The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  Vannie, crouching to one side of the demolished window, shielding his eyes from the glare while trying to see between his fingers, caught glimpses of his boys reeling and stumbling out into the blinding light, and being herded into one of the trucks. Funny, no blood. No one seemed hurt. They were walking under their own steam. After that barrage? How? Unless. … Of course! Those Lewis guns had been aimed high, just to scare, not to kill. And it had worked! For a moment he was furious, raging, as if he’d been cheated, made a fool of. He all but sprang to his feet, tommy gun blazing. But then his breath was gone, and his anger too. He was swept with a sense of his own helplessness, and of awe for whoever it was out there who had engineered this. For the first time in his life Vannie Higgins felt humble.

  * * *

  Izzie, two weeks ago while hitchhiking with Morris back from Smithtown, aching, numbed still by the terror of the ambush, had been calculating all the way to New York—how one might surprise Higgins, beat the momzer at his own game. …

  Light. Light takes away darkness, the protective cloak of thieves. So the trucks, one way or another, would have to be made bright as—whole banks of glaring spotlights. Sure, Ernie Blomberg would know someone who could rig theatrical lights, and also set up generators in the trucks to power them; and Ernie, it turned out, did know such people.

  Next, the momzers would have to be overpowered. Iz then would need weapons more potent than rifles and submachine guns. What kind? Where to get them? A soldier acquaintance of Julie’s stationed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn explained possibilities, the most feasible of which was the Lewis gun, only twenty-seven pounds, operable by one man, with six times the firepower of Higgins’ automatic weapons and six hundred times that of the rifles most of his troop used. And Iz learned too that for a not unreasonable fee, the Lewis guns and their Government-trained operators could be leased—for a day or so.

  The following afternoon in the garage, Iz asked Little Nathan if he could have a word with him. The paunchy bootlegger nodded, studying the racing form while he listened. Iz had planned to explain it coolly, very businesslike, but then couldn’t help getting excited as he got into the details. Beckstein chewed quietly on his cigar until Iz was half through and then began to snicker. Iz, his heart dropping, waited for the boss to stop, so Iz could go on and tell about the Lewis guns. But the moment Iz resumed, Little Nathan snapped, “Shut up, you swollen-headed little putz,” flicking his cigar ash toward Izzie. “From you, that’s enough. Got that?” and he’d brusquely turned and sauntered off to the little office.

  That same night Iz had slipped past the torpedo-doorman at Little Nathan’s clip joint, the Club Corfu. Iz, frightened though he was about facing up to Beckstein again, felt he had to make another try. Inside himself he felt strangely confident that he could pull this thing off. Moving through the smoke-filled Arabian Nights decor, for a second Iz panicked. Little Nathan, who usually sat alone or with a show girl, was flanked by muscles, Big Gangy Rudnick and Long Boy Hymie, either of whom would wipe the floor with Iz (or anyone) if given the slightest encouragement. Iz fought down his panic. If he soon would be taking on dreaded Vannie Higgins, how could he let himself get cold feet because of two knuckleheads?

  Getting Little Nathan’s serious attention, and fast, that’d be the trick. Iz would have to come on, not just smart, but tough somehow too, so that his setting himself against Higgins wouldn’t sound like idiocy, and yet not too tough, or the bootlegger—who could blow his stack easy—would take offense and give the nod to the muscles.

  Little Nathan eyed him coolly, but said nothing.

  Iz, prepared for peremptory dismissal, or, if he were lucky, an invitation to sit down, felt confused, but then instinctively pulled out a chair and sat.

  Still no one spoke. To Iz, Beckstein was eyeing him as if Iz were an unwary ant daring to traverse Beckstein’s sidewalk.

  “I can do it, Mr. Beckstein. I wouldn’t have come here tonight if I wasn’t sure I could do it.”

  Little Nathan stroked his cheek with his forefinger. “Three thousand, was that your cockamamie number?”

  “Yes, and I promise you either I’ll get you back that whole cargo, complete, or I’ll get you—” Iz was about to add the word probably, but held it back. “—Higgins. Then that crook’ll be glad to pay you back the sixty-eight thousand the last hijack cost you, if that’s gonna save his neck. No?”

  Little Nathan grinned, shaking his head.

