Queen of the Underworld (33 page)

“A cartel of local bookmakers. Highly organized and controlled by Manny and his cronies.” Paul tugged up the lightweight blanket and rearranged us under it so that he lay on his back and I fit into the crook of his arm. It felt cozy and privileged to be tucked up close with him against the air-conditioned chill when people outside were sweltering in the streets. Paul’s old-fashioned desk lamp with its green glass shade bathed us in its underwatery glow. As always, the blackout shades were drawn, cloaking us in an aura of fantasy and—had our encounter with Irving Katz not tainted the word with irony—protection.

What had happened, or not happened, between us in bed was a first for me. It was fraught with complexities that called for a new kind of response. Before Paul, the omnipresent—omni
pressing
—urge of the male member had demanded simple responses from me, depending on the person attached to it: outright blockade (“Nope, that’s as far as
you
go”), postponement (“I’m not sure how I feel about you yet”), or erotic détente (“Okay, you definitely arouse me, but please take precautions”). The few times I had awarded my body as a sort of merit badge for someone’s persistence had left me feeling queasy and untrue to myself. With Paul, I had been the one yearning for his body while he was still in the stage of wanting to protect me. In a way, I had seduced him by falling in love with him. And now, this afternoon, when I was more in love with him than ever, the requirements had suddenly changed. He was my first older man. What were the courtesies older people showed each other when their bodies sprang surprises? It had always been more than just the act for us, he’d just said, and whatever this unpredictable afternoon turned out to require of me, I wanted to honor that notion.

“Supposedly ‘S&G’ stood for Stop and Go. Meaning sometimes the heat was on and the syndicate had to lie low and other times there was no heat at all, everybody had been paid off, you could flourish openly in the bright sunshine. As I said, Manny was the kingpin and it was a highly organized affair. S&G would negotiate the concessions for its bookies, paying a top hotel like the Roney up to fifty thousand dollars for a winter-season rental. The syndicate took care of all the business details: accounting, payoffs to law enforcement, you name it. It was so prosperous and smoothly run that it achieved a sort of respectability. The S&G boys dressed well, gave money to charity, and were not harassed by the police, who went after the sleazier bookies. S&G bookmakers had their own cabanas at the big resort hotels, and guests who wanted to play the horses could lounge by the pool and summon a boy like Irving Katz to run their bets to the cabana while they ordered another Tom Collins and waited out the race. Meanwhile back at headquarters, the syndicate was taking care of all the organizational details and deducting a king-size chunk from each bookmaker’s profits.”

“Is this what they’re after with you? They want to take part of your profits and in turn they’ll keep the police away?”

I burrowed deeper into the cave of his armpit, picking up for the first time, beneath Stella’s custom scent, a personal odor. It was not a sweat smell or an unwashed smell—an unwashed Paul being a contradiction in terms—but it had a distinctive acrid pungency, like a glandular release of the afflictions playing out inside him.

“It’s not the police I’m worried about. My members pay dues and if they want they can go upstairs and have a game of cards or dice. Cabbies don’t drop off tourists at my place and get a fifty-dollar thank-you note from the doorman.”

“Then—I don’t understand—what would this Manny be protecting you
from
?”

“Oh, small mishaps, to start with: a small electric fire in the kitchen when no one’s there. A faulty stair riser so someone falls and breaks a leg. Then, if the owner is being stubborn, something foul finds its way into the water lines and the club has to close down till it’s fixed. If the owner is still holding out, next is maybe a major break-in by hoodlums who completely wreck the place—”

“But . . . those are
threats.
Like the mob or something.”

“Darling, this
is
the mob. Miami Beach is mobbed up, that’s what my barber just got finished telling me. The old gang’s back in town, he said; Manny Lanning has a suite at the Sherry Frontenac, and everyone’s wanting a piece of the action.”

“If only we hadn’t crossed to the other side of the street! You wouldn’t have run into that Irving creature.”

