by Michael Mayo
Ellis asked if I knew him.
“Maybe, but he’s not a regular if that’s what you’re asking. Hell, I really can’t tell anything from these. He just looks dead.”
“He was carrying an Illinois driver’s license issued to John Zenger. Looks phony.”
“What happened to him?”
Ellis shrugged. “Looks like he was too close to his bomb when it went off. His coat’s burnt on the back, and he had two short sticks of dynamite on him. Has Fat Joe thrown out any anarchists this week?”
He sucked hard on his smoke and frowned at the photographs, and it came to me that Ellis was stuck between what he wanted to do and what he had to do.
Being ambitious and not too concerned about strict legality, he wanted to put the touch on me for the licenses and such before I either decided to go it alone or to sell the place. But being a detective, he couldn’t have unexplained bodies lying around in the street, and if I happened to know anything about the matter, then he had another reason to make nice.
So I said, “Look, whatever’s going on here, if you come up with anything that has to do with my place, I want to know about it first, OK?”
He agreed. We finished our gin and left.
Back on the street, Ellis hailed a cab. I told him that I thought we could maybe do business if he didn’t try to screw me over on his end, but I’d still have to think about it because I didn’t really know what I was going to do. And that was the truth.
He headed uptown in his cab, and I hadn’t taken five steps when a kid stepped up in front of me and blocked my way. He was dressed in work clothes, a lot like the guy who’d followed me. Collarless shirt buttoned up to his neck, thin coat, cap tilted at an angle, thumbs hooked in his suspenders.
The kid gave me a cocky look and said, “Are you Jimmy Quinn?”
I nodded and thought he was probably the same boy who’d tried to pick my pocket on the way over.
He said, “I’m supposed to tell you—” but his eyes went wide as he saw something behind me. It was so dramatic I thought he was playing with me, but he spun around and bolted down the street. I looked over my shoulder and damn near jumped out of my skin. Standing right behind me was an old woman in black giving me the evil eye as hard as she could. Her face was right up next to mine, and her breath was foul. She flicked her fingers at me, muttering something I couldn’t understand. I thought it was Italian. I knew she was cursing me and slipped my fingers into the knucks. She glared at me some more, then turned and stalked away.
It took me a few seconds to shake off the chill she gave me. I waved down a cab and thought that the night was getting off to a strange start. I didn’t know the half of it.
Chapter Three
It was around seven thirty when I got out of the cab and went back into the speak.
We had seventeen customers—fifteen regulars, and two strangers at the bar—a little light for a weekday night. A couple of Dutch Schultz’s guys were in a booth, and Mercer Weeks was at the bar. They had no reason to like each other. I didn’t know Dutch’s guys by name, but Weeks dropped by most evenings. Weeks worked for Jacob Weiss. In fact, he was Weiss’s muscle and right-hand man. Everybody knew that Jacob the Wise didn’t do anything until he talked it over with Weeks. Word was about that Dutch was trying to horn in on Jacob’s numbers racket. That was their business, as long as Weeks and Dutch’s guys didn’t try to fight it out in my place. Everybody was welcome at Jimmy’s—crooks, cops, citizens, as long as they didn’t start anything. No guns, no fights. I nodded to Weeks as I passed him, and he nodded back. He knew the rules and wouldn’t do anything. I wasn’t so sure about the guys in the booth, but decided that they were just a couple of mugs who didn’t know from doughnuts about any plans Dutch might have had, and they weren’t going to start any trouble.
I bought the place from Carl Spinoza in January, 1929. I can’t say that I really wanted to own a speakeasy, but I couldn’t continue doing what I had been doing. That was handling whatnot for A. R. and stealing trucks and cars for Meyer Lansky, as I mentioned. I also delivered booze for Lansky, Charlie Lucky, and Longy Zwillman over in Jersey.
