Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  “Are you serious, Harry?”

  “You know me, keed. I’m not much of one for laughs.” He punched Cassidy’s arm softly. “Come on, put your coat on.”

  “You guys kidnaping cripples these days? What if I’d rather stay home?”

  “Come on, Lew. Don’t be that way. Coupla guys want to talk to you. They’re friendlies, ain’t that right, Bert?”

  “Sure they are. A little fresh air can’t hurt, Lew.”

  “I don’t think you guys are so friendly. I think I’ll stay here—”

  Suddenly Harry Madrid had moved in close, fast like big men can be, and Cassidy felt a vise closing on his arm. Harry Madrid had always been a cop who was good at the heavy work. Now he had Cassidy’s arm pinned and twisted up tight and he was grinning like a Dutch uncle. “Don’t fuck with me, Lew. Never, ever fuck with Harry Madrid.” One jerk and the arm would snap like a twig. “I’ll never fight fair if dirty will do. You got that?” The grin was stretched tight across large worn teeth. At just that moment he looked like something that fed itself by gnawing on carcasses. “You gonna come with us, Lew?”

  Cassidy chuckled and shook his head like Bogart in the movies. “Two bashful suitors. What a pair. Sure, sure, I’ll come. But you gotta give me my arm back, Harry.”

  They all stood around and laughed like idiots stalling for time while Madrid handed Cassidy’s stick to Reagan and held his chesterfield for him. “Didn’t know Brooks made coats like this so big,” Madrid said.

  “They make ’em for big rich guys—”

  “Then what are you doin’ in one, Lew?” Madrid laughed.

  “You’re a mighty amusing guy, you put your mind to it.”

  “That’s what the missus says.” In the elevator Madrid said, “You’re gonna enjoy this, Lew. You’d never guess who wants to talk to you. Never.”

  “You can say that again,” Reagan said, making huge wet footprints across the lobby carpet. The doorman nodded to Cassidy. The toothpick was gone from Bert Reagan’s mouth. Cassidy wondered where in the world it had gone.

  The Cadillac limousine was black and shiny, like a mammoth beetle in the fresh snowfall. It looked as if it had been built on a hearse chassis and there were heavy curtains on the rear windows. Reagan squeezed his plaid bulk behind the wheel. Harry Madrid held the rear door while Cassidy gingerly climbed into the spacious backseat. The jumps were folded away. Madrid settled in beside him and lit the little pipe again, filling the compartment with cherry-scented smoke. There was little traffic and the snow blotted out all the normal sounds of the city.

  “Where does Reagan think he’s going?”

  “Just down the street. Nothing complicated. Don’t worry, the horse knows the way.” Madrid chuckled, smoke trickling from his nostrils, dragonlike. He pushed the curtain away from his view. “I was a kid, there were horse and buggies on Park Avenue. Now we’re driving around in a goddamn room. Tell me it’s progress, Lew.” He puffed reflectively, looking at the Christmas-card scene outside. Remembering his childhood. He wasn’t the kind of man who could ever have had a childhood. The thought of Harry Madrid in knee pants, with a mother and father on a buggy ride, took Cassidy by surprise. He’d never thought of Madrid as, strictly speaking, a human being. He was an old-time cop. “Times change, Lew. Now I’m thinking about retiring, few years down the road, go someplace upstate. My wife’s people, y’know. Small-town people. Honest, hard workers.”

  “Can’t picture you in a small town, Harry.”

  “I could be sheriff, some one-horse, jerkwater place. It’s a thought, ain’t it? Harry Madrid, Sheriff. Die with my boots on. I knew Bat Masterson when he came to New York, after all the Dodge City stuff. Newspaperman he was. He told me the frontier was gone, it was all over. I says, ‘Bat, you’re wrong, you’re all wet. I been on the frontier all my life.’ He looks at me kinda slow, says I don’t know what I’m taking about. I says, ‘New York’s the frontier, the original frontier town, always was, always will be, as long as this country lasts.’ He thought about it, then he nods and says maybe I was right, come to think of it. Well, Lew, I’ve been on the frontier so long I’m beginnin’ to feel like the Marshal of Abilene.” He coughed and wheezed, laughter rambling.

