The Man with the Golden Arm
Page 2
‘No, that’s you,’ the dealer corrected him slowly.
It looked like a long night for Solly Saltskin. Not even Frankie Machine would guarantee him that the officers had only been joking.
‘There’s some things to kid about ’n some you ain’t s’pposed to, Frankie,’ the punk scolded him. ‘It’s a libel suit when you do. I could sue right now. I could sue you. You got me in here. Record Head was gettin’ me ready to make the street ’n you jammed the deal – false pertenses, that’s all you are.’ He threw a long looping left that Frankie caught in one hand, then scrubbed the punk’s wispy poll with it like a man fondling a mangy pup. If Sparrow had had a tail he would have wagged it then; if they’d been in the death house together he wouldn’t be too frightened so long as Frankie Machine was by.
To manhandle him fondly and get him into jams and then get him out again, just like that, the very next day.
‘If Schwiefka wasn’t always tryin’ to chisel on the aces we wouldn’t get tossed in the bucket so much,’ he confided in Frankie in the tone of one giving strictly inside information. ‘Bednar had Kvork pick us up just to show Schwiefka he’s a week behind wit’ the payoff.’ Then turned from the dealer, as the lockup went past rattling his keys, and in the same hoarse inside-info whisper: ‘Sssss – Pokey! You got this door locked good? We don’t want none of you crooked cops breakin’ in here tonight!’
The tranquil, square-faced, shagheaded little buffalo-eyed blond called Frankie Machine and the ruffled, jittery punk called Sparrow felt they were about as sharp as the next pair of hustlers. These walls, that had held them both before, had never held either long.
‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch,’ Frankie was fond of boasting of his nerveless hands and steady eye. ‘I never get nowheres but I pay my own fare all the way.’ Frankie was regular.
‘I’m a little offbalanced,’ Sparrow would tip the wink in that rasping whisper you could hear for half a city block, ‘but oney on one side. So don’t try offsteerin’ me, you might be tryin’ my good-balanced side. In which case I’d have to have the ward super deport you wit’ your top teet’ kicked out.’
For being regular got you in about as often as being offbalanced on one side. That was the way things were because that was how things had always been. Which was why they could never be any different. Neither God, war, nor the ward super work any deep change on West Division Street.
For here God and the ward super work hand in hand and neither moves without the other’s assent. God loans the super cunning and the super forwards a percentage of the grift on Sunday mornings. The super puts in the fix for all right-thinking hustlers and the Lord, in turn, puts in the fix for the super. For the super’s God is a hustler’s God; and as wise, in his way, as the God of the priests and the businessmen.
The hustlers’ Lord, too, protects His own: the super has been in office fourteen years without having a single bookie door nailed shut in his territory without his personal consent. No man can manage that without the help of heaven and the city’s finest precinct captains.
What’re you gonna do for Dunovatka
After what Dunovatka done for you?
the captains still sing together at ward meetings-
Are you goin’ to carry the preesint?
Are you goin’ to be true blue?
Offhand it might appear to be a policeman’s God who protects the super’s boys. Yet a hundred patrolmen, wagon men, and soft-clothes aces have come and gone their appointed ways while the super’s hustlers linger on, year after year, hustling the same scarred doors. They are in the Chief Hustler’s hand; they have been chosen.
The hustlers’ God watched over Frankie Machine too; He marked Sparrow’s occasional fall. He saw that both boys worked for Zero Schwiefka by night while the super himself gave them hot tips each day.
The only thing neither the super’s God nor the super was wise to was the hypo Frankie kept, among other souvenirs, at the bottom of a faded duffel bag in another veteran’s room. The barrel of a German Mauser and a rusting Kraut sword leaned out of the bag against the wall of Louie Fomorowski’s place above the Club Safari.
We all leave something of ourselves in other veterans’ rooms. We all keep certain souvenirs.
Sparrow himself had only the faintest sort of inkling that Frankie had brought home a duffel bag full of trouble. The little petit-larceny punk from Damen and Division and the dealer still got along like a couple playful pups. ‘He’s like me,’ Frankie explained, ‘never drinks. Unless he’s alone or with somebody.’
