That Old Gang Of Mine

by Leslie Thomas

  Neither knew what foot went first but excuses were loudly

  31

  elbowed aside and they found themselves in the revolving crowd bouncing up and down and in and out to some Slovak dance from years back.

  They saw that the girl was dancing, however, and the jig conveniently gave way to another, a progressive dance where the people stood in lines, stayed with a partner for a few steps and turns and then moved on to someone else. Bruce adeptly inserted himself three places from the girl and soon they came face to face. They clapped hands together as the dance required.

  'This is beautiful,' said Bruce. 'Gee, I love this dance. What's your name?'

  She sighed. 'Okay. My name's Gwendolina but everyone calls me Gabby.'

  'I don't wonder,' said Bruce.

  She grimaced, then laughed. 'I'm from St Pete's, Florida, and the lady you are about to hold in your arms is "my grandmother. You'll like her. Goodbye.'

  Bruce found himself pushed along the line by the eager Ossie, who grinned happily at the girl he now turned in his hold. 'I'm in steady employment,' he said, 'and my name's Ossie. I'm a lifesaver.'

  'I'm not drowning,' she said, disentangling his arms. 'Yet.'

  Bruce quickly broke out of sequence and slipped into the line again on the left side of Ossie, so that when the dancers moved up again he was facing the girl. 'It's me again,' he smiled winningly. 'I'm Bruce.'

  'I'm Bruce, fly me,' said the girl wryly.

  'Loose Bruce,' called Ossie sideways down the dance line. 'Ask him why he's called Loose Bruce. Go on, ask him.'

  'I'm six feet almost one inch, fair hair, brown eyes, friendly nature and alone.'

  'Alone? I wonder why that could be?' said Gabby.

  Ossie made a quick break from the line and pushed in before some old five foot fellow who was patiently looking forward to dancing with Gabby.

  'You're spoiling the dance,' he said sharply to Ossie.

  'Sorry. I'm not sure how to do this one. I'm just all confused,' said Ossie moving in on Gabby. He smiled his mature smile

  32

  at her. 'I save people from the ocean,' he said. 'All day.'

  'He gets ten dollars a time,' Bruce called up the line. 'He wants you to put your grandmother in the sea and he'll split it with you. He's all heart.'

  The dance stopped and everyone clapped, Bruce and Ossie louder than anyone. 'They spoiled it,' said the five foot man who had been looking forward to dancing with Gabby. 'They shouldn't be allowed in here.'

  Ossie smiled overwhelmingly at him and then at the puffy lady at his side. She blushed pink and, nagging, pulled the small man away. Gabby and her grandmother sat down and Ossie and Bruce sat on either side of them, Ossie triumphantly next to the girl. 'Why don't you join us,' suggested Gabby caustically.

  'Gabby,' said the old lady. 'Are these two trying to pick us up?'

  'I'm afraid so, grandma.'

  'Well I don't want to be picked up. I'm fancy free. My heart's my own.'

  A man with red bursting cheeks pranced to the centre of the floor and threw his arms wide. 'Ladies and gentlemen, nice people,' he beamed. 'Now we come to the time of the cabaret. You all like the cabaret, don't you?' There was a chorus of approval. 'Yes of course. Well tonight we have your old favourite, Lou the Barbender, the strongest man on Miami Beach. Also a lady who's just come down from Pittsburgh who can sing, and a gentleman who's real hot playing the zither.'

  The two young men watched almost mesmerized as a big woman in a blood-red dress rushed immediately on to the stage, pushed the compere violently to one side and flung herself into a hideous song with enormous and tuneless gusto. All around the people groaned and buried their heads in their hands; some shouted rudely at her to quit. But she appeared not to hear, went right through three verses and the terrible chorus, eyes closed, mouth wide, not caring for anyone or anything. She left the stage to a fusillade of catcalls and boos. The compere returned shakily. 'Thanks people, I just knew you would enjoy that,' he smiled.

  33

  'Mother Courage,' said Ossie. 'That's who she is. Mother Courage.'

  'They've all got guts,' put in Gabby turning to him. 'You need guts to survive down here.'

  'I figure they ought to do something,' said Bruce, anxious to talk with her. 'Not dancing or singing. Not made up things. Get me? Something they'd be a hundred per cent occupied with. You know?'

