Mile High (19 page)

“Yes. I saw that.” Goff sat up quite straight.

“Why did you organize those robberies?”

Goff stared. His face darkened visibly because he could not have grown paler. “What are you talking about?”

“You are a thief.”

“Now, just a minute here!”

“You are a cheap package-snatcher—or should I say a mastermind of package snatchers?—and you disposed of the bonds through those tinhorn bucket shops you organized.”

“Who said that? That's a goddam lie. Who said that?”

“Goff, I want the money to be handed over to Willie Tobin before this bank closes on Friday.”

“
You
want the money? That wasn't your bank that was hit. They never hit your messengers.”

“Call it a fine.”

“A fine. The bonds were worth five million dollars! God knows how many people could have been involved. God knows where all that money could be now.”

“I hired you to work as a moneylender, not as a thief. You endangered my business when you had those packages snatched. Bring the money to Tobin by Friday afternoon or you'll be out of business.”

That sentence, which West thought could close him out, composed Goff, and his eyes showed their old, hard hatred. “You know banking, Mr. West, and you figured out a very good thing for me. But you don't know the people I work with, and you don't know how to put me out of business.”

West studied him the way a great chef de cuisine might look at the daily garbage. “Friday afternoon, Goff,” he said.

“Up your ass,” Goff answered and walked to the office door. As he touched the doorknob West called out to him and he turned. “You forgot your bank statements,” West said, holding them out. Goff returned and accepted the envelope. He walked to the door again and West called out again. He turned.

“Now, don't tell Bella Radin what we talked about today,” West said with mock severity.

When Goff reached the pavement on William Street he was nearly ill with rage. He forgot that he had driven to the bank in his car or that his driver was standing at the building entrance. He strode past the man, who came after him, touching his arm. Out of reflexive frustration Goff turned and struck the man heavily in the face, making him stagger sideways. Shocked at what he had done, he felt his anger cool. As curious crowds began to gather he helped the driver to right himself and, mumbling apologies, hurried the man toward the car. The driver was as astounded by the blow as by the fact that for the first time Goff had acknowledged him at all. They got into the car and Goff told the driver to take him to the Park Central Hotel. He peeled a fifty-dollar bill off a large roll of money and leaned forward to drop it in the driver's lap.

There were fourteen telephone messages at the hotel, but he ignored them. He ran a very cold bath and lay in it for ten minutes because that was what relaxed him most. He got into pajamas and a robe and called room service to send a waiter into his kitchen to make him a cup of Ovaltine. In about twenty minutes he felt calm and sleepy. It was five minutes to six. What was he in such an uproar about? He stretched out on the bed and began to sort everything into its place, but not all of the pieces would fit. How in God's name had West known he had engineered the bond heist? How had he found out he had floated the bonds away through the bucket shops—and how did he know Goff owned bucket shops? What was wrong here?

The only thing that could give Goff satisfaction gave him enormous satisfaction. West had had a fair run in the money-lending business. Ninety-eight percent of that kind of a turnover for thirteen years should be enough for the greediest banker in the world. West was finished now. It was all Goff's business now—100 percent Goff's. He felt so good about it that he began to marvel at the brass of the ice-water bastard demanding to be paid five million dollars from somebody else's bonds and calling it a “fine.” He was willing to steal the money from Goff, then call it a fine for stealing. Well, the cold-ass grabber had made his own square bed and he could have it. West saying he was going to put him out of business was a very funny line. Goff fell asleep.

He awoke to the sound of his doorbell ringing and to a pounding on the door. He rolled out of bed and put on a light. The noise stopped. He started across the living room toward the door when the ringing started again. “Shut up!” he shouted. “And you better have a goddam good reason.” He opened the door.

