“That is good, Fuggin,” said Don Pietro. “Now, the first thing I ask of you as a soldier in this thing of ours is to get me a few shrimp cocktails.”

  “What do I look like, a fuggin’ waiter?” exploded Carmine.

  “No, you look to me like a man who has respect for his capo,” Don Pietro said evenly.

  Listening to the steel in his capo’s voice, Carmine Imbruglia swallowed once and asked, “How many shrimp cocktails you want?”

  “One truckload. I understand there is one leaving Baltimore for the Fulton Fish Market at two o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Oh, swag,” said Carmine. “Why dincha say so? I can handle this.”

  · · ·

  It was not easy. The truck was a sixteen-wheeler and Carmine’s aging Volkswagen Beetle was not up to forcing a sixteen-wheeler over to the side of Interstate 95.

  So Carmine executed the only strategy available to him. With the driver’s door open, he cut in front of the truck, jammed on the brakes, and dived for the shoulder of the road.

  In a grinding cacophony, the Beetle disappeared under the truck’s front grille and bumper, lodging under the cab like a bone in a Rottweiler’s throat. The sixteen-wheeler jackknifed to a stop, rubber burning and smoking.

  “Okay, stick ’em up,” said Carmine to the driver.

  The driver was obliging. He got out of the cab and stood white-faced as Carmine climbed behind the wheel. He got the engine started. He pressed the gas.

  The truck lurched ahead and stopped amid a squealing of tormented metal.

  “What the fug’s wrong with this pile of junk?” demanded Carmine.

  “The pile of junk under the cab,” said the white-faced driver.

  Carmine remembered his Volkswagen, which he had intended replacing with his share of the shrimp. Without the shrimp, there would be no replacement. And without wheels, his career as a wise guy was finished.

  Rescue in the form of a tow truck happened along then.

  Brandishing his Saturday-night special, Carmine made the hapless truck driver get in front of the tow truck. The wrecker screeched to a halt. Carmine jumped into view.

  “You!” he told the wrecker driver. “You hook this wrecker up to that truck there.”

  “You crazy?” demanded the driver. “I can’t haul a sixteen-wheeler. It’ll bust my rig.”

  “You fuggin’ do as I say, cogsugger, or I’ll give you a lead fuggin’ eye.”

  The driver didn’t understand all of it, but the part about the lead eye was clear enough. He lifted the cab, and as cars whizzed by without pause or interest, Carmine made the two drivers haul the remains of his Beetle out of the way.

  Then he made the driver of the wrecker tie up the truck driver. Carmine then bound the latter.

  Carmine Imbruglia left them by the side of the road saying, “I hope yous jerks rot.” It all had been too much like work.

  · · ·

  After Carmine had gotten through telling Don Pietro Scubisci the whole story, Don Pietro paused to extract a toothpick from between his teeth and casually inspected a fragment of cold pink shrimp meat impaled on it.

  “You left the wrecker?” he asked, unimpressed.

  “What was I to do? You wanted shrimp. I brought you shrimp. When do I get my cut?”

  Don Pietro snapped his fingers once.

  Soldiers began bringing in cases of bottled shrimp cocktails and set them beside Carmine.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Your percentage,” said Don Pietro.

  “I expected money!”

  “You are a smart boy, Carmine. I will let you sell your share of the shrimp for whatever price you see fit. This is only fair, since I will be moving volume at a very low price.”

  “You are very kind, Don Pietro,” said Carmine sincerely, touched by the consideration of his capo.

  He was a happy man as he carried the shrimp, one case at a time, on the IRT back to Brownsville.

  “We’re gonna make a fortune,” he told his wife. “Restaurants will be fallin’ all over themselves for quality shrimp like these!”

  “At least you got work, you bum,” Camilla had said.

  The next evening, Carmine Imbruglia dragged himself home with a solitary case of shrimp under his arm. It was the same case he had started the day with. The others remained stuffed in his refrigerator and in the cool air of his basement.

  “I got no takers,” he complained to his wife.

  “What’re you talking? No takers?”

  “Somebody got to every fuggin’ restaurant first. I got undercut. Except the last guy, who still wouldn’t buy.”

  “Why not?”

