Legs

by William Kennedy

  I'd told Jack in Hamburg, when we shook hands at the gangplank, that I'd meet him when he docked in the U. S. and I'd bring Fogarty with me. But Fogarty, I discovered, couldn't leave the state, and Jack was coming in to Philadelphia. The federals had Fogarty on three trivial charges while they tried to link him to a rum-boat raid they'd made at Briarcliff Manor, a hundred and twenty-five thousand-dollar haul of booze, the week before we left for Europe. This was the first I'd heard of the raid or of Fogarty's arrest. He'd been waiting in a truck as the boat docked, and when he spotted a cop, he tried to make a run. They charged him with vagrancy, speeding, and failing to give a good account of himself, my favorite misdemeanor.

  '"They can't tie me to it," Fogarty said on the phone from Acra. "I never went near the boat. I was in the truck taking a nap. "

  "Excellent alibi. Was it Jack's booze?"

  "I wouldn't know."

  "As one Irishman to another, I don't trust you either."

  So I drove to Philadelphia by myself.

  The reception for Jack was hardly equal to the hero welcomes America gives its Lindys, but it surpassed anything I'd been involved in personally since the armistice. I talked my way onto the cutter that was to bring a customs inspector out to meet the Hannover at quarantine on Marcus Hook. A dozen newsmen were also aboard, the avant-garde eyeballs of the waiting masses.

  We saw Jack on the bridge with the captain when we pulled alongside. The captain called out, "No press, no press," when the customs inspector began to board, and Jack added his greeting: "Any reporter comes near me I'll knock his fucking brains out." The press grumbled and took pictures, and then Jack saw me and I climbed aboard.

  "I was just passing by," I said, "and thought I might borrow a cup of birdseed."

  Jack grinned and shook hands, looking like an ad for what an ocean voyage can do for the complexion. He was in his favorite suit—the blue double-breasted—with a light gray fedora, a baby blue tie, and a white silk shirt.

  "I'm big pals with these birds," he said. "Some of them whistle better than Jolson."

  "You're looking fit."

  "Greatest trip of my life," he said. The captain was a hell of a fellow, the food was great, the sea air did wonders for his stomach and blah blah blah. Marvelous how he could lie. I told him about the reception he was going to get, some evidence of it already in view: tugs, police launches, chartered press boats, that customs cutter, all of them steaming along with us as we glided up the Delaware toward Pier Thirty-four. Jack's navy.

  "I'd estimate three thousand people and a hundred cops," I said.

  "Three thousand? They gonna throw confetti or rocks?"

  "Palm fronds is my guess. "

  I told him about Fogarty's travel restrictions, and asked: "Was that your booze they got on that boat?"

  "Mostly mine," he said. "I had a partner."

  "A sizable loss—a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars."

  "More. Add another twenty-five. "

  "Were you on the scene?"

  "Not at the dock. I was someplace else, waiting. And nobody showed. My old pal Charlie Northrup worked that one up."

  "He was your partner?"

  "He tipped the feds."

  "Ah. So that's what this is all about."

  "No, that's not even half of it. What about Jimmy Biondo?"

  "I had a call from him. He wants his money."

  "I don't blame him, but he's not going to get it."

  "He threatened me. He thinks maybe I've got it. I didn't think he was that bright."

  "How did he threaten you?"

  "He said he'd make me dead."

  "Don't pay any attention to that bullshit."

  "It's not something I hear every day."

  "I'll fix the son of a bitch."

  "Why don't you just give him back his money?"

  "Because I'm going back to Germany."

  "Oh, Christ, Jack. Don't you learn'?"

  When he talked to Schwarzkopf about greasing the way for a return trip, I took it as the necessary response of an angry reject. I couldn't imagine him really risking a second international fiasco. But I was making a logical assumption and Jack was working out of other file cabinets: his faith in his ability to triumph over hostility, his refusal to recognize failure even after it had kicked him in the crotch, and, of course, his enduring greed. As a disinterested observer I might have accepted all but the greed as admirable behavior, but now with Biondo on my back as well as Jack's, such perseverance struck me as an open invitation to assassination.

