The winter of Frankie Machine

23

It was the summer of ’68.

The summer Frank came back from Vietnam.

The truth of the matter is, Frank thinks now as he watches the rain splatter against the window of his safe house, the truth is that I killed more men for the feds than I ever did for the mob.

And they gave me a medal and an honorable discharge.

Frank punched out a lot of VC and NVA during his stint in-country. That was his job-sniper-and he was damned good at it. Sometimes he felt bad about it, but he never felt guilt over it. They were soldiers, he was a soldier, and in a war, soldiers kill soldiers.

Frank never bought into any of thatApocalypse Now crap. He never shot any women or children, or massacred any villages, or even saw anyone who did. He just killed enemy soldiers.

The Tet Offensive was made for guys like Frank, because the enemy came out to be shot. Before that, it had been frustrating patrols in the jungle that usually turned up nothing, except when you walked into a VC ambush and lost a couple of guys and still never saw the enemy.

But in Tet, they came out en masse and got gunned down en masse. Frank was a one-man wrecking machine in the city of Hue. The urban house-to-house fighting was a perfect match for his skills, and Frank found himself in mano-a-mano duels with NVA snipers that sometimes went on for days.

Those were battles of wit and skill.

Frank always won.

He came back from Nam to find that the country he’d left didn’t exist anymore. Race riots, “peace riots,” hippies, LSD. The surf scene was just about dead because a lot of the guys were in Nam, or were screwed up because of it, or they went the hippie route and were living in communes in Oregon.

Frank put his uniform away and went to the beach. Spent long weeks surfing mostly by himself, holding his own small bonfires and cookouts, trying to reclaim the past.

But it wasn’t the same.

Patty was.

She’d written him every day he was in-country. Long, chatty letters about what was going on at home, who was dating who, who had broken up, about her secretary work, her parents, his parents, whatever. And love stuff-passionate passages about how she felt about him, how she couldn’t wait for him to come home.

And she couldn’t. The former “good Catholic girl” walked him up to her room the second her parents left the house and pulled him down on the bed. Not that I took much pulling, Frank remembers.

God, the first time with Patty…

They got to the brink, like they had so many times in the backseat of his car, except this time she didn’t clamp her legs tight or push him off. Instead, she guided him inside her. He was surprised, but he certainly didn’t object, and when it came time to pull out-all too quickly, he remembers ruefully-she whispered, “Don’t. I’m on the Pill.”

Which was a shock.

She had gone to the doctor and then went on the Pill in anticipation of his homecoming, she told him as they lay on her bed afterward, her head snuggled into the crook of his arm.

“I wanted to be ready for you,” she said. Then, shyly, added, “Was I okay?”

“You were terrific.”

And then he was hard again-God, to be young, Frank thinks-and they did it again, and this time she climaxed and said that if she’d known what she was missing, she would have done it a lot sooner.

Patty was good in bed-warm, willing, passionate. Sex was never their problem.

So Frank got back with Patty and they began the long, inevitable march toward matrimony.

What wasn’t inevitable was Frank’s future.

What was he going to do now, with his Marine tour winding down? He thought about re-upping, maybe making the Corps a career, but Patty didn’t want him going back to Vietnam, and he didn’t like being away from San Diego that much. His father wanted him to go into the fishing business, but that didn’t sound all that appealing, either. He could have gone to college on the GI bill, but there was nothing he was that interested in studying.

So it was a gimme putt he’d end up back with the guys.

It was nothing dramatic, nothing sudden.

Frank just ran into Mike Pella one day, and they had a beer, and then they started hanging out. Mike told him about his past, how he grew up in New York with the Profaci family and had a little hassle there and then was sent out west to work for Bap until things straightened out.

But he liked California, he liked Bap, and so he’d decided to stay.

“Who needs the fucking snow, right?” Mike asked.

Not me, Frank thought.

He started to go with Mike to the clubs where the guys spent their days, andthis hadn’t changed. This had stayed the same, like it was in a time warp. It was comforting, familiar. Familial, I guess, Frank thinks now.

It was all the same guys-Bap, Chris Panno, and Mike, of course. Jimmy Forliano had a trucking business out in East County, and he’d come around sometimes, but that was really about it.

They were a small, tight little group in what was, back then, still a small town. That was the thing about San Diego in those days, Frank thinks now. We weren’t really even a “mob,” or an obvious family like they had in the big East Coast cities.

And there wasn’t a hell of a lot going on.

