Jitterbug (4 page)

That was the beginning of the Cleaners and Dyers War, from which the Purple Gang took its name. Sid Yegerov, who paid no attention to territorial disputes and did not keep company with others of his profession, had known nothing of the business until he returned from the bank to find black smoke pouring out of the front of the shop and a hook and ladder clanging up the block.

Sid wasn’t impressed with the police investigation, even when it produced an arrest at the end of just three days. The suspect, a nineteen-year-old neighborhood youth whom the dry cleaner knew by sight, had turned himself in at the local precinct house and confessed, saying he had intended only to destroy the shop as an example to those establishments whose owners refused to align themselves with the Cleaners and Dyers Protective Association, of which he was the local representative. Guilt over the death of Mrs. Yegerov had proven too much for him to bear in silence. Hearst’s
Detroit Times
ran a picture of the suspect on its police page, face buried in his manacled hands on a bench outside Recorders Court before his arraignment on a charge of felony murder.

The widower was unmoved, It was clear the youth had been put up to take the blame, probably in place of some more valuable gang member, and that he had been promised good representation and a sum of money to compensate him for the inconvenience—in this case, seven to ten years of his life for the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter, to which he pleaded guilty. He was out in three.

Sid didn’t bother to attend the sentencing, or to keep track of what happened to the boy, although he heard a rumor that something had happened during his confinement in the Southern Michigan Penitentiary at Jackson and that it was bad enough to prevent him from returning to the neighborhood, where the story was known. That meant he was in Toledo. The Purple Gang owned that port on Lake Erie down to the manhole covers and the storage buildings where the Department of Public Works kept the piles of salt it spread on the streets in February, as well as several hundred cases of Old Log Cabin, sourmash whiskey, a favorite in Capone’s Chicago. By now he was probably a street commissioner.

What Sid did, instead of interest himself in the fortunes of the young man who the law was satisfied had taken Chanah’s life, was buy a gun.

It was a seven-millimeter Luger that Krekor Messarian, the Armenian tailor in the next block, had acquired from a German in the trenches in France during the 1917 Christmas truce. The trade had cost him six cartons of Fatimas. The cleaner gave him fifteen dollars. The pistol, an ugly brown length of pipe with checked wooden grips and a firing mechanism that worked on the same basic principle as a cigarette lighter, shared a White Owl cigar box on a shelf below the counter with an extra magazine loaded with brass cartridges. At night he took it home, box and all, and carried it under his arm to work each morning. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about the pistol in Mr. Yegerov’s White Owl box. Boys who came to pick up their parents’ cleaning sometimes worked up courage enough to ask to see it. He always refused. He knew the gun would save his life one day.

When the little copper bell mounted on a spring clip above the door jangled and a young man came in with an army tunic folded over one arm, Sid didn’t examine him any more closely than he did any other customer, although he didn’t get much business from strangers. The uniform didn’t surprise him. He saw them often on streetcars, and had wondered if the young men who wore them used civilian cleaners or whether the service was provided by Uncle Sam. The tunic itself, closely woven wool dyed a rich brown, promised a welcome change from Herman Schwemmer’s out-of-date mustard suit he wore to synagogue and invariably befouled afterward, in summer with dripping ice-cream cones at Sealtest and in fall and winter with matzoh at Berman’s, and Mrs. Tolwasser’s cotton print dress, which attracted mud and grease like lint every time she stepped off the running board of the Edison electric she had been driving ever since Mr. Tolwasser had his brains kicked out by his milk horse on Woodward in 1913. Sid knew every detail of every item of nonwashable apparel in the neighborhood as well as he knew his own.

The young man himself was pleasant-looking in that bland, characterless way of unworn youth—dark sandy hair brushed back from a prominent widow’s peak and features well enough balanced for Hollywood, or so Sid concluded from the pictures he saw in
Parade.
(He himself hadn’t been to see a movie since Chanah, had never watched one whose dialogue wasn’t restricted to preprinted cards.) The fellow had on a military-style trenchcoat too heavy for a warm June day over a khaki shirt and trousers with a necktie to match. He was carrying a briefcase.

He brushed aside Sid’s greeting with a question. “How are you with ink?”

The cleaner turned his attention from the eyes beneath the liquid black visor of the young man’s cap—clear, brown eyes, anxious about his uniform—to the tunic, which he took and turned inside out without asking questions. The blue-black stain was where he expected to find it, at the base of the inside breast pocket.

