by Don Swaim
“A man’s only as old as the woman he feels,” he replied. “In fact, I was telling Ruth the other day that I wished she’d keep my hands to herself.”
Ruth was a former chorus girl, now Groucho’s wife.
“And how is Ruth?” I asked.
“She talks a lot. I’ve always thought that women should be obscene and not heard.”
“Domestic problems?”
“You can say that again. When she accused me of kissing the maid, I told her I was just whispering in her mouth.” Groucho took a bow. “Gentlemen, I’ve had a wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”
I had heard all of Groucho’s jokes before, but every time he told them again they were just as funny. After Groucho made his exit, Ira, concerned look on his face, spoke to me in low tones.
“Tokol, you’re not going to endanger George and me, are you?”
“Nothing like that, Ira. I just need to lay low.”
“Have you read about this Murder Incorporated? What about Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson—and those dreadful Italians who are in something called the Mafia? And that awful Meyer Lansky. I went to shul with him!”
“Nothing like that. Just someone with a personal grievance. I’ll see to it nothing happens to you and George.”
“We’re about to move to Hollywood, the two of us. George is going to write scores for the movies. He’s got years and years of music in his head.”
As I tossed and turned on Ira’s sofa overnight, the words to “Someone to Watch Over Me” kept floating through my brain. Who wrote that song anyway?
I needed weaponry, so the following morning I thought of Gagliano’s Pawnshop in East Harlem. The shop was legit. Almost.
I left the Gershwins’ building heavily disguised, thanks to doorman Frank, who gave me his extra uniform, hat, and eyeglasses. Peeking into the lobby mirror after pasting my trusty auxiliary mustache on my upper lip, I saw that I resembled a cast member in the H.M.S Pinafore.
Pawnbrokers, evidenced by the three gold balls dangling over their doors, have a noble history dating to fifth-century China. But Gaetano Gagliano’s on East 105th was more than a lending service for desperate Depression victims needing quick cash. The unassuming Gaetano, balding, glasses thick as Mason jars, was a powerful sub-boss in the Luciano Crime Family, which had Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Jersey in the palm of its black hand.
He and I had a past. During the Castellammarese Wars, I saved his life, a mere trifle on my part and not worth describing here, but Gaetano had never forgotten. In my business, it was useful to have pals on both sides of the law.
Better than a bank, Gaetano also offered an excellent dirty-money laundry service.
When I entered his shop—cluttered with Victrolas, Kodaks, ukuleles, René Lalique stemware, Shirley Temple dolls, a baseball bat signed by Lou Gehrig, and a trumpet once owned by Bunny Berigan—he didn’t recognize me at first.
“Ciao, Tokol. In that uniform you look like an admiral about to go down with his ship.”
“Gotta watch my ass, Gaetano, if you catch my drift.”
“I’ve been there, amico. What’s on your mind? Say, I got this twenty-four karat gold ring that just came in. Only worn for an hour. She’s a beauty. Perfect for that lady of yours. It’s yours for a song. In fact, it’s yours without a song.”
“I need a small arsenal, something I can carry in, say, that alligator-hide suitcase over there.”
“Follow me.”
He led me to the cellar where he unbolted a sliding door to reveal an impressive armory.
“Just got a new shipment of these Thompson model 1921A SMGs with fifty-round drums and unlimited .45 ACP cartridges, plus optional violin cases with velvet linings.”
“Perfect.”
He also had Colt M1911.45 semi-automatics, Browning automatic rifles, 12-gauge sawed-off and pump-action shotguns, Smith and Wesson .38 specials, even those cute little Colt Police Positive short .32s for close-up work. As well as German stick grenades and Mills fragmentation No. 23 bombs left over from the Great War.
I filled the alligator.
“Arrivederci, amico,” he said. “You got my number.”
I left Gaetano’s confident I had enough firepower to get me through.
At a corner phone booth I dialed Diana’s BUtterfield 8 number, but it wasn’t her who answered.
Said the voice on the far end, “Diana’s not available, Tokol. Mind if I call you that? It’s how you refer to yourself these days, is it not?”
