Текст книги "Cogan's Trade "

Автор книги: George Higgins

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

“I go see the guy,” Frankie said. “ ‘Look,’ I say, ‘my old man wants his teeth. He’s in fairly good shape now. Not gonna bite anybody. Where’s his teeth?’ And the guy tells me, same thing the old man tells me. ‘I dunno where his teeth are,’ he says. ‘I put the damned things inna box, and the box’s still there but the teeth’re gone. Him and Burke, they been talking about his teeth ever since he come in. I just don’t know. I don’t find them, I’ll buy him new teeth. I can’t understand it.’

“So I go back,” Frankie said. “Burke’s awake now, at least his eyes’re open, and the old man’s all pissed off, talking the best he can without his teeth, ‘Fine fuckin’ place this is, you come in here and they take your teeth, fuckin’ bastards,’ it’s all ung, ung, ung, he hasn’t got no teeth, and Burke’s sitting up straighter and straighter and finally Burke laughs. And he’s got two sets of teeth. His own, that’re his, and my old man’s. Looked like a fuckin’ man-eating shark. I thought the old man was gonna kill him. Gets his teeth back, wipes them on his sleeve, puts them in his mouth, I think the old bastard was almost sober. ‘See?’ he says. ‘See, you little shit? Make something of yourself and stay off the fuckin’ booze. See what happens to you? Get out there and make some big money and stay the fuck away from Burke. You cocksucker.’ Then he’s gonna beat up Burke.

“I tell you,” Frankie said, “I think he was right. I always thought he was right.”

“You got caught doing it, though,” Russell said, “that fat little fuck. And now you’re gonna go out and get caught again.”

“I didn’t meet you at the ball park,” Frankie said. “Keep that in mind. You’re already pushing your luck again, and you could get grabbed too.”

“For what I’m doing?” Russell said.

“Not gonna matter very much,” Frankie said. “What’ve they got over you?”

“Year and a half,” Russell said.

“Plus what they give you for doing it,” Frankie said. “And all the guys, they’ll be shitting all over you, stealing dogs, for Christ sake.”

“You know something?” Russell said. “I bet they wouldn’t. I bet they wouldn’t even violate me for that. I bet they wouldn’t. And Jesus, it’s gotta be the easiest thing a guy ever did. This morning there, we go out to Sudbury? Those silly shits. They get up and they come downstairs and they let the dog out. They don’t know what they’re doing. You sit there, I think you could park right in their yard if you wanted. They wouldn’t even see you. They let a four-hundred-dollar animal out, right out the door at you, woof, woof, woof, ‘Here, boy, here boy,’ and you wave a little meat at him. Jumps right in. You tried to go in that house and he was in there, he’d take your fuckin’ leg off, probably. But you show him eighty cents’ worth of cheap lamb chops and it takes about two minutes and you’re on your way. I got this Labrador today, beautiful dog, scoffing down the meat and drooling all over the place before they get the door shut, big tail going whump, whump, whump, happy as a pig in shit because he’s eating and he’s getting his ears rubbed. That dog loves my ass. You talk about money? It’ll be Saturday before those stupid bastards even know he’s gone, and I’ll sell him in Florida next week for two hundred without even pushing the guy. Don’t take no brains. Just the rocks.”

“Two hundred,” Frankie said. “John’s talking about ten apiece.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, “but he didn’t say, he didn’t say how we’re gonna get it, that he’s too chickenshit scared to do it himself so he wants us to do it and he just sits back there and takes his piece without doing nothing. I didn’t hear him say nothing about that. He just decided he wanted to get all pissed off because somebody might’ve used something or maybe was doing something or something.”

“If he says it’s there,” Frankie said, “it’s there. And you got to, if the guy’s worried about something, well, he doesn’t want to go and fuck it up, is all. You can’t blame a guy for that. He’s all right.”

“Yeah,” Russell said, “yeah. He’s so careful, how much’d you do the last time he got something set up for you? About sixty-eight months, am I right?”

