Brain Guy: A gang killer meets his match in a TNT blonde (9 page)

“Du bist a Yid,” cried Metz. “A Jew, nothink else.”

Outside, Bill thought of McMann. He was lucky to get any money out of the Wiberg holdup. He felt smarter than the gang of gyps because he knew definitely he’d been rooked.

He went to see Wiberg. That was the way to be. No softness, to work at crime as a scientist works in a lab. The hell with people. “I hear they’ve been working on you. Tough luck.”

Wiberg had waited for the chance to explode. “They always pick on a poor man. Bang me on the head. A feller asks me for a pair lady stockings when bing! And I had lot of money. How they know cin Gott allein weisst.”

“They get much?”

“I should say. Seven hundred.”

He stuck out his lower lip. “You been eating dope. Don’t kid me. When did this shop net you that in a year? You’d have to put dresses on half the behinds in town for seven hundred.”

“They took it, I tell you.” He picked up his paper. “The police. Phooey on them with their radio cars. Who they catch? Nobody. But I remember that feller.”

“Forget him. You’re insured. Maybe that holdup’s a Christmas present — that is, if they give you seven hundred.”

He left the shop. He’d been rooked. He couldn’t forget it, thinking of McMann and Paddy with the cold calm ferocity of a scientist contemplating necessary guinea pigs. Otherwise it was a good day’s work. Fifteen bucks and a job for Joe. Metz wasn’t a bad guy. Neither was the dough in his till. On Saturday nights around midnight Metz ought to be good for five hundred. That was dough. He wondered how the kid’d fit in with his future? The clean honest kid, thinking of cleanliness and honor as qualities similar to skin pigmentation or the shapes of noses. He’d forgotten to interpret honesty either ethically or spiritually.

He was a champ chiseler and Christmas Day he dropped in at the office. He was the prodigal come home, and everybody was tickled to see him. Christmas Day Stanger had a fatted calf for everybody. It was an old custom. A bottle was on the table and they were drinking conservatively under Stanger’s happy but moral eye, the rent-collectors and stenos gazing at one another, standing up like human beings and not shorn in two, leaning over desks like exhibits out of the Flea Museum. There was no fatted calf for Bill, but many handshakes and wonderings when he’d get a job. “I just dropped in to wish you all a merry Christmas and happy New Year.” He smiled so charmingly that Stanger called him into his private cubicle and slipped him ten bucks, despite strenuous protests that he’d dropped in for the spirit of the thing. He had a tough job keeping a straight face.

“They’re all getting presents,” said Stanger. “I want you to take it. Why haven’t you been around for lunch with Joe? Mrs. Stanger has asked me many times to get in touch with you down on Leroy, but there’s no phone and somehow I never got around to writing.”

“Thanks, Mr. Stanger. Thanks for the free rent. It’s swell of you.”

“Listen, you must come around for dinner.”

Later he said: “Merry Christmas” again. No use losing a contact like Stanger. Ten bucks…. That night he went to a party with Madge. McMann was there, and so were a few of Duffy’s kids, Schneck and Ray. He’d noticed Schneck and Ray were thick friends. Duffy of course was too big to show up. McMann told him on the sly he’d invited the kids up. “Might be needn’m soon. Free booze and grub and they’ll be eatin’ outen our hands.” After the party, McMann, Bobbie, and Madge and himself went to a joint in Harlem. The ten bucks went like a light.

B
ILL
put down the valise and opened the dog-box his brother had lugged in from Easton. For a moment the two brothers didn’t look at each other, tacitly filling in the strangeness of meeting after so long by concentrating on a third and neutral object.

The dog was a mongrel puppy, normally happy with an inane blue-eyed youth, but now disconsolate. It ran about the flat, lifting its nose in sorrow for its abduction to a place that didn’t smell of grass. Its white coat was spotted with black like a Dalmatian, the ears and eyes those of a sad hound.

“He misses the country,” said the kid brother.

“What’d you bring him in for? A dog in the city — hell.”

“You’re not sore, Bill?”

“Did I say I was?”

“I’m awfully glad to be here.”

“You were always a lover of animals.”

“So were you. Don’t you remember?”

