The Mobster’s Lament Read online

  He reached the taxi rank and got in line behind a gaggle of wealthy revelers, the men in shiny suits, the women pearled and minked. Further on, groups of merry-makers stumbled about. It was the first weekend of the month and the streets were full of payday drunks. Gabriel looked around at the carnage, spotted a noticeboard affixed to the wall of the building opposite. A couple of years ago it had been covered in posters for war bonds, now a plumage of paper scraps was pinned to it that fluttered in the wind, turned mushy in the drizzle. Police bulletins, lost and found, missing persons.

  Gabriel stared at the last. There were dozens of them. Mostly girls, mostly young, from all over America, last seen boarding buses or trains in towns he’d never heard of. Last seen wearing this or that. Some of the notices had photos pinned to them. Some of the girls didn’t look that much older than Gabriel’s niece. He thought about the hustlers who prowled Penn Station and the bus terminals looking for runaways, easy marks, fresh meat, GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS.

  He heard a car horn honk and turned to see he was at the front of the queue. He hopped into the waiting cab.

  ‘Where to, pal?’ the cabbie asked.

  ‘The Copa.’

  The cabbie nodded and pulled into traffic, and Gabriel looked again at the posters, thought about all the world’s missing people, the disappeared. In ten days’ time, one way or the other, he and his niece would be among their number.

  2

  Monday 3rd, 2.34 a.m.

  They hauled north through Midtown, leaving behind Times Square and its midnight rainbow. They cut onto 7th, then 52nd. They passed the jazz clubs on Swing Street, which were still pulsing with neon, music and movement. They turned up Madison, which was quieter, more respectful of the hour. The classical facades of its offices and apartment blocks were daubed in stillness and shadows, making them look tomb-like, as if the street was lined either side with crypts. Gabriel imagined the whole city a necropolis, skeletons behind every door.

  The cab turned onto 61st Street and signs of life: the Copacabana, located on an otherwise fusty residential street in the upper-crust Upper East Side. There was still a queue of people snaking up the sidewalk, waiting to get in. There were bouncers and cabbies and revelers heading home. That nightclub buzz. The dull thud of music shook the air.

  They stopped behind the broadcast van parked up by the entrance to the Copa Lounge next door. Gabriel hopped out, paid the fare and looked up at the sign: Never a cover or a minimum. He walked past it, to the entrance of the Copa itself. The bouncers opened the rope, let him in. He nodded his thanks.

  He stepped into the foyer and went down the stairs and the sound of the band upped a notch, then the doors to the dancehall opened and the music hit him like a blast wave. The two a.m. floorshow was reaching its climax; Carmen Miranda on stage, shimmying away in a tight satin dress, headscarf packing half a bowl of fruit. Behind her a bevy of Samba Sirens broke hearts with their hips, matching Miranda’s movements with unnerving precision.

  The club was nearing its capacity – seven hundred people, spread out across the various floors, mezzanines and terraces. On the stairs and ramps that connected them all, captains and waiters rushed around. The Copa had started out as a modest attempt to bring the glamorous hotel nightlife of Rio De Janeiro to the cold north, but had become so popular they’d had to constantly expand the space. They opened a cocktail lounge upstairs and WINS started broadcasting a radio show from it – the famous stay-outs drop in with their pin-ups. And you’re invited! Then someone decided to turn it into a movie; Copacabana, starring Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda. Since the movie required a soundtrack, the Copa became a song as well: ‘Let’s Do the Copacabana’. It was this song that Miranda was dancing to now. The Brazilian singer-dancer-actress had been booked into the club for five weeks as part of the film’s publicity tour, and the song was the climax of the floorshow. As her hips shimmied to the atomic rumble of the conga drums, Gabriel cast his eye over the crowd.

  At the bar Frank Sinatra and Rocky Graziano were involved in some kind of limbo competition with a pair of girls Gabriel thought he recognized from the theatre posters on 42nd Street. He could see the effect of Benzedrine in their eyes. One of the girls fell onto the carpet and they all burst out laughing. Frank slapped Rocky on the back, like they’d achieved something of note, and maybe they had.

