As Time Goes By (8 page)

"That's swell," said Lois. "Only my father says I'm
not allowed to have boyfriends until he says so."

They got off at the next stop and walked back to Ruby's. "What do you do, Rick?" asked Lois.

"This and that," he replied evasively.

"Oh, unemployed, huh?" said Lois, and his heart
fell. He didn't want her to think he was the bum he
thought he was. "Nothing wrong with that. Lots of fel
las are. Maybe you ought to come home with me and
meet Daddy. He gives away jobs like they was candy."

"Yeah,
sure," said Rick. In his mind's eye he envi
sioned a wild-haired Einstein, like the teachers at City College, or a sweatshop drudge with a bullwhip and a
chip on his shoulder. "What's his name?"

"Solomon Horowitz," she said. "Ever heard of
him?"

Rick stopped talking, and men he stopped walking.
Heard of him? Solomon Horowitz, the Mad Russian. Solomon Horowitz, the rackets king of upper Manhat
tan and the Bronx. From the uptown numbers games
in Harlem, Washington Heights, and Inwood to loan-
sharking in Riverdale, from arson-for-hire in East
Tremont, right down to a couple of neighborhood crap games in Marble Hill, Solly had the territory covered. Heard of him? Hell, Rick wanted to
be
him someday.

Lois brought him home to meet her parents and to
deliver the gefilte fish, more or less in that order. Rick
felt a stab of disappointment when she stopped in front
of a new law tenement on 127th Street just west of
Lenox Avenue and said, "Well, here we are. The Horo
witz family mansion!" She laughed derisively. "You were expecting maybe the Vanderbilt estate?"

Some of the apartment houses on the West Side had
names. This one didn't. The anonymous building was
no better or worse than any of its neighbors, and it cer
tainly put on no airs. There was a violin shop on the
ground floor and four levels of flats above it. Next door
was a kosher wine shop—still legal, despite Prohibi
tion. Around the corner was a movie theater and a gro
cery store.

"It's nice," said Rick. That was not entirely a lie; it
was nicer than his place.

They stood on the sidewalk for a moment together, sharing the same thoughts. The daughter of Solomon
Horowitz deserves better than this, thought Rick, surprised; the daughter of Solomon Horowitz is going to get better than this, thought Lois, determined.

They walked up two flights of stairs to the third floor.
Rick later learned that Solomon Horowitz had an aver
sion to living either on a low floor, where someone
unwelcome could climb through his window, or on the
top floor, where someone equally unwelcome might
descend from the roof. In business he liked to play
things right down the middle, and that was the way he
lived as well.

Lois rapped on a door near the head of the stairs.
"It's me!" she said. "I'm home."

Rick could sense that he was being observed from
the peephole, just for a moment, and then the door was
opened and Lois stepped across the threshold. "This is
Mr. Baline," she said. "I fainted on the el. He helped
me up. Be nice to him."

The next thing he knew he was face-to-face with
Solomon Horowitz, the Beer Baron of the Bronx.

A short, stout man with the iron grip of a steelworker
looked at him as if he were eyeballing a dray horse.
Horowitz was about five feet five inches tall and must
have weighed close to two hundred pounds, very little
of it fat. He wore a rumpled blue serge suit, a white
shirt unbuttoned at the collar, and a loud floral tie. His shoes were off, and as Rick couldn't help noticing, his
socks had been darned once or twice. To look at him, you'd never know he was one of the most successful
gangsters in New York.

"A man who does mine a good turn has done me a
good turn," he said. "And him I reward. You mar
ried?"

"No."

"Like music?"

"If it's good."

"Drink?"

"As much as the next guy."

"You a lush?"

"Not yet."

"Got a head for business?"

"Depends on what it is."

"Can you handle yourself in a fight?"

"Sure."

"Ever use a gun?"

"No, but I'm willing to learn."

"Are you a coward or a
fegeleh?"

"No."

"You want to
shtup
my daughter?"

"Daddy!"
cried Lois.

Rick looked at her. Her eyes told him not to, so he looked back at Mr. Horowitz. "No," he lied.

"Good; that you can forget about. I'm reserving her
for a rich
shaygets."
Horowitz resumed his interroga
tion: "What's your father do?"

"Never met the man."

"Dead?"

"That's what they tell me."

"Mother?"

