Bugsy Malone

by Alan Parker

  Bugsy, going under for the sixth time, suddenly saw three of the hobos laid into with the crispest left hook he’d ever seen. The black boy’s punches flashed right and left so fast they whistled through the air. He tossed the last down-and-out headlong into the alley like a sack of dirty laundry at Hung Fu Shin’s. The rest of the hobos ran off into the street – the ones that could still run – side-stepping the passing bike sedans that hooted and swerved.

  The boy helped Bugsy to his feet.

  “They take your money, mister?”

  Bugsy winced as he slapped his pockets. The money had gone. “Yeah, nearly two hundred dollars.”

  The black boy brushed his hat and took off his jacket to clean off the dust. He revealed a pair of yellow webbing braces that held up his baggy trousers. In fact, the trousers were so enormous there was room for three more boys inside, and the braces were so wide that they looked as if they could hold up the Brooklyn Bridge with ease. Bugsy picked up his own hat from the garbage.

  “It was nice of you to help me like that.”

  “Oh, it was nothing,” replied the chubby-faced boy. As he grinned, his cheeks bulged out like big, shiny, black apples. His teeth sparkled like a toothpaste billboard on the freeway and he smiled with a smile that came easy.

  The two of them walked towards the street.

  “You must be a boxer. Right?” asked Bugsy.

  “Nope,” came the reply.

  “You’re not? But that’s the best punching I ever saw.”

  The boy smiled again. His large eyes flashed as his eyelids fluttered with unaffected modesty. Bugsy was curious. He’d come across a lot of boxing talent in his time, but this was the best he’d ever set eyes on.

  “You ever been coached?”

  “Nope.”

  “Every thought of taking it up?”

  “Nope.”

  Bugsy persisted. “Why not? You could be a champion.”

  The boy shrugged and smiled once more – a sad smile this time. “Never had the chance.”

  “I know someone who can help you. You know Cagey Joe?”

  “Nope.”

  “You know Sluggers Gym?”

  “Nope.” This time the boy’s smile was enormous – it spread from ear to ear and his mouth seemed filled with twice as many teeth as a normal person’s.

  “What’s your name, anyway?”

  The boy through for a while. He was no scholar but his name was something he did know. “Er... Smith. Leroy Smith!”

  Bugsy put an arm around his new-found friend and thrust out his hand. “Put it there, Leroy. You’ve got yourself a manager.”

  The two boys shook hands and Bugsy winced once more. Partly from Leroy’s iron grip, and partly from the black and blue reminders of the down-and-outs’ boots.

  “You know the first thing I’m going to do with you, Leroy?”

  Back came Leroy’s favourite answer. “Nope.”

  “I’m going to treat you to one heck of a meal.”

  “I thought they took your dough, man?”

  “Who needs dough?” Bugsy tossed his arms in the air to emphasise his words. He shouldn’t have, because it made the ache in his back and the bruises on his ribs seem worse. He gasped again and Leroy put his arm around him for support as they walked off towards the brighter side of town. Away from those dark alleys, Bugsy thought to himself. But he needn’t have worried any longer – with Leroy Smith as a partner he could take on the world.

  CAPTAIN SMOLSKY LEANED back confidently in the back of the police car. Up front, O’Dreary struggled with the pedals of the bike sedan and the sweat glistened on his forehead from the effort. Smolsky had no reason to look confident – he was about as near to solving this case as O’Dreary was to breaking the world land speed record. But his career hadn’t been all failure. He chewed on his pencil as he pondered over his successes. Actually, “success” would put it more accurately.

  It had been the famous “Black Sox” scandal. The case that had shocked the baseball-going public so deeply in 1919. Smolsky had been on loan to the Californian Police at the time. The New York Commissioner had thought it wise to give the city a rest from the Polish super sleuth (as he was generally referred to in high places). There was also the chance that Smolsky might like the sunshine or the eucalyptus trees and stay there for good. As it turned out, Smolsky surprised everyone, including himself, and had the triumph of his career.

