Tales of the Bagman

by B C Bell

  Mac slammed the brake and spun the car around a-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Uncle Ray clutchsed the door, bouncing around the interior.

  “Better crazy than dead, Uncle Ray.”

  Uncle Ray agreed, more frightened of Mac’s driving than Aunt Trudy. Mac gave Ray Tony’s gun and told him he’d be back within twenty-four hours.

  Chapter II

  The Hellfighter

  In an alley just off the train tracks near Addison and Lincoln, hidden behind a hot dog stand and the rail yard, a high wooden fence barricaded the perimeter of a junk strewn, dusty lot. In stark contrast, an exquisitely detailed sign stood above the gated entrance—“Crankshaft’s Car Repair and Sales.” But what made the sign stand out wasn’t the quality of the block calligraphic lettering, it was the two-foot illustration above it. The silhouette of a soldier, a WWI doughboy with bayonet fixed and charging over a ribbon that read “369th Infantry Division.” It was the insignia of The Harlem Hellfighters. In the War to End All Wars the 369th had spent more time in continuous combat than any other American regiment on the western front. Stunned by their fighting ability, the Germans had nicknamed the division The Hellfighters.

  As soon as Mac pulled the car through the gate, it was immediately out of place. Most of the other cars on the lot were either used and for sale or in pieces. The garage itself was little more than a sheet metal shack. Mac pulled up inside. A black man in his forties, graying at the temples, pulled his head up from an engine block.

  “Hey, buddy, you can’t park there— Mac?”

  “How you doing, Crank?”

  “OK, listen. You can’t park there—I don’t care what you’re driving. I have a Packard I have to get out by five, and unless you want to trade me that Blue Streak for everything else on the lot, I can’t keep it here.”

  “Actually, that’s probably not a bad idea,” Mac said.

  At first, Crankshaft thought he might be interested—until Mac told him everything that had happened. Then Crankshaft closed the garage, and they went over to Barney’s Grill across the street. The sign out front had once read “Barney’s Bar and Grill,” but somebody had splattered wood stain over the two middle words. Now it read “Barney’s” with the word “Grill” over on the far side of the sign. Prohibition was still in effect, but once you went past the counter and the bouncer who worked as a cook, up the back stairs and down a long hall, you were in a tavern. Barney’s had been there so long nobody knew who Barney was anymore. But it was dark, out of the way, and a much better place to have a discussion than a car lot in the middle of a heat wave.

  Mac took a seat in a makeshift booth by a window where he couldn’t have raised the window shade even if he had wanted to.

  “What happened to ‘I’ve got a Packard I have to get out by five?’” he asked, pushing his hat back on his head.

  “Customer can wait.” Crankshaft reached across the table and forced Mac’s hat back down. “Have you gone crazy? You pull the brim of that hat down… And hide your face! You beat up one of Slots’s guys and stole a car?”

  “I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, Crank. How much you think you can get me for the car?”

  “Can’t think of anybody I hate enough to unload it on. Might get you a few hundred for the parts.”

  “I need twelve hundred.”

  “Give me about a month to supe it up, you might get it. BUT THE CAR BELONGS TO—” He was yelling, and brought it down to a whisper, “—Slots Lurie. Are you crazy?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.” Mac rubbed the back of his neck. “I need a place to stay until I can figure this out, come up with something. Can you help me out?”

  ***

  The next day at three o’clock the bell hanging over the door at Stephano’s Corner Grocery jingled as Mac entered and went to the counter. Mr. Stephano was wringing his handlebar mustache with one hand and writing something down next to the cash register with the other. He looked up with a scowl and then almost smiled as he saw Mac.

  “You’re back. I thought you were moving onward and upward, on to better things,” the shopkeeper said.

  “Aw, better things turned out to be a lot worse.”

  “In your business I’m not surprised.” Mr. Stephano handed him a small paper bag full of cash—the week’s payment for Lurie. “You’re early, too. Trying to make an impression on the boss?”

