The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (26 page)

“Thank you, though you probably know more about him than I do.”

“You know what happened with the NYPD, right?”

“I was there. My father and I lived in the same apartment.”

“I paid your rent yesterday,” Justo said. “Just in case you’re concerned.”

“I have ten days before it’s due.”

“Shushan likes to pay early. Sometimes the mail to Brooklyn, it’s like a foreign country. But you don’t have to worry. I took care of it.”

“Thanks.”

“Not at all, boss. It’s my job. What exactly do you want to know about your old man?”

“When did he start working for Shushan?”

A shrug. “He joined the payroll in fifty-seven, March I think—I’d have to look it up—but for some time before he was more or less freelancing. Shushan needed a tough Jew, he called on your father. And he was one tough Jew.”

“To do what?”

“Sometimes just to show up.”

“To show up?”

“You know, somebody was making trouble, Mike would show up. Somebody was leaning on a friend, Shushan didn’t like to have to intervene personally unless there was a real necessity. This was a time we started reducing the payroll, because we didn’t need feet on the street. But it wasn’t like today. We still had guys. I mean, big guys. But he’d send Mike. I mean, your father was my size. Mike would... show up.”

“And...”

“If necessary, lean back.”

“My father was an enforcer for Shushan Cats?”

“Nah,” Justo said. “First of all, what did Shushan have to enforce? Nobody was going to bother our bookies, not with Shushan having a writ from Auro Sfangiullo—”

“A writ.”

“A permit, like. Or a license. Maybe more like a blessing. It wasn’t in writing. Just everyone knew not to even think about challenging Shushan because he was tight with Sfangiullo. They had an agreement between them. This business, Shushan used to say it should be called disorganized crime. Most of the time everyone is at everyone else’s throat. They’ll fight like cats over a piece of mouse you practically can’t see. Who controlled what was always in flux, still is. But in some cases, like with the Fulton Fish Market and the bookies in Brooklyn and some territories in Manhattan, the boundaries of territories were as clear as on those Hammond globes. Outside of that and a few similar situations, chaos. What can I tell you? Gangsters aren’t geographers or statesmen or anything rational. And the people at the top of the pile encourage it. You know why? Because if the lower levels are fighting among themselves they won’t think of attacking the top layer and supplanting them. So when you hear about the so-called highly organized, super-disciplined Mafia, you’re reading the usual newspaper stuff, fiction. In this business, unless you have a writ, the only thing that counts is feet on the street. Shushan had a writ. Where was I going with this?”

“My father.”

“Oh yeah. Shushan had a writ, and Mike he had a rep. First he was a tough cop—you had to be tough to be a Jew in the NYPD. Then he was a cop they threw off the force, excuse me for saying it that way, which means even the cops were scared of him, plus it was known he was alone in the world with a kid. I mean, it was common knowledge he was a desperate man. Instead of being scared something might happen to him if he got into a brawl—fists or firearms, with these guys it’s always to the death—he was more scared he might lose his work if he didn’t prove himself than lose his life if he backed off. Maybe Mike was no three-hundred pound gorilla, but he was all muscle and all guts. Shushan liked to say he was a World-War-II Marine, when the Marines were really Marines. You knew he was a Marine, right?”

“He always kept his dress uniform. I still have it.”

“So to protect the little he had he would rumble with the worst, which didn’t happen too often because when they saw him coming they would stand clear. Personally, though, I can tell you from experience, he was a sweet man. Very friendly. Warm like. What’d I say?”

I straightened the line of my lips lest Justo think I might lose it. “He was different with me.”

“Well, that happens. My father, he never told me once he was proud I went to college. Those old-time Puerto Ricans, for them if you didn’t do manual labor you were goofing off. He still can’t figure out what an accountant does. Never had a checkbook in his life. Got paid in cash, paid in cash. In a couple years he goes on Social Security—I’m afraid he’ll toss out the checks.”

“My father and I didn’t talk,” I said. “He never told me much.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so proud.”

“I don’t know one way or the other,” I said. “And I don’t care.”

“You don’t sound like you don’t,” Justo said. “If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Next topic,” I said.

“You’re the boss.”

“Until Shushan shows up.”

“Boss,” Justo said. “I don’t think so.”

