“That is easier to trace,” Nicky said. “On my request, Van sat Uncle Mario down with a bottle of Tia Maria liqueur and his bouncing baby youngest grandniece, Cinnamon Angela Fontana. Maria, I should mention,” Nicky addressed the company, “was the first name of our sainted and saucy matriarch and Mucho Macho Mario’s sainted mama, Maria Guadalupe Fontana. And ‘Angela’, of course, speaks for itself.”
“Between the oldest and the youngest of our Vegas line,” Aldo said, “Uncle Mario was soon teary-eyed and reminiscing for a concealed recorder about his arrival in Vegas as a lad, when Bugsy Siegel was losing sight of the ‘take’ and getting the visionary stars in his eyes blasted to smithereens.”
“Before someone shot out one,” Ralph added.
“Poor Bugsy.” Temple shook her head, sadly. “He had it right. Vegas was a pre-Disneyland theme park for adults and ahead of its time, but mob bosses tend to get so impatient.”
Julio had small sympathy for Bugsy. “Mob bosses are primitive, like sharks. They bite first and think about it later, while digesting.”
“So,” said Temple, “while Uncle Macho Mario Fontana was digesting Tia Maria, what did he come up with?” She was hoping this Fontana progressive fairy tale was soon going to produce a high-octane ogre. “Vegas grew apace after Siegel’s death,” Aldo said. “In the early days it was crude frontier-themed motels and attractions. It was wide open, like a town in a fifties TV Western. There were still injuns around, and Chinese from the railroad-building days and other folk that would not be tolerated in an expanding Vegas for red-blooded Americans.”
“Omitting red-blooded Indians, of course,” Matt said.
“Native Americans,” Nicky corrected. “Who are doing damn well in the casino business, better than Vegas or even Macao now. Leave ’em nothing and drive ’em out of anywhere desirable in the country and they end up getting future hot spots like the Oklahoma oil wells and the East Coast barrier tourist islands and, yup, casinos.”
“Back then they weren’t a mote in the mob’s eye,” Aldo said. “But there was one pesky type that hankered to come to Vegas like everyone else and had the numbers to be profitable.” He hit the control and a logo familiar only to dedicated Las Vegas historians appeared on-screen.
If what happened in Vegas, stayed in Vegas, à la the classic advertising motto, Temple knew that episodes of shameful history in Vegas also stayed buried in Vegas.
“I gotcha,” Temple said. “You’re referring to the Moulin Rouge hotel-casino, founded in nineteen fifty-five for an underserved clientele ignored by the burgeoning Strip enterprises.”
“Man,” Eduardo said. “I’ve seen pictures of those cursive neon letters, Moulin Rouge. Looked snazzy with those long, low, finned convertibles sitting out front of it like tethered Detroit automotive manta rays. The place didn’t last long, though.”
Matt quirked an interrogatory eyebrow at Temple, who’d now become lead presenter.
“It had the lifespan of a mayfly.” She shook her head. “I researched it recently in connection with the Crystal Phoenix Black & White band show. Black clientele, and even some performers, were frozen out of Vegas in those early days, when there were still national and local laws against ‘mixed’ accommodations and associations. There was no black mob, but a group created an all-black staffed hotel-casino across the tracks from the Strip, near the black neighborhood. Its major black performers made it so popular as an after-Strip-show hours joint for major white Strip performers who wanted to jam with the legends, that the Strip had to integrate its clientele in self-defense.”
“That’s a wonderful, ironic twist of history,” Matt said. “Why is the place so unknown?”
Temple shrugged. “The Moulin Rouge only lasted eight months once the Strip imitated it. All attempts to repurpose the building or designate it as a historical site over the decades seemed to be jinxed. Eventually it was torn down.”
“Sounds a lot like the old building near Electra’s place,” Matt said. “You’d think they’d salute the black and white mega-entertainers leading the pack in those days.”
“The Rat Pack itself was a game-changer,” Temple said. “I hate to say it, given Frank Sinatra’s mob connections and his huge case of little-people-crushing ego, but the Rat Pack’s Strip act—including a Brit actor who was a future Kennedy presidency in-law, Peter Lawford; a black super-entertainer, Sammy Davis, Jr.; a Jewish comedian, Joey Bishop, originally Joseph Gottlieb; and some young actresses the Rat Pack named ‘Mascots’—Shirley Maclaine, Judy Garland, Angie Dickenson, Juliet Prowse, and Marilyn Monroe—broke the racial and bigotry barrier in this town, all the while it remained sexist. Women always come last.”
