Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  “Everybody wants to give me a job—”

  Luciano laughed. “Don’t listen to Dewey, he’s a double-crosser.”

  “So what’s to keep him from double-crossing you on the parole?”

  “Because I’d let it out in detail how he came to me to get elected. No, don’t worry about Luciano. But remember, you can trust me to do what I say, you can’t trust Dewey at all. I’m an honorable man, that shitheel wants to be President … that says it all. Tommy Dewey in the White House.” He shook his head and laughed more loudly. “This is the moment of truth, Touchdown. You’re lookin’ right down the barrel of the rest of your life. You can go in the crapper with Bauman and Leary. Or you can grab the brass ring, go with Lucky and Dewey. That little squirt gets to be President, I’m gonna be King for sure. Think about it, Touchdown.”

  Cassidy nodded. “Okay, okay, I’ll think about it. But in the meantime, you haven’t said a word about what you want from me.”

  “You’re close to Leary, Leary’s in bed with Max. I want to know what Max is up to. I don’t care what it is, forged gasoline stamps, bribery, homemade twenties, war profiteering … Leary’s got to be in it, too. You find out. You can’t help but find out if you pay attention … and we’ll get back to you, Harry and this guy with the toothpick, we’ll be in touch. Simple.”

  “What if I don’t do it?”

  “Think of yourself as a spot. Think of me as the spot remover. Like I say, it’s simple.”

  He smiled at Cassidy as if he were genuinely pleased, finally at ease knee-deep in a murder threat.

  The snow had stopped falling but it was still blowing across the highway, blowing hard off the Hudson. Bert said he wanted to stop and get the chains put on before they slid off into the damn river. He pulled into a garage and café where the blowing snow hovered around the lights like swarms of gnats in the summertime. They went inside for coffee while the kid started in on the chains.

  Harry Madrid ordered three coffees. They sat in a booth by a window where a neon sign cast a red glow across their faces. They all took their hats off but left their overcoats on. Cassidy stared quietly into the last fading shreds of daylight. Headlamps poked nervously along the snowy highway. He was trying to make some sense of the day. The more he thought about it the less he liked it. He felt like a man being crammed into a very small cage. Every time he made a move he hurt himself.

  “So, Lucky, fuck you,” Harry Madrid whispered. “If that wasn’t the goddamnedest thing I ever did see. Jeez, Cassidy, you haven’t got the brains you were born with … so, Lucky, fuck you! If that don’t beat all …”

  “You’re lucky he was in a good mood,” Reagan observed.

  “What was he gonna do, shoot me?”

  “Oh, Lucky’s got ways,” Reagan said. “Remember the Normandie? Like he said, though, you’re okay with him. You can trust him. Like he said, Dewey’s a liar.”

  “Where does all this crap leave you guys?”

  “Up to our chins in crap,” Harry Madrid said, “as usual. But Bauman’s going down, any way you slice it.”

  “But why drag me into it?”

  “Because Max’s operation is real tight. We can’t get a guy inside. Max don’t trust many people. Terry, he trusts Terry—”

  “So go to Terry—”

  “For one thing, Luciano wants Terry, too. And Terry won’t bite the hand that feeds him.”

  “Give Luciano Max and he’d forget all about Terry.”

  “Lucky’s got a long memory,” Reagan said, shaking his head.

  “You guys think I’m going along with this?” Harry Madrid put a match to his pipe. “Yup, I think you will. If you don’t, you heard what the man said. One spot gets removed. And he still gets Terry. There’s no percentage in that, chum. It’s a mug’s bet. Who knows, you give Dewey and Luciano a hand here, Bauman goes inside, maybe you can deal for Terry’s ass.” He cupped his hand around the bowl of the little pipe and puffed mightily. “No other way, Lew. They’ve got you by the balls. And if Lucky blows you away, don’t think Dewey’ll give a shit. He won’t. He needs Lucky.” He shook his massive head. “Nobody blowin’ smoke your way today. Truth time, all day long.”

  The rear chains were starting to bang at the inside of the fenders and the wind was pushing the big Cadillac around the road like a toy. Up ahead the clouds had begun to blow away and the glow of the city had come into view.

