Gone Bamboo (24 page)

"He calls here all the time . . . always . . . Tell Paulie do this, tell Paulie do that. I don't see how you boys work with a person like that. He's got no respect for privacy, that man."

She put the half-empty shopping bags on the table between Henry and Paulie, who played peekaboo while she put the remaining items in the cupboards, maintaining a steady, friendly patter the whole time.

"Have you had any breakfast? How 'bout I make some nice scrambled eggs with some sausages?" To Henry, she confided, "Paulie was so good to remember the groceries. He always forgets." And Henry saw, beneath the familiarities, fear in Mrs Caifano's face, hidden by the talk of breakfast and groceries, but there. It made him feel ashamed of himself, and he tried to smile sympathetically.

"And so late," she babbled on, "always so late . . . the drinking, the smoking. Henry . . . you should hear this man, he gets up inna morning, the coughing and wheezing. I swear." She shook her head.

"I could use a cig right now," said Paulie, searching his pockets for a pack. "Shit. I knew I forgot something . . ."

Eager for a smoke himself, Henry pulled out his own, a crumpled pack of Gitanes. He lit one for himself, then, seeing the look on Paulie's face, trying to suck smoke into his lungs from across the table, passed him the pack.

"Thanks," said Paulie.

"Oooh, are those French?" asked Mrs Caifano. "I never seen those. You from France, Henry?"

"No, ma'am," said Henry. "I just like them."

"So can I get you somethin' to eat, Paulie? Henry looks so skinny. Let me make you something—"

"We ate," said Paulie, his stomach growling. "At the diner, we had somethin' before."

"Well, you'll have some coffee. I'm just gonna make a little toast for myself, you don't mind. If you boys wanna talk business, I'll be out of your way inna min. Will you have some coffee, Henry? I grind my own beans."

A roar settled on the house as a jet passed low overhead. Henry could hear the tires squeal as the plane settled down onto the nearby runway. When the noise was gone, Henry looked across the table and saw an amused look on Paulie's face, much less worried now.

"Sure," he said. "Thanks, Mrs Caifano, I'll have a cup."

"You wanta show Henry the yard, Paulie. I'll call yez when it's ready," said Mrs Caifano. "We're putting in a pool, you know, Henry. Paulie, show him what you done so far. I'll give a yell. Youse can have it onna patio, it's ready."

Paulie stood up, turned his back on Henry, and walked out the screen door into his backyard, holding the screen until Henry followed.

"Thank you," said Henry to Mrs Caifano.

"Nice lady," said Henry.

"Twenny-two years married," said Paulie, not looking at Henry but gazing distractedly into the empty pit in the center of the small, fenced-in yard.

"Really? That's a long time," said Henry.

"You know . . . all 'at time, I never fucked around on her. Not once. The whole time."

"That's . . . extraordinary," said Henry, taken slightly aback. "I mean . . . you know . . . people in your outfit—"

"Twenny-two years. Not once."

"That's . . . admirable, Paulie. Really. I imagine most of your colleagues don't share your views on the sanctity of marriage."

Paulie laughed. "No . . . no they don't." He hoisted up his pants and stepped down into the half-empty pit, kicking at a rock on his way to the deepest point. "You know, I saw youse that night down there. I saw your wife there inna stretcher. She gonna be okay now?"

"Yeah . . . she'll be okay."

"I felt bad about that."

"I get the sense . . . that. . . Well, let's just say you're an unusual man, Paulie."

"Yeah." Paulie chuckled. "I guess so."

"So. What do we do now?" asked Henry. "We going to wrestle around the backyard for a while? The wife gonna come out with my piece, take a few shots at me? What's next?"

"Nah . . . she ain't gonna do nothin' like that."

"She calling somebody on the phone?"

"Who she supposedta call?"

"I don't know."

Paulie stepped in front of Henry, hands at his sides. "You ain't gonna hurt my wife, Henry. Even you had yer gun now, you wouldn't do nothin' like that. You ain't gonna shoot no old lady in her bunny slippers."

"No," admitted Henry. "I guess not."

Paulie nodded and looked up at the sky for a long time. If Henry wanted to, he could have killed him right then. A hand across the windpipe, maybe. He let the moment pass. "I guess I could beat you to death. Kick in the nuts, chop in the neck . . ."

"Yeah, right. We'd look pretty fuckin' stupid, rollin' aroun' inna dirt."

Another plane came in low, the noise building to a deafening whine as it dropped out of the steel gray sky over Paulie's house. The neighbors were waking up now. Henry could smell cooking bacon and burning English muffins. Somebody was yelling at kids in the next house over.

