Sometimes she would lock the door. And then he couldn't sneak into the apartment in the morning to get a jacket or brush his teeth or comb his hair. He would go to school with the hairy dust of the hallway floor still on his back. But none of the students would laugh.
One had tried it once. Norman Felton had settled it in an alley with a broken bottle. The boy had been bigger, by a full half foot, but size never bothered Norman. Everyone had weak points and on the big ones, it was bigger. All the more space for a stick, a rock, a broken bottle.
By the time he was fourteen, Norman Felton had done two stretches in the reformatory. He was headed for his third when one of his mother's sleeping partners left a wallet in his pants. Norman, heading for the sink, picked up the wallet and left the room. It wasn't the first time he had lifted a wallet near his mother's bed, but it was the first time it had been so full. Two hundred dollars.
This was too much to split with mom, so Norman Felton walked down the stairs of the tenement house for the last time. He was on his own.
His success was not immediate. He ran through the two hundred dollars in two weeks. No firms would hire a fourteen-year-old boy, not even when he said he was seventeen. He tried to work his way in with a bookie, but even they wouldn't touch kids as runners.
He had spent his last nickel on a hot dog and was nibbling around it, saving it, caressing it, as he strolled down Fifth Avenue, scared for the first time he could remember, when a large man leaving a mansion bumped into him and knocked Norman's last food to the pavement.
Without thinking, he flailed into the grownup. Before he got off his second punch, two giants were upon him, beating him.
When he recovered consciousness, he was in a large kitchen with servants buzzing around. A middle-aged woman, attractive and heavily-jeweled, was wiping his forehead.
"You certainly know who to take on, kid," she said.
Norman blinked.
"That was quite a show out in front of my house." He looked around. There were more pretty women than he had ever seen in his life.
"What do you think, girls?" the middle-aged woman asked. "Does he know who to take on?" The girls laughed.
The woman said "Kid, you're not going to tell anyone about this, right?"
"Got no one to tell," Norman said.
The woman shook her head, smiling with mistrust. "No one?"
"Got no one," Felton repeated.
"Where do you live?"
"Around."
"Around where?"
"Where I can find a place to live."
"I don't believe you, kid," the woman said and wiped his forehead again.
And thus, Norman Felton began his career in the most fashionable house in New York. He made a good errand boy for the Missus and the girls like him. He kept his mouth shut and he was smart.
Later, he found out who had bumped his hot dog, out in the street. It was Alphonso Degenerato, head of the Bronx rackets.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"They all want you, Mr. Morroco," Norman would say. This always insured a five the next time. Morroco would laugh. "You know it too, kid."
Then Norman would lead Morroco up to either Norma or Carol's room. He would return downstairs knowing what the girls would be doing.
The first thing was to get Morroco aroused. That could take twenty or thirty minutes. His potency was all in his mind. Then, with great effort, the girl could end it. Her groaning would be real. Only it wasn't excitement, it was exertion.
Then came the lavish praise, telling Morroco what a wonderful man he was. This, the Missus explained, was what he paid for. And that's how they made fifty dollars a night from Vito Morroco.
He was in the rackets, the girls said. But he wasn't a torpedo. No money in it. All he did was deliver money from one place to another and keep his mouth shut. He was a bag man. And he never lost a penny and he never said a word about his business.
He worked for Alphonso Degenerato who had the Bronx rackets. Sometimes he would carry, so the girls said, one hundred thousand dollars.
Norman would run the errands for the house and keep his eyes open. He watched people. He watched Morroco. He saw the admiral from Washington who paid a girl to dance around him nude and sprinkle powder over him.
He saw the minister who asked to be whipped. He saw the men who needed two women and those who couldn't perform with a dozen. He saw the lonely and the frightened.
And he ran his errands. Pick up a case of hooch here, a woman there; deliver both. Make sure Daisy had her powder. Never call Mr. Johnson by name. Mr. Feldstein appreciated a little bow upon greeting.
The Missus took a liking to him. "Men are run by their balls, their bellies and their fears," she would tell Norman. "First, they're afraid. Then, they're hungry. When both those feelings are gone, they go for what I give them."
Norman listened. But she was wrong. He learned that quickly.
Men are run by their egos; stronger than life, than food, than sex, is pride. A man is without this pride only when it is beaten from him. Left alone, human beings are servants of their pride before their bodies. All else flowed from pride.
He saw it in Johnson, in Feldstein and in Morroco. He saw it in the shiny buttons of the admiral. Men were weak and they were prideful and they lied to themselves. And that was their weakness. It was the Missus' weakness, too. He proved it.
Norman Felton was seventeen and had been at the Missus' for three years when she asked: "Have you had any women?"
"Yeah."
"Which one of the girls?"
"None of them. I get mine outside."
"Why?"
"Your girls are dirty. Like swimming in a sewer."
The Missus laughed. She rolled back her head and shrieked a harsh laugh that sent her weakly leaning against one of the lamps in the kitchen where they were talking.
But when she saw, Norman was not embarrassed or cowed, she stopped laughing and began to yell. "Get the hell out of here. Get out of here, you rat scum. I picked you up out of the gutter, you rat scum. Get out of here."
The cook backed away toward her stove. One of the girls ran into the kitchen and stopped in horror. The Missus, for the first time anyone could remember, was crying.
And chuckling softly before her was Norman, the errand boy.
So he had won, but he had no job, no education and little money. What had he won?
Norman Felton walked out into the rain-chilled afternoon with forty-five dollars in his pocket and a plan. A man had to survive. If he could not, he would die. One life lost. His life was as valuable as the next. More so. It was his.
So Vito Morroco, who had never lost a delivery in his life, a good man with a gun and with the muscle, that night coming out of the Missus' place, met the former errand boy.
He met him in a passageway leading from the side exit to the street. Nobody could see who entered or left.
Norman Felton stood in the passageway. "Gee, Mr. Morroco," he said. "I'm glad I seen you. I'm desperate."
"I heard you been canned, kid," Morroco said. The word "desperate" put him on the balls of his feet. Norman suddenly realized how big Vito was. The hand never left the pocket. The cold brown eyes seemed to cut through Norman's will. The scar-creased lip moved into a sneer.
"What do you want, kid? A fin?"
The air in the chill passageway seemed choking stale. Norman felt the metal strip in his own pocket. It was so damned small. He noticed Vito's eyes move toward his pocket. It was now or never.
"No, Mr. Morroco. I need more."
"Oh," Morroco said. There was a bulge in his pocket, too.
"Yeah. I got a plan how we can both make a fortune."
"We, kid? We? Why you?"
"It's like this. I seen a lot of guys come into the Missus' place. But never none like you, Mr. Morroco. I mean, I know maybe a hundred broads who want it real bad but there ain't a guy, a real guy who can give it to 'em. And I heard the broads in the Missus' say they'd be willing to pay you if you didn't pay them."