Legs (22 page)

A package came which the police traced, thinking
someone was trying to make good on the numerous threats that Jack
would never leave the hospital alive. An eight-year-old girl from
Reading, Pennsylvania, had sent it—an ounce of holy oil from the
shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre.

"I read about Mr. Diamond being shot and how his
arm is paralyzed, and I have been taught in school to help those who
are down and out," the child told police.

"Punk kid," Jack
said. "What does she mean down and out?"

* * *

On the street in front of Polyclinic little clusters
of Jack's fans would gather. A sightseeing bus would pass and the
announcer would say, "On your right, folks, is where the
notorious Jewish gangster Legs Diamond is dying," and all would
crane but none would ever see the lip quivering as he slept or the
few gray hairs among all the chestnut, or the pouches of experience
under his eyes, or the way his ears stuck out, and how his eyes were
separated by a vertical furrow of care just above the nose, or that
nose: hooked, Grecian, not Jewish, not Barrym0re's either, merely a
creditable piece of work he'd kept from damage, now snorting air. He
was twelve pounds under his normal one fifty-two and still five ten
and a half while I sat beside his bed with his last will and
testament in my pocket for his signature. And he wheezed just like
other Americans in their sleep.

I'd been fumbling through a prayer book on Jack's
bedside table while he slept and I had turned up a credo I no more
accepted as mere coincidence than I did the congruence of his and my
pleasure in Rabelais; which is to say I suspected a pattern hovering
over our relationship.

The credo read:

You work much harm in these parts,
destroying and slaying God's creatures without his leave; and not
only have you slain and devoured beasts of the field but you have
dared to destroy and slay men made to the image of God: wherefore you
are worthy of the gallows as a most wicked thief and murderer; all
folk cry out and murmur against you. But I would make peace, Brother
Wolf, between them and you, and they shall obtain for you so long as
you live, a continual sustenance from the men of this city so that
you shall no more suffer hunger, for well I know that you have done
all this harm to satisfy your hunger ....

This paraphrased perfectly my private plot to forget
Charlie Northrup the way everybody else was forgetting him. He was
gone off page one, only a subordinate clause in Jack's delightful
story. Charlie, thanks for giving us so much of your time. Such fun
having a cadaver in the scenario, especially one we can't locate.
But, Charlie, please excuse us while we say a little prayer for Jack.

I remember also the passing thought that maybe it
would be better if Jack never woke up, and then I remember seeing him
wide awake, swathed in hospital-white hygienic purity.

"Hey, Marcus," he said, "great to wake
up to a friendly face instead of some snooping cop. How's your
ballocks?"

"Friendly toward ladies," I said, and when
he laughed he I winced with pain.

"I been dreaming," he said. "Talking
to God. No joke."

"Uh-oh."

"Why the hell is it I'm not dead? You figured it
out?"

"They were bum shooters? You're not ready to
die?"

"No, it's because I'm in God's grace."

"Is that a fact? God told you that?"

"I'm convinced. I thought I was just lucky back
in '25 when they hit me. Then when Augie got it, I thought maybe I
was as strong as a man can be, you know, in health. But now I think
it's because God wants me to live."

He was not quite sitting up in bed, his prayer book
there all soft and black on the white table and his rosary twined
around the corner post of his bed, shiny black beads capturing the
white tubing. Did he appreciate the contrast? I'm convinced he
created it.

"You've got the disease of sanctity," I
told him.

"'
No, that's not it."

"You've got it the way dogs get fleas. It's
common after assassination attempts. It accounts for the closeness
between the church and aging dictators. It's a kind of infestation.
Look at this room."

Alice had hung a crucifix over the bed and set a
statue of the virgin on the windowsill. The room had been
priest-ridden since Jack moved into it, the first a stranger who came
to hear his confession and inquired who shot him. Even through
quasi-delirium Jack recognized a Devane stooge. The next, a Baltimore
chum of Alice's who dropped in without the press learning his name,
comforted Jack, blessed him through opiated haze, then told newsmen:
"Don't ask me to tell you anything about that poor suffering boy
in there." And then came good Father Skelly from Cairo, indebted
to Jack for the heavenly music in his church.

"God won't forget that you gave us a new organ,"
said the priest to the resurrecting Jack.

"Will God do the same for us when ours gets
old?" Jack asked.

The priest heard his confession amid the two bouquets
of roses Alice renewed every three days until Jack said the joint
smelled like a wake, and so she replaced them with a potted geranium
and a single red wax rose in a vase on the bedside table.

"I thought you'd given up the holy smoke,"
I said. "I thought you had something else going for you. "

"What the hell am I supposed to do after people
keep shooting me and I don't die? I'm beginning to think I'm being
saved. "

"For dessert? Looks classic to me, Jack. Shoot a
man full of bullets and he's a candidate for blessedness."

"What about you and your communion breakfasts?
Big-shot Catholic."

"Don't be misled. That's just part of being an
Albany Democrat."

"So you're a Democrat and I got fleas. But it
turns out I don't mind them."

"I can see that, and it all ties in. Confession,
sanctity, priests. Yes, it goes with having yourself shot."

"Come again?"

"The shooting. I've assumed all along that you
rigged it."

"You're not making sense."

"Could it have happened without your approval?
You saw them alone, you know what they were. I know what such
go-betweens can be, and I'm not even in your business. And you never
had any intention of turning over that money. You asked for exactly
what you got. Am I exaggerating?' '

"You got some wild imagination, pal. I see why
you score in court."

