Legs - William Kennedy Page 8

  "Jimmy wants to call off the deal," Willie said to Jack, the first time a deal had been mentioned on the trip.

  "Is that so?"

  Willie handed the cable to Jack, who read it to us. "Tell our friend we can't stay with him," it said.

  "I wonder what he's worried about'?" Jack said. Classy Willie didn't say anything.

  "Do you know what he means, Willie?"

  "He's talking about the money. Wants me to take it back to him."

  "Our money?"

  "Jimmy figures it's his money until we make the buy."

  "Until I make the buy," Jack said.

  "You know what I mean, Jack."

  "No, Willie, I can't say that I do. You're a card thief. I never knew a card thief who could talk straight. "

  "Jimmy must figure you're too hot. The radio says they won't let you into England."

  "I wasn't going to England. "

  "You know what I'm talking about, Jack."

  "I suppose I do, Willie. I suppose I do." Jack put on his weary tone of voice. "But I'll tell you the truth, Willie, I'm not even thinking about money. What I'm thinking about is

  jewels."

  "What jewels?"

  "I got eighty grand worth and I don't know how to get them off the boat. They'll go through my luggage with a microscope. ' '

  "Let your friend Marcus carry them," Willie said. "He's legitimate."

  "Not interested, thank you," I said.

  "That's not a bad idea, Marcus," Jack said.

  "It's a terrible idea, Jack. I want no part of hot merchandise. No part whatever. Not my line of work."

  "If Marcus says no, it's no," Jack said. "We'll have to find another way. "

  I believe Jack already knew what he was going to do with the jewels and was merely testing me for a reaction. My reaction was so instantaneous he didn't even press it a second time. I was more attuned to Classy Willie's problem. If Biondo ever had any sense at all, he wouldn't have sent a dapper thief, a man long known as the Beau Brummell of Forty-eighth Street, to play watchdog to a man as devious as Jack.

  "Jimmy wants me to get off at England and come back home with the cash," Willie said. "That was the plan if there was a hitch. He said he talked to you about it."

  "I do remember something like that," Jack said. "But how do I know you won't take the cash and hop a boat for the Fiji Islands? I already told you I don't trust card thieves, Willie. I couldn't jeopardize Jimmy's money that way. No. We'll get to Germany and make the deal, and we'll all be a little fatter when we get home. Am I right, Count?"

  "The beer is good in Germany," said The Count, a diplomat. "You don't have to needle it."

  The facade of the deal was that Jack was to buy booze and wines, and ship them from Bremen to somewhere off Long Island. That's what I was told, by Jack. But Devane was right that Jack was after dope—heroin, which Jack had been buying in Germany since '26 when Rothstein was financing the imports. A federal charge Jack had been dodging successfully since then had come with the bustup of an elaborate smuggling scheme in which Jack was a key figure. The present destination was Frankfurt and, after the deal was wrapped up, a week's vacation in Paris. I remember when we got back to the States that a federal narcotics nabob told the press that Jack's dope smuggling made his booze and beer business look like penny-candy stuff. But people didn't pay attention to such official guff.

  Their image of Jack was fixed. He was a bootlegger. Locking him into dope was only a source of confusion.

  * * *

  I have vivid recollections of Jack and the press meeting in the hallways of courthouses, at piers and railroad stations in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Catskill. I remember the aggression the newsmen always showed, persistent in their need to embarrass him with gross questions, but persistent also in their need to show him affection, to laugh harder than necessary at his bons mots, to draw ambivalent pleasure from his presence—a man they loved to punish, a man they punished with an odd kind of love. When the British newsmen invaded the Belgenland on our arrival in Plymouth, some thirty reporters and cameramen pushed their way into Jack's stateroom to be greeted by the presence himself, clad in black slippers, sky-blue silk pajamas with a white chalk stripe, a navy-blue silk robe, and a Rameses between index and middle fingers. The British behaved no differently from their American brethren, except that Jack's being a foreigner diminished their need to insult him for the sake of the homeland. But their self-righteousness shone through in their questions: Why does America tolerate gangsters? How long have you been a gangster? Was Mr. Charles Northrup murdered at your order? Do you think gangsterism will end when Prohibition ends? How many men have you killed in your life? What about Capone and your Brooklyn arsenal?

