The Head of the House

by Al Zuckerman

  “This way.”

  The lanky one led him the length of the narrow hall. One of the others lit the way down to the basement with a flashlight.

  Sally, was he down here somewhere? They were marching Iz between storage shelves inches away on both sides of him—a narrow corridor. In the flickering murkiness he caught glimpses of parallel corridors. The whole basement seemed to be shelves—a sort of stockroom. So Sally, then, had to be above, up on the ground floor, or further up. And with more muscle up there with him. Two more? Five? Hell, even for a hundred that gas ought to work the same—if it worked at all.

  Sally, he had to be alive, that was the big thing. They wouldn’t have finished him until they’d hooked onto all his horse. Which they couldn’t have yet. Julie swore not one of them had yet come back out the door.

  But just getting Sally out would be tough too—probably have to carry him. With these creeps putting the whacks on for half a day, Sal’d be limp—dead weight. Iz felt a pang in his gut. Could he do it? Would he have the strength, enough breath, with that gas mask on?

  All four greasetails were sticking right with him. That probably was good. That many fewer to worry about later—upstairs.

  What, though, if one of them knew electricity—knew the hookup down here couldn’t be the real trouble—that an acetylene torch was not how you get lights back on? Nah, they wouldn’t have let him get this far if they knew. … Or would they?

  The fuse box and meter circled by the beam of light was smack in front. Only thing now was to go, to do it. Careful, real careful. Once the tool case was open, he began screwing the acetylene container to the hose valve.

  “Whatsat for?” the high-pitched one buzzed.

  He answered matter-of-factly, “An acetylene torch, puttin it together.”

  “Whatcha need a torch for?”

  “You gotta socket what’s gotta come out. Every build-in around here, same damn thing.”

  He pulled out the gas mask. “You guys maybe better move back a ways. This thing gets hot, and it stinks pretty bad too.”

  He heard scrapings and shufflings, like they were retreating a bit. Good. Every inch would count in that hellish half minute after he’d exploded the stuff, and before it had yet burned out their noses and throats.

  He slipped on the mask. Now, through the goggles, he saw only one, the creep who held the flashlight. But there were four, hawkeyeing his every wiggle.

  Grasping them gingerly, careful not to let them slip, he set two of the hot-stuff canisters, about the size of flashlight batteries, on a rickety backless chair. There was enough gas and smoke crammed in each one, Pitseleh had promised, to knock out an army. The welding flame would spark it.

  Izzie struck a match, unscrewed the actylene regulator, lit the whispering whooshing gas, and methodically set about adjusting the air-gas mix till the sickly orange color was gone, and the flame glowed pure white. Right and left he feigned turning knobs, as if preparing the world’s most complicated apparatus. The trick would be to look expert, while getting them used to seeing the torch and seeing it face right at them.

  Ready, ready, ready. His mouth was parched, his heart booming like a bass drum. Would the damn things go fast enough so these rats couldn’t get him?

  One way to find out—only one.

  Dipping down the tiny but searingly bright glow, he let it lick the top of one canister, then the second.

  SSSSsssssssssssss—like steam hissing from a radiator.

  That’s all? That was the explosion? They were duds, lemons, flat busts. He was dead. Hot anger flared and burned inside his head—at himself. Shmuck.

  But why? Why would The Mavin have crossed him? Harry’d never let him get out of this, not without holes in him. Pitseleh knew that.

  So then, could this. … Was this how it was working—like so?

  Iz forced himself to crouch, fixing his attention on the torch’s regulator knob, fiddling with it, like it was on the blink, just couldn’t get it right. And waited, waited, waited. …

  A cough.

  He couldn’t see any of them—he might as well have been looking through a knothole. Where were they? He tried dabbing at his windows with a handkerchief. Nothing still. If they were going to blast, it’d be now.

  He swung around, facing away from where they’d been, began loosening a fuse. Not smart to keep sticking his gas mask right in their faces, to make a show that he was wearing one.

  He waited for gunshots.

  A second cough, then a third. His heart swelled. Low coughs, wheezing coughs, smothered coughs, coming now almost constantly, in series practically, then over lapping, then like all four creeps at once. He ached-yearned to run, try and hide. The light, fixed on him all the while, finally began to waver, to jerk up and down. It flew suddenly up somewhere, leaving him completely.

