by Irwin Shaw
“They’re tearing down the building,” Axel said. “They’re going to put up a whole block of apartments with stores on the ground floor. Port Philip is expanding, Mr. Harrison says, progress is progress. He’s eighty years old, but he’s progressing. He’s investing a lot of money. In Cologne they knock the building down with bombs. In America they do it with money.”
“When do we have to get out?”
“Not till October. Mr. Harrison says he’s telling me early, so I’ll have a chance to find something else. He’s a considerate old man, Mr. Harrison.”
Rudolph looked around him at the familiar cracked walls, the iron doors of the ovens, the window open to the grating on the sidewalk. It was queer to think of all this, the house he had known all his life, no longer there, vanished. He had always thought he would leave the house. It had never occurred to him that the house would leave him.
“What’re you going to do?” he asked his father.
Axel shrugged. “Maybe they need a baker in Cologne. If I happen to find a drunken Englishman some rainy night along the river maybe I could buy passage back to Germany.”
“What’re you talking about, Pa?” Rudolph asked sharply.
“That’s how I came to America,” Axel said mildly. “I followed a drunken Englishman who’d been waving his money around in a bar in the Sankt Pauli district of Hamburg and I drew a knife on him. He put up a fight. The English don’t give up anything without a fight. I put the knife in him and took his wallet and I dropped him into the canal. I told you I killed a man with a knife that day with your French teacher, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Rudolph said.
“I’ve always meant to tell you the story,” Axel said. “Anytime any of your friends says his ancestors came over on the Mayflower, you can say your ancestors came over on a wallet full of five-pound notes. It was a foggy night. He must’ve been crazy, that Englishman, going around a district like Sankt Pauli with all that money. Maybe he thought he was going to screw every whore in the district and he didn’t want to be caught short of cash. So that’s what I say, maybe if I can find an Englishman down by the river, maybe I’ll make the return trip.”
Christ, Rudolph thought bitterly, come on down and have a nice cosy little chat with old Dad in his office …
“If you ever happened to kill an Englishman,” his father went on, “you’d want to tell your son about it, now, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t think you ought to go around talking about it,” Rudolph said.
“Oh,” Axel said, “you planning to turn me over to the police? I forgot you were so high principled.”
“Pa, you ought to forget about it. It’s no good thinking about it after all these years. What good does it do?”
Axel didn’t answer. He drank reflectively from the bottle.
“Oh, I remember a lot of things,” he said. “I get a lot of remembering-time down here at night. I remember shitting my pants along the Meuse. I remember the way my leg smelled the second week in the hospital. I remember carrying two-hundred-pound sacks of cocoa on the docks in Hamburg, with my leg opening up and bleeding every day. I remember what the Englishman said before I pushed him into the canal. ‘I say there,’ he said, ‘you can’t do that.’ I remember the day of my marriage. I could tell you about that, but I think you’d be more interested in your mother’s report. I remember the look on the face of a man called Abraham Chase in Ohio when I laid five thousand dollars on the table in front of him to make him feel better for getting his daughters laid.” He drank again. “I worked twenty years of my life,” he went on, “to pay to keep your brother out of jail. Your mother has let it be known that she thinks I was wrong. Do you think I was wrong?”
“No,” Rudolph said.
“You’re going to have a rough time from now on, Rudy,” Axel said. “I’m sorry. I tried to do my best.”
“I’ll get by,” Rudolph said. He wasn’t at all sure he would.
“Go for the money,” Axel said. “Don’t let anybody fool you. Don’t go for anything else. Don’t listen to all the crap they write in the papers about Other Values. That’s what the rich preach to the poor so that they can keep raking it in, without getting their throats cut. Be Abraham Chase with that look on his face, picking up the bills. How much money you got in the bank?”
“A hundred and sixty dollars,” Rudolph said.
“Don’t part with it,” Axel said. “Not with a penny of it. Not even if I come dragging up to your door starving to death and ask you for the price of a meal. Don’t give me a dime.”
