Sweet Thunder (21 page)

“No, I would not. But if you really want to do me a favor—”

“Yes? What?”

“Shave.”

He chuckled. “Nothing doing. The boys would think I chickened out, gotten scared of the other gangs.”

I despaired. “Then you won't part with a beard, and I can't. Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

“Can't?” That quick, he was gazing at me as if through a gunsight. “There's something more on your mind than barbering. Spill it.”

I drew in breath. This slick bootlegging operative had granted me reprieve, and in all conscience, I had to do the same for him. “While we're in the trading mode, I should warn you—you're not the only one with people on the lookout for you.”

“Is that a fact,” he let out with a world-weary sigh. “It must be our irresistible good looks.”

“If only it were that simple.” I told him my own twofold story, the Chicago gambling mob's ire over the long-ago prizefight ready to be fanned anew if the big World Series bet was traced to me.

When I was done, the Highliner whistled through his teeth again. “Man, you're a case. I thought bootlegging was complicated. Thanks for tipping me off, I'll put the boys on the lookout for stray hoodlums.” I felt better on that score, for the first time since Cutthroat Cartwright arrived. That lasted until the next words I heard. “What are you going to do to keep breathing? Don't you carry?”

“Carry—? Oh. A gun. No.” How much better off humankind would be had gunpowder never been invented and combat was waged with more civilized weapons. Such as brass knuckles. “Chicago pinkie rings,” I tried to sound tough but had to pat hard through my layers of clothing to make the telltale jingle.

The Highliner rolled his eyes. “Sure, those are really great up against some gink armed to the teeth and more than arm's length from you. But if that's how you want to plan your funeral, it's your choice.”

With that decided, he leaned toward me, authority in every whisker as he made the terms of our mutual existence clear. “Here's the deal, Morgan. I'm not saying anything to the boys about you. Nothing to be gained from that. Just don't abuse the privilege of being a spitting image.” I shook my head. “And you'll keep your trap shut about the warehouse and these trucks and so on.” I nodded my head. The Highliner gave me a last keen look, then winked roguishly as if at himself in a mirror. Reaching into one of the crates, he pulled out a bottle of Canadian rye and uncorked it with a flourish. Offering a swig, he said with that silky laugh: “After you. We have to make a toast—Confusion to our enemies, eh?”

  14  

T
HE BOARDINGHOUSE LOOKED A BIT
worse for wear, Butte weather to blame, but otherwise the hillside residence with its distinctive sign—
CUTLETS AND COVERLETS—OR IF YOU'RE NOT WELSH: BOARD AND ROOM
—appeared much the same as when I first arrived into this vexing city, in need of food and shelter. I had led what I thought was an eventful life before coming to this address, but what an amount more had been squeezed in between that first knock on the blue-painted door and mine now.

“Yes?” Grace's pleasant lilt came first as she answered the door. That immediately changed to “Oh, no, you don't,” as soon as she saw it was me, along with the taxi driver who was laboring up the sidewalk with the trunk. “You can't come crawling back here with all your belongings and think you can kiss and make up and everything will be like it was before.” Pushing me aside, she called to the driver struggling with his load. “Put that back in the taxi.”

“Grace, that's not my trunk, it's
our
trunk. From our trip. The railroad evidently ran out of places to sidetrack it.”

“Why didn't you say so.” She called to the taxi driver again. “Leave it and take him with you.”

“But I need my things from it.”

Grace puffed her cheeks, bottling up stronger language before she said, “Morrie, you have turned into the most exasperating human being. Why couldn't you get your junk out of there ahead of time?”

“It's locked. The key is on your Portuguese charm bracelet, remember?”

“So it is.”

“Aren't you going to go get it?”

“I'm debating.”

The hackie spoke up from where he stood puffing. “Could you folks have this fight inside on your own time, maybe?”

Between us, he and I wrestled the trunk into the boardinghouse with Grace hovering over our every move. I gave him some money and told him to come back in half an hour. Fifteen minutes, Grace truncated that. Off she stormed, her golden braid bouncing, to fetch the key. Hoop and Griff edged out of the parlor where they had been listening, chorused “How you doing, Morrie?” and “What do you know for sure, Morrie?” and fled to the far reaches of the house.

In no time, Grace flew back, unlocked the trunk, and flung open the lid. She snapped a glance at me where I stood watching her with yearning. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

“You look recovered. From the hives, I mean.”

“No thanks to you. Get busy on your stuff.”

