Maestro: 4 (The Herbie Kruger Novels)

by John Gardner

  Most of the men circled around Galli-Curci, paying court and homage, vying with one another to talk with her. Then, one of them slowly detached himself from the herd and came over to the piano. He was slim, young, very dark and good-looking, obviously Italian. His whole manner was elegant. He wore tinted eyeglasses and his smile appeared friendly, though Louis had already learned never to trust a man by his smile.

  “You play very well,” the young man said. Behind the tinted glasses his eyes seemed to be judging Louis’ intelligence. This one did not seem to be like the other mobsters in the room. “Genna,” he introduced himself. “Tony Genna.”

  So, Louis thought, this is the one they called Tony the Gentleman, or Tony the Aristocrat. Anthony Genna, the only member of that feared Sicilian family with any education or culture.

  “Killers,” Carlo had said. “Never cross the Gennas, Pianist. They’re a breed: plain and fancy two-handed killers. It’s in the blood from way back in Sicily. Mind, Tony’s a little different because he’s been educated.”

  Louis rose, knowing this was a sign of respect, offering his hand as Tony Genna asked what he did in Torrio’s organization, nodding and smiling as Louis told him.

  “But, Louis, you’re a real musician. You love music, yes?”

  Louis admitted this was so.

  “Okay,” Genna said. “I got a regular box at the opera. I also like music: opera, concerts. One night soon we’ll go together. I’ll bring a couple of broads who have brains as well as the other equipment. We’ll make a night of it, okay?”

  Louis said he would like that very much. His night off was usually in the middle of the week, when business was quiet. Wednesday as a rule.

  Genna told him that sounded fine. He took out a hand-tooled leather wallet, extracted a card and wrote down a telephone number. “Just call me there anytime. Whenever you feel like it. I have a good box we can use any night of the week. Just let me know, okay?”

  Louis said it was very kind of him. “You know music, and I like that in a person,” Genna said. “It’ll be a pleasure to share the enjoyment.” Then he lowered his voice, “With most of them,” he inclined his head slightly towards the other men, “it’s just emotion. Bel canto emotion. Sure, it has to come from the heart, but it also comes from here.” A finger tapped his temple.

  Louis just smiled. He did not want to nod or even indicate that he was agreeing to anything in public with Genna.

  Later, Capone came over and said he had done very well. He hoped Louis realized what a privilege it was to be allowed to accompany Madame Galli-Curci. Nevertheless, he patted Louis on the shoulder and slipped two hundred-dollar bills into his handkerchief pocket.

  As it turned out, it was a couple of weeks before he even had a chance to call Tony Genna. On the Monday after the reception Carlo told him that he would be needed at The Barn on this Wednesday night.

  “There’s a load coming in, and we gotta spike it,” he said. “I’ll see ya get extra pay. I’m doing ya a favor, right?”

  Louis had no idea of what to expect. He certainly did not know what spiking entailed. But it did not worry him, he had a favor to ask Carlo anyhow. He was saving money quickly, and was now determined to return what he owed to his parents, but he did not want to send it himself, or give away his new name or any address where they might come looking for him.

  Already he worried about the outcome of his night in the stockroom with Ruth. For all he knew she could be trying to bring charges against him for rape—though he also knew that, in New York, it would be very difficult for a girl like Ruth to make anything stick. Also there was always the possibility that she was pregnant. He did not worry permanently, or even lose sleep over these possibilities. But occasionally they nagged at him.

  He found that nowadays he felt little for his father, and wondered if he was becoming callous. Naturally, he was sorry for his mother, but could feel no real pity. Was this peculiar? Was it normal? Who could tell? Later in his life he knew he would probably regret this shell, which seemed to be building around his heart like a thick hide, there to protect him from the emotions and pain of human relationships. Now, all he wanted to do was make some kind of reparation. Already he had enough to return two hundred dollars without putting himself at financial risk should some offer come up that would allow him to quit working for the mobsters.

  “You still got plenty of contacts in New York?” he asked Carlo, who said that New York was no problem.