“Pa, you’re getting yourself all worked up. Why don’t you go upstairs and go to bed. I’ll put in the hours here.”
“You stay out of here. Or just come and talk to me, if you want. But stay away from the work. You got better things to do. Learn your lessons. All of them. Step careful. The sins of the fathers. Unto how many generations. My father used to read the Bible after dinner in the living room. I may not be leaving you much, but I sure as hell am leaving you well visited with sins. Two men killed. All my whores. And what I did to your mother. And letting Thomas grow up like wild grass. And who knows what Gretchen is doing. Your mother seems to have some information. You ever see her?”
“Yeah,” Rudolph said.
“What’s she’s up to?”
“You’d rather not hear,” Rudolph said.
“That figures,” his father said. “God watches. I don’t go to church, but I know God watches. Keeping the books on Axel Jordache and his generations.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Rudolph said. “God doesn’t watch anything.” His atheism was firm. “You’ve had some bad luck. That’s all. Everything can change tomorrow.”
“Pay up, God says.” Rudolph had the feeling his father wasn’t talking to him anymore, that he would be saying the same things, in the same dreamlike dead voice if he were alone in the cellar. “Pay up, Sinner, I will afflict you and your sons for your deeds.” He took a long drink, shook himself, as though a shiver had run coldly through his body. “Go to bed,” he said. “I got work to do.”
“Good night, Pa.” Rudolph took his coat off the hook on the wall. His father didn’t answer, just sat there, staring, holding the bottle.
Rudolph went upstairs. Christ, he thought, and I thought it was Ma who was the crazy one.
II
Axel took another drink from the bottle, then went back to work. He worked steadily all night. He found himself humming as he moved around the cellar. He didn’t recognize the tune for a while. It bothered him, not recognizing it. Then he remembered. It was a song his mother used to sing when she was in the kitchen.
He sang the words, low,
Schlaf’, Kindlein, schlaf’
Dein Vater hüt’ die Schlaf’
Die Mutter hüt die Ziegen,
Wir wollen das Kindlein wiegen?
His native tongue. He had traveled too far. Or not far enough.
He had the last pan of rolls ready to go into the oven. He left it standing on the table and went over to a shelf and took down a can. There was a warning skull-and-bones on the label. He dug into the can and measured out a small spoonful of the powder. He carried it over to the table and picked up one of the raw rolls at random. He kneaded the poison into the roll thoroughly, then reshaped the roll and put it back into the pan. My message to the world, he thought.
The cat watched him. He put the pan of rolls into the oven and went over to the sink and stripped off his shirt and washed his hands and face and arms and torso. He dried himself on flour sacking and redressed. He sat down, facing the oven, and put the bottle, now nearly empty, to his lips.
He hummed the tune his mother had sung in her kitchen when he was a small boy.
When the rolls were baked, he pulled out the pan and left them to cool. All the rolls looked the same.
Then he turned off the gas in the ovens and put on his mackinaw and cap. He went up the steps into the bakery and went out. He let the cat follow him. It was dark
and still raining. The wind had freshened. He kicked the cat and the cat ran off.
He limped toward the river.
He opened the rusty padlock of the warehouse and turned on a light. He picked up the shell and carried it to the rickety wharf. The river was rough, with whitecaps, and made a sucking, rushing sound as it swept past. The wharf was protected by a curling jetty and the water there was calm. He put the shell down on the wharf and went back and got the oars and turned out the light and snapped the padlock shut. He carried the oars back to the wharf and lay them down along the edge, then put the shell in the water. He stepped in lightly and put the oars into the outriggers.
He pushed off and guided the shell out toward open water. The current caught him and he began to row steadily out toward the river’s center. He went downstream, the waves washing over the sides of the shell, the rain beating in his face. In a little while the shell was low in the water. He continued to row steadily, as the river ran swiftly down toward New York, the bays, the open ocean.
The shell was almost completely awash as he reached the heart of the river.
