by Ed Gorman
The door opened again. It wasn’t Wolf, it was the kid who’d jammed me on the street with the older woman. He motioned me out. I went.
He kept me in front of him. We took two flights of stairs. He ushered me into a study on the third floor.
The door closed behind me. I looked around. It was better appointed than the examination room, walls of books, a sturdy partner’s desk, tall windows looking out front and back. It ran the depth of the house. In the back, enclosed inside the block of buildings, there was a garden, shared and secret. The tulips and crocuses had a good start against the late spring. Lilacs were blooming early, the forsythia already wilting. I took none of it for a sign.
Wolf came in. He put my guns down on the desk. “In for a penny, in for a pound, Mickey,” he said. “We don’t trust one another worth a damn, but we might find each other useful. Does that suit your purpose?”
“Our purposes might still be at odds,” I said. “What’s van Rensellaer to you?”
“He’s a banker.”
“I didn’t know he worked.”
“He’s a trustee on several boards.”
“Serious money begets even more serious money.”
There was a pause. “What do you think about Jews, Mickey?” Wolf asked me.
“Jews put their pants on one leg at a time, same as the rest of us,” I said.
He pushed my guns toward me.
I picked up the .38 Super. “Christ-killers,” I told him, fitting the gun to the small of my back. “That’s what the priest used to tell us, back at St. Aloysius. But he was an ignorant barstid, getting drunk on Communion wine.” I scooped up the 7.65, lifted my shoe onto Wolf’s desk, and tucked the gun inside my ankle holster. I put my foot back on the floor.
“Not something you care about, then, one way or the other?” Wolf asked me.
“I didn’t say that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I never met a Jew that didn’t keep his word.”
“I never met an Irishman who wasn’t slippery,” he said.
“Tell me about van Rensellaer,” I said.
“He’s a rock-bottom anti-Semite.”
“Jew-haters are a dime a dozen.”
“That’s been my experience,” he said.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I meant, give me something that I can use for leverage.”
“There’s the dead girl you spoke of.”
“You’ve got your reasons to compromise van Rensellaer, I’ve got mine,” I said. “I already know what mine are.”
He reached down, pulled one of the desk drawers open, and came up with a fifth of rye, shy a few inches. He fished around some more and came up with two mismatched tumblers. He offered me one, and we each apple-polished them on our sleeves. Wolf poured himself a decent three fingers and handed me the bottle. I did the same. We lifted our glasses and clicked rims. I knew he was only giving himself time to think, but I appreciated the companionable peg, and it was good, smoky Canadian.
He put his glass down. I saw he’d made up his mind. He turned and went to the windows overlooking the street. “Israel needs money and weapons,” he said, his back to the room. “Small arms are problematic, still, but not the main issue. I’m talking about field artillery, crew-served machine guns, tanks. We need diesel, replacement parts, tools and dies. The industry for modern, mechanized war.”
“And you’re running on rubber bands and spit.”
He turned around. “The choke point is financial,” he told me. “If we had gold on deposit with the Federal Reserve, we could borrow against it, but for the moment, we’re begging hat in hand for credit. In six months, the situation might have changed, but in six months, the state of Israel might not exist, if the Arabs drive us into the sea.”
“So van Rensellaer’s anti-Semitism isn’t academic,” I said.
Wolf went to a sideboard and unlocked it. He took out a package wrapped in oiled paper, the thickness of a telephone directory, a foot and a half long. He dropped it on the blotter of the desk with a solid, metallic thump.
I knew what it was. I could smell the Cosmoline.
“Open it,” Wolf said.
I unwrapped the paper. It was an ugly thing, but it looked extremely functional. I picked it up. Maybe seven pounds.
“Based on the Sten gun,” Wolf told me. “For its method of manufacture. Stamped receiver, forged barrel. Fires the 9mm Parabellum, from an open bolt. Six hundred rounds a minute, on full auto. Designed by a man named Uziel Gal. If we had the factory capacity, we could produce a hundred a day, and on the cheap.”
I locked the bolt back. The recoil spring felt like a good twenty pounds, but the bolt moved like butter.
“Friends up in Hartford,” he said, answering the question I hadn’t asked him
Hartford, Connecticut, was home to Colt. They made the gun I carried. I squeezed the grip safety and pinched the trigger, and the bolt slapped shut on the empty chamber. Ten rounds in a second, I thought. Like a water pistol with real bullets.
“You take my point,” Wolf said.
I put the gun down, reluctantly. “I do,” I said.
He spread his hands, inviting comment.
“Okay, let me see if I’ve got this right,” I said. “Van Rensellaer can choke you in infancy, because his influence extends to a consortium of New York banks. Once they turn you down, you can’t get financing from Switzerland or Hong Kong, for the simple reason that bankers don’t make bad loans.”
“We’d be blackballed.”
“How can one man make that decision?”
“Let’s say he’s the swing vote. Elections have turned on less.” Wolf shrugged. It seemed a gesture of habit, something he did for lack of an expressive vocabulary, the way another man might smile, reflexively, and not exactly mean it.
“And if you could catch him in an embarrassment — ”
“It would be preferable if we swung his vote our way, yes.”
