I'd been watching Jack have fun all day, first with
his machine gun and then his champagne and his Rabelais and his dream
of a purple mansion; but his fun was nervous, a frenetic motion game
that seemed less like fun than like a release of energy that would
explode his inner organs if he held it in.
We were climbing a mountain by this time, along a
two-lane road that wound upward and seemed really about as wide as a
footpath when it snaked along the edges of some very deep and sudden
drops. I saw a creek at one point, visible at the bottom of a gorge.
When you looked up. you saw mountains to the left, and you climbed
and climbed and climbed and then made a hairpin turn and saw a
waterfall cascading down the side of a great cliff.
"Get a look at that," Jack said, pointing.
"Is that some sight?"
And at another sharp turn he told Fogarty to stop,
and we both got out and looked back down the mountain to see how far
and how, steeply we had climbed; and then he pointed upward where you
could see more mountains beyond mountains. The stop was clearly a
ritual for Jack, as was pointing out the waterfall. It was his
mountain range somehow, and he had a proprietor's interest in it. We
made a cigarette stop as we entered Haines Falls, a store where Jack
knew they carried Rameses, his exotic, Pharaonic brand, and he
dragged me to the souvenir counter and urged me to buy something.
"Buy your wife a balsam pillow or an Indian head
scarf."
"My wife and I split up two years ago."
"
Then you got no reason not to go to Europe. How
about a cigarette box for yourself or a pinetree ashtray?"
I thought he was kidding,
but he was insisting; a souvenir to seal our bargain, a trinket to
affirm the working relationship. He fingered the dishes and glassware
with their gaudy Catskill vistas, the thermometers framed in pine,
toothbrush holders, inkstands, lampstands, photo albums, all with
souvenir inscriptions burned into them, commemorating vacation time
spent in this never—never land in the clouds. I finally agreed on a
glass paperweight with an Indian chief in full war bonnet inside it,
and Jack bought it. Forty-nine cents. The action was outrageously
sentimental, the equivalent of his attitude toward that Algerian
crone or the deceased brother, from whom, I would later come to know,
Jack felt all his good luck had come. "All my troubles happened
after Eddie died," Jack told me in the final summer of his life
when he was learning how to die. Thus his replacement of the brother
with Fogarty had a talismanic element to it. Talismanic paperweight,
talismanic brother-substitute, talismanic memory of the Arthritic
Witch of Fun. And here we were in old talismanic Haines Falls, the
highest town in the Catskills, Jack said, and of course, of course,
the proper place for him to stash the queenly consort of his fantasy
life, the most beautiful girl I've ever known.
* * *
Jack said he once saw Charlie Northrup belly-bump a
man with such force that the man did a back-flip over a table.
Charlie was physical power, about six four and two forty. He had a
wide, teeth-ridden smile and blond hair the color and straightness of
straw, combed sideways like a well-groomed hick in a tintype. He was
the first thing we saw when we entered Mike Brady's Top o' the
Mountain House at Haines Falls. He was at the middle of the bar,
standing in brogans with his ankles crossed, his sportshirt stained
with sweat from armpit to armpit, drinking beer, talking with the
bartender, and smiling. Charlie's smile went away when he met Jack
eyeball to eyeball.
"Missed you the other night, Charlie," Jack
said.
"Yeah. I think you're gonna keep missing me,
Jack."
"That's a wrong attitude. "
"May be. But I'm stuck with it."
"Don't be stupid, Charlie. You're not stupid."
"That's right, Jack. I'm not stupid."
Jack's face had all the expression of an ice cube,
Charlie's full of overheated juices. He was telling Jack now about
something I had no clue to; but from their tone there were
confidences between them. It turned out Charlie was responsible for
Jack being in the Masons. They had been young thieves together on
Manhattan's West Side in 1914, running with The Gophers, a gang Owney
Madden led until he went to jail for murder. They both wound up in
the Bronx about 1925, with Charlie gone semi-straight as a numbers
writer and Jack a feared figure in the New York underworld because of
his insane gang tactics and his association with the powerful Arnold
Rothstein. Jack had also opened a place he called The Bronx
Theatrical Club, whose main theatrical element was Jack's presence as
a performing psychopath. I say performing because I don't think Jack
was psychopathic in its extreme sense. He was aberrated, yes,
eccentric, but his deeds were willful and logical, part of a career
pattern, even those that seemed most spontaneous and most horrendous.