"Only one."

"You afraid of anything besides her?"

"Just being a loser."

"You get along with the
shvartzers?"

"Well enough," he said.

"You looking for a job?"

"You could talk me into it," said Rick.

"Nightclub work okay?"

"You bet."

Solomon Horowitz looked Yitzik Baline up, down,
and sideways.

"The cut of this one's jib I like," he finally an
nounced. "Unemployed I can always use. See me to
morrow, this address." With that he began to close the
door in Rick's face.

From behind her father's back, Lois blew him a kiss.
"Good night, Ricky," she said. "See you again
someday."

As he waved good-bye to her, he realized that he had
forgotten all about his mother's knish. Right then and
there, he knew he was in love.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

New York, July 1931

The milk trucks came over the rise in Bedford Hills at dawn, just as Tick-Tock had said they would.

"Here you go, kid," Solly said to Rick, handing him the revolver. It was a blue steel Smith & Wesson .38,
primed and ready, with all six chambers loaded, and
the way the daylight glinted off it, you could practically
shave with it.

Rick nodded confidently. "Thanks, Solly," he said.
This was his first armed action, and he was ready for
it

It was six-fifteen on the morning of July 4,1931, and
already it was hot and humid and stifling. The milk
trucks belonged to Dion O'Hanlon, except they weren't
carrying milk. They were carrying whiskey down from
Canada to a thirsty midtown Manhattan. It was Solly's
intention to make sure thirsts were quenched uptown
and in the Bronx first.

This part of Westchester was supposed to be their
cordon sanitaire, a place they could drive through with
out fear of molestation or hijacking. That's what
O'Hanlon paid his protection money to the Westchester
cops for, and that's what he expected to get in return.
The boys driving his trucks had gotten lazy, though.
Today, they were as unwary as the romping schoolkids
at P.S. 31 in the Bronx. Today, O'Hanlon's money was
no good here. Solomon Horowitz had outbid him. He
felt it was his patriotic duty.

Not to mention he'd had to. He needed the liquor for
his clubs, and O'Hanlon had recently euchred him out
of a sweet deal up in Montreal that Horowitz had
thought he'd locked up.

"Zei gesunt,
Ricky," said Solly. "Remember, never pull your piece unless you plan to shoot somebody. Never shoot unless you plan to hit somebody. Otherwise maybe they get mad and hit you back."

Rick watched the boss move away briskly. For a
stout man, Solly was a nimble fellow.

Rick began to take aim as the first truck cab came
into his sights. Tick-Tock Schapiro, Solly's right-hand
man and his third cousin, in that order, slapped his
hand down hard. "Watch it, punk," he growled. "You
might hurt somebody with that thing."

Tick-Tock got no quarrel from Rick. Schapiro was
six feet four if he was an inch, and every inch of him
was mean. His given name was Emmanuel, but nobody
ever used it. He had acquired his nickname when he
was thirteen: the ticking of the grandfather clock in the tiny hallway of the Schapiro family apartment on Little
Water Street was driving him nuts, so he went out and
acquired his first piece from a Five Pointer over on An
thony Street, brought it home just as pleased as punch,
and shot the bejesus out of the clock's face, taking spe
cial pleasure in watching the glass front shatter, the hands of the clock spin off, and the inner mechanism
explode into a thousand pieces that no Swiss clock-
maker could ever put back together again.

When his
oma
complained about what he had done to her clock, which she had brought over from Ger
many, he threw her down a flight of stairs. Tick-Tock told the cops she'd slipped. His mother, who'd seen the whole thing, gave them the same story. Tick-Tock had
that effect on people.

Tick-Tock was also Solomon Horowitz's most valu
able asset in his newly escalating battle with O'Hanlon.
Schapiro was big, but he wasn't dumb, and he had de
veloped the best inside information on the Irishman's booze shipments. How he did it was anybody's guess.
Tick-Tock didn't talk much.

"Lemme show ya," he said. Coolly Tick-Tock aimed
his pistol at the lead truck and shot out the front tires. The vehicle swerved precipitously as its wheels were
transformed into a shower of rubber shards. Schapiro
was a hell of a shot, as even Kinsella, the driver of this
particular truck, would have had to admit. But with no
control over his truck he was helpless as it swerved off
the road, grazed a tree, and rolled onto its side. Sweat,
cordite, and burning rubber mingled in the air like some obscene perfume that wouldn't be offered for
sale at the big new Bloomingdale's store on 59th Street any time soon.

