‘I was afraid of that,’ the surgeon said. ‘There is nerve damage and I can’t do much about it, unfortunately.’
The other thing exercising my mind was the future. Bridgett kept silent for six weeks, then a typewritten letter arrived via the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It opened with ‘Dear Mr McCrae’ and ended ‘Yours sincerely, H. Billy’, without a signature. I smiled fondly over the reference to her childhood. It was wonderful to hear from her, although she was forced to write about ‘Mrs Fuller’ in the third person. She explained that ‘Mrs Fuller’ now ran the entire Firebird, after the death of Mr Lenny Giancana, and I had no doubt that her paperwork regarding the basement full of cement would have helped. Miss H. Billy never signed her letters or expressed any loving sentiments but, even so, it wouldn’t have been difficult to trace the letters back to her if one went astray. At least if it fell into someone’s hands, they wouldn’t know of our love.
H. Billy informed me that she had sold my apartment and deposited the money in a local Albany bank under the name Jack McCrae, as well as the balance in my Las Vegas bank account, which gave me a total of $15,600; a very pleasing sum. She must have decided it was too risky to send that much cash via the Brotherhood. Included in the letter was a new ID card and social security number in the name of Jack McCrae, ‘compliments the interior decorator’. She’d obviously used Anna-Lucia Hermes and her husband, the mayor, to obtain it.
After I’d been in Albany for three months I received a letter from H. Billy, via the usual means, with distressing news. Johnny Diamond had been shot and killed outside his parents’ home in Ohio, hunted down by those animals, basically, because he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder had been reported in the local newspaper, simply headlined: EX-PIT BOSS MURDERED. In her note she cautioned me that Sammy was back on his feet, although with the permanent support of crutches. The article repeated the usual no-suspects line, but told of the fight at the Desert Inn and Johnny Diamond’s hurried exit from Las Vegas. Shortly after Johnny’s death, a frightening note had been slipped under Bridgett’s door: The Diamond has hit the deck. The next card to go will be the Jack of Spayds.
It didn’t sound like anything Sammy could possibly have composed and I guessed it was sent from the Chicago Mob, warning that godfather Tony Accardo, and his big guns were out to get me, and that, unlike Sammy, they were not a bunch of Chicago hicks carrying meat hooks. My unsigned statement to the police was worthless, and I suspect a signed one would have made little difference. I was still a loose end that needed to be snipped off. Slipping the note under Bridgett’s door meant they suspected she was keeping in touch with me, so I wasn’t surprised when H. Billy ended her letter: Mr McCrae, future contact will now cease, but I felt my heart sink.
I suddenly felt very lonely. I had contacted my mother and Nick Reed via the porter network, which carried over the Canadian border. It was complicated, though, and Booker T. insisted they couldn’t guarantee it. I had warned my mom and Nick not to contact me and told them about my hand and that the Mafia were involved. If I came home, it wouldn’t be safe for me or anyone involved with me. I didn’t give them my address or even tell them I was in Albany but simply said that I was being treated by one of America’s best hand surgeons, and that I’d be in touch as soon as I felt it was safe to do so.
Several days later, Dr Haghighi surprised me, after a regular check on the progress of my hand, by saying, ‘Your stepfather will be here tomorrow, Jack. He’s officially here to consult on some burns patients. While he’s not aware of being watched, he doesn’t want to expose you to any more danger.’
‘How the hell —?’
He cut me short. ‘Surgeon’s network.’
Nick arrived and I spent the day telling him the whole story, after Dr Haghighi had filled him in on the details of my hand injury. Nick thought about it for a few minutes before saying, ‘Jack, your treatment is all but finished, the dressing is off and you know how to care for yourself. Dr Haghighi says that, with time and exercise, you’ll get more movement in your hand, and that the movement you’ve got already is pretty remarkable. As one surgeon to another, he’s done a great job.’
‘Yeah, but no piano,’ I said softly.
‘Afraid not, son; not as a professional, anyhow.’ He didn’t carry on – there was no point – and how could I tell him that life as a musician was everything to me, and that without jazz, the blues, my life was finished as far as I was concerned? He hadn’t told me anything I didn’t know. ‘What seems obvious to me, Jack, is that you need to get the hell out of North America for a good bit.’ He paused. ‘And that includes Canada.’
