Life and Death of a Tough Guy (27 page)

“What for?”

He leaned closer and said. “They were takin’ you for a ride tonight’s what for.” And knew now it was no dream, for drunk as Georgie was, this bit of news hit home like the point of an ice pick. “The Spotter put the mark on you, Georgie! You dumb sonofabitch, I warned you not to keep pesterin’ him.”

Water poured in the sink, the walls were painted blue and scribbled with the pencils of idlers and drunks, and Joey, staring into Georgie’s face, knew it was no dream. For Georgie’s eyes seemed to be shouting: Me!
A mark on me!
Endless
Me’s!
like soap bubbles from a pipe seemed to be bubbling up from Georgie’s clenched lips.
Me! Me! …

“Georgie,” he heard himself saying and the sensation of dream closed in again like moving walls, all the walls painted blue. For what right did he have to be doing what he was doing? A job was a job, an order an order, and The Office was never wrong. He must be goofed-up to be doing what he was doing. Who the hell was he to fight Them. “Georgie, you gotta blow outa town! You’re marked! Christ, George,
why’d
you have to pester the Spotter?”

Why? There was no answer to that. And if there was, it didn’t mean a damn any more. “Soak your friggen head!” he ordered. “We can’t stay here a whole friggen night!”

He watched Georgie lower his big head and splash his black hair and face. I’m nuts, Joey thought. Goofed-up. He pulled out his wallet, he counted forty-three bucks and shoved the wallet back into his top coat pocket. “Got any dough?” he asked Georgie.

“Dunno,” Georgie spluttered and wet-handed he dug his wallet out of his rear pocket. Joey snatched it from him, counted twelve bucks.

“Cheap bastard!” Joey cursed like a madman for a second. Oh God, he mourned; I’m doing all this for what? For a no-good cheap bastard…. As if that were the final straw.

When they blew out of the coffee pot, Georgie had forty-two of Joey’s bucks in his wallet plus his own twelve. And the transference of the money, like everything else tonight was out of a dream. For when Joey had returned Georgie’s wallet with the forty-two in new money, Georgie’d dropped it to the floor. Into a puddle of water under the sink. Had retrieved it, had dried it on a wad of toilet paper. And only then had Georgie come alive to what was going on tonight, his teeth chattering as if that wet wallet had plunged him into an icy shower. “I can’t believe it, Joey,” he’d mumbled. “I can’t believe it.”

“Better believe it! You’re takin’ the train to Philly, Georgie.” Georgie had sobbed like a baby and Joey’d socked him on the shoulder with all his might, “Stop that, stop that! Philly! Get that! Don’t show your face again! You stay in Philly! Get that! Don’t show your face again! Stay there! You come back I’m good as dead. That Pete bastid was kinda suspicious before. Christ!”

Who had been talking so smart about Philly? Himself? Couldn’t be. A smart guy wouldn’t go around hiding in stinking toilets with a sonofabitch marked lousy.

Christ, Joey thought as they got into the car. Christ, he thought as he drove. Was Georgie sitting next to him? Or was the guy next to him Petey? Oh, Christ, what was he letting himself in for?

But like a dream-man magnetized to the wheel, he couldn’t do anything but drive, the most perfect driver in the whole nighttime town — red light you stop! green light you go! Clutch and brake for a complete stop, first gear, second gear, third gear…. And the nighttime town, all of it, reddish sky, people on the sidewalks, lights, all of it, fitted snug and cozy inside the Pennsylvania Railroad Station where under a ceiling a mile above their heads, he led Georgie to the ticket windows, bought a one-way to Philly, hurried to the gates. There was a red and gold sign:
Newark, Princeton Junction, Trenton, Philadelphia
and there were people all around them but none of them were Petey, for Joey searched and the only guy to give him the creeps was a skinny guy in a black hat but it wasn’t the Spotter, no it wasn’t the Spotter, at least not yet, and the waiting people picked up their bags and Joey pushed at Georgie’s shoulder. “You don’t wanna miss your train,” he heard himself saying. “Remember, Georgie, keep outa Noo Yawk, Georgie!” And in that moment of leaving and departure, dream-like as such moments always are, as if the surging crowd were rushing away from all that they’d ever known, towards some pearly gate, Georgie hugged Joey for a second and that renegade enforcer banged big Georgie on the back in farewell with a gladness he hadn’t known in years. “Damn ‘em, Georgie! Damn ‘em!” Joey said.

Moving with the crowd smaller, smaller, Georgie changed into the old Georgie of their kid days…. And the gates closed.

