Life and Death of a Tough Guy (26 page)

He answered. “Bug, I didn’t wanna — ”

And it said: “Mama, mama….” And it said: “A boy has never wept or dashed a thousand krim. Mama, mama….”

Joey choked as if he himself lay on that roof dying, and sobbing he woke up from the dream.

• • •

Georgie awoke with the alarm clock, calmly he reached out his hairy thick arm to shut it off. Nightmares let Georgie alone when he slept. The alarm clock’d been set for 2 A.M. because at 3 A.M. sharp he was meeting Joey and Pete Bowers for a little job. Georgie yawned and again that hairy arm of his coiled out in the darkness like a snake to the end table alongside the bed. He switched on the lamp. Light shone on Georgie and the woman in bed with him. She was sound asleep. A nice pott, thought Georgie. They were all potts to Georgie. Calling them potts gave him a good feeling. Just as he called real havana cigars, stinkerenos, steak dinners, grub, and sixty dollar new suits, glad-rags.

Maybe it was a depression on for the jerks, but for Georgie Connelly, in the enforcing business years now, the boom was still on. It was a pretty new business and he’d gotten in on the ground floor.

He patted the woman. She didn’t stir. He reached for a strand of her hair, and gently at first with the gentlest of pressures, he began to pull.

A cry broke from the woman’s throat, her eyes opened, and Georgie plunged his hand deep into her hair and tugged hard.

“Georgie!” she cried in pain and fright.

“Aw,” he grinned foolishly and slowly, as if his fingers hated to let go, he released his hold. “Forget it, all I wanted was to say so long.”

“Some way to say so long. You getting nuts or something,” she mustered the courage to scold him.

“I’m not going to stand all your nutty stuff, Georgie. What’d you wake me up for anyway?”

Georgie laughed and put his hand down on her breast. He laughed louder….

He was only ten minutes late when he got to the meeting place, but Joey and Pete’d gone on without him. He cursed the two of them and walked to the nearest bar.

A few weeks later Georgie got himself so drunk he felt he just had to talk to the Spotter. And right away. Laughing like a loon, he blew into the front office of the Elwood Realty. “I wanna see the Spotter! Tell’m Georgie’s here.” The girl at the phone remembered him. “Mr. Boyle is tied up,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Tell’m Georgie’s here!” Georgie shouted. He had an unbuttoned look about him that autumn morning, top coat, jacket, vest, all open, the knot of his necktie slipped an inch from his collar.

“Mr. Boyle’s tied up. What can I do for you?”

“What can you do for me, hahahahaha,” Georgie laughed, and gave her the high high-sign, slapping his left hand down on the bicep of his right arm as he jerked his right forearm up.

She didn’t flinch or blush and Georgie turned to the two men quietly waiting in the front office like a comedian to his audience. “What can a pott do for a guy? Should I tell her?” They stared through Georgie as if he were a sheet of glass and he realized he wasn’t going to get much of a hand out of this crowd. “Whatsa matter?” he challenged them.

They were silent but their silence spoke for them. A drunk had no right barging into the Elwood Realty — in offices a guy had to behave himself. They knew how, so why the hell couldn’t he. One of them, the one with the eyes out of an eye dropper, had a connection with the Cunard line; he supervised the importing of narcotics. The other was a numbers book with eyes like boiled onions.

“Shut up!” Georgie shouted at them. He pointed a bullying finger at the smaller of the two. “O.K, you!”

“That girl’s only tryin’ to do her duty,” Eyedropper Eyes answered.

“Tryin’ to do her doo-ty,” Georgie repeated as if he’d worked hard memorizing this particular line. “She’s a dope!”

“Mac, that’s no kinda talk,” was the reply. The girl had flushed and he glanced at her sympathetically. Nobody had a right saying things like that in an office.

Georgie shook that pointing finger of his at him. “Shut up, shrimp, or I’ll mobilize yuh! Who the hell d’yuh think y’are. Me and Boyle — ” He crossed his middle finger over the pointer finger. “We’re like this, thas how we are. Hey, pott!” he said to the girl. “Tell Spotter I’m here.”

“Mr. Boyle’s tied up — ”

Georgie rushed through the door of the front office, snapping his fingers at the girl protesting behind him.

The Spotter caught the breeze of the door of his private office as it opened and shut with a bang, but if it bothered him, he showed no sign, smiling at his visitor. Georgie jabbed his pointer finger behind him, in the general direction of the front office. “Tried to high-hat me, Spotter! Lousy pott. Tied up, she says, the pott — ”

“Sit down, Georgie.”

