Inherit the Mob (3 page)

“Your old man is the real McCoy,” Flanagan said to Gordon. “How did you get to be such a pussy?”

“You wanna ask questions, beat it,” Gordon said in a passable
imitation of his father’s gravelly voice. “I’m Wildman William Gordon, and I bump off Irish pen pushers for the fun of it. Jesus, Flanagan, grow up. These are a bunch of geriatric cases. What the hell are you so excited about?”

“Excited? Listen, when I was a kid, my mother used to tell me, ‘Eat your dinner or Max and Ax will get you,’ ” said Flanagan. “And now, here I am, in Max’s apartment. Come on, be a guy, who are some of these people?”

“I don’t know most of them myself,” Gordon said truthfully. His father and uncle had always been extremely careful not to mix business with family. They had expected him to become a doctor, and hadn’t been any too pleased when he chose journalism as a career. To them, newspapers were too close to their world, and they had a poor opinion of reporters, whom they considered professional stool pigeons. Gordon was just about to explain this to Flanagan when a small man with a long scar across his right cheek came up and put a gnarled hand gently on his cheek. “Hello, Velvel,” he said.
“Vos macht a yid?”

“Hello, Uncle Abe,” Gordon said. “You look good.”

“I feel like an astronaut. Why not? You been here long?”

“Just got here. Uncle Abe, this is John Flanagan, who works with me. Abe Abramson.”

“Your mudda done it,” Flanagan said with a wide grin. Abramson blinked, stared and then burst into loud laughter. Already a little drunk on the Canadian Club, Flanagan turned to Gordon. “It’s 1937, right? And one Abe “Bad Abe” Abramson is shot in a card game on Hester Street. The cops arrive. ‘Who done it, Abe?’ one of them asks. ‘Just tell us who done it.’ And Bad Abe looks up at the cop and says, ‘Your mudda done it.’ Right?”

To Gordon’s amazement, Abramson laughed again. “Your friend here is what, some kind of historian?” he said. “How’d you hear that one?”

“The code of silence,” said Flanagan, drunker than he appeared. “The common bond between your world and mine. Velvel doesn’t understand about that.”

“Where’d you find this guy?” Abramson asked with mock anger; it was obvious that he was enjoying the attention.

“Maybe we could get together sometime, talk about the old days,” Flanagan suggested.

“Sure, why not, I’m the nostalgic type,” said Abramson. “I live in Florida these days, you ever get down there, look me up.” The old man punched Gordon on the arm. “Your mudda done it,” he laughed. “Oh, by the way, Velvel, Nate Belzer wants to talk to you in your uncle’s office. He says come in when you get a chance.”

“I’ll go see what he wants now,” Gordon said. “Uncle Abe, show this Mick around, all right? He wants to be Damon Runyon.”

“A fine type of gentile,” said Abe. “I knew him in Miami.…”

Belzer was waiting for Gordon in Max Grossman’s study. He sat behind the large old-fashioned desk, idly flipping a pencil in the air. “Pull up a chair, Velvel,” he said. “I want to talk to you about your uncle’s will.”

A few years earlier,
Fortune
magazine had listed Max Grossman as one of the five hundred richest men in America. The old gangster had no children, and since learning of his death that morning Gordon had been wondering if he might be in line to inherit some money.

“Velvel, you know what your Uncle Max did for a living?” he said, coming straight to the point.

“He was a retired businessman who owned a chain of department stores,” Gordon said, reciting by rote the answer he had been given as a teenager on the way to a preppy boarding school. It was a good answer, one that had served him well through twenty-five years, and he had no desire to hear anything different now.

“Your uncle had various interests,” said Belzer. “He owned department stores, that’s true. Your father and he had a number of department stores. But there were some other things as well. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Not really.”

“Come on, Velvel. You’re a big boy now. It’s time you knew about the family business.”

“Where’s my father?” Gordon asked, sounding childish, even to himself. “If we’re talking about family business, how come he isn’t here?”