“He would have come looking for me. It was only a matter of days. I was already on their list. Not a big fish, but at this stage they’re testing the waters. You heard him going on about my upstairs kitchen, the ‘paintings and decor.’ He’s already been inside. He knows what’s behind the big foxhunting painting. Probably one of the construction crew let him in, someone on the payroll. Construction people make ideal snoops. No, at this stage they want to find out who’s for sale and who isn’t and blow the isn’ts out of the water early in a style that will make other isn’ts reconsider. A small fish like me could be a timely warning to others.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I want no part of it. He’s peddling his gefilte fish in the wrong market.”

“But then, won’t they start engineering their ‘mishaps’?”

Paul freed his arm and rearranged me so that my head rested against his chest. “That’s what I’m lying here thinking about. I’m happy you’re here with me, so we can think about it together. Say I phone the Sherry Frontenac tomorrow and say, Manny, I’m willing to talk—”

“But you just said you didn’t want any part of it!”

“Shhh, hear me out, kid.”

He began stroking my hair back from my face in a soothing rhythm that seemed to blend with the beat of his heart. “We’re just going through the options. Think of it like someone’s writing a story. Maybe your good friend Thomas Mann. So far he’s got this guy who’s built a nice little business for himself, a private club on the Beach, open during the winter months, where members, many of them prominent lawyers and business types who have known one another since childhood, can go and feel welcome and have a good dinner and some entertainment or wander upstairs and join a bridge or poker game or open up the door behind the painting and play the wheel. The last few years he’s even realized a profit, which he decides to reinvest in an upstairs kitchen for late-night short orders, just like the country clubs and the old-time ‘gentlemen’s casinos,’ like the old Royal Palm over on Biscayne Bay. So. Everything’s going great until there’s an upheaval in a little entertainment capital to the south and the gambling mob has to leave that little country in a hurry and restart its business in the old neighborhood. It takes them a few months to set up headquarters, hunt up old contacts and make new ones: find out who’s doing what, and who’s doing
well.
And on the list of those doing well is a small, discreet club, a sole-owner operation, that’s investing in improvements. A lackey checks out the site himself, recognizes it belongs to an old buddy, or would-be buddy, from high school, and soon afterwards has the luck to bump into him in broad daylight.

“We’ll skip the next scene, with the Sabbath dog-walker and who said what on Collins Avenue. Your friend Thomas Mann’s already got that part written and we’ve just read it. Now we have to move on to where the story can branch out in a number of different ways. You still with me?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s start with the surrender option. I call Irving and say, Okay, let’s talk. I’m invited over to the Sherry Frontenac suite and they roll in the hospitality wagon and there are little kosher delicacies and sealed bottles of Black Label and Cuban cigars. Irving calls me ‘Paulie’ a few thousand more times while Manny treats me like the prodigal son and makes optimistic talk about partners in an expanding business. I walk out a protected man but not my own man anymore. Or ever again. And once a week during season some bagman, maybe an Irving Katz in training, pays me a visit, probably to this very room, and I open that right-hand desk drawer and hand over an envelope full of bills. That goes on for a while. Until they up the ante to the next denomination of bills.”

“But what if you aren’t making enough money to cover all these payoffs?”

“Ah, that branches out into a subbranch. We have a talk, he buys me out, sets me up somewhere else as an employee. Or maybe I stay put at my club, everybody thinks I still own it, but I’m a dummy front, I’m in
their
club now, and once you’re in their club you can never get out other than feetfirst. There are some grislier outcomes to this subbranch, but we’ll skip them since I have no intention of becoming a dues-paying member to those
gonifs.
”

“But what can you
do
?” I sat bolt upright. My heart was pounding with indignation.

“Easy.” He reached for me and pulled me back to his chest. “I need you right here. We’re working it out like a story. Try to keep a distance.”

