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  I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. Tony ordered a drink and tried to change the conversation. Then he saw the egg timer on the table. He stared at it, blinking, then a strange look came over his face and he pleaded, “No, please God, no.” He got to his feet and ran out of the bar as if something terrible was chasing him.

  It was after midnight before I could track Dewey down. “What’s with the egg timer?” I asked.

  Dewey reached in his pocket and showed me two mug shots from the New York City police files. One was Noodles, and the other one was the guy hiding at the top of the stairs who hit me with the pipe.

  I just shook my head in disbelief. “How?”

  “Michael likes you, no one knows why. Tell me – why does Michael like you?”

  I would never tell anyone why Michael protected me. I got back to Noodles. “How, Dewey? How did you find these guys so fast? What’s with the egg timer?”

  “You know how Michael gets when he wants answers right away. The timer belongs to Tony Degaglia’s mother. You shouldn’t have told Michael you had dinner over there.”

  I remembered the expression on Tony’s face. I gasped in fear. “My God, what did Michael do to her?”

  Dewey laughed. “Michael would never hurt anybody. He and Greenway visited the old lady, told her they were from the Health Department and had to test her apartment for a contagious virus and that she had to leave right away or she might get sick and die. They put her up in a nice hotel for a few days. When Tony saw the egg timer he panicked. You know what Michael always says, ‘If you’re guilty you assume the worst.’ When Tony rushed back to his mother’s apartment, Silkey was waiting for him outside. The asshole was dumb enough to call Noodles from his mother’s apartment. It was easy, we had the phone number, address, and he led us right to them.”

  Again Michael was ahead of everyone. “Dewey, Michael is dangerous, I don’t care if he didn’t hurt the mother, Michael is dangerous.”

  “You have no idea. If we don’t get the money back right away, I’m betting even money that Michael’s going to give the old lady a swimming lesson in the East River. If that happens, I’ve got three-to-one odds she’ll make it. She only has to do about six feet to the dock, the water is a little cold and dirty, but she looks tough. How much can I put you down for? Silkey’s in for thirty. The old lady is going to get wet. Michael is pissed. Noodles is Tony Degaglia’s best friend, they grew up together. It’s all up to Degaglia now – Mama or his best friend.”

  At about noon the next day Michael invited me to lunch. The last time he invited me to lunch he bought me a hot dog and told me to quit. Now he wanted to go on a picnic. Michael said he knew of a quiet place by the river on the Upper West Side under the highway. It was a little pocket park between the Hudson River and the elevated West Side Drive, very secluded, only two picnic tables. Michael brought a wicker basket of Italian sandwiches made with hard bread, ham, salami, cheese and fried peppers and a green bottle of wine. I knew Michael had something important to say. He sat down first, facing the river. I sat opposite, looking at the steel girders supporting the highway overhead.

  Michael started, “How’s your wife, your son …?” I knew he couldn’t care less about my family and waited for the real purpose of our lunch. I saw a black car drive up and park about thirty yards away under the overpass of the West Side Drive. As Michael pulled a fried pepper from his sandwich, and I began nibbling through the hard roll with my swollen lips, two men got out of the car and opened the trunk. One of them was Tony Degaglia; the other was agent Ed Silkey. They dragged two men out of the trunk – Noodles and the guy who had hit me with the pipe. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs.

  I tried to chew on my sandwich as Michael sipped his wine with his cold gray eyes staring at my cut and battered face. All the while, his back was to the car. He showed no emotion or acknowledgement of what was about to happen.

  Ed Silkey threw the men on the ground. Degaglia knelt down and beat Noodles in the face with his fists. Then he beat the other guy with a belt and he kicked both of them while they lay on the ground. Degaglia got a baseball bat from the car and whacked their knees and elbows. At times Michael would stop his meaningless chatter for a moment because the screams and pleas for mercy were too loud to talk over.

  Even though my teeth were still loose and bleeding, I couldn’t stop gnawing at my sandwich as I watched one of the most horrible sights I had ever seen. Blood ran down my teeth onto the hard bread crust.

