Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  He turned, assumed the position, and felt the quick, frightened run of hands across his body. It wasn’t well done. He could have brought in at least three pieces if he’d wanted to.

  “I’m a director,” said the man. “I never thought I’d end up frisking guys. But if you’re Ben’s friend, you move in Ben’s world.”

  “What would you do if I had an automatic?” asked Frenchy.

  “I don’t know. Probably scream, then faint.”

  Frenchy laughed.

  “This way. I’ll tell him you’re here. He’s upstairs with Virginia’s brother and his fiancée.”

  “No problem. I’ll wait. I’ve got plenty of time.”

  The man led Frenchy to some kind of living room at the rear of the house, or maybe it was a den. Who could tell in a house so big and plush? It was full of rococo touches, like a statue of Cupid, on tiptoes with his little bow and arrow in bronze. Some English dowager looked as if she were Queen Mab in an oil painting over the mantel but the coffee table had a French country look to it. Then a huge picture window displayed a rose trellis across the backyard about twenty-five feet, festooned with bright explosions of blossoming fire, like gunshots frozen, somehow. It was June and the roses were out. He studied the trellis in some detail, looked at the lay of the yard, the height of the wall, the location of the gate and even the lock on the gate. All very interesting.

  In time, the man himself came into the room. Frenchy had never seen him before. He was shorter than he’d imagined, with a movie star’s tan and white teeth, his blond-brown hair brilliantined back like George Brent’s, his muscular, broad-chested body creamily bulging against the beautifully tailored glen-plaid double-breasted suit he wore, with a tie perfectly tied, perfectly centered. His eyes were bright and sharp and everything about him radiated sheer animal heat.

  “I’m Ben Siegel,” he said. “And Mr. Lansky said I should see you but not to ask the name.”

  “My name is a Top Secret,” said Frenchy.

  “You with the feds?”

  “Not the feds that you need to worry about. Another outfit. We work overseas. Handling things. Very hush-hush. I just got back from someplace I can’t even tell you about, or I’d have to kill you.”

  Ben looked him up and down.

  “You’re pretty young for that kind of thing, ain’t you, kid? Shouldn’t you still be sipping milk from a carton in the school cafeteria?”

  “I’m smarter than I look and older than I seem.”

  “Okay, so? What’s this all about? How’re you in with Meyer?”

  “I don’t know Lansky. I know some people who know some people. Calls were made because favors were owed and I had something you might find useful. It happens also to be useful to me. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Is this a touch?”

  “It won’t cost a cent.”

  “Okay. Sit down, Mr. Mystery Man.”

  “Thanks.”

  Siegel sat on a flower print sofa; Frenchy sat in a high wing chair, also flowery.

  “So?”

  “You want the name of a man in Arkansas. I happen to have some experience in Arkansas.”

  “You don’t look like a country boy.”

  “I’m not. But I spent some time there and I worked for a law enforcement unit and I met the man you want to know about. I know all about him.”

  “How did you know I wanted to know about him?”

  “You remember a guy named Johnny Spanish?”

  “Yeah, whatever happened to Johnny?”

  “Big mystery. But whatever happened to Johnny also happened to your old friend Owney Maddox.”

  “I hear Owney’s in Paris,” said Siegel.

  “Somehow, I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s in Mexico, Rio, Madrid or Manila, either.”

  “I’ve heard that too.”

  “Anyhow, Johnny Spanish told me of your interest in this individual.”

  “The cowboy. He packed a punch, I’ll say.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Fuckin’ yentzer hit me so hard I can still feel it. I sometimes wake up dreamin’ about it. So what’s the bargain?”

  “I know who he is. I know where he is.”

  “What do you want in exchange?”

  “A good night’s sleep.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Put it this way. This man and I were colleagues at one point. Then we had a policy disagreement and I was forced to make certain other arrangements. I don’t know if he knows about them. I don’t know what he knows. He could know everything, he could know nothing. It didn’t matter when I was overseas, but now it looks like I’m going to be in the States for a bit, while I go to a language school. I don’t want to worry about him showing up for a discussion.”

  “I get it.”

