Inherit the Mob (18 page)

That night Flanagan dropped by Gordon’s. Gordon was aware that Flanagan had met Sesti at Umberto’s but knew nothing about the conversation itself, or today’s capitulation. No need, Flanagan reflected, to disturb the boss with details.

“We’re all set,” he said. “We can start at the beginning of the month. Carlo will deposit the money in any bank we say, and the organization pays all expenses. Now all you have to do is figure out which world leader you want to turn into Al Capone.” Flanagan snapped his fingers. “Speaking of which, you’ve got company for dinner on Saturday night.”

“Company? Like who?”

“You’re not going to believe this, but Luigi wants to break bread with you.”

Gordon stared at Flanagan. “Luigi? You mean Spadafore? Wants to have dinner here?”

“Sesti dropped the hint. It’s customary, especially after he had you
to his place. Cement the deal, drink out of the same cup, all that sort of shit. I think you ought to serve Chinese. Those hors d’oeuvres that Ida had at the shivah were delish.”

“Goddamn it, Flanagan, are you out of your mind?” Gordon exploded. “I can’t have those guys over here. The FBI sticks to Spadafore like white on rice. I got a doorman who already thinks I’m connected and this’ll be all over the neighborhood. You gotta get me out of this—”

“Look, they’re your friends,” said Flanagan. “You’re the one who went there for dinner. I can’t help it if they’re big on protocol. Besides, it’s no big deal. We’ll get a caterer in, set the place up. The doorman? Fuck the doorman. As far as the feds are concerned, Luigi Spadafore was an old friend of your uncle’s and this is a condolence call. What’s to worry?”

Gordon looked dubious. Finally he uttered a resigned sigh. “OK, OK. I guess I don’t have any choice. What the hell do we serve them? I gotta get some wine, too, and liquor. Goddamn it all to hell, Flanagan, I ought to make you pay for this.”

“Relax, we’ll take it out of expenses. I’m serious about the Chinese, by the way. Make a nice change of pace for the old boy. I don’t imagine he gets much lo mein out in Gnocchi City.” Suddenly he clapped his hands together and laughed. “Hey, I got a great idea,” he said. Let’s load the fortune cookies, put in little messages like, ‘Carlo, you’re under arrest.’ ”

Gordon laughed in spite of himself. “Yeah, or ‘Luigi, you have just been poisoned. Signed: The boys.’ ”

“Or how about, ‘Mafia girls do it with Ricans.’ That ought to get ’em.” The two old friends giggled like a couple of schoolboys.

“ ‘Go on a diet, Luigi,’ ” said Gordon.

“ ‘You talk like a sissy, Carlo,’ ” laughed Flanagan. “Let’s do it, it’ll be great for a laugh.”

Suddenly Gordon was sober. “Forget it, chief. No loaded cookies. And no Chinese. Just get some caterer to bring in steaks and potatoes, regular old American food. A tossed salad. And something for dessert, maybe from that place on Mulberry, what’s-its-name. Have them serve the food and leave. And a few bottles of liquor—Wild Turkey, Jameson’s, Sesti probably drinks Chivas. And some wine. As long as they’re paying for it, I might as well stock up.”

“Your wish is my command,” said Flanagan, looking at his watch. “I got to go home for some z’s. I got a late meeting uptown.”

“What’s uptown?” asked Gordon. “You taking night classes at Columbia? Criminology 101, maybe?”

“Naw,” said Flanagan. “I’m going to see an old friend, guy I went to high school with. You don’t know him.”

“OK,” said Gordon. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow. And I’m counting on you to handle dinner.”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” said Flanagan. “Just leave it all to your consigliere.”

At five minutes after two in the morning, feeling rested from a long nap, Flanagan climbed out of a cab on the corner of 125th Street and Amsterdam. The ride cost him twenty dollars.

“I ain’t got cancer,” the elderly driver had said when Flanagan climbed into the cab near his building on Twenty-third and asked for the Harlem address.

“Glad to hear it,” said Flanagan. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I figure, someday I find out I got cancer, I drive up to niggertown at two in the morning, get it over with all at once,” said the cabbie. “But this ain’t the night.”