  He and a number of other junior detectives had been given instructions to nose around the baseball fraternity to try and weasel out any information they could relating to suspected ‘fixed’ baseball games. The world series that year was at Red Bluff, between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. After the best of nine series, the underdog Reds won 5-3. A lot of money had changed hands and the police uncovered the fact that several White Sox players had taken bribes from gamblers to deliberately ‘throw’ the game. Eight players later testified to a Chicago grand jury admitting that they had deliberately played badly for money. Smolsky had been in on the investigation from the beginning, and he returned from his Californian mission covered in glory. Since then, however, Smolsky’s career had been one long climb up the ladder of success in a downwards direction.

  But this case was different, he kept telling himself. If he could only repeat his ‘Black Sox’ success on his own territory, it would wipe his slate clean. And a lifetime of blunders meant a long list, a lot of chalk and a lot of wiping.

  The sedan whispered its way through the trees and squeaked to a halt at Dandy Dan and Fat Sam’s meeting place – Fiveways, at the intersection of Lexburg and Denver. The ground was covered with the remains of the splurge battle. Smolsky ordered the six other policemen, who were crammed into the sedan with O’Dreary, to look for clues. They scratched their heads as they scoured the ground around them, occasionally bumping into one another. Suddenly Smolsky let out a triumphant yell.

  “Ahaa! Come and take a look at this, O’Dreary.”

  O’Dreary ran to the spot where Smolsky was pointing. He crouched down by Smolsky’s legs and followed his eyes along the police captain’s pointing finger to the “clue”. O’Dreary looked up at his boss and smiled a smug smile.

  “You’ve cracked it this time, Captain Smolsky.”

  Smolsky was a little surprised at this reaction. He’d thought he’d found a clue, not a solution. He pushed his hat to the back of his head as movie police captains do.

  “I have? What do you see?”

  This was a question O’Dreary was not really ready for. He stared at the spot and saw nothing but Smolsky’s shoe in the soft mud.

  “Tell me, what do you see, O’Dreary?”

  “Your foot, Captain.”

  Smolsky whipped off his hat in desperation and whacked it across the back of the Irishman’s thick head. “Not my foot, you knucklehead! Under my foot. Tyre marks.”

  O’Dreary looked again, and sure enough, under Smolsky’s shiny black shoe was the imprint of a tyre from Dandy Dan’s bike sedan, pressed out quite clearly in the squelchy mud.

  “It’s a tyre mark, Captain.”

  “Too right it’s a tyre mark, you Irish potato head. Get the plaster. We’ll take a mould.”

  “Sure thing, Captain.”

  O’Dreary snapped his fingers at the other policemen to help him. They struggled in the back seat of the sedan for a moment and appeared with a zinc bath filled with plaster. The white liquid slopped around as they staggered with it to the spot where Captain Smolsky was now kneeling. He brushed away the loose pieces of grass from the creases of the tyre imprint. As the tottering policemen backed towards the crouching detective, one of them trod rather awkwardly on a discarded custard pie. It was inevitable. The gooey object threw the unfortunate officer’s legs up into the air. The bungling policemen toppled over one another into a pile of arms and legs, and the bath of plaster they were holding tipped upside down, emptying its sloppy white contents over Mrs Smolsky’s favourite son.

  There should
have been all hell let loose, but there wasn’t. Instead, there was silence. Even the birds seemed to stop twittering, lest they should be blamed for the mishap. Smolsky gradually stood up. He was covered from head to toe in white plaster that was already beginning to set. He looked like an iced candy figure on top of a birthday cake. The policemen just lay there and stared. No one was brave enough to move, let alone speak. The police captain’s face turned scarlet with rage. Not that anyone noticed the colour, as his face was covered in white plaster. Finally a shout – no, not a shout, a strangled scream – came out of Smolsky’s mouth.

  “Aaah!”

  It’s difficult to explain this word exactly. It was the kind of word you only see in picture comics – and the kind of sound you might only hear when a rhinoceros accidentally treads on a monkey’s foot.

  “You idiots!” he yelled. “Wipe it off before it sets hard.”

  The stupefied policemen regained their senses and bumped into one another in their attempts to help their boss.

  “Quickly, you jerks! It’s beginning to inhibit me.” Smolsky screamed – and the more he screamed, the more the policemen bumbled. And the harder they tried, the harder went Smolsky’s plaster overcoat.

