I couldn’t tell if she’d been drinking or not. “I heard the stories, Ma. Belfast, Queenstown, Liverpool—”
“They wasn’t just stories, Owen. They was life.”
She turned away from me now and started wrapping again. This time it was the picture of May, her engagement picture, her of the Mona Lisa smile, looking into the future, and in that moment I knew just what she’d seen. She’d seen the same thing Monk had seen, lying there on his bed, nearly beaten to death. The same thing Da saw on the pier in Liverpool, half-blind and half-mad, gulping his last breath.
Nothing.
She shrouded May quicker than Da, opened up the lid and slipped her inside. “My daughter,” she said, May’s name having vanished along with her body.
There were two pictures left, mine and Marty’s. I was wearing a fine suit and my fedora; Marty was hatless, his suit not so fine. “What about them?” I asked.
She sat back down, heavy with the weight of her years. “They stay. I used to think they was goin’ places.” She glanced up. “Get me a glass of tea, if you’d be so kind. In the kitchen.”
A fat-bellied pot of tea snuggled in a warmer was sitting on the table, as usual. I poured a single glass and brought it in to her. Even though it was hot, she drank the tea down quickly. The sweat ran down her face, or maybe it was tears, but she didn’t bother to wipe it away.
Instead, she wiped her lips and rose. “Time for my nap,” she said. “Make fast the door on your way out, if you don’t mind.”
I stood there, watching her go off in her old youthful dress, seeing the girl she once was, the dancer, the beauty. She neither looked back nor said another word, a ghost on her way back to her private world.
I waited a decent interval and then opened the trunk. The smell of mothballs hit me square, and it took a few seconds for my eyes to penetrate the darkness within.
The picture of Da and the picture of May lay together, side by side at the bottom. Otherwise it was empty.
As empty as Da’s lungs and Monk’s head and Becker’s conscience and May’s future and my heart. I gazed hard into that emptiness and I was damned if I could see any more than she had.
Chapter Seventy
There was one more part of the Arrangement, and that involved Dutch. Dewey’s pursuit of Public Enemy No. 1 had become a staple of the newspapers, which was another reason I hated the press. If a man’s business wasn’t his own business, then whose business was it? It was certainly none of the business of the newspaper lads, who were always poking their noses into places their noses didn’t belong. I often found myself wishing, during this period, that we could do to them what the Big Fella had done to Jake Lingle—that is, shoot them in the head and leave their bodies on the sidewalk—because after all, they were no better than the rest of us. Didn’t they all drink and have fluff on the side and steal from their employers and rat out guys—Hell, they made a living being rats—and switch to the side of whoever’d take care of ’em? Just as phony as goo-goos, reporters were, you ask me.
Still, Dutch courted ’em like a politician, and the deeper he got into trouble, the more interviews he gave. I’d seen this mistake before, and so had Dutch—it’s what got Capone into trouble—but Dutch never learned nothing from nobody.
So we read about him in the papers nearly every day, how he beat the tax-evasion rap up in Malone by bribing the farmers and turning the tables on the feds. “I offered them one hundred thousand dollars to settle this thing when they were broke and people were talking revolution and they turned me down cold. I’m no gorilla. I never killed nobody nor caused nobody to be killed. They say I was a beer baron. So what? We got Repeal, ain’t we? I gotta laugh when I read about a guy who gives the public a beer being called a public enemy. If that’s the case—what do you call Roosevelt?” Dutch was always on the right side of the issues.
“I call him a dirty double-crossing sonofabitch,” said Charlie Lucky. We were all up in Mr. Ross’s suite at the Waldorf, waiting for Dutch—Charlie, Meyer, Frank, Lepke and his gorilla Shapiro, me.
“What was it Capone used to say?” asked Costello, tossing me the paper. “ ‘When I sell whiskey, it’s called bootlegging. When my customers on the Gold Coast serve it, it’s called hospitality.’ ”
“This Dewey stuff, this is much more serious,” said Meyer. “The feds blew it. Dewey won’t.”
“What the hell’s with that guy?” asked Costello. “Why don’t he go back to Michigan, leave us all alone?”
“He wants to be Governor,” said Charlie.
“He wants to be President,” said Lansky.
