Shamrock Alley

by Ronald Damien Malfi

  The ax came down, and Mickey broke out in another gale of laughter. Again, and he began to sober up and watch Jimmy work. Jimmy swung like a madman, his teeth gritted, his pale skin and cropped hair flecked with blood. Once he tired, he handed the blood-slicked ax to Mickey and told him to finish. “Keep going,” Jimmy told him, “until nothing’s left.”

  Blood spreads quickly on a concrete floor. Mickey got it under his shoes, in his hair, on his clothes. Yet he worked like a professional, his eyes never off his target, his hands blistering and muscles cramping but never slowing down.

  Once Green had been adequately dismembered, Mickey dropped the ax to the floor, walked past Jimmy, who sat smoking on an overturned plastic bucket, and vomited in the corner. Beside him, Jimmy didn’t say a word. And when he’d finished emptying his stomach, Mickey wiped his mouth with his sleeve, staggered over to Jimmy Kahn, and bummed a smoke from him.

  In the end, the only items they wound up keeping from Green’s car were the plates and negatives used to print counterfeit money. At first, they didn’t even know what they were exactly—they’d never gotten involved with the counterfeit racket before, and they had no knowledge of printing. But then it quickly dawned on them.

  “Keep ‘em,” Jimmy said.

  “For what? To sell?”

  “To hold onto,” Jimmy said.

  “How do these things work, anyway? Like … whattaya do?”

  Jimmy just shrugged. He was unrolling a length of plastic bags.

  “Why you think he had ‘em in his trunk?” Mickey asked.

  “What am I, his mother? The hell should I know? Here—help me wrap him up.”

  They didn’t find a use for the plates until roughly one month later, when Douglas Clifton, one of their sidekicks, appeared on the scene with some news.

  For some time, Clifton had been bleeding the bank account of some ritzy old broad from the Upper East Side. In only a short amount of time, Clifton had managed to work his way behind the wheel of the old woman’s car, and was given a key to the house, his own bedroom and closet (complete with wardrobe), and spending money.

  “How old is this broad?” Mickey had asked him once.

  With little interest, Clifton had said, “I don’t know. Maybe like sixty.”

  “Sixty? Jesus Christ, that’s like my grandmother! You gotta fuck that?”

  After some time, Clifton had gotten wind of an old shop-turned-storage warehouse in the Bowery the old woman owned. Swiping a set of keys, he headed down there one day to check the place out. It was like a museum of crap, but Clifton didn’t know shit from sugar cubes and figured Mickey and Jimmy might be interested in cleaning the place out and seeing what they could move. Mickey headed down to the warehouse with him one afternoon to take a look around. Unimpressed, he told Clifton there was nothing worth a dime in the place … and then he spotted the two printing presses, and the bent and rusted wheels in his head began turning.

  “What’re these?”

  “Beats me,” Clifton said.

  “They look like printing tables—presses—like where—you—”

  Clifton did not understand the importance of the presses until Jimmy Kahn took a trip to the warehouse with Mickey and, yes, they agreed they were printing presses. They explained to Clifton about the plates and the negatives, and about killing Horace Green. Clifton seemed both amused and chagrined by the story and, at one point, the gun used to shoot Green twice in the chest was stashed in the trunk of the Lincoln Towncar Clifton drove around in.

  Enter Harold Corcoran.

  Corcoran was a small-time hustler who, at one time, had been employed as a printer’s assistant for a printing press in the Bronx. When he found the time, and if the money was right, he would forge documents for some of the neighborhood crews. Over time, however, his predisposition toward cocaine and marijuana cost him that job and eventually landed him in a rehabilitation facility somewhere upstate. He served three months and was back on the street the same day of his release, getting his feet wet all over again.

  Having worked some paltry jobs in Hell’s Kitchen in the past, Corcoran had become friends with Jimmy Kahn, and Corcoran’s father had even known Jimmy’s parents. One October evening, Jimmy, along with a sharp-faced Greek named Moonie Curik and a nineteen-year-old runner named Gavin “Duster” O’Toole, drove out to Long Island to knock over a liquor store. There was a scuffle, and Jimmy shot the guy behind the counter twice in the face, killing him. It had been Harold Corcoran who’d holed Jimmy, Curik, and O’Toole up at his place in Long Island until everything had cooled down.

