Whiskey River (27 page)

The fourth man out of the car, as big as Jack, with his hat jammed down on top of his ears and his mouth open for purposes of breathing, was Stink Barberra. Shadows pooled inside the pouches under his eyes.

“Drop the hardware now. One at a time, so the dock don’t fall down.”

The shotguns had been left in the car. They bent and laid their pistols and revolvers gently at their feet. Barberra took longer because he had a handgun in each of his side pockets and another in a shoulder rig under the coat.

“Don’t forget that little two-shot in your hat, Stink,” Jack said.

He removed his hat with both hands, exposing his white bald head and the black fringe that stopped where the hat began, his tiny eyes, and took out a nickel-plated Colt derringer, and put it on the ground next to the others.

“Now get down on all fours and crawl under the car.”

They hesitated, Barberra longer than the others, then did as directed, getting sawdust and grease on their camel’s hair and alpaca.

Bass Springfield joined them holding his .45. Jack asked him if he’d left Nick untied.

“He ain’t going nowhere.”

“Okay, get rid of these heaters, the ones in the car too. Throw ’em in the drink.”

While Springfield was doing that, the weapons splashing substantially, Jack told the men with the crates to finish loading the Franklin. When their hands were free he had them toss their guns off the dock. There were two more crates in the speedboat by the piles. Lon covered two of the three loaders from the edge while they went down the rope ladder. When the cargo was in place Jack had Springfield move the Buick out of the way and told the three men in sweaters and caps to lie down on their stomachs. They complied. Andy and Lon got into the Franklin.

“Jerk them wires,” Jack shouted as Springfield stepped down from the Buick. He himself flung up the Chrysler’s hood on one side, tore loose the spark plug wires, and threw them after the guns. Lon started the Franklin. Jack took a step in that direction, then turned back, raising the Thompson. “Slither out from under there, Stink.”

“Mr. Jack,” Springfield said. After disabling the Buick he had gone back for Jack’s hat and stopped in the alley now with it in one hand and his pistol in the other, down at his side.

“Get in the car with Lon and Andy. Roll down all the windows. Stink’s coming along.”

“What for?”

Barberra was standing by the Chrysler now with his arms spread slightly and the front of his coat streaked with filth. “You little shit,” he wheezed.

Jack fired a chattering burst over his shoulder. A round struck sparks off the Chrysler’s roof and whistled off into the night. One of the men under the car yelled.

“Next one goes in your ear,” Jack said. “Shake a leg.”

Barberra walked ahead of him and climbed into the backseat of the Franklin. There wasn’t room in back for three large men and the whiskey
and
the submachine gun, so Jack heaved it. It arced out past the dock, turned two somersaults, struck the water, and bobbed once, kicking up its buttstock, before sliding straight down. Jack made Barberra transfer a crate from the seat to his own lap and he and Springfield squeezed in on both sides. The garlic smell was oppressive with the doors shut. Springfield hadn’t had time to open both windows in back, so Jack cranked down his. He threw out the derby and put on his snapbrim. Then he placed the Luger cocked against Barberra’s temple. “Don’t hit no bumps, Lon. I ain’t sure how much pull this trigger takes.”

Lon slipped the clutch. “What do we want with him?”

“Joey depends on Stink,” Jack said. “Without Stink we’d still have Baldy Hannion and the place on Howard and an aeroplane. Frankie-boy, he’d still be mucking around in Joey’s policy business in the Bottom if it wasn’t for Stink. What do you think a shooter like Stink is worth to Joey?”

Andy said, “Five thousand. That’s five times what we got for Dom.”

“I’m thinking fifty.”

“Grand?”

“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Lon said.

“He won’t pay it,” said Springfield.

“Then we’ll send him fingers till he does. Stink’s got ten.”

Barberra sat with his big-knuckled hands curled around the edges of the crate in his lap and said nothing.

“Look at this here,” Andy said.

At the stop sign on Guoin, a cross street, two uniformed police officers sat in a black-and-white Oldsmobile touring car with mounted spotlights and a gonger on the left side. The car pulled out behind the Franklin and followed it for two blocks, then turned east on Woodbridge. Jack lowered the Luger a couple of inches.

“Fat wasn’t fooling when he said they were taken care of,” Lon said. “I bet they heard that chopper, too.”

