LEW CASSIDY WAS TWENTY-NINE that year. An old twenty-nine because of a couple of things built into the core of his life. One was his occupation, the other was his wife, Karin. Together they’d put some years on Cassidy.
When he came jogging through the echoing tunnel from the locker room, the cleats chattering on the runway like a bad case of pregame nerves, and was funneled out onto the grass at the Polo Grounds, he felt as if he’d spent all twenty-nine years with a hangover. Which wasn’t of course the objective truth. The hangover that Sunday was strictly the result of Saturday night with Terry Leary. And it was a beaut, big and dark and mean, like a Cuban girl Terry had introduced him to at a New Students Mixer before the Bucknell game in 1933. Alicia had been her name and for a while there she’d been a lot more fun than this hangover.
But that was all old news now and Alicia had become a memory by the time they’d played Harvard two weeks later. The funny thing was, though, Terry was still running around with the prettiest girls in town and Lew Cassidy was still absorbing a weekly shit-kicking on the football field. One of the pretty girls was on Terry’s arm right there in Max Bauman’s box as Lew trotted past, lobbing a football to Frankie Sharansky, who actually caught it—something he’d never be able to do once the game started.
“Hey, Lew, howsa boy? Come on over here—hey, baby, how ya feeling? Howsa head?” That was Terry, standing at the box railing, beckoning with a pigskin-gloved hand. A flask bulged in the pocket of the soft caramel-colored polo coat with the belt like a bathrobe and a huge collar flopped up against the December wind. With his pencil-thin moustache and slicked-back black hair he looked like a cross between a movie star and the highest-priced gigolo in New York. He was a cop. NYPD, working homicide. With his looks, his personal manner, and the hot cases he kept getting, Terry was a star of sorts, certainly in his own circle, as Lew was in his, and Terry loved living up to the role he’d created for himself.
“Lew, listen, I’d like you to meet Naomi. She’s a big fan of yours, right, Naomi?”
Naomi was the kind of girl you never get to her last name. She was a redhead with too tight a permanent but Terry’s hair was cut well enough for both of them. The rest of her, so far as Cassidy could tell, was okay, though one beauty mark would probably have been enough. He figured she was wearing a little gold ankle bracelet, too. Terry had a collection of them in his jewelry box, said they always came off in the heavy going.
“You’re just swell, Mr. Cassidy.” She batted her eyes and looked at Terry to see if she’d read the line right. “Terry’s told me what pals you are—”
“Sign her program, will ya, Lew? Sign it, ah, ‘Billy, I hope you’re out of the hospital soon and back to football—Your friend, Lew Cassidy.’ Kid’s dying, some damn thing, it’s her brother—”
“He’s not dying, Terry. He’s got polio …”
“Whatever’s the matter with the Kid, thatsa boy, Lew, Billy will love it.”
Cassidy signed the front of the program. The crowd was getting noisier as game time approached. From nearby boxes people were craning their necks to see Lew Cassidy up close, without his leather helmet.
“Thanks so much,” Naomi said. “Score a touchdown for me today, okay?” She batted her eyes and looked at him from behind a grillwork of thick lashes, heavy with mascara.
“Anything you say, Naomi.”
Terry hugged her expansively, possessively, and puffed one of Max Bauman’s enormous cigars. He leaned forward like a man plotting mischief and winked. “Not too many touchdowns, kid. I got five hundred bucks down says the Giants wipe the floor with you guys, twenty-one points or better.”
Cassidy shrugged. “You never know,” he said. Which was a barefaced lie since everybody in the Polo Grounds knew Terry’s money was as safe as the crown jewels. They’d all come to see the Giants whip the Bulldogs but they’d also come to see Lew Cassidy score some touchdowns. He’d scored eight in the last three games, including three against the Bears, and was leading the league in both scoring and rushing. He’d had a helluva season, running from tailback like a Mack truck, providing the Bulldogs with enough offense to get the Giants’ or anybody else’s attention, but defensively the ’Dogs had crashed in flames long ago. Though Cassidy was undeniably a powerful, crushing runner, his play at defensive end when the ball went over was characterized more by energy and determination than by tackles. He had the defensive end’s fatal flaw: He was too aggressive, too eager to get into the play, couldn’t hold back and box the ball carrier in toward the clogged center of the field. Time and again he would overcommit, get taken out of the play by a blocking back while the runner cut up the turf going around him and heading off down the sidelines. In writing about Cassidy and the pitfalls of the end run, Grantland Rice had observed that Cassidy had “the heart and soul of a born sucker and there’s nothing on the Good Lord’s green earth he or the Bulldogs can do about it.” Cassidy felt it was always nice to be noticed. And Rice had also called him “the toughest runner and headbuster in the game once you’re inside the twenty and heading for the end zone.”
“You got any money down yourself?” Terry gave him an innocent, open-faced choirboy look. “You want me to put some down for—”
“Come on, you know I only bet us to win. Haunts you if you go the other way.”
Terry nodded. Cassidy had a hundred each riding on the Redskins and Sammy Baugh down at little Griffith Stadium and on Sid Luckman and the Bears to beat the crosstown Cardinals for the championship of Chicago. He hadn’t put a nickel on the game he was about to play.
“Hey, Cassidy, get your butt over here. You got some football to play!” Coach Horse Farraday was frowning at him over his spectacles. Nobody knew why they called him Horse because he was a small man who, with his long nose, tiny shining eyes, and weak chin, far more resembled a rat than, say, the mighty Seabiscuit.
The team in its black jerseys and pants with the red and white trim gathered around Farraday for a final inspirational word. The word was always the same. “All right, you assholes, go out there and wear ’em down. Be tougher, be meaner, be dirtier, just so’s you don’t get caught at it. Wear the bastards down, don’t let ’em get their hands on the ball …” It went on and on in that vein and Cassidy had been hearing it for seven years, which was a hell of a long time for a guy who carried the ball thirty, forty times a game. Today wasn’t going to be any different because Farraday was one of those wear-’em-down coaches who hadn’t had a new idea since Amos Alonzo Stagg was a pup. For seven seasons he’d had Lew Cassidy to wear ’em down. Give the ball to Lew and let Lew run over ’em and wear the bastards down. When it came to the forward pass, Horse Farraday figured there were three things that could happen to the ball when you started throwing it around and two of them were bad. He used to say that when the going got tough, the tough got going, which Cassidy figured was all well enough, except it was hard to keep saying it when you’d only won the one game and Christmas was less than three weeks away.
