On the Waterfront (27 page)

As Katie turned from the table toward the exit, she found her way blocked by a couple of muscular men in rented tuxedoes who were snarling at each other, “Don’t tell me I didn’ see ya, I
saw
ya”—“The hell ya saw me”—“The hell I didn’ see ya, ya dirty …” Then they started swinging at each other. Katie backed away in fright while the bartender hurried over apologetically.

“There’s a weddin’ inside in the private room. These fellas ’re just feelin’ good. Celebratin’.”

“Yeah,” Terry said. “Don’ mind them. In two minutes they’ll be huggin’ ’n kissin’ each other. Come on. I’ll get you out through the lobby.”

He led her down a narrow paneled corridor which passed the small ballroom rented for private parties. A local five-piece orchestra was playing, as a somewhat corrupted two-step, that good old Irish jig “The Washer Woman.” The room was darkened, and shifting beams of red, green and purple lights moved across the bodies of the dancers from a cheaply ornate balcony.

As Terry and Katie paused to look in, the bridal couple dashed past them, escaping from their guests in the semi-darkness. The bride was small and not very pretty. Terry recognized her as the oldest daughter of Joe Finley, a minor City-Hall grafter who had a piece of the loading on Pier B. The kid was Freddie Burns, a checker, moving up in the world. The bridal gown was lacy white and beautiful, and Katie, bemused by the drink, the confusion, the music and the rainbow effect of the moving lights, was touched by the rented-hall romance of it all. She had no thought, as Terry did, that the groom was a cutie marrying City Hall to beat the rap of an eight-hour day. “I love weddings,” Katie said.

“The car’s in the side alley,” the groom was saying.

“Give me a cigarette,” the bride said, as they hurried away.

“Later. You smoke too much anyway,” the groom said, and the couple disappeared down the corridor.

The five-piece semi-pro band had swung into an oldie, “Avalon”; the sound of the sliding of feet on the wooden floor was hypnotic. The men were mostly heavy-muscled petty officials who looked too big for their tuxedoes. Most of the women had gone too fat. Many had yellow, shellacked beauty-shop hair. This was a gathering of the minor politicians and straw bosses of Bohegan, spiced as usual with members of the local mob, not the goons, but the loan sharks, shop stewards and delegates who fed on and fed the local politicians.

Katie stood at the threshold, lost in the music. Terry wondered what she was thinking. “I met my love in Avalon—beside—the bay: I left my love in Avalon—and sailed—away …” the song crooned its simple, heartbreaking logic.

“Guess they forgot to send us our engraved invitations, huh?” Terry tried to arouse a spark in her.

She smiled faintly and he was encouraged. He indicated, in the grand manner, his brown corduroys and red-and-black-checked wool shirt. “I’m glad I wore the tux. I hate to feel outta place.”

She smiled at him and he slid his arms around her, careful not to come too close.

“Come on—you wanna—you wanna spin a little?” He made a pair of dancers out of his index and middle fingers and spun them around in front of her face, closer and closer until they danced along the bridge of her nose. She laughed, and before she could say no he was dancing with her in the corridor. He swung her around, expertly; she followed easily, instinctively.

“Ah, you dance divinely,” he said with borrowed elegance, and she laughed again. With more confidence now he led her to the edge of the darkened ballroom where they began to whirl among the other dancers.

“Hey, we’re good!” he said. “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Murray.”

She let him hold her tighter. The music was soothing with its simple-sweet lilt and its saxophone croon. “The Sisters oughta see ya now,” he said with his mouth close to her ear. When she closed her eyes he let his lips touch her hair and slowly move down to her cheek.

“Oh, I’m just floating, floating,” she murmured. “Just floating …”

The saxophone player had lowered his instrument and risen to his feet to do the vocal in a thin, true, Rudy Vallée voice. Terry joined in with him softly:

“
And so I think I’ll travel on—

To Av—a—lon …”

The band hit a final, conventional chord and the overhead lights came on in an intrusive glare. Terry and Katie were still holding on to each other, caught in the crooning, tin-pan-allegorical mood of the song, when Truck came up to them. Gilly was with him. Truck and Gilly weren’t there for any wedding, Terry could see that. They didn’t say, Hiya, kid, or anything like that. None of the back-slapping and clown-sparring. They were all business, solidly, heavily business.

“I been lookin’ all over for you, Terry,” Truck said.

One thing about Bohegan, you couldn’t hide. It was a mile long and a mile deep and everybody watched everybody else.

