Roscoe (10 page)

Roscoe drove twenty-five minutes to Patsy’s summer place to give him the news. It was situated on a Helderberg mountainside that gave a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
vista of Patsy’s Garden of Eden, the city and county of Albany. Patsy’s father had built a cedar-shingled summer bungalow on the land when he was sheriff. When the old man died, Patsy
winterized the place, added a second story, built outbuildings to breed fighting chickens and a pit where they could fight. In the years after the Party took City Hall, the house became the summer
hub of political action. Principal Albany Democrats made regular pilgrimages here to listen to Patsy the oracle tell them what they should think tomorrow.

Wally Mitchell, an ex-heavyweight who knocked down Jim Jeffries and was now Patsy’s driver and bodyguard, unlocked the chain across the driveway and waved Roscoe in. Such security had been
the norm since a homegrown gang of bootleggers tried to shoot Bindy and later kidnapped his son, Charlie Boy McCall. Roscoe saw Bindy’s custom-made, bulletproof black Packard, and he parked
alongside it. He stepped out into the sunshine of a clear August afternoon and could see everything, from the beginning of the patchwork fruited plain at the base of the mountains, all the way in
to the tower of Albany’s splendid City Hall and the Al Smith State Office Building, Albany’s modest skyscraper. He saw the shadow of a cloud moving fast across the plain below, but in
the clear, blue-white sky he could find no cloud. He saw Patsy and Bindy near the chicken coops and went to them.

“How fare the chickens of this world?” Roscoe asked.

“Chickens is chickens,” Patsy said. “Fight ’em and eat ’em.”

“The received wisdom of history,” Roscoe said. “Don’t you fellows have a main coming up?”

“Tomorrow night, up in Fogarty’s,” Bindy said.

“Been weedin’ out my sick ones,” Patsy said, a chicken under his arm. “One of my tough guys’s got the megrims, feedin’ it too much. And this guy got the
chicken pox fightin’ his friends. His head’s pecked all to hell.”

The McCall brothers had raised chickens since early adolescence in North Albany. Later, when they moved to Arbor Hill, Patsy kept his coops in a stable next to his house on Colonie Street, but
as the chickens grew in number he was deemed a neighborhood nuisance and told to get rid of them. A politically connected neighbor let him put his coops on the Albany County Courthouse roof, the
beginning of Patsy’s life above the law.

Patsy put his poxy chicken back on the walk and led the way to the kitchen. Wally Mitchell was lifting a blue roasting pan out of the oven, two cooked chickens in it. He put forks under the
chickens and moved them onto a white stoneware platter. The house smelled like Sunday.

“Cook those yourself, Wally?” Roscoe asked. Wally’s left ear, from heavy use by others, looked like a partly eaten chicken wing.

“I don’t cook,” Wally said. “I do the heavy liftin’.”

Rose Carbone, Patsy’s full-time housekeeper ever since Patsy’s wife, Flora, died, stood at the sink washing a pot.

“Did you make the gravy?” Patsy asked Rose.

“I did not and I would not and you know it,” she said.

“Good,” said Patsy.

Rose went out of the kitchen and Patsy said, “She’s all right but she can’t make gravy.” He took a tin of flour from the pantry and put the roasting pan with its
drippings on the gas stove and lit the burner. He mixed the flour with some water, poured it into the pan as the drippings began to boil, added salt, pepper, a splash of Kitchen Bouquet, and water
from a kettle, then stirred the mix with a wooden spoon. Roscoe knew better than to try for Patsy’s attention when he was cooking, so he sat at the kitchen table to watch a ritual that dated
to their adolescent fishing trips, when Patsy cooked in self-defense against Roscoe’s and Elisha’s life-threatening concoctions; and again in the army in 1918, when shrapnel knocked
Patsy off his horse; and after his leg healed they made him a cook’s helper. Patsy poured the thickened brown gravy into a bowl and set it beside the chickens.

Bindy came out of the bathroom into the kitchen. “You see that stuff in the
Sentinel
?” he asked Roscoe.

“I have some serious news on that,” Roscoe said.

Patsy nodded and put down his spoon and the three men walked through Patsy’s workout room toward the parlor. Patsy punched the hanging bag and bent it in half. He sat in his parlor rocker,
feet crossed on the floor, a book,
Hard Times,
open on his reading table, and under it the
Sentinel.
His brown fedora sat on a straight chair by the door under the holy-water font,
which was a Christmas gift from Father Tooher, pastor of St. Joseph’s.