The shell was found, overturned, the next day, near Bear Mountain. They didn’t ever find Axel Jordache.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
1949
Dominic Joseph Agostino sat at the little desk in his office behind the gym with the newspaper spread out in front of him to the sports page, reading about himself. He had his Ben Franklin reading glasses on and they gave a mild, studious look to his round, ex-pug’s face, with the broken nose and the small, dark eyes under the heavy scar tissue. It was three o’clock, the mid-afternoon lull, and the gym was empty, the best time of day. There wouldn’t be anything much doing until five o’clock when he gave a calisthenics class to a group of club members, middle-aged businessmen most of them, fighting their waistlines. After that he might spar a few rounds with some of the more ambitious members, being careful not to damage anybody.
The article about him had come out the night before, in a box on the sports page. It was a slow day. The Red Sox were out of town and weren’t going anyplace, anyway, and they had to fill the sports page with something.
Dominic had been born in Boston, and had been introduced in his fighting days as Joe Agos, the Boston Beauty, because he lacked a punch and had to do a lot of dancing around to keep from getting killed. He had fought some good lightweights in the late twenties and thirties and the sportswriter, who was too young ever to have seen him fight, had written stirring accounts of his matches with people like Canzoneri and McLarnin, when Canzoneri and McLarnin were on the way up. The sportswriter had written that he was still in good shape, which wasn’t all that true. The sportswriter quoted Dominic as saying jokingly that some of the younger members of the exclusive Revere Club were beginning to get to him in the sparring sessions in the gym and that he was thinking of getting an assistant or putting on a catcher’s mask to protect his beauty in the near future. He hadn’t said it all that jokingly. The article was friendly, and made Dominic sound like a wise old veteran of the golden days of the sport who had learned to accept life philosophically in his years in the ring. He had lost every cent he’d ever made, so there wasn’t much else left but philosophy. He hadn’t said anything about that to the writer and it wasn’t in the article.
The phone on his desk rang. It was the doorman. There was a kid downstairs who wanted to see him. Dominic told the doorman to send the kid up.
The kid was about nineteen or twenty, wearing a faded blue sweater and sneakers. He was blond and blue-eyed and baby-faced. He reminded Dominic of Jimmy McLarnin, who had nearly torn him apart the time they had fought in New York. The kid had grease-stained hands, even though Dominic could see that he had tried to wash it all out. It was a cinch none of the members of the Revere Club had invited the kid up for a workout or a game of squash.
“What is it?” Dominic asked, looking up over his Ben Franklin glasses.
“I read the paper last night,” the kid said.
“Yeah?” Dominic was always affable and smiling with the members and he made up for it with non-members.
“About how it’s getting a little tough for you, Mr. Agostino, at your age, with the younger members of the club and so on,” the kid said.
“Yeah?”
“I was thinking maybe you could take on an assistant, kind of,” the kid said.
“You a fighter?”
“Not exactly,” the kid said. “Maybe I want to be. I seem to fight an awful lot of the time …” He grinned. “I figure I might as well get paid for it.”
“Come on.” Dominic stood up and took off his glasses. He went out of the office and through the gym to the locker room. The kid followed him. The locker room was empty except for Charley, the attendant, who was dozing, sitting up at the door, his head on a pile of towels.
“You got any things with you?” Dominic asked the kid.
“No.”
Dominic gave him an old sweat suit and a pair of shoes. He watched as the kid stripped. Long legs, heavy, sloping shoulders, thick neck. A hundred and fifty pounds, fifty-five, maybe. Good arms. No fat.
Dominic led him out to the corner of the gym where the mats were and threw him a pair of sixteen-ounce gloves. Charley came out to tie the laces for both of them.
“Let’s see what you can do, kid,” Dominic said. He put up his hands, lightly. Charley watched with interest.
The kid’s hands were too low, naturally, and Dominic jabbed him twice with his left. But the kid kept swarming in.
