Free Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra Page B

insurance money and the doctoreventually bought a house with his. Makes you wonder why they ever gave up house calls.”
    From the youngest age, a Hell’s Kitchen child was told it was wrong to steal from anyone who lived in the neighborhood. The church was also sacred ground. Street muggings were rare, and the price for attacking an elderly person was steep.
    Rumor circulated about one tough guy who robbed an old lady. He didn’t hit her, just took her purse and the eight dollars it held. Word got out and the mugger was found. He had both his arms and legs broken and two fingers of each hand were removed. After that, when kids saw old ladies in the street, they
gave
them money. There were rules on those streets. Serious rules.
    When my friends and I were young, Hell’s Kitchen was run by a man named King Benny.
    In his youth, King Benny had been a hit man for Charles “Lucky” Luciano and was said to have been one of the shooters who machine-gunned “Mad Dog” Coll on West 23rd Street on the night of February 8, 1932. King Benny ran bootleg with “Dutch” Schultz, owned a couple of clubs with “Tough Tony” Anastasia, and owned a string of tenements on West 49th Street, all listed in his mother’s name. He was tall, well over six feet, with thick dark hair and eyes that never seemed to move. He was married to a woman who lived outside the neighborhood and had no children of his own.
    “He was fourteen when I first met him,” my father told me one night. “Wasn’t much of anything back then. Always getting the shit kicked out of him in street fights. Then, one day, for who knows what reason, an Irish guy, about twenty-five years old, takes him and throws him down a flight of stairs. King Benny breaks all his front teeth in the fall. He waits eight years to get that Irish guy. Walks in on him in a public bathhouse, guy soaking in a tub. King Benny looks in a mirror, takes out his front teeth, lays them on a sink. Looks down at the guy in the tub and says, ‘When I look in amirror, I see your face.’ King Benny pulls out a gun and shoots the guy twice in each leg. Then says to him, ‘Now when you take a bath, you see mine.’ Nobody ever fucked with King Benny after that.”

    T HE LARGE ROOM was wrapped in darkness. Three men in black jackets and black sport shirts sat at a table by an open window, playing
sette bello
and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Above them, a dim bulb dangled from a knotted cord. Behind them, a jukebox played Italian love songs. None of the men spoke.
    At the far end of the room, a tall, thin man stood behind a half-moon bar, scanning the daily racing sheet. A large white cup filled with espresso was on his left, a Kenmore alarm clock ticked away on his right. He was dressed in black shirt, sweater, shoes, and slacks, with a large oval-shaped ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. His hair was slicked back and his face was clean shaven. He chewed a small piece of gum and had a thick wood toothpick in the corner of his mouth.
    I turned the knob on the old wooden door that led into the room and swung it open, thin shafts of afternoon sunlight creeping in behind me. No one looked up as I walked toward King Benny, the heels of my shoes scraping against the floor.
    “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I asked, standing across from him, on the far side of the bar, my back to the three men playing cards.
    King Benny looked up from his racing sheet and nodded. He reached out for his coffee, raised it to his lips, and took a slow sip, eyes still on me.
    “I would like to work for you,” I said. “Help you out, do whatever you need.”
    King Benny put the cup back on the bar and wiped his lower lip with two fingers. His eyes didn’t move.
    “I can be a lot of help to you,” I said. “You can count on that.”
    One of the men playing cards slid his chair back, stood up, and walked toward me.
    “You the butcher’s kid, am I right?” he asked, his three-day-old beard growing in