On the Waterfront (16 page)

“Haw haw haw.” Moose coughed out his laughter like the motor of a big Mack truck turning over in the morning.

“Condolences,” “J.P.” said again, with a respectful little bow, and was on his way to the next transaction. There were longshoremen who needed money to put meat on the table. And there were always a few who would borrow a sawbuck to put on the nose of a horse with Jockey Byrnes, the book for the mob. So the money would come from Johnny Friendly and return to Johnny Friendly, increasing itself as it flowed in a rising, uninterrupted stream.

“More coffee, fellers?” Fred wanted to know.

Lowering his voice, Pop said, “If ya put a ball in it. I’m disgusted.”

Fred shook his head. “You know the law. Eight o’clock.”

“In the cup,” Pop whispered. “On the q.t. An emoigency.”

Fred looked at the old, lined face that he had known here at the counter over the years. He knew all about Joey. But he minded his business. It wasn’t his war.

“Well, bein’ it’s you, Pop,” he said under his breath. He took

Pop’s coffee cup, lowered it to a shelf below the counter and poured a shot into it from the pint he used to help himself through what he called the Sahara stretch.

“I’m sorry fer yer troubles,” he said as he pushed the cup toward Pop. Pop downed it gratefully.

Men in business suits seldom ventured into the Longdock and when a pair of them entered, everybody was aware of them without looking directly at them. Some of the local officials and the shipping people went around in suits and white shirts and ties but they almost never came into the Longdock, which was strictly rank-and-file. Business suits nearly always meant cops. But most of the plain-clothesers were familiar to the Longdock clientele and the two fellows who had just come in were strangers. One of them was a husky, square-jawed fellow in his middle thirties who looked like an ex-college football player still in pretty fair shape. The other one, slightly under medium height, was dark-complexioned, compact and professionally dour. He carried a brief case. This pair of outsiders walked along the counter until they came to the trio including Terry Malloy. Terry and his two buddies, Chick and Jackie, pretended not to notice that the two men had paused behind them.

“Any of you boys know Terry Malloy?” Glover, the ex-football player asked.

The three young men at the counter went right on eating.

“Did you hear him ask you a question?” Gillette, the smaller, and more aggressive of the two, cut in.

“Malloy? Never heard of ’im,” Jackie said over his shoulder.

“Me neither,” Chick quickly added, without looking around.

Glover and Gillette looked at each other and then Glover consulted a photograph he had taken from his overcoat pocket. He took a step closer to Terry, who was hunched forward in deliberate, brooding defiance of their presence.

“You’re Terry Malloy, aren’t you?” Glover said.

Terry still didn’t bother to answer. Gillette was ready to repeat the question when Terry swiveled around on his stool as slowly as possible and looked them over.

“So what about it?”

“I thought I’d recognize you,” Glover said cheerfully. “I saw you in St. Nick’s a couple of years ago. I’m a fight fan.”

“O.K. O.K. Without the bird seed. Whaddya want?”

“Identification,” Glover said and he flipped his wallet open with a practiced flourish. Terry regarded the flash of the badge and the I.D. card with studied contempt.

“State Crime Commission?” Terry waved the wallet away. “Are you kiddin’?”

“We’d simply like to talk to you for a few minutes,” Gillette said.

“You’re talkin’ to me,” Terry said.

“He means over in a booth or maybe you’d rather step outside,” Glover said. “So we can be alone.”

“I got nothin’ I can’t say in front of my friends,” Terry said. “What’s the deal?”

“The Commission is conducting an investigation of waterfront crime and underworld infiltration of the Longshoreman’s Union.

“The facts, ma’m, just the facts,” Chick cracked, and Jackie laughed.

“So go ahead and conduct it,” Terry said. “Whaddya want from me?”

“Just a little information,” Glover said pleasantly.

“I don’t know nuthin’,” Terry said and swung back to the counter.

“You haven’t heard the questions yet,” Gillette reminded him.

Terry slowly swung back again until he was facing them, took a good look, meant to be menacing, at the trim, business-like figure of Gillette and turned to his coffee again.

“The State’s trying to root out labor racketeers,” Glover said.

“Look, who’s kiddin’ who?” Terry said. “Nobody’s gonna root out nuthin’. That suckin’ Commission is just gonna get itself some headlines and maybe somebody’ll run for Mayor or Governor or something.”

