Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  He had passed the building often enough, had noted the steam coming from its vents even on the hottest of summer days, had noted the pigeons lining up on the roof in the dead of winter, had smelled the rye vapor on the air. It was only a matter of time before the operation was busted.

  A policeman poked his head out of one of the top-floor windows.

  ‘We’re ready!’ he screamed.

  The officers on the street formed a cordon and pushed everyone back to the opposite sidewalk, and a handful of photographers with press cards tucked into the brims of their hats kneeled down at the curb and pointed their cameras upwards. When the officer in the window saw the road was clear, he disappeared inside and then there was a sound like an explosion, and a torrent of whiskey burst from the top-floor windows, gushing like a waterfall down the front of the building, thousands of gallons clattering onto the sidewalk, where a lake of whiskey quickly formed, engorging the gutters and grates.

  And then the torrent slowed to a stream, a trickle, a drip, and a heavy quiet descended on the crowd, everyone silent except for the photographers, who continued to snap away. Great wet streaks stained the brickwork below the windows, leaving the building looking like a tear-stained face, its eyes gouged out, its mouth agape; and the vapor rising off the whiskey lake was enough to get them all drunk.

  Then the policemen lifted the handcuffed men off the sidewalk and stood with them in front of the paddy wagons while the photographers took their pictures. The handcuffed men didn’t look dishonest or menacing. If anything they reminded Michael of the abattoir workers from the streetcar. And the policemen holding them up looked just as embarrassed, wearied by the point-lessness of it all. By the next morning the proprietors would be free and the distillery would be undergoing repairs.

  Michael remembered his own time as a cop and he lamented the stupidity of banning alcohol in a country run by an Irish police force, the stupidity of placing America’s fifth-largest industry into the hands of criminals, gifting them two billion dollars a year, daintily wrapped up in a tax-free bow.

  Michael turned and headed home. He let himself into his apartment and walked through the living room into the kitchen. Annette was at the stove, making their dinner, still wearing her nurse’s uniform. Michael walked up to her and kissed her on the back of the neck and she turned to him and smiled. They were always happy to see each other after even the briefest separation, the world being so against them.

  ‘Telegram arrived,’ Annette said, nodding at the kitchen table. Michael frowned, walked over and picked it up: CALL ME TONIGHT LAKE VIEW 137586 WALKER.

  Jim Walker was an assistant at the State’s Attorney’s office, someone Michael traded information with now and again. A telegram at home was highly unusual. He tucked it into his shirt pocket and decided to call him after dinner. He went into the bathroom and took a cold shower, changed into clean clothes, and when the children had come back from playing with their friends, they sat down to a meal of corn on the cob and smoked ham.

  As Michael watched his children eat, he thought of Mrs Van Haren’s money once more. He had always lived with the sad fact that the opportunities afforded to his children were fewer than those given to him purely because they were a different color. Now Thomas would be finishing school soon, and Mae not too far behind, and Michael feared for what would become of them. Chicago didn’t offer uneducated Negroes much in the way of a decent wage, but plenty in the way of blue-collar drudgery and crime. With money to get them educated, to send them to the University of Chicago or Northwestern – both of which admitted colored people – they could become doctors or lawyers, safe in the ranks of the black middle class. Otherwise, the only options for Thomas were ending up broken and aged like the Stockyard workers on the streetcar, or in the back of a police wagon like the bootleggers.

  There was laughter around the table and Michael looked up to see smiles and grins and he realized he had missed a joke. Thomas was saying something, leading the conversation, confident as always. Mae was acting coy. Annette was looking over them with a stern and motherly eye. And Michael was worrying about the future.

  After dinner they set about clearing the plates and Michael stepped out to the store to use the phone there to call Walker. He turned onto the avenue where the grocery was, passed a group of girls playing hopscotch, a gaggle of old women sitting on kitchen chairs, fanning themselves with newspapers. Over the years the neighborhood had gotten busier, bursting at the seams with newcomers from the South, all of them moving to these few overcrowded blocks, and the influx had only grown larger with the Mississippi floods the previous year. And all these newcomers had no choice but to move to the Black Belt, due to the prejudice and violence they encountered if they tried to move anywhere else.

