All these things and more bubbled out of me like the waters in Hot Springs, came rushing down the hills of my soul like a torrent, a flood that would eventually wash away everything that stood before it, and might, just might, if I played my cards right, cleanse my soul.
“I’ll take the message,” I concluded.
“I thought he was your friend,” said Charlie Lucky. “Despite that thing with your sister.”
So they knew. They all knew, and didn’t tell me. What are friends for?
“Who better to deliver the news?” I said.
“Let’s say you get the message across,” said Meyer. “Then what?”
“Then I leave. I’m getting out anyway, retiring—remember?—heading to the Springs to get married, settle down, run our businesses, make some money, maybe if I’m as lucky as you, Charlie, even die in my bed with my wife beside me.”
“Mazel,” wished Meyer.
“The question is: what are you going to do after I’m gone?”
I’m sure they’d never considered that. “Gurrah and I are going to take in Porgy and Bess on Broadway,” said Lepke. I’d never known him to make a joke before.
“Or maybe Lunt and Fontanne in The Taming of the Shrew,” said Shapiro, and that made two jokes I never expected. I guess the situation was funnier than I thought.
“It’s all yours, Owney,” said Charlie Lucky.
“No, Charlie,” I replied. “It’s all yours.”
Chapter Seventy-Two
The Palace wasn’t that grand. It was a former speak, on East Park Street across from the bus terminal in Newark, a town in a state I’d never much favored, despite having the Mayor, a couple of state senators and former Governor Silzer on my payroll. Newark in them days was basically Italian and Jewish, slowly turning colored, so none of us saw much of a future there, but it was a place we could do business in relative safety, and none more so than the Dutchman. I’m not sure why; maybe it reminded him of the Bronx.
I had the Bug case the joint that afternoon and he reported back. There was a long bar to the left and some tables across on the right, which led to a back dining room near a men’s john. According to Jack Friedman, the bartender, the Dutchman and his circle sat in the back room, giving interviews, conducting business from the pay phone, dining, drinking, waiting. Because it was located in Jersey, Dewey couldn’t touch the Palace or its occupants, and because it was on Longy Zwillman’s turf, which was to say mine, Trenton left it alone. Abe Landau and Lulu Rosenkrantz even got themselves appointed deputy sheriffs of Essex County, so they could carry their heaters legally, wherever they went, and as for Dutch, what the hell did he care about the law at a time like this?
The time was a little after ten P.M. when our car glided up in front of the joint. We had a driver, name of Piggy, and two messengers, my Bug and another Jewboy named Mendy Weiss, whom Lepke had recommended.
“Got the telegrams?” I asked. As one, Bug and Mendy nodded. Bug had a .38-caliber revolver as his primary weapon, and a .45 backup; Mendy chose a shotgun for the evening’s labor, “Lulu, the one with hair, will have a .45 or two and he’s very quick. Abe will have a .45 as well. Berman has nothing but his noodle, so be sure you take care of that. Dutch usually has a .45 in his waistband, but that you let me worry about Civilians?”
“Just Friedman, the barkeep,” said Bug.
“Can we trust him?”
“How can we not?” said Workman.
We were right in front of the Palace now, and I eagled the hand-lettered sign in the window: “Closed for Private Party.”
“I’ll say,” I said.
The only weak spot was Piggy, who looked a little skittish to me. “What’s the matter, Piggy, never been a messenger boy before?”
“No, sir, Mr. Madden,” he quivered.
“Don’t worry, there’s nothing to it. All you gotta do is sit here with the motor running until you see us come out. Then you drive like hell.”
Piggy sweated and nodded. “Got it.”
“Good. You don’t, well, I gotta turn in a bad performance report to your employer. Capeesh?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Madden.”
I turned to the Bug. “Charlie, did you learn anything last time we were together?”
“And how.”
“Tell Mr. Weiss.”
“Don’t be in a hurry but don’t dawdle neither,” said the Bug. “Don’t let ’em say anything. Begging slows you down.”
“Right,” I said.
“Make each shot count. No showin’ off.”
“Good,” I said to my prize pupil, the second coming of Johnny McArdle. “One last thing. Let Bug take out the gunners,” I said to Mendy. “You handle Otto—”
“Aww—”
“Dutch you leave for me. No matter what happens, you leave him for me. Got it?”
“Got it,” said Weiss, disappointed. This was the biggest hit of his life.
“Don’t worry, Mendy,” said Workman. “There’ll be plenty of other chances.”
“Thanks.”
I patted the big Bug on the arm and could feel his muscle. “You’re ready.”
His big wide face broke into a grin that had more teeth than Eleanor Powell. “Gee, thanks, Mr. Madden.”
I checked my own gun, Monk’s gun, my last shot, whether fired in anger or during the course of business. There was one last bullet in the chamber, of which fact I didn’t bother to inform my cohorts. Because after all these years of practice, either I was going to get this right or I wasn’t. This was the test that Monk had been preparing me for, that all the time in the can was for, that all the bodies I’d caused to cease breathing, either directly or indirectly, were leading up to, stepping-stones, over which I was going to dance all the way to Arkansas and redemption.
“Let’s go.”
