Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  It was the job God had made him for, though Father Paddy had a more colorful way of putting it. He said Terry was happy as a pig in shit. Terry knew all the gangsters and gunsels. He hung around the clubs and knew the fancy women who woke up late in fancy apartments and lived mainly at night in silky dresses that draped like naughty ideas between their nipples. If that was Father Paddy’s idea of shit, he hadn’t thought the thing through.

  So Terry knew all the Damon Runyon characters and they knew him. They understood the job he had to do and asked only that he extend them the same courtesy. Live and let live. Terry got the picture. He was a fast learner and he wasn’t out to eradicate crime in his bailiwick. He just wanted to keep it under some semblance of control. It was all true, what he’d told Cassidy. There was only a nickel’s worth of difference between the good guys and the bad.

  Funny thing, the way Cassidy got to know more gangsters than cops from hanging around with Terry. He even made some money betting the football games, as well as the ponies and the fights, because Terry always knew when the fix was in.

  Gangsters and cops, a stroll along the knife edge … and now somebody was after Terry again, somebody had him on their list … and Cassidy heard in his mind those two voices behind the curtain of ether. What the hell had it meant? Why had they seemed so threatening, so dangerous …

  He woke up in the middle of the night, the door to his room halfway open. Every so often a nurse padded by on squeaky rubber soles. He took a sip of water, tapped the glass against the cast. Damn thing came all the way up, ankle to asshole.

  He lay quietly, listening to Terry snore, sound asleep in the chair by the window. The snoring was nice and steady like the surf in the Hamptons in the summer. That was when he got to thinking about the guys watching Terry …

  It was the night they went to see the Joe Louis fight at the Polo Grounds in October, a couple months before. Sixty thousand people on a cold fall night. He closed his eyes and it all came back to him, the roar of the crowd filling his mind the way Terry’s snoring filled the hospital room.

  Lou Nova was glistening under the ring lights, shuffling his feet in the corner while they laced up his gloves. Chewing his mouthpiece. He was slick and shiny with sweat, his skin pale, almost translucent, the muscles rippling. Waiting for the bell.

  Everybody was there and between Cassidy and Terry it seemed they knew them all. They were sitting in the five-hundred-dollar seats and the two famous broadcasters Graham McNamee and Ted Husing were kidding Cassidy about some collegiate exploit he only half remembered himself when the ring announcer was suddenly introducing him. A lot of sporting types were trotted across the squared circle. Cassidy was up the rickety wooden steps, climbing between the ropes. “And here’s the hard-driving tailback of the Bulldogs … the touchdown-scoring machine … you all remember him from his days at Fordham … Llleww Casss-ssidy!” There was a burst of noise, Cassidy turning and waving in the bright lights, going to each corner to wish the fighters well. Louis was looking at Nova and Nova seemed to be in a trance and Cassidy climbed down out of the ring while the jockey who had won the last Kentucky Derby was climbing up for his introduction.

  They were a threesome that night: Cassidy, Terry, and a character called Marquardt Cookson, only slightly larger than Kate Smith. He must have come in at about three fifty. He was wearing roughly two hectares of blue serge and snappy gray gloves. He had little pointed feet, the kind of guy who could show them a new move or two at Roseland despite his size. Actually there was a fourth. Cookson had a little guy with him, cute as a bug in a rug, with peroxided hair, who kept handing him things. Cigarettes, a gold lighter, hot dogs, hankies to mop his streaming face. Whatever his name was, the pretty boy had a lot to do and all of it very important to Marquardt Cookson. The whole thing reminded Cassidy of the Sylvester Aubrey Bean affair and the witch-hunt for homos Terry avoided by playing down the sensational aspects of the case. Markie Cookson had been very relieved and very grateful for Terry’s discretion and the fight tickets were probably just one more installment of his appreciation. Markie was said to have some drug connections. Maybe that was why the peroxided number’s eyes looked funny and Markie sweat so much.

