Life and Death of a Tough Guy (25 page)

“So long, feller.”

Joey hung up. He leaned against the wall of the booth. He smiled. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God.” He searched in his pocket for nickels. Whatever they want, I don’t want, he thought.

Joey Case, enforcer, was like any other man in a hated job, wishing he had the nerve to quit but knowing he never would, doing his job as well as he could and yet always hoping things would work out against the boss.

He phoned the boys in his troop; Georgie, Pete, Tunafish, and the two new guys, Ed Roscamino and Leo the Goneph. They were all on hand, waiting — except Georgie. Joey left the booth, smiling. Even that God damn Georgie falling down on the job, out drinking or whoring, couldn’t get him down tonight. Not with the Dutchman still kicking around, a prize headache to the God damn Office.

He laughed when he saw the redhead in the green coat, and seizing her arm hurried to the curb where he whistled a cab.

“Where we going, Joey?” she asked.

“Where you wanna go, Sweetie?” he pulled her to him, kissed her on the mouth, the cab inching up Broadway, the bright lights whirling ahead of them like a swarm of purple and blue and green butterflies in a neon sunrise. He straightened up. He laughed, drunk without a shot. “How ‘bout the Mocambo?”

“Joey, that place is expensive. When we were there the last time, you said — ”

“What’s money anyway?”

“What’re you celebrating, Joey?”

That was a question for the monkeys, for when he considered what the hell he was celebrating, he couldn’t hit on the answer right away. Sure, he was glad he was out of the Dutchman job, if it was the Dutchman. But why the three cheers? The Dutchman didn’t know him from a hole in the ground, wouldn’t give him a nickel for a cup of coffee. The Dutchman’d watch him bleed to death without lifting as much as the corner of his handkerchief. Still, he was celebrating the Dutchman, one guy with the nerve to go against The Office. He was celebrating what he himself didn’t have the nerve to do. He’d had the nerve once…. Joey gritted his teeth at the memory. It was a million years ago now, that night when the Spotter’d made him eat dirt, made him say he’d killed the Bug. A little thing, but it was enough. He’d backtracked and once a guy backtracked, hell was the next stop. And that was no kidding. God, he should’ve spit in the Spotter’s face that night! Taken his chances. And either the Spotter would’ve won or he’d’ve been somebody. Somebody! Like the Dutchman maybe.

On the strength of might-have-been, he tipped the cabbie a solid buck and slipped a quarter into the hand of the out-of-work opening the cab door.

The Mocambo was another spot in town where the depression was kept out like some plague and the medicine used was a simple one: money. Money popped with the corks drawn out of the champagne bottles, money poured into the glasses, money glittered on the ringed hands of the women, money laughed out of the throats of their escorts. Noisy and crowded, vulgar and frenzied, the Mocambo was all these and yet its patrons felt safe here. Three or four highballs later, Enforcer Joey Case, drunk to start with, was floating.

“Baby,” he said as dance music played somewhere, reaching across the table for her hand, and blinking at her round face. In the dim Mocambo light, he saw the thin-faced tailor girl of long ago when he’d had his whole damn life before him and the sky the limit. “We been together a long time, baby, yuh know that?”

“A long time,” she agreed.

“I’m thirty-three,” he announced defiantly. “Yuh know that — thirty-three!” As if he half expected a sneer on her lips. But they were smiling rye-sherry fondly at him and he thought he had nobody else but her. Maybe he could even trust her…. He laughed bitterly, the enforcer laughed for who was kidding who? He could trust her only because he’d never told her a damn thing. Yep, he’d been smart, he’d used the old bean — Christ, let the Spotter croak! Smart, the one guy with the brains to keep his mouth shut with a dame. Smart, and ended up an errand boy anyway just like Georgie. He muttered. “What good’s it done me? What’s it all mean? The hell with it! You’re better than any of these God damn dames here. So what’d it get you? Suppose I marry you even, what good’s that? I’m gonna marry you one of these days,” he said. “Why the hell not?”

All about them men were whispering to their mistresses, on the dance floor men were dancing with other men’s wives, with only a down-beat enforcer promising marriage to the steady girl friend.

She was drunk, but not drunk enough to believe him, just drunk enough to remember hopes long since gone.

“You’re not gonna cry, Sweetie?”

“Me, Joey?”

“You don’t cry any more,” he stated the fact. “You usta — aw!” he jerked his thumb at the laughing flushed women, “I could go out with one of ‘em and you wouldn’ cry, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t cry.”

