“Their beef?”
“Stealing each other’s gamblers, so they say. But there’s a fancy man in there somewhere.”
“You’ll take care of them?” He was growing restless.
“I’ve chocolates and champagne in the car. If that doesn’t work, I’ll knock their heads together.”
“What else.”
After thirty more minutes, Dexter returned to the Cadillac in a state of clamoring impatience. The girls, the bulls, the wheedling Mrs. Mackey—all of it was petty and pointless when measured against his new vision. He hungered for a sense of progress, of new things approaching while old familiar ones receded. It seemed far too long since he’d had that sensation.
At three o’clock, he parked the Cadillac outside a modest yellow wood-frame house that sagged, knock-kneed, against the one beside it. It had been many years since Mr. Q. had given away brides and kissed squalling wet babies at their christenings. Nowadays he left home only to visit his store. He’d no doorbell, no telephone, and was fond of saying he had never sent—or accepted—a telegram. If you wanted to talk to Mr. Q., you knocked at this door and waited while his Scotch terrier, Lolly, amplified the news of your arrival.
Three minutes after her yapping commenced, Mr. Q. opened the door and sealed Dexter in his warm, fruit-smelling embrace. He was hulking and cavernous at once, browned to mahogany. Time had enlarged him in an organic, mineral way, like a tree trunk, or salts accreting in a cave. The frailty of his advanced age showed itself in the silty, tidal labors of his breath.
“Have a seat,” he whispered as the excitable Lolly buzzed at their feet, white ribbons twitching in the fur on her head. “I’ll make . . . the coffee.”
From the time Dexter had first managed, at almost sixteen, to read the coded signals in his father’s restaurant with enough precision to trace their source to this house; when he’d turned up on Mr. Q.’s doorstep with no more right than a stray dog, each visit had begun with the brewing of coffee on this same coal stove. The operation seemed to require a more delicate touch than Mr. Q.’s floppy, glovelike hands could manage, but Dexter had never seen him spill a drop.
During the silent interval while Mr. Q. stooped over the stove, Dexter (and every other visitor, presumably) gazed through the back window and gathered his thoughts. The stone birdbath was full of last week’s snow, and the swaddled peach and pear trees—vestiges of an orchard—looked like boxers petrified mid-blow. Even more thickly cosseted were the six grapevines Mr. Q. had brought with him on the ship to New York, roots inside soil inside clay inside burlap inside layers of Sicilian newspaper. The vines of his youth. Only men he regarded as family were asked to assist in harvesting his grapes. Dexter had done so many times. Even now he could conjure the dry, sour smell the stems released when cut, the velvety sun-warmed weight of the grapes in his palm. The yield was symbolic; the wine Mr. Q. aged in pine barrels in his cellar was an alloy consisting mostly of grapes he purchased, delivered by the crate.
When the coffee hissed on the stove, Mr. Q. poured it into two small cups and brought them to the table. “You look good,” he said softly, patting Dexter’s cheek. “But that’s the luck of . . . being a handsome fella. How you feel?”
“Good,” Dexter said. “Very good.”
“You strong? You look strong.”
“Yes. Strong.”
Though barely more than a whisper, Mr. Q.’s voice broke with the rumbling, soupy force of a primeval exhalation. He managed to emanate volcanic warmth while almost never smiling—a habit those around him tended to mirror in his presence. When Mr. Q. made an observation, or acknowledged one, it became immediately true. Dexter was strong. He knew that always, and he knew it now especially.
“You’re my . . . strongest man,” Mr. Q. said, pausing for breath between sentence halves. “I hope you won’t mind a . . . little canning . . .”
“My pleasure, boss.”
He had canned once before with Mr. Q.: peaches from his trees. On the spectrum of possible chores, canning fell in the middle: more laborious than harvesting vegetables from the large greenhouse (whether by rental or fiat, Mr. Q. controlled the land behind all of the houses on his block, making for a farm of some three acres); preferable to shoveling manure from Apple, his dray. The worst chores involved milking—either his cow, Angelina, whose rubbery udders throbbed with veins and horseflies, or—worse—his goats, who kicked, nibbled neckties, and produced almost nothing for one’s pains. Mr. Q.’s chores were a source of gentle mirth among his chiefs on the rare occasions when they met, but cautious mirth—no one wanting to laugh harder than anyone else.
Today they would be canning yellow pole beans from the greenhouse. “Try one,” Mr. Q. urged as Dexter began cutting off the tough ends on a worn marble slab. It tasted like a bean, more or less, but he pronounced it capital and finished it off. “You may have heard,” he began as he worked, “I gave Badger some necessary hell a few months back.”
“Badger,” Mr. Q. breathed, “has energy.”
“Never saw him again.”
“Chutzpah. To quote my Jewish friends.”
“If you say so.”
“He’s put together a little . . . numbers game.”
Dexter was glad to have the beans to look at, for this news surprised him. Badger had his own numbers game after three months in New York? Not likely; he must be overseeing one of Aldo Roma’s games. Mr. Q. permitted favored chiefs an unusual degree of autonomy and independence. Dexter relished the distance from his counterparts—he wanted nothing to do with the Red Hook piers, for example, where men behaved like animals. But the sprawling, “blind” nature of Mr. Q.’s empire allowed for little mutual curiosity among chiefs, let alone gossip. For that reason Dexter was gratified when his boss said, “I’d like Badger to . . . bring his game into a . . . couple of the clubs.”
“Of course. Which ones?”
“You decide.”
Dexter nodded, satisfied. He wanted to keep an eye on Badger.
A large pot simmered on the stove, steaming the air in the small kitchen. Mr. Q. gathered the beans in his shaking hands and dropped them in.
“I’ve a new idea, boss,” Dexter said. “The next step, as I see it.”