The Mobster’s Lament

by Ray Celestin

  Half an hour later Michael was back at 129th Street, approaching the El station, the hulking iron armature which kept both it and the train line fixed in the air. Through its strut-work came a rusted metal sunlight, patchy and hard. Michael walked up the long flight of steps that led to the platforms, his head still spinning.

  If Tom had never gone back to his job at the hospital, then what had he been doing in the year and a half since he’d returned from the war? Living off his savings and wandering New York? Why had he lied? Why hadn’t he gone back into employment? It was only a matter of time before the prosecution found out, and it would be another nail in Tom’s coffin.

  When Michael reached the platforms, he needed to sit down to regain his breath. He found a bench, sat. The wind was blowing much harder up here than on street-level, it snatched the heat from his face, left his skin smarting. But soon enough a train rattled into the station.

  Michael boarded and it was only when the train was trundling downtown that he realized what it was he was feeling underneath the anger and the confusion – betrayal. Tom’s lies hurt like a knife in the back. He thought about all he’d sacrificed for Tom. He remembered the night of his birth, all those years ago in New Orleans. How his son had entered the world and brought with him a trailing freight of tenderness and worry that had never lessened, and never would.

  It was on Tom and Mae’s behalf that Michael and Annette had moved north, rearranged their lives for the safety of their children. All he’d ever done, he’d done on account of his children, and all he wanted from Tom in return was the truth. Why was he holding it back?

  He watched the city spin past in a daze, the chaotic tenement roofs of Harlem, the moneyed high-rises of the Upper East Side. He thought about Dr Miller looking at him like he was a madman.

  He got off the train at 59th Street, made his way back to his apartment on 7th Avenue. The sidewalks were filled with a lunchtime crowd, office workers pouring out of towers, heading into diners, shops, running errands. Others were heading into bars, hankering after lunchtime whiskies or beers.

  When Michael reached his building, he looked up at its facade and decided he needed to clear his head before going back in. He walked to Central Park, got lost in its winding paths, trying to figure out what was going on. He could make no sense of Tom’s situation and wondered if it was because the situation itself was senseless, or if his brain had grown too old and slow to uncover any logic that might be running through it.

  Was Tom really so traumatized by the war that he had returned from it and given up on life? If so, why hadn’t he sought help? Why hadn’t he turned to his parents?

  It made Michael angry – at Tom, at the perpetrators, at himself. If he could just find the people responsible, he was sure he could see Tom returned to safety. He focused on the energy of revenge, even though he knew he shouldn’t, and his thoughts spiraled further onwards into darkness.

  He left the park and crossed to his building and took the elevator up to the apartment. He made himself a coffee, and poured a double measure of whiskey into it before placing a call to Annette back in Chicago, wondering how he’d break the news to her of this latest bewildering setback.

  24

  Thursday 6th, 10.27 p.m.

  Times Square was where the city slammed against you. The blaze of neon, the blinding lights, the roiling crowds, the blast of traffic, all so strong as to feel like a physical force. It took a while for Ida to acclimatize when she came out of the subway, to take it all in, to fortify herself. Then she hurried through the night-time confusion, heading north.

  She walked along streets teeming with tourists, sailors, cops, kids, vendors and hawkers of everything imaginable, a criss-cross of cabs driving through steam. She passed by all-night movie houses and seedy-looking cabarets, cafeterias whose sheet-glass windows reflected in speckles and sweeps the square’s neon glitter.

  She reached 52nd Street, which was lined with brownstone nightclubs, their entrances covered by ratty, half-collapsed canopies. Outside each doorway were billboard stands, set up to entice the customers in – An Open House Jam Session – A Modern Jazz Concert – No Cover, No Minimum, No Cabaret Tax.

  Ida stopped underneath a pink neon sign that read The 3 Deuces, the club where she was supposed to meet the man Louis had told her might be able to help, a member of his touring band who had information on Cleveland. She smoked a cigarette, watched the crowds, the traffic, till a tall, light-skinned man approached, wrapped up in a dark blue overcoat.

