by John Gardner
Capone looked forty years of age: big, heavy-bodied, though the muscletone was hard as rock beneath. He had bulllike shoulders upon which the large round head sat as though grafted between them.
He licked his thick, sensual lips and, under the light-brown hair and shaggy eyebrows, bright gray eyes appraised the boy, as though he were trying to put a price on him.
Even though it was almost eleven in the morning, the man was not yet dressed. He lounged back in a chair, clad in a royal blue silk robe over pajamas of a similar color, but with gold piping around collar and cuffs.
Louis, who had spent much time in New York window shopping at the high-class stores on Fifth and Park Avenues, knew the pajamas were French models, made by Sulka at almost twenty-five dollars a pair. A fortune. He had seen similar ones in Sulka’s window, and in the glossy magazines. Louis already had a taste for good clothes. He wanted to make enough money to buy only the best. Sometimes he even got a hard-on looking at the men’s fashion magazines. Music, women, money and good clothes often gave him an erection.
Capone smiled, and Louis saw that his lips had a purplish tint to them. He raised one hand, and a diamond flashed on the middle finger as he ran his palm around his dark jowls. In a few years, the face would become fleshy as he put on weight.
Somewhere behind him, a man in a barber’s apron moved, whipping up a lather in the shaving mug. There were other men in the room. Louis Packer was aware that a lot of eyes were on him.
“The kid I told ya about, Mr. Capone.” It was the second time Carlo had said it.
Capone nodded slowly, reaching for a cigar. One of the men sprang forward to flick a lighter and Capone pushed it away with his hand. “How many times I gotta tell ya. Ya don’t light cigars with cigarette lighters. Ya light them with a match. Got it?” The match flickered at the end of Carlo’s fingers, and as Capone rolled the cigar in the flame he looked up at Louis. “Yeah, the Jew kid. You told me, Carlo.”
Louis had arrived at Chicago’s La Salle Street train station around eight that morning. As promised, Carlo Giarre was there to meet him, with another man, whom he introduced as Frankie Rio. Both of them looked tired, as though they had been up all night, and Carlo explained that they would not be able to see Mr. Capone until later in the morning. “He ain’t inclined to getting up early,” Carlo grinned.
“None of us is that way inclined.” Frankie Rio did not grin. His expression seemed to be permanently sullen.
Carlo explained that they had been up all night. “We did a little job, see? Then, after that … Well, the boss likes the night life. He always takes some of the boys out with him. We got him home at five this morning: good to see ya, Pianist; glad ya took me up on the offer.”
There was a black automobile outside the train station and they drove to a diner that served breakfast. A sign outside read, “The Best Breakfast in Town. All you can eat for $1.00.”
The owner served them personally, and appeared very anxious to please the three young men. Carlo called him “Jimmy,” like he knew him well, and introduced Louis as, “My friend, Louis the Pianist. Ya won’t forget him next time he drops by, will ya, Jimmy?”
“No, sir.” Jimmy smiled nervously at Louis. “You’re welcome to eat here any time you want.”
Louis noticed there was no charge for the breakfast, which was the best he had eaten in a long time. Though his mother was a good cook, her food was plain, and breakfast had never been much of a meal in the Packensteiner household. Now he had coffee, and flapjacks with honey, scrambled eggs, toast, jelly. “Anything you want, you just ask,” Jimmy said, and they did not even leave him a tip.
Around ten thirty they drove to a building that looked rundown and decrepit by daylight. Along the front wall, above a small door, there was a sign, laced with unlit neon. The Four Deuces, it said, and there was a large hand showing four deuces fanned from a deck of cards.
Carlo tapped lightly on the door—three double knocks—and a voice from inside asked who he was. Carlo spoke softly, and there was a clicking of locks and the sound of bolts being withdrawn.
A small lobby led to another door and so into a large room, dark and unattractive in the light from four small windows set high up, and the couple of overhead bulbs that were switched on. Two elderly black women swept around a landscape of tables which had their chairs piled onto them, upside down, so that they looked like strange four-legged skeletal animals.
