About the only illicit activity that did not go on in the Mad Russian's empire was girls. “This pimping, pah! This I leave to the guineas!” he would exclaim when one or another of the younger boys in the gang would ask him why, unlike Salucci, he didn't run dames. That put an end to the subject as far as Solly was concerned, but not as far as the younger fellows were concerned; and then one of the older boys would have to take the kid aside and explain that once, years ago, when he was fresh off the boat and could find no other way to make a living, Solly had run a few choice girls—girls who would do anything after arriving in America and finding out that the promised land was an eighteen-hour-a-day sweatshop on Allen Street sewing alongside your mother, your father, and all your cousins.
Then Prohibition had come along, and that was the end of that, thank God.
Rick loved the nightclubs, which Horowitz had scattered across the city, glamorous places where you could hobnob with the swells, listen to jazz, and gaze at the most beautiful women in New York, all for the price of a drink. An inflated price, to be sure: despite Prohibition, speaks weren't a particularly risky business, which made the steep markup on booze all the more delightful and remunerative.
The Noble Experiment was in its twelfth year and, everyone said, on its last legs. Earlier than most gangsters, Solly Horowitz had gleaned the happily awful truth that the Eighteenth Amendment was going to be extremely unpopular with most of the city's citizens, and he determined to slake their thirsts, Volstead Act or no Volstead Act. This bit of prescience had made him a rich man many times over, but he still lived simply and unostentatiously above old Mr. Grunwald's violin shop on 127th Street with his wife, Irma. Mrs. Horowitz's recollection on almost every matter pertaining to her husband was doubtful, especially since she spoke almost no English. She knew nothing, she saw nothing, and most important, she remembered nothing, which was the way Solomon intended to keep it.“What for she gotta learn English?” her husband used to exclaim whenever the subject came up.“Yiddish ain't good enough for her?”
Horowitz was not a big man, but then most top gangsters weren't. They didn't have to be. In appearance he was short and a little rotund, but not fat: behind his affable exterior was both a formidable intellect and a strong physique. Not to his face, the boys called Solly“the Mad Russian,” in honor of his birthplace somewhere in what was, what had been, or what would eventually again be Russia. Even Solly was a little fuzzy on the exact site of his nativity, although most of the betting men in the organization—which was to say all of them—put their money on Odessa. In his speech, the boss had the authentic Russian disregard for articles, definite or otherwise.“Daddy,” Lois would exclaim in exasperation after a particularly Horowitzian enormity,“you gotta learn to talk right!”
Solly was not the fashion plate O'Hanlon was, favoring off-the-rack suits from Ginzberg's on 125th Street; the occasional presence of an egg stain on one of his ties rarely dissuaded him from wearing it. Nor, for that matter, did Horowitz drive a snazzy Murphy Duesenberg around town for every flatfooted copper to spot. If you had seen Solomon Horowitz on the subway or the el, you might have mistaken him for a businessman—an insurance salesman, perhaps, working the immigrant communities for all they were worth. Which in his own mind, he was.
It was worth your life, however, to underestimate him—or worse, cheat him. One time, Big Julie Slepak, president of the Restaurant Workers’ Benevolent Association, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of S. Horowitz Inc., had tried to skim a few grand off the top of money that rightfully belonged to the boss. Confronted with the evidence of his malfeasance, Julie tried to bluster his way out of his pickle until Solly put an end to it by yanking out the pistol that he always carried in the waistband of his trousers, shoving it in Big Julie's mouth, and pulling the trigger, thus shutting him up for good. That he did this right in front of his lawyer was a measure of the security Solly felt when conducting his business.
“Boys,” he said over the fallen flunky,“a lesson to you this should only be. Never try to take from me that what is mine!”
Today, Rick could tell the Mad Russian was in an expansive mood, because he was smoking a cigar, a small indulgence he occasionally permitted himself. Normally Solomon Horowitz did not smoke or drink, and while he did not keep glatt kosher at home, he usually came as close to it as his appetites would permit. His vest was unbuttoned, and he sat comfortably at his rear table.
