I had the place done up in what they were soon calling Art Deco style, everything black and white except my big wooden desk, and everything—and I do mean everything—sleek and stylish, much like my own good self. Some joker’d cracked open King Tut’s tomb a coupla years before, and so Egyptian jazz was everywhere, but I liked it anyway.
I was sitting alone when the buzzer under my desk sounded and I hit the intercom.
“Officer wishes to speak with you,” said Frenchy’s disembodied voice.
“Ask him if wants to buy a carton of cereal.”
“Says he knows you.”
“All the cops know me.”
There was a brief pause and then Frenchy came back on the wire. “Says he knows you from the old days. Says he’s a friend. Says he don’t want no trouble. Says—”
“Shut up and send him in.”
I took a .45 out of my top desk drawer and slipped it in my suit coat pocket. I liked cops as much as the next guy, but there was no sense in taking chances.
A rap at the door announced his arrival: two short, one long.
“It’s open.”
The door swung wide and the first thing I saw was Frenchy’s bulk, occupyin’ most of the doorway.
The second thing I saw was my old friend Branagan.
Time hadn’t been particularly kind to him, but then time is never particularly kind to anybody. Time just goes about its business, heedless of human entreaty, artifice or subterfuge, and then kills us dead whenever it gets the urge. The City of New York, on the other hand, was treatin’ him swell—Branagan was sporting captain’s insignia.
“I thought you was done with patrollin’,” I said by way of greeting. “Cashiered, as it were.”
“Things change,” says he.
“It’s okay, George,” I told Frenchy, who withdrew.
Branagan plopped himself in the chair opposite. His hair had turned gray, and he’d lost, rather than gained, weight, but he’d turned in his roundsman’s tunic for an officer’s raiment.
“Nice uniform. No hard feelings?”
“Thought we could do some business,” says he.
“You never did stand on ceremony.”
“Why bother when there’s dough to be made?”
He had a point there. “How much?” I didn’t like Branagan, but I did admire a man who got right down to business and didn’t let bygones get in the way of the present.
“Depends on what the information’s worth to you.”
I offered him a drink, which he accepted. “Why you doin’ me favors?”
“Times change.”
“Meaning I got money now.”
“And I still got the Law.”
“Makes us even, then.”
“Are you gonna listen or are you gonna yap?”
Over the course of the next half hour or so, Branagan laid out past, present and future. What had happened to him in the aftermath of Monk’s apparition. Suspended. Travelin’ a bit out West—he got as far as the Great Salt Lake and the country of the saints. Homesickness. Letters here and there. Reinstatement—the Tiger taking care of its own. Risin’ through the ranks in precincts near and Brooklyn while I’m on ice. And here we are, nearly twenty years on, face-to-face once more.
“Another drink?”
“Well—I am on duty,” said Branagan, reaching across the desk for the glass, “so maybe just this one more.”
“Drop by the El Fey tomorrow and the rest of ’em’ll be, on the house.”
“Count on it.”
I lit up a cigarette. The first hit of smoke always seared the hell out of my lungs, but the pain wasn’t bad once you got used to it. “What do I get in return for my hospitality?”
Branagan glanced around the room like Commissioner Enright himself was lurking in the shadows. “You’re gonna get hit.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
“Mooks?”
“Feds.”
“Why?”
“Make an example of you.”
This was not good news. Ordinarily there’d be no problem. But a big shipment of beer was being loaded onto my Pierce-Arrows and it needed to get where it was going.
“Make ’em disappear.”
“They got authority.”
“Look at this.” I pointed out the window. Up and down Tenth, the entire block between 25th and 26th was jammed with idling trucks, each waiting to snake around to the loading dock and take on its supply. “I got authority. You got authority.”
Branagan was trying hard to follow.
“Where them feds gonna park?” Tasked him, and answered. “No place legal, that’s where. You know how they hate to flash a badge until the last second? They’re gonna drive right up and double-park and come charging in here like they own the joint. But you ain’t gonna let ’em.”
