Out of his pocket Sidney took the soiled hanky again and ran it around his forehead and skull. “But nobody had to tell me this story didn’t look like it was going to have a happy ending. I put Al and Vera up in the Rittenhouse Hotel. The next day, or the day after that, Vera pays me another visit at my office and says that if Al doesn’t play and do what they say, they’re gonna kill him. You don’t have to be a genius to know this is a distinct possibility. But how come she’s so sure? Well, since I last saw Vera I’ve been asking about her around South Philly, and now I know she’s been peddling her puss for Irving and his crowd since she was a teenager. This is the broad my best ballplayer chooses to shack up with?” Sidney clapped his hand against his forehead. “Gott in himmell!
“It took me about a minute and a half to turn her, Ronnie. I told her she had to choose sides. I told her from now on she was my spy. To let Irving ’s people know Al wasn’t going along with them and I wanted Vera to let me know exactly what they were going to do about it. The playoffs are about to start and Vera reports back to me that Al won’t make it out of the National Hotel Ballroom alive if he doesn’t go in the tank-the Planets win by two points in the first game, no more.
“If she’s telling me the truth, all I got to do is frisk all three thousand people who show up for the game. I hire every tough Jew I know to guard the doors that night. Irving and Itchy and their broads waltz right in, but not until we’ve patted them down. I put Al in the game. Only problem is, they smuggled a gun in somehow and Itchy comes out of his seat at the end of the game and tries to shoot Al as he’s leaving the floor. Some of my guys get to Itchy first and nobody gets hurt, but Itchy gets away.
“An hour after the game, Al goes back to his suite at the Rittenhouse, the one I got for him and Vera, and he walks in and there’s Vera asleep in the bed with the covers pulled up over her chin. She doesn’t wake up when he comes in, so Al goes over and pulls the covers down. Vera’s throat has been slit from ear to ear. Poor girl. And me, I figure I’m responsible for it because when Irving and Itchy saw all the security at the game, they must’ve figured Vera was talking to me, had tipped me off. And she paid a terrible price.
“So now it’s war. I’m ready to break Itchy in two when one of my guys who was watching the stands during the game tells me that it was Irving ’s seat that was empty since the middle of the game. Are you sure? I ask. Sure I’m sure, says my guy. So it’s Irving, who used to kill kittens when he was a boy. Now he’s killed a grown-up kitten named Vera.”
“This is quite a story, Grandpa,” I said.
“You haven’t heard nothing yet.”
“Is it true?”
“What’re you talking about?” Sidney said, genuinely enraged this time. “What do you know? Of course it’s true! Sit and listen. I’m trying to tell you something!” His eyes started to glisten with tears of old grief. “I make a few calls, people I know, and I set up a meeting with Levchuck. I knew he’d see me. The kid who made good and the kid who made bad. So we meet on a bench by the Schuylkill River, where there can be no surprises. He’s got three or four of his guys stationed all around, just like in the movies. Touching their weapons through their clothes.
“Let me tell you, I’m disgusted. I know the guy’s murdered Vera, but he’s blaming Itchy. Saying, ‘ Sidney, I can’t control him. For ten bucks, he’d shoot himself!’ I can’t say anything to him, because I’ve got to protect Al. Got to protect my team. I got to get Al and the team out of this alive. So I plead with this goniff to call the whole thing off.
“I say to him, I say, ‘Don’t you have bigger things to worry about?’ And he says to me, ‘ Sidney, what could be bigger than having you come to me on your knees?’ See? That’s what it was all about for him, Ronnie! Making me come to him on my knees begging for Al Newberger’s life.
“So he purses his lips and decides to change the terms. Doing me a big favor. Irving says the money on the street is swinging the Jersey Reds’ way now, saying we can’t beat ’em in the series. So Irving wants to put his money on us now, the underdogs.”
“So Al Newberger’s gonna have to bet his life that the Planets take the Reds,” I said.
“‘I’ll take your boys, Sidney,’ he tells me, pleased with himself. ‘All they’ve got to do is win. Everything’s kosher. You win, I’ll win, we’ll all win.’ What can I do, Ronnie? I’ve got to take the terms. At least Al’s not shaving points now, and he’s in charge of his own destiny. But the whole thing’s making me sick. That’s what I remember saying to Irving. ‘Guys like you make me sick.’
“And he says, ‘There aren’t any guys like me, Sidney. There’s just me.’”
“I think I’ve read about this guy Levchuck,” I said.
“Of course you have! He was a big k’nacker! Listen to me! I take Al aside and tell him what the deal is now: we win the series and everything’s copacetic. But he’s out of control. Irving ’s murdered his girlfriend and now he’s supposed to go out and win the championship? To save his own life? Being owned by Levchuck all because he beat up his scrawny schlammer, and now this? He’s out of control and he’s throwing things around the hotel room. I have no doubt he’d kill Irving if given half a chance.
“I know what I’ve got to do. I ask him where the gun is, the gun he took off Itchy two or three weeks before. He says he’s stashed it up his chimney at his apartment. So I drive him over there and make him give it to me. He hands it over, but first he takes the bullets out. ‘Give me the goddamn bullets,’ I say, because, sure, I figure he’s thinking he’ll get another gun and use the bullets. But Al says, ‘Fogey, I’m just taking them out because I’m afraid you might hurt yourself.’ You can imagine me handling a gun, Ronnie, right? So he hands me the bullets separate and now I feel a little bit safer that Al’s not going to do something stupid. And I tell him that we’ll be all right, that all we’ve gotta do is beat the Reds in seven, which is what we were gonna do anyway.
“Well,” Sidney said with a long sigh and a sip of water, “to make a long story short, the Reds beat us up and before we know it, we’re down two games to one. Now we’re shitting bricks. If we don’t win three of the next four, I don’t know how I’m gonna keep Al alive. The fourth game’s at the National, so I get every tough kid in the neighborhood to watch the doors and stand around the court, watching the stands, just in case. I tell ’em we’re expecting trouble. The place is all kocked up with people. Every Jew and half the Italians in Philadelphia are there, and none of them knows we’re playing for our lives. Just Al and me.
“Well, we lose by three in front of our own fans. We’re down three games to one now, with two of the next three in Jersey City, and I’m thinking of asking the league on the q.t. to move the rest of the series to an undisclosed location. I’m thinking of how to get Al out of Philadelphia, maybe out of the country.
“Then it happens, like manna from heaven. Sometime after midnight on the night of that fourth game, somebody pops Irving Levchuck in the alley behind the candy store where he likes to conduct his business. Ran his operation out of the storeroom in the back. Old Irving takes one right in the punim. Dead. It’s front page in all the papers the next day. No one can figure it out. There’s talk that the Matteo brothers sent someone to do it. That somebody in Atlantic City thought Irving was taking too big a piece of the heroin racket.