32

New York 1949

“Where am I?”

Another strange room. A grimy tube of light flickered in the ceiling above.

“Bellevue,” Tom told him.

“That’s ironic.”

“Why?”

“Never mind. What’re they sayin’?”

“First things first. How do you feel?”

“Like a juvenile delinquent. First things first: What is it?”

“They think it’s a coronary heart condition,” Tom told him reluctantly.

“What’s that mean?”

“Second cousin to a heart attack,” he said. “From overwork.”

He tried to lift his head up but felt dizzy immediately and fell back onto the pillow. Looking to his side, he saw an old man’s hand on the rail of the hospital bed—realizing only after a long moment that it was his hand, so old and gray did it appear, sprinkled with liver spots, a tube inserted into it. Suddenly, he felt like weeping.

“Where’s Slim?” he asked instead.

“Out having a cigarette. She’s been here beside you the whole time. I just told her I’d take a watch.”

“Jesus, is it that bad?”

“No, Charlie, they think you’ll be fine. But the work—”

“How’re the papers playin’ it?”

“Very nice, very sympathetic. You even bumped the good cardinal from the front pages.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, he finally accepted defeat, went up to Val-Kill to have tea with Mrs. Roosevelt.”

“I’d like to have been a fly on the wall at that little encounter,” he said, laughing faintly, despite how much it hurt his chest. Tom was alarmed to see how gray and listless his face looked, his eyes watering up freely.

“You’ve got to take it easy, Charlie. That’s all there is to it,” he said gently. “You have to get eight hours sleep every night, cut down the smoking, get some regular exercise—”

“They say lots of things, but they don’t run the City of New York, do they?” he said, his fine blue eyes looking blurry and tearful and small in the middle of the big pillow. “I can’t just lay it aside. The job is with me every minute, from when I wake up in the morning until my head hits the pillow. And when I fall asleep at night, I dream about it—dreams that’re so real they leave me tired in the daytime.”

“Surely, Charlie, there’s some way you could—”

“No, Tom, there isn’t,” he said, cutting him off. “I must see to it that our laws are enforced and our streets kept clean. I must see that our health precautions are observed, and that our children get a good education, and that the old and the feeble get to eat. I must see that good homes are put up for the slum dweller, and that our hospitals are clean and well run for the sick—”

“All right, Charlie!” Tom tried to assuage him, alarmed at the rising hysteria in his voice.

“You were the one had that priest come an’ talk about my duties at my swearing-in, Tommy,” he said, grabbing at his brother’s jacket and shirt. “I think about that still: all my duties and responsibilities, and God help me if I betray them—”

“You’ve never betrayed anything, Charlie!”

But his brother was rambling on, oblivious. “Talk about Eleanor Roosevelt, you know I saw the big man himself, not long before the end. I’d flown back in from Italy, and he came up to New York for a parade, a few days before the election. It rained all that day, but he had to take it. They drove him through four boroughs in an open car, wavin’ an’ wavin’ to the crowds, just a hat and a rain slicker to protect him, but he took it.

“He had to show he could still do it. There were too many rumors he was sick; it was too obvious from the way he looked, all the weight he’d lost. They’d planned out a few way stations where they could stop an’ at least change his clothes, get him dry an’ warm for a few minutes. They had me wait in one a those, some little house in the Village. He wanted to talk to me about runnin’ for mayor, maybe even governor, after the war was over, but I could barely concentrate on it, lookin’ at him. The man was all wrung out, Tommy. The mind was still there, but his legs were sticks, his face a skull. His jaw falling open, he was so tired.

“But they toweled him off, an’ put him in a fresh shirt, and out he went again. To ride on through the drivin’ rain, grinning an’ waving to all the idjits. That’s me, don’t ya see, Tommy? I can’t rest an’ relax any more than he could. It doesn’t work that way! You can’t let the job get ahead of ya, even for a moment. Clairey warned me—”

“Then why don’t you quit?” came a soft voice from behind Tom.

Slim stood in the doorway, holding two cups of coffee. She handed one to Tom and went to sit on the edge of the bed just behind him, gently stroking Charlie’s legs under the blankets with her spare hand. She’d had the servants bring over a change of clothing from the mansion, and now she looked as poised and cool as she always did, in a man’s Brooks Brothers shirt and an appropriately demure gray skirt, her hair tied up in a ponytail. To look at her, no one would have known she’d been up all night, much less sitting beside a hospital bed for the past eight hours.

Charlie blinked at her, uncomprehending.