“Well, okay?” Terry said.

“The boss wants you,” Truck said.

“Right now?”

“Definitely,” Gilly said.

Truck bent his bull neck toward Terry’s ear. “He just got a call from Upstairs. Somethin’s gone wrong. He’s hotter ’n a pistol.”

“Well, I gotta take this—this young lady home first,” Terry said.

“I’d get over there, Terry,” Truck said. “If I was you I wouldn’ waste no time. Gilly c’n take the little lady home.”

“Definitely,” Gilly said.

“Look, you tell ’im—tell ’im I’ll be over after a while,” Terry said.

Truck looked at Gilly, scandalized. “O-kay,” he said, the inflection on the last syllable making his meaning unmistakable, “O-kay …”

The two Johnny Friendly boys shrugged to each other and left Terry standing there.

Katie crossed the threshold into the corridor and watched them walking rapidly toward the lobby. Terry joined her, shifting uncomfortably.

“Who are those …” she started to ask.

“Aah, just a couple of—fellas around,” Terry said, troubled.

“What was that short, thick one whispering to you?” Katie asked. “Why does he have to whisper?”

“Listen, Katie, for your own good,” Terry jumped ahead of her questions. “You gotta quit askin’ things. You gotta quit askin’ so many questions. You gotta quit tryin’ to find out things. Lay off. Lay off.”

“Who were those two?” Katie said.

“It aint safe,” Terry continued. “Now I’m tellin’ you for your own good. It just aint safe. I tell you, lay off.”

“Why worry about me?” Katie said. “You’re the one who was just saying you only look out for yourself.”

“Okay, okay,” Terry said harshly, feeling some relief from guilt and his frustrated attraction for her in being able to lash out at her. “Go ahead, get in hot water. Just don’t come hollerin’ to me when you get burned.”

“Why should I come hollering to you at all?” Katie asked.

“Because …” Terry said resentfully, “because…I think you and me are gettin’ …”

He looked at her angrily, and guiltily, and hung his head.

“I won’t let myself,” Katie warned him. “Not me! “

“That goes for me double,” Terry said.

Inside, in the private room, the overhead lights were dimming again. The band swung into a Lombardo version of a Dick Rodgers waltz.

“I’m leaving,” Katie said.

“Yeah, let’s cut outta here,” Terry said. “I’ll see ya home.”

It had grown colder as the sun ducked behind the massive ridge of factories marking the western outskirts of the city. They no longer had anything to say to each other. They walked rapidly down Dock Street. Approaching Terry’s stoop, a half dozen doors down from the Doyles’, Katie was just about to tell him there was no need for him to accompany her any farther when a man in a brown tweed overcoat and a dark brown hat stepped quickly out of the front hallway where he had been waiting. “Mr. Malloy?” he called out to Terry.

Terry swung in surprise at the
mister.
He frowned as he recognized the Crime Commission joker, the tall, broad-shouldered one who had asked him too many questions at the Longdock.

“Yeah, yeah?” Terry said.

Glover approached with a pleasant smile. “I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Malloy. You’re being served with a subpoena, Mr. Malloy.”

He handed the unprepossessing sheet of paper to Terry. Terry didn’t look at it. He crumpled it into a ball in his hand.

“Be at the State House. Courtroom Nine, at ten o’clock Monday morning,” Glover said.

This was too much for Terry. “Listen, I already told ya. I don’t know nuthin’. I don’t
know
nuthin’ about that.”

“You’re entitled to bring a lawyer with you,” Glover went on. “And you’re privileged under the Constitution to protect yourself against questions that might incriminate you.”

“Are you kiddin’?” Terry said, suspended somewhere between anguish and anger. “Y’know what you’re askin’ me to do?”

“Mister Malloy,” Glover said in a practiced voice, as if he had spoken this line a thousand times, “all we’re asking you to do is to tell the truth.”

“
All
,” Terry said bitterly. “That’s all, huh?” He shook his head scornfully. “Boy, what you don’ know.”

“See you Monday morning,” Glover said. “And of course failure to appear means a warrant for you and an automatic contempt of court. Good day, Mr. Malloy.”

“
Mister
Malloy,” Terry said with his hands on his hips, disdainfully, as he watched Glover walk away. “Cop!”

“What are you going to do?” Katie said.

Terry had forgotten she was still there. “Tell you one thing,” he said viciously. “I aint gonna eat cheese for no cops, and that’s for sure.”

