Killing Them Softly Read online

  “Russell’d get to anybody,” Frankie said. “It’s the way he is.”

  “Yeah,” Amato said, “but the way I used to be, I wouldn’t’ve cared if he could piss off everybody inna world, you know? He couldn’t piss me off. If he was right for the job, he’d be right for the job. Screw, I’m not gonna marry the guy. All I want, all I would’ve been thinking about is, is he right for this job, and if I thought he was right, that’d be it.”

  “Well,” Frankie said, “you change your mind or something?”

  “I dunno,” Amato said. “I been asking around about him. You know, not too many guys and all, I don’t want it to seem like maybe I had something in mind. That I don’t need. But, well, I’m afraid, I’m afraid he’s not the kind of guy we oughta have in on this. You go around this thing inna wrong way, you could get somebody hurt, and I don’t want that. There’s no reason for that, you know? You hit somebody, you’re not gonna get any more money or anything. It’s just, it don’t make no sense. You got to have guys that can, that’re not going to go haywire or something, is all.

  “These people,” Amato said, “these’re not the kind of people, that’re around a bank or something, they expect maybe some day a guy or somebody’s gonna come in there and try to rob them and, it’s not their money, people tell them, how they oughta act. They’re not that kinda people at all.”

  “Heroes,” Frankie said.

  “Heroes,” Amato said. “They’re a different kind of guys, and they’re liable, some of them, you never know when one of them’s gonna do it, go right off his ass and start making trouble and then you got to fuckin’ shoot somebody, for Christ sake. Some of them, they think they’re pretty hot shits. Somebody comes in there that’s not absolutely cool, well, that they can see right off doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s not taking no shit off anybody that wants to fuck around with him, well, then it’s gonna be different. Bad, different.”

  “You’re not gonna promote that North End thing to me again, are you, John?” Frankie said.

  “The barbut?” Amato said. “Nah, this’s different. Although I got to say, I still think you could do that thing if you thought about it long enough and you went in there with the right type of guys, knowing what you’re doing. A few guys, some day somebody’s gonna knock that thing off, and then he’s gonna have a whole lot of money. A whole bunch of money.”

  “I wanna meet that guy, afterward,” Frankie said. “I think probably, I’m ever gonna meet him, I better meet him quick, is what I think. Fuckin’ thing. You ever look that thing over? There’s a guy on the corner in the phone booth. Funny how come the phone company put that thing right there, huh? And then there’s always a guy that’s sitting up in the window and looking out at the guy in the phone booth. Coldest night in the year, go down there, that guy’s in the phone booth. He’s not doing nothing. I think maybe that’s how he makes his living. I wouldn’t want it, maybe, but it’s fuckin’ steady’s what I think. You wouldn’t even think anybody’d go out, and there he is, and then there’s that alley and I bet there’s not more’n fifteen heavies in that room with the pieces all set to go.”

  “There’s still a lot of money in there,” Amato said.

  “ ‘So much money they lose it, they lose the dice in it some times,’ ” Frankie said. “ ‘You go in and you get it, they’re never gonna be able, report it, no government types chasing you around, you just go down past Billy’s Fish and up the stairs and you’re set for life.’ Yeah, and Dillon gets better so fast you wouldn’t believe it, I bet, and fifty guys helping him, too. I been hearing about that place since, I think I was about fourteen when I first hear about that place,” Frankie said. “The thing of it is, all that time, nobody ever did it. I wonder how come.”

  “My daughter’s fourteen,” Amato said.

  “Jesus,” Frankie said. “It don’t seem that long.”

  “Yup,” Amato said. “She’s fourteen years old. And the other day, she left her stuff out on the dresser? I see this light blue cardboard thing. I go in and I look. She’s onna Pill.”

  “No shit,” Frankie said.

  “I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it,” Amato said. “I said to Connie: Tor Christ sake, willya tell me, what’s going on here?’ So she tells me. ‘So what? They’re all on it.’ I said to her: ‘Whaddaya mean, they’re all on it? Who’re they? What the hell’s she doing on it? Tell me that, all right? I don’t care about the rest of them.’ Oh, so that makes me the automatic bastard. ‘You want, you’d probably rather she gets pregnant or something.’ I couldn’t, I just couldn’t believe it, was all. ‘Connie,’ I said, ‘she’s fourteen years old, for Christ sake. Fourteen. That’s kind of early, I think.’ ”

  “I think so too,” Frankie said.

