As Time Goes By (18 page)

As usual, Tick-Tock Schapiro sat not far away,
watching Solly's back.

Rick wanted to talk about Lois, to at least broach the
subject, because while he loved Solly like a father, he
loved Lois not at all like a sister. Solly's proscription against his daughter's dating any of the boys, though,
was still very much in effect.

Rick glanced over at Tick-Tock and wondered if the big ape could read minds. If anybody were to tell Solly that he and Lois had been getting a little friendlier than
Horowitz allowed ... Not for the first time, he thought
about Big Julie.

If Solly harbored any suspicions about Rick's inten
tions toward Lois, he gave no evidence. Instead he was
off on one of his favorite subjects, which was the honor
roll of Manhattan's great Jewish gangsters and his
place as the last of them. Like some French King, after
himself Solly saw only a deluge.

There was Dopey Benny Fein, him with the droopy
eye. And Big Jack Zelig, with the crazy straw hat he
used to wear all the time. And Louis Kushner, who shot
Kid Dropper right in the back of a police car! And the
greatest of them all, Monk Eastman, with his pigeons and his cats, who even fought in the war! Jesus, there
was Jewish gangsters back then!

They were all familiar names to Rick Baline. He had
grown up hearing of their exploits, like the time when
Monk's gang, dubbed in honor of the boss (who was
born Edward Ostermann) the Eastmans, had clashed
with the Five Points boys led by Paul Kelly (who was really an Italian named Vacarelli). They shot up the
intersection of Rivington and Allen Streets so thoroughly that it took a couple of hundred coppers to re
store the peace and sent the
shmattes
who ran the
crooked stuss games in the perpetual shadows of the
els scurrying for cover for maybe three whole hours
before resuming business as usual.

The reminiscences always started with the stories
about Dopey Benny, so-called because a nerve or
something had gone kaput in his cheek, which there
fore drooped, occasioning any number of beatings,
clobberings, and shootings provoked by the indiscrimi
nate use by relative strangers of the hated nickname.
From there, Solly's memory would quickstep through the years between the turn of the century and more or
less the present day, and would always end with the
Shma
over the declining number of authentic gangsters
of the Jewish faith, the kinds of fellas who could go
toe to toe with the Irishers and the Italians without
blinking and never took guff from nobody.

Rick always listened, his ears opened even wider
than his eyes. Every time he went home to his dingy,
solitary flat on West 182nd Street, Solomon Horowitz
rose in his estimation with each stair that he climbed. Each step up those dark stairs, reeking with the smell
of frying fish and boiling cabbage, seemed to him a
step farther away from the kind of life he wanted to
live, a step back in the direction of Chrystie Street, be
yond which lay the boat, the shtetl, and Galicia. His mother had told him enough about her girlhood there,
a dreary region of coal mines and (in her telling, at
least) Cossacks, to make him never want to go to cen
tral Europe. Paris, he had decided, would be more his kind of place.

"Do you ever think about going straight, Solly?"
asked Rick.

"Go straight?" Horowitz laughed. "You gotta be
kidding."

"Well, why not?" persisted Rick.

"I tell you why not, smart guy," Solly shouted. "I
tell you what straight is. Straight is cops with their
hands out, shaking down Mr. Moskowitz on Second
Avenue. Straight is Tammany politicians who slap on a
yarmulke when they sit shiva for somebody they don't even know, and then ask you for your vote. Straight is
when they put up another blind tiger on the Bowery,
but neither a church nor a shul." He spat contemptu
ously. "That's what straight is, it is."

Horowitz leaned over toward his protege. "Straight,"
said Solly, "is
meshugge."

In the distance, Schapiro grunted.

"Ricky, sometimes I think maybe you're
meshugge,
too. This worries me. You know the rules."

"The rules?" said Rick.

"The Lois rules," Solly answered. "I hear things. I
see things. Dumb I'm not." He buttoned the top button
on his vest. "And neither are you. You can like, but
you don't touch. You touch, Tick-Tock has to shoot you."

"With pleasure," Tick-Tock said from the shadows.

"What a waste!" Solly seemed saddened by the very
thought of Rick's untimely demise. "Because her I got
plans for." Rick was smart enough not to ask what
those plans were and smart enough to glean that those
plans did not involve him.

"And you, Ricky," he said. "I got plans for you, too.
Not the same plans. But plans. A boy like you with a head for business, why, there is gelt to be made in the speaks, and easy gelt at that," he said. "Which is what I want to speak to you about."

With that, Solomon Horowitz informed Rick Baline
that henceforth he would be the manager of Solly's
newest nightspot, the Tootsie-Wootsie Club, just
opened on the site of a former black social club. "Me, I'm getting too old for this kids' stuff. Staying up until
four in the morning, shmoozing the clientele, breaking up fights, cleaning up messes,
oy.
I should be in bed. Besides, you mix better with them."

"With who?" asked Rick.

"The
goyi
m
,
that's who! Not just the micks and the
wops, but high society. Why, I should expect John
Jacob Astor himself to walk in here if he was still alive,
with his three hundred and ninety-nine best friends." Solly rubbed his hands together. "What we got here is
the uptown version of Mrs. Astor's ballroom!"