  Paul Cassidy sat several rows behind his son with Max Bauman and Cindy Squires. They were flanked by Bennie the Brute, a couple of lawyers, and two other guys who were moving slowly with the weight of all the hardware they were packing. In those days the crowd at a championship fight could probably have held off the Wehrmacht. Paul Cassidy was going to Chicago the next day to testify in the Willie Bioff trial. Movie business skulduggery. Max Bauman was talking to Paul about backing a series of pictures. The guns were there because some of Bioff’s hoods had gotten the word to Paul that if he went to the Windy City to testify he’d wind up in a Chicago River bridge piling. Consequently Max was sending a couple of heavyweights to keep Paul company on the train and discourage Willie’s boys. Lew had heard the story the night before at Jake & Charlie’s but it was all confusing, hard to keep straight when there were so many tough guys around, and he had to play the Green Bay Packers on Sunday.

  It was a particularly big fight, even by the Champ’s standards. Louis’s draft board back in Chicago had classified him 1-A and everybody figured this would be his last fight. In May he’d struggled with Buddy Baer down in Washington but had finally felled the big ox in the sixth. Then a month later he’d gotten the scare of his life from a twenty-three-year-old kid from Pittsburgh called Conn who’d given him a boxing lesson for twelve rounds. Billy Conn was three rounds away from the world’s championship when he decided to punch it out with Joe. He didn’t make it through the thirteenth. And now Cassidy had five hundred bucks that said Nova would last at least five.

  It was getting colder by the minute but Cookson sweat anyway. Terry was jumpy, kept checking the crowd when he’d normally have been looking at the fighters the way he’d check out the nags up at Saratoga or the chorines on Broadway. After an uneventful second round Cassidy asked him what was eating him, anyway.

  “Nothing, pal, nothing at all. Three more rounds, baby, just three more rounds.” Then Cookson was tugging at his sleeve and giggling like a man who’d just done a job in his pants. He was talking to Harry Madrid, who never missed a fight, and Harry was gesturing with his right hand, telling him what Nova should have been doing. Markie was listening but the expression on his face said he was on his way to the moon. The cute blond guy handed him the hankie and Cookson wiped his face. He looked like he was thinking about patting Harry Madrid’s face. That would have been something to write home about.

  Cassidy shivered and watched Nova move around, jab a little, slip away, take Louis’s shots on his forearms. He got through the third and nobody was breathing hard but Marquardt Cookson. The fourth went by, a stately minuet.

  “Just so he doesn’t do a Conn,” Cassidy said.

  “They’re watching me, pal,” Terry said, grinning. Cassidy’s head snapped over. “Yeah, no shit. They watch me all the time.” Terry grinned some more. “It’s a compliment, hey? Ah, the hell with it. Come on, Lou baby, one more round!”

  “Who’s watching you all the time?”

  “Somebody watching you, Terence?” Cookson inquired. He sneezed.

  “Forget it, Markie. I was pulling Lew’s leg. Everything’s fine, just fine. Nothing to worry about. Don’t get in a sweat, Markie.”

  “Good advice but much too late,” Cassidy murmured, and Terry laughed.

  Lou Nova was not only a pretty fair fighter. He practiced yoga, it was in all the papers. He had a kind of serenity and it saw him through the fifth. Cassidy could have kissed the guy.

  “So Joe carried him for five,” Terry said. “He made your bet for you, pal. Now watch what happens.” He winked like he knew something Cassidy didn’t.

  Nova came out in the sixth and tried to nail the champ with a right hook.

  Cassidy at ringside heard the staccato voice of Clem McCarthy calling the fight into his mike and to a w
aiting world.

  Louis is punching—

  With all the speed and power of a Buick—

  And he’s down! Nova is down in the center of the ring!

  And it’s over! It’s all over in the sixth

  At the Polo Grounds!

  It all came with a lethal suddenness, like getting hit by a tackle so hard you didn’t really feel it. You just lay there. Feeling no pain. Nova just lay there and it was like he’d begun an unscheduled trance. It was Joe Louis and everybody had gotten used to the Brown Bomber’s Special Trance. And Cassidy noticed the front of his formal shirt and the white carnation in the lapel of his tux were spattered with Lou Nova’s blood.

