Going, Going, Gone

by Jack Womack

  ‘Bah, bah, black sheep,’ said Hamilton.

  Hmf hmf hmf.

  ‘James,’ said Martin. ‘James Kennedy.’

  I didn’t remember ever seeing a picture of him when he wasn’t in diapers. ‘What’s his game?’

  ‘He has none,’ Martin said. ‘Not long before he died, the old man disowned him. Then a year and a half ago mom forgave and forgot.’

  ‘Forgave and forgot what?’

  Martin shook his head. ‘There was an incident of some sort.’ He looked over at his accomplices; Hamilton didn’t shake his head, but he might as well have. ‘It’s not important. Not anymore.’

  ‘Even so, the Cardinal preferred that his brother left Massachusetts,’ Hamilton said. ‘Joe Jr. didn’t want him in California. Jack didn’t want him in Washington. At Bobby’s urging, they sent him to New York, where any leopard can change his spots.’ Hmf hmf hmf. ‘A year and a half ago they bought him a store, here in Manhattan.’

  ‘Record store,’ said Martin. ‘Old records.’

  ‘Specializing in 78s. Martin tells me you’re an aficionado of music of the old days, Walter. That’s what led us to believe you’d be perfect, that you’d have something in common. You and I may even share some favourite songs. Russ Columbo?’ I winced at the thought of listening to any of those proto-crooners. ‘It’s a gritty little warren on West 82nd, near Columbus, next to a chinee laundromat. Any chance you know the place?’

  Knew it well; best shop in town, even before he took over. Always struck me there was something familiar about the new guy but managed never to place it. ‘That’s James Kennedy?’ Hamilton nodded. ‘Pretty tightlipped cat but when it comes to wax he can talk your ears off.’

  ‘Then talk to him about records. Talk to him about anything. Get to know him better. Do you know him already?’ I shook my head. ‘Let him get to know you. That’s all we want.’

  I wasn’t enough of a sob sister to fall for that line, but they were at least using the right kind of lure. ‘Make with the gladhand and the bakery is back in business?’

  In Bennett’s absence Hamilton allowed Frye to light his cigar. ‘Exactly. You’ll receive a stipend of five hundred dollars a week, plus expenses –’

  ‘Bitte, but what are these records?’ Sartorius asked, his iron needle carving a ravine across Hammy’s bouncy tune. ‘Classical music?’

  ‘Degenerate music,’ I said.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Blues. Jazz. Spirituals. Music of African origins.’ Sartorius frowned, but under the circumstances he didn’t start slinging the braunsweiger. ‘So all I do is be Jimbo’s friend? Where does the flash, bang come in?’

  Hamilton shook his head, but Martin wouldn’t look me directly in the eye. ‘There won’t be any of that, Walter.’

  ‘Still like to know how the play ends before I get too far into the first act.’

  ‘Walter, we’ll be operating under standard procedure,’ Martin said. ‘You’ll receive no more information than necessary at any given point. You know that’s the only way we can work –’

  ‘What will you get out of this?’ I asked Hamilton.

  ‘The satisfaction of extending favours to friends,’ he said.

  ‘Which friends?’ I asked. ‘I call. Show your hand.’

  Frye extracted a folder from his leather lunchbox. With pudgy digits he worked a few black and white glossies loose and flipped them my way. Giving them the eye, I saw myself; also saw Chlojo dragging me down the street, Eulie taking the lead. Didn’t please me to know I was being followed but I can’t say I was surprised.

  ‘I sized you up as quite the Lothario, Walter,’ Hamilton said, putting through a lecher to lecher call. ‘Very striking, these women.’

  ‘Picked ’em up at Max’s,’ I said, thinking it best to be as nonchalant as possible. ‘Jersey girls come into town to see the big city. Didn’t get to first base, though. Pity.’

  ‘Modern woman,’ Hammy sighed. ‘Even flappers never wore such dresses.’ He studied the glossies as if reading the bill. ‘The big one is female? Our observer wasn’t absolutely sure.’

  ‘I have a question, however,’ Sartorius said, pushing one of the photos in front of me and stabbing at the girls’ heads with his finger. ‘Shape of the skulls, you see. And earlobes. Possible mongrelization, it seems to me. What was specified on their identifications?’

  ‘Sorry, but I don’t check teeth.’

  He blinked a bit faster than was necessary, but otherwise didn’t give the game away. ‘This was of no concern to you?’

