Mile High (7 page)

To develop his roommate system Paddy procured a list of the forty-one members of Eddie's class at Gelbart and had his bank run down the credit ratings of their families. Together he and Eddie selected the six top ratings, and on arrival at school, Eddie set out to cultivate those six whether they had shale acne, congenital idiocy, or were immediately nicknamed “Shitty” by the other boys. “It's the long view that sees you through, Eddie,” his father taught. “Don't forget, Burr married an old whore for comfort in his old days. You got to go to the money, Ed—money don't go to you.” Working his points with Tammany sureness, Eddie always managed to be assigned to a room with the bestconnected boy in his class (next to Eddie), but an important part of the system was to move on to a new roommate every year so that the greatest amount of future ground could be mapped. This required a strategy that would not hurt, offend or alienate the current roommate. “I've talked it over wit' t'ree of the biggest men in Wall Street, Eddie,” Paddy said. “All independent of the other. Everyone of them said the same. The only good anybody gets outta schools is meetin' the right people. The rest is all a lotta Latin an' chowder.”

Twice a year, at Christmas and at spring holidays, Eddie would take his current roommate and the next year's roommate with him to New York. Paddy would put the boys up in a big suite at the Astor. These sessions always clinched next year's roommate and held the current one as a friend forever. In the years to come Eddie was able to move at the inner core of the great newspaper and magazine publishers, the bankers, lawyers and industrialists, all because of Paddy's (and Aaron Burr's) superior planning. When Eddie got the two young men to the Astor Paddy really laid it on with a trowel. He moved his “afternoon office” uptown to the boys' living room, and in and out of the doors of the hotel suite would walk such figures as George M. Cohan, Philadelphia Jack O'Brien, Al Smith, Isadora Duncan, Georgie Mountin, the jockey who won the Preakness, and Winston S. Churchill, who was in New York on a lecture tour. On the last night of the heavenly visit, after a quick tour of all the principal museums and lunch at Jack's, when they were all dressed for dinner and he was opening a magnum of champagne (which he did not drink), Eddie would announce the surprise. There would be a discreet knock on the door and into the room would come three beautiful women (one of them always the glamorous, famous Lorette des Anges, who was always assigned to the current roommate) and really wonderful fun would begin. The roommates never got over that part of the program. For some of them it was the only thing they remembered about their youth. All of it gave Eddie a sound appreciation of power.

It wasn't only an education in material things. “Use their religions, Eddie,” his father taught. “Sometimes that's a good handle on a man. But remember Burr. The old, long, ice-cold view of everything. Religion is only the politics of the centuries.” That was the only lesson from Paddy he never learned. His mother had been a savage, primeval Catholic. His wife was to be a rote devout. These two women had such formidable influence on his emotions that he was herniated by religion, which was for him an emotion never to be examined, only felt.

As soon as he was admitted to the bar his father explained that he was now qualified to run the family's little bank. It was a miniature bank run in a street-level store on West 14th Street, having four big safes in the cellar that could have been opened with the stick of a taffy apple but were safe safes because they were Paddy's safes and the criminal element needed Paddy. The bank had been established in '81 with a capital of ninety thousand dollars for the workingmen in the neighborhood. The saloon chain, the whorehouses, the gambling joints were throwing off good money. Because he never failed to deliver less than 98 percent of the vote, and on one occasion had delivered 107 percent, he was always so well regarded by the leader that Tammany saw to it that certain city funds, and later on, state and federal funds, were deposited in the West National Bank; and the gamblers and West Side gangs always used it as their bank.

“Banks are the great power stations,” Paddy taught. “It's as clear as day. The more money they put in your bank the more power you got, but the beauty part is the more power we get the more money they put in.” Both of them were dead certain about Eddie's place in politics. “Yes and forever,” Paddy taught. “Look what Aaron Burr did with politics for a power base. He damned near owned Mexico. Now, mind you, to get it started I had to do it out in front where they could all see me workin'. But not you. There's warmth in the shadows you never dreamed of, Ed. There's much beauty behind a mask. Run the people who you put there to run politics and let them run everything but the bank. The bank is the only place the world sees you out in front. Give them the glory and a ham sandwich. You take the rest.”