I could see the glimmer in his eyes. But not only did I see understanding about this evening’s drill, I saw a dope havin’ a glimmer at the future, and liking what he saw. That was where we were going to beg to differ. “Capeesh?”
No one could capeesh like an Irishman. I watched the whole thing. As soon as the first of the feds’ crummy Fords pulled up and sure enough double-parked, they were harassed on the spot by traffic patrol. Since they didn’t want to blow their cover, they pulled away, to look for a legal spot, but I’d made sure the boys had taken every available spot for blocks in every direction, so about fifteen minutes later back they come, and this time they double-parked and the hell with the cops.
No sooner were they out of their cars, though, when another group of patrolmen descended on them, demanding identification, which the feds of course refused to provide. The cops threatened ’em with arrest for vagrancy. Voices were raised, then fists. Meanwhile, a couple of wreckers arrived and started towin’ the feds’ cars. One by one they went galumphing down the street, bouncing like bar drunks, with the feds in their suits standing on the street scratching their bums in wonder at the cheek of it all.
Eventually they managed to impound some of my empty trucks—for about five minutes—until Shalleck hustled into court and pointed out to a sympathetic jurist that the feds didn’t have a leg to stand on, that just because they mighta smelled beer brewin’ doesn’t mean there necessarily was beer brewing, and even if it was, it could have been near beer, which after all was not only legal but kosher, or maybe not kosher but still legal, and anyway who cared because of the separation of church and state, or even shul and state, and of course the judge, a fine man name of Aaron Levy, agreed, and I got my trucks back, Joe got his fee, Branagan got a month of free drinks and the feds got egg on their face.
Which didn’t keep them from trying again of course. Pretty much the same thing happened every time they came back, so that after a while they completely stopped speaking to the New York City Police Department, which so angered our splendid mayor, Jimmy Walker, that he told them they weren’t welcome in the great City of New York if that’s the kind of attitude they had, and we all thought and hoped a war would break out between the cops and the feds, but it never quite did and more’s the pity. I had to give them credit for stick-to-itiveness, but as the poet said, it’s the hobgoblin of small minds.
Made them plenty mad, though. I guess I was riding too high to fully appreciate it at the time, but when the feds get mad at you, they stay mad for a long, long time.
As for myself, I had one bit of unfinished business with the feds—namely, a mug by the name of Jerry Bohan, the man who shot Monk Eastman—so at the end of all the rigmarole on Tenth Avenue I slipped over to the Lower East Side, asked a few questions, moseyed downtown a bit, tucked around a corner or two and in short order found Bohan sitting on a barstool in a sad-sack joint called the Blue Bird, run by a fella name of Brosnahan, who I just happened to be after knowin’.
Chapter Forty
The irony of the fact that I was walking through the doors of what had once upon a time been the New Irving was probably not lost on me, although I didn’t
stop to think about it. Monk’s old place, the scene of much honest mayhem in the good old days, and here I was, big as life, for this day only, the great man himself, reincarnated. And if it was Easter Sunday to boot, well, that was simply poetic justice.
Bohan wasn’t much to look at, but then assassins are usually not a patch on the great men they dispatch. It went without saying that everybody in the joint knew who I was except for Bohan himself, which was to be expected, because a federal in my experience was about the dumbest form of life there was, except for a Republican.
“Whaddya know, whaddya say?” says I, sitting down at the stool next to him.
“What’s it to you?” He was at least three drinks ahead of me, and already belligerent.
“A beer,” I said to the barkeep. “Madden’s No. 1.”
“Swill,” said Bohan.
“Name your poison,” says I, taking a draught. Even though I didn’t drink anymore, it was mighty good. “What’s yours, friend?”
“What’s it to you?” he snarled.
I picked up the bottle and looked at the label. There was my name, big as life, emblazoned across the bottle’s belly, right in front of an artist’s rendering of the Phoenix Brewery its own good self, all red brick and smokestacks, old Tenth Avenue come to life.
