7

Mexico City, 1953

They took a taxi to the Hotel del Prado for dinner. Charlie, still a little tipsy, he could see, talking quickly to the driver in Spanish, the man smiling and nodding patiently.

“I told him to drive around a little, let you see some of the city. We still have plenty of time!” he informed Tom expansively.

They plunged into the rivers of ceaseless, bumper-to-bumper traffic, veering and accelerating past the peso cabs, and the squealing yellow streetcars. The buses with their heaps of religious figurines and paper flowers behind the wheel, and the ads hand-painted on the doors. The pace much like that of New York, maybe even faster: hordes of office workers, men and women going out or going home, scrambling across each intersection. Men in uniform—chauffeurs, doormen, and soldiers—standing outside of dark, shabby little bars. Not talking to one another, just standing there sweating next to whores trying to fix their stockings and taking their time about it.

Tom was sure that Charlie was aware of what he was showing him, a city so much like his own, or maybe his own fifty years before—full of color and life, with countless little shops and street scenes. A people in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Maximilian himself built this broad avenue here,” Charlie told him, gesturing at the wide expanse of the Paseo de la Reforma. “Built it straight from the National Palace here all the way up to Chapultepec, so he could keep tabs on the wife, up in their palace.” Charlie grinned weakly at him. “Not a bad idea, if you ask me. Wish I’d done the same!”

They circled past still more construction sites, most of these, too, with the name Alemán on them. In the darkness, the bright posters looked faded, while atop the new, tall buildings the neon signs blazed to life, flogging liquor and beer, insurance companies, newspapers. Charlie pointed out one squat, brutal structure of mostly concrete with little slits for windows, occupying the better part of a city block.

“The new American embassy building,” he said, shaking his head. “Look at those windows—it’s like a castle! They’re back to the old ways, just tryin’ to intimidate and overwhelm. Well, it won’t work anymore!”

Their driver grinned back at them over the seat, as he had been doing almost constantly since they’d left the hotel, the gold gleaming in his teeth.

“The Americans I drive always want to know what Mr. O’Kane is doing,” he said in his earnest English. “I tell them he is best ambassador we ever have from U.S.!”

“D’ya know this guy, Charlie?” Tom teased him.

“I ride with him a lot. Now, José, stop! My brother here’ll think you’re my new publicity agent.” Charlie blushed, though he was obviously pleased.

They pulled up in front of the Del Prado. There was a whole new cluster of street vendors on the sidewalk outside—men selling sugared peanuts and fake-alligator bags, and an organ grinder playing and singing something plaintive. By the hotel entrance, slender young women in dyed blond hair, black dresses, and white gloves smoked cigarettes and pretended to be oblivious.

They pushed their way out of the cab and into the crowd. As Charlie was paying the driver, a small boy in a tattered blue shirt planted himself in front of them, waving long, narrow sheets of paper covered with numbers under their noses, shouting over and over, “La lotería! La lotería!” Instantly, more vendors seemed to swarm around them. Someone selling sweet potatoes and hot roasted corn, from a cart with a mournful steam whistle attached. Another man selling balloons, another what looked to be cut sections of honeycomb.

“Nacional! Forty thousand pesos—forty thousand for tomorrow!” chanted the little boy with the lottery strips.

“C’mon now, that’s no way to sell ’em,” Charlie said jovially, digging a handful of change out of a pocket and pulling out one of the sheets, handing it to Tom while the hotel doormen roughly and casually pushed away the other hawkers.

“The national lottery,” he explained. “Everybody’s crazy for it. You remember, I wanted to start a lottery when I was mayor? Take the money out of the hands of all those policy boys and put it in the public coffers. But the old bluenoses wouldn’t let me, and then they wanted to put me in jail for what the bookies were doin’—Dario!”

