Tower: A Novel (9 page)

Found some mook trying to force himself on this girl, had her by the hair, face pressed to the brick wall, and was tearing at her panties from her lifted skirt. Kicked the ever living crap out of him. Pounded his face. Nicky, man, kicked at him like a mule. Wouldn’t stop. Kept swinging his boot, kicking and stomping. Even the chick we saved was freaked out.

“Whoa, whoa, Nicky,” I said, bear-hugging him and pulling him away. “You’ve got to rein it in, bro.”

“Why?” was all he said.

Things changed for us forever after that night. Even when Nick did his six months in Spofford, a place that would put the devil into a martyr, he was more in control. He really seemed on the edge. Of what, I couldn’t say, but it was nothing good.

The rest of my life changed in short order.

Been working at the airport for my Uncle Harry for a few years out of high school. Could have gone to college, should have, but I didn’t have the heart for more clueless teachers with advanced degrees in irrelevance. My mom was too self-absorbed to protest. I’m sure my dad was disappointed—hell, name me someone or something that didn’t disappoint him—but he wouldn’t have had the stones to say boo. Think maybe if he had said something, I would have gone for him. Of course, he didn’t. Why fuck up a perfect losing streak?

Uncle Harry was a fucking charmer, a real class act. Brought a smoking blonde half his age to my cousin Jay’s bar mitzvah. She knew Harry for the low rent asshole he was. Caught her sucking the drummer’s cock during a band break. Saw me watching. Stared at me. It was like a dare. Grow up in Brooklyn, you recognize a dare. “Go ahead, tell that fat fuck!” her eyes seemed to say. I didn’t say a word.

Anyway, the cargo area at the airport was the Wild West with jets. It was its own fucking little world with its own codes and rules. First thing you learned was that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had about as much control of the cargo area as a bull rider has of the bull. The Mob ran the unions and the truckers and the container stations and the warehouses. If you farted near JFK, the Boys got their ten percent.

The low level guys ate their lunches at The Owl. The Owl was a real upscale joint, showed porn movies at the bar during lunch, but they did serve great eggplant parm heroes. The Boys on the next level up fucked their whores at the Jade East Motor Inn on the South Conduit. That’s where Harry had met the blonde cocksucker he’d taken to my cousin Jay’s. You gotta love Uncle Harry, a real class act, but the blonde was right about him, he was smalltime. It was that you had to be in that world to know it. To the Boys, Harry was the fat Jew they tolerated because he earned for them.

That was another thing you learned quick. There was no such thing as friends among thieves. These guys would pat you on the back, drink with you, slip you a c-note every now and then, but it was meaningless. They were cold bastards, but the guineas were sweethearts as compared to the donkeys. Christ, the Irish were real fuckers. At least with the Italians, you knew most of their decisions were based on earning. You had some sense of where you stood with them boys. Was different with the boyos. They strayed from logic a bit too often to suit me. Then again I’ve always been a bit of a moth. Show me the flame and I’m there.

Met Boyle and Griffin through Harry, and Nick met Boyle through me. Harry had all of Boyle’s import/export brokerage. Not that I knew or cared what was in the boxes I trucked back and forth from the City to the warehouse at JFK and back again. It was Boyle who offered me my first real money for my first real crime. Initially it was just driving, then we moved onto “other” things: nothing violent, but always with the rush of potential violence. Never knew when someone would walk in when they weren’t supposed to. Boyle, the Bible-thumping hypocrite, had his own imported boyo to do his violence.

Griffin had the real brogue, not the second generation cartoon bullshit that came outta Boyle’s gob. Not that Griffin talked much. A quiet fucker, he spoke with his fists and pistols, a knife too, if need be. Griffin had the real troubles in him, too. He’d been with the Provos, it was whispered, whoever the hell they were. I knew about the IRA, what did I know from Provos and Protestants? Did I give a shit who wore orange and who wore green and who marched through what neighborhood? Truth be told, Jews took guilty pleasure at the concept of Christians at each other’s throats. Guilty pleasure’s the only kind we know. Kept my eye on Griffin even when Boyle spoke. The level of Boyle’s danger reached only as deep as Griffin’s darkness. That made Mr. Boyle pretty fucking dangerous. I’d seen some of Griffin’s handiwork.