“I mean it. Why don’t you quit, then?” she repeated, gazing into her husband’s face, and in a flash Tom saw how brilliant the idea truly was.

“It’s not that easy, Slim. Vinnie Impellitteri would become mayor, for cryin’ out loud. Some mobbed-up court clerk! We only put him on the ticket because we couldn’t find an Italian who wasn’t a communist or a crook—”

“Then you could say you won’t run again. It will give them plenty of time to pick a successor. That seems simple enough, doesn’t it?”

Tom thought he saw a light go on in his brother’s eyes, like a drowning man suddenly spotting a rope. Slim looked up at him as well—her face making a silent appeal, he thought: a way out.

“I dunno, Tommy,” he said slowly—but Tom could pick up the note of hope in his voice. “I do have an obligation to the voters . . .”

“What do you owe them anymore, Charlie?” he said, making the case for him. “You’ve given forty years to this city, working your way up from cop, to DA, to mayor. Walkin’ a beat, dispensing justice. Sending the worst killers this town’s ever seen to the chair. Where does it say you have to serve as mayor till you’re dead?”

“It would be good for us, Charlie. We could go away somewhere, see a little of the world until you get your health back,” Slim pleaded, her voice sincere. Glancing at Tom as she said it. He picked up her meaning easily enough: it would be good for them, too. Give them the chance to get out of this whole dirty business they couldn’t help themselves from—

“Maybe that would be the best thing,” Charlie was saying, running a hand over his chin, his face imbued with a little more color already. “What good can I do anybody dead, or laid up like some invalid? Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead.” He gave a small chuckle. “I could even endorse Frank Hogan to succeed me—that would shake ’em up, the whole lot! Have the prosecutor himself in the mayor’s chair.”

He face twisted suddenly in alarm.

“But what about the money? Forty thousand a year as mayor—where would I ever make that again?”

“There are plenty of people who would be glad to hire you, darling, with your experience,” Slim cooed at him.

“Sure there are,” Tom joined in. “Colleges, universities. Foundations. You could come back to the law firm with Natie and me, be our rainmaker. It’s not like before the war, Charlie. They practically pave the sidewalks with gold now.”

“That’s just the new mica concrete, that sparkles like that,” Charlie said, trying to jest—but the idea obviously intrigued him. “Maybe that would be the way. We could even go out to California, visit brother Mike for a spell an’ see if there’s any possibilities. You know, I always wanted to see the golden West—”

“That’s it, Charlie,” she said encouragingly. “Keep thinking that way, my darling. There are so many opportunities.”

 

They left him soon after, when he drifted into what looked like a very peaceful sleep, still mumbling about the possibilities. On the sidewalk outside the hospital, she offered him her hand almost formally, and he was tempted to kiss the small white glove. But when he did touch her she squeezed his palm tightly in hers, speaking to him in a low, urgent voice.

“Tommy, it’s—”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. It’s—”

“I do know,” he said, hushing her. “It’s the best way to stop it—for all of us. He’s killing himself in that job. The two of you should go. To California, or wherever. And then—”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

She had shown up soon after her phone call in the early-morning hours—made from a booth in some downtown club, with the sound of a horn in the background, and a slow jazz guitar, and laughter that was a little too forced. Arriving by taxi, minutes later. Sweeping down to his basement apartment in yet another frilly cloud of a designer gown, a bottle of good champagne in her hand—glowing still from the adventure of her night out. Giggling to see him in his gun-smuggling clothes as he shushed her and pulled her inside. Holding her against the door, and kissing her over and over there—she was unable to get another foot inside before he had the gown off, and then everything else. They had the champagne only afterward, enjoying each other at their leisure on the couch. Telling each other about all the things they’d done that night, across the different worlds of the City. Staying up for the rest of the night they had, until it was time for her to get back into her gown, and her taxi, and head uptown.

“Until it was time for me to turn back into a pumpkin,” she told him out on the sidewalk, smiling but with the sadness plain in her eyes.

“You? A pumpkin? It’s the rest of us who shrink back to our quotidian existences when you’re out of sight,” he said as gracefully as he could, thinking how much he was going to miss her.

“My God, I thought he was dying, right out there on the lawn. I couldn’t live with myself, if it was over worry for me—”

“I know. I feel the same way.”

“Goodbye, Tommy.”

“Goodbye, Slim,” he told her, though they both knew they would see each other the next afternoon at the hospital again, and the day after that, and the day after that, and who knew for how long after that until Charlie—finally, maybe—made up his mind and moved them away to California.

Outside of the hospital they really did try to keep away from each other. No more phone calls in the middle of the afternoon that made his heart leap. No more rushing halfway across town to meet her for an hour. All the intricate wiring of an affair, gone dead for good.

