Legs (10 page)

" 'Not me. I'd never shit in church. You hear
that, goddamn it? Never!'

" 'All them rain drinkers. They all shit in
church.'

" 'Not me, no sir. Why do you say that'?'

" 'I never knew an Irishman wouldn't shit in
church if he thought he could get away with it.'

" 'Irishmen don't shit in church. I don't
believe that.'

" 'I seen four Irishmen at the same time, all
taking a shit in church.'

" 'Polacks shit in church.'

" "I once seen an Irishman shit right in
the holy water fountain.'

" "That's a goddamn lie.'

" 'Then I seen two Irishmen takin' shits in the
confessional boxes and about a dozen more takin' shits up on the
altar all at once. I seen one Irishman shit during a funeral.
Irishmen don't know no better.'

"I was layin' on my
cot while this was going on. Then Jack got up and punched me in the
right eye so hard I lost the sight of it. Jesus, that was a crazy
thing to do. I didn't even see it comin'. I had to kick him all over
the room, broke ribs and stuff. The guards pulled me off him. I
woulda killed him if I knew the eye was gone, but I didn't know it
then. When I saw him a week later he got down on his knees and asked
me to forgive him what he done. I said, 'Fuck you, Jack,' and left
him on his knees. But we shook hands before I left and I told him
'Okay, don't worry about it.' But I was still sore about it. I done
six years because the MP I kicked died, and when I come out I looked
Jack up because I figure he owes me a job. He thought he did a tough
thing about the eye, but shit, once you get used to one eye it's just
as good as two. And workin' for Jack, you get to do everything you
got to do, so I got no complaints."

* * *

We were about halfway down the mountain when Murray
hit the brakes, but not soon enough, and we skidded into a rock slide
and smashed into a boulder that must've just landed because other
little rocks kept bouncing off the car. Both of us hit the
windshield, and I got a hell of a bump and a four-day headache out of
it. Murray's forehead was cut, a horizontal gash like a split seam.

"We better haul ass before another one falls on
top of us," Murray said, a thought I hadn't had yet since I was
preoccupied with my pain. He tried backing up, but the car made a
weird noise and was hard to move. He got out in the rain and so I got
out after him. There was about one foot between me and about a
four-hundred-foot drop, so I got carefully back inside and out
Murray's door. He was pulling on the front left fender, which was
smashed and rubbing against the wheel. Murray was a small man but a
strong one, for the fender came almost straight at this tug. He cut
his right hand on the edge of it, and when I offered him my pocket
handkerchief, he shook his head and scooped up a handful of earth and
grass and patted it on his forehead and then globbed a wad into his
sliced right palm. "Get in," he said, his face and hand
smeared and dripping with bloody mud.

"I'll drive," I told him.

'"
No, I'll handle it."

"You're in no shape to drive. "

"This is not your car, mister," he said in
a tone that was unarguably the last word.

"All right, then, back up and turn around. I'll
direct you. You're damn near over the edge right there, and it's one
hell of a long way down."

It was dark now and I was wet to the underwear,
standing in the middle of desolation, maybe about to be buried in a
landslide, giving traffic directions to a bleeding, one-eyed
psychopath who was, with one hand, trying to drive a mythic vehicle
backwards up an enchanted mountain. I'd come a long way from the K.
of C. library.
 

JOHNNY RAW,
JACK
GENTLEMAN

Jack came to Albany to see me four days after my time
on the mountain. He was full of Europe and its glories, the spas at
Bad Homburg and Wiesbaden, the roulette and baccarat in the casinos
where croupiers spoke six languages, the eloquent slenderness of the
Parisian whore. He came to my office with Fogarty; he was in town on
other business we didn't discuss but which I presume was beer supply
for his expanding clientèle. He handed me five hundred cash as my
initial retainer.

"What do I do for this?"

"Buy a ticket to Europe."

"Jack, I've got no good reason to go to Europe."

"You owe it to your body," he said. "All
that great wine and great food."