  The high demand for space meant the landlords could raise their prices extortionately, so while Negroes got paid the lowest wages in the city, they had to pay the highest rents, and Michael, having a black wife and two children with her, was similarly gouged. And in this was the root of the neighborhood’s slow deterioration – was it any wonder the tenants there had neither the means nor inclination to repair the buildings their landlords were leaving to rot, to put their own meager money into improving the assets of the men who were exploiting them?

  Southerners in the big city had to negotiate all these problems, and as they did so, they were depicted as slow, bumbling, uncultured, cluttering up the sidewalks that people with jobs were busy rushing down. The Broad Ax, one of Chicago’s most popular Negro newspapers, even printed a column, ‘The Wise Owl’, offering advice to new arrivals on how to stop acting like country bumpkins: Refrain from wearing head-rags and other signs of slavery in public.

  Michael turned a corner and passed a shoeshine stand, a front for a drug-dealing operation, at which a pale-looking white man in a linen suit was buying a wrap of heroin. Michael nodded at the shoeshine man, who grinned and nodded back, then he reached the grocery and said hello to the old-timer who ran the place. He stepped into a glass-paneled booth, lifted the receiver, pulled the telegram from his pocket and gave the operator Walker’s number.

  ‘One moment, please,’ said the operator, and as Michael waited he got steadily more parched in the sauna-like booth. A few seconds went by and the call was connected.

  ‘Walker? It’s Talbot.’

  ‘Michael! Glad you called. I heard you had a visit from a certain rich lady today. I need to talk to you about it before you take the job.’

  ‘I’ve already taken the job.’

  ‘Maybe you’re gonna have to un-take it. You free tomorrow afternoon?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You know Delano’s by Comiskey Park?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Meet me there at five. And don’t tell anyone we spoke.’

  Michael put the phone down and stepped out of the booth. He dropped a coin on the counter for the old man, and as he made his way out of the store he noticed on the racks outside the shop there was a bucket full of cantaloupes resting in ice-water, the sign above it informing him they were from Louisiana. He paused and looked at them, the pale yellow globes bobbing about in the ice-blue water, promising sweetness and coolness and a taste of back home. He searched about for a ripe one.

  When he got home, he cut it up and shared it out. The children went off to their rooms, and Michael and Annette sat in the living room and he told her about Mrs Van Haren’s money, and Walker’s telegram; and as they discussed it, they watched through the window as the roaring sun passed behind the silhouettes of the steam cranes in the distance and sunk into a thin strip of sky between two high-rises, as if the city had captured the great orb, and was squeezing out its life like an orange in a press.

  Then night came on, a jungle of neon and cement turned shadowy blue, oceans of electric lights all over the city: the arcs of the cinemas downtown, the skyscraper beacons warning aircraft of their height.

  They dwelt on the possible future paths their children might take. Michael tried
to assess his chances of finding the missing girl. They talked about the dangers the case might pose for the family. Images flickered in Michael’s mind’s eye, of Thomas as a Stockyard worker, a bootlegger, a shoeshining drug dealer, a university graduate.

  Sometime after eleven he left the apartment and went back to the store, and placed a call to Ida who’d had a phone line installed at her home the previous year.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Michael.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  She sounded sleepy, her voice muddled and rasped.

  ‘When I got home this afternoon I had a telegram from Walker at the State’s Attorney’s. Wanted to talk to me about the Van Haren case.’

  ‘Someone’s moving quick. She’s being followed.’

  ‘Her or us.’

  ‘Maybe Ralph let something slip at the division. Or someone noticed the case folder was missing.’

  ‘Or maybe one of Van Haren’s servants is informing on her.’

  They stayed silent a moment as they mulled over the possibilities.

