Wiseguys In Love Page 5

  Michael caught it, and then this huge guy appeared from nowhere. Michael held on to the ball for dear life as he wove and bobbed around the tackle, just out of reach. In a sudden sprint, the tackle charged him; Michael ducked and made it across the goal line.

  He was just about to toss the ball up in the air to declare victory when the tackle broadsided him, knocking him down and all of the wind out of him.

  “You fuckin’ cheater!” The tackle kept screaming as he lay on top of him and punched him in the ribs like a machine, every blow worse and worse until the sharp, splintering pains of cracked ribs followed each blow.

  The next thing that happened was just a fuzzy memory for Michael. He remembered Tony screaming, “Mikey, look out!” And suddenly the weight was pulled off of him and the blows stopped. He pulled his sore body up, wheezing, and stared frozenly at Tony.

  He and the kid were wrestling for control of a razor. It was the rusty blade of a broken barber’s tool, the kind the old men were shaved with in neighborhood shops. The edge had been honed shiny and the handle had been padded with a rag and some electrical tape to make it easier to hold.

  Michael couldn’t move. He ached, and with every breath the pains grabbed at his chest sharply. He looked around to see whether anyone saw what was going on. Across the street sat Ralphie and Solly’s driver, chatting, oblivious.

  Just as Michael tried to motion to them, Tony slammed the kid back with one big push, but the kid was like a cat. He bounced back to his feet, razor in hand, and began circling Tony.

  “What are you doin’ here?” Tony boomed out at the kid.

  Suddenly, the kid lunged and got Tony, not deeply enough to cause serious damage but deeply enough to draw blood. Tony looked down at his chest, at the wide opening where the fabric had been cut and was now exposing his skin. Tony felt with his hand and stared, almost puzzled at the blood, as if it wasn’t his but something someone had spilled on him.

  “You cut me,” he said, amazed.

  And then something had happened that Michael would never forget. He saw “the look.” Tony’s eyes slightly crossed and his face scrunched up as if he was in pain, and Michael’s blood went cold.

  “You tried to cut up my cousin over a touchdown and you cut me—you don’t fuckin’ do that.”

  Michael remembered the next couple of moments in that weird way you do when you are frozen with fear—in both slow motion and in the blink of an eye, all at the same time. He’d watched Tony grab the kid, spin him around effortlessly like a dance partner, and, holding one arm up behind his back, he’d grabbed the hand the razor was in and just as effortlessly pulled the blade up to the kid’s neck and began to push it into the skin. Michael felt himself tense at the memory of the look on the kid’s face: puzzlement and amazement and absolute terror, then a wince as the blade began to cut his skin.

  Tony was just about to pull it across the kid’s neck when finally other voices broke through the moment. Michael looked up to see Ralphie and the Soltanos’ driver.

  “Eh kid, this is a game, capisce?”

  “He tried to kill my fuckin’ cousin.…”

  “Look, you gotta stop it,” Ralphie counseled.

  “Stunadze, you gonna drop him here? In the middle of a playing field with all these witnesses?” the driver asked.

  “I can’t do nothin’ else,” Tony answered matter-of-factly.

  Michael watched Ralphie and the driver exchange odd glances and then look back in awe at Tony.

  “Drop it or I’ll shoot you,” the driver said just as matter-of-factly. “Why don’t we go somewhere and talk?”

  Maybe it was the threat of being shot, or maybe it wasn’t, but they watched Tony take the blade away and push the kid down on the ground. The kid scampered off into the crowd that had gathered.

  But no matter why Tony had chosen to drop it, the one thing that Michael and Ralphie and the driver knew was that Tony would’ve had no problem at all cutting the kid’s throat and then going home to eat.

  There was that look in his face: a steel-cold emptiness behind his eyes, a deadness that could not distinguish a human being from, say, a gnat. It was a frightening glitch in Tony’s psyche.

