Life and Death of a Tough Guy (18 page)

He likes working for me, Joey thought, glancing about this kitchen that could have been his mother’s or Georgie’s mother’s. The castiron stove unused now in the summer; the table covered with oil cloth; the sun threading the cracks in the windowshades. The old days stirred in his heart a second and he wished that things hadn’t changed between himself and Georgie.

When Fitzpatrick stepped into the kitchen, the sleep was still heavy on him. He yawned, his big tattooed arms hung as if weighted out of their sockets. He wore a sleeveless undershirt, gray pants, his yawny red brick Irish face like a hundred others down the West Side. Then suddenly he was fully awake. His sleepy face seemed to have grown a heavy jaw. There were a pair of sharp gray eyes on either side of his short twisted nose. “You guys ain’t from the union!” he said harshly.

The three men seemed to be meeting on a street corner, Joey and Georgie with their straw hats on their heads, tightening up, too, at the dock walloper’s anger.

“Not exactly,” said Joey. “We could help you against Luzzi.”

“Who the hell’s askin’ for help! Who are yuh guys?”

“Friends. We can be your friends or Luzzi’s — ”

“An’ you can git the hell outa here!”

The straw hats didn’t move an inch. Fitzpatrick shouted, “Git the hell outa here!” His wife rushed into the kitchen.

“You got her worried,” Joey remarked, smiling.

“Who’s askin’ you! Git out!” Jabbing his stiffened forefinger at the kitchen door. “Git out! Git out!”

“We’re goin’,” Joey said. “You’re okay, Fitzpatrick. You’re an hones’ union man! Trouble is you’re in my territory.” His eye brightened as he said my
territory
and by God it was his territory.
His
territory,
his
break,
his
Local 23….

Three days later, as Fitzpatrick was leaving his house for work, a parked car rolled down the street, Joey at the wheel. Big Georgie, Lefty and Billy Muhlen jumped out, blackjacks in their fists. They left Fitzpatrick on the sidewalk. He lay there like a fly glued in its own blood as the housewives screamed for the cops out of the windows.

“The cops,” the Spotter informed Joey, “they t’rowed his complaint into the terlet. Betcha three to one he comes around.” But Fitzpatrick was stubborn. He wouldn’t talk with John Terry who went to see him. John Terry, who described himself as, “A peepul’s politician, for the peepul first and last,” couldn’t do a thing with the dock walloper.

It was up to Joey again. He used finesse this time. He waited until Fitzpatrick was strong enough to go back to work. He let the union leader earn close to a week’s pay and even to fortify himself with a visit, after work, to a waterfront speak. When Fitzpatrick stepped out into the street, they kicked the whiskey out of him. They broke his twisted nose with the end of a blackjack. When they had him down, Georgie banged his fist into Fitzpatrick’s right eye, and then as deliberately into the left one.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick had to lead her husband like a blind man to the station house. “Them gangsters hit him in the eyes extra on purpose,” she wept. The desk sergeant listened to her and expressed his opinion it was Luzzi’s boys slugging Fitzpatrick. “You better get yourself some pertection,” the copper advised the union leader.

“What they payin’ you for pertection?” Fitzpatrick bellowed.

“You’re blind as a bat, man,” the desk sergeant replied calmly. “Don’t be dumb too.”

At the Hotel Delmore, it was a chipper Joey these days. “Sweetie,” he said one morning, a day or so after the second beating of Fitzpatrick. “Things’re comin’ along fine.” Freshly shaved, his dark blonde hair slicked down, he looked at her on the bed. She lay there as unmade as he was made up for the summer morning blowing through the windows. Her red hair uncombed, her face pale, two tiny clots in the inside corners of her eyes. “Yep, I’m the early bird!” he laughed.

“Joey — I still don’t understand it,” she said as he walked to the dresser to knot his necktie.

“What doncha understand, Sweetie?”

“Why should the longshoremen union — ”

“Let me run things?” he interrupted her. “Well, I skipped most-a the details so no wonder you don’t understand. But take it from me, it’s like everything else. A racket. It’s the pull what counts.” He patted his brown and blue necktie, walked to the closet for his jacket. “I’ll tell you somethin’ else I been thinkin’. This is a mick union and they don’t love the Jews. I been thinkin’ I oughta call myself Case. Spelled with a C, not a K. An American name, more like. How you like it? Pretty classy?”

“Joey, you know how I think,” she began timidly. “If it was up to me — ”

“You don’t know what class is! These’re a bunch of micks — but what the hell do I haffta explain it?” He slid into his summer jacket graceful as a dancer. “You’re in America only you still don’t know it.”