  Corcoran was a difficult guy to get in touch with. It took Jimmy a few days to track him down, but when he finally did, Corcoran nearly began salivating at the prospect of hooking into a counterfeit operation. When he requested to examine the printing presses, Jimmy and Mickey drove him out to the Bowery warehouse that same day. There, Corcoran looked the machines over and nodded once, impressed.

  “You can do this?” Jimmy said.

  “Sure,” Corcoran replied. “I mean, its gonna take some money to get things started—there’re supplies and everything—but you got the presses, the plates and negatives, and that’s the hardest part.”

  “How much money we talkin’?” Mickey wanted to know. He didn’t approve of laying out cash to guys like Harold Corcoran. He’d even been tempted to suggest he and Jimmy try and work the presses by themselves and screw everybody else. But Jimmy had been negotiating with the Italians for some time, and some of their business savvy had rubbed off on him. Whereas Mickey had always been a believer in the quick buck, Jimmy was actually beginning to organize things, set things up. It had been Jimmy’s idea to break into the unions, the clubs, the construction outfits as well. Jimmy Kahn had lofty aspirations.

  “I’ll have to figure it out,” Corcoran said. “There’s paper, ink …”

  “Figure it out,” Jimmy said, “then let us know.”

  Meanwhile, Jimmy busied himself with contacting potential buyers. His plans were to run off a couple million dollars and sell the money in lump sums to four or five different customers, who would in turn move it on their own. Both he and Mickey could get more for the counterfeit, Jimmy knew, if the bills had not been previously circulated. By selling to all his customers at the same time, he’d ensure he and Mickey made a healthy profit. Needless to say, his intentions were on the mark but his connections were lacking. Neither Jimmy nor Mickey knew the first thing about moving counterfeit bills and found it difficult to make suitable connections. Francis Deveneau was one connection—he could move the bills through his club via a network of operatives. But it turned out to be more difficult than they’d thought.

  Mickey and Jimmy would occasionally drop in at the warehouse and oversee the operation, but they new very little about the printing of counterfeit money. One evening, while creeping around the warehouse after hours, Jimmy discovered a trash can full of wadded sheets of paper, each with hundred-dollar bills printed on them. When he later confronted Corcoran about the trash, Corcoran assured Jimmy that there was a lot of throwaway involved in printing phony bills, and that he’d just have to trust him. Problem was, Jimmy did trust him.

  It seemed that the production of the phony bills was running smoothly since Jimmy and Mickey had set the project in motion, up until about four months ago. Before they sold a single counterfeit note to anyone, Jimmy was approached one evening in McGinty’s tavern by an Irish guy in a suit and tie named Danny Monahan. After a few lines of conversation, Monahan produced a crisp hundred-dollar bill from his shirt pocket and laid it on the bar in front of Jimmy.

  “Take a look at that,” Monahan said, an impetuous grin breaking across his face. “What do ya think?”

  “This?” Jimmy said, picking up the hundred and examining it. “This a fake?”

  “Looks good, don’t it?”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Some fella. Figured maybe you’d be interested.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy sa
id, fingering the bill. “Can I take this one?”

  “I can sell you a whole stack,” Monahan offered. He was older than Jimmy and the rest of the West Side gang, holding down a tolerable job at an accounting firm. Yet Jimmy knew him from his dealings throughout the West Side. Not a permanent fixture in Hell’s Kitchen, Monahan was a late bloomer who, in his middle age, was still trying to cut himself a piece of the underground pie. To Jimmy Kahn and Mickey O’Shay, guys like Danny Monahan were a joke—somebody to harry when there was time to kill—but the counterfeit note caught Jimmy’s eye. The following evening, he showed it to Mickey.

  “I been goin’ down to the warehouse, watching what’s goin’ on,” Jimmy told him. “This bill … this is one of ours.”

  “Huh?” Mickey held it up to the light, examined it. It looked real enough to him.

