Funny Boys (27 page)

I
N THE EARLY MORNING RUSH, TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY IN
A
LBANY
. Thankfully, the driver wasn’t a talker and they both dozed much of the way.

“All over, people. I gotta make deliveries.”

When the truck stopped at a red light, they thanked the driver and got out.

“You sure are a lifesaver, mister,” Mickey said.

But after the truck had melted into the traffic, Mickey felt dis-oriented. It was one thing to rely on the serendipity of fate and quite another to translate it into an action. Mickey dipped a hand into his pocket and assessed his finances. He had four dollars and change.

“I was saving for a rainy day, but one good drizzle would wipe us out.”

They stopped at a one-armed beanery, ordered coffee and split a ham sandwich. Mutzie looked pale, forlorn, unhappy and very misplaced in men’s clothes.

“You ready to be a girl again, Mutzie?” Mickey asked.

“It didn’t bring me that much luck when I was.”

He sensed her depression. Her spirit was diminishing and he had no plan to bring any hope.

Over her objections, he made her buy lipstick and rouge at Woolworths and persuaded her to buy a skirt, blouse and sandals in a a small store that advertised cheap prices in the window.

“Magic,” Mickey said when she emerged from the dressing area. She had put on make-up and brushed her hair, which fluffed out her Jean Harlow bob. Observing her, his heart seemed to overflow with feeling. She looked a lot younger than she had looked at Gorlick’s.

“I’m a girl again,” she said.

“Thank God,” Mickey said, eyes locking into hers. They stared at each other for a long moment. She was the first to turn her eyes away.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Not what. Who.” He felt an idea emerging. “Being tired, broke, hungry and desperate has its good points.”

“Name one,” Mutzie said.

“Motivates the survival instinct.”

Grabbing her hand, he led her in the direction of the state capital building. But as they got closer, his pace slowed. There was something terribly intimidating about the structure, its façade gleaming in the sun and the New York State flag flying from its summit.

Again, the memory of Irish’s words surfaced in his mind.
Whereyabeen. Dey got New Yawk in de palm a dere hands
.

And yet with Mutzie at his side, he was able to continue to muster some sense of the heroic. Or was he pretending? His gaze washed over the people who passed them. The streets and the people of Albany seemed oddly different. It suddenly occurred to Mickey that he was in strange territory, alien territory. They had emerged from the ghetto, from Brownsville, from the Borscht Belt, from the safety and commonality of a purely Jewish-oriented world.

Not that there weren’t gentiles in that comfortable world of Jewishness. Certain of them didn’t count as foreigners, like those Italians who lived on the fringes of the Jewish neighborhoods. Even men like Albert Anastasia and Frank Costello, or the odd gentile that seemed to have taken on the characteristics of a Jewish person, like some of the clerks in the stores or even the teachers in the Brownsville schools.

Even those cruel and brutal Jewish gangsters, who he had vowed to bring to justice, seemed less strange to him than the people walking the streets in this town. There was, he knew, a certain faulty logic in his observations. It was his bounds that were Jewish, his world, certain parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan and, of course, the Catksills. The Bronx, too, but that was far away, an hour by subway, eons beyond his home borders. The “City,” by which he meant what everyone called the heart of Manhattan, had its share of goyem. But somehow it seemed more Jewish, less alien.

It surprised him. He had never thought about it in this way. Until now.

“Funny, they don’t look Jewish,” he said suddenly.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Mutzie said.

“Were you thinking also that maybe we’re traitors?”

“It crossed my mind,” she said. “Then I remembered what I saw. Somehow.…” She hesitated. Her tongue darted over her lower lip, caressing it for a moment. “It makes me feel sick to my stomach. Jews aren’t supposed to do things like that.”

He nodded agreement. In this alien environment it was clear that everything in his and Mutzie’s world was measured by “Jewishness.” Es ist gut fa de yidden? Is it good for the Jews, was the bottom line, passed down from parent to child, as ingrained in their psyche as the tiniest nuance of anti-Semitic attitude or jargon.

He was confused by this larger issue. It was troubling, although it did not negate his disgust at the horrors they had witnessed and the desire to set things right. We owe it to ourselves to cleanse our own house, he assured himself. This new idea renewed his confidence.