The reason I couldn’t keep doing what I had been doing was because you needed two good legs for that kind of work. Eventually, somebody’s going to try to catch you, and you’ve got to be able to outrun him. But on the night that Rothstein got shot, in the autumn of 1928, I tore up my right knee. I’ve told the story before. It comes down to this. I was where I wasn’t supposed to be and got scared and ran away. I ran so fast and reckless that I fell and tore apart some tendons or ligaments inside my right knee.
After that night, I couldn’t take a step without a cane or a crutch. Eventually, my knee got stronger, and I got a brace to keep it from buckling beneath me, but my running days were over. As it happened, some associates and I had invested wisely in the 1919 World Series, so when I was forced to find a new line of work, I had the cash to buy Carl out. Spinoza’s was a fairly prosperous speak in midtown. Like a lot of places, it was easy to get to, but the booze was rotten. Carl would sell any kind of coffin varnish you could pour into a glass.
When I took over, that changed. I made a deal with Lansky to buy the good stuff directly from him, and Jimmy Quinn’s sold the best booze at premium prices. We did great business. Less than a year later, the stock market crashed. Since then, we’d been doing OK. Most months, I was covering my nut and making a little money—not as much as before the crash, but I turned a profit. Like most people, I felt I was damn lucky to have a way to make a living, and I figured that once things turned around, I’d be fine. But it sure as hell didn’t get any easier with more and more guys out of work and banks closing and the goddamn government about to force me to become an honest publican.
It always made me feel kind of classy to call myself a publican. Had to look it up the first time I saw it in a newspaper. It’s a guy who runs a public house where people can buy booze. Means some other things too, but they don’t apply.
The speak was a couple of steps below street level. There was a restaurant upstairs, the Cruzon Grill. We had an arrangement with them. Actually, I sort of owned Cruzon, too. Back in the early days of Prohibition, Carl or somebody, I really don’t know who it was, made some adjustments to the cellar with hidden storage spaces and passageways that led out to vaults under nearby buildings, including a church. He kept a lot of his inventory there. You see, back then the cops and the feds actually raided speakeasies. It’s crazy, I know, but it happened, and so Carl or whoever stored stuff at different addresses, ones that wouldn’t be listed on a warrant, so they couldn’t seize the stuff. At least, that’s what I heard, and I know a lot of guys thought the same thing whether it was true or not.
It had been years since anything like that happened. I had an arrangement with the local cops and most of the feds. Fat Joe Beddoes somehow knew if strangers who tried to get in weren’t kosher, and kept them out. Maybe I lost some paying customers because of my bouncer, but we never got raided.
The speak had been tonied up since I took it over. Nothing elaborate, just new carpeting, wallpaper, plumbing in the bathrooms, tin ceiling, and we cleaned the picture of the naked lady behind the bar. We even put in a little dance floor, and if we ever got around to booking any musicians, maybe somebody would dance.
Connie Nix and Marie Therese were behind the bar whispering to each other and giving me cool disapproving looks.
I took my table at the back. Connie brought me a cup of coffee and the evening papers. Then she handed me a card and said, as properly polite as she could be, that there was a gent at the bar who wanted to see me. It was a personal card, not a business card, and it read:JOHANN KLAPPROTT.
I rubbed my thumb over the engraving. Expensive stuff. I told her to send him over. She looked back and raised a hand.
The two strangers at the bar were watching us. One of them was a big scowling bald guy. The o
ther one picked up a short glass and made his way through the tables. He was a sleek but comfortably plump blond man who walked carefully and carried a Malacca cane he didn’t need. He wore calfskin gloves and a dark blue three-piece worsted with the faintest of red pinstripes. It fit well enough to have been made for him. His blood-red tie was tied into a tight walnut-sized knot tucked behind the high collar of his white shirt. He bowed slightly before he pulled out a chair and sat across from me.
His face was flushed, maybe from the cold, maybe from the drink, and he sat just as carefully as he walked, tugging his trousers to maintain a sharp crease when he crossed his legs. He was probably forty or so, with regular features, and he wore some kind of woody cologne.
“Thank you so much for seeing me, Mr. Quinn. I won’t take up too much of your time.”
