* * *
Police were still dragging lakes all over the Catskills. They preferred to do that rather than follow the tip that led to a six-mile stretch of highway near Saugerties that was paved the day after Charlie disappeared.
Jack's home was searched; Alice was nowhere to be found. A shotgun and rifle in a closet were confiscated. Fogarty was seminude with a buxom Catskill waitress of comparable nudity when the raid came.
Life went on.
* * *
I noticed that Jack had a luminous quality at certain moments, when he stood in shadow. I suspect a derangement of my vision even now, for I remember that the luminosity intensified when Jack said that I should carry a pistol to protect myself (he meant to protect his money) and then offered me one, which I refused.
"I'll carry the stuff, but I won't defend it," I said. "If you want that kind of protection give it to The Count to take home."
Since that perception of Jack's luminosity, I've read of scientists working to demystify psychic phenomena who claim to have photographed energy emitted by flowers and leaves. They photograph them while they are living, then cut them and photograph them in progressive stages of dying. The scientists say that the intense light in the living flower or leaf is energy, and that the luminous quality fades slowly until desiccation, at which point it vanishes.
I already spoke of Jack's energy as I saw it that memorable Sunday in the Catskills. The luminosity was further evidence of it, and this finally persuaded me of a world run not by a hierarchy of talents but by a hierarchy of shining energetics. In isolation or defeat some men lapse into melancholia, even catatonia, the death of motion a commonplace symptom. But Jack was volatile in his intensifying solitude, reacting with anger to his buffetings, also trying to convince, bribe, sweet-talk, harass his way out. At Aachen he argued with the German cops, saying, yes, he had the same name as the famous gangster, but he wasn't the same man. In protest of their disbelief he did a kind of Indian war dance in the aisle of the first-class coach, a dance at which one could only marvel. Ah, the creative power of the indignant liar.
I remember my own excitement, the surge of energy I felt rising in myself from some arcane storage area of the psyche when I strapped on the money belt. No longer the voyeur at the conspiracy, I was now an accessory, and the consequence was intoxicating. I felt a need to drink, to further loosen my control center, and I did.
At the bar I found a woman I'd flirted with a day or so earlier and coaxed her back to my cabin. I did not wait to strip her, or myself, but raised her dress swiftly, pulled her underclothing off one leg, and entered her as she sat on the bed, ripping her and myself in the process so that we both bled. I never knew her name. I have no recollection of the color of her hair, the shape of her face, or any word she might have said, but I still have an indelible memory of her pubic region, its color and its shape, at the moment I assaulted it.
* * *
No one suspected me of carrying The Great Wad, not even Classy Willie. I passed along the sap question to Willie over drinks on the train out of Belgium. "Did Jack ever give you back Biondo's bankroll?" He gave me a hangdog look that deflated his dapper facade and reduced him forever in my mind to the status of junior villain.
The Berlin lawyer I contacted when Jack was grabbed at Aachen and held for four days was named Schwarzkopf, his name the gift of a German detective who took a liking to Jack and spoke English to him, calling him "der Schack," a mythic nickname the German press had invented. (The French called Jack Monsieur Diamant; the Italians, Giovanni Diamante; and he was "Cunning Jackie" to the British.) Schwarzkopf turned out to be one of Berlin's leading criminal lawyers, but he failed to delay Jack's deportation for even a day. He even failed, when it became clear that Germany was not an open door, to get Jack aboard the liner I'd booked us on out of Bremen. The liner said no.
Nevertheless, Jack commissioned Schwarzkopf with a one grand retainer to sue the German government for mistreatment and expenses, and to grease enough levers to get him back into Germany when the fuss went away. It was typical of Jack not to yield to what other men would consider the inevitable.