  “The stuff had spoiled by then,” said Carmine, setting the case on the kitchen linoleum and kicking it methodically.

  Carmine and Camilla had a rough next month, but as Carmine explained it to his wife over breakfast one morning, “At least we ain’t fuggin’ starving. We’re eating better than any of the neighbors.”

  “If you call cold shrimp three times a day eating,” Camilla had spat. “And I still say it was that rotten Don Pietro that undercut you with the restaurants.”

  “Get out of here! Don Pietro wouldn’t do that. I’m a made guy now. A soldier. We’re practically like this,” said Carmine, putting two cocktail-sauce-covered fingers together.”

  “Put your balls in there and it would be the truth.”

  “When the time comes for me to make my bones,” snarled Carmine (Fuggin) Imbruglia, “I hope it’s for breaking yours.”

  · · ·

  The years rolled by. Carmine toiled in wire rooms, ran numbers, served as a wheelman, and whenever Don Carmine had a yen for seafood, he asked for Fuggin.

  One day, at the height of the Scubisci–Pubescio wars, when Don Pietro and Don Fiavorante Pubescio of California were at war for the title capo da tutu capi, boss of all bosses, Don Pietro summoned Carmine Imbruglia to his scarred walnut table.

  Carmine noticed a long gouge along the top where a .38 slug had chewed a furrow that had not been there the week before.

  Don Pietro was pouring Asti Spumante into the furrow, trying to get it to match the color of the rest of the wood.

  “Fuggin,” he said softly, “I have need of you.”

  “Anything, Don Pietro. Just ask. I will make my bones with any Scubisci family member you name.”

  “Forget bones. I want cod.”

  “You want me to clip the Lord?” sputtered Carmine. “I wouldn’t know where to find him. Would you settle for a priest?”

  “I said cod, not God.”

  “Who’s he? I don’t know no west-coast wise guy that goes by the name Cod.”

  “Cod,” said Don Pietro patiently, “is a fish. A tasty fish.”

  Carmine sighed. “Just tell me where the truck will be.”

  Don Pietro lifted a rag. “Not a truck. A boat. I want you to steal this fishing smack, whose hold is filled to the brim with fresh cod.”

  “I don’t know nothing about hijacking no boats,” said Carmine heatedly.

  “You will learn,” said Don Pietro, going back to his polishing.

  It was actually pretty simple, Carmine found.

  He rowed out into the Sound in a stolen rowboat and waited for the smack to happen along. Carmine wondered why it was called a smack. Maybe it was running drugs.

  When it finally muttered into view, he rowed in front of it, chortling, “This is a snap. It’s gonna be just like the shrimp heist, only smoother. I won’t need no wrecker.”

  There was a minor problem when he waved his snub-nosed revolver and shouted, “This is a stickup!” because the boat for some reason wouldn’t stop. It bore down on Carmine’s tiny rowboat like a foaming monster.

  “Fuggin’ brakes must be broke,” said Carmine, dropping his revolver and rowing like mad. The fishing smack veered off and hove to.

  “Need a hand?” the captain called. He was swathed in a yellow slicker and floppy hat that made him look like a refugee from a soup commercial.

  “I’m lost,” Carmine said, planting a foot on the dropped revolver so it wouldn’t be seen.

  “Come aboard.”

  This meant that Carmine had to row to the fishing boat, which caused him to mutter, “Who fuggin’ died and made you admiral?” under his breath.

  A brine-soaked rope was lowered. Carmine kept sliding down. Finally he tied it around his waist and said, “Just fuggin’ haul me up, okay?”

  The fishing-smack crew obliged. When Carmine got to the deck, he pulled his revolver out from under his shirttail and stuck it in the captain’s startled, element-seamed face.

  “This is a heist, admiral,” he announced.

  “I’m a captain.”

  “Fine. I hereby appoint myself admiral of this tub. Everybody make like Popeye the fuggin’ Sailor Man and jump into the rowboat. This is my tub now.”

  Since fishermen usually carry no weapons, the crew did as they were told.

  Carmine left them bobbing in his wake. He spun the heavy wheel toward land, grinning from ear to ear.

  He lost the grin about the time Far Rockaway came into view and his foot couldn’t find the brake.

