And All the Saints

by Michael Walsh

  Abe and Lulu looked at each other and I could see in their eyes they had to admit I was right.

  “Yeah, but—” said Abe.

  “—even if he was in—” said Lulu.

  “—and he wasn’t busy—”

  “—it probably wouldn’t be a good idea,” finished Lulu.

  Now my suspicions were raised pretty high. “I know he’s got a dame up there, if that’s what’s bothering you,” I said. “I don’t care. I seen plenty of dames, in and out of their knickers.”

  “But you haven’t seen this one,” blurted Lulu.

  “At least we don’t think you have,” modified Abe. “Not in a long time anyway.”

  “Think I care about some old girlfriend?” Abe and Lulu looked at their scuffed shoes. Everybody knew my reputation for looking askance at mugs what tried to make time with my girls. “Forget it,” I said. “I’m a new man.”

  They still seemed pretty dubious. Lulu even started to move in front of me, blocking my way up the stairs. And then Abe did something that caught me completely by surprise: he patted me down and found the .38 that Monk had given me so long ago. Talk about sentiment.

  “Kinda old, ain’t it?” said Abe.

  “I can’t believe you done that to me, Abie,” I said.

  “It’s for your safety.”

  “It’s for everybody’s safety,” said Lulu.

  “Okay,” said I, “but I want that back. When I come down, you give it to me.”

  Abe and Lulu were still lookin’ dubious as they buzzed Dutch.

  “Boys, I give you the solemn word of an Irishman on the head of his mother and his sister that I will not hold you personally responsible for anything that occurs upstairs, and that furthermore I will keep my Irish temper and emotions in check come what may. Deal?”

  Abe and Lulu musta been getting tired of looking at each other, because Lulu stepped aside to let me pass.

  “Who’s he up there with?” I joked. “Mae West?”

  As I climbed the two flights of stairs to Dutch’s hideaway I was going over in my mind the business proposition I was going to present to him. How we’d combine our beer operations, our nightclubs, to take ’em legit once Repeal hit. How we’d introduce slot machines and card tables into the back rooms of all our clubs for special members. How we’d do our best to keep running the numbers but to keep the dope away from the coloreds, because being Irish I’d had plenty of opportunity to see what the Creature could do to a family, and I didn’t want to find out about coke or horse or whatever they call it.

  I had it all figured out, see. I had even figured the next step, which was to let Roosevelt have his fun, and to give myself up to the parole board, with suitable fiduciary assurances that I wouldn’t have to do much time. To take Frank’s advice and put myself on ice for a while, until the storm from Washington and Albany blew over, and then to be there, the last mug standing, to pick up the pieces and to go on with business as usual, as usual.

  All these thoughts were in my head and plenty more I’ve forgotten about, and frankly it’s a miracle that I can remember any of them because at that moment I rapped sharply on the door and I could hear laughter from inside and then all of a sudden a pretty girl not wearing much of any clothes opened the door and at that instant I knew why Abie and Lulu had taken my heater away from me because there I was face-to-face with my sister, May.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  I guess it was only a second or two that we stood there looking at each other, a couple of strangers united by a mother and a father and separated by a threshold, but it sure seemed a lot longer. I have a vague, dim memory of glimpsing Dutch lying on the bed, a bottle of cheap beer in his hand, wearin’ only his shorts and his socks, held up by a couple of garter belts. There’s nothing makes a man look more foolish than to be caught in his stars and garters, but there was Dutch and there was I and which of us was the bigger fool at that moment?

  “Zat you, Bo?” said Dutch. They say Jews don’t drink, but whoever says that has already had a few shots too many, in my opinion.

  Neither May nor I could muster words at this moment.

  “Bo?” shouted Dutch.

  “No,” I managed to croak, “it ain’t Bo.”

  “Where the hell is that sonofabitch?” screamed Dutch. “I’ll cut his balls off, that motherfuckinsonofabitchinbastard.”

