by Ray Celestin
‘So if he wasn’t a junkie, and he wasn’t a dealer, how comes he had a stash of money and drugs in his room?’
‘Because they weren’t his,’ said Ida. ‘They were someone else’s. Someone else was in that room with Bucek. Someone who owned a stash of money and drugs.’
‘A dope pusher was in there with him,’ said Michael, realizing. ‘And when the attack happened, he either ran off and escaped, or the attackers took him away.’
‘Exactly,’ said Ida.
That was what was missing, the shape of the emptiness that tied it all together – the hotel had another resident, a mystery guest.
‘So maybe Bucek wasn’t running away from someone,’ said Michael. ‘He was running to someone. Bucek went to hide out with the pusher who lived at the hotel.’
Ida remembered Tom saying no one ever saw Bucek in the hotel, and something else clicked into place. The floor-plan.
‘Bucek’s room was on the first floor,’ she said. ‘The only one with direct access to the alleyway on the side. Whoever rented that room could get in and out of the hotel without any of the other residents seeing. A perfect spot for hiding out.’
‘And to sell dope from,’ said Michael. ‘Maybe the hotel owner rented that room out to people he knew were on the run or dealing. Which means the Palmer Hotel isn’t just a flophouse, it’s a dope-pad.’
‘And dope-pads are attacked all the time,’ said Ida, grinning. ‘That’s it. That’s the reason for the attack. Bucek wasn’t the intended victim, the other man was, the pusher.’
They both fell silent and Ida felt the warmth of a breakthrough buzzing through her; she wondered if Michael was feeling it, too.
‘If all this is right,’ he said, ‘it means the hotel owner is in on it. He knew there was a dealer there and was probably getting kickbacks, kept his name off the guestbook.’
‘But he added Bucek’s name to it after the murders.’
‘And he took the night of the murders off.’
‘That’s our lead,’ said Ida.
‘Yup,’ said Michael. ‘We need to press the hotel owner.’
PART FIVE
‘Bugsy Siegel, who has beaten a great variety of raps ranging from rape to murder, used to be co-captain of the Bug and Meyer Mob of gunmen and blackjack artists. Now he’s got things pretty well sewed up in Los Angeles and along the Pacific Coast and is said to be moving into Nevada where gambling is legal. With Eastern and California money, he seems to be trying to build up Las Vegas as a rival to Reno.’
HERBERT ASBURY, COLLIERS, 1947
12
Tuesday 4th, 2.35 p.m.
Gabriel spent the hours after getting the job from Costello careening through New York in his sky-blue Delahaye, the sports car he had – like so many things in his life – won in a card game. He stopped by the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, where Benny had stayed. He spoke to Orville Hayes, the hotel detective, a man Gabriel had worked with in the past. Gabriel asked him if Benny had taken his usual suite – he had. If he’d left anything in the hotel’s safety deposit boxes – he hadn’t. If Benny had used the hotel’s car service – he hadn’t. Strange, because Benny normally did.
Gabriel offered Orville a Frank Costello-sized kickback if he fixed up Gabriel with the phone records from Benny’s room. Orville said he’d work on it.
After that Gabriel drove the length of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. Looked up Benny’s acquaintances – friends, old flames, business partners, mistresses, enemies. He asked them all the same questions, about the money without ever mentioning the money, without letting the secret get out. People gave him the names of more people to speak to. But no one had anything useful to say.
Day turned to night. He went home to catch a few hours’ sleep then stopped by the Copa, told Havemeyer he was on a job for Costello. Told him to hold the fort.
Then he visited the nightspots Benny had visited. El Morocco, 21, La Martinique, The Hurricane. When the nightclubs closed Benny and his entourage had headed to the after-hour spots – The Stage Delicatessen, Lindy’s, Reubens. The man had even found time to visit 52nd Street jazz spots and Midtown theater-crowd dives. Gabriel’s dip into the last days of Benjamin Siegel morphed into a swirl of nightclubs, restaurants, hotels and bars that left him feeling both dizzy and empty, despairing of his old friend’s vacuous way of life.
Everyone who’d met Benny on that trip said the same thing – Benny looked good, Benny looked happy, Benny was the life of the party, Benny picked up the tab.