“I’ll give you a twenty and you can turn off the meter,” Flanagan said. The driver had shrugged wordlessly and headed north. When they reached his destination, Flanagan was barely out of the backseat before the cabbie skidded into a U-turn and headed back downtown.

Flanagan walked along 125th going west. The block was deserted, but he could hear loud music from several of the apartments. He stopped in front of a darkened barbershop and rang the bell three times. A moment later, he heard the latch unfasten, and he walked in, past the chairs to a door on the side wall. He knocked and a buzzer went off.

Flanagan pushed the door open, and walked into a long, narrow windowless room full of smoke and music and the smell of barbecue. Several dozen middle-aged people sat at card tables playing tonk. A few couples danced between the tables to Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Along the side wall, a
knot of men shot craps. In the rear, a group was gathered around a small bar, drinking and eating ribs from plastic plates. There was not a single white face in the room.

Flanagan’s appearance, in a dark blue raincoat and the Borsalino, had a freeze-frame effect. The crapshooters held their dice, the dancers came to a stop, and the people at the bar suspended their drinks in midair. The only sounds were from the jukebox and from the large fan attached to the corrugated iron ceiling that whirled overhead.

“What’s the matter, you never seen a mulatto before?” demanded Flanagan in a loud voice. Nobody laughed.

“Man, what the hell you doin’ in here?” said one of the cardplayers. “You don’t belong here.” An angry murmur arose from the gamblers.

Suddenly there was noise at the end of the room, near the bar. Flanagan saw a medium-sized brown man in a white chef’s cap emerge from the kitchen. He squinted through the smoke in the direction of the door. “John Flanagan like to do the Dixie Do, yes he do!” he said with a grin, and waved.

Flanagan felt the tension drain from the room. He walked over to the chef and shook his hand. “Hi, Morgan,” he said. “Looks like your white clientele has fallen off.”

“Long as it ain’t my dick, John Flanagan,” he said. “Good to see you, young man, where you been at?”

“Here and there,” said Flanagan. “Boatnay around?”

“Be here in a minute,” said the chef. He reached for a bottle of Jameson’s and poured four fingers without being asked. “How ’bout something to eat?”

“What’s on the menu tonight, Morgan?”

“Red beans and rice soufflé, ribs à la Morgan or the special-tay of the house, our famous assortment of pork delicacies,” he said grandly.

“Downtown they call those chitlins, I believe,” said Flanagan.

“Yaas, indeed,” said Morgan. “Well, up here we pride ourselves on speaking the King’s English.”

“Yeah, B.B. King,” said Flanagan. “I’ll have some ribs but go easy on the Tabasco. I’m feeling a little queasy.”

“Well, you lookin’ good, my man. Look like Don Juan, Ali Kahn and Ponce Daily-on.”

Flanagan was halfway through the ribs when the door opened and Boatnay Threkeld walked in. As always, Flanagan was struck by the remarkable resemblance between Boatnay and Sonny Liston. There was one difference, though. The ex-heavyweight champ was dead; Boatnay was indestructible.

He took his time walking over to the bar, stopping at the tables to say a word to the cardplayers, winking at the dancing ladies. Finally he slid his bulk gracefully onto the barstool next to Flanagan. “Hey, John, what’s happening?” he said in a soft voice.

“Hi, Boatnay. Your old man looks great,” Flanagan said, pointing in the direction of the kitchen. “How come colored people never get old?”

“Laughing at white folks keeps you young,” he said. “What brings you up to Harlem in the middle of the night?”

“I was looking for you. They told me at the precinct that you were working late, I figured you’d drop by here eventually.”

“Yeah, I’ve gotta be the only po-lice captain in New York City got him an after-hours joint for a hangout.”

“Ain’t nothin’ the matter with an after-hours establishment,” said Morgan, overhearing. “It’s not but eleven o’clock in California, and this place runs on Hollywood time.”

“More like Las Vegas,” said Flanagan, gesturing toward the crap game.

“Yaas, this is the Caesar’s Palace of Harlem,” said Morgan. “I provide drink to the thirsty, nourishment to the hungry and entertainment to the greedy. I don’t permit drugs or thugs, coke or smoke, prostitution, retribution or air pollution on my premises.”

“You also don’t have a license,” said Boatnay. “If you weren’t my father, I’d bust you.”