“I don’t see how
you
can. It’s your whole life, everything you’ve worked for, and it’s not a story. Some real-life crook comes up to you in broad daylight and says, ‘You’ve done well, Paulie, now fork over our king-size cut’—”

“Yeah, I’ve worked hard for it. But it’s by no means my whole life.” He was stroking my head again, a steady fatherly stroke.

“How can you be so philosophical about it?”

“That’s a good question. Maybe because”—his chest heaved and I felt him swallowing hard—“I’ve just lost something that puts it in a less world-shaking perspective.”

“You mean Stella?”

“I told you, she changed my life when she said, Why not dream big? After you’ve been as good as dead—”

“You stop imagining difficulties for yourself . . . and just get on with what you’d like to do next,” I finished chapter and verse for him.

“So I went ahead and seized an opportunity and made an elegant club for people like myself. It was the first of its kind, you know, and I’m proud of that. I’d say we’ve had a pretty good run. And I’ve gone year by year without imagining the worst until today it came waddling toward me behind a little dog. What a fatso Irving’s become.”

“But is it really the worst? Aren’t there still options?”

“For me, oh yes. I’m still my own man. There are plenty of things I could see myself doing next. But for P. Nightingale’s, I’m afraid the options have run out. It’s fitting, in a way, that it should be happening now. Stella was the club’s godmother. She lent us the down payment. It’s even named after her—“Rossignol” is the French for nightingale, and that’s the name she chose for herself in Paris after my grandfather killed himself in Germany. His name was Rosenthal. After my mother died, I decided to make a new start myself, change our name to match the club’s. Bev gave me some flak, you know her special brand of humor she wields like a weapon. Oh, great, she says, for the first twenty years of my life I’m stuck with a Polish name nobody can spell or pronounce; then I get one that suits me, that has some gravity to it, and now you go renaming us after a frivolous foreign bird. But she went along, she even said it had a cozy element to it that would be good for business: Mom and Pop Nightingale welcoming their friends to P. Nightingale’s in Bal Harbour. Well, Monday Stella goes in the ground and Nightingale’s goes on the market. I’m going to offer the exclusive listing to an old friend, Martin Feldman.”

“But then . . .”

“What?”

Wait a minute, I was silently protesting. We barely got going on our Thomas Mann options and you’re
selling
the club while we’re still lying in it?

Not only that, what was the meaning of all these sudden first-person plurals? She lent
us
the down payment . . . I decided to change
our
name to match the club’s—and the “cozy” image of Mom and Pop Nightingale welcoming their friends! Where was I in this new plot development where he was “still his own man,” still very much married to Bev, but putting P. Nightingale’s in the ground along with Aunt Stella?

“What?” he repeated.

“Oh, just thinking . . .”

“About what, my darling?”

Was it possible he would leave me behind in Miami, settle year-round in North Carolina, which, as far as I knew, wasn’t “mobbed up” yet? Would it have been better for my love life if I had gone to the
Charlotte Observer
? Oh, damn, blast, hell.

“In one of the clippings about Stella I was reading last night, she told the interviewer about a young man who had just opened a new business on the Beach and wanted a new scent to affirm his new identity. Was that you?”

“It was. In the write-up about more men starting to use cologne?”

“Yes. She said he had also anglicized his surname. So you made Rossignol into Nightingale. But you never told me what your name was before that.”

“I never told you that? I guess not. It never came up. It was Stern. My father’s name was Stern. You heard Irving call me Paulie the Stern.”

Earl’s response to first hearing Paul’s name rang jeeringly in memory: “Hell, if his name is Nightingale, mine is Woody Woodpecker.” And I had replied, “I don’t care whether his name is Nickelbaum or Noodleberger. Whatever his name is, he’s more of a gentleman than you’ll ever be,” and earned a black eye.

“She made you a cologne with—she listed the ingredients. Vetiver, some kind of tobacco, and some root that smells like wet dog—”

“Costus root,” supplied Paul, laughing softly.

“Which, if used in the right combination with the other ingredients, creates a . . . well . . . a time-honored aphrodisiac.”