The man was in town begging for money to save his casino and his life, but he spent the trip like he was researching a New York City travel guide. Something didn’t add up. Especially when Gabriel thought of Benny at the Copa, looking haunted, holding back.
The only tip Gabriel got came from the manager at Hanson’s. Benny had strolled in there one night with fifteen close personal friends. The manager had to rearrange tables. Then he went outside for a smoke and ended up chatting with the driver of Benny’s car, a young yid whose name the manager didn’t catch.
Other witnesses confirmed the existence of the car and the driver, though not much by way of his identity. If Gabriel could find the driver, he could get a complete list of everywhere Benny had visited, including any banks or stash spots. But how to find the identity of the driver?
Night turned to day and still nothing.
More than twenty-four hours after being given the job, Gabriel was no closer to finding the money. And as his list of people to speak to got shorter and shorter, a realization dawned – he would have to visit the one person in New York he really didn’t want to see before he left town. As he became reconciled to the fact, he figured he’d better make an appointment with the Doc, because he was starting to flag, because he needed something to keep him going, because he didn’t want to see her sober and sleepless. He needed fortification.
He called the Mackley Hotel, where the Doc worked, and they agreed to meet, appropriately enough, in the drugstore deli on 34th, right in the shadow of the Empire State Building. Gabriel knew the spot. When people threw themselves off the viewing platform twelve hundred and fifty feet above, they tended to land on the sidewalk opposite the drugstore, making it a destination for New York’s more macabre people-watchers.
Gabriel got to the deli early. It was small, bright, white-tiled and airy. The pharmacist’s counter took up one side of the space; opposite was the deli counter and the tables and chairs. A radio somewhere was tuned to NBC, the volume low. There were customers at the drug counter – a middle-aged woman in a bolero-length fur, and a boy wrapped up in a peacoat – but the deli counter was empty, the old-timer who manned it sitting instead at a table next to the meat-slicer, hunched over a pack of cards.
Gabriel smoked a ciggie, drank a coffee. He looked over at the old man, saw he was playing solitaire and he instantly thought of Costello. His boss was an accomplished player of poker, pinochle, bridge, sette-e-mezzo, a Hungarian game called klobiosch, but when he wanted to think, he’d break out the cards and play solitaire.
‘It’s a bum’s game,’ Adonis had said to him once. ‘There ain’t no skill to it. You’re just sorting whatever comes out of the deck.’
Costello had smiled. ‘That’s exactly why I play it,’ he’d said. ‘All it needs is one more suit and it’s exactly like the five families.’
And he’d turned his head down and got back to it. Adonis shot a confused look at Gabriel, but Gabriel had understood. Costello was practicing how to deal with whatever was tossed his way out of the pack, by the hand of fate, studying how happenstance cascaded through the world, caused the shifting of alliances, the sundering and recombination of bonds.
The front door opened and the Doc stepped in, stooped against the cold, wrapped up in a fedora and a camel-hair coat. He spotted Gabriel and headed over to his table. They nodded at each other. The Doc was in his sixties, jowly, with splotchy skin and winter in his hair. He took off his coat, draped it over the back of a chair, slid into his seat
, wheezing as he did so.
The waiter came over.
‘A celery tonic,’ said the Doc. Then he turned to Gabriel. ‘You eaten? You don’t look like you’ve eaten.’
Gabriel shook his head.
‘Bring us some pickles, some bread, whatever the soup of the day is,’ said the Doc.
The waiter nodded and headed off. The Doc turned to Gabriel and looked him up and down.
‘How’s life, Gabriel?’ he asked. ‘This goddamn cold getting you down?’
Gabriel shrugged. ‘Could be worse.’
The Doc gave him a shrug in return, pulled out a paper packet from his coat pocket, and handed it to Gabriel. Gabriel took a peek inside: Benzedrine and Dexedrine to wake him up, Seconal and Nembutal to put him to sleep.
‘Better living through chemistry,’ said the Doc, pouring a glass of water from the carafe on the table and raising a mock toast.
Gabriel slipped the packet into his coat, slid a large denomination bill across the table. The Doc took the bill, folded it, hid it inside his sports jacket.
