Under the Skin (7 page)
of Lucky Strike. He put one in his mouth and I took out my lighter
and lit it for him.
“Jab’s looking snappy,” I said.
“You think? How about that right lead?”
“You try it against somebody knows what he’s doing and he’ll take
your head off with a counterpunch.”
“That’s what Otis says. He also tells me you landed a stinger on
him the last time you guys sparred. Says he’s gonna tap you a good
one next time, remind you who’s who.”
“I always expect him to try tapping me a good one.”
“I think he’s right—you’re getting too goddamn cocky.” He softly
spat a shred of tobacco off the tip of his tongue and took a casual look
around. We were the only ones in the gym. “So?” he said.
“Everything’s jake,” I said. I put the valise on the table and worked
the snaps and opened it and he looked inside.
“It’s all he had with him,” I said. “Said he could get more from the
bank tomorrow, but you said let it go, so I—”
“Fuck the money,” Rose said. “He down?”
“He’s down.”
“I don’t mean are his hands and knees busted. Not for a bastard I
warned.”
“He’s
down,
” I said. “Two other guys were there. I gave them the
word for Dallas.”
He nodded and smiled. His best smile couldn’t hold a candle to
Sam’s, but then Rose rarely smiled with the intention of making
someone feel warmly regarded. His usual smile was the one he
showed now. The smile he wore when he won.
“There was a piece in the money bag too,” I said. “I took it.”
“Let’s see.”
I unzipped the briefcase and took out the .380 and laid it on the table.
He picked it up and thumbed off the safety and pulled the slide back just
far enough to see the round snugged in the chamber, then eased the slide
forward again and reset the safety. He turned it over this way and that,
regarding it from every angle. A .380 was the second kind of pistol I’d
ever fired and I liked the model a lot. It didn’t have the punch of the army
.45 automatic but was generally more accurate. Still, everybody knew an
automatic could jam on you and a revolver never would. This piece was
in mint condition, though, and I couldn’t resist it.
“Nice,” Rose said. He set it on the table and pushed it back to me.
“Had supper?”
“I was about to.”
“Good.” He dropped the butt on the floor and stepped on it, then
picked up a fresh towel and slung it over his shoulder. “I’ll take a
shower and we’ll go for clams.”
“Don’t you have a party or something?”
“Because New Year’s? Hell, Kid, it don’t mean nothing but another year closer to the grave. What’s to celebrate?”
F
orty minutes later we were in his private corner booth in Mama
Carmela’s, a small Italian place on Seawall Boulevard. A picture
window looked out on the gulf. The faint lights of shrimp trawlers
moved slowly across the black horizon. I’d brought the briefcase with
me, both pistols in it, so I wouldn’t have a gun digging into my belly
while I ate.
The grayhaired waiter brought a basket of breadsticks and poured
glasses of Chianti. Rose waved off his suggestion of minestrone and
salad and ordered clams in pesto over capellini for both of us.
“Molto bene, Don Rosario,” the waiter said with a bow, and retreated to the kitchen. A Victrola behind the front counter was softly
playing Italian songs.
As always, Rose wanted every detail, so I told him exactly how it
had gone in Houston. And as always, he listened intently and without interruption.
When I was finished, he raised his glass and said, “Salute.”
The clams and pasta arrived and Rose ordered another bottle of
Chianti. We tucked our napkins over our shirtfronts and dug in,
twirling pasta on our forks, spearing fat clams dripping with pesto,
sopping up sauce with chunks of warm buttered bread. Rose wasn’t
one for conversation while he dined. He broke the silence only to ask
how my clams were. “Damn good,” I said. He nodded and refilled our
glasses and gave his attention back to his food.
When we were done and the waiter cleared away the dishware and
poured coffee and bowed at Rose’s dismissal of dessert and left us
again, Rose said he wanted me to stick around town for the next week
or so.
It took me by surprise. He knew I liked making out-of-town
collection runs, that I hated hanging around the Club with nothing to do.
“I’m supposed to make the pickups in Victoria tomorrow,” I said.
“Then there’s the pickups across the bay in a couple of days.”
“I already put another man on the Victoria run. And your partners
can handle the eastern collections. I want you close by for a little
while.”
“How come?”
“I got a hunch about those Dallas guys. They might just be dumb
enough to try something. If they do, they’ll probably try it pretty
soon, and I want you here to deal with it.”
He read the question on my face. “I got a phone call,” he said.
