As Time Goes By

by Michael Walsh

  A whore. The kind of woman he had spent his life despising. The kind of woman he had so diligently sought to turn all of womankind into, just to assuage his conscience. He had made them sleep with him, the enemy, because he could. He had been sleeping with the enemy because he wanted to. Because he was the enemy. Not anymore.

  He slept soundly that night, for the first time in centuries.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  SENATOR, GANGSTER IN RACKETS PROBE!

  read the headlines in the October 23, 1935, edition of the New York Mirror. The byline was Walter Winchell's. Winchell didn't often stoop to news stories, but this one was different. This one was news.

  What does the face of evil look like? If you are a regular moviegoer, you may think you already know: a hard guy with a fedora and a heater. But what if it was the face of the man next door? Your best friend, or his best friend—or worse yet, the fellow you voted for in the last election?

  Flash! This column has learned that Senator Robert Haas Meredith, widely mentioned as a contender for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the next election, may be the target of an investigation into his ties to a notorious gangland boss.

  That would be none other than Lorenzo Salucci, the favorite tenant of the Waldorf-Astoria. There's hardly a working girl in this town who doesn't owe her livelihood in one way or another to the sinister, olive-skinned Sicilian—who's not even an American citizen!

  According to documents received by this office, Senator Meredith and Lorenzo Salucci—assisted by his aide-de-camp Irving Weinberg—have been in cahoots for several years. Salucci, it is said, helped rig the election that saw the victory of the Republican Meredith over the Democratic incumbent in heavily Democratic New York State.

  Maybe now we know why.

  The documents clearly show a pattern of corruption extending back years. With his partners, Meredith has been involved in prostitution, loan-sharking, and, before the blessed end of Prohibition, bootlegging.

  Hold on to your hats:

  Meredith's lovely wife, the former Lois Harrow, is not the former Lois Harrow at all. On the contrary, she is the former Lois Horowitz, the only daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Solomon Horowitz of W. 127th Street in Manhattan and the Grand Boulevard and Concourse in the Bronx. Mr. Horowitz, the uptown rackets king, is the proud possessor of a rap sheet as long as my leg. And that's pretty long!

  What's more, we're told, the former Miss Horowitz has been keeping company on the QT with the suave, handsome Rick Baline, proprietor of the Tootsie-Wootsie Club, the former uptown speakeasy that some say is really owned by Solomon the Wise himself.

  This column tried to reach the Senator last night at his home in Albany. But we were told that Meredith was“away on business” and had no comment. Business, yes—but what kind?

  Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea: Stand by for further developments!

  Rick read the Mirror with almost no emotion. The bit about Solly and Lois was a typical O'Hanlon touch, just to keep him honest.

  He sat in his office, waiting. A cup of coffee lay on his desk, untouched. He was thinking about touching it when the buzzer alerted him to the imminent presence of a visitor. His loaded .45 lay right next to the coffee. He didn't have to think twice about touching that. He picked it up and slipped it in his pocket.

  The door opened without a knock. It was Meredith.

  “Come on in, Senator,” Rick said as affably as he could.“I’ve been waiting for you.” He wasn't worried. He'd confronted a lot tougher characters than Robert Haas Meredith. Even so, he wasn't sure what to expect. An irate husband, a ruined politician, a homicidal maniac.

  He got all three.

  The senator tossed his copy of the Mirror on Rick's desk. Rick waited for him to say something. He did.“What is the meaning of this?” sputtered Meredith. His face was red, his tie was askew, and he hadn't shaved that day.

  “Why don't you ask Winchell?” said Rick.“It's his byline. You'll find him down at the Mirror.”

  “I don't want to talk to some cheap newspaperman,” Meredith hissed.“I want to talk to you.”

  “Be my guest, but make it snappy. I’m a busy man, Mr. Meredith. I’ve got a nightclub to run.”

  “Don't get smart with me.”