 

Instead, he went down to the labor school that he knew Father Phil Carey was running at Saint Francis of Xavier’s, on West Sixteenth Street. Following a stream of men in laborer’s clothes into the basement, under the stone image of the saint waving a crucifix admonishingly over them. He was surprised to see how many more men there were already downstairs, the air thick with humidity and body odor, coffee and cigarettes. He could hear voices lecturing and chalk squeaking on a blackboard somewhere, while other men—all of them looking like they were fresh from the docks, or a construction crew—were hunting and pecking at a couple of typewriters, inking and cranking away at a mimeograph machine.

He found Father Carey easily enough in the next room. The little priest’s light hair was lapped with gray now, and he no longer wore a sweater or spoke with his head down, but there was still the same Barry Sullivan smile about his lips and eyes. He recognized Tom at once, greeting him with a happy shout and a thump on the back, pressing a cup of stale, bitter coffee into his hand before he led him around a pillar and into a corner space that yielded as much privacy as the crowded rooms allowed anywhere.

“Looks like business is good, Father,” Tom told him, almost shouting to be heard above the general rumble of the crowd.

“We have three hundred men down here now,” Father Carey acknowledged, watching impishly as Tom took a sip of the rancid coffee and made a face. “But it’s not just the numbers. You saw them out there. The men are doing it for themselves now. They’re even running their own newspaper out of the basement here, The Crusader.”

“Impressive,” Tom admitted, amazed by the sight of so many big men working at office machines.

“There’s no stopping them, Tom. Not after the war. It’s not like before; now they want everything that’s coming to them. Taxi Jack O’Donnell even threatened to burn us down.”

“Did he!”

“He gave me a ride back from the docks last month, in his big chauffeured Chrysler. Made a point of telling me all about how, when the communists painted a hammer and sickle on the side of his church, he told the congregation from the pulpit where their headquarters were. The next week, sure enough, there was a big fire at commie central. Then he tells me, just as he drops me off here, ‘And Father Carey, you see we know where your address is, too.’ Can you believe that one?”

“He sounds like a storm trooper.”

“Oh, storm trooper, hell! I wouldn’t want to insult the poor storm troopers. No, O’Donnell’s just a horse’s ass. A nitwit . . . a bum. That’s all he is. Threatening to burn down a church! Willing to let King Joe Ryan put him in his back pocket, just so he could keep his fancy cars and his fat parish bank account to show the cardinal!”

His enthusiastic rancor halted abruptly, eyes falling.

“It was purest nonsense,” he said, “and I never felt the least afraid. But you know, just the act of getting into his chauffeured car like that—it reminded me of Peter Panto, all over again. These idiots still thinking they can kill free men like dogs, right out in public.”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“Not in the church, maybe. Not out in public. But these men . . .” He motioned all around him. “All we tell them is, you don’t save your soul in church, or on your knees. You find salvation in this world through prayer and work with others. They do the rest. We’ve got them on the run now, Tom—King Joe and his whole crowd. We even have the cardinal behind us.”

“Francis Spellman?” Tom asked, astonished.

“He had us up to the Powerhouse just last week, Father Corridan and myself, asked about the work on the docks. Heard us out, then said to keep him informed, let him know if there was anything we needed.” Carey grinned. “I think it’s because we’ve got Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker with us. Do you know what he said, when Taxi Jack asked him to denounce her? ‘That woman may be a saint!’”

“Ah, that’s horseshit, Father, an’ you know it!” a nicotine-soaked voice boomed at Tom’s shoulder, and looking up Tom was surprised to see not a workman but a priest’s collar. “The cardinal’s just hedging his bets. He acts like he’s with us, then he goes an’ makes Bill McCormack a Knight of Malta, for God’s sakes—”

“Here’s another Jesuit for you, Tom—from Amsterdam Avenue, by way of Wall Street,” Father Carey told him. “This is Father John Corridan, though we all call him Pete, for reasons that will shortly become obvious. Together, we’re a regular Mutt an’ Jeff act.”

The priest was taller than anyone else in the room, over a head taller than Father Carey. He looked about to enter middle age, his pate mostly bald, but he possessed a broad, athletic build, with wide shoulders and big, wide hands that made Tom’s knuckles pop when they shook. He moved quickly and decisively, and behind his dour, almost sneering expression, there was a ready anger in the man.

“Bill McCormack?” Tom asked. “He’s a knight now, too?”

