The public be damned.
William Henry Vanderbilt
Reply to a newspaper reporter, 1882
Despite my announcement that I was leaving home, or perhaps because of it, Susan and I were getting along better. We both agreed that I had been under some financial and professional strain, and that George's death had caused us both some emotional trauma, and even the sale of Stanhope Hall had probably contributed to my outburst in the restaurant and my announcement when we got home. I assured Susan, however, that I still thought her father was a monumental prick. She seemed willing to let it go at that.
Anyway, toward the end of July, Mr Melzer called me at home to inform me that he had worked out a deal with the Internal Revenue Service. To wit: I would pay them $215,000 within sixty days and they would consider the obligation fulfilled. Mr Melzer seemed pleased with his work. He said, "That is a savings to you of $99,513."
"But then I would owe you about fifty thousand dollars, Mr Melzer, and I've already paid you twenty thousand. So really, Mr Melzer, if you do a little arithmetic, you have saved me only about thirty thousand dollars. I could have done as well myself."
"But I did the work for you, Mr Sutter." He cleared his throat over the phone. "And there was the matter of the criminal charges. That alone is worth -" "Get them down another ten or shave your commission."
"But -"
I hung up. After a decent interval of an hour or so, Mr Melzer called back. "They will take two hundred and ten thousand dollars, Mr Sutter. That is the best I can do. I will make up the other five to you. Considering they could still bring criminal charges against you, I suggest you settle." "I never understood, Mr Melzer, why the IRS and the Mafia haven't merged." Mr Melzer chuckled and replied, "Professional jealousy." He added, "Can you have the cheque ready within sixty days?"
"Yes."
"Fine. I'll hand-deliver the cheque to the IRS and see that it is properly credited. That is part of my service."
There was a not-too-subtle subtext there. I said, "And I suppose you'd like to pick up your cheque at the same time."
"That would be very convenient."
"All right. Call me in thirty days."
"Fine. And thank you, Mr Sutter. It has been a delight working with a man of such refinement."
I couldn't say the same, so I said, "It's been educational."
"That only adds to my delight."
"By the way, Mr Melzer, did you happen to hear anything regarding how the IRS discovered this oversight on my part?"
"I did make some inquiries regarding that very question. I did not receive any direct answers, but we can assume this was not a random examination of your past tax returns."
"Can we then assume that someone was out to make difficulties for me?"
"Mr Sutter, I told you, you are not popular with the IRS." "But I have not been popular with the IRS since I began beating them at their game twenty years ago. Why would they examine my return now?" "Oh, I think they knew about this oversight of yours for years, Mr Sutter. They like to see the interest and penalties accumulate."
"I see." But I found that hard to believe, even of the Internal Revenue Service. They were tough but generally honest, even going so far as to return money that you didn't know you overpaid them.
"However," Mr Melzer continued, "I would not pursue that if I were you." He added, "Or you will be needing me again."
"Mr Melzer, I will never need you again. And I am not intimidated by any agency of the government. If I believe I've been singled out for persecution, I will certainly pursue the matter."
Mr Melzer let a moment pass, then said, "Mr Sutter, if I may be blunt, your type of man is nearly extinct. Accept your loss, swallow your pride, and go live your life, my friend. No good will come of your trying to take on forces more powerful than yourself."
"I enjoy fighting the good fight."
"As you wish." He added, "By the way, I would still like to call on you for your professional advice if I may. Your work for me would be strictly confidential, of course."
"Better yet, it will be nonexistent. Good day."
Well, things always seem to work out, don't they? The very next day, on one of my rare appearances in my Wall Street office, there was a phone call for me. It was a Mr Weber, a realtor in East Hampton, informing me that he had good news. He had, in fact, a bid of $390,000 for my little summer cottage. "That is not good news at all," I informed him.
"Mr Sutter, the market has fallen to pieces. This is the only serious offer we've had, and this guy's looking around at other houses right now." "I'll call you back." I then phoned every other realtor who had the house listed and listened to an earful of bad news and excuses. I called Susan, since she is joint owner of the house, but as usual, she wasn't fin. That woman needs a pager, a car phone, a CB radio for her horse, and a cowbell. I called Weber back. "I'll split the difference between asking and bid. Get him up to four hundred and forty-five."
"I'll try."
Mr Weber called me back in a half hour, making me wonder if his customer wasn't actually sitting in his office. Weber said, The prospective buyer will split the difference with you again, making his final offer $417,500. I suggest you take that, Mr Sutter, because -" The housing market is soft, the summer is waning, and the stock market is down sixteen and a quarter today. Thank you, Mr Weber."
"Well, I just want you to know the facts."
Mr Weber, by now, could smell his commission, which I figured at six percent to be about twenty-five thousand dollars. I said, "I want four and a quarter for me, so you'll give me the difference from your commission." There was silence on the phone as Mr Weber, who had been smelling prime ribs, realized he was being offered T-bone or nothing. He cleared his throat as Mr Melzer had done and said, "That's do-able."
"Then do it." Normally, I would be more aggressive in real estate deals and also with the IRS. But I didn't have much strength from which to bargain. In face, unbeknownst to Mr Weber, I had none, and time was running out. Mr Weber said, "It's done. Did I tell you that the buyer wants to rent the house starting immediately? No? Well, he does. He wants to use it for all of August. He's offering a hundred a day until closing. I know you could get more now in high season, but it's part of the deal, so I suggest -" "His name isn't Melzer, is it?"
"No. Name's Carleton. Dr Carleton. He's a psychiatrist in the city. Park Avenue. They don't see patients in August, you know, and he has a wife and two kids, so he wants -" "My family wants to use the house in August, Mr Weber." "It's a deal breaker, Mr Sutter. He insists."
"Well, in that case, I had better make new summer plans, hadn't I? Perhaps I'll go down to the town dump and slug rats with a rake." "Actually, I could find you another rental out here -" "Never mind. Do it your way and Dr Carleton's way." "Yes, sir. Dr Carleton really likes the house. The furniture, too."
"How much?"
"Another ten. Cash."
"Fine. Did he see the picture of my wife and kids in the den?" Mr Weber chuckled. Making deals was fun. I said, "If this bonzo is trying to pull off a cheap summer rental, I'll hang his balls over my mantel." "Sir?"
"Get a one percent binder, now. Today. And I want to go to contract in a week with twenty percent down."
"A week? But -"
"I'll fax you a contract this afternoon. You get this guy in high gear, Mr Weber. If there are any problems, get back to me pronto." "Yes, sir." He asked, "Are you looking to buy any other property out east?"
"What do you have east of Montauk Point?"
"Ocean."
"How much?"
"It's free, Mr Sutter."
"I'll take it." I hung up. Madonn', when the shit happens, it happens. Well, I thought, I broke even today. Not bad for a man who's only in his mid-forties. I took the train home that evening and met Susan at McGlade's for dinner, as we'd planned that morning. I explained the deal to her and said, "I tried to call you to get your approval." Which was more than Frank Bellarosa did when he bought Alhambra without mentioning it to his wife.
Susan didn't seem to care about the sale. But you never know with women. To paraphrase what Churchill said about the Germans, "Women are either at your feet or at your throat."
Anyway, I had my calculator out and I was doing some number-crunching over my third gin and tonic. "So, we pay the IRS, we pay Melzer, we pay the real estate commission, we satisfy the existing mortgage, we damned sure put money aside for the capital gains tax since we're not buying another house, and we add in the ten thousand for the furniture and about three thousand for rent, and deduct the taxes on that as though it were income to play it safe… then, let's see, we factor in some out-of-pocket expenses…" Susan was yawning. The rich are bored by money talk. I scratched some figures on my place mat. "Well, I think we cleared ninety-three bucks." I thought a moment, then said, "A potential half-million-dollar asset wiped out." I looked at Susan. "What does the government do with all my money?" "Can we order dinner?"
"I can't afford it. I'll drink." I played around with the numbers again, but I still couldn't afford solid food, so I ordered another gin and tonic. Susan said, "Oh, by the way, are you figuring in the twenty thousand dollars you owe me?"
I looked up at her. "Excuse me, Mrs Sutter, this is a joint liability." "Well, I know that, John. But it wasn't my fault." Understand, please, this woman needs twenty thousand dollars like I need to move another stable across the property. I cleared my throat, the way Messrs Melzer and Weber had done. "Why are you bringing that up?"
"My attorneys want to know -"
"Your father."
"Well… I don't really care about the money. But it's not a good habit to get into. I mean, mingling assets."
"We mingle my assets. Look, Susan, rest assured I have no claim on your property, even if we do occasionally mingle assets. You have a very tight marriage contract. I'm a lawyer. Trust me."
"I do, John, but… I don't actually need to have the money, but I do need a sort of promissory note. That's what my… lawyers said."
"All right." I scribbled an IOU for $20,000 on the place mat, signed and dated it, and pushed it across the table. "It's legal. Just ignore the part about lunch, and dinner, and cocktails, steaks and chops."
"You needn't be so touchy. You're a lawyer. You understand -" "I understand that I've given your father free legal services for nearly two decades. I understand that I paid half the cost for the moving of your stable -" "Your horse is in there, too."
"I don't want the stupid horse. I'm going to have him turned into glue." "That's an awful thing to say. And by the way, you bought the boat in your name only."
"The cheque had my name on it, lady."
"All right, then… I don't like to bring this up, but you've never had to make a mortgage or rent payment since we've been married."
"And what did you do to get that house except to get born with a silver spoon up your ass?"
"Please don't be so crude, John. Look, I don't like to talk about money. Let's drop it. Please?"
"No, no, no. Let us not drop it. Let us have our very first and very overdue fight about money."
"Please lower your voice."
I may or may not have lowered my voice, but the jukebox came on, and so everyone who was listening to us had to listen to Frank Sinatra singing 'My Way'. Great song. I think the guy at the end of the bar played it for me. I gave him a thumbs-up.
Susan said, "This is very ugly. I'm not used to this."
I addressed Lady Stanhope. "I'm sorry I lost my temper. You're quite right, of course. Please put that IOU in your bag and I will repay the loan as soon as I can. I'll need a few days."
She seemed embarrassed now. "Forget it. Really." She ripped up the IOU. "I don't understand any of this."
"Then, in the future, keep my business and our business to yourself, and do not discuss any of it with your father. I strongly suggest you get a personal attorney who has nothing to do with your father or your trustees. I will deal with that attorney in any future matters." Including matrimonial. "And please keep in mind that, for better or worse, I am your husband." She was really quite red now, and I could see she was vacillating between my feet and my throat. She finally said, "All right, John." She picked up the menu and I couldn't see her face.
I told you about the red hair, and I knew she was still wavering between her good breeding and her bad genes. I suppose, as a purely precautionary move, I should have put the steak knives out of her reach, but that might be overreacting. I was still pretty hot myself, of course, and I had to get one last zinger in. I said, "I didn't appreciate your father calling you the other night to see if you were all right. Does he think I beat you?" She glanced up from the menu. "Of course not. That was silly of him." She added, "He's really quite angry with you."
"Why? Because I stuck him with the dinner bill?"
"John… what you said was a bit strong. But… he asked me to tell you that he would accept an apology from you."
I clapped my hands. "What a magnificent man! What a beautiful human being!" I wiped a tear from my eye.
The song had ended, and we had our audience back.
Susan leaned across the table and said to me, "You've changed. Do you know that?"
"And how about you, Susan?"
She shrugged and went back to the menu, then looked up again. "John, if you apologized, it would make things so much less tense. For all of us. Even if you don't mean it. Do it for me. Please."
There was a time, of course, not so long ago, when I would have. But that time had passed, and it was not likely to come again. I replied, "I will not say something I don't mean. I will not crawl for you, or for anyone. My only regret in that episode is that I should have grabbed his tie and yanked his face into his cheesecake."
"You're really angry, aren't you?"
"No, anger is transient. I hate the bastard."
"John! He's my father."
"Don't bet on that."
So, I had dinner alone. But I figured I should get used to it. Someday my quick wit is going to get me into trouble. Actually, I guess it did.
This elderly couple walked into my office and announced that they had not gotten along for about fifty years and they wanted a divorce. They looked as if they were around ninety – stop me if you've heard this – so I said to them, "Excuse me for asking, but why have you waited so long to seek a divorce?" And the old gentleman replied, "We were waiting for the children to die." Well, there are times when I feel the same way. Susan and I were reconciled yet again, and I had apologized for suggesting that her paternal origin was in question and that her mother was a whore. And even if Charlotte had once had hot pants, what difference did it make? But there was still the open question of whether or not her father was a monumental prick and so forth. I honestly believe he is, plus some. In fact, I even jotted down a few more descriptions of him in the event I ever saw him again. Susan, of course, knew what he was, which was why she wasn't terribly upset with me; but William was her father. Maybe. Anyway, I was still living rent-free in Susan's house, and we were speaking again but not in complete or compound sentences.
I had been getting to bed early on Monday evenings, as per Mr Bellarosa's suggestion, rising early on Tuesdays and joining him for coffee at dawn. Susan hadn't questioned me about my two early-Tuesday departures on foot to Alhambra, and as per my client's instructions, I hadn't told her about his imminent arrest.
The FBI knew now, of course, that I was Frank Bellarosa's attorney, but my client did not want them to know that we had anticipated an early-Tuesday-morning visit. So, for that reason, I had to walk across our back acreage and approach Alhambra from the rear so as not to be seen from the DePauw outpost.
Incidentally, I had run into Allen DePauw a few times in the village, and with that profound lack of moral courage that is peculiar to rat finks, stool pigeons, and police snitches the world over, he did not snub me, but greeted me as though we were still buddies. On the last occasion that I ran into him, at the hardware store, I inquired, "Do you trust your wife alone with all those men at your house around the clock? Don't you go to Chicago a lot for business?" Instead of taking a swing at me, he replied coolly, "They have a mobile home behind my house."
"Come on, Allen, I'll bet they're always coming inside to borrow milk while you're away."
"That's not very funny, John. I'm doing what I think is right." He paid for his machine gun oil or whatever it was and left.
Well, probably he was doing what he thought was right. Maybe it was right. But I knew that he was one of the people at the club who were making anonymous demands for my expulsion.
Anyway, in regard to Tuesday early A.M., even if the FBI came for Frank Bellarosa on another day, I was ready every morning to jump out of bed and be at Alhambra quickly. This was really exciting.
It was early August now, a time when I should have been in East Hampton. But Dr Carleton, whoever the hell he was, was in my house with his feet on my furniture, enjoying East End summer fun and the instant respectability of an eighteenth-century shingled house. I'd spoken to the psychiatric gentleman on the phone once to get him squared away with the house, and he'd said to me, "What is your rush in going to closing, if I may ask?"
"My mother used to take money from my piggy bank and never replaced it. It's sort of complicated, Doc. Next week, okay?"
So, I had that date out east and I needed the bucks for the Feds, but the other Feds across the street here wanted to bust my client and I had to stay on top of that, too. It was hard to believe that it was as recently as March when I'd had a safe, predictable life, punctuated only now and then by a friend's divorce or a revealed marital infidelity and occasionally a death. My biggest problem had been boredom.
I had called Lester Remsen the day after the battle of McGlade's and said to him, "Sell twenty thousand dollars" worth of some crap or another and drop the cheque with my secretary in Locust Valley."
He replied, "This is not the time to sell anything that you're holding. Your stuff got hit harder than most. Hold on to your positions if you can." "Lester, I read the Wall Street Journal, too. Do as I say, please." "Actually, I was going to phone you. You have margin calls -" "How much?"
"About five. Do you want me to give you an exact figure so you can send me a cheque? Or, if money is a little tight, John, I can just liquidate more stocks to cover the margin calls."
"Sell whatever you have to."
"All right. Your portfolio is a little shaky."
This is Wall Street talk for, "You've made some very stupid investments." Lester and I go back a long way, and even when we're not speaking, we talk. At least we talk about stocks. I realized I didn't like stocks or Lester. "Sell everything. Now."
"Everything? Why? The market is weak. It will rally in September -" "We've been talking stocks for twenty years. Aren't you tired of it?" "No."
"I am. You know, Lester, if I had spent the last twenty years looking for Captain Kidd's treasure, I would have lost less money." "That's nonsense."
"Close my account." I said, and hung up.
Well, anyway, it was six A.M. on the first Tuesday in August, and I was brooding about this and that. In reality, even if Dr Carleton wasn't in my summer house, I wouldn't be there this August, owing to the fact that my client next door wanted me to stick close. I suppose I could have moved into Alhambra, to be very close, but I don't think the don wanted me around while he conducted business and consorted with known criminals. And I certainly didn't want to be a witness to any of that.
So on that overcast Tuesday morning, I walked out of Susan's house and began my cross-country trek in a good suit, carrying a big briefcase into which I would place five million dollars in cash and assignable assets with which to make bail.
I had examined all these assets one night at Bellarosa's house in order to list and verify them. Thus, I saw a small piece of the don's empire. Most of what I saw was recorded property deeds, which the court would accept. There were some bearer bonds and a few other odds and ends, together totalling about four million, which would meet even the most excessive bail. But to be certain, Bellarosa had dumped a shopping bag onto his kitchen table that contained a million dollars in cash.
As I was making my third trip to Alhambra in as many weeks, the birds were singing and the air was still cool. A ground mist sat about chest high on the fields between our property, and it was sort of eerie, as if I were going to Wasp heaven in my Brooks Brothers suit and briefcase. I reached the reflecting pool with the statue of Mary and Neptune still glaring at each other, and a figure moved toward me out of the mist. It was Anthony, who was being taken for a walk by a pit bull. He barked at me. The dog, I mean. Anthony said, "Guh mornin', Mistah Sutta."
He must have sinus condition. "Good morning, Anthony. How is the don this morning?"
"He's 'spectin' ya. I'll walk ya."
"I'll walk myself, thank you." I proceeded up the path to the house. Anthony was quite nice when you got to know him.
I approached the rear of the big house, noticing that the security lights were still on. I crossed the big patio and pulled the bell chain. I saw Vinnie through the glass doors politely bolstering his gun as he recognized me. "Come on in, Counsellor. The boss is in the kitchen."
I entered the house at the rear of the palm court, and as I made my way across the large space, I noticed Lenny, the driver, sitting in a wicker chair near one of the pillars, drinking coffee. He, like Vinnie, was wearing a good suit in expectation of visitors and for the possible trip into Manhattan. Lenny stood as I approached and mumbled a greeting, which I made him repeat more distinctly. This was fun.
I made my way alone through the dark house, through the dining room, morning room, butler's pantry, and finally into the cavernous kitchen, which smelled of fresh coffee.
The kitchen had been completely redone, of course, and the don had told me exactly how much it cost to import the half mile or so of Italian cabinetry, the half acre of Italian floor tile, and the marble countertops. The appliances, sensibly, were American.
The don was sitting at the head of an oblong kitchen table, reading a newspaper. He was dressed in a blue silk pinstripe suit, a light blue shirt, which is better than white for television, and a burgundy tie with matching pocket handkerchief. The newspapers had dubbed him the Dandy Don and I could see why. Bellarosa glanced up at me. "Sit, sit." He motioned to a chair and I sat to his right near the head of the table. He poured me coffee while still reading his paper.
I sipped on the black coffee. I suspected that one would never find a round table in the house of a traditional Italian, because a round table is where equals sat. An oblong table has a head where the patriarch sat. So, there I was, sitting at his right hand, and I wondered if that was significant or if I was getting into this thing too much.
He glanced up from the newspaper. "So, Counsellor, is this the morning?" "I hope so. I don't like getting up this early." He laughed. "Yeah? You don't like it. You're not the one going to jail."
I'm not the one who's broken the law for thirty years.
He put down the newspaper. "I say this is it. The grand jury sat for three weeks. That's long enough for murder. The RICO shit can take a year, nosing around your business, trying to find what you own and where it came from. Money is complicated. Murder is simple."
"That's true."
"Hey, fifty bucks says that this is the morning."
"You're on."
"Yeah, I know what you're thinking. You think they're not going to indict me.
You think you squared it with Mancuso."
"I never said that. I said I told him what you asked me to tell him – about Ferragamo. I know Mancuso is the type of man who would pass that on to Ferragamo and maybe even to his own superiors. I don't know what will come of that." "I'll tell you what's going to come of it. Nothing. Because that scumbag Ferragamo is not going to back off after making his pitch to a grand jury. That would make him look like a real gavone. But I'm glad you talked to Mancuso. Now Ferragamo knows that Bellarosa knows." Bellarosa went on, "But maybe you shouldn't've told him you were my attorney."
"How could I speak to him on your behalf without telling him I was representing you?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. But maybe if you didn't say anything, he might've opened up to you."
"That's unethical and illegal, Frank. Do you want a crooked lawyer or a Boy Scout?"
He smiled. "Okay. We'll play you straight."
"I'll play myself straight."
"Whatever."
We drank coffee awhile and the don shared his newspaper with me. It was the Daily News, that morning's city edition, which someone must have delivered to him hot off the printing press in Brooklyn. I flipped through the lead stories, but there was no early warning, no statement from Ferragamo about an imminent arrest. "Nothing about you in here," I said.
"Yeah. The scumbag's not that stupid. I got people in the newspapers and he knows it. He's got to wait for the bulldog edition, about midnight. We'll get that tonight. This prick loves the newspapers, but he loves TV more. You want something to eat?"
"No, thanks."
"You sure? I'll call Filomena. Come on. Get something to eat. It's gonna be a long morning. Eat."
"I am really not hungry. Really." You know how these people are about eating, and they actually get annoyed when you refuse food, and they're happy when you eat. Why it matters to them is beyond me.
Bellarosa motioned to a thick folder on the table. "That's the stuff."
"Right." I put the folder containing the deeds and such in my briefcase. Bellarosa produced a large shopping bag from under the table. In the bag was one hundred stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, a hundred bills in each stack, for a total of one million dollars. It looked good like that.
He said to me, "Don't get tempted on the way to court, Counsellor."
"Money doesn't tempt me."
"Yeah? That's what you say. Watch, I'll get to court and find out you cold-cocked Lenny and stole the money. And I'll be in jail and I get this postcard from you in Rio, and it says, 'Fuck you, Frank.'" He laughed. "You can trust me. I'm a lawyer."
That made him laugh even harder for some reason. Anyway, I have this large briefcase, almost a suitcase, that lawyers use when they have to drag forty pounds of paper into court, plus lunch. So I transferred the paper money into the briefcase along with the four million in paper assets. Paper, paper, paper. Bellarosa said, "You looked at those deeds and everything the other day, right?"
"Yes."
"So you see, I'm a legitimate businessman."
"Please, Frank. It's a little early in the morning for bullshit." "Yeah?" He laughed. "Yeah, you see, I got Stanhope Hall in that briefcase now. I got a motel in Florida, I got one in Vegas, and I got land in Atlantic City. Land. That's the only thing that counts in this world. They don't make no more land, Counsellor."
"No, they don't except in Holland where -"
"There was a time when they couldn't take land away from you unless they fought you for it. Now, they just do some paperwork."
"That's true."
"They're gonna take my fucking land."
"No, it's just going to be used as collateral. You'll get it back." "No, Counsellor, when they see that shit in your briefcase, they're gonna come after it. Ferragamo is going to start a RICO thing next. They're gonna freeze everything I got, and one day they're gonna own it all. And that stuff you got in there makes their job easier. The murder bullshit smoked out a lot of my assets."
"You're probably right."
"But fuck them. Fuck all governments. All they want is to grab your property. Fuck them. There's more where that came from." I guess so, if Mancuso was correct. A lot more. "Hey, did I tell you I made an offer for Fox Point? Nine mill. I talked to that lawyer who you told me handles things here for the people who own the place." He asked me, "You want to handle that for me?" I shrugged. "Why not?"
"Good. I'll give you a point. That's ninety large."
"Let's see if they accept nine. Don't forget the Iranians." "Fuck them. They're not owners. They're buyers. I only deal with owners. I showed this lawyer that my best offer was his client's best offer. So he's going to make his clients understand that. His clients are not going to know about any more Iranian offers. Capisce?"
"I surely do."
"And now we got a place to swim. I'm gonna let everyone on Grace Lane keep using the beach. And nobody has to worry about a bunch of sand niggers running around wrapped in sheets. Capisce?"
"Do you think you could avoid using that word?"
"Capisce?"
"No, the other word."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Forget it."
He shrugged. "Anyway, you can count on ninety large in a few months. Glad you came?"
"So far." I said to him, "You're obviously not too concerned about facing murder charges, racketeering charges down the line, or possible assassination." "Ah, it's all bullshit."
"It's not, Frank."
"Whaddaya gonna do? You gonna curl up and die? You see a deal, you make a deal.
One thing's got nothing to do with the other."
"Well, but it does."
"Bullshit."
"Just thought I'd mention it." I poured myself more coffee and watched the sun burning through the mist outside the kitchen window. You see a deal. You make a deal. I recalled a story I'd had to read once in history class, up at St Paul's. In the story, two noble Romans were standing on the ramparts of their city, negotiating the price of a piece of land in the distance. The seller extolled the virtues of his land, its fertility, its orchards, and its proximity to the city. The potential buyer did his best to find some faults with the land to get the price down. Finally, they struck a deal. What neither man mentioned during or after the negotiations was that an invading army was camped on the land in question, preparing for an assault on Rome. The moral of this apocryphal story, for Roman schoolboys, and I suppose for modern preppies at St Paul's who were supposed to be sons of the American ruling class, was this: Noble Romans (or noble preppie twits) must show supreme confidence and courage even in the face of death and destruction; one went about one's business without fear and with an abiding belief in the future. Or, as my ancestors would say, "Stiff upper lip." I said to Bellarosa, "I didn't know you'd closed on Stanhope Hall." "Yeah. Last week. Where were you? You don't do legal work for your father-in-law? What kind of son-in-law are you?"
"I thought it would be a conflict of interest if I represented him for that transaction, and you for this matter."
"Yeah? You're always thinkin' about that kind of stuff." He leaned toward me.
"Hey, can I tell you something?"
"Sure."
"Your father-in-law is a little hard to take."
I had this utterly irrational mental flash: I could get Bellarosa to have William rubbed out. A contract. A closing. This is from your son-in-law, you son of a bitch. BANG! BANG! BANG!
"Hey, you listening? I said how do you get along with that guy?"
"He lives in South Carolina."
"Yeah. Good thing. Hey, you want to see the painting?"
"I'll wait until it's hung."
"Yeah. We're gonna get some people here. Susan's gonna be the guest of honour."
"Good."
"How's she doin'? Don't see her much anymore."
"Is that so?"
"Yeah. She around today? To keep Anna company?"
"I think so. We don't exchange daybooks."
"Yeah? You got a modern wife there. You like that?"
"How's Anna?"
"She's getting used to living here. She has all her crazy relatives drive out, and she shows off now. Donna Anna." He added nonchalantly, "She got over that ghost thing." He smiled at me unpleasantly. "You shouldn't have told her that crazy story." I cleared my throat. "I'm sorry if it upset her." "Yeah? That was a hell of a story. The kids fucking. Madonn'. I told a lot of people that story. But I don't know if I got it right. Then I told it to my guy, Jack Weinstein. He's a smart guy like you. He says it was a book. That you got the story out of a book. It's not a story about Alhambra. Why'd you do that?" "To amuse your wife."
"She wasn't amused."
"Well, then to amuse myself."
"Yeah?" He didn't look too pleased with me. "Somethin' else," he said. "Anna thinks you were the guy who growled at her. Was that you?" "Yes."
"Why'd you do that?"
I pictured myself at the bottom of the reflecting pool wearing concrete slippers unless I had a better answer than 'To amuse myself.' I said, "Look, Frank, that was months ago. Forget it."
"I don't forget nothin'."
True. "Well,- then accept my apology."
"Okay. That I'll do." He added, "And that's more than I usually do." He stared at me, then tapped his forehead. 'Tu sei matto. Capisce?" It helps when they use their hands. I replied, "Capisco."
"You people are all crazy."
We both went back to our newspaper, but after a few minutes of silence, he asked me, "How much am I paying you?"
"Nothing. I'm returning a favour."
"Nah. You already did that by talking to Mancuso. Get me sprung today, and you get fifty large."
"No, I -"
"Take it now, Counsellor, because I might need you later for something, and if they grab all my money under RICO, you ain't gonna get shit." I shrugged. "All right."
"Good. See? You got ninety and fifty already and you ain't even had your breakfast yet." He wagged his finger at me. "And don't forget to report it on your income tax." He laughed.
I managed a smile. Fuck you, Frank.
We spoke about family for a while, and Frank asked me, "Your daughter still in Cuba?"
"Yes."
"If you talk to her, tell her it's number fours."
"Excuse me?"
"Monte Cristo number four. I forgot to tell your son to tell her that. That's the big torpedoes. Number four."
I wasn't going to argue with him about smuggling, so I nodded. He asked me, "Do you think the old lady is going to stay in the gatehouse?" "I advised her to do that."
"Yeah? What would she take to get out?"
"Nothing, Frank. That's her home. Forget that."
He shrugged.
I played with the idea of telling him that William Stanhope had probably contributed money to the Gold Coast Preservation Fund, earmarked for the Stanhope Hall zoning battle. But I couldn't bring myself to reveal a confidence like that. However unethical William's action was, it wasn't illegal, and he'd confided his thoughts in front of me about four minutes before I told him to go fuck himself. But I did ask Bellarosa, "What are you going to do with Stanhope Hall?"
"I dunno. We'll see."
"You could use it to bury bodies."
He smiled.
I asked him, "Where's your son, Tony?" I'd met the little La Salle student the previous week, and he seemed like a sharp kid. He also reminded me of his father in his appearance and mannerisms. Bellarosa seemed very proud of him. I'd taken to calling the kid Little Don, but only in my mind, of course. Bellarosa answered me, "I sent him to his older brother for the rest of the summer."
"Which older brother?"
He looked at me. "It don't matter, and forget you heard that. Understand?" "Absolutely." My Lord, you really had to think before you asked any questions of this man. The rich and famous were like that, of course, and I had wealthy friends who didn't advertise the whereabouts of their children either. But they would tell me if I asked.
He asked me, "Hey, your son still in Florida?"
"Maybe. Maybe not."
He smiled again and went back to his paper. He was doing the crossword puzzle. "American writer, first name Norman, six letters… ends in r" "Mailer."
"Never heard of him." He filled in the boxes. "Yeah… that's it. You're a smart guy."
Filomena came into the kitchen, and she really was ugly, kind of hard to take in the morning. She and Frank chatted away in Italian for a few minutes, and I could tell his Italian wasn't good because she was impatient with him. She dragged out all sorts of biscuit tins with Italian writing on them and dumped them on the table. She was giving Bellarosa a hard time about something, then started giving me a hard time.
Frank explained to me, "She wants you to eat."
So, I ate. There were different kinds of breakfast biscuits, and they weren't bad with butter. Bellarosa had to eat, too. Filomena watched us for a while, motioning to me to keep shovelling it in. Bellarosa said something sharp to her, and she gave it right back to him. This was sort of like a power breakfast, and Filomena had the power.
Finally, Filomena found something else to do, and Frank pushed his plate away.
"Pain in my ass."
"Well, that hit the spot."
He leaned toward me. "You know any men around here for her?"
"Not offhand."
"She's twenty-four, probably a virgin, cooks like a chef, cleans, sews, and works hard."
"I'll take her."
He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. "Yeah? You want an Italian woman? I'm gonna tell your wife."
"We've already discussed it."
We had another cup of coffee. It was approaching eight A.M., and by this time I was beginning to think it was a little late for an arrest, but then Vinnie came into the kitchen as though he were walking on eggs. "Boss, they're here. Anthony called from the gate. They're coming."
Bellarosa made a motion of dismissal, and Vinnie dematerialized. Bellarosa turned to me. "You owe me fifty bucks."
I had the feeling he wanted it right then, so I gave it to him and he shoved it in his pocket. "See?" he said. "Ferragamo is a dishonest man. He lied to the grand jury and they gave him his indictment. So I'm getting arrested for something I didn't do, and he knows I didn't kill Juan Carranza. Now there's going to be blood in the streets, and innocent people are going to get hurt." People who get into trouble with the law start sounding like saints and martyrs.
I've noticed that with my clients who get caught doing creative accounting. Bellarosa stood and said to me, "On January fourteenth of this year, on the day Juan Carranza was killed in Jersey by the DEA guys, I got a very good alibi." "Good." I stood, too, and grabbed my briefcase.
"You never asked me about my alibi for that day because you're not a criminal lawyer."
"That's true. I should have asked."
