Donald Westlake: The Busy Body

On the way back to the cars, Nick Rovito came close to Engel and said, his voice low, “Mark where they planted him.”

Engel looked around, marking it, and said, “How come?”

Nick Rovito said, “On account of tonight you’re digging him up again.”

Aloysius Eugene Engel was born in a hospital in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan twenty-nine years, four months and three days before Nick Rovito told him he was going to be a grave robber. In the intervening period he had been a lot of things, but never once had he been a grave robber.

Engel was the only son of Fred P. Engel and Frances (Maloney) Engel. His father ran a small store on St. Nicholas Avenue, where for a front he sold cigarettes and magazines while in the back there was a perpetual poker game and in another room two telephones on which bets were taken. Engel’s father worked for the organization on straight salary, plus he could keep whatever profit he made off the cigarettes and magazines, which wasn’t much. Engel’s mother worked since before he was born at the Paris Style Beauty Shoppe on 181st Street, where she was eventually the oldest and most valued employee. It had been her dream for years to start her own beauty shoppe, but Engel’s father had the unhappy habit of placing bets with himself, trying to beat himself with the nags even though under his bookie hat he knew nobody beats the nags. But hope springs eternal, and Engel grew up in a household permanently on the brink of financial chaos.

Also arguments. Money troubles cause arguments in the best of marriages, and Engel’s parents didn’t have the best of marriages. So they’d scream at each other — in those days Engel’s father still did some screaming himself, and occasional punching — and either Engel’s mother or some neighbor woman was always calling the cops, until somebody had to come down from the organization headquarters and point out it was an embarrassment to the organization to have the cops forever coming by the apartment of one of the organization bookies, and after that the arguments were quieter because Engel’s father stopped answering back.

It was probably his father’s silence more than anything else that made Engel ultimately side with him. He knew, just as his father knew, that everything his mother hollered was true, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, nobody’s perfect, and if Engel’s father’s imperfection happened to be throwing his money away on a lot of gluepots, it could have been worse, so why not have a little understanding? By the time Engel was in high school, he was full to the brim with understanding for his father and silent rebellion against his mother.

So when his mother told him that after high school he should go on to college to make something of himself, “Not be a bum all your life like your old man, the bum,” Engel resolutely turned his back. He got his high school diploma, went to his father, and said, “Introduce me to somebody, Dad. I want to go to work for the organization.”

“Your mother wants you to go to college.”

“I know.”

Father and son looked at one another, and understood one another, and smiled at one another through their tears. “Okay, son,” said Engel’s father. “I’ll call Mr. Meyershoot downtown tomorrow.”

So at seventeen Engel went to work for the organization, first as a messenger boy for Mr. Meyershoot, who had an office way downtown on Varick Street, and then later on in various capacities, including even strong-arm now and then even though he was only of moderate weight and not particularly mean of disposition. He had also once or twice been a union official, and he’d for a while been a courier something like the job Charlie Brody’d had, and he’d worked here and there in the organization. He moved from job to job more than the average, but that was because he was young and restless and always interested in new things.

Meanwhile his mother took about four years to get used to it. She blamed his father for being a bad influence, and gave him several million words on the subject, but eventually, in just about four years, she adapted herself to reality and stopped bugging him about missed opportunities.

On the other hand, once she adapted she had something new to say. “Make a name for yourself, Aloysius,” she’d say. “Don’t be like your bum of an old man, the bum, a regular stick in the mud, never moved up out of that crummy store in thirty-four years. Make your mark, move ahead in the world. If it’s the organization you want to work for, work for it. Get ahead. After all, didn’t Nick Rovito start at the bottom of the ladder, too?”

This kind of talk didn’t bother him so much. He didn’t possess much of the kind of ambition she was talking about — she wouldn’t have liked to hear how Nick Rovito had come up from the bottom of the ladder, but Engel was never so unfair as to tell her — but he was older now and able to let her words pass over him without leaving any marks. “Sure, Mom,” he said sometimes, and other times he didn’t say anything.

If it hadn’t been for the Conelly blitzkrieg, Engel might have kept drifting along in the organization for years. But the Conelly blitzkrieg came along, and Engel was in the right place at the right time, and all of a sudden the kind of future his mother had been talking about for years was dumped in his lap. As his mother pointed out, all he had to do now was take the good things that were being offered him. He had it made.

The way the Conelly blitzkrieg happened to help Engel was a little complicated. Conelly was a big florid hearty happy guy, Nick Rovito’s right hand. He and Nick Rovito had been partners for years, Conelly always at Nick Rovito’s right hand. But something had happened to Conelly, something had suddenly made him too ambitious. Despite the Central Committee down in Miami, despite his years of friendship with Nick Rovito, despite the risk involved and the unlikelihood of success, Conelly decided to get rid of Nick Rovito and take over the organization himself.

Conelly wasn’t working alone. He had friends in the organization, middle-range executives that were more loyal to Conelly than to Nick Rovito, and Conelly one by one brought them over to his side, planning and hoping for a bloodless palace revolution. One of the guys he brought over to his team was Ludwig Meyershoot, who was Engel’s father’s boss. And Ludwig Meyershoot, having a soft spot in his head for Fred Engel, tipped him to what was about to happen. “So you wouldn’t wind up on the wrong side, Fred,” he said.

Engel’s father promptly told Engel’s mother, who just as promptly said, “You know what that is, Fred Engel? That is your son’s chance for advancement, high position, a life of luxury, all the things you never got.”

Engel himself didn’t know about any of this yet. He had his own place now, on Carmine Street in the Village, because of women. It always used to throw a damper on the proceedings when he would take a woman home for purposes of cohabitation and first have to introduce her to his mother. So now he had his own place and it worked out a lot better.

Meanwhile, uptown, Fred Engel was going through one of those conflicting loyalty problems that big dull serious novels are made on. He felt the loyalty of habit toward Ludwig Meyerhashoot. He felt the loyalty of awe toward Nick Rovito. And he felt the loyalty of blood toward his son.

Eventually the combination of Nick Rovito, blood ties and a shrill-voiced spouse did the trick. Fred Engel called his son to a meeting in the family apartment. “Al,” he said, because no one on earth but his mother called Engel by his full first name of Aloysius, “Al, this is important. Conelly is going to try to take over from Nick Rovito. You know who I mean? You know Conelly?”