  But the thing that stuck in Cassidy’s mind a couple months later wasn’t Louis clubbing Nova to the canvas. And it wasn’t the five hundred and it wasn’t the blood on his shirt. It was Terry Leary’s face, the anxious shine in his eyes, the new pencil-thin moustache that gave him the rakish movie star look, and something he’d never heard in Terry’s voice before.

  They’re watching me, pal … They watch me all the time …

  He lay in the hospital bed, leg aching, remembering what he’d never heard in Terry’s voice until that night.

  Fear.

  The night Joe Louis knocked out Lou Nova in the sixth at the Polo Grounds, Terry Leary was scared of something and he knew they were watching him.

  Cassidy came all the way out of the fog on Monday. The sun was bright and it looked wintry outside, scrawny bare branches and little brown birds at the windows looking like they wanted to come in. The sheets were crisp and white and his mouth tasted like his jersey had smelled the day before.

  Terry’s chair was empty but his camel’s-hair coat was thrown over another chair. His cigar lay dead in the ashtray. Cassidy heard him laughing with a nurse in the hallway and then he came in carrying the New York Times. His chocolate-colored gabardine slacks had a crease like a Gillette Blue Blade. He was wearing brown and white wing tips. The heels clicked loudly. Cassidy tried to focus on the big headlines but his eyes weren’t quite right yet. He was thinking about the sports page.

  “Hey, he lives! You want Nursie to bring you the bedpan? I’d hate to miss that—so how you feeling, you lucky son of a gun?”

  “Some luck.”

  “Doc says you’ll maybe have a limp for the rest of your life,” Terry said cheerily. He was grinning and what he said didn’t really sink in.

  “Did we win?”

  “I don’t know but I’d be pretty damned surprised. I went down to the locker room when you went to sleep under the Giants’ bench. Then came right on to the hospital with you. Then I had to go to work fighting crime for a while.” He leafed through the paper. “56–14, you lost. Picture of you here being carried off on the stretcher. Not much of a likeness. There’s blood all over your face. Anyway, your football days are over, Jocko. And let me tell you, nobody gives a shit about your game, not now. Sunday turned out to be quite a day.”

  “Terry, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking—”

  “You got a million-dollar leg, you won’t have to fight.”

  “Fight who?” None of it was making any sense.

  He shrugged. “The Japs, the Germans, you won’t have to fight any of ’em.”

  “Terry, Terry, make sense.”

  “Okay. Yesterday the Japs blew the shit out of Pearl Harbor—that’s somewhere in Hawaii. Just about the time the Giants tried to break your leg off. There’s a war on, Lew, and we’re in it. You’re out of it … and FDR is making a speech about it today.” He lit a big Havana, one of Max Bauman’s. It smelled wonderful. “You’re out of it,” he repeated. “Now we gotta get me out of it.”

  Cassidy was trying to make sense of everything. Mainly he kept thinking about 56–14. Jesus. Worse than he’d thought. Now this Pearl Harbor thing, what the hell was that all about?

  There were flowers on the table. Terry pointed at each vase as he spoke. “Roses are from Max and that blond slugger of his, Cindy Squires. The mums are from Bennie the Brute. The guy’s got a soft spot for you, Lew. I think he’d sincerely regret having to rub you out. And this lavish display of cut flowers is from the Mara family on behalf of the Giants.” He slipped into his polo coat and snapped the brim of his dark brown hat. “I gotta run. I’ll come back tonight after I catch all the bad guys.” He flipped the newspaper onto the bed. “Read it and weep, Jocko.”

  When he was alone, Cassidy looked at the front page.

  JAPAN WARS ON U.S. AND BRITAIN: MAKES SUDDEN ATTACK ON HAWAII: HEAVY FIGHTING AT SEA REPORTED

  Then it hit him. While he’d been on the field warming up, at 1:05, the Japanese bombers had come out of the morning sun. 7:35 in Hawaii. And the Japanese army had landed on the east coat of Malaya, bombed Singapore, and marched into Thailand.