"I don't know, Paulie," said Henry, sighing. "You got any ideas?"

Paulie smiled, his eyes turning to slits as he took Henry's arm. "Actually," he said, "I'm thinkin' a' somethin'."

43

P
aulie Brown was a film star. "Popping up everywhere at a theater near you," joked one of the bleary-eyed FBI men, watching a grainy surveillance tape of Paulie having a midday walk-talk with Jerry "Dogs" Camino.

Paulie's sudden emergence as social butterfly over the last few days was causing a lot of speculation in the Foley Square offices of the Organized Crime Strike Force. From Jimmy Pazz's rarely seen factotum to roving diplomat in the blink of an eye, Paulie had been observed having espresso in Brooklyn with Benny "Red" Merlino, lunch in the Village with Jackie Essa, midafternoon walk-talks with Jerry Dogs, as well as his usual schedule of errands and meetings with his "known associates," Jimmy Pazz and Richie Gianelli.

"Jimmy's gotta be makin' a move," said one of the experts assigned from OCCB to the strike force after viewing Paulie's third appearance on videotape that day. "What are we hearing from snitches?"

"Dick," answered the exasperated FBI guy. "We're getting dick. Nobody knows nothing."

"Then
what
the fuck is going on?" railed the OCCB guy. "
What
is he doing?"

Informant reports continued to hint at nothing. Nobody got shot. Nobody disappeared - all the usual faces were observed showing up at their usual haunts. There were no unusual outbreaks of cheek kissing or backslapping to indicate a shifting of power or loyalty. Life went on. The only thing different was that Paulie Brown had suddenly gone from knuckle dragger to Kissinger, and nobody could figure it out.

Surveillance was stepped up, of course. Jimmy Pazz's trailer was watched more closely than before. Paulie was followed from pay phone to pay phone; but as he never used the same one twice, it was impossible to listen in. An effort was even made to run a wire into Paulie's house; an agent dressed as a cable TV repairman tried to get past Mrs Caifano one afternoon. The old lady had a lawyer pulling into the driveway before the agent was halfway through his pitch. What little Jimmy said on his office phone was indecipherable and useless, and, since his offices were swept for listening devices twice a week, a room mike was out of the question.

Then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Traveling Paulie Brown became good old Predictable Paulie Brown again, and things went back to normal. Eleven A.M., Subject Paul Caifano woke up, had breakfast with his wife, and went to the racetrack. One-thirty P.M., Paul Caifano had lunch with his usual associates, Edward "Boy" De Cecco (known gambler), Robert "Ruby" Marx (suspected loan shark), and Charles "Chickie" Lowenstein (known bookmaker). They ate, as always, at the Turf and Surf Lounge at the track. Paulie was known to favor the pastrami. At four P.M., Paul Caifano visited the West Side Poultry Barn, a business in which he was known to have a controlling interest; from there he went to the Best of Friends Social Club on Arthur Avenue, where Jimmy's crew were known to assemble. At nine P.M., Paul Caifano had dinner with Richie "Tic" Gianelli (alleged soldier in the Calabrese crime family), finishing up at eleven-thirty. He had drinks, alone, at Mary's Bar near his Howard Beach home, after which he retired.

In short, exactly the same routine.

Henry fed pigeons on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. He ate smoked fish and black bread, pierogies and hot borscht, and drank a little but not a lot of vodka. When not sitting on the boardwalk in an old man's coat with a fake cane, he lay around his rented room, watching television and sleeping. His next-door neighbor, a taxi driver from Azerbaijan, knew him as an out-of-work machinist who spoke a few words of Russian and had an interest in coins. He'd seen him go into Sammy's, the coin shop a few buildings down. It was good, thought the taxi driver, to have a hobby.

44

H
enry stepped back and admired his work: two hexagonal warning signs, bright yellow with black lettering, one admonishing the reader to WEAR HARD HAT AT ALL TIMES, the other warning, EXPLOSIVES! USE OF TRANSISTOR RADIOS, WALKMANS, AND CELLULAR PHONES IS FORBIDDEN!

The signs were about four feet high, sunk in two cone-shaped concrete stands, and unusually thick, about six inches. Henry didn't think anybody would notice. He sat down in Sammy Avakian's cluttered storage lookup and smoked a cigarette, thinking.

Jimmy Pazz, watching
House of Style
in his trailer office, heard the whooshing sound first. He thought for a second it might be coming from the television and was irritably reaching for the remote when there was a loud
thud,
a jarring impact that rocked the whole trailer on its cinder-block foundation. Richie Tic looked up from his magazine in time to see the wall beginning to glow, something white hot coming through the paneling right next to the photograph of Connie Francis, spitting flame and sparks. He was opening his mouth to say something when whatever it was erupted into the room in a concussive fireball. Jimmy was on his feet in time to see Richie's upper torso bounce off the acoustic tile ceiling, his lower body, clothes smoking, crumpling to the floor.

