“Tell me how you know Max,” said Daisy to the judge. “Now there’s a brain! I daresay his books are touched with genius.”
“Some friends of Mr. Rothstein had the misfortune to appear before me in court not long ago. Mr. Stanwick asked to interview me about the matter, but of course professional ethics forbade my commenting on it.”
“ ‘Misfortune’?” cried Eddie. “I’d say they was pretty goddamned lucky to appear before you! ’Scuse my language, Duchess.”
“Nonetheless,” said Gilfoyle, struggling to continue. “I was very pleased to meet Mr. Stanwick. I count myself a great fan of his novels, particularly Ticker Rape.”
It was now the judge’s turn to apologize, for injuring Daisy’s ears with that scandalous title. To make amends, he took out a dollar and snapped his fingers for the girl with the tray of paper gardenias.
Daisy cooed while he pinned one on her. “I should think Mr. Rothstein will be very pleased with the piece Max has written. Of course, my professional ethics forbid me from showing you an advance copy of it.”
Eddie Diamond gave a thuggish snort over the word “piece.”
“It must be fascinating,” said the judge, “to produce a magazine about all that’s new and unusual in this hundred-mile-an-hour world of ours.”
Daisy’s comment on the excitement and responsibility involved in such an enterprise was cut short by the arrival at the table of a skinny, shaking man in a checked jacket who asked Eddie Diamond when Rothstein was supposed to get here tonight. He was immediately pushed away, more forcefully than Daisy could imagine being necessary. Eddie responded to the inquisitive look on her face. “Some fourth-rate crooner who needs dough to pay his bookie. A parasite.”
Embarrassed, Judge Gilfoyle explained to Daisy: “Mr. Rothstein often acts as a kind of banker for people unable to secure credit by more conventional means.” The explanation competed for her attention with a wave from a tall, lately retired ballplayer at a table near the front of the restaurant.
“Do you know him?” asked the judge.
“No,” said Daisy. “I suppose I remind him of someone.”
“You couldn’t possibly,” said the judge, taking advantage of Eddie Diamond’s current distraction by Leo Lindy himself, who had brought a pile of messages to the table. “You seem to me unique in all the world,” Gilfoyle told Daisy.
“Oh, Your Honor!” she said, while Eddie straightened the little pile of paper and set beside it an ashtray and a book of matches.
“That’s the ‘out’ basket,” he explained to Daisy. “The boss don’t like to keep a lot of files once he’s through with readin’ stuff.”
Over the next quarter-hour, during which a policeman clapped his hand on the judge’s back and a pockmarked lawyer came by the table to present his card, Daisy felt more and more certain that this poor, considerate magistrate was in over his head. The sweat pouring off his neck had begun to destroy his collar.
“Tell me about your late wife,” she said, sure Judge Gilfoyle would welcome a sentimental shift in his mental focus.
“Oh,” said the judge, immediately brighter. “My Charlotte was the most wonderful woman. A factory girl when I met her forty years ago, but anyone who knew her would swear she was a lady. Yes, Countess, a wonderful woman. We were never blessed with children, so she showered all her attention on me.”
“No more than you deserved, I’m sure,” said Daisy, whose own attention detected that the diners within a twenty-foot radius had fallen silent—over the arrival of three men who proceeded to sit down at her table. Judge Gilfoyle made the introductions. Arnold Rothstein—“The Brain,” “The Big Bankroll”—was accompanied by Mr. Fats Walsh, his bodyguard, and a thin, blond-haired associate named William Wellman. Rothstein appeared even paler than Daisy remembered his being last month; the brown eyes were heavily ringed with fatigue. But he was dressed exactly as Max Stanwick had described him for Bandbox, with an all-white, spun-silk muffler done in an Ascot knot. While The Brain scowled at the stack of messages, the judge whispered to Daisy that Wellman was the man who had recommended the ill-starred Juniper Park venture.
“It’s nice to see you again,” Rothstein said to Daisy, remembering his manners and last month’s foot massage.
Daisy’s eyes went to bat, more for the judge’s sake than her own. “Mr. Rothstein, I understand that you’re camera-shy, but you really should have let my magazine shoot you wearing that muffler.”
