The Numbers Man

The Numbers Man, by David J. Gerrity

May, 1977  Signet Books

The “Cordolini trilogy” by David Gerrity wraps up with this novel, which was published two years after the first volume (hard to believe I reviewed that one over ten years ago!). As with the other two books it’s a slim paperback, coming in at 153 pages, and as with The Plastic Man most of the running time is given over to Mafia types bickering and bantering with each other, with “series protagonist” Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini essentially reduced to a walk-on role. 

The action occurs about a month after The Plastic Man. Gerritty does not seem to have any grand intentions in mind and I get the impression he was turning this book out solely because the first two sold, and accordingly he wings his way through the narrative. The Numbers Man is dull and unnecessary, and doesn’t even have an eleventh-hour twist like The Plastic Man did to liven things up. Given that a lot of the dialog either recaps what happened in previous volumes or is given over to random musings on the life of a Mafia thug, my assumption is that Gerritty’s heart wasn’t in this one. Also my assumption is that Signet wanted more “Mafia” books, so Gerrity was catering to the publisher to make a sale, or hell maybe he just wanted to write a third novel so he could have a “trilogy.” 

The only problem is, The Never Contract told the complete story; the second and third volumes kind of just spin their wheels, dwelling on the ramifications of that first book. The Never Contract established Frank “The Wolf” Cordolini as an almost mythical character in the Mafia, a killer who went after the Family and got his revenge. In The Plastic Man, Cordolini was shuffled off to the side, with even major incidents – like his starting a family after the events of the first book, and then losing them to the Mafia – given short narrative shrift. The Numbers Man goes one better, by killing Cordolini himself in the opening pages! 

But then, even someone entirely new to the trilogy will doubt Cordolini’s truly dead. As it is, we get a harried opening sequence in which some Mafia thugs ambush Cordolini’s car in upstate New York, blasting it and sending car and driver into a lake, where the car submerges, with Cordolini’s body conveniently inside. Apparently this is like a few weeks after The Plastic Man. From here The Numbers Man turns into an oddball book in which a bunch of low-level mobsters shoot the shit and plot against each other while a mysterious figure begins to sow trouble between two families in New York City. 

This figure first shows up as a cop, and later as a mailman. The title of the book refers to a particular incident in which the mysterious figure hits a numbers operation that is run by one of the families. The curious thing is that these action scenes are over and done with in the span of a few paragraphs, but Gerrity will spend pages and pages on one-off mobsters discussing the events that transpired. The two characters who most rise to the surface are Don Albert, presumably returning from the previous volume(s), who is consigned to an iron lung thanks to traumatic injuries he suffered in Cordolini’s attack at the denoument of The Plastic Man, and Mike Sachetto, a goombah with designs on becoming a don himself. 

There is (are?) a plethora of Italian names to keep track of in the novel, and as if doubling down on it Gerrity even makes the sole non-Mafia character in the novel an Italian, too! He’s a cop and his name is Gino Coletti, and given that Gerrity most often refers to him as “Coletti,” I kept misreading his name as “Cordolini.” Not only that, but Gerrity has doubled down on “C” names, as if intentionally making it hard for his readers to keep track of who is who. Seriously, we have Cordolini, Coletti, Colmo, and a guy named Cookie. What, no Cobretti? Also I should mention here that there isn’t a female character in the novel, other than the hapless wife of one of the thugs, who appears for a page or two. 

I don’t exaggerate when I say that a lot of The Numbers Man is given over to dialog. There’s even a lot of stuff with Coletti shooting the shit with his partner, particularly over Coletti’s frustration with how the Mafia gives Italian-Americans a bad name. Meanwhile everyone tries to figure out who is honing in on Don Albert’s operation, and the reader will have figured out long ago that it is indeed Cordolini; no spoiler, as one of the mobsters figures this out early on, though he’s not believed. I did find it humorous how all these mobsters kept insisting that Cordolini was killed in that upstate New York ambush, even though his body was never found and also because “The Wolf” was, you know, a friggin’ legend in the Mafia, so you’d think these people would be a little more willing to suspect he faked his death. 

And on page 75 we learn this is indeed what happened, as Cordolini is introduced to us in the narrative without much fanfare, sitting in an apartment in Brookyln and planning his next hit. He was in fact the fake cop and fake mailman, and his goal is to start an internecine war to wipe out the two New York families. We only have a cursory reminder of his war on the Mafia, started for real when they killed his wife and son, but just like last time Cordolini’s off-page more often than not. In The Never Contract David Gerrity established that Frank Cordolini was more myth than man, so apparently Gerrity’s goal was to follow through on that in the narrative itself, with Cordolini more of a shadowy figure than a protagonist the reader can root for. The problem is Cordolini is too aloof and distant from the reader. 

Even more of a problem is that this leaves the heavy narrative lifting to one-off characters, same as in The Plastic Man. And given that they all turn into a bland retread of each other, The Numbers Man quickly becomes a chore of a read. Gerrity introduces so many characters that he seems to lose sight of them; one major character dies in the final pages almost anticlimactically. And speaking of which, the “climax” itself is almost an afterthought, a quick shootout on 57th Street in Brooklyn. 

Gerrity leaves Don Albert’s comeuppance off-page, but The Numbers Man ends on a nicely-handled scene in which the don’s fate is clearly implied. But curiously the door is left open for future tales of Frank Cordolini, as by novel’s end he has more money in his pocket thanks to hitting more numbers operations, and he still has a score to settle with the mob. But this was it for Cordolini, and I believe this was it for David Gerrity’s writing career, as I don’t believe he published anything else after this one…but then, The Numbers Man seems clear enough indication that the well had run dry.