American Gangster (4 page)

Stocky little Rossi, in a white shirt and dark tie, emerged from the darkness, gestured to the table as if the dope were a waiting meal, and the two men sat.

“You have any idea, Frank, what we have to deal with?”

Frank wasn't sure which sense of the word “deal” Rossi was talking about; so he just said, “No.”

“These SIU cops, these
princes
of the city,” Rossi said, each word a bitter seed he spat out, “they strut around in their leather jackets like movie stars. Are they cops? Are they gangsters? Who the fuck knows.”

SIU stood for Special Investigations Unit.

“They can waltz into a property room,” Rossi was saying, “and flash their gold shields and just sign out ‘evidence.' You know what kind of evidence I'm talkin' about.”

“This kind,” Frank said, nodding to the dope.

Rossi grunted something that was almost a laugh. “Insult to injury, this is the fuckin'
French Connection
dope. The
same
dope Popeye Doyle and Sonny Grasso took off
us!
”

In his mind's eye Frank could see it:
he could see the detectives entering a warehouse with a suitcase of evidence and grocery bags of other goodies. They take the half-kilo bags of uncut heroin from the suitcase, and then from the grocery bags comes a Pyrex mixing bowl, flour sifter, boxes of milk sugar, latex kitchen gloves, a medical scale and yellow baggies.

They peel off the black-and-green evidence tape, then they transfer the heroin to numerous yellow baggies, just a smidge compared to the bigger amount of lactose that cuts the heroin to next to nothing.

“They seize it,” Ross went on, nearly raving, “arrest everybody, whack it up and sell it back to us.
Our
fuckin' dope. They been living off it for years, these New York pricks.”

“Fuckin' crooks,” Frank said blandly.

“They basically control the market with this shit. What the fuck has happened to the world, Frank?”

“Down the crapper.”

Shaking his head, Rossi rose and went over to the bar and made them two espressos. The bartender
turned on the high-perched TV and a news report began playing, Walter Cronkite droning on about the heroin problem—not here in the USA, but over in Vietnam, among the GIs.

Rossi returned with the small steaming cups and both men sipped.

Finally Rossi said, “Sad about Bumpy. Took God to kill him, bullets couldn't do it.”

Frank nodded, sipped some more. He liked the strong hot beverage; the smell of it up his nostrils was as good as the taste.

“Things are never gonna be the same in Harlem,” Rossi said, “without the Bump. Girls, clubs, music, all cheaper and louder. . . . Before, you walk down the street, nobody bothers you, 'cause Bumpy's making sure they don't. . . . How bad is it out there now?”

Frank shrugged. “Guys taking down crap games, cops rousting honest crooks, dealers shooting dealers.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Chaos. Every asshole for himself.”

Rossi, eyes wide, shook his head. “Who can live like that? There has to be fuckin' order, Frank. I mean no offense, but this would never happen with us Italians. More important to us wops, more than any one man's life? Order. A semblance of goddamn fuckin' order.”

Frank didn't disagree.

Soon Frank and the heroin were back in Harlem, where he caught a late breakfast at his favorite diner. He ate alone, as was his custom, in a window booth,
and when the attractive, middle-aged waitress, Charlene, offered a refill, he risked a second coffee despite the espresso he'd already had.

“But that's the last one, Charlene. Thank you.”

She beamed at him. “All right with me, Frank, if you stay all day. But I wouldn't. It's nice outside.”

“Then maybe I'll just have to go for a walk.” He gave her the smile that he knew was the best thing he owned. “Just 'cause you said so.”

She loved hearing that, ambling off a happy woman.

Frank was just pouring some sugar in his coffee when someone tapped on the window. He looked up and saw two army guys in uniform; one of them was a Harlem kid he knew, Willie Something. From the look in Willie's eyes, Frank knew what he wanted.

What the hell. Support the boys. Wasn't he heading over there, anyway?

Before long Frank was leading them up the stairs of the corner building where Red Top, a lanky good-looking chick with a trademark ruby-tinged 'do, kept her apartment. She was Frank's girlfriend, when he felt like it, but mostly she was his cutter, and that's what she was doing right now—sitting in her slinky pantsuit smoking at a worktable arrayed with her drug-cutting apparatus. They could hear Aretha Franklin singing “Respect” on the stereo playing in the living room.