“Joey, I don’t want to fight with you — ”

“Shut up then! Those foreign yid names’re okay for tailor stores but that’s all!”

Her lips twisted as if he’d slapped her. She was silent. Her head lowered meekly on her neck, reminded him of his mother. The thought infuriated him. All she needed was a shawl. “Lay off the
vino!
And wouldn’t you be the one for the
vino!
The Jews and the ginzos!
Vino!
”

He was gone and after a while she got up and showered. After a while, she sat at the mirror.

That was she, Sadie Madofsky — or maybe he’d call her Sally now. Sally or Susie, to go with Case. C, A, S, E, with a C. Mrs. Sally Case. A real American.

She smiled bitterly at the face in the mirror. “Hello Mrs. Case,” she in a flat tinny voice like a perfumer in a vaudeville skit at the Palace. And wept a second later.

She lit a cigarette. She smoked two in a row and then shrugging, poured herself breakfast: a glass of sherry.

The phone rang — a woman who lived at the hotel, Mabel Sears by name, with whom she’d become friendly.

“What are you doing, Sadie, on this gorgeous day?” Mabel asked in plush la-de-da voice.

“Nothing.”

“Ditto! And am I sick of the papers! Did you read — They ask Rhinelander, ‘When you slept with Alice didn’t you see she was colored?’ That nigger had her nerve saying she was Spanish. Why can’t we meet millionaires like Rhinelander, or do you have to be a nigger, I ask you. Let’s have lunch, all right? I know a place where we could meet us some nice men — ”

“No.”

“Still the pure in heart. Oh, you dope. What does he do with his spare time?

Go to the library?”

“Mabel, I’ll hang up!”

“Your Joe’s just like my Bill — ”

“I’ll hang up on you!”

“I’m only trying to get some sense in you.”

“Never mind, never mind!”

“Why all the excitement? Oh, you redheads! Why don’t you do what I do when I’m excited, Sadie? I sit me down in a chair and I tell myself ‘Day by day in every way you’re getting better and better.’ ”

“That’s Dr. Coué’s — ”

“What do you care whose it is? It’s good for hangovers, too. I hate to see a girl drink before six P.M.”

“Whose drinking?”

“Who said you were? I’ll meet you in the lobby about one. All right?”

“All right.”

Everything was all right. Dr. Coué said so, and Dr. Coué ought to know.

The Local 23 election was held on a Thursday night in August, with twenty of Joey’s strongarms lined up against the walls outside the meeting room. At the table in the entrance, Joey sat, the membership lists typed in alphabetical order, before him. “What’s your name?” he said to the first dock wallopers coming up from the street. They glanced uneasily at the delegates from the poolrooms leaning against the walls. “What’s your name?” Joey repeated. “Only members in good standin’ vote tonight,” he stated. “No damn ringers tonight!” That night, members in good standing were limited to Fitzpatrick’s supporters. Fitzpatrick’d come around — two beatings were enough plus the fact that the authorities were completely uninterested in his complaints. Fitzpatrick’s supporters, their names checked off on the membership lists, were admitted; Luzzi’s supporters kept out. The Luzzi votes milled around, waiting for Luzzi; for Luzzi’s righthand men, Brennan and Pellicane.

Luzzi’d been knocked for a loop in the hallway of his own house; Brennan was in a hospital, his face smashed in; as for Pellicane, he’d listened to John Terry, “the peepul’s politician.” Fitzpatrick was elected president of Local 23. Unanimous.

During the next few months, the local was made into a juicy little racket. There was a cut to the Spotter and Quinn on the monthly membership dues. With Hooker Alfiero’s help, pilferage was organized solidly — with cuts to Hooker, the Spotter, Quinn and John Terry — the steamship lines footing this bill. “I know I promised the local to you,” the Spotter had said to Joey. “But John Terry, he gotta claim for what he done, and he got a coupla relatives to take care of. They’ll be in the local with Fitz. Joey, it just can’t be helped.”

“I was counting on that Local 23,” Joey’d said. For once he hadn’t been able to manage the pokerface of a good soldier.

“Aw, I’ll find you somethin’ better,” the Spotter’d promised him. “To cheer you up, here’s half a G for the good job. Honest, I’ll find you somethin’, Joey. Remember, they don’t call me the Spotter for nothin’, and added a sly digging thrust. “I spotted you when you was nothin’, remember, kiddo?”

As if either of them would ever forget that little fact again this side of the grave.

• • •

The first thing the Spotter did on awaking that May morning was to reach for his heart with the stealthy pickpocket hand of a man with a coronary. He picked its slow and even beat and looked with the palest of eyes at the light buff ceiling of his room at the Hotel Berkeley. The second thing the Spotter did was to turn on his bedside radio. From the square brown box an invisible songbird, female sex, fluttered: “ ‘Barney Google with those googly googly eyes….”