  Still completely ignoring what was going on behind him, Michael said, “I’m glad you liked the sandwich; would you like mine? I’ve only eaten the peppers. The wine is excellent.” He reached across the table with his napkin and dabbed away some blood on my lip.

  TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

  It took about six weeks for the stitches in my face to heal and begin to fade. During that time I sat in the office doing nothing – growing more restless with each day. Even more than the cocaine, I found I was addicted to the street – the excitement, the swagger, the danger. “Truth, Justice and the American Way” was slowly being replaced by “let’s fuck up some bad guys today.” I wanted back on the street. When Pike had a small case for me in the Bronx – just a couple hundred dollars, an easy buy – I jumped at it.

  As Pike and I were talking to the informant, Michael came in and looked at me in a strange way. Then I heard him in Pike’s office; “I don’t give a fuck if it is an easy buy, he’s not going back on the street, not till I say so; he does surveillance and drives me around.” Then Michael came out of the office, looked at me and said, “Haven’t you learned anything from the beating and LSD? You’ve got to take it easy for a while. Get the Benz; pick me up at Lorenzo’s in thirty minutes.”

  I was humiliated. I deserved more respect, but no one ever went against Michael. The terrible truth was that Michael was right. I saw things differently. I wanted to get the Mafia more than ever, but now I was afraid of the street. I didn’t want to get beat up again. I worried about what else was happening to me even though there were no more hallucinations and my eyes appeared normal.

  That evening Michael took me to a club in Greenwich Village called the Showboat where I met Sally, a fat, effeminate, foppish homosexual. He either owned the club or had so much influence that he ran it. He was not on file as an informant for the Bureau but he traded information. If you wanted to know something you couldn’t find in the library, you went to Sally. He would either know it or find out, but in return you had to give him something. Michael stopped by the Showboat to talk to Sally at least twice a week. I asked Michael how Sally knew so much. At first Michael answered, “Sally made a business of buying and selling information, that’s all.” But I wasn’t convinced. Then Michael told me the truth: “Sally was once a spook for us, CIA agent overseas, a real party boy. He gave people drugs and whores, and once he got them hooked on coke then he gave them heroin. Then he controlled them; generals, politicians, their wives, their kids, Sally turned them all into spies – no information, no dope. He turned them all into his rats. The government paid him well and even helped him get the drugs and the women. But Sally partied too much … and after a while he became the party.”

  Michael smiled. “The ultimate undercover agent, he never came out, he partied – sex, booze, the whole trip – all to find Cold War secrets for his country. The government sold him out, gave him up, to get a Russian agent. It was just business. We were getting hurt somewhere else so we ratted him out. Everyone tried to kill him – us, the Russians, the Germans … Finally they gave up and he opened up a bar, but old habits die hard. He just keeps on going, one big party after another.” Michael was on a roll. “Besides owning the nightclub, Sally is also a small-time drug dealer. He never touches drugs or sells them; he trades bags of heroin for information. If you’re a heroin addict and strung out and don’t have the money for a fix, you come to Sally. If you can give him information about your heroin connection or dealers in the neighborhood, Sally wil
l give you a free bag of heroin. Or if you don’t know anything, but need a fix, Sally will tell you what you must find out, just like the old days in Europe.”

  I looked at Michael and said, “I don’t believe it. Junkies lie all the time, and they would certainly lie to get a free fix of heroin.”

  Now Michael was really enjoying the conversation. “You don’t lie to Sally. You don’t ever want to lie to Sally. Sally’s still a spook in his own twisted mind. You see, here’s the way it works. If you need a fix, you go to Sally. If he likes what you tell him, or if you find out things for him, he will give you a number.”

  “A number? What do you mean? Give you a number for what?”

  “Washington Square Park is less than a block away from here. It’s framed on all four sides by a black wrought-iron fence. When no one is looking, Sally’s people tape little bags to the top of the steel bars. When addicts make deals with Sally, Sally gives them a number and they count the bars until they find their reward. For example, if Sally gives you the number thirty-five, you count thirty-five bars from the entrance and you find your reward. This way Sally doesn’t take any risk in giving people drugs.”

