September is a good time of year way upstate. I stood beside the car and smoked and looked around. The cigarette smoke was thin and blue in the air. The mountains over us in the west were half in the green of summer and half in the browns and reds of fall. The lake, seen down past the cabins and the tree trunks, was blue and deep and cold. I could smell it. Far away over it was Vermont, dark green.
I didn’t look at Kapp. I didn’t know how to fix my face to look at him. It wasn’t as though I’d been an orphan all my life. I already had a father. Kapp had blood claims, but he was a stranger.
After a while, Bill came up into sight from between the cabins. He stood there, not looking our way, and got a cigarette for himself. He fumbled badly with it, as though his fingers had swollen. Then he came over, slow and heavy, and got silently behind the wheel and started the engine.
I didn’t know who to sit beside. The front seat still made me geechy, but I didn’t want Bill to think he was being cut out. Kapp knew it, and grinned at me. “Sit up front with your brother. I want to stretch out, I’m tired.”
I got in and slammed the door. Bill gazed out the windshield and mumbled, “Back to the hotel?”
I said, “Might as well.”
We drove back to Plattsburg. Kapp said he wanted a drink. Bill went upstairs, walking away with his shoulders hunched, and Kapp and I went across the lobby and into the bar. It was called the Fife & Drum. The glasses were painted red, white and blue to look like drums. Because of the Revolutionary War.
Kapp said, “I haven’t had a drink in fifteen years. What’s a good Scotch?”
I shrugged. “I don’t buy good Scotch.”
The waiter stooped and murmured, “House of Lords?”
“Good name,” said Kapp. “Got a ring to it. Two doubles, on the rocks.”
The waiter went away. I said, “You were in jail more than twenty years. They let you have liquor the first five?”
He winked. “I should of gone to Sing Sing, boy, but I had connections. And there was a time when Dannemora was a little easier. Not like a Federal pen.” He made a sour face. “It is now.”
The waiter came back, went away.
Kapp raised the glass, tasted it, made a face. He coughed. “I forgot. It’s like starting new, it’s been so long. Remember how lousy it tasted the first time?”
“You want a mix?”
“A what? Oh, a set-up? Not me, boy. Not Eddie Kapp.” He got out a new cigarette, working one-handed. His left hand looked terrible. I held out my zippo and said, “I’m sorry what I did to you.”
“Shut your face. Tell me about Kelly. Your brother. He doesn’t look like the type to be here.”
“They killed his wife, too.”
“Hah? His wife?” He sat back and nodded at me and grinned. “That means they’re scared,” he said. “Scared of old Eddie Kapp. That’s good.”
“We found a guy said there was some kind of syndicate trouble brewing in New York. That that was why they killed my—my father. Why they killed Kelly.”
“Take it easy. You think of him as your father, call him your father. He was a lot more your father than I was, huh?”
“You were in jail.”
“That’s the truth.” He swallowed some more Scotch. “I’m getting used to it,” he said. Then he watched himself tap ashes into the tray. “About your mother,” he said. “I don’t want you to get me wrong, what I said before. Edith never worked in a house, nothing like that. She wasn’t ever a professional.”
“Let’s forget about that.”
He got mad. He glared at me. “She was a good girl,” he said. “She gave me a good son.”
I had to grin. “Okay.”
He grinned back at me. “Okay it is, boy. And I’ll tell you something, they’re out of their heads. They’re panicky. I can look at you two and there’s no question which one of you is Will Kelly’s boy. No question. But there’s always the chance, always the chance. They’re panicky, they’re afraid of the chance. They’ll even go for the kid, you wait and see.”
“Do you think so?”
“You wait and see. Hah!” He sat back again, smoking like a financier, his eyes gleaming in the dim light of the bar. “We’ll give them merry hell, boy! Who wants Florida?”
“The Seminoles.”
“They can have it.” He leaned forward fast. “You know what I was going to do? I figured I was an old man, washed-up, ready to retire. I wrote my sister—frigid-faced bitch, but I didn’t know anybody else in the world—I told her leave that bum she’s married to. We’ll live in Florida, I’ve still got plenty stashed away, with an extra twenty years’ interest on it. See? Old Eddie Kapp, washed-up, retired to Florida for the sun and the cheap funeral. With my sister.”
He ground out the cigarette. “Family, family, family, that’s always the same damn thing.” His voice was low and grim and intense. “With the mob, with you, with me. Always the same damn thing. I was ready to spend the rest of my life with my sister. Think of it, with my sister. I hate her, she’s a hypocrite, she always was.”
“I met her,” I said. “She’s just frustrated.”
He grinned. “Careful, boy, you’re talking about your aunt.”