‘The Mafia has a very long arm, Nick. I’m not broke, but it’s a question of where? I imagine Jack Spayd is not a common name on a passport.’
Nick, as usual, was pretty calm, almost laconic, but I knew his manner covered deep concern; he was, by nature, a man of few words. ‘I’ll come back next week . . . see what can be done.’
He was back six days later. ‘I’ve had a quiet word to a friend or two in the Royal Canadians, permanent brass in our old regiment, and they connected me with some friends of theirs in the Mounties who run Canadian Intelligence. As we discussed, they recommend you leave the country, get away someplace where they’ll never look for you.’
‘Yes, but where, where the hell do I go?’ I said. ‘I’ll need a passport under another name if I want to do that safely . . .’
‘I guess we’re thinking alike. Canadian Intelligence have come up with a legal trick. They’ve arranged for your passport using my family name, without any of the usual adoption paperwork. No need for any complicated legal stuff. Your mother has found a snap of you that can be made to work as your passport photo. That should be enough to throw anyone off your trail.’
‘They did that?’
‘Well, normally it would be a bit tricky. The guy involved is pretty high up in the security section of the Mounties. He’s repaying what he says is a favour because I saved his brother’s life. Guy received burns to fifty per cent of his body after being rescued from a burning tank at Normandy.’ Nick shrugged. ‘Just doing my job, I guess, but he insists he owes me this one. Your medal didn’t hurt either.’
‘Missing earlobe pays off at last,’ I laughed. ‘Thank you, Nick,’ I said simply. There wasn’t much more I could say, anyhow. I’d become the owner of a new Canadian passport in the name of Jack Reed, a new man with a new life.
‘Africa, Jack; for a while, anyway – somewhere in the middle or to the north, that’s what the Intelligence guys say. That’s where a lot of the German SS disappeared after the war. Just one more thing and I stress that it’s very important: you cannot, must not, contact anyone in Canada or tell any person who may have previously known you your new surname. The same goes for any friends in America. Not a word until you’re settled. You have simply disappeared . . . gone, vanished for the time being.’ He looked at me sternly. ‘No Miss Frostbite, no Joe, no Mac. Please, Jack?’ He paused, then said, ‘and no one in Las Vegas. You’re not the only one involved in this.’ He stood up, and removed a new Canadian passport from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. ‘It’s got all the right visas you’re going to need from the bottom of Africa to Ethiopia. I’ve also prepared a set of papers on regimental notepaper outlining your career as an army medic; the courses you’ve passed, medical experience while in action. I’ve signed these but also got your old CO, as well as the battalion commander – now a major general – to do a reference for you. You never know when they may be useful,’ he concluded. ‘Now, I’ve got a train to catch. Good luck, son.’ We shook hands (he wasn’t the kind of man who hugged) and he grinned, but it wasn’t one of those grins intended to indicate mild humour. ‘Only one other person can know any of this, so my next concern is how I am going to explain all this to your dear mother.’
‘Do your best, Nick,’ I said fervently, ‘and give her my love.’
Nick left without a nod. The
more I saw of this remarkable man, the happier I was for my mom.
I’d done my blubbing. Until this moment I’d hoped to get back to my beloved Bridgett but now I felt certain I’d lost her, possibly forever. I dared not tell her my new name. Nick had emphasised that I couldn’t even tell my surgeon because it could compromise Canadian Intelligence, who’d gone out on a limb for me.
I sat silently for a long time, my left hand resting in my lap. It still looked a mess, but the bones had knitted, the skin had healed and, although it was pretty ugly to look at, it had movement. Perhaps one day the feeling would return to my pinky.
I rose and reached for the soft yellow polishing cloth that contained the second-hand harmonica my drunken father had won from a friend at the tavern and given to me as a belated eighth birthday gift. I picked up the battered old instrument and began to play ‘St James Infirmary Blues’. Softly, tentatively at first, then with more confidence.