Georgie plunked himself into a chair, grinning foolishly and fondly at the man in the dark gray suit behind the shining desk. “Lousy pott,” he complained.

“Been on a bat, Georgie?”

Georgie grinned like a school kid being scolded by a teacher and again recalled his grievances against the office girl. “Dumb pott! I says, ‘You tell Spotter I’m here. Spotter and me’re like this.’ ” He crossed his middle and pointer fingers, demonstrating.

“Georgie, I’m Mister Boyle here — ”

“Yeh,” Georgie agreed heartily. “Gotta remember that.”

“It’s all right with your pals to call me Spotter. Sure, why not? Sure. Why shouldn’t you tell your pals all about me, how we come up together. It’s no secret. We was in the Badgers together, wasn’t we, Georgie? All through prohibition together.”

Georgie smiled. The Spotter, glancing at the drunken lush, had a notion the office was crowded — with his own private collection of ghosts.

The ghost of his old partner, Tom Quinn, the ghost of John Terry, the living ghost of Dewey…. The ghost of Dutch Schultz squeezed inside, too. For The Office’d cut the Spotter and Frank Fannelli in for a slice of the Dutchman’s numbers empire. The Dutchman, dead, was an asset of Elwood Realty as he’d never been alive. True, the name Dutch Schultz was not listed on the books of the corporation. And the corporation’s attorney, Robert McKenzie of the law firm of McKenzie and Smith in which Magistrate Farber had an interest, would have testified under oath that there were no entries under the heading of murder.

There were only ghosts.

The Spotter wiped his sweaty palms on the cloth of his trousers. This Georgie was a headache. The son-of-a-bitch’d be breaking into Dewey’s office next. Once they started going soft there was no limit. “Georgie, you have a drink on me, Georgie. That’s what you do, and one of these days we’ll get together and have a lil talk about the old days and what we done together, okay Georgie?”

“You said it, Spotter,” Georgie smiled. So did Mr. Boyle.

The smile stayed on the Spotter’s lips as Georgie lurched through the door. A smile as false as an artificial flower.

The Spotter phoned Charley Valinchi and Charley turned the job over to the one guy who could take care of it with the least noise: Georgie’s pal, Joey Case.

That Georgie’d gotten just a little too soft and with Dewey hitting on all sixteen cylinders, there was no use taking chances. On nobody.

Georgie Connelly was no better than a mobster by name of Pretty Amberg who’d been burned to death in his own car because the feeling’d gotten around that Pretty couldn’t be trusted a hundred percent any more. With the heat on, ninety-nine percent wasn’t good enough. No better than a mobster by name of William Gage who’d been stabbed to death and dumped into Swan Lake in the Catskills, a slot machine pedestal anchored to his feet. No better than an honest Brooklyn clothing trucker by name of Joseph Rosen who’d been pumped full of bullets because he was about to be questioned by Dewey on Lepke’s labor rackets and Lepke was a guy who happened to be Lucky Luciano’s friend. Why should Georgie get special treatment?

• • •

Pete Bowers didn’t look like an enforcer on a job. Rather he was wearing the face of a goodtime Charley as he suggested to Georgie they’d had enough to drink and how about a piece of tail? He led that happy drunk to a joint down near the river where Georgie cornered the knock-kneed pimp in the blue sweater and announced that he wanted the best pott in the place.

It was a four-room two-dame flat, and the girls waiting together in one of the bedrooms for sweet company’s sake heard the racket in the kitchen and wished they didn’t have to work on their day off. Yes, it was their day off and a fat lot of good it was doing them.

Georgie wheeled around to wave a drunken finger under Pete’s nose. “Take it easy,” Pete urged him, wondering when the hell Joey’d show up with the damn car. “Take it easy, Georgie, will you?” The big guy only laughed, he circled his heavy arm around Pete’s shoulders, leaning hard on his whorehouse buddy, and hollered at the pimp. “What yuh hangin’ ‘round for, monkey? I want the best pott — ”

“Yeh, yeh, but like your friend says, ‘Take it easy.’ ”

“Pete, you gonna let this monkey….”

The girls in the bedroom had heard other riproaring boozehounds before. They’d heard about every kind of male animal there was, yipping and yacking and yelling, and they were deaf as the keepers in a zoo are deaf, and the only voice they really listened to was that of the man in the blue sweater: the chief keeper.

Pete winked at the pimp who said, “C’mon, big boy. See ‘em yourself and take your pick.” When he returned to the kitchen he said, “That big gorilla!”

