Life and Death of a Tough Guy (6 page)

The door opened a gambler’s wary inch. In the greenish-yellow space between the edge of the door and the dark wall — Eyes!

“Davey Finkel sent us,” Joey said.

“Finkel?” Inch by inch the door widened, the eyes became part of a face, a fat dark face with a neatly trimmed General Pershing mustache.

“Finkel says you run a straight game. You’re Ganzer, ain’t you?”

“I’m Ganzer — ” dubiously. “You fellers’re kinda young — ”

The Spotter had thought of the answer to this one too. Joey recited, “We got the dough, what more you want. We got the dough.”

To that magic word, the door swung wide and they walked into what had been a kitchen. On the unused rusted coal stove stood a whiskey bottle and glasses. At the kitchen table, Ganzer’s partner, the second house man, was playing solitaire. He raised his brown eyes to the newcomers and then they fell back, heavy as lead pieces, to the rows of cards.

“Wanna wait ‘til the crowd comes?” the man with the mustache asked. He was jacketless, in an immaculate pearl gray vest, his snowy shirt sleeves banded by purple sleeve-garters. Gold cuff links shone in his snowy cuffs; a tie-pin in his necktie, a tiny golden hand whose thumb and forefinger held a diamond. A true gambler, this one, gleaming like a false diamond himself.

“Sure, the night’s young,” Joey said to him.

The man with the mustache laughed. He appealed to the solitaire player: “Sam, you hear? Nothink like a young sport.” He was studying them, smiling. “So you know Finkel? What you doink in dis neighborhood? You’re Irish,” he said to Georgie. “You, you’re a Polack,” he said to Joey.

“Not me,” Joey replied and wondered what he was waiting for. The coast was clear just as the Spotter’d said it’d be. But the Spotter hadn’t foreseen a room spinning like a wheel. Stove, solitaire player, man with mustache. Joey’s eyes shifted from Ganzer’s smiling and suspicious face to his tie-pin, and suddenly as if that golden hand had given him the signal, he swung his arm behind him, heard himself saying. “Stick ‘em up, you guys! Stick ‘em up!” There was a revolver in his fist and the spinning room had come to a stop. With a shocking stop. Still the room was, and yet vibrant, with the iron muscle of that gun of his that had already knocked Sam, the solitaire player’s hands away from his cards and over his head, and tossed Ganzer’s plump hands high toward the mouse gray ceiling.

“Keep ‘em up, sheenie!” Georgie warned as he tapped at the solitaire player’s pockets, pulling out a wallet and a gold watch. Georgie hurried over to Ganzer, tapped him, unbuttoned Ganzer’s back pocket He hauled out a wallet thick with the fading money for this night’s crap game while Joey floated the eye of his revolver from target to target, smiling a little, as if they were only a couple of white ducks in a shooting gallery after all.

“The tie-pin!” he ordered Georgie.

Georgie reached for the golden hand, but it was held in place by a safety-bead.

“Take his tie off!” Joey said.

Ganzer’s face had been a deadpan, but now he ground his teeth as if they had stripped him naked. Georgie stuffed the necktie with the golden hand into his pocket.

The door bell rang. It rang, it rang. The solitaire player sat straight in his chair, but Ganzer’s upper body leaned forward as if he were about to answer the door.

“Stay where you are!” Joey warned them. “Georgie, let the bastid in. I’ll take ‘m!”

Georgie went to the door, he opened it, the newcomer stared at the gun pointing at him. Joey said, “Stick ‘em up!” And turned to see the kitchen table leaping at him, the cards fluttering to the floor, red cards, black cards, the table coming at him.

The solitaire player, playing the table like a hidden ace, charged the kid with the gun. The newcomer grappled with Georgie. Twice Joey pulled the trigger, but the table didn’t drop, coming at him two-legged, headless, like an apparition out of the dark streets of his childhood. He fired a third time and when the horror smashed into him Ganzer plunged forward, grabbing at his gun arm, kicking. A fourth bullet whined into the ceiling and Joey fell to the floor, his groin throbbing from Ganzer’s boot who stooped and yanked the gun out of the kid’s unnerved hand.

From the floor, biting on his lips to keep from crying, he saw Georgie slowly lift his arms and hands over his head, and cursed himself who’d lost his gun to a pack of sheenies.

Ganzer, the man with the gun now, kicked the kid on the floor in the belly. Joey felt his insides break like glass. With a boneless weak hand, he rubbed at his chin. His chin was wet, his fingers smelled of death. He realized he’d puked. Who? He? It couldn’t be true.

