Jimmy and Fay (6 page)

Marinelli finished the chunk he was chewing, cut another, and said, “What are you doing here? Didn't expect you until next week.” He spoke with the low murmuring voice that he used when he was talking in private. Guys at the next table couldn't make out a single word.

“Yeah, I know,” I said as I sat and slipped him the envelope under the table, “but some other business came up and I had to see Lansky tonight. This is for this week and next, got that?”

He grunted and tugged at the envelope. I held on to it. “Got that?”

He frowned as he chewed. “Yeah, I got it. Two weeks,” he said, palming the envelope.

I felt the weight of responsibility float away. Maybe the abrupt change in routine had got to me more than I understood, and it felt terrific to be rid of the thing. You see, in all the years I'd been doing this work, I never missed a meeting. Sure, a lot of lines got crossed and somebody didn't show up where I expected him to be, and sometimes other guys tried to hijack me and I was late, but in the end, I always delivered. Always. It would be a hell of a time to ruin my record.

He washed his steak down with a gulp of dago red.

I said, “This other business I mentioned, you might know something about it.”

“Yeah, how's that?”

“Suppose a guy came across a stash of dirty books, ‘art' picture books, real good ‘art' picture books, who would he talk to about unloading them? Carlo?”

You see, after we knocked off Maranzano and Charlie took over, he handed over his peepshows and pinball machines to Carlo Gambino. He kept the slots for himself.

“How many books?” Marinelli asked.

“Can't say. I've only seen one and been told there's more, but who knows? It's not my racket. Before I do anything, I gotta be sure I'm not horning in on somebody else's territory. Is anybody else peddling stuff like that?”

He chewed and thought and shook his head. He allowed that you could find some higher-quality stuff, real hardback books and the like, in some stationery stores, but nobody was making payments to him to make sure the cops left them alone. The truth was, he said, that the market just wasn't that big or profitable. I said he was probably right. The whole business didn't smell right.

He pushed his plate away. “It's not really your line of work anyway. I hear you're going legit.”

“I'm trying to, but they're sure as hell making it rough on me.”

“I know. It's a hell of a thing. Now I've got this prick LaGuardia breathing down my neck. He gets in office, who knows what the fuck will happen.”

Uncle Al looked around the big room at all the guys who were trying to figure out what was going on and if they were making a living today, would they still be able to do it tomorrow. He leaned across the table and for the first time, his voice got louder and guys at the next tables turned to listen. “It started with that goddamn Roosevelt and now the fucking reformers are crawling out of the woodwork. A hell of a thing, just a hell of a thing. I mean, think about it, what did we do wrong? Nothing. We gave the people what they wanted. They voted the right way and we made jobs for them and their kids. Yeah, we took our cut, but fair's fair, right? Isn't that what made this fucking city great?”

“It was just too good to last,” I said, and he nodded his head.

Chapter Six

I collected my hat and coat and went out to Mulberry Street to hail a cab. My first thought was to follow my original plan and look for Charlie at Polly Adler's new place. But the meeting with the two dumb-ass blackmailers—and their cigarette-smoking boss, if that's who he was—made me think that it might be a better idea to stop by my place and pick up a .38. But, thinking they were done with me for the night, I changed my mind. When the taxi pulled over, I told him to take me to Polly's address on Fifty-Fifth and to let me know if he noticed anybody following us.

He asked if I wanted him to shake them and I said, no, that wasn't important. I just wanted to know if anybody was interested. Nobody was. The cabbie was disappointed.

For a time, Polly had probably been the most famous madam in the city, and that's saying something. She had strong competition. But I knew her before then. Hell, I knew her before she was Polly Adler. I couldn't have been more than ten or eleven at the time. She was older. Here's how it happened.

When I first met her, she was Pearl Davis. I don't think Davis was her real last name, but everybody called her Pearl. She was an immigrant from Russia. She wasn't the prettiest girl you ever saw, but she was funny and curious and she was always in the middle of things. She was also busty and short. Truth is, at four-foot-eleven, she was one of the few women I've ever known that I could honestly say, “I towered over her.”