“One of the other two guys must’ve called Dallas as soon as you left
the hotel room. Then Dallas called me, some guy named Healy—
fucken mick. Says he represents the organization that owns the
machines Ragsdale was pushing on this side of the line.
Organization
—like he’s talking about Standard Oil. Says he wanted
me to know his
organization
had nothing to do with Ragsdale putting
the slots in Galveston County, that it was strictly Ragsdale’s doing.
Ragsdale deserved what we gave him.”
“So what’s the problem?” I said. “Sounds like he was saying they
got your message and they want no trouble.”
“That’s what I thought. He’s telling me it was all Ragsdale, his
outfit’s hands are clean, right? So I tell the harp no hard feelings,
Ragsdale crossed the line but the account’s all settled.”
“
So?
What’s the problem?”
“I’m getting to that. You know, that’s
your
problem, Kid, I told
you before—you get in too big a hurry. The man in a big hurry is the
man who misses something important. Always be sure you know
what’s what
before
you make a move. You listening to me?”
“Yes, Daddy. So... what’s the problem?”
He gave me a look of mock reprimand and pointed a warning finger at me. A lot of people referred to him as “Papa Rose,” though
never to his face—they didn’t dare get that familiar with him. The
truth was, he didn’t mind the “Papa Rose” at all. He took it as a show
of respect toward him as the head of a sort of business family. Calling
him “Daddy” was my sarcastic way of ribbing him about it, especially
when he’d lecture me like I was some schoolkid. I didn’t do it often,
and rarely in front of anybody else, but one day I’d called him Daddy
when Artie the bookkeeper was in the room, and Artie’s eyes got big
as cue balls. He must’ve expected Rose to blow his top at my insolence. But all Rose did was roll his eyes and shake his head and say to
Artie, “Young people today got no respect. My old man woulda taken
a belt to my ass if I’d been so disrespectful, believe you me, no matter how old I was.”
LQ heard me one time too, and later that night when we were in
a waterfront beer bar he said I was the only guy he knew besides Sam
who could chivvy Rose like that. LQ was thirty years old and had
been Rose’s main Ghost until I came along, but he swore he wasn’t
jealous about me replacing him.
“I never was all that much at ease around the man,” he said. “Truth
to tell, I never seen nobody at ease around him but you and Big Sam.
I figure it’s on account of you and him are two peas in a pod.”
The idea that Rose and I were alike had never crossed my mind.
“How so?” I said.
“Well, lots of ways. Like how the both you sometimes look at
somebody you know like you never seen him before in your whole entire life and you aint decided yet whether you even like him or not.
There’s never no telling what’s going on in you-all’s head, either of
you. You and him both got this way of . . . aw, hell, you both can be
creepy as a graveyard is how so.”
I gave him the two-fingered “up yours” sign, and he just laughed.
“The problem,” Rose said, “is this Healy guy said his organization
wants fifty percent of what their slots in Galveston County bring in.”
He signaled the waiter for a refill on our coffee.
“So,” Rose said after the waiter withdrew, “I told him that far as
I’m concerned, his
organization
can have a hundred percent of what
their machines take in.”
“Really?” I said. I knew a punch line was coming. “Bet he didn’t
expect to hear that.”
“The only thing is, I says to him, his organization aint
got
no machines in Galveston County. The only slots in Galveston County are
my
slots. I said if his company was a little short of machines, I’d be
happy to sell him some at bottom dollar, help them out, one businessman to another. Just be sure and don’t put them in Galveston
County, I told him.”
“Well hell,” I said, “that’s a very generous offer. I hope he appreciated it.”
“Every mick I ever met got a potato for a brain. They don’t understand nothing, don’t appreciate nothing. Here I’m giving them a
chance to buy back the slots at a bargain and all the guy says is they’re
willing to
negotiate
the percent. I said to him he still didn’t get it,
there’s nothing to negotiate. And
he
says, well then, I can just give the
machines back. Said he could send his boys around to pick them up.”
“Give them
back
? He said that?”
“My hand to God. So I tell him again: any machine in Galveston
is
my
machine, so there’s nothing for me to pay a percent on and nothing to give back to nobody.
And,
I tell him... anybody who tries to
take any machine out of Galveston would be trying to steal from me.
Know what that fucker said then?”
I arched my brow. I always got a kick out of his outrage at the rest
of the world’s inability to understand things as clearly as he did.