“Never mind. It doesn’t matter. That’s one thing I learned from my old man.”

“What’s that?”

“Hope for the best. Assume the worst.”

“That’s why people feared him.”

“Fear is important, I take it.”

“Oh yeah. I mean, Shushan never had to raise a hand to anyone in five years, maybe longer. Fear, it’s catching. Everybody hears the stories, some of the stories even get a bit exaggerated in the retelling. People do that. So Shushan, he didn’t have to work much, if you know what I mean.”

“I need to see Royce and the brothers, and Jimmy and Tommy, the Chinese guys.”

“You got it.”

“Is there someone else I haven’t met?”

“You putting something together?”

“Do I have a choice?” I asked.

“Not much of one.”

Jimmy and Tommy Wing came in first, along with two Chinese bruisers in black leather jackets who sat by the door opposite Ira like a human wall, not introduced, not even looking in my direction. I had the feeling they were not exactly English-majors. Jimmy and Tommy, however, were as American as apple dim sum, comfortably integrated into both societies, so that Tommy immediately reached out to me in the language of sports, as they had with Shushan in the restaurant, except that I knew little of professional baseball, college basketball or horse-racing, and cared less. Forgive them: they know not Wystan Hugh Auden. At four in the afternoon they put down two double shots of Old Grand-Dad like gunfighters in a movie saloon.

“You’re a Jewish guy, right?” Jimmy said. He wore the kind of suit that heralded the beginning of a fashion revolution, the British assault vaulting over from Carnaby Street in London and the American front opening out of Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. This wasn’t exactly flower power, but close: Jimmy was decked out in a gray suit illuminated in thin stripes of mauve and pink, framed by a high collar over four buttons, a fat mauve tie, and on his small feet peculiarly pointed dark grey jodhpurs. Tommy was just as advanced in shades of garden green. Both wore sunglasses, though the suite’s curtains were drawn. “I’m right about that, like Mr. Shushan?”

“We’re both Jews,” I said.

“Can you explain that?”

“The coincidence?”

“No,” Jimmy said, moving his head slightly to the left so that behind the dark lenses set in pentagonal wire frames he was probably flashing a look to Tommy. “Jews.”

Tommy nodded. He was not a talker.

“We were discussing about it coming over,” Jimmy said. “Jews. I mean, they tried to wipe you out and here you are and just as powerful. It’s true you have a council?”

“A council?”

“That rules the world, secretly?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s in Brooklyn. Meets every four years in the back of a kosher deli on Flatbush Avenue.”

The two Chinese were not laughing.

“That’s it, only four years?” Jimmy said. “Is that enough?”

“For most things.” I said. “Like the color of cars. Ever notice that GM, Ford, Chrysler, they all bring out the same colors? But mostly it’s political, like deciding who’s going to be president. We backed Jack Kennedy, of course, because he’s a Jew.”

“He’s a Jew?”

“Jimmy, he
pretends
to be Irish Catholic,” I said. “But the last lord mayor of Dublin, Bobby Briscoe, he’s a Jew. So being Irish and a Jew, that happens. St. Patrick also.”

“How about that,” Jimmy said.

“Mao too.” I couldn’t help it.

Justo shot me a look.

“Mao?”

“You thought only Chiang Kai-shek, right?” God help me, I couldn’t stop. “Common error.”

“Chiang?” Jimmy said.

“You know who else? Sandy Koufax.”

“Yeah, Koufax,” Jimmy added. “Very Jewish. Fanned the first five Yankees in the first game of the series. Broke the record with fifteen strike-outs. Rubbed the Yankees into the dirt.”

“You don’t like the Yanks?”

“The Yankees are basically Italian,” Jimmy said. “Joe DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle.” In total agreement, Tommy nodded with alarming vigor. “Yogi Berra,” Jimmy continued. “Joe Pepitone. It’s the dago club.”

I considered this for a moment while the two lit cigarettes that immediately stank up the room.
Gauloises.
Who knew Chinese hoodlums dressed English and smoked French? Still, it was a convenient opening. “You don’t like... Italians?”