Red Top gave each of the servicemen, sitting across from her, a packet. “On the house for our men in uniform.”

“Why thank you, sugar,” Willie said, “that's real kind.”

“Don't thank me,” she said, and smiled but her eyes were cold. “Thank Frank.”

Willie looked at Frank gratefully but Frank nodded his “You're welcome” before the kid could even say the words.

While the servicemen cooked up their dope, the old acquaintances chatted, Frank asking Willie, “How's Nate? You see him lately?”

“Hell, I see him all the time. The dude is here, there and everywhere.”

“That right?”

“Oh, yeah. He's in good shape. Great shape. Got himself his own club now.”

“Oh. He
is
doing good, then. Where, Saigon?”

Willie shook his head. “Bangkok. That's where all the serious R & R goes down.”

The other GI, who Frank didn't know, said, “I don't suppose Nate'll
ever
come home. Not till the rest of us do, anyway. Maybe not even then.”

As the GIs prepared to shoot up, Frank offered some advice. “Better boot it a couple times, fellas. These cops keep cutting it, selling it, cutting it. . . .”

“I don't mean no offense, my brother,” Willie said, as he shot the stuff into a vein, “ 'cause the price is right and all that. But since I got home? I find the shit over here is . . . shit. But the shit in Nam? It is way, way, way, way, way. . . .”

But Willie didn't finish, nodding off before he could.

Still, Willie may have been the one with the needle, but Frank got the point.

Good shit in Vietnam.

He would file that away, like he filed away all information, for when it would come in handy.

And it would.

Within his circle, in
his private life and for that matter his business dealings, Frank Lucas considered himself a moral man.

Matters of right and wrong, in any larger sense—social or religious—were defined by the world he'd been born into, a white man's world. Dope being sold to black people was a reality that wasn't going anywhere; better another black man be in charge. Killing people who needed killing was strictly business—those yellow people getting killed over in Vietnam by boys both black and white made less sense to Frank than removing a business rival or a personal threat by violence.

Frank hadn't invented the world where money ruled, but if he was going to live in it, by God, he was going to have at least his share. The kind of money he wanted to make in legitimate business would have meant Wall Street, if you called that legitimate. And he knew he couldn't get a fucking janitor job on Wall Street.

As far as Frank was concerned, white men had sent him down the criminal road, had given him no choice, really, not since that day when he was six and the Ku Klux Klan came to his family's shack and killed his cousin, Obadiah.

Obie had been twelve and had committed the crime of looking at a white girl funny—“reckless eyeballing,” they called it down South. Five rednecks
grabbed his cousin, tied the terrified Obie up and shoved a shotgun in his mouth and blew his head apart. Right there on the front porch, Frank watching through the window.

With Obadiah gone, Frank was the oldest child and, needing to put food on the table, he became a prodigy of crime, at first stealing chickens and pigs, soon graduating to mugging drunks with a rock outside the local whorehouse, there in La Grange, North Carolina. By the time he was the age Obie'd been, when that shotgun blew his head away, Frank was on a chain gang in Tennessee. At fourteen he was shacked up with a lady bootlegger in Kentucky. At sixteen he decided to try going straight, took a trucking job, but sleeping with the owner's daughter led to his dismissal. Well, what really led to his dismissal was hitting the owner, a beer-belly bruiser called Big Bill, alongside the head with a piece of pipe. When Big Bill didn't pay up the hundred bucks Frank was owed, the young man took four hundred instead and set the front office on fire.

His mother had advised him to hightail, which he had, to New York, where he'd found his way from Penn Station to 114th Street and a world of black people—Harlem USA, where Bumpy Johnson had come into his life.

Frank didn't consider himself a violent man. He was willing to respond in self-defense, when need be, and he would do violence when business called for it. He took no pleasure in fists, knives or guns, and did not seek such foolishness out.

But foolishness did sometimes seek him out.

