the latter category.

Nixon: The only way to stay ahead is to move ahead. We cannot forget this. We

cannot allow ourselves to forget—and God help us if we do—that the Earth revolves

around the sun every 365.25 days.

Fishboy had never seen the black and white tones on this set glow so intensely.

They were extraordinarily vivid and sickening.

Kennedy: Only you can decide what you want, what you want this country to be,

what you want to do with the future. I think we’re ready to move.
 Fishboy could hardly breathe. There were things he had to do. He had to tell Hank

Mazzetti to call off the plans for tomorrow night. A dead man wouldn’t be bringing too

many people to the park. Then he had to make arrangements—personal arrangements—

for another, different job. But first there was something he wanted to do.

He walked down the hall to the master bedroom. Tray was in bed, also watching

the debate, getting a good picture. She turned on her pillow and looked at him with an

anxious and questioning expression, as if she were thinking why are you still alive? He

lost whatever he was going to say to her. Instead he went over to the bed, bent down and

did something that shocked the both of them. He hugged her tightly.

>>>>>>>>>>>>
 CHAPTER 24 (NOW & THEN)

I LOVE LIFE MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF, WHATEVER THAT MEANS

IT NEVER GOT SAID

“It’s freezing in here,” Danny said. The long-suffering Calvin brought another blanket

over and wrapped it around him. “Why do you keep the place so cold?”

“This house is so humidified,” said Calvin, “it’s about to condense into water.”

“Doesn’t feel like it. I need something hot to drink. I need a hot Coca-Cola.”

“That’s disgusting and it’s no good for you. You’ll get yourself some diabetes.”

Danny threw a pillow at his head. “Stop nagging me and let me die my own

death.”

“Be my guest.”

Huddling and shivering, Danny turned back to Kassata. “I see I told you

something you didn’t want to hear.”

She was troubled and silent, like she couldn’t decide if she was on the verge of a

breakdown or a breakthrough. She seemed to be hearing the reincarnated voices of past

lives. “My grandfather really killed a man?”

“He didn’t feel good about it, I can tell you that. It wasn’t something he planned,

you know? There was no malice aforeplay.”

“But he killed a man. That’s a bold thing to say.”

“I’m just telling you what I couldn’t tell you before. Maybe I can’t tell you now

either, I don’t know. You wanted to know what happened. I told you. I didn’t mean to

hurt you.”

“If you’re telling me the truth, I don’t see how you can avoid it. And you’re sure

you’re telling me the truth?”

 “Look at me. I’m a sorry old bag of piss. My ass is turning to ice. Parts of my

body I never even heard of are failing. Why the fuck would I lie now?”

“It’s just hard for me to put this all together.”

“I know, I know. All this time, you want your grandfather’s death to have some

meaning. There was a significance to it, a point. But there was no point. Except

confusion. Insanity and confusion.”

“Did your father ever find out Tango was trying to save his life?”

Danny thought for a long time. “I don’t know. If he did, he never said. But that’s

not a no. Like a lot of people who never shut up, the things that really bothered him never

got said. Here’s a for instance. He had another son.”

He told us about Davy—the pregnant girlfriend, Korea, the war hero dead at 19.

He didn’t find out about his half-brother until later in life, and when he did he realized

he’d always been living in Davy’s shadow. It wasn’t bad when he was young—his father

had worshipped him back then. But when Danny got older, past 19, when he and Calvin

got busted for heroin, for example, Davy’s phantom began to stalk him. He could never

live up to the unspoken, unmentioned memory of the son whose life had been frozen in

perfection. Even when he did something right, even when he wasn’t failing Fishboy, he

was failing him.

“My father was certifiable,” he said. “He lived completely in his own world.

When I was a kid, we were collecting for UNICEF at school. I asked him for a donation,

a quarter. He said no, he didn’t do charity. I said children are starving in India. He said if

they’re not starving in India, they’re starving someplace else. What do I look like, Pope

fucking Pius? NO.”

 Something was bothering Danny. He sniffed at his new blanket. “What is this?

This thing stinks.”

