by Don Swaim
“There won’t be one. I’m through. I’m spending my days reading the voluminous number of letters addressed to me, some begging me to take on all sorts of cases, most forlorn, foolish, and impossible; many letters asking for money; but most from people anxious to save my soul, and who believe it’s their duty to act for God in rescuing me from my impending doom.
“When I was a boy I wondered what the old could find to make it worthwhile to stay alive. Now I know. After you and Diana depart, Mrs. Darrow will fold back my bed and prop the pillows with tender care, and I shall grow deliciously drowsy over the pages of a book, and then drift off into dreams without fear or regret.”
Diana and I played tourists for the next three days, after which I donated the Packard One Twenty LeBaron Convertible Victoria to a destitute family on the South Side. I was tempted to again return to Manhattan on the Twentieth Century Limited, but this time we flew because I wanted to waste no time drifting off into dreams without fear or regret.
Back in Diana’s Park Avenue penthouse, as we were disrobing in preparation for some romantic coupling, I felt a lump in my coat pocket. It was the rag voodoo doll I’d bought from Mambo Miriam on Chartres Street in New Orleans. I was about to feed it to Kyle, when I decided I might find some use for it after all. You never know. After all, enemies are a dime a dozen.
The Château Cheval Blanc red Bordeaux was dry, but sweet was the silky baritone of Conrad Thibault singing “The Day You Came Along” on the Zenith Stratosphere—until the mood was broken by a familiar, grating voice.
Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press. Flash! A new poll by the Literary Digest predicts Alf Landon, governor of Kansas, would whip President Roosevelt with fifty-seven percent of the vote if the election were held today. Your humble scribe takes no sides, of course, but if I had Aladdin’s lamp, I’d fix it so that FDR never caught a cold.
Flash! It seems like only yesterday that my critics blasted me because I reported on divorces and births, and stories like the cross-eyed man whose eyes uncrossed after he was hit by a bus. Now, it’s usually some crank who thinks I’ve insulted Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Landon, or someone else. I’m not a Communist, nor am I a Fascist, I’m an American. There’s no room for any ism—except patriotism.
Flash! Your obedient servant is about to entrain to Hollywood to appear in his first starring movie, Wake Up and Sing, a musical with Ben Bernie, Eddie Cantor, and Alice Fay.
Flash! Now a W.W. exclusive. This reporter has learned that the NYPD is covering up a violent tong war in the streets of Chinatown, and that the police brass are refusing to acknowledge it. With the cops sitting on their batons, there’s only one man equipped to end this bloodshed. My own Certain Acquaintance, who works relentlessly to fight evil and bring criminals to justice. Sic ’em, C.A., but don’t get yourself killed.
…For Jergens Lotion, this is Walter Winchell wishing you lotions of love.
four
Tong Wars 1937
The tong wars returned to Chinatown the year FDR was sworn in for his second term—not to say there was any coincidence.
I learned about the tongs from my hip pal Harry Wong who had sweated in his father’s hand-laundry during the day while hitting the books at Brooklyn Law at night. Harry, asking for my help, recently hung his shingle on Doyers Street, and was waiting for clients to flock to his storefront. And waiting.
As we sat in my favorite dim sum joint, Woo Fat’s on Pell Street, Harry said to me, “Tongs prefer using hatchets and cleavers, Tokol, so their victims are always left a bloody mess.”
Harry’s father, Zong Hon Wong, operated his laundry on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, near the Y where I caught Zs when not crashing at Diana’s penthouse. Thus, I got to know and like the Wongs, who put just the right amount of starch in my shirts.
Harry said, “The last tong war was in nineteen thirty-three, Tokol, and it’s started all over again. The cops aren’t doing diddly. They even deny there’s a war.”
“I spent some time in the Orient and speak a little of the lingo, Harry, but tell me more about this tong business.”
“Mandarin versus Cantonese. Most of the Cantonese in America hail from China’s southern mainland and Hong Kong. But there’s been an influx of Mandarins from the north and Taiwan, including some young hatchetmen involved in the protection racket—or worse. And they’re not limited to Chinatown. Like, they busted the windows of Pop’s laundry uptown.”
