As Time Goes By

by Michael Walsh

  From the day Solly had put Rick in charge, the Tootsie-Wootsie Club had become his most profitable business venture. Almost instinctively Rick knew where and how to get the best beer, and his connections with the whiskey manufacturers running product down from the French Department of St. Pierre, an island off the Canadian coast, had quickly become second to none. He played every angle and drove trucks through every loophole. For example, the law specifically exempted sacramental wine from its proscription, so Rick did a thriving trade with synagogue and church alike, using them as front organizations for his importation of fine French wines and kicking back a generous share of the profits to support charitable activities. He had gotten the notion one day down on Grand Street, when he saw a line of Irishmen outside a kosher wine store and suddenly realized just how attractive Judaism had become to a host of nominal anti-Semites.

  Rick's taste in music was similarly well developed. Prior to the club's opening, the best place for jazz music in town had been O'Hanlon's Boll Weevil, a few blocks up the street, but Rick was not about to let his customers either drink second-rate liquor or listen to third-class music. He began aggressively to court the best songwriters and musicians, hiring Herman Hupfield as the house composer, bringing in bandleader Jimmie Lunceford from one of the Capone mob's Chicago clubs. Everyone agreed, however, that his greatest find was Sam Waters, a stride piano player from Cooper Street, north of the railroad tracks in Sedalia, Missouri. As a lad Sam had known Scott Joplin and, more important, had learned from him. Sam's ear for a tune was legendary, and his ability to pick up anything and play it had won him a large following.

  Some members of the gang looked askance at Rick's friendship with Sam. They complained to Solly that it wasn't right for a white boy to be on such good terms with a shvartzer. Rick and Sam would sometimes disappear together on weekends, tooling up to the Catskills in Rick's DeSoto to go fishing. Tick-Tock said a Jew and a colored boy shouldn't be hanging out together, but Solly told him to shut up and mind his own business.“If the rest of you bums could take care of your business the way Ricky takes care of his, why, we would all be rich instead of just me,” he told them.

  Finally, Rick was always on good terms with the cops. Personally he had nothing against policemen, who by and large were working stiffs like himself, trying to get ahead. The way Rick saw it, the police were his friends. With the right amount of financial encouragement, they kept the booze trucks running smoothly (some off-duty cops even rode shotgun for him), kept the rival gangsters off each other's backs, and deflected the feds as much as they could. And when they couldn't, they warned him about it, so he could close the club down for“renovations” until the feds ran out of expense money and went back to Washington, where they belonged.

  It was a good life. The only person who didn't quite see it that way was his mother. The last time he'd seen her, which was months ago, she had asked him about the money and the clothes and most of all about the car, and he had been afraid to answer her. In fact, he hadn't even bothered to try, because he knew that she knew, and it was easier for both of them to pretend otherwise. He'd call her tonight, and if not tonight, soon, just as soon as he could. Really, he would. It was long past time for a mitzvah.

  “Well, Solly,” said Rick, clearing his throat,“there is some business I’d like to discuss. It's got to do with Lois.”

  “Nu?” said Solly.

  Rick had been putting off this conversation for three months, since the night he'd met O'Hanlon at Rector's. Since the night Lois gave him the brush-off. He had been fearful of telling the boss about meeting the Irishman and Meredith, and he still hadn't delivered O'Hanlon's message, afraid of Horowitz's unpredictable rage, afraid to reveal that he'd been taking his daughter to a gangland hangout when that was expressly against his orders.

  So far, nothing untoward had happened. Solly and Dion continued their uneasy standoff, with Salucci and Weinberg lurking somewhere in the bushes south of 14th Street. Maybe O'Hanlon had forgotten all about it. Maybe enough time had elapsed that Solly wouldn't be tempted to put two and two together. Maybe Rick's proven ability to pour profits into the boss's pockets would make everybody forget about everything else.

  Rick was still trying to figure out a way to broach the subject when Horowitz beat him to the punch.“Isn't it great about her and that fancy lawyer!”

  “Which fancy lawyer?” asked Rick.

