by David Mamet
“I think that you flew with the R.F.C.,” Mike ventured, in imitation of a man who had done no research.
“Oh, what? I suppose I did,” Sir William said, in his part of the charade, and they both laughed.
The phone rang. Sir William answered it. “Yes?” he said. He listened for a moment, then said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
“Captain Hodge,” he said. “Captain Hodge. Someone, it seems, has vouched for a Captain Hodge.”
“That would be me,” Mike said.
“Who was your squadron commander, in France?”
“Hubert Devere,” Mike said.
“Do you recall his wife’s name?”
“He didn’t care for women,” Mike said.
Sir William nodded, and refilled their glasses.
“How might I help you?” he said.
“I want to know about the IRA,” Mike said.
Sir William took Mike to lunch at the Drake Hotel. The restaurant looked out over East Lake Shore Drive.
“My real war was South Africa,” Sir William said. “It perhaps is rougher here.”
“At least the territories are defined,” Mike said. “I understand over there was a bunch of hide-and-seek.”
“No way to fight a war,” Sir William said, “save that it was their way, and they won.”
“Well, perhaps one could learn from them,” Mike said.
“One could,” Sir William said. “One has. The Irish have. Mow down a bunch of innocents, throw a bomb, ‘o’er the Border and awae, wi’ Jock O’Hazeldean.’”
“What can be done about it?” Mike said.
Sir William nodded. “The Irish? You can do this,” he said. “Have a drink, and thank the Lord it’s not your fight.”
“It’s your fight,” Mike said.
“Yes.”
“What will come of it?”
“In truth?”
“Yes.”
“In truth? It will bring the Empire down.” He shrugged.
“Now,” he said, “your wars here, your gang wars, mimic, interestingly, the border squabbles of Europe. Imported, whole, from Sicily, as I am told; and, as I know to be the case, from Ireland.”
“What can we do about it?” Mike said.
“Here,” Sir William said, “the clan fights within itself, for place and wealth; and, as a clan, against the Other, for territory.
“Each fights, additionally, against what the learned might call the host mechanism.”
“The dominant culture,” Mike suggested.
“Perhaps,” Sir William said, “save, what does it dominate? It is dominated, by those groups which can fight and disband. The borderers. Like our friend Piet in South Africa, the various gangs, here, can pick their fights. We have only the choice of accepting or rejecting each particular battle.”
“Napoléon said, ‘Who dictates the terms of the battle, dictates the terms of the peace,’” Mike said.
“Indeed he did,” Sir William said. “And, like the rest of mankind, he did not take his own advice; and his grand army died in the snows of Russia.”
“And here?” Mike said.
“Here, the snows are the riches of your merchant city. Which will tempt, and convince the immigrants that the easier way to power is that indigenous to the locale. In South Africa, our friend Piet hid behind rocks and potted us, just as he shot the gazelle.
“Your immigrants here steal and kill; they have the local franchise for sin, and they sell liquor and drugs and women, on license from City Hall. Reformers might call it kickbacks or bribes but it is, finally, merely a license.
“The politicians who oppose them, those who cannot be bribed, if such there be, are, currently, killed. In time, and one may, perhaps, see it already, the Irish, and the Italians, will ask: why not become the politicians? And they will.
“They, then, as one soldier to another, will have taught themselves the foremost lesson: study the ground. Then they will not only possess the sin franchise, but every other fungible good, service, and permission.”
“What will you do with the IRA?” Mike said.
“Currently, currently, all we can do is kill them. If and when we find them.”
“Can you prevent them?”
Sir William shook his head. “We can interdict their arms, now and then. They’ll go elsewhere, of course, but their arm of choice is, currently, yours . . .”
The waiter came by with the coffeepot.
“Yes, I think so,” Sir William said. “You?”
Mike said yes. The waiter poured the coffee and left.
“. . . the tommy gun . . . ,” Sir William said.
“And they buy them here?” Mike said.
“They can’t buy them here,” Sir William said, “as there is an arms embargo. They steal them here.”
