Billy Phelan's Greatest Game Page 22

  Patsy pulled the car to the side of the road in a desolate spot near the Albany Paper Works. Along the flats in the distance Martin could see the tar-paper shacks hoboes had built. Did Francis have a reservation in one?

  “They picked Berman as go-between,” Patsy said.

  During the morning, Morrie had sent word to Bindy through Lemon Lewis that a letter had been left for him at Nick Levine’s haberdashery. “We got Charlie Boy and we want you to negotiate,” it said. “If you agree to do this, go to State and Broadway at one o’clock today and buy a bag of peanuts at Coulson’s. Cross the street and sit on a bench in the Plaza facing Broadway and feed the pigeons for fifteen minutes.” The letter was signed “Nero” and also bore Charlie McCall’s signature.

  Almost simultaneously Patsy received a letter in his mailbox at the main post office on Broadway, the third letter since the kidnapping. “We want the cash pronto and we are treating your boy nice but we can end that if you don’t get the cash pronto. We know all about you people and we don’t care about your kind so don’t be funny about this.” It was also signed “Nero” and countersigned by Charlie.

  “You’re not surprised they picked Berman?” Martin said.

  “Not a bit,” said Patsy. “I always thought the son of a bitch was in it.”

  “But why suspect him out of everybody else?”

  “It’s an Albany bunch did this, I’ll bet my tailbone on that and so will Bindy. They know too much about the whole scene. Berman’s always been tied in with the worst of the local hoodlums—Maloy, the Curry brothers, Mickey Fink, Joe the Polack. We know them all, and they’d need Morrie because he’s smarter than any of them.”

  “Me, Patsy. What am I doing here?”

  “Morrie’s playing cute. He says he really doesn’t want to do this thing but he will as a favor. He wants somebody there when they deliver Charlie, a witness who’ll take some of the weight off his story. He asked me to pick somebody and when I gave him four or five names, he picked yours. He thinks you’re straight.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Go with him. Do what he says and what they tell you to do. If he’s their man, you’re ours. And take care of Charlie when you get to him.”

  “When does this happen?”

  “Now. Morrie’s waiting for me up in the Washington Park lake house. Can you do it?”

  “You’ll have to tell Mary something to put her mind at ease. And clue Emory in somehow.”

  “Here’s a couple of hundred for lunch money. And put this in your pocket, too.” And Patsy handed Martin a snub-nosed thirty-eight with a fold of money.

  “I wouldn’t want to use a gun.”

  “It won’t hurt to take it.”

  Patsy then drove north on Erie Boulevard to Erie Street and turned on it toward Broadway, past the car barns Edward Daugherty had written about. Scabs clung to the frame of a trolley as it rocketed through the gauntlet of stone throwers. Across Erie Street from the barns the old wooden Sacred Heart Church once stood, long gone now, Father Maguire on horseback with his whip, his church plagued by pigs and chickens. God be good to Charlie Boy, and all the sick and simple, and all the unhappy dead in Purgatory, and Mama and Papa.

  Patsy drove up Broadway through North Albany and up Lawn Avenue to Wolfert’s Roost, where the tony Irish played golf. Martin took Peter there one day and the boy fired a hole in one on a par three and thought he’d learned the secret of the game. The car sped along Northern Boulevard, through a rush of memories now for Martin, who considered that on this day, or another very soon, he might be dead. All the history in his head would disappear, the way his father’s history was fading into whiteness.

  Patsy drove over Northern Boulevard and into Washington Park, past the statues of Robert Burns and Moses, and up to the gingerbread yellow-brick lake house. Patsy parked and Martin got out of the car and stared at a stunning sight: a maple tree shedding its yellow leaves in a steady, floating rain. The leaves fell softly and brilliantly into a perfect yellow circle, hundreds of them constantly in the air, an act of miraculous shedding of the past while it was still golden. The tree was ancient, maybe as old as the park, or older. Martin had walked through the park with his father an age ago. Young people with sleds rolled in the snow and embraced and kissed behind bushes glittering with icy lace. Young people rode together in the summer in open carriages. They held hands and walked around the spectacular Moses fountain. Martin’s father stood at the edge of these visions, watching. This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past.