While Farraday kept on extolling the virtues of rock-’em, sock-’em play, Cassidy looked back at the crowd and saw that Terry and Naomi had now been joined by Max Bauman, in his black chesterfield with the velvet collar and the soft homburg, and a blonde in a mink coat. Her name was Cindy and she belonged to Max. Cassidy had met her last night and she’d—no, he couldn’t think about last night. Had to think about football. And anyway she was Max’s. But just then she looked like the symbol of beauty and chastity for whom Saint George might have slain any number of dragons. Either that or a Vassar girl at the Yale Bowl in a cigarette ad, though maybe that was only another version of the same thing. You never knew when it came to symbols. It was tougher to see Max Bauman as Saint George, unless your idea of the dragon slayer was five-five, Jewish, bald, easily induced to weep, and a big-time gangster. Max was all of those things and for all Cassidy knew the dragon hadn’t been made that Max couldn’t slay. Max saw Cassidy and gave the thumbs-up sign, which could have meant just about anything since Max was also the main owner of the Bulldogs though he didn’t like it generally known. Maybe if they were winners but, as it was, he didn’t think it was such a hot idea. A football fan, that was Max’s weakness, and the Bulldogs were, each and every one of them, his toys. Thumbs-up could have meant Cassidy should go out there and show ’em how a real man played this game, wear ’em down and rock ’em and sock ’em. It could also mean get out there and go in the tank because my pal Luciano’s bet half of Jersey on the Giants by twenty-one. You just couldn’t tell.
Behind Max, like one of the newer skyscrapers, was his shadow, a full load called Bennie the Brute. Maybe that’s how Max would deal with dragons and damsels and errant knights alike. Just wind Bennie up and point him and wait awhile for the screaming to stop. Anyway, they made quite a picture. The cop and the gangster with their cigars, the pile of muscle standing guard behind them, the remote can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her blonde on the gangster’s arm, and Naomi, who was just passing through, asking for Mr. Touchdown’s autograph, and moving on having added her ankle bracelet to Terry’s collection.
“So, goddammit, you sorry piss ants,” Farraday observed, concluding his final pregame remarks at the top of his lungs, “go out there and play some football so you can hold up your heads and look ’em in the eye when you collect your paychecks!”
He was such an emotional, inspirational leader. Cassidy could barely contain his enthusiasm. He was making six thousand dollars for the season, highest salary on the team, and Farraday was making four. Cassidy figured he earned his six and, if laughs counted, Horse was probably worth the four.
It was always the same, like standing at the bottom of a deep well of noise, waiting for it all to come crashing down on you.
A Sunday afternoon at the Polo Grounds, gray sky without any sun glare, not too cold, the grass mottled green and brown, spongy underfoot. He hadn’t gotten all the clumps of mud and grass from where they’d wedged between his cleats during the warm-up and now it was too late. He was waiting now, just waiting for the kaleidoscope to shake, for the game to begin.
The crowd was standing and yelling behind a curtain of smoky haze. The radio station banner, the big white letters WHN on a navy-blue background, hung from the broadcast booth on the mezzanine level. He glanced over at the scoreboard where the other games were listed. There wasn’t any word yet from Washington or Chicago but he knew he’d keep checking instinctively as his own game ground onward.
His helmet was pinching his ear, which was tender from last Sunday when somebody had knocked the helmet off in a plunge at the goal line and somebody else had kicked hell out of his head. His pads and jersey smelled like sweat from another century. By the end of the season they couldn’t clean the smell away anymore. Maybe winners had more sets of uniforms. He couldn’t believe the Giants smelled this crummy.
Cassidy was the lone return man. Art Hannaford had gone down with a broken leg just before Halloween leaving Cassidy as the only kick returner. Everybody on the team had congratulated Art, laughing at what Cassidy was in for. Art had gone back to his job at a bottling company in Hoboken.
Far away, on the horizon, beyond the drainage hump in the center of the field, the kicker moved up and the noise got louder, like the Twentieth Century Limited bashing through the bedroom wall, and he put his leg into the ball.
The ball climbed up the flat, leaden sky, end over end, like a fly moving up a gray wall. He waited for his depth perception to click in so he could get an idea where the hell it was going to intersect with planet Earth.
Kickoffs always scared him. Waiting, wondering what he was doing at twenty-nine, seven years out of Fordham, playing a kid’s game, wondering what would happen when the ball came down …
The ground began to tremble. It was always the same but nobody who’d never been out there for the kickoff could quite believe it. It was like an earthquake he’d once sat through in a Los Angeles hotel. He’d been scared shitless then, too.
It was doing a trapeze act up there, twisting and spinning in the gusts of wind, and he seemed to stand at the five-yard line for an eternity, waiting for it to top out. The Giants came down the field snorting and puffing and blowing like the horses Karin used to ride out near Princeton …
There he was, waiting for the kickoff to come down, and the crowd was on its feet bellowing and the ground was shaking and he had one hell of a hangover and even then he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife.
It was always the same.
He met her at the Winter Olympic Games in 1936. His father, Paul Cassidy, had put him on the payroll for the trip, calling him a talent scout for the sake of his accountants and the tax people. The football season was over. It would be a perfect time for the two of them to pal around together, visit Paris, and meander down to Nice afterward, all the while scouting the talent.
The talent that stopped Lew in his size tens was a twenty-year-old ice skater and the story going around Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the swanky German resort town where the Games were held, was that Adolf Hitler himself had his eye on her. In 1936 Adolf Hider’s name didn’t mean all that much to Lew except he was the guy running the whole damn country. The Germans seemed crazy about him and the posters of him on the walls were pretty striking. The Charlie Chaplin moustache didn’t seem funny—just somehow Germanic and authoritative. He seemed to have the country and the people revved up and everybody was having a fine time in Garmisch. The Führer thought the young skater, Karin Richter, was the answer to the twenty-four-year-old Norwegian Sonja Henie, who had brought her ballet training to the sport and revolutionized it while winning gold medals at Saint Moritz in 1928 and at Lake Placid in ’32.