“It’s the new detergent we’re using,” said Calvin. “Eco-friendly.”

“It smells like…fucking kiwi.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“I’m staying alive for this?”

“Tango’s death,” I said. “Did your father tell you about it?”

“Not at first. I begged and begged him but he said he didn’t know. Years later,

though, he started taking heart medication. When the drug kicked in he’d get hyper and

he’d really, really, really want to talk. That’s when he told me what happened.”

>>>>>>
MY BRAIN’S NOT MATCHING MY MOUTH

“You should try laughing more,” said Pep Hayward. “Laughing’s the most alive thing

you can do.” Tango wouldn’t disagree, but it was tough to laugh when you’d murdered

someone the night before. Everything was gone. He’d lost Tray. He’d probably lost

Fishboy’s trust, and if so he’d never get it back. At least Fishboy was still alive. He had

that. And he had the game. He had pool, he had the touch. Whatever was going to happen

after this, he’d have to build it on the game.

Tango was trying to get used to some of his other cues. Maybe he should shop

around for another Panamanian Tiger model. He didn’t know, wasn’t sure. Why did he

even bother coming to the Audubon today? He wouldn’t be waiting for any more coded

messages. Trying to understand his life right now was like trying to reconstruct a letter

from a two-year-old typewriter ribbon.

It was getting to the time for his daily bean-pie run. He needed one of those flaky

and custard-filled rounds, so similar to the pies his mother used to make. That was one

thing he could say with certainty. The mashed beans, the sugar, the butter, milk,

cinnamon, nutmeg—he needed a taste of that to get himself home again.

But you can’t get the high without the pie. His connection, Larry X, wasn’t

standing at his usual spot on 125th and Seventh. This was bizarre. Every day since that

kid Calvin Whoopin’ Crane had directed Tango up here, Larry X had been operating in

the same exact location, across the street from the Hotel Theresa, close by the blind street

singer, Rev. Gary or Rev. Davis, take your pick. He’d been surgically connected to the

corner. But not today.

 Tango asked the old gospel singer if he knew where Larry X was, the Black

Muslim who always sold pies and papers here. The reverend, taking no break from

fingerpicking his guitar, raised his sunglassed eyes to the sky and listened.

“Up the block,” he said.

Tango squinted in the direction of Blumstein’s Department Store and the Apollo

Theater. Yeah, there he was, all the way over on the intersection of 125th and Eighth, on

the other side of the street—tight gray suit and tiny bow tie, Larry X hawking copies of

Muhammad Speaks with a cardboard carton of pies at his feet.

Why the hell had he moved?

Tango walked along the bustling continuum of shops and shoppers. Fried food,

high-fashion wigs, cool clothes, YOUR AD HERE—low rates, wide reach. The day was

cloudy and gray, but some combination of perfume, food and incense from the music

stores sunnied the air with the scent of orange blossoms.

Larry X didn’t seem happy to see one of his best customers. He was trying to

appear as calm as a head of lettuce, but he wasn’t pulling it off. He looked like he’d been

appointed Secretary of Jitters for the Nation of Islam. Something had happened to him to

make him migrate.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Tango. “Why’re you here? Branching out?”

“I thought I might try Eighth Avenue.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Big. I thought this might be a better possible. And once you make up your mind

about something, you know? You’re gonna get going.”

“What’re you talking about?”

 The man shook his head. “My brain’s not matching my mouth today.”

Tango took out a quarter. “No matter where you are, I’m hungry.”

Larry X ignored the coin and shoved a pie into his hands. “It’s on the house.”

“I’m not looking to glom off you.”

“It’s okay. Take another. Take a paper too.”

“Why’re you so loopy?”

“Looks like we might get some rain,” he said, and then he turned and took off like

he’d just heard his train whistling, leaving the box of pies behind.

Tango spun around and checked the street. Something was shaking Larry X out of

his jock strap. He didn’t see anything. Traffic, pedestrians, people going in and out of

Blumstein’s. Then he looked up. He saw a flash of sunlight on the roof of the store, a

tense yellow reflection, totally out of place on a gray overcast day.