  The land was a cemetery before it was a park. To prepare the park, men dug up the old bones and carted them to new cemeteries north of the city.

  “Come on, let’s move,” Patsy said to Martin.

  Martin touched the pistol in his pocket and took a final look at the yellow rain of leaves, a sunburst of golden symmetry. On a day such as this, God rescued Isaac from his father’s faith.

  Morrie Berman, looking sharp in a gray fedora and blue pinstripe suit, sat alone on a bench inside the desolate lake house, legs spread, elbows on knees, blowing smoke rings at the tile floor. He stood up and stepped on his cigarette when Patsy came through the door. Patsy shook his hand and said, “I brought our friend.” Then Martin too shook Morrie’s hand, enriching with a quantum leap his comprehension of duplicity.

  “They just said a heavy no to the twenty,” Morrie told Patsy. “I got the message just before I came up here.”

  “What else did they say?”

  “They think you’re trying to chisel them. They called you a muzzler and said they want at least seventy-five.”

  “I got everything here the family can scrape together,” Patsy said, tapping the black leatherette suitcase he carried in his left hand. “Matt just came back from New York with the last five and now there’s forty here. And that’s all there is, Morrie, that’s all there is. I don’t even have enough left for a shave. Morrie, you know we wouldn’t chisel on Charlie’s life. You got to make them know that.”

  “I’ll do my level best, Patsy.”

  “I know you will, Morrie. You’re one in a thousand to do this for us.”

  Patsy handed Morrie the suitcase. “Count it, make sure.”

  Morrie opened the suitcase and riffled swiftly, without counting, through the wrapped tens and twenties, then closed it.

  “What about their letters?”

  Patsy took a white envelope from his inside pocket and handed it to Morrie.

  “One more thing. How do I account for all this cash if I get stopped?”

  Pat took the envelope back from Morrie and wrote on it: “To whom it may concern. Morris Berman is carrying this money on a business errand for me. To confirm this, call me collect at one of these telephones.” And he wrote the numbers of his home and his camp in the Helderberg Mountains, and then signed it. Patrick Joseph McCall.

  “Is there anything special I need to know?” Martin asked.

  “Morrie will tell you everything,” Patsy said. “Just do what needs doing.”

  “They didn’t like it you were a newspaperman,” Morrie said, “but I convinced them you were okay.”

  “Do we need my car?” Martin asked.

  “We drive mine,” said Morrie.

  “You tell them we want that boy back safe,” Patsy said.

  Morrie smiled and Patsy embraced him.

  “They’ll know if I’m followed,” Morrie said.

  “You won’t be followed.”

  And then the three men went out of the lake house, one behind the other. Indian file. The truculent Mohawks once walked this same patch of earth. The Mohawks were so feared that one brave could strike terror into a dozen from another tribe. When the six tribes met to talk of land on Long Island ceded to the white man in exchange for guns and wampum, the lone Mohawk delegate asked whose decision it had been to cede the land. The Long Island chief said it was his. The Mohaw
k then stood up from his place in the tribal circle, scalped the chief, and left the meeting, a gesture which called the validity of the land transaction into some question.

  In 1921, when Martin walked through the park with his father, they talked of Martin’s novel in progress. Martin had just returned from Europe, where he had written about the war. His articles had been published chiefly in the Albany press by Martin H. Glynn, and several of his longer pieces were printed in The Atlantic and Scribner’s and the North American Review, which had once printed the writing of his father. Certain editors regarded Martin as a writer of notable talent and encouraged him to challenge it. Accordingly, he wrote two-thirds of a novel about reincarnation.

  He traced the story of the soul of the Roman soldier who diced for Christ’s cloak, and who was subsequently to live as an Alexandrian fishwife, a cooper in Constantinople, a roving gypsy queen, a French dentist, the inventor of a spring popularized by Swiss watchmakers in the late seventeenth century, a disgraced monk in Brittany, a bailiff in Chiswick, an Irish sailor in the American Fenian movement, and finally a twentieth-century Mexican trollop who marries into the high society of Watervliet.