  “So our interests coincide. I give you him. You pay off your debt, and I don’t have to worry about him coming to collect his debt.”

  Bugsy looked him up and down.

  “You may be a guy who can handle himself but you really fear him, huh?”

  “He is very good. The best. Better than me, and I’m very good and getting even better each time out. But I’ll never get to his level. He’s a natural. He’s also capable of throwing everything in his best interest away on some obscure notion of honor. In other words, the most dangerous man alive.”

  “Maybe I ought to charge you.”

  “No. You want him. I’ve heard the story a hundred times. It’s a famous story. It’ll probably end up in the Saturday Evening Post and then the pictures. You can’t afford in your line of work to let something like that slide. That’s why you’ve hired private eyes, bribed newspapermen, tried to infiltrate the Hot Springs police department.”

  “Say, you are informed, ain’t you?” Bugsy was clearly impressed.

  “I know some folks.”

  “Okay, spill it. Just a second. Hey, Al, get down here!”

  The Hollywood gofer appeared a moment later.

  “Yes, Ben.”

  “Write down what this guy says. Okay, go ahead, Mystery Man.”

  Al got out pad and paper and began to take notes.

  “His name is Earl Swagger,” Frenchy said. “He lives on Route 8, in Polk County, Arkansas, with his wife, just west of a little town called Board Camp, maybe fifteen miles east of the county seat, Blue Eye. The name is on the mailbox. It’s his father’s old place. He’s got it painted up real nice now, I hear. And he and his wife had a little boy about ten months ago, so they’re all very happy. He’s just been appointed a corporal in the Arkansas State Police. You failed to find him on your own because part of the deal that was made when they closed down the Garland County raid team after Johnny Spanish blew it away was to destroy all the records, so that nothing exists on paper.”

  “Okay,” said Ben.

  “He’s a former Marine first sergeant. He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo.”

  Bugsy’s eyes squinted in suspicion.

  “No wonder you don’t want him on your tail.”

  “What else can I do? Perform some service for him and believe that it’ll protect me from his wrath? Not in this world, pal.”

  “Yeah, well, this will make you real happy. I will send some guys out there. Very tough guys. They will jump this Earl Swagger with crowbars and smash him in the head. They will drag him someplace in the woods, and, on my instructions, they will break every bone in his body. Every single one. It’ll take hours. They will smash his fuckin’ teeth out, break his nose, blind him, punch out his eardrums. The last words he hears will be, ‘Compliments of Ben Siegel, who remembers you from the train station.’ Then they’ll leave him there, and either he’ll die tied to that tree or he’ll be found and he’ll spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, blind, deaf and dumb. He will remember Ben Siegel, that I guarantee.”

  It was a little of Ben’s famous craziness—the Bugsy part of him—that just leaked out.

  Frenchy noted it, then stood. The two men didn’t shake
hands, and Ben walked him to the door.

  “And if anybody ever asks you, kid,” Ben said, “you tell them about the day you learned what kind of man Ben Siegel was.”

  “Yes sir,” said Frenchy.

  He went to his car and drove away.

  Sometime later, Ben was reading the paper on the sofa. He sat with it in his lap, waiting for Chick Hill to come downstairs with Jerri. Al Smiley, his pal, sat next to him.

  “This has been a very good day,” Ben said. “A very good day. I get to scratch an itch that’s been bugging me for over a year. The Flamingo is raking in the dough. I can pay off my debt to Meyer. Virginia will be back tomorrow. Hey, Al, life is good.”

  “Life is good,” said Al.

  “I always win. Nobody outfights me!”

  • • •

  Outside, the shooter steadied the carbine on the trellis. He wasn’t trembling at all, but then that was his gift. At moments like these, he held together. Always had. Always would. It was what he was meant to do.

  Front sight. That was the key.

  Trigger pull. Squeeze, not yank. The carbine was light, a little beauty of a rifle, powerful as a heavy .38 or one of those Magnums.

  He saw Ben Siegel’s face against the front sight. Then the face faded to blur as the sight blade became hard and perfect.

  The gun recoiled; he didn’t hear the blast.

