Jitterbug (22 page)

A squealing as of rats carried his attention overhead, where baskets of currency rode pulleys up and down wires leading to and from the cashier’s office, Suspended like a gunnery emplacement above the floor. Even Mammon had wings in Hudson’s. But for the preponderance of khakis and navy whites among the clientele, time there stood frozen at 1937, when light was showing at last at the end of the long black tunnel of the Great Depression, and Hitler and Tojo were someone else’s headache. He wondered how well that attitude would stand up if the Luftwaffe were to drop a bomb shrieking into the middle of the toy department.

He had no difficulty keeping up with the older couple. They moved among the bustling shoppers, clerks, and swallowtailed floorwalkers like flotsam on a sure tide, neither hastening their pace to accommodate those in a hurry nor slowing it to admire the merchandise on display. He drifted along behind, stopping from time to time to finger a necktie on a rack or read the price tag on the sleeve of a seersucker jacket. He had no fear they’d notice him, as they were oblivious to everything but their own measured pace down the aisle, but he didn’t want store security to connect him with the slow-moving pair.

At length they stepped aboard the varnished-oak escalator to the basement, timing the move with the patient calculation of fragile age. He got on several customers later. He had begun to perspire beneath the poncho and regretted bringing it. The forecast had called for steady rain all day long.

The bargain floor was as well-appointed as all the others, yet there was an atmosphere of sad resignation about the place, as if one had come down socially as well as geographically to browse among its discontinued styles, factory seconds, and soiled and damaged merchandise. The crowds were no less dense, but lacked the electricity of those on the upper levels. The ratio of black to white, middle-aged and older to youth, was greater. Their quest was as determined, but there was little joy in it. Wartime prosperity took a heavy emotional toll on those still suffering from the effects of Black Tuesday.

When he alighted from the escalator the couple were examining bath towels. He went over to wander among sheets and pillowcases left from the spring white sale. He was close enough to overhear the stout woman telling her husband she was looking for something with more of a nap,

After a few moments the old man said he was going to look for the men’s room. The tip of the bamboo cane thumped the floor in counter to his shuffling footsteps.

That corner was relatively deserted. A table piled with post-season corduroys slashed to half price occupied most of the customers in the middle of the room. The view was blocked by a display of mock windows dressed in last year’s curtains. He came around the end of the display, sliding a hand inside the briefcase.

“May I help you, soldier?”

He stopped short. A salesgirl standing on a stepladder smiled down at him from the flouncy valance she was busy threading onto a brass rod.

“Thanks, I’m just looking.” He shrugged his poncho over the briefcase.

“I thought the army supplied you boys with all the housewares you needed.”

“I’m shopping for my wife. My fiancée, I mean. We’re getting married next month.”

“Too bad. They’re either too young or too old—or too married.”

He retreated to the more populated part of the room. There, face burning with rage and frustration, he pretended to interest himself in corduroys. Every time he looked up he could see the girl’s brunette head showing above the curtain display. He wondered how long he had before the old man came back from the men’s room.

At length he heard a scraping noise, and when he looked up the girl’s head was gone. A moment later she came past the table carrying the stepladder.

The stout woman had unfolded one of the larger bath towels and was holding it up in front of her as he came around the end of the aisle. Her back was to him. He glanced all around and up, in case there were more stepladders. Then he broke into a lope, drawing out the bayonet.

Just as he got close enough to smell the decayed flowers of her perfume, his foot scraped the floor. She started to turn. He caught her larynx in the crook of his left elbow, choking off her cry. He swooped his right around and up. She sagged in his embrace. As she slid down, spraddle-legged, he caught the strap of her bulky handbag looped around her right wrist with the hand holding the bayonet. Then he stepped back, letting her sprawl the rest of the way onto her back. The dark pool spread swiftly across the buffed linoleum. He opened the bag and closed his hands around a thick cardboardy bundle held together with a rubber band.

“Jesus God!”

He whirled. The man standing at the end of the aisle, thick-shouldered, with short-clipped hair and a soft roll around his middle, wore the blue twill shirt and trousers of a Hudson’s security guard. His eyes and gaping mouth were huge in a face gone watery white. Then the mouth clamped shut and his right hand swooped down toward the checked butt of the revolver in his belt holster.