Jack shook his head sadly. “I thought they was going to clean up this town.”

“Lucky it wasn’t that bird, Gabriel,” said Andy.

“That lunger, forget him. It’s the bulls that won’t stay bought you got to watch out for, like Kozlowski.” But Jack was distracted. “You know the thing about cops? They can go anywhere, do anything. Nobody stops them, asks where they’re going or what they’re up to. Not even other cops.”

“Bulls got it made in this town,” Andy agreed.

“It ain’t just this town. It’s because they’re bulls. They could walk into the ladies’ toilet, who’s gonna stop them? It’s like they’re invisible.”

“You got a wife. Why would you want to walk into a ladies’ toilet?” Andy was puzzled.

“I don’t. It’s just something I thought of.”

Having a hostage complicated matters. They’d planned to stash the whiskey in the disused blockhouse at Fort Wayne like always, but a prisoner needed feeding and guards. After they had driven around aimlessly for half an hour arguing, Jack suggested they drop off the cargo as planned and take Barberra from there to Bass Springfield’s apartment on Crystal Street.

“Celestine’s there,” Springfield said.

Jack wanted to know if she could cook.

“Beans and fatback.”

“Stink ain’t particular. Are you, Stink?” Jack dug an elbow into his ribs. He’d put away the pistol finally.

Stink said, “You little shit.”

“Pick up the needle, Stink. That record’s busted.”

“What’s wrong with St. Clair Shores?” Springfield asked.

“I got neighbors.”

“Who, Johnny the Rock and the Fleischer brothers?”

“We got an agreement: No mob stuff in the neighborhood. One more in yours won’t be noticed. Pull in here, Lon.” He pointed at a little parking lot next to a corner market with a sign in the window that said OPEN 24 HOURS in English and Polish. They were in Hamtramck.

“What for?”

“Didn’t the air corps teach you no manners? You don’t invite yourself over to somebody’s house without bringing something.”

Jack and Andy got out to shop while Springfield and Lon watched the hostage. They came back ten minutes later with a box of groceries, which Jack put on top of the whiskey crate on Barberra’s lap, “Polack behind the counter wanted to know if we was throwing a party,” he said when they were back on the road. “Tell ’em what you said, Andy.”

“ ‘Sons of Italy.’ ”

“T
HANKS FOR COMING,
M
INOR.
Can Dom get you anything?” I hesitated, then said no thanks. I wasn’t used to good host’s manners from Joey Machine. He shook my hand inside the greasy little office behind glass on the ground floor of the garage without rising from the ancient desk chair and waved me into the only other seat in the room, straight hickory with a rung missing. The desk, gray steel, was shoved against the brick wall and a wooden mail case stood on it with its pigeonholes stuffed full of papers. A bulb with a funnel shade hung by a cord from the ceiling, its light pooling through the glass onto the concrete floor outside the office and a row of automobiles in various stages of dismemberment. It was late, the garage was closed. The air smelted of stale exhaust.

Joey was in vest and shirtsleeves with the vest unbuttoned, no necktie, and his cuffs turned back on his hairy wrists. He’d been working; an old-fashioned black adding machine with a big handle stood on the desk, surrounded by curls of tape like empty cocoons whose larvae had left a residue of anonymous figures in martial rows. At midnight it was a fevered kind of clutter, as if he had to work all night to manufacture the evidence that the lawyers for the Bureau of Internal Revenue presented against him during the day. The trial, in its second month now, had taken its toll. His face looked even pastier than usual, he had blue-green smudges under his eyes like thumbprints, and he was smoking a lot. The index and middle fingers of his right hand, between which a Lucky Strike rested, were stained black, a Vesuvius of gnawed butts had erupted over the sides of a cheap tin ashtray on a pile of yellow bills of lading. Big Dom stood outside facing the glass, the reflected light from the bulb accentuating the gorilla cast of his lower features. Insofar as his battered and bitten face was capable of expression, he looked worried.

“Sorry about the dump,” Joey said. “I’m having some work done upstairs. Steel plates in the walls, iron mesh over the windows, couple of other improvements I can’t talk about. Costing me a fucking fortune. I don’t know why the feds are breathing hot air down my ass. I’m building my own little Leavenworth right here.”

“Concerned?”

