Legs (11 page)

"Jimmy wants to call off the deal," Willie
said to Jack, the first time a deal had been mentioned on the trip.

"Is that so?"

Willie handed the cable to Jack, who read it to us.
"Tell our friend we can't stay with him," it said.

"I wonder what he's worried about'?" Jack
said. Classy Willie didn't say anything.

"Do you know what he means, Willie?"

"He's talking about the money. Wants me to take
it back to him."

"Our money?"

"Jimmy figures it's his money until we make the
buy."

"Until I make the buy," Jack said.

"You know what I mean, Jack."

"No, Willie, I can't say that I do. You're a
card thief. I never knew a card thief who could talk straight. "

"Jimmy must figure you're too hot. The radio
says they won't let you into England."

"I wasn't going to England. "

"You know what I'm talking about, Jack."

"I suppose I do, Willie. I suppose I do."
Jack put on his weary tone of voice. "But I'll tell you the
truth, Willie, I'm not even thinking about money. What I'm thinking
about is
jewels."

"What jewels?"

"I got eighty grand worth and I don't know how
to get them off the boat. They'll go through my luggage with a
microscope. ' '

"Let your friend Marcus carry them," Willie
said. "He's legitimate."

"Not interested, thank you," I said.

"That's not a bad idea, Marcus," Jack said.

"It's a terrible idea, Jack. I want no part of
hot merchandise. No part whatever. Not my line of work."

"If Marcus says no, it's no," Jack said.
"We'll have to find another way. "

I believe Jack already knew what he was going to do
with the jewels and was merely testing me for a reaction. My reaction
was so instantaneous he didn't even press it a second time. I was
more attuned to Classy Willie's problem. If Biondo ever had any sense
at all, he wouldn't have sent a dapper thief, a man long known as the
Beau Brummell of Forty-eighth Street, to play watchdog to a man as
devious as Jack.

"Jimmy wants me to get off at England and come
back home with the cash," Willie said. "That was the plan
if there was a hitch. He said he talked to you about it."

"I do remember something like that," Jack
said. "But how do I know you won't take the cash and hop a boat
for the Fiji Islands? I already told you I don't trust card thieves,
Willie. I couldn't jeopardize Jimmy's money that way. No. We'll get
to Germany and make the deal, and we'll all be a little fatter when
we get home. Am I right, Count?"

"The beer is good in Germany," said The
Count, a diplomat. "You don't have to needle it."

The facade of the deal was that Jack was to buy booze
and wines, and ship them from Bremen to somewhere off Long Island.
That's what I was told, by Jack. But Devane was right that Jack was
after dope—heroin, which Jack had been buying in Germany since '26
when Rothstein was financing the imports. A federal charge Jack had
been dodging successfully since then had come with the bustup of an
elaborate smuggling scheme in which Jack was a key figure. The
present destination was Frankfurt and, after the deal was wrapped up,
a week's vacation in Paris. I remember when we got back to the States
that a federal narcotics nabob told the press that Jack's dope
smuggling made his booze and beer business look like penny-candy
stuff. But people didn't pay attention to such official guff.

Their image of Jack was
fixed. He was a bootlegger. Locking him into dope was only a source
of confusion.

* * *

I have vivid recollections of Jack and the press
meeting in the hallways of courthouses, at piers and railroad
stations in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Catskill. I remember the
aggression the newsmen always showed, persistent in their need to
embarrass him with gross questions, but persistent also in their need
to show him affection, to laugh harder than necessary at his
bons
mots
, to draw ambivalent pleasure from his
presence—a man they loved to punish, a man they punished with an
odd kind of love. When the British newsmen invaded the
Belgenland
on our arrival in Plymouth, some thirty reporters and cameramen
pushed their way into Jack's stateroom to be greeted by the presence
himself, clad in black slippers, sky-blue silk pajamas with a white
chalk stripe, a navy-blue silk robe, and a Rameses between index and
middle fingers. The British behaved no differently from their
American brethren, except that Jack's being a foreigner diminished
their need to insult him for the sake of the homeland. But their
self-righteousness shone through in their questions: Why does America
tolerate gangsters? How long have you been a gangster? Was Mr.
Charles Northrup murdered at your order? Do you think gangsterism
will end when Prohibition ends? How many men have you killed in your
life? What about Capone and your Brooklyn arsenal?

Jack treated them like children, laughing at their
requests for a laundry list of his victims. "First off, boys,
I'm not a gangster, only a bootlegger. There are no gangsters in
America. Too easy to get rich other ways. I'm just a civilized
citizen. Not a dese, dem, and dose guy. Just a man of the people,
trying to make a dollar. Over here getting the cure. Got some stomach
trouble and I was advised to go to Vichy and Wiesbaden and take the
waters. Brooklyn arsenal? I own nothing in Brooklyn. Capone used to
work for me years ago, driving a truck, but I haven't seen him in
years. That feud is a lot of nonsense. I get along with people. I'm a
legitimate citizen. You newspaper guys scream at the cops to pick me
up, and they hold me a few days and find out I'm clean and let me go.
I'm not claiming you treat me wrong, but I never see anybody write
big headlines when they tell me the charge don't stick. I'm sick of
headlines, boys. I came to Europe to get away from it all for a
while. Leave that hubbub behind. Make a kind of grand tour on my own,
take the waters and cure what ails me. You can understand that, can't
you, fellows?"

Sure they could.

