Hot Springs (22 page)

This was his first urgent gathering since they’d swung into operation.

“We have an opportunity,” he said. “In the service, the CO’d just give the order and I’d draw up a plan and that would be that. But this ain’t the service, and it’s your butts on the line, so I figure you ought to have some say-so in what we do next. Fair enough?”

The men nodded or murmured assent, even the still-sleepy Frenchy Short, now something of a hero for his victory over the two gangsters.

“Y’all know what radio intelligence is?”

“Fred Allen?” somebody said.

“No. Gangbusters!

There was some laughter.

“Not quite,” said Earl. “It’s what you can do when you break the other guy’s code. Or it’s what you can do when you know the other guy’s broken your code, only he don’t know you know. Well, we now got us a chance to play a little radio game, ‘cept that it’s a telephone game.

“Mr. D. A. knows all the tricks, and he figured Owney’s boys would be trying like hell to find us. He figured they’d even try and tap Mr. Becker’s phone lines. That’s why we don’t use telephone lines. Well, goddamned if Carlo Henderson didn’t go downtown yesterday dressed like a farmer, and goddamn if he didn’t find a telephone crew set up at a junction box where all die prosecuting attorney’s lines are shunted through te the big Bell office. So they are listening. Here’s a coupla things we could do.

“First, we could just mark it, and make certain we never gave up nothing on the phone. See, that would keep them guessing, and it would cause them to spread out their resources, because mind my words, what they want to do is ambush us.

“Now here’s another thing we could do: we could pass out phony information. We could say, See, we’re going to Joe’s Club. So they’d set up to get us at Joe’s Club, only we’d hit Bill’s Club. That way we’d be sure to have a raid without no problems. We could probably do that two, three times. Then they’d catch on, and that game’d be over.

“But there’s one last thing we could do. We could pass out the information that we were going to hit Joe’s Club. So you can bet they would load up at Joe’s Club. They’d love to hit us and hurt us and kill some of us. They’d love to humiliate Mr. Becker and send us home in shame. But here’s the wrinkle. We know that they know. So instead of them hitting us, we lure them in, and then we hit them. They think they got us marked, all the time we’re marking them. We counterambush and we smoke ‘em good. See? Their best shot is blasted, the power and the prestige of Owney Maddox and his hillbilly gunmen is made to look pathetic. We found a place on Malvern that’d work right fine. Called Mary Jane’s.”

“Hell,” said Bob Billy, one of the most aggressive raiders, a Highway Patrolman from Mississippi, “I say we go and kick some fellers upside the head.”

Cheers and laughter and agreement rose.

Earl let it die down.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s fine and good, but understand where you’re going. You’re going into the fire. Sometimes you can’t control what happens in there. Blood will be shed, blood in this room. Know that going in. If it’s more than you bargained for, it’s okay. But I want a vote, and I want it secret, so nobody feels pressure. I want it written down. A simple no or yes. Because we can’t make this work if we don’t believe in it.”

It was unanimous.

“He’s finished,” said the Countess.

“But suppose he isn’t?” Ben said.

“He’s finished. I know he’s finished.”

“But suppose he isn’t? He’s a tricky bastard, slippery and smart. He gets out of it somehow. And he hears I been talking against him. And he gets to thinking about it. And he hears about the desert and the building I’m doing and the plans I got. And he reads the writing on the wall. He knows that even though I’m in a different state two fucking thousand miles away, he and I are at cross purposes.”

“Don’t get paranoid, darling.”

“What’s paranoid?”

“The idea that everyone is out to get you.”

“Everyone is out to get me.”

“But not yet. Because you are smarter and quicker and you see these things so much sooner.”

They lounged by the pool of the Beverly Hills Country Club, beside a diamond of emerald-blue water patrolled by the legends of the movie business, their wives, their children, their managers, their assistants, their bodyguards. The Countess wore a white latex suit a la Esther Williams; her legs were tan, her bust was full, her toenails were red.

Bugsy wore a tight red suit that showed off his extremely athletic body, his ripply muscles, his big hands, his larger-than-life penis. He too was tan, and his hair gleamed with oil, the sun picking it up and glinting off it fabulously. He looked like a movie star, he wore movie star sunglasses and he sipped a movie star’s drink, a pina colada, from a tall glass.

Virginia was on one of her trips back east, to visit certain aging relatives or so it was said. He actually wasn’t too clear on where she was, but it helped to have her gone, as she could be a pain in the ass. She’d been really annoying of late.

