Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  6

  The kid was hot. The kid was smoking. His strawberry-blond hair fell across his pug face, a cigarette dangled insolently from his lips, and he brought the dice, cupped into his left hand, to his mouth.

  “Oh, baby,” he said. “Jimmy Hicks, Captain Hicks, Captain Jimmy Hicks, Jimmy Hicks, Sister Hicks, Baby Hicks, Sixie from Dixie, sexy pixie, Jimmy Hicks, Baby Hicks, Mamma Hicks, oh, baby, baby, baby, you do what Daddy says, you sweet, sweet baby six!”

  A near-religious ecstasy came across his face as he began to slowly rotate his tightly clutched fist, and sweat shone brightly on the spray of freckles on his forehead. His eyeballs cranked upward, his lids snapped shut, but maybe it wasn’t out of faith, only irritation from the Lucky Strike smoke that rose from his butt.

  “Go, sweetie, go, go!” said his girlfriend, who hovered over his shoulder. She looked about ten years older than he, had tits of solid, dense flesh, and her low-cut dress squeezed them out at you for all to see. Her lips were red, ruby red, her earrings diamond, her necklace a loop of diamond sparkle, her hair platinum. She touched the boy’s shoulder for good luck.

  With a spasm he let fly.

  The dice bounded crazily across the table and Earl thought of a Jap Betty he had once seen, weirdly cartwheeling before it went in. The Betty had settled with a final splash and disappeared; the dice merely stopped rattling. He looked back at the kid, who was now bent forward, his eyes wide with hope.

  “Goddamn!” the boy screamed in horror, for the cubes read three and four, not the two and four or the three and three or the five and one he needed, and that was the unlucky seven and he was out.

  “Too bad, sir,” said the croupier with blank professional respect, and with a rake, scooped up what the kid had riding, a pile of loose twenties and fifties and hundreds that probably amounted to Earl’s new and best yearly salary.

  The kid smiled, and pulled a wad of bills from his pocket thick as Dempsey’s fist.

  “He crapped out,” Earl said to D.A., who stood next to him in the crowded upstairs room of the Ohio Club, watching the action. “And he’s still smiling. How’s a punk kid like that get so much dough to throw around? And how’s he get a doll off a calendar?”

  “There’s plenty more where that came from,” said D.A. “You don’t go to the pictures much, do you, Earl?”

  “No sir. Been sort of busy.”

  “Well, that kid is named Mickey Rooney. He’s a big actor. He always plays real homespun, small-town boys. He looks fourteen, but he’s twenty-six, been married twice, and he blows about ten thousand a night whenever he comes to town. I hear the hookers call him Mr. Hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show!”

  Earl shook his head in disgust.

  “That’s America, Earl,” said D.A. “That’s what y’all was fightin’ for.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Earl finally said.

  “Sure. But just look around, take it all in. Next time you see this place, you may be carrying a tommy gun.”

  The club was dark and jammed. Gambling was king here on the upstairs floor, and the odor of the cigarettes and the blue density of the smoke in the air were palpable and impenetrable. It smelled like the sulfur in the air at Iwo and the place had a sort of frenzy to it like a beach zeroed by the Japs, where the casualties and supplies have begun to pile up, but nobody has yet figured out how to move inland. And the noise level was about the same.

  At one end of the room a roulette wheel spun, siphoning money out of the pockets of the suckers. A dozen high-stakes poker games were taking place under low lights. In every nook and cranny was a slot and at each slot a pilgrim stood, pouring out worship in the form of nickels and dimes and silver dollars, begging for God’s mercy. But craps was the big game at the Ohio, and at even more tables the swells bet their luck against the tumble of the cubes and piles of cash floated around the green felt like icebergs. Meanwhile, some Negro group diddled out hot bebop licks, crazed piano riffs, the sound of a sax or a clarinet or some sad instrument telling a tale of lost fortunes, love and hope.

  Earl shook his head again. Jesus Christ, he thought.

  “We got to keep moving, Earl,” said the old man. “They don’t like baggage in a joint like this. You play or you leave.”

  As they moved downstairs, they passed through the crowded bar. Five girls tended it, hustling this way and that to stay with the demand. Behind them, in the elaborate mahogany structure, ranks of dark bottles promised an exciting form of numbness.