"Well, as it so happens, I was here. That's one of the days I drove out here to look at this place. I was here almost the whole day, walking around, eighty miles from where Carranza got hit. They blew his head off in his car on the Garden State Parkway. But I wasn't anywhere near there. I was here." "Was anyone with you?"
"Sure. Someone's always with me. Lenny was driving. Another guy was keeping me company."
I shook my head. "No one wants to hear that crap, Frank. That's not an alibi.
Did anyone around here see you?"
He looked me in the eye. I don't know why I hadn't seen that coming. I said, "Forget it."
He pointed his finger at me. "Counsellor, if you tell that judge at the bail hearing that you saw me that day, you blow Ferragamo out of the water, and I walk in two minutes, maybe without even posting bail." "No." I moved toward the door.
"Hey, maybe you did see me. What were you doing that day? You out riding?"
"No."
He moved toward me. "Maybe your wife was out riding. Maybe she saw me. Maybe I should talk to her."
I dropped the briefcase and came toward him. "You son of a bitch!" We stood there, about a foot apart, and I kept thinking about the lead pipe. I said, "I'm not going to commit perjury for you, and neither is my wife." We stared at each other and finally he said softly, "Okay. If you don't think you got to say that to get me sprung, then you don't have to say it. Just get me sprung."
I poked my finger at him. "Don't try that shit on me again, Frank. Don't you ever ask me to do anything illegal. I want an apology or I walk out of here." I couldn't read anything in his normally expressive face, except that his eyes were somewhere else, then he focused on me. "Okay. I apologize. Okay? Let's go." He took my arm, I took the briefcase, and we went out to the palm court.
Lenny and Vinnie stood at the small peep windows that flanked the front door.
Vinnie turned to his boss. "Somethin' screwy here."
Bellarosa brushed him aside and looked out the window. "I'll be goddamned…" He turned to me. "Hey, look at this."
I moved to the window, not knowing what I expected to see – tanks, SWAT teams, helicopters, or what. I did expect to see vehicles, and in the vehicles at least a dozen men: federal types in suits and maybe a few uniformed county police and detectives so that everyone felt they had a piece of the action. But what was coming up the long cobblestone drive now was a solitary man on foot, taking his time, looking at the flower beds and poplars, as though he were out for a stroll.
As the man got closer – actually long before that – I recognized him. I turned to Bellarosa. "Mancuso."
"Yeah?"
Lenny, at the other window, exclaimed, "He's alone! The son of a bitch is alone." He turned to Bellarosa. "Let's off the motherfucker." I didn't think that was a good idea.
Bellarosa said, "The man has balls. What balls he has."
Vinnie was scandalized. "They can't do that! They can't send one guy!" Mr Mancuso wasn't alone, of course, but had the full weight and power of the law with him. That was the lesson to be learned this morning, not only by Frank Bellarosa and his men, but by me.
Lenny said, "Here he comes!" He put his right hand inside his jacket, reaching, I hoped, for his appointment book. But no, he drew his revolver and said, "Should we take him, boss?" Actually, he didn't sound too sincere. Bellarosa replied, "Shut up. Put that away. Both of you get back. Over there.
Counsellor, you stand there."
Lenny and Vinnie moved far back near a column, and I stood to the side.
There were three raps on the door.
Frank Bellarosa strode to the door and opened it. "Hey, look who's here." Mr Mancuso held up his badge case, though we all knew who he was, and got right to the point. "I have a warrant for your arrest, Frank. Let's go." But Bellarosa did not make a move to leave and both men stared at each other, as if they had both anticipated this moment for years and wanted to let it hang there awhile to be fully appreciated. Finally Bellarosa said, "You got some balls, Mancuso."
Mancuso replied, "And you are under arrest." Mancuso pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket. "Hands to your front."
"Hey, goombah, let me take care of a few things first. Okay?"
"Cut the goombah stuff, Frank. Are you resisting arrest?"
"No, no. I just want to talk to my wife. No funny stuff. I was waiting for you.
Look, we got a civilian here." He stepped aside and motioned toward me. "See?
You know him. He'll vouch for me."
Mr Mancuso and I made eye contact, and I could tell that he already knew I was there. I said to him, "Mr Mancuso, you can see that my client was expecting this arrest, and he has made no attempt to resist or to flee. He wants some time to speak to his wife. That is reasonable and customary." I didn't know if that was true or not, but it sounded as if it could be. I think that's the way they do it in the movies.
Mr Mancuso said to Bellarosa, "All right, Frank. Ten minutes. Just a hug and a smooch. No boomba, boomba."
Bellarosa laughed, though I was certain he wanted to smash Mancuso's face with a lead pipe.
Bellarosa moved out of the doorway, and Mancuso walked a few paces into the palm court, looked at me, then saw Vinnie, then Lenny. He glanced around to make sure he hadn't missed anyone.
Bellarosa said, "Benvenuto a nostra casa."
Mr Mancuso replied in Italian, and though I couldn't understand what he'd said, it didn't sound like 'Thank you.' In fact, if I didn't know firsthand that Mr Mancuso didn't use profanity, I'd swear he said, "Fuck you." Maybe he only swears in Italian. Anyway, whatever he said caused Frank, Vinnie, and Lenny to be unhappy with their paesano.
Frank kept his smile in place, excused himself, and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Mr Mancuso turned his attention to Lenny and Vinnie. He said to them, "Carrying?"
They both nodded.
"Licensed?"
Again they nodded.
Mr Mancuso put out his hand. "Wallets."
They both put their wallets in his hand, and he rummaged through them, letting money and credit cards fall to the floor as he retrieved their pistol licences. He compared their faces to the photos and said, "Vincent Adamo and Leonard Patrelli. What do you do for a living, boys?"
"Nothin'."
He threw their wallets to them and said, "Get out."
They hesitated, then scooped up their money and cards from the floor and left. Mr Mancuso turned his attention now to his surroundings, looking up at the birds, the hanging plants, and the mezzanine and balconies. I asked him, "Would you like some coffee?"
He shook his head and began ambling around the palm court, checking on the health of the potted palms, making sure the birds in the lower cages had food and water, then contemplating a pink marble column.
This was indeed a different Mr Mancuso than the one I'd gone sailing with. He turned and looked at me, then motioned me to a big wicker chair. I sat, and he pulled another chair over and sat across from me. We listened to the birds awhile, then he looked at me and asked, "What's the problem, Mr Sutter?"
"Problem? What problem?"
"That's what I asked you. You have to have problems or you wouldn't be here. Family problems? Money problems? Wife problems, life problems? You're not going to solve any problems here. Are you trying to prove something? What's making you unhappy?"
"You, at the moment."
"Hey, I'm not in the happiness business."
"Are you in the priest business?"
"Sometimes. Look, I'll let Bellarosa call his attorney, Jack Weinstein. Weinstein will meet him at Federal Court. I'll give you five minutes with Bellarosa to explain to him any way you want that you don't want to represent him or, in fact, ever see him again. Believe me, Mr Sutter, he will understand." "You're not supposed to try to come between a lawyer and his client." "Don't tell me the law, Mr Sutter. You know, it doesn't matter to me, as a federal agent making this arrest, who Bellarosa's attorney is. But it matters to me as a citizen and as a man that his attorney is you."
I thought about that for a moment, then replied, "I truly appreciate that. But I cannot walk away from this, Mr Mancuso. Only I know how I got here, and why. I have to see it through, or I'll never break out on the other side. Do you understand?"
"I have always understood. But you should have explored your alternatives."
"Probably I should have."
We sat in silence for a few more minutes, then I heard Bellarosa's heavy tread on the staircase.
Mancuso stood and met him at the bottom step, cuffs in hand. "Ready, Frank?" "Sure." Bellarosa extended his hands, and Mancuso cuffed him. Mancuso said, "Against the post."
Bellarosa leaned against the marble stair post, and Mancuso frisked him. "Okay." Bellarosa straightened up, and Mancuso said to me, "As long as you're here, you tell him his rights."
I didn't really remember the wording of the so-called Miranda warning, which was a little embarrassing. (I do mostly taxes, wills, and house closings.) Anyway, Mancuso and Bellarosa helped me out, though Mancuso had a little cheat card with him. He said to me, "Okay? Your client understands his rights?" I nodded.
Mancuso took my client's arm and began leading him away, but I said, "I'd like to see the arrest warrant."
Mr Mancuso seemed annoyed, but fished it out of his pocket and handed it to me. I studied it carefully. I'd never really seen one, and I found it rather interesting. I figured I was earning a little of the fifty large already, and making up for the Miranda thing, but I could sense that Mancuso and even Bellarosa were a little impatient. I handed the warrant back to Mancuso, but I wondered if I was supposed to ask for a copy for my files. Mancuso led Bellarosa to the door and I followed. I said to Mancuso, "Are you going directly to the FBI office at Federal Plaza?"
"That's right."
"How long will you be there?"
"As long as it takes to book my prisoner."
"And after the booking, will you be taking my client directly to the Federal Court at Foley Square?"
"That is correct."
"At about what time, Mr Mancuso?"
"Whenever I get there, Mr Sutter."
"Will there be newspeople there?"
"That's no concern of mine, Mr Sutter."
"It's a concern of Alphonse Ferragamo, who is going to stage a media circus."
"It's still no concern of mine."
I said, "I plan to be with my client every step of the way, Mr Mancuso. I expect everyone to behave properly and professionally."
"You can count on that, Mr Sutter. May I remove my prisoner? I'd like to get on the road."
"Certainly." I said to Frank Bellarosa, "I'll see you at Federal Plaza." Bellarosa, trying to look very nonchalant despite the cuffs and Mancuso's hand on his arm, said to me jokingly, "Don't forget the briefcase, and don't stop for coffee, and don't get lost. Capisce?"
I noticed that Frank Bellarosa was not as eloquent with his hands cuffed, but I understood him. "Capisco."
He laughed and said to Mancuso, "See? Another few months and I'll have him cursing in Italian."
"Let's go, Frank." Mancuso led Bellarosa out the door. I stood at the open door, and Lenny and Vinnie joined me. I watched Mancuso take Frank Bellarosa down the long drive toward the gate where Anthony stood watching. There is something about that scene that I won't ever forget. But I don't think that Anthony, Vinnie, or Lenny were as profoundly impressed with the scene, nor would they make the logical deduction that crime doesn't pay. Lenny said to me, "Ready to go, Counsellor?"
I nodded and retrieved my briefcase as Lenny went out to bring the Cadillac around front.
I found myself standing with Vinnie, who still seemed annoyed that the house hadn't been surrounded by SWAT teams and paratroopers. "We shoulda offed the motherfucker. You know? Who the fuck does he think he is?" "The law."
"Yeah? Fuck him." Vinnie stomped out the door.
I started to follow, but heard a noise behind me and turned. Coming down the winding staircase, wailing at the top of her big lungs, was Anna, wearing a robe and slippers. I started to back out the door, but she saw me. "John! John! Oh, my God! John!"
Madonn'. Do I need this?
"John!" She came rushing toward me like a '54 Buick with oversized bumper guards. "John! They took Frank! They took him away!" She collided with me -
Boom! – and wrapped her arms around me, which was all that kept me from sprawling across the floor. She buried her face in my chest and gushed tears over my Hermes tie. "Oh, John! They arrested him!"
"Yes, I was actually here."
She kept sobbing and squeezing me. Madonna mia. Those tits and arms were crushing the air out of my lungs. "There, there," I wheezed. "Don't cry. Let's sit down."
I steered her over to a wicker chair, which was like trying to manhandle a side of beef. She wasn't wearing much under her robe, and despite the circumstances and the early hour, I found I was a wee bit cranked up by her proximity. An incredibly insane thought passed through my mind, but I got it right out of there before it got me killed.
She was sitting now, clutching my hands in hers. "Why did they take my Frank?" Gee, Anna, I can't imagine why. I said, "I'm sure it's a mistake. Don't worry about it. I'll have him home by tonight."
She yanked me down to my knees and our faces were close. I noticed that, as upset as she was, she'd dallied upstairs long enough to comb her hair, put on a little makeup, and that nice scent she used. She looked me straight in the eye and said, "Swear to me. Swear to me, John, that you will bring Frank home." Mamma mia, what a morning this was going to be. I never had these problems at a house closing. I cleared my throat and said, "I swear it." "On the grave of your mother. Swear it on the grave of your mother." As best I knew, Harriet was still alive and well in Europe. But a lot of people think my parents are dead, including me sometimes, so I said, "I swear on the grave of my mother that I'll bring Frank home."
"Oh… dear Lord…" She kissed my hands and blubbered awhile. I managed to get a look at my watch. "Anna, I have to go meet Frank." I stood, her hands still grasping mine. "I really have to go -" "Hey, Counsellor! Got to move!" It was Vinnie, who, seeing Anna clutching me, said, "Oh, hi, Mrs Bellarosa. Sorry about this. I gotta take Mr Sutter to court."
I disengaged my hands and said to Anna, "Call Susan and she'll come over to keep you company. Maybe you can go shopping, play a little tennis." I hurried toward the door, snatched up my briefcase, and left quickly.
On the expressway into Manhattan, Lenny, behind the wheel, said, "Did you see how cool the don was?"
Vinnie, also in the front seat, replied, "Yeah. He ain't afraid of nuthin'." He looked back at me. "Right, Counsellor?"
I was a little annoyed with these two, who had been singing Bellarosa's praises for the last ten miles, as though he'd been arrested by the KGB for pro-democracy activities and was on his way to the Lubyanka for torture. I said, "There was nothing to be afraid of except bad drivers on the expressway." "Yeah?" snapped Vinnie. "I've been arrested twice. You got to show balls or they fuck you around. How'd you like to be looking at ten or twenty years?" "Hey, Vinnie," I replied, "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
Capisce?"
Lenny laughed. "Listen to this guy. He sounds like fucking Weinstein now. Hey, Counsellor, how'd you act if you was thrown in a cell full of melanzane and spies?"
"I might prefer it to being in a car with two greaseballs." They thought that was very funny and they laughed, slapped their knees, pounded the dashboard, and Lenny hit the horn a few times while Vinnie whooped. The Italians, I'd discovered, were pretty thick-skinned when it came to ethnic humour at their expense. But there were other kinds of jokes they didn't find so amusing. You had to be careful.
Vinnie said to me, "The don is lookin' forward to lunch at Caffe Roma today, Counsellor. He's gonna be there, right?"
"I hope so. If not, we'll get Caffe Roma to deliver to his cell." Now there's an example of the kind of joke they don't find funny. In fact, Vinnie said, "That's not too fuckin' funny."
Lenny said, "If you don't walk out of that court with the don, maybe you should find another way home."
That wasn't quite a threat, but it had possibilities. I replied, "Let me worry about that. You worry about driving."
No one spoke for a while, which was fine with me. So there I was, in a black Cadillac with two Mafia goons, heading into the maws of the federal criminal justice system.
It was just nine A.M. now and the worst of the rush hour was over, but traffic was still heavy, so I didn't think there was any chance that we'd overtake Mancuso, and in fact, I didn't even know what sort of vehicle he was driving. But as it turned out, though we never saw the car that Mancuso and Bellarosa were in, I began to realize that the same four nondescript grey Fords had been keeping pace with us for some time.
Lenny said, "Look at those cocksuckers."
So I did. Each car held two men, and they were staring at us as they played a game of changing positions around us. The car to our front suddenly slowed down, and Lenny hit his brakes. "Cocksuckers!"
The grey Fords to our sides and rear boxed us in, and they slowed us down to ten miles an hour, causing the other Long Island Expressway motorists behind us, who are not known for road courtesy in the best of times, to go nearly hysterical. Horns were blaring, insults hurled, drivers pounded their foreheads against their steering wheels. They were really upset back there. So we caused what they call on the radio 'major delays' approaching the Midtown Tunnel.
This wasn't just harassment, of course, but a rather unethical attempt to separate me from my client. I saw Ferragamo's hand in this and began to suspect that it wasn't the FBI in those cars, but Ferragamo's men from the Justice Department. I said to Lenny, "Go right to Federal Court in Foley Square." "But the don said to meet him at the FBI headquarters."
"Do what I say."
"He'll kill us!"
"Do what I say!"
Vinnie, who had about half a functional brain, said, "He's right. We gotta get straight to the court."
Lenny seemed to understand. "Okay. But I ain't takin' this fuckin' rap, Vinnie." I settled back in the seat and listened to the horns blaring around us. I didn't think Mancuso was in on this, and as best I could figure it, Mancuso would get a call over his car radio instructing him to go straight to Federal Court. Bellarosa could and would be booked there instead of at FBI headquarters. Then Bellarosa would be whisked in front of a judge for arraignment, and the head of New York's largest crime family would be standing there in his nice suit without an attorney. The judge would read the charge and ask Bellarosa to enter a plea. Bellarosa would say, "Not guilty," and the judge would order him held without bail. Frank would put up a big stink, but to no avail. Murder is a tough charge, and it would take me about two weeks to get a bail hearing. Actually, I would be well-advised to just head on down to Rio and send a postcard. I looked at my briefcase beside me. Some of the paper assets were negotiable, and there was a cool million in cash. The Brazilians didn't ask many questions when you deposited a million U.S. in the bank, except maybe what colour cheques you wanted.
I looked at my watch. They were probably at Foley Square by now, but the booking process, even if it was speeded up, still had to be done according to law; there would be a body search, fingerprinting, photographs, a personal history taken, and forms to fill out. Only then would they haul Bellarosa in front of a waiting judge. So it was possible for me to charge into the courthouse, find out where Bellarosa was to be arraigned, and get into the courtroom on time. It was possible.
I remember I had a house closing in Oyster Bay once, and my car broke down… but maybe that's not a good comparison.
Well, but what could I do? I took down the licence plate numbers of our escorts, stared back at them, then picked up a newspaper lying on the seat. The Mets had beaten Montreal and were two games out of first place now. I said to my friends up front, "Hey, how 'bout them Mets?"
Vinnie said, "Yeah, you see that last night?"
We did baseball chatter awhile. I knew we had to have something in common besides the same boss and the fear of our lives.
There was a car phone in the rear, and I could have called Susan, but I had no desire to. The next time she heard anything of me would be on the afternoon news. But then I remembered she didn't read, hear, or watch the news. But maybe she'd make an exception in this case. Thanks for the challenge, Susan. We approached the tunnel tolls, and I looked at my watch. This was going to be very close.
We lost our escort at the Midtown Tunnel and got on the FDR Drive. Lenny turned out to be a better driver than a conversationalist, which is saying very little, and he got us quickly into and through the narrow, crowded streets of lower Manhattan. But the closer we got to Foley Square, the slower the traffic was moving. I looked at my watch. It was nine-forty, and I estimated that Mancuso and Bellarosa could have been at Foley Square for as long as thirty minutes. The wheels of criminal justice move slowly, but they're capable of a quick grind if someone such as Alphonse Ferragamo is standing there squirting oil on them. But the wheels of the Cadillac were not moving fast at all. In fact, we were stalled in traffic near City Hall Park, and the first arraignments would begin at ten A.M. Damn it. I grabbed my briefcase and opened the door. "Where you goin'?" asked Vinnie. "Rio." I exited the car before he could process that. It was hot and humid outside the air-conditioned Cadillac, and it's not easy to run in wing-tip shoes despite their name, but all lawyers have done this at one time or another, and I headed up Center Street toward Foley Square at a good clip. On the way, I practised my lines. "Your Honour! Don't bang that gavel! I got money!"
The streets and sidewalks were crowded, and many of the people in this section of town were civil servants of the city, state, or federal government who, by nature, were in no particular hurry. However, there were a few other Brooks Brothers runners whom I took to be attorneys on missions similar to mine. I fell in behind a good broken-field runner, and within ten minutes I was at Foley Square, covered with sweat, my arms aching from the weight of the briefcase. I'm in pretty good shape, but running through Manhattan heat and carbon monoxide in a suit is equivalent to about three sets of tough tennis at the club. I paused at the bottom of the forty or fifty courthouse steps and contemplated the summit a moment, then took a deep breath and charged toward the colossal columned portico. I had a mental image of my passing out and of good Samaritans crowding around me, loosening my Hermes tie, and relieving me of my five-million-dollar burden. Then I'd have to hitchhike to Rio. But the next thing I knew, I was inside the cooler lobby of the Federal Courthouse, walking purposefully across the elegant ivory-coloured marble floor, then through a metal detector, which didn't go off. But a U.S. Marshal, obviously intrigued by my dishevelled appearance and huge briefcase, asked me to put the briefcase on a long table and open it. So, there I was, in this massive lobby amid the hustle and bustle of a courthouse at ten A.M., opening a briefcase stuffed with wads of money. If you've ever emptied a bag of dirty underwear at Customs, you know the feeling.
The marshal, an older man who probably thought all marshals should look and act like Wyatt Earp, stood there with his thumbs hooked in his belt, chewing a wad of something. Despite his cowboy pose, he was not wearing boots or spurs or anything like that. Instead, he was dressed in the standard marshal's courthouse uniform, which consisted of grey slacks, white shirt, red tie, and a blue blazer with the U.S. Marshal's service patch on the breast pocket. His shoes were penny loafers, and his six-gun was not strapped around his waist, but was somewhere else, probably in a shoulder holster. I was very disappointed in this outfit, but chose not to remark on it. Wyatt Earp inquired, "What's that?" It's money, you stupid ass. "It's bail money, Marshal."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yup. I have a client being arraigned this morning."
"Is that so?"
"It is. And in fact, I don't want to miss it, so -"
"Why're you all sweaty?"
"I was actually running so as not to be late for the arraignment."
"You nervous about something?"
"No. I was running."
"Yeah? You got some kind of identification?"
"I believe I do." I pulled my wallet out and showed him my driver's licence with my photo, and my bar association card. A few other marshals were standing around now, watching me and the money. Wyatt Earp passed my driver's licence around and everyone took a look. Needless to say, a crowd was gathering, enchanted by the green stuff, so I closed the briefcase.
After my licence made the rounds, including, I think, a passing janitor, I got my ID back. Earp asked me, "Who's your client, Counsellor?" I hesitated, then replied, "Bellarosa, Frank."
The marshal's eyebrows arched. "Yeah? They got that sucker? When?" "He was arrested this morning. I really want to get to the courtroom before he comes before the judge."
"Take it easy. He'll be lucky if he sees a judge by lunchtime. You new around here?"
"Sort of." I added, "I need to speak with my client before the arraignment. So I'll just be on my way." And I was.
"Wait!"
I stopped. The marshal moseyed over to me, sort of bowlegged as if he'd been on a horse all morning, or maybe he had haemorrhoids. He said, "You know where the lockup is?"
"Actually, no."
"Well, I'll tell ya. You go to the third floor -
"Thanks."
"Hold on. The lockup is between the marshal's area where your guy is going to be fingerprinted and photographed, and…" He stopped talking and moved closer to me. "You gotta go to the bathroom or something?"
I guess I seemed a little fidgety, and Wyatt could see it. He looked suspicious again, so I took the bull by the horns. "Look, Marshal, my client is going to be processed very quickly because of who he is. In fact, he's already processed. I do not want to miss the arraignment because if I do, he will not be happy with me." I almost added, "Capisce?" but the guy looked Irish. He grinned. "Yeah, you don't want to miss that arraignment, Counsellor. You know where to go?"
"Third floor?"
"Right you are. Your guy been indicted and arrested, or just arrested and waiting indictment?"
"Indicted and arrested."
"Okay, then you don't want the Magistrate, you want the District Judge, Part One."
Mamma mia, this guy was going to give me a course in the Federal court system. In truth, I didn't know any of this, but neither did I care. I just wanted to get to the third floor before it was too late. However, I didn't want to look panicky, which would only cause him to be more helpful or more suspicious. I smiled. "Part One. Right."
"Yeah. Part One. Third floor." He looked at this watch. "Hey, it's after ten.
You better get a move on."
"Yes, I'd better." I walked, not ran, toward the elevators. I heard him call after me, "I hope you got enough money there."
I hope I have enough time, Wyatt. I took the elevators up to the third floor. As bad luck would have it, the elevator stopped outside the Magistrate's Court, not Part One, so I was already lost. I picked a direction and walked. There were dozens of handcuffed prisoners in the corridors of justice with their arresting officers, U.S. Marshals, FBI men, attorneys for the government, attorneys for the accused, witnesses, and all sorts of people, none of whom looked happy to be there. There is something uniquely depressing about the hallways in any criminal court; the prisoners, the guards, the visible evidence of human frailty, misery, and evil.
I picked a corridor and went down it. The Federal courts are distinctly different from state or municipal courts in many respects. For one thing, you usually get a higher-quality criminal, such as Wall Street types and other white-collar rip-off artists who were stupid enough to use the U.S. mails for their schemes or to branch out across state lines. Occasionally, you get a spy or traitor, and now and then (but not often enough) you get a congressman or member of the Cabinet. But I'd heard, and now I saw with my own eyes, that with the increase in federal drug cases, the quality of federal defendants was somewhat lower than in years past. In fact, I saw men who looked as if they were definitely part of the international pharmaceutical trade, and I could see why Frank Bellarosa, tough guy that he was, would just as soon avoid trouble with these new guys.
In fact, I didn't even want to be in the same hallway as these dangerous felons, even if they were cuffed. For one thing, they smelled, and the stink was overpowering. I had smelled that odour in state criminal court once and knew it; it was the smell of the junkie, a sort of sugary-sweet smell at first whiff, but underlying it was a stench like a rotting animal. I almost gagged as I walked down the corridor. John Sutter, what are you doing here? Get back to Wall Street where you belong. No, damn it, see it through. Where're your balls, you finicky twit? Push on.
I pushed on, through the stinking corridor of Magistrate Court, and found Part One, where the defendants were uncuffed and smelled better. I asked a deputy marshal, "Has Frank Bellarosa come before a judge yet?"
"Bellarosa? The Mafia guy? I didn't even know he was here." "He's supposed to be here. I'm his attorney. Could he have been arraigned already?"
He shrugged. "Maybe. Judge Rosen's been doing arraignments for a while."
"Where is his courtroom?"
"Her. Judge Rosen's a woman."
"How many judges are arraigning this morning?"
"One, same as every morning. You new here?"
"I guess so. Where is Judge Rosen's courtroom?" He told me and added, "She's a bitch on bail, especially for wiseguy types."
So, with that encouraging news, I walked quickly but with no outward signs of the anxiety that was growing inside me to the door of the courtroom marked JUDGE SARAH ROSEN and opened it.
Indeed, the court was in session, and two marshals eyed me as I entered. Sitting in the benches where spectators normally sit at a trial were about thirty people, mostly men, and almost all, I suspected, were defence attorneys, though there might be some arresting officers as well, and perhaps a few defendants who were deemed not dangerous and thus were uncuffed. I looked for my client's blue suit and for Mancuso's distinctive pate among the heads and shoulders but did not see either. There was an arraignment in progress. A defendant and his attorney stood in front of Judge Sarah Rosen. To the right of the defendant was a young assistant U.S. Attorney, a woman of about twenty-five. She was in profile, and for some reason, she reminded me of my daughter, Carolyn. The courtroom was quiet, yet everyone up front was speaking so softly that I could catch only a word or two. The only thing I heard clearly was the defendant, a middle-aged, well-dressed man, say, "Not guilty," as if he meant it and believed it.
The criminal justice system in America is basically an eighteenth-century morality play that the actors try to adapt to twentieth-century society. The whole concept of arraignments, for instance, the public reading of the charges, the haggling over bail in open court, is somewhat archaic, I think. But I suppose it's better than other systems where justice is done in dark, private places.
One of the marshals was motioning me to sit down, so I sat. The arraignment in progress was finished, and the defendant was led away in cuffs, bail denied. Not good. The court officer called out the next case. "Johnson, Nigel!" Presently, a tall, thin black man wearing a white suit and dreadlocks was escorted into the courtroom through the side door, rubbing his wrists where the cuffs had been. An attorney rose and made his way toward the judge's bench. If I had to guess, I'd say the gentleman standing before Judge Rosen was a Jamaican and the charge probably had something to do with drug trafficking or illegal immigration or both. The arraignment could take as long as fifteen minutes if there was an argument over bail. Meanwhile, Ferragamo could have pulled a really neat trick, and my client could be standing in front of another judge in Brooklyn Federal Court, offering his Rolex watch for bail. The courtroom was cool, but I was still sweating. Think, Sutter.
As I thought, I was aware that the door behind me had opened a few times, and I noticed that men and women were making their way to the front of the court and finding seats. I also noticed two men and one woman in the otherwise empty jury box. They were sketch artists, which I thought was unusual at an arraignment. Sitting a few feet to my left was an attorney doing some paperwork on his briefcase. I leaned toward him and asked, "Have you been here long?" He looked over at me. "Since nine."
"Have you heard Frank Bellarosa's case called?"
He shook his head. "No. Is he going to be arraigned here?" "I don't know. I'm representing him, but I'm not familiar with the Federal Courts. How would I find -" "Quiet in the court!" bellowed the fat marshal, who probably saw me rather than heard me. These guys are power freaks, all full of themselves with their guns and badges and potbellies. I recalled that Mark Twain once observed, "If you want to see the dregs of humanity, go down to the jail and watch the changing of the guard." I wish Uncle Walt had said that. Anyway, I settled back and considered my options.
The arraignment of the tall fellow had begun, and indeed it was a drug charge.
The U.S. Attorney, the defence attorney, and Judge Rosen were conferring. Apparently, the defence attorney wasn't getting his point across, because the judge was shaking her head and the U.S. Attorney, still in profile, seemed smug, and the defendant was staring at his feet. Presently, a guard came, and the defendant became the prisoner again. She's a bitch on bail. Yes, indeed. If, in fact, Frank Bellarosa came before her, I could think of no reason in the world why she would set bail for him on a murder charge.
The longer I sat there, the more convinced I became that this whole thing had been stacked against me from the beginning. I was sure that my client was in Federal Court in Brooklyn right now. I could ask for a bail hearing, take an appeal, get a writ of habeas corpus, and try to get him sprung sometime in the near future. But that's not what I was getting paid for, nor what he wanted. I got up, took my briefcase, and left.
I went to the holding cells located in a far corner of the third floor and checked with the U.S. Marshal who was in charge of the cells. But my client had disappeared as surely as if he had been swallowed into the Gulag. I went to the public phone booths and called both my offices, but there was no message from my client. So, I sat there, contemplating my next move. Just then, the deputy marshal that I'd spoken to regarding the arraignments came up to me. He said, "Oh, I'm glad I found you, Counsellor. Your guy, Bellarosa, is going to be arraigned at Brooklyn Federal Court."
I stood up. "Are you sure?"
That's what I hear from my boss. Too bad. I wanted to see him." "I'll get you his autograph," I said as I raced toward the elevators. I rode down to the lobby, rushed out the doors, down the steps, and hailed a cab in Foley Square. I could be across the Brooklyn Bridge and in Federal Court in about twenty minutes. A taxi stopped and I opened the door, but as I was getting in, I happened to notice an NBC news van. Then it hit me. That group of people who had walked into the courtroom, and the three sketch artists in the jury box. "Damn it!" I left the taxi door open and raced back toward the courthouse. That bastard! That bastard Ferragamo! What a conniving son of a bitch!" I took a deep breath and charged back up the steps – there were forty-six of them, and the five million dollars was getting heavier.
I passed through the metal detector again, smiled at Wyatt Earp, who gave me a surprised look as I walked in long strides toward the elevators. I watched Earp out of the corner of my eye until an elevator came. I got in and rode up to the third floor.
I went directly to Part One and pulled open the door to Judge Rosen's courtroom in time to hear the court officer bellow, "Bellarosa, Frank!" A murmur went up from the crowd, as they say, and people actually began to stand, then a few people moved into the aisle to get a better view, and I found myself pushing to get through.
The courtroom deputy was shouting, "Order in the court! Sit down! Sit down!" Through the crowd, I caught a glimpse of Bellarosa as he was escorted in through the side door.
As I made my way to the front, the courtroom deputy called out, "Is the attorney for Frank Bellarosa present?"
I reached the spectator rail and said, "Here!"
Bellarosa turned to me but did not smile, though he nodded to show he appreciated my resourcefulness in figuring out what had happened that morning. I actually felt very proud of myself despite the fact that what I was doing was not serving humanity or Western civilization in the least. I passed through the gate in the spectator rail and put the briefcase on the defence table. I glanced at Judge Rosen, who registered no surprise that I was there, and I deduced that she was not part of the set-up. But the Assistant U.S. Attorney seemed rather surprised, and she couldn't hide it. She looked around the courtroom as if she expected someone to come to her assistance. Judge Rosen said to me, "Counsellor, have you entered your appearance in court?"
