Brian sat down, filled with an icy sense of wonder at his self-control.
“All right. Now, well, you’re not the one she left with,” Crowley said shrewdly. “She left with Tom Fairley’s lad.” He stared somewhere between Brian’s lips and throat, as though to seek out the truth from the very source of his voice. Crowley hunched forward and seemed even more lopsided. “All right. You’re no college boy.” A quick tilt of his head dismissed Brian’s clothes in no uncertain terms. “I don’t want any shit from you; you answer my questions.” The eyes met Brian’s with a cold, calculating, knowing gaze. “Who are you? What do you do? And where the hell did you meet her?”
Brian ran his tongue along the inside of his lower teeth and took measure; the old son of a bitch, trying to bullshit him like he was a scared seventeen-year-old kid. He smiled, leaned forward and said very softly, “I’m Brian O’Malley. I’m a pimp. And I picked her up at a school dance.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder for casual emphasis, then shrugged. “She might have the makings, but I’m not sure yet.”
The blue eyes congealed. The thin lips pulled downward and froze. The long-fingered clawlike hand released the stick and rubbed ferociously at the blade-thin sharp nose, then clutched again at the knob of the stick, which balanced between his high knees. His lips split apart in the sudden, irrevocable way the edges of a terrible wound split, but instead of flesh and blood, long, white, unexpectedly dazzling teeth were revealed.
Crowley’s strange body was overwhelmed by spasmodic motion over which he seemed to have no control. His feet stamped alternately, causing the high knees to rise and fall in an almost galloping pace. The palms of his hands slapped first at the arms of the dark chair, then at the accelerating knees.
Crowley’s face, long and fleshless as a skull, went from dead white to bright pink, then darkened to an alarming shade of purplish blue. Strange gagging, sputtering sound struggled deep inside his scrawny neck, as though he was trying to bring up a bone.
Brian, at first stunned and then appalled by the fantastic contortions, thought the old man was either having some kind of attack or had gone completely mad. The worst part of it was that it was his fault. He should have just kept his mouth shut and left. Now it was too late.
My God, Brian thought, what’ll I do if this old nut strangles himself or something?
He leaned over the jerking body but couldn’t think of a single thing to do except place his hand on a bony shoulder and ask with some alarm, “Hey, Mr. Crowley, are you okay? Can I do anything for you?”
Crowley gasped and wheezed and indicated with a series of head movements that Brian should lean dose to his mouth to receive a message which could not travel very far from his lips.
Incredibly, Patrick Crowley, in a hacking, strangulating sound, whispered into Brian O’Malley’s unbelieving ear, “You bastard, you bastard, I like you, you little son of a bitch! You’re the first little bastard with any guts!”
TWENTY-SIX
WHEN PATRICK JOSEPH CROWLEY arrived as an immigrant from Knockraha, a tiny hamlet just twelve miles from Cork, he was thirty-seven years old and had just buried his widowed mother. He left behind eight brothers and five sisters and too many nephews and nieces to bother counting.
He brought with him a sense of unaccustomed freedom. All prearrangements were canceled. As the oldest son, the scrap of poor land which had become his wasn’t worth a damn, never had been, never would be. After the ordeal of watching the old woman through her hard and lingering death, some unknown claim asserted itself within him: he was tired of his hard and lingering life.
For the price of his ticket to New York and a few odd dollars to get started on, Patrick sold his birthright to the brother born ten months after himself, and good luck to him.
The streets of New York, which had filled lesser men than Patrick Joseph Crowley with terror, had an altogether different effect on the tall, leathery, hard-bitten countryman. He walked the island of Manhattan from east to west across its salty tip and breathed in the tarry smell of the waterfront and found the strangeness tantalizing. He walked into the commerce center of the island and the excitement of the frantic streets pounded in him with the intensity of a powerful heart. He paced the city as though he were a great absentee landlord come home at last to examine his possessions. It was a dirty, filthy, knot-hard fist of a place and it was the home for which, unknowingly, he had always yearned. Skeletons of new buildings rose everywhere out of the rubble of dying wooden structures. The monstrous city reeked with potential and Crowley wanted not just aroma but taste.
Of a frugal nature, even in the heart of enforced frugality, he gathered his pennies and nickels and dimes as carefully as he could from an assortment of odd jobs which did not pay more than pennies and nickels and dimes, but Crowley, patient and experienced with life, sought not miracles but opportunity.
He sought solace from the waves of loneliness that assaulted him like a fever in the familiarity of the saloon, where he could hear the range of Irish voices and words and thoughts, from poet to fool to planner and plotter and thief. He watched carefully and listened closely as he nursed his one large glass of beer each evening.
There were those who had come too soon, young boys with empty bellies and dreams too grand to even touch along the edges of reality. They were the ones who drank too much, too fast. He watched them on a Saturday night, fingers caked with factory grease and oil or muscles knotted and aching from the docks. They dug into the little brown pay envelopes and called for whiskey. By Tuesday night, they’d plead for a short beer and pledge future wages against the favor.