“Lady,” said Eddie Diamond. “Never say ‘shoot’ around Mr. Rothstein.” He hacked his way through another guffaw; an awkward silence followed.
Wellman eventually broke it. “I’ve been showing Mr. Rothstein the auto-racing track we’re starting to build near the development in Queens.”
Daisy, a natural encourager, nodded brightly.
“Yes,” said Rothstein, cutting Wellman off. “The track goes round and round, just like the rest of the project.” He then drilled the judge with a look that was all business. “I may soon be needing your—what shall we call it?” he said, glancing at Daisy with some wariness before he found the word. “Expertise.”
Gilfoyle smiled nervously.
Daisy took the jurist’s hand and made a last attempt to lighten the mood. “It’s delightful seeing a bit more of your world, Mr. Rothstein. But isn’t it time I showed you a little of mine? My magazine is hosting a party tomorrow evening, and I’d like to invite all of you gentlemen to come by.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Diamond and Mr. Wellman and myself will have some business obligations to attend to,” said Rothstein, “but I’m sure the judge’ll be delighted to go.” The Brain came the closest he had to smiling when he noticed the look of pleasure now invading Gilfoyle’s sagging features. “In fact,” added Rothstein, putting a match to the message he’d just read, “I’m going to let him see you home now, Countess.”
16
Instead of asking for the Warwick Hotel, Betty told the cabdriver to take her the handful of blocks between the Forty-eighth Street Theatre and Malocchio. She’d left Cock Robin at intermission, upon realizing she’d missed half the dialogue and still figured out the rest of the plot. She was more than eager to go home, but had decided, having seen the same sheet of GME ad figures, to check up on Joe.
Arriving at Gianni Roma’s detestable little bistro, she found Joe still in full swing, recounting the morning’s victory over Jimmy to the small group of staff he’d shanghaied here hours ago. Gianni was on his way to get Betty a small plate of spaghetti alla vongole, her usual, before Joe even noticed she was there. “Hey, sweetie!” he finally said, his features in a visible war between pleasure and disappointment. Only Spilkes, on his right, betrayed unalloyed relief: Betty’s supervision would mean a shorter night and the chance to catch a late train back to Connecticut.
“And you honestly think Houlihan accomplished this miracle?” asked David Fine, for the second time.
“Does it make a difference?” asked Harris.
Paul Montgomery, gathering that “no” was the right answer, vigorously said the word. Spilkes also shook his head in the negative.
“What a cover that’s going to be!” said Paul Montgomery, toasting the air with his water glass. “Rosemary LaRoche! Jimmy’s going to be green.”
Green with money, thought Spilkes, if the ads kept moving in Cutaway’s direction. He looked at his watch and pressed upon the heartburn above his solar plexus, wishing among other things that Harris would get Montgomery out of town on another assignment as soon as possible. The managing editor could never take more than a couple of days of Paulie around the office, peeing all over the carpet like some exuberant puppy.
“There’s plenty more great stuff in the pipeline,” said Harris. “As soon as dawn breaks, Arinopoulos will be down on Wall Street shooting our bull and bear.”
“You still haven’t told us who’s writing the text for that,” said Spilkes, remembering to grin in tribute to the chief’s slyness. “The lineup sheet still just has ‘tk’ fo
r the scribe.”
“You’ll see,” said Harris, leaning back and putting his arm around Betty. He scanned Fine and Montgomery’s faces for signs of competitive anxiety. He knew how to keep his men on their game, and thanks to this morning’s triumph over Jimmy, he was feeling very much on his own.
Giovanni Roma poured Betty some coffee and interjected a question: “So is Lindstrom gonna ride-a your bull?”
Harris answered: “Uh, we’re going to give Waldo a rest after the last couple of days he’s had.”
“Good!” said Roma, flourishing the silver pot. “We like Waldo well rested.”
“Gianni,” said Harris, tugging the maître d’s white towel. “Get us some grappa.”
“Joe,” warned Betty, “you’ve got another late night tomorrow.”
“I do?”
“The bash for the fiction-contest winner,” Spilkes informed him.
