Beirut Incident (11 page)

Back in my room, I stripped Spelman's body and neatly folded his clothes, putting them in the bottom of my own suitcase. Then I dragged him into the neighboring room. Completely naked, his face a gory mess, he would not be immediately identifiable. And, as far as I could remember, he had never been arrested, so his prints were not on file, and his identification would be even further delayed.

I left Spelman's body inside the shower, with the frosted glass doors shut, and returned to my room to dress.

Downstairs at the front desk, I interrupted the young, red-jacketed clerk. He didn't like being taken away from his paperwork, but he tried not to show it too much. "Yes, sir?"

"I'm in room six-thirty-four, and if six thirty-six, next to me is empty, I'd like to take it for a friend of mine. She's… uh… he's coming in later."

He grinned at me knowingly. "Sure thing, sir. Just register here for your friend." He spun the register pad at me.

Smart ass kid! I signed Irving Fein's name and an address I made up, and paid twenty-three dollars for the first night's rent.

Then I took the key and went back upstairs. I went into 636, took the "Do Not Disturb" sign, and hung it outside the door. I figured that three or four days could pass with that sign on the door before anyone made more than a cursory check.

I went back to my own room and looked at my watch. Four a.m. It had been just an hour since Spelraan woke me up. I yawned and stretched. Then I took off my clothes again and hung them neatly over one of the chairs. This time, I made sure that Wilhelmina was tucked under my pillow before I climbed into bed.

Then I turned out the light. There wasn't much else to do in New York at four o'clock in the morning.

I fell asleep almost instantly.

The next morning I checked out of "Manny's place" by nine o'clock. Spelman's clothes were packed along with mine in the suitcase, along with one of the sheets and a pillowcase, which had been smeared with blood.

From the Chalfont Plaza, I grabbed a cab heading downtown on Lexington and went to the Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street just off Seventh Avenue. It's kind of a beat up old hotel these days and attracts a lot of odd characters. It had its days of glory, however. Dylan Thomas stayed there, and Arthur Miller and Jeff Berryman. My main reason for moving in there was far from literary nostalgia: Larry Spelman's body wasn't next door.

The first thing I did was to send out for some brown wrapping paper and a ball of twine. Then I carefully wrapped up Spelman's clothes, the sheet and the pillowcase, and took the package over to the post office.

I mailed the package to Popeye Franzini. The return address read "Gaetano Ruggiero, 157 Thompson Street, New York, N.Y. 10011." The longer Spelman's body remained undiscovered the better, but once it was found, I wanted suspicion directed away from me. I didn't know of any specific bad blood between the Ruggieros and Franzinis at the moment, but once that package arrived, there would be.

The current postal system is such that I could depend — with reasonable assurance — on the fact that a third-class package mailed from Twenty-third Street to Prince Street, a distance of about thirty blocks, would take at least a week.

I went into the Angry Squire, a pleasant little bar on Seventh Avenue around the corner from the hotel, and had a leisurely lunch washed down with two mugs of that good Watney's ale. Then I called Louie at his Village apartment.

Louie was ecstatic, as usual. "Hey, Nick! What's up, man? I tried to call you up at Manny's Place, but they said you'd checked out."

"Yeah. Too plastic for me. I moved down to the Chelsea."

"Great! Great! I know the place. Hey, look, Nick. Uncle Joe wants to see us this afternoon. Okay with you?"

I wondered if I had much of a choice. "Sure, why not."

"Okay, then. About two o'clock. At Uncle Joe's office."

"Okay," I reassured him. "I'll see you then."

It was a pleasant day and I walked, taking my time. I hadn't really seen much of New York in years. It had changed a lot in some respects, in others it looked exactly as I remembered, probably exactly as it had fifty or a hundred years before.

I walked to Sixth Avenue, then headed downtown. Sixth Avenue down to Fourteenth Street still looked the same, but it had changed, and for a moment I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me, and I smiled to myself. I was getting so cosmopolitan I didn't notice some things any more. Sixth Avenue from Twenty-third Street to Fourteenth was almost entirely Puerto Rican. The conversations I heard around me were, for the most part, in Spanish.