  Reagan slid the car to a quivering stop at the private entrance of the Waldorf Towers, around the corner from the main Park Avenue entrance. A man who carried enough gold braid to be in command of a fleet or two somewhere opened the door and they all got out, sucking up the bracing fresh air. Harry Madrid spoke to the doorman. Then they went inside and took an elevator almost to the top, the domain, so far as Cassidy knew, of movie stars, titans of industry, and big-time politicians.

  “Bet you never been up here before,” Reagan said.

  “Well, you’d lose,” Cassidy said.

  “When?” Reagan sounded doubtful.

  “Reception for Lindbergh. Somebody figured we’d get along.”

  “Lucky Lindy?” Reagan’s mouth was open.

  “Himself. And his wife. She’s a looker, Bert. Little dark thing.”

  “Yeah, I heard she’s a pip.”

  Cassidy waited while Harry Madrid knocked. Today it wasn’t going to be Charles Lindbergh. But who the hell was behind that door?

  Tom Dewey was standing alone by the window watching the snow swirling down onto Grand Central Station. He must have been one of the two or three most instantly recognizable men in New York. You couldn’t miss on La Guardia, for one, and DiMaggio, and then there was Tom Dewey, who really did, as he turned around, look like the groom on top of a wedding cake. The aide who ushered them in faded away into the shadowy reaches of the antique-appointed living room and Dewey came toward them with the famous thick black moustache twitching in a convivial politician’s smile. “Mr. Cassidy,” he boomed, the deep rolling voice not at all what you’d expect from a wedding-cake decoration with a Groucho Marx upper lip, “I’m Tom Dewey. I’m mighty glad you could stop by this morning. Come on over here, I’ve got some breakfast for us.” He gave Cassidy a terrifically manly handshake and led them back to a table set for four. “Please, everyone, take a pew, please.”

  Cassidy sat down and, while Dewey busied himself with silver chafing dishes of eggs and ham and pitchers of orange juice and coffeepots, he wondered what Dewey could want with him. He knew what everyone knew about Tom Dewey. Five or six years before, he’d put aside a successful law practice and become special prosecutor in the campaign against big-time, organized crime. He was suddenly turned into a crusader for all that was right and good and a man to watch politically. He brushed off all the gangland death threats, threw himself into the fight against the mobsters. And became a public hero. Now he was a clean-cut and fresh-faced thirty-nine and his name kept coming up when people talked about a Republican to run against FDR in 1944. He wasn’t very big but Cassidy sensed the presence, what his father would have called star quality. He looked fit but not quite real. It was that moustache. It looked like you could reach over and knock it into his orange juice. But he was stuck with it. It was his trademark.

  “Dig in, boys,” he said, dishing up eggs and ham and pushing the toast rack across white linen deep as the snow outside. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. Cassidy. I’m a great fan of yours. You had quite a season—I was there the day you hurt your leg.” He brushed a bit of egg from the moustache. “Pearl Harbor. I guess that day will live in infamy for you in more ways than one. How’s your recovery progressing?”

  Cassidy nodded, swallowing ham. It was a good breakfast. “I’m all right. Takes a long time for this kind of thing to heal.”

  “I’ve read that your football days are over. Is that true?”

  “So they tell me.” He sipped hot coffee. Madrid and Reagan were eating like two men afraid they’d never see another egg.

  “Tell me, what are your plans? Career-wise, I mean.” Dewey crunched on a piece of toast and left a little fleck of butter in the moustache. Cassidy tried not to look at it.

  “I haven’t
really thought about it. Something’s bound to turn up.” He shrugged. He was wearing a black and white herringbone jacket and a white shirt open at the neck. He had an eighteen-inch neck so he didn’t wear a tie all that much.

  “Well, I wish you’d keep me in mind before you make any commitments elsewhere. I’m going to need some good men from now on, solid men I can depend on absolutely. You may have heard about my possible future in politics.” He smiled. He was all confidence, wore it as comfortably as the blue pinstriped suit. He didn’t care if Cassidy was a straight-ticket Democrat because he’d sized up the football star and decided he was smart, a man who knew the main chance when he saw it. All that came through in the smile. Tom Dewey knew he was the main chance. Cassidy figured it wasn’t worth arguing about. “Well, what you heard is not idle speculation. I’m going to be the next governor of New York—please, just remember that, Mr. Cassidy—and I have the feeling you’re my kind of people.”

