Francis X. Gilfoyle was never free, even on his own bench, from the watchful eye of a “messenger.” But on Thursday afternoon, with nothing much at stake for Arnold Rothstein in State of New York v. John Roma, the judge could follow his own lenient instincts.
Gianni, called upon to make a statement before sentence was pronounced, looked around and found the audience pitifully small. Waldo was of course nowhere to be seen, but not even Daisy DiDonna?No, a couple of columnists had made mention of “the countess and the judge,” and she’d thought it better not to appear in her lover’s courtroom on a day he had to send someone from her circle up the river. And aside from that, what with Bandbox’s more pressing woes and the current newsprint-devouring story of the Bremen aviators—found stranded but alive up on Greenely Island—Gianni’s little drugs-and-degeneracy episode had lost any head of steam in the press. The only viewer the defendant could recognize was David Fine, who’d shown up as the eyes and ears of Joe Harris, preoccupied by the approaching climax of the Shep venture.
A look from Mr. Goodheart, his top-notch lawyer, reminded Gianni that he needed to be contrite. Just admit it, he’d been advised; put in a dig at Prohibition if you want—it’ll go down well with a Tammany wet like Gilfoyle—but let that be the extent of any contempt for the court.
“Your Honor,” said Gianni, after clearing his throat, “itsa hard to tella right from wrong these days.”
Goodheart gave him a second stern look.
“But I didda wrong.” Gianni paused to look around at Fine. “I coulda used a little help and guidance from my friends, but”—he turned back to the bench—“even so, I didda wrong.”
Judge Gilfoyle looked as sympathetic as his sweet, ancient mother, and pronounced a sentence of four months in the state prison at Fishkill—as little punishment as the law would allow.
Both Gianni and the judge were then led from the courtroom—the latter not by his bailiff but the ever-watchful messenger.
Fine sat for a moment by himself, thinking about his good old days as Gianni’s sommelier, even before Joe Harris came on the scene. He had an awful feeling that it was all coming to an end. Joe had looked plain terrible this morning, trying to decide whether to hold the issue back or let it go—a quandary he had only hours left to think his way out of. Boylan would not return the editor’s calls, whether just to torture him or because there’d been a double-cross, no one could be sure. And tomorrow, whatever happened, Joe would have to sit through the GME breakfast with a smile.
Fine decided to go up to Yankee Stadium and rub Eddie Bennett’s hump.
Norman Spilkes sat alone in his office, fingering the tie tack he’d been given the other week at AT&T: a tiny Statue of Liberty and a bejeweled little Eiffel Tower attached by five links of the thinnest possible chain. Between his index finger and thumb, the managing editor worried the object as if it were the string of beads Harris’s barber always carried.
He meditated upon the marvel that had once been the focus of his own employment: the telephone. Before long, everyone, not just General Pershing, would be able to call from Paris—or dial directly from Norwalk to New London—all on his own. Harris’s helpless bellowing of “Hello, Central!” when Mrs. Zimmerman and Hazel were away from their desks had already begun sounding antique. During his days at AT&T, Spilkes had never seen the numbers drop; people only wanted more of a product being continually improved and purveyed by no one else. Whereas desire for his current wares, after a long juicy waxing, had begun to wane so fast you could hear the air escaping.
Why, he tried to remind himself, had he come here? Because he’d grown tired of administering too sure a thing? Because he’d been so dispirited, a few years ago, by the discovery of his own early middle age? Back then an improbable dinner-party encounter with Joe Harris had seemed a chance to throw his own gearshift into a fast, giddy reverse. He loved Joe’s Bandbox—its pages were a flashing nickelodeon of all the images he’d desired for himself as a young man—and in many respects he loved Harris, too. The fun catering to his moods when that outsized creature was soaring! And the pleasure of being the calm traffic cop to all the colliding racehorse personalities on the fourteenth floor! The clattering racks of suits; the athletes; the steakhouses; the girls and the gadgets—what would he have done without them? Jazzed by his new job’s tonic, but still happily tethered to his pretty wife and children, Spilkes had made it successfully into his middle years. Which only—right now—put him at another crossroads. The career change that had been a matter of rejuvenation was turning, suddenly, into a terrifying self-indulgence.