There were some sturdy lads who had had some connections to guide and direct them into the various organizations of government: the great city departments, where the boys all wore blue and sounded like home. Well, Crowley was too old for any of that and had a slight stiffness to his right leg besides. He’d had a childhood accident and some nerves had been severed and the thing never moved right but it didn’t bother him too much.
There was another group at the saloon that Pat Crowley observed and it was toward this group he was drawn. They were older men, in their late forties or fifties. They seemed a thoughtful group and a sober group. Most important of all, they seemed a successful group. The owner himself, Hardigan, touched his brow in deference to them, and Shanley, the hired bartender, served them immediately that they appeared.
Crowley did not go unnoticed either. He was marked as a quiet and watchful man and as something of a mystery. No one knew exactly what it was he wanted for he never complained or boasted and complaints and boasts were what filled the smoky air of every saloon along Tenth Avenue from the lower 20’s to the lower 40’s, along with the singing of sad or merry songs. After a time, the noisemakers and bellyachers dismissed Crowley as not worth the bother to wonder over.
The well-dressed important group, who kept to themselves in a neat rear room and were served fresh trays of free lunch directly from the kitchen, thought that Crowley might one day be useful to them, and though they seemed to ignore him, they had marked him.
It turned out that Patrick J. Crowley was useful, although it also turned out that he was more than his benefactors had bargained for.
Among the habitués of Hardigan’s rear room was a certain Michael Fleming, who was a councilman, re-elected every time he ran for the simple fact that he had no opposition. One of Michael Fleming’s proudest claims was that as an elected representative of the people he regularly kept promises made to them. One of Fleming’s most frequent promises was that the sidewalks and streets of the City of New York would be kept paved and free of holes as long as he had anything to say about it. He had a good deal to say about it, since he made it his business to be actively involved in knowing what streets to rip up and put down again.
Each time a major repavement job came along, sealed bids were submitted by contractors eager for the job. The lowest bidder, of course, would receive the contract. Technically.
Actually, th
e contractor who submitted the lowest bid would be visited by someone with some useful advice to offer. The useful advice was that it would be wise for all concerned to subcontract the job to the firm of Savacco and Walsh. Otherwise, it was highly likely that a great number of violations of the building code would be found in the manner in which the job was done. It was also possible that the men hired to do the job would find the working conditions and the pay not at all to their liking. It might even come about that between labor problems and violations, the firm might fall upon difficult days and might even fail to survive.
On the other hand, if the job was subcontracted to the firm of Savacco and Walsh, why, for their cooperation and decent good sense, it would be seen to that some really choice jobs would be thrown their way, in addition to a fee of about 10 per cent of whatever amount over the estimated bid the job actually ran.
Savacco and Walsh, the subcontractors, generally ran at least 50 per cent over the estimate given by the original contractor, whose firm’s name remained on the contracts. On a few grand occasions, they ran nearly 200 per cent over the estimate.
The firm name of Savacco and Walsh never appeared anywhere in connection with city business.
Savacco was a senile cripple without wife or child. He had been paid a generous fee for the use of his signature when the partnership was formed. His signature was no longer necessary since he had long ago given power of attorney to his partner, George Walsh.
George Walsh was the name Michael Fleming used in his dealings as a subcontractor.
Out of nowhere, or so it seemed to Michael Fleming and his colleagues in city government, came a snot-nosed young greaseball of an assistant district attorney who thought to make his name a household word in time for election in the fall, though God knew what the poor bastard hoped to run for. There were long lines of faithful party servants ahead of him and turning on his party was hardly the way to make himself popular, but that was the thing he tried to do.
His name was Anthony Tulisi, and when Mike Fleming sent for him, he cautioned the boys not to call him a greaseball or wop to his face, since the lad had an education and seemed sensitive.
The meeting was held in Fleming’s office at City Hall. Tulisi, beneath his dark complexion, was pale with indignation and glowed with the light of youthful righteousness.
He told all assembled that a change was coming and that they were through. They were all a bunch of robbers and thieves. He, Anthony Tulisi, was going to expose them all before the grand jury and the people of the City of New York. Honesty was going to come into style. The crooks were going to jail.
They kept him talking. He was young and emotional enough to let slip the fact that his case against them rested on the evidence of some jackass of a bookkeeper whose hobby, it seemed, was minding other people’s business. The bookkeeper worked for the city’s Department of Finance, and instead of thanking God he had a steady job, he took it upon himself to worry about how much money was spent over and above the low-contract bid on various jobs. He got himself curious enough to start keeping a regular little record, and finally he brought his little record book to Anthony Tulisi, who happened to be his cousin.
Between them, they seemed to think they were about to rise, in a few spectacular years, from the sons of street fruit peddlers to rulers of the City of New York.
Not by a long shot.
The difficulty was, as Michael Fleming explained to his cohorts, that “family” was involved. If the little bastard bookkeeper wasn’t related to the young assistant district attorney, it might be easy enough to just get rid of him and his records, but blood made things tougher. Those Italians were like jungle tribes where it came to family and were known for murdering the children of their enemies for four or five generations when they had one of their feuds going strong. That was the kind of situation to be avoided.