  Michael owed him his life from then on. Although Tony never said anything or asked for any favors back, he was owed, and Michael knew the day would come for the payback. But more importantly, it was at that moment, Michael believed, that he’d watched Tony get handpicked by the Soltanos.

  Solly did appreciate Tony’s strength. He was soon giving Tony jobs to make his bones in the business. Run a bag up to the Bronx, visit Mordy Soloman for payments—Tony did it without question.

  But the thing that put him in was taking a fall for one of Solly’s cousins during a fur heist in Brooklyn.

  It had been a walk-through case. The doors to the warehouse had been left unlocked; all they had to do was load the truck. They had just gotten there, hadn’t even opened the truck, when Solly’s cousin, a real putz, began playing with his gun and hit the alarm box. A patrol car must have been right around the corner, because they were there in what seemed like two seconds.

  As everyone scattered, Tony grabbed the guy’s gun and yelled at him to run. Tony was left there alone.

  And that was when Tony really made his biggest impression on Solly. They couldn’t make the robbery charge stick, so they found something else. The unlicensed gun Tony was carrying carried with it a mandatory one-year sentence.

  And Tony did the stand-up thing and kept his mouth shut, and did a year at Rikers.

  Michael looked at his face, with his weird, off-kilter nose. And that, Michael thought in awe, was the only thing Tony had to show for the whole year—a broken nose, from a guard the first week inside.

  Other than that, Tony talked about Rikers the way Michael talked about working in the college cafeteria. Yeah, it was a sewer, and you had to be careful of certain people, and the hours sucked, but if you stuck around long enough, you might learn something.

  Tony was “made” by the time he was nineteen. And in his mind, he owed it all to Solly.

  He liked driving Solly around. He didn’t mind straightening out people for Solly; it came naturally to Tony. In return, Tony now had respect. He earned a good living, had nice clothes, drove a nice car.

  So whatever Solly wanted must be right, right?

  And that was when the whole mess began.

  Michael stared out the window at the little churchyard across from Solly’s place. The sun was out, but it was raining. It had to be around five. He stretched his legs out in front of him. Yeah, Solly was good for Tony.

  Michael had no idea why he was here.

  No, he knew why. It was because two years ago, three things had happened that changed his entire life.

  First, he’d screwed up at law school.

  The picture of a third-year midterm being waved around a small office materialized in front of his eyes.

  “Mr. Bonello, I don’t know what you take us for, but this is inexcusable.”

  “Professor Birnbaum, I really don’t know what you mean. That paper is my work—”

  He’d tossed it on the desk contemptuously and picked up another blue-covered exam booklet and threw it in front of him. Michael kept his eyes on it.

  “Go ahead. Open it up. Read a passage. Almost any passage.”

  Michael had taken up the booklet and opened it. He pretended to read a page.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s word-for-word in most places. Do you know whose exam this is?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “It’s the work of the woman sitting directly to your left. How do you account for this?”

  “Coincidence?”

  It wasn’t. But it was the only thing he could think of. Of course the work was the same. Jessica had begged him—in bed, out of bed. She’d worn him down one way or another until he finally gave in just to keep her quiet. What would be the harm?

  He just hadn’t thought it through. And he
never, ever expected her to copy word-for-word. Shit, no one was that stupid. He stared up at Professor Birnbaum. She’d been called in an hour earlier, and, judging by the tone of his voice, it had hardly been in defense of him.

  He was brought up to a reviewing board to bounce him out of NYU Law so fast, he didn’t know what hit him. What it came down to was her word against his, and Jessica Fine’s word was taken as true and Michael Bonello’s was taken as lying.

  Jessica turned out to be a real piece of work. He called her apartment and left crazed, pleading messages with a roommate who seemed to be under the impression that he had copied from Jessica. When that didn’t work, he resolved to track her down.

