The Head of the House
Page 8
Iz dismissed him.
Dominic Manzo might be more logical. Before Pig Eyes—as he was known, but only behind his back—had set up in the rigged crap-game business for himself, he’d been top torpedo for Frankie Marlowe, and before that, as a Mulberry Street kid, he’d strong-armed small-time garment center payrolls in partnership with Gyp the Blood. Izzie had first heard of him back in the days of the nickel crap game with Julie. Manzo, it had been noised around, was strictly to stay away from.
In November 1926, though, Iz hadn’t been able to avoid running into him. It was the evening Iz and Julie returned after they’d spent three weeks and a wad of green in Nassau in the Bahamas, and had nothing to show for it—no Scotch, not a case had they found at a price that made sense. Mr. Beckstein would not be pleased.
When they reached downtown, they found West Street bolted and padlocked. The ancient cast-iron warehouse now served as little more than an office, so this was a surprise but no shock. But phone calls to the Gramercy Park apartment, the Club Corfu, the bottling plant in Harrison, the Navy Yard cooker and to the second big pot Boris had built in Hoboken, all were scratches. No Beckstein. Strange.
They stopped a cab and headed for the Holland Tunnel. Izzie kept a small stash in his own lock box at the Jersey drop, which in the last year had become the hub of the operation.
What with the two big-league stills cooking day and night, with occasional loads of industrial alky, and with the fair-sized dribble from the “egg farms” as well as from a few indy shiners, more than five thousand gallons of 190 proof had started flooding in daily, either for cutting and bottling, or for direct sale in five-gallon tins to smaller adulterers and to Harlem “juice joints,” where it was cut with water and served by the drink with Coke or ginger ale. The profit on sales of the straight 190 proof Little Nathan calculated at 150 percent, but on the “bottled-in-bond” it came to nearly 300 percent—and when made with hijacked sugar, 500 percent! This was why Nathan had acquired the sprawling, grimy red brick building at the edge of the fetid swamp just east of Newark in a noxiously smoky little town called Harrison. West Street, straining, could handle four hundred cases a day. At Harrison, he could turn out twenty-four hundred.
Besides, fewer heads were getting bumped in Jersey. Around New York every week guys were having mouthsful of gravel pounded into them. Izzie had had to set up his security tighter than a drum. Two blocks from West Street he’d established a check point. All trucks going out and coming in diverted there and circled the block. Lookouts were stationed in shifts on all four corners. Anybody following a rig around three of the four corners got nudged off the street by crash cars which accompanied every load. Even then, every few weeks a heap and sometimes a crash car too would be lost.
Across the river things were more organized, businesslike. A payment to Waxey Gordon, generally twenty thousand weekly which Izzie personally delivered to Gordon’s Broadway office sweetened the Harrison mayor, his chief of police, the Union County Democratic leader, the district attorney and principal judges, key Jersey Central Railroad employees, the supervisory Feds in the Monument Square Newark office of the Prohibition Bureau, and of course Gordon himself.
The Grover Cleveland-vintage building had once been used for the manufacture of varnish, principally to coat rifle stocks. It still bore the title “Garden State Varnish Company.”
What Izzie liked most about Harrison were the coloring and flavoring operations, done by hand strictly according to formulas prescribed by Chichikov. Case loads of prune juice, used alone or mixed with caramel, turned out to be the Russian’s favorite tinting agents. For flavor, the Virginia Dare Extract Company of Brooklyn supplied a fine grade of oil of rye or bourbon, which evoked somewhat the taste of the real thing, as did coal tar creosote for Scotch, and oil of juniper for gin. When some customers, especially in the South, insisted upon a higher proof, more fiery liquor, Boris provided it for them not by increasing the alcohol content, which would have increased the cost, but by mixing in instead a bit of glycerine to heighten the bead and a little iodine to add sharpness and bite.
The bottling itself was set up on a conveyor-belt assembly line, with counterfeit bottles, corks, labels, and tax stamps. The stamps were exquisitely engraved by an outfit in Atlantic City; from Detroit came the perfect imitation whiskey-cases with the names and trademarks of name brand distilleries burned into the wood. So-called Scotches, Irish whiskies, French brandies were packed in hams and then dunked in a vat of real New York harbor sea water, thus discoloring and staining the containers and labels, and making them appear as if they had endured a soaking in a small boat which had dared to run the Coast Guard blockade.