  “I heard you wanted to be President,” Cassidy said.

  “One step at a time,” Dewey said. “I appreciate your candor. You are my kind of people.”

  “Is that why we’re all having breakfast together? Maybe Harry and Bert could deliver campaign posters …”

  Dewey didn’t miss a beat. He laughed, turned the big smile with the black roof on Madrid and Reagan, who stopped eating long enough to roll on their backs with paws in the air. Dewey’s laugh shattered all the glass in the room and when the echoes rolled away he sat staring at Cassidy until the smile was gone, too.

  “You may recall that I made something of a name for myself a few years back, Tom Dewey the Racket Buster.” The way he said it made you think you might as well go back to Venus if you hadn’t heard. “Now I’m back in private practice—”

  “Where the publicity’s harder to come by,” Cassidy observed. “You put what’s his name, Luciano, away, right?”

  Dewey nodded. “For good, I might add. Judge McCook gave him fifty years. Yes, you see I found his Achilles’ heel—prostitution—and I got him on it. Think of it, fifty years, that’s the same as life, and half a century in Dannemora is half a century of very hard time, indeed. It’ll be 1985 by the time Lucky gets out and by then”—he spread his hands—“neither he nor anyone else will care. Have you ever had cause to visit the facility at Dannemora, Lew?”

  “I’m delighted to tell you I haven’t, Tom.”

  “It’s an unhappy spot. In winter it’s colder than a well-digger’s heinie, the northern walls are coated with ice. In summer it’s an oven. The cons up there call it Siberia. And I put Luciano in for the rest of his life.” The thought perked up his appetite and he dug back into the eggs and ham.

  “That’s great, Tom. Hell of a job you did.” Cassidy pushed his plate away. Bert Reagan, by the sound of it, was still in mid-meal. Madrid was fiddling with his pipe. “But I don’t quite see what all this has to do with me.”

  Dewey looked up, eyes wide, as if surprised that he hadn’t gotten down to brass tacks yet. He covered his mouth with a heavy napkin and came out smiling. “Ah! Why you’re here! Well … because I’m not done with the gangsters yet, that’s why. There’s work that remains to be done before I rest.” His face was very firm and serious now. He’d leaned back and crossed his legs and folded his arms across his chest. He was carefully modulating his voice, keeping it just short of the whine of religious zealotry. He wasn’t selling The Watchtower. He was a man who wanted to be President with Albany a station on the line. “What I did to Luciano,” he intoned, wagging a forefinger to let you know he damn well meant it, “I am going to do to … Max Bauman!” He blinked beneath eyebrows that made a set with his moustache. “Max … Bauman.” He stood up and paced once around the three men at the breakfast table, his hands behind his back, and went to stand by the windows. He looked out into the blowing snow as if seeking inspiration, then turned back to face them. “Max Bauman is a very wicked man. Did you know that, Lew?”

  “Well, no, I wouldn’t call Max wicked, exactly. I think of Max as having a checkered past. No worse than lots of others. Anyway, I’ve been told all of that was a long time ago.” Cassidy shrugged. He didn’t know what he was talking about and he was beginning to resent Dewey’s having led him down the path to a defense of Bauman.

  “Well, you’ve been misinformed, Lew. Don’t tell me, let me guess. Bauman’s character witness has been Terry Leary—am I right?”

  “That’s right. Terry’s known Max a long time.”

  “Indeed he has. You could hardly call him an entirely unbiased source, Lew, that’s the problem.”

  “You want me to believe you’re an unbiased source, Tom?”

  “Let me tell you about Max Bauman. I’ll make it brief.” He looked at his watch and shot his cuffs, showing onyx links and an inch and a half of starched cotton. “This is a story about four men, young immigrants, who came to New York, grew up in the streets of the ghetto. Charlie Luciana, who changed his name to Luciano because the other way sounded effeminate to him. His parents came from a village called Lercara Friddi in Sicily. Benjamin Siegel, whose family came from Kiev. Maier Sucholjansky from Grodno, Poland. Max Bauman from the Warsaw ghetto. An Italian and three young men of the Jewish persuasion. Contemporaries, more or less. They picked pockets together as boys; they were drawn together by their poverty, by their lack of good English, by their determination to conquer this new, hostile country of theirs. Early on they discovered that with money they could control their destinies, make this new land their home. Charlie Luciano had a Sicilian proverb he used to recite to them. Cu avini dinari e amicizia teni la giustizia. He who has money and friends has justice as well.”