“He’s not here because he doesn’t want to be here,” said Belzer. “I want to show you something.” He opened a leather briefcase and slid a neatly stapled set of papers across the desk to Gordon. It was covered with numbers. Big numbers, with dollar signs in front of them. “Read,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

G
ordon had been reading all his life. When he was seven, his mother took him for the first time to the main branch of the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. Thirty-five years later, he still remembered vividly how she had browsed through the card catalog, jotted something on a slip of paper and, within twenty minutes, received two thin volumes of Greek mythology, complete with pictures of gods and snakes, from a hole in the wall. She explained that someone called a librarian had filled the order; as the only child of wealthy, indulgent parents, he had imagined that the librarian had written the books just for him.

Seven-year-old William Gordon became a fanatical reader, a fact he was careful to conceal from his friends. He did not want to be considered a bookworm, and he sometimes intentionally failed to answer questions in school to avoid that reputation.

Then, at the dawn of puberty, Gordon discovered a practical use for literature—it was a means of learning about sex. Just after his Bar
Mitzvah he swiped a paperback marital guide from the rack in a drugstore. The book inflamed his imagination and gave him a precocious awareness of girls and the fun he could have with them. That year, at summer camp, he employed his knowledge to bluff his way into the cot of a seventeen-year-old counselor from Westchester who smelled of bubble gum and shampoo.

The following autumn, Gordon was sent, under protest, to Grayling Academy, a prep school in Vermont. There he again found a practical use for his reading habit. Grayling was going through a liberal phase, and the emphasis was on “creative processes” and “independent thinking” rather than on memorization and discipline. Gordon persuaded the headmaster to allow him to substitute “extracurricular reading” for classes, and turned in reports on books he had already read, a system that allowed him enough free time to become a better than competent basketball player and to comb the adjacent villages for willing townie girls.

Gordon’s mother, Else, was a pretty, somewhat vague woman whose father, a German Jewish snob, founded the Monarch Department Store chain and then lost it through inattention. He was bought out by Al Grossman, acting for his brother, Max; and Al took the daughter along with the rest of the inventory. Else Grossman wanted her son to attend Princeton and become another F. Scott Fitzgerald. Al, who seldom interfered in the boy’s education, hoped he would study medicine at Columbia, but not enough to insist. Gordon, who considered authors sissies, and hated the idea of spending his life with sick people, disappointed them both by going to the University of Wisconsin and majoring in journalism.

After three years in a boys’ school, Gordon fell in love with the University of Wisconsin. He was delighted by the accessibility of co-eds, beer and a real library. He racked up an impressive number of conquests among blond small-town English majors looking for an intense Jewish intellectual from the big city; joined ZBT and became a star fraternity jock, although he wasn’t quite good enough for varsity sports; and, for the first time, brought his reading out of the closet. He concentrated on history and international politics; even then, he knew he wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

In his senior year, he was appointed editor in chief of the college newspaper. He also changed his name from Grossman to Gordon,
because he thought it looked better as a byline. The previous editor had been hired by the
Detroit Free Press
as a city reporter, and Gordon expected to travel the same route—a Middle Western apprenticeship followed by a job with a New York paper, and then on to the Orient Express.

During spring break, Gordon flew back to New York to attend his uncle’s annual seder. By this time his parents had already moved to the large red brick house in Scarsdale, but Max and Ida stayed in their East Side duplex, which he had visited twice a year—on Thanksgiving and Passover—for as long as he could remember.

By no means religious, Gordon’s family belonged to no synagogue and observed few holidays—Al Grossman went to his office even on Yom Kippur unless there happened to be a World Series game. But Passover was special, a time when the family gathered to recall the humble roots from which their present affluence had sprung. The holiday always made Gordon nostalgic, although he was never certain what he was nostalgic for.

