She looked at the card and saw in the obsolete glory of his pen strokes the biography of her vampy, bondaged, satin-slippered addiction. The card read: "There is no good and bad in the elfin realm." When she looked up, the man had packed his table and was halfway down the block.
* * *
Kiki looked over Madge's shoulder at the headline which read: JACK DIAMOND SHOT FIVE TIMES BY GUNMEN IN 64TH STREET HOTEL.
"I was there," Kiki told Madge.
"You didn't shoot him, did you'?"
"Oh, Madge, I love him."
"What's that got to do with it? Come on, we've got to get you off the street."
And so they took a cab to Madge's place and Kiki had a stiff drink, a very stiff one, and then she started to weep. So Madge held her hand and Kiki knew that even though Madge was her friend that she was touching her because she was a special person. Because Madge never touched her like that before, stroking the back of her hand, patting it with her fingertips; and Kiki felt good because somebody was being nice to her and she finally told Madge then how she heard the shots as she stood in the shower. And she thought somebody would come in and shoot her. And she would die in the bathtub, her blood going down the drain.
Maybe Jack would be the one to shoot her. Why did Kiki think that about J ack?
Then she heard the running in the corridor, and she said to herself, why, Jack wouldn't run away and leave me, and so she quickly got into her pink robe and went next door to Jack's own room and saw the door open and Jack on the floor with his eyes open but not moving, looking up at her. And she said, "Oh, Jackie, you're dead," but he said, "No I'm not, help me up," and they were just the best old words she'd ever heard and she put her arms under him and lifted him and he put one of his hands over his stomach and the other over his chest to hold in the blood where they'd shot him. Blood was coming down his face and all down his blue pajamas so you couldn't even see the red racehorses anymore.
"Get the whiskey," Jack told her when she had him sitting on the bed, and she looked around the room and couldn't see it, and Jack said, "In the bathroom," and when she got it, he said, "In my mouth," and she wiped the blood off his lips and poured in the whiskey. Too much. He choked and coughed and new blood spurted out of one of the holes in his chest, and like a little fountain turned on and off by the pumping of his heart, it flowed down over his fingers. "Get The Count," he said, "across the hall," and she knocked on The Count's door until her knuckles hurt and he came to Jack's room and Jack said to her then: "Get the hell out of here and don't come back and don't admit you were here or you're all washed up." And Kiki nodded but didn't understand and said to Madge, "How would I be washed up, Madge? Did he mean in show business?" And Madge said, "Go on," so she said The Count called a doctor as she was leaving and then took Jack to another room in the hotel, down the hall, because Jack said the killers might come back to see if they did the job right. And Kiki, still in her pink robe, backed down the hallway toward her own room, and watched The Count walking and holding Jack, who was bent like a wishbone, and in they went to another room, which was when Kiki decided she would go to the theater and behave like nothing at all had happened. And things went along perfectly well, didn't they? They went along fine, just fine until she saw it all again while she was dancing. What she saw was that little spurt of blood coming out of Jack's chest like a fountain after she gave him too much whiskey. That was when she decided to fall down.
Madge read in the paper that two gunmen came running out of the hotel about the time Jack was shot and got into a car with its motor running and its door open and drove off with their New Jersey license plates. Those men, awful men, had shot Jack two places in the chest and once in the stomach and once in the thigh and once in the forehead, and the doctor said he was certainly not going to be able to go on living with all those holes in himself. The paper made no mention of the pretty little lady who was the first to see it all, but Kiki knew that her time of attention was going to come.
She caught the faintest smell of mothballs in Madge's closet, and she thought of marriage because only married people need mothballs. Kiki would never keep anything long enough to worry about moths unless she happened to be married. Last year's things? She stuck them away and bought new ones and let the moths have their fun. Kiki never thought of herself as married, even though she and Jack talked about it all the time. She talked about it and Jack tried to change the subject, is more like it.
"I'll marry you someday, kid," he told her once, but she didn't believe that and wasn't even sure she wanted to believe it. Kiki doing the wash. Kiki beating the rugs. Kiki making fudge. It was certainly a laughing matter.