We stepped out into the night. Mid-autumn, cold enough for an overcoat, just barely.
I opened the door and let Bug and Mendy precede me. I saw Friedman already hitting the floor, the cloth he was wiping the bar with still damp and on the bar.
Nobody at the tables opposite. Closed for private party.
Bug striding forward like a boy who can’t wait to take First Communion, reaching into his coat pocket, his hand on the butt of the .38, which was just swinging out now…
Mendy coming up with the shotgun…
Me, with Monk still in his holster, trailing both of them.
Abe and Lulu at one table, talking. Abbadabba at another, alone, totaling up sums. A third table, where somebody had been sitting, half-empty glass of beer on the table, the seat vacant for now.
If a man’s life is measured in minutes, then his death gets cut fine into half-seconds. That’s about how long it took for the three men in the room to say hello to their fate before the lead started to fly.
Bug sprayed the room, no questions asked or answered. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—all six shots hit their mark before anybody knew what hit him. Then the .45 in his other spoke: phut, phut, phut, phut.
Ker-BLAM, Mendy’s shotgun was heard from too.
Lulu featured us first, stood up, then went down, seven slugs in him already without so much as a how-do-you-do, but still whipping out his .45, trying to return fire, but unable, because he was hit from chest to belly, just like me so long ago, and I felt for Lulu, I really did, but it was too late for feelings now, and time only for settling accounts at the Big Register.
Abe was across from Abbadabba, his back turned slightly to the doorway, which let the Bug’s first shot enter just below his shoulder and come out his neck, the second one shatter his upper arm and the third fracture his right wrist just as he was trying to get off a shot.
Otto tried to reason, to play the angles, to duck, but no luck. Mendy’s second report caught him but good and put him on the ground, all 220 pounds of fat and brain and no muscle at all.
Maybe all of five seconds had elapsed and three men down.
No sign of Dutch. Monk stayed in my pants.
“For Christ’s fucking sake,” said Bug, reloading. “Where the hell is he?”
“Watch your language, boy,” I said, heading into the only other room the Dutchman could be in. The men’s room.
Which was where I found him, propping himself drunkenly up against the wall with his left arm while his right hand held his wiener, which was taking a leak. He was wearing his hat and his topcoat, which is the only time in my life I ever saw a mug wearing an overcoat in the pissoir. It was so funny, so dumb, that I almost laughed, except that this was no time for chuckles.
Even in his state, he must have heard something of the noise in the dining room, because at that moment he turned around, his dick still in his hand, shaking it onto his shoes.
“What is this, the Fourth of July?” he said.
“I brought your answer.”
“Come and have a drink with me first,” he said, trying to zip up and making a bad job of it. “You know how I hate to talk business on an empty stomach.” He approached me with a sly camaraderie. “That fuckin’ greaseball Luciano pinochled me pretty good, didn’t he?”
I shot him once, right where Little Patsy’s bullets had done their most damage, in the groin, the shot that had condemned me not to impotence but to childlessness, my first and only girl having been lost to me so many years before. The last bullet I would ever fire from Monk’s revolver ripped a hole through the innards of Dutch Schultz, punched out his back and lodged in the tiles, shattered, its work and mine done.
He got this look of surprise and confusion in his eyes right then. I thought he might go for his .45, the one he always carried, but wouldn’t you know it, on this evening he’d left it back at the hotel, the Robert Treat Hotel, just around the corner. The only time in recorded history that the Dutchman was without his gat, and he had to run into me.
But he didn’t go down.
“Jesus, what did you do that for, all’s I said was let’s have a fuckin’ drink.” He pushed his way out of the john and into the dining room, his lifeblood trailing out in a mist behind him.
Abe, Lulu and Otto were all lying where they’d fallen, but if you can believe this, not a one of them was dead yet. There was blood everywhere, a real abattoir the likes of which I never seen before, all three of these tough Jews was either moanin’ or movin’. In the meantime my lads were nowhere to be seen, and it was then I realized that I was the one who was dawdlin’. But I owed that to a friend.
Dutch stepped over Abbadabba’s body like it wasn’t there. “Where the hell’s the bartender?” he said, tacking for his table. The mirror in the room had been shattered by two shots, and one of the pictures as well. The reflections were almost as crazy as the reality.
I never cease to be amazed by the things dying men do. Dutch plopped into his chair like he was about to order dinner after a hard day at the office, and looked up at me for the last time. “I thought we was friends,” he said.
Then his head plunked forward onto the bloody table and he put his hands out like he was praying to Allah, because he sure as hell wasn’t praying to Jehovah, or maybe he coulda been just another lush who’d had two or three or ten too many, when in fact he’d had just one too many, and who’d put his head down just for a minute, just to catch a few winks, just to catch his breath, just to collect his thoughts before going home to his wife and having to explain how he got in this condition, and no, that wasn’t lipstick on his collar, it was blood, his blood, just look for yourself, put your hands into my wounds and feel for yourself.
I backed away, my empty gat in my hand, as useless now as Dutch’s Schwanstuck, no backup, nothing. I knew the good busybodies of Newark would have already called the heat, and I was trying to make as graceful an exit as possible for a man of my age, which was forty-three years old, which still came as a surprise to Little Patsy in Hell I’m sure.