“Oh, right,” said Harris. The affair had gotten bigger every year; this time Oldcastle was throwing open his own penthouse for it. “What you don’t know is I’ve also got a big morning. Get the grappa, Gianni.”
Betty, disgusted, removed Joe’s arm from her shoulder.
He leaned back into the table. “Now let me tell you about this dame LaRoche,” said Harris, forgetting he’d already apprised the males, at considerable length, of his lunch with the actress.
“I’m all ears,” said Betty.
Harris’s face froze. Exercising his gift for quick, strategic retreat, he said, gravely, “We’re going to have to photograph her pretty carefully. She’s not nearly the knockout I’d have guessed.”
“If you drink the grappa,” Betty pointed out, “you’re not going to be able to keep lying this well.”
The sound of a waiter’s knuckles rapping sharply on the window above the checkered café curtains quieted the table. “A gawker,” he explained, apologetically, when heads turned. The diners could see, through the glass, a sweet-faced, frightened-looking young man already beating a retreat to the other side of Fiftieth Street.
But just as quickly, Giovanni Roma headed out the door after him, scolding the waiter as he rushed past: “You never know whose son that might be!” Within thirty seconds, the boy was inside and getting warmed up in the vestibule.
The Bandbox party had already resumed listening to Harris’s revised estimate of Rosemary LaRoche’s looks, when Roma brought the pink-cheeked boy over to their table. “Mista Harris, I think you shoulda meet a very important subscriber. This here is—say your name again, bambino—from Greenpoint, Illinois.”
“Greencastle, Indiana, actually,” said the boy, scarcely believing the sound of his own voice, in here of all places. “My name’s John Shepard.”
“Hey, kid,” said Harris.
Betty could see the boy’s knees knocking. “Gianni, get the young man a chair. This is Mr. Spilkes, Mr. Fine, Mr. Montgomery. I’m Miss Divine. Sit down, sweetheart.”
Harris was generally baffled by anyone between birth and twenty, and didn’t relish turning the rest of his evening into some kind of kid’s birthday party, but he could see Betty regarding the boy with a maternal gaze she ordinarily reserved for Mukluk, who had been delivered home to the Warwick hours ago by private car.
“John,” asked Spilkes, “what is it you like about the magazine?”
Harris intervened: “Norman, let the kid drink some coffee before you turn him into a one-man customer cluster.”
But Spilkes’s question worked magic. John Shepard’s jaw unlocked to pour forth a flood of consumer approval: “I must have read the January issue four times on the train! Mr. Fine, I loved what you wrote about that restaurant with the shish-kebab swordfights. I felt like I was in Constantinople!”
“His expense report looked like he’d been in Constantinople!” said Harris. “Where was that place?”
“Ho-Ho-Kus,” said Fine, who was thinking this was one smart kid who’d come in the door.
“I missed seeing you in this issue, Mr. Montgomery, but I thought that article you did last month on the family of acrobats was completely swell. Especially the part at the end where the one who was paralyzed got all choked up saying goodbye to you—”
“Sorry about this month, John,” said Paul, reaching into his pocket for one of the dozen Ty Cobb autographs he’d brought back. “Maybe this’ll explain—and make up for—my absence.”
“Tell me, kid,” said Harris, waiting for the boy’s mouth to close. “Do you ever read Cutaway?”
“I don’t think you can get it in Greencastle,” John Shepard replied, hoping the answer didn’t make him seem like a rube.
“Gianni, get this kid a plate of your best veal!” cried Harris.
John, however overwhelmed, remained polite enough to turn to Miss Divine and say, “My sister always reads Pinafore.”
“Gianni, get this boy a piece of cake,” said Betty, glad the compliment had gone into her good ear. “Now, John, tell us where you’ve been today.”
Before any of the food arrived, John Shepard downed several warm, and entirely unfamiliar, gulps of grappa, which caused him to narrate his adventures in a single loquacious rush. His dinner companions—companions!—were soon aware of everything that had happened to him aboard the Cleveland Limited, where he’d gotten no more than a couple of hours’ sleep sitting up in the club car. They also learned how he’d found himself a room for a couple of nights at the Railroad YMCA, which he couldn’t believe was actually on Park Avenue, because he knew all about Park Avenue, whereas the average person in Greencastle, even a professor like his father, still thought all the fancy people in New York lived on Fifth Avenue.
