Mile High (23 page)

“I
think
its Frenchy Marton.”

“Oh, dammit! He's notorious!” She kept looking, focusing on closer tables. “Bill, who is the man with the terribly hard black eyes and the chalk-white face? Over there, at the table with the two men who seem to be smoking the same cigar?”

Willie turned in his chair to look where she was indicating. “Uh-oh. That's Arnold Goff.”

“No!” Mrs. Winikus said incredulously.

“The sportsman?” Irene asked.

“Sportsman!” Mrs. Winikus snorted the word.

“The—uh—gambler,” Willie said.

“He has fixed everything there is to bet on, and he certainly looks like he takes dope,” Mrs. Winikus said.

“Oh, I suppose these people take dope on crackers,” Irene said. “
I
read somewhere that they call Mr. Goff ‘Mr. Underworld.' Isn't this thrilling, Jane? We are embedded in gangsters. Do you know him, Bill?”

“Well, yes. That is, I've met him.” Reflexively, he looked down the table to where Edward was lighting someone's cigarette. Tobin felt extremely important, which was extremely rare for him. Important in Irene's eyes. He thought, if this is what happens when she hears I know Arnold Goff, whatever would she do if I introduced her to Pal Al, the people's darling, Capone?

Irene's interest, somewhat reluctant, was the polite response she felt it proper to show, just as, in a drawing room, where the hostess has said casually that she and Chandler have just acquired Rembrandt's “The Night Watch,” would she like to see it? Irene would have had to show great interest, not because she was all that wild about Rembrandt but because it would mean so much to her hostess. Here was old Bill positively alight with all this new-found attention, and here was one of her guests of honor enjoying every second of everything she thought was happening around them, so Irene decided she would have to pretend that Arnold Goff was Rembrandt's “The Night Watch.”

“Do you know him well enough to invite him to join us, Bill?”

“Why, yes, as a matter of fact. Goff was the chap I called to get this table.”

“Then do ask him to come over, and please get him to bring his dreadfully sinister friends.”

“Oh, my God,” Mrs. Winikus said, “I can't
stand
it!”

Bill got up and made his slender, elegant way through the mire of yacking, yelling yahoos just as one of the men at Goff's table slipped off into the smoke.

“Everything okay?” Goff asked Tobin.

“Couldn't be better.”

“Meet Herm “Hot Horse” Levin, a great handicapper and a prime manufacturer of twenty-nine-ninety-fives, in case you have a friend you'd like to outfit in a few classy dresses at wholesale.”

“Any time,” Levin said.

“This is Mr. William Tobin,” Goff told him.

“I came over to invite you fellows to join our little party,” Bill said.

“Has anybody consulted Mr. West on that?”

“I am here as courier from Mrs. West.”

“Oh. Well, who can say no to that? Right, Herm?”

“Anything you say, Arn.”

The three men struggled back to the West party and Tobin made the introductions at Irene's end of the table. The others were unreachable back in the thick murk.

That night, as they were preparing for bed, Edward said, “Why was that cheap gambler sitting at my table tonight? How did he get there?”

“
Cheap
gambler? Mrs. Winikus said he had arranged for the only crooked World Series every played. And he seemed a very nice man.”

“I asked you: How did he get there?”

“I asked Bill to bring him over.”

“How did you know Tobin knew him?”

“He told me. Jane had pointed out this notorious gang-leader, Frenchy Marton, who was actually too far away for anyone to see, then I saw Mr. Goff and for something to say because Jane was so fascinated, I asked Bill who that was, then one thing led to another, then Bill, who just does things because he's so
sweet
, said it was Mr. Goff whom he had called to get the table, so I asked him to ask Mr. Goff and Mr. Levin to join our table. We thought Mr. Levin was some heinous gangster, but he turned out to be a dress manufacturer, which I thought was
very
amusing.”

“Irene, never do that again.”

“But what was wrong?”

“This is what was wrong. Those places are nothing but low marketplaces and—”

“But they're marketplaces for everyone. All the men at our table tonight were doing business
except
Bill. The most sinister thing that happened was that Mr. Levin gave me his card and made a mysterious mark at the corner of it that means, he told me, that I will get the real wholesale price if I buy dresses at his place.”