When the second knock on the door came, just seconds after Madge told her to hide in the bedroom (and she was in the closet by then, under the muskrat and smelling the mothballs by then), she heard Madge say to somebody,
"What the hell are you bothering me for? You have no right to come in here. " But they didn't go away. Kiki heard them walking in the rooms and heard them just outside the door, so she breathed so silently that not even a moth would have known she was there.
Who are those men is what Kiki wanted to know. Are they after me? And at that the light flashed into the closet and the muskrat unwrapped itself from her back and a hand grabbed her and two great big faces stared down at her.
"Go away," she said. "I don't know you men." And she pulled one of Madge's dresses over her face. She could hear Madge saying, "I had no idea she was involved in any shooting. I certainly wouldn't have brought her into my own home if I thought she was mixed up in any sort of nasty shooting business. I don't want this kind of publicity."
But they put Madge's picture in the papers too. With her legs crossed.
* * *
Jack didn't die. He became more famous than ever. Both the News and the Mirror ran series on him for weeks. The News also ran Kiki's memoirs: How I went from bathing beauty to the Ziegfeld chorus to Jack Diamond's lap. She and Jack were Pyramus and Thisbe for the world and no breakfast table was without them for at least a month. Kiki overnight became as famous as most actresses, her greatest photo (that gorgeous pout at the police station) on every page one.
Jack recovered at Polyclinic Hospital, and when he came to and saw where he was, he asked to be moved into the room where Rothstein had died. The similarities to this and A. R.'s shooting, both shot in a hotel, both mysterious about their assailants, money owed being at the center of both cases, and Jack being A. R.'s man of yore, were carefully noted by the press. You'd think it was the governor who'd got it, with all the bulletins on conditions and the endless calls from the public. The hospital disliked the limelight and worried too about the bill until a delivery boy brought in an anonymous thirty-five hundred dollars in crumpled fifties and twenties and a few big ones with a note: "See Jack Diamond gets the best." This the work of Owney Madden.
Of course Jack never said who shot him. Strangers he could never possibly identify, he told Devane. Didn't get a good look at them. But the would-be assassins were neutral underworld figures, not Jack's enemies and not in Biondo's or Luciano's circle (nor Dutch Schultz's either, who was generally credited with the work at the time). Their neutrality was why Jack let them in.
Their function was to retrieve Charlie Lucky's money, but Jack refused to give it back, claiming finally that Luciano was lying about his role in the transaction. This was not only Jack's error, but also his willful need to affront peril. The visitors' instructions were simple: Get all the money or kill him.
He was sitting on the bed when they took out their guns. He ran at them, swinging the pillow off the bed, swinging in rage and terror, and though both men emptied their pistols, the pillow deflected both their attention and their aim so that only five of twelve bullets hit him. But five is a lot. And the men ran, leaving him for dead.
* * *
The Count called me to say that Jack mentioned me just before he went unconscious from his wounds. "Have Marcus take care of Alice and see she d
oesn't get the short end from those shitkickers up in the country," he told The Count. Then when Alice called me from the hospital and said Jack wanted to see me, I went down, and it turned out he wanted to make his will: a surreptitious ten thousand to Kiki, a token bequest, no more; everything else to Alice. The arrangement seemed to speak for itself : Alice, the true love. But Jack wasn't that easy to read even when he spelled it out himself. Money was only the measure of his guilt and his sense of duty, a pair of admitted formidables, but not his answer to his enduring question.
He was in good spirits when I saw him, his bed near the window so he could hear the city, the roar of the fans spiraling upward from Madison Square Garden during the fights, all the cars on Broadway squealing and tooting, the sirens and bells and yells and shouts of the city wafting Jackward to comfort him, the small comfort being all he would have for two and a half months, for Jack Diamond the organism, was playing tag with adhesions, abscesses and lungs which had the congenital strength of tissue paper. Jack's mail came in sacks and stacks, hundreds upon hundreds of letters during the first weeks, then dwindling to maybe a steady twenty-five a day for a month. A good many were sob stories, asking for his money when he shuffled off. Get well wishes ran second, and dead last were the handful who wanted him dead: filthy dog, dirty scum. Women were motherly, forgiving, and, on occasion, uninhibited: "Please come to my home as soon as you are up and around and I will romp you back to good health. First you can take me on the dining room table, and then in the bathroom on our new green seat, and the third time (I know you will be able to dominate me thrice) on my husband's side of the bed."
