I spent a couple of days hiding out here and there, reading the newspaper accounts of my manhunt. The plane gambit had worked well enough. The night watchman had sung his song and there was a lookout for me in Canada and Mexico, whence the cops figured I’d flown. Others speculated that I’d gone to Reno to get a divorce from Loretta, the news of how I was sweet on Agnes down in Bubbles having made its authorized way into Winchell. Finally, Agnes gave an interview to the local rag to the effect of how I was down there and we were very much in love, that sort of malarkey.
All this talk about love got me to thinking and maybe a little randily at that, the result of which I made a phone call to Lucky about that dame and he told me he’d canned her some time ago, she was workin’ a crib downtown, and if I wanted her, it wouldn’t cost me nothin’, we bein’ friends and all.
“I can make my own deals, Charlie,” I said. “Just gimme the address.” Which he did: 23rd Street. The Cornish Arms. The same flophouse where Mad Dog had holed up with little Lottie, just before he ran into Bo Weinberg and his Thompson.
She answered on the first knock, breathless, expectant, needy, broke.
“Hello, lover boy—Jesus…”
“Hello, Mary Frances Blackwell,” says I.
I went to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. Not out of disgust or lack of desire. Fear.
“You don’t love me no more?”
“I got the clap.”
That flashed me back to Margaret Everdeane right quick. “So what? I seen plenty of clap. They got a cure. They got a cure for everything nowadays.”
“Not for this clap they don’t. It’s the big one. Syph.”
“How bad?”
She started to say something, opened her mouth in fact; the words wouldn’t come but the tears did, plenty of ’em. “Tertiary.”
I slept with her that night, just slept. We held each other like children, through all the hours of darkness, the hours of magic, when men and women meet each other as equals, as primals, bodies and souls.
“How long you got?” The light was glancing through the dirty windows, northern light, weak light, New York City light.
She sat up and shrugged, her nightie falling off her left shoulder, exposing her breast, that still beautiful breast no matter what was going on inside her, in the mysterious woman place that no man, however exploratory, however adventurous, can ever understand.
“Maybe a year. Maybe not.”
“What can I do?” I assumed the answer was nothing, but it seemed to me the gallant question to ask, the only question to ask.
“Same as always,” she said. Then she threw her arms around me and hugged me so tight I thought I was going to expire right then and there, because my breathing wasn’t so good, you savvy, what with everything and all, the bullets and the bullet wounds, the healed and the unhealed. She mashed her mouth onto mine, sucking my tongue and my breath, tasting and infusing at the same instant, her last gift to me, her last bequest, her last request.
“Kill ’em all.”
Some combo. A syphilitic whore and a sterile gangster, locked in an embrace, genitals that wouldn’t generate, generations that would go ungenerated, forever and ever.
“Amen,” I said. I pulled on my clothes and left.
The short version is she didn’t make it a year. The long version is she never wanted for anything, as long as she lived. I owed her that much, and more. She’s up in the Bronx today, with several of my friends, peaceful now.
Everybody was getting pretty worked up about the search for Public Enemy No. 2—that would be me, a testimonial to my ability to stay out of the headlines—and the wrapping up of my business affairs was coming along pretty well when all of a sudden Vannie Higgins shows up back in New York and starts shooting off his mouth.
Charlie Workman brought me the news. “Says he took you for ten grand. Says you never went to Arkansas. Says he don’t even know where Arkansas is. Says he flew around in circles for a while, then landed at Teterboro and went to see his girlfriend. That’s what he says.”
This made me very unhappy. This made me out to be a liar, and worse, made Agnes out to be a liar. “Where is he now, Charlie?”
Charlie was a big guy and sometimes we think big guys is slow, and he was slow enough when he talked, but pretty quick on the trigger when he had to be, which is what I liked about him. “You won’t believe this piece a shit,” he said, and normally I don’t cotton to that kind of language but I was getting pretty mad at Vannie myself. “He and three pals knocked over the Hydrox Laundry, got away with thirty-five hundred bucks and a couple a heaters.”
“That all they get?”
“They also grabbed a ring and wristwatch from Edith Schwartz.” Edith was the bookkeeper, whose job it was to keep the books as separate as possible.
“Hurt her?”
“More than they had to.”
“What’s Frenchy doin’ about it?”
“Hunting.”
“Any luck?”
“I already found him. Red Hook.”
The more I saw of this kid, the better I liked him. He leaned forward, hoping to hear the magic words from my lips. I was sorry I had to disappoint him, but this was personal.
“This one I’m taking for myself. You can watch, see how it’s done.” The Bug flashed me a hurt look, and I knew right then that he was a stand-up guy, a gee who’d do time rather than rat on a fella. “I’m going back to college in a couple of days anyway. Stake him out, set him up and we’ll roll.”
“Gee, thanks, boss.” He was genuinely grateful.
“Maybe you’ll do me a favor someday.”
We bagged Vannie a couple of days later in Brooklyn, where he was swaggering around, making the mistake of bragging about how he was holding parts of me in the palm of his hand. Hiram was at the wheel and the Bug was beside me as we slid up to Vannie somewhere near the Gowanus Canal.
“Feel like a trip, Vannie?” I said.
I’ll say this about Vannie Higgins: he may have been a weasel, but he took it like a man. Even half-drunk, he got into the car without a fuss, sandwiched himself between the Bug and me and didn’t open his gob.
We drove out to Garden City pretty much in silence. “Meet Charlie the Bug.” Vannie nodded. “Unlike Benny, he don’t mind the name Bug. Takes it as a compliment to his guts, in fact. Ain’t that right, Bug?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s the truth, Vannie, but don’t you worry about Bug. He just feels like a trip too. Never been out on the Island before. Ain’t that right, Bug?”
“That’s right.”
“They say travel’s broadening. Ain’t that right, Vannie?”
Vannie tried to say something but he couldn’t.
“Mrs. Schwartz would like her ring back and her wristwatch. Imagine that, Bug, a buncha mugs in the middle of a cheap stickup heisting a lady’s rocks. Don’t seem right. Does it seem right to you, Vannie?”
Vannie shook his head.
“Plus of course I want all my money back. Vacations are expensive these days and, well, dough don’t grow on trees.”
Vannie swallowed hard and turned his pockets inside out.
“I guess we’re going to have to make restitution some other way, eh, Vannie? It’s like you go out of town and then your best friend starts making time with your girl. No self-respecting guy can have that.”
We got to Garden City, near Roosevelt Field. I told Hiram to stay with the car and I told Bug to come with us.
As we strolled into the woods Vannie finally said something. “You ain’t really going to do this, are you, Owney?”
I liked Vannie. I really did. “A year ago, two, the answer woulda been no. But things is different now and I gotta make examples and clean up loose ends. It’s just bad timing is all.”
“What do you mean bad timing?”
“I don’t need any more pigeons in my life, especially stool pigeons.”
He opened his mouth in protest and that’s when I got Da’s knife in him, right up through the roof of his mouth. He tried to struggle, but the wind was already out of his sails, and I cradled him in my arms as I jabbed the blade through his palate and, with a smack from the heel of my hand, up through the nasal cavity and into his brain. He died like one of my birds, bloody but peaceful, with only a twitch or two of his legs in protest.
That’s what I call merciful.
The Bug and I wrapped his body in a sheet, popped it in the trunk and dumped it in Park Slope, on 8th Street, not far from the hospital, which wasn’t going to do him any good at this point, and Green-Wood Cemetery, which was.