by Don Swaim
He never completed the word as his mouth gaped, his eyes taking on an amazed expression. He never knew what hit him.
But I did. A dart protruding from the center of his forehead. He collapsed, dropping the knife, which clanged on the cement.
I heard shouts and shots, the rattle of tommies, screams and cries.
The next thing I knew I was hauled off the board, my straps removed, and in Diana’s arms.
“His, his goons?” I stuttered.
“Taken care of, Tokee, darling. All of them. Relax. Your friends are here.”
“Friends?”
“You didn’t think I was going to let you do this thing alone, did you? You were bait, and Janus fell for it.”
Then I saw Diego Rivera blowing the smoke from the barrel of his pistol. Gaetano Gagliano with some of his Mafioso brothers shouldering Browning automatics. Aimee McPherson held a Colt short 32. Frank, Ira’s doorman, lugged a pump-action shotgun. Groucho wielded a 12-gauge sawed-off. Even Sinclair Lewis was there with a Smith and Wesson .38.
“Red,” I said to Lewis, “never thought I’d see you in a place like this.”
“There may be a novel in it, Tokol.”
“And you,” I said to Diana. “You pinged Janus with your blowgun.”
“And obviously, I got the right face. The poison worked just as the Waorani tribesmen showed me when I was a little girl in the Amazon. They knew a lot for naked people.”
“But… poison?”
“From my pet cobra. Kyle gets off on being milked. Why did you think I adopted him in the first place? Oh, lookee, I think your friend with the two faces is still breathing.” She put her ear close to his mouth. “My mistake. Poison works even faster than I thought.”
“How did you—”
“I had a feeling he would pull something like this, and that he was more likely to find you than you him. Darling, I knew you’d never listen. It was merely a matter of our keeping you in our sight after the fight, allowing his hoods to snatch you, and then coming to the rescue deus ex machina—just like the cavalry in those adorable Hoot Gibson Westerns.”
There was some cleanup we had to do at the Madison Square Garden Bowl, little things such as disposing of the bodies, after which we took a breather, the three of us.
Diana, Kyle, and I.
In Diana’s penthouse, surrounded by her collection of Georgia O’Keeffe abstractions, sculptures, and ceramics, we savored romantic evenings with pitchers of martinis and Twinkies—while through the Zenith Stratosphere the crooner Russ Columbo sang “Prisoner of Love” on the Blue Network.
Until…
Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press. Flash! New York City police have discovered a gangland boneyard in an East River lot near the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City. Seven unidentified corpses were unearthed, all riddled with gunshot wounds. This may be the beginning of a new war among the Mafia families.
Hmmm. Strange. I thought I counted eight corpses, including Janus.
Flash! New York isn’t the only bed of organized crime activity. From Minnesota comes word of a violent underworld enterprise known as the Syndicate. This reporter has learned exclusively that a certain acquaintance, who from now on shall be known only as, well, Certain Acquaintance, plans to risk his life by single-handedly bringing down this unholy alliance of criminals. Good luck, C.A.
…For Jergens Lotion, this is Walter Winchell wishing you lotions of love.
two
Po-lice and Vigilantes 1935
I’d barely gotten over the death of my pal Lawrence of Arabia when I received more lousy news.
An acquaintance of mine, a newspaper guy named Leon Linquist, called collect from Minneapolis to say he was in trouble with the mop. Mop? Damned line was all noise.
Such distractions only added to my foul mood. True, I was no longer under threat by The Man With Two Faces. I had seen his corpse in a shallow grave in some crummy Queens lot. But it was T.E. Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle crack-up in Dorset, England, that hit me hard. To me, Lawrence was simply known as Ned, and I’d befriended him well before Lowell Thomas. Not that I was envious of the unctuous NBC Radio commentator, but Thomas crudely capitalized on his shallow relationship with Lawrence, while I hadn’t—wouldn’t. Lowell even published a book about Ned stuffed with errors and exaggerations. And I wasn’t mentioned once.
But, thankfully, Thomas wasn’t around to describe that delightfully sordid occasion at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo when Ned and I stripped to our loins in a drunken romp that neither of us regretted. Ned was short, barely five-feet-five and self-conscious about his height, yet he made up for it by good living, a teetotaler, mostly, and a vegetarian who abstained from tobacco. He tested himself by periodically fasting and dehydrating himself.