  “You want a drink, Earl?”

  “Nah,” said Earl. “I gave that shit up.”

  Earl wore a new blue pinstripe three-piece suit and a brown fedora low over his eyes. He had a yellow tie on, and a nice shiny pair of brown brogues. He felt like he was wrapped in bandages but he looked like $50 worth of new goods, which is what he was.

  “Probably a good thing,” said D.A. “I won sixteen gunfights drunk, but, goddamn, there came a time when I was drinking so much I was afraid I’d wake up in Hong Kong with a busted nose, a beard, a tattoo and a brand-new Chinese family to support.”

  “Happened to more than a few Marines I knew,” Earl said.

  They walked out onto the street. Before them, on the other side of Central like seven luxury liners tied up in dockage, the town’s seven main attractions—bathhouses—blazed against the night, and even now were crowded with people seeking the miracle power of the waters, which emerged from the unseen mountain behind them at a steady, dependable, mineral-rich 141 degrees.

  People had been coming to this little valley for centuries and so the city had acquired an odd clientele: it was for those in need. If you needed health and freedom from the cricks of arthritis or the rampages of the syph you came to Hot Springs and soaked for hours in the steamy liquid, which if nothing else numbed the pain and cleaned out your dark crevices. When you got out, you felt like a prune. Better? Well, possibly. At least you felt different. But as the years passed, the city grew to offer the fulfillment of other needs, all of them elemental, and its clientele by the year 1946 was not merely the old and the infirm but the young and the very firm: there was no human need that could not be satisfied in Hot Springs in a single evening, from sexual to financial to criminal to redemptive.

  The city the hot spigots nurtured was spread along the curve of a now-buried creek, the one side buttressed by the bathhouses, the other by the town’s commercial strip, which was a hurdy-gurdy boardwalk: oyster houses, restaurants, shooting galleries, nightclubs, casinos, sports books and of course whorehouses. The street was a broad boulevard, and lit so well it appeared to be a kind of limited daylight. Only the mountain, which the U.S. government owned, was invisible, but every other damn thing was there to see.

  “It’s like Shanghai in ’36,” said Earl, “except the whores’ eyes ain’t slanty.”

  From their vantage point—across Central, standing on the sidewalk before the Fordyce Bath House and looking up and down the street, which ran between the mountains and seemed to be guarded at the north end by a gigantic gateway consisting of the vast Arlington Hotel on one side and the much taller Medical Arts Building on the other—it seemed gigantic. The lights rolled away to either horizon, a mile of sin and hustle. Yet that was only Hot Springs’ most visible self. From the main thoroughfare, other roads curved up into the hills, and each block had a whorehouse and a casino and a sports book, sometimes more than one each. Out Malvern, the color turned black, for in Hot Springs sin knew no racial barriers, and the action got even smokier and steamier out there, toward the Pythian Hotel and Baths, the only place in town where the Negroes who actually provided the labor for the place could sample the burning waters.

  “Boy, I don’t see how Becker is going to close this place down with just twelve of us,” Earl said. “It would take a division.”

  “Well, here’s the drill,” said the old man. “There’s maybe five hundred sports books in this town, and they’re the heart of the operation. Everything feeds off of them. But of them, there’
s one that’s called the Central Book, and all the other books feed off it. It’s got all the phone wires and all the race data comes pouring into it; the geniuses in it chalk the odds, and call around town to the other book so that the bets can be laid right up to post time. Then they tab the results, and get them out, and the traffic goes on. It’s a great business; the house edge is two percent and the house wins, win or lose. But its problem is it’s vulnerable to a wire shutdown. It all depends on how fast they get info from the outside. That’s the lifeline. See, here’s the deal—if we can shut down that main book, man, we hurt ’em. We nail ’em.”

  “Do we know where it is?”