  “Mannaggia la cornata!” he screamed, remembering a favorite saying of his father’s. He was hazy on the meaning, but it seemed to fit the occasion.

  The fishing smack piled into a dock, and both colliding objects splintered and groaned terribly.

  But not as much as Carmine Imbruglia. He jumped into the water, hoping that like Ivory soap, he would naturally float. When he didn’t, he threshed and struggled until he felt the cold silty sea bottom. It was only three feet down.

  “Fuggin’ sumbidges,” Carmine complained as he trudged toward shore. “They musta took the brake pedal with them.”

  There remained the problem of the cargo.

  It took all the rest of that day, and half the night. But Carmine was able to get most of the glassy-eyed cod out of the hold and to shore. A rented U-Haul got it home, where he lined the fish up in his cool basement on endless sheets of waxed paper. This time he left the furnace off.

  The next morning he hosed the fishy corpses down to get the sand and muck out of their gills, and after selecting the best specimens for himself, hastily peddled them to every area restaurant he could find. Carmine made a cool seven hundred dollars and change.

  Only then did he truck the rest to Don Pietro.

  “This is all?” asked Don Pietro, peering into the back of the U-Haul.

  “I already took my cut,” Carmine explained. “So it wouldn’t spoil like last time.”

  “Next time, you do not do this,” Don Pietro warned.

  “Next time,” said Carmine, “I hope it’s a boat they keep up. Would you believe it? Fuggin’ thing had no brakes.”

  Carmine Imbruglia rushed home that day. He had finally made a good payday. He felt good. He felt flush. He squandered an entire dime on the evening Post.

  The headline, when he read it, made him want to throw up: “FOOD POISONING OUTBREAK IN AREA RESTAURANTS. Tainted Fish Blamed.”

  Eyes popping, Carmine read the lead paragraph. Then he did throw up. Into the wadded-up copy of the Post.

  He never did finish the paper. Or go home.

  Carmine hastily changed trains and doubled back.

  They were carrying Don Pietro out of his office on a stretcher when he pounded up Mott Street, panting and sweating.

  “What happened?” Carmine asked, hunkering down behind two little old ladies in black scarves on the outskirts of the gathering crowd.

  “Poor Don Pietro. They say it is food poisoning.”

  “I’m dead,” Carmine croaked, white-faced.

  One of the old women clucked sympathetically. “Did you eat the bad fish too?”

  “I’m thinkin’ about it.”

  Don Pietro was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, deep in a coma. Weeks passed. Then months. Carmine had lammed for Tampa, since Florida was open territory. He survived by playing the ponies.

  After almost a year, he squandered a slug and called his wife from a pay phone at Hialeah.

  “Am I still hot?” he asked, low-voiced.

  “The don says you can come back. All is forgiven,” she told him.

  “How much are they paying you to lie to me, Camilla?”

  “Nothing. I had you declared dead and cashed in your insurance. I don’t need your money or you.”

  “My own wife, setting me up. I don’t fuggin’ believe it.”

  “Then don’t. Don Pietro is still in a coma. Don Fiavorante is in charge now. He says he owes you big.”

  “The truth?”

  “The truth, so help me God, Carmine.”

  “Warm up the bed, baby,” Carmine said happily. “Pappa’s comin’ home.”

  “Warm your own bed. If you’re moving back, I’m moving out of town. And taking the kids with me.”

  “I ain’t payin’ child support if you do,” Carmine warned.

  “Then don’t.”

  Carmine paused. “How much did the insurance company pay you, anyway?” he asked suspiciously.

  “One hundred and forty thousand. And after fifteen years married to you, let me tell you, I earned every red cent.”

  “Goddamm it! I want my fuggin’ cut!”

  “Not a chance. Good-bye!”

  The line clicked in his ear as Carmine Imbruglia heard the roar of the racetrack crowd as the fifth race ended.

  Carmine grabbed a passing bettor.

  “How’d Bronze Savage do, pal?”

  “Broke her legs.”

  “I hope that fuggin’ nag ends up as glue,” Carmine muttered.

  “That’s no way to talk about an unfortunate animal.”

  “I was referring to my fuggin’ wife, thank you,” grumbled Carmine Imbruglia. “This is what I get for marrying a broad from Jersey. I should have listened to my sainted mother, may she rest in peace.”