“How many guys wanting to be President do we have to put up with?” I wondered. “How many Presidents does a country need, anyway? It’s a damn shame when the pols can score cheap points off guys like us and then get elected for complaining instead of doing something.”
“They’re capable of anything,” said Charlie. “They’re fuckin’ animals.”
The buzzer sounded. Lucky mashed a button. “Tell Mr. Flegenheimer to come right up,” he said. “Tell his associates Mr. Landau and Mr. Rosenkrantz to wait in the lobby.”
The private elevator brought Dutch right to Lucky’s door. “Come on in, Dutch,” Charlie welcomed him. “You know all the boys.”
Dutch threw his hat on the sofa. He was steaming. “This fuckin’ Dewey, this sonofabitchin’ bastard—”
“Let’s save the pleasantries for later, Arthur,” said Meyer, “and get right down to business, shall we?”
“Where’s Mr. Weinberg?” inquired Charlie.
“Mr. Weinberg couldn’t be with us today,” replied Dutch. “He fell in with some bad companions, and he’s doin’ penance even as we speak.”
“I heard he disagreed with something that ate him,” said Gurrah Shapiro.
“You oughta know, Gurrah, you’ve fed enough mugs to the fishes over the years,” snapped Dutch, who wasn’t afraid of the likes of Gurrah Shapiro. “And they say the East River is dyin’, Jesus what a crock.”
Lepke, who wasn’t any bigger than Dutch, moved forward belligerently. “You got no cause to be sore at Gurrah—” he began.
“Why don’tcha go fuck yourself, ya little yid?” barked Dutch, who was so proud of being German.
“Jesus,” said Costello, “it’s the War of the Jews all over again.” Frank was referring to how Lansky had sent Waxey Gordon up the river with a timely and anonymous forwarding of some particularly incriminating documents, and the waxing of King Solomon, the Scotch-whisky monarch, up in Boston. Benny Siegel, Lepke, Curly Holtz, Shadows Kravits, Big Greenie Greenberg—all those tough Jews danced to little Lansky’s tune.
Dutch sat down at the table like he owned the joint. Not a word or a glance between us, no recognition at all of the last time we saw each other. He was still the same old defiant Dutchman he’d always been, but I couldn’t help but notice he was sagging a little.
“Pressure getting to you, Dutch?” I asked.
“That’s what I came here to talk about,” he said, brightening. “I got a way to fix things.”
I knew Dutch Schultz well enough to know that he always perked up when he was contemplating murder, and sure enough, he was.
“We’ve staked out this sonofabitch Dewey and can you believe it this schmuck goes to work by the same route every day. He leaves his apartment at 1148 Fifth Avenue at eight each morning, then goes around the corner to a drugstore to have his coffee and use the pay phone. The fuckin’ pay phone! Like he was a bookie or something. Apparently doesn’t wanna wake the wife, Jesus they must have had some time in the sack the night before, huh? Maybe not Anyway, he’s there, in the fucking phone booth, a sitting fucking duck like Mad Dog Coll and we all remember what happened to him, right? He sips his coffee so he don’t get his mustache wet and then his boys chauffeur him downtown.”
“You sure you can get him?” asked Lepke, who’d cooled down. “I wouldn’t mind seein’ that putzhead go. But be sure you get ’em all. You know the old sayin
g: no witnesses, no indictments.”
Dutch waved his hand in the air dismissively. “Piece a cake. It’s the Mad Mick all over again and Bo took care a him okay.”
“But Bo ain’t with us no more,” reminded Charlie.
“Whattaya, Charlie, questioning my professionalism? My judgment?” Dutch’s voice was rising. “You think I need Bo for a job like this?”
“Settle down, Dutch,” said Frank. “We’re all friends here.”
“You think my boys Abe and Lulu cannot take out a fucking lawyer and a couple of secretaries? You must have a pretty low opinion of me, Charlie, a goddamned pretty low opinion, you can say something like that to me. To Dutch Schultz.”
Meyer walked over and put a hand on Dutch’s shoulder. “Dutch,” he said, “you can trust me. You and I are lantsmen, like Lepkeleh and Gurrah.”