I laughed. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“I tell you, I’d given up. Tony and The French and all the rest, they were writing letters to me. Come on back when they spring you, Eddie, we’re ready to roll. We’re just waiting on you, Eddie, and we move in. Yeah, the hell with all that. That’s the way I figured it, I was an old man, time to retire. And just the one relative in all the world.” He curved a grin of pain. “It’s family, it does it every time. Where’s the damn waiter? I’m getting the taste back.”
We re-ordered and it came, and Kapp went on: “I’ll tell you about family. Listen, when I saw you—who knew what you were or what you wanted? Twenty-two years ago it looked easy. When this baby here is in its twenties, I’ll be out again, and he’ll be at my side. See? But by now, who knew? You were Kelly’s kid, not mine.” He drank, inhaled cigarette smoke, grinned, winked at me. “Then I saw you, boy. Raymond Peter Kelly. Keep the Kelly, who cares? I saw you, and I knew you were mine.” He got to his feet, looking around. “Where’s the crapper?”
He had to ask a waiter. I sat and thought about him. I thought, He copulated with a married woman named Edith Kelly and impregnated her and she produced me. I could believe and understand that. I thought, He is my father. That was something else again.
He came back and sat down. He finished the second drink and we ordered thirds. They came and he went on talking as though he hadn’t stopped. “This thing about family, now,” he said. “It’s an important thing with a lot of people. All kinds of people. And I’ll tell you a group of people it’s important to, and that’s the people make up the mob. Particularly in New York. You don’t think so? Hard cold people, you think. No. There wasn’t a two-bit gun carrier on the liquor payroll didn’t take his first couple grand and buy his old lady a house. Brick. It had to be brick, don’t ask me why. It’s in the races, national backgrounds, you know what I mean? Wops at the national level, mikes and kikes at the local level. Italians and Irish and Jews. All of them, it’s family family family all the time. Am I right?”
I said, “People get assimilated. Americanized.”
“Yeah, sure, I know that. Believe me, for the last few years, I did nothing but read magazines. I know all about that, when you’re Americans you got no roots, you move around, all that stuff. No family homestead, no traditions, nothing. Who gives a shit about cousins, brothers, parents, anybody? Only if they’re rich, huh?”
We grinned at each other. I said, “Okay. So what difference does it make?”
“I’ll tell you, boy, there isn’t a man in the world doesn’t want to be respectable.” He pointed a finger at me, and looked solemn, as though he’d spent long nights in his cell thinking about these things. “You hear me? Not a man in the world doesn’t want to be respectable. As soon as a man can be respectable, he is. You got immigrants, they come into this country, how long before they’re really Americanized? No roots, no traditions, who cares about family, all that stuff. How long?”
I shrugged. He wanted to answer the question himself, anyway.
“Three generations,” he said. “The first generation, they don’t know what’s going on. They got funny accents and there’s a lot of words they don’t know, and they’ve got different ways of doing things, different things they like to eat and wear, and all the rest of it. You see? They aren’t respectable. I’m not talking about honest and dishonest, I’m talking about respect. They’re not a part of the respectable world, see? Same with their kids, they’re half and half. They’ve got the whole upbringing in the house, with the old country stuff, and then grade school and high school and the sidewalk outside. See? Half and half. And then the third generation, Americanized. The third generation, they can be respectable. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
I said, “I don’t think respectable’s the word you mean.”
“The hell with that.” He was impatient, brushing it away. “You know what I mean. It takes three generations. And the third generation has practically no crooks in it. I mean organization crooks, the mob. That’s almost all first and second generation, you see what I mean? Because every man in the world wants to be respectable, but a lot of guys are going to say, ‘Okay, if I can’t be respectable, I can’t. But I still want to make good dough. And only the respectable types like in the Saturday Evening Post can get the good jobs with the good dough. But my brother-in-law drives a liquor truck bringing in the stuff from Canada and makes great dough, plus sometimes a bonus for an extra job doing this and that, so what the hell. I can’t be respectable, anyway.’ See what I mean?”
I nodded. “Yes, and I see what you’re driving at. The first and second generations aren’t Americanized. So they’ve got the old feeling for family.”
“Right! And that’s where you come in, boy.” He leaned far forward over the table. “I tell you, family is all to these people. You kill a man, his brother kills you. Or his son. Like you, for Christ’s sake, going after the guy killed Will Kelly. Or things like this, there’s maybe a dispute of some kind, somebody in the mob gets killed by somebody else. And the guy who did it, or ordered it, he sends like a pension around to the other guy’s wife. You know what I mean, a few bucks every week, help buy the groceries, get the kids some shoes. You know what I mean. There was a time in Chicago, ’27, ’28 I think it was, there was almost forty widows getting bootleg pensions all at one time. You see what I mean?”