  Roosevelt was going to address Congress a little after noon. It was going to be on the radio.

  In Washington a crowd of more than a thousand had quietly gathered at the Japanese embassy and watched the staff make a bonfire of all its files and records. On West 93rd in New York the police had closed the Nippon Club.

  There was a reprint of the editorial from the Los Angeles Times. “Japan has asked for it. Now she is going to get it. It was the act of a mad dog, a gangster’s parody of every principle of international honor.”

  Take that, you bastards! He found a little story from Berlin. The German High Command announced that they guessed they weren’t going to make it to Moscow in 1941 after all.

  He put in a call to Paul. He had just gotten up in Los Angeles. They talked about the war and Lew forgot to tell his father about the leg. “We’re going to be at war with Germany, too, son,” Paul Cassidy said. “Now what that means about Karin we’ll have to see.”

  “I know, Dad, I know.”

  “I won’t tell you not to worry.”

  “I’ve been worried for so long—nothing’s happened to change, that.”

  “We’ll try to find out what’s going on with American citizens over there. Maybe there’ll be a repatriation deal.”

  “Look, they’ll just say she’s a German … they’ll say she chooses to stay with her father. You know that as well as I do. Hell, maybe it’s true—anyway, we’re going to be at war with Germany right away. She’s in their hands unless she can escape.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t count on that unless life is a Jack Warner picture.”

  “I’m not counting on much of anything. Look, Dad, I’ll call you tonight after we know what Roosevelt said. We’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.”

  “Okay, sonny. You all right?”

  Cassidy laughed. “Sure, sure, I’m fine.”

  “Best to Terry,” Paul Cassidy said, and hung up.

  He’d just gotten to the sports page when he heard the most unmistakably familiar voice of his lifetime.

  “Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of the Senate and the House of Representatives.

  “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan …”

  The sportswriter said the final score of the game might well have been different had “the Bulldogs scoring machine Lew Cassidy been at his customary tailback slot but the unfortunate Cassidy was injured on the opening fifty-yard kickoff return and did not return to the game. The winner, however, would never have been in doubt as the Giants unleashed a furious scoring onslaught of their own,” blah, blah, blah. 56–14. Good God!

  “Last night the Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

  “Last night the Japanese forces attacked Guam.

  “Last night the Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

  “Last night the Japanese forces attacked Wake Island.

  “And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island …

  “No matter how long it may take to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their right
eous might, will win through to absolute victory …

  “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

  It wasn’t a long speech but the man with the braces on his legs made his point.

  Cassidy was sitting there in his hospital bed with his own leg throbbing, his brain still not quite up to par, shorting out, snapping, crackling, Karin, Karin, Karin, when there was a knock on the door.

  “Are you decent, Mr. Cassidy?”

  He didn’t recognize the voice. “As decent as I can get,” he said.

  The door swung open and Cindy Squires was looking at him. She didn’t look exactly friendly: There was the same quality she projected when she sang, a kind of distance between herself and the rest of the world, as if she were perpetually in two places at once and the other place was a little more important. Or maybe it was the special kind of arrogance that comes from having been hurt badly and survived. “Hi,” she said, making a tiny waving gesture with one hand. She was wearing the fur coat and pearl-gray slacks and a gray turtleneck sweater. “Do you remember me? Or do you think I’ve got the wrong room?”

  “I remember you. You’re hard to forget. Beat hell out of anybody lately?”

  “I retired undefeated, Mr. Cassidy.” Her voice was still low and kind of hoarse. “Golly, that’s quite a cast.” She stared at the leg encased in white plaster. She came close and tapped it with her red fingernails, smiled slowly at the hollow sound. “How do you feel?”

  “About like I look, I guess.”

  A playful smile crossed her solemn face. “I didn’t save you from that thug just to have you get torn to shreds the next day. When I saw you go down and then they carried you away on a litter … it seemed to me I had a bit of a personal interest. Now I want to see how badly the goods were damaged.” She gave him a teasing, appraising look.