by Al Zuckerman
Leroy, sensitive to her disquiet, cradled her, brushed her ear with his lips, said, “Your poppa’s smart as they make ’em. So no need to take on so. He is going to figure this thing.”
Leroy, she knew, meant those words. Then why did they sound—hollow?
“What worries me”—Leroy held her more tightly—“is him finding out about the two of us.”
Another reason, she thought, why it’d be good to disappear. “Do you—ever dream about running away, somewhere we’d be—far from my father, not see him, or even hear of him?”
“It’s gonna be okay right here.”
“You’re not afraid—at all?”
“I fight it down.”
So he too was scared. “So, why do you stay with my dad?”
“You’re forgettin, I think, that you’ve got your arms around a jigaboo.”
“Stop that!”
“You know anyone else who’s gonna set me up in a job as good as I’ve got with him?”
She was stunned. A job, so irrelevant, so tiny a thing compared with fearing for her very life.
“And he treats me like a man. Baby, to me that’s the biggest thing there is.”
She looked hard at Leroy’s blackness, which for a while now she hadn’t noticed, and she understood.
“And you love him too, don’t you?”
“Yeah, maybe. But see, the other big thing about my being along with him is, I can see myself some day making it—really big.”
“Even after he finds out about us?”
She felt Leroy’s body flinch, as if she’d punched him.
She felt awful. She’d wanted to make him see things her way, but not to—hurt him really.
“Soon,” he muttered, “I suppose I’m going to have to talk it to him. And however that happens, you’re going to have to help.”
Craziness! That she could push her father to do something, anything, he was opposed to, pure cloud nine. Yet in some things it was true that she had been able to.
Poppa, Poppa, Poppa, Poppa! So always with her, and in the middle of everything, all through Leroy, in between her and Leroy, and part of this horror with David, and inside her too, deep inside.
Could that be why she felt somehow goaded to defy him? And yet there was such power in him, she knew she couldn’t, not really. … Or might there be a chance she could? She began to tremble.
CHAPTER 3
Leroy got out of the taxi, stepping onto the carpeted sidewalk and under the Waldorf’s marquee, which today was warding off a hot sun. Standing still a second, he had the feeling of his shoulders and biceps expanding, all but bursting the seams of his new cord suit, as if suddenly he were equal somehow to these Towers before him. The Waldorf was no bigger than the Xanadu, no more genteel than the Saratoga Tuxedo, but it was more awesome somehow. The first time he’d come to see Mr. H. here, he’d felt intimidated, unworthy to enter the lobby’s subtle, money-dripping hush. And he’d had to suffer an order, uttered as a suggestion from an unctuous elevator starter, that Leroy “might prefer the service elevator.” Right off Leroy had had the flunky phone upstairs, so there’d be a quick end to that shit, which there had been. Yet at every arrival since, Leroy had been in a sweat, just in case; and even though he was prepared to give them double hell if someone started up again. Except today, he didn’t feel the least bit in a sweat. The massive bronze revolving door turned as easily as a pinwheel. Today he was ten feet tall, a millionnaire, good-looking as Clark Gable, even white, sort of. He wasn’t sure why. But the brass buttoned bellhops nodded deferentially enough to him, and the elevator boy knew the floor without one word. At the door to the suite, though, Leroy did hesitate to push the buzzer.
* * *
“I appreciate this, Dan.” Iz had finally managed to get a word in. He’d waited patiently and then impatiently while Keohane, longwinded even on long distance, had recounted in detail the working of his charms and power on three separate crusty, son-of-a-bitch admirals. Now Iz, eager to get going with his instructions to Leroy, wanted to wind this up, especially since Morris, Reuben, Louie and Blinkie would be arriving within minutes too.
“Forget it, will you?” Keohane oozed good will. “Those fellas are ornery as they come, but even they could tell just from a glance through his file that David is not the kind of young officer to go prancing off A.W.O.L.”
“Still, if you hadn’t put it to those guys, there could have been—an inquiry, a court martial, at the least a who knows how much commotion? So believe me, I’m relieved and I’m grateful too.”
“Hell, Iz, that is my job, you know, looking after my people, making sure the right thing gets done—when I can.”