“If you weren’t my son, I could pay you off, ’stead of letting your big rib-eating self come in here and devour up all my profits. Be a hell of a lot cheaper,” said Morgan. He moved off to talk to some people at the other end of the bar, leaving Flanagan and Threkeld alone.

Flanagan’s parents were both dead, and his only sister lived in Denver. Morgan and Boatnay Threkeld were the closest thing he had to a real family in New York. Flanagan had known them for more
than thirty-five years, ever since Boatnay transferred to St. Benedict High School in Brooklyn.

They met on the first day of school. Even at fourteen, Boatnay was massive and scary-looking, and word of him spread within an hour throughout St. Benedict. “You gotta see this new jungle bunny,” Artie Cassidy told Flanagan. “He looks like he just walked out of a King Kong movie.”

Flanagan had never met a black kid before, and he was curious. At lunch he sat down next to Boatnay Threkeld, who was eating his sandwiches in splendid isolation. “My name’s John Flanagan,” he said, introducing himself.

“That a fact?” said Boatnay, and continued eating.

“You a Catholic?”

“Chippewa Indian.”

“You got an attitude for a new kid,” Flanagan said.

“I’m not new, I’m almost fifteen,” Boatnay said, draining a cardboard container of chocolate milk in a gulp. He opened another one and took a swallow. By this time, both boys were aware that they were the center of attention in the crowded lunchroom. Boatnay picked up the milk container and handed it to Flanagan. “Have some,” he said.

Flanagan took the cardboard holder and considered. “This is a test, right?” he said. “See if I mind drinking out of the same spout.” Boatnay looked at him through dark brown eyes and said nothing. Flanagan handed him back the container. “I don’t drink people’s spit,” he said. “I don’t give a shit who they are.” Boatnay shrugged.

“That what they do where you come from, drink each other’s spit?” asked Flanagan.

“I live over on Flatbush Avenue,” said Boatnay.

“Didn’t know they had an Indian reservation in Brooklyn,” Flanagan said. He saw the black boy’s mouth twitch, but he couldn’t tell if it was with anger or amusement.

“Lot of things you don’t know,” said Boatnay.

“You mean like, the mysterious mysteries of the ghetto?” said Flanagan. “You’re a real asshole, you know? I come over here to welcome you to St. Ben’s and you act like a jerk.”

Threkeld looked at him steadily for a moment. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he finally said.

“Why should I be?” asked Flanagan. “What are you gonna do, untie my shoes?”

Boatnay Threkeld laughed, a loud bark that resounded through the quiet lunchroom. “My name’s Bernard Threkeld,” he said, smiling for the first time. “My friends call me Boatnay.”

A week or so later, Boatnay Threkeld took Flanagan to meet his father, who owned a small bar called the Shrimp Hut in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “Daddy, this is John Flanagan, the kid I was telling you about,” he said.

Morgan looked at him with warm, laughing eyes. “Nice to meet you, John Flanagan,” he said. “Did you ever eat a rabbit stew?”

“Not on purpose, no sir,” said Flanagan.

“Well, I was fixin’ to feed my boy some stew, and with your kind permission, I’ll make you a plate, too.” There was a musical quality to his voice that reminded Flanagan of the evenings when his father and uncles sat in the parlor, drinking and telling stories about the old days in Hell’s Kitchen.

Morgan Threkeld set two bowls of steaming stew in front of the boys, and then walked around the bar and put a quarter in the jukebox. The song was Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” and Morgan sang along, snapping his fingers and shaking his shoulders and hollering
whews
of approval. He didn’t look like any father Flanagan had ever seen before. His own dad would have played Bing Crosby and banged his hand on the tabletop.

“You like your studies, John Flanagan?” Morgan asked. Flanagan nodded. Despite himself, he loved school. “That’s fine,” said Threkeld. “I’m a strong believer that the younger generation will someday rule this nation, as long as you don’t lose your, er ah, refrigeration. In other words, be cool, stay in school and use your education as your most important tool.”

Afterward, Boatnay walked Flanagan part of the way home.

“Your old man’s a really cool guy,” Flanagan said. Threkeld gave him a serious look. Suddenly he seemed a lot older than fourteen. “My dad is a man,” he said. “Around here, that’s a lot harder than being cool.”