Night Music (37 page)

Dan Carroll trusted my grandfather. A harsh word was never spoken between them.

And King Solomon?

Well, King Solomon wasn't the trusting kind, which was how the trouble began.

•  •  •

You have to understand something about Maine. Back in the nineteenth century, it was considered the drunkest state in the Union. The mayor of Portland, Neal Dow, was a Quaker, and a founding member of the Maine Temperance Society. Consequently, he didn't much care for the reputation that the state had acquired. Hell, he only needed to take a walk from the lower end of Congress Street to Munjoy Hill to see what his city had become. That's a distance of about a mile, and in Dow's time it boasted about three hundred establishments where a man or woman could get a drink. You didn't even have to step off the sidewalk: grocers prepared rum punch in tubs outside their stores and served it up in tin cups. Eventually Dow had enough, and just about single-handedly forced through a prohibition law in 1851. It stood for nearly five years, until the Rum Riot of 1855 led to shooting and killing, and put the kibosh on both prohibition and Dow's reputation. So, you know, Maine's relationship with liquor was kind of complicated, to say the least, even before the Volstead Act came to pass.

And my grandfather did well out of Prohibition, like a lot of people who saw opportunity in a flawed law, and had the determination and organization to take advantage of the situation.
Organization
was the important word, because Prohibition created organized crime: with so much money to be made, order and discipline were crucial. My grandfather understood that, and so did Dan Carroll. He paid my grandfather generously for his work and gave him a cut of any shipments that made it safely to Boston, which was most of them. But then, in January 1933, King Solomon sent a man named Mordecai Blum to Maine.

Blum arrived at my grandfather's house in Portland the day before he was due to travel to Vanceboro to pick up eighty cases of premium whisky that were coming across the border from McAdam. My grandfather knew that Blum was on his way: Dan Carroll had called ahead to warn him. There had been a falling-out between Carroll and Solomon over a shipment that had gone astray. The story was that a boat went down in Machias Bay, but some of the liquor subsequently turned up in a garage owned by Bill Sellers, who worked for Carroll. Anyway, Carroll claimed to have known nothing about the deception, and Sellers ended up in a hole in the ground, but it cast a shadow over the working relationship between Solomon and Carroll for a time. For my grandfather, that shadow was Mordecai Blum's.

Blum was a squat, humorless man, with small, lifeless gray eyes that peered out from under heavy lids. His head was long and oversized, and did not narrow at the neck. It looked, my grandfather recalled, like a huge thumb protruding from the collar of his shirt. He was abominably hirsute: my grandfather caught a glimpse of him in his drawers while he was shaving and swore that only his face and the palms of his hands were hairless. The rest of his body was entirely covered with a wiry black pelt so that his skin was barely visible through it.

Blum radiated a kind of primitive power, and it was known that he did Solomon's killing for him. “Motke the Mortician,” that was what Dan Carroll called Blum, and he advised my grandfather to keep a close eye on the man, and not to turn his back on him, if he could help it. Carroll didn't think my grandfather was in any immediate danger from Blum, not if he was straight, which he knew my grandfather to be. Tendell might have been a criminal, but he was an honest one, if that isn't a contradiction in terms. In any case, he was smarter than to steal from Dan Carroll, and could account for every case of liquor that passed through his hands. Still, he did not share Carroll's faith in Blum's ability to distinguish between honesty and dishonesty, or his willingness to do so. My grandfather knew that the death of Sellers was not enough to satisfy King Solomon, and he had no desire to be sacrificed as an example to others.

My grandfather and Blum drove up to Vanceboro together, mostly in silence. Blum wasn't a talkative individual, and my grandfather preferred to keep his own counsel with strangers. He did learn that Blum didn't touch alcohol of any kind. Apparently wine and hard liquor disagreed with Blum's insides, and he didn't even care much for the taste of beer. Here they found some common ground. Tendell's father had been a drinker of the worst stripe, a foul and physically abusive man who died a violent death at the hands of some lobstermen he'd crossed down on Commercial Street. He was gutted with a gaff and left hanging from a wharf bitt. Personal experience, therefore, had left Tendell with a distrust of men who couldn't hold their liquor, and an innate caution in his own consumption. I never saw him drink more than one glass of rum or whisky at a single sitting, and even a beer would have gone flat by the time he got around to finishing it.

