The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  “Besides,” Morris rambled on between chews, “you tol’ me Little Nathan’s got Mr. Whiskers greased just about every place we’re passin through.”

  “Who’s worried about the police?”

  But Morris thought of the fifty dollars he’d be getting for two days’ easy work, and smiled at his younger brother.

  “Iz,” he said reassuringly, “any guy big enough for the Coast Guard to escort his boats in, and then those Government gobbies on the dock to help unload—you think some jerkwater hijacker’s gonna start up on him?”

  Izzie smiled wryly. Jerkwater hijacker indeed. Morris, whose most recent job had been peddling Dugan’s donuts door-to-door, had never heard of Vannie Higgins, but Little Nathan sure had. Whiskey-laden ships from Europe normally anchored twenty miles off the tip of Long Island in a stretch of water known as rum row, and the usual off-loading point on shore was Montauk. On this haul, though, Little Nathan had prevailed on Captain McCoy to bring his sleek schooner into Gardiner’s Bay. The bootlegger had also arranged for the contact boats which transported the whiskey from ship to shore to shift from Montauk over to Greenport on the inner north fork of Long Island’s tip. All this to avoid Vannie Higgins.

  Higgins was a hijacker. Truckload thefts were an everyday occurrence in the early 1920s. Thousands of independent bootleggers—unlike the monopolies that took over later in the decade—plied the spirits trade, and most were bankrupted by thieving desperadoes. To import liquor, capital was needed, plus relationships with foreign exporters, shipowners, truckers. One had to have warehouses, meet a payroll for employees and for public officials on the take. But with daring and none of this overhead, a poor man could obtain the same cargo and make a fast fortune. On Long Island the most fearsome of these buzzards was Higgins.

  Izzie knew no one who had ever seen the bandit, but he had heard plenty about the soft-spoken, black-eyed killer. His ambushing troop, which had the reputation of opening fire before asking questions, was the reason Nussie, who normally worked as a bouncer in one of Little Nathan Beckstein’s speaks, had been appointed big gee for this job. The regular rodman on convoys had been riddled with bullets and burnt to a crisp, along with a Duesenberg and three other strongarms, the week before. Little Nathan, who’d radiated an electric fury when the phone call had come, by the next day was calmly marking up the racing form same as ever. The boss, Iz gleaned, had ransomed back his shipment for a price not steep enough to warrant hiring an army to dig up the potato fields looking for Higgins—that time.

  Izzie shook his head at the thick growth of scrubby trees and brush which had begun to replace the fields alongside the road, and wondered why he’d so readily agreed to come. A mechanic wasn’t usual on these trips. Of course, today’s freight was no dribble. All six of Little Nathan’s trucks, three Nashes, the White, the Autocar and the Mack were loaded with the real McCoy: Johnnie Walker, Dewar’s, Booth’s High and Dry, Golden Wedding—worth, depending on how much it would later be cut and adulterated, as much as six hundred thousand dollars! And what was there to stop Vannie Higgins? Little Nathan’s hope that the hijacker would concentrate on the south shore Montauk road and overlook Route 25? But wouldn’t Higgins have his own informants there who would alert him to any big goings-on? Or was Nathan Beckstein just not too concerned about his guards getting shot up, as long as the trucks somehow got through?

  “Morris, remember: You hear guns, the first little blast, and you do what I told you. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “These guys don’t play around.”

  Morris grinned, amused, skeptical. “Bubi, who’s gonna shoot at me?” He pursed his lips and began to blow a gum bubble.

  Izzie’s squinting eyes were combing the woods ahead. “I got you into this. And I’m making sure I get you out.”

  Morris, touched and charmed by Iz’s earnestness, pointed reassuringly with his chin to the black Hudson which had swung out of its position at the center of the column and was patrolling alongside on the left, where the brush was thickest. The car’s four occupants could be seen holding Thompson guns across their knees, and Izzie knew those mugs also wore, and often even slept in, shoulder holsters containing .38 caliber revolvers.

  The brothers’ was the last truck in the column, and Izzie turned his head to the side view mirror for a check on the rear guard car. It was right behind, almost on top of them. Idiots! Why so close? Further back, they’d at least have space to maneuver.