"No, Your Honour. I just now arrived."
She looked at me, and I could tell she had seen me earlier. She shrugged. "Your name?"
"John Sutter."
"Let the record show that the defendant is represented by counsel." Judge Rosen then advised Frank Bellarosa of his right to remain silent and so forth. "Do you understand?" she asked him in a tone of voice that suggested she was unimpressed by his notoriety.
"Yes, Your Honour," replied Bellarosa in a pleasant voice. She looked down at the charge sheet that had been handed to her and scanned it for a minute, then read the charge of murder to Bellarosa and asked him, "Do you understand the charge against you?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"And have you seen a copy of the indictment?"
"No, Your Honour."
Judge Rosen turned to me. "Have you been given a copy of the indictment, Mr Sutter?"
"No, Your Honour."
Judge Rosen looked at the Assistant U.S. Attorney and addressed her by name. "Miss Larkin, why hasn't the accused or defence counsel seen a copy of the indictment?"
"I'm not sure why the accused hasn't, Judge. But defence counsel was not present during the processing of the accused this morning."
Judge Rosen said, "He's here now. Give him a copy of the indictment."
"Yes, Your Honour."
I went to the prosecution table, and Miss Larkin handed me a thick sheaf of papers. I made eye contact with her, and she said, "Perhaps you'd like a few hours to read that. I have no objection to a second call on this arraignment." "I do."
Judge Rosen said, "Mr Sutter, will you waive your client's right to a public reading of the indictment?"
I didn't have to, of course, and I could have had the indictment read line by line for the next few hours. In the eighteenth century, when people had more time and indictments were handwritten and a lot shorter, part of the drama was the reading of the grand jury's findings. But the fastest way to piss off Judge Rosen was to exercise any right that took more than two minutes of the court's time. I said, therefore, "Though we have not had an opportunity to read the indictment, we waive a public reading of it."
She inquired of me, "Have you seen the arrest warrant, Mr Sutter?"
"I have."
"And you have heard the charge read by me in open court?"
"We have."
She nodded and looked at Frank Bellarosa. "How do you plead to the charge?" "Not guilty!" he replied in a tone of voice that sounded almost aggrieved, as if a monumental injustice was being done.
Judge Rosen nodded, somewhat inattentively, I thought. Someday, someone would shout out to her, "Guilty as charged!" But she wouldn't hear it, nor would it register. She then said to Bellarosa, "You also have the right to be released on a reasonable bail."
That was true, but it wasn't likely.
Judge Rosen looked at me and said, "However, in a case of murder, Mr Sutter, I do not grant bail. Furthermore, under federal law in a case involving narcotics, which in a manner of speaking this case does, there is a presumption against the defendant. But I assume you want to say something to me which would overcome that presumption."
"Yes, Your Honour. May I confer with my client for a moment?"
"If you wish."
I leaned toward Bellarosa and said, "We were delayed." I explained briefly. He nodded and said, "They don't play fair. See?" He added, "Hey, I heard of this judge. She's a tough bitch. They made sure she was doing arraignments this morning. Understand?"
I regarded Judge Rosen a moment. She was a woman of about forty-five, young for a federal judge, and somewhat attractive, if you're into stern-looking women. I didn't think my boyish-charm routine would do me any good, unless she happened to get off on scolding boyish men. You have to play every angle. Judge Rosen looked at the Assistant U.S. Attorney and asked her, "Miss Larkin? Do you wish to say something?"
Miss Larkin replied, "Your Honour, in view of the presumption under the statute, the government requests that Frank Bellarosa be detained. However, if the court is inclined to hear arguments for bail, the government is entitled to and requests a three-day continuance for a bail hearing."
"Why?"
"So that the government can gather evidence for the court to show why the accused should be detained."
Judge Rosen said to me, "Is that all right with you, Mr Sutter?"
"No, Your Honour. It isn't."
"Why not, Mr Sutter?"
"I don't see any reason for my client to sit in jail for three days. The government has been investigating this case since January. They know everything they're going to know about my client already, and it's not likely they are going to learn anything new in the next seventy-two hours." Judge Rosen nodded and said to Miss Larkin, "Request denied." Miss Larkin did not look happy. She said to Judge Rosen, "Well, then, Your Honour, the U.S. Attorney would most probably wish to be present for any discussion of bail."
"Why?"
Miss Larkin replied, "Because of the… the seriousness of the charge and the notoriety of the accused."
Judge Rosen looked at me. "Mr Sutter? Would you like some time to confer with your client? We can schedule a bail hearing for this afternoon." I replied, "No, Your Honour. We have entered a plea of not guilty, and we request bail in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars, which we are prepared to post right now."
Judge Rosen's eyebrows rose at that statement. She turned her attention back to Miss Larkin and said, "If Mr Ferragamo wished to be here for this arraignment, he should be here now. The attorney for the accused has indicated that he wants to discuss bail at this time." Judge Rosen added, "I assume you have read the indictment and are familiar with this case, Miss Larkin. I'm sure you can present the government's arguments for detention."
The subtext here was that it wasn't necessary to bother the U.S. Attorney since no bail was going to be granted anyway, and let's get on with it. But Miss Larkin, at a young age, had developed a nose for trouble, and she knew her limitations, which marked her as a potentially great attorney. She replied, "Your Honour, will you instruct the deputy to call Mr Ferragamo's office and pass on my request for his presence? In the meantime, we can proceed." Judge Rosen motioned to her courtroom deputy, who disappeared into the judge's robing room to make the call. I wondered how fast Ferragamo could run in wing tips.
I looked into the courtroom and saw that the word had gotten out and the room was packed. In the jury box were the three sketch artists, scratching away at their pads now. I brushed my hair with my fingers.
Judge Rosen said to me, "Mr Sutter, go ahead and present your argument for bail."
"Yes, Your Honour." You could literally hear ballpoint pens clicking in the courtroom behind me. Courtrooms don't terrify me the way they do some lawyers. But in this case, I had some real anxieties, and the cause of those anxieties was not the audience or Miss Larkin or the judge, but my client, who wanted to be on his way in ten minutes.
I spoke in a normal conversational tone, but I sensed that I could be heard clear to the back of the silent court. I said, "Your Honour, first I want to bring to your attention the fact that my client had previous knowledge, through the newspapers, that the U.S. Attorney was presenting evidence of murder to a grand jury. He made no attempt to flee during that time. And furthermore, anticipating that an indictment might be handed down and an arrest warrant issued, he instructed me to remain available in that event. He, too, remained available for arrest, and in fact, when the arrest came at approximately eight A.M. this morning, I was with him and can attest to the fact that he made no attempt to flee or resist." I added, "If the arresting officer, Mr Mancuso, is here, he, too, can attest to that."
Judge Rosen looked toward the side door, then out into the court. "Is Mr Mancuso present?"
A voice called out from the side of the court. "Here, Your Honour." As Mr Mancuso made his way through the standing-room-only crowd, I said to Bellarosa, "They tried to send me to Brooklyn. Your buddy Alphonse is a snake." He smiled. "Yeah, we shoulda known they'd pull some stunt. I never got to FBI headquarters neither. Mancuso gets this call on the radio, and next thing I know, we're pulling up to the back of the courthouse. You see what I mean? Fucking Alphonse."
Mancuso came through the rail and stood a few feet from us. Bellarosa said to me, loud enough for him to hear, "They wanted to get you over to FBI headquarters where they were going to jerk you around until this was over in court. But I dragged my ass through the booking. Fucked up six sets of prints." He laughed and poked me in the ribs. "I knew you'd figure it out. You're a smart guy. Hey, we leaving here together?"
"Maybe."
Judge Rosen said, "Mr Sutter? Do you need a moment?" I turned back to the bench. "No, Your Honour." She said to Mr Mancuso, "Please relate the circumstances of the defendant's arrest."
Mr Mancuso did so, very precisely, professionally, and unemotionally, leaving out only the conversation that he and I had had regarding my midlife crisis. Judge Rosen said to him, "What you're saying, Mr Mancuso, is that Mr Bellarosa appeared to be expecting you, and he made no attempt to flee or resist arrest." "That is correct."
"Thank you, Mr Mancuso. Please remain in the court." "Yes, Your Honour." Mancuso turned and looked at me, then at Bellarosa, but I could read nothing in his face but weariness.
He took a seat at the prosecution table.
Judge Rosen said to me, "It appears that the accused made no attempt to resist or flee. However, I am not going to grant bail based solely on that fact. Unless you can convince me otherwise, Mr Sutter, and do so very quickly, I am going to order that the accused be taken to the Metropolitan Correction Center right now to await trial."
We did not want that, did we? So I looked at Judge Rosen and said, "Your Honour, I also want to bring to your attention the fact that my client has never been convicted of a violent crime in any jurisdiction. He has, in fact, no history of violence." Someone in the courtroom laughed. "Further, Your Honour, my client is a legitimate businessman whose" – I could actually hear some tittering behind me. People are so cynical these days – "whose absence from his companies would impose an undue hardship on him, would interfere with his livelihood, and with the livelihoods of people who depend on my client for employment -" The laughing was becoming a little more overt now, and Judge Rosen, too, smiled, but then caught herself and banged her gavel. "Order!" Miss Larkin, I noticed, was smiling also, and so was the court reporter, the two marshals, and the courtroom deputy. Only Frank and John were not smiling. Judge Rosen motioned me to approach the bench, and I did. She leaned over and our faces were only inches apart. We could have kissed. She whispered to me. "Mr Sutter, at your request, I let you say your piece, but this is really very silly, and you're wasting my time and making a fool of yourself. Now, I understand the pressure you must be under to keep your client out of jail, but you can forget it. He can go to jail and await a more formal bail hearing where you may present more substantial evidence than your own characterization of him as a gentle man and a good citizen. I have a lot of arraignments before me today, Mr Sutter, and I'd like to get moving on them." She added, "A few days or weeks in jail won't kill him."
I looked her in the eye. "But it will. Your Honour, at least let me say what I have to say. Can we retire to your chambers?"
"No. Your client is not any different from anyone else who will come before me today."
"But he is different, Judge. You know that and so do I. This courtroom is packed with newspeople, and they're not here to report on the general state of the criminal justice system. They have, in fact, been tipped off by the U.S. Attorney's office to be here at your court to see Frank Bellarosa led away in cuffs." I added, "The press knew before even you or I knew that Frank Bellarosa would be in this courtroom."
Judge Rosen nodded. "That may be true, Mr Sutter. But it doesn't change the charge or the general policy of refusing bail in cases of homicide." Still tete-a-tete, I whispered, "Your Honour, my client may or may not be involved in so-called organized crime. But if he is who the press alleges he is, you must be aware that no major figure such as Mr Bellarosa has fled U.S. jurisdiction for many decades."
"So what?" She looked at me a moment, then said, "Mr Sutter, I sense that you are not a criminal lawyer and that you are not familiar with Federal Court. Correct?"
I nodded.
"Well, Mr Sutter, this is another world, different, I'm sure, from the one you come from."
You can say that again, lady. But good Lord, do I really look and sound like some son of Wall Street Wasp, or worse yet, a la-di-da society lawyer from Long Island? I said lo Judge Rosen, "I'm here to see that justice is done. I may not know how things are usually done here, but I know that my client has a right under Constitutional law to have a fair bail hearing."
"He does. Next week."
"No, Judge. Now."
Her eyebrows rose, and she was about to throw me out and put Bellarosa in the slammer, but as luck would have it, Miss Larkin interrupted. Obviously Miss Larkin didn't like all this talk that she couldn't hear, so she said, "Your Honour, may I speak?"
Judge Rosen looked at her. "All right."
Miss Larkin came closer to the bench but spoke in a normal volume. "Judge, whether or not the accused came into custody peacefully is not relevant in determining bail when the charge is murder. Nor is this the time or place to consider other circumstances that defence counsel might wish to put before the court. The government has reason to believe that the accused committed murder, and is a danger to the community, and has the resources and ample reason to flee the country if released on bail."
Judge Rosen, who had had enough of me a minute before, now felt obligated, I think, to give the defence the last word before she kicked me out. She looked at me. "Mr Sutter?"
I glanced at Miss Larkin, who still reminded me of Carolyn. I had an urge to scold her but said instead to her, "Miss Larkin, the suggestion that my client is a danger to the community is ludicrous." I turned to Judge Rosen and continued, loud enough now for everyone to hear, "Your Honour, this is a middle-aged man who has a home, a wife, three children, and no history of violence." I couldn't help but glance back at Mr Mancuso, who made a funny face, sort of a wince as if I'd stepped on his foot. I continued, "Judge, I have here in this briefcase the names and addresses of all the companies that my client is associated with." Well, maybe not all, but most. "I have here, also, my client's passport, which I am prepared to surrender to the court. I have here also -" Just then, the side door swung open, and in strode Alphonse Ferragamo, looking none too happy. Ferragamo was a tall, slender man with a hooked nose set between eyes that looked like tired oysters. He had thin, sandy hair and pale, thin lips that needed blood or lip rouge.
His presence caused a stir in the court because nearly everyone recognized him; such was his ability to keep his face before the public. Ferragamo had been called an Italian Tom Dewey, and it was no secret that he had his eye on either the governor's mansion or, a la Tom Dewey, the bigger house in Washington. His major problem in running for elective office, I thought, was that he had a face that no one liked. But I guess no one wanted to tell him that. Judge Rosen, of course, knew him and nodded to him but said to me, "Continue." So I continued. "I have here, too, the ability to post a substantial bail, enough to -" "Your Honour," interrupted Alphonse Ferragamo, ignoring all court etiquette. "Your Honour, I can't believe that the court would even entertain a discussion of bail in a case of wilful and wanton murder, in a case of execution-style murder, a case of drug-related, underworld assassination." The jerk went on, describing the murder of Juan Carranza with more adjectives and adverbs than I thought anyone could muster for a single act. Also, he was into word stressing, which I find annoying in court, almost whiny. Judge Rosen did not look real pleased with Alphonse Ferragamo charging into her court like – pardon the expression – gangbusters, and running off at the mouth. In fact, she said to Alphonse, "Mr Ferragamo, a man's liberty is at stake, and defence counsel has indicated that he wishes to present certain facts to the court which may influence the question of bail. Mr Sutter was speaking as you entered." But Alphonse did not take the hint and put his mouth into gear again. Clearly, the man was agitated, and for whatever reason – justice or personal vendetta – Alphonse Ferragamo desperately wanted Frank Bellarosa in prison. Meanwhile, Miss Larkin, who in her own way had handled this open-and-shut case better by keeping her mouth mostly shut, sort of slipped off and sat beside Mr Mancuso at the prosecutor's table.
"Your Honour," Ferragamo continued, "the accused is a notorious gangster, a man who the Justice Department believes is the head of the nation's largest organized crime family, a man who we believe, through investigation and through the testimony of witnesses, has committed a drug-related murder." In a monumental Freudian slip, Ferragamo added, "This is not a personal vendetta, this is fact," leaving everyone wondering about personal vendettas. Obviously, this guy hadn't been in a courtroom for some time. I mean, I don't do much court work either, but even I could do better than this clown. I listened as Mr Ferragamo did everything in his power to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I was tempted to interrupt a few times, but as that old Machiavellian Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "Never interrupt an enemy while he's making a mistake."
I glanced at Judge Rosen and saw that she was clearly and openly annoyed. But even a judge has to think twice before she tells a U.S. Attorney to shut up, and the more Ferragamo talked, the more time I felt I would be given to present my arguments.
The interesting thing about what Ferragamo was saying now was that it didn't relate directly to the question of bail. Instead, Ferragamo was going on about Bellarosa's alleged problems in the drug trade, especially in regard to Colombians and rival Mafia gangs. The man sounded as if he were holding a press conference. Actually, he was. Ferragamo informed everyone, "The heroin trade, which has been traditionally controlled by the Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, is now only a small part of the lucrative trade in illegal drugs. The Bellarosa crime family is seeking to muscle in on the cocaine and crack trade, and to do so, they must eliminate their rivals. Thus, the murder of Juan Carranza." Good Lord, Alphonse, why don't you just paint a target on Bellarosa's forehead and turn him loose in a Colombian neighbourhood? I glanced at Frank and saw he was smiling enigmatically.
Judge Rosen coughed, then said, "Mr Ferragamo, I think we understand that you believe the defendant has committed murder. That's why he's here. But pre-trial incarceration is not a punishment, it is a precaution, and Mr Bellarosa is innocent until proven guilty. I want you to tell me why you believe he will forfeit his bail and flee."
Mr Ferragamo thought about that a moment. Meanwhile, Frank Bellarosa just stood there, the object of all this attention but with no speaking part. I'll give him credit for his demeanour though. He wasn't sneering at Ferragamo, he wasn't cocky or arrogant, nor did he seem deferential or crestfallen. He just stood there as if he had a Sony Walkman stuck in his ear, listening to La Traviata while waiting for a bus.
Rather than answer Judge Rosen's direct question, Alphonse Ferragamo had some advice for her, and she clearly did not like his tone, but she understood the words. What he was saying in effect was this: "Listen, lady, if you let this guy go free on bail, public opinion (the press) will crucify you. If he flees the country, you might as well go with him." And the final point, though not in these exact words, was this: "Judge, you have no reason whatsoever to stick your neck out. Just bang the goddamned gavel and have the prisoner taken to jail." Judge Rosen did not seem happy with the lecture, but she did seem to grasp the import of it. Still, to irk Ferragamo, I think, she turned to me. "Mr Sutter?" I began my counterattack, and that son of a bitch kept interrupting. I was scoring points, but clearly the home team started with lots of points. Bail proceedings, you understand, are not stacked in favour of the defendant as a trial by jury is, and it was all I could do just to keep Judge Rosen from banging the gavel and ending the whole thing. I mean, what was in it for her to listen to me tell her to make an insane decision that would jeopardize her career and lead to speculation that she was on the mob's payroll or was sleeping with Italian gangsters? There was nothing in it for her except that she was ticked off at Ferragamo's grandstanding, and in some deeper sense, she was not now fully convinced that Bellarosa was a bail risk. In short, she was interested in justice.
I went on with my description of Bellarosa as if I were introducing him for a Knights of Columbus award. "He has deep roots in his former Brooklyn neighbourhood, having lived within a mile of his birthplace all his life. Recently, he has become my neighbour, and I know this man personally." This brought a few murmurs from the crowd, but having started on this tack, to use a nautical term, I had to sail with it. "My wife and his wife are friends. We have entertained at one another's house" – sort of – "and I've met some of his family – " Oh, shit. Wrong word. Everyone laughed again, and the gavel crashed down again. "Order!"
I recovered nicely and went on, "Your Honour, I will personally guarantee that my client will not leave the Southern District of New York and that he will appear in court to face this charge on the date assigned to this case. I repeat, Your Honour, my client, despite all innuendos and allegations and public smears to the contrary, is a substantial, taxpaying citizen, a man with friends and fami- and relatives all over the metropolitan area, a man who counts among his friends many prominent businessmen, clergy, politicians -" More chuckles from the peanut gallery, though I could see I had made a few more points, but was anyone keeping score? I said, "And further, Your Honour -" Ferragamo couldn't stand not hearing himself talk for this long, so he cut me off again. "Judge, this is ridiculous. This man is a known gangster -" It was Judge Rosen's turn to interrupt. "The charge before the court is murder, Mr Ferragamo, not racketeering. If the charge were racketeering and he had these roots in the community, I would have already set bail. I'm not interested in allegations of racketeering. I'm interested in the question of whether or not this man will flee a drug-related murder charge."
Ferragamo was annoyed. He looked at Bellarosa, and their eyes met for the first time. Then he looked at me, as if to say, "Who the hell are you to get in the middle of this thing between Ferragamo and Bellarosa?" Ferragamo said to the judge, "Then let's concentrate on that aspect; this is a man who has vast resources, not only in this country, but in foreign countries, and it is not inconceivable that -"
"Your Honour," I interrupted, since this seemed the way to get the floor with Mr Ferragamo, "Your Honour, I stated earlier that I have here my client's passport -"
Ferragamo interrupted by yelling at me directly, "Your client, Mr Sutter, can buy fifty passports!"
I found myself, for the first time in my life, shouting in court. "Mr Ferragamo, I gave the court my word! I am personally guaranteeing that-" "Who are you to personally guarantee -?"
"Who are you to doubt -?"
And so it went, degenerating very quickly into courtroom histrionics. Everyone loved it. Except Judge Rosen, who banged her gavel. "Enough!" She looked at me. "Mr Sutter, the court appreciates your personal guarantee and is impressed with your foresight in dragging a suitcase full of money into court" – laughter – "and acknowledges your offer to turn over the defendant's passport. However, your request for bail is deni-" "Your Honour! One more thing, if I may."
She rolled her eyes, then motioned wearily for me to go on.
"Your Honour… Your Honour…"
"Yes, Mr Sutter? Speak. Please."
I took a deep breath, caught Bellarosa's eye, and spoke. "Your Honour, regarding the charge itself… the charge as read… the charge states that the alleged murder of this Juan Carranza individual took place on January fourteenth of this year in New Jersey. Well, Your Honour, my client has an alibi for that day, and I didn't think it appropriate or advisable to introduce that alibi at this time, but it's obvious that I must address myself to that alibi. So, if I may approach the bench…" There was a silence in the courtroom, broken by Ferragamo's voice. "What kind of alibi, Mr Sutter? I want to hear what alibi you have." He looked at the judge. "Your Honour, I have five witnesses who have testified under oath in front of a grand jury, who have implicated Frank Bellarosa in the murder of Juan Carranza. The grand jury voted to indict the defendant based on this testimony. What possible alibi could the defence counsel present here…?" He threw up his hands in a dramatic gesture. "Oh, this is inane. Really, Mr Sutter. Really. You have wasted my time and everyone's time."
He really looked pissed off. Really. But I was more pissed off. In fact, the more this jerk spoke, the more I realized he was a ruthless, egocentric media hound. I said to him, loud enough for everyone to hear, "Mr Ferragamo, I have the licence plate numbers of four cars that attempted to delay my appearance here in court. I believe that when I run those numbers through the DMV, I will find those cars are registered to the U.S. Attorney's office. I believe that you engaged in an unlawful act to keep-" "How dare you? How dare you?"
"How dare you?" I shot back, doing a little word stressing of my own. "How dare you obstruct-" "Are you insane?"
I mean, I was really hot now. Needless to say, it's not a good idea to make an enemy of a man like this, but what the hell, I had enemies in high places now: the IRS, the FBI, The Creek, the Stanhope dynasty and their attorneys, and so forth. What was one more? I said, "I'm not the one displaying aberrant behaviour in open court."
"What?"
The crowd loved it. I mean, really loved it. There they sat, only ten minutes before, bored out of their minds with pro forma early-morning arraignments, and suddenly, in walks Frank Bellarosa, then his button-down attorney, who turns out to be a little bit nuts, and the ambitious Alphonse Ferragamo, who has completely lost control of himself. I glanced into the courtroom and saw reporters scribbling furiously, artists looking up and down between their pads and the bench as though they were following a vertical Ping-Pong game, and the rest of the crowd, smiling attentively, like people who had been sitting through a dull opera only to discover there was a nude scene in the second act. Bellarosa and I made eye contact again, and he smiled at me. Meanwhile, Alphonse and I were getting in good jabs at each other, not really addressing any issue except the issue of egos. Judge Rosen let us spar for about a minute, not wanting to be thought of as a killjoy, but finally she rapped her gavel. "That's enough, gentlemen." And she used the term loosely. "Mr Sutter," she said, "that is a serious accusation, but even if it were true, it has no bearing on this discussion. And regarding any alibi you say your client has for the day of the alleged crime, Mr Sutter, such alibi evidence may be considered by the court in determining whether to set bail or not. However, I don't see how I can give your argument any credence unless you happen to have witnesses in this court. And even if you did, Mr Sutter, I am not prepared to delay this morning's arraignments by swearing in witnesses at this time." She added, "I'm sorry, Mr Sutter, but the question of bail must be decided at a future session -" The gavel went up again.
"Judge," I said quickly, "Judge, on the day in question, January fourteenth of this year -"
"Mr Sutter -"
"My client, Your Honour, was, in fact, inspecting property adjacent to my property on Long Island. And though he was unknown to me personally at that time, I recognized him from newspapers and television, and I realized that I had, in fact, seen Mr Frank Bellarosa."
Judge Rosen leaned toward me and waited for the gasps and all that to subside.
"Mr Sutter, are you telling me that you are Mr Bellarosa's alibi?"
"Yes, Your Honour."
"You saw him on January fourteenth?"
"Yes, Your Honour. I was home that day. I checked my daybook." Actually I hadn't, but I should have before I committed perjury. I continued, "I was riding my horse and saw Mr Bellarosa with two other gentlemen walking around the property that he subsequently purchased. I saw them and they waved to me and I returned the wave, though we did not speak. I was not more than thirty feet from Frank Bellarosa and recognized him immediately. This was at nine A.M., then I saw them get into a black Cadillac at about noon and leave. Mr Carranza, was murdered at about noon as his car left an exit of the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey, about eighty miles from where I saw Mr Bellarosa at the same time." What could Alphonse Ferragamo say? Only one word and he said it. "Liar." I gave him my best withering Wasp look, and he actually turned his oyster eyes away.
Judge Rosen sat quietly for a full minute, probably wondering why she had wanted so badly to be a judge. Finally, she asked me, "How much money do you actually have there, Counsellor?"
"Five million, Judge. Four in assignable assets, one million in cash." "Good. I'll take it. See the clerk downstairs." She banged her gavel as Ferragamo bellowed. Judge Rosen ignored him and said, "Next case!" On the way to see the district clerk down in the basement, Bellarosa said to me, "See, I knew you could do it."
My stomach was churning, my head ached, and yes, my heart ached. Never in a billion years would I have imagined that I would perjure myself in court for any reason, let alone to spring a Mafia don.
But neither did I ever think I would be charged with criminal tax fraud for a stupid misjudgement. Nor would I have imagined that a U.S. Attorney would frame a man because of a personal grudge, or try to obstruct justice by delaying me on my way to court, then trying to send me on a wild-goose chase to Brooklyn. Yes, I know that two wrongs don't make a right – that's one of the first ethical lessons I learned as a small boy – but part of life and part of growing up is the ability to do what has to be done to survive. When the stakes go from baseball cards and pennies to life and death, then sometimes you make adjustments. Concessions, I guess you'd say. Sometimes you lie. The history of the world is filled with dead martyrs who would not compromise. I used to admire them. Now I think that most of them were probably very foolish. Bellarosa said to me, "See what a prick that guy is?"
I didn't reply.
He went on, "You pissed him off. I didn't want you to do that. It's personal for him, but it's not personal for me. Capisce?"
"Frank. Shut up."
I was still sort of in a daze as I moved through the corridors of the courthouse, reporters with pads and pencils swarming around us. They can't bring cameras or tape recorders into the courthouse, but why they let these crazy people inside at all is beyond me. Freedom of the press is one thing, but blocking the hallway is inconvenient and probably a misdemeanour. Finally, out on the courthouse steps, minus my heavy briefcase and my virginity, we ran into the press again, who had fallen back to regroup and join up with their cameramen and photographers.
Reporters were asking all sorts of pertinent and dangerous questions, but all they were getting from the don in return were wisecracks, such as: "Hey, what're you all doing here? No autographs. You want me to smile? Get my good side." And so forth.
Also, he knew some of the reporters by name. "Hey, Lorraine, long time. Where'd you get that tan?" Lorraine smiled at the charming man. "Tim, you still working for the paper? They don't know about your drinking?" Ha, ha, ha. A TV reporter got his microphone under Bellarosa's nose and asked, "Is there a power struggle going on between the Mafia and the Medellin cartel over the control of the cocaine trade?"
"The who and the what over the which? Talk English." A more sensible reporter asked, "Do you think Alphonse Ferragamo is pursuing a personal vendetta against you?"
Frank lit up a big cigar, Monte Cristo number four. "Nah. People lie to him about me, and he's got to follow up. He's my good goombah." Everyone laughed. "You happy to be free this morning, Frank?"
He puffed on his stogie. "I gotta tell ya, I had the worst breakfast of my life in there. That's what I call cruel and unusual punishment." That got a good laugh, and as it became obvious that Mr Bellarosa was not going to make any newsworthy statements, the emphasis shifted to the entertainment value of the story. Frank was good entertainment. Someone asked him, "How much did that suit cost you, Frank?"
"Peanuts. I go to a little guy on Mott Street. I don't pay uptown prices. You could use a good tailor yourself, Ralph."
So the don held court for a few minutes as we made our way down the forty-six steps toward the street, surrounded by about fifty members of the press, including cameramen and photographers. Worse, a crowd of several hundred onlookers had materialized. It doesn't take much to draw a crowd in New York. I was not being completely ignored, of course, and reporters who couldn't get the don's attention were settling for me, but I was just reciting my mantra, which was, "No comment, no comment, no comment." We were near the bottom of the steps, but the crowd around us was so thick now, I couldn't see any way to get to the street where Lenny was supposed to meet us with the car.
A reporter asked me, "How much does five million dollars weigh?" It seemed silly to say 'No comment' to a silly question, so I replied, "It was heavy enough for me to think that it was excessive bail." Well, you should never encourage these people, and by answering one question I opened myself up for a lot of attention. I was really getting grilled now, and I glanced at Bellarosa, who gave me a look of caution through his cigar smoke. "Mr Sutter," asked a newspaper reporter, "you said in court that you were delayed by four cars on your way here. How did they delay you?" "No comment."
"Did they cut you off?"
"No comment."
"Do you really think those cars were driven by people from Alphonse Ferragamo's office?"
"No comment."
And so it went. I seemed to have a permanent microphone under my nose now, recording my 'no comment' for posterity. I spotted the Cadillac parked illegally in the square about fifty yards away, with Lenny behind the wheel. Then I noticed Vinnie approaching the courthouse with two patrolmen in tow. Meanwhile, the press were really getting on my nerves. I glanced again at my client and saw that he was still smiling, still puffing away, and still at ease despite being surrounded by aggressive A-type personalities. But though he was at ease, Bellarosa did not have the reputation of being a publicity hound. He could handle it, but he did not seek it out as did some of his predecessors, certain of whom were – partly as a result of their fondness for talking too much to the press – dead.
A particularly persistent and pesky female reporter, whom I recognized from one of the TV networks, was bugging me about the alibi. She asked me, "Are you certain it was Frank Bellarosa you saw?"
"No comment."
"You mean you're not sure it was Frank Bellarosa."
"No comment."
"But you said it was Frank Bellarosa."
And on and on she went, as if we were married or something. "Mr Sutter," she said very snottily, "Mr Ferragamo has five witnesses who put Frank Bellarosa at the scene of the murder. Are you saying they're all liars? Or are you the liar?" It must have been the heat, and I guess my own state of mind, or maybe that woman's tone of voice finally got to me. Anyway, I snapped back, "Ferragamo's witnesses are liars, and he knows they are liars. This whole thing is a frame-up, a personal vendetta against my client, and an attempt to start trouble between-" I got my mouth under control, then glanced at Bellarosa, who touched his index finger to his lips.
"Trouble between who? Rival mobs?"
Someone else, a Mafia groupie or something, asked, "Trouble with his own mob?
Trouble with his underboss? With Sally Da-da?"
Mafia politics were not my strong point, but obviously the initiated knew all sorts of underworld gossip and they thought I did, too. "Trouble with who?" asked someone else. "With the Colombian drug kings? With Juan Carranza's friends?"
"Is it true that the Mafia is trying to push out the Colombians?" "Mr Sutter, did you say in court that Alphonse Ferragamo ordered people to run you off the road?"
I thought someone already asked that question.
"Mr Sutter, are you saying that the U.S. Attorney is framing your client?" Mr Sutter, blah, blah, blah. I had this image of the television set over the bar at The Creek. I wonder if people really do look heavier on TV. I hope not. I could hear my pals now. "Look at him." "He's getting fat." "He's sweating like a pig." "His tie is crooked." "How much is he getting paid for that?" "His father must be rolling over in his grave." My father is actually alive and well in Europe.
Finally, the two cops, with Vinnie encouraging them on, got through to us. Frank bid the press fond adieu, waved, smiled, and followed Vinnie and the two cops through the throng with me bringing up the rear. We got out to the street, and Lenny inched the car closer through the onlookers. I was annoyed that the government could set the stage for a media circus, then not provide crowd control. Actually, I never realized how many annoying things the government did. Vinnie got to the Cadillac and opened the rear door. Bellarosa ducked inside, and one of the cops said, "Take it easy, Frank."