“Sure, an’ why not? That goddamned Spellman! Who the hell does he think he is? He could put the docks in order in five minutes if he would ever read the riot act to those sons of bitches! Instead, he gives them the highest honors in the church, for Christ’s—Pete’s—sake!”

The words were all but spat out through the priest’s thick lips, each one punctuated by the thrust of the burning cigarette he held between two fingers. His breath smelled heavily of smoke and cloves, and he seemed to Tom more like a shipyard boss, running a shape-up, than any priest he had ever known.

“He wanted me to deliver a message to you,” Tom told him, remembering his purpose.

“Who?”

“Mr. Big himself. I fell into owing him a favor, so I told him I’d do it.”

“Ah, that’s the way the waterfront works—it’s the way this whole city works!” Corridan said, his eyes gleaming. “They inveigle you into owing something. A loan, a bet, something. Then they own you. What does Mr. McCormack want for his favor?”

“He says he wants to talk. He wants you to name your price, whatever it is, and he says he’s not an unreasonable man, an’ you an’ he an’ Joe Ryan can reach an agreement, he’s sure of it,” Tom recited.

“That’s what you agreed to tell us?” Father Carey asked, while Corridan glowered above them.

“That’s it.” Tom nodded. “I said I would do it. What I didn’t say was that I would also advise you to tell him to go shove his price and his offer up his arse. Better yet, I wouldn’t get within ten feet of the man. There, I said it.”

“Well, you’re a hell of an emissary,” said Corridan, a slow, crooked smile spreading across his face. “Whattaya think he means by this?”

“I think he means that by sending me, his offer will look like it came through the mayor. Which I can assure you, it did not. I haven’t even told Charlie about this. It has nothing to do with my brother.”

“You may not be as right about that as you think, but God bless you anyway,” Corridan told him cryptically, throwing a big arm around his shoulder and towing him across the room. “It’s one more proof: we’ve got McCormack on the run at last.”

“Is he?” Tom’s voice skeptical.

“Sure. The feds are pressuring King Joe to keep the docks running at all costs, so they can get the Marshall Plan shipments out to Europe. No more of his finaglin’ around, and they can’t risk a wildcat strike by the men. Hogan’s squeezing him from the other end, here in Manhattan, with the criminal investigations. And meanwhile, Mike Johnson’s series in the Sun is putting everything together at last, ripping the veil off just who Mr. Big really is. It’s like bringing the boogeyman out of the closet.”

Father Corridan gestured to a bank of beige metal file cabinets that reached up to the basement ceiling.

“We’ve got all the rest. There’s the whole sordid history,” he told Tom fervently. “The biblioteca apostolica of Bill McCormack an’ his waterfront empire. All the theft—did you know that last month they lifted an entire electrical generator, right off the docks? Millions, maybe hundreds of millions in goods stolen every year!

“Over here,” he said, pointing to another stack of cabinets, “these are the rackets. The loan-sharking, the bookmaking. All the beatings, and the knifings, and the killings. It’s all opening up. Everybody’s talking since Cockeye Dunn and his boy-os got convicted of murder. Pretty soon we’ll have a straight line—right up to King Joe, and then on to Mr. Big himself.”

“It will take more than the facts to stop Bill McCormack,” Tom said slowly. “We thought we had it all set up before. Thought we had enough to blow up the whole waterfront. But things tend to slip away.”

“We’ve got it all now—enough for a thousand indictments on every pier! And all of it written up in triplicate, the copies held in safe locations. I don’t think even McCormack would try to burn a church, but we’re taking no chances.”

“First you have to get Dunn to talk,” Tom told him, looking over at his mountainous file cabinets. “Then you have to get people to believe him—a lowlife racketeer like that, feeding off the men for years. It won’t be easy. But I agree with one thing—if McCormack wants to talk, he’s not winning.”

He looked up to see Father Corridan grinning wolfishly at him. The priest leaned over, slid open the bottom file cabinet—and pulled out a half-empty fifth of Dunphy’s.

“I think this calls for a war conference, Mr. O’Kane. Care to join me?”

The rest of the afternoon and the evening wore away in a blur of drinks and of bars, across the width and breadth of the West Side. The priest, now in a dark coat and hat, like a huge crow, talking to him very intently. The last thing he remembered that night was walking arm in arm across the cathedral-sized waiting room of Pennsylvania Station, with Corridan and a much shorter man with a dramatic sweep of dark hair, whom Pete had introduced as a writer. The three of them singing some patriotic Irish song at the top of their lungs. Tom thinking, in his last smear of a thought, Well, if anyone can send the devil back to hell, it’s this one.