  Behind them were a few second-rate film stars and half the Yankees outfield, who’d been in the club every night since their World Series win a month back. Men from the Bonanno crime family mooched about with some women who might have been their wives or girlfriends or mistresses. Members of New York’s four other Mafia families were scattered about. On one of the far terraces, high up, in the darkness behind some fake palm trees and mirrored columns, Gabriel spotted Mayor O’Dwyer seated at a table with a crowd of suits, stirring a swizzle stick round a joyless mai tai.

  The mayor looked up, and through the roar of dancers his eyes met Gabriel’s. They nodded at each other. O’Dwyer was elected with the support of Frank Costello, the head of the Luciano crime family, the not-so-secret owner of the Copacabana, the man on whose behalf Gabriel managed the club. Gabriel tried to make out the other men at the mayor’s table, but it was too shadowy. One of them picked a pill from a cigarette case and tossed it into his mouth.

  As the band reached a crescendo, Gabriel took one last look around the room, and felt crushed once again by what he saw, the thought that this was where they had come to, this decadence was what peace had brought, the end result of the world tearing itself apart, of millions slaughtered and shadows burnt onto walls. He wondered, as he often did, if maybe the world hadn’t died in the conflagration, and they were all carrying on their existence in limbo, a necropolis, and he was the only one who’d noticed.

  The band reached the end of the song in an avalanche of conga rolls and horns. A roar went up from the crowd and people hugged each other, and some kissed. Eyes glistened.

  Miranda bowed.

  The emcee took the mic and announced the band would be taking a break and now here’s Martin and Lewis to keep you all entertained.

  Dean Martin came onto the stage holding a whiskey, Jerry Lewis with his hands in his pockets. Martin thanked the emcee, and held up a finger to him as he exited the stage.

  ‘Behind every successful man,’ he said, ‘there’s a surprised mother-in-law.’

  The drummer flung off a roll. The crowd burst out laughing.

  Gabriel turned his back on it all, headed to a door marked Staff Only and pushed through it into a dank, gray corridor. The door shuttered behind him and killed much of the sound. After a few corners he reached his office, unlocked the door and stepped inside. It was a windowless space, as gray as the corridor, with a year-round smell of damp. It was dominated by a green baize table at which three men counted stacks of money. They put the money into piles, wrapped the bills in bands, added them to trays, licked pencils, scribbled on lists. The accounting was complicated, a list of what they actually made, a list of what the tax authorities would hear about, a list of what went to the official owners, a list of the skim Costello and the Mob would take. Gabriel was probably the only person in the operation who could keep track of it all.

  He locked the door and slumped into his chair, and the two passports felt like they were burning a hole in his jacket. Six years of planning, ten days to go, and he was succumbing ever more to the jitters.

  He lit a cigarette, noticed he was being eyed by Havemeyer, the oldest of the men sitting around the table counting stacks.

  ‘What?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘Costello wants to see you,’ Havemeyer said without breaking his count.

  Panic thumped through Gabriel’s chest, coursed through his torso.

  ‘He was here?’ he asked.

  Havemeyer shook his head. He finished counting off the stack, wrapped a band round it, laid it on a tray, made a tick on a list. Only then did he turn to look at Gabriel. The lime-colored cellophane of his visor caught the b
eam of the overhead and sent a shaft of lurid green across his face, making him look like a character from one of the comic books Sarah left scattered about the apartment.

  ‘He called,’ said Havemeyer. ‘Left a message with Augie.’

  ‘He say what he wanted?’ Gabriel asked. Then realized it was a stupid question. The city bugged Costello’s phones, and even though Costello hired a telephony expert to scan for them, he still only ever discussed business in person.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Havemeyer.

  Gabriel tried to calm himself. Maybe Costello had a job for him and it was all OK. Or maybe Costello had found out and Gabriel’s grave was already being dug.

  ‘You sweating?’ Havemeyer asked.

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘It’s raining out.’

  It looked like the old man bought it, because he nodded and got back to his count.