“Five and a half,” Frankie said. “That wasn’t his fault. He did time too, don’t forget.”

“Forget nothing,” Russell said. “He was the guy that set the thing up, wasn’t he? And now he’s got another bright idea. Okay. But me and Kenny, you give me another week with Kenny and we’ll have ourselves about twenty good dogs, and I guarantee you, the coke’ll be there and I’ll be where the coke is and I’ll have the money and I am on my fuckin’ way. One month from today I got a Moto Guzzi and no shit from anybody.”

A silver train pulled in from Cambridge. The red panel on the front read: QUINCY. It blocked the view of the heavyset man as he finished removing the E in SOUTHIE and started on the E in EATS.

“So I guess you’re not coming, then,” Frankie said.

“Look,” Russell said, “go and see the guy. See if you can get him to tell you something about it. I’ll be around. You find out what it is, you’re still interested, don’t matter to me. You decide, you want to do it, it’s all right, I’m in. Without knowing. He still wants me out, I’m out. I’m not gonna waste the whole afternoon on it, though. That I’m not gonna do.”

“HE’S GETTING LAID,” Frankie said. “He said he hadda choice between coming down here and getting laid, and he decided to get laid.”

“Can’t blame a guy for that,” Amato said. “Somebody put one like that up to me today, I probably wouldn’t be here myself. So, I assume you’re still in for it, who else’re we gonna get? You think of somebody?”

“I didn’t,” Frankie said. “I don’t know, he’s still interested. He didn’t, the only reason he didn’t come down here, he said if you wanted him to come in on it, okay, he’d come in on it. And if you didn’t, okay, no hard feelings, he’s doing all right.”

Amato was silent. Then he said: “Frank, I just don’t like the guy, you know? I just don’t like him.”

“He’s all right,” Frankie said. “He comes on kind of strong when you first see him, but he’s basically all right. And he’s very, very stand-up.”

“Which, after the Doctor, we could both use,” Amato said.

“Yeah,” Frankie said. “I wouldn’t mind running into that son of a bitch some time again when I felt good.”

“I don’t think you’re gonna,” Amato said. “Nobody’s seen the Doctor for a while, the way I get it.”

“That so?” Frankie said. “I wonder where he could’ve gone.”

“Well,” Amato said, “you know, it’s hard to say. He was in San Francisco, he was in the service. He was always saying, he’d like to go back there some time. He said it was too cold, it got too cold for him around here.”

“That’s probably where he went, then,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Amato said. “Of course, this was Dillon, I get this from. He knows a guy.”

“Oh,” Frankie said.

“Dillon don’t look good,” Amato said. “He don’t look good at all. I was in town the other day and I saw him. He looks white, all white around the gills. I didn’t say anything to him, but he don’t look good at all.”

“Dillon’s getting old,” Frankie said.

“We all are,” Amato said. “Look at me, the way I let that little shitbird of yours get to me the other day? I never would’ve done that before. I’m yapping at the kids all the time, for Christ sake. For seven years the only time I see the little bastards’s once a month or so, and now I’m finally home and I’m giving them hell all the time. I’m always fighting with my wife. I never used to fight with my wife. I used to, she was being a big pain in the ass, I used to kind of roll with the punches, you know? Now I don’t. I’m getting old. And I swore, boy, I was in? I swore when I got out I was gonna make every minute count, the rest of my life. You ever get me some place again, I can go to sleep without some asshole shoving his dick through the bars, all right, that’s all I ask. And am I doing it? No. Of course I’m not. I’m just as big an asshole now as I was before.”

“Russell’d get to anybody,” Frankie said. “It’s the way he is.”

“Yeah,” Amato said, “but the way I used to be, I wouldn’t’ve cared if he could piss off everybody inna world, you know? He couldn’t piss me off. If he was right for the job, he’d be right for the job. Screw, I’m not gonna marry the guy. All I want, all I would’ve been thinking about is, is he right for this job, and if I thought he was right, that’d be it.”

“Well,” Frankie said, “you change your mind or something?”