  To pass the time Harry Madrid told Cassidy how Charlie Luciano had gotten his nickname. It was 1929. A smart Sicilian colleague of his called Salvatore Maranzano wanted Luciano to kill yet another Sicilian, a gang leader, Giuseppe Masseria. Maranzano set up a meeting at an empty warehouse on Staten Island.

  The thing was, Luciano was just as smart as Maranzano: He knew the Sicilian Mafia tradition that a man who killed a superior could not then immediately take his place. Luciano wanted to be top man in the Outfit and saw through Maranzano’s scheme to prevent his accession. He told Maranzano no dice.

  Before Luciano knew what was happening the warehouse was full of Maranzano’s boys intent on mayhem.

  They strung Luciano up against the wall and had at him with clubs and belts. They ground cigarette butts into his back. They took turns slicing his face with razors. Maybe now, Maranzano suggested, he’d reconsider and ice Masseria. But no, with what little strength Luciano had left, he said he didn’t think he would.

  They finally cut him down. He looked like a butcher’s mistake. They piled him into the back of a car and threw him out onto the road once they’d reached top speed. They figured the pavement would not only kill him but make such a mess of the corpse that nobody would notice the torture scars.

  The cops found the body later on. They didn’t think the poor bastard would live until they got him to the hospital but they gave it a try. It took fifty-five stitches to put just his face back together. And somehow he lived.

  Meyer Lansky came to visit him, asked how he felt.

  Luciano whispered through the bandages, “Lucky to be alive.”

  “Lucky,” Lansky marveled. “Lucky Luciano, that’s you.”

  And so it was.

  Chapter Five

  WINTER TURNED TO A COLD, wet spring. The snow melted and the ice was gone from Central Park and the Japanese hadn’t given up, which only went to show you that even doctors can be wrong. Insofar as Cassidy and Terry went, the doctors were doing fine. They both were slowly rounding back into something like their old form. Terry was thinking about testing his tender back by returning to work and Cassidy was getting used to maneuvering with his cane. The strength in his leg was hinting at a revival but it was going to be a long, slow process. He was still living at Terry’s and the days were long and quiet. Terry had turned off the flow of female admirers who’d gotten into the habit of dropping by. It was as if he needed solitude to think but he never brought up the subject of the people who were watching him. Cassidy wondered if just possibly he’d forgotten about it, but no, that wasn’t like Terry. What was happening was more like the celebrated “Phony War,” which had occupied Europe while Hitler had rested, waited. Cassidy and Terry were both waiting out an interlude, waiting for all hell to break loose again. There was too damn much time to think, so far as Cassidy was concerned. It was almost as if Tom Dewey and Lucky Luciano had appeared to him in a crazy dream. There was no word from Harry Madrid, nothing. He thought of Luciano, back at Dannemora, listening to The Romance of Helen Trent, thinking about settling the score with Max Bauman and Terry Leary. He wondered if Lucky was growing impatient. The prospect was not a comforting one.

  The failure of Harry Madrid to press him left Cassidy free to avoid facing the issue of Max and Terry. Nobody had asked him to produce information, so the dilemma remained at one remove. One thing he knew for sure: He couldn’t betray Terry. With luck, no one would force his hand. But what if he had to betray him to save him?

  He watched the papers for war news, read everything, and never missed the correspondents’ reports on the radi
o. All in the hope of finding something which might shed any light on what could be happening to Karin in Cologne. The bombing of Germany had so far ignored Cologne, thank God. It was a fruitless search and he knew it. But he kept looking. He didn’t know when he might stumble across some ray of hope, however faint. Some news. Anything. But there was nothing and he knew that was the best he could hope for. When Cologne made the papers, it was bound to be bad news. That was the only kind of news coming out of the fatherland these days.

  She was over there, that was all he knew. So he went to sleep every night thinking of her, praying that she was all right.