Bellarosa said to the two cops, "Thanks, boys. I owe you one." Meanwhile, I can't even get a cop to interpret complex and contradictory parking signs for me. But that was yesterday. Today, the cop near the open car door touched his cap as I slid in beside the don. What a screwy country. Vinnie had jumped into the passenger's seat up front, and Lenny pulled away, moving slowly until he was clear of the crowd, then he gassed it. We headed downtown, then Lenny swung west toward the World Trade Center, then downtown again to Wall Street. Obviously, he was trying to lose anyone who might be following.
We passed my office building, the J. P. Morgan Building at 23 Wall Street, and though I was still supposed to work there, I felt a sudden nostalgia for the old place.
We drove around for a while, no one saying much, except that Vinnie and Lenny were congratulating the don ad nauseam about his great escape, as though he had something to do with it. I really detest flunkies.
Bellarosa said very little in return, but at one point he leaned over to me.
"You did real good, Counsellor. Right up until the end there."
I didn't reply.
He continued, "You got to be careful what you say to the press. They twist things around."
I nodded.
He went on, "The press ain't lookin' for facts. They think they are, but they want a good story. Sometimes a good story has no facts. Sometimes it's funny. They think this stuff is all funny. This stuff with the Mafia and all. The big Cadillacs, the cigars, the fancy suits. Somehow they think this is all funny. Capisce? That's okay. That's better than them thinking it's not funny. So you keep it funny. You give them funny stuff. You're a funny guy. So lighten up. Make it all sound funny, like it's a big joke. Understand?"
"Capisco."
"Yeah. You did fine with that lady judge. Alphonse fucked himself up. He talks too much. Every time he opens his mouth, somebody wants to put their fist in it. He's pissed off now, but he's gonna be a lot more pissed off when the press starts asking him about the car bullshit this morning and the frame-up thing. You didn't have to say all that shit. You know?"
"Frank, if you don't like the way-"
He patted my knee. "Hey, you did okay. Just a few points I gotta make so you know. Okay? Hey, I walked. Right?"
"Right."
We kept driving around lower Manhattan. Frank ordered Lenny to pull over at a newsstand, and Vinnie got out and bought the Post for Frank, the Wall Street Journal for me, and some medical journals for himself, mostly gynaecology and proctology. Lenny shared the journals with Vinnie at stoplights. I like to see people try to improve their minds.
I had some paperwork with me relating to the bail: the receipt for five million dollars, the bail forfeiture warning, and other printed matter that I looked over. I also had the arrest warrant now, and the charge sheet, which I now read. Most important, I had a copy of the indictment, which ran to about eighty pages. I wanted to read it at my leisure, but for now, I perused it, discovering that, indeed, all the evidence against Frank Bellarosa was in the form of five witness statements. There was no physical evidence putting him at the scene of the crime, and all the witnesses had Hispanic names.
I had never asked Bellarosa about the actual murder, and I only vaguely remembered the press accounts of it. But from what I could glean from the witness statements, Juan Carranza, driving his own car, a Corvette, left the Garden State Parkway at about noon on January fourteenth, at the Red Bank exit. With him was his girlfriend, Ramona Velarde. A car in front of the Corvette came to a stop on the single-lane exit ramp, and Carranza was forced to stop also. Two men then exited the car behind Carranza, walked right up to his car, and one of them fired a single bullet through his side window, striking Carranza in the face. The assassin then tried the driver's door, and finding it unlocked, he opened it and fired the remaining four bullets from the revolver into Carranza's head. The girlfriend was untouched. The assassin then threw the revolver on the girlfriend's lap, and he and his companion got into the front car that had blocked the exit ramp, abandoning their car behind Carranza's. The witnesses to this assassination were Ramona Velarde and four men who were in a car behind the car from which the assassins exited. Each of the four male witnesses stated frankly that they were Juan Carranza's bodyguards. I noted that none of them said they fired at the men who had bumped off their boss. In fact, they stated that they put Ramona Velarde in their car and jumped the curb onto the grass, driving around the assassins' abandoned car and the Corvette, but they made no attempt to pursue the assassins. The subtext here was that they recognized that their boss had been hit by the Italian mob, and they didn't want to be dead heroes. The New Jersey State Police determined that this rubout had federal drug and racketeering implications and contacted the FBI. Through an anonymous tip, Ramona Velarde was picked up, and she subsequently identified the four bodyguards, who were all picked up or surrendered within a few weeks. All of them agreed to become federal witnesses.
The issue of identification seemed to me a little vague. Ramona Velarde was only a few feet from the assassin, but I don't see how she could have seen his face if he was standing beside a low-slung Corvette. All she could have seen was the hand and the gun. Similarly, the assassin and his partner would have exited their car with their backs to the four bodyguards, who had let that car come between them and their boss. However, all four men stated that the assassin and his partner glanced back at them a few times as the two men stepped up to Carranza's Corvette. All four of the men said they recognized the face of Frank Bellarosa. Ramona Velarde picked Bellarosa's photo out of mug shots. Well, as I read this interesting account of gangland murder, it did certainly sound like a mob hit, Italian style. I mean, it was classical Mafia: the boxed-in automobile, the girlfriend left untouched, even the bodyguards left alone so that the hit didn't become a massacre, which would draw all sorts of unwanted negative press. And the abandoned car was stolen, of course, and also Italian style, the murder weapon was left behind and was clean as a whistle. The amateurs liked to use the same gun over and over again until somebody got caught with it, and ballistics showed it had about a dozen murders on it. The Italians bought clean guns, used them once, and dumped them immediately at the scene before strolling off.
I thought about this testimony I was reading in Bellarosa's Cadillac. It was quite possible that the murder had taken place exactly this way, and the witnesses were telling the truth, except for the identification of Frank Bellarosa. I'm no detective, but it doesn't take many brains to realize that a man such as Bellarosa, even if he wanted to commit a murder personally, wouldn't do it in broad daylight where half the population of the New York metropolitan area could identify his face. But apparently someone in the FBI office or the U.S. Attorney's office saw this murder as an opportunity to cause problems in the underworld. Therefore why not assign it to the number-one Mafia boss? And I thought, if Bellarosa was right that the murder was done by the Drug Enforcement Agency, then the DEA would most probably choose a modus operandi of the underworld, e.g. an Uzi submachine-gun attack to imitate Colombians, a knife or machete attack to imitate the Jamaicans, a bomb assassination as the Koreans had used a few times, or the cleanest, safest, and most easily imitated attack – a Mafia rubout.
I realized that what I was doing was formulating a defence in my mind, but beyond that I was trying to convince myself that I was defending an innocent man. Trying to be objective, trying to be that universal juror, I evaluated what I knew of the case so far and found that there was a reasonable doubt as to Frank Bellarosa's guilt.
I glanced at Bellarosa as I flipped through the indictment. He noticed and said to me, "They named the guys who testified against me. Right?" "Yes. Four men and one woman."
"Oh, yeah. Carranza's girlfriend. I remember that from the papers." He asked, "She said she saw me?"
"Yes." He nodded but said nothing.
I said to him, "They're all under the federal witness protection programme."
"That's good. Nobody can hurt them." He smiled.
I said to him, "They won't made good witnesses for a jury. They're not upright citizens."
He shrugged and went back to his newspaper.
Lenny stopped in front of a coffee shop on Broadway. Vinnie took coffee orders, then went inside to fetch four containers.
We drove through the Holland Tunnel into New Jersey, then came back into Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel.
The car phone in the rear rang, and Bellarosa motioned for me to answer it, so I did. "Hello?"
A familiar voice, a man, asked, "Is Mr Bellarosa there?"
John Sutter is a fast learner, so I replied, "No, he's at Mass. Who is this?"
Bellarosa chuckled.
The man answered my question with one of his own, "Is this John Sutter?"
"This is Mr Sutter's valet."
"I don't like your sense of humour, Mr Sutter."
"Most people don't, Mr Ferragamo. What can I do for you?" I looked at Bellarosa. "I would like your permission to speak to your client." Bellarosa already had his hand out for the phone, so I gave it to him. "Hello, Al… Yeah… Yeah, well, he's kind of new to this. You know?" He listened for a while, then said, "You ain't playing the game, either, goombah. You got no right to complain about this." He listened again, a bored expression on his face. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what? Look, you gotta do what you gotta do. Am I complaining? You hear me shooting my mouth off?"
I couldn't hear the other end of the conversation, of course, but I couldn't believe the end I was hearing. These guys were talking as if they'd just had a disagreement over a game of boccie ball or something. Bellarosa said, "You think I'm gonna use dirty money for bail? Check it out, Al. You find it's dirty, it's yours, and I'll come back to jail… Yeah. Save yourself some time. Don't get technical." He glanced at me, then said into the phone, "He's an okay guy. Get off his case. He's a real citizen. An important citizen. You don't fuck with him, Al. You fuck with him, you got serious problems.
Capisce?"
Me? Was he talking about me?
Bellarosa said to the U.S. Attorney, "I'm sorry you're pissed off, but you should just think about it. Okay?… Yeah. I'll do that. Catch you on TV tonight, right?" Bellarosa laughed. "Yeah. Okay. See ya." He hung up and went back to his newspaper.
Madonna mia. These people were crazy. I mean, it was as if they were playing at being Americans in public, but between themselves some sort of ancient ritual was taking place.
No one spoke for a while, then Bellarosa looked up from his paper and asked his boys, "Okay?"
Lenny replied, "I never spotted nobody, boss."
Bellarosa glanced at his watch, then asked me, "You hungry?"
"No."
"You need a drink?"
"Yes."
"Good. I got just the place." He said to Lenny, "Drive over to Mott Street.
We'll get a little lunch."
Gaffe Roma is a fairly famous spot in the heart of Little Italy. I'd been there a few times for dinner with out-of-towers. But it wasn't on Mott Street. I said to Bellarosa, "Mulberry Street."
"What?"
"Caffe Roma is on Mulberry Street."
"Oh, yeah. We're not going there. We're going to Giulio's on Mott Street."
I shrugged.
He saw that I didn't appreciate the significance of what he was saying, so he gave me a lesson. "Something else you got to remember, Counsellor – what you say you're doing and what you're doing don't have to be the same thing. Where you say you're going and where you're going are never the same place. You don't give information to people who don't need it or to people who could give it to other people who shouldn't have it. You're a lawyer. You know that." Indeed I did, but a lunch destination was not the kind of information I kept secret or lied about.
But then again, nobody wanted to shoot me at lunch.
Little Italy is not far from Foley Square and is also close to Police Plaza, the FBI headquarters at Federal Plaza, and the state and city criminal courts. These geographical proximate are a convenience to attorneys, law enforcement people, and occasionally to certain persons residing in Little Italy who might have official business with one of these government agencies. So it was that we could actually have pulled up in front of Giulio's Restaurant on Mott Street in Little Italy within five minutes of leaving Foley Square. But instead, because of other considerations, it took us close to an hour. On the other hand, it was only now noon, time for lunch.
Giulio's, I saw, was an old-fashioned restaurant located on the ground floor of one of those turn-of-the-century, six-storey tenement buildings bristling with fire escapes. There was a glass-panelled door to the left, and to the right, a storefront window that was half-covered by a red cafe curtain. Faded gold letters on the window spelled out the word GIULIO'S. There was nothing else in the window, no menus, no press clippings, and no credit-card stickers. The establishment did not look enticing or inviting. As I mentioned, I come to Little Italy now and then, usually with clients, as Wall Street is not far away. But I've never noticed this place, and if I had, I wouldn't have stepped inside. In truth, my clients (and I) prefer the slick Mulberry Street restaurants, filled with tourists and suburbanites who stare at one another, trying to guess who's Mafia.
Lenny drove off to park the car, and Vinnie entered the restaurant first. I guess he was the point man. I stood on the sidewalk with Bellarosa, who had his back to the brick wall and was looking up and down the street. I asked him, "Why are we standing outside?"
Bellarosa replied, "It's good to let them know you're coming."
"I see. And you really can't call ahead, can you?"
"No. You don't want to do that."
"Right." He never looked at me, but kept an eye on the block. There are many fine restaurants in Little Italy, all trying to keep a competitive edge. A shortcut to fame and fortune sometimes occurs when a man like don Bellarosa comes in and gets shot at his table. A terrible headline flashed in front of my eyes: DANDY DON AND MOUTHPIECE HIT.
I asked my lunch companion, "Has anyone been knocked off here?"
He glanced at me. "What? Oh… no. Yeah. Once. Yeah, back in the Prohibition days.
Long time ago. You like fried squid? Calamaretti fritti?"
"Probably not."
Vinnie opened the door and stuck his head out. "Okay." We entered. The restaurant was long and narrow, and the rows of tables had traditional red-checkered cloths. The floor was ancient white ceramic tile, and the ceiling was that pressed tin with glossy white paint on it. Three ceiling fans spun lazily, keeping the smell of garlic circulating. On the plain white, plaster walls were cheap prints, all showing scenes of sunny Italy. The place wasn't much to look at, but it was authentic.
There weren't many diners, and I could see waiters standing around in red jackets, all stealing glances at don Bellarosa. A man in a black suit rushed toward us, his hand prematurely extended, and he and Bellarosa greeted each other in Italian. Bellarosa called him Patsy, but did not actually introduce him to me, though he was obviously the maitre d'.
Patsy showed us to a corner table in the rear. It was a nice comfortable table with good fields of fire.
Lenny had arrived, and he and Vinnie took a table near the front window with a good view of the door. Now we had interlocking fields of fire, which was the first requirement for a pleasant lunch at Giulio's.
Patsy was obsequious, the waiters bowed and bowed and bowed as we walked by, and a man and a woman, apparently the owner and his wife, ran out of the kitchen and stopped just short of prostrating themselves on the floor. Everyone was grinning except Frank, who had this sort of Mafia poker face on that I'd never seen before. I said to him, "Come here often?"
"Yeah." He said something to the owner in Italian, and the man ran off, perhaps to kill himself, I thought, but he returned shortly with a bottle of Chianti and two glasses. Patsy uncorked the wine but Frank poured. Finally, after a lot of fussing around our table, everyone left us alone. Frank banged his glass against mine and said, "Salute!"
"Cheers," I replied, and drank the wine, which tasted like grappa diluted with tannic acid. Yuk!
Frank smacked his lips. "Aahh… that's good. Special stuff. Direct from the other side."
They should have left it there.
A few more people had entered, and I looked around. The clientele at lunch hour seemed to be mostly locals, mostly men, and mostly old, wearing baggy suits without ties. I could overhear a mixture of English and Italian around me. There were a few younger men in good suits, and like a vampire who can tell its own kind at a glance, I recognized them as Wall Street types, trendy twerps who had 'discovered' Giulio's the way Columbus discovered America, i.e., it ain't there until I find it.
Here and there I noticed tables at which were men who I thought might be in Frank's business. And in fact, Frank nodded to a few of these people, who nodded back. Despite the informality of the place and the fact that it was warm, only the Wall Street twerps and a few of the old men had removed their jackets. The rest of the clientele, I was sure, were either wearing shoulder holsters or wanted everyone to think they were. Frank, I knew, could not be armed, as he had just been through a booking and search. Lenny and Vinnie, I knew, were armed. I was basically unarmed, except for my three-hundred-dollar Montblanc pen and my American Express Gold Card.
I said to my client, "Are you satisfied with the way it went this morning?"
He shrugged. "It went like it went. I got no complaints with you."
"Fine. Do you want to discuss the charge against you? The defence?"
"I told you, it's bullshit. It's not getting to trial."
"It could. Ferragamo had five witnesses for the grand jury. Those witnesses said enough to implicate you in the murder of Juan Carranza." "Ferragamo's probably got something on them. They maybe saw the hit, but they didn't see my face there."
I nodded. "Okay. I believe you."
"Good. Then you did the right thing today."
"No. I committed perjury."
"Don't worry about it."
The owner, whose name was Lucio, came by with a bowl of fried onion rings, and a waiter put down two small plates.
"Mangia," Frank said as he took a clawful of the onion rings.
"No, thanks."
"Come on. Eat."
They weren't onion rings, of course, but I was trying to pretend they were. I put a few of the things on my plate, then put one in my mouth and washed it down with the Chianti. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
There was a big loaf of Italian bread sitting right on the tablecloth, unsliced, and Frank ripped it apart with his big mitts and flipped a few pieces my way. I didn't see a bread plate and probably never would. I ate some of the bread, which was the best I've ever had.
Between chews, Bellarosa said, "You see what I mean about how law-abiding I am? Mancuso came in by himself, and I'm waiting for the fucking cuffs. Now how do you think they take a spic out of one of those social clubs? They go in there with a fucking battalion, armed to the fucking teeth, and they got to beat off spies and drag the guy out screaming. Half the time somebody gets a split head or gets shot. You see the difference? You think Mancuso is a fucking hero? No. He knew I wasn't going to put him away."
"Still, Frank, that took balls."
He smiled. "Yeah. That little, skinny wop bangs on my door and says, 'You're under arrest.' Yeah." He added, "But you think Mancuso is going to be a star? No fucking way. Ferragamo runs his show his way, and he's the star. You'll see on the news."
Unbidden, the waiter brought over a bowl of what looked like scallops covered with red sauce. Bellarosa shovelled some on my plate beside the fried squid. He said, "This is scungilli. Like… conch. Like a shellfish. Sono buone." "Can I order something from the menu?"
"Try that. Try it." He dug into his whatever it was. "Eat. Come on." I positioned my wine and a piece of bread, swallowed a piece of the conch, drank the Chianti, and bit on the bread.
"You like it?"
"Sono buone."
He laughed.
We ate, drank, and talked awhile. No one offered us a menu, and I noticed that most of the customers were not using menus but were talking food with the waiters in a mixture of Italian and English. The waiters seemed friendly, happy, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, patient, and helpful. Obviously they weren't French.
It struck me as I sat there that this restaurant could have been a hundred years old, older than The Creek, older than The Seawanhaka Corinthian. And very little in the restaurant had changed, not the decor, the cuisine, or the clientele. In fact, Little Italy was a sort of time warp, a bastion of Italian immigrant culture that seemed to be resisting change and assimilation against all odds. If I had to bet on what would last into the next century – the Gold Coast or Little Italy – I'd bet on Little Italy. Similarly, I'd put my money on Giulio's over The Creek.
I regarded Frank Bellarosa as he ate. He looked more comfortable here, obviously, than he had in The Creek. But beyond that, he belonged here, was part of this place, part of the local colour, the fabric and decor of Giulio's, and Mott Street. I watched him, his tie loosened, a napkin stuffed in his collar, and his hands darting around the table, relaxed in the knowledge that no one was going to take anything away from him; not his food, nor his pride. We were working on our second bottle of Chianti, and I said to him, "You're from Brooklyn. Not Little Italy."
"Yeah. But most of Brooklyn's gone. My old neighbourhood is gone. This is still the place. You know?"
"How so?"
"I mean, like every Italian in New York comes here at least once in his life. Most come once or twice a year. It makes them feel good, you know, because they live in the suburbs now, and maybe their old neighbourhood is full of blacks or Spanish, or something, so they can't go back there, so they come here. This is everybody's old neighbourhood. Capisce? Well, maybe not your old neighbourhood." He laughed. "Where you from?"
"Locust Valley."
"Yeah. You don't have far to go home."
"It gets farther every year."
"Well, I like to come down here, you know, to walk on the streets, smell the bakeries, smell the cheese, smell the restaurants. Lots of people come for San Gennaro – you know, the Feast of San Gennaro, the patron saint of Napoli… Naples. They come for St Anthony's feast, too. They come here to eat Italian, see Italians, feel Italian. You understand?"
"Is that why you come here?"
"Yeah. Sometimes. I have some business here, too. I see people here. I got my club here."
"The Italian Rifle Club?"
"Yeah."
"Can you take me there?"
"Sure. You took me to The Creek." He smiled. "I take Jack Weinstein there. He loves it. I get him drunk and take him down to the basement and let him blast the targets. I got a silhouette target down there that says 'Alphonse Ferragamo.'" He laughed.
I smiled. "I think they throw darts at my picture in the IRS office."
"Yeah? Darts? Fuck darts." He stuck his finger at me and cocked his thumb.
"Ba-boom, ba-boom. That's how you make holes in targets." He finished another glass of wine and repoured for both of us. The Chianti was getting better. By the third bottle it would taste like Brunello di Montalcino, 1974.
I looked around the restaurant again. During my mental absence it had gotten full and was noisy now, lively and hopping. I said to Bellarosa, "I like this place."
"Good."
Actually, I was feeling better. Sort of like the high you get after a close call. I couldn't come to terms with the perjury, you understand, but I was working on it. In fact, I took my daybook out of my pocket and, for the first time, turned to January fourteenth. I write in ink, partly because, as an attorney, I know that my daybook is a quasi-legal document and, therefore, should be done in ink in the event it ever had to be shown as evidence. On the other hand, I always use the same pen, the Montblanc with the same nib and the same black Montblanc ink, so if I had to add something after the fact, I could. But I don't like to do that.
Anyway, with some real trepidation, knowing a lot rode on this, I looked at the space for January fourteenth and read: Light snow. Home in A.M., lunch with Susan at Creek, Locust Valley office P.M., meet with staff, 4 P.M. I stared at the entry awhile. Home in A.M. Did I really ride that day? Maybe I did. Did I ride over to Alhambra? Perhaps. Did I see three mafiosi walking around? I said I did.
I began to close the book, but then I noticed the entry for January fifteenth:
7:40 A.M., Eastern flight #119, West Palm Beach. If I had gone to Florida on the morning of the fourteenth, Ferragamo and the FBI would eventually have discovered that by subpoenaing my daybook, or by other means. And John Sutter would be sharing a cell with Frank Bellarosa. But I was in the clear; Home in A.M. The Sutter luck was holding. If I were a Catholic, I would have crossed myself and said the Rosary. I put the book in my pocket. Bellarosa said, "You got someplace else to go?"
"No. Just checking something."
"Yeah? Does it check out?"
"Yes, it does."
"Good." He looked me in the eye. "Grazie," he said, and that was all the thanks or acknowledgement I would ever get, and more than I wanted. Bellarosa said, "I want to take the women here with us at night. You'll like it at night. This old ginzo plays the little squeeze box" – he pantomimed someone playing an accordion – "whaddaya call that? The concertina. And they got this old fat donna who sings like an angel. Your wife will love it." I asked, "Are you safe to be with?"
"Hey, what's this thing you got about that?" He tapped his chest. "If I'm the target, I'm the target. You think anybody gives a shit about you? Just don't get in the way and don't be looking at people's faces. Capisce?" He laughed and slapped my shoulder. "You're funny."
"So are you." I knocked back another glass of that nectar of the gods and asked him, "But how about the other people? The Spanish? The Jamaicans? Do they play by the rules?"
He was chewing on olive pits now and spoke as he chewed. "I'll tell you one rule they play by. They come into Little Italy to make a hit, there won't be a fucking black or Spanish left in New York. They understand that rule. Don't worry about them around here."
I've always like New York because of its ethnic diversity, this great American melting pot. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses… I've forgotten the rest of it. Maybe we've all forgotten it. Bellarosa leaned toward me and said, "As long as this stuff bothers you, you ever think about getting a gun permit?"
"It's not on my "must do" list, no."
"Well, if you're going to be around, you know, you should think about it."
"Why?"
He quoted. " 'Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.' Who said that?"
"Mother Teresa?"
He laughed. "Come on. Machiavelli. Right?"
"Right. Do I get combat pay?"
"Sure. Hey, I owe you fifty large. Right?"
"No. I don't want it."
"That don't matter. You got it."
A waiter set down a platter of antipasto. There seemed to be no sequence to this meal, at least none that I could determine.
Bellarosa pointed to the items on the plate. "That's prosciutto – you know that stuff, right? This is stracchino, and this is taleggio. This cheese here has worms in it, so I won't make you eat it."
"Excuse me?"
"Worms. Little worms. You know? They give the cheese a flavour. You don't eat the worms. You crumble the cheese like this and get the worms out. See? See that one?"
I stood. "Where is the men's room?" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Back there." I walked to the men's room, a horrible little place, and washed my face and hands. Worms?
The door opened and Lenny came in. He stood at the sink beside me and combed his greasy hair. He asked me, "You enjoyin' your lunch, Counsellor?" "Shouldn't you be out there keeping an eye on the door?" "Vinnie got two eyes." He washed his hands. "Fucking city. Everything's got dirt on it." He dried his hands on a towel roll that had dirt on it. "You're the don's lawyer, so you're not wired. Correct?"
"Wired? Are you out of your mind?"
"No. Sometimes people got wires. Sometimes they come in the shitter to drop a wire, sometimes to pick up a wire. If I see people go to the shitter when they're talking to the don, I think wire, I think gun."
"I think you've been watching too much TV."
He chuckled. "So? You mind?" He held out his clean hands toward me. I stood there a moment, then nodded. The son of a bitch gave me a thorough frisking, then said, "Okay. Just checking. Everybody got a job." I put a quarter on the sink. "That's for you, Lenny. Good job." I left. Boy, I was really getting the hang of it now. I returned to the table and saw that the worm cheese had been removed from the antipasto.
Frank said, "Yeah. I got rid of that for you. You find the back'ouse okay?"
"The what?"
He laughed. "The back house. Back'ouse, they say in Little Italy. From when it was out back. You know?"
"Yes, I found it." I saw Lenny return to his table, glaring at me as he sat. I asked Bellarosa, "Did you send him in to frisk me?"
"Nah. He just does it. Look, I know Mancuso tried to get to you, and I trust you more than I trust a lot of my own people. But when I know I'm talking to a guy who's clean, I feel better."
"Mr Bellarosa, a lawyer cannot, may not, will not, act as an agent for the government against his own client."
"Yeah. But maybe you're writing a book." He laughed. "Fuck it. Let's eat. Here. This is called manteche. No worms." He put a piece of the cheese on a biscuit he called frisalle and held it near my mouth. "Come on. Try that." I tried it. It wasn't bad. I sipped some Chianti and popped a black olive in my mouth. These people dined out differently from what I was used to. For instance, none of the previous plates had been cleared, and Bellarosa returned to his fried squid.
I said to him, "Mancuso told me you once beat one of your men with a pipe and broke every bone in his body."
He looked up from his squid. "Yeah? Why'd he tell you that? What's he trying to do? He trying to make me sound like a bad guy?"
"Well, that certainly didn't show you in the best light."
"Mancuso should learn how to keep his fucking mouth shut."
"The issue is not Mancuso, Frank, The issue is you beating a man with a pipe." "That's not an issue." He pulled apart some bread and dipped it in the red sauce as he spoke. "When you're young, you sometimes do things you don't want to do, but got to do. I wasn't the boss when that thing happened. The boss was a guy who you'd know. He's dead now. But when he said to me, 'Frank, you got to do this or you got to do that,' I did it. Capisce?"
I didn't reply.
"Just like in the army or in the church. You follow orders. I give the orders now, and I don't like the rough stuff. Times are changing. Not everybody wants to get into this business anymore. You got to treat your people better." "At least offer them Blue Cross and Blue Shield."
He thought that was funny. "Yeah. If you break their legs, they're covered.
Yeah. Blue Cross."
There was no reason to pursue the bone smashing incident; it was only important that he knew I knew about his peculiar managerial style. In truth, there were times when I would have liked to beat my partners with a lead pipe, but that would only give them an excuse to do the same to me. And that made me think of Signer Niccolo Machiavelli. I said to Frank, "An enemy must either be caressed or annihilated."
He looked up from his food. "Yeah. That's the problem with pissing somebody off, Counsellor. I'm happy you understand that. In my business, you treat people with respect or you put them away. Now that thing with the pipe, for instance, that was not a good idea. That was one pissed-off paesano, so when he was feeling better again, I knew I had to settle that. You know? He had to be caressed or annihilated. You don't leave people around like that with vendettas against you."
"So you bought him dinner and gave him a raise."
"Yeah." He thought a moment, then added, "I'll tell you the main thing that's wrong with what the priests teach you – the main thing wrong with religion. It's the bullshit about turning the other cheek. You do that and everybody's gonna take a pop at your face. But sometimes you got to take a hit. Like with Ferragamo. There's not a fucking thing I can do to him. All I can do is make sure there's not a fucking thing he can do to me. Understand? And if you can't get rid of a guy, you don't piss him off, even if he's on your case." "But you piss Ferragamo off just by being alive."
He smiled. "Yeah. That's his problem. But you piss him off by smart-assing him."
"So what? There's not a thing he can do to me."
"Maybe yes, maybe no. So maybe he comes after your friends. Maybe you want to give him a call and discuss the case. He would like you to do that. He would like you to show a little respect.
"The man is an asshole, Frank, and everybody in New York knows it."
"That's why he needs all the respect he can get."
We both laughed at that one. Bellarosa said, "Hey, maybe the son of a bitch will be the Governor someday, or even the President. Be nice to him. He'll make you the Attorney General."
In fact, by taking Mr Frank Bellarosa as a client, I would never be considered for any public office. Not that I want to be a judge or to run for the State Assembly or anything like that, but in the back of every lawyer's mind is that possibility. I was once elected to the Lattingtown Village Board, but after this fiasco, I would be well-advised to stay out of public life for a decade or so. Frank said, "So maybe you'll call him. I'll give you his private number." I looked at him. "Frank, he's not going to drop any charges against you after today."
"Yeah, I know that. I'm not talking about that. I thought you understood."
"You mean, you want me to apologize to him?"
"You don't have to say, 'Mr Ferragamo, I'm sorry I made you look like an asshole and a fool.' In fact, you don't mention that. You just talk to him about the case with respect. He'll forgive you, because he's an asshole. Capisce?" Here was a client who wanted me to call the prosecution – not to try to make a deal or plea bargain, but to apologize for beating his pants off in court. Mamma mia, I don't remember any of this from Harvard Law. I replied, "I'll call him. And I'll be respectful toward his office."
"There you go. Sometimes assholes hold important positions. You think every Caesar was a bright guy? Whaddaya gonna do? You got to deal with it." He poured more wine. "Ready for your pasta?"
We'd been there an hour already, and I had consumed a lot of food, mostly bread, cheese, and olives, which were the only edible things served so far. Also the Chianti was working its way through my duodenum. I said, "I'll pass on pasta." "No. You have pasta. They have lingue de passero here – the sparrow's tongue."
"Can I get meatballs instead?"
"It's not real sparrow tongue. It's the name of the pasta. You think we eat sparrow's tongue?"
"You eat worms, Frank, and sheep's brains."
"You don't eat the worms. You'll have sparrow's tongue. It comes from a little town called Faro San Martino in Abruzzo – the province of Brutus. That's where my wife's family is from. They're very thickheaded there. But they have magnificent pasta." He put his thumb and forefinger to his lips and kissed. "Magnifico. And we're gonna have it with the puttanesca sauce. The whore's sauce."
"Say again?"
"Whore. Whore. I don't know why they call it that. Maybe because it's got anchovies in it." He laughed. "You understand?"
"I believe I do.",
He raised a finger and a waiter appeared. Bellarosa made a sweeping motion with his hand, and the waiter snapped his fingers, and two busboys hurried over and cleared away round one.
I settled back in my chair and had some water. I noticed that the Wall Street types had left, and so had some of the local tradesmen. But the old men stayed on, sipping wine or coffee. Also still present were the men who looked like Frank. Obviously, there were two kinds of lunches served here: American Italian and Italian Italian.
Frank stood and excused himself but did not head for the back'ouse. Instead, he walked to a table where four men in dark suits sat. They greeted him cordially but with obvious reserve. I watched as a waiter ran over with a wineglass and one of the men poured Bellarosa some Chianti. They all touched glasses and I heard them mumble, 'Salute.' They drank, then they all hunched forward over the table and said grace. Well, maybe not.
Good Lord, I thought, these people really exist. I mean, right there, not twenty feet away, were five mafiosi drinking wine in a restaurant in Little Italy. I was sorry I hadn't brought my video camera. Look, kids, here's Daddy having lunch with a Mafia don. Now the don is walking over to talk to his mobster friends. See? Okay, the camera's swinging around to those two men near the door. See them? They're bodyguards. See the door? Close-up of the door. Okay, back to the table with the Mafia men.
I watched them, sans video camera. They all talked with their hands. One of them made a motion as if he was pushing something down into the table, another one touched his forefinger to his right eye, Bellarosa tapped the tips of his fingers on the table, and another guy flicked his thumb under his chin. One thing they didn't do with their hands, however, was to point at or touch one another.
