Legs (14 page)

I already spoke of Jack's energy as I saw it that
memorable Sunday in the Catskills. The luminosity was further
evidence of it, and this finally persuaded me of a world run not by a
hierarchy of talents but by a hierarchy of shining energetics. In
isolation or defeat some men lapse into melancholia, even catatonia,
the death of motion a commonplace symptom. But Jack was volatile in
his intensifying solitude, reacting with anger to his buffetings,
also trying to convince, bribe, sweet-talk, harass his way out. At
Aachen he argued with the German cops, saying, yes, he had the same
name as the famous gangster, but he wasn't the same man. In protest
of their disbelief he did a kind of Indian war dance in the aisle of
the first-class coach, a dance at which one could only marvel. Ah,
the creative power of the indignant liar.

I remember my own excitement, the surge of energy I
felt rising in myself from some arcane storage area of the psyche
when I strapped on the money belt. No longer the voyeur at the
conspiracy, I was now an accessory, and the consequence was
intoxicating. I felt a need to drink, to further loosen my control
center, and I did.

At the bar I found a woman
I'd flirted with a day or so earlier and coaxed her back to my cabin.
I did not wait to strip her, or myself, but raised her dress swiftly,
pulled her underclothing off one leg, and entered her as she sat on
the bed, ripping her and myself in the process so that we both bled.
I never knew her name. I have no recollection of the color of her
hair, the shape of her face, or any word she might have said, but I
still have an indelible memory of her pubic region, its color and its
shape, at the moment I assaulted it.

* * *

No one suspected me of carrying The Great Wad, not
even Classy Willie. I passed along the sap question to Willie over
drinks on the train out of Belgium. "Did Jack ever give you back
Biondo's bankroll?" He gave me a hangdog look that deflated his
dapper facade and reduced him forever in my mind to the status of
junior villain.

The Berlin lawyer I contacted when Jack was grabbed
at Aachen and held for four days was named Schwarzkopf, his name the
gift of a German detective who took a liking to Jack and spoke
English to him, calling him "der Schack," a mythic nickname
the German press had invented. (The French called Jack Monsieur
Diamant; the Italians, Giovanni Diamante; and he was "Cunning
Jackie" to the British.) Schwarzkopf turned out to be one of
Berlin's leading criminal lawyers, but he failed to delay Jack's
deportation for even a day. He even failed, when it became clear that
Germany was not an open door, to get Jack aboard the liner I'd booked
us on out of Bremen. The liner said no.

Nevertheless, Jack commissioned Schwarzkopf with a
one grand retainer to sue the German government for mistreatment and
expenses, and to grease enough levers to get him back into Germany
when the fuss went away. It was typical of Jack not to yield to what
other men would consider the inevitable.

When we met Schwarzkopf in the palm garden of the
Bremen hotel where Jack was staying, he brought along his nephew, a
young, half-drunk playwright named Weissberg, who in turn brought
along a gum-chewing, small-breasted, brassiereless, and dirty little
whore, dirtier than street whores need to be. She spoke only three
words near the end of our conversation, stroking Weissberg's silky
black mustache and calling him "
Mein
schén scheizekopf
. "

Weissberg had written a well-received play about
burglars, pimps, and pickpockets in Berlin, but he'd never met
anybody in the underworld with the exalted status of Jack and so he'd
persuaded Schwarzkopf to arrange a meeting. The violinist and
accordion player were sending out Straussian strains suitable to palm
gardens as we all drank our dunkelbock and schnapps under an open
sky. The tables were small, and so Classy Willie and The Count, who
both carried weapons now, sat apart from our quartet, just as Fogarty
and The Goose had on the mountain. Jack, like the aristocratic
Germans around us, had an acute sense of class distinction.

Jack's German mood, after he was refused first-class
passage, seemed, finally, glum. That's how I read it, and I was
wrong. He was more disturbed than that, but I was unable to perceive
it. I excuse myself for this failure of perception, for I think he
was concealing it even from himself. It was Weissberg who brought him
to explosion. Weissberg began with questions, not unlike the press,
only more penetrating.

"Do you know anyone in the underworld who has a
conscience, Herr Diamond?"

"I don't know anybody in the underworld. I'm
only a bootlegger."

"What are your feelings about willful murder?"

"I try to avoid it."

"I have known people who would steal and yet
would not maim another person. I know people who would maim and yet
stop short of murder. And I know of men who claim that they could
murder in anger but never in cold blood. Is this the way the
underworld is morally structured?"

Jack seemed to like that question. Possibly he'd
thought of its import over the years without ever raising the
question quite so precisely. He squinted at the playwright, who
talked with a cigarette constantly at the corner of his mouth, never
removing it, letting the ashes fall as they would, on his chest or
into the schnapps, or snorting them away with nasal winds. He was
accomplished at this gesture, which I guessed he'd adopted when he
first entered the underworld milieu.

"There's always a guy," Jack said to him,
"who's ready to do what you won't do."

"What is your limit? What is it you will not
do?"

"I've done everything at least twice," Jack
said with a satiric snicker, "and I sleep like a baby."

"
Wunderbar!
"
said Weissberg, and he threw his arms in the air and arched his body
backward in the chair in a physical demonstration of Eureka! We
listened to waltz music and we drank our legal alcohol and we watched
the playwright commune silently, smilingly, with this sudden
inflation of meaning. He threw off the half inch of cigarette from
his lip and leaned toward Jack.