  ‘Frankly, mein bruder, this isn’t DC. When it comes to wretched refuse we wrote the book here in New York. Everybody you didn’t catch before they got out of Europe. Shame all of you had to wind up here.’ I fixed him in my sights; no way, no reason I should put up with Nazis. They were bad as Georgians. ‘We even let Jews in.’

  ‘These women appear to be more negroid than Jewish,’ he said. ‘Did you ask about their parents?’

  ‘What do you do on a date, Herr Jones? Take blood tests?’ No reaction: the Big Nazi Book of Laughs was a slim volume with wide margins. ‘Strikes me I haven’t seen your identification.’

  Martin’s eyes widened and I felt his shoe kicking mine, under the table. Hamilton’s smile curled into more of a leer, as if he was really enjoying the way I didn’t make friends.

  Sartorius took out his wallet, flipping it open so I could see his driver’s licence and be impressed by his American Express card. Then he put it away, and returned his attentions to the photos of me and my visitors.

  ‘These women were strangers to you?’

  ‘Pickups, like I said.’

  ‘Even so, according to your Justice Department’s edicts, those of questionable background are to be at least investigated –’

  ‘Take Walter’s word for it,’ Martin said, interrupting at a timely moment. Hamilton shot my man a glare that could set fires. Frye slid the glossies back into his folder. I imagined they’d go back into the big drawer with the other pieces of string.

  ‘Yes, Hermann, rest assured. We know everything about Walter that we need to know.’

  The look the old codger gave me wasn’t a pleasant one, no matter how big the grin underneath. There was no way they’d have anything on me; Dad wasn’t even one thirty-second, and he’d burned the family records before he set foot in Washington state. As far as the official world could find out I was Caucasian, that is to say the official world outside of Martin; he knew about me only because I knew about him. Even so, my nerves were starting to feel more than a little on the supercharged side.

  ‘Better get to it,’ I said, standing. ‘Could use some subway fare, I think.’

  Martin passed me two Jacksons and a sawbuck. I added them to the single in my wallet.

  ‘Subway fare is twenty-five cents,’ Sartorius pointed out.

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘Better give me one more for the road.’ Martin handed over a fifty.

  ‘The coin in the coffer rings,’ Frye said, wiping the corners of his mouth as if he’d just finished running his choppers over an ear of corn, or his wife’s honeybin – the last seemed awfully unlikely. ‘The soul into purgatory springs.’ Hmmf hmmf.

  Coasting away slow I eased past the sots lined up along the bar, deciding not to check my hair in the mirror. Bad, bad, bad; the Boche might make themselves useful at NASA or in the Agriculture Department, but let them stick a monocle in anywhere else and the next thing you knew they were using their break time to draw up furnace blueprints, just in case a less lax administration gets into office. Last thing I needed was some blonde beast nitwit rummaging through my ancestral laundry. I was sure Bennett somehow had a hand in this, somewhere; he always gave me the impression he suspected, he just never came out with it. I would have given it all deeper thought, but a voice I heard as I exited caught my attention.

  ‘Walter.’

  There they were, both my mutts bounding toward me. Seeing them, seeing how especially good Eulie looked, I
instinctively switched into beach-strut mode, drawing in the gut so that no part of it would be visible. Then I thought of the genealogical voyeurs still hanging out in the bar, and decided we’d better make tracks. ‘Hi hi. Around the corner, ladies,’ I told them, leaning forward to cut wind resistance as I ankled past them double-time. ‘Come on, follow me.’ I steered my dusky delights down 18th and then up Park. They dressed down in daylight. Eulie wore an orange mini and knee-high boots – no jacket, coat or stockings. Even on the run I could see her pipestems pimpling up like plucked drumsticks. Big Mama wore leather, nothing but the old shiny shiny from bootsoles to collar. Looked like she came straight out of one of those magazines for special audiences. Inverted cross earrings dangled off her lobes, and I wondered if she was Cainite. As we kept up the pace I saw the stares were starting to load up, and figured we’d better slow down before we reached critical mass. Once on 21st east of Park I stopped at midblock and signalled they should join me. ‘OK, this is good.’

  ‘What disconcerts, Walter?’ Eulie asked, laying one of her little paws on my arm. Let me tell you, that charged my battery right up. ‘You’re uncoloured.’

