Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  To the naked eye, Mr. Q. still partook of an agricultural economy that dated back to the previous century, when he’d arrived by clipper ship as a young man and found Brooklyn teeming with farms. He made wine, preserves, milk, and cheeses at home in Bensonhurst and sold them from an unprepossessing storefront a half mile away, operated by his four sons.

  Dexter pulled up in front of this storefront now, as he did every Monday morning (the only day he arose with the rest of the world), a checkbook in his breast pocket and neatly wrapped bundles of cash in several others. A bell jingled as he pushed open the door. Frankie, Mr. Q.’s eldest son, who looked close to sixty (though no one really knew), sat at the counter. Like his brothers, Giulio, Johnny, and Joey, Frankie had thin brilliantined hair and an expressionless face. All of them smelled like cloves or pepper, a dry-goods smell, although it might have been the shop itself. Dexter rarely saw them outside it.

  “Good morning, Frankie.”

  “Morning yourself.”

  “Enjoy your weekend?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Awful cold, wasn’t it?”

  “Why, yes, it was, now you mention it.”

  “The missus well?”

  “She is at that.”

  “And the grandchildren?”

  “Oh, sure, they’re swell.”

  “Getting big, I imagine.”

  “You can say that again.”

  With occasional variations for temperature, season, and family configuration (Joey, the youngest, hadn’t any grandchildren yet), this conversation was indistinguishable from those Dexter held every Monday morning with whichever of Mr. Q.’s sons he happened to encounter at the shop. All were such perfect proxies for their father that it was tempting to regard them as drones: men whose every movement was controlled from afar. Yet occasionally, Dexter thought he glimpsed, in the vacancy of their faces, stores of memory, knowledge, and savvy opinion.

  He wrote a check to Mr. Q. for eighteen thousand dollars: his legitimate earnings for the previous week. Waving dry the ink, he said, “War is good for nightclubs, and that’s a fact.”

  “Pa will be happy to know it.”

  “The roadhouses aren’t quite as flush, with gasoline in such short supply. But the city clubs more than compensate.”

  “Son of a gun.”

  “Say, I’d like to speak with your pa this afternoon, if he’s a minute to spare.”

  “You know where to look.”

  “Why don’t I stop by around three.”

  This plan, so casually made that it hardly qualified as an appointment, could not have been more ironclad had it been typed into an executive diary by a secretarial school graduate fluent in stenography.

  Before saying goodbye, Dexter slipped Frankie three envelopes fat with cash: the week’s undocumented profits. The thickest, always, were the gaming proceeds, marked “No. 1” in pencil on the outside.

  “Say, you haven’t seen Badger lately,” he said, turning to go.

  “Why, he’s in here most days,” Frankie said.

  “Making out okay, new to the city and all?”

  “Well enough, I’d say,” Frankie said, with a chuckle that could only mean Badger was bringing in money. How—picking pockets at the racetrack? Even that seemed over his head. The kid had surprised Dexter by not returning after he’d put him out of the car last October. Word had reached him later that Badger had affixed himself to Aldo Roma, an old-school racketeer and one of Mr. Q.’s lesser chiefs, with whom Dexter maintained a cordial, wary distance.

  Back in the Cadillac on his way to Heels’s place, he began preparing for his visit to Mr. Q. Other bosses whiled away their days in social clubs, gossiping with their lieutenants—not this one. For as long as Dexter could remember, there had been rumors that Mr. Q. was finished, a doddering loony fiddling with cucumber seeds, driving a horse cart packed with jars of tomato jam in his bedroom slippers. Yet the tendons of his power stretched from Bensonhurst to Albany to Niagara Falls, Kansas City, New Orleans, Miami. The coherent functioning of this corpus was a neat trick that required not a little hocus-pocus. Did the thing run itself? When—how—did Mr. Q., who was surely pushing ninety, oversee it? Was there another man behind the man—a deeper potentate whose proxy Mr. Q. had secretly become? How did he spend his money? Was it true he’d purchased a small South American country?