  ‘You Louis’ pal?’ he asked.

  Ida nodded and introduced herself.

  ‘I’m Shelton,’ the man said. ‘Let’s talk inside. It’s freezing out here.’

  He nodded at the club behind them. Just inside the entrance sat an old man behind a cash till. Ida handed over three dollars for two covers and the man let them in.

  ‘Where you from?’ Shelton asked.

  ‘New Orleans by way of Chicago,’ Ida said.

  ‘Yeah, should have figured Nawlins, what with you being a pal of Louis’.’

  They descended a dark, narrow staircase then stepped through a door into a cellar the size of a shoebox, with a dozen tables arranged around a tiny stage which was empty except for a drum kit.

  Shelton led her across the floor to the cramped bar. Ida took in the people sitting on the hard wooden chairs, at the impossibly small tables, or standing around the edges of the room. A strange mix – black and white, young and old, men and women. Some looked bookish, wearing loose jackets and knit ties, others looked like tea heads and dropouts, others still looked like they’d come here from uptown, brooding, dangerous. Instead of music, the audience’s chatter filled the space. Ida sensed something in the air, a feeling of expectation; the crowd was excited about something.

  They reached the bar and Shelton approached a man sitting on a stool, sipping a drink. He was a dark-skinned Negro, with a goatee beard and a porkpie hat slanted on his head, black suede shoes on his feet. There was something about the way he leaned back, focused on watching the crowd, the tumbler in his hand, that lent him an air of solemnity and earnestness.

  ‘Eubie,’ said Shelton.

  The man at the bar looked up at them, and a grin broke out across his features. ‘Hey, Shelton. What’s going on?’ he said.

  They hugged each other, and Shelton gestured to Ida. ‘This is the lady that’s looking for Cleveland,’ he said.

  Shelton nodded and Ida introduced herself.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, ma’am,’ the man said. ‘I’m Eubie.’

  He spoke in a Southern drawl, yet another migrant to the city.

  ‘Eubie’s the booker at the club here,’ Shelton said. ‘I only know Cleveland a little bit, but Eubie played in a band with him.’

  Ida nodded and explained to Eubie why she was looking for Cleveland.

  ‘Yeah, the House of Horrors,’ Eubie said. ‘I recognized the name of the hotel in the papers. Figured Cleveland might be involved. You wanna get yourselves a drink?’

  Ida bought whiskies for Shelton and herself.

  ‘So, you know where Cleveland is?’ she asked Eubie.

  ‘Nah, he went missing months back. A little while before the murders. One minute he was there, the next he was gone. Had a gig and he never turned up.’

  ‘You sure he disappeared before the murders?’ Ida asked.

  ‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ said Eubie.

  ‘You know why he went missing?’

  Eubie paused, apprehensive.

  ‘You can trust me,’ Ida said. ‘I’m not with the police. I’ll keep your name out of everything. I just need to find Cleveland. A man’s life is at stake.’

  Eubie thought about it, sighed. ‘What do you know about Cleveland?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Nothing much,’ she replied. ‘Just that he’s a jazz musician who sells dope on the side.’

  ‘Yeah, half the people in the scene are either pushing dope or using it. Take a look around you,’ Eubie said, indicating wit
h a nod the people crammed into the club. Ida ran her eye over the patrons and frowned; it didn’t really strike her as a dope crowd. None of them displayed the stupor, the listlessness she associated with the drug.

  ‘Before the war, Cleveland was one of the best saxophone players I ever played with,’ Eubie said. ‘Made music like you’d never heard. The kind of thing people’ll be listening to in twenty years and still think it sounds like it’s from the future.’

  ‘But he went to fight in the war and when he came back, something had changed. He played wild. Angry. Went off on his own. Rest of the band couldn’t keep up. Crowds booing. He walked off stage a few times, left us in the lurch. One time he threw his sax into the crowd, nearly started a riot. He was back on the dope then. Sometimes I think how angry he would’ve played without it. Maybe that’s why he got high all the time. Anyway, whatever he saw out there in Europe turned him from angel music to devil music. I mean, it was still beautiful, but violent, angry.’