  I nodded. ‘Damn right. So are you if they ask.’ Looking behind us, I checked to be sure we hadn’t been tailed. Gave the surroundings a quick check, now that I knew Hammy’s boys could be playing Weegee on me whenever I wasn’t looking. Lovely Eulie batted those lashes and my knees started clicking like castanets. Chlojo, idling, gave a hot dog cart a come-hither look. She licked her lips like she was deciding whether she should eat hot dogs or hot dog man first. ‘Those were your supervisories?’ Eulie asked.

  ‘You went in the bar?’

  ‘We sighted from without.’

  ‘The guy who was sitting on my right, he’s my boss. The other three, they’re bad news. Blondie’s all ubermensch and a mile wide, he’s onto you two –’

  Eulie didn’t appear to hear a word I said. ‘Walter, privacy essentials. Can we shack with you?’

  My jaw dropped like I’d been poleaxed. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Go to your pad,’ she said. When I gave her peepers a closer gander I gathered she’d almost hit the bull’s eye when she first tried her line but it hadn’t quite come out as she planned. ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘Come on.’

  I ran them down 21st to Third, where we stood and waited for the light to change blue. The uptown clattered along the tracks overhead; it was a sunny day, and venetian-blind shadows ran the length of the avenue. Chlojo nearly bumped into a bum lowering his string down a sewer grate, fishing for change. A firetruck rolled by, and from the looks the gals were getting I suspected they’d try to roll by again.

  ‘Where’ve you two been?’ I asked. ‘You said you’d be dropping back by. I could have died of old age at this rate –’

  ‘Are you still sighting?’ Eulie asked. Other people in passing cars gave Chlojo stares like she was the Loch Ness monster. One poor dope nearly slammed into an El stanchion before swerving back into his lane, nearly clipping a Seven Santini Brothers van.

  ‘The ghosts?’

  She nodded, and as we crossed the street I filled her in. ‘I bring in spookarama in stereo every night.’ I guided them down Third, past the pawn shops and thrift stores and bars. ‘Mornings, too. Sometimes they try to talk to me. I don’t know if talk’s the right word. They know my name. He does at least.’ Sweet petite looked like I’d told her the sun was made out of cream cheese. ‘But he’s all transmit and no receive.’

  ‘They speak directly to you?’

  ‘How’d they find out my name?’

  ‘Unknown,’ she said. I never saw anyone look so worried as she always did.

  ‘No matter,’ I said. ‘Now when we get to 18th we’re going to go through the building next door, go up to the roof and cross over that way, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Walter, there’s something you need knowing.’

  ‘What’s that –?’ I started to say, but was interrupted.

  ‘Hey!! Mama!’ some too-manly voice shouted out. ‘Where’d you two come from?’

  Demolition men were taking down some old hovel at the corner of 19th, and we were lucky enough to be passing by just as their shift was ending. More than a dozen of them were swinging down from their scaffolds like rabid monkeys. ‘Give us your number, baby. Who’s that, your big sister?’

  ‘Shake it, baby –’

  ‘Pass ’em by,’ I told my gals, quickening the pace, trying to reach the corner before they could cut us off. No go, though; Moe, Larry and Shemp walled off the sidewalk and their trucks blocked the curb.

  ‘Hey, gals,’ said the one in the centre, a red-faced lout with ropy arms and ham-sized hands. ‘We lost our phone numbers. Can we get yours?’ The one on his right, a wiry Italian, slid behind me as if I wasn’t even there.

  ‘We’ll take it from here, buddy,’ the one on his left said. This wasn’t good, but if worse came to worse and these meatheads lost control of themselves, I’d go to the fallback position. I always keep five STP-12 patches hidden in my wallet in case of emergencies. I slid it out of my pants and got one ready; all I needed to do was slap one wherever they were bare and the lugs would be flat out on a ten count. The big one, I gathered he was the foreman, planted himself in front of Chlojo’s face and switched the charm on high beam. ‘Some tits, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Got anybody takin’ care of ‘em?’

  ‘You a go-go dancer, honey?’ the Italian asked Eulie.

  ‘You disinterest us,’ she said. ‘We’ll proceed.’