  “Yeah,” Amato said. “So, you know what she says to me? She says: ‘How old’s Rosalie when you’re going with her?’ ”

  “How old was Rosalie?” Frankie said.

  “Eighteen,” Amato said, “which is a hell of a lot different. Only, of course, I couldn’t say that. I always, whenever she asked me, I denied that. And Rosalie wasn’t on no Pill then, either. Every month … Ah, she was a lousy lay anyway.”

  “She didn’t look it,” Frankie said.

  “She was, though,” Amato said. “Shit, getting into Fort Knox would’ve been easier. More fun, too. I hadda tell her every time, it’s true love, all that shit. I hadda be an asshole, do that. And she, she didn’t do nothing. It was like fuckin’ a stump. I used, she also didn’t do nothing about doing anything. I used to say to her: ‘Rosalie, for Christ sake, will you get something? You don’t want to get pregnant, do you?’ And then she’d start crying. It’s a mortal sin. I don’t know. I didn’t. I used to think, I was an asshole, I used to think I really had something there. Now, now I dunno why I did it. It wasn’t worth anything near like what I hadda put up with to get it.”

  “She was one good-looking broad, though,” Frankie said.

  “See the game the other night?” Amato said. “I did. I was home. Connie finally went to bed. Muscles in her jaw got tired. That’s what I like about TV, boy. You can turn off the sound. They had this shot of Snead coming up behind this big Swede center’s ass. You see that?”

  “I was out,” Frankie said.

  “Well,” Amato said, “I seen Rosalie the other night, I seen her down the Artery. Connie had me stop, get some fuckin’ bread. That’s another thing, I don’t know why it is. I don’t ask her, do some of my business. Why the fuck’ve I gotta stop on the way home and do her business? Anyway, I see Rosalie. She’s bigger’n that Swede now, I swear to God.”

  “She was a real good-looking girl,” Frankie said.

  “Ah,” Amato said, “she got married. That’s what she wanted. That’s the thing she used to worry about, I was humping her. I was worried, why the fuck’s she such a lousy lay. She was worried, how the fuck’s she marry me, I’m married to Connie? I didn’t wanna get married again. I got married once. Once’s enough for any guy, isn’t crazy. But that’s what she wanted. She’s pregnant now. About her fourth, I guess. That broad? I bet, she’s got legs on her now, I bet she couldn’t get my pants on, is how big she is. Everything goes to hell if you wait long enough. Connie says to me: ‘You don’t like certain things? Okay. You talk to her, Mister Big Deal Father, that’s spending six or seven years in prison while she’s growing up. You talk to her. You tell her what a bad girl she is.’ Of course Connie couldn’t’ve told me, I was in there, what the fuck’s going on. How’m I supposed to know it? Shit. There’s nothing you can do anyway. It don’t matter. It just pisses me off, is all. It pisses me off.”

  “Look,” Frankie said, “I don’t mean nothing, all right? I don’t care how pissed off you are. You at least got something.”

  “Still come up dry, huh?” Amato said.

  “You know what I did?” Frankie said. “I went down the Probation. Like I actually believe all that shit they’re always handing out, there, all that stuff. ‘Here’s someth
ing for you. Place in Holbrook needs assemblers. One thirty a week. Four to midnight. Steady work and it’ll keep you out of trouble.’

  “Beautiful,” Frankie said. “I’m living in Somerville. How the hell’m I supposed to get to Holbrook in the middle of the afternoon? Never mind, for Christ sake, how the fuck I’m supposed to get home inna middle of the night. ‘Buy a car. You need a car for your job, we’ll help you get your license back.’

  “With what?” Frankie said. “I haven’t got no money. What am I gonna buy a car with? Why the fuck they think I need a job, I’m living with my sister and everything. So I can keep warm? I haven’t got no money, a car. ‘Maybe you can get a ride,’ they tell me. Right. Hang around the Square every day, I find somebody that just happens to be going down to Holbrook. Just at the right time, too. Assholes.

