Havana

Chapter 12

The old men met in an impoverished mountain state so foreign to all the things they knew it seemed like a trip to someone else's old country. The site was an air-conditioned house that had once belonged to a mine manager and looked down across the coaledout ridges, the abandoned and rusting steam shovels, the scars in the earth. It was like a mansion in a battlefield.

They arrived by Cadillac, each with two or three bodyguards. The huge cars dominated the roads up from Miami and New Orleans, over from Cleveland and Pittsburgh, down from Boston and New York. When they reached the small town that was their destination, it was almost like a funeral parade: black Caddy after black Caddy, negotiating the hairpin turns, crawling through ruined, desolate, misty villages, past knots of curious, slat-ribbed children with hollow faces, lank hair and deep eyes.

And the men in the cars were famous too, at least in their worlds. They were the wisest of the wise, the toughest of the tough, the meanest of the mean, the fastest of the fast. What stories they could tell if storytelling were permitted, though of course it was not. What those old eyes had seen, what those old brains had calculated, what those old, still-strong hands had crushed.

They were lumpy, dark men, set in their ways, in black suits and ties and white shirts, and fallen socks over big black shoes. The lenses of their glasses were thick. Their veins showed, their eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, their hands large, their jowls fallen, their faces swaddled in fat and unsmiling, drawn, serious. They spat a lot, smoked a lot, cursed a lot. They wore pomade in their thinning hair. They looked as if they'd never laughed in their lives, or had a drink with a girl or gone to a dance or a ball game or a party. Their faces had the gray pallor of indoors at night, the waft and stench of cigarettes, the glow of neon. They were old men of the city.

They drank Sambuca or Frangelico or Amaretto from small glasses and sat listlessly around the living room, not at a single grand table like medieval potentates-there was no nobility in their world, only practicality-but like old peasants at a coffee-house in Salerno, too frail to toil in the fields. The subject was not who was there, but who was not there.

Chicago was not there.

"These Chicago people, I don't know," said one. "They get more arrogant all the time. They think their thing is such a great thing."

"What is to be done? Our thing must be protected, but I am not eager for a return to the old days."

"Me neither. I've been shot enough already, six times, cut twice, beaten a dozen."

"If I'm to be stabbed in the back," one joked, "I want it to be by friends, not enemies!"

Everybody laughed.

"The Chicago thing could become a problem," said the eldest of the equals. "The Chicago thing grows mighty on the river of money that flows to it from this Las Vegas, the city in the desert. Who would have dreamed such a thing? A city in a desert!"

"Sometimes even the longest shots come in. Someone picks the number."

"The Chicago thing owns Las Vegas, so Chicago now sees itself first among equals. Soon, possibly, it will see itself as first without equals. It will be the only thing. Our things will be nothing."

"Ben Siegel would be horrified if he knew how his dream had turned out because he was always, in his heart, an East Coast boy," someone said.

"He was a great man, a seer―"

"He was also a nutbin jaybird whose eyes were bigger than his brain and he never had no judgment at all. He starts a fight in a train station with a fellow turns out to be a professional boxer. Goes urp all over his fancy clothes. He ends up like all the hot ones, with his face blown off on his sofa. His eye, I understand, is on the floor."

"But Ben was committed, rest in peace and a slow death to whoever done the deed on him, to a fair shake for all the things. His idea was that Vegas would be for us all, we'd all have a piece. Not this Chicago thing, as these greedy bastards have established, and now it teeters dangerously toward what nobody wise and old wants."

Though unsaid, all acknowledged privately the theory of mutually assured destruction that kept the peace, fragile as it was, in their tough little world of things. All knew that if any thing grew too powerful, it would wage war on the others. Alliances would be formed, treaties broken, it would be city against city, thing against thing. Worst of all, of course, it would embolden the class of men these men feared the most: The FBI? Not a chance: No, far worse: their own children and grandchildren, eager to take over, eager to drink from the river and to strut their strength and to push the old bastards aside. These people really frightened the old men. The kids: they wanted their thing.

But at last the one from New York, the wisest of them all, spoke, and all listened.

"The Chicago thing has Las Vegas. We have Cuba. As long as we have Cuba, we need not fear Chicago. Chicago needs to fear us. Next to Cuba, Las Vegas is nothing but an annoyance."

"This is very true," someone said.

"He speaks what is real."

He continued.

"We have our best man down there. He is clever, oh so clever with the numbers―"

"The Jew? He is not one of us."

"He is in cunning. Only he lacks our will to do what is necessary. He has not killed, I believe."

"No, he has not. He is an arguer, a fixer. With the guns, the boomboom, the flying blood, the puddles all sticky and black, the faces blown off, the hair mussed, the newspaper shots of what happens in alleys to men who have transgressed. No, not for him."

"That is a shame. Sometimes that is where it must end. In an alley, with a pool of blood and the face gone."

An amen chorus agreed. That was where it had to end some time. Nothing else would satisfy.

"This is why I have made an arrangement, which I now put before you, for your approval," said the New York thing representative. "I have done this already. It can be undone, if you demand, but I think you will see some wisdom in it."

"So, go ahead."

"What is needed down there is someone with our kind of hot blood. The balls to get close with knives or guns. Fists even. Sometimes necessary as we have said."

"It is not in the Jew to be that way. Any Jew. They have been beaten on too many times for them to take pleasure in that."

"It was in Ben, at least a little. It was in Lepke Buchalter, rest in peace. It was in Murder, Inc. and in Barney Ross, the boxer. They were all Jews. Now in this Israel. These Jews are fighters, too. With the machine guns, what have you."

"They are a new kind of Jew. Our kind of Jew is like our man in Havana. Or Abbadabba Berman: the numbers, the quickness, the sureness with the figures. That is your typical Jew. Certainly, yes, in certain times, it changes. You cannot, I think you will agree, count on it to be that way. You have to count on the typical, not the extraordinary."

"So what have you done?"

"I have sent him a man."

"One man would make such a difference?"

"One man, yes. This man."

"And who is this man."

"Frankie Carbine."

"Frankie Horsekiller? Frankie of Times Square? Frankie of the two policemen? That Frankie?"

"That Frankie, exactly."

"Oh, my god!"

The amen chorus rumbled nervously, then the wise man spoke again.

"He is crazy. He has no judgment. He likes too much to shoot. All his problems he solves with a gun. He wants to be big but he hasn't the vision. He just has his gun and his craziness. But sometimes you need craziness. You need that thing where there is no fear. Some of the old-timers had it. We had to move on, but there are throwbacks, and Frankie Carbine is such a man. We may have need of the crazed down there. Cuba is the lynchpin of all our things; we may have to defend it with crazy. Sometimes, crazy is necessary."

All amened in honor of crazy.