Life and Death of a Tough Guy (23 page)

Tunafish laughed with appreciation. Pete over at an end table pocketed a silver cigarette lighter.

Joey saw him. “Put that back!” he ordered.

“Aw, Joey.”

“Put that back!”

Milty the Poet faced the guy he now knew was in charge.

They looked at each other. “Give me a chance. I’ll convince you, you’ll see, you’ll see!” His eyes had no glassy centers of fear now; his eyes were like two wet spots on the white face.

Joey turned his face away. “Get goin’. Christ, get goin’!”

The game was over. Pete came at Milty the Poet quick as a snapped knifeblade, the Tunafish glided over soft and feminine while Georgie rushed to the duffle bag, opened it.

Milty the Poet didn’t try to run or fight. He dropped to his knees and gently, as if praying, he placed his hands on Joey’s shoes. Joey shuddered, stepped backwards. Pete sneaked his fingers inside the collar of the man on the floor and Tunafish patted him all over searching for a weapon; he didn’t expect to find any, but Tunafish always played it cozy.

“What do you want?” Milty the Poet screamed and then he tried to smile as if it were all a joke they would share with him in another second. In that magic second beyond life and death when they would all sit down and have a drink together, the killers and the killed.

That smile wavered on his lips, only he’d forgotten how to smile, his lips giving them all not a smile but its imitation. “You’re choking me!” he wailed but still he smiled.

“Don’t choke’m Pete!” Joey said sharply.

“I didn’t do nothing,” Milty the Poet shrilled. “Didn’t Olsen explain to you?” he asked Joey in a fearful and yet hoping voice as if still deep down he knew that it was all a joke. Oh, God it had to be a joke. “Didn’t Olsen explain? Olsen, Olsen,” the man on the floor repeated as if the name,
Olsen
, were his salvation on this earth.

“Hurry it up, Georgie!” Joey yelled. “God damn you! It’s your God damn job so get goin’.”

Georgie got up from the duffle bag. He had taken out towels, several pairs of new cotton gloves and three ice picks, all of which he had arranged neatly like a surgeon.

Milty the Poet sobbed, he tried to crawl to Joey. Tunafish planted his foot down on Milty the Poet’s left hand. Pete tightened his hold on the man’s collar. Georgie approached. He stooped, he clipped Milty the Poet on the side of the jaw, a stunner rather than a k.o.

Milty the Poet groaned. “God, what’d I do. Didn’t do nothing, didn’t do nothing.”

None of them had ever done a thing. Maybe a little case of an itchy finger on a trigger, or a little grabbing up of territory that wasn’t to be grabbed, maybe a little trouble, a little stool pigeoning, but nothing really serious that couldn’t be fixed. For when a man smells his death, he feels that nothing he has ever done is so big that it can’t be fixed. For death alone can’t be fixed. Everything else can or ought to be.

“I didn’t do nothing. Honest to God, on my mother’s grave, I swear I was with you boys all the time, not with the Dutchman. Ask Olsen, he’ll tell you. Go get Olsen, you don’t believe me. Get Ol — ”

Georgie hit him hard behind the ear. He fell to the floor, he should’ve stayed there — it was a real wallop — but the death he smelled roused him like some potent smelling salt. “Olsen!” he screamed. “Olsen! Olsen, he can’t do this to me!” he babbled as if it were all Olsen’s fault. Double-crossing The Office in New York was Olsen’s fault, the Dutchman was Olsen’s fault, everything was Olsen’s fault.

The man in the gray sweater and the plaid knickers carried all the faults in the world on his shoulders.

“Georgie you big bastid, quit foolin’ around!” Joey cursed him.

Georgie stared reproachfully at Joey like a hunting dog bawled out for no good reason. Then he dashed over to the duffle bag as Milty the Poet tried to get to his hands and knees. The Tunafish raised one foot, pushed shoe leather against Milty the Poet’s face, pushing rather than kicking him off balance. Milty the Poet tumbled, but his eyes swifter than his falling body seemed to tear upwards out of their sockets, focusing in a last agonized appeal on the man giving the orders.

“I didn’t do nothing, God I didn’t do nothing!” he screamed.