Chick and Jackie nodded. The waterfront had been investigated by Mayor’s committees and grand juries and roving Senators for years. There had been headlines and more headlines, and when all the smoke had cleared away, there was the waterfront, the same old waterfront. Investigation: that was the dirtiest word in the harbor.

“We didn’t look you up this morning to ask you your opinion of our work,” Gillette said. Terry had marked him right away as the nasty one. “We came in to ask you a few specific questions.”

Terry was ready with another smart answer, but Glover was ahead of him, his voice still casual and pleasant:

“There’s a rumor that you’re one of the last people to see Joey Doyle alive.”

“You c’n go take your rumors …” Terry started to say.

“We’re not cops, you understand,” Gillette explained. “We can’t do anything about the Doyle case. But we’d like to find out if there’s any connection between his death and the dock rackets in general.”

“We’re not even serving you a subpoena,” Glover said. “Simply inviting you to an executive session.”

“I told you guys—I don’t know nuthin’,” Terry said.

“All we want to do is ask you a few little things about people you may know,” Gillette added.

Terry swung his stool the long way around to face Gillette, wheeling as slowly as he could and making this a gesture of insolence.

“People I may know … you mean eat cheese for ya?”

“Slow down, boy, slow down,” Gillette said.

“The nerve of these guys,” Terry said for the benefit of his friends.

Then he rose from the stool with his fists clenched at his side.

“You better get outa here, buster.”

Gillette was shorter than Terry but he had been a judo expert in the Army and he had the physical confidence of a small man who knows he is ready and able. He had judo in front of him and the State behind him.

“I wouldn’t advise that, Mr. Malloy, unless you want to be booked for assaulting an officer of the law.”

“Listen, cop,” Terry said, relaxing his hands and having to make up for it with his voice. “I don’t know
nuthin’,
I didn’ see
nuthin’,
an’ I aint sayin’
nuthin’.
Now why don’t you an’ your girl friend here take off? Go on, blow.”

“All right,” Gillette said quietly. “We’ll be seeing you again.”

“Never will be too much soon for me, Shorty,” Terry said.

Glover dropped his large hand on Terry’s shoulder with a familiarity from which Terry flinched. All his life cops had been the heavies, pinching him for swiping apples and then winking at the real jobs. Only two ways to handle cops, outrun ’em or take care of ’em. His brother Charley never had no trouble with cops.

“Take it easy, kid,” Glover said. “You have every right not to talk if that’s what you choose to do.”

“Do me a favor ’n drop dead,” Terry wrapped it up.

The two intruders turned away. Terry shook his head at them and wolfed his doughnut to show his chums how little he had been affected.

“How do you like them two gumshoein’ around, takin’ me for a pigeon?”

Jackie laughed and mimicked them in a falsetto, using a paper napkin for a mock notebook. “Gimme the names. I’ll write ’em down in me little book.”

Terry laughed, with relief, and punched Jackie’s arm approvingly.

“One more word ’n I would’ve belted ’em, badge or no badge.”

“Aah, them politicians is a joke,” Chick said. “When they got nuthin’ better t’ do they pick on the waterfront.”

“C’mon, choke the coffee down,” Jackie said. “Five minutes the whistle’s gonna blow.”

“I hear ya sittin’ pretty, Terry,” Chick said. “A steady job in the loft. How’s about fixin’ us up now that you’re a big shot.”

“The loft boss ’d bounce you the first day,” Terry said as he tossed a dollar on the counter to pay for the three of them. He was trying hard to push those Commission jokers out of his mind. “You gotta have brains for the job I’m gettin’.”

“Or at least a brother with brains,” Jackie said.

Actually Jack and Chick, who had known Terry in reform school, stood in well with Big Mac. They were always ready to help things along on the pilferage and they worked steady enough to come out with around four thousand a year, aside from the personal loot. They weren’t part of the regular goon squad like Truck and Sonny but Big Mac could count on them to throw a punch or a brick, when the situation demanded.

“Come on, girls, let’s get over there,” Terry said, falling into his rolling, boxer-walk as he led them out.

The cold at the river’s edge ate into their bones, the late November cold that blows off the river into the weathered faces of longshoremen. Now they were gathering at the pier entrance to wait for the summoning whistle of the hiring boss.