Eventually they reached Vanceboro, where the cars and drivers were waiting for them. Shortly after ten
P.M.
, a pair of trucks arrived from across the border, and the process of transferring the whisky to the Cadillacs began. Blum took no part in it. He watched the work, and then interrogated the Canadian drivers, who had been doing the run for four or five years and disliked their honesty being called into question. They might have been crooks, but they too were straight, and stole no more than they believed to be their due. Blum had a little notebook, and in it were recorded details of every run that had been made in the previous twelve months. He went through each one with the drivers, cross-checking what they could recall of their shipments with what my grandfather and Dan Carroll had ultimately delivered to Boston. When he wasn't satisfied with their answers, he would place a question mark beside the relevant entry in his notebook. My grandfather watched it all without comment, even though Blum was effectively implying that he might be a liar, and alienating the Canadian drivers in the process. Snow clouds gathered above them, and my grandfather was anxious that they should be on their way, but Blum would not be rushed. So it was that the first flurries had begun to fall by the time they were done, and their little convoy had not traveled more than ten miles when the road ahead was lost to them.

“We need to find shelter,” said Tendell. “We don't want to get stuck out on this road with liquor in back.”

“I thought your bribes kept the police quiet,” said Blum. He removed his notebook from his pocket and began reciting various sums of money, and quantities of liquor, that Tendell had listed as bribe expenses over the preceding months.

Tendell was tempted to point out that Blum's questioning had delayed them, and otherwise they might have been a little farther ahead of the storm, and closer to a town, but he saw no sense in alienating Solomon's man.

“I can pay off cops,” said Tendell, “but not the prohis, at least not the new ones who've only been up here since November. Some of the old guys, maybe, but the Bureau has started sending us true believers, and they frown on bribery. They're no fools, either. They know that we use these roads.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“A guy named Wallace lives not far from here. He has a barn that he lets us use from time to time. It'll cost us a case of liquor, but it'll be worth it. We can wait out the snow there. If need be, Wallace has a tractor and a plow blade. He'll help us get back on the road tomorrow.”

Blum didn't look happy at the thought of spending a night in the North Woods, but Tendell couldn't imagine a situation where Blum would look happy. His demeanor didn't seem to allow much for positive emotions.

“A whole case?” said Blum. “That sounds like a lot.”

“He's taking a risk, plus he does a little bootlegging and moonshining of his own on the side. My guess is that he'll take what we give him and turn it into five times as much rotgut.”

“All the more reason to bargain him down.”

“He's not the bargaining type.”

“Everybody's the bargaining type. You just need to find the right leverage.”

Tendell glanced down at Blum's massive hands. He was closing and unclosing the fists, as though already preparing to use his own particular negotiating skills on the unfortunate Wallace.

“Listen,” said Tendell softly. “This is my country, and my people. You leave the talking to me. In a day or two you'll be back in Boston, but Wallace and those like him will still be here, and I need them on my side. You understand?”

Blum turned his head lazily and stared at Tendell from beneath those swollen lids. He reminded Tendell of the big cats in the Franklin Park Zoo, seemingly relaxed to the point of somnolence, until someone put meat before them.

“You know King Solomon?” asked Blum.

“I know him.”

“He doesn't trust you.”

“Yeah? And there I was thinking you'd come all this way to give me a prize.”

“I don't trust you either.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“You can tell it to the King.”

Blum turned away. Tendell tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He'd never killed a man, never even come close, but he thought that he had it in him to kill Motke Blum if the opportunity arose, and fuck King Solomon.

Tendell pulled over to the side of the road, jumped out of the car, and went to inform the rest of the drivers about the change of plan.