"Please when you are feeling better I would like you to please come and drown our six kittens," another woman wrote. "My husband lost everything in the crash. We cannot afford to feed six more mouths, and children come before cats. But I am much too chickenhearted to kill them myself and know you are strong enough to oblige."
"I have a foolproof plan for pass-posting the bookie I bet with," wrote a horseplayer, "but, of course, I will need protection from his violence, which is where you come in as my partner."
"Dear Mr. Legs," a woman wrote, "all my life I work for my boy. Now he gonna go way and leave his momma. He is no dam good. I hope he die. I hope you shoot him for me. I will pay what you think up to fifty-five dollars, which is all the extra I got. But he deserve it for doing such a thing to his momma who gave him her life. His name is Tommy."
"Dear Sir," wrote a man, "I read in the papers where you have been a professional killer. I would like to hire you to remove me from this life. I suppose a man in your position gets many requests like this from people who find existence unbearable. I have a special way I would prefer to die. This would be in lightly cooked lamb fat in my marble bathtub with my posterior region raised so you may shoot several small-caliber bullets into my anus at no quicker than thirty-second intervals until I am dead."
A package came which the police traced, thinking someone was trying to make good on the numerous threats that Jack would never leave the hospital alive. An eight-year-old girl from Reading, Pennsylvania, had sent it—an ounce of holy oil from the shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre.
"I read about Mr. Diamond being shot and how his arm is paralyzed, and I have been taught in school to help those who are down and out," the child told police.
"Punk kid," Jack said. "What does she mean down and out?"
* * *
On the street in front of Polyclinic little clusters of Jack's fans would gather. A sightseeing bus would pass and the announcer would say, "On your right, folks, is where the notorious Jewish gangster Legs Diamond is dying," and all would crane but none would ever see the lip quivering as he slept or the few gray hairs among all the chestnut, or the pouches of experience under his eyes, or the way his ears stuck out, and how his eyes were separated by a vertical furrow of care just above the nose, or that nose: hooked, Grecian, not Jewish, not Barrym0re's either, merely a creditable piece of work he'd kept from damage, now snorting air. He was twelve pounds under his normal one fifty-two and still five ten and a half while I sat beside his bed with his last will and testament in my pocket for his signature. And he wheezed just like other Americans in their sleep.
I'd been fumbling through a prayer book on Jack's bedside table while he slept and I had turned up a credo I no more accepted as mere coincidence than I did the congruence of his and my pleasure in Rabelais; which is to say I suspected a pattern hovering over our relationship.
The credo read:
You work much harm in these parts, destroying and slaying God's creatures without his leave; and not only have you slain and devoured beasts of the field but you have dared to destroy and slay men made to the image of God: wherefore you are worthy of the gallows as a most wicked thief and murderer; all folk cry out and murmur against you. But I would make peace, Brother Wolf, between them and you, and they shall obtain for you so long as you live, a continual sustenance from the men of this city so that you shall no more suffer hunger, for well I know that you have done all this harm to satisfy your hunger ....
This paraphrased perfectly my private plot to forget Charlie Northrup the way everybody else was forgetting him. He was gone off page one, only a subordinate clause in Jack's delightful story. Charlie, thanks for giving us so much of your time. Such fun having a cadaver in the scenario, especially one we can't locate. But, Charlie, please excuse us while we say a little prayer for Jack.
I remember also the passing thought that maybe it would be better if Jack never woke up, and then I remember seeing him wide awake, swathed in hospital-white hygienic purity.
"Hey, Marcus," he said, "great to wake up to a friendly face instead of some snooping cop. How's your ballocks?"
"Friendly toward ladies," I said, and when he laughed he I winced with pain.
