Casino Moon

48

THE DAY BEFORE THE fight, my father asked me to meet him out on the Boardwalk at six o’clock in the morning. A chill wind strafed in from the Atlantic and a lazy sun was just beginning to climb out of the water. The sky was the color of a bruise.

“You remember when you were a kid and I used to take you for walks along here?” he began.

“Yeah, sure.”

How could I forget the way he took me by the hand after my real father died?

“You remember the stories I’d tell about the way Atlantic City used to be?” He handed me a cup of coffee.

“I’m not sure.”

The stories Vin told had a different flavor from the ones I heard from Mike. My real father liked to talk about the old hotel palaces, and Sinatra, and the diving horse on the Steel Pier. With Vin, it was another world.

“You know, they made history here once,” he said. “The old-timers. Capone, Luciano, Lansky, Siegel, Dutch Schultz, Maxie Hoff from Philadelphia. They all came into town one weekend in 1929 and decided to get rid of all the Mustache Petes from the old country who’d been running things. They wanted to make it more of an American business and not just a bunch of animals killing each other. They were supposed to be staying right down there at the Breakers.”

He waved his hand at the row of casinos and cut-rate hotels down toward the south end of the Boardwalk.

“I told you that story, right?” He took a sip from his coffee and smiled when it seemed to burn his tongue. “How they tried to check in all at once under assumed names, but the guy at the desk got wise and tried to throw them out?Lansky had to intervene just to keep them from shooting the place up. Instead they packed up their violin cases and moved on down to the Traymore.”

Steam rose off his coffee and evaporated in the salty air. Now that he’d brought it up, I realized he had told me the story about a million times before. But I had a feeling he was trying to make a different point this time.

“It’s all gone now,” he said, putting his coffee down on a green bench. “Back then, there was ...” He put his hands together, trying to think of a word.

“Cohesion?”

“Cooperation. They knew how to work together. They even helped each other move their bags to the other hotel when the Breakers wouldn’t take them in. And they had the greatest sit-down in the history of man. Divided up the whole country. That was the way they did it back then. They worked for a common goal. It all goes back to the old country. I ever tell you how they started this thing of ours?”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some French soldier raped a Sicilian girl on the day of her wedding and her mother cried “Mia figlia, mia figlia” and that night all the peasants sneaked out and killed the French soldiers. That story’s engraved on my cranium too. I still wasn’t sure what he was driving at.

“But that was the old country,” my father said with a sigh, briefly working over his hair again with the Ace comb. “Here, it’s different. It’s every man for himself. Like the way you live.”

Before I could defend myself, he put up a hand to cut me off.

“I’m not blaming anybody,” he said. “If I was starting off now, maybe I’d be the same as you. But that wasn’t the way I was brought up. I was brought up the old way, to think of the good of the whole borgata when I did something. Maybe if I was brought up your way, I could’ve learned to be more independent...”

I brought him up short. “So what’s the problem, Dad?”

He just looked out at the whitecaps rolling in and crashing on the beach. “Teddy found out that you still got a piece of this fight. And he wants to know when he’s getting his cut.”

“Tell him he’s got a long wait.”

“He ain’t gonna wanna hear that.”

“Then fuck him! What’s he going to do about it?”

Without a word, my father pulled up his shirttail and showed me the nine-millimeter tucked in his waistband. That knot tightened at the back of my skull.

“What are you saying? He was going to have you shoot me if I didn’t come across?”

The sun was rising higher, but my father still looked cold. The Boardwalk was empty at this hour, except for a couple of old bums rolled up in sleeping bags on the green wooden benches by the bathhouse.

“Look, I’m in a tough spot,” my father said, dropping the shirttail over his gun and looking embarrassed. “All my life I been a loyal soldier to Teddy. We came up in reform school together. I known him a helluva lot longer than I know you. Just throw him seventy, seventy-five thousand on top of what you already owe him. Show him some respect. You’ll make a sick man happy.”

“No!” I told him. “This was my deal all the way. I raised all the revenue, I took all the risks. Why should he be able to come in at the last minute and take a cut?”

“Because the man is dying. He feels like everything in his life’s been taken away from him. First he lost his son. Then Jackie from New York stole the unions. Now his health is going.” Vin gestured at the darkened casinos that sat like still white elephants along the Boardwalk. “Twenty years ago, he could walk around and feel like he owned this town. But then all these casino corporations and lawyers pushed him out. You don’t know what’s been taken from him

“What’s been taken from him?!” I exploded. “What’s been taken from him?!! What about what he took from me? He took my fucking childhood!! He took my fucking father from me!!”

Vin looked crestfallen. “I been a good father to you.”

But I wasn’t going to be put off any longer. This had been a long time coming, like rain after a humid spell. “I’m not talking about that,” I ripped into him. “I’m talking about Mike. The man whose blood runs in my veins. I want to know what happened to him.”

“Why, wha, I told you none of us know.” Vin couldn’t look me in the eye.

“All right, that’s enough,” I told him harshly. “That’s enough of the lies. Now I want to know the truth. I waited all my life. I already know Teddy killed Mike. Now I wanna know why and I want to know what you had to do with it.”

The tide flowed in and rolled out the way it had for five million years, but the breath my father exhaled sounded even older than that. A sandpiper ran along the shore with a clam in its mouth.

“Come on.” I stared at him. “You owe it to me.”

He ignored me for a few seconds and tried to light a cigarette. He flicked his lighter three times without producing a flame and then threw it across the beach. He stared after it for a long time before he spoke again.

“Well,” he said finally. “I guess you gotta be told sometime.”

I realized I was shaking, the way I did before I killed Nicky. “Tell the story.”