“I dunno,” Amato said. “I been asking around about him. You know, not too many guys and all, I don’t want it to seem like maybe I had something in mind. That I don’t need. But, well, I’m afraid, I’m afraid he’s not the kind of guy we oughta have in on this. You go around this thing inna wrong way, you could get somebody hurt, and I don’t want that. There’s no reason for that, you know? You hit somebody, you’re not gonna get any more money or anything. It’s just, it don’t make no sense. You got to have guys that can, that’re not going to go haywire or something, is all.

“These people,” Amato said, “these’re not the kind of people, that’re around a bank or something, they expect maybe some day a guy or somebody’s gonna come in there and try to rob them and, it’s not their money, people tell them, how they oughta act. They’re not that kinda people at all.”

“Heroes,” Frankie said.

“Heroes,” Amato said. “They’re a different kind of guys, and they’re liable, some of them, you never know when one of them’s gonna do it, go right off his ass and start making trouble and then you got to fuckin’ shoot somebody, for Christ sake. Some of them, they think they’re pretty hot shits. Somebody comes in there that’s not absolutely cool, well, that they can see right off doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s not taking no shit off anybody that wants to fuck around with him, well, then it’s gonna be different. Bad, different.”

“You’re not gonna promote that North End thing to me again, are you, John?” Frankie said.

“The barbut?” Amato said. “Nah, this’s different. Although I got to say, I still think you could do that thing if you thought about it long enough and you went in there with the right type of guys, knowing what you’re doing. A few guys, some day somebody’s gonna knock that thing off, and then he’s gonna have a whole lot of money. A whole bunch of money.”

“I wanna meet that guy, afterward,” Frankie said. “I think probably, I’m ever gonna meet him, I better meet him quick, is what I think. Fuckin’ thing. You ever look that thing over? There’s a guy on the corner in the phone booth. Funny how come the phone company put that thing right there, huh? And then there’s always a guy that’s sitting up in the window and looking out at the guy in the phone booth. Coldest night in the year, go down there, that guy’s in the phone booth. He’s not doing nothing. I think maybe that’s how he makes his living. I wouldn’t want it, maybe, but it’s fuckin’ steady’s what I think. You wouldn’t even think anybody’d go out, and there he is, and then there’s that alley and I bet there’s not more’n fifteen heavies in that room with the pieces all set to go.”

“There’s still a lot of money in there,” Amato said.

“ ‘So much money they lose it, they lose the dice in it some times,’ ” Frankie said. “ ‘You go in and you get it, they’re never gonna be able, report it, no government types chasing you around, you just go down past Billy’s Fish and up the stairs and you’re set for life.’ Yeah, and Dillon gets better so fast you wouldn’t believe it, I bet, and fifty guys helping him, too. I been hearing about that place since, I think I was about fourteen when I first hear about that place,” Frankie said. “The thing of it is, all that time, nobody ever did it. I wonder how come.”

“My daughter’s fourteen,” Amato said.

“Jesus,” Frankie said. “It don’t seem that long.”

“Yup,” Amato said. “She’s fourteen years old. And the other day, she left her stuff out on the dresser? I see this light blue cardboard thing. I go in and I look. She’s onna Pill.”

“No shit,” Frankie said.

“I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” Amato said. “I said to Connie: Tor Christ sake, willya tell me, what’s going on here?’ So she tells me. ‘So what? They’re all on it.’ I said to her: ‘Whaddaya mean, they’re all on it? Who’re they? What the hell’s she doing on it? Tell me that, all right? I don’t care about the rest of them.’ Oh, so that makes me the automatic bastard. ‘You want, you’d probably rather she gets pregnant or something.’ I couldn’t, I just couldn’t believe it, was all. ‘Connie,’ I said, ‘she’s fourteen years old, for Christ sake. Fourteen. That’s kind of early, I think.’ ”

“I think so too,” Frankie said.

“Yeah,” Amato said. “So, you know what she says to me? She says: ‘How old’s Rosalie when you’re going with her?’ ”

“How old was Rosalie?” Frankie said.

