by Al Zuckerman
Scott at first had thought it’d be better for Linda if he kept this to himself. But after several hours of butting up against what was becoming a hopeless maze, he had asked her, and then found that she didn’t know where her father was either. Which seemed odd, a little bizarre, and yet in the light of everything happening, maybe not so bizarre.
She’d pitched right in, and made a slew of calls herself. She was sure her pop could be reached any time anywhere through Cousin Reuben, or Uncle Morris, or Mr. Okun in Florida, or Leroy surely—except he’d gone to Cuba; but those men were some of the ones Scott couldn’t quite get to. No one anywhere would admit that Hargett even was away, much less suggest where he might be now. Everyone Scott did get to seemed natural and spontaneous, and yet their nonanswers were so similar, he began to find it eerie and infuriating.
Scott altogether worn out on his third night in New York, left the hospital, stepped out into the blackish street, and was instantly struck by the cold. Its suddenness all but cracked his bones open to the marrow. He considered turning back rather than brave it to Lexington Avenue where he’d intended to grab some supper, but then forged ahead. Numb toes would be easier to endure than another of those gluey cafeteria meals.
As he reached the edge of the entrance’s glow, a taxi pulled up. What luck! He dashed back to it. Before he’d closed the door behind him, he saw, already in there, a man extending a hand to him—Jesus, Mr. Hargett! Scott was stunned, furious, a little frightened, and elated. They’d driven blocks before his heart’s pounding quieted.
Scott could not have known, since no one did, not Linda or David or Morris or Leroy, that Izzie had secluded himself in such a way that no one in the world knew where he was. Not that Iz lacked trust in his people. They were true, fanatic even, in their loyalty. He’d decided, though, that they might be better off without the possible burden of such knowledge. It was conceivable, after all, that one of them might be snatched and then sweated for just this information. Therefore he’d arranged it that through one person only, and this man himself ignorant of Iz’s whereabouts, could Hargett be contacted. It was Silverberg, who could send a message, but only through the day’s presiding official at the Banque de Génève et d’Outre-Mer, and then only with a code which changed twice daily, so that outside Silverberg’s office where the lawyer might conceivably not be wholly in control of things, even he couldn’t get to Iz.
Nor would Scott have been likely to glean from the warm handshake and fatherly squeeze around the shoulders Mr. Hargett gave him that things were not going particularly well for his future father-in-law. Izzie’s awesome resources simply were not delivering the goods. Even the intelligence network generally conceded second to none, the Mafia with its operatives in every major American city and with associates in Europe, the Near East, North Africa, the Caribbean, was coming up with nothing.
Izzie’s hole-up, actually minutes away from Lenox Hospital, was atop a brownstone in the Fifties a few steps off Fifth Avenue. An unmarked street door opened to a miniscule private elevator which rose to the fourth floor only. The stories below housed the offices of Harmonium Importers Inc., a venerable firm of exclusive distributors of the highest grade Scotches, brandies, and champagnes. Iz had inherited Harmonium in late 1935 from the abruptly demised Arthur Flegenheimer (Dutch Schultz). Now the controling dummy corporation was overseen by attorneys in the Silverberg firm, and only one person currently with Harmonium had ever had personal contact with Hargett: an elderly Japanese gentleman, a research chemist and engineer, who rarely left Perth Amboy, where he directed a vast warehouse in whose basement functioned a streamlined, wholly mechanized beverage manufactory. Iz was proud of the old bootleg skills which he could still make pay off, but he had virtually no one to share this pride with. The business was one of a handful in which he had no partners. No one close to him knew about it except Silverberg, and he only as one among dozens of deals in which Iz had an interest. Thus the likelihood of an enemy’s tracing Hargett to a wholly separate apartment atop Harmonium Importers was dim, a thousand to one, odds which Iz could stay comfortable with, for a little while anyway.
Scott’s surprise faded while his tension mounted, as he waited for Mr. Hargett to explain, or for himself to speak up. The cab turned into Central Park, cruising slowly, taking the twisting curves gently. At the first red light, the older man exhaled profoundly, and then said, “So, anything new up there?”
