Legs (15 page)

Jack listened, but all he
heard was silence. The bird shat at him again. Jack yelled, "Fuck
you, birdies," to the canaries and went back topside.

* * *

Jack heard from the radio operator that he was still
steady news across the world, that now everyone knew he was on a ship
with forty-five hundred canaries and that the corpse of Charlie
Northrup had still not turned up. The sailor who fed the birds came
up from below one morning, and Jack detected traces of the Northrup
mouth on the man, a semitaut rubber band with the round edges
downward turning. No smile, no smile. When the sailor opened the
hatch, Jack heard the music of the birds. He inched toward it as it
grew more and more glorious. The song heightened his sense of his own
insignificance. What song did he sing? Yet it unaccountably pleased
him to be nothing on the high seas, a just reward somehow; and now
the birds were singing of justice. Jack remembered how satisfying it
was to be shot and to linger at the edge of genuine nothingness. He
remembered touching the Kiki silk and strong Alice's forehead. How
rich! How something! And the vibrancy of command. Ah yes, that was
something. Get down, he said to a nigger truck driver one night on
the Lake George road; and the nigger showed him a knife, stupid
nigger, and Jack fired one shot through his forehead. When Murray
opened the door, the nigger fell out. Power! And when they got
Augie—the lovely pain under Jack's own heart. Bang! And in the gut.
Bang! Bang! Fantastic! Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart
for any fate.

"How's all the birdies?" Jack asked the
sailor.

"Very sad," said the sailor. "They
sing to overcome their sadness."

"That's not why birds sing," Jack said.

"Sure it is."

"Are you positive?"

"I live with birds. I'm part bird myself. You
should see my skin up close. Just like feathers."

"That's very unusual," Jack said.

The sailor rolled up his sleeve to show Jack his
biceps, which were covered with brown feathers.

"Now do you believe me?" the sailor asked.

"I certainly do. It's absolutely amazing.

"I used to be a barn swallow before I became a
sailor."

"You like it better as a bird or this way?"

"I had more fun as a bird."

"I would've given
nine to five you'd say that," Jack said.

* * *

A sailor told me a story when I boarded the Hannover
back in the States.

"A strange man, der Schack, und I like him,"
the sailor said. "Good company, many stories, full of the blood
that makes a man come to life as thousands around him become dead. A
natural man. A man who knows where to find Canis Major. I watch him
by the railing, looking out at the waves, not moving. He looks, he
trembles. He holds himself as you hold a woman. He is a man of
trouble. The captain sends me to his cabin when he does not come to
breakfast, und on the table by the bed are three birds, all dead. Der
Schack is sick. He says he vill take only soup.
For
three days he stays in the room und just before Philadelphia he comes
to me und says he wants to buy three birds to take home. 'They are my
friends,' he says. When I get the birds for him, he wants to pay me,
but I say, 'No, Schack, they are a gift.' In his cabin I look for the
three dead ones, but they are gone. "

* * *

I beat Jack home, caught a liner a day and a half
after he left Hamburg, and probably passed his floating birdhouse
before it was out of the English Channel. The money passed back to
America with me without incident, and so, I thought, had I, for I had
been a passive adjunct to Jack's notoriety, a shadowy figure in the
case, as they say. But my shadow ran ahead of me, and when I returned
to Albany and rented a safe-deposit box for the cash, I found I was
locally notorious. My picture had been taken in Germany with Jack,
and it had smiled all over the local papers. My legal maneuvering on
the Continent, however marginal and unpublic, had been ferreted out
by German newsmen and duly heralded at home.

I'd told Jack in Hamburg, when we shook hands at the
gangplank, that I'd meet him when he docked in the U. S. and I'd
bring Fogarty with me. But Fogarty, I discovered, couldn't leave the
state, and Jack was coming in to Philadelphia. The federals had
Fogarty on three trivial charges while they tried to link him to a
rum-boat raid they'd made at Briarcliff Manor, a hundred and
twenty-five thousand-dollar haul of booze, the week before we left
for Europe. This was the first I'd heard of the raid or of Fogarty's
arrest. He'd been waiting in a truck as the boat docked, and when he
spotted a cop, he tried to make a run. They charged him with
vagrancy, speeding, and failing to give a good account of himself, my
favorite misdemeanor.

'"
They can't tie me to it," Fogarty said on
the phone from Acra. "I never went near the boat. I was in the
truck taking a nap. "

"Excellent alibi. Was it Jack's booze?"

"I wouldn't know."

"As one Irishman to another, I don't trust you
either."

So I drove to Philadelphia by myself.

The reception for Jack was hardly equal to the hero
welcomes America gives its Lindys, but it surpassed anything I'd been
involved in personally since the armistice. I talked my way onto the
cutter that was to bring a customs inspector out to meet the Hannover
at quarantine on Marcus Hook. A dozen newsmen were also aboard, the
avant-garde eyeballs of the waiting masses.

We saw Jack on the bridge with the captain when we
pulled alongside. The captain called out, "No press, no press,"
when the customs inspector began to board, and Jack added his
greeting: "Any reporter comes near me I'll knock his fucking
brains out." The press grumbled and took pictures, and then Jack
saw me and I climbed aboard.

"I was just passing by," I said, "and
thought I might borrow a cup of birdseed."

Jack grinned and shook hands, looking like an ad for
what an ocean voyage can do for the complexion. He was in his
favorite suit—the blue double-breasted—with a light gray fedora,
a baby blue tie, and a white silk shirt.

"
I'm big pals with these birds," he said.
"Some of them whistle better than Jolson."

"You're looking fit."