The Germans were hopeful that winter of ’36. But, as it turned out, Karin Richter skated well and looked exquisite, which wasn’t enough to get a medal, let alone dethrone Henie, who won again. Rumor had it that Hitler canceled a reception he’d been planning for her had she won, and maybe he had. She never found out for sure, not even when she got to know Dr. Josef Goebbels, who was busy by then arranging his own parties for her. But that came later. At the time, Cassidy turned on the charm and told her the Olympics hadn’t been a complete loss for her. She’d met him. She’d nodded patiently but didn’t know what he was talking about when he told her he was the star tailback of the Bulldogs. Which only made him work on her all the harder.
Though he was the one who spotted her first, getting a good look at her early one morning when she was practicing at the rink just beyond the window of the hotel dining room where he was having breakfast, it was his father who approached her. Paul Cassidy was a movie producer back in Hollywood. He liked to insist that he was the first one with the idea of making Sonja Henie a movie star. Turned out he was a brick shy of a load in the money department but, then, that was the show business for you. If you were in the movie end of things, you didn’t even think about giving up. Paul Cassidy thought maybe he’d lucked into something when Lew dragged him out to the rink to watch through the morning mist the gorgeous girl doing her figure eights.
She was certainly a good enough skater to build a lightweight movie career around and, to tell the truth, Paul had never seen her as doing Lady Macbeth. He was, however, looking past strictly ice-bound pictures, past her legs which were unusually long for a skater, past that cute little fanny where Lew’s observations had stopped for some time to catch their breath and deliver a heartfelt sigh. Paul was looking at her face because, though he might not know about skating, he sure as the devil knew about movies. He knew it was the face that mattered. A woman could be badly underslung, flat-chested, bowlegged, and overweight, with all her springs badly sprung, but if she had the face—well, she had the face, and that was what it took to do the heavy work in the movies. Karin Richter had the face, all right. Classically high cheekbones, a nose just less than haughty length, which made her more approachable, level eyebrows over solemn, oddly pale brown eyes. Her upper lip was thin, the lower full, hinting at a kind of permanent pout, thankfully unlike her temperament. It was a face as likely to stick in the memory as any he’d ever seen.
Lew dropped like a stone into those bottomless brown eyes, the brown equivalent of the blue you sometimes saw in pure mountain lakes. He didn’t come up for air until he’d followed her back to Cologne, met her austere scientist father and faintly dismayed mother, and convinced her to marry him. They came back to the States together, Lew and Karin and Paul. Almost before she knew it she had a husband and a producer and was getting ready for a screen test.
Herr Dokter Goebbels, who was Hitler’s propaganda expert in Berlin, had to be consulted by Paul Cassidy regarding his plans for Karin’s future on the silver screen. Goebbels made a big deal out of it, talking about the German film industry’s vitality and the opportunity it afforded beautiful young German actresses, which was where Paul remarked that while that was undeniably true and he bowed to no one in his respect for the German cinema, it was also true that Karin was a skater, not an actress.
“Just for the sake of argument, Joe—you call me Paul, Joe,” Paul said over the cognac late one night after dinner with Goebbels and his wife, “let’s say the girl comes to Hollywood, does the test for me, and she’s got something up there on the screen. That magic which not one of us can resist. But she’s still a skater, see? So she learns her way around the camera in her first five, six pictures. We’ve taken the risks, we’re stuck with the kid if she just sort of lays there. You never heard of her, see? But if she can act, if she connects, well, then we work out a deal. You want her to come back, do a picture or two every now and then, no problem. If we’re lucky, hell, she’s an international star. Whattaya say, Joe, why not let us take the risk for you?”
Goebbels just laughed and grinned crookedly. He was a swarthy, funny-looking little geek with a clubfoot and damned if he didn’t wear his uniform to the dinner table. He limped across to where Cassidy sat uncomfortably on an austere chair, shook hands, said, “For our American friends, why not? How can I deny her the chance to go to Hollywood? I’d like to see it myself; perhaps someday it can be arranged. Who knows?”
Later Goebbels saw him to the front door where a venerable Daimler-Benz and driver waited to return the movie producer to the Adlon. “Now listen to me, my friend,” Goebbels said, shaking a finger beneath his guest’s nose, all in mock seriousness, “I know about your movie business. All furriers and junk men and moneylenders—Jews, all of them. You take good care of our little girl, she’s your responsibility. Don’t let the Jews get their hands on her! And you make her a great star!” They shook hands again and Goebbels said, “Auf Wiedersehen, Paul,” and Cassidy went back to the hotel thinking about the impossibility of Goebbels’s final instructions. She should be a star … but no Jews could be involved. He shook his head. A contradiction in terms. So Goebbels didn’t know batshit about the movies, in Hollywood or Germany or anywhere else, apparently.
When Lew and Karin were married up at Lake Placid in 1938, the good doctor took time off from helping Hitler devour Europe and sent a lengthy Teutonic wire from the Reichschancellery congratulating them on their mutual good fortune, wishing them a long and happy life together, and hoping they would soon visit him in the bride’s fatherland. He also sent about five hundred dollars’ worth of roses, which cleaned out all the florists for miles around the little church where the ceremony took place. Karin blushed and frowned. “More proof, the Nazis have no taste, no sense of restraint,” she said. She found them intolerably vulgar, from their manners to their uniforms to their torchlit rallies. “The only one I ever liked was Fat Hermann,” she’d once told Lew, referring to Reichsmarschall Göring, the epic hero of the Great War. “He bounced me on his knee once when I won a children’s skating competition. Pinned the little medal on my blouse.” That was the only good thing he’d ever heard her say about the Nazis. Lew figured Fat Hermann was overly fond of little girls but had the sense to keep his mouth shut.