  Jack treated them like children, laughing at their requests for a laundry list of his victims. "First off, boys, I'm not a gangster, only a bootlegger. There are no gangsters in America. Too easy to get rich other ways. I'm just a civilized citizen. Not a dese, dem, and dose guy. Just a man of the people, trying to make a dollar. Over here getting the cure. Got some stomach trouble and I was advised to go to Vichy and Wiesbaden and take the waters. Brooklyn arsenal? I own nothing in Brooklyn. Capone used to work for me years ago, driving a truck, but I haven't seen him in years. That feud is a lot of nonsense. I get along with people. I'm a legitimate citizen. You newspaper guys scream at the cops to pick me up, and they hold me a few days and find out I'm clean and let me go. I'm not claiming you treat me wrong, but I never see anybody write big headlines when they tell me the charge don't stick. I'm sick of headlines, boys. I came to Europe to get away from it all for a while. Leave that hubbub behind. Make a kind of grand tour on my own, take the waters and cure what ails me. You can understand that, can't you, fellows?"

  Sure they could.

  Jack's fame at this point was staggering. About four hundred Englishmen had come to the pier by six thirty just to get a glimpse of him. The press of the whole Western world was following our transatlantic voyage, front-paging it with an intensity not quite up to what they did for Byrd, Peary, and other world travelers, but I'll bet with more reader interest. One English paper was so anxious for a story that it invented a phone interview with Jack two days before our boat reached an English pier. "I'm here in London on a secret mission," they quoted him as saying. So the newsmen, installing Jack in the same hierarchy where they placed royalty, heroes, and movie stars, created him anew as they enshrined him. They invented a version of him with each story they wrote, added to his evil luster by imagining crimes for him to commit, embellishing his history, humanizing him, defining him through their own fantasies and projections. This voyage had the effect of taking Jack Diamond away from himself, of making him a product of the collective imagination. Jack had imagined his fame all his life and now it was imagining him. A year hence he would be saying that "publicity helps the punk" to another set of newsmen, aware how pernicious a commodity it could be. But now he was an addict, a grotesquely needy man, parched for glory, famished for public love, dying for the chance at last to be everybody's wicked pet.

  He called the stateroom press conference to a halt after fifteen minutes and said he had to get dressed. The newsmen waited and he joined them on deck, clad now in his blue pinstriped suit, his wide-brimmed white felt hat, seven-and-a-half-B black wingtips, his purple tie, and his Knight Templar pin in his lapel.

  "Hello, boys," he said, "what else do you want from me?"

  They talked for another quarter hour and asked, among other things, about that lapel pin; and a story goes with that.

  When we talked after the press left, Jack told me that Charlie Northrup was why he was in the Masons. Back in the Bronx in the mid-twenties Jack was playing cards in the back room of his garish Theatrical Club, orange and black decor, and Charlie was sitting in. For no reason he could remember, Jack wondered out loud what a jack was, the picture card. Charlie told him the symbolic meaning of a knave among kings and queens, and Jack liked the whole idea.

  Charlie
talked about the Masons and their symbols, and it was like the dawn of a new era for Jack. He pumped Charlie for more, then talked him into proposing him as a candidate in the order. He went through in a whoosh and obviously with attention to all the arcane mumbo jumbo he had to memorize. The Masonic books I inherited from him were well marked and annotated in the margins, in his handwriting.

  Alongside one section on an old Templar rite of initiation, a Christly pilgrimage through red, blue, black, and then the final white veils of the temple, Jack had noted: "Good stuff. Sounds like one of my dreams."

  * * *

  Just after meeting the British press Jack complained to me of itching hands, small red dots which gave up a clear fluid when squeezed. The broken pustules then burned like dots of acid. A passenger shot off three of his toes at skeet and blamed Jack for hexing the weapon. Then the Minneapolis librarian cut her wrists, but chose against death and summoned help. Her condition became common knowledge on the ship.

  I saw Jack on deck alone after that, toying with a rosary, the first time I knew he carried one. He was not praying—only staring at it, strung like webbing through his fingers, as if it were a strange, incomprehensible object.