“You said something about this being where I came in.”
“Damn right.” He stopped and laughed. “You know, I’m not used to all this talking, all at once like this. It makes me thirsty. And I’m not used to this Kings & Lords, whatever it is.”
“House of Lords.”
“Yeah. I can feel it in my head already, and what is this, my third?”
“Third, yes.”
“Let’s make it fourth.”
We did, and he said, “The twenties, those were the years. We organized faster than the law, that was the main thing. We were one jump ahead all the time. Until this income tax thing, and I tell you that was unfair. That was a cheat. I’ve got no respect for the Federal Government; if you can’t get a man fair, you just can’t get him, you see what I mean? Now, who in the whole damn country ever filled out a tax form honest? Up till then, I mean.” He shook his head. “No respect for them at all, they don’t go by the rules. Anyway, the point was, we all got organized and we had thirteen good years, and then along came Repeal and we had a tough time getting readjusted, you know? Like the March of Dimes, when this Salk vaccine came along. Shot their disease right out from under them, huh? They had to go quick find some other disease. Same as us. Liquor’s legal again, so there isn’t the profit in it any more. So we’re diversifying, there’s dope and there’s gambling and there’s whores. Gambling’s best, it’s safest. The other two, dope and whores, the people you have to deal with, by the very nature of the business they’re unreliable. You see what I mean?”
I nodded, while he paused and drank.
“Of course,” he said, “there’s also the unions. Lepke led the way in that field, around from strikebreakers to trade associations to pocket unions. But Dewey got him, in ’44. Four years after the Federals got me. Frankly, I was one of the people always thought Lepke overdid it. He gave Anastasia more work than you can imagine. Lists of fifteen, twenty people at a time. After a while, it got so that was all he was doing, making up lists of people for Anastasia’s group to kill. So the unions are something else again. It’s a funny thing, that’s the only area with the legitimate base—you know, there’s nothing illegal about unions to begin with, like there is with gambling and narcotics and whores—but it’s the worst for killing and breaking things up. You know what I mean? The only area where just an innocent citizen who doesn’t have anything to do with anything can get beat up or shot, because of where he works or something like that.”
“What’s all this got to do with me?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “I’m goddamned, boy, this House of Lords is going right up into my head. I can feel the fumes going right up into my head. The point was, I was trying to give you some of the background, you know what I mean? ’33, Repeal, it all started to fall apart. Everybody’s looking for a new way to make a living, fighting it out for territory and what’s whose and all. And Dewey came along to make life tough. And then the Federal Government, with this cheating income tax thing. A lot of us got moved out, one way or the other. Died or retired or went to jail or one thing and another. And these new people came in. Businessmen, you know what I mean? Respectable. No more of this blood bath stuff, that’s what they wanted. Just a quiet business. Buy your protection and run your business, and let it go at that. I could see it in the papers, all through the forties, everything quieting down. Like a few years ago, the meeting at Appalachin. I could see in the papers and the magazines, everybody was surprised. Like nobody knew there was a mob any more. It called itself the Syndicate now, and people figured it wasn’t real, you know what I mean? Here’s a guy, he runs a bottling plant for soft drinks, and he’s got sixty-five guys out to his house for a meeting, and everybody was surprised.”
“That’s right near Binghamton,” I said. “Appalachin is. I was eighteen then. Some of us rode out in a guy’s car to look at Barbara’s house. Where the meeting took place.”
That made him laugh again. “You see what I mean? Sightseers, for Christ’s sake. People don’t believe it any more. There was a time, in the thirties say, when all the people around a place like that would have stayed miles away, you never know when the shooting’s going to start. Now, things’ve been so nice and quiet for so long, a bunch of kids go out in a car and look at the house.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe it. Why, there was a time, if word got around that somebody like the Genna boys, say, were in town, all the innocent citizens would have gone inside and locked the doors and crawled under the beds. The same as when Anastasia got it in ’57. Nobody believed it. There he was on the floor in the barber shop with five bullets in him, and pictures in the Daily News, and if you say the word mobster, everybody thinks of the thirties.”
“Not me,” I said. “One of them shot my fa—my father.”
“Just a hired gun. You’ll never find him.”
“Wrong. I found him today. He was the guy in the Chrysler.”
“The one you hit, or the driver?”
“The one I hit.”
He grinned and nodded. “Good boy. You’ve got a lot of Eddie Kapp in you, I swear to God.”
“Yeah. We were up to ’57.”