“Eighteen,” Amato said, “which is a hell of a lot different. Only, of course, I couldn’t say that. I always, whenever she asked me, I denied that. And Rosalie wasn’t on no Pill then, either. Every month … Ah, she was a lousy lay anyway.”

“She didn’t look it,” Frankie said.

“She was, though,” Amato said. “Shit, getting into Fort Knox would’ve been easier. More fun, too. I hadda tell her every time, it’s true love, all that shit. I hadda be an asshole, do that. And she, she didn’t do nothing. It was like fuckin’ a stump. I used, she also didn’t do nothing about doing anything. I used to say to her: ‘Rosalie, for Christ sake, will you get something? You don’t want to get pregnant, do you?’ And then she’d start crying. It’s a mortal sin. I don’t know. I didn’t. I used to think, I was an asshole, I used to think I really had something there. Now, now I dunno why I did it. It wasn’t worth anything near like what I hadda put up with to get it.”

“She was one good-looking broad, though,” Frankie said.

“See the game the other night?” Amato said. “I did. I was home. Connie finally went to bed. Muscles in her jaw got tired. That’s what I like about TV, boy. You can turn off the sound. They had this shot of Snead coming up behind this big Swede center’s ass. You see that?”

“I was out,” Frankie said.

“Well,” Amato said, “I seen Rosalie the other night, I seen her down the Artery. Connie had me stop, get some fuckin’ bread. That’s another thing, I don’t know why it is. I don’t ask her, do some of my business. Why the fuck’ve I gotta stop on the way home and do her business? Anyway, I see Rosalie. She’s bigger’n that Swede now, I swear to God.”

“She was a real good-looking girl,” Frankie said.

“Ah,” Amato said, “she got married. That’s what she wanted. That’s the thing she used to worry about, I was humping her. I was worried, why the fuck’s she such a lousy lay. She was worried, how the fuck’s she marry me, I’m married to Connie? I didn’t wanna get married again. I got married once. Once’s enough for any guy, isn’t crazy. But that’s what she wanted. She’s pregnant now. About her fourth, I guess. That broad? I bet, she’s got legs on her now, I bet she couldn’t get my pants on, is how big she is. Everything goes to hell if you wait long enough. Connie says to me: ‘You don’t like certain things? Okay. You talk to her, Mister Big Deal Father, that’s spending six or seven years in prison while she’s growing up. You talk to her. You tell her what a bad girl she is.’ Of course Connie couldn’t’ve told me, I was in there, what the fuck’s going on. How’m I supposed to know it? Shit. There’s nothing you can do anyway. It don’t matter. It just pisses me off, is all. It pisses me off.”

“Look,” Frankie said, “I don’t mean nothing, all right? I don’t care how pissed off you are. You at least got something.”

“Still come up dry, huh?” Amato said.

“You know what I did?” Frankie said. “I went down the Probation. Like I actually believe all that shit they’re always handing out, there, all that stuff. ‘Here’s something for you. Place in Holbrook needs assemblers. One thirty a week. Four to midnight. Steady work and it’ll keep you out of trouble.’

“Beautiful,” Frankie said. “I’m living in Somerville. How the hell’m I supposed to get to Holbrook in the middle of the afternoon? Never mind, for Christ sake, how the fuck I’m supposed to get home inna middle of the night. ‘Buy a car. You need a car for your job, we’ll help you get your license back.’

“With what?” Frankie said. “I haven’t got no money. What am I gonna buy a car with? Why the fuck they think I need a job, I’m living with my sister and everything. So I can keep warm? I haven’t got no money, a car. ‘Maybe you can get a ride,’ they tell me. Right. Hang around the Square every day, I find somebody that just happens to be going down to Holbrook. Just at the right time, too. Assholes.