  “And if it doesn’t work,” Iz drove on, “I’ll pay you back the three thousand myself, personally, every penny.”

  Beckstein snickered.

  “Look, I made it back from the Greenport trip, didn’t I? And I was the only one who did, right?”

  “Lucky. Crazy luck. But if you think I’d risk three grand on—pie-in-the-sky that’d turn out to be your corpse, then you’re not the brainy kid I took you for. Now go home.”

  “Mr. Beckstein, I’ve done harder things than this.”

  “You got a big mouth, you know that?”

  “When I was a kid in Europe, twelve years old, these German soldiers were getting ready to set fire to our village. We sneaked up on them, me and my little gang, shot all three of them.”

  Little Nathan sighed and turned his head. “Gangy, take him outside.”

  Iz’s heart plummeted again. What now? If he tried to stay and keep arguing, both torpedoes would drag him out. But if there were only one. …

  Seeming to bow before the inevitable, Iz wended his way to the kitchen exit, with Big Gangy right behind.

  “Aw right, you little wise-ass, now scram,” the torpedo growled as they came out into the night.

  “C’mere, Gangy, I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Dirty pictures. These here’ll make your eyes pop out.”

  Iz swung a corner into the adjacent unlit alley, waited breathlessly. Would the gunsel come? Footsteps.

  Iz slammed into his knees, buckling Big Gangy.

  The galoot fell screaming, “You punk bastard, I’ll kill you. I’ll tear your fuckin little ass off you. I’ll. …”

  There was a soft thud as Iz, putting all his might into it, brained Gangy with a bottle. Then there was quiet.

  “You again?” Little Nathan raised his eyebrows.

  “Well,” Iz shrugged, trying to appear apologetic, “you didn’t let me finish.”

  “Where’s Gangy?”

  “I—put him to sleep for a little while.”

  “You what?” Beckstein snapped so loudly that eyes from neighboring tables turned on them.

  Again Iz shrugged, as if to say, what choice did I have? “Look, I,” he whispered, “I’m sorry. I mean, he’ll be all right. But look, if I’m going to take on you-know-who, you don’t think I could run from Gangy Rudnick, do you?”

  Little Nathan tilted back in his chair and seemed almost to close his eyes.

  Iz had, he sensed, made the right move—so far.

  Izzie’s electrifying exploit brought the Louie-gun kid, as he was promptly nicknamed, the attention of New York’s top racketeers: Joe Masseria, Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, Big Bill Dwyer, and to the man who was so well connected he’d even fixed the 1919 World Series, the underworld’s guiding spirit and financier, Arnold Rothstein. Overnight the name Isadore Hargett also became known to Alphonse Capone in Chicago, George Remus in Cincinnati, King Solomon in Boston, Nig Rosen in Philadelphia, as well as to leading and lesser luminaries of the wholesale liquor and gambling industries in Detroit, Saint Louis and Cleveland.

  Izzie himself was pleased, but not surprised. He, after all, had done no more than stick by his word. His promises to Little Nathan had struck everyone who’d known about them as rash. But when Beckstein’s drowsy eyelids shot full open, gazing down at a cardboard suitcase stacked neatly with twenty dollar bills, $68,000 worth, rashness became transformed into wisdom.

  To the calculating men around the country in their bottling plant offices, sticking by one’s promise when suc
h huge sums were involved, and when one easily might modify one’s promise without undue risk—was noteworthy, remarkable. Such action betokened a personality whose deeds were to be reckoned with and remembered, and they were.

  Izzie, promptly elevated to Beckstein’s number two, his salary jumping from $40 to $400 a week, entered into a new world. With all his teeming energy he set about learning the arts of importing, manufacturing, and distributing alcoholic beverages. He recognized that he knew pitifully little, and if he could learn, the opportunities might be golden. Outwitting Higgins he considered no big deal. Anyone with a brain could have done it. Learning a business that might start him toward his dream, that would be something else again.

  CHAPTER 3

  Izzie sprang up from the discolored bench, its mahogany stain worn off over the decades by thousands of anxious rumps. His two sisters remained sitting, holding hands, not speaking, but now and again squeezing fingers, while their eyes were fixed rigidly on the hospital elevator doors.