For example, on a cold clear morning a week after Bumpy's burial, Frank was sitting eating breakfast in his favorite diner, minding his own business, eating his damn eggs, reading the sports section. He hadn't given ten seconds' thought to Tango Black since he'd seen the bald thug scrounging food and drink at Bumpy's wake.

So when Tango and a bodyguard as big as he was came strutting into the diner, heading Frank's way, Frank didn't bother looking up from his paper. Tango was all in black, including a black leather jacket that said the dude was trying to be Shaft, only Shaft wouldn't have worn all that gold jewelry.

But when Tango planted himself next to Frank's booth, Frank knew foolishness had arrived. Still, he did not bother to look up at the man. He had enough on his mind, reading the paper and forking his eggs at the same time.

“Didn't you see the jar, Frank?” Tango rumbled. He glanced back at his boy and they exchanged school-kid grins. “I think he walked right past it. . . . Did you walkright past my jar, Frank?”

Frank already knew that there was no jar in question, not really. This was Tango being clever. Poetic. Frank ate a bite of eggs, not caring to comment on Tango's poetry.

Finally Tango plopped himself down across from Frank. The big man was smiling but not really happy. “The
money
jar, Frank. On the corner. What I got to do, put a damn sign on it?”

Frank gestured to his mouth, indicating he might
answer if he weren't busy chewing. Tango waited with surprising patience for Frank to swallow, which he did, but his guest got an irritated look when Frank's next move was to reach for his cup of coffee, and wash the bite down.

With quiet menace, Tango said, “Bumpy don't own 116th Street no more, Frank, in case you didn't notice. Bumpy don't own
no
real estate in Harlem no more, in point of actual fact. I'm the new landlord and the lease is twenty percent.”

Frank, dabbing at his mouth with a paper napkin, gave Tango a skeptical look.

Tango's eyes widened and he gestured with open hands. “Don't like the tariff? Then don't sell no more dope, Frank. Try gettin' a real fuckin' job. Need one? I could use a driver, drive
me
around, open
my
door, like you done for Bumpy. Remember, Frank? Yessuh, nosuh, where to suh, right away, Massa Johnson suh.”

Halfway through the speech—even before the most insulting part—Tango was a dead man. Of course, Tango didn't know that. And Frank would let Tango walk around a while. But Tango was already a ghost, just getting an early start on haunting Harlem.

Coolly, Frank said, “Twenty percent, huh?”

The big bald head bobbed up and down. “Offa every dollar. Every vig, every truckload, every girl, every damn ounce. You pay your tribute like anybody else, Frank. You put it in the goddamn
jar
.”

Gently smiling, Frank shook his head. “You're a businessman, Tango. So you understand business.”

“That's what we're talkin' about here. Business.”

“But twenty percent's my profit margin. If I'm giving that to you, then what am I working for? I'm not looking for a hobby.” Frank shrugged. “You hit me, everyone you know, for twenty percent, you put us
all
out of business. Which puts
you
out of business.”

Tango displayed a yard of white teeth. “Then you'll just have to work harder, Frank. Raise your prices and shit.”

Frank shook his head as he reached for the check. “There are reasonable ways to make money, Tango . . . and then there's this way. Bumpy never took twenty percent.”

“Bumpy's fuckin' dead.”

Frank studied Tango's dark eyes and the hard, determined cast of his jaw. This was a stubborn man and a stupid man. Also dangerous. But mostly stupid.

Taking out his money clip, Frank peeled off a five to cover the check; then he peeled off a one, and flipped it over in front of Tango.

“There you go,” Frank said. “Your twenty percent.”

Frank got up and went out. He could feel Tango's eyes on him, but he wasn't really concerned. He knew what he would do about this problem; he just had to pick the right moment.

Sitting in his apartment,
which was nicely but not ostentatiously furnished mostly in shades of brown, Frank leaned back in a comfortable chair with a pencil in one hand and a spiral pad in the other.

On the yellow paper he did the math—for a guy who never graced a schoolroom door, he was a whiz at it. Just for the hell of it, he worked out what it would cost to accommodate Tango. After all, Frank had no desire to work the protection racket, which had been fine in days of Bumpy Johnson and Dutch Schultz and Al fucking Capone, but today it was a dying game to be sure.