Three men stood there. Incredibly, one was Joe “the Boss” Masseria. He tried to register that before he saw that the other two were Frankie Yale and Frankie Marlowe. Joe the Boss hadn't shown himself out of his neighborhood for years because he had decided that it was dangerous to call attention to himself. He did the thinking. He had lieutenants to do the work. He ran all the rackets in New York: booze, narcotics, the Italian lottery, vice, extortion—name it, they belonged to Joe the Boss. Charley Lucky ran Manhattan for him. Ciro Terranova ran uptown and the Bronx. Frankie Yale ran Brooklyn for him. Joe ran all the big hoods, all the rackets, and he was head of the Unione, and in all the years he had done business with Goff they had met only once.

What the hell was this? He stared at Frankie Yale, his pal, his contact, the man he did business with and with whom he had had many a wonderful time. Goff was in the nightclub business with Frankie Marlowe and they owned a couple of fighters and a couple of horses together. Goff knew so much about these three men that the way they stood there looking at him was frightening. Frankie Yale was the richest man in Brooklyn, it occurred to him fleetingly. Yale had once sent a pair of diamond cufflinks to a newspaperman because the man had written that he was “the Beau Brummel of the underworld.” Joe the Boss was maybe three and a half times bigger than Capone—not Capone's scrapbook, Capone: Frankie Yale was
the
specialist for fancy hits. He handled only very big hits. He had killed Jim Colisimo and Dion O'Banion as a favor. And Marlowe was Yale's chief gunman.

“What is it, boys?” Goff said shakily. “What's the matter?” His voice broke. Masseria pushed him on the chest and sent him backward into the room. Marlowe locked the door.

“Frankie, listen—” he said to Yale.

“Shuddup.”

He had
made
Yale! He had made all of them. Without the money he had lent them they would be nothing—stevedores sweating on the docks or pimps or strong-arms. This was too much. Something had gone wrong. “I never keep cash here,” he said. “I swear there isn't six grand in the whole place.”

“Arnold?”

“Yes, Joe?”

“I got a contract to hit you.”

“Hit me?”
He looked frantically from one face to the other. His mouth became unsteady and he had to grit his teeth to stop its trembling. “Why? Whose contract? This is impossible. I do everything right. I help everybody. I helped you. Who wants me hit?”

They stared at him and he slid downward into a chair.

“Who?” Masseria asked resentfully. “You wanna know who? You think I turn out to handle goddam hits, you son of a bitch? You think I come alla way up here and Frankie comes alla way from Brooklyn because
we
wanna hit a fucking shylock?”

Goff was trembling uncontrollably. “They can't pay you what I can pay. There isn't anybody in this entire business, coast to coast, who can pay you more than I can pay. Lemme walk outta here with a suitcase and get on some ship. I'll go so far nobody'll ever see me again. I'll be like dead. You'll collect twice—from them and from me. Okay?”

Masseria nodded to Yale. Yale grasped the front of Goff's robe and pajamas and pulled him to his feet. “Why don't you do what you're told, you prick.”

“Do what, Frankie?” Goff was weeping. “I'll do anything. Tell me what.”

“Tomorrow when the banks open you get outta here and you take a payoff from certain bonds you got and you bring it downtown to a certain guy, you know who.”

Goff gaped. He couldn't seem to make himself understand. “You mean—
West?”

“Shaddopp!” Masseria roared. “I don' wanna know who! You unnastan'?
You
know who. That's enough. You hear?” Yale hit Goff in the gut with all his professional force and dropped him retching on the floor. Masseria walked up beside him and kicked him viciously in the head with his heavy shoe. He rolled Goff over with his foot so that Goff was staring up at him. “You get me mixed up wit' people like this again,” he said with heavy anger, “and you'll wish to God somebody would take a contract to come in and only kill you.”

In 1912, because of his extensive political connections, William Tobin, a well-known New York attorney, was named to the action committee of the National Brewers' Consortium and to the defense committee of the Personal Liberty League of the Distillers' Appeal. For the entire alcoholic-beverage industry he was able to swing into action such hopeless projects as the employment of dozens of costly experts to analyze dry strategy—which was available in the daily newspapers for two cents—and the beverage industry's boycott of firms that he pointed out as opposing traffic in beer and spirits (because they had tried to discourage on-the-job drinking by employees), such as the Pennsylvania Railroad, Procter & Gamble, and the United States Steel Corporation, which were then blacklisted. The Heinz Company was cited as an enemy because its founder was president of the Pennsylvania Sunday School Association, which had endorsed prohibition.