  But when he closed his eyes, it got worse. What he’d feared most, what he’d told himself could never happen, was beginning. It felt like a dreaded disease, long in remission, now beginning to run its course. He couldn’t see her as clearly anymore. The memory of her was doing the one thing he’d known, known, it could never do. It was beginning to fade. Very slowly, but it was fading. Only he knew it. When he spoke of her to Terry, the words were no different. He loved her as much as he ever had. That wasn’t the point. He loved her but time was stealing her away. With each day the worst thing happened, kept happening. Karin was slipping away from him. Every night he faced the darkness and the fact that love’s fire was dimming at last. It wasn’t lessening, only receding. He began to realize he was no longer in love with a woman. He was in love with an abstraction called Karin. A symbol … Karin just wasn’t real anymore. He didn’t know what to do about it. Maybe there wasn’t anything he could do.

  The Bataan Peninsula fell to the Japanese early in April. They took 36,000 prisoners. Cassidy figured the lucky ones had died in the fighting.

  The war news was bad and both Terry and Lew had begun to grow weary and restless with their isolation. Cassidy was confronted by too many frustrations. He’d decided he’d waited long enough on Harry Madrid: What did the silence mean? Had they decided to proceed against Bauman and Terry without him? That was the worst possibility because it would deprive him of the chance to keep Terry out of it. Cassidy didn’t care what happened to Max Bauman, not in the final instance, not if what he’d been told was true. But Terry … he had to keep Terry from going down aboard Max’s ship. To complicate the issue, if he told Terry what was going on, God only knew what Terry might do … One thing was sure. Terry couldn’t find out what was going on. It would be like lighting a stick of dynamite while you were locked in a closet.

  One evening Terry casually mentioned that it would be fun to throw a party announcing their return to the land of the living. Cassidy leaped on the idea. When contemplating the guest list, the name of Harry Madrid came up: Cassidy observed that Harry had certainly paid enough hospital visits to earn an invitation. Terry agreed, threw in the names of a couple other homicide dicks, including Bert Reagan, who invariably seemed to go where Harry Madrid went.

  Paul Cassidy was in town for the first time since the Louis-Nova fight the previous autumn. Terry made sure Max Bauman and Bennie the Brute were there. And Max made sure that Cindy Squires got a night off from Heliotrope. Charley Drew took a night away from the Tap at the Taft to come by and play the piano. Terry arranged for several highly decorative, unattached women to join the group. Paul Cassidy brought a couple of wandering screenwriters and a publicist who’d been working on the Jane Russell campaign which had made her one of America’s most famous stars, though no one had ever seen her act. It was the triumph of tits, according to Herman Redwine, the publicity man who’d introduced the special cantilevered brassiere, designed by Miss Russell’s patron, Howard Hughes, to the waiting world. “Those tits don’t have to act,” Redwine observed with the bemused confidence of a man who has seen the future and recognized it as tits. “They just sort of have to sit there and look alert. This brassiere will do it, believe me.” His shirt was too tight but the collar was too big and he talked with a smoke in his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot. Paul Cassidy said that between Hughes and Miss Russell’s breasts Herman Redwine was not the man he’d once been.

  There were thirty, maybe thirty-five people working their way through the White Horse and the Old Granddad and the ribs and all the chafing dishes full of stuff Terry had had sent over from Longchamps. Some of it was brown and tasted like chili. Some of it was yellow and tasted like lobster Newburg. It was all very festive. Cassidy tried not to think about Karin and the 36,000 guys on Bataan. Unfortunately, the first rank of alternatives—Harry Madrid, Tom Dewey, Lucky Luciano, and Max Bauman—was no great improvement.

  Harry Madrid came early but immediately attached himself to Terry near the bar, putting back bourbon neat, and embarked on cop stories. Harry’s face was getting red and Terry was laughing and two more cops joined the group and Cassidy stood watching them and wondering at all the camaraderie. Harry was quite an actor.