Inside the hotel the maitre d’ threw his arms around Charlie, exclaiming, “Mr. Embajador, we love you!” before seating them at the best table in front of the orchestra. The room heavy in gold and silver, chairs and booths upholstered in dark leather, with long tapered candles and bowls full of roses on every table. The men in tuxes and tails, the women exclusively in long white and black gowns, their necks and wrists laden with still more gleaming metal. Charlie in white tie, too, wearing at least half of his countless decorations from the war, Tom saw, despite his embarrassment. All the medals he had secretly memorized, and could still recite by heart: the Legion of Honor and the Legion of Merit, the Aztec Eagle and the Pan-American Collar—shiny stars and suns and hearts from all over Europe and the Americas, and even a long ceremonial chain from somewhere, which he used to tease his brother about unmercifully.

Slim joined them at the table, with her hair up and wearing a strapless red Balenciaga gown and a small, gold pendant that hung down between the top of her breasts. Her entrance drew a long collective murmur from around the room, and the ruffle of a dozen ladies’ fans. She posed for a moment by her chair, taking a long look.

“Why, they’re wearing even more hardware than you are tonight, Charlie,” she said, leaning in to kiss him on the cheek.

“Hello, Slim. It’s good to see you,” he said, his voice barely a croak. But she had already moved on.

“Hello again, Tom,” she said. Barely sliding her face along his, her cheek fragrant with a light perfume, lips grazing his ear.

“I begged him not to wear the necklace,” Tom joked, pointing to the ceremonial chain around Charlie’s neck, and Slim smiled.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m the spectacle here. That’s why I decided to wear this. I thought I might as well show my true colors—”

“You shouldn’t be talkin’ like that, Slim,” Charlie told her. “You know everybody loves you.”

“They think I’m a whore. But they still love you, Charlie.”

“Ah, now, Slim—”

A line of tuxedoed men were already making their way over to the table, shaking his hand and embracing him, chatting animatedly in Spanish while their wives stayed back at their tables, peering in their direction. The orchestra struck up as slow a cha-cha as was humanly possible, and when Slim looked at him imploringly, Tom took her out onto the half-filled dance floor.

“Damn, Tom, I can see you haven’t been wasting any time at nightclubs,” she said, laughing, as he stumbled over his feet and hers.

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right. You never could dance,” she said softly, leaning in close. “It’s one of the things about you I always found endearing.”

“Who’s all that?” he asked her, trying to distract himself from the feel of her against him.

“Charlie’s friends? They call them ‘the Big Crowd.’ The Alemanistas—sort of a combination of café society and Tammany Hall. There would be more, but right now half of them are lamming it in Europe, along with our glorious ex-presidente.”

“They seem to like Charlie, all right.”

“What’s not to like? He’s the most charming man I ever met. Plus they’re convinced he must have some money somewhere.”

“Are they?” he asked, alarmed. “What makes ’em think that?”

“Because they do, silly. Stashed away in Cuba, or Spain. It happens with every new president, though it really got out of control this time around. They’re saying they took eight hundred million dollars. But when the heat dies down they’ll all come back, buy themselves a new hacienda or a yacht.”

“So they think Charlie must’ve done the same.”

“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

“But you know that’s not true,” Tom said, the bile rising in him at the thought. “The IRS has been through everything. So were Rudy Halley and the Kefauver Committee. He must be the most investigated man in America, and none of ’em found a thing! Hell, Slim, you know all he’s got is his mayor’s pension.”

“I know that better than anyone,” she said in a low voice, and slipped her arms around his neck. She was all he could look at then. Her body as slender and supple as ever, her shoulders brown from the sun. Her face still so beautiful and inviting.

“God, I missed you, Tom,” she said. “I missed your indignation. I missed how much you care.”

“That’s just what he needs—more rumors, more innuendo. We have to help him, Slim,” Tom said. But he knew they were just words now. All he was aware of was how her breasts grazed against his chest, the trace of perfume that made him want to put his cheek against hers again, and kiss her mouth in front of everyone.

“Does he look like he needs any help?” she asked, nodding toward him at the table.

It was true, he looked better than Tom had seen him since he’d arrived. Ebullient now as he always was on the stump, pumping hands and slapping backs. Laughing heartily, his face a more natural color.

