Whiskey River (6 page)

“Go back the way you come, boss. You ain’t got business here and we does.”

He was an enormous Negro with flat features the color of anthracite. His nose was running but he didn’t look chilled. The material across his shoulders tightened when I reached inside my coat for my wallet. I drew it out slowly and showed him my press card. “Connie Minor, the
Banner.
Mr. Machine invited me.”

He stared at the card longer than he had to. It dawned on me he was illiterate.

“What’s the story, Bass?”

We were joined by a bouncy bantamweight in a mackinaw and a cloth cap jammed down to the bridge of his nose by the band of a pair of red earmuffs. He was no larger than Howard Wolfman and almost as fair; a shrunken negative of big black Bass with bright blue eyes and a toothpaste smile.

“Man says his name’s Connie.”

The bright blue eyes flicked over me and came to rest on the card. “It’s okay, Bass. Jack knows about it.”

After a beat the big man took a .45 automatic pistol out of his right coat pocket and slid it off cock. It was a clumsy operation. Each of his hands was a gnarled mass of meat and bone that had been broken—no, pulverized—and knitted badly. The fingers were stiff and awkward, which I didn’t think had anything to do with the cold. I noticed then that the automatic’s trigger guard had been filed off. He would never have been able to get a finger inside it to pull the trigger.

“I’m Andy Kramm.” The bantamweight grasped my gloved hand with his small slender bare one. I could feel the taut cords through the glove. “This here’s Bass Springfield. He used to play ball.”

“The Biloxi Bullets,” I said, looking at him. “I thought you looked familiar. You played left field.”

“Sometimes center.” The big man sounded a little less hostile. He had succeeded in applying the safety and returned the pistol to his pocket. “Not many white folks follow black ball.”

“I broke in as a sportswriter. My first assignment was the Negro leagues. You were working on some kind of record when you dropped out.”

“Hit safely in thirty-eight consecutive games,” said Kramm. “Then the Klan got him.”

Springfield nodded. “Tied me to a cottonwood and let fly at my hands with a table leg till I couldn’t grip a bat no more.” He looked at them, then put them in his pockets.

“Baseball’s loss is our gain. Them Purples keep their distance when Bass is around.” Kramm put a hand on my back. “Jack’s in the lead car.”

“Jack?”

“Jack Dance. He’s barking the show. I’ll introduce you.”

Kramm and I started that way with Springfield following, providing a windbreak. The lead car was a six-year-old Hudson Model S four-door with its motor running, black over bottle green and shaped like a bus, with a plank mounted up front in place of a bumper. The front door on the passenger’s side was open and the boy I had known as John Danzig sat on the seat at an angle, with one foot on the running board, pouring steaming liquid out of a thermos jug into a tin cup. He looked up, saw me, and grinned.

“Hey, Connie! Move any slot machines lately?”

If he hadn’t mentioned the slots I might never have placed him. As it was it took me a minute to make the connection. He had lost the baby fat and looked big and hard in a black camel’s hair topcoat over a brown pinstriped suit. He had a pearl-gray snapbrim on the back of his curly head and matching spats on tan wingtips that were better suited to the lobby of the Fisher Building than a windswept downtown street in late January. Then and later, always, he was overdressed for the occasion. He had worn his last twenty-dollar suit.

“You know each other?” Kramm was puzzled and, it seemed to me, annoyed. He’d been robbed of his introduction.

“We was in the moving business together. How the hell are you, Connie?” He stood the thermos on the floor of the sedan and shook my hand. His was manicured, and as free of calluses as I remembered. My memory was working fine now.

“Freezing my balls off,” I said. “Who’s this Jack Dance?”

“Joey’s idea. You know them wops, can’t say a name that don’t sound like that crap they eat. Hang a lip over this. It’ll warm your belly.” He held out the tin cup.

I accepted it, taking off my gloves first so I could feel the heat on my palms, and offered him the flask. He shook his head.

“Never touch it. Thins the blood. Go ahead, drink up.”

I put away the flask and took a sip.

“This isn’t coffee.”

“Didn’t say it was. Chicken broth’s better.”

It tasted better than whiskey anyway. The fumes thawed out my sinuses. He watched me drain the cup.

“Joey says you’re here to make us famous.”

“I promised him I wouldn’t use names.”