In tandem the sunglasses came off, leaving both Jimmy and Tommy less formidable but at the same time more excitedly bright-eyed, at least visibly. Though I knew from Shushan that they stuck to their own turf, terrorizing Chinatown and a few other pockets of Chinese population in New York, I thought maybe it would be a good idea for them not to become too excited. They had a reputation for random violence. As opposed to the violence of normal hoodlums, who will gladly beat the shit out of someone on a commercial basis, Chinese gangsters might burn a fellow Chinese alive with kerosene simply because he showed too little respect. Of course they had enough business among their own. The Chinese were incorrigible gamblers, with a special affinity for blackjack, and because most had left their families behind were regular clients of the closely controlled whorehouses along Division Street. Culturally they had a predilection for hard drugs, and most of the new-style containers arriving in the Port of New York packed tight with sixty or seventy Chinese always carried enough heroin to make the shipment profitable even if the human cargo died along the way. According to Justo, if junk smelled like rotten meat, it was Chinese. “What’s to like in the dagos?” Jimmy said. “They think Little Italy it’s a state, like the Vatican or something, or Rhode Island, and God help anyone who steps inside. It’s like you have to get a visa. These days, with Chinatown so crowded, when one of us buys an apartment house on the wrong street it’s just not comfortable, let me put it that way. The old Italians, the plain working stiffs, they’re moving out. Long Island, New Jersey, Staten Island. What are we going to do, not buy? You been on the Staten Island Ferry recently?”

“No.”

“It’s like Sicily,” Jimmy said, then seemed to tire of the subject, perhaps in frustration. “They don’t like us. We don’t like them.”

I smiled. “How’d you boys like to help the Jews out with the Italians?”

“The Jews got an Italian problem?”

“A little one,” I said.

After the Chinese left Royce and the brothers came in. Once I had the key it was easy.

“What can we do for you, Mr. Russell?”

“Not a thing,” I said. “Except maybe tell me where you get your threads.”

“You like this style?”

“The Negro is the best dressed man in America,” I said. “You look at the television news, you see white people who couldn’t dress their way out of a Klan costume. I’m not kidding you, gentlemen, clothes make the man, and your typical ofay looks like he’s been dressed by somebody who normally makes flour sacks.”

“Amen to that,” Fred said. He was the tallest of the three brothers, and possibly the youngest. Ed and Ted nodded. All of them glowed metallically, the rich dark material of their suits shot through with gold thread that matched the wide bands on their porkpie hats—in 1963, unless a woman was present, men kept their hats on; when a woman entered an elevator all the hats came off, and when she got off they went right back on. Their shoes were of unusual color, brightly sueded tans and greens and blues. Each of the three brothers wore a white-on-white buttondown shirt, just coming into style. Royce’s was light blue with a tab collar that pressed the knot of his silver necktie up and out like a push-up bra.

“You might appreciate fine dressage,” Royce said. “But you telling us for a reason.”

“You can’t fool a wise man,” I said.

The three brothers nodded in appreciation.

“You still be doing it,” Royce said. “You trying to flatter us to be on your side?”

“My side?”

“Your thing with the Tintis, man, it a known conception. People be talking about it. They be saying, ‘Going to be blood on the street worse than Birmingham, worse than Little Rock.’”

I looked at my watch. I got up and went to the 21-inch television in the corner, a top-of-the-line Zenith, the first with color and stereophonic sound, and clicked it on. Zenith had remote control for black-and-white sets, but not yet for color. There, booming out in a gravelly reassuring baritone, was Walter Cronkite.

“—while the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King told CBS News he has just begun to fight.”

And here was the man himself, dressed for societal combat in a snap-brim hat, a dark suit and a narrow two-tone silver tie that might have come out of Royce’s closet. Two months before he had thrilled part of the nation and pissed off the rest with his “I have a dream” speech during a march on Washington that had brought some two-hundred thousand civil rights activists to the capital. “That is right, because the cause of the American Negro is just and it is not going to be abandoned. The colored people of Birmingham are locked in a struggle with the forces of intolerance, injustice and plain hatred. But we will not be moved. We shall prevail.”

Cronkite’s voice returned over footage of Birmingham firemen hosing down marchers, black and white, their arms locked together, as police on horseback swung in with batons from both sides. “An epic battle is being played out on the streets of one of America’s great cities,” Cronkite intoned. “Now this.”