Immoral Certainty by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

keep it around after it’s full of snot?”
    Karp grinned. That was one of the reasons he liked Roland. Karp’s view of the human race had become fairly bleak by this time, but Roland made Karp look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “That’s a nice image, Roland,” he said. “But if you’re right, we might as well pack it in.”
    “He’s not right, Butch. In fact, it’s total bullshit,” said a gravelly voice from the other end of the table. Its source was a chunky, dark-jowled, greasy-locked, pop-eyed figure slouched back in his chair and looking like a heap of dirty laundry. He wore a lavender brocade tie with a knot the size of a jelly donut yanked down to the second button of his shirt. The shirt, a white-on-white silk job, was open at the collar, revealing a mat of dark hair like old Brillo.
    “Why is it bullshit, Guma?” asked Hrcany testily.
    “Because,” said Guma, “there is no fuckin’ way Harry Pick would be worried that Noodles would rat him out on this thing. Noodles is a stand-up guy.”
    Hrcany rolled his eyes. “Christ, Guma! You really believe that omerta shit? You really think that if we dragged that little mutt in and hit him with a felony murder rap he wouldn’t roll?”
    Guma placed his finger beside his nose and screwed his face into a reasonable likeness of a crafty Sicilian peasant’s, which did not, after all, require much screwing. “Cu’e orbu, bordu e taci campa cent’anni ’n paci,” he replied.
    “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It means, ‘He who is deaf, dumb, and blind will live a hundred years in peace.’ It’s like a motto, like ‘Better Living Through Chemistry.’ You better believe these guys take it seriously, especially Noodles.”
    Hrcany looked away in disgust, but Karp signalled Guma to go on. Guma said, “You know why they call him Little Noodles? He got the name in the joint—this was Sing Sing, so it was maybe twenty years ago, before they closed it down. Impellatti was the wheelman on the Baggia hit. You remember that, Art?” Devlin nodded and Guma continued, warming to his tale. He had been with the D.A. longer than anyone else in the room and had an encyclopedic memory.
    “What a mess! It was in the old Park Terrace Hotel at Thirty-fifth and Lex. There was a barbershop in the hotel with a window on the street. Al Baggia used to get shaved there every morning, get a little hot towel. Needless to say, given his line of work, he always had a couple of buttons sitting in the hallway leading to the shop. Anyway, Impellatti, he couldn’t of been more than about eighteen, whips this big Caddy up onto the sidewalk right up against the window of the barbershop and the shooter—who was Charlie Tonnatti, by the way—smokes Baggia with a shotgun. And they’re gone, boom!
    “So the cops pick up Frank and they take him over to the Fourteenth Precinct and they give him the business, and this was before Miranda was fuckin’ born, so they had no problems with really tearing into him. But no way could they get the name of the shooter out of him. The D.A., same shit—nothing! Then—boom! All of a sudden he confesses to being the gun. So he gets the max, nineteen years they sentence him and he don’t even blink. He’s in the can eleven years, not a word about the hit to anyone, and believe me they sent ringers in there to listen, too.
    “Oh yeah, about the name. There was a guy in the joint at the time, a huge hulk, looked like Primo Camera, but beefier and not as smart, name of Angie Lasagna. Frank hung out with him a lot, they kind of looked out for each other. So, naturally, because of his name they called Lasagna ‘Big Noodles’ and Frank was Little Noodles. Angie died a couple a years back, walked in front of a bus—”
    Karp broke in, “And the point is, Goom … ?”
    “The fuckin’ point is that no way is Harry Pick gonna waste Frank ’cause he’s worried he’s gonna rat. Not if Frank had to go over for fifty