Ghostheart (25 page)

Astoria was different from Queens in many ways, neither better nor worse, merely different. There seemed to be more money, and thus the money he carried bought Harry less influence. He took a three-room apartment on Shore Boulevard overlooking Ralph Demarco Park, and late at night, leaning from the back window of his bedroom, he could see the North and South Brother Islands, and he knew that had he been able to lean a few feet further he would have seen around Bowery Bay to Rikers where I was holed up. Through May and June, even into the early part of July, Harry couldn’t face the prospect of going down there, and he set his mind to working his way back into the world.

He was now alone, and though alone was never good it nevertheless gave him some freedom. He could be where he wanted to be when he was needed, and he took advantage of that flexibility. He started the card games and running bets, establishing a small operation from a single bench in Ralph Demarco Park where those with greenbacks to spare could pay them over and place their odds. He paid on time, always to his word and bang on the nickel, and the reputation he had forged
as a younger man came back – slowly, but it did come back, and within five or six weeks he was turning around ten or twenty thousand dollars a week. He ran a sideline in recommendations for some of the more up-market hookers, and from them he earned a commission and a blow job whenever he needed one. He became a face, the face carried a name, and people started to remember him and count him as one of the players.

By the start of the summer Harry was back on form. He bought a car, and with that car he traveled further afield, used some of the money he was earning to invest in gambling houses and bars. He let the crazies smoke their weed and shoot their shit out back, but he charged them rent by the hour to sleep it off and put a man at the top of the alley to shout when the cops came cruising. He was safe, he was quiet, he kept his word and shut his mouth, and when he felt that he had arrived he started once more to think of me.

He convinced himself that I didn’t need him visiting, but he knew it was a lie, and finally – his nerves steeled against whatever he would find – he made the trip. It was a bitter day despite the season, and from the East River through Hell Gate the wind came like a tornado of razor blades and cut into his face as he stood on the deck of the ferry, his heart like a dead man’s fist in his chest, his nerves ragged, his mouth dry.

The sounds and smells of the penitentiary were as bad as he had imagined. The bitter-sweet taint of cheap disinfectant mixed with the cloying stench of a mass of men crammed into tiny cells, all living out of each other’s pockets. Harry could smell the fear, and inside of that the frustration, the interminable boredom, the hatred and resentment, the guilt and the innocence. All of these things rolled together and pumped through the building by a noisy air-conditioning system that probably carried more dust and infection than anything else.

Harry came into the communal visitation room, a long bank of tables back to back with a ceiling-high sheet of toughened
glass separating them. Some of the tables were taken. Beaten-to-fuck cons muttered as their wives nagged, as their children itched and wriggled and squirmed to leave; a young man, possibly no older than Harry himself, sat cowed and despondent as an elderly woman – presumably his mother – endlessly berated him about the lack of heating in her apartment, and how everything would have been fine had he not gotten himself ‘all mixed up with bad sorts.’ Harry listened without hearing anything at all, he told me, and when the far door opened and I appeared in denim jacket and jeans, my hands cuffed to a wide leather belt around my waist, he got up from where he was seated and felt the urge to push right through the glass, to throw his arms around me, to swallow me whole and carry me out into the real world. These things he would explain to me as best he could, but I knew whatever he might feel, however this place might challenge his sanity and his reason, it was nothing compared to what I was feeling. I had lost my life, and though I understood that being in Rikers was as much my own fault as ever it was Harry’s, there was nevertheless a deep-seated seed of resentment. I did not water the seed or tend it with any care, but I could feel it, and it was growing.

We talked for a little while, exchanged words of little consequence. I had lost weight, and down the right side of my face a wide bruise was fading. Harry asked me about the bruise, how it came to be there, but I did not tell him. Even at that point I felt Harry Rose was tormented enough, and I did not want to fuel the fire of that Hades. I told Harry that he could bring money, as much as he wanted, but to be aware of the fact that whatever he brought I would receive only half. The remainder would be split between the duty guard at visitation and the block warden. Money is good in here, I told him. With money you can get a better cell, be a little more selective about who you might share it with, and when it comes to food there’s a few little extras that can be obtained by the man carrying greenbacks. Harry told me he would bring more money next
time, and from his overcoat pocket he took a roll of ten-dollar bills amounting to little more than three or four hundred. I turned and nodded at the duty guard, the guard sauntered over, and after a few brief words with me the guard nodded at Harry and walked away. He’ll take it when you leave, I told him.