“Maybe they got the wrong Wong.”
“Naw, they’d already threatened Pop if he didn’t fork up the dough for insurance, so called. Naturally, the Cantonese have organized to defend themselves, but there’ve been beatings and sabotage—just an overture to the impending carnage. The tongs are brutal.”
“Dealing with a tong war may be slightly above my pay grade, Harry. Not sure I know how to handle it.”
“Look beyond Chinatown’s chop suey joints. These Mandarin interlopers call themselves the Chinese Celestial Benevolent Security and Safety League. Get enough evidence to send ’em to the Big House. Isn’t that’s what Tokoloshe and Son Cleansing Services is all about? I’m helpless, Tokol. The ink on my diploma’s still wet.”
The surly server rolled a fresh tray of har gau, jiu cai bau, wu gok, pei gun, and funk zao to our table, and whatever they were Harry and I made short work of them.
“Harry, I bumped into Captain Moishe O’Hara of the Fifth Precinct at the Policeman’s Ball. I hear he’s a no-nonsense cop. Don’t know him well, but it’s said he runs a tight ship.”
“Talk him up. I can give you the names of all the Mandarin gangsters. Their top dog’s called Fang Chen.”
“Address?”
“Eighty-four and one-half Mott Street. It’s really a cover for an opium and gambling den that caters not only to Asians but a select number of Caucasians who pay gobs of cash.”
“I’ll do what I can, Harry, but it’ll have to wait until after we fly back from California. Diana and I are going to pay our respects to my pal Ira Gershwin and attend the George Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl.”
I had been shocked to learn of George’s premature death earlier in the year after all the parties I’d gone to at the brothers’ Riverside Drive penthouse. I hadn’t seen the Gershwins since they decamped to Hollywood.
“Hurry back, Tokol. Until then, slip me five.”
We shook on it.
I was sorry for leaving Harry to his own devices, but the Gershwin concert was too important for me to pass up. Besides, Diana was itching to try out her new plane on a cross-country flight.
She was now a licensed pilot and owner of a five-seat Fairchild Model 45, powered by a 225 horsepower Jacobs L-4 radial engine, a flight machine I gave her to mark the anniversary of our introduction.
She and I first locked eyes and more in Tangier, where I was on a secret assignment and she had gone to mend a broken heart, which she refused to discuss. That starry North African night, as we puffed the hookah, was enough for us to know we were kindred spirits, particularly after I learned that her weapon of choice was the blowgun.
I liked women with style.
The plane, which she parked in a hangar at Floyd Bennett Field in Marine Park, Brooklyn, was built to her specs at Fairchild’s Farmington, Long Island, plant. After a gentle baptism with a vintage bottle of Moet & Chandon, Diana christened the ship Hot Mama, and boldly painted the name on the fuselage.
She’d become bosom buddies with Kenyan bush pilot Beryl Markham, who taught her fly in a Gypsy-powered Percival Gull low-wing monoplane. As an aviatrix, Diana refused to be deterred simply because Amelia Earhart had disappeared over the Pacific near Papua, New Guinea, and was presumed dead, nor by last spring’s explosion of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, which killed thirty-six.
She said, a little defensively, “Flight is now a fact of life.”
“Or death,” I added in an ominous tone.
D
iana handled her takeoffs and landings with aplomb, and was trying to teach me to fly, shaky as I was at the controls. Finally, the maze of dials and switches on the instrument panel started to make sense.
“Hey, dollface,” I said, “maybe you’ll let me take the wheel now that we’re in the clouds.”
“Stick, darling, it’s called a stick.”
After studying the latest aeronautical charts, she figured we’d be in Burbank in two days, including refueling stops. We weren’t out to set aviation records, and for me the goal was just getting there in one piece. Diana was damned good, but no Eddie Rickenbacker, and this was her first transcontinental jaunt.
The noise from the engines inside the cabin was well-nigh deafening, but she didn’t seem to notice.
America was an amazing place from the air, a farrago of plains, cropland, forests, rolling hills, mountains, and sprawling cities, while vast reaches appeared, deceivingly, to be unpopulated.