“Not with we Fontanas,” Aldo said. “We know we owe it all to Mama.”
“And now Italians are the chic retro-villains in town,” Aldo pointed out, buffing his nails on his expensive lapels. Sit down, sit down, you’re rockin’ the boat.
“I get it,” Temple said. “You’re saying that abandoned building also rocked the boat in its day back in the fifties, like the Moulin Rouge. How?”
Aldo clicked to another image. Another neon-smooth cursive sign appeared. Zoot Suit Choo-Choo.
“Huh?” Temple said.
“I will be passing around black-and-white photos,” Aldo noted, “because negatives are all that remain of that building when it was first built, just like with the Moulin Rouge. However, you can see photos and films of similar joints’ interior on Internet boogie-woogie and jive sites and from Hollywood musical film clips.”
“And last but not least. Here is Jumpin’ Jack Robinson, Zoot Suit Choo-Choo star, maybe black, maybe Hispanic, maybe southern Italian. Founder, performer, the first freelance, un-mob affiliated entrepreneur near the Strip.”
“That’s not going to end well,” Matt whispered to Temple before she could say the same thing.
Still, Aldo wanted to finish his presentation with a bang.
“Jumpin’ Jack Robbinson, Zoot Suit dancing king and Sin City wild card.”
Up popped a black-and-white photo. A broadly smiling entertainer was caught in an expansive dance mode. He was balancing on the outstretched heels of his black-and white spectator loafers, his baggy pants stretched to the limit, three swagging watch chains swayed from hip to ankle, and arms spread wide to embrace the world and the audience.
Temple guessed the performer’s outfit and pose was an icon for the age of Zoot Suitery swag and swing. She remembered Fred Astaire doing a Bo Jangles tribute act that captured that black entertainment icon too.
“Found hung,” Aldo said.
The discrepancy between the frozen-life image and the bare, dead fact had everyone shocked and speechless.
Aldo took a prosecutor’s circular stroll around the assembly to come back front and hit the jury in the face with the facts. “Hung from an onstage light pole by the sturdy chain of a cheap toilet pull of the day, in nineteen fifty-six. In the basement of the building in question. The case was never solved.”
Temple was desperately seeking that ogre who was the key to it all. “Don’t tell me there were no suspects.”
“Dozens back in that day,” Aldo said. He adjusted his shirt cuffs. “One of the most colorful was capo of the Italian mob, naturally. Crude but effective. The cops called him ‘Jack the Hammer’.”
“That sounds like some shyster TV-ad lawyer’s nickname,” Temple objected. “That’s not even an Italian name.”
“Aldo was sparing the ladies’ sensibilities,” Ernesto said. “The mob boss was noted for taking guys out into the dessert and using a jackhammer to encourage them to talk, or keep quiet forever. Name of Giaccomo Petrocelli. Giaccomo. Italian for ‘James’, but in English it shortens to just plain ‘Jack’. Giacc the Hammer.”
Matt, beside her, shifted on his chair and coughed, as repelled as she by brutal mob execution styles.
Temple shuddered in the benign sunlight. “Not so plain,” she told Ernesto. “An ogre like Giacco Petrocelli would be capabl
e of hanging a man by his own Zoot suit chain. What happened to him?”
Aldo shrugged. “Somebody offed him after the millennium. Most of his power was gone. He never adapted.”
More than fifty years ago a macabre message had been sent in a building a couple blocks from where she laid her head every night, Temple realized.
How on earth had Electra’s ineffective, ordinary-Joe ex-spouse’s body become the vehicle of another, undecoded message today? And who had sent messages by murder then and now? Obviously, two different killers. So who wanted to echo Vegas’s Bad Old Days of Italian, Irish and Jewish mob control and violence, and maybe even the ethnic unrest? And why?