“Better than arranging a happy accident,” I said.
He gazed at me with what I took for placid candor. “Things have a way of redounding,” he said.
“The shortest way between two points is a straight line.”
“Perhaps.”
“Then why haven’t you had him killed?” I asked.
He smiled wolfishly. “That was my first thought,” he told me. “I was second-guessed.”
“We’re of like minds, then,” I said to him, “but neither of us is free to act according to our instincts.”
“We accept discipline,” he agreed.
“Grudgingly,” I said.
He knew what I was suggesting. “I might trade you mine for yours,” he said.
“Except that I don’t want van Rensellaer dead.”
“I’m willing to split the difference,” Wolf said.
I picked up my whiskey glass again. There were two fingers still left in it.
“Absent friends,” he said.
We clicked rims a second time.
Of course, I had no reason to want van Rensellaer dead, so far as I knew. And it would be awkward to explain to Dede. But if Wolf had been telling me the whole truth, or as much of it as he judged wise, van Rensellaer was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Which didn’t make him a murderer.
By the time I left the Israeli safe house, it was getting on toward noon. I went to Midtown, to the Horn & Hardart. Lunchtime, and close to Grand Central, it was a rendezvous point for my numbers runners. I already had a fistful of change from the cashier, and I doled out coins as they trickled in. It didn’t bother me that they went straight for the Indian pudding and the Boston cream pie; I wasn’t interested in the condition of their teeth. Judy, though, had sense enough to pick pot roast with a side of succotash. She made her sidekick Roger get American chop suey. She knew the value of a hot lunch.
I never thought of the automat as a marvel, but I suppose it was, from the number of visitors from out of town who made it a destination. To me, it was part of
the climate, the weather of a place I knew. Of course it’s gone now, like so much of the New York that I once inhabited.
They sat down with the thick china plates in front of them and tucked into their food. I gave her the chance to take the immediate edge off her hunger, but I suppose I was waiting in vain, metaphorically speaking. Judy’s hunger wasn’t physical — not in the sense of being satisfied by meat and potatoes.
It didn’t take her long to inhale the pot roast.
“Anything of use?” I asked her, when she came up for air.
She began mopping up the pan gravy with a piece of buttered bread. She shrugged, still chewing, and cut her eyes at Roger.
I glanced over at him too.
He had his mouth full, as well, but that didn’t stop him. The difference between the two of them was that Judy played her hand close to the vest until she needed to show her cards, but Roger wasn’t as artful. He was the sort, man or boy, who turned the deck faceup on the table. His eagerness was all, and his attention to detail. It had an advantage, however. He gave everything equal emphasis. He didn’t interpret, or leave one thing out at the expense of something else. He left it up to me to decide.
She’d worked only the three or four blocks south of Sutton Place, he reported. She did her business in empty doorways or vacant lots. The professionals had access to cheap hotels where the desk clerks took a piece of the action for an hour’s use of their sheets, and the tough older whores had chased her off more than once. It was a buyer’s market.
Something about it didn’t sit right. “The older women, the prossies,” I said to him, “they’ve likely got a cold-water flat they go home to, or a hotel room, anyway. The street kids, what do they have to call home?”
“The subway,” Judy said.
“A hobo jungle, in the tunnels?”
She nodded.
“Find it,” I said.
Judy and Roger exchanged a quick glance. They already knew where it was, I realized, but were reluctant to tell me.
“No harm’s going to come to them, Jude,” I said.
She said nothing, although her doubt was easy to read. I’d meant Maggie no harm either.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I tried not to trade on my friendship with Johnny Darling. We came from different worlds. He was married now and recently a dad, no longer the devil-may-care boy of those reckless days we’d shared before the war. He carried fragments of Japanese shrapnel in one knee, too, from the Pacific, and the barely perceptible limp added to his gravity. Not that he gave himself airs. Oh, and there was his father, the so-called Black Cardinal, an outright market monopolist who harked back to the robber barons of the Gilded Age. I’d foolishly made an enemy of him, and it was an injury he’d be unlikely to forgive.
Johnny wasn’t cut from the same cloth. He was a democrat with a small D, or what you might call a natural aristocrat, one of a dwindling number.
We met at Jack Sharkey’s later that afternoon.
“How’s life been treating you, Mickey?” he asked.
“Not much, lately,” I said.
We shook hands and took our seats at the bar. Both of us ordered Dewar’s. It was a sentimental choice. In one of our previous lifetimes, we’d smuggled bootleg scotch in from Canada.
“Not a social occasion, I take it,” he said.
“We’re not social equals, Johnny,” I said.
He started to dispute me, out of politeness, and then chose not to. He raised his drink, his expression inward.
“August van Rensellaer,” I said.
His glass stopped halfway to his mouth.
“I see I’ve come to the right person,” I said.
“What’s your interest?”
“It’s personal.”
“Mine is financial. Or, say better, my father’s is.”
“Your dad’s in bed with August van Rensellaer?”
“Figuratively speaking. But understand, Mickey, compared to the van Rensellaers, my family’s nouveau riche.” He shrugged his shoulders, ironically. “Not social equals.”
