Max Collins - Ask Not

I had heard of Churchill Farms. It was said to be a remote farmhouse on the bayou where Carlos often took business associates and guests for private talks. Some of those business associates and guests didn’t come back. Yankee Gumbo, anyone?

“I’m fine talking here,” I said with a shrug.

“Naw, naw,” Marcello said. He was reaching for the phone again. “We get us some privacy, Nate.” Into the phone, he said, “Jack, bring de car aroun’.”

When he hung up, he said, “Dat’s Jack. He my personal barber and driver like. You gonna love Jack.”

Jack was a big guy, six two easy, the Frankenstein monster in a suit and tie, with a nice slicked-back haircut. He was waiting at the end of the hall for us, and opened the door onto bright sunshine. That sunshine did not keep me from seeing the message posted on the inside of the door, for all of Uncle Carlos’s guests to read on their way out:

We rode in back of a bronze Caddy with hulking, well-groomed Jack — clearly as much bodyguard as barber or driver — up front at the wheel. Carlos and I actually did talk about the investigations that I — or anyway, my agents — had done into the various investors Paul Fudala had assembled to back his new product.

“Dese is good folk?” Marcello asked, frowning earnestly. “Good bidness-type people? Rely-upon-type people? No crooks in de woodpile?”

“No, they’re upstanding citizens. Solid investors.” Hilarious, wasn’t it, that the boss of the mob in Louisiana was so careful about who he got in “bidness” with?

Moving off the main highway onto Marcello’s property, the Caddy navigated a narrow strip of bumpy dirt road that seemed to go on and on. This wasn’t a private drive — we passed a shrimp-packing plant that Marcello said was his — but if we had met another car, passage for both would have made a tricky dance.

As we rumbled along the rutted dirt road, a white egret here or a blue heron there would swoop skyward from the bordering marshes. If this represented Marcello’s six-thousand-some acres, what he owned was a swamp, a vast one with mud-brown ponds, Spanish-moss-hung gray cypress, and emerald-green palmettos.

Our conversation trailed off and, after a few minutes of silence, Marcello noticed me watching out the window as the eerie landscape glided by.

“Dere’s where we get rid of de bodies,” Marcello said, pointing past me out the window, then laughed, hee-hee-hee.

Big joke. Once, a long time ago, I had run into that swamp, away from underlings of the teenaged Marcello’s boss.

“Hey, Heller, you a Jew?”

“I’m half a Jew.”

“How da hell kin a man be half a goddamn Hebe?”

“My mother was Catholic. My pop was an apostate Jew.”

“A pos what? What dat?”

“It’s a Jew who doesn’t believe in the faith.”

“You one?”

“I’m nothing.”

“You don’t believe in nuttin’?”

“I believe in money.”

“We got dat much in common. Anyway, good thing ya ain’t a full-on Hebe, ’cause ya know what we do with dem, in dese parts, don’t ya, Nate?”

“No, what’s that, Carlos?”

“Why, we jes’ roll ’em outta de car into de ol’ swamp. Dey plenty a snakes in dere.”

Alligators, too.

He gave me a playful shrug. “Aw, hell, son, I’m just funnin’ ya. Think ah’d kill me a Jew jes’ for shits and grins?”

I didn’t reply. My eyes caught the driver’s in the rearview mirror, and he gave me a little eyebrow shrug. I guess Jack wasn’t so sure. Not that it mattered to him — he was pure Italian.

“What de hell, Nate, snakes ain’t no never mind to no mongoose.”

Was he referring to what I thought he was referring to? Was that what this visit was about?

A clearing emerged from the marshy landscape and two rustic buildings appeared before us: a small, remodeled barn, painted white, with the kind of narrow first-floor windows a pioneer shot at Indians out of, and a shed around which milled goats and chickens. Dive-bombing swallows and green-bottle flies were swimming out there through the humidity.

Jack pulled around on the gravel apron near the former barn’s front door, and we got out of the Caddy. But apparently we weren’t going in right away — Marcello was wandering toward where the swamp edged the clearing. I followed him. Jack stayed behind, sitting on a small cement front stoop, smoking a cigarette, looking bored.

I stood beside Marcello. Shit, he was short — I felt like Wilt Chamberlain. He had his suit coat folded neatly over an arm as he gestured toward the swamp. The afternoon was starting to die and sunlight lanced through the ghostly trees, making a blur of a panorama that he seemed to be repainting with a thick, gesturing hand.

“First thing ah gonna do, ah gonna put one of dem marina deals in dere. For boats and shit. Ah already got a hunting camp down over dere, dat direction — duck blinds and dat. But dat jus’ the start of it.”

He walked to another position and I followed him. The view was the same, blinding with sun, but he began painting with his hand again.

“We gon’ drain out mos’ a dis shit. We gon’ have shoppin’ centers and a big-ass airport and a sports stadium and housing, you know, dem condom minimums.”

Fucking rubbers again.

“Ah gon’ turn some of dis dicey shit o’ mine over to my brothers, give dem a shot. Me? ’Fore ya know it, ah’m gon’ be strict legit. Ah done what it took ta ride out the damn Depression, an’ never let it stand in my way, da kinda shit dey give guys like us, Nate, wops and micks.”

I had apparently been promoted to a full-fledged mick.

“I’m sure you’ll be a very rich man,” I said, squinting into the sun.

“Ah’m already a very rich man. But dis way dey can’t fuck wid me so much. Ah’ll be fuckin’ respectable, son. So why does some people wanna give me shit, is what ah wanna know!”

What the hell was he talking about?

Finally our tour moved indoors. The barn-turned-farmhouse was straightforward and plain... although the upstairs was a handsomely furnished meeting room with a long conference table, lush carpeting, and wood-paneled walls, again adorned with framed aerial photographs of his properties. Downstairs was simple, the furnishings straight from the Montgomery Ward showroom — a small bedroom with one dresser, a dining room, a modern if spartan kitchen.

That was where we wound up, seated at the kitchen table. Jack the barber remained outside with the darting swallows and green-bottle flies. There were no countertop appliances, unless you counted the little hi-fi, like a teenage kid would have in his room. Immediately my host put on an LP — Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites. Then he went to the refrigerator and took out a platter of sliced cheese and salami, which he brought over to the gray-topped Formica table and set down.

“Scotch all right?” he asked.

Rum was my preference, but I said, “Scotch is fine.”

He got a bottle out of the cupboard, poured several inches each into a couple glasses, and left the bottle on the table as he sat back down.

He nibbled some provolone. I nibbled some salami.

He said, “So, how often you see dat rat bastard Bobby dese days?”

I didn’t think he meant Darin or Rydell or Vee, even though they were all Italian. Connie was no help — she was busy singing “Arrivederci Roma.”

“Not in a long time,” I said.

Which was a lie, but not one Marcello was likely to see through.

Gingerly filling the silence, I ventured, “That was a shame what he put you through last year. I read about it in the papers.”