‘I don’t mind Frankie pertendin’ my neck is a pipe now ’n then,’ the child from nowhere admitted, ‘but I don’t like no copper john to pertend that way.’ For no matter how Frankie shoved him around the punk never forgot who protected him nightly at Zero Schwiefka’s.
Their friendship had kindled on a winter night two years before Pearl Harbor when Sparrow had first drifted, with that lost year’s first snow, out of a lightless, snow-banked alley onto a littered and lighted street. Frankie had found him huddled under a heap of Racing Forms in the woodshed behind Schwiefka’s after that night’s last deck had been boxed.
‘What you up to under there?’ Frankie wanted to know of the battered shoes protruding from the scattered forms. For this was the place where Schwiefka, urged by some inner insecurity, piled dated racing sheets. He never had it in him to throw a sheet away, pretending to himself that he was filing them here against a day when age would lend them value; as age had in no wise increased his own. Frankie used them, on the sly, for starting Schwiefka’s furnace; but advised the shoes severely: ‘Don’t you know this is Schwiefka’s filin’ cab’net?’
Sparrow sat up, groping blindly for his glasses gone astray somewhere among the frayed papers below his head. ‘I’m a lost-dog finder,’ he explained quickly, experience having taught him to assure all strangers, the moment one started questioning, that he was regularly employed.
‘I know that racket,’ Frankie warned him, trying to sound like a private eye, ‘but there ain’t no strays to steal in here. You tryin’ to steal wood?’ Frankie had been stealing an armload of Schwiefka’s kindling every weekday morning for almost two months and didn’t need help from any punk.
‘I got no place to sleep, Dealer,’ Sparrow had confessed, ‘my landlady got me locked out since the week before Christmas. I been steerin’ for Schwiefka all day ’n he told me I could sleep in here – but he ain’t paid me a cryin’ dime so it’s like I paid my way in, Dealer. It’s too cold to steal hounds, they’re all inside the houses. Some nights it gets so cold I wisht I was inside one too.’
Frankie studied the shivering punk. ‘Don’t shake,’ he commanded. ‘When you get the shakes in my business you’re through. Steady hand ’n steady eye is what does it.’ He handed him a half dollar.
‘Here. You’ll get a double case of pneumonia sleepin’ in here. Get a room by Kosciusko Hotel.’ N the next time Zero don’t pay you off come tell Frankie Machine. That’s me – the kid with the golden arm.’ He paused to brush back the shaggy mop of dark blond hair under his cap, squinting a bit with the weak right eye. ‘It’s all in the wrist ’n I got the touch – dice, stud or with a cue. I even beat the tubs a little ’cause that’s in the wrist too. Here – pick a card.’ Cold as he was, the punk had had to pick a card.
During the lonely months with Frankie overseas and Schwiefka trying to deal his own game, Sparrow alone, of that whole semicircle of 4-Fs, from Blind Pig to Drunkie John, had remembered that golden arm.
‘I’d be over there with the dealer right now,’ Sparrow had mourned quietly to himself those months, ‘if I just hadn’t got turned down for admittin’ I steal for a livin’.’
Frankie hadn’t troubled to write anyone until he began coming out of the fog into which an M.G. shell had put him: on his back in an evacuation hospital with a daylong aching from shrapnel buried in his liver for keeps. He’d gotten off a shaky V-mail telling Sophie he was coming home.
‘Guys who think they can rough me up, they wake up wit’ the cats lookin’ at ’em,’ he had immediately begun warning everyone. And spat to emphasize just how tough a Division Street punk could get.
He had looked forward to watching Frankie’s bag of corny card tricks once more. All the tricks of which he had never tired; as Frankie’s Sophie had so long ago tired of them all. As Frankie had so long ago tired of showing them to her; yet had never wearied of revealing them, the same ones over and over, for Sparrow’s ever-fresh amazement.
‘That’s one Hebe knows how bad it can get,’ Frankie sometimes explained their friendship obscurely, ‘knows how bad it can get ’n knows how good it can be. Knows the way it used to be ’n how it’s gettin’ now. I’d trust him with my sister all night. Provided, of course, she wasn’t carryin’ more than thirty-five cents.’