“Said if I wanted my own machines in those joints I shoulda had
them in there already. Then Ragsdale wouldn’ta had no place in
Galveston County to put theirs. Like
I’m
to blame for them cutting
in on me.”
“Brass balls, I’ll give him that.”
“Brass fucken brains. I told him it was none of his business how I
run mine. He tells me I oughta think it over. I tell him I just did—
and hung up. Fucken guy.”
“So? Now what?”
“Who knows? They might be stupid enough to think they got to
get even somehow, and stupid people are the hardest to predict. They
don’t think logical and they don’t plan careful.”
He shook out another cigarette and lit it. “So you stick around,”
he said. “You don’t have to be at the Club, just stay in town and
check in with the office every now and then. Let Bianco know where
you are in case I gotta get you in a hurry.” Mrs. Bianco was his office
secretary.
“You talk like I’m the only one on the payroll. There’s two dozen
Ghosts in town every day, a half dozen always right there at the
Club.”
“I only got one the best.”
“Oh, Christ, spare me the charming con, Don Rosario.”
“I’m just telling the truth, Kid, like always.” And we both
laughed.
Then Caruso started singing about the clown who laughs to hide
his sorrow, and Rose leaned out of the booth and gestured for somebody at the register to turn up the volume. I lit a cigarette and looked
out at the distant trawler lights. Rose sat back and stared out at the
gulf too, and softly sang along with the great tenor.
Before Prohibition came along and changed their lives the Maceo
brothers had been barbers for years, and Sam told me they often harmonized with opera recordings on the Victrola while they cut hair.
Sam’s favorite was
The Barber of Seville,
which I’d never heard until he
played some of it for me one night. He said he’d work his scissors in
quick, jumpy time to the music and laugh at the way the customer
in the chair would cringe in fear of getting an ear snipped off.
They started out in the barbershop of the Galvez Hotel and then
opened a little shop of their own downtown. They’d learned the haircut trade from their father, who brought them from Palermo to New
Orleans when Rose and Sam were still children. Sam once told me
that on the ship coming over from Sicily he’d gotten beat up and had
his pocket watch stolen by an older boy, a big dark bully from Naples.
The watch had been a present from his grandfather and he didn’t
want to tell his daddy what happened. But he told Rose. They hunted
all through the steerage sections but didn’t find the guy until Sam finally spotted him on the topside deck and pointed him out. The boy
was about fifteen, Sam said, a couple of years older than Rose and
much bigger, but Rose lit into him like a bulldog and got him down
and beat the hell out of him while a crowd of kids cheered him on.
He banged the bully’s head on the deck till he was almost unconscious, then dug through his pockets and found the watch, then
started dragging him to the rail to shove him overboard, but a deckhand intervened.
Another thing the brothers learned from their daddy in the early
Louisiana days was how to make wine. When they moved to Galveston they made it in tubs in a shed behind their rented house. At first
they made it just for themselves and a few close friends, then they
started selling jugs of it to some of their regular barbershop customers. When Prohibition became the law, they produced the stuff in
greater quantity and sold it under the counter to anybody who
wanted it. Pretty soon they became partners with one of the two main
gangs fighting for control of the island’s bootleg business. Over the
next few years there were gunfights in the streets and killings in
broad daylight, but the Maceos were able to stay legally clear of the
worst of it. Once the top dogs of the two gangs were all in prison or
the graveyard, Sam and Rose brought the factions together and took
over the whole operation. By then they were also in the gambling
business, which swiftly became their most lucrative enterprise.
Most of the Maceo stories you heard were about Rose, of course,
and no telling how many were true. That’s always how it is—the guy
nobody really knows is the guy who gets the most tales told about
him. Like the story about his first wife, who’d been murdered way
back when the Maceos were just starting in the bootleg business. I
heard it from LQ, who’d heard it from somebody else, who’d heard it
from who-knows-who. The way the story went, one evening Rose invited three friends home for dinner on the spur of the moment—although he’d never invited anybody to his house before—and when
the four of them got there, they found his wife in bed with another
man, both of them naked and both of them dead.
“You could say they died of natural causes,” LQ said, “since it’s
pretty natural to die when somebody shoots you in the brainpan.”
According to the witnesses, Rose wept like a baby, but there was
a lot of secret curiosity about the true cause of his tears—whether he
was crying because his wife was dead or because she’d put the horns
on him. The police investigated but the killings were never solved.
“Way I heard it,” LQ said with a sly look, “the cops had
no
idea