What stood open in front of us was more than a trunkful of mingled belongings, it was every memory of our glorious honeymoon year. With my throat tight, I began sorting out my clothing and the other contents—books to me, trinkets to her, we agreed on at least that much—until I came across a creamy souvenir program from a performance of the Lipizzaner riding academy. “Remember Vienna? Those magnificent horses white as ermine?”

“Don't start that kind of thing, please.” Her violet eyes were shiny with near tears. It was all I could do not to take her in my arms and—

Suddenly there were footsteps on the stairs, and the stairwell practically filled with a rangy figure who had a Roman nose and a centurion chin and a full head of black wavy hair. Pausing midway down, he scrutinized the two of us and the strew of belongings on the parlor floor. In an Italian baritone, he asked: “Is he bother you, mizzus?”

“Nothing to worry about, Giorgio, thank you.”

Giving me a sharp look that took inches off my height, he turned back up the stairwell. “At your service.”

I stared at the broad back disappearing at the top of the stairs. “Who in the world is that?”

“Who do you think? The new boarder. Giorgio Mazzini. He's a powderman on the graveyard shift at the Neversweat.”

An Adonis on the premises; another arrow into my heart. Glumly I added opera formal wear to my stack. Time was running out on me and I had to speak my piece. “Grace, you must listen. I've reached an understanding with the Highliner. He'll see to it that the police won't pick me up at random and his men will be on the lookout for thugs from out of town—that's a help, wouldn't you say?”

“Oh my, yes,” she said too sweetly. “Now you're in with bootleggers, but still on the outs with gamblers and this Cutthroat menace and whatever goons Anaconda may decide to sic on you. You're practically a walking insurance policy, Morrie.”

“You don't sound very reassured.”

“Imagine that.” Drawing a breath through her teeth, she steeled herself for what she was about to say. “Now it's your turn to listen. If”—she doggedly erased that—“
when
I take you to court, as I'll need to because of the properties”—her arm-flung gesture somehow took in territory from the parlor to Horse Thief Row; the fact caught up with me that I was half owner of the boardinghouse, as she was of the mansion—“and everything, it will all have to come out about you. About,” she faltered, but went on in a low voice, “Morgan Llewellyn and so on. You have to be ready for some rough treatment from any judge.”

“The one in front of me now counts the most,” I said humbly.

Her eyes glistening again, she turned her face away from me to the clock. “You'd better get busy on the trunk. Your time is about up.”

It was my turn to draw a determined breath. “There's something else that has to be sorted out, now or never. My position at the
Thunder
. Jared and Armbrister can't keep me on if I'm being dragged through a scandal in court; the
Post
will shout it from every street corner. I have to ask you to wait a little while before starting legal proceedings.” I hurried the rest as she started to protest. “We're not that far from turning the tide against Anaconda—I swear to you, we're not.”

There was a third presence with us now. In the spot of honor on the sideboard was propped the wedding photograph of the ever so young Grace and her Arthur. My predecessor, foursquare in his roomy suit and expansive mustache; even on that matrimonial day, doomed to leave her a widow, when the unsafe conditions in the mines produced the Speculator conflagration. Now Grace rested her gaze on that fateful photo, as did I. Finally, she nodded, all the agreement I needed. She said again, “Go get them, the snakes. Now you'd better hurry, I hear your taxi.”

Each with an armful of my clothes and books, the driver and I loaded into the flivver for a silent ride up the slope to Ajax Avenue. Leaving behind half my heart, the put-upon woman who was still my wife until divorce or annulment or some other form of dissolution caught up with me, and one Giorgio Mazzini, powderman, which was to say dynamiter. Without intelligence enough to blow his nose, if I was any judge of humanity, but built like a stallion and with that Mediterranean name full of lip-puckering vowels. Worse yet, it no doubt was his legitimate one.

•   •   •

“What are you going to do with yourself now that you're an involuntary bachelor, join a Lonely Hearts Club?”

“Not funny, Sandy. I'm still a married man.” Conscious of his stern gaze, I roamed uneasily around the library tower. Conversation with Sandison in his lair somehow could cause the prickling sensation that pages were mysteriously turning in some certain book on the surrounding shelves, with the escaping spirit of the printed tale suffusing the atmosphere of the cylindrical room. In this case, alas for me, the literary presence seemed to be the inexorable Grand Inquisitor from
The Brothers Karamazov.
Facing the judgmental figure leaning back in his desk chair with his arms folded and his beard resting on his chest, I tried not to sink into Russian fatalism while telling him Grace and I, for the time being, had reached an understanding that there would be no legal separation.