The warmth of Goebbels’s words as well as the sheer number of roses led Lew to believe that the propaganda minister had not seen the first Karin Richter picture which Paul Cassidy in his wisdom not only produced but wrote as well. It was called Murder Goes Skating. Lew never understood why stars like George Brent and James Gleason agreed to costar with Karin but apparently they both went back a long way with Paul. And they got a month in Sun Valley out of it. There had to be some reason. Murder on Ice followed a few months later, much the same kind of thing though Tom Tully signed on for the ride. Her third movie, Bless Your Heart, was a little Christmas number and she only had to skate in one scene where she was teaching kids at an orphanage with lots of nuns also taking to the ice. It was a marked improvement. Karin’s career looked more than just promising. She was an American citizen by then. It was 1939.
While the German army was taking big bites out of the map of Europe, while Lew was playing his kid’s game, while Karin was letting Paul Cassidy try to make her a movie star, Herr Professor Ernst Richter, Karin’s father, was getting sick. The reports he sent were sketchy, reticent, and stoic but worrisome. It sounded serious: Nothing less would interfere with his government work and he admitted that it had. What it sounded like was cancer.
Karin decided she had to go back to see him, to be with him if he needed her, since her mother had died not long after she and Lew had gotten married. What could Lew say? A father was a father and wouldn’t he have felt the same if it had been Paul? Europe was going to hell from the looks of things but everybody was saying it had gotten as bad as it was going to get. Hitler had the Lebensraum he’d been yelling about, and now it would all calm down. And, anyway, it was her father.
She sailed from Pier 42 on the Hudson, bound for Lisbon on the American Export Line. She’d then catch a Lufthansa flight from Lisbon, heading into the heart of the Third Reich. Berlin. Then on to the family home in Cologne.
There was only one big problem once she got there.
They wouldn’t let her come back.
No strong-arm Nazi stuff, just Dr. Goebbels feeling that a good German girl’s place was with her dying father, as he was sure she would agree. And as long as she was back home, he felt that it was only logical that she make a movie or two. He invited her to tea in Berlin, then went to Cologne to continue making his case. The troops, he said, would worship her as they devoted themselves to the greater glory of the fatherland. They needed such exemplary models of German womanhood to keep their morale up. He told her that her father needed her by his side if he were to continue his work as long as he could. Goebbels told her of the special laboratories which had been built for him, one in Cologne, one in the mountains. He arranged interviews for her with her father’s doctors, who were none other than the same men he, Himmler, Bormann, and—yes—even the Führer himself depended upon. He told her that all Germany needed her skill and beauty to fill the cinema screens. He wasn’t kidding but a snow job from a Nazi was like a death threat from anybody else.
Lew decided it was time for the old football hero to make an end run and go rescue his wife.
But Karin wrote begging him not to do anything rash. She begged him to stay in New York. She said that there were old family friends who had become Nazi sympathizers: not monsters, she wrote, just friends of her parents’ whom she’d known and trusted from her childhood. They assured her that there were no plans for a wider war, that it was all over, that peace in Europe was at hand. They told her that once Goebbels got a movie out of her she’d be welcome to come and go as she pleased and as her father’s condition warranted. They told her that her father worshiped her, depended on her, would fall like a leaf in winter without her. Stay, they told her, until the vigil was over, if that was the will of God. Make the movie, Liebchen. And don’t worry so much, you’ll put lines on that lovely face.
The only thing she had to worry about, they told her, was an impetuous American husband who didn’t understand the way things stood in Germany. Keep him back home, her old family friends kept telling her, and the time will fly and you’ll be together again. Like little lovebirds. But if he comes barging into Germany making a fuss, they couldn’t be responsible for the consequences. To her father, to her, to her husband. They clucked and shook their heads and peered through their monocles. They were full of good advice.
So Lew didn’t go.
He waited and played football and read the papers and watched the Nazis club Europe damn near to death. He watched the Blitzkrieg and Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain from afar and counted the letters that got through from Karin.
He never did find out if she made Goebbels’s movie but he supposed the Reichsminister had a lot on his mind in those days and maybe he’d just never gotten around to it.
Paul said it probably wouldn’t have been worth a shit anyway since all the good Kraut moviemakers had escaped to Hollywood.
Saturday night before the Giants game.
Cassidy’s last letter from Karin had come through in September, posted by a friend passing through Lisbon. She told him not to worry, that her father’s condition had stabilized—it had turned out to be leukemia—and she was well enough, more or less untouched by the war. She hoped he knew how fouled up the mail was, what with Europe, North Africa, and the Atlantic all mired in one aspect of the war or another.
He knew about the war, all right, probably a good deal more than she did. And he believed what she wrote about her present state of mind, how much she loved him, missed him, and thought about him. Yet, hearing from her so infrequently, he couldn’t help feeling pointless, empty, a man going through increasingly senseless motions. He began drinking more than was good for him, had gotten in the habit of hanging around the nightclubs while trying to mask the emptiness, the worry, the loneliness.
The fact was, without Terry Leary he might not have made it through the season. He sure as hell wouldn’t have had the best year of his career, not without Terry. Because it was always Terry there to rescue him from the black hound of depression, to listen while Lew opened the taps and poured out his troubles. Terry understood because he knew Karin, too, had been best man up at Lake Placid, struggling to control all those goddamn roses from Goebbels.
Whenever Cassidy got too far down, Terry would make it his business to do the cheering up. “Gotta get you out of yourself,” he’d say, and nobody was better at that than Terry. He knew what was going on in New York: It was his style, his city. Another cop once told Cassidy: “That Terry, he’s got eyes in the back of his head. Eyes that see around corners. He knows what’s coming before it’s coming. That Terry, you gotta get up before breakfast to get ahead of him.”
On Saturday nights, with games looming the next afternoon, Terry took it upon himself to keep Cassidy out of trouble. Hell, there was always somebody who wanted to outpunch or outdrink a football hero and Cassidy was a big man, easy to spot, an easy target. But Terry could see around corners, and besides, he was a tough guy by profession and inclination. A cop.
Sometimes Terry’s magic worked and sometimes it didn’t.