  “Why don't you cut the small talk and tell me the real reason you've come here? Better yet, I’ll tell you. You've come here to find out what I know beyond what was in Winchell today,” Rick said.“The answer is, I know plenty. I know all about you and Salucci, about how he supplies you with girls when you come home to visit your ‘constituents’ in New York.” He blew a smoke ring in the senator's direction.“I also know how Weinberg cooks the books for you so you can cheat the revenue service of what's coming to it. I also know … but why go on? I know everything, and what I don't know O'Hanlon surely does. About the only thing I don't know is why you must have double-crossed Dion, because, friend, that is like welshing on a bet with the devil.”

  Meredith sat there in the visitor's chair across from him, with only the gleaming leather surface of Rick's desk between them.“You think you're a pretty smart guy,” he said.

  “I am,” answered Rick.“You're not. You're through, Meredith, and so is Salucci and so is Weinberg.”

  Meredith snorted.“We'll see about that. If I were you, I’d be worrying about Horowitz right about now.”

  “Tick-Tock and Solly can handle anything your boys can throw at them,” said Rick.

  “I wouldn't be too sure about Schapiro's loyalties.” Suddenly the senator's head snapped up.“Where's my wife?” he demanded.

  “She was my girl before she was your wife,” said Rick.“I can't help it if she's decided that she prefers it that way again.” He looked into the back room.“Why don't we let the lady decide for herself. Lois?”

  “I’m right here, Rick.”

  She looked glorious. Her ebony hair was swept up, and her face was flushed with color. She was still the most beautiful woman either man had ever seen, and Meredith realized at last he had been a fool to cheat on her, a fool to risk the wrath of her father, a fool to risk the ire of O'Hanlon, a fool to mingle with gangland because it gave him a thrill, a fool to have carried hypocrisy as far as he had when he wasn't cut out for it, a fool to have trusted these people, who didn't even trust themselves.

  She walked toward both men, as alluring as Eve. She smiled at Meredith and then threw her arms around Rick Baline and kissed him as lustfully as she had ever kissed a man.

  “Do you want to go back with him?” Rick asked her.“Although why bother? Hubby here'll be doing a long stretch in the jug, you'll still have the house in Westchester, and I can start visiting in the daytime instead of the middle of the night when he's down at one of Salucci's whorehouses. What do you say?”

  He knew he shouldn't taunt Meredith, but he couldn't help himself. Robert Haas Meredith stood for everything in New York that he despised, because it despised him.

  In reply, Lois put her arms around Rick's neck and hugged him again.“Please, Rick, take me away. Let's run, while we still can—let's run far, far away, where no one will ever find us.”

  “I guess that's your answer, Senator,” he said.

  He looked at Meredith and mentally replaced his patrician features with Solomon Horowitz's. Solly, who had so diligently chased respectability, and at what price. Solly, who had been willing to sacrifice for it his only daughter, his only child, the only person in the world he loved, really loved, without reservation, and whom he had therefore condemned to a life without love. How could he have gotten it so terribly wrong?

  Lois removed her head from Rick's chest and looked at her husband.

  “I hate you, Robert,” she said.“I thought I loved you. I tried to love you, not for your sake or even for mine, but for my father's. He wanted a better life for me. So I let myself believe that I was happy with you, and for a while I was, because I wanted out and you were my ticket. You sure had me fooled.”

  She stood up strai
ght and proud.“I learned soon enough that you were a fraud. Sure, you lived in a better part of town and you wore fancier clothes and you hung around with people who didn't drop their g's and knew which fork to use and vacationed in the South of France. But deep down you and the rest of your crowd weren't any different from the men I had watched come in and out of our house since I was a little girl. You cheated the government and you paid off the cops and you looked down your noses at people like my father even while you were doing business with them. Sometimes you even put them in jail, just to show them who's boss.

  “When I found out, did I leave you? I should have, but I didn't. I put up with your hypocrisy, and I turned a blind eye to your whoring and your cheating and your chiseling. Not for your sake, but for my father's. No more. Look at you!” she spat with as much contempt as she could muster.“You're not a man! You're nothing!”

  Meredith stood up. In his right hand he held a pistol.“I’ll show you who's nothing,” he said.