Keohane was all sugar. But what tune would he sing after he’d found out the score, that the well had gone dry, that there’d be no more monthly palm oil, that ransoming David had had to mean Iz’s unplugging from the casinos—for a while anyway? Old Dan was too valuable to risk upsetting. There had to be a tit left for Keohane to suck some good from. The New York and Florida real estate, the wine and liquor importing, the Perth Amboy bootleg plant, those thank God were separate, no part of the lousy sell-off. The dollars left weren’t big, but at least something. It was not something Iz could talk about on the phone, though. It’d have to wait, but the longer it did, the worse the shock for Danny-boy. With some explaining, Iz hoped Keohane would come around, understand this was the straight stuff, and only temporary. Because Iz would be needing the guy, maybe more even than before.
The good-byes were quick. Iz’s mind was on David, the quick visit they’d had together in Portsmouth before the boy had reported back to his ship. …
“Pop, I’m okay, really, they treated me just fine.”
Iz had been touched, the boy trying to reassure him, set his mind to rest. “But what about from now on? You scared?”
“I hadn’t thought about that. Should I be?”
“In a way, yeah.”
David’s eyes had widened, puzzled, worried too.
Iz had wanted to hug the kid, tell him it’d be smooth sailing, a hundred percent, from there on; but Iz had sensed that David in his heart knew better.
“If you keep a little worried, you keep careful.”
“Worried about what, Pop? Is there—someone else who might come after me?”
“I don’t think so, no. But then I never thought anyone would ever come after you in the first place.”
“I’m more worried about you than about myself.”
Had the boy been trying to make Iz feel good? No, Iz decided, David had meant it. Which made Iz feel funny, knowing his son cared for him so, and glad that he’d paid the fucking incredible ransom.
“Linda, honey, I’m going to be busy a while. Come back at supper time, and we’ll have a nice dinner together, okay?”
She’d been hovering in the adjacent bedroom, supposedly resting. When finally her father had hung up the phone, she’d sprung toward the door and carefully slipped in. All her life, a suggestion like this from him had been tantamount to a command, unquestioningly and speedily to be obeyed. She had to steel herself against her own instinct to say, “Sure pop,” and meekly leave. Yet hard as this was for her, she knew that for Leroy it was a thousand times worse. All he had slaved for, dreamt about, his whole future, trembled in the balance. She wanted to be with him, and yet felt she had to be so careful.
If she spoke first, Leroy would come off looking like a follower, the boyfriend who let himself be led by the girl, which in her father’s eyes would reduce him to a half-man, a genuine nigger; and then it all would be hopeless.
“Mr. H.?”
He was speaking! Go on, go on, she wanted to shout.
“Yeah, Leroy?” her Poppa tilted his head.
“There’s a—matter I’d like to talk about if I might, and it concerns Linda too. So if you could, well, bear with me a few minutes, I’d really like for her to stay.”
Her heart welled up. He’d done it. He was braving the awesome man, and eloquent
ly too. And simultaneously almost, Poppa’s darting his eyes from Leroy to her filled her with butterflies.
Poppa spread open his palms, signifying an assent. “Sit down, Linda.” He spoke to her tenderly as always. “Make yourself comfortable.”
She felt she ought to be next to Leroy, but there was no chair alongside his. She slipped onto the brocaded couch, but at the opposite end from her father. Immediately she felt embarrassed. Dumb mistake. She should have sat close to Poppa. It would have pleased him, made it harder for him maybe to—turn them down.
“I’m ready, Leroy,” Poppa quietly said, “if you are.”
Leroy suddenly looked down at his shoes, brown wing tips with a high gloss, and then just as abruptly again faced her father. “It’s just what it must look like, I guess,” he diffidently began, “I’ve liked Linda as far back,”—and he shrugged uncertainly—“pretty much as I can remember, and admired her too; but me being what I am, well, that was the end of that, wasn’t it? But then after what happened to Scott, well, we got to seeing each other, becoming real friends. And now for me, it’s gotten to be—more. And what I’d never in a million years have hoped, or dreamed of even, is that that’s also happened to her.”
Linda had been watching Poppa’s eyes close, his mouth open and chin gradually drop.