The Doc had been an MD at Beth Israel until his junkie nephew was caught hawking stolen prescription blanks on 105th Street and they were traced back to the Doc. He resigned in exchange for the hospital not referring the matter to the medical authorities, got a job in the Mackley Hotel, across the street from where they were. Ostensibly he was employed to look after any guests who fell ill. In reality, he used the consulting room to distribute pills and prescriptions, with the hotel management receiving kickbacks at thirty percent gross.
‘You’re looking tired, Gabby. How comes?’
‘Running errands for Frank Costello.’
‘What errands? You’re already running his nightclub.’
The waiter returned with a glass and a bottle of Dr Brown’s Celery Tonic, popped the cap, poured the drink, put it down on the table. When he’d gone, Gabriel told the Doc about having to look into Benny’s last days, without mentioning the missing money. He told him how he’d been at it all this time and had come up blank, and now there was only one person left to see.
The Doc frowned, trying to figure out who it could be.
‘Beatrice?’ he asked.
Gabriel nodded. The Doc grinned.
‘Is that why you needed chemical Dutch courage?’ he said.
Gabriel said nothing. The Doc laughed.
The waiter returned once more, this time with a tray bearing a plate of pickles, a basket of rye bread, and two bowls of chicken noodle soup. The Doc broke a slice of bread and picked up a spoon. Gabriel eyed the pickles wearily, unnerved by the brilliant formaldehyde green of their skins.
‘Hitler killed how many millions of us over in Europe,’ said the Doc. ‘And here you are doing the same to yourself.’
‘You’re the one selling me the pills.’
‘I don’t mean the pills. I mean you being a lapdog for Costello. You need to move on, Gabriel. Before you wind up as dead as Benny.’
Gabriel knew it, but couldn’t say so. He thought instead of Mexico, of Cancun, of flocks of flamingos swooping over the mud flats of Yucatan, the sunset glittering on their wings.
‘Mobsterism was a one-generation deal for the Jews,’ said the Doc. Gabriel had heard the lecture before, countless times. ‘We arrived here, we did what we had to do to survive. Then we moved into the middle-classes and washed our hands of it. You stick around too long doing that kind of thing, you end up dead. The Jews learned it, the Irish learned it. The Italians and the Negroes haven’t. What about you, Gabby?’
‘I haven’t learned it,’ he said.
He wasn’t sure why he let the Doc hector him thus. They’d known each other since Gabriel was a child, since Gabriel’s sister had died. The Doc was on duty at the hospital the night she was thrown out of that window, fell fourteen stories. Gabriel wondered if he put up with the Doc because he’d never really known his own parents, barely remembered them. Maybe that explained Mrs Hirsch, too. Gabriel took his family where he could find them.
‘Eastman dead, Rothstein dead, Reles dead,’ said the Doc, reeling off a list of Jewish gangsters – the kosher nostra – who’d bit the bullet. ‘Schultz dead, your pal, Benny Siegel, dead. You and Lansky won’t be far behind unless you change your ways. Adaptability, Gabriel. That’s the key to survival.’
Gabriel thought about the Doc’s fall from grace, from Beth Israel to hawking pills out of the Mackley Hotel’s consulting room. He wondered if this is what he meant by adaptability. He gave the Doc a look which said as much, and the Doc caught it.
‘Ah, I know what you’re thinking. I’m lecturing you to stay alive and selling you a packet full of death,’ he said, jabbing the spoon in the direction of Gabriel’s coat. ‘But this is part of my own adaptability. I’m saving up to move out of New York.’
‘Move where?’ Gabriel asked, half expecting to hear the man say Mexico.
‘Eretz Yisrael.’
Gabriel laughed. The Doc looked offended.
‘Israel’s a pipe dream,’ said Gabriel, trying to explain himself.
‘We’ll see,’ said the Doc, eyeing Gabriel carefully. ‘One thing I know. New York’s no place to grow old. You not eating your soup?’
Gabriel looked down at his food. Steam was rising from the bowl. The surface of the broth was broken here and there by gleaming white noodles, carrot, tarragon, strips of chicken. He wasn’t in the mood to eat, but he knew he should before he took the pills. He lifted up the spoon and it felt like lead. But the food sent a warmth down his throat and into his stomach that spread throughout his body. He suddenly felt nourished, and tired.