He lunged, closing the distance between them in two long strides and slicing the bayonet’s long double-edged blade around in a backhand sweep. The blue twill shirt opened straight across the guard’s soft middle, and as the glistening coils spilled out he forgot about the gun and reached with both hands to hold himself in.

That ended the threat. As the guard’s knees buckled he swept past and around the end of the display of curtains, where he fell back into a normal pace for a busy department store, closing his poncho over his bloody weapon and the bounty he’d snatched from the woman’s bag. He was almost to the escalator when he realized he didn’t have his briefcase. He’d dropped it during the first attack.

Just then the old man passed him, leaning on his bamboo cane. He decided not to go back. Not because of the old man, who would certainly be no more trouble than the guard, but because there were too many people too near. It was just luck that the guard had been too deep in shock to cry out before his strength left him. A soldier never sneered at chance, but neither did he ask too much of it.

He walked up the escalator, just like any shopper for whom the mechanism was too slow. He listened for the first cry, the clanging of the alarms signaling for all the doors to be secured. Then he was out on the sidewalk.

The uptown car was on time. Once again he had a token ready and he took a seat at the rear. The rest of the passengers crowded up front. He took off his poncho, folded the bayonet inside to avoid staining his uniform, and sat back to count the number of ration stamps he’d removed from circulation.

He was holding a fistful of recipes clipped from newspapers.

T
INO THOUGHT
M
R.
O
RR’S
driver, Barney, was a giant pain in the ass.

Every time the bodyguard shifted his weight while leaning against the gleaming maroon surface of Mr. Orr’s DeSoto, the driver looked down with a scowl to see if he had managed to scratch the paint with his butt. Two years ago the little Irish fuck had been rolling Chevies on the GM test track for forty a week and now he was acting like a full partner. But Tino was in a good mood, enjoying the feel of the sun on his back and the sound of the river gurgling past the shore of Belle Isle, and he made conversation instead of a fight.

“Think he’s carrying?”

“Who? Mr. Orr?”

“Shit, no. He ain’t had a piece in his hand in twelve years. I mean the twerp by the car.”

Barney looked at the man in the uncomfortable-looking black suit standing, by the black Cadillac with government plates, parked a hundred yards farther down the gravel apron of the freshly blacktopped road that circled the island. The car was a blackout model, with all the chromework painted over. The man’s complete attention remained on the two figures standing inside the railing by the Scott Fountain.

Barney looked away. “Sure he’s carrying. Would you keep your coat on in this heat if you weren’t?”

“I think I’ll go talk to him.”

“About what?”

“Things. We’re in the same line of work.”

The man by the Cadillac didn’t move his head as Tino approached, but he was sure his eyes did behind the dark lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. His coat was open.

“Hiya,” Tino said.

“Good afternoon.”

“You Secret Service?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding? You protect the president?” Tino showed off his dental work. Joe Louis had knocked out all his front teeth in 1936, cinching his retirement from the ring.

“I don’t work White House.”

“Seen him up close, though, I bet.”

“Lots of times.”

“He walk at all? I see him standing with them canes when he’s giving a speech.”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“Top secret, huh? That’s why they call it Secret Service.”

“Something like that.”

“See any action?”

The man was silent for a moment. Then he touched the nosepiece of his opaque glasses. “Took some guns off four male subjects parked by the Reflecting Pool in ’39. Said they were shooting ducks. Turned out they were Bund.”

“Wow.”

“I got a commendation.”

“Bonus?”

“No. Treasury doesn’t do that.”

“Pisser. What kind of piece you carry?”

“Army .45.”

“Hey, me too. Ever fire it?”

“Just on the range.”

Tino pointed up at the fountain, at a pigeon cleaning its feathers on top of one of the marble lions’ heads. “Can you pick off that bird from here?”

“Sure.”

He pointed toward the Italianate arches of the Belle Isle Casino, where a woman held the leash while her wirehair terrier lifted its leg against a low hedge. “Hit that dog?”