Roscoe sat in an armchair facing Patsy and Bindy, who weighed three pounds less than a horse and made Roscoe feel thin. Bindy sat on half the sofa, eating peanuts from a silver dish.

“I just punched out Roy Flinn,” Roscoe said.

“Nice,” Patsy said.

“That little pimple,” Bindy said.

“Veronica’s a nervous wreck. I only went down to yell at Roy, but then he said Elisha owned a block of whorehouses. So I hit him.”

“Good,” Patsy said.

“He said we’re in for a dogfight with the Governor. What do you make of that, Bindy?” Control of brothels and gambling had been Bindy’s responsibility since the 1921
takeover.

“Dogfight?” Bindy said. “I’ll tell him about dogfight. I’ll break both his legs. Put the Night Squad on him, Pat. Break both his legs.”

“You hear anything about raiding the whores?” Roscoe asked.

“They been snooping around Division Street,” Bindy said, “but it don’t feel like a raid.”

“Shouldn’t we close the whores down to be safe?”

“How will anybody get laid?” Bindy asked.

“Tell the boys to have a go at their wives,” Roscoe said.

“We’ll see a lot of rape.”

“This isn’t forever,” Roscoe said. “Just till we see the whites of their eyes.”

“If this goes public I’ll catch hell from the Bishop,” Patsy said. “Wouldn’t hurt to give the girls a vacation.”

“How could Roy say that about Elisha?” Roscoe wondered.

“We had a big buy-up in ’33,” Patsy said.

“I remember that,” Roscoe said, “but not Elisha.”

“You were in Kentucky, screwing around with racehorses,” Patsy said.

“It happened fast,” Bindy said. “Income from the madams fell two thousand in two weeks, two owners died, one left town, and three houses went dark. I told Patsy we oughta own
them places, so we bought ’em. And kept buyin’.”

“Elisha bought them?” Roscoe asked.

“He organized the investors,” Patsy said.

Bankers panting to do business with the city could prove their sincerity by investing in whorehouse real estate, and lawyers could do the same by representing the whores when they were
periodically arrested to put their pictures in the files, and to justify the Vice Squad’s existence. Within two months the neighborhood of the whores was stabilized through dummy
corporations, and whoredom also had new friends at court.

“Roy said Elisha owned the houses,” Roscoe said.

“He never owned ’em,” Patsy said.

“I wonder if his name is on any deeds.”

“He used front people.”

“But can they prove he was behind it?”

“I don’t know how,” Patsy said. “And who’s gonna indict a dead man? They want us up against the wall for Alex’s re-election. What I don’t get is where
Roy Flinn borrowed the balls to take us on.”

“Maybe he wants to get back at us for what happened to Artie.”

“Artie?” said Patsy. “That’s fifteen years ago.”

“Artie died six months ago in Poughkeepsie,” Roscoe said. “Maybe it affected Roy. He didn’t even want a death notice in the papers.”

“Where’s his leverage?” Patsy asked.

“He’s cozy with the Governor’s gang, so maybe he feels protected,” Roscoe said. “Also, his paper’s heavy with ads from outside Albany—summer hotels,
nightclubs, restaurants, dude ranches that don’t worry about pressure from us.”

“Send a fire inspector down to that firetrap of his,” Bindy said. “Make him spend thirty grand to bring it up to code. He’ll come around.”

“Bad scene,” Roscoe said. “Harassing the press, and the patriotic press at that. There are other ways.”

“Name a few,” Patsy said.

“Take over his block. You did it with the whorehouses.”

“The whole block?”

“It’s a small block. Condemn one side to widen it for improved traffic flow, put in new sewer pipes. Pay Roy a quarter of what his building’s worth, settle sweet with
the—what?—three, four other landlords? Then we own the block. When Roy is gone and we’ve got the property, cancel the project.”

“Condemn the block,” Patsy said. “Goddamn it, Roscoe, you are one twisted, beautiful sonofabitch.”

“That’s what my mother always said.”

“You want some chicken?”

“Of course I want some chicken.”

“The gravy’s good.”

“Life without gravy is not life,” Roscoe said.

As they went back to the kitchen for lunch, O.B. called to report that Roy Flinn and his lawyer were filing a third-degree assault charge against Roscoe. Roy’s eyebrow and lip were badly
split and his nose was broken.

“Have Rosy open court at two o’clock for the arraignment,” Roscoe told O.B. “Tell him to set my bail at four hundred to make Roy feel good.”

“You’ll be here, like an upstanding citizen,” O.B. said.

“Of course I’ll be there. Two o’clock. On the dot.”

