(2004) Citizen Vince (15 page)

Dupree sits in the car, unsure what to do.

“Oh, come on! You’re like a fuckin’ woman.” Charles grits his teeth, then leans back in the car and offers a charming smile. “Look, I promise you never tasted food like this. Your guy ain’t goin’ nowhere in the hour it takes us to eat a bowl of fuckin’ noodles. Now come on. Help me out here.”

Nitti’s is well lit, walls covered with framed pictures of Italian movie stars and snapshots of regular people standing between a small Italian couple, maps of Italy, baskets hung with eggplant and artichoke and strung-up Chianti bottles. The food is set out in pans on a long table in the front of the room—a lasagna, a ziti, spaghetti, meatballs, and sausages, followed by pans of green beans and zucchini. Most of the customers are men, sitting at long picnic tables covered with checked tablecloths, drinking water glasses of Chianti.

The old, hunched Italian man from the pictures calls from a stool behind the cash register. “Two, Charlie?”

“That’s right, Guiseppe. This here is Dookie. He’s a rook cop out there in California, come to learn how the finest do it.”

Dupree opens his mouth to correct Charles, who turns and mutters, “I know you ain’t from California, but that old fuckin’ guinea wouldn’t know from Seattle.”

“He a cowboy, then, Charlie? Bang, bang?”

“That’s right, Giuseppe. Fuckin’ bang bang cowboy.”

The old Italian points his finger. “Bang, bang!”

“You’re on expense,” Charles says. “Pay the man.”

Dupree gives him fifteen bucks. Charles grabs a plate and Dupree doesn’t know what else to do, so he follows. They fill their plates with food and join a severe man in the corner, thin-faced and wisp-haired, drawing on a cigarette, his cleaned plate pushed to the side, along with a kitchen wineglass. He looks from Charles to Vince and back, sniffs, and takes a drag. “Where the fuck you been, Charlie? It’s almost eight.”

“I’m on the job tonight, Mike. I told you.”

“You didn’t tell me shit. Why are you still on the clock?”

“I figured I might need the overtime.” He looks at Dupree. “And someone to vouch for my whereabouts.”

“Who’s the kid?”

Dupree opens his mouth to introduce himself, but Mike hasn’t so much as looked at him, so he lets Detective Charles do it.

“This is Officer Dookie. Dookie, this is Mike. My PBA rep. Dookie here is a badge from Seattle. We’re helpin’ each other on some shit today. We’re like partners here—like fuckin’ alibis. Right?”

The word
alibis
chills Dupree, but it fades in a bite of the best meatball he’s ever had—spiced and meaty, like someone fed a steak to a tomato. “My God, this really is good,” he says.

Charles laughs. Mike just stares.

“See, I told you Dookie’s okay. He’s gonna vouch that I was busy helpin’ him out tonight. Ain’t that right, Dookie?” Charles pops in his own mouthful of food.

Dupree feels a tightness in his chest. “What are you talking about?”

Mike flicks his cigarette at Detective Charles’s plate. “I can’t believe you got a appetite after all this. You’re a real fuckin’ pig, Charlie.”

“Fuck you, Mike.”

“No! Fuck you, Charlie! You screwed up this time, man!”

Dupree looks back and forth, a bite of meatball still speared on his fork.

“I know.” Charles talks through a mouth of baked ziti. “So—”

“So?” Mike stubs his cigarette out. “So I’m tired of saving your ass.”

“Come on! Why you gotta treat me like a fuckin’ kid? Stop bustin’ my balls already and tell me what to do.”

Mike sighs. “You’re in deep shit, Charlie.”

“I know what I’m in.”

“It’s time you squared up, man.” Mike lights a new smoke. “This ain’t a free meal you took, Charlie. Or goddamn tennis shoes.”

“I know what it
ain’t,
Mike. Just tell me what I gotta do.”

Dupree looks from one to the other.

“How many times I tell you? You don’t mess with this side of the river, Charlie. That girl’s father is a Newark councilman. I can’t help you over here.”

“Did you find out—what’s she sayin’?” Charles asks.

“She’s sayin’—” Mike looks over at Dupree again. “Are you sure you wanna talk about this in front of…”

“I’ll go outside.” Dupree starts to stand.

Charlie’s hand clamps down on Dupree’s leg. “No. Dookie stays. No secrets between partners.”

Mike shrugs. “She and her girlfriend drove over to Alphabet City to buy a dime bag. You pulled them over, took one of the girls back to your car, forced her to blow you in your car, and then stole their coke.”

Dupree has lost his appetite. Pushes his plate away.

