Deacon King Kong(47)
“He knows what to do.”
Elefante gave up. At least there would be a set of eyes in the house while he ran up to the Bronx to check out the Governor’s tip.
He sighed, rose from the kitchen table, reached for his tie on a nearby doorknob, placed it around his neck, and then stepped to the parlor mirror to tie it, feeling a blend of relief and, despite himself, a small bit of excitement. He’d already decided that the Governor’s story about this so-called hidden loot, this great treasure that his father had somehow hidden someplace in his boxcar or in his storage warehouse, was a fable. Yet a few discreet phone calls and a query to his mother proved that the Governor’s story was, at least, partly true. Elefante had confirmed that the Governor had been his dad’s sole friend and cellmate for two years in Sing Sing. His dad had also mentioned the Governor to his mother several times as he drifted toward death, but she swore she’d paid little attention. “He said he was holding something for a friend and it was in God’s hands,” she told him. “I paid it no mind.”
“Did he say in God’s hand, or the palm of His hand?” Elefante asked, remembering the poem the Governor cited.
“You were there!” she snapped. “Don’t you remember?”
But Elefante did not. He had been nineteen, about to inherit a business that was beholden to the Gorvino family. His father was dying. He had to take over. There was a lot to think about. He was drowning in his own confused, bottled-up emotions at the time. God was the last thing on his mind.
“No I don’t,” he said.
“He was talking out of his head at the end there,” his mother said. “Poppa hadn’t been in church since he was out of prison, so I paid it no mind.”
Elefante had checked all his storage places—the ones he had access to, which was more than he cared to let his customers know about—and come up empty. He raked through his own memories as well, but they played tricks on him. As a boy, he remembered his father saying to him several times . . . Look out for the Governor. He’s got that crazy poem! Pay attention. But what teenager paid attention to his dad? His father didn’t speak in detail anyway. He spoke in nods and grunts. Giving words to ideas was too dangerous in their world. When Poppa did give words to something, though, it was for a reason. It had weight. So Poppa must have been giving him a message. But what? The more Elefante considered the matter, the more confused he became. Driscoll Sturgess, he decided, the Governor himself, might have the answer—if there was one at all. So he’d called and made arrangements to see him, to maybe get some peace on the question.
Elefante grabbed his jacket and car keys, feeling anxious and a little excited. The trip to the Bronx was more of a break for him than anything else. He paused one last time at the mirror in the front hall to straighten his tie and unrumple his suit, checking himself out sideways. He still looked good. A little heavy maybe, but his face was still tight, no wrinkles, no crow’s-feet around the eyes, no kids, no cousins he trusted, no wife who cared for him, no one to take care of his mother either, he thought bitterly. At forty, Elefante was lonely. Wouldn’t it be nice, he thought, as he straightened his tie one last time, if there was a real big score in it. Just once, something that would get him off that pier, out of that hot boxcar, out of the squeeze between Joe Peck and the Gorvinos, who controlled every dock in Brooklyn, and get him to an island in the Bahamas where he could spend the rest of his life sipping grape and watching the ocean. The stress of the job was beginning to wear at him. The Gorvinos were losing faith in him. He knew it. He could tell they were increasingly irritated by his resistance to drugs, a prejudice he’d inherited from his father. But that had been a different time, and they were different men. The old man had kept the Gorvinos satisfied by renting them cheap storage space, doing quick under-the-table construction jobs for them, and moving anything they wanted outside of dope. But that was before, in the age of graft, numbers, smuggling, and booze. Dope was the thing now. Big money, and Joe Peck, the only other made member of the Gorvino family in the Cause District, had jumped into the dope game with both feet, becoming a major distributor, pulling Elefante in by the nose. There were plenty of docking points in Brooklyn, but Elefante was under constant pressure to keep his dock active because Peck was in his area, and Joe moved dope from water to shore in whatever stupid form he could dream up: in cement bags, in gasoline tanks, in the back of refrigerators, stuffed into TV sets, even in car parts. It was risky. He hated the whole tuna. Drugs were a damn stinking fish, the smell of it taking over everything. Gambling, construction, cigarettes, booze were all second-rate now. Ironically, the Gorvinos weren’t wild about dope or Joe Peck either—they knew how stupid and impulsive Peck was—but they lived in Bensonhurst and not in the Cause. That might as well have been the moon as far as Elefante was concerned. They never got to see Joe’s stupidity up close, which always complicated matters. Peck had his head so far up his ass he couldn’t see the order of things. He made deals with the colored, the Spanish, and every two-bit crooked cop who could put two nickels together—without one bit of trust between them. That was a recipe for disaster and a ten-year stretch in the workhouse. To make it worse, Victor Gorvino, head of the Gorvino family, was old as the hills and half-demented, fucked up in his head. Gorvino was under a lot of heat from the cops now. Getting in to see him to explain Joe Peck’s stupidity was difficult. To top it off, Gorvino and Peck were Sicilian. The Elefantes were from Genoa, northern Italy, which fell right into his father’s admonition. “Remember,” he’d remind his son, “we’re just a bunch of Genoans.” They were always on the outside.