  I shook my head. “I still don’t get it. The addicts can lie to Sally, pick up their bag of heroin and off they go?”

  Michael laughed. “No. No. It’s not that easy. You see, not all the little bags hanging on the bars contain heroin. Some of them are bags of strychnine. If Sally believes you are telling the truth he will give you a number that has a bag of heroin taped to the bar. If he thinks you’re lying to him he will give you another number. You won’t know the difference until you’re shooting up, and then it’s too late. If you lie to Sally you’re dead. If you give him good information, you have a sweet reward until the next time.”

  Only Michael could think this was a good idea. I stared in silence, knowing it was all true. Everything had a price. It was business with Sally, like it always had been. Everyone was a welcomed customer. Death meant nothing.

  PIRATES

  Daisy was glad I was spending more time at home, beaten up or not. Of all the dragons that stalked me every day, loneliness was not one of them, but I knew it haunted her. Playing her clarinet in the park and raising Mark was not challenging enough for someone as smart as Daisy, but she was too loving and too loyal to give up on me. Eventually Daisy and I were able to joke about my first day on the job and she would still threaten to send me a fruit basket again if I didn’t come home on time. She never stopped supporting me and pretended to believe the lies I told her about work. Seeing me hurt brought out great kindness and support. Her love and intelligence were the only beacon of light in my life, but I could feel them fading as I thought about going back to the street. My ambitious fight for truth, justice and the American way still burned inside of me, but I wondered if it wasn’t just revenge against people like Mars La Pont.

  One morning Dewey asked me to pick him up for a ride to work. Dewey had a family and lived in a brownstone in Far Rockaway, Queens. I beeped the horn a few times, and finally the front door opened and a woman waved me inside. She introduced herself as Maggie, Dewey’s wife. I should have expected that she would be beautiful, wholesome, friendly, and intelligent. She had a deep voice, and a touch of arrogance like she was well-educated. I thought she would know who I was, but she didn’t. When I told her that I was Dewey’s partner, she seemed surprised. She was fixing breakfast for her sons; Maurice, six, and Dwight Junior, twelve. They both looked exactly like Dewey – or, perhaps even stranger, it was Dewey who looked exactly like the children.

  As I waited with a cup of coffee, I saw some things on the living-room wall. One was a gold-embossed diploma from Annapolis, which noted that Dwight Paris was third in his class. I had heard that Dewey had come to the Bureau from Naval Intelligence and spoke several languages. I was still surprised to see a framed photograph of the deck of a ship. There were many rows of sailors in white uniforms, standing at attention, saluting, and at the center of the picture was the captain with short white hair, and burning blue eyes, standing at attention. Everyone was saluting one sailor, who was standing alone. His arm was halfway raised to answer the salute of the captain and his shipmates. The lone sailor was Dewey Paris. The caption read – “Dwight Paris and Captain Maurice Castlemann.”

  Dewey came into the room, tying his tie, and kissed his two sons and wife good-bye. The older son, Dwight Junior, followed us to the door and smiled bravely at his father, who messed up his hair as we left. I wondered why Dewey never mentioned that he graduated from Annapolis, or that he had a son named Dwight Junior, who looked just like him. But most curious of all was the picture of him on the ship deck, being honored by everybody.

  When no one needed a ride, I would sleep late and just show up at the office in the afternoon and then bounce from bar to bar in Manhattan until after midnight. I usually drank alone because I looked so bad. I had let my hair grow long and had scars and bruises on my face. One night at about midnight at the El Hambra, the same bar where I had made my first case, someone called my name. I looked over to see a short man in a sport shirt. I didn’t recognize him and couldn’t believe anyone would recognize me in my condition. It was Elliott Goldstein, my first case, talking to me now. He had changed. He even appeared shorter. Elliott told me that he had been forced to make cases, that he had been beaten by the dealers, and that Pike sent him into impossible situations to find information and try to set people up, while constantly threatening him with prison. He had lost his family and his job, and now he was forced to peddle drugs just to stay alive and get closer to more dealers. He laughed at how bad I looked. He said he’d seen many faces just like mine. Incredibly, Elliott did not blame me for his troubles; he should not have been using cocaine. Elliott said I was like a pirate ship, strong and crashing through the waves, not knowing where to land next, or caring. I would always be okay. He said I was a true pirate, who would survive no matter what – or who got killed. Because I had no rules to stop me or even slow me down. I didn’t really love or care about anyone. So nothing could ever get in the way of whatever I did. I would always survive. He looked at me with sadness and finished his drink and said, “I feel sorry for you,” and walked out. I thought about Daisy and Mark. I began to realize that my lies to them held us together as a family. Michael had once said, “Your lies will become your reality. Lie all the time, it’s good practice.”