“Well.” Charles sulks and his bald head is furrowed to the crown. Takes a bite of noodles and points with his fork. “That ain’t what happened, Mike.”

“Yeah? What happened?” Mike picks a flake of tobacco off his tongue and looks at Dupree’s plate, then up at Alan for the first time. His eyes shift back to Charles.

“She practically took off my belt, Mike. I didn’t force nobody to do nothing. I was doing her a fuckin’ favor.”

“Aw, Jesus.”

“Come on, Mike. How am I supposed to know she’s a councilman’s kid? You’re fuckin’ killin’ me here.” Detective Charles drains his wine and reaches for Dupree’s glass. “There ain’t some way we can make this better?”

“Make it better? IA’s already got wind of it. How we supposed to make it better, Charlie?” Mike smokes hard.

“Look—” Charles reaches for Mike’s arm.

Mike pulls his arm back and points his finger at Charlie’s nose. “I know you’ve had a tough time of it, Charlie. But this shit has got to stop.”

“It will. It will. I swear.” Charlie seems to smell hope for the first time.

Mike watches the trail of smoke from his own cigarette. “I reached out to the councilman and, as you might guess, he ain’t exactly thrilled that his daughter’s buyin’ coke ten days before election.”

Charles points with his fork. “I knew you could help me, Mike.”

“Shut the fuck up, Charlie! You’re lucky this guy’s a sleazeball councilman. If it was my kid, you’d be pissing through a fucking tube!” He takes a breath. “The guy is having trouble with a labor union that’s supporting his opponent. He doesn’t want to go in-house for this…so if you helped him out…I don’t know.” Mike slides a sheet of folded paper across the table.

Charlie grabs the paper and opens it. Dupree sees Mike has written a union-local number and the name Daryl Greene on the page. “What’s he want from the guy?” Charlie asks. “Drumstick? Wing?”

“No, no, nothing like that. Just deliver the message.”

Charlie beams as if he’s won the lottery. “That’s it?”

“A
strong
message,” Mike says. “After that, I think the councilman will take care of his daughter,” Mike says. “But that’s only half your only problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Internal affairs has the name of the coke dealer. They think you have a deal with him to pick off buyers from out of town after he sells to them.”

“Goddamn it, Mario!” Charles spits. Then he wipes his face
and tries to restore his smile. “I’ll take care of that. I’ll make that better.”

Mike leans forward. “You gotta get this shit under control, Charlie.”

“I will, Mike. I will. I promise. After this, I’ll take some time…get all squared away. Just help me out here.” He puts his hands out on the table.

“Yeah. Okay.” Mike reaches across and takes Charles’s hand, squeezes it.

Dupree has been watching all this with horrified fascination. He clears his throat. “Look, fellas. I want no part of this. Your business is your business. But this has nothing to do with me—”

Both cops turn slowly to Dupree, as if they’ve forgotten he’s there. Mike smiles and pats him on the arm: “How about some more wine, Dookie?”

TWO CARDS DOWN.
Three on the flop. Roll one on the turn and then the river—because it can sell you down. There is order and sense to a game of Texas Hold ’Em. Like breathing. Even after three days without sleep. And suddenly it doesn’t matter if you’re in New York or Washington, if you’re Vince or Marty or Jimmy Carter…it’s just the cards, same cards for everyone, fifty-two in four suits, gently rounded corners, crosshatch designs, the same cards everywhere, and you take to the game as if it could save your life, which of course it can.

Vince starts strong, with a suited king-jack. Decides to buy a pot right off, announce his presence. Bets heavy. Two guys drop. Two more on the flop. Three more on the turn. Vince misses his flush but pulls another king on the river and takes three hundie off a bald guy with thick glasses. The conversation goes on around him: everyone is getting balls busted or is up to his eyes to a shy or has a dickhead for a PO. The patter is familiar and yet Vince
can’t seem to register the exact details, who says what, whose balls, which shylock, what parole officer. And suddenly it doesn’t strike him as that different from the donut-shop talk, or the
normal
ladies on the street: the PTA and the charcoal grill, braces and checking accounts.
Banana apple strawberry.

Vince folds a hand, rides a low call through the flop, and then folds again. One of the players tries to engage Vince, but he gives minimalist answers. Used to live in the City. Moved to the West Coast. Runs a donut shop in Washington State. Ran into an old friend who said he knew a good game.