“You asking me something,” her father whispered icily, eyes still closed, “or telling me?”
Leroy weighed that, then answered firmly, “I’m asking you.”
“The feeling I got is it’s too late for just asking.”
“I am asking; but it’s true, I also feel—committed to her.”
“So you are telling me. So now let’s pin down what you’re telling.”
Leroy dropped his head into his hand, as if to rest, recover, then took a big breath, looked up, and plunged. “I love your daughter Linda.” He sounded stiff, formal. “She, I know, feels the same to me. So we are asking your permission to get married—and for your blessing.”
Poppa’s lower lip pushed upward, furrowing his face into a million wrinkles—of what? Fury, pain? He opened his eyes, still grimacing, and looked at her, then at him. Finally he said, “And what kind of plans you got, if I don’t give permission, let alone a blessing?”
“None, we have no plans.” Leroy’s voice was cracked and choked-sounding. “But we’re hoping—I’m hoping, and praying too, that you’ll give us some kind of chance.”
Poppa’s breath rasped in and out.
Linda felt a moistness above her lip. She was sweating.
Her father turned to her. “What do you think you’ll do if I say no? Forget this craziness?”
Linda wished she could vanish into thin air.
“Linda?”
“I don’t know,” she blurted. “I can’t think of a time when I haven’t obeyed you, in pretty much everything. So I guess I’m hoping, too—with all my heart, Poppa.”
Izzie exhaled slowly through his teeth. He shook his head. “I thought you kids were smart. But this, it’s not just foolishness. It’s jingle brains, dumb as not knowing split beans from coffee. All your lives you’re going to have to fight people anyway, hundreds of them, in the normal course. So now in addition you want to go and take on the whole goddamn world?”
“But,” she pleaded, “the world is changing, Poppa.”
He looked at her sadly, then snorted bitterly and said, “When you get to my age, I guarantee you won’t see it that way.”
“Maybe. But you know me.” Leroy’s voice was fuller, clearer now, and stronger. “I don’t sit around, wait for stuff to just change all by itself. I like to push.”
Izzie got up, walked over to the window, and faced out toward the East River and Queensborough Bridge. “Leroy, I have plans for you. But suddenly I’m thinking I made a mistake. You’re not as smart as I thought you were.”
“Poppa, no,” Linda begged, “don’t do that to him.”
Iz ignored her, concentrating on Leroy. “Did you in your wildest dreams ever think that I would buy this?”
Leroy bowed his head. “No. Not really.”
“So where’s the percentage in getting me all burned up?”
Leroy slowly shrugged, a gesture so much like her father’s, and said, “Maybe it’s true. Love can get you blind.”
“Only I can’t have a man running things for me who’s blind.”
Linda felt cold. She wanted a sweater, a blanket. But the chill felt so deep inside, she knew that nothing could warm her.
“Can we say,” Leroy looked straight at Linda, his eyes hard, unwavering, and then turned to Iz, “that my sight’s been restored, and sharper than before?”
“Can we?” Poppa asked.
“Yeah, definitely.” Leroy then turned to her. “I’m sorry.” His voice sounded flat, emotionless.
Linda rushed out of the room, longing to pound her fists into both of them.
CHAPTER 4
Reuben Silverberg, generally poised and imperturbable, was staggered and hurt. The lawyer’s silver-rimmed eyeglasses had fogged in the heat and excitement, so everything was a blur, both in his head and all around him in this hotel suite. It seemed airy, unreal, strangely cruel that Iz could have said what Reuben almost certainly had heard him say. The numbed attorney pulled out a crisp handkerchief and wiped his lenses clear. When he again could see the others, their stunned disbelieving looks were confirmation. Blinkie Nathanson’s rounded jaw, enormous belly, his whole paunchy mass, sagged—with grief almost. Not-so-dapper Louie Okun was sitting frozen still, ramrod-straight and palely off-color, like a wax figure. Morris, on the couch next to his brother, was dully shaking his head. Even Leroy looked as if he couldn’t quite believe it, that he of all people was the one Mr. H. had just named to be top man in charge while Iz was gone. It had been a slap in the face to all of them, but especially to Reuben, since he’d been “coordinator” during Iz’s past absences.