  Rhea, her hair turned a light silky brown during the three years Iz had been working for Little Nathan, had grown into a poised and softly beautiful assistant bookkeeper at a restaurant-equipment supply house. Eye glasses obscured the sparkle of her eyes, but still they glowed, especially since she had fallen in love with Jacob Meiselman, a bookish cub reporter for the Yiddish Daily Forward, who also was a night student at City College and a Trotzkyite.

  Marilyn, wed for more than a year to a spasmodically employed carpenter named Joe Liebeskind, still kept house at the nine-room, rambling, high-ceilinged West End Avenue apartment in which Izzie had installed his family less than a week after his rocketlike rise in Beckstein’s hierarchy. Marilyn, enjoying more material comforts than she’d ever dreamed existed, as well as the nightly ministrations of a strapping husband, nonetheless was generally tense and given to sudden outbursts. Knocks on the door, telephone rings, newspaper headlines, everything worried her, especially her brother Izzie and what might happen to him. The rape had left deep scars.

  Izzie too thought of Welzel from time to time, mostly when Marilyn’s jumpiness caused her to lash out at him. He hoped that her having a husband would make up to her for the German, but these hopes were not high.

  Izzie had visibly hardened. He wore a dark blue suit with stiff broad lapels. His sharp-angled jaw was shadowy with an incipient beard. His posture had a commanding straight-up-and-downness. But within was the tense adolescent of Antipolye. He couldn’t sit still alongside his sisters, nor could he stay away from them for more than a minute or two. The horrifying prospect that any moment a white-coated stranger would step out of one of those elevators and ask which of them was Morris Hargett’s next of kin impelled him in twenty aimless directions, made him want to drive his fist through glass, through bricks, concrete, to wreak havoc and at the same time to numb himself so as not to feel the pain of … no more Morris. NoooOOO!

  A pang of envy of his father surged through him. There was Khayim standing in a corner, his face to the smoke-darkened wall, his body rhythmically swaying, rapt with prayer, heedless of the Christ idol hung from a crucifix above, his lips almost soundlessly crooning: “… Mine eyes hath seen mine enemies; mine ears have heard of the wicked who rise up against me. The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree … shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon … shall be planted in the house of the Lord. …” How Izzie wished he could pray too, or cling to his sisters, or do something.

  Hungrily Izzie eyed the gleam of the outside world through the dust-coated glass in the door. He decided to leave. What could he do for his brother here? Or, for that matter, for his sisters and father? And anywhere else his heart would not sink sickly at every creaky sliding open of an elevator door. He needed to think, dope out why this had happened, start hammering out a plan for a next move—if he lived long enough to make it. He was sure that the blast of tommy gunfire which had exploded the Cadillac into a holocaust, roasting his good-as-gold brother to a charred, half-alive moaning lump had been intended for himself. He looked over toward his weary, tightlipped sisters who’d been keeping their vigil for more than six hours and who, for as long as their brother’s life hung in the balance, would steadfastly stay there. No, they wouldn’t understand his leaving. It would hurt them. And Izzie felt tender toward them. If they were to lose him too, though, it would hurt them more.

  “I’ll be back. Got to make a phone call.”

  Both sisters nodded mutely.

  He looked up at the naked trees on the brownstone-lined street and wondered if he’d ever see their scrawny branches lush green again. There were dozens of men he’d come to know during his three years with Little Nathan who would have killed him, or anyone else, as remorselessly as they’d have stepped on a cockroach. It could have been some muzzler sidekick of Dutch Schultz, Waxey Gordon or Joe the Boss, greedy to move in on Little Nathan’s sweetheart West Side drugstores which sold whiskey for “medicinal” purposes. Or even some sherry exporter on Bay Street, Nassau, or a blackstrap molasses dealer in Havana, or a mountain moonshiner from Sinking Cove, Tennessee. Iz, after a near-drowning from having a small boat shot out from under him, had learned that there was no relaxing, no letting up. He arose in the morning worrying, and went to bed with his mind still churning about storms at sea, sugar prices, machinery breakdowns, and mostly about people. Today’s right guy could turn into tomorrow’s wrongo. Aside from Morris and the boss, he trusted no one, except for Nutsy and the few others from the old crowd. That left a lot of possibles. Finding the bumper who’d burned Morris would be a bitch.