“ ‘Move down there,’ they tell me,” Frankie said. “Same thing. I still haven’t got no money. I had money, I could move down there, I’d move some place else, I wouldn’t be bothering them in the first place. Well, they’re sorry. That’s all they got right now, that they’re pretty sure the guy that does the hiring’ll take a guy like me. I should probably go down the welfare and get enough dough, I can move out there. The guy’s just sick of talking to me. He wants his fuckin’ coffee or something. Okay, that’s the end of that. Then I see Russell. He’s going right along. He’ll probably buy a hotel or something in a couple weeks or so.”

“Not on dogs,” Amato said.

“He’s just doing that,” Frankie said. “He’s gonna use that to buy something, soon’s he gets enough. That’s what I’d like to do, I got something in mind like that myself. But first I got to get the money to buy the stuff.”

“What is it?” Amato said.

“There’s this guy I know,” Frankie said. “I see him, he naturally wants to know, how’re things going? So we have a couple pops, he’s buying, and we talk, and then he says, well, he’s gotta go over this place and I can come along if I want, maybe I’ll see something.

“So we go down this place,” Frankie said, “and it’s money. All twenties. Beautiful stuff. I had, I could’ve bought some of that stuff. I hadda thousand on me, I could’ve bought twenny thousand dollars of that stuff. And I tell you, it’s beautiful. You could move it under a floodlight.”

“Better call the guy up,” Amato said. “Tell him bye-bye. He’s gonna get grabbed. He better pass the first one inna drugstore and get himself a new toothbrush. He’s gonna need one.”

“John,” Frankie said, “wrong. This stuff is really good. The paper’s good, the ink’s good, the colors’re right. I tell you. I really looked at that stuff. The guy that made it oughta go take some of it to the government. It’s better’n the real stuff.”

“The guy’s Chubby Ryan,” Amato said.

“I dunno him,” Frankie said.

“He’s not around,” Amato said. “He’s in Atlanta. He’s doing ten fuckin’ years for that beautiful stuff. That funny? You know something? I agree with you. It’s beautiful stuff. It’s fuckin’ near perfect. But Chubby, Chubby knows a lot about printing and all of that, but, see, Chubby hasn’t got no fuckin’ brains. Just like your friend, there, Doglover. He’s all right. He just don’t know anything. Guys like him, the guys you’re always hanging around with, well, they’re the only guys’re stupider’n Chubby. Because all that stuff’s good for now, except for wiping your ass on it, it’s to sell to guys like you, don’t know any better, what’s gonna start happening to them when they go out and start moving the stuff. That’s why the price’s so low.

“You know what’s the matter with that stuff?” Amato said. “I’ll tell you. Chubby took it out to fuckin’ Wonderland, is what Chubby did. He hasn’t got no brains. He thinks, it’s good, he’s gonna move it all by himself. He’s gonna go out the dog track and move the whole run, he’s so proud of that funny. So he did. He moved about ten thousand of it, all by himself, one single fuckin’ night. Five hundred of them goddamned beautiful things, and every single one of them’s got the same goddamned number on it.

“Now of course,” Amato said, “them guys, run dog tracks, they’re all stupid, aren’t they? Betcher ass. Dumb as shit. Never occurred to them, race track’s a good place to pass funny. No, not on your life. So they never train them tellers, look out for anything like bogus. So of course, them tellers never spot anything, the night Chubby’s there, throwing twenties around like he’s apeshit and everything, absolutely not. So they only had about nine hundred security guys and some cops and the Secret Service all over the place when Chubby comes back, the eighth race. And you know what he says? They give him his rights and everything, he don’t have to say a fuckin’ word, and if he didn’t know that already, which he should’ve, he knows now. And they tell him, he’s in the shit for counterfeit. And he looks at them and he says: ‘Jesus Christ. I put them in coffee. They don’t look new.’

“You know what he did?” Amato said. “They give him his phone call and he calls Mike. And Mike says, Mike tells him, keep his mouth shut. And Mike goes down there, and, Mike knows everybody. So he goes in, and they’re all laughing at him, and he knows it, and he asks: ‘Why?’ And they show him the reports and stuff. And then Mike’s gonna go see his client. And he walks inna cell and he looks at him and Chubby says: ‘Boy, am I ever glad, see you.’ And you know what Mike says? He looks at him, and he says: ‘Chubby, this one’s for free. Plead it.’ And he goes out.

