Bugsy Malone

by Alan Parker

  Sam replied with a gesture that could only have been learned in Naples.

  “Not if Dandy Dan gets his way. I won’t have a dime for a shoe-shine.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not a red cent.”

  Tallulah returned with the drinks. She put Bugsy’s down in front of him and then pulled herself up a chair.

  “Tallulah,” Sam said sharply, “Can you leave us for a minute? This is men’s talk.”

  Tallulah stroked Bugsy’s hair. “It’s all right. I’m unshockable.”

  But Sam was insistent. “Tallulah, go fix your make-up.”

  “I’ve already fixed it.”

  “Then go and make yourself even more beautiful than you already are.”

  “But you know that’s impossible.”

  “Tallulah.” Sam was getting angry. He glared at her with a look that could have cut a man in half. It bounced off Tallulah. She stood up.

  “All right. All right. I’ll go manicure my gloves.”

  She stormed across the speakeasy floor and up the stairs to the girls’ dressing room.

  Fat Sam turned to Bugsy. “Bugsy, I need help. My gang’s all gone. My friends don’t want to know me. My business is in ruins. I’m a wreck. In short, Bugsy, I need you.”

  Bugsy was more than a little taken aback.

  “Me? Why me?”

  “’Cause you’re no mug. You’ve got brains up there, not pretzels.” He tapped his head to make it quite clear where he admired brains.

  Bugsy was not impressed. He’d spent his whole life keeping out of trouble and he saw no reason to get involved now.

  “No, it’s not my line.”

  Fat Sam leaned even closer and held him firmly, if not affectionately by the arm. “Help me, and I’ll give you two hundred bucks to go with the two hundred I already gave you.”

  But Bugsy shrugged once more. “Impossible.”

  This surprised Sam, who said, “I thought you were smart?”

  “Impossible, because I’ve already lost the first two hundred.”

  Sam was amazed. “Have I misjudged this Bugsy Malone?” he thought.

  “You lost two hundred bucks? Gambling?”

  “No, I was mugged.”

  Fat Sam shrugged with his face, as only Italians can. He was as sympathetic as a hood could be who regarded mugging in the same way as a world series baseball player regards a pitch and catch match in the local park. Sam said nothing more and got out his wallet. He peeled off dollar after dollar, counting them on to the table. “Two hundred green ones, plus the two hundred you lost.”

  Bugsy couldn’t believe his eyes. “Four hundred bucks!”

  Sam was impatient. “Do we have a deal?”

  Bugsy felt the crisp, new, green and black notes crackle between his fingers. He whistled to himself as he weighed up the price of keeping his independence against the possibility of those precious dollars vanishing into Fat Sam’s pocket, lost to him forever.

  “Well?” Sam pushed him.

  Bugsy couldn’t resist. “You have a deal.”

  They shook hands and smiled at one another. It was then that the telephone rang. Tallulah answered it upstairs.

  “Bugsy, it’s for you. It’s Blousey.”

  “Excuse me a minute, Sam.”

  “Sure thing, Bugsy. Take your time. Use the phone all you want. Be my guest. Phone home. Phone Europe. Phone wherever you please. If Dandy Dan takes over this place he’ll have to pay the phone bill. Ha ha ha.” Sam’s laugh fooled no one.

  Bugsy counted the money as he walked up the stairs. Tallulah blew him a kiss as she handed him the phone. Bugsy smiled coyly. He stroked his eyebrow with his finger as a token gesture of embarrassment. But he also was fooling no one. Certainly not Tallulah.

  “Hello, Blousey?”

  Blousey had waited patiently. She had sat on a stool by the phone in her apartment house hallway for a good twenty minutes before she’d plucked up courage to phone the speakeasy. The wind zipped down the New York streets and rattled the ill-fitting window panes, sending a draught whistling past Blousey’s door. She had wrapped herself in the pink and blue dressing gown her Auntie Mary from Wisconsin had made for her. It kept her warm and made her look even sadder, flopping as it did in neat folds around her thin legs and slippered feet. She’d flicked through the Manhattan and Bronx phone book in search of Bugsy’s favourite pool hall. She’d even left a message with the janitor’s wife in his building. In desperation, she’d rung the speakeasy. Tallulah’s voice on the other end of the phone was not a welcome sound. “Sure he’s here. I’ll get him for you, honey.”