Before Harry had a chance to say any of the things he had planned and rehearsed, the half-hour visit was over. I stood up and, looking directly at Harry, my eyes cold and emotionless, I said, You take care Harry Rose. Someday I’ll beat this thing, and I want you to remember what I did for you, okay?

Harry told me he would remember, told me that he would never forget, and with that I turned and walked to the door.

Harry stayed there – motionless, unable to think of anything – and though he hoped that I would turn and look back as I went through the door, he also hoped I would not. There was a look in my eyes, he told me later, not of a man defeated, but of a man fighting against tremendous odds to maintain his sanity. I went silently, I didn’t turn back, and when the door closed Harry Rose was left alone and confused in a strange room filled with lost lives and broken hearts.

He came back to see me the following week. Brought a thousand dollars with him, three cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon. Won’t see the smokes or the bourbon, I told him, but the money’ll be good. Leave it a while now. Stay away for a month or two. Things’re looking up. Got myself moved into a better cell. Got some quiet guy with me who minds his own. I’ll be okay. Could be worse.

Could be one helluva lot better, Harry wanted to say, but he didn’t say a thing.

Harry went back on the ferry, bitter wind like sheet ice cutting through him. Buried his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and wondered how often he could come across here. Seemed like every time he came he died a little inside. We’d both killed Olson. Both of us were guilty. Harry felt he was paying for his sins in some bitter hole of personal torment, but
my fate had been much worse. I would be in Rikers for the rest of my life.

Or so I believed.

I can talk about things now, things I would not have realized then, and even had I realized them I would not have shared them with the world. Killing is in the commandments, but killing remains to be the one commandment that the vast majority of us never see from the inside out. How is it to kill a man? I’ll tell you how it is. Necessary. That’s how it is. Sometimes something happens that catches you someplace inside, someplace within the shadow cast by your own heart that you didn’t know existed. Someone does something that is beyond anything even close to forgiveness. What was done to Carol Kurtz was such a thing. Maybe we saw it the same way, me and Harry, like raping some poor schmooze was like raping our own mothers. Some bullshit psychology theory the head-shrinkers would have loved to share with us. Time and again I replayed the moment I stood in the county morgue basement looking down at that girl. She was naked, a paper tag tied to her toe. The big toe on her right foot. Paper carried a number. That was all she was to the world by that time. A number. But before she was a number she was a life. A real life, you see. She had a name and a heart and a voice to sing with; she had folks someplace outside the back of nowhere; she was pretty and smart and funny and crazy in some small kind of way, and hell, maybe she would never have amounted to anything more than Harry’s girl, but that would have been enough. Enough for her at least. Maybe that’s what she had always wanted: to be
somebody’s girl
. And then she wasn’t even that. She was a rape victim, a killing, a corpse and a number. Assholes down there didn’t even know her name. I didn’t tell them. They didn’t deserve to know. But I knew. That was enough for me. Went out of there touched in some place I’d never been touched before. Guy I killed for seventeen bucks and change wasn’t someone I’d known. Hadn’t known him from Adam. But Carol I did know. And when I found out who had done this
thing to her it became necessary to see them wind up the same way. Blue and cold and stiff and silent with a paper and a number tied to their toe; big toe on the right.

Seeing the asshole die was justice, a catharsis, a balancing of the scales. Killing him was just as simple as that.

You look back on it in hindsight, look back on it from the inside of a Rikers eight by eight, and you don’t regret the killing. No, you never regret the killing. You just regret the getting caught. Like they say, you know the thing about the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt never get caught. Fucked the dog on that one. Fucked it good.