  ‘There’s something else,’ said Michael. ‘I spoke to Annette. About Walker. And the money.’

  ‘And?’

  Michael wiped the sweat from his brow, the heat in the booth having closed its fingers round him.

  ‘I’m in.’

  8

  Al had arranged for a room at the Drake Hotel so after the funeral Dante caught a taxi there, and checked in under the suspicious eyes of the reception staff. The Drake was a lavish place, fashionable with celebrities and the upper crust, and a man like Dante, in his rumpled suit, sweating and pale, clearly looked out of place. He caught the elevator to his floor, and walked into a suite of rooms so large it took the bellboy a couple of minutes to show him around.

  Dante took a shower, sat on the sofa, smoked a couple of cigarettes and leafed through the room-service menu while he waited. Then there was a knock at the door and the man entered, a balding Chinese man in a summer suit and bow tie, a blue anemone in his lapel. Dante stared at the flower a moment, then shook his head and let him in.

  The man delivered what had been agreed upon at the funeral parlor: a .45 Colt service revolver, a .38 snub-nose Beretta, a Maxim silencer, five boxes of ammo, a lock-picking kit, five hundred dollars in cash, the number of the direct line through to Al’s suite at the Metropole, and the keys to a Stutz Model BB Black-hawk roadster, which the man informed him was parked up in the hotel’s lot – license plate 286-515.

  ‘You mind me asking something?’ said the man when they had concluded their business. ‘What’s with the Beretta?’

  He nodded to the tiny gun laid out on the table. Cheap European imports like the Beretta had become popular over the decade, despite being shoddily made and inaccurate, and so low-caliber they had almost no stopping power. The guns had numerous nicknames: British Bulldogs, Pocket Revolvers, Saturday Night Specials, Suicide Specials – the last two on account of the circumstances in which the guns were often fired. They were sold to women mostly, as they fitted inside a purse, and no gangster or policeman would be caught dead with one.

  ‘I mean,’ said the gun dealer, ‘you probably can’t even kill anyone with it.’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Dante. ‘I can shoot first and ask questions later.’

  He grinned and the gun dealer grinned back.

  ‘Fair enough,’ the man said. ‘Now, can I interest you in any hand grenades, nitroglycerin, marijuana or cocaine?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Dante.

  The man smiled again, nodded, and went on his way.

  After he’d gone, Dante went down to the parking lot and looked about for the Blackhawk. He found it easily enough – it was large, sporty, boat-tailed and painted black with a red trim that gleamed in the sunshine. What it lacked in subtlety it made up for in speed – the car had hit over a hundred miles per hour in Daytona the previous year. Dante wondered exactly what Al was thinking in getting him such a conspicuous vehicle; then he grinned, got in and hit the ignition.

  He drove south through mid-afternoon traffic to the Black Belt, a neighborhood of jazz and blues and other subtle riches, and he sought out the name he had been given by his friend back in New York. He found the man at a corner on State Street, manning a shoeshine box. Dante parked up, paid a kid a dollar to mind the car, and sat at the shoeshiner’s and ordered ‘the special’.

  When the man had finished, Dante handed him his money, and the man handed Dante in return a small brown block wrapped in cellophane. Dante bid the man good-day and drove back uptown, stopping off at a medical-supplies store, and a grocery. He didn’t take a direct route, he drove about, taking it all in, getting reacquainted with the city of his birth, shocked at how much it had changed in just a few short years. From the Gold Coast to Bronzeville, from the lakefront to the river wards, the city was abuzz with transformation.

  Even in the slums outside the Loop things had undergone a drastic modernization. The city had always been a patchwork quilt of old-world neighborhoods, memories of foreign hometowns transported to the Midwestern plains. Now that farrago of communities was being cut through with lines of modernity, slashed at by the gods of progress, leaving across it perfect scars of elevated railroads, high-rise blocks, grand avenues as precisely straight as the drawings of the city planners who dreamed them up. And Chicagoans had no choice but to make do with this gouging of their city, a city forever stretched between an imported past and an imagined future.