The normally free and easy San Diego had a new federal prosecutor who was busting everyone’s balls. He’d worked up a twenty-eight-count indictment against Jimmy and Bap for some bullshit about the truckers’ union and was generally making life difficult for whatever organized crime there was in the city.

Bap also had a silent piece of a local taxi company, and he set Frank up with a job driving cabs.

Washing machines on wheels is what they really were, the guys laundered so much money through those taxis. Gambling money, loan shark money, prostitution money-it all went on cab rides.

And political money.

To city councilmen, congressmen, judges, cops, you name it. The chief of police got a new car every year, courtesy of the cab company.

Then there was Richard Nixon.

He was running for president and needed a war chest, and it just wouldn’t have looked good-mobbed-up guys in San Diego writing checks to the Nixon campaign. So the money went through the cab company in chunks “donated” by the owners and the drivers. Frank never would have found out about it except that he saw one of the checks on the office desk one night.

“I’m giving money to Nixon?” he asked Mike.

“We all are.”

“I’m a Democrat,” Frank said.

“Notthis year, you ain’t,” Mike said. “What, you want Bobby fucking Kennedy in the White House? Guy’s got a hard-on for us you could cut glass with. Besides, it ain’t really your money, is it? So relax.”

Frank was sitting in the office of the cab company with Mike, drinking coffee and talking shit, when the call came.

“Are you boys ready to take a step up?” Bap asked.

He was calling from a phone booth.

Bap never called from home, because Bap wasn’t stupid. What he’d do is, he’d put rolls of quarters in his pocket and he’d walk four blocks to this phone booth on Mission Boulevard at night and conduct his business from there, like it was his office.

Usually, they’d meet Bap on the boardwalk in Pacific Beach, just a few blocks from the boss’s house.

You wouldn’t have figured a guy like Bap to have loved the ocean so much.

Something he and Frank had in common, although, of course, Bap never got out on a board, or even went for a swim, as far as Frank ever knew. No, Bap just liked looking at the ocean; he and Marie used to go for sunset walks together on the boardwalk or stroll on Crystal Pier. Their condo had a nice oceanfront view, too, and Bap used to stand at the window and do watercolors.

Bad watercolors.

He had dozens of them, scores of them, probably, and he used to give them out as presents all the time; otherwise, Marie would bitch about him clogging up their whole place with the paintings.

Bap would give them for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, Groundhog Day, anything. All the guys had them-what were you going to say, no? Frank had one on the wall of his little apartment on India Street-it was a sailboat heading out into the sunset, because Bap knew that Frank liked boats.

Which was true, Frank did like boats, which made this watercolor all the more painful, because no vessel should have to suffer what Bap did to this boat. But Frank kept it on his wall, because you never knew when Bap might drop by, and Frank didn’t want to hurt his feelings.

This worked because he wasn’t married yet. The married guys’ wives usually made them put Bap’s paintings in a closet or something, because the married guys were usually made men and protocol, even in casual San Diego, dictated that even a boss didn’t just drop by without a phone call. But there had been some frantic replacements of paintings on walls when the phone call came, with guys scrambling to get one of Bap’s hideous watercolors up in the living room before the doorbell rang.

So if it was just normal business, they met at the beach. This day, however, Bap told them to meet him at the zoo, outside the reptile house.

The subject was a guy named Jeffrey Roth.

“Who?” Mike asked.

“You heard of Tony Star?” Bap asked, his face pressed up against the glass, staring at a spitting cobra.

“Sure,” Mike said.

They all had heard of Tony Star. He was a rat from Detroit, whose testimony had put half that city’s family away. Rocco Zerilli, Jackie Tominello, Angie Vena, they were all doing time because of Tony Star. The papers had a field day with the irresistible headline TONY STAR WITNESS.

“He’s ‘Jeffrey Roth’ now, in the Witness Protection Program,” Bap said. He started tapping on the glass, trying to provoke the cobra into attacking. “You think you could get one of these guys to spit at you?”

“I don’t think they want you doing that,” Frank said. He felt bad for the snake, which was just minding its own business.

Bap looked at him like he was nuts, and Frank got it. “They” probably didn’t want Bap killing people, hijacking trucks, shylocking money, and running gambling operations, either, so he probably wasn’t going to stop tapping on the glass at the zoo. Indeed, Bap tapped on the glass some more, then asked, “Guess where Star is living now? Mission Beach.”

“No shit!” Mike said.

It was a personal affront, a rat living right in their own backyard.

