Halfway through the speech — even before the most insulting part — Tango was a dead man. Of course, Tango didn’t know that. And Frank would let Tango walk around a while. But Tango was already a ghost, just getting an early start on haunting Harlem.
Coolly, Frank said, “Twenty percent, huh?”
The big bald head bobbed up and down. “Offa every dollar. Every vig, every truckload, every girl, every damn ounce. You pay your tribute like anybody else, Frank. You put it in the goddamn jar.”
Gently smiling, Frank shook his head. “You’re a businessman, Tango. So you understand business.”
“That’s what we’re talkin’ about here. Business.”
“But twenty percent’s my profit margin. If I’m giving that to you, then what am I working for? I’m not looking for a hobby.” Frank shrugged. “You hit me, everyone you know, for twenty percent, you put us all out of business. Which puts you out of business.”
Tango displayed a yard of white teeth. “Then you’ll just have to work harder, Frank. Raise your prices and shit.”
Frank shook his head as he reached for the check. “There are reasonable ways to make money, Tango... and then there’s this way. Bumpy never took twenty percent.”
“Bumpy’s fuckin’ dead.”
Frank studied Tango’s dark eyes and the hard, determined cast of his jaw. This was a stubborn man and a stupid man. Also dangerous. But mostly stupid.
Taking out his money clip, Frank peeled off a five to cover the check; then he peeled off a one, and flipped it over in front of Tango.
“There you go,” Frank said. “Your twenty percent.”
Frank got up and went out. He could feel Tango’s eyes on him, but he wasn’t really concerned. He knew what he would do about this problem; he just had to pick the right moment.
Sitting in his apartment, which was nicely but not ostentatiously furnished mostly in shades of brown, Frank leaned back in a comfortable chair with a pencil in one hand and a spiral pad in the other.
On the yellow paper he did the math — for a guy who never graced a schoolroom door, he was a whiz at it. Just for the hell of it, he worked out what it would cost to accommodate Tango. After all, Frank had no desire to work the protection racket, which had been fine in days of Bumpy Johnson and Dutch Schultz and Al fucking Capone, but today it was a dying game to be sure.
And there was just no way.
After he paid the Italian suppliers, and Red Top and everybody else who worked for him, Frank would be a goddamn pauper. This shit would be his hobby...
His first instinct, even though it had been tinged by an emotional response to Tango’s disrespect for Bumpy, had been correct. Tango had to go.
But inadvertently Tango had opened Frank’s eyes to a basic problem in the supply-and-demand scheme of things. Frank was working on way too slim a margin. The dope trade, for all the money that rolled in, was a pie getting cut up too many ways; and then there were those crooked fucking cops who were squeezing the goombahs by the nuts.
Something had to change.
And Frank had to change it.
Throughout his life Frank had developed a method of dealing with tight situations. He was not an impulse buyer in the showroom of life; he liked to mull, and mold his options.
He’d been known to lock himself in a hotel room, shut off the phone, yank down the blinds, take room service and just think. Isolation helped him get a clear view, he could look back over the past, backtrack five years if need be and think about everything he’d done and everyone he’d encountered and everything he’d heard, and search every nook and cranny of his memory for information and answers.
This time, however, he did not check himself into a room; instead he took the German shepherd he’d inherited from Bumpy out on the beach at Coney Island, and together man and beast had walked under a bleak gray-blue sky along a beach where seagulls fought for scraps in the sand. This time of year the place was all but deserted, a handful of screaming kids riding a roller coaster barely competing with the sound of surf rolling in and gulls cawing as they circled to provide a mostly soothing soundtrack for his thoughts.
Frank and Bumpy and, for that matter, the dog had often come here and walked and talked.
Bumpy had never come right out and said that some day Frank would take his place, if not in the protection business then in the black world that was Harlem. But the older man would dispense advice, without really saying why he was offering it or indicating what Frank was to do with it.
Drifting over the waves and into his thoughts came the memory of Bumpy’s resonant voice: “A leader is like a shepherd, Frank. He sends the fast, nimble sheep out front, and the others follow. And the shepherd? He walks quietly behind. Watching. Guiding.”
Where the tide rolled in, Frank picked up a stick that seemed perfect for the dog to fetch. He hurled it and the animal went scampering after it. Gulls cawed hungrily. Kids screamed happily.
“Now the shepherd, he has a stick, a cane, a staff... and you know he’ll use it if he has to.”
The dog brought the stick back and, as he threw it again, Frank pictured Bumpy on a day when he’d done the same thing.
“But most of the time, the shepherd doesn’t have to use that stick. He can move the whole herd, quietly. With skill. With brains. And with the force of his own personality.”
On days like this, Frank and Bumpy would have ended up at the hot dog stand, where Bumpy would buy a naked pup for his German shepherd to gulp down, while the boss and his number one man would chomp at condiment-laden hot dogs like two more kids at Coney Island.
And Bumpy would dispense wisdom with relish, hot dog or otherwise, though the memory of his mentor’s words were more recent, not given at Coney Island but in front of the electronics store window where Bumpy had died.
“What right do they have, cutting out the suppliers, pushing all the middlemen out, buying direct from the manufacturer? Putting Americans out of work! This is the way it is now, Frank.”
There on that bleak beach, Frank’s mind assembled scraps of information and bits and pieces of advice into what he knew at once was a bold new plan.
Bumpy had been right: things had changed, cutting out the middlemen was a fact of life, the way it was now... and the little boy who’d seen the white men blow his cousin’s brains out of his skull knew that you couldn’t change the way things were. You had to accept the world as it was and work within it.
And make the world work for you.
If he were really to be white-boy rich someday, Frank would first have to cut out the Italians, whatever risk that might entail. No more picking up packages from Rossi or the like. Fuck that shit — Frank would get his own supply.
The voice of that soldier kid, Willie, sitting at Red Top’s table, pushed out Bumpy Johnson’s in Frank’s mind: Good shit in Vietnam.
This war, this stupid war, had turned a lot of kids, black and white, into casual druggies and a good number into outright junkies. Right now Vietnam was full of GIs getting strung out, and shit good enough to string out GIs was good enough for Frank to sell state-side. Sell, hell — he’d make a killing.
So it was that Frank Lucas went from Coney Island to a doctor’s office in Harlem where he took a series of shots, not the least of which was to prevent malaria. Then he went to a photography shop for a picture to take with him to the post office, where it was stapled to a passport application.