misinformed.”
“I wanna believe that,” Teddy said slowly, putting his head down on the pillow and trying to get back into the rhythm of the dialysis machine. “I wanna believe we mean more to each other than lies. But I already told you, Vin, I’m gonna have to get a piece of that. Didn’t I?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“So where’s my piece? All I’m hearing is lies. Anthony’s gotta be clearing a mil for this fight. What’re they gonna say about this in Philadelphia? In New York? On the Commission? The son of one of my own is giving me the finger.”
Vin put his hand over his heart. “Jeez, Ted, I, I don’t know. The kid must nota told me the truth.”
Teddy’s eyes stared straight up again. “That’s why he’s gotta go,” he said.
“But Ted...”
“He’s dying of ambition, your boy. See, I know he thinks I’m dying, because everyone’s talking about it, but he’s wrong. See, I still got the life force going inside me. But him, he’s the one that’s dying. You got no respect, it’s like a malignancy. It eats away inside you, a little bit at a time. You gotta cut it out or it’s gonna kill the whole body. You understand what I’m saying, Vin? Sometimes you gotta sacrifice a vital organ to save the rest.”
“Teddy, what’re you telling me? Now I gotta whack my own kid?”
Six more angry coughs racked Teddy and then a kind of serenity settled over him.
“Come on, Ted, you don’t mean that,” Vin beseeched him with clasped hands. “Lemme try and straighten him out. He’s a little confused, is all.”
A volcanic tremor came from somewhere deep inside Teddy. “What’re you, turning into a frail on me, Vin?”
Vin pushed himself up against the back of his chair. “Nah, I’m just saying, you give him an opportunity to stretch his wings and he’ll prove his loyalty,” he said with his voice cracking. “It’s like a little bird leaving his nest and coming back with twice as many twigs.”
“What’s the matter with you? Don’t you understand I want this fuckin’ kid clipped in the ass?”
“Let me talk to him one more time. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm.”
Teddy just looked at him.
“Look at all the things I done in my life,” Vin went on. “Sometimes I look back and I think raising that boy was the only one that meant anything. After his mother died, it was just him and me. I brought him up like he was my own.”
Teddy kept glaring. There was a slightly jaundiced, yellowish tinge in his eyes.
Vin was almost off the couch and on his knees. “On my life, Ted. I’ll work this out. From now on, it’s my responsibility.”
“That’s what I’m telling you!” Teddy flared like old embers in a fireplace coming back to life. “It’s your responsibility to whack him.”
“But if I whack him, how are we ever gonna see any money out of this? See what I’m saying, Ted? Leave it to me. If I don’t turn Anthony around and make him work for you, you can give me all the blame. I’ll take whatever I got coming.”
Teddy touched his ear and the crease along his brow began to soften. With great effort, he leaned forward and slapped Vin’s knee with a pudgy, liver-spotted hand.
“All right,” he said with another cough. “You talk to him. Tell him I want sixty-five percent of whatever he’s making. And don’t take no for an answer. No more lies. That’s the end of it.”
“He’ll do the right thing.”
“Good, because otherwise he’s gonna get this.” Teddy made the sign of a gun with his hand.
The dialysis machine began to make a sputtering noise. Teddy slapped it a couple of times, but it didn’t help. Nothing was going through the tubes. Finally he turned a dial on the machine and some of the fluid began to flush through again.
“Life force, Vin, it’s a remarkable thing.” Teddy tried to roll onto his side without pulling one of the needles out of his thighs. “There’s days I think I’m gonna live forever.”
He coughed five times in a row. Vin leaned over and touched his hand. “You are, Ted. You are.”
“Yeah.” The machine seemed to shake. “But now I gotta go for my radiation three, four times a week and take this fuckin’ female hormone.”
“You’re still more a man than anyone I know,” Vin gripped his hand and kissed it.
Teddy looked up at the saline solution in the clear plastic bag over his head. “You know, Vin, the only part I’m sorry about is I don’t have a son of my own to pass things on to no more.”
“No one could blame you for that,” Vin assured him.
Teddy fell into another one of his long brooding silences, as his eyes followed the path of one single bubble in the clear tube, trying to make its way from his thigh to the humming machine.
48
THE DAY BEFORE THE fight, my father asked me to meet him out on the Boardwalk at six o’clock in the morning. A chill wind strafed in from the Atlantic and a lazy sun was just beginning to climb out of the water. The sky was the color of a bruise.
“You remember when you were a kid and I used to take you for walks along here?” he began.
“Yeah, sure.”
How could I forget the way he took me by the hand after my real father died?
“You remember the stories I’d tell about the way Atlantic City used to be?” He handed me a cup of coffee.
“I’m not sure.”
The stories Vin told had a different flavor from the ones I heard from Mike. My real father liked to talk about the old hotel palaces, and Sinatra, and the diving horse on the Steel Pier. With Vin, it was another world.
“You know, they made history here once,” he said. “The old-timers. Capone, Luciano, Lansky, Siegel, Dutch Schultz, Maxie Hoff from Philadelphia. They all came into town one weekend in 1929 and decided to get rid of all the Mustache Petes from the old country who’d been running things. They wanted to make it more of an American business and not just a bunch of animals killing each other. They were supposed to be staying right down there at the Breakers.”
He waved his hand at the row of casinos and cut-rate hotels down toward the south end of the Boardwalk.
“I told you that story, right?” He took a sip from his coffee and smiled when it seemed to burn his tongue. “How they tried to check in all at once under assumed names, but the guy at the desk got wise and tried to throw them out?Lansky had to intervene just to keep them from shooting the place up. Instead they packed up their violin cases and moved on down to the Traymore.”
Steam rose off his coffee and evaporated in the salty air. Now that he’d brought it up, I realized he had told me the story about a million times before. But I had a feeling he was trying to make a different point this time.
“It’s all gone now,” he said, putting his coffee down on a green bench. “Back then, there was ...” He put his hands together, trying to think of a word.
“Cohesion?”
“Cooperation. They knew how to work together. They even helped each other move their bags to the other hotel when the Breakers wouldn’t take them in. And they had the greatest sit-down in the history of man. Divided up the whole country. That was the way they did it back then. They worked for a common goal. It all goes back to the old country. I ever tell you how they started this thing of ours?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some French soldier raped a Sicilian girl on the day of her wedding and her mother cried
“But that was the old country,” my father said with a sigh, briefly working over his hair again with the Ace