  “ ‘Move down there,’ they tell me,” Frankie said. “Same thing. I still haven’t got no money. I had money, I could move down there, I’d move some place else, I wouldn’t be bothering them in the first place. Well, they’re sorry. That’s all they got right now, that they’re pretty sure the guy that does the hiring’ll take a guy like me. I should probably go down the welfare and get enough dough, I can move out there. The guy’s just sick of talking to me. He wants his fuckin’ coffee or something. Okay, that’s the end of that. Then I see Russell. He’s going right along. He’ll probably buy a hotel or something in a couple weeks or so.”

  “Not on dogs,” Amato said.

  “He’s just doing that,” Frankie said. “He’s gonna use that to buy something, soon’s he gets enough. That’s what I’d like to do, I got something in mind like that myself. But first I got to get the money to buy the stuff.”

  “What is it?” Amato said.

  “There’s this guy I know,” Frankie said. “I see him, he naturally wants to know, how’re things going? So we have a couple pops, he’s buying, and we talk, and then he says, well, he’s gotta go over this place and I can come along if I want, maybe I’ll see something.

  “So we go down this place,” Frankie said, “and it’s money. All twenties. Beautiful stuff. I had, I could’ve bought some of that stuff. I hadda thousand on me, I could’ve bought twenny thousand dollars of that stuff. And I tell you, it’s beautiful. You could move it under a floodlight.”

  “Better call the guy up,” Amato said. “Tell him bye-bye. He’s gonna get grabbed. He better pass the first one inna drugstore and get himself a new toothbrush. He’s gonna need one.”

  “John,” Frankie said, “wrong. This stuff is really good. The paper’s good, the ink’s good, the colors’re right. I tell you. I really looked at that stuff. The guy that made it oughta go take some of it to the government. It’s better’n the real stuff.”

  “The guy’s Chubby Ryan,” Amato said.

  “I dunno him,” Frankie said.

  “He’s not around,” Amato said. “He’s in Atlanta. He’s doing ten fuckin’ years for that beautiful stuff. That funny? You know something? I agree with you. It’s beautiful stuff. It’s fuckin’ near perfect. But Chubby, Chubby knows a lot about printing and all of that, but, see, Chubby hasn’t got no fuckin’ brains. Just like your friend, there, Doglover. He’s all right. He just don’t know anything. Guys like him, the guys you’re always hanging around with, well, they’re the only guys’re stupider’n Chubby. Because all that stuff’s good for now, except for wiping your ass on it, it’s to sell to guys like you, don’t know any better, what’s gonna start happening to them when they go out and start moving the stuff. That’s why the price’s so low.

  “You know what’s the matter with that stuff?” Amato said. “I’ll tell you. Chubby took it out to fuckin’ Wonderland, is what Chubby did. He hasn’t got no brains. He thinks, it’s good, he’s gonna move it all by himself. He’s gonna go out the dog track and move the whole run, he’s so proud of that funny. So he did. He moved about ten thousand of it, all by himself, one single fuckin’ night. Five hundred of them goddamned beautiful things, and every single one of them’s got the same goddamned number on it.

  “Now of course,” Amato said, “them guys, run dog tracks, they’re all stupid, aren’t they? Betcher ass. Dumb as shit. Never occurred to them, race track’s a good place to pass funny. No, not on your life. So they never train them tellers, look out for anything like bogus. So of course, them tellers never spot anything, the night Chubby’s there, throwing twenties around like he’s apeshit and everything, absolutely not. So they only had about nine hundred security guys and some cops and the Secret Service all over the place when Chubby comes back, the eighth race. And you know what he says? They give him his rights and everything, he don’t have to say a fuckin’ word, and if he didn’t know that already, which he should’ve, he knows now. And they tell him, he’s in the shit for counterfeit. And he looks at them and he says: ‘Jesus Christ. I put them in coffee. They don’t look new.’