It was the last thing he ever saw.

>>>>>>
GOODNIGHT, NURSE

I asked Danny who pulled the trigger. He shrugged and said nobody. Nobody? It had to

be somebody. “It was nobody,” he said. “Nobody to speak of. Some mook my father

hired, some Lee Harvey Oswald. I don’t know who it was. Shit, you know him better

than I do. You actually met him. You paraded his bones all over the internet.”

“That’s who it was? Your father had him killed?”

“Same day. No one else ever knew who it was, then or now.”

“And Larry X? Was he dispatched too?”

“No, just paid off.”

Well, I had my answers. So did Kassata, after a lifetime of asking, but she was

still brooding and itchy.

“This is so fucked,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell us this the first time?”

“Don’t get short with me.”

“If you’d told us, your Gary Tripucka would still be alive.”

“That’s your big plus? That’s your best argument? I wasn’t a big fan of your

grandfather’s. I didn’t want to talk about the fucker. I didn’t want to do anything to help

his fucking granddaughter. I hated him. Not always, sure. I liked him when I was young.

I loved him. But not after what happened.”

“When you found out about your mother?” she said. “He was sleeping with your

mother?”

“She wasn’t my mother. She was my mother. He was fucking my mother. He

broke up my family. He ended the only happy times I had. After that, after they got
divorced, the only time the three of us were together was in the summers. In this house.

This is why I live here.”

Kassata let some of the air out of her anger. “Did you ever talk to her about

Tango?”

“Why would I do that? What she did, what she wanted to do, that was her

business. That was between her and whatever. It wasn’t my business, that’s for sure.”

“What happened to her after?”

“She turned into a nasty, lonely old lady. A carnivorous old lady. She turned into

an expert on bitching. Everything was wrong. She couldn’t start a sentence without

saying why’re you doing that, how can you be so stupid, I can’t believe you’re making

such a mistake. Always with her lip hung over a glass of gin. She was miserable. For

what it’s worth, I think your grandfather was the only man she really loved, but I would

never say that to you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kassata. “I think sorry is what I feel.”

“She thought everything was my father’s fault, even after they split. And he

thought everything was her fault. I’d left something at his place once, she told him to

bring it over. He got in an accident on the way. Naturally he blamed her. She got cancer.

She blamed him for it. When she was dying from it, she blamed him for that too.”

“Sorry.”

“That was the last time the three of us were together, at her funeral. My father

came to the church, her side of the family had put him in like the third or fourth row. He

refused to sit there. He walked up to the front row and stood there until they made room

for him. When he finally sat down he said to the priest, you can start now.”
 Another spasm of shivers ran through Danny. He gave Calvin a sharp glance.

“Whatta you got the temperature down to, 30?”

“You want another blanket?”

“Not if it stinks like this one.”

“What happened to your father?” I said. “Like right after. Manny da Silva and all

that.”

The way Danny started snorting I thought he was having some kind of attack. But

it was laughter.

Manny was a dick, he said. A hardnose little Hitler. He’d already banned drinking

at the social club when Johnny Kachka was still live. After he took over, Manny told his

guys they couldn’t drink at Emilio’s on West 37th. He didn’t want them congregating in

the same place. Too risky. He put other drillmaster rules into effect. His people didn’t

like his attitude. One day Manny held a meeting. He said he knew things had gotten slack

under Kachka, but he was going to firm everything up, and if anybody didn’t like the new

discipline, they should blame him. They did. One of his own guys shot him that night.

Once Manny was dead, the Five Eyes gave Long Island to Fishboy. They didn’t

care if he was nuts. As long as somebody was keeping the territory running while they

milked it from underneath, they were content. And the government followed its usual

form and eventually lost interest in organized crime. The FBI shifted its focus to radicals,

subversives and Commie sympathizers, and everybody lived as happily as any decent-

minded mobster could.

“Your father had his finger in a lot of pies.” I said.

 “His finger? He had his whole fist in them. But yeah, he did okay from then on in.