  “I been watching everything,” Jimmy continued. “At night, after Corcoran leaves, I take some of the papers out of the trash and bring ‘em back to my apartment.” He plucked the note from Mickey’s hand and slammed it on the bar. They were at the Cloverleaf that evening, and patrons of the ‘Leaf knew better than to look up at the slamming of fists. “This is one of ours,” Jimmy continued. “The serial numbers match.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means,” Jimmy went on, “that Corcoran ain’t happy with five percent and he’s selling this shit out from under us.”

  Jimmy had negotiated a 5 percent cut for both Harold Corcoran and Douglas Clifton on any batch of counterfeit they were able to sell. Now, according to Jimmy, one or both of the bastards was fucking them in the ass and selling the shit throughout the city.

  The idea seemed implausible to Mickey. “You sure?” He could not fathom why someone would think they’d be able to rip them off.

  “The fucking numbers are the same,” Jimmy repeated.

  “Those shits,” Mickey growled. “I told you we gave them too much room, that we shoulda watched them closer. Now what?”

  There was a pause as Jimmy considered their options. There was over a million dollars of counterfeit printed already. If they used their heads, they could start moving what they had before the bills sold by Corcoran or Clifton or whoever, made much of a circulation.

  Jimmy and Mickey had approached Corcoran one night at the warehouse, playing it cool, and asked him about the money. As expected, Corcoran denied selling the counterfeit under their noses.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “You’re spending a lot of money printing this shit, Harold …”

  Almost frustrated at their intrusion, Corcoran said, “Jimmy, man, there’s a lotta fucking waste that goes into the production. You see the trash? You see what we’re throwin’ away? It costs money to print this shit, man.”

  They let it go at that, though neither Mickey nor Jimmy believed Harold Corcoran had told them the truth. And some time later, after spotting Corcoran in a club, Mickey approached the printer and demanded to know just what the hell was going on.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Corcoran said, the palm of one hand up in defense.

  He was sitting at a bar with some friend of his, a black guy named Fee Williams. “What’d I tell you before, Mickey? I don’t know nothin’ about this. I ain’t sellin’ your money, man. Think I’m crazy? Now chill out. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Mickey, who happened to be in the company of some of his own friends, was in no mood for drinking with a traitor and a thief. “Either you come clean with me right now,” he told Corcoran, “or you and your nigger friend are gonna see God tonight.”

  “You know what?” Corcoran said then. His tone was quite un-apologetic. “You’re one crazy piece of shit, Mickey—you know that? Got some nerve, accusing me of somethin’ like that. I wouldn’t rip you guys. Jimmy’s like family to me. You think you’re being ripped, I’d go see your buddy Clifton instead of wasting time poking me …”

  It is difficult to say what made Mickey murder both Harold Corcoran and Fee Williams that night as they stepped from Toby’s Bar on West 41st Street, but it was not solely about the counterfeit money. Some of it was Corcoran’s attitude—the way he held his hand up in front of Mickey’s face, the way he spoke to him in front of the guys. It could have also been Fee Williams, Corcoran’s black friend, who set Mickey over the edge: Mickey was a dedicated racist who thought blacks and Hispanics and Italians and anyone else who was not what he considered “white” deserved to burn in the hottest depths of hell. Or it could have been something as simple as his mood that evening. Regardless, when Corcoran and Williams stepped from Toby’s Bar, Mickey O’Shay and his boys were outside waiting for them.

  “Mickey—” was all Corcoran managed to say.

  The gleam of a knife appeared in Mickey’s hands. It shot out in a swift, decisive streak and embedded itself into the soft flesh of Fee Williams’s throat, pinning the man against the brick alley wall.

  Corcoran began to run, but he would not make it very far: he tripped and spilled to the street like a cripple. Above him, Mickey and his boys walked circles, staring down at his exhausted body. He was held down and, with the same knife, his tongue was cut from his head. Following that, someone produced a hammer and, amidst a storm of insanity, the West Side boys took turns beating Harold Corcoran to a bloody pulp.

  Mickey’s one hope was that Corcoran would live long enough to feel the worst of the pain.

  Later, Jimmy was somewhat incensed by Corcoran’s hasty disposal. Killing Harold Corcoran left them without a printer, which meant whatever money they had printed before Corcoran’s death was all they were going to get. Taking Corcoran’s advice, Mickey suggested they approach Douglas Clifton and see what he had to say. “Maybe,” Mickey suggested, “they got a stash of it somewhere.”