Harris and Betty and the rest of the table further learned about the hour John had just spent walking through Times Square, looking for the neon sign of the kitten with the spool of thread, which he’d seen pictures of but guessed must now be gone. He’d lost count of all the jewelry merchants and costume repairers and joke sellers whose windows he’d gone past—never mind the theatres!—before figuring out that New York, if you wanted to get a real idea of it, was better off seen from a distance than close up. So he’d ascended to the observation deck in the Shelton Hotel over on Lexington (he deliberately didn’t say “Avenue,” just “Lexington,” so he’d sound more like a native), and he’d seen the whole metropolis spread out before him. Less than an hour ago he’d been floating high above the streets, and now here he was down in the thick of things in a way he couldn’t have dreamed about! Except he had dreamed about it—a scene just like this—while he’d slept sitting up inside the Cleveland Limited.
Before long, in the presence of so much talkative innocence, Harris felt ready to call it a night. “Kid, why don’t you come by the office tomorrow? We’ll show you around.”
“Really?” said John, gaping again, despite the speedy regularity with which these treats were coming.
“Sure,” said Harris, getting up from the table. “Welcome to New York. I’m sure there’re big things in store for you.”
No one at the table had interrupted John’s excited narrative to ask why he had come to the city, or what circumstances had preceded his departure from Indiana. It was, to these diners, a simple given that everywhere else was a place you left, that each person arrived in Manhattan like an appliance ready to be taken out of its box and plugged in. This nice boy was just one more shiny creature off destiny’s assembly line.
There was another set of eyes peering into the restaurant’s windows, with more accomplished stealth than John’s had been able to practice. Ever since quitting time, Chip Brzezinski had been pacing Midtown, dogged by Jimmy Gordon’s breakfast warning that Cutaway would lose interest in him if his next bit of sabotage didn’t pan out. Looking obliquely through the glass, Chip was now wondering what truck this turnip had fallen off of, and why he was sitting at that table like he’d just made his First fucking Communion. Was the kid part of some new stunt by Harris? “Bandbox Junior”? A new feature, or maybe a whole new supplement? Chip mad
e a note of the little fellow’s kisser—so ripe for a pasting—before turning up his collar and heading into the night.
17
“Where are the goddamned HORNS?” shouted Gardiner Arinopoulos, rubbing his hands in the predawn cold.
The truck driver, standing in the gutter of Wall Street behind the live cargo he’d started to unload, looked from the photographer to the animal and back again. “What horns?” he asked. “He’s a Black Angus.”
“I ASKED for a bull! What KIND of bull has no horns?”
“The Black Angus kind,” said the driver.
“Oh, Christ. SHEA!”
The photographer’s assistant was standing beside a second, smaller, truck parked in front of the Subtreasury Building. He walked over to his boss.
“How are we GOING to get horns on this thing?” cried Arinopoulos—who soon had a brainstorm. “Get into a taxi and GO up to the studio. There’s that pair of skinny megaphones STANDING in the corner. You know where I’m talking ABOUT? Strap them together and BRING them down here. Instantly!”
“What about the koala?” asked Shea, pointing to the smaller truck.
“I’LL watch the fucking bear,” the photographer declared. “And YOU stay HERE,” he ordered the driver of the Angus.
Looking a few feet down the sidewalk, Arinopoulos could already make out the time on the Seth Thomas clock that stood like a solemn lollipop on the sidewalk. Real daylight would arrive within fifteen minutes. After that he’d have perhaps another fifteen to get his picture, before the street’s eager beavers started showing up to open their offices and get in his artistic way. So the moment Shea commenced his northward dash Arinopoulos began setting up his camera.
He took no notice of the young man standing across the street. About an hour ago, Allen Case, a cap pulled low across his face, had taken up position between two deep scars on the façade of the J. P Morgan Building. These reminders of the 1920 anarchist attack had prompted Allen to look over at the now-famous spot where the bay horse got blown to bits by a bomb inside the wagon it had been forced to pull. It might be too late to save that poor creature, but it wasn’t too late to save the koala, somewhere inside that second truck, from indignity, and worse.
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