  Paul Cassidy had brought along a movie projector and the Robert Montgomery picture Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which he was getting ready to show in the master bedroom. Lew gave up watching Madrid buddying up with Terry and went with his second drink to the bedroom, where his father was threading the film. Paul winked at him, kept talking to the pretty women who had clustered around him, wondering just how big a deal he was when it came to getting you into the movies. Cassidy smiled, remembering how his late mother had always enjoyed watching her husband charming the hopeful ladies. He’d always been good at it but she’d known he was a one-woman man, producer or not. When she’d known she didn’t have much time left, she’d held her son’s hand and smiled past her pain and told him to grow up to be a man like his father and she’d know it, she’d look down and be proud of him. She told him to understand if his father ever fell in love again, because a person needed someone to share his good times and his bad times. She’d made him promise and he had, but Paul Cassidy had never fallen in love again. “I’m lucky, Lew,” he’d told him years later. “I’m in love now, see, son, I’ve always been in love with one woman and it’ll just be a while before I’m back with her. So don’t worry, kid. I’m fine.”

  Now he was telling the ladies about Hollywood’s idea of a wartime crisis. MGM may have had more stars than there were in heaven but they also had an Eleanor Powell musical called I’ll Take Manila and consternation had swept the executive suites.

  A pretty blonde batted her eyes and pouted: “What’s the big deal, vanilla, chocolate, or butter brickle?”

  Paul looked dolefully at his son. “Manila. In the Philippines, my child. Not vanilla as in Schrafft’s. See, Eleanor Powell isn’t going to take Manila anymore. The only people likely to take Manila now are the Japs,” and the blonde laughed like Billie Burke. She didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Maybe she hadn’t heard about the war.

  He told them that Gable had taken Lombard’s death very hard. He expected Gable to enlist any day now. Female eyes filled and shone moistly at the thought of a grieving Rhett Butler. Cassidy kept thinking of those poor bastards on Bataan. But Paul was doing all he could, salvaging the family honor. He was putting together another Bond Tour with a bunch of stars, Bogart and Tracy and Mary Astor and Loretta Young and a lot of others. Remember Pearl Harbor, that’s what everyone was saying.

  “Sorry to hear about the leg, Lew.”

  He turned around and saw a man wearing an officer’s uniform, perfectly tailored, a brown coat, and immaculately creased officer’s pinks with a wonderful break at the top of his gleaming cordovans. He was tall, thick, and filled the doorway. He was smoking a cigarette in a black holder and carrying a lowball glass. He was tight-mouthed but smiling with pale green eyes. His name was Bryce Huntoon. He’d been a Harvard fullback when Cassidy was in his last year at Deerfield. He’d tried to model his running style on Huntoon’s. Lots of stiff-arming. Cassidy hadn’t seen him more than a few times in the past five years but he made the society columns from time to time. Part-time ladies’ man, a full-time hotshot Wall Street lawyer.

  “Occupational hazard, Bryce. That’s what I get from running around with a footbal
l. Glad you could come. What the hell kind of getup is that?”

  “Oh, this,” Huntoon said, shaking his head of wavy hair. “I don’t like wearing this, it makes me feel like I’m fighting the war, or trying to look like someone who is, and I’m not.” He was a stuffed shirt but not a bad guy. The cigarette holder was a little much, though. “False pretenses. But I’m a soldier for the duration, officially anyway. They insist I wear this monkey suit—”

  “They give you a gun?”

  “Are you kidding? No, no gun. No basic training either, thank God. I’m in the army but mainly I sit at a desk doing what I do best. Shuffling papers. What I’ve always done. Contracts for war material. Right now I’m working with Mr. Bauman. Scrap metal, trucking … everybody’s got to pitch in these days.”

  They walked back toward the music. The living room was crowded and smoky. Charley Drew was playing “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.”

  “What’s your rank, Bryce?”

  “Colonel. Don’t ask me why—”

  “Uniform make you lucky with the ladies?” Terry asked the question, smiling, surveying the party with satisfaction.

  “Terry, old man, I’m always lucky with the ladies, hadn’t you heard?”

  “Well, good luck tonight,” Terry said. He went off to greet Max Bauman, Bennie the Brute and Cindy Squires. Their coats were wet with rain.

  “Why, there’s Mr. Bauman now,” Huntoon said. “Who’s that with him?”

  “The gentleman who would blot out the moon, were there a moon, is known as Bennie the Brute—”

  “No, no, the girl. The frail, as Terry used to say.”