He pulled her arms gently down from around his neck. “Slim—”

“Oh, Tom, I’m already a spectacle,” she said, trying to smile at him. “Did you know the first week I was here, I was trying to tell El Presidente Lammistero that I liked riding horses. It came out, ‘Me gusta montar caballeros’—I like to ride men. It was all downhill from there—”

“Slim!” he said, admonishing, and she pulled back, seeing that she was embarrassing him.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she told him lightly, letting him lead her off the floor and back to their table. “It’s him you have look out for.”

Looking at Charlie surrounded by the Big Crowd, Tom thought for an instant that he could be looking at their father, the schoolmaster. Sitting at the kitchen table of a Saturday night, when he sent to town for the Dublin papers, and read them by the kerosene lamp to any of the neighbors who happened to come by. Patiently explaining what something meant when they asked. His soft, reedy voice effortlessly filling the house. Looking out over his spectacles and his pipe when he wanted to have a little fun with an item, usually to tease their mother . . .

Charlie now just as self-assured. Rambling away on one topic or another. His voice—a politician’s voice—deeper and richer, and more blustery than their father’s, switching effortlessly from English to Spanish and back again. Regaling the men standing around their table with the old stories, from when he was mayor.

“—a Mrs. Throckmorton Updike asked me if she might plant forsythia along the traffic islands on Park Avenue. And she was a nice old lady, so I gave her permission, which was my fatal mistake. Next thing I know, the Parks Department is wantin’ to know, am I aware the forsythia blooms just one month a year? An’ next it’s some precinct captain wantin’ to know why there’s no forsythia planted in Democratic neighborhoods, an’ then it’s the botanists askin’ didn’t I know there’s dust an’ car exhaust on Park Avenue, an’ terr-ible vibrations from the subway . . .”

Tom noticed to his disgust that his brother’s voice had slipped into a brogue. The men clustered around the table laughed and smiled dutifully—though he saw that they pointedly paid no attention to Slim, who ignored them in turn.

“But it was all worthwhile. A month later I get the nicest note from Mrs. Throckmorton Updike, sayin’ she would even consider votin’ for me the next time, assumin’ there wasn’t a qualified Republican in the race!”

The men laughed on cue, and shook his hand, and except for a pair of nearly identical well-dressed men in their forties, circulated away. Charlie went right on.

“You know, I’ve been reading a lot about Daniel Boone recently, and my old friend Cortés,” he said, taking a big swig from the glass of red wine before him, the waiter instantly refilling it. “A man could be great then. There was rhythm, there was movement in those days.”

“Which days? They were three hundred years apart,” Slim remarked, but Charlie paid her no mind, though he reached out to grip her wrist. Tom noticed the familiar gold cufflinks with his initials on them—the ones that inspired some of the columnists to start calling him O.K. Charlie.

The two men who remained listened attentively. They had thinning hair, thin moustaches, and the steady stare of hyenas, Tom thought. Charlie introduced them as two of the Pasquel brothers, and asked how President Alemán was.

“More to the point, where is President Alemán?” Slim interjected.

“Now, now, I won’t have a man condemned before he’s given his day in court,” Charlie said, chastising her. “I know what that’s like. What did that fella in the Collier’s write about me, Tom? ‘The mayor of New York can make a hundred thousand a week in kickbacks from building and supply contractors alone, if he likes.’”

“Something like that.”

“‘And Mr. O’Kane’s administration built a billion and a half dollars in housing, and hospitals, and schools, and roads, without a breath of scandal!’ Without a breath of it!”

The Pasquels nodded politely in acknowledgment of his honesty and made their excuses. Charlie leapt up to pump their hands and thump their backs. Tom was certain he could see the faint bulge of a gun through each of their dinner jackets. Slim took the opportunity to move to the other side of the table.