“I like dogs.”

“You could hit it, though.”

“Sure.”

“Me too.” After another little silence Tino said, “How do you put in for a job with the Secret Service?”

“To begin with, you can’t have a criminal record.”

“What makes you think I got a record?”

For answer the Secret Service man pointed at Frankie Orr, leaning on the iron railing next to Frank Murphy, Justice of the Supreme Court and former attorney general of the United States.

“How much money you make?” Tino asked then.

“I pay my bills.”

“That’s the only difference between you and me, bo. My boss pays mine.” He turned around and went back to stand next to Barney. “High-hat government fuck.”

“Watch the paint,” Barney said.

Frank Murphy had a forehead that was outgrowing his scanty hair and thick black-Irish brows thatching the soft dark eyes of a shanty tenor. They masked a machinelike brain and a will of granite. Before vacating the office of attorney general to accept his seat on the Supreme Court, he had been a Detroit Recorder’s Court judge, mayor of Detroit following the recall of Charles “Wide Open” Bowles, governor of Michigan, and high commissioner of the Philippines, where he had served for two years as governor-general. He had fought in the trenches of France at the same time Frankie was doing his stretch in the New York State Reformatory at Elmira for putting out the eye of a Rothstein tough named Jake the Kike with a nail in a board during a scrap in the Garment District. In Frankie’s mind this made them fellow veterans.

“I should get back here more often,” Murphy was saying. The baroque white-marble fountain gushed behind them as they leaned on the iron railing overlooking the pyramid of steps. From their base the grass spread like green felt, beyond which sparkled the river, and beyond that rose the buildings of Windsor and Hiram Walkers distillery, an old Orr associate. “Summer’s a sorry time in Washington. It won’t let you forget it was built in the middle of a swamp.” Murphy’s Corktown brogue was evident only when he spoke of Detroit. It would have raised eyebrows among the preening Ivy Leaguers of the Brain Trust.

“Bitch in winter, though,” Frankie said. “Michigan.”

“That’s your ancestry speaking. You lack sod in your blood.” Frankie made no reply to that, not knowing what it meant. He was the only one of the pair dressed for the weather, in one of his trademark dove gray snapbrims, a Dobbs Airweight with ventilator holes above the band, blue summer worsted, solid blue tie on a gray silk shirt with a monogram, and woven Italian leather loafers, hundred bucks a pop since the embargo. The justice was turned out like an Irish civil servant: rumpled black suit, cheap white cotton shirt, lace-up brogans with thick rubber soles. But then Frankie thought it would be a shame to hide swell clothes under a black robe.

“Friend of mine owns a cabin up on Walloon Lake,” he said. “Hemingway had the place next door. Why don’t I send the key around? You could fish for three months, forget all about Washington till September.”

“I can’t picture you with a friend who fishes.”

“Okay, the joint’s mine. I was going to turn it into a roadhouse, but then the war came along and I couldn’t get the material. It ain’t in my name.”

“A rose by any other. Only you’re no rose.”

“Roses are for saps. I always send orchids. What about it, Your Honor?”

“Thank you. I prefer to buy my fish in a market. The price is much less dear.”

“Not with rationing. Well, suit yourself.” Irony was lost on Frankie. “Where you staying, the Book-Cadillac? They give you the presidential? What am I talking about, sure they did. I know a penthouse suite makes it look like a dump. The manager owes me a favor. He’ll keep your name off the register. Reporters in this town are a pain in the ass.”

“Where would that be, the Griswold House?”

Frankie’s face went plank flat. “They tore down the Griswold,” he said.

Murphy, watching him out of the corner of his eye, chuckled. “I never really bought that story, about you cutting a man’s throat in the Griswold dining room. I thought you spread it yourself to scare the other wops into line. But you know something, Oro?” He pronounced the name with sinister foreignness. “You’re a rotten poker player. There’s a Friday night foursome at the Columbia Arms would peel you down to your guinea ass: Harry Hopkins, Buckminster Fuller, John O’Hara, and Francis L. Murphy. A button man in silk undies is still just a button man.”