Joey wanted to say: Nobody’s blaming you. And wasn’t that a crazy idea! He couldn’t stand the sight of the guy on the floor, turning to get him out of his eyes. To see Georgie pulling on a pair of clean cotton gloves, picking up one of the ice picks and two of the towels. Almost, Joey didn’t recognize Georgie now, and then he recognized him all right. It was the Georgie of the jobs, his face smooth and his lips soft as if about to smile. Joey’s heart gave a wild skip. Christ! Where was that other bastard? Pete Bowers? He searched the room for him, anything to forget the guy on the floor. Tunafish had to kick him this time, the tip of his shoe caught Milty the Poet in the ribs. Where was that Pete bastard? Then guessed Pete must be heisting everything loose in the other rooms, and thought wearily: Let him, let him, the hell with it.

Georgie walked to the half-conscious man. First he spread the two thick towels on the floor. Then he lifted him onto the towels, sitting down on his stomach and reaching for the ice pick nearby on the floor.

“Georgie!” Joey called. Georgie didn’t hear him, his eyes almost as bright as the steel point of the ice pick in his white gloved hand.

What’s eating me tonight, Joey wondered, exhausted. He felt dead beat as if his brain and his heart had been scooped out. For he hadn’t given a damn one way or another on all the other nights. A mark was a mark, a job was a job.

“Georgie, finish him!” Joey shouted. Georgie didn’t hear him. Joey ran to him, he seized Georgie’s shoulder. “I said finish’m up!”

Georgie stared at him like a kid scolded by some adult for pulling the wings and legs off a fly. “Okay, okay” he muttered and studied the mouthing spitty face under him. “Why they call you Milty the Poet?” he asked. “Why they call you Milty the Poet?”

Joey stood there helplessly. Almost he felt like slugging Georgie, but he was aware that the Tunafish was watching him. The Tunafish who would be whispering in Charley Valinchi’s ear: That Joey’s not so tough. Know what he done up there up in Solomon County….

“Make rhymes if you’re Milty the Poet. Lemme hear you make rhymes! Make rhymes!” And as Milty the Poet screamed the rhyme of his approaching death, the point of the ice pick plunged down into his heart.

• • •

Up in the Spotter’s private office at the Elwood Realty, Joey felt the chilly Sensation of dreaming the same dream over and over again. As if all his life he’d been asking the Spotter for one damn break after another. Not that he’d gotten around to himself as yet, for like the Salvation Army, he was first preaching Georgie. “Charley Valinchi, he had this talk with me how Georgie’s makin’ a pain outa himself, Spotter,” Joey heard himself saying in the voice of a true blue pal. “So I says to myself, ‘Joey, better see the Spotter yourself and get the story straight!’ ”

“The guy’s softenin’ up. That’s all there is to it,” the Spotter answered.

“That’s just what Charley said, but it’s not so. He boozes, yeh, and sometimes he goes off his nut a lil. I warned him good.”

“You was always a boy scout about Georgie.”

“Maybe, but when you get right down to it, how many of the old Badgers you got left?” Joey’s eyes were downcast as he made this pitch at the Spotter’s guarded heart. Yes, sir, a boy scout. But what he’d come up here for was to see if he could get the hell out of the enforcement racket. Georgie wasn’t the only one softening up. There was a certain party by name of Joey Case. Something’d happened to him on that last job…. “Not many of the old Badgers left, Spotter. There’s you and me and Georgie.” He lifted his eyes and the chill deepened, for the man at the shiny desk didn’t look like an oldtime Badger but more like a businessman in his dark gray suit, white shirt, and silver and black necktie. A businessman? Joey wasn’t sure. More like a walking corpse. The Spotter’s shrunken neck was swimming inside the white collar, the pale eyes like dulled metal, the skin so thin it seemed that a rub could break it and have the blood coming out. Joey despaired of making any kind of a dent when the Spotter replied.

“You’re right, Joey. There’s maybe eight or nine Badgers left all told.”

It was true as gospel. Damn few of the old Badgers were kicking around. Some’d burned in the chair, some the coppers’d thrown into the can. Bootlegger wars’d put more than one good man on the marble slab. Like Sarge Killigan shot down in the war with the Fallons. And what’d ever become of Fallon? And Billy Gahagan? Or was it Billy Gavagan? “Was Billy before your time, Joey?” the Spotter asked. A lot of Billys had come and gone and the Spotter just couldn’t keep track any more. “Good guys,” the Spotter said. “They were all good guys. Remember Clip Haley? He had to get himself killed in a brawl.”

But neither of them wasted a tear on Tom Quinn or John Terry and why should they? Quinn and Terry hadn’t been Badgers. As for Bughead Moore, a Badger from way back, they both remembered him, and the Spotter was tempted to bring the Bug up, but good manners was on the menu this morning.