That year the seder began no differently from all other seders. Max Grossman sat at the head of the table, a black silk skullcap on his thick white hair and a noncommittal look on his face, while his friend Nathan Belzer chanted the Hebrew prayers. Gordon was, by that time, well aware that his uncle was a notorious gangster, but he could never relate the movie image of a crime lord to the old Jewish man he had known all his life. Max had a soft voice with just the smallest Yiddish inflection, and, unlike his mercurial brother, he was rarely animated. If Gordon had to choose a single word to describe his uncle, he would have picked “ordinary.”

Theirs was a distant relationship. Max and Ida were childless, and the old man didn’t relate easily to children. Occasionally, as a small boy, Gordon had tried to charm his uncle with self-consciously precocious comments about the adult world, but Max had refused to be charmed. “Your boy is a good talker, Al,” he said once, and Gordon, who knew that his uncle had spent a lifetime keeping his mouth shut, realized that it was not a compliment. Since then, he had been as silent around his uncle as good manners permitted. So, when Belzer completed the seder with “Next year in Jerusalem” and Max leaned over to him and said, “Velvel, I’d like to talk to you alone for a few minutes,” Gordon had been astonished.

Max took Gordon into the large study off the living room, closed the door and sat at his desk. His nephew sat across from him in a straight-backed chair, trying to remember if he had ever had a private conversation with the old man. He couldn’t recall one.

“You’re finishing college this year,” Max said.

“That’s right, Uncle Max,” said Gordon, determined to be taciturn.

“Have you decided yet what you want to do?” he asked. It was, Gordon assumed, a preliminary question; the old man must have known from Gordon’s father that he planned to become a journalist.

“I want to be a newspaperman,” he said, choosing the word for its practical, hard-bitten sound. “Eventually, I’d like to become a foreign correspondent, but that’ll take a few years.”

“Have you ever thought of going into the business?” Max asked in a flat voice. “Your father could use you maybe.”

“I’m not too interested in department stores, Uncle Max. Besides, I don’t think I’d be good at it.”

Grossman nodded at the justice of this evaluation. “Probably not,” he said. “I hear your name is Gordon now.”

Gordon flushed with surprise; he hadn’t yet told his parents about the name change. “It’s a pen name, Uncle Max,” he said. “I didn’t have it officially changed or anything. How did you know?”

Grossman ignored the question. He took a sheet of paper from the top drawer of his desk and pushed it across the polished surface toward his nephew. There was a name already written on it; clearly this meeting was not a spontaneous whim. “Tomorrow, go and see this man,” Max said. “He’s a friend of mine. He’ll give you a job as a foreign correspondent.”

Cy Malkin, whose name and phone number were written in longhand, was the editor in chief of the
New York Tribune
. He was a legendary figure in American journalism. Gordon was so surprised that he laughed out loud.

“Cy Malkin? Why don’t I just go and talk to President Kennedy? Uncle Max, it doesn’t work that way. I mean, I appreciate it, but Cy Malkin doesn’t meet with journalism students. Besides, it takes years to work your way up to getting a foreign assignment—”

“Who’s talking about working your way up?” Max said reasonably.
“I want to give you a graduation present, Velvel. Somebody gives you something, take it. You’re a good kid.”

Gordon was more surprised by the compliment than by his uncle’s naïve notion that a casual friendship with an editor could get him a job. “Thank you, Uncle Max,” he said. “I’ll call Mr. Malkin tomorrow.” He doubted that he actually would, but he didn’t want to spoil the moment.

“Fine,” said the old man, pushing himself up from the desk. “Let’s go back and get strudel.”

Gordon put Cy Malkin’s number in his wallet, and walked around New York with it for three days before getting up the nerve to call. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t get past the editor’s secretary. Finally, on the morning before he was scheduled to return to Madison, he rang Malkin’s office.

“This is William Grossman,” he told the secretary, instinctively using his real name. “My uncle, Max Grossman, said to call Mr. Malkin.”