“No,” Scott answered through clenched teeth, “not really.”
“Ai, that’s what I figured.”
Questions, every second another shot through Scott’s mind. How’d Mr. Hargett just happen to be here? Who was Isadore Hargett? What was the man’s secret? Secrets really—there seemed to be a million of them. The rumors, for example, that he’d been close to Al Capone, the real boss behind Pirone—was any of that true? To prompt such talk, Mr. Hargett would have to have done some of that, wouldn’t he? Except that Senator McCarthy, with his buck shot accusations against innocent people, did seem to be proving the opposite. But all day today, how come no one would offer a hint even about where the man was? Why? And yet he seemed to know about Dad. How? Could he have visited? Or was it through Linda? A chill ran up Scott’s back. Could she have been lying?
Scott’s heart hurt. If only he could shut it all off, like a light switch.
“You know about my dad’s condition, then.”
“It’s the McCoy, what the doctor’s been saying. All double-checked too. Once the shock wears off, another day, two at the most, he’ll start to come back pretty fast.”
The hurt in Scott’s head was gone. He noticed the park’s twinkling street lights. He felt lightened, a great load off his shoulders, blessedly relieved. But his pleasure almost immediately soured. Annoyance at his gullibly accepting this nonmedical, off-the-cuff assessment so quickly and completely. As if the universe were controlled by Mr. Hargett.
“Kid, you’re kind of mad at me, aren’t you?”
Scott silently gasped. In the dark, how did the man know? “No, not angry, just. …”
“I know, I understand. But what happened to your dad and his friend, believe me, was freakishness, pure. Freaky as an earthquake. Anybody on that street at that time would have got hit the same.”
Again Scott’s spirits soared. So that proved it. No sinister plot. A mad accident. Mr. Hargett’s low voice was totally persuasive.
“They’ve got them now,” the little man quietly crowed, “up at the precinct on 111th; vermin, the lowest of the low. Knocked them off, five this afternoon.”
Scott was stunned, and thrilled. Those subhumans really arrested? But . . . how did Hargett know, and he himself not?
“Spics, two of them, certified crazies.”
Scott felt awed at the man’s way of seeming to know everything. Scott looked up to his own father as one of the rare, nothing-can-stop-them personalities. Compared to Mr. Hargett, though, Leo shrank.
“What did you—” Scott stammered, “How did that, something like that, ever happen?”
“Exactly how, I don’t quite know.”
“But you—you were responsible for having those creeps caught, weren’t you?”
“Maybe, sort of, in a general way. But the details, I really don’t know what they are.”
Scott tried to read Mr. H.’s face, make out somehow something more, but it was too dark, and awkward.
Scott felt annoyed, though he recognized that could be the truth. “So then, generally could you tell me what you did?”
“Well,” the older man sighed, “you stick it out in a hard business for as many years as I have, you find you’ve done a few things for people; some of them feel they owe you a favor.”
“Policemen, private detectives, people like that, you mean?”
A streetlamp briefly illuminated Hargett’s smile. “No, no, no, no. See, there are a lot of businesses in this city, especially small gambling businesses, like numbers drops and horse books, where the operators make it their job to
know everybody who lives nearby, even the little kids. That’s the only way you got safety running those kind of businesses. So then what happens in a case like this is, I happen to know people who happen to be friends with those kind of businessmen. And there’s not much that ever happens anywhere in this city that sooner or later one of those small neighborhood guys doesn’t find out about.”
Scott, digesting this, was a little short of breath. Mr. Hargett seemed to have resources in a way more vast than those of the Government.
“Later I’ll drop you off back at the hospital, and you’ll tell your pop. It’ll perk him up.”
Scott felt grateful, and yet still annoyed too. Hell, he’d said so much already, he might as well try and get it all out. “Have you been hiding from me, Mr. Hargett! I had a hell of a time trying to reach you.”