“An understanding? That must have been some reach.” He lurched up straight in his chair, sighing a mighty sigh. “I don't know about you, but I miss having a woman around. They're good for a lot of things. Look at us now,” he glumly continued this train of thought, “a pair of wild cards, with no queens in the deck. I tell you, Morgan, or Llewellyn, I should say, poor representatives of the human race as we've been, what would I have amounted to without Dora and you without Grace?” He shuddered.

To cut the gloom before it became as thick as borscht, I protested that he was being overly hard on himself, implying myself as well, and chided,
“There's a fascination frantic / in a ruin that's romantic.”

He bared his teeth at the jingle from
The Mikado
, as I figured he would, but it worked in distracting him from lugubrious memorializing. Dora Sandison had been a force to be reckoned with when I'd had to schedule the Gilbert and Sullivan Libretto Study Group around other bevies of enthusiasts that met in the public library basement, besieging both of us with queenly demands on behalf of her musical idols. Thinking back on that, Sandison now looked almost contrite. “I probably shouldn't have called it the Giblet and Mulligan Society.”

That pretty much ended that, as he turned with a grunt to the latest fine edition waiting in the package from a rare book dealer and I to the encyclopedic demands of the house. The manse was balky with only the pair of us as residents. It sorely missed the ministrations of Hoop and Griff, not to mention the presiding influence of Grace. Fortunately the kitchen was not hostile territory to me—I had picked up certain culinary skills in the course of life and I was a whiz at washing dishes—but the grocery shopping and a dozen other unaccustomed chores kept me hopping. As for the rest of the domicile, he and I truly were like captain and mate trying to keep the hulk afloat after the crew had abandoned ship. Samuel Sandison had not spent his life as boss of cowboys and librarians for nothing; his approach to upkeep consisted of pointing out to me things that I was then expected to fix.

And so I was not as surprised as I might have been to hear an explosive “Damn, what next?” from the hall bathroom on a not untypical day when I was about to leave for the newspaper office.

He materialized in the hallway in suspenders and flapping shirttail, looking aggrieved. “The sink is plugged. Better tend to it or the place will turn into a swamp.”

I groaned and went to find the rubber-cupped plunger called a plumber's friend. When I returned, Sandison was still circulating, dressed now and gathering a book here and a hat there, grumbling all the while—“It's a hell of a note when a man can't even wash his face”—before heading out to the public library. Consequently I was at the nasty task of suctioning out whatever had clogged the drain, idly mulling whether the appropriate verb was
plunging
or
plungering
, when the door knocker banged urgently. “I'll get it,” Sandison growled as he passed, “you keep at the damnable plumbing.”

“Package,” an unfamiliar voice was heard over the sink sounds. “Are you Morgan?”

“Ha. Not by a long shot. You're not our regular postman—where's O'Malley?”

“He's down with the croup.”

“Sturdy lad like him? This country is going soft. Are you sure the name on that parcel isn't Sandison?”

“Sure I'm sure. I have to give it to somebody named Morgan.”

“If you're going to be silly about it.” Sandison called to me, and I abandoned the plunger and started for the front doorway where he hadn't budged, still incredulous that the postman did not have somewhere on his person a package containing a valuable book as usual. Shaking his head and agonizing for me to come, the postman jumpily clutched what appeared to be a wrapped box, about the size of a cracker tin. All I could think was that Grace must have mailed something of mine overlooked in the trunk. As I approached, the man in postal uniform yanked a pistol from the open back of the box and hissed, “This is for you, Bolshie pig!”

The first bullet nearly parted my hair, Sandison having batted the gun as if annoyed with a fly. The shooter fired wildly again and again, into the floor and ceiling, while the two of them grappled like wrestlers and I ducked and dodged from one side of their mad struggle to the next, trying vainly to get my hands on the weapon. They knocked the hat rack over, coats sent flying, and shattered the hall mirror as they reeled from wall to wall in the narrow confines. Sandison had the weight advantage but was twice the other's age, and the assailant possessed the determination of a bug-eyed fanatic. Somehow he momentarily twisted loose and spun to point the gun at me, this time at close range. A split second became eternity as I could see death coming. But as the shooter yelped, “Take that, pinko!” and pulled the trigger, Sandison lurched onto him like a falling tree and intercepted the bullet meant for me.