Yet the vistas became monotonous as we navigated for endless hours over the heartland, so I read the year’s best seller How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. What had I learned so far? To be empathetic, respect others’ dignity, never overtly try to win arguments, and shoot to kill only as a last resort.
Safely on the ground in California, we engaged a limo and driver to whisk us to the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, where Diana and I enjoyed a quickie in our suite, then off to the Hollywood Bowl to meet backstage with Ira Gershwin.
“I was devastated when I heard about George,” I said as I hugged the self-effacing, bespectacled songwriter, who once sent his doorman Frank with a pump-action shotgun to help Diana rescue me from The Man With Two Faces.
“It’s been hard for everyone, Tokol. We were working on a musical called The Goldwyn Follies when George began suffering from blinding headaches and hallucinations, which turned out to be a brain tumor. They operated at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, but it was hopeless.”
“A damned injustice. George was only thirty-eight. All that potential lost.”
“We sent his body back to New York to be buried at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson. Thirty-five-hundred people jammed into Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue for his funeral. But my brother’s finest tribute will be here tonight in Hollywood.”
“I’m not exactly sure how the essence of America is defined, Ira, but George pretty much captured it.”
“There are nations in Europe that would have flung out a Jew like him, Tokol, but he was welcomed in America, and he repaid it like a dutiful son.”
The Hollywood Bowl, carved into a concave hillside, was packed with an audience of twenty-six-thousand as Diana and I took our seats for the memorial concert, broadcast around the globe with Edward G. Robinson leading the eulogies. Otto Klemperer conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Al Jolson sang “Swanee,” Gladys Swarthout “The Man I Love,” Fred Astaire “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” Lily Pons “Summertime,” and Oscar Levant played the first movement of Gershwin’s Concerto in F. Not surprisingly, the performance ended with Rhapsody in Blue.
After the concert, the line of cars on Highland Avenue, which led from the Bowl, was so heavy, our limo was stuck for two hours, which gave me time to think not only the about American condition, but the Fascist-led revolution in Spain now in its second year, the mad ravings of Führer und Reichskanzler Adolph Hitler, Mussolini’s brutal conquest of Ethiopia, and Japan’s ruthless invasion of China. The disparate elements of the world were on a collision course.
Then I heard on the car radio the robust but calming voice of FDR cutting through the chaos as he called for an international quarantine against the epidemic of world lawlessness: “War is a contagion whether it be declared or undeclared.”
God knew there was enough lawlessness in Chicago.
We flew out of Burbank Airport with no issues, Diana at the controls, but somewhere over New Mexico we got into trouble. I was half-dozing when I was awakened by a loud thump and felt Hot Mama shake violently.
“We hit some birds, Tokee, but we’re okay. I think.”
One of the crate’s propellers began sputtering and came to a halt, except for the casual drifting of its blades.
“We lost an engine,” Diana said. “I’ll have to set her down. There’s a landing strip in San Ysidro.”
“Where’s San Ysidro?”
“Nowhere, so if we can’t reach it we’ll dump in the desert. Plenty of that around, although it’s pretty rugged. I’m radioing Albuquerque to let them know our position.”
No luck. The radio had power but remained mute, almost like an insult.
“I think the antenna was snapped off when the birds hit us,” she said.
Almost as bad, the compass was knocked off its pin, so it was hard getting a precise bearing on our location, especially with the sun directly above.
Then the remaining engine stalled.
“I’m going to put Hot Mama down, darling. Brace yourself.”
“Any last words?”
“I think I forgot to water my rubber tree plant before we left.”
The plane’s wreckage, with our bodies in it, might never be found in the desert remoteness. If we did survive, the wasteland and all its infamy might eat us, denuding further our sun-bleached bones, appreciated only by Gila monsters and scorpions.
Then the ground below Hot Mama began to spin wildly. Conceptually, I knew it wasn’t actually terra firma in a dizzying whirl but the plane itself, and I wanted to shout, Pull up! But somehow my tongue got to be too much of a mouthful. The noise borne of rushing wind replaced the whirr of the now dead engines, therefore even more terrifying.
Ever closer reeled a kaleidoscopic snarl of scorched bedrock, parched plateaus, ravines, gorges, and strange growths that might be rock, flora, or even human. And then, just before I blacked out, the sickening shudder and jolt of metal at odds with the earth.
