Deacon King Kong(56)

Elefante was impressed. It wasn’t so much a bagel shop as it was a factory. But now the two men were back in the Governor’s two-family house, in the upper apartment where he stayed, and with the pretty daughter apparently safely down in her apartment below he was eager for the real talk. One look at the daughter told Elefante all he needed to know: if the Governor was telling the truth, he had no real plan.

“It’s not my business,” Elefante said, “but does your daughter know anything about . . . what I’m here to discuss?”

“Christ, no.”

“Don’t you have a son-in-law?”

The Governor shrugged. “I can’t tell you the ways of the young. In the old days, Irish legend had it that the seals on the beach in Ireland were really dashing young princes who slipped out of their skin to become seals and marry the merry mermaids. I think she’s looking for a seal.”

Elefante said nothing.

The Governor suddenly appeared tired, and he leaned back into the couch, his head tilted up toward the ceiling. “I’ve no son. She’s my heir, that one. She’d give it the full shilling if I told her about this business, but she’d make bags of it. I want her out of it.”

He seemed by nature a lighthearted man, but the tone of that statement let Elefante know that the door was open to his taking full charge of the affair and negotiating a better price for himself, if there was indeed anything to the old man’s story at all. The man was exhausted. That small bit of walking to his shop and the tour of it had worn him out completely. “I’m a bit jaded and might have to rest my head on me couch in a while,” he said. “But I can still talk. We can get started now.”

“Good, ’cause I’m not sure what you’re selling.”

“You’ll know now.”

“Talk then. It’s your party. I already asked around. My poppa had some friends who remember you. My mother says my poppa trusted you and that you two did talk. So I know you’re okay. But you have a good operation here. This isn’t a bagel shop. It’s a factory. It’s clean. It makes money. Why get flashy and monkey with trouble when you’re making good guineas now? How much dough do you need?”

The Governor smiled, then coughed again and grabbed a handkerchief and spat in it. The glob he spat into that handkerchief, Elefante saw, was big enough that the Governor had to fold the handkerchief in half to use it again. This Irish paisan, he thought, is sicker than he’s letting on.

Instead of answering the question, the old man tilted his head back again and said, “I got this place and the bagel shop in forty-seven. Well, my wife got the shop, actually. I was in jail that year with your father.

“Here’s how we got it. I had some money put up. How I got that money doesn’t matter, but it was a good amount of chips. I made the mistake of telling my wife where it was while I was in prison. She came to visit one day and said, ‘Guess what? Remember the old Jewish couple on the Grand Concourse with the bagel shop? They sold it to me cheap. They wanted out fast.’ She said she couldn’t reach me to make a decision. She just went for it. Bought the whole fecking building. With my stash.”

He smiled at the memory. “She told me about it in the visitors’ room. I ate her head off. I blew my top so bad the prison guards had to collar me to keep me from wringing her neck. It was weeks before she even wrote to me. What could I do? I was in the slammer. She burned up every penny we had—on bagels. I was shook. Mad as a box of frogs.”

He stared at the ceiling, his face wistful.

“Your father thought that was funny. He said, ‘Is it losing money?’ I said, ‘How the hell would I know? There’s niggers and spics all over.’

“He said, ‘They eat bagels too. Write to your wife and tell her you’re sorry.’

“I did, blessed God, and she forgave me. And now I thank her every day for buying that place. Or would. If she was here.”

“When did she pass away?”

“Oh, it’s been . . . I don’t keep track.” He sighed, then sang softly,

    Twenty years a-growing,

Twenty years in blossom,

Twenty years a-stooping,

Twenty years declining.



Elefante found himself softening, the inside part of him, the part that he never let the world see, the part that had loosened when the man’s daughter swept her mop into the room. “Does that mean you have a clear conscience on the whole bit? Or just a bad memory?”

The Governor stared at the ceiling a bit longer. His eyes seemed fixed on something far distant. “She lived long enough to see me come out of prison. She and my Melissa, they built the business while I was in jail. Three years after I came out, my wife took ill, and now I’m a little under the weather myself.”

A little under the weather? Elefante thought. He looked ready to keel over.

“Luckily Melissa’s ready to take it over,” the Governor said. “She’s a good lass. She can fly the business. I am lucky she’s so good.”

“All the more reason to keep her out of trouble.”

“That’s where you come in, Cecil.”

The Elephant nodded, uncomfortable. The reference took him by surprise. He hadn’t been called that in years. “Cecil” was a childhood nickname his father had given him. His real name was Tomaso, or Thomas. He bore his father’s name as a middle name. Cecil was his father’s creation. Where it came from, and why his father chose it, he never knew. It was more than a name of adoration; it was a sign between father and son that they needed to talk privately. His poppa was bedridden in his last year, still running the business, and there were often other people about his bedroom, men who worked in the boxcar, in construction, and in the storage house. When Poppa said “Cecil,” there was important business, private business about, and they needed to discuss it when the room cleared. The Governor’s knowledge of the name was a further sign of credibility—and also, Elefante thought glumly, responsibility. He didn’t want to be responsible for this guy. He had enough responsibility.