  Fat Sam had been number one man around the Lower East Side for longer than he could remember. Before him it had been his Uncle Gino – or Stubby Gee as he was affectionately called (or Mad Eyes as he was often, less affectionately, called). Sam would never have admitted it, but Dandy Dan was getting to him, and he could see his precious hoodlum empire crumbling around his ears. Knuckles was all he had left, and when a guy was in a jam like Sam was, he naturally clutched at straws – hence the strange mechanical device that stood on a wooden tripod in the underground garage near Sam’s place.

  The machine was a hotchpotch of tubes and springs, with a large nickel funnel into which Knuckles was pouring a bucket of splurge. Sam looked at the monstrosity with great optimism, but his sidekick was less certain.

  “You sure this is going to work, Boss?” Knuckles queried.

  Sam dismissed his henchman’s lack of confidence. “Of course it will! It looks like a splurge gun, doesn’t it?”

  Knuckles looked at the peculiar contraption in front of him. No one but a sinking man would see any resemblance between this piece of mechanical madness and a snazzy, Dandy Dan Mark One model splurge gun. Sure, it had a barrel that made it look vaguely like a gun. This is probably what prompted Knuckles to reply, “Well, sort of like a splurge gun, Boss.”

  Fat Sam was indignant. “Anything Dandy Dan can do, Fat Sam can do better. Am I right?”

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  Knuckles wasn’t about to disagree with him. He was nervous enough as it was – and thoughtlessly cracked his knuckles once more to prove it.

  “Don’t do that,” Sam snapped.

  “Sorry, Boss.”

  “Right. Are you ready?”

  Knuckles crouched behind the would-be splurge gun and gripped the starter handle that protruded from the side. “Ready, Boss.”

  Sam stood with his feet apart, halfway between the ‘gun’ and the target – which was a full-size, lifelike cut-out of Dandy Dan.

  “OK. Get set.”

  “Set.” Knuckles flexed his fingers around the handle.

  Fat Sam narrowed his eyes at the cut-out figure.

  “Fire!”

  Knuckles cranked the handle for all he was worth and a loud explosion echoed around the garage. Sam ran towards the target to see the damage his new weapon had achieved. There was no sign of a mark – splurge or otherwise – anywhere on it. He smacked Dan’s painted face.

  “Missed! Oh well – it’s back to the drawing board, Knuckles.”

  The fat mobster covered his eyes with his hand as he walked away from the figure. “What we gonna do, Knuckles?” he muttered.

  There was no reply. Sam looked up – and it was then that he saw the results of the explosion. Neither Knuckles nor the machine were in an upright position. The contraption had blown its seams and lay in a smoking, smouldering mess around Knuckles – who was submerged in a gallon or two of white, sticky splurge. Fat Sam’s mouth dropped open at the sight. Whatever game it was that everybody was playing, Knuckles had cashed in his chips.

  It was at that moment that Fat Sam lost his studied hoodlum cool. He lapsed into the Italian he’d learned on his grandmother’s knee and ran to the far end of the garage, half shouting and half weeping. He punched at Dan’s painted face, and the wooden cut-out fell backwards with a loud crash that sent clouds of long-settled dust bursting into the atmosphere. Right then, Sam would have been the first to admit he wasn’t entirely in control of the situation. But he would also have added that “us Italians can get a little emotional at times” – and he upended a workbench full of tools on to the floor. The noise of the clattering metal and his desperate shouts could be heard for six blocks. Fat Sam was getting a little emotional.

  Meanwhile, back at the intersection of Lexburg and Denver, Smolsky’s covering of ‘Quick Dri’ plaster had lived up to its name and had set to a rigid coat that stiffened Smolsky’s body like a dehydrated straightjacket. O’Dreary delicately poked his boss, feet first, into the back of the police car. Smolsky looked less like a precinct detective than like a sort of plaster ornament people stand in their gardens. He yelled at the clumsy police helpers as they tried hard to not bend his stiffened body.

  “Careful, you idiots! Go easy, it’s cutting into my neck, you clumsy dummy.”

  O’Dreary tried to calm his boss down as he got into the driving seat.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. We’ll break you out when we get back to Headquarters.”