The bars were in the same places, but now they bore Spanish names; EI Grotto, El Cerrado, El Portoqueno. The old Italian delicatessens were still there as I had remembered, but now they were
bodegas,
with more fruit and fewer vegetables. If anything, Sixth Avenue was cleaner than it ever had been and the round-hipped, vivacious Latin girls clacking by on their high heels were a big improvement over the slow-moving eddies of elderly ladies with their shopping bags who used to fill the neighborhood.

Fourteenth Street looked more like Calle Catorce in San Juan, but there was an abrupt change from there southward to Third Street. Here, it was much as it had always been, the small-business part of the Village, hardware stores, drugstores, grocery stores, delicatessens, ten-cent stores, coffee shops. There never had been any particular ethnic identity to this stretch of the avenue and there wasn't now.

It was a polyglot crowd; neatly suited business men with attaché cases, strolling hippies with shoulder-length hair and blue jeans, chic housewives pushing black plastic baby carriages, hobbling old ladies with gnarled features and vacant eyes, kids armed with baseball gloves, a beggar on crutches. There were more mixed couples than I had remembered.

At Third Street, I turned east past MacDougal and Sullivan, then went south again on Thompson Street, a big grin of reminiscence on my face. Thompson Street never changes. All the way down to Prince Street, it is the old Italian Village: quiet tree-lined streets bordered with solid rows of brownstones, each with its series of steps running up to heavy oaken front doors, each one fronted by an iron railing designed to keep the unwary from falling onto the steep row of concrete steps leading to the cellar. For some reason, when the Village was built up in the late 1880s the cellar doors were always put in the front instead of the back.

Here, the pace is different than anywhere else in the city. The noise seems suffused, the action slower. Old men stand in clusters of two and three, never sitting on the stoop, just standing, talking their dotage away; fat-breasted housewives lean from upper windows to chat with neighbors standing on the sidewalk below.

On the fenced-in playground of St. Theresa's Junior High School, the neighborhood's young Italian bucks, long out of school, mingle with the kids in a perpetual softball game. On the sidewalks, the black-eyed, black-haired Italian girls walk sturdily, eyes straight ahead, if they are alone. If they are with a group of girls, they squirm and dawdle, talking constantly, darting their eyes up and down the street, making it ring with their laughter.

There are few businesses on Thompson Street, an occasional candy store, inevitably dark green with a faded, half-slashed awning sheltering the newspaper stand; a delicatessen or two, with huge salamis hanging in the windows; here and there a drugstore, almost always on the corner. What Thompson does have, however, is funeral parlors — three of them. You go to one if you are a friend of the Ruggieros, another if you are a friend of the Franzinis, the third one if you have no connections with either family or, if you do, don't want them known.

Also on Thompson, between Houston Street and Spring, there are five restaurants, good Italian restaurants, with neatly checkered tableclothes, a candle on each table, a small bar along one wall of the adjoining room. The people of the neighborhood often drink at the bars, but they never eat at the tables. They eat at home every night, every meal. Yet somehow the restaurants are full every evening, though they never advertise — they just seem to draw couples, each of whom has somehow discovered their own little Italian restaurant.

By the time I reached Spring Street and turned left toward West Broadway, I was so deep in the Old Italian ambiance I almost forgot that my involvement was something less than pleasant. The grand old Italian families who live south of Houston Street are not, unfortunately, mutually exclusive of the Mafia.

I arrived at
Franzini Olive Oil
at exactly two o'clock. Louie's cousin Philomina wore a white sweater that emphasized her breasts, and a brown suede skirt that buttoned down the front only partially so that when she moved, a good deal of well-shaped leg was showing. It was rather more than I'd expected from the conservatively-dressed Philomina of the day before, but I'm not one to complain about a very attractive girl wearing more revealing clothes.

She showed me into Popeye's office with a polite smile and an impersonal air she might have used for the window cleaner or the cleaning lady.