  I stepped into the room, managing to avoid looking at May. “You shouldn’t oughta talk like that when there’s a lady present, Dutch,” I said.

  Dutch managed to point both eyes in the same direction. “The gallant brother, come to rescue the fair virgin!”

  I decided to ignore that. “At least, she used to be a lady—”

  Dutch was struggling to his feet, sloshing the bottle of beer. “You know what they say about Catholic girls?” he wobbled.

  He drew nearer. May remained frozen.

  “They might not fuck you on the first date…”

  “Until you made a whore out of her,” I spat.

  “…but they sure will blow you.”

  The force of my blow put the Dutchman on his arse. May grabbed my arm. “Don’t,” she said in that little voice, and even with all that alcohol in her, she still had something of a head left on her shoulders. Unfortunately she hadn’t been thinking with that part of her body much then. “They’ll hear you.”

  Dutch was still sitting in a puddle of beer, looking bewildered. “Madden?” he said. “I thought we was friends.”

  “We used to be,” I muttered.

  “That’s a hell of a way to treat a friend,” he said, rubbing his jaw.

  “Put some clothes on,” I told my sister.

  “How d’ya like my girlfriend?” he burped.

  “I used to like her a lot,” I said as I fumbled for May’s things. Her dress was thrown into a heap in the corner, her stockings were draped over the edge of the bed. As I reached for them, Dutch shot out a hand and grabbed me.

  “What d’ya think you’re doin’?” he managed.

  I slugged him again, hard. I wasn’t worried a bit about Abie and Lulu because they knew, they knew the rules, they knew it was my sister, they’d tried to save me from my own folly. After all I was supposed to be out of town and here I was, big as life. They were right guys, even if they were working for this dirty bastard.

  My punch knocked the beer bottle out of Dutch’s hand and I picked it up. I was about to hit him over the head with it when this time it was May who grabbed me. “No.”

  “Go home to your husband.”

  “No.”

  “Go home to your mother, then.”

  “No.”

  “Then just go home, for Christ’s sake.”

  “No.”

  I was uncomfortable in that room, facing off against my naked sister, defenseless and beautiful and my own flesh and blood.

  “Go home to your brother, then. The one who always took care of you when nobody else could.”

  I don’t think either of us was ever closer to killing each other at that moment. She didn’t even bother to cover herself up. Instead she let me have it. I woulda rather’ve had it again from Little Patsy and his mugs ten times over.

  “I would,” she said, “but I don’t have that brother no more. He’s gone, disappeared. The brother I knew was a real man who thought big and dreamed big, and wanted me to be part of those thoughts and dreams. We were gonna be a team, him and me, partners, the way he became partners with Monk and Dutch and all the rest. But he just never could start seein’ me as a partner and kept on seein’ me as just a girl.” She paused. “Like now.”

  I stepped back, ready for anything. Ready to slug Dutch again, or kill him, or hold her, sweet May, in my arms once more. “How long’s this been goin’ on?” I asked, throwing her dress at her.

  “Long enough.”

  I had to ask. “What about…that other stuff? The stuff you told me wasn’t true?”

  “What was I supposed to tell you?” she said.

&nb
sp; “Let’s go.”

  “You go. I’m staying.”

  “Don’t you love Jack?”

  “Don’t you love me?”

  Dutch had somehow managed to get to his feet. I’ll say this about him, he was tough, he could take a punch. I wish some of my fighters had his jaw, and his heart. “I think you better go now, Madden,” he said.

  “I think you’re right, Dutch,” I said.

  I stepped back out into the hallway. There was no sound from below; Abe and Lulu had too much class to come between a couple of guys arguing over a dame, the oldest argument in the book, and with always the same result somewhere down the line.

  “What are you gonna do?” she asked me as she started to close the door.

  “I’m going to take a vacation,” I said. “A long vacation.”

  “I wish I could go with you. I wish I had come with you.”

  “I wish you’d come with me all along. Now it’s too late.”

  She got that look in her eye then, that wise look she’d had since she was a kid. “Owen, are you in trouble again?” She’d been saying that to me since the old days on Tenth Avenue.

