Deacon King Kong(49)
Elefante listened in silence. This is what happens when you deal with people you don’t trust, he thought bitterly. It doesn’t matter if it’s drugs or cereal. Same problem.
“I ain’t involved,” he said.
“Gorvino won’t like it.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“Yeah . . . well, not yet. I talked to his guy, Vincent. He says Gorvino will get back to me, but Bed-Stuy is our area, that’s what Vincent says. He says we got to deal with it.”
“It’s your area, Joe. Not mine.”
“It’s our dock.”
“But it’s your dope.”
He saw Peck’s face darken; he was fighting back his boiling temper, just a string away from busting loose. With great effort, Peck checked himself again.
“Would you roll with me just this one time, Tommy?” he said. “Just this once? Please? Move this Lebanon shipment for me and I won’t ask you ever again. Just this one fucking time. With this one shipment, I’ll make enough to muscle them niggers off and tell them to fuck off forever. And I can clean up things with Gorvino too.”
“Clean up things?”
“I’m into him for a few thousand,” Joe said, adding hastily, “but I get this shipment and I can clean that up easy and I’m outta dope forever. You’re right, by the way. You’ve always been right about the dope. It’s too risky. This is my last job. I’ll clean things up and I’m out of it.”
Elefante stared at Peck in silence for a long moment.
“C’mon, Tommy,” Peck pleaded. “For old times’ sake. You haven’t taken one goddamn shipment in six months. Not one. I’ll give ya eight grand. It’ll take an hour. One fucking hour. Straight off a freighter, to the dock, and out. No unloading tires or nothing fancy. Just grab the stuff and get it to me. One hour. That’s how long it’ll take to get it outta your hair. One hour. You can’t make that much slinging cigarettes in a month.”
Elefante nervously tapped one hand on the car roof. The GTO rumbled, shaking, and Elefante felt his resolve shaking with it. Just an hour, he thought, to risk everything. It sounded easy. But then his mind ran through the scenario quickly. If the crap came in from Lebanon, it’d be on a freighter, probably out of Brazil or Turkey. That meant getting a fast boat to retrieve it, because a freighter would not dock in the Cause. The waters were deep enough, but only barges came to Brooklyn, which meant probably taking the speedboat to the middle of the harbor from the Jersey side to be safe. That meant slipping past harbor patrol on that side, grabbing the loot in the middle of the harbor, racing back to shore, getting the stuff to an untraceable car that would likely have to be stolen, and then moving it to wherever Joe Peck wanted it. Knowing how the feds were everywhere now, it might be that Peck had the feds watching his front door and the Gorvino family watching the back door, since he owed the Gorvinos money. He didn’t like it.
“Get Ray out at Coney Island.”
Peck’s temper broke through. He banged the steering wheel furiously with his fist. “What kind of fucking friend are you?!”
Elefante’s top teeth met the bottom of his folded lip as he felt the dreadful silence descend on him. The day, once hopeful and full of promise, with a pleasurable trip to the Bronx ahead to sound out a possible treasure, was ruined. Even if that so-called treasure was the pipe dream of an old Irish con artist who was likely full of shit, the idea of tracking it down to zero was still a reprieve from the day-to-day of his own trapped, screwed-up life. Now the lightness of the day was gone. Instead, a familiar seething spread inside him, like a black oil slick sliding into place, and the silence took over. It wasn’t rage, uncontrolled and raw, but rather a cool anger that launched a terrible, unstoppable determination within him to squelch problems with a speed and dispatch that even the most hardened mobsters of the Gorvino family found unsettling. His ma said it was the Genoan in him, because Genoans learned to live unhappily and trudged forward no matter what, just finishing things up, dealing with it, bearing up doggedly till the job was finished. The Genoans had been doing that, she said, ever since the ancient days of Caesar. He’d been to Genoa with his parents, and he’d seen it himself, a city of dull, exhausting hills, the dreary, ancient, gray buildings, the solid stone walls, the bleak cold weather and miserable rain-soaked cobblestone and brick streets, the unhappy souls wandering about in tight circles, from home to work and back home again, grimly walking past one another, tight-lipped, pale, never smiling, marching stolidly down the small, drenched streets as the cold sea splashed over the sidewalks and even over them and them not noticing it, the smell of stinking sea and nearby fisheries climbing onto their clothing, into their miserable tiny houses, their drapes, and even into their food, the people ignoring it, plodding forward with grim determination like robots, having accepted their fate as unhappy sons of bitches living in the shadow of happy Nice, France, to the west and under the sunshine disdain of their poor dark cousins to the south, Florence and Sicily, who laughed like dancing Negroes, happy and content to be the black Ethiopians of Europe, while their smiling cousins on the Mediterranean Sea, the French, sunned themselves topless on the lovely beaches of the Riviera. All the while the hardworking, joyless Genoans marched on grimly, eating their fucking focaccia. No one appreciated Genoan focaccia except the Genoans. “Best bread in the world,” his father used to say. “It’s the cheese.” Elefante tried it once and understood then why Genoans were a miserable lot, because life was nothing compared to the delicious taste of Genoan food; once they got to the food, the business of life, whatever that business was—loving, sleeping, standing at the bus stop, shoving each other at the grocery store, killing each other—had to be done with speed so as to get to the food, and they did it with such silent grit, such determination and speed, that to get in the way of it was like stepping into a hurricane. Christopher Columbus, his mother pointed out, was a Genoan who wasn’t looking for America. He was looking for spices. For food. A real Genoan, she said, would hang themselves before they’d let anyone destroy the one or two things in life that gave them a little relief from the difficulties of the devil’s world.