I hung in there. Fingernails on the precipice. You shut down your mind, your thoughts, your feelings. You walk the walk and talk the talk and color inside the lines. They say ‘Jump!’ and you say ‘How high boss?’ Either that or you wind up in the cubes. Don’t go to the cubes, they tell you when you get inside. The other cons. Don’t get yourself in the cubes kid. Cubes are blackpainted, no windows, hole in the door through which comes your food. Once a day kind of food. Bucket in the corner to dump your guts and take a piss. Live in the stench of your own shit for a week at a time. Come out, you can’t see. Lights are bright, too fucking bright. Eyes can’t handle it. Come out once a week, stumble around like a punch-drunk bareknuckle prizefighter for fifteen minutes until your head screams to turn off the lights, and then they shove you right back in again until next Tuesday. Went there once. Three days only. Short shift. Long enough for me. Badmouthed the boss. Told him I saw his mother chasing a troop train with a mattress on her back. Model citizen after that. No shit boss. Didn’t tell Harry Rose about these things, not then. Told him another time, a long time after. Just gritted my teeth, clenched my fists, tightened my ass and followed the lines. Like a good kid. Momma’s boy.

Time passed, slow and painfully.

August of ’56 saw John Kennedy beaten by Estes Kefauver in
his hope for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. Eisenhower and Nixon were nominated by the Republicans to run for re-election. Harry Rose worked out of his apartment on Shore Boulevard, taking bets, collecting what was owed and paying what was due with the same sense of exactness that had always been his trademark. It wasn’t the same however, and when he was approached in September by a man called Mike Royale, ‘King Mike’ to anyone who knew him he said, he was presented with a proposition that would take him out of Astoria, away from the stench of the Bowery Bay Sewage Treatment Plant and the ghost of Rikers Island on the other side of the channel. Harry Rose – always on the lookout for a route to greater things – listened very attentively to what the man had to say.

Hookers, King Mike told him, sitting there with his gut busting out of his vest and his shirt collar tight enough to choke him. Wide face, teeth like stumps of broken chalk, hair slicked back with pomade so’s it looked like it’d been spray-painted on his head. Everything about him was fat, even down to the stubs of his fingers, and on those stubs were jammed rings that looked like they’d stem all possibility of blood-flow to his fingertips. That’s where the money is these days, he said, his voice a little breathless like his neck was too swollen for the words to get out properly. And I’m not talking your five-dollar alleyway hand-job hookers, face like a bulldog licking piss off a poison ivy … no siree, I’m talking uptown, class-A, clean girls who work out of respectable hotels, a manager and a couple of heavies to take care of the miscreants. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking, you know? Where your blue-collar Joe Public can come and spend an hour or so in the company of a girl he’d never have a hope in hell of getting if he was out on his own. We got a coupla places sorted out already, and we’re looking for some investors if you know what I mean. You seem like a smart kid, and from what I’ve heard you carry a little money and your word’s as good as it comes. Heard you ran a three-way for Benny Schaeffer a month or so ago, heard he hit for you for
three big ones, and neat as paint you showed up at his place and paid up. Even told him thank you for his business and you were hoping to do more business with him real soon. That so kid?

Harry told him it was so. Didn’t mention the fact that Benny Schaeffer was one of the stupidest gamblers Harry had ever met, and in the previous fortnight alone Harry had taken back the three big ones and a couple more besides.

So this is the kind of thing we’re talking about, King Mike went on, and seems to me you’re the kind of guy we’d want to have come down and see our places. If you like what you see we can cut you in for a ten-percent share, okay?

The cost? Harry had asked him.

A businessman, King Mike said. I like that kind of attitude. Straight as an arrow and right to the point. You come down, you check it out, and if you want in we talk figures. Deal?

Deal, Harry said, and they shook hands.

The following day King Mike sent over a car, and they took a trip across the Triborough into Manhattan.

Harry felt at home almost as soon as he set foot on the sidewalk. Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, Rockefeller University, the Cornell Medical Center, the Whitney Museum and Jack Jay Park. Names that meant something, places he’d heard of before, and when they stepped up to a tall brownstone building, a discreet sign in the window that read Gentleman’s Hotel & Bar, Harry felt he had perhaps lucked into something that carried a little more class than Benny Schaeffer and his cohorts.