  Blousey couldn’t pretend it didn’t hurt. She had set her heart on getting out of New York and away to the coast and fame. She’d always been a dreamer. And while her fantasies seemed so much nicer than her real life, she saw no reason to make excuses for it. Maybe Bugsy being nice to her was a fantasy too. A daydream that would disappear when the rumble of a heavy truck or the elevated railway snapped her out of it. She didn’t have to wait more than a minute for Bugsy to answer, but it seemed like a week and it made her realise how much she wanted him to be genuine.

  “Hello, Blousey?”

  “Bugsy? Is that you? What are you doing there?”

  “Just business.”

  “With Tallulah?”

  “With Fat Sam.”

  “Did you get the tickets?”

  “No, not yet. Something’s come up.”

  He saw no point in lying to her, though he didn’t want to hurt her. But to someone with hopes as big as Blousey’s, one small step backwards to a normal person is a whole flight of stairs. She took it on the chin.

  “But you promised me. You promised me.”

  “I know, but Hollywood can wait a couple of days, can’t it?”

  This also seemed reasonable to Bugsy. Ever since Jesse Lasky had put up that shed to make De Mille’s ‘Squaw Man’ twenty years ago, Hollywood had grown and sprawled too far for anyone to believe such a tinselled monster could disappear overnight.

  Blousey took this second blow on the chin, too.

  “You had no intention of taking me to Hollywood.”

  “I do. Look, there’s just something I’ve got to do first.”

  At this moment, Tallulah came on the scene with Bugsy’s drink. It was impeccable timing by the smart blonde lady – but for Bugsy it was as well-timed as an iceberg floating into an ocean liner. Tallulah leaned on his shoulder and whispered in his ear, soft enough to make the hairs on the back of Bugsy’s neck stand on end, and loud enough for Blousey to catch.

  “You rat! You promised me!”

  Bugsy pulled the phone away from his head as the shriek of Blousey’s voice vibrated his inner eardrum like rain on a tin roof.

  “Look, trust me, will you? I’ll call you.” He replaced the earpiece in its holder. Pushing his hat to the back of his head, he took a consolation sip of his drink.

  Blousey put down the phone and leaned sadly against the wall. Maybe it was just a dream after all.

  STONES WOULD DO it. Leroy’s window was on the first storey at the front of the house. Bugsy had leaned on his bell for five minutes but still couldn’t wake him up. He scooped up a handful of loose gravel from the gutter and tossed it for all he was worth at Leroy’s window. It worked. As soon as the stones made noisy contact with the glass, a light went on. Leroy pulled up the window and poked his sleepy head out.

  “Who’s there?” he said, as his stubby fingers rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

  “It’s me. Bugsy. Get dressed and come down. We’ve got a job!” Bugsy tried not to laugh at Leroy’s rather peculiar, baggy, striped pyjamas.

  “You’ve got me a crack at the title already?”

  “No, this is a different type of job.”

  Leroy wasn’t interested in work at the best of times, let alone at this hour.

  “I’m tired. Come back in the morning.”

  “There’s two hundred dollars in it for you.”

 
; The change in Leroy was miraculous. His sticky, sleepy eyes clanked open like the tumblers in a fruit machine. Leroy’s pappy always used to say, “When you’re down on your luck and there’s nothing but clouds on the horizon, then a prayer, a song, and a few bucks is like a ray of sunshine.” To Leroy, the possibility of earning two hundred dollars was like an entire heat-wave summer. He retreated inside so fast that he misjudged the height of the window and knocked his head heavily on the wooden frame. He rubbed his granite skull and the pain went. The window frame had no such luck.

  Leroy and Bugsy crawled through the overgrown bushes at the edge of the lawn outside Dandy Dan’s mansion and stared at the truck parked in the drive. They had managed to avoid the guards on the front gate by crawling through a hole in the wire fence. Leroy had torn the hole himself – pulling the wire apart as easily as someone ripping out a detachable lining from a raincoat.