“No more cryin’!” he said as if it were a law he was decreeing in force from that minute on. “There’s enuf misery. Now, looka, Sweetie. This, this celebratin’ — You see, I hadda chance to be a big man down the waterfront. The Spotter, he killed it, see — ”

“Joey, let’s dance,” she said. “We haven’t danced a long time.”

He stared at her smiling face and realized she didn’t really care about his secrets. They’d been secrets too long. “Yeh, les dance,” he said.

Out on the floor, he squeezed her close and they pushed out into the squeeze of other bodies while the music like hands made of sound nudged at his shoulders. He felt tired, he wondered what was happening to his castiron belly. Getting old, he mourned fleetingly while the drunks on the floor steadied him and the yellow and red and blue spotlights wove a basket of light holding him and all the dancers. He watched her yellow forehead change into purple, her face flickering in the colored lights like a face in a dream. “You’re my girl,” he said to reassure himself, and although she whispered “Yes” and pressed close to him, he still wasn’t sure. A yammering drunk elbowed him and he muttered a curse and the jazz poured like the smoothest rye whiskey in the world as he danced with a stranger who didn’t want to know his secrets. She just doesn’t give a damn any more, he thought sadly.

“Yeh,” he said. “Yeh, yeh — ”

“What Joey?”

“Joey! Joey Case you mean. Classy huh?”

“It’s a classy name — ”

“What do you know! I’m jinxed — I could tell you but why should I?” he said and wished momentarily with all the fervor and innocence of a heartbroken drunk for a world where the best man could win with no Spotter calling the tune and no Office laying down the law….

When they left the Mocambo, cabbing back to their hotel, the newshawks were shouting the latest extra. This was another night when Hitler, the German Fuehrer had been squeezed out of the big black print by the Dutchman. That black print like funeral crepe was shaped into letters proclaiming the end of the Dutchman.

Enforcer Joey Case would read about it the next day.

• • •

“Why are you taking my picture?” The dying Dutchman yelled at the photographers crowded around the hospital bed. “You’re going to kill me.” And then he had stopped talking sense:

“Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword: French Canadian bean soup. A boy has never wept or dashed a thousand krim….”

What did the dying Dutchman mean? The editorial writers wrote editorials, the psychoanalysts analyzed, the general public scratched its head over those crazy words. “A boy has never wept or dashed a thousand krim.”

Language from worlds of dream — haunting Joey Case.

The Spotter opened his manila envelope and removed all the clippings and newspaper photos of Dutch Schultz. It was minutes before his scissors finished the job of destruction.

• • •

The death of Dutch Schultz, shot down with his two guards in a Newark saloon, was like a needle in the prosecuting arm of Thomas E. Dewey. He moved against Jimmy Hines, the Tammany politician whose name’d been linked not only with the Dutchman’s but with the big boys in The Office. He moved against Lucky Luciano. Dewey wanted to get Lucky Luciano, not on an income tax charge, but on his rackets. And all over town, the word traveled: “The heat’s on, Dewey’s after Lucky!”

It was like saying, “It’s the end of the world!” Here the protection had been gold-plated, with the cops taken care of, from the flatfoot pounding his beat right on up to the inspector in his cop-chauffeured car. The Office had helped the man in the blue uniform take care of his old age and the man in the magistrate’s gown take care of the old-age problems of his grandchildren. Law and justice maybe had been blindfolded, but the bandages were made of folding money, guaranteed to soothe the most sensitive of eyes.

“The heat’s on!” the word traveled. “Dewey’s after Lucky Luciano!”

When the little mobsters spoke the name of a man like Lucky Luciano, they sounded exactly like government clerks speaking the names of cabinet members.

Lucky Luciano! He was one of the big men in The Office, he had organized prostitution into a million dollar racket. Now, with Dewey serving subpoenas all over town, casting a huge net into the underworld, the racket buster was certain to catch, among the fishy madames and pimpy eels and miscellaneous poolroom sharks, some singing stool pigeons.

“The heat’s on!”

“The heat’s on!”

Another word was being passed around too, a private word from Charley Valinchi to his troops of enforcers. “Anybody we think’ll sing to Dewey we get rid of….”

• • •

Joey couldn’t believe it, but after all there were plenty of guys who looked like the Bug. So he’d drawn a guy who could’ve been the Bug’s twin brother.