The Countess, by contrast, was a more comforting person. Her name was Dorothy Dendice Taylor DiFassio, the last moniker making her an authentic countess, though the count had long since been abandoned. She was one of Ben’s earliest Southern California lovers and she had connections to Italy through her title, and the two of them had some crazed adventures together.

“That is why I need a backup plan and I need it now.”

“You’ll come up with something.”

“I have to be ready. He’s now involved with this goddamn crusader. Everybody’s talking about it. He got two Cleveland boys clipped on him and right now his name is mud in every syndicate spot in the country. He is so weak now he can hardly keep it going. But I know him. He’ll come up with something, he’ll get out of it, you’ll see.”

“You give him too much credit, darling. Look, there’s a cute one!”

She pointed at a pool boy. These creatures came from all over America to become movie stars. Most failed but some actually got as far as pool boy. They modeled their bodies and their blond locks around the club, hoping to catch a producer’s eye. The one she noticed, though, was beefier than most and not blond at all, but rather dark-haired.

“You, boy,” she called.

“Christ, Dorothy,” said Bugsy, “are you going to fuck him right here?”

“Possibly. But it would hurt my chances for a table at El Morocco. Boy, come here.”

The lad obliged.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Roy, ma’am,” he responded.

“Roy, eh? How wonderful. Roy, I think I’d like a whiskey sour with a lemon twist. Do you think you can remember that?”

“Yes ma’am.”

He lumbered off.

“That one’s going to be a big star someday,” she said. “He’s got a certain je ne sats quoi.”

“I’ll say,” Bugsy said. “The way he was staring at my dick shows what a future he’s got in this fruit town!”

“Ben, you are so crude. I don’t think he’s homo.”

“The handsome ones are all homo. Anyhow, back to my problems.”

“Oh, that’s right, darling,” said Dorothy, “I forgot. Yours are the real problems. The rest of us are simply bedeviled by petty annoyances.”

“Well, Dorothy, I do not think Roy the Pool Boy is going to pull out a chopper and clip you right here. I am at risk and I’ve got to deal with this problem.”

“Do you want him killed?”

“Ah—difficult. I’d have to get permission. It’d have to go through channels. And everything’s so spread out these days. It used to be a few blocks of Brooklyn, now it’s everywhere, from coast to coast. Getting things okayed can be tough and time-consuming.”

“So what you really want is him eliminated, but not necessarily killed.”

“That would be right, yeah. If I could get him sent up for five years or so, he’d have nothing when he got out.”

“Hmmm. What are his weaknesses? His vanities?”

Ben thought hard. He remembered the beautifiil art deco apartment overlooking the city, the phony English accent, the liveried staff, the sense of elegance.

“He wants to be a British gendeman. He wants to be cultivated. He wants to be like the real Gary Cooper, not the real Cary Grant. He likes furniture, art, food. He wants to be a king. He’s tryin’ to be bigger than who he is. He’s tryin’ to forget where he came from and what made him.”

“I see,” said the Countess. “Quite common, actually. And exacdy why I treasure you so dearly: you are what you are to the maximum. There’s no hypocrisy in you. Not a lick of it.”

“I guess that’s a compliment.”

“It is. Oh, hello, what’s this?”

It was Roy the tall Pool Boy. He held a whiskey sour on a silver platter and he offered it to madame.

She opened her alligator purse and removed a $50 bill.

“For you, darling,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, bowing a little so that he could get a better look at Bugsy’s dick stuffed in his tight bathing suit.

Then he went away.

“A look like that could get him killed in a lotta places on the East Side,” said Ben.

“And he is what he is,” she said. “Anyway, art? Art? You said art? He collects art.”

“Yes.”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “You know, collecting is a disease. And even the most rational and intelligent of men can lose their way when they see something they must have. This should be looked into, darling. This has possibilities.”

“Guns?” asked Owney. “Yes sir,” said Pap. “Not just the six-shootin’ guns we carry during the day. Guns.” “Traceable? I wouldn’t—”

“No sir. ‘Bout fifteen or sixteen years ago, when it was a time of road bandits and generalized desperado work, it was Grumleys what rim houses of safety in the mountains. We had boys from all over. I’se a younger man then, and we Grumleys, we took ‘em in, and fed ‘em and mended ‘em. The laws knew to stay far from where the Grumleys had their places in the mountains. So I seen them all, sir, that I did. Why, sir, was as close to him then as I am to you now. Johnny, such a handsome boy. Reminded me of a feller from the movies. Lord Jesus, he was a handsome boy. Beaming, you might say. Filled the room. A laugher, a fine jester. And just as polite and respectful to our Grumley womenfolk as a fine Mississippi gendeman, he was, he was indeed. Oh, it was a sad day when that boy went down.”

