Carlos nodded again and said nothing. It was never easy to know just what Swifty Zavrakos’ eyes were doing, with all his tics, but I had the feeling that he kept glancing at me. And I must say I wasn’t reassured—something wasn’t right, there was a misunderstanding somewhere—I felt a vague apprehension, a kind of foreboding.
The Cadillac was streaking across the Roman campagna with its ruined aqueducts and cypress trees. Then it turned into a park, drove for a moment down a tunnel of oleanders and stopped in front of a villa that seemed made out of nothing but glass and a strange, asymmetrical shape, a kind of screwy triangle. I had paid a few visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, but I must confess that when I got inside, it was a shock all the same; it was hard to imagine that one of the greatest leaders in the history of American organized crime lived here.
All the photos of Mike Sarfatti I had seen showed him standing on the Hoboken dock, in a bold landscape of cranes, chains, bulldozers, crates and steel, which were his real element. Now I found myself in a kind of hothouse, among furniture with twisted shapes that looked as if they came out of a nightmare, under a luminous ceiling whose colors kept changing and from which hung iron objects that turned and swayed continuously while lumps of cement, with tubes, pipes and steel strips sticking out, loomed up menacingly in every corner, and on the walls, paintings—at least I suppose they were paintings, they had frames—tossed their blobs of sinister smears and their snaky lines at you until you felt like screaming.
I turned to Carlos. He was standing with his mouth hanging open, his eyes popping, his hat on the back of his head. I think he was scared.
As for Swifty Zavrakos, he must have gotten such a shock that his twitches had stopped; his face was frozen and you could see every feature; I had the feeling I was meeting him for the first time. Even Shimmy Kunitz had come out of his stupor, glancing around in every direction, his hand in his pocket, as if he expected someone to fire at him.
“What’s that?” Carlos rasped.
He was pointing at a kind of steel octopus that seemed to be opening its tentacles to trap us.
“That’s a Buzzoni chair,” a voice said.
Mike Sarfatti was standing on the doorstep. The image of 30 years of social struggle on the New York waterfront exploded before my eyes: 2,000 tons of rotting meat, in the sabotaged deep freezers on the docks, raising their stench higher than the Empire State Building; the bodies of Frankie Shore, Benny Stigman, Rocky Fish and other traitors who had tried to organize the infiltration of the longshoremen’s union by political elements, hanging from meat hooks at the door of the slaughterhouses; Sam Berg’s face burned by sulphuric acid the day after his article appeared denouncing what he called “the crime syndicate’s take-over of the labor movement”; the machine-gun attacks against Walter Reuther and Meany—all came back to me in a few lightning flashes of memory, while I stared at the hero of this victorious epic who was now standing in front of me.
He was wearing worker’s overalls and looked as if he had just come out of the yards. I had thought he was older; he couldn’t have been more than fifty. Powerful hands, a wrestler’s shoulders, and a face of brutal splendor whose features seemed to have been chopped out with an axe. But I was immediately struck by the haunted, tortured expression of his eyes. He seemed not only preoccupied but actually obsessed. You saw on his face a real stupor, a kind of astonishment that touched that fine Roman mask of his with a strangely lost, bewildered expression. You could tell, while he was talking to us, that he had something else on his mind, and something much more important to him. But he seemed glad to see Carlos all the same. As for Carlos, he had tears in his eyes. They stood embraced for a minute, gazing at each other affectionately and patting each other on the shoulders. The butler came in with a tray of drinks, and set it down on a table. Carlos drank down his martini, looking around him with obvious disgust.
“That’s a funny place you’ve got here,” he said.
Mike smiled.
“What ‘s that?” Carlos asked, pointing accusingly at the wall.
“That’s a Wols,” Mike said.
“What’s it supposed to be?”
“He’s an abstract expressionist.”
“A what?”
“An abstract expressionist.”
Carlos sneered. His lips closed around his cigar and he began looking offended, even nasty.
“I’ll give a thousand bucks to the first guy who can tell me what that’s supposed to be,” he said.
Mike seemed annoyed.
“You aren’t used to it.”
Carlos was sitting heavily in his chair, looking around him with hostility. Sarfatti followed his eyes.
“That’s a Miro.”
“A kid of five could do that,” Carlos said. “And what’s that one?”
“A Soulages.”
Carlos chewed on his cigar a minute.
“Yes, well, I’m going to tell you what it is,” he announced finally. “There’s a name for that . . . It’s called decadence.”
He stared at us triumphantly.
“Decadence. They’re all rotten in Europe. Everyone knows that. Completely degenerate. All the Communists have to do is give it a push and the whole Continent will collapse. I tell you, they don’t have any moral fiber left. Rotten, all of them. We shouldn’t leave our troops stationed here; it’s probably catching. And that . . . what’s that piece of garbage?”
He aimed his cigar at a piece of shapeless concrete bristling with huge, twisted needles and rusty nails that occupied the center of the room. Mike didn’t say a word. His nostrils were pinched and he stared hard at Carlos. He had steely grey eyes and it wasn’t pleasant to be on the receiving end of that stare. I noticed that he was clenching his fists. Suddenly I was looking at the Mike Sarfatti of the legend, the king of the Hoboken docks, the man who had outsmarted Guppo, Fazziola, Luciano, Kutzakis, the five Anastasia brothers and even Dirty Spivak, the man who for 15 years had been the only master after God on the New York waterfront.
“The guy who made that’s completely nuts, Carlos declared assertively. “They should put him away.”
“It’s one of my latest works,” Mike said. “I made it.”
There was a deathly silence. Carlos’ eyes were bulging out of his head. Swifty Zavrakos’ face was twitching as if he had received a thousand electric shocks; it looked as if his features were trying to get away from him.
“I made that,” Mike repeated.
He looked really furious now. He stared at Carlos with the attention of a beast of prey. Carlos seemed to hesitate. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, but the instinct of self-preservation was strongest.
“Oh, well,” he said. “If you made it. . . . Well, then I suppose it’s all right.”
He glanced in disgust at the sculpture, then, evidently, decided to forget it.
“We came to talk business, Mike,” he said.
Mike wasn’t listening to him. He was staring proudly at the mass of concrete bristling with nails and needles, and when he began talking it was with a strange gentleness— a kind of awe—in his voice, and again that expression of astonishment, almost of naïveté, passed over his features.
“They reproduced it in Alto,” he said. “On the cover. It’s the best art magazine over here. They say I succeeded in suggesting the fourth dimension—the space-time dimension. Einstein, you know. I hadn’t thought of that, of course; you never know exactly what it is you’re doing; they say there’s always an element of mystery in it. The subconscious, of course. ... It made quite a stir. Since I finance the magazine, there were all kinds of stupid remarks. But those guys are incorruptible. You can’t buy them. They have principles. It’s the most advanced thing I’ve done, but I have other pieces out in the studio. Come, I’ll show you.”