Arriving at the main gate, Julie ordered the cab to wait out on the street, while Iz waved to Uncle Nubsy, the night-shift gateman who admitted them.
Halfway to the little cement stairway leading up to the office, Julie grabbed Iz’s arm, stopping him. “Something stinks, Iz,” he whispered.
“Why?”
“Uncle Nubsy, d’you get a look at him? His eyes, rolling around like he was scared shitless.”
Was this why Beckstein couldn’t be tracked to a phone? Izzie’s mind raced. Rush back to the cab? Uncle Nubsy, buzz him?
A blinding beam of light obliterated further considerings.
Izzie felt not so much angry as annoyed, not frightened as much as curious, as a riot gun prodded him up the steps. Who had goofed? Why? He’d have to bang some heads, whip things back into shape.
He and Julie were shoved into Boris’s lab, a sour-smelling room whose shelf-lined walls were crammed with jars, racks of vials, retorts—every conceivable item for analyzing industrial alky.
Before he saw anything, he heard, “Aaaaannnnngh! AAAAAANNNNNGGGHH!” Boris screaming. Izzie’s insides heaved.
A moment later all he felt was fury. Hot rage filled his gorge till he thought it would choke him.
Roped to a chair, hands behind him and tautly bound, stripped to the waist, his chest a patchwork of sores, Boris was being poked in the breast with a lighted cigarette.
A bull-shouldered youngish man of middling height, wearing a gray suit with a vest, was grinning like a fat frog while pressing a butt against Boris’ oozing, pitifully raw nipple.
“Aaaaaaannnggh! AAAAnn. …”
Iz and Julie’s captors, seeking instructions, diffidently interrupted the torture.
“Get those punk kids outta here,” the gorilla barked, “an’ fast.”
“This one here’s Izzie Hargett.”
“That squirt?” the squat muscle glowered. “You off your rocker?”
“Izzie.” Boris had opened his eyes.
Manzo, eyes widening, clearly was surprised.
“Izzie, tell him,” he blurted weakly.
“Tell him what, Boris?”
“My kicker, she is worth more money,” a gob of spittle dribbled from one corner of his mouth down to his chin. “Tell him, the Foul One flay his soul, he take it. He be rich.”
Izzie knew that a wrong move, a wrong word on his part, and these pugs would drill him as easy as talk to him. Even Julie was keeping his big yap shut. But these bums were after dough, or after something. And it looked as if they’d already been after it a while. There might be an angle.
Manzo announced himself and his purpose. He was squeezing for twenty-nine G’s in principal and vigorish which he claimed to have taken notes for from Boris two weeks ago at the game he promoted.
“An’ he ain’t walkin outta here, not on his feet he ain’t, till I got every one a them skins in my pocket.”
Where was Little Nathan? Chichikov was worth a hundred times that amount. Beckstein would pay it in a second. Unless. …
“What’s this secret kicker,” a figure in the background cut Izzie’s train of thought, “he says is worth all this dough?”
“It’s a chemical formula you add to ferment your mash quicker,” Izzie answered quickly—hoping. “Granulated sugar’ll take you seventy-two hours. Throw in
his kicker, and you cut it to sixteen. With molasses, down to half of that.”
“So what’s so hot about that?”
Shmuck. Apeman. It meant that using a fixed number of mash vats, you could produce three or four times as much alky, quadruple the profit. But this gunsel obviously knew beans about distilling, and this was no time for complex explanations.
“You gonna get me that dough,” Manzo shot at Izzie, with no hint that Boris’s secret formula had even been mentioned, “or do I go on sweatin him?”
“You let me make a phone call?”
“I’ll make the call.”
“Okay.”
Izzie scrawled a name and number, and handed the paper to Pig Eyes.
“Izzie,” Boris crooned, tears streaming from his eyes, “I looove you.”
Whaaaack! Manzo, out of the blue, in one savage, catlike motion swiveled and crashed his fist into Boris’s eye.
Chichikov’s head jerked back with a cracking noise.
Izzie grew terrified that his friend’s neck was broken.