The man who had opened up to them was small, like a ferret, but sharply dressed in a pearl gray double-breasted pinstripe, which Louis regarded with some envy. In fact, almost the first thing he had noticed about Carlo and Frankie Rio was their clothes.
Carlo had grown: filled out, his face tougher, his eyes showing a new, wary knowledge, and the splattered pockmarked left cheek seemed more noticeable, giving him a sinister edge, particularly when he hardened his eyes—a new trick which proved frightening. He had obviously learned a great deal since their last meeting: more confident and better, if flashily, dressed: a brown double-breasted, beautifully tailored suit, silk shirt and tie with a matching fedora, cocked jauntily on his head.
The man who had let them in tilted his head towards a stairway, muttering, “He’s up, but I don’ know if he’s seein’ anyone yet.”
Louis felt uncomfortable, dowdy, clutching his cardboard suitcase and wearing the cheap suit his father had bought for him when he started to manage the Fifth Avenue store.
As though sensing his old friend’s discomfort, Carlo gave him an easy smile. “Don’t worry, Pianist. Mr. Capone likes music. Just act natural.”
Now, standing in front of Capone, Louis felt even more of an interloper. He looked down at his shoes, which were also cheap and needed polishing. Capone wore very expensive brown leather bedroom slippers, polished and well cared for. He recognized the design as French; he had seen them, either in a smart store window or a magazine. He thought that if Capone placed a foot on the floor between a girl’s legs he could have seen right up her skirt in the mirror shine of those slippers. Louis’ mind, he had discovered, rarely strayed from girls these days. Anything he saw seemed to have a connection with sex. He presumed it was something to do with growing into a man.
Capone’s hand paused for a second as it traversed his left cheek, then flattened, as if to hide the scar that ran, livid, from ear to jaw. Louis remembered the night with Carlo and the Havemeyer Street boys. He thought of what Carlo had told him about the knife cuts, like the one on Capone’s cheek. A Sicilian punishment. There were at least two New York Jewish boys going around permanently marked by Carlo’s knife, and he wondered about Capone. Why did he bear the mark of a Sicilian punishment?
Capone turned his large head away, again as though to hide the scar. “Carlo tells me good things about ya, Jew kid. Calls you the Pianist. …”
“Louis, ‘The Pianist,’ Packer, yea.”
He should not have spoken. Anger flared in Capone’s eyes. “Don’ interrupt me when I’m talkin’, Jew kid.” For a few seconds everyone seemed to stand, frozen and still. Then Capone laughed. “Ya gotta learn things quick here in Chicago, kid. So, ya like to play piano?”
“It’s what I do best.”
Capone grunted, saying something about that being the right way to live your life: doing what you did best.
“We do some things pretty good, eh, boss?” one of the attendant men said.
Capone turned his eyes towards the voice. “Yes, Harry, some of us do: and don’t ya ever forget that we do it under the guidance of Mr. Torrio.”
“That’s right, Al.” “You said it, boss.” “Always under Mr. Torrio, Al,” various men replied.
Capone said that he bet his sweet ass they did, then turned back to Louis. “Come,” he said softly. “Come play piano for me downstairs, eh?” He rose in one quick movement and, with a wave of his hand towards the door, he motioned Louis to follow him. There were initials, a monogram, on the silk Sulka robe—AC. Louis swore, as he saw the monogram, that one day he would ha
ve that. Everything he wore, from underwear to shirts, would be monogrammed LP. The day would come, maybe sooner than he expected.
They went down into the club and the two cleaning women scurried away like frightened rabbits as soon as they saw Capone. The gangster lifted a chair from one of the tables, straddling it the wrong way round, cradling his arms on the chair back. Some of the other men followed his example, while others just leaned, bored, against the wall. Then Capone motioned towards a piano, set on a small band dais in the corner.
Louis went over and sat down at the instrument, hitting middle C, then trying a few chords. The piano had been used a great deal. “This is in need of tuning,” he said, glancing back at Capone.
“Oh, so it’s in need a tuning,” Capone mimicked. “What d’ya expect, a Steinway Grand?”
“All instruments need tuning from time to time, Mr. Capone.”
“This mean ya can’t play, right? ’Cuz it ain’t tuned?”