  Michael thought I should relax for a few more days, so he introduced me to Charles DeWitt. DeWitt was an old black man with big hands and a wide grin. He seemed to be the kindest person I’d ever met – humble, polite, and sincere. DeWitt was a heroin addict but a great musician nonetheless. I went to see him at Count Basie’s in Harlem. When I got to the club, there was a complimentary pass waiting for me. When it was Charlie’s turn to perform, he stood up with his trumpet and played the most beautiful, soulful music I had ever heard. The crowd was stunned and gave him a big hand. DeWitt just sat down as if he was alone in the room. Afterwards, I saw him backstage and gave him a bundle of heroin bags that I’d taken from the evidence locker in the office. I could see the gratitude on his face. I knew I would become a regular at his gigs. Snorting cocaine had restored my self-confidence and then some, but I was still making stupid heroin buys for other people’s cases. I wanted to make my own cases, not just get credit for them in Dewey’s falsified reports.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  MANASSO

  Edmond Manchester’s life changed drastically after Domenic Scarluci and Lisa Marie were found in a pool of blood. His apparent double-dealing with Port Authority lockers, eleven keys of dope and mob money had placed him firmly within the clutches of 90 Church. The case against him remained open since he was now Dewey’s informant. Dewey and I would hang out in his penthouse watching ball games on his TV. He became a nervous wreck anticipating what we would ask him to do next.

  As usual, Dewey’s use of Manchester’s information was brilliant. His p
lans were never straight lines – always in circles. When Manchester told him that one of his drug couriers was Joe Angeleci, son of Aggi Angeleci – the Mafia Don who masterminded corruption of the Longshoreman’s Union – Dewey began to spin his web.

  It started as a “freak” minor traffic accident on the West Side Highway. Somebody rear-ended young Joe Angeleci and it turned into a fist fight. The cops came, searched both cars and – lo and behold – found a kilo of Manchester’s heroin in Joe’s car. Fortunately, Agent Silkey was just driving by and stopped to help. It was, of course, Dewey driving Pike’s government car that rear-ended poor Joe. Pike tried to claim it was a major investigation. No one except Pike thought that all of this was all just a coincidence. Joe, only eighteen years old, was facing serious jail time.

  Preying on the children of Mafia leaders never bothered Michael. Even the tragic deaths of Lisa Marie and her father were just, as Dewey said, “road kill.” A couple days later I drove Dewey and Michael to a small restaurant in Long Island. Aggi Angeleci was sitting alone at a table in the corner. Dewey and Michael sat down at the table while I picked a stool at the bar nearby so I could listen. There were no greetings, Michael got to the point, “Too bad about Joe. Did I hear he was going to college?”

  Aggi was a little overweight, but not the typical Mafia thug. He was intelligent and dressed like a banker. He didn’t say anything; he just looked at Dewey’s big grin with disgust.

  A waiter came out of the kitchen, carrying a bottle of wine and a glass. He set the table for one, then he brought a plate of meat and cheese and placed it in front of Aggi. Dewey grabbed the only glass on the table and poured himself a glass of wine.

  The mobster turned red and glared at Michael. “Let’s get this over with.”

  A plate of rolls came out. Dewey grabbed them away from Aggi and started to make a sandwich. Michael smiled. I couldn’t believe Dewey was eating the Mafia Don’s lunch.