As usual, Tick-Tock Schapiro sat not far away, watching Solly's back.
Rick wanted to talk about Lois, to at least broach the subject, because while he loved Solly like a father, he loved Lois not at all like a sister. Solly's proscription against his daughter's dating any of the boys, though, was still very much in effect.
Rick glanced over at Tick-Tock and wondered if the big ape could read minds. If anybody were to tell Solly that he and Lois had been getting a little friendlier than Horowitz allowed … Not for the first time, he thought about Big Julie.
If Solly harbored any suspicions about Rick's intentions toward Lois, he gave no evidence. Instead he was off on one of his favorite subjects, which was the honor roll of Manhattan's great Jewish gangsters and his place as the last of them. Like some French King, after himself Solly saw only a deluge.
There was Dopey Benny Fein, him with the droopy eye. And Big Jack Zelig, with the crazy straw hat he used to wear all the time. And Louis Kushner, who shot Kid Dropper right in the back of a police car! And the greatest of them all, Monk Eastman, with his pigeons and his cats, who even fought in the war! Jesus, there was Jewish gangsters back then!
They were all familiar names to Rick Baline. He had grown up hearing of their exploits, like the time when Monk's gang, dubbed in honor of the boss (who was born Edward Ostermann) the Eastmans,. had clashed with the Five Points boys led by Paul Kelly (who was really an Italian named Vacarelli). They shot up the intersection of Rivington and Allen Streets so thoroughly that it took a couple of hundred coppers to restore the peace and sent the shmattes who ran the crooked stuss games in the perpetual shadows of the els scurrying for cover for maybe three whole hours before resuming business as usual.
The reminiscences always started with the stories about Dopey Benny, so-called because a nerve or something had gone kaput in his cheek, which therefore drooped, occasioning any number of beatings, clobberings, and shootings provoked by the discriminate use by relative strangers of the hated nickname. From there, Solly's memory would quickstep through the years between the turn of the century and more or less the present day, and would always end with the Shma over the declining number of authentic gangsters of the Jewish faith, the kinds of fellas who could go toe to toe with the Irishers and the Italians without blinking and never took guff from nobody.
Rick always listened, his ears opened even wider than his eyes. Every time he went home to his dingy, solitary flat on West 182nd Street, Solomon Horowitz rose in his estimation with each stair that he climbed. Each step up those dark stairs, reeking with the smell of frying fish and boiling cabbage, seemed to him a step farther away from the kind of life he wanted to live, a step back in the direction of Chrystie Street, beyond which lay the boat, the shtetl, and Galicia. His mother had told him enough about her girlhood there, a dreary region of coal mines and (in her telling, at least) Cossacks, to make him never want to go to central Europe. Paris, he had decided, would be more his kind of place.
“Do you ever think about going straight, Solly?” asked Rick.
“Go straight?” Horowitz laughed.“You gotta be kidding.”
“Well, why not?” persisted Rick.
“I tell you why not, smart guy,” Solly shouted.“I tell you what straight is. Straight is cops with their hands out, shaking down Mr. Moskowitz on Second Avenue. Straight is Tammany politicians who slap on a yarmulke when they sit shiva for somebody they don't even know, and then ask you for your vote. Straight is when they put up another blind tiger on the Bowery, but neither a church nor a shul.” He spat contemptuously.“That
's what straight is, it is.”
Horowitz leaned over toward his protÉgÉ.“Straight,” said Solly,“is meshugge.”
In the distance, Schapiro grunted.
“Ricky, sometimes I think maybe you're meshugge, too. This worries me. You know the rules.”
“The rules?” said Rick.
“The Lois rules,” Solly answered.“I hear things. I see things. Dumb I’m not.” He buttoned the top button on his vest.“And neither are you. You can like, but you don't touch. You touch, Tick-Tock has to shoot you.”
“With pleasure,” Tick-Tock said from the shadows.