Then I did something, I admit to you frankly, that was pure sentiment. I wiped the fingerprints from the .38 and laid it down on the table next to the Dutchman, who was still moaning and muttering something. This gat had been out of circulation for so long, I reasoned, that even if the dumb Jersey cops put two and two together and matched the pieces of the slug in Dutch’s gut or in the wall of the shitehouse to the heater, they’d be mystified how an ancient weapon like this could have killed a modern man like Arthur Flegenheimer on October 23, 1935, at the Palace Chop House, Sea Food, Beer on Draught, Dine and Dance, in Newark, New Jersey, Closed for Private Party.
This is why I have to laugh at crime reporters and scribblers and the movies and such, what happened next I’m talking about, because if you showed this in a moving picture or wrote this down in a novel, the audience would laugh and throw tomatoes at the screen or tear the pages out, because it could never happen in real life, except it did.
Otto Berman rolled over, moaning, clinging to a life that was doing its damnedest to escape him and was about to succeed.
Lulu Rosenkrantz, a bloody mess, was trying to stand up.
Abe Landau wasn’t there.
I didn’t want to turn my back on Lulu, but I sure wondered where the hell Abe was, so I was rotating my kopf back and forth like a dope at a tennis match when I hear more shots.
Abie had managed to make it to the street.
He had blood gouting out of a hole in his neck, an artery, so it was just a matter of time, but there wasn’t any time, and he was firing with his right hand, even though there wasn’t much left of it. This is what I mean by tough Jews, Abe Landau blasting away and my gunners in the car blasting back until a couple of more shots caught him and sent him flying into a trash can out by the curb, and this part was exactly like in the movies. Abe sat down hard in the can, which wobbled a bit and then tipped over into the gutter, and he rolled half in and half out, his gun hand in the street and his arse in the trash.
Only problem was my getaway car had gone away, leaving me there on the sidewalk without a firearm, a stiff in a can, and no way to get home.
I turned back to the Palace and can you believe it here comes Lulu, ventilated, and he’s leaning up against the bar like the sousedest souse in the world and by God he’s reaching into his pocket and taking out a quarter, a fucking quarter, pardon my French, and getting change from Friedman—I don’t expect you to believe me now—and then staggering over to the pay phone near the front and plopping the nickel into the phone and having a conversation with somebody, the operator I suppose, a tough Jew who was also a cheap Jew, who didn’t want to pay a quarter when he could have paid a nickel, which he did, and died doing so, the useless wire in his hand, hello Central get me Heaven.
I stepped back into the bar real quick, ready to kick Lulu to death if I had to, but I didn’t have to perform this particular corporal act of mercy. “What did you see?” I asked Friedman, whose eyes were as wide as the nipples on a fifty-cent whore after she’s earned her keep.
“Nothin’.”
I looked at the twenty cents on the bar. “Keep the change.”
I have to tell you I had no idea what I was going to do as I went back out into the street. Already I could hear distant sirens, fire or fuzz I couldn’t tell, and thought about running for it, but decided not to, because what is more undignified than a middle-aged man in a fedora, fine suit, nice shoes and an overcoat from Saks running down the street like a teenage second-storey man?
Besides, what did it matter anymore? May was avenged, Lucky and Meyer had closed their deal, and the Syndicate would go on, no matter what happened to me. Frenchy had my clubs, Costello had the finances, Dutch had his answer, Agnes had her future and somewhere, wherever she was, Yonkers, Reno, wherever, Loretta had my name, and Margaret, whoever she was, had my heart. The heart that May took from me when she died, and gave back to me on that long ride to the boneyard.
I was glad Margaret had it, because where I was going, wherever I was going, I didn’t need it anymore. Because the place where my heart belonged lay over the river, those lights, just across the water, and I wasn’t going to e
ver get to call it home again.
Behind me, the show was over and the Palace was quiet, and the souls making ready to depart, wherever they were headed.
I saw the lights of a car, tearing around the corner: a wheelman and a shotgunner. There was no sense running. I put my hands up as a big mug got out of the passenger’s side and took it all in.
“They musta done something wrong,” said Big Frenchy DeMange.
“You can say that again, George.”
“Come on, Owen. Time to go home.”
He tossed his shotgun into the gutter. It bounced once and landed in Abe Landau’s lap, where it belonged.
PART THREE
Owen
The 73rd and Last Chapter
April 24, 1965
I made Bubbles forty-eight hours later, the day after the Dutchman finally quit. Agnes and I were married on December 3, 1935. I was forty-three, she was thirty-four. We’re still married.
Incredibly no one died in the Palace Chop House that night. They all made it to Newark City Hospital, and then one by one they checked out. First the magnificent brain of Otto Berman shut down just before three in the morning, then the lionhearted Landau followed him into eternity about four and a half hours later. Even with all that lead in him, Lulu managed to hang on until early in the morning of October 25, just about the time I was pulling into Hot Springs, my hands clean and my conscience clear. After all, I didn’t kill nobody. The doctors failed to save them.
And All the Saints Page 42