I picked up my drink. “Here’s to unequal partnerships,” I said.
He smiled, genuinely, and we touched glasses.
“What about van Rensellaer, professionally?” I asked him.
“He makes money for his stockholders,” he said.
“The public be damned,” I said.
It was a famous quote of Jay Gould’s. Johnny took it in good humor.
“It’s an unhappy mischance, your father being involved,” I remarked. “Given that there’s bad blood between us already, I’d sooner not cross him a second time.”
“That might be, ah, impolitic,” Johnny said. “I’d hesitate to call attention to myself, were I you.”
“Could be unavoidable.”
“Then again, if this personal matter were to have adverse financial consequences for the van Rensellaers — ” He left the sentence unfinished.
I thought I understood his meaning. “Your father might see advantage in it,” I suggested.
“Two birds with one stone,” he said.
I didn’t much care whether or not I got back into the Black Cardinal’s good graces, but it had a certain symmetry.
“What’s all this in aid of, Mickey?” Johnny asked me.
“Jews,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Jews. Yids. Sheenies. You got a problem with it?”
“Quit horsing me around,” he said, evenly. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Money and guns for Israel. Van Rensellaer’s in a position to queer the lending policies of the major New York banks.”
“He would be,” Johnny said. “And he would if he could.”
“Apparently, he can.”
“Isn’t that the damnedest thing,” he muttered.
“Men with money make the rules?”
Johnny laughed. “Since when did you become a Red? No. I meant this whole crazy notion of some secret enterprise, with Jewish capital pulling strings behind the scenes, using Gentiles for front men, when Israel’s going hat in hand to survive.”
“What’s your own attitude toward Jews, Johnny?”
He stared at me. “I had Jews in my outfit in the Pacific,” he said. “We served alongside Negroes, for Christ’s sake.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
“Everybody bleeds the same color,” he said, primly.
“How about your father?”
He made a dismissive gesture. “My father’s a creature of his class,” he said. “He’s anti-Semitic by reflex. Does he do business with Jews? Of course. He’d do business with Hitler.”
He probably had, but I didn’t say so.
“It’s about profits, Mickey,” Johnny said. “It’s not about personal prejudice or social distinctions.”
I’d never seen Johnny squirm. I didn’t like seeing it now “Then what’s van Rensellaer’s game?” I asked.
“Who the hell knows? Maybe he just doesn’t need the money. Or he’s fixated. It’s irrational.”
“Could be,” I said “Or he’s in it for bigger stakes.”
“What’ve you got on him, Mickey?”
“Sex with an underage girl, who then turned up dead.”
I watched him fold it over in his mind. “Nope,” he said. “One thing follows another. Doesn’t mean the first thing caused the second “
“I didn’t say it did.”
“You’re making a connection, though.”
“One thing happens, and then something else happens, or happens to be part of the mix, and then something else happens,” I said. “Guy gets his knob polished, and a girl gets killed. That’s all I have. Let’s call it the first thing, and the third thing. I missed out on the second act.”
I had him interested, I could see that, but maybe I’d made a mistake bringing Johnny into the equation because I didn’t know if he was disinterested. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have his own hor
se in the race.
“We’ve always been frank with one another,” I said. “If you’ve got reason to hold out on me now, all you have to tell me is that you’ve got a reason. I don’t need to know what it is.”
“You’ve put me in a tough spot,” he said.
“When did I ever betray a confidence?” I asked him. “Yours or anybody else’s?”
“We’ve never had a conflict of interest,” he said.
“Let’s say your father’s made common cause with August van Rensellaer’s banking combine. Let’s say it’s a conspiracy, in violation of the laws against restraint of trade. Let’s further say it’s simply a scheme to cheat investors.”
“For the sake of argument,” Johnny said, warily.
“I don’t care,” I said. “If you’re robbing widows and orphans, that’s between you and your conscience, or between you and God. My guess is that if it were widows and orphans, or war vets, you would have already stepped in. Which tells me it’s players with a serious bankroll, real money. Money they’re equipped to risk.”
“Nobody can afford to lose money,” he said.
“Some people lose money, and they lose their homes,” I said to him. “Some people lose money, they have to sell the yacht.”
“You are going Red,” he said, smiling.
“Two questions. If van Rensellaer’s end of the partnership collapses, does your father sink or swim?”
“If van Rensellaer sinks, my father treads water. He’ll be in position to take a controlling interest. Second question.”
“Follows on the first. Why hasn’t your father just cut van Rensellaer’s throat?”
“Old money, new money,” Johnny said. “It’s a negotiation.”
I nodded. A place at the table.
“It is about social distinctions, Mickey,” he said.
“And no Irish need apply,” I said.
He drew back, offended, and then realized he wasn’t the one offended.
I waved my hand at him. “Jesus, boyo, you’re too sensitive to imagined slights.”
“Which one of us should be embarrassed?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Leave that be,” I said. “Riddle me this instead. Why is August van Rensellaer dead set on putting the kibosh on bank loans to Israel?”
“He doesn’t want his daughter marrying a Jewboy.”