“So,” Rose said after the waiter withdrew, “I told him that far as I’m concerned, his organization can have a hundred percent of what their machines take in.”
“Really?” I said. I knew a punch line was coming. “Bet he didn’t expect to hear that.”
“The only thing is, I says to him, his organization aint got no machines in Galveston County. The only slots in Galveston County are my slots. I said if his company was a little short of machines, I’d be happy to sell him some at bottom dollar, help them out, one businessman to another. Just be sure and don’t put them in Galveston County, I told him.”
“Well hell,” I said, “that’s a very generous offer. I hope he appreciated it.”
“Every mick I ever met got a potato for a brain. They don’t understand nothing, don’t appreciate nothing. Here I’m giving them a chance to buy back the slots at a bargain and all the guy says is they’re willing to negotiate the percent. I said to him he still didn’t get it, there’s nothing to negotiate. And he says, well then, I can just give the machines back. Said he could send his boys around to pick them up.”
“Give them back? He said that?”
“My hand to God. So I tell him again: any machine in Galveston is my machine, so there’s nothing for me to pay a percent on and nothing to give back to nobody. And, I tell him…anybody who tries to take any machine out of Galveston would be trying to steal from me. Know what that fucker said then?”
I arched my brow. I always got a kick out of his outrage at the rest of the world’s inability to understand things as clearly as he did.
“Said if I wanted my own machines in those joints I shoulda had them in there already. Then Ragsdale wouldn’ta had no place in Galveston County to put theirs. Like I’m to blame for them cutting in on me.”
“Brass balls, I’ll give him that.”
“Brass fucken brains. I told him it was none of his business how I run mine. He tells me I oughta think it over. I tell him I just did—and hung up. Fucken guy.”
“So? Now what?”
“Who knows? They might be stupid enough to think they got to get even somehow, and stupid people are the hardest to predict. They don’t think logical and they don’t plan careful.”
He shook out another cigarette and lit it. “So you stick around,” he said. “You don’t have to be at the Club, just stay in town and check in with the office every now and then. Let Bianco know where you are in case I gotta get you in a hurry.” Mrs. Bianco was his office secretary.
“You talk like I’m the only one on the payroll. There’s two dozen Ghosts in town every day, a half dozen always right there at the Club.”
“I only got one the best.”
“Oh, Christ, spare me the charming con, Don Rosario.”
“I’m just telling the truth, Kid, like always.” And we both laughed.
Then Caruso started singing about the clown who laughs to hide his sorrow, and Rose leaned out of the booth and gestured for somebody at the register to turn up the volume. I lit a cigarette and looked out at the distant trawler lights. Rose sat back and stared out at the gulf too, and softly sang along with the great tenor.
Before Prohibition came along and changed their lives the Maceo brothers had been barbers for years, and Sam told me they often harmonized with opera recordings on the Victrola while they cut hair. Sam’s favorite was The Barber of Seville, which I’d never heard until he played some of it for me one night. He said he’d work his scissors in quick, jumpy time to the music and laugh at the way the customer in the chair would cringe in fear of getting an ear snipped off.
They started out in the barbershop of the Galvez Hotel and then opened a little shop of their own downtown. They’d learned the haircut trade from their father, who brought them from Palermo to New Orleans when Rose and Sam were still children. Sam once told me that on the ship coming over from Sicily he’d gotten beat up and had his pocket watch stolen by an older boy, a big dark bully from Naples. The watch had been a present from his grandfather and he didn’t want to tell his daddy what happened. But he told Rose. They hunted all through the steerage sections but didn’t find the guy until Sam finally spotted him on the topside deck and pointed him out. The boy was about fifteen, Sam said, a couple of years older than Rose and much bigger, but Rose lit into him like a bulldog and got him down and beat the hell out of him while a crowd of kids cheered him on. He banged the bully’s head on the deck till he was almost unconscious, then dug through his pockets and found the watch, then started dragging him to the rail to shove him overboard, but a deckhand intervened.
Another thing the brothers learned from their daddy in the early Louisiana days was how to make wine. When they moved to Galveston they made it in tubs in a shed behind their rented house. At first they made it just for themselves and a few close friends, then they started selling jugs of it to some of their regular barbershop customers. When Prohibition became the law, they produced the stuff in greater quantity and sold it under the counter to anybody who wanted it. Pretty soon they became partners with one of the two main gangs fighting for control of the island’s bootleg business. Over the next few years there were gunfights in the streets and killings in broad daylight, but the Maceos were able to stay legally clear of the worst of it. Once the top dogs of the two gangs were all in prison or the graveyard, Sam and Rose brought the factions together and took over the whole operation. By then they were also in the gambling business, which swiftly became their most lucrative enterprise.
Most of the Maceo stories you heard were about Rose, of course, and no telling how many were true. That’s always how it is—the guy nobody really knows is the guy who gets the most tales told about him. Like the story about his first wife, who’d been murdered way back when the Maceos were just starting in the bootleg business. I heard it from LQ, who’d heard it from somebody else, who’d heard it from who-knows-who. The way the story went, one evening Rose invited three friends home for dinner on the spur of the moment—although he’d never invited anybody to his house before—and when the four of them got there, they found his wife in bed with another man, both of them naked and both of them dead.
“You could say they died of natural causes,” LQ said, “since it’s pretty natural to die when somebody shoots you in the brainpan.”
According to the witnesses, Rose wept like a baby, but there was a lot of secret curiosity about the true cause of his tears—whether he was crying because his wife was dead or because she’d put the horns on him. The police investigated but the killings were never solved.
“Way I heard it,” LQ said with a sly look, “the cops had no idea who mighta done it. About the only thing they knew for sure was that it wasn’t suicide. The old boy who told me the story did say real quiet-like that it was sorta like suicide, since a woman who’d cheat on Rose Maceo might as well wear a big ‘Kill Me’ sign on her back.”
Caruso finished wailing about the tragic clown. Rose dabbed at his eyes with his napkin, then blew his nose.
“Fucken guinea,” he said. “Voice like an angel.”
The waiter came and topped off our coffee. A moment later the window abruptly brightened with an explosion of light and sparkling skyrocket trails arcing over the gulf. There was a muted staccato popping of firecrackers, an outburst of car horns. Somebody in the kitchen began banging pots and shouted “Happy New Year!”
Rose raised his coffee cup and I clinked mine against it.