Legs (34 page)

Moralists cited that cheer as proof of America's
utter decadence and depravity, rooting for a dog-rat like Diamond.
How little they understood Jack's appeal to those everyday folk on
the sidewalk.

I must admit that the attorney general lined up an
impressive supply of witnesses to prove conclusively to any logician
that Jack was in Sweeney's speakeasy in Catskill the night Streeter
was lifted. But once I identified Streeter as a bootlegger, the issue
became a gangster argument about a load of booze, not the torture of
innocence. And Jack was home free.

It wasn't so easy to confuse the issue at the federal
trial in Manhattan. All that the federal lawyers (young Tom Dewey
among them) had to do was connect Jack with the still, which wasn't
much of a problem, and they were home free. The Catskill burghers,
including my friend Warren Van Deusen, spouted for the prosecution,
and so did some of Jack's former drivers; but most damning was
Fogarty, who called Jack a double-crossing rat who wouldn't put up
money for a lawyer, who let this poor, defenseless, tubercular
henchman, who had trusted him, take the rap alone and penniless.
Alice was in court again, with Eddie's seven-year-old son, a
marvelously sympathetic prop, and Jack broke into genuine tears when
a newsman asked him in the hallway if the boy really was his nephew.
But those feds nailed our boy. My rhetoric had no resonance in that
alien courtroom: too many indignant businessmen, too much faceless
justice, too far from home, too much Fogarty. In an earlier trial at
Catskill, the state had managed to convict Fogarty on the same
Streeter charge Jack was acquitted of, which was poetic justice for
the turncoat as I see it. Jack drew four years, the maximum, and not
really a whole lot, but enough of a prospect to spoil
the
summer.

Jack had been making plans to merge with Vincent Coll
and Fats McCarthy, substitute their mob for his own, refurbish the
Catskill scene, and maybe put a toe in the door of the Adirondacks.
But Johnny Broderick and a squad of New York dicks followed Coll's
crowd up from Manhattan and raided them in Coxsackie, hauling in
about a dozen. They missed Coll and McCarthy, who along with a few
stragglers holed up in an artist's home in Averill Park, a crossroads
summer town east of Troy, where Jack and Coll occasionally met and
tried to cook up a future for themselves.

It was a depressing time for Jack. Kiki had to take
an apartment away from the Kenmore when the state police began to
breathe heavily around the lobby, and Alice was delighted to get rid
of the competition. But Jack took Kiki out regularly and brought her
back to the hotel for visits after the first trial, and Alice finally
said good-bye forever, folks, and went to live in her Manhattan
apartment on Seventy-second Street.

The acquittal in Troy came
in early July, the federal conviction in early August, and the state
announced it would try Jack on a second Streeter charge, kidnapping,
in December. It was a very long, very hot summer for all of us, but
especially Jack, like the predator wolf pushed ever farther from
civilization by angry men, who was learning the hard way how to die.

* * *

Jack's federal conviction drove a spike of gloom into
everybody. Jack insisted on trying to buy a retrial, his hangover
from the days when Rothstein had money in everybody's mouth, all the
way up to the Presidential cabinet. That money had bought Jack a
delay on a federal charge of smuggling heroin for Rothstein, the
noted bowling pin case, and Jack died without ever having to face up
to the evidence against him.

"The fuckers are all the same, all the way to
the top," he said to me one night. "They'll do you any
favor you can pay for."

