Legs (19 page)

"Tough guy,"
Murray said.

* * *

"Marcus," Kiki said from the other end of
the phone, and it was the first time she called me that, "I'm so
damn lonely."

"Where's your friend?"

"I thought you might know. "

"I haven't seen him since the night I took you
to dinner."

"I've seen him twice since then. Twice in
seventeen days. He's up in the country with her all the time. Christ,
what does he see in that fat old cow? What's the matter with me? I
wash my armpits."

"He's all business these days. He'll turn up."

"I'm getting bedsores waiting. What he don't
know is I'm not waiting anymore. I'm going into a new show. I just
couldn't cut it anymore, sitting, waiting. Maybe he sees me dancing
again he'll think twice about playing titball with his fat-assed
wife. I bet when she takes off her brassiere they bounce off her
toes. "

Kiki was tight, another road to power.

"What's the show and when does it open? I
wouldn't miss that. "

"
Smiles
is the name of it, and I do one routine by myself, a tap number. It's
swell, Marcus, but I'd rather make love."

"Sure. Had any more visits from Jimmy Biondo?"

"Nobody visits me. Why don't you come down to
the city and see me? Just to talk, now. Don't let the little lady
give you the wrong impression. "

"Maybe I will," I said, "next time I'm
down there on business."

I had no pressing business in New York, but I made it
a point to go, and I presume it was for the same reason I'd helped
old Jesse frame a new identity for himself and then got him a job in
Boston—because I was now addicted to entering the world of Jack
Diamond as fully as possible. I was unable not to stick around and
see how it all turned out. And yes, I know, even as a spectator, I
was condoning the worst sort of behavior. Absolute worst. I know, I
know. I called Jack when I decided to go down, for I had no wish to
put myself in the middle of the big romance.

"Great," he said. "Take her to a
movie. I'll be down Friday and we'll all go out."

"You know I still have some of your belongings."

"Hang onto them."

"I'd rather not."

"Only for a little while more. "

"A very little while."

"What's the problem'? They taking up too much
room?"

"Only in my head."

"Clean out your head. Go see Marion."

So I did and we went to dinner and talked and talked,
and then I took her to see Garbo in Flesh and the Devil in a place
that hadn't yet converted to talkies. Kiki was a Garbo fanatic and
looked on herself as a
femme fatale
even though she was nothing of the sort. The main thing she had in
common with Garbo was beauty. There is a photo of Garbo at fifteen
that has something of Kiki about it, but after that the ladies were
not playing the same game. "The spiritually erotic rules over
the sensually erotic in her life," an astrologist once said of
Garbo, which was a pretty fair critical summary of her movie self at
least.

Kiki was something else: a bread-and-butter
sensualist, a let's-put-it-all-on-the-table-folks kind of girl. She
actually enjoyed the feeling of being wicked. In the movie Garbo
rushes to save her two loves from a duel, repentant that she started
it all as a way of simplifying her choice between them. She falls
through the ice on the way and it's good-bye Greta. Kiki leaned over
to me and whispered, "That's what you get for being a good girl.
"

Kiki started out with the glitter dream, a bathing
beauty at fifteen, a Follies' girl at eighteen, a gangster's doll at
twenty. She yearned for spangles and got them quickly, then found she
didn't really want them except for what they did for her head. They
preserved her spangly mood. She was in spangles when she met Jack at
the Club Abbey during his fugitive time, and he loved them almost as
much as he loved her face.

"I always knew exactly how pretty I was,"
she told me, "and I knew I could write my own ticket in show
business, even though I don't dance or sing so great. I don't kid
myself. But whatever you can get out of this business with good
looks, I'm going to get. Then when I met Jack it changed. My life
started going someplace, someplace weird and good. I wanted to feel
that good thing in me, and when I did it with Jack, I knew I didn't
care about show business except as a way to stay alive and keep
myself out front. I'm Jack's girl, but that's not all I am, and
supposing he drops me? But I know he won't do that because what we
have is so great. We go out, me and Jack, out to the best places with
the best people, rich people, I mean, society people, famous people
like politicians and actors and they fall all over us. I know they
envy us because of what we've got and what we are. They all want to
make sex with us and kiss us and love us. All of them. They look up
my dress and down my front and touch me any place they can, stroke my
wrist or hair or pat my fanny and say excuse me, or take my hand and
say something nice and stupid, but it's all an excuse to touch. And
when practically everybody you come across does this to you, women
too, then you know you're special, maybe not forever, but for now.
Then you go home and he puts it up in you and you wrap around him and
you come and he comes, and it mixes up together and it's even greater
than what was already great, but it's still the same fantastic thing.
You're in love and you're wanted by everybody, and is anything ever
better than that? One night, when Jack was in me, I thought, Marion,
he's not fucking you, he's fucking himself. Even then I loved him
more than I'd ever loved anything on earth. He was stabbing me and I
was smothering him. We were killing everything that deserved to die
because it wasn't as rich as it could be. We were killing the empty
times, and then we'd die with them and wake up and kill them again
until there wasn't anything left to kill and we'd be alive in a way
that you can never die when you feel like that because you own your
life and nothing can ruin you.

"And then he leaves
me here for seventeen days and keeps track of everygoddamnbody I buy
a paper off or smile at in the lobby, and so I stay in and practice
my dance steps and listen to Rudy Vallee and Kate Smith, and I don't
even have a view of the park because Jack doesn't want to be a target
from the trees. This is a nice little suite and all, and do I mean
little. Because you can lose your mind staying in two rooms, and so I
fix my hair and pluck my eyebrows. I know when every hair in my
eyebrows first pokes its way out. I watch it grow. I take a hot bath
and I rub myself off to forget what I want. One day I did that four
times and that's not healthy for a young person like me and I'll tell
you straight, I'm to the point where I'm not going to be so damn
particular who's inside me when I want to feel that good thing. But I
never cheated on him yet, and I don't want to. I don't want to leave
him, and that's the God's truth. I almost said I can't leave him, but
I know I can. I can leave if I want. But I don't want to leave.
That's why I took the job in
Smiles
.
To show him I can leave him, even when I don't want to."