I must have been thrown clear of Hot Mama in the crackup because when I came to, I felt my body crumpled into a ball on the baked desert clay.
“Diana?” I called out.
She was my first thought as I tried to sit up, blinded by the unrelenting sun. As the blur began to leave my eyes, I distinguished a human shape looming over me.
“Diana, is that you?”
The sinister figure leaned in, and I looked into the terrifying eyes of a war-painted ogre with fang-like teeth. I heard ritualized chanting, howls, and shrieks that amplified into a near-deafening roar.
Over it all came the savage scream, “You are on sacred land, white man, and for that and all else you have done you will die.”
Damn, as if things weren’t bad enough without being reminded of the evils my covetous forebears inflicted on the folks who had first dibs.
Through the contagion of indefinable shapes and unrelenting clamor, I saw that the fiend was holding what appeared to be a knife in either clawed hand. The fang-like face began to dissolve into another specter. Even before it came into full focus I recognized it. The Man With Two Faces. He was about to throw the knives at me that would pierce my body, channeling me to a hell even worse than the present one.
“But you’re dead, Janus, you’re dead!”
“Think so, Tokol?”
“Tokee, snap out of it.”
I was rallied by sharp slaps on my cheeks as the phantasmagoria evaporated. I never cared much for pain. Even the little bondage games Diana enjoyed mostly failed to amuse me—except the one in which she wore a feathery merkin and I a leather codpiece.
“Sit up, Tokee.” Diana’s voice.
As usual, I obeyed, although dizzy and weak. Diana always knew best.
“Are you okay, darling?”
“Um, I think so. Must be due to those monkey gland injections I had in Paris.”
“I was able to pull out of our dive and level off, but you bumped your head when we hard landed.”
The face of the savage who’d threatened me with annihilation looked down at me—only
he wasn’t a wild man, no fangs, no war paint. And unlike Janus he lacked two faces. He was smiling, wearing denim trousers with a turquoise belt buckle, boots, and a straw hat. Nor did he have a knife in each hand, but a rifle slung over his shoulder, which I learned later he carried to shoot rattlesnakes.
I had suffered another of my recurring nightmares about The Man With Two Faces, which seemed to get worse as each year passed by.
Diana said, “We’re on the Tamaya Indian Reservation, and this is Bobby Menchego who lives a few miles up the way. He’s fluent in Keresan, the original language of the Tamayan people.”
“Howdee, bub,” Bobby said. “Saw ya’ll go down. Good thing I come along in my old pickup. Road’s just over yonder. It’s dirt but it gets you there.”
“I must have hallucinated,” I said.
“Desert plays funny tricks sometimes. Say, ya’ll might have been stuck out here all night if I ain’t come along. Freeze your Eastern asses.”
“Bobby’s family is part of the Santa Ana Pueblo,” Diana said. “They’ve been working this land since the fifteen-hundreds—before the Spaniards.”
I said, “When we went down I was sure we weren’t going to make it.”
“Hot Mama’s a bit banged up, Tokee, but nothing that can’t be fixed. Bobby’s going to tow her in his pickup to Albuquerque. Find out what went wrong with those engines.”
Bobby said, “Ya’ll kin stay the night at my place, if you don’t mind four kids and five dogs runnin’ around like fools. For dinner, the wife’s makin’ spiced pork, wild sage bread, corn puddin’, baked pumpkin, and in the mornin’ blue corn flapjacks and ranch eggs.”
Bobby Menchego’s plain adobe was filled to the timbers with people and pets, including an argumentative chicken, Henrietta, who had the run of the place. The entire family joined in to sing medieval songs of lore strummed on an autoharp by Bobby’s wife Sally, such heirlooms as “When the Bloom is on the Sage,” “Cool Water,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and “It Looks Like Rain in Cherry Blossom Lane.”
At chess, Bobby may not have been a Capablanca, but he beat me three out of four games, the fourth being a draw. Sally insisted Diana and I sleep in their bed, while they camped on the floor. The Menchego homestead was noisier than Hollywood’s pretentious Chateau Marmont, but a lot more fun and way less expensive.