“It’s so long ago I’ve forgotten.” The brothers raised their eyes from the puppy waddling on its inept legs, from Joe’s single shiny valise, and stared at each other across the distance of two years. The distance was infinite because Easton was less than a hundred miles from New York and Bill could have easily visited if he’d wanted to. Seeing his flesh and blood on Leroy Street, Bill thought of his own appearance. Joe wasn’t a mirror likeness of himself, but there was enough duplication for him to feel a sudden longing, a certain sense that this boy was his brother and no one else. The kid’s hair was lighter than his own, almost yellow, but he was not quite as husky or as tall. His eyes were the same color of blue. He was his brother all right. He ached at the impact of Joe’s youth, the nineteen years that were enough like himself to cause the years to retreat, leaving something green and sunny in heart. In a way he was seeing the Bill that had been four years ago, seeing himself not in memory, but in the flesh. This smooth eager face, this courageous kid that was now his brother, had once been himself. The bitter age that had nothing to do with five or ten years, but was ageless as time, now lay on his shoulders like an impossible burden.

“How’s College Hill? Everything sleepy as ever? You’ve grown. Last time I saw you — that summer two years ago, it was — you were a head shorter.”

“We had a dandy time that summer.”

“Things are different now. I lived in a hotel then and we did the town like gentlemen, but now I’m poor as a mouse. Poorer.”

“I don’t care, Bill. I’m tickled to be here.”

“How are those relatives of ours? Not so hot?”

Joe insisted they were all right. “Like hell they are,” said Bill. “They probably made you feel punk once in awhile.” Joe seemed bewildered at his talk, the queer stresses upon quiet words shaped into sounds of things ominous, sounds echoing of Paddy, of McMann, of his brother’s new life, cold, brutally phlegmatic.

“Spotty doesn’t like it here,” said Bill.

“It’s the city,” said Joe apologetically as if to say that Spotty’s reaction wasn’t his own. “I’m glad to be here. Back home they were decent, but somehow — well, I wasn’t in the way, but somehow I felt I was in uncle’s wife’s way a little bit. There wasn’t anything definite. She was decent. I don’t know if I’m making it clear. I hate to sound like a crab or to have you think I was some orphan at the mercy of hard relations. Not that at all. They were decent. Maybe it was my fault. I didn’t feel close to them nor they to me — not very close that is, for we all liked each other. Honest, I’m glad I’m here, though.” His eyes shone. He patted the double bed. “We’ll sleep together like when we were kids.”

Bill gulped, and the old kid times of father and mother streamed up from his blood and marrow. “You bet.”

“We’ll start in together, Bill. Just as you wrote. The rent’s free and you have a little money and then this Jewish fellow has a job for me. Gee, you must be a wonder to get a job. Back home they don’t exist.”

“It wasn’t anything.”

“Who lives in this house, Bill?”

“Hardly anybody. It’s half empty, but there are some poor families with kids, all plugging. And the Gebhardt family. They got a pretty daughter.” Joe laughed. “I wish I could get a job for myself. Everyday I see some important people, and if I get a break I’ll be in the money again. Then, as I told you at the Pennsy, I make some side money doing some nighttime bookkeeping. Don’t worry, we’ll get along.”

“That’s why your eyes are shot. You ought to take care of them. That bookkeeping must be hard on them.”

They smiled at each other, over the ridiculous puppy sniffing at musty floor smells, their eyes meeting and remembering a fogged sad time of kid days, looking into the future, puzzled, Joe a little sentimental, Bill wondering what Joe was really like. A nice kid, but what was under Joe’s skin? Joe could never guess what a bunko artist he was.

“We’re in Greenwich Village,” said Joe.

“Hardly. The artists are further east. It’s poverty mostly.” He sighed. “I’ll be back at six. I’m going to see Metz.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, you better not. I’ve got to see some other people after that. You wash up and then we’ll have a regular meal, spaghetti, antipasto.”

“Can we afford it?”

“The Ritz is our next stop, kid.” He buttoned up his camel-hair coat, edging down the three small rooms to the door. From the bedroom Joe looked as if he wouldn’t see him for a year. He narrowed his eyes with the wonder of it. Joe was nuts about him. What a good kid! “So long, Joe.”

“Hurry it, Bill.” He wouldn’t drag Joe in the dirt for the world. He grinned sickly, feeling, knowing, that somehow or other he’d get Joe in dutch. It always happened that way. It was the natural thing. What a big brother he was! By God, he wouldn’t make a play for Metz if it was the last store on earth. He hoped he’d keep this New Year resolution. The El pillars on Greenwich were bolted right in the sidewalk. Almost above his head a train hit his sight with the might of a movie train pounding straight at the audience. He felt tiny inside. So Joe had come to town. Hoorah! It didn’t make so much difference. He was awed at the velocity of his direction. Would McMann be home? There was another store lined up, and Mac ought to hear about it. He had a hunch Mac had a good bean on his shoulders.

