Rick looked at her. Her eyes told him not to, so he looked back at Mr. Horowitz. “No,” he lied.
“Good; that you can forget about. I’m reserving her for a rich shaygets.” Horowitz resumed his interrogation: “What's your father do?”
“Never met the man.”
“Dead?”
“That's what they tell me.”
“Mother?”
“Only one.”
“You afraid of anything besides her?”
“Just being a loser.”
“You get along with the shvartzers?”
“Well enough,” he said.
“You looking for a job?”
“You could talk me into it,” said Rick.
“Nightclub work okay?”
“You bet.”
Solomon Horowitz looked Yitzik Baline up, down, and sideways.
“The cut of this one's jib I like,” he finally announced. “Unemployed I can always use. See me tomorrow, this address.” With that he began to close the door in Rick's face.
From behind her father's back, Lois blew him a kiss. “Good night, Ricky,” she said. “See you again someday.”
As he waved good-bye to her, he realized that he had forgotten all about his mother's knish. Right then and there, he knew he was in love.
CHAPTER SEVEN
New York, July 1931
The milk trucks came over the rise in Bedford Hills at dawn, just as Tick-Tock had said they would.
“Here you go, kid,” Solly said to Rick, handing him the revolver. It was a blue steel Smith & Wesson .38, primed and ready, with all six chambers loaded, and the way the daylight glinted off it, you could practically shave with it.
Rick nodded confidently. “Thanks, Solly,” he said. This was his first armed action, and he was ready for it.
It was six-fifteen on the morning of July 4, 1931, and already it was hot and humid and stifling. The milk trucks belonged to Dion O'Hanlon, except they weren't carrying milk. They were carrying whiskey down from Canada to a thirsty midtown Manhattan. It was Solly's intention to make sure thirsts were quenched uptown and in the Bronx first.
This part of Westchester was supposed to be their cordon sanitaire, a place they could drive through without fear of molestation or hijacking. That's what O'Hanlon paid his protection money to the Westchester cops for, and that's what he expected to get in return. The boys driving his trucks had gotten lazy, though. Today, they were as unwary as the romping schoolkids at P.S. 31 in the Bronx. Today, O'Hanlon's money was no good here. Solomon Horowitz had outbid him. He felt it was his patriotic duty.
Not to mention he'd had to. He needed the liquor for his clubs, and O'Hanlon had recently euchred him out of a sweet deal up in Montreal that Horowitz had thought he'd locked up.
“Zei gesunt Ricky,” said Solly. “Remember, never pull your piece unless you plan to shoot somebody. Never shoot unless you plan to hit somebody. Otherwise maybe they get mad and hit you back.”
Rick watched the boss move away briskly. For a stout man, Solly was a nimble fellow.
Rick began to take aim as the first truck cab came into his sights. Tick-Tock Schapiro, Solly's right-hand man and his third cousin, in that order, slapped his hand down hard. “Watch it, punk,” he growled. “You might hurt somebody with that thing.”
Tick-Tock got no quarrel from Rick. Schapiro was six feet four if he was an inch, and every inch of him was mean. His given name was Emmanuel, but nobody ever used it. He had acquired his nickname when he was thirteen: the ticking of the grandfather clock in the tiny hallway of the Schapiro family apartment on Little Water Street was driving him nuts, so he went out and acquired his first piece from a Five Pointer over on Anthony Street, brought it home just as pleased as punch, and shot the bejesus out of the clock's face, taking special pleasure in watching the glass front shatter, the hands of the clock spin off, and the inner mechanism explode into a thousand pieces that no Swiss clockmaker could ever put back together again.
When his oma complained about what he had done to her clock, which she had brought over from Germany, he threw her down a flight of stairs. Tick-Tock told the cops she'd slipped. His mother, who'd seen the whole thing, gave them the same story. Tick-Tock had that effect on people.
Tick-Tock was also Solomon Horowitz's most valuable asset in his newly escalating battle with O'Hanlon. Schapiro was big, but he wasn't dumb, and he had developed the best inside information on the Irishman's booze shipments. How he did it was anybody's guess. Tick-Tock didn't talk much.
