Stephen Solomita - A Piece of the Action

“Stanley, make me a promise you’ll listen close and I swear I won’t be too long.”

“Keep it short and I’ll repeat it word for word.”

“Huh,” she snorted, “always with the smart mouth. One day you’ll get in trouble with a mouth like that.”

“One day?”

“When I came to this country,” she said, ignoring his response, “I was already thirty years old, a married woman with two children. This was in 1920. All my life before that I lived in a shtetl in Poland. A shtetl is a small village. For me, a goy was one of two things. A goy was a peasant with a club or a Cossack with a sword. Believe me, Stanley, I’m not exaggerating even a little bit. I saw plenty growing up-Jews beaten, robbed, killed. It was an expected thing. So, when I found out that my husband, who came here before me, was living in an apartment with a goy next door, I was so crazy I couldn’t talk.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Little by little, I learned there were goyim in the world who didn’t hurt Jews just because they were Jews. There were goyim who were neighbors, who helped you out when you were in trouble. This maybe sounds to you like nothing, but, for me, it was a revelation like even the prophets didn’t know. It changed my life and all my thinking. Rosaura is like me when I first came to America. She don’t know a soul. She don’t know how things work. But she’s my neighbor and she’s your neighbor, too. Just like her boarder, Luis Melenguez. From my thinking, when a neighbor asks for a favor, you do what you can. That’s how we survived in 1920 and that’s how we survive today.”

“What’s the favor, Greta? What exactly does she want me to do?”

“Stanley, don’t be a schmuck. First you should find out what’s going on. Then you’ll think of something.”

January 12

Pat Cohan was near to tearing his mane right off the top of his head. He just couldn’t get it right. Just couldn’t. Whenever he patted the last feathery wisp into place, whenever he was about to turn away from the mirror and face the plague that’d fallen on him over the last few days, another white knot popped out and fell over his eyes like the fine lace veil his wife put on every time she left the house.

What it made him feel was incompetent, disheveled, out of control. Which, in his mind, was the same as old. Which was the same as retired. Which was the same as dead. Which …

The point was that he could remember a time when he took problems in stride, when he actually looked forward to problems. Because if there was anything the Department appreciated, it was a cop who could make problems disappear. Especially the kind of problems that embarrassed the NYPD.

He looked at himself in the mirror, fingers automatically fluttering over his mane. His face was bright red, which meant his pressure was up again.

“Ya look like a boozer, Pat,” he muttered to his reflection. “Ya look like a damned Irish drunk.”

What he felt like doing was covering his head with vaseline like some punk rock-and-roll singer. Or just shaving the whole mess off. Wear it military-style and to hell with his image. But what he did, finally, was fish a can of Clairol hairspray out of a bureau drawer and coat his mane until it was stiff as a board. Which he didn’t mind all that much. No, what really bothered him was the sweet perfumy smell. It would cling to him for the next hour, no matter what he did.

Sighing, he turned out the lights and headed downstairs to the den. Once there, once the door was closed and he felt safe, he intended to light the biggest cigar he could find and fill the small room with smoke. Unfortunately, in order to get to the den, he had to pass through the living room.

“What’s that smell?”

Pat Cohan turned to confront his daughter. She was sitting in a leather wing chair. His favorite chair. And she was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Isn’t there something you should be doing, Kathleen? Maybe your mother needs help.” Ordinarily, he enjoyed her teasing, actually encouraged it.

“Mother can pray the rosary without me, Daddy. But if you’d like to go up and ask her if she wants assistance …”

That was just what he needed. A visit to his wife’s private hell, to windows and doors draped in black velvet, to an agonized, bloody Jesus hanging on the cross. The endless drone of his wife’s prayers sounded more like the hum of a mindless insect than human speech. The dead mourning the dead.

“When Stanley shows up, I want to see him.”

“Okay, Daddy. Sal’s here, by the way.”

“Patero?”

“Who else? I didn’t want to disturb you, so I put him in the den.”

Pat Cohan felt his face begin to redden. His fingers automatically drifted up to his hair, then dropped back to his side. He left his daughter and crossed the living room.

What he wanted to do was get it over with. He wanted to handle this problem the way he’d handled every other problem that stood between himself and the top of the heap. But this problem happened to be dope, and dope simply refused to be handled. It wasn’t clean, like gambling or prostitution. Dope was an open sewer pouring disease onto the city streets. It infected everyone around it, the innocent as well as the guilty, with a mechanical indifference that was near to maniacal.

The only way to handle dope, he’d decided long ago, was to stay as far away from it as possible, to retire before he had to deal with it. That strategy had failed. It’d failed because the same people who controlled the gambling and the whores were moving into heroin. They had no choice in the matter. The potential profits were enormous. To surrender those profits to another gang would be the economic equivalent of cutting your own throat.

He opened the door to his den and stepped through it to find Sal Patero sitting behind his desk. His handcarved, mahogany desk with the eagle’s claw feet.

“Get the fuck out of my chair.”

“Good evening to you, too, Pat.” Patero got up and moved around the desk. “Am I allowed to sit at all?”

“Cut the bull, Sal. I’m not in the mood for it.”

“What’s that smell? It smells like perfume. You wearin’ some kinda sweet aftershave?”

Cohan felt his face redden. He closed his eyes and silently counted to ten.

“Take it easy, Pat. Ya gettin’ ya pressure up. What’s the matter with you, tonight?”

How could he answer that one? My hair won’t stay put? I’m too old to handle the bullshit anymore? My only daughter’s future husband is a fucking fool ?

“All right, Sal, why don’t we just get to it.” He sat behind his desk, opened the center drawer and took out a long fat cigar. The cigar was a gift from the Chief of Detectives, a handrolled Cuban import. He unwrapped it quickly, snipped off the end and lit it up.

Patero leaned forward in his seat. “I spoke to Accacio again, like you said. To get a better picture of what he wants from us. Pat, he ain’t askin’ for protection. What he says he needs is information. Like where the narcs are operatin’, their targets and like that. Accacio figures he can keep his boys out of trouble if he can see the trouble coming.”

“I suppose he expects us to hand over all the paper in the Narcotics Squad?”

“No way, Pat. Accacio ain’t stupid. He wants to operate along the East River, from Fourteenth Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge. All them projects? The ones already built and the ones goin’ up? The Housing Authority is fillin’ ’em with Puerto Rican welfare. Accacio figures it’s like a captive market. Between the welfare and the low-cost apartments, they’ll never move out. Every time one of them goes on dope, Accacio’s got a customer for life.”