"All right, maybe,"
I said. But what, really, did I need with this kind of action? Where
was the profit? Jack merely said he'd be in touch within the week and
that was that. Then I got a weird call at three the next morning from
him, saying he'd decided to go to New York immediately instead of
next week and leave for Europe in the afternoon if he got the
booking, and was I ready, did I live in control of the quick decision
or was I going to take a week to think it over? It meant being in
Manhattan in about nine or ten hours and committing myself to the
booking and turning off my practice. He kept saying, "Well?
Well? What do you think?" And so I said, "All right, yes,"
against all sane judgment, and he said, "You're a winner,
Marcus," and I rolled over and went back for two more hours.
Then I closed off my Albany life with four phone calls and caught the
ten thirty train to New York.

* * *

A fox terrier leaped overboard, an apparent suicide,
the day the news broke aboard ship that Charlie Northrup's
bloodstained Buick was found in a Sixty-first Street garage near the
Brooklyn Army Base. The garage was owned by Vannie Higgins, a pal of
Jack's and the crown prince of Long Island rum-runners. Oxie and a
Brooklyn couple, the wife a pal of Alice's, were arrested in their
apartment with an arsenal: tear-gas grenades, ammo, flares,
fountain-pen pistols, bulletproof vests, and enough explosives to
blow up a city block. Brooklyn war with Capone, said the papers. Oxie
said only that he was sleeping on Jack's porch at Acra when two men
he wouldn't identify woke him and offered him fifty bucks to take the
Buick to New York and dump it. Cops saw him and the other man near a
Fifty-eighth Street pier acting suspiciously, and Oxie admitted that
the blocks in the Buick were to be used to run it over the
stringpiece.

We were two days out of New York on the Belgenland,
bound for Plymouth and Brussels, and suddenly our foursome—Jack,
Count Duschene, Classy Willie Green, and myself—was the center of
all attention. Jack was traveling under the name of John Nolan, a
name of notable nautical import, and he got away with it until the
radio brought news bulletins from the New York City police
commissioner, a feisty old Irishman named Devane, that Jack was
fleeing from a foul murder and was now on the high seas, bound for
England to buy dope.

He wasn't wanted by the police, but Devane felt it
his duty to alert the nations of Europe that a fiend was approaching.
The Northrup car was the subject of daily bulletins in the ship's
newspaper, and as the mystery of what happened to Charlie
intensified, so did Jack's celebrity. Passengers snapped his picture,
asked for his autograph, assured him they didn't believe such a nice
person as he was would have anything to do with such terrible goings
on.

The fox terrier: He appeared as I stood on the sports
deck near the rail, while Jack was shooting skeet. I saw nothing
chasing the dog, which came at me in a blur of brown and white, but
there must have been something, for he was panicky or perhaps
suddenly maddened. He took a corner at high speed, dead-ended into a
bulkhead, turned around, and leaped through the rail, flailing like a
crazy-legged circus clown falling off a tightrope into a net. I saw
him surface once, go into a wave, bob up again, and then vanish. I
doubt anyone else saw it.

A man finally came toward me at a brisk pace and
asked if I'd seen his dog, and I said, yes, I'd just seen it leap
overboard.

"Leap overboard?" the man said, stunned by
the concept.

"Yes. He leaped."

"He wasn't thrown?"

'"
Nobody threw him, I can tell you that. He
jumped. "

"A dog wouldn't leap overboard like that."

He looked at me, beginning to believe I'd killed his
dog. I assured him I'd never seen such a thing either, but that it
was true, and just then he looked past me and said, "That's Legs
Diamond," the dog instantly forgotten, the man already turning
to someone to pass along his discovery. In a matter of minutes a
dozen people were watching Jack shoot. He had been reloading during
my encounter and saw the crowd before he put the shotgun again to his
shoulder. He fired, missed, fired, missed. The crowd tittered, but he
looked at them and silenced the titters. He fired again, missed
again, fired again, missed again, and thrust the gun angrily at the
man in charge of lofting the clay pigeons. Then he and I went quickly
down to the parlor where Classy Willie and The Count, a dapper pair,
were jointly relieving four other passengers of their vacation money
in a poker game. I knew neither The Count nor Willie before I boarded
the ship with Jack, but it turned out that The Count was Jack's
international associate, an expert bottom dealer who spoke French,
German, and Spanish and did not lose his head in the presence of too
many forks, and that Classy Willie was a card thief, specializing in
ocean liners, who had been hired by Jimmy Biondo to represent him in
the dope deal. Willie had a certain suavity behind his pencil-line
mustache, but he was also known for his erratic violence on behalf of
his employer.