  Rick had one arm around Lois. He had his right arm free, but not free enough.“Put that thing away before you hurt somebody, Senator,” he said, reaching for the .45 in his pocket.

  “You don't have the guts, you cheap hood,” said Lois.

  Meredith aimed and fired. He hit Lois square in the chest. She was dead before she collapsed across the desk.

  Rick's answering bullet found its mark surely and swiftly, knocking Meredith out of his chair, onto the floor, and into eternity.

  Suddenly alone, he cradled Lois in his arms, just as he had done on that day so long ago, on the elevated running down Second Avenue, on his way to buy his mother a knish. Only this time he was powerless to revive her.

  He was kissing her when Abie Cohen crashed through the door, his gun drawn. He saw Robert Meredith dead on the carpet and Lois Horowitz Meredith dead in Rick's arms.“Jesus, boss,” said Abie.

  “Make sure Solly's okay,” said Rick.“Now.”

  “He's up in the Bronx,” Abie told him.“As soon as he seen the papers this morning he cleared out.”

  “Tick-Tock's with him?”

  “I don't know. I ain't seen Tick-Tock all day.”

  Something wasn't right. How long did it take to get up to the Concourse, anyway? From Harlem it couldn't take longer than twenty minutes or so even at this time of day; all you had to do was shoot across 125th Street to Third Avenue, over the bridge to the Bronx, and there you were, on the Grand Concourse in the New Jerusalem. Guns drawn and blazing, if need be.

  He got to his feet, Lois's body slipping out of his arms for the last time. This was where laziness got you, this was where carelessness landed you, this was where inattention washed you up—all for committing the sin of thinking yourself respectable in the eyes of polite society. Polite society was still Mrs. Astor's ballroom, no matter how much that ballroom liked to drink. Polite society married its daughters off and didn't have their husbands come back to haunt them with ghouls like Salucci and Weinberg in tow.

  Salucci and Weinberg. Payback time. The clock was ticking on all of them.

  Cohen and Lowenstein and Tannenbaum, squad leaders, Abie downtown to Mott Street, Laz and Pinky to the West Side, on the double, with four or five of their best gunsels. Hit Salucci and hit Weinberg and hit them hard and hit them dead. Get them in their cribs now, on Mott Street, around the old Points, on the Bowery, in the penthouse at the Waldorf if need be, but get them and kill them and worry about the aftermath afterward.

  His last act was to clean out the safe. He had never counted the money in it, because, up to this moment, the amount was none of his business. Now it was. He was going to need cash, and lots of it.

  He rifled through the carefully arranged stacks of hundred-dollar bills and whistled to himself. The safe was stuffed with half a million dollars, maybe more. Solly had been saving it for Lois. Now Rick was stealing it. He stuffed it in a suitcase and ran.

  His last view of the club was the awning, and the poster in front, the poster he had had printed up just the other day, which advertised“Tonight in person. Lunceford and Hup-field, together again. Performing your favorite songs, including the hit, ‘As Time Goes By’! With Sam Waters at the piano.”

  He made the Broadway bridge six minutes later, a new Manhattan speed record, but luckily the cops were not around to record it. He didn't want to have to explain why he was driving so fast, or what he was doing with a suitcase filled with half a million dollars in the trunk of his car. At this point, he preferred to let his .45 do the talking. If it wasn't too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Renault had wasted no time in finding suitable female companionship among the locals. Failing to find Rick shortly after his arrival, he was strolling up on PetrrÍn Hill—the faux Eiffel Tower he found irresistible—and had promptly made the acquaintance of a young lady named Ludmilla Maleeva. He had succeeded in getting her to make love to him after tempting her with some small luxuries, as well as with his tales of how the real Eiffel Tower looked and how beautiful Paris was in the summer. She slept with him that afternoon with enthusiasm, if not ardor, for M. Boucher was as close as she was going to get to Paris at this point in her life.