Still crazy, still paranoid, but he made Long Island work. Time went on, he got into

politics. He became a kingmaker, deciding who got to run for what. He said politics were

too important to be left to politicians. That’s mostly what he did later in his life, last

hundred years or so. Setting up political deals with backers, still wearing his fur coat and

cowboy hat.”

“You eventually took over for him.”

Danny nodded. “Once I got clean, once I got Calvin out of jail, settled that score, I

started filling my custodial duties. But it wasn’t the same. It’s not the same as when I was

growing up. You’re not dealing with the Fishboys and the Kachkas of the world anymore.

The people today, they’re all Brooks Brothers suits, dingleberry counters, bandits armed

with MBAs. I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Fuck them. In my

father’s day—people don’t believe this when I tell them. But in my father’s day, the New

York Times, the fucking New York Times had two full-time bookies on the payroll. They

called them news clerks, but all they did was take bets from the staff. Management

thought it was a convenience, keep everybody in the office. You know shit like that

doesn’t fly anymore. The people today, they’d want a stake in the New York Times to

provide gambling services. The greed on these fuckers is unbelievable. They’ll grab any

bone they think’ll make soup. Most guys would fuck a snake if it had an ass? These

people’d fuck a snake if it had a wallet.”

Danny took a break, rested, caught his breath. He was disgusted and spent. He

looked at Calvin. “Give me another one of those stink-sheet blankets.”

 Calvin tucked the material around him, working gently, carefully. Even so, Danny

cried out like he’d been stabbed.

“Time for the painkiller,” said Calvin. “And the other meds.”

“It’s goodnight nurse after that,” Danny said to us. “I’m taking meds, then I’m

taking more meds for the side effects of the meds I’m already taking.”

“Painkiller’s in the fridge,” said Calvin, walking out of the room. “I’ll go get it.

Don’t leave.”

“Fuck you.”

Kassata shuffled her feet. The train was leaving the station. “I guess we’ll get

going,” she said. “Thank you for talking to us under these…circumstances.”

“The deathbed scene?” said Danny. “Yeah. Reminds me of the time I saw my

father when he was dying. He said he had something to tell me, something important.

What? I love life, he said, more than life itself. I still have no idea what he meant.”

“Maybe he was trying to give you a sense of hope,” I said.

“It’s possible. Trying to tell me, in his usual fucked-up way, that things aren’t

hopeless. You notice a lot of people say life is hopeless? You notice they’re still hanging

around to say it?”

Calvin came back with vials of pills and a filled syringe.

Danny looked at the needle. “Just like old times. That’s how I started on the junk.

Calvin would hit me up. That’s how we got to be friends.”

“We all have our regrets,” said Calvin. He flicked an air bubble out of the barrel

and skinpopped him in the arm. “You’ll be rarin’ to sleep in a couple of minutes.”
 I felt Kassata take my hand and squeeze it. She hadn’t touched me in quite some

time. I looked at her and saw her nose running from the tears.

“Don’t do that,” said Danny. “Don’t cry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I’m just saying, there’s no need for it. No need for anything, really. There’re two

big moments in life—birth and death. Everything else is crap.”

“Pretty dramatic,” said Calvin. “You’re really hamming it up at the end.”

Danny pulled his blankets and covers up to his chin, waiting for the first rush.

“Well, that’s all I got. That’s the only wisdom I have to convey. No, wait, there’s

something else. One more word of advice.”

“What?” said Kassata.

“Stay warm.”

>>>>>>>
CRAZY FAITH

Three days after Danny died, Kassata decided she wanted to visit the intersection of

125th and Eighth. She’d never been there before, never had the heart. Now she was

ready. Sadly, now there was almost nothing left to see. There’s a lot of history in Harlem,

but in street names only. The corner where Tango was killed is now officially known as

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. Mount Morris

Park, where Tango broke his cue on Spider’s neck, was renamed for Marcus Garvey in

the 1970s. Time passes, people and places disappear. All the crap between birth and

death, as Danny would put it, dissolves and fades away. The snake swallows you and

then spits you out, and you start all over again. The only question is, the time you spent

passing through the intestines, was that life or death?