"I want to write a play about your life,"
he said. "I want to come to America and live with you. I don't
care what might happen in your life, and I fully expect you'll kill
me if you think I'm informing on you. I want to see you eat and
breathe and sleep and work and do your bootleg things and steal and
rob and kill. I want to witness everything and write a great play,
and I will give it all to you, all my glory, all my money. I want
only the opportunity to write what I believe, which is that there are
similarities among the great artist, the great whore, and the great
criminal. The great artist is the work he does which outlives him.
The great whore lives in the memory of ineffable sensual
gratification that outlasts the liaison; she is also the beauty of
the parts, as is art. And she is the perversion of love, as art is
the exquisite perversion of reality. Of course, with both artist and
whore, the rewards are ever-greater recompense, ever-greater renown.
And I see the great criminal shining through the bold perversion of
his deeds, in his willingness to scale the highest moral barriers
(and what is morality to the whore, the artist?). In all three
professions is the  willingness to withhold nothing from one's
work. All three, when they achieve greatness, have also an undeniable
high style which separates them from the pedestrian mobs. For how
could we tell a great criminal from a thug in the alley, or a great
whore from a street slut, if it were not for style? , Yesssss, Herr
Diamond, yesssss! It is abandon, first, which goes without saying,
but it is finally style that makes you great and will make me great,
and it is why we are drinking here together in this elegant hotel and
listening to this elegant music and drinking this elegant schnapps.

"My little piglet here," he said, turning
to his own whore, who understood no English and whose breasts look
like two fried eggs in my memory, "knows nothing of style and
can never be more than a gutter animal. She is a filthy woman and I
do enjoy this. I enjoy paying her and stealing back the money. I
enjoy infecting her with my diseases and then paying her doctor
bills. I enjoy squeezing her nipples until she screams. She is a
superb companion, for she is stupid and knows nothing of me. She is
not capable of even conceiving of how the great whores of Germany
function today. I will have them, too, in time. But now my piglet
exalts my young life.

"And you, sir, are a great man and have achieved
great things. I can see in your eyes that you have leaped all moral
and social barriers, that you are no prisoner of creeds and dogmas.
You are intelligent, Herr Diamond. You live in the mind as well as on
the street of bullets and blood. I too live in the mind and in the
heart. My art is my soul. It is my body. Everything I do contributes
to my art. We live, you and I, Herr Diamond, in the higher realms of
the superman. We have each overcome our troublesome self. We exist in
the world of will. We have created the world before which we can
kneel. I speak Nietzsche's words. Do you know him? He says clearly
that he who must be a creator in good and evil has first to be a
destroyer and break values. We have both destroyed, Herr Diamond. We
have both broken old values. We have both gone into the higher planes
where the supermen dwell, and we will always triumph over the spirits
of defeat that try to pull us down. Will you let me live with you and
write your story—our story? Will you do this, Herr Diamond ?"

Jack gave it a few seconds, letting it all settle,
watching those electric eyes under Weissberg's bushy black brows.
Then he went over to The Count's table and came back with The Count's
small .25-caliber pistol half-concealed from the two dozen customers
who sat in the garden's magical twilight, letting Strauss, the gentle
swaying of the potted palms, and the intoxicating mellowness of the
afternoon's first drinks lull them into sweet escape. Jack pulled his
chair close to Weissberg's until they were knee to knee, and he then
showed the playwright the pistol, holding it loosely in his palm. He
said nothing at all for perhaps a minute, only held the weapon as a
display item. Then suddenly and with eyes turned snakish, with a
grimace of hate and viciousness whose like I had never seen before on
his face, he nosed the barrel downward and fired one shot into the
grass between Weissberg's feet, which were about six inches from each
other. The downward course of the firing, the small caliber of the
weapon, the shot muffled by pants legs and overwhelmed by music,
created a noise that did not disrupt. A few people turned our way,
but since we seemed at ease, no disturbance in process, the noise was
assumed to be something as trivial as a broken glass. Jack took no
notice of any external reaction. He said to Weissberg, "You're a
kid, a fool. "

The pistol was already in his pocket as he stood up
and tossed a handful of deutsche marks on the table to pay for the
drinks.

"My beautiful
shithead," said the dirty little whore, stroking Weissberg's
mustache, which by then was wet with tears, as wet as the front of
his pants. Weissberg, the young playwright, had very suddenly
liquefied.

* * *

Jack was two days out of Hamburg on the freighter
Hannover, the only passenger, before he heard the strange melodic
chaos coming up from below. He went through corridors and down a
stairway where he found the forty-five hundred canaries the Hannover
was bringing to the American bird-cage crowd. The Hartz Mountain
birds, yellow and green, stopped singing when Jack entered their
prison, and he thought: They've smelled me. But canaries are idiots
of smell and wizards of hearing and love. The prison was moist and
hot and Jack began to sweat. A sailor feeding the birds looked up and
said, "I'm feedin' the birds."

"So I see."

"If you don't feed 'em, they drop dead."

"Is that so?"

"They eat a lot of food."

"You wouldn't think it to look at them."

"They do, though. "

"Everybody needs a square meal," Jack said.

"Canaries especially."

"Can I help you feed them?"

"Nah. They wouldn't like you."

"What makes you think they wouldn't like me?"

"They know who you are. "

"The canaries know me?"

"You saw the way they quit singin' when you come
in?"

"I figured they were afraid of people. "

"They love people. They're afraid of you. "

"You're full of shit," Jack said.

"No, I'm not," said the sailor.

Jack opened a cage to gentle one of the birds. It
pecked once at his knuckle. He lifted the bird out and saw it was
dead. He put it in his pocket and opened another cage. That bird flew
out, silently, and perched on top of the highest stack of cages,
beyond Jack's reach unless he used the sailor's ladder. The bird
twisted its tail and shat on the floor in front of Jack.

"I told you," the sailor said. "They
don't want nothin' to do with you. "

"What've they got against me ?"

"Ask them. If you know what music is all about,
you can figure out what they're sayin'. You know how they learn to
sing so good? Listenin' to flutes and fiddles."