She slides the chain lock off and opens the door. “Is he in trouble? Marcus, what you do?”
Malone nudges Marcus in front of him and steps inside. He sets the turkey on the kitchen counter, or what he can see of it under the empty bottles, ashtrays and general filth.
“Where’s Dante?” Malone asks.
“Sleepin’.”
Malone pulls up Marcus’s jacket and plaid shirt and shows her the welts on his back. “Dante do this?”
“What Marcus tell you?”
“He didn’t tell me nothin’,” Malone says.
Dante comes out of the bedroom. Lavelle’s newest man is brolic, has to go six seven, all of it muscle and mean. He’s drunk now, his eyes yellow and bloodshot, and he looms over Malone. “What you want?”
“What did I tell you I was going to do if you beat this boy again?”
“You was going to break my wrist.”
Malone has the nightstick out and twirls it like a baton, bringing it down on Dante’s right wrist, snapping it like a Popsicle stick. Dante bellows and swings with his left. Malone ducks, goes low and brings the stick across Dante’s shins. The man goes down like a felled tree.
“So there you go,” Malone says.
“This is police brutality.”
Malone steps on Dante’s neck and uses his other foot to kick him up the ass, hard, three times. “You see Al Sharpton here? Television crews? Lavelle here holding up a cell phone? There ain’t no police brutality if the cameras aren’t running.”
“The boy disrespected me,” Dante groans. “I disciplined him.”
Marcus stands there wide-eyed; he’s never seen big Dante get jacked up before and he kind of likes it. Lavelle, she just knows she’s in for another ass-kicking when the cop leaves.
Malone steps down harder. “I see him with bruises again, I see him with welts, I’m going to discipline you. I’m going to shove this stick up your ass and pull it out your mouth. Then Big Monty and me are going to set your feet in cement and dump you in Jamaica Bay. Now get out. You don’t live here anymore.”
“You can’t tell me where I can live!”
“I just did.” Malone lets his foot off Dante’s neck. “Why you still laying there, bitch?”
Dante gets up, holds his broken wrist and grimaces in pain.
Malone sees his coat and tosses it to him.
“What about my shoes?” Dante asks. “They in the bedroom.”
“You go barefoot,” Malone says. “You walk barefoot in the snow to the E-room and tell them what happens to grown men who beat up little boys.”
Dante stumbles out the door.
Malone knows everyone will be talking about it tonight. The word will get passed—maybe you beat little kids in Brooklyn, in Queens, but not in Manhattan North, not in the Kingdom of Malone.
He turns to Lavelle. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t I need love, too?”
“Love your kid,” Malone says. “I see this again, you go to jail, he goes in the system. Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Then straighten up.” He takes a twenty from his pocket. “This ain’t for Little Debbies. There’s still time for you to go shopping, put something under the tree.”
“Ain’t got a tree.”
“It’s an expression.”
Jesus Christ.
He squats down in front of Marcus. “Anybody hurts you, anybody threatens to hurt you—you come to me, to Monty, Russo, anyone on Da Force. Okay?”
Marcus nods.
Yeah, maybe, Malone thinks. Maybe there’s a chance the kid don’t grow up hating every cop.
Malone’s no fool—he knows he isn’t going to stop every child beating in Manhattan North or even most of them. Or most of any other crime. And it bothers him—it’s his turf, his responsibility. Everything that happens in Manhattan North is on him. He knows that isn’t realistic either, but it’s the way he feels.
Everything that happens in the kingdom is on the king.
He finds Lou Savino at D’Amore over on 116th in what they used to call Spanish Harlem.
Before that it was Italian Harlem.
Now it’s on the way to becoming Asian Harlem.
Malone edges his way back to the bar.
Savino is a capo in the Cimino family with a crew based on the old Pleasant Avenue turf. They’re into construction rackets, unions, shylocking, gambling—the usual mob shit—but Malone knows Lou also slings dope.
But not in Manhattan North.
Malone has assured him that if any of his shit ever shows up in the hood, all bets are off—it will blow back on his other businesses. It’s pretty much always been the police deal with the mob—the wiseguys wanted to run hookers, to run gambling—card games, backroom casinos, the numbers racket before the state took it over, called it the lottery and made it a civic virtue—they gave a monthly envelope to the cops.
It was called the “pad.”
Usually one cop from every precinct was the bagman—he’d collect the payoff and distribute it out to his fellow officers. The patrolmen would kick up to the sergeants, the sergeants to the lieutenants, the lieutenants to the captains, the captains to the inspectors, the inspectors to the chiefs.
Everyone got a taste.
And most everybody considered it “clean money.”
Cops in those days (shit, Malone thinks, cops in these days) made a distinction between “clean money” and “dirty money.” Clean money was mostly from gambling; dirty money was from drugs and violent crimes—the rare occasions when a wiseguy would try to buy off a murder, an armed robbery, a rape or a violent assault. While almost every cop would take clean money, it was the rare one who took money that had drugs or blood on it.
Even the wiseguys knew the difference and accepted the fact that the same cop who’d take gambling money on Tuesday would arrest the same gangster on Thursday for dealing smack or committing a murder.
Everyone knew the rules.
Lou Savino is one of those mob guys who thinks he’s at a wedding and doesn’t realize it’s actually a wake.
He prays at the altar of dead false gods.
Tries to hold up an image of what he thinks used to be but in fact didn’t exist except maybe in the movies. The fuckin’ guy wants so bad to be something that never was, even the ghost image of which is now fading into black.
The guys of Savino’s generation liked what they saw in the movies and wanted to be that. So Lou ain’t trying to be Lefty Ruggiero, he’s trying to be Al Pacino being Lefty Ruggiero. He ain’t trying to be Tommy DeSimone, he’s going for Joe Pesci being Tommy DeSimone, not being Jake Amari but James Gandolfini.
Those were good shows, Malone thinks, but Jesus, Lou, they were shows. But people point to the spot a couple of blocks away from here where Sonny Corleone beat up Carlo Rizzi with a trash can lid like it really happened, not to the spot where Francis Ford Coppola filmed James Caan pretending to beat up Gianni Russo.
Yeah well, Malone thinks, every institution survives on its own mythology, the NYPD included.