As Time Goes By (17 page)

She
leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
"You can finish it upstairs."

"Keep playing, Sam," said Rick.

"I ain't going nowhere," said Sam.

Hand in hand, Ilsa Lund and Richard Blaine rose and
left the lounge.

Very early the next morning, Tamara Toumanova de
parted for Prague.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

New York, January 1932

Ricky, you shoulda seen this place in old times,"
said Solly after they had finished the policy racket col
lections, the beer deliveries, and the obligatory target practice one winter's morning. Solly still liked to collect on policy himself from time to time, perhaps to
keep in touch with the roots of his success, and he
would drag Rick around Harlem, collecting his tribute.
They were sitting in Solly's favorite counting house,
a storefront saloon at 129th Street and St. Nicholas Av
enue. The joint itself wasn't much, but that was the
point. A long bar was on the left as you came in the
narrow front door, and Solly's regular table at the back
commanded a sweeping view of the whole room. Getting the drop on him would be difficult here, especially
when he was with two or three of his boys or all by
himself with just Tick-Tock Schapiro to keep him com
pany. Tick-Tock was worth two or three ordinary boys
any day of the week and twice on Saturday.

"German and Irish, it was, and of course Jewish.
Now, different." He gestured with both palms facing
up, a typically Horowitzian hand movement that meant
What can you do? "Some folks don't like it.
Feh
on
them! Ricky, let me tell you something those boys
downtown don't know: Coloreds is people, too." By
"downtown," Rick knew, Solly was talking not only
about City Hall, but about Tammany Hall. And O'Han
lon. And Salucci and Weinberg in their headquarters
on Mott Street, and all the other gangsters looking to muscle in on Solly's uptown turf.

"What is more," Horowitz continued, "they got
money to spend, especially on policy! Everybody love
policy. And I let them all play." He thumped himself on the chest. "I got big heart!" he exclaimed. "The
goyim, what do they know? They treat their own kind like
bupkus,
and they treat the coloreds worse. But not me. I treat everybody equal until proven they deserve otherwise."

The numbers game was one of the most lucrative,
and probably the easiest, of Horowitz's rackets; you
practically had to beat the suckers away with a stick.
The gambler picked a number between 1 and 999 and
put down a bet, usually fifty cents. The winning lottery
number was the last three digits of the handle at a par
ticular racetrack on that day, which was published in
the newspaper, so everybody knew if he or she had
won. A winning bet should have paid off at 999 to 1, but once the cost of doing business and markups had
been figured in, the real payoff was only half that. Still,
that didn't seem to stop anybody from getting a bet
down.

Little black boys in Irish caps would call out in greet
ing to Solly as he made his stately procession uptown. Every once in a while Solly and Rick would spy a par
ticularly well dressed black man, turned out in spats and sometimes even a monocle, whom the boys followed with stars in their eyes. That would be one of Solly's collectors, a big man in the community who
could afford the finest things available to a Negro.
"You
see," he told Rick, "they know I'm honest. I pay off, 500 to 1."

"But the odds are 999 to 1," Rick objected one time.

"Is not my problem," said Solly. "The rules say you
pay off at 500 to 1 and that's what I do. Not 350 to 1.
Not 400 to 1. Not even 499 to 1. Five hundred to 1, and
not a penny less. I don't cheat them like Salucei does;
I don't fix the handle the way Weinberg does with his
phonus-balonus racetracks in Timbuktu. I treat 'em square, and I got no problems." He gestured up and
down Lenox Avenue and watched gratefully as the men
tipped their hats to him. "See?" he cried. "Everybody
love Solly Horowitz! The Grand Rebbe of Harlem!"

When Solly had muscled into this part of Harlem, he
had had to contend with the formidable figure of Lilly
DeLaurentien, a Haitian voodoo lady much given to bangles and beads who had had the colored numbers racket all to herself. Solly and Lilly clashed early and often, but after more than a few of her boys had ended
up in the North River with their feet encased in blocks of cement, an uneasy truce had been called, with Lilly
ceding most of her territory but retaining her social
standing. There were whispers that Lilly and Solly had
sealed their bargain with a roll in the hay, but no one
really knew.

Solomon Horowitz confided in God and, once in a
very great while and then only under duress, in Mrs.
Horowitz. The only things he really trusted were his
gat, which he kept well oiled, and his aim, which he
kept well honed. This accrued to Solly's continued
welfare and, indeed, existence, but it also had the added
benefit of keeping the neighborhood's rat population
handsomely in check. Horowitz hated rats, whether of the two- or four-legged variety.

In half a year Rick Baline had risen from green new
comer to one of Horowitz's most trusted advisers. Only
Tick-Tock seemed to resent his rapid rise in the gang;
the rest of them were clever enough to realize that Rick
was smarter and braver than all of them. Killers Solly
had plenty of, Schapiro foremost among them. Tick-
Tock could put a bullet through a rat's eye at two hun
dred feet, which was a skill that came in quite handy down around the Five Points, where Tick-Tock had
grown up. As the boss's bodyguard, Tick-Tock once had high hopes for himself in the succession depart
ment. Solly, though, was still the boss, and after him
the boss would be whoever Solly said he would be.
Solly knew it wasn't going to be Tick-Tock. Deep
down, Tick-Tock did, too, and he didn't like it.