  He dropped the torch and darted right, hugging the gritty wall, getting stopped by a barrier—wooden. The coal bin? He veered ninety degrees right again, scooting in up a corridor, and fell to the floor, his cheek to it, feeling refreshed for a second by its coolness.

  Shouts, a shrill piercing cacophony: “I’m choking. I’m dyin. Rash, helpl What da hell! Get that scum bag. The bastid! Kill him! Help!” Screams too, screams over screams, drowning each other, broken by wrenching, racking, gut-spewing coughs. Butting noises, men falling, crashing into shelves. …

  Izzie listened. He prayed that the ceiling was solid, thick, that no one upstairs could hear this. His tongue tasted bitter. Inside his chest, his lungs, no pain—so far. The mask felt nice and snug, like it was supposed to.

  The screams were getting fainter, less frequent, the coughs feebler, further away.

  No sound now. He groped his way back fast, relit the torch, gathered up his big case, and ankled for the stairs, bounding over the sprawled-out, spasmodically writhing bodies.

  He found Sally on the second floor, alone.

  That, in 1929, Sally Pirone was taken for a ride; that in the annals of bootleg he was all but unique in surviving such a mishap; that his square-chinned face thenceforth was disfigured by a sagging right eyelid, a right ear shorn of its lobe, and a helter-skelter crossribbing of scars from his hairline to below his jaw which led to his being nicknamed Spiderface or Spider Sally by the press; that in his own world he acquired the monicker Sally Happy, because the scar tissue at the corners of his lips made him look as though he was smiling—all that was served up as a delectation for the sensation-hungry, gangster-infatuated public of his time.

  But that Pirone’s unprecedented resurrection stemmed neither from his own derring-do nor from his abductors’ incompetence, but rather from his having been rescued while unconscious, blood-soaked, his face and back striped with raw flesh and charred with burns, nearly dead, and that his rescuer was one man acting alone, a slightly built Jew unknown outside the alky trade—that information remained closely held. Izzie’s boys did what they were told. They shut up. Sally’s troops were told that their boss had pulled the creep on his own. In the sanctums of the nation’s more substantial bottlers, rumors inevitably circulated. But virtually no one could nail them down.

  On a day in October when Pirone, flanked and partially supported by a white-uniformed nurse and a sharp-eyed bodyguard, was exercising his still-flaccid legs, learning to walk again, the New York Stock Market crashed, wiping out fifteen billion dollars in securities values. The nation reeled. Doctors, lawyers, storekeepers, even bootblacks had been buying and selling the blue sky, pyramiding their hoards into stupendous paper profits. Overnight, they were prostrated. Many leaped from high windows rather than face their families’ ruin. Steel mills damped their hearths and closed, as did coal mines, factories, mammoth banks and cracker-barrel corner grocers. A hundred and twenty million Americans suddenly were broke—or felt as if they were.

  Who now could afford the bootleggers’ absurdly high-priced phony Scotch? Millions who had to have the stuff, who couldn’t face up to their grim lives without it, began concocting cheap s
ubstitutes at home—vile, often poisonous mixtures called bathtub gin. Competition among the thousand-gallon-a-day producers for the woefully shrunken markets escalated to new heights of ferocity. Rub-outs were as common as the unemployed selling apples on street corners. Vito Belcastro, Joe “The Boss” Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano were among those unfortunates.

  One result of this was that Sally Happy, having forged alliances with the brighter of the young Italians in all five boroughs—men less provincial and closed in outlook than their elders, by virtue largely of having been born in this country—by the end of 1931 was acknowledged Number One in New York. Except for Dutch Schultz’s Jersey breweries and Harlem numbers banks and Louis “The Judge” Lepke’s garment center rackets, Pirone, with his ties to the Democratic Party bosses and their deputy, Mayor Walker, had his hand into virtually everything, from penny slot machines to world’s championship prize fighters. And those enterprises he didn’t personally control, he shared in as a silent partner. His own senior silent partner was Izzie Hargett. At almost every major step of Pirone’s ascendancy, Izzie’s ingenuity and muscle had been basic—and dead quiet.

