“They wanna play games, we’ll play games,” he muttered in a grinding, vindictive voice. “This will not stand.”
“Is this about those gentlemen who came from New York this afternoon?” his wife asked.
“Yeah, Camille. They’re real gentlemen. You’re a real shrewd judge of character.”
“That was lovely hair the younger one had.”
Teddy just glared at her.
He had a momentary urge to take a leak, but decided to let it pass. He was getting up three, four times a night lately, but the stream was just a trickle. He told himself it was nothing worth talking to a doctor about.
He turned to the page marked “Disbursements” and took another bite out of the carrot cake. There were fewer names here than there used to be. Only two dozen men were left in his crew. And since he tried to have his bookkeeper Buddy Milito whacked for cheating him, Teddy had been forced to keep the records himself, painstakingly transcribing each figure from the crumpled-up slips crew members gave him into the composition book.
He paused and finished the piece of cake on his plate, noticing he’d given his niece Carla three thousand dollars in the last six months.
“Camille,” he said. “Get me another piece of cake. And bring me some grappa while you’re at it.”
“You sure you haven’t had enough?” she asked meekly.
He stared at her until she backed up into the kitchen like a dog afraid of being hit with a rolled-up newspaper.
The truth was he never got enough. Not since his days in the reform schools and foster homes. Food seemed to fill some deep gnawing need inside him. On the long winter nights, after he was first exiled to Atlantic City, he took solace gorging himself on cheese-steak hoagies the way other men stuck needles in their arms. And when things turned around and he became a boss, he indulged himself at the best Italian restaurants in town.
Still it wasn’t enough. He went back to writing on the disbursements page as his twenty-three-year-old retarded daughter Kathy knocked over something upstairs.
“There she goes again.” He grimaced. “What’s the matter with her?”
His wife brought him the grappa and another piece of cake, with her head bowed. “She’s been having spells, kind of. She keeps asking for Charlie.”
Teddy looked up at her and felt something tear in his chest. “Why’s she doing that? She fuckin’ knows he’s dead.”
“I dunno.” His wife began to cry again. “I guess she still misses him.”
Teddy took a sip of grappa and went back to writing. “Well go look in on her. Make sure she isn’t breaking any of them German car radios we left in her room.”
He shook his head as his wife floated out of the kitchen in a haze of barbiturates. If she wasn’t out of her mind on pills these days, she was crying herself blind with grief. The memory of Charlie was the only thing that mattered to her anymore.
When Teddy thought back on the boy, it was in isolated moments of not knowing what to say. To Charlie on the floor, watching TV. Charlie spending too much time alone in his room. Charlie coming home late with a split lip and bloodshot eyes.
Teddy once controlled half the unions and most of the drug trade in town, but he could never find the nerve to ask his only son if he was shooting dope. Thinking it over now, he didn’t blame himself for the boy’s suicide, but he wasn’t sure who else to hold responsible. So he settled for raging at the rest of the world a little bit every day.
Mosquitoes flew into the zapper on the porch and fried themselves. Nighttime traffic rumbled by. And the phone remained silent. The Commission people had abandoned him.
He turned back to the income page and looked in the shoebox under the table, thinking there must be more money somewhere. Maybe some slips were misplaced. He couldn’t believe they were getting squeezed this tight. He turned back to the disbursements page and saw he’d given his lawyer Burt Ryan seven thousand dollars in the last two months without Burt making a single court appearance. With the racketeering indictment due any day, that number was sure to double or triple.
That yawning void opened inside him again. He quickly finished the grappa and stuffed down the rest of his carrot cake, feeling the satisfied ache in his gut. He shut the book, thinking he could handle only so much suffering in one night.
He walked through his wife’s bedroom, taking off his shirt and pants, and went into his smaller green bedroom on the north side of the house. He lay down on the sofa bed and watched the leaves outside form shaking shadows on his ceiling. He hoped sleep would come quickly, before the hunger returned again.
12
I DIDN’T WANT TO waste time learning the ropes, soI asked John B. to introduce me to the top people in boxing right away. On a cool blue Friday afternoon, he brought me over to a press conference at the Golden Doubloon Casino at the Boardwalk.
The first guy we met in the Admiral’s Ballroom was an executive named Sam Wolkowitz. I’d seen him on cable TV being interviewed before the fights. He was a senior vice president at the corporate outfit that helped sponsor these events. His company was part of a vast global communications network that included $75 million movies, several huge record divisions, four or five publishing companies, and the most massive interactive computer system in the world. In other words, the kind of contact I’d been trying to make all my life.
“Nice to meet you.” I grabbed his hand and shook it.
He just looked at me with twinkling blue eyes. He wore a beautifully tailored brown Hugo Boss suit, a custom-made white shirt with a light red stripe and French cuffs, and a hand-painted tie I would’ve strangled for. His hair was cut short and neat and his ears stuck out like a Toyota with both doors open. After a couple of seconds, I realized he was still looking at me, expecting me to say something, but my mind had gone blank.
“You, ah, you look much better than you do on TV,” I said finally.
His eyes narrowed and the left corner of his mouth turned up. He must have thought I was coming on to him. I started to flush with embarrassment.
Fortunately, John B. interrupted. “My man, Mr. Sam,” he said, pushing the brim back on the cowboy hat he was wearing that day. “I got a proposition to discuss with you.”
Since the subject was his brother, the champ, John was in his confident mode. The other corner of Sam Wolkowitz’s mouth came up, but it still looked like he was sneering.
“A proposition?” he said. “I hope this isn’t another one of those complicated arrangements that you suggested we try in Anaheim last year.”
“Oh no, not like that!” John B. said with a laugh so hearty it made his eyes bulge and his knees bend.
For all I knew, John B. had suggested they try going to bed with the same hooker in Disneyland. I smiled like I’d been along for the ride.
“No, this is serious.” John straightened up. “You know, my brother and I been talking about this opening you got coming up with the fight this fall.”
“Hmm,” said Sam. His face was like a blank computer screen.
“You know, he’s been training awful hard, my brother.” John B. dipped his head in admiration. “And when he was at his best, there wasn’t another like Elijah. He had people come up to him, every airport, every city, just to tell him he was the greatest inspiration to their lives. So we was wondering if like you might be interested in, like him, you know, fighting on that bill, seeing as you had the other man dropping out.”
John B. finally noticed that Sam wasn’t jumping up and down with enthusiasm. “Well John,” he said in a pointy nasal voice, “as I am sure you are aware, that was not just a regular bout we had to cancel. It was a world- class title fight. It doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint to substitute a fighter like your brother.”
“Oh,” said John B., squaring off into a boxing stance that didn’t look right on him. “I know what you’re worried about. You’re worried about all that booll-shit they say about brain damage. But it ain’t true. You want the