Frankie could never acknowledge that he squinted a bit. ‘If anythin’ was wrong with my peepers the army wouldn’t of took me,’ he argued, ‘the hand is quicker than the eye – ’n I got a very naked eye.’ Yet he sometimes failed to see a thing directly beneath that same very naked eye. ‘Where’s the bag?’ he would ask. ‘Under your nose, Dealer,’ someone would point out. ‘Well, there’s suppose to be six bucks in it,’ he’d explain as if that, somehow, were why he hadn’t seen it right away.
He squinted a bit now, in the cell’s dim light, with the ever-present deck in his hand. ‘I can control twenty-one cards,’ he boasted to Sparrow. ‘If you don’t believe me put your money where your mouth is. I’ll deal six hands ’n call every one in the dark. Name your hand. You want three kings? Okay, here we go, you get what you ask for. But watch out, punk – that hand beside you is flushin’ ’n that bird with nothin’ but an ace showin’ is gonna cop with three concealed bullets.’ And that’s how it would be whether he was showing off in a cell or in the back booth of Antek Witwicki’s Tug & Maul Bar.
‘I give a man a square shake till he tries a fast one or talks back to me,’ he warned the punk. To hear him tell it Frankie Machine was pretty mean. ‘When I go after a wise guy I don’t care who he is, how much he’s holdin’ – when you see me start pitchin’ ’em in, then you know the wise guy is gettin’ boxed.’ Sparrow nodded. He was the only hustler on Division Street who still believed there was anything tough about Frankie Machine. The times he had seen Frankie back down just didn’t count for Sparrow.
‘What you got to realize in dealin’ stud is that it’s just like drill in the army -’ n the dealer’s the drill sergeant. Everybody got to be in step ’n stay on their toes ’n there can’t be no back talk or you got no harmony left – I’m good with a cue because that’s in the wrist too. Used to get fifteen fish for an exhibition of six-no-count. No, they never put my picture on the wall but I lived off the stick three months all the same when the heat was on ’n that’s a lot of hustlers can say.’
It was more than Frankie could say too. He would have starved in those three months if it hadn’t been for Sophie’s pay checks. And although Sparrow was seldom allowed to forget, for long, what a mean job that of an army drill sergeant was, Frankie’s report was still hearsay: he’d put in thirty-six months without so much as earning a pfc’s stripe. Somehow the army had never quite realized what a machine he was with a deck.
(There were those who still thought he was called Machine because his name was Majcinek. But the real sports, the all-night boys, had called him Automatic Majcinek for years; till Louie Fomorowski had shortened that handle for him. Now, whether in the dealer’s slot, at the polls or on a police blotter, he was simply Frankie Machine.)
The bottom card squeaked as he dealt to Sparrow on the gray cell floor, and it irritated him that he couldn’t get a second off the bottom without hitting the card above. Though he never had sufficient nerve to deal from the bottom while in the dealer’s slot he liked to feel he had the knack as a symbol of his skill.
For he had the touch, and a golden arm. ‘Hold me up, Arm,’ he would plead, trying for a fifth pass with the first four still riding, kiss his rosary once for help with the faders sweating it out and zing – there it was, Little Joe or Phoebe, Big Dick or Eighter from Decatur, double trey the hard way and dice be nice – when you get a hunch bet a bunch – bet a dollar and then holler – make me five to keep me alive – it don’t mean a thing if it don’t cross that string – tell ’em where you got it and how easy it was.
When it grew too dark to read the spots on the cards Frankie pulled a tattered and wadded scratch sheet off his hip. ‘Took me ten years to learn this little honey – watch the lunch hooks now.’ Sparrow watched the long, sure fingers begin to weave swiftly and delicately. ‘Fifty operations in less than a minute,’ Frankie boasted – and there it was, a regular Sinatra jazzbow with collar attached out of nothing but yesterday’s scratch sheet. ‘If it was just silk you could put it on now,’ Sparrow saw with awe. ‘Why couldn’t you just turn ’em out all day, Dealer? Everybody in the patch’d buy one – there’s a fortune in it.’
‘I ain’t no businessman,’ Frankie explained, ‘I’m a hustler – now give me five odd numbers between one ’n ten that add up to thirty-two.’