“I never carry a fountain pen myself,” he said. “The only thing you can count on them to do is leak.”

“Can you get it out?”

“Is it fresh?”

“It happened yesterday.”

“I can do something if it hasn’t set.” He hung the coat on the rack by the register and slid over the receipt pad. “Name?”

“Taylor.”

He wrote it down, tore off the original, and held it out. “I can have it for you tomorrow night.”

“I need it sooner.”

“Lots of people ahead of you. Nice weather. Barbecues. They pour on plenty of sauce so they don’t notice there’s not much meat.”

Corporal Taylor laid a five-dollar bill on the counter.

Sid couldn’t believe this war. Only five years ago, five dollars was a hundred. He smiled at the eager young soldier. “Inspection?”

The corporal grinned shyly. He was just a boy. “Yes, sir. The captain’s a good man, but he seems to think the war will be won by the side with the sharpest creases.”

Sid grunted. “You can pick the coat up at eight
A.M.
The chemicals will need to dry tonight or they’ll run and bleach the lining. It will be a dollar twenty.” He pushed the bill back across the counter.

The corporal thanked him and put the money in a trench-coat pocket.

“Where are you stationed?”

“Fort Wayne.”

“What outfit?” Sid took the tunic off the rack and folded it.

“Hundred and Seventy-seventh.”

“Really? My nephew’s in the Air Corps. This looks like their insignia.”

“That’s right.”

“I thought the Hundred and Seventy-seventh was Field Artillery.”

Corporal Taylor hesitated. The cleaner felt embarrassed for him. “I guess you can’t expect the army to tell us what it’s up to. All we’re doing is paying for this war.”

“I just go where I’m assigned.”

No more words passed between them. The young man left the shop.

Sid was troubled by the exchange, and returned to it from time to time throughout the day, not thinking about it only when he was forced to respond to a customers comments on the war, Roosevelt, rationing, and the mysterious ability of chocolate and cream sauce to migrate to one’s lapels unobserved, or when he made change, which after thirty-seven years still required all his concentration. Particularly when he was daubing at the indigo stain on the rayon lining of Corporal Taylor’s tunic with a sponge dipped in a mixture of mineral spirits and naphtha—his own blend—he wondered about the bizarre lapse. There was no Army Air Corps installation near Detroit. Both the 182nd and the 177th Field Artillery regiments had shipped out months ago, leaving only the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Wayne to receive and store military vehicles produced at the automobile plants. Perhaps the young man had served overseas and been wounded, either physically or mentally, and was confused about details. Certainly there was an air about him that suggested something vital was missing.

Rotten war. They were all rotten. It didn’t matter if they were endorsed by governments or cheap punk crooks. They were thieves of life and youth. They left ugly stains that all the mineral spirits and naphtha in the world could not eradicate.

He left the tunic to hang overnight, inside out to dry completely and dispel the fumes, locked up, and struck off to board the streetcar home, carrying the White Owl cigar box with the Luger inside. He had become another of those old Jewish shopkeepers plodding along the sidewalk with their shapeless hats pulled low and all their ambitions reduced to the next square of concrete. Lately he had ceased even to think about that, had begun to become what he had beheld. His kind blended into the gray city background like lichens on a stump.

He would never get used to the quietness of the street at that early hour of the evening. The day shift at the plants had let out an hour and a half ago, the night shift was well along. Gas and tire rationing had erased the weekday shopping and entertainment traffic from his neighborhood as effectively as alcohol erased tomato sauce from cotton. If he closed his ears to the bleating of the odd horn over on Woodward, the hollow whistles of the trains shuttling iron pellets and coils of copper wire and donated scrap back and forth across the grounds of the sprawling Rouge plant, he could imagine he was back in St. Petersburg, delivering bread and paper collars to customers of the shops in the narrow twisted streets that had known nothing but horses, carts, and sore feet since before Tamerlane. There, as here, the sudden scrape of a strange heel on pavement echoed off the brick walls as if it were immediately behind him, making the hair on the back of his neck prickle. His fingers tightened on the cigar box. It calmed him with its tactile reality, the reassuring weight of the German automatic resting inside.

