“How’s it feel to be a free man?”
“Are you goin’ back to the rackets?”
“Whaddya think about Repeal?”
Stuff like that.
“Boys,” I said, “listen up and write this down.”
You wanna get a pack of jackals like journalists quieted down, just tell them to listen up and write this down.
“I’m through with the rackets. I’m through with broads, beer and Broadway. I’m through bein’ a punk.”
“How old are ya, Owney?” shouted one jerk.
“Forty-one years old. It’s time to start thinkin’ about retirement, about goin’ somewhere I can raise my flowers and my birds in peace and quiet.”
“A changed man, huh?” said a yertz in a cheap hat and a bad suit.
That gave me an idea. “Changed man? You bet I am. Remember what you boys used to call me?”
“Owney the Killer!” they all shouted. Reporters find a story that works, they stick with it until the readers get sick of it.
“Well, now you’ll be calling me Owney the Hermit. That’s how changed I am.” They loved that.
One of our new boys, Jim O’Connell, was the wheelman, a nice kid. Joe was in the back with Frenchy. “Everything jake?” I asked.
“Ain’t like it was,” said Frenchy, who’d put on weight I think he was eatin’ too good on my nickel. “Never is, is it?”
Joe Shalleck handed me my discharge papers. “You’re still under aegis of the parole board until July 1, 1935, which means that legally you’re not to leave the jurisdiction—”
“I got things to do,” I reminded him.
“Correct, although legally—”
“Legally a million bucks ought to go a long way toward making my life easier. Is everybody paid?”
Shalleck nodded. “The bribe’s been paid,” said Frenchy, who never had much of an ear for subtlety.
“I don’t like that word. It’s like ‘tax.’ Let’s call it…an investment. An investment in the Plan.”
“You mean the Arrangement,” corrected Shalleck.
“Whatever you wanna call it, just do it.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Good.” Joe shut up, which was a rare and wonderful occurrence. “Where’d we get the car?”
“I stashed the Doozy,” said Frenchy. “Figured it’d be safer that way.”
“Have it shipped down the Springs, quiet,” I said. “Didja bring the map?”
Frenchy handed me a road map of the United States. I traced the route to Bubbles with my finger. “Fourteen hundred miles—”
“Thirteen hundred and ninety-three,” said Frenchy.
“Thirteen hundred and ninety-three miles each way. Too bad it ain’t closer, but if it was any closer, it wouldn’t be no good to us. Bulletproof?”
I was referring to the Packard. From the front seat, O’Connell spoke up. “Take a tank to knock this baby over,” he said.
“Where’s the Dutchman?” There was an uneasy silence in the car. “Well, where the hell is he?”
“Gone fishing,” said George.
“Somewhere upstate, in Jersey, who knows?” said Joe. “Good riddance to dead rubbish.”
“Find him. We got some unfinished business.”
Frenchy plunked out a big mitt, took the map from me and folded it up neatly. “Things ain’t going too good for the Dutchman,” he said.
“I’m all broke up about it.”
“There’s muttering he’s cuttin’ a deal for himself. State, feds, whatever it takes.”
“That’ll be the day. Dutch may be crazy but he ain’t no canary.”
“On the other hand,” said Joe, “I have it on the highest authority, and I am talking the highest authority, just about the top of the line, and I mean all the way down the line, or up the line, whichever, from Pennsylvania Station to Washington, District of Columbia, that Dutch’s still making noises about sending Bo Weinberg and Abe and Lulu to visit Thomas E. Dewey on his morning stop for coffee and doing unto him what Bo did unto the late Vincent Coll. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
“Not from an officer of the court,” I agreed.
“Nor from Joseph Shalleck, private citizen, who has every hope and intention of living a long, happy and prosperous life and dying in his bed and not in custody somewhere at age oh I don’t know, let’s say ninety-two or thereabouts.”
We passed through Yonkers and I thought about my wife, Loretta, and our little girl, not so little now, twenty-one years old, all grown up, and I wondered what had become of her. I wondered if Margaret ever thought of me, and if she did, what she thought of me.
Then we were driving down through Harlem toward the Cotton Club, and all at once a terrible wave swept over me as I realized that I was going to lose all this, my city, the only city I’d ever really known and certainly the only one I loved. I loved her from her head to her toes, from the northernmost reaches of the Bronx, where Monk and Kelly had slugged it out, down to the tip of the Battery and across to Brooklyn, where so many of our associates lived, then up through Queens, past the laundry, and all the way out to the tip of the Island and across to the Jersey Shore, where so many of our rum cutters had sailed, during the glorious days of the Noble Experiment, when men like me made this country what it is today. I cursed the fate that was forcing me to leave it, and then I thanked the Good Lord above for allowing me to have thirty years here, including time spent behind bars, to live and work and realize my destiny. Still, it was a smart play and nobody ever said of Owney Madden that he didn’t know a smart play when it came up and introduced itself.
A few days later the Packard and my own good self were through the new Holland Tunnel and then the long drive through Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee to Arkansas, down to Little Rock to stop in to pay my respects to the Governor and hand him a little token of our esteem, the first of many, and then over to Bubbles, Hot Springs, to see my sweetie, Agnes, and ask her to marry me. I thought she was going to faint dead away.
