“You go up to some poor bastard, working his ass off to support his family, and you sell him fucking ‘protection,’ yeah? He don’t pay, you bust his place up, then you go back and tell him, ‘See? The cops can’t protect you, but we can.’ That’s not a man’s work. Me, I do a man’s work.
“So—you gonna protect me? You got cops that’ll look the other way, judges on your payroll? That’s some insurance I wouldn’t mind buying.
“That’s what Ken told them at the sit-down,” Solly told me. “And when they said, yeah, they did have that kind of juice but they couldn’t put their names on the table—could they?—Ken, he says:
“Why is that, then? ’Cause you’d be giving me info on dirty cops and crooked judges, yeah? And maybe I could trade that, if I got in a jam, is that about right?
“So the dagos, they all nod, like the fucking movies, you know? And Kenny says:
“That door swings both ways, doesn’t it? If I come to you about a job of work I’m going to do, or even if I pay your tax after the work is done, and you get jammed, what’s to stop you from trading that?
“I thought it was gonna be the O.K. Corral right there,” Solly said. “But Kenny sliced into them first. Had a whole list of family men who’d turned rat. And the big shots at that table, they couldn’t deny it. So Kenny says,
“Tell me a guy who’ll give up a boss wouldn’t give me up. Can you do that?
“It was quiet for a minute. Then one of the older guys—a real survivor, he must have been—he says, ‘We let you slide on the tax, word gets around, then nobody pays.’ But Kenny, he’s ready for that one.
“ ‘Only way word gets around is if one of you spreads it.”
“The man had steel balls,” Solly said to me. “But it wasn’t just that. Ken made sense. He had a rep. Not just for being crazy—which he was, I grant you—but for keeping it low-key. No flashy suits. No diamond rings. No nightclubs. You see what I’m saying?
“The man was a master. No trademarks, no patterns. It could be a bank one time, a truckload of furs—only way you could tell it was Ken’s work was by how smooth it went.
“So what would be in it for Ken to brag about not having to pay tax? Nothing. He’d be killing his own golden goose. His game was no-ego, see? The family guys knew he was telling the truth: if they made a deal with Ken, nobody was gonna hear about it from him.”
Only Ken wasn’t around anymore. Which gave me a real problem with Solly being so generous.
He’d gone to a lot of trouble, setting me up like he had. The cops didn’t know Stanley Jay Wilson, but Solly knew him. Knew him real well. Where he banked, what car he was driving … even the business he was supposed to be in.
I didn’t like that last part. I’d been using that “personal trainer” tag for a while before I did my last bit. But, truth is, I don’t know the first damn thing about how to do it. I picked up some lingo from magazines, and I guess I look like someone who should know that stuff. It wasn’t like I actually had to convince anyone.
But I’d never mentioned this to any of the guys I ever worked with. It isn’t the kind of thing you talk about.
So how did Solly know?
And how come he told me so much stuff about himself? It was like he wanted us to be even up on info about each other.
I knew this much: Solly never did anything just to be doing it. “It’s all investment,” he once told me. “Risk against gain. Everything in life always comes down to that.”
That’s why my first stop was this Verizon store. The kid in the red shirt called up my account on his screen, said they were really sorry about my phone getting smashed on the subway platform, and sold me a new one.
The place was kind of frantic, people running in and out, arguing about credit, getting their friends to cosign for them, trading up to a fancier model … so the kid I got just told me to pick out whatever I wanted—it’d go on my next bill.