Marked Man

5

Charlie the Greek found me.

I was leaning on the railing of the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey, across from the Kohr Bros. frozen-custard stand at the Seventh Street ramp. The air was wet and salty, shot through with honky-tonk lights, the Ferris wheel spun, seagulls hovered. Little kids squealed as they pulled their parents to the amusement pier, boys bought skimmer boards at the surf shop. Taters Famous Fresh Cut Fries, Johnson’s popcorn, Tee Time Golf, free live crabs with kit. Ah, summer at the shore, it can’t help but stir sweet memories of an idyllic childhood, except not my memories and not my childhood.

“You Carl?” came a voice ragged and dry, with the flat accent of Northeast Philadelphia.

I turned to spot a short, old man with stubby arms who had sidled up beside me. His forehead came to my elbow. He looked to be in his sixties, and from the evidence they had been sixty hard years. His head was big and round and bald, his eyes were squinty, his plaid shorts were belted high on his waist. And then there were the white socks and sandals.

“I’m Carl,” I said.

“You couldn’t maybe have dressed to blend?”

“Would you have recognized me if I wasn’t in my suit?”

“Maybe not, but jeez.” The man’s head swiveled, his eyes shifted. “Every mug on the boardwalk has you marked.”

“Let me say this, Charlie. Even on the boardwalk, my suit is less conspicuous than those shorts.”

“Bermudas,” he said, hitching up his belt. “On sale at Kohl’s.”

“I bet they were.”

“Was you followed? Did you check to make sure you wasn’t followed?”

“Who would be following me?”

His head swiveled again. “Stop with the attitude and bark.”

“I checked before I left the city and again when I pulled in to the rest stop on the expressway and surveyed the ramps. All clear.”

“Good.” Pause. “How’s my mother?”

“She’s dying.”

“The old bat’s been dying for years.”

“She looked pretty bad.”

“Ever seen her look good? Trust me, she’ll end up spitting into my grave afore it’s over.”

He hiked up his shorts until they were just beneath his breasts, scanned the boards. “Want to know why I ran all them years ago? They wasn’t going to send me away hard, it wasn’t the time what had me worried. But she would have come in every visiting day to sit across from me and let me have it through the Plexiglas. I would have killed myself halfway through.”

“She wants you to come home.”

“I knows she does.”

“So?”

“She tell you what I got facing me?”

“She told me some. From the D.A. I learned some more.”

“Coming home for me, it ain’t no luxury cruise. And not just because of the time they’re going to pound on my head. It would be a miracle I survive it.”

“You’re talking about the Warrick Brothers Gang?”

“Quiet, all right? Jeez, you want to get me capped right here?”

“It’s funny, Charlie, but I don’t see you as the gangster type.”

“Hey, it ain’t all rough stuff. I ain’t so big, sure, but neither was that Meyer Lansky.”

“Even Meyer Lansky was bigger than you.”

“I was making a point, is all. I got some skills, don’t think I don’t.”

“So why are the Warrick guys so mad at you?”

“I maybe said some things to some people. Hey, I could go for some soft-serve. You want to get me some soft-serve?”

I pressed my lips together for a moment and then said, “Sure. What flavor?”

“Vanilla. And don’t forget the jimmies. I like all them different colors. It makes it festive. Like a party in your mouth.”

“You got it.”

“And make it a big one,” he said.

I pushed away from the railing and got in line at the Kohr Bros. stand. I needed just then some time away from whiny little Charlie. Not that Charlie didn’t have anything to whine about, what with the mother he had waiting for him. But if he decided to stay on the lam, I’d have to give back the pile of plunder sitting in my drawer. On the other hand, considering the FBI’s keen interest, and what Charlie was intimating about his former running mates, it might be best for everybody if Charlie stayed out in the cold.

“You don’t like custard?” said Charlie after I brought him a cone nearly half his size.

“Whenever I get soft-serve it ends up dripping on my shoes.”

“You should buy a pair of sandals, that way it slips right through.”

“Look, Charlie,” I said. “What am I doing here? You sound like the last thing you want to do is to come home.”

“Yeah, I knows, but you know.”

“I know what?”

“It’s my mother. She says she wants me to say good-bye. She says it would make up for everything, she could see me one last time.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think I’m sick of running. And I ain’t living the life of Riley, you know?”

“Who the heck is Riley anyway?”

“Some guy who ain’t living in crappy week-to-week walk-ups and sweeping floors, who’s actually looking forward to retirement because he’s got Social Security coming, who ain’t waiting for a knock that ain’t about the rent or the rats, but about something worse.”

A father took his three sons over to a bench by the rail to eat their cones. The kids’ faces were smeared with chocolate, the youngest was crying about something, the middle was hitting the eldest, the father was ignoring them all and staring slack-jawed at the underage girls who strolled on by. Ah, fatherhood.

“Are you going to be able to take care of me?” said Charlie.

“I don’t know.”

“My mother said you could.” He took a wet lick of his cone. “She said you would work it out.”

“I don’t know if I can. It’s a little more complicated than she might have thought.” I glanced at the family. “Let’s take a walk on the beach,” I said.

“I don’t want to go to the beach,” said Charlie. “I hate getting sand in the socks. It chafes my toes.”

“A bit more privacy might be the ticket, don’t you think?”

Charlie did his swivel-head thing, checked out the father and three boys on one side of us, a young couple on the other. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

We took the wooden stairs to the beach. On the way down, Charlie tripped and lurched forward. As he grabbed hold of the metal rail, the mound of vanilla atop his cone tumbled over and splattered onto the step.