“Irene, Arnold Goff is about as low a specimen of human life as anyone can find anywhere. He is a suborner, probably a murderer, a cheat, a fence and a narcotics peddler and a few dozen other rotten things. He lives in a state of multiple mortal sin and if I were asked to name the lowest living American I would unhesitatingly name Arnold Goff. Now do you see what was wrong?”

“Yes, dear.”

“But it was not your fault, Irene, it was Tobin's fault.”

“No.”

“I'll see him tomorrow morning.”

“Edward, I said no. Bill is a gentleman who saw that Jane and I were hopelessly, childishly diverted by all the goings-on at the Silver Slipper nightclub, and he did what he did because I asked him and because he is gallant.”

“Well, he won't do it again.”

“Edward, when I make a mistake I have a right to the blame. I will not share the blame. You simply have to promise me you won't mention this to Bill.”

“All right, goddammit.”

“Edward! I don't think that taking the name of the Lord in vain makes you very much better than your estimate of Mr. Goff.”

“Aaaarrrgggghhhh!” He kicked a wastebasket across the room.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The year 1928 opened well. Transfers to the Horizons A.G. account in Zurich had averaged out at a steady $25,917,154.19 weekly for 1927, to be reinvested as foreign capital in the booming stock markets in Europe and the States. The liquor industry had stabilized well. The organizational shape-up of fewer and fewer small gangs in the national market areas and more and more large outfits had continued nicely and desirably. They were well into Phase Four, the national return to American distilleries. The country was prosperous, and this had meant a sharp increase in the public consumption of entertainment, gambling, narcotics and vice. The demands for the excitement of it all had helped shylocking and had expanded extortion activities and labor organization. Sickeningly, the Bolsheviks had seemed to gain a strong foothold in Soviet Russia, but Edward's European informants said this could not last, while that goddam Willie Tobin kept bringing in what he called “proof” that communism was not only permanently established in Russia but that the Russian government was determined to send it on the march to overthrow the United States. Tobin was like some babbling schoolgirl about it. He kept insisting that his “information” showed that Edward Courance West was not only a prime target but a
lever
and that they had many secret agents trying to get “information” that would “expose” Edward Courance West. He refused to believe it, but it made him sick, nonetheless. It could not be true, but if it were true, he would fight them as they had never been fought in their rotten lives.

If organized labor was a tremendously profitable business, it was also the key mass in American life where the Bolsheviki would attempt to strike, and he kept his finger on labor's pulse and had specialists, such as Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro, and hundred of their lieutenants throughout the labor movement report to Bill Tobin the slightest evidence of Communist infiltration, which, God damn them, was where Tobin was compiling the most revolutionary information on Soviet plans any agency, official or otherwise, had ever seen. The government had nothing like it. The President was a child in Communist affairs. Let them get their own information. He would sit and sift and judge what his people were constantly ferreting out and when the time came to act he would act. The certain point was that there did not seem to be any immediate danger. As America continued to grow, as the market continued to rise, as the people grew wealthier and more secure, the Communist conspiracy did not have a chance.

The year 1927 had been a record-breaker for everyone and it seemed that there was no stopping it. He had acquired a substantial interest in sixty-seven companies and sat on the boards of fifty-four of these. However, it had not been a good year entirely. Don Vito Cascio Ferro had died in Palermo's Ucciardone prison. He had been arrested in 1927 by Mussolini's police prefect, Cesare Mori, on a trumped-up charge of smuggling. He had ignored the court during his trial, much as if he had been sitting in his own flower-lined patio overlooking the bay. When his lawyer had appeared to be pleading for leniency, Don Vito gratingly had admonished him for speaking “in conflict with my principles and my authority.” He was permitted to address the court before it sentenced him. He spoke briefly and disdainfully to the judges. “As you have been unable to obtain proof of any of my numerous crimes, you have been reduced to condemning me for the only one I have never committed. May God have mercy on you.” Don Calogero Vizzini succeeded Don Vito. He was cordial and most helpful to Congressman Rei when the banker arrived in Palermo in the late spring to pay his last respects at the grave.