  “I just want an envelope delivered to my folks. It’s got to be done by someone who doesn’t know me, and who isn’t going to lead them back here. Just deliver the envelope and wait for a reply, in case one of them’s sick or something.”

  “Five bucks, it’ll cost ya,” Carlo said, without even looking at him.

  “Only five bucks. Look, Carlo, I don’t want them to know anything about me. Only five bucks?”

  “Let me tell ya, Lou, there are people in this world who’d kill for five bucks, if ya know the right places to look. Ya can buy an awful lot of silence for five bucks. Just for the price of a meal and a drink. Okay?”

  Louis wrote to his parents that night, at least in the early hours of the morning, after The Barn had closed—

  Dear Father and Mother,

  Just a word to let you know I am okay, but still sorry about the money. I told you that I would repay you, and the enclosed is the beginning of this. Please do not try to find me. The person who brings this letter does not even know it is from me, or who I am, so it is no good questioning him. If you do not want to write, just send a message, I will understand, but I do want to know if you are both okay. Be well and happy.

  He signed it Louis, sealed it, together with the two hundred-dollar bills Capone had given him, and entrusted the letter to Carlo.

  The answer came back within a week. A plain envelope. Inside, was Louis’ original envelope, opened. His letter was intact, but scrawled across it in red pencil were the words, “I no nobody name off Louis.” It was signed “J. Packensteiner.” The two hundred-dollar bills were also inside. They had been neatly torn in half.

  “Y’okay, Pianist?” Carlo asked, noticing that Louis had gone white, and was almost shaking with anger.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine.” To himself he vowed, “I now know nobody by the names Joseph and Gerda Packensteiner.” As far as he was concerned, his mother and father were dead. It took only twenty-four hours for him to expel them from his heart and mind.

  “This was not so with my dear cousins back in Bavaria, Herbie. This you have to understand. Even after I left New York I would write to them every month. Every fucking month I wrote them. Letters to all three of them. To David, Rebecca and Rachel.”

  The letters were clandestine, in that Louis swore his cousins to secrecy: writing as though from the old New York address, wagering that his father and mother would not tell his aunt and uncle, in Bavaria, of the shame he had brought on the family. In the first letters from Chicago he said very little, but enclosed a small slip of paper, giving David his new name and address. He judged David would keep his mouth shut.

  “There were other strategies I used also, Herb.” The old Maestro gave a grunting laugh. “You see, I was already using subterfuge; I had already started training as a spy, yes?”

  Kruger did not reply. He just gave a special nod of the head, turning his face slightly sideways. It was a mannerism he had been using for a couple of days now, whenever he wanted Passau to get on with his narrative. It was gradually beginning to work, the strange turning of the big head and the nod: Pavlovian signals. If he went on using it, Passau would, he hoped, psychologically reflex and just go on talking. It worked now.

  It was during the same week Louis sent the letter to his father that he found out about “spiking.” He already knew that the main gangs operating in Chicago had their methods of either making or obtaining alcohol—both the real thing and the cooked-up rotgut. Also Torrio had shares in several breweries which still operated illegally.


  On at least three nights each week, trucks would move through other gangs’ territories, delivering barreled beer to the Torrio-operated bars and clubs, and to the privately owned speakeasies which Torrio supplied by pressuring their owners to buy only from him. If these joints held out from buying, Torrio’s people would go there when they were crowded, late at night, and break the place up using baseball bats. Heads were split open, and some innocent people suffered. If the owner still did not comply, his joint would be bombed or, worse, a couple of hoodlums with tommy guns would blast their way in during opening hours and teach them a more severe lesson. It was only business, they said. Nothing personal.

  Carlo explained what was to happen on this particular Wednesday night. The customers were screaming for booze that had a kick to it, and Capone had come up with a way of supplying their needs. Torrio liked the idea, so the plan went into action.

  Every available pair of hands was needed, including those of the musicians, though the waiters, barmen and the girls were exempted. “If we pull them out, we lose money,” Carlo explained.