Sparrow pretended to figure very hard, tracing meaningless numerals with his forefinger in the cell’s grayish dust until it was time for Frankie to show him how. Somehow Sparrow never seemed certain which were the odd and which the even numbers. ‘Mat’matics is on my offbalanced side,’ he allowed, ‘I make them dirty offslips.’
Yet he was as accurate as an adding machine in anticipating combinations in any alley crap game; he distinguished clearly between odd and even then – sometimes before they turned up. ‘Playin’ the field is one thing, solvin’ riddles is another,’ it seemed to Sparrow, and saw nothing unusual in the distinction. ‘It’s what they couldn’t figure in the draft, neither,’ he recalled. ‘I was either too smart or too goofy but they couldn’t tell which. It was why I had to get rejected for moral warpitude.’
Frankie was making a vertical row of three ones and a parallel row of two ones. Adding the first row, he got a total of three and, adding the second, a total of two: by the proximity of the two totals he had a total of thirty-two.
‘There’s somethin’ wrong somewheres, Frankie,’ Sparrow complained, sounding distressed. ‘You got my big eyes rollin’ ’n the lights goin’ on in my head – but if I just knew some good old long division I could put the finger on what’s wrong.’
‘Nothin’ wrong at all, Sparrow. Strictly on the legit – just the new way of doin’ things we have these days. Like the new way of makin’ ten extra bucks for you out of every hundred you got in the bank. This I wouldn’t show to nobody only you. Only me ’n the bankers know this one ’n they’re sweatin’ it out that the people’ll find out ’n have ’em all broke in a week. Swear you won’t tell?’
‘Saint take me away if I tell.’
‘No good. Swear a Hebe one.’
‘I don’t know no Hebe one, Dealer.’
No oath was necessary. He would have died before betraying the smallest of Frankie’s professional secrets. ‘Of course,’ Frankie warned him now, ‘in order to get away with this one you got to give up your interest – you willin’ to give up your interest?’
The question worried Sparrow. ‘Is it a Hebe bank ’r a Polak one, Frankie?’
‘What’s the diff?’
‘If it’s a Hebe one maybe I got a uncle workin’ there, he’ll just sneak me a fistful when the president ain’t peekin’.’
‘You got no uncle in this one,’ Frankie decided firmly. ‘In fact you got no uncle nowheres. You ain’t even got a mother.’
‘Maybe I got somebody in the old country, Frankie.’ Hopefully.
‘There ain’t none left in the o
ld country so quit stallin’ – you gonna take a chance or not? You can’t make this tenner ’n keep your interest too.’
‘Okay, Frankie. I’ll chance it.’
‘It’s just this simple, buddy-o.’ He began tearing tiny squares off the hand-fabricated jazzbow, each square representing ten dollars, until he was ready to make a hypothetical deposit of ten squares – thus with an account of one hundred dollars he pretended to withdraw that amount, then replaced it beginning with the last square he had withdrawn, in the old burlesque routine, so that by the time he had replaced the hundred he still retained one square in his hand. ‘And there’s your daily-double money ’n you still got your hundred in the bank,’ he announced triumphantly. ‘You can do it all day, they can’t stop you as long as the sign outside says the bank is open for business. It’s on the legit so they got to let you – that’s the new way of doin’ things we got these days.’
Sparrow removed his glasses, blew on them, put them back on and goggled dizzily, first at Frankie and then down at the make-believe money. It was hard to tell, when the punk goggled like that, whether he really didn’t understand or was just putting on the goof act to please Frankie. ‘Somethin’ wrong again,’ he complained, seemingly unable to put a finger on the trouble at all. Before he had time to gather his shocked wits Frankie had another sure-fire miracle working for him.
‘Here’s how you always pick up a couple bucks in a bowlin’ alley, Solly. You’re bowlin’ ’n you get a perfect split railroad – the seven ’n the ten pins. A guy offers you twenty to one you can’t pick it up. “I never seen it done my whole life,” he’ll tell you, “Wilman couldn’t pick it up.” He’ll even show you a record book where it says it ain’t been done in years. You tell him, “Put up ’r shut up.” So he puts up a double saw ’n you just stroll down the alley ’n pick ’em up with the lunch hooks. That’s all. Strictly on the legit.’
‘Is that in a Hebe bowlin’ alley ’r a Polak one?’