  * * *

  The night we were steaming toward Plymouth, a steward came to Jack's room with a message from the captain that the British authorities had definitely proclaimed Jack persona non grata. Stay out, you bum. The message jolted him, for it suddenly put our destination in jeopardy. What would Belgium do? And Germany?

  Jack came to my stateroom and said he wanted to go up on deck and talk, that he didn't trust the walls. So we walked in the sea-sweetened night along the main deck where a few night walkers took the air, most memorably a rheumatic old aristocratic woman with a belief in the curative power of voyaging that was so religious she left her deckchair only during storms and meals, and to sleep and, I presume, to pee. She chewed tobacco and had a small pewter spittoon alongside her chair which she would I pick up and spit her little bloody gobs into in a most feminine manner, that is, through taut, narrow lips. She was the only witness to my conversation with Jack, and her presence and periodic spitting were the only intrusions on our conversation, apart from the splash of the sea, as we talked and walked, up and then back, in our desolated section of deck. We talked only of Jack's rejection by England until he decided to get to the point. "Marcus, I want you to do me a favor."

  "A legal one?"

  "No."

  "I thought as much. The jewels. I told you I want no part of it, Jack."

  "Listen to me. This is a lot of money. Do you believe in money?"

  "I do."

  "So do I. "

  "But I don't want to go to jail to get it."

  "How many lawyers you know ever went to jail?"

  "A few, and you'd have a point if we were back in Albany."

  "I told you a long time ago you were a thief in your heart."

  "No, we're still not talking about thievery."

  "Right. This is just a proposition. You don't have to take it."

  Jack then took from his inside coat pocket a long slender box, and we paused under one of the wall lights so I could view its contents: an array of gems, rings, and necklaces. Some jewel thief had stolen them, fenced them, and they'd found their way to Jack, the internationalist, who would refence them in Europe. I knew he hadn't stolen them. He wasn't above such activity, just afield of it. No longer a burglar. He'd failed at that as a teen-ager and graduated to the activity that conformed to his talent, which was not stealth but menace.

  "They don't take up much space," Jack said, and I nodded and made no answer.

  "I planned to get rid of them in Brussels, but they're too hot to carry. I mean look at that"—and he held up a ruby for me to admire. "It's kind of famous, I'm told, and where it came from is even more famous."

  "I don't think I'm interested."

  "My suitcase has special bindings for this stuff. You could get it off the boat and through customs. But not me, not now."

  I toyed with it. NOTED UPSTATE LAWYER CAUGHT WITH MRS. ASTOR'S FAVORITE RUBY, Or was it Mrs. Carnegie's? Or that tobacco-chewing lady aristocrat behind us, whoever she might be?

  "If you don't handle them, I dump them. Now."

  "Dump them?"

  "Overboard."

  "'Christ, why do that'? Why not hide them in a chandelier and come back later for them? Isn't that how it's done?"

  "Fuck 'em," Jack said. "I don't want anything to do with this goddamn boat again once I get off it. It's a jinx."

  "A jinx? You don't really believe in jinxes."

  "I'd be fucking well dead if I didn't. Are you game? Yes or no. "

  "No."

  He walked to the railing and I trailed him, expecting the next ploy in the act. A final appeal to my greed.

  "You wanna watch?" he said, and so I moved alongside him in time to see him tip the box and see, yes, jewels falling, a few, and disappearing in shadow long before they hit the water. He tipped the box further and a few more plummeted toward the deep, then he shook it empty, looked at me, and, while looking, let the box flutter toward the water. It flipped a few times, made a silent plop we could see because it was white, and was then glommed by the blackness.

  * * *

  Jack was in shirtsleeves, sitting alone at the card table where Classy Willie fleeced the suckers, when I came up for brunch one day. I ate and then watched Jack playing solitaire and losing. I sat across from him and said, "I was planning to get off this tub and go home, but I think I'll stay on for the full treatment. "

  "Good. What changed your mind?"

  "I don't know. Maybe the jewels. But I think I decided to trust you. Is that a mistake'?"

  "Trust me with anything but women and money."

  "I also want a straight answer on Charlie Northrup. Is that asking too much?"

  Jack mused, then with high seriousness said, "I think he's dead. But I'm not sure. If he's dead, it wasn't murder. That I am sure of."

