"Rose spoke of common cause, of the villainy of capital, of a corrupted polity. She's got the heat of the committed."
"You think she's a Bolshie.” A statement, not a question.
"I didn't say she was in the pay of the Kremlin."
"No, but you'd say she had a thirst for social justice, and her father's trapped in the past, with no eye for the future."
"A thirst for social justice is no bad thing,” I said.
Johnny smiled. “I'm in no position to argue,” he said. He was one to wear his privilege lightly.
"As for her dad,” I said, “I'd agree he's fighting a battle that's already been decided."
"Did he win or lose?"
"Ach,” I said, “that's the argument. If it were up to Des, he'd rewrite history."
"That's a fair description of a Stalinist,” Johnny said.
I didn't take his meaning.
"Des Morrissey's a rigid man,” Johnny said. “His daughter appears to have inherited that, from what you say, if not his politics in the strictest sense. Beware orthodoxy, Mickey.” He grinned. “It's all snake oil, to keep the rich in power."
"The rich keep the rich in power,” I said.
"Our secret's out, then,” Johnny said cheerfully.
* * * *
The third matter of business, the one I said I wasn't so sure of, was our friend Dermot's place in the scheme of things. I'd offered it to Johnny as a certainty, but I think that was mostly to make a weak tale more convincing.
Be that as it may, I reported back to Tim Hannah.
He was keyed up and eager, but once he learned that Des Morrissey had agreed in principle to the meeting, protocols yet to be determined, he seemed overtaken by lassitude, as if his former nervous energy were only a function of his anxiety that I'd fail in my errand, and when I proved successful, all the wind went out of his sails. I volunteered the intelligence that it was Rose Morrissey, not her father, who'd closed the deal.
His reaction was studied and overcareless. “Ah,” he said, “she's something of a beauty, I'm told."
"She has a sharp mind and a sharp tongue,” I remarked.
"Well, we don't all look for a pliant woman, Mickey,” Young Tim said, sort of sly-like.
"Pliant” was far from the word I'd use to describe Rose. I wondered, as Johnny had, how they'd met. I was sure they had.
He nodded to himself, as if confirming something he'd known already. “I don't doubt she's got a mind of her own,” he said.
"I'd say she was the brains of the outfit."
"Would you? And why's that?"
"Des knows tactics. He's a street fighter, by preference, and a politician only by default. Rose has an eye for the grand scheme. She understands strategy, not just stratagems."
Tim gave me a chilly stare. “Perhaps she's need of both,” he remarked. He'd said nothing about her withered legs. I took it the subject wasn't to be discussed, or not directly.
"Des has a hard boy from Belfast keeping an eye on things,” I told him. “A minder for the Provisionals."
"Keeping an eye on Des, you mean,” Young Tim said. He knew where the land lay.
"He might be Rose's creature, to some degree."
A sudden fury suffused Tim Hannah's face, but it was just as quickly suppressed. I should have realized he'd find a rival in Dermot. “To what degree?” he asked me acidly.
I beat a retreat. “They have little enough in common,” I remarked. “But it's my impression Rose wears the pants. Des is a front. This lad takes his instructions from the girl, not her father."
Young Tim seemed to subside. “Find out what you can about their relationship,” he said. “Better to begin a negotiation in full knowledge than with the cup half empty."
Which was all the encouragement I needed.
* * * *
On the West Side, as I've said, there were two factions vying for influence, the Hannah mob and Des Morrissey's patriots. But there was a third orbit, the longshoremen and dockworkers along the piers, whose loyalties were mixed. I went down to the river to test the waters.
In my father's day, the stevies on the West Side docks were Irish to a man, just as the East Side docks were worked by the Italians, but because of the war, there'd been a lot of mix and match, and the former ethnic solidarity had been fragmented. Greeks, Yugoslavs, Russians, Hunkies and Polacks, Dutchmen and Jews, you name it, even Negroes—a man who swung a baling hook could find work. Then, as now, it was a closed shop, jobs handed down from father to son, but these days the term was freighted with a different meaning. The docks were union. Scabs were beaten bloody, and there was no second chance. You'd be thrown into the river if you showed up again, likely to be ground to pulp between the pilings and the shifting steel hulls.