That's why the gang carried fire extinguishers. Pinky
Tannenbaum, Abie Cohen, and Laz Lowenstein
sprinted toward the burning truck, spraying gunfire and
foam more or less simultaneously. Meanwhile the rest
of the boys enfiladed the convoy, riddling the cabs of the other three trucks like they were the metal turkeys
at Luna Park, the ones you could pop to impress your girl, win a stuffed animal, and maybe get lucky, too.

In the teeth of the ambush, the Irishers jumped out
of their trucks like Aran fishermen abandoning their curraghs in a storm. They fired as they dropped from
steering wheels and shotgun positions, blasting back as
they scuttled for safety, but they didn't have a chance.
Horowitz's men were tough and disciplined, like their
leader, and they wasted no lead. In less than a minute
the battle of Bedford Hills was over, as even the dimmest of O'Hanlon's gangsters realized it was not worth
dying to save a few thousand gallons of Canadian Club.
They threw their pieces to the ground in surrender.

Tick-Tock wanted to shoot them all where they
stood, but Solly refused. "We're bootleggers, not red Indians," he said. "We take no scalps." He turned to O'Hanlon's men, waving his pistol in the air and yell
ing, "Get outta here, you sons of bitches bastards."

O'Hanlon's boys didn't need to be told twice. They
turned and ran. How they would get back to New York
was their problem.

Although he knew O'Hanlon wouldn't see it like
this, the way Solly Horowitz had things figured, this
booze was his. He used to have a straight pipeline from
the Michaelson family's distilleries in Quebec; he'd
been doing business with them for years, ever since
Congress had handed him a gift called the Volstead
Act. Lately, though, O'Hanlon was bending, if not outright breaking, their understanding about who got what
and from which suppliers, and he'd been chiseling him
with Michaelson, bidding up the price and increasing the volume. That was no way to do business, unless Dion was trying to put Solly out of business.

Ordinarily the road through Bedford Hills was an
O'Hanlon highway, while Solly generally brought his
booze down the other side of the Hudson, through the
Catskills via Newburgh and the river. In Solly's opin
ion he was only getting back what should have been his
in the first place. Solomon Horowitz did not appreciate
another man's taking what belonged to him.

O'Hanlon would be furious, Solly knew, but that was
tough. He wasn't about to start letting himself get mus
cled by the Irishman and his new allies, Salucci and
Weinberg. Why, Solomon Horowitz had been running gangs in New York when that little
pisher
Irving Wein
berg was still wetting his short pants. And if the day
ever came that a fresh-off-the-boat wop like Salucci
could start pushing him around with impunity ... well,
that day would never come.

This would get their attention.

Horowitz strolled over to the now abandoned cara
van. Rick was about to holster his gat when, out of the
corner of his eye, he caught an arm, a hand, a finger, a
trigger, all moving. Without thinking he knocked Solly
to his knees and came up firing.

He'd raised his gun just as O'Hanlon's man had
raised his. Rick was faster. His .38-caliber bullet
slammed into the man's wrist and shattered it on the
spot. He'd fired reflexively, just the way Solly had
taught him in all those hours of practice in the Harlem
backyards. Yitzik Baline was a natural with a heater.

Solly turned to look at Rick admiringly. "Nice
shooting," he said. If his close brush with death bothered him, he wouldn't let it show. Solomon Horowitz
never let anybody see him sweat.

"Yeah, Lois is gonna be real proud of you, hero,"
sneered Tick-Tock, who had come back from the fray
mad because he hadn't gotten to kill anybody. He
walked over to the wounded man and shot him in the head. There: he felt much better now. "You know," he
said, turning his attention back to Rick, "I think she's kind of sweet on you."

Solly didn't answer but instead glowered at his
cousin. As far as Lois Horowitz was concerned, her
father had big plans for her, and they didn't include
any of the mugs and yeggs in the gang. In his presence,
you didn't joke about Lois's being sweet on anybody.
In fact, you didn't even mention her. Not if you wanted
to live a long, prosperous, and healthy life. That went
for everybody, and that went for Tick-Tock double, be
cause after all, Tick-Tock was family. Sort of.