  Bugsy held Leroy back with his arm and ducked down. Leroy copied him, although he didn’t know why.

  “We’ve got to get closer.”

  The two crawled along on their tummies until they were scarcely twenty feet from the truck. Bugsy suddenly saw what Dan’s men were guarding so closely.

  “Splurge gun!”

  His whispered explanation took Leroy by surprise. He quickly looked about him, expecting to be held up.

  “Where?”

  “In the crates, stupid. Look what it says on the side of the truck.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t you read?”

  “Sure. It’s just that I’m a little short-sighted. What does it say?”

  Bugsy read out the words painted on the side of the truck, which were also stencilled on the wooden boxes loaded into it.

  “The Splurge Imports Company Inc. Dock 17, East River.”

  “That must be where they keep the guns.”

  Leroy was no Sherlock Holmes – or Doctor Watson, come to that – but he wasn’t stupid. Well, not very stupid.

  Suddenly Bugsy saw something else. Two burly guards, dressed in evil-looking baseball catchers’ masks and wielding baseball clubs, had just turned the corner towards them.

  “Look out, Leroy.”

  The two boys crawled back into the bushes as fast as they could. As they emerged on the other side, they saw that their path was blocked by another pair of baseball guards. Leroy turned to Bugsy, who was thinking fast. Leroy was grateful for that.

  “What are we gonna do, Bugsy?”

  “We’re going to have to make a run for it – there’s too many of them. Ready?”

  “Ready?”

  They pounded down the narrow, high-hedged path that led them back to the hole in the fence. But in their hurry they missed a thin trip wire that stretched across the lane. Leroy’s boot caught it first. His feet were thrown in the air and he did a belly flop dive on to the gravel. The trip wire yanked another wire that pulled a handle that set the alarms going. In seconds, there was pandemonium. The air was filled with the jarring, ear-splitting sounds of bells, klaxon hooters, and barker dogs. From every direction, guards descended on the two boys. Bugsy was knocked out by the first swing of a baseball bat, but Leroy managed to floor a good half-dozen of them before he, too, had butterflies fluttering in his head from a K.O. slug.

  The hoods went through Bugsy’s pockets and took out two Greyhound tickets. One of them read them out aloud.

  “You’ve gotta believe it, fellahs. Listen to this. Two tickets to guess where? Hollywood.”

  The rest of the guards laughed – and the tickets landed in a screwed-up ball next to Bugsy’s head.

  “The only stars he’ll be seeing are between the eyes.”

  It was a fair description, because, apart from the butterflies and the odd goldfish floating above him, stars were all Bugsy was seeing. He hadn’t even told Blousey he’d bought the tickets. Now she’d never know.

  Blousey sat on the end of her bed and clicked open the brass fasteners on the battered leather bag her Uncle Digby had loaned her when she first left for New York. She’d got a little ahead of herself and started to pack for Hollywood, which was a mistake, because it made the situation all the more painful when she unpacked. As she reached into the bag, she saw the nickelodeon viewer that Bugsy had given her. She rubbed the tortoiseshell with her sleeve until it shone like new. The Hollywood stars were still there when she held it up to the light, but somehow they didn’t shine so brightly now. They seemed so far away.

  She should never have thrown in her job at the speakeasy. It had taken her nearly six months to get a job and only two weeks to give it back.

  She dropped her head in embarrassment as she walked along the corridor to Fat Sam’s office. The other girls smiled to themselves as she passed them. Loretta, Dotty and Tillie almost bumped into her as she turned the corner.

  “Hi, Blousey. Miss your train?”

  “Hi, Blousey. What happened?”

  “Your guy let you down?”

  Their questions had no hope of getting answers. Blousey’s attention was clearly somewhere else. She rapped hard on the door marked ‘S. Stacetto. Private’. Fat Sam opened the door gingerly. With no hoods around him, he was a little careful whom he opened the door to. He was relieved to find it was Blousey.

  “Yes, honey. What can I do for you?”

  Blousey forced herself to ask, “I was wondering if I could have my job back?”

  Fat Sam was in a good mood. He felt strength in numbers and was very pleased to have her around.

  “Sure, honey. Go right in. Everyone’s welcome. The more the merrier.”