“Johnny?”

“Johnny Dillinger. The most famous man in America. And that other smiler, the one from the Cookson Hills acrost the line in the territory? He rusticated some time out with the Grumleys too. The newspapers called him Pretty Boy, but I never heard no one call him but Charlie, and even Charles most ofttimes. Charlie was a good ‘un, too. Big-handed boy. Big strong farm hands, Charlie had. Charlie was one of the best natural shots I ever seen. He could shoot the Thompson sub gun one-handed, and I mean really smart and fine-like. Would take the stock off. Shoot it one-handed, like a pistol. And Ma. Ma and her boys comes through a time or two. Knew Clyde Barrow and that Bonnie Parker gal too. They was just li’l of kids. Scrawny as the day was long. Like kitty cats, them two, rolling on the floor. Never could figger on why the laws had to shoot them so many times. Seen the car they was driving. It was put on display up in Little Rock. Took the Grumleys to show ‘em what the laws could do if they’d the chance. Them laws, they must have put a thousand bullets into that car, till it looked like a goddamned piece of cheese.”

“And you got guns? Enough for this job?”

“Enough for any job, sir. Your Thompson sub guns, five of ‘em. Drums. And, sir, we have something else.”

“Ah,” said Owney, fascinated as always by the old reprobate’s unlikely language, part Elizabethan border reiver’s, part hillbilly’s. They sat in the office of a warehouse near the tracks, where Owney’s empire received its supplies and from which point it made its distributions; Owney had declared it to be his headquarters for this operation. Grumleys in overalls with the hangdog look of mean boys about to go off to do some killing work hung around.

“What might that be, Pap?”

“Why, sir, it be what they call a Maxim gun. The Devil’s Paintbrush. It’s from the First Great War. The Germans used it. It’s got belt after belt of bullets, and we’ve never used it. My father, Fletcher, got it in a deal with a Mexican feller who come to Hot Springs in 1919 for to buy some women to take back to Tijuana. Wanted white gals. Thought he’d make a fortune for his generalissimo. Well, we got this gendeman’s Maxim gun, but he never got any white gals. Wouldn’t sell no white gal to a Mexican.”

A Maxim gun! Now that was some power.

“We’ll set it up on the second floor,” Pap explained. “When them boys come to call, we’ll let them come in and up the stairs. Then my cousin Lem’s boy Nathan will open up with the Maxim. Nathan is the hardest Grumley. He served fifteen years of a life sentence, and prison taught him savage ways. Nathan is the best Grumley killer. Onct, he shot a clown. Never figgered out why. I ast him once. He didn’t say nothing. I guess he just don’t like clowns. He’s a Murfreesboro Grumley, and they grow Grumleys hard down there.”

“I thought it was the Yell County Grumleys that were so hard.”

“Yell County Grumleys are hard, naturally. But you take a naturally hard Grumley and you toughen him up ki a bad joint, and what you got is something to make your blood curdle. That Mr. Becker would beshat his drawers if he but knew what awaited.”

“It’s a shame he won’t be along. We hear he arrives afterward, always.”

“He won’t arrive afterward this time. There won’t be no afterward,” said Pap. “They’ll only be blood on the floor and silence.”

“That I believe,” said Owney, looking at the dance of black madness in the old man’s glittering eyes.

“Mr. Maddox,” said Flem Grumley, arriving from some mission. “We just heard. My cousin Newt has it from the phone tap at Hobson and Third. They’re going to hit Mary Jane’s tonight.”

“Mary Jane’s?” said Owney, unfamiliar with the place.

“It’s in Niggertown.”

“It’s going to be hot in Niggertown tonight,” said Pap. “Oooooooo-eeeee, it’s going to be hot. We’ll even boil us a cat for luck!”

It was a time of waiting. Earl thought it was like the night before when the big transports wallowed off an island, and you could hear the naval guns pounding all through the night, but in the hold, the boys were in their hammocks, all weapons checked, all blades oiled, all ammo stashed, all gear tight and ready, and they just lay there, smoking most of them, some of them writing letters. There’d always be a few boys shooting craps in the latrines, loudly, to drum away the fears, but for most of the boys it was just a time to wait quietly and pray that God would be watching over them and not assisting Mickey Rooney with his racetrack betting the next day.