“How you gettin’ along with Charley Valinchi?” the Spotter said at last as Joey had been praying he would.

“Swell, Spotter. He’s a swell guy. But why should I kid you, Spotter. I’m nothin’ there. It’s close to two years I been with Charley and long enough. I remember when you first brought me to see Clip Haley.”

“That’s ten, twelve years ago.”

“Closer to fourteen. I was fifteen then, Spotter, a kid and you was already a big man. Spotter, I’d like to be back with you.”

Almost the Spotter weakened — Joey sensed it — but then the moment passed. The Spotter wasn’t giving a thing away. All the Spotter had to spare, as one old-time Badger with another, was a smile and a promise, two commodities on the discount that skidding depression year.

That night, as the Spotter lay in his bed at the Hotel Berkeley, he counted up the old-time Badgers. Not many left, the Spotter thought. I shouldn’t’ve given Joey the brush-off. No? Why not? Why feel sorry for him? Who’s feeling sorry for me? The hell with him. He’s getting soft. We all get soft. Me, it’s the Bum Ticker. Two attacks the last year. Four weeks in bed, the last one. Soft, soft, all of us, one damn way or another. That Joey’s smart, too smart, the way he dragged in the Badgers. He’s worried and that’s not so smart. He better stop worrying. It’ll rot his brains out, rot his guts. You can be the toughest guy in town, but if you keep worrying, you’ll go soft. I’ll be cutting up all the clips I got on No-Gun Joey yet…. Must be that redhead of his softening him up. Why’s he stick to her all these years? He don’t love her. That kid’s like me, he’s got no real love in him. He never had time for real love, always on the make. But he sticks to her, that’s the mystery….

• • •

The day after Joey went out of town again — “I have to go to Cleveland,” he had said — Sadie Madofsky walked up Ninth Avenue, the El overhead a dusty blue color as the summer twilight deepened and the lights came on in the stores. Down here at this hour, in this neighborhood of broken slate sidewalks, the women in their any-old dresses, the men in sweaters that might once have been red or blue but now had a grayish look, the depression look, Sadie was sharply aware of her freshly dry-cleaned dress, her legs in silk stockings, her feet in lizardskin shoes.

About once a month, she would walk through the old neighborhood, playing a strange game with herself, a game in which she pretended to be visiting her father and brother. She would turn up Twenty-Fourth Street, her nerves stretched so tight she would almost sober, peering into her father’s tailor store as she passed, never going inside or even thinking of doing so, flitting by, a plump redheaded ghost in good clothes.

She had bought her right to play this game of conscience. One afternoon about a year ago as she was returning to her hotel with one of her hotel girl friends, she had happened to see a dispossessed family crossing Broadway. A man, a woman, three children, all of them loaded down with goods, blankets, pots, satchels, the littlest girl carrying a doll. Maybe they were walking crosstown to move in with some relative beyond Third Avenue? Maybe they were going to the relief station? Sadie didn’t know, but she had suddenly wondered about her father and brother and what the depression was doing to them. So taking a dollar from her bag, she gave it to the woman, and when she was in her own room, she had immediately sat down at the desk, still wearing her hat and coat, and written a letter to her father. He never replied. The weeks, the drinking weeks, floated by, and she would recall her unanswered letter as she sat in her room, a nice big glass of sherry in her hand, remember and forget as her thoughts climbed the fences of the years. All the fences were beginning to look alike to her. Like the fences in the backyards of Chelsea and Hells Kitchen, their paint long gone, but always with some freshly chalked message about some Billy who loved some Gracie. As she had once loved Joey…. With a glass of sherry in her hand, she could forget he was seeing women on the side, forget that she was unmarried, childless, separated from her family, forget, forget, forget…. Then she could smile gently to herself like a baby, and in a sense she had become her own baby: a baby to whom she faithfully fed the bottle. And nothing but the best, too. Wine smooth as a mother’s milk.

But there were days when the wine hadn’t helped or the movies or the long conversations with her girl friends, when the world had grinned at her through the windows of the Hotel Delmore like a hateful peeping Tom. She would remember there was such a thing as a depression and that millions of people were out of jobs. And who knew how her father and brother were getting along. She had written a second letter, this time to her brother Herman, omitting her name and return address from the outside flap:

Dear Herman,

How are you? I hope you and Papa are all right. I hope business isn’t bad but if it is, let me know. Herman, I wrote Papa, but he didn’t answer. Did he tell you? You must be in college. Are you? Write me here at the Hotel Delmore….