What’d happened? It was hard to believe. Lead-footed he walked into the Waiting Room, sat down on one of the long endless dark brown benches. The waiting room was full of faces he’d never seen before and would never see again. Men and women waiting in a place where all leavings and departures seemed an illusion, waiting like prisoners for dreamlike trains that would never come….

What he was waiting for? Where was he going? He told himself he had to think. Think? That was a hot one. All the thinking’d been done when he’d put Georgie on the express to Philly. Joey sat there and the silence of waiting which is like the hush in the hours after midnight sounded in his ears. You better think, he advised himself humbly. Think what? Think of the car you parked. What for? Not a chance in a million Pete’d see it. Pete! Pete’s phoned Charley Valinchi by now sure as fate, and Charley’d be phoning him, and if Charley didn’t believe him he could kiss his life good-bye.

Christ! What’d he done tonight? What was to stop Georgie from getting soused in Philly and coming back on the next train. Nothing. Forty-two and twelve was only fifty-four bucks. Not much. Enough for a drunk, a dame. That sonofabitch might do anything, come back, run to the Spotter. Joey thought: I deserve it. I got it coming. They’ll send Georgie after me….

And in that waiting room where people were dozing, sitting with drooping eyelids, Joey’s eyelids stretched tautly open on an imaginary locked door. It swung wide and he saw Georgie with an ice pick in his hands…. And if not Georgie, Pete. Somebody. He lit a cigarette and the smoke he blew out into the stale dead smoke of the waiting room felt like the last breath of life in his lungs. No use kidding himself. He’d bucked The Office. His life wasn’t worth a lead cent. He’d bucked The Office. Nobody could get away with that. Nobody. Not even the Dutchman with his mob and bodyguards and politicians and lawyers.

The loudspeakers announced a train. Some of the people in the waiting room picked up their valises and bundles, stumbling towards the gates like sleepwalkers. While in Joey’s mind a private train dispatcher of his own began to bawl out private destinations: YOU OUGHTA GO TO PHILLY TOO…. IF GEORGIE COMES BACK YOU’RE DONE … PHILLY WHILE YOU GOT THE CHANCE … GO TO PHILLY … GO TO DEWEY …

He started as if some stool pigeon’d shouted his name out behind him. I’m getting soft in the brain, he thought frantically. I’m getting soft if I can think of that for a single second. Even here, alone, with myself.

He looked at his wrist watch. It was 1:19. As if the neat regular face of his watch with its twelve eyes, each exactly the same distance from the other, had calmed him, he thought: Joey, no sense working yourself up. Georgie’s on his way to Philly. He won’t come back. Not tonight anyway. So what you do is go back to the hotel and see if Charley’s phoned. And if he did, you get your answer pat. You got rid of Georgie, you dumped him in the bushes.

Bushes? …
He grinned wildly. What bushes? The bushes in Central Park, the bushes up near Albany, the bushes in Sullivan, no, Solomon County, phone Pete Bowers and ask him if it’s okay to call it Sullivan. Sullivan, Solomon, Sullivan, Solomon, his head jingled off, Sullivan, Solomon….

He went into the Men’s Room. The walls were tiled white, and he thought of the blue walls where he’d brought Georgie, and maybe he ought to soak his head in the sink too, only who’d put him on the train to Philly, who’d give him forty-two bucks in cash? The Spotter for old time’s sake? The Spotter? Nah! Sooner get it from the Dutchman…. Joey washed his hands and there in the mirror, staring at him, was the blonde-haired gray-eyed mug of a guy he’d known pretty well. Joey Case, No-Gun Joey, the toughest guy in town, the toughest guy in the world. That was him all right, all right. Bucking The Office’d given him the title hands down. The Dutchman wasn’t the only one, no, sir, not the only one. Both of them crazier than a bat. Ask Pete Bowers. “Pete Bowers,” he said aloud, his lips barely moving, speaking as convicts do, under the eyes of their guards.

His head jerked around abruptly as if somebody’d come through the door to stand at his elbow, but there was no one. Still he felt eyes on him. Pete’s eyes and the Spotter’s who’d marked Georgie and by so doing marked him, and Charley Valinchi’s eyes. The X-ray eyes of The Office that could see clear across the town, see through all the white walls and all the blue walls, see through the bone of his skull, see the creepy fears curling like worms inside his brain.

You bastard, he cursed himself. Stop your panic. You gotta think. Christ sake, you gotta think.

And he thought of Dewey.

Suddenly he was calm, calmed by the enormity of this idea. He walked up the flight of stairs — he had a sensation that all night long he’d been climbing one huge flight after another — and he pitied himself who was so ground-down that he could think, even for a second, of turning rat.