Louie was already there, bouncing. He'd been talking to Popeye. Now he turned, wrung my hand in a fervent handshake as if he hadn't seen me in months, and placed the other hand on my shoulder. "Hi ya, Nick! How are you? Good to see you!"

The huge old man in his wheelchair behind the black desk glared at me. Reluctantly he nodded and motioned with one hand. "Sit down." I took one straight chair, sat back, and crossed my legs. Louie took the other, spun it around, and then sat down straddling it, his arms crossed over the back.

Popeye Franzini shook his head slightly, as if Louie were a puzzle he could never figure out. Fat fingers fumbled at a cigar box on his desk and stripped the cellophane from a long black cheroot. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, lit it from the cigarette lighter on his desk and then peered at me through the smoke.

"Louie seems to think you're pretty damned good."

I shrugged. "I can handle myself. I've been around."

He stared at me a moment, evaluating a piece of merchandise. Then he apparently made up his mind. "Okay, okay," he muttered. He fumbled on both sides of his wheelchair as if looking for something, then raised his head and bellowed:

"Philomina! Philomina! Dammit! You got my briefcase?"

Louie's cousin appeared immediately, though her exquisite grace prevented her movements from seeming hurried. She placed a battered old grey attaché case in front of Popeye and glided out silently.

"You seen that goddamned Larry?" he grumbled at Louie as he flipped open the clasps. "He ain't been around all day."

Louie spread both hands, palms up. "I haven't seen him since yesterday, Uncle Joe."

"Me neither," the old man growled.

Thank God! That meant Spelman hadn't communicated with the Franzinis before coming up to roust me. I could probably thank the effects of heroin for that lapse of procedure.

Popeye Franzini took a sheaf of papers from the attaché case, studied the first page for a moment, and then laid them down on top of the case in front of him. His voice, his whole manner, suddenly changed and he was now the businessman.

"Frankly, Nick, you're not the man T would pick for this job. We don't know you well enough and I would prefer someone who had been with the organization. However, Louie here says he wants you, and if he thinks he can trust you, that's the main thing."

I returned his gaze without expression. "Whatever you say, Don Joseph."

He nodded. Of course whatever he said. "The point is," he went on, "this organization has been having some difficulties lately. Our receipts are off, a lot of our people are getting into trouble with the cops, the Ruggieros are moving in left and right. In other words, somehow or another we seem to have lost our grip on things. V/hen that happens in a business organization you call in an efficiency expert and make some changes. Well, I consider us a business organization and I'm going to do just that."

Popeye Franzini drew hard on his cigar and then pointed it through the smoke at Louie. "There's my efficiency expert."

I looked at Louie, remembering how my impressions of him had changed so quickly in Beirut. Outwardly, his demeanor suggested anything but efficiency. I was beginning to grow fond of this man. Though I was sure he was more intelligent than he appeared at first, I doubted he was very tough.

As though reading my thoughts, Popeye went on. "Louie's a lot tougher than most people think. I brought him up that way. Like he was my own son." His face grimaced in a smile at his nephew, who grinned back at him. "Right, Louie?"

"Right, Uncle Joe." He spread his hands expressively, his dark face beaming.

The Franzini story played through my mind as I listened with one ear to Popeye's obviously oft-repeated story of Louie growing up as the man he'd raised him to be.

Up until the second World War, the three Franzini brothers had been a team. Louie's father, Luigi, was killed during the Marine landing at Guadalcanal in August, 1942; the young Louie was taken in by Joseph.

By that time Joseph was battling the ravages of MS, though he was still able to walk with a lurching gait and drive a car. He also had his older brother, Alfredo, to contend with; the two brothers had grown steadily apart, and after Luigi's death, their quarrels grew into a bitter war for control of the family interests.

If the schism between the brothers had continued the entire Franzini
famiglia
as a Mafia power center would have been undermined. Joseph wasn't about to let that happen. In February, 1953, he set up a peace parley with Alfredo. On the day of the meeting, he took his Cadillac, alone, to pick up Alfredo, and the two brothers drove east, out of the Village.

It was the last time anyone ever saw Alfredo Franzini.