Legs (5 page)

He got up immediately when the key turned in the
front door. We all watched as Alice stopped to coo at two canaries in
a silver cage on the porch. When she went on to the kitchen, Fogarty
sat down on the sofa with Oxie, who made a surreptitious gesture to
Jack.

"Marion called about a half hour ago," he
whispered. "Here'?"

Oxie nodded and Jack made facial note of a
transgression by Marion.

"She wants you to see her this afternoon.
Important, she said."

"Goddamn it," Jack said, and he went into
the living room and up the stairs two at a time, leaving me on the
porch with the boys. Fogarty solved my curiosity, whispering:
"Marion's his friend. Those two canaries there—he calls one
Alice, one Marion." Oxie thought that was the funniest thing
he'd heard all week, and while he and Fogarty enjoyed the secret, I
went into the living room, which was furnished to Alice's taste:
overstuffed mohair chairs and sofa; walnut coffee table; matching end
tables and table lamps, their shades wrapped in cellophane;
double-thick Persian rug, probably worth a fortune if Jack hadn't
lifted it. My guess was he'd bought it hot; for while he loved the
splendid things of life, he had no inclination to pay for them. He
did let Alice pick out the furniture, for the hot items he kept
bringing home clashed with her plans, such as they were. She'd lined
the walls with framed calendar art and holy pictures—a sepia print
of the Madonna returning from Calvary and an incendiary, bleeding
sacred heart with a cross blooming atop the bloody fire. One wall was
hung with a magnificent blue silk tapestry. a souvenir from Jack's
days as a silk thief. Three items caught my eye on a small bookshelf
otherwise full of Zane Grey and James Oliver Curwood items: a copy of
Rabelais, an encyclopedia of Freemasonry, and the Douay Bible
sandwiched between them.

When he came down. I asked about the books. The
Freemasonry? Yeah, he was a Mason. "Good for business," he
said. "Every place you go in this country, the Protestant sons
of bitches got the money locked up."

And Rabelais? Jack picked up the book, fondled it. "A
lawyer gave it to me when I had my accident in l927." (He meant
when he was shot three times by the Lepke mob when they ambushed and
killed Little Augie Orgen.) "Terrific book. You ever read it?
Some screwball that Rab-a-lee."

I said I knew the book but avoided mentioning the
coincidence of Rabelais being here and also in the K. of C. library.
where I made my decision to come here, and in the additional fact
that a lawyer had given the book to Jack. I would let it all settle,
let the headiness go out of it. Otherwise, it would sound like some
kind of weird, fawning lie.

Alice heard us talking and came into the living room
in her apron. "Those damn Masons," she said. "I can't
get him away from that nonsense."' To rile her, Jack kept a
picture of an all-seeing eye inside a triangle, a weird God-figure in
the Masonic symbology, on the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Alice
raised this issue, obviously a recurring one.

"It sees you, Alice," Jack told her, "even
when you pee."

'"
My God doesn't watch me when I pee,"
Alice said. "My God is a gentleman. "

"As I get it," Jack said, "your God is
two gentlemen and a bird."

He opened the Rabelais to a page and began reading,
walking to the kitchen doorway to serenade Alice with the flow. He
read of Gargantua's arrival in Paris, his swiping of the Notre Dame
Cathedral bells for his giant horse, and then his perching on the
cathedral roof to rest while mobs of tiny Parisians stared up at him.
And so he decided to give them wine.

" 'He undid his magnificent codpiece' "—Jack
read with mock robustness; his voice was not robust but of a
moderately high pitch, excitable, capable of tremolos—"and
bringing out his john-thomas, pissed on them so fiercely that he
drowned two hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and eighteen
persons, not counting the women and small children." "

"My God, John," Alice said, "do you
have to read that?"

"Piss on 'em,"
Jack said. "I always felt that way." And holding the book
and talking again to me, he said, "You know what my full name
is? John Thomas Diamond." And he laughed even harder.

* * *

Jack threw the book on the sofa and went quickly out
to the porch, then to the car, and came back with a bottle of
champagne in each hand. He put both bottles on the coffee table, got
four glasses from the china closet.