  “You keep this quiet now,” Solomon commanded him, tapping a finger alongside his nose,“but she's thinking about maybe marrying. To a big man, too!” Solly rose from his chair and drew himself up to his full sixty-five-inch height.“Make her papa proud!” He played with a cigar.“Mrs. Robert Haas Meredith—it's got a good gong to it!”

  “What?” exclaimed Rick.

  He sat back with a particularly contented expression on his face.“It's the American dream,” he said.“Off the boat and aboard the ladder.”

  He was bouncing both hands off his belly in delight when the first shot splintered the wood behind Solly's head. If he hadn't leaned back at just that moment, it would have hit him right between the eyes.

  An instant later, the second shot skidded across the desktop, ricocheted off a cheap lamp, and crashed into the ceiling, sending down a shower of plaster.

  The first two shots were nearly simultaneous. By the third shot both Rick and Solly were on the floor, guns drawn, and had come up firing. Rick marveled briefly at the boss's reflexes.

  Neither he nor Horowitz had seen the gunmen—there must be at least two—nor could they see them now. But from prone positions on the floor they poured back return fire. Rick had a momentary impression of a splintering door-jamb and of a groan from just beyond it; of a shattering glass transom, of exploding light fixtures in the hallway.

  Then he saw a foot in the doorway where someone had been standing. It was a lone foot, and it didn't seem to be moving much. The gunfire had also stopped. Maybe five seconds had elapsed since the attack, not even. They were both still alive.

  “Goddamn sons of bitches bastards,” muttered Solly, snapping a new clip into his automatic. He was up on his feet in no time flat and charging out the door. Rick had youth on his side, but he was no match for the boss.

  Solly paid no attention whatever to the foot in the door. As Rick rounded the corner he could see that the assailant to whom the foot belonged was still alive, but unarmed; Solly kicked his pistol away as he ran by him.“Ricky, knife, alive!” he shouted before disappearing down the stairs.“Goddamn sons of bitches bastards …”

  Rick leaned over the wounded man. One of their slugs had caught him just above the heart, and he could plainly see the man wasn't going to make it. The guy on the floor was dark, with curly black hair, and as he leaned over him, Rick couldn't at first tell whether he was Italian or Jewish. Then he remembered his boss's warning about the knife.

  The wounded hood whipped the stiletto past his face so close and so fast, Rick almost lost his nose.

  Sicilian, for sure.

  He could hear gunshots from below as he rendered the man harmless by socking him on the jaw. He left him there and hustled down the stairs.

  Solomon Horowitz sat on the bottom step. The other Italian lay at his feet, quite dead, shot through the left ear at what must have been very close range. Had he tried to surrender? Rick didn't want to know.

  “Salucci?” asked Rick, heading out the front door. They must have come uptown somehow. He looked up and down the street in vain for the getaway car. A few black passersby looked at him nervously; he didn't understand why until he realized he still had his pistol in his hand. He slipped it into the special pocket in his suit coat and stepped back inside.

  Solly and the dead man had disappeared. He could hear a heavy tread on the stairway. He followed it up.

  With the stiff slung around his shoulders, Solly had tramped up the stairs and back to the office. The accomplice was still alive. Solly dumped the corpse right next to him.

  “Ricky, you speak some wop,”
he said.“Find out what's going on here before I get angry.”

  Rick spoke to the dying man in Sicilian. Most of the Sicilian he had learned fighting the Italian kids in East Harlem had something to do with somebody's mother or sister, but it would have to do.

  The dying man was croaking something unintelligible. Rick could understand that: if he had a bullet in his chest, he might not be easily understood, either. He bent his ear as close to the man's mouth as he dared; even in death some of these guys were known to bite off a nose, an ear, any body part they could get their teeth around.

  “Son of a bitch bastard,” Solly said impatiently.“With this shtunk we get nowhere.” All at once he snatched up the wounded Sicilian in his arms. Cradling him like a baby, Solly walked over to the elevator.

  “Wait a second, Sol,” said Rick, but Horowitz wouldn't listen.