  "Let's get it straight, Jack. I'm not comfortable."

  "Who the hell is'?"

  "I used to be. I want to get rid of that money and I want to get rid of Jimmy Biondo. I went along for the ride, but it's turned into something else. You don't know how big this Northrup thing is. In the papers every day. Biggest corpse hunt in years, which raises our old question again. Is he or isn't he? I've got to know this time."

  We were on the forward deck, watching the boats watch us. The captain and his sailors were nowhere near us, but Jack looked behind and then spoke so no breeze would

  carry the words aft.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Great. Jesus Christ, that's great news."

  "It wasn't my fault. "

  "No?"

  "It was a mistake. "

  "Then that makes everything all right. "

  "Don't fuck around with this, Marcus. I said it was a mistake."

  "It's a mistake I'm here."

  "Then get the fuck off."

  "When it's over. I don't quit on my clients. "

  I think I knew even as I said it that there would be no quitting. Certainly I sensed the possibility, for just as Jack's life had taken a turning in Europe, so had mine. Our public association had done me in with the Albany crowd. They could do beer business all year long with Jack, but after mass on Sunday they could also tut-tut over the awful gangsterism fouling the city. It followed they could not run a man for the Congress who was seeking justice for an animal like Jack. Forget about Congress, was the word passed to me at the Elks Club bar after I came home from Germany. When I think back now to whether the Congress or the time with Jack would have given me more insight into American life, I always lean to Jack. In the Congress I would have learned how rudimentary hypocrisy is turned into patriotism, into national policy, and into the law, and how hypocrites become heroes of the people. What I learned from Jack was that politicians imitated his style without comprehending it, without understanding that their venality was only hypocritical. Jack failed thoroughly as a hypocrite. He was a liar, of course, a perjurer, all of that, but he was also a venal man of integrity, for he never ceased to renew his vulnerability to punishment, death, and damnation. It is one thing to be corrupt. It is another to behave in a psychologically responsible way toward your own evil.

  * * *

  The police came aboard, just like Belgium, with a warrant for Jack as a suspicious character. Jack was afraid of the mob, afraid he was too much of a target, but the cops formed a wedge around him and moved him through. The crowd pushed and broke the wedge, calling out hellos and welcome backs to Jack; and some even held up autograph books and pencils. When all that failed, the fan club began to reach out to feel him, shake his hand. A woman who couldn't reach him hit his arm with a newspaper and apologized—"I only wanted to touch you, lover"—and a young man made a flying leap at Jack's coat, got a cop's instead, also got clubbed.

  "Murderer," someone called out.

  "Go home. We don't want you here."

  "Don't mind them, Jack."

  "You look great, Legs. "

  "He's only a bird in a gilded cage."

  "Give us a smile, Legs," a photographer said and Jack swung at him, missed.

  "Hello, cuz!" came a yell and Jack turned to see his cousin William, an ironworker. Jack asked the cops to let him through, and William, six four with major muscles and the facial blotch of a serious beer drinker, moved in beside the car wher
e Jack was now ringed by police.

  "Lookin' snappy, Jack," William said.

  "Wish I could say the same for you, Will."

  "What's that you got there in the lapel?"

  "Knight Templar pin, Will."

  "Son of a bitch, Jack, ain't that a Protestant bunch?"

  "It's good for business, Will."

  "You even turned on your own religion."

  "Ah shit, Will, have you got anything to tell me? How's Aunt Elly?"

  "She's fit."

  "Does she need anything'?"

  "Nobody needs anything from you."

  "Well, it was nice seeing you, Will. Give my regards to the worms. "

  "We know who the worm in this family is, cousin."

  And Jack got into the car.

  "What do you think of the killing of the dry agent yesterday at the Rising Sun Brewery in Newark?" a reporter asked through the window.

  "First I heard of it, but it's the most foolish thing in the world. It'll cramp business for a month."

  "Can you whistle for us?" another reporter asked.

  "Up your whistle, punk," Jack said, and the reporter faded.

  "How did you find Europe?"

  "I got off the boat and there it was."