At six they rubbed their wet faces dry with towels, smelling like new suits, and went downstairs for dinner. Icy air blew in from the river. Beyond the elevated highway, the cars zizzing home from work, the west wind humming in steady. The river was out of sight, but Bill guessed Joe was dreaming of the river’s immense gray sweep. He was that kind of kid. Joe was excited, his eyes jerking up to the warehouse and printing plant, seeing with so new a vision that Bill also realized their significance. It struck him that these eight-story fortresses, the opaque windows wired for strength, in contrast to their own shabby down-at-heel house, were the goals of all endeavor. Their house. The stoop with the black cast-iron rails, the iron picket fence, the garbage pails, all reiterating the poverty of the “last of the Trents”; rubbing destitute elbows with other junky tenements on either side of them a row of beggars kowtowing and sucking around before the industrial brutes across the way. A fellow had to get his pile by hook or crook. Anything was fair. The only thing that counted, as the churches and colleges and government knew, was dough. “We’ll get out of here, soon,” Bill said.

A speakeasy had moved into the tenement on Hudson and Leroy, next to the coffee-pot. Inside, the kids were staring through the window covered with the ice lace of winter, the kids also dreaming of dough. Joe’s eyes had the far-away abstraction of one peering ahead to a legendary freedom. He’d get used to it. He’d get used to the city and to Bill. On Hudson Street a wire meshing ten feet high surrounded the school playground. Beyond the yard, full of the gray miserable cindery gravel of city playgrounds, the school was shuttered up. They followed Leroy eastwards. Elegant high-stooped houses like those on Washington Square, red brick, the brass polished, with a sense of dark rich corridors and servants, gave way to tenements. Leroy curved on itself towards the Village and spaghetti. Joe nearly always followed the same street afterwards, even when he didn’t see much of Bill, stepping in the footprints of that first night. Leroy was always a winter street to him, of dusk and pleasant hunger.

The streets of town, spinning out from their flat like webs about a spider’s home, entangled him forever. The city. The sense of being caught in one spot while the glamorous web of activity spread to the ends of the world. Beyond Leroy the immense town was endlessly beautiful. Yet after he was working for Metz, the city betrayed him. It held promise, but no fulfillment. Bill betrayed him, too. It was as if Bill had moved back to Easton because he’d come to New York. After the grind at Metz’s he was alone. Bill came in late at night. He’d be asleep usually, but when Spotty lifted his pointed head, growling, barking, he’d snap awake to see Bill grinning at his grogginess. He’d say: “G’night” as Bill patted Spotty, his hand saying: It’s me, mutt. Sometimes Bill’d ask how the slave was, and say maybe he ought to quit. “Go to bed, Bill.” “No fooling, Joe. I think it’s too hard on you. Quit.” He’d beg him to let him sleep. Or Bill’d curse, stating it was a pain to get up at six as Joe did and then in at eight or nine at night. Joe was no slave, was he? But he’d be talking to a corpse. Joe’d be sound asleep. The job was no cinch, but perhaps it was best for the two of them to be separated in the working, planning day.

Joe would get up, shutting off the alarm and switching on the light. Spotty, of course, would be wide awake, his behind shaking like a hula dancer’s with the terrific love of a dog greeting its master after the night. The long white tail lashed like a whip. Spotty tried to walk, mad to kiss Joe’s face. He’d pour milk in a bowl, crumbling up a piece of white bread, his eyes red, his heart somber. The puppy was growing up with a thick chest and huge feet. When the dog had eaten, Joe’d stare at Bill, wash up, and go downstairs for breakfast. He’d got into a habit of studying the dull sleeping face. All wasn’t kosher in Denmark, as Metz’d say. Bill was awfully pale. He smoked and drank too much at his bookkeeping. He whored too much. That bookkeeping job was a swell job. Yet, whores, Joe thought with the virginal condemnation of a young boy who’s had a few affairs, and those with housemaids, mostly, in a park. Bill was a sight for sore eyes. It made them sorer. The nose and mouth built in clay (his features were handsome, but weighted) were getting gross. Bill’s clothes would be thrown all over the place. And there’d be a foul smell of tobacco and booze. The windows were kept shut in the winter. What a job he had! Wished he had a job like Bill. Even the whore part of it wasn’t so bad. He was sure of Bill. He knew Bill. When Bill drank, there was always a dame along.