Spyros Lambrou picked up the card. It read “Anthony Rizzoli—Import-Export.” There was an Athens hotel address and a telephone number at the bottom of the card.
Nikos Veritos had sat there wide-eyed, listening to the conversation. When Tony Rizzoli walked out the door he said, “Is he really…?”
“Yes. Mr. Rizzoli deals in heroin. If we ever let him use one of our ships, the government could put our whole fleet out of business.”
Tony Rizzoli walked out of Lambrou’s office in a fury. That fucking Greek treating me like I’m some peasant off the street! And how had he known about the drugs’? The shipment was an unusually large one, with a street value of at least ten million dollars. But the problem was in getting it to New York. The goddamned narcs are swarming all over Athens. I’ll have to make a phone call to Sicily and stall. Tony Rizzoli had never lost a shipment, and he did not intend to lose this one. He thought of himself as a born winner.
He had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York. Geographically, it was located in the middle of the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, and its northern and southern boundaries ran from Twenty-third to Fifty-ninth streets. But psychologically and emotionally, Hell’s Kitchen was a city within a city, an armed enclave. The streets were ruled by gangs. There were the Gophers, the Parlor Mob, the Gorillas, and the Rhodes gang. Murder contracts retailed at a hundred dollars, with mayhem a little less.
The occupants of Hell’s Kitchen lived in dirty tenements overrun by lice, rats, and roaches. There were no bathtubs, and the youths solved the shortage in their own way; they plunged naked into the water off the Hudson River docks, where the sewers from the Kitchen’s streets emptied into the river. The docks stank of the stagnant mass of dead, swollen cats and dogs.
The street scene provided an endless variety of action. A fire engine answering an alarm…a gang fight on one of the tenement roofs…a wedding procession…a stickball game on the sidewalk…a chase after a runaway horse…a shooting. The only playgrounds the children had were the streets, the tenement roofs, the rubbish-strewn vacant lots, and—in the summertime—the noisome waters of the river. And over everything, the acrid smell of poverty. That was the atmosphere in which Tony Rizzoli had grown up.
Tony Rizzoli’s earliest memory was of being knocked down and having his milk money stolen. He was seven years old. Older and bigger boys were a constant threat. The route to school was a no-man’s land, and the school itself was a battleground. By the time Rizzoli was fifteen years old he had developed a strong body and considerable skill as a fighter. He enjoyed fighting, and because he was good at it, it gave him a feeling of superiority. He and his friends put on boxing matches at Stillman’s Gym.
From time to time, some of the mobsters dropped in to keep an eye on the fighters they owned. Frank Costello appeared once or twice a month, along with Joe Adonis and Lucky Luciano. They were amused by the boxing matches that the youngsters put on, and as a form of diversion they began to bet on their fights. Tony Rizzoli was always the winner, and he quickly became a favorite of the mobsters.
One day while Rizzoli was changing in the locker room, the young boy overheard a conversation between Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano. “The kid’s a gold mine,” Luciano was saying. “I won five grand on him last week.”
“You going to put a bet on his fight with Lou Domenic?”
“Sure. I’m betting ten big ones.”
“What odds do you have to lay?”
“Ten-to-one. But what the hell? Rizzoli’s a shoo-in.”
Tony Rizzoli was not certain what the conversation meant. He went to his older brother, Gino, and told him about it.
“Jesus!” his brother exclaimed. “Those guys are bet-tin’ big money on you.”
“But why? I’m not a professional.”
Gino thought for a moment. “You’ve never lost a fight, have you, Tony?”
“No.”
“What probably happened is that they made a few small bets for kicks, and then when they saw what you could do they began betting for real.”