“Those two fellas have a hand in everything,” Charlie said confidentially to him. “You know they run the Mexican League—”

“Sure, they’re big stuff. I remember when they signed Danny Gardella off the Giants,” Tom said, rapidly getting fed up.

“Jorge, the older one?” Charlie continued as if he hadn’t heard a word. “He’s Presidente Calles’s son-in-law. He owns ships, cattle, has a big car business, even his own publishing company—”

“They say he killed a man, too, with that cute little gun he keeps in his tux,” Slim said softly, smiling brightly at them.

“I’m trying to buy into an auto dealership with a friend down here. I figure all I need is about twelve thousand a year, American. Maybe just nine thousand. Of course, if I really wanted to play my cards right, with the people I know in the Big Crowd I could make a hundred grand a year—just for starters!”

Slim looked away, staring off over the dance floor. Her bare back was magnificent in the low light, taut and sleekly muscled, and Tom remembered how it used to feel when he held her.

“—if I wanted to show them up north it was money I could make, I could make it. But they’d just assume I’d stolen it, like always—”

His brother’s babble of words felt unbearable.

“I know, Charlie,” Tom said, cutting him off. “You wrote me about it—”

“Sure, I wrote you! But it’s not the same thing for you to see it, to meet the people down here, an’ see how it is for yourself—”

“Charlie!” Slim said sharply, without looking back, and Tom watched as his brother’s face crumpled, then tried to recompose itself.

“Well, let’s get back to that some other time. You know, you never did tell me how it is back home,” Charlie said haltingly.

“You know how it is—”

“Oh, I see the kind of things they write about me. That Collier’s fella? ‘O’Kane was an almost great man. You might say he was fifty percent genius, and fifty percent jerk.’”

“They write plenty of good things, too—”

“Sure! How’s this one? ‘He was a true tragedy. A great man, but there was a hole in him somewhere’! C’mon, Tommy—d’ya see a hole?” He pulled at his white dinner jacket, and then the shirt underneath, popping a couple of his shirt studs. Two waiters scrambled immediately under the table to retrieve them.

“How could ya do it, Tommy?” he asked, his mood changing rapidly to despair, then to righteous anger: “Jesus, Tommy, how could ya let ’em do that to me?”

Charlie finished the wine in his glass with a flourish, and Tom realized that he had never seen his brother drunk before. Tom tried to wave the waiters away, but they had already brought another bottle. One of them quietly placed Charlie’s sprung studs in his hands.

“You have to be careful with this stuff up here,” Charlie said again as he brought the glass to his lips. “Remember, we’re seven thousand feet above sea level! It goes to your head.”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“If it’s good for the world to crush a man, let the world do it,” he said resignedly, slurring his words.

“Charlie, there’s millions who love you—”

“You know I think sometimes about how it was when I was still on the magistrate’s bench, back in Brooklyn. You were there when I was still a magistrate, Tom.”

“I remember.”

“Those were the happiest days of my life. I remember Claire sayin’ it at the time, God rest her soul. ‘This is where you belong, Charles,’ she said. ‘You’ve found your own level. Now be content with it, an’ do some good.’ Why did I ever not listen to that woman!”

“Please God, Charlie, no more stories about the magistrate’s court,” Slim said from across the table, turning back to them and snubbing her cigarette out savagely.

“Decidin’ all those neighborhood quarrels between the little people. You remember how it was. There was ‘the defender,’ an’ ‘the complainer,’ and ‘the bailer.’ I can still remember a couple of neighbors, Meyerowitz an’ Klein, feudin’ over a tree. The tree that grows in Brooklyn—only what they were arguin’ over was the little bird that lived in the tree, an’ soiled the wet wash in Mrs. Meyerowitz’s yard!”

“I remember it, Charlie.”

“And that old fraud on the bench—what was his name? George Folwell! You know, the one who spoke fake Italian? One session, the translator was out, so Judge Folwell decided to do the job himself. He comes out with a big long spiel of it, an’ the defender looks at Folwell an’ says, ‘Sorry, judge, I no unnerstan’ so good the English.’ Oh, I thought the whole damned court was about to die laughin’!”

