When I’d been facing getting served up that way, a young, illiterate, bullnecked hood had been one of the flunkies I’d encountered. That teenaged hoodlum was just a hired hand, and we hadn’t really tangled. He had just helped set me down in a wooden chair in the back room of a ramshackle bayou restaurant called the Willswood Tavern and gone back out front to serve his customers, leaving me to the whims of a political stooge named McCracken and an imbecile called Bucky Boy. I wasn’t even sure the hood knew my name, back then. I knew his, all right.
I’d first encountered Marcello on that job for Huey, in ’35, in the French Quarter, when Carlos was just a kid loading Chief slot machines in back of a truck. I’d have never guessed that by 1947, at age thirty-eight, he would assume leadership of the Louisiana Mafia. Like Kennedy patriarch Joe, Carlos had gone partners with New York’s Frank Costello — Kennedy in booze, Marcello in gambling.
Anti — organized crime crusader Robert Kennedy having been the kid of a fellow Costello accomplice was an irony Carlos never forgot — although I’d be shocked if he knew what the word irony meant.
Not that he was a dummy. Far from it. Carlos Marcello was perhaps the most autonomous mob boss in these United States. The Mafia had, after all, put down its roots in Louisiana long before Chicago, New York, and New England. The loose structure here, so intertwined with Pelican politics, provided mob boss Marcello uncommon independence and power. He did not answer to the national commission of Cosa Nostra bosses, who considered Louisiana a foreign country, and rightly so.
Marcello had learned early on to insulate himself from accomplices, or if not, silence them. For a junior-high-school dropout, he was uncommonly shrewd, and generous — his six brothers all held responsible positions in his enterprises. As one would expect of a Louisiana kingfish, he also had a knack for exploiting greedy, cowardly public officials.
“Dat’s all ah got to say about dat,” Marcello said into the phone, keeping the elves in line. “Tony, don’t you call me back with no bad news now, you hear?... Give my love to Lucy and da twins.”
And he hung up. He rose to shake hands with us. He was barely five feet tall, yet he still managed to give an impression of size.
“Well, fuck me sideways,” Marcello said, “how long it been, Paulo?”
“Maybe two years,” Paul said, finishing up a handshake. “I don’t get home much as I should... Carlos, this is Nate Heller.”
Marcello grinned at me. There was something charming about it. Also something chilling. He had dark, inverted-V eyebrows that gave his otherwise pleasant face a devil’s-mask quality.
“So dis is da famous private eye,” he said, shaking my hand. If my fingers were toothpaste tubes, he’d have made a hell of a mess. “Like on the tee-vee, huh?”
“Something like that,” I said, smiling.
We all sat down.
“Now, Nate... or ya prefer Nathan?”
“Nate is fine.”
“Now, me, ah don’t stand on no damn ceremony. Ya can call me Carlos, or Uncle Carlos. We gonna be great frien’s.”
“I hope so, Carlos.”
“You pals wid da Silver Fox, ah hear.”
He meant Johnny Rosselli, a Chicago Outfit guy who traveled in the highest of low circles.
“John and I go back a long way,” I admitted.
Marcello sat forward, leaned on two elbows, cocked the big head, arched one upside-down V. “You go back all de way to Frank Nitti days, dat right?”
“I knew Frank. I was just a kid then. We did each other favors.”
“And now you a regular Jimmy Bond, ain’t ya, son?”
I just smiled.
Was this mere friendly banter? Or was there menace in there? Certainly condescension, since most men my own age don’t call me “son.”
The Little Man leaned back, rocked easily in his high-backed leather swivel chair. “You boys want some refreshments? Ah don’t drink dis time of day, but don’t let dat stop you. Me, ah wouldn’t mind a Coke-Cola.”
“Coke would be fine,” Paul said, as I nodded. My client had a nervous smile. You would, too, if you were about to talk business with Carlos Marcello.
Carlos punched a button on his phone and got Frances on the speaker, and the madam of a four-state call-girl ring said, most pleasantly, that she’d run over and get us some Coke-Colas.
The meeting began and I quickly became a third wheel. Paul explained to Uncle Carlos that he already had the financing for production of the new oil additive, the merits of which he spent two or three minutes on, then emphasized he hoped Marcello could fund distribution of the product. Our host seemed interested and agreeable, and asked many smart questions in that stupid-sounding Cajun drawl.
About halfway through this discussion, Frances arrived with little cold-sweating bottles of Coke. She wore an orange skirt to go with her yellow blouse and had a figure nice enough to work for her own prostie ring.
As the business talk grew more serious, an edge came into Carlos’s voice. “Now, Paulo, you come to me ’cause there ain’t nobody in Louisiana dat could distribute dat oil thing a yours better dan Uncle Carlos. We both know dat. Didn’t ah get slots in every corner of dis state?”
“Yes,” Paul said, nodding. “Louisiana would be a fine place to take the product out for a trial run.”
“But ah wanna have a gar-on-tee dat ah in for de long haul and a nice slice, when dis thing gits rolled out.”
“Well, of course, Uncle Carlos,” Paul said, a quaver in his voice. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Marcello was giving his old friend that classic Mafia stare. I’d seen that same no-nonsense boogey-man whammy delivered by mob bosses from Nitti to Ricca, Accardo to Giancana, and was convinced these guys practiced that glaring glower in the mirror. I almost laughed. Almost.
“You know dat loyalty’s da most impotent thing under da sun to Uncle Carlos. Ah don’t take kin’ly to muthafuckers dat screw my ass over.”
Despite the meat-locker air-conditioning, Paul had beads of sweat on his forehead.
“Uncle Carlos,” he said, and the “uncle” seemed goddamn silly, considering they too were about the same age, “we been friends since we were kids. Surely you can’t doubt—”
Marcello cut the air with the edge of a thick hand. “Frien’s and bidness, dey don’t always go t’gether so good. You and me, Paulo, we ain’t never done no bidness together. So ah don’t mean to sound like no hard-ass muthafucker...”
Like hell he didn’t.
“... but it like when ya crawl in bed wid some broad, and you think, should ah slip on de rubber or not? We ain’t usin’ no rubber here, my frien’. We is bareback all de way. You still wanna do bidness with Uncle Carlos?”
“Very much.”
The stare melted into a big smile, mitigated only by the devilish eyebrows. “Well, dat’s fine den.” He turned his now-friendly gaze on me. “Nate, you min’ if ah steal you away for a spell? You boys stayin’ at the Roosevelt, right?”
Both of these questions struck me as non sequiturs, but Paul said, “Yes, I can drive our rental to the Roosevelt and meet up with Nate later, if you’d like some time with him.”
“Well, ah surely would,” Carlos said. “Ah wanna ask him about dem investors of yours he been lookin’ into — always like to know who ah’m gettin’ in bed wid.”
Rubbers again.
“’Sides which, we got mutual frien’s, Nate and me. We might wanna discuss about dis-and-dat, Paulo, dat might not be somethin’ a fella like you need to hear.”
Paul considered me mobbed up, so he understood that. I didn’t consider myself mobbed up, despite all the gangsters I’d known and even consorted with over the years, but I always let clients like Paul think I was. Good for business. But occasionally it put me in an awkward position. Like now.