  'I don't know. But I see what you mean,' she said. 'Like building a dam or riding pony express.'

  'Something like that,' agreed Ossie.

  'My grandma searches for treasure with a metal detector,' said Gabby quite proudly.

  'I've seen her,' said Ossie. 'When she finds it I'm going to help her carry it home.'

  Lou the Barbender had now taken the centre of the floor. He lifted a ten pound weight with his little finger, a feat which brought excited gasps from the encircling ladies. He was red-faced in his tailed suit and every one of his shirt buttons had burst, but he looked formidable in an old-fashioned way.

  Bruce looked beyond the strong man to where the man they called Sidewalk Joe, the old New York gangster, sat like a well preserved dandy at the edge of the floor. Bruce turned and caught Ossie's eye. He briefly jerked his head sideways and the two young men stood up carefully and, with an excusing nod to Gabby and her grandmother, sidled their way through the audience to the deserted sandwich table. They both picked up leftover segments of bread and put them in their mouths.

  'I've got it,' said Bruce. 'It's beautiful.'

  'Okay,' said Ossie sceptically. 'What is it?'

  'Crime,' said Bruce seriously, biting into the rye bread. 'Organized crime.'

  34

  three

  Captain of Detectives Albert Salvatore drove over the Julia Tuttle Causeway from Miami Beach towards the City of Miami at eight o'clock on a shining Florida morning. His head told him that his police college reunion he had attended the previous night at a hotel on the beach had been a raucous experience. He had been obliged to telephone his wife Betty at midnight to report that he was in no condition to negotiate his passage home and had slept on an uncomfortable floor in a room in the hotel.

  The splendid but everyday crystal air and water of the region was all about him, with sail boats and power boats op the lagoons and the habitual Goodyear silver blimp in the sky. And had he been a reflective sort of man, which he was not, he might have given thought to Julia Tuttle after whom the concrete causeway on which he drove was named. Mrs Tuttle, an adventurous widow, had literally discovered Miami less than a century before when it was swamp and jungle and inhabited only by Seminoles. She had sailed down the Miami River with her family, a piano and a pair of Jersey cows and found herself in a region of such warm lushness that she sent a sprig of orange blossom to Henry Flagler the railroad builder in New York. By this he could see, on that cold January day in 1895, that Miami was without frost. So he built a railroad to the south and opened up the great vacation city.

  From the Julia Tuttle Causeway, Salvatore could look over silvery lagoons to both north and south, joining the long peninsular of Miami Beach and the island of Key Biscayne to the city of Miami. Further north the lagoons thinned to become the amazing and little known Intra-Coastal Waterway, a canal running almost the whole length of the eastern seaboard of the United States. In winter, using lakes and rivers and the canal itself, small boats from as far north as Canada could voyage to Florida and into the Caribbean without once having to risk the open sea. From the point where the wide lagoons bottlenecked into the slim canal the banks were joined by a

  35

  series of cantilever bridges, opening at their centre to allow the passage of larger craft. There were ten of those mechanical bridges between Hollywood Beach at the northern extreme of Miami Beach proper to West Palm Beach several miles further up the coast. They crossed the Intra-Coastal Waterway at Hollywood, where there were two bridges, Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Boca Raton, Delray Beach, Lake Worth, Palm Beach and West Palm Beach
. Each bridge carried above it a highway connecting Route A95 and the Florida Turnpike with the beach resorts. That morning Captain Albert Salvatore had, perhaps fortunately, no inkling of the drama and frustration these cantilever bridges were to cause him in his pursuit of the most unusual gang of criminals Florida, probably even the entire United States, had ever known.

  He was not, and this he admitted even to himself, the most spectacular of police officers, nor did he look it. He was slightly undersized, but slim enough, with a worried face that continued its habitual frown right up to the summit of his head via a channel naked of hair. He found this embarrassing and his wife Betty blamed it on his scratching his head when puzzled or frustrated, which was frequently. On special occasions he tried to conceal this channel by combing the hair from its sides over the exposed skin. His children had been heard to refer to him as 'Old River Head' and this had frightened and annoyed him. He was running out of people whom he could love and who loved him in return.