  Dexter had had a vision—the sort of revelation that gobsmacked him once every few years, and that Mr. Q. counted on him to provide. It had come while he was standing on the beach with the crippled girl, right after Thanksgiving, and had strengthened and ramified in the weeks since: an unforeseen dividend of that charitable act.

  Heels lived with his ailing mother in the same Dyker Heights house where he’d grown up: knickknacks and cut crystal, lace curtains indistinguishable from their embellishment of cobwebs. He was a committed bachelor, as they said. He appeared at the door in a Rangoon dressing gown with velvet lapels, his last shock of yellow-white hair brilliantined to filigree over a ceramically shiny pate. He carried a cigarette in a long ivory holder. “Apologies, boss,” he said. “Mother’s been fussy this morning; I haven’t had time to dress.”

  “Those from Sulka?” Dexter asked, gesturing at the pajamas with turquoise piping visible under his dressing gown. Heels had a good eye—one of many things Dexter liked about him. He owned several vicuña coats.

  “Custom,” Heels said. “I find Sulkas just a shade too rough.”

  “You’re a tender flower,” Dexter rejoined dryly.

  “Coffee, boss?”

  While Heels went to get it, Dexter settled onto a couch in the parlor. Music was open on the upright: Chopin. Dexter had always assumed Heels’s mother played, but she’d taken to her bed in recent weeks. “Heels,” Dexter said when he returned with the coffee. “Don’t tell me you can play Chopin.”

  “Only when I’m tight.”

  Heels ran the Pines directly, but in the past couple of years he’d become Dexter’s all-around man at the New York clubs. Every midmorning, when they’d both had a few hours’ sleep, they reviewed a list of concerns—or headaches, as Dexter had come to think of them. Today the first order of business was a police raid the night before at Hell’s Bells, in the Flatlands. Three dealers and a croupier were in the Tombs; Heels would bail them out.

  “Same lieutenant?” Dexter asked.

  “The very one.”

  “You’ve talked to him?”

  “Tried. He claims not to speak our mother tongue.”

  “Holding out or showing off?”

  “The latter, I’d say, seeing as he made no demands. And there was mention of ‘cleaning house,’ ‘moral turpitude,’ and ‘scum of the earth.’ ”

  Dexter rolled his eyes. “A mick?”

  “Phelan.” Heels grinned. His own name was Healey.

  “I’ll fix it,” Dexter said.

  Understandings with the law were axiomatic, of course, and by far his greatest business expense. Arrangements were required at every level, from the beat cops who enjoyed a regular bottle and the occasional envelope to district commanders and beyond. It was in this realm, where police brass kept company with union leaders and state politicos, that Dexter’s business and family lives came closest to touching. Undoubtedly, his father-in-law’s blue blood and known intimacy with the president afforded Dexter a degree of protection beyond what he paid for. He was as close to untouchable as any man could be in his line of work, yet there would always be idealistic young lieutenants wanting to make a name. Most could be turned with the right combination of blandishments. Purists, like Phelan, were transferred by their superiors to other districts.

  Next problem: Mrs. Hugh Mackey. She had come around the Pines twice, with police, loudly demanding an inquiry into her husband’s disappearance.

  “Men skip town every day of the week,” Dexter said. “Even when they aren’t trying to blackmail their former employers.”

  “She says her Mackey would never walk. Devoted husband
, adoring father. Tears.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Same thing he did, is my guess.”

  “That’s easy. Pay her off.”

  A maître d’ who appeared to be skimming off the house. A manager who might have fallen into dope. Fighting among the girls who worked the gaming tables at the Wheel, in the Palisades. “Screaming, clawing, pulling of hair,” Heels said. “We should charge a supplement.”

  “Their beef?”

  “Stealing each other’s gamblers, so they say. But there’s a fancy man in there somewhere.”

  “You’ll take care of them?” He was growing restless.

  “I’ve chocolates and champagne in the car. If that doesn’t work, I’ll knock their heads together.”

  “What else.”

  After thirty more minutes, Dexter returned to the Cadillac in a state of clamoring impatience. The girls, the bulls, the wheedling Mrs. Mackey—all of it was petty and pointless when measured against his new vision. He hungered for a sense of progress, of new things approaching while old familiar ones receded. It seemed far too long since he’d had that sensation.