  “Iz, you know what all these trees make me think of?”

  “No, what?”

  “Lillian. She would like it out here. I think on our honeymoon, I’m gonna take her to the mountains.”

  Izzie felt a warmth all through him for his bubble gum brother. We look at the same lousy trees. He sees honeymoons, while I see. …

  Suddenly he heard snapping, cracking reports, the deadly rattle he’d been dreading. It was smoking, blazing, blasting, ear-splittingly roaring from all sides.

  Dipping just after the crest of a slight hill, the lead Buick had had to swerve to avoid a sack of potatoes lying in the center of the badly cracked road. The driver and his fellow hoods had thought nothing of it. They were in populated territory, with two crossroad gasoline stations immediately behind them. The sack no doubt had accidentally fallen off a farmer’s wagon.

  While the Buick’s men were slightly off balance, a motley collection of heads—capped with sou’westers, old World War I army campaign hats, porkpies, tam-o’-shanters, coonskins—poked out from behind rocks, trees, and up from the roadside ditches, and let loose with that deafening, murderous crossfire. Submachine guns equipped with Cutts compensators banged out up to a hundred steel-piercing, bone-shattering slugs a minute. From behind the gasoline pumps of the two crossroad stations, other flinty eyes began blasting the escort Hudson and randomly plugging the truck cabs. As the convoy lurched to a ragged halt, an olive drab military-looking tanker truck came hurtling up from behind, plowing full into the rear guard car, crumpling the ton of iron, steel, and rubber like an accordion. Two or three of Nussie’s boys survived long enough to shoot back for a few minutes, but the backwoods brigands inched in closer and closer, soon blasting away at point-blank range and ending all resistance.

  Izzie and Morris saw almost none of this. When the shooting began, their whole world was obliterated. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive—get away from the guns and bullets.

  “Grab the emergency!” Izzie screamed.

  “Whaaaaa …?”

  “The brake, grab the brake!”

  But chubby Morris, his jaw frozen, was still stunned by the fiery bedlam.

  Izzie, with the strength of a suddenly released high-tension coiled spring, snatched the wheel with one hand, and with the other grabbed his brother by the hair and jerked his head down to the seat on which he had himself been sitting a split second before. At the same time, almost as if purely by reflex action, Izzie slithered over his brother, kicked Morris’s feet away from the foot controls, and stamped on the brake with hammerlike force. An instant later, now crouching half on top of the near-paralyzed driver, he yanked up hard on the handbrake, finally making the heavily laden truck grind-squeal-screech to a halt.

  Without even a moment’s pause, he swung about to dive back into the insulated refuge he’d painstakingly set up for just such an emergency. Then he heard a clinking sound very close at hand. He stopped. A bullet must have shattered the window glass. He knew that without looking up. Morris. He had to get Morris out of here. For the first time, panic rippled through him, turning his knees to jelly, his fingers numb. His head throbbed. He’d been so frenziedly in motion he had shut terror from his consciousness. Now it burst loose. He rolled to the floor below his brother, better to position himself to elbow-shove-pummel Morris, if need be, back to safety.

  “Move!” he shouted. “Get up!” He goaded his brother sharply in the ribs. “Up! Go! Get your ass back there. You want to get killed?”

  Morris started to lift himse
lf. A fresh roar split the air. Morris collapsed and buried his face in the seat.

  Izzie snatched his brother’s one exposed ear and tweaked it hard, cruelly. “Up! Back there!” he bellowed. “You go, or I’ll kill you.”

  Rising, shocked, an enraged bull, Morris flailed wildly at Izzie, while at the same time scrambling up over the seat and back into the truck.

  Izzie clambered after him, and it was then that he felt the burning in his right arm, the flashing sting and the spreading hot ache, as if he’d been bitten by a wasp or hornet. His upper sleeve suddenly was splattered with blood, and the thick red stain descended rapidly down his forearm.

  Hours later, or so it seemed, the cracking gun reports ceased and gave way to an even more ominous quiet. Izzie, groping in the semidarkness, struggled to light a match. He succeeded. The bleeding had stopped, his tourniquet was holding; he could move his arm and fingers without severe pain. Nothing broken, he concluded. He rose to a kneeling position and feverishly began restacking the hams to hide his prostrate brother and himself from whoever any minute now would be entering and inspecting the truck. The hijackers would want no unfriendly witnesses at any possible future trial.