‘The Italians were lucky,’ said the Doc.
Gabriel looked up at him, but the Doc was busy with his food, somehow contriving to both lecture and fill his face all at the same time.
‘Mussolini goes on an anti-Mafia campaign so half Italy’s mobsters leave for America. The Jewish and Irish gangsters are moving into the middle-classes, so the Italians fill the vacuum. Luck. Within a few years gangsterism’s given the biggest boost it ever saw by Prohibition and they’re the ones in place to profit. Luck. Then there’s the Great Depression and the whole labor force unionizes and the Italians are there to get involved. Luck. Then there’s the war and Mussolini’s the enemy so Italian-Americans get trusted advisor status. Luck. Then it turns out J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t believe in the Mafia, sends the FBI off chasing communists instead. Luck. These Italians have ridden a wave of luck like nothing I’ve ever seen. Been riding it for decades. They’re as lucky as the Jews are unlucky.’
All the talk of luck made Gabriel think of Costello and his obsessive solitaire-playing.
‘What’s your point, Doc?’
‘My point is their luck’s going to run out some day. Soon. And when it does, you don’t want to be around, Gabby, believe me. You need to change. Or you’ll end up dead.’
Gabriel thought on this. Took another spoonful of soup.
‘A free man thinks of death least of all things,’ he said, quoting a Spinoza line back at the Doc he’d heard the old man reel off a thousand times.
The Doc’s spoon stopped moving. He looked up at Gabriel, started laughing.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘At least I’ve taught you something.’
The Doc ripped a piece of bread in two and threw it into his bowl to mop up the last of the soup.
Gabriel was still smiling when the death of his sister popped into his head.
‘Say, Doc,’ he said. ‘Spinoza ever say anything about revenge?’
The Doc thought. ‘He must have,’ he replied. ‘Everything you need to know you can find in Spinoza. I’ll root around.’
They finished their soup and paid and stepped out onto the cold street. They buttoned up their coats. The Doc looked Gabriel over, sizing him up, like he was in the consulting room, diagnosing.
‘There’s two ways to be in this world, Gabby,’ said the Doc. ‘You can have a heart that’s made of clay. That can change, be molded
by the world, that can leave you vulnerable, damaged, hurt.’
‘Or?’
‘Or you can have a heart that’s made of stone. And that’s even worse.’
The Doc patted him on the shoulder and ambled off across the sidewalk, heading for the intersection that led back to his dingy consulting room.
Gabriel watched him go, lit a ciggie, walked over to his car, got in.
He didn’t start the engine. He opened up the Doc’s packet, dry-swallowed two Benzedrine tablets. Looked up at the Empire State Building. He was feeling gloomy and it wasn’t just the job, his imminent departure, the dip into Benny’s last days. It had something to do with what the Doc had told him. Something about Israel, or maybe Gabriel’s response to it.
That was it.
He’d laughed at the Doc’s plan to escape, but how could he not draw a parallel with his own plan to flee to Mexico? Maybe his own dreamed-of escape was just as ludicrous as the Doc’s. His heart sank. He wondered if everyone in New York didn’t carry around some promised land inside of them, some mirage that would evaporate if they ever actually approached it. Benny had tried to build his dream out in the desert and look where it got him. For the first time Gabriel felt that maybe, despite all his planning, he might never reach Mexico. The feeling transmuted into dread.
He looked up at the cliff-face of the Empire State Building and thought of his dead sister falling to earth. Maybe a body would streak through the sky at twelve hundred and fifty feet of accumulated velocity and explode onto the sidewalk in front of him.
13
Tuesday 4th, 4.34 p.m.
Magic hour and the sky was thickening gold. Gabriel parked up on the south side of Union Square and waited for the giant clock on the tower of the Consolidated Edison Building to tick down. He chain-smoked Luckies and thought about things in the rat-a-tat way he did when the Benzedrine was kicking its way through his nervous system. Benny, Costello, the missing two mill, the Doc, the forger, the Savoy-Plaza, Mexico City, Beatrice Iverson, all of them swirling around the wasteland of his head.