“But in the end, you did. Right?”
“Were you”—Scott was incredulous—“doing it deliberately—testing me or something?”
Mr. Hargett snorted softly, amused. “No, no, no. I like you, but that important to me you’re not. Not yet anyway. No, it’s just I’m being alone for a while, way off by myself.”
“And even Linda doesn’t know where, or how to reach you?”
“No one does.”
Fantastic and yet true, Scott sensed.
“So does that square it with you then?” Mr. Hargett gently twitted. “Make you feel not so picked on?”
Scott shrugged. “I guess so. It’s just so—unusual.”
“After what happened at Princeton? Scott, like my Broadway friend Blomberg says, ‘With a show you get one crack, only one.’ Now you understand? But now I want you to tell me, why all the phone calls? Why me? And so badly?”
Scott’s hungerings were all aswirl. How to sort them out, boil them down? Simply, “For help.”
Mr Hargett took Scott’s hand. “What’s it look to you like I’ve been doing?”
The cab felt overheated, stifling, Scott jerked loose his tie. The man was talking about having those muggers caught. But that was not the help Scott had been praying for. “Have you seen my father?”
“Yes.”
Scott was stunned.
“You have gone out to eat. And I like to do things quiet. But you don’t have to take my word. You’ll see for yourself, once you tell him those rats are headed for the electric chair where they belong.”
Scott wondered if that really would rouse his father. And there was also the disaster with Dynamic. How to broach that? “There are uh business problems I was hoping I could talk to you about.”
“They’re pretty much taken care of.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you see tonight’s paper?”
“No, not yet.”
“The closing price for Dynamic stock is right back up where it was. Now I just hope you haven’t got other business problems.”
Tears welled up in Scott’s eyes. The man was—fantastic.
“You all right, Scott?”
“I—I don’t know what to say.”
“So don’t say. That’s okay too. In fact, it’s better.”
Scott felt an attraction, a pull, a need to stay somehow alongside and at all costs with this man.
CHAPTER 15
Vacuous, decadent, a mockery of the myth’s grandeur: Linda hated The Infernal Machine—especially Jocaste. Almost every line Cocteau had written for Oedipus’s grande-dame mother, Linda could hear in Mrs. Kremish’s voice.
The term paper she supposedly was putting into final form was due tomorrow morning. Absurd. She could never get it finished by then. Gross, heavy-handed invective was all she seemed capable of tapping out tonight. Even the typewriter was fighting her, sliding about at every return of the carriage.
So go to sleep, she told herself for the twentieth time, and then didn’t budge from her chair. Her sense of duty, or her fear or something, wouldn’t let her. She tried spurring herself back to work. She ought to be in heaven with all this quiet, Mom out for Mah-Jongg, nobody popping in the way the kids did up at the dorm. Her own mind, though, was providing disturbance equal to a whole dormitory’s. And it had been this way since her lunch with that Medusa.
Even with things calmer, Mr. Kremish out of the hospital and pretty well recovered, Scott back up at Dartmouth, Linda nonetheless still felt shaky, overtired. One reason was Scott who used to write every day, and now would miss days. Linda had called three nights ago, anxious, and asked, why, how come? He’d laughed it off, told her he was just behind in his courses, working to get caught up. Besides, in another week, classes would be letting out for Christmas, and he’d be down there with her, wouldn’t he? It had sounded so good, but that hadn’t stopped the sudden crying spells. They’d just happen, leaving her drained, beaten. She’d thought of asking for an appointment with the Dean, maybe a leave of absence. Or go see—why not?—a psychiatrist. Two of the kids she knew at Barnard were. …
Bzzzzz! She was startled, jarred. Someone downstairs in the lobby. Who? At ten o’clock at night?
Tentatively, uneasily, Linda put her mouth to the barely-working intercom in the kitchen wall.
“Yes?”
“Man down here,” a doorman’s voice squeaked, “says he’s Mister Hargett.”
Poppa! How gorgeous!