That Saturday night they began as they usually did with drinks at the Taft Hotel, Seventh and 50th. They met in the lobby, all combed and brushed with clocks on their socks and shines on their shoes. Terry had come directly from his regular weekly appointment at the Terminal Barber Shop, which wasn’t as ominous as it sounded. He was grinning, shooting the breeze with the cigarette girl and kidding the bellhops, wearing his smooth shit-eating Irish-malarkey grin, his ebony hair slicked straight back from his high square forehead. He was normally very pale but not since he’d discovered the Suntan Shave at Terminal where for half a buck you also got zapped by their new sunlamp. He’d developed of late a sort of pinkish-tan flesh tone, not quite Palm Beach but closer than any other cop gave a damn about getting. The tan went well with the belted camel’s-hair polo coat.
Terry had made it to NYPD plainclothes faster than almost anyone ever had, or so the story went, and he’d had to face the resentment of some older, more traditional colleagues. Not only had he risen fast, he always had lots of money to go with the good-looking dames and the big cigars. It was obvious that he lived way beyond whatever his cop’s salary was, and for a long time Cassidy fell for the line that he specialized in not only beautiful but also generous lady friends. In any case, Cassidy figured it was none of his business.
Terry had always been good at having plenty of money, even back in Fordham, where there’d been a story that he supplied very discreet, highly companionable young ladies for social evenings with some of the priests. He used to say that he wished he’d thought of that himself since there was bound to be money in it. Cassidy didn’t really know where the money for the women and the Park Avenue apartment came from but he had some ideas. There were such things as gratuities from an appreciative public who enjoyed helping out a deserving cop, particularly a celebrity cop, which he’d become when he blew the Sylvester Aubrey Bean murder case wide open and then artfully put the lid back on. It was a masterful inside performance and every homo in New York owed him one.
Terry led the way into the Tap, said something to Charley Drew, who was working the piano for all it was worth, and settled in at the bar. He ordered a couple of Rob Roys and when they came he clicked his glass against Cassidy’s, the ice tinkling.
“Absent friends, Lew,” he said. “Any news?” The toast and the question composed their private ritual. Terry missed her almost as much as Lew did. He missed her for Lew because underneath the polish and the jazz he was a sentimental mick, full of Irish heart and blarney.
“Dr. Goebbels says the German Volk must accept the idea of a long, hard war,” Cassidy sighed. “I know it’s true ’cause I read it in the Times. He says defeat will be worse than an inferno for the German people. So they have just begun to fight. I’m not encouraged.”
Terry nodded. “Tell it to the Bolshies. It’ll get worse before it gets better. Think of it, kid, she may be making a movie over there right now …” Terry was star-struck. Always had been. He always said the introduction of sound film was the most important event of his lifetime thus far. He loved to come up with funny little bits of information that Cassidy never was sure he could believe. He said that Theda Bara’s real name was Goodman, that “Theda Bara” was an anagram for “Arab Death” dreamed up by some studio genius. Even Paul Cassidy hadn’t known that and he claimed to have come within a gnat’s eyelash of screwing her in 1925 when she was thirty-five and her career was almost over.
Through the second Rob Roy, Terry kept the conversation going, told Lew way too much about the Bob Hope movie he’d seen the other night, Caught in the Draft. He could have gone on about movies all night but he switched gears and said he’d bought a mink coat at Russek’s that afternoon for two grand. When Cassidy asked the name of the lucky lady, Terry just laughed, slid off the stool, waved good-bye to Charley Drew, who was playing “My Indiana Home” for a couple from Terre Haute celebrating their anniversary, and asked Cassidy if he was hungry.
They headed downtown in a cab. There was a heavy mist and the windshield wipers clapped raggedly. Times Square looked like a cheap, gaudy dream of Christmas. The marquees twinkled in the night. Lillian Hellman had a hit show, Watch on the Rhine. Cassidy looked away. Germany again. He couldn’t get away from it.
He was a hero to the guys hanging around Keen’s Chop House and it took a few minutes to get through the crowd wishing him luck against the Giants. Then a table was ready for the guy leading the league in touchdowns and they got down to a couple of serious steaks. Halfway through his, Terry put down his knife and fork, patted his mouth with the heavy linen, and lit a Dunhill Major, one of the new long cigarettes. “Listen, pal,” he said, “I may be needing your help one day soon.”
“Spare me the bad news,” Cassidy replied, dunking a piece of steak the size of a hockey puck in the Lea & Perrins. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know exactly. That’s the problem. Some people pass me the word, that’s all. I’m on the wrong list, or so they say. Right at the top. Kinda news like that, hell, ruined my lunch. I was at the Harvard Club, too. Damn fine lunch. Max invites me to lunch and then I get this call. From a friend with his hankie over the mouthpiece. You know? Couldn’t finish my rice pudding.”
“What can I do? Want me to go out there and wear ’em down for you?”
He laughed and shook his head. “No, just stay my friend, Jocko.” Terry called him that sometimes, an old Fordham nickname, mainly when he was thinking about the old days, wishing they were back in them. “Anyway, maybe it’s a joke. Or a false alarm.” He finished his cigarette and dug back into the two-inch-thick porterhouse.
“Max Bauman? He went to Harvard?”
“Where else?”
“I don’t know. Not that many Harvard men wind up making license plates and twine up in Dannemora, that’s all. Bootlegging, running girls, running guns, Havana casinos, funny money …”
Terry shook his head, amused at the recitation. “Misunderstandings. And all a long time ago. You know how it was during Prohibition. Hell, I used to deliver hooch for my uncle in Jersey City when I was just fourteen. Max, he’s in trucking, scrap metal, he’s got the club, he made the big mistake of buying the Bulldogs, he’s putting some money into the movie business.” He shrugged. He was wearing a gray suit with a white chalk stripe broad as the yard lines out on the field. There was a maroon silk in his breast pocket, suspenders to match, a pearl pin in his maroon swirled tie. Finchley’s on Fifth at 46th, three hundred bucks for the works.
“Whatever you say,” Cassidy nodded. “You’re the cop.”