Solly grasped him by his shoulders, held him at
arm's length, and stared him right in the eyes. "Re
member this: The
goyim,
they trade with us, they buy from us. Sometimes they sleep with our women. But
they don't drink with us. And, if you're smart, you
won't drink with them, either. "You keep them like this,
always." Slowly he let his hands fall from Rick's
shoulders. "You understand?"

"Don't worry, Solly," said Rick. He could hardly
believe one of his two dreams had just come true. "I'll
make it a point never to drink with the customers." He
looked at his boss. "No matter who they sleep with."

Now, for the other dream.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

New York, April 1932

Guess what I've got?" Rick Baline asked Lois
Horowitz one night. They were sitting on the stoop in front of her building. The air was pleasantly brisk but
not cold; Rick loved the way it raised the color in
Lois's pale cheeks.

Rick's hands were behind his back, concealing
something.

"Two bottles of Moxie?" she asked.

"You're cold."

"A treasure map for some pirate's island?"

"You're ice cold, and besides, they were fresh out of
those at Blinsky's when I asked."

Lois bit her lower Up for a moment. "I know," she
said. "A ticket on the
Twentieth Century
to Cali
fornia!"

That, he knew, was what she really wanted. "No," he said, "but you're warmer now."

"I give up," she said, pouting prettily.

"Here." He handed over a pair of duckets: two in
the orchestra for that evening's
Show Stoppers,
starring
Ruby Keeler and Al Jolson at Henry Miller's Theatre.

This was going to be tricky. From time to time Solo
mon Horowitz allowed Rick Baline to escort his
daughter to minor social functions, in the manner of a
chaperone, but even those occasions were rare. A
Broadway show and dinner afterward, though, was a
full-fledged date, and those were strictly
verboten.
More and more Rick found himself resenting the restrictions. He wanted to take his best girl out on the
town. After all, what was the point of being a gangster
if you couldn't act like one?

The way Solly saw it, that was not going to happen.
He may have lived contentedly, if not happily, above
the violin shop, but he wanted better for his daughter.
He did not aspire to Fifth Avenue, but he wanted her to
do so. He was not a vain man, and he never envied
O'Hanlon his silk suits and slicked-back hair, or Sa-
lucci his dark Italian good looks. Money he had
aplenty, but it was being put aside—the safe at the Tootsie-Wootsie Club was stuffed with it—where it would come in handy someday, maybe even do some
good, if not for him, then for his only child. He thought
of it as a kind of dowry, but one that was reserved for
Lois and not for her husband—who in any case had
better be both rich and successful before Solomon
would ever consent to any union with his issue.

Rick, however, had been enamored of her from the beginning, smitten by her raven hair and her cerulean
eyes and her alabaster skin. There was more to Lois
than simply looks, though, as he soon discovered. Like
him, she wanted things out of life, big things. Not just
a fancy car and a big house, either, but education and
social standing as well. Lois
was working hard to im
prove the way she spoke, hunting down her "ain'ts"
and rooting out her dropped "g's," and she was spend
ing her afternoons in the public library reading every
thing she could find. The small allowance she got from
her father she spent on stylish new clothes. Lois had
never looked very much like the other girls in the
neighborhood, but now she was distancing herself from
them as fast as she could.

"Rick Baline!" she exclaimed. "You certainly don't
give a girl much time to get ready to see the hottest
show on Broadway!"

"The most beautiful girl in Harlem doesn't need
much time," he said.

She ran up the front steps. As she opened the door,
she blew him a kiss. "Meet me back here in an hour," she said, "and don't be late. I hear the opening number
is a knockout"

Rick wasn't so sure. Throughout the first act Ruby
Keeler danced like an elephant and sang like a chim
panzee. "Jeez, she's terrible," he remarked as they
stood outside at intermission. Lois was smoking a ciga
rette, something her father would never allow her to do
at home. Smoking was something the smart set did.

"Everybody knows that," said Lois.

"So how does she get to be in a show with Jolson?"

"She's his girlfriend, that's how," said Lois. "Guys
like to do things for their girlfriends, you know."

Rick wanted to pursue the subject, especially the part
about girlfriends, but Lois wasn't interested. She was
gazing around at the theater crowd, at the fancy cars lining the streets, and up at the midtown skyline. "It
sure is a lot nicer here man it is in Harlem," she said
half to herself. "Say, did you get a load of some of
those joints we passed on the way down? Wouldn't you
just die to live in a place like those someday? I sure
would."

"Don't you worry, Lois," said Rick. "We both will,
before you know it."

She grabbed his arm. "Do you really think so? I
can't wait."

"I promise."

"That's what I like about you, Rick," said Lois.
"You're going places, too. Why, I'll bet you see the
whole world someday."
       

"If you'll go with me."

The buzzer announcing the start of the second act
prevented her reply. "Come on, let's see how it all
turns out," said Lois, taking Rick by the arm.

