The Secret by Harold Robbins Page A

Judaism, and you don’t need to practice it, but you are a Jew. Look at your pecker. The God of Israel commanded us to cut off our foreskins, which we do because we were so commanded. Many Christians do it, too, but they don’t have our excuse.”
    Then he handed me a slender book: the annual report of Cheeks, a Partnership. I had no idea how to read a balance sheet or a profit-and-loss statement, but even to me it was apparent that I was scanning the report of a highly profitable business.
    He left me alone with it for half an hour, then came to me and asked, “Have you ever heard of Cheeks stores? Your mother and I built the business together. We don’t compete, exactly, with Victoria’s Secret or with Frederick’s of Hollywood, but we sell a daring line of merchandise to daring customers.”
    “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Of course.”
    “Do Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky have anything to do with your business?”
    “I take your point,” my father said. “The answer is no. Those two men have helped me, mostly by giving me valuable advice. If you are asking me if I am involved in Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, that sort of thing, the answer is definitely no.”
    I nodded—skeptically, I am afraid.
    “I’ve known gangsters, Len,” my father said soberly. “Albert Anastasia, called The Executioner, who was murdered. Crazy Joey Gallo, who was murdered. When you start a new business in this city, you meet these people. You have to come to terms with them. I’ve come to terms with them. I might have been found floating facedown under a dock, otherwise. But I never joined them.”
    I nodded. I glanced at the numbers he had shown me. I remembered the private plane named Cheeks. I had to say something. I didn’t know my father very well yet. But I was unable to believe my mother could have been involved in anything that involved the men my father said he wasn’t involved with.
    I’d met Sal Nero, but knew nothing about him.
    To me, he was Uncle Sal—though my father told me he was really Solomon Schwartz and as much a Jew as we were. He had a wife and children, but he was divorced as I recall, and his children were grown and saw him seldom.
    I would hear many stories about Sal Nero as the years passed by, but I did doubt and do doubt that many of them were true.
    He took an interest in his partner’s son—me—and when I was at home he would take me to baseball games. I suppose I went to half a dozen Yankees games with Uncle Sal. Usually his girlfriend, Truda, went with us. Always, we had box seats on the first-base line.
    One evening I will never forget. Sal wrote a note and handed it to an usher with a twenty-dollar bill. In a few minutes a baseball player appeared just outside our box and greeted Sal with a hearty hello.
    “Hey, ol’ buddy,” said Sal. “Meet Len Cooper, son of my business partner.”
    I stretched out over the fence and shook hands with the player, Number 15, whom I could not identify. I had no idea who he was.
    “Thought you might sign a ball for my little buddy,” said Sal.
    “Sure thing,” said the baseball player. He summoned a bat boy and got from him a brand-new baseball. He scribbled on it and handed it to me.
    The player saluted and returned to the field.
    I read what he had written on the ball:
    To Len with best wishes—Thurman Munson
    I still didn’t know who Thurman Munson was, and had to look it up when I got home. He was the catcher for the New York Yankees—and a very big baseball star. He had less than twelve months to live when he signed the baseball I now display inside a Lucite box. He was killed in the crash of an airplane he was flying, in Canton, Ohio, the next year.
    So … that’s the kind of guy Uncle Sal was. He was a guy who could walk into Yankee Stadium and call one of its all-time great players to come to his box and sign a baseball for a kid who didn’t know who he was.

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    When I was at Amherst and Yale I was conscious of my father’s fortune