What the hell! What was to stop me, a guy named Jack Reed, becoming the best jazz and blues harmonica player in the entire world?
PART FOUR
AFRICA
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
AFRICA! IN MY CHILDHOOD the map of Africa was fairly well covered with red colonies belonging to the British Empire. Perhaps it would be more correct to say the red bits were members of the empire, but as a kid I saw the Union Jack as the proprietorial flag and, in my mind, wherever it fluttered, it signified absolute ownership.
Starting with the books Miss Mony first taught me to read and later with those suggested by Mrs Hodgson at the library, I was able to conjure up the vast African continent from stories of derring-do and adventure. In them, square-jawed men with steely blue eyes served as exemplars of white Anglo-Saxon manhood, willingly giving selfless service, their energy, prowess and knowledge, to bring primitive people those quintessentially British gifts of sound governance, justice, medicine and education.
Alas, very few women seemed to feature in this childhood pantheon of heroes, my notion at the time being that by remaining in their homeland, they were protected from the rampaging lusts of the dark races who had, as a matter of tribal law and absolute entitlement, treated the opposite gender as a possession and, in all senses, as inferior. That white women were oppressed never occurred to me; nor did I ever think that all this spreading of cartographical red ink was largely motivated by greed, natural resources being plundered solely for the enrichment of a nation that then demanded respect, subservience and sycophantic allegiance from the indigenous people they regarded as inferior in every way.
I was taught at school that our white man’s duty was almost a part of the Darwinian struggle; that British law, medical science and industrial might combined with the Christian faith were, in effect, part of a relentless evolutionary process that was necessary, even by the use of force, to overthrow the superstitious, ignorant, heathen tribal ways of the primitive natives wherever they were to be found, and ‘wherever’ often meant Africa.
Patently the motivation of the greatest empire on Earth wasn’t benign, and yet, as a consequence of it, some order was brought to the former chaos, some enlightenment to the indigenous mind, some progress made against ravaging disease and some small steps towards social justice began to appear.
This could not be said for all European conquests of the African continent. The Belgians brought with their possession of the Congo the greatest reign of murderous terror Africa had ever experienced. And yet, until they finally banished slavery in 1807, Britain was second only to Portugal as the nation controlling the slave trade to North and South America. It was Britain that had brought the forebears of Hector and his lovely daughter Sue, Chef Napoleon Nelson, Booker T. and the members of The Resurrection Brothers to America. It should be noted too that the French, Belgians, Portuguese, Germans, Italians and Dutch were also deeply involved in African colonisation.
To all my fanciful fictions of benign British colonial rule had been added the stories of the 1914–18 war, where men had willingly sacrificed their lives in countless numbers to uphold the traditions of the glorious empire. Despite the fact that my own country was not under threat from Germany or Japan in the Second World War, this same sense of duty prevailed when I joined up to fight for the greater good of the far-flung empire. I regarded my tiny contribution as a part of the ongoing tide of good sweeping away the tyranny of evil. The war was a rite of passage for me, as it was for many young men, but it had not changed my life as much as the psychopath Sammy Schischka wielding his ball-peen hammer had.
Even without Sammy, my life would have been changed by the cruel twist of fate that had allowed me to find true love and, almost in the same breath, lose it. I told myself she would forever dwell in my heart and perhaps someday . . . but even before Nick Reed’s warning not to contact her, I’d pretty well decided that my pride simply forbade me from doing so. To become dependant on her love, to try to salvage what was left of my shattered ego, was unthinkable. I was once again on my own and, in effect, scuffing. I was no longer Jack Spayd, or Jack McCrae, but Jack Reed, ex-piano player, now jazz harmonica player and sometime medic, on my way to Africa with a deck of playing cards in my hip pocket, ready to start all over again but with very little idea of where or how to do it.