Agnes had been up to see me plenty in New York, and I always took her to the clubs, the speaks, anyplace glamorous, because she just ate that stuff up, like a kid gobbling an ice cream cone. It struck me during our courtship and later marriage that I could stash a good deal of cash on and about her person, in the form of bracelets, necklaces, rings and all manner of jewelry that dames swoon for, and did she ever swoon. Each time I gave her something she acted like she’d never seen anything like it, which in most cases she hadn’t, but she’d take it, trembling, from my hands and then put it on or try it on or model it in some way that she thought might appeal to me, and whether it did or it didn’t didn’t really matter because we were both getting what we wanted out of our deal.
“When shall we be married, Owen dear?” she asked. She really did talk like that. All southern girls do, most of ’em anyway, particularly when they want something.
“I’ll be fully discharged from parole in the summer of 1935,” I told her. “Right after that.”
“We’ll live here of course.” Here being 506 West Grand. Not far from the federal court building, where I knew I’d be spending some time, Arrangement or no Arrangement, and just down the road from Hot Springs High School, on which I’d be laying some charitable contributions, to establish my bona fides.
She’d been born in that house, which had belonged to her father, James Demby, the Postmaster. It was small, but had plenty of room for addition and expansion, and best of all it could be fixed up to accommodate my special needs. I put in a wing for myself, with plenty of avenues of escape if any of my old friends came calling in a bad mood. I also bombproofed the garage and put the mail slot there, in case any of my old friends sent me an explosive token or two. There was even a spot for my pigeon coop, and they say down here in Bubbles that every homing pigeon in town is descended from my flock.
I spent the next couple of years shuttling back and forth like this, closing down operations up North and setting them
up down South. McLaughlin proved to be a most understanding Mayor, especially after Frenchy and I took him out for a drive one day and Frenchy stuck a gun in his ribs while I explained the facts of life to him. After that, everybody continued to kick back to Leo, and Leo kicked back to me; I gave Costello a piece of my action up North and Frank steered my clubs legit, just like we’d agreed. It was all part of the Arrangement.
Marty and his girl Kitty got married on the first of May 1934, but I had to miss the wedding on account of business. Which business I can relate quickly.
I found Branagan without much difficulty. He’d made it to retirement, pension, his little tin box full. I’d kept his palm greased through thick and thin, and the one good thing I can say about the former roundsman was that he was fairly cheap, drank no more than necessary to get himself plastered and had himself a nice flat on the Upper West Side. He was still chasing underage quim, which is what I found him with on the night I came to call and cash in his chips.
I shot him once, point-blank as he answered the doorbell, in his knickers just like the way I remembered him, only this time it wasn’t Jenny Gluck, except that it was, if you get my meaning. Anyway, I didn’t have no time for chitchat, this was just business, putting paid to an overdue account, and to his credit he never said a word, not when he opened the door, not when he recognized me even though my hat was pulled down low, not when the slug crashed through his forehead, right between the eyes, and he pitched backwards onto his Oriental carpet, the blood seeping out from the back of his dead head, and the girl—she really was a girl, not even close to a woman, even though we got older younger back then—not knowing whether to weep from sorrow or fear. I threw my coat around her and escorted her out the door, down the stairs and into my car and I took her home and never once asked her name.
Which reminded me that there was one thing about Branagan I never knew and that was his Christian name. If he even had one.
After a little friendly persuasion, Loretta gave me a Reno divorce, in August 1934. I was almost a free man.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
“So here’s the deal, and this is the best deal we’re gonna get, so my advice to you as your attorney-at-law, and you’d be well advised to take it, is to take it, which is: Whereas you, Owen Vincent Madden of Liverpool—”
“Leeds.”
“Wherever, England, having been duly arrested in excess of one hundred times—”
“How many, exactly?”
“Who cares? and convicted once—well, two if you want to count the parole beef, which I personally don’t—hereinafter known as the party of the first part, has been discharged from parole by the State of New York—”
“About time.”
“And has duly authorized lawful counsel—”
“That’s you?”
“Shut up and listen, in the person of Joseph Shalleck, Esquire, that’s me, to petition the party of the second part, hereinafter referred to as the government of the United States of America—”
“Those rats—”
“Whatever, for redress of certain grievances, it is hereby concorded and agreed—”
“Very fancy.”
“That, in return for certain assurances of personal safety and security, that the party of the first part—”
“That’s me.”
“Hereby undertakes and warrants the following—”
“What do they mean by ‘certain’?”
“We’re still working out some of the details, so the language is a little fuzzy.”
“Go on.”
“Hereby undertakes and warrants—”
“You said that already.”
“To absent himself in perpetuity from the City of New York, including the Five Boroughs, as well as the Counties of Westchester, Rockland, Nassau and Suffolk, and the State of New Jersey.”
“Did they throw in Poughkeepsie too?”
“I don’t see nothing about that in here.”
“What happens if I don’t?”
“You’ll be arrested and sent back to Arkansas.”
“What happens if they don’t?”