“Ah, jeez,” he said. “My ice cream. I hate when that happens.”

He stood there, staring forlornly down at his now-empty cone and the white Rorschach blob at his feet. He looked right then, with the light streaming from the boardwalk behind and leaving him a round, bald, silhouette, like an overgrown toddler, about to break into tears.

“Want me to get you another one?”

“Would you? Really? Really?”

“I’ll meet you at the water’s edge.”

Charlie was waiting for me just above the reach of the tide, in front of the stone jetty. The sea was black, with lines of phosphorescent foam rising and falling in the darkness. Behind us the sounds of the boardwalk turned tinny, as if being played from an old transistor radio.

“Why is the FBI still chasing you, Charlie?” I said after I gave him the cone and he sucked down half of it while staring at the ocean.

“Maybe something I done a long time ago.”

“Something with the Warrick gang?”

“No,” he said. “Something from before. When I was still legit and trying to prove myself to my mother. Something what I done with four of my pals I grew up with. Just something that we pulled.”

“A little prank?”

“I guess yous could call it that.”

“When?”

“Almost thirty years ago. It’s a long story.”

“I have time.”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Because whatever I do, I won’t rat out the old crew. The Warrick guys, they can rot in hell. But the old gang, they’s more family than family, if you understand.”

“Tell me about them.”

“What’s to tell? The five of us, we grew up together.”

“Like brothers.”

“Sure we was. One of them was Ralphie Meat, what lived just a few streets down from me. Bigger than anyone you ever saw, hard as tacks. And that rumor what gave him his name, it wasn’t a rumor. He was the terror of his gym class. All those kids with their little weenies taking showers with this huge hairy thing waving in their faces. It was enough to put the whole class of them in therapy for years. Ralphie Meat.”

“Is he still around?”

“Who knows? Who knows about any of them? There was also Hugo from Ralph’s same street, a real troublemaker, one of those guys who was always scheming a way to slip a fiver out of the other guy’s pocket. And Joey Pride, who lived in the border area between our neighborhood and Frankford. Joey was car crazy and certifiable – I guess you needed to be back then as a black kid hanging with a white crew. But it was Teddy Pravitz, the Jewish kid from across the alley, what made us more than we had any right to be. The thing that we done, it was him what convinced us we could.”

“Could what?”

“Pull it off.”

“Pull off what?”

“I can’t talk about it,” said Charlie.

“Come on, Charlie. What the hell did you pull?”

“Listen, it ain’t important. I’m not spilling about any of this. I got loyalties, you know. And secrets, too, dark ones, if you catch the drift. Whatever they want, they don’t get that.”

“I talked with the D.A. They’d give you something for flipping on what’s left of the Warrick gang, but the feds are apparently looking for something else.”

“I bet they are. And let’s just say whatever it is they’re looking for, I can get my hands on it.”

“On what?”

“Does the what matter? I knows where it is, the thing they’s still looking for.”

“If that’s true, I might be able to work something out.”

“Would it let me come home and say good-bye to my mother without getting my ass blown off or me dying in jail?”

“I could try to get you a deal and protection, if that’s what you want. Maybe even set you up someplace in Arizona with a new life.”

“Arizona?”

“It’s nice there.”

“Hot.”

“But it’s a dry heat.”

“Clear up my sinuses.”

“That it will.”

“I miss her.”

“Your mother?”

He turned to me, and it was strange, the way this old man could appear, in the shadows, like the youngest of children. The lights from the boardwalk collected in his eyes and then began to roll down one cheek.

“What do you think?” he said. “She’s my mother.”

“Okay,” I said.

“She’s dying. I’m too old to keep running. I’m tired. And I’ve changed.”

“You too?”

“I’m not the hood that I was. Can you do it? Can you make that deal? Can you get me home again?”

That’s when I felt it, that little spurt of emotion that trembled my jaw and left me helpless in the face of his want. If there’s any part of being a lawyer that I can claim to be a natural at, it is the empathic connection to my clients. Yes, I had a retainer of riches that kept my imagination warm at night, and yes, I kept my billable hours with a banker’s care, but it wasn’t the money that drove me, at least not anymore. Frankly, the way my business was tanking, I could make more as a salesclerk in the tie department at Macy’s. Polyester is the new silk, trust me, and that red is just fabulous with your eyes. But a client in desperate need, that was what really got my juices going, and that’s what Charlie Kalakos surely was. A marked man, on the run, hunted by both sides of the law, desperate to make his peace with the dying mother who had tortured him all his life. And now he was asking me to bring him home.

“I can try,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “then try.”

“How do I get in touch with you?”

“You want to talk to me, talk to my mother. She’s the only one I trust with a number.”

“Okay. But I have to know more. You have to tell me what the FBI is looking for.”

“Do I got a choice?”

“Not if you want me to have any leverage,” I said.

“It was just a small job.”

“Not so small if the FBI is still looking.”

“Maybe it wasn’t so small at that. Was a blonde I used to hump when I still had some meat on my bones. Her name was Erma.”

“The name alone gives me chills.”

“She was big and beautiful, Erma was.” The hint of a smile, a blush of pride, like one bright memory in a life of infantile failure. “And so was what we pulled.”

I stared at his silhouette in the dim light of the dark beach, the excitement starting to build. “Tell me, Charlie. What the hell is it that you can get your hands on?”

“You ever hear,” said Charlie, “of a guy named Rembrandt?”