36
In the Ranks of Death
“This is my last quest, as you call it, of this trip, Kathleen, and it’s sorry I am to drag you along, but I can’t cut you loose until I leave Ireland in case you might kill me or in case someone else might want to kill you.”
“Oh, cut the music-hall Irish palaver, Max Kinsella. It’s tired I am of your endless do-goodin’ and breast-beatin’. I might rather be killed. So what am I expected to suffer through now?”
“I confess it’s all too easy to walk the walk and talk the talk in Ireland. I need to find the remains of Gandolph the Great, or be sure he was given a proper burial or cremation. I was forced to abandon his body in the car.”
“Is it a church burial in Belfast you’re after?”
“No. He wasn’t Catholic, just a damn good man. I promise my intentions are purely secular, Kathleen.”
“Despite the grandiose performing name, he sounds a right old fellow,” she admitted, “and a far more decent father figure than I had.” She shook her head and the glory of her flagrant thick hair the nuns had cropped. “Maybe you’ll less regret following the black velvet band if we find him.”
That “we” was revolutionary, so he didn’t mention it.
The car’s GPS guided Max over the curving hills to the M1 and a straight shot into Belfast in less than an hour. As Max and Garry had found on the previous visit, Americans were startled by how short distances and very little time could cross borders in the British Isles and Europe.
Belfast’s population was almost 700,000. As they drove into the city, its views were dominated by Belfast Castle high on a hill and other large and stately red brick and white marble ministerial buildings dating back to earlier centuries, but also new, striking simple and clean modern office complexes.
The “Peace walls” meandered like scars through city, bunkerlike dividers between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods painted with colorful urban graffiti six feet up, then bare concrete expanses topped by high-wire fences.
“Where are we to sleep tonight?” Kathleen asked, her eyes fixed on the passing buildings and cars.
Hours of their mutual wariness gave her tone the same weariness he felt.
“We’ll not be doing much of that, I’m thinking, with various factions sure to have an eye on me or you.”
“You want them to find us.”
“How else will I discover what happened to Garry’s body?” Max had Googled a hotel on the fringe of the city center. “We can rest at a decent hotel, have a leisurely dinner, and then go walking.”
“The perfect Max Kinsella night out. Feed the prey, then it’s on foot, looking for trouble to find you. You sure know how to wine and dine a woman.”
“I’m not going to get caught in another car chase.”
Max pulled the Honda into an interior parking garage. They left their luggage inside, with Kathleen pulling out a loose-knit dark sweater and Max a light black leather jacket for the evening chill.
“This is a cheap American chain hotel,” Kathleen said, sounding surprised and a bit indignant.
“We’re not newlyweds, Kathleen. It’s a solid, unassuming three-star hotel that’s been redone inside and will keep us invisible and off the street until dusk, when we go hunting.”
“Or being hunted.”
“What’s the matter? Home ground not a big enough advantage for you?” Max asked. “I’m the one who’s the target.”
In the dim parking garage, her posture and expression shifted. Max couldn’t quite read how. Perhaps she’d arranged earlier to hand him over to the Real IRA. Their reserved double/double bedroom with en suite would be a prison cell for them until a late dinner would have a walk through Belfast for a chaser.
Dinner had been decent—salmon filet for her and for him the interesting Irish-prepared barbecued ribs, corn on the cob, cole slaw, and chips. Kathleen mocked his all-American menu choice.
Max didn’t want to waste his time reading a long wine list, or drink much of it. He ordered a Bailey’s Irish coffee with whiskey, his favorite after-dinner drink with Garry Randolph.
Kathleen ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows and a shot of sweet syrup. He mocked her all-American soda fountain dessert.
Then they got up, hooked their outer clothes off the chair backs and went into the cool, dark streets.
Max took Kathleen’s sweater-clad arm. He didn’t want her either ahead or behind him. He veered for the narrower and darker streets, for the oldest cobblestoned ways, graffiti-lined walls of abandoned public housing buildings into trash-occupied alleys, where the smell of urine ebbed and flowed like rank incense.
Lounging knit-capped gangsta youths on corners straightened at the sight of Kathleen, but Max pushed her between him and the wall side and gave them a long wolfish lowered-head glare.