“No, I can play this.”
“Okay, then play.”
“What do you want me to play, Mr. Capone?”
Someone out of sight tried to mimic his voice, like Capone had done, “What you want me to play, Mr. Capone?”
There was some laughter, and Capone turned, his eyes spreading fear around the room. There was a deathly silence, then the big man threw back his bull head and guffawed. “How about ya give me the prelude to Verdi’s Aida, Jew kid.”
Everyone laughed, except Carlo, who knew better.
Louis simply nodded, then, arrogantly, looked around, his hands resting on the keyboard.
“Waddya waitin’ for, Jew kid?” somebody shouted.
“For everyone to shut their mouths and be quiet.” Louis tried to make the anger flare in his own eyes, as he had seen Capone do it.
Nobody moved, or replied, so Louis turned back to the keyboard.
He could transpose most of the great operatic scores straight onto the piano keyboard. It was what he had done with the entire orchestral repertoire, in duets, and alone, under Aaron Hamovitch’s guidance. So the short introduction to Verdi’s opera was not difficult for him. First, the soft and beautiful theme associated with Aida herself, in the higher register; followed by the stronger, descending notes of the melody connected, in the opera, with the priests.
An overused, out of tune, bar piano is no complete orchestra but, as Louis began, so Capone stiffened, sitting very still as Louis took the brief introduction to its conclusion.
When he had finished, he looked at the gangster and saw that the light gray eyes seemed to be filled with tears. The large head nodded. “So ya know opera? Okay, so ya like opera. Well, so do I, kid. Bel canto, huh? Ya like that?” He shifted his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “So that’s okay for cultured people like myself, but what about the dumb fucks who know nothing? What about the broads and the Johns we get in places like this, The Four Deuces, every night of the week. What ya play for them, huh? I’m askin’ ya.”
Louis turned back to the piano. He did a couple of Joplin rags—“Maple Leaf” and “Stomptime”—then slid into a classic blues, thinking mainly of the words he had first heard with Carlo so long ago now—
I thought I heard Buddy Bolden shout,
Open up that window, let the bad air out.
He knew who Buddy Bolden was: more than he had known when he first heard the name. Bolden, the father of New Orleans jazz: now, at this very moment, in an insane asylum, mourned as already dead by those who knew him in the early years. Knew him when he could blow a horn so loud that, on a still night, you could hear him two miles away—from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain.
Louis did not even think about Capone and his hoods as he slid from the classic blues into a hard boogie, using the strong repetitive, key-changing, left-hand beat, that was known as Pinetops boogie, from its originator, Pinetops Smith.
Finally, he brought his audition—for he knew that all this was some kind of test—to a close with an upbeat version of “The Sheik of Araby,” the great popular song of the time, whistled by butcher boys and hummed by respectable matrons in the privacy of their boudoirs.
Nobody spoke, or applauded, when Louis stopped playing. He saw they were all looking towards Capone, as though waiting for his approval. Slowly, Capone nodded, his mouth again shifting the cigar from one corner to the other. “Guess the piano playin’ is okay, kid. Tell ya what we’re gonna do.” The hand moved to his cheek again, diamond ring flashing. “Yer buddy, Carlo, brought ya here, and he’s doin’ an important piece of work at the moment. Ya see, we got a place called The Barn, over in Burnham. Carlo’s runnin’ muscle there. Ya know, kid, makin’ sure nobody gets outta line. We got a little band, comes in every night, just to keep everybody happy. Well, ya can fill in on piano when the band takes a break. Ya can help Carlo as well.” He paused again, as though thinking, then he smiled. “If ya can prove y’re okay. Right?”
Louis had no clear idea of what he meant, but he was not about to turn down the possibility of a job. He nodded and said he appreciated it.
“Oh, ya will. I’m sure ya will,” Capone laughed, then motioned to Carlo. He had some errand he wanted Louis’ friend to run; in the meantime, Frankie Rio and the man called Harry—a fat, lumpy man, with a thick foreign accent—would, as Capone put it with another smile, “Take care of him.”