  “Ricky,” he commanded,“open the door.”

  Rick started to ring for the operator, but Solly barked at him:“I said open the door, not call the car.”

  Rick pried open the safety doors.

  With a grunt, Solly hurled the man down the elevator shaft. Then he went back, picked up the dead man, and threw him down the shaft as well.

  For the first time Rick was able to get a good look at them: The man with the knife lay on his back, his left leg splayed outward, his right arm bent at the elbow, his hand resting on his waistcoat. His left arm was raised as if in thought, its hand applied to the left side of his head, which was unmarked except for a bloodstain on his right cheek. His mouth stood slightly agape, as if he had been just about to say something. His dead companion's head was nestled in the first man's left armpit, as if they were brothers and still accustomed to sleeping together in the same bed. He lay spread-eagle and ungainly, both arms flung out to the sides as if in surrender, hands limp, toes pointing upward.

  “Fresh off the boat Salucci no-goodniks, come to make mischief,” Solly said.“Salucci thinks he can muscle in on Solomon Horowitz in Harlem? He sends these goombahs to whack me? Goddamn son of a bitch bastard!”

  Rick wanted to hit back right away. He knew what this was all about, and a wave of guilt washed over him. He hadn't given the boss O'Hanlon's message because he didn't want him to find out about him and Lois—and this was the result.

  Solomon would have none of it.“Ricky,” he said,“what for we got to go looking for Salucci? He should only come looking for us, and explain why he tries this farpotshket thing, and to beg my forgiveness before I come downtown and shoot him right in his whore's bed. So nothing is what we got to do. We sit tight, and mark my words, we get visitors. What we don't do is go looking for them, and what else we don't do is run away.”

  He wasn't even breathing hard.“Is old saying: ‘The rabbi whose congregation don't want to drive him out of town ain't much of a rabbi. And the rabbi they do drive out ain't much of a mensch.’ Right here is where I’m staying.”

  Rick said he didn't understand why they didn't send Tick-Tock down to the Lower East Side to pay back Salucci several times over.

  “Because we're not ready,” his boss replied.“When you're not ready, and you do something anyway, why, you got nobody to blame but yourself when everything turns out a farshtinkener mess, is why.”

  Why they weren't ready was a question that suddenly occurred to Rick. Where the hell was Tick-Tock Schapiro?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Two days later Rick and Solly were sitting in the freshly repaired back room of the Tootsie-Wootsie when Abie Cohen made a noise and the managers looked up to see, standing in the same doorway that the two Sicilians had so recently darkened, Dion O'Hanlon, Lorenzo Salucci, and Irving Weinberg. Behind them were Cohen and Tick-Tock. Nobody had a gun out.

  Rick jumped to his feet, but Solly didn't move.“Hello, boys,” he called out.“I’ve been expecting you. Come in and make yourselves at home.” He acted as if nothing had happened.

  O'Hanlon glided in on his tiny feet. Salucci, bigger, moved slowly and deliberately. At his side, Weinberg bobbed and nodded like one of those little birds that rides a rhinoceros.

  “Good evening, Mr. Horowitz,” said the Irish gangster in his soft, lilting voice.

  “Shall I pat him down?” Rick asked, but Solly wouldn't let him.

  “Never insult an equal,” he said, sitting there like a Jewish Buddha.“Otherwise he feels free to insult you back, and who knows where that all ends?”

  “Solomon the Wise,” said O'Hanlon, making himself comfortable.“And good evening to you, Mr., er …?”

  The move was Rick's.“Baline,” he replied as if he'd never seen O'Hanlon before.“Rick Baline. I’m the manager here.”

  O'Hanlon bowed.“Baline,” he said, rolling the word around on his tongue as if trying to distinguish the taste.“The name of course is familiar to me, and for a moment there I thought your face might be as well.” He pulled back both corners of his mouth to imitate a smile.“It must be the light. My mistake.”

  “Abie, some chairs for my guests,” said Solly.