Everything was on fire. Jimmy knew that. He could smell his own flesh singeing, and the blond Dynel wig - it was melting over his head, long, gooey strands of blond plastic running down his face like hot lava. Screaming like an impaled wolverine, Jimmy used his 320-pound bulk to smash through the office door and out of the burning trailer.

In the last few seconds of his life, Jimmy saw things with an unusual clarity. Through burning eyelashes and melting Dynel, he actually noticed the Calabrese Construction panel truck double-parked across the street, realized he'd never owned or even seen it before. The signs were new also, he noticed, one on each side of the entrance to the site, and he ran at them like goalposts, hoping to flop into the puddle of rainwater between them and put out the flames.

When the backs of the two signs erupted in unison, spraying hunks of irregularly shaped shrapnel through Jimmy from his knees to his collarbone and throwing him back onto the steps of the trailer, he had a half second of consciousness left - time to realize what had happened.

By the time the cops arrived, running from their observation post a block away, the van was gone and Jimmy looked like the smoldering remains of a shaved buffalo. The charred heap of flesh and smoking Dynel smelled unbelievably acrid.

When the fire department finished hosing down the trailer and went looking for Richie, they found his head and one shoulder wedged in an open desk drawer, strangely unburned; the rest of him was ashes.

The guys at ATF were called, and after sifting through the wreckage and arguing with the crime scene officers, the Fire Department Arson Team, and the medical examiner over who got what and what exactly constituted a body part, one agent in a blue nylon parka briefed some curious Fibbies from the strike force on his initial findings.

"Looks to me like somebody fired a fuckin' LAWS right up Jimmy's Hershey Highway," he said, grinning at the novelty. He walked over to the trailer steps, where two young men from the ME's office were trying to figure out how to get Jimmy Pazz's corpse onto a gurney and retraced the hapless capo's last steps.

"Jimmy comes runnin' outside, feelin' pretty uncomfortable already, I guess, and he gets a bellyful a' Claymores right about . . . here. That's an antipersonnel mine, in case you didn't know," he added.

"That's . . . like . . . military hardware," ventured one of the Fibbies. "What are you telling us? Jimmy piss off Abu Nidal? I mean, maybe you see this shit in Beirut . . ."

"Don't ask me." The ATF agent shrugged. "All I can tell you is this was real creative work. Whoever done this, I'd like to meet. I haven't seen anything like this since . . . since nineteen sixty-nine, and that was in fuckin' Vietnam. I
like
this guy. This guy is a pisser."

45

S
o the parrot . . . he comes outta the freezer," said Charlie Wagons, his whole body shaking with suppressed laughter. "And he says,
'Brrrrrr, brrrrr .
. . I'll be
good,
I'll be good! I promise! Just tell me one thing, though. What did the turkey do? Ask for a blow job?'"

Henry laughed politely. Frances was not amused. "I don't like what she did to the parrot," she said, turning to pet the weimaraners. She'd heard the joke before anyway, from Captain Toby, who told it better. Toby got the parrot's voice just right. Charlie, struggling for breath between hits on a joint and long, noisy inhalations on his portable respirator, made the parrot's struggles too painful, too tragic.

Henry sipped his rum and gazed out over the water at the lights from Saint Martin, looking forward to going home. Charlie lived right on the beach now, and Henry could even see the headlights from cars over there, moving up and down the mountain roads. The weekly trips to Anguilla to see the increasingly dependent Charlie were becoming a burden, like visiting a tiresome grandmother, and Henry yearned to be back in their rooms at the Oyster Pond - holding Frances between clean hotel sheets, listening to the familiar chop-chop of the waves below their balcony, the New York City weather playing silently on the cable TV.

"Ya got any more a' this marahoochie you can leave with me?" asked Charlie, enjoying the last of the torpedo-size spliff. "Sidney Poitier back there - whatsisname? Agnes? Angus? - he won't get me none for love or money. Fuckin' creepin' Jeesus."

"Yeah, don't worry. We'll leave you a couple ounces. Enough to last you till next time," said Henry, keeping an eye on Frances, who had gone down the beach a few yards. "When are you gonna learn how to roll your own, though? I'm not gonna keep rolling 'em all up for you. If you want a pipe I'll get you a pipe. How about a nice big bong, Charlie? Would you like that?"