The great harbor of the world’s most modern metropolis still hired its dockmen in the same haphazard way as in the days of the sailing ships when a transatlantic schooner would drop anchor off South Street and a chief would whistle for loiterers and hangers-on to leave their grog shops and pick up a good Yankee dollar or two for a four-hour turn as a human pack-horse unloading the coffee and tobacco and hemp that was making this upstart city of half a million people the greatest trading center in the world. London and Liverpool and San Francisco had long since put away as a museum relic the hiring whistle, but here in Bohegan and all around the harbor the century-old whistle still called the willing hands, called them not to work, but to offer themselves for work while the hiring boss looked them over and made his choices. In the clipper days he combed through them to separate the able workers from the rummies. Now he looked them over for signs of compliance. There were subtle devices an outsider scarcely would notice, a match over the left ear signaling willingness to kick back a couple of dollars on the job or a tiny American flag pinned to a windbreaker lapel identifying the wearer as a member in good standing of the kick-back club. This was the silent language of harbor corruption.

The men first to arrive at the Hudson-American pier operated by Tom McGovern’s Interstate Stevedore Company had started a fire in a rusted metal barrel left there as a primitive heater for the frost-bitten dockers. Even through their thick gloves and heavy shoes the cold penetrated their fingers and toes, and they shifted weight from foot to foot and worked their fingers over the fire to fight off the numbness. From November until March it was chilling, thankless work, and half-frozen fingers and icy decks multiplied the accidents. And in the summer heat the bottom of the hold was airless and the hatch gangs felt as if they were being steamed alive. But the up-and-down fall tackle and the cargo sling knew no season. In January sleet or in sweating, bare-waisted July, you swung your hook, loaded that pallet. The pier superintendent has a bug up his rump this morning. He’s yelling for twenty-five tons an hour! Let the bum load it hisself if he’s in sech a fuggin’ hurry.

The men around the fire-barrel blew little clouds of cold breath into the air and exchanged small-talk about how lousy the fight was the night before. They were careful not to mention anything too serious because the pier entrance was all ears, with’ the Friendly boys, Sonny and Truck and Gilly and Specs and Barney and the rest of them, wandering around on the Earie. And since the shape-up pitted every man against his neighbor one never knew when a fellow you trusted would go running to Big Mac or Specs Flavin, who held the title of shop steward, in return for the favor of regular work. Regular work—a chance to pull down your seventy-five, eighty a week every week so the money coming in balanced the money going out—that was the quest, the hope, the muffled cry of every one of the three or four hundred who offered himself to Big Mac’s cynical double-o. A guaranteed minimum wage for every qualified longshoreman—that had been one of Joey Doyle’s pet ideas as opposed to the surplus labor pool encouraged by the shipping companies and exploited by labor-racket boys like Johnny Friendly and Charley Malloy. Job security, that’s what Joey had called it, instead of larcenous hiring bosses throwing jobs out into the crowd every morning like fish to hungry seals.

When Pop and his three cronies came up to one of the fire barrels they had an almost imperceptible but singular effect on the men already gathered there. These men felt they should say something to comfort Pop, but the words stuck to their tongues. Subconsciously they drew away a few inches as if Pop was death itself and the mere brushing of his windbreaker could be fatal. A killing on the docks always left the men edgy and withdrawn, sometimes for months. Even a year later the tensions would still be there. There was the time five years ago when Andy Collins was ready to take over as assistant hiring boss and was shot dead right in the office of 447. “Elbows” Sweeney, who did the job for Johnny Friendly, had taken off for Florida and was seen at Hialeah every day betting in the money that Johnny sent him to keep him happy. Andy Collins had been a popular man who had done a lot for Catholic Youth in the parish. Everybody knew it was Sweeney. Every bar in Bohegan could tell you the story. Plenty of longshoremen in 447 hated Johnny Friendly and Charley the Gent for the Collins job. But what was a fellow gonna do? This was the only work you knew and this was the only place to get it. If you moved over to some other pier and another set-up, you’d have to start all over again as an outsider picking up the crumbs. And it was just as rough across the river on the midtown piers, or over in Port Newark, as it was here in Bohegan. You get the psychology? So with Pop here, the men felt deeply and at the same time had to be careful not to show their feelings. Conflicting waves of emotion met in them like a riptide and made them dangerous below the surface.