When we met Schwarzkopf in the palm garden of the Bremen hotel where Jack was staying, he brought along his nephew, a young, half-drunk playwright named Weissberg, who in turn brought along a gum-chewing, small-breasted, brassiereless, and dirty little whore, dirtier than street whores need to be. She spoke only three words near the end of our conversation, stroking Weissberg's silky black mustache and calling him "Mein schén scheizekopf. "
Weissberg had written a well-received play about burglars, pimps, and pickpockets in Berlin, but he'd never met anybody in the underworld with the exalted status of Jack and so he'd persuaded Schwarzkopf to arrange a meeting. The violinist and accordion player were sending out Straussian strains suitable to palm gardens as we all drank our dunkelbock and schnapps under an open sky. The tables were small, and so Classy Willie and The Count, who both carried weapons now, sat apart from our quartet, just as Fogarty and The Goose had on the mountain. Jack, like the aristocratic Germans around us, had an acute sense of class distinction.
Jack's German mood, after he was refused first-class passage, seemed, finally, glum. That's how I read it, and I was wrong. He was more disturbed than that, but I was unable to perceive it. I excuse myself for this failure of perception, for I think he was concealing it even from himself. It was Weissberg who brought him to explosion. Weissberg began with questions, not unlike the press, only more penetrating.
"Do you know anyone in the underworld who has a conscience, Herr Diamond?"
"I don't know anybody in the underworld. I'm only a bootlegger."
"What are your feelings about willful murder?"
"I try to avoid it."
"I have known people who would steal and yet would not maim another person. I know people who would maim and yet stop short of murder. And I know of men who claim that they could murder in anger but never in cold blood. Is this the way the underworld is morally structured?"
Jack seemed to like that question. Possibly he'd thought of its import over the years without ever raising the question quite so precisely. He squinted at the playwright, who talked with a cigarette constantly at the corner of his mouth, never removing it, letting the ashes fall as they would, on his chest or into the schnapps, or snorting them away with nasal winds. He was accomplished at this gesture, which I guessed he'd adopted when he first entered the underworld milieu.
"There's always a guy," Jack said to him, "who's ready to do what you won't do."
"What is your limit? What is it you will not do?"
"I've done everything at least twice," Jack said with a satiric snicker, "and I sleep like a baby."
"Wunderbar!" said Weissberg, and he threw his arms in the air and arched his body backward in the chair in a physical demonstration of Eureka! We listened to waltz music and we drank our legal alcohol and we watched the playwright commune silently, smilingly, with this sudden inflation of meaning. He threw off the half inch of cigarette from his lip and leaned toward Jack.
"I want to write a play about your life," he said. "I want to come to America and live with you. I don't care what might happen in your life, and I fully expect you'll kill me if you think I'm informing on you. I want to see you eat and breathe and sleep and work and do your bootleg things and steal and rob and kill. I want to witness everything and write a great play, and I will give it all to you, all my glory, all my money. I want only the opportunity to write what I believe, which is that there are similarities among the great artist, the great whore, and the great criminal. The great artist is the work he does which outlives him. The great whore lives in the memory of ineffable sensual gratification that outlasts the liaison; she is also the beauty of the parts, as is art. And she is the perversion of love, as art is the exquisite perversion of reality. Of course, with both artist and whore, the rewards are ever-greater recompense, ever-greater renown. And I see the great criminal shining through
the bold perversion of his deeds, in his willingness to scale the highest moral barriers (and what is morality to the whore, the artist?). In all three professions is the willingness to withhold nothing from one's work. All three, when they achieve greatness, have also an undeniable high style which separates them from the pedestrian mobs. For how could we tell a great criminal from a thug in the alley, or a great whore from a street slut, if it were not for style? , Yesssss, Herr Diamond, yesssss! It is abandon, first, which goes without saying, but it is finally style that makes you great and will make me great, and it is why we are drinking here together in this elegant hotel and listening to this elegant music and drinking this elegant schnapps.