He knew where he wanted to go, but not if he was exactly in the right place. This time, he wasn’t still limping from his broken legs. He was more formidable, although he and Gandolph had fought their way out of the place he was hoping to find last time. The last time for Gandolph, by so few minutes.
A single man from behind took Kathleen’s arm on the wall side into his custody. Max didn’t turn to react, but spun to put his back the wall to confront the man coming toward them.
The men, wearing black knit caps pulled down to their eyebrows, were twenty to thirty years older than he, like Garry, but toughened by years of passionate, merciless urban warfare.
The advancing man spoke in a voice as soft and smooth and soothing as the best Irish whiskey.
“D’ye have such an ache to commit suicide, Michael Kinsella? Is that what brings you back to the Auld Sod again in so little time after suffering such a heavy loss your last time back?”
Max felt a swirl of triumph. Bull’s eye. This was same bunch he and Garry had encountered during the previous trip. They had bargained before; they could bargain again.
He let Kathleen drift behind him, cursing him under her breath as the second man brought her along behind like excess baggage.
Shoved down narrow, steep stone steps into a cellar, they inhaled a crude potpourri of stale ale and smoke.
A man stayed guarding the bottom of the stairs. A lone man behind a long bar stared up as they entered. The place was empty except for a half-dozen men wearing peacoats and sweaters and the ubiquitous knitted or billed tweed caps lounging at wooden tables and chairs against a smoke-blackened brick wall. Pint glasses filled with dark amber liquid topped by a dispirited frill of foam circled their tables.
Max felt suddenly thirsty.
Above them all, hanging tin kettles and bellows dripped from blackened oak beams. The dark walls held rough oil portraits of long-dead Irish Republican heroes.
Max and Kathleen were released and left standing in the middle, the main man moving to lean against the bar and confront them. Him. The light above the bar revealed his features. Max recalled his name and would use it.
“D’ye have such an ache to commit suicide, Michael Kinsella?” he repeated. “Is that what brings you back to the Auld Sod again in so little time after suffering such a heavy loss your last time back?”
“That’s just it, Liam. I’m here to find Garry Randolph’s burial place.”
The man nodded. “You two did a damn fine job of disrupting the IRA�
�s agenda to drive out English rule years ago. The peace was hard-bought, but it finally came and is many years old. And so did the penalty for your actions then come due at last here on our common soil. We are not inclined to exact further punishment on ye at this late date.”
“Apparently there are hold-outs,” Max noted.
Kathleen smiled. “Like rock ‘n’ roll, the IRA never forgets.”
Liam shook his head and paid her attention for the first time. “Kathleen, Kathleen, Kathleen, your nerve is as storied as your beauty, but we are all older now and cherishing different goals, different means. I can’t say which is the greater shock for my old eyes. The sight of you again, or the sight of you accompanied by this misguided American traitor to our cause.”
“He forced me back here,” she said.
Liam nodded. “Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows, although I believe you and he are not new to this truth. I have never known in that case whether you were following your IRA head or your cold, cold heart, Kathleen, sleeping with the enemy, but the result was to make us a formidable foe for years and cost us dearly before the peace.”
“I didn’t come to Northern Ireland an enemy,” Max said. “I was a sympathizer. And the dearly won peace now,” he added, “means nothing if the lingering past is not forgiven, although not forgotten.”
“Eloquent,” Liam said, then again repeated himself. “D’ye have an ache to commit suicide, Michael Kinsella? We still have old business with you and will do it privately.”
Liam nodded at his men. Two rose and swept Kathleen into a private room. Both she and Max started to object, but the movement was so swift that dissent was an afterthought.
Max wondered if the former IRA members wanted to spare Kathleen witnessing any brutal revenge they had planned, little knowing how much she’d rejoice in his maltreatment and bad luck.
Liam sighed and kept center stage, pacing in front of his patch of bar.
“Yes, the peace is here and holding, with exceptions. Too much blood has been shed,” he said. “We don’t hold a grudge against Randolph. He was a professional agent, he operated in Germany and Spain as well as Northern Ireland. You, on the other hand, Michael Kinsella, were a tourist and a turncoat, an Irish lad from America who betrayed us. At least you learned the taste for revenge we Irish have cultivated after centuries of brutal English rule.”
Cat in a Zebra Zoot Suit Page 25