Frank and Mike had had many discussions on the subjects of rats. It was the worst-possible thing in the world to be, the lowest of the low.

“You gotta be a stand-up guy,” Mike had said. “We’re all grown men; we know the risks. If you get popped, you keep your mouth shut and do your time.”

Frank had agreed, absolutely.

“I’d die before I’d go into the program,” he’d said.

Now they had a guy who had put half the Detroit family in the joint, and here he was, hanging out and enjoying himself on Mission Beach.

“How’d they find him?” Mike asked.

The spitting cobra had curled itself into a ball and looked like it was asleep. Bap gave up and moved on to the puff adder in the next cage. It was wrapped around a tree limb, coiled and looking dangerous.

“Some secretary in the Justice Department that Tony Jack’s got on the arm,” Bap said, tapping on the adder’s cage. He took a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Frank. The note had an address in Mission Beach written on it. “Detroit wanted to send their own guys, but I said no, it’s a matter of honor.”

“Fuckin’ right it is,” Mike said. “Our turf, our responsibility.”

“And it’s worth twenty grand,” Bap said.

The puff adder struck at the glass and Bap jumped back about five feet, losing his glasses in the process. Frank suppressed a laugh as he picked them up, wiped them off on his sleeve, and handed them to Bap.

“Sneaky fuckers,” Bap said, taking the glasses.

“They’re camouflaged,” Mike said.

Frank and Mike went out and bought some geeky clothes that made them look like tourists and checked into a motel on Kennebec Court on Mission Beach. They spent most of their time looking out through venetian blinds at Tony Star’s condo across Mission Boulevard.

“We’re kind of like cops,” Mike said the first night in.

“How do you figure?”

“I mean, this is what they do, right?” Mike asked. “Stakeouts?”

“I guess,” Frank said. First time he ever felt sorry for cops, because being on a stakeout was boring. It gave whole new meaning to the wordtedium. Sitting there drinking bad coffee, taking turns going to Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, or a local taco joint, eating off your lap on sheets of greasy paper. What this garbage was doing to his insides, Frank could only guess. Heknew what it was doing to Mike’s insides, because it was a small room, and when Mike opened the door as he came out of the bathroom…Anyway, Frank started feeling bad for cops.

He and Mike would take shifts, one of them keeping watch out the window while the other grabbed some sleep or watched some bad television show. They only got a break when Star went out, which he did at 7:30 every morning to go jogging.

They discovered this the first morning when Star came out the front door of the building in a purple jumpsuit and running shoes and started doing stretches against the rail of the building steps.

“What the fuck?” Mike asked.

“He’s going running,” Frank said.

“Heshould go fucking running,” said Mike.

“He looks good, though,” Frank observed.

Star did look good. He had a nice tan, his black razor-cut hair was neatly brushed back, and he was thin. They decided only one guy should tail him, and Mike took the job. He came back an hour later, sweaty and incensed.

“Fucking guy,” Mike huffed, “goes jogging around the marina like he don’t have a worry in the world. Scoping the chicks, looking at the boats, soaking in the sunshine, working on his fucking tan. Cocksucker is leading the good life while friends of his are in the hole. I’m telling you, we shouldhurt this motherfucker before we take him out.”

Frank agreed-Starshould suffer for what he’d done-but those weren’t the orders. Bap had been very clear about that-“quick and clean” was how he wanted it. Get in, do the job, get out.

The sooner the better, as far as Frank was concerned. Patty hadn’t been too thrilled about him going away like this.

“Where are you going?” she’d asked.

“Come on, Patty.”

“What for? Why?”

“Business.”

“What kind of business?” she’d pressed. “Why can’t you tell me? You’re just going out to party with your buddies, aren’t you?”

Some party, Frank thought. Sharing a cheap motel room with Mike Pella, listening to his constant toilet mouth, sucking in his cigarette smoke, smelling his gas, spending hour after tedious hour looking out the window, trying to establish the pattern of some rat’s pathetic life.

Because that was the key, a pattern.

Bap had coached him on that. “Guys lapse into habits,” he had told Frank. “Everyone does. People are predictable. Once you can predict what a guy’s going to do and when he’s going to do it, then you can find your opening. Quick and clean, in and out.”

So they knew he went jogging around the marina every morning. Mike wanted to do it then. “We get ourselves some fag tracksuits, we run up behind him, and we pop him in the head. Done.”

