Life and Death of a Tough Guy (14 page)

But there was a big secret and the Spotter knew what it was as well as Georgie. Maybe half the West Side had the idea Joey’d shot the Bug. But with Joey swearing he had nothing to do with it, his pals had to believe him. Even if they didn’t, they had to keep their traps shut. That was what a right guy had to do.

Georgie said not a word, his hands resting on his heavy thighs.

“Did you help Joey with the Bug?” the Spotter questioned, leaning back in his chair, completely relaxed although the office was suddenly alive with something like electricity. It leaped out of Georgie’s silences, it shone from the sweat on his forehead. “I’m askin’ you something, you big puke!” the Spotter said, but he wasn’t the least bit angry.

Georgie’s eyes like those of a dog were full of pleading.

“You’re doin’ the right thing, Georgie,” the Spotter acknowledged. “Only you’re forgettin’ I’m not one of the guys out there. I’m the guy who give you and Joey your job. You can’t pull no secrets on me. I’m not gonna sit here and have you playin’ dumb, Georgie!”

“Spotter, I ain’t doin’ nothin’ of the kind — ”

“What the hell’re you doin’ then? Looka, Georgie, I don’t need you and I don’t need Joey. See how far you guys get without me. You two guys better hit the road,” he suggested like a true blue friend trying to be helpful. “God damn wise guys!”

“I’m no wise guy!” Georgie protested in an anguished voice and almost the Spotter laughed.

“No? Then when I ask you somethin’ you answer. Georgie, I’m gonna give you just one more chance!”

Big Georgie sat there as if strapped to his chair — the chance the Spotter was about to offer him like a knife at his throat. “Did you help Joey with the Bug?”

Silence.

“Answer, you big bum, or get the hell out!”

“No,” said Georgie, sweating.

“Joey done it himself, huh?”

Again, Georgie was silent. As if the office had suddenly filled with witnesses urging him to be still. Witnesses from another time, 1-4-Alls in their knee pants and caps; the Badgers in the years before prohibition. The room shook with the most terrible of all their epithets:
Stool pigeon
. Hadn’t Georgie himself gone around singing the old-time bit of doggerel?

“Georgie,” the Spotter said. “Georgie — ”

“I don’t know no more’n you, Spotter!”

“He didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“If Joey didn’t get the Bug who did, Georgie?”

“Christ, I don’t know nothin’, Spotter!”

“Joey got the Bug! That’s what you know, Georgie! That’s what everybody knows so for Christ sake what’s the big secret, Georgie? What’s the harm when everybody knows Joey got the Bug? Georgie, ain’t that what you think, too? Answer, Georgie!”

Georgie slowly nodded, his eyes moist in that second of shame, both betrayer and betrayed.

The Spotter ordered Georgie to stay in the office while he walked into the noisy clubroom. Half the guys already had their pay envelopes in their pockets — no shot in the arm can beat it! — laughing and horsing around and feeling good. They greeted the Spotter as if he were a tin god come down from his pedestal and he waved his pale immaculately manicured hand at them all, and in earshot of them all spoke to Joey, “You and me got a date, kiddo.”

They cabbed over to the Hotel Berkeley and the Spotter, as with Georgie, again spoke of one thing and another. The Spotter closed the door of his room behind them. He smiled — the smile of a worn-out womanchaser alone with a new girl. Always the good host, the Spotter set down a bottle of whiskey and a glass on the table. Joey poured himself three inches of rye. The Spotter kept glancing at him. He saw a young, good-looking medium-built guy, not too husky or too slender, in a good brown suit and a two-dollar silk necktie. The Spotter got a real bang out of inspecting Joey’s glad rags. It was as if he’d crossed the room and personally felt the cloth and rubbed that silky necktie between his fingers. The Spotter got a bigger bang out of Joey’s easy pokerface.

“Here’s luck,” Joey said as if he began every evening with a cab ride to the Spotter’s private stock of whiskey.

“Drink hearty! Want another?”

“No, that was a hooker!”

“The Bug could’ve put away two or three like that one,” the Spotter remarked.

“He was a drinker,” Joey agreed, nodding solemnly like any man speaking well of the dead. “He had hollow legs, the Bug.”

“And all you know’s what you read inna papers?”

“ ‘Bout the Bug? Sure, like I told you, Spotter — ”

“You sure of that?” The Spotter smiled like some racketeer playing with a bought-and-paid-for-dame whom he could strip any second he wanted, flesh and dress, smile and girdle.

“Sure.”