  One of the men heaved a tray of money stacks over to the safe in the corner, a squat piece of cast iron, whose lumpen shape had always reminded Gabriel of a bomb. Another of the men opened the safe door, and the dollar bills were consumed by the darkness at its heart. If everything was an illusion, if they had indeed descended into the underworld, this bomb was the furnace that powered the dream.

  Six years of planning, ten days to go, and he’d been called in by the boss of all bosses.

  3

  Monday 3rd, 7.05 a.m.

  Four hours later, Gabriel, Havemeyer and two security goons stepped out of the Copa’s stage door into an ash-colored dawn. The goons sent the roll-shutters that covered the entrance crashing to earth and the noise roared down the alleyway and made Havemeyer jump. He looked around him with red, rheumy eyes and Gabriel thought how a man Havemeyer’s age shouldn’t be working nights in a club anymore.

  The goons padlocked the shutters and handed Gabriel the keys and then they went their separate ways; the goons for a workout in Bova’s gym in Williamsburg; Havemeyer back to his sofa in the Heights, because his wife liked to sleep late; and Gabriel for a meeting with Frank Costello, the ‘prime minister of the underworld’.

  He walked to 5th, where the sidewalk was busy with suits and secretaries, shop girls, Negro maids, kids hawking papers. The night rain had left a sheen across the city, made the pavements slippery, the air clammy and close, despite the chill. Gabriel hailed a cab to take him to the other side of the park. He could use the drive to prepare for the meeting. He needed to come across relaxed, normal, steady. Like he wasn’t about to vanish with a giant wedge of stolen Mob money.

  He lit a cigarette and remembered the beaches in Mexico as he’d seen them during the war. He felt the scorching heat of the sun on his skin, the pure white light bouncing off the sand, the calming shush of the waves. For a moment he was no longer on the bleak streets of New York in November.

  And then he was again.

  Cold and tired and anxious in the hard gray dawn.

  They passed the subway station and people were streaming out of its exit. Every work day half a million commuters flooded into Manhattan via its tunnels and bridges, which made Gabriel wonder if the island’s rarely seen soil compressed under their weight, sank a little, if the river lapped ever so slightly higher against the piers?

  The cab approached Columbus Circle and came to a stop at a red light. Gabriel smelled the warm, sweet fragrance of freshly baked bread, saw a bakery truck pulled up outside a grocery. The bakers were unloading trays of bread covered in wax paper. Gabriel felt a pang of envy. The bakers had food to show for their night’s work. What did Gabriel have? He and the fifty people he employed had spent the night conjuring up an illusion of exotic Rio in a basement on East 60th Street. A lavish phantasm that vanished every dawn. Nothing left of it but a few hundred hangovers being slept off across town, and the last traces of the congas echoing in his head.

  The lights turned green and the cab headed north. He counted off the streets as they ticked by on his left, 60th up to 71st. On his right, the park was poised on the tipping point between fall and winter. There was frost on the ground, and the trees had lost their leaves, revealing their black, spindly armatures, a smattering of birds’ nests, a long-deflated balloon some child must have cried over in the dog days of summer.

  The rain picked up again, pattering hard against the cab’s windows, fragmenting the world into translucent beads. They pulled up outside the Majestic Apartments, a twin-towered Art Deco building at 115 Central Park West. At one time or another, most of the city’s Mob bosses had owned apartments there. Now only Costello was left. Gabriel paid the cabbie and got out into the drizzle and wind, then through the entrance, nodding to the doorman, into the reception area, where he was hit by a burst of warm, dry air.

  ‘Here for Mr Costello,’ he said to the concierge, who nodded and waved Gabriel up. At this time of day there was always a steady stream of people arriving to see Costello.

  The elevator took him up eighteen stories, opening onto a red-carpet corridor at the end of which was the door to apartment 18F. Any other Mob boss would have security guards at this point, if not in the reception area downstairs, or out on the street. Not Costello.