Patsy looked at his watch. “Two o’clock’s too early,” he said. “You gotta eat your chicken.”

“Make that three o’clock,” Roscoe told O.B.

In Police Court, Roscoe could hear Roy Flinn’s nose throbbing under its bandage as they stood before the bench to hear Rosy Rosenberg, whom Roscoe and Patsy had put on
that bench, read the law relating to assault, and then set bail at four hundred dollars, “in default of which you will be remanded to Albany County jail.” Roscoe smiled at Rosy, waved
at Roy, and paid the four.

Horse Talk

They were in the east parlor of Tivoli when Gilby read the item about Pamela in the
Sentinel
and asked Veronica, “Is it true she’s my mother?”

Veronica told him, “I’m your mother. She gave you up before you were born.”

“Now she wants me back.”

“She can’t have you, and she won’t get you.”

“Who’s my father?”

“He’s dead,” Veronica said. “You didn’t know him.”

“I don’t know anything,” Gilby said, and he went out onto the porch.

“Where are you going? Listen to me!” But he kept walking. She caught up with him. “Did I ever tell you what your Grandma Julia used to say? ‘Patience and perseverance
took the snail to Jerusalem.’ ”

Gilby shrugged.

“When she was a girl,” Veronica said, “she’d throw a penny off the bridge into Washington Park Lake and say, ‘I’m going to have a big, big house and a butler
named Johnny,’ and she did.”

Gilby stared at her.

“She only went to third grade in school, but she owned the world. I’m talking about overcoming problems. Do you see that? It’s like breeding a champion Thoroughbred. Your
father and I always wanted that for you. You have money and brains and love, and you can’t give that newspaper story any importance. What does the stupid
Sentinel
know about
champions?”

Gilby went onto the back deck, vaulted the railing with one arm, and ran down the drive toward the stables.

“Gilby!” Veronica yelled. “Listen to me! I want to tell you about this.” But he would not look back. She went down the steps of the deck and ran after him as fast as her
high heels would allow. When she reached the second stable, he was saddling Jazz Baby. Ticky Blake, who for twenty-two years had trained Fitzgibbon horses, stopped brushing Mr. Bantry,
Veronica’s bay, and listened.

“Gilby, your life won’t change,” Veronica said. “I won’t let it. I’m a strong person. Do you believe I’m strong? Well, I am, and we have powerful
friends in all the courts, and I have more money than your aunt does to fight this, and I’ve won every fight I ever had with her.”

Gilby, in his white sneakers, stepped up into the saddle.

“Gilby,” Veronica said, “talk to me.”

The boy nudged Jazz Baby onto the road and into open pasture, toward the trail through the western woods.

“Saddle Mr. Bantry for me, Ticky,” she said, and she ran to the house and up to her bedroom and pulled herself out of her dress and slip and shoes. She stepped into her riding
britches and boots, then shoved her arms into a pullover shirt, and double-timed down the stairs with her hair flying, a
laissez-faire
beauty when she wanted to be. She mounted Mr. Bantry
and rode at a gallop into the woods after the boy, praying to her trinity of Gods—Jewish, Anglican, Catholic—that she would not lose Gilby, because she absolutely could not lose another
thing,
not one.
Yet she seemed to be galloping toward more loss and new shame, the press again prying just as it had when Elisha was named a profiteer in the crazy baseball pool and he fled
with her to Europe from a scandal that never really amounted to much, so supported was he by clergy and politicians of every stripe. Elisha, grand husband, you’re gone, and you left Veronica
in wicked confusion: grief still green but waning; men hovering at the wake, eyes probing her widowed beauty for just one wrinkle of welcome. But Veronica rejected every eye, wants no affection
while she still cries in the half-empty bed. She’s fighting the fears her loneliness generates, but they are smothering her.

She rode the trail to where it came out of the woods at Lake Tivoli. Maybe Gilby would go to the fishing shack to be there with his memories of Elisha. She should have told Gilby the history of
his birth, as Elisha wanted, but she’d waited for him to come of age, so he could handle such disturbing rejection. They told him only that he was adopted, his parents’ names unknown to
them.

She saw the shack and dock and lake, which Gilby had not yet outgrown but would now think of as no longer his. It is yours, Gilby, and I’ll see you keep it. She wanted to find him on the
dock but he wasn’t in sight. She turned onto another trail, seeing him ahead of her, then not. She stopped and listened for him, heard the rustling breath of the forest, the breath of her
horse, but no sound of her boy. She had lost him. No, she would never lose him. He was gone. No, not gone. Gone. Never.