  At two thirty in the morning Carlo called his hand-picked men out into the yard at the rear of The Barn.

  Three truckloads of barreled beer had arrived, and several Capone soldiers—as they liked to call themselves—were unloading the barrels and setting them out in rows. One of the Capone people, known simply as Jack, appeared to be in charge, and it was Jack who put them through their paces. First he handed out braces and bits, galvanized buckets, and handfuls of short wooden sticks. They had to drill a hole in each barrel plug, allowing exactly three-quarters of a bucket of beer to drain out of every barrel. Then they were to plug the hole with two or three of the short sticks.

  In one corner of the yard there were two more men with a portable ice-box. As each barrel was emptied of its specified amount they would bring over a second pail and a small hand pump. This new pail held a mixture of ginger ale and raw alcohol, equivalent to the amount of beer removed from the barrel. The mixture was pumped into the barrel, plus a small amount of air. When this was done, Jack would move from keg to keg with a new plug which he would drive through the temporary bung of sticks. He did this with great precision, using a sledgehammer. One swipe at each barrel and nobody would know that the original plug had been tampered with.

  The resultant mixture of spiked beer was known, in the trade, as “suds.” It had a kick like a mule, and brought the Torrio-Capone mob seventy-five dollars a barrel: a profit of almost seventy percent. Later, Louis learned that this lethal mixture was, in fact, one of the more innocuous forms of strong bootleg booze. Other kinds of spiked beer caused severe problems to drinkers—problems which ranged from kidney failure to blindness.

  The week following Louis’ introduction to the mysteries of spiking he made arrangements to go to the opera with Tony Genna. Almost as an aside, he mentioned it to Carlo, whose brow darkened as he looked hard at Louis. “Be very careful, Pianist. Them Gennas. Siciliani. They ran the toughest operation in town, and there’s no sentiment; not like old Big Jim Colosimo.”

  “Colosimo was sentimental?” Louis raised his eyebrows.

  “Ya’d be surprised. He was a regular guy, Big Jim. He really cared about the people who worked for him. Biggest-hearted guy I ever met. Did ya know he had a farmhouse? Fixed the place up real nice. He used it as a rest home for broken-down whores. They got good food and regular hours. He put those girls back into good shape. Yeah, Big Jim had a long gold streak of sentiment about him. The Gennas, they just push a girl out if she gets sick or too tired. They just let ’em die. But not Jim Colosimo.”

  “I didn’t know any of that. Who runs the place now? Who ran it after Big Jim was … died?”

  Carlo scratched his head. “Oh, he sold it before they iced him. Some of the girls ran away, and wouldn’t go back to work. He got real mad and closed the operation down. Then he sold it.”

  “That was sentimental old Big Jim?” Louis thought with a private smile. Carlo went on talking, telling him that the Gennas ran the whole of what was then known as Chicago’s Little Italy: a well-defined area, not far from the Loop. According to Carlo, all those who were connected with the rackets had already organized trading in liquor, long before the Volstead Act became law in 1920.

  Even crooked politicians, like the “Dink” and the “Bath,” had stockpiled vast amounts of booze, which they hid away in warehouses and cellars all over the city. The Gennas had got a jump on a lot of people by obtaining a license to handle industrial alcohol, some of which they distributed to legitimate users, keeping the bulk of their stock for themselves.

  Carlo laughed a lot. “See, they got this warehouse over on West Taylor Street, almost next door to the Maxwell Street precinct house—well, maybe the cops were a hundred yards away, but they was close. They had all the Maxwell Street cops on their payroll. Got them to turn a blind eye, and blind is right: those guys use fusil oil for flavor, and distill the alcohol in vats over big stoves. They got half the homes in Little Italy distilling the stuff. Just cooking raw mash over their kitchen fires. Ya can smell it in the streets over there, and I can tell ya, Louis, it’s poison. People go blind and mad from drinking that mixture, but those Gennas just can’t keep up with the demand. And, apart from that, they’re real killers, like I told ya before.