The Man With Two Faces.
“I’ve been looking all over town for you,” he said.
“Where’s Diana, dammit?”
“Safe enough. Had to give her pet king cobra some knockout drops, however.”
“How did you find her?”
“A little arm twisting here, leg twisting there. Besides, who but you would call your business Tokoloshe and Son—and all that infers? It’s listed in the phone book, for Christ’s sake. If you had used your given name you couldn’t have revealed yourself better.”
“So you put two and two together and came up with me.”
“Did you forget we were in Africa together? And that memorable night in Macau…”
“Okay, you win, you bastard. What exactly do you want?”
“You, of course. You took something of irreplaceable value from me. Diana goes free when I have you. An even exchange.”
“Where?”
“The Glad Tidings Tabernacle on West Thirty-third Street. It’ll have a nice crowd. Aimee Semple McPherson has brought her Foursquare Gospel revival to New York, and the faithful are clamoring to be led to Jesus. My associates and I will be among the throng, along with your Diana. As soon as you step forward after answering Sister McPherson’s call to be saved, we’ll snatch you and release her.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll have you exactly where I want you.”
Diabolical. I’d be surrounded by assassins in a house of worship.
While Aimee preached to the devout, penned pious sermons, and composed sacred hymns, she was also an oft-married, goodtime gal who wore flashy dresses, fox furs, and made the society pages. Patronizing speakeasies and nightclubs, Aimee drank only water—she claimed. Who would dispute such a cute apostle of the Lord?
However, I knew something Janus didn’t.
I was intimately acquainted with America’s most famous radio evangelist.
We had been lovers.
It happened when I was on a secret assignment to Los Angeles. Aimee and I fell into a romantic entanglement we imagined was love. Abruptly, she abandoned her Pentecostal notions, I my paganism, and we secretly eloped to an adobe shack in the Arizona desert. There we sated our voracious appetites, performing acts no god worth his salt would approve of, assuming gods have salt.
It was presumed Aimee had drowned while swimming at Venice Beach—until phony ransom demands started pouring in. Suspicions arose.
Five weeks after her disappearance, she returned to her Angelus Temple in Echo Park with a murky cover story that she’d been chloroformed by a mysterious couple called Steve and Rose. Somehow she escaped her kidnappers and walked twenty miles across the blistering desert to safety.
In truth, she and I had decided that lust was not love, so we called it fini. I dropped her off at a phone booth in Douglas.
After all the years, however, we remained chummy.
Aimee’s gospel road shows were avidly attended, and The Glad Tidings Tabernacle overflowed with the unswerving faithful. Thousands wanting a direct line to the Big Guy Upstairs were turned away, and the cops had to cordon off the streets to contain the hordes.
I entered the edifice through the back in the guise of a uniformed fire marshal there to enforce the safety rules. Through a peephole near the organist I could observe both stage and audience, but the place was so packed, I couldn’t spot Diana or The Man With Two Faces. But they were there someplace.
The revival was being broa
dcast on a nationwide hookup by Aimee’s Los Angeles station KFSG. As always, she began by speaking in tongues, the indecipherable glossolalia all believers knew were the very utterances of God, although not even the most righteous understood what the hell her words meant—or if they were words.
Then, in her plain Canadian English, Sister Aimee said into her microphone, “Brothers and sisters, it’s now the moment for those who have not found Christ to step forward and be saved.”
Instantly, hundreds of worshipers rose, only to be held back by Aimee’s deputies brandishing billy clubs.
“I shall recite the name of the first to come forth and discover the Lord. I call on… Diana Dryad.”
A murmur from the crowd.
“Is Diana Dryad in the congregation?”
“I’m here, Sister Aimee! Blessed Mother of God.”
Wedged between two hulking gorillas rose a diminutive woman garbed in black with a hood that all but hid her face.
“Advance, Diana Dryad, and lead the others who wish to be saved. Praise Jesus.”
Diana wriggled from the grasp of the befuddled stooges and led the believers, surging, to the pulpit, where she repented, was sprinkled with holy water, blessed by Sister Aimee, found the Lord, and most important fell into my red-uniformed arms.