  Had Sally’s close links to the Jew been known, they would have been interpreted sooner or later by the more wolflike of Pirone’s underlings and compeers as signs of weakness. And upheavals and blood, if they hurt Sally, would touch Izzie too. Besides, Izzie had been watching the biggest wheels get knocked off, mainly because, from Izzie’s point of view, they’d attained exactly what they’d seemed to lust for, the spotlight, headlines, frontpage stuff—which turned out every time to be poison. The lesson was plain as his peaked nose: the less known about him, the better.

  But the newshawks could not be avoided entirely, or they’d sniff and dig for their stories. So he gave them something to send them on their way. Garden State did exist, and its top guys were Julie and Harry. If anyone asked, Izzie was just a working stiff in the office. He never himself spoke with a columnist or reporter, never permitted his picture to be snapped by a stranger.

  But in December 1933 the Prohibition Law got repealed, and things changed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Farvel the Landlord shut his ears to the waiters’ shouts, the busboys’ clacking avalanches of dishes, to everything but the smoky wah-wah-woo of Harry Earl’s saxophone. With the swinging door between kitchen and dining room open, he felt soothed by the music as if by a balm.

  “Frankie!”

  Louie Okun, the maitre d’. Wha’d he want? Fuck him. If he’d caught on, he’d be out there in the gaming room pulling those cards out and switching in new decks, not in here yelling like a constipated school-teacher. Christ, if this scam panned out—a million to one shot—but if it did, Farvel gloated in anticipation, seeing that know-it-all out at the track, broke, not even a deuce to lay on a nag’s nose. And Okun, his tumble would be nothing compared to Hargett’s. Wise-ass Izzie wouldn’t be worth his weight in horseshit.

  “Yeah?” Farvel answered.

  Around Hialeah the regulars knew the frizzy-haired, bony Farvel as Bum Finger Frankie. Here at Izzie’s newly bought Mayflower Inn, only a couple of hundred yards up U.S. One from Gulfstream Park in Hallandale, Florida, the secondhand bottle dealer’s supervisors and co-workers called him just Frankie. But the big boss, on the infrequent occasions when he ran into the harried kitchen flunky, clung to the old bootleg monicker, Landlord.

  “The garbage, you horse louse.” Okun’s clipped consonants pierced the din. “You want us to go swimmin in it? Get it outta here!”

  Farvel edged past Frenchy Patru, the sous chef, bent over his butcher block, trimming, slicing, flattening the scalloped veal with great care, gentleness.

  Farvel gripped the barrel’s handles and yanked up. The garbage quivered, coffee grinds mixing into bacon grease, but the container barely left the ground. He repositioned his legs, this time closer to the can, eyeing the mound of fish heads and melon scraps. Just two more days, he consoled himself, and he’d be out of this hellhole, and with some real folding money, more than he’d touched in the five scroungy pony-chasing years since he’d left New York.

  A little after midnight Farvel, half-leaning against the dishwasher, saw Louie Okun slip in and say something to Olaf, the chef. Olaf nodded his pink pie-face, and then ambled down the aisle, tapping Frenchy and whispering a few words, then to the son-of-a-bitch pastrycook, then the dopey salad man. One by one they began carrying out his hushed order, shutting off ranges, warming ovens, steam tables, gathering uncooked stuff for the refrigerator. Someone shouted, “No more dinners goin out.”

  Blood rushed to Farvel’s head. Why? Could the casino action already be going in the icebox? Naah. It was too early. Only yesterday Pie-Face Olaf had sent word that dinner service would go till one, and maybe even till two. So now, so early, no more eaters out there?

  Someone was sitting down. Farvel spotted him out of a corner of his eye. Okun! Jesus H. Christ. That cheap hide had never gone back out of the kitchen. How come? Okun sticking in here could mean things out in the gaming rooms might be turning bad. Could the bastard be hurting at seeing the house lose? Incredible. The sew-up might just be working.

  Okun’s face looked so green—like any guy would, losing his living, and being made a monkey out of.

  Magiunto had to be the reason.

  “We ain’t gonna hurt him. We just gonna cut his balls off. Know what I mean?”

  A month back almost, and Farvel trembled just remembering Magiunto’s grin. He’d seen better on crocodiles at the zoo. And those mean-as-a-wolf eyes, that croaking voice.

  “Frankie, the only thing a Jew’s got for balls is money. We take away his green, and then wadda they call him? Pisher, right?”

