by Robert Ferguson
americano
I
couldn’t believe it. I could not believe it! Billy had been banging her
in that top floor apartment of the flop-house at 47th and
9th since he’d hauled her out as a hostage from the jeweller’s he’d
done single handed all those years ago to make his bones. An’ now they wanted to
get marr-ied? Or at least she did, I presumed. Billy
marr-ied? Well, no more than the little runt
deserved.
Well,
I had to believe it. The word was good. Always had been, that
word, from that one, inside the gang an’ turned by a couple of really
big cops with ex-regulation billy-sticks who’d made it either that
or his old woman got it. Whenever. Oh, that word had to be
good!
So
Billy an’ Hannah were coming down out of their fortress, out from behind the
gang’s lines, the floors of mattresses and foot-soldiers and guns that had made
winkling them out impossible for so many years. To get married in the
ballroom at the Ogalala Hotel on 24th. I knew it well. Danced there
regular’, when I was young enough to dance. I knew its layout, its music and its
service intimately. It would be so simple. All I had to do was get the Captain
onside.
I
put it to the Captain in his favourite bar. He was horrified. “What are you
trying to do to me?” he screamed in a whisper. “You know the Chief won’t let you
get near Billy and Hannah. He’ll hate it!”
“But the Mayor will love it,” I
replied, “and I know where he drinks, too. And with Billy gone, and the Chief
gone…well, promotions all round, maybe?”
“Fix the Mayor and you’ve got it,” the
Captain said, after a lot more whispered hisses, and a couple more scotches.
“He’ll love it,” I repeated. “He’ll be counting the thank-you votes.”
And he did
- both.
So,
time to go to work. I needed to find sufficient cops who could play liquorice
sticks an’ horns with their left hands, while handling their pieces with their
right; an’ get a dozen shotguns fixed up as working trombones, and a dozen more
horns with 38’s stuck down their bells. An’ get hold of a couple of dozen more
who could wait table without pouring soup down the clients’ backs, or dropping
burgers into their laps.
As
usual, there were no volunteers. “Ooh, Loot,” they cried, “we’re cops not nancy
waiters.” “Ooh, Loot, I ain’t played in a band since high school.”
“You went to
high school?” I said. “You can’t read the Captain’s standing orders, let alone
the dots on a stave. But you’ve got two hands, and decent balance. You can wait
table, can’t you? You’ve been in a restaurant now and then since high school, I
suppose? Take your wife out Saturday and watch how its done. No,
definitely not on the Department’s expenses! Ok, who’s
next.”
Then
there was the weapons sergeant. “Ain’t no way you can put guns in musical
instruments so the instruments still play. I never heard of any such thing,
Loot. Is the Captain behind this idea? Whose budget’s carrying it?”
“Look,
Sarg.,” I explained patiently, “A horn’s a tube. A trombone’s just a longer
tube. They both have an opening at the but end. And a gun is also a tube, but
thinner and shorter. So what we need is some engineering, some imagination, an’
that’s why I came to you, Sarg.” I really larded it to him. “If anybody can do
it you can. We just need a couple more holes for the triggers and magazines,
shielded so the air doesn’t escape from the musical tubes. But keep them small,
‘cos nobody’s got to see ‘em under my guys hands.”
The
breakthrough came, of course, with the first guy who took it on. One of the
younger men in the Traffic team finally stepped up, bored out of his skull after
four months of trolling round the filthy alleys of the Bronx in his squad car,
and never getting out of it except to buy a hot dog and endless cups of
disgusting coffee that the dispatcher never let him finish before they were
cold. He actually did play in a swing band. Now! And once he
signed up, and offered to rehearse any other volunteers, and I talked the
Captain into paying three hours’ overtime for the operation itself, we finally
began to put together a team. Waiters appeared, guys whose families ran pizza
houses and spaghetti cafes in Little Italy, who had waited table from the age of
eight in parts of the City that Billy had terrorised for years, and who had
scores of scores to settle.
Sarg,
down in the Secure Weapons Store in the basement, found an engineer friend of a
friend of a friend who used to sell guns to the Mob, until going straight under
the influence of his wife’s nagging and a 12-stretch up the river. Sarg. didn’t
tell him the target. Just what the instruments and weapons had to
do.
We
had a team, and I could fix the hotel manager. He knew I knew enough about him
and his family’s past to send him away for years. Also, several very nasty
characters would love to hear who had told the Department about various meetings
and dinners in the Ogalala that they had worked hard to keep secret, especially
from the police. Oh, yes, I could fix the hotel manager! But I wasn’t going to
put the arm on him ‘till Billy an’ Hannah were on their way to the
ceremony.
It
went well. Minutes before Billy an’ Hannah arrived at the front of the Ogalala
in their great big armoured Buick, I had a quiet, short word with the hotel
manager. He quickly agreed not to get involved. I’d guessed he would.
The band an’ the waiters were ushered silently out of the back of the
hotel into vans, an’ replaced by cops; an’ nobody in the hotel noticed a thing.
In fact, the only folks who did notice anything were the layabouts and
bums and wino’s who did notice – well, those who could – that there were no cops
on the streets. But they weren’t going to complain, just enjoy the quietest
night in years. It was a big operation, really big, but worth it to get Bad
Billy an’ his dame.
Into
the hotel ballroom came the happy couple, and their bodyguards took places at
tables around them. We noted who was where. They’d all be carrying tonight. The
band started playing, an’ the dancing began. The boys were good! They
swung! I was proud of them, an’ enjoyed the sound.
Foot-tappin’.
When
the time came, the “band” stopped playing an’ withdrew to the edge of the dance
floor, an’ so did the “waiters”, forming a circle around Billy an’ Hannah. Two
more of Billy’s heavies brought in the Padre, almost carrying him, one under
each of his arms, and the poor, terrified Father, sweating hard, an’ hoping’ the
Monsignor never heard about it, said the words in a muttered rush. Billy kissed
Hannah long an’ hard, my boys brought in the cake an’ put it centre front on the
little circular table in front of Hannah, and gave her the fancy, blunt knife.
An’ my boys drew their guns.
Billy
an’ Hannah froze, an’ I walked forward from the kitchen. No gun. Why’d I need a
piece? There were plenty in there already, and more of ours than theirs. But I
was wrong. Oooh, I was wrong, cos’ the paying customers rose as I walked forward
and placed the muzzles of their guns in the right ears of my boys, whose pieces
clattered to the sprung, timber dance floor.
An’
even then, I wasn’t worried. I’d learned this trade mounting ambushes in ‘Nam.
And my second line neutralised Billy’s back-up boys, guns cold in the backs of
their necks. More clattering on the floor, an’ the bandsmen and waiters
recovered both sets of weapons. “Time’s up, Billy,” I said. “Sure is,
Lootenant,“ Billy said, with that sneaky grin on his chops I’d hated and dreamed
of for years.
* *
*
And
that’s where the Lootenant’s story stopped, when I found it in the locked drawer
in his desk. He’d never finished it, and for a very good reason. If somebody had
to write the last lines, however, they would be these:
“Time’s
up, Billy,” I said.
“Sure is, Lootenant,“ Billy said, and Chief of Police
Seringato, Seringato the Sicilian, Seringato the Take, walked up behind me and
shot me plumb in the back of the head.
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