"Alice, Speed, you want champagne?" They
both said no and he didn't ask Oxie. Why waste champagne on a fellow
who'd rather drink feet juice? He poured our champagne, the real
goods.

"Here's to a fruitful legal relationship,"
Jack said, rather elegantly, I patronizingly thought. I sipped and he
gulped and poured himself another. That disappeared and another
followed that, two and a half glasses in one minute.

"Thirsty," he explained, "and that's
prime stuff." But he was getting outside his skin. He finished
what was in his glass and then stared at me while I drank and told
him my experiences with bad champagne. He interrupted me, perfectly,
at a pause, with obvious intentions of letting me continue, and said:
"I don't want to interrupt your story, but how about a walk?
It's a great day and I want to show you a piece of land."

He led the way out the back door and along a stream
that ran parallel to the highway, and at a narrow point we leaped
across the stream and into the woods, all soft with pine needles,
quiet and cool, a young forest with the old granddaddy trees felled
long ago by loggers, and the new trees—pines, white birches,
maples, ash—tall but small of girth, reaching up for sunlight. A
cat named Pistol followed at Jack's heel like an obedience-trained
dog. He was an outdoor cat and had picked us up as we left the back
steps, where he'd been sitting, gnawing gently on a squirrel that
wasn't quite dead and that still had the good sense to run away
whenever Pistol relaxed his teeth. But that old squirrel never got
far from the next pounce.

Jack walked rapidly, stepping over the carcasses of
old trees, almost running, moving uphill, slipping but never falling,
surefooted as the cat. He turned around to check me out and at each
turn motioned to me with his right hand, backs of fingers upright
toward me, bending them toward himself in a come-on gesture. He said
nothing, but even today I can remember that gesture and the anxious
look on his face. He was not mindful of anything else except me and
his destination and whatever obstacle he and the cat might have to
dodge or leap over: an old log, jutting rocks, half-exposed boulders,
fallen limbs, entire dead trees, the residual corpses of the forest.
Then I saw a clearing and Jack stopped at its edge to wait for me. He
pointed across a meadow, a golden oval that rolled upward, a lone,
dead apple tree in the center like the stem and root of a vast yellow
mushroom turned upside down. Beyond the tree an old house stood on
the meadow's crest and Jack said that was where we were going.

He walked with me now, calmed, it seemed, by the
meadow or perhaps the sight of the house, all that speed from the
forest faded now into a relaxed smile, which I noticed just about the
time he asked me: "Why'd you come down here today. Marcus?"

'"
I was invited. And I was curious. I'm still
curious."

"I thought maybe I could talk you into going to
work for me."

"As a lawyer or riding shotgun?"

"I was thinking maybe you'd set up a branch of
your office in Catskill."

That was funny and I laughed. Without even telling me
what he wanted of me, he was moving me into his backyard.

"That doesn't make much sense," I said."My
practice is in Albany and so is my future. "

"What's in the future?"

"Politics. Maybe Congress, if the slot opens up.
Not very complicated really. It's all done with machinery."

"Rothstein had two district attorneys on his
payroll."

"Rothstein?"

"Arnold Rothstein. I used to work with him. And
he had a platoon of judges. Why did you get me a pistol permit?"

"l don't really have a reason."

"You knew I was no altar boy. "

"It cost me nothing. I remember we had a good
conversation at the Kenmore. Then you sent me the Scotch."

He clapped me on the shoulder. Electric gesture. "I
think you're a thief in your heart, Marcus."

"No, stealing's not my line. But I admit to a
corrupt nature. Prolligacy, sloth, licentiousness, gluttony, pride.
Proud of it all. That's closer to my center."

"I'll give you five hundred a month."

"To do what?"

"Be available. Be around when I need a lawyer.
Fix my traffic tickets. Get my boys out of jail when they get drunk
or go wild."

"How many boys?"

"Five, six. Maybe two dozen sometimes."

"Is that all? Doesn't seem like a full-time
job."

'"
You do more, I pay you more."

"What more might I do?"