Pete glanced at his wristwatch. It was 11:27. Joey was exactly twenty-seven minutes late. Pete lit a cigarette like a man waiting for a train. The pimp sighed and wished to God he could be left in peace without all this damn funny business thrown his way these last few months. And this was a Tuesday night, too, the night he wasn’t open for customers. On a man’s night off, he shouldn’t be working.

Downstairs in the street, a car had just parked. “You need me?” the driver asked Joey.

“No.” Joey hurried down the sidewalk. A lamppost cast its long shadow ahead of him and he felt as if he were on one of the streets of his dreams. How dark this street was, with its abandoned warehouses and boarded-up tenements, a November street, the air raw and cold in his lungs. He heard his lonely footsteps on the broken slate sidewalks. Heard the cars speeding by on the elevated West Side highway bordering the river: moving yellow beads on a string suspended against the sky. He had an impulse to turn around and look at those cars. God only knew why. There was no help there, no answer, no meaning. It was another world, on wheels, and he was on foot, on this street that could’ve been a dream street but wasn’t — oh God, if he were only dreaming! He was late for this job. Job? Job, yes! he thought fiercely. That’s all it was, a job, still another job. And if the job’s name was Georgie Connelly, so what. It wasn’t the old Georgie he’d known anyhow.

No, it wasn’t the Georgie he’d hoboed with and it certainly wasn’t the Georgie who’d been a 1-4-All. This was a Georgie drinking like a fish and if Dewey picked him up, a Georgie who might start singing. Like the time when Georgie’d squealed on him to the Spotter….

Still, the face of the old Georgie kept dropping out of his heart like old photos out of a forgotten box put away long ago, and really there shouldn’t have been anything in it. He had emptied it over the years, nailed it shut and hung a padlock on it twice as heavy as those used by the feds in the prohibition days. Or so he would have guessed.

Georgie….

He turned into the doorway of the tenement where Pete and Georgie’d come before him and he thought: No ice picks for Georgie, no picture wire for Georgie, none of that for Georgie. They’d ride Georgie out of town and put a bullet in his head. They’d give him the fastest of fast shuffles.

But when Joey and Pete, with Georgie between them came down into the street again, Joey had to grit his jaws to keep himself under control. For Georgie, the happy drunk was now the happy lover, laughing as he described the girl he’d just had. “Joey, you shoulda see’d her. Okay and I mean okay! Anytime you say, you and me, we take her out, okay Joey?”

No, this was no street in a dream. And the Georgie hooking one arm around Joey’s shoulders and the other around Pete’s was no dream Georgie either. Then why did the street seem to be rushing at him on wheels like the cars up on the West Side highway? A street like some shadowy express pounding through the tunnels of memory, with all the streets he’d ever walked on with Georgie coupled up one behind the other like endless freights…. Why did he have to think of Thirty-Seventh Street? Twenty-Fourth Street? For Christ sake why’d he have to remember? For Christ sake, he was just an enforcer and who he enforced wasn’t his God damn business. Just an errand boy jumping when Charley Valinchi said jump! For Christ sake, for Christ sake, for Christ sake…. He was no Dutch Schultz to buck The Office and what’d it got the Dutchman anyway?
A boy has never wept or dashed a thousand him…
. Those last mystical and terrible words of the dying Dutchman streaked across his consciousness and he heard himself saying when they came to the waiting car, his heart moving his lips — what there was left of his heart: “I’ll take care-a Georgie myself — you guys beat it. Beat it!”

“Joey, what’ll the boss say?” Pete whispered in his ear. “Joey — ” the driver protested.

“Beat it!” he heard himself saying, his voice and their voices like voices in a dream. “Beat it I said!”

The next hour was no hour made of real minutes ticking off on his wristwatch, but like time in a dream. Timeless. He parked the car in a street that could’ve been in another city, marched Georgie into a Tenth Avenue coffee pot — and the avenue seemed no avenue he’d ever known, the coffee pot sliding into vision like another scene in a nightmare where the counterman maybe was an enemy and the few customers maybe hidden devils. He ordered black coffee, aspirins, for Georgie, his eyes constantly shifting to the door. Who’d expect to trail him here? Pete Bowers? The driver of the car? Charley Valinchi? The Spotter? Or maybe the dying Dutchman with a hole in his side, babbling of a thousand krim. Was Georgie talking? Or was he imagining that Georgie was talking? Maybe Georgie was dead and he was dead, only they didn’t know it yet? Then why drag Georgie into the coffee pot toilet? Why open the faucets at the sink? A white sink once but now coated with the gray dirt of forgotten hands. “What’s the big idear?” he heard Georgie saying and heard himself answering in a voice of fear and prayer and defiance. “You gotta sober up Georgie.”