Tom tried laughing with him, but the next moment his brother’s face had gone sour again.

“That’s where I shoulda stayed, Tommy. Keepin’ the peace between the people of Brooklyn—”

“You did a lot more than that, Charlie.”

“—all the little people, who think I’m the thief of all the world!”

“Are we discussing leprechauns again?” Slim asked.

“They don’t, Charlie,” Tom tried to tell him, but his brother was past hearing him.

“‘I see before me the Gladiator lie,’” he recited, rocking back in his chair.

 

 

“He leans upon his hand—his manly brow

 

 

Consents to death, but conquers agony,

 

 

. . . The arena swims around him—he is gone

 

 

. . . Butcher’d to make a Roman holiday’!”

 

 

“Jesus, Charlie, will you give it a rest?” Slim asked, but he only stared at her out of unsteady, drunken eyes.

“Don’t you think I’ve wanted to say that to you a few times?” he shot back—then recited again: “‘Masters with no authority in their house/Their women out playing night and day—’”

“Which book is that from, Charlie? One Hundred Narrative Poems About Unfaithful Wives?’” she said, fuming, her voice rising enough to attract stares from some of the grand donas about the room. “What’s it do for anything, all this feeling sorry for yourself?”

“Runnin’ around here with everything in pants,” Charlie said, pretending to ignore her, turning to appeal to Tom. “Did you see that picture in the magazine of that rancher fella, Gandarias, helpin’ her strap on her gaucho chaps? How close he was standin’ behind her?

“Charlie, so help me God—”

“Jesus, Tommy, I ask you: what did that look like to you?”

“Honest to God, Charlie, I thought he looked old enough to be her father.”

Stopping dead on his own faux pas, while Slim put her hand over her mouth but burst out anyway into uncontrollable laughter, drawing further stares from the wealthy Mexican women all around the room. Charlie’s sunken eyes sliding from one to the other of them, still not comprehending. Looking as dazed and exhausted as the bull Tom had watched her fight that afternoon.

“I think you’ve had enough now, Charlie.”

“Ah, listen to him, my own little brother! No, no, Tommy, I’m not drunk. Have you ever seen me drunk?”

“No, Charlie. Not until tonight.”

“You know who taught me not to get drunk? Ed Dunphy the waiter, that’s who! Back before the Great War, when I was workin’ as a hod carrier. I had an education of sorts, but I didn’t have any manners. So every Saturday night that summer, after I got my wages for the week, I’d have the barber give me a trim, an’ shave, and a shampoo, and an iodine treatment. And then I’d put on me one navy blue suit an’ my best white shirt and my only tie, an’ my eighty-five-cent straw hat. And I’d go down to see Dunphy, where he worked at Healy’s famous restaurant, on West Sixty-Sixth Street.”

“So you told me, Charlie.”

“He was quite a man, Ed Dunphy. By then he owned two apartment houses, bought just with what he saved up waitin’ tables. He’d sit me down an’ teach me everything. How to read the menu, and how to eat the salad, an’ use the silver oyster fork.”

Tom tried to get the bill but the maitre d’, still smiling broadly, waved him off. Instead he helped pull out Charlie’s chair for him and lead him to the door.

“Looks like the floor show’s over, folks!” Slim said as she followed, waving openly to the women seated around the room, who glowered back at her.

“He told me never to be a showoff. He told me he could tell a showoff by how he talked to the hatcheck girl, an’ he said he’d rather see his own daughters in a convent than goin’ around with a showoff. He told me, ‘I like nice people, rich or poor, who take one cocktail and order properly, an’ up they get an’ go away. The kind that always says, ‘Thank you, waiter.’ That makes me feel good.’ He taught me all that, an’ when he was through, he said, ‘I’ve done all I can for you here. When you have a steady job, get married to a nice girl an’ stay home with her. Places like this give a lad bad habits.’”