  Before they had left New York, Izzie had sneaked four empty wooden crates into the truck. These had originally served as shipping containers for bolts of Italian silk used by the sweatshop diagonally across the street from the garage, Izzie had conceived of them as a security shelter and escape passageway. He had cut away their thin sides and connected them to make one long tunnel-like box which extended almost the length of the truck. At the two ends he had stacked his mechanic’s tools and the spare parts and supplies for emergency automotive repairs. So at Greenport, when every inch of stowage seemed to be needed for dollar-earning cargo, and Nussie Katz was growling about the crates, Izzie had managed to persuade the high-strung gorilla that the fate of the entire convoy might depend on a precious battery or fan belt packed in one of them.

  Within minutes Izzie had himself and Morris closed in and fairly cozily entombed under the small mountain of Scotch and gin. He was erecting a second protective barrier made up of the spare-parts boxes, when he heard the truck cab’s door click open, then voices, shouts: “Naw, they’re gone.” A flicker from a high-intensity lantern briefly seeped through the crevices between the hams. He dared not breathe. Then it shut off. “Look, blood. The bastards couldn’a got far.” Someone made the ignition whine; the engine kicked over, rumbled. He moved his leg which had fallen asleep and inhaled deeply. The motor idled for a long time. “The hell with them. They’re bleedin somewheres. Let ’em bleed.” The pulsating, vibrating vehicle shuddered and slowly began to move. He got to work. At the rear of the truck he had allowed room for only the scantiest possible, one-deep layer of hams. It was these that now had to be rearranged, pulled into the crates, so that a way would be open for them to escape.

  An hour later, outside a white clapboard village called Smithtown, as the Nash noisily accelerated from a full stop on a stretch of road bordered by two apple-and-pumpkin stands crowded with fall shoppers, Izzie jumped off and tumbled into the nearby ditch. He heard his brother scrunch to the ground a small distance away. To his great relief, he heard the trucks grind on and die away. People at the farm stands may have seen him. But no one came. He didn’t care. He lay face down in the damp trough, his palms and knees scraped, his right arm sleeveless and caked with blood … contemplating his future career.

  Izzie’s awe and envy of Little Nathan had been felt instantly and had grown steadily. Who else but Beckstein owned so stunning and majestic an automobile, could at all times reach into his pocket and pull out a bankroll as thick and multileaved as a prayer book, need only wiggle a finger to have fierce men rush to do his bidding, have knock-out girls with cascading blonde curls lovingly hanging on both his arms? Izzie’s father, brother, sister and himself, laboring six days a week, after an entire year probably earned all together as much as this bootlegger did in a day—or an hour. Even Uncle Zalman, with sixteen families paying him rent, and with his spacious basement storeroom restocked every two weeks with a fresh supply of the newest refrigerators, was a groveling pauper compared to Nathan Beckstein.

  And the demand for his product seemed insatiable. Not on Avenue B near Eighth Street where the Khargetnishes now lived, surrounded only by Jews; the homes Iz frequented rarely contained any alcohol drink at all except for the lustrous red sacramental wine. But the goyim couldn’t seem to get enough of the poison, would pay the most absurd prices for it. Horrible stuff, foul, vile. But truckload after truckload rolled out around the clock, the market inexhaustible.

  Iz ached to get his hands into that gushing flow of money. Until today it had seemed it would take forever—ten or maybe twenty years. He’d believed that he’d need graying hair, a lush bank account, connections with the whole world, monkey-wrench hardness, daring and brains. Now he knew better. Only the latter three were crucial—at least to begin with. He was smarter than Little Nathan. If he had planned this operation, he knew he would have saved not only his own skin, but the convoy as well. And he would have led it personally.

  So maybe he could become the one to see to it that the trucks got through. Or if he couldn’t get that job, then to see to it maybe that the trucks didn’t get through.