  “You have excellent language at your disposal, and a talent for the bizarre,” said the elder Daugherty, “but the book is foolish and will be judged the work of a silly dilettante. My advice is to throw it away and refrain from writing until you have something to say. A novel, Martin, is not a book of jokes.”

  As a retort, Martin told his father of a former schoolmate, Howie McMahon, who was obsessed with the fate of the oiler in Crane’s open boat. Howie taught it to his students at Albany State Teachers College, wrote of it, spoke frequently of it to Martin. My struggle, Howie said, has no more meaning than the life of the oiler with his lifeless head bobbing in the surf after such a monumental struggle to survive. The oiler lived and died to reveal to me the meaning of his life: that life has no meaning. And Howie McMahon, Martin told his father, on a Sunday morning while the family was at high mass, hanged himself from a ceiling hook in the coal bin of his cellar.

  “My response to the ravings of a lunatic like your friend,” said Edward Daugherty, “is that whether he knows it or not, his life has a meaning that is instructive, if only to illuminate the impenetrability of God’s will. Nothing is without purpose in this world.”

  Martin plucked a crimson leaf from a maple tree and tore it into small pieces.

  “That leaf,” said the elder writer, “was created to make my point.”

  By late afternoon on Saturday, the Albany newspaper and wire service editors decided they could no longer withhold news of the kidnapping from the world, and they told this to Patsy McCall. He said he understood but had no further comment. At seven o’clock Saturday night, sixty-three hours after Charlie had been taken, his story was told in print for the first time. Headlines seemed not to have been so fat and febrile since the Roosevelt landslide.

  The nation’s press sent its luminaries of the word to Albany to pursue the story: Jack Lait, Meyer Berger, James Kilgallen, and Damon Runyon among many, forcing comparisons with the 1931 killing of Legs Diamond in an Albany rooming house, the last time America had cast such a fascinated eye on the underside of Albany life.

  Shortly after nine-thirty Saturday night, Billy bought one of the last of the Times-Union extras, an early edition of the Sunday paper, at the Union Station newsstand. The story of the kidnapping carried Martin’s byline. Billy read his own name in the story. No mention was made of any intermediary having been chosen, and no member of the McCall family would speak for publication.

  The confirming source for all information was the district attorney, Dick Maloney, who complained that neither he nor the police could convince the McCalls to cooperate with their investigation. Governor Herbert Lehman suggested a reward for the capture of the kidnappers but Patsy told the governor, no, this is between us and them.

  Billy folded the newspaper, shoved it into his coat pocket and crossed Broadway to Becker’s. The bar was busy, but he found a spot and caught Red Tom’s eye. Red Tom nodded but made no move to come near him. “A beer, Tom,” Billy finally said, and Red Tom nodded again, drew a beer, and placed it in front of Billy.

  “Only one, Billy.”

  “What do you mean, only one?”

  Red Tom put up his hands, palms out, and said nothing. A stranger at the bar looked Billy over, and Red Tom walked away. Billy sipped his beer and waited for enlightenment. When the stranger left the bar, Red Tom came down to Billy and whispered: “Gus don’t want your business.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. What’d you do to him?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t saw Gus in weeks to talk to. And I don’t owe him a nickel.”

  “Tell Billy Phelan we don’t want his business is his exact words,” said Red Tom. “Why not? I says to him. Because he’s no good, he says. Wait a minute, I says to him, Billy is all right, he’s a good friend of mine. Okay, you open up your own place and serve him. Here he don’t get served, do you get my meaning? I get his meaning. I can’t serve you, Billy, and I don’t know why. Do you know?”

  “Maybe I know,” Billy said.

  “We’re friends, Billy, but I got to work.”

  “I know that. I don’t blame you for anything.”

  “If I did own the joint, nobody’d keep you out.”

  Billy managed a small smile and finished his beer. “Have you seen Martin tonight?”

  “Not yet. He must be on the story.”

  “I’ll catch you later, Tommy.”