“You know what the papers said about Monk when he came back from France, Jerry?” He gave me a rheumy look. “ ‘Monk Eastman Wins New Soul.’ ”
I cracked the empty bottle over his head as hard as I could, which was saying something. That was the signal for the bartender to drop onto the floor and forget he’d ever seen my face, and for what few patrons who were in this fine establishment of a Sunday to start to scatter, and for Jerry it was the signal to reach up and grab his bleeding scalp, which meant that, defenseless, he was a sucker for receiving the broken half of the bottle right in his face. It caught him across the bridge of the nose, which meant that both shards gouged into his eyes, blinding him on the spot.
A more pathetic sight than a blind man, his eyes streaming with blood, Oedipus calling for his mommy, there isn’t, but in my heart there was no mercy at all, just the vision of Monk lying there, whether bloodied in the Bronx barn or on the pavement outside the Wigwam it didn’t matter, my Monk, my father.
Bohan had fallen off his stool and was kneeling on the floor, mumblin’ and mutterin’ to beat the band.
“You know what this is, don’t you, boy?” I said to him as calmly as I could, removing one of my pistols from my waistband.
I never saw such blood. “Oh God Jesus Mary and Joseph and all the saints please sir have mercy…”
I conked him but good with the butt of a .45, which drove him down face first into the floor. “Answer my question.”
I’ll give Jerry Bohan this. He managed to push his torso up, elevating his puss to my knee-level, all the while whining for mercy and asking questions of eternity it was not my place to answer.
Normally it is against my rules to beat a man when he is down, but in the matter, I decided to make an exception. I swung the automatic, catching him on the jaw, which knocked out a few of his teeth, not that he was going to need them where he was going.
“Answer me.”
It always makes it easier on me when a man who knows he’s about to die gives up and makes it easier on himself. Luigi had fought me, Willie had never seen it coming and Fats had had it coming. Jerry raised his head one last time, praying through blubbery red-flecked lips, and I might have felt sorry for him, except that I didn’t.
“Tell me,” he pleaded, because I guess in the end we all want to know why we’re getting it, why here, why now, why.
“Redemption.” I shot him once through each bloody eye and left him there on the floor, the New Irving floor that had absorbed so much blood it was almost human. Now Jerry’s blood was mingling with Monk’s and the score was even.
I tossed a couple of bills on the bar as I departed. “Drinks on the house,” I said. “Make ’em doubles.”
Chapter Forty-One
The El Fey was okay and so were the other clubs, like the Livingstone on East 58th where the pink lemonade went for a buck and a half, which was a profit to me of about $1.48. Along with the Club Abbey, the Silver Slipper at Broadway and 48th Street was Texas’s favorite, and it made her a star. “Hello, sucker,” she’d say, and no truer words were ever spoken. What I liked about Texas was that she got it. “Never lose the purple mantle of illusion,” she’d tell her girls. Good advice.
I ran all my joints on the up-and-up. One night Winchell told me that a new scribbler on the block, kid name of Whitney Bolton, had told him some society dame was claimin’ she got shortchanged by one of my waiters. I rang up Bolton and told him to come over to my office in the Longacre Building in Times Square—used to be Longacre Square until the newspaper got fancy pants. The waiter was waiting for him when he got there, the overcharge of $21.90 in his paws, which he handed over to Bolton on the spot. Then I fired him.
“What’s your beat, Bolton?” I asked the newspaperman after the waiter was gone.
“Gangland, Mr. Madden,” says he.
I dropped by his newspaper a couple of nights later. He was sitting at a messy desk, pounding an Underwood, what a way to make a living. City rooms are noisy as hell, but this one fell silent as I moseyed along, and I made sure everybody got a good look at me, especially Bolton’s editors, as I stopped in front of his desk.
“Close your jaw,” I said. “That’s better.”
I could see the fright in his eyes. “What—?”
“Relax.” I looked around and saw the editors standing in their office doorways. “We’ll just shoot the breeze a couple of minutes and then I’ll be gone.”
“Why—?”
“You’re covering gangland, aren’t you? Well, this shows ’em you know what you’re talking about.”
As I left I could hear typewriters being pounded once more. I found out later that Bolton’s editors were so impressed he got a ten-buck-a-week raise the very next day. And I never had no trouble from him, ever.