  “That’s why they call them the Terrible Gennas. Ya take that Angelo. Bloody Angelo, they call him; and Il Diavolo—that’s Mike Genna. Tony’s okay, but the others, terribile, and once ya get mixed up with one of them, even Tony, it’s just a matter of time before they try to use ya.”

  The Gennas, it seemed, had one of the wildest men in Chicago on their payroll. “The Scourge,” Carlo called him: Orazio Tropea, who was thought to possess Il malocchio—the evil eye.

  “The guy says he’s a sorcerer, and I guess people believe him. They even got one of your kind on their payroll—Samoots Amatuna, big member of the Musicians’ Union. Tried to knock over his manager by hiding a pistol in his violin case. Y’ever hear of such a thing? Tony’s okay,” he repeated. “But ya watch out for the others.”

  Louis promised he would, and Carlo told him to have a good time on his night off. “Me, I have to see the boss tonight. I gotta favor to ask Capone. Important favor.”

  “Herbie,” Passau’s voice seemed to falter. “If I had only known then the full consequences of my meeting with Tony Genna, and the nature of Carlo’s favor from Capone, I would have packed my bags that night and taken the first train out of there. We will get to it in time, but the truly awful things that happened much later in my life are traced right back to that time. I wouldn’t wish on a dog any of the anguish that came out of that.” He paused. Then, “Lunch?” he asked.

  So, Herbie thought, as he headed for the kitchen. So I was right, there is something dreadful buried deep in the Chicago years. During the previous evening, he had made a large pan of Bolognese sauce, out of ground beef, tomatoes, carrots, celery and garlic. He now began to simmer the dish again, and dropped several handfuls of spaghetti into boiling salted water. While this was cooking he went up to the bedroom where he knew Pucky Curtiss had been listening to the tapes on the doctored machine.

  She was still in bed, propped up on pillows, making notes as she listened through the Walkman headphones.

  “Fascinating, Herbie.” She switched off the tape. “Fascinating stuff. He’s certainly a gold-plated bastard.”

  “You heard enough to get any clues? Like the Shylock Holmes?”

  She did not laugh or even bat an eyelid.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’ve picked up on the obvious things, but what we need, as you well know, Herb, is the most recent stuff. We must know if we’re going to get what happened last year—the visits to East Germany, Bulgaria, Czecho, Poland and Hungary, and what he’s done since. That’s the bottom line.”

  “How else we going to get it? Stick matches under his fingernails? Give him the Chinese burn?”

  She frowned, pushing her reading
glasses down her nose a fraction and shifting under the thin sheets. Herbie could see she was naked, and felt like a thirteen-year-old with his first really aching boner. He sat down, thinking, “my God, I got a hard here that a cat could use as a scratching pole.” He did not mean to think coarsely, but his body was well out of control.

  “I see no other way,” Pucky said. Her lips spread into a slow, somewhat sensual, smile, as though she detected Herbie’s embarrassment. “No other way at all. You’re quite right, an entire query of interrogators would fail now. They’d still be working on the old reprobate when the angel of death arrived for him. The only problem, as I see it, concerns time and remaining undetected.”

  Herbie shrugged. “Well, we’re going to run out of food in a day or so. But you have a car that nobody can trace. They’re not going to tie you to the one you rented at National Airport.”

  “But they’re probably still watching for me.”

  “So, let them watch. Naldo told me the big supermarket in town, the one where you made contact with him, is open twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re suggesting I go there and stock up?”

  “I got money. You got money. We’re going to need foodstuffs. Foodstuffs and booze, both.”

  “If they’re really looking, they might easily recognize me. They’re not idiots. If they suspect I’m still around that’s just the kind of place they’d watch.”

  “Amazing what dark glasses and maybe a wig can do.”

  “And where in hell do I get a wig?”

  “Here. The lady who owns this place, I been in her bedroom. …”

  “You’ve rummaged through her things?”

  “Sure. It’s always necessary to find out what assets we have to hand. This lady has three very good wigs. All dark. Black as a badger’s … I mean jet black. They’d do the trick.”