Anyhow, she had been working as a seamstress at a dress factory when her foreman took a shine to her and asked her out. The first time they were alone together, he made a pass and she said no. Then he knocked her out and he knocked her up, and when she told him about it, the bastard fired her.

She dug up the money to take care of her immediate problem but had a hard time finding another job, and she spent about a year living hand to mouth in a ten-dollar-a-month mouse hole down on Second Avenue. I guess it was worse for more people in the Depression, but Pearl's year of being broke came at a time when it seemed to her like everybody else was flush with cash and that made it damned hard to take.

Now, the night she told me most of this was several years later. We had been drinking and she probably said more than she meant to. I listened a lot.

For her, the bad times ended in January, 1920, when a friend took her to meet a dress manufacturer who lived up on Riverside Drive. She said the place where he lived with his family was maybe the nicest apartment she'd ever seen. He didn't have any work for her, but while she was visiting his place, she met one of his acquaintances, Kitty Robinson, a tall, blue-eyed blonde about Pearl's age. Kitty was an actress and singer who'd just arrived in town from Chicago and had already landed a part in a new Broadway revue that was about to start rehearsals.

Kitty and Pearl hit it off, and before long, she was inviting Pearl over to her place, which was every bit as high-toned as the dress manufacturer's, nine rooms done to the nines. Better yet, Kitty palled around with all the beautiful, witty show business people. The two girls got along so well that Kitty invited Pearl to move in and keep her company until her mother arrived from Chicago in a few months. Pearl took her up on it and thought it was all pretty terrific until she got to know Kitty better.

That's when she found out that her friend liked to relax at “hop parties,” where she partook of a pill or two of opium in a nice warm pipe. At first, Pearl thought it was just something that Kitty did from time to time, and it would certainly stop when Kitty's mother arrived. I don't know if she really believed that or not, but she learned different.

Kitty's mother showed up with a young lounge lizard gigolo in tow. She called him “Dad,” and both of them dove right into the hop party whirl. Pearl tagged along.

One of their favorite places was another vast Upper West Side spread where an older woman named Melissa Louise lived. Melissa Louise was the mistress of a Wall Street financier, and she was so well heeled that she made the rest of them look like bums. Besides the apartment, she had a car, a chauffeur, a two-­hundred-dollar-a-month allowance, and, she claimed, a hundred-­thousand-dollar trust fund that was hers whenever she decided that she wanted to leave.

At Melissa Louise's place, they'd close the transoms and put damp towels under the doors of the drawing room. That's where the lady of the house would stretch out on a big fur rug while her guests reclined on the divans that surrounded her, and they'd all hit the pipe. All but Pearl.

Both Kitty and Melissa Louise warned her against the stuff, and so she never indulged. Though Pearl never said so, I got the idea that it wasn't so much her welfare and problems with the law that led them to keep her away from the pipe. They needed somebody who was straight to look after them. That's how Pearl and I met.

You see, at the same time she was moving into the world of the upper crust, I was living in a building in Hell's Kitchen with Mother Moon. Oh Boy Oliver lived there too. Now, Mother Moon was either my aunt or my grandmother, we were never sure which exactly. Before she married a Chinaman, she was Mother Quinn, and my father had been told to find her when he came to America from Ireland. He did that, and he and my mother moved into her place. Then after he left and my mother died, Mother Moon raised me. She taught me how to steal and who to steal from, how to run and how to fight when I absolutely had to, and she hired me out to Rothstein as a messenger. She also loved her pipe. On those days and nights when she was not in the mood to stretch out in the Sans Souci opium den, she'd give me money and send me over to the place on Third Avenue to buy a can and bring it home. Pearl did the same for Kitty and Melissa Louise, and that's where we met, back at the office with a Dutch door where the old man who ran the place kept the supply that he'd dole out to a few old and trusted customers.

The sign on the street said that the Sans Souci was a music hall, and they did have some kind of entertainment. There was also a restaurant and a casino. The opium den was around back and in the basement. But if you wanted to pick up a tin of the best-quality stuff, you had to call ahead and see the old guy.

That's what I was doing one evening, waiting in an alcove off the main hallway and outside the office, when Pearl showed up.