The anxiety over the Soviet threat (which could not be coped with tangibly enough) and the pressures of work, travel, decisions and public appearances (four honorary degrees in 1927) were all taxing, and Edward had to release the tension somehow. In March 1928, Rhonda Healey called Tobin at his new sixteen-room apartment at 64th and Fifth Avenue, where a clever architect had managed to use twelve hundred and eighteen square feet for closet space, to say that Eddie had beaten up one of her girls so badly that the girl was in critical condition at the Midtown Hospital and that she was afraid, when she regained consciousness, her brothers were going to force her to tell where it had happened and who had done it to her and that the worst kind of trouble could develop. Tobin hurried to the hospital.

The girl had a fractured skull, a broken jaw, multiple fractures of the right arm and seven badly splintered ribs that had edged her over into pneumonia. She was on the hospital's critical list. It was a simple matter to hold off the police investigation, but her family were waiting—in the hospital—in a near hysterical state. Did Mr. Tobin wish to talk to them? He thanked the doctors, but he said that meeting would have to wait for the moment. He paid a nurse a relatively large sum to sedate the three brothers without their knowledge, and for their own good (and for the good of the hospital) because in their enraged grief they were approaching violence; this was managed with coffee and with milk. He left instructions as “lawyer for the patient” that no expense was to be spared for medical care. He telephoned Congressman Rei from the telephone facing the waiting room and the three leather-jacketed brothers. They were very large men who sat, red-eyed and despairing, bursting irrationally into questions at each other in loud voices. They were workingmen. He hoped they were teamsters or stevedores.

“Hello, Ben? Bill Tobin. Fine. Yourself? Good. Ben, we have a little emergency here and, to tell the truth, I don't know exactly what kind of muscle is needed, but suffice to say, for the moment anyhow, one can't buy one's way out of this particular contretemps. I'm at the Midtown Hospital in New York. Yes. That would be marvelous. Suppose you ask him to ask for me at Manny Wolfe's at the corner of Forty-ninth and Third? Fine. I'll be at the bar. Thank you, Ben. And you can be sure this is very much a business call involving our peerless leader.”

There was no change in the girl's condition when he left fifteen minutes later. The brothers were much calmer, however. In thirty-five minutes he saw the bartender nod in his direction and two men who introduced themselves as Al and Reggie Sciortino joined him. Willie explained the problem in vague terms, because that was not what they were there to discuss. “Suffice to say accidents are accidents, but the three brothers will not accept that it could be an accident. And the point is if they started backtracking to the girl's employer and making a lot of noisy trouble there, if they began to beat up on one of the girl's coworkers and got some kind of an idea of who had caused the accident, that would all be pointless. They are very large, very strong, very violent, agitated men and they have to be discouraged.”

“If we get them outta the hospital, there ain't nothing to it. Was the broad a hooker?”

“Yes.”

“You the mout'piece for the operation?”

“Did anyone tell you to ask me any questions? Do I have to make the same phone call all over again?”

The other man touched his forearm. “He's only human. Forget it.”

“I'm genuwinely sorry,” the first man said.

“I have no idea how these things are done,” Willie sniffed. “The girl's name is Carmela Palermitano, and her brothers are in the fifth-floor waiting room.”

“Okay, fine. We'll handle it,” the older brother affirmed.

“You want them hit?”

“The point is this: They have to be completely discouraged from persisting in following up the idea of who caused this accident. If you can talk to them and discourage them, that would be fine. If you have to beat them to discourage them—well, they have to take their chances with the rest of us.” Willie was losing patience.

“But if they won't listen?”

“As I said, quite distinctly, Mr. Sciortino, they have to be discouraged. What you have to do to discourage them is your job.”

Carmela was able to see him, with Rhonda Healey, in five days. The brothers were no longer at the hospital. Rhonda introduced Willie as her lawyer. Carmela said she had a bad headache but otherwise everything was okay.