As I quoted Stella’s words, I felt the terrain of Paul’s body changing.

Lose a few, win a few, I thought, tucking myself under him.

“We’re plugged in again,” Paul presently exulted.

To keep myself from wriggling and cutting short our “refueling,” I pondered the question of surnames. The name Emma Stern as a byline was certainly more formidable than Emma Nightingale. Bev was right, it had gravity.

Though, to borrow Dave Bisbee’s term, it was probably a moot exercise on my part.

20.

Sunday morning, June 21: Room 510

new words:
cartel
bagman
gonif
STERN

I have been in Miami exactly one week today.
I feel a thousand years older and a million times more ignorant.

I closed my “Go, Tar Heels!” notebook and dropped it into the bedside drawer, on top of the Gideons Bible. Then, pricked by some atavistic need for divine judgment, I slid out the Bible, opened it at random, and stabbed at a page with my finger.

“For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” Romans 7:19.

Well, that would certainly do in lieu of church, where everyone seemed to have gone except Don Waldo, who, last time I looked out the window, was breaststroking up and down the turquoise pool, his leonine head erect, his undulations making sun-dappled wavelets on either side of him. There was something noble and touching about the international man of letters in his billowing maroon trunks sedately propelling his blimp shape through the water.

Presently I would dress and head out for an American breakfast at Howard Johnson’s with the fat Sunday issue of the
Star.
But now, while my brain was still uncluttered after sleep, I sank back on the pillows to ruminate further on yesterday.

I was almost glad Paul had pleaded urgent business errands today and would not be picking me up until early evening. I needed time to assess the damages.

Yesterday afternoon in bed at the club, we had found our way through a menacing impasse back into our realm of matchless rapport. Only to end up having our first falling-out in Stella’s apartment on Espanola Way.

Though how could you call it a falling-out when he hadn’t even reproached me? I remembered last summer when I’d been complacently folding napkins for the next meal and “letting the garbage pile up” at the Cohens’ table. It was the first time I had disappointed him, and he was sharp with me.
Stern.
But last night had been much worse: I could gauge from his carefully chosen words, spoken almost apologetically, how far I had fallen from grace.

How presumptuous of me to think I could pep-talk him out of his pessimism about Manny Lanning and his gang! I had been so triumphant after our sublime lovemaking, giving myself full credit for “honoring” the earlier bout of impotence with mature tact and composure, yet also feeling flush with my youthful aphrodisiac powers. I suppose I had assumed it would be a cinch to recharge his fighting spirit as well.

If only I had stopped short of making that stupid comparison with his grandfather shutting up shop in Leipzig and killing himself “without fighting back.”

(“How could anyone be
that
stupid!” Charles P. Rose accused in his single-note refrain while Jake Rance raged contrapuntally up and down the scale: “How uninformed women are! You never know any
facts
! Where
were
you? What were you thinking of? Didn’t you ever pick up a newspaper or hear people talk?”)

Up until then Paul and I had moved about Stella’s apartment in harmony, making plans for the dispersal of her worldly goods. In the final third of her life, her American years, she had kept faith with cherished parts of her past while leaving plenty of space for new interests and acquisitions: her “perfume corner” with its vials and beakers, the beautiful rugs and antique furnishings bought at Miami Beach auctions. The rooms testified to a personality that had kept growing branches right to the end.

“I’ll bring boxes tomorrow,” said Paul. “The books I’ll keep. One of these days maybe I’ll find time to read the ones in English. And the others have sentimental value.”

He pulled down a volume from the shelf, Goethe’s
Faust
in German. The frontispiece was Delacroix’s painting of Faust being tempted by a robust Mephistopheles. At the top of the facing title page,
Stella Rosenthal
had been penned in a girlish formal hand. “You’ve read it. A college kid like you.”

“No, I haven’t, but I need to. Thomas Mann wrote his own version of it in his novel
Doctor Faustus.
And when he was working on
Felix Krull
he said he felt he was living in Goethe’s sphere.”