  Crime in greater Miami contained a high element of misdemeanours which the police officially referred to as 'self-adjusting'. This included various feuds within the Miami branch of the Mafia or between the Mafia and other organizations whose members appeared in the area on spring vacations as regularly as the big league baseball teams who came there to tune up for the new season. These crimes, while they had to be investigated, could generally be relied upon to look after themselves, vengeance and sometimes even justice being delivered within the framework of the secret society itself. The same went for political crimes, a bomb explosion or a shooting, among the many Cubans who had settled in Florida following

  36

  the coming to power of Fidel Castro in Havana. The various factions within the tempestuous Cuban community occasionally took primitive revenge on each other. But the Cuban eye for the Cuban eye was the same as the Mafia tooth for the Mafia tooth. All that remained for the police to do was to take photographs and police notes.

  There was a third area of self-righting crime, the hot-weather misdemeanour of passion, usually domestic, which required no great effort either to solve or to bring to justice. These three types of activity took up a fair part of Salvatore's professional life and he could handle them. Handle them with such ease, in fact, that the recent intrusion of a man called George Zaharran, a retired policeman, into his working hours, a minor thing in itself, had become a major intrusion and irritant.

  He guessed that Zaharran would turn up somewhere that morning because it was Monday and he had become a habit on Monday. Salvatore owed him professional favours from the distant past but he found it difficult to find the opportunity, or the inclination, to repay them now. Zaharran was elderly, fat and almost immovable. He had set himself up as a private investigator, or a criminalistic inquirer and investigator, as he preferred to be known, had, over two or three years, achieved a series of almost spectacular failures and was now begging for work.

  Zaharran, in fact, did not appear until after eleven that morning - thus lulling Salvatore into false complacency - and then it was in the coffee shop where the police detective went for a twenty minute break from his office.

  It was all but impossible for Zaharran to conceal himself anywhere, this added to an enormous slowness of movement being one of his prime failure factors, and even though he contrived to sit shadowed by a large and dusty indoor plant in the coffee shop, Salvatore immediately spotted him. But it was too late to escape. Zaharran emerged.

  He was like a brown elephant, wearing fawn shirt and trousers, lumbering forward, small-eyed, large-limbed, fat-bodied, with a look of pleasured astonishment on his worn

  37

  face. 'But Captain Salvatore ... what a break ... I just didn't know you numbered among the clientele of this place! May I buy you a cup of coffee?'

  Salvatore sighed. 'Jesus Harry Christ,' he said. 'You know I come in here, Zaharran. Every goddamn day I come in here. And now you're in here also. You bother me at my office and you bother me now when I'm taking a private cup of coffee. Why not come to my home maybe?'

  'My cover's blown,' sighed Zaharran sitting heavily on the stool next to the policeman.

  'Like it always was,' returned Salvatore unkindly.

  'In the early days I was good,' said Zaharran, more in reminiscence than protest. 'You got to give me that. I helped you a lot then. Remember the case at Key Biscayne - the big house robbery? And the kidnapped kid at Pompano ... ?'

  'Okay, okay. But that's gone. You're retired, Zaharran. Why don't you be like other retired guys and retire?'

  'If I gave up the work of detection I would just go to pieces,' said Zaharran illogically. Salvatore stared at the human wreck beside him. He melted sufficiently to order a second cup of coffee which he passed to Zaharran.

  'Coffee,' beamed Zaharran, his face a movement of creases. 'Now you buy me coffee. You're seeing things my way.'

  'I don't,' said Salvatore bluntly. 'You're retired and that's retired. If you want to go on investigating then get your own cases.' He tried logic. 'Listen, we got trained cops, plenty of trained cops. How can I pass on even a crumb to you? How can I? How can I justify the cost?'

  Zaharran felt about his fawn pockets and produced a bent business card. It said: 'George Zaharran, Criminalistic Inquirer and Investigator. Formerly of the Police.' 'Here,' he said as if making a donation. 'Take this with you, captain.'

  'Jesus Lionel Christ,' sighed Salvatore. 'I have plenty of these already. I got a whole drawer full of them.' He held the battered card between two fingers. 'And they don't get any cleaner either. I guess the Sanitation Department might have a case against you Zaharran, handing out dirty cards like this.'