  Everybody sat, with their hats on and their hands in their laps. It was safer that way. For three top gangsters like these to come into Horowitz's stronghold with assassination in mind would be crazy, reflected Rick, and then he decided that was probably what Giuseppe Guglielmo had thought, too. He stayed cautious.

  Solly opened the colloquy.“Do I send my boys downtown to make trouble for you, Dion?” he asked, waving his hands in the air. He could not bring himself to address Salucci or Weinberg directly.“Solomon Horowitz is a man of honor. He sticks to his agreements, and since Atlantic City in 1929 his agreement with O'Hanlon says that Harlem and East Harlem and the whole damn Bronx is his to do with as he pleases. Is this not still so?”

  O'Hanlon smoothed an imaginary wrinkle off the front of his double-breasted suit, which he wore tightly buttoned up.“That's what we're here to discuss,” he said, his voice cool.“The two unfortunate lads who expired on your premises were blood relatives, cousins of some sort, I believe, of Mr. Salucci here, freshly arrived in this fair land of ours and sent north across a Hundred and Tenth Street by their distinguished relation in order to bring a certain business proposition to you. Mr. Salucci is very distressed to think of the discourtesy with which you greeted them, and by your impatience in not giving them a fair hearing.”

  “The next time he has a business proposition for me, maybe he sends his boys unarmed, as always.” Solly busied himself with cutting and lighting a cigar.“Then they get a fair hearing instead of ending up in a box.”

  O'Hanlon looked distressed.“The inexperience of poor immigrant foreigners,” he said,“often has regrettable consequences.” He looked around the room.“As no doubt all of us in this room, with the possible exception of Mr. Baline, can attest. These lads were armed for the simple reason that their own sad homeland of Sicily suffers from such a deplorable lack of law enforcement that honest citizens must perforce defend themselves.”

  The Irish mob boss crossed his legs and sat back in his chair.“But that is water past the Spuyten Duyvil now,” he said.“The real reason for our visit is to put the memory of this unfortunate incident behind us. We cannot let even such a tragedy as this interfere with the larger purpose for which we have come here today.”

  O'Hanlon rose and faced Solly like a priest about to pronounce a benediction.“Lorenzo?” he invited, levitating his dainty hands.“Solomon?”

  Salucci rose sullenly and faced Solly across O'Hanlon's surprisingly wide shoulders.“Please accept my most humble apologies for this sad misunderstanding,” said the Italian in a dull monotone.

  Solomon just looked at him.“This he calls an apology?” he said, immobile.

  “Lorenzo's command of English leaves much to be desired, graciousness-wise,” O'Hanlon remarked affably.“To translate, what he means is that it will not happen again, and you have my word on that.”

  Solly got slowly to his feet, eyeing Salucci warily.

  “Solomon, you and I go back a long w
ay,” O'Hanlon reminded him.“I am asking you as a friend to do this thing for me now.” He stepped back briskly, like a matador, as the two men came together, threw their arms around each other, and kissed each other on the cheeks.

  “That is the end to it, then,” said O'Hanlon, satisfied, as they parted. Solly's face, Rick noticed, was flushed, Salucci's sallow. Everyone sat down again, except Rick, who had not budged.

  “It seems to me such friendship should be celebrated with a suitable toast,” said O'Hanlon.“Will the host please do the honors?”

  Solly reached into the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. It was the same drawer, Rick knew, where he usually kept a small .22. He wondered if O'Hanlon knew that and decided he probably did. There didn't seem to be much that O'Hanlon didn't know.

  Solly came up with a bottle of whiskey and three glasses. He poured small golden shots into each of them, kept one for himself, and handed the others to Salucci and O'Hanlon.“A day like this demands the best.”

  “To friendship,” offered O'Hanlon, and everybody drank. Then Solly rose.

  “Today is a very special day,” he said.“On two more counts. So I drink now a toast to my friend Yitzik Baline—the finest of my club managers, the straightest shot among my boys, and the man I love like a son. If God forbid anything should ever happen to me, he is my whattyacallit, my heir apparent.” Nobody snickered at the aspirated“h,” Russian style.“Everything I have shall be his.L’chaim!”