  What if this Ginny Magiunto really was a faster stepper than Little Nathan or old Belcastro? He was wise to Farvel’s old Prohibition landlord business. And nobody but Izzie himself should have had the dope on the out-of-the-money Brooklyn column-still job. Magiunto had it though. An operator posted up that good, maybe he could tangle with Hargett.

  “So then quicker than you can reach for a nickel to call your bookie, our little friend’s on his way back to New York.”

  It had been cool up on the pier behind the Belle Bay Club, that day a month ago, windows both sides of the office, curtains billowing, nice breeze coming off Biscayne Bay. Yet suddenly Farvel had got hot. It had just hit him. The nomination was in the hat for him to be cold meat. And the longer he stuck it in this chair, and the more of this rough stuff talk he listened to, the lousier the odds on his keeping on breathing long enough to make it north for Louisville, let alone Saratoga.

  It was a squeeze. The old fucked-any-way-you-turn middle. Turn to Izzie, and Trigger Joe would do a job on him. But if he went along with this Ginny, then sure as hell, the way his luck had been running, Izzie would chop him up in smaller pieces than he had Little Nathan.

  Unless, a long shot but possible, this crocodile had one thing going for him. Surprise. Maybe.

  “But Hargett, you know what I mean, he’s, well, he’s uh,” Farvel had stammered. What in hell could he have said straight out? If only somehow there was a way to keep this bastard from spilling the dope on what he really was after, then maybe maybe Farvel still could rabbit the deal.

  “Now you wanna know where you come in, right?”

  No, NO! Shit, no!

  “Look, I—I hardly know the guy. Why tell me this stuff?”

  “Cause I’m invitin you to mob up with me. See, you gonna be the inside man.”

  Farvel’s insides had churned painfully from his craw up to his throat.

  “But the thing is, I don’ know nuthin about this kinda action.”

  “You don’ have to. I got it on ice.”

  “All I know is ponies. Wadda I know about workin a crib?”

  “You just gonna wash up a few dishes. Help carry in a few cases supplies.”

  “Mr. Magiunto, if you’re in this heavy, you’re talkin responsibility. I wouldn’t want you shoul
d burn up good money on account of me.”

  “I think”—The Trigger’s voice had sunk to a whisper which Farvel had to strain to catch—“now you just better listen. Okay?”

  And Farvel had realized his even hoping to do a duck had better stop.

  “Now these supplies, they come in cartons, sealed up, brand new. On the outside it says, Ivory Soap, maybe Heinz’s Ketchup. But that’s only the label, see. You gonna pull off those labels, an’ underneath, it’s gonna say, Tally Ho, or maybe Bicycle Brand. You get my meaning?”

  “Doped cards?”

  “Smart boy.”

  Marked cards, case loads, and he’d be carrying them in. Farvel had suddenly thought of the nice cemeteries he passed in Queens on the way out to the Jamaica track. There’d be no stone with his name, there, or anywhere.

  “Yup, you gonna become my friend. Plus pick yourself up a nice chunk of change.”

  “How nice?”

  His skin had started to tingle. A stake up front, that could be getaway money.

  “Five big ones. One down, two after the first night, two when you finish the job. Fair enough?”

  “Yeah, that’s all right.” He would make himself sound hot to jump off and go all the way. “An’ I sure could use it.”

  “Those cards fall right, and we take half, maybe three-quarters Hargett’s bank that first night.”

  Farvel had considered blowing town, but once having taken the thousand, it was too late. Those Ginnies would track him to California or to the North Pole.

  His forearms tensed, strained, lifted one end of the piled-high tray, tipping it just enough so that the mound of gravy-caked plates sloshed gently into the gray rinse water. The dishes clattering even under water seemed a big noise. Funny. How come? Next second he noticed a clang of a pan against a washtub, a slam of an oven door, booming out. Loud as a starting gun almost. It echoed in his ears. Why? Then it hit him. Of course! From the outside, no more hubbub. No more Harry Earl playing, no people dancing, or praying and exclaiming around that craps layout. Every place but this roast box of a kitchen was dead quiet. So the Mayflower had to be closed up, the marks all gone, and the Trigger’s hustlers too—whoever they’d been. While Louie Okun, looking sick, pale, was still sitting there bent over on that potato sack.