He had a slight accent and pale gray eyes. He took out a brushed steel cigarette case but put it back when he noticed there wasn’t an ashtray on the table. If he’d asked, I’d have told him to go ahead and light up. I always did. That was good business, and it was just the way things were then. Thinking back on it, I believe Johann Klapprott was the only person who figured out how much I didn’t like cigarette smoke. He covered the odd moment by taking a sip of his drink and toasting me with it.
“I was surprised to see that you have Steinhäger,” he said. “Very few establishments in this part of the city even know what it is.”
“Everything we serve is the McCoy, straight off the boat. Don’t get much call for Steinhäger, but we try to have anything our customers want.” Steinhäger is German gin. Frenchy probably had to dust off the jug.
“Precisely, and that’s why I’ve come here this evening. Is there someplace where we could talk with more privacy?”
I said yeah and wondered what the hell he was getting at. I got my cane, and he followed me to the hall at the back and up the stairs to the office. I unlocked the door, snapped on the reading light, and sat behind the desk.
“Have a seat. I don’t have any Steinhäger here. I could order another from the bar or offer you Booth’s.”
“No, this is fine,” he said and sat on the chair facing the desk. He took out a leather-bound notebook and a little mechanical pencil that fit inside it. When he opened it, I could see that he’d sketched a floor plan of the place. Front door, stairs, coat closet, bar, booths, tables. The lines were straight, and the proportions looked about right.
“I represent a party that is exploring the possibility of entering the hospitality business when the sale of alcohol once again becomes legal. This party is looking at several establishments, including yours, for purchase. Do you have any interest in selling?”
“Not particularly.”
“Would you entertain an offer? If not, I will not pursue the matter any further, but I assure you, my client is serious.”
“Sure, I’ll listen.”
He sat back and finished his gin with a long drink. He seemed to loosen up, but that was really just part of his pitch. The guy was a born salesman. “I am reluctant to reveal how much this party is willing to pay, but I can assure you it is an impressive figure. For the right establishment.”
“First off, who is this party?”
“Actually, it is a group of businessmen and investors, the Free Society of Teutonia.” He smiled and leaned back, and I noticed that he was wearing a silver lapel pin with a black cross, a swastika.
Now remember, this was the fall of 1932. Not to be flip about it, but I didn’t know from Nazis. I listened to the radio and read the papers, mostly the sports pages and the comics and the movie stuff and the local news. I knew the Nazis were in Germany, and I knew they had big rallies and they yelled a lot. That was about it. I’d seen some pictures of their flags and banners, but when I saw the symbol on Klapprott’s pin, the first thing I thought about was Larry Fay. He was a bootlegger and nightclub owner. He also had a fleet of taxis that everybody knew because they had loud crazy horns and lots of fancy nickel-plated gimcracks bolted to the bodywork. They also had swastikas painted on the door. Larry told me he thought they brought him good luck.
That night, I figured that maybe Fay was part of this Free Society or maybe they were trying to buy out some of his operations, too. If they were serious about getting into the business, that would have made sense.
“OK,” I said, “to give us something to talk about, since we’re just talking, right, why don’t you name a number? That way, we’ll know what we’re talking about, since we’re just talking.”
He smiled at my bushwa, but I think that by then, he knew what we were doing. Whether he did or not, he took out another of his engraved cards and wrote on the back of it with his little mechanical pencil.
He put the card face down on the table and slid it across to me.
Poker-faced, I picked it up. He’d written 35,000$ with the dollar sign at the end. It was more than I expected.
“OK,” I said. “That’s the number we’re talking about since we’re just talking. What now?”
“Do you wish to continue?”
I nodded.
“Could you give me an estimate of your monthly expenses and receipts?”
“Not without going over the books.”
“There will be time for that, I am sure. What is your relationship with the restaurant upstairs?”
“I own the building. Vittorio pays rent—not much—runs the Cruzon, sells wine and beer and drinks from our cellar. And he makes sandwiches for me.”
“So the two operations could be combined?”
“They already are, really.”