• • •

Time? There was no time. There was a cup of coffee on the counter of a railroad station restaurant. There were invisible tracks, criss-crossing, joining the late-hour coffee drinkers. There was himself, his mind filled with the lucidity of leavetaking as if soon he would be taking a train, destination unknown, and could look back at the township he’d built with the years of his life.

Call it Joey Case. A township different from the township of the next man’s life, only as one fingerprint is different from the next.

This guy Joey Case’d sure got himself in a spot, he thought. Joey Case, Joey Kasow, No-Gun Joey, No-Jew Joey. Was he a Jew? More errand boy than Jew. A guy
was
what he was deep down. Suppose a guy was nothing deep down? Then what was he? Nothing! A nothing guy, neither hebe or mick. All his life he’d wanted to be one damn thing or another. Wanted to be tough, wanted to be smart, wanted to stand on his own two legs. Be independent. Had his chance with Local 23, but the Spotter, he killed it. The Spotter…. Who else but the Spotter, always the Spotter. Railroading him into The Office, putting him on the spot. Christ, God, he’d gotten Georgie off. How was he getting himself off?
Who
was he getting off though? That was the big question. Joey Case? Joey Kasow?

Joey’s mind ran like a driverless car against the twin walls of his double self: Joey Case versus Joey Kasow. And he thought as if he had all the time in the world, not of himself, but of Dutch Schultz whose name’d been Arthur Pflegenheimer when he’d been a boy. Dutch Schultz….
A hoy has never wept or dashed a thousand krim
. Who was the boy who’d never wept, Joey wondered. Where was that boy? Where was Arthur Pflegenheimer, where was Joey Kasow? He remembered how a few days after the Dutchman’s death he’d picked up a dictionary and looked up the word,
krim…
. There was no word,
krim
. The nearest thing to it was kran — a Persian coin; kremlin — a Russian fortress; Kriemhild — the wife of Siegfried killed by his own brother, avenged by his wife; and kris — a Malay dagger. Funny, he had brooded how all the close words were money or forts or daggers or this Dutchie Kriemhild who’d gotten even for her husband’s murder. Murder and money, daggers and forts — wasn’t that what the whole God damn works was about, he asked himself now. With The Office always laying down the law to every poor sonofabitch who tried to buck it?

Joey finished his coffee. It was time to go. The train was coming in. It’d been long overdue. In fact it was God damn late.

• • •

He unlocked the door of his room at the Hotel Delmore, switched on the light and stared at Sadie sleeping in the bed. He’d wake her and find out if Charley’d called. But first he better calm down, he thought, put on that old pokerface. He closed his eyes, he pressed his two forefingers against his eyeballs. He opened his eyes again and thought as if it were a brand-new thought: she’s got real red hair.

He rubbed at his jaws, he massaged his cheeks, and bit by bit worked control over every separate feature. He felt his jaws clinching hard, he was aware of his tight lips, their edges meeting like two strips of leather. No more cry-babying around, he thought with a profound and lonely pride in himself who’d gotten up the guts to buck Them.

He crossed the room to the bed, he shook her naked shoulder and when she was sleepily awake, he lit a cigarette and put it between her lips. “Take a big puff, Sweetie. Gotta talk to you.”

Sleepily, she inhaled. “Now, Joey?”

“Now. Anyone phone me?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“The one who always calls you, Joey.”

“What’d he want?”

“Said you should see him tomorrow. Tomorrow at eleven, yes. Is something wrong?”

“Yeh, something’s wrong.”

She bolted upright and he glanced at her, but the face he saw was Charley Valinchi’s…. Christ, here he was panicking himself again. If Charley really thought he’d let Georgie off the hook, they wouldn’t be waiting until eleven the next morning. They’d be waiting downstairs in the lobby. “I gotta good record!” he said with a grim self-mockery. “They’re givin’ me the benefit of the doubt.”

“Joey, I don’t understand.”

He sat down on a chair near the dresser.

“I’m blowin’ out of town tomorrer,” he said slowly. “I’m playin’ it safe. Even I convince ‘em, suppose Georgie shows up to queer me? I’m playin’ it safe. No other way. Safe!” And a spasm of laughter broke from his lips.

Her eyes were staring with a clear and unmistakable fear. “What is it, Joey?” she cried. “Tell me.” He looked at this redhead in the filmy nightgown, at her rounded plump arms, wondering how he was going to tell her he was blowing out for good. How? He looked at her and she was like a stranger. But she was all he had. And if he’d lost her, their life together a constant losing, losing her again and again with each kept woman, losing her when she started hitting the bottle, losing her in spades twice over and for keeps when she started hitting the bottle alone, she was still all he had.