  At three o’clock, he parked the Cadillac outside a modest yellow wood-frame house that sagged, knock-kneed, against the one beside it. It had been many years since Mr. Q. had given away brides and kissed squalling wet babies at their christenings. Nowadays he left home only to visit his store. He’d no doorbell, no telephone, and was fond of saying he had never sent—or accepted—a telegram. If you wanted to talk to Mr. Q., you knocked at this door and waited while his Scotch terrier, Lolly, amplified the news of your arrival.

  Three minutes after her yapping commenced, Mr. Q. opened the door and sealed Dexter in his warm, fruit-smelling embrace. He was hulking and cavernous at once, browned to mahogany. Time had enlarged him in an organic, mineral way, like a tree trunk, or salts accreting in a cave. The frailty of his advanced age showed itself in the silty, tidal labors of his breath.

  “Have a seat,” he whispered as the excitable Lolly buzzed at their feet, white ribbons twitching in the fur on her head. “I’ll make . . . the coffee.”

  From the time Dexter had first managed, at almost sixteen, to read the coded signals in his father’s restaurant with enough precision to trace their source to this house; when he’d turned up on Mr. Q.’s doorstep with no more right than a stray dog, each visit had begun with the brewing of coffee on this same coal stove. The operation seemed to require a more delicate touch than Mr. Q.’s floppy, glovelike hands could manage, but Dexter had never seen him spill a drop.

  During the silent interval while Mr. Q. stooped over the stove, Dexter (and every other visitor, presumably) gazed through the back window and gathered his thoughts. The stone birdbath was full of last week’s snow, and the swaddled peach and pear trees—vestiges of an orchard—looked like boxers petrified mid-blow. Even more thickly cosseted were the six grapevines Mr. Q. had brought with him on the ship to New York, roots inside soil inside clay inside burlap inside layers of Sicilian newspaper. The vines of his youth. Only men he regarded as family were asked to assist in harvesting his grapes. Dexter had done so many times. Even now he could conjure the dry, sour smell the stems released when cut, the velvety sun-warmed weight of the grapes in his palm. The yield was symbolic; the wine Mr. Q. aged in pine barrels in his cellar was an alloy consisting mostly of grapes he purchased, delivered by the crate.

  When the coffee hissed on the stove, Mr. Q. poured it into two small cups and brought them to the table. “You look good,” he said softly, patting Dexter’s cheek. “But that’s the luck of . . . being a handsome fella. How you feel?”

  “Good,” Dexter said. “Very good.”

  “You strong? You look strong.”

  “Yes. Strong.”

  Though barely more than a whisper, Mr. Q.’s voice broke with the rumbling, soupy force of a primeval exhalation. He managed to emanate volcanic warmth while almost never smiling—a habit those around him tended to mirror in his presence. When Mr. Q. made an observation, or acknowledged one, it became immediately true. Dexter was strong. He knew that always, and he knew it now especially.

  “You’re my . . . strongest man,” Mr. Q. said, pausing for breath between sentence halves. “I hope you won’t mind a . . . little canning . . .”

  “My pleasure, boss.”

  He had canned once before with Mr. Q.: peaches from his trees. On the spectrum of possible chores, canning fell in the middle: more laborious than harvesting vegetables from the large greenhouse (whether by rental or fiat, Mr. Q. controlled the land behind all of the houses on his block, making for a farm of some three acres); preferable to shoveling manure from Apple, his dray. The worst chores involved milking—either his cow, Angelina, whose rubbery udders throbbed with veins and horseflies, or—worse—his goats, who kicked, nibbled neckties, and produced almost nothing for one’s pains. Mr. Q.’s chores were a source of gentle mirth among his chiefs on the rare occasions when they met, but cautious mirth—no one wanting to laugh harder than anyone else.

  Today they would be canning yellow pole beans from the greenhouse. “Try one,” Mr. Q. urged as Dexter began cutting off the tough ends on a worn marble slab. It tasted like a bean, more or less, but he pronounced it capital and finished it off. “You may have heard,” he began as he worked, “I gave Badger some necessary hell a few months back.”