“
Momser
— bastard!” Ganzer cursed in Yiddish. He nodded at the man Georgie had let in. “Max, a favor I ask of you. Go outside the door and when the people arrive, tell the people there will be no play tonight. Do me this favor, my friend.”

Georgie had averted his head. He couldn’t look at Joey whose shirt was covered with greenish vomit. Christ, what luck, Georgie was thinking dumbly. He blinked when the gun was aimed at him; he submitted to a search. The solitaire player found a blackjack in his pocket. He squatted down next to Joey, patting at him with the seeking quick flats of his hands, straightened, sniffing at his fingers. There was vomit on them. He walked over to Georgie and toweled his fingers clean on Georgie’s jacket.

Ganzer’s eyes hadn’t shifted from the kid on the floor. The one on the floor was the
momser
with the gun. “The friend of Dave Finkel!” he cried in a passion and kicked once, viciously.

Joey passed out.

“Sam, throw water on the
momser
,” Ganzer said, and he aimed the wheeling gun at Georgie. Sam filled a glass at the sink, walked to the kid on the floor and flung the water out as hard as he could. The glassful flew. A bullet of water, it hit, drenching the kid’s face and stinking shirt.

Joey felt a tearing begin inside his belly. Like a hand, like the golden and revengeful hand of the tie-pin. He pressed his fingers against the tearing, the pain.

“That’s from Finkel!” the man with the gun grimly informed him.
“Verdarmmte Irisher momser!”
Damned Irish bastard, Ganzer had cursed.

Finkel…. Joey, remembered the name, he remembered everything. The gray haze was going, the sharp black and white of memory remained. He peered at the three faces in the room, the two gamblers set against him, murderous. His eyes met Georgie’s guarded eyes, and between one breath and the next, they opened to pity. He’s sorry for me, Joey thought, he’s sorry for me. For an instant he loved Georgie as once he’d loved his mother when only she could shelter him from the street.

Street of Jack the Ripper, of the bad boys, street of fear…. Street of the 1-4-Alls, street of the Badgers, street of love.

He heard the man with the gun questioning him about Finkel and knew that soon he’d have to answer. Answer what? Christ, what was the right answer?

“You coulda killed me!” Ganzer said, as if he’d been the rusher with the table. His dark eyes slanted unbelievingly at the gun in his hand. His meaty shoulders sagged as if only now had he realized how close he’d been to hurt, to death. He stirred himself, glanced at Georgie who was still reaching for the ceiling. “
Schwartzer Irisher choleria
— black Irish cholera — turn ‘round to the wall!”

Don’t tell ‘em a thing, Georgie’s eyes had said in a final message. Now those eyes were gone, Georgie was gone. The broad faceless back, the hands lifted in prayer, wasn’t Georgie.

Joey felt alone.

“Who telled you ‘bout dis game, ‘bout me?” Ganzer questioned him.

Joey said nothing. The solitaire player lit a cigarette, he puffed calmly and then remembering the blackjack, he fetched it out of his pocket, hefted it in his palm. His fingers tightened on the blackjack. He went over to Georgie, swung. Georgie collapsed.

The man with the gun flushed, but before he could speak the solitaire player explained in Yiddish. “I had the wish to give him a little knock, Ganzer. Is that so
schlecht
— bad?”

“
Grubber jung
— thickheaded lout!” Ganzer cursed him.

“For such dirt a clean burial in the river.” The solitaire player wagged his blackjack at Joey and said in English. “How you like it? We shove your head in a milk can and throw you in the river. How you like dat?”

From between the solitaire player’s gold-capped teeth, the river hurled into Joey’s consciousness. He’d heard, and who hadn’t, of the milk can dodge where the head of the guy to be dumped was pushed into the can like a cork into a bottle. He lay there on the floor, weak and in pain, covered with the vomit of defeat, seeing the river of the West Side docks, seeing the rivers of his dreams and nightmare drownings. It was a second of profound revelation, the world splitting into its two naked halves: those who stood strong on their feet, armed with gun and blackjack, and those who lay beaten and afraid on the floor.

“Momser,”
the man with the gun was saying to him. “How you come here?”

Ganzer could have served on a plainclothes squad for he had to perfection the hammer-and-nail technique used by most detectives in questioning suspects. Keep hammering the same question and sooner or later the nail gives.

“How you come to Finkel?”

“Just went in for a drink.”

“Finkel, he telled you ‘bout me?”