“Wait.” He ordered another round, took a first sip, and said, “The last few years, some of the older guys have been coming back. Back from overseas, with the heat off at last, or out of jail, or one thing and another. And these smooth new types say, ‘Yeah, Pop, but we don’t use shotguns any more. We use inter-office memos. Why don’t you go write your memoirs for the comic books?’ And what can they do? Here’s organizations they set up themselves, and now they get the cold shoulder. They try something, and the lawyers and the tame cops come around. Nobody throws a bomb in the living room any more, they just nag and niggle and slip around. Typical businessmen, see what I mean? Every once in a while, there’s an Albert Anastasia, he just won’t get reconstructed, and the guns come out. Or like with you. But not so much any more. A good press, isn’t that the phrase? Good public relations. Everything nice and quiet.”
“We still haven’t got to me.”
“You’re the ace in the hole, boy. Family, didn’t I tell you? We’ve got all these old boys, hanging around now, waiting to move in again. But they can’t move. There’s nobody to set himself up for boss, that’s all it takes. They’ve met, they’ve written to each other, they’ve talked it over. And they’ve decided on somebody they’ll all accept to run things. Me.”
He gulped down all of the drink. “I’m getting the taste back.” His grin was lopsided. “I wasn’t going to do it. I was going to Florida with Dot. Or without her, the hell with her. Because of you. The symbol. In 1940, I was ready to make my move. Not just New York City. Half the Atlantic Seaboard. Everything from Boston to Baltimore, the whole thing. It should have been mine years before, but I’d moved too slow. Only now I had it. I had the support. Hell, I was part of the new look myself! And then these goddamn Federal people came along with this goddamn income tax thing. And I said to some of the boys, ‘When I come out, this pie is mine.’ And they said, ‘Eddie, you’ll be sixty-four years of age. Twenty-five years is a long time.’ And I said, ‘They’ll remember Eddie Kapp. You people will remember Eddie Kapp.’ They said, ‘Sure, but you’re going to be an old man, Eddie. Who’s going to follow you?’ And I told them, ‘Edith Kelly has a kid of mine. When I come out, he’ll be grown. And he’ll be with me.’ That’s what I told them.” He nodded loosely, eying his empty glass. I motioned the waiter. He came and took the glass away.
Kapp watched him go. Softly, he said, “Don’t you think that meant something to them? Family. A goddamned symbol, boy, that’s what you are. A symbol. Eddie Kapp is bringing new blood. Eddie Kapp and his boy. That’s why they want me. They got a symbol to come around, something to tie them all together.”
“When my father came into New York to pick me up,” I said, “somebody must have recognized him.”
“Sure. For twenty-two years, who cared? Before I went in, I told Will to get out of New York and stay out, not to ever come back as long as he lived. He knew I meant it, and he did it. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t have to know why.”
“He didn’t know I was yours?”
Kapp shook his head, grinning. “He knew you weren’t his. That’s all he knew.”
I emptied my glass. All I could see was Dad looking at me, that last second before he vomited blood. “He didn’t know why they were killing him. Jesus, that’s sad. Oh, good Christ, that’s sad.” When I waved at the waiter, my arm was stiff. I said to Kapp, “He never once let me know. I was his son. Mom was dead, he brought me up by himself. Bill and me, we were the same, exactly the same.”
I couldn’t talk. I waited, and when the waiter brought the glass I emptied it and told him I wanted another.
Kapp said, “They knew I was getting out soon. They saw Will Kelly in town. They got panicky. They had to get rid of Kelly, and they had to get rid of his sons. They couldn’t take the chance on the symbol still meaning something.” He nodded. “And it still means something,” he said.
I lit a cigarette, gave it to him, lit another for myself. The waiter came with more drinks. Kapp had the cigarette in his right hand. He picked up the glass with his left hand, then grunted and dropped it, and it fell over on the table. His face looked suddenly thinner, bonier. He said, “Good God, I forgot my hand.”
“Let’s see it.”
It was gray. A swollen oval on the back was black. I said, “The hell with this. We’ve got to find you a doctor.”
“I didn’t feel a thing,” he said. “Not until I picked that glass up.”
The waiter was there, looking irritated, mopping up with a red-and-white-checked cloth. I paid him, and we left, and got the name of a doctor from the desk clerk. And directions, just down the street.
We went there, and the doctor looked him over. He cut the hand, for drainage, and bandaged it up, and said it would be a couple weeks before Kapp could really use it. In the meantime, keep changing the bandage every day. And stop back in three or four days. Then he checked the left knee, because Kapp was still limping. He said that was nothing to worry about, just bruised. Kapp told him he’d walked into a chair. We both had liquor on our breath, so the doctor didn’t question us.
Then we went back to the hotel and up to the room. Bill was lying on his bed. His forehead was bloody around a small hole, and he had the Luger in his right hand.