Edward Courance West at twenty-one became the youngest bank president in the history of the state. The bank was three blocks west of Tammany Hall, which had moved uptown from Franklin and Nassau in '68. To install his son, Paddy had torn down the building the street-level store was in and built a four-story edifice, with a vault for the sweet little bank whose capital was now eight million, two hundred and ninety-one thousand dollars and eleven cents (as of the 1909 year-end audit).

When Paddy died suddenly after a lifetime without a sick day, Eddie was twenty-three years old: March 24, 1911. Leaving the Franklin Street saloon with Willie Tobin, Paddy passed a horse that had just been frightened by a noisy automobile and had reared high, startling Paddy, who had grabbed the reins to pull the horse down to his level so he could slam it a good punch in the mouth. He knocked the horse to its knees, then picked it up again to send it spinning over on its side in the shafts. Then Paddy made a rattling sound in his throat, grabbed at his chest with his huge right hand and fell down on the pavement. Willie ran into the saloon to get a bottle of whiskey and to call Doc Solomon, the coroner, who was at the bar talking to a police captain. By the time they got back to Paddy he was dead.

He was seventy-nine years old and might have lived to be ninety had he remembered Aaron Burr and not lost his temper just for the sake of slugging a horse. Just as Burr might have been President had he not lost his temper and shot Alexander Hamilton. Eddie made careful note of both errors and withdrew a few steps backward into greater coldness. But error to one side, Paddy West had died as active, powerful, teetotal and unsmiling as always. His life had been a chapter in the ever-unfolding American dream, inspiring and evocative. A principal thoroughfare of the City of New York was named for him, West Street—as had been Sullivan County, Foley Square and Plattsburg, New York, for other great men who had striven to widen the base of democracy.

The day after Paddy West's magnificent funeral, as he scraped red rubble off his cheeks, Edward Courance West, aged twenty-three, encountered the merest ghost of the idea that was to make him one of the great kings of the world but that was to finish the expansion and terminate the glory of the American dream by several centuries. Everything that followed the execution of his idea in American history was to be looted and sacked by him, drained and left hollow, and he was to be only most obscurely (by not more than three people) identified with it. From the moment the perfume of that idea lingered over him Eddie West thought about very little else. He began forthwith to organize all the affairs and details of his inheritance so that they might be administered at once by his appointees.

CHAPTER TWO

The first step was to talk things over with the Leader, himself a saloon keeper who had been a horsecar driver on the 14th Street crosstown line, a job obtainable only through political wirepulling because it was a cash business and unreported fares were considered to be a fringe benefit. The Leader had worked hard and had spent very little and by the time he was twenty-four he had enough to lease his own saloon—soup and beer for a nickel with all the free crackers, cheese and bologna you could eat. Beyond members of his family (of which he considered little Eddie one) he was not a communicative man. Politics had been his only interest for all his life, and from the day of the opening of his first saloon and the establishment of his famous Fanwood Club he worked day and night, summer and winter, to deliver the vote when it was needed, so that in proper time he was made docks commissioner and was able to put four or five hundred thousand dollars aside and expand his chain of saloons. He was a political genius. He was what Paddy West believed Aaron Burr was and which Aaron Burr had not been.

He lunched every day on the second floor of Delmonico's at Union Square, right by the Hall, at a table that rested on four tiger's paws, the room being known to the press as “The Scarlet Room of Mystery,” its door guarded by lads from the gas house district. Eddie got there early to be sure of a seat next to the leader, who was so glad to see him that he nodded at him. They ate caviar, tortue verte au sherry, filets de sole à la Nantua, suprême de volaille aux truffes fraîches, haricots verts à la crème, pommes de terre à la parisienne, parfait de fois gras à la gelée de porto, asperges vertes, bombe Montmorency and friandises. The Leader and Eddie shared a bottle of seltzer. The others at the table drank beer. The Leader did not countenance talking during meals—he rarely did what might be called chatting at any time—and would glare at anyone who talked while dining, or have him removed from the room. When the cigars came out the Leader rose and walked gingerly to the small table at the far corner of the room that had only two chairs. Eddie followed him. They sat down. The waiter served coffee, then went away. The Leader puffed on his cigar, then raised his eyebrows, signifying that Eddie could speak.