"Fuck that," said Charlie. "I can fuckin' roll. I been practicin'." He reached inside his robe and pulled out a perfectly ballistic one-paper joint, evenly packed and rolled like a nonfiltered Camel. "See?"

They sat on Charlie's porch for a while without saying anything, watching Frances play tug-of-war with the dogs. Charlie lit another joint and started complaining again about Angus, the owner of the small Anguillan guesthouse where he'd lived for the last months.

"He's a religious fanatic, the guy," he said. "Him an' the missus, and everybody else on this miserable fuckin' island. You should try listenin' to the radio down here, watchin' TV. Especially Sundays . . . Forget it. You got yer Jerry Fuckin' Falwell on one channel, Oral Roberts on the other. Change stations you got Jimmy Swaggart askin' for some more money so's he can go and get another hand job. They even got that fuck with the hair Benny, Benny somethin'. This prick - he
blows
on people. Blows that curry breath on people an' it's suppose' to be magic, 'cause their eyes roll up an' they fall onna ground, and the next thing, when they stand up, they ain't got that brain tumor no more. I'm tellin' you, every fuckin' station there's people cryin' or about to cry, askin' you to send money."

"What about the VCR?" asked Henry, growing annoyed. "Watch a fucking tape."

"I
seen
'em all," complained Charlie. "I send Angus or Mrs Angus down the video store. I say, 'Get me somethin' good. Somethin' with a little excitement in it, some good car chases, some broads.' Whaddya think they bring back?
Free Willy!
I thought it was a fuck film . . . it's about some kid and his fish! I go fuckin' nuts!"

"Okay, okay. We'll bring you some tapes next time."

"Get me some good gangster movies. Ones I ain't seen. Jesus, Henry, you know what I like."

Henry took another sip of rum and swept his hand reflexively over his head. The hair was growing back; it was already over his ears, tangled, sun bleached, and sticking up in spots like a Rastafarian's. It was grayer, though, and Henry, when he caught sight of himself in a mirror, thought he looked old. He was tan again - it had taken only a couple of weeks once he'd returned from New York, and it was nice, of course, to live without shoes or socks.

Frances's wounds had healed. Yes, there was a large, star-shaped scar over one breast, but her face looked fine, only a slight crescent of dead tissue over her right eye to remind of that night. They almost never talked about it.

"You gonna hog that whole joint?" she asked, back from the water's edge, the weimaraners trailing sleepily behind her. She snatched the joint out of Charlie's hand and took a hit. "Still pissing and moaning about Anguilla?"

"What do you think?" said Henry.

"You're becoming a real whiner," she said, sitting down in the sand and cracking a beer. "Read the paper today? I figured that would cheer you up."

"What? About Jerry Dogs? Yeah, ain't that a bitch! They say he's been in 'at trunk for two weeks. Can you imagine the stink? I guess . . . I guess he had a fallin' out with Paulie." Charlie sat up in his rattan armchair a little, warming to the subject. "Jerry was always a pain. And him and Jimmy was close. That was probably his problem. Paulie was smart havin' that guy clipped, believe me. I woulda done the same thing. You can't have people walkin' around harborin' bad feelings. It's bad for everybody."

"Good luck and God bless, that's what I say," said Henry. "Maybe we should send him a card. 'Congratulations on your new job.'"

"Paulie the Boss," said Charlie, shaking his head. " W e l l . . . see how
he
likes it."

One of the weimaraners came over and licked Charlie's hand. "Hello, Useless," said Charlie, leaning over to nuzzle the dog's face, kissing his nose. "Government dog. Half the fuckin' Dominican army lands on my house an' they run away - don't even bark." He scratched the dog's head while it looked up at him adoringly. The other weimaraner came over and plopped down under his chair. "Maybe they wasn't so dumb after all."

Frances, seeing Charlie getting sad again, came around behind him and began massaging the old man's neck. It didn't help. Charlie's shoulders started to shake, and tears came, running silently down his cheeks. He didn't bother to wipe them. No one said anything for a while. Charlie coughed and snuffled and took a sip of wine before settling back in his chair and closing his eyes. Frances took Henry's hand and led him to the water. They stood ankle deep in the gentle surf and wiggled their toes.

"You think he's sleeping?" asked Henry.

"Yeah. He does that a lot lately, drop off like that. He's old. Old people do that."

Henry put his arm around Frances's waist, and they stood there for a while, looking up at the sky, the bewildering array of stars, the horizon purple and orange around a fat, yellow moon, the silhouette of Saint Martin in the distance. A light breeze rustled the palm trees behind them, and Henry turned to look back at Charlie, sleeping in his chair, the dogs at his feet.