  His openness was something Gabriel always liked about his boss. Costello didn’t carry a gun, didn’t employ bodyguards, didn’t have a chauffeur drive him around. When Costello had an appointment, he caught a cab, alone, unarmed. Like any other New Yorker. This as much as anything made the city feel that Frank Costello wasn’t half so bad, that although he was the boss of all bosses, head of the commission, leader of the five families, chief of all organized crime, in charge of an army of over two thousand men, he was more than anything a local boy done good. Manhattan’s gangster.

  Under his leadership the Mob had earned more money, grabbed more influence, come into more power than at any time in its history. All this under a man who’d never even wanted to be the head and had only taken the job reluctantly.

  Gabriel knocked on the door and after a few seconds, Costello’s wife Bobbie opened up.

  ‘Morning, Gabby. How’s tricks?’ she asked, leaning in to kiss him.

  She had a high-pitched, little girl’s voice that had stayed with her through the decades.

  ‘You know,’ Gabriel replied. ‘Getting ready for winter.’

  ‘Here to see Frank?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She turned and led him down the corridor.

  Bobbie was a petite woman, pretty, brunette, quick-witted. Like many Italian gangsters, Costello had married an outsider, a Jewish girl from 7th Avenue, just around the corner from the East Harlem slum in which he’d been raised. It was another part of the Frank Costello fairytale – marrying the rich girl from the right side of the tracks. He’d been twenty-three at the time of the marriage, Bobbie fifteen.

  ‘How’s the Copa?’ she asked.

  ‘Same old.’ He smiled. ‘Latin music, Chinese food, American sleaze-balls.’

  She laughed.

  Two dogs came yapping up the corridor, a miniature Dobermann and a toy poodle, barking and scowling. Bobbie kneeled down to shush them.

  ‘Would you shut the fuck up?’ she said, grabbing them by their collars. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with them.’

  The dogs continued to yap at Gabriel and he wondered if they could sense a traitor in their midst. If, like cancer and fear, dogs could also smell betrayal.

  ‘How’s Sarah?’ Bobbie asked, ushering the dogs down the corridor.

  She always asked after Gabriel’s niece, and when she did, Gabriel felt a tinge of something in her voice. Bobbie and Costello were childless, maybe the reason why they doted on the two dogs.

  ‘At the moment, crazy about comic books,’ he replied.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Every kid in the city’s got their nose in a comic book.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  ‘You need to get out more in daylight hours,’ she said, giving him a sly grin.

  They reached the lounge and went straight in. The scene inside had always reminded Gabr
iel of a hotel restaurant at breakfast time. Along the far wall tables had been set up, laden with serving trays of bacon and eggs, pastries and breads, toast toppings, coffee pots, a samovar of tea. Two bored-looking maids stood next to the tables, waiting for people’s orders, and all across the rest of the space, on sofas and chaises-longues, by the windows, by the piano, next to the fireplace and the slot machines, were the luminaries, standing or sitting or leaning, drinking, eating, talking, planning, scheming. Gabriel spotted suits from City Hall, Wall Street, trade unions, all but one of New York’s crime families.

  Every week Costello hosted breakfasts here, and so the day began for many of the city’s political players. It was all part of Costello’s grand plan – to ingratiate himself with the upper crust, do them favors, lend them money, blur the lines between legitimacy and racketeering, make so many friends, it was impossible to be weeded out.

  And the plan had worked, so far. Costello not only organized the nation’s crime, but much of its commerce, too. New York was home to the most powerful economy the world had ever known. Half the country’s imports and exports flowed through its port, a port that was controlled by the Mob, making this the heart within the heart of the world’s greatest city, the nightmare within the dream.

  ‘I’ll see if he’s free,’ said Bobbie. ‘Help yourself to food and coffee.’

  She headed through the din and Gabriel lit a cigarette and checked to see if his hands were shaking. Then he headed over to the buffet tables and grabbed a coffee, scanned the room. The decor was gilded, vintage, luxurious, overdone. Furniture had been bought in bulk to fill the apartment’s vastness and make it look homely. A wood fire crackled in the hearth, above it hung a Howard Chandler Christy in a gilt frame. There was a gold piano, and in each corner, a slot-machine from Costello’s New Orleans operation, all of them rigged to pay out. Costello’s idea of hospitality.