It was an unforgiving environment, peopled by a tough crowd.
But as it developed, labor's very strength was its Achilles’ heel.
I was talking up an old soak named Dunratty, not a Hannah informer so much as anybody's who'd cross his palm with money for drink. Dunratty was unreliable, passing along a deal of gossip, much of it the purest moonshine, but he had an ear to the ground nonetheless. I'd already taken note of two hardcases of the Italian persuasion, wearing suits and ties, pearl gray fedoras, and cashmere topcoats—not your usual uniform on the waterfront. Costello's mob had been making inroads on the docks since before the war. I asked Dunratty what he thought.
"Barstids, them dagos,” he remarked, although without much heat. It was a commonly held opinion among the Irish, but it told me nothing about why Costello's button men would be making themselves so visible. “They been around since talk of a strike begun,” Dunratty volunteered.
This was news. Strike? I hadn't heard of any grievances.
Dunratty gave me the look he'd give a wittol. “Ach, for Christ's sake, Mickey, are the Hannahs losing their grip? The Italians smell a change in the weather and look after their own interest."
I didn't follow.
"The damn waterfront's up for grabs,” Dunratty said, losing patience with me for not seeing the obvious.
I slipped him a fin, and left him to his own devices. What I needed was a less anecdotal reading, or a more partisan one.
The union hall was down a few blocks and over two on Tenth Avenue, but I didn't think it would suit my purpose. At this hour of the day, all I was like to find was some gimped-up old stevie sweeping cigarette butts out from under the chairs. Not that such a one might not repay a little time invested, but I had the feeling time wasn't to be carelessly spent. There was a flavor of hurry in the air, the feral scent of angry men.
I went looking for Gyp O'Fearna. My interest in finding him was twofold. Gyp was a shop steward in the dock union and would know of any discontents. Secondly, he was a man of fixed loyalties, not one to be swayed by empty promises. He held the hard-won gains of the working class in trust. If there were a struggle for control of the waterfront, Gyp O'Fearna was like to be in the thick of the fight.
And so it proved.
After at first getting a few blank looks—some of which might well have been willed ignorance, the clannishness of the docks, unready to trust strangers—I was eventually directed over to Pier 86, just below the passenger terminal, where a crew was off-loading cargo pallets from a Dutch-flagged freighter. I noticed, though, that the ship's home port, stenciled on her stern, was Abidjan, the Ivory Coast, which wasn't a country of tulips and wooden shoes. And there were some self-important types wearing Army uniforms and carrying clipboards, pretending to supervise the operation. Since the war, you no longer saw much military presence on the piers, so it was obvious this cargo was somehow special, and as I started to make my way along the dockside, a couple of MPs blocked my progress.
Now of course, I carried all sorts of credentials, some of them forgeries, some of them legitimate, such as a Sullivan Act card signed by Mayor O'Dwyer, allowing me to carry a loaded weapon concealed on my person. I chose to display one of the less questionable falsifications,
identifying me as an inspector of gas mains.
Their officers puffed up, naturally, but they had to let me through. In the city, licensing trumps everything.
I discovered Gyp O'Fearna in an act of pilferage.
Startled by my unheralded presence, he certainly appeared guilty enough and bundled away the man he was talking to with a few last-minute instructions.
"Act in haste, repent at leisure,” I remarked.
He affected not to take my meaning. “Little off our graze, are we, Mickey?” he inquired, smiling.
"It's all the same to me, Gyp,” I told him. “I'm a wee bit curious who's got you in their pocket though."
He looked to see whether anyone was listening, but we were by ourselves in the cavernous concrete Customs warehouse.
"Are the Provisionals rewarding you?” I asked him. I meant the IRA militia. “Sinn Fein's bagman, Des Morrissey?"
"I never knew you to have any politics,” Gyp said, avoiding a direct answer.