  “I’m just after catchin’ a few birds, May. And maybe lettin’ a few fly away.”

  “I always wanted to fly.”

  I leaned forward and kissed her lightly on her cheek. “Good-bye, May.”

  Then she shut the door and was gone. The next time I saw her, we were back on 34th Street, just like we was kids again, only not. I was too dumb to get her play, and she was too smart to keep on playing. Frenchy wasn’t the only one who could figure odds.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  I spent a couple of days hiding out here and there, reading the newspaper accounts of my manhunt. The plane gambit had worked well enough. The night watchman had sung his song and there was a lookout for me in Canada and Mexico, whence the cops figured I’d flown. Others speculated that I’d gone to Reno to get a divorce from Loretta, the news of how I was sweet on Agnes down in Bubbles having made its authorized way into Winchell. Finally, Agnes gave an interview to the local rag to the effect of how I was down there and we were very much in love, that sort of malarkey.

  All this talk about love got me to thinking and maybe a little randily at that, the result of which I made a phone call to Lucky about that dame and he told me he’d canned her some time ago, she was workin’ a crib downtown, and if I wanted her, it wouldn’t cost me nothin’, we bein’ friends and all.

  “I can make my own deals, Charlie,” I said. “Just gimme the address.” Which he did: 23rd Street. The Cornish Arms. The same flophouse where Mad Dog had holed up with little Lottie, just before he ran into Bo Weinberg and his Thompson.

  She answered on the first knock, breathless, expectant, needy, broke.

  “Hello, lover boy—Jesus…”

  “Hello, Mary Frances Blackwell,” says I.

  I went to put my arms around her, but she pushed me away. Not out of disgust or lack of desire. Fear.

  “You don’t love me no more?”

  “I got the clap.”

  That flashed me back to Margaret Everdeane right quick. “So what? I seen plenty of clap. They got a cure. They got a cure for everything nowadays.”

  “Not for this clap they don’t. It’s the big one. Syph.”

  “How bad?”

  She started to say something, opened her mouth in fact; the words wouldn’t come but the tears did, plenty of ’em. “Tertiary.”

  I slept with her that night, just slept. We held each other like children, through all the hours of darkness, the hours of magic, when men and women meet each other as equals, as primals, bodies and souls.

  “How long you got?” The light was glancing through the dirty windows, northern light, weak light, New York City light.

  She sat up and shrugged, her nightie falling off her left shoulder, exposing her breast, that still beautiful breast no matter what was going on inside her, in the mysterious woman place that no man, however exploratory, however adventurous, can ever understand.

  “Maybe a year. Maybe not.”

  “What can I do?” I assumed the answer was nothing, but it seemed to me the gallant question to ask, the only question to ask.

  “Same as always,” she said. Then she threw her arms around me and hugged me so tight I thought I was going to expire right then and there, because my breathing wasn’t so good, you savvy, what with everything and all, the bullets and the bullet wounds, the healed and the unhealed. She mashed her mouth onto mine, sucking my tongue and my breath, tasting and infusing at the same instant, her last gift to me, her last bequest, her last request.

  “Kill ’em all.”

  Some combo. A syphilitic whore and a sterile gangster, locked in an embrace, genitals that wouldn’t generate, generations that would go ungenerated, forever and ever.

  “Amen,” I said. I pulled on my clothes and left.

  The short version is she didn’t make it a year. The long version is she never wanted for anything, as long as she lived. I owed her that much, and more. She’s up in the Bronx today, with several of my friends, peaceful now.

  Everybody was getting pretty worked up about the search for Public Enemy No. 2—that would be me, a testimonial to my ability to stay out of the headlines—and the wrapping up of my business affairs was coming along pretty well when all of a sudden Vannie Higgins shows up back in New York and starts shooting off his mouth.

  Charlie Workman brought me the news. “Says he took you for ten grand. Says you never went to Arkansas. Says he don’t even know where Arkansas is. Says he flew around in circles for a while, then landed at Teterboro and went to see his girlfriend. That’s what he says.”