  Ida looked again at Eubie, saw that behind the veneer of aloofness, there was anger in him, too. She wondered if he’d served in the war as well, come back to government promises that proved empty, to a city destroyed by race riots, awash with heroin and not much else. She thought of Tom, how a whole generation of young men had been affected by the war. While Cleveland came back angry and raging, Tom had come back broken, subdued, roaming the streets to ease his distress. And finally their paths had crossed in the Palmer Hotel with disastrous consequences.

  ‘Look, I don’t know where he disappeared to,’ said Eubie. ‘But I know why.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ida.

  ‘After he didn’t show up to that gig, no one saw him for a while,’ Eubie explained. ‘And we got to worrying. I went uptown, found him in that hotel room of his. Holed up. Said he was quitting music. I’d heard it before. He was like that. But this time was different. He said he had a line on someone.’

  ‘You mean he was blackmailing someone? Who?’

  ‘One of these guys he dealt to,’ said Eubie. ‘Cleveland mixed it up. Had a bunch of customers from radio stations, magazines, advertising. Midtown cats who liked to slum it. You know, do dope at parties in the Village on the weekends, then catch the commuter special to their office on Monday mornings. Cleveland used to push to them. Maybe he was friends with them too, I don’t know. He used to get invites to their parties. I went along a few times. Swanky pads. Rich but trying to look poor, you know, authentic? I think they dug having colored people around. Anyway, Cleveland said he was gonna bleed this cat dry. Said he didn’t need to play music no more. Once this con came off, he was set for life.’

  ‘He say who the man was?’ Ida asked.

  Eubie shook his head. ‘Nah. But it had to be one of those Midtowners. I figured maybe it was someone famous, from the radio or Broadway. Some Hollywood actor maybe who’d started buying dope off him. Then Cleveland figured he could switch and blackmail the guy. I wouldn’t put it past him. Like I said, Cleveland came back angry.’

  ‘You know someone in this Midtown crowd we can talk to?’ Ida asked.

  ‘Yeah, I know a guy,’ said Eubie. ‘Works for NBC, doing effects on the radio.’

  ‘Effects?’

  ‘Sound effects, background noises, atmosphere for the radio shows. Dick Tracy. Boston Blackie. All that detective serial shit. We got him a job recording some of our sessions, in return he got me and Cleveland a gig playing the background music on a few episodes of his radio show. Could have got us more, but we were the only two shines in the building and the other musicians got sore.’

  ‘Can you get me his number?’ said Ida. ‘A name?’

  ‘Sure. I probably got it in the office out back,’ Eubie said, gesturing to a door at the end of the bar. ‘But the number didn’t come from me.’

  ‘Course not,’ Ida said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing,’ he replied. ‘Like you said, a brother’s life is at stake.’

  Ida nodded, smiled, felt a glint of hope. Cleveland was blackmailing someone influential who’d bought dope from him. Maybe that blackmail victim sent someone to the hotel to kill Cleveland and somehow it ended with a bloodbath. It was a good motive for the hit. It felt right. It fitted. Even if it meant going up against someone with pull, it was welcome news; at last they were on track to figuring out who was behind the murders. They needed to find out who Cleveland was blackmailing and, if the evidence fitted, build a case against them.

  Eubie checked his watch. ‘I need to introduce the band,’ he said to Ida. ‘Then I’ll go find it.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ida.

  Eubie gestured to a kid who was loitering about at the end of the stage. The kid nodded back then disappeared through a door, and a few seconds later, five young Negro men came out of the door and walked onto the stage. They were all dressed in suits, but there was something about them, the way they hung their heads, their solemn expressions, the way they’d didn’t even look at the audience, that marked them out as different to any jazz musicians Ida had ever seen.