The big number in act two was a duet for Ruby and
Al, set beside an obviously fake waterfall; her name
was Wanda and his was Joe. As far as Rick could make
out, the plot of the piece had something to do with
young lovers thrown together, despite the wishes of
their parents, at a resort hotel in the Catskills, or maybe
it was Lake George. Joe was a poor Irish bellhop on
the make, and Wanda was a rich girl trying to throw
over her current beau, a bloodless Protestant named Lester Thurman whom she quite clearly didn't love, in favor of Joe. The moral of the story seemed to be that
anybody can be anything or anyone he wanted to be as
long as he had the chutzpah to get away with it.

"Hungry?" he asked as they exited.

"I thought you'd never ask," she said.

He took her to Rector's, the swanky restaurant on the West Side renowned for its food and its status as
a gangland hangout. The refined clientele got a thrill
knowing that the hard boys and brassy dames at the
tables were very often the same folks they would read about in the Broadway columns and police stories the
next morning. Hits, however, were strictly off limits at
Rector's—nothing was worse for business than a cou
ple of out-of-town salesmen catching a stray slug as
they munched their veal chops. Rector's was a kind of
gangland no-man's-land, where rivalries, if not guns,
had to be checked at the door.
         

Off in a comer, Rick spied Damon Runyon, drinking
whiskey hand over fist and chatting up a couple of
dolls. Runyon liked to hang around the fringes of gang
land, romanticizing the tough guys as colorful characters with hearts of gold in his tales, when in fact the
relatively good ones were family men like Horowitz and the bad ones were sadistic killers like Tick-Tock
and Salucci. The only gold in gangland was fool's
gold.

Lois was thrilled. Solomon would never have let her
come here, and Rick was already mentally explaining their presence there to his boss should it come to that.
But he could see the gleam in her eyes and knew he
had done the right thing in bringing her. This was the
kind of glamorous life she wanted; minus the gang
sters, this was the kind of life her father wanted for her
also. "It looks a little crowded," she said.

"The first rule of restaurants," he told her, "is that
there's always an empty table if you really want one." He waved to the ma
ï
tre d'. "I mean, if the President of the United States walked in here just now, they'd find
him a table, wouldn't they? Well, the President is
here!" Smoothly he palmed a $20 bill and slipped it to the man as he greeted them.

"Andrew Jackson," he
whispered to Lois as they
were led to their table. "Works every time."

Then he spied the great Dion O'Hanlon himself,
holding court at his usual table against the back wall, not far from the kitchen.

They said that as a youth, O'Hanlon had been
lured into an ambush in a restaurant and, before he
got any of the three pistols he always carried with
him out of the special pockets he had had sewn into
his custom-made suits, had been shot eleven times.
Dion, however, survived; the three guys who tried to
clip him were dead within a week. O'Hanlon was
never seen in public again without both backup mus
cle and a handy escape route. Dion O'Hanlon was
the Houdini of gangsters.

Rick was mesmerized at the sight of him. He had seen O'Hanlon only in odd photographs in the news
paper—the Irishman wanted to stay out of the papers, and fearful reporters happily obliged—but Rick knew
it was him. It was like coming face-to-face with
Satan.

"Champagne," Rick told the hovering waiter. To
night was special.

"Champagne!" exclaimed Lois. "What's the occasion?"

"I'll tell you after it gets here," said Rick.

O'Hanlon was a short, dapper, well-dressed fellow
who filled out a dinner jacket like a small ice chest.
Since nobody in gangland outranked him, he kept his
hat on, wearing his fedora cocked low over his left eye,
but Rick knew he could see everything that mattered.
Mentally Rick compared O'Hanlon's splendor with
Solly's rumpled proletarianism and tried to decide
which look he preferred. It didn't take long.

Walter Winchell was talking to him earnestly: "I
got the dirt, I mean, do I ever!" He was shouting
loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, but
O'Hanlon was paying only half attention to the
scribe, apparently preferring his conversation with a handsome blond man in evening clothes. A real Joe
College type, thought Rick, the kind of guy he
loathed on sight.

Suddenly O'Hanlon rose. "Good evening, Mae," he
said, tipping his hat. He turned to Winchell. "Walter,
would you mind leaving us alone for a while?"

While Winchell scrammed, Mae West herself saun
tered over as only Mae West could. She plunked herself
down next to the gangster and began to whisper what Rick assumed were sweet nothings in O'Hanlon's ear.
Everybody in New York said they had been an item
once upon a time.

"Look!" exclaimed Lois. "There's Mae West!"

Rick was contemplating the wonder that was Mae West when he noticed O'Hanlon glance his way and
then nod to someone behind him. It was a short, brisk
downward motion of the head, almost imperceptible
unless you were looking for it.

Two seconds later he felt a hand on his shoulder. Not
a friendly hand, not a "Hey, buddy" hand, but just a hand, leaning on him as if he were a lamppost. Rick twisted his head to the side and saw that the hand be
longed to another little man, about the same size as
O'Hanlon and even sleeker. Rick hadn't heard him ap
proach, but here he was. The man glided like a dancer,
smooth and silent