Warmth surged through her; even her earlobes tingled. It was a month since she’d seen him, and she’d so passionately wanted to. Simply being with him would make her feel less helpless, as if she could share the force radiating from him.
She glanced over at the wing chair he used to sit in when he lived at home. She (and Momma too, Linda knew) still thought of it as his. God, how many years since the divorce, since he’d been here?
A radiator valve made sputtering noises as she moved into the front hall, and she realized it was odd, that it was December and he was still in New York. This time of year always, since her public school days, he’d be away in Florida or Cuba. “The season, gonna be a big season, gotta get ready for the season.” Christmas holidays, after school’d let out, she and Mom and David and Uncle Harry’s family would bundle onto the Orange Blossom Limited or the Seatrain Express, ride two nights and a day to Uncle Morris’s old Biltmore Palace; since high school, they’d gone by plane, just Linda and David, to the Xanadu. Except this year. …
Greasy hair, a spaghetti stain on her shirt, she felt unkempt. If only he’d phoned her first.
But then she opened the door, and quickly she was in his arms, safe, inside the magic fortress.
Opening her eyes, looking over his shoulder, it struck her how much taller she was, except that he felt so much bigger.
“Lindeleh,” he crooned.
She bent, kissed his forehead and tried nestling on his shoulder.
“Sorry I’ve been—a little hard to reach.”
She shrugged.
“You weren’t worried about me, were you?”
She had been. But she shook her head. And then she was busy hanging up his coat, ushering him in, and her awkward feelings faded.
In the living room, in the light, she could see he was tired.
“You hungry, Poppa? There might be some pot roast left.”
He brightened. “Your momma’s?”
“Who else’s?”
Wistfully he smiled. “It used to be the best.”
“Still is.”
At the little table where dimly she remembered him eating years ago, also late at night, she felt unspeakable regret.
Amazing, she thought, how he never changed. His eyes were aglow, his hair barely flecked with gray, whereas the kitchen walls had yellowed, the stove’s enamel chipped, rusted, the linoleum faded. And she’d certainly changed.
He smacked his lips and said, “Your mother’s cooking, to that I could nicely still be married.”
It made Linda feel good watching him eat. “Are things okay, Pop? With you?”
“I’ve been through worse. For you, though, I’m hoping I can make it a little easier.”
<
br /> Inwardly she shuddered. She didn’t want to know what he meant, and yet. … “Tell me—what’s happening.”
He pushed away his plate. “Someone I could avoid pretty easy, but who Reuben convinces me it’s better I go see, wants me in Washington, D.C. day after tomorrow.”
Who? What did he mean? It hit her, a hammer banging down on her head.
“Smart.” He smiled. “You figured it already, hunh?”
Kefauver, the Organized Crime Hearings. Her chest ached. She was afraid. “I thought you told me once about President Roosevelt, that he. …”
Hargett nodded, sighed, “But he left us, you know, and went off to the other world. And that kind of promise is not a thing a politician writes down.”
“But why, I mean, why you? What’re they going to ask you?”
“Who are the people I rob? How do I do it? How many trillions do I get away with? Do I really run both the United States and the whole world?”
“But—that’s crazy.”
“It’s a craziness that gets them votes.”
She cringed, seeing his name on newstands, big headlines, her name too. “What if they don’t believe you?”
He shrugged. “At the worst, they might get me for contempt.”
“And then?”
“Their lives’ll go on, and so will mine.”
“And that’s all?”
“Maybe I pay more taxes. But for you, it means a small headache with the Kremishes. But nothing is going to change.”
She wanted to crawl into bed, hide, vanish.
“Lindeleh, why I came tonight is to tell you, no matter what they accuse me of, no matter what garbage you hear, don’t give it the time of day. The truth is, you can hold your head up, and high too. Cause there’s not one thing for you to feel ashamed about.”
She wanted to answer, reassure him, say, “I know, Pop, and I believe that, and I’ve always believed it, and I love you.” But something held her back. He couldn’t be being subpoenaed for no reason at all. Could he?