“I visited the restaurant earlier this evening and noted the dimensions. That leaves only the cellar. Would it be possible for me to examine it?”
“Sure.”
I picked up my cane and my keys, and we went back downstairs. As I was unlocking the door to the basement, Klapprott said, “One moment, please. I’d like my associate to see this.”
He made a curt gesture toward the bar. A few seconds later, the bald guy he’d been sitting with showed up. His associate was a mouth-breathing six-footer with heavy sloped shoulders, a cheap blue serge suit, and a bully’s happy eyes. He smelled of schnapps—a lot of schnapps.
He asked Klapprott a sharp question in German. The lawyer shook his head.
I told them to wait there until I got the lights. I took my time and made more noise with my stick than I needed to. I also shifted around some cases and boxes before I hit the switch, and they came downstairs. Klapprott started drawing in his little book while the big bald guy poked around.
The cellar had a low ceiling, bare brick walls, plank floor, and a pungent smell. It was a combination of that raw underground earthiness you get in an unfinished basement along with all the old beer and liquor that had spilled and soaked into the floorboards.
Eventually, Klapprott said, “It’s difficult to estimate in this light, but it appears that the cellar does not extend to the street.”
“No,” I lied. “It used to, but Carl Spinoza, who owned the place before I did, put in those shelves and walled off that part. But that was before my time. We don’t use it now. Hasn’t been open for years.”
The associate was extremely curious about the shelves on that wall. He kept talking to Klapprott in German. He looked over our beer and ice storage and the dumbwaiter that went up behind the bar, but he kept going back to that one wall of shelves.
I couldn’t understand the words they were saying, but I recognized the irritated tone of the associate’s questions, the slurred voice, and some angry jabber that didn’t sound like questions. Klapprott’s responses were short. He was telling the guy to shut up, and the guy wasn’t paying any attention. He was getting mad about something.
Finally, he came back and pointed at me and waved his hands around. He edged closer, still talking a mile a minute and looking at Klapprott. He
turned away, then swung back around fast, trying to sucker-punch me.
It figured that the big bastard was up to something, but I didn’t think he’d do anything like that without Klapprott’s OK. Judging by the lawyer’s surprised expression, he thought the same thing. But the big shit wasn’t as fast or as clever as he thought he was, or as sober as he needed to be.
I brought the cane up with my hands spread and blocked the blow. I jabbed with the hook end, aiming for his throat, but missed and crushed his nose. Blood spurted over his chin and stained his shirtfront. He staggered back and knocked over a case of Scotch. I wasn’t stopping until I was sure he’d stay down, so I changed my grip and went for his ribs. I swung hard as he twisted away, and I hit his side. Something crunched. It wasn’t my stick. He went down to his knees.
Then Klapprott pushed his way between us saying, “Please, Mr. Quinn, no more. I apologize most profusely. Please let me handle this, please.”
It took me a second to calm down. I was still jazzed, and I don’t think so good when I’m pissed off. A lot of big guys, particularly drunken big guys, think that they can just take a swing at a little guy and slam him around. Makes me mad every time.
Frenchy showed up at the top of the stairs. I told him everything was OK.
Klapprott turned to the big guy who was still on the floor. He knelt and held a pocket square to the bleeding nose.
After I’d calmed down, I said, “Now you can tell me what you really want in my cellar. And you can forget the song and dance about wanting to buy me out.”
“That is the truth, Mr. Quinn, I assure you.” He stood up and turned around to face me. “It is not the only reason we came here this evening, but an offer will be made, and it will be legitimate. I do not understand why Luther would act so unconscionably.”
His sincerity tugged at my heartstrings. “Sure. Now tell me why you were trying to break in this morning. Was that your guy with the bomb?”
“Really, Mr. Quinn, I can promise you that …” He stopped, and I could see the moment when the realization came to him. He whirled around and cuffed the big guy on the ear. He rattled off more German. I caught the word schisskopf. They went back and forth for a while, with the big guy sounding a little apologetic but still drunk and stupid.