"What's the strike talk?” I asked.
"Mickey, you're all over the map,” he said, grinning. “I'd say you were fishing, with no bait on your hook."
"Too true,” I said, smiling in return. “But then I'd say you were being disingenuous, Gyp. I found you with your hand in the cookie jar, right enough."
Again he feigned artless misunderstanding, his expression all puzzled innocence. “There's a lot of extra paperwork, a military consignment,” he said. “Everything in triplicate, with the i's to be dotted, t's to be crossed."
"You're full of cobbles, Gyp,” I said. “You're planning to misroute this cargo, send it on a trip around Lake Erie or the like. That, or steal it. The shifty-eyed barstid you were just speaking with now, Francis Xavier Quinn, known as Frankie the Lie. Tell me, sure, what business would the two of you have, it wouldn't prove to be monkey business?"
"Frankie's a shifty lad, I'm willing to admit,” Gyp said to me candidly. “And you wouldn't be, yourself?"
He had me there.
"I'm thinking, where's the advantage?” he asked.
Ah. Now we were on the same turf. “Well,” I said, buying myself some time, “how much money buys your silence?"
"It's worth my while."
"Is it, now?” I had to be canny, still. “How much is your life worth, then?"
"Are you threatening me, Mickey?"
"No, not I,” I said. “I was thinking of the Italians."
He tried to bluff it out, holding my gaze, but I could read the doubt behind his bravado.
I sighed. “If you climb in bed with Costello and the Mafia capos, there's no going back, you know that."
"Who exactly are you speaking for, Mickey?"
"I speak for the Hannahs. Always have."
"Word is that Young Tim doesn't reside much trust in you."
"Say then that I speak for myself."
"What weight does that carry?"
I'd been doing my best not to act the threatening presence, but it was getting me nowhere. “Don't play the fool,” I said.
"Oh, so it's bare knuckles now, is it?"
"Bare knuckles from me, or cement shoes from the Guineas."
I could see he was having second thoughts.
"Let's begin at the beginning,” I said. “Whose water would you be carrying, and who offered you the bucket?"
He looked at me askance. “What am I getting in return for what I could tell you?” he asked.
"My silence,” I said. “And you know I'm good for it. I've betrayed no man's confidences in thirty years.” I shouldn't have had to remind him of it, but this was no time for niceties.
It was a quick and dirty deal, not soon forgiven.
He caved. I had a name for keeping my own counsel. Gyp knew he was balanced on the knife's edge and might require my goodwill, or that of the Hannah mob. It was easy enough to draw him out, after he'd felt the prick of the spurs.
I wondered, though, whether I was being too easily led, or if I only heard what I'd come ready to hear.
But in the event, his story was this:
Yes, there was a strike looming. Wages and benefits had been artificially depressed during the war, and now the men who worked the docks wanted their piece of the action. Which was seemingly fair enough. After all, there was a boom on. But there were others who expected a piece of the action, circling like wolves, and chief among them was the Costello organization, primus inter pares of the Five Families.
"Who've you made cause with then?” I asked him.
He looked sly and laid his index finger alongside of his nose, a gesture indicating a shared secret, something we were both privy to but knew better than to speak of aloud. It could mean anything, or nothing.
I lost patience, and at the end, as it all too often did in my experience, it came down to some knuckle-breaking. I have to wonder at people.
But it got me a name, although the name was new to me.
* * * *
"Noel D'Oench,” I said to Frankie the Lie. It had taken me a little time, but I'd eventually run him to ground at McAvoy's, a hole-in-the-wall piano bar abaft of Grand Central.
"Bunny, his friends call him,” Frankie told me.
"Would you count yourself among them?” I asked him.
He snorted.
I raised my eyebrows. “Does that mean he has few friends,” I inquired, “or merely that his friends are better chosen?"
"It means he considers me below the salt,” Frankie the Lie said with no small amount of venom in his tone. “He's too high and mighty for Harp primitives the likes of us."