Janus had been foiled again.
And I never fired a shot.
Diana and I made our escape in a waiting hook and ladder, and flew in a double-winged Curtiss Goshawk to the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel in Asbury Park. There we registered under assumed names to chart our next move.
Diana needed to do one thing, however. Phone her staff to tell them to feed her king cobra. When Kyle got cranky without his daily ration of mouse, toad, and canary no one was safe, particularly radio script writers.
Over a breakfast of Wheaties and Champagne, she said to me, “When we get to the Bowl for the Baer-Carnera fight—”
“We?”
“After all this, you don’t think I’m going to let you go alone, do you? The arena holds tens of thousands. How can you possibly find The Man With Two Faces by yourself?”
“I know each of his faces better than my own. There’s a good side and a bad side, and both are indelibly etched into my brain.”
“But—”
“In any event, he’ll be at ringside while I’ll have a vantage point from in the ring.”
“You mean—”
“Yeah, dollface, I’ll be Max Baer’s second cornerman.”
I knew how to pull strings, one of which was attached to a certain La Cosa Nostra sub-boss in East Harlem with connections.
The open-air Madison Square Garden Bowl was a sprawling mess of an arena at Long Island Boulevard and 48th. It was built on the cheap with sagging, splintery bleachers and a lingering odor of fumes from the regular midget auto races. There was nothing lovely about it, but boxing wasn’t lovely either.
Heavyweight champ Primo Carnera was six-feet-six inches, two hundred seventy-five pounds. Born in Italy, he consumed for breakfast a quart of juice, two quarts of milk, twenty pieces of toast, fifteen eggs, a loaf of bread, and half a pound of Virginia ham. The year before, he killed Erie Schaff in the ring.
Happy-go-lucky contender Max Baer was six-feet-two inches, two hundred twenty-one pounds. Born in Nebraska, he took the mail-order Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. Four years earlier he killed Frankie Campbell in the ring.
At the weigh-in, Max plucked hairs from Primo’s chest while reciting, “He loves me, he loves me not.”
The Clown Prince amused everybody but those he slugged.
Disguised as a has-been, broken-down palooka, with a paste-on flattened nose and stick-on cauliflower ears, I took seriously my role as one of Max’s cornerman. But even as I tended to my duties in the ring, armed-packed case at my side, my eyes swept the bleachers for The Man With Two Faces.
So far, no go.
But I spotted Diana, who gave me a thumbs up. She was seated next to her chum Edward, Prince of Wales, and his galpal Wallis Warfield, both disguised as hick tourists from Iowa.
Near ringside flitted a cigar-chewing, casual pal of mine toting a huge Speed Graphic. Weegee worked as a darkroom technician for ACME Newspictures, but was hoping to make it big as a tabloid crime photographer. For Weegee there was no such thing as too much gore.
And there was the panhandling Bohemian poet Max Bodenheim and his wife Minna. Never thought I’d ever see Max at a boxing match. How the hell did he even afford a ticket? I liked his poem about Death’s voice being like jewels dropped into a satin bag—but it didn’t pay the rent. I should have staked him to the bout, but, well, you get busy trying to avoid getting killed.
Despite his more than fifty-pound disadvantage, Max came out slugging in the first round, decking the champ with a hard right, then a series of punches that downed Primo twice more. At the bell, Carnera was so groggy he didn’t know which quarter of the ring was his.
I placed Max’s stool in his corner, cleaned his mouthpiece, held up his spit bucket, and put an icepack on his neck.
And then I saw him, The Man With Two Faces, sitting close to ringside
Assuming he’d be surrounded by his goons, I figured a little collateral damage wouldn’t be a bad thing. I could open fire and in the panic and confusion make it to safety. As I was about to unlatch the suitcase and let fly with my Chicago organ grinder, I realized Janus was seated with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, reformer Samuel Seabury, Postmaster General James Farley, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. I couldn’t fire at Janus without taking out the cream of the New Deal.
Damn.
