Deacon King Kong(15)
5
THE GOVERNOR
Thomas Elefante, the Elephant, heard about the Deems Clemens shooting an hour after it happened. He was working on his mother’s flower bed in his brownstone on Silver Street just three blocks from the Cause Houses, dreaming of meeting a plump, good-looking farm girl, when a uniformed cop from the Seventy-Sixth Precinct rolled up, called him over to his squad car, and relayed the news.
“They got a line on the shooter,” the cop said.
Elefante leaned on the squad car door and listened in silence while the cop blabbed on about what the cops knew. They knew the victim. They were certain about the shooter too. Elefante didn’t care about any shooter. That was Joe Peck’s problem. If the coloreds wanted to kill each other over Peck’s dope, that was Joe’s headache, not his. Except, of course, killings brought cops like this one. Cops wrecked the economy—his economy anyway. Moving hot goods while cops were running an investigation in your backyard was like being the dumbest kid in class who always raises his hand anyway. No matter how stupid you are, it’s only a matter of time before the teacher calls on you.
Elefante was forty, heavyset, and handsome; his dark eyes and gaunt jaw held a stony silence that cloaked a delightful, sarcastic sense of humor despite a childhood of bittersweet disappointment. His father had spent a good part of Elefante’s childhood in jail. His opinionated, eccentric mother, who ran his father’s dock at the harbor during his dad’s imprisonment, spent her spare time collecting plants from every empty lot within five miles of the Cause, a hobby to which she increasingly dragged her reluctant bachelor son, who, she often noted, had worked himself well past the marrying age.
Elefante ignored those comments, though lately he’d conceded to himself she was probably right. All the good Italian women in the Causeway neighborhood were already married or had fled to the suburbs with their families, now that the coloreds were fully established. The time to get married, he thought, was when I was young and stupid, like this cop. Even this lumphead, he thought bitterly, was probably dating some hot young number. He could tell by the way the kid talked he wasn’t from Brooklyn. He likely wasn’t even from the Cause District. He looked barely twenty-one, and Elefante, staring at him, guessed the guy was clocking maybe seven grand a year—And still, he’s meeting women, Elefante thought. Me, I’m just a kickball. A blob. I might as well be a gardener.
He listened with half an ear as the kid chatted, then stepped back and leaned on the fender of the parked car behind him to glance up and down the street while the cop yammered on. The kid was careless, and obviously inexperienced. He’d double-parked right in front of Elefante’s house, in full view of every house on the block, which, like everything else around here, the Elephant thought ruefully, wasn’t safe. It wasn’t like the old days when everybody was Italian. The new neighbors were Russian, Jewish, Spanish, even colored—anything but Italian. He let the cop blab a little more, then, interrupting him, said, “The Cause ain’t my business.”
The cop seemed surprised. “You ain’t got interests down there?” he said, pointing out the windshield of his patrol car toward the Cause Houses, which rose like a pyramid three blocks distant, glimmering in the hot afternoon sun that sent heat waves off the beaten streets, and the Statue of Liberty, which could be seen shimmering at a distance in the harbor.
“Interests?” Elefante said. “They used to have baseball games down there. I liked those.”
The cop looked disappointed and a little afraid, and for the briefest of moments, Elefante felt sorry for him. It bothered him that people, even cops, feared him. But it was the only way. He had done a few terrible things over the years, but only to defend his interests. Of course he’d done some nice things, too, but got no credit for any of them. It was how the world worked. Anyway, this stupid kid seemed okay, so Elefante pulled a twenty out of his pocket, carefully folded it in his fingers in his left hand, leaned into the car window, and deftly let it slip to the floor of the patrol car before turning away and stepping back onto the sidewalk. “See ya, kid.” The kid drove off fast. Elefante didn’t bother watching his taillights disappear. Instead, he looked in the other direction. It was an old habit. If one cop goes this way, look for the second coming that way. When he was satisfied the street was clear, he stepped to his wrought-iron gate, opened it, and reentered the garden that fronted his modest brownstone, closing it carefully behind him. Still wearing his suit, he dropped to his knees and began digging at the plants, glumly considering the shooting.
Drugs, he fumed silently as he dug. Fucking drugs.
He stopped digging to peer over his mother’s flower garden. He scanned the different ones. He knew them all: sunflower, catchfly, Jerusalem oak, bedfly, hawthorn, witch hazel, cinnamon fern, and what was the last, this one he was replanting right here? Lady fern, maybe? The ferns were not doing well. Neither were the hazels and hawthorn.
He bent over and began digging. I’m the only forty-year-old bachelor in New York, he thought ruefully, whose mother collects flowers like junk—and then expects me to replant whatever crap she finds. But the fact is, he didn’t mind. The work relaxed him, and the garden was her pride and joy. She’d picked most of the plants out of the abandoned railroad tracks, ditches, and weeds that sprouted around the deserted lots and factories of the Cause District. Some, like this fern, were real treasures, arriving as near weeds and blossoming into full-grown plants. He scratched away at the fern, digging it out, pulling fresh earth out of a nearby wheelbarrow, pushing more earth aside, setting the new earth in place, and reanchoring the fern gently into place with the smooth efficiency born of experience and repetition. He stared at his work a moment before moving on to replant the next. Normally, his mother would check his work later on, but lately she’d been too sick to get out, and the garden was beginning to show small signs of neglect. Several plants were brown and dying. Others needed replanting. Several she wanted brought inside and potted. “There’s something going around Brooklyn,” she declared. “Some kind of disease.” The Elephant agreed, but not the kind of disease she was worried about.