“Yeh.”

“Irish
momser
.”

All night long he’d been hearing that chorus of Iri
sh bastard
sung out as if it were a single spitting word
like jewboy
. But in the fury of this night, no words, no insults meant anything. The guy with the gun was the top American of them all.

Ganzer said to him, “I’ll tell you somet’ing. You keep lying, we’ll kill you and dot’s all.”

On the floor, fear became cunning. “I’m Jewish like you. Gimme a chance.”

The man with the gun roared out his disbelief, the man with the blackjack smiled and joked about circumsized
goys
.

“Ich bin a Yid and my nommen is Joey Kasow,”
he said in a rusty Yiddish that was half English.

“In America, the Irishers go to
cheder
,” the man with the blackjack said in Yiddish to Ganzer.
Cheder
— Jewish school. He nodded at Georgie’s back and asked Joey with a bitter humor, “Vot’s his name? Cohn?”

They laughed, the two dark men who had met plenty of Irishmen and Poles in the East Side with a smattering of Yiddish. Then Ganzer said, “How you came here? Who send you?”

“We heard from Finkel — ”

“Enough with Finkel! Who send you?”

He knew now they wouldn’t stop until they had the name out of him, and the name they wanted was Spotter Boyle’s. They were certain it was inside his head and they wanted it on his lips. “Finkel,” he repeated stubbornly.

“Irish liar!”

“I’m not lyin’! He sent me, for God sake, he sent me — ”

“No, no. Not Finkel! Sam, a lil knock, give him.”

He cringed as the man with the blackjack neared him. He had tried being smart, tried to use the “old bean” but it hadn’t worked. “No!” he cried at the man with the blackjack who was leaning over him now, silent as death. For all the talking that had to be done was coming out of the mouth of the man with the gun.

“The las’ time, Irish
momser!
Who sent you?”

Spotter Boyle
.

That was the name they wanted and it almost burst out on his lips, and in anguish and hatred at how close he’d been to turning squealer, he screamed. “Sheenies!” screaming like a madman, for in this kitchen where four bullets had pumped out of his gun, in this blackjack kitchen of vomited pain, there was only room for a squealer or a madman.

The blackjack whanged down at him, his arms sprang up, and the blackjack caught him on his forearm. His breath exploded in his lungs like a brown paper bag blown up by a kid and broken with a quick clap. The man with the blackjack jabbed his weapon like an exploring left, feinting like a boxer. Hit!

It was the little knock ordered by the man with the gun who said, “The las’ time, Irish
momser!
”

Full tilt into a wall he’d run — that was how the knock had felt. Joey recovered slowly, he looked up helplessly at the two faces, the two weapons. The blackjack, the gun.

“Who send you?” the gun was asking.

Joey shook his head, tears in his eyes. The gun said, “Sam, a lil knock.”

“Wait!” he screamed, names forming in his brain, other names.

“Who send you?”

“The Hudson Dusters,” Joey said, naming the gang below the Pennsy tracks.

He had silenced that pitiless
who send you
. He said, “We’re from the Hudson Dusters. The Hudson Dusters, the Hudson Dusters….”

The gun listened. “Sam, a lil knock,” the gun said.

The blackjack lifted and the impulse to confess he was lying quivered on his lips, and then with all his might he cried. “What more yuh want, yuh damn sheenies! The Dusters, Johnny Murtagh sent us!” He’d named the leader of the Hudson Dusters. “Johnny Murtagh sent us — ”

This wall hit harder than all the others.

His mind emptied of all fears and doubts, of madness and cunning, loyalty and betrayal, and he drifted away on a river wider than the river of the Hudson Dusters and the Badgers, limitless between the fragile banks of human brain and human temple.

“Least you didn’t rat,” the Spotter had admitted when the pair of beaten-up kids dragged back out of the East Side. Just the same he bawled Joey out for giving his real name. “Suppose them sheenies get after Johnny Murtagh and he starts huntin’ the guys in his gang what give him away? He’s got no Joey Kasow in the Dusters, but we have. All we need’s the Dusters fightin’ the Badgers! You guys stay outa sight a while. Don’t come near me!”

It was Georgie who had said, “Joey, les hobo a while. I always wanted to see the country.”

“Might as well,” Joey had answered bitterly This treatment of the Spotter’s hit below the belt; he hadn’t expected a gold medal exactly, but they hadn’t ratted and they’d saved their skins into the bargain. “Nobody loves a loser!” he announced to Georgie as if he’d discovered this fact in person.