“What kind a bullshit is this?” Manzo looked at Izzie’s scrawled notation as if the blow to Boris had never happened.
The Russian’s nostrils were bubbling out blood.
“You hear me, punk?” Manzo’s voice grated, razorcool.
Izzie, seeing Boris lift his head, took a breath. His long-shot brainstorm had to pay off, and fast. Any second Pig Eyes could let go again, and not just with his hands.
“No bullshit,” Iz answered flatly. “Call him.”
“Sally Pirone,” Manzo enunciated laboriously as if there were fresh doubt in each syllable, “is gonna square twenty-nine Gs for him?”
“No. For me.”
Manzo glared at Izzie from head to toe. He appeared to be doping out how he’d go about breaking each of Izzie’s bones. Then he quietly croaked, “You sure better be for real.”
Izzie’s gut tightened up.
It took three calls before Sally, whose eminence in the Unione Siciliana now ranked second only to that of Joe the Boss, was located having dinner at Arnold Rothstein’s swank midtown trap, The Chicago Club. The look on Manzo’s pasta face while Mr. Sal gave him the word—violet rubber lips frozen slightly apart, pig eyes open wide, two little brown saucers of awe and fear—made Izzie feel good, so good it almost squared his ravening hunger to icepick the momzer.
Manzo collected that same evening. But he felt awkward taking money from Mr. Sal. And when Pirone commented that anyone who played rough with a pal of his was maybe a little ass-brained, Dominic saw red.
What the gorilla had no way of knowing was that Izzie, in addition to cramming his head with distilling lore, had become a keen student of the politics of bootleg. Izzie’s continuing friendship with the Keohane family—Dan of the P.S. 165 Green Devils and now a law clerk and his dad a captain of New York’s finest—had taught him how and by whom power in the City truly was wielded. As a result, Izzie had persuaded Little Nathan that the fix for the Navy Yard cooker should be applied through Pirone. Mr. Sal was already dealing regularly with the Democratic boss of Brooklyn on bordellos, horse books, an Italian lottery, at least six other stills, and a flock of speaks; he had not merely an “in,” but his own key to the door. Izzie every Saturday delivered five big Gs—five Cs more than Nathan previously had been paying out—personally to his longtime acquaintance. And since Izzie, through his association with Waxey Gordon, was able to pass along tips on Madison Square Garden main events, Sally’s gratitude was heartfelt.
Later, alone in the monklike bedroom on West End Avenue which he’d never taken the time to adorn with even a picture, he weighed his courses of action. They boiled down to: kill Manzo, leave the business, or both. He quickly rejected the second idea.
Nothing anywhere could beat the dough in booze. A gallon of industrial alky, transformed into brew, at retail brought in sixty-four dollars. Original cost, twenty cents. To manufacture five gallons of the sugar-based 190 proof set you back, including overhead, ten bucks. Sold by the drink, the tin earned $270. If even a fraction of those profits stuck in his pocket, he could blow himself to the Woolworth Building, and play the ponies like a pasha, which is how Little Nathan pissed it away. Right now Iz was only hired help. Before too much longer though, he could be his own man, and then—then. …
But it was not just the money. It was more—whatever had made him stick with the nickel crap game, even after Julie had been blasted.
As for hitting Pig Eyes, that might relieve the hate that caused his head to thrum as if someone were sitting on it; but then that left the possibility of repercussions. Pig Eyes had relatives, if not friends; and the news of their run-in had to be around. No, the thing had to be handled more subtly. And it was.
Iz arranged for a young fellow he’d met up in Saratoga named Abbadabba Sheinkopf, a man with a face as blank as a new bottle, to appear at the brassiere manufacturer’s Seventh Avenue showroom where Manzo was operating his game. The upstate talent, who could palm four sets of loaded dice as smoothly as if they were his own fingernails, in one six hour session caused Manzo to lose more than he could pay off in years, and to lose it not to Sheinkopf, which might have been dangerous, but to several other citizens who had nothing in common with each other or with Pig Eyes, except that they were as self-righteous as he about collecting on markers.
Manzo had to leave New York so quickly he had no time even to notify Mrs. Manzo.