  "Who was the blonde you were with in Hamburg?"

  "A Red Cross nurse I hired to take my pulse."

  "How well did you know Charlie Northrup'?"

  "A personal friend."

  "The police think you killed him."

  "Never trust what a cop or a woman thinks. "

  No longer amused, the cops shoved the reporters back and made a path for the car. Jack waved to me as it pulled away, smiling, happy to be vulnerable again. My subconscious works in musical ways at times and as I wrote that last sentence I heard an old melody iioat up and I couldn't say why. But I trust my music and when I sang it all the way through I could hear a jazz band playing it in raucous ragtime, Jack giving me that going—away smile on the pier forty-two years ago, soothed by the music, which I hear clearly, with a twist all my own:

  It goes Na-Da, Na-Da ,

  Na-Da-Na-Da nil-nil-nil.

  Jack was twenty hours in jail. His aunt sent him a box of molasses cookies, and I sent him two corned beefs on rye. Commissioner Devane in New York had asked Philadelphia to hold Jack, but they found nothing to prosecute and by midmorning I'd worked out a release arrangement. We'd announce we were leaving town, assuring the citizenry that no carpetbaggers would invade the territory of the local hoodlums. Jack wanted only two hours to visit relatives and the judge said all right, so we went through a four-minute court ritual. But the judge found it necessary to give Jack a dig: "This court considers the attention you have received from the press and from the vast numbers of people who gathered at the pier to witness your arrival, to be twin aberrations of the public mind, aberrations which find value in things that are worth nothing at all. I speak for the decent people of this city in saying that Philadelphia doesn't want you any more than Europe did. Get out of this city and stay out."

  In the car, Jack looked like a man trying to see through a rain of cotton balls. The reporters tailed us, so he said, "Skip the relatives, head for New York." We lost the last of the press about thirty miles out of the city. It was a decent fall day, a little cloudy, but with a lot of new color in the world. But then it started to drizzle and the road got foggy. The fog seemed to buoy Jack's spirits and he talked about his women. He'd left his canaries on the ship and now wanted to buy something for Alice and Kiki, so we stopped at Newark, which he seemed to know as well as he knew Manhattan.

  "Dogs," he said. "Alice loves dogs."

  We went to three pet shops before we found a pair of gray Brussels griffons. They appealed to Jack because he could claim he'd bought them in Belgium. There were four

  in the litter and I suggested another pair for Kiki.

  "She'd lose them or let them die," he said, and so we found a jewelry store and he bought her an eight-hundred-dollar diamond, elaborately set ("A diamond from my Diamond," she quickly dubbed it).

  I'd expected him to emphasize one or the other woman when he arrived, depending on his mood: horny or homey. But he balanced them neatly, emphasizing neither, impatient to see them both, moving neither away from one nor toward the other but rather toting one on each shoulder into some imagined triad of love, a sweet roundelay which would obviate any choice of either/or and would offer instead the more bountiful alternative of both. More power to you, old boy.

  But his mood was not bountiful at the moment. We came out of the jewelry store and got in the car, and he looked at me and said, "Did you ever feel dead?"

  "Not entirely. I woke up once and felt my leg was dead. Not pins and needles but genuinely dead. But that's as far as I ever got."

  "I feel like I died last week."

  "You've had a pretty negative experience. It's understandable."

  "I didn't even feel like this when I was dying."

  "Go someplace and sleep it off. Always works for me when I hit bottom."

  "Some cocaine would fix my head."

  "I'll stop at the next drugstore."

  "Let's get a drink. Turn right, we'll go to Nannery's"—and we hunted down a small speakeasy where Jack knew the doorman and got the biggest hello of the week from half the people in the place.

  "I just heard about you on the radio ten minutes ago," Tommy Nannery told him, a spiffy little bald-headed Irishman with oversize ears. He kept clapping Jack on the back and he put a bottle of rye in front of us. "They sure gave you a lot of shit over there, Jack," Nannery said.

  "It wasn't so bad," Jack said. "Don't believe all that horseshit you read in the papers. I had a good time. I got healthy on the ocean. "

  "I didn't believe any of it," Nannery said. "Talkin' here the other night about it I says to a fellow, they don't shove Jack Diamond around like that, I don't care who they are. Jack has got friends a way up. Am I right?"