* * *

At 9:30 P.M. on Saturday, October 11, 1930, three
men, later identified as members of the Vincent Coll gang, walked
into the Pup Club on West Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. One walked
up to the short one-eyed man at the bar and said softly to him,
"Murray?" The one-eyed man turned on his stool and faced
two guns.

"You're out, Murray," the man who had
spoken to him said, and the other two fired six bullets into him.
Then they left.

An hour and a half later, in an eighth-floor room at
the Monticello Hotel, across the hall from the room occupied by
Marion Roberts, two men stepped off the elevator at the same time
that two others were touching the top step of the stairs leading to
the eighth floor. The four fanned out into the cul-de-sacs of the
hallways and returned to the elevator with an all clear, and Jimmy
Biondo stepped out past a blanched elevator man. The five men, Jimmy
at the center, walked down the hall to Room 824 and knocked three
times, then twice, then once, and the door opened on Jack Diamond in
shirtsleeves, a pistol on the arm of the chair he was sitting in.
Count Duschene said he stood to Jack's left, and at other points
around the room were the men who had confronted Murray earlier in the
evening: Vincent Coll, Edward (Fats McCarthy) Popke, and Hubert
Maloy.

"Hey, Jimmy," Jack said. "Glad you
could come. How you getting along?"

Pear-shaped Jimmy, still mistrusting the room, stared
at all faces before settling on Jack's and saying, "Whatayou got
to offer aside from my money?"

"Sit down, Jimmy, chair there for you. Let's
talk a little."

"Nothing to talk about. Where's the money?"

"The money is in good hands. Don't worry about
that."

"Whose good hands?"

"What's the difference if it's safe'?"

"Never mind the horseshit, where's the money'?"

"What would you say if I told you it's on its
way back to Germany?"

"I'd tell you you ain't got very fucking long to
live."

"I'm going back there, Jimmy, and this time I'll
get in. Don't you like instant seven-to-one on your money?"

"I like my money."

"We made a deal. I want to keep my part of the
bargain is all."

"No deal. Tony Amapola knows how you deal.
Charlie Northrup knows how you deal."

"I knew you'd think of me when Tony got it. But
I had nothing to do with that. I like Tony. Always did. As for
Charlie I do know what happened. It was a free-lance job. Charlie
made enemies up in the country. But Charlie and I were as close as
you and Tony. We were like brothers."

"Charlie had a different story. He said you were
a fuckhead."

"You don't believe me, ask any of these boys who
it was gave it to Charlie. "

Jimmy looked around, settled on Fats McCarthy. Fats
nodded at him.

"Murray The Goose," Fats said. "He
give it to Charlie."

"You heard yet what happened to Murray The
Goose?" Jack asked Jimmy.

"No."

"Somebody just dealt him out, up in the Pup
Club.

Walked in and boom-boom-boom. Cooked The Goose.
Somebody got even for Charlie is how I read it. Now how do you like
your friends?"

"It's a fact," The Count said. "I
happened to be in the club at the time."

"There's a coincidence for you," Jack said.

"Puttin' it on The Goose don't mean he was even
in the same state. "

"Ask around. Don't tell me you didn't hear the
rumors."

"I hear nothin'."

"You oughta listen a little instead of talking
so much about money. There's more to life than money, Jimmy."

"Fuck life. I been listenin' too long. I been
listenin' to your bullshit here five minutes, and I don't see no
money onna fuckin' table. I tell you what—you got a telephone. I
make a call to an old frienda yours. Charlie Lucky."

"Always glad to say hello to Charlie."

"He be glad to say hello to you too because half
the two hundred come outa his pocket. Whataya think of that, you
Irish fuck?"

"I'll tell you what, you guinea fuck, call
Charlie. He tells me it's half his I'll have it for him in the
morning."

Jimmy moved his elbow at one of his young gunmen:
early twentyish, pencil-line mustache. The gunman dialed, said
something in Italian, waited, handed the phone to Jimmy.

"That you, Charlie?" Jimmy said. "I'm
with our friend. He wants to know were you my silent partner. Okay.
Sure." He handed Jack the phone.

"Charlie, how you doin'? You staying thin?
Right, Charlie, that's the only way. You were. You did. So. Yeah. Now
I get it. You're not saying this just for Jimmy. You wouldn't con me
after all these years. Right. I understand. Let's have a drink one of
these days, Charlie. Any time. Beautiful."

Jack hung up and turned to Jimmy. "He said he
loaned you twenty grand at fourteen percent."

"He don't say that."

"I just talked to the man. Did you hear me talk
to him? What am I, a guy who makes up stories you see with your own
eyes?"

"He's in for half, no interest"

"I tell you what, Jimmy. I'll have twenty
available in the morning. I'll call you and tell you where to pick it
up and you can pay Charlie back. Meantime we still got a deal with
what's left."

"
Charlie, give me a hundred, you fuckheaded
fuck!" Jimmy screamed and stood up, and everybody's pistol came
out at the same time. Jack didn't touch his. All the pistols were
pointed at all the other pistols. Anybody moved it was ten-way
suicide.

"We don't seem to be getting anyplace,"
Jack said. He lit a Rameses and sat down and crossed his legs. "Why
don't you go have a drink and think about life, Jimmy? Think about
how rich you'll be when I come back with all that beautiful white
stuff. A million four. Is that hard to take or is that hard to take?"