"My little piglet here," he said, turning to his own whore, who understood no English and whose breasts look like two fried eggs in my memory, "knows nothing of style and can never be more than a gutter animal. She is a filthy woman and I do enjoy this. I enjoy paying her and stealing back the money. I enjoy infecting her with my diseases and then paying her doctor bills. I enjoy squeezing her nipples until she screams. She is a superb companion, for she is stupid and knows nothing of me. She is not capable of even conceiving of how the great whores of Germany function today. I will have them, too, in time. But now my piglet exalts my young life.
"And you, sir, are a great man and have achieved great things. I can see in your eyes that you have leaped all moral and social barriers, that you are no prisoner of creeds and dogmas. You are intelligent, Herr Diamond. You live in the mind as well as on the street of bullets and blood. I too live in the mind and in the heart. My art is my soul. It is my body. Everything I do contributes to my art. We live, you and I, Herr Diamond, in the higher realms of the superman. We have each overcome our troublesome self. We exist in the world of will. We have created the world before which we can kneel. I speak Nietzsche's words. Do you know him? He says clearly that he who must be a creator in good and evil has first to be a destroyer and break values. We have both destroyed, Herr Diamond. We have both broken old values. We have both gone into the higher planes where the supermen dwell, and we will always triumph over the spirits of defeat that try to pull us down. Will you let me live with you and write your story—our story? Will you do this, Herr Diamond ?"
Jack gave it a few seconds, letting it all settle, watching those electric eyes under Weissberg's bushy black brows. Then he went over to The Count's table and came back with The Count's small .25-caliber pistol half-concealed from the two dozen customers who sat in the garden's magical twilight, letting Strauss, the gentle swaying of the potted palms, and the intoxicating mellowness of the afternoon's first drinks lull them into sweet escape. Jack pulled his chair close to Weissberg's until they were knee to knee, and he then showed the playwright the pistol, holding it loosely in his palm. He said nothing at all for perhaps a minute, only held the weapon as a display item. Then suddenly and with eyes turned snakish, with a grimace of hate and viciousness whose like I had never seen before on his face, he nosed the barrel downward and fired one shot into the grass between Weissberg's feet, which were about six inches from each other. The downward course of the firing, the small caliber of the weapon, the shot muffled by pants legs and overwhelmed by music, created a noise that did not disrupt. A few people turned our way, but since we seemed at ease, no disturbance in process, the noise was assumed to be something as trivial as a broken glass. Jack took no notice of any external reaction. He said to Weissberg, "You're a kid, a fool. "
The pistol was already in his pocket as he stood up and tossed a handful of deutsche marks on the table to pay for the drinks.
"My beautiful shithead," said the dirty little whore, stroking Weissberg's mustache, which by then was wet with tears, as wet as the front of his pants. Weissberg, the young playwright, had very suddenly liquefied.
* * *
Jack was two days out of Hamburg on the freighter Hannover, the only passenger, before he heard the strange melodic chaos coming up from below. He went through corridors and down a stairway where he found the forty-five hundred canaries the Hannover was bringing to the American bird-cage crowd. The Hartz Mountain birds, yellow and green, stopped singing when Jack entered their prison, and he thought: They've smelled me. But canaries are idiots of smell and wizards of hearing and love. The prison was moist and hot and Jack began to sweat. A sailor feeding the birds looked up and said, "I'm feedin' the birds."
"So I see."
"If you don't feed 'em, they drop dead."
"Is that so?"
"They eat a lot of food."
"You wouldn't think it to look at them."
"They do, though. "
"Everybody needs a square meal," Jack said.
"Canaries especially."
"Can I help you feed them?"
"Nah. They wouldn't like you."
"What makes you think they wouldn't like me?"
"They know who you are. "
"The canaries know me?"
"You saw the way they quit singin' when you come in?"
"I figured they were afraid of people. "
"They love people. They're afraid of you. "
"You're full of shit," Jack said.
"No, I'm not," said the sailor.