  "That's straight?"

  "That's as straight as I can say it."

  "Then I guess I have to believe it. Deal the cards."

  He picked them up and shuffled. "Blackjack," he said and, after burying a card, dealt us both a hand. I had eighteen. He had twenty, which he showed me before I could bet. I looked blank and he said only, "Watch," and then dealt six hands, face up. I got between thirteen and seventeen in all six. He got twenty four times and two blackjacks.

  "Impressive. Are you always that lucky?"

  "They're marked," he said. "Never play cards with a thief." He tossed the deck on the table, leaned back, and looked at me.

  "You think I killed Northrup.”'

  "You say you didn't. I told you I accept that,"

  "You don't convince me."

  "Maybe it's the other way around."

  He put his coat on and stood up. "Let's go out on deck. I'll tell you a couple of stories." I followed and we found our way back to the desolate spot where he'd dumped the jewels. The old lady was there, and it was still as private as any place on deck.

  "How are you today?" Jack said to the old dame, who took the remark first as an intrusion, then looked at Jack as if he were invisible. He shrugged and we walked to the rail and looked down at the waves and at our foamy wake.

  "I dumped a guy in the water once over marked cards."

  I nodded, waited. He stared out at the ocean and went on: "A card game in a hotel. It was the first time I ever met Rothstein. I was working as a strikebreaker with Little Augie, breakin' heads, just out of jail. A bum. I was a bum. Augie says to me, 'You wanna work strongarm at a card game?' And I said all right and he sent me to this hotel room and there's Rothstein, the cocksucker, and he says to me, 'What happened to your head?' 'Nothin' happened to it,' I said. "That haircut,' he said. 'You look like a skinned rabbit, skinned by somebody who don't know how to skin. Get a haircut for pity's sake.' Can you imagine that son of a bitch? He's got seventy-six grand in his pocket, he told me so, and h
e tells me get a haircut. Arrogant bastard. He was right about the haircut. A barber-school job. Awful. I tell you I was a bum on the street and I looked like one. But he made me feel like a zero.

  "So the game went on and there's this high roller—let me call him Wilson—who's challenging Rothstein. There's other players, but he wants to beat A. R., who's the king. And he's doing it. Wins eleven thousand one hand, eight the next, in five thousand-dollar freezeout. Rothstein has two men in the bathroom looking over the decks Wilson brought, and they find the marks, little tits on the design in the corner. First-rate work by the designer. Rothstein hears the news and calls a break but doesn't let on, and then tells me to brain Wilson if he gets out of hand, and I say all right because he's paying me. He bottom-deals Wilson a six and Wilson calls him on it. Then A. R. says never mind about bottom dealing, what about a man who brings paper into a legitimate game? And when Wilson stood up, I brained him. Didn't kill him. Just coldcocked him and he went down. When he came to, they told me to take him someplace he wouldn't be a bother. They didn't say kill him. I took him to the river with a driver and walked him to the edge of a dock. He offered me four grand, all he had left from the game, and I took it. Then I shot him three times and dumped him in. It turned out he had three kids. He was a cheater, but he was complicated. He looked at me and said, 'Why? I give you the four grand.' His life had to be complicated with three kids and I killed him. I wanted the four grand bad and I knew he had it. But I never killed anybody before and I tell you I blame Rothstein. Maybe I wouldn't have killed him if he didn't say that about the haircut, make me feel I was such a bum. I knew I was a bum, but I didn't think it showed so much. With the four grand I wasn't a bum anymore. I bought a new suit and got a haircut at the Waldorf-Astoria."

  * * *

  The money inspired Jack. He and his brother Eddie met one Ace O'Hagan, who drove for Big Bill Dwyer, the king of Rum Row. Dwyer had the Coast Guard, Jersey City, and part of Long Island on his payroll, and Jack gave Ace fifty to connect him to Dwyer for a job. Ace called Dwyer from the bar where he and the Diamond boys were drinking and found Dwyer was partying and wouldn't be back. Then, in the back of Jack's car, with Eddie driving, Jack had another idea and stuck a pistol in O'Hagan's ear and asked for the location of Dwyer's most vulnerable drop.