One of Fleming’s colleagues, a gifted thinker named Tommy Doolan, said that since family was so all-important, it was through family that the solution was to be found, just given enough thought. He was right, as he generally was.
Several trustworthy people, some professional at the job since they were members of the Police Department, some not professional and valuable for that very reason, did a careful, thorough, 100 per cent complete investigation of the family of Anthony Tulisi and his cousin, Joseph.
Joseph Tulisi, the bookkeeper, had a seventy-two-year-old father who liked little girls. Very little girls, four or five or six years old.
What he liked to do was to touch them on the knee or on the thigh. What he liked best was to duck his hand under a little girl’s dress for a quick grab. Then he’d give the little girl a penny or a piece of fruit and a pat on the head.
Since there was nothing better, and since Michael Fleming and Tommy Doolan both thought it was pretty good, they decided to go with what they had. What they now needed was an impartial witness, someone with no connections or ties with Michael Fleming or anyone else in the city government. Someone who was without malice or reason to bring about catastrophe upon the head of the Tulisi family through discovery of the fact that seventy-two-year-old Louis liked little girls.
That was where Patrick Joseph Crowley came in. He met all the prerequisites of the job. It was learned that he was from Knockraha, and as fate would have it, Tommy Doolan himself was from Dungourney, not fifteen miles east of Crowley’s home in the County of Cork After some hard and amazing concentration, for which he was famous, Doolan remembered that he had a cousin married to a Crowley girl and from all accounts there was nothing bad known of the Crowleys of Knockraha.
It was Tommy Doolan himself struck up a conversation with Crowley, liked the way the man darted and squinted his eyes when spoken to; it showed a sharp sense of caution. Crowley seemed to be his own man. No one had anything to say about him, not one way or another.
Doolan put the deal to him directly. A sober honest man was needed to do a job of observation for four dollars a day, and when a certain dirty old Italian man committed a certain dirty act, of which there was no question he would sooner or later, and likely sooner, why the honest man was merely to call the matter to the attention of a policeman and go before the magistrate.
Mike Fleming agreed with Tommy Doolan that Crowley was a good choice. A younger man in the same situation might be maddened by the old degenerate’s action and crack his skull on the sidewalk. Certainly, no one wanted a dead Louis Tulisi. What was wanted was a live Louis Tulisi caught with his hand up a little girl’s dress by an outraged stranger.
It went better than they could have hoped. On the second day that Patrick Crowley strolled through the Mulberry Street commotion of Little Italy, idly avoiding crashing into any of the hundreds of pushcarts that lined both sides of the street, he knelt at one point to tie his shoe. In this position, he had a clear view through the spokes of the high-wheeled cart of the shaved-ice peddler. What he saw was the gnarled old hand of Louis Tulisi creep beneath the dress of a little girl who stood on her toes, straining anxiously toward the ice peddler with her penny held high. The child didn’t even notice Louis Tulisi next to her.
Patrick Crowley stood up, shot around the wagon and with a tremendous roar he pointed an accusing finger at the culprit. The old man froze in his position of guilt just long enough to be seen by the crowd. Then he collapsed on the sidewalk in trembling terror. People screamed and shrieked, and though their language was incomprehensible, their intention was clear. Crowley protected the frail body from flying fists and pinching fingers and relinquished him only to the arms of a blue-clad policeman.
At the police station, Louis Tulisi pleaded and begged and, above all, he confessed. Before many witnesses and without even being asked, the old man berated himself and cursed himself for his terrible fault and knocked his fists against his forehead, but without enough strength to knock himself out.
The police sergeant leaned down imperially from his high position behind the desk and told Patrick Crowley, “You needn’t stay here now.
You’ve seen the old bastard into the station and we’ll take it from here.”
“No, I’ll just stay on a while,” Crowley said.
The sergeant’s harsh voice might have intimidated another man as he asked, “Oh, you will, will ya? And just who the hell do you think you are?”
Patrick Crowley folded his arms across his chest, each elbow resting in a large palm, country-fashion. “If you just call Tommy Doolan, you might find out,” he said.
A different voice came from the sergeant “Oh, yes, well then, yes, that’s different, of course.”
There was a deference, a respect, an eagerness to please which had never before been directed to Patrick Crowley. He knew that he had used the name of Doolan to test its power. He had known Doolan was an important man, but didn’t know exactly where he fitted into the scheme of things. With a shrewd instinct, Crowley knew he’d been used for more than the capturing of an old man with bad habits.
He hung around the police station and watched the commotion and clamor. There were arrivals and departures of all kinds of people in all stages of excitement and concern. No one questioned him; he was Doolan’s man. But Crowley asked a few questions and all concerned were very cooperative. After all, it was assumed that he knew all there was to know already.
What he had no way of knowing was that the bookkeeper, Joseph Tulisi, frantically traded his record book for his father.
But not before his cousin, Anthony Tulisi, was confronted in court with his errant old Uncle Louis. He was struck dumb and could not bring himself to utter a word on behalf of the People of the State of New York relative to the arraignment of the old culprit.
It was officially noted that the young assistant district attorney was temperamentally unsuited to see to the administration of justice without fear, favor or partiality.
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