It was hoodlum talking, pure hoodlum and it aroused a sharp, pure reaction in Katie. “It was Johnny Friendly who killed Joey, wasn’t it?” she said.

Terry clenched his fingers around the subpoena. He looked down at his feet. He felt like running, as if he just swiped some stuff off a pushcart and should be getting out of there in a hurry. “Katie …” he started to say.

But now Katie was pressing. “He had him killed or had something to do with it, didn’t he? He and your brother Charley? Isn’t that true?”

“Katie, listen …”

“You can’t tell me, can you? Because you’re part of it. And as bad as the worst of them. Just as bad. Aren’t you? Tell me the truth, Terry. Aren’t you?”

She was raising her voice, on the verge of tears, and Terry took a step backward and put a hand out as if to calm her.

“Shhh, take it easy, take it easy. You better go back to that school out in daisyland. You’re drivin’ yourself nuts. You’re drivin’ me nuts. You’re drivin’ everybody nuts. Quit worryin’ about the truth all the time. Worry about yourself.”

Katie lowered her voice, so as not to scream at him. “I should have known you wouldn’t tell me. Pop said Johnny Friendly used to own you. I think he still owns you.”

“Please. Don’t say that to me, Katie …”

Katie looked at him and wanted to cry. Then she said, as gently as she could, “No wonder everybody calls you a bum.”

“Don’t say that to me, Katie. Don’t say that to me now.”

“No wonder … no wonder …” Katie kept repeating softly.

“I’m—I’m tryin’ t’ keep ya from bein’ hurt. Don’t you see? What more d’ya want?”

“Much more, Terry,” Katie said. “Much much much more.”

She turned away abruptly and ran up the street toward her tenement stoop so as not to let him see her crying.

Terry watched her hurry up the steps into her hallway. Then he looked at the crumpled paper in his hand. “Son of a bitch,” he said fervently, “son of a wall-eyed bitch. Son of a lousy joint-chewing wall-eyed bitch.”

Then he remembered Johnny Friendly. He must be getting light in the head to follow a broad like this and disobey a direct order from Johnny Friendly. With his head down, trying to think, and the stinking subpoena burning a hole in his pocket, he turned the corner toward the docks and the back room of the Friendly Bar on River Street where Union Brother John Friendly was waiting for him.

B
IG MAC AND GILLY
and Truck and Sonny and Specs and “J.P.” and the rest of them stared at Terry when he entered the back room of Johnny Friendly’s bar. They looked at him as if they had never seen him before. Even Charley barely mumbled “Hiya, kid.” They were waiting for Johnny Friendly to make the move.

“Well, it’s nice of you to drop around,” Johnny said as Terry approached. Friendly’s eyes were feared around here for their cold-blue dead-pan stare when he was crossed. His lips barely moved when he talked. There was more than anger in him.

There was a studied withdrawal that made men who incurred his enmity come close to collapse when he fixed them with this look. It was known and dreaded on River Street as “The Friendly freeze.”

Terry was on his guard because he could feel all their eyes watching him for sign of geezer. How tough was the tough kid now? their eyes were asking.

“I was comin’ over,” Terry said carefully. He glanced at Charley, who was standing near Johnny. Charley was with him, but he kept a stern face on him so as not to weaken himself with Johnny. These were make-or-break moments in this business. Johnny’s was a terrible authority, beyond appeal. There was no hedging, no uncertainty. Mercy or punishment was dealt from the top of the deck, slapped on the table for all to see, irrevocable.

“Just comin’ over here,” Johnny said mincingly. Then he made his voice coarser and louder. “How? By way of Chicago?”

Big Mac and one or two others laughed obligingly. Terry tightened his mouth at them and tried to stop Johnny from jabbing him silly with words.

“No kiddin’, Johnny, I was …”

“Shut up, you shlagoom,” Johnny said. The seventy-five-cent H. Uppmann clenched in his mouth was like the muzzle of a .45 fixing Terry at point-blank range. “How many times you been knocked out, Terry?”

There was scattered laughter again, but this time Terry didn’t turn away from Johnny’s ice-blue eyes.

“Knocked out? Uh …” Terry thought back, over the good nights and the tough ones. “Only two times. And one was on cuts that night …”

“Shut up,” Johnny said. “Two times. That must’ve been once too often. Your brains must be rattling. What you got up there, Chinese bells? Huh? You got a bunch o’ Chinese bells up there where your brains useta be?”