He was rising in the world, a celebrated hijacker, and Charlie was a
working stiff with money problems. Charlie married Jimmy Biondo's
sister and they vacationed in the Catskills. When times got very
rough in New York, Charlie and some two-bit Jersey thieves bought a
defunct brewery in Kingston and went into shoestring bootlegging. In
the years after, Charlie opened his roadhouse and also became the
biggest beer distributor in Greene and Ulster counties. He was tough,
with a reputation for muscle if you didn't pay promptly for your
goods. But he was different from Jack. Just a bootlegger. Just a
businessman.
"I'm having a little meeting tomorrow night,"
Jack told him, "for those who couldn't make it to the last one."
"I'm booked up."
"Unbook, Charlie. It's at the Aratoga. Eight
o'clock. And I'm all business, Charlie. All business."
"I never knew you to be anything else, Jack."
"Charlie, old brother, don't have me send for
you."
Jack left it there. turned his back on Charlie and
walked down the bar and into the table area where only one table was
occupied: by that beauty in a white linen suit and white pumps; and
at the table with her a five-foot-five, one-eyed, waterheaded gnome.
This was Murray (The Goose) Pucinski who'd worked for Jack for the
past five years.
"Oh, God, Jack, oh, God where've you been?"
was Kiki's greeting. She stood to hug him.
Jack squeezed her and gave her a quick kiss, then sat
alongside her.
"She behaving herself, Goose?" Jack asked
the waterhead.
Goose nodded.
"How could anybody misbehave up here?" Kiki
said, looking me over. I was struck by the idea of misbehaving with
her. That was the first logical thing to consider when you looked at
Kiki. The second was the flawless quality of her face, even
underneath all that professionally applied makeup; a dense rather
than a delicate beauty, large, dark eyes, a mouth of soft, round
promise, and an abundance of hair, not black as Alice had said, but
auburn, a glorious Titian mop. Her expression, as we visually
introduced ourselves, was one of anxious innocence. I use the phrase
to describe a moral condition in fragments, anxious to be gone, but
with a large segment still intact. The condition was visible in the
eyes, which for all their sexual innuendo and expertise, for all
their knowledge of how beauty rises in the world, were in awe, I
suspect, of her rarefied situation: its prisonerlike quality, its
dangers, its potential cruelties, and its exhilarating glimpses of
evil. By eye contact alone, and this done in a few seconds, she
conveyed to me precisely how uneasy she was with The Goose as her
chaperon. A quick glance at him, then at me, then a lift of the
eyebrows and twist of the pursed lips, was my clue that The Goose was
a guardian of negative entertainment value.
"I wanna dance," she said to Jack. "Jackie,
I'm dying to dance. Speed, play us something so we can dance."
"It's too early to dance," Jack said.
"No. it isn't"—and her entire body did a
shimmy in anticipation. "Come on, Joey, come on, puh-leeeze."
"My fingers don't wake up till nine o'clock at
night," Fogarty said. "Or after six beers."
"Aw, Joey."
Fogarty hadn't sat down yet. He looked at Jack who
smiled and shrugged, and so Fogarty went to the piano on the elevated
bandstand and, with what I'd call a semipro's know-how, snapped out a
peppy version of "Twelfth Street Rag." Kiki was up with the
first four bars, pulling Jack to his feet. Jack reluctantly took an
armful of Kiki, then whisked her around in a very respectable
foxtrot, dancing on the balls of his feet with sureness and
lightness. Fogarty segued into the "Charleston" and then
the "Black Bottom," and Kiki split from Jack and broke into
bouncily professional arm maneuvers and kicks, showing a bit of
garter.
Interested as I was in Kiki's star and garter
performance, it was Jack who took my attention. Was Legs Diamond
really about to perform in public? He stood still when Kiki broke
away, watched her for a step or two, then assessed his audience,
especially the bar where Charlie Northrup and the barkeep were giving
Jack full eyeball.