The Spotter laughed. “You
sure
got a nerve. That’s what I like about you.” As he spoke, he realized he sort of meant it. Who’d fought for the kid against Clip Haley? Who’d watched over the kid like a good uncle, giving him every break? Nobody but the Old Spotter. “One thing you ain’t never learned, Joey,” the Spotter said like a good uncle a little on the sad side now. “This holdin’ out on me’s no good. This playin’ under the table’s n.g. twice over.”

“I don’t get you, Spotter.”

“There you go again. Crappin’ me again. But I can’t help likin’ you, Joey. You’re just like I usta be before I got such a sick bastid. Joey, you’re smart. Why does everybody think they can put one over on a sick bastid?”

“I don’t know what you’re gettin’ at, Spotter.”

“The Bug gets plastered. He comes for you at Sarge Killigan’s party. What’s to stop him from gettin’ plastered again, comin’ for you again? I would’ve done the same in your boots, Joey. Why didn’t you come and tell the Ol’ Spotter how it was?”

“ ‘Cause there was nothin’ to tell, Spotter.”

The Spotter stared at that innocent face. It was the phoniest of phonies but in his heart the Spotter couldn’t help handing it to the kid for trying. “You’re just a lil too snotty,” the Spotter said meditatively. “Okay, you lyin’ sonofabitch!” he snapped. “So there’s nothin’ to tell! Some other guy killed the Bug, right?”

“Yeh — ”

“Yeh, and I’m just a station house flatfoot to crap up! ‘Scuse me, Mister Kasow, for botherin’ you and don’t slam the door on the way out! Wait!” he cried as if the hotel were a detectives’ backroom after all. “I almost forgot — your pal Georgie, tonight over the club, he said you killed the Bug. That’s what he said. And shut up! I’m not finished yet! T’night, your pal Georgie said you killed the Bug — ”

“I didn’t — ”

“Okay, you didn’t, and Georgie’s just a damn liar, only shut up, I’m not finished!”

They were both silent. A silence that spread until it reached the hallway where the Bug’d died, his fingers clutching frantically at the floor. Joey couldn’t have spoken now even if he’d wanted to. He was in that hallway again, listening to the Bug moaning, “Mama, mama….” in a world where all the ears were stuffed with cotton and the only listener himself, with a gun in his fist. As he was the only listener in this room to hear the lost voice in his own throat begging for help. And who was there to help him? No one, not even Georgie….

“That’s what Georgie said or is he a liar?”

“A liar,” Joey mumbled tonelessly.

“Joey,” the Spotter stated. “You’re not gonna hold out on a damn thing any more. Get that into your head and you’ll be okay. I got big things in mind for you but you’re gonna follow orders from now on, Joey. Look alive, Joey!” His eyes flitted at the kid’s lost and betrayed face. “Makin’ a big secret out of the Bug! Okay, we’ll forget it! Only I wanna hear you say it. I want it right off your lil ruby lips. C’mon, Joey,” he coaxed. “Speak up! You can speak up now. What’s the big secret when Georgie’s give’d you away. You killed the Bug and I wanna hear you say it! Cmon!”

“I killed’m. You satisfied, you bastid?”

He had never called the Spotter bastard to his face — nobody in the gang ever had — but the Spotter only smiled. The Spotter was completely satisfied, his sunken eyes bright, victorious. At last, he’d broken the kid, broken into a part of him that nobody had ever touched. And the Spotter knew he wouldn’t have made it if not for Georgie — Georgie whom the kid’d trusted like a brother.

Every man had his weak spot: you could have sworn to that one on all the Bibles in the world.

Downstairs, Joey plunged like a blinded man into the river of light that was Broadway, he moved with the shirtsleeved sweaty crowds under the huge electric name of DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS. At the corner newsstand, an old man with a face like a gray rag was shouting hoarsely, “Lates’ extry on Hall-Mills sex moider. Lates’ extry….” Out in the gutter the cars honked, and the laughter of the joyriders shrilled wild like the saxes in the upstairs dance halls. Joey climbed a floor to an upstairs speak, he drank five straight whiskies in a row, but even here the Spotter’d followed him, a bony ghost mocking at him from behind all the red perspiring and arguing faces.

“Babe Ruth hit fifty-nine homers las’ season — ”

“That ain’t the pernt.”

“What’s the pernt then?”

“What Babe did was save the game see? When Rothstein fixt the World Series he killt the game, but the Babe and his bat, he saved the game….”

It was the Spotter, nobody else but the Spotter, only the Spotter, and who else could it be but the Spotter.