From Solly, Rick learned that while drink itself
might be bad—"the booze I can take or I can leave,
but you should leave it alone"—drinking, and the art
of it, was something with which a young man could
profitably busy himself, and busily profit himself as well. Therefore, in addition to his other remunerative
rackets, Solly owned and operated a string of blind tigers, blind pigs, dives, taverns, saloons, and speakeas
ies across upper Manhattan. Horowitz also owned a
string of laundries, mostly in the Bronx, where he
could change dirty money for clean, get his bartenders'
aprons pressed, and from time to time cause to disap
pear in one or another of the lye vats a particularly
troublesome corpse.

About the only illicit activity that did not go on in the Mad Russian's empire was girls. "This pimping, pah! This I leave to the guineas!" he would exclaim when one or another of the younger boys in the gang
would ask him why, unlike Salucci, he didn't run
dames. That put an end to the subject as far as Solly
was concerned, but not as far as the younger fellows
were concerned; and then one of the older boys would
have to take the kid aside and explain that once, years ago, when he was fresh off the boat and could find no
other way to make a living, Solly had run a few choice
girls—girls who would do anything after arriving in
America and finding out that the promised land was an
eighteen-hour-a-day sweatshop on Allen Street sewing
alongside your mother, your father, and all your
cousins.

Then Prohibition had come along, and that was the end of that, thank God.

Rick loved the nightclubs, which Horowitz had scat
tered across the city, glamorous places where you
could hobnob with the swells, listen to jazz, and gaze at the most beautiful women in New York
,
all for the
price of a drink. An inflated price, to be sure: despite
Prohibition, speaks weren't a particularly risky business, which made the steep markup on booze all the
more delightful and remunerative.

The Noble Experiment was in its twelfth year and,
everyone said, on its last legs. Earlier than most gangsters, Solly Horowitz had gleaned the happily awful
truth that the Eighteenth Amendment was going to be
extremely unpopular with most of the city's citizens,
and he determined to slake their thirsts, Volstead Act
or no Volstead Act. This bit of prescience had made
him a rich man many times over, but he still lived sim
ply and unostentatiously above old Mr. Grunwald's vi
olin shop on 127th Street with his wife, Irma. Mrs.
Horowitz's recollection on almost every matter per
taining to her husband was doubtful, especially since she spoke almost no English. She knew nothing, she saw nothing, and most important, she remembered
nothing, which was the way Solomon intended to keep
it. "What for she gotta learn English?" her husband
used to exclaim whenever the subject came up. "Yid
dish ain't good enough for her?"

Horowitz was not a big man, but then most top gang
sters weren't. They didn't have to be. In appearance he
was short and a little rotund, but not fat: behind his affable exterior was both a formidable intellect and a
strong physique. Not to his face, the boys called Solly
"the Mad Russian," in honor of his birthplace some
where in what was, what had been, or what would
eventually again be Russia. Even Solly was a little
fuzzy on the exact site of his nativity, although most of
the betting men in the organization—which was to say
all of them—put their money on Odessa. In his speech,
the boss had the authentic Russian disregard for arti
cles, definite or otherwise. "Daddy," Lois would ex
claim in exasperation after a particularly Horowitzian
enormity, "you gotta learn to talk right!"

Solly was not the fashion plate O'Hanlon was, favor
ing off-the-rack suits from Ginzberg's on 125th Street;
the occasional presence of an egg stain on one of his
ties rarely dissuaded him from wearing it. Nor, for that
matter, did Horowitz drive a snazzy Murphy Duesen-
berg around town for every flatfooted copper to spot.

If you had seen Solomon Horowitz on the subway or
the el, you might have mistaken him for a business
man—an insurance salesman, perhaps, working the im
migrant communities for all they were worth. Which in
his own mind, he was.

It was worth your life, however, to underestimate
him—or worse, cheat him. One time, Big Julie Slepak, president of the Restaurant Workers' Benevolent Asso
ciation, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of S.
Horowitz Inc., had tried to skim a few grand off the
top of money that rightfully belonged to the boss. Con
fronted with the evidence of his malfeasance, Julie
tried to bluster his way out of his pickle until Solly put
an end to it by yanking out the pistol that he always carried in the waistband of his trousers, shoving it in
Big Julie's mouth, and pulling the trigger, thus shutting
him up for good. That he did this right in front of his
lawyer was a measure of the security Solly felt when
conducting his business.

"Boys," he said over the fallen flunky, "a lesson to
you this should only be. Never try to take from me that
what is mine!"

Today, Rick could tell the Mad Russian was in an
expansive mood, because he was smoking a cigar, a
small indulgence he occasionally permitted himself. Normally Solomon Horowitz did not smoke or drink,
and while he did not keep glatt kosher at home, he
usually came as close to it as his appetites would per
mit. His vest was unbuttoned, and he sat comfortably
at his rear table.