I noticed, too, that their expressions were for the most part stoic, sort of that Mafia poker face that Frank put on when he walked in here. But now and then their eyes or their mouths would convey something without revealing anything. I had no idea what was being discussed, of course, but I assumed that Bellarosa was telling them about his morning. Maybe they knew about the arrest by now, if it was on the radio or if they had another source of information. In any event, they would be interested in the outcome of his court appearance. The fact that he was in Giulio's was a point in his favour regarding any rumours floating around town that he was making deals with Alphonse Ferragamo. The other order of business would be the Juan Carranza problem. By now, I could actually imagine a conversation among these people. Frank was saying something like, "We gotta stick together on this Carranza thing. Okay? We don't want a bunch of spies making us do things we don't wanna do. Right? And we don't want the fucking Feds to start something between us. You know? I don't wanna see no Italian blood spilled over a bunch of spies. Agreed? We don't want to hurt business, so if we gotta go to the mattresses with these spies, we hit them hard and fast. Understand? We don't make no separate deals with spies, chinks, melanzane, Feds, DAs, or nobody. Capisce?"
How's that? The scary thing is that four months ago, if I'd heard that conversation, I wouldn't have understood half of it. Now I could make it up. Madonn'. What was happening to me? I didn't know, but it was interesting. I regarded Lenny and Vinnie at their nice table for two in the corner. They hadn't had any alcohol as far as I could see, but they were puffing up a smoke screen and drinking cup after cup of coffee. The Italians seem to have the capacity to sit for hours at a table, talking and consuming things. Lenny and Vinnie seemed content doing nothing except sitting and watching the door. But I guess watching the door was about as important a job as there was in Giulio's at the moment. Both of them, I noticed, were also watching the remaining clientele, especially the four men with Frank. But the lingerers in the restaurant all seemed to be known by the waiters and maitre d', and I thought it was unlikely that one of them would suddenly stand up and start blasting away. No, it was the door that had to be watched. So, to help Vinnie and Lenny, I watched the door, too.
After about fifteen minutes, Frank returned to our table. "I'm sorry, Counsellor. I had some business there."
"No problem."
The pasta came and Frank dug right in. "Whaddaya think? Smell like a whore's pussy? Yes? No?"
"No comment."
I picked at the pasta, which I guess did resemble little sparrow tongues.
Actually, it was quite good, including the fishy sauce, but I was stuffed.
Bellarosa tore off a piece of bread and actually stuck it in my dish.
"Here, dunk. Don't be shy."
I don't even like it when Susan takes food off my plate. But I took the bread from him and ate it.
I glanced at my watch. "Do you want to call your wife?"
"Yeah. Later."
"Maybe we should let her know you're out on bail."
"She's okay."
"She was upset after you left."
"Yeah? I told her to stay upstairs. You see? They don't fucking listen anymore."
"Nevertheless, a call – "
"What made you think of my wife? The puttanesca sauce?" He laughed. "Is that what made you think of calling my wife?"
I wasn't going to touch that one. I played around with the pasta and sipped the wine.
Bellarosa finished his pasta and spilled some of mine onto his plate, commenting, "You're not eating. You don't like it?"
"I'm stuffed." I glanced at my watch. It was two-thirty. I informed Bellarosa, "I told your wife I'd have you home this afternoon."
"Yeah? Why? I told you, we got to stay around here. I got more people to talk to. I want you to say something to the newspeople later. We got a nice big suite at the Plaza. We'll hang around town for a few days."
"A few days?"
"Yeah."
"Frank, I have a business, appointments -"
"What can I tell ya? The shit hit the fan, Counsellor. I'll make it up to you." Actually, I had no appointments and nearly no business left to worry about. And for fifty large, I could stick around for a few days.
Frank took the rest of my pasta. "Yeah, we'll send home for some clothes. Your wife will pack some things for you."
"Will she?"
"Sure. That's what wives are for."
Not my wife, goombah.
He waved his hands over the plates as if he wanted them to go away by themselves, but a waiter popped up out of the floor and whisked them away. Another waiter brought two plain salads. Frank said, "Clears your palate." He sprinkled oil and vinegar over his greens and tomatoes, then did the same for me. "Eat," he said.
I poked at the salad.
"Eat it. The vinegar helps you digest."
"What does the oil do?"
"Helps you shit. Mangia."
The salad I could handle, but I said, "Don't order any more food for me." "You have to have the main course. What did you come here for?" Bellarosa called over the waiter. They discussed the main course in Italian, then Bellarosa turned to me. "Whaddaya like? Veal? Chicken? Pork? Fish?" "Sheep's head."
"Yeah?" He said something to the waiter and I heard the word capozella. They both laughed. He turned to me. "They got a special chicken dish here. Nice and light. Okay? We'll share it."
"Fine."
Bellarosa ordered, then turned back to me. "This dumb wop walks into a pizzeria, you know, and says to the guy, "I want a whole pizza." And the guy says, "You want it cut in eight pieces or twelve?" And the dumb wop says, "Twelve, I'm really hungry."' Bellarosa laughed. "Twelve slices. I'm really hungry. Get it?" "I think so."
"Tell me one."
"Okay. This Wasp walks into Brooks Brothers, you know, and he says to the guy, 'How much is that three-piece pinstripe suit?' And the guy says, 'Six hundred dollars.' And the Wasp says, 'Fine, I'll take it.'" I went back to my salad. Bellarosa let a few seconds pass, then said, "That's it? That's the joke? That's not funny."
"That's the point."
"What's the point?"
"Wasps aren't funny."
He processed that a moment, then said. "You're funny."
"No one else thinks so."
He shrugged.
We drank awhile, and the nice little chicken dish came, and it was enough to feed half the dining room in The Creek. Bellarosa spooned the stuff onto two plates. "This is called pollo scarpariello. Say it."
"Pollo… scarp…"
"Scarpariello. Chicken, shoemaker style. Maybe a shoemaker invented it. Maybe they make it with old shoes."
I turned over a piece of meat with my fork. "What part of the chicken is that?" "That's sausage. You make it with sausage, too. It's sauteed in oil and garlic, with mushrooms."
"That does sound light."
"Eat it. Here, try this. This is escarole with more oil and garlic. The garlic gets that pussy smell outa your mouth. Here. You got to try everything." I called the waiter over. "Bring me a bottle of that water with the bubbles in it and a glass of ice."
"Yes, sir."
He brought a green bottle of Pellegrino, and I made a mental note of it for the future. I poured and drank three glasses of the sparkling water while Frank ate the chicken and sausage.
It was nearly three-thirty but the place was not completely empty. Frank's four friends had left, but a few old men sat around with coffee and newspapers. Two old guys were actually snoozing. Vinnie and Lenny were still drinking coffee and smoking.
The door opened, and I instinctively tensed. A man entered, about fifty years old, wearing a dark grey suit and sunglasses. Behind him was a younger man whose eyes darted around the tables. I poked Bellarosa's arm and he followed my gaze to the door. I glanced at Vinnie and Lenny and saw they were on the case. The two men who had come in were aware of Bellarosa's bodyguards and didn't make any abrupt movements, but just stood there near the front door looking at Bellarosa and me. The waiters stood still, staring at their shoes. The few old men in the place gave the two intruders a glance, then went back to their coffee and newspapers.
Frank stood and stepped away from the table, and the man with the sunglasses took them off and came toward Bellarosa. They met in the middle of the restaurant and embraced, but I could see it was more a demonstration of respect than affection.
Frank and his buddy sat at an empty table. The man's partner, or bodyguard or whatever, took a seat with Vinnie and Lenny at their suggestion. I turned my attention back to Bellarosa and his paesano. If you watched these people long enough, you could figure out the pecking order. Whereas Frank the Bishop Bellarosa seemed to have no peers this side of Augustus Caesar, this man who had just come in was close. The man had lit Bellarosa's cigarette, but he did it in such a way as to suggest that he didn't like doing it and might not do it again. Bellarosa, for his part, purposely blew smoke at the man. They were both smiling, but I wouldn't want anyone to smile at me like that. The conversation lasted five minutes, then the man patted Bellarosa's shoulder as if he were congratulating him on getting out of the slammer. They both stood, embraced again, and the man left with his friend. The waiters reappeared. I relaxed a bit, but I noticed that Lenny and Vinnie had their eyes glued to the door.
Frank sat down across from me. "That was a guy who used to work for me."
"The guy whose bones you broke?"
"No. Another guy."
"He looked familiar. Is his picture in the papers sometimes?"
"Sometimes."
I could see that Frank Bellarosa was a bit distracted. Obviously, that man had said something that upset my client. But whatever it was, I would probably never know about it.
It was apparent to me, however, that don Bellarosa was doing some politicking, some public relations on his own behalf, and that he had more personal appearances to make. I had the sense, too, that this was galling to him, but he was going to do it just the same. He might not compromise or make deals with the law or with blacks or Hispanics or with women. But he had to deal with his own kind, and he had to do it with just the right balance of force and respect. Bellarosa seemed to have come out of his pensive mood and he said to me, "Hey, you drink cappuccino, espresso, or American?"
"American."
He signalled a waiter and gave an order. The coffee came and behind it was a man carrying a tray of pastry. Mamma mia, I couldn't even swallow my own saliva anymore. But good old Frank, playing both host and waiter, insisted on describing each of the pastries before asking me to pick two for myself. There was no use declining, so I picked two, and he told me I didn't want those two and picked two others for me.
I nibbled at the pastry, which was good enough to find room for, and I also got my coffee down. We chatted with Patsy, with Lucio and his wife, and with a few of the waiters. Everyone seemed happy that the meal was coming to a bloodless conclusion. Patsy smiled at me. "You like everything?" "Very good."
"You come back for dinner. Okay?"
"Sure will."
Lucio and his wife were not smooth like Patsy, but I tried to draw them out.
"How long have you owned this place?"
Lucio replied, "It was my father's restaurant, and his father's restaurant."
"Your grandfather was Giulio?"
"Yes. He came from the other side and opened his restaurant, right here." He pointed to the floor.
"In what year?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe 1900."
I nodded. A real slick entrepreneur would have made the most of that: Giulio's; family-owned on Mott Street since 1899. (The last century always sounds better.) But I had the impression that Lucio was concerned only with the day's fare and his customers' satisfaction a meal at a time. Maybe that's why he was successful, like his father and his father's father.
The chef came out, complete with apron and chef's hat, which he removed prior to bowing to the don. Good Lord, you would have thought Bellarosa was a movie star or nobility. Actually, he was even more important than that; he was mafioso, and these people, mostly from Sicily and Naples, I suspected, had good ancestral memories.
We chatted a minute longer. They all could not have been friendlier, but nevertheless I felt a bit out of place, though not uncomfortable. Lucio and company could tell, of course, that I was an important person, but not an important Italian person. I felt actually like an American tourist in Italy. Frank stood and I stood, and the chairs were pulled away for us. Everyone was grinning wider as they held their breaths. A minute more and they could all collapse on the floor.
I realized that the only thing missing from this meal was the bill. But then Frank took a wad of cash from his pants pocket and began throwing fifties around the table. He hit the chef with a fifty, Patsy with a fifty, and three waiters with a fifty each. He even called over two young busboys and slipped them each a tenner. The man knew how to take care of people. We all bid each other buon giorno and ciao.
Lenny was already gone, and Vinnie was outside checking the street. I saw Lenny pull the Cadillac up in front of the restaurant, and Vinnie opened the rear car door while we were still inside the restaurant. Vinnie motioned through the glass door, and it was only then that Bellarosa exited the restaurant. I was right behind him but not too close. He slid into the backseat and I got in beside him. Vinnie jumped into the front and Lenny pulled quickly away. And this guy wanted to take the wives here? Get serious, Frank. But maybe he was just taking normal precautions. I mean, maybe even when peace reigned in the regions of the underworld, Frank Bellarosa was just a careful man. Maybe I would take Susan here with the Bellarosas. Couldn't hurt. Right? We travelled south on Mott Street, which is one-way like all of the narrow streets in the old part of Manhattan. Frank said to Lenny, "Plaza Hotel." Lenny cut west on Canal and swung north on Mulberry, driving through the heart of Little Italy. Bellarosa stared out the window awhile, recharging his Italian psyche. I wasn't sure, but I suspected that he did not walk these streets freely; that, like a celebrity, he saw most of the world through tinted car-windows. Somehow I felt sorry for him.
He turned to me and said, "I've been thinking. Maybe you had enough of this shit."
Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. I didn't reply.
He went on, "You did what I needed you to do. You got me sprung. You know? Jack Weinstein can take over from here. He knows how to deal with those scumbags in the U.S. Attorney's office."
"It's up to you, Frank."
"Yeah. This could get messy. You got a nice law practice, you got a nice family. You got friends. People are gonna bust your balls. You and your wife go take a nice vacation someplace."
What a nice man. I wondered what he was up to. I said, "It's your decision, Frank."
"No, it's your decision now. I don't want you to feel pressured. No problem either way. You want, I'll drop you off at the train station. You go home." I guess it was time for me to bail out or take an oath of loyalty. The man was a manipulator. But I already knew that. I said, "Maybe you're right. You don't need me anymore."
He patted my shoulder. "Right. I don't need you. I like you." Just when I think I've got this guy figured out, I don't. So we went to the Plaza Hotel.
What I didn't know was that half the Mafia in New York were going to show up that night.
The Plaza is my favourite hotel in New York, and I was glad that Frank and I shared the same taste in something, since I was apparently going to be there awhile.
We checked into a large three-bedroom suite overlooking Central Park. The staff seemed to appreciate who we were – or who Bellarosa was – but they were not as obvious about it as the paesanos at Giulio's, and no one seemed particularly nervous.
Frank Bellarosa, Vinnie Adamo, Lenny Patrelli, and John Whitman Sutter sat in the spacious living room of the suite. Room service delivered coffee and sambuca, and Pellegrino water for me (which I discovered is an antidote for Italian overindulgence). By now it was twenty minutes to five, and I assumed we all wanted to catch the five-o'clock news on television. I said to Frank, "Do you want to call your wife before five?"
"Oh, yeah." He picked up the telephone on the end table and dialled. "Anna? Oh…" He chuckled. "How you doin' there? Didn't recognize your voice. Yeah. I'm okay. I'm in the Plaza."
He listened for a few seconds, then said, "Yeah. Out on bail. No big deal. Your husband did a terrific job." He winked at me, then listened a bit more and said, "Yeah, well, we went for a little lunch, saw some people. First chance I had to call… No, don't wake her. Let her sleep. I'll call later." He listened again, then said, "Yeah. He's here with me." He nodded his head while my wife spoke to him, then said to her, "You want to talk to him?" Bellarosa glanced at me, then said into the phone, "Okay. Maybe he'll talk to you later. Listen, we got to stay here a few days… Yeah. Pack some stuff for him, and tell Anna I want my blue suit and grey suit, the ones I had made in Rome… Yeah. And shirts, ties, underwear, and stuff. Give everything to Anthony and let him send somebody here with it. Tonight. Okay?… Turn the news on. See what they got to say, but don't believe a word of it… Yeah." He laughed, then listened. "Yeah… Okay… Okay… See you later." He hung up, then almost as an afterthought, he said to me, "Your wife sends her love."
To whom?
There was a knock on the door, and Vinnie jumped up and disappeared into the foyer. Lenny drew his pistol and held it in his lap. Presently, a room service waiter appeared wheeling a table on which was a bottle of champagne, a cheese board, and a bowl of fruit. The waiter said, "Compliments of the manager, sir." Bellarosa motioned to Vinnie, who tipped the waiter, who bowed and backed out.
Bellarosa said to me, "You want some champagne?"
"No."
"You wanna call your wife back and tell her what you need?"
"No."
"I'll dial it for you. Here…" He picked up the telephone. "You go in your room for privacy. Here, I'll get her."
"Later, Frank. Hang up."
He shrugged and hung up the phone.
Vinnie turned on the television to the five-o'clock news. I hadn't expected a lead story, but there was the anchorman, Jeff Jones, saying, "Our top story, Frank Bellarosa, reputed head of the largest of New York's five crime families, was arrested at his palatial Long Island mansion early this morning by the FBI. Bellarosa was charged in a sealed sixteen-count federal indictment in the murder of Juan Carranza, an alleged Colombian drug lord who was killed in a mob-style rubout on the Garden State Parkway on January fourteenth of this year." Jeff Jones went on, reading the news off the teleprompter as if it were all news to him. Where do they get these guys? Jones said, "And in a startling development, Judge Sarah Rosen released Bellarosa on five million dollars' bail after the reputed gang leader's attorney, John Sutter, offered himself as an alibi witness for his client."
Jones babbled on a bit about this. I wondered if Susan recalled the morning of January fourteenth. It didn't matter if she did or not, since I knew she would cover me so I could cover Frank Bellarosa. Oh, what tangled webs we weave, and so forth. Mr Salem taught me that in sixth grade.
Jeff Jones was saying now, "We have Barry Freeman live at Frank Bellarosa's Long Island estate. Barry?"
The scene flashed to Alhambra's gates, and Barry Freeman said, "This is the home of Frank Bellarosa. Many of the estates here on Long Island's Gold Coast have names, and this house, sitting on two hundred acres of trees, meadows, and gardens, is called Alhambra. And here at the main gates of the estate is the guard booth – there behind me – which is actually a gatehouse in which live two, maybe more of Bellarosa's bodyguards."
The camera panned in on the gatehouse and Freeman said, "We've pushed the buzzer outside there and we've hollered and shaken the gates, but no one wants to talk to us."
The camera's telescopic lens moved in, up the long driveway, and the screen was filled with a fuzzy picture of the main house. Freeman said, "In this mansion lives Frank the Bishop Bellarosa and his wife, Anna." I heard Frank's voice say, "What the fuck's this got to do with anything?" Freeman went on for a while, describing the lifestyle of the rich and infamous resident of Alhambra. Freeman said, "Bellarosa is known to his friends and to the media as Dandy Don."
Bellarosa said, "Nobody better call me that to my face." Vinnie and Lenny chuckled. Clearly they were excited about their boss's television fame.
The scene now flashed back to Freeman, who said, "We've asked a few residents on this private road about the man who is their neighbour, but no one has any comment." He continued, "We don't think the don has returned home from Manhattan yet, so we're waiting here at his gate to see if we can speak to him when he does."
Bellarosa commented, "You got a long wait, asshole."
Barry Freeman said, "Back to you, Jeff."
The anchor, Jeff Jones, said, "Thanks, Barry, and we'll get right back to you if Frank Bellarosa shows up. Meanwhile, this was the scene this morning at the Federal Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Jenny Alvarez reports." The screen showed the video tape of that morning: Frank Bellarosa and John Sutter making their way down the steps of the courthouse as savage reporters yelled questions at us. My blue Hermes tie looked sort of aqua on camera, and my hair was a bit messy, but my expression was a lawyerly one of quiet optimism. I noticed now that the snippy female reporter who had given me a hard time on the lower steps was on my case even then as we first left the courthouse, but she hadn't really registered in my mind at the time. I saw, too, by her microphone, that the station I was watching was her station. I guess that was Jenny Alvarez. She was yelling at me, "Mr Sutter? Mr Sutter? Mr Sutter?"
Obviously, she had been fascinated by me the moment she laid eyes on me.
Actually, she wasn't bad-looking herself.
But neither Frank nor I had said much as we descended the steps, and the scene shifted to the lower steps where we got stuck for a while. And there was Great Caesar, with the majestic classical columns of the courthouse behind him, puffing on his stogie, wisecracking and hamming it up for the cameras. I hadn't noticed when I was there, but from the camera's perspective I could see a line of federal marshals on the top steps of the courthouse, including my buddy, Wyatt Earp.
Frank commented to the three of us, "I gotta lose some weight. Look how that jacket's pulling."
Vinnie said, "You look great, boss."
Lenny agreed, "Terrific. Fuckin'-ay-terrific."
It was my turn. "You could drop ten pounds."
"Yeah? Maybe it's just the suit."
I turned my attention back to the television. You could hear a few questions and a few answers, but mostly it was just entertainment, a street happening, impromptu theatre. Then, however, Ms Snippy's cameraman got a close-up of her bugging me again. "Mr Sutter, Mr Ferragamo has five witnesses who put Frank Bellarosa at the scene of the murder. Are you saying they're all liars. Or are you the liar?"
And stupid John replied, "Ferragamo's witnesses are liars, and he knows they are liars. This whole thing is a frame-up, a personal vendetta against my client, and an attempt to start trouble between -" 'Trouble between who?" asked Ms Snippy. "Rival mobs?" And so it went. Frank didn't say anything, but I had the feeling he wished this wasn't going out over the air to Little Italy, Little Colombia, Little Jamaica, Chinatown, and other quaint little neighbourhoods where exotic people with big grudges, big guns, and extreme paranoia might decide to engage in what was called a drug-related murder.
I turned my attention back to the television. The classical columns and crowded steps of the courthouse were gone, and the background was now grey stone. And there was Ms Alvarez live, apparently recently returned from her engagement in lower Manhattan. In fact, she had changed from the morning's neat suit and was now wearing a clingy, red fuck-me dress and holding a bulbous phallic symbol to her lips. But did she put it in her mouth? No. She spoke into it. "And this is Stanhope Hall. Or at least its walls and towering gates. And over there, right behind the gates, is the gatehouse where an old woman tried to shoo us away a little while ago."
Funny, but I hadn't recognized the place at first. It was odd that you could sometimes believe in the imagist world of television, but when the person or place was someone or something you knew personally, it didn't look real; the perspective was wrong, the colours were off. The very diminution of size made the person or place nearly unrecognizable. But there it was: the gateway to Stanhope Hall on television.
Ms Alvarez did ten seconds of travelogue, then said, "You can't see the fifty-room mansion from here, but in that mansion lives John Whitman Sutter and Susan Stanhope Sutter."
This was not at all accurate, of course. Susan had lived in the mansion once, but had stepped down in the world. I'll write to Ms Alvarez. Anyway, Jenny Alvarez went on about blue bloods, high society, Susan's parentage, and all that nonsense, then she came to the point, which was, "Why would John Sutter, a respected and successful attorney with the old Wall Street firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, with rich and powerful friends and clients, defend Frank the Bishop Bellarosa on a charge of murder? What is the connection between these two men, between these two families? Did John Sutter, in fact, see Frank Bellarosa on the morning of January fourteenth when Alphonse Ferragamo charges that Bellarosa murdered Juan Carranza in New Jersey? Is that why Sutter chose to take on this case? Or is there more to it?"
There's more to it, Ms Snippy.
Bellarosa asked, "Where'd they get all that shit on you, Counsellor?"
"I handed out press kits on myself."
"Yeah?"
"Just kidding, Frank."
Ms Alvarez was still at it. Where she got all that shit was from Mr Mancuso and/or Mr Ferragamo. This was called payback time, aka 'Fuck you, Sutter." Thanks, boys.
Frank Bellarosa said, half jokingly, "Hey, who's the fucking star of this show?
Me or you? I didn't know you were a big shot."
I stood and walked toward my bedroom.
"Where you goin'?"
The back'ouse."
"Can't you hold it? You're gonna miss this."
"I won't miss it at all." I went into my bedroom and into the bathroom. I peeled off my jacket and washed my hands and face. "Good Lord…" Well, aside from my personal reasons for being here, the fact remained that Frank Bellarosa was not guilty of the murder of Juan Carranza. "Not guilty," I said aloud. "Not guilty." I looked in the mirror and held eye contact with myself. "You fucked up, Sutter.
Oh, you really fucked up this time, Golden Boy. Come on, admit it." "No," I replied, "I did what I had to do. What I wanted to do. This is a growing experience, John. A learning experience. I feel fine."
"Tell me that in a week or two."
I am the only man I know who can get the best of me in an argument, so I turned away before I said something I'd regret.
I dropped my clothes on the bathroom floor and stepped into the shower. Oh, that felt good. The three best things in life are steak, showers, and sex. I let the water cascade over my tired body.
By tomorrow morning, this story would be spread all over the newspapers. The Daily News, New York's premier chronicle of the Mafia, would headline it, and so would the Post. USA Today would give it some play, and the Wall Street Journal, while not seeing any real news value to the story per se, would report it. My fear there was that they would decide that the story was not Frank Bellarosa, but John Sutter of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds. In fact, they might massacre me. Woe is me.
And by tomorrow morning, anyone in Lattingtown, Locust Valley, or the other Gold Coast communities who had missed the story in the above-mentioned newspapers, or missed it on the radio, or somehow missed it on New York's dozen or so TV news shows, could read it in the local Long Island newspaper, Newsday, with special emphasis on the local boy, John Sutter. I saw the headline: GOLD COAST TWIT IN DEEP SHIT. Well, maybe not in those words. But Newsday was a left-of-centre sort of publication in a heavily Republican county, and they delighted in being antagonistic toward the nearly extinct gentry. They would have fun with this one.
I tried to imagine how this would sit with my partners, my staff, and my two secretaries when they discovered that Mr Sutter had expanded the scope of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds into criminal law. As the water flowed over my head, I had this mental image of my mother and father flipping through the International Herald Tribune, somewhere in darkest Europe, looking for depressing stories of famine and political repression, and stumbling upon an odd little article about Mr Frank Bellarosa, Mafia gang leader in New York. Mother would say, "Isn't that the fellow who lives next to our son, what's-his-name?" And Father would reply, "Yes, I believe… well, look, here is a mention of John Sutter. That must be our John." And Mother would say, "It must be. Did I tell you about that darling little cafe I saw yesterday in Montmartre?" Of course my friends at The Creek would be somewhat more interested. I pictured Lester, Martin Vandermeer, Randall Potter, Allen DePauw, and a few others sitting around the lounge, nodding knowingly, or perhaps shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, or doing whatever they thought everyone else thought was appropriate, and Lester would say, "If only John had had more strength of character. I feel sorry for Susan and the kids."
Jim and Sally Roosevelt, though, were real friends, and nonjudgemental people. I could count on them to tell me straight out what they thought and felt about me. Therefore, I would avoid them for about a month.
Then there were my relatives, my aunts and uncles such as Cornelia and Arthur, and my too many cousins, and their spouses, and the whole crew of silly people I had to associate with because of things like Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, weddings, and funerals. Well, Thanksgiving was three months away, I didn't know about any upcoming weddings, and no one seemed about to croak (though after today I wouldn't be surprised if Aunt Cornelia did). And if they all snubbed me, I wouldn't care one whit, but they were more likely to pester me for details of my secret life as a Mafia mouthpiece.
And of course, there were Carolyn and Edward. I was glad I'd tipped them off about this, so when they heard it from other sources, they could say, "Yes, we know all about that. We support our father in whatever he does." What great kids. Anyway, I guessed that Carolyn would be outwardly cool, but inwardly worried. That girl keeps everything in. Edward would start a scrapbook. But I'm not concerned about the judgement of children, my own included. As for my sister, Emily, she had passed through her own midlife rejection of upper-middle-class values and had already reached the other side. I knew she would be there waiting for me when I arrived at my destination, and bless her, she wouldn't want to know anything about my journey, only that I'd made it. Ethel Allard. Now there was a tough call. If I had to put major money on that, I would say she was secretly pleased that another blue blood had been exposed as morally corrupt. Especially me, since she could never find a chink in my shining armour. I mean, I never beat my wife (except at her own suggestion), I didn't owe money to tradesmen, didn't use the gatehouse to screw women, I went to church, hardly ever got drunk, and I treated her reasonably well. "But," she would ask, "what good have you done lately, Mr John Sutter?" Not much, Ethel. Oh, well.
I'm only glad that George isn't alive to see this, for surely it would have killed him. And if it didn't, he would have annoyed me with his superior and disapproving attitude, and I would have killed him myself. But, you know, there's a bright spot even in a pile of horse manure. For instance, the Reverend Mr Hunnings would be secretly and sneeringly happy that I was shown up for what I was: a gangster groupie who probably dealt drugs to support his alcohol habit. And I liked the idea that he was probably happy. I was happy that he was happy. I couldn't wait to get to church next Sunday to put my envelope in the collection plate with a thousand dollars in it. Then there were the women; Sally Grace Roosevelt, for one, who had found Susan's description of don Bellarosa so interesting. And there was Beryl Carlisle, who I was sure now would peel off her damp pants the moment I walked into the room. And there were women like the delicious Terri, who would take me a little more seriously after this.
Ah, we're getting a little closer to the crux of this matter, you say. Perhaps.
Let's discuss Charlotte and William Stanhope for one half-second: Fuck them. Now on to Susan. No, I can't blame her for what happened, for my being at that moment in the Plaza Hotel with a mobster, an accused murderer, and a man who had about two hundred people looking to kill him. I couldn't blame her for my decision to be Bellarosa's attorney. And I couldn't blame her for the unwanted press attention she and I were both now getting and would continue to get until perfect strangers knew all about us. No, I couldn't blame her. But you do see that it was mostly her fault.
I mean, no, not her fault, but sort of her responsibility. In a very small nutshell, it was like this: Susan thought Frank Bellarosa was interesting and, perhaps by inference, more of a man than her own husband. Her husband, who truly cares what his wife thinks of him, did not like that. Her husband is a jealous man. And her husband thinks he is every inch the man that Frank Bellarosa is. More of a man in many ways. But it doesn't do a bit of good to say such a thing.
You have to show it.
And so, when the opportunity to do so presented itself, ironically through the person of Frank Bellarosa himself, the husband, showing more ego than judgement, proceeded to ruin his life so he could show everyone a thing or two. Did I have any regrets as of that moment? Not a one, really. In fact, I felt better than I'd felt in a long time. I knew I would.
I stepped out of the shower and dried myself off. In the misty mirror I drew a nice big smiling face. "Smile, stupid, you got what you wanted." It was a wild night. The phone rang nonstop, and people came and went. Obviously, the don was not in hiding, but had simply moved his court from Alhambra to the Plaza.
There were phone calls from the news media, too, and I suppose the word had gotten out via the hotel staff, or perhaps some of the invited guests. But Bellarosa was taking no calls from the press and told me not to make any statements until the morning. A few enterprising, not to mention gutsy, reporters had actually shown up at the door of the suite and were greeted by Vinnie, official gatekeeper for don Bellarosa, who had a funny line. "I'll let ya in but ya ain't gettin' out." No one accepted the invitation. But I could have sworn I heard Jenny Alvarez's voice arguing with Vinnie. Waiters set up a bar and brought food all night. The television was on constantly, tuned to an all-news channel that re-ran the Bellarosa story every half hour or so with a few variations. I could barely hear the television above the chatter, but I could see Bellarosa and Sutter walking down those courthouse steps every half hour.
Most of the men who arrived at the suite seemed to be vassals of the great padrone, captains and lieutenants in his own organization. They hugged and kissed him, and the lesser of them satisfied themselves with a handshake. A few older men actually bowed as they took his hand. Obviously, they were there to swear fealty to this man who was their don. Bizarre, I thought; this so-called empire of Bellarosa's sort of reminded me of a medieval principality where none of the affairs of state or the rules of behaviour were written down, but simply understood, and where oaths were binding on pain of death, and court intrigue was rampant, and succession to power was accomplished through a mixture of family blood, consensus, and assassination.
The men present were dressed in standard Mafia suits of blue, grey, and black, some with pinstripes. The suits could almost pass for Wall Street, but there was something subtly different about them, and the dress shirts ran mostly to shiny satin or silk, and the ties were drab monotones. There were lots of gold cuff links, expensive watches, even jewelled tiepins, and every left pinky in that room had a diamond ring, except mine.
The men around me spoke mostly in English, but every once in a while, someone would say something in Italian; just a line or two that I couldn't understand, of course. I regretted that I'd wasted eight years in French class. I mean, what can you do with French? Insult waiters? I did get lucky in Montreal once, but that's another story.
Anyway, not everyone who came to the Plaza suite was there to pay homage and swear loyalty. A few men showed up with their own retinues, men with unpleasant faces whose embraces and kisses were strictly for show. These were men who were there for information. Among them were the four whom Bellarosa had sat with at Giulio's, and also the steely-eyed man who had come in later with the bodyguard. Bellarosa would disappear with these men into his bedroom, and they would emerge ten or fifteen minutes later, their arms around one another, but I couldn't tell who screwed whom in there.
At any given time, there were about a hundred men in the big sitting room, though, as I said, they were coming and going, but I estimated that as of about ten o'clock, two or three hundred people must have shown up. I wonder what the office Christmas party looks like.