I nodded. “It's often the case that when the upper classes go slumming, they find the company not to their liking."
"You know more about this than you're telling."
Of course I didn't. I was laying chum.
"He's a man for the great unwashed masses in principle, our Bunny is, but not in their smelly particulars,” he told me.
Suffice it to say that the man was no simple snob, or so I understood from Frankie. It was a phenomenon I'd seen something of. There were people who came from money or privilege, who felt guilty about their advantages. But in the event, the folk they wanted to raise by their bootstraps turned out to be either unworthy or simply too damn stubborn to take instruction from their betters, and I counted myself among that number. It was apparently an eye-opening experience for someone like D'Oench to discover that so many of us desired no moral improvement.
"He's a man of divided loyalties,” Frankie the Lie said.
"How so?” I asked.
Frankie tipped me a wink. “A leopard who's changed his spots,” he said. “He worked for the War Department not so long ago."
I thought of the military personnel on the dock earlier.
"He left, it seems, under somewhat of a cloud."
"You can speak plainer than that,” I said.
Frankie shrugged. “His sympathies were in question,” he told me. “It's said he had a soft spot for Uncle Joe Stalin, or at the least a certain leftward spin to his footwork."
"He's an upper-class Red?"
"Hammer-and-sickle, no swords into ploughshares, neither."
Premature anti-Fascist before the war. Active in rallies for the Loyalist side in Spain. Broken hearted and confused, like so many other American lefties, by the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, but after the German invasion of Russia, a devoted commitment to defeating the Axis. It was a not uncommon curriculum vitae. What separated Bunny D'Oench from the pack, according to Frankie, was that beating the Nazis was only a signpost on a longer road. World brotherhood, arm in arm toward the greater good for the greatest number.
Frankie the Lie was to my knowledge only concerned with the greater good for a constituency of one.
"Idealism,” he said, shaking his head. “It's all the same to me. A mark's a mark, whatever his motives. It makes not a particle of difference whether you understand the man's weakness in fine, only that you know the weakness is there."
&nbs
p; We understood each other, certainly. “I'm intrigued by his motives,” I said.
Frankie looked at me askance. “You'd be wanting to see the Hannahs out of harm's way,” he commented.
I hadn't thought to put it that way, but since he'd been so kind as to supply me with an alibi, I went along.
"It's none of their concern, or yours,” he said.
I took the carbon flimsy out of my breast pocket and spread it on the table between us.
Frankie looked at it with cautious attention.
It was a copy of the cargo manifest, which I'd taken off of Gyp, almost as an afterthought.
"Cocoa, peanut oil, flax,” I said with an inquiring glance at Frankie. “Which of it would you be buying at discount?"
"A thousand pounds of cocoa,” Frankie the Lie said.
"Why's the Army there?” I asked him.
"I don't know,” he said, and I took him at face value.
"Gyp O'Fearna means to sidetrack the cocoa for you."
He spread his hands. It was too obvious to require an answer.
"Suppose the entire shipment goes astray?"
"What's that to me?” he asked.
"You're only bothering with chocolate."
"Where's the profit, else?"
"Would you think D'Oench to be in it for profit?"
"Ach,” Frankie sniffed, “he answers to a higher calling."
"But this,” I said to him, reading from the manifest. “Bauxite, manganese, lithium chloride? Metallic ore, chemicals, I'd imagine, in one form or another."
He shrugged.
I was at a loss to imagine the ready market. Contraband it might be, but neither fungible nor recognizably utilitarian.
"You don't steal what can't be sold,” Frankie said, putting my thought into words.
"Not if you've only the one client,” I agreed.
"Why would they be fool enough to buy it back?” Frankie asked.
"They'd simply hunt you down, the Army and the FBI."
Then what was Gyp selling D'Oench? I wondered, and answered my own question. Information.
Frankie the Lie, however, dealt in more tangible goods. “I wouldn't want you to queer this,” he said.
"I've no need to,” I told him.
"You've other villainy in mind,” he said suspiciously.
AHMM, June 2007 Page 9