  “Exactly. Still planning on bigger and better things.”

  “Y’know, nice kid like you, I just don’t see you doing this kind of thing for a living. Somebody your size, your smarts, you oughtta be your own boss. Not in the rackets, somethin’ square… Aaah, listen to me, giving career advice to a bagman—” he said waving a hand in the air. Then he stopped and winked. “—I mean, a courier. You do what you have to do, mac.”

  Even though Mr. Stephano used the slang term “mac”—the way somebody might call a stranger on the street “bud” or “doc”—Mac made sure the old man thought he was somebody else.

  “Thanks, Mr. Stephano, I will. Oh, and it’s not Mac. It’s Anthony.”

  “Anthony…” Mr. Stephano said to himself, as if he were testing the way it sounded. The bell hanging on the door rang again, and Mac was gone. “Anthony,” Stephano said to the empty store, and nodded as if he approved.

  The weather was cooler than yesterday, and Mac began to enjoy his little stroll around the old neighborhood, taking his time. He even stopped at a gag shop halfway through to paste on a fake, pencil-thin mustache. At a cigar store he bought a cheroot and sat with the owner, listening to the Cubs game on the radio. Lon Warneke pitched a shutout, and the Cubs finally beat St. Louis.

  By five o’clock another warm front had blown in, but he’d already collected a fourth of the protection money on his old route—Southport, from Irving to Addison. He had also reminded every shop owner that his name was Anthony. It had been fun, but as he made his way into the evening he began to get nervous, glancing over his shoulder, expecting whoever was working his old route to be coming up right behind him.

  Walking back to the car he’d borrowed from Crankshaft, he saw a couple of Lurie’s men and ducked into The Music Box Theater, pretending to see King Kong again. He didn’t stay for the ending. He knew the big ape got machine gunned to death.

  Later, Mac drove over to Aunt Trudy’s and gave the money to Uncle Ray, telling him to make sure and give it back to the man he’d borrowed it from—not Slots or his other men, because that would’ve been too dangerous. He gave him an extra hundred in case there was any trouble.

  By seven o’clock he was pulling in Crankshaft’s gate to return the car. They went back over to Barney’s and had a beer.

  Mac lay back against the window in the same booth they’d been in yesterday, his hat hanging over his face like he was napping. Crankshaft brought the draft over.

  “I’m not so sure they like serving a black man around here, Mac.”

  “Did you tip ‘em?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dive like this, you’re with me, you tipped ‘em, they love you,” Mac rattled off.

  “Yeah, well, I saw in the paper today almost a fourth of the country’s out of work, and sooner or later they may want to find somebody to blame.”

  “Human nature, I suppose… Tell you what, next time you can pick out the place. I’ll buy. Go listen to some of that blues music even.”

  “Speaking of blues,” Crankshaft said, “what do you think Slots is going to do those shop owners you took his protection money from?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Slots is meaner than an Irishman at an English breakfast. He’s liable to take it out on them.”

  Mac put down his glass and wiped the foam off his mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, he’s not going to
let it go. He’s going to want his money, and he’s not going to care how he gets it.”

  Mac slapped himself in the head with the heel of his palm. “Oh my God, Crank. I didn’t even think about it. The shopkeepers…”

  “You really don’t plan this stuff out, do you?”

  Mac gulped his beer and bolted for the door.

  The first thing he did was stop in a drug store and call Stephano’s Grocery. The fan in the phone booth ceiling was broken, but he had to close the door just to fit inside the thing. He didn’t notice how hot and uncomfortable it was until he got Mr. Stephano on the line and didn’t know what to say. He asked the old man if he was all right.

  It was obvious Stephano was scared. He played stupid. When Mac asked about protection money, Stephano kept playing. He had to; he didn’t know who was on the other end of the line. Mac kept picturing him in a sling or staring at a bullet hole behind the cash register.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Stephano. I’m going to help.”

  “Who is this? What do you want?” Stephano said.

