. . . shakedown street
“You oughta be shamefaced, what you do to your people.” The tiny man looked at him, wiping his hands on the dirty apron stained with grime and poverty. But wiping wasn’t doing much good. 1965: combat troops setting foot in Vietnam, Watts going up in flames, dead cosmonauts orbiting the Earth, and these people were living on sawdust floors, no heat and no hot water.
“Think you’re my people, huh?” Gabe Zoller stepped out of the sun and into the doorway, letting his eyes and nose adjust to what lay inside — more a shack than a shop, not a wall that looked like he couldn’t push a hand through it — swatting at the bottle flies buzzing around on account of the chickens and capons hanging in the front window. Its striped awning supposed to keep the light off the poultry. Live ones in crates clucking over by the chopping table, a tip of a cleaver sunk in the stained wooden top. One of the birds flapped, sending dust and feathers up into the thin stream of sunlight coming past the door. Gabe thinking the smell of the place belonged in a barn. More crates were lined and stacked out front. This guy whose name Gabe didn’t remember, Kohn or Kahn or something, calling Gabe his people.
Collecting for Ernie Zimm, same way he did at the beginning of every month. This tiny man acting like he didn’t know why Gabe was here, giving him the same hard-luck story about mouths to feed, showing the height of his kids with his hands, both children needing shoes. The guy’s “oy oy oy” supposed to show the hardship. Three oys being a pretty bad week.
“We all got shit to schlep, man.”
“God knows you and sees what you do.” Kohn or Kahn pointed a knotted finger.
“God, huh?” Gabe let his eyes go around the place, saying, “You ask me, there’s only you and me and the chickens.” It pissed him off, this guy bringing God into it, telling him how it was. “Oughta take a hard look, and ask what God’s done for you lately.” Be doing a favor if He threw fire and brimstone down on this whole fucking ward. Burn it to the ground, as far as Gabe was concerned. A front room used as a store with a couple more rooms in back, one claptrap wall holding up the next. Gabe guessing the wife and kids were huddling back there, hearing through the thin walls, and staying out of sight.
Gabe gave another glance out the door. “You can run your mouth, but you still owe me the hundred.” He snapped his fingers and put out his hand, eyes looking for anything of value. “Not gonna to ask again.”
Two stooped old women in head scarves went by, both tapping canes on the sidewalk, careful not to look in, minding their own business.
“No more.” Kohn or Kahn rose to full height and stomped a foot, top of his head up to Gabe’s chin, his eyes defiant, shifting to the cleaver sticking in the carving table.
Gabe stepped to block him.
The tiny man jumped the other way and grabbed the push broom off the wall and stood with it like a rifle at present arms; this guy in his dirty apron was off his nut, giving Gabe attitude. Then he jabbed the end like a bayonet, and rushed at him, yelling.
Swatting the broom aside, Gabe caught the handle and tossed it away, then got a mittful of apron and spun the man, putting some weight behind the knuckles, slugging him in the ribs and sending him to the floor. Bending for the broom, he snapped the handle over his knee and tossed the pieces down, saying, “Okay, fun’s over, I mean it. Let’s have it.” Wagging his fingers for the money.
“I ain’t got it.” The man stayed in a ball, holding his side.
When they copped an attitude, Gabe had to get tough, these old-world types going mulish about giving up their savings. Leaning down, Gabe slapped him across the mouth, saying, “You think it puts some pep in my day, having to smack you?” He grinned — yeah, it did. Catching the man by the apron straps, he propped him up. “How about now? Or you want more?”
The man’s mouth was bleeding. Eyes slanting off sideways like he might pass out. Reaching in a pocket, he pulled some crumpled bills and held them out. “All I got, here take it. Take it.”
And he did, Gabe counting it, then shaking him, making him dig in the other pocket, coming up with another deuce and some coins. Ended up just shy of forty bucks, Gabe made a face and shoved him back down.
The man gasped for air.
Wiping blood from his sleeve, Gabe pulled up the knees of his trousers and squatted back beside the man, saying, “I got a couple more stops to make, not the only mope I got to see. Was going for a drink after, now I got to stop off and put on a clean shirt, then come back here. Means I’m gonna miss happy hour.”
The man’s eyes lolled, Gabe not sure the guy was even hearing him.
“Pull it together, will you, man.” Gabe could hear the crying coming from the back now. The guy’s wife shhing a child. “Look what you put your family through, selfish schmuck.” Gabe lifted him by the apron straps and got him to his feet, clapped a hand on the boney shoulder, saying, “Okay, I’m gonna give you a break. I’m gonna be back end of the week. And I want the rest, you understand that? Every cent. Nod if you do. Okay then.”
Shaking the shoulder, making the head bob back and forth.
“Letting you off easy, not charging interest this time, you understand?”
The man nodded, then made a sound in his throat like he might be sick.
Gabe let him go, the man tottering around, catching himself on the carving block, the cleaver stuck in the top.
It was a waste of time, trying to give a guy like this a break. Gabe watched the man as he considered the cleaver, then he collapsed back on the straw floor.