  The bike sedan pulled off down the track with Smolsky’s plaster-splattered head protruding from the back window. But his large, rubber-lipped Polish mouth had been spared the clinging mess and was working overtime to make up for the rest of his imprisoned body.

  THE BOXER IN the ring winced as he took a left hook from his sparring partner, and he clung on illegally in the hope of getting a second breath. It was the first thing Leroy saw as he stepped into Sluggers Gym, and he groaned. He turned on his heels and made straight for the exit, but Bugsy pulled him back inside.

  Leroy protested, “I’m scared, Bugsy. Maybe I’d better stick to digging roads.”

  “Nonsense. Your place is here. Wait till you meet Cagey Joe. He’ll straighten you out as quick as it takes to count you out in ten.”

  Leroy didn’t like the comparison. He looked around him at the factory of muscle and sweat. Everywhere he saw fighters – good and bad, promising fighters, has-been fighters, white fighters, black fighters. Everywhere fighters punishing their bodies and punishing the heavy bags like they were their worst enemy. The smell of their sweated labour filled the air and the sound of yelps and grunts made Leroy wince.

  Ever since he was little (actually, Leroy had never been little because he weight fourteen pounds at birth and had put on weight steadily until he’d reached his present bulbous proportions), he’d known he was stronger than the other kids on the block. But with a temperament as cool as Louisiana lemonade and a smile so warm that it made you want to eat him, he’d never really got into fights. That’s not to say he hadn’t hit people. Occasionally he’d forget his massive weight (and punch). During impromptu football games in the cat lot, Leroy would get carried away and half the opposing team would end up picking themselves off the floor, rubbing their sore chins and shaking their dazed heads. Often they wouldn’t get up at all until they were brought back to the land of the living with a well-aimed bucket of water.

  Leroy had been born in Louisiana, the eighth of eight strapping children. Even in a family as enormous as Leroy’s, a fourteen-pound smiling baby is something of an event. Leroy’s father had moved the family north in search of a better job for himself and a better life and future for his eight offspring. They’d moved to Philadelphia first, before making their way to the big apple – New York. Which is where Leroy found him
self. A soft, cuddly, teddy bear of a boy in a neighbourhood so tough you could get a Congressional medal for walking the streets after dark. But it hadn’t spoiled Leroy. He smiled when he was provoked, and laughed when he was shouted at. There was a kindness from inside him that shone in his eyes and filtered from his pearly white teeth. Also, as they say in Louisiana, he was built like a brick chicken-house, and everyone knew that if you messed around too far with Leroy you were in danger of having the point of your chin punched somewhere back where your ears used to be.

  Which is why Bugsy gripped him firmly by the arm and dragged the reluctant lad towards Cagey Joe, who was leaning between the ring ropes, watching the two boxers swapping punches above him. His narrow, evil eyes were trained on his fighters, and he blinked, and twisted his face, as punches flew, missed and connected. As he dropped his concentration for a minute, he noticed Bugsy and Leroy, and threw his arms open to greet his old friend.

  “Bugsy! How you been, man?”

  “Swell, Cagey Joe. Swell. And you?”

  “For me, good – but for this bunch of punch bags...”

  He twisted his nose again as he threw a disapproving look at the two fighters who seemed to be belting the life out of one another. Bugsy pulled Leroy forward.

  “Cagey Joe, I want you to meet the next heavyweight champion. Leroy, meet Cagey Joe. Cagey Joe, meet Leroy Smith.”

  Cagey Joe turned his piercing slit eyes in Leroy’s direction. The stare was evil enough to frighten the boy into politely taking off his hat. Cagey Joe circled slowly.

  “Ever been in the ring before, boy?”

  “Nope.”

  “So you wanna be a fighter, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  Leroy was falling back on his usual witty dialogue. Cagey Joe looked at Bugsy, somewhat puzzled.

  “Sure he does,” said Bugsy quickly. “Look at those fists. Did you ever see such fists? Hit it, Leroy.”

  Bugsy held up his palmed hand. Leroy made a fist that looked more like a bag of walnuts than a handful of knuckles. He threw it in the direction of Bugsy’s open hand, and it connected with an almighty slap that made Bugsy wonder if he’d ever hold a pool cue again.