  ‘Baby, you going to give me your number?’ the foreman asked Chlojo, giving her the eye-to-eye. ‘Don’t run into many my size.’ He took hold of her hand, but then jerked it away as if he’d been burned. ‘Christ Jesus,’ he shouted. ‘Your hands’re rougher than mine. It’s some faggot, get off –’

  Her flight suit seemed to lack the special brassiere her earlier ensemble sported. What happened next happened very fast, and I can’t truthfully say that I saw it. Chlojo seized his hand and pulled him towards her; her right arm moved, and the foreman fell on the sidewalk, wailing like a banshee. Chlo was still holding his hand, not that it was going to be of much use to him any longer. One time I gashed my thumb, playing Jack the Ripper on a bagel with a dull knife, and there was so much blood I feared I’d be leeched dry before I could curb the flow. That was just a paper cut compared; the foreman’s wrist squirted like a hose.

  ‘Shit, man –’ his companions said, doing a quick reverse. Chlojo pitched the hand into a trash can and started to walk south again. Hard to say now, much less at the time, what was most upsetting – what Chlojo’d done, or the way Eulie took it in stride.

  ‘Lay still,’ I said, kneeling and pulling my belt loose from my pants. I wrapped it around his arm above the elbow and yanked tight, buckling it off. Two workmen ran out with a towel and stick, ready to tie on a tourniquet, and I gladly let them buy out my medical practice. We had already attracted a crowd, and under the sound of the el overhead I heard sirens coming up fast. Just when I’d have wanted everyone to pretend they were asleep and not hear anything, half the neighbourhood seemed to be running over to see. One woman looked at the wrist stump-on and let out a blast like a tugboat.

  Eulie grabbed Chlo and pulled her back to the scene of the crime.

  ‘Walter, are you coming?’

  I really turned on the air raid siren. ‘You can’t do things like this,’ I said, screaming at tall and frosty. ‘Don’t you know you could have killed him?’ She nodded.

  ‘Cops’ll be here any second,’ I said to Eulie, imagining what could happen if Big Bertha really went to town. ‘Beat it. They’d haul you in in a second.’

  ‘Walter, please –’

  ‘Out! Go!’ They heeled it down the street; one of the construction crew tried, briefly, to keep Chlo from getting past but she picked him up and slung him on top of the roof of a yellow cab and after that, no one else seemed willing to intervene. Seconds after they disappeared a p
addywagon and five cans of Spam careened up, and out barrelled the boys of Killarney, waving their guns and clubs like it was Armistice Day.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ one of the older cops asked me. He had a face like a pile of rocks.

  ‘Psychos,’ I said, estimating a freeform narrative would work best. ‘Acidheads, probably. Goofballs. Jumped that poor guy, cut his hand off.’

  ‘Cut it off? Christ –’

  ‘They went that-a-way,’ I said, pointing, figuring they were long gone.

  ‘That’s the fuck,’ the Italian said, coming up and shoving me against the el stanchion. I really wished he hadn’t been such a responsible citizen. ‘He was with ’em all the time.’

  * * *

  Now in the Big Onion, only difference between being a material witness and being a suspect is that if you’re chalked on the first cue, nobody beats you up until you get to the precinct house. Every twenty years the feds launch a new investigation into New York police brutality and, my luck, this was year nineteen. Back when the bosses built my precinct’s pigsty this was the noted Gas House District, which took in the terrain from Third to the river south of 23rd; home turf to the Gashouse Gang, the East River Pirates, Sweeney’s Gadabouts and the Kerosene Boys; by the time I came to town the gangs were long canned. The place was built when Bryan was president and should have been condemned before he left office. No matter how often they renovated, the screams still stuck to the walls and, my brothers, I wasn’t keen on slapping on a layer of mine. My prints were filed, and as they bore the federal stamp they would have guaranteed my quick release, but no one seemed willing to look for them. The desk jockey tossed me in a one-bum drunk tank so I could consider the errors of my ways. A doped-up Chinaman two cells down caterwauled Beatles tunes.

  Hour or so passed, then a cop led me down a hall lined with wooden file cabinets and pieces of broken chairs. He dragged open the vault in the back wall and bade me enter. The interrogation room had a damp concrete floor, tile walls and a row of lockers – only one with a door – and a big fan. Inside, two of New York’s finest cooled their heels. Both wore Korvettes suits, tight on their arms as sausage skin. The taller one had slapped on so much Vitalis that his head looked flammable, and to enhance his tango-gaucho silhouette, let a tamed caterpillar snooze on his lip. The wider cop had toothbrush hair and a nose that couldn’t have been broken less than eight times, no good for anything except supporting shades. I’d never met the day shift at my local establishment. They had me try out a wooden chair that wasn’t broken yet. A sunlamp hung overhead, set on low instead of deep-fry.