“Max is aces with me, pal. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
They went on from Keen’s to a couple more joints where sports types hung out. Two broadcasters who’d be doing the next day’s game were good for another set of Rob Roys and then Terry said they ought to work their way back uptown. They came to rest in the Savoy Room listening to Hildegarde sing “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” The last time Cassidy had seen Paris was the spring of ’36 with Karin, and their hearts had definitely been young and gay. Hearing the song and seeing the chanteuse in the spotlight made him blue. So they went on to Heliotrope, which was just down West 52nd from the Onyx, where Count Basie was in residence. Cassidy didn’t have to think very hard to know who’d be in residence at Heliotrope.
Max Bauman.
He was the first guy Cassidy saw when his eyes adjusted to the purple darkness and the indirect lighting that came from he knew not where. He was sitting at a corner table with Bennie the Brute, who had probably been a classmate at Harvard and a secret Jane Austen scholar.
Bauman waved to Terry and they drifted over, sat down. Max always wore a tuxedo at his club. So did Bennie the Brute, who was doing the impression of the world’s largest penguin. Pretty soon they were all lapping Courvoisier from snifters the size of cowboy boots. Max passed out Havanas from his private stock at Dunhill. First they’d sniff the brandy. Then they’d sniff the cigars. Cassidy’s nose hadn’t seen so much action in years.
Max was somewhere in his fifties, a sports fan who’d never had the luxury of competing himself. He asked Cassidy lots of questions about the Giants and Cassidy pretended to give him complicated inside dope. It was just a kid’s game but they were sitting around bullshitting over brandy and cigars so what the hell. Most of Cassidy’s mind was still on Karin and the news from Europe. The Brits seemed to keep chasing Kraut battleships around the Atlantic. You had to give the limeys credit. They had pluck.
When Max got to talking about his son Irving, his eyes filled up. Nobody noticed but Cassidy. Irving had left Harvard during his sophomore year and joined the navy. “He’s quite a kid, Lew,” he said, his face full of a father’s love. Cassidy saw the boy at his bar mitzvah, getting a gold watch and a fountain pen and pencil set and lots of checks. “Said he figured there was a war coming and he wanted to be in on it. You know what those bastards, those Nazi bastards, are doing to our people over there? Sure, you know, you’re a bright boy, a college man. Hell, I’m too old to do much fighting but Irvie, he says he wants to get ready to fight when the chance comes … my mother and father, Poland, they lost everything and now they’re just gone, poof, and my Irvie says fuck that, he joins the. navy! Whattaya think of that, Lew? Hey?”
“Irvie’s got guts, Max.”
Bauman wiped the corner of one eye with a hairy knuckle, nodded. Nice manicure. “The Yorktown.” He swallowed hard. “Irving Bauman, Lieutenant j.g., USN. Some kid, my Irvie.” He waited, watched a girl singer go stand beside a white baby grand. Her silvery-blond pageboy swung forward and cloaked one eye. She gave their table a barely perceptible smile. “Communications officer.”
“What?”
Bauman leaned over, his eyes darting from the girl to Cassidy. He smelled like the kind of cologne Cassidy could never find. “Irvie. My son. He’s communications officer on the Yorktown.”
“That’s great, Max. You should be very proud.”
But Max didn’t hear him. He was transfixed watching the girl.
Bennie the Brute touched Cassidy’s arm when the girl began singing in a low, almost hoarse voice. “Listen to her, Lew. Quite a nice voice. A real stylist.” He wore silver-rimmed spectacles with thick circular lenses. He had a nose like a zucchini. He always wore a polka-dot bow tie, even with his tux. He was big and friendly and gentle, like a large dog who when aroused might eat you in an excess of high spirits. “Delightful,” he said.
“Delightful,” Cassidy agreed. You’d have to have a hell of a good reason to disagree with Bennie. Besides; the girl could sing.
“Miss Squires,” Bennie whispered. He wore nice cologne, too, but the effect was lessened by the fettuccini with garlic and oil he’d had for dinner. “Miss Cindy Squires,” he said like a man repeating the answer to the only question that mattered. She sang “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and everybody clapped. Max Bauman looked very pleased. Bennie was whispering again. “Mr. Leary told us about her. Mr. Bauman hired her the first time he heard her sing. He called her a thrush. Mr. Bauman has a finely educated ear.”
“Well, he is a Harvard man.”
Bennie nodded. Speaking of ears, Cassidy had once seen Bennie the Brute bite a man’s ear clean off during a late-evening dispute in Hell’s Kitchen. No clam sauce, no oil and garlic, just an ear, al dente.
Moments before Cindy Squires sang “The White Cliffs of Dover” Bauman leaned across the table and tapped Terry’s arm. The two profiles came together in the dim light and Max whispered, “You pick up the coat for me, Terry?” Terry nodded and Bauman patted his sleeve.
She was singing about the bluebirds over the white cliffs on some better, happier day when the world would be free. The crowd was eating it up. Everybody had seen the newsreels and read the papers and knew what Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post and H. V. Kaltenborn and Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer were saying. They knew all about Churchill and the brave fly-boys of the RAF and the Spitfires and the Hurricanes. Cindy Squires knew how to sell the song, conjuring up all those images by some kind of magic. Cassidy thought she was just about the classiest-looking girl he’d ever seen, well bred, with a fancy accent. Vera Lynn would have been proud of her. Everybody was proud of her. Everybody was proud but Terry Leary, who must have figured that finding her for Max had brought his account up to date. Terry looked bored. Still, he kept checking her out over the rim of his snifter. Terry didn’t miss much.
After she’d finished the set Cassidy got up to head for the Gents. Max said, “We never own liquor, Lew. We only rent it.” Terry yawned. “Through those doors, take a left.” Max pointed the way. The corridor was painted a hot shade of heliotrope with dim lights in wall sconces shaped to look like jungle foliage. He was occupied in the Gents for two, maybe three minutes, thinking that it was time to get home before his head got any foggier. It was past midnight. Twelve hours away from his customary throwing up in the locker room.