“You can use mine. The bulls don’t scare me.”

“Not even Kozlowski?” He was still a lieutenant, still in charge of the Prohibition Squad. The department wasn’t about to promote him and go begging for someone to take his place. Most bulls preferred a leper’s sheet to the rubber raincoat.

“He worked me over with a lamp cord for a little, but nobody liked that bug Wagner. I heard he died of a bad needle.”

“I hadn’t.”

“No?” His smile flared briefly, leaving behind a light phosphorescence, like a flashbulb. “Anyway, Joey sent down bail and gave me a job. Tom too.”

“Where
is
your brother?”

“Waiting for your letter of introduction. He’s all ready to start working for the
Times.”

“He’s the one?” I remembered how carefully he had weighed the risks before agreeing to help Hattie with her slot machine problem. A poet, John—excuse me, Jack—had called him.

“Says he can’t write no novels without getting experience first. I said he could have all he wanted if he stayed here, but he said that wasn’t the kind he needed. He wasn’t a lot of good anyway. He thinks too much. Thinks all the time.” He worked his fingers into a pair of doeskin gloves. “That was some night at Hattie’s. You remember that funny little guy, they cut a piece off of his brain?”

“Jerry the Lobo.”

“That’s him. Guy like that, he’s better dead.”

I knew then. It wasn’t what he said exactly, or the way he said it. It was that he even brought up Jerry the Lobo. The newsroom oddsmakers at the time, when they thought about Jerry at all, had decided that he had wandered into a boxcar and was cadging his beers in Pensacola or someplace, thinking he was still in Detroit. I had never entered the discussion. Thinking about Jerry the Lobo made me sad.

“What’s the radio say, Lon?”

Jack directed this at a skull-faced man in a greasy slouch hat and brown leather aviator’s jacket, who had just come out of the garage.

“Overcast and flurries.” He kept walking in the direction of the last car in line.

“Good.” Jack smiled at me. “No place to hide on the lake when the moon’s out.”

“Who’s Lon?”

“Oh, we just call him that on account of he looks like Lon Chaney in that picture, the one about the opera. His name’s Camarillo.”

That name I knew. He had shot down eight German planes with Eddie Rickenbacker’s squadron during the war and had a medal pinned on his chest by Woodrow Wilson. That was the last good thing I had heard about him. “I thought he worked for Sal Borneo.”

“He did. Now he don’t.”

“He’s a killer. They’re the only ones that can just up and quit like that.”

“Mercy-go-run,” Andy Kramm said. “Jack, you never told me I was keeping company with criminal trash.”

Big Bass chuckled—a low, chilling sound, like wind whistling through holes in a steel drum.

“No-man’s-land out there on the ice, Connie. You just joined the war.” Jack took back the tin cup and corked the thermos. “Let’s roll, kids.”

I rode in back with Andy Kramm, who rested his feet on a long black metal toolbox on the floor. Jack drove and Bass sat on the passenger’s side in front, blocking my half of the view through the windshield. The tire chains clanked and light from the streetlamps fluttered inside the car. Behind us the headlamps of the other cars were strung out like mourners in a funeral procession.

We took Woodward down to Jefferson and turned left. “Lake Erie’s the other way,” I said.

Jack turned his head to grin at Bass. “We don’t go
out
on the ice, Connie; we come
back
on it. There’s no law against driving to Canada.”

“Oh.”

We crossed on the Ambassador Bridge. The Windsor Tunnel, which some Detroiters had already rechristened the Funnel for its potential as a conduit for alcohol, was still under construction. The river beneath our feet glistened like black oil.

The guard in the Customs booth had silver hair and rimless glasses under a fur cap. He looked over our ID’s. “Reason for your visit?”

Jack said, “Pleasure.”

He handed back the cards. “Enjoy your stay.”

We drove on. Nobody else in the party was detained. Customs officials weren’t dumber then than they are now, or any less honest. When eight cars of a uniform size and vintage crossed the border with chains on their tires, the man in the rimless glasses had to suspect their true purpose, along with the probable presence of a number of unlicensed weapons. Bootleggers brought money into Canada. Where they went with what they bought was strictly between them and their own country.

