THE SCREEN DOOR HAD new patches to go with the old ones, and new rents that needed patches. The old colored woman who answered my knock was wearing the same tattered housecoat of more than a year before but no hairnet this time, and as thin as her hair was, with startling pink scalp showing through it in streaks, I wondered that she had ever needed one in the first place. She looked at my white man’s clothes, hat and necktie with no funeral in the neighborhood or Baptist meeting to justify them, the suitcase, heard what I had to say, and unhooked the screen door. She was a sunken post in a changing tide, that old woman in her house that needed whitewashing; she would look as she did and live as she had regardless of who was mayor and who had killed whom for whatever reason and whether liquor was banned or legal, not out of any conscious sense of determination or pride but because this was where she had landed, this was the condition of the deck. The furniture was the same, the odd floral covers on the sofas faded one step closer to plain white, but clean. Only the worn rug was missing, having evidently grown too thin to contribute and therefore banished. Even the homemade radio set on the painted table, the room’s one sad nod toward luxury and leisure, was in the same unfinished state; a loose crystal I had noticed on my first visit lay in the identical spot.
Music was playing behind the door in the dark upstairs hallway, Jack’s kind, hot horns and jungle drums. I knocked.
“Yeah?” This was a new male voice, which threw me, there in that place that defied evolution. Eager young barracudas of Jack’s stamp had drifted in and out of his association in the past, but since Sylvester Street, it had strictly been the three with whom he’d started minus Baldy Hannion. There was no brewery now to give him a foundation, no collateral of a physical nature to make his standard worth following. Hunches are for the old and established. The young need a sure thing.
“Connie Minor.”
The door opened six inches and a boy of nineteen or twenty inserted himself into the rectangle. He was shorter than Jack but nearly as broad, and much softer. He had a ring of fat above his belt under a white shirt with the collar spread, a round face and thick red hair and gray eyes with a watery sheen and a harelip. The gun in his hand was a .38 revolver, the snubnosed kind bulls carried. I had never seen him before.
“Let him in, for Christ’s sake, does he look like a torpedo?” Jack, wearing pinstriped trousers and a shoulder holster over a BVD undershirt, shoved him aside and grabbed my free hand. “Get in Connie, how the hell are you, you’re letting the flies out.”
I let him pull me inside. It was a railroad flat, a series of rooms lined up all in a row so that you had to pass through all of them to get to the back. We were in the kitchen. It had a shade drawn over its only window and bulging yellow plaster on the walls and newspapers taped over the places where there was obviously no plaster at all. The linoleum on the floor was dirt-colored. There were a cot with rumpled bedding on it in a corner, an old Michigan Stove Company woodburner with a warming oven overhead and yellow calcined grease on the black iron and nickel, a cast-iron sink, an icebox dripping into a pan, and an oilcloth-covered table where Andy Kramm and Lon Camarillo sat playing dominoes until I came in with the suitcase, when they got up and came over. In the next room, visible through the open door, a portable phonograph with a daisy-petal horn stood on a chest of drawers playing King Oliver. The place stank pungently of old meals and urine, the way they all did, the way they all still do in that neighborhood. That’s how civilization smells under the toothpaste and powder.
“Open it up.” Andy was staring at the suitcase.
“That ain’t no way to treat a guest.” Jack took the suitcase from me, lightening me by more than just pounds, and sat me down at the table. “They followed you, right?”
“I lost them at the park like you figured.”
“Joey’s chewing their asses out right now, I bet.”
Someone knocked at the door: Bang-bang, pause, bang. Jack set down the suitcase and opened it with the Luger in his hand and the soft young man, who had stepped out when I came in, entered. “No sign of anybody outside.” The harelip didn’t seem to get in the way of his speech.
“Connie, this here’s Vern Scalia. Vern’s the reason you’re here.”
We exchanged nods. He stuck his revolver inside his belt. It had several thick rubber bands wound around the grip to keep it from slipping down.
“Vern’s the one told us about the shipment. He used to work for Joey. Joey don’t know yet he don’t no more.”
“Just what we need in this outfit,” said Andy, building a skyscraper out of dominoes. “Another wop.”
Lon gave him his death’s-head stare.
I said, “Shipment?”
“You should’ve seen it.” That’s when Jack told me about the hijacking.
Bass Springfield came in on the end of the story from one of the rooms in back. He was wearing a blue work shirt and overalls and carrying a Negro baby wrapped in a towel with the name of a hotel stenciled on it. I’d heard a baby crying the moment I’d entered the house, but I’d assumed it was in another apartment. He was feeding it milk from a beer bottle with a nipple on it. His deformed hand held the bottle like a claw.