"Greatest trip of my life," he said. The
captain was a hell of a fellow, the food was great, the sea air did
wonders for his stomach and blah blah blah. Marvelous how he could
lie. I told him about the reception he was going to get, some
evidence of it already in view: tugs, police launches, chartered
press boats, that customs cutter, all of them steaming along with us
as we glided up the Delaware toward Pier Thirty-four. Jack's navy.

"I'd estimate three thousand people and a
hundred cops," I said.

"Three thousand? They gonna throw confetti or
rocks?"

"Palm fronds is my guess. "

I told him about Fogarty's travel restrictions, and
asked: "Was that your booze they got on that boat?"

"Mostly mine," he said. "I had a
partner."

"A sizable loss—a hundred and twenty-five
thousand dollars."

"More. Add another twenty-five. "

"Were you on the scene?"

"Not at the dock. I was someplace else, waiting.
And nobody showed. My old pal Charlie Northrup worked that one up."

"He was your partner?"

"He tipped the feds."

"Ah. So that's what this is all about."

"No, that's not even half of it. What about
Jimmy Biondo?"

"I had a call from him. He wants his money."

"I don't blame him, but he's not going to get
it."

"He threatened me. He thinks maybe I've got it.
I didn't think he was that bright."

"How did he threaten you?"

"He said he'd make me dead."

"Don't pay any attention to that bullshit."

"It's not something I hear every day."

"I'll fix the son of a bitch."

"Why don't you just give him back his money?"

"Because I'm going back to Germany."

"Oh, Christ, Jack. Don't you learn'?"

When he talked to Schwarzkopf about greasing the way
for a return trip, I took it as the necessary response of an angry
reject. I couldn't imagine him really risking a second international
fiasco. But I was making a logical assumption and Jack was working
out of other file cabinets: his faith in his ability to triumph over
hostility, his refusal to recognize failure even after it had kicked
him in the crotch, and, of course, his enduring greed. As a
disinterested observer I might have accepted all but the greed as
admirable behavior, but now with Biondo on my back as well as Jack's,
such perseverance struck me as an open invitation to assassination.

"Let's get it straight, Jack. I'm not
comfortable."

"Who the hell is'?"

"I used to be. I want to get rid of that money
and I want to get rid of Jimmy Biondo. I went along for the ride, but
it's turned into something else. You don't know how big this Northrup
thing is. In the papers every day. Biggest corpse hunt in years,
which raises our old question again. Is he or isn't he? I've got to
know this time."

We were on the forward deck, watching the boats watch
us. The captain and his sailors were nowhere near us, but Jack looked
behind and then spoke so no breeze would
carry
the words aft.

"Yeah," he said.

"Great. Jesus Christ, that's great news."

"It wasn't my fault. "

"No?"

"It was a mistake. "

"Then that makes everything all right. "

"Don't fuck around with this, Marcus. I said it
was a mistake."

"It's a mistake I'm here."

"Then get the fuck off."

"When it's over. I don't quit on my clients. "

I think I knew even as I
said it that there would be no quitting. Certainly I sensed the
possibility, for just as Jack's life had taken a turning in Europe,
so had mine. Our public association had done me in with the Albany
crowd. They could do beer business all year long with Jack, but after
mass on Sunday they could also tut-tut over the awful gangsterism
fouling the city. It followed they could not run a man for the
Congress who was seeking justice for an animal like Jack. Forget
about Congress, was the word passed to me at the Elks Club bar after
I came home from Germany. When I think back now to whether the
Congress or the time with Jack would have given me more insight into
American life, I always lean to Jack. In the Congress I would have
learned how rudimentary hypocrisy is turned into patriotism, into
national policy, and into the law, and how hypocrites become heroes
of the people. What I learned from Jack was that politicians imitated
his style without comprehending it, without understanding that their
venality was only hypocritical. Jack failed thoroughly as a
hypocrite. He was a liar, of course, a perjurer, all of that, but he
was also a venal man of integrity, for he never ceased to renew his
vulnerability to punishment, death, and damnation. It is one thing to
be corrupt. It is another to behave in a psychologically responsible
way toward your own evil.

* * *

The police came aboard, just like Belgium, with a
warrant for Jack as a suspicious character. Jack was afraid of the
mob, afraid he was too much of a target, but the cops formed a wedge
around him and moved him through. The crowd pushed and broke the
wedge, calling out hellos and welcome backs to Jack; and some even
held up autograph books and pencils. When all that failed, the fan
club began to reach out to feel him, shake his hand. A woman who
couldn't reach him hit his arm with a newspaper and apologized—"I
only wanted to touch you, lover"—and a young man made a flying
leap at Jack's coat, got a cop's instead, also got clubbed.

"Murderer," someone called out.

"Go home. We don't want you here."

"Don't mind them, Jack."

"You look great, Legs. "

"He's only a bird in a gilded cage."

"Give us a smile, Legs," a photographer
said and Jack swung at him, missed.

"Hello, cuz!" came a yell and Jack turned
to see his cousin William, an ironworker. Jack asked the cops to let
him through, and William, six four with major muscles and the facial
blotch of a serious beer drinker, moved in beside the car where Jack
was now ringed by police.

"Lookin' snappy, Jack," William said.

"Wish I could say the same for you, Will."

"What's that you got there in the lapel?"

"Knight Templar pin, Will."

"Son of a bitch, Jack, ain't that a Protestant
bunch?"

"It's good for business, Will."

"You even turned on your own religion."

"Ah shit, Will, have you got anything to tell
me? How's Aunt Elly?"

"She's fit."

"Does she need anything'?"