I understood these relationships only much later. At
this point in the trip I assumed both men worked for Jack. I asked
Jack about Oxie and the car and he said, "I take no
responsibility for mugs like him once they're out of my sight."

"Goddamn it, Jack, you've got me involved in the
biggest murder case in upstate New York in Christ knows how long and
you give me this evasive routine?"

"Who said you're involved? I'm not even
involved."

"You're involved. On the radio is involved."

"Tomorrow there'll be an earthquake in Peru and
they'll try to stick me with it. "

"Bullshit."

"Shove your bullshit up your ass," he said
and walked away.

But he came back an hour later and sat down beside me
in a deckchair, where I was brooding on my stupidity and reading
Ernest Dimnet on how to think better, and he said, "How's things
now?"

"I'm still involved."

"You worry a lot, Marcus. That's a bad sign.
Gets you into trouble. "

"I'm in trouble now because I didn't worry
enough."

"Listen, you got nothing to be afraid of.
Nobody's after your ass, nobody wants to put you on the spot. I never
knew a fucking lawyer yet couldn't talk his way out of a sandstorm.
You'll do all right if you don't lose your head."

"There was blood in that car, and Oxie was with
it. And Oxie is your man. "

"Somebody could've had a nosebleed. For
chrissake, don't fuck me AROUND!" And he walked away from me
again.

We didn't speak a direct word to each other, apart
from pass the salt, for two days. My plan was to get off at Plymouth
and get the next boat home. I observed him from a distance, seeing
people go out of their way for a look at him playing cards in his
shirtsleeves. I saw a blond librarian ask him to dance and begin a
thing with him. He was a bootlegger and, as such, had celebrity
status, plus permission from the social order to kill, maim, and
befoul the legal system, for wasn't he performing a social mission
for the masses? The system would stay healthy by having life both
ways: first, relishing Jack's achievement while it served a function,
then slavering sensually when his head, no longer necessary, rolled.
This insight softened my hard line of Northrup. Maybe it was all a
bootlegger's feud, which somehow made the consequent death okay. Let
others assess the moral obliquity in this.

Jack went through a tango with the librarian, who was
from Minneapolis, a fetchingly rinsed-out blonde who wore
schoolmarmish tweed suits with low-cut blouses beneath. You saw the
blouses only when she peeled off the top covering as the dancing went
on and on. Jack invited her to eat with us when he started up with
her, and he saw to it that none of us lingered over coffee.

Then one day at dinner she wasn't there. Her empty
chair went unremarked upon until Jack himself gestured toward it and
said, "She wanted my autograph on her briefs," which I
thought was a quaint euphemism for Jack.

Everyone laughed at the absurdity, even me.

"I gave her a bullet," Jack said, and I
fell into uncertainty until he added, "She says to me, 'It's the
right shape but the wrong size.' And I told her, 'Use it sideways."

We were swilling
duck a
l'orange
when the librarian came up to the
table with her jacket off and put her face inches away from Jack's.

"You turn women into swine," she said.

Jack nodded and bit the
duck.

* * *

The morning news was that the search for Charlie
Northrup had turned into one of the biggest manhunts in New York
State history. He was presumed dead, but where? On top of this came a
cable from Jimmy Biondo to Classy Willie, precipitating an impromptu
meeting of our small quartet in Jack's cabin. Willie arrived, visibly
equipped with a pistol for the first time since we boarded ship.
Sensing tension, I got up to leave. But Jack said stick around, and
so I did.