And Israel, what in God’s name was the point of Iz’s shlepping himself there, of all places? Iz had put in a lot of time, Reuben knew, and money too, right after the War, grabbing up ex-Liberty ships for Nazi victims fleeing to Palestine; also for guns and ammunition from Havana, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, anywhere at all, for the Irgun. But that was six–seven years ago. Now, with his whole life’s fruits getting filched away, and so vilely—was this a time for a sentimental journey? How could he turn his back, walk away? Since public school, as long as Reuben had known him, Iz had never taken even small shit, from no matter whom, lying down. And this thing was by no means small. Yet Iz steadfastly was refusing to give ear to the offers of support which everyone had pointed out were coming in from all over. To Silverberg that had been as shocking as now this—incredible!—Leroy Logan. How to understand his cousin Iz? But then Reuben admitted wryly to himself, that was a thing he never had quite been able to do.
Leroy was in turmoil, part of him ecstatic, and part terrified. Why him, and why now? He was smarting still from Iz’s rebuke and even more from the deep disapproval which Leroy knew Mr. H. had not put into words.
Could this be a test? Of his ability? His word? To show him the riches which might one day be his if he stayed in line and kept far away from Linda?
That’s how it appeared; but with Mr. H., appearances sometimes cloaked purposes which could range from the merely surprising to the deadly. And Leroy realized that now he himself could be in line for the latter. Feeling faint he gripped the seat of his chair to steady himself.
He had put all thoughts of Linda from his mind—almost. But he knew that Mr. H. had not, and wouldn’t either, not for a long while. The opportunity he’d longed for for years unbelievably was his. And now an inner voice whispered that he might be wiser to chuck it, and try to disappear.
“Iz, your head, it’s a jump ahead of me usually,” Okun diffidently broke the stunned silence, “so when you say a thing, usually to me, that’s it. But this time, I know for sure, and you know too, that even with us out of the casinos, we’re still tied in tight w
ith Italianers, who ain’t gonna go for this—at all.”
Blinkie nodded in agreement.
Iz looked at these men, remembering them when they weren’t paunchy, saggy-jowled, wrinkled up with middle age. When Silverberg despite a semi-rich father was a flaming-eyed radical, and dandified Okun would swagger down Broadway with a flashy cane and spats, and Blinkie with a wink could get no end of girls to come running in spite of his being an elephant. All of them on a minute’s notice ready to move anywhere, do anything, just so long as Iz passed the word. And now? He saw gray hair, white hair, no hair, weakening eyes peering through thick glasses, guys who couldn’t run a quarter mile if their lives depended on it, men fiftyish and petering out, not just their confidence in him, but in everything, in life itself. So even if Iz did manage to torpedo this unknown momzer, and by luck, guile, ingenuity, gain back the casinos, even then there’d remain a battle with age and death that they’d ultimately have to lose. But who anywhere was brave enough to face up to that? Which was part of why, he realized, they were so against Leroy. But also, except for Reuben somewhat, they’d been unhappy about Leroy, discreetly of course, even way back when the kid had been no more than Iz’s driver. Negroes were meant to be tap dancers, jazz musicians, Pullman porters and suckers for the numbers. And even Silverberg, who liked and respected the young black, was blinded now by jealousy.
“Louie is kind of right about those fellas, Iz.” Morris too now openly joined the kick. “So where’s the sense in making it all rougher and more complicated than already?”
Ten years ago or last year even, none of them would have demurred so openly about a decision of his. If one of them did voice a reservation, it’d have been done hesitantly, obliquely, and Iz would have felt free either to answer or to ignore it entirely. But things no longer were so clearcut. Now he needed each one of these men fully as much as or more than they needed, depended on him. So he would have to offer some kind of explanation. But what? “This is because you guys are getting old, brains shrinking, and muscles; and working around the clock isn’t your favorite thing any more. Because these Italianers you’re in the habit of thinking are reliable, are not. Because coloreds are hungrier than whites, and they’ll hustle harder, some of them; plus if you look around the world, they’re in the majority, so sooner or later they’re going to be taking over anyway. Because this boy is as sharp as any of you, and he can get off his ass quicker to take action. …”