Rand looked at him. There was a taut, teeth-baring smile on Angelo’s face, but there was no smile in his eyes. Something, the young agent thought, is disturbing this man.
“Angelo, I live in Denver.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Considerable, in fact. Have you ever been out West?”
“Out West? Sure, I been out West.” Angelo gave the agent a regard that mixed pity with contempt. “I was up in Albany once.” He produced another mirthless laugh. “You know what they say, kid? Once you get past Yonkers, everything out there’s Bridgeport.”
He waved a hand past the sagging fagade of a Catholic church. “Over there,” he noted, with a certain pride in his voice, “is Joey Gallo’s old turf. His docks are down there.”
Rand followed his gesture toward the lowlying piers pushing into the gray sludge of the harbor. “Do the rackets still control the piers?”
What’s with this guy? Angelo thought. Next thing he’ll want to know is, is the Pope Catholic? “Of course. Profacci family. Anthony Scotto.”
“And you guys can’t break them?”
“Break them, you kidding? They own all the stevedore companies that lease the piers. And the union local on every pier is owned by the mob that owns the stevedore company. If a guy hasn’t got an uncle, a brother, a cousin inside the union to recommend him, forget it, he don’t work. What happens his first day down there, guy comes up to him, says, `Hey, we’re taking a collection for Tony Nazziato. Broke his leg over to Pier Six.’ He says, ‘Tony who?’ and he never works again. Because old Tony, he’s up there in the union hall, and he could run the hundred on that broken leg of his.
It’s an understanding. Like everything on the piers.”
Enough of this, Angelo thought. He gave the agent a quizzical regard. “They sent you all the way from Denver just for a crummy barrel of chlorine gas.”
Rand swallowed hastily. “I’d hardly call chlorine gas crummy. You heard what they said about how toxic it was.”
“Yeah, well, you know what I figure? At least two thousand of you guys been pulled in here, all for that little barrel.”
The New Yorker’s face, Rand noted, seemed relaxed, but the cold set of his gray eyes had not changed.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” the agent replied. He hesitated a moment.
“You must be getting close to retirement age, Angelo.”
Okay, Angelo said to himself, the kid wants to change the subject, we’ll change the subject. “Sure. I could retire. I got the years. But I like the job. Like the excitement. Nobody’s breaking my balls. What would I do, I retire? Sit out there on Long Island somewhere and listen to the grass grow?”
Just the thought of retirement reminded him that it was here, in this precinct, that he had walked his first beat. In 1947. He’d been so close to home he could drop in for coffee in the house where he’d been born, kiss Ma, talk with the old man in the tailor shop he had set up when he came over from Sicily after the first war, lounge in the back room where Angelo had pushed the needle himself on Saturday afternoons, listening to the Metropolitan Opera, to his old man belting out Rigoletto, Trovatore, Traviata. Knew them all, his old man. Where did they go, all those years, Angelo thought, where did they go?
“You been with the Bureau long?” he asked Rand.
“Three years. Since I got out of Tulane Law School.”
Figures, Angelo thought. I always get the veterans.
Angelo fell silent for a moment, looking again at the once familiar neighborhood, resembling now the blastedout villages he’d fought over north of Naples in the winter of ‘43. Those years in the service, the force. He’d done all right. For an Italian. The Police and Fire Departments in the city belonged to the Irish. The Italians had the Sanitation. Jews owned the teachers. They said New York was a melting pot, but its heat could thaw things out only so much.
“You married, kid?”
“Yes,” Rand replied. “We have two children. How about you?”
For the first time he noted a softening in the detective’s gray eyes. “I lost my wife to cancer some years ago. We had one child, a daughter.” The words were issued like pronunciamento, a definitive statement that permitted no further questions.
Angelo turned off the avenue and drew up to a gate. He flashed his detective’s shield at the guard inside, who waved them ahead. They rolled down a slight incline to a huge three-story fagade of yellowing cement opening before a dark cavern that looked a little like a covered railroad stand. Overhead, a walkway linked the building to a pair of massive warehouses. They were quintessential U.S. government functionaclass="underline" squat and tasteless, without any redeeming frill or folly. Four railroad tracks ran into the pier’s dim recesses. Painted overhead in black block letters were the words “PASSENGER TERMINAL.”
“The end of the line for the kid in Upper Seventeen,” Angelo mused.
“What?” the startled Rand asked.
“Shit. Forget it. It was an ad during the war. You weren’t even born then.”
He flicked a peanut into his mouth and shook his head as though in disbelief. “I shipped out of here in ‘forty-two.”
A bitter gust of wind tore off the bay, flinging up to their nostrils the putrid odor of the dirty sea water lapping the docks. Angelo headed toward a shacklike booth at the end of the pier, its windows coated with fly specks, grime and dust.
“Would you believe that?” he asked. “U.S. Customs Office. You could walk a circus elephant past those windows and the guy inside wouldn’t notice.”
Angelo led the way into the dimly lit office. Decals of the Knicks, the Jets, old postcards, a yellowing Playboy centerfold were stuck to the walls. In one corner sat a hot plate in a little puddle of cold coffee. It was surrounded by an open can of Nescafe, a pair of mugs, their handles chipped, a jar of Creem, a few cubes of sugar, each capped with its matching crown of flies. The Customs officer had his feet up on the desk, a copy of the Daily News open to the sports page on his lap.
“Oh, yeah, they told me you were coming,” he said at the flash of Angelo’s gold shield. Without getting up, he added, “They’re waiting for you next door in the stevedores’ office.”
That office was little different from Customs. Stacked by month on a table were six piles of paper, almost a foot high, the manifests of the ships that had called at the pier in the last six months.
Angelo took off his overcoat and folded it neatly over a filthy cabinet. He plucked a few peanuts from his pocket and offered them to Rand. “Have a peanut, kid, and let’s get to work. Remember, the va piano, va sano.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, my friend, a good cop is a guy who takes his time.”
The Mayor’s chubby hands, the hands Abe Stern had once imagined jabbing and punching their way through the glare of a prize ring, were pressed flat against the White House windowpane. Despair etched every line that seventy years of toil and struggle had left upon his face. Six million seven hundred thousand people, he thought over and over again, six million seven hundred thousandl A holocaust even worse than the tragedy that had swept the remnants of his father’s family into the gas chambers of Auschwitz; and all of it accomplished in the glare and incandescence of a few terrible seconds.
“Mr. President.” His voice was a harsh plea. “We gotta do something for those people up there. We got to.”
The President was perched on the corner of his desk, his weight supported by one foot. He had brought the Mayor back here to his private office after the NSC meeting to try to both brace and prepare him for the ordeal they were going to share.
“We are, Abe,” he answered. “We’re going to negotiate our way out of it. No man can be as unreasonable, as irrational as this. In the meantime, what’s important is to keep calm, not to let ourselves give in to panic.”