  He headed north again up the Magnificent Mile, where skyscrapers were being hoisted up by the dozen, their unfathomable weight of steel and rock screaming ever upward. Chicago had invented the skyscraper, had foisted it on the world, and now it was almost as if the city felt a duty to keep replicating its invention, in a million different forms, across its increasingly cluttered skyline. The low sun was sending girders of light slanting onto streets through the gaps in the skyscraper canyon, so as he drove, he passed alternately through stretches of golden sunlight and pale blue shade.

  Eventually he passed the city limits, still heading north, to the place where he and his wife would go when they skipped off school – an isolated beach in a tiny cove in a not much frequented part of the lakeshore. Although in his absence the city had spread itself ever further into the prairies, devouring more and more of the lakeshore, he was glad to see when he arrived at his destination that the city’s assault on the earth had not yet destroyed the part he loved.

  He pulled up to the same sandy piece of ground he used to park on when he stole his father’s car to drive Olivia out there, and took a moment to look out over the waters and the city clinging to the hem of the lake. He could have sought out her grave, to pay his respects there, but he had already been to a funeral once that day, and the sad truth was, he didn’t know where she was buried. Coming to the beach where they had misspent the tender afternoons of their youth seemed like something she might smile at.

  He fixed his eyes on Lake Michigan in front of him, its waters as immense as a sea, and he watched as they changed color with the setting sun. Further down the beach, in the midst of the urban sprawl, rich folks were sucking down oysters and champagne, couples were promenading on the boardwalks, kids were getting into trouble, but all the way up here, there was just the vastness of the prairie meeting the vastness of the lake. The only sounds were the soft lapping of the waves, the rustle of the wind in the grasses, the distant barking of dogs.

  When the sun had set and darkness come over the land, dots of light appeared in the gloom, from the city to the south, and the ships far out on the lake. Dante switched on the light in the car, unwrapped the cellophane from the block and inspected what he had bought. He could tell by the color, the texture, the firmness, that it was the same stuff he got back in New York – Turkish, by way of processing plants in Marseilles, shipped across the ocean to Canada and smuggled into the country by bands of enterprising young men like his friends Lansky and Luciano back in the Big Apple.

  Dante crumble
d some of it onto a spoon he’d grabbed from the hotel, scraped the flint on his lighter and watched as the mixture bubbled and popped and turned to liquid, and his mind drifted back to the ghosts he had run away from six years earlier, and the strange irony of the job Capone had tasked him with.

  When Dante was a young bootlegger in the city, his business partner, Saul Menaker, had told him of a man that had a connection to two chemists over in the Caribbean. The chemists had invented a method of changing the chemical structure of alcohol, just a slight rearrangement of the molecules, which meant the alcohol would pass the alcohol-level checks at the border on a technicality, whilst retaining its taste and its ability to intoxicate. To drum up interest from distributors, the chemists had cooked up a sample, and with a showman’s touch for ballyhoo, had distilled it into a batch of champagne.

  It seemed like a good deal to Dante and Menaker, a good way to avoid the poisons other producers derailed their alcohol with – aftershave, antifreeze, embalming fluid, paint thinner, coal-tar dye, sulphuric acid, formaldehyde. Of all of them, fusel oil was the worst. A by-product of fermentation, it was put into clear liquor to give it the color of whiskey, and caused people to go blind and insane.

  Around a thousand people died each year from drinking tainted booze – more deaths than the gunmen ever caused. When a batch did the rounds, the rumors surrounding what had happened to the drinkers read like a dispatch from a battlefield – deaths, blindness, insanity, paralysis, lost limbs, muteness. The drink got so poisonous and strong that doctors began prescribing morphine to people as a way of coping with hangovers, causing a spike in narcotics addiction, too.

  This champagne, on the other hand, the chemists’ representative informed them, was only different to regular alcohol in the after-scent it gave off when it had been exposed to air, a slight, almost unnoticeable, caustic tang.