  Her passion, however, she was reserving for Karel GabcÍk, a Czech boy from the countryside who had come to the city to study at the university. Ludmilla had great hopes for Karel—until the Nazis closed the universities. After the big student demonstrations in September 1941, the Germans had shot nine students and sent 1,200 more to concentration camps. Luckily Karel was not in either group; like his older brother, Josef, who had escaped to England to continue the fight, he remained adamant in his hatred of the Germans.

  Ludmilla could not quite understand what the GabcÍks had against the German occupation. She was not old enough to care whether the place she lived in was called Czechoslovakia or Bohemia or the Greater German Reich, as long as she was happy. Though the rest of Europe might be at war, Bohemia was at peace. Her beautiful hometown of Prague had not been bombed or disfigured by fighting in any way. There had been rationing, of course, but food was plentiful, even meat, and the beer still flowed freely. How much worse it could be!

  Still, she had already figured out that information was the coin of the realm. So when Renault, after downing most of a bottle of the Czech liqueur called Becherovka, hinted at an important event that would soon occur, she listened very carefully. This information would delight Karel, she was sure, as well as raise her in his estimation. She wanted Karel to love her as much as he loved his country. The way she saw it, if she could pass on a tip, then Karel could pass it on through his brother's network, and perhaps they would eventually throw the Germans out and live happily ever after, the way couples did in fairy stories. She had to admit that last part of the fantasy was a long shot, but long shots won every now and then, even in central Europe.

  She was only seventeen, but she knew enough to know that what she knew was worth knowing.

  The next evening she met Karel in a country tavern in a little town outside Prague named Bubenec. She didn't mind traveling to meet her lover, because she was wearing a new dress that the nice M. Boucher had purchased for her, as well as a pair of French silk stockings that he had produced from God knew where. She liked the way the men admired her as she walked down the street, the way they seemed to savor her very existence as a woman. Her voluptuousness would not last forever, that much she knew; she was determined to make it last as long as she could, and for it to pay off.

  Sitting at a table with some of his friends, Karel looked up as she made her entrance. He noticed her new dress. Good, she thought. Let him wonder where I got this dress. Let him wonder where I got these beautiful stockings. Let him start paying me more attention than resistance and revolution.

  Karel kissed her as she sat. She loved the way he tasted, of fresh Czech beer and strong cigarettes. So much better than the little Frenchman, who could not handle even a single bottle of Becherovka, which any self-respecting Czech could down before dinner, before the ser
ious drinking began.

  Ludmilla wasted no time in getting to the point.

  “Karel,” she said,“something is going to happen.”

  Karel was careful to evince no reaction.“What kind of something?” he asked.

  “I don't know,” she replied.“Something very big.” She dropped her voice.“A bomb!”

  The part about the bomb she made up, but it sounded good. In fact, M. Boucher had not said anything at all about a bomb but only had muttered something about an event that would shock the world, something involving weapons and death, until he'd finally fallen asleep and she'd had to squirm out from underneath him, the pig. The French were supposed to be such great lovers.

  “Hush!” Karel drew her mouth toward his and pretended to kiss her.“Who told you this?” he muttered under his breath.

  She could see the alarm in his eyes as he held her face close to hers.“A Frenchman I met yesterday,” she confessed.

  “Did you sleep with him?” demanded Karel, sounding more distressed than jealous.“Is that where he told you? In bed?”

  “Yes,” she confessed glumly.

  Karel GabcÍk was willing to forget about Ludmilla's infidelity for the moment. Far more important was his brother's operation. Could she be referring to Operation Hangman? What else?

  After a brief interrogation, he made some small excuse, got up from the table, and ran out the door to grab his bicycle. The other men in the tavern saw Ludmilla alone, and Ludmilla saw them. A brief, decent interval, and then she was no longer alone.

  After an hour of furious pedaling, Karel reached the farmhouse in Lidice. The first person he saw was Victor Laszlo, staring at the sky and smoking contemplatively.

  “Mr. Laszlo!” exclaimed Karel. He could not bring himself to call the famous Resistance leader“Victor.”

  Lost in thought, Laszlo finally deigned to take notice of him.“What is it, boy?” he asked.