I tried to speak but failed. I realized that coming there was a mistake. The leer on Manetti’s face told me that he now saw me as submissive. I had to suppress the urge to shoot him then and there.
“You ready to make some movies?”
“I got you your money,” I said, hefting the little satchel and placing it on the table.
“Seventy-two thousand?” he said as he shifted in his chair.
“Yes.”
“What about the interest?”
“What interest?”
“Two thousand dollars a day late fees. That’s eight thousand more.”
“Can I bring you something to drink?” a waiter asked Manetti. He seemed to appear out of nowhere.
“Go away,” Coco said.
“Can I get you another glass of wine?” the waiter then asked me.
“Didn’t I tell you to go away?” Coco asked.
“I wasn’t speaking to you, sir,” the server said quite pleasantly. “I was speaking to the lady.”
“You better get the fuck away from here.”
The waiter might have been a fool but I appreciated him. He waited to see if I had anything to add and, when I didn’t, he walked off at a leisurely pace.
“One way or another you’re going to work for me,” Coco said.
“No.”
“You need to make a film for a friend of mine,” he said, “to pay your vig. We got it all set up. The shoot starts next Monday.”
“I can’t do that, Mr. Manetti.”
“No? The next time I beat on you there won’t be anyone around to stop me.”
“Hello, Coco,” someone said.
He was standing right next to us but neither of us had any inkling of his approach. It was Jude in a very nice, dark Armani suit. He smiled as the waiter from before pulled a chair up to the table.
Coco was so surprised that he didn’t respond.
“Deb,” Jude said in greeting.
“Hey, Jude.” I liked saying that.
“What are you doing here?” Coco asked, if not with deference at least with respect.
“This is my restaurant. I own the place.”
“We’re doing some business,” Coco said, trying to regain control at the table.
“I didn’t know that you had anything to do with Deb. What’s in the bag?”
“Nuthin’.”
“I only ask,” Jude said, “because I gave a bag just like that to Deb only an hour ago. We’re very good friends, you know. Very close.”
Coco gave me an evil stare.
“I don’t appreciate people fucking with my friends,” Jude added. “I don’t like it when they try to extort them either.”
“I bought her debt.”
“You bought Theon Pinkney’s debt. Deb never borrowed a cent, did she?”
“Listen, man—”
“I asked you a question in my house,” Jude said, cutting the gangster off.
Again Coco was silent.
“You know me, Coco,” Jude said in a soothing tone. “I’m a fair guy. I don’t push people around. I mind my own business. But Theon was my friend and Deb here is too. You have no reason to make her pay for an act of God; neither does Dick Ness.”
“So what you sayin’, Jude?”
“Mr. Lyon.”
“What do you want?”
“Give Deb her money back and tell Dick from me that he should repay you. If he doesn’t like that he knows where to find me. If he needs a friend in some of his work he can call me then too. How’s that?”
“I’ve wasted time on this.”
“Time lived is an eternal blessing,” Jude Lyon quoted from somewhere.
Coco’s nostrils flared. He pushed the leather bag six inches across the table in my direction. Then he stood up, refusing to look at me. I knew by this avoidance that I was safe.
As Coco walked out of the restaurant I said, “Thanks, Jude. Thanks a lot.”
“Theon knew that he could pay off Ness but he died before we saw each other. And Dick and Coco know there’s no insurance in the loan-sharking business. Call me if you need anything else.”
Jude left soon after Coco. I stayed because I didn’t trust my legs to carry me or my hands to steer a three-ton automobile.
I ordered pounded pork chops with brussels sprouts and new potatoes and waited for the food to come. My mother was crying somewhere in a room far away and long ago. She was crying, night after night, because my father was out with his thug friends getting into trouble, breaking the law.
When he’d come home my mother stayed in the bedroom while Aldo poured himself a drink in the dining room.
On one such evening, when I was ten, I climbed out of bed and went to see my father while his wife dried her tears and waited.
“Hey, baby girl,” he said when I walked in. He was drinking scotch and smoking a filterless cigarette.
“Daddy?”
He held out his arms and I ran to sit in his lap.
“Yeah, babe?”
“How come you stay out late with them men an’ make Mama cry?”
It was a dangerous question. Aldo Peel had a bad temper and when he was mad anything could happen. I knew I was risking something terrible, but still I needed to know why my mother had to suffer.
Instead of shouting and throwing me to the floor my father laughed. He kissed my cheek and hugged me tightly.
“Does that make you mad?” he asked.
“It makes me feel bad for Mama. I don’t like it for her to be so sad.”
“You don’t like it and I don’t neither,” he said. “You think I wanna be out in the street with them fools? You think I wouldn’t rather be in the house with my wife and children?”
“Then how come you don’t stay home?”
“Because I will not be a slave, dear heart.” He took a deep drag off his cigarette.
“I don’t understand, Daddy.”
“This country is run by big men,” he said. “There ain’t too many of ’em. Most the men in this land is little like me and all the other men an’ women on this block, in this neighborhood. The big men put all the little people in cages so small that a little man or woman got to ask the big man to open the door just to turn around.”
“Like a jail?” I asked.
Aldo Peel nodded vigorously. “Except the do’ ain’t locked. The little man could walk outta there anytime he wanted.”
“Then why don’t he?”
My father brought his face very close to mine. I remember clearly the sour scent of cigarettes and whiskey.
“Because the only way the little people could eat is to stay in that cage like the do’ really was locked. Even if they just open the do’ to turn around without askin’ they don’t eat that week.
“That’s why I go out at night. That’s why I run with bad men and do things they say is wrong — because I will not live in the big man’s cage. I will not be his punk.”
I wanted to hold my father right then. I wanted to shield him from the big men and their power.
“Aldo,” my mother said from the doorway behind me.
My father kissed me on the lips and hugged me to his chest. There were tears in his eyes when he put me down.
My mother told me to go to bed and then took my father by his waist and walked him to their bedroom.
I didn’t go to bed but instead stayed at the dining room table, sitting in the chair where my father sat. I understood something that I could not have explained, something that I would have forgotten if I had gone to bed like my mother said. I stayed up all night, until the birds were singing and the sun reached around the far corner of the earth, because I needed to hold on to the sad truth my father had transmitted to me.
I sat in the darkness, and then in light, imagining the world as long hallways of small cells holding all of my friends and their parents and all of their friends. Giant men and women with bullwhips patrolled the hallways, snapping at hands and feet that stuck out from the cells. People were crying and moaning like my mother. Electric light filtered down through the bars and I knew that there was no sunlight or moonlight anywhere in that world.