  And Billy went out of Becker’s, feeling a door close on his life when the outside door clicked behind him. He stood looking around Broadway, which was at its Saturday night brightest, bustling with the traffic of cars and people, the usual bunch thickened by the showgoers and nightclubbers.

  Not wanted in Becker’s? That’s like a ball game with no home plate.

  Billy walked down Broadway and up the stairs into the Monte Carlo. The horse room was dark but the bird cage, the crap table, and two roulette wheels were all busy, and in the back Billy saw lights on in the card room. He stepped to the crap table, where Marty Mitchell was on the stick and Bill Shea, who ran the Monte Carlo for Bindy, was watching the play. Billy didn’t know the shooter, who was trying to make a six. He made it, and then threw an eleven. He doubled his bet to forty dollars and threw a seven. “That’s five passes,” somebody whispered, and Billy pulled out the exchequer, sixty-two dollars, and put twenty on the come line.

  “That twenty is dead,” Bill Shea said, and the game stopped.

  “What’s the problem?” Billy said as the stickman nudged the twenty off the line and back toward Billy.

  “No problem,” Shea said. “Your money’s no good here, Phelan.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since now. And you’re not wanted on the premises.”

  “Is this Bindy’s orders?”

  “I wouldn’t know that. Now, be a good fellow and take your money and get out.”

  Billy put the twenty around the rest of his cash and backed away from the table under the silent eyes of the players. As he went out the door, the game resumed and the stickman called: “Seven again.” Billy walked slowly down to the street.

  He found the same response in three more Broadway bars, in Louie’s pool room and at Nick Levine’s card game. Nick, like Red Tom, apologized. No one gave Billy a reason for turning him away. In Martha’s, he sat at the bar and she poured him a double scotch and then told him he’d been marked lousy.

  “It was Bindy, I know that much,” Billy said. “When did you hear about it?”

  “This afternoon,” Martha said.

  “How?”

  “Mulligan, the ward leader, called me. Said you might be mixed up in the kidnapping and to give you the treatment. I said, I got no argument with Billy, and he said, You don’t do what I ask, your taxes go through the roof. So bottoms up, honey, and find someplace else to drink.”

 
“That’s a lie about the kidnapping. They wanted me to inform on somebody and I wouldn’t. That’s what it’s about.”

  “Don’t make no difference to me what it’s about. Them taxes are what this place is about all of a sudden. They go through the roof, Martha goes back on the street, and Martha’s too old for that.”

  “I’m not your problem, Martha. Don’t worry.”

  “You hear about Louie?”

  “Louie?”

  “Louie Dugan. He died about two this afternoon. Cop who took him to the hospital last night came by and took a statement. I liked that crazy old man. He was mean as a goose but I liked him.”

  “What’d he die of?”

  “Stuff he swallowed in his lungs, the cop says. Drink up, Billy. Don’t make me no trouble.”

  “I’ll catch you later, Martha.”

  “Not till things is straight. Then you catch me all you like.”

  Billy called Angie at the Kenmore, and while he waited for her room to ring he decided to ask her: How’d you like some fingerprints on your buns? But what he really wanted was to talk to her. Her phone never rang. The operator said she’d checked out and left no message. He went up to the Kenmore anyway and found the bar was out of bounds for him. Wally Stanton, a bartender, said the word came from Poop Powell, not Mulligan. Bindy had a whole team on the street fencing Billy out. Broadway gone, now Pearl Street.

  He walked up Pearl toward Clinton Avenue and stopped in front of Moe Cohen’s old jewelry store. Now the store was a meat market and Moe was meat, too; hired three punks to get himself killed, gave them five grand in diamonds and two hundred in promised cash. They shot him in the head and all it give him was a headache, and he says, Do something else, I’m dying of cancer and heart trouble, hurry, and they let him have it in the wrist and then in the shoulder and hit him with seven shots before they got one through the eye to do the trick. When they checked his pants for the two hundred, all they found was twenty-eight cents. The bum robbed us. They all went to jail, but nobody could figure out why Moe wanted to die. He didn’t have cancer or heart trouble, he had something else.