“I just promised him two thousand to do the collection in three weeks,” Twill said, smiling.<þdiv/font>
It was a good deal, seeing that I owed my son six thousand.
Not having the cash on hand, I paid off his friend in installments over the summer and got Twill to agree to my starting a college account for him. I’m still depositing money on the first of each month, and listening to my favorite songs every day.
“Suppose I don’t want to go to college?” he argued when I first brought up the notion.
“You need to go,” I told him. “After that you could go into business and become a billionaire.”
“Not interested,” he replied, holding up a lazy hand intended to short-circuit the capitalist curse.
“Not now,” I said with fatherly assurance.
“Not never, Pops. Money makes people weak and stupid. And you know when you’re rich nobody ever likes you for you but for what you’re worth. I’d rather just make enough to do what I want and keep the electricity on.”
He was fourteen years old at the time. I promised him that if he didn’t want to go to college by the time he was twenty he could have whatever money was in the account.
“FAT MAN” BY Jethro Tull was playing on the Bose speakers I’d installed in the backseat. Twill wasn’t my son by blood but I would save him from himself. He deserved a better life, despite his intelligence and predilections.
As I sat there waiting for the prey to show itself, I turned my attention to Norman Fell.
I wondered what it was like to live a life when you couldn’t read a word. How strange the titles of books must seem; even your own name would only be familiar in a symbolic kind of way. To be a man like him out there hiding in plain sight, making a life for himself half swathed in internal darkness.
But literacy didn’t make you smart, just like, as Twill had already figured out, money didn’t make you rich.
Both Fell and I knew that finding those men was wrong, but we had bills to pay and shoes to replace, pretenses to keep up. Well after the properties had been condemned, we were still trying to build lives.
I used to believe that I was getting somewhere, that with enough experience and enough money in the bank I could become a well-heeled member of some exclusive club. I’d leave the street life to the mooks that lived it. I’d climb to the penthouse all the time knowing that the higher one gets . . .
I kept a storage space in the Bronx that had information on over three hundred cases that I had been involved in. I had once counted on those files to be my exit plan. I’d call everyone still alive and sell what I had for five thousand dollars a pop, on average. Or, if I got busted, I could use that information to deƒ€ormational myself out of a prison sentence.
But none of that mattered anymore. I was no longer a moral illiterate. I could read the signs and I knew what they meant.
“BLUE MOON” BY the Marcels was just ramping up on my system when a man came out the front of the yellow-and-blue cottage. A Mann. I knew his face from the temporary website Christian had provided. He was walking an elderly dachshund on a red shoulder leash. The old dog was pulling, halfheartedly, I thought, trying to get out and piss on the streets where he’d squandered his doggie youth.
The twelve-pound pet was a mottled brown, his master was pink and bulbous. If A Mann was thirty pounds overweight, forty of that was flab. He walked like a man who had never exercised a day in his life, a little wobbly on every fourth or fifth step. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt. This ensemble wasn’t very fashionable but that wasn’t saying much—Mr. Mann would have had to undergo a serious TV makeover to get him looking like he belonged anywhere.
On the other hand, he didn’t seem to care about appearances. A muttered to the dog and waited patiently for it to do its business. He was ready with a little plastic bag. It was painful, seeing him lowering to one knee on those weak and rusty pins.
When he was halfway down the block I got out and followed from the other side of the street.
We strolled in our separate worlds down toward the ocean. He was thinking about his dog and I was wondering how to make him my bitch.
With Christian’s help I knew that A had no wife or children. His mother lived with a sister in Tampa, and they had fallen completely out of touch. He’d changed his name to Dwight Timmerman and lived a very quiet life on a stipend garnered from a lifetime of careful investments. He lived in a kind of self-imposed, self-generated witness protection program.
Christian’s thoughtfully constructed website told me that A, when he realized that he was working for gangsters, had gone to a wealthy friend from high school who had made it rich. This friend, a man simply referred to by Christian as Mr. Jones, helped him change his identity. Jones had done all this with the help of one of Rinaldo’s subordinates.
Alphonse Rinaldo threw a broad web over the city of New York. Almost everyone was connected to him, though few knew it. His control over the city was so complete that he might have even pulled the strings of his own employers.
I had suspicions about Fell (aka Ambrose Thurman), but in the case of Tony the Suit there wasn’t a shadow of doubt: the moment I turned over Mann’s address, he and the dog would be dead. And if I refused to turn the name over, I’d be on Tony’s blacklist and someone else would root out the accountant.
The odds between me and Tony were pretty much even but if Harris Vartan decided to weigh in on the gangster’s side I wouldn’t make it a day.
I didn’t havƒ€">I didne much of a choice, and I had a family that needed me breathing in order for them to stay afloat.
THE STROLL LASTED for about thirty minutes. Mann and dog had to stop four times to catch their breath. One time there the accountant plopped down on a bench with his back toward the ocean. He was breathing through his mouth while the dachshund panted laboriously. The dog was looking up at A while he stared at the clouds. It was a moment of grace in an awkward life. I remember feeling a little jealous.
After that five-minute breather the duo lurched back to the cottage—probably to take an afternoon nap.
Ê€„
32
After leaving Coney Island I was at sixes and sevens, as my foster aunt Moth used to say. I didn’t want to set A up for a hit, but he was a dead man whether I did or didn’t. If I was still in the life I might have been able to turn Tony down; I’d’ve had other clients who could block his demands. But as it was, I had no protection. And I didn’t have much room to move in either; there was other pressing work that had to be done.
I dropped by Gordo’s Gym to work off some of the frustration.
Gordo gave me that grin again when I came through the door. He shifted his gaze to a lithe young fighter shadowboxing gracefully against the far wall.
Jimmy Punterelle was a handsome white kid with thick brown hair and a dark-blue tattoo of Rocky Marciano on his right shoulder. He was already stripped down and warmed up, so when Gordo introduced us it was the easiest thing in the world to suggest that we have a friendly sparring match. The kid sneered, then became a bit suspicious when Gordo told me that I wouldn’t need protective headgear.