Now, six months later, could Pig Eyes suddenly have linked Izzie together with Sheinkopf, and then doped out that it was Sheinkopf, with his magnetized dice and with magnets concealed in his sleeves and around his wrist, who had busted him? How …? Besides, tommy-gunning a car from a distance, that wasn’t Manzo’s style. He’d grab a pigeon real close, so he could get his kicks knuckling him, and then maybe guzzling him. …
Izzie, terrified of what he might hear, had to force himself, but he did phone the hospital. Morris’s condition, thank God, was unchanged. Not bothering to take off his shoes or remove the bedspread, he stretched out in the little hotel room he had taken under a phony name, and for the fourth time asked himself … who?
In the early evening a few hours later, Sally Pirone leaned forward, resting his elbows on the fragile-looking lady’s desk, his lips apart, about to speak. Instead he shut his eyes, as if first rechecking a list of figures. Then he opened them and looked searchingly at Izzie before he asked, “How about Little Nathan? You thought a him?”
Izzie’s fantasies of perfumed rosy breasts, moist tongues giving unimaginable thrills, stimulated by the background sounds of clinking glassware, piano music, female squeals and giggles—on that instant flew out of his head.
Between calls every two seconds to the hospital, each answered, “Still listed as critical,” Izzie had one by one considered every goon he might have pushed even a little.
But the boss? His boss? The man who for three years every day, twenty-seven hours a day, Izzie had run to do things for? For whom he’d risked his neck so many times he’d lost count?
He felt woozy, weak as a clip-joint highball.
Just last night—no, the night before—Little Nathan had taken Iz out on the town, a fine steak at the House of Morgan where Helen Morgan herself had perched atop her little piano and sung “My Bill” for them, to John Scarne’s incredible card trick show at Texas Guinan’s 300 Club, then on to see the fabulous Al Jolson at Jack “Legs” Diamond’s Hotsy Totsy. And the boss had invited Izzie for a turn up at Polly Adler’s Central Park West penthouse with the cutest redhead in New York, a guaranteed living doll. It was five A.M. then, and Iz had excused himself. But Little Nathan had treated him like—his own kid brother. He’d even come right out and said, which for Beckstein was like once in a lifetime, “Izzie—kindt, you’re hot stuff, smartest keppel in the business. If the deal on the new Bayonne cooker comes through, I’m cutting you in for a nice little piece.” Izzie had floated home aglow.
To Pirone, Izzie answered dully, “No.”
“Maybe? So? So what if I did?”
“Maybe,” Pirone paused, “he don’t like that.”
“But why? I never crossed him. I never thought about crossing him. How could he ever …?”
Prione shrugged. “You gotta know him better than me.”
Izzie pictured puffy-cheeked Nathan at his corner table in the Corfu beckoning to Big Gangy Rudnick. Rudnick, who would have liked Izzie’s job—that’s where the big action was—stayed away from the cookers and the drop. He took care solely of Beckstein’s personal business—like making sure the lead chorus girls at the Corfu, all three of them Nathan’s, didn’t nest with other men. When a jack got caught in one of Little Nathan’s ovens, Gangy would stomp the Romeo, and the girl would be out of show business for good.
But Gangy would never. … Why not? Sure he would.
But Little Nathan would never. …
Iz and the boss, together they’d been through tight times. In a kind of way, Izzie loved that pudgy, unloveable man. So then how could …?
Hell, Izzie thought, he kept the entire operation—stills, imports, trucks, garage, bottling plant, big fixes and minor grease spots—clicking like the chorus line in George White’s Scandals. And Little Nathan knew that. Who would kill his own good thing?
Unless … did Sally really know something? Izzie felt clammy with sweat.
“Sal, is this just an idea you have? Or did you hear something?”
“Strictly an idea.”
Izzie swallowed. “So—what makes you think …?”
Again Pirone shrugged. “I been around a few more years than you. A bum like him, sometimes that’s how he plays. Iz, I don’t think you see how big you been gettin.”
What did that mean? That Little Nathan might be afraid Izzie would hit him? Everything was so upside down. It was true Little Nathan didn’t really trust anybody—not even Izzie. Fifty different times Izzie had heard about the boss’ checking with the yeast suppliers, with Waxey, even with the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, to triple-check the accounts were legit.