“Mike, yeah, Mike,” he mumbled, like he was trying to find the right place to begin. “He was a lifeguard, from over Margate. Good-lookin’, smoothtalker. He looked like that guy on television. What was his name? Edd ‘Kookie’ Byrnes.”

77 Sunset Strip. I remembered the song Mike used to sing.

“Yeah, Mike did the whole California bit with the blonde girl and the red Corvette convertible. But what he really wanted to be was like Hugh Hefner and Howard Hughes rolled into one. A millionaire and a playboy. He was a dreamer, you know. Except he didn’t know how to do any of the things that got those guys where they were. He didn’t have any fuckin’ money. So that’s why he had to hook up with a couple of mugs like Teddy and me. He needed the muscle. And we needed somebody presentable-like like him to go in and talk to people in banks and such, because me and Teddy, we’d get thrown out before we got through the fuckin’ lobby.”

So that was Mike. I wondered if I would’ve gotten along with him as an adult.

“Anyway,” said Vin, looking down at the gray Boardwalk railing. “The three of us got involved in a real estate deal. We bought this hot dog place on the Boardwalk called Manny’s on the Boardwalk. I used to go in there once a week and slam the guy’s hand in the cash register. Eventually, they decided to just give us the deed instead of paying the protection money. So then about six months later, this hotshot lawyer from New York has a sit-down with us and wants to buy the property for a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. Mike says fuck you, because he’s a dreamer.”

“What do you mean?” I strained to remember Mike’s face, but all I could picture at the moment was the back of his head and the shine on his shoes.

“You know,” said Vin. “He wanted to build one of these golden palace hotels like they used to have in the old days in Atlantic City. So he was holding out for more money. Which made Teddy nuts. He never liked Mike. Was always jealous, because Mike was so handsome and Teddy, he was kinda on the weighty side. And the two of them had a disagreement. Botta beep, botta bing, who remembers all the details? Mike wound up dead.”

“No botta beep. I want the real story. Tell me exactly what happened. Did Teddy get somebody to stick an ice pick in him?” I was in a rage. I wanted to tear the truth out of Vin.

He was already holding his sides like he was in pain. “Ah, shit. It was nothing. We were sitting around the living room, having some drinks, discussing things, and Mike went to the kitchen to get Teddy some pretzels. And when he came back in, Ted took a gun from behind one of the sofa cushions and shot him once.”

“Where?”

Vin’s mouth opened in disbelief. “What, do you gotta know everything?”

“Where did he shoot him?” I said louder.

“In the face. All right? Teddy shot him in the face. He never liked the way Mike looked. It was over in two seconds.”

A brief wind shifted the sands and another wave crashed onthebeach,breakingintoamillionfragments.But something inside me had turned to stone. “Then what happened?”

“Please,” Vin said in a quiet voice. “Don’t do this to me. I’m your father. I love you ...”

“Screw you. I want the rest.”

He threw his arms around himself. “It was all Teddy’s idea,” he said. “He had me pick you up in the car and the two of us drove out to bury Mike in the Pinelands. Teddy figured no one would stop a car with a little kid in front. Afterwards, I bought you a hot dog on the Boardwalk. I always thought you remembered it. That’s why I couldn’t understand that you’d keep asking me.”

I should’ve remembered it. I tried to bring it all back and picture it. But all I could see before me was the sea, the beach, and Vin, a trembling old man. The real memory was locked away behind some door I couldn’t open. Maybe it was better that way.

“So what happened to the real estate deal?” I asked, just to finish the story and lay it to rest.

Vin shook his head. “I guess Mike was right,” he sighed. “We wound up selling the property for a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. And then the lawyers we sold it to went and tore down the hot dog stand and built the Doubloon Casino. We could’ve all been millionaires.”

I just stood there for a second, watching the Doubloon’s red TAKE A CHANCE sign thirty yards away blink on and off in the early-morning light. When the sun hit the casinos at this angle, they really did look like palaces and castles. Especially before all the losers, hustlers, scavengers, high rollers, hookers, sidewinders, and people who’ve just never caught on to how the world works came streaming out onto the beach.

All this time, it had been so obvious. But I didn’t want to see it. Now that I knew it all, I didn’t so much feel angry as half dead inside.

“I don’t think I can be around you anymore,” I told Vin.

A gust of wind blew through the tower of his hair, leaving it lopsided. “I understand,” he said.

“Tell Teddy whatever you want about the fight. I don’t see how I owe him anything else now.”

I started moving away, toward a broken part of the Boardwalk.

“What about you?” Vin tried to keep up with me. “What’re you gonna do.”

“Never mind about me.”

I still hadn’t worked out whether I was going to try to stay or get out of town after the fight. Either way, I wanted to make sure I’d have enough money to give my wife and kids.

“Anthony, gimme a hug.”

I turned to look at Vin. This murderous old man, who’d destroyed the life I could’ve had. I’d never noticed how hairy he was before. He had hair in his ears, hair in his nose, hair curling off the back of his neck. Larry DiGregorio must have felt his hairy fingers pressing down on his windpipe. Somehow I couldn’t find it in my heart to hate him. I just knew I had to get away from him.

He held out his arms to me.

“I’m not going to do that.” I stiffened.

Vin bowed his head, accepting that was the way it was going to be. “All right,” he said. “The only thing is, just make sure you get Teddy the sixty you already owe him. Otherwise, even I can’t protect you.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll get it.”

The wind whistled down the beach like a long train sigh and the tide crested along the nearest jetty. I looked down and saw the Boardwalk was littered with thousands of pieces of clamshells that had been dropped there by seagulls and crushed underfoot by tourists.

“Hey, Anthony.” Vin suddenly grabbed my arm and turned me to face him one last time. “I’m sorry.”

“About what?” Where could he begin?

“I dunno.” He let go of me and started to walk away with his hands in his pockets. “I guess everybody oughta be sorry about something.”