“I liked this whole thing better,” said Dutch, “when the Jews were running the rackets and not the dagos—no offense, Charlie, Frank. What’s happening to us, Meyer? We goin’ soft, like the Irishers?”
That hurt.
“Maybe you oughta start spending more time in East New York, Brownsville, Ocean Hill,” said Lepke. “There’s plenty of tough kikes out there.”
“But I’m here,” said Dutch. “Hell, I ain’t even supposed to be on this side of the river.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t tell,” said Costello.
“So it’s agreed, then?” said Dutch, looking around the room. “Lepke, you and your pet monkey Shapiro agree with me, don’t you? We get rid of Dewey, we get rid of a mighty big stone in our shoes. Because let me tell you, this guy will not stop with me. If he gets me, he’ll come after you, Charlie, and you, Meyer, and you, Owney, and all of us, every last fucking one of us. He will not quit until he tromps over every one of our dead bodies on his way to Albany and then to Washington. He’s a bad guy, and I am requesting your permission to take him out now, while it’s easy.”
“Just for the sake of argument,” said Charlie, “what if we decline?”
I thought Dutch was going to start laughing. “You can’t be serious, Charlie. You may be Italian but you’re not stupid. You’re—”
Dutch took a breath and started again. “I know you’re trying to muscle in on my policy business, you and Meyer, and I understand that, even if I can’t allow it. But that is something we can discuss like rational human beings, sit down, have dinner—”
“Just don’t let Charlie get up to take a leak while you’re eating,” cracked Costello, and everybody laughed and maybe somewhere even Joe the Boss was laughing.
“—talk things over. Jesus, these politicians really piss me off. We work for them, we slug for them, we vote for them, we give them money and then they turn around and treat us like one of your two-buck hookers.”
“I don’t have any two-buck hookers, Dutch,” said Charlie, real level.
“The point is, they don’t respect us. This will not only get their attention—it’ll get their fucking respect.”
Nobody said anything for a while. Charlie looked both conniving and dubious. Lepke was obviously on Dutch’s side and Gurrah did whatever Lepke wanted him to, but they were an entry, a team, so they only had one vote. Costello, I knew, would side with Lucky; he was the front man, and didn’t need the bad publicity Dewey’s assassination would entail. I was inclined to agree with Dutch; as far as I was concerned, whacking Dewey was the next best thing to whacking Roosevelt. Which left it up to Meyer.
“Mr. Schultz has made some very persuasive arguments, with the eloquence and tact for which he is so justly renowned,” said Lansky. “Thank you, Arthur.”
It took Dutch a beat or two to get the picture that he’d been dismissed, like a defendant the jury’d just found guilty. “That’s it?” he said finally.
Charlie Lucky got up and pushed the elevator call button. “Thanks for stopping by, Dutch. You can go out through the underground garage and be back in Jersey in no time. Newark, I hear.”
Dutch looked to Lansky for support. “Meyer, you said we were lantsmen. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren’t, ’cause I ain’t no matzo ball like you. But where’s Benny? Why is he out in Los Angeles banging B-movie actresses when he oughta be here, banging at our enemies? What kind of outfit are we runnin’?”
The little man gave a littler shrug. “Where shall we send our answer?”
I think Dutch must have sensed which way Meyer’s mind was blowing. “Look at you. One foot still on the boat and already you think you’re on Park Avenue.”
“We are on Park Avenue,” reminded Lansky.
Dutch shook his head in disgust. “In another two generations there won’t be any more Jews in America, just a buncha yids in fancy clothes with phony names and fake English accents.” I don’t know why he looked at me when he said that, but he did.
“I got one last question,” said Dutch. He seemed a little embarrassed. “You guys, you Catholics…Charlie, Frank, Owney…any of you ever…go to confession?” That was a question none of us expected. “You know all that Catholic jazz, Confession, Communion, extreme unction, the sacraments, the whole megillah.”
Luciano shrugged off the query; his soul was long gone, if he ever had one.
“I ain’t been to Confession in I dunno how long,” said Frank. “Too much like pleading guilty, you ask me.”
“Here’s why I’m asking,” said Dutch. I’d never seen the great Dutchman like this, shuffling his feet in front of his pals like a little boy. “You all know I been through some tough times lately, what with the indictments, the acquittal, etc., and when I was seeing”—he shot me a quick sideways glance—“a certain lady, well, she got me to thinking that maybe it wasn’t just luck, but something else, someone else. And that someone is Christ.”