  He blew her a kiss with his frankfurter sausage fingers. But she missed it, because her head had dropped down again. As she went into the girls’ room, she passed Tallulah and Velma who were buffing up their nails.

  “Hi, Blousey. How you been?” they asked in unison. But even the two of them together couldn’t get through to Blousey. She ignored them both. Velma let out a sympathetic sigh.

  “Did you ever see a broad carry a torch so high?”

  “Yeah, the statue of Liberty.”

  The words were scarcely out of Tallulah’s mouth before the girls’ room door slammed in her face. Tallulah shrugged her slinky shoulders and walked away. If anyone had looked close enough they would have seen that she was smiling.

  THE WHITE BLUR waved back and forth in the attic at the top of Dandy Dan’s mansion. Bugsy blinked to focus his eyes, and the white blur turned into an electric light bulb that swung freely on its flex. He looked around him. Although his head was pounding like a ceremonial kettledrum, he quickly took in the situation.

  He was tied to a chair which was also tied to Leroy, who was in a similar position. And they were sitting in their underclothes. Evidently Dandy Dan had taken the precaution of removing their suits to discourage any escape.

  Leroy also blinked his way back to reality. He had been going through nightmares where goldfish swallowed goldfish and doors opened to other doors and then to sky, which left him floating in mid-air, where he was finlly gobbled up by another goldfish. Leroy was glad he had come to. He preferred a bruised head to being swallowed by a goldfish any day of the week.

  Leroy twisted and heaved, and managed to ease the roped that tied him. Bugsy felt something gnawing into his wrists.

  “What are you doing, Leroy?”

  “Untying the knots with my teeth. I saw it in a movie once.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure.”

  “Mind you don’t go hurting my wrists now.”

  “What about my teeth?”

  They both laughed, but, sure enough, Leroy was having some success. His teeth were big enough, after all. He could bite a cap off a Coke bottle as easily as anyone else bit off a piece of Hershey bar.

  In Dandy Dan’s drawing room, the string quartet continued their disregard for Mozart by murdering yet another piece of his music. Dan himself was being fitted for a new suit. The arms were tacked on with loose stitches, and the bespectacled tailor
drew meaningful lines on the grey pinstriped material with waxed chalk. Dan stood motionless, staring at his favourite person in the mirror.

  There was a knock at the door, and in came Bronx Charlie, his hat held respectfully in his hands. Dan spoke without moving. He was so pinned up by his tailor that he probably couldn’t move anyway.

  “What is it, Bronx Charlie?”

  “Er... I was wondering what you wanted us to do with these two guys we caught, Boss.”

  “I haven’t decided yet, Bronx Charlie.”

  “Shall I come back, Boss?”

  Dan would have stroked his moustache with his forefinger – as he always did when he felt superior – if he’d been able to bend his arm. But he merely said, “Give me an hour to think up something. Something particularly nasty.” And he tugged at the pinned-up grey sleeve, which ripped away from its stitching as Bronx Charlie backed out of the room.

  The string quartet were oblivious to the conversation and carried on struggling through their musical piece. Up in heaven, Mozart was probably sitting with his fingers in his ears.

  Leroy had made a very good job of undoing Bugsy’s ropes, and Bugsy returned the favour by undoing his. Once free, Bugsy ran to the room’s single exit, the door. He pushed on it and twisted the handle, but was not surprised to find that he could not open it.

  “Locked.”

  Leroy stood in the middle of the room, thoughtful, but not exactly alight with brilliant suggestions. Bugsy looked around the empty attic. An old chest, a packing case, the two chairs they had been tied to, and a few old discarded picture frames were all that was in it. He looked up to where the light was coming from and saw a narrow window in the ceiling.

  “The skylight, Leroy. Try the skylight.”

  Leroy didn’t need any more encouragement. He turned over the packing case and placed a bentwood chair on top of it. With great courage, but not a great deal of agility, he hauled his tubby frame on to the wobbly chair. Bugsy watched as his fat friend reached for the iron bars that stretched across the skylight, and began to pull with all his considerable strength. But the bars had little respect for Leroy’s muscles and refused to budge.