Jack opened a cage to gentle one of the birds. It pecked once at his knuckle. He lifted the bird out and saw it was dead. He put it in his pocket and opened another cage. That bird flew out, silently, and perched on top of the highest stack of cages, beyond Jack's reach unless he used the sailor's ladder. The bird twisted its tail and shat on the floor in front of Jack.
"I told you," the sailor said. "They don't want nothin' to do with you. "
"What've they got against me ?"
"Ask them. If you know what music is all about, you can figure out what they're sayin'. You know how they learn to sing so good? Listenin' to flutes and fiddles."
Jack listened, but all he heard was silence. The bird shat at him again. Jack yelled, "Fuck you, birdies," to the canaries and went back topside.
* * *
Jack heard from the radio operator that he was still steady news across the world, that now everyone knew he was on a ship with forty-five hundred canaries and that the corpse of Charlie Northrup had still not turned up. The sailor who fed the birds came up from below one morning, and Jack detected traces of the Northrup mouth on the man, a semitaut rubber band with the round edges downward turning. No smile, no smile. When the sailor opened the hatch, Jack heard the music of the birds. He inched toward it as it grew more and more glorious. The song heightened his sense of his own insignificance. What song did he sing? Yet it unaccountably pleased him to be nothing on the high seas, a just reward somehow; and now the birds were singing of justice. Jack remembered how satisfying it was to be shot and to linger at the edge of genuine nothingness. He remembered touching the Kiki silk and strong Alice's forehead. How rich! How something! And the vibrancy of command. Ah yes, that was something. Get down, he said to a nigger truck driver one night on the Lake George road; and the nigger showed him a knife, stupid nigger, and Jack fired one shot through his forehead. When Murray opened the door, the nigger fell out. Power! And when they got Augie—the lovely pain under Jack's own heart. Bang! And in the gut. Bang! Bang! Fantastic! Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate.
"How's all the birdies?" Jack asked the sailor.
"Very sad," said the sailor. "They sing to overcome their sadness."
"That's not why birds sing," Jack said.
"Sure it is."
"Are you positive?"
"I live with birds. I'm part bird myself. You should see my skin up close. Just like feathers."
"That's very unusual," Jack said.
The sailor rolled up his sleeve to show Jack his biceps, which were covered with brown feathers.
"Now do you believe me?" the sailor asked.
"I certainly do. It's absolutely amazing.
"I used to be a barn swallow before I became a sailor."
"You like it bette
r as a bird or this way?"
"I had more fun as a bird."
"I would've given nine to five you'd say that," Jack said.
* * *
A sailor told me a story when I boarded the Hannover back in the States.
"A strange man, der Schack, und I like him," the sailor said. "Good company, many stories, full of the blood that makes a man come to life as thousands around him become dead. A natural man. A man who knows where to find Canis Major. I watch him by the railing, looking out at the waves, not moving. He looks, he trembles. He holds himself as you hold a woman. He is a man of trouble. The captain sends me to his cabin when he does not come to breakfast, und on the table by the bed are three birds, all dead. Der Schack is sick. He says he vill take only soup. For three days he stays in the room und just before Philadelphia he comes to me und says he wants to buy three birds to take home. 'They are my friends,' he says. When I get the birds for him, he wants to pay me, but I say, 'No, Schack, they are a gift.' In his cabin I look for the three dead ones, but they are gone. "
* * *
I beat Jack home, caught a liner a day and a half after he left Hamburg, and probably passed his floating birdhouse before it was out of the English Channel. The money passed back to America with me without incident, and so, I thought, had I, for I had been a passive adjunct to Jack's notoriety, a shadowy figure in the case, as they say. But my shadow ran ahead of me, and when I returned to Albany and rented a safe-deposit box for the cash, I found I was locally notorious. My picture had been taken in Germany with Jack, and it had smiled all over the local papers. My legal maneuvering on the Continent, however marginal and unpublic, had been ferreted out by German newsmen and duly heralded at home.
Legs - William Kennedy Page 10