“From whom?” Mike said.
“From your army.”
“I’m looking for an Irishman who may be in the IRA,” Mike said.
“Should you come across him, I’d hope you’ll tell me,” Sir William said.
“Can you help me?”
“I would if I could,” Sir William said. “Which isn’t quite true, and, as one soldier to another, I owe you the truth. And it pains me to refuse you. I perhaps could give you a lead, but it would be a violation of my oath of office. The IRA are involved in the theft, from your armories, of these guns. They are here. I would advise you to steer clear of them. They will not hesitate to kill you. They’ll kill anyone.”
Sir William patted his lips with the napkin and rose. “Well,” he said. “Now: here’s a tip, however, f’I can do you a good turn.”
The good turn concerned the missing automobiles. The coach-built North Shore touring cars lifted, Sir William said, and driven to East Chicago. They were loaded on freighters, and traveled up through the Sault Ste. Marie locks, the St. Lawrence, and trans-ocean to be sold in Europe, mainly in France.
A British contingent of “observers” was due to raid the next outgoing freighter, the first of the coming month. The actual raid and subsequent arrests being conducted by the Washington Bureau of Investigation.
The two men rose and walked across the restaurant.
“Why would you care who’s stealing some cars?” Mike said.
“Oh, no. We don’t,” Sir William said. “But it does get us onto the docks. Which, we have friends who tell us, are the same docks from which our Irish friends are shipping their guns.”
Chapter 36
JoJo had called, with, as he said, “a lead into the thing.” He asked Mike to meet him at the Chez. Parlow insisted on coming along. Mike asked why.
“’Cause I don’t trust the little snitch,” Parlow said.
“Snitch he may be, but he’s a noncombatant,” Mike said.
“Well, it may take one to know one, so take me along,” Parlow said.
The sign read Under New Ownership, which meant, of course, “under the same ownership,” which meant, of course, Dion O’Banion and the North Side.
The Chez Montmartre was now called the Place Pigalle. The bad liquor was still served in coffee cups; the crap and poker games in the back room were still gaffed; the girls were new, but interchangeable with the girls of old, and they were kept in place still, under the supervision of the North Side.
One could, as before, get a passable drink; edible, overfussed food; a girl; and a floor show. The floor show’s quality depended, as always, on the biological imperatives of the manager.
“I know they’ve got to get laid,” Parlow said, “and, owning the barrel, they will shoot the encompassed fish, the chorines, which, while not sport, is, at least, sex; what, though, is the connection, which you must allow exists, between the mugs’ taste in broads, and the broads’ universal lack of talent?”
The singer nestled in the crook of the piano. She sang “Bye Bye Blackbird” as if it were a dirge for all the good in the world.
“She’s not even attractive,” Mike said.
“She is if you’re Jimmy
Flynn,” Parlow said. “And look at it: This girl, mirabile dictu, he doesn’t even have to pay her, take her clothes off. She’s stark naked anyway.” Parlow nodded at the girl, who was now circulating on the floor, tweaking the necktie of this and that nightclubber, planting a kiss on a bald head, trailing across a shoulder what passed, in courtesy, for a languid hand. The singer came to the bridge.
“No one here can love or understand me / Oh, what hard-luck stories they all hand me . . . ,” she sang.
“Best bridge ever written,” Mike said.
“I won’t argue with you,” Parlow said.
The titular ownership of the Chez had passed through Teitelbaum’s widow and back to O’Banion and his consortium. There had been talk, the lads said, that Lita Grey held the philosopher’s stone which would transform her from the Discarded Woman to the Ruler of It All, but that talk had disappeared with Lita Grey.
“She opened. The Pandora box,” JoJo Lamarr had said. “How do I know? As it consumed her. You guys, famously, saw that in France.”
“What did we see?” Mike said.
“The Krauts would put a live grenade under their bodies when they died; you guys come around, turn ’em over, or looking for souvenirs, bang.”
“I’m sure that went on,” Mike said.
“You ever get any souvenirs?” JoJo said.