He came back into the hallway, adjusting his eyes to the gloom after the bright lights on the shiny white tiles. He heard something from the end of the hall, shook the booze out of his perceptions. A woman’s voice, angry, rushed, out of breath from behind a closed door. “Bloody bastard, you … bloody … bastard!” It was a loud whisper and there was no r in bastard; it came out sounding like bah-stud. Then he heard something slam against the wall, cutting her voice off in mid-curse.
The door wasn’t locked and he saw a gold five-pointed star at eye level. He pushed it open.
Cindy Squires stood with her back to her dressing table mirror, perfect blond hair disheveled, clutching a silk dressing gown to her thin body. She was reaching for a vase of roses behind her. A large man stood between them, his back to Cassidy, one hand grabbing at the front of the flimsy robe. As Cassidy came through the door the man ripped her arm away and tore the robe open. Her tiny breasts, the fragile rib cage, registered in Cassidy’s mind: He’d never seen such vulnerability. She clawed with one hand at the man’s face, her perfect heart-shaped face a mask of determination, unafraid. The man let out a yell of pain and Cassidy saw scratches on his cheek leaking blood. He turned back to her, looking from the blood smeared on his hand to her spitfire face, made a low growl, and lunged at her in a fury, knocking her backward, bending her against the mirror.
Cassidy took him by the collar of his tuxedo jacket, yanked him backward, twirled him around, and threw him at the wall hard enough to stick. Like spaghetti. The eyes were glassy with too much liquor and just enough confusion. Cassidy gave him a sour frown and hit him in the chest, right on the onyx stud below his sternum. The man coughed and went walleyed.
“Get out of the way, Miss Squires. He’s gonna lose his dinner—”
“Jolly bad luck for him,” she said. She was holding the vase of roses over him.
“Better not hit him with that. You could hurt him—”
“Good!” She flung the vase at him. He was sliding down the wall, eyes pointed in different directions, and the vase clunked off the wall. Drenched in water and smothered in roses, he reached the floor, closed his eyes, and tipped over.
“Services will be held at Mount Olivet Cemetery.” Cassidy grinned.
Cindy Squires had closed her robe and cinched the belt tight. Her nipples seemed enormous, protruding beneath the silk from her boyish chest. “Flowers in his hair,” she muttered. “Swine!” She bit her lip and looked up at Cassidy. “I suppose I owe you thanks—so, thank you.” She looked back at Sleeping Beauty. “But I could have handled him, actually. I had him right where I wanted him. Still and all, thanks.” Her solemn face hinted at a smile. Her voice was very soft and husky.
“This sort of thing happen often?”
“Never. Most people know about Max and the thrush, which is how I’m usually described among such … people.” She made the final word an insult. “Maybe he’s an out-of-towner.” She took Cassidy’s arm and hugged it spontaneously. “Who are you, anyway?”
“One of those people, I guess.”
“Well, you’re my Saint George. And you’ve more or less slain the dragon. A friend in need—” She leaned up and planted a quick kiss on his mouth. She took a hankie from the pocket of the robe and quickly wiped it away, destroying the evidence. “He seems to be coming around …”
The man lifted a leg experimentally, looked at it as if it were an unfamiliar piece of farm machinery. Then he figured the hell with it, let it flop loudly back onto the floor. “All wet,” he observed with great dignity. His eyes closed and he sighed like a man who’d already had to put up with too much.
“What the devil’s going on here?” Max Bauman stood in the doorway. He sounded curious, not angry. “You all right, my darling?” He went past Cassidy and put a protective arm around her shoulders, pulled her tight. Her face powder smudged the lapel of his dinner jacket.
“This drunken oaf was making a nuisance of himself,” she said softly, matter-of-factly, her eyes turning toward Max, “and this nice chap came in and dealt with him.” Cassidy smiled at that. Dealt with him. “I threw the vase at him. I’m sorry about the roses, Max—”
“I send her roses every night,” he said to Cassidy, winked. “Plenty more where they came from.” He held Cindy Squires at arm’s length, looked her over. “You’re all right?” She nodded, raked her hair into place with long nails. “Good girl. Lucky you were nearby, Lew. I won’t forget it.”
“It’s nothing, Max. I enjoyed it.”
“He enjoyed it,” Max said, chuckling. “That’s good, Lew.”
Bennie the Brute cleared his throat in the doorway. “Can I be of any assistance, Mr. Bauman?” He needed a bigger doorway. He looked crowded into this one.
Max nodded at the man on the floor. “Take out the trash, Bennie.”
Bennie whisked the limp body off the floor after brushing the roses away. He carried him like a man putting a child to bed. When he went out, they heard the sound of a door opening into the alley, then a crash as Bennie filled one of the trash cans.
Cassidy watched the girl. She smiled shyly and said she ought to get dressed. Some girl, he thought. Had him right where she wanted him …
“In a minute, baby,” Max said. “Have you met young Lochinvar here?”
She shook her head, put out her hand. “I’m Cindy Squires …”
“Lew Cassidy, Miss Squires. It was a pleasure … dealing with our friend.” He watched her eyes, looking at him frankly, one from behind the pale curtain of hair.
“Lew works for me,” Max said. He slapped Cassidy on his broad shoulders, an owner’s gesture. “He’s got some business to take care of for me tomorrow. You’d better get some shut-eye.” Cindy Squires nodded politely and pulled away from Max. She brushed at the powder she’d left on his jacket. “Thanks again, kid,” Max said. Cassidy nodded and left them together. Cindy Squires had turned her back and was untying the belt on the robe.
They were finally leaving a little after one o’clock. The new closing-hours law was supposed to put the city on a more wartime footing should war come. No one seemed to know just exactly how, but then no one much cared either. The clubs along West 52nd fudged it, stayed open later. Terry was tipping the checkroom girl and she was giggling, helping him into the heavy camel’s-hair coat. A big guy saw Cassidy, recognized him, and came bellowing over. He raised the subject of two fumbles Cassidy had made against the Bears.
“Fuckin’ queer,” he shouted. “Vaseline fingers.”
Terry was laughing.
The big loudmouth followed Cassidy outside. It was raining and foggy. The guy wanted to fight, he was feeling good, he wouldn’t remember a damn thing if he lived through the night.
Cassidy told him to get lost, turned his back on him, a mistake, and he clipped Cassidy on the base of his skull with a fistful of car keys.