“Lemme show ya,” he said. Coolly Tick-Tock aimed his pistol at the lead truck and shot out the front tires. The vehicle swerved precipitously as its wheels were transformed into a shower of rubber shards. Schapiro was a hell of a shot, as even Kinsella, the driver of this particular truck, would have had to admit. But with no control over his truck he was helpless as it swerved off the road, grazed a tree, and rolled onto its side. Sweat, cordite, and burning rubber mingled in the air like some obscene perfume that wouldn't be offered for sale at the big new Bloomingdale's store on 59th Street any time soon.
That's why the gang carried fire extinguishers. Pinky Tannenbaum, Abie Cohen, and Laz Lowenstein sprinted toward the burning truck, spraying gunfire and foam more or less simultaneously. Meanwhile the rest of the boys enfiladed the convoy, riddling the cabs of the other three trucks like they were the metal turkeys at Luna Park, the ones you could pop to impress your girl, win a stuffed animal, and maybe get lucky, too.
In the teeth of the ambush, the Irishers jumped out of their trucks like Aran fishermen abandoning their curraghs in a storm. They fired as they dropped from steering wheels and shotgun positions, blasting back as they scuttled for safety, but they didn't have a chance. Horowitz's men were tough and disciplined, like their leader, and they wasted no lead. In less than a minute the battle of Bedford Hills was over, as even the dimmest of O'Hanlon's gangsters realized it was not worth dying to save a few thousand gallons of Canadian Club. They threw their pieces to the ground in surrender.
Tick-Tock wanted to shoot them all where they stood, but Solly refused. “We're bootleggers, not red Indians,” he said. “We take no scalps.” He turned to O'Hanlon's men, waving his pistol in the air and yelling, “Get outta here, you sons of bitches bastards.”
O'Hanlon's boys didn't need to be told twice. They turned and ran. How they would get back to New York was their problem.
Although he knew O'Hanlon wouldn't see it like this, the way Solly Horowitz had things figured, this booze was his. He used to have a straight pipeline from the Michaelson family's distilleries in Quebec; he'd been doing business with them for years, ever since Congress had handed him a gift called the Volstead Act. Lately, though, O'Hanlon was bending, if not outright breaking, their understanding about who got what and from which suppliers, and he'd been chiseling him with Michaelson, bidding up the price and increasing the volume. That was no way to do business, unless Dion was trying to put Solly out of business.
Ordinarily the road through Bedford Hills was an O'Hanlon highway, while Solly generally brought his booze down the other side of the Hudson, through the Catskills via Newburgh and the river. In Solly's opinion he was only getting back what should have been his in the first place. Solomon Horowitz did not appreciate another man's taking what belonged to him.
O'Hanlon would be furious, Solly knew, but that was tough. He wasn't about to start letting himself get muscled by the Irishman and his new allies, Salucci and Weinberg. Why, Solomon Horowitz had been running gangs in New York when that little pisher Irving Weinberg was still wetting his short pants. And if the day ever came that a fresh-off-the-boat wop like Salucci could start pushing him around with impunity … well, that day would never come.
This would get their attention.
Horowitz strolled over to the now abandoned caravan. Rick was about to holster his gat when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught an arm, a hand, a finger, a trigger, all moving. Without thinking he knocked Solly to h
is knees and came up firing.
He'd raised his gun just as O'Hanlon's man had raised his. Rick was faster. His .38-caliber bullet slammed into the man's wrist and shattered it on the spot. He'd fired reflexively, just the way Solly had taught him in all those hours of practice in the Harlem backyards. Yitzik Baline was a natural with a heater.
Solly turned to look at Rick admiringly. “Nice shooting,” he said. If his close brush with death bothered him, he wouldn't let it show. Solomon Horowitz never let anybody see him sweat.
“Yeah, Lois is gonna be real proud of you, hero,” sneered Tick-Tock, who had come back from the fray mad because he hadn't gotten to kill anybody. He walked over to the wounded man and shot him in the head. There: he felt much better now. “You know,” he said, turning his attention back to Rick, “I think she's kind of sweet on you.”
