Levin walks back to the table. “Okay, that was embarrassing.”
Malone notices he takes it well, though, he’s laughing at himself. And the kid went—three mob guys in front of their women, and the kid went. It says something.
Russo raises his glass. “Here’s to you, Levin.”
“Was that really Lou Savino?” Levin asks.
“What, you think we hired actors?” Russo says. “No, that’s him.”
“You know him?”
“We know him,” Malone says. “He knows us. We’re in the same business, only on different sides of the counter.”
The steaks arrive.
Another rule of Bowling Night—you order steak.
A big red juicy New York Strip, a Delmonico, a Chateaubriand. Because it’s good, it’s what you should have, and if you’re in the same restaurant as wiseguys you want to be seen eating meat.
Cops fall into two categories—grass eaters and meat eaters. The grass eaters are the small-timers—they take a cut from the car-towing companies, they get a free coffee, a sandwich. They take what comes, they’re not aggressive. The meat eaters are the predators, they go after what they want—the drug rips, the mob payoffs, the cash. They go out and hunt and bring it down, so it’s important that when the unit is out as the Unit, it dresses tight and eats steak.
It sends a message.
You think it’s a joke, but it’s not—they’re literally looking to see what’s on your plate. If it’s a cheeseburger, guys are talking about it the next day. “I saw Denny Malone at Gallaghers the other night and he was eating, are you ready for this? Hamburger.”
The wiseguys will think you’re cheap or broke or both, and either one sends a message to their reptilian brains that you’re weak, and the next thing you know, they’re trying to take advantage of that. They’re predators, too; they cut the weak out of the herd and go after him.
Malone’s steak is great, though, a beautiful New York Strip cooked rare with a cold red center. Instead of the baked potato, he went with big cottage fries and a pile of green beans.
It feels good to cut into the steak, to chew it.
Substantial.
Solid.
Real.
It was the right decision to call Bowling Night.
Big Montague digs into a sixteen-ounce Delmonico, his concentration thorough. In a rare revelation, he once told Malone that he grew up in a household where meat was a rare treat; as a kid he ate his breakfast cereal with water instead of milk. And he was a big kid, always hungry. Monty should have been a street thug; his size made him the perfect bodyguard and enforcer for some mid-to high-level dealer. But he was too smart for that, Malone thinks. Monty’s always had the ability to see around the next corner, know what’s coming, and even as a young teenager he saw that the dope-slinging life led to a cell or a coffin, that only the guys at the top of the pyramid made the real money.
But he observed that police always ate.
He never saw a hungry cop.
So he went the other way with it.
Those days, the Job sucked down black candidates like salt peanuts. You were AA, had two legs and could see beyond your thumbs, you were in. They didn’t expect a black candidate to have an IQ of 126, though, which is what Monty tested. Big, brilliant, black, he had “detective” written all over him from day one.
Even the cops who hate blacks give him his props.
He’s one of the most highly respected cops on the Job.
Now he looks tight in a midnight-blue tailored Joseph Abboud suit, powder-blue shirt, his red tie obscured by the linen napkin tucked in at his neck. Monty ain’t gonna take a chance on staining a hundred-dollar shirt, he don’t care what it looks like.
“What you looking at?” he asks Malone.
“You.”
“What about me?”
“Love you, man.”
Monty knows this. He and Malone don’t do that jive brothers-from-another-mother, ebony-and-ivory bullshit, but they are brothers. He has a brother who’s an accountant in Albany, another doing a fifteen-to-thirty in Elmira, but he’s closest to Malone.
Only makes sense—they spend at least twelve hours a day together, five or six days a week, and they depend on each other for their lives. It’s no cliché—you go through that door, you never know. You want your brothers with you.
Just as there’s no question that being a black cop is different, it just is, that’s all. Other cops, except his brothers here, look at him a little different, and the “community”—as the social activists, bigmouthed ministers and local politicians laughably call the ghetto—see him either as a potential ally who should help them out, or as a traitor. An Uncle Tom, an Oreo.
Monty don’t care.
He knows who he is: he’s a man trying to raise a family and get his kids the fuck out of the “community”—that community who’ll rob each other, cheat each other and kill each other for a nickel bag.
While his brothers at this table would die for each other.
Malone once said that you should never partner with anyone you wouldn’t leave alone with your family and all your money. You did that with any of these men, when you came back, your family would be laughing and there’d be more money.
They order dessert—mud pie, apple pie with big wedges of cheddar cheese, cheesecake with cherries.
After that, coffee with brandy or sambuca, and Malone, he decides he needs to even things up a little for Levin, so he says, “Never Say Die Harry was great, but you want to talk dead bodies, though . . .”
“Don’t do it,” Russo says. But he starts laughing.
“What?” Levin asks.
Monty’s laughing, too, so he knows the story.
“No,” Malone says.
“Come on.”
Malone looks at Russo, who nods, and then says, “This was back when Russo and me were still in bags down in the Six. We had this sergeant—”
“Brady.”
“Brady, who liked me,” Malone says, “but for some reason hated Russo. Anyway, this Brady, he liked to drink, and he used to have me drop him off at the White Horse so he could get a load on and then pick him up later, bring him back to the house, he could sleep it off.
“So this one night, we get a DOA call, and in those days, a uniform had to stay with the body until the ME came in to call it. It’s a bitter cold night, subzero, and Brady he asks me, ‘Where’s Russo?’ I says, ‘On his post.’ He says, ‘Get him over there on the DOA.’ It sounds nice, right? Get Russo out of the cold, indoors, but Brady knows that Phil here . . .”
Malone starts laughing again. “Back then, Russo was terrified of dead bodies.”
“Scared stiff, so to speak,” Monty says.
“Fuck the both of you.”
“So I try to talk Brady out of it,” Malone says, “because I know Russo’s a total pussy about this and might faint or something, but Brady ain’t havin’ it. Has to be Russo. ‘You tell him to get his fuckin’ ass over there and stay with the body.’
“It’s a brownstone over off Washington Square, the body’s in bed on the second floor and it’s clearly natural causes.”