“What a waste!” Solly seemed saddened by the very thought of Rick's untimely demise.“Because her I got plans for.” Rick was smart enough not to ask what those plans were and smart enough to glean that those plans did not involve him.
“And you, Ricky,” he said.“I got plans for you, too. Not the same plans. But plans. A boy like you with a head for business, why, there is gelt to be made in the speaks, and easy gelt at that,” he said.“Which is what I want to speak to you about.”
With that, Solomon Horowitz informed Rick Baline that henceforth he would be the manager of Solly's newest night spot, the Tootsie-Wootsie Club, just opened on the site of a former black social club.“Me, I’m getting too old for this kids’ stuff. Staying up until four in the morning, shmoozing the clientele, breaking up fights, cleaning up messes,oy. I should be in bed. Besides, you mix better with them.”
“With who?” asked Rick.
“The goyim, that's who! Not just the micks and the wops, but high society. Why, I should expect John Jacob Astor himself to walk in here if he was still alive, with his three hundred and ninety-nine best friends.” Solly rubbed his hands together.“What we got here is the uptown version of Mrs. Astor's ballroom!”
Solly grasped him by his shoulders, held him at arm's length, and stared him right in the eyes.“Remember this: The goyim, they trade with us, they buy from us. Sometimes they sleep with our women. But they don't drink with us. And, if you're smart, you won't drink with them, either. You keep them like this, always.” Slowly he let his hands fall from Rick's shoulders.“You understand?”
“Don't worry, Solly,” said Rick. He could hardly believe one of his two dreams had just come true.“I’ll make it a point never to drink with the customers.” He looked at his boss.“No matter who they sleep with.”
Now, for the other dream.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
New York, April 1932
Guess what I’ve got?” Rick Baline asked Lois Horowitz one night. They were sitting on the stoop in front of her building. The air was pleasantly brisk but not cold; Rick loved the way it raised the color in Lois's pale cheeks.
Rick's hands were behind his back, concealing something.
“Two bottles of Moxie?” she asked.
“You're cold.”
“A treasure map for some pirate's island?”
“You're ice cold, and besides, they were fresh out of those at Blinsky's when I asked.”
Lois bit her lower lip for a moment.“I know,” she said.“A ticket on the Twentieth Century to California!”
That, he knew, was what she really wanted.“No,” he said,“but you're warmer now.”
“I give up,” she said, pouting prettily.
“Here.” He handed over a pair of duckets: two in the orchestra for that evening's Show Stoppers, starring Ruby Keeler and Al Jolson at Henry Miller's Theatre.
This was going to be tricky. From time to time Solomon Horowitz allowed Rick Baline to escort his daughter to minor social functions, in the manner of a chaperone, but even those occasions were rare. A Broadway show and dinner afterward, though, was a full-fledged date, and those were strictly verboten. More and more Rick found himself resenting the restrictions. He wanted to take his best girl out on the town. After all, what was the point of being a gangster if you couldn't act like one?
The way Solly saw it, that was not going to happen. He may have lived contentedly, if not happily, above the violin shop, but he wanted better for his daughter. He did not aspire to Fifth Avenue, but he wanted her to do so. He was not a vain man, and he never envied O'Hanlon his silk suits and slicked-back hair, or Salucci his dark Italian good looks. Money he had aplenty, but it was being put aside—the safe at the Tootsie-Wootsie Club was stuffed with it—where it would come in handy someday, maybe even do some good, if not for him, then for his only child. He thought of it as a kind of dowry, but one that was reserved for Lois and not for her husband—who in any case had better be both rich and successful before Solomon would ever consent to any union with his issue.
Rick, however, had been enamored of her from the beginning, smitten by her raven hair and her cerulean eyes and her alabaster skin. There was more to Lois than simply looks, though, as he soon discovered. Like him, she wanted things out of life, big things. Not just a fancy car and a big house, either, but education and social standing as well. Lois was working hard to improve the way she spoke, hunting down her“ain'ts” and rooting out her dropped“g's,” and she was spending her afternoons in the public library reading everything she could find. The small allowance she got from her father she spent on stylish new clothes. Lois had never looked very much like the other girls in the neighborhood, but now she was distancing herself from them as fast as she could.