"I been dreaming," he said. "Talking to God. No joke."
"Uh-oh."
"Why the hell is it I'm not dead? You figured it out?"
"They were bum shooters? You're not ready to die?"
"No, it's because I'm in God's grace."
"Is that a fact? God told you that?"
"I'm convinced. I thought I was just lucky back in '25 when they hit me. Then when Augie got it, I thought maybe I was as strong as a man can be, you know, in health. But now I think it's because God wants me to live."
He was not quite sitting up in bed, his prayer book there all soft and black on the white table and his rosary twined around the corner post of his bed, shiny black beads capturing the white tubing. Did he appreciate the contrast? I'm convinced he created it.
"You've got the disease of sanctity," I told him.
"'No, that's not it."
"You've got it the way dogs get fleas. It's common after assassination attempts. It accounts for the closeness between the church and aging dictators. It's a kind of infestation. Look at this room."
Alice had hung a crucifix over the bed and set a statue of the virgin on the windowsill. The room had been priest-ridden since Jack moved into it, the first a stranger who came to hear his confession and inquired who shot him. Even through quasi-delirium Jack recognized a Devane stooge. The next, a Baltimore chum of Alice's who dropped in without the press learning his name, comforted Jack, blessed him through opiated haze, then told newsmen: "Don't ask me to tell you anything about that poor suffering boy in there." And then came good Father Skelly from Cairo, indebted to Jack for the heavenly music in his church.
"God won't forget that you gave us a new organ," said the priest to the resurrecting Jack.
"Will God do the same for us when ours gets old?" Jack asked.
The priest heard his confession amid the two bouquets of roses Alice renewed every three days until Jack said the joint smelled like a wake, and so she replaced them with a potted geranium and a single red wax rose in a vase on the bedside table.
"I thought you'd given up the holy smoke," I said. "I thought you had something else going for you. "
"What the hell
am I supposed to do after people keep shooting me and I don't die? I'm beginning to think I'm being saved. "
"For dessert? Looks classic to me, Jack. Shoot a man full of bullets and he's a candidate for blessedness."
"What about you and your communion breakfasts? Big-shot Catholic."
"Don't be misled. That's just part of being an Albany Democrat."
"So you're a Democrat and I got fleas. But it turns out I don't mind them."
"I can see that, and it all ties in. Confession, sanctity, priests. Yes, it goes with having yourself shot."
"Come again?"
"The shooting. I've assumed all along that you rigged it."
"You're not making sense."
"Could it have happened without your approval? You saw them alone, you know what they were. I know what such go-betweens can be, and I'm not even in your business. And you never had any intention of turning over that money. You asked for exactly what you got. Am I exaggerating?' '
"You got some wild imagination, pal. I see why you score in court."
But when he looked at me, that furrow of care between his eyes turned into a question mark. He ran his fingertips along the adhesive tape of his chest bandage, pleasurably some might say, as he looked at the author of the bold judgment. Jack Diamond having himself shot? Ridiculous. He fingered the rosary entwined over his right shoulder on the bed, played the beads with his fingertips as if they were keys on an instrument that would deliver the music he wanted to hear. Organ music. A sound like Skelly's new machine. No words to it, just the music they play at benediction after the high mass. Yes, there are words. From a long time ago. The "Tantum Ergo." All Latin words you never forget, but who the hell knows what they mean? "Tantum ergo sacramentum, veneremur cernui; et antiquum documentum, Novo cedat ritui."
A bridge.
A certain light.
Something was happening to him, Jack now knew.
* * *
"I want you to talk for me," he said. He had recovered from my impertinence, was restoring the client-attorney relation, putting me in my place. "I want you to talk to some people upstate. A few judges and cops, couple of businessmen, and find out what they think of my setup now. Fogarty's handling it, but he can't talk to those birds. He's too much of a kid. I got through to all those bastards personally, sent them whiskey, supported their election campaigns, gave 'em direct grease. All them bums owe me favors, but the noise in the papers about me, I don't know now whether it scares 'em or not."
Legs Page 15