“See,” Amato said, “that’s your main problem you got today. You got guys that know how to do things but they don’t know nothing about having no fuckin’ brains, is all. They haven’t got no imagination. The only thing they can think of to do is the first thing they can see that looks good to them. Only, five hundred guys already did it before and everybody knows what’s going on, so you automatically go out there and you do it and they’re watching for you and they get you. You got to think of a different angle, something nobody else thought of for a while, or else you got to go down to Holbrook there and you go to fuckin’ work. Everything else’s a waste of time, and it’s dangerous, too, because you’re gonna do time.”

“Okay,” Frankie said, “you’re the guy with the angle. Tell me what the angle is. Only, don’t tell me, it’s the barbut, is all. I’m not going down that alley behind Billy’s Fish some night and wind up in Everett with a couple in my head. No fuckin’ way. I want dough. I’m not getting dead, gettin’ it.”

“How about,” Amato said, “well, look, let’s talk about it. Before we decide. You think Doglover there can handle a card game?”

“Well I mean,” Frankie said, “shit. Sure, anybody can. They can find one where they can go in and they haven’t got to go up against some kind of an arsenal. Those fuckin’ things, they just got less money in them’n the barbut’s got, is all. Those things’re protected. You can’t do them unless you’re so fuckin’ dumb you actually like having everybody going around tryin’ to off you.”

“There’s one you can do,” Amato said.

“There’s ten I can do, John,” Frankie said. “I know of at least ten of them I can do. But then after, somebody, everybody’s gonna have at least eight hot ginzos out looking for me.”

“Uh uh,” Amato said. “Do this one and they’ll, they won’t even look for you.”

“Why not?” Frankie said.

“Because the minute it fuckin’ happens,” Amato said, “they’re gonna know right off, who it is.”

“For some reason,” Frankie said, “that don’t make me feel better, you know, John?”

“Not us,” Amato said. “Keep in mind, I know how these guys think. They’re not gonna think, they’re never even gonna think it might be us or even somebody else. They’re pick one guy, right off, and go find him and whack him out and that’ll be it. And you and me and that little prick, if that’s the guy we get, we cut up about forty, fifty thousand dollars. No fuckin’ sweat.”

“I don’t know’s I go for setting somebody up,” Frankie said.

“You’re not setting him up,” Amato said. “He set himself up. Mark Trattman runs this game. This’s the second game Markie’s had. The other game got knocked off. Markie did it.”

“Ah,” Frankie said.

“He did it,” Amato said, “and there was all kinds of shit. One of the guys that got robbed was a doctor, and he had a brother was a state cop, and he was mad as hell, he was gonna do this and he was gonna do that and everybody’s running around, they hadda give the guy back about, I dunno, three or four thousand, to shut him up, and they go around and see Trattman. And he puts on this great act. And they believe him.

“So everybody pisses blood for a while,” Amato said, “the way they always do when the shit hits the fan, and there’s about a month or so goes by and everybody, nobody’s running any games or anything, and then, I think it was Tommy Balls, somebody says: ‘Fuck this,’ and he hires about ten guys to stand around and opens up and nothing happens. So they all look at Testa’s game, and nothing still happens, and after a while everybody’s open again and everybody’s happy.

“So one night,” Amato said, “the guys’re hanging around and they’re talking and all, having a few drinks, and finally one of them says how it’s funny, they had that thing and everybody got all jumpy and now they’re all running again and nobody’s tried it again. Probably having more guys around, huh? Well, Markie starts laughing. See, he can’t resist it. So he tells them, he did it himself. He got two guys to come in and he did it himself. The guys got five apiece, they’re a couple guys carrying hod that he happens to know or something, and he come out of it with close to thirty.”

“He’s lucky they didn’t put him to sleep,” Frankie said.