“Fuckin' Wallace,” said Riber, the big Dane. “Freeze our balls off, we will.”

Conlon and Marks, the other two drivers, nodded in agreement. Wallace lived a notoriously hardscrabble existence, even by the standards of the Northeast.

“We can't keep driving,” said Tendell, “not in this.”

“What about the Jew?” asked Conlon.

Although they hadn't spent much time with Blum, they had heard the questions he'd asked of the Canadians, and knew the problems he was trying to cause. He hadn't yet got around to questioning them, but he would.

“He's not happy about it,” said Tendell. “But he can walk back for all I care.”

“Be a shame if something happened to him,” said Marks.

“If something does,” said Tendell, “then King Solomon will kill us all.”

“He's a rat,” said Conlon.

“He's got nothing to rat about. We're clean. Danny knows it. This is all just for show.”

They grumbled a little more, but the cold and the snow put a quick end to it. When Tendell got back in his car, he saw that Blum had his Colt pistol in his lap.

“You going hunting?” asked Tendell.

“You were out there for a long time.”

“We were taking the night air. It's good for the constitution. Why don't you put the gat away? Nobody here has a beef with you.”

“Really? I got good hearing, me. I don't think your friends like me.”

“They don't have to. They only have to put up with you, just like I do.”

The gun disappeared beneath the folds of Blum's coat. Tendell resumed driving.

“You don't like Jews,” said Blum, after they had traveled for a mile or more, Tendell taking it slowly, unable to see more than a few feet ahead of him in the snow. It was a statement, not a question.

“I like Jews plenty,” said Tendell. “I deal with them, drink with them, even fucked a few Jewish women in my time. It's not about that.”

“Then what is it about?”

“You're King Solomon's man, and you're looking for an excuse to put a bullet in my head, because the King wants to discourage others from doing what he thinks Sellers did.”

“There's no doubt about it. Sellers fucked the King over.”

“And Dan Carroll, too.”

“The King is not so sure.”

“Then the King is wrong.”

Blum's breath plumed and lost itself against the windshield, as though trying unsuccessfully to escape the hostile confines of the car.

“The King used to think that he and Carroll were alike,” said Blum. “But he was wrong. The Irish run the police, the fire department, the councils. They have power. The Jews, they don't have power, not like that. We are not the same.”

“You think that situation is going to get better with you coming up here and pissing everyone off with your questions?”

“Do you play chess?”

“No. I never much cared for games.”

“It's a pity,” said Blum. “Games are a reflection of reality, and chess is war on a board. The King and Dan Carroll are jostling for position. Those men behind us are pawns. They are the first to be wiped away in any conflict. Men like us, we are knights, bishops, rooks. If we are careless, we get taken by a pawn, but mostly we are vulnerable to those most like ourselves.”

“And Sellers? What was he?”

“He was a pawn who thought he could be a king.”

The two men exchanged no further words until they came to the turnoff that led to Wallace's place. There was no sign, and no gate, merely a gap in the tree line. A narrow trail, distinguishable only by its absence of growth, wound down through the woods to where a farmhouse became visible behind a veil of white. It wasn't much to look at, but lights burned in its windows, and smoke and sparks flew from its chimney. Behind it stood a big barn and some smaller outbuildings. Farther back in the woods, Tendell knew, was Wallace's still.

The old man himself appeared in the doorway as they approached. He had a shotgun in his hands, although he did not raise it. Tendell halted while they were still a ways off and identified himself.

“You can come on down,” said Wallace, and only then did Tendell lead the convoy into the yard. He put the brakes on and told Blum to stay where he was—“He's nervous around strangers”—then went to speak with Wallace. The homesteader was in his seventies, with long white hair and a beard to match. His boots were unlaced, and he was wearing a big wool coat with a fur-lined collar over tan moleskin trousers and a navy sweater. Tendell noticed that the hammers of the shotgun were cocked, and Wallace didn't appear in any hurry to ease them back down.