The Tobin Committee was able to raise rages among companies and consumers alike. Tobin succeeded in setting the brewers against the distillers and the vintners against the breweries, so that each secretly expected to drive the others out of the market; the brewers, particularly, had hopes of arranging to manufacture the only national alcoholic beverage. He also advised groups to bribe the wrong politicians, who would then vote dry or run shouting to the newspapers. Each dummy “front” organization Tobin formed for his industries to fight the prohibitionists was somehow exposed and destroyed. Wherever possible he guided the alcohol manufacturers to do everything wrong, every possible public and private mistake. All in all, Tobin made popular mistakes for his people, wholly aided by the fact that Americans had been educated for a generation through the WCTU's educational committees. Americans deeply wanted the brewers and distillers to be guilty.

His job well done, Tobin left political contact work in 1914 to accept a post as executive vice-president of Horizons A.G., a Swiss corporation dealing in imports. The new appointment made Tobin very happy. He was miserable when he was separated from Eddie, filled with dread and woe, since all the while he served the wet cause Eddie forbade him to attempt to come within a mile of him. They could not be seen together. Tobin could understand that that was necessary functionally, but it made him miserable, and were it not for the fact that he had to telephone Eddie every night to get his instructions and find out what it was he would be required to do next, he simply did not think he would have been able to stand it.

But that was over now, thank God. Eddie had given him a wonderful six-window office directly over Eddie's own office in the new West National Building. A direct telephone connection had been sunk into the building wall within a copper cable where no one could tamper with it. Willie Tobin had never known any other life than working for the Wests. Paddy had chosen him when he was thirteen because he had been so silent. Paddy had put him through law school and had broken him into politics; then Eddie, marvelous, marvelous Eddie, had polished him.

Willie was a small-boned man, elegant in his movements and his almost epicene taste in clothes, with large, limpid brown eyes that stared passively, even adoringly. He had a wonderful flair for scarves, which he wore instead of ties—not in public, of course, but at the office, since he saw no one but the staff personally; everything was done on the telephone. He still had the knack of silence, because he knew Eddie admired that, but with the staff he could rattle on like a blue jay. He had an entirely male staff. He thought that was much the best thing, considering the types who might possibly decide to visit the office—a bunch of hairy gorillas. Willie just seemed to vanish at the end of the working day. He never invited even the closest staff people to dinner or to his place even though some of them had had very, very big eyes over that prospect. He'd taken some of them to lunch. He'd taken a few of them to important performances of the ballet or to really good art shows, but never just one of them, in fact never less than three of them. He certainly had no women friends. He was absolutely crazy about Irene West—that was clearly there for everyone to see except Irene and Edward West. But when the staff people talked it over at
their
places almost every night of every week of the year they decided that Willie adored Irene because she was so close to Eddie that some of that wonderful stuff must rub off on her.

Willie's life, public and private, was like a human extension of a complicated telephone system. Edward West always knew where to find him simply because he tried not to stray from the telephone unless Eddie had okayed it first. He placed and took eighty and ninety telephone calls from New York, most states and Europe in the course of his twenty-four hour self-imposed duty. He concentrated the essence of these calls into précis form and took them himself to Eddie's office every morning, heavily sealed, names identified in code. He was, or became, absolutely indispensable because he lived to perfect ways to make himself indispensable to Eddie. But he made no grandiose efforts to advertise his brave activities. He did prodigies of work without showing effort. He murmured rather than spoke. He had the analytical ability to think his way through the consecutive parts and movements of a watch, but only the extremely observant (which did not include Edward West) knew he was as intelligent as he was because he really did work hard at diverting attention from himself. “You are not there to bellow opera arias,” he told himself.