Jack saw me staring, laughed. “Bet you never guessed Bass was a daddy. We didn’t neither till we got here. Celestine tied into him for bringing us, didn’t she, Bass?”
“She’s asleep,” he said, in response to nothing.
“Little Quincy’s gonna be a slugger,” Jack went on. “You got to see the shoulders on this kid. Knock that ball clean into the white side of town.”
“He ain’t.” Springfield jiggled the child in his arms. “He gonna be mayor, wear a tall hat.” It was a tone of voice I’d never heard him use, as close to real laughter as I ever heard him come. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the little dusky face since he’d entered.
“That ain’t no ambition. If I had a kid I’d want him to be the one pays the mayor. Clear that table, boys. It’s Christmas.”
Andy and Lon swept the dominoes into a deal box and Jack hoisted the case up onto the table and opened it. For a time they all stared at the neat stacks inside, Springfield dividing his attention for the first time. Then Jack started picking up the banded sheafs and checking the bills, pushing them back rapidly with his fingers like a bank teller. He dug down, selecting stacks at random, destroying the symmetry inside the suitcase. While he was doing that, a pretty, short-haired colored girl came in wearing a plaid bathrobe and man’s shoes on her feet and took the baby from Springfield; it had begun to cry again. Without paying attention to any of us she set down the bottle, opened her robe, and popped a brown nipple into the child’s mouth, jiggling and humming something tuneless, turning away from the table and the fifty thousand dollars in cash she had not looked at once. That’s what I remember when I think of Celestine Brown, whom I never heard speak a word: a young woman who made maybe twelve hundred a year working at Ford’s, breast-feeding her baby in the presence of a fortune she didn’t acknowledge. The boy would be about eight now.
I said, “What about Barberra?”
“Tell Joey he’ll be back in the garage tomorrow. It’s healthy to sweat a little.” Jack stretched a bill between his hands, held it up to the bulb in the ceiling. I guessed he was looking for Series 1921. Joey had experimented with counterfeiting ten years before and given it up as too risky.
“He’ll want to hear I saw him.”
He put back the bill and dropped the lid. It wouldn’t close now so he let it gape. “Lon, take him back.”
I followed the former ace through a bedroom that had to be Celestine and Springfield’s—the bottom drawer of the bureau had been pulled out and lined with towels to serve as a crib, and a rectangular framed sepia print hung on the wall above the iron bed showing two rows of solemn-looking Negroes in baggy white baseball uniforms, the front row down on one knee leaning on their bats—up to a closed door that he unlocked with a key he took down from atop the doorframe. He pushed it open but didn’t go in. I got the impression I shouldn’t either.
It had originally been a walk-in closet and had probably served as a storeroom at one time, but not lately because the poor don’t have anything to store. It had no windows and only a chain fixture, with the bulb removed so that the only light in the room came through the door. Barberra was sitting up on a folding cot, one of those wood-and-canvas army assembly affairs, in a shirt that needed changing and wrinkled trousers and his white socks, the soles black with dirt, his wrists and ankles bound with wire. In that light he looked balder than Baldy Hannion, the Oklahoma train robber, whom it was commonly believed Barberra himself had killed, but not as bald as Joey Machine’s Washington lawyer, Cranston, who shaved even his fringe; but his scalp was as naked as a skull and just as white. It didn’t look as if it had ever had hair. He blinked in the light, he had a two-day carpet of black beard. The little room smelled of dirty socks and a white enamel chamber pot under the cot, which was empty at the moment but would always be tainted no matter how thoroughly it was scrubbed and disinfected. And beneath that, garlic.
Lon closed the door and locked it, replaced the key, and we returned to the kitchen. We passed Celestine in the bedroom, tucking the baby into its makeshift crib and humming, perhaps unconsciously, the “Royal Garden Blues,” now playing on the phonograph. Jack or someone had changed the record.
“He doesn’t look too happy,” I told Jack.
“Stink wouldn’t be happy being happy. He thinks you got to be mean all the time to do people. He’s healthy, that’s what counts, like they say.” He was straightening the stacks of bills in the suitcase. Andy was watching him, looking fascinated more by the action than the money, like a dog staring at the hand that’s pointing instead of what it’s pointing at. Vern Scalia, watching from his post by the door, was definitely interested in the money. I could see the bills reflected in his eyes—blue to go with his red hair, courtesy of some ages-dead Viking visitor to Sicily—the gray tip of his tongue coming out to wet the groove in his cleft lip. I’d disliked him on sight.