“Afraid?” he asked as they moved forward again toward the state capital building.

“Yes,” she answered, squeezing his hand.

“Remember. Every silver lining has a cloud around it.”

She pursed her lips and looked up to the sky in mock exasperation. As they walked to the capital, he began to feel uneasy. Perhaps the combination had their people here, watching for them. He felt uneasy, unsafe, paranoid.

“I feel like everybody is watching us,” Mutzie said.

“It’s like going for a long walk on a short pier.”

Inside the capital, they made their way through the elaborate marble corridors to an area marked “Office of the Governor.” It was crowded with people sitting on chairs theater style, apparently waiting to be called to meet someone on the governor’s staff. Perhaps, he decided, they might find a person in the governor’s office who was not tainted. But who? On the wall was a large photograph of the Governor. No, Mickey protested to himself. Corruption could never reach that far. No way.

There was a directory at one end of the reception room with names of various officials, none of whom were familiar except the name of Governor Herbert Lehman. Below his name was a roster of assistants and departments that meant little to either of them.

Mickey was afflicted suddenly with galloping discouragement and frustration. His grandiose plans to achieve justice seemed to deflate. No miracle had arrived. He felt helpless.

A gray-haired woman with a tight, unsmiling face wearing
rimless glasses sat at a reception desk. She seemed formidable and imperious. Every few minutes the telephone would ring and she would call out a name in an officious manner, peering at the waiting supplicants with icy superiority. A person or persons would rise and make their way to the desk, where she would scrutinize them and hand them a form that she had scribbled on, and the person or group would enter whatever inner sanctum awaited through large ornate double doors.

“Maybe this is the wrong place to start,” Mutzie whispered.

“Perhaps I should ask for the office of the state police,” Mickey mused. He had not seen any reference to the state police on the directory. At that moment he spotted a uniformed state policeman standing near the wall. He was observing the people in the waiting room. Mickey felt the policeman’s eyes wash over him.

“Maybe he’s one them,” Mutzie said. “Looking for us. Maybe the word is out.”

Mickey grabbed Mutzie’s arm and they started toward the exit, when suddenly the came face to face, literally, with a recognizable face, a kindly, round bald man’s face. The governor, Herbert Lehman! Behind the governor walked a state policeman. The man looked so ordinary, so normal.

To Mickey, it was the wished-for miracle.

Without thinking, as if by rote, he blocked the governor’s path. “Mr. Governor,” Mickey cried. “Just the man I need to see.”

The governor looked at him, frowning warily, and the state policeman was quick to act, his hand reaching for his pistol holster.

“No, please,” Mutzie shouted. “He means no harm.”

“Step aside, sonny,” the state policeman growled.

“I need you, sir,” Mickey said, fighting for composure. His knees shook. “We’ve witnessed a killing.”

The governor looked at him, puzzled.

“It’s true, sir. By gangsters.”

“Leave the governor alone,” the state policeman said, his hand remaining on the holster.

“Please, sir,” Mutzie pleaded. “Let us tell you. It’s true. We need your help. We don’t know who to trust.”

“One more time,” the state policeman said. “Move aside.”

“Please, sir. It’s a matter of life and death. Just give us a few minutes to tell our story.”

“You’re our only hope,” Mutzie said. Her eyes met the governor’s, who searched her face, then looked toward Mickey.

“A matter of life and death?”

Mickey nodded. “Ours.”

The governor frowned and shook his head.

“Give us a chance, Governor. Please,” Mutzie begged.

Governor Lehman contemplated their faces. He had a grandfatherly look, soft and compassionate.

“It won’t take long,” Mickey said, his heart thumping in his chest. He searched his mind for a joke. None came. “I wish I had a joke,” he blurted.

“A joke?” the Governor asked, perplexed.

“He’s a tumler,” Mutzie said. “You know …”

“I know,” the Governor said, offering a hollow chuckle.

“Show him, Mickey,” Mutzie said.

“Really, Governor,” the state policeman said. “You should be going.” The governor looked at Mickey, expectant.

“Okay. Okay.” Mickey thought for a moment. “Having one wife is called monotony. Terrible I know. Here’s another. If the money is really yours, how come you can’t take it with you?” Mickey felt sweat break out on his back. The governor didn’t crack a smile.