But when he looked at me, that furrow of care between
his eyes turned into a question mark. He ran his fingertips along the
adhesive tape of his chest bandage, pleasurably some might say, as he
looked at the author of the bold judgment. Jack Diamond having
himself shot? Ridiculous. He fingered the rosary entwined over his
right shoulder on the bed, played the beads with his fingertips as if
they were keys on an instrument that would deliver the music he
wanted to hear. Organ music. A sound like Skelly's new machine. No
words to it, just the music they play at benediction after the high
mass. Yes, there are words. From a long time ago. The "Tantum
Ergo." All Latin words you never forget, but who the hell knows
what they mean? "
Tantum ergo sacramentum,
veneremur cernui; et antiquum documentum, Novo cedat ritui.
"

A bridge.

A certain light.

Something was happening to
him, Jack now knew.

* * *

"I want you to talk for me," he said. He
had recovered from my impertinence, was restoring the client-attorney
relation, putting me in my place. "I want you to talk to some
people upstate. A few judges and cops, couple of businessmen, and
find out what they think of my setup now. Fogarty's handling it, but
he can't talk to those birds. He's too much of a kid. I got through
to all those bastards personally, sent them whiskey, supported their
election campaigns, gave 'em direct grease. All them bums owe me
favors, but the noise in the papers about me, I don't know now
whether it scares 'em or not."

" 'Pardon me, your honor, but are you still in
the market for a little greasy green as a way of encouraging Jack
Diamond with his bootlegging, his shakedowns, and his quirky habit of
making competitors vanish?' Is that my question?"

"Any fucking way you like to put it, Marcus.
You're the talker. They all know my line of work. It'll be simpler if
I still got the okay, but I don't really give a goddamn whether they
like it or not. Jack Diamond's got a future in the Catskills."

"Don't you think you ought to get straight
first?"

"You don't understand, Marcus. You can carve out
a whole goddamn empire up there if you do it right. Capone did it in
Cicero. Sure there's a lot of roads to cover, but that's all right. I
don't mind the work. But if I slow now, somebody else covers those
roads. And it's not like I got all the time in the world. The
guineas'll be after me now."

"You think they won't ride up to the Catskills?"

"Sure, but up there I'll be ready. That's my
ball park." I've often vacillated about whether Jack's life was
tragic, comic, a bit of both, or merely a pathetic muddle. I admit
the muddle theory moved me most at this point. Here he was,
refocusing his entire history, as if it had just begun, on the dream
of boundless empire. It was a formidable readjustment and I
considered it desperate, but maybe others would find it only confused
and ridiculous. In any case, given the lengths he was willing to go
to carry it off, it laid open his genuine obsession.

I might have credited the whole conversation about
the Catskills to Jack's extraordinary greed if it hadn't been for one
thing he said to me. It took me back to 1928 when Jack was arrested
with his mob in a pair of elegant offices on the fourteenth and
fifteenth floor of the Paramount Building, right on Times Square.
Some address. Some height. Loftiness is my business, said the
second-story man. Now Jack gave me a wink and ran his hand sensuously
along the edge of the chest bandage that was giving him such
pleasure. "Marcus," he said, "who else do you know
collects mountains?"

I've been in Catskill maybe a dozen and a half times,
most of those visits brief, on behalf of Jack. I don't really know
the place, never needed to. It's a nice enough village, built on the
west bank of the Hudson River about a hundred or so miles north of
the Hotsy Totsy Club. Henry Hudson docked near this spot to trade
with the Indians and then went on up to Albany, just like Jack. The
village had some five thousand people in this year of 1931 I'm
writing about. It had a main street called Main Street, a Catskill
National Bank, a Catskill Savings Bank, a Catskill Hardware and so
on. Formal social action happened at the IOOF, the Masonic Temple,
the Rebekah Lodge, the American Legion, the PTA, the Women's
Progressive Club, the White Shrine, the country club, the Elks.
Minstrel shows drew a good audience and visiting theater companies
played at the Brooks Opera House. The local weekly serialized a new
Curwood novel at the end of 1931, which Jack would have read avidly
if he'd not been elsewhere. The local daily serialized what Jack was
doing in lieu of reading Curwood.

Catskill was, and still is, the seat of Greene
County, and just off Main Street to the north is the four-story
county jail, where Oxie Feinstein was the most celebrated resident on
this particular day. Before I was done with Jack, there would be a
few more stellar inmates.

The Chamber of Commerce billed the village as the
gateway to the Catskills. The Day Line boats docked at Catskill
Landing, and tourists were made conscious of the old Dutch traditions
whenever they were commercially applicable. A Dutch friend of mine
from law school, Warren Van Deusen, walked me through the city one
day and showed me, among other points of interest, the home of Thomas
Cole on Spring Street. Cole was the big dad of the
nineteenth-century's Hudson River school of painting, and one of his
works "Prometheus Bound," a classic landscape, I remember
particularly well, for it reminded me of Jack. There was this giant,
dwarfed by the landscape, chained to his purple cliff in loincloth
and flowing beard (emanating waves of phlogiston, I'll wager) and
wondering when the eagle was going to come back and gnaw away a few
more of his vitals.

I called Van Deusen, who was involved in Republican
county politics, as a way of beginning my assignment for Jack. In the
early days of our law practice, his in Catskill, mine in Albany, I
recommended him to a client who turned into very decent money for
Van, and he'd been trying for years to repay the favor. I decided to
give him the chance and told him to take me to lunch, which he did.
We dined among men with heavy watch chains and heavier bellies.
Warren, still a young man, had acquired a roll of well-to-do burgher
girth himself since I'd last seen him, and when we strolled together
up Main Street, I felt I was at the very center of America's
well-fed, Depression complacency. It was an Indian summer day, which
lightened the weight of my heavy question to Warren, that being:
"What does this town think of Jack Diamond'?"

"A hero, if you can believe it," Van said.
"But a hero they fear, a hero they wished lived someplace else."