“Saved the game from what!” Joey shouted furiously at the red faces staring at him, to recognize the Spotter. And although there were other drunkards roaring their heads off, the bouncer had Joey by the neck and the seat of his pants and before he knew what was happening, he was outside the speak door, while downstairs, the crowds waiting for him, packed him up and carried him to the nowhere he’d glimpsed at the bottom of one whiskey glass too many.

“You’re drunk,” he heard her saying when he walked into their furnished room, “Joey — ”

“No, Sweetie, no Sweetie,” he protested vaguely.

“You’re drunk, Joey.”

“Who’s drunk?” He teetered around the narrow room where they’d been living almost two weeks now, marvelling at this dumb body of his that could get itself so God damn stinko. He paused, he shook his finger at her, grinning, because he alone knew the big secret. What big secret? “Think I’m drunk, doncha?” he asked, a foxy grandpa, tapping the tip of his forefinger against his temple. “Ol’ head ain’t drunk, Sweetie. Not on your life, Sweetie. Not the ol’ head.” And wistfully he thought that if only he could put his hands inside his head and take out what he knew, to take it out and hold it in his hands…. Hold what?

He remembered. Oh, Georgie, why’d you do it, he thought heartbrokenly, and mourned for himself too. Georgie wasn’t the only rat that night by a long-shot. He’d doublecrossed himself, too. Eaten dirt….

Joey lurched across the room to the double bed. The spring squealed at his dropped body. He covered his face with his hands.

“Joey, Joey,” she cried, running to him. “What’s the matter, Joey. Joey!”

“Who’s drunk?” he challenged her.

“Not you,” she humored him. She loosened his collar, unknotted his necktie. There was whiskey spilled on the tie. She took it off, wet the corner of a towel at the sink in the room, scrubbed the bright silk. She kept glancing at him as she worked. He seemed to be asleep, but when she tried to help him out of his suit, he muttered, “Who’s drunk? Who’s drunk — ”

“Joey — ”

“You’re drunk yourself! You’re alla you drunk….”

Sadie Madofsky winced. She sensed a truth in what he had said. For wasn’t she drunk to be living with Joey? And her father? Wasn’t he drunk, worse than drunk? She lay down on the bed without undressing, tried not to think, for it was no use thinking of her father, of Joey, of anyone.

Her father had refused to listen to her, calling her
kurva
and driving her out of the house.
Kurva
, whore. Oh, so she had been seeing him before, her father had hammered at her. And once a week! And lying! Visiting her girl friend, indeed! A liar, no daughter of his, a whore! It was all crystal clear to Tailor Madofsky. A girl was either good or bad: a judgment like a bolt of lightning to be borrowed out of the fist of the Tenement God whose obscure delegate the tailor was. Implacable and righteous and all-powerful, that God. His bolts lit, not only the Sabbath candles of the Jewish storekeepers, but the candles in the churches. Black was black and white was white; the heart’s different colors unseen in a world of bedazzled and slitted eyes. And so she had returned to Joey like a thousand other ‘bad girls’ fleeing the railroad flats where judgment had destroyed love, seeking love’s shattered doll wherever it could be found — even in the arms of lovers and seducers, even in the arms of seducers and pimps.

When Sadie had opened her eyes in her seducer’s room, she had stared, confused at Joey, a cigarette between his lips, his white shirt open at the collar. Where was she? Where? In a bed! What bed? The recognition of herself on his bed had plunged into her last innocence like a driving hot bolt. Herself — no one else was under this sheet! Herself — her dress above her hips. Herself, oh God.

Sadie had suddenly glimpsed herself as something shameful, obscene like a penciled drawing on a subway poster. Something no longer quite a person, but the hidden parts of a person. Herself, the raw meat, the spots of blood on the bedsheet. That couldn’t be she, she had thought in shock; and yet second by second the Sadie Madofsky who had attended school and helped her father in the store and kept his house like a little mother seemed to be hurrying away from the Sadie Madofsky half-naked in this bed.

“Sweetie,” the white shirt had said to her, smiling. “We had ourself some fun. How you feel? You better wash up and we’ll get some breakfast.”

So far, she hadn’t cried or screamed. She had watched White Shirt pick up a towel and bring it over to her. Recognized her underthings and stockings on the chair near the bed on which White Shirt had placed the towel. In front of the chair, she saw her shoes as if she had put them there herself, as if in her own house. She had stared at her things and they had stared back at her, inanimate but animate with memory, their betrayal the more awful because it was so casual.