Cassidy slipped and fell forward and smashed his lip on the curbstone, tasted blood and shredded pulp, and wished he were elsewhere under a different name.
He was fumbling around trying to stand up and the next thing he saw was a flash of pale blond hair and dark brown mink. Terry had gone off down the street in the rain whistling for a cab. Cassidy looked up, swallowing blood, just in time to see Cindy Squires come at the guy from his left, smash a mink-draped forearm across his face. His nose broke, spraying blood across the mink and the rain-lashed sidewalk. She hooked her right leg behind his ankle and pushed him over backward. He went down like he’d been shot, with a bad, solid, wet sound. His head bounced off an iron grating.
Cassidy was back on his feet holding a split lip together between thumb and forefinger. “What the hell—”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Mr. Cassidy.”
“But how? What you did to—”
“I told you I had that other bloke right where I wanted him.” She nodded over her shoulder. “Him, as well. I’m English, you see—”
“Ah, of course. That explains it.”
“At my school they prepared us in self-defense. For a German invasion, don’t you see? Then Mommy and Daddy sent me over here—”
“To work for Max Bauman?”
“Of course not. Don’t be fatuous. I managed that more or less on my own.” She shrugged. She looked down at the man she’d felled. “I don’t suppose this could be a Nazi? No, too much to hope for …”
Max and Bennie came out onto the street, stood staring at them. “What exactly is going on here?”
“Miss Squires just returned the favor,” Cassidy said. “Rescued me. Don’t look at me, Max. It’s a crazy old world.” He laughed and his lip tore open again. “Shit.”
“Cindy?” Max said.
“I couldn’t let this numbskull finish off your star player—”
“You two,” Max said, starting to rumble with laughter, “have got to stop meeting this way.” He punched an elbow into Bennie’s midriff. Bennie offered a tolerant, pained smile, bow tie bobbing. “Howsa lip, Lew?”
“Fine. Only hurts when I laugh.”
“That’s good, Lewis. Only hurts when you laugh …” Max’s shoulders shook with laughter. He put his arm around Cindy. “Nice work, baby.”
Terry came back down the street from the direction of Fifth Avenue. Without a cab. He shrugged. “I saw it all, Max. She took the guy off like she was born to it.”
Cassidy sat down on the wet curb realizing just how loaded he was. The whole crazy evening was landing on him like the Bears. When he stopped contemplating his undone equilibrium and looked around, he and Terry were alone with Cindy’s victim. He’d missed everybody else’s departure. He closed his eyes and saw Cindy watching him from behind the strands of bone-colored hair. I don’t suppose this could be a Nazi … He smiled to himself. His lip came apart again. This girl, she was a new one on him. The hell with his lip. He laughed out loud.
The guy on the sidewalk wasn’t moving. Once his feet in pointed black shoes twitched convulsively. “Terry, he looks dead or something.”
“Do him good,” Terry said. He prodded the limp bulk with his toe and the bulk groaned and said “Shit.”
Terry pulled his foot back, kicked the middle of the bulk, and it jerked into a crescent shape. It sounded like it might be crying.
Terry got Cassidy home in a cab, drunk but peaceful. He laid him out on the bed like a stiff and Cassidy had a terrible dream about lying in the street all wet with a bunch of gangsters in a black Packard coming at him hell-bent and running over his hand. He woke up soaked with sweat, half convinced it had been a dream.
Jesus. What a night.
He was sober by then and the sky over Washington Square was getting gray, wet and sad like an old winter coat you’d come to hate. Before he got back to sleep he thought some more about Karin and how it had been when the going was good. But when he closed his eyes, it wasn’t Karin he saw. For the first time it wasn’t Karin …
When the ball starts coming down, everything speeds up, like somebody pushed a button somewhere and you’re in an old movie, running for your life with the Keystone Kops on your ass.
Cassidy kept his eye on it and for a moment the pressure of the hangover multiplied it, and there were two balls coming at him a couple of feet apart. If he muffed it, there was no Art Hannaford to cover it. Which one was the real ball?
He picked the one on the left.
It hit him like a cement breadbox, first in the hands, then slammed against his chest. It was 1:30 and the ’Dogs were being served to the New York Giants. Cassidy had the feeling they were going to put him on a roll and cover him with mustard. Fordham had never really prepared him for this. On the other hand, he wasn’t in the army yet and it was a living.
It seemed like the harder he ran the slower he went. He was out of breath from the hangover and from the ball hitting him in the gut and he damn near dropped it at the fifteen. But even with a hangover he was Cassidy and that year Cassidy was the best there was …
Bodies were beginning to hurtle past and guys were screaming when he noticed at the corner of his vision something approaching a miracle. Danny Maidstone had just made his first block of the season. He lay on the grass with a moronic smile of surprise on his innocent mug. He’d opened a little corridor along the sidelines and that was all Cassidy needed. He cut to the right, sprinting for it, figured what the hell, so I’ll have a heart attack and die on the field, so what? He took off like a supercharged Buick. Fuck it, they could bury him under the goalpost.
He got past the thirty in one piece. He wondered if he was secretly hoping somebody would catch him. A ninety-five-yard kickoff return wasn’t on the itinerary for the day. He’d need an oxygen tent by the time he passed midfield.
Their kicker was waiting for him at the fifty. Cassidy couldn’t help himself. He was beginning to think touchdown. An opening kickoff touchdown—Jesus! He felt like laughing at the craziness of it—against the Giants! He stiff-armed the kicker and set off down the white sideline stripe, like a projectile being sucked into the crowd’s roar.
Then Coogan’s bluff collapsed on him.
Somebody had been chasing him from behind. Cassidy wondered what the hell had taken the guy so long—it must have been like chasing a one-legged guy with a crutch!
And suddenly King Kong was on his back. He was riding Cassidy across the sideline. Cassidy couldn’t seem to avoid the long wooden bench where the Giants were politely standing aside to make way for him.
Then he was all twisted around on the ground spitting teeth and blood and that was the least of his problems.
His leg was pointing in the wrong goddamn direction.
Very wrong.