Frank vetoed it. Too many things could go wrong. One, him and Mike jogging-they’d stick out like polar bears in a sauna. Two, they’d be out of breath, and it was hard to shoot accurately when you were out of breath, even from short range. Three, there’d just be too many potential witnesses.

So they had to figure something else out.

Problem was, Star wasn’t giving them many openings. He lived a very boring life, predictable as death and taxes, but very tight. He’d go jogging in the morning, then come home, shower (presumably) and change clothes, then go to his job at an insurance agency, where he’d work from ten to six. Then he’d walk back to his condo and stay there until he went jogging again in the morning.

“This is one dull motherfucker,” Mike said. “He don’t go out to no clubs, no bars, don’t pick up no broads. What, the guy just sits in there jacking himself off every night? Biggest excitement in this guy’s life is ‘Pizza Night.’”

Every Thursday night, 8:30, Star had a pizza delivered to his door.

“I love you, Mike.”

“You going fag on me?”

“Pizza night,” Frank said. “Star buzzes the guy in.”

This was on a Tuesday, so they pretty much relaxed for a couple of days, laid low, and waited for Pizza Night. Wednesday night, they ordered a pizza from the same joint, ate it, and saved the box.

At exactly 8:25 Frank was at the front door of Star’s building with the pizza box in his hand. Mike was in the work car on the street, ready to drive them out of there and to intercept the pizza guy with some sort of bullshit if he had to.

Frank rang the bell and shouted into the intercom, “Pizza, Mr. Roth.”

A second later, the buzzer sounded and Frank heard the metallic click of the lock opening. He went into the building, walked down the hallway to Star’s unit, and rang the bell.

Star opened it a crack, keeping the chain on the door. Frank could hear the drone of a television. So this was the rat’s big life, Frank thought, treating himself to a pizza while he watches the boob tube.

“Pizza,” Frank repeated.

“Where’s the usual kid?” Star asked.

“Sick,” Frank said, hoping this thing wasn’t going south. He got ready to kick the door in, but Star opened it first. He had his money in his hand-a five and two ones.

“Six-fifty, right?” Star asked, holding out the bills.

Frank reached into his pocket like he was digging for a couple of quarters.

“Keep the change,” Star said.

“Thanks.” A fifty-cent tip, Frank thought. No self-respecting wise guy in the world would give a fifty-cent tip. No wonder he turned rat. Frank handed Star the pizza box, and when the guy’s hands were full, Frank pushed him inside, kicked the door shut behind him, and pulled the silenced. 22 pistol.

Star tried to run. Frank put the bead on the back of his head and fired. Star fell forward and crashed into the wall. Frank stepped up over Star’s prone body and aimed at the back of his head.

“Rat,” Frank said.

He pulled the trigger three more times and walked out.

The whole thing had taken maybe a minute. Frank got in the car; Mike put it in gear and drove away.

“How’d it go?” Mike asked.

“Fine,” Frank said.

Mike grinned. “You’re a machine,” he said. “‘Frankie Machine.’”

“Wasn’t that the name of a guy that Sinatra played in the movies?” Frank asked.

“The Man with the Golden Arm,” Mike said. “He was a junkie.”

“Great.”

“But you,” Mike said, “you’re the man with the goldenhand. Frankie Machine.”

The name stuck.

They took Ingraham Street down to the floodway. Frank got out, smashed the pistol on some rocks, and threw the pieces into the water. Then they dumped the work car in a strip mall parking lot in Point Loma, where they found two other cars waiting. Frank got into his and drove downtown, dumped the car, took a taxi to the airport, then another taxi back home.

Nothing ever came of it.

The San Diego cops pretty much took a pass on the case, sending a message of their own to the feds: If you’re going to put a snitch in our yard and not tell us about it, what the hell do you want us to do?

The truth is, nobody really likes snitches, not even the cops who make their bread and butter from them.

Frank got up the next morning, made coffee, and turned on the television. It was showing the kitchen of some hotel in Los Angeles.

“What, you’re surprised?” Mike asked him later that morning.

“Kind of.”

“I’m only surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” Mike said.

And that’s the way it is, Frank thought. Bobby gets two in the head, Nixon gets checks.

There was a lot of celebration down at the cab office when Nixon got elected. One of the first things the new president did was to transfer the San Diego federal prosecutor who was putting so much pressure on the guys.

The indictments against Bap were dropped, although Forliano went into the can.

Other than that, it was back to business as usual.

Frank and Mike split two thousand dollars for the Tony Star job.

Frank bought an engagement ring with his cut.