The girl said, “Should I get dressed, too, Rock? Are we going out for dinner?”
He glared at her. “Did I ask you anything?”
“No.”
The flatness of their voices in the room was almost a surprise: yelling across the mountainous landscape between them, you’d expect an echo.
“Did I fucking ask you anything?”
“No.”
“That’s right. Go on and get dressed. Put something on that eye—it’s ugly.”
“Yes, Rock.”
“And call Augustino’s and get us the regular table.”
“Yes, Rock.”
But she hadn’t moved from her perch. She was waiting, respectfully, for us to leave. I guessed.
Rocco ushered me out of the railroad yard, putting a hand on my arm, giving it a gentle, friendly squeeze. He too smelled of Vitalis and Old Spice, though less potently than Joey, who trailed down the hallway behind us.
“You gotta be tough on these dames,” Rocco said. “Gotta know how to handle ’em.”
“You’ve certainly got a touch.”
He knew I was kidding him, and he liked it. “You’re a card, Heller.”
“Yeah, a joker!” Joey chimed in, grinning, pleased with his wit.
Rocco gave me a look that admitted his baby brother’s idiocy, but fondness was in there, too. And before we left, he patted Joey’s cheek and said, “Ask Charley to wait for me, before you talk business.”
So we were going to talk business. Wasn’t that a delightful notion.
We summoned the elevator and its cauliflower-eared guardian, who delivered us to the eighteenth floor. The entryway was identical to the floor below’s, only this time Joey pressed the sunburst doorbell.
“I don’t ever just bust in on Charley,” Joey said. “He don’t like it.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t bother him,” I said. “We can do this some other time….”
But Joey rang the bell again, and before long, Charley—presumably after checking the peephole—revealed himself in the doorway.
Broad-shouldered, kind of stocky, Charles Fischetti was around fifty, an almost-handsome guy with an oval face, bumpy nose, knife-scarred jaw and small mouth that could flash in a surprisingly mischievous smile. Under black slashes of eyebrow that reminded you he was Rocco’s brother, Charley’s hazel eyes beamed an icy, unblinking intelligence. Charley dyed his gray hair platinum and combed it back in traditional George Raft gangster style; he seemed taller than his brothers, but that was the elevator shoes.
“Sorry to drop in on you, Charley,” Joey said.
No dressing robe for Charley Fischetti: his pin-striped single-breasted Botany 500 was so dark a gray, it looked black; his shirt was a light blue and his tie a slip-stitched gray with dots of red, like precision splashes of blood.
“Joey,” Charley said, in a mellow, mildly scolding baritone, “I told you bring Heller around, but I didn’t say just pop by with him.”
Joey had a panicky look, so I jumped in with, “It’s my fault, Mr. Fischetti.” I didn’t know Charley very well, and couldn’t take the same liberties as with Rocco. “I got the date wrong, but Joey said I might as well come on up, anyway.”
Charley smiled at his forty-year-old baby brother, and patted his cheek, much as middle-brother Rocco had. “You’re a good boy, Joey. I shouldn’ta doubted you.”
I said, “If you have another appointment…”
“I do have somebody coming around…” He checked his watch. “…but that’s not for almost an hour.”
Joey explained that Rocco would be joining us.
“Well that’s fine,” he said to his brother. Then, as he gestured for me to step inside, he said, “And let’s make it ‘Charley’ and ‘Nate.’”
“Thank you, Charley.”
“Hey—any friend of Frank Nitti’s is a friend of mine.”
We had stepped into the living room when I replied: “Frank was a fine man. He was almost a father to me.”
That was overstating it, but I wanted to be welcome in these circles, and of course Nitti had been the successor to their beloved cousin Capone.
“Do you like modernist?” Charley asked. “I like modernist.”
Charley liked modernist, all right. The penthouse had the same layout as Rocco’s, with the same light gray walls and charcoal slate floor, but offset by the turquoise of a biomorphic-shaped sofa, the forest green of a sculpted plywood lounge chair’s webbed upholstery, and the salmon pink throw rug (with black geometric squiggles) on which this stuff sat in front of the out-of-place traditional fireplace, over which a huge metal-framed Picasso lithograph squinted with its various eyes.
“Oh yeah,” I said, amazed and appalled by the array of atomic age nonsense: kidney-shaped glass on a claw hand of sculptured walnut serving as a coffee table, green Fiberglas chairs with black wire legs, black metal floor lamp that looked like a praying mantis.
“Most of this,” he said, gesturing expansively, “I buy overseas. The Scandinavians get all the credit, but the best modern design is Italian. Carlo Mollino, Gio Ponti, Gian-franco Frattini….”
“No kidding.”
“Take a look at this,” Charley said, waving me over to several framed paintings on the wall (Joey had taken a three-legged Fiberglas chair, proving it could be sat in). The canvases were abstractions, doodlings in color and geometry.
At his side, I regarded these masterpieces, wondering if Drury’s microphone was snugged behind one of them.
“You know, the great artists, they all had patrons,” Charley said. “In the Renaissance. Guys like Da Vinci, Michelangelo. It was an Italian thing.”
“So I heard.”
“See, I have a lot of fine pieces in my collection. I have three Dalis. That’s a Picasso over the fire. I got a Miro, and a Klee. Worth a goddamn fortune. But these, these mean more to me.”
“I take it these are new painters.”
The tiny mouth curved in a slice of a smile. “You know, Nate, you impress me, your sensitivity. Your insight.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’m tight with Ric Riccardo. He’s my artistic advisor.”
An accomplished artist himself, Riccardo ran a popular, artsy cafe on Rush Street out of a converted warehouse, where he had single-handedly started the local craze of restaurants and merchants exhibiting artists and sculptors.
Charley was saying, “Ric only recommends the best of the new young talent.”
What, as compared to the old young talent?
“You see, Nate, I’m not just a collector—I’m a patron.”
Like the Borgias, I thought.
“Take this one here,” he said, pointing to a canvas that appeared randomly splattered with green, brown, and black. “Ric says this fella is going to be the next Jackson Pollock.”
I didn’t burst Charley’s bubble and point out there already was a Jackson Pollock; I merely nodded and murmured appreciatively if nonverbally.
He slipped his arm around me. He smelled like Vitalis, too, but the cologne was something more expensive than Old Spice—something more expensive than I could recognize.
“Nate,” he said, “I feel comfortable with you. I really do. I am so used to uncouth company.”
“Yeah, I hate that.”
“I hope you feel comfortable with me. A lot of people get the wrong idea about me, you know.”
“I know what you mean.”
“People like us—you’re from the West Side, right?”
“Right.”
“Maxwell Street?”
I nodded.
Stepping away, he shrugged elaborately. “You know about coming up from the streets. Rough beginnings.” He leaned near again and put a hand on my shoulder and whispered: “That’s the trouble with Joey. We pampered him. He come to be a man when we already had our family position, our fortune.”
“That can be hard on a kid.” Even a forty-year-old one.
“What I mean is, coming up, we all make youthful indiscretions. Now, I’m a respectable businessman—and a connoisseur of the finer things.”