“Rick Baline!” she exclaimed.“You certainly don't give a girl much time to get ready to see the hottest show on Broadway!”
“The most beautiful girl in Harlem doesn't need much time,” he said.
She ran up the front steps. As she opened the door, she blew him a kiss.“Meet me back here in an hour,” she said,“and don't be late. I hear the opening number is a knockout.”
Rick wasn't so sure. Throughout the first act Ruby Keeler danced like an elephant and sang like a chimpanzee.“Jeez, she's terrible,” he remarked as they stood outside at intermission. Lois was smoking a cigarette, something her father would never allow her to do at home. Smoking was something the smart set did.
“Everybody knows that,” said Lois.
“So how does she get to be in a show with Jolson?”
“She's his girlfriend, that's how,” said Lois.“Guys like to do things for their girlfriends, you know.”
Rick wanted to pursue the subject, especially the part about girlfriends, but Lois wasn't interested. She was gazing around at the theater crowd, at the fancy cars lining the streets, and up at the midtown skyline.“It sure is a lot nicer here than it is in Harlem,” she said half to herself.“Say, did you get a load of some of those joints we passed on the way down? Wouldn't you just die to live in a place like those someday? I sure would.”
“Don't you worry, Lois,” said Rick.“We both will, before you know it.”
She grabbed his arm.“Do you really think so? I can't wait.”
“I promise.”
“That's what I like about you, Rick,” said Lois.“You're going places, too. Why, I’ll bet you see the whole world someday.”
“If you'll go with me.”
The buzzer announcing the start of the second act prevented her reply.“Come on, let's see how it all turns out,” said Lois, taking Rick by the arm.
The big number in act two was a duet for Ruby and Al, set beside an obviously fake waterfall; her name was Wanda and his was Joe. As far as Rick could make out, the plot of the piece had something to do with young lovers thrown together, despite the wishes of their parents, at a resort hotel in the Catskills, or maybe it was Lake George. Joe was a poor Irish bellhop on the make, and Wanda was a rich girl trying to throw over her current beau, a bloodless Protestant named Lester Thurman whom she quite clearly didn't love, in favor of Joe. The moral of the story seemed to be that anybody can be anything or anyone he wanted to be as long as he had the chutzpah to get away with it.
“Hungry?” he asked as they exited.
“I thought you'd never ask,” she said.
He took her to Rector's, the swanky resta
urant on the West Side renowned for its food and its status as a gangland hangout. The refined clientele got a thrill knowing that the hard boys and brassy dames at the tables were very often the same folks they would read about in the Broadway columns and police stories the next morning. Hits, however, were strictly off limits at Rector's—nothing was worse for business than a couple of out-of-town salesmen catching a stray slug as they munched their veal chops. Rector's was a kind of gangland no-man's-land, where rivalries, if not guns, had to be checked at the door.
Off in a corner, Rick spied Damon Runyon, drinking whiskey hand over fist and chatting up a couple of dolls. Runyon liked to hang around the fringes of gangland, romanticizing the tough guys as colorful characters with hearts of gold in his tales, when in fact the relatively good ones were family men like Horowitz and the bad ones were sadistic killers like Tick-Tock and Salucci. The only gold in gangland was fool's gold.
Lois was thrilled. Solomon would never have let her come here, and Rick was already mentally explaining their presence there to his boss should it come to that. But he could see the gleam in her eyes and knew he had done the right thing in bringing her. This was the kind of glamorous life she wanted; minus the gangsters, this was the kind of life her father wanted for her also.“It looks a little crowded,” she said.
“The first rule of restaurants,” he told her,“is that there's always an empty table if you really want one.” He waved to the maître d’.“I mean, if the President of the United States walked in here just now, they'd find him a table, wouldn't they? Well, the President is here!” Smoothly he palmed a $20 bill and slipped it to the man as he greeted them.
As Time Goes By Page 13
