Getting Sal Giordano on the telephone was not a simple process. He was paranoid about wiretaps and refused to have a phone at his apartment. You could leave a coded message for him at Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard, and if you got lucky he might even be there when you called. But he wouldn't actually talk on the old rotary pay phone in the green- painted alcove at the end of Perretti's counter, because that phone could be tapped as well. The most Sal would do was say hello, give a few one-word answers, and arrange a conversation on a different phone. To be safe, however, this other phone had to be away from the immediate neighborhood and couldn't be used too often. This meant there had to be several choices. So Sal had to figure out which phone he wanted to use that day, how long it would take him to reach it, given traffic and weather, and then hope the box hadn't been vandalized by the time he got there. Crime paid, but convenient it was not.
On an afternoon toward the middle of February, after trying morning and evening, from home and from downtown, for several days, Joey finally managed to connect with his old friend. "Sal!"
"Joey!" said the gruff, familiar voice. "Where are you, man?"
"Key West, like I said I would be." For Sal, the question had been first and foremost a part of his routine security check on telephones, and so the next and more radical part of Joey's answer did not immediately sink in. "In a deli next to where I work. Where're you?"
"Me?" Sal said. "Inna parking lot of the Airline Diner, out near La Guardia. 'Scuse me if I gotta yell. Lotta fuckin' planes going by. Hey, wait a second. Did you say where you work?"
"You picked up on that, huh?" said Joey. "Unbefuckinglievable, huh? Yeah, I got a job."
"Doing what?" Sal yelled, above the whine of a landing jet.
"Real estate. Sort of. I stand onna corner and con people into going to look at these condos. Time-snare, they call it. Starting to make a little bit of money."
"Joey, that's great," Sal said, and though he meant it, he could not keep out of his voice some of the same doubt and sourness that had crept in when his younger pal had first said he was heading south. It had to do with watching someone you care about go someplace you know that you will never follow. "So you haven't taken over the rackets yet?"
Joey laughed into the phone. "Hey, I tried. Fact, I got some stories, Sal, you'll shit. Probably I'll try again sometime. But ya know, what I was tryin' to do, it was too much too soon. The rules down here, the traditions, everything's different. Up north the money comes outta the street, down here it comes outta the water."
"Fuck does that mean?" shouted Sal Giordano.
"That's what I gotta figure out before I try again," said Joey. "And inna meantime I'm hooking tourists for forty bucks a couple. How are things up there?"
Sal hesitated as a plane screamed past. "Up here it's like eighteen degrees, old ladies are falling down onnee ice, and I'm freezing my nuts off."
"I'm not asking for the weather report, Sal. How're things?"
Sal hesitated again, though this time there was no airplane. "Not great, Joey. It's a very tense time up here. Very tense."
"The cops?"
"Nah, not the cops. Cops are pretty much leaving us alone. It's among our own people. There's a lotta mistrust, lotta bad feeling. Some guys have been disappearing. People are talking like maybe there's gonna be war."
" 'Zis about Charlie Ponte's emeralds?"
"Fuck you know about that?" Sal asked, and even though he was talking to his adopted kid brother, the former runt who never won a fight and was never entrusted with any but the dullest and most trivial errands, such was the mood of wariness among members of the Queens and Brooklyn Mafia families that he could not quite squelch a note of suspicion. "You know more than you did when you was up here."
"I got a friend down here," Joey said. It sounded like, and was, a boast. "You remember a guy named Bert the Shirt?"
"Sure I do," said Sal, above the jet noise. "Good man. But wait, ain't he the guy that dropped dead onna courthouse steps?"
"Yup. He kicked the bucket. But they brought him back, and the Pope let him retire. People still look to him on Florida business, though."
"Joey," said Sal, "do yourself a favor-don't get curious about this. It's bad, I'm telling you. Your old man, they finally made him consigliere, but it's not like they're doing him a favor, the way things are. Everyone's like getting ready for a siege. Practically every day there's sit-downs, everybody plotting, trying to figure out who's with who. Your brother Gino, he's tryin' so hard to look brave it's ridiculous. It's a fucking mess."
"So Sal, get away, take a vacation. Come down here and relax awhile. You'll love it. You're like the only person I miss from the whole fucking city."
" Marrone, Joey. Think. With what's going on, it would only be like the stupidest thing in the world to suddenly show up in Florida. Besides, it wouldn't be doing you any favor to show these guys you're buddy- buddy with the family. That's just asking for trouble."
Joey frowned at the coin box and tugged at the collar of his pink shirt. "You're right, Sal, I guess you're right. Maybe not now. It's just that I'd like to see ya sometime."
"Sometime. I'll get down there sometime." Sal said it like he didn't believe it would ever happen. A jet seemed to be revving up next to the phone booth. "So listen," he screamed, "you stay outta trouble down there. You got any messages you want me to take to anyone? Your old man? Your brother?"
Joey looked out the window of his phone booth, at the life of a Key West deli. A guy with a shaved head was making conch salad sandwiches. A girl with her boobs hanging out of an undershirt was sucking mango juice through a straw. Outside, it was eighty- two degrees, people were not worrying about tapped telephones or about being murdered by their colleagues, and Joey was suddenly very grateful to be right where he was, doing just what he was doing, nothing more and nothing less. "No, Sal," he said. "No messages. No messages for anybody."