Only once he confided in me was after a particularly brutal job. Guy owned a few hot dog trucks owed Boyle several large and was slow to pay. Big mistake being a late payer. Watched Griffin snap every one of the man’s fingers like they were popsicle sticks. Stopped getting nauseous when he switched to his left hand.

“How do you do it?”

Griffin knew what I meant.

“Violence is violence done for whatever cause. You blow up a car in Derry or you snap some tardy fooker’s fingers, it’s violence. Don’t somehow think the Lord keeps two sets of ledgers. You cross the line, you cross the line.”

Such was the extent of his philosophy.

Suppose I was moving up the ladder and I’d gotten Nick some work with me, mostly petty shit, but then Nick discovered he had a talent for boosting cars. He made Boyle and a lot of Third World bastards happy. Then something happened to put a crimp in my career. My mom exercised her prerogative.

“The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The mirrors are sheeted.”

—Sylvia Plath, from her poem “Contusion”

I
F THE IRISH HAVE
a heart for anything, it’s death. Since sorrow is their stock and trade, a mother’s death is like a fucking grand slam in the bottom of the ninth. And suicide? Holy hell, you add a sin like that to the equation and it’s epic. Boyle quoted to me from the good book, patted me on the back, and told me to take all the time I needed. Like he was a magnanimous fellow looking out for my well being. Yeah, sure. It was that Nick and his cars were pulling in some serious cash. And besides, Nick was one of their own.

No, it was Griffin’s reaction that shocked me. He actually displayed a bit of humanity, as far as it went. Shook my hand and said, “Sorry for your troubles.” Gave me a smirk. Was as close to real sympathy as he was ever going to get. Proved the authenticity of Irish-ness I suppose and that even killers had mothers once, too.

When I got the call from my dad, I was in a bit of shock. It’s not like I didn’t know the call would come someday. That my mother would eventually kill herself was as much a surprise as sunset. The surprise was that she had lasted
this
long. Think even my mom’s shrinks knew they were simply delaying the inevitable. She was broken inside. All the king’s horses and all the king’s lithium couldn’t put Sophie back together again.

Have to hand it to her, though. She did it with flare, with a gesture, a final
fuck you!
to all the other mothers on the old block. Sophie may have been too haunted to love her son or husband or to care about the whispers and stares, but that was not to say she didn’t notice or didn’t hear. So when she stepped out of bed sometime in the middle of the night, went to the broom closet to retrieve the step ladder and nylon rope—the rope having already been cut to length and formed into a crude noose—climbed to the top rung of the squat ladder, slung and secured the rope over the fat low limb of the old oak in front of our stoop, snugged the noose tight around her neck, and kicked the ladder away, Sophie was paying back her neighbors in full. It made me want to applaud. She had achieved in death something she had failed at in life; I was proud of her.

When I got past the shock, I was pretty fucking relieved. It’s a cruel thing to say, true or not. But she robbed me. Even more surprising than Griffin’s reaction was my dad’s. Cried! He cried over her. This woman, this un-wife, this un-mother, this stranger who had filled up his emptiness with her own miserable existence, this is who he shed tears for! Didn’t think it was possible for him to shrink any further and yet he did.

Her funeral at Rosenzweig’s on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue M was about as well attended as a 1977 Mets game. The rabbi had to ask people to move up and fill in the empty seats. Of the neighbors, only Nick’s mom came. Given Sophie’s parting love letter to the block, can’t say that I expected a big show of support. Nicky was there too as was Uncle Harry, cousin Ira the cop and Sheila his wife. Harry, at least, had the rare good taste to leave his latest cocksucker back at the Jade East. And as the service was conducted by a rent-a-rabbi, things moved along apace.

The burial was out on Long Island along an avenue they might as well have called Cemetery Street or Burial Boulevard. There was like ten different graveyards for Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, veterans, you name it. Think I might have seen one for clowns and other deceased circus performers. Wondered if they buried clowns in little cars, ten to a car. It was all such a bunch of crap or, as Boyle might say, a load a shite. What does any of it matter to the dead?

Clearly the rabbi had received the going flat rate for his services as he picked up the speed with which he rendered his graveside ceremony. Spoke so quickly the words blended together into a kind of buzzing. When he was done, the few of us there tossed some spadefuls of dirt atop Sophie’s coffin. That was that. My dad didn’t even bother asking if I wanted to sit
shiva
with him. If I said no, he would’ve been forced to back down. So why bother?