  · · ·

  Little Italy had changed since Carmine Imbruglia had skipped town. It had shrunk. Chinatown had practically swallowed it whole. Still, the street smells were the same. The fresh baked bread, the sauces, and the pastries that hung sweet and heavy in the warm air enveloped him like a fragrant fog of welcome.

  “Ahh, heaven,” said Carmine Imbruglia. He felt his life poised before a turn for the better. At age fifty-seven he was about to embark on a fresh start. Maybe even make capo regime one day.

  Carmine walked into the Neighborhood Improvement Association. Two unfamiliar men came out to greet him.

  “How’re yous guys doin’?” he asked guardedly.

  “Who’re you?” one growled.

  “Don’t yous guys know me? I’m Cadillac.”

  “Cadillac?” they said, tensing. One fingered his sport-coat buttons close to the bulge of his shoulder holster.

  “Carmine Imbruglia.”

  One of the goons called over his shoulder, “Hey, boss, Fuggin’s here!”

  Carmine’s expression collapsed like a brick wall before a wrecking ball. He forced a smile onto his brutish face as the rounded brown shape that was Don Fiavorante Pubescio stepped out of the familiar black walnut alcove wearing a white shirt open to his bronzed sternum and revealing gleaming fat ropes of gold chains.

  “Fuggin!” cried Don Fiavorante. “It is so good to see you!”

  Carmine allowed himself to be gathered up into a fatherly bear hug, patting the big soft man on the back as his cheeks accepted the capo’s dry lips and he returned the gesture of respect in turn.

  “Come, come, sit with me. How has Florida been?”

  “Hot.”

  “Not as hot as Brownsville, am I not correct, Fuggin? I am given to understand that it is to you I owe my good fortune.”

  As they sat, the waiter poured some kind of sweet-scented tea into a cup before Don Fiavorante. The service was repeated for Carmine.

  Carmine Imbruglia could not help but wrinkle his nose at it all. Don Fiavorante looked as California as a cheap Hollywood producer. Carmine had expected as much. But tea?

  “Drink up,” said Don Fiavorante. “It is good. My personal physician, he insists that I drink tea. This is ginseng.”

  “Chink tea?”

  “Ginseng,” said Don Fiavorante politely. He was a polite man. Unctuousness exuded from his bronzed skin like suntan lotion. He was unfailingly genteel.

  “Maybe you have been wondering about Don Pietro,” he inquired.

  “Sometimes,” Carmine admitted. In fact, he had nightmares about him. They all involved Carmine being stuffed with cod and consigned to a watery grave.

  “Don Pietro resides at Mount Sinai, not living, not dying. He is a how you say...?”

  “A vegetable,” a bodyguard growled.

  “Such a crude word,” said Don Fiavorante. “He is a melone. A melon. I do not know what kind.” The don allowed a wan smile to wreathe his healthy features. “He eats through a tube, and drinks through the same tube. He excretes through another tube. He has more tubes coming out of him than Frankenstein the monster. And from what? Eating a piece of fish.”

  Don Fiavorante smiled like an ivory-toothed Buddha. He leaned closer, his dark eyes glittering.

  “You ever bring me a piece of fish, my friend, I will bring the fish a piece of you. Capisce?”

  “Never, Don Fiavorante,” promised Carmine solemnly, touching his heart.

  “From today, you are with me.”

  “I am with you.”

  “I am protecting you. You are now a sottocapo under me.”

  “Sottocapo?” blurted Carmine Imbruglia. “Me?”

  “Starting now. While you have been away, we have had many troubles. Here in New York. In Chicago. Up in Providence and Boston. It is Rico here and Rico there.”

  “Those damn Puerto Ricans!” snarled Carmine Imbruglia. “I knew they would get too big for their breeches one day.”

  Don Fiavorante reared back his head and laughed good-naturedly, his teeth as polished and perfect as piano keys.

  When he had control of himself, he sobered.

  “Up in New England, we have troubles. Patriarca senior is dead. Junior is in Danbury. We have no one we can trust up there. All is disarray. I am making you my underboss in New England. You will pick up the pieces. You will put them back together. You will make Boston hum again.”