Springfield, looking as if he had never held a baby in his life or predicted its future, stood with his hands in the pockets of his overalls, the way he always did when he wasn’t using them, scrutinizing one of the newspapers on the wall, as if it weren’t his apartment and he didn’t see them every day. He was staring at a six-month-old picture of a Coast Guard officer with gold braid on his cap swinging a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne at the bow of a new cutter designed to outrun any bootlegging craft on the river; an obsolescence even before its hull got wet. I knew then that I would never be at home among these men, one of them, honorary or otherwise. They were always waiting for me to leave so they could get on. I don’t know why it bothered me, but it did.
The Pious Heart was there, of course, hanging all alone in its gummy devotion in the middle of a patch of plaster with a fresh crack running through it—caused, no doubt, by the nail that supported the picture. You could track Jack through the city by the nails he left behind to hold up that devout adolescent.
“I’ll go,” I said.
Jack was still sorting. “Thanks, Connie. Sorry you lost sleep.”
“I don’t want to do this again.”
“Can’t blame you. Stink’s hard enough to take dressed and barbered.”
“You know what I mean. Next time call someone else.”
“If that’s what you want.”
I hesitated. “You’re letting him go in a few hours, right?”
“I said I was.”
“Your word’s not worth shit, Jack. Everybody knows it.”
He looked up, a brick of bills in each hand. I felt a flash of the old paralysis. He wasn’t subject to rages, but you just never knew what he was going to do. A beat, then he grinned. “Get some sleep, Connie. I ain’t so crazy I’d chop down the money tree. Not yet.”
Vern Scalia opened the door for me and I went out. When I think of Jack I usually see him the way he looked that night as I was leaving, a boy in a gangster’s thick-muscled body with his hair grown back out long and curling, the upright V of his broad shoulders and narrow waist and the inverted V of the shoulder rig over his ribbed undershirt describing a perfect diamond. Fast music playing. The next time I saw him he was dying.
The Black Bottom at half-past one, ante meridiem: puddles of blue neon and red argon on the sidewalks, as if a Martian had taken a leak on every corner; fat, middle-aged Negroes in belted coats with Chesterfield collars and yellow spats and big Panamas, the uniform of the policy baron, by special arrangement with Hizzoner Joey G. Machine; old colored men in soft caps and holey sweaters drinking from bottles wrapped in paper bags; young shines practicing their steps on corners for their big break at the Graystone Ballroom downtown; small black boys running, threading their way through knots of saloon-hoppers, clutching paper sacks full of policy slips; willowy Negresses in ostrich feathers and monkey-fur collars hanging all over white men in fedoras and peaked lapels, the men grinning lopsidedly with gold-foil-wrapped bottles under their arms, clutching pairs of long-stemmed glasses, taking the party down the street and up the stairs; a friendly place for the next half hour, at the end of which the unwritten curfew kicked in and then it would be everyone to his own side of town and God help the white man whose watch stopped. Night belonged to the Negro; it could be rented by the other side, but not bought.
I parked by a booth on Harper and called the garage. The wind shifted while I was dialing and sticky blue smoke drifted from an alley where three coloreds in red band jackets were smoking muggles. I closed the door.
“You see Barberra?” demanded Joey when I told him I’d made the delivery.
“He’s okay. Jack says you’ll have him back in the morning.”
“It’s morning now.”
“After daylight, then. He looked like they’ve been treating him well enough.”
“Fuck I care how they’re treating him? I just want him breathing and in one piece. The kike tell you what he did to Nick Salerno?”
“I don’t think he meant to hit him that hard.”
“Where they holed up?”
It shouldn’t have thrown me. I’d thought my silence on certain things was a given, bestowed on me by right of my trade. But Joey didn’t recognize rights, didn’t understand givens. I said, “If I told you that, no one in this town would trust me to tell me it’s raining.”
“Trust, I trust that suitcase I sent you up there with. When you got dough you don’t need trust. Who was there?”
“His gang.”
“That motherfucker Scalia was there, wasn’t he?”
I said he was. It wasn’t the first time Jack had underestimated Joey.
“That shitbag, that snake-fucking Sicilian son of a mangy whore. That ass-kissing back-stabber.”
There was more of this. I could never tell how much of his famous tantrums was real and how much staged to buy him time to think. The murders carried out in his name were too well orchestrated to have been the product of simple fury.
At length he ran out of vituperatives. His breathing was more phlegmatic than usual. Then the line went dead.
“You’re welcome,” I told the dial tone.