But times had changed to a certain unpredictable
degree in Manhattan, especially for people like Jack. The new federal
crowd was young, imbued with Seaburyism, and still unbuyable. Even if
we had found somebody to buy, there was the case of the diminishing
bankroll. The first thing Jack did after he got out of the Catskill
jail on bail was to take the one hundred and eighty thousand dollars
I'd held for him in safe deposit. That still seemed like a lot of
money to me, but it wasn't for Jack. He owed everybody: me, the
hospital, the doc, his barber, his waiter, the hotel, his driver,
Hubert the bodyguard, infinite numbers of bartenders who would now
and in the future provide him with service. He was keeping apartments
in Troy, Watervliet, Albany, East Greenbush, a house in Petersburg,
and probably six or eight other cities I don't know about. He was
keeping Kiki. He was subsidizing Alice in Manhattan. And, and most
costly of all, he was paying off politicians everywhere to keep his
freedom, keeping them from infecting him with further trouble. The
one hundred and eighty thousand dollars went in a few months, or so
Jack said, though I think he must have kept a secret nest egg
somewhere, and if he did, of course, he kept it utterly to himself.
He didn't leave the egg with me. I also know Vincent Coll offered him
a loan of ten thousand dollars after a nifty Coll snatch of a
Saratoga gambler, and a handsome ransom of sixty-five thousand
dollars; and Jack took it.

He coped with the money problem like the pragmatist
he had come to be. He went back to work. I met him at the Albany Elks
Club bar on a steamy August evening after a day at Saratoga had given
me nothing but the aesthetic boredom of picking losers under the elms
of the track's stylish old clubhouse and paddock. I came back to town
alone, feeling curiously empty for no reason I could explain. The
emptiness was a new development. I decided, after six beers, that I
hadn't felt this way since that day I was sitting alone in the K. of
C. library. And when this thought registered, I knew the problem was
Jack-related. My life was far from empty professionally. Since Jack's
acquittal in Troy the calls were flooding in and I could name my
price for trial work. Was it, then, the loss of a political career?
Like an amputated leg, that particular part of me did pain, even
though it wasn't there, and yet I was simultaneously relieved at
never having to be a politician. It was such a vapid way to spend
your life, and a slavish game, too, slavish to the political clubroom
crowd, even to the Elks Club where I was standing, a superb fragment
of all I found stagnant, repulsive, and so smugly corrupt in Albany.
The Democratic bagman, though it was two months till election, was
already in his corner of the card room (two city detectives watching
the door), accepting tithes from everybody who fed at the county
courthouse or city hall troughs—janitors, lawyers growing fat from
the surrogate court, vendors, bankers, cops, firemen, secretaries,
clerks, contractors. The pattern was consistent with Jack's notion of
how an empire should be run. Everybody pays.

Just as I liked Jack, I also liked the old bagman. He
was a dandy and a curmudgeon and a wily and wise old Irishman who had
read his Yeats and Wilde as well as his Croker and Tweed. I also
liked the men who were next to me at the bar. They were men I'd been
raised with, men who knew my father and my uncles: tradesmen and
sportswriters and other lawyers and politicians and factory hands who
liked pinochle and euchre and salesmen who liked to bowl and drink
beer, and, of course, of course, Jack.

Most of the Elks who talked frankly with me were
confused by his presence. They knew what his minions had done at the
Elks Club in Catskill, which bothered them far more than the
kidnapping of Streeter or making Charlie Northrup disappear. They
didn't really want Jack around. But they were also awed when he
walked in, flattered when he bought them a drink, and marked forever
when he put his arm on their shoulder and talked baseball with them.
Hello, Bill! Hello, Jack! Brotherrrrrrrrrrrrr!

"Counselor," Jack said to me when he moved
in alongside me at the bar, "I'm going to buy you a new hat."

"'
So you're at that again," I said.

"The heat must've got to it, Marcus. It's dead
for sure. Take a look."

I looked at my trusty old Panama, which had aged
considerably since I last examined it, I must admit. "Well, it's
getting old, Jack, but then so are we all. And I do feel compassion
for things that are deteriorating visibly."

"Whataya say, you want to take a ride?"

"Sounds sinister, Jack. My father warned me
about taking rides with strange gangsters. "

"Little business trip, and what the hell, it's
too goddamn hot to stand here smelling armpits. The air'll do you
good. Blow the stink off you. "

"You're right, I could stand a change. Who's
driving?"

"Hubert."

"Ah, Hubert. I still find it hard to believe
you've got somebody named Hubert in your employ."

"Good kid, Hubert. Does what he's told."