After three minutes, Dominic dropped his hands and said, “Okay, that’s enough.” He had rapped the kid pretty hard a few times and had tied him up when he came in close, but with all that, the kid was awfully fast and the twice he had connected it had hurt. The kid was some kind of a fighter. Just what kind of fighter Dominic didn’t know, but a fighter.
“Now listen, kid,” Dominic said, as Charley undid the laces on his gloves, “this isn’t a barroom. This is a gentlemen’s club. The gentlemen don’t come here to get hurt. They come to get some exercise while learning the manly art of self-defense. You come swinging in on them the way you did with me, you wouldn’t last one day here.”
“Sure,” the kid said, “I understand. But I wanted to show you what I could do.”
“You can’t do much,” Dominic said. “Yet. But you’re fast and you move okay. Where you working now?”
“I was over in Brookline,” the kid said. “In a garage. I’d like to find something where I can keep my hands clean.”
“When you figure you could start in here?”
“Now. Today. I quit at the garage last week.”
“How much you make there?”
“Fifty a week,” the kid said.
“I think I can get you thirty-five here,” Dominic said. “But you can rig up a cot in the massage room and sleep here. You’ll have to help clean the swimming pool and vacuum the mats and stuff like that and check the equipment.”
“Okay,” the kid said.
“You got a job,” Dominic said. “What’s your name?”
“Thomas Jordache,” the kid said.
“Just keep out of trouble, Tom,” said Dominic.
He kept out of trouble for quite some time. He was quick and respectful and besides the work he had been hired to do, he cheerfully ran errands for Dominic and the members and made a point of smiling agreeably, at all times, with especial attention to the older men. The atmosphere of the club, muted, rich, and friendly, pleased him, and when he wasn’t in the gym he liked to pass through the high-ceilinged, dark, wood-paneled reading and gaming rooms, with their deep leather armchairs and smoked-over oil paintings of Boston during the days of sailing ships. The work was undemanding, with long gaps in the day when he just sat around listening to Dominic reminisce about his years in the ring.
Dominic was not curious about Tom’s past and Tom didn’t bother to tell him about the months on the road, the flophouses in Cincinnati and Clevelan
d, and Chicago, about the jobs at filling stations, or about the stretch as a bellboy in the hotel in Syracuse. He had been making good money at the hotel steering whores into guests’ rooms until he had to take a knife out of a pimp’s fist because the pimp objected to the size of the commission his girls were passing on to the nice baby-faced boy they could mother when they weren’t otherwise occupied. Thomas didn’t tell Dominic, either, about the drunks he had rolled on the Loop or the loose cash he had stolen in various rooms, more for the hell of it than for the money, because he wasn’t all that interested in money.
Dominic taught him how to hit the light bag and it was pleasant on a rainy afternoon, when the gym was empty, to tap away, faster and faster, at the bag, making the gym resound with the tattoo of the blows. Once in awhile, when he was feeling ambitious, and there were no members around, Dominic put on the gloves with him and taught him how to put together combinations, how to straighten out his right hand, how to use his head and elbows and slide with the punches, to keep up on the balls of his feet and how to avoid punches by ducking and weaving as he came in instead of falling back. Dominic still didn’t allow him to spar with any of the members, because he wasn’t sure about Thomas yet and didn’t want any incidents. But the squash pro got him down to the courts and in just a few weeks made a fair player of him and when some of the lesser players of the club turned up without a partner for a game, Thomas would go in there with them. He was quick and agile and he didn’t mind losing and when he won he learned immediately not to make the win too easy and he found himself collecting twenty to thirty dollars a week extra in tips.
He became friendly with the cook in the club kitchen, mostly by finding a solid connection for buying decent marijuana and doing the cook’s shopping for him for the drug, so before long he was getting all his meals free.
He tactfully stayed out of all but the most desultory conversations with the members, who were lawyers, brokers, bankers, and officials of shipping lines and manufacturing companies. He learned to take messages accurately from their wives and mistresses over the telephone and pass them on with no hint that he understood exactly what he was doing.