Ever since Harris told him about Jimmy Gordon’s taunting phone call, Spilkes had felt seized by something like panic. What did Jimmy mean about Bandbox “providing the crime”? What did he know? That the rumor of arrests out in California was false? Had Boylan set a trap—his way of getting back at Harris? And had Spilkes’s own cautionary calculation been the undoing of what might have been a great success?
Maybe he and Joe would both wind up in the clink with Gianni.
Instinct now made him reach for that embodiment of everything once steady and secure in his life: the phone.
“Mrs. Zimmerman,” he heard himself saying, “please get me James Lauder at AT&T headquarters.”
While he waited for the connection, he consulted his New Haven Rail Road timetable and took out an empty Brooks Brothers shopping bag from the bottom drawer. Could he get out of here, with his personal possessions, this afternoon, without anybody noticing?
Just before 5:00, Cuddles came in from a short walk to the Commodore to pay Shep’s weekly bill. Across from the Chanin Building’s construction site, he’d looked up at some Indians strolling the girders twenty floors above the street. Strange that they should be the group most at home atop the city’s new vertical essence; stranger still that New York had been home to him from the moment he first ferried into Manhattan more than twenty years ago. He had rarely made a surefooted way across any beams—he’d more usually felt like he was hiding in the bucket that dangled from the crane—but even now, as Brigham Young had said to Grandpa Houlihan about somewhere far away, This was the Place.
And from what he’d learned just before his walk, it might be that for a while to come.
Back inside his office, Cuddles removed his raincoat and found Harris taking up position in the doorway. The boss was in a state. “Where’s Norman?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea.”
Harris shook his head. “The pictures on his desk are gone. Is Fine around?”
“Not back from the courtroom,” said Cuddles. He realized that ’Phat was looking for friends, and that he himself still hadn’t been redeemed to the point where he was eligible to serve.
“How about your girlfriend? Is she here?”
“Do me a favor,” said Cuddles. “Tell her that’s the role life has thrust upon her.”
Harris, all need, stood there waiting. Cuddles refrained from giving him the look he deserved, and added only: “She left early.”
Harris moved his eyes to the clock, whose second hand kept falling and ticking, falling and ticking.
“You know,” said Cuddles. “You can find Jimmy and Paulie up on eighteen.”
Stung by the remark, and the realization that on this crucial evening of his life it was coming down to him and Houlihan, Harris finally asked: “Have a drink?”
Cuddles hesitated, and tried to pretend his delay came from something other than pride, but Harris persisted: “There are two bottles of pre-Prohibition Stoli still standing—at the back of the closet, where my moose used to be.”
Once the two of them got settled on opposite sides of the big marble desk, under the gaze of Yvette and Claudine, Harris could no longer hold it in: “I’ve got twenty minutes left to pick up the phone. I haven’t heard from Boylan, and the trucks leave the plant at five-thirty.” He looked at his EDITOR OF THE YEAR cigarette case, and the buckram-bound back issues, and the pictures of Mae West and Walker and all the rest of them inside their simple black frames. “I’m damned either way. What am I supposed to do? Hold it back and skip an issue?” He knew that would be like asking the rain cycle to skip a step; the sudden downward lurch of the sales graph would resemble the thunderbolt immediately hurled by Oldcastle. “Even Betty’s taken a pass,” said Harris. “She claims she’ll love me either way.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Cuddles.
“Not to me,” Harris responded. “I’ll hate myself if I pick wrong. And hate myself worse if she still loves me after that.” He took a frustrated pause. “Christ, we came so close with this. I don’t know whether to kill Jimmy or kill Norman.”
Cuddles thought a moment before asking, “You know that second bottle of czarist Stoli? Wrap it up for Jimmy. And put in a thank-you card—for forcing you to the top of your game.”
Harris looked at him blankly.
“Has my judgment ever been wrong?” asked Cuddles.
It was an astonishing question. Cuddles’ absence of initiative had for so long been so total that one would no more ponder the matter of his judgment than one might worry over the walking skills of a man who’d stopped breathing.
“Call the plant,” said Cuddles. “Tell the trucks to roll.”
Harris was sweating. His own judgment and initiative were top-notch, but what he’d always had in huger measure than anyone else was nerve. He now peered at Houlihan, the last man around the campfire. To bet everything on the look in his eye, which hadn’t been clear since long before Bandbox began its slide, would take the last dollop of guts the editor-in-chief could find.
“Mrs. Zimmerman,” he said, not even realizing he’d picked up the phone. “Get me the printing plant.”