  The last time he saw her was a fall afternoon, late. The sun had turned the trees across the street in Washington Square Park a golden red. And Michael sat shivering in the shadow of the NYU law library. He pulled his jacket around him tightly as a cold wind blew against him and watched the peaceful sights of young mothers pushing infants in strollers, being escorted home by dancing older children, excitedly telling them of their day in school.

  A woman with familiar dark hair passed quickly, and Michael jumped off the ledge and grabbed Jessica by the arm.

  “What!” she began, and her face went pale as she looked at him. He was rumpled and unshaven.

  “You gotta tell them the truth,” he said hoarsely.

  He watched her face turn from a scared pale to a stony-cold statue’s face.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Jessica, they are going to throw me out this afternoon unless you show up at the meeting.”

  “So, what do you want me to do?” She shook his hand free.

  “Tell them the truth! Damn it, I’ve worked my whole life for this. My father—” His voice cracked.

  “I told them the truth.”

  His jaw dropped. That was it—it was over.

  “You lying bitch,” he murmured, scarcely able to inhale.

  “You stay away from me, Michael Bonello, or I swear I’ll get a lawyer.” She turned and walked stiffly away from him, and as she did it was as if Michael was watching his whole life and his last chance to really get out fade with each step she took.

  The final meeting, where the board voted unanimously to expel him, seemed to go by in a flash, for something so monumentally life-altering.

  He was out and it was put permanently on his record.

  Michael walked around New York for a month in a dismal, mostly drunken haze. His whole life had been shot down by a Long Island princess.

  He remembered a big bash in New Jersey. His nickname in the neighborhood was “College.” He was trotted out in front of Solly with the same pride that Tony was. That was saying a lot, considering that, as far as Michael knew, his father was little more than a bookkeeper for some of the Soltanos’ regular businesses, and Tony helped run the street for the Soltanos.

  Michael was going to be the first legit Bonello on American soil. And suddenly, it was all over.

  He’d stayed drinking at bars on the Lower West Side—bars where he knew there’d be no chance in hell of running into anyone from the neighborhood. He knew he had to tell his father. He also knew it would destroy him.

  That was when the second thing happened.

  Michael’d been sleeping one off when the phone call came from his mother.

  She was at Brooklyn Memorial. She was crying so hard, she forgot how to speak English. It took him five minutes to connect padre and morte together.

  The first thing he did was throw up. He shaved, put on his best clean shirt, trousers, and jacket. He stopped off for a drink to quell his nausea, and then took a cab to Brooklyn.

  It was like walking in on a nightmare as he stood outside the morgue door, staring through a small glass window at his mother, weeping over his father’s body. This was just not right. It wasn’t right. Everything was happening so fast, so frighteningly fast.

  She’d been sitting by her husband in the morgue for a couple of hours by the time Michael showed. It took him fifteen minutes to get her out of the cold tiled place.

  That evening, his father was lying in a funeral home, and Michael was sitting at their kitchen table in Brooklyn, surrounded by women, most dressed head to foot in black, swapping widowhood stories in Italian.

  He and Tony slipped out, Tony grimacing at him as they walked into a bar.

  “Your mother ain’t gonna like you drinking, Mikey. It ain’t good for you.”

  “Uh-huh,” was all he said as he downed several shots of whiskey.

  “So what you gonna do, Mikey?”

  “I don’t know, Tony. I don’t know anything.… What do you think I should do?” he asked absentmindedly.

  “Maybe I could hook something up for you.”

  “Yeah, sure, that would be great,” he remembered answering—sarcastically, he had thought—but he was on his fifth whiskey in less than an hour.

  Sophia Bonello didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t speak a word of English for two days. Into the third day of viewing, they were seated in front of the coffin at the Cardarelli funeral home near Oyster Bay.

  They were in one of the larger rooms, filled with black folding chairs, the windowless walls covered in brownish red velvet. A red light bulb placed behind the open casket kept your eyes stuck to it.

  They’d been staring at this thing that had begun to look like a bizarre table decoration. Michael had stood over it again and again, trying to reconcile the man in the casket with his father.