  • • •

  Ben had just the impression of being punched hard and also a brief awareness of glass shattering. Then he—

  • • •

  The gunman fired again, watched as blood flew from the neck. He wasn’t aware of the man next to Bugsy collapsing in a heap on the floor.

  He shot again and again into the face, watching as the whole beautiful head quivered each time it absorbed a bullet, then settled back, more broken, bloodier, the jaw askew, the cheekbone smashed.

  A dog was barking.

  The gunman left the trellis and walked up to the window itself, standing close to the eight bullet holes clustered in the heavy glass, each with its silvery webbing of fracture.

  Ben lay with his head back on the sofa, his hands in his lap, a whole backed-up toilet’s worth of blood corrupting the beauty of his suit and the flowers of the material of the furniture. His tie was still tight and perfect.

  The dog barked again.

  The shooter put the little rifle to his shoulder one more time, aimed carefully and squeezed the trigger. He fired through the punctured glass, and it collapsed like a sheet of ice. He hit Benjamin Siegel in the eye, blowing it out in a puff of misted blood and bone fragments, and it spun wetly through the air and landed with a revolting sound on the tile floor.

  Frenchy lowered the carbine.

  “That’s for the cowboy,” he said, “you fucking yentzer.” Then he turned and coolly walked around the house, through the neighbor’s yard, dropped the carbine into the back seat of his car, and drove away to the rest of his life.

  69

  Earl sat with his son in the rocker on the porch. He held the boy close and rocked gently. The sun was bright and shone off the whiteness of the newly painted barn. He had done a lot to the old farm, including painting all the buildings that same brilliant white, mowing the high grass, planting a garden. He had a plan for plowing the field in the next spring, to put out a small crop. He wanted to buy some horses too, because he wanted his son to ride.

  He checked his watch. He wasn’t due on duty for another hour and Junie was in taking her nap. The State Police black-and-white was parked in the barnyard, next to an old oak.

  A Little Rock newspaper with two items of interest lay on the floor of the porch, next to the rocker. BECKER SETS GOV BID one headline had read; and far below it, in the corner, another bit of news from the old days: WEST COAST MOBSTER SLAIN.

  Neither had anything to do with him. Both seemed far away, and from another lifetime, not even his own. His life was now entirely different from that one, more settled. The rigors of duty, a necessary job; the effort it took to keep the farm running and to help Junie, who was still recovering from the strain of her labor; and the requirements of this new thing, which pleased him so much more than he could ever have believed, this business of being a father.

  The infant squirmed against him, made some unidentifiable sounds, and looked him square in the eye. There was something about the boy that impressed his father. He looked at things straight on, seemed to study them. He didn’t say much. He wasn’t a crier or a bawler, he seemed never to get into accidents or do stupid things like putting his hand in a fire or grabbing the hot teakettle. He never awoke in the night, but when they went in, early, he was always awake already, and watchful.

  “You are something, little partner,” he said to his son.

  The boy was ten months old, but he still had the warmth of a freshly baked loaf of bread to his father’s nose.

  The boy wanted to play a game. He reached out and touched his father’s nose and his father jerked his head back and made a sound like a horse, and the boy’s face knit in laughter. He loved this game. He loved his daddy holding him.

  “Ain’t you a pistol! Ain’t you a little pistol, buster! You are your old daddy’s number-one boy, yes, you are.”

  He had an idea for the boy. No one would ever raise a hand against him, and no one would ever tell him he was no good, he was nothing, he was second-rate. He’d already talked to Sam about it. This boy would go to college. No Marine Corps for him, no life of war, of getting shot at, scurrying through the bush. He would have a good life. He would be a lawyer or some such, and have a life he loved. He’d face none of the things his poor old dad had just survived. No sir. That wasn’t for boys. No boy should have to go through that.

  “Da—” said the boy.

  “There you go, little guy! That’s it! You know who I am. I am your old damned daddy, that’s me.”

  The boy’s teething mouth lit up in a smile. He reached out to touch his father’s nose again, and the game recommenced.