  “Of course not. Lots of folks do, but they ain’t gonna be telling us. What we’re going to do is hit a variety of places, close ’em down, wreck the machinery, and turn the prisoners over to the cops. The cops won’t hold ’em but a day, but the key is wrecking the machinery. You pull those slots off the wall, and you’ll see that some of them have been tagged ten or twenty times for destruction by the Hot Springs PD. Somehow, it never gets done. So we smash the slots, wreck the gaming tables, confiscate the money and the slips, and look for financial records or anything that will tell us where the Central Book is. See, it’s simple. It’s like the war. We take out Jap headquarters and we win.”

  They were drifting north up Central, and in most of the second-and third-floor windows of the buildings that lined its gaudy west side, girls hung out and called.

  “Hey, sugah pie. Hey, you come on up, and we’ll teach you a thing or two.”

  “Come on, baby. Here’s where it’s so sweet you gonna melt, honey.”

  “We got the best gals up here, sweetie. We got the prime.”

  “Care to get laid, Earl?” said the old man.

  “Nah. I’ll get a dose for sure. Plus my wife has gone and gotten herself pregnant, so I don’t need no complications.”

  “Pregnant? When’s it due?”

  “Hmm. Truth is, I don’t know. She’s been that way for a while, only I didn’t notice.”

  “Earl, if I’d a known you had a pregnant wife, maybe I wouldn’t have signed you up. This could be scratchy work.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, old man. It’s what I do best.”

  “Shouldn’t you be happier? I had a kid, and even though he died young, I never regretted it. Those were happy times. Anyhow, you’re going to be a daddy. That’s supposed to be a time of joy for every man.”

  “Ah,” said Earl grumpily.

  “You’ll figure it out, Earl. Believe me, you will.”

  They moseyed along, past the bathhouses on the right and the casinos and the whorehouses on the left. In time, the bathhouses gave way to a nice little park, where the city fathers had laid out flower beds and trees and the like. It was so pretty, and behind it rose the mountain which presented Hot Springs with its thermal liquids and turned it into a town like no other.

  The sidewalk was crowded, for in Hot Springs nobody stood still. The two undercover men slid through knots of the desperate who’d come to Hot Springs out of the belief its vapors could cure them and knots of the rich, who’d come to Hot Springs out of belief in fun. The former were shabby, scrawny and chalky; they looked half dead already, and they were invisible to the pleasure seekers, who were always sleek and in suits or gowns, with straw hats or veiled hats, usually pink and full, usually hearty and hungry and looking forward to the night’s fun. Now and then an HSPD black-and-white would prowl the streets, with a couple of slovenly semicomatose officers looking out, watching the crowd for pickpockets or strong-arm boys.

  “We should tell them cops there’s gambling going on here,” said D.A.

  “Why, they’d be shocked,” Earl said.

  At last they came to a magnificent structure maybe four blocks north of the Ohio Club, literally in the shadow of the Medical Arts Building and the gigantic Arlington Hotel, with its tiers of brightly lit rooms. But as magnificent as the Arlington was, it could not compete with the elegance of the place across the street.

  It was the Southern Club. Black marble porticos held up by marble columns announced its palatial ambitions; the whole thing was polished to gleam in the dark like something out of a Hollywood movie set in Baghdad. Inside the foyer, a chandelier glittered, sending slices of illumination into the street; the whole place was emblazoned with lights. Limousines pulled up slowly, letting out their moneyed passengers, and the tuxedo was the order of dress for the men, while the women, usually heavily jeweled, wore diaphanous white gowns that clung to their bodies.

  “This is where the high rollers go,” said D.A. “This is Owney’s masterpiece. Man, the money he makes in there.”

  “What does he think he is, a king or one of them Egyptian fellows who had a tomb the size of a mountain?”

  “Something like that,” said D.A. “He’s got two casinos in there, three parlors for high-stakes poker, and a lounge where he gets the top stars to come in and perform. I think it’s Perry Como this week. He even had Bing Crosby one week. Oh, it’s the nicest place between here and St. Louis and here and New Orleans. It’s a peach of a place. There ain’t no place like it anywhere.”

  “He’s doing well, ain’t he?” said Earl, watching the place carefully, as if laying plans for a night attack.

  “Let’s camp here for a bit and see what we can eyeball.”

  They found a bench on their side of Central, and watched the show progress, as the slow train of limos each dropped off a matched set of swells. It seemed to be some kind of swell convention. Even Earl in his new blue suit felt underdressed.