  As they got their instruments ready, Eubie walked from the bar onto the stage, and the crowd hushed.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Eubie said, ‘thank you for coming here tonight on this cold, wintry evening. Hopefully we can warm you up a bit. I’d like to present to you the Charlie Parker Quintet. On trumpet Miles Davis, on piano Duke Jordan, on bass Tommy Potter, on drums Max Roach and on alto saxophone, the one and only “yardbird” himself, Charlie Parker.’

  He whisked his hand up to the band and the audience applauded. He smiled, then stepped off the stage and headed back to the bar, disappeared through the door into the office at the rear.

  Ida looked at the band’s leader with the saxophone in his hand. He was in his mid-twenties, she guessed, and looked a mess, his suit rumpled, his posture slumped, his eyes glazed over, staring at the boards of the stage below him. He looked disturbed, just a step away from homelessness. But the crowd all seemed to be in awe of him, leaned forward almost as one, expectant, excited.

  After a moment, he looked up at the audience as if noticing them for the first time, cleared his throat.

  ‘First tune’s called “Anthropology”,’ he mumbled.

  He nodded at his band-mates. The drummer counted time and they launched into the song.

  It was unlike anything Ida had ever heard. Jazz, but played at breakneck speed. Fury and ferocity. The tune fragmented. The drummer hit the drums so fast the sticks became a blur. The ride cymbal glistened and pulsed. The horns and the piano knocked out a chorus, which quickly spun into a saxophone solo that twisted so much the melodic line kept sounding like it was going to tie itself into a knot, but always, at the last second, the saxophonist escaped in a feat of virtuosity, flipping the melody inside out, looping it round into something new, whipping it on.

  Phrases shimmered about the bars in ever-shifting patterns. Solos and choruses started and stopped and started again, abruptly, juddering, jagged and tense. As chaotic and restless as the streets outside. But always, somehow, dazzling and clear. It felt like the first time Ida had heard jazz as a child in New Orleans. Bewildering.

  She looked over the crowd, saw how they leaned forwards in their seats, some with grins, some with their eyes closed, some with their eyes like pins that caught the light. Those standing around the edges of the room tapped their feet and nodded to the rhythm as it twitched and throbbed.

  The men on the stage played with a trance-like focus on their instruments, sweated into their shirts. Ida had never seen Negro musicians play with that kind of attitude on a stage before, disdainful, dripping with self-confidence. The saxophonist, who looked so shabby and unremarkable before the music had started, had come alive, seemed forceful now, seemed to emanate something magical.

  ‘How you like it?’ Shelton asked, shouting over the music.

  Ida smiled. ‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Reminds me of when I was young.’

  He gave her an odd look. ‘This is new music,’ he s
aid.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

  He thought for a second or two, then he seemed to get it.

  ‘I’ve never heard people improvise like this before,’ she said.

  Shelton smiled. ‘You free your mind and the notes come out,’ he said. ‘Like you don’t even have a choice.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very free if you don’t have a choice,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got a choice in how you play them,’ he replied, shrugging.

  Ida paused, then nodded, though she wasn’t sure how true that was.

  The door to the office opened, and Eubie stepped out, holding a scrap of paper. He walked round the bar and handed it to Ida. She looked at it and saw a name and a telephone number. She smiled.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, looking up at Eubie.

  He shrugged. ‘Just remember, it never came from me.’

  Ida nodded and slipped the paper into her pocket and they turned to look at the band.

  The trumpet player, a dark-skinned kid who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, was involved in what sounded like a battle with the drummer. His solo felt like it was constantly going to be capsized by the waves of noise crashing out of the drum-kit, but somehow he always managed to surf clear, rising into the air, causing the drummer to pound the drums even more frenetically. And so they continued on, skyrocketing around one another, whirling to a crescendo.

  Then just as abruptly as they’d started, the song came crashing to an end. And all that could be heard was the sound of the musicians catching their breath, the tap of their sweat dripping onto the stage.

  Something rushed around the room and the audience burst into applause.

  Ida thought of the big bands of the swing period, bloated and ponderous, dying now like so many beached whales. It all seemed so fake compared to these five musicians and the honesty with which they played.

  When the applause had died down, the saxophonist looked around the room again, announced the next song.