If all this sounds pathetically melodramatic, then you’re probably right. But at least I had long since given up feeling sorry for myself for my physical condition by the time I set off to build a new life from the smoking ruins of the old one. I’d done my weeping in private and, to be truthful, was somewhat embarrassed by the scale of mine when compared with those I’d witnessed in the physical therapy department of the Albany General Hospital. People recovering from motor and industrial accidents, with arms and legs missing, faces smashed into permanent and nightmarish Halloween masks; people in wheelchairs, their backs broken, who would never walk again. They too had lost their careers and dreams and much more besides, while, I told myself, the sum total of my disabilities was a numb left pinky, a missing earlobe, and fingers that no longer moved sufficiently swiftly for a keyboard virtuoso. I could almost hear Joe saying: ‘Jazzboy, it be time to harden up some. Time to go back to dat harmonica where you done all yo jazz ’n’ blues startin’ out. Time to go forwards by goin’ backwards. Time to meta-phor-i-cally crawl under dem Jazz Warehouse steps once more.’
I wondered if I would ever see Joe again or Miss Frostbite, or Mac and the twins, or even Mrs Hodgson, but, most of all, my darling mom and Nick Reed, whom she loved so dearly. Then, of course, there were the coloured folk, Chef Napoleon Nelson, Hector, Booker T., the people who had worked in the kitchen or as cleaners, and The Resurrection Brothers – people who had given me so much joy and happiness and, as Bridgett and Pastor Moses had pointed out, so much love. I couldn’t bear to think I might never see Bridgett again.
I took the train to New York, booking a private compartment in the name of Jack Reed; my first public act using my new name. I found a small, cheap and essentially nondescript hotel in the East Village, then spent the next two days in the New York Library, getting rid of the crap in my head about Africa and replacing it with some facts that might help me find useful employment in a place where I could remain well hidden.
I wasn’t sufficiently foolish to think that Africa needed a harmonica player of jazz and blues, but I was equipped for little else. Barney de Andrade, the bartender in the GAWP Bar, had taught me how to mix cocktails but it wasn’t a skill that I imagined would be in demand at my level of proficiency. Perhaps in South Africa, in some second-rate cocktail bar in Cape Town or Johannesburg, although I’d already decided that the attitude of the whites to coloured folk in Africa was even worse than in America and, besides, large cities would not be sufficiently remote to keep me safe from the Mafiosi.
Then, purely by chance, my eye caught an article that was buried in the business section of the New York Times and had the headline: a place in the sun for shady people. It explained that the world was seriously short of copper, due
to demands during the Second World War, and now the Korean War. The ‘Copperbelt’, situated in Central Africa and incorporating the mines in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia, was a major source of supply outside of Chile. Professional South African goldminers could triple their income in the copper mines, where few questions were asked and skilled men were well rewarded. This also attracted men who kept their past a secret and had felt the need to leave their country of origin, among them war criminals and other white men with no mining experience. The article mentioned a mining company called the British American Selection Trust, an American-financed mining group that operated the Luswishi River Copper Mine in Northern Rhodesia, the richest of its kind in the world.
Bingo! I’d found my red patch, almost plumb in the centre of Africa. It didn’t take me long to locate their New York office and telephone to ask if I could see someone about employment opportunities in Central Africa. To my surprise I was put through to a Miss Truscott, the personal secretary of a Mr Leslie, Global Vice President of Mining Recruitment. She had me wait a few minutes, then came back and made an appointment for three o’clock the following day, asking me to bring my resumé with me. So much for no questions asked or skills required.
I spent an hour that evening preparing my resumé or, rather, trying to improve it, for the preparation took less than fifteen minutes. War medic and piano player just about summed it up, unless I included my skills as a poker player or cocktail mixer, but somehow that didn’t seem appropriate. The result was pretty pathetic. I most definitely fell into the unskilled category mentioned in the newspaper article. Perhaps the only thing I had going for me was the set of papers my stepfather had prepared detailing my career as an army medic, including several references to courses I’d undertaken, some of which I barely remembered, involving medical knowhow I’d long since forgotten. Still, emblazoned with the regimental insignia, and with Nick’s signature and impressive qualifications as well as that of the regimental commander, they looked reasonably professional and impressive. Among them was the recommendation that I study medicine at the conclusion of the war and the fact that I’d qualified for an ex-serviceman’s grant to do so.
Jack of Diamonds Page 65