Saying to him, “Lenny, the guy I work with, wouldn’t put up with this drek, not for a second. Can tell you that. He’d use his fists, then burn you out. You and everybody you got in back’d be out in the street. You understand that?”
The man groaned and gave a nod.
Hearing the wife and kids bawling in back, Gabe tossed the coins on the ground, the man snatching them up. Why did these old goats let their wooden heads get in the modern way of doing business. Seeing it as paying money under coercion instead of being kept safe from the riff-raff out there. A bad attitude, that’s what it was.
Gabe checked his knuckles. Hands that used to be toughened from his time in the ring, now going soft. At one time he’d been in Ungerman’s good books, the promotor finding him training at the Y on Brunswick Avenue, liked what he saw and put him in the ring, getting him a trainer, Gabe with a ten-and-six and lots of promise, sparred with Chuvalo, the two-time title challenger who was just another guy from the Junction. Man, that guy could hit from either side, left or right. They sparred head to head and toe to toe in ’62, after George got himself disqualified for head-butting that Welsh fighter, Erskine. Say what you want about Chuvalo, that man could throw rockets out of nowhere that could knock you for a ten-count. Just ask Floyd Patterson about it. Gabe started making money on the side, doing collections for Ernie Zimm back then, not something Ungerman approved of, the two businessmen not seeing eye to eye.
Gabe hadn’t stepped to the bag or into the club in months, nowhere near a hundred percent since he took the bullet earlier last year, caught it low in the abdomen, tearing up a mile of intestine. A shootout he and Lenny Ovitz got into with the Italians, guys trying to make Little Italy not so little. He left one of the Italianos, Marco DiPalma, breathing his last, and sent two of his crew running off, Lenny squatting behind the fender of Gabe’s Catalina, firing across the hood. Gabe still wondering if the bullet he caught was one of Lenny’s, the guy firing from behind him. Something he never mentioned. The two of them taking care of business, making their point — Ward Six belonged to Ernie Zimm.
Zimm had a med student make a back-door house call, a kid with some bad debts who didn’t ask a lot of questions, patching Gabe up, told him he was the first guy he patched up since Yom Kippur. Ernie making Gabe pay the two hundred for getting the bullet dug out, along with the vial of painkillers.
Now, sucking his knuckles, Gabe was seeing the situation for what it was. He’d go back to the travel agency at day’s end, the front for Ernie Zimm’s operation, walk past Dag Malek and Manni Schiller sitting at their desks, and drop nine hundred and thirty-eight bucks in front of Ernie, having to explain why he came back light. Supposed to collect a hundred from each of the Market shops on his route. And he’d have to put up with Ernie going on about coming back light, calling it a miss. How he ought to take the rest out of Gabe’s pay.
And when he found out Gabe laid a hand on this chicken guy, Ernie would give him more shit about his temper getting in the way of clear thinking again. Sure catching a lot of shit working for Ernie Zimm these days, and getting tired of the smug duo, Dag and Manni, desk jockeys always grinning when he walked in, like he was some joke. Dag with his stupid one-liners, the guy thinking he was Shecky Greene. The pair of them acting like the sun they promised their customers on those Miami cruises was shining from their assholes.
Guys with no clue what it was like down at street level, only a few blocks away from the Parliament house. Gabe wondering when was the last time Ernie himself came down to the Ward. Dag and Manni too, both gone soft in the belly, sitting behind those desks selling vacations, forgetting how to use their fists and strike the fear that once got them paid.
It was all him and Lenny Ovitz these days, the message was out around the Market, when Gabe “The Twist” or Lenny Ovitz came to collect, you paid what you owed. A miss meant getting thumped or worse. Gabe and Lenny in no mood to go back light, and Ernie Zimm not wanting to hear about it, writing the miss in his goddamn book.
Taking a trussed-up capon dangling in the front window, Gabe stepped out of there, into the squinting sunlight, crossing Nassau. A car with three guys inside squealed up short, and the driver tapped his horn, saying something out the window.
Thumping a fist on the hood, Gabe stepped to the driver’s side, capon in his left hand, held it by the neck. “Know what happened to the last guy honked at me?” Looking at the two greasers in front, another in back. The one on the passenger side and the guy in back looking like brothers, same thick mustaches.
“That’s good, except honking, that’s a goose,” the driver said, smiling. “What you got there’s a chicken.”
“What I got here’s a capon.” Holding it close to the guy’s face.
The guy in back leaned forward, saying something to the driver, giving Gabe cold eyes.
The driver saying. “My mistake, a capon. A big bird, but no culhões.”
“What’s that?”
“You have yourself a nice day.” The guy waving him off and driving on.
Going across to his Catalina, the Pontiac baking in the heat by the curb, a bullet hole still in the rocker, a reminder from the Italians.
Mid-June in Toronto, and it was like swimming in ball soup. He hadn’t cracked the windows, thinking he’d only be a minute. Like an oven in the black car, Gabe laying the un-plucked bird on the opposite floor mat. ...
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