Dario, the maitre d’, halted them with a cautionary hand at the door, pausing to take the rescued studs from Tom’s hand. Then gently, lovingly, he reinserted them and closed his brother’s shirt again.

“He was a gentleman, was Ed Dunphy—just like you, Dario!” Charlie called after the maitre d’ as they carted him on out. Dario only giving a small bow and dispatching the doorman to flag down a cab for them. Slim walked past them out onto the sidewalk to have a cigarette, Charlie barely seeming to notice.

“Ah, me, Ed Dunphy! I was such a greenhorn in those days! I remember how you were Tommy, when you first come over—before you knew what the score was?”

“Sure.”

“When you were tryin’ to work your way through law school at night, and I got you the job on the Camarda docks in Red Hook?”

“I remember.”

“First job you had in America, workin’ as a checker—”

“First day out, I saw a man lift a whole side of ham,” Tom said, and sighed. “Just picked it right off the hook and walked away with it, and I reported it. Next day, they fired me.”

“You can’t go by the book, Tommy. We had a rule book back when I was walkin’ a beat, too. If we’d gone by that, the whole City of New York woulda been left defenseless.”

Charlie stood wavering by the door, waiting for his cab, not unhappily. A light rain was falling now, a cooling air blowing gently into the entrance of the Del Prado. Tom could see Slim pacing under the awning in her red dress, drawing impatiently at her cigarette.

“Then you took up with the union. That was some trouble! You didn’t know it, but oh, those b’hoys wanted to throw you right in the river!”

“Did they now, Charlie?” Tom asked, struck by that remark but unable to say just why. Thinking that his brother might be right—the thin air making it hard for him to concentrate, after only the half glass of wine he had imbibed.

“Do you remember that meeting down at Saint Stephen’s hall? When you gave your first speech?”

“Don’t remind me, Charlie! I worked on that speech for two whole weeks,” Tom said, shaking his head ruefully. “The priests down there helped me write it all out in Italian. I memorized all the pronunciations, the accents . . . ”

Going over and over it in his room up at Mrs. Maguire’s boardinghouse. Studying every gesture in front of the mirror as if he were O’Connell himself, out to talk before a monster rally.

“It was a full house, too,” Tom continued. “All those longshoremen. And I did read it beau-tifully, if I say so myself. And then I said—in Italian!—‘Freedom of speech has come at last to the waterfront, where now a man may speak without fear!’ Oh, you should’ve seen it, Charlie!”

“I wish I did. I wish I did!”

“And then, when I was all done, I hear a voice from the back of the room. ‘Mister,’ it says in English—”

A voice like a hoe being raked over gravel. As serious as death.

“‘Mister,’ the voice says, ‘why you mean anybody can go up there an’ speak?’ And I say, ‘That’s right, man. That’s what we’re here for.’ And the voice asks again, ‘You mean anyone can just go up there an’ speak right now?’ And I says, ‘Put away your fears! Come forward now, an’ tell us your name!’”

“And up comes Tony Anastasio!” his brother chortled. “Tough Tony, brother of Albert Anastasia, the Lord High Executioner himself!”

“Oh, but you shoulda seen ’em scatter! ‘My name is Anthony Anastasio,’ he says, in that bear growl a his, an’ ten seconds later there wasn’t another soul left in Saint Stephen’s hall.”

They were both laughing hard now, laughing as they had not done together since years before in Charlie’s office, recounting the follies of other men.

The cab came at last, and the doorman helped Tom cart his brother out to it. Pushing him gently into the middle of the back seat, Slim getting in after him, and Tom going around the other side so he’d be propped up between them. The boy in the tattered blue shirt running up, Tom saw—too late. Waving the lotería strips at them again, the lists of numbers flashing by the window.

Charlie still talking as they pulled away from the curb. Mumbling now, and almost out, but Tom realizing nonetheless that he was listening to both a defense and a confession.

“So isn’t it possible,” Charlie said, slurring his words, “isn’t it possible your big brother didn’t know what the hell he was doin’ either?” before he passed out in his seat.