“Now you see why I am currently unemployed.” Mickey
shrugged. “And unfortunately what we have to tell you is not exactly a laugh riot.”

“Is it that important?” the governor asked.

“Very,” Mutzie said.

The governor looked them both over again and shook his head. “Follow me,” he said, murmuring. “What a politican will do for a vote.”

“Hey, that’s good, sir. Maybe you should be a tumler.”

“I am,” the governor said.

Governor Lehman was kindly and understanding, grandfatherly with, as Mutzie’s mother might say, a nice Jewish punim. They followed him to his elaborate office where he sat at his desk and they sat on two chairs directly facing him.

The governor smiled, then put his hands together in a finger cathedral, leaned back in his chair and nodded to Mickey to begin. He listened intently to Mickey’s story, shaking his head in disgust periodically and occasionally nodding agreement as Mickey made suggestions and comments.

These people must be stopped, Mickey told him. They are killers, racketeers, ruthless, cruel, cynical men who corrupt everything they touch. He and Mutzie had witnessed a horrendous crime, he explained. They had seen this horror with their own eyes. Mickey had not spared the governor any of the details. At each gruesome turn in the story, Mutzie nodded in emphasis.

The governor shook his head in despair.

“How awful,” he said.

The comment seemed a cue for Mickey to delve into those details of personal experience that he and Mutzie had undergone. He spoke of his father’s brutal beating at the hands of Pep and Reles, and how it was well known that they bribed cops, judges and politicians.

“And we want to help. To tell people what we saw.”

Then Mickey turned to Mutzie and, with delicacy and careful self-censorship, indicated how Mutzie had narrowly escaped condemnation to a lifetime of prostitution.

“Think of how many other innocent young women have been treated like this, Governor,” Mickey said.

“Appalling,” the governor responded, blowing his nose to mask his emotion.

Mickey told the governor what he had learned of the terrible corruption in the city, in Sullivan County, the gambling, the prostitution, the alleged payoffs and bribes. Of course, he admitted, he could not know individual details.

“There are people who believe that the corruption goes all the way to the state government.”

The governor suddenly sat upright and with the flat of his hand banged on his desk.

“Not in this office,” he said with passion and indignation. “Never.”

“If we thought that, sir,” Mickey said. “We would not be here.”

Their testimony, Mickey told the governor, would be the opening wedge to break this evil gangster combination, and remove their stranglehold on many of the legitimate businesses of the state.

“We are not as naïve as you think, young man. Believe me, we are working on it. But we need proof, evidence. Tom Dewey is using every resource,” the governor said. Again, he slapped his desk.

“Governor, the worst part is …” Mickey hesitated, shrugged and glanced at Mutzie. “The worst part is …” He lowered his voice. “Many of these gangsters are Jewish, like us.”

Governor Lehman nodded lightly, pursed his lips and a frown creased his forehead. His bald pate turned slightly red.

“Our own people,” Mickey reiterated. “It’s a disgrace.”

The governor turned his eyes away and studied his hands. Then he looked up lugubriously. “Not a pretty picture,” he said.

Mickey’s remarks had clearly agitated the governor. He tensed for a moment, then leaned back and again made a cathedral with his fingers.

After a long hesitation, Mickey then explained how he and Mutzie were in grave danger as material witnesses to this crime, citing the number of the legal code. The governor nodded.

“Who can we trust?” Mickey asked.

“You can trust me,” the governor insisted, picking up the telephone on his desk.

“Not the state police, Governor,” Mickey warned.

Governor Lehman rubbed his chin. He appeared deep in thought. Then he reached for the phone and whispered into the speaker. Within a moment a man appeared. He was youngish, serious-looking with horn-rimmed glasses and a professional, all-business air.

“This is Allen Morgan, one of my aides. He is working very closely with Mr. Dewey.”

Morgan nodded. The governor introduced them.

“These young people have a story to tell Morgan. And they must be protected.”

Mickey felt vaguely uneasy. Could he be trusted? Mickey wondered. There was something about the man’s demeanor that roused Mickey’s gut instinct unfavorably.