"Maybe you could move some money for me. I want
to start some accounts in other banks up this way, and I don't want
to be connected to them. "

"So you want a lawyer on the payroll."

"Rothstein had Bill Fallon. Paid him a weekly
salary. You know who Fallon was?"

"Every lawyer in the U. S. knows who Fallon
was."

"He defended me and Eddie when we got mixed up
in a couple of scrapes. He wound up a drunk. You a drunk?"

"Not yet."

"Drunks are worthless. "

We were almost at the old house, a paintless
structure with all its windows and doors boarded up and behind it a
small barn, or maybe it was a stable, with its eyes gouged out and
holes in its roof. The panorama from this point was incredible, a 
one-hundred-and-eighty-degree vision of natural grandeur. I could see
why Jack liked the spot.

"I know the old man who owns this," he
said. "He owns the whole field, but the son of a bitch won't
sell. He owns half the mountainside. A stubborn old Dutchman, and he
won't sell. I want you to work on him. I don't care what the price
is."

"You want the house? The field? What?"

"I want all you can get, the whole hill and the
forest. I want this yellow field. Everything between here and my
place. Things are going good now and they can only get better. l want
to build up here. A big place. A place to live good. I saw one in
Westchester, a great place I liked. Roomy. A millionaire owned it.
Used to work for Woodrow Wilson. Had a big fireplace. Look at this
rock."

He picked up a purple stone lying at our feet.

"Plenty of this around," he said. "Have
the fireplace made out of it. Maybe face part of the house with it.
You ever see a house faced with purple rock?"

"Never."

"Me either. That's why I want it."

"You're settling in here in the Catskills then,
permanently?"

"Right. I'm settling in. Plenty of work around
here." He gave me a conspiratorial smile. "Lots of apple
trees. Lots of thirsty people." He looked over at the house.
"Van Wie is his name. He's about seventy now. He used to farm a
little up here a few years ago." Jack walked over to the shed
and looked inside. Grass was growing inside it, and hornets, birds,
and spiders were living in the eaves. Birdshit and cobwebs were
everywhere.

"Eddie and me did the old man a favor in here
one day," Jack said, reminding me and himself, and, in his way,
reminding me to remind the old man too that when Jack Diamond did you
a favor, you didn't turn your back on him. He turned suddenly to me,
not at all relaxed now, but with that anxious face I saw as he was
moving through the forest.

"Are you with me?"

"I could use the
money," I said. "I usually lose at pinochle."

* * *

I can recall now the quality of the light at that
moment when I went to work for Jack. The sun was dappling his
shoulders as he peered into the shadows of the empty stable with its
random birdshit, with his faithful cat Pistol (Marion later had a
poodle named Machine Gun), rubbing its sides against Jack's pants
legs, his head against Jack's shoe, the sun also dappling the black
and white of Pistol's tiger tom fur as it sent its electricity into
Jack the way Jack sent his own vital current into others. I mentioned
to Jack that he looked like a man remembering something a man doesn't
want to remember and he said yes, that was a thousand percent, and he
told me the two interlocking memories he was resisting.

One was of another summer day in 1927 when old man
Van Wie came down the meadow past the apple tree, which was not dead
then, and into the forest where Jack and Eddie Diamond were firing
pistols at a target nailed to a dead, fallen tree, recreation therapy
for Eddie, for whom the house, which would later be described as
Jack's fortress, had been purchased: mountain retreat for tubercular
brother.

The gunfire brought the old man, who might have
guessed the occupation of his neighbors but not their identities; for
Jack and Eddie were the Schaefer brothers back then, a pseudonym
lifted from Jack's in-laws; and Jack was not yet as famous a face as
he would be later in that same year when Lepke bullets would not
quite kill him. The farmer did not speak until both Jack and Eddie
had given him their full attention. He then said simply, "There
is a mad cat. Will you shoot it before it bites on my cow? It already
bit on my wife." Then the old man waited for a reply, staring
past his flat nose and drooping mustache, which, like his hair, he
had dyed black, giving him the comic look of a Keystone Kop; which
was perhaps why Jack said to him, "Why don't you call the
troopers? Or the sheriff. Have them do it."