  “Badger,” Mr. Q. breathed, “has energy.”

  “Never saw him again.”

  “Chutzpah. To quote my Jewish friends.”

  “If you say so.”

  “He’s put together a little . . . numbers game.”

  Dexter was glad to have the beans to look at, for this news surprised him. Badger had his own numbers game after three months in New York? Not likely; he must be overseeing one of Aldo Roma’s games. Mr. Q. permitted favored chiefs an unusual degree of autonomy and independence. Dexter relished the distance from his counterparts—he wanted nothing to do with the Red Hook piers, for example, where men behaved like animals. But the sprawling, “blind” nature of Mr. Q.’s empire allowed for little mutual curiosity among chiefs, let alone gossip. For that reason Dexter was gratified when his boss said, “I’d like Badger to . . . bring his game into a . . . couple of the clubs.”

  “Of course. Which ones?”

  “You decide.”

  Dexter nodded, satisfied. He wanted to keep an eye on Badger.

  A large pot simmered on the stove, steaming the air in the small kitchen. Mr. Q. gathered the beans in his shaking hands and dropped them in.

  “I’ve a new idea, boss,” Dexter said. “The next step, as I see it.”

  A shudder of liveliness moved through Mr. Q. like a roll of thunder and settled in his moist brown eyes. “You know I . . . count on you for that,” he said.

  It was Dexter who had divined, even before Prohibition ended in ’33, that rather than howl like scalded dogs, as so many in the underworld were doing, they should open a series of legitimate clubs that would cleanse Mr. Q.’s gargantuan liquor trade earnings. Aside from inoculating his fortune against the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the arrangement had allowed them to profit from an array of ancillary rackets both legal and illegal—everything from hat-checking to cigarettes to love matching, as Dexter thought of it. His own role as figurehead had been essential: not once arrested; pedigreed by marriage, with the foresight to have shed his tongue-twisting name in favor of a short, stylish one (you might say) long before anyone cared to know it.

  And oh, how the plan had worked! Buoyed them both on a tide of legitimacy that swept Dexter into the presence of picture stars and newspapermen and elected officials, state and national, into whose pockets Mr. Q.’s influence had then been pressed. A beauteous arrangement all around. There had been one mistake: Ed Kerrigan, Dexter’s sole misjudgment in twenty-seven years of employment. People had gotten hurt, as the parlance went. But in the end, the trouble had brought down a rival and left Mr. Q. unscathed. This felicitous outcome was sure
ly what had prompted Mr. Q. to declare three years ago, in his primordial hush, “It is forgotten. We won’t speak of it again.” Afterward, in the privacy of his automobile, Dexter had wept with relief.

  When the beans were sufficiently boiled (something Mr. Q. seemed to know innately), it fell to Dexter to ladle them, upright, into mason jars. When each jar looked like an overcrowded elevator, Mr. Q. instructed him to pour scalding water over the beans, filling every jar to the neck.

  “Now we screw these lids on tight . . . but not too tight . . . and we . . . put them into the pressure canner,” Mr. Q. said, sounding overly winded for the little they’d done. “And then . . . you tell me our . . . idea.”

  Dexter had wanted to lead up to it gradually, like steps in a waltz, until there was nowhere left to move except his inevitable conclusion. But the broiling beanwork had cleared his mind of those steps, as perhaps it was meant to. In this atmosphere of heat and truth, preambles fell away and you ended up just saying the thing. He helped Mr. Q. screw the mason jars closed and place them carefully in a tarred pot that looked as if it had been dredged from the bottom of the sea. Mr. Q. covered the pot and hefted the flame underneath it. Then he sank onto a chair, breathing hard.

  Dexter mopped his face with his handkerchief, resumed the seat across the small table, and began. “I’d like to approach Uncle and offer our services, and our businesses, for the war effort.”

  No immediate response; there never was. The onus was on Dexter to illuminate the bedrock layers underneath.

  “The Allies will win, it’s only a question of time,” he said. “At that point, the U.S. will be more powerful than it has ever been. More powerful than any country ever, in the history of the world.”