If I could have laughed out loud, I would have, and if I could have shot him, I would have.
“While I been lyin’ low, I been studying,” Dutch went on. “Catholicism. I’m thinkin’ about converting.” He paused. “Do they let Jews be Catholics?”
We all just stared at him, incredulous.
“I think so,” said Costello. “I mean, they let Jesus. I don’t think there’s no laws against it.” Frank looked at me, as if I was some kind of expert. “Why don’t you ask Madden here? He still sticks his head in St. Mike’s now and then, don’t ya, Owney?”
I nodded, trying to avoid looking at Dutch. “Mostly funerals these days.”
Dutch walked over and looked me square in the eye. He had some nerve, I’ll give him that. “You ever go to Confession?”
“Only when I have to.”
We looked at each other for a few moments and then Dutch turned and grabbed his hat. “I’m in the back room at the Palace Chop House in Newark,” he said.
“We’ll be in touch,” said Lucky Luciano.
We were all silent until the elevator was well and truly on its way.
“Let’s vote on Dewey,” said Costello. He voted no. Lepke and Gurrah voted yes. So did I. Meyer voted no. That left it up to Charlie.
“Ixnay,” he said. I wonder if Dewey ever knew how close he came to tasting Lulu’s lead.
“And the Dutchman?” asked Lucky.
“I don’t like Germans,” said Meyer Lansky.
Chapter Seventy-One
The only question was who should deliver the message. Meyer argued that whoever the messenger turned out to be, he should be Jewish, as a matter of respect.
Charlie and I and Frank disagreed. We were one gang now, working together. Cooperation was the future, and if we were going to cooperate, we might as well start at the most fundamental level of our operation. “That was the problem with Monk and Kelly, they couldn’t cooperate,” I said.
“About a little pissant thing like a stuss game,” said Frank. “Who even knows how to play stuss today, ’cept a buncha old babushkas?”
“We have excellent messengers of all races,” Charlie pointed out. “Irish, Italian, Jew, colored, Spanish, Polack, even a Welshman or two
.”
“It’s important,” said Frank, who was always thinking. “Important to show America that we can all work together for something more than our own good.”
“Frank’s right,” I said. I felt myself getting a bit exercised, because I was about to say something I’d believed for a long time. All my resentment, at both the world I’d been born into and the world I found, suddenly bubbled up inside me. Then it all came pouring out, just like they say it does when you’re dying, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
The whole damn thing, from Somerset Street in Leeds to the factories of Wigan to the docks of Liverpool, my father taking that beating from Thomas Jefferson so we could get to America, only to find the selfsame bastards waiting for us on this side of the ocean that we thought we’d left behind. Little Fats Moore, knocking over my mother, and almost killing me, and even though I put paid to his arse, how he was still with me every breath I took. The way they made our boys gonophs and our girls drabs; the way they worked us to death in the mines and the tunnels and on the streets and stole our money and our prettiest girls. The way they turned our own against us and turned ’em into cops and bulls, their nightsticks and their daysticks; their striped-pants lawyers and their prissy women in their summer dresses, so tempting and tantalizing but you could only look and not touch, paddy, unless you did what I did, took their law and turned it against them, twisted it, worked it over so that it didn’t bear no resemblance to law at all, except maybe the law of the jungle.
And it was in that jungle, our jungle, that we had a chance. Let them decry us, scold us, remonstrate with us, send our own priests into our own neighborhoods to tell us what not to do. Give us our parades and hope like hell we’d go away; give us our drink to keep us drunk and then, once they’d got us hooked, take it away from us to turn us into criminals in our own houses. To put our pictures up in post offices, to tell American virgins that we were the Devil, come to turn them into whores and dope fiends when in fact it was them what was doing that very thing to us and ours. Which taught me early and often that whenever one of them opened his gob, you should believe the exact opposite, especially when he was tellin’ ya how much he cared for you and how much good he was going to do for your people, if only you’d give the sonofabitch your vote and your money and your livelihood and, for good measure, your life.
And All the Saints Page 41