  But then Earl noticed the presence of two small boys standing just off the porch as if they’d just come sneaking out of the treeline to the left and were pleased with their stealth.

  “Well, howdy,” he called.

  One was a slight youth, blond and beautiful; the other was bigger and duller, with the sad, slack face of someone vacant in the mental department.

  “Howdy, sir,” said the smaller, sharper boy.

  “What you-all doing way out here?”

  “We come out on our bikes. We’s goin’ ’splorin!”

  “You find anything?”

  “We’s looking for treasure.”

  “Ain’t no treasure out here.”

  “We gonna find treasure someday.”

  “Well, maybe so.”

  “You a police?”

  “Why, yes I am. I am in the State Police. I haven’t put my uniform on yet. You boys look thirsty. You want some lemonade?”

  “Lemon,” said the big boy.

  “Lemonade,” corrected the smaller one. “Bub ain’t too smart.”

  “Not smart,” said Bub.

  “Well sir, this here’s my baby boy.”

  “He’s a cute one,” said the boy.

  “What’re your names, fellas?”

  “I’m Jimmy Pye. This here’s my cousin Bub.”

  “Bub,” said Bub.

  “Okay, you all stay there. I’m going to go in and pour you two nice glasses of lemonade, you hear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Earl walked into the house and set his son into his playpen, where the boy just watched.

  He opened the refrigerator and got out a pitcher of lemonade that Junie always kept and poured out two tall glasses.

  But when he returned to the porch, the boys were gone, having moved on in their quest for treasure.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In Hot Springs in 1946 there was indeed a veterans’ revolt, in which returning GIs, led by a heroic prosecuting attorney, fought and ultimat
ely vanquished the old line mob and gambling interests that controlled Arkansas’ most colorful town. However intense it was—the old newspapers suggest it was very intense—it was not nearly so violent as I have made it out to be. Moreover the lawyer who led it—who as I write still lives and who had a most distinguished career—was in every way a better man than my Fred C. Becker. And even the English-born New York mob figure, reputed to be Hot Springs’ secret Godfather, was far and away a gentler, better fellow than my nasty Owney Maddox, and is still thought well of in Hot Springs.

  So I take pains to separate the real historical antecedents from my grossly fictionalized versions of them. Hot Springs is meant to reflect not the reality of the GI Revolt but only my fabrications upon its themes, with the exceptions of the real figures of Benjamin Siegel and Virginia Hill.

  The rest is what I do, which is write stories, not histories, and whenever stuck between the cool plot twist and the record will choose the former. I am responsible for all of it, though I should mention those who helped me along the way.

  Foremost of these is Colonel Gerry Early, USA Retired, of Easton, Maryland. Gerry, a personnel officer, volunteered to research Earl’s Marine career and, with the help of Mr. Danny J. Crawford, Head, Reference Section, Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C., gave me the great pleasure of reproducing what I feel certain is Earl’s record exactly as it would have been had he lived in a world outside my head. It’s also a nice tribute to the professional NCOs of the United States Marine Corps in the ’30s, who were to prove their worth (and earn glory) in the Pacific. This was long, hard work and I am indebted to them both.

  My good friends Bob Lopez and Weyman Swagger were again there to help me. Lopez also introduced me to Paul Mahoney, who collects vintage cars, and Paul helped me with the cars of the ’40s. And Paul, in turn, introduced me to Larry De Baugh, an eminent collector of vintage slots, who briefed me and showed me such devices as the Rol-a-Top and the Mills Black Cherry. My colleague Lonnae Parker O’Neal was generous in helping me get the nuances of Southern black speech patterns of the ’40s. My Washington Post cellmate, the gifted Henry Allen, was of assistance in helping me work out the culture of the ’40s, even as he was preparing his own millennium project for the Post, in which he attempted to and did in fact answer the following most interesting question: What would it have been like to be alive in each decade of the century? Our mutual supervisor, John Pancake, Arts Editor of the Post, was his usual helpful self in not paying terribly close attention to my comings and goings. I could just say, “John, you know, the book,” and he’d nod, acquire a distressed expression, and then wearily look in another direction as I marched out.