She was not happy to be there. Melissa Louise told her it was completely safe and provided the car and driver and said that everything had been arranged, but the Sans Souci was not in the best neighborhood, and Pearl had hoped that part of the city was behind her.

Chinese waiters and other guys hustled through the hallway. It was narrow, crowded, dim, and thick with incense and tobacco smoke. A few of the guys glared at us suspiciously, but most paid us no mind. Pearl crowded in next to me. Even though I was just a kid, I was about her size and color. She said, “Is this the place for . . .”

“Yeah,” I answered and rapped twice quick on the door. “Mr. Ung, you've got another customer.”

The top part of the door swung open, bumping into us, and I could see Mr. Ung perched on his tall stool in front of a rolltop desk that took up most of the room. There was a little five-tael can of opium on the desktop. Mr. Ung gave Pearl the once-over and said, “Who you?”

Pearl stood as tall as she could, handed the old guy an envelope, and said, “Miss Melissa Louise called. I'm expected.”

He sniffed and snatched the envelope. He said, “You wait,” and started to pull the door shut.

I grabbed it and held it open. “Hey, that's mine,” I said, pointing to the can.

He gave me a mean look, handed it over, and slammed the door. I could've left then, but I could tell the girl wanted me to stick around, so I pocketed the dope and introduced myself. “Don't worry about him,” I said. “They wouldn't let you in if they didn't know somebody was coming. First time?”

“Yeah.”

“How much are you picking up?”

“Three cans of”—she looked at a slip of paper—“Li Yun.”

I told her that was the good stuff and the cans would fit in her bag, and she should be sure to keep it closed and tucked under her arm.

She shot me a skeptical look and said, “I may be new to this, but I'm not stupid. Besides, I've got a driver right outside. I'm not worried.”

Like hell she wasn't worried. Pearl knew her way around some rough parts of town, but being in a place like that for the first time, she could use a little company, even a smart-ass kid like me.

I waited until Mr. Ung came back and checked the labels to make sure it was the Li Yun, not some junk he was trying to foist off. But I guess Melissa Louise was on the level. Pearl stuffed the cans down deep, clutched her bag, and held onto my arm as I led her back out by the restaurant to Third Avenue where her car and driver were waiting. She said, “Thanks, kid,” and I didn't see her for a while after that.

She went back to Kitty's place, Kitty's Mom and Mom's Gigolo, and things went south.

Heroin and cocaine had been replacing opium for some time because they were easier to handle and more profitable, and people got a bigger kick out of them. There were only a few old holdouts like Mother Moon who stuck with the pill and the pipe. Kitty started shooting heroin.

Pearl was looking for a way out when she met a bootlegger named Scoodles Jerome at one of Kitty's parties. He told Pearl that he was having a fling with a society dame who was married. They were looking for someplace nice where they could while away an afternoon. He said he'd pay the rent if Pearl could find the right apartment and make herself scarce for a few hours from time to time.

It turned out to be two bedrooms furnished on Riverside Drive. Pearl moved in, and for a few months everything was terrific. Maybe Pearl caught a few more movie matinees than she might have, but that was okay. She still thought it was a sweet deal. Then Scoodles and his squeeze called it quits. He asked Pearl if she might know of a new squeeze. Just doing a favor for a friend, you understand, nothing more than that. She asked around and, sure enough, a cute girl named Fran, from back in her first days at Kitty's, said she was interested in a little hubba-hubba.

Things worked out so well that some of Pearl's other friends asked if they might help to entertain Mr. Scoodles. She said yes, and pretty soon he was spending two or three nights a week at her place. Pearl told me later that it was the best time she ever had in the business.

Scoodles was a nice-enough guy. I knew him because he worked with Lansky and Charlie every now and again. He thought Pearl's setup was so great that he'd show up most evenings about six with bags of chicken from the rotisserie down the street, and jugs of dago red, and they all had a fine old time. Eating chicken, drinking red, screwing, eating chicken. Since it was so informal, Pearl could still convince herself that she wasn't involved in selling sex. And, she kept telling herself, this was only temporary, anyway, a way to earn enough to go into some kind of legitimate business.