Before him the street stretched, empty and dark as a tunnel, a street of warehouses and boarded-up tenements, the lights few and far between even in the tenements where people lived. Or were there people high up in the stone-like sheets hanging from that low and stony sky? Under his feet, he felt cobblestones like the cobblestoned streets of his boyhood. He realized he was walking in the middle of the gutter. Why? All because the guy was like the Bug and might jump out at him from one of those boarded-up doorways? The Bug? The Bug’s double? Okay, call the bastard Bug Number Two. Tailed him once and he’d tail him twice, only where was the bastard and why did he have to come to this street? A now-you-see-him, a now-you-don’t kind of a guy. Where was he hiding? He felt fear, its foul and filthy mouth sucking at him so that he was bone-dry, with not a drop of blood left in his body, not a drop of sweat. Fear forced him to pull his gun. And — “No-Gun Joey …” a voice called mockingly from a doorway. “No-Gun Joey, the enforcer …” it called safely from its doorway. He stood paralyzed in the middle of the gutter, listening to that mocking voice that yet sounded lonely, as lonely as the street. Run, his heart clapped, but he couldn’t for the voice was talking again and almost he could believe the street was talking and not a human being. “What you enforcin’ anyway? …” it hissed, mocking and lonely and sad. “What we wanna take pot shots at each other for? Why?”

Why?

Yeh, why? For what? For who?

Complete agreement was in his heart when the gun exploded. Not his gun, the other gun. He screamed inside of himself, hurled out of the gutter. Images of shooting gallery ducks floated along the grooves of consciousness. He flattened against a wall, trembling and grinning like a maniac at the shooting gallery ducks, the sitting ducks in his mind. He could feel that grin on his lips like a living thing, separate from himself: the grin of a lifetime. A grin of:
you got to be smart
. Oh, he was smart, so smart he’d almost gotten it that time. Took Bug Number Two to trick him. A now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t. The bastard wasn’t human. For a bastard like that you needed luck.

“Hey, Joey. No-Gun Joey …” the voice called while out of the high black walls, heads were calling too — had those heads always been there? — “what you enforcin’ anyway?”

Another bullet exploded and, crouching, he rushed towards the doorway. Luck, he prayed with tears in his eyes. Hesitating before plunging into the doorway of the gun. The shaking fingers of his left hand made the sign of luck, the cross, and he raced inside. Feeling as if he had dived down a chute head first, down a hole, a pit, and glimpsed, sensed, for it was too dark to see, a darkness running from him. He shot at it, controling himself to keep from emptying his gun. Missed! for the darkness still ran. A door opened, but it wasn’t a door but another hole, a pit toward which he was sinking. Against it, Bug Number Two was silhouetted, a shape of the pit, inhuman, fleshless. He pulled his trigger a second time, frantically pursuing, frantically counting his expended bullets. Two of his, two of mine, two of his, two of mine, I’m gonna die this time…. Jingles of childhood lifted in a pandemonium of lost words and blurred rhymes.

And where was Bug Number Two? There was only the empty dark doorway, shining now, a square of darkness, steadily shining. Somewhere there was a moon, he thought with a sense of revelation, blinking at that shining doorway, a square moon leading where…. He peered out across the yard at the shadowy fire-escapes of a factory. White stars powdered the blackest sky he had ever seen and high in the sky, the moon. Its huge yellow-white eye winked at him in warning. He stayed inside the door, ready to wait all night, while behind him the hallway breathed with a black breath, black as the barrel of a gun, with himself the bullet, himself the trigger, himself the target.

Or was the target the now-you-see-him hopped up out of dark corners and legging it for the fire-escapes? He pulled his trigger, ran out into the backyard, up the fire-escapes, no longer sure who was chasing who. Why hadn’t he stayed inside?

Why?

All he knew was that the standing still had changed into a wild and reckless climbing, the fire-escapes’ iron ladders lifting into the sky. He fired again, cursed, sobbing at his own recklessness. One, two, three, four, one two three four, four of his bullets, against two from Bug Number Two….

Oh, God, he thought. Oh, God, he prayed and, hoarding the two bullets left, he climbed. Through the bars of the fire-escapes he saw him, through iron bars, and for all his chasing he felt himself locked inside some iron place he would never escape. For this wasn’t Bug Number One, this was Bug Number Two, and he’d reach the top first with bullets galore to pour into him as he came over the edge. And he climbed and he climbed to the hole in the world the sky had become, a hole with a yellow-white eye staring at him. The eye of Bug Number Two…. Climbed to the top landing and the now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t fired at him. Fired, missed, fired, missed. And he fired at it, and whatever it was, human being or ghost, it dropped. He laughed, he was so happy. He walked to it, turned it over, and it said: “No-Gun Joey …” And it said: “What you enforcin anyway?”