“Don’t what?”
“Keep their part of the bargain.”
“Nothing is what happens, what are you gonna do? Roosevelt’s the president and you’re not. Never can be, not being born American, and by the way you might want to think about becoming a citizen of the good old U.S. of A., after all this great land’s done for you and besides it might come in handy one of these fine days, unless that is you don’t care when your tushie gets put on a boat and shipped back to England or wherever as an undesirable alien, do you? And is hereby forbidden from owning any fiscal or fiduciary interests in or operating any business, whether legal or illegal, within said area, the current legality or illegality of which business is not affected by the Eighteenth or Twenty-first Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you can’t brew beer no more.”
“I wish they’d make up their minds.”
“So do most people.”
“That’s it?”
“More or less.”
“Did they put it in writing?”
“Not any writing that anybody’s ever gonna read.”
“That tells me something.”
“You and me both. Agreed to this day, whatever day and date it is, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury and special adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”
“That rat.”
“You already said that.”
“Treasury never did like me. Where do I sign?”
“Right here.” Joe handed me a pen and I scrawled my name.
“How can I trust them?”
“How can you not?”
“They ever find out what happened to Vannie Higgins?”
“Nobody saw nothing and Vannie ain’t talkin’. ”
“That figures.”
We shook hands. “When are you leaving?” Joe asked. The date was October 22, 1935.
“Coupla three days. Figure I’ll be in Bubbles by the twenty-seventh or so.”
“What’s keepin’ you?”
“Unfinished business.”
“Don’t dawdle.” “Don’t worry.”
“Write when you get a chance.”
“Watch the papers, and I don’t mean the funny papers.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
I found my mother back at the apartment at 440, sitting in her easy chair, listening to a program on her crystal set. Since my father’s death, she had worn widow’s weeds, I’d never seen her in anything but, a silent keening visible to every passerby, the subject of her grief obscure but personal. She had kept his picture displayed like the image of a saint in a roadside shrine, a holy relic minus the hank of hair or bit of bone, and all it needed was burning votive candles to make the devotion complete. The portrait picture she was even now packing away, laying it to rest carefully wrapped in the news of the day. She didn’t so much as turn as she heard the key in the lock.
“Whaddya know, Ma?” I called out, alerting her to my presence. She kept wrapping, folding and wrapping, ever more tightly until if Da had still been breathing, he would have been smothered. “Whaddya say?”
I noticed she wasn’t wearing black anymore. Her weeds had been tossed casually across the back of a chair, discarded, and instead she had managed to wriggle into some number that looked like it’d seen better days and many months and years too.
“Ma?” I said, sensing.
Methodically she finished what she was doing, which was wrapping up Pop but good and laying him to rest in the old steamer trunk she called her hope chest. I guess it was just about then that I realized I’d never seen that crate open, in all the long years we’d spent together, Ma and I. I’d never once been tempted to raise its heavy lid, with the big metal lock, never once been moved to discover what she had brought over from the Sod with her, what goods had survived the sea jou
rneys, what was so important to her that she had sheltered it here, away from life’s vagaries, safe and secure in her home.
She put the portrait into the chest and closed the lid as I came up behind her. “What’s the occasion?” I said.
Ma took the nearest chair, smoothing her old skirts. “Owen,” she acknowledged.
We looked at each other for a time.
“You’ve come to inform me of somethin’,” she said at last. “Don’t lie to me, boy, for sure won’t I know, because you’ve been lyin’ to me all your life.”
“Never,” I copped, “about anything important.” This was important. We both knew it. “Where ya going, Ma?”
“Home,” she said.
“Long way home.”
She shook her head. “No it ain’t Home’s right here.” She gestured with her hands, old lady’s hands, each of them sixty-five years old. Old people got older faster then. “Sometimes the longest journey you take is the one where you never have to leave. Because everyone else leaves you. And sure aren’t you just as lonely as if you were the one who’d up and gone away, but worse, because they’re all somewhere and you’re left here alone, nowhere.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “So where you going, then?”
“It ain’t where I’m goin’. It’s where you’re goin’. For goin’ you are, unless I’m very much mistaken.”
She had me there.
“Long ago, when I was nothin’ more than a girl and dreamin’ about the day I’d meet your father, I used to try to picture my life the way it would be henceforth. Most of the images that rattled around in me poor head were cutouts from the papers, things I’d heard at the ceilis, tales the silly geese in Lisdoonvarna told after spoonin’ with lads who didn’t know not a whit more than they did. I heard tell of journeys far and wide, to lands across the sea, not just Amerikay but Canada, Uruguay, New Zealand, Montserrat and I don’t know where all else the Good Lord meant to disperse us.
“The one thing I did know is that once we was gone, we was gone. Nobody came back from them places. When they sailed away, they was as good as dead, and that’s the way we treated ’em. When it came our time, we knew that’s the way they’d treat us too. Didn’t expect no more, didn’t get it either. It was like a little death, the kind you have to suffer and pass through on the way to the next life. Sure, didn’t we think it was as good as Heaven we was going to, no matter what heathen land we were bound for.”
And All the Saints Page 40