The two men were not overly friendly, as though keeping their distance, withholding any form of camaraderie until Capone had made some final judgment. They led Louis to the back of the building where there was a room the size of the entire Packensteiner apartment in New York. The room had been turned into a gym, with all the latest equipment, including showers for use when you had sweated off excess fat. He wondered if Capone ever used it. It was doubtful.
Frankie Rio told Louis to strip to his shorts, then the two men leaned back against the wall, lighting cigarettes, as they put him through a series of exercises—making him skip rope for fifteen minutes; then row hard on the machine, for another quarter hour. They ended up by getting him to lift progressively heavier weights.
While working at the store, Louis had kept himself in reasonable shape. He knew the dangers of the streets and, once in a while, he would go up to a gymnasium off Times Square, run by one of the Packensteiner clients. This man was a wealthy prize-fight promoter, with a string of fighters in his own stable. He allowed Louis to exercise, and even got one of his heavyweights to give the young man some lessons. Louis, the fighter said, was a quick learner. “Could be a good boxer if you gave it some time.”
Louis had told him he had neither the time nor staying power to be a fighter.
“Oh, you got the staying power,” the boxer told him.
Even so, he was breathing hard, and sweating a good deal by the time Frankie and Harry had finished telling him what to do in Capone’s private gymnasium. They were still a little hostile, so Louis was not altogether surprised when, as he put down the last of the weights, Frankie Rio moved in close to him, bringing back his right fist to deliver a rabbit punch.
Louis sidestepped and the fist went past him. He saw a flicker of annoyance cross Frankie’s face, then the expression turned to one of amazement as Louis landed a left and right, in a one and two, to the man’s stomach, and finally a straight left to the jaw, sending Rio reeling against the wall.
He immediately stepped back and assumed a boxing stance but, either Rio had learned fast, or Harry had warned him off.
Harry—Louis later discovered his name was Guzik—indicated a door. “Take a shower, Pianist,” he grunted.
Frankie Rio shook his head, then felt his jaw. Harry was smiling, so Rio had lost face. “Ya did good, kid,” Rio said, trying to make the best of it. “When ya’ve showered, dry off and get dressed, okay?”
Louis nodded. “No hard feelings?”
Frankie looked at him as though he would kill him if he could, but thought better of it. “No hard feelings, kid.” There was little conviction in his voi
ce, and Louis knew he had probably made an enemy he might have to watch.
Oddly, Louis, who had been very tired after the long trip from New York, now felt fresh and invigorated. Sure, his muscles ached a little, but it was as though fresh blood was pumping through his body. In all, he felt good and alert. Ready for anything.
When he came out, dressed, from the showers, only Harry Guzik was waiting for him. “He wants ta see ya now.” Harry smiled, though his eyes remained cold and aloof.
Capone was dressed, surrounded by the same group of men, when Louis was shown into another room, his office, a few minutes later. He was told to sit down and wait while Capone issued instructions and checked papers. Frankie Rio was not there, and he noticed one or two of the other men nodded and smiled at him, trying to be friendly.
At last Capone sent everyone out of the room except for Louis, to whom he did not speak for some minutes while he sat, looking him in the eyes and occasionally nodding. Finally—
“Well, kid, I gotta good report on ya. Two things. First, my boys always gotta keep in good shape. Everyone takes regular exercise. I need people around me who are ready for action anytime and anywhere. I hear ya almost sent Frankie to sleep. Harry says yer fast, so ya might find yerself doin’ other jobs for me as well as playin’ the piano.
“Okay. Second, I got another saying as well. When a guy can’t do the business with a broad anymore, then he’s finished. Ya remember that, Pianist. Carlo swears to me on his mother’s eyes, that yer okay in that department, so I accept his word. If I ever hear different, ya got trouble, okay?”
Louis said okay.
“Right, ya start work out at Burnham today, with yer buddy, Carlo. So ya won’t feel lonely. Like I said before, yu’ll play piano when the band takes a break, and yu’ll assist Carlo when he needs ya. There’ll be other work as well. In good time. In this outfit we all of us have to do other kinds of work. And this outfit’s big, Pianist. Very big, and it’s gonna get bigger. Ya hear me straight?”
“You’re the boss, Mr. Capone.” Louis grinned.