Solly didn't answer but instead glowered at his cousin. As far as Lois Horowitz was concerned, her father had big plans for her, and they didn't include any of the mugs and yeggs in the gang. In his presence, you didn't joke about Lois's being sweet on anybody. In fact, you didn't even mention her. Not if you wanted to live a long, prosperous, and healthy life. That went for everybody, and that went for Tick-Tock double, because after all, Tick-Tock was family. Sort of.
CHAPTER EIGHT
January 23, 1942. This is London. While the battle for the Soviet Union rages thousands of miles away, here on the western front the bombs of the Luftwaffe continue to fall almost nightly as Adolf Hitler attempts to bring Great Britain to her knees. Last night, the docks of London's East End took a terrific pounding from the forces of Field Marshall Goering. Bombs fell throughout the evening, ranging as far west as Cheapside and Whitechapel. Not even the majestic dome of Christopher Wren's architectural masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, was spared the assault.
But even amid the rubble, there yet springs hope. For London is home to every anti-Nazi resistance movement in Europe, and their numbers are growing daily. Led by the exiled general Charles De Gaulle, the Free French are waging a fierce rearguard campaign against the Germans across North Africa and in the Middle East, striking first, unsuccessfully, at Dakar and then in Syria. The Norwegian government-in-exile is also here, working day and night to overthrow Vidkun Quisling's collaborationist government. Czech partisans are now calling the city home as well. Having seen their country first partitioned by the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and then destroyed by the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, they have sworn to overthrow both the Protectorate and the Nazi satellite state of Slovakia.
“Let the puppetmasters in Berlin be advised,” exiled President Eduard Beneš] has declared. “We shall not rest until our beloved Czech homeland is fully restored.”
“Shut it off, Sam.”
“Don't you want to hear the news?” asked Sam.
“Not unless it's good,” said Rick.
“There ain't no good news these days,” Sam objected.
“That's what I’m trying to tell you,” said Rick.
Sam switched off the radio, plopped himself into a chair, and picked up his book. He was reading Bleak House by Dickens, which he had found in the hotel library. Reading about white folks worse off than himself made him feel better.
Over the past six years he had sometimes doubted the wisdom of what he had done, of escaping with Rick across the ocean, one step ahead of disaster, when he might have sat the whole mess out in New York and waited for the smoke to clear; there was always a market in Manhattan for a good singing pianist … not to mention a first-class driver. How he longed for his favorite lake in the Catskills or, if he allowed his mind to drift back that far, his boyhood in the Missouri Ozarks, where the fish were always jumping, or his young manhood in New Orleans, where Lake Pontchartrain always beckoned.
Then he remembered Paris and all those French girls with their small bosoms and their big noses, and their insatiable curiosity about all things nègres, and that was the end of that particular reverie. Who was to say that if he had stayed in New York he wouldn't have ended up like Horowitz and Meredith and the rest of them? All things considered, he hadn't made out so bad. Except that he didn't care for London very much. The buildings were monochrome, the skies were slate gray, and there was hardly a black face in sight. He went back to his book.
Rick, too, relaxed in reverie. With the money from the sale of the cafÉ to Ferrari, he had taken a suite of rooms at Brown's Hotel. Rick was posing as a theatrical agent, part of the fiction being that Sam was his manservant. The funds would not last indefinitely, but they would last long enough, or so Rick hoped, for them to find Victor and Ilsa. More than a month had already passed, however; despite their best efforts, neither Rick nor Renault had succeeded in locating Victor Laszlo.
What if Laszlo had played him for a fool? He'd like to think he'd learned a few lessons in treachery over the years, but it wouldn't be the first time he'd been had. What if Laszlo knew that Rick would be able to resist neither his appeals to Rick's patriotism nor his love for Ilsa and so had conned him out of the exit visas? Laszlo was just pigheaded enough to think he could take on the entire Third Reich all by himself.
What if that note in Lisbon had been meant to throw him off the scent, written by Ilsa under duress from her husband, who suspected that Rick's magnanimity was not entirely altruistic, and who had gone to New York—where Rick could not follow? What if the Laszlos weren't really in London at all? What if they really had gone to America? Then that was that; he couldn't go back, unless he wanted a one-way ticket to Old Sparky at Sing Sing. But where could he go? He was beginning to run out of places.