  It didn’t look like his father. Pop never had had red, red lips. And he’d never had skin that color. He didn’t like cut flowers, either. He’d told Michael once that they reminded him of funerals, and here he was, bathed in them. Among the baskets and bouquets of flowers, a huge cross of snapdragons and white mums stood at the head of the coffin. At the foot, white carnations formed a large horseshoe, onto which was tied a big black satin bow. Michael had first thought that one was a mistake until he looked at the card.

  It was from a bookie who’d owed Pop.

  People had filed past them each day from eight in the morning till nine at night, with a special private showing for Solly and his family. Mass cards were everywhere on the black stands on either side of the box. And since that had filled up fast, they had begun tossing them inside and on top of the coffin. The red light reflected off the plastic-coated ones lying on his father’s chest, giving him the eerie impression of breathing. There were so many by the end of the thing that Michael figured every church in the metropolitan area was going to be busy blessing Vincent Bonello for the next year.

  Why not? Pop was popular in the neighborhood. He’d been a good man. There was always an extra place to be made at his table, always an extra buck if one was needed. Yeah, he was known for being a bit of a pushover on money. But that was part of having a good heart.

  He never wanted Michael, his only child, to grow up doing what he did. He wanted him to be main-line American—a lawyer or doctor, something with dignity. He sent him to private schools, made sure he kept his grades up, and kept spoken Italian to a minimum in the house.

  The morning of the third day, his mother, puffy-eyed and wearing the black uniform she’d be in for the rest of her life, looked over at Michael and finally spoke English.

  “You gonna get in trouble with your school for being out like this?”

  “No,” he replied flatly.

  He took his mother’s hands and they both sat in silence as Father D’Amico made the sign of the cross as the mortician’s assistants sealed the coffin.

  It was all so final, Michael thought. What had happened to the second chances of his childhood? And why was it that when a terrible thing happened in life, it took such an unfeeling split second instead of the long time it should merit because of its importance and ramifications?

  Tony silently drove them to the burial site and stayed by the car during the brief ceremony. Mourners returned to their cars, leaving Sophia and Michael holding on to ea
ch other’s hands in silence.

  “Come on, Ma, let’s go,” he said finally, choking on the words.

  She looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears, and silently he dropped her hands and made his way back to the car, giving her time to say her last good-bye to her husband in privacy.

  He was weeping when he got to the car, and Tony gave him his handkerchief. They stood leaning against the car as Michael tried to pull himself together.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he murmured, and glanced at Tony.

  A big smile moved across Tony’s face, and that was when the third thing happened.

  “Don’t worry, Mikey, I got you taken care of. Solly says take some days, then come in when you’re ready.”

  “What?” he asked, not following.

  “You said you needed a job in the bar.… I had to pull a lot of strings, but I got it okayed.” Tony put an arm around Michael’s back and gave a quick hug that nearly dislocated his shoulder. “I’m gonna teach you everything I know. You got a job. Solly’s gonna take care of you, just like he does me.”

  So now he owed Tony twice—once for his life and now for his “new career.”

  Michael sat dumbfounded as Tony drove them back to the city. He thought he’d been sarcastic. He never expected Tony to take him seriously. He felt his palms get wet, and he began to think about it. What were his options? He was going to tell someone who kills for a living that he didn’t want this “favor”? After all, if he didn’t accept and Tony was made to look like a jerk … He couldn’t think about that.

  By the time they reached New York, Michael was resigned to having to accept Tony’s offer, at least for now. He’d just be real smart about it. He’d keep a low profile, ride with Tony for a couple of weeks, and then slide out of it. After all, his father had never gotten deeply mired. He’d managed to dance on the outside. If Pop could weave and dodge not getting involved with the dirty side of the business, he certainly could. He could prove he was Vincent’s son.

  That had been two years ago.

  A tap on the window brought him back to the present. He rolled down his window and looked up at Ralphie.