  This made me very unhappy. This made me out to be a liar, and worse, made Agnes out to be a liar. “Where is he now, Charlie?”

  Charlie was a big guy and sometimes we think big guys is slow, and he was slow enough when he talked, but pretty quick on the trigger when he had to be, which is what I liked about him. “You won’t believe this piece a shit,” he said, and normally I don’t cotton to that kind of language but I was getting pretty mad at Vannie myself. “He and three pals knocked over the Hydrox Laundry, got away with thirty-five hundred bucks and a couple a heaters.”

  “That all they get?”

  “They also grabbed a ring and wristwatch from Edith Schwartz.” Edith was the bookkeeper, whose job it was to keep the books as separate as possible.

  “Hurt her?”

  “More than they had to.”

  “What’s Frenchy doin’ about it?”

  “Hunting.”

  “Any luck?”

  “I already found him. Red Hook.”

  The more I saw of this kid, the better I liked him. He leaned forward, hoping to hear the magic words from my lips. I was sorry I had to disappoint him, but this was personal.

  “This one I’m taking for myself. You can watch, see how it’s done.” The Bug flashed me a hurt look, and I knew right then that he was a stand-up guy, a gee who’d do time rather than rat on a fella. “I’m going back to college in a couple of days anyway. Stake him out, set him up and we’ll roll.”

  “Gee, thanks, boss.” He was genuinely grateful.

  “Maybe you’ll do me a favor someday.”

  We bagged Vannie a couple of days later in Brooklyn, where he was swaggering around, making the mistake of bragging about how he was holding parts of me in the palm of his hand. Hiram was at the wheel and the Bug was beside me as we slid up to Vannie somewhere near the Gowanus Canal.

  “Feel like a trip, Vannie?” I said.

  I’ll say this about Vannie Higgins: he may have been a weasel, but he took it like a man. Even half-drunk, he got into the car without a fuss, sandwiched himself between the Bug and me and didn’t open his gob.

  We drove out to Garden City pretty much in silence. “Meet Charlie the Bug.” Vannie nodded. “Unlike Benny, he don’t mind the name Bug. Takes it as a compliment to his guts, in fact. Ain’t that
right, Bug?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s the truth, Vannie, but don’t you worry about Bug. He just feels like a trip too. Never been out on the Island before. Ain’t that right, Bug?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They say travel’s broadening. Ain’t that right, Vannie?”

  Vannie tried to say something but he couldn’t.

  “Mrs. Schwartz would like her ring back and her wristwatch. Imagine that, Bug, a buncha mugs in the middle of a cheap stickup heisting a lady’s rocks. Don’t seem right. Does it seem right to you, Vannie?”

  Vannie shook his head.

  “Plus of course I want all my money back. Vacations are expensive these days and, well, dough don’t grow on trees.”

  Vannie swallowed hard and turned his pockets inside out.

  “I guess we’re going to have to make restitution some other way, eh, Vannie? It’s like you go out of town and then your best friend starts making time with your girl. No self-respecting guy can have that.”

  We got to Garden City, near Roosevelt Field. I told Hiram to stay with the car and I told Bug to come with us.

  As we strolled into the woods Vannie finally said something. “You ain’t really going to do this, are you, Owney?”

  I liked Vannie. I really did. “A year ago, two, the answer woulda been no. But things is different now and I gotta make examples and clean up loose ends. It’s just bad timing is all.”

  “What do you mean bad timing?”

  “I don’t need any more pigeons in my life, especially stool pigeons.”

  He opened his mouth in protest and that’s when I got Da’s knife in him, right up through the roof of his mouth. He tried to struggle, but the wind was already out of his sails, and I cradled him in my arms as I jabbed the blade through his palate and, with a smack from the heel of my hand, up through the nasal cavity and into his brain. He died like one of my birds, bloody but peaceful, with only a twitch or two of his legs in protest.