“Scotch all right?” he asked.
Rum was my preference, but I said, “Scotch is fine.”
He got a bottle out of the cupboard, poured several inches each into a couple glasses, and left the bottle on the table as he sat back down.
He nibbled some provolone. I nibbled some salami.
He said, “So, how often you see dat rat bastard Bobby dese days?”
I didn’t think he meant Darin or Rydell or Vee, even though they were all Italian. Connie was no help — she was busy singing “Arrivederci Roma.”
“Not in a long time,” I said.
Which was a lie, but not one Marcello was likely to see through.
Gingerly filling the silence, I ventured, “That was a shame what he put you through last year. I read about it in the papers.”
Bobby Kennedy had been attorney general only three months when he made perhaps his most audacious move against organized crime. He arranged for Marcello, reporting in for a routine quarterly meeting at the New Orleans immigration office, to be grabbed by INS agents, handcuffed, and hauled off for immediate deportation. Marcello was actually born in Tunisia, but Kennedy pretended that a forged birth certificate, once used by Marcello to obtain a Guatemalan passport, was real.
“Livarsi ‘na pietra di la scarpa!” Marcello blurted, his dark eyes bulging and bloodshot, his hand gripping the glass of Scotch so tight I thought it might crack. “Dat’s an old Sicilian saying, man.”
“Is it?”
“Ya wanna know what it mean, man?”
“Naw, that’s okay.”
“It mean, ‘Take the stone out of my shoe!’ Don’t you worry about that little Bobby son of a bitch. He gon’ be took care of.”
“You don’t want to do that, Carlos,” I said gently. “That could get you in one hell of a lot of trouble.”
But he wasn’t listening. His eyes weren’t bulging now, they were looking inward, and his mushy mouth let the words out softly.
“Dey jus’ snatch me, man, dem damn feds, dey grab my ass and don’ let me call home or nuttin’, don’t lemme get my fuckin’ toothbrush, man. Dat fuckin’ Bobby, he jus’ dump my ass in Guatemala City wid no money, no clothes, no nuttin’.”
We sat and drank. I took it easy, but he was putting it away. The more he drank, the more mush-mouthed his speech became, not surprisingly. The farmhouse was cool, window air conditioners going, but his forehead was sweat-beaded. When he got up to turn the Connie Francis record over, he seemed a little unsteady.
He sat back down hard and talked a little bit about Paul Fudala and the fun they’d had in the French Quarter as kids, getting laid young and often.
“All de boobies back den was big, and all de pussies was tight.”
Dose were da days.
He talked about legit business deals and repeated his plans for draining Churchill Farms and creating housing and commerce where snakes and alligators now thrived. Then he got up and put on Connie Francis — More Italian Favorites. She was singing “That’s Amore” when he brought up Bobby Kennedy again.
“You still got dat Bobby bastard fooled, Nate?”
“Not sure I follow, Carlos.”
“Back in dem racket committee days, when you was workin’ for Bobby? Little bastard never knew you was really workin’ for Jimmy, did he?”
That was Jimmy as in Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters president the McClellan Committee had been investigating; but actually Hoffa was the bastard I still had fooled. I’d been Robert Kennedy’s double agent — an old secret that could still get me newly killed.
Marcello leaned forward, gestured with his glass of Scotch, amber liquid sloshing around. The redness of his eyes was like Christopher Lee in a Dracula picture.
“Lemme tell ya somethin’, Nate. Dis Bobby done me and my family wrong. We went through two months of hell, me and Jackie.”
Like JFK, Carlos Marcello had a long-suffering wife named Jacqueline.
“Ah got my ass bounced aroun’ Guatemala like a fuckin’ rubber ball, man, stuck in dis jail, stuck in dat hotel. Den dey say dey is sendin’ me home, and dey drive me to da Honduras border and what da fuck, dey dump my ass again. Dis time ah got my lawyer wid me. Fuck lotta good he done, middle of de goddamn jungle wid mountains and shit all aroun’. We walk seventeen miles, Nate, we walk eight hours in de wilderness like some fucker in da Bible. An’ here ah is in a bidness suit and tie, hikin’ like a fuckin’ Boy Scout under de tropical sun. Ah pass out three times in de dirt, and one time ah look up and tell Mike, my lawyer, ah tell him, if ah don’t make it, you tell my brothers what dat goddamn rich-kid Bobby Kennedy done to me. Tell ’em to do what they got to do.”
I sipped Scotch.
Connie sang, “Return to Me.”
Quietly I said, “You can’t hit the attorney general of the United States, Carlos. You’re not in the jungle now.”
“Ah know dat,” he said, shrugged, and finished his latest glass. He poured some more. “Wouldn’t do no good, nohow. His brother Jack, dat bastard gonna hit us wid everything he got.”
“Right.”
“But ya know what dey say in Sicily, man.”
“I don’t know.”
“You wanna kill de dog, don’t cut off de tail, man, cut off de head.”
“What’s that mean, Carlos?” Though I thought I knew.
He frowned. “It mean de dog, he keep bitin’ you, you only cut off his tail. But you cut de damn dog’s head off, de whole damn dog gonna die... tail and all.”
He nibbled at some salami. Threatening to kill the President gave him an appetite.
“Carlos, Bobby would come after you so hard that—”
“Ha! You don’t know much for a Chicago boy, Nate. Who will da new president be? Lyndon Baines Johnson, dat’s who. And he hate Bobby like poison. He fire that li’l bastard faster den shit.”
We finished our Scotches. I hoped he didn’t see me shaking. We walked out the back way into the muggy night and Carlos reached a hand up to settle on my shoulder. Why had he told me all that? Jesus, why me? Had he got drunk and let his mouth run to where later he’d sober up and want me dead?
Standing at the edge of the swamp, where darkness had settled and the moon was touching black unknowable ripples with silver, he said, “Dat Bobby, he still tryin’ to deport my ass, man. And Momo, too. And da shit he give Hoffa, who a good, hardworkin’ man helpin’ hardworkin’ men! Gotta stop, Nate. Gotta damn stop.”
“This is out of my league, Carlos.”
His smile was a horrible thing, the kind of smile one of those alligators out there would give you before taking a limb away for lunch.
“Don’t play humble, man. Ah mean, hell, you part of dat mongoose deal, right?”
There it was again — mongoose. Only with a capital M, as in Operation Mongoose: the unholy marriage between the CIA and the Mafia. Their joint attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro may have failed, but it had been a marriage nonetheless.
“I’m just a little tiny cog in that wheel,” I said.
“Come on, now! You only set up de whole damn deal.”
Yes, I had officiated at the marriage. Marcello had not been part of the original Miami meeting in ’60, but he and Florida boss Santo Trafficante were thick as, well, thieves. So it was no surprise he was in the know.
I had been approached by a CIA spook I had history with who asked me to serve as a go-between mutually agreeable to both sides — I had that reputation of being mobbed up, remember.
Marcello squeezed my shoulder. “Tell me how dat little prick thinks he can get in bed wid us, and then fuck us over. You tell me dat, son.”
It was something I had never understood myself. Bobby and his brother Jack were both well aware of Operation Mongoose. And yet Bobby had still pursued his dream of being the man who took down the Mafia.