“About who, the feds? No. Hell, no. Taxes, what kind of yellow shit is that to pull? They want to stop me selling beer, why don’t they walk up and arrest me for that like men instead of pulling this chickenshit? It’s the kikes I’m concerned about, that wild-ass Dance and all his tribe. You know why they call them Purples?”

“I heard it was because they got their start during the cleaners and dyers’ war.”

“No, it was because one of the first people them pukes robbed, hit him over the head and lifted his wallet—his fucking wallet, for Christ’s sake, with maybe two dollars in it and change—he was a butcher, and he told the bulls they was all purple like rotten meat. That’s the first true thing that was ever said about them and it still holds. It ain’t enough them Washington nancies hung this tax thing around my neck, that asshole Borneo and his pup

Frankie Orr, the Pinball Prince, think they can muscle in on me while I’m in fucking court eight hours a day; no, I got to have this crazy Jew gunning for me so I’m stuck in this hole for the next three months while they turn my office into fucking Fort Knox. Now he pulls this.”

He lit a fresh Lucky, forgetting the one he’d parked half-smoked and smoldering on top of the pile of butts. “What I could do is send some boys up to St. Clair Shores and snatch that society dame he’s hitched to, teach him two can play this kidnap game. But I ain’t like that, I don’t touch family. I’m not a Hun. I don’t kill little girls.”

“Who’d he kidnap?”

When Joey Machine called you in the middle of the night, admitted he remembered you, and asked you to come see him, you went without asking why. I figured if he was sore enough at me for whatever reason to give me the river treatment, he’d have sent two guys for me. I’d thought maybe he needed another favor, which meant he had something to trade. I hadn’t had a beat in weeks. The column was as bleak as a Wall Street report.

“Fella works for me named George Barberra. You wouldn’t know him. Snatched him in the middle of a delivery.”

“They took Stink
alive?”

“Oh, you heard of him. Four ayem this morning, shit,
yesterday
morning, my phone rings in Rochester, it’s the kike himself, he says, ‘Rise and shine, Joey, I got your boy Stink.’ Then he hangs up. Christ, my wife’s in the fucking bed next to me. I don’t sleep the rest of the night. Five ayem there’s a knock on my door, car takes off out front and leaves rubber all down the block. There’s a package on the stoop with a pink ribbon tied around it. It’s too small for a bomb, so I open it and there’s Stink’s knucks. I know they’re his brass knuckles because there’s friction tape wound around the part you hold like he uses to protect his hand, they’ve both been busted before. On the inside of the wrapping there’s a note: ‘Call you at the garage. Love, Jack.’
Love,
for Christ’s sake. What’s he, a nancy? So when I’m not in court getting a blister on my ass sitting on that hard seat, I’m here waiting for the fucking phone to ring. Weil, tonight it rang.”

I waited. Something momentous was about to happen. It was in the air, like the monoxide that filled the garage. He stooped and slid a leather suitcase out of the kneehole of the desk. It wasn’t even a new suitcase; the straps were cracked and the corners were scuffed and shaggy. He laid it down on the concrete floor gently, reverently, and opened it, unbuckled the straps that held the clothes-press in place and flipped it back. Thirty Benjamin Franklins smiled up at me, each on top of a stack as high as the suitcase was deep.

“Fifty grand,” he said. “A five and four zeroes. That’s the price, and don’t think I didn’t have to send my best collector to ten different places to get it.”

“Barberra’s worth that much to you?” My tongue felt like leather. People who say money makes your mouth water have never seen five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills all in one place.

“More, only don’t tell the kike. Accountants? I can stand outside any business school you name and buy ten Prestos for half that. Collectors? Drivers? Legs? They stand outside waiting to work for
me.
A shooter like George, that does who you tell him to do when you tell him to do it and nobody else, and draws his pay without holding you up for more than you agreed on—well, you come up with a figure, I’ll pay it if I can raise it. Understand, I’m not telling you any of this, you didn’t hear it, if you say you did, I’ll deny it. I think a man should know why he’s carrying someone else’s money, assuming his risks. I’m not Sal Borneo, treat you like a junkwagon nag, slap on the blinders and smack you on the ass in heavy traffic.”

He covered up the money, closed the suitcase and latched all the latches and buckled all the buckles. Then he stood it back up with its handle on top. He must have done it. I was watching him, and when my brains came back, that was the suitcase’s condition.

“I’m carrying it?”