As I walked away from the gravesite to the one pitiful limo, cousin Ira hooked his arm through mine. In my family this was a major sign of affection.

“Does this mean we’re engaged?” I asked.

“Just keep your mouth shut, wiseguy, and keep walking.”

“But the limo, my dad…”

“I’ll drive Todd home,” he called to my father, waving him to go on ahead.

We stopped until the limo and the two or three other cars pulled away. I remember the sick look on my Uncle Harry’s face when he saw me. Thought he might actually have been sad his sister hung herself, naked on the tree in front of her house, shit and piss running down her cold, bare legs. No, not Harry. He got into his black El Dorado and sped away, the front tires spitting gravel back in defiance.

When I tried removing my arm from Ira’s grip, he squeezed my hand till it nearly broke.

“Come on, asshole, someone wants to meet you.”

Ira was my mom’s cousin and as popular as a lungful of cancer. At that infamous bar mitzvah of my cousin Jay’s, people lined up to talk to Harry like he was the Pope. No one talked to Ira. No one ever talked to Ira. Jews are funny that way. They respect the law, but not those who enforce it. Ira was a joyless fuck. A good detective by all measures, but joyless.

He marched me to a stone bench in front of a row of four graves. A black granite headstone marked each of the graves. Each bore the name Einstein. Was there like a message in that, I wondered?

Standing by the bench was a hulk of a man with a shaven head and thick neck. It was the kind of neck with ripples in the back. He wore an ill-fitting gray suit that might as well have had SEARS CLOSEOUT embroidered down the sleeves. But he was shaped so that even a Sayville Row suit would have looked like a Halloween costume on him.
Cop! Cop! Cop!
The alarm bells rang in my head.

“This is Captain O’Connor,” Ira said.

“Christ, another donkey.”

Cousin Ira unhinged his arm, gave me a quick jab in my left kidney that left me on my knees and gagging on Sonya Einstein’s grave.

O’Connor crossed himself—you just gotta love the fucking Irish—knelt down beside me and said, “Pleasure to meet you, too. Sorry for your troubles.”

His smirk was broader than Griffin’s but had the same chilling effect. This guy meant business.

“You and me, Todd, we’re gonna be great friends,” he continued, his sour breath making me cringe. He held his left hand out to me. “Come on, lad, take it. It’s gonna be yours in a coupl’a months anyways.”

I looked back and saw Ira was fully prepared to administer his unique form of renal massage to my other kidney if I didn’t follow instructions. I held out my left hand. In it, O’Connor placed a NYPD detective’s shield.

“What the f—”

Ira landed his punch before I could get the
-uck
out of my mouth. Now I coughed up my breakfast onto Sonya’s grave.

“Jesus and his blessed mother!” O’Connor exclaimed in much the same way as Boyle might. “Show some respect for the dead.”

Managed to right myself and make it to the bench. O’Connor took the seat beside me.

“Now here’s the offer, lad. You’ll be one of us or you’ll be one of them,” he said, pointing to the Einsteins. “It’s a simple choice. I run the OCCB—do you know what that is, son?”

“Organized Crime Control Bureau.”

“Smart boy.” O’Connor patted my cheek. “As I was saying, I run the OCCB Task Force that oversees criminal enterprises where more than one gang of scumbags does business with another. You know, like how the wops and sheenies at JFK make nice with those shanty pricks you work for.”

“I don’t work for anyone but my Uncle—”

O’Connor slapped my face hard.

“Don’t take that attitude with me, lad. That fat cunt you call your uncle has been in my pocket for five years. So maybe when the boyos cut his heart out and feed it to him, they can lay him beside you.”

“Harry’s been an informant for years,” Ira chimed in. “And one way or another, he’s a dead man.”

“That’s right, Todd, your uncle’s fucked. But for you, there’s a chance.”

I held the shield up. “You call this a chance?”

“No, lad, I call it an
only
chance. And you’re lucky to have it. How you’ve managed all these years to avoid arrest is beyond me. Had you been arrested, let alone convicted of anything, you’d be fucked as well.”

“How’s that?”

“Because we’d be hard pressed to get you on the job with a record, shithead,” Ira said. “So we’re making this an elevator ride for you.”