“Lefty, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony says.

“Lemme talk to Donnie.”

I get back on the phone and he resumes.

“I told you nobody goes on the expense sheet. You tell that motherfucker Tony that he owes me $500 and he sends me $500 tomorrow. I’m gonna shoot that motherfucker in the head. There’s something wrong over here, pal. I’m going to Brooklyn tomorrow and I’ll have all the answers. Who’s your fucking boss?”

“You are.”

“I’m your boss. I’ll get the answers in Brooklyn before he leaves. I want you by the phone at the club, twelve o‘clock. Make sure that other motherfucker’s on the extension phone. I want both you guys on the phone when I call.”

“I’ll make sure he’s there.”

“When I get through with Sonny, right then and there, if he can’t give me the right answers, I’m gonna tell you something.”

“What?”

“Ain’t nobody knows that I got three fucking grenades. Ain’t no motherfucker could ever live after I get through with them. If this guy gives me the wrong answers tomorrow, I’ll blow the fuck everybody up.”

“Lefty.”

Sonny and Boobie came down. They sat with Rossi and me in the lounge at the Tahitian. I had a Nagra in my boot.

“I don’t want to get caught in the middle with Lefty,” I say.

“I spoke to him,” Sonny says. “See, when I say to you, ‘Don’t say nothing,’ don’t say nothing. Lefty stood up for me when I was away. And I’d never do nothing to hurt him. He’ll go all the way with you. He’s a tremendous guy, a dynamite guy, but he tends to dramatize. He called me back after he talked to you. He was fucking whacked. Now, I don’t have to tell nobody what I’m doing. So you don’t tell him nothing. I’ll tell him what I want him to know. I’m never telling him what conversations take place. He knows me too long. I never do nothing underhanded. If I take down any money from here, he gets his end and he goes home to sleep.”

“He’s done a lot for me, too, in six years,” I say, “but I don’t want to have arguments with him over you. Anything we do, I’m always gonna give him a piece of my end. I don’t want him to think that I’m fucking him.”

“Donnie, you know the story with this crew. When I went away, they put me on the clothesline.”

“I know.” When Sonny was in the can, his crew had deserted him. He was separated from his wife, but he had four kids he wanted taken care of. Money supposed to go to his family wasn’t paid.

“They didn’t want to bother with me, this crew,” Sonny says. “They were afraid. But when the boss told him to keep his fucking mouth shut about me, he stood up. So now I come back home, the whole fucking story changes. Now we got all the power. So I brought him right back.”

“He’s a stand-up guy. There ain’t no two ways about it.”

“But you can’t tell him nothing. He gets them two fucking wines in him and then—well, he’s trying to help you, but he’s hurting you. Now, see, everything is politics. Five years ago, I give you my word of honor, I’m gonna put two guns in my fucking pocket for whoever calls me. But today you can’t do it. Today you gotta sit back and just go step by step.”

“That’s right,” Rossi and I say.

“You got all the kids coming around today, you know, and they’re stronger than lions. And all these old guys, they got a brain of a seventy- or eighty-year-old person. A seventy-year-old brain can’t compare with mine, because where he’s got like twenty more years experience in his day, I got like fifty more years experience in my day. And we’re living in my day, not their day anymore. That’s what they fail to understand.”

“That’s right,” we say.

“Like, who thought jeans were gonna be good? A young kid thought of jeans and look at the fucking money jeans are making. These old-timers will never wear a pair of jeans in their life. Their brain stopped. I’ll show you men that will go through a fucking tank for you, and I gotta give them a hundred, two hundred a week, and they ain’t earning a dime. All these big puffers with their cigars and pinkie rings, they’re taking down all the money. It’s gotta change.”

“Yeah,” Boobie says. He is looking around at some of the people passing through. “Those blondes is with somebody down here or what?”

“They’re just around,” I say, “far as I know.”

Rossi left the table for a few minutes. Sonny opened up more around me because Rossi was still considered an outsider.

I told Sonny that “our friend, the cop” had introduced Tony to a guy who owned shrimp boats and used them to bring in cocaine and marijuana.

“The deputy gave you this guy as a connection?” Sonny asks.

“Yeah. The deputy was with this guy a while back, protecting him for hauling marijuana. This guy does everything. We just met him, you understand. I told Tony, ‘Let this guy do all the talking. We don’t want it to look like we’re too anxious to do business. We just let him keep telling us what he wants to do.’ He said he was gonna come and see us a couple of months ago, but he wanted to make sure we were okay.”

“I don’t want to talk to Tony about it,” Sonny says. “If we do anything with this guy, you arrange it. We’ll take one piece and put it out on the street. Take us seven days. Whatever money we get, we’ll send up. Tell him the smoke is good because there ain’t that much involved. See, I got an army of cars to go back and forth from Orlando. Now, what we’re dealing with is a tremendous amount of trust in people. I only talk to you because you’re good, and you talk to me.”

“Right.”

“Down the line, these motherfuckers are weak. So don’t talk to nobody. I always talk alone, because the only way there is to get caught is talking with two other people. Because now there is a strict law. In other words, me and you are talking like now. They can’t pinch him over there for conspiracy with us because there’s just two of us. But there’s a lot of guys got five or ten years. We don’t trust nobody. We gotta get sneaky. Because the sneakier we are, the smarter we are.”

A few days earlier, Donahue, the deputy sheriff, brought up the matter of dog-racing tracks with Rossi. He wanted to know if Rossi’s people might be interested. Some politicians would have to be bribed. I brought it up with Sonny. “The cop told Tony his people are gonna come up with the bread, and they got a lock in Tallahassee, which is the state capital, for the license. He wants to help him put it together and for protection, so nobody else is gonna muscle in on it.”

“We could definitely protect this guy, down to the track. We gotta bring in another family, because that family controls over there.”

“That’s what I think he’s looking for.”

“Yeah, I’ll get that. Meanwhile I’ll come out with my top guns. Let’s hear what Tony’s got to say.” He waves for Tony to return to the table. “We’re talking about the dog track.”

Rossi nods. “He guaranteed that he’s got two investors around here, and each will put up a million dollars. But what he wants is protection, all what it takes in order to put this thing together.”

“What kind of help does he want? Protection from what?”

“He came to me because, you know, you couldn’t run a track here in Florida without Trafficante’s permission. That never came up directly. That’s what I read into it. He thinks I could, you know, reach out.”

“Yeah, well, that’s no problem. But who knows anything about putting a track together? That’s what we gotta find out. What is he actually looking for?”

“Sonny, all I do is listen. I didn’t say yes, no, nothing. There’s three dog tracks now, each one is open four months, so they’re all working with each other. Now, you put in this other track, you’re gonna have problems with those other three tracks unless there’s somebody there that controls it. So what he’s really looking for is the permission.”

“Or somebody,” I say, “that can go sit down with the guy in Tampa.”