We left the bar and walked out to the top of the
club's stone stoop, which faced on State Street. It was middle
evening, the streetlights on, but the sun still making long shadows.
We looked up toward Capitol Park, where Hubert went for the car,
where General Philip Sheridan, another Albany Irishman, sat astride
his horse, riding into eternity. There were only the two of us on the
stoop, which struck me as unnecessarily foolish, given the recurring
rumor of gunmen out to get Jack.

"We make nice targets for your friends here,"
I said.

"Fuck it. You can't live like a rat in a hole
forever."

I could only agree with that, which straightened my
back. How little encouragement it takes to place oneself in jeopardy.

"What's this business trip you've got planned?"

"A small delivery to a customer."

"You don't mean you want me to join you on a
booze run."

"Relax, would I do that to you? We won't be in
the same vehicle with the stuff. And it's only beer. We'll follow the
truck, well back. Plenty safe. Up to Troy, back down to Packy
Delaney's. It's a favor for Packy and I'm glad to do it. I like The
Pack."

"I do myself."
 
"I'm
glad for the ride, too," Jack said. "Jesus, I get bored
easy lately. "

"We've got the same affliction."

Hubert pulled up and we headed for Stell's, a busy
Troy brewery run by a gang of beer-savvy Dutchmen Jack had been doing
business with for years. But the pickup and delivery of the moment
would be a departure for Jack: made in a borrowed truck by the man
himself, notable status reduction. His excuse was he was doing Packy
a favor. "He's in a bind with his Albany supplier, hates the
beer he has, but he's gotta take it." It proved to be the other
way around, Packy responding to Jack's request for a loan with a
pragmatic substitute—a deal. Packy would buy the beer at Jack's
price, even though he didn't need it; Jack would show a profit, Packy
would avoid making a cash loan that would probably never be repaid,
and Packy would have the beer, at least, to show for his investment.

We drove up Broadway and through North Albany, past
the streets of my own neighborhood: Emmett, Albany, Mohawk, Genesee,
Erie, then the park in front of Sacred Heart Church on Walter and
North Second Streets, a view which provided me with a pang of
recognition and a sliver of insight which made this trip worth
recording. I remembered how my father looked, sitting on a park bench
in the years just before his death, teeth too prominent, like a
skull's mindless grin, his brain almost as white as his hair,
watching the trolleys go to Troy and back. I tried to imagine what
that man, who never stole a nickel in his life, would make of his son
being on Jack's payroll, a speculation which, I know, reveals more of
me than of the old man.

My father was not a religious man in his youth and
middle years. He routinely did his Easter duty, kept the
Commandments, but often slept through the Sunday slate of masses. Yet
he ended his days at daily mass, even serving for the priest when the
altar boy of the day overslept. I've long tried to persuade myself
that his final conversion to piety was more than simplistic fear of
the next, for my father was complex, a teacher, a Latin scholar who
named me for his favorite Stoic. Remembering him, then, at that
moment by the park when I was also conscious of how Jack was
regularly telling his beads, and when l was questioning my own
irrational reading of Aquinas long after I'd lost my faith, I knew
all three of us were hounded by religious confusion: Jack out of
Saint Anne's, both my father and I out of Sacred Heart, products all
of the ecclesiastical Irish sweat glands, obeisant before the void,
trying to discover something.

And as we passed Sacred Heart, I looked at Jack and
said to him, "My old man used to sit in that park and watch the
world go by when he got old."

Jack craned his neck for a
look, smiling at the thought. His own yellowing skin, and his teeth
with too much prominence, gave me back the face of my father. And
thought then that I knew what they were both looking for. I thought:
They have misplaced tomorrow and are looking for it. And the search
is ruining today.

* * *

We stopped at a garage on Fourth Street in Troy to
pick up the truck Jack was borrowing from a fellow named Curley, who
once drove for him. Curley had gone off on his own and now had a
fleet of Macks and Reos which did heavy duty on the highways on
behalf of public thirst. Hubert got the keys for our truck and drove
it from a back lot to the gas pump in front of the garage, where a
kid attendant in overalls gassed us up with Socony.