“I got a love bite from a fifteen-year-old Belgian girl,” Mike said, “and a souvenir of the Black Forest: paper knife, with a picture of an elf.”
“Uh-huh?” JoJo said.
“What was in Pandora’s box?” Mike said.
“Well. The secret that can get you killed,” JoJo said. “The Black Forest, they make up the fairy tales?”
“The Grimm Brothers,” Mike said.
“Yes. The Brothers Grimm,” JoJo said, “all the tales of dark forces, and beasts, and so on.”
“What are we selling?” Parlow said.
“How did the guys,” JoJo said, “make up those stories?”
“They invented them,” Parlow said.
“Yeah. I understand. But what does that mean?”
Mike looked at Parlow, who raised his eyebrows, meaning, That is either the stupidest or the wisest question I’ve ever heard, I’ll be damned if I know which.
“They just wrote down a lot of words that occurred to them,” Mike said.
JoJo nodded.
“What are you selling?” Parlow said.
“But I can’t be happy,” the singer sang, “’til I make you happy, too.” The audience broke into applause. The singer half-curtsied. The band swung into a two-step, and various men walked their women onto the dance floor.
Mike saw the thief’s retreat from the direct question. “Brings you up here?” Mike said.
“Brings me up here is: a drink, and a glance at the bare titties, neither of which, you been downstate, one can never get enough of.”
“I’m sure that it was very trying,” Parlow said.
“I heard something,” JoJo said, “which, I immediately thought, would interest you.” He looked at Mike for a moment.
“. . . Alright,” Parlow said. “Excuse me.” He rose and left the table. JoJo watched him walk across the room to the hatcheck, where he began chatting up the hatcheck girl.
“I knew that girl, I knew her father,” JoJo said. “But I can’t remember her name.”
“Why’d you want to meet here?” Mike said.
“. . . He was a cop? A fireman? A something. In Hegewisch? A cop. He got tossed, he worked as a chauffeur in Hyde Park. His name was, no, his name was . . .” JoJo looked nervously over Mike’s shoulder.
“Oh shit,” Mike said. “Aw, come on, JoJo. You’re putting me on the spot? Are you fucking putting me on the spot?” Mike looked around the room, but saw no muscle beyond the one eternal bouncer at the door.
“Why would I do that, Mike, I wouldn’t do that, and if I did that, why would I do that here?”
“Well, then, what the hell’s the name of the charade?” Mike said.
Mike felt a light touch on his shoulder. He looked around to see a fellow in a tux.
“Mr. Hodge,” the fellow said, “if you would come with me.”
The singer finished and bowed herself off, followed by the four barely clad dancers. The MC took the stage.
“Will you look at the sense of humor on these broads . . . ?” he said. “Give ’em a hand.”
The audience applauded as requested.
“Thank you,” the MC said. He adjusted his tie. “Always delighted to see the cognoscenti of this great and glowing town. It is a rare treat to see this many lovely faces not demanding child support. Drink up, you geniuses, for if you can get smashed on water and iodine you’re sittin’ pretty and you’ve got a hell of a short memory. How ’bout those girls, huh? Who wants to take ’em home to Mama . . . ? I’m marrying one of ’em. I got quite a shock, I know her as Louise, on the marriage license, they tell her, ‘Put your real name.’ Turns out, she was christened ‘Third from the Left.’”
Mike was led through a curtain just off the stage. He squeezed by the last of the dancers. They were lifting off their headdresses and placing them on the rack just offstage.
Mike smelled the sweat and powder from their dressing room. The chorus hurried down the narrow corridor, stripping themselves naked as they filed into the dressing room. Mike was directed down the corridor and up a narrow staircase.
The room was paneled in black walnut. An enormous chesterfield took up one wall. Jimmy Flynn sat behind the partners desk once occupied by Weiss and Teitelbaum. He stood as Mike was passed into the room.
He said, “You want a drink?”
“No thank you,” Mike said.
Flynn said, “Then sit down.”