Anyway, Bellarosa paid very little attention to me, but he wanted me to stay in the room, I suppose to show me off, or to immerse me in Mafiana, maybe even to impress me with his world. However, he barely introduced me to anyone, and when he did think to introduce me, I didn't get any kisses or hugs, only a few surprisingly limp handshakes. But I wasn't put out by this. In fact, I noticed that these people were not big on introductions in general and barely bothered with them or acknowledged them, even among themselves. I thought that odd, but perhaps it was only my cultural bias; I mean, in my crowd, and with Americans in general, introductions are a big deal, and I even get introduced to people's maids and dogs. But with Bellarosa and his goombahs, I think there was this ingrained sense of secrecy, silence, and conspiracy that precluded a lot of idle chatter, including people's names.
It was sort of an Italians-only party, I guess, but then Jack Weinstein showed up and I was never so happy to see a Jewish lawyer in my life. Weinstein came right up to me and introduced himself. He didn't seem at all professionally jealous, and in fact, he said, "You did a nice job. I never could have sprung him."
I replied, "Look, Mr Weinstein -"
"Jack. I'm Jack. They call you Jack or John?"
Actually they call me Mr Sutter, but I replied, "John is fine. Look, Jack, I don't think I should have any further involvement in this case. I don't do criminal work, and I simply don't know the ropes at Foley Square." He patted my shoulder. "Not to worry, my friend. I'll be in the wings the whole time. You just schmooze the judge and jury. They'll love you." I smiled politely and regarded him a moment. He was a tall, thin man of about fifty with a deep tan, dark eyes, and a nose that could be described as Semitic or Roman; in fact, Weinstein could have passed for a paesano. Giovanni Weinstein.
He informed me, "You shouldn't have said that about Ferragamo. About the aberrant behaviour in court. Crazy people are very sensitive about being called crazy."
"Screw him."
Weinstein smiled at me.
I said, "Anyway, you know, of course, that Frank doesn't think he will make it to trial. He thinks he'll either be… you know… before then, or that Ferragamo will drop it for lack of evidence."
Weinstein looked over both his shoulders and said softly, "That's what this is all about. This gathering. This is public relations. He has to show that he's not afraid, that he has the support of his business associates and that he's still an effective manager." He smiled. "Capisce?"
"Capisco."
Weinstein chuckled. Boy, what a good time we were having. He said, "And I'm not going to bug you about that statement you made to the reporter out on the steps, John, because I put my foot in it a few times myself when I first came to work for this outfit. But you've got to be careful. These people speak their own brand of English. For instance, take the words "pal" and "talk". If someone here says to you, 'Hey, pal, let's go outside for a talk,' don't go. Same with, 'Let's take a walk.' Capisce?"
"Sure. But -"
"I'm just making you aware of this stuff – expressions, nuances, double meanings, and all that. Just be aware. And don't worry about facial expressions or hand gestures. You'll never understand any of that anyway. Just listen closely, watch closely, keep your hands still, your face frozen, and say very little. You're a Wasp. You can do that."
"Right. I think I figured that out already."
"Good. Anyway, I'm glad you were ready to go this morning. You know, usually the State Attorney General and sometimes even the U.S. Attorney will make an arrangement so that they don't have to come and arrest a man like Bellarosa at his home, or on the street or in a public place. You understand, when you have a middle-aged man with money and ties, the prosecutor can work something out with the guy's attorney. A voluntary surrender. But sometimes these bastards get nasty, like when they arrested those Wall Street characters in their own offices and marched them out in cuffs. That was bullshit."
I shrugged. There were two ways of looking at that, depending on if you were watching it on TV or if you had the cuffs on.
Weinstein said, "We were pretty sure they'd come for Frank on a Tuesday, so when our snitch rang me last night and let me know it was on for seven this morning, I wasn't too surprised."
"What snitch?"
"In Ferragamo's office… oh… forget where you heard that." "Sure." I thought a moment. That son of a bitch cheated me out of fifty bucks. I couldn't believe it. Here was a guy who threw fifty-dollar bills around, who offered me exorbitant fees for doing very little, and he screws me out of fifty bucks. Obviously, it wasn't the money, it was his obsessive need to win, and to impress people. And this was also the guy who gave me his alibi two minutes before he was arrested, then told me to forget it while making it clear to me he didn't intend to spend one day in jail. This guy was slick. Weinstein said, "See what I mean? I figured you knew about that. You can't figure these people, John. And they say Jews are tricky. Hell, this guy… well, enough of that."
I inquired, "Is he in any real danger? I ask that because I don't want to get caught in the crossfire, and I don't mean that figuratively." Again Weinstein glanced around, then said, "The Hispanic gentlemen will never get to him, and really don't want to get to him themselves, because that will cause them many problems. This is fine, because they tend to be indiscriminate with their submachine guns. However" – his eyes travelled around the crowded room as he spoke – "someone here can and will get to him if they smell weakness, if they think he is more of a liability than an asset." He added, "Think of a school of hungry sharks, and think of the biggest shark with a wound that leaves a trail of blood in the water. How long does that big shark have? Understand?" I nodded.
"It's not that they don't like him," Weinstein said, "or that he hasn't done his job. But that's history. They want to know about today and tomorrow. The bottom line with these people, Counsellor, is keeping out of jail and making money." "No," I informed him, "keeping out of jail and making money are the subtotals.
The bottom line with these people is respect. Appearances. Balls. Capisce?" He smiled and patted my cheek affectionately. "I stand corrected. You learn fast." He said, "Give me a call when you get some time. We have a few things to discuss. We'll have lunch."
"Any place but Little Italy."
He laughed, turned, and greeted someone in Italian. They hugged but didn't kiss.
That would be me in a year or so if I wasn't careful.
A very short and very fat man came up to me, and his stomach hit me before I could back away. He said, "Hey, I know you. You work for Jimmy, right? Jimmy Lip. Right?"
"Right?"
He stuck out his fat, sweaty hand. "Paulie."
We shook and I said, "Johnny. Johnny Sutta."
"Yeah. You're Aniello's godson, right?"
"That's right."
"How's he doin'?"
"Very good."
"The cancer ain't killed him yet?"
"Uh… no…"
"He's a tough son of a bitch. You see him at Eddie Loulou's funeral last month?
You there?"
"Of course."
"Yeah. Aniello walks in, half his face gone, and the fucking widow almost drops dead in the coffin with Eddie." He laughed and so did I. Ha, ha, ha. He asked me, "You see that?"
"I heard about it when I got there."
"Yeah. Jesus, why don't he wear a scarf or something?"
"I'll mention it to him when we have lunch."
We talked for a few more minutes. I'm usually good at cocktail party chatter, but it was hard to find things in common with Paulie, especially since he thought I was someone else. I asked him, "Do you play golf?" "Golf? No. Why?"
"It's a very relaxing game."
"Yeah? You wanna relax? What for? You relax when you get old. When you're dead.
What's Jimmy doin' with himself?"
"Same old shit."
"Yeah? He better watch his ass. None of my business, but if I was him, I'd lay off the chinks for a while. You know?"
"I told him that."
"Yeah? Good. You can push the chinks so far, you know, but if you keep leanin' on them, they're gonna get their little yellow balls in an uproar. Jimmy should know that."
"He should."
"Yeah. Hey, tell Jimmy that Paulie said hello."
"Sure will."
"Remind him about the place on Canal Street we got to look at."
"I will."
Paulie waddled off and bumped into someone else. I took a few steps toward the bar and someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a large gentleman whose features looked Cro-Magnon. He asked me, "What's Fat Paulie talkin' to you about?"
"Usual shit."
"What's the usual shit?"
"Who wants to know?"
"Hey, pal, if you don't know who I am, you better fucking ask around." "Okay." I moved to the bar and poured myself a sambuca. How, I wondered indignantly, could anyone here mistake me, John Whitman Sutter, for one of them? I caught a glimpse of myself in a wall mirror. I still looked the same. But maybe my breath still smelled of puttanesca sauce and garlic. Anyway, I asked a young man at the bar, "Who is that?" I cocked my head toward the Cro-Magnon gentleman.
He looked at the man, then at me. "You don't know who that is? Whaddaya from Chicago or Mars?"
"I forgot my glasses."
"Yeah? If you don't know who that is, you don't gotta know."
This sounded like Italian haiku, so I dropped the subject. "Play golf?"
"Nah." The young man leaned toward me and whispered, "That's Sally Da-da." "Right." Now I had three Sallys in my life: Sally Grace; Sally of the Stardust Diner; and a gentleman who, if I recalled Mancuso correctly, was born Salvatore with a whole last name, but who had apparently not mastered much speech beyond the high-chair stage. How's little Sally? Da-da-da. Sally want ba-ba? I said, "That's the Bishop's brother-in-law."
"Yeah. Sally is the husband of the Bishop's wife's sister. What's her name?"
"Anna."
"No, the fucking sister."
"Maria, right?"
"Yeah… no… whatever. Why you asking about Sally Da-da?"
"He told me to ask around about him."
"Yeah? Why?"
"He wants to know what I was talking to Fat Paulie about."
"You shouldn't be talkin' to Fat Paulie about nothing."
"Why not?"
"If you don't know, you better find out."
"Fat Paulie talks too much," I ventured.
"You got that right. Fat Paulie better watch his ass."
"And Jimmy Lip better watch his ass, too," I said.
"Why?"
"He's leaning too hard on the chinks."
"Again? What's wrong with that asshole?"
"He listens to his godson too much."
"Which godson?"
"Aniello. No, Johnny. No…" I had to think how that went.
The young man laughed. "I thought you was gonna say his godson Joey. I'm Joey.
Who are you?"
"John Whitman Sutter."
"Who?"
"The Bishop's attorney."
"Oh… yeah… I saw you on the news. Jack is out?"
"No, Jack is still in. I'm doing the front stuff."
"Yeah. I heard that. Whaddaya want with Sally Da-da?"
"Just talk."
"Yeah. You wanna stay away from that guy. You let the Bishop talk to him."
"Capisco. Grazie." I made my way to the window and looked out over Central Park. Basically all cocktail parties are the same. Right? You just have to get a few drinks in you, get warmed up a little, and work the room. The only thing missing at this little gathering was women. Actually, I realized I didn't miss them. Capisce?
At about ten P.M., a short, squat gentleman with hairy hands arrived, wheeling four suitcases on a luggage cart, one of which looked like my Lark two-suiter. Lenny directed the man, whom he knew, into the appropriate bedrooms. I wondered if Lady Stanhope enjoyed packing my suitcase. I'm glad Frank asked her, not me. At eleven P.M., someone switched to a network news channel and turned up the volume. People began to quiet down and drift over to the TV set. The lead story was still the arrest of Frank Bellarosa, but the slant this time was Alphonse Ferragamo's noontime news conference, which had been given short shrift earlier. I had no doubt that the U.S. Attorney's office had complained vigorously about media sensationalism and too much human-interest fluff regarding don Bellarosa and his attorney. Time for hard news. After the anchor's lead-in, the screen showed yet another cameraman's perspective of the steps of the courthouse, with Bellarosa waving to everyone, and with me looking tan, fit, tall, and well dressed. No wonder the women love me.
Anyway, this lasted only five seconds or so, then the scene shifted to a crowded press-conference room, probably in the bowels of the Foley Square complex. A close-up of the podium showed Alphonse Ferragamo looking more composed than when I'd last seen him in court. A few people around me made interesting observations about the U.S. Attorney, such as 'motherfucker', 'cocksucker', 'asshole', 'shithead', and 'faggot'. I'm glad Alphonse's mother wasn't in the room. Mr Ferragamo shuffled some papers and read a prepared statement. "At seven-forty-five this morning," he began, "agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working within a Federal Organized Crime Task Force, which includes New York City and State police and agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency, acting in coordination with the Nassau County police, effected the arrest of Frank Bellarosa at his Long Island mansion." I could have sworn I saw only Mancuso there. But I guess everybody else was out on Grace Lane, and they wanted to be mentioned.
Ferragamo went on, "This arrest is the culmination of a seven-month investigation by New Jersey state police acting in concert with the U.S. Attorney's office and the FBI. The evidence presented to the grand jury, which led to the indictment and arrest of Frank Bellarosa, implicates Bellarosa as the triggerman in the slaying of the reputed Colombian drug king Juan Carranza." So Ferragamo went on, fashioning a hangman's noose for my client, and I wondered who in that hotel room would put it around his neck. From where I was standing, I could see Bellarosa's face, and he betrayed no emotion, no uneasiness or discomfort. He was listening to La Traviata in his head again. But I could see several other men in the room who looked uneasy. Others looked deep in thought, and a few glanced quickly at Bellarosa.
Ferragamo tied the last knot in the rope by announcing, "Federal witnesses have testified in closed session that there is an ongoing power struggle within the Bellarosa organization and that the murder of Juan Carranza was not sanctioned by the organization or by the other four crime families in New York. The murder was carried out by Bellarosa and a faction of his organization that wants to regain dominance of the drug trade and push out the Colombians, the Caribbean connections, and the East Asian connections."
Ferragamo continued, "This murder indictment is only the first of many more indictments to come in the war against organized crime. The scope of this investigation has been widened to include other charges against Frank Bellarosa including charges of racketeering under the RICO Act. Other figures in Bellarosa's organization are also under investigation." That didn't get a round of applause. On one level, everyone knew that Ferragamo was beating the bush to see who would panic and run to him. But on another level, everyone in that room had a friend or relative in jail. Mancuso had been right about the mob's being crippled by a slew of recent convictions. But there were others in the five families who saw this as an opportunity, a period of cleansing. Out with the old blood, in with the new. Gang wars used to accomplish the same thing.
And speaking of gang wars, Ferragamo was right on top of it. He said, "The U.S. Attorney's office and other federal, state, and city law enforcement agencies are concerned that this struggle for control of the drug distribution may lead to a new type of gang war on the streets of New York: a war between and among different ethnic groups who live in uneasy peace among themselves, but who may now resort to violence." Ferragamo looked up from his prepared statement. For a half second you could hear the breathing in the room around me, then a reporter at the press conference asked Ferragamo, "Did you expect Bellarosa to show up with a Wall Street lawyer and five million dollars?" A few people in the press room laughed, and in the hotel room many heads turned toward me.
Ferragamo smiled sardonically. "We had some indication of that." Then, there she was, Ms Snippy, aka Jenny Alvarez, standing up and asking, "You have five witnesses, Mr Ferragamo, who say they saw Frank Bellarosa shoot Juan Carranza. Yet Bellarosa's lawyer, John Sutter, says he saw Bellarosa on Long Island that morning. Who's lying?"
Alphonse Ferragamo gave a nice Italian shrug. "We'll let a jury decide that." He added, "Whoever is lying will be charged with perjury." Including you, Alphonse. I'm not taking this rap alone. And so it went for another minute, but then it was time to get on to the standard story of the fire in the South Bronx, which was only newsworthy because nobody could believe there was anything left in South Bronx to burn. Actually, I think they run the same footage of the last fire on slow news days. Lenny flipped through the other two networks, but we only caught the last few seconds of the Ferragamo news conference, which had apparently been everyone's lead story.
Lenny turned back to the all-news channel, which at that particular moment was doing sports. The Mets did it again, trouncing Montreal six to one. What a day. Why did I feel eyes on me? Well, time to fade to black as they say, so I opened the door to my bedroom, but saw it was being used for a meeting. Sitting around on my chairs and bed were six unhappy-looking men, including Mr Sally Da-da, who stared at me and inquired, "Yeah?"
"This is my room."
They all looked from one to another, then back at me. "Yeah?" I said, "I'll give you ten minutes." I closed the door and went right to the bar. Actually, they could have longer if they needed it. The crowd had thinned to about thirty men now, and I noticed that Jack Weinstein was gone. I took my drink and went to one of the windows again and opened it, breathing in some fresh air.
Frank Bellarosa came up beside me with a drink in his hand, and a cigar in his mouth. We both stared out at the park and the lights of the great city. Finally he said, "You have a good time tonight?"
"Interesting."
"You talked to Jack."
"Yes. Smart guy."
"Yeah. Who else you talk to?"
"Fat Paulie. Some other people. I didn't catch many names."
"Yeah? You meet my brother-in-law?"
"Sort of." I added, "He's in my bedroom now with five other men."
Bellarosa said nothing.
We continued looking out into the summer night, and I was reminded of the night on his balcony. He offered me a cigar and I took it. He lit it with a gold lighter, and I blew smoke out the window. He said to me, "You understand what's happening here?"
"I think I do."
"Yeah. We got a long, hard fight ahead of us, Counsellor. But we won round one today."
"Yes. By the way, I'd like my fifty dollars back."
"What?"
"I heard about your snitch in Ferragamo's office."
"Yeah? From who?"
"Doesn't matter who."
He fished around in his pocket and pulled out a fifty, which I took. He said, "Wanna make another bet?"
"What's the bet?"
"I bet that's the last time you catch me cheating." He laughed and slapped me on the back.
So we puffed away on the Monte Cristos, then he said to me, "A lot of these goombahs think you're magic or something. Capisce? They respect your world. They think you people still hold the power in your hands. Maybe you do. Maybe it's slipping away. Maybe if the Italians and the Anglos could somehow get together, we could get New York back. Maybe get this country back." I didn't reply, because I couldn't tell if he was serious, joking, or crazy. He said, "Anyway, you have this… what do you call it…? This like aura, you know, around you, like you are connected to powerful sources. That's what they said on television. That's what a lot of these goombahs believe." "You sure got your fifty thousand worth."
He laughed. "Yeah."
"You understand, I hope, that I have no such power. I'm socially and financially connected, but not politically connected at all."
He shrugged. "So what? That's between us."
"All right. I 'm going to bed. Can I kick your brother-in-law out of my room?" "Later. We'll wait up for the bulldog editions. I can get the Post and the Daily News hot off the press in about half an hour. I got people waiting for them now." He asked me, "Hey, you call your wife?"
"No. Did you call yours?"
"Yeah, she called before. She's okay. She said to tell you hello. She likes you."
"She's a nice woman. A good wife."
"Yeah, but she drives me nuts with her worrying. Women. Madonn'." He let a second or two pass, then said, "Maybe it's good that we get away from them for a few days. You know? They appreciate you more when you're gone awhile." I wondered if Anna appreciated her husband more after he returned from two years in a federal penitentiary. Maybe she did. Maybe if I got nailed on a perjury rap and went away for five years, Susan would really appreciate me. Maybe not. At about midnight, with about a dozen people left in the suite, two men arrived within a few minutes of each other, each carrying a stack of newspapers. One had the Post, the ink still wet on it, and the other, the Daily News. They threw the papers on the coffee table.
I read the Post headline: GOTCHA, FRANK. The Post is not subtle. Beneath the headline was a full-page photo of Frank Bellarosa being led down a corridor of the Federal Court in cuffs, with Mancuso holding his arm. I learned from the caption that Mr Mancuso's first name was Felix, which explained a lot. It was obvious that despite the prohibition against cameras in the courthouse, Ferragamo had arranged for the daily newspapers to have photo opportunities during the time that Bellarosa was in cuffs. A picture is worth a thousand words, and maybe as many votes when November rolled around. Bellarosa picked up one of the copies of the Post and studied the photo. "I'm taller than Mancuso. You see? Ferragamo likes to have big FBI guys around the guy in cuffs. He don't like Mancuso for a lot of reasons. Plus the guy's short." He laughed.
The remaining men in the room, including me, Frank, Lenny, Vinnie, Sally Da-da and two of his goons, and a few other soldier types each took or shared the newspapers. I picked up a copy of the Daily News, whose headline read: BELLAROSA ON MURDER CHARGE.
Again, there was a full-page photo, this one of Bellarosa holding his cuffed hands up, clenched together like a victorious prizefighter. The caption read:
Frank Bellarosa, reputed boss of New York's largest crime family, taken into custody in Federal Court yesterday morning. I held the newspaper up for Bellarosa. "You'll like this shot."
He took the paper. "Yeah. Good picture. I remember that one."
Vinnie said, "You look good, boss."
Lenny nodded. "Yeah. Nice shots, boss."
Everyone else added their congratulations on a fine photo, cuffs notwithstanding. I wondered if Frank Bellarosa got tired of full-time sycophants.
I did notice that Sally Da-da was not adding his congratulations, but was reading the News. I did not like this man, and he knew it. And he did not like me, and I knew it, so it sort of balanced out. But aside from not liking him, I didn't trust him.
I opened the Daily News to a byline story and saw a small photo of Frank and a man who looked vaguely familiar. The caption read: Bellarosa leaving courtroom with Attorney John Suffer. Ah. I thought he looked familiar. Bellarosa was reading the Post. He said, "Hey, listen to this." He read, "'In a move that surprised and even shocked veteran court observers, Bellarosa showed up at the arraignment with blue-blood lawyer John Sutter of Lattingtown, Long Island.'" Bellarosa looked at me. "You really got blue blood?" "Of course I have."
He laughed and went back to the story and read, "'Sutter is the husband of Susan Stanhope Sutter, heiress daughter of a socially prominent Gold Coast family.'" He looked up at me again. "Does that mean your wife's got blue blood, too?" "Absolutely."
Bellarosa scanned the article and said, "They got a lot of shit here on you, Counsellor. Your law firm, your clubs, all that stuff."
"That's nice."
"Yeah? Where do you think they got all that shit so fast? Your pal Mancuso and scumbag Alphonse. Right? They're really trying to stick it up your ass." And doing a rather nice job of it, I should say. Oh, well, what did I expect? When people like me step out of bounds, the government is right there to pounce, and the press eats it up. There are unwritten rules in this society, too, just like in Bellarosa's society, and if you break the unwritten rules, you won't get your bones broken, but you'll get your life broken.
I looked again at the Daily News article and found my name. Here's what the article did not say: "John Sutter is a good man, an okay husband, and a fairly good father. He served honourably in the U.S. Army, and is active in conservation efforts. He contributes thousands of dollars to charity, is a generous employer, and plays a good game of golf."
Here is what the article did say: "Sutter himself has been under investigation by the IRS for criminal tax fraud."
I thought I'd solved that problem. I guess it was a matter of verb tenses. Has been. Had been. Journalese was interesting. It was an art form. I wondered if I should write a letter to the editor or begin a lawsuit. Probably neither. I poured myself a scotch and soda, and without wishing my fellow revellers good-night, I went into my bedroom and closed the door. I saw my suitcase on the luggage rack and opened it. Susan had risen to the occasion and had done a nice job. She had packed my toilet kit, a grey suit, and a blue suit of summer-weight wool. There were matching ties and pocket handkerchiefs and dress shirts. There was also enough underwear for about two weeks, which might have been a subtle hint.
As I unpacked, I saw an envelope with my name on it and opened it. It was a 'Dear John' letter from Susan, which didn't surprise me since my name is John. But I'm being flip. As I brushed my teeth in the bathroom, I read the letter, and here's what it said:
Dear John,
You looked marvellous on television, though I'm not certain about the green tie with the blue suit. Or was the TV colour off? You handled that bitchy female reporter quite well, I thought. I spent the day with Anna, who was very impressed with you and thanks you. I had to go home through the back way as there were reporters at the gates of both houses. How long will that nonsense last? Lots of messages on our answering machines, though I haven't played any of mine yet. But there was a Fax from your New York office asking you to call. Urgent. I wonder what that's all about? What a break for Frank that you happened to see him on that day. Was I out riding with you? Call me tonight if you have a moment.
Love, Susan
Well, that was vintage Susan Stanhope. Anna Bellarosa probably spent the whole day blubbering and wailing, and Susan spent the day arranging flowers. Well, look, this is the way people like us are. We can be passionate, affectionate, angry, sad, or whatever, but we don't show much of it. I mean, what good does it do? It's self-indulgent, and, contrary to popular opinion, it doesn't make you feel any better.
Still, Susan's note was a bit sang-froid, to use a French expression. On the other hand, I hadn't expected any note at all. I wonder if she wrote to Bellarosa.
I undressed, and as she hadn't packed any pyjamas, I went to bed in my underwear. No, I wasn't going to call her.
I drank my scotch and listened to the muted murmur of Manhattan street sounds eight floors below. I still smelled that horrible fishy sauce and that garlic on my breath. No wonder Italy was the only country in Europe without vampire legends; they turned back at the Alps.
I may have drifted off for a while, but I woke up remembering that I had to tell Jimmy Lip that Fat Paulie wanted him to look at that place on Canal Street. More important, I had to tell Jimmy to lighten up on the chinks. The phone rang and it was Susan, and I spoke to her, but in truth, I think it was a dream.
The phone rang again and it was Jenny Alvarez with an interesting proposition. I said to her, "Come on up. Tell Lenny or Vinnie it's okay. I'm in the first bedroom to the left."
Later I heard a knock on my bedroom door and she entered. I said to her, "If you like me, why were you so bitchy to me?"
"That's my way."
She took off her shoes, but not her red fuck-me dress, and crawled into bed beside me. What a tease. I wanted to kiss her but I was concerned about the anchovies and garlic on my breath.
I'm not sure what happened next, but when I woke up again before dawn, she was gone. Actually, I doubt she was ever there.
The next morning while having coffee in the suite, I called a few select newspaper people whose names Bellarosa had given me. The story I put out was this: Frank Bellarosa wants a speedy trial within the next month, and any delay on the part of the U.S. Attorney's office would be construed as justice denied. Mr Bellarosa is innocent of the charge and wants to prove so in open court. This, of course, would put Alphonse Ferragamo on the spot to develop a case quickly, and since there apparently was no case, Ferragamo had to either drop the charges or go into court with little chance of winning. Ferragamo wanted to do neither; what he wanted was for someone to knock off Bellarosa soon. Anyway, after coffee that morning in the littered living room of the suite, I went into my bedroom and dialled Susan. "Hello," I said. "Hello," she replied.
"I'll be in the city for a few days and I wanted you to know."
"All right."
"Thank you for packing my bag."
"Think nothing of it," she said.
"Thank you just the same." When husbands and wives get on this frigid roll, you'd think they were total strangers, and they are.
Susan asked, "Did you see my note?"
"Note…? Oh, yes, I did."
"John…?"
"Yes?"
"We really have to talk about it."
"The note?"
"About us."
"Not us, Susan. About you."
She didn't reply for a few seconds, then asked, "What about me? What is really bothering you about me?"
I took a deep breath and said, "Did you call me last night? Did we speak?"
"No."
"Well, then, it was a dream. But it was a very realistic dream, Susan. Actually it was my subconscious mind trying to tell me something. Something I've known for some time, but couldn't come to grips with. Has that ever happened to you in a dream?"
"Maybe."
"Well, in my dream I realized that you were having an affair with Frank Bellarosa."
There, I said it. Well, sort of. She didn't reply for a few seconds, then asked, "Is that why you're in a bad mood? You dreamed that I was having an affair with Frank?"
"I think it was more than a dream. It was a nocturnal revelation. That's what's been bothering me for months, Susan, and it's what has come between us." Again there was a long silence, then she said, "If you suspected something, you should have come to grips with it, John. Instead, you've become withdrawn. You've indulged yourself in playing Mafia mouthpiece and telling off all your friends and family. Maybe what's happened to us is as much your fault as mine." "No doubt about it."
Again, silence, because neither of us wanted to return to the issue of adultery.
But having come this far, I said, "So? Yes or no? Tell me."
She replied, "You had a silly dream."
"All right, Susan. If that's what you say, I will accept that because you've never lied to me."
"John… we have to talk about this… in person. There's probably a lot we've been keeping from each other. You know I would never do anything to hurt you… I'm sorry if you've been upset these last few months… you're a very unique man, a very special man. I realize that now. And I don't want to lose you. I love you." Well, that was about as mushy as Susan ever got, and while it wasn't a full confession of marital infidelity, it was something very like it, sort of like plea bargaining. I was pretty shaky, to be honest with you, and I found myself sitting on the bed in my room, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. If you've ever confronted your spouse with charges of sexual misconduct, you know the feeling. I finally said, "All right. We'll talk when I get back." I hung up and stared at the telephone, waiting, I guess, for it to ring, but it didn't. You have to understand that prior to that day in court and the subsequent media exposure, I wasn't ready to confront this other issue of Susan and Frank. But now, having put my old life behind me forever, and now that I felt good about myself, I was prepared to hear my wife tell me she had been sexually involved with Frank Bellarosa. What's more, I still loved her, and I was prepared to forgive her and start over again, because in a manner of speaking, we'd both had an affair with Frank Bellarosa, and Susan was right that this was as much my fault as hers. But Susan was not yet at the point where she could tell me it had happened or tell him it was over.
So, lacking a confession from Susan, I had to remain in that limbo state of the husband who knows but doesn't know, who can't ask for a divorce or offer to forgive, and who has to deal with the parties as if nothing were going on, lest he make a complete fool of himself.
Or maybe I could just ask Frank, "Hey, goombah, you fucking my wife, or what?" Later that morning, Bellarosa and I met Lenny and Vinnie with the Cadillac outside the plaza. We drove back down to Little Italy where we stopped at Bellarosa's club for espresso. The Italian Rifle Club had few similarities to The Creek, as you might guess, except that it was private and that men discussed things there that had to do with manipulating the republic for the benefit of the club members. Maybe there were more similarities than I realized. That morning Bellarosa had a series of meetings scheduled in his club, which was actually a large storefront with a black-painted picture window, dark inside, and divided into various dim coffee rooms and private rooms. I was pretty much ignored most of the time, and sometimes they spoke in Italian, and sometimes when someone present didn't speak any Italian, I was asked to leave the room with the words, "You don't want to hear this, Counsellor." I was sure they were right.
So I drank a lot of coffee and read all the morning papers and watched some old geezers playing a card game that I couldn't follow.
After an hour or so in the club, we left and got back into the car. Though there was a layer of clouds blocking the sun, the morning was getting hot, an urban heat produced by cars and people and yesterday's sun still trapped in the concrete. Country squires can tolerate only about a week in Manhattan in the summer, and I hoped we wouldn't be much longer in the city, but with this guy you didn't ask questions about times and places.
We made a stop at Ferrara's, where Bellarosa picked out a dozen pastries for Anna, which were put into a nice white box with green and red string and which Bellarosa carried to the car. I can't describe to you why the sight of this big man carrying that little box daintily by the string struck me as so civilized, but it did. It wasn't exactly Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, but it was a profoundly human act that made me see the man, the husband, and the father. And yes, the lover. Whereas I'd always seen Bellarosa as a man's man, I saw now that my original impression of him as a man whom women would find attractive was accurate. Well, not all women, but some women. I could see Susan, Lady Stanhope, wanting to be debased and sexually used by this insensitive barbarian. Maybe it had something to do with her seeing her mother in bed with a gardener or stableboy or whoever it was. Maybe this is something that all highborn ladies fantasize about: taking off their clothes for a man who is not their social or intellectual equal, but is simply a sexual turn-on. And why should this be such a shock to men? Half the wealthy and successful men I know have screwed their secretaries, cocktail waitresses, and even their maids. Women have libidos, too. But maybe Susan Stanhope and Frank Bellarosa had a more complex relationship.
Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning in Little Italy, Greenwich Village, and environs, making a few quick stops, sometimes for talk, sometimes for taking provisions aboard the Cadillac. The car soon smelled of cheese and baked goods, and some horrible salted codfish called baccala, which I suppose couldn't be put in the trunk because of the heat. Bellarosa explained to me, "I'm going to send all this stuff home later. This is all stuff Anna likes. You want to send something to your wife?"
It annoyed me that he always referred to Susan as my wife, instead of by her name. What did he call her when they were alone?
"You want to stop for something? Flowers or something?"
"No."
"I'll send these pastries from Ferrara's like it was from you."
"No."
He shrugged.
As we headed up toward Midtown, he said to me, "You called this morning?
Everything's okay at home?"
I replied, "Yes. How's your wife? You call this morning? Everything okay at home?"
"Yeah. I'm just asking you because if you got problems at home, you don't have your mind on business. And because we're friends. Right?" "How was I yesterday in court?"
"You were fine."
"Subject closed."
He shrugged again and looked out the window.
We stopped at the Italian Seamen's Club on West Forty-fourth Street, and Bellarosa went inside by himself. He came out fifteen minutes later with a brown bag and got into the car. Now what do you suppose was in that brown bag? Drugs? Money? Secret messages? No. The bag was filled with small crooked cigars. "These are from Naples," he said. "You can't get them here." He lit one up and I could see why you couldn't. I opened the window.
"You want one?"
"No."
He passed the bag up to Vinnie and Lenny, who took a cigar apiece and lit up. Everyone seemed happy with their little duty-free cigars. Of course, today it was cigars, tomorrow it could be something else that came out of the Seamen's Club. Interesting.
Instead of stopping for a three-hour lunch at an Italian restaurant, we stopped at an Italian sausage cart near Times Square. Bellarosa got out and greeted the vendor, an old man who hugged and kissed Bellarosa and nearly cried. Without asking us what we wanted, Bellarosa got us all hot sausage heros with peppers and onions. I said, "Hold the mayo." We ate outside the double-parked car as we chatted with the old vendor, and Bellarosa gave the man a hunk of goat cheese from Little Italy and three crooked cigars. I think we got the best of that deal.