“Maybe we’ll read it together someday. My mother could quote long passages. I know some of them by heart without fully understanding which word means what.”

As he recited the German lines, his voice took on a harsher character. I heard a different Paul. Just as I heard a different Tess when she spoke in Spanish.

“
‘Verklungen, ach, der erste Widerklang. Mein lied ertönt der unbekannten Menge.’
Which more or less means that the friendly crowds of old are gone and my song of grief now falls on indifferent ears. That was the passage she quoted the most. It summed up my mother’s philosophy of life.”

I had been thinking many things at once—too many, the ideas bouncing off one another. How would my character change if I were to speak in a different language? Would I gain more authority, like Tess, or sound foolish, like Enrique Ocampo? What image of our future was Paul glimpsing when he said maybe we’d read it together someday? And I thought of all my new friends at the Julia Tuttle, from the young Luisa to the old Don Waldo, all of them suddenly uprooted from the home they took for granted; and of Thomas Mann himself having to begin life all over again in this country when he was sixty-three. And now the same old enemy was threatening Paul. Usurpation was knocking on his door in the form of Manny and his mob.

“You know what?” I blurted, full of zeal. “I think you ought to fight them. The law is on your side. This isn’t Nazi Germany. You don’t have to be like your grandfather in Leipzig.”

Paul frowned. The four slashes of wrinkles that resembled the beginning of a tic-tac-toe game deepened in the center of his brow.

I thought he was considering my advice and plunged recklessly on. “And, I mean, who knows? Maybe he shut up shop too soon. Instead of killing himself, what if he had stuck it out and fought back?”

Paul replaced
Faust
on the shelf. He gazed obliquely down at the richly patterned oriental carpet on which we stood. “Hindsight and history tell us he wouldn’t have lasted very long,” he said quietly after a pause. “Someone else would have put the bullet through his head, or packed him off in a boxcar.”

Still focused on the carpet, he went on, more gently than ever, as though trying to shield me from the disgrace of my own ignorance. “You’ve got to remember we’re a very ancient race, Emma. We’ve learned to read the writing on the wall. It’s construed as cowardice by some, but it can also be a form of wisdom.”

Iowa Mother of 4
Is Mrs. America

By Marge Armstrong
Women’s Section Editor

was the local lead story on page one—not in the Women’s Section, either. Last night, Mrs. Margaret Priebe, the “slender 36-year-old graying wife and mother” (in the two-column photo you could see the gray) had been crowned Mrs. America of 1959 in Fort Lauderdale’s War Memorial Auditorium about the same time Paul was driving me back to the Julia Tuttle.

I read through Marge’s Mrs. America story, increasingly appalled. It was enough to put you off the whole prospect of becoming a Mrs.

“I didn’t do my best,” the new Mrs. America, wearing a pale green floor-length strapless gown, had gasped after being crowned. “Everyone else was better than I was.”

Her husband, a purchasing agent, declared himself stunned and of course proud. “Who’s the boss? I am—at least sometimes,” he said.

The runners-up were listed.

Mrs. Alaska had been voted “Mrs. Congeniality” by her fifty sister contestants.

Hundreds had jammed the hot, sticky lobby of the auditorium, each clutching $4.50 to buy admission to the show.

But because the event was staged mainly for a telecast, the un-air-conditioned auditorium was crammed with TV equipment and many in the audience had to make do with watching the ceremony on TV monitors spotted throughout the orchestra.

TV technicians wore shorts and sport shirts while the fifteen Mrs. America finalists sweltered in their formals.

Primarily a test of homemaking skills, the Mrs. America contest awarded $13,000 in prizes to the winner. The winner’s awards would include a completely equipped new kitchen, an in-ground swimming pool, a South American vacation for two, and a $1,000 savings bond.

To win the coveted crown, Mrs. America had “cooked, cleaned, and scrubbed her way through the three days of competition.”