  'Let them try,' shrugged Zaharran. 'I'd sue them for violation of civil rights. Violation of the rights of the elderly, the poor

  38

  and the needy.' He looked thoughtful. 'Maybe I could sue you for that, Salvatore, or the police department. Violation of the rights of the elderly, the poor and the needy.'

  'We do it all the time,' said Salvatore unimpressed. 'It's no good violating the rights of the big people is it? You can't win.'

  He finished his coffee and rose. 'Got to go,' he said. 'Lots to be done.'

  'Wish I could help,' said Zaharran sadly. 'I miss it like hell, you know. Maybe some small routine cases. Missing children, stray dogs ...'

  'We have all the personnel we need. You should concentrate on divorce, Zaharran, like most private investigators do. That pays.'

  Zaharran made a worse face than he had. 'No dice,' he said. 'I always fall out of trees and I'm too big to get under a bed. I know, I've tried.' He leaned forward with last minute urgency and fumbled again in his gaping pocket. He produced a small sheaf of business cards encircled with an elastic band. He separated them hurriedly and handed them one by one to the reluctant Salvatore.

  'Zaharran Real Estate,' said the first card. 'Zaharran Paper Novelties' said another. 'Zaharran Mailed Astrology' said a third. And as an additional reminder, 'George Zaharran, Criminalistic Inquirer and Investigator. Formerly of the Police* said the fourth.

  Salvatore sighed and took the cards. 'If you should ever feel yourself in requirement of any of those services,' prompted Zaharran, 'do not hesitate to call me. I can recommend the mailed astrology personally.'

  Nothing was going to stop Salvatore leaving now. He reached the sunshine of the door. Zaharran called after him: 'The businesses are for sale too ... Five thousand ... a thousand dollars the lot ...'

  But the policeman had gone. Zaharran gathered himself together, asked the man behind the counter if he wanted any paper novelties. He did not. So Zaharran himself lumbered out into the sad eternal sunshine.

  The potent aroma of lokshen pudding hung over South Miami Beach. It drifted from the kitchens of the compressed hotels and out on to the dry sidewalks of Ocean Drive, Washington Avenue and the short streets between them. In Flamingo Park it loitered about the trees in the late sunshine, it wafted to the windows of The Four Seasons Nursi
ng Home, it triumphed even in competition with the Latin smells that issued from the Cuban eating places. It was a balm and a reassurance to the thousands of Jewish people in the twilight streets. While there was lokshen pudding there was hope.

  'Jeez, that Jerusalem smell gets everywhere,' protested Ari the Greek sitting under the Tree of Knowledge in Flamingo Park. He did not know why it was called the Tree of Knowledge, it was just that it had a notice to that effect and Ari, in general, believed what notices said. Also, it seemed appropriate to him that an outnumbered Greek should sit beneath its boughs.

  'It's bad enough being a fit kinda guy down here,' he confided to Bruce who sat one side of him. Ossie sat on the other considering him quizzically. I mean the ladies, they outnumber the guys by plenty to one. So they bother you. "Can I do anything for you Ari?" "Gee Ari, you sure look young and healthy." "Don't you get lonely Ari?" The shit that's circulated in these parts, you would not believe. When a guy's on his feet and breathing down here, he's in trouble, just believe Ari. And get the smell of that pudding.'

  'We thought up an idea,' said Bruce getting in while Ari took a breath.

  'Yeah, an idea for business,' said Ossie. Ossie had been fired that day as a beach guard. They said he wasn't working hard enough. There were not enough rescues on the books. He had an idea they were looking for an excuse to get rid of him.

  'Business!' exclaimed Ari. 'Business! Listen kid, let me tell you about business. Don't tell me. And especially business in these parts and this locality.'

  'We had an idea ...' restarted Bruce hopefully.

  'Teeth,' said Ari with conviction. 'Now teeth are good business. Have you just seen the teeth they sell around here? Jeez, but an alligator couldn't accommodate some of the teeth they

  40

  sell in these parts. Just you see how many folks are about South Miami with their faces all screwed up. That's the teeth they've got. Get good teeth and you've got good business. And taking blood pressure. Now there's a good business. You don't need no stock, no capital. All you have is a Band Aid and a pump and you charge a buck a time to tell people they're still alive. A buck to find you're still alive! And walking sticks! Now there's another racket. What you got to pay for a walking stick is robbery ...'