If a man is known by the company he keeps, then Frank Bellarosa was sort of a populist, mixing with the masses the way the early Caesars had done, letting the common people hug and kiss him, venerate him, and lay hands on him. At the same time, he mixed with the highborn, but if the Plaza was any indication, he seemed to treat the powerful with cool contempt.
The sausage man was not tending his car and, in fact, shooed away a few people so he could better tend to his luncheon guests, dining alfresco in expensive suits in the heat of Times Square with the Cadillac blocking traffic. What a bizarre little scene, I thought.
We wiped our fingers on paper napkins, bid our host buon giorno, and got back into the car. Still chewing on a mouthful of sausage, Bellarosa said to Vinnie, "You tell Freddie to hit these guys up for another fifty cents a pound on the sausage and let them pass it on to their customers." He said to me, "It's a good product and everybody eats it – your Spanish, your melanzane, they love this shit. Where they gonna go for lunch around here? Sardi's? The coffee shops serve shit. So they eat on the street and watch the pussy go by. Right? That's worth another quarter. Right? You like the sandwich? You pay another two bits for it? Sure. So we hit the vendors for another fifty cents a pound and they pass it along. No problem."
"Now that we've all discussed it," I said, "should we take a vote?"
He laughed. "Vote? Yeah, we'll vote. Frank votes yes. End of vote."
"Good meeting," I said.
"Yeah."
Actually, I was impressed with Bellarosa's attention to the smaller outposts of his empire. I suppose he believed that if he watched the price of sausage, the bigger problems would take care of themselves. He was very much a hands-on man, both in his professional life and his personal life, if you know what I mean. We crossed the East River into the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by way of the Williamsburg Bridge. After that, I was lost. Brooklyn is a mystery to me, and I hope it remains so. Unfortunately, I had a guide who pointed out everything to me, the way people do who think you care about their squalid little part of the world. Bellarosa said, "There on the roof of that building is where I got my finger wet for the first time."
I had the impression he wasn't talking about sucking his thumb. I said, "How interesting."
Anyway, we stopped at a beautiful old baroque church covered with black grime.
"This is my church," Bellarosa explained. "Santa Lucia." We got out of the car, went to the rectory, and knocked on the door, which was opened by an old priest, who went through the hugging and kissing routine. Bellarosa and I were shown into a large second-floor commons room where two more elderly priests joined us and we had coffee. These people drink a lot of coffee, in case you hadn't noticed, though it's not so much the caffeine they're after, but the shared experience, sort of a wet version of breaking bread together. And wherever Frank Bellarosa went, of course, coffee was made and served, usually with something sweet.
Anyway, we had coffee, and we chatted about this and that, but not about yesterday's difficulties with the law. The three priests were old-school Italians, naturally, and didn't use their first names, so there was none of that Father Chuck and Father Buzzy nonsense. On the other hand, they all seemed to have difficult first and last names, and with their accents, it sounded as if they were all named Father Chicken Cacciatore. I called them all Father. So the head guy was talking about how the bishop (the real bishop of the diocese) wanted to close up Santa Lucia unless it could become self-sufficient, which seemed unlikely since there were hardly enough Italian Catholics left in the parish to support it. The priest explained delicately that the Hispanic Catholics in the parish, mostly from Central America, thought that ten cents in the collection basket covered the overhead. The priest turned to me and said, "The old people of this parish can't go to another church. They want to be close to their church, they wish to have their funeral Mass here. And of course, we have those former parishioners, such as Mrs Bellarosa, who return to Santa Lucia and who would be heartbroken if we had to close."
Okay, Father, bottom line.
He cleared his throat. "It costs about fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain and to heat the church and rectory, and to put food on the table here." I didn't reach for my wallet or anything, but while the priest was telling me this for the don's benefit, the don had scribbled out a cheque and put it on the coffee table face down.
So, after a few more minutes, we made our farewells and embraces and got our God-bless-yous, and we left.
Out on the street, Bellarosa said to me, "Nobody can shake you down like a Catholic priest. Madonn', they hit me for fifty large. But whaddaya gonna do? Ya know?"
"Just say no."
"No? How ya gonna say no?"
"You shake your head and say, 'No.'"
"Ah, you can't do that. They know you got the money and they do a guilt thing on you." He chuckled, then added, "You know, I was christened at Santa Lucia, my father and mother was christened here, I was married here, Anna had the kids christened here, Frankie got married here, my old man was buried here, my mother -"
"I get the picture. I've got a church like that, too. I give five bucks a week, ten at Easter and Christmas."
"It's different here."
Instead of getting back into the car, Bellarosa turned and looked back at the sad old church and surveyed the mean streets around us. He said, "I used to play stoopball on those rectory steps there. You ever play stoopball?" "I've heard of it."
"Yeah. The slum kids played it. What did you play? Golf?" He smiled.
"I played the stock market."
"Yeah?" He laughed. "Well, we played stoopball right there. Me and my friends…" He stayed quiet for a few seconds, then said, "Father Chiaro – that was the old pastor you just talked to – he used to charge out of the rectory and run us off. But if he got hold of you, he'd drag you by the ears into the rectory and put you to work on some shit job. You see those doorknobs in there? They're brass, but they don't look it now. I used to have to polish those fucking knobs until they looked like gold."
"He's still got you by the ears, Frank."
He laughed. "Yeah. What a sovanabeech."
"A what?"
He smiled. "That's the way my grandfather used to say it. Sovanabeech. Son of a bitch."
"I see." Well, I tried to picture fat little Frank Bellarosa on these streets, playing ball, making zip guns, kneeling in the confessional, getting his finger wet, kneeling in the confessional, and so on. And I could picture it, and I'm a nostalgic guy myself, so I'm partial to people who are sentimental about their childhood. I guess that's a sign of middle age, right? But with Bellarosa, there was more to it, I think. I believe he knew then that he was going home for the last time, and that he had to take care of Santa Lucia so that the priests there would take care of him when the time came. There had been a few stories in the newspapers over the last ten years or so about problems with certain priests and churches providing burial services for people in Frank's line of work. I guess this frightened Frank Bellarosa, who had assumed all along that he was dealing with a church that was under direct orders from God to forgive everyone. But now people were trying to change the rules, and Bellarosa, not one to take unnecessary chances and knowing he couldn't take it with him, prepaid for his burial service at Santa Lucia. That's what I think.
Bellarosa put his hands in his pockets and looked down the intersecting street. "In those days you could walk down this street here late at night and nobody bothered you, but a lot of the old ladies would yell at me from the windows, 'Frankie, get home before your mother kills you.' You think anybody says that on this street anymore?"
"I doubt it."
"Yeah, me too. You wanna see where I lived when I was a kid?"
"Yes, I would."
Instead of getting into the car, we walked from Santa Lucia in the heat, the way Frank Bellarosa must have done many years before. Lenny and Vinnie tailed behind us in the Cadillac. The area around the church was mostly black, and people glanced at us, but they'd probably witnessed similar scenes, and they knew this was a prodigal son with a gun, so they went about their business while Frank went about his.
We stopped in front of a burned-out five-storey brick tenement, and Bellarosa said, "I lived on the top floor there. It was a hundred degrees in the summer, but nice and warm in the winter with those big steam radiators that banged. I shared a room with two brothers."
I didn't respond.
He went on, "Then my uncle took me out of here and sent me to La Salle, and the dorms looked like a Park Avenue penthouse to me. I started to understand that there was a world outside of Williamsburg. You know?" He was quiet again, then said, "But I got to tell you, looking back on this place in the 1950s, I was happy here."
"We all were."
"Yeah." We got back into the car and drove some blocks to a better street, and he showed me the five-storey brownstone where he and Anna had spent much of their married life. He said, "I still own the building. I made apartments on each floor and I got a bunch of old people in there. I got an old aunt in there. They pay what they can to the church. You know? The church takes care of the whole thing. It's a good building."
I asked, "Are you trying to get into heaven?"
"Yeah, but not this week." He laughed, then added, "Everything's got an angle, Counsellor."
We drove around the old Italian section of Williamsburg, which had never been very large, and what was left of Italian Williamsburg seemed rather forlorn, but there were stops to be made, and the trip was not all nostalgia, but partly business. As I said, it must be difficult to run a crime empire when you can't use the telephone, or even the mail for that matter. And this fact obviously necessitated a lot of driving and quick stops to call on people. Frank was the three-minute Mafia manager.
After Williamsburg, we drove into more lively Italian neighbourhoods in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and Coney Island, where we made more stops and saw more people, mostly in restaurants and in the back of retail stores and in social clubs. I was quite honestly amazed at the number of branch offices and affiliates of Bellarosa, Inc. – or would one say franchises and chain outlets? More amazing, there didn't seem to be any written lists of these stops. Bellarosa would just say a few words to Lenny and Vinnie, such as, "Let's see Pasquale at the fish place," and they'd drive somewhere. I could hardly believe that their pea-size brains could retain so many locations, but I guess they had good incentives to do their job.
We left Brooklyn and went into Ozone Park, Queens, which is also an Italian neighbourhood. Frank had some relatives there, and we stopped at their row house and played boccie ball in an alleyway with a bunch of his old goombahs who wore baggy pants and three-day whiskers. Then we all drank homemade red wine on a back porch, and it was awful, awful stuff, tannic and sour. But one of the old men put ice in my wine and mixed it with cream soda, of all things. Then he sliced peaches into my glass. Frank had his wine the same way. It was sort of like Italian sangria, I guess, or wine coolers, and I had an idea to market the concoction and sell it to trendy places like Buddy's Hole where the clientele could drink it with their grass clippings. Ozone Park Goombah Spritzers. No? Yes?
Anyway, we moved on into the late afternoon, making a few more stops at modest-looking frame houses in other Queens neighbourhoods. Frank Bellarosa had entertained the movers and shakers of his world, the chiefs and the 'made men', at the Plaza Hotel. Now he was going out into the streets to talk to his constituents, like a politician running for office. But unlike a candidate, I never heard him make any promises, and unlike a Mafia don, I never heard him make a threat. He was just "showing his face around," which seemed to be an expression with these people that I kept hearing. Showing your face around must have a lot of subtle connotations, and must be important if Bellarosa was doing it.
The man had a natural instinct for power, I'll say that for him. He comprehended on some level that real power is not based on terror, or even on loyalty to an abstract idea or organization. Real power was based on personal loyalty, especially the loyalty of the masses to the person of don Bellarosa, as I witnessed with the sausage vendor and with everyone else we'd stopped to see. Truly the man was an intuitive and charismatic leader – the last of the great dons.
And as evil as he was, I nearly felt sorry for him, surrounded now by enemies within and without. But I had also felt sorry for proud Lucifer in Paradise Lost when he was brought down by God and heaven's host of goody-goody androgynous angels. There must be a serious flaw in my character.
We headed back to Manhattan after dark. New York is truly a city of ethnic diversity, but I don't have much occasion or desire to hang around with the ethnics. However, I have to admit that I was intrigued by the Italian subculture that I had caught a glimpse of that day. It was a world that seemed both alive and dying at the same time, and I remarked to Bellarosa in the car back to Manhattan, "I thought all that Italian stuff was a thing of the past." He seemed to understand what I meant and replied, "It is in the past. It was past when my old man took me around on Saturdays to sit with the goombahs and sip wine and talk. It's always in the past."
The old immigrant cultures, I reflected, still exerted a powerful influence on their people and on American society. But truly they were losing their identity as they became homogenized, and ironically they were losing their power as they filled the vacuum created by the so-called decline of the Wasp. But more important, back there in the shadows, somewhere in the outer boroughs, were the new immigrants, the future that neither Frank Bellarosa nor I understood or wished to contemplate.
As the car approached the skyline of Manhattan, Bellarosa said to me, "You have a good time today?"
"It was interesting."
"Yeah. Sometimes I have to just get out and see these people. You know? To see that everybody's still out there. I've been losing touch, kind of holed up at Alhambra. You can't do that. You go out there and if somebody wants to take a pop at you, then at least you went down out on the street, and not holed up someplace waiting for them to corner you. You know?" "Yes, I do. But do you need a lawyer along while you're tempting fate?"
"No. I need a friend."
I had several sarcastic replies right on the tip of my tongue, but I said nothing, which said it all.
He added, "I'm gonna make you into an honorary Italian like Jack Weinstein. You like that?"
"Sure, as long as that doesn't make me an honorary target." He sort of laughed, but I think he was finding less humour in the subject of his assassination. He did say, however, "I talked to some people. You got nothing to worry about. You're still a civilian."
Great news. And I trusted these people, right? Well at least they probably all belonged to the rifle club and were good marksmen. I surely hoped so.
We went back to the Plaza Hotel. Bellarosa gave Vinnie and Lenny the night off, and Frank and I ordered dinner in the suite.
As we ate at the table in the dining area, we made small talk, mostly about vegetables and real estate. I sliced my steak, and as I did so, I wondered what new and exciting course my life would take if I plunged my steak knife into Bellarosa's heart.
I think he was reading my thoughts because he said, "You know, Counsellor, you're probably thinking that your life is getting fucked up and you think I fucked it up for you. Wrong. You fucked yourself up and you did it before you ever laid eyes on me."
"Maybe. But you're not part of the solution."
"Sure I am. I helped you get rid of all the bullshit in your life. So now you got to go on."
"Thank you."
"Yeah. You think I'm some kind of dumb greaseball. Wrong again." I was getting a little annoyed with this guy now. I said, "Stupid people think you're stupid. I know better."
He smiled. "Yeah. It's an old Italian trick. Claudius did it to save his life before he became emperor. There's a guy in my business up in the Bronx – you know the guy – he's been acting simple-minded for ten years because the feds are on his case. You know? But Ferragamo is stupid and he thinks I'm stupid, so I surprise him every time, but he's too stupid to get it." He laughed. We went back to our steaks and didn't speak until coffee, then he asked me, "You ever play dumb?"
"Sometimes."
"Like, I mean, you know something, but you don't let on you know. You hold on to it until the right time. You don't go off hot and get yourself hurt. You wait." I replied, "Sometimes I never let on. Sometimes I just let the other guy go crazy wondering if I know."
He nodded appreciatively. "Yeah. Like what, for instance? Give me a for instance."
We looked at each other across the table, and I replied, "Like the bullshit with the IRS, Frank. You told Melzer to go to his friends in the IRS and see if they could find something on me, and they did. Then you turn me on to Melzer, who fixes things for me, and I owe you a favour. You're a real pal." He played around with his dessert and didn't reply.
I asked, "But what if I hadn't come to you with the problem?"
He shrugged.
"Then," I said, "you'd find another problem for me. Or maybe I'd need another kind of favour from you, like the variance for the stables. I'm not sure that was a coincidence or a set-up, but apparently you have my wife's ear, so you can get to me through her."
The man obviously knew there was trouble between Susan and me, and if he had a conscience at all, it was a guilty one. In fact, he actually looked uncomfortable. I mean, beyond class differences and political differences, and ethnic and racial tensions, and all the other problems that people have with one another in society, the most primitive and elemental cause of violence, murder, and mayhem is sexual possessiveness. To put it more simply, people get angry when other people are fucking or trying to fuck their mate. Anyway, Bellarosa must have been feeling a little uneasy or he wouldn't have prodded me into the subject to see my reaction. He looked at me, waiting to see, I think, if I was actually going to broach the subject of him and Susan. But since it was he who was feeling a little uneasy, not me, I decided to leave him hanging awhile longer.
Without a word, I stood and went to the sideboard on which were a few dozen telephone messages, one of which was from Susan advising me that she'd changed her telephone number. I suppose the media were getting to her, not to mention our friends and relatives. I threw the message with the new phone number in the wastebasket and left the suite.
Down in the lobby, I was accosted by none other than Jenny Alvarez, the lady in red, except that she was not wearing red that evening. "Hello, Mr Sutter," she said.
She was, in fact, wearing a black silk dress, sort of an evening dress, I guess, as if she'd just come from dinner. She really looked good, and I wanted to ask her if we'd spent the night together, but it seemed like a silly question, so I just replied, "Hello."
"Can I buy you a drink?" she asked.
"I don't drink."
"Coffee?"
"I'm in a bit of a hurry."
She seemed hurt, and I began to believe we really had spent the night together. I'm a lot of things, but a cad isn't one of them, so I accepted the offer of a drink, and we went into the Oak Bar and got a table. She ordered a scotch and soda, and I made it two. She said, "I saw the statements you made to the newspapers this morning."
"I didn't know TV journalists read the papers. Or read at all."
"Don't be a snot."
"Okay."
"Anyway, I'd like to do an interview with you."
"I don't think so."
"It won't take long. We can do it right here in the Plaza, live for the eleven-o'clock news."
"I'd be dead for the morning news."
She laughed as though this were a joke. This was not a joke. She said, "Could you get Mr Bellarosa to join you?"
"I think not."
"Maybe we could tape an in-depth interview and run it on our nightly news show at eleven-thirty. That's a national show. That would give you both an opportunity to present your side of the case."
"We're actually going to present our side in court."
So we went on in this vein for a while, Ms Alvarez thinking I was playing hard to get, and I, to be honest, not blowing her off because I was enjoying the company. She had nice full lips.
We ordered a second round. She could not comprehend, of course, that not everyone in America wanted to be on television. Finally, growing a little weary with her obsessive badgering, I said, "I had a dream last night that I slept with you."
She seemed like a tough sort of lady who'd heard it all before, but this took her by surprise, and she actually got flustered. I was smitten. I said, "Look, Ms Alvarez – can I call you Jenny?"
"Yes."
"Look, Jenny, you must know that these people don't appear on TV shows. You have a better chance of getting the Premier of the Soviet Union on your show than getting Frank Bellarosa."
She nodded, but only, I think, to get her brain working better. She said, "But you are not in the Mafia -" "There is no Mafia."
"You can talk to us. Mr Ferragamo has agreed to come on the show-" "He'd do a sitcom if the ratings were high enough."
She giggled. "Come on, Mr Sutter… John. Don't you see how this can help your client?"
So we began round three with another round of drinks. She went on for a while, making a good case for television exposure, but I'm afraid I wasn't paying much attention. I said, "It was a very realistic dream."
She replied, "Look, if it means getting you on the air…" I paid more attention. "Yes?"
"Well… we can scramble you."
"Excuse me?"
"You know. Scramble your face and voice. No one will know it's you."
"Unless you introduce me by name."
"Don't be silly. What would be the point of -?"
"You had on that red dress."
"The scrambled interview would have a different slant, of course. Not John Sutter as attorney, but as an unidentified source. We've done that before with organized crime reports. You'd talk about -" "'Do you have an apartment in town?"
Round three ended in a draw, and we went to round four, both optimistic. At seven bucks a pop in the Oak Bar, one of us was down fifty-six dollars already, plus tax and tip. There was a bowl of really good smoked almonds on the next table, but our table had a bowl of those disgusting goldfish pretzels. They're all over the place.
She went on again, glancing at her watch a few times. I asked, "Are you doing the news tonight?"
"I don't think I have a story tonight since you're not cooperating."
"Do you get paid anyway?"
"Maybe. Look, at least consider the news show at eleven-thirty. We have a show put together, but we need a focus."
"Does that mean you won't scramble my face?"
"I mean an angle. I want someone to speak intelligently about different aspects of this case. I don't want any more so-called experts. I want someone who can give the American public the other side of this issue." "What other side?"
"The constitutionality of RICO, the government's harassment of certain ethnic groups under the guise of justice, Ferragamo's statements about a possible gang war between Hispanics and Italians. That sort of thing. I really want to get a different view on this thing."
"Sounds like a good show. I'll watch it."
"Let's go talk to Mr Bellarosa. See if he wants to be interviewed. See if he wants his attorney to go on."
"Stay here." I stood. "See if you can get a bowl of smoked almonds." I went out to a house phone and called the suite, but Bellarosa's line was busy. I had no intention of presenting Ms Alvarez's offer to him, but I wanted to see if he was still in. I went back to the Oak Bar, sat, and informed Ms Alvarez, "He says no. And no means no." She had gotten the smoked almonds and I took a handful.
"Then how about you?" she asked. "Will you go on the air?"
"What's in it for me?"
"I take off the red dress."
"Before or after I go on the air?"
She looked at her watch. "Before." She added, "Fuck me, but don't screw me." We both smiled. Well, dreams do come true if you let them. But this one looked like trouble. I stood. "Sorry. I can't live up to my end of the deal. But it's been fun." I left her with the tab.
In the lobby, I checked for messages, and there were a few from TV, press, and radio people. Most criminal attorneys would parlay this opportunity into fame and fortune. But mob attorneys such as Jack Weinstein and John Sutter had to satisfy themselves with 'No comment' and tainted money that could be seized under the RICO Act. Hey, who said this was going to be good for my career? Anyway, I turned toward the lobby doors, intending to take the walk I had intended to take before, but once again I was waylaid by Jenny Alvarez. She said, "Let me ask you a question. A personal question, off the record." "I like the regular missionary position, but I'm open to anything."
"What I want to know is, why did you get involved with Frank Bellarosa?"
"It's a long story. Truly it is."
"I mean, I saw your estate out there on Long Island. My God, I didn't think people still lived like that."
"I live in the guesthouse on the estate. You got that wrong on TV. And what difference does it make where I live?"
"It makes all the difference. We're talking TV, John. Entertainment. You're a star. You look like a star. You act like a star. You're well dressed, you carry yourself well, and you speak extremely well. You're a class act." "Thank you."
"Even if you did stick me with the tab."
"That's the classiest thing I've done all week. Look… Jenny, you're very attractive, and I'd like to take you upstairs, but I think you're giving me a line of bull because you want something from me, and it's not sex. And I can't deliver, not sex or information. I'm a faithful husband, plus I'm impotent and simpleminded. So -" "What's the matter?"
Coming from the direction of the Oak Bar, staring at me, were Lenny and Vinnie. I guess they had seen me in the bar and wondered why I was having a drink with a TV reporter. Jenny Alvarez's face is well-known in New York, and even cretins like Lenny and Vinnie watch the news. Anyway, Cretin One and Cretin Two were making stupid movements with their heads, indicating they wanted me to join them.
Ms Alvarez inquired, "Who are those men?"
"Those are my law clerks." Well, the best way to cover myself, of course, was to make it clear to Lenny and Vinnie that my intentions in speaking to Ms Alvarez were sexual and not traitorous. How's that for a rationalization? So, I put my arm around her and led her to the elevators. I said, "Let's have a drink in my room."
"All right."
Lenny and Vinnie got on the elevator with us. As we rode up, I said to my pals, "This is Jenny Alvarez. She's a famous TV reporter."
They glanced at each other. Vinnie asked, "The don want to see her?"
"No, I want to see her. Alone, and I don't want to be bothered."
They both smirked, leered, and drooled. Class acts.
We got out on the eighth floor. Lenny unlocked the door to the suite, and we all entered. Bellarosa was lying on the couch, watching TV with his shoes off. Jenny Alvarez went right up to him and introduced herself as he stood. Bellarosa said, "Oh, yeah. You're the lady who gave this guy here a hard time. You friends now?". She smiled. "Yes, we are."
Well, the next thing, of course, was that she was going to start hammering poor Frank for an interview. Right? Wrong. She turned out to be the class act of the evening. She said, "John invited me for a drink. I hope I'm not intruding on business."
Bellarosa replied, "Nah. We're on vacation."
I said to Ms Alvarez, "Let's go to my room." I snagged a bottle of scotch and a bucket of ice from the bar, and she took two glasses and a bottle of soda. I showed her to my room, but as I began to follow her in, Bellarosa tapped me on the shoulder. He closed the door to my room and said to me, "You couldn't get yourself a house whore? You have to bring this TV broad up here?" I replied tersely, "It's my business who I spend my free time with. But to set the record straight, my relationship with that woman is and will remain platonic."
Bellarosa glanced at the scotch and ice bucket in my hands and smiled. I guess that did seem like a pretty idiotic statement from one man of the world to another. However, I added, "And it's not a business relationship either." "Yeah? So no pillow talk. Okay? Watch what you say to her. Understand?" I stepped toward the door, but he didn't move aside. Instead, he said, "What's on your mind, Counsellor? What's bugging you?"
"If you spoke to my wife tonight, and I assume you did, then you know." He stayed silent a moment, then added. "Yeah. Okay. I spoke to her. But you got that all wrong. That's a bad thing to be thinking about. That's a very dangerous thing, when a guy gets something like that in his head. I've seen that kind of thing get people hurt and killed. So you just put that out of your head." He grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake. "Okay?"
So I guess I was outvoted, two to one, on the question of a sexual triangle. I said, "All right, Frank. Subject closed. Open the door for me." He opened my bedroom door, and carrying the ice bucket and scotch, I went inside and kicked the door shut, then put the scotch and bucket on a cocktail table. Jenny Alvarez said, "Are you sure I'm not interrupting business?"
"I'm sure. Make yourself comfortable. Have a seat."
We sat in the two facing club chairs in the corner with the drinks on the cocktail table between us.
As I put ice in our glasses, I noticed that my hand was a little unsteady. Confronting one's wife with an accusation of adultery was a little tense, but confronting the other man, especially when the guy was a killer, was not one of life's better moments. But I felt strangely at peace, as if I'd gotten rid of a great burden and put it on the people who'd stuck me with it in the first place. I mean, if you analysed it with cold logic, it really wasn't my problem, unless I chose to make it so. Still, I knew that the cold logic would eventually give way to more basic feelings such as heartache, pain, betrayal, jealousy, and other standard marital miseries. But tonight, I felt on top of things, and I had a drinking companion.
Jenny Alvarez said, "Nice suite. Crime pays."
I replied, "Thanks for laying off Bellarosa."
"I came up here to have a drink with you."
"Right." Cynic though I am, I believed her, and it felt good to believe what someone said for a change. I mixed us scotch and sodas, and we touched glasses and drank. I have to be honest with you; I was nervous. I said, "Don't you have to be on the air or something?"
"You're my only assignment tonight. But since you're not going on the air, neither am I. But I'll call in later." She added, "Late enough so they can't get me on something else before airtime. So I'm free tonight. Feels good." Well, I mean, she rearranged her whole schedule, you know, so she could have a drink with me. So what was I supposed to do? Kick her out after one drink? Get room service to deliver a Monopoly game? I cleared my throat. "I'm very flattered."
She smiled. Oh, those lips. I have to tell you, I'm not usually into Latin beauties, but this woman was absolutely gorgeous. She had a soft brown complexion, dark eyes that sparkled, and thick black hair that cascaded over her shoulders. When she smiled, she had dimpled cheeks that I wanted to pinch. She said, "You're separated, I understand."
"I hadn't heard that."
"Well, I did."
"From whom?"
"People out where you live."
"Is that a fact? I didn't even know that."
She smiled. "Most men would just say yes to that question under these circumstances."
"I'm not most men. I'm into truth. Are you married?"
"I was. I had a baby on TV. Remember? Two years ago." I seemed to recall some mawkish and tasteless coverage of the progress of her pregnancy and final delivery. But I don't watch much TV news, and until now I didn't even realize that this was the same woman. I replied, "I do remember that. TV cameras in the delivery room. Sort of vulgar." She shrugged. "Not for television."
"I also seem to recall a proud father."
"I'm divorced now."
"So no more babies on television."
She smiled. "Not for a while."
We chatted a bit, but I watched my consumption of scotch, in the event I had to rise to the occasion. I can't do it when I'm loaded, which is frustrating because that's usually when I want to do it the most. Alcohol is a cruel drug. I said, "Look, I asked you up here to cover myself with those two goons.
Understand?"
"I think so. Do you want me to fake orgasmic noises, then leave?" "Well… no. I enjoy your company. But… I just wanted you to know why I invited you here."
"So now I know. Do you know why I accepted the invitation?"
"You find me interesting."
"That's right. Very interesting. Intriguing. You intrigue me."
"Well, that's good news. You may not believe this, but I used to be dull."
"That's not possible." She smiled. "When was that?"
"Oh, back in March, April. I was really dull. That's why my wife left me."
"You said you didn't know anything about that."
"Well, I haven't been home in a few days. Maybe I should call my answering service."
But I didn't. We talked about this and that, bantered and teased, but we never talked about Frank Bellarosa. However, it occurred to me that there was more than one way to put a knife into his heart. I mean, I could use this woman as a conduit to the news media. I could remain anonymous, and she would vouch for the reliability of her source. I could feed the media all sorts of things that could put Frank Bellarosa into jail or into the grave. And that would take me off the hook for the perjured alibi, and Bellarosa would be out of my life. I mention this because it did cross my mind. I guess I had been hanging around Bellarosa too long. But I was determined not to let my life become obsessed with vendetta the way his was. Whatever he had done to me, he had to live with it, and perhaps one day, he would answer for it. Vengeance is.mine, saith the Lord. So I dismissed my thoughts of revenge (for the moment) and got back to the business at hand. I said to Jenny Alvarez, "There's no payoff, you know. I mean, even if you spend the night, I'm not telling you anything."
"I told you I'm here because I want to be with you. I don't really give sex for stories and you don't really proposition women who need something from you. That was a game downstairs."
"And it's another game up here. And I'm out of practice." "You're doing fine. I'm still interested. By the way, did you see yourself on TV?"
"Sure did."
"Your hair was messy."
"I know. And my tie looked the wrong colour, but it wasn't. I can show you the tie."
"Oh, I believe you. That happens on TV sometimes."
The phone rang, but I didn't answer it. Jenny made a call to her studio and told them she was through for the night. I had a club soda, and she had another scotch. We both kicked our shoes off at some point. There was a TV in the bedroom and we watched her news show at eleven. The Bellarosa story got a minute, mostly reports about the published stories in the newspapers, including my press statements. Ferragamo, who was good at the ten-second sound bite, said, "We are investigating Mr Bellarosa's alibi for the day in question, and if we find evidence that contradicts that alibi, we will ask that bail be rescinded, and we will take Mr Bellarosa into custody again, and we will consider action against the individual who supplied the alibi."
Ten seconds on the head. The man was a pro.
Ms Alvarez inquired, "He means you, doesn't he?"
I replied, "I think so."
"What sort of action? What can they do to you?"
"Nothing. I was telling the truth."
"So the five other witnesses were lying? No, don't answer. No business. It's a habit. Sorry." She seemed lost in thought, then blurted out, "But it just doesn't make sense, John."
"Does it make sense that Frank Bellarosa would commit murder in broad daylight?"
"No, but… you're sure you saw him?"
"Is this on the record?" '
"No, off the record."
"Okay… I'm positive it was him."
She smiled. "If you're going to keep talking business, I'm leaving." ' "My apologies."
The sports came on, and I was delighted to discover that the Mets trounced Montreal again, nine to three. "They're going all the way," I said. "Maybe. But the Yankees will take the first four of the Series."
"The Yankees? They're lucky if they finish the season."
"Baloney," she said. "Have you seen the Yankees this year?"
"There's nothing to see."
We discussed this for a few minutes, and though I could tell she was knowledgeable, it was obvious that she was very biased. I explained, "They don't have one long-ball hitter on the team."
"Pitching is the name of the game today, buddy, and the Yankees have real depth in the bullpen."
This was very frustrating. I tried to explain the facts of baseball life to her, but she said, "Look, I can get us into the press box at Yankee Stadium. You come and see the Yankees play, then we can discuss this intelligently." "I wouldn't go to the Bronx if you paid me. But I'll watch a Yankee game with you on TV."
"Good. I want you to watch them against Detroit next week." Well, anyway, it was a good night, and we had fun, and the next morning I felt a little better than I had the morning before. Capisce?
We spent a few more days at the Plaza, but neither Frank nor I ever mentioned or alluded to the subject of my wife's being his mistress. But I could tell he was still burdened by the subject, and he could tell I was not. I don't mean to suggest I was playing with him; he was not a man to be played with. But apparently he had some human feelings like the rest of us mortals, and I sensed he felt he'd gone beyond the bounds of even Machiavellian behaviour and crossed into actual sin. Well, Father what's-his-name could issue him a quick absolution over the phone. "Say two Hail Marys, Frank, when you get a chance. See you at Communion."