  He was not altogether inexperienced in showing his teeth. Soon after his arrival in America four years ago, he’d begun cutting them in a wire-mesh-protected schoolyard. Given his weak English, diminutive size, and the lateness in the school term, he had been assigned despite his almost sixteen years to the eighth grade at P.S. 165. Though it was a relatively new brick building, its plaster walls and ceilings were already flaking and jaggedly cracked, its rigidly lined-up desks blackened and deeply carved. His very first recess period, Andrew Feld, who had sat alongside him during the incomprehensible civics lesson, was explaining to him in Yiddish that the President of the United States, though his son did not automatically inherit the White House, still was greater than any king anywhere, because America was made up not of one state but of forty-eight. Suddenly the spotless, spectacled scholar hissed, “Chickee the Irishers. Chickee!” and knicker-clad legs pumping, Andrew raced off, weaving through a group of girls lined up around a jump rope, and disappeared. Izzie had not understood the words but had grasped their urgency and sense of danger. Still, here there were only nice, neatly dressed students talking and playing. No murderous Cossacks, no exploding cannon blasting up craters, demolishing roofs, walls and human bodies, no sharp-tipped bayonets. What terrors could there be here? Curious, he’d waited to see. A moment later he found out.

  Three grinning louts with upturned noses, their caps cocked sideways, wearing bright-hued green and red sweaters torn at the elbows, were all around him.

  From behind, a wiry freckle-faced short youth snatched Izzie’s hat.

  At the same time the tall sandy-haired one who seemed to be their leader sneered to his face, “Got any dough, Mockie? We’ll match you pennies.”

  The spanking new immigrant, bewildered by the strange words, had simply stared back at them, his eyes narrowing, hardening.

  “What’sa madda? Cat gotcha tongue?”

  “He’s a greenie,” said the dark-haired third member of the trio, whose grime-smirched face was the dirtiest of the lot.

  “Let’s give ’im ’is lumps ’fore the bell rings,” urged the runty hat snatcher.

  Suddenly the big fellow’s hand shot forward, pushing Izzie backward, and causing him to trip and tumble over the wiry urchin who had crouched behind him.

  Izzie’s head hit the concrete with a thud. His jacket ripped at the shoulder. His scalp and shoulder ached dully. The pain was sharper in his heart. President Wilson’s land of justice was no better than Brest-Litovsk. What would Poppa say, seeing his new tailored jacket rent and spoiled?

  The bullies laughed, while the pipsqueak chanted, “Sheeny, Sheeny came to school, dirty Sheeny’s a horseshit fool!”

  Then all
three sauntered off, not looking back, tossing Izzie’s precious American wool felt hat back and forth between them.

  Suddenly a hurtling, low-flying machine-driven set of arms and legs rocketed by the hooligans, snatching the hat right out of the biggest boy’s hands, and at the same time somehow knocking him sprawling to the ground.

  The surprised toughies quickly regrouped and gave chase, but Izzie had disappeared among the running, skipping, yelling, milling crowds of youngsters.

  Later, walking home, immaculate, starch-collared Andrew Feld, all smiles at having an attentive listener, explained to Izzie that those ruffian Irishers were part of a larger Mick gang called the Green Devils. It was rumored that they performed such daredevil acts as tossing stinkbombs into shops; raiding fruit pushcarts, sometimes even knocking them over; fashioning swords from scrap bed springs; and humiliating Jewish kids. There was only one way to protect yourself—offer them a gum drop or a penny if you had one, or try and stay far away from them.

  The newcomer quietly, calmly asked a few questions: How many such Irishers were there; had they ever badly wounded or killed any Jewish boys; did they bring their clubs and rusty swords to the school? Andrew’s not-so-terrible answers caused Izzie to smile. He would find ways of dealing with them. He had no intention of paying tribute to these so-called devils.

  The next day when the rowdies came looking for him, he had divested himself of Andrew and the equally timorous Ernie Blomberg, and stood in the center of the yard, where it was less crowded and he’d have more space to maneuver. It was a balmy May morning. A warm breeze flecked at the edge of the girls’ brown and navy-blue skirts.

  The Irishers separated and came at him from different directions, trying to block the attempt they were sure he would make to flee. He stared full at them, letting them know he saw them approaching. But he did not stir.

  The sandy-haired mischief maker stepped within an inch of the Mockie’s nose. But the rangy youth felt uneasy. Something was amiss. Why hadn’t the little Hebe run?