He heard the steps for a long time, not increasing in pace but faster than his so that they must overtake him unless he ran, and this he would not do, not at his age and station in life, not while he had a weapon. He assumed they belonged to someone who, like him, was on his way home from work. The man was in a hurry. A young man, then, with a wife awaiting him whom he loved. Probably his route was long and he was walking to save fuel and rubber and wear and tear on his automobile. Sid, who was not so pressed—why hasten home to empty rooms?—slowed his own pace and moved in close to the wall to give the fellow room to pass.

When the footsteps behind him slowed as well, he turned to look over his shoulder. He felt relief when he saw the man was in uniform. It was only a G.I. hurrying to catch the streetcar and be back in barracks before taps. Then he recognized Corporal Taylor, and for some reason he felt a twinge of apprehension. He stopped and turned to confront it—and him.

“Your uniform will be ready in the morning,” he said. “It must dry overnight, and then I need to press it. There is no use your hurrying what takes time to correct.”

The young soldier had stopped in front of him. His briefcase was open and he had one hand under the flap. When it came out, something came out with it, a long strip of reflected light from the streetlamp on the corner. And then the briefcase was falling and the other arm was curling up and around to encircle Sid’s neck.

He fumbled at the lid of the cigar box, but it slipped from his grip. The box struck the sidewalk, tipping open and dumping out the Luger and the extra magazine. By then he was being spun on his heel, spun and pulled back against the long hard length of the young man’s body. Something tugged at the front of his waistcoat; something that encountered no resistance from the wool or the cotton shirt beneath or the under-shirt beneath that and pulled a string of fire from his pelvis to his collarbone. A warm wetness spilled down his leg like urine. Then something broke, a string inside him, and he felt himself folding to the sidewalk like a coat sliding off a hanger in his shop. He never felt the sidewalk.

C
ANAL SAID, “WHICH ONE
tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Zagreb said. “You pick.”

“I picked last time.”

“So you’re in practice.”

McReary said, “I’ll pick.”

Canal laughed. “Forget it. You’ll pick the Ladybug because you got a hard-on for that tall barmaid.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Burke said, “Give it up, Tim. Dames like that wipe their asses with guys like you.”

McReary tried on a leer. It made him look like Mortimer Snerd. “Sounds pretty good.”

“Jesus H. Christ.” Canal relit his cigar, a lost cause once the glowing ash reached that part of the wrapping saturated with saliva. “Let’s hit Rumrunner’s.”

Rumrunner’s occupied a former Michigan Stove Company warehouse at the end of one of the narrow streets that led to the Detroit River. It had been a blind pig during Prohibition. Boats loaded with Canadian whiskey had delivered their cargoes through a door located under the dock, bricked up long since. The front entrance retained its ornamental iron grill-work, designed to slow down raiders while personnel inside hid incriminating liquor paraphernalia. Double-tiered tables had allowed patrons to keep their drinks out of sight from the windows, and now proved convenient to provide a dry surface on top for euchre. Then as now, such features were cosmetic, intended merely to pique the customers’ love of the forbidden; in fact, most of the overhead had gone to the Prohibition Squad to discourage interruptions. Since Repeal, the establishment had become one of the many beer gardens along Jefferson, dispensing Aires and Fox DeLuxe beer, nickel bags of potato chips and pretzels, and steaming plates of bratwurst and sauerkraut to the city’s largely German population. Here, polka was king, swing merely the prime minister, and few denounced the Nazis for their nationality, rather for their friendship with Hirohito.

Patriotism was in evidence, however. Various colorful posters, inspirational (PRODUCTION IS AMERICA’S ANSWER, SAVE FREEDOM OF SPEECH—BUY WAR BONDS), recruitment (I WANT YOU FOR THE U.S. ARMY, IT’S A WOMAN’S WAR TOO—JOIN THE WAVES), and admonitory (LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, SOMEONE TALKED!) decorated the brick walls just below the canopy of tobacco smoke, and snapshots of various area soldiers, sailors, and airmen in uniform shingled a bulletin board near the blackboard menu. But most of the adornment was nostalgic: framed front pages from defunct tabloids shrieking of gangland massacres, blowup photos of men in cloth caps and fedoras unloading crates of whiskey from the trunks of touring cars, snapshots of rum-running boats, sleek and speedy. Twelve years of Depression followed by six months of rationing had restored the romance to the excesses of the Roaring Twenties.