The distillery Joey Machine did business with was in Leamington, conveniently located near the point where a convoy loaded with contraband might push off for the trek across Lake Erie’s frozen surface. On our way through the provincial village of Windsor I remembered why I was there and asked Andy Kramm how he had come to hook up with the Machine organization.

“I was a gunner with the Polar Bears. When I got home the war was over a year and there wasn’t no work for a veteran. I guess that’s how Lon wound up here too.”

“What are the Polar Bears?”

“We stood behind to fight the Bolsheviks in Russia, but that war didn’t go so good and they sent us home finally. I missed all the parades.”

“You’ve been with Machine since 1919?”

“No, I bummed around some: Drove a truck for the Greeks, run with the Little Jewish Navy, shot craps for Lefty Clark in Ecorse till my luck went west. Joey hired me off the floor the night Lefty canned me.”

“As a croupier?”

“No. Hell, no. I never got back my luck for that. He wanted a gunner.”

In Leamington, Jack pried the Hudson down a narrow brick-paved alley into a rutted lot and parked it at the end of a loading dock lit by a bare overhead bulb. The other cars arranged themselves around the dock, a ragtag cohort of Essexes, Lincolns, and Studebakers with missing fenders and rocker panels rusted through. Their exhaust pipes smoked thickly in the subzero air.

We got out. The wind off the lake had razors in it. Jack vaulted onto the dock, pounded on a door next to the closed bay, and went inside when it opened, tipping a brief L of yellow light from inside. The rest of us stood around with our hands in our pockets, stamping life into feet numbed by the inadequacy of old car heaters.

The lake was a great empty black hole spreading east to the blank sky and west to a lonely scattering of lights that was the city of Monroe, twenty miles south of Detroit. I felt the emptiness in the pit of my stomach. The cars seemed small and fragile compared to that bleak distance. I couldn’t help thinking of Little Augie Bustamente, feeding the fish on the floor of the lake.

“Colder’n a witch’s tit, all right,” said Andy Kramm next to me. “I wouldn’t turn down a pull on that flask of yours. Jack’s chicken soup just makes me piss.”

I got it out and handed it to him. I watched him tip it up. “Is it true he doesn’t drink?”

“Nothing like the Creature to warm up the tubes. You buy good liquor.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and returned the flask. “Oh, he don’t say no to a beer when he’s thirsty. He ain’t the only leg to steer away from harder stuff. Jack says it’s what separates him from the suckers on the other end, but I say if it gets out he won’t touch his own liquor, it won’t be good for business.”

“You mean Joey’s liquor.”

“Sure. Ain’t that what I said?” He moved off, smiling.

A
CHAIN RATTLED AND
the bay doors swung outward on parched hinges, pushed by Jack and a solid-looking fat man in an earflapped hunting cap and streaked overalls. The inside of the building was a cavern lit by a row of ceiling bulbs, stacked to the rafters with stenciled wooden crates and charred barrels and smelling heavily of sawdust and sour mash. It was a warm stink, like the interior of a stable, and took the edge off the bitter wind. I hadn’t seen that much beer and whiskey stored in one place since the early days of Prohibition when the bulls were still gleefully smashing up the distilleries in the warehouse district for newsreel photographers. I could not conceive of its value on the 1930 market.

I had to scramble out of the way while the men in Jack’s party, unbidden, formed three lines and began loading crates bucket-brigade fashion into the trunks and tonneaus of the cars parked at the dock. Jack, the hard fat man, and Bass Springfield brought out the crates and handed them down one by one to the first men in line, who followed suit. The cars filled with miraculous speed.

Nonparticipation is the reporter’s hallmark, even when the event involves a perfectly legal transaction under Canadian law. In this case the efficiency of the system would only have suffered had I tried to take a hand. I had toured the River Rouge plant with Henry Ford and monitored the Detroit Police Department’s twelve-week officer training course, and neither operation had worked more smoothly or with less waste. I stood out of the base path and conducted spot interviews.

Most of the loaders were in their twenties and younger, boys from poor neighborhoods whose heroes drove sixteen-cylinder Auburns and wore alpaca coats with tailored pockets for their revolvers. As they worked they leered at one another as if the common labor in which they were engaged—again, no laws had yet been broken—were somehow naughtier and less prosaic than stacking cartons in a market; as if they shared a practical and unprintably dirty joke. Asking them questions was not rewarding, unless sniggering and winking could be called good copy.