  If Douglas Clifton had any of their counterfeit hidden, they’d get him to give it up. One way or another.

  Clifton had been spending a lot of time at the warehouse, confident that there were salvageable, salable antiques among Evelyn Gethers’s dead husband’s junk. The night Jimmy and Mickey approached him, he was half bombed from smoking too much weed and had several days’ beard growth sprouting from his face. As the door was lifted and Mickey and Jimmy entered, Clifton struggled to pull himself to his feet and achieve some semblance of sobriety.

  “Hey …” Clifton righted himself against a wall, his features seeming to swim across his face. The entire garage was veiled in a thin haze of smoke and reeked of pot. Clifton’s words came out slow and stupid. “You guys …”

  Jimmy was in no mood for games. “What’s been going on with our money, Doug?”

  Rubbing a hand across the nape of his neck, Clifton managed to turn around and run his eyes over the two printing presses and, beyond the presses, at the duffel bag full of printed counterfeit. “What about it?” he said, his throat scratchy and dry. “It’s here …”

  “You and Harold Corcoran been ripping us off,” Mickey added, “been selling the shit from under us. How much you got left? How much you guys print that we don’t know about?”

  The fear in Clifton’s eyes—sober or not—registered immediately. “I wouldn’t fuck you guys! Christ, come on. What am I, an idiot?” And he tried a frightened laugh. He sounded pathetic. “I don’t—I mean, you—the fuck do I know ‘bout printing money?”

  Jimmy was relentless and unemotional. “How much you got left, Doug?”

  “No!” Clifton shouted, his fists balled, his face flushed. He was no stranger to the stories that circulated around about the brutality of the two West Side boys, no stranger to the jobs they’d pulled and the people they’d ripped apart.

  Mickey circled around the printing presses, his hands stuffed customarily in his pockets. Before him, his shadow bled across the concrete floor.

  Jimmy took a step closer to Clifton. “How ‘bout we make a deal, huh?” Jimmy said.

  Distrustful, Clifton stammered, “Wuh-what deal?”

  From behind, Mickey grabbed Clifton’s shoulders and pulled him back with amazing
force. Clifton, too stoned and frightened to react, spilled to the floor, cracking his head on the cement, and howled like an injured coyote. He struggled to roll over and away from Mickey, but Mickey held him to the floor with little difficulty, both his hands squeezing the flesh of Clifton’s upper arms. A wide grin on his face, Mickey hung his head directly above Clifton’s, their noses only inches apart, the curled and wet strands of Mickey’s hair tickling the sides of Clifton’s face.

  Jimmy came forward, pulling a long knife from inside his jacket. Kneeling down, he managed to pin both of Clifton’s legs to the floor, Jimmy’s knees pressing heavily into the man’s thighs.

  “The deal,” Jimmy said, snatching Clifton’s right wrist with the speed and accuracy of a snake’s strike, “is that you take something of ours,” and he pressed the point of the knife slowly into the tender flesh of Clifton’s wrist, “and we take something of yours.”

  Jimmy slammed the knife all the way through Clifton’s wrist; the knife point chinked dully against the cement floor on the other side. Douglas Clifton screamed, and hot, rancid breath rushed up into Mickey’s face, the entry wound in Clifton’s wrist spilling over with blood. He continued to struggle, but his terror coupled with fresh pain had immediately weakened him.

  Jimmy continued to slice through Clifton’s wrist, pausing briefly when the knife blade struck bone. Gritting his teeth, Jimmy worked the knife through bone and gristle, streaks of Clifton’s blood spraying his face.

  The deed was completed in a matter of two minutes. When finished, Jimmy slowly rose to his feet, a bit out of breath from the rush of adrenaline. He held the bloodied knife in one hand and Douglas Clifton’s severed right hand in the other.

  “Good deal, right?” Jimmy said, taking a few awkward steps backward.

  Mickey released Clifton and stood as well. All the fight had drained from Clifton’s body. Even now, Clifton was capable only of pulling himself into a fetal position, his abbreviated right arm tucked under the folds of his shirt. His back hitched, though he was still too shocked to emit a single sob.