  But he’d do it. He’d grown used to hard jobs, hard unlikeable men. He had accumulated almost thirty-five grand in twenty-dollar gold pieces which he’d stashed in a Broad Street bank safety deposit box—but when he ate, he still could not bear to see a scrap left on his or anyone else’s plate. In his heart lurked the unspeakable fear that tomorrow he might again be forced to flee—from policemen, Federal agents, Italianer trigger boys, and he’d be hungry, and in danger. This same largely unconscious fear, though, coupled with his fierce desire to conquer it, was what had driven him from one perilous feat to another—until now. Morris dying. How could Iz win over that?

  Seeking relief from the morbidity, he thought of the heel-clicking, bowing-from-the-waist, champagne-and-orchid-loving, outrageously lecherous Russian chemist who had schooled Iz in the intricacies of distilling.

  Boris Chichikov, the mad giant of a distilling genius, spent much of his time frantically trying to hide from his rightfully suspicious wife, under rolltop desks, crap tables, behind mash vats, in speakeasy ladies’ rooms, hotel mop closets. Izzie began laughing to himself. “Izzie, my most esteemed friend, my little savior, brother, you know my wretched life rests in your two hands. You must save me from Jeanine that plague, that anthill of vipers inside one female!” Yet the cross-as-a-cat little Frenchwoman had loved her preposterous husband—and learned to hate Izzie.

  Poor Boris, he’d cashed in his chips at forty-seven the only way he’d have wanted, in a huge downy bed at the Hotel Buckingham, his sex organ greatened to elephantine size, making love to Baby Beulah, the pert-assed lead dancer at Owney Madden’s Cotton Club, a girl who had adored her grizzly Boris so, she had slashed the cheeks of two other girls over him. At Boris’ sparsely attended funeral—the jealous widow had demanded no one be invited—Jeanine had wept torrents. Then, as she left, she’d spat on her husband’s new-dug grave. Had she dared, Izzie knew, she would have done worse to him.

  She blamed him, Izzie knew, for Boris’s departing this world and abandoning her, blamed Izzie for filling her lamb’s pockets with silver, encouraging him in idiocies which had to drag him to his grave. A score of other bootleggers, Iz consoled himself, would have indulged Boris equally as handsomely.

  He thought of the first day Little Nathan had ordered him to carry iron for Boris Chichikov. No one, not Al Capone, not Arnold Rothstein, not Calvin Coolidge himself was to be allowed near this Roosky whom Beckstein had lured f
rom Cleveland.

  Commercial alcohol could be had for pennies a gallon. But the Government had it heavily adulterated with poisons to prevent its being drunk. And to foul up the bootleggers, secretly changed the poisons every few months. But this Chichikov could analyze any formula and come up with a new one to detoxify the stuff. He was a potential gold mine. He had to be big-brothered around the clock.

  “Go avay!” something had roared from behind the door of Room 1417 at the Hotel Astor, “Or I tveest you into a shoe of a horse!”

  “I’ll wait.” Little Nathan had been unfazed.

  “Listen, I am beezy. Very beezy. Later!”

  “Boris, please, this is important.”

  Izzie, never before having heard the boss plead with anyone, had felt new and immense respect for this roarer.

  “You bodder me vun more time, and I qveet. Forever!”

  “All right,” and Beckstein, who rarely relaxed enough to crack a smile, winked at Izzie, “then you just slip my twenty-five gees back under the door, and then go ahead, quit. Okay?”

  Suddenly bolts clicked, and the door opened a crack, revealing a vertical inch or two of an enormous hairy body.

  “Beckstein, you are a gentleman, a man of honor, I know dot. So geev me please an hour, a leetle hour, and then I am weeth you, I am of you, I belong only to you.”

  Izzie had heard elevator door noises and faint noises down the corridor, but had paid them no heed. Now, hearing footsteps drawing close, he turned and saw a petite veiled woman, her fine-boned jaw jutting out aggressively, bearing down on them with two beefy, blue-coated policemen right behind.

  Little Nathan waited for them to pass.

  The little woman abruptly hurled herself against the partially open door, yowling unintelligible insults and curses in French at the top of her lungs.

  The door flew back.

  The shocked Russian, knocked off balance, arms flailing, penis flapping, tumbled to the floor with a glass-rattling thud. The demurely veiled lady leapt atop him, shrieking and slapping him as if he were some great padded clown in a Punch-and-Judy show.