Anyway, on one of those days at the Plaza, I had lunch with Jack Weinstein, whom I took a liking to. On another day, I called Alphonse Ferragamo, whom I had taken a disliking to. But I was nice to Alphonse, as per my client's orders, and Mr Ferragamo and I agreed to fight fair and clean, but we were both lying. Alphonse – not me – brought up the subject of my client's cooperating in other matters of interest to the Justice Department in exchange for Justice dropping the charge of murder. I replied, "He's not guilty of murder." Mr Ferragamo informed me, "Well, we think he is. But I'll tell you what. I'll talk to Washington about a blanket immunity for Bellarosa if he wants to talk." "How about absolution?"
Ferragamo chuckled. "That's between him and his priest. I'm talking immunity from prosecution for good information."
Good information? What kind of information did the stupid son of a bitch think the don of dons had – the location of a bookie joint in Staten Island? Bellarosa had plenty of good information; he just wasn't going to give it to the Justice Department.
"Immunity on anything he testifies about under oath," said Alphonse, which is not quite the same as blanket immunity in exchange for unsworn information. This guy played it slick. I thought a moment. If, in fact, Frank Bellarosa squealed, the Mafia in New York would be crippled for years, maybe forever. And perhaps for that reason alone, his paesanos wanted him dead. He simply had too much information and he had a good memory.
I said to Alphonse, "Mr Ferragamo, my client knows nothing about organized crime. But if he did, I think he'd rather speak to the State Attorney General than to you."
This got Alphonse a little worked up. The nice thing about a federal form of government is that you can play off one level of government against another. They taught me that in civics class. Well, they didn't, but they should have. Alphonse said, "That's not a good idea, Mr Sutter. That won't get your client off the hook with the United States Government."
"And cooperating with you won't get my client off the hook with the New York State government."
"Well… let me work on a joint immunity sort of thing. Would that be what you're looking for?"
"Maybe. And we have six parking violations in the city. We want those fixed, too."
When I heard him force a laugh, I knew I had him by the short hairs. He said, "So you present this possibility to your client, Mr Sutter. You seem a bright and reasonable man. Maybe a man like you could convince your client to make a really smart move."
"I'll tell him what we discussed." You have to understand that every prosecutor in America would like to get just one break like that in a lifetime; a top-level bad guy who was willing to sing for a year into a tape recorder and rat out a thousand other bad guys. To tell you the truth, it was a good deal for Frank. Ferragamo, in effect, was offering Frank Bellarosa his life. But very few of these paesanos made deals, and Frank Bellarosa was the last man in America you would approach with a government offer. But Alphonse was asking, and I had to make sure he was offering the real thing, and it was my duty to pass it on. I said to the U.S. Attorney, "Meanwhile, we really want a quick trial date, Mr Ferragamo, or I have to start complaining to the press." "My case is ready, Mr Sutter. My office is working on a date."
Bullshit. "Fine. When can I speak to the government witnesses?"
"Soon."
Horseshit. 'Thank you."
Understand that U.S. Attorneys don't often speak directly to defence lawyers, and when they do, they're a bit arrogant and bullying. But Mr Ferragamo had probably been reading about John Whitman Sutter in the newspapers, and he must have gotten the impression that I was someone with power, and he was being nice to me at least until he had me checked out. Also, of course, he wanted me to get Frank to sell out. But there was the matter of my perjury, which must have perplexed him. I said to Alphonse, "I saw you on TV the other night, Mr Ferragamo, and I didn't appreciate the inference you made that I was lying about my client's whereabouts."
"I didn't actually say you were lying, nor did I use your name. I said we are investigating the alibi."
"Meaning you're sending Justice Department investigators around to my community and my offices to see if anyone can tell you where I was on January fourteenth of this year. I don't like that."
"Be that as it may, Mr Sutter, that is how I must proceed." He added, "It may have simply been a case of mistaken identity on your part. Correct?" "I know whom I saw."
"Well, if you're willing to say that, and ten years in jail for perjury doesn't frighten you, then I suppose you know where you were on January fourteenth. That was the day before you flew to Florida for vacation, wasn't it?" Mamma mia, first the IRS, then this guy. Why was everyone so intent on getting me into a federal prison? It must be my attitude. I replied, "You're wasting your time and the taxpayers' money, Mr Ferragamo. But I respect your thoroughness and diligence."
"Thank you. Please think about what I've said. Whatever we can work out for your client, we can also work out for you."
I bit my lip, my tongue, and a pencil, and replied, "Thank you for your time." Anyway, I spoke to Jack Weinstein in his Midtown office the next day, as you don't talk about these things on the telephone. I outlined what Alphonse Ferragamo had said and added, "I know what Frank's answer is going to be, Jack, but this is perhaps his one last chance to save his life, and to start a new life."
Weinstein stayed silent a few minutes, then said to me, "Okay, John, I'm Ferragamo and I have you for perjury and you're looking at maybe ten in a federal prison. Okay, what I want from you is all the information you have on your friends and relatives and business partners that can put them away for cheating on their taxes, for playing fast and loose with SEC rules, for doing a little coke and marijuana, maybe for price-fixing, and for all those other little white-collar things that you winked at over the years. Okay, so your partners will go to jail, your wife's family goes to jail, your family goes to jail, your old school buddies go to jail, and you go free. What do you say, John?"
"I say fuck you, Alphonse."
"Precisely. And it goes deeper than that with those people, my friend. It's some kind of ancient distrust of government, some primitive code of honour and of silence. Capisce?"
"Yes, but the world has changed, Jack. Really it has."
"I know. But nobody's told these people yet. You go tell Frank the world has changed and tell him to give up every last paesano he knows. Go tell him." I stood to leave. "I suppose if Frank Bellarosa plays by the old rules, then he holds the old world together."
"I think that's it." He added, "But you do have to tell him what Ferragamo said.
Schedule about two minutes for that conversation."
"Right."
"Hey, how does 'Weinstein and Sutter' sound?"
Not real terrific, Jack. But I smiled and replied, "How about 'Sutter, Weinstein and Melzer'?"
He laughed. "Melzer? I wouldn't share a match with that guy." I left Weinstein's office knowing that despite my ambivalent feelings about Frank Bellarosa's being alive, well, and free, I had done my job. But to be certain, I did present Ferragamo's offer to Bellarosa. However, I didn't need a whole two minutes because after about thirty seconds, Bellarosa said to me, "Fuck him."
"That's your final decision?"
"Fuck him and fuck his dog. Who the hell does he think he's dealing with?"
"Well, he just took a shot at it. Don't take it personally. He has a job to do."
"Fuck him and fuck his job."
Pride goeth before the fall. Right?
Anyway, Frank and I and Lenny and Vinnie drove to the rifle club one night. We went down to the basement with a bunch of other sportsmen, all armed with revolvers and automatics, and we blasted away at paper targets and drank wine all night. Jolly fun, almost like bird shooting out in the Hamptons, lacking only a beautiful autumn landscape, tweedy old gentlemen, vintage sherry, and birds. But not bad for Manhattan.
Lenny and Vinnie, as it turned out, were really good shots, which I suppose I should have known. But I discovered it the hard way after losing about two hundred dollars to them on points.
So there I was at a Mafia shooting range, blasting away at paper targets with my wife's boyfriend and his Mafia pals, wondering if perhaps I should have taken in a movie instead. Anyway, we were all a little pie-eyed from the wine, and the shots were getting wilder, and one of the club members presented Bellarosa with a silhouette target on which someone had sketched in the features of Alphonse Ferragamo. The drawing was not Michelangelo quality, but it wasn't bad, and you could identify Alphonse with the owl eyes, aquiline nose, thin lips, and all that. Frank hung the target and put four out of six rounds through its heart at thirty feet, much to everyone's delight. It was not bad shooting considering he'd had enough wine to make him unsteady on his feet. But the whole incident made me a little uncomfortable.
The next few days passed with phone calls and meetings, mostly in the suite. I had expected a man like Bellarosa to have a girlfriend, or many girlfriends, or at least to get someone for a night. But I saw no signs of impropriety during the time we were at the Plaza. Maybe he was being faithful to his wife and his mistress.
As for my impropriety, Bellarosa said to me, "Hey, I don't mind you bring women up here, but no more lady reporters. She's just trying to get something out of you."
"No, she just likes my company."
"Hey, I know that type. They use their twats to get ahead. You don't find that type in my business."
Indeed, no one in Frank's business had female genitalia. If the government couldn't get him on murder or racketeering, maybe they could nail him on discriminatory hiring.
He went on, "I'm telling ya, Counsellor, I'd rather see you talking to the devil than some puttan' who's trying to make a name for herself." Well, what was I going to say? That I was infatuated with Jenny Alvarez and it was strictly personal? I mean, it was hard for me to hold the moral high ground after dragging Ms Alvarez and a bottle of scotch into my room. You know? But did I have to listen to a sermon from Frank Bellarosa? Maybe I did. The Bishop went on, "Men's business is men's business. Women don't play by the same rules."
"Neither do men," I informed him.
"Yeah. But some do. I try to keep my business in the family. You know? My own kind. That's why I had to make you an honorary Italian." He laughed. "Am I Sicilian or a Neapolitan?"
He laughed again. "I'll make you a Roman because you're a pain in the ass."
"I'm honoured."
"Good."
Indeed, everyone in Frank's world was male, and nearly all of them were Italian, and most of them were of Sicilian ancestry or from the city or region of Naples, as Bellarosa's family was. This did make the rules of behaviour and business easier, but there weren't many outside ideas that penetrated this closed world. Jack Weinstein's roots, though, were obviously not southern Italian, and he was perhaps Bellarosa's link to the outside. I had learned, incidentally, that Weinstein's family and Bellarosa's family had known one another in Williamsburg. That section of Brooklyn, you should understand, was not predominantly Italian, but was mostly German, Jewish, and a little Irish. A real melting pot, to use an inaccurate term, since no one mixed much, let alone melted. However, because of the proximities of other cultures, the Williamsburg immigrants were not quite as insular as the immigrants in other areas of New York, who created tight little worlds. Thus, the Williamsburg Italians, such as those around Santa Lucia, went to school with and even made friends with non-Italians. This information came from Mr Bellarosa, who didn't use the words proximity and insular, but I understood what he was saying. Anyway, he and Weinstein went back a lot of years, which I found interesting, and, like me, Jack Weinstein did not want to be, nor could he ever be, under Mafia constitutional law, the don. Thus, Weinstein was Bellarosa's Henry Kissinger, if you'll accept that analogy. So how did I fit into the Bellarosa crime family? Well, I was the noblest Roman of them all.
We checked out of the Plaza on Sunday and returned to Long Island in a three-car convoy, each car packed with Italian men and Italian food. I was in the middle car with Bellarosa, and the interior smelled of ripening cheese and cigars. I didn't know if I would have to boil my clothes or burn them. Regarding Susan, she hadn't called again; at least she hadn't called me again. And I never did return her call and couldn't if I wanted to since I'd thrown away her new unlisted number. So, to be honest, I was a little tense about walking through the front door.
Bellarosa said to me, "The girls will be happy to see us."
I didn't reply.
"They probably thought we were having a good time in the city. Whenever you go away on business, they think you're having a ball. Meantime, you're busting your ass to make a buck. Right?"
"Right."
"Anyway, Anna's cooking all my favourite things tonight." Whereupon he rattled off all his favourite things in this sort of singsong voice that Italians use when talking about food. I actually recognized a few of the things. I'm an honorary Italian. Anyway, this food talk must have made him hungry because he ripped open a bag of biscotti and unwrapped a hunk of cheese that smelled like gym socks. He borrowed a stiletto from Vinnie and went to work on the cheese. Executive lunch. He asked, "Want some?"
"No, thanks."
"You know what a garbage truck is called in an Italian neighbourhood?"
"No, I don't."
"Meals on wheels." He laughed. "Tell me one."
"Did you hear about the dumb Mafia guy who tried to blow up a police car?"
"No."
"He burnt his mouth on the tail pipe."
He liked that one and slid the Plexiglas divider open and told it to Lenny and Vinnie, who laughed, though I could tell they didn't get it. We rode in silence for a while, and I reflected on the present state of affairs. Despite the unspoken and unresolved issues between Frank Bellarosa and me, I was still his lawyer, and if I took him at his word, his friend. I could believe that if it weren't for the fact that I was also his alibi, and he was protecting his interest in me, which sort of coloured things.
Actually I didn't want to be his lawyer anymore, or his friend or his alibi. I could have told him that a few days ago, but since his arraignment it had become vastly more complicated for me to cut ties to him. As a lawyer, and therefore an officer of the court, what I had said in court was perjury even though I hadn't been under oath. And as a lawyer, if I recanted what I'd said, I'd probably be facing disbarment, not to mention a bullet in the head. There was, of course, this other side to being made an honorary Italian. It wasn't all wine and rigatoni, it was also omerta – silence – and it was us against them, and it was some sort of unspoken oath of loyalty that I must have taken, accepting Frank Bellarosa as my don. Mamma mia, this shouldn't happen to a High Episcopalian. Bellarosa impaled a hunk of cheese on the point of the knife and held it under my nose. "Here. You make me nervous when you watch me eat. Mangia." I took the cheese and bit into it. It wasn't bad, but it stunk.
Bellarosa watched me with satisfaction. "Good?"
"Molto bene." Not only were we partners in crime, but we were beginning to talk and smell the same.
After a few minutes of silence, he said to me, "Hey, I know you're pissed about some things, you know, things that you think I did to you, like the Melzer thing. But like I told you once, sometimes you can't get even. Sometimes you got to take the hit and be happy you're still on your feet. Then the next time you're a little tougher and a little smarter."
"Thank you, Frank. I didn't realize all you've done for me."
"Yeah, you did."
"Don't do me any more favours. Okay?"
"Okay. But here's some more free advice. Don't do me those kinds of favours, either. You don't talk to people like that reporter broad, and you don't even think about ways to even up the score. I'm telling you that for your own good. Because I like you, and I don't want to see nothing happen to you." "Look, Frank, I 'm not into vendetta like you are. I took the hit and I learned my lesson as you said. But if I was into revenge for the Melzer thing and for those other things, I guarantee you, you wouldn't even see it coming. So we let bygones be bygones, and we finish out our business, and we part friends. Capisce?"
He looked at me a long time, then said, "Yeah, you're smart enough to take a shot at me, but you ain't tough enough."
"Fuck me again and we'll find out."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
I could tell he wasn't real happy with me, but he thought about it and said, "Well, I'm not going to fuck you again, so we'll never find out. Okay?" "Sure."
He put out his hand and I took it. We shook, but I wasn't sure what we were shaking on, and I don't think he knew either. Neither did he believe me that I wasn't looking for revenge, and I didn't believe that he wouldn't screw me again the first time it was in his interest to do so.
Anyway, as we approached the expressway exit to Lattingtown, Bellarosa said in a tone of conciliation, "Hey, come on over for dinner tonight. We got lots of food. Anna invited a bunch of people over. All relatives. No businesspeople." "Are we related?"
"No, but it's an honour to be invited to a family thing."
"Thank you," I said noncommittally.
"Good. Susan, too. I think Anna talked to her already." He added, "Hey, I got an idea. Let's make this the picture party. Everybody's going to be there who I want to see the picture. Let's do that."
I had the distinct impression everybody knew about this already. In polite suburban society, this would be a sort of friendly ruse to get a couple back together again. But Frank Bellarosa had all sorts of other angles as usual. He said, "Your wife will be the guest of honour. That okay with you?" Well, the prospect of spending an evening at an Italian family homecoming party for a Mafia don with my estranged wife as the guest of honour was not that appealing, as you may conclude.
"Okay? See you about six."
Vinnie suddenly burst out laughing and slid back the Plexiglas. He looked at me.
"Burned his mouth on the tail pipe. I get it."
I should have taken the train home.
The convoy turned into Stanhope Hall and proceeded up the gravel drive of Bellarosa's newly acquired fiefdom until we reached the little enclave of Susan Stanhope, where I bid my felonious friends good-day and carried my suitcase up to the front door.
Susan's Jaguar was out front, but with horse people that doesn't necessarily mean anyone is at home, and as I entered the house, it had that empty feeling about it. So the joyful reunion was postponed.
I went to my den and erased twenty-six messages on my answering machine, then took a stack of faxes and burned them in the fireplace unread. I did go through my mail because I respect handwritten letters. There was only one of those, however, a letter from Emily, which I put aside. Everything else turned out to be business mail, bills, ads, and assorted junk, which I also burned.
I sat down and read Emily's letter:
Dear John,
Where in the name of God did you get that horrid tie? I kept adjusting the colour on my TV, but the tie didn't go with the suit unless your face was green. And I see you still don't carry a pocket comb. I saw that Spanish woman -
Alvarez, I think – on the affiliate station here, and she hates you or loves you. Find out which. Gary and I are fine. Come on down. Soon!
Love, Sis
I put the letter in my desk drawer and went into the kitchen. We have a family message centre, formerly known as a bulletin board, but the only message on it said, Zanzibar, vet, Tuesday A.M. Fuck Zanzibar. He can't even read, and he's not allowed in the kitchen anyway.
I carried my suitcase upstairs and entered the former master bedroom, now called the mistress bedroom, and threw my suitcase in the corner. I changed into jeans, Docksides, and T-shirt and went into the bathroom. My mouth still smelled of that cheese, so I gargled with mint mouthwash, but it didn't do any good. The stuff was in my blood.
I left the house and got into my Bronco, which I had trouble starting after it had sat idle for a while. George Allard was indeed dead. The engine finally turned over, and I headed down the driveway. I was on my way to go see my boat, but as I approached the gatehouse, Ethel stepped out of the door and stood in the drive, wearing her Sunday flower dress. I stopped the Bronco and got out. "Hello, Ethel."
"Hello, Mr Sutter."
"How are you?"
"I'm fine," she replied.
"You look well." Actually she didn't, but I'm pretty easy on recent widows, orphans, and the severely handicapped.
She said to me, "It's not my place to say this, Mr Sutter, but I think the press is treating you unfairly."
Was this Ethel Allard? Did she use that George-ism "it's not my place to say this"? Obviously this woman was possessed by the ghost of her husband. I replied, That's very good of you to think so, Mrs Allard." "This must be very trying for you, sir."
I think my eyes moved heavenward to see if George was up there smiling. I said to Ethel, "I'm sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you regarding unwanted visitors."
"That's all right, sir. That's my job."
Really? "Nevertheless, I do appreciate your patience. I'm afraid this might go on for some time."
She nodded, actually sort of bowed her head the way George used to do to show he'd heard and understood. This was a little spooky, so I said, "Well, you take care of yourself." I moved back toward the Bronco.
She informed me, "Mrs Sutter and I went to church this morning."
"How nice."
"She said you might be coming home today."
"Yes."
"She asked me to tell you if I saw you that she will be on the property this afternoon. She may be tending her garden or riding or at the stables. She asked that you look for her." Ethel added hesitantly, "She hasn't seemed herself the last few days."
Neither have you, Ethel. Neither has anyone else around here. Just then, I would have given anything to go back to April when the world was safe and dull. Anyway, I really didn't want to see Susan; I wanted to see my boat, but I couldn't very well ignore Ethel's message, so I said, "Thank you. I'll take a look around." I got back into the Bronco, turned around, and headed back up the long drive.
I drove to the stable and looked inside, but Susan wasn't there, though both horses were. I put the Bronco into four-wheel drive and drove across the property to Stanhope Hall, but I didn't see her tending her vegetables in the terrace gardens. I drove past the gazebo and the hedge maze, but there was no sign of her.
I was aware, as I drove over the acreage, that this was no longer Stanhope property, but Bellarosa property, and in fact even my access to Grace Lane was by way of the long driveway that was now Bellarosa's, though I assumed that whoever had handled the sale for William was bright enough to put an easement clause into the contract. Actually, since I didn't own the guesthouse, what did I care? Susan and Frank could work out an easement arrangement. How's that for whiny self-pity? But put yourself in my position: landless, moneyless, powerless, jobless, and cuckolded. But I was also free. And I could stay that way unless I was foolish enough to get myself land, money, power, a job, and my wife back. As I skirted around the plum orchard, however, I noticed a straw sun hat on a stone bench at the edge of the grove, and I stopped the Bronco. I got out and saw that beside the hat was a bouquet of wildflowers, their stems tied together with a ribbon from the hat.
I hesitated, then went into the grove. The plum trees were planted far apart, and despite the fact that they had grown wild over the years, there was still an openness inside the grove.
I saw her walking some distance away wearing a white cotton dress and carrying a wicker basket. She was gathering plums, which were few and far between in this dying orchard. I watched her awhile, and though I couldn't see her face clearly at that distance in the dappled sunlight, she seemed to me downcast. If this whole scene seems to you a bit too set, I assure you the same thought occurred to me. I mean, she told Ethel to have me look for her. On the other hand, Susan is not manipulative, not prone to using feminine wiles, or any of that. So if she had gone through the trouble of setting this up, that in itself said something. I mean, if I'd found her tending the vegetables that Bellarosa had given us, then that, too, would have said something. Right? Well, enough horticultural psychology. She seemed to sense she wasn't alone, and she looked up at me and smiled tentatively.
Now picture us running toward each other through the sacred grove, in slow motion, the boughs parting, the wicker basket thrown aside, shafts of sunlight beaming on our smiling faces, our arms outstretched, picture that. Cut to John Sutter, his hands in the pockets of his jeans regarding his wife with cool detachment. Close-up of Susan's tentative smile getting more tentative.
Anyway, she moved toward me and called out, "Hello, John."
"Hello."
She kept coming, the basket swinging slightly by her side. She looked more tan than when I'd seen her five days before, and her freckles were all out. I noticed that she was barefoot and her sandals were in her basket. She looked about nineteen years old at that moment, and I felt my heart thumping as she got to within a few feet of me. She took a plum out of the basket and held it toward me. "Want one?"
I had an ancestor who once accepted a piece of fruit from a woman in a garden, and it got him into deep trouble, so I said, "No, thanks." So we stood a few feet apart, and finally I said, "Ethel told me you wanted to speak to me."
"Yes, I wanted to say welcome home."
"Thank you, but I'm not home."
"You are, John."
"Look, Susan, one of the first things those of us who were not born in a manor learn is that you can't have your cake and eat it, too. There is a price to pay for indulging yourself. You made your choices, Susan, and you have to accept responsibility for your actions."
"Thank you for that Protestant, middle-class sermon. You're right that I was brought up differently, but I've made my adjustments to the new realities far better than you have. I've been a good wife to you, John, and I deserve better treatment than this."
"Do you? Does that mean you deny any sexual involvement with Bellarosa?"
"Yes, I deny it."
"Well, I don't believe you."
Her face flushed red. "Then why don't you ask him?"
"I don't have to, Susan, since you told him what I said to you. Am I supposed to believe you or him when it's obvious that you're both in cahoots? Do you think I'm an idiot?"
"No, you're a sharp lawyer. But you've become overly suspicious and cynical." She paused and looked at me. "I'll tell you something, though. Frank and I have become good friends, and yes, we talk, and we talk about you and about things, and I suppose that has the appearance of impropriety. I apologize for that." I looked into her eyes and I wanted to believe her, but I had too much circumstantial evidence to the contrary. I said to her, "Susan, tell me you are having an affair with him and I will forgive you. I mean that unconditionally, and we'll never speak of it again. You have my word on that. But you must tell me now, this minute, with no more lies." I added, "This is a onetime offer." She replied, "I told you the extent of our relationship. It was close, but not sexual. Perhaps it was too close, and I will deal with that. Again, I apologize for confiding in him, and if you're angry, I understand. You are all the man I need." She added, "I missed you."
"And I missed you." Which was true. What was not true was her confession to a lesser crime. It's an old trick. I could see this was going nowhere. Susan is a cool customer, and if she were on a witness stand for eight straight hours and I were a savage lawyer, I could still not shake her. She'd made her decision to lie, or more accurately, Bellarosa had made it for her, for his own reasons. I felt that if it were anyone else but him, she'd stand up and tell me the truth. But this man had such a hold over her that she could look me in the eye and lie, though it was against everything in her nature and breeding to do so. I felt worse at that moment than if she had just said, "Yes, I've been screwing him for three months." Actually, I was frightened for her because she was less able to handle Mr Bellarosa and his corruption than I was. I knew instinctively that this was not the time to push her and continue the confrontation. I said, "All right, Susan. I understand that you were seduced by him in another way. And yes, I am angry and jealous of your relationship with him, even if it's not sexual. I wish it were simply physical and not metaphysical." This was not true, of course, because I'm a man first, and a sensitive, intellectual, modern husband second, or third, or maybe even fourth or lower. But it sounded like the right response to her confession of emotional infidelity. She said to me, "You were seduced by him, too, John."
"Yes, that's right."
"Well, can we be friends?"
"We can work on it. But I'm still angry about a lot of things. Maybe you are, too."
"Yes, I'm angry that you've accused me of adultery and that you've been emotionally withdrawn for months."
"Well," I said, "maybe we should separate for a while." She seemed to mull that over, then replied, "I'd prefer it if we could work out our problems while living together. We don't have to sleep together, but I'd like you to live at home."
"Your home."
"I've instructed my attorneys to amend the deed in both our names." Life is one surprise after another, isn't it? I said to her, "Instruct them not to."
"Why?"
"I don't want assets if I have tax problems. And I don't want your assets under any circumstances. But thank you for the gesture."
"All right." She asked, "Well, will you be staying?"
"Let me think about it. I'm going to spend a few days out on the boat. I'm afraid I won't be able to come to your unveiling this evening." She replied, "If you'd like, I'll tell… Anna to call it off."
"No, Anna would be disappointed. Please pass on my regrets to Anna."
"I will."
"I'll see you in a few days." I turned to leave. "
"John?"
"Yes?"
"I just remembered. Mr Melzer came around the other day. Thursday or Friday, I think."
"Yes?"
"He said you were supposed to make some sort of initial payment on your taxes."
"Did you tell him we haven't gone to closing on the East Hampton house yet?"
"Yes, I did. He said he'd see what he could do, but he sounded concerned." "I'll get in touch with him." I hesitated, then said, "Susan, we have a long way to go."
She nodded. "Maybe we can go away together as soon as things settle down, John.
Just you and I. We can take the boat to the Caribbean if you'd like." She was certainly trying, and I was certainly not. But the hurt was too deep, and the lies were not making it any better. I had the sudden compulsion to tell her I'd slept with a famous TV news reporter, and I might have if I thought it would do either of us any good. But I felt no guilt at all and didn't need to confess, and Susan didn't need to hear a confession that was given out of vengefulness.
"Think about a boat trip, John."
"I will."
"Oh, Edward and Carolyn both called. They send their love to you. They're drafting letters, but that might take a while." She smiled. "I'll call them when I get back. See you in a few days."
"Be careful, John. You really shouldn't go out alone." "I'll stay in the Sound. Nothing tricky. I'll be fine." I added, "Good luck tonight." I turned and walked away and heard her call out, "Don't go to the Caribbean without me."
I pulled into the yacht club an hour later, having stopped at a deli in Bayville to pick up beer, baloney, and bread. You can live on beer, baloney, and bread for three days before scurvy and night blindness set in. I carried the case of beer and the bag of groceries to the boat in one trip and set everything down on the dock. As I was about to jump aboard, I noticed a cardboard sign encased in a sheet of clear plastic, hanging from the bow rail. I bent down and read the sign:
I stared at the sign awhile, trying to comprehend how this thing got on my boat.
After a full minute, I stood and loaded my provisions on board. As I went about casting off, I noticed that people in nearby boats were looking at me. I mean, if I needed a final humiliation, this was it. Well, but it could have been worse. Let's not forget that right here on Long Island in colonial times, people were put in wooden cages and dunked in ponds, they were tarred and feathered, locked in pillories, and whipped in public. So one little cardboard sign was no big deal. At least I didn't have to wear it around my neck. I started the engine and took the Paumanok out into the bay. I noticed that on the door that led below was the same sign as the one on the bow rail. I saw yet another one tied to the main mast. Well, I couldn't say I didn't see the sign, could I?
I cut the engine and let the boat drift with the tide and wind. It was late afternoon, a nice summer Sunday in August, a bit cooler than normal, but comfortable.
I really missed this while I was in Manhattan: the smell of the sea, the horizons, the isolation, and the quiet. I opened a can of beer, sat on the deck, and drank. I made a baloney sandwich and ate it, then had another beer. After five days of menus, room service, and restaurants, it was nice to make myself a baloney sandwich and drink beer from a can.
Well, I went through about half the case, drifting around the bay, contemplating the meaning of life and more specifically wondering if I'd done and said the right things with Susan. I thought I had, and I justified my not telling her I didn't buy her story by reminding myself that she was borderline nuts even under the best of circumstances. I wasn't looking to destroy her or the marriage. I really wanted things to work out. I mean, on one level, we were still in love, but there's nothing more awkward than a husband and wife living together when one of them is having an affair, and the other one knows about it. (What I had done is called a fling. Susan was having an affair. Bellarosa had explained that when we were all having dinner at The Creek that night. Right?) Well, you don't sleep together, of course, but you don't necessarily have to separate and file for divorce, either. Especially if you're both still emotionally involved. There are other less civilized responses, I know, like having the big scene, or one or the other spouses going completely psychotic and getting violent. But in this case, the entire mess had evolved in such a bizarre way that I felt I shared in the responsibility.
Actually Susan had not verbally acknowledged that she was having an affair with our next-door neighbour, and that sort of complicated the situation. To make a legal analogy, I had made an accusation but had never presented evidence, and the accused exercised her right to remain silent, sulky, and withdrawn. And in truth, though Bellarosa had tacitly acknowledged the affair, my evidence was purely circumstantial as far as Susan was concerned. So, I think we both figured that if we just avoided the issue and avoided each other, we might eventually both come to believe none of this had happened. It was sort of the reverse, I suppose, of our sexual fantasies; it was using our well-developed powers of make-believe to pretend that what was happening was just another sexual melodrama, this one titled, "John Suspects Susan of Adultery." Anyway, somewhere around the tenth or eleventh beer, I realized that it was Frank Bellarosa who stood in the way of a real and lasting reconciliation. Well, the sky was turning purple, and the gulls were swooping, and it was time to go back. I rose unsteadily, went below, and retrieved a fire axe that was clipped to a bulkhead. I went into the forward head and swung the axe, cutting a five-inch gash in the fibreglass hull below the waterline. I pulled the axe out and watched the sea water cascade down the hull between the sink and shower. I swung the axe a few more times, cutting a good-size hole in the hull. The sea gushed in, swamping the floor and spilling out into the forward stateroom. I went topside and opened the flag locker, pulling out seven pennants and clipping them to the halyard. I ran the pennants up the main mast. Proud of my idiocy, and with the Paumanok listing to starboard and me listing to port, I lowered myself onto the aft deck and pulled a small inflatable life raft from under the cockpit seat. I put the remainder of the beer aboard the raft along with two small oars, and I sat in the raft. I popped a beer and drank while my boat settled deeper into the water around me. The sea came over the starboard side first, sloshed around the tilting deck and raised the life raft a few inches.
The Paumanok took a long while to sink, but eventually the stern settled into the water and the lifeboat drifted away over the swamped stern. I watched my boat as it settled slowly into the sea, listing at about 45 degrees to starboard, its bow rising up out of the water and its mast flying the seven signal pennants that proclaimed to the world Fuck you. It was nearly dark now, and as I drifted away, it became more difficult to see my boat, but I could still make out the mast and the pennants lying almost perpendicular to the water. It appeared as though the keel had touched bottom and that she was as far down as she was going to go.
I drifted with the tide for a while, working on a fresh beer and thinking about this and that. Obviously, what I had done was a very spiteful thing, not to mention a class A felony. But so what? I mean, someone was being very spiteful toward me. Right? I saw Alphonse Ferragamo's hand in this, and Mr Novac's hand, too. And perhaps even Mr Mancuso's hand and possibly Mr Melzer's influence. No good will come of your trying to take on forces more powerful than yourself. True, but I was enjoying the fight.
What I didn't enjoy was the loss of my boat, which in some semi-mystical way had become a part of me over the years. The Paumanok had always been my ace in the hole, my rocket ship to other galaxies, my time machine. That's why they'd taken her from me. Well, as the signal flags said, Fuck you.
Of course, if I hadn't been so spiteful and impulsive, I'd have gotten the boat back after I'd come up with the taxes, but that wasn't the point. The point was that the Paumanok was not going to be used as a pawn or a knife in my ribs. It was a good boat, and it should not suffer the indignity of a government tax-seizure sign on it. So I hoisted the beer to her and lay down in the life raft and drifted around the bay.
Around midnight, after counting a billion stars and wishing on a dozen shooting stars, I stirred myself and sat up.
I finished the last half of a beer, oriented myself, and began rowing for shore. As I pulled on the oars, I asked myself, "What else can go wrong?" But you should never ask that question.