He had to buy his way and Pete’s into this game, two thousand each, but Pete seems to have taken off without playing and Vince has the feeling he got stuck at the kid’s table, with a bunch of nobodies—bottom of the food chain. So now he’s stuck at the first table, fine—nine guys drinking, working cigars, and playing Hold ’Em. If he knows this kind of game—one-time buy-in, 10 percent vig to the house—he guesses there are a couple of other nine-man tables in other rooms in the building, that they’ll play until people drop and the tables will come together for a ten- or fifteen-grand buy-in, and if he can just make it through this game, and maybe the next, he’ll make his way deeper into the building, to the tables with the deep pockets, and eventually to Johnny Boy’s table, where he’ll try to buy his freedom.

“You in the army?”

Vince looks up at an old guy with sunken cheeks. “I’m sorry?”

“Your hair. You don’t see it short like that anymore.”

Vince keeps forgetting about his crew cut. “No. I’m not in the army.”

“I was at Normandy myself, Omaha Beach,” the old guy confides. “Lost half my platoon in an hour.” No one looks up; they’ve heard this. “Bullets weren’t half as bad as the seasickness. It was almost a relief when we landed.” The other players ignore the man. “I’ll never forget. I watched one guy sink right to the bottom
with his pack. Didn’t get off a shot. Just jumped out of the boat and sank. Drowned under all that weight.”

Vince looks down at his cards. He gets a pair of nines and calls a bluff so transparent it wouldn’t win a twenty-dollar pot at the Pit, let alone these stakes. Vince draws a third nine. And for a moment, the idea of squaring with Johnny Boy is less important than the way the cards are falling. The next hand he pulls jack-five off suit, and while he’d normally sit this one out, he doesn’t have enough time to play smart and he decides this is as good a time as any to buy a pot. It’s a scientific fact: the higher the stakes (and these are about as high as Vince has ever played) the easier it is to bluff, to buy one. It works. The other players fold—lucky because he gets no help. Four folds later, he goes after another pot. Now the other players take notice. They eye him; watch his hands and his face. Two players stay in. The flop: ace, queen, four. Dealer turns a nine and, on the river, a four. Guy across turns his cards: ace-nine. Someone whistles. Vince rolls his cards. Pair of queens. He rakes in another nickel. Two players leave the table, broke after less than an hour. One of them is the old guy from Omaha Beach. He looks at Vince, who can’t think of a thing to say. In his mind he sees the old man as a soldier, loaded down, sinking in the black water. “Good playing with you,” Vince says. His chips are heaped, not stacked, his original two grand now six. The real players are settling in.

“So when you say you make donuts, do you mean—”

Vince looks over at a guy on his left. “I’m sorry?”

“Donuts.” The guy has a rubbery face—deep-set eyes and thick lips, heavy outer-borough accent. “You talkin’ maple bars and stuff? Bismarcks?”

“Yeah. Maple bars. Bismarcks. Éclairs. Cake donuts. Everything.”

Rubber Face laughs. “See, I thought maybe it was one of them euphemisms. You know…make donuts.”

The rest of the guys at the table join him in laughter, but one of the players says, seriously, “You make them jellies?”

“Yeah. We make jellies.”

The guy smiles. “That sounds good right now. Don’t it, Ken? Don’t that sound good? A fuckin’ jelly donut?”

Across the table, a black-haired boy with ferret eyes shrugs and points to his silk shirt. “I ain’t eatin’ a fuckin’ jelly donut in this shirt. Damn you, Tommy. Grow up. That ain’t no donut for an adult.”

Vince considers the remaining guys at this table—drivers and second-story guys, talkers, five-to-teners, no talent that he can see; doubtful anyone here is made—and in a moment of the old bluster, he can’t imagine any reason why he shouldn’t take every cent off these assholes. He bends the corners of his two cards. Pair of tens. Look at that. He expected a lot of things tonight: that he’d be turned away from the poker game; that he’d get in the game but wouldn’t find Johnny Boy; that he’d find him, but Johnny Boy would immediately have him hauled away and shot. The last thing that he expected was luck.

With a lead, Vince is ruthless. He bullies and ignores bluffs and his chips rise, tilt, and finally fall against one another like Roman columns. He alternates buying pots and nursing the other players along during his better hands. It is one those rare evenings when the cards themselves barely matter; it could all be in his head. He could play without cards and win half these hands. The other players do exactly what he wants them to do.

When there are three left he goes in: spies his cards (queen-nine) when they come and then lets them sit. Bets light. Lets them raise. Then doubles their raises. They glower, look at their cards, look at Vince, look at their cards, look at Vince’s cards (face down, he will not look at them again, and they will wonder, Did he ever look?), look at their cards, look at Vince, and finally call. The flop comes; queen, jack, nine.