  “You know what he did?” Amato said. “They give him his phone call and he calls Mike. And Mike says, Mike tells him, keep his mouth shut. And Mike goes down there, and, Mike knows everybody. So he goes in, and they’re all laughing at him, and he knows it, and he asks: ‘Why?’ And they show him the reports and stuff. And then Mike’s gonna go see his client. And he walks inna cell and he looks at him and Chubby says: ‘Boy, am I ever glad, see you.’ And you know what Mike says? He looks at him, and he says: ‘Chubby, this one’s for free. Plead it.’ And he goes out.

  “See,” Amato said, “that’s your main problem you got today. You got guys that know how to do things but they don’t know nothing about having no fuckin’ brains, is all. They haven’t got no imagination. The only thing they can think of to do is the first thing they can see that looks good to them. Only, five hundred guys already did it before and everybody knows what’s going on, so you automatically go out there and you do it and they’re watching for you and they get you. You got to think of a different angle, something nobody else thought of for a while, or else you got to go down to Holbrook there and you go to fuckin’ work. Everything else’s a waste of time, and it’s dangerous, too, because you’re gonna do time.”

  “Okay,” Frankie said, “you’re the guy with the angle. Tell me what the angle is. Only, don’t tell me, it’s the barbut, is all. I’m not going down that alley behind Billy’s Fish some night and wind up in Everett with a couple in my head. No fuckin’ way. I want dough. I’m not getting dead, gettin’ it.”

  “How about,” Amato said, “well, look, let’s talk about it. Before we decide. You think Doglover there can handle a card game?”

  “Well I mean,” Frankie said, “shit. Sure, anybody can. They can find one where they can go in and they haven’t got to go up against some kind of an arsenal. Those fuckin’ things, they just got less money in them’n the barbut’s got, is all. Those things’re protected. You can’t do them unless you’re so fuckin’ dumb you actually like having everybody going around tryin’ to off you.”

  “There’s one you can do,” Amato said.

  “There’s ten I can do, John,” Frankie said. “I know of at least ten of them I can do. But then after, somebody, everybody’s gonna have at least eight hot ginzos out looking for me.”

  “Uh uh,” Amato said. “Do this one and they’ll, they won’t even look for you.”

  “Why not?” Frankie said.

  “Because the minute it fuckin’ happens,” Amato said, “they’re gonna know right off, who it is.”

  “For some reason,” Frankie said, “that don’t make me feel better, you know, John?”

  “Not us,” Amato said. “Keep in mind, I know how these guys think. They’re not gonna think, they’re never even gonna think it might be us or even somebody else. They’re pick one guy, right off, and go find him and whack him out and that’ll be it. And you and me and that little prick, if that’s the guy we get, we cut up about forty, fifty thousand dollars. No fuckin’ sweat.”

  “I don’t know’s I go for setting somebody up,” Frankie said.
<
br />   “You’re not setting him up,” Amato said. “He set himself up. Mark Trattman runs this game. This’s the second game Markie’s had. The other game got knocked off. Markie did it.”

  “Ah,” Frankie said.

  “He did it,” Amato said, “and there was all kinds of shit. One of the guys that got robbed was a doctor, and he had a brother was a state cop, and he was mad as hell, he was gonna do this and he was gonna do that and everybody’s running around, they hadda give the guy back about, I dunno, three or four thousand, to shut him up, and they go around and see Trattman. And he puts on this great act. And they believe him.

  “So everybody pisses blood for a while,” Amato said, “the way they always do when the shit hits the fan, and there’s about a month or so goes by and everybody, nobody’s running any games or anything, and then, I think it was Tommy Balls, somebody says: ‘Fuck this,’ and he hires about ten guys to stand around and opens up and nothing happens. So they all look at Testa’s game, and nothing still happens, and after a while everybody’s open again and everybody’s happy.

  “So one night,” Amato said, “the guys’re hanging around and they’re talking and all, having a few drinks, and finally one of them says how it’s funny, they had that thing and everybody got all jumpy and now they’re all running again and nobody’s tried it again. Probably having more guys around, huh? Well, Markie starts laughing. See, he can’t resist it. So he tells them, he did it himself. He got two guys to come in and he did it himself. The guys got five apiece, they’re a couple guys carrying hod that he happens to know or something, and he come out of it with close to thirty.”