  "You're right, Tommy. Here's to my friends."

  Jack drank about three straight ones while I was getting halfway through my first. He put a twenty on the bar and said he'd take the bottle.

  "My treat, Jack, my treat," Nannery said. "Glad to see you back in Newark."

  "'It's nice to have good friends," Jack said. "Tommy, it's nice."

  He had another two fast ones before we left, and in the car he sat with the bottle between his legs, swilling it as we went. When I got into Manhattan, he was out of his depression with a vengeance, also out of control with good old Marcus at the wheel. I'd every intention of dropping him in the city and going straight on to Albany with a demarcating flourish. The end. For the peculiar vanity that had first sent me to Catskill on that odd summer Sunday, the need for feeding the neglected negative elements of my too-white Irish soul, the willful tar-and-feather job on my conscience, all that seemed silly now. Childish man. Eternal boy. Bit of a rascal. Unpredictable Marcus. The wiping away of my political future, however casually I'd considered it in the past, the prospect of assassination, and my excursion into quasi-rape convinced me my life had changed in startling ways I wouldn't yet say I regretted. But what would I do with such developments? Underneath, I knew I was still straight, still balancing the either/or while Jack plunged ahead with diamonds and doggies toward the twin-peaked glory of bothness. I felt suddenly like a child.

  I looked at Jack and saw him whiten. Was that a bad bit of barley he was swilling? But the bottle was two-thirds down. He was suddenly quite drunk, and without a sound or a move toward the door, he puked in his lap, onto the seat, onto the gearshift, the floormat, the open ashtray, my shoes, my socks, my trousers, and the Philadelphia Inquirer I'd bought before going to court, Jack's face in closeup staring up from it at Jack, receiving mouth-to-mouth vomit.

  "Fucking ocean," Jack said, and he collapsed backward with his eyes closed, lapsing into a ragged flow of mumbles as I looked frantically for a gas station. He rattled on about being offered fifteen hundred a month to perform in a Ge
rman cabaret, and twenty-five thousand by an English news syndicate for his life story and a blank check by the Daily News for the same thing. I'd heard all this in Germany and was now far more interested in any sign of the flying red horse on Eleventh Avenue, steed that would deliver me from puke.

  " 'Magine 'em asking Rothstein?" Jack said, eyes closed, words all tongued." 'Magine him packin' 'em in?"

  "No, I can't imagine it," I said, distracted still. Jack opened his eyes when I spoke.

  "Wha'?"

  "I said I couldn't imagine it."

  "'Magine wha'?"

  "Rothstein onstage."

  "Where?"

  "Forget it."

  "They wouldn't put that bum onstage," he said and he closed his eyes. He snapped to when I hosed down his lap and shoes at the gas station, and by the time we got to the Monticello Hotel where Kiki was waiting, he was purged, stinking and still drunk but purged of salt air and European poisons, cured by America's best home remedy. And good old Uncle Marcus was still there, guiding him with as little guidance as possible toward the elevator. Upstairs, Jack could lie down and think about puke and poison. He could discover in quiet what his body already understood: that his fame hadn't answered the basic question he had asked himself all his life, was still asking.

  PLAYING THE JACK

  Jimmy Biondo visited Kiki three hours before we knocked on her door. The result was still on her face. She'd met him with Jack frequently, and so, when he knocked, she let him in. He then dumped his froggy body into the only easy chair in the room, keeping his hat on and dripping sweat off his chin onto his bow tie.

  "Where's your friend Diamond?"

  "He hasn't called me yet."

  "Don't lie to me, girlie."

  "I don't lie to people and don't call me girlie, you big lug."

  "Your friend's got trouble."

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "He's gunna grow great big holes in his belly."

  "He better not hear you say that."

  "He'll hear it all right. He'll hear it."

  "Listen, I don't want to talk to you and I'll thank you to leave."

  "I'll tank you to leave."

  "So get lost."

  "Shut up, you dumb cunt."