  Mac hung up the receiver without revealing who he was and accidentally derailed the phone booth door in an effort to escape from the hot box. The air outside was just as stale.

  Back at Crankshaft’s he paced in circles, sweating and talking to himself. Even with the bay doors open the heat was oppressive. Crankshaft sat in the shadows straddling a dented metal desk chair with his hands hanging over the back, watching. He pulled a bottle of bourbon out of the desk in the corner and poured Mac a shot to calm him down.

  “No thanks, Crank. I gotta be able to think.”

  “Isn’t that what started this to begin with?”

  “No, that wasn’t ‘thinking,’ it was ‘not thinking.’”

  “So it was not thinking twice.”

  “No, it was—you know what I mean. But now I’m thinking. Just, not quite organized yet, the plan’s all jumbled up in my head. Just give me a little time. Just a second… Something’s gonna just jump out.”

  Crankshaft drank the shot and went back to tinkering with a carburetor on his desk.

  Mac kept pacing and talking to himself. After about ten minutes he sat down on Crankshaft’s desk and picked up one of the mechanic’s old war trophies: a rusty hand grenade. Crankshaft used it for a paperweight.

  “Hey, Crank, why’d you keep this thing?” Mac said, tossing it from one hand to the other.

  “Because it almost killed me, you fool!” Crank grabbed the grenade out of the air. “It’s a reminder to do the right thing because life’s too short. You may never get another chance.”

  “Weird. Why didn’t you just hang your medal up?”

  “Because I don’t want anybody stealing it. Fifteen-year-old grenade is one thing, Croix de Guerre’s another.”

  “Yeah, but you should at least keep it out on display. You don’t just lock that kind of thing away in a safe.” Mac stopped in his tracks and snapped his fingers. “King Kong!”

  “King Kong?” Crankshaft sat the old grenade back down on a pile of papers. “The big dumb ape?”

  “Yeah. How do they stop ‘the big dumb ape’ at the end of the movie?”

  “Haven’t seen it. Army Air Corp’s on the poster though.”

  “That’s right! Airplanes nail the big dumb ape at the top!”

  “Thanks a lot, Mac. Really, I’d hate to have to sit through the whole picture, you know, all that suspense and everything.”

  “Oh—the ending. Sorry about that, Crank. Look, I gotta go. I’ll let you know how it works out.”

  Crankshaft watched him walk toward the gate and wondered if Mac was as big a dumb ape as he pretended to be.

  Chapter III

  Jawbreaker

  Slots Lurie ran all of his operations out of a speakeasy on the bottom floor of a three-story brownstone in the meatpacking district. Even before prohibition, The Lincoln Taproom had held a reputation for rough and tumble trade. Located off the main thoroughfares, between two refrigeration houses, the bar’s regulars were a rowdy collection of dockworkers, butchers and truck drivers. Now, newly rechristened “The Lincoln Men’s Club,” the only differences were a membership fee and an even tougher customer base.

  The membership fees paid off the cops, and the toughest customers worked for Slots.

  No matter what you called it, the club was headquarters for every major, organized, illegal operation on the North Side. Hijacking, prostitution, protection, gambling, you name it. Before the money went to the big boys in The Loop, it went uptown to Slots.

  Mac had been mostly muscle for the mob, but he’d gotten in through his connections as a burglar—and he’d taken pride in his work—he was still the best second story man on the north side. Regardless of what he did, he always remembered what his dad had told him: “Never stop learning. Because when you stop growing, you might as well be dead.”

  After Mac’s father died he began to realize how right the man was. He watched the older kids in the neighborhood grow up and continue to play cops and robbers for the rest of their lives without ever learning anything. So while he was growing up, he approached things a little differently. When he had played baseball, he studied coaching. When he had worked construction, he studied engineering. And when he’d had to resort to crime for a living, he studied being a thief. Sure he’d been a hired mug, but whenever anybody came in with a payoff or a good story, he asked questions. What’s the best way to break into a house? The best way to tail somebody without them knowing it?