“Well,” Amato said, “he is. But you got to understand Mark. All the guys like Markie. He’s a genuine hot shit. And look when they find out: when everybody’s open again. They’d’ve found out it was him when the games’re all closed and everybody’s hearing footsteps and nobody’s making any money, then, I think, they would’ve done it to him. But they didn’t. And then, when they did, well, what the fuck, huh? It wasn’t none of their money and just as long as it doesn’t happen again, because all the customers, you’re not gonna get them coming in unless they think it’s protected, but the protection’s really there, well, shit on it.”

“I bet it probably wouldn’t happen again that way,” Frankie said.

“And that’s the angle,” Amato said.

“What’s it good for?” Frankie said.

“I figure,” Amato said, “I was there twice. I been there twice since I got out. I run into Markie one night, I was in town seeing what’s going on and looking around and I run into him and we had a couple drinks and he says, he tells me he’s got this thing and I should come up. So, twice, both times onna Wednesday. He runs it two nights a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. Now the guys that’re there, that come on Wednesday, there’s a few that come both nights but it’s really a different group the two nights. There was probably, I would say about forty thousand flying around the nights I was there. There’s this one creep that wears fuckin’ velvet pants, and he had at least five on him both the nights I was there. So, a little more, a little less. And of course that’s just what I saw. Most guys, go to something like that, they’ll carry a little more’n what they’re gonna let you see, case they get a bad run of cards and they got to ride something out. So you go in there, you’re gonna give everybody a nice little massage and everything, you’re probably gonna come up with, say, ten more.”

“Not bad,” Frankie said.

“Now there’s guys,” Amato said, “I was there, I heard talk, see, Markie just got divorced again and apparently he had a little party, had a couple hookers come in and eat each other and everybody had a great time and some of these guys’re pissed off, he didn’t invite them. ‘Friends only, no customers,’ he says. So they get on him, and some of the Friday night guys were there and that’s how these guys find out about it. ‘They’re good customers,’ Markie said, ‘good customers’re the same as good friends, my book.’ So I got an idea, there’s more dough there onna Friday’n there is onna Wednesday. So the question is, when’re we gonna do it? And I think, I still think, a Wednesday. Friday that place’s different. During the week it’s pretty quiet, but on Fridays and Saturdays they got a lot of people coming and going, getting laid and all, and that’s just another fuckin’ thing you got to think about, parties going on and everything. And I think, I dunno, I kind of think maybe there’s some guys in there, Fridays, don’t come Wednesdays, the kind of guys I don’t want to get pissed off. I didn’t see nobody there Wednesdays, had any muscle. I think it’s better.”

“How’re we cutting this?” Frankie said.

“A third,” Amato said. “I get a third.”

“That’s high, John,” Frankie said.

“Not for this,” Amato said. “I know where it is and I know what it is. A third’s right. You, I don’t care what you do. You can get that wild man or somebody, do it for five, get him. Fine with me.”

“The guy who goes in with me gets the same’s I do,” Frankie said.

“Up to you,” Amato said.

“You’re not going in,” Frankie said.

“Uh uh,” Amato said. “They’d burn me the minute I came inna door. I’m gonna be a long ways away from that place that night and I’m gonna have a lot of people around me, saw me there. See, that’s what, that’s why I think of you. All I can really do is show somebody where the thing is. I can’t go near it, and I need a guy I can trust, somebody that isn’t gonna tell me, they come up with thirty, it’s really fifty and they’re fucking me and there’s no way I can check. I gotta just be the guy that does the brainwork on this. What I need’s two guys to do the job the way I tell them.”

“All right,” Frankie said, “I’m in. Now, what about Russell?”

“What about him?” Amato said.

“I’m still thinking, he’s gonna be the other guy,” Frankie said. “You get used to that?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Amato said. “You can go in with Tarzan in his fuckin’ spotted jockstrap if you can get him to do it, don’t matter to me. I just want, get somebody who’s gonna do it right. There’s only two things a guy’s gotta have, right? He’s gotta have balls, which you say the guy’s got, and he can’t be nobody my padrones know.”