  Dewey came back to the table and poured himself a cup of coffee, then refilled Cassidy’s cup. He went back to the window, sipped from his cup, brushed his moustache with a knuckle, and went on.

  “These four lads robbed individuals on a door-to-door basis, graduated to banks and jewelry stores, then developed protection rackets for restaurants, shopkeepers, bookies. They were just hitting their stride when the Volstead Act broadened the scope of their activities. With alcoholic beverages prohibited, our four—along with the other gangsters big and small—began to supply a very thirsty populace. They smuggled whiskey from Scotland, rye from Canada, rum from Nassau, and they ran gunboats to protect their shipments, but still they couldn’t begin to meet the demand. So they began taking over warehouses here in the States to distill and bottle their own stock. But there was a problem—the gangs spent as much time fighting over territories and slaughtering each other as they did selling the stuff. Luciano had the answer … combine the gangs into one vast interlocking organization. Luciano told them the truth—the bigger the operation, the larger the profits. He called a meeting of the gangs in Chicago, taking his three Jewish lieutenants with him, and he laid out his plan. Well, it went over big; they decided to divide the country into territories. Thus, organized crime was born. They decided to resurrect an all but forgotten name for themselves, in honor of Luciano. Unione Siciliano. Funny thing was, Lucky never called it that—he used his own name for it … the Outfit.”

  Dewey paused to gauge the interest of his audience and found it pleasing. “Now they were into very big business, indeed,” he said. “Twenty, maybe thirty million dollars a month. Alcohol, gambling, extortion, murder, bribery, prostitution, drugs, you name it. I don’t know, maybe it was fifty million a month. Maybe there was no way to count it. Luciano was the man at the top. Maier Sucholjansky was in control of financial matters. By now his name was Meyer Lansky. Benjamin Siegel was an enforcer with a reputation for what we might call an artistic temperament … which had earned him a nickname. He was ‘bughouse’ as they say, nuts. Bugsy Siegel. And Max Bauman was still Max Bauman and his special areas of concentration were prostitution and drugs. And bribery—Max usually had access to a million dollars in used, small-denomination bills to pay off the cops, the lawyers, the judges, the jury foremen. Max also had a reputation as an enforcer; they
called him a backshooter—you never let him get behind you, that was the point.” Thomas Dewey sighed and looked at his watch again. “Which pretty well brings us up to the present, Lew. Except now that Lucky’s in Dannemora, Max has more of the show to himself. The war has been a godsend to Max Bauman. They say he’s now in control of a thousand gas stations, Maine to Texas … and he’s forging gasoline rationing stamps—that alone could make all this other stuff look like small change. And that, Lew, is why I’m going to get Max Bauman. I’m going to put him away for forever and a day, Lew … believe it!”

  Dewey snapped the politician’s smile back into place, erasing the crusader in an instant, and grabbed Cassidy’s hand, shaking it sincerely once again. “Lew, may I say it’s damn good to have you on our team? Well, it is. I know how it must frustrate you, having that bum leg when you could otherwise be in uniform, fighting for your country. But”—he raised a forefinger and tapped Cassidy’s chest—“nothing you could do on some hellhole in the Pacific could do more good for this old country of ours than helping to put Max Bauman where he belongs—”

  “Wait a minute, Tom,” Cassidy interrupted. “Maybe I’m a little slow on the uptake here but I don’t know what you think I’m going to do to help you … Have I missed something?”

  “Lew, I’d love to stay and chat,” Dewey said, “but I’m already running late. Harry and Bert have got another man they’d like you to see, then everything will be explained.” His aide had appeared from the other room and was holding Dewey’s overcoat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—have some more coffee, whatever you like. Harry, Bert, good of you to lend a hand.” He was almost to the door when he turned back. “I almost forgot, Lew. Bauman’s latest enterprise. You’ve read about the Normandie? It was sabotage. The Nazis right here in New York, on our docks. You know who did it for them? Your pal Max Bauman.”