Jack's fame at this point was staggering. About four
hundred Englishmen had come to the pier by six thirty just to get a
glimpse of him. The press of the whole Western world was following
our transatlantic voyage, front-paging it with an intensity not quite
up to what they did for Byrd, Peary, and other world travelers, but
I'll bet with more reader interest. One English paper was so anxious
for a story that it invented a phone interview with Jack two days
before our boat reached an English pier. "I'm here in London on
a secret mission," they quoted him as saying. So the newsmen,
installing Jack in the same hierarchy where they placed royalty,
heroes, and movie stars, created him anew as they enshrined him. They
invented a version of him with each story they wrote, added to his
evil luster by imagining crimes for him to commit, embellishing his
history, humanizing him, defining him through their own fantasies and
projections. This voyage had the effect of taking Jack Diamond away
from himself, of making him a product of the collective imagination.
Jack had imagined his fame all his life and now it was imagining him.
A year hence he would be saying that "publicity helps the punk"
to another set of newsmen, aware how pernicious a commodity it could
be. But now he was an addict, a grotesquely needy man, parched for
glory, famished for public love, dying for the chance at last to be
everybody's wicked pet.

He called the stateroom press conference to a halt
after fifteen minutes and said he had to get dressed. The newsmen
waited and he joined them on deck, clad now in his blue pinstriped
suit, his wide-brimmed white felt hat, seven-and-a-half-B black
wingtips, his purple tie, and his Knight Templar pin in his lapel.

"Hello, boys," he said, "what else do
you want from me?"

They talked for another quarter hour and asked, among
other things, about that lapel pin; and a story goes with that.

When we talked after the press left, Jack told me
that Charlie Northrup was why he was in the Masons. Back in the Bronx
in the mid-twenties Jack was playing cards in the back room of his
garish Theatrical Club, orange and black decor, and Charlie was
sitting in. For no reason he could remember, Jack wondered out loud
what a jack was, the picture card. Charlie told him the symbolic
meaning of a knave among kings and queens, and Jack liked the whole
idea.

Charlie talked about the Masons and their symbols,
and it was like the dawn of a new era for Jack. He pumped Charlie for
more, then talked him into proposing him as a candidate in the order.
He went through in a whoosh and obviously with attention to all the
arcane mumbo jumbo he had to memorize. The Masonic books I inherited
from him were well marked and annotated in the margins, in his
handwriting.

Alongside one section on
an old Templar rite of initiation, a Christly pilgrimage through red,
blue, black, and then the final white veils of the temple, Jack had
noted: "Good stuff. Sounds like one of my dreams."

* * *

Just after meeting the British press Jack complained
to me of itching hands, small red dots which gave up a clear fluid
when squeezed. The broken pustules then burned like dots of acid. A
passenger shot off three of his toes at skeet and blamed Jack for
hexing the weapon. Then the Minneapolis librarian cut her wrists, but
chose against death and summoned help. Her condition became common
knowledge on the ship.

I saw Jack on deck alone
after that, toying with a rosary, the first time I knew he carried
one. He was not praying—only staring at it, strung like webbing
through his fingers, as if it were a strange, incomprehensible
object.

* * *

The night we were steaming toward Plymouth, a steward
came to Jack's room with a message from the captain that the British
authorities had definitely proclaimed Jack
persona
non grata
. Stay out, you bum. The message
jolted him, for it suddenly put our destination in jeopardy. What
would Belgium do? And Germany?

Jack came to my stateroom and said he wanted to go up
on deck and talk, that he didn't trust the walls. So we walked in the
sea-sweetened night along the main deck where a few night walkers
took the air, most memorably a rheumatic old aristocratic woman with
a belief in the curative power of voyaging that was so religious she
left her deckchair only during storms and meals, and to sleep and, I
presume, to pee. She chewed tobacco and had a small pewter spittoon
alongside her chair which she would I pick up and spit her little
bloody gobs into in a most feminine manner, that is, through taut,
narrow lips. She was the only witness to my conversation with Jack,
and her presence and periodic spitting were the only intrusions on
our conversation, apart from the splash of the sea, as we talked and
walked, up and then back, in our desolated section of deck. We talked
only of Jack's rejection by England until he decided to get to the
point. "Marcus, I want you to do me a favor."

"A legal one?"

"No."

"I thought as much. The jewels. I told you I
want no part of it, Jack."

"Listen to me. This is a lot of money. Do you
believe in money?"

"I do."

"So do I. "

"But I don't want to go to jail to get it."

"How many lawyers you know ever went to jail?"

"A few, and you'd have a point if we were back
in Albany."

"I told you a long time ago you were a thief in
your heart."

"No, we're still not talking about thievery."

"Right. This is just a proposition. You don't
have to take it."

Jack then took from his inside coat pocket a long
slender box, and we paused under one of the wall lights so I could
view its contents: an array of gems, rings, and necklaces. Some jewel
thief had stolen them, fenced them, and they'd found their way to
Jack, the internationalist, who would refence them in Europe. I knew
he hadn't stolen them. He wasn't above such activity, just afield of
it. No longer a burglar. He'd failed at that as a teen-ager and
graduated to the activity that conformed to his talent, which was not
stealth but menace.

"They don't take up much space," Jack said,
and I nodded and made no answer.

"I planned to get rid of them in Brussels, but
they're too hot to carry. I mean look at that"—and he held up
a ruby for me to admire. "It's kind of famous, I'm told, and
where it came from is even more famous."

"I don't think I'm interested."

"My suitcase has special bindings for this
stuff. You could get it off the boat and through customs. But not me,
not now."

I toyed with it. NOTED UPSTATE LAWYER CAUGHT WITH
MRS. ASTOR'S FAVORITE RUBY, Or was it Mrs. Carnegie's? Or that
tobacco-chewing lady aristocrat behind us, whoever she might be?

"If you don't handle them, I dump them. Now."

"Dump them?"

"Overboard."

"'
Christ, why do that'? Why not hide them in a
chandelier and come back later for them? Isn't that how it's done?"