I had to bide my time.
Max tried to finish Primo off in the second round, but, due to his bulk, Carnera absorbed the blows like a bass drum.
At the end of the fifth, as I sponged his kisser with cold water and the cutman closed a few lacerations with an adrenaline-soaked swab, Max wheezed, “I feel like I’m either beatin’ a country ham or a dead horse.”
As the sweat-drenched rounds careened on, the two fighters clinched like lovers at a prom, wrestled, plunged to the floor, staggered like drunks. Primo, teetering, managed a few solid punches, but it was Max’s fusillades of lefts and rights, rights and lefts that created the carnage.
It wasn’t until the eleventh that the referee stopped the match.
Max was declared the new heavyweight champ.
The cheering crowd leaped to their feet and I completely lost sight of The Man With Two Faces.
I blew it. Diana was right. She had warned me the crowds would get in my way.
As the flash guns popped and the horde roared, Max was packed off to his dressing room by his adoring fans, while I, pushed to the rear, struggled to follow, encumbered by Max’s stool and the other tools of the cornerman’s trade, not to mention my arsenal-filled alligator.
The Man With Two Faces had outfoxed me, just as I had given him the slip at Glad Tidings Tabernacle.
But I never got to Max’s dressing room.
In a reeking, urine-stained labyrinth under the bleachers I was snatched by half a dozen or more gorillas, relieved of my case, and dragged to a remote corner of the arena, which was strategically partitioned from view. I must have blacked out because when I came to I found myself upside down strapped to a door-sized sheet of plywood.
“We meet in the flesh once again,” said The Man With Two Faces. He sat in front of me on Max’s corner stool. “Surprised?”
“Nothing you do surprises me, Janus.”
“Did you think your disguise as a punch-drunk cornerman had me fooled, Tokol? You knew I wouldn’t miss this fight, and I knew you knew it, although you didn’t know I knew it. Plus I was sure you wouldn’t try anything, ah, foolish as long as I sat with the imbecile La Guardia and those New Dealers. At heart you were always a softie.”
“I don’t have to ask what you’re going to do to me.”
“As I observe you dangling there so unceremoniously, I’m tempt
ed to let my boys use you as a punching bag. But there’ve been enough blows thrown in this decrepit coliseum tonight. I’m going to do something far more clever.”
On a folding table next to him, he opened a familiar case. Even while hanging upside down, I saw clearly it was the valise he carried in Africa, Macau, and, significantly, Singapore. It contained his polished, keen-edge single-piece throwing knives.
“Remember when, plastered, you distracted me while I was throwing, Tokol? How you made me lose my aim? How the love of my life was suddenly removed from me? All because of you.”
“She was my love too, you bastard, and because of your stupid mistake she was also my loss.”
He picked up one of his knives and flicked the tip with his finger.
“I’m not going to miss this time, Tokol, nor shall I attempt a silhouette. Eleven of these knives, finest Damascus steel on earth, are about to make a neat diamond-shaped pattern in your upper torso, with the twelfth to enter right between your eyes.”
“Um, Janus, let’s not be hasty. Why don’t we talk this over? There’s lots of stuff we could do together for old time’s sake. Remember how grand it was when we were slaughtering Berber tribesmen in Morocco? Let’s grab a few beers at Jack and Charlie’s 21. Take in a show. Cole Porter’s Anything Goes is at the Alvin. Palisades Park just got a new Cyclone roller coaster.”
“That’s all shit, Tokol, and you know it. The moment for talking has passed. Now it’s merely a matter of mass times velocity.”
He stepped back.
“Eighteen feet?” I said.
“Ah, you remember. The perfect distance between hand and target.”
A full-spin thrower, he always used a hammer grip. Preferred his throws to be direct and clean. Conscious, of course, of wind and air resistance.
I was about to become a bloody pincushion.
He took his usual stance, left foot forward, which I had watched him do hundreds of times before, but never were his knives directed at me.
“One.”
He raised his throwing arm, the first knife in his customary grip.
“Two.”
His wrist cocked in precise position.
“Thr–”