Mike sat on the couch. Flynn walked around the desk. He took the partner’s chair and turned it, and sat facing Mike. He rubbed the top of his head for a moment.
“Look,” he said. “Instead of the preface, here it is: your, your work, it gets back to us, is taking you into an area, you don’t want to go.”
“Alright, what are we talking about?” Mike said. “’Cause you don’t want me, I presume, just, hang up my hat, and move to Michigan, or die, or something, or why’m I here?”
The man did not speak.
“Give me a hint,” Mike said. “You know who I am.”
“I know who you are,” Flynn said, “and you have the reputation of being an okay guy, that’s right.”
“Well, then, why don’t you . . . Let me start again,” Mike said. “If you don’t mean to shoot me: tell me what you do mean, and perhaps we’ll work something out.”
“I’m in a hell of a position. Nobody wants to hurt you,” Flynn said, “this fucking thing has hurt you enough. Look . . .”
Mike left the office, and began down the stairs leading through backstage and out the front. The chorus was on, singing and dancing to “The Oceana Roll.”
“To see the smoke so black, come from the old smokestack / It’s floatin’ up to heaven and it won’t be back . . .”
Mike turned away, toward another staircase at the far end of the corridor. The floor show was heard, filtered, through the sets and flats stacked at the rear of the stage. Mike had been “given the warning,” and he needed to sit down.
A half-open door gave onto a small carpenter shop. The shop was empty. Mike went in and sat at the carpenter’s bench. The cheap Masonite board above the bench was covered in chalk drawings of props and scenery. Elevations and plans were pinned into the board, as were several yellowing publicity photos of the chorus.
“‘This fucking thing has hurt you enough,’” he thought. “‘This fucking thing has hurt you enough.’”
He had been, politely, asked to back off his investigations into the deaths of Ruth Watkins and Jackie Weiss. They were connected, as far as he knew, solely by proximity to jewelry belonging to the late club owner.
And the request came from the Chez, Mike reasoned, so the two murders must h
ave been connected to the Chez. Very well. But were they connected to him?
In what had the “thing” hurt him enough? Only in the loss of Annie Walsh.
An old man’s voice said, “What are you doing here?” Mike turned to see the man, quite obviously the stage carpenter. He was a black man. His coveralls were ancient, and washed, over the years, to the consistency of silk; a flat carpenter’s pencil sat in his coverall pocket. He wore a clean blue shirt, buttoned tightly at his neck and wrists, and a four-in-hand string tie, not seen since before the War. He might have been in his late sixties.
“What are you looking at?” he said. He spoke with a trace of a Southern accent and with formality, as a man who had previously had a different life. A teacher, perhaps, Mike thought.
“I beg your pardon,” Mike said, and rose.
“What are you looking at?” the man said.
“I was looking at nothing,” Mike said. “I came down from the office, I got turned around.”
“Who are you?” the man said.
“My name is Hodge,” Mike said. “I’m a reporter.”
“Are you here about her?” the man said. He nodded his head toward the Masonite board.
“Did you expect someone to come about her?” Mike said.
“She’s dead,” the man said. “I told the police.” He was anxious, and lied badly.
“I’m not here about her,” Mike said. Whoever she might have been, Mike thought, the man was doing a pathetic job of protecting her. Mike turned away, to spare the man his lie. He found himself looking at the publicity photos of the chorus girls tacked to the wall.
“She’s dead,” the man said. “She’s dead. And she didn’t do it.” He motioned Mike away from the photos.
“Alright,” Mike thought, “somebody’s dead and her picture’s on the wall. She’s dead. And she didn’t do it. Who is she?” He used the photo grabber’s trick. The City Desk sent them to the homes of the bereaved, to steal a photo of a deceased or accused in the confusion. If there were multiple choices, the picture grabber would ask, “Do you have a photo of your son?” If there were photos of several likely candidates, the picture grabber would exploit any opposition, saying, “I just want to know, which one is he?” He’d move his hand over the photos. When he reached the right one, the defiant or reluctant family member would look away. “Works every time,” Poochy had said. “Every time.”