You may have got the notion along the way that I was hell with the ladies, which was true. Maybe my head was swelled by all my successes, but I held the notion that pretty much any dame I fancied was mine on my say-so, and you know what? I was pretty much right. Not wishing to crimp my style, I was spending most of my time at the Winona, although I still looked in from time to time at 352, to make sure everything was all right there, but May and Ma were doing fine on their own, and Marty, well, I didn’t see much of him, largely because around this time he got sent up the river for three years on an assault charge.
I’ve never understood why fellas that don’t have no talent for it still want to be gangsters; it would be like wanting to be Paderooski without knowing a do from a re from a mi. I knew I was born to the life from before the boat, but the plain fact of the matter was that Marty was never going to amount to much in the gangland department. Neither was Georgie, but him I let hang around because I liked him and because the girls liked him. Even Georgie, though, had found more profitable occupation tea-cozying with the East Side married ladies up at the Plaza Hotel, where he could put his talents as a gigolo to splendid use. There was another guinea he worked that racket with, name of Valentino, of whom you’ve probably heard. To hear Georgie tell it, the bloomers was rainin’ down on them thick and fast, and I believed him.
We were having a beer one night at the Winona after he got off what he called work. There was two kinds of lipstick across his cheek, and his collar was blotchy with sweat and tears and perfume and God only knew what else, plus he smelled like kisses and cigarettes.
“Got an idea,” says Georgie.
“Who you kiddin’?” I asked. We was friends, so I could talk to him like that.
“Rudy’s idea, actually. Has to do with the picture business.”
“You mean them nickelodeons over in Jewtown?” That would be Second Avenue south of 14th.
“They don’t call ’em nicks anymore. They’re photo-dramas. Picture shows…Anyway, Rudy’s heading out West, thinks I should join him.”
“Maybe someday.”
“You think?”
I looked at Georgie. He was a good-looking kid, no doubt about it. “Can you act?”
“What difference does it make?”
He had me there. “Give it a few years. Let’s see if folks take to it in a big way.” His face fell a little. “Besides, you’re too young for California. Not to mention small. Do a little growin’ first, why don’t ya?”
“Rudy says all them nickels add up.”
“Let’s count our nickels here first.”
Anyway, there I was one evening, holding court at the Winona. Freda and Margaret were both there, as was most of my boys. Billy and Chick had landed jobs with the Tiger, so they came around only once in a while now, and Eddie had got himself sent to college for a stretch for doin’ I forget what, even though he was of course innocent. Which meant that Art and Johnny had more or less become my bodyguards. After that business with Mollinucci, I hardly went anywhere without ’em, except to some young lady’s chambers, and even then I sometimes had them standing guard outside, to make sure I wasn’t disturbed in my ministrations by anything as inconvenient as a father, brother or husband.
We were going over some business, namely, the amount of money the gang could earn by various malefactions. The income of the Gophers was mainly derived from safecracking, second-storey work, stickups and holdups, shakedowns and collections for Tiger, of which we got a piece.
“Punching?” asked Art, who was the one who could write.
“Couple a bills.”
“Blacken both eyes?”
I thought a second. “Two bucks apiece.”
“Nose and jaw broke?”
“Call it ten.”
“Ear chawed off?”
“Gotta be at least fifteen.”
“Slashed cheek?”
“Anywhere from one to ten bucks, depending on whose cheek it is.”
“Shot in the leg?”
“Let’s say up to twenty-five.”
“What about the arm?”
“Same, only start countin’ at five.”
“How come?”
Johnny smacked Art in the shoulder. “It’s harder to hit an arm,” he said.
“Maybe for you. Bomb-throwing?”
“Five bucks to fifty bucks.” Pineapples were expensive.
“The Big Job?”
I thought about this for a moment. My first Big Job had been done gratis, but that was on account of my temper. This was business.
“A hundred simoleons and not a penny less.”
Art and Johnny both whistled. To any chump on the street, a hundred bucks was a fortune—a month’s wages—and here they could earn that in a day. I woulda thought it was a fortune too at one time, but not anymore.
We was so wrapped up in all this business that none of us noticed that Loretta Rogers had sat down and was havin’ a glass of whiskey a couple of tables over. Normally I woulda been alerted to such a development, my standing order being that I was to be notified whenever one of my babes was on the premises, to avoid unpleasant situations, but I also had declared I was not to be disturbed while discussin’ matters financial, which in the minds of the boys clearly superseded order number one.
There was something else that might have had something to do with it. To tell you the truth, I was tirin’ a little of Loretta. She was sweet—nicer than Freda by twenty city blocks—and she had a set of lungs on her that a fella would kill to get his hands on, but she was awful light upstairs, and I had found out what every guy discovers sooner or later, which is that you can’t stay in bed with ’em all day, much as you think you’d like to.
The first I knew of Loretta’s presence was that she was standing next to our table, a glass of rye in her hand and looking none too chipper. The color had gone out of her face, her hair was mussed and unwashed and frankly she didn’t smell too good, like she’d been sick not long earlier and I mean English sick, not American.
“What’s new, what’s blue and how do you do?” I said as jaunty as I could muster.
“Not so good.”
I remember the room getting very quiet right about then, something it never did, except it was just my luck.
“Owney,” she blurted, “you got me in trouble.”
We had a bell system at the Winona, manned by a lookout. One pull meant it was a gang member, two signified somebody from the Tiger, three indicated the visitor was someone we had to do business with, even if we didn’t like him, and four meant an inquisitive copper. Repeated clanging meant run like hell.
Before I could say anything, the bell rang. We all stopped counting at five.
Loretta screamed as the bulls’ battering rams started pounding down the doors. This was no time for yelling, though, and so, quick as sewer rats, up jumps me and Art and Johnny and we start pushing furniture against the entrance right quick. Mugs started dashin’ this way and that, especially down the back staircase to the cellar, where they could disappear into a dozen tunnels beneath the streets.
Our tables and chairs was losin’ the battle against the cops’ pile driving. “What about the clunker?” asked Art, referring disrespectfully to the piano. I shook my head no, because in my opinion you should never use a fine instrument as a doorstop.
My desire to preserve my Steinway, however, is what lost us the battle, ’cause the rams were tougher than Keating’s cheap front door and down the latter came, followed by a host of coppers led by a big sergeant.
Most of the gang had hightailed, leaving just me and a few of the boys to deal with the situation. Before you go thinkin’ that was cowardice, though, let me say that it was more like prudence, because a footloose gangster is far to be preferred to one caged in the Tombs. There was nothing for it but to stand and fight.
I yanked my gat out of my waistband. “I’ll shoot the gizzard out of any copper what tries to come in!” I shouted, but those Irish pigs were crazy-brave, and they kept on coming until somebody whistled a bullet and that somebody mighta been me.
That was the signal for some several minutes of general fracas firing. Bullets went poking through walls, shattering glass windows and busting up the appointments until we all more or less ran out of ammo about the same time.
As often happens in these kind of wild gunfights, nobody got hurt serious. The sarge mighta got winged a bit, but it was your basic standoff, except we was outnumbered and presently they fell upon us, clubs at the ready. One of the dirty bastards tried to take a swing at Loretta, which naturally had me runnin’ to protect her, especially in light of her recent information, which meant I had to turn my back on the bleeding sergeant for a moment and that’s when he caught me alongside the head and down I went, face-first into the floorboards, and once again had the ignoble experience of waking up in durance vile.