  “Now let me tell you a little story about where the Southern comes from. In 1940, a bridge washes out above Little Rock, over the Arkansas. So the payroll for the big bauxite operation at the Hattie Fletcher Pit that comes down from Chicago won’t be rolling that way, that once. Instead, Alcoa ships the money to Tulsa, and from Tulsa to the nearest railhead, which is Hot Springs. One shipment only, while they’re shoring up that bridge over the Arkansas. These payrolls is special, down here in the South—see, in 1940, nobody has checking accounts, so it’s got to be all cash money. Over $400,000.

  “Anyhow, she rolls into the train yard here at Hot Springs late one Friday night, and fast as you can say Jack Sprat, five very tough cookies hit the train in the yard. They know which car is the mail car and everything. They blow the lock with some kind of specially built bomb device, and climb in. One of the guards pulls a gun, and they shoot ’em all down. Tommy guns, four men shot to death in a second. There’s four large vaults in the mail car and they know which one to blow open with nitro; they’re out and gone with the payroll in less than three minutes. Of course the HSPD can’t get its cars over here for love nor money; by the time the State Police get a team in it’s practically the next morning, and even when the FBI joins up, whoever done it is long gone. Of course they throw up roadblocks, and roust local law enforcement in three states, and put bulletins on the radio and round up all the known armed robbers and shooters in those same three states. But that job was too slick for any local hoods. I don’t think Johnny Dillinger himself could have done such a thing, and of course the manhunt don’t turn up a damned thing. They just got away as slick as you can imagine. A Marine like you ought to admire it, Earl: it was a commando raid.”

  “They had to have inside info,” said Earl.

  “Clearly they did. Now here’s the point: two weeks later, Owney Maddox buys the old Congress Hotel, tears it down, and begins to build on this here Southern Club. Where’s he get the money? From outside sources? I don’t think so; anyhow, Becker can’t find no business records and the deed is entirely in Owney’s name. Maybe he’s tired of sharing with the big boys, maybe he don’t want to be tied to them, maybe he sees an opportunity to take the town over lock, stock and barrel. Of course nobody can prove a thing, but there’s four widows and a bunch of orphans who got nothing for the deaths of their husbands, except maybe a nice letter from the railroad. And Owney got the Southern C
lub.”

  “I hate the kind who pays others to do the killing.”

  “Well, well, well,” said D.A., checking his watch. “Yep, right on time. Back from a nice steak at Coy’s. Yes, sir, there’s the man himself.”

  Earl watched as the darkest, fanciest car he’d ever seen pulled down the line of limos. A Negro in livery came out with a whistle, and stopped traffic, so that the car could slide in without having to wait in line.

  “It’s a bulletproofed ’38 Cadillac,” said D.A. “It’s the biggest in Arkansas. Probably this side of Chicago.”

  The car was $7,170 worth of black streamline, with its teardrop fenders and its gleaming silvery grille and the white circles of its tires. It was the Fleetwood Town Car Series 75, absolute top of the Caddy line, its V-16 engine displacing 346 cubic inches, its dark sleekness and rakish hood ornament suggesting a hunger to get into the future. The car slid directly to the place of honor, and immediately two more liveried black men rushed out to open the door for Mr. Maddox.

  “Just in time for Perry Como,” said D.A.

  Owney got out, stretched magnificently, sucked in a breath of smoke from his cigarette holder, and ran his other hand over his slicked-back hair. He wore a creamy dinner jacket.

  “He don’t look so tough,” said Earl. “He looks kind of fancy.”

  “He’s British, did you know that? Or sort of British. He came to this country when he was thirteen, and now he puts on airs and calls everybody Old Man and My Dear Chap and Ronald Colman shit like that. But it’s all a con. He was running a street gang on the East Side when he was fifteen. He’s got a dozen or so kills. He’s a tough little monkey, let me tell you.”

  Hard to match that description with what Earl thought was a toff, a glossy little fellow who paid too much attention to the way he dressed.

  Owney leaned over gallantly, put in his hand, and took a long, silvery limb from a lady, and bent to escort her out of the car. She bobbed, then popped up in clear view.