  How do you crack a safe?

  Nobody was supposed to know about the drop safe in the second floor office of The Lincoln Tap—but Slots and Tony had gone upstairs with some girls one night and left Mac in the office alone cooling his heels. Mac had gotten bored. And then he got curious.

  People came into The Tap with money all the time. Big Money. Where did it go? Sure, it probably went to Frank Nitti’s boys over at the Drake Hotel, eventually. But they had to stash it somewhere at The Tap first, right?

  Mac had been sitting in Slots’s chair when he stood up behind the desk to grab a cigar and noticed the floor under the rug seemed to have a little give to it. The drop safe under the floorboards had the take.

  Mac didn’t know when the payoff moved, but estimated that at any given time there was about $10,000 there. Ten grand. A lot of money in 1933. Enough to buy two houses. Enough to put Slots out of business.

  The layout was simple enough. Bar on the first floor. Office and meeting room on the second. Working girls on the third.

  The bar closed at four AM and didn’t open again until seven, when the meatpackers on late shift clocked out. Between four and seven a janitor came in and pretended to clean up the joint. The janitor would be the only man downstairs. The janitor was Jimmy “The Jaw” Pirelli.

  Jimmy was a local golden gloves boxer who’d been transformed into a heavyweight sensation almost overnight. Nicknamed “The Jaw” because nobody had ever knocked him out, Pirelli was one of those boxers referred to in the business as an iron man. Unfortunately, after spending two years as a punching bag, his iron man status left him so punch drunk he’d been forced to start taking dives for the mob, and the boxing commission banned him for life. These days it took most of his mental effort to brush a broom.

  Mac’s plan was to crack the safe in the second floor office of The Lincoln Men’s Club. Frank Nitti’s boys in The Loop would be more than a little upset at having their blood money stolen, but they wouldn’t take it out on the victims of a protection racket. They’d take it out on Slots.

  Slots Lurie would be out of a job. Out of town on a rail. Out of sight and out of mind.

  ***

  The first rule of burglary is: Plan ahead so you don’t have to improvise. The second rule: Improvise.

  At four AM, Mac sat crouched
in the alley behind The Lincoln Tap. His dark suit played breaking and entering games with the shadows as he pulled his hat down trying to fuse with the gloom. He’d picked the lock only to find the door barred from the inside. He could hear Jimmy the Jaw throwing bottles in the garbage and scooting the furniture around. Mac would give him till five o’clock to take the garbage out and then try to sneak in behind him. Not the brightest of plans, but Jimmy wasn’t exactly the brightest of guys.

  Mac glanced down at his crepe-soled shoes. Gumshoes. They were quiet and built to last, but he wished somebody would design something a little more comfortable. Something with a thin, rubber sole, maybe. Canvas instead of leather, so they wouldn’t squeak. A shoe for sneaking around in.

  He reconsidered when he noticed a rat gnawing at his heel. He grabbed it by reflex, and almost screamed when he looked it in the face. Instead of screaming back at him, it snarled—or growled—or whatever it is rats do. He was flinging it around in the air, holding it as far away as possible, still trying to figure out what to do with it, when the rear exit swung open.

  Mac crouched down behind the door where he couldn’t be seen and, for some reason, held the rat facing him. He touched his index finger to his lips, shushing the little pest. The rat looked up at Mac and suddenly shut up.

  He held it down and away from him as Jimmy the Jaw dragged two garbage cans out the door, headed for the back of the alley. Mac ran inside with the rat in his hand and threw it into the barroom on his way upstairs to the office. He picked the office lock and locked the door behind him in less than two minutes. Then he pushed the desk chair back and really went to work.

  The safe was a Mosler combination lock, one of the best, but Mac didn’t know enough about safecracking to worry about it. He pulled a stethoscope out from under his tie and listened to the tumblers click. After two turns to the left, he massaged it back to the right. Click again.