The homemaking judges narrowed down the fifty-one contestants to fifteen. Next they got together with the poise-personality judges to choose six finalists. Then the poise-personality judges selected the winner.

Though hacked into the
Star
’s typical bite-size “grafs,” Marge’s keen but unobtrusive reportage carried you right into the event.

You saw and heard the Iowa housewife, admired her efforts to remain slim after giving birth four times, were disarmed by her modest self-put-down after the gasp of surprise at being chosen, and by the strands of gray she hadn’t chosen to dye.

You pressed against the other spectators in the sticky heat and were indignant at having forked over your $4.50 only to get shunted off to monitors so the usurper medium of television could lord it over reality.

You sweated under the hot lights in your strapless formal with your sister contestants who for three days had scrubbed floors and baked cookies with poise and personality to make this event possible, while the TV technicians strutted about in their shorts, making themselves the indispensable feature of the show.

Marge must have been bouncing up and down in her typing chair right down to the wire before deadline last night, x-ing out whole paragraphs (“I’ll always be Tillie the Toiler when it comes to prose”) to turn out this keenly observed slice of American life with its subversive subtext. For the subtext was there, I could swear it.

Castro and his doings were nowhere to be seen, neither on the front page nor in any part of the A section. Promising harbinger!

Joelle Cutter-Crane and her well-dressed photographer that she could “run” could be on a plane back to Miami this very moment.

(“Well, Don, at least we got our first story in. I was the one, by the way, who suggested the headline, Castro’s Land Swap Triggers Hate and Joy.’ ”

“What do you think will happen to that couple, Joelle?”

“What couple?”

“The smiling dirt-poor couple I shot those moving photos of. Do you think the next dictator will take away their sixty-six acres and give them back to the rich?”

“Well, Don, if so, we’ll go back as guests of the new government and do another human-interest series: ‘Volatile Cuba: Setbacks for Poor, Reprieve for Rich.’ ”

“The new government might not take kindly to being called ‘volatile,’ Joelle.”

“Touché, Don. Oh, dear, I think you have spilled food on your tie again.”)

And Lídia’s
movimiento
plans for a backyard revolution would be nipped in the bud. She’d take her checkbook and organizing skills back to Palm Beach and leave Alex in peace to run his hotel until his
abuelo
had time to build the big one for him to manage in Havana. And Luisa Ocampo would be able to have her tenth birthday party with friends in her own warm pool back in Oriente. And Don Waldo, after delivering his lecture, “The Journey from Delusion to Reality in the Novels of Jane Austen,” at Princeton, could return home with his young bride and invite his son the Jesuit over to dinner. Afterwards, over cigars and brandy, they would talk of Lídia, the former wife and daughter-in-law.

(“She has not changed,
hijo.
If you want to take orders, it is far more enjoyable to be taking them from Ignatius of Loyola.”)

T
HE INTERNATIONAL
headline story, side by side with Mrs. America, was about the Dalai Lama, who had escaped to India from Tibet. (One-column picture of a dark-haired,
very
young man with horn-rimmed glasses; cutline: “I must tell the world.”)

1,000 Monasteries Sacked

65,000 Slain, Says Dalai

MUSSOORIE, India (UPI) — The refugee Dalai Lama Saturday accused the Chinese Communists of killing 65,000 Tibetans and destroying 1,000 monasteries in a “reign of terror” designed to smash the ancient Tibetan culture. He challenged the Reds to an on-the-spot investigation by an international commission.

At his first mass press conference since he fled his capital of Lhasa March 17 and took asylum in India, the Tibetan god-king charged the Reds had submitted members of his family to indignities and had even removed the lock on his mother’s bedroom door.

The twenty-three-year-old Dalai Lama made no attempt to conceal his concern over the plight of his people.

He said he would welcome a meeting of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Premier Chou En-lai of Red China to work out a “peaceful and amicable solution of the present tragic problem.” But he stressed that he will not return home unless the Communists promise to restore the full powers he exercised before the Red Armies invaded the Himalayan country in 1950.