"
C'mon, Jackie," said Kiki, her breasts in
fascinating upheaval. Jack looked at her and his feet began to move,
left out. right kick, right back, left back, basic, guarded,
small-dimensioned movements, and then "C'mon. dance," Kiki
urged, and he gave up his consciousness of the crowd and then left
out, right kick, right back, left back expanded, vitalized, and he
was dancing, arms swinging, dancing, Jack Diamond, who seemed to do
everything well, was dancing the Charleston and Black Bottom, dancing
them perfectly, the way all America had always wanted to be able to
dance them—energetically, controlled, as professionally graceful as
his partner who had danced these dances for money in Broadway shows,
who had danced them for Ziegfeld; and now she was dancing on the
mountaintop with the king of the mountain, and they were king and
queen of motion together, fluid with Fogarty's melody and beat.
And then above the music, above the pounding of
Fogarty's foot, above the heavy breathing and shuffling of Jack and
Kiki and above the concentration that we of the small audience were
fixing on the performance, there came the laughter. You resisted
acknowledging that it was laughter, for there was nothing funny going
on in the room and so it must be something else, you said to
yourself. But it grew in strength and strangeness, for once you did
acknowledge that yes, that's laughter all right, and you said,
somebody's laughing at them, and you remembered where you were and
who you were with, you turned (and we all turned) and saw Charlie
Northrup at the end of the Z bar. pounding the bar with the open palm
of his right hand, laughing too hard. The bartender told him a joke,
was my thought. but then Charlie lifted the palm and pointed to Jack
and Kiki and spluttered to the barman and we all heard, because
Fogarty had heard the laughing and stopped playing and so there was
no music when Charlie said, "Dancin'. . . the big man's dancin'
. . . dancin' the Charleston on Sunday afternoon . . . and then Jack
stopped. And Kiki stopped six beats after the music had and said,
"What happened?"
Jack led her to the table and said, "We're going
to have a drink," and moved her arm and made sure she sat down
before he walked to the bar and spoke to Charlie Northrup in such a
low voice that we couldn't hear. Charlie had stopped laughing by then
and had taken a mouthful of beer while he listened to whatever it was
Jack said. Then he swallowed the beer, and with a mirthless smile he
retorted to Jack. who did not wait for the retort but was already
walking back toward us.
"I'm trembling, brother," Charlie called to
him. "Trembling." He took another mouthful of beer, swished
it around in his mouth, and spat it in a long arc after Jack. Not
hitting him, or meaning to, but spitting as a child spits when he can
think of no words as venomous as his saliva. Then he turned away from
the direction of his spit, swallowed the last of his beer, and walked
his great hulk out of the bar.
Holy Flying Christ, I said to myself when I
understood Charlie's laughter and saw the arc of beer, for I
understood much more than what we were all seeing. I was remembering
what Jack's stylized terror could do to a man, remembering Joe
Vignola, my client in the Hotsy Totsy case, a man visited not by
Jack's vengeance but merely by the specter of it. I was remembering
Joe on his cot in the Tombs, tracing with his eye a maze a prisoner
before him had drawn on the wall, losing the way, tracing with his
finger, but the finger too big, then finding a broom straw and
tracing with that. And scratching his message above the maze with a
spoon: Joe Vignola never hurt nobody, but they put him in jail
anyway. Joe was dreaming of smuggling a gun in via his wife's
brassiere, but he couldn't conceive of how to ask her to do such an
embarrassing thing. And the district attorney was explaining almost
daily to him, it's just routine, Joe, we hold 'em all the time in
cases like this, an outrage, as you know, what happened, and we must
have witnesses, must have them. Also a precautionary measure, as l'm
sure you're aware, Joe, you're safer here. But I want to go home, Joe
said, and the DA said, well, if you insist, but that's twenty
thousand. Twenty thou? Twenty thou. I'm not guilty, you've got the
wrong man. Oh no, said the DA, you're the right man. You're the one
who saw Legs Diamond and his friends being naughty at the Hotsy
Totsy. I'm not the only one, Joe said. Right, Joe, you are not the
only one. We have other witnesses. We have the bartender. We have
Billy Reagan, too, who is coming along nicely. An open-and-shut case,
as they say.