We started at 125th and Seventh, where the bean pies were sold in the shadow of

the Hotel Theresa. This was once called the Waldorf-Astoria of Harlem, and Louis

Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Jimi Hendrix, Fidel Castro and Malcolm X

had passed many times through its doors. Now it’s an office building.

On this side of the street, the old blind singer lives only as a legacy. Originally a

blues star in the 1930s, Rev. Gary Davis was reborn in the 60s folk boom and became an

enormous influence in music history. As for the traitorous Larry X, his fate will have to

be traced by his future biographer.

We walked along 125th, retracing Tango’s last steps. Not much of the funk

remains. The raucous little shops have been replaced by chain franchises—Starbucks,

Planet Fitness, The Body Shop, H&M and banks, banks, banks.

Nobody teaches time anything.

 Kassata was decompressing from finding out about her grandfather. Getting the

answer to a long-asked question often comes as a shock. Me, I was keeping myself

together with baling wire and tattered pieces of rope, trying to play the role of the happy

manic-depressive.

We crossed to the north side of the street. The Apollo Theater was still intact.

Christ, the people who played here—Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Count

Basie, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett,

Marvin Gaye, The Commodores. This is where Gladys Knight, King Curtis and Jimi

Hendrix won the Amateur Night contests. This is where James Brown’s body was laid in

soul state.

The art nouveau building that housed Blumstein’s Department Store was still

standing. The tall, horizontal sign that once blazed the store’s name in neon now said

Touro College. And it wasn’t in neon, but in paint. The sign climbed up to the roof above

the fifth floor. The place where the anonymous sniper waited hadn’t changed since that

day in 1960.

This is where it ended. We were standing on the spot where Tango took the bullet,

looking up at the roof where he’d seen that fugitive flash of light. There was a kind of

mathematical completion in this naked encounter with the past, a sense of the cycle

turning. But if we were waiting for something to happen, some revelation to come down

on us like a final curtain, nothing did.

Kassata was dismayed by the pedestrians, the cars blithely passing by, the

humdrum of the street life. “They don’t know,” she said. “They don’t know what this is,

they don’t know what it means. The thing that happened here, all the things that ever
happened here, they just don’t know. I’ve got a chill shooting up my spine, this is

something lost from my childhood, but all these people just don’t know it.”

Here we go. She let a waterfall of words loose, bit-torrents of thoughts about

memories, yesterdays, neural traces in the brain, blood lines in the heart, her mother, her

family, how fast it all goes, things that shouldn’t be forgotten, shouldn’t be obliterated,

it’s too human, it’s just too human, it’s just too human for that.

Her speed rap was irritating, it was exasperating, but it meant she was returning to

normal.

Maybe coming here was disappointing, but what did we expect? It was going to

change our lives? Heal the wounds? Wash away our sins? Not happening. We’re all lost,

broken, sleepless people, stumbling in the dark. When it comes to finding a place in the

world, we’re all homeless.

But that doesn’t mean we have to be afraid. If we can find some crazy faith, we’ll

find a way to go on. If we can go beyond ourselves, our fractured identities, our

misconstructed egos, we’ll find the meaning of meaning. Where do you look? Depends.

Sometimes it’s way out there, sometimes it’s deep in here. Sometimes it’s in the sky,

sometimes it’s down below. The location can change, but the sense of going beyond

never does, and it makes all the sorrow to come worthwhile.

Kassata had been talking all this time. The woman could go through the rosary in

three minutes flat. But now she started sputtering and slowing down. A minute later she

was silent, as if a fog had slipped in over her words.

I looked up past the fifth-floor roof. God was working in watercolor, and getting a

little sloppy with the blues, but it was a beautiful day.

 Kassata put her hand around my arm. It wasn’t the sexiest move a woman could

make, but it thrilled the hell out of me.

“I’m shaky,” she said. “I’m all wired up. I need to step down from this.”

“I know, you want to go somewhere for a drink.”

“No, as long as we’re here, let’s ask around. Let’s go looking for some bean pie.”

###