Still, I wanted something special, a real classy joint that folks would come to for miles around. Something out of the ordinary, with topflight chow, the best performers, the prettiest girls. I found it uptown, smack in the middle of the Dutchman’s precincts, which was pretty much the true beginning of our friendship, and the trouble between us, which is often more or less the same thing.
How it happened was Hiram.
Hiram was no kid anymore and neither was I, and since our reunion at Sing Sing I’d taken a friendly interest in his career, especially because I was plenty interested in the fight game. Seems that Hiram had graduated from shine to rubdown boy to trainer, and had himself a stable of colored boxers that he trained in a gym up on 125th Street, which by this point was pretty much completely brown.
As part of our investing strategy, George and I had bought pieces of several fighters. Now, I may be a white man, but I never let a little thing like color interfere with the sweet science or its financial rewards. When Hiram told me about a boxer named Harry Wills, a tough Negro they called the Black Panther who Dempsey was ducking, I decided to take a spin up darktown way to have a look at him.
I found Hiram in the gym, seegar in his mouth, admiring his boy. “Ain’t he pretty? Lookit the way he move. Beautiful. Damn!”
I could see why Dempsey was ducking Wills. He was coiled and quick, a right regular black panther indeed, with sinewy muscles and flashing fists. “He’s too quick for Jack, that’s for sure,” I said.
“Colored boys is always too quick for white fighters,” said Hiram, not even bothering to glance over to look at me. With the evidence in the ring, I could hardly disagree. “Look at the jab. He bust up Dempsey’s nose in round one, that’s for sure.” Hiram spit out of the side of his mouth. “Harry’d clean his clock.”
“Hell, I could bust Dempsey’s nose. He’s through, washed-up.”
Hiram featured me sideways, keeping an eye on
his pugilist. “Tex Rickard tells me Dempsey’s gonna fight Tunney.”
“Irish got to stick together.”
“They never give colored no chance.”
I watched as Wills got off a couple of fancy combinations. “Right you are. Furthermore, Tunney’s going to beat Dempsey. And then he’s gonna be champ.”
Hiram spat harder, a big brown ball of phlegm that missed the spittoon and splattered on the hardwood floor.
“It’s the way of the world, Hiram,” I said. “It’s our time. Someday it’ll be yours. Just be ready for it, ’cause they’re only gonna give you one shot.”
Hiram brought a small hammer down on the time bell. “Okay, Harry, come down here and meet Mr. Owney.”
The glistening Negro slid through the ropes and a cornerman took off his sparring gloves. My hand disappeared into his and we shook. “You got what it takes, kid.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Wills.
“You got some nice moves there.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Wills.
“Good luck to you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Wills, and shuffled off to the training room.
“Too bad he ain’t gonna get his shot.”
I wasn’t telling Hiram anything he didn’t already know. “White boys don’t want to fight colored, not heavyweights. Ever since Mr. Jack, they want the champ to be white.”
We walked together out of the gym. There was a horde of humanity in there, but I was the only white man. “How’s Johnson? See much of him?”
Hiram brightened a bit as we trotted down the stairs. “He runnin’ a supper club now, the Deluxe, up where the old Douglas Casino used to be.”
“Lenox, right?”
Hiram nodded. “At 142nd. Northeast corner. It ain’t open yet, but he prob’ly there. Don’t got much else to do these days.”
I got an idea. “Feel like a walk?”
Hiram did, and half an hour later we were climbing the stairs up to the Club Deluxe. It was on the second floor of a nondescript two-story building, with a theater on the ground floor. The theater wasn’t very successful—the Renaissance Casino on 133rd was eating its lunch—but the Deluxe was still in operation. Barely. Even before I got to the top of the stairs, I could see that Johnson was going to need some help. It wasn’t that it was shabby, exactly, just tired and run-down and deflated, like an old boxer after he’s been knocked down for the last time. Jack had had plenty of knockdowns in his life, not in the ring, but from the law. That was something we both had in common.
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