He turned up the volume, draped his black silk robe over his shoulders and to the tune of “googly googly” walked into the bathroom. Shaved to “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More.” Dried his bony jaws and chin to “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

An excited announcer broke in with a news bulletin: “Lindy’s on his way! History is in the making! Lindy’s on his way, God bless him! At 7:52 on this 20th day of May, 1927, Lindy, the man of destiny climbed up into his plane the Spirit of St. Louis….”

• • •

At ten o’clock, he sat with his partner Quinn in his lawyer’s booklined office, the brown and red legal tomes backdropping Emanuel Farber, counsellor at law to the lawless. On the lawyer’s mahogany desk lay a newspaper with a banner headline: LINDY TAKES OFF.

They figger he’ll make it in thirty hours,” Quinn remarked after the first hellos. He sat overflowing his chair, a fleshy and aging Irishman with a head on him like the end of a beam that had been sheathed with fat, his little eyes set in puffs of fat.

“Did you know Lindy’s father was a lawyer and a Congressman for quite a few years?” Farber said with enthusiasm.

“Okay, Manny, you’ll be a magistrate next year! A congressman, too!” the Spotter said. “Wanna know something? I’m sick and tired hearin’ about this Lindy. Maybe I oughta call off my meetin’ with Dutch Schultz account of Lindbergh? The hell with the Swede!”

“You ain’t human,” the old Quinn scolded him.

“Yeh, the only other guy that don’t ‘preciate Lindbergh today is John Terry an’ he happens to be dead.” The Spotter spoke with a definite relish like a man who has just put away a good meal.

The lawyer and the ex-saloonkeeper stared at him. The Spotter’s lips split into a little grin. “Maybe John should’ve been allowed to stick around for all the Lindbergh excitement?”

For a second all three thought of John Terry. He had been their man, another West Side politician with a regular route like a milkman between the desks of the police sergeants, the roll-tops of the big politicians, and the Spotter’s pay-off desk at the Elwood Realty. An under-the-table man, John Terry, shot down six days ago in the vestibule of a brownstone house in the Twenties bought on the proceeds of one under-the-table deal too many.

The lawyer was the first to speak — officially. “Spotter, I wouldn’t advise that kind of loose talk if I were you!” Pointedly, he added. “John Terry left quite a few friends.”

“Yeh, don’t talk ill of the dead!” the Spotter mocked, and lowering his head he crossed himself with a mocking hand.

“You oughta be ashamed!” Quinn said angrily.

The Spotter jeered. “Honest John Terry! He would’ve been alive today connivin’ and chiselin’ like he done his whole life if you hadn’t got so damn lazy. His blood’s on your hands, Quinn.”

“That’s an awful thing to say!” the fat old man said in a trembling voice.

“We’ll put it up to Manny here. Who was the one who got sick and tired supervisin’ the brewery — ”

“Spotter!” Quinn shouted. “What’s that got to do with Terry?”

“Lemme finish. Supervisin’ the brewery was your job. Okay, you squawked so much about retirin’ and one damn thing and another, we sold it and began buyin’ beer from Dutch Schultz. The worst thing we could’ve done — ”

“We didn’t know it then,” Quinn protested.

“No? We knew he was the prize mad dog of all time. Dutch Schultz the guy never satisfied. We know’d he was the kind always lookin’ to squeeze a guy out. And that goes for us.”

“We didn’t know he’d be turnin’ Terry into a Judas!”

The lawyer lifted the hands of a well-paid peacemaker and said, “We’ve got enough headaches without arguing among ourselves.” He smiled, “If these arguments continue, I’ll be flying to Paris myself — ”

The Spotter reached for the newspaper on the mahogany desk and flung it across the office. The front page, with its huge black headline and full-length picture of the pilot standing at his plane, pulled loose, flying with paper wings an instant before sailing down into the thick carpet.

“May I ask the purpose of that?” Manny Farber demanded.

“I’m seein’ Schultz twelve o’clock on that hoss piss he calls beer!”

“All right,” the lawyer placated him.

“I don’t wanna hear no more Lindbergh! We’re in a bad position. There’s a limit to what we can make our speaks buy and Schultz’s beer is that limit! Joey givin’ ‘em the muscle is no answer. They’re right and we’re wrong. They’re the ones losin’ the customers. We gotta improve the beer and that’s all there is to it. So I see the Dutchman and he promises better beer. With John Terry out, he’ll give us better beer awhile, but his promise you can wipe your feet on! The way I see it, we’ll have to make our own beer again.”