“About the leadership of the First,” Eddie said. The Leader pursed his lips. “I want John Kullers,” Eddie told him.

“John K
ull
ers?

“Yes.”

“You won't run yourself?”

“No.”

“You'd run it like Paddy ran it, Eddie. That's what we have to have.”

“John Kullers will run it that way because I'll be telling him how.”

“Have you thought about the Eyetalians?”

“What about them?”

“Paul Kelly was in to see me this morning. He wants Jimmy Lehner for leader in the First.”

“In
my
district?”

The Leader shrugged as though he were shifting a grand piano across his shoulders. “That's politics for you.”

“Well?”

“You better talk it over with him.” The Leader stood up. The meeting was over. “Straighten it all out, Eddie. We don't want trouble.”

Eddie went to the Franklin Street saloon and sent out a runner to locate Paul Kelly, who, since winning his murder trial with Paddy West's help, had applied to the courts to have his name changed back to Vacarelli. He had retired from the gang business and had gone into the labor-union business and had changed his residence from the Lower East Side to East 116th Street. By the process of elimination it was determined that Vacarelli must be in a poolroom in East Harlem, his uptown headquarters.

He greeted Eddie warmly in the pool hall. They spoke Sicilian. Eddie said he wanted to have a little meeting someplace, so Vacarelli stopped playing pool and they went outside to sit in a wagon.

“What's up, paesano?”

“I just left the Leader.”

“Yeah? I saw him this morning.”

“I know. He said you wanted to take over my district.”

Vacarelli shrugged. “Why not? It's near my business.” He ran the waterfront.

“Because you don't know politics, Paolo. It's a family profession and very complicated.” Eddie was calm and reasonable. “What is it you think you can get out of the leadership that I can't get for you? Did Paddy ever let you down? I'm Paddy now.” Eddie was taking the sincere, straight way because he had a lot to do that day and all this blather was such a minor part of it. Vacarelli didn't have a chance of taking over the First, and all of them knew it; this was just to reestablish his position and maybe win a few points if he could.

“You gonna be district leader, kid?”

“I'm running John Kullers.”

“He's all right, but he's yours.”

“Ours, Paolo. John and I will take care of everything for you.”

“That's good.”

“You'll tell the Leader it's all straightened out?”

“I'll tell him today.” They shook hands and Eddie went downtown.

The biggest men in the city were in the Franklin Street saloon, retasting the vigor of Paddy's funeral. Some, who had five days of alcohol in their systems, were misty-eyed or openly weeping. One leading actor was asking all who would listen if they had caught him when the news of Paddy's death had come to him. Eddie shook a lot of hands and accepted a lot of commiseration with his long face and his cold eyes and his blatted Gelbart Academy accent. When he found the chance he told the head bartender to send Willie Tobin upstairs as soon as he could be found. Willie was Jiggs Tobin's son, a bail bondsman Paddy had used as a runner to the judges, the police and the prosecutors across the street. Paddy had made Willie take the bar examinations three times until he had passed. He was two years older than Eddie, a born lobbygow and second gravedigger.

Willie came into the shabby office cautiously, as he did everything else, closing the door behind him. He was a small-boned, dapper man with a vaguely epicene air. Eddie didn't tell him to sit down so he didn't. “How long were you with Paddy, Willie?” Eddie asked.

“Since I'm thirteen. Half my life almost. God rest his soul.”

“This was Paddy's office, but this afternoon your name goes up on that door.” The offer seemed to make Willie nervous. “‘William Tobin, Attorney-at-Law,' it'll say. It's your office now.”