Ned was a decade older than me, educated at Oxford, and at first I saw him more as a mentor and big brother than as an intimate. That quickly changed, and he became especially alluring after the Arabs put a price on his head.
He was fascinated by me and my upbringing as well.
“Tell me more about Kansas, Tokol,” he once said after an afternoon of passion.
“You’re joking.”
“I’ve never been to your prairies.”
“I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or just batty.”
“I have the same problem.”
I loved fondling his flesh, which was so much softer than one would expect of a man accustomed to desert heat and sand. In our intimacies, I was startled by his advocacy of the riding crop, which he insisted be applied to him in pleasure.
“Again, Tokol,” he would say, “Again.”
Ned professed to his friends that he had no interest in sex, while believing in the honesty of perfect love.
I can state with absolute authority that Lawrence of Arabia believed in both.
We once enjoyed carnal knowledge, the two of us, on the hump of a camel, awkwardly yet triumphantly. Years later, he and I shared laughs over it in Ankara while guzzling too many glasses of arak.
I was in my sixty-third floor office suite in the Chrysler Building brooding while studying the sun sliding below the Hudson, pinpoints of lights from the myriad buildings multiplying throughout the metropolis, making the city seem more beautiful than it was. There’s little uglier than the sight of hungry men and women waiting in a breadline.
I’d elected to stay in while Diana attended the premier of a new Blue Network show, “The Chase and Sanborn Potpourri Hour” starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Ed Wynn, Jimmy Durante, Jane Froman, the Boswell Sisters, and Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra.
“In good conscience, I can’t miss that show, Tokee, darling. Or should I call you C.A. from now on?” She chuckled. “Anyway, the show’s to be a live remote from the Hippodrome Theatre. Plus I’ll be able to wear my pearls, diamond tiara, and chinchilla stole.”
As writer of record of radio’s most popular daytime serials, Diana had to go, but I had no interest radio joie de vivre, intending to sack out on my office couch rather than my bare room at the Y. While the famous Lavender Star of Africa diamond heist left me impossibly rich, allowing me to indulge in various challenging amusements, I was essentially an ascetic. Like a cat I slept about anywhere.
Linquist’s call from Minnesota interrupted my reflections about Lawrence and our exploits in Aqaba during Allenby’s Ottoman campaign.
“Leon,” I growled into the phone, “your line stinks. Long distance is expensive. No wonder you called collect.”
“You can afford it, Tokol.”
“How’d you get this number anyway?”
“From Winchell.”
Of course, Walter, the blabbermouth. Linquist, Winchell, and I were mutual acquaintances. Rarely did a week go by that I didn’t huddle with the commentator at the Stork Club’s Table 50. Up to now, our arrangement to exchange mutually advantageous information suited us both. Winchell, who was now referring to me on the
air as Certain Acquaintance—or C.A.—had mentioned that Linquist might be calling, and I’d forgotten.
“Tell me again,” I said to Leon. “You’re in trouble with the mop?”
“Mob, Tokol, mob. Racketeers. Thugs. Four of them disguised as New Deal Democrats nearly beat me to a pulp. In broad daylight. Threatened my life, my family’s.”
“You went to the police?”
“That’s a laugh. The Minneapolis cops are in on it. Now I carry a pistol. Then they tried to frame me by claiming I sodomized a sixteen-year-old hooker because I happened to stay in the same hotel where she serviced her johns. The little bitch had been paid off, but she plainly perjured herself in court, so I beat the rap.”
“Why are they so pissed off at you?”
“Because my Prairie Patriot tells the truth about the Syndicate and corruption and graft. You won’t believe what I have on the governor, a bribable bum named Karlson.”
“Sounds serious, Leon.”
“They’ve put out a contract on me, whatever that means, although I’ve a pretty good idea.”
I met Linquist when I was on a job that took me to neighboring St. Paul, and we hit it off.
The FBI’s Hoover had begged me to help bust the Alvin Karpis-Arthur Barker Gang, headed by Barker’s mom Kate, better known as Ma. They’d snatched St. Paul banker Edward Bremer, and were holding him for a two-hundred-thousand dollar ransom. Working with Special Agent Mike Litvak, I arranged for the ransom’s delivery and Bremer’s freedom, but the gang escaped. Litvak, a likeable moron, was responsible, but I took the fall. At least we got the kidnap victim back.
Now, I had good intelligence the gang was hiding out in Florida. I intended to deal with them after I finished my current assignment.
As for Linquist, he fought for principles. Therefore, Leon was as poor as I was wealthy. I was occasionally for sale—depending on the cause—and he wasn’t, which is why I admired his passion. For me crime fighting was more of a hobby.
“What do you want me to do, Leon? I’m in Manhattan. Have a business to run. Gotta leave for Louisiana tomorrow.”
“I know where you are, Tokol, and I’m aware of what you do. That’s why I called. I need you in Minneapolis before something happens to me.”
Tokoloshe and Son Cleansing Services was used to cleaning up crap, of course, never with feather dusters or floor brushes, but sometimes I spread myself too thin. Occasionally, I wished I actually had a son, making it a true family business.
“Leon, you can’t afford me.”
“Listen, Tokol, I’ve got fourteen-hundred bucks in the bank. Take it all plus the title to my newspaper. I also have a wife and a nine-year-old daughter. They’ve got to account for something. Like your conscience.”
I sighed. “Okay, but tomorrow I’m on the train to New Orleans where I intend to buy a six-cylinder DeSoto Airstream and drive it up to Baton Rouge. After that, Diana and I need to see some guy in a place called Pampa, Texas. When we’re finished we’ll head to Minneapolis.”
“It may be too late by then.”
“I can work just so many miracles, Leon.”
The next afternoon, Diana saw me off at McKim, Mead, and White’s grand Pennsylvania Station where I was to catch the Pennsy to connect to the Southern Railroad’s Crescent Limited. I shuddered in humility each time I entered that magnificent Beau Arts cathedral to railroading, knowing it would forever endure—like the Great Pyramid of Giza.
On the congested platform, Diana said, “Tokee, darling, I do wish I could go with you, but my scribes are so far behind with “Our Gal Zelda” and “When a Widow Weds,” I must stay here to whip them into action. If I lose Proctor & Gamble we’ll go off the air. I’ll catch up with you in Texas after you finish your work in Baton Rouge.”
“But Pampa’s in the Dust Bowl, dollface. It’s a cataclysm out there. So why—”
“No time to explain now. I’ll wire you before I leave.”
Meeting lips, we embraced, and then I swung aboard the Pullman. In my compartment, as the romantic countryside of Bayonne, Perth Amboy, and Carteret flashed by, I open my valise and inspected the blowback semi-automatic revolver I obtained from Gaetano Gagliano, who was like a father to me.
Peering through glasses slightly thicker than jelly jars, Gagliano had said, “I got what you wanted, Tokol, a 7.65-millimeter Browning, but it don’t have much stopping power. Here’s a better choice. This Walther PP. It was removed from the corpse of an unfortunate gent from Palermo before he had a chance to fire it.”
“I already pack a Smith and Wesson M&P .38 Special, Gaetano. No, it’s the Browning I want. Compact, light, cheap, and perfect for an amateur.”
“But you ain’t no amateur.”
“It’s the world’s deadliest handgun.”
“Whad’ya mean?”
“The Browning 7.65 was used to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, setting off the Great War, which murdered over thirty-five-million people. If it can do that, I figure it’ll serve me just as good. Your Browning may not be the original, which is in Vienna’s Museum of Military History, along with Ferdinand’s Graf and Stift touring car, but—”
“No, no Tokol. It is the original.”
“Huh?”
“I had it stolen from the museum. Yeah, amico, it’s the very gun that killed Archduke Ferdinand. Anything for you.”
“Gaetano…”
“You saved my life once. Least I could do.”
The Pennsy got me to DC, where I changed to the Crescent Limited to New Orleans. In my compartment, I cleaned, oiled, and wrapped the Browning in tissue with a neat bow, appreciative of its lethal place in history. Then I headed to the dining car to enjoy the potage paysanne, roast guinea with currant jelly, hearts of romaine, and fresh plum tarte, after which I relaxed with a few glasses of Dewar’s single malt while reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Taps at Reveille.
Within two days I was in Baton Rouge, where I parked my new DeSoto Airstream, and gazed up at the Louisiana State Capitol building, thirty-four stories, built just two years before as a limestone monument to the former governor, now senator, Huey Long.
Which was why I was there.
On the drive up the Mississippi to Baton Rouge, I heard Huey rage through the Airstream’s staticky Motorola:
They say I’m ignorant, and I am, on account of I got no education. But I’m a lot smarter than all them SOBs put together when I say: Every man a king, every man a king, but no one wears a crown. I can scare or buy ninety-nine out of every one-hundred men, and then I can’t can go to hell ’cause all I cares about is the boys at the fork of the creeks.
To the rich, Share-the-Wealth Huey was an amoral demagogue—but he was a hero to the poor, promoting a scheme to guarantee an annual income for every breathing American. Disguised fascism, his critics called it. Surrounded by a thug contingent, Huey ran Louisiana as his personal fiefdom. He called himself the Kingfish after the con man on radio’s Amos ’n’ Andy.
This year would prove to be a bad one for Long, often described as the most dangerous man in America. And I would be partly responsible.
On the dot I was ushered into the office of Carl Weiss, MD, on the seventh floor of the Reymond Building. The ear, nose, and throat specialist’s credentials were impeccable. A Tulane graduate, he studied in Austria, interned at New York’s Bellevue, headed the Louisiana Medical Society, and was a Kiwanis in good standing.
“We meet again, Dr. Weiss,” I said.
“Did you bring what you said you’d bring, Mr. Tokoloshe?”
Weiss was all business.
“You could have bought one of these in a local five-and-dime, doctor. In the South it’s easier to buy a howitzer than a quart of hooch.”
“I needed something untraceable.”
“Here it is, wrapped with a pretty red bow. Plus a box of .32-caliber tin-plated, copper-jacketed bullets. Suggest you practice shooting at soup cans before putting it to actual use.”
“I’m not unfamiliar with g
uns, Mr. Tokoloshe. This is Louisiana after all.”
I turned to leave. Then, “Doctor, I remain prepared to do the deed myself, which was why I was handsomely paid by your associates.”
“It’s something I must do on my own. A matter of principle and pride. Huey Long undermined the judicial career of my father-in-law. Claims my wife has negro blood, which in Louisiana is unthinkable. He has destroyed my family.”
The doc spewed a litany of other grievances.
I had some reservations about leaving that historic, earth-shattering Browning in the hands of a greenhorn, but the customer’s always right—unless he gets me killed.
Before I crossed into Texas, I phoned Leon Linquist to inquire if he was still alive.
“But for how long I don’t know, Tokol. Ever hear of a mobster known as Hyman Cherry Lips Zwillman? No? Remember the name in case I go down before you get here. Bastard runs the Syndicate in the Twin Cities. When are you arriving anyway?”
“Patience, Leon. Don’t leave the house. Bolt the doors, lock the windows.”
“Easy for you to say. I’ve got a paper to run.”
Next I phoned Diana’s BUtterfield 8 number, simple to remember since some writer named O’Hara just published a book of that title.
“Finished in Baton Rouge already, Tokee, darling?”
“It was a cinch. A mere advisory role. Meet me at Love Field in Dallas.”
“I’ll wire you my ETA in care of Western Union. Howard’s already in Brooklyn. We’re flying out of Floyd Bennett Field.”
Howard Hughes had just broken the record for the fastest flight in aviation history, three-hundred-fifty-two miles an hour. When not amusing himself piloting the planes in his vanity air force, he made both movies and movie starlets.
I tolerated Howard, although he was starting to get weird. I wouldn’t put it past him if he put the make on Diana.
Listening to the Airstream’s Motorola en route to Texas, I heard the stunning news that G-men had gunned down Ma Barker and one of her sons, Fred, in a house at Lake Weir, Florida. Sonofabitch. The paunchy prick J. Edgar beat me to ’em. But all was not lost. Ma’s son Arthur and his pal Alvin Karpis were still at large.