“How long we gonna stay here, boss?” interjected Sam, reading his thoughts, as usual.
“Until we find Victor Laszlo.”
“If we find Mr. Laszlo,” corrected Sam.
“We will,” Rick answered, smoking a cigarette and looking down onto Dover Street. “We have to.”
“If you say so,” said Sam. “This sure ain't like Paris. Or New York. I mean, a fella can't hardly get something decent to eat.”
Rick turned to look at his friend. “You know those are two places I told you not to talk about,” he growled.
“Aw shucks, boss, you can't go holdin’ on to the bad memories forever. What's done is done: you can't change what happened back home.” Sam bit his lower lip. “Anyway, it wasn't your fault, how things turned out.”
“Of course it was my fault,” snapped Rick. “Who else's could it be?”
Sam was getting as agitated as Rick. “If that's the way you want to be about it, fine,” he said. “If you want to drag this thing around with you for the rest of your life, you go right ahead. But as for me, every time I bite into one of those awful steak-and-kidney pies, I’m gonna remember me the leg of lamb at the Tootsie-Wootsie—”
“Shut up, will you?”
“—and the steak frites at La Belle Aurore, and—”
“I said shut up!” A knock at the door interrupted the argument. “Get that, will you?”
Sam padded over to the door and opened it.
“Hello, Sam,” said the visitor, entering. It was Renault.
“Ah, Ricky, still living the life of a man of leisure, I see.” The dapper little Frenchman had traded in his Vichy uniform for a Savile Row suit, atop which he wore an elegant homburg. He looked like a minor diplomat, which was how he was happy to pass himself off, especially to the English ladies. “Whereas I have been working hard, procuring useful information.”
“The day will never come when you have to work hard for a living, Louie,” said Rick. “Not without a fight.”
“Work is in the eye of the beholder,” Renault responded. “Should I choose not to behold it, that is entirely my business.” With a flourish he produced a silver cigarette case and flipped it open. “A gift from one of my new admirers.”
“What exactly was she admiring?”
Renault puffed out his chest. “Resourcefulness is the hallmark
of the true gentleman,” he said.
“I’ll bet.” Rick took one of the offered cigarettes.
“What gives?”
Renault lit up, took a puff, and collected his thoughts.
He smoked like a bird pecking for worms, darting at the cigarette rather than embracing it, whereas Rick preferred long, slow drags. Sam didn't smoke at all. It was another of the white man's vices he had learned to live without.
“Well, among other things, I think I may have found a way to discover the whereabouts of our friend Victor Laszlo—and, of course, of your friend Miss Lund as well.” Renault paused to savor the effect of this particular bit of intelligence on his listeners.
Rick, however, only nodded, a barely perceptible tilt of his head. “Go on,” he said.
Renault smiled. “Not even Victor Laszlo, whose consideration of the comfort and feelings of his fellow man is second only to his way with the fair sex, can expect us to wait here forever. Furthermore, my sense of duty as a Frenchman and a patriot has compelled me to contact De Gaulle's headquarters and offer my services in the struggle against Hitler.”
That had been part of their plan all along.
“It's about time,” said Rick.
Renault relaxed into a chair. One of the qualities he found most lacking in the Americans was a sense of style, of presentation, of savoir-faire. He made a little noise in his throat by way of preamble. “Seriously, Ricky, it seems that a gentleman answering the description of Monsieur Laszlo has recently been sighted by one or two of my, er, new colleagues coming and going in the district of South Kensington.”
That got Rick's attention. “You got an address?”
“Not yet,” Renault lied. He wasn't quite sure why he lied. Maybe it was just out of habit. Maybe he wanted to check the place out first, to make sure he had the right information. Another day or two wouldn't hurt.
“Well, get one, pronto,” said Rick. “By the way, just who are these new ‘colleagues